As always, many thanks to my patrons, whose support truly buoys both my funds and, more importantly, my desire to write. It's always easier to perform a task when you know people desire the result Link in my signature if you want to become a Patron, or see the various options available. The big one is early access to new chapters, the next being Hedonistic Heroism.
Neolithic Knuckledraggers: Tempist, Acrimonius, Here_I_Am!
Bronze Barbarian: L. Baccus
Iron Intellectuals: A. Quinn, CyberCrisis, Dragon Guy, MouthyStorm, WanderingDaemon, Khalifa Khalid, Nick Paris, SourLeeberry
Machine Menace: Amanda E.
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Herald
Chapter Nine
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The atmosphere in the room was tense as the pair stared each other down, before Taylor grinned made her way over the arena as well. Looking the other woman over, she nodded in approval.
"The legendary Ash Pheonix." She hummed, continuing her inspection. "Ah, but you go by Cinereal now, don't you? Frankly, I preffered the name you carried as a Ward. I have a fondness for phoenixes, after all."
She reached one hand out towards the padded wooden sparring staves, racked as they were on the wall beside the arena, and one of them leapt into her hand. Balancing it in her hand for a moment, she tossed it towards her opponent, who caught it easily.
"You still favour the staff, I believe, when it comes to melee combat?" she added, and Cinereal's eyes narrowed behind her mask before she nodded tightly in response.
"So, you can pay attention to press releases and read PHO. If that's supposed to impress me, I'm afraid you'll find yourself quite disappointed." The experienced heroine replied coolly, and Taylor shrugged even as she called a wooden long-sword to her own hand, taking up a lazy-looking stance with her practice weapon held tip down beside her leg.
"Hardly. As you say, any fool with an internet connection and half a brain can learn that much about you. Neither of us are fools, Cinereal, though you seem to have an idealistic view of heroism." She flicked the fingers of her free hand in dismissal, though whether that was of Cinereal's idealism or the idea that either of them were fools, none of the observers could guess.
"What would a child like you know about heroism? You've barely experienced enough of a life to know right from wrong, never mind understand the nuance of something like this." Cinereal scoffed in something rather like amusement, moving her staff into a ready stance and Taylor raised an elegant eyebrow without moving so much as a single muscle more.
"Decrying the beliefs and experience of another due simply to their age or some other arbitrary, immutable factor." She remarked, sounding even more amused than Cinereal had, straying to the far side of mocking as she continued. "Lo and behold, the great wisdoms of the ancient. If such iron-clad logic and profound contemplations are the hallmarks of adulthood, I should think myself glad to be a child still."
Cinereal chuckled at that, even as she advanced and made a lazy swing with her staff. Taylor didn't even bother with blocking, merely rotating her torso aside to let it pass her by.
"You've a clever tongue, I'll give you that. I suppose you aim to give me some lecture about how heroism and villainy are a matter of perspective? Probably bring up the example of South America, huh?" she asked, and Taylor tilted her head with a single blink before nodding.
"Amongst other things, not the least of which being that the people most often identified as heroes in human history were named so for the enemy body counts to their names and nothing else. Ever has humanity adored their warriors and martyrs." She agreed, seemingly pleased by Cinereal's foresight. "And it is not so far into your ancient past, but less than a century. I see no reason for this to change now, when monsters and depraved beasts like the Nine roam this world. Though at least some enterprising gem has dealt with Heartbreaker."
"The circumstances are different. Armies, organized groups, have checks and balances. Soldiers have officers, officers have generals, generals have the leader of their nation. There is oversight." Cinereal responded, making a throwing-away motion that was not too different from Taylor's own.
"Oversight often fails or stifles necessary actions, by the very nature of bureaucracy, but I will agree that oversight isn't aninherently bad thing." Somehow, Taylor made the words sound like a profound concession on her part, something that they should all grateful to receive. "Am I not submitting to the PRTs oversight, even if it is to my detriment and that of the city?"
"Working with law enforcement is not to the detriment of anyone, and certainly not of the city." Cinereal bit the words out, and Taylor gave a harsh bark of laughter as she went on the offensive, darting forward, sword flicking out in a horizontal slash, the harsh clack of wood-on-wood resounding in the room as Cinereal blocked the strike with ease.
"No? I, and I alone, crushed the Merchants in twenty-four hours. Through my own methods, without support from the Protectorate, the PRT, or the police. I broke them as a gang, delivered Skidmark and Squealer to you on a silver platter." she said with something very close indeed to a sneer, bearing down on her opponent's staff before disengaging and striking again with an underhand slash that was batted away as Cinereal spun the length of wood. The older heroine used the block's momentum to add to the force of her next strike, the clack resounding again as Taylor blocked in turn. "I accomplished in the course of a day what law enforcement has failed at for years. It was not the government that laid Heartbreaker low, but an independent. Now I will be bound by the chains of protocol, of regulation and public relations."
"The short-term view of a child. You see immediate benefits, immediate goals, and nothing further than that. Yes, you've eliminated the Merchants, but in doing so you've probably made the situation in the city more precarious for all of us! Up until now, its been a cold war. Skirmishes at most, with everyone pretty much sticking to their damn corners." Was the quick, hard response. "You've trashed the balance of power in the city! The ABB and the Empire will tear each other to bits in order to get their hands on as much Merchant territory as possible in order to get the edge over their rival!"
"The passive view of someone dedicated to maintaining the status quo because it is comfortable, rather than bringing about righteous change that may hurt in the short term." Taylor retorted just as coldly, no long sounding remotely amused. "The view that has for too long infected this city, this world. The view that defending our little patch of land, our little scrap of existence, is better than trying to make things better. The status quo leads to destruction, and keeping it in place makes you neither a hero nor a leader. It makes you a manager. A maintainer of pain rather than one who fights against it."
Her next strike shattered the staff in Cinereal's hands, the hero crying out in surprised pain and backing off with stinging hands, and she tossed the sword aside before looking around at the staring audience, scoffing at the censorious looks she was receiving from many of the adults. Including her parents, who gave her particularly pointed looks. Tossing her hair slightly, she looked back at her opponent, and folded her arms.
"I get it, you want to make sure that the civilians are safe, and you think the best way to do that is to try and keep the peace. That might work for now, but that's no different from leaving a strangling vine in your garden because removing it might harm some of your other plants. Callous though it may seem, ignoring the vine will choke the life out of everything it touches. Slowly, perhaps, even gently. But inexorably." She said after a moment, almost gently, a touch of regret on her features. "That doesn't mean you don't try to limit the harm done to the rest of the garden, but you still clear the vines."
"Easy for the gardener to say." Cinereal hissed, flexing her hands as she tried to shake off the discomfort, turning around to look at where Armsmaster and Miss Militia were watching with the elder Heberts. "I protest her placement strongly, but I won't object to a higher level. Maybe you can turn her into someone whose definition of heroism, and her methods of carrying it out, are a little bit less sociopathic."
With that, she stormed from the room, brushing past the rest of the room. The doors slid closed behind her, and there was a moment of silence before Taylor sighed a little tiredly.
"Well, that could have gone quite a bit better than it did, I suppose." She said, shaking her head in disappointment and folding her arms lightly beneath her bust. Stepping out of the arena, she made her way over to the waiting adults, some of whom were looking at her more favourably than others.
"Well, Miss Hebert, I can tell you that your philosophy will not make you many friends amongst certain sections of the Protectorate and the PRT." Armsmaster's voice was clipped and cool, but professional as he stared at her from behind the opaque mask of his helmet. "While I can appreciate the sentiment of your comments, Cinereal's points should be taken to heart. You're certainly old enough to remember the Boston Games, even if you weren't entirely aware of the details at the time. If a similar event was to take place in the Bay, with the heroes, as outnumbered as we are, against the Empire's numbers and Lung's power, it would be worse, and by an order of magnitude at that."
"And why is it that we are so outnumbered by our enemies?" Taylor asked sharply, raising an eyebrow at him. "Why is it that, so close to Boston, we do not receive the help we need to crush them? We have a group of literal nazis in the city, and a rapacious, lazy rage beast with a serial suicide bomber for backup. Yet we ignore them, let them spread their poisonous ideaology! It's so painfully incompetent that I might thing it deliberate!"
"What, exactly, is that supposed to mean? Are you trying to imply something?"
If Armsmaster's voice had been cool, Battery's was hardly far off of arctic. Of course, if her tone was arctic, her gaze was nothing short of searing, and the rest of the room shuffled uncomfortably as Taylor squared off with the young heroine once again.
"Of course not, at least not on the part of anyone in this room. None of you would be so comfortable working with some of our fellow heroes if you were Empire supporters." Taylor refuted calmly, though for all its serenity her voice implied no give on her stance at all. "But it certainly seems strange that we receive no help in eliminating the worst ideology known to our nation. No, its been allowed to fester, to grow stronger, not just through allowing the Empire to continue its existence but by not eliminating Lung."
The adults certainly seemed to grasp her intent, more or less, but she could see the bafflement in the gathered Wards, and she sighed again. Taking on a slightly lecturing tone, she continued whilst pacing slightly.
"Understand me, I am making no excuses for the Empire. However, I can understand why an otherwise decent person, who has a loved one kidnapped to 'work' in one of the ABB's 'farms' would be a little more…open-minded about Empire ideaology than they might otherwise be. Angry, hurt, wanting revenge, they strike back. It's just against the people who deserve it, at first, the gang members that did the deed or do it to others. That's not so bad, really, it's just a bit of quid pro quo."
She paused, eyes a little dark for reasons beyond any of the people around her.
"But over time, immersion in that much anger, that much pain, with such a poisonous belief system as your only company…it begins to twist you. Righteous anger, a desire to save others from ill fates, becomes hatred and bigotry. A desire for justice becomes a desire to cause pain. Bringing salvation turns to delivering suffering. You look around and see your enemy in everyone, even if only because they do nothing to 'stop people like them'. So the Empire can point at Lung, can point at Oni Lee, and say 'you see? Everything we say about the cruel, animalistic degeneracy of the lesser races is real!', and what can people use to argue against it?"
She gestures at Aegis, at Miss Militia, at Shadow Stalker.
"A handful of heroes? The same heroes that have 'let' the ABB run rampant for so many years, purportedly on the off-chance that Lung will again come to an Endbringer fight when he has ignored dozens?"
"When Lung arrived, he took on the entire department at once and won! It's not that we're not willing to try and take him in, it's that we can't! Certainly not if we still want to have a city left afterwards!" Miss Militia protested immediately, and when Taylor opened her mouth, made an imperative gesture with her hand. "Please don't mention me, a 'big freaking gun', and a mile between us. Above and beyond how I might feel about assassinating someone who isn't an immediate threat, doing that would guarantee a level of escalation that we won't come out on top of across the entire country, possibly the continent. Not to mention the fact showing ourselves willing to snipe a man walking down the street from a mile away without warning will do incredible damage to our reputation and image."
"Mmh, that's true. I suppose the public wouldn't feel comfortable with the sort of precedent that such a thing would set. A bit to tyrannical for most people's tastes. In fact, I'm sure there would be people screaming about how evil it was even if he was in the midst of keeping hostages or trying to kill law enforcement. It takes all types, after all." Taylor acknowledged, mouth twisting in a wry facsimile of a smile. Shrugging eloquently, her smile turned more genuine as she continued. "Well, I suppose we will see whose ideals hold true in the end. For now, I have completed my testing, yes? So when do I get to go on my first official patrol?"
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Nearly four hundred miles from Brockton Bay lay the fortified city of Ellisburg. It might not be fortified in the classical sense, as the sprawling walls and vast arrays of weaponry mounted upon them were pointing into the city, rather than away from it, but it was fortified all the same. This was entirely understandable, of course, given the massive threat that had wiped out the five-thousand plus people that had once called it home and twisted them into his 'children'. Monstrous, fantasy-esque creatures created from the corpses of everyone he killed.
Since this horrific event, Ellisburg had been sealed and watched around the clock, with the bare handful of attempts at resolving the situation permanently all ending in utter disaster. Not surprising in the least, of course, because as everyone knew, attacking a Tinker in their workshop was the most foolish thing (and the quickest way to die) anyone could possibly hope for. Considering that Nilbog, the S-class threat that had turned Ellisburg into his 'kingdom', was not just a Tinker, but was in fact a Biotinker, and you could probably double the imperativeness of that particular piece of advice.
On the 'good' side of the wall, a two-mile-wide encirclement had been cleared of any and all obstructions and cover. Trees, rocks, ditches, shrubs, berry bushes. Anything that might have provided cover to any nefarious, or particularly stupid, person or people trying to approach the fortifications was gone.
Anyone who was caught trying to cross that ten-thousand, five-hundred-and-sixty-foot no-man's land (and there were always a few, daredevils or dumb kids acting on a dare being the most common) was easily spotted, chased down, and arrested long before they reached their objective. No one, regardless of social rank, sex, race, or age was spared a pair of silver bracelets. Most were given a slap on the wrist, of course, a chastisement for being foolish and a public shaming as they were released in front of the reporters that were always camped outside the no trespass zone. Others, such as the few repeat offenders that seemed to actually want to reach the city, were bundled off to spend some time in the nearest jail.
Only a few deserved any real prison time, mostly minor villains looking to make a name for themselves by breaking through the blockade and fighting Nilbog's beasts. One or two had even tried to attack the city, to rouse the oddly passive Goblin King's ire and cause chaos as he attacked the garrison and rampaged through the countryside.
None of these people, however, whatever their purpose or punishment, had ever succeeded in actually reaching the walls, never mind bypassing them. No one ever had, and no one ever would. After all, there were dozens of layered defenses. Master/Stranger protocols, security cameras of every persuasion and spectral type, roving patrols with dogs, armed guards, automated turrets with Tinkertech IFF, dozens of parahumans within half-an-hour at most (less, for some departments, with their teleporters)…oh yes, the Ellisburg Quarantine Zone was impenetrable.
Doubtlessly, all the people who made such confident assertions, boasts if one was to be honest, would have been as shocked and embarrassed to be proven wrong as they would have been apoplectic at the failure of those defensive systems (and the human beings behind them) if they had ever seen the current scene. Of course, none of them would ever know, because Aeldari were not so easily discovered as that.
"Why is it, exactly, that we haven't just cleaned this entire place out? We know exactly how to destroy this 'King' and his kingdom without any harm to the LEOs and the people outside the walls, so why don't we just be done with it?" a young woman in the armor of a Striking Scorpion grumbled unhappily, fingers flexing rhythmically on the hilt of her sword as she idly spun her shuriken pistol in her hand, a single finger inside the trigger guard acting as the axel of rotation.
There was a chorus of groans from the rest of her group. There were another five, for a round half-dozen in total, split evenly between male and female, each clad in the armor of the aspect warriors most familiar with stealth and ambush tactics. The ideal infiltrators for so heavily defended and scrutinized a location as Ellisburg.
All of them had been orphans, once. Family members killed by villains, if they were lucky. Abandoned or sold off to pay a debt if they weren't, but all of them had been found by their Lady. She had given them a new family, a new purpose. A goal to strive for, a cause to which they could dedicate themselves.
She had given them power, power to protect themselves and their new family. Power to right wrongs long ignored, wrongs long thought unsolvable. Many amongst their kin had rejoiced at the death of Heartbreaker, even those who had not lost kin to the rapacious beast, and whispers abounded between them that, perhaps, the Heartbroken (as the media had taken to calling the liberated slaves) may in some part join their crusade.
But such things were for their Herald to concern herself with, she and her Pheonix Lords.
"Because our orders were to investigate and observe, nothing more. Lady Karandras was quite clear about that, as you well know." The groups exarch, a young man who sounded as if he was in his twenties, responded evenly from where he was sitting cross-legged nearby, doing maintenance on his own weapons. "I appreciate your eagerness to right wrongs, but don't underestimate the beasts that fill this city. They are weak, yes, easily killed. There are also thousands of them, and Nilbog is more than capable of creating far more dangerous entities should the situation ever call for it."
He paused for a moment, looking up at her, their eyes meeting behind their helms, and he gave her a small smile that she couldn't see.
"Remember, my friend, that she has been planning our paths for a long time. How many years has she spent gazing into the aether, how many threads has she traced and tweaked on the skeins of fate?"
The first girl who spoke clearly didn't appreciate the reminder or the gentle lecture, but she bowed her head slightly in acknowledgement all the same. While most of them had been skeptical of Yvraine's power when they had first met her, for even amongst parahumans precognition was a rare and often limited talent, they had all quickly found that she had not been exaggerating her powers. They had watched as she had torn enemies apart with nothing more than her mind, had watched her twist the world into a pretzel and teleport groups of them across the continent.
They had watched, and experienced themselves, as she changed countless fates with careful and deft manipulations. A word here, a gesture there, an unusually large tip to that struggling waiter or some rattled trashcans behind that house, resulting in a patrol car checking a neighborhood at a certain time on a certain night. A thousand little things that were seemingly insignificant when apart but, when their effects were added together, changed the destinies of thousands.
"So, we search for weaknesses in the Protectorate's defenses and we search for signs that Nilbog has exploited them. Not the most exciting job, but if nothing else it will provide a chance to practice our talents in stealth." One of the other boys added, receiving murmurs of agreement from the others in response, and the leader got to his feet with a nod.
"Correct on all counts. Now, all of you should dig in and get some sleep. We're moving on to the next grid square tomorrow, and I don't want any of you fumbling things around because you were too busy playing grab-ass to get some sleep." He instructed, walking over to a thoroughly nondescript patch of ground. Crouching down and digging his fingers into the earth for a moment, he tugged…and flipped open a hidden hatch. It was small, barely the same size of a sewer grate, and beneath it was a small burrow-like shelter. He slipped inside, armor only just avoiding getting caught on the edges, and pulled the hatch shut behind him.
"'Dig in'", he says. God, what a crappy joke." The first girl groaned in affectionate exasperation before opening and slipping into her own nest. Based on the NVA and VC tunnels of the Vietnam War, they were the primary method of the Striking Scorpions to have hidden shelter during infiltration missions such as this one. After all, it wasn't as if sleeping in the buildings or the open would be a wise decision, and while they could take turns on watch, hidey-holes such as this was the best and safest option.
One by one, they all followed suit, taking cover beneath the ground and getting some sleep. The next day would bring more scouting, more monsters to avoid and dangers to flirt with.
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Next story to be updated will be Hedonistic Heroism, which will be posted on Sunday! As always, please comment and give advice or such things!