The strand of bone holding the bone arrow back snaps as the tension my improvised spear-thrower had been placing on it finally becomes too much. A few moments later the dart tears through the chest of a naked cape, tall and thin and emaciated and now very, very dead.
A flying melted cape (we've been calling this variety Starfish) turns around in surprise, but Vapa is on it, falling from on top of a building and tackling it into the water. The remaining two capes in the enemy group are already moving, one twisted and previously-limping individual blurring with power-assisted speed towards the Kat Sidhe Squad. The other too-pale-to-be-human one is stumbling back from the thrashing mess of Vapa and monster clone in front of her when chains tear out of the water to wind around her with a clang, constricting shut with a rattle of metal and roar of displaced water.
I charge off the roof using stilts to slow my fall and land next to the grapplefest. Vapa disengages and rolls away through the water, small gouges dimpling her skin and clotting before my very eyes. For a moment, the melted cape seems surprised at the sudden change in opponent.
Then I'm hugging him, shoving needles under his skin and expanding them, aiming for lungs and heart and brain and anything that feels fragile, severing tendons and leaving blades in their place until the cape is brain-dead and still. I disconnect carefully, letting the body fall forwards into the water as I scan for another target. The Starfish capes can regenerate from just about anything, but they can't shrug off the wounds themselves. That means Kat can leave a hatchet in their head and move on, but if he takes it out the cape gets back up. Cutting off their heads just leads to a second cape growing back (and wasn't that a pleasant surprise?), so putting them down for good is up to me.
This makes four. Five, if I count the one I killed with Big Game.
The rest of the fight is wrapped up quickly. Vapa's bitten the cape with my dart through his chest, his emaciated limbs visibly seizing in pain as her venom removes any hope for recovery. Kat Sidhe checkmated his opponent, the Mover zipping from place to place trying to escape only to lose a leg to a short arc of silver. The clone (camouflage) brings the axe down again, hitting center of mass with a meaty thunk I can hear over the rain twenty feet away, and the other four join in shortly afterward.
Where's the pale one?
"This one's hard to hurt," Caress comments casually, stepping out of the alleyway she'd been hiding in, naked save for her chain veil, and even that's more of a formality at this point than anything else. With Vapa's regeneration, my armor, and Kat's weird sort of reset, Caress is actually the most fragile of us. It shows, with bruises mottling her ribs, legs, and arms. I haven't heard her ask us to slow down yet though, even if she does occasionally throw out some good-natured gripes. "Doesn't seem to be able to breathe underwater though," she says in a sing-song voice, smiling happily as she taps the chain winding down her right arm and into the water. I follow its path to the rippling area of water where I presume she's holding the pale cape. I shiver.
Vapa's a Protectorate cape, and you can tell every time she opens her mouth. Everything from her diction to her strategy feels like it was critiqued, edited, and censored into the ideal balance between effectiveness and appearance with little left over for personality. Maybe that's hyperbole, but not by much. She does know what she's doing though, and she hasn't given me any real reason to dislike her.
Kat Sidhe's complicated. On the one hand, he says he's not a villain. On the other hand, he doesn't like talking about himself. After the second question from Caress about what he does outside of fighting biblical plagues, he flat out told us that he wasn't going to share anything and threatened to run off on his own. Vapa managed to soothe the resulting ruffled feathers, but the whole episode left a bad taste in my mouth. Besides that though, he's nice enough, striking the balance between providing advice and respect in a way that doesn't come across as patronizing or coddling.
And then there's Caress.
What can I say about Caress? She's a flirt, apparently without regard for sex. Aggressive, arrogant, with a sense of humor that's by turns bright as a firework and dark as anything Amy might say while elbow deep in a corpse. She's pretty and she knows it, the nicks and faint white lines that pepper her body worn with such confidence that I can't see them as blemishes. She smiles a lot, with a lot of subtle variations I think I could learn to enjoy reading.
She's also a villain, through and through.
Caress claimed the title like it was a badge of honor, something to be proud of, not a mark of shame. She described a few of her stunts for us, looking Vapa dead in the eye as she did. Robbing a museum and making off with a fortune in loose gems. Dismembering an out of town villain who had tried to step in on her territory, leaving the freshly-made cripple for the police to find. Fighting two, then three, Protectorate heroes to a standstill. Vapa's tail thrashed as Caress continued to speak, but it was Kat who finally called enough.
I don't know how to feel about her.
"Done!" Caress says, flicking her arm and bringing her massive spool of chain up and out of the water, intricate coils flowing back around her body like a living thing. Touch-range telekinesis, and of the 'crushing cars' variety. The pale corpse floats to the top of the water, face down and motionless. I see an undivided Kat wading towards us, and Vapa is shaking herself clean of water for what feels like the third time in ten minutes. "Where to next?" Caress asks, somehow still cheerful and energetic after half an hour of fighting.
"Up this street, third left," Kat says, poking at his bracelet as he moves through our group, oblivious. Caress follows him shortly after, humming tunelessly as she uses her chains as makeshift stilts to walk above the water. Vapa and I bring up the rear, her eyes glowing as she dips into her tool box of vision-based Thinker powers to look for threats while I form another bone javelin, ready to unload on anyone who sticks their head out.
Figuring out how to structure our group was fairly easy. Kat is a one-man front line, Caress trumps a huge number of non-strikers, Vapa is the only one of us with a sensory power worth noting, and I'm versatile and mobile enough to act as support for whoever runs into a bad match up. None of us can ignore physics in a way that deals with the more troublesome breakers or brutes, but Caress is imaginative and I can always pop them like fucking balloons with a sphere of bone in the cranial cavity.
In my opinion, what's more impressive is the organization of the people calling the shots, the thinkers and strategists, the ones planning and adapting to the chaos of the fight. Leviathan tore the gathering of anti-Erinye capes apart, and inside of ten minutes they had the survivors on organized hunter/killer missions, slowly hemming in the monster and containing her summons while keeping the whole mess clear of the Endbringer.
The enemy isn't exactly rolling over, though. Each cell of warped parahumans we've run across has had a very specific composition: one Thinker, one Starfish, and two to three other combat capes. The Thinkers keep ambushes from being perfectly effective (only two out of the five of our attacks actually got all the capes in the pod), while the more mobile parahuman clones can evacuate their companions. It's a group composition that prioritizes keeping forces alive and gathering information, not fighting. Sure, they'd be trouble for a squad of PRT agents without containment foam, but the four of us have never been seriously threatened by this trash.
It makes me worried.
Where are the dangerous ones?
"Next patrol should be coming in around ten minutes," Kat says, snapping me out of my thoughts. He shakes out his arms and heads towards an alleyway, a hatchet already in his hand. Caress does the same on the opposite side of the street, chain slipping from her form to hide in the mucky water. I turn around and hold my arms out to my sides. Vapa jumps onto my back, I catch her legs, and we begin the slow ascent to the rooftops.
They're repetitive, these ambushes. Like making roses for the Pale Garden, or going to school, or healing people, with about the same amount of variation. It's easier though, because the potential fallout of me failing here is so much less complicated. With the healing, things could turn out poorly even if I did my job right. With the roses, I can do everything perfectly and that will be the reason it doesn't sell, the uncanny valley dividing me from profits. With school, there were no happy endings, only less miserable ones.
Here if I screw up, I get hurt. If I screw up badly, I die.
Simple.
"Spot for me," I say, making another area-of-effect javelin and stepping back across the rooftop until the street is out of sight. Vapa continues to stare off into the distance, a purple and green gargoyle, the rain drops in front of her eyes illuminated by the shine of her power.
"Three blocks out, little to no wind. No change in rain. On mark," she says, and I ready my weapon.
Two groups later the routine changes.
"We're closing in on Erinye herself," Kat says, mask pulled up to his nose and mouth half-full of burger. The restaurant's sign looks melted off and the surrounding block is in ruins, but this particular place has somehow avoided total annihilation. Once again Caress broke open the door, once more Vapa left contact information for reimbursement, and Kat started flipping burgers almost immediately. I made a table and chairs, and we're refueling while he lays out the situation. He swallows, then takes a sip of his Coke before continuing.
"Notice how we only found two more patrols?" he asks. "That's 'cause she hasn't sent out many. Other groups aren't finding shit, and control's getting antsy."
"So we're going to be attacking her head on?" Caress asks, already finished with her food. She'd tried to get into the bar earlier, but Vapa and Kat both made it clear that fighting drunk wasn't an option so she settled for the chocolate ganache cake I found in the freezer. She currently has her chair tilted on its two back legs, a chain wrapped around the table to keep her balanced. "Didn't you want to do that earlier?"
"And now that we've properly contained the threat, we can," Vapa says, eyes narrowing. She ate a few dozen raw eggs, then chased them with two uncooked burger patties. Caress and Kat didn't make a big deal of it, but I had to push away my fish after seeing that bulge in her throat slide down into her chest. "What's the plan?" she asks, switching her gaze to Kat, who shrugs as he shovels a few more fries into his mouth.
"They're gonna be a bit more careful about who they send in," he says, wiping his fingers on a napkin. "Breakers, Tinkers, Blasters with range, Masters with dismissable minions, and a few Changers only."
"People who can resist her Striker power or who don't need to be close to do damage," I say, nodding along.
"Exactly," Kat says, finishing his burger. "Everyone else is gonna hang around the edges and keep the survivors from getting away. That's us," he says, motioning to Vapa, Caress, and himself. "They want you in the main group," he says quietly.
I take a deep breath, then let it out, shifting my seat back so I can recline and look at the ceiling, resignation pooling in my stomach. I feel a hand cover mine, and when I look down Vapa's resting her scaled fingers over mine.
"Want, not need," she says firmly, meeting my gaze. "There are other capes. Everything about this is voluntary-"
"I'll do it," I say, interrupting her and gently brushing her hand away. "I just need a minute to think." A strange expression comes across Vapa's face, made even more unreadable by the inhuman body language. Caress is still smiling, but it's tight-lipped, and she's spinning her fork angrily around her palm in a way that isn't quite possible for a normal human.
Kat's the one to break the silence.
"Directions should be comin' up on your wrist right about now," he says, tapping his bracelet twice. Sure enough, the tech chimes, and when I look down there's an arrow pointing off to the side. "Give 'em hell," he says, pulling his mask back down and standing up, then twisting in place far enough to crack his spine, sending a loud series of pops echoing throughout the deserted room. Vapa makes a face.
"Was that absolutely necessary?" Vapa asks, pushing herself away from the table. "Such an action is terrible for your back."
"It really isn't," I say, tension flowing out of me as I force myself not to laugh at the unbelievably banal small talk from capes who were killing people not even an hour ago. "Generally speaking, the only people who should worry about hurting themselves that way are-"
"Neeeeeeeeerd," Caress interrupts, brushing past us all to get to the door, a tendril of chain pushing it open as she walks out into the rain. We watch her go, the screen door wheezing shut behind her agonizingly slowly, finally closing with a loud click. The remaining three of us stand there awkwardly, not sure what to say or where to look.
"Bye, I guess," I say, backing up towards the door. Vapa nods once, as does Kat Sidhe.
"Good hunting," he says, offering a small wave.
"Don't die," Vapa says awkwardly, patting me on the shoulder. I don't think she knows how to deal with someone else stepping into a more dangerous situation than her. I put on an empty smile behind my mask.
"I'll try not to," I reply, stepping outside.
Then I stop.
Caress is standing under an umbrella of chains, the rain making near-music as it pounds down onto the metal. Her veil is thicker this time, covering her eyes, and her mouth is set, grim as a grave.
"I'm not handling a dozen fragile roses through the rest of the battle. I'm good, but I'm not that good," Caress says, jerking her head down the street. I follow her as she starts to walk, both of us forming stilts to stay out of the worst of the wet.
"So, I'm going to work with those two guys all nice-like, right?" she says, pointedly not looking at me. "It's going to be a pain in the ass, but I'm going to do it. Pretty sure we never agreed on a price, so you're going to pay me whatever I think is fair for my help after we're done here, got it?"
"Okay," I say, wanting to look at my bracelet to get directions but also knowing that Caress is trying for something more. Where is this going?
"I'll wait in Lincoln Park every third Wednesday," she says, glaring straight ahead, one hand clenching and unclenching at her side. The chains at the end of her pseudo-dress are writhing and lashing, kicking up sprays of water as they slide against one another.
"Sounds like a plan," I say cautiously.
"Good," Caress says curtly.
We walk for a few more moments in silence.
"Fuuuuuuuuuck," Caress moans, stopping in place and scrubbing at her head with both hands, metal clanking against metal as the umbrella wraps back around her. "I'm fucking useless with this shit. Just meet me in Chicago. We'll figure the rest out there," she says, turning to face me, eyes focused and hard. "Come back, alright?" she asks, a new tenderness in her voice that I don't recognize. I try to puzzle it out, thinking about where I've heard similar examples.
A hug in the rain. In my living room. After a funeral.
I blink, dumbstruck.
"I'm fifteen," I say slowly. The chains stop, frozen in mid air.
"Oh," she says. For a moment, we both just stand there, staring at one another.
"Fuck," she says quietly, looking away from me, veil moving to cover the lower half of her face. "Forget I said anything." The words sound cold and harsh, filtered through metal and crushing sorrow. She starts striding back towards the restaurant, chains lying flat, lifeless. Unsure of what to say, I watch her go until she disappears back into the restaurant.
Then I shake my head and stilt up to the rooftops.
I don't have time to think about whatever this could've been. I have work to do.
The gathering point is ten minutes away. Maybe the travel time could've been shorter, but the bracelet took me on a circuitous route that went around natural choke points and avoided open ground. In the distance I can see other capes either strafing something concealed from sight by the cityscape or bounding along towards my destination as well. Echoes of the battle reach my ears, faint and indistinct, making me feel...
Restless.
This time the rendezvous is in the parking lot of a strip mall, potholes and parking lines concealed by a slightly-lower flooding. I'm not the first to arrive, but I'm also clearly not the last, with another pair of capes coming in as I watch, one floating down in a truly massive suit of power armor and the other surfacing in a spray of water and black limbs.
This is the smallest staged group I've joined today. Maybe a dozen people total, each and every one of them looking oddly refreshed and relaxed. One woman is even reclining on the hood of a Hummer, light green sundress riding up her thighs and plastered to her body. She's not alone. A bare-chested man with greasy blond hair is leaning on the car, arms crossed and a jovial expression on his face as he chats with her, words indiscernible through the pounding rain. He stops talking when I show up though, a broad grin stretching across his face.
"If it isn't fuckin' Rosie," he says, arms dropping to his side as he splashes through the wet, stride unimpeded by the shin-high water. "Good to see you're still standin'. Where've you been kickin' around?" he asks, extending his arm, elbow bent at a right angle and hand up. I look him up and down, taking in the wolf-on-swastika tattoo on one shoulder and E88 tattoo on the other.
Then the pieces fall into place and only my fused bones keep me from taking a step back in surprise.
"Hookwolf?" I ask incredulously. He shrugs and drops his hand, the other one going up to his head to scratch through sodden hair.
"Yup," he replies, quirking an eyebrow. "We gonna trade answers or something?" he asks.
"Yes, and that counts," I snap, some vestigial instinct throwing out the answer as the other half of my brain re-asses the man in front of me. "Why are you here?" Certainly his costume didn't hide much, but I always expected his face to be different. Ugly, maybe, or heavily scarred. There are a few white flecks on his cheeks, and his nose is crooked in a way that I assume means that it's been broken a few times, but other than that he looks surprisingly normal. Rugged, yes, and frankly scary, but I wouldn't be able to pick him out of a line up of other Empire thugs.
At least, I wouldn't've been able to.
Hookwolf throws his head back and laughs at my response, a deep and throaty thing that causes several heads to turn in our direction. Thankfully my mask conceals my flush, but I still have to push down the urge to shatter a bone in response to the sudden increase in attention.
"Fair 'nuff," he says, laughter subsiding as he looks me in the eye. He has to tilt his up to do it, but he also doesn't seem bothered by that fact. If anything, it puts a smile on his face, one that's surprisingly unguarded for a neo-Nazi. "Anyway, I'm here 'cause I can't cut Leviathan more 'n a few inches deep. They need someone good at killing for this monster, though." He lifts up one hand, the fingers unspooling into blades, hooks, and spikes. "See, that I can do. Now, mind giving me the details on where you've been?" he asks, blades pulling back underneath his skin as he drops both hands down to hook into the pockets of his jeans.
"The healer tent," I say, composing myself. "My powers interact well with Isidis, Alabaster, and another cape." I can't bring myself to deny him the information, so I settle for saying it as flatly as possible. Hookwolf nods agreeably.
"Othala's always jawing about how overworked she is," Hookwolf says, shaking his head ruefully. "Nice to hear she's been gettin' a bit of help." A few strands of blond hair plaster themselves across his face as a particularly vicious squall rolls through. He pulls them away from his eyes, grimacing. "Storm's brewing," he mutters, turning to look over his shoulder, and I follow his gaze. The clouds look like they're congregating, getting denser, darker, and even lower to the ground than before.
"Alright everyone, listen up!" a voice shouts, two loud claps echoing behind it. I tear my eyes away from the sky, searching for the source of the command. I don't have to look long.
The cape is a striking woman in a grey bodysuit and a crimson mask, a few bolts of the same color breaking up her otherwise dull outfit. I hear a few people mutter something vaguely complementary towards her, but besides that the lot is silent save for the pitter patter of rain and roar of wind.
"I'm Cineral, and I'm in charge," she says, looking each person in the eye in turn. I manage not to shudder as her cold grey orbs meet mine, but it's close. "We're the melee force. There aren't a lot of us because Erinye will beat basically anyone in close-range combat." She pauses to let that sink in, then continues. "You're here because you're tough, fast, and can bring the hurt without getting turned against us if you trip into her. Kill her minions, keep eyes on the S-Class threat, and leave damaging her to the blasters. Don't try to engage her unless you don't have any other choice, and if you do, run as soon as you can and let a big gun take her out. And no, you're not a big gun," she says, voice growing hard enough to shatter diamond. "I can burn a building to ash in less than minute. If you can't top that, you can't do anything that matters to her. Everyone clear?" she asks, waiting for dissent. I look at Hookwolf for a moment, and he looks back at me before turning forward and nodding, face drawn and serious, already pushing out blades. The other capes give their own acknowledgements, ranging from barely perceptible gestures to hackle-raising howls.
This is it.
I take a breath, inhaling salt and mist and cold night air. It's almost dark enough to need light, the odd shadows cast by the powers in use around me making us all look a little less human.
Then I let it out and nod, needles and blades spilling out of my armor.
Cineral looks at the group for a moment longer, then turns on her heel, walking back the way she came.
"The S-Class threat is this way. Let's go."
