Born of Blood Chapter 2 (Original chapter Chapter 16)
Aftermath of Bakuda's Bombing Rampage
"Fuck." I looked around at the damage done to the city from the top of a building, "That bomber bitch really went to town on the Bay."
"Well she is more than slightly off her rocker." Tattletale answered from behind me. I had patched the rest of the Undersiders together and accelerated their healing from Bakuda's impromptu torture session, but their muscles will still be aching and sore as hell for a while. Tattletale, otherwise known as Lisa, was no exception, but she had still come out to talk to me for some reason.
"What's on your mind, Tats?" I asked, turning to face the wan-faced blonde, "You should be asleep. Getting beaten up takes it out of a girl."
I should know. Fucking Sophia.
"I'm fine, Bloodborne." Tattletale sighed, and then winced as she sat down against the wall, "OK, so I'm not fine, but I'm not exactly on death's door either. I should be asking how you are. Bakuda concentrated on you quite a bit before she focussed on the rest of us."
"Yeah, well…I'm a Brute who has a diminished sense of pain and a pretty good regeneration factor." I shrugged uncomfortably, "Better me than the rest of you."
"And that's why we need to talk." Tattletale looked me in the eyes firmly, "You have to stop feeling that your life is expendable."
"I don't-!"
"You do." The Thinker cut me off with a strident tone in her voice, "I can deduce things from even the smallest clues, remember? Given even more data, I can find out even more. I don't know what exactly, but someone or a group of someones, has reduced your ability to care about yourself to a great degree. You see the lives of others as more important, you don't hesitate to throw yourself into dangerous situations that even Brutes would be wary of and you dance on a knife's edge by taunting powerful Capes."
Like Lung. Like Bakuda. Went unsaid and unneeded.
I was silent for a long while. "I told you how I Triggered."
"Ah." The girl nodded seriously, "Yes, them. Those three bitches. I have to say that for once, I'm on Regent's side here. What they did was beyond the pale. They deserve to have some degree of punishment."
"I refuse to lower myself to their level!" I snapped back, "I refuse to do that. Villain or not, I am better than they are!"
Tattletale put both hands up in a pacifying gesture. "OK, OK, calm down. I understand that. I was just offering my opinion."
I forced myself to calm down. Lisa didn't deserve that. "Sorry. Those three are a touchy subject."
"The people responsible for making someone Trigger usually are." The purple-clad villainess replied with a cynical laugh, "Usually it isn't a person responsible for someone Triggering though. A stressful situation, like being trapped in a burning building or being in a car crash, is the usual line. The ones involving deliberate human actions usually tend to be the most stressful and the most damaging to the newly Triggered Parahuman. Like in your case. It takes a special kind of scumbag to make someone Trigger."
"That fits those three to a 'T'." I snorted, "Look, I won't go out of my way to get back at them, but if I get the chance and it doesn't break the rules, I'll do something about them."
"That's all I want." My…friend…said. It was so unusual to be able to call someone that nowadays.
"I'd better head home. Dad'll be having kittens after Bakuda's little temper tantrum." I said after a good few moments.
"Sleep well, T." Tattletale said as she got up stiffly and hobbled over to the rooftop door, "We'll give you a call if we need you."
The Next Day
As expected, the news of the Undersiders taking down Bakuda was nowhere to be seen. Just that the bomber bitch was in custody and was to be sent to the Birdcage ASAP.
I didn't mind, but I knew that that arse, Armsmaster, would be hot on our tails the next time that he had a chance. According to Lisa, he had a jealous streak a mile wide and didn't like people having accomplishments that he didn't have.
Boo-hoo for him.
"…and in other news, the gang war in Brockton Bay, ignited by the mad Tinker Bakuda of the ABB, has begun." The newscaster was saying solemnly as I ate my cereal, "The newly freed Dragon of Kyushu, Lung, has been witness fighting against villainous Parahumans of the Empire Eighty-Eight across the town, with Oni Lee launching hit and run raids in Empire-claimed territory."
That's what Bakuda's bombing spree had been all about; a distraction to allow Oni Lee to free Lung from jail. Great. I had put him down once, looks as if I was going to have to do it again. Stupid PRT. Couldn't they do anything right?
OK, so I was a bit peeved at the PRT and the Protectorate since they almost crushed Regent during our bank robbery, but that was justified! What the hell was Kid Win doing with a laser cannon that size?! It had brought down a wall on Regent and only an automatic swipe of over a gallon of blood turned into a shelter had saved him.
Regent being Regent had asked me to not surround him in blood again if she could possibly help it as blood stank. I had told him that if he'd rather go mano-a-mano with half a ton of brick, mortar and metal, he was going about it the right way.
"I wish I could stay home with you, Taylor, but I've been called in by the Union." Dad said with a thunderous frown. Dad was known as the Demon at the Union because of his awful temper, and I wondered which idiot had decided to hit one of Dad's buttons (leaving me alone in the middle of a gang war) and earned themselves a rant.
"S'OK Dad. I'll hole up here." I smiled at him, "This part of town's not claimed by any of the gangs, so I'll be fine."
It was true. My neighbourhood had always been strangely left out of the usual shenanigans by the gangs. About two neighbourhoods to the south we had Empire territories, the same to the east we had ABB, while the PRT and Protectorate 'territories' were to the north and west, with a small Merchant territory squeezed in there.
It took a lot of coaxing and reassuring to get my dubious Dad out of the house, but once his car rounded the bend, I got to work. Entering my house and leaving through the back garden, I snuck into an alley and changed into my blood armour. Thanks to Tattletale's insights, it was much more effective protection now and I had the pattern memorised perfectly.
Flying up on a platform of black blood, I overlooked the surrounding chaos of the streets and saw what I had been afraid of; a large group of the ABB marching towards my neighbourhood. Just fucking perfect.
I sped off to intercept them and floated above their heads, arms crossed and quite plainly glaring at them, despite my blank mask.
"Gaijin!" the apparent leader of the gangbanger snarled.
"Turn around." I ordered them flatly, "If you leave now, I won't do to you what I did to your boss."
That made them nervous. The revelation that I had fought and beaten their oh-so powerful Dragon of Kyushu had them pause for a moment before the leader screamed something at them in Japanese that put some steel in their spines.
"I'm really getting fed up of this." I muttered to no one before I dissolved the platform of blood beneath me, landed on the road and started beating the ABB unconscious.
"Now. Where. Is. Lung?" I demanded of the leader, the only one left conscious.
"I…I…I dunno!" he stammered in fear, "He…He's been moving around a lot since he broke out! We get our orders via phone calls!"
"Hand it over."
In short order, I had the gangbanger's phone and was flicking through the contacts. A lot of them were in Japanese, but that actually played into my hand as I found one with 'Kyushu no Ryū' as the name.
"Huh…so you're actually ranked high enough in the ABB to have Lung's number?" I looked at the man appraisingly. He had a dozen piercings apiece in his ears and his hair was dyed blond. "Unexpected, that."
"Shut up, Gaijin bitch." He snarled. Apparently this was a sore point for him, enough so to override his fear of me, at least temporarily.
I made a tendril of blood expand into a full-on tentacle and smack in the back of the head to knock him out before gathering all the blood I had generated into a ball and compressing it until it was the size of a marble. I opened a pouch that I had made on my right hip and dropped it in. This was something Tattletale had talked me into because it made me look bad to leave blood all over the place.
Tying the ABB gangbangers up before I left, I recreated my platform and sped into the city. I was not going to let the ABB or either of the other two gangs run rampant any longer. Did this make me a bad villain? Probably, but who cares.
I was sailing down the Broadwalk when a demon-masked figure appeared on a nearby building. Oni Lee. The next second, he was in front of me, pin pulled out of a grenade on his bandolier. Shit! He was doing his usual suicide bomber trick!
"Fuck!" I yelped and surrounded the Oni Lee Clone with a thick shell of blood as I hurriedly backpedalled away from it. Most of the blast was contained by the blood and that which wasn't as directed up, because I had deliberately made the topmost part of the shell thinner up there to make any explosion follow the path of least resistance.
"Where's Lung?" I demanded of the tele-duplicator, who had appeared back on his original roof. I wasn't seriously going to go after him, you understand. I was just really pissed at him.
Oni Lee said nothing and attempted a repeat of his previous attack, which I neutralised in the same way.
"OK. Now I'm actually getting mad." I said and cracked my knuckled loudly, "Time to get serious."
So, this Taylor, despite being a member of the Undersiders, is also a bit obsessed with making sure her enemies go down and stay down. That's why she felt compelled to leave and enter the town and that's why she's hunting for Lung. Not exactly keeping her word to Tattletale, is she?