Cans of Worms

by Louis IX

You end up in an endless corridor with numbered doors. Most of them lead to another version of Earth Bet, where the nexus that is Taylor Hebert experiences life differently - sometimes very badly. Others reflect upon other characters.

66. Deserved Breather

CANS OF WORMS
by Louis IX

Check first chapter for disclaimer and global warnings. This one is quite dark, in many places, and also longer than usual (20k words). Told in an after-effect manner by… someone – you can guess as to who this is.

A Well-deserved Breather

This one started as a bad joke, and progressed as a criminal prank, only to continue as a crushing weight preventing the targeted organism to breathe.

But I get ahead of myself, again. Forgive me, as that is both a curse, and a blessing. My blessing is my ability to explore several thoughts at the same time, to weighs them against each other, to imagine how one of them could be better than another. My curse is that, most of the time, my speed of thought is faster than what I could articulate, and a fortiori express in an understandable and non-offensive way.

Also, in most of those trees, there is no "better" branch, and I'm reduced to choose by pruning the worst situation, when I can. Which is not that often. Not that I was able to actually do anything, when it concerned a city. Thankfully, or not, if it was a whole city, it was also a single city.

Brockton Bay.

Let it be known, in advance, that this place must be cursed. Any attempt to better it had failed, and many people from outside had ended up removing their assets and washing their hands of it. Try to find it on a map, you'll see: they cancelled the whole city.

Today, I'm going to speak about one of the nexus points in time where things went to hell in a hand basket. Last month, I spoke about what happened when the Slaughterhouse Nine chased the Teeth out of the town, in the nineties. Last week, I spoke about Marquis' arrest and the subsequent unmasking of New Wave… and the murder of one of them, at home.

Today is all about Taylor Hebert.

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Meet Taylor Hebert

Taylor was bullied in school.

I know, you'll say that she's not the first to whom that situation happens. Nor will she be the last. Children being left to their own devices until they're adults (and then, of course, being left to their own devices too, in a legal fashion), without any true morality guidance, will keep inflicting cruelty upon each other. Parents blame teachers, and vice-versa.

Basic psychology would tell you that you won't change people by praising virtue if you don't dangle a sparkly carrot for those truly virtuous – and give it out, too. And don't forget the stick, either, for when the carrot isn't enough. Thinking that humans are inherently good is being blind to reality, in a criminal way.

The case of Taylor Hebert may be seen as unusual, or even unique, because she was bullied by people who had supportive parents, and who had the ear of the authority figures, and who knows what else. But it isn't that unusual.

It may also be seen as unique in that she was almost killed, suffered debilitating wounds, and triggered. It isn't, either, in our world dotted with parahumans.

The way it was unique was how it impacted not only her, her bullies, and their school and families… but also the city, the country, and the worlds. Plural.

The starting event was their bullies' third murder attempt. They had already stowed her in a locker filled with used tampons, and hit her with a speeding car. Escalating again, they stowed her face-first in one of those large trashcans (or small dumpster) with wheels, injected her stunned form with a cocktail of drugs (so that forensics won't look too closely at the circumstances), and locked the container before pushing it downhill, towards the local landfill. Of course, there was some travel involved between those steps, but it isn't today's topic.

The thing rolled, and Taylor suffered. Awoken at the first bump, she was very much aware when her thin arms and legs got broken, the bones piercing and tearing through the flesh as the dumpster rolled on itself interminably.

She couldn't scream, though.

The trashcan hadn't been empty when she had been shoved in, and in her first gasps upon being so rudely awakened, she found herself with her airways filled with filth. With how her glasses had broken, her eyes were another thing of the past, and it was doubtful that the contaminated liquids filling her ears too could bring anything useful to a normal human being.

Taylor ceased to be a normal human being, during that descent into putrid hell. She triggered, at last, and became a parahuman.

And her first act, as a powered individual, was to exert her power on nearby human beings. Such as her two main bullies, still laughing from atop the hill, and pointing. Not that she could see, or hear.

In any case, her first order of business was to get the hell out of there. So she pushed. But not with her damaged limbs, too broken to be of any use whatsoever.

The first indication that things were going to be better for her, and worse for the Bay, was the slight distortion of air around the trashcan. With the shape of very large pliers. Two, then four, then eight of them. They took hold of the thing, one in each corner, and… pulled.

The result resembled an explosion, the container violently ripping apart with the parts travelling away from the centre point at speeds reaching the speed of sound. The sonic booms that resulted echoed in the dug-out space, making the car's windows rattle and crack.

"What was that?" Emma probably asked her friend. After all, she hasn't told anyone what had happened.

"Shit!" was probably Sophia's answer. "Shit, shit, shit! The little shit has the nerve to trigger now! Let's get out of here!"

"You mean… Taylor's a parahuman, now?"

"Yes! And she has cart-blanch, or something like that, to kill us right now!"

"But… she wouldn't do something like that, would she?"

"Look at her! Really look at her, and tell me what she wouldn't do!"

Emma must have looked down, right then, because she probably paled… and most certainly pissed herself. Taylor was hovering, and her body was an unrecognizable and bloody mess. Only her hair allowed Emma to guess where her face was, given that it was another mangled and bloodied body part. And, even as she was on the verge of dying, she was levitating over the circular depression caused by the explosion.

The air around her shimmered as multiple tools were imagined and equally quickly discarded. And then, to Emma's horror, and making her shit herself (we have proof), the shape of shears came out of compressed air, took hold of the mangled and irreparable flesh… and cut. Taylor's legs fell in the landfill, the left one cut over the knee and the right at the hip. They were followed by her left arm, cut at the shoulder. Each time, the cut happened where the bone had started to break, leaving what remained in a relatively stable state. The right arm had been somewhat protected and was kept, even if it lacked most of its skin, and three fingers which were left with the trash as well.

What came to the realization of the two culprits, and now witnesses, was that despite the gruesome happenstance, there was no blood spilled. Apparently, the air was compressed around Taylor's whole body, managing her survival despite those conditions: several pockets of air managed to redirect the blood coming out of her body back into it through vessels that needed it.

Soiled fabric followed the discarded limbs, as well as damaged skin. Filth was extracted from every orifice, but it didn't help Taylor breathe again, because the very air around her had already managed to enter and leave her lungs through the holes in her chest. It didn't help her speak or see or hear anymore, either: the vocal cords had been ripped when the filth was forcibly pushed inside; the ears didn't work either; and the eye holes were just that – holes.

At the same time, she seemed strangely aware of their presence. Her whole body (well… whatever remained of it) slowly turned on itself, alongside a slanted axis, until she faced them directly. And then she flew towards them. Slowly, again, as if she was a toddler learning to move under her own power. Or, more probably, as a parahuman slowly coming to grips with what her power could do.

The answer didn't seem much, and certainly not something that should have helped her that much anyways. Air wasn't something that you could really manipulate directly. Try to shape the air in front of you with your hands, if you want to see what she should have received as a minor power.

Only her dire needs allowed the alien shard behind her power to invade her brain more than was usually the case among parahumans – at least, that's the prevailing theory, as she certainly hasn't given anyone the possibility of seeing what was going on, up there. When she triggered, she was in such a state that only by releasing almost all constraints on the parahuman connection was she able to survive. She's the only parahuman we know who had gone further than second trigger, in that regard. In one go, too.

Some tried to theorize that she was now the shard's puppet, instead of a parahuman manipulating her power. After all, it's known that she remanded to her power shard the many small and repetitive uses of it. A human brain simply doesn't have enough space to manipulate atoms to the degree she needed, even just to stay alive. Just as with regular humans in relation to breathing, she didn't think about it all the time. Otherwise she wouldn't be able to accomplish anything – we might have preferred.

But was she controlled by an alien power or not? At that time, we had no idea. However, Thinkers devised a variant of Turing's test, and we determined that she was still the same girl underneath the one we now see as a monster. Or a god, as opinions diverge on that point. All this because she had been horribly broken.

But back to Taylor and her power on air.

The result of her cascading trigger event was that she knew everything that was in direct contact with air, within a radius around her – a hundred yards or so, at that time. Or so we estimate. Those things included the ground, the building, the trees, the vehicles… and also the people and animals. Each of those made a hole in the air.

Not only did she know, but she could also interact.

Sophia had tried to pull Emma inside the car, but the redhead was paralyzed by fright, seeing the mockery of life that Taylor had become. So she frantic track star started the car by herself and tried to leave. However, the car stopped advancing right before it could escape Taylor's area of effect, its rear lifting off the road and then pulling the vehicle back despite the front wheels trying to advance. Soon, the whole vehicle was levitated and turned back towards Taylor and Emma.

Sophia tried to open the door, but it was slammed shut on her and she couldn't open it again afterwards. She turned to shadow, too, unheeding of the fact that she outed herself to a sworn enemy… but she couldn't leave the car either. She knew that her shadow form, insubstantial as it may be, had a different reaction when going through different materials. Very dense ones were quite difficult to get through.

The fact that she couldn't leave made her realize that the air density around the car was strong enough to keep her inside… and crush it into a little cube of metal, too.

Soon afterwards, the sounds made by the car's motor ceased abruptly, and Sophia had nothing to do with it.

Taylor had lifted her right arm, towards the car, and whatever remained of her fingers were slowly closing around empty air. And while she was doing so, Emma could hear the sound of metal tearing in the fancy vehicle, as its insides and outsides were slowly crushed – the cracked glass broke further, but the parts didn't separate completely, staying more or less in place. The motor being one of those crushed parts, its gasoline had started to leak, only to be redirected inside the car, where Sophia could smell it. She would burn, in addition to being slowly crushed to death? Or would she become like Hebert herself?

"That's it, you weakling!" she shouted in anger, quite incoherently too. "You want to even the playing field? You want me to get a second trigger?"

Or at least that's what the PRT Thinkers established, based on analysis of how she was beforehand. Of course, she may have degenerated into a blubbering mess at that point, praying for her survival. Or screaming incoherently, in the face of her imminent death. She may already be dead because of the gasoline, or the crushing vehicle may have nicked a vein…

We will never know, because the car continued to be crushed until it became that small cube, barely a foot high. And at that volume, the high density of material had brought everything at a temperature so high that it caused a fire in the trash heap it was then thrown into.

Emma had passed out during Sophia's ordeal, but Taylor had noticed, and air was forcibly inserted into her ribcage, with a rhythm that pushed her to awaken. And too bad if she got a broken rib or two because of that. After that, her blood pressure equalized somewhat, without a visible reason, and she was able to watch Shadow Stalker being killed without falling into unconsciousness again. She was all the more terrorized, of course.

However, like Taylor had been at the start of her difficulties, two years ago, Emma had not lived enough hardships for the alien power-granting shards to have deposited the seeds of parahuman power in her brain – that's the overarching theory, today: you needed hardships already to gain the Corona Pollentia and then the Gemma, making your "first trigger" your third or something.

As for Emma, she was maybe afraid enough to get one of them, but that was all.

After Sophia was well and truly dead, Emma noticed that Taylor's hand continued to curl on empty air, the movement signifying the compressing of something. She wondered if it was her turn already, only to realize that, with each flex, a small hexagonal portion of the air around Taylor became solid. And white – like clouds gathering in the sky. Pane after pane, hex after hex, the very air around Taylor transformed into an armour… with a proper human shape. Unbeknownst to either girl, it was also Taylor's power which memorized the place of each hexagon, and which micro-managed moving the lot of them when Taylor merely wished to move. It gave some robotic movements, a few times, but the two of them seemed to align and the movements became smoother.

And then Taylor spoke. Or tried to. The first indication was the presence of sound around her. Everywhere, and coming from nowhere. It was also too loud or too feeble, the noises too alien to be anything resembling speech. But it was only Taylor trying to form sounds from nothing, by making the air itself vibrate – after all, what was a sound if not vibrations in the air? It already allowed Taylor to perceive every noise in her area of effect.

And then, when she got the process in hand, she stopped making random noises. Instead, it was a relatively correct human-sounding… bellow. "ARE YOU HAPPY?"

"…what?"

"ARE YOU HAPPY?"

"I… no. Of course not."

"WHY?"

"You just killed my best friend, and made me watch! What monster are you to do that?"

"YOU JUST KILLED YOUR BEST FRIEND, EMMA. THAT WAS TAYLOR HEBERT. THE CONSEQUENCES ARE ON YOU."

"What consequences? You just killed Sophia!"

"SOPHIA WAS A TOOL FOR YOU, JUST AS YOU WERE ONE FOR HER. OTHERS TOOK TURNS TO HARM TAYLOR, AND WE'LL VISIT THE SAME UPON THEM."

"No! Leave Madison out of it!"

"WE'RE NOT SPEAKING ABOUT HER. NOT ONLY."

"Who, then?"

"YOU'LL SEE. WE INTEND FOR YOU TO SEE. AND EITHER GO MAD OR BECOME LIKE US."

And that's when Taylor Hebert started her first crusade on Brockton Bay. During the night that followed, she would travel slowly through the empty streets, levitating in the middle, at twenty feet off the ground. Several people were found dead in the morning, some with a twisted neck, others having suffocated to death on nothing. Some suffered more than others, with arms and legs pulled, sometimes violently enough to separate from the torso, leaving the people dying from the massive blood loss. Others were cut open in various places of the body. One Madison Clements got her body immobilized before the skin of her face was slowly peeled off, and the macabre mask turning around afterwards, nailing itself to her wall, and laughing at her. She became mad.

And during all this, Emma was pulled along, ensconced in another air armour, seeing everything but not being able to say anything.

The next morning, Winslow was almost empty, to the alarm of its teachers and principal. A few calls to students' home made them realize that something very wrong was going on… and that's when the two white armours arrived through the sky.

With her power acting like telekinesis upon her surroundings, Taylor opened the building like one would open an orange. And if a Professor Gladly was suddenly found cut in half because his classroom was split in two by the action… Emma found it quite normal, by now.

Blackwell wanted to disagree, of course. "Who are you two, and what are you doing here?"

"WE'RE HERE FOR JUSTICE." the asexual bellow sounded around her, making her turn around to search for hidden loudspeakers. "EMMA'S JUST HERE TO WATCH. SHE'LL GET HER DUE AFTERWARDS."

"What justice? I did nothing wrong. And must you yell that much? I'm going to end up deaf if you continue."

There was a pause, and then an awful noise as if a dozen forks were drawn along a dozen blackboards. And then the voice spoke again, albeit with a different pitch.

"You covered the bullying inflicted on one Taylor Hebert. They murdered her. We're what's left. Because of you. As a result, you'll get what Taylor got."

"What? But I-"

"Let's start. Two years ago, Sophia punched Taylor in the guts. She was an athletic star. Taylor was not. Here's what was felt."

And Blackwell recoiled when feeling a blow hit her below the ribs, cutting her breathing and making her fall into a ball. It took her several seconds to catch her breath again, and ten times more to be able to uncurl.

"That was only physical damage. Remember that you told Taylor that this was normal, in a high school. If it's normal, you have nothing to say against it, right? Oh, and don't worry, we won't inflict the emotional damage Taylor suffered at the same time. We don't know you enough for that." A pause. "The following week, Sophia punched Taylor in the face. Twice."

Blackwell got a split lip and a black eye. It continued for some time. Nobody could interrupt, or intervene.

Police was dispatched, of course, but their bullets were ignored, as they did nothing to the two ultra-dense armours flying in the air. The cops stopped shooting, wary of hitting other people around them – after the first couple hits, the air seemed to deflect the bullets towards the other teachers – most of them were cowering behind their windows, in full view of the event.

And those cops sent to remove Blackwell physically couldn't enter the building. Oh, they could pull the doors open, but the very air behind them was as solid as a steel wall.

And all the while, the inhuman voice could be heard listing dates and events, and Winslow's Principal could be seen taking blows left, right, and centre. Her legs ended up broken in several places, as did her arms. But, each time, she was brought in a standing position before another blow could be listed… and inflicted. A couple times, another name was listed as a teacher witnessing the incident, and Blackwell would be spared… only to still receive a blow when it was established that she had pushed the teacher not to call the cops.

Speaking of which…

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Meet the Protectorate… and the PRT

"Unknown villain!" a strong voice yelled. "You're under arrest! Cease and desist immediately!"

Contrarily to what the two flying armours did when the police came (which was: nothing at all), the diatribe stopped when the parahuman forces came.

One of the flying armours was lowered in front of Armsmaster, who stood ready to skewer its occupant with his halberd. And then the armour dissolved, leaving him with something he wasn't ready to handle: a girl with her eyes forcibly open, her clothes filthy, and already quite mad. "M'sry. Plse, stp." She was mumbling continually.

"Armsmaster." the bellow came back, and the Protectorate hero realized that it came from the other flying armour (unless the unknown parahuman had another hostage, and was also a Stranger; Occam's Razor suggested the former theory). "You know this person."

It wasn't a question. And his HUD illuminated with files, which led to Alan Barnes' vouching for Shadow Stalker's character. And then to the last known status of Stalker's Wards' phone: destroyed. A Dragon-made piece of equipment. Almost impossible.

He nodded, and then realized the futility of his action when done behind someone's back – the other armour hadn't turned. Still, it must have felt the move somehow because it spoke again.

"She, and Shadow Stalker, have spent two years bullying Taylor Hebert, culminating in three murder attempts."

"…what?" He shook himself. "Nonetheless, this can be discussed with the proper channels. You attacked the Principal, and are the main suspect in numerous deaths in town. You're under arrest, and must come with me!"

"Too late. We are sorry, but you are much too late. As such, your request is denied. You will have to wait before asking again."

"What? Why? And who's speaking?"

"We… are... Taylor… and… HER POWER." the "voices" said, and Armsmaster's HUD lit up to indicate a vocal analysis confirming the dual speech that followed. "Taylor suffered greatly. Only by taking a step back can she heal her mental wounds. The therapy requires some mental distancing, which is the reason behind our way of speaking. And also visiting her torments on her tormentors… hence Emma's mental state, since Emma was mainly a psychological torturer. And Sophia's physical state."

"What about all the dead people in town? Children, even?"

"To you, perhaps. To Taylor, they were equals, with some of them upperclassmen, even. Any of them could have intervened on her behalf, tried to befriend her, give her a tissue to wipe her tears or her blood. None did. Most participated, one way or another. Taylor being an acceptable target, many took attacks of opportunities." A pause. "We got biblical. Those who got physical got their money back in a physical fashion."

"And Principal Blackwell? And the teacher you already killed?"

"Principal Blackwell enabled all this, often telling Taylor that this situation was normal. If that's normal, she can receive it as well, right?" The armour lifted its arm towards said Principal. "We are currently listing everything Sophia did, inflicting on her what Taylor felt. And we are about halfway through. As to the teachers, we're only punishing those who didn't do their job. Professor Gladly was the worst."

"You're going to kill her if you continue."

"If she said it's normal to let people die, you can't interfere. It's her school. And if you say it's Vigilantism, it means you'll recruit me."

"Of course not! Why would I-"

"Sophia was recruited into the Protectorate Wards one year ago, after a year spent as a Vigilante. If anything, her bullying ways worsened. If we discover that you were as much a willing enabler as Blackwell, here, we'll have another conversation, Armsmaster. One you'll enjoy just as much as our dear Principal."

"You dare threaten me?" he growled, honed instincts (and some programming with output on his helmet's display) pushing him to adopt cape pre-fight stance #12.

"AND YOU THINK YOU CAN?"

The bellow was so loud, right then, that windows cracked, over a block away. The nearest ones shattered, eliciting cries of pain in those among the teacher who had been pushed nearest to the panes.

"I tire of this. You will speak when allowed to. You will also breathe when allowed to. And you will not move."

And, truly, Armsmaster was kept immobile, barely breathing, while his HUD lit up with many alerts. Inability to overcome the sudden pressure coming from every direction. Low oxygen intake. And a larynx that was painfully pressed upon – he knew, from his martial arts training, that such a situation was normally one where he would yield to the opponent. But there was no one to yield to. The villain's armour hadn't deigned turn around during their whole chat!

Still, he had a monitoring software installed in his helmet so that his eye movements could be tracked and transformed into actions on his HUD. Despite the mechanical possibility of moving his armour that way, it proved useless, only adding to the stress the servomotors were under. He stopped immediately, wishing to conserve functionality when he'd be finally "allowed" to act. Instead, he wrote messages to people he knew. Piggot. Dragon. The Triumvirate.

And the cameras in his armour continued to film Winslow's Principal being slowly beaten to death… and then stopping. That was because of a comment from the flying armour – under which he suspected Taylor Hebert was, resisting lawful arrest.

"…and, after this, the bullies destroyed Taylor's flute, which had belonged to her dead mother. They even taunted her by showing it, once, mangled and covered in shit, before making it disappear. We suspect it's down the Bay."

"It's… not." Blackwell groaned, blinking with difficulty.

Given the heavy silence that followed, Armsmaster suspected that Taylor had gone even more immobile than what her current unmoving armour showed. "Where is it?" came from the armour – well, not the armour proper, as it was still an echoing sound, coming from all around Blackwell. Still, it was the voice of a distraught teen girl.

"I have… confiscated… from Madison. Repaired it… kept as token… if you were… recruited in a gang."

The laughter that followed was cold and mocking, and Armsmaster felt that it was less than human. At the same time, the constraints on his armour, which had eased when Taylor "spoke", became harder all of a sudden. "IF YOU HAD GOTTEN TO KNOW TAYLOR, YOU WOULD HAVE KNOWN SHE WOULD NOT DO THAT. EVEN AFTER TWO YEARS OF HELL, IT STILL HAD REQUIRED A LITTERAL MURDER OR THREE TO MAKE HER BREAK. NOW ANSWER HER OR WE WILL PICK YOUR BELONGINGS APART UNTIL WE FIND IT. AND YOU WILL BE DEAD."

"My desk… third drawer…"

Sounds could be heard from what could reasonably be her office, and a whole desk hovered out. The massive piece of furniture was then turned over and shaken, the drawers opening and their content raining two stories down – the cops down there quickly ran out of the way. Only one item didn't fall with the rest, intercepted and brought to the homicidal cape. It looked like a metal flute.

In an instinctive manner, Taylor brought the flute to her lips to play it, but it didn't work, her armour preventing her from touching it. So she willed the armour open.

To the shock of everyone there, including a still-frozen Armsmaster and the news crews further afield, the white armour opened like a flower… and showed the extent of Taylor's damage beneath.

Like a child trying to play for the first time with a beloved instrument, she looked (if you searched through the horrific wounds) both happy and frustrated: bringing her to her lips and blowing did nothing, since she now breathed through holes in her lungs. And then, she only had one hand to play it with.

She was coming to that realization when a cop who was more brawn than brains decided to shoot her while she was unprotected.

The very air froze between Taylor and the bullet, continuing downwards and flash-freezing the cops' arms, and then his whole body. And then the new statue exploded, showering the area with little bits of ice. For the moment, it held, but the place would soon be quite bloody.

As forces of Law and Order did all the time (gangs, too… food for thought), once one of them was brought down, it was like their self-control was shot too, and several of them opened fire. By then, however, the armour had sealed shut again and the bullets were ignored again. The flute was encased in the left forearm of the armour, which had been empty until now. It was not useless, though: having remembered how to make the instrument work, Taylor and her shard pushed air through it to produce sound, and pressed buttons to produce notes. Haunting sounds.

The armour spoke again. "YOU GET A REPRIEVE, FOR NOW." It was with the voice Armsmaster was quickly associating to the otherworldly power associated to Taylor Hebert. And it had an additional message for him. "ARMSMASTER. WE SHALL MEET AGAIN." And then the armour moved, upwards. It was soon so small that only a telescope could notice it.

"Hebert disengaged." he composed with his eyes, before realizing that he could speak again. Since it was faster to send messages that way, he continued audibly. "Taylor Hebert, temporary codename Fallen Angel, has disengaged from Winslow's theatre of operations. Blackwell still alive, if barely. Warning: powerful Brute in armour, powerful Shaker with probable telekinesis, unlimited by lack of sight. Thinker analysis required before engaging in a meaningful way. Armsmaster out."

"She was right." came a voice in his ear. Dragon. "I analysed the files Blackwell had. Shadow Stalker did quite a number on that girl."

"The law forbids self-justice." Armsmaster pronounced.

"Not everywhere, as some States allow you to defend your house with even lethal means. And self-defence is allowed everywhere. Especially in the case of a new trigger."

"We will have to determine when she triggered, and when she killed Shadow Stalker. If-"

"Don't make her revisit her trigger, please. I don't want to have to attend your funeral." Dragon sighed. "You knew that Hess was toxic after barely a minute talking with her. Only Piggot insisted on having as many soldiers as possible, in her war against the gangs."

"True. She is… was… a good little soldier. Perhaps too good."

"Good soldier?" the Canadian Tinker replied, her voice becoming so cold that it was almost artificial. "Like those sent in those wars the US have undertaken for half a century? I watched how those cops interacted with a force of nature stronger than themselves. The same happens when soldiers everywhere feel threatened: they try overwhelming force in return. It works so well, when the people in front of you have no means to defend themselves. It didn't, here. Obviously."

"Dragon…" Armsmaster sighed. "I understand your point. Still, if Hebert's trigger and Sophia's murder aren't directly linked, you know that I can't defend her."

"Very well. Here's what I got from a camera in the landfill. It isn't even a surveillance camera: it's the internal webcam of the computer left here so that employees can pass the time. It saw some action behind the window, so the angle is wrong and we miss quite a bit. But the timestamps are correct."

"Thank you, Dragon." Armsmaster replied when he noticed the symbol on his HUD telling him of the arrival of a video clip. She didn't respond and he sighed again. Sometimes, he wondered if he really wanted to pursue that relationship. For a man in his position, computers were much easier to understand than women! And then he remembers the heart-to-heart conversations and how they had each found a way to interact with each other as humane beings.

Of course, he was both relieved and worried when he confirmed through the video (poor as it was) the mere minute between the trigger and the execution. It also made him increase his evaluation of Fallen Angel's powers… and thank his lucky star that she had merely "slightly pressed" on his throat (through his armour, he belatedly realized), instead of crushing it like the insignificant insect he may have been, to her.

Thanks to his various visual indicators, he noticed some agitation in a frequency he wasn't currently hearing. Playing it from the moment it started, in an accelerated fashion, brought him the entirety. It was from Piggot.

"This is unacceptable! That brat goes to school with a Ward, and murders her? That's worthy of the Birdcage! Go fetch her father, with force if need be."

"Belay that order." He spoke, adjusting his selection of channels so that he could broadcast. "This is Armsmaster, to all PRT and Protectorate forces. We don't attack civilian relatives of even the worse villains. Fallen Angel has acted rashly, but she is less than a day away from the worse trigger in History – have you seen her body, under that armour?"

"That doesn't excuse-"

"Yes it does, and you know it, and it angers you, and you want to take it out on the girl's father."

"That's insubordination! You-"

"No it's not, and you know it, and it angers you. I'm not under your command, Director. I'm under the Triumvirate."

"They are under the Chief Director, who is my commanding officer! One word, and I'll-"

"Empty threat, and you know it, and it angers you. We Protectorate heroes play little soldiers for you, but only because we know it facilitates the PRT's work. But we are not mandated to. We are not forced to. And we will stop if you don't treat parahumans in a humane way. Especially the new triggers."

There was no response, and Armsmaster thought Piggot was seething. Or writing that message she had threatened him with. He shrugged.

"To all, about Fallen Angel. Don't engage her without cause. Having seen from close by what she's capable of, I estimate a very high level Shaker, using telekinesis or something approaching, unlimited by her apparent lack of sight. Also a flying Brute."

"We can boast a new Narwhal?" came the unmistakable voice of Assault.

"Probably not, because she doesn't use forcefields. Her telekinesis can bypass armour, and it's invisible."

"Besides," Battery added, "I know why you jumped to the Narwhal idea, Assault, and I have seen the uncensored version of the news footage. I cried. That's a badly broken girl, there. And underage, too."

"Sorry, boss." Assault said, and Armsmaster smirked as he knew who the "boss" in question was – and that wasn't him.

"In clear, we don't want to annoy the relative of the new overpowered villain." Velocity said, slightly out of breath. "Is that it?"

"The villain part is to be determined."

"She killed all those kids, in town!" That was Piggot, again.

"Trigger event, Director." Armsmaster replied, going against his own argument to Dragon but only to try to appease the trigger-happy Director. "With all the bylaws around that, I'm sure we can find some middle ground. Who knows, if you treat her with civility, she might even join the Wards."

There was silence after that. From Piggot, at least. Velocity was still speaking. "So, to repeat, we don't send a PRT squad to the girl's father, and we don't enter his home without knocking. Right?"

Something in the way Velocity was speaking, including so many details, alerted Armsmaster. "If you see that happening, you have all right to use force against the PRT."

"That's insubordination!" Piggot yelled again.

"PRT forces doing what I just said not to do?"

"This is not insubordination, since they aren't subservient to you."

The grin he could hear in her tone froze his blood in his veins. "This is going up the chain." he assured, before shutting off his link to Piggot. "Velocity, secure the father. Make sure that if Fallen Angel appears, you are seen helping him. I'm heading there."

As he mounted his trusted bike, Armsmaster started another conversation with a sigh. When did his life become so complicated?

"Legend here."

"Armsmaster here. We have a situation. I created a notice for a new parahuman, codename Fallen Angel. Director Piggot had the brilliant idea to send the PRT to kidnap the girl's father. With force. If this goes through, Brockton Bay will be a warzone."

"Hm. Understood. The Protectorate and the PRT can't be seen fighting each other. I'll have a few words with Alexandria, she's the one dealing with Costa-Brown. Just a side question: Brockton Bay has the Wards lodged at the PRT building, right?"

"Yes, sir. I'll try to find a way to get them back at the Rig at the first opportunity. Thank you, sir." And damn Piggot to have suggested that using military-like deference speech was more efficient, making him adopt it immediately!

"Good day."

And that was that. Orders were sent so that Assault and Battery could secure the Wards, and that meant that he arrived at the Hebert's home alone… and right as Taylor descended from the sky. Either she has heard part of his diatribe, or the universe has some sense of humour, because she was sporting immense cloudy white wings behind her armour – wings that probably started as contrails from her escapade in the sky.

The house was sporting some damage from live ammunition, but her father was relatively healthy, thankfully – only bleeding from a bullet in the leg, and he was leaning on Velocity to walk. The PRT agents were waiting in balls of containment foam, courtesy of Velocity's bandolier of grenades, now half-empty.

"Taylor? Is that you?" the man (Daniel, his HUD provided) asked.

"Dad? Are you alright?" the girl asked – even if, once again, the sound came from everywhere. It was the girl's voice.

"Nice sound effect, and nice armour." Daniel chuckled. "What is it made of?"

"Air, dad. My power is just that."

"Seems solid enough." the man said, knocking at his daughter's shoulder.

"Compress anything enough, and you'll get a solid. Air being mostly nitrogen and oxygen, it had to be pressed quite a bit to make this."

Behind his HUD, Armsmaster had the necessary calculations done, and his eyes widened at the sheer power it implied. If she ever died and released her control, her armour only would explode so massively that it would level the nearby buildings.

"Enough about me." Taylor continued. "What happened to you?"

"I'm fine, just a flesh wound. Some people wanted to invite me to see their boss, but they weren't polite, and Velocity here helped contain them. Thank you." Daniel addressed the last to the mentioned hero, who nodded. "Speaking of flesh, can you open your helm, at least, so that I can see my daughter in the flesh?"

"I don't think it's wise-" Armsmaster tried to interject, only to be beaten to the punch when Taylor's armour opened again. It was limited to the helm, thankfully, but the damage was still horrible.

"Oh my god!" Daniel exclaimed. "How can you be alive? Is your power keeping you alive, or do you need a doctor?"

"I'm… fine, dad." The voice was everywhere again, and both Daniel and Armsmaster noticed that the girl's mouth hadn't moved. "My power… I manipulate air, as I told you. But in such a fine manner that I can push and pull at things and keep them pushed and pulled without having to think about it. My blood circulates correctly, even though I had had to remove… some parts, that were too damaged." A short pause, while she tried to express herself through a smile. "As you said, it's a flesh wound."

He was not that amused. "Do you need something to eat? Can you even eat? Or drink?"

"I… don't know. It has been less than a day. I'm not tired, and I haven't slept yet. I don't know what I can do. I don't know what I am. Dad… I'm afraid."

They hugged, and Armsmaster turned around. It was not because he didn't want to get emotional. Nor was it because he despised those shows. It was mainly to look around, because he knew that enemies could always jump at you from behind.

And there was one, right behind him! He swore as he took a step back, readying his halberd against the strike that… wouldn't… come?

Oni Lee, the suicide bomber, had been poised to strike at his back with one of his elongated stiletto, probably aiming at some vulnerable part of his armour. At the same time, his fingers were on one of his grenade, ready to remove the pin. And two whitish hexagons were preventing him from seeing anything. The same white Taylor's armour was made of.

"I noticed him approaching, teleporting, from around the block." Taylor told him – and he knew that because her voice came from next to his ear. "Apparently, he needs line of sight to teleport. When he popped up next to you, I blinded and immobilized him. Do you want him dead?"

"That… shouldn't be necessary. Thank you. Can you keep him for a minute? I'll get the materiel to hold him properly."

"No problem."

That should have been the end of a good day, with the heroes gaining a valuable asset.

But, instead, there was a loud cracking sound from several blocks away, and Taylor's armour was suddenly decorated with red and grey. And Daniel Hebert slid on the ground with a massive hole in his head.

"Dad! Dad!" Taylor was screaming, her unseeing eyes burning with tears, while her lipless mouth now formed a grimace. "DAD!"

Armsmaster had just enough time to mourn his idea of a good day when Taylor's control faltered and Oni Lee's acted. The villain's knife found his throat and jerked sideways, damaging everything. At the same time, the suicide bomber threw his grenade at the girl and her dad – and Velocity, who didn't seem to have reacted yet to the villain's newfound freedom. And he teleported away. He didn't see his incendiary grenade go off and engulf the house and the heroes in front of it. He didn't notice that Taylor had encompassed her dead father in an armour similar to her own.

And he wouldn't see the Fallen Angels for a while, because Taylor was on the hunt for a totally different prey.

''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''

Meet the Empire Eighty-Eight

Snipers generally take the higher grounds, so as to get a clear view of their target. Estimating the direction from her father's wound, Taylor moved there post-haste, and found Victor in the process of stowing his rifle away, his wife Othala next to him.

She had barely enough time to grant him invulnerability when they both felt the air around them becoming much heavier. Much, much heavier. All the while, the ground didn't crack under their new weight, showing supporting power going the other way. It put the two villains between the figurative rock and hard place.

Victor held for several seconds, but he had the distinct displeasure of seeing his wife crushed to death next to him, her pleas for clemency unheard. And with her death, his temporary immunity was lifted, and he joined her in oblivion.

"They are Empire, dad. They attacked us. We can destroy them, now." one of the two Fallen Angels "said" – contrarily to Taylor's earlier habit, the helm had started to show a mouth, which moved with the sound it made. And then there were eyes, and ears. And hair, too, that would grow quite long on her: in barely a minute, it reached her feet. At the same time, the armour with her father inside adopted a physical appearance close to what he had looked like. All this was purely cosmetic, of course, but it helped maintain the charade that everything was alright… and that one of them wasn't a corpse.

Cosmetic it was, perhaps, but the hair could animate and grab things or persons. As to her "father", the whole armour still manipulated by her power, it spoke with a voice similar to his, but with an alien undertone – one she knew was related to her power. "DESTROY."

As if manifesting his new job, the armour's right hand elongated until it was shaped like a sword… one as big as the creature itself. They flew. People with Empire colours noticed them, of course, some of them even catching their attention by firing their guns at them.

They were quickly crushed as well. Literally so, again, and without any contact from the Fallen Angels. And, following the few they allowed to flee, they arrived in front of MedHall, where several capes were already in the street, arrayed against them.

Crusader was one of the first to attack, choosing the sword-wielding Angel to begin with. Taylor wept when she felt her father being skewered through the armour by the ghostly clones. Not wanting to wait before dealing with the one cape able to actually harm them, she used her power to crush the man's skull inside his helmet.

The Angels ignored most attacks, after that, while their own did massive damage. Just so that their enemies thought they could gain the upper hand, though, they simulated a hand-to-hand fight, Taylor with her hands while the armour with her dead father inside acted like a swordsman. In fact, even if some of their enemies were nimble enough to evade the blows, they were still hit when her punches extended into compressed air. Same with her father's sword, which got an invisible edge extending further than the already large visible blade.

By hitting them repeatedly, even the two giant Valkyries started to become tired, and wounded. It was something to impress and kill small people, for them. It was another to fight an armour that wouldn't move, or bend, or break, and which could grow too, as much as they could. By now the proud MedHall building was in ruins, their fight having gone through it several times. Some more minutes afterwards, Fenja was pushed back against the rubble and tripped, the massive sword having repeatedly hacked at her shield and own weapon and reduced them to a sliver of their former glory. Several gashes adorned her arms and legs, much like her sister.

Daniel's armour lifted his weapon with two hands, as if to deliver a killing blow, and Menja thought that it left her an opening. With all her might, she tried to impale the armour with her spear, from behind. To her shock and surprise, it worked! It left her flat-footed, just as the armour dissipated to nothingness in front of her… revealing her sister. The spear had gone through their enemy, but only to strike through Fenja's heart. And since Fenja had been still holding whatever remained of her blade upwards, trying to defend herself, the flat-footed Menja who fell down suddenly got herself stabbed through the heart as well.

They couldn't even enjoy their last seconds of life with the taste of victory against the enemy cape, because the armour that they thought had completely disintegrated had merely shunted away most of itself, revealing a normal-looking one near their feet, still housing a normal-sized Daniel Hebert (a dead one, but still).

While this fight was going on, the armour with Taylor inside was taking on the remaining capes, starting by Stormtiger – she still played with the others, keeping right in the "almost" range when they tried to attack… or just tanking a few attacks to no visible effect.

Stormtiger generated whirling blades of air… which Taylor intercepted with her moving hair. She made it look like it worked, even, leaving locks of "hair" falling… only to straighten and fly towards other capes, acting as explosive darts. Such as Alabaster – who wouldn't die when she "merely" cut him in half. One such dart flew right as he regenerated again and pierced his eye to penetrate his skull, where it exploded, vaporizing grey matter through his ears, eyes, nose, and mouth.

Given how powers worked, Taylor thought that, without the brain nodules allowing the man to channel his power, he wouldn't regenerate. He did. Seeing this, Taylor took the next option, creating a cannon-like structure made of air around the man, one aimed to the sky (with a tilt northwards, as she didn't want him to come back after orbiting another planet or three). He was catapulted so fast that his body was almost reduced to a pulp, but that allowed him to be shoved into space, where he would die continually for as long as his trip lasted, his blood boiling every few seconds. And when he would eventually find somewhere to land, chances were that it would be a star, where his body would burn continually. Unless his power failed him beforehand, of course.

Despite making him think otherwise, Stormtiger's blades of air proved ineffective. Especially as, after getting rid of Alabaster, she focused on him. He felt his control slipping, and the massive blade he had been concentrating on escaped his will and turned on him. His anguished flight was interrupted by an almost-solid and circular pane of air around him, acting with the whirling blade… like a gigantic blender.

And then, leaving the man to die, she turned towards Rune.

Annoyed at the many large-sized projectiles (cars, mainly) that she had to dodge to keep the illusion that her opposition had the slightest chance to win, Taylor directed several of her explosive darts of compressed air (generated at will, in fact) towards Rune. The moving and flying objects around the robe-robed telekinetic moved to intercept, of course, only to be shaken backwards with the force of the explosions.

Those explosions shuffled the obstacles backwards, more and more, until a particularly solid one pushed the girl off her own flying platform. Said platform may have been pushed to the other side, too, to help. She tried to pull other debris to stop her fall, but the air seemed to resist their movement, too, while guiding her fall towards the deep hole she had made in the concrete, earlier, to create her flying platform.

Slamming there, her legs broke in several points, and she couldn't even move when her own artillery fell on her, one item at a time, crushing her bit after bit. She was dead way before the last piece of asphalt was laid down, her body crushed to a pulp that, mixed with the smaller debris, could also be seen as cement between the pieces of roadwork, leaving said road as untouched as if she hadn't been there.

Two capes remained. Two close-contact specialists, one in strength and the other in agility. Hookwolf tried his own blender-attack method by humping Daniel's leg like the dog-like creature he emulated. Yes, despite having seen the now-dead twin giantesses try hacking at it ineffectually. But it worked! Or at least it seemed so, given that he could feel the man's armoured leg start to give way. Unfortunately, it didn't help anything, as it wasn't the limb which was turning into puree, but the air around it which was in the process of solidifying, as if to increase the armour's thickness.

Hookwolf's rotating blades caught the sludge, half-solid and half-liquid, and the solid parts got stuck to his various hooks while the liquid followed the nooks and crannies between them… heading further inside his Changer form. Mere seconds later, he could feel the strange matter getting closer to his human core than any opponent had ever succeeded.

In a sudden flash of inspiration, he realized that it was a Bad Thing, for him. That he could die if the foreign matter reached far enough through his defences and reach his flesh. So he tried to flee… but he couldn't move, suddenly. His murder-blender body was slowly coming to a stop, blade after blade becoming immobile in the hardening white slushy. And in that unusual state, he also realized that the foreign matter pulled at the blades. The constant tearing he felt was accompanied with a further invasion when the liquid air penetrated deeper into his body. And when it found his human part, it pounced: all his blades were pulled at the same time, quite forcefully, thus causing an amount of damage and pain he had never felt in his life. At the same time, he couldn't howl or even do anything as, a few seconds later, the blades had been reversed, and impaled his human shell.

Hookwolf died from his own weapons, much like Stormtiger died from his own attack, and Rune too… in a way. Taylor had really decided, with her power, to apply the biblical theme of the reckoning: an eye for an eye. Or, in another biblical passage: live by the sword, die by the sword. Remained only one cape, now, and it was one specializing in acrobatics and spatial awareness.

Cricket had started the fight by losing her ninja weapons, one after the other. Seeing no way for her very normal hands to damage the unnaturally hard armour, she sought to flee, jumping on a roof and taking shelter in the stairs going inside from there. However, given that Taylor had soon finished with Hookwolf, she could count the capes and know that she missed one. Or more. Moving around revealed to her power the shape of the cape wearing a cage-like mask. And she sent her weapons back, hardened air currents lifting them and propelling them, turning corners and accelerating upon reaching their target.

The first hint something was wrong, for Cricket, was when her kamas came whirling towards her, at speed, without anyone visible to have thrown them. She hadn't felt them, either! Normally, she could feel incoming projectiles, because she constantly emitted ultrasounds that reflected back from anything around her. Echolocation, she was told it was called.

She was still superhumanly fast as well, and dodged the double attack by a hair, only their pointy ends arriving near enough to catch on her cage-like mask, ripping it off quite forcefully. Her ears, on which it had been attached, suffered too, a pain compounded by the weapon handles striking the back of her head. It was enough to miss the sound of her weapons landing. Or not.

They had not landed because they had stopped right behind her, as if frozen in time. She only noticed because she whirled around, searching for them with her eyes when her ears didn't work anymore. They were right there, hovering right outside of her immediate reach, as if to taunt her. And her echolocation couldn't even pinpoint them, still!

She wondered about the fact that they could be an illusion, but her removed mask and the pain in her ears reminded her that the attack had been real. Speaking of ears…

In fact, after they stopped hurting, her ears felt strangely dull, as if a blank noise was superimposing itself on the vibration she emitted all the time. It hid the kamas from just in front of her, as well as the walls around her, and the ground, the stairs, and the ceiling. Since she had used that sense as much as the others to orient herself in space, since her trigger, she started to get nauseous, and finally understood what felt the victims of her other power (theorized by some to be just another expression of her echolocation power, since she couldn't use both at the same time).

Feeling quite stupid all of a sudden, she reached forward with a snarl, catching the two handles at the same time, ready to then turn around and hunt the cape who had thrown them. Except… she should have moved away, because their immobility was betraying something happening around them: the energy permeating the air in immediate contact with the weapons was removed quickly, making the area reach for the absolute zero (in Kelvin degrees).

Cricket had a brief moment to consider that both weapons were unnaturally cold, before the burning sensation started – any sufficiently cold surface will make your body feel as if burned… and stick to you, too. She couldn't do anything as she noticed her hands becoming blue… and crackling. And in her movements of inevitable recoil from the pain, she pulled at them, ending up breaking her wrists. Only then was she able to finish her move around. And only then did she notice the white armour there. It was advancing towards her menacingly. She took a step backwards. Then another. The third caused her to impale herself on her own weapons, now returned to normal temperature. Given the overwhelming pain in her forearms, she didn't notice the stabbing until the weapons were far enough inside for the wounds to be deadly. She collapsed, and that's how the police would find her, later: lying face down with her own hands holding the weapons with which she backstabbed herself. A critical hit.

In her circuit around MedHall, Taylor had found Cricket, but she had also found the two missing members of that particular congregation: Krieg, and Kaiser. In fact, the two had held themselves in reserve (or so they said) in the bunker below the building. With the tower demolished, they wouldn't leave anytime soon. Still, Taylor didn't want to leave a half-finished job to chance, and hovered right above the bunker for a while. Initially sealed, with its own air generator, she hadn't felt it or its insides.

Due to the wreckage above it, enough cracks had appeared for the air to communicate between inside and outside. Enough for her power to assert its dominion over the added volume. And bring the oxygen out. Removing some from the carbon dioxide inside as well, she created an environment rich in silent lethality. And she stayed for some time, just enough to ensure that the two capes were down in a definite manner.

It was even like watching a movie, too, as when they noticed their the incoming fate, they accused each other of duplicity and ended up killing each other – well, given his armour and blades, Kaiser killed Krieg first, only to die a few minutes later due to the carbon monoxide.

It left another cape who had worked for the Empire before, but Purity had sensed the shift in the wind before all that shit fell, and she hadn't followed Kaiser's order to congregate, choosing to skip town instead, with both her daughter and Theo, her stepson and occasional babysitter for Aster. And instead of a flying lantern outing herself, she also chose to leave in a very normal and inconspicuous manner: by car.

And, on the freeway, she chose the exit "Out of this story" so we won't speak about her anymore.

''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''

Meet the Asian Bad Boyz

In the aftermath of the battle, Taylor thought about its impending consequences.

First, the Empire itself was dead, or nearly so. There were still a few unpowered thugs still standing, but no cape to protect them from the police (and the consequences of their actions). It meant that everyone would soon feel safer in what was said gang's territory – minorities, for obvious reasons, but also those who paid the gang for "protection".

Second, and more important, would be the inevitable rush for the gang's territory, coming from the other gangs. In fact, if she did nothing more, it would be inevitable that the ABB would claim the many opportunities left for grab. The Merchants, too, but it would be uncoordinated, coming from another direction, and not necessarily successful – it had already happened that, given their drug-addled minds, they failed at grabbing an empty city block.

Already primed and ready to kill, Taylor didn't need much reason not to obliterate all of them, in whichever order they would present themselves. Still, she didn't want to wait, because there was one particular cape had caught her interest, earlier… when he had killed Armsmaster. Right when the Protectorate leader had seemed reluctant to antagonize her. Even sympathetic, almost. She would never know, now.

As she flew towards other parts of the town known to be dangerous, this time with a concentration of Asian population, she got her fill of mooks to slice, dice, and puree. Air blades could be quite versatile when several were used next to each other. One villain cook threatening her with his cleaver? He ended up reduced to little more than fries, after her passage. His gambling friend, angry at having lost his lucky die? He became nothing more than little cubes of flesh and bone. Still, she reserved especially painful treatments to those showing themselves stupidly violent – or violently stupid.

The capes were completely different from the contact fighters the Empire had enlisted (and lost). The first she sought out was Oni Lee, and he had to be trapped to be effectively killed. Since he already knew she could act at range, he was a bit more limited than usually, so he brought something else to compensate: a grenade launcher. Taylor immobilized the incoming canisters with her air powers, of course, even sending some back at him – not that he cared, since he teleported away before his double launched the explosive ammunition. But after seeing that the normal (and even high-incendiary) ordnance were pushed away, the teleporter chose another type of canister. Tinker-tech. Not that it was immediately visible, of course.

When a black hole cut off half of her dad's body, still in an armour behind her (as well as her armoured feet, but she didn't care), Taylor cried again. And when another bomb transformed the remains, and the armour around it, into glass, she was properly incensed. And when she reformed his armour to hold the pieces of glass, her anger caused the air around the white armour to be compressed as well, only much less so: it was, in fact, thick enough to create a cloud, which darkened the more she added to it, with the added advantage of hiding him. She did the same for herself.

Because of her new anger, her power reacted somewhat, and she could feel things further than usual… and act. She had to do it quickly, though, because of the sudden Thinker headache at processing a much larger area.

The air solidified around all the gang members she could find, before moving them all in a circle hovering around her, at the limit of her normal reach. And they turned, too, faster and faster. Enough that most of them were pushed flat against the back of the sphere, allowing her to open the other side to peer inside. Not that she needed to, with her power, but the spike of pain in her head made her realize that she couldn't use her power all the time. And she thanked her power to take charge of the constant work of moving her armour around… and just keeping her alive.

The half-sphere holding normal thugs dissolved, leaving them to fly fast in a ballistic trajectory… that would eventually kill them – she arranged to throw them towards the boat graveyard, mainly. They would either die by the bludgeoning impact against rusted hulls, the piercing result of hitting pointy things like antenna, or the cutting effect of moving at full speed against lines or cutting edges. And if not, the Bay was beneath, and they could drown, for all she cared.

Half of those bubbles made to capture Oni Lee only contained a bit of ash from his clones. In others, she pierced the eyes and pinned the limbs to render his threat moot. Only one of them bled from his wounds, the others ending up as piles of ash too. Among them, some had chosen to activate a bomb while being subjected to insane g forces, and died prematurely for it. Taylor kept both herself and the real Lee out of those – she wanted his death to be personal. And it was: forcing air into his body, while keeping him alive all along, she inflated him like a balloon. Muscles ripped painfully, bones were pulled, breaking and separating from each other, lungs exploded inside the body, the stomach ripped, its acids burning the surrounding flesh… only the skin held, like a body bag holding a barely conscious caricature of a soup. And then it did not, and Oni Lee exploded.

The second parahuman to die, there, was Lung. In fact, he had already arrived when Taylor had begun her aerial ballet with the spheres, and his ineffectual yelling did nothing, nor did him and his mooks shooting regular bullets straight up in the sky – due to Taylor protecting herself with an invisible wall, most of those fell straight back. And Lung couldn't rampage and escalate much, yet, because the enemy was out of his range and not threatening him. He was enraged, especially when showered with a liquid Oni Lee, but that was only a starting point for him.

And then, Taylor was facing him, and his escalation engine skyrocketed in an instant. He was big, he was reptilian, he was able to fly… but he wasn't generating fire. In fact, the reactions his body was having needed so much oxygen that it steadily disappeared from inside the bell-like invisible container Taylor had shaped around the dragon. He fell from an acute lack of oxygen, and without having had his last fight.

It wasn't how he died, though. That one was courtesy of the new Tinker supposedly in his employ, Bakuda. She made the kind of bombs Lee had used before, and while Taylor didn't recognize the larger canisters that suddenly entered her area of control, she still had the presence of mind to throw them back. The black hole it generated was bigger than Lee's had been, and it was just a bit too far to really touch her body. Or whatever remained from her dad's. It still swallowed most of Lung's body, as well as half of the warehouse next to them. And created quite a draft of air to fill the place suddenly devoid of it, pulling things and persons alike towards the epicentre. Of course, with how Taylor mastered air, mere currents wouldn't move her.

Courtesy of the jeep-mounted military-grade launcher, more ordnance came at her. She tried to resist by creating a powerful wind towards the jeep, successfully redirecting some even before they could enter her zone of control. At the same time, the agitation in her, and around her, created some friction inside the dark cloud surrounding her.

It was especially visible when she felt several canisters entering her area of effect through the sides, courtesy of several of Bakuda's underlings. In her instinctive reaction to flash-fry the bombs before they could activate, Taylor used the friction in the miniature thunderstorm around her to create a lightning bolt, and then fork it to pass through the grenades.

Some exploded quite near, and only her complete insulation helped to deal with things like sonic effects. But on her side, the bolts continued down until striking the ground… or something touching it. Or someone. A few gang members died on the spot, while others were just a bit burned. What was sure was that involuntary muscle spasms were to be avoided when one manipulated a grenade launcher. A whole group of thugs was hit by an incendiary bomb exploding at their feet, while another was covered with a fast-acting putrefaction agent, screaming as his body liquefied, and then gurgling, and then nothing. Yes, Bakuda was quite mad. Some of those who had no ammo left, she directed towards Taylor, hands up… only for their head to explode with yet more unusual effects.

Used to have the upper hand since her trigger, Taylor didn't know how to deal with someone able to throw dangerous bombs at her from beyond her reach. So she tried to think tactically and repositioned herself over Bakuda. The Tinker ordered the jeep's driver to move, but Taylor was fast and nimble enough to stay over it continually. That way, gravity was added to her downwards air flow to prevent Bakuda's bombs from reaching her. If they did, she had the bottommost part of her reach as hard as reinforced steel.

It wasn't sufficient, as just by tweaking the bombs Bakuda had seen her actively avoid, the mad Tinker was able to make even larger black holes. She was also able to mount a bomb canister on a rocket propeller, bypassing the need for complicated ballistic computations – or just brute force. One went so far that it exploded behind Taylor, its hole in reality swallowing part of her dad's armour again. Only his head remained… a glass head with a hole inside.

Taylor went to the offensive, then, making her own "bombs": a kernel of hardened air, inside an area frozen to deep space temperatures. With the clouds around her, ice easily formed around the hard ball, and she threw several at the mad Tinker, accelerating them much like she had accelerated Alabaster. They broke the sound barrier as they pelted her, and Bakuda may have been fast enough to cower and yell for her driver to get them the hell away… or at least start the sentence. Instead, they got the hell itself. Without Taylor's power holding the compressed air together, as soon as the balls left her zone of control, they exploded violently, showering Bakuda and everything around her with icicles so cold that they burned.

"You can't!" she exclaimed, noticing Taylor's ominous cloud descending on her – she may have had more ammunition, but her broken body couldn't aim the launcher, and said launcher was damaged anyways. She wanted to make other explosives go boom, to harm Taylor while keeping her alive. But the hand controller able to select which bombs to explode had frozen with her hand, before being reduced to organic rubble. The mask which displayed that selection and identified her as "friendly" to her own bombs… was broken. And since both her legs had received direct impacts from the pseudo-ice, they were both broken and frozen, making her unable to reach the toe rings that acted as detonator – she couldn't even activate her dead-woman switch by making all the bombs explode. The indignity!

Her last intentions were to haggle, to tell this murderous cape that killing her would destroy the city because of her magnum opus, a bomb so impressive that it would raze the whole town – she could even give surprisingly accurate details on it, but the truth was that it was only almost-complete… on paper. Not completely crazy, Lung had allocated money for grenades, not city-wide bombs, so she had made grenades. Besides, even if she had such an engine of mass destruction, she could only gargle impotently when Taylor used the air to lift her and face her. And then she was crushed, slowly, from the bottom up. Her last seconds were pure agony as she was forced to regurgitate her own organs.

"Shit, cockgargling cumstain! That was motherfucking sick, and I know what the fuck sick means!" a voice said from behind Taylor – who sighed silently, thinking briefly about giving herself a face on the back of her head, just to prevent those annoying situations to creep up. A notion quickly discarded.

''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''

Meet the Merchants… and the other rejects

Taylor knew there were people, there, because they hadn't been careful enough to stay out of her zone of control. Or even take into account the fact that she might be a Shaker. She hadn't reacted, though, because the interlopers hadn't made any offensive gesture as of yet. In fact, before the outburst, they had been uncharacteristically quiet… for Merchants – she hadn't needed to turn around to know who it was, either.

A second of thought reminded her that the Merchants' resident Tinker, Squealer, had talents besides making monstrous vehicles: she could also hide them and drive discreetly.

"How nice of you to join this party." Taylor replied, slowly turning towards the group of Merchants – not that they could see her easily, with the stormy cloud around her. "That way, I won't have to search for you."

"Nuh huh." Skidmark replied, his fingers making the universal "no" sign, in an exaggerate fashion. "We're just here to tell you we're leaving. No need to search for us or anything. We're leaving you with them, instead. They came as soon as they noticed you."

Taylor looked behind the Merchant's vehicle, where several people walked into the pavement from a side street. As in a choreographed move, like the Beatles crossing the street, they came one after the other, making a straight line with the same space between them. And then they turned, all together, facing her.

Except they weren't four, but nine: Jack Slash, Hatchet Face, Crawler, Mannequin, Bonesaw, the Siberian, Shatterbird, Burnscar… and a new member, apparently a young woman. They were the Slaughterhouse Nine.

"Bye bye!" Skidmark yelled, before slamming his car shut, his power and Squealer's shenanigans making the hideous engine move sideways and disappear (both from view and through another side street), leaving Taylor alone in front of the group of seasoned killers.

She could have stopped the Merchants, of course, but the reputation of the Nine made her wary of splitting her concentration.

Besides, there was something niggling at her thought processes.

"We are in the process of recruiting." Jack announced grandly, walking forwards with his usual panache. "We always are, in fact, even when, as you see, we are Nine. The carnage you dealt, though, was like a succulent dessert, and we couldn't resist coming here post-haste. Come, child. With us, you will be able to kill to your heart's content. Unless you don't want to? What do you want?"

Taylor didn't react, still processing the foreign influence with the help of her "passenger" – as some had named the alien power-granting shards.

Jack was a bit surprised, because his "charisma" didn't seem to impact the cape in front of him as it did with others, generally. Well, he would say it's his natural charisma, but others implied that he has some Master power over other capes. Why otherwise could he have kept hold of the Nine for so long? And resisted assault from numerous other capes? And if he was truly able to deliver on such a promise of "all the killings that you want", why were they spending so much time in hiding, between their killing sprees?

In fact, if his power didn't do as much, it was because Taylor's connection to her shard was different than normal. Instead of being able to insert his thought process inside another mind, he saw his attempts watched, and the feeling was completely alien. As if he was an ant suddenly becoming conscious of the existence of humans.

Seeing their leader hesitate, experienced members approached. "What is it, Mister Jack?" Bonesaw asked.

"Want me to eat it?" Crawler almost implored. "I'm so hungry…"

"Yes…" he ends up saying, pulling his trusted knife out. "Let's do that."

"Yeah!" Crawler bellowed, before running at the cloud… only to be stuck inside Taylor's zone of control. Levitated, he was turned this way and that, before a strong push propelled him in the Bay. On his attack vector, he was followed by Hatchet Face, whose power-nullifying aura did exactly that: create a hole in Taylor's aura, in which he could move as he wanted. She couldn't use her powers on him!

Still, when fighting Bakuda, she had been unable to get close to her as well, so she had a few aces in her sleeves, most notably the fact that his power may nullify her power around him, but not the power-generated physical items she threw as she flew away – slowly enough so he'd stay focused on her.

Balls of compressed air, frozen pebbles, and mixes between the two pelted the hatchet-wielding cape, and even if he was a Brute, his arms and legs were subject to frostbite like anyone subjected to those conditions of temperature and pressure. Like others before him, his will was strong enough to try pushing through. And, like them, the frozen limbs got forcibly separated from his torso, starting by his legs, his feet stuck to the ground by the intense cold – like a frozen Terminator.

Having turned around at the last instant, he was facing the sky when pointy icicles started to impact his prone form. They pierced, they burned, and the last one, pushed through his yelling mouth, killed him. Given that it froze his neck, his corpse was promptly beheaded when he crashed down.

And then Taylor was able to descend to the ground, and take hold of his oversized hatchet (as large as a battle axe, in fact). With a concerned eye, she looked at the remaining members of the chaotic evil club, most notably Jack and the Siberian.

Apparently, Jack interpreted her look correctly because he stepped forward and started to explain. "Do not fret. While we could probably get at you if we go at it together, that is not how we operate. What would be the fun, in that? We test our nominees with one-on-one fights so it stands to reason that the next one to do so… is me!"

And Jack Slash let loose, his knife's edge extending invisibly and allowing him to hack at Taylor's armour – to the sides only, his power not extending to piercing attacks. To his dismay, it didn't damage Taylor as much as he thought it would, the compressed air being quite dense. In addition, the lower body was mostly empty, and the upper armour was thickened after each of his hits. All in all, he felt himself as efficient as a toddler trying to chip away at a marble statue with a dulled butter knife.

Despite his lack of offensive effect, his attack vectors being continuous, they had the secondary effect of deviating the icicles sent towards him. It forced Taylor to improvise. Thankfully, she had several ammunitions available to her. Everything in her area could be considered as such, after all.

Rocks, bits of masonry, of rusted vehicles, and corpses… everything she could use as a projectile started hovering at the same time before being guided and propelled to strike at the man from several angles. And Taylor kept for the very end the weapon she already had in her hand. For some reason, while she used Hatchet Face's torso, the man's head stayed at her feet – it may have been because it was too small, and relatively fragile.

Jack's slicing defence found itself thoroughly tested with everything, including more icicles he could count. He was strong and agile enough to resist most of the onslaught, even slicing through the headless torso of his ex-companion, near the end. However, his aim was off to deal with what followed Hatchet Face's body: his axe. As such, he only sliced through the handle, making it spin even faster… and plunging deep into the Slaughterhouse leader's chest.

Jack was in a great deal of pain, but he smiled nonetheless, blood leaving his mouth and staining his chin in rivulets, just as his skin took a purple tinge due to blocked blood flow.

"You… should have… gone for… the head!" he gasped, before snapping his fingers. Yes, that one.

Apparently, it was some sort of signal, as the remaining members of their little community moved as one. Siberian was the fastest and reached Jack, her touch granting him a temporary reprieve from death's passage. Following her was Bonesaw, the little girl already opening her schoolbag to get her emergency surgery kit out.

Mannequin approached too, but not towards Jack. He flew quickly towards Taylor, followed by two women, one of them covered in burn scars. He didn't attack, his goal being elsewhere. He also didn't need to defend himself, as Taylor was suddenly awash in feelings of depression and apathy and didn't attack him either. After all, his only job, right now, was to fetch Hatchet Face's… face (I'm kidding, it's the whole head) and bring it back to Bonesaw.

The little surgeon had a fascination with parahuman powers, and was the only one with the wherewithal to operate on live parahuman brains. Or dead ones, as it appeared. Her powers helped her cut bones and flesh alike, and keep body parts living through ordeals and grafts that had been more and more extreme. With her experience, she was able to quickly (and messily) fuse the useable parts of Hatchet Face's face (and brain) with the back of Jack's head. And, once properly connected, the power nullifier's Brute power kicked in, and Jack's torso wound closed, pushing the axe out.

"How interesting." he commented, breathing normally again. He patted his head a few times, and removed his fingers before Hatchet Face could bite them off. "But I didn't want that, my dear. Or did I, now?" he asked Bonesaw.

"You also know, Mister Jack, that each time I work on a parahuman, now, I can't stop until I fiddle with their brain." Bonesaw was young, and sounded petulant, exactly like a preteen her age generally acted towards their designated parents. Or just one who acted contrarily to their wishes. After all, her "mother" was always behind her.

Case in point: the Siberian was physically behind her, now, patting her shoulder soothingly… and watching Jack intently. The message was clear: the order woman often protected them from outside threats, but she was capable of defending Bonesaw should he want to punish her. For some reason, the stripped cape had acquired parental instincts over their younger member.

"No matter, no matter." Jack grumbled grandly – if that makes the slightest sense. Noticing the bloody axe on the ground, he grabbed it and then faltered. "Whoah. Nice!"

"What is it, Mister Jack?"

"Apparently, while I was limited to blades before, I can now use any weapon. Watch." And he swung the axe in the air, only for the building across them to gain a wide gash through its front. Much wider than the axe head, and also in a "in your face" manner that Jack hadn't been able to deal with slashing weapons before.

"You don't seem to have a power nullifying aura, though." Bonesaw mentioned. "I felt Hatchet Face's before, and I feel nothing now."

"No? Wait a minute… there's a mental switch, I think. I guess it's to select which power to use? Just a second… now! How does it feel, now?"

The girl nodded. "That's the one. So you can only have one power at a time?"

"I still feel like I can take over the world." Jack said, cutting his own palm on the axe blade and watching it close by itself. "Yep, still a Brute."

"What do we do, now?" came from Cherish, who had walked back to them, her whole body still facing Taylor's immobile one.

Jack noticed her tense stance, and remembered his inability to affect her with his own "charisma". "Is it hard to maintain her in that state?"

"Yes. I can feel like there's another presence, and it's amused, and it shakes me loose every now and then."

"Better have Bonesaw work at her immediately, then." Jack pronounced, and the girl hugged him in thanks before sauntering towards her new prey… plaything… body horror target.

"Can you show me your body?" she asked. "I've seen it in the news, but it was censored. I know you lack several things, and I'd like to help."

"We would like to help, too!" another voice exclaimed from the side. "After all, any group would be better with her than against. And since the heroes dropped the ball, as well as the now-defunct Empire, we'd like to throw our hat into that competition!"

The woman who was speaking (in a loudspeaker) was thin but athletic. She was named Quarrel, and was the current Butcher's host. She was covered in leathers, themselves decorated with bones. Realistic-looking human bones. Or plain real ones.

Her companions (Animos, Hemorrhagia, Reaver, Spree, and Vex) fanned around her, clad in the same uniform. And others followed, unpowered members still wishing to sow the chaos the gang was known for.

The Teeth had arrived in town.

"Out of the question!" Jack yelled back, his own team gathering for the showdown that would inevitably occur.

The current Butcher smiled evilly. "In that case… prepare to die!" And they charged.

For some reason the Teeth's leader didn't stay at the back, sniping at anyone with her unmissing missiles, or spam her power of remote pain (and cardiac arrest) from a secure position. The reason was Cherish, as Jack had drilled several scenarios in her head: when meeting that particular foe, instil an inflated sense of invulnerability (even if the Butcher was quite a formidable foe, already) and remove any sense of self-preservation.

However, Cherish soon left the Butcher to her own mental processes, because of the wave of clones heading her way from Spree's power – the man could spam a dozen of them per second, or something like that, and the whole area was already full of them. To deal with those, she renewed and reinforced the aura of apathy she had around Taylor (and her, now, since she had followed Bonesaw). Those coming close lost any will to fight, becoming like flies stuck in honey. Thankfully, they were only a target of opportunity, and Spree soon concentrated his attacks on someone else.

Bonesaw was excluded from Cherish's influcence, of course, and the little bio-Tinker had already convinced Taylor to leave her armour and approach. Seeing the damage on her, she gushed… and tutted at the amateur job the girl had done in reconnecting her blood vessels. In fact, if she couldn't be healed correctly, she would get gangrene soon. Not to speak of her stomach and intestines, working on empty fumes and their acids dissolving the surrounding organs.

If she wanted to keep her power within her group, Bonesaw couldn't keep her like that, so she prepared herself for the next best thing: moving the brain to another body. The problem was that there was nobody there except the three of them (and the rapidly-degenerating Spree clones, obviously unfit for this task), as the Teeth were battling the remaining members of the Slaughterhouse – and given their bloodlust, it was as if they were on a revenge path from the chase that had happened twenty years before.

The fastest on-site was the Butcher, thanks to her explosive teleportation. She still had to make several jumps to arrive, punctuating each one with a dart thrown using her power. Shatterbird was hit quite badly, and chose to flee… through flight. Obviously.

Despite her initial thoughts of staying at the back and especially not use her explosive teleportation, given their foes, the current Butcher was blinded by bloodlust… and forgot about Burnscar. And the various instances of short-lived fire and brimstones were exactly what attracted the attention of the Slaughterhouse's own sort-of explosive teleporter.

Each of them expanded into a localized inferno, from which Burnscar could materialize, her own knife descending upon the Butcher's back. Sensing the fire expanding behind her, Quarrel would teleport away by reflex, only for the same to happen again. And again. And again, in a game of chase where the one losing the most was the city, soon with fires developing in quite a large radius.

The second one to reach the Slaughterhouse was Animos, having transformed into a large dog-like creature. And once in range, it roared… only to see Hatchet Jack come to him with an axe. Remembering Hatchet Face's nullifying power, he stopped roaring and prepared to charge, only to Hatchet Jack to change his power and swing his axe from afar, chopping his forelegs in one go. Then his whole body.

Jack then turned to assist the Siberian, as the physics-defying woman was dealing with a tide of Spree clones. They did nothing to her, and she killed them with barely a touch, but they still came in numbers, creating a realistic-looking wave that submerged her. And without seeing anything, she continued slashing around, waiting for a reprieve when she would see anything. Jack's slashing through the crowd provided a short moment of visibility, but the nominal leader soon found himself in another pickle, when his run towards his ally was stopped cold.

Vex was a Tooth (if that's how you call the Teeth members, individually) with the power of generating razor-like forcefields in empty spaces, and it was a nice ability to create traps for people to run into… and cut themselves. As it happened, Jack had jumped down from some height, and the gravity pushed him through the cloud of razors feet first, cutting through fabric, muscles, and tendons all the same.

"Oh. That's quite bad." he merely said, still trying to move away. Switching powers, his anti-power field disabled the force fields around him, but without muscles to hold his legs steady, he broke everything below the belt upon landing. Hatchet Face might have been a regenerating Brute, but it would take a while to deal with such a debilitating wound. And Vex wasn't without options, when he found that he couldn't create anymore forcefield around the cape leader. Instead, he walked towards him and started hitting him with the cutlass he always wore. Jack tried to switch powers again, to find things to say to convince him to leave, only to get those forcefields pressing on him. The choice of dying by a thousand cuts by forcefields or by a thousand cuts by cutlass wasn't a choice, really.

Despite the fires erupting around him, Mannequin noticed that Vex was killing Jack, and hurried there… only to be interrupted when several Teeth intercepted him. Since many were unpowered, he went through without fanfare, only to be locked in place when their blood erupted from their wounds and elongated into a net that kept him in place. Apparently, between those who fell from his slicing blows was Hemorrhagia, and the woman was hurt even worse than the others. But her power allowed her to scab easily, and use spilled blood as a weapon. The net was one thing, but she let the blood flow into Mannequin's openings when he retracted his chain-like extensible limbs to escape her enclosure. And, once the blood was inside his body, it reformed into blades that shredded everything.

Hemorrhagia then spent a few minutes healing herself before heading towards Bonesaw. And, in the meantime, she noticed that more capes had joined the fight.

From the Teeth, Spree was dead, a Siberian hand-shaped hole in his chest – apparently, she had been able to walk through the waves until reaching the point of origin. Except that said Siberian had disappeared soon afterwards, right as an explosion shook a side street, destroying several vehicles – consequence of the still-ongoing game of chase between a crazier and crazier Burnscar and the Butcher.

Reaver was dead, burned to death after Butcher and then Burnscar teleported near him – perhaps an attempt from Quarrel to shake her pursuer loose.

Vex was dead, after having tried to fill the area around the defenceless Fallen Angel with his forcefields. But said area didn't conform to what his power considered as "empty", since it was filled with Taylor's power. Facing that way, he had missed the appearance of three other persons behind him. Capes, as well. One of them even had a literal cape on his shoulder. And a top hat. A stray debris, touched by another one of them, had gone through him as if shot by a cannon.

Hemorrhagia didn't know much about cape groups from outside Boston and Brockton Bay, and didn't recognize the Travellers. It means that she didn't care for their "request" for Bonesaw to heal someone they called Noelle. She only cared for the fact that they killed a friend of hers… and she didn't have that many of them, to begin with. And that they required Bonesaw to help them, too. For her, Bonesaw was someone to be killed for past grievance (they had met before, once, and she had been left with blood poisoning, something she had had to deal in a lengthy and painful process).

She wasn't one to shout, but her charge was noticed by the capes, starting by the one who had done nothing yet. Due to power-related reflexes, she placed her hands together and then separated them, creating a light that was positively blinding, as it shone like the sun while it was night time already. And the sun moved on an interception course with her. She dodged, barely, only to find herself facing Trickster… and then Cherish, in the blink of an eye. "Thanks!" the caped cape yelled from where he was, Bonesaw having appeared at his side to replace her. "I just needed someone to switch with- Ow!"

"Kidnapping is bad!" Bonesaw yelled, pushing a bloody finger into his sides again – and, contrarily to normal teenagers, the girl's fingers were as sharp as a scalpel… and hollowed out. It allowed her to cut people open with her bare hands, and also inject various products through tubes going through her fingers.

"What… have you… done?" the one called Trickster asked, falling to a knee.

She shrugged. "Poison. Acid. What-have-you. I don't remember. Your fault for surprising me! Oh, hi, Burnscar!"

The fire-based mad teleporter had stopped chasing the Butcher, but not because she was tired. It was because of the attraction the new sun was exerting on her fire-addled mind. In fact, she was so wild, especially after her many jumps, that she physically jumped into the inferno.

"No!" the one managing the sun yelled, her concentration broken. Apparently, she didn't want her creation to kill people. What was she doing there, then?

However, instead of winking out, the new sun grew arms, legs, and a head. Soon, it had copied Burnscar's appearance, even if nobody could look at it directly. The head moved, then, as if it was speaking, but nothing could be heard. It shrugged and disappeared suddenly, leaving quite a lasting after-image as well. At the same time, the same light appeared somewhere else in town, as the mad arsonist clearly wanted to renew her chase of the Butcher with her new power.

It was not to be, though. Somewhat blinded by the light, the four capes didn't react fast enough when they heard Hemorrhagia running back at them. Her blood being shaped in large triple-bladed Indian swords, one in each hand, she was able to hit each of the capes in front of her at least once, and then push her blood further in the wound, killing them quickly. Even Bonesaw, who lasted the longer, but who got stabbed in the neck, preventing her brain from interacting with the rest of her body – such as, you know, to deliver plagues and the like.

In his last breath, though, the one called Ballistic touched her own blood blade, transforming it into a missile that he propelled through her body, cutting her in half and killing her too.

When Sundancer died, the sunlight that had been flickering through the city winked out. That gave the Butcher some breathing space, and she teleported back to the main battlefield, only to notice that almost everybody was dead (and that there were some more capes than before).

She walked slowly around, approaching the place where a white armour with wings was still hovering above the ground. Below it were the messy remains from Taylor's mutilated body, and Cherish. The young woman was still standing, and had her eyes closed. The Butcher didn't know about her, but thought it didn't matter since she had frozen during the whole battle. Dismissing her as unimportant, she approached the armour.

"I have won. No one of importance remains. Join me!" she demanded.

The armour didn't move. Quarrel was going to repeat herself, only to hear a vibration that quickly increased in volume and pitch. It was so loud that she had to shield her ears and close her eyes, making her miss the most important thing: the exploding of every pane of glass in the area – a really, really, wide area, since it encompassed the whole city. The Shatterbird song, usually used to announce the arrival of the Slaughterhouse Nine in town, looked like it was heralding their complete annihilation.

The Butcher was hit from everywhere at once, as Shatterbird didn't only scream to break glass – an addition granted to her vocal box by Bonesaw, but which had made her unable to speak normally. Her main power was telekinesis applied to glass, hence her "costume", which was made of glass fragments that she levitated in real-time. Glass shards swirled to her, taken from the many broken windows (and other things), before massing around the Butcher. They sliced, and diced, and attacked Quarrel's body, peeling fabric easily… but merely nicking her durable skin. It would have been painful, still, but the Butcher was immune to that too.

"You dare?" Quarrel yelled, facing the flying glass telekinetic. She still had a weapon in hand, despite her whole equipment having dropped to the ground. And in her brief moment with her eyes and mouth open, she threw her dagger. It flew true, according to her power, and pierced Shatterbird's heart. But that brief moment with eyes and mouth open was also enough for the whirlwind around her to pass beneath her skin and start slicing the inside of her body. Given the protection afforded by the skull, the Brutcher's brain was mostly untouched, but she was clearly dying from the slushy mixture of blood, flesh, and glass in the solid sack that was her skin.

The Butcher dying, with the one killing her already dying too? What would the shard do?

We would never know, because Crawler chose that moment to reach the shore, back from his trudge on the ocean floor. And his jump flattened the naked body. That's when he noticed Cherish, still there and still unmoving. Except she was crying.

"She killed dad." she was mumbling.

"I don't understand." He was confused, and not only by the woman in front of him. His power was going haywire, as he felt another trying to assert dominance – the Butcher's shard was ecstatic, too, as Crawler had unknowingly prevented its return to oblivion.

"She killed dad!" Cherish exclaimed, looking at him while pointing at the other flying armour… which had its head exploded.

To understand, Crawler would have to have been there when the Teeth attacked. When Bonesaw was looking at Taylor's dying body, and wondering where she could stow the valuable power held there.

She didn't have to look at Cherish to know that she would be a perfect candidate.

You might wonder who might do this to people they know? From the same team, even? Remember that Bonesaw did this, and more, to anyone and everyone. Just a few minutes ago, she had done the same with Jack and Hatchet Face. The fact that parts of Hatchet Face's brain had frozen had been the only reason for the main personality to emerge to be Jack's – when doing whole brain transplants, she knew that there were risks of insanity, or multiple personality disorders (at the least). The fact that Cherish and her didn't appreciate each other pushed her to remove her memories here, too.

You might also wonder why would Cherish accept this. Of course, she wouldn't. But when passing innocently near her, Bonesaw had her nails scratch the young woman's side, injecting one of her faster-acting paralyzing agent (physical… and mental). In barely a couple seconds, Cherish was the apathetic one, leaving Bonesaw to recover from her own panic attack – inflicted by the woman's power in the short time it took for the poison to act.

And then she got to work.

Given that brain surgery was her forte, Bonesaw had some experience in that, and each of her attempts had been more successful than the last. Now, she also wanted the end result to not look like a monster, to be somewhat palatable to human sensibilities, so she worked hard at it. It means that she didn't just push Taylor's face in the back of Cherish's head, like she had done before. Instead, she "just" increased Cherish's skull size (while staying within normal parameters) and removed parts of her grey matter (the one with the memories) before shoving Taylor's brain inside. Only her power made sure that everything stayed (relatively) healthy and connected (relatively) correctly, even as she fiddled with the thing.

And then she closed the "hatch", her power allowing the bone to fuse back together – in all seriousness, if people had a real look at what her power did, they would wonder if she was another daughter of Marquis, especially since she complemented Panacea quite well.

Thankfully, the end result hadn't pushed Cherish into the "balloon-head" category, though… like her attempt with Shatterbird – giving her more brain matter had been necessary to deal with a larger area of effect before the corresponding Thinker headache could form.

While she plied her trade, Bonesaw kept her concentration on the task at hand, instead of dealing with those around her. But she, too, felt observed by an alien intelligence… and the second flying armour, still hovering above everything despite the temporary lack of anything bringing blood and energy to Taylor's brain – and, in Bonesaw's expert opinion, that brain was much more connected to its Gemma than other parahumans', which could explain Taylor's "out there" moments.

In an equally strange way, the grey organ was pulsating in her hands during the transfer. Like a still-beating heart. She had almost dropped it, too, only to feel an acute feeling of danger should she fail to do as promised.

Once back in a body, though, the brain asserted its dominance, and forged new pathways into the surrounding grey matter. That took a while, because the alien shard knew not to forge ahead too fast, lest it destroy its current vessel.

Unfortunately, in the minutes during which Taylor was prepared to do great things (terrible, but great), Shatterbird had shattered the last physical representation of Taylor's last parent: her dad's head. Not that he could have been restored to life, of course, but she hadn't fully realized that.

So it was with a new feeling of utter rage that she lashed at the one cape there. One which had just gotten an injection of powers to go with his already adaptive invulnerability. And who was, thankfully, just coming to grips with them. Such as by shuffling the various powers and corresponding minds into his separate brain parts, spread over his large body. It ended with a cacophony of voices, then, each mouth able to yell a previous Butcher's vitriolic intents for the world to hear. Or just Taylor, right then. Crawler had awoken as the new Butcher.

Thanks to her increased brainpower, Taylor didn't let the rage come across a good solution for the apparently immortal cape in front of her, even if she had used it before – with another immortal being, even. She didn't manifest the sound that could have been made by an oversized catapult, but it was almost the same effect, except it was increased by several orders of magnitude. Thanks to her mental adjunct, her zone of control was now an immensely large volume, which she could shape as she wanted. She could cover the whole city with it… or make a cylinder up to the limits of the atmosphere – and even beyond, since she could move the air over that limit. That cylinder acted as a cannon, and Crawler as the ordnance.

Thankfully for her, and for us, Taylor didn't gain the Butcher's powers, meaning that Crawler survived the shot and the subsequent entry into space. Or it's because he was too far, when he died, for the power transference.

Given his starting speed, Crawler would probably overshoot Alabaster, but Taylor still wished for the two to meet and fight endlessly on the surface of a remote star, burning in hell forever. And if they met but were too far from each other, the Butcher still granted Crawler a form of teleportation with which he could get closer and grab Alabaster. It was still short-ranged enough not to allow him a return trip home, since the explosion that accompanied it didn't change his vector.

After that, in the sudden silence around her, Taylor lifted herself up slowly, her area of effect settling over the city. With the light of dawn coming to her elevated position before it could reach the buildings beneath, she started her day by using the air to extract the little bits of glass from the ground, trying to solve the most complicated puzzle in existence by recreating her dad's face.

Due to her extended zone of control, she felt the three heroes approaching through the air before seeing them. And she recognized them, too. That's why she let them approach her in peace. After all, between Armsmaster's warning, their own groups of Thinkers, and the mere fact that she was the sole survivor, on Earth, from the pile-on involving most of the capes from the Empire Eighty-Eight, the Asian Bad Boyz, the Slaughterhouse Nine, the Teeth, and the Travellers… one would be crazy to attack her. Or indomitable in their self-confidence, without regard for reality. Hm.

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Meet the Triumvirate

That's when a black hole appeared, eating her creation right as she had started to get a hand at finding the good pieces and shoving them together. She hadn't realized that, by levitating herself and the glass around her, she could be mistaken for Shatterbird.

Rage, again, flooded her. The glass fell, and her armour appeared around her.

"Why do you keep killing my dad?" she yelled, before lashing out blindly.

"Oh sh-" was the last word of the most powerful cape in the world, interrupted as it was when air pressed on him from every direction. Only his powers allowed him not to die immediately.

"You want to kill me with black holes? See if you can become one!" Taylor yelled again, the pressure increasing again and again. Eidolon wasn't rumoured the strongest cape for no reason, and his chosen powers included Brute resistance.

But how can a relatively simple Brute power, even with a high rating, resist the equivalent of a hundred g (and still growing) pressing from all sides at the same time? Especially when it also invaded his ears and airways?

With a series of sickening crunches, the cape's bones were broken in several places, before he couldn't deal with the pressure anymore and whatever remained was reduced to a very dense grain of indeterminate matter… which looked like sand.

Seeing this, Taylor propelled it far into the ocean, so that it could join the other grains of sand at the bottom of the ocean's floor. Given that her throw was guided by her power, Alexandria was unable to catch it before it sunk into the water, and she didn't follow.

"What have you done?" she yelled as she returned in front of Taylor.

"You killed my dad." Taylor replied.

"We did not! That was Empire action!"

"The Empire had moles in the PRT. The moment a raid was illegally ordered by its Director, they knew. Victor was nearby, and ordered to shoot anyone if it could sow chaos among the heroes." Taylor replied, before cocking her head to the side. "At least that's what I can make from the ramblings and emotions of the people below."

"And then you killed everyone. Every cape."

"Yes. Parahuman powers don't seem to enjoy anything but fighting. I want to make my city a better place, so I removed every cape I could find."

Legend zipped next to Alexandria before returning to tangibility. "Do you intend to kill the Protectorate heroes, too? The Wards?"

Taylor shook her head. "If they aren't stupid like the PRT, they should leave, or get their powers off. I know Panacea can help, there – I just heard her saying so. However, I also know Triumph and Miss Militia want to stay and mount a guerrilla effort. They are now suffocating from even suggesting the idea."

"What?" Legend exclaimed, before shooting downwards, towards the Rig.

"I should have told him they were at my house, trying to install a bomb there – and given Miss Militia's adherence to procedure, I know it is under orders." Taylor continued to comment on what was happening in the city under her, showing a level of knowledge that made Alexandria wary. "I wonder whom. Or not. Oh well, they will die anyways. They just released the bomb to try to breathe easier. Thankfully, I can encase the bomb's explosion so that it doesn't damage my house. Too bad their bodies won't be recoverable, though."

"You're a monster!" Alexandria said, pointing a finger at her. It didn't tremble, but only because Alexandria's superpower involved a lack of anything resembling emotions.

As such, her expression of anger didn't faze the part of Taylor who got Cherish's power. "Nice one." she said in reply. "Now try this one for size."

And then Alexandria felt true anger for the first time since she became a parahuman. It was so sudden, and so powerful, that she couldn't resist. Yelling incoherently, she threw herself at her antagonist repeatedly, acting more like a toddler making a temper tantrum than the calm and collected (and tactically savvy) super-heroine everybody knew her as. And, as such, Taylor didn't move at all, her armour of solid air tanking every blow from the super-strong woman.

It made Legend start and stop when he returned from the Rig. "I haven't found the heroes. What's happening?"

"She killed everyone!" Alexandria bawled at him, pointing a trembling finger at Taylor. "She sabotaged our experiment!"

"Your… experiment?" he asked.

"Yes, the experiment!" the woman was incensed and so blinded by rage that she didn't filter what she was saying. And to whom. "Cauldron thought that, by letting parahuman gangs settle into fief-like territories, we could reinstate feudalism among them, and get more of them for the final showdown."

"So… you let Brockton Bay fall into disarray… as an experiment?" Legend asked, disgusted.

"Why, yes! There are things more important than a city, you know?"

"What would be more important than saving their lives?"

"Saving everyone's life! You don't get it, but Scion is the enemy, here! We must find the proper combination of powers to get him out, in one go if possible! And…" she trailed off, noticing that Legend's gaze wasn't on her anymore. "He's right behind me, isn't he?"

He only nodded, and fractionally at that, and she sighed before turning around. The Golden Man was effectively there, and his eyes were on Taylor, wondering. "THINKER?" he… spoke. Apparently, the exterior appearance of Taylor's armour (with her face, and body shape) made him think of something. Or someone.

Alexandria tried to answer, only to be pushed aside when Scion approached the hovering teen in her armour of compressed air. Given the woman's expression of outrage, it wasn't something she was used to, and she was ready to retaliate out of pure spite. Only Legend stopped her from trying another temper tantrum… and a suicidal one, at that, given the power discrepancy.

Taylor's shard wasn't an Entity, though, so it sent a denegation mixed with many proposals and ideas for a renewed partnership. All this compressed into a single word – uttered, as usual, by the air around Taylor. "POSSIBLE."

"GUIDANCE?"

Taylor wanted her city to prosper. For that, she wanted parahumans to stop fighting. Given her mental entanglement with her shard, her thought processes contaminated her passenger's, just as those changed hers. As such, the shard transmitted many intents, all rolled up in a single word again. "PEACE."

"CYCLE?" Scion asked, looking genuinely confused. In clear, he wondered what would happen if his species stopped harvesting powers and exploding planets in their quest to find a way around the Heat Death of the universe.

Taylor's shard allowed the multiple interpretations of this single word to percolate in her consciousness, and the girl chose a simple way to convey that, even if someone was going to die anyways, they should enjoy the time spent alive. It was one of the "important things" her mother had inculcated her when, when she was but a little girl, her grandparents had died and she wondered why. "LIFE."

Within the word, she laced an expression of Cherish's power, to bring joy around her. It was so intense that the dawn, initially cold and grey, became rosy and promising in her zone of control. The humans, downstairs, started their day with a skip in their step and a song in their heart. And Scion smiled, for the first time in recorded history, before nodding. "LIFE." he concurred, before zipping away. And Taylor smiled, too: his "word" held as much punch as hers, if not more, and she had lost all of her rage, all of a sudden. Instead, there was joy… and the idea of creation.

A pregnant pause ensued, because the normally unflappable Alexandria was at a loss for words. Still, her own Thinker power had helped her understand the "conversation", contrarily to Legend, who still clutched his ears in pain. "Did you just… defuse the end of the worlds?" she asked.

Taylor shrugged, her armour conveying the movement perfectly. "Seems so. Have you even tried?"

Alexandria looked lost for a second. "But… we thought… precognition…"

Legend looked sharply up, at that. "You followed Contessa's Path, right? A precog who tried to map a way to get rid of someone so powerful that she couldn't see him?"

"How do you know that?" Alexandria asked, her fists on her hips, and the very image of imminent violence. And then Scion zipped right behind Legend, and lifted a finger to give her the universal "no" signal. She deflated instantly, and wondered if it had been a hallucination, given that the Golden Man disappeared immediately afterwards. Even Legend hadn't caught on the appearance. "Sorry. I forget that you saw her, and even know some of her powers. We thought that, with your too optimistic outlook on life, you'd try to block us."

"And I bloody well should have!" Legend replied, shocking his co-worker with the unusual profanity. A deep breath later, he spoke more calmly. "At least, tell me that Cauldron will stop."

"Come with me, we'll see the Doctor." was the answer. "Now that you know, there's no need for that secrecy. Door to Cauldron, please." she ended, speaking to the air.

Taylor watched them disappear, not even trying to follow. Instead, she fell straight down, leaving the armour behind. Her fall guided by her power, she ended up back in her home. She opened the windows to let fresh air in – and the compressed remains of the two humans and one bomb out. And then, as she watched the rosy sun peek from the horizon, she felt a hand patting her shoulder. And then another. And she sighed in joy when feeling her parents hug her, even if she knew, somewhere in her mind, that they were just projections. Compressed air that her shard monitored, like it monitored everything in the city. It had had them clothe themselves, too, using her memories for the end result to be somewhat realistic. And she could pretend to be in paradise.

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The End

At least, that's how the story is told. Many Thinkers have filled the holes where nobody would comment – or nobody alive could retell what happened.

But however it happened, most parahumans thought afterwards that our city was cursed… with something that was spreading around, thanks to Scion. Life and joy was celebrated everywhere, and should any cape set shop for a gang, they found themselves simply disappearing – or worse, depending on what the gang promoted.

Those who come here as refugees, though, trying to escape the chaos outside, are welcomed… and their powers watched for any sign of conflict. Panacea still works here, after all, despite all of New Wave having moved to Boston – Carol Dallon couldn't accept the idea of a fresh trigger in charge of "her" city, and had been moved forcibly afterwards. With how Taylor knew everything in town, Amy Dallon had been proposed the choice of following, and stay miserable, or stay, and heal when she wanted, and perhaps get weaned off from her sister's "love-me" aura. Given the level of control Taylor has, Panacea can be flown from anywhere in the town in seconds, if rogue parahumans (in the sense that they flouted Taylor's laws) needed emergency lobotomies.

In fact, anyone can request to fly, now. Much like Clairvoyant and Doormaker, the parahumans Cauldron employs to move their personnel around, Taylor knows what's happening everywhere, and can act through the air. Those making more than a few waves aren't even visited by Panacea, as they simply disappear.

Taylor Hebert may or may not be among us, today, but if she is, she doesn't show herself. She doesn't need to. She hears the city. She feels the city. She is the city. I'm sure that, should the need arise, she could even fly the whole city. Into space, even, because… why not?

There's no need for that, though. The only reason why people would have this option is to escape a natural disaster… such as an Endbringer. However, since Eidolon's death, the three menaces hadn't moved. At all.

With the parahuman-related ultra-violence finally out of this city, and soon the world, we can, at last, take a well-deserved breather.

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To be continued… yeah, no.

Author's Notes: Inspiration for this started when I read "Oxygen", from ReiZetsubou (on SB and SV, but it can be found here under another pen name). It's a bit short and the premise is interesting, hence this one – although it is quite different.