"That's odd," Uber commented. "Boss, the elevator just cruised down past the ground level into the basement."
"It's getting odder," Danny reported. "I've been moving into the superstructure, and a whole lot of small charges just went off. High heat, no concussion. Maybe thermite or phosphorous, I'm hardly an expert. It looks like it just got most of the joints for the building's internal structure."
"Shit," Trainwreck hissed. "We've been made. We must have set off some kind of alarm or a trap."
"Sierra Zero?" Danny prompted.
"Okay, I've got zero percent chance you make it up undetected, you guys are already busted. But... an eighty-eight percent chance of victory without casualties."
"Eighty-eight's been a bad omen tonight," Benthic pointed out, touching her comm piece. She looked around at the rest of the team, and saw some pensive postures. She was sure the expressions behind their masks and hoods were just as anxious.
"Okay, uh, eighty-eight point two one seven nine," Gambler elaborated.
"That's better," Uber said. "Okay, if the elevators are out of the question we can move up through the stairs."
Salvage shrugged. "Stairs could be trapped. I can just knock holes in the ceiling and take the unexpected way up."
"Belay that," Wharf Rat said, staring upwards. "You're not seeing what I'm seeing. With the structure sabotaged, this whole building is swaying in the breeze. The structural supports aren't joined together anymore, they're basically just stacked on top of each other. It's gone flimsy and wobbly. If you start punching through floors, you'll probably bring the whole damn building down on your heads. Oh, more good news: the exterior doors just sealed closed. Welded, I think more thermite or phosphorous, and some kind of bars just dropped across them. You're not leaving the way you came in."
"Windows are trapped too," Oni Lee said, stepping away. One of the Butcher's powers was a short-range danger sense, and he could sense danger from the glass and the frame both.
"Looks like we head up through the gallery of traps," Panacea said.
"Sierra Ten, explore the upper floors," Wharf Rat said. "Intangible only, keep one of you down with the team. I'm bringing rats up from the basement to scout the building, but you move faster than I do. I'll be disabling traps as I find them. Everyone else, move to the stairs, cautiously."
"Maybe the upper-floor windows aren't trapped," Pariah suggested. "We may be able to get out of this building that way if we need to."
"We'll keep an eye on that option," Wharf Rat replied. "Okay, Sierra Ten, what've you got?"
"Unusual construction all over the place. Hardly any people around, just some after-hours security. They're armed and holding defensive positions with a regular check-in. Also, any of the Ambassadors that were asleep and off-shift, they're awake now. So, that sucks. Guess we won't be catching him in his bed," Gulliver said. "There's hidden passages, pits, spring-loaded blades, other stuff. It's all very mechanical, surprisingly low-tech from what I can see. No bombs, no electrified surfaces."
"He probably thinks they're either less predictable or less elegant than simple physics traps," Wharf Rat hazarded. "All right, pull your second back, I want you leapfrogging back to front. We put Sierra Three at the front, use his danger sense. Next one of Sierra Eight's stuffed shirts, to set off traps without endangering any of you. Go ahead and breach the stairwell whenever you're ready."
Oni Lee placed his hand on the door and pushed. Four generations of super-strength surged, and the door came off its hinges. A guillotine blade came down through the doorframe, hidden inside the wall, and Oni Lee pulled back fast enough to get nothing but a deep gash that ran from his elbow to his knuckles. Bone was visible in the second before blood flooded the wound. Panacea stepped up and started healing him before the first red drop hit the floor, and by the time he was fully mended there was only a small amount of blood loss. "Hmm," he said, staring at the blade. "Switch was up high, out of my range."
"Sierra Leader, be advised that Sierra Three's danger sense is not entirely reliable for us," Trainwreck said into the comms.
"Understood," Wharf Rat said. "Proceed with caution."
The first set of stairs crumbled away when they put weight on them, and the ledge to climb up past them was embedded with sharp blades and a collapsing structure so as to cut off the fingers of anyone that tried to climb past the stairs. "I've got a bad feeling about this," Uber said. Trainwreck placed his hands over the blades and let his teammates climb up his back, keeping them safe as they scrambled up onto the landing. Oni Lee helped pull the massive power armor up onto the landing as well.
"Not the rail," Oni Lee, gesturing for nobody to touch it. Trainwreck grasped it, and curved blades sprang out up and down the length. The blades clanked on his armor, and he just 'hmm'ed to himself in mild interest. Oni Lee gave him a short glare.
"Hang on a second," Wharf Rat said. "The fire sprinkler on the next landing is filled with high-power acid. I'm severing the lines and diverting flow." There was a massive thrumming sound as it was disabled. "Okay, good to go."
"No," Oni Lee said. He gestured for Parian to send her construct up, and it placed one foot on the stairs before they crumbled away, sending the homunculus tumbling all the way back down to the bottom and landing on the broken concrete from the first flight of stairs. A twenty-foot fall onto edged rubble, sure to cripple most people or most parahumans. Pariah deflated the construct and Uber fetched it back up with his grapnel gun. Salvage reached over and knocked out the rest of the trapped stairs, and then leaned forward to bridge the gap between landings with his own massive body. The team clambered quickly across him, and then he shed a couple tons of mass so they could help pull him up onto the landing.
Circus cut three tripwires in rapid succession, and Gulliver pointed out a flight of stairs that was hinged to swing down and crush anyone underneath. And each time they disarmed the traps, there was a weird hollow distant thrumming noise. "What is that noise, anyway?" Benthic asked.
"I'm gonna check it out," Wharf Rat said. "You guys keep moving."
A collapsing wall tried to force them over the stair rail to fall to the ground below, but Pariah was able to hold the mass at bay long enough for Salvage to gather it for himself. And as soon as the broken wall was cleared, guards on the other side opened fire. Salvage crossed his arms in front of his face and advanced on them, covering the team behind him. Oni Lee leaped over the stairs so he was far enough from his teammates, then teleported into the midst of the guards with a detonation that flung them all about like rag dolls. Panacea jumped from one to the next, sedating them before they could gather themselves.
"That sound is from the elevator shaft," Wharf Rat said. "That elevator that dropped into the basement, it's rocking back and forth in its shaft, swinging on its cable. Seems like every trap we disable sets off a counterweight that smacks into the elevator cab and sets it swaying. It's building its vibration the further up you go."
There was a bit of a pause, the Scavengers trading a look with each other. It was Leet that spoke up, from back at the Brockton Bay headquarters. "That doesn't sound safe," he pointed out. "Set off too many traps, or spot them and disable them, and the building starts coming apart from the inside."
"We should get off the stairs," Pariah said.
"Hold on," Wharf Rat said. "Got a hunch. Sierra Zero, odds of no-casualty victory if they stay on the stairs or if they move away?"
"Um, eighty-seven percent on the stairs, forty-one percent if they don't."
"Thought so," Wharf Rat said. "The thrumming is deliberate, it calls attention to the oscillations in the elevator cable. It built up a lot right before the wall came down, to make you want to get off the stairwell and try a different way up, through a new gallery of traps before you get steered right back to the stairwell. Traps, within traps, within traps." He paused, took some deep breaths, considered the position, and made a conclusion. "Okay, Sierra Zero, I've got a new plan. Odds?"
"Um, eighty-six percent if you do, forty percent if you don't."
"Okay then. Guys, we switch strategies, I'm calling an audible on this play. Move onto the floor. Don't touch anything and send the stuffed shirts out in front to check for pits and pressure plates. Move to the windows. Sierra Ten, you're heading upwards. Find me some Ambassadors, and take them out. Invisibility and intangibility are two of the least-common powers, and among the hardest to plan for, so you're our ace in the hole, our monkey wrench. Go get 'em. Be careful, you've got no backup. Don't look for Accord, just his minions. I'm moving my rats out, stay in contact. Talk me through what you're doing."
"Um, okay," Gulliver said. "I spotted Citrine up on the eighteenth floor, looks like she was doing something with air pressure and concentrating on the wall adjoining the stairwell. I'm climbing up, my way. Reach through the floor, pull myself up, set my feet, stand up, reach through the next floor. Okay, she's right there. Hang on a second, and ... and okay, she's tazed out now. Looks like this room's built on a piston to move her up once she's attacked us, so she can jump us again at a higher level. Dirty. Okay, now that I know what I'm looking for it's pretty easy to find the Ambassadors, they're all in these heavy steel rooms with extra-thick walls. I don't even know this guy's name, but he's dressed in this really dark bright red."
"Bright colors are light, dark colors are not," Pariah said. "The word you're looking for is 'deep', or perhaps 'jewel-toned'."
"Okay, yeah, that," Gulliver said. "Now, some guy in blue with starburst patterns. He, oh, he takes a lot of putting down. Hang on. There we go. Uber, thanks for making me bring this gun full of rubber bullets, it made the difference today. Climbing, climbing..."
"We're at the window," Panacea said.
"Good deal, Sierra Eight, can you let them down to the ground safely?"
"Mostly safely. Small fall at the end."
"Got it. Get Sierra Three down first, have him catch Sierra Nine. Nine, get small and then get big when you're on the ground, start catching the rest as they come down," Wharf Rat said. "If Accord likes traps so much, odds are he's already got a way out of his own trap. I want to see it. And whatever it is, it's less dangerous than pushing up the stairwell."
"Roger that, Sierra Leader," Gulliver said. "Okay, just tazed Othello out. Easy and done."
Danny watched the Scavengers break out the windows on the ninth floor, and Pariah deflated her minions and turned them into a thick rope to let her comrades climb down. Oni Lee appeared at the bottom in an explosion, and the team began climbing down one at a time. Salvage dropped the last fifteen feet into Oni Lee's arms, then began gathering dirt from the ground to bulk himself up. His limbs divided and unraveled, rendered down to thin bands and strands that gathered the dirt and pulled it into the shame of arms and legs, binding it in place with a thin network of his strands. It shifted and repositioned under his uniform, filling him out and bulking him up until he was big enough to reach up and grab his teammates and set them down on the ground. Pariah was the second to last, she deflated her robes and climbed down, then brought the cloth rope with her. The last one down was Trainwreck, who took a flying leap out the window with a loud whoop and a cry of "Cannonbaaaaaaaaall!"
Salvage and Panacea and Pariah caught him, but it was close.
Gulliver materialized on Danny's shoulder, two inches tall. "Okay, all out and all clear."
"Right then. Scavengers, the building has no stable support. Several really good hits to this corner of the building should topple it," Wharf Rat said.
"Awesome," Uber said, his eyes lit up. "All the best games have destructible environments."
Trainwreck snorted. "I was so sure you were going to reference the load-bearing boss monster." Circus swatted him on the arm, it made a gonging sound.
Panacea took the first round, spraying a wash of Crawler acid across the building facade to expose the loosened structure. It had a building's worth of weight on top of it, so even unsecured it was wedged tightly in place. But it was still a weakness. Once the I-beam was exposed, Trainwreck started punching it from one side while Salvage took the other side. There was a four-foot difference in their height, so between the two of them they started to slowly knock it askew, leaning left from the top and leaning right at the bottom, as well as denting it and bending it. A crimp appeared slowly in the thick metal, and they bashed it a few more times. The metal began to groan, and the crimp grew into a crease, and then it sagged enough that the wrinkle radiated like crow's feet and started to buckle in place.
"Haul ass!" Trainwreck bellowed as they sprinted away, heading at a right angle from the direction of the building. Salvage made surprisingly fast time, his long legs stretching way out. Trainwreck moved from running to rolling on the tires built into his armor, and they were both well clear before the sagging I-beam set off the chain reaction that started the building falling. There was a loud gonging noise and an elevator cable snapped out through the building, shearing through supports before it was reeled in. Glass exploded through one side of the building, and then the opposite side of the building sagged inward and turned into an avalanche of powdered concrete and shattered windows.
"There were people in there," Benthic pointed out.
"There were a couple dozen security goons who were waiting for a chance to shoot us because their boss the supervillain paid them too," Wharf Rat clarified.
"Okay, yeah," she said, conceding that point. "They were ready to murder us, so I guess this is kind of self-defense."
The building swayed away from the avalanche, toppling in slow motion, and a heavily-built steel box tipped over the edge and started sliding down the avalanche, sledding along miraculously smoothly. And then another and then more, all of them the size of a medium room, with sealed doors at the ends. Gulliver nodded. "Oh, yeah, that's what they're for. Okay, that's the six Ambassadors all sealed up in their giant padded air-bags and delivered to the bottom. Any of them that are still conscious can let themselves out and attack, except I took care of that."
"Holy..." Pariah trailed off, staring upwards. One more steel room was launched out, trailing a long elevator cable. It shot out sideways on a long, looping arc, well away from the rest of the building's collapse. The building's fall seemed to be counterweighting the propulsion of this last room. It started to fly over the building next door, then the cable snapped taut for a second and then relaxed, just enough to arrest the momentum and set the giant steel box directly on the roof's helipad.
"This guy is really starting to annoy me," Trainwreck growled. Circus nodded.
There was a short trek to the next building. The front door crumbled in front of Trainwreck's fist, and the single security guard in the lobby just held up his hands and backed away, leaving them to take the elevators. "We'll get the first one and secure the top," Trainwreck said when he saw how small the cabs were on the inside. He and Circus piled inside and she squirmed past him to push the button for the rooftop. The doors slid closed, dinged softly, and then exploded.
Pariah fell back, her hands held to her face in shock, while Benthic and Oni Lee leaped forward to rip away what was left of the elevator doors. Panacea lunged out of her Crawler suit and let it collapse on the ground behind her, and Oni Lee pushed Circus's corpse into her hands. Panacea tried, and pushed, and worked, but the life she needed wasn't there and she could not create it from nothing. It took a few minutes to extract Trainwreck from his suit and pass it off, but he was just as dead. The bomb had crushed them both utterly, blasted away their flesh, ruptured dozen of organs and fractured their skulls. Trainwreck's suit was powerful, but it corroded exterior was not nearly sealed enough to keep out the overpressure from an explosion.
Wharf Rat stared, and the swirl of questions in his stomach whipped up. Could he have known? Could he have done something different? Could he have saved those two? The roil of his thoughts was always a spiral, and he felt them like a whirlpool that could drag him down. Circular thoughts that came without end, leading from one second-guess to the next. But now the roil of self-doubts was fusing with his anger, and it felt like a tornado inside him. Could he have known? No. Could he have saved those two? No. Could he have done something different? He could have killed Accord in cold blood in his bed instead of sending in his team to engage him with a fair fight.
He was barely aware of his own actions as the rats came. They flooded the building, nearly covered every surface. Up the stairwells, up the walls, through the offices, through the crawlspaces, inside the walls and vents. It took him a few minutes to make sure the rest of the building was clear, and then he started walking up the stairs. He watched through dozens of eyes as his team tried to save Trainwreck and Circus somehow. Oni Lee was cutting open their chests and Uber was palpating their hearts like an expert emergency surgeon, and Pariah was stitching wounds shut to try to keep the blood from leaking out. Panacea still had a hand on either of them, trying to stimulate their life functions any way she could, Gulliver putting pressure on the wounds. Danny barely saw the steps ahead of him. He was halfway to the roof before he realized that Taylor and Salvage were both walking with him, just a few steps behind. He saw only red.
On the roof, the room was still sealed shut. A tide of rats hit it, chewing away seals and rivets, every minuscule weak spot and every join from metal to metal. Panels were pried up, lithe bodies squirmed inside, and the apparatus was chewed apart from the inside. The door clunked and sagged, slid halfway open, sputtered, and then went quiet. Salvage grabbed the doors and hauled them aside, and inside was a modest but tastefully-appointed bedroom. Thick plush carpet, a lavish bed, somber wallpaper, and a mahogany cabinet and bedside table with a flower vase fallen on the floor beside it. "You've taken out my Ambassadors," said the small man who stood in the middle of the room. He wore maroon silk pajamas and slippers, and an elaborate mask with jointed segments that allowed it to flex and move with his facial expressions and speech. "But, at least I took out some of your team."
Wharf Rat stepped inside, his fists raised to pound the small villain in the most barbaric way. But Accord was not done talking. "Though, now I realize that I did not get the one member of your team that matters most to you. No matter, I can resolve that now." He stepped on a particular patch of carpet at the same second as Benthic came through the doorway, and a lance of steel shot through the gap and pierced her armor at the joint between the ribcage and the midriff. "The wound is lethal enough," Accord explained. "But she has also been injected with large doses of a poison that causes a particularly agonizing death and a powerful hallucinogen that will magnify the effects. She is going to die in unimaginable pain, Wharf Rat, unless you leave me right here and take her immediately to the nearest hospital. She has seven minutes to live, and the emergency room is seven minutes and fifteen seconds away if you use the elevators." The girl clutched her stomach and dropped to the ground, grinding her teeth to restrain her screams.
A mouse on the console by the side of the street operated his simple controls in a specific pattern. "Sierra Seven, to the roof, Sierra Two is down." Panacea looked down at her two dead teammates, their injuries too extensive to reverse. She was in tears when she stepped into her Crawler suit and sprinted up the stairs, taking the steps five at a time with the super-strong legs of her organic armor.
Accord stared up at the tall, thin man in the black clothing and hood, glaring through his wooden mask from his deepset dark eyes. "Mister Wharf Rat, you are allowing this young woman to die, a woman I've already figured out you care about more than any other. You love this woman, no, this girl, and you are making no move to take her to the hospital."
"Hospitals come to us," Salvage said, his voice rumbling through his massive chest. Then he reached forward, and picked up Accord, and dragged him out of his lamplit bedroom and out into the harsh nighttime winds of the rooftop. Gravel crunched under his feet and stained his slippers, and then the last shove from Salvage shoved him to his knees to scrape his hands and soil his pajamas.
"What do you want?" the short masked thinker demanded, glaring up at them.
"So many people ask that, but it's never the right question," Scavenger said, his voice tight to keep it from trembling with emotion. "Still, I'll cut to the chase. First: all the accounts and passwords for your banks, every dollar you own or control. Second: all the information you have available about Cauldron."
"You're insane and ludicrous," Accord sneered back. "If you know anything about Cauldron you should know why I don't dare double-cross them."
"I assure you, you would rather sell them out than hold out on me," Danny said. He flinched as Taylor started screaming, the poison starting to work. She writhed and thrashed, her heels scrabbling on the roof.
The thinker switched his gaze back to the Scavenger's leader. "This is a bluff. You're no killer, certainly no torturer. You're the great negotiator, the diplomat, the problem-solver."
"And you're still acting like you're stupid," Danny said, shaking his head sadly. "The best way to negotiate is from a position of strength. I am in a position of strength. And you are a petty, vindictive sadist. A casual killer who pays back minor slights with wildly disproportionate cruelty and violence. You are a bully, Accord, who uses his mean-spiritedness to intimidate. You are a compulsive who believes that there is a place for absolutely everything, who has never once questioned his own assumption that his place is to be in charge, and doesn't even stop to realize that this assumption is what demonstrates what a selfish little psycho you really are. Your own actions and history demonstrate who you are and what you do. Now, in what way do you possibly imagine that leaving you alive is a net benefit to the world? You're exactly the kind of person that people like me break the rules to kill. And I'll share a secret, Accord," Danny said, leaning forward as he pointed behind him towards the screaming teenager. "I'm not trying to make anyone proud of me anymore."
"Was that a legitimate question?" Accord asked, his eyes calculating.
"What?"
"You asked why leaving me alive is a benefit to the world," Accord said. "Are you actually asking?"
"I'm actually asking," Danny said, standing straight.
"The cabinet behind me, there's a series of binders. They have the answers to solving various social ills. Poverty, hunger, crime, pollution, things like that. All on a very reasonable budget in a very reasonable time frame."
"And the catch?" he said, as behind him the roof access door burst open and Panacea lunged out. Her armor was unnatural looking, chitinous and meaty, with barbed armor across the forearms and chest, the face a horror show of fangs and mandibles. But it split open at the throat and the chest, folding back to let her out into the air so she could grab Taylor and start working. She didn't take the time to remove the armor, just thrust her fingers into the wound through the hole the lance had carved into her.
"The catch is that you actually do something!" Accord snapped. "Nobody ever does anything, they just say it's interesting and they move on," Accord spat bitterly. Rats opened the doors of the cabinet and started pulling out the binders in question."
And then the world swam. Or something larger than the world, something sinuous and ponderous that flexed its way through the vast voids of space, a tapered mass that undulated from across realities as much as through distance. And with it was another one, the two orbiting each other on the same path. And their outer layers ablated away as they traveled, sheering off like the heat tiles of a space shuttle making reentry, spreading as they spiraled towards their destination. But one of them was off-course.
Danny snapped back to himself, staring at Accord. "What was that?"
"That's a trigger event," Accord said, his voice dripping with horror. He stared at the girl who was sitting up now, holding her head as if to shake the cobwebs out.
Danny looked up at Panacea, met her eyes, traded a look and a nod before he turned back to the villain. "Say, Accord, this young woman over here once mentioned to me how catastrophically, self-destructively stupid it is for anyone to act as cruel and hateful as you do. As she told me, any sensible person who realized that people who are tortured or abused are likely to turn into dangerous parahumans, would stop torturing and abusing people. Why would you act like such a sadist if you know that someday one of your victims will trigger? And here you are."
"You still need answers, and that gives me bargaining power," Accord sneered. "You came asking about Cauldron. You may be good at negotiations, but however this ends will be guaranteed to work out better for me and terribly for you. In the long run, in the big picture, you're nowhere near as smart as I am. So let's negotiate."
"You've triggered," Panacea said to the other girl. Her voice was soft, gentle, comforting, a lifetime of bedside manner. "You're parahuman now. A real one. How do you feel?"
Taylor turned towards the girl, opened her mouth to speak, then paused as if she had just noticed something, figured something out. "Oh," she said in a small voice.
"Oh what?" Panacea asked, her eyes kind.
"Oh, I'm a mind reader," Taylor said.
"What?" Accord demanded.
"I can.. oh," Taylor said, as she turned towards him. "Ah. I've got what we came for, D- Wharf Rat."
Accord's eyes darted all around. "Her father," he said, his gaze settling on the Wharf Rat. "Now here's information we can negotiate for."
"Now you see, this shit is exactly why I am barely inclined at all to give you a hope of leaving here alive," Danny sighed. "You've misunderstood your position again, Accord. Just like you're not the leader of all things by divine right, you're also not an invaluable bargaining chip. You see, as of now it's more important to us that you stop working with Cauldron than that you give us information on them. And they'll get the message one way or the other. Oni Lee?"
The knife appeared in Accord's throat, chipping the edges of one of the articulated wooden segments. The thinker died convinced that he had done it on purpose and damaged his mask just to irritate him as he bled out. Gulliver appeared just in time to watch the villain drop to the ground and pump dark blood out into the gravel of the rooftop. Sirens were pulling close, god alone knew what sort of reaction they were going to have to an entire building falling down in the middle of the night. Danny had to wonder if he was technically a terrorist now.
"Boss?" Salvage said, staring at the open door to the stairwell. A hole was in the air, roughly the shape and size of an open doorway. And on the other side of this gap in nothingness was a brightly-lit white hallway, almost dizzying in its symmetry. Pariah and Uber were standing to the side, he had not even noticed them arriving.
"Later," Danny said, turning away from Accord's corpse to kneel next to his daughter. "Taylor?"
"That really sucked," she said, her voice strange. "But, it's already a memory. A weird, terrible memory. He dosed me with hallucinogens... and something else," she said.
"Can you stand?" Danny asked.
She paused, thinking it through. "I can. If I have to. But I'd rather if I didn't have to, right away."
"No way," Leet said in their headsets. "There's no such thing as a real mind reader. There can't be. There's just the Simurgh, which is as far past parahuman psychics as Behemoth is beyond parahuman blasters. And of course those psychics you see on TV, but all they can do is tell you what kind of specially-made card you're holding. It's barely useful enough to cheat at cards. Telepathy is impossible."
"And yet here we are," Taylor said. She had her helmet off, and she had it tucked under one arm while the other hand held the giant fabric wing for support. The countryside below was dark and all looked the same, as if they were riding over a black ocean and not trees and roads and houses. Her black curly hair streamed out behind her, the wind pulling tears from her eyes.
"I can't believe we left Trainwreck and Circus behind," Panacea repeated. "They were our friends."
Danny sighed. "I want to find out if we're not declared terrorists before I stand in the middle of a crowd of cops and ask about funeral arrangements. They get really, really unpredictable when a building has been destroyed."
"Look, I can understand leaving the bodies behind, kinda," Leet said. "I've never been one for crying over embalmed meat, the important part of someone is gone when they die and all that's left is carrion. But you know what I don't understand? I don't understand why you left that doorway hanging there. That's what you went there for, that's the invitation you were looking for, and you just picked up and walked away."
Gulliver sat on Danny's shoulder, clinging to his collar. "The man's got a point, boss. We fought for this, we lost people to get their attention, and then we walked away with nothing."
Danny shook his head. "There'll be another invitation. A better invitation. If we'd walked in that door, we'd have been approaching them as supplicants, beggars. Now we've turned them down, and the next time they come to us it will be them asking us for our time and not the other way around."
"That's kind of dumb," Gambler said.
"Status dynamics and power plays are always dumb," Danny said. "But that doesn't mean that people stop doing it, or that it stops being important. Things like that make a big difference. If we sit in their waiting room, we're the subordinates and they're in control. And from there they just need to keep us off-balance, and tease us along with half-truths, cryptic hints and unexplained assertions. And if we push back against it, we come across as being petulant or unreasonable, like children throwing a tantrum. But if they have to come to us to answer for what they've done, it's a whole different dynamic."
"Jesus," Salvage said, shaking his head. "I never realized there were people who think like this."
Taylor looked over at Danny with a curious gaze. "This is how you held your own against Jack Slash, isn't it?"
The words dropped the bottom out of Danny's belly. The solid certainty dissolved into unanswered questions. How had he been unaware that he was doing it again? What had done it to him? Arguing with Accord? Seeing Taylor hurt? Was he always going to manipulate people whenever he got too distracted and lost focus? What was Taylor going to think of this now that she was a mind reader? "Yeah," he said quietly. "Stuff like that is how I talked my way past Jack Slash. Nobody else ever has."
"I've also seen you using it on my principal at school," Taylor pointed out, and he remembered the way that woman stood at the top of steps to give herself the psychological advantage of height and tried to devalue him further by having him come to her. He had flipped the script then, and again tonight. Taylor paused, and continued. "You never seemed to have a knack for that sort of thing. God, you were embarrassing at parent-teacher conferences, just sat there and-"
"Yes then," Danny interrupted. "As long as I'm not working power plays on you guys, I think I'm okay. People like Jack Slash, Accord, and Cauldron, it's the only thing they respect, and you have to get their respect before they stop looking for a way to rob you or kill you and actually talk to you like a person. But, let's cut back to the first issue: our new telepath."
Leet jumped right in where he left off. "It's impossible. It's always been impossible. Look, mind control is easy. Hypnosis has been a thing for a long time. Seventeenth-century technology and an electrical spark can make a brain do things like move a leg or an eye. With parahuman powers, even easier. It's so easy that the closest things we've ever had to mind-reading was to hypnotize someone to tell their secrets, and that's pretty haphazard. Do you know what truth drugs actually do? They make you want to talk, want to trust people, and they screw up your attention span so you can't keep a lie straight. That's it. Look, a copper wire in the brain can mind control someone, but do you know what we've got for mind reading technology? If you put someone in an MRI machine, calibrate it with a ton of trial and error and confirmation bias, screen out external factors, and have the subject cooperate, then you have them concentrate really hard on a simple picture and use the machine to extrapolate a smudgy version of that picture, about two times out of three. That's it. Reading someone's thoughts can't be done because our thoughts aren't just a line of text or a picture. Everything's connected, everything's a context. That's how brains work. Everything is referenced in a dozen places and those parts of the brain all light up to bring those fractions of ideas into one place to make one whole idea. It's like reading a book, but every page has a dozen footnotes to a dozen other books, and every page in those books has a dozen footnotes, and so on and so forth. To be able to read a single page, you need to be able to read the whole library at once."
"And I can," Taylor said. "Look, my dad has infinite multitasking abilities, right? He can control a million rats at once without breaking stride. He can see through their eyes and come up with separate plans for them that all interconnect, right? Heck, he can even scan their memories. Well, just like he can work his power on every rat in a city, I can work my power on every thought and memory in someone's head, all at the same time. I can read the whole library."
There was a long pause, broken only by a flash of moonlight on water underneath them. "Shit," Leet said. "That might work."
Danny reached over and patted Panacea's hand. "I'm going to call the PRT and have them transfer Circus and Trainwreck's bodies back to Brockton Bay for a proper funeral. They'll be able to go over the evidence in what's left of that building, and interrogate the Ambassadors, and that'll clear our names. I'll explain that we came back to Brockton so that nobody in our city would know we were gone and left it undefended. And then they'll send us back our friends, and we'll be able to say goodbye."
"Are you sure?" Panacea said, looking sideways at him.
"As sure as I can be," he said, his mouth tight. "Now, pardon me a moment." He turned away, and softened his voice even more. "Gambler?"
"What?" the girl's voice demanded. Her voice was still full of tears.
"Thank you for helping us," he said. "We'll be home soon, and then we can get you some ice cream or something while we talk about this."
She was clearly tired, unused to being up all night. She blurted out, half shouting, "There's nothing to talk about! I told you it was okay and you went ahead and now they're dead!"
"You gave us odds. You gave us a percentage. And that's not a sure thing. I rescued you on a sixteen-percent chance, we already know that sometimes the odds get beaten. Sometimes we beat the odds in our favor. Sometimes against us. We do our best," Danny said, his voice leaking sadness, "but sometimes we take a bad roll. That's why we call it gambling, to remind ourselves that sometimes we will lose."
"You're home early," Danny said, surprised. He held a clipboard while rats ran around his office, typing and checking monitors.
Taylor went up on tiptoes to kiss his cheek. "Yeah. I think I'm gonna get my GED. Or just take the credit-by-exam tests from the state and then graduate a couple years early. I scanned my teachers today, and now I've got several years of college education in my brain and years of experience teaching the high school subjects." She dropped onto the couch in a tangle of ungainly limbs, and started picking at the cuff of her jeans.
"What, you just download their knowledge?" Danny asked, raising an eyebrow.
She squinted in thought. "Not precisely. But when I'm reading someone, for a few seconds I've got their entire mind inside mine, basically. Now, most of it goes away quickly, I don't remember the entire structure of how they sort colors from textures in their visual lexicon, or every off-handed memory of some friend-of-a-friend anecdote. For the most part I only really retain highlights. Like everything Accord knew about Cauldron and crime and woodworking and stuff. And I know a lot about mechanical engineering and sociology that I didn't know before, but it's mostly the broad strokes and big concepts. But for stuff like high school academics from a high school teacher, that's such a comprehensively conditioned knowledge of the material that it's practically like how you never forget how to ride a bicycle. For a while there, I knew so much about the subjects that I just can't forget it, basically."
He nodded. "Okay. That's weird. But yeah, if you think you're ready to graduate high school, go for it. You're really bright, you're probably ready for college even without your new gift."
He finished signing off on the clipboard and set it on his desk. "So, what do we need to know about Cauldron?"
She rolled her eyes. "God. Okay, first of all they see everything and hear everything, basically. Anytime you say their name or get in their business, just assume that someone has noticed and is watching to see what else you do or say. They have that teleportation thing you saw, portals. They've got their own base, and it's huge and mysterious and they go out of their way to make it look like a hospital or a New Age holistic healing center kind of thing. The person to talk to is Doctor Mother, she's the head of the whole thing. Black woman, near your age, French accent, lab coat. There's other folks working there, mostly parahumans, some of them are scary as hell. Especially Contessa. Brunette, wears a fedora. Rarely talks. Can't be beaten. She's the trouble-shooter and problem-solver, also bodyguard and enforcer and assassin. They sell superpowers, not cheap, Accord had a working deal with them, automatic bill pay and stuff. No idea where the formulas come from, yet. And yes, they have a lot of test subjects that they sometimes release with no memory."
Danny nodded. "Okay, its good to have all of those facts in one place. But tell me what they're like. Impressions, tone, corporate culture, things like that."
"Dry, analytical, utterly ruthless," Taylor rattled off. "The doctor can discuss the most blood-chilling subjects with clinical detachment. She's got plans within plans and wheels within wheels, working towards something very very big. Contessa and the doctor are more partners than it would seem at first glance, rather than superior and subordinate. Accord never saw many people, either it's a very small operation or they insulate most of the operation from outsiders. It's a world-spanning conspiracy that has to control billions of dollars, but most of what he saw was the same three or four people, lots of empty halls, and three or four parahumans that were either brain-damaged or brainwashed."
"Did the doctor ever mention where her degree came from?" Danny asked.
She rolled her eyes. "No, dad, that never came up in conversation when they were negotiating millions of dollars for deadly half-tested superpowers from shadowy conspiracies."
"Or what powers she has?"
"Well, yeah," Taylor blinked. "She doesn't have any. But, she's got other capes to do everything for her."
Danny rolled this around in his head and considered everything. "So, we absolutely need to keep everyone from finding out what your powers are," he said. "There's tons of people in this world that would kill you preemptively just because of a million-to-one chance that you'd learn their secrets. And tons more people that would kidnap you and force you to learn their enemy's secrets, then kill you."
"Not to mention the way you got me involved in a campaign against a massive superpower conspiracy that is famous for killing people to keep its secrets," Taylor pointed out. "I'm surprised they haven't sent Contessa after me already."
"Hmm," Danny mumbled, turning back her direction. "That's an interesting unanswered question."
She raised an eyebrow. "I don't actually need mindreading powers to get you with piercing insights, you know."
He chuckled, and picked up the clipboard again. "True enough. I think for my own good I should get out of here and go check out the premises."
"And I'll head up to our apartment," Taylor said, pulling herself upright. "Maybe get some more training in with Uber."
Danny paused in the door. "What is he teaching you and Gulliver these days?"
"Martial arts," she answered. "He's basing it off of aikijitsu for stance, movement and turns, as well as counters and reverses. The striking portion is mostly Muay Thai, the Eight Limbs variant. We incorporate parts of Capoeira for recoveries, sweeps and dodging, and also Krav Maga's takedowns and disarms. But the part that surprises me is how much time he spends drilling me in boxing. Just jab-jab-cross combination, over and over, for hours."
"Jesus," Danny said. "I think I've heard of half of those. What does he even call that program?"
"Leet Kune Do."
Danny threw his hands up, grinning with amused exasperation. "Of course he does. Get outta here, I'm gonna tour the premises."
He walked around, and part of him was examining the place and the practices and the personnel, but part of him was turning over a dozen conversations he'd had recently. Things had gotten complicated in some weird ways he had not anticipated. For one thing, the conversations with Squealer through the bulletproof glass of her minimum-security visitor's booth. She was apparently ruling the roost in the female wing, through a combination of massive wealth and the sort of mean-spirited cunning that thrives in prison environments. And she had demanded to know why he had testified on her behalf at the lawsuit for her intellectual properties. He had tried four or five ways to explain to her, but he didn't think she ever got it.
The designs she created could change the world for the better, improving many aspects of people's daily lives all across the globe. They could reduce pollution, poverty, starvation, inflation, congestion, waste, and accidents. But if the plans were in the hands of a villain, they could never be used the right way. And if they were in the hands of the Protectorate, they never would be used by the world, only by the Protectorate. But the Protectorate could publicize her work and generate interest. And with her in jail, the interested companies could find her and make a legal contract that helped everyone. And making Squealer rich was just a minor side effect of helping all the rest of the world.
She never did understand what he was getting at, and kept pressing him for his real reasons. Eventually he realized that she was suspicious and he just wasn't speaking a language that she understood. So he asked her to write out a check for a million dollars to the Scavenger Industries pension fund, and then she was happy that she had figured out the catch. It was a bit disappointing that she only understood his motives if he was trying to rip her off. He wondered if she was always broken that way, or if it was a function of her trigger event.
But that was only the lesser of the disturbing visitations he'd put in at a women's prison. There was something chilling to sit down across from Bonesaw and pick up the phone to talk to her. She was wearing a black jumpsuit instead of regular uniform, with the word VILLAIN printed in blood red on her front and back and her legs. The uniform had been cut way down to fit her. She still had the same eerie blonde Shirley Temple ringlets pinned back to frame her face, but she looked somber now, rather than the manic glee that she was most commonly photographed with.
Her incarceration had been troublesome. She was a minor, and quite insane, and almost certainly coerced onto her path by Jack Slash and the rest of the Slaughterhouse Nine. Those all argued for leniency and rehabilitation. But the sheer magnitude of her crimes and her cruelty argued in favor of an immediate death penalty. On the balance, they probably would have sentenced her to the Birdcage, but doing so would mean that every other inmate at that establishment was effectively sentenced to a lingering, torturous death. So the best option after that was to bring her to a maximum-security prison and confine her to solitary imprisonment with mandatory psychological counseling and a constant presence of armed guards. The courts had appointed Panacea to remove all the hidden weapons and augmented systems from Bonesaw's small body, and it had taken her days to return the girl to a normal human biology.
When he sat down across from her and picked up the phone, she had started talking immediately. About what he had said to Jack Slash, and what Jack had said to him. How she had started thinking of herself as one of Jack's victims or Jack's pawn, instead of Jack's friend. And in those moments of waning faith, Jack had taken her through the sewers and talked about how she could modify the Lamia to be more deadly, more dangerous. It was a misstep on his part, and had driven a wedge between them. When Benthic showed up, Bonesaw stood still for a few seconds. Long enough for Jack to get punched out. And she had fought back against Flechette, mostly for appearance's sake, but she assured the Wharf Rat that she certainly could have beaten the Ward girls and escaped if her heart had been in it.
Danny had told her that he believed her without reservation.
She smiled a little at that, and told him how her family had died. How they had died slowly, over and over, brought back from the brink by her talents and ingenuity, only to be tortured back to death's door by the Slaughterhouse Nine, until finally she had given them a merciful death to end their suffering. How Jack had used that opening to drag her along with his schemes and games. How she had thrown herself into it, how she had squeezed every ounce of glee from each terrible killing, because it was the only way to deny the consuming enormity of what had happened to her family, to herself. How she had hid from monsters by becoming a monster. And how fragile that house of cards had been. As soon as she was made to think of herself as a victim again, not a friend, it had all come back. It had unraveled the defense mechanisms that kept her safe from Jack.
He had just nodded, waited for her to continue. But she hadn't, she went quiet. She stared at her hands, cuffed at the wrists and elbows by specially-made manacles, her hands ensconced in gloves that had the fingers stitched together and the thumb sewn to the palm, so she could not manipulate any objects at all. And he had asked her his question: "Are you getting what you need?"
She had said yes, staring down at her bound hands. She did not cry. She was either still too damaged, or already too strong to break down like that. But her voice had cracked, and there had been a glimpse of a hurt little girl. He asked her about her psychiatrist, about the food. He told her about television celebrities and the latest episodes of some cartoon she was a fan of. He told her about how Accord had killed his teammates, and how badly Gambler had taken it. Bonesaw had paused, listening, and nodded slowly. Danny didn't work to emphasize his point about how Gambler had been involved in those events but not at fault for them, but Bonesaw was a clever girl, and she recognized what he was saying.
When his time was up, she asked him to call her Riley. He had watched her escorted away, then went to the bathroom, lifted away his mask and vomited uproariously.
He couldn't help feeling like it was easier to fight Bonesaw and arrest her than it was to visit her in prison and find out about the real person she had once been. But the part of him that saw uses for people and opportunities to seize advantage couldn't help but speculate at how soon she could be found mentally competent by her psychiatrist, and maybe released to the world to use her immense medical genius for more positive ends. At how she would fit in as a member of the Scavengers. He shoved that thought aside, there was no way the rest of the team would tolerate her. Come to that, when he stopped to think about his own feelings instead of logistics, he was pretty sure he couldn't tolerate her either. There was just far too much history, far too many dead bodies in her past.
The main factory floor was humming along, the machines building their parts quickly and efficiently. The humans that walked up and down the line were checking for faults and studying them to fix them if they started to break down. The conveyor belts were right now building replacement parts for the assembly arms, to start stocking up the other factories that Scavenger Industries was buying. In the end, they decided that several factories working for them and several factories just collecting subsidy money was less odious than one factory working for them and a few factories collecting the monopoly subsidy. So, they would be acquiring some of the properties up for sale, and letting the rest sell out for condo developments.
Danny nodded to foremen and workmen as he walked past, and turned his attention to the harbor side of the factory, where dockworkers were putting the finishing touches on the loading docks and the waterline. In a few days, this factory and the rest would all start turning out new products. A lot of their production was standard interchangeable components for the new power armor that the Protectorate was making standard issue. Armsmaster and Dragon were working together to revamp the facility that had made the dragon suits for years, so that it would work more efficiently and create more equipment for Dragon and also for the rest of the Protectorate. And the plan was that after that, the PRT task force soldiers would start wearing power armor in their own missions. So high tech armor components were a growth industry and Scavenger Industries was keeping itself busy. And after that, they had reserved a patent from Squealer's designs for heavy submarines that could open up whole new industries of ocean exploration and construction.
They were going to keep money moving into Brockton Bay for a while, spreading through the poorer districts like the Docks, and the city should thrive for a good long while. As long as no more Class-S threats cropped up. He crossed his fingers and hoped for the best.
Fifteen minutes ago, the bar had been raucous and rollicking, le bon temps roler-ing like all hell. It was the kind of dive bar that people go to when they want to have fun, with a vaguely Irish decorating scheme and plenty of blonde wood paneling and a running special on draft beers. Brass fittings and pool tables predominated, on karaoke every other Saturday. But right now it was silent as a tomb, all eyes staring at the big screen that occupied the wall across from the entrance. The footage showed a massive figure from a distance, surrounded by dust and smoke and haze, as lightning lashed down from the clouds overhead and buildings toppled from the earthquakes that echoed out away from the creature. It was early morning, pre-dawn, but someone had set up search lights and spotlights everywhere to keep visibility up. The crawl at the bottom of the screen repeated only Behemoth spotted in New Delhi, Protectorate on the scene, over and over again.
Several customers stood up and walked for the door, past the somber crowd that stared at the screen, and more stood up to join them. The people moved solemnly because they knew this pain, the terror that New Delhi was going through. And, shamefully, many of them were glad that it was someone else this time: the last three Class-S events on record had all targeted Brockton Bay, two of those at once. This was the first indication that Brockton was not cursed. The others at Danny's table sat with him as the bar emptied out. He imagined that the people were looking for the other kind of dive bar, the kind that people went to when they wanted to drink away their problems. Kurt and Lacey, Barry, Oni Lee, Uber and Leet, and Pariah, all sat clustered around him and watched for his move. And after checking to make sure the bartender and the waitress were not listening in, he pulled out his phone and dialed.
"Hello, this is Wharf Rat," he said into the cell phone. "Could you put me through to whomever is operating the New Delhi command post? Thanks. Have a nice day," he said by automatic reflex, then winced at the cringey inappropriateness of the words. He recovered when the phone transferred to someone new. "Hello Chevalier. This is Wharf Rat, from Brockton Bay. Yes, I understand. I just want to point out that I was not alerted or invited. I was wondering if this was an oversight or a deliberate slight." He paused, and then snorted to suppress a sharp retort of laughter. "Hm! Okay then, I'm going to be right here watching from my side. Tell Tattletale I said hi, and could you transfer me to Eidolon? Yeah, he'll take my call."
"Tell him I said hi," Pariah said. She had been one of the inner circle in the wake of the Leviathan victory, alongside Eidolon.
"Hey, Eidolon, it's Rat," Danny said casually. "I've got Parian here, she says hi. Yeah, Pariah now. I know, it sounds a bit grim but honestly she's really owning it and making it fit her. Uh huh. Well, I was kind of looking forward to hanging out again soon, but when I wasn't called in for the Behemoth attack I was concerned that people were snubbing me. Well, yeah. Yeah, Chevalier said that it's because everyone felt bad about how they'd left me high and dry during the Slaughterhouse Lamia catastrophe, and nobody wanted to be the one to call me and ask me for help. Personally, I don't think the story rings true, because even after I called them myself, Chevalier didn't suggest that anyone teleport me in. So yeah, I'm pretty sure there's hard feelings."
"Dumbasses," Kurt supplied. "Seriously, you'd think they'd want to bring back the dream team that killed Leviathan."
"Well, Flechette was the keystone for that whole operation," Uber pointed out. "And she's told them not to call her for any more Endbringers. If she's not giving an encore, there's no point to the rest of them."
"Well, yeah you need a new plan," Danny said. "No, like back to the drawing board, you can't just adapt what worked last time. Uh huh. Okay, so you're trying to pull together a power to call Scion, right? Like we discussed? Well good. Uh huh. Wait, tell me more about that, I'm curious to hear this. Of course this is a good time, duh, it's not like you're doing anything important," he said, inflecting his tone with sarcasm.
"Kinda cool that the boss is so close to Eidolon," Leet said.
"They talk all the time," Barry said, sipping his beer. "Apparently Eidolon doesn't have a lot of friends, even on his own team. And you know Danny, he's everyone's friend."
Leet raised an eyebrow. "Yeah, I watched him kill literally thousands of monsters. Last week he killed a criminal kingpin in Boston. I met him when he graciously spared us from his purge of Brockton's villains. It's hard for me to see him as anything so homey or earthy as 'everyone's friend', just my own perspective."
"Whatever," Barry said. "You'll get to know him."
Danny leaned forward. "So, you keep getting into these super-dangerous battles for enormous stakes, because when you first started out that sort of thing made you more powerful. And you want that back. I get that, I do, Eidolon. But dude, lemme ask the hard question: is it working? Are you getting what you want?" Another long pause, and he sighed. "So, you gotta try something new, my man. Don't keep trying the thing that doesn't work. What? Man, you're Eidolon. You've got whatever powers you want. Identify the problem, and get the power that solves that problem, piece of cake. If you need your powers charged up, then don't dink around with trying to get a feeling, just charge your powers up. Yeah. Yeah, uh huh. Well, you've got Behemoth rampaging around. Get yourself the ability to absorb his energy and channel it into your powers. He's got raw power to spare, but he doesn't have your versatility."
"How's the Scion thing going?" Lacey asked in a hushed voice.
Danny put his hand over the mouthpiece. "It's harder than we expected, he's had to re-try like three times already." He turned back to the phone. "Sorry, what? Yeah, I've got a television here, we're watching. Okay, just call us back when you can, okay? Oh, and the whole gang says hi. Maybe when your done you can shoot over here and meet us for a drink." He hung up the phone. "Well, let's see what happens next, shall we?"
"Sounds like Eidolon's got problems of his own," Pariah said, sipping her soda.
"He's not getting any younger," Danny said, shrugging. "Though, now that I think about it, I have to wonder why that is. Certainly he can make himself younger and stronger again? Anyway, apparently he's been on booster shots to keep his power levels up, for quite a while now. But he was really sure that all he needed was a big enough fight and he'd overcome his psychological block and unlock the rest of his power."
"Is that a thing with you guys?" Kurt asked. "Like, psychological blocks and performance issues?"
Leet snorted. "Not that I've ever heard of. Like, ever. Sure, our frame of mind can make a difference, like anyone else. Insecurity or depression can make people slower, less intelligent, even physically weaker. But not a lot, it's within a margin of error. And parahumans don't just lose their powers because of emotional conflicts or whatever. Nah, I think what Eidolon's been trying to do is a lot more like trying to fix your car with the power of positive thinking. It's a nice idea, but eventually you need to actually solve the problem for real because that shit doesn't work."
"Oh, hang on, it's starting," Uber said, nudging his oldest friend. The watched on the television as Eidolon drifted forward, towards Behemoth. He was wearing armor fitted and colored to look like his original costume, with the green cloak and the green lights filling the hood. Blue lights shone from his feet, where the antigravity panels were worked in, allowing him to fly without dedicating one of his three powers to that. Lightning struck him directly from above, but there was no exit stream from him to the ground. He flew forward at a steady pace, further into the thick of the hellscape that surrounded the Endbringer. More lightning struck him, and his body seemed to swallow it up, grounding it out. And then another bolt struck, and stuck. It lashed down at him from the clouds as if pinned in place, flicking all about the cloud layer as if to try to escape, or as if harvesting the rest of the electrical energy into the cloud to stream into Eidolon. The lightning strikes around them began to slow, to stagger, to soften. The forest of lightning strikes that surrounded New Delhi began to thin out as the one hero diverted them all into himself and absorbed them.
Behemoth turned, ponderously, to face the hero. The team of Behemothkillers that the Protectorate had put together seemed mostly intent on slowing the monster down and mitigating the damage it could do. He could see the merit of that strategy, Behemoth was particularly hard to fight against. The beast could control or project any form of energy, so targeting it with energy attacks was worse than useless. And since nearly any material object could be melted or blasted to pieces and destroyed, affecting it with non-energy attacks was often useless or suicidal. Danny could see a reddish glow that seemed to slow everything inside of it. In addition there were chains lashing out of the ground to try to pin Behemoth's legs down, occasionally forcing the slope-backed gargantuan to drop one horn-fingered hand to the ground for balance. The chains were melted over and over but they kept reforming and reappearing, slowing the creature down further. And the ground was sloping around him, forming a crater that he was forced to work his way out of. Whatever he had come for, he was making little headway. But slowing him down might contain the collateral damage he could inflict, but it also focused that same collateral damage. When it finally had its feet shifted it pivoted from its thick waist and pointed a hand that looked like fingers burned down to blades and claws, and fired out a bolt of lightning as thick around as a subway train straight at Eidolon.
The bolt struck and stuck like the other, pouring energy into the man at an incredible rate. Behemoth pulled back, but the flow kept streaming. It moved differently in the air, less like something forced forward and through, and more something pulled and siphoned away. Behemoth shifted his feet, ponderously, slowly, each movement costing him several seconds. The other hand was brought to bear, and it gouted flames that seemed to boil the air itself. Blue-white and too bright to look at directly, they punched out from Behemoth into Eidolon, and they were pulled into his body. The camera was far away, but from this angle it looked like Eidolon was laughing, his head tipped back as he guffawed. The flames did not stop, they siphoned out of Behemoth's well of energy and into the hero. Eidolon dipped low to the ground, and the seismic shocks that rattled the ground began to slow and still as well, the energy of the vibration pulled up out of the ground and into Eidolon.
Behemoth opened his mouth to roar, a blast of sonic energy that could pulverize buildings. But when it hit the green-hooded man, it did not pulverize. The cone of terrible noise contracted, focused, as he pulled in the edges of the blast towards himself to absorb the full measure of Behemoth's mighty roar. The monster lurched off balance, and it tried to close its mouth. But the massive blast of the roar would not abate, would not still enough for it to shut its mouth. Flames and lightning and seismics and sonics all poured out of Behemoth and into Eidolon. So it tried something new: it charged him. A detonation went off at Behemoth's feet, a vast concussion powerful enough to launch the monster out of the crater and away from the chains, out of the slow-time field. It rolled in the air, and the streams of energy fleeing the monster towards the hero did not stop, merely bent around awkwardly in the air to continue their flow.
It closed the distance, and when it stood Eidolon was too close, he was inside the thirty-two-feet threshold that Behemoth could ignore the Manton effect, channeling his powers directly into the body rather than directing them through the air. Volcanic heat blossomed inside Eidolon, enough to char him immediately to ash. But he was unaffected, the heat was absorbed instantly, harmlessly. Behemoth staggered backwards, trying to exit the radius, even as lightning and fire poured from its hands, and its mouth channeled forth a constant sonic blast into the hero. And then it melted the ground under its feet, and began sliding down into the molten pool of lava, escaping into the earth. "Holy crap," Barry said. "He's chasing it off all by himself, without Scion's help. It's only been fifteen minutes, and Behemoth the Herokiller is already retreating."
"I don't think Eido is willing to let him go that easy," Lacey said. "Check it out."
The green-cloaked man thrust one hand out, low to his waist, then gestured upwards, and the molten lava pool of Behemoth's creation was ripped upwards into the air to hang suspended. The fire and sonics and lightning continued to pour out of the inscrutable monster, now joined by laser beams firing out of the eyes. And then Eidolon began gesturing again, swatting back and forth. Cooling magma was knocked clear by a vast telekinetic force, as if dusting off a titanic doll in the hands of an even greater invisible giant. And then the invisible giant began tormenting its doll. Eidolon's hands mimicked a motion, and Behemoth's arms were rotated upwards, backwards, down, and forward, over and over. The motion would have shattered most humans' shoulder joint, but Behemoth had a different body, built on layers and not structures. The rotation had no joints to break or tendons to rupture. But, it did stretch the different layers at different rates, forced the strata of its body to disconnect internally. Faster and faster, round and round, until something gave way and Behemoth's arms fell off. The massive thick brutish limbs slid away like massively padded gloves off of a stick figure, leaving only whip-thin spindles of shiny silver projecting out of the sides of the massive muscular body. And those spindly arms were still pouring out the energy that the man was absorbing. If anything they seemed brighter now, as if the flow was increasing or as if the giant arms had been slowing the process by insulating the source.
And then the giant began turning the doll's head, twisting it around and around. The flesh stretched, one way and then the other, faster and faster until the neck began to change consistency, the layers separating. Then Behemoth unloaded its arsenal, desperate to put an end to this. It exploded, a harsh actinic glare as it went nuclear and wiped out everything in a surprisingly small radius. When the explosion reached Eidolon, it paused, without the energy to expand further. And then the white orb of the continuous detonation, a nuclear weapon firing constantly in a blast like the sun brought to Earth, began to deform and deflate. The sides away from Eidolon collapsed in, the explosion focusing to project all of its energy into Eidolon, just like the lightning and fire. It was a desperation gambit, hoping to overwhelm the parahuman's absorption, but that was a futile gesture. And then Behemoth's head fell aside, dark and bulky and hollow, the open neck of it showing where the inner layers had come apart. A dozen ore more of the outermost layers still clung together, looking like a disembodied head, with only a deep divot in the center showing the center layers that were still attached to the monsters.
The news camera in New Delhi could no longer make out what was happening to Behemoth, though the light was dimming as Eidolon began absorbing the nuclear flash along with the blastwave and the nuclear heat. The massive black body fell to the ground now, the wounds at the shoulders and neck showing the empty space inside where Eidolon had extracted the core of Behemoth from its visible body. Green flashes were going off inside the white light that surrounded the monster, and they all sat on the edge of their seats watching the second Endbringer being laid low. The bell above the door chimed as someone walked in, and the green flashes inside the white light began to join together into something spidery and electric.
"You know there's a fair amount of signal delay between New Delhi and here?" said the man who had just walked in as he plopped down at an empty seat between Lacy and Uber. "Be cool guys, I'm just one of the gang, all right?" They all stared at him with open mouths, too stunned to speak or shout. Fortunately the barstaff was too engrossed to notice this exchange.
Eidolon turned and stared at the television. "Okay, so I shut off the telekinesis and switched to a new power here, one that let me remove his invulnerability to his own energy. I was absorbing, and siphoning, all the energy that he could produce, and then I turned his Manton overrides around on him, so that he could actually be damaged by his own powers. And that started breaking down his inner layers, right, all the way down to the actual core, the bit that actually goes nuclear. So when it went off like Leviathan's, I just absorbed that blast like the rest and, ah there you go," he said, gesturing as the Eidolon on screen hung in the air, with nothing in front of him but fine ashes sifting down to the ground, the last traces of Behemoth nothing but the discarded flesh. And then the cloaked figure vanished without a trace himself, teleported away. The man at their table turned back around, grinning. "Pretty cool, huh?"
"Holy shit," the bartender said, staring.
"Holy shit," Leet echoed.
Pariah took a sip of her drink. "People are going to ask why you didn't do that years ago," she said.
"Because shut up, that's why," Eidolon snorted at his own joke. "But seriously, I'm going to tell them it's because nobody before Tattletale was able to figure out how to kill an Endbringer. We always wasted time trying to beat them up like they were a monster, and not a nuclear power source hiding inside a monster. We wasted time trying to make them bleed, instead of doing damage that mattered."
"Good plan," Kurt said, clearly awestruck and glowing with hero-worship for the weedy potbellied man. "You've thought about this?"
Eidolon shrugged. "Half of all I think about it, is fighting Endbringers. All right, you guys sit tight I'm going to get a drink." He stood up and went to interrupt Duffy's rapt stare at the television to get himself a draft beer. He paid with a fifty and told the bartender to keep the change.
"Holy shit Eidolon's drinking with us!" Barry hissed under his breath.
Danny nudged the man with his knuckles, a gesture of a punch with no force at all. "Don't blow this for him, be cool and just hang out with him, all right? He's earned the right to be a normal guy for a night."
"He's earned whatever he wants," Uber chuckled. "If he wants a quiet night with beer and us assholes, I say let him have it."
Eidolon sat back down with a mug of amber and a frothy top. "I hate parades," he said, taking a sip. "Keys to the city, champagne galas. Where I come from, we celebrate with a beer." Without his mask muffling his voice, his accent was very small-town Southern, diluted from years living in New York with his team.
"Okay, but you gotta spill how you did that," Leet urged him, almost trembling.
Eidolon grinned as he set his glass down. "You saw it, I drained his energy off and then used it against him. I don't know how long I'm going to be able to keep this charge, but right now I can switch powers in just a couple seconds, and it's awesome. I wasn't even this strong when I first started as a hero, so it's exactly what I needed. I'm hoping that this jumpstarted my powers to a new level, but I could deal with the disappointment if I'm back to normal by tomorrow morning."
"He could deal with the disappointment," Uber laughed, nudging Eidolon with his elbow. "Get a load of this guy!"
Barry scrunched his forehead. "Is there some way you could store the energy for when you need it? Like a battery or something?"
"Hmm," Eidolon considered it. "I suppose it's worth a shot... okay, I'm working on that now, and I guess in the next few days we'll know if it's working or not. Okay, so what's up with him?" he said, nodding towards Oni Lee.
"I'm just quiet," Oni Lee said.
Danny clapped a hand on Oni Lee's shoulder. "He's had a tough year. Brainwashed, made to work for villains, recovered, brainwashed again, infected with fourteen psychotic villain brains, brainwashed again, recovering slowly again, with a bunch of new powers that he never asked for. And, he's even mixed up in my business, and you know how weird and frustrating that can get."
"I'd be the quiet type too," Eidolon said. "I respect it. The more I talk the more I make an ass of myself, I should spend more time quiet. So Danny, when are you gonna take me up on my invitation to hit up New York? We still have tons of rats we'd like to get rid of, if you recall."
"Oi youse guys," the bartender Duffy said. "Wrap it up and pay yer tabs, I'm closing early tonight on account of Eidolon killin' that Endbringer. I gotta celebrate too, ya know."
