When Erinye attacked the triage tents, she did more than just kill a few wounded and throw us into disarray: she also kidnapped some of the on-site Thinkers, capes who had a form of clairvoyance or future sight that required close proximity to whatever they were trying to predict. That meant that any sort of ambush was likely to be ineffective, and that we'd never be able to properly surprise her.
So we don't bother being subtle.
Hookwolf is tearing through the water next to me, eating up the ground in long, loping strides that send spray everywhere, the droplets curving in the wind. Another cape keeps pace next to him, four armed and four legged, her panther-like face twisted up into something nearly euphoric as she shoots along the ground. The reclining cape from before flies silently above us, somehow untouched by the rain. The rest of the group lags a little bit behind us, and it's a challenge not to outpace them.
Both sides of the conflict have Thinktanks, and since the clones retain their memories we're at a slight disadvantage. Erinye will know most of the potential powers we could bring to bear, and has a lot of redundant abilities and as many Thinkers as she wants. On the other hand, there are so many people peering into what could be that no one on either side can make heads nor tails out of it. As a result, it's likely to come down to a straight fight rather than mind games, a brawl where both sides have perfect information on the opposing side's movements. In that battle, we might have the upper hand, if only just, because Erinye has yet to absorb any truly terrifying capes.
We don't intend to give her a chance to.
"ETA is two minutes," my bracelet murmurs. It's Cineral's voice, harsh but not uncaring, and I tear my mind away from the chase and focus on the words. "Projectiles will be incoming momentarily. Flak 41 and a few other Blasters will try to shoot them out of the air. Tank only what you can't dodge, and if there's a residual Shaker effect call it out." I look up at the horizon expectantly, but I don't see anything yet.
Then a line of white light comes out of nowhere and blows one of my bone limbs out from under me and the fight's begun.
I remember trawling PHO at one point and coming across a thread on the use of capes in wars. It eventually devolved into corner cases, technicalities, and trolling, but up until that point it was actually pretty interesting, if a little above my level as a non-college student without a background in either historical warfare or parahuman studies. A few things stuck out to me, though.
The first was the importance of recognizing that a power used incorrectly is frequently worse in a fight than a well-trained man with a gun. While it took a while, the thread eventually came to the general consensus that properly used powers almost universally have the potential to be more dangerous than a well-equipped human, and if you have a Blaster who can't necessarily kill people with one shot, chances are there's a better way to use them.
The second was recognizing that anything resembling traditional tactics and strategy would more or less fly out the window. Your army needs to be able to see one another and enact Master/Stranger protocols, but then area-of-effect Blasters and Shakers will ravage your forces. Retreating from high-rating Movers is near-impossible, as is running a guerilla war versus any group of Thinkers worth the name. The only counter to a group of multiple precogs is your own group, in which case they both end up doing nothing but giving each other headaches. Different Brutes operate under different rules, which requires different answers for each, and carrying kit to deal with all of them would be prohibitively heavy, difficult, and expensive. In short, nothing about modern warfare is applicable in a truly large-scale engagement of parahumans.
The third is that the chain of command in a parahuman/human army would require a complete rework. Any random foot soldier can become a war-winning cape inside of a day, and people who were giving them orders a day ago will have to learn to bend the knee to them. That alone would require a total restructuring of how each individual human being was treated, but then there's the hierarchy within the parahumans themselves. Do you assign rank by experience? By power level? A cape's relative threat rating is only loosely connected to how long they've had their ability, and handing out authority to whoever won the power lottery strikes no one as a good idea.
There was really only one person considering what the ground-level view would be like, though. One person who speculated on the potential personal experience of a parahuman on the front lines of a battle with a huge number of powers active at the same time. They said it would be the single most hellish conflict a human could process for about five minutes, and then they'd probably be dead.
RedLeadLord was half right.
I don't know how many Blasters Erinye was able to nab, but there are enough of them to turn the streetlamp-free night bright as noon, filling the air with projectiles, lasers, and barely-perceptible blasts of something so numerous and dense that they briefly obscure the sky. Almost none of them make it to the ground. Instead, they're intercepted by lances of pure white light, wildly ricocheting stars the size of pin balls, or simply pop out of existence halfway to their targets. After maybe ten seconds, the barrage lets up, the projectiles moving over our heads as the ranged parahumans start focusing on one another, leaving the street still bright but deserted.
Not for long, though.
More than a dozen Starfish capes fly towards us, brown thunderbolts screaming through the rain just over the water to avoid getting caught in the crossfire above. The woman in the sundress suddenly accelerates ahead of me, one arm stuck out in front of her, fingers grasping for something. One Starfish twists in mid-air to avoid it and swipes at her chest, only to move straight through without any effect.
What?
The sundress cape's own arm spins around in a pale blur, passing through the Starfish's head, and it falls to the ground, blood leaking from its ears. It starts to get up almost immediately though, both hands pushing it up and out of the water, murder in its eyes.
No.
I reach down as I charge by, fingers of bone lengthening and twining into a lance, and stab the Starfish in the head, hooks springing from the shaft to catch his ribs and chest as I drag him along and replace his meat with bone. I let the lance drop, the body attached sinking into the water behind me as I look up to watch the sundress cape.
She's tearing through the Starfish, a dream amongst monsters. None of them can so much as touch her, and where her arms pass bodies contort and twist, falling out of the sky. They don't stop getting back up though, and only a few of the capes around me bother to help her keep them down. I grit my teeth at the sheer Sisyphean uselessness of it all and remedy that by stabbing every Starfish I see writhing on the ground, leaving them pinned, pierced, and finally dead-
"Incoming!" someone shouts, and I tear myself away from the grisly task to look for the new threat. Sure enough, a counter charge has already been organized. There are enough clones to fill the street completely, one body indistinguishable from the next as they shamble forwards.
For a moment, I falter.
That's a lot of capes.
Then a Tinker in a suit of power armor so large it might be closer to a mech steps forward, at least twelve feet tall, all angular planes and dark metal. They lift a hand, blue arcs of lighting flowing from the ground and environment to gather in their palm, forming a sphere of crackling energy the size of a beach ball.
"Ground yourselves!" they shout. I have enough presence of mind to stilt over to a nearby building and jump out of the water, break my eardrums, and put as much of my bone and skin in contact with the concrete as possible before-
There's a hot, blue flash that makes me feel tingly, even from this far away, even through my bone. I repair my ears, still ringing and fragile even though I saved the bones from the blast, and shift my vision back to the Tinker. Half a dozen monsters lie scorched and spasming in front of them, with only two still able to move. The Tinker is fending them off easily enough though, one with each hand, electricity by turns snapping out to deflect attacks or scorch flesh.
I still can't hear anything.
I see a long-limbed cape dashing below me, a simian thing that looks too swollen and too flushed with blood to be healthy. I gauge the distance carefully, then let go of the wall.
The fall is short, made infinitesimally shorter when I impact the cape's back before the water, something crackling familiarly beneath my feet. I don't let up, slipping bone through fragile skin, winding, twisting, cutting, and never letting up until the flesh beneath my feet feels more like liquid than meat-
Something hard slams into me and I feel the lightness of falling with none of my usual control.
It's almost peaceful.
Then I slam back down into the water, push myself up, and bare my teeth at my attacker, blades and needles rippling out of my armor as I prepare to face the new threat.
Who dares?
A virtual mountain of a man does, taller than I am and far more massive, with hands large enough to palm a beach ball and a comparatively tiny skull perched on top of an obscenely thick neck. It twists its face into a smile, jagged and deformed teeth glistening in the rainy night.
"No one likes you, you know," he says in a comically high voice, plodding forward in water that's past my knees and not even all the way up his shins. "They're just too afraid of you to tell you the truth. That you're a hypocrite. A liar." I feel a brief twinge at the words, then harden myself.
Enough of that.
I sprint forwards, fingers and hooks twisting out of my arms ready to flay the filth before me. The giant's smart though, and one legs comes around in an arc, sending water everywhere. I roll forwards under the spray as an open hand passes through where my torso would've been. Blind luck, but it worked. I duck into his space and slash my arm across his chest-
Only to have to pull away, breaking my connections to the bone weapons and leaving them behind as they get stuck in gummy meat that feels less like flesh and more like rubber glue, the shards twisting into ultra-fine sea urchins and doing nothing. A few bone stilts get me out of melee range and I'm wary now, eyeing up the mass of flesh like a primed bear trap.
The monster's tiny mouth twists into a hideous grin, all chips of frustratingly-resistant bone and wrinkled lips, and it spreads its arms wide as it crouches down into something like a wrestling stance, fingers wriggling in anticipation.
"Your power really makes sense, you know," the monster says conversationally. "You change yourself, trying to fit in, trying to take control of your life, but it's just a shell, and a brittle one at that. One sharp strike-"
"Hey ugly!" a voice shouts. I flick my eyes to the side just in time to see a mass of blades and hooks the size of a semi truck come out of nowhere to slam into the side of the monster. "Try me on for size," Hookwolf growls, the screech of metal on metal punctuating the meaty ripping noises as blood and gore start spraying out behind him.
For a moment, I have an obscene flashback to the medical tent and can't help but smile at the sight.
Great minds think alike.
Then I feel an impact in my lower back and roll with it, coming out of the water facing the direction it came from.
This cape looks like a snake made of arms, with fangs formed of bone and skulls for eyes. Its maw goes wide as it hisses, and I twist, shattering both teeth and eyes, but the cape just screams at me, in irritation or pain or some combination of the two, loud enough to blow the rain towards me and send water spraying away from it. I push out a pair of blades along my arms and charge forward, trusting my bone to find purchase in the water as the melee begins in earnest.
The most hellish thing a human could process, for about five minutes.
After that you're either used to it or dead.
I lose track of how the fight is going. I think a lot of people do.
The battleground moves as the night goes on and the storm gets worse. I think it must be command directing us towards Erinye. There are no clear orders, no voices coming from my wrist, but I notice the iron-clad cape and the sundress woman blocking off streets and killing any monster that comes within arm's reach, murdering until the bodies lay around like action figures scattered by some errant god, and the monsters eventually stopped running into the killing grounds.
It helped, thinking of them as monsters.
Eventually, I started noticing patterns. The flying capes were hard to put down, in a way that never left you certain that they were dead. They were Starfish or Octopi, either extremely fast and capable of regenerating through just about anything or armed with four extra limbs and only a shade more killable. There was another type on the ground that was smart and variable, like it never stopped learning, never stopped subtly changing its form, never stopped talking.
I let Hookwolf kill those ones. He was good at it. In return, I would double up on the fliers, on the gossamer striders that would float out of his reach and rain caustic flakes of green and red on everyone, on the strange strain of capes that couldn't be cut and had to be suffocated but were strong enough to ignore things like half a ton or more of angry metal Nazi.
Turns out you can't ignore getting your lungs filled with bone.
Then I would move on to the next one, a constant cacophony of pain and rain drowning out everything but the wet red movement of bone, bodies, and fighting.
"Boost me," a voice whispers in my ear, all sticky vowels and rumbling consonants, throaty and aggressive in a way that makes me think of big cats and the time Mom read me Sula before bed when I asked her about sex. This isn't Bloody Mary's first time calling me up though, so instead of lashing out I spin around, catch two of her four rising feet, then push up as she pushes down. I hear a thump as she impacts her target, as well as a victorious howl that drowns out the ever-present pitter-patter, and a brief scream from whoever (whatever, I correct myself, they're not people) the eight-limbed cape has chosen as prey.
Then I stick both my arms out, one straight left and the other straight right, spear two Master minions back into strange half-here-half-not hexagons, and move on to search for their creator.
I think we're winning.
We must be. We started with twelve and change, and now there are eleven of us. I don't know who's missing, where they went, or what they could do, but I assume that they must have sold themselves dearly. In the brief lulls when the fighting drops to merely intense rather than frantic, where I can afford to take a moment to stick my head under a broken drainpipe for a sip of rainwater or just collapse against the side of a building for long enough to take three deep breaths, panting without having to force my lungs further open to make sure I don't black out, I think about just how much I've changed since Winslow. How Taylor has become White Rose almost full time, how I now have a body count to rival most Empire members (if monsters count as people), how nothing I could've done with a high school diploma comes remotely close to this.
In those brief moments, I catch glimpses of my reflection in the flooded streets. I can't help it, really. It seems like half the powers in play involve creating light, which turns the ground into one giant mirror, constantly shifting at the steps of others.
What I see is different. My armor, usually pale and smooth, has turned into something horrible, all serrated edges winding around limbs, the lines jagged where bone broke off or was pushed out. My mask has shifted once more, the avian beak replaced by thorns ready to twist and stab and reach out to pull-
I feel something bite into my shoulder and try to burrow, and only the swift release of an armor panel keeps it from consuming me completely. A naked woman stumbles past me, not ready for the sudden shift in her center of gravity. I stab her twice, long, thin needles sliding in place roughly where a human heart would be and a monster heart would be close enough to, breaking them off before the bite and burrow can chase its way back to me. The naked woman falls back, legs jerking oddly as they slowly give out. I cast my eyes around, looking for the next threat.
Break over.
I spot a cape that's blurry around the edges wave his hand at an incoming Starfish, which vanishes with a bang into a cloud of expanding gas. I fire off some flak behind me, eating the pain with an almost apathetic stoicism as I walk over towards him, sizing the cape up as I leave bone splinters and screaming behind me. He has scars, bright white ones, across his face and neck. There's a wispiness around the end of his limbs, like he's made of a mirage, and he has empty, smoke-filled pits where his eyes should be. I catch a raised eyebrow at my approach, but he doesn't do whatever he did to the Starfish to me so I take it as approval and step close enough I could touch him. He's smoking, the cigarette long enough for me to think it must be fresh, and oddly scentless.
The smoking cape takes a long drag on the cigarette, the bright glow of the embers at the end never moving down the stick, then points to a pair of capes walking across the battlefield, lopsided and gangly as newborn deer without any of the grace. Somehow untouched, they're making a beeline for him through the melee, slipping between individual battles without so much as slowing down. He gestures and a pair of icicles appear in the air, floating for a moment before shooting off with a boom, missing me by inches to tear into two of the flying capes and send them tumbling, lost to the chaos. I look at the smoking cape, a question on my lips, but he grimaces and taps his head, then mimes a single tear sliding down his cheek. Another wave of his hand and a trio of capes disappears in a foof of steam, fire that doesn't go away, and screaming.
I shake my head, then charge at the two capes. Not sure what I was supposed to get from that, but targets are targets. I slide under a cape made of shuddering static and white noise that has one arm intersecting with the head of a brittle-looking cape screaming in agony, duck under the backswing of a massive monster, and try to stab one of the-
-fear, nothing but fear, in wavering green eyes as I point a blade at a girl who can't be older than me-
-diverting the blade and tripping as my stilts tangle in one another. I hear giggling, barely audible over the din, and shake myself as I stand back up, blinking my eyes behind my mask as I stare at the two capes, both now focused on me.
What the fuck was that?
"She tried to hurt us," one of them says. He's lanky, too lanky, like someone picked up a boy and pulled, treating the human body like so much saltwater taffy without regard for proportion or balance.
"Naughty, naughty," the other says, shaking a head that has one too-large eye and one too-sharp tooth tearing at his lip to no apparent effect, a caricature of boyish curiosity. "What do you think we should do to her?"
I lash out at the snaggle-toothed-
-"Taylor, I love you, please tell me what's going on," Dad asks but this time he's nearly crying, eyes watering and-
-little fuck that sends my arm skittering to the side. Again, what the fuck? I feel myself nearly vomit, and I have to shatter ribs to stay aware as I back up, holding myself still using my shell as I stare impassively at them. They laugh again, the two of them nearly falling over in their mirth, and I snap.
Fine.
Let's see how they handle a flaying.
I turn the image of their faces over in my head, focusing on them until they almost look likeEmma, and I grit my teeth as I charge again-
-"Go home, Taylor. I didn't ask you to come over," Emma says and I feel something go fragile in-
-and this time the murdering takes and I put enough ruler-thin blades into their bellies that I'm the only thing holding them together. For a moment I'm close enough to hear their breath catch as they lose use of the bottom half of their lungs, close enough to hear the surprise in their voice.
Then I push them away, spinning around to find someone else to vent the excess self-loathing on.
We must be winning. Most of us can't be hurt, and those of us who are vulnerable are either lucky or can shrug it off. The clones stand for maybe seconds before each of us, hoping to find a combination of powers that can crack one of us before the others tear them to shreds, all while our Blasters ravage their back lines and the truly scary capes get ever closer to coming over here and wiping them out.
We have to be winning.
