This was not what I'd been expecting.
There'd been little to no doubt in my mind that Fenrir would turn on me as soon as I made my presence known. He was infamous specifically for his tendencies toward violence and feared for his extensive capabilities and slicing, skewering instruments thereof. While my exact motivations couldn't be any more clear to him than they were to me, I had to assume that, even for capes, crashing through someone's window and smashing into their stuff didn't constitute a friendly hello.
I'd had a general outline of events in my head. Sharp implements of all shapes and sizes would make an appearance. He'd shred my guts some here, dismember me a bit there, and while he was busy turning me into an inky purée the unknown cape and her dog would get a chance to run. Once he'd reduced me to a puddle with goggles he'd leave, empty-handed. I was pretty sure I could survive that.
In reality he'd missed his mark for step one completely; there wasn't a single visible piece of metal on his person save for his mask. Not from this angle, at least. He stood there, collected, expectant, backed by feral barks and growls. When I failed to make a move he clucked his tongue. "C'mon, kid. No backing out. Finish what you start."
I grit my teeth. My soaked arms made quick, sweeping arcs up and across, flinging splashes of oil his way. It was slippery stuff and tough to get off if you couldn't absorb it, so getting some on him could seriously impede his mobility for as long as he maintained his untransformed state.
He ducked around the attacks with ease, in motion before I even finished the sweeps. To add insult to inevitable injury one of his thumbs was hooked in his belt loop again. After the first couple times I noticed he was stepping forward with each dodge, slowly closing the distance between us. At best I'd get him lightly misted before he reached me.
I switched tactics, backing into the dog pit's barrier. My arms swept lower, spreading streaks across his path that crisscrossed and bled into a decent amount of coverage. The warehouse interior was too wide to smother in full but I'd settle for reducing his playing field as much as I could.
Instead of slowing down for the sake of caution he started to ramp up his approach, stepping with the balls of his bare feet on gaps in the crosshatch. The length of his strides increased to work around the pattern but the tempo of his steps remained constant, as though to reinforce that even if he let me make the first moves, we were doing this at his pace, at his leisure. When I aimed subsequent splashes at where I thought he was going to step next he started feinting different directions, ducking under a crest I'd been tricked into aiming high, advancing from one side once he'd gotten me to commit a swipe at another. His eyes, deep set and severe behind his jagged metal wolf mask, had yet to look away from me.
When he was only a few steps away from the pit I went for a few final attempts to land hits on his person. He sidestepped the first but allowed the second and third to connect as he stepped over the far wood barrier onto the tarp. They netted a pair of stripes across his tank top and the legs of his jeans, stained black and soggy. An acceptable trade, apparently, for the gut punch that came next.
I tried to block it with my arms but the weight of its impact was tremendous, forcing them to liquefy, ploughing through and sending me tumbling backwards over the other barrier and onto the concrete. I scrambled back to regain my footing and evade any piercing bits, but he just stepped out of the pit himself and stood there in front of me, thumb in loop, disturbingly human. My oil was flowing faster now so in moments I had enough to reform my arms and coat them. In the interest of stalling I waited for him to move first, this time.
He seemed content to watch me put myself back together. When I'd finished he said, "Regenerator to boot, huh? I've seen worse. Seen a lot better too, though." He swiped some moisture off his tank top with a pinky, seemed to consider it for a second, then shook his head and wiped it onto his jeans. "Can't figure your plan, getting into this. What'd you think you were gonna do, trip me? Make my blades move smoother?"
I didn't answer.
"You're not here for her," he said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder. "No team. The only one she even talks to is the blue bitch and you're no flying brick. So either you're dumb as shit and you're here for me, or-"
I was trying to peek around him to check if the other girl had gone yet, but before I could he grabbed me by the jaw and forced my attention back to him. Gone from his eyes was the languidness I hadn't recognized until it wasn't there - now they bore into me like drills poised to gouge. A tremor of undiluted fear rattled down my spine, the kind that doesn't care how much hurt you think you can take, the kind I imagined wild animals knew in their last moments.
Fenrir rose his voice just enough to drive the point home. "Your fight is here, dumbass. She stopped existing the moment you made your entrance. Now either you're here for me, or you're here for you, and her being here was a good enough excuse. So tell me, do you have the brains of a chimp? Or do you have the balls of an ele-"
My lower jaw dissolved in his grasp beneath my mask and I pulled back before he could adjust. I tried to make the most of the surprise and jab at his throat but he redirected my strike. His follow-through twisted my arm until the joint locked painfully. I had to sacrifice everything halfway down my bicep to get out of the hold, leaving me with a gushing stump. The sudden loss of resistance made him stumble and my stump spewed in his foot's path. He didn't fall but he slipped on the slick enough to throw his balance for a split second, and instinct told me I'd just created the closest thing to an opening I was going to get.
Every ounce of concentration I had went into my next move. I swung my intact arm at his head, a little higher than where I wanted to hit. He raised an arm to block mine, but just before contact I let it go liquid, still following through with my new stump, correcting for gravity. Once it was past his block I pushed my power out to reconnect with the oil that had been my arm, fixed where it'd lost shape, and solidified it just in time to deliver the most vicious haymaker I could muster.
His mask covered his face and most of the rest of him felt hard as metal, but, as it turned out, neither defense protected his ear. He recoiled from the blow, suddenly appearing less the immovable object, if only for an instant.
I barely had the chance to revel in my accomplishment before one of his ankles hooked around the back of mine and he barged his shoulder into me, the combination pushing the wind out of my chest and knocking me on my ass again.
Somehow, this wasn't followed up by furious retaliatory blending.
Instead, to my astonishment, he was laughing. Again.
It was different this time, though I couldn't quite quantify how. There was more… ease in it? Satisfaction? I hesitated to associate him with any sort of jubilance but I thought there was an undercurrent of that, too.
My arms had reformed just down past my elbows and I propped myself up on them. I tried to speak but all that came out was a bubbling gurgle, and I realized I'd never reformed my lower jaw; the slack in my facemask had been filling with oil instead. I corrected that and redirected excess to my arms.
When I spoke it was with a voice developed over months of solitary practice. No one but Charlotte had heard me use this voice before, and even she'd only heard it when my need for outside feedback had begun to outweigh my embarrassment. It wasn't some dumb falsetto, like boys used when mocking girls. It was just my own voice, sourced more from my head than my chest, pushed to the upper limits of my range - which I'd been slowly extending - and held there. All the minute, signifying inflections I'd learned to suppress for fear of getting beaten up, I let loose now. It was still pretty low for a girl but I could live with it.
"What- what about you?"
His laughing had petered off but his good mood hadn't. "What about me?"
I swallowed. "Why are you doing this? Bothering to toy with me, if I'm not worth your time?"
He touched a hand to the ear I'd hit and it came back tipped with blood - perforated eardrum? He hardly seemed bothered. "Take it from a man that's won a lot of fights: there's more to it than the short term, the winners and losers. Smartest man I knew taught me that. Bastard though he was, Kaiser got it, too. Had a smooth hand with it, subtle."
He continued. "Purity doesn't have that. She can run the day-to-day, win a battle with the badges or my Chosen in the now, but she's got no long game, no end goals. The Empire will just get chipped away until she's got nothing left to stand on. Me, I don't have the finesse either, but the way things will pan out I won't need it. I'm making moves to set up for when I rule this city and they start sending lapdog capes from outside after me and mine.
"What's happening here is one of those moves. This?" He pointed to his ear. "This says you dropping in wasn't a fluke. You've got fire in you, more than just stupid mistakes or cape crazy. Once you've gotten into some real fights and made something of yourself, I want you in the Pit, pushing my Chosen past their limits. Doing your part to lift up the next era."
"You seem pretty sure I'm going to join up." My voice only wavered a little.
He rolled his broad shoulders in what might have been a shrug. "You'll have enough reasons."
Unsure what he meant by that I said, "...So what now?"
The sounds of his knuckles cracking were like fireworks. "Now you run off and I show Bitch what happens if she charges her power when I told her not to."
A whistle pierced the air.
He turned around just as a series of rapid impacts shook the ground. Before he could transform more than halfway, a hulking mass of meat, spines, and teeth crashed into him jaws-first. The creature barreled past me, above me, feet thundering on either side of my barely-solid body. It was like being trapped on the tracks while a train passed over me. A long, whiplike tail trailed after the body.
I rose to my feet in time to see the beast bust through the double doors in the front, Fenrir erupting into blades in its maw. It spat him out onto the street and he whirled into shape, twisting and shifting from an amorphous mass into a decent approximation of a huge wolf. He wasn't as big as the creature but his spikes matched its spines three-to-one, if not more.
From the other end of the warehouse, slumped where wall met floor, the other girl called out, "Angelica! Kill!"
What followed was an almost incomprehensible storm of metal and meat clashing, thrashing each other apart. The creature gnashed and tore away edges with its mouth. Fenrir's body ground and carved in turn, working through the tough flesh. The chunks that sloughed off looked just like the ones piled in the corner and I realized the creature - Angelica - probably was or was made from the now-absent terrier.
I hurried over to the girl and knelt beside her. She hadn't lost too much blood from her leg wound, but she'd stopped trying to put weight on it and she looked a little dazed. It occurred to me she wasn't wearing a mask, but there wasn't much to be done about it.
"Hey," I said, trying not to let my jitters show, "I- I don't know how much I can help, but… do you have a knife?"
Her eyes met mine through her haze and narrowed, mouth set in what seemed a constant scowl.
"I move around too much to keep anything in my costume and you need to put pressure on that."
The wooziness reasserted itself and she wavered. As if recognizing she didn't have another option, she shut her eyes and pulled a pocket knife from her jacket.
I said, "Thanks," and right after felt stupid for it. I was the one fixing her up, after all. The knife unfolded easy and I cut through the thick fabric of her pants around the wound. It ran wide enough on her shin that I only had to cut out a couple inches extra to create the cloth I tied it off with. Blood started to darken its earthy tone but in all it didn't look too shabby.
I wasn't sure how much gratitude I'd been expecting, but it'd at least been more than a, "Hmph," and a brush aside. Her eyes widened at the scene outside and I turned to look as well.
Fenrir was making quick work of Angelica, having cleaved away maybe a quarter of her body mass. She didn't seem to be hurting much for it but danger was nipping at her enormous heels. The girl gave another shrill whistle, this time with a different inflection, and Angelica broke away from the shredding death. She almost made it to the busted front entrance but he was after her like a rocket. His claws came within a foot or two of her haunch.
From out of nowhere a blur shot into Fenrir's center mass, and the next moment he was gone from view. I could hear his metal scraping pavement as he tumbled down the street. The blur doubled back to the warehouse entrance, less a blur and more a person now, hovering a couple feet off the ground. She was tall, though it was hard to tell how much of that was just the flying, and she held herself with confidence. Her costume consisted of sneakers, dark wash skinny jeans, a navy jacket half-zipped over a white tee, and a sleek white full-face mask that started to gradient at the edges into light blues, then darker hues where it disappeared under her hood.
"Okay," she said, gaze lingering in the direction she'd sent Fenrir flying, "that'll buy us a hot minute but the uniforms will be here soon, so grab-"
As she entered the warehouse her head turned to us, and when her opaque blue eyeholes met my goggles she stilled, then rushed right at me. Fists gripped the collar of my coveralls, lifted me by them and pinned me to the wall. Between the lingering adrenal frisson of fighting a gang boss, the renewed barking of the caged dogs, and the sheer weight of this cape's presence, I was having a hell of a time maintaining solidity.
"So it's true, the Chosen got themselves a new idiot," she said, mask looming close to my face. "Let me introduce myself. I'm Vega, and you're a two-bit asshole who hurt my friend." She tilted her head. "Nice to beat you."