By the time this chapter is posted, a new picture should be posted on the thumbnail. Said picture is the mark on the back of Saiyan's hoodie.
Chapter Eight: Scion, Part One
"So, Tattletale," Clockblocker said, "The girl that can pull anyone's secrets out of their heads, the chick that can figure out your safe combination by hearing your voice of the phone, the outright villain that can crack your WIFI security by looking at it for a couple of minutes," he gesticulated wildly at that point, "That one? That's the girl out there who figured out how to use your abilities?"
"Yup," Taylor said unworriedly.
"And you aren't panicking about this because…?"
Would you like to know how long it took me to get this strong?" the girl asked, looking up at the teen boy, "It took seven months, four if you start counting from when I unlocked my Ki. By that point I was able to take on Lung. Another month and a half before Leviathan because of extenuating circumstances. Tattletale, even if she has my rate of growth, will take months to get to my level. Months that I won't be sitting by idly and doing nothing. By the time she's as strong as I am now, I'll be several times that."
"And if she figures out someone else's ability? What then?"
"Yeah," Taylor said, shaking her head, "I don't think it's going to work that way. My ability is… special."
"Yeah, well," the boy sat down with a huff, "Pardon me if I'm not excited about having to go up against her, even if she's only fractionally as strong as you."
"I don't think you'll have to worry about that," Taylor said, "At least, not often."
"Why do you believe that?" Armsmaster made his presence known at that point. The man seemed even more bitter than ever, for some reason, though he did very well at keeping it professional with her, outside of the training room.
"Well, for starters, she must have been boosting herself up since we caught her, back in July," the others nodded, "And she's clearly strong enough to take on whatever the hell Echidna was, with only a little assistance to keep the monster contained. She'd probably wipe the floor with most of the Brockton Bay Protectorate with little effort."
"Then why hasn't she?"
"That's the question, isn't it?" Taylor said, "She has more power than most brutes and she hasn't done anything with it. That we know of."
Dennis opened his mouth to say something about that, but then closed it again when Armsmaster held up his hand.
"What do you mean by that? Do you know of something she has done with your energy techniques?"
"No," the girl shook her head, putting down the book she was being kept from reading, "I mean I think I know what she's doing. I know for a fact, strong as I am, there has gotta be a cape out there who could kill me, if not face to face, then when I least expect it. I haven't had a chance to test my sensing against Strangers, but I bet it will work just as effectively there as anywhere else. Also, there is nothing in my repetoire that would stop Heartbreaker from taking me under his control," she shuddered a little at the thought of that subtle monster, "I bet that Tattletale is thinking something along the lines of using her powers only to consolidate her power, and pull the occasional heist for fun, rather than waging a war against the PRT and the Protectorate."
Armsmaster rubbed his chin for a moment, thinking about that.
"Frankly, if we had to worry about her making a move, she would have done it by now," Taylor said, shrugging and burying her nose in her book again, "She'll strike sometime down the road. Probably enough to get our attention, but not enough to get a kill order. She's too smart for that."
"So, what do we do now?" Dennis asked.
"Arrest her when you can, just like all the other annoying criminals and gangsters," she turned a page in the book.
-9001-
The earth rumbled and cracked and bled lava, seconds before it belched forth a demon of hatred, fire, and death. The monster with lava and obsidian for skin took a deep, whistling breath, took a thunderous step forward, and roared his presence for all to hear and fear. Lightning arched off the spikes on its back. Its single, baleful eye glowed with the anger born of it's absolute loathing of everything human.
When the roar was heard, everything around it for half a mile shook and broke apart. Anyone who didn't have a high enough Brute rating would have been killed by it, their organs ruptured due to the physical resonation of the sound.
Fortunately, none were there to greet the Behemoth as it made ground in New Delhi. Except for one.
Floating high above the monster, Saiyan hovered, looking down at the monster that had been completely out of her league before. In just three months she had gone from barely being able to beat Leviathan to a whole new level.
Briefly, she wondered if this was what it felt like to be Scion.
She shook away that thought and hefted the weapon that had been given to her by Armsmaster. It was a hyper dense javelin, so heavy that she never would have been able to lift it without her Ki, no matter how long she trained. As it was, even with her Ki powering her muscles far beyond human norms, she could feel the weight in her hand.
She held it in the perfect thrower's stance, having watched a video of an Olympic gold medal winner throwing a javelin to gain the skill. The amount of energy she was pumping through her body was so intense that it was actually causing steam to rise from her form.
One by one, the groups of muscle necessary to throw, activated. By the time Taylor released the weapon, it had broken the sound barrier so many times that even Saiyan felt the shock, even more so when the heavy piece of metal achieved double the speed of light.
Behemoth didn't even have a chance to realize that its intended battleground was barren of opponents before the javelin hit and the world around it exploded.
It was only due to Saiyan herself, blanketing four square miles of land, just outside the city with Chi so thick a human couldn't breath that stopped the entire world from exploding.
And it wasn't enough.
Saiyan's eyes widened behind the goggles. Reduced to nothing more than a quivering frame, the monster still lived. It looked more like a burnt stick figure than the creature of cape nightmares. It had no eyes, no mouth, no claws. It stumbled into a standing position, it's thin, crisped frame moving jerkily as what was left of its head swiveled to, somehow, look at Saiyan.
The girl would have taken a fearful step back, then, had she been on the ground.
Seconds later, Scion appeared within her range, and her thoughts were bombarded with information from her power.
For one, it told her that she could never move like him. He wasn't human, he was never human. He didn't use Ki or Chi. He flew because of an energy source that was filtered to him out of thin air. Following that energy source, it appeared to come from an alternate reality. Her Chi latched onto that thread of energy and her world turned into pain as her power tried to understand the motion of everything.
She screamed and fell out of the sky, beating her own head with her fists. When that didn't lessen the pain, she tried bashing it into the ground, causing a fifty foot wide crater to form and creating ripples that were registered on the Richter Scale.
The pain lasted centuries, seconds, as her power told her things that she was never meant to understand and her brain tried to deal with it.
After an eternity, a few scant moments, it latched onto one thing. Scion. The real Scion.
He was a creature so massive it was a planet, all on its own. Its eyes saw not one world but thousands, millions. It drifted in the cosmos, shedding pieces of itself, gifting them to lesser lifeforms for a purpose she couldn't yet begin to guess. Even her power couldn't tell her what was going through the hyper massive monster's mind.
The knowledge itself seemed to shatter her power, even. It broke under the strain, then reformed, stronger than ever, and suddenly she understood.
She understood what it was, how it worked. She knew that it had been traveling through hundreds of trillions of universes, for an inestimable amount of time. It was alone, but not the only one of its kind. She could see that it was… incomplete. It was only half of what it could be. Somewhere out there, its other half contained the rest of its powers.
And she knew, in her core, that it was not there for the betterment of mankind.
When Saiyan opened her eyes again, seeing her native reality, it was to the sight of Scion staring down at her.
And again, she screamed.
-9001-
So, this chapter was kind of short. It was mostly about what happened just now.
Power Levels!
Dennis/Clockblocker- 30
Taylor/Saiyan- 6826
Scion- 150,000/?