Chapter 8: Inferno
It couldn't be that easy? Could it? It was mere happenstance that he found himself with the opportunity. The college girl was looking at him with sweat matted hair and grime lined face, her arms raised in fighting pose, the arms thin from a lack of food and exercise, her yellowed teeth barely visible behind the snarl as he tried to placate her with half-raised open hands.
"Easy, I'm not going to hurt you." He didn't know if he ever would have the opportunity to hurt her if the dozen or so spheres on her makeshift bandolier were anything to go by. Bombs and a lot of them, some of them whirred and whizzed audibly as he took another step down the rickety stairs. It stank of muck down here and the girl was obviously the reason for it.
Happenstance… The building was dilapidated and the only reason he was here was that he saw some old bald guy come and go at odd hours. Mere chance that he took note of it as the man hauled crates or burlap sacks every so often and left with nothing that Shang-Huang could see. It was now clear that the girl was a hostage, from her atrocious look to her half Asian features. And she was a cape to boot.
"I'm here to get you out." It was happenstance that got him involved in cape affairs, first that Taylor girl, then Lung and now this girl, no, this woman. Luck would have it that she was half Asian, it was rumoured that the dragon was half Asian, not that he cared what ethnicity his capes were, as long as they followed him with unquestioning loyalty, too bad there was only one other cape in the ABB.
She didn't respond to his word, arms still raised to fight if she needed to. She looked behind him, watching the dark hallway for anyone coming down behind him, after tense seconds with no one following the teen she returned to look at him and finally accepted that he wasn't part of the nazis keeping her hostage.
"You're not with them?" She asked hopefully, even with a boatload of bombs strapped to her chest she was afraid. The bald guy that he had knocked out had quite a big swastika on his back, neatly covered by his shirt.
"No, no fuck those guys, I'm here to get you out." He offered his hand, and she gently took it. He imagined he was a knight in shining armour saving a princess, but the reality was that he was a scrawny teenaged rebel that saved a college girl from captivity at the hands of the nazis, not that the ABB did any better than them.
He turned to slowly walk up the steps, the boards creaking with every step and he peered around the corner into the barely lit hallway, the fat bald man was slumped just a few feet away from the door, his unconscious form shifting as he took shallow breaths. He moved down the hall and the woman followed two steps behind, he felt her hover over the fat man and turned to watch as she planted a might kick into the nazi's nose, the sharp crack of broken nose singing out into the hall.
The door to the outside was a heavy steel one and was locked with a massive padlock, the building was one of the dilapidated warehouses close to the docks and people would assume the man driving the beat-up sedan would be a dockworker, not a nazi torturer that worked not fifty feet from a residential block filled with Asians. That's why he'd found the man, his room looked straight over the road and he saw the man walking up and down every third day or so. Eventually, his curiosity got the better of him and led to this string of events.
"He's not back yet." A nasal tone broke through the calm morning, two white men were walking down the street, their attire reminiscent of dock and warehouse workers, except for the not so well-hidden red bandanna poking out of one of their pockets. They'd say it was a cloth, but Shang knew better.
"Doug's never late, hope the chink bitch didn't cause problems for the idiot. Bitch can't even walk from what I heard." Shang turned to look at the woman, her legs were wobbly, either from malnutrition or broken kneecaps that had barely healed. Her eyes were red as she fought back angry tears, her hand drifted to one of her bombs on her bandolier and Shang had to grab her hand to keep her from chucking a grenade at the two. He was reasonably sure that she couldn't even throw that far if she wanted to.
Instead, he pulled her along the back alley further from his home, around the two idiots standing close to the door. He could still hear them as they decided to move closer to investigate the delay of their plus sized partner.
"His shits been kicked in!" The nasally one called out, his partner already rushing out of the entrance of the basement cell they had been holding his rescue in.
"The chink escaped! Call the boss, I'll check to see if she's nearby." The pounding of feet became faint as Shang led the woman down the alleyway, her legs wobbling as they went further and further. She collapsed to the ground and nearly pulled Shang to the floor with her as she grabbed onto his jacket.
"I can't…" Silent tears streamed from her eyes as she fought the pain of her legs to keep taking one step further and escape the torment of the empire. Shang weighed his options, he could pick her up, she was light enough to do so but it would leave him slow and unable to do anything if they found them. He looked around to find a hidden corner to camp in before the nazis found them. He picked up the woman, amazed at how light she was and moved to the steel door he had spotted.
The screech of metal on metal cried out as he opened the door, the entire street would hear the commotion and he hurried to help his rescue through the door before the thugs could come closer. He scurried away inside with the woman on his back and gently sat her on the ground before poking his head out to see if the thugs were coming, the coast seemed clear as the two were probably on their way to the door. The few seconds he had, he had to use wisely so he pulled out his phone, the darkness enveloping the two swiftly vanquished by the small phone's glare, quick tapping fingers had him calling the only person he knew capable of helping him.
"Boss, I'm in a bit of a tight spot here. I saved a girl from an eighty-eight cell; she can't walk and we've got thugs chasing us. I'm at Grave street, in an old warehouse, she's a cape." He didn't waste time waiting for the old man to ask more questions as he heard the door groan a second time as the bulky man stepped into the building. Shang kneeled down next to the woman and whispered reassuring words to her to try and keep her calm while attentively listening to the heavy footsteps of a man twice his size.
"Hey, hey. I need you to stay quiet or they'll find us. I'll keep a lookout, but they'll be here soon." She was shivering from the adrenaline and pain, grimly determined to see herself free from captivity.
Shang remembered how the dragon had demanded that he bring him something more valuable than Taylor, than the hunter, a tall order if there ever was one. But a tinker and he assumed she was a tinker as she ripped one of the spheres from her bandolier and eagerly pressed the big red button with her thumb. Her tear-stained eyes steeled in determination with a healthy dose of fear as she hoped to both use and not use the exotic bomb clutched in her sweaty hand.
"What does that one do?" Shang whispered his question as the thug walked away from the two into another hallway, trying to distract her from the pending assault from the thug stalking the halls of the run-down building.
"This one is a mute-bomb, it stops all vibrations from travelling through air. It will also fry the brains of anyone within ten feet when it blows." Her eyes had turned hard as she explained the properties of her creation to him through grit teeth. A manic bomber with nothing to lose, far from home and with a tinker power specialised in exotic bombs. The very idea sent a shudder down Shang's back as he thought about how she probably didn't escape due to her fear of blowing herself up with her definitely overly lethal devices.
A crash alerted them to the whereabouts of their stalker, the man must have knocked something over as he walked around the building. The echo of his clumsy fumbling in the dark relieving the two. Shang poked his head around the corner, the light streaming in from the open door blurred the darkness that the rest of the building was doused in. If he could only figure out where the nasally one was, then he could maybe sneak past the two and escape to another hidden corner in the dilapidated district.
Tense seconds passed as he hoped to be saved from a nightmare. His boss had to come for them, leaving a kid, let alone a parahuman, to be caught by E88 thugs was never on the table. He only hoped that they'd be here faster than the reinforcements from the empire.
Tire squeals roared into the building as several vehicles made their way to stop in front of the building, doors slammed and people shouted. To his horror it was in English, not the Japanese of his boss and the rag-tag bunch of his gang. The most recognizable of the lot was the nasally one.
"The chink is in there, Greg's already inside so try not to shoot him." Shang looked down at the bomb clutched in the hands of his rescue. He could maybe get them out, he looked around but the darkness of the building was impenetrable and he couldn't see anything he could use to get them out.
Shang had never killed, but he knew that the E88 would do much worse to him than just killing him if they caught him with the tinker woman. He bit down hard, his teeth grinding in his ears as he swallowed the bile rising in his throat. His decision made, he knelt next to the woman and gently pulled the bomb from her grasp, keeping his finger on the angry red button.
"I need another bomb, one that can blow a hole in the wall." She looked at his face for tense seconds but reached out to another bomb on her bandolier.
"Same as that one but it'll freeze anything and then blow up after a second or two." The proffered item was indistinguishable from the one in his hand but he took it anyway.
The treading of feet came through the door as it screamed a final time as the leading man swung it open. Shang had to do it now. A final gulp of spit almost had him heave as he leaned out from the corner and threw the mute bomb towards the feet of the five or so men walking into the building.
The bomb bounced once, twice. The metallic ding alerted the empire thugs as death came in a small canister.
"Grenade!" One shouted as training kicked in and the five men dived for cover, which there was nothing of in the lobby of the building, nor that it would save them from the brain-melting pulse. The final second ticked down as the sphere came to a halt and exploded with nary a whisper. No sound came as Shang witnessed five men die from his own hands. He wanted to throw up but hurried to the other side of the building to plunk the ice bomb next to the wall.
No sound came as the wall frozen into blue and white before exploding with no concussive force or sound, the bricks crumbling to nothing as the opening in the wall streamed in light. Shang pulled the woman up onto his back and made his way through the opening. He looked to where the nazis had been and spotted a pair of wide eyes looking straight at him, the man tried to shout and point at him but nobody could hear anything. Shang bolted to the other end of the alley, again going further from his home. The lanky skinhead chased after him but not before grabbing the attention of one of his buddies.
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The knocking on the door shattered the slow wake I was undergoing, sleep retreating quickly instead of the gradual process everyone enjoyed. I shook my head to clear out the stars in my vision from pressing my eyes too tightly into something, I found that the something was the upper arm of one Victoria Dallon.
A second set of knocks followed before I could respond. Vicky shuffled awake with alarm as the knocking continued past the previous set's amount and picked up intensity as the last one rattled the door before it stood still, an exasperated sigh coming from whoever stood behind the door.
"Vicky! Get up! We're going to be late." Amy's shouting pierced the grogginess of the blond, whose eyes snapped open upon seeing me, her sleep infused mind only now starting to remember the previous day.
A third set of knocking would have been preferred over the mousy girl barging her way into her sister's room. Amy froze with words dripping from her lips in shock, the syllables melting as she took stock of what was in front of her. Her eyes flicked from the mess of blond hair matted with sweat, blood and dirt. To my face ringed by hair that stuck to my cheeks with dried monster blood, then down to the red-stained shirt I wore with a large tear where my shoulder began.
It took two seconds for the girl to regain her composure, two very long seconds.
"T-Taylor." Her voice had a sharp inflexion to it at the end of my name, making it sound more like a question than an acknowledgement that I was here. In the bed of her sister. Oh boy.
"Amy!" Vicky's voice cut through the girl's wandering mind and grabbed her attention before things went out of hand. "Amy." The blond stood up, her leg wobbling from the stab she had taken yesterday, it didn't go unnoticed by the younger sister and with a hand to her head tried to explain my presence. "This is, uhm… We went out yesterday."
Amy's narrowed and her lips thinned into a frown at her sister's words, "To do what Vicky?" She lifted her hand from the handle of the door and folded her arms in front of her, her hip poking out to one side as she tried not to get exasperated from the blonde's half answer.
Vicky had a sheepish look to her face, as she sat down at the foot of the bed and idly rubbed the scar on her leg, covering it from the sight of her sister.
It might be prudent to point out that we were both still in the clothes we wore yesterday. Vicky slept in her green-camo, the same clothes she had worn when we went and hunted Velkhana, except now the pants were ruined from the bone spike that had lodged itself into her thigh and almost took her life and was speckled with dried blood and dirt.
I wore a long-sleeved grey shirt with matching grey sweats, with a number of holes in some places.
"We, we killed something." Amy's hands curled with barely contained anger.
Before Vicky could continue, her sister interrupted her with a hiss, her voice soft but deadly as she tried not to scream in the early hours of the morning.
"And you told no one, not even me. You told us you were going to Dean last night for a family dinner."
"That was the plan." Vicky defended; it didn't matter.
"Then why were you with Taylor." Her hand flicked out and quickly poked out an accusatory finger at me as she barely contained her shouting at the reckless blond.
"She asked and… I don't know, it was so exciting last time. I couldn't say no." She shied away from eye contact with her sister, knowing that what she did was a tad reckless even if she had the autonomy to do it.
"Couldn't say no? You sound like an addict. Thank god Carrol won't find out, but you owe me big time for this. And you." She turned ever so slightly to look in my direction, pinning me down with her eyes, daring me to make a move or a single squeak.
"You need to leave my sister out of your suicidal sport." It ticked me off.
"It's not a sport." I retorted, "I have to do it."
"Have to my ass, you're running around killing big scary monsters that you control with your powers just to get some attention." I was taken aback, I thought Amy wasn't the type of person to verbally attack a person she barely knew, but I barely knew the girl so I shouldn't have been surprised as she simply ignored my response, dismissing it outright.
Anger that I hadn't felt since killing Valstrax returned to me with a cunning vengeance, released from the trapdoor in my head that had been locked away with the cold calculating mind of the aforementioned apex predator.
"Oh sure! Let me go and kill some monster and put it on the PHO while I'm at it, why not call the media and tell them I did something good! Don't tell me what I'm doing with my powers miss heal-for-nothing." I towered over the girl by standing on the bed but the brown-haired girl didn't back down. Her composure broke as her voice rose in volume as she retorted to my sarcasm.
"I know how you rogues work, playing high and mighty, better than everyone else until you need me to patch up your skull after going toe to toe with Hookwolf, you're not anything new Taylor." Vicky was stuck between the two of us as the shouting increased, unsure which side to choose or if she should.
"I never wanted these powers anyway! You think it's fun for me to go against a monster the size of a house. A monster the PRT can't even handle if they tried!" I had to calm down somehow, the moment was getting to me as the girl's disparaging comments drove me further and further into twin monster's unnatural anger.
"And you're the only one who can? Give me a break. You're a scared girl running from her own problems. You can't even sit and have ice cream without running away from a group of kids!" I clamped down on the anger thrashing in my mind, my body shivering as tiny sparks of red floated around my hands, I'm better than the trio, I can control my emotions. I am the one in control. I am the one in control. I am the one in control.
"Amy Stop!" Vicky's voice cut through the room in an instant, the silence let us hear the pounding footsteps coming from further down the hall, someone was coming to the door.
"Alright, what's with all the shouting, what did you do-" The mature face of, I assumed to be their mother stared at the three of us in the room. Vicky in her camo, I in grey slacks with holes in them and Amy with her arms crossed and her face contorted in anger.
"Vicky." The stern tone only a mother could pull off rung out. "Why are you in those, didn't you go to Dean's last night?"
The eldest turned away from her mother, ashamed at ditching her boyfriend to go out on a stint with me rather than spending time with her boyfriend. Her movement revealed the massive hole in her pants where the bone spike had punctured her, the fabric ringed with dry red blood.
Amy was on her in a second, tearing at the fabric but unable to get it off. "Strip!" She ordered the golden girl.
"Wait wait wait." Vicky tried to get her sister off her but the mousy girl kept close even with her sister swinging her arms around.
"As the only medical professional here, I order you to strip, get those pants off. Now!" With a sigh of defeat, Vicky struggled to get the pants off before her sister's anger returned. Her mother was waiting with her arms crossed, her eyes staring at me while her two daughters played doctor. The boiling rage in my mind disappeared as soon as the woman had entered, hiding behind the cold cunning of several monsters' combined intelligence.
A small gasp followed after Amy wiped away the dried blood and revealed the red-pink scar, it was ugly, I knew without looking at it, I had enough of my own that I stared at in the mornings.
"Want me to get this sorted for you?" Amy said it not as a question, but more as if it was a formality, she'd do it even if Vicky said no. The golden girl gave her sister a shallow nod and within the blink of an eye the scar transformed into perfectly fair skin, the hairs grew back within a few seconds as I stared at the miracle of Panacea's powers.
The mousy girl turned to her mom, a silent message going between the two telling the older woman she was done. With the patching done the two turned back to me as Vicky remained seated with her head bowed down, defeat clear in her form, she knew she would be grounded for going out with me and I could only imagine the amount of trouble that would put on her mind.
"That's Taylor." Amy spoke, understanding flicked over their mother's face in an instant, the pieces snapping into place as her gradual deciphering of the room's riddle came to a close.
"The girl Vicky hasn't been able to stop talking about. The 'hunter' of Brockton." The dismissive tone from the woman was hurtful, I tried my best to keep to myself.
"More like wannabe celebrity." By now it was clear that Amy didn't care about me, seeing me as another piece of the broken chessboard that the bay had become.
"Blood and scars. Last time it was the aftereffects of frost burn, almost frostbite. Vicky could have lost her legs. Now…" The mother, Carrol I remembered now, waited for Amy to fill in the details of yesterday's injuries.
"Beyond the scar and the blood loss, there are signs of a neurotoxin that almost reached her heart along with heavy signs of necrosis in the kidneys and around the injury. Whatever kept her alive told the body to fuck over the toxin but didn't repair the damage done to the internal organs past getting them back to work." Her gaze flicked to me and stared at my bare shoulder, three large scars taunting her.
"So, my daughter goes out with the newest cape of Brockton and almost dies this time, a few seconds away from death it seems. What do you think a fitting punishment would be for you, Victoria?" Carrol's posture was tense, her heart beating quickly with adrenaline. But the girl kept quiet, a single tear running down her nose to hit the floor.
"No answer, fine. No phone for a month, no going out for a month. Double the Ward patrols. And if your grades drop below a B, we'll be extending the time." I couldn't comment on the severity of the punishment, dad did nothing when it came to discipline after mom died.
Carrol turned to face me fully as I stepped off the bed, we were at eye level even with her heels and my bare feet.
"You are never to contact my daughter again, understood?" I resisted the urge to fight back, I knew a losing battle when I saw one. I nodded, I'd keep my friend one way or another, an overbearing mother wouldn't stop me.
"Leave." She stood aside and I walked stiffly through the door, but not before Amy poked my bare shoulder, doing so to add insult to my injuries. I followed the hall to the living room and spotted the entryway immediately.
The morning air was crisp and cool, a slow wind running through my hair. A puff of red flames had me in my armour and I floated into the air and made my way to the Undersiders' base.
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After cleaning up in the purple-themed bathroom of Lisa, who seemed to be gone from the base and the sole inhabitant was the greased weirdo that was Alec. I left to go look out over the city again on top of the Halloway building. The tall building afforded those with keen eyes the opportunity to scout out most of the city for strange happenings, not that I was looking for anything as I was still sorting the mess out from the morning in my head.
I was distracted and it led to me not noticing the flying bronze suit of armour landing behind me in shimmering white and gold.
"Hunter!" His voice was strong and proud with no wavering inflexion from puberty, it grabbed my ears and spun me around to face him without a second thought. It was so abrupt that I didn't even think to stand ready for a fight, instead stuck with my jaw open behind my faceplate while staring at the glowing man. He raised his hand to placate me, his shield hovering above his arm and his golden spear resting casually against his shoulder.
"Chill, I'm Dauntless, I just want to talk." One of the protectorate's newer superheroes, with new being a generous term, he'd been in the city for a few years by now. His experience gave him an air of confidence but in a relaxed way, he knew I wouldn't fight if he didn't start anything. I was reminded of the last time I had talked with a Protectorate cape and couldn't stop myself from remarking on it.
"Last time you guys wanted to talk it led to you chasing me around the city." His tiny nod bounced the helmet a bit, exaggerating the movement.
"A mistake, we should have done it the way we planned, a few heads rolled afterwards; mostly the people to gun-ho about nabbing independents." Gravel crunched beneath his armoured sabatons as he casually approached, his shouting dying down as he got closer to me. he was close enough that I could see the definition of his muscled arms beneath the tight white under armour weave all the PRT capes wore.
"Victoria got to you first and we're happy to see you fighting monster outside of the city. Quite a few people were getting scared with how big your last monster was, the silver and red one and it took Armsmaster and Piggot's combined effort to keep other directors from stepping in and escalating the situation." He was standing maybe five feet away from me, he was a tall man and stood half a head above me. His hazel eyes looked down over the city and quickly flicked to me as I turned to inspect whatever he was looking at down below.
"And you're telling me this why?" I asked after a few seconds of car watching. The PRT had shown how they wanted to approach me and I didn't want to antagonize them as I had no reason to. If they left me alone, I would do my part to clean the bay in the coming weeks, one gang operation at a time if I had to.
"Just thought you should know, just because we chased you when you ran doesn't mean we want to arrest you." I had gathered as much from their standoffish methods, having the danger barbie liaise between us in lieu of having a real contact person.
He turned his entire body to me, the shining spartan-Esque armour grabbing my attention, pinning my form as he leaned over and stared me right in the eye. "And we know you killed Crusader, but we can't arrest you for that either." I froze, my jaw clenched… Vicky, her phone call wasn't just because she wanted to know, the PRT had asked her to confirm from my side.
"It was self-defence. I've got the scars to prove it." My feet slid back slowly, a single long step making space between us as I took a single deep breath to calm myself down. They won't arrest me for killing a murderer. A long tense pause floated in the windy air between us as Dauntless turned back to watch over the city. Finally, after more than a minute of him watching cars go by, he turned back to me with a thin smile on his face and took a single step closer to not shout over the wind, again.
"No, I saw you here while I was flying overhead and I thought it might be a good idea to talk to you, not every day that we can talk to the rogues of Brockton without a fight going on." he had a valid point, the rogues of Brockton were solitary and I wasn't any different.
"Want to talk someplace where the wind isn't flicking gravel into your face?" I asked after a rough gust slapped grit into our armours. He floated up but unlike the way Vicky's graceful powers allowed. His body jerked up from his armour grabbing him and hoisting him into the air where he shifted his posture to float over onto a lower building. The roof was littered with clothes hanging on railings and the wind was barely a whisper on the squat building as we took shelter past between a set of large white sheets.
"Okay, so, spill. What do you want to talk about?" I inquired, he leaned against one of the vents of the building, his spear leaning beside him.
"The first thing is that we want to talk to you about the last two monsters you went out and fought. We know Victoria went with you but she hasn't taken the initiative to report on them, it took her mother calling us to let us know that you went on a hunt twice since last week and from what I hear, she wasn't very happy to tell us that." His delivery was neutral and relaxed, not the way I'd think a PRT cape would respond to knowing two teenagers went and tried to kill monsters most pro teams wouldn't be able to handle. I carefully chose my words.
"She forced me to take her the first time and then saved my life. And then she saved my life again yesterday. She might have put herself in danger to do so, but I nearly died three times when I fought Valstrax in the streets." He reacted with the same neutral posture, I guess he knew of the details.
"And she almost died each time she saved yours, correct?" I fidgeted with my hands, I hadn't thought about it like that. I'd much rather have her not risk her life to save mine.
"Sort of… I didn't ask her to save me, she did it on her own. I would have managed someway even if she didn't do it. I'm kind of tough you know." I rapped my hand against my breastplate, the ding of the steel did nothing to put me at ease. Nergigante had bitten through the plate without trouble after all.
Dauntless took a moment to relax and let me stew with the knowledge that I almost killed one of my only friends. Did I deserve to have someone like that saving me at the cost of her own life, I hadn't even rushed over to her while she was battling the poison in her system, instead of rushing to talk to the monster that had spoken maybe ten words to me. If the monster hadn't died exactly when it did, she might have been dead from the toxin before I could save her. I need to look after my friends better, I couldn't let them get hurt recklessly.
"She did it to save you, she's a hero after all. Don't blame yourself for anyone else's actions. Just be glad you have someone willing to take a bullet for you. Now can you describe the monsters you killed and what powers you got from them?" I didn't really want to tell him about them but I had an obligation to inform the heroes of what was going on in their city.
I summarised the monsters.
"And the powers?"
"Nothing, nothing from the ice dragon and nothing from the dragon eater. There was one thing, Nergigante, the dragon eater. He spoke to me. It wasn't a bestial talk, it was regal and noble; powerful and strong, he said that things had been put into motion. I have no clue as to what he means by it." In hindsight, I shouldn't have said it.
"No new powers, but talking monsters, let's hope for your sake it was nothing." It had been about twenty minutes since Dauntless had snuck up on me and the midday sun was starting to retreat behind a bank of clouds wafting out from the bay.
"It was great to talk to you Taylor, I don't think the PRT has your phone number, can you give it to me?" I withdrew my phone from my limitless bag and began reading out the un-memorised numbers when everything went silent, no sound escaped from my mouth as I kept reading the last three digits. The complete silence startled us both enough that we started looking around for anything that might be causing the abnormality.
I jumped into the air and spun around, eyes wide to try and see if I could find the cause for the muting of an entire city block, the superhero trailed behind me after a fraction of a second and we almost collided mid-air as I couldn't hear him coming up.
A flash caught my eye and I turned to look as a massive billow of black smoke wafted into the air not five streets over. If people were hurt, I'd need to get there. I turned to get Dauntless' attention and motioned that I was heading over to the scene. His golden glow told me that he was following right behind me as I took a slow approach to the cloud of smoke.
Fire raged around the area in a perfect circle as the tar of the road melted and burnt, the smoke coming from the tar as it disintegrated. The brickwork and steel of the area melted and crumbled to pieces as the heat penetrated my armour from more than two hundred feet away. I didn't know of anything that could burn that hot, not even my powers were capable of getting to that level.
The lack of sound complicated the matter as I tried to figure out what had happened and if there was anyone that needed assistance.
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Shang looked down the street around the corner as he tried not to get sunburn from the intense heat coming from the bomb the woman on his back had thrown just mere moments ago. The continued void of sound around them made it easy to get away as the bomb she had thrown at the feet of the chasing nazis all but melted them into puddles that evaporated into the atmosphere.
The woman wasn't impressed with his dillydallying and pulled on him to get him to start moving down the street again. Shang wasn't overly athletic past what he and his friends did for sport on their times off and he was huffing and puffing as he jogged down the road with the woman weighing him down, even with her meagre weight. As he turned one last corner to get on the home stretch to his family's small flat he was interrupted by his passenger swinging her arms in front of his face and getting his attention to where she was pointing.
A blocky black car was driving towards them and not on the road. It was driving straight on the sidewalk and was barreling straight at them, silence reigned as the black sedan slammed on the brakes and stopped mere inches from the teen. Out climbed a muscled bare-chested man with simple cargo shorts and a pale blue tiger mask.
The absence of sound limited the conversation from the man but his movement indicated that he knew who he had ran into, or at least knew the woman from the bandolier around her shoulder. The woman reached for a grenade but a forceful wind punched out from the man and blew past the two to crack the brick wall behind them, effectively telling the two to surrender or die.
Shang gently sat his rescue on the ground and turned with his hands raised in surrender to the tiger of the empire, he'd be dead as soon as the man heard that he had killed some of the empire goons. It was just the way gang warfare worked in Brockton.
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I watched from above as cars raced between the streets, old beatups covered in hastily painted blue stripes raced against black sedans with nazis hanging out of the windows firing at them. Two or three of these chases were tearing up the silent streets as the black smoke from the inferno continued to rise to the sky. I wasn't interested in chasing around thugs, capturing the gang's superpowered murderers was what I was after and my silent floating companion was probably thinking the same.
I crossed over a street that served as a clear boundary between the matchbox apartment buildings and the warehouse district and spotted a blue masked cape pulling on the black hair of a woman while an Asian kid laid on the floor clutching his stomach, blood staining his clothes as he tried to stand back up.
Nazi cape, oh how I wanted to jump in and knock his head into the ground but the woman he was pulling across the ground had a nasty set of silver spheres in a bandolier around her shoulder. I didn't want to know what those things were and my intervention might make this troublesome.
Dauntless had no such reservations as he plummeted to the ground right above the nazi. He was only a few feet above the man when the earthbound cape twisted around to blast a solid column of air at the pro. Dauntless raised his hovering shield and took the blow with almost no knockback. A second punch of air had him moving out of the way as the shield diverted the air current away but the force pushed him aside along with it. A third air punch met him on the ground and Dauntless sidestepped it while taking a second forward step towards the nazi.
StormTiger, a wind-based nazi cape I remembered, Lisa had gone through all of the capes and made me memorise all of the names and abilities of the local gang's supers.
Stormtiger punched again but his air fist missed the rapidly moving Dauntless with another fraction. He looked down at the squirming woman in his hand and promptly threw her to the side, but not before sending a low powered windy punch at her leg, drawing three massive rents into her leg and making her scream out in silent pain.
Now with both hands free StormTiger blasted Dauntless with rapid strikes, most of them were dodged but quite a few he had to absorb with his floating shield, each strike dulling the white glow of the bronze buckler. I had to help him or he'd never make it to villain, as said villain kept jumping away when the bronze super got close enough to swipe at him with his silver spear.
I had never used any of my weapons to attack a person, against thugs it would be overkill seeing as I was already an order of magnitude stronger than an average person. But against capes… and lethal ones to boot, I had to.
The sword was maybe four and a half feet long, the shield was large enough to hide behind if I crouched. The edge of the sword cleaved the light as it bounced off it, eager for monster blood, I wouldn't be giving it any satisfaction. I pocketed the blade and kept the shield out as I allowed Valstrax's ambush instincts to rocket me towards the razor wind cape.
Speed was everything, the wind-based cape couldn't feel me coming if I moved faster than the air. I didn't want to kill him and had to slow down before impacting him, but I was still barreling towards hit at a decent pace, I impacted him, grabbed him and twisted around to keep him from dying from abrasion to the ground. The pavement scratched long streaks on my red plate as I came to a standstill, quickly getting up and grabbing the masked tiger's leg before he could scurry away from me.
A blast of razor wind buffeted my faceplate as he punched out towards me. I barely hung on and lifted his body whole and flung him into the wall of the closest building, his air-based powers softening the impact but it still took a chunk of the fight out of him.
Last time I faced Crusader, who scurried away and ambushed me with two ghostly spears in my torso. Stormtiger didn't have the luxury as I blasted his feeble wind away with my own and grabbed him by his shoulders and threw him to the ground, pinning him with an armoured knee waiting for Dauntless to get make his way over here and cuff the man.
His struggling picked up strength as his breath came back to him, I wondered where the bronze armoured man was and looked over my shoulder to see half of the street on fire with a fifteen-foot silver dragon blasting fire at the protectorate cape.
It wasn't one of my beasties. Long and silver with no wings, it looked like an eastern dragon and floated in the air as it coiled around nothing, its maw stretched wide as a torrent of flame gushed out on the protectorate cape.
It had to be 'Lung.' Which was a problem as I guessed the man wanted something to do with me, seeing as he hadn't fought the local superheroes in weeks, but Dauntless had intercepted him and was currently fighting for his life.
The absence of sound made the fighting awkward as Stormtiger eventually broke out of my hold as I watched the dragon of the east fight the bronze spartan. He made to punch me but froze upon seeing the street on fire. He promptly turned and fled, I turned to nab him but a sixth sense tingled and I narrowly dodged a fireball heading my way, the cape-powered flame sticking to the brickwork like napalm.
Abruptly sound returned to the field, the roar of flames, the screeching of tires, the echoes of gunshots. Roaring into a cacophony I had never experienced, it left me in a minor daze as Lung roared a challenge at me as he battered the bronze spartan away, the man slumped in a pile against one of the buildings.
'Hunter!' I gripped the handle of my sword tightly as the silver dragon neared me. I didn't know why I could understand him, his reptilian maw made a gnashing sound as he tried to speak but only a garbled mess came out.
'I've had enough fighting for today, Hunter, I would like to speak to you.' Why would he want to do that?
"Why?" I shouted over the roar of flames.
'The dragon desires to parley with the dragon hunter. Is it not customary for the hunter to understand their prey before hunting them?' I didn't know why, I couldn't imagine a reason why he'd want to talk with me. Dragons never wanted to talk and when they did it was out of curiosity. But Lung wasn't a dragon dragon, he was mortal and thus had normal human ideas. Talking to a man was probably more acceptable than talking to a beast. Still, he was Lung, the leader of the ABB, known murderer and trafficker, a drug lord and generally seen as the worst person in the bay.
That left me with no choice, he was the main reason why I wanted to clean up the bay, he and the empire's slow stranglehold on the city were killing any good people here.
"No!" My denial visibly angered the silver dragon and I pulled my sword, the blade shimmering from the bright orange flames around me.
'You are a fool, there isn't a person in the world who can match me! I am Lung, I am the dragon of the east and I will have your respect!' He opened his mouth and spewed out fire. I sprinted away from him and tried to wait out his breath attack but the narrowness of the street lent itself to his powerset and I had to raise into the air to dodge the flamethrower as it continued to track me into the sky.
The air fizzled in ozone as I summoned Kirin's thunderbolt to slam into the monster, no, he wasn't a monster in that sense.
The crack and boom of the golden bolt was followed by the sharp cry of Lung as his form writhed in electrical sparks. I dived forward with red crimson jets, my blade singing in the air as I cut into the relatively soft silver scales of the dragon. Blood erupted from his wound and doused some of his flames, the scent of copper rising into the air as the almost magical fires boiled his hot blood.
I turned around after my pass to see that the long trail I had carved was gone, with no blood leaking from wounds and no trace of my attack. Lung coiled upon himself, his body elongating as he bent and twisted to face me again. Long silvery whiskers graced his face now as he was visibly larger than before, now maybe twenty feet long. His face was twisted into a reptilian smirk.
'I am the dragon.' His words echoed out as his mouth made a clicking clacking sound with a hiss at the end. Fire erupted from his mouth again and I sped away from the increasingly fast and hot flames. My sword was stowed on my back as I shot crimson blast after blast at him, his serpentine body twisting in the air to flow out of the way of each crimson bolt.
I summoned the razor wind I had used to kill Velkhana and flung it at him, the wide attack striking him along several sections of his floating coiled body, drawing blood but the wounds vanished in front of my eyes as he simply regenerated from them.
A hissing laugh echoed from him as he bolted with unmatched speed towards me, an outstretched paw slamming into my instinctively raised shield, the force broke my arm in several places as I was sent spinning into the air.
'I am the dragon.' He spoke again, his silver form towering over me as I stabilised into the air. 'And I will have your respect!' His silver tail lashed out and hit me in my stomach, sending me spinning through the air again. I lost my bearings along the way as blood rushed into my head from the g-force I was experiencing, I landed on the ground after a while.
'Now hunter, we will talk.' I groaned, dizzy and in pain as I tried to get my feet beneath me on the pavement.
'I am the dragon, and you, the dragon hunter, will be coming with me, you have a place in my ranks. You can not fight this, it is destiny.'
"Destiny can suck it. I am nobody's pet." Red and blue. Fire to light up the soul of demons. A burning rush flew from my form over him, his own fire battling mine as I poured every last piece of my power into an attack that was destined to be futile. But it wasn't futile, the blue of Lunastra washed over his silvery form and boiled scales as he screamed in agony.
'You bitch! You dare hurt the dragon with his own domain. I. Am. Fire!' The buildings around me burst into flames as he fought back against my monster inferno with his own near mythical blaze. The only reason I wasn't melting under his heat was due to my own power erupting into a nova as Teostra's and Lunastra's fire rolled back into one and fused together in a white-hot explosion. Sending Lung flying and me skidding across the pavement until I came to rest a couple of hundred feet away.
I was shaken awake by Dauntless. "Taylor, wake up! We don't have long before he's back, we have to hide." But it was too late, the continued use of my powers over the fight had drained my batteries dry, a bottomless pit formed in my stomach as I realised that I couldn't stop the hunt from starting.
*AN, the story continues and reaches a bloody climax in the coming two chapters. AN*