A/N: Chap 4 review responses are in my forums as normal. Also, please note that my depiction of the Saltykovkoya Bratva in this chapter is based almost exclusively on the Wiki entry. I never read Wildbow's PRT Quest because, to be honest, I just don't like quest style stories. So if you see anything patently off or wrong about my depiction of the capes or the powers, please consider it AU. Any Russian dialogue is courtesy Google Translates, which means it's probably wrong. I had a couple of Russian speakers pipe in about it last chapter, but given it's the middle of the night there and I don't have a chance to check comments each week until I'm posting, it's a little late to fix here. Just accept that that Google Translates isn't very good at actually translating, but it's a hell of a lot better than I am. -DM
Chapter Six: Do You Want Some Bratva with That?
Taylor's dad loved Chuck Norris movies. Anytime The Octagon or Forced Vengeance, or any other of Norris's old movies came on TV, he'd watch it over mom's literate howls of despair. Norris's career didn't make it past the late eighties, any more than Stallone's or Schwarzenegger's acting careers. Muscle-bound strong men or martial artists couldn't compare to the real-life battles of the fast-emerging capes in the world.
For a good five or six years, though, Hollywood produced movies that were essentially variations on a theme that Daniel Hebert adored. Right before each choreographed sequence of numbing violence, Dad would grab Taylor's arm and say, "Watch this! Watch this!"
Taylor didn't particularly like the movies, but Mom positively hated them and gladly threw her only daughter at her father as sacrifice for a few hours of quiet reading time. What always struck Taylor about the movies was how cold the heroes looked while murdering the bad guys. Dad saw it as right versus wrong; of righteousness overcoming villainy. Even as a kid, Taylor just saw one man killing many with a cold, sometimes smug expression.
As she quickly killed her fourth man of the day, snapping his neck from behind, she wondered if her face bore the same expression as those 80's action stars her dad loved so much.
She stripped the man of his pistol. From Piter's mind she had a gross understanding of how to cock and fire the weapon, and how to put in new clips. Just like Piter, Gregor and the third man she killed, this one carried a large pistol and three extra clips. She slipped his pistol behind her belt and put the extra clips into her stolen tactical vest.
She reached the deck of the ship. It was longer than she'd realized, with an island that rose another four levels above the deck. She could see a group of five men at the fore of the deck, standing around smoking cigarettes. She couldn't see the back section, other than the hint of what looked like a helo pad.
She didn't explode into motion, since that implied a violence of movement. Rather, she went from utter stillness to a run with a smooth conservation of energy that left her almost invisible to the naked eye. The five smoking men did not see her at all; not until she was in their midst.
As much as she wanted to strike you with foot and fist, she couldn't afford to leave the men able to strike back. Instead, she struck with the Force, using her hands and feet to guide telekinetic blows as naturally as if she'd been training her entire life. It felt instinctive—frighteningly so.
The first man's head dislocated from his spine; an internal decapitation. A second started to say something before a blow caved in his chest and sent him flying over the side of the ship. He did not splash into water, but rather she could the barest thud, as if he struck cement or packed dirt.
The third was reaching for his pistol when she whipped her foot around. The blow snapped his head to his shoulder, breaking his spine and sending him in an uncontrolled cartwheel. The fourth managed to pull his gun and fired off a shot.
The report of it momentarily shocked Taylor with just how loud it was. That gave the fifth time to turn and shout a warning.
The fourth tried to shoot her again, but she moved too fast. A telekinetic blow snapped his wrist, causing him to drop the gun. She caught it an inch from his hand, shoved the barrel into his ribs under his extended arm and fired three times in quick succession. The report of the weapon seemed somehow even louder when she was the one firing it. The kick of the weapon felt like someone slapping her hand with the back of a hammer.
He didn't even reach the deck before she had the gun to the forehead of the fifth soldier.
"Please," he begged. He looked young.
Her eyes stung. "Too late." She pulled the trigger and watched as his head snapped backward, taking his body with it until he flopped to the deck, utterly still.
Abruptly the Force surged through her like a jolt of adrenaline. She found herself back-flipping away just as the deck where she just stood erupted in a shower of sparks. The air roared with the numbingly loud buzz saw sound of a huge cannon.
She came to her feet and rolled forward again as the gunner tried to secure her position in his sites. He stood on what looked like a small balcony just under the windows of the ship's bridge, and the weapon he wielded was the size of Taylor's torso. It spit out a stream of bullets so fast the sound of it wasn't a thumping, like a machine gun, but rather like a chainsaw.
It had a similar effect on the deck behind her as a chainsaw would have on wood.
Harnessing the Force like she would a giant slingshot, she blasted herself into the air right toward the cannon and its wielder. She moved so fast the gunner couldn't bring the weapon to bear on her faster than she could swing her stolen pistol into line and squeeze off a single bullet. She didn't consciously aim, and more than she'd consciously harnessed the Force to kill those men before. The Force moved within her, and she surrendered to it.
He looked surprised when the bullet punched through his forehead and left a crater in the back of his head.
Taylor gripped the edge of the balcony, letting the first stolen gun fall. She could hear and sense more men just inside as she quickly scrambled over the barrier onto the balcony. She spun the cannon around on its mount and began firing on the tower itself, angling the bullets so that they punched up through the floor at the men in the bridge. The sound of it felt like people punching her ears, but she didn't care.
She couldn't hear anything over the cannon, but she could feel their pain as she fired until abruptly the slightly glowing, spinning barrels of the cannon ceased producing bullets. The hole she'd punched through was easily large enough and she jumped up and through it, pulling the first of her two remaining stolen pistols.
It felt like it was the gun guiding her hand, rather than her hand and mind guiding the gun. The four soldiers huddled in the back of the bridge, struggling to find shelter from the cannon fire. They clutched assault rifles in their hands as they crouched down.
In less time than it took to say her name, Taylor had four shots fired. BANG BANG BANG BANG. Each bullet honed in with a terrible accuracy she would never have imagined at any other time in her life, and each man's head snapped back as she killed him.
Again, her arm moved seemingly of its own accord as she surrendered herself completely to the Force. When the soldier rushed through the narrow hatch onto the bridge, two shots met him—one in the forehead, one in the chest. She pulled the pistol from his hands with her power and dropped her own in time to fire a shot at the edge of the door that ricocheted into the hallway.
"Fuck!"
The man hiding just inside screamed as the ricochet struck him. That gave her the time she needed to turn the corner, shove her pistol into the wounded man's eye-socket and paint the hull behind him in red and gray with the reflexive pull of a single finger.
Coming up the narrow stairs, she saw six men in what looked like camouflaged armor and assault rifles.
She didn't bother with her pistol. She moved to the head of the stairs, where the lead soldier could see her with wide eyes. She thrust out her left arm and filled narrow space with so much blue Force lightning it saturated the air itself. The men's screams were lost in the roar of the energy she poured into them.
When she stopped, six dead bodies collapsed down at the foot of the stairs, blocking it effectively. She drifted back into the bridge just in time to see a streak of smoke searing through the air right at her. She didn't have time to do anything other than duck back into the hall beside the man she shot through the eye.
The explosion made the wall she hid behind thrum like the head of a drum. Despite covering her ears and head in her arms, the concussive force of the explosion left her ears ringing and pushed to her to her knees. Through the Force, though, she could sense more men rushing up the stairs toward her over their fallen comrades.
The surge of adrenaline shot through her veins again, warning her of more danger. This time, she did explode into motion, placing a foot against the metal wall at the back of the stairwell to kick herself through the shattered bridge. She dove through the massive hole where windows used to be just as another RPG flew in behind her.
For a startlingly long moment, Taylor hung alone in open air, easily twenty-five feet above the deck. The soldier with the RPG launcher on his shoulder stared up, slack jawed, as she flipped mid-air and came down feet-first on his head.
His shoulders snapped as she used his malleable flesh to soften her landing and flip free. He collapses screaming to the deck.
Suddenly a new figure appeared out of the air right in front of her. Obviously a cape, the woman wore a heavy mantle and hood decorated with blade-tipped feathers along the hem, and a wickedly sharp beaked half-mask. Long, luxurious black hair flowed around her shoulders. Taylor caught all this in a single, gestalt glance right before the air around the Russian cape exploded in a ring of familiar orange light.
It was the same shade of light she saw right before she was captured. This time, however, she was ready. Taylor somersaulted over the ring of energy and fired the pistol in her hand mid-jump.
The cape proved prepared as well and disappeared with a pop and another burst of energy that forced Taylor to move again. She sensed more capes running down the stairs from the top of the ship's island even as she rolled under the second orange energy blast toward her attacker.
Once more the Russian cape teleported away, this time emerging near the island next to a hulking, heavily armored man who looked more like a walking destroyer than a man. Three diagonal yellow stripes ran across his right arm, chest and left leg.
From the other side of the island, three more capes emerged. One was a gnarled, twisted figure of muscle and bone who didn't bother with a mask, but who did bother with a shotgun. The other wore riot gear almost like a PRT agent, but with a steel mask with a red star on the forehead. The third cape was another woman clad in a dark crimson body suit with the sickle and star of the old Soviet Union over her left breast, and a small half-cape that hung down to the small of her back.
Behind the capes, Taylor could sense even more soldiers gathering, but it was the parahumans who presented the greatest threat. And of the five, the man with the star mask felt the most dangerous in the Force.
"This was the little one from the east of town," the woman in the bird mask said. She spoke in heavily accented English.
"She's good for a fight, ja?" That was the destroyer. "She no tits, but good legs. I was going to fuck her good, get her ready for the brothels."
"The Chinese comrades do like the pale, skinny ones," the cape in the starred mask said. "She might even be willing to cooperate."
Taylor felt something foreign and slimy thrust into her mind—a powerful, alien intent that pierced through the veil of her own thoughts and feelings with sickening ease. She had no words to describe the violence of it because it was a violence she'd never encountered or even dreamed possible. She felt the alien intent trying to crush her emotions and thoughts into a paste, leaving only the desire to do what she was told.
She didn't think it was the same type of telepathy she had—he couldn't have sensed her thoughts or emotions even if he wanted to. He didn't. All she was to him was another American whore. Her value was measured in the number of men who could fuck her before she got a disease and died.
She was nothing. Her only hope for happiness was to do what he wanted.
But what he wanted infuriated her. Rage and hatred burned in the back of her mind, fueled by the Force and the utter shit of her past week. She grasped that fire with metaphorical hands and began burning that alien, intrusive tentacle of thought and desire. It tried to withdrawal, but in her rage victory wasn't enough.
She wanted this bastard to suffer.
"You take all the fun out of fighting, Saltykovskava," Tunguska whined.
"Maybe not," Saltykovskaya said through gritted teeth. "The little piz'da is fighting me."
The woman in the bird mask stared from Taylor to Saltykovskaya. "Ty che, blyad? No one can resist your power!
"She is! Do something, you fools! She's hurting me!"
The fire of Taylor's rage caught hold of the intruding mind and sent pain and destruction down it's invisible length. She lashed out with a furious scream, taking the man's faltering power and twisting it herself. Saltykovskaya screamed and clutched his head with both hands before crumpling to the deck of the ship.
"Igor!"
Beak girl teleported, growling with her own anger. Taylor rolled from her position on the deck, spun, and snapped off a single shot of her pistol at the empty air, guided solely by the Force. Beak girl appeared exactly as the bullet struck her shoulder. She spun and stumbled back with a startled cry, but by then Taylor was already running toward her to get a second shot off.
A warning in the back of her mind led her to jump up as razor-wire shot through the area where she would have been if she hadn't moved. She landed in a roll behind the beak woman, gripped the semi-conscious cape with her telekinesis, and held her up as a living shield against more of the razor wire.
Beak screamed in pain, while the cape shooting the razer-wire from her hands cursed. Taylor jumped over the Beak while maintaining her grip, and used both the Force and her own momentum to launch Beak Girl into Razorwire, just like she launched Mouse Protector. The other cape had only a moment to scream before Beak struck her and both went flying back into the wall of the ship's island with bone-crushing Force.
The two remaining capes rushed Taylor—the destroyer with a ball of explosive energy between his hands and the gnarled man with his shotguns.
Lightning lashed out and sent the gnarled man stumbling away. It did nothing to the destroyer other than make him stumble. A brute, maybe?
The huge man launched his own attack. Taylor tensed and fired off the rest of her clip, but like her lightning, the bullets bounced off him. The crackling ball of energy the huge man shot at her buzzed with power as it flew toward her in what proved to be an astonishingly slow attack. The ball of brisling energy cruised along at about the speed of a reasonably fast walker.
The gnarled man recovered from her attack, found his shotgun, and fired again. His aim was wide, but Taylor doubted his next shot would be. She launching herself into the air, somersaulting over the bizarrely slow energy attack and the cape who launched it. She landed, gripped the gnarled man with her power, and threw him directly into the ball of energy.
The destroyer-man's energy attack might have moved slowly, but it held a terrifying amount of destructive energy. It didn't just vaporize the gnarled man, it took a huge portion of the prow of the boat with it in a massive bloom of bright white light.
Taylor had only a second to catch her breath and shield herself with Force energy before the concussive shockwave struck her and sent her stumbling back over the two female capes she'd taken out earlier. The whole boat rocked violently, sending waves splashing through the channel.
Th destroyer knelt down and leaned forward, riding the blast through sheer brute power, the same way he tanked both her bullets and her lightning. He stood when it was done, wiped ash from his uniform, and started marching toward where Taylor landed.
"Koschei, are you back yet?"
"Ja. I am."
From where she lay on the two unconscious female capes, Taylor couldn't help but stare in shock as the gnarled man who just blew up walked down the stairs from the upper island. He looked even more gnarled and twisted than before, moving with a slight limp, and yet he had no sign of any burns. He was just bigger and filled with more twisted muscle mass.
He carried a new shotgun.
"I am going to fuck that whore in her ass until she bleeds," Koschei said in heavily accented English. He brandished his shotgun. "And then I'm going to stick this in her cunt and pull the trigger. Maybe I do it at the same time, ja?"
"Mission's fucked," destroyer said. "They won't be happy."
"Fuck 'em," Koschei said. "I told the men to go get rid of the meat."
From under the ship, Taylor could hear kids screaming as the Russian soldiers moved to secure them. Destroyer and Koschei walked side-by-side toward Taylor, talking in rapid-fire Russian as if about the weather, or a popular television show, until the two paused at Taylor's feet.
"Stupid little girl," Destroyer said with a huge, bellowing laugh. "I am Tunguska. Bullets do nothing to me. And this is Koschai the Deathless. You cannot kill him, but he can kill you."
"And I will," Koschei said. "Slowly, and painfully. I will take weeks to…urgh."
After fighting off the alien intrusion in her mind, reaching into his brain was almost ridiculously easy. Taylor let her right hand drop as Koschei the Deathless stumbled backward and flopped to the deck in a spread-eagle position, his jaw hanging open to allow drool to fall.
Tunguska turned and glared through his heavy mask. "What did you do?" he bellowed.
"Think he'll enjoy being Deathless with a frontal lobotomy?" Taylor whispered in a voice made hoarse by rage and exhaustion.
The huge cape screamed and rushed forward, only to stop and grasp at his neck.
Taylor pushed herself back to her feet even as she held out her right hand to grasp the giant in her power. She could feel tears burning at the corners of her eyes.
"I've never killed anyone in cold blood before," she said as a tear ran down her cheeks. "Never wanted to. Until you fuckers kidnapped me. You turned me into a killer. Congratulations, asshole. You managed to make my shitty life even worse. Think about that in hell."
It was hard. Something about Tunguska resisted her power, but she pressed in more and more. He screamed at her in Russian as she squeezed so hard that steel would have bent. Still he shouted at her, grasping at his neck, until finally his power gave before hers did. The sound of his neck snapping reverberated almost like a gunshot. His body fell to the deck with a heavy thump beside the drooling, insensate Koschei.
She could sense that the two women capes were still alive, but so badly injured neither presented a threat. She left them and started toward the stairs of the ship, where the soldiers were beating the captured children and teenagers back into their cells. More soldiers were in the island tower. She could feel the engines of the ship turn on, readying to depart.
Abruptly, everything changed.
She found herself floating in the sea of stars, watching as two massive, scintillating entities approached her world.
Just as quickly as it came, the vision ended with a meaty thud striking the hollow of her left shoulder. The odd thing was that it didn't hurt at first. It felt like someone punched her, hard. But nothing like what she imagined a bullet wound should feel like. At least for the first second. Then the pain struck, radiating out from the wound in a wave of agony that stole her breath and sent her stumbling to the deck of the ship with an anguished cry.
She could hear men shouting, and bullets pinged off the deck in a shower of sparks all around her. They were coming, closer and closer. They would land a hit on her again, it was only a matter of time. The Force directed her teary eyes toward one of the men she'd already killed—a heap of ballistic armor and weapons.
Though she'd never seen one before in real life, thanks to Arnold Schwarzenegger she knew a grenade belt when she saw one. With a thought and a flex of will, the grenades lost their pins and then flew right over her head toward the line of approaching soldiers. In the darkness, they didn't see the threat until it was too late.
Six shockingly loud POPS echoed across the deck of the ship, and the decking thudded painfully under her with each explosion. The grenades went off sometimes only inches from the line of soldiers that were coming for her. Only a few were able to scream, but none of that particular group were able to continue attacking.
Getting up was one of the hardest things she'd ever done. Her left arm hung limply at her side. With her right, she pulled her last remaining pistol and approached the handful of soldiers not killed by the grenades.
Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. She fired until the gun's slide locked. Guided by the Force, each bullet found their mark. Rather than try to reload with her wounded arm, she dropped the empty weapon and just summoned another to replace it.
Adrenaline briefly overcame her agony in a familiar sensation. She turned to see a man struggling to reload the cannon, while others manned the severely damaged bridge. The deck thrummed with the engines while below she could sense terrified children screaming.
She didn't reach out with her hand. She simply stood and stared at the island as her pain and rage boiled in the Force. She directed that massive energy at the tower itself. At first nothing happened visually, but the entire ship throbbed with vibrations and the groaning of metal. Taylor could hear men shouting in alarm from within the island. The man on the cannon stumbled in his efforts to reload the huge weapon.
Abruptly the top deck of the castle imploded with a shower of shattered glass, twisted metal, and terrified screams. The man at the cannon pulped in a shower of blood. Doors opened on the deck below, only to close again as that deck imploded as well. Abruptly the entire castle collapsed inward like a giant wet clay model being crushed together between massive invisible hands. Wiring shorted out with showers of sparks and men screamed in pain. Small explosions riddled the structure as she crushed the superstructure entirely, and with a grunt at the effort tossed the whole sparking, twisted mass of metal onto the broken cement of the shattered cement that stretched out in an empty lot beside the ship.
Opposite, standing on the helopad she had only glimpsed at, four more soldiers stood frozen, their jaws hanging open in shock.
Taylor fired. Bang, Bang, Bang, Bang. Four shots from a pistol more than fifty feet away. Each shot found their mark with unerring accuracy, guided by the Force and her rage. Four men fell, each dead from the single head shot.
Blinking back tears, Taylor realized she was on her knees. The effort to stand made her sob and almost black out, but she did it anyway. Swaying, she walked back to the now open hatch that led to the lower decks of the ship. As she did so, a single soldier looked up at her with wide, terrified eyes from the middle of the steep stairs. He threw his rifle away as he backed from the stairs, both hands up.
"Surrender!" he said in a heavy accent. "Surrender!"
Taylor moved down the stairs, too tired for anger. She raised her gun and fired. His head snapped back as he died. His body slid like a broken Slinky down the stairs. She stumbled over him as she reached the stairs. Her left arm felt completely numb, now, though pain radiated all around it into her chest and stomach.
From the bodies in the gangplank, she knew the soldiers got all the kids back into their cells. She saw at last two naked bodies—a boy who looked her age, covered in so much blood she couldn't make out his features other than he had a Latino complexion, and a skinny, pale girl whose face appeared to be a mass of hamburger. The sight should have shocked or hurt or something, but the numbness in her arm seemed to have spread to her mind.
The kids did fight back, though. Just past the dead teens she saw two fallen soldiers, both collapsed in pools of blood and unmoving. She stepped over them without a second look. She continued until she reached the open door where the two girls she first met were.
Despite the numbness, exhaustion and the pain that seemed to be shooting down like little arrows though her body, the Force swirled around and within her. She could feel the doors of every cell; she could feel the pain, fear and anguish of those kids within. Though she could barely walk, with the Force she was powerful.
The door to Yuki and Maria's cell ripped open so hard the steel door imbedded itself in the adjoining wall. Inside, Yuki jumped and cried in alarm, and then disappeared not just from sight, but from Taylor's force senses. She was too tired to put for the effort to understand how or why, especially not when Yuki reappeared a second later, just as naked as before.
The tiny girl knelt down on the floor where a bloody, motionless Maria sprawled. As naked as Yuki, there was no cloth to hide the two red and black holes punched so violently through Maria's stomach and chest. Taylor could see the terrible bruises that disfigured her face and darkened the skin on her arms, legs and torso.
Somehow, Maria's chest continued to rise and fall with weak breaths.
"The soldiers came when you were out there. She wouldn't…she was so mad! She screamed at them and fired the gun. I didn't even know she knew how to use it. She fired and fired and screamed until she didn't have any more bullets, and they…they shot her!"
Taylor turned away from the girl she failed so terribly and looked down the hall. Across from their cell, another door slammed open, accompanied by a terrified squeal. Down the length of the gangplank, Taylor ripped the rest of the doors open.
"Your clothes are in the room at the front." She didn't shout, but with the Force ever child there heard her as clearly as if she were speaking into their ears.
She then stumbled back to the cell that held Yuki and Maria. Her collapse to the floor was less a graceful sitting and more a loss of control over her legs. She could feel blood running from her shoulder onto the wall behind her as she slid down.
"Oh." Yuki leaned forward in the dim light from the hall. "Oh, God! You're shot. You're shot, too! Are you going to die? I don't…I can't be alone again! Please be okay. Please!"
"Yuki," Taylor whispered.
"What? What can I do? Please, tell me…"
"Shut up and go get dressed."
"Oh. OH, yeah!"
Yuki disappeared at a run, her feet slapping painfully against the grate outside until the sound was lost in the scared cries and calls of all the other children. When she was gone, Taylor saw Maria looking at her. One eye was swollen shut, but the other was clear and brimming with tears.
With a wave of her good hand, she levitated Maria closer, until she laid right next to her. She found herself placing her good hand on the first of the bullet holes. Just like with Dragon's ship, she could feel everything in Maria's body with the Force. Pulling the bullet out was easy. What she did next, though, was anything but.
She didn't know if it was instinct or something else, but her vision narrowed as the entirety of her concentration and power distilled down to a fine point focused on the damage caused by the first bullet. Some unknowable time later, she let up, gasping desperately for air as she hovered on the verge of blacking out.
Though it hurt terribly, she moved to the second bullet, removing it just like she did. The healing was harder because she felt so weak and tired, but still the Force came. When she was done, she could feel that the girl would not die.
At least she managed to do one decent thing with her life.
It was the last thought she had before passing out.