Heieienej

by Kahlil Johnson

Aka lei

4. Xjjeiid

"Alright. Stage one is starting in one minute. We have the Nine on the first floor. All members appear to be present, sir, including Shatterbird," a mercenary's voice said over the radio, reporting the situation, "It appears they have a pair of new capes with them or at least Bonesaw-controlled capes of some kind."

"What do they look like?" Longinus inquired over radio, putting a finger on the side of his helmet.

"Couldn't get a good look, sir," the same mercenary replied, with a sound of a gunshot in the background, followed by a blade being drawn with a hiss and someone screaming. "One of them shoots green lasers that make you really sick when they hit. The other one seems useless for this encounter, since they're holding him back - Hatchet Face?"

"It likely is," Coil answered. "Status on the Siberian and Crawler?"

"As planned, we're dodging them both. Crawler is in the main hall, and can't get through the smaller passages. Siberian is trickier, sir, she–" the voice cut out for a moment. There was a very distant rumble somewhere up, like an explosion, and some concrete flaked off of the ceiling above Longinus, "–is breaking through walls, and, sir, it appears the Siberian is resistant to the stasis mines. They can keep her in place for short periods of time, but she forces her way out moments later."

"Hm. Stop deplyoing them," Coil answered, after a second of consideration, "Save them for Crawler and the rest. And… team bravo?"

"Sir?" another voice answered, this one breathing heavily, with gunshots ringing very loudly in the background.

Coil waited for a tense moment, maybe eight seconds of total silence, excepting the subtle vibrations from floors above them where the fighting was taking place. "Retreat to choke-point C, set up the forcefield barricade to split them up. You have your chance in thirty seconds, then stage one is a go for everyone."

A series of responses, deafening almost.

Grue looked up as Bitch's third dog finished growing. The one she was riding - and whom she commented was distinctly uncomfortable to ride - was apparently called 'Bastard,' which Regent explained was a name he got when he nipped Bitch in the finger. He was also a wolf pup, and also a gift from the goddamn Siberian, so that was something. When Longinus stretched his imagination, he could see Bitch as a member of the Nine. Bonesaw probably wouldn't like her because of the swear word in her name, but he could picture a pack of hounds tearing apart crowds of people, and it was terrifying.

"Want armor for the dogs?" Longinus asked, waving at Bitch.

"Yes," Bitch answered, looking at him. Her face was as gruff and feral as usual, but there was a sense of longing in it. A desire for his offer. A genuine desire to protect her dogs from any sort of injury that's avoidable.

Longinus out-stretched his hands and released golden streaks. They enveloped Bastard, going around his legs and torso, condensing and solidifying into a thick battledress. He added some sharp blades in key places, where they wouldn't risk hurting Bastard himself as he moved while adding a ferocious element to the armor itself. He topped it all off with a helmet that had a rhinoceros-like protrusion at the front, as much for stabbing as it was for smashing.

"And the others?" Bitch asked, beginning to smile - the smile was clearly unnatural to her, a form of gratitude which she struggled to cope with.

"Will do," Longinus said, turning to the other dogs, doing the same thing for them. He made sure to add bladed, stabbing, and blunt weapons at the end of the tails, as there was no reason to hold back against the Nine. To replenish his energy stores, he applied great telekinetic force om himself and began to regenerate his stores at accelerated speed.

"Sir, Mannequin is running counter-interference on point C. Siberian rejoined the rest of the team. She is shielding them from our strikes as needed. It seems we're going to lose point C at this rate," one of the mercenaries said. His voice was tense, but he was breathing calmly, speaking in short, concise sentences. Over the radio, gunshots rang.

Coil's voice, as he answered, had a very exact tint to it, that was hard to accurately grasp - he wasn't pleased per se, but he was not displeased. Not something in the middle, but rather, something that combined both emotions. "As expected of him. Stage one is a go, move out. Focus on Crawler and Mannequin, unless Siberian decides to pursue."

With that, Bitch's dogs, Trainwreck, Gargoyle, Avalanche, Purity, Stormtiger, Fog, Haunt, Burnout, Genesis' body which was a large dinosaur mutant with rending claws and the lower body of a snake, and the Combat Thinker whose name was apparently Crackpop walked into the heavy-duty cargo lift. The doors closed, and they went up, while everyone else proceeded down the hallways - Longinus couldn't help but notice Trickster was wheeling around a girl in a wheelchair, who appeared to be sleeping, or at least unconscious. It definitely wasn't Dinah Alcott, though. The girl in the wheelchair was too old, she was the age of the rest of the Travelers.

Longinus sighed and followed everyone else. In the meantime, he sent four of his charges in the passenger vision power, with the intent of being able to use parahumans' powers through them. Like, say, releasing Grue's smoke from his body without any injunction from him.

Gabriel's power flashed red, and the charges failed to apply.

Not possible? Alright. Longinus then opted to try something else. Draining energy from other powers? A nebulous concept; he didn't bother fleshing out what he meant by that, and didn't consider if it mattered in the heat of the moment. His power flashed red, and the charges failed to apply. This was followed by a quick, but extremely vivid and bright orange flash.

He nodded to himself, and opted to re-apply the charges, but with a specific function: communicate with other passengers to get useful information on how to defeat their hosts. His mindscape flashed red, and purple. Denial and helplessness.

Fuck! Just communication with other passengers, then.

His charges shook, beginning to flash green, then red, then green, then red. The flashes weren't bright, vivid, or dangerous, - it was attempting something, but failing constantly. In several moments, there was a single, sledgehammer-sized flash of red across Longinus' awareness, and the charges broke away and drifted away from one another. The External Trump power was left as it had been.

Passenger, help me out here, if you can hear me. You promised.

No response, or at least no obvious one.

Longinus kept observing what was happening before in his awareness, hoping something would change. Nothing did. The power was back to its usual lazy state of weaving another charge, and doing nothing else.

Alright, good enough for now, he mused to himself, shrugging. He opened his eyes. He'd been only peripherally focused on the outside world, kind of sleepwalking alongside the group of capes. At some point, Tattletale joined up with them, and was glancing at Trickster smugly, while he was thinning his lips as much as possible, staring ahead of himself, and pushing the wheelchair-bound teenage girl onward. The group contained everyone except the people taking part in stage one, and Forest who was setting up his plants elsewhere.

Longinus walked closer to Tattletale, curiosity taking the best of him. "What did you find out?" he asked, whispering.

"Not here," she whispered back, almost wincing as she looked at the people around them.

"That bad?" Longinus whispered again, surprised.

"Not sure," she answered, with a note of finality. A 'stop talking.'

"Do you want armor?" Longinus said out loud, deciding to change the topic, to make it seem like they were talking about this all along.

"We're not fighting anyone yet," Venus pointed out from the sidelines.

"I won't have time to construct armor on you if I'm busy constructing walls and returning fire, so might as well do it now," Longinus explained, looking back at Venus with an annoyed grimace, luckily concealed by his helmet. The interruption wasn't apperciated, to be sure.

"Give everyone a vest, maybe?" Grue suggested, raising a hand neutrally. He looked around. Half of the capes reacted with neutrality, while the other half gave non-committal but vaguely positive responses. Grue glanced back at Longinus. "Conserve energy for now. Unless you're feeling confident about your limit."

"Vest will do," Longinus nodded. Then, he raised a fist, emitting a wave of golden energy from his body, which stuck itself to everyone around him, condensing into a flexible vest of interlinked micro-rings, each one the size of an undilated eye pupil. Resistant, light and protective enough to stop a stab wound in its tracks, convert the force into blunt injury. It'd do for now. After this, he increased the force of the telekinesis on himself to regenerate quicker. His energy stores were between seventy-five and eighty percent, after outfitting everyone including Bitch's dogs with armor - they'd definitely grown, ever since his upgrade, but the regrowth rate was mostly the same.

"Report, all teams," Coil's voice blared over the radio.

"Sir. Crawler is in an all-out brawl with Bitch's dogs, aided by Avalanche and Haunt - whose current form appears to be a statue of ice that makes touched objects… do something. When Crawler tried to attack him, he slumped over like he was about to collapse from exhaustion, but the tactic seems to be affecting him less and less as expected of Crawler."

Coil seemed focused on something else, though. "The Siberian?"

"We're doing our best, sir, but she's with the rest of the group. Also, we have confirmed the second Bonesaw creation is Hatchet Face."

"All teams, except the ones fighting Crawler - retreat to chokepoints E-1, E-2, and E-3, then deploy stasis mines and grenades liberally, but not more than a third of your total. I want hallways D-2, D-4, and D-7 to be blown up to cut off escape points, and… blow up C-4 through C-8 too, to cut off Mannequin any flanking space. Are the vents sealed?"

"Sir, yes, sir, - to all of that, sir. Blowing the designated areas in three… two… one... fire in the hole," Everyone in the hallway looked up. The earth trembled at a high frequency for less than a second. Little droplets of gray particles detached from the ceiling and walls., falling around them

Coil waited for a moment, then ordered, "I want a report in… thirty seconds. And see if you can distract the Siberian."

"Sir, yes, sir." And with that, the conversation was over.

Regent whistled out, with a degree of spice. "Things are getting hot up there."

In less than a minute, the remaining capes reached the estimated path for the Nine once they managed to fight their way down to the second floor. Everything during stage one was just a delaying tactic, a battle of attrition and distraction, an attempt to detach the Nine's members from one another, spread the key members off - the second one would be more like a game of cat and mouse. Leading the Nine into the correct pathways, so they end up walking straight into stage three, which was best described as pure armageddon.

Trickster handed off the wheelchair-bound girl off to a mercenary in armor, who nodded, saying something along the lines of, 'we'll take good care of her,' before wheeling the girl off towards the deeper parts of the base, where it was safe. Large blast doors sealed themselves shut behind him.

Longinus looked at Trickster briefly, then shook his head to himself. Trickster was already lighting up his - presumably - final cigarette for the night. Longinus couldn't help but think, Why bring a… well, don't wanna be rude, but why bring a sleeping cripple to a literal fucking hellscape?

Trickster turned around to face Ballistic and Sundancer, as he took in the first drag of his cigarette. At roughly the same time, Grue and Tattletale turned to the remaining Undersiders. "Any bright ideas before the carnage starts?"

"Out of smart juice," Longinus jokingly stated.

"Coil's up to something else," Tattletale noted blankly, leaning against the wall. She looked around the junction to make sure none of the other teams could overhear their conversation.

Longinus perked up. "Not surprising. You think he plans to slaughter everyone here by using the Nine?" he asked quietly.

"Nah," she said, shaking her head. "If he wanted to do that, there'd be plenty of ways to do it more easily. Like rigging the entire base blow up. Even if we didn't die instantly, we'd be trapped by tons of rubble and have at best minutes or hours before we ran out of oxygen."

"What a nice image," Regent jabbed with an unamused frown. "But if he doesn't want to play a double-crosser, then what does he play? I doubt it's Doubt."

Tattletale prevented herself from snorting, but her chin twitched a little, next to the neck. She rubbed her nose, not daring to call his joke clever. "If I had to guess? The way he seemed pleased with himself - and mind you, this is a big shot in the dark. If there's any time my power was to give me something wrong, I'd say this whole thing is the final step in his plans. He saw an opportunity in the Nine's attack, somehow, and decided to seize it. I'm not sure how this gives him a one-up over the PRT, though. If I had to guess, again, I'd say it's whatever's or whoever's in the vault."

Longinus put a hand on the protuberance in his helmet's, where the sharp chin-equivalent was located. It made sense, but… how could he take advantage of the Nine? "The powerful being in Coil's vault–"

"Is one of the Travelers," she interrupted. "They had more members before they arrived in Boston, and then less when they arrived in Brockton Bay. There's a guy called Oliver, who's with them - I've met him once, but none of you did. His power is weird, but it fits into this whole puzzle somehow."

"Weird in what way?" Grue's head tilted at an angle.

"It's… too weak, too plain," she said, moving her hand up in irritation. "He's a sort of Stranger slash Changer. He looks at a face, and if it's attractive, his own shifts slightly to take on those qualities, until he becomes his own image of a dream boy. That's just too weak, too… bland. It stands out because of how stupidly plain it is, and my power tells me it's related to this Travelers stuff, somehow."

Longinus looked down at the ground for a moment. It took him what was maybe five seconds, but what felt like half a minute of very concentrated thought processes leading into one another, as he made a realization. "It's not the whole power," he stated, a metaphorical lightbulb turning on above his head.

The Undersiders looked at him. Especially Tattletale, who blinked. "Not… the whole power?..." Grue asked, trailing off.

"...I can't explain," Longinus swallowed for a brief moment, realizing that he couldn't really talk about Cauldron here.

Tattletale's eyebrows shot up, and she glanced at the Travelers out of the corner of her eyes. She stared forward for exactly the span of time it took her to take three breaths, and then a deeper breath. With that, she turned her head only slightly in the Travelers' direction, whispering, "Longinus, talk to me about something. Anything. Just talk. Make it look like a normal conversation."

Longinus was surprised, as was the rest of the Undersiders - Regent was amused as all hell, though.

"Regent, be yourself," Longinus whispered to the boy, whose amusement only rose to the point where he was forced to stifle a snort. Then, Longinus raised his voice. "Dear god, can you be serious for once? We're about to fight the Nine, for god's sake!" he exclaimed, turning in Regent's direction with an annoyed tone. A game of pretense.

Regent took up a look twice as amused as before, folding his arms, and concealing the amusement beneath a thin veneer of sarcastic dryness. To the man's credit, he played along rather splendidly - affecting the exact tone he'd have used if this were a normal conversation between them. "Come on, dude, it was funny."

That's where Tattletale stepped in. Her voice was hinged, louder, but the sentence she spoke wouldn't have been out of place in a normal conversation - just loud enough the Travelers could hear her, and anyone else would barely bat an eye. "Joking about jacking off into a cauldron? Seriously?"

She smirked, as she caught Trickster glancing in their direction, before glancing away and continuing a conversation with Ballistic. Longinus stopped himself from laughing out loud. He resorted to snorting. Fuck! She's fucking smart! Holy shit, she's smart!

Longinus broke the semi-circle the Undersiders made, taking a step in Tattletale's direction and leaning in closer to whisper to her ear. The team sans Tattletale looked briefly confused, as he murmured near her head, "That's why their powers are dim, appearing weaker. They're vial capes."

"Hey, I'm confused," Imp whispered to them, mostly to Grue, who nodded.

"Either of you care to explain what the fuck this whole charade was?" Grue queried, hissing through his whispers.

"If we survive, I will explain everything, but you need to promise me you will not utter a word with anybody. Am I clear?" Longinus said dryly, with a tinge of non-compromise; a tone that didn't leave anything up for discussion. He had to admit that he'd learned that one lesson from Piggot's caustic attitude.

Grue looked deeply unsatisfied with that. He folded his arms, and drew out the word, "Suuure."

Moments later, Coil's voice came over the radio. "Get ready for stage two in one minute, thirty seconds. All forces are retreating downstairs in half a minute."

"Positions!" Venus said to everyone, before using her Mover power and running across one of the hallways, and turning the corner into another.

The Undersiders moved, and Grue began to exercise his power around himself. A sort of wispy outline of his own body bulbed out on top of himself - it made him look very large, and probably aided in dodging attacks, without necessarily obscuring vision. Tattletale took out her laser pistol from its pouch and then strutted down the hall. Regent decided to go with her, into better cover, next to the mercenary gunmen down the corridor. After a brief hesitation, so did Grue. Longinus' Stranger detection power told him Imp was already getting prepared to shoot some dicks.

Longinus decided to build cover. Additional cover and armor, where it couldn't be brought in otherwise. He took a knee, putting a hand on the ground. He breathed in, then out. Golden waves rippled out of his hand, as pillars of golden crystals steadily grew out of the ground, creating additional screens. Semi-transparent, so the shooters could look through.

He couldn't keep the thoughts of their discovery about the Travelers out of his head. It was distracting, especially during a fight. He recalled so many things, feeling like his life might end tonight.

Cauldron. The vial capes - Coil was one too, wasn't he? It explained the dim, mottled aura. If both he and the Travelers were vial capes, then who was the person that was stuck in the vault? 'Not the whole power' was an assumption he had made, but now it made sense. 'Balance' was something that goes into Cauldron vials, and vials were often times mixed together. Risks of deviation. He remembered that one charge he plucked too early from its womb - how it grew out of control.

The person in the vault didn't drink the whole vial. They only have the power, sheer unrestricted, raw power; while Oliver has the balancing stuff.

Was the person in the vault affected by that? Was the person some kind of extreme deviation? Something that put Case 53s to shame? How did Coil tie into this?

And soon after that, all of the other dots clicked together, like pieces of a puzzle. Coil's plan: it wasn't what it seemed. Too flawless.

Before anything else could happen, the stairwell doors broke open, as Trainwreck rammed through, soon followed by the rest of the capes involved in the first stage. Grue peeked out of his hiding spot and began to cover their retreat with his smoke. The last people to run out was a group of mercenaries, and one of Bitch's dogs, which was on fire, but mostly unbothered by that fact.

Only breaths later, shards of jagged glass rained down the hall. Two or three of them caught Longinus across the armor panels, but they mostly went across blindly, with the intent to just strike at whatever. He ducked lower, behind cover, as he observed the events unfold. He'd have loved to go and help, but he needed to conserve his energy for defense, and if he went in to do melee, he was as good as dead.

Mercenaries, Tattletale, and other gunners began to fire, while Grue rearranged his power to be more advantageous to the defenders. He was funneling the Nine into one of the side hallways. Longinus caught a flash of Jack Slash's form, laughing as he held the Siberian's hand and kept flicking his knife in large sweeps, to punish anyone who peeked out of cover at the wrong moment.

One of the mercenaries screamed in rage that moment, and turned on his allies with his rifle raised up to eye-level. "Motherfuckers! Traito–" Bang! Another mercenary unceremonially blew his brains out, splattering cold brain matter on the floor, and they went back to shooting. Another went on to radio his discovery.

"Sir, we need counter-Masters to deal with Cherish."

"Regent! Mind-fuck with your sister!" Longinus shouted, as he started firing explosive lasers through the doors, which were meant to blow on contact or after one second of flight. A lot of time, given how fast lasers travel.

"That's gonna be pretty difficult, hombre, I don't have full control over some of these guys," Regent exclaimed, over radio.

"I'm working on it," Venus spoke, running around the back lines and spraying her gas. Where the fuck was Coil's third anti-Master cape?

Longinus looked around the battlefield, but didn't see them. Haunt was crouching behind a piece of golden cover, utterly calm. Not in the artificial way that someone calmed themselves when in a stressful situation, or in Regent's definition of being constantly amused by everything like he was high. Haunt was just calm. Like this was ordinary. Like he was picking up groceries, or sorting through his mail.

In moments, a flash of something went across Longinus' awareness, and he felt cold dread running down his spine. After that, Haunt's body ripped itself into shreds leaving behind a corpse that turned into dust. Something else emerged, a monstrous, grotesque abomination that looked like the combination of a crying woman with a blood grasshopper - large, red grasshopper eyes that cried blood, a pair of segmented stalks atop an insectoid face that was covered in a human face on top of it, as if the grasshopper exploded from within, the human skin only remaining as an ablative layer.

The creature - Haunt, Longinus had to remind himself - leaped onto the ceiling and began to crawl across like something from an actual horror movie. Motherfucker was really abiding to his name. When Haunt reached a good spot, his mouth opened into eight slabs - fucking Pennywise - revealing jagged rows of teeth, and a sonic scream emerged, deafening Longinus even without him being directly subjected to it. Concrete cracked in the wake of the scream, and glass seemed to break - including Shatterbird's, which became dust.

In that moment, the Siberian leaped out from the darkness, beginning to run down the hallway. One of the mercenaries immediately reacted, as if waiting for this, and threw a projectile that was halfway between a grenade and a capacitor. As it exploded, it created a - for a lack of a better term - cage of electromagnetic lightning around the Siberian, suspending her in midair. Even then, she swam forward, very slowly.

Longinus activated his power-sight, looking at the Siberian. Give me a weak spot, something, for fuck's sake!

Nothing. She was just as gray as the background, and she was in range of the power vision. Longinus' heart dropped.

That meant she was either not a parahuman, or not actually there. The former was literally impossible. The latter was more likely.

In that moment, another freakish creature joined the fight. A mutated, extra bulky rhinoceros rushed down the hall from the defenders' side and slammed itself into the electromagnetic cage, dying in the process, but generating an explosion of lightning that managed to force the Siberian to fly back towards the Nine. She was undamaged, either way, but trailed black dust in her wake as she moved back.

The Siberian leaped again, towards a mercenary. Just when she prepared to cut him down, he was replaced by a woolen dummy with an effect that Longinus associated with Trickster's power.

Crawler emerged from behind the Nine in that moment, with a rumbling laugh that shook everyone's bones with its vibrations. Longinus saw one of Sundancer's bigger suns - the size of a boulder - flying towards him, stopping midway, and then going down another hallway, which drew the monster's attention as he moved after it, probably to eat it like a moth or something.

Coil's voice spoke over the radio, "Begin a steady retreat towards chokepoint C. Blow up tunnels D-12, D-13, D-16 and D-18."

The mercenaries began to step back, as Longinus moved the cover alongside with them. He felt feedback from shards of glass, fire, and knife slashes splattering against the panes. Longinus disintegrated every un-manned cover piece, reabsorbing them into himself for ammo. After that, he opened rapid, unrelenting fire on the Siberian: lasers of pure kinetic energy, to push her back.

She walked through his lasers, unbothered, not even noticing his action.

"Stasis on the Siberian!" Ballistic declared. One of the mercenaries eagerly complied, chucking a grenade at the striped woman.

The Siberian's face contorted in utter, feral rage, and she tried to leap out of the way of the projectile but failed to do so in time. The cage of lightning glowed bright around her. The Siberian thrashed against it once, twice, then cut through something vital with her fingers, because the cage failed at that moment, freeing her to walk forward again. Out inside Grue's darkness, Longinus could just barely make out the silhouette of another one of the Nine's members that he didn't recognize; a candidate, maybe, judging from the red-green costume.

Everyone retreated, as the key hallways exploded, leading to a forking path, with the defenders splitting up to protect both, until Coil ordered them to explode C-1, which caused the one to the left to collapse with a bang. Another group of mercenaries, Longinus alongside them, as well as Tattletale, Grue, and Uber, went down another path, around, to lure the Nine. They went through a medical room on their way through, only to stop at the sight within.

Bonesaw had her hands behind her back. She was leaning forward, as she looked at the disemboweled corpses in front of her. She was almost appraising, like an art critic making a scheduled visit to a gallery.

She wheeled around, smiling. "Oh, hey! It's you guys."

Longinus didn't hesitate for a single moment: he raised his hand to shoot her with a piercing laser, only to find himself tasting something salty-sweet, with a faint aftertaste of iron. He looked at his hand, only to find it was missing, a steady waterfall of blood falling out. He felt the burn of his healing power, but it'd take some time for it to regrow. Longinus clutched his wrist. The pain bordered on debilitating, but he ignored it, in favor of staring at Bonesaw like a deer in the headlights.

His fury didn't stop, until it did, and he felt oddly paralyzed by a sudden grip of fear. Cherish's voice spoke, affecting a French accent, "I've got him. Rather unruly for a nice boy."

Jack's voice spoke back to her, "Very unruly."

Last edited: Dec 7, 2019

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Dec 6, 2019

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Birdsie

Birdsie

Sharp Talons Cleave The Worthy

Dec 7, 2019

#4,144

He looked to the right, and found the mercenaries looking around in confusion and fear, too much to move. They'd all backed away into each other, then stopped moving suddenly, with jerky flinching running through them. A sudden jolt of fear, to keep them in their place. Grue and Tattletale seemed to be affected by Cherish's power, too, paralyzed by fear.

There was a swarm of mechanical spiders on the ceiling above them, and the floor next to the entrance, skittering, their metallic bodies chittering as they writhed over each other. Longinus couldn't count them, because of that, but he'd wagered there was anywhere from thirty to sixty at a bare look.

Jack emerged from behind one of the cut privacy curtains to their left, holding a cleaver in his hand before he sheathed it in favor of a classic kitchen knife. He twirled it, wordlessly, as he watched the group and whistled appreciatively.

"Quite the welcoming party, I have to say. Not you in particular, but rather, this whole arrangement." He made a one-handed gesture at the entire base, with a sense of gravitas. "I rather enjoy the labyrinthine architecture of the location. I'd have found an underground base garish, but now that I'm down here? It has an appeal to it, I admit."

Longinus turned on his power vision to look at Jack Slash. He wanted to see if he had any weak spots. The world went gray, and he found the auras of parahumans in the near area.

Cherish's was Shadow, the same as Regent's, only this particular 'strain' seemed to focus on short-term raw emotional manipulation, rather than controlling the nervous system with fine precision, requiring learning. Cherish could hear them from across the length of a city, like music, and she could 'pluck' the strings in people in a slightly shorter range. It explained how she found the candidates.

Bonesaw's was the dark red Chirurgeon, which was a Tinker-oriented shard that seemed to store data on biology, and biology-related accessories. Longinus looked deeper and noticed the subtle underlying mechanisms of her work. Her Tinker power used meat as material, and like any Tinker who had an aptitude for telling their materials apart, and judging their quality, she could judge his quality. She saw the musculature, adrenaline in his veins. She could very roughly judge how many times his heart would beat before it expired.

Jack… was out of reach, a meter or two. If Longinus focused, he could just barely see the faint wisps of some red aura, but nothing more. Longinus felt a spark of annoyance in his chest, and terminated the power-sight.

Jack stepped further out of reach, wheeling around as he perused the room with an appraising eye. "You know. A supervillain's base isn't my style, at least not a base like this, but in another life? Yes. It'd need some tasteful decoration, but I could work with it." Jack nodded to himself, turning around and smiling at them.

Longinus' fists clenched.

"What's wrong?" Jack asked, looking at them. "Cat got your tongue? We've just barely begun the evening. Talk to me!" he pleaded with a smile, almost teasingly, and frowned when no one didn't.

Jack looked at Cherish, then at the mercenaries, and gave her a shallow nod. Cherish seemed to focus on the mercs, and they looked at one another, raising their guns and starting to shout, cuss, and swear, calling one another greedy fucks. It took two seconds for the gunshots to ring out, making the Undersiders flinch. The gunshots lasted for less than five seconds, accompanied by the sounds of corpses falling to the ground.

A moment later, the last mercenary dropped onto his knees, sobbing, calling himself pathetic as he reached for his sidearm in fear and agony, pulling off his helmet with the other hand. A bang later, and Longinus' helmet was freckled in the man's blood. He smelled both it and gunpowder.

Longinus' own hand injury was pulsing with the remnants of pain, but the open wound was already halfway closed into a stump, the meat darkening with faint embers of flame, After handing out those healing phoenixes, his power was running on its last fumes, but it could still help out. Surprisingly, losing his foot earlier - what felt like years, but was actually days ago - kind of did prepare him for this shock, and so did the awareness he could make a construct prosthetic for himself.

Jack extended both hands to either side. "Will you talk to me now?"

"Screw you," Grue said defiantly, clearly not knowing what else to say.

Jack took that fact in stride and nodded. He twirled the knife with expert grace, making it dance between his fingers, as he took three steps in Grue's direction, causing him to begin wincing in fright unrelated to Cherish's power. Jack smiled ruefully, then took two steps back as he turned to Longinus. WIthout any fanfare, sounding more curious than anything, he asked, "Will you attempt to shoot me, if I tell Cherish to release her hold on you?"

"No," Longinus responded, without stuttering. He was trying to keep the debilitating fear and overwhelming rage out of his voice, but it still showed, with his teeth clenched. He was honest, though: He was going to blast Cherish' brains out, instead.

"Good," Jack answered with a note of satisfaction, beginning to smile. "Because you would die faster than you could try to kill Bonesaw, or Cherish, or me. Even if you make the sacrifice play - well - the Siberian is still out there, mowing down your friends, and I don't think you're a match for her."

Nevermind.

Bonesaw nodded happily to Jack's statement, then looked at Longinus. She held her hands to her side, bouncing on the balls of her feet, as she said, "And you broke the rules, when you sniped Shatterbird with that weird laser cannon! So we punished you as promised! I was really surprised, you know?"

"...What?" Longinus turned to Bonesaw, legitimately confused.

"It wasn't him," Jack answered with a sudden realization sparking in his eyes. He twirled his knife in disappointment, before clutching the handle very hard. Without revealing anything in his voice, he said, "That's… hm. That's very unfortunate, because we already carried out the punishment. I feel very stupid all of a sudden."

"...What did you do?" Longinus asked, his remaining hand's fingers twitching. A cold spike of subtle fear seeped in his mind, distinct from the bland, artificial dread that Cherish's power kept pouring into his head.

"Let me show you," Bonesaw said invitingly, skipping up closer and dragging Longinus by his forearm - the one where his hand was missing. Jack stepped out of the way, as she led Longinus down the medical hall, and pointed at a figure standing and staring blankly at them from the middle.

"Unhand me," Longinus pulled his stump away snappily. He stared at the figure, eyes widening by the second.

The figure moaned at them, and Longinus felt himself going into shock at the sound. A beret, green scarf, colored in dried blood, some of it black, some of it red. She wore military clothes, covered in blood from top to bottom, with patches of a tight-fitting white uniform underneath. Half of her hair was blonde, and the other half was black, made into blood-greased pigtails, one eye red, the other a dark brown. Her face was twisted, the mouth cut open into a Cheshire grin to reveal twin sets of long, thin, needly teeth that neatly fit into rows. There was an energetic, livid cloud of green, with small red-black sparks within.

"Ta-dah! Meet War Crime!" Bonesaw declared, spinning her hands in effect as she stepped into the frame of Longinus' vision. The flesh tinker looked at War Crime with a loving gaze, putting her hands together near her head. "Isn't she beautiful? Laserdream's power gives Miss Militia's guns just the right oomph! We have rifles that shoot radiation, laser-napalm flamethrowers, uuh - probably some other things too, but I just barely started figuring out how her new power works. It was quite hard to make! What do you think? Centurion?" Bonesaw turned to look at him, developing a tiny frown at being ignored.

His legs shook. He couldn't do anything for them anymore; too much risk that his power just wouldn't blend with them the right way. There was an option: to put them out of their misery. He felt pushback from Cherish's power. An unexplainable sense of peace, with the idea that this was fine. His lips moved, curved, and twitched, as he tried to get out a scream, but found himself not wanting to. Longinus shook his head in cold disappointment.

He hated it. He hated it so much. He was supposed to be heartbroken, but he couldn't be. He heard Cherish giggle, and couldn't even be mad at her, and some part of him, deep down - suppressed - hated her and wanted to cry.

"Tell Cherish to let my head go," Longinus demanded, neither snappy nor clenching his fists.

"I'm not convinced by your previous statement. You might do something stupid if she does," Jack said. When Longinus looked back, he saw that Jack had both of his hands around the necks of Tattletale and Grue respectively, forcing them to look at the grotesque imagery.

"So what now?" Tattletale asked, her fists unclenched in parallel to Longinus' own.

"Now?" Jack asked, looking at her almost like a father regarding a daughter that was asking him about something. He nodded to himself with pursed lips. "I'll kill you three, I suppose, and then go and rejoin the fun. Which one of you goes first, or, hm… should we make it a contest? What do you think?"

He glanced at Bonesaw and Cherish. The former clapped her hands excitedly, while the latter gave him a look of indifference. Bonesaw began to say, "Can I get Centurion as a pet? Please? Pretty please?"

Jack thought about it for the entirety of two seconds, before shaking his head and nodding up at Longinus' burning stump near the wrist. "No, I don't think that's plausible. Do you see his hand? I'm not sure how that fire will mesh together with your control rig, dear Bonesaw. I'll find you a different pet."

"Then..." she glanced at him, excitement deflating, "His brain, at least?"

"If you can carry it, and keep it from healing. But only the brain. If we leave the body here, it'll make for a great surprise to the heroes, or whoever finds this place once we're over," Jack answered her, with an expanding smile. Deep down, Longinus felt a gut-wrenching terror. Cherish released her control on him, almost entirely, allowing him to feel the full range of his emotions while making him neutral to the Nine's members just enough that he didn't want to attack them.

"Man, you're such a pain in the ass to control," Cherish said, scratching the back of her head. "Seriously."

Tattletale looked at Cherish, focusing on her, narrowing her sight. It was the expression she had when she'd found a string, one that she could pull on to find a web of her usual Thinker bullshit. Maybe it'd yield something. They had to buy time.

Bonesaw reached for one of her spider bots, which leaped onto her and became something like a backpack, with its surgery-outfitted legs serving as robot arms with handy tools. She hummed, as she walked up to Longinus and unceremoniously turned on the circular saw. Longinus got an idea to buy time. He shouted out, "There's a prophecy that might interest you!"

"A prophecy?" Cherish asked, tilting her head in surprise. "What?"

"A Thinker prediction. A very, very reliable Thinker prediction," he answered, focusing his stupor-inducing power entirely on Cherish, so she couldn't call out his bluff for long enough.

"Now you've made me curious," Jack said, glancing at Cherish at roughly the same time that Longinus did. He realized that Longinus was using a power, but didn't care. Cherish herself only seemed to unfocus slightly but was still self-conscious, and clearly annoyed. "Go ahead. If it's interesting and viable, I'll have Bonesaw give you a quick death."

If there was ever a time to be Tattletale, this was that moment. To channel his inner negotiator, and interest Jack just enough to let them go.

"You'll have to let us go," Longinus answered, folding his arms and shaking his head. He took on the presence of a mogul, a trader. "It's really juicy."

"Or I can do this," Jack said, gripping Tattletale by the shoulder and pointing the knife in his grasp at the left side of her stomach. She stiffened in fear, clenching her hands in alarm. "One flick of the wrist and the contents of her stomach will decorate this floor, Centurion. Are you prepared for that?"

Longinus' body became rock-solid in fear. He wasn't. The heart beating in his chest hard enough that it might have exploded at any moment in time definitely didn't help. He was quick on his feet, as he thought. "If the Slaughterhouse Nine travel to Ellisburg, the world ends within two years."

"Interesting," Jack said. He lowered his knife slightly, musing, twirling it just in front of Tattletale's belly in circles; like some kind of twisted dance. He stopped for a moment, over her navel, and poked it once, twice, causing her to stiffen even more. After keeping it there for several seconds, he looked up from his thought. "Hm. Bonesaw, what do you think?"

The little girl shrugged. "I always wanted to meet Mr. Nilbog, but I can't really tell how much we'll fit together without looking at his work," she answered, tapping a finger against her chin.

Jack nodded with a degree of satisfaction, and promptly said, "Make sure Centurion's death is quick. Maybe shock the brain into death, first. I am a man of my word, after all."

Tattletale spoke out in that moment. "Wait! I have something else."

"Now, that just sounds like you're trying to distract me and waste my time," Jack sighed out, shaking his head. Pressing the knife twice as hard into her stomach for a moment, he let go of her neck, then of her stomach with the knife. "Well? Out with it." He gave her back a little push, making her stumble forward half a step.

Tattletale turned, with a desperate smile. "Cherish. She's planning to betray you, and she was, from the start. She wanted to take over the Nine for herself."

Jack's face went cold, and he looked at Cherish, clearly upset. He walked away from Tattletale, beginning to pace around in the middle of the room, nearly frantic. He started nodding along to Tattletale's words, then stopped moving very suddenly.

He turned, swung, and Tattletale's chest opened up a long, red gash, as she was thrown to her back. "Stupid," Jack drawled, with a degree of disappointment in his voice, and Tattletale seemed to cringe at the word. "I knew that. I was eager to see how she'd get around our immunity to her powers. You spoiled the fun."

Cherish was looking cold, and Longinus felt her control slipping, but his own stupor-inducing power was making her just cold enough to control her own emotions. Longinus released his power's hold, like someone letting go of an extended rubber band and seeing the dominos of havoc fall.

Cherish's power dropped entirely, as she turned, and said, "I- she's lying!"

"She is not," Jack replied, glancing at her with a hint of derision. "Did you really think I'm that stupid?" Without looking, he swung his knife at Tattletale again, prompting a sudden intake of air and then a stifled scream.

Longinus bolted to her, kneeling next to the girl, manifesting a blue flame to heal her wounds. Jack was content to watch at first, then frowned when he saw the wounds beginning to close. "I don't think that will be necessary, Centurion. Scars are necessary to remember lessons, don't you think?"

Longinus was scared. Scared, anxious at the idea he was going to die here, and he felt completely helpless. He desperately wished for Imp to appear out of nowhere, blasting their heads with void rounds, but to no avail. His Stranger-detection power didn't say anything. We're all going to die.

When he didn't reply, Jack clicked his mouth in annoyance and withdrew a straight razor from his belt, into his off-hand. He raised it in Tattletale's direction, then dragged it across her throat, causing her to sputter out blood. Longinus flinched, not noticing Jack's movement until the red gash appeared on her neck.

"No!" Longinus screamed, holding her throat so that the blood would stop coming out. Blue flames closed the gash from underneath his hands, flickering between his fingers visibly.

"Aww, look at him," Bonesaw cooed, putting her hands together. "He's just like I used to be. Trying to save his loved ones, all silly like that."

"Indeed." The barest expression approaching a smile appeared on Jack's face.

Grue was standing in his spot, utterly frozen in an unnatural manner - still affected by Cherish, it seemed. Longinus stared at him for a long moment, angry.

Jack's voice broke him out of his thoughts, very sudden, as the man knelt next to him, over Tattletale's bleeding, battered, but still living body. She struggled to speak, even as Jack looked at her.

And then he spoke. It was cold. It lacked any of the good-natured humor there used to be, when he walked with them down the streets of Brockton Bay. "Tell me. Why did you lie to me about the prophecy? Did you think I'd jump at it, like some oaf? I really want to know." Jack's hand fell on Longinus' left shoulder, prompting a spark of cold fear to run through his body, making him shiver.

"It's not a lie," Longinus defended himself, arms and hands shaking over Tattletale's bleeding throat. It was a half-truth. Half of his statement was true.

"You're keeping something from me," Jack said. He gestured at Tattletale's face with his razor. "Tell me the truth, and I'll let you heal her. Don't, and I might do something drastic."

"I don't know the truth." He wasn't lying: he was only speculating since he didn't know anything for certain anymore.

Jack twirled the razor in his hand. He threw it up, then caught it by the handle, then tossed it up again, catching it. A moment of silent contemplation. Longinus observed the movement with animalistic fascination, fearing that the next time he caught it might be the time he decided to swing it.

Instead, Jack caught it one last time, holding it in place for a moment, thinking.

"Alright then." He stood up, patting Longinus on the shoulder twice, like someone trying to cheer up their buddy. Jack continued to speak, out of Longinus' sight, his shadow looming over both him and Tattletale like some kind of dark curse, "I'll leave you three alive, for now. But only in exchange for an honest answer to an honest question. If you lie to me again, I will kill you right here and ask someone else until they tell the truth."

Longinus felt himself slumping in relief, then tensing up again at the threat. "What question?" he asked, voice shaking.

Jack's mouth contorted into a smile. Longinus couldn't tell from seeing it, but from the slight, quiet wet sound of his lips curving. "Who's the buried girl? The one in that vault these documents of yours mention?" Tattletale shook her head dimly, a tear appearing in her left eye.

Longinus looked down at Tattletale, whispering. "I c-can't let you die." He looked up at Jack. He didn't hesitate, as he spoke, "A massively powerful parahuman, whose destructive power is on par with an Endbringers. She was the target of Leviathan, and is Crawler's candidate."

"Sounds very interesting," Jack said, perking up. He sounded conflicted, as he asked, "In that case, would you mind one last question? I know I said that was the last one, but humor me."

"I will answer if you leave us alive, and alone," Longinus requested.

"Of course." Jack nodded, stepping forward. The shadow loomed even taller over them. "I'm a man of my word. It makes things more interesting"

"Ask," Longinus demanded with a dry tone, his whole body shaking.

"Would you like me to free the buried girl? The one on par with the Endbringers?" Jack asked. There was an underlayer to the voice. Something philosophical, or rhetorical. A deeper question that was hidden inside two obvious ones.

Longinus was conflicted. He now realized the full spectrum of Coil's plan. Pretend the Nine released the girl, by having them actually break her out. "Are you implying that she's an anti-Enbringer weapon?"

Jack frowned, and once again, Longinus could only tell by sound rather than sight. "I'm not trying to imply anything. I asked you a simple question."

Whatever I answer, Coil will release her either way.

"Whatever my answer is, the result won't–"

Grue screamed, as he fell to the ground, his kneecap sporting a very deep, shallow cut. Jack flicked his razor back up, and another cut developed next to that one, smaller, causing Grue to breathe in with a hiss, trying desperately not to move any more than necessary. Jack spoke, "Yes or no. It's not that hard."

"No!" Longinus screamed, his whole body trembling in terror.

Jack nodded, saying, "Very good. I'm proud of you, Centurion." He walked around Tattletale and Grue's body, until he was directly in front of Gabriel, with no way to avoid looking at his legs. Then he crouched, trying to establish eye contact. "Look me in the eyes. I want to see a brave face, looking up at me, when you do."

In the moment he looked up, the world turned grey. It was easier to comply with Jack's demands, that way.

There was a red aura around Jack's body. It was glitching, distorted, for a lack of a better description. It was plump, too - seasoned with data, heavy with information gathered over hundreds of conflicts. His passenger feasted ever since he Triggered. It was like a ripe fruit, or a mature growth. It was also releasing waves of energy from itself, and with each wave, Longinus felt his own ability to see the passenger diminish. Broadcast, specializes in the transfer of energy in order to communicate, mostly kinetic, radiation, and electricity. Serves as the go-to communication tool between shards.

"I'm proud of you," Jack said again. Bonesaw and Cherish now stood to his sides, with War Crime next to the former. He inclined his head with a degree of respect. "Do you know why?"

"I don't," Longinus asked, staring him in the eyes. His eyes were pale blue, nearly grey. And they looked so calm, with a slight crinkle around them - he was old, now, when compared to how young he'd been when his career apparently started. A parahuman who lived out nearly their entire lifespan, since their years as a child, fighting and killing.

"Because, finally, Centurion – at last – you found your identity, and I can see it's not with us, as sad as that is," Jack said. His smile never faltered as he explained this.

"What is my identity, then?" Longinus asked, hands trembling, as his flames kept Tattletale's wound stable.

"You're not a hero," Jack said, shaking his head gravely, "But that's obvious. Cherish may have given you the push, but the desire to kill was you. You didn't stop your inhibitions, when they were brought to the fore. You're a villain at heart - doing the wrong things for the right reasons. I'm not one to judge morality, obviously, but I think that's what you are. A free man, doing what he believes is right. Am I correct?"

Longinus held Jack's gaze for a long, hard moment. "Yes," he responded. "Can I ask you a courtesy? A parting gift?"

Jack stood up, smiling as he did. "Go on ahead."

He looked to Bonesaw's left, traced the lines of War Crime, the combination of a New Wave costume and blood-coated military fatigues. The needle teeth grinning at him, and the girlish pigtails that didn't fit. "Put War Crime out of her misery," Longinus requested, tears going down his cheeks, beneath his helmet. Cold tears, weeping for something that won't come back.

Bonesaw pouted. "Do I have to?"

Jack shook his head. "It's your choice, but Centurion… no, Centurion's gone. He was gone the moment he killed three men in blind rage. What do you call yourself, now?" He glanced at the cape in front of him. Gabriel felt a sense of signifiance, to answering Jack, like there was no coming back from it.

"Longinus."

"Yes." Jack nodded, and there was a degree of appreciation to the movement. Appreciation and pride in the choice. Jack looked at Bonesaw, nudging her towards sympathy or pity with his expression and voice. "Longinus will be sad. Miss Militia and Laserdream were both very close to him, after all. It's your choice, little Bonesaw."

"Awh, damn..." Bonesaw clicked her tongue.

"I'll give you the autograph you wanted," Longinus pleaded, coming out shaky. He gave her a sparkle-eyed look and a smile, trying to put on a happy, brave face to sway her.

She smiled, nodding. "That's a fair trade!" She reached into her pocket and drew a long needle of metal, then walked up to Grue and sunk it into his open wound, causing him to hiss in pain. Bonesaw withdrew the needle, which was now slick with blood. She handed it over to Longinus, and looked around for paper with a sullen expression.

"Your..." Cherish stopped, clearly about to say 'breasts,' or something to that effect, before she said, "apron?" She gulped when Jack looked at her with a knowing smile.

Bonesaw nodded in excitement, laughing coyly. "That's a good idea," she said, holding out the rim of her dress closer to Longinus, the apron on top of it.

Longinus extended his hand to take the needle, beginning to move, when Bonesaw interrupted the process and crashed his thoughts, saying, "From Centurion to Bonesaw! That should do it, and you should have enough ink for that much. Draw a little heart at the end, if you can. Hearts are cute."

"A-alright..." Longinus complied. His hand and fingers moved, sketching the autograph in Grue's blood. It almost felt like drawing the sentence took an eternity. Down at the end, he used a heart instead of a dot for the exclamation mark, and sagged with relief when it came out alright.

Heh… I still got it...

"Nice!" Bonesaw said, then took out a small device. She handed it over to Longinus, pointing at a small button to the side, "This one kills her. They're both more or less cognizant, by the way. War Crime has one-third Miss Militia's brain, one-third Laserdream's, and one-third shared. They should be able to roughly recognize any parting words you have. You're welcome!"

"N-now leave," Longinus said, rotating the remote in his hands, looking at it.

Bonesaw didn't need any prompting, already beginning to hum and whistle, as her spiders began to skitter out of the room, Cherish following after her. Jack stayed behind, stopping near the doorframe. He turned around, and smiled at them, one last time. It wasn't the same amused smile he often held, but a devilish expression. His voice was coming back to its usual cheeriness, but with a dark undertone to it. "By the way. Do you know why I asked you if you wanted me to release the girl in the vault?"

"I don't," Longinus answered, holding back a sob.

"Now that you told me you don't want me to, I will do it," Jack said, confirming Longinus' suspicions. "At least if possible. But first, I will kill Coil, as we agreed previously. One person for one person. It was nice meeting you, Longinus, but if anything you've said was even remotely true, I believe I have a world-ending to work towards. Rather ambitious, but I think I like the idea. Jack Slash - me - fated to end the world. It's poetic, in a way, no? I told you how my parents lied to me, about how the world ended. It's only right that I bring that about. I'll start with this buried girl. Goodbye, Longinus." With that, Jack walked out, closing the door on his way out.

Tattletale hitched a breath almost instantly, beginning to speak through her regenerating throat, "F-fuck. W-why, tell… him?"

"I c-couldn't let yo-you die," Longinus said, releasing a burst of flames towards Grue as well. Grue released a hiss of breath he'd been holding in his lungs for what must have been the entire encounter.

"Fuck," he said, almost cried, even. The tough-looking Grue, on the border of breaking.

Longinus stayed silent, looking down at the ground for a brief moment. Then, his eyes traveled up to the abomination that was his mother, and his girlfriend. He stared at War Crime, tears streaming down his eyes.

Tattletale decided to close her eyes, in that moment, still breathing. "I'm… going to rest. Not… die."

Longinus took off his helmet so that War Crime could see his face, one last time. The right eye shifted a little at the sight, but the creature made no indication otherwise. "I'm so sorry. I'm so, so sorry. I disappointed you both. Please forgive me," he cried out, bursting out in tears, snot coming out of his nose as he wept uncontrollably, his finger wavering over the kill button.

Grue spoke, in that moment, still in lots of pain, but pushing through it with a thin voice, "Do it. They're in pain, right now." He nodded quickly, snappily, his jaw shut in pain. "It's… the right thing to do. Fuck, I'm going to throw up. I'm sorry." Grue turned himself over to the other side, away from sight, and belched undignifiedly.

Longinus looked at War Crime. At Crystal and at Hannah. "I love you," he croaked, pressing the button.

The creature slumped to the ground like a ragdoll whose strings had been cut, without emitting a single sound, aside from the thump from hitting the ground. After two seconds of pure silence, Gabriel burst out in tears, screaming, throwing the remote against the wall hard enough that it gibbed into bits of plastic.

I'm a monster.

81

Birdsie

Dec 7, 2019

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Threadmarks Dira Necessitas 11.6

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Birdsie

Birdsie

Sharp Talons Cleave The Worthy

Dec 7, 2019

#4,181

Grue stood up, slow and careful not to slip on any of the blood and vomit. He stared down at the corpse of War Crime, shaking his head and shuddering, with a quiet, "Fuck… fuck me," before breathing in and suppressing his notions of fear. His jaw set itself into a firm clench, and he looked at Gabriel and Tattletale. "You both alright?"

Gabriel looked up at Grue, tears still streaming down his cheeks. He couldn't wipe them aside, because of the helmet. "I'm… okay. My hand has mostly regrown, and… she'll be okay," he muttered quietly, fighting back the last remaining tears. He could feel that innate desire to breathe in, but if he did, he'd release more tears from his eyes, possibly start whimpering and weeping again. A natural reaction that he was familiar with.

So many powers, so much 'control' over himself, and yet, so little.

Grue hobbled up to them, and extended a hand to either one. Tattletale uncoiled her body a little, and breathed in, opening her eyes and reaching out. They clasped forearm-to-forearm, and he lifted her up.

Although the cuts on her body were healed up, there was still some remaining dry blood - a majority of it had been burned away, though, so it just left the sight of naked skin, in an uneven 'x' on her torso covered in pale red blurs. It didn't uncover any of her 'fairer sex bodyparts,' but the two cuts crossed each other just above the navel, going under the breasts, and making the rest of the costume dribble off slightly. Tattletale looked down at herself and sighed, a little raspy, saying, "I'm gonna need new clothes after this. Just… fuck today. Today in particular."

"Are we going after them?" Grue asked, looking back at where Jack left only a minute ago. It felt like it was years since then, as stupid as that sounded.

Longinus struggled to pick himself up because of the sheer mental exhaustion. It seeped into his bones, into his muscles, making them weaker in the same way you couldn't quite hold anything properly while laughing. The exhaustion must have been mental, because he'd barely strained himself today, but he just wanted to lie down and never get up again.

"No," he declared, averting his gaze from the spot where War Crime's body was.

"No?" Grue asked, moderate anxiety slipping into his tone, before he fixed it, "If he lets out… you know who, then... "

"The vault girl would've been released either way, Jack or not," Longinus said gravely, sighing. "His intervention will just… make it look like Coil didn't do anything in particular."

Tattletale was staring at the ground, as her frown deepened. "Coil planned this," she said. Her lips narrowed into a thin line. She strode forward and struck a metal IV stand pole, making it collapse to the ground. "Not all of the particulars, but the broad strokes. Fuck - I feel so dumb. I should have seen this coming." She gripped her head, breathing in.

"Jack promised he'd kill Coil for me, back when I was with them. He always keeps his word," Longinus uttered, staring down at the ground. He hoped, deep down, that the Nine would succeed in that particular endeavor. Maybe the psychopaths could ironically do some good for the world, for once?

Grue used the radio, "Anyone there? Status report."

"Heeey, we have a problem," Regent said, with a wince audible in his voice, "Crawler and Siberian kind of drilled through the floor and ignored the entirety of stage three. Also, they killed Forest and some others. Was this supposed to happen?"

"Of course not," Longinus spoke, infusing sarcasm into his tone.

Tattletale reached for her earbud, speaking into it, "Ch- actually, no, fuck that. Don't chase them. Coil, are you there?"

No response.

"Talk to me, boss," she added, demandingly, "I know you can hear this."

"Fuck," she said, releasing the radio and turning around with an upset expression, her teeth grit.

Longinus turned to Tattletale. "Should I tell everyone our conclusion?" he asked, not speaking into the radio.

She ignored him, in favor of using the earbud again. "Trickster? You there?"

"All of the mercenaries are dead," he said, sounding moderately chilled. Like he'd stepped out of the emotional equivalent of a freezer. "Bonesaw's spiders converted them into - I am pretty sure - zombies, with guns. We've locked ourselves in the storage container room at H-10, and Ballistic and Sundancer managed to get a few of them."

"Are the Nine anywhere near you?" Longinus asked, waiting for a response.

"Doesn't matter if they are," Tattletale interrupted Longinus before Trickster could answer, with a mild annoyance in her tone, "Trickster, who's in the vault? This is a do-or-die question. Tell me or we're all fucked."

"What? No!" Trickster yelled.

"Goddamn it," Ballistic's harsh voice came over the radio. "You're going to go out on them?"

"Trickster, she'll be released tonight! Answer the question!" Longinus exclaimed over radio, hurry and anxiety singing in his tone.

"Noelle," he answered, not providing any clarification for several, tense moments. Tattletale's pupils dilated in anger, and she opened her mouth to speak when Trickster said, "Noelle is in the vault. We… I need to get to her. I need to help her."

"I can help too," Longinus declared.

"Like fuck you can," Trickster barked, his voice full to the brim with what sounded like months of repressed anger and bitterness.

"Trickster, what's Noelle's power? Talk to me? Stop reacting to Longinus' empty words, yeah? Just talk to me, alright? Come on," Tattletale said, raising her finger in Longinus' direction. He felt briefly annoyed at her dismissal, but decided to let her have the crack at it - she was the one with the shard named 'negotiator.'

"Fuck you. Are you trying some kind of psychology game with me? Fuck you!" Trickster yelled the second insult, with a boiled rage. After that, his radio cut out, and Tattletale groaned out in anger. Longinus stared at Tattletale in mild annoyance for a moment, sighing and folding his arms.

"Fuck," he simply said.

"Word of advice, if I may," Trainwreck said, "I think it would be wise to allow Tattletale to negotiate on her own, the next time. The offer of help appeared to have upset Trickster."

Tattletale ignored Trainwreck this time, a heated look on her face, as she looked at Longinus. "What do you know? About Trickster, the Travelers? Spill all of it, fast. Only the important parts."

"They're all vial capes. Noelle drank a vial, but only half of-"

"No shit, Sherlock," Tattletale interrupted, "I meant whatever fucking conversation you had with them, that you haven't told me about. Because if I don't know the full details, my power doesn't work. I need context, remember? A and B gives C. I have A, so give me the goddamn B, Longinus."

"My Thinker power told me that if Noelle's existence goes out, the Travelers will be instantly killed on sight," Longinus said, paraphrasing Oracle's past words as best as he could.

"Right. Okay, or so they think. Give me a moment, I want to try something," she said, and raised her right hand to her earbud. She motioned for them to follow her; Longinus and Grue fell into step, as they walked out of the medical room, leaving behind War Crime and the rest of the gutted base staff alone. Tattletale spoke over the radio, "Okay, Ballistic, Sundancer. You there? Maybe Genesis?"

"Genesis is busy making a new body, and she's not even with us in the room," Ballistic answered, sounding strained. A clang of metal rang in the background. "What do you want?"

"Where's Trickster?" she asked.

There was the impression of Ballistic bitterly shaking his head from the other side of the connection. "Gone. He teleported somewhere, swapped himself for a zombie outside the door after telling me to get ready to kill it, and said he'll be back. Fucker could have taken us too - fuck, this sucks."

"We're on our way," Tattletale said, and her voice sounded demanding as she continued, "Talk to me, until then. I'll ask some questions about Noelle, and you're going to answer them unless you want Jack Slash to get cute with her."

"Trickster and Noelle were probably lovers," Longinus made the assumption out loud. "Or siblings. Or really, really close friends."

Tattletale sighed as if to say, 'I figured that out a week ago,' and continued to speak over the radio, "Okay, Ballistic. Let's start easy. What's Noelle's power?"

"I- she... "

"Drank half of a magical elixir, yeah. We know," Tattletale pressed, "And the spell did what, exactly?"

"It changed her. I'm… I don't think I should tell you anything."

"Don't," Trickster suddenly snapped over the radio. "Goddamn it, Ballistic. Don't tell them shit."

"They'll get to her, Trickster," Sundancer protested.

Longinus began, "We alre–"

Grue thumped Longinus in the shoulder, as if to quietly reprimand. He whispered, "Dude, shut the fuck up. She's got this."

Longinus nodded, lowering his hand from the button of his radio.

"As cute as it is to watch you have a spat-" Tattletale started, as the three of them turned a corner. Down at the end of the corridor, there was a mercenary in armor, lurching forward and holding his rifle with only one hand. His grip swayed to lift it, and Tattletale raised her laser pistol in alarm.

A pair of shots rang through the hall, a laser scorching the zombie in the torso and sending it reeling to the floor, while a bullet nicked the floor in front of Tattletale and Longinus' feet, causing them both to flinch. She continued her speech from earlier, "-I don't really have the time for your bullshit. Just tell me what Noelle's power is, or I'll dial the PRT. Coil already doesn't care, because he knows he has what he wanted. What I want is to minimize damage, and maybe prevent some goddamn Birdcage sentences when this shit gets out." Just to be safe, Tattletale finished the zombie off with a second shot to the head when they got closer.

"It will not. I won't allow that," Trickster argued, fighting to the very end.

"Sweet," she said. A third laser shot hit the zombie between the eyes, charred and smoking brain fluids leaking out and filling the air with a very foul smell of innards. Grue looked green around the gills for a moment, and Tattletale nearly threw up, as the three stepped around and crossed the hallway and turned the next corner.

There, in front of a pair of large, bolted warehouse gates in a sort of vestibule connected to the large room where stage three was supposed to take place, a group of ten to fifteen zombies was ramming itself against the gates, trying to get through. They kept moaning, punching, and one fired his rifle by muscle reflex.

Longinus thrust both of his hands forward, launching forth a sharp, long blade of kinetic energy shaded gold. The zombies at the front received most of the force - one was bisected at the upper torso, and another decapitated where its armor was thinnest, while several others were thrown down and caused a domino effect where the rest of the lumbering horde stumbled or fell, beginning to crawl.

One of the zombies, clearly retaining most of its brain functionality, raised its rifle parallel to the ground and aimed at them. It moaned a sound that almost approached someone saying, "firing," as he began to press the trigger.

Before the zombie could open fire, Longinus shot a laser bolt through its eyes, killing it instantly. The zombie slumped in death, but even as its gormless face stared at the floor through the helmet, it somehow managed to moan out in lackluster self-awareness. The sound was eerily close to, "I'm hit," like it was remembering its life.

"Fucking Bonesaw invented a goddamn zombie plague," Grue said with the slightest hint of fear and disgust, hesitant to step forward. "Should I cover up my nose? Does this spread? Like AIDS?" The question was made in genuine worry, and he looked at Tattletale for an answer.

She shook her head, saying, "No. Jack wouldn't allow that. Plagues that go out of control and kill everyone in the city before you can torture them personally? Too boring." She pointed at Longinus with her thumb over her back, then at the warehouse door with her index finger, as she started checking out the larger room to the side and using the radio again.

Longinus nodded and approached the door, blasting lasers through some of the still 'living' zombies' heads, to put them out of their misery. After that, he gripped the door with both hands and prepared to pull it out of its frame.

"Okay, Ballistic. Longinus is about to bust you all out. Don't fire," she said.

Longinus strained his muscles, exerting his full telekinetic might. Invisible tendrils connected his shoulders through his arms to the doors' structure, into the hinges, mechanisms and bolts keeping them in place. He focused on structural weaknesses, ripping them apart. In moments, a single bolt shot out of its place, then a second one, and then several others, like low-speed bullets, and then the concrete around the door cracked in a smooth rectangle, as Longinus began to use his feet and moved the door out, leaving an ideally smooth concrete frame.

He tossed it on the zombies' bodies, just in case, causing a disgusting, sickly wet sound of dead bodies' soft tissues being gibbed, and exploding into blood, as well as skulls and bones cracking and being crushed.

Sundancer, on the other side, took off her helmet and tossed it aside, turning around to give her face even a semblance of identity protection, as she began to throw up. Her three suns, roughly tire-sized floated around her, as she knelt over and expanded the pool of vomit. "F-fuck, fuck. Oh my god."

Longinus shuddered in disgust but didn't react physically in any other way. He stayed silent.

"Did you have to do that?" Ballistic asked, looking at the corpses in concealed terror.

"They're… zombies. They don't die unless you destroy the brain," Longinus answered in his own defense. He felt completely justified; his conception of zombies came from his old world's fiction. He didn't know if Bonesaw's zombies worked in the same way, but you can never be too sure.

"Jesus Christ," Sundancer said, beginning to shake her head in disillusion and dread, "Oh my fucking god. What is my life anymore? I just want to go home. Please, let it end, let it all end..." Ballistic approached her and laid down a hand on her shoulder.

"Do you guys feel like sharing info now?" Tattletale asked, stepping over the sickly pool of bodily fluids and blood. "Because if you don't, the situation is going to be even worse."

Longinus folded his arms, looking at them. "Now that radio isn't in the way… we know most of what there is to know about Cauldron."

"Okay, can you shut the fuck up? Both of you? I'll talk, and I fucking hope Noelle kills you all," Ballistic spat, standing up. There was a rod of metal in his shaking head - Longinus recalled that Ballistic's power allowed him to propel a car fast enough that Dauntless had basically no time to react, blurring the vehicle. And that was a car; if Ballistic's power could make smaller objects go faster, this would get pretty ugly.

"Okay," Tattletale said, raising her eyebrows and hands in her defense. "Go ahead then."

Longinus nodded and stayed silent, listening intently.

Ballistic's left foot was out of control, tapping up and down in stress, either post-combat jitters or just generally upset. He looked at them and started to speak, while Sundancer behind him was hyperventilating, "Noelle… fuck, we were… Nnnot going to explain the context or how we got the vials because fuck you, I'm not going to the Birdcage - her power is… she touches a person, and it disables their powers for as long as she's touching them."

"That's not too bad–" Grue began to speak.

"And then she makes a stronger, meaner copy of them. Including powers. Sometimes the powers are a bit different, I don't fucking know how it works," Ballistic answered, shaking his head as his jitters seemed to intensify. "She's got more than that. I… she, she's been growing, basically. She eats stuff, and it… becomes a part of her. She mutates permanently, becoming larger and larger. I hate to say it, but she looks… bad, right now."

Longinus felt his heart sink into his gut. Oh no. Oh no. Holy fucking shit, no, I need to stay away from that. After that, he raised his hand, hesitantly. "Can I ask a question?"

"What?" Ballistic nearly snapped but managed to control his stress and breathed in - his breath hitched for a moment, but he finished it in the end.

"Do you… happen to know if she was the reason Leviathan attacked Brockton Bay?" Longinus asked, lowering his hand slowly.

"Do I look like Albert fucking Einstein to you? I don't fucking know whatever the fuck Leviathan wanted, and I don't give a fuck," Ballistic snapped with anger. After a second, he breathed in, "Okay. I'm going to calm down, and you shut up and let me continue. You were so fucking eager to pressure me into this, so now at least let me finish."

Tattletale glanced at Longinus, then at Ballistic, her face kept expertly blank and betraying not a touch of emotion. Longinus glanced back at Tattletale for a moment, then turned back to Ballistic, to listen. I wonder what she's thinking, or rather, Thinking.

"She regenerates wounds really quickly," Ballistic continued, waving the rod in his hand off-handedly, "When she started… growing, we tried to cut off parts, I guess. Kind of stupid of us, in retrospect. It never worked. She grows back. Coil told us he'd try to cure her, but now that seems to have kind of fucking fallen through."

A moment later, Imp arrived, breathing in exhaustion. "Hey, guys. I was trying to find you. I have good news and bad news."

Longinus turned towards her and his eyebrows lifted up. It was an unexpected appearance, but a welcome one. He sighed in relief and turned the rest of his body in her direction, "Start with the bad."

"Okay." She nodded once, then looked at her pistol kind of lamely. "The void rounds don't work on the Siberian. She just… it's like, for one-tenth of a second that part of her body is cut away just like normal, then the second one-tenth all of it is missing, and then she's fine again. She flickers back."

Longinus looked down for a moment, recalling what his power vision showed him. "She's not actually there. It's like… a fucking hologram, or something."

"Genesis' power," Tattletale perked up, then glanced at Ballistic. "Right? She makes bodies. Designs them, then controls them remotely. She has to fall asleep for the process? Someone is controlling the Siberian. She's not a parahuman, she's a projection of some kind. Long-distance, probably."

Longinus nodded. "It makes too much sense," he said, putting a hand on the chin of his helmet. They knew a weak spot, but the problem was getting to that weak spot.

"Okay. Okay, range..." Tattletale thought, then pursed her lips, turning to Longinus. "Do you have a phone?"

"I have the burner phone you gave me last week."

"Okay. Do you remember the number of anyone in the PRT? Literally anyone. Best if it was the Director, though," she said.

Longinus looked down for a moment, closing his eyes to remember. "Piggot's, Calvert's, Aegis', Clock's and Weaver's."

"Okay, call Piggot and–"

"Heeey!" Regent yelled, running up to them. "Trainwreck and Gargoyle are fucking dead. We need to get out of here. Those crazy motherfuckers opened the goddamn vault and some kind of large meaty green motherfucker crawled out and started talking to Jack Slash. Also, Coil's dead, so that's something at least!" He raised his arms and smiled at them like a crazy person, shuddering through a breath involuntarily, from some kind of injury to his chest presumably.

Longinus' eyes widened in shock. His heart sank to his gut, then jumped out of his throat, then went back down. It did that at least four times. "W-what?"

"Coil's not dead," Tattletale said, shaking her head. "Injured, maybe. What you saw was probably a body double."

"A clone of Coil, made by Noelle, maybe?" Longinus suggested.

"Coil's nowhere near stupid enough to try something like that," she answered, shaking her head and rejecting the idea, looking at him with ridicule. "Cloning himself? He's afraid his cat might betray him. A Coil clone would probably be even worse for his paranoia. No. No clones of Coil here, unless the Nine were to feed him to Noelle."

Longinus nodded, feeling rightfully shut down. "Right."

"Anyway," Regent began, "Jack Slash is talking to her right now, and so's Trickster. The Midtowners escaped. I have no idea about Haunt, though. I saw him, but when I told him we gotta run, he just shrugged at me, then walked past me in the direction of the danger, instead of away from it. So fuck that guy."

Imp jumped up. "Oh, yeah, that reminds me about the good news. I managed to find Coil's mercenary commander while he was packing up - that guy on the radio, responding to his questions?" There were nods, some hesitant, from the people in the room. "Yeah, so I put a gun up to his dick and interrogated him. And apparently Dinah Alcott's back with her family, but they're also going to be threatened and mind-controlled for her to join the Wards. The fucker laughed at me as he said it."

"And then you shot him in the dick?" Regent asked.

"Yeah," she nodded as if it were a perfectly normal thing to answer to a perfectly normal question.

Longinus turned to look at Tattletale. He really feared to bring this up, because he was peripherally aware that Tattletale would dislike or dismiss the concept. He still proposed, "This may sound stupid, and impossible, but we need to somehow join the Wards, again in my case."

She looked at him, completely unimpressed. She nodded alongside the idea, as if considering it. "Right. The organization that Coil is going to be running when this all blows over. Alongside the rest of the city. Do you notice how Coil went silent on the radio a while ago?" The question carried weight in it.

"I did," Longinus said, spreading his arms helplessly.

"Yeah. Do you think he'll just talk to us, again? Oh, 'sorry I abandoned you, I had to pretend to be dead.'" She affected a smooth, but mocking tone, as she said it. Tattletale shook her head, snorting through her nose in clear, but grim amusement. "Nope. We're loose ends, now. At least the Undersiders are, because of you and me. The Travelers? Probably, given he'd betrayed them openly by letting Noelle get taken by the Nine. I don't know about the Midtowners - point is, we're getting replacements next Tuesday, whether or not we join the Wards."

"Loose ends," Grue repeated her words, shaking his head. He clutched his left temple and breathed out. "Goddamn it. Things were, I want to say, going pretty well until the Nine rolled into town. Shit."

Longinus stared down at the ground. "Then what do we do?" he asked, helplessly looking back up at them.

"We're in a pretty precarious spot," Tattletale said, then looked over at Ballistic and Sundancer, who were looking out of place, staring at the rest of the people assembled. "Okay. Let's preface it with this: Jack is either going to convince Noelle to join the Nine and use her to wreak havoc, or he's going to let her out on her merry way, after convincing her that he's not at fault for her losing her chance at a cure. Medium odds he fails either one, but overall, pretty decent odds he succeeds at least one. Also, very good odds Trickster is dead right now, unless either he or Noelle convinced Jack they're necessary to keep Noelle's loyalty. If he's alive, then we've got Trickster clones. If he's dead, then we've got Trickster zombie clones."

"Right." Grue nodded, folding his arms. It was easy to see he was trying to look tough in the face of fear: his fingers were twitching, his left knee shaking like it was about to give out at any moment. "Yeah. Where does that bring us?"

"Well. Obviously, we don't want another S-Class threat." Tattletale clapped her hands together, made a phoning gesture at Longinus, flicking her eyebrows up. "So we're calling up the professionals, yeah? Actually, wait, wait, wait!"

Longinus was already dialing Piggot's number when Tattletale told him to stop.

"Yeah?" he asked, his finger hovering over the 'call' button.

"Okay, hold on. Not too fast," she said, thinking. "Okay, so… Coil's number one goal is to take over the city. He doesn't have the Undersiders and Travelers anymore. He has mercenaries, has some independents that could form a group, and maybe the Midtowners. He also wants the PRT. The PRT is strained, lots of new recruits: he's going to try to make Piggot look incompetent. Spin whatever Noelle does as Piggot's fault. The last nail in a coffin that's been set up some time ago, not helped by stuff like the Youth Guard or the death of the current local Protectorate leader."

"Do I say all that, as you said it?" Longinus queried.

"Not finished," Tattletale said, raising a hand to stop him. She looked Longinus straight in the eyes, as she elucidated, "More immediate goals. Coil wants to leverage Noelle and the Nine, yeah? I say fuck him in the ass. His teams set up explosives all over this trailer park, so we're going to kablooie it and cleanse it in nuclear fire."

She wheeled around. "Regent, Imp. Any idea where the Pure are?"

Imp didn't answer, while Regent just shrugged, hands to the side. "How am I supposed to know? Last I saw Purity, she was blasting at Crawler and then got spat on by his acid bullshit. So she's probably dead. Othala? I saw Bitch picking her up at some point, but I'm not sure where she went off to now. That's all I have." He shrugged again.

"I saw Stormtiger's corpse, come to think of it," Imp said, looking up at them. She lacked her usual energy, but didn't sound outright depressed, or sad, or even particularly scared. "Or, well - either his corpse, or his really, really bloody, badly burned and cut up unconscious body. But you know, Occam's razor and all that."

Tattletale nodded, saying, "Okay. No one worthwhile to stop for. In that case, here's the plan: Longinus, you have a tinker power, yeah?"

"Yes."

"Okay. New plan: we give you one of Coil's explosives, and you find a way to tinker up a detonator," she said, looking at him with a very serious expression. "For all of the bombs. We get the fuck out, grab one bomb, and then you make the detonator, we toss it back in, and then pop goes the weasel. Thoughts?"

"Let's get out first," Sundancer proposed from the sidelines, holding onto her elbow with one hand, looking almost shy. At some point, either he suns expired, or she dispelled them, because they weren't there anymore. She was wearing her helmet again, though, but that didn't really help.

"Right. Genesis?" she asked, looking at Ballistic.

He shrugged. "Last I saw Genesis, Trickster was handing her off to some of the mercenaries."

Tattletale thought for a moment, then said, "I'll try to get Genesis. Grue, Ballistic, and..."

"Me!" Imp proclaimed.

"Imp," Tattletale finished with an acquiescing nod, "Come with me. Longinus, grab a bomb and fly outside as fast as you can and get to work. The rest? Get the hell out."

Nods and agreements, as everyone broke out into a run in the directions of their assignments.

Longinus stopped Tattletale for a moment. "For what it's worth, thank you for not killing me, back when you found me on the street," he said with a genuinely thankful tone. After that, he flew away to do what he was told to do.

She looked briefly weirded out, but he didn't hear her response, if any.

78

Birdsie

Dec 7, 2019

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Birdsie

Birdsie

Sharp Talons Cleave The Worthy

Dec 8, 2019

#4,190

Longinus grabbed one of the ceiling-mounted explosive charges as he zipped past, then sped off in the direction of the stairs. He flew carefully, making sure nobody saw him - he'd rather not be associated with the whole building going down - as he extended invisible telekinetic wings, flapping them at each turn up the stairs, adding speed and maneuverability to his movements. The velocity with which he ascended was insane, dizzying, but he managed to quickly find a rhythm for doing it that didn't result in him crashing into a wall.

Within moments, Longinus was on the first floor and began to lose track of his location. He'd gone in, earlier today, but the place looked different now. A lot of the walls and rooms were wrecked, concrete dust and rubble lying everywhere, torn cables sparking near the ceiling, and on top of that, the whole place was dark. Dead mercenaries, the combat thinker from earlier, spent ammunition, and what looked like the fried remains of a stasis mine were lying around in the first 'area' to begin with.

He bolted across an intersection of two hallways, and decided to go left, then forward, and eventually worked his way back the drainpipe he'd used to enter. Longinus ascended, looking down and scanning the area.

There were bodies of dead workers around. Nearly a quarter of them charred black, and the rest were some mixture of torn, stabbed, rent, slashed, and otherwise fucked up.

Longinus lowered his altitude until his feet hit the ground. Carrying the bomb in his left arm, he dashed behind a small, white modular building. Some kind of temporary cabin - probably a staff room for the construction workers on the surface. He angled himself behind it, so he could easily look around the corner at who left the base, without exposing himself unnecessarily to any cape-duplicating monsters or insane knife-wielding maniacs.

He took a tentative look at the bomb, and felt his tinker power give him a relative comprehension of the device. The feedback was weak, vague, but he could understand the ostensible elements.

Ninety-nine percent of the time, ripping a handful of wires out of a bomb would safely defuse it, either by removing the fuse from the detonator or the detonator from the explosive material. Most people who made bombs were unsophisticated, and most bombs were designed not to be found until after they had detonated. There wasn't much point in making them particularly hard to defuse or move, and there weren't many people with the technical skill to do it.

Here, this wasn't the case. The wiring was completely internal, every wire had the same color, and seemed to have very little to do with the actual detonation, but was connected to a receiver that could accept a specific frequency of electromagnetic waves to enable the detonator.

Longinus walked into the staff cabin, and rummaged through. He'd need materials: a transmitter or something alongside those lines, a device to program the transmission frequency, and obviously, electricity. Easily obtainable in this environment.

He grabbed a calculator from a nearby desk, then took out his burner phone. He'd need to create a new power to make this work - something that allowed his tinker power to inspire itself along the lines of 'sending data from point A to point B.' And he had only five charges. Do or die. Five tries, probably more if he managed to combine them somehow without fucking up.

Longinus didn't act immediately. He thought first, he considered avenues. How his power worked.

In that time, he noticed Regent, Sundancer, and a nightmarish cloaked wraith that must have been Haunt emerge from the drain pipe. Haunt's current form seemed to be almost intangible, weaving around and phasing through the ground and nearby walls, but also being repelled by them.

Longinus temporarily closed his eyes, entering his powerscape, to get a better look at the elements he was working with.

Five charges surrounded the fountain, which had only just created a lonely string of the sixth one. He briefly wondered if he could pull off a Noelle: throwing that unrestricted, incomplete charge into the Tinker power, to make it mutate and evolve without limit. There would be risks, lots of risks. Too many.

The risk wasn't worth it. Not for a thing like this. He opted to push the five charges into the Tinker power, with Jack Slash' shard in mind: Broadcast but applied to technology. Maybe, such a precise thought would get a narrower, better result at a lower cost. At least, he hoped.

His Comprehension Tinker power reacted and began to churn. The charges glowed with a flowing cohesion, as filaments extended between them and then towards the Comprehension Tinker. The power began to flash green and the sprockets began to turn once more, requiring a momentary break to produce the upgrade.

"Progress on that detonator?" Tattletale's voice broke him out of his reverie. Genesis' body was behind her, next to Ballistic, but she was unconscious again.

"Working on it," Longinus said, not opening his eyes.

"We don't have a lot of time," Ballistic said, miffed and tapping his foot against the ground audibly.

Regent spoke up, in that moment, "I saw two Tricksters on my way out. One of them was naked, the other had kevlar. I'm just saying."

His power finished the process. It was a dud. Instead of upgrading anything significant, he could now memorize two blueprints instead of one at a time.

With heartrending grief, he pushed Oracle Morpheus into Comprehension Tinker, much like a chef might use a knife to slide chopped onion into a pot of boiling water. Both powers began to interweave like two bacteria dancing and then ramming into one another in an act of mutual self-annihilation, yielding an inert mass of protoplasm that would soon be given a new form.

His mind was dead-set on shaping that new form in a way he wanted it to. Of course, he couldn't decide the exact outcome, but he could give it a nudge with instructions. Tinker Power with specialization in comprehension and information. Be it sharing, gathering or processing information. If the power came out right, it would make Longinus able to significantly upgrade Sebastian from a poor, dog-brained machine into a proper artificial intelligence – plus, he'd get to keep the maintenance aspect of his power.

The outcome was something else than expected. Whatever it was, Longinus could tell it was a proper tinker power, instead of that subpar thing he used to have.

Ideas filled his mind. A vast majority were devices, most of them handheld or wearable, which focused on either gathering information that allowed him to manipulate people, their thoughts, or their minds, or devices that allowed him to alter people, their thoughts, or their minds to facilitate information gathering. Most of these blueprints were exceedingly complicated, resource-costly, and time-consuming to build, including research to crystallize very rough concepts into workable devices. There were a few options on the periphery; droppings compared to the main bounty. Maybe a tenth of the ideas were weapons. A rough-cut concept for a pistol that could shoot someone to cause psychic baffling, essentially rendering them into thoughtless vegetables for a few seconds. An addition for that same pistol, that would render it capable of altering memories, and another that caused the damage to stack up and eventually become semi-permanent.

Irrelevant. It didn't help his situation.

Longinus thought, trying to come up for an application for his new Tinker power that could solve the detonator problem.

"He's just standing there, staring at the bomb," Sundancer pointed out. Her voice carried the same kind of concern that someone calling in a police regarding a potential serial killer at two AM had.

"I'm thinking," Longinus stated dryly, like Tattletale would when her power shenanigans were interrupted.

"Well, hurry up," Ballistic jabbed, folding his arms and sounding clearly annoyed. "We don't have infinite time."

"I'll call the PRT in the meantime, ask for a meeting," Tattletale said, and then turned to walk away.

Longinus kept thinking about his power, the depths of ideas. Data, or the human psyche. Two specialties, binary; the power could have them work alone, but it specialized in having them play off of each other. One to facilitate the other. He'd need a proof of concept to come up with something to transfer data between two non-human psyche elements. It'd be a deviation from the specialty, and, although his power wasn't bound to those two specialties, it would work very poorly outside of them.

An idea, not within the power, but in his own mind. Could he link his own mind to act as a detonator? To give the 'explode' command? Human psyche to data.

His tinker power reacted at the idea, and something began to assemble. Necessary materials, but the idea was incomplete. It required research, and he didn't have time for goddamn research!

At its current iteration, the idea was a plate inserted into the brain. A cyborg augmentation, really. It'd allow the user to connect with technology, with great difficulty. The current iteration of the device would be untested, made on the fly, without research. It wouldn't give any feedback, and his control would be as rough as a drunk person's - each stray thought would risk sending some kind of signal. Worse yet, it'd require surgery - the plate had to be put into someone's head. Or, failing that, someone's brain had to be taken from their skull and connected to wires and cables.

With an untested device, the odds of some kind of accident were over ninety-five percent.

Longinus slammed his fist into the table in front of him. There was a loud crackle, as his fist left a fractured dent in the plastic. "Fuck!" he shouted out in frustration. He tossed the explosive charge onto the table, helpless about the issue.

"Please, tell me that was the 'fuck' of orgasmic, sexual satisfaction at being the best guy in the world, and you just figured out a way to make that detonator," Imp pleaded.

"I'll take it down on my own," Longinus said, beginning to go out.

"No!" Grue said, stepping in front of him and shaking his head. He gestured to Regent and Sundancer. "You've heard them. Noelle made Trickster clones. She's probably doing it as we speak. The odds that Jack swayed her, and they're going to come up is too high. We're getting the hell away from here."

"Fuck!" Longinus shouted again, in even more frustration than before.

Grue and Regent looked between themselves, and then away, at Tattletale who was chatting on the phone. No longer distracted by conversation, the group of villains and independent cape mercenary currently in the form of a ringwraith listened to the call.

"–so you don't have the leverage, capacity, or, really anything with which to fulfill your promise," Tattletale nodded, smiling as she said it. "Coil's already doing work to depose you, but then, I suppose that shouldn't be surprising. All I'm asking, is you send Dauntless, Grumman, Thunderstrike - hell, send motherfucking Legend, and we're going to have a calm discussion regarding the Nine, whom we have trapped in an Endbringer shelter."

Longinus approached, listening intently, as he folded his arms. There was a lull, as Tattletale looked at her fingernails - not visible through her thick black gloves and nodded to whatever it was that Director Piggot was spouting on the other side. "Yuup, Fortress Constructions. That's right. Mhm. Yeah. Ask Chariot for directions, ciao." She clicked the phone off.

He looked at Tattletale. "So?" Longinus asked, eager to know how it went.

"Protectorate will be here in sssix to ten minutes," Tattletale wagered, "And they will probably want to detain us - you, in particular. My current plan is to dig our heels in, irritate them a little, and prod them to go down head-first into the lion's den over there. Otherwise, they won't believe us that there's a young, nascent proto-Endbringer being cooked down there with Jack Slash as the chef de cuisine, and the Slaughterhouse goddamn Nine as the kitchen assistants."

"Noelle cloning the Nine..." Longinus thought for a moment. "Slaughterhouse Nine? More like Slaughterhouse Too-Fucking-Many," he said, snorting at his own quip.

"God, I feel so bad about Noelle," Sundancer whispered to herself, looking down at the ground. "We… we should have helped her."

"Don't beat yourself up over it," Ballistic whispered back.

"You think someone as powerful as her can't handle the Nine?" Longinus asked, genuinely trying to reassure them, a calming coo in his tone.

"I'm pretty sure we should be more concerned about her joining them," Tattletale spoke, folding her arms. She nodded in the Travelers' direction. "Something they didn't tell any of us, but I figured out a while ago."

"She's Crawler's candidate, that much is obvious," Longinus stated.

"She's mentally unstable," Tattletale corrected, or added, depending on how you chose to look at things. "That's why she's in a thick vault, instead of a parahuman asylum. Too much risks she snaps for no reason and goes on a killing spree. Throwing that kind of person at Jack Slash is like throwing a human baby at a hyena. He's going to eat up a good person with issues and then crap out a psychopath who loves using her power to torture as many puppies and babies as possible."

"It's one of the numerous risks of the vials," Longinus pointed out. "Physical and mental deviations."

"I keep hearing about these 'vials,'" Regent said, slightly miffed, "But all I hear when you say that is, 'hurr-durr secrecy, hurr-durr can't-tell-you.'"

"Later," Longinus snapped back, annoyed. How can he not get that this is not the time?

"Why not now?" Regent asked, pushing back. He didn't look particularly annoyed, but definitely unamused, which might well have served the same role for his emotional spectrum.

"It will take at least an hour to tell you about only the tip of the iceberg," Longinus explained.

"Try," Grue suggested, folding his arms. Imp, in an amazing deed of unity, stood next to him and did the same. Haunt's ringwraith-cloaked body looked at Longinus without speaking, but the slight tilt of the head implied curiosity.

"Everyone present, except you four, already know. I'd rather not have Haunt know about this. Sorry, but not knowing you, I don't trust you in the slightest," Longinus added, looking at the ringwraith. The cloaked monster of darkness cocked its head almost parallel to the ground and shrugged, raising both its hands and shoulders at the same time. It let out a guttural sound that could have been interpreted as, 'What can you do, I guess?'

"Please, give us some privacy," Longinus pleaded, putting his hands together in a pleading manner.

The cloak of shadows seemed to lose reality and cohesion for a moment. The darkness broke, spilling outward like a fluid cloud, and behind it stood a man in a costume, dark, but human.

"Why?" he asked. There was no real emotion to the statement, just an inquiry for the sake of making one.

Longinus looked down for a brief moment, considering the question. He didn't really have any good answers. "Well, given the fact that you don't know anything about the subject, knowing would either mean dying, getting brainwashed or… I'unno, becoming one of their agents, if they allow such a thing."

"If acquiring knowledge of the subject you mention implies one of these three things, how did you find out? It seems you are none of these three," Haunt said. Again, no particular emotion. An absence of displeasure, a total lack of hostility. Maybe some tidbit of tonality that could be taken as being curious.

"By accident," Longinus admitted. "I… retrieved a briefcase from a gang-war, and inside were documents that explained everything, alongside some other stuff."

Haunt began to speak, and his tone finally gained some timbre. He listed, "Briefcase, vials, fourth Endbringer in a basement. I think I can piece together the topic. You can tell me, now." Tattletale shrugged from next to Longinus.

"So, who talks?" Tattletale asked. She turned to Longinus, with a curious look. "We have maybe five to eight minutes, until the 'coppers' get here."

"You start. You're more concise," Longinus offered, with a hand pointed in her direction as to say 'go ahead.'

She nodded, turning to the group with an ascertaining glance, and pursed her lips. "Okay. Yeah, what he said is basically it. There's a group called Cauldron, and they sell vials. You drink one? Suddenly, you fly, lift cars, and scream loud enough to break a skyscraper in half. You drink half of one, like a nincompoop?" She glanced at the Travelers as she said it, "And you become capable of spitting out mutated clones instead - welcome to the world, here's your complementary headache, and that's the city we're wrecking today!"

"We get it," Ballistic said, sinking down with anger and shame. He pursed his lips, nodding, as he grumbled, "Yeah, yeah. We fucked up. If it helps you any in throwing stones, we had no choice. It was basically drinking the vials or dying. We chose 'drink the vials,' and there weren't enough for all of us."

"Oh, they're also responsible for–"

"Wait, shut up, for a moment," Tattletale said, interrupting Longinus. She extended a finger in Ballistic's direction, beginning to inch in closer as her face twisted in curiosity. "What did you say?"

"There weren't enough vials," Ballistic repeated himself.

Tattletale turned to Longinus, stopped for a moment, did something in her head, judging from the way her eyes started darting around the place like she was loading software, then turned to Longinus again. "In your briefcase. How many were there? I'm running off of assumptions, here. Fumes, but I can piece something together, I think."

"Six," Longinus answered.

"In yours?" she asked, looking at Ballistic.

"Six," he said. "So?"

Tattletale frowned. "Genesis, Trickster, Ballistic, Sundancer, Oliver, and Noelle. That's six. Some of the puzzles are missing. Did you put the puzzles into the dick-tea, Longinus?" she asked, looking over at him in a mock questioning expression, before folding her arms with a 'harrumph' and looking at the Travelers. "Where did you put the dick-tea puzzle pieces, Ballistic? Did Trickster swap them out for your brain after he drank his vial? It'd seem to fit the MO of your team. No one with an actual brain would think to splice something that has the words 'Deviant case' and 'repossession' written on it."

Longinus looked at the Travelers as well, putting his hands behind his back. He was unaware that the pose made him look less like Doctor Fate and more like Darkseid. "Every vial has a balancing agent. That's why you need to drink it all, in one go. Oliver got the balancing agent, Noelle got… the raw, unrestricted power."

"I already said, I know we fucked up," Ballistic said, and looked at Sundancer. "Back me up here." She shook her head.

Tattletale's vulpine grin made an appearance on her face. "Oh, fuck. You guys are dirty. That's something. Wow, I'm almost feeling secondhand self-loathing. Hey, Longinus, where did Signal go?"

Longinus looked at Tattletale, somewhere between hurt and offended at the question. He took a step back, in confusion. "...Why?"

Tattletale sighed out in expaseration, rolling her eyes. "Just answer. I'm having a moment here."

"China," he said. "Accord is trying to pull her back from the Yangban."

"Exactomundo," Tattletale said, clapping her hands together and turning to the Travelers. "While he's at it, should we ask him to get their friend out as well? Because holy fuck - selling someone to the Yangban?" She clicked her tongue repeatedly, as if to replace the words, 'not nice.'

Sundancer spoke up, in that moment. Her body took on a defensive tone, like an animal pushed into a corner. "Cody… Perdition touched Noelle, and it spawned a bunch of clones. Accord wasn't happy that the clones interrupted his meeting with Trickster. Someone had to take the fall, and it wasn't going to be one of us."

Tattletale nodded with a slightly open mouth. Her face bore an expression that pretty much all but screamed, 'you fucked up on so many levels it's inconceivable to mortal minds,' then said, "Okay. That's nice, cute, and very disloyal of you, but there's no more time for any more epithets. Look alive, people. Protectorate in three… two..."

In that moment, the earth shook, as three figures landed down and encircled the area. Longinus spun around, scanning the new arrivals.

On one end, a woman in a purple-blue suit, with a black-visored helmet that covered her entire face. There was an ambient field of purple energy in an arm's reach around her, emitting sparks of blue lightning, and flashes of flame, but it dialed down until it was entirely gone. Thunderstrike.

On another side, a surprisingly short man in a dark costume, made from dark leathery cloth, with clear white outlines and highlights. It seemed almost laminated, reflecting light brightly. He wore a helmet resembling that of an air pilot, that covered most of his face, and had his fists balled up. Grumman.

On the last side, someone Longinus recognized. Dauntless, with his sparkling arclance and shield, his boots giving off yellow lightning that licked itself along the ground. His armor seemed to be more bloated, glowing slightly - upgraded with his power over time - but it was the same Dauntless otherwise.

The fourth figure landed last, more gracefully, and instead of outright smashing into the ground, he touched down with one foot and immediately transitioned to using the other one to step forward. White-blue costume, with a domino mask, and slicked hair. And also the guy who kicked Longinus' ass a while ago. Legend.

"Are we being detained?" Regent asked to break the tense silence.

"Not for now," Legend answered, looking at him, from where he'd been looking at Tattletale and Longinus primarily.

"Good to know," Longinus said accusingly. He folded his arms to appear more hostile and closed off. Legend noticed, his eyes tracing Longinus' outline for a moment.

"Warrant or GEE-TEE-EFF-OH," Regent said casually, in Legend's face, causing the hero to look at him once again. "No, seriously. We called you about a civil disturbance and you come down here spears and lasers blazing and making even more noise? It's midnight, dude. There's a curfew."

Legend raised a hand, as Regent was saying, 'dude,' and he responded, "I know. Okay, okay." He nodded, looking down and covering up a mixture of exasperation and helpless amusement.

"A proto-Endbringer is being cooked up and groomed by the Slaughterhouse Nine, down in Coil's base," Longinus explained, making a TL;DR of the situation.

"I find that hard to believe," Dauntless said, lowering his shield.

"Go down yourselves and have fun," Longinus pointed his arm at the drainpipe down the construction site.

"Somehow, I don't find that idea appealing," the new leader of the Protectorate ENE answered. "You'll forgive me if I don't."

"Enough," Legend said. Everyone turned to look at him, and he faced Tattletale. He moved up from the ground, flew and crossed the distance of twenty meters in an eyeblink, and touched down again a distance of two or three steps away from them. "You called us here, and I don't believe you'd do that unless this was–"

"A trap, or I was serious this is an S-Class situation." She nodded, placing one hand on her waist and raising another as she spoke, "And obviously it's not a trap because you could mop the floor with everyone here, even if I mind-controlled Dauntless, Grumman and Thunderstrike somehow."

He smiled, rather tersely, like he wanted to laugh. "I see what you did there. Conversations with you are like drinking alcohol, Tattletale."

"Intoxicating?" Regent hedged.

"Poisonous, precarious, and often lead someone down a path of poor life choices," Legend corrected, glancing at Longinus for a brief second before he looked back at her. "Either way, as I was about to say, before you employed your interruption-based domination tactic on me - yes, I come here in good faith, to discuss what issue has gotten the villainous underworld so worked up."

Longinus scoffed while looking back. "The Birdcage is suuuuch a better option," he whispered to himself. As if I'd get a fucking fair trial.

"Okay. So, here's the lowdown for you non-information gathering types," she said, looking at Thunderstrike, Dauntless, and Legend in short succession with a royal scoff at the end. "Down below this earth? There's a nascent Endbringer brewing, and Jack Slash is trying to convince it to join the Nine as we speak. I really would rather come into custody than be standing here when the explosion of happy murder happens."

Legend pinned her with the world's most unimpressed look. "You keep saying that," he said, clutching the top of his head with a sigh, "But I don't really believe it. I'm not sure if I don't believe it, or just don't want to believe it. I'll need some kind of compromise, if you want me to cooperate, Tattletale. You're an unknown quantity."

"Oh, is it about what happened to Armsmaster?" A shiver of smugness entered her voice. She looked at Legend appraisingly, folding her arms. "Huh. Never took you for someone that utilitarian, but it appears you're not so stupid after all. Okay, I'll play ball. Name your price, rainbows and howitzers."

Longinus looked at Tattletale and folded his arms as well. He knew Legend would probably ask for him into custody or something, and he'd have to agree, given the circumstances.

"First of all, let's establish a ground rule." Legend looked at her, standing slightly akimbo, but less heroic, more concerned gay parent. "I'm naturally disadvantaged from the fact that you're a Thinker, who, as the Protectorate suspects, can see the weak points in things. If I have a poor argument, you can find the holes in it."

Hah! The Protectorate thinks wrong. It's so much more than that.

She looked at him, her smile growing. "You're not too shabby at the political double-talk, huh? Or was that a power move? A return for speaking over you earlier?"

Legend smiled back. "I know what's necessary."

"Guys," Grue declared, breaking the interaction with raised arms. "Nascent Endbringer?" He pointed down questioningly.

"And again - I am not sure I believe that," Legend stated with a frown.

"I'm really going to just go down there and let Noelle copy me, unless you start believing us," Longinus said. "Maybe a murderous Centurion will change your mind."

"Assuming there is anyone down there," Legend said, in a tone that suggested he didn't actually believe it, "I very much doubt you would do that. And I can't act without evidence, so for now, I propose that we wait for Protectorate reinforcements to arrive, and then we'll send our men in to investigate."

"So you can detain us without a struggle?" Longinus argued, interrupting him.

"I didn't say I would detain you at any point during this conversation," Legend answered, with an utterly calm voice. Almost indifferent, even.

Longinus didn't answer, clenching his fists so hard he'd have cut through his skin if it wasn't for his gloves. He felt anger churning in his extremities like liquid heat. This single night brought more suffering than all of the two months on Earth Bet combined, and this motherfucker was acting like they were joking.

Bitch spoke up in that moment, "Fuck you," as she emerged on one of her dogs from the drainpipe, the others following soon after. The golden armor was cracked, and they'd suffered injuries. Bitch had a pair of people riding alongside on her dog's back - Othala, and a young boy who was so handsome that Longinus instantly pinned him down as Oliver.

More notably, however, her dogs had red teeth, and one of them was munching on a still fresh, naked corpse, slightly bloated and mutated. She whistled and pointed at Legend, and the dog spat the corpse in his direction. Legend stepped back, raising his hands, but not charging up any lasers. The Protectorate members behind him poised for combat, and turned to track Bitch's dogs with their eyes, but otherwise did nothing.

"Meet Trickster… three, four, five?" Tattletale asked, shrugging. "I don't know. I didn't count, but there'll be plenty more. How does a Shatterbird two sound, to go along with your order?"

Legend was surprised, taken aback. "This man has a resemblance to Trickster, but I've never seen him without his mask on."

"If you don't stop them, the Slaughterhouse Nine will turn in the Slaughterhouse Nine-K. They already started," Longinus warned.

"It is," Sundancer said, her shoulders quivering as she did. "It's him. One of him."

The faint smile left Legend's face entirely, as he looked back at Tattletale. "I'm going to treat this with the same gravity as any Endbringer situation if what you say is true. In other words, we're going to enter a truce to fight the threat - if it turns out you lied to me, you can expect kill orders to be signed out for you, and probably each of your friends, as accomplices to the crime." He looked around, not at Tattletale, but at the gathered villains. "Am I clear? This is a very serious claim. It needs to be treated as such."

Haunt spoke up - the last person anyone expected to, and what he said definitely wasn't charming, "You're scared, aren't you? You're good at hiding it. Convincing yourself that everything will be fine." He took on an active air, as he entered the conversation, almost with the same quality that Tattetale held. It made him sound like he had a psychosis on fear. "What are you so scared of, Legend?"

"A fourth Endbringer, probably. A fourth Endbringer that can produce an army of Jack Slashes, or an army of Crawlers," Longinus spoke up, chuckling helplessly.

"No. A fourth Endbringer is somehow not a salient enough threat in his mind," Haunt said, nodding up at Legend. "He's afraid of the consequences, isn't he?"

Legend's fists balled up, but he continued speaking in the same, affable and charismatic tone, with the presence of someone who knew what they were doing. "We're getting off-track. I'm going to call in reinforcements from the Protectorate, and mark this as A-Class, tentative S-Class threat. Does that work for you?" He looked back at Tattletale, as the main negotiator.

"We have the Nine already, who are an S-Class threat. With an additional, probable S-Class threat. I'd say to call it in as directly as an S-class," Longinus dryly explained.

"That's very fair," Legend nodded along. "I'm going to bring that up with the Chief Director. For now, though, I'd like you all to come with us, to the PRT headquarters. If everything you say is true, then there's no reason not to - we can't arrest you, under the truce's effects."

Tattletale smirked at him. "Power moves. Curiouser and curiouser."

"Being the leader of the Protectorate includes having the skills to keep things running," Legend clarified, before touching off from the ground. It was a subtle movement as if gravity smoothly stopped affecting him - like he was rising from the surface of an asteroid than the Earth.

"Should I fly the others there?" Longinus asked with a dry, blank tone.

"If you can," Legend said, nodding in agreement. "It'll make things faster. We can evaluate the threat, get Thinkers to work on it. Call in reinforcements."

"I won't be as quick if I fly everyone at the same time," Longinus added, tapping his foot on the ground.

"If your friends are willing, I can take one person with me. Dauntless and Grumman, too," he said, looking at the capes in question.

Haunt spoke again. His voice carried a note of interest in it, cutting through the conversation in the same way he did before. "I can do it, too, Legend, but I'll require your permission."

"Permission?" Legend frowned, clearly dawning in understanding but - ironically - fearing the answer. "To do what?"

"To transform."

"Permission granted," Legend barely finished, when a flash of very real fear ran through Longinus' mind. It was distinct from the fear he'd felt when the Nine captured him, or when Cherish poured synthetic feelings into his mind. This was a spike - a brief, quarter-second event horizon, but it was so much more forcible than anything else.

Longinus flinched, and when he looked, Haunt's body had corroded with sparks of lightning, before transforming into a grotesque alien caricature of a human being, ten-feet-tall, with limbs impossibly stretched and gaunt on a torso that was far too tiny, and a head hanging down on a segmented tube of flesh like a snake. Its head was turned upside down, a dark smile twisted to look like a scowl or a frown, with a pair of black voids instead of eyes. The creature's alabaster-silver skin revealed bulging black veins, and it made some people green around the gills.

It spoked in a coarse voice, like someone couldn't decide whether to pour shredded glass or gravel down someone's throat, gave up, and decided on both. "This body can fly. Who's up for it?" Its giraffe-like neck twisted around in an unnatural way, looking at the group over its body, causing the upside-down grin to become a normal grin.

"Whose fear is this?" Longinus inquired curiously, swallowing to get rid of the dry throat.

The pair of dark voids bore into Longinus, as the face turned sideways, the grin never dropping as he spoke, "Bits and pieces of everyone here. I took some from you - you probably know which ones." He did. "Very, very interesting. One of the other major pieces was from Legend."

Legend, for his own part, was looking down at Haunt with a mild frown, but didn't say anything. "Alright. Let's move, then. If the S-class nature of this event is true, then we don't have much time."

Bitch offered, "I can take several people with me, on my dogs."

Legend nodded, then floated down to offer his hand to Ballistic or Sundancer. The latter was too shy, so eventually Ballistic grasped it, muttering something along the lines of 'no homo, no offense.' Legend moved to lift him off under the shoulders, then they began to lift off higher and further, leaving a very faint streak of blue behind them.

Tattletale looked between Bitch and Longinus, as if indecisive on with whom she should hitch a ride. Sundancer was already mounting one of Bitch's dogs, and looking at the unconscious Oliver and Othala with apparent concern.

Dauntless took Grue, while Grumman took Regent. Regent, for his part, didn't quip about the man's disability for once – points for him. Imp unsurprisingly decided to go with the Bitch Express instead of Haunt's Gaunt-Necked Macabre Monster Airlines, and Bitch herself helped get Genesis up from her wheelchair and onto one of her dogs, with another one carrying the wheelchair in its mouth.

Longinus glanced at Tattletale and gestured for her to come closer with a wave. She complied, offering her arm. He took her arm, and wrapped his own around her waist, and took off into the sky, leaving behind a cloud of dust on the ground.

I just wanted to say, I really hated Gabriel's underperformance in this chapter. I literally mentioned, in this thread, OOC, that his power was safe because he could pretty much spend five charges on distinct powers and if something didn't work, he could combine them to make something useless into something useful. Old, useless elements could be recycled into new ones. Instead, he decided to drop all five into an upgrade to an old power, which I warned him some time ago would just, well, mostly upgrade that power's parameters instead of introducing fresh elements.

I mean, not that blowing up the base would have worked. Coil intended for it to be reusable, but still would have significantly hampered the Nine and given the ProtectorateVillains some breathing space.

74

Birdsie

Dec 8, 2019

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Threadmarks Dira Necessitas 11.8

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Birdsie

Birdsie

Sharp Talons Cleave The Worthy

Dec 8, 2019

#4,206

"Do you think Legend… knows about Cauldron?" Longinus asked at a relatively low tone.

"Why don't you check with your power, when you get the chance?" she offered. They were both protected by a thin, faintly visible layer of telekinesis and environmental shielding, preventing the high air friction from… maybe not rending them to shreds, but definitely from making their head spin and splash into their skin with the force of a water-hose.

"I could, yeah," Longinus answered, nodding.

"I'm talking about the… passenger sight," she clarified, waving her hand and smiling when she felt the air part around it like a knife, then wincing, as she made the comparison in her head, followed by shaking her head. "You can tell apart vial capes from natural ones, right? If he's a Cauldron agent, which is theoretically possible, he's probably a vial cape, too. I'm probably wrong. My power's overworked. It's turning up false or junk data at pretty much every step. I'd take a nap, but… well, we don't exactly have time for that."

"What if I use my Master power on you until we get to the PRT HQ? I'll stop you from thinking. I… think it's the same thing as sleeping," Longinus offered, not sounding entirely sure of his statement.

"Nnnot unless it safely disables key parts of the brain," Tattletale answered, and then said, "I'm not sure. No. I'd rather sleep normally."

"Alright," Longinus shrugged exaggeratedly, which altered their aero-dynamicity a little bit and made them stutter through the air, like an airplane that met a strong gust of wind. "Woah–"

"Damn," she said, in a moment of self-awareness. "I really would like to get a fresh costume. This one's cut up. I'd have called Jack Slash a pervert, if I weren't almost fifty-percent sure he's asexual, or close to it. Construct armor, would you? Or at least construct cloth or something?"

Longinus let out an amused chuckle, taking advantage of their close physical contact to generate a layer of golden construct kevlar-like cloth under her own costume, to cover up her naked skin. "There you go, one serving of superpowered bra for you," he said.

"You don't get feedback from those, right?" She glanced at him, then her face sunk. "Oh god, you do. Uggh!"

"Yeah, I'm trying to ignore it, though," Longinus responded with a helpless tone, honesty filling his voice. "Also, I'm going to be honest with you, you're fit like a fiddle. I don't think I've seen, or felt, somebody as fit as you in a whole lot of time," he added, genuinely appraising the girl's supposed efforts.

"Thanks, not thanks," she said, grimacing with pursed lips. "It makes me feel so much better that you appreciate my body while your power gropes it."

"It's not exactly like that. It's... hard to put into words. It's definitely not like touching, though. My power tells me what it feels," Longinus explained.

She raised an unamused eyebrow at him. "So. Basically like touching, then."

"...I guess so. Sorry," Longinus apologized, shaking his head in a bit of shame.

She snorted without speaking. "You have one-time forgiveness for sexual assault. Welcome to the world of villainy. How does it feel to commit a crime on a hapless woman, Longinus?"

"I like how this is my entrance in the villain world. Not my three counts of aggravated murder, but this," Longinus cheerfully chirped in, using humour to actually cope with the shame and pain.

"Hey, you can joke about it." She shrugged, causing the air resistance to give them some turbulence for a fraction of a second. Tattletale winced, before finishing her statement, "That means you're getting better. Speaking of, do you want to… talk about… today? About, you know?"

Longinus stayed uncharacteristically quiet.

The last time he said he'd talk with somebody about something, that person ended up being Hannah. They were supposed to speak about what happened in Boston, but then the city began to go shit, and everyone got so busy, and this was way worse than Boston and god - he rocked in the air, and Tattletale's words broke him out of his mental descension, "Longinus! Longinus! Easy, easy! Calm down, alright? Don't have a panic attack while we're five-hundred feet off the ground, alright?"

"S-sorry," Longinus regained his composure, squeezing Tattletale a little harder, desperately trying to find comfort in that pseudo-hug. Uncomfortable and awkward for her, probably, but he needed it.

"No problem. We're almost there," she pointed out, nodding at the building.

The PRT headquarters were exactly the same as they'd been a week ago. It was only days since he joined the Undersiders, but this place seemed to be so alien, now. Like a different planet. Everything looked fresher, or maybe it was the perspective of commuting here while flying.

"I'm gonna land, hold on," he pointed out, beginning his descent.

"On the rooftop," she said, looking up. Legend and Ballistic were already there, with the rest of the fliers making their way. Fly-sized, from the distance.

Longinus and Tattletale touched down on the rooftop of the PRT HQ. Out of the doorway that led into the building stepped out no one else than Director Piggot, accompanied by two PRT squaddies in full armor, armed with a rifle each, as well as three grenades of containment foam at the front of their chest plates. Legend and Dauntless stepped forward to discuss with her, while Grumman and Thunderstrike kept their eyes on the mass of villains - not including Bitch, Sundancer, Imp, Othala, and Oliver. As well as all those who died.

Longinus glanced in Legend's direction, with his arms crossed to his chest. Luckily, Tattletale broke him out of his soon-to-be panic attack, but it was quickly rushing back to him. He tried to fight it, but his knees began shaking subtly.

It didn't help that, after a moment, Legend and Piggot both looked in his direction with some unknown quantity in their expressions. Piggot grimaced and shook her head, while Legend spoke to her. After a moment, she turned around and marched out, as Legend floated back to the group.

"Here's what's going to happen," Legend announced, voice booming and cutting down the small conversations that started up between some of the capes. "We're going to go down to the conference room, while we get word out of the threat. I want all of you to be quiet and discreet about it. There, we'll wait for any confirmation regarding the threat, and for reinforcements."

Longinus stared at Legend with fidgeting hands. He continued to tap his foot against the concrete roof, and the metallic sole of his boots made a clunking noise with each tap. His palms were sweating, his knees getting wobblier by the second. He glanced at Tattletale, as if desperately asking for help.

"Don't worry. We're all going in, and if they try to arrest you, they'll have to go through us, first," she said, and Grue nodded in the background. That was surprising - had Longinus earned his respect? Or was it the bittersweetness of shared trauma?

Longinus let himself smile at her words and at Grue's acknowledging nod. His body slumped in relaxation and his foot stopped all movement, and the incessant metal-on-concrete noise stopped to leave space for absolute, awkward silence.

With that, the Undersiders and Travelers proceeded to use the elevators to go down to the third floor. They had to take the rides with several people at a time, and the Protectorate ensured there was always at least one member of them in the elevator - to watch out for any 'funny business' presumably. In several minutes, everyone was down, next to the conference room. Bitch was waiting outside with her dogs, barely-grown, looking less like monsters of flesh and bone, and more like bloodhounds with less fur and more raw muscle on them, and sharp teeth. Othala and Oliver were nowhere to be seen, but Sundancer was standing behind her.

Once inside, Longinus felt a hot knife go through his heart. It wasn't the stab of anger he was so used to feeling nowadays, but the gut-wrenching pain of knowing this was the place where he started his journey, the place where everything began: where he made friends, relationships, which then were utterly destroyed by his own incompetence and bad decisions. His body tensed up for a brief moment, but he was luckily pulled out of his daze by a familiar, canine growl.

Bitch walked inside, only to be stopped by Adamant who raised a hand. "The dogs wait outside, unless you can stop using your power on them," he stated. Legend floated closer, watching out for the trouble.

Bitch, as Bitch often does, began to stare him down in a bid for domination. Tattletale decided to step in. "No one's asking you to give up your armor, Mr. Metallokinetic," she jabbed, "Do you really want to deprive a girl of hers?"

Legend looked to Adamant with an expression of mild sympathy. "Don't give them too much trouble, Adamant. She can go in, if she behaves."

Adamant stepped aside grudgingly, revealing Dovetail had been standing behind him. The woman did much the same, creating a short row of Protectorate capes that looked distinctly unwelcoming. Bitch strode past them with a proud, almost lofty, but harsh gait, followed by her dogs who did much the same.

Longinus was close behind her, head ducked down in shame. He felt the gazes of each one of the heroes burn through his skin, marking his very soul with their looks of disgust and contempt.

After several moments, mostly everyone was situated. The conference room had changed, ever since he was last in it. As opposed to having a single, long table, there were several shorter tables arranged in something like a horseshoe shape, with Director Piggot and Legend's places near the forefront. Tattletale elected to stand, instead of sitting, while the Protectorate began to talk about the issue, with Legend probably trying to convince her to play along.

Longinus had to sit down on one of the chairs; standing up was getting troublesome. The moment he sat down, he felt a wave of relief rush over him, as if all the tiredness momentarily left his back. He turned his gaze to Grue. "I'm… sorry for what happened earlier," he muttered, his gaze not daring to meet his, or anybody's for that matter.

"You healed my knee," he said, shrugging. He was mostly unreadable with his skull-mask on, but his body language betrayed that he'd been a little shaken by the events, and trying to hide it. "I'm fine. Though, the next time a knife-wielding psychopath asks you to answer him, can you try not to get all philosophical about it?"

Longinus shuddered at his statement, and he involuntarily straightened and tensed up. "S-sorry," he apologized again, this time, quieter.

"Hey, don't worry about it," Regent said, surprisingly comforting given his... self. "The next time, instead of being philosophical, try quoting the Bible at him. Maybe he'll turn from his villainous ways and become a faithful God-fearing man?" Nevermind!

Longinus chuckled softly, his mind taken away from the swirling cloud of pure negativity by his joke. "Yeah, maybe," he responded, cocking his head to the side.

In that moment, Legend's voice cut through the air in his conversation with Piggot. It wasn't that he rose it any more than he did, but rather, the words he spoke that drew attention. "And I'm hoping it's a trick, because the alternative is worse: a new S-class threat, according to Tattletale and Longinus."

"That's right," Tattletale announced, stepping forward in spite of the shocked PRT officers staring at Legend, and turning to her instead. "We're talking about a new proto-Endbringer, being created right here, under Brockton Bay."

Longinus folded his arms, looking in the direction of Legend and Director Piggot. "WIth the potential to be more dangerous than an actual Endringer, if we count the Slaughterhouse Nine," he added.

"I wouldn't go that far," Tattletale said, waving one arm at him. "But yeah, pretty much bad news for everyone." She turned to Piggot.

"Waites, Doyon," Piggot said, looking at a pair of PRT officers. "Get on the phone. Patch them through to me as soon as you get a hold of someone. I want our best Thinkers on this, I don't care what it takes."

Two men nodded, beginning to work, while Piggot looked at Tattletale with a cut of dryness to her appearance. "Is it true, Tattletale? That she copies people?"

"With their powers," she said, looking distinctly unamused for once. "If she touches you, she can basically vomit out an evil clone. Or a duplicate. Call it whatever you want to call it. From what little I know, she counts as Master-ten, and possibly Changer and Brute on top of that."

"The powers can be stronger than the original," Longinus added dryly.

"We should wake people up," Legend suggested, as he glanced at the nearest clock. "It's nearly one AM, but we need everyone on this."

Piggot nodded. "That's what we'll do."

"Not the Wards, I hope," Longinus pointed out, folding his arms judgingly.

"If this is an S-class threat, we might have to," Piggot said, glaring at him unrepentantly. A dry jab followed soon after. "But then, the parents have signed their leaflets, haven't they?"

Longinus stared at her in silence, but his fists balled up in resentment. Oh, how he wanted her to become collateral damage in the coming apocalypse; part of his situation was her fault, after all.

"Let's not escalate," Legend whispered to her. "Not the time for it."

She nodded, without drawing her eyes from Longinus. After narrowing them at him, she looked away and said, "Call in the Wards. Make sure they're escorted. We don't want any risks at this time and situation."

One of the men in plainclothes nodded, and took out a phone of his own.

At those words, Longinus felt conflicting emotions. This was the chance to see Taylor again, but at the same time, this would endanger her, and the rest of his former friends. His fists clenched even harder as he attempted to fight the thoughts away, failing.

"I have to ask, and it's not because I want to in particular, but rather, because I feel oblidged to, but tell me," Director Piggot said, looking at Tattletale with an inquisitive eye. "What exactly do you plan to do with the city, Tattletale? It's no secret you've claimed territory, and according to Sundancer, Coil is dead."

"That's not actually true," Tattletale said, shaking her head. "He faked his death, if I had to guess."

"And?" Piggot raised an eyebrow.

Longinus answered her, instead of Tattletale. There was a bloodthirst in his voice, as he said, "And he's going to use the coming crisis to put the last nail in your coffin, playing it up as one of your numerous incompetencies, to get you fired and take over the PRT ENE."

"And you'd like to see that happen, I presume? As one of his employees?" Piggot asked, with a note of bitterness.

"I see that you've misunderstood the situation, Director Piggot," Longinus answered, with a note of professionalism.

"I'm not sure what the situation is. Are you threatening me?" she asked, open-endedly.

"I'm informing you of what is going to happen, so that you can properly fight back," Longinus concluded dryly.

"How kind of you, as the person who enabled Coil to take this much advantage of our department in the first place. Coil and Accord," she answered. There was aggression brewing in her voice, but Legend stepped into Longinus' sight and shook his head, trying to dissuade him from speaking further.

Longinus' fists were so tight that his gloves creaked, the heavy plastic clanking against itself while the cloth stretched firmly against his hands. He held his tongue, to not escalate further.

The pig.

Tattletale spoke up, "To answer your question, we're probably going to try to take Coil down, assuming that's even possible. I have some guesses as to his identity, which I'm willing to share. After that, we'll probably run things on our territories more subtly than the old gangs."

He's probably already pretty high up in the PRT; they wouldn't let a random nobody become the new Director. Renick? That advisor guy? No, Renick isn't black… what was the other guy's name? Fuck.

"And how is that?" Piggot asked, curiosity piqued.

"Keep the peace so we keep you guys off our backs. I wouldn't mind a system like the Yakuza of Japan's yesteryear, where we support and involve ourselves in local business, legally, to the point that nobody will be able to shake us," she answered, rather unceremonial in her proclamation.

"Director Piggot, tell me, is anyone in the PRT's administrative staff a black man?" Longinus inquired.

"I didn't take you for a racist," Director Piggot said, rather miffed, "As someone who arrested some of the most prolific Empire members and sparked a minor gang war as a result." If someone minded her calling out the fact that Longinus was literally Centurion with a paintjob swap, no one called her out on it.

"Coil is a black man, and I made the assumption that he's already high up in the PRT's hierarchy if he's to become the new Director: they wouldn't let a random guy become the head honcho," Longinus said.

"Yes, Longinus. We have dozens of black workers," she answered without fanfare. "I don't know of anyone who fits the profile, but I'll make sure to make an extensive staff check."

"Anyone close to your position? Somebody who you consult often? What's the name of the advisor-consultant guy? I can't recall," Longinus inquired, slowly standing up.

"Renick isn't black," someone pointed out.

"Renick is the Deputy Director, I'm talking about the PRT's consultants," Longinus shot back, feeling his mind-gears turn.

"You're grasping at straws," Piggot said.

Click. "Thomas Calvert," Longinus announced. "Just an assumption, but check into him," he sat down on his chair.

"Who?" one of the white-shirt workers questioned.

"He's one of our primary consultants," Director Piggot said, looking at the source of the voice, before she turned to Longinus. "And I planned to do so already."

Right.

"As fun as it is to sink Coil's political career," Tattletale interrupted, "Do you guys have any of that Thinker confirmation yet?"

Legend looked at the men with the phones, and one of them nodded, pulling his head away from the device. "Hunch, and several others confirm something bad will happen within several hours, and continue for several days with and without intervention."

"Shit," Tattletale cursed, looking down at the ground and pursing her lips.

Legend looked at one of the other workers. "The reinforcements?"

"It's late night, early morning," a man shrugged anxiously. "Most of them are still getting up and commuting. We'll probably see the earliest teleports by Strider in a few minutes."

"Okay," Legend said, then began to stride to the exit of the room, "I'm going to go back and check out the complex."

"No, whoa, hold ooon there, rainbow smiles," Tattletale said, stepping in Legend's way. "If she clones you, that's pretty bad."

"Nobody wants tens of evil Legend clones flying around, blasting shit," Longinus pointed out.

"I'm a Mover," Legend answered. His smile wasn't exactly patronizing, but he was acting confident. "I believe I won't allow this Endbringer to catch me."

Tattletale raised a finger. "And you'll be in an enclosed space, with clones of Trickster and possibly the Slaughterhouse Nine. Let's not."

Legend's mouth set into a frown, but he nodded and glanced aside. "Do we have any drones? Remote-controlled?"

One of the PRT uniforms nodded. "We'll get them deployed right away, sir."

If only Signal was here.

"Oh, that reminds me," Tattletale turned to Piggot. "Dinah Alcott. She's either free and back with her family, or Coil is moving her or moved her elsewhere. She wasn't at his base, last time I checked."

Piggot looked at one of the PRT operators. "Call the Alcotts and ask." He nodded and got on the phone. Lots of telecommunications at this place.

"More Thinker results, ma'am," one of the men said, "Eleventh Hour says 'nine,' and Appraiser reads 'purple.' We also have precognitive confirmation that lots of parahumans will be involved. It's looking like an S-class threat, if they're talking about the duplicates."

"The Truce is up, then," Longinus stated gravely, with all the implications that came with that phrase.

"At least we're not splitting hairs over it," Tattletale said, and roughly in that moment, Chariot entered the room from the entrance.

"Oh, and just to inform you guys, the Teeth from Boston are comi–" Longinus stopped as he saw Chariot enter the room. "Hey colleague," he quipped, a spiteful smirk appearing under his helmet.

"We already know that," Legend answered, glancing between Chariot and Longinus with a confused and slightly worried look. "We've been tracking their movements. Last they were seen, they were a kilometer north of Brockton Bay."

Dauntless sighed. "Great."

"So maybe Sundancer and Ballistic would like to talk about their little big friend, since we're discussing her already?" Tattletale glanced at the two, causing them to shrink.

"Her name is Noelle." Ballistic stood up, sighing. "And, yeah, she copies capes… people, really, she copies anything organic she touches. We were trying to get Coil to develop a cure for her."

Director Piggot snorted, smiling at him ruefully. "A cure for powers? That's rather far-fetched."

"And also really, really bad," Tattletale cut in, causing almost everyone in the room to wince collectively. "Because as far as I know, Noelle is really unstable. If Jack can convince her that Bonesaw might be able to do something about it, and if Trickster goes along with it - and I know he will, then we're looking at an angry, cape-duplicating monster and her lifemate becoming the members of the Nine."

"Trickster wouldn't," Sundancer said, sounding like she was about to cry.

"He would, and it's because just like you two, he's a Simurgh bomb and he's going off," Tattletale said, causing people in the room to flinch, especially Sundancer and Ballistic who went stiff. "Yeah, that's right, shit for brains. I figured it a while ago, while we were talking about Accord."

"They're fucking what?!" Longinus exclaimed, getting up and going on the defensive, staring at them.

"Didn't you notice how Trickster pretty much went lowkey insane the moment Noelle was mentioned?" Tattletale looked at him questioningly. "I thought it was love to the point of stupidity at first, but some things didn't click, and my power - as tired as it is - confirmed it in several ways. It really clicked for me when I realized the Travelers, and how they operated as a whole. Going from city to city. If you track their route back, and how often they moved, you might just be able to see they started in the areas of Wisconsin."

"Madison," Legend said, gaping at the two of them. "That's where the Simurgh used Professor Haywire's technology, to open portals. You two..."

"Are from another Earth," Tattletale said, nodding, before glancing at Longinus.

"You were caught in the crossfire, I assume?" Longinus asked disbelievingly, gaping as well.

"We were… gamers, I guess. God, that sounds so fucking stupid," Ballistic said, shaking his head. "We were going to a… convention, basically, when the building we were in suddenly got ripped apart and we saw a fifteen-foot-tall angel woman in the sky, singing in our heads and fighting people. And then some fucking portals started opening, monsters got dropped from the sky, and… God, it was so confusing. I don't really… I just wanted, we wanted to go home."

"Right. My guess is, the Simurgh engineered you gaining powers," Tattletale said, avoiding the topic of vials by a rather wide margin, Longinus noticed, "She was also responsible for Noelle's powers going out of control. She set up this situation, the one we're experiencing right now, years in advance."

Longinus crossed his arms, glancing at Tattletale. His body language shouted, 'Tell the truth.' She glanced at him from the corner of her eye and shook her head very subtly, painting it as general disappointment to the others in the room.

"Either way, Trickster is a high-functioning Simurgh bomb, as is Noelle. You two? If I had to guess, she mostly ignored you. Not enough potential for damage," Tattletale answered, "But that might be what she wanted us to think, so I'd rather sequester you somewhere nice and peaceful."

"Bullshit." Ballistic clutched a mug in his hand, beginning to raise it at her, until a blue piercing laser shattered it in his hand. A second one, more like a punch, sent him reeling against the wall. With that, Adamant leaped at him, and the two began grappling for a moment. Dovetail backed up Adamant, and Ballistic was in a pair of handcuffs within moments, as the Protectorate began to cart him out of the room.

Sundancer shook her head. She extended both of her shaking hands to the nearest PRT uniform, who cuffed her up, then pushed her on after Ballistic.

Longinus scoffed and sat back down, feeling the tension release.

"You r-really think that's n-n-necessary?" Grumman asked quietly, looking at Legend with a questioning gaze.

Legend established eye contact with a softness to his face. "Yes. They couldn't be helped, really."

Tattletale glanced at the two of them, before sighing. Within moments, the doors to the room opened again, as the Wards strode in. Longinus felt a pang of shock and immense relief, as he saw Aegis at the forefront, his fists balled up. He was followed by an equally pissed Clockblocker, and a demure-looking Weaver moving in after them. Transfusion, Vista, Flechette came in after them.

Clockblocker immediately proceeded in Longinus' direction, causing the Undersiders to collectively stand up. In response, the entire Protectorate stood up on the other end of the room. Haunt didn't do anything, looking at the situation with either amusement or blank acceptance.

Longinus didn't move an inch. "I deserve it," he said, quietly, averting his gaze.

"Yeah, you do," Clockblocker answered, his voice surprisingly cold and blank. Unlike Dennis. Not a single second passed, before Longinus felt his head rock backward, as the world rolled around him for a moment. The blow knocked his wind out of him. He heard yells, and hurried, forceful footsteps, as some kind of scuffle began. By the next second, when he'd regained his senses, he looked and saw that Weaver and Transfusion were holding a heavily-breathing Clockblocker by the arms, five or six paces away.

He shook them off, staring at Longinus with enmity. Actual hatred.

Longinus stood back up, and stayed absolutely still. "Hit me again," he requested. "Do it as many times as you want."

"If I didn't have a helmet, I'd spit on you," Clockblocker choked out.

"Enough." Legend walked in front of the Wards, proceeding to chide them, "We're entering a truce. This isn't the time for this. Weaver, Vista; go take Clockblocker outside. Let him cool off." The two girls nodded, and proceeded to tranquilize him with soothing words, as they led him away out of the room.

Longinus glanced momentarily at Weaver, feeling a pang of cold pain flow down his spine and into his veins.

"I didn't really believe that you had it in you," Transfusion commented. She looked unlike herself, in both the literal and metaphorical sense. Her costume was a little tweaked; the ponytail was done away with, in favor of short-cut hair, and her armor was looking slightly less bulky, showing off bits of feminity without being revealing. On the metaphorical end, she was looking calmer, but somehow less carefree. Less like a wild animal.

"If you want to hit me, or spit on me, or anything of the sort, you have my explicit permission to do so," Longinus stated, blank neutrality taking over his body language and tone. He felt so meaningless right now, so small and insignificant.

"Stop letting yourself be treated like that," Grue whispered, angry at Longinus' stance. "You can't take that. It brings all of us down with you."

"I don't really feel like it. I'm sympathetic," she said with an inflection to her tone, and he starkly recalled that she was a killer. She murdered the men who caused her Trigger, hunted them down across the city over the span of what must have been… what, two days? She either knew where they lived, or her power provided her with an enhanced ability to smell blood or something.

Longinus looked down for a moment, then looked at Grue, nodding. His gaze then turned back to Transfusion, "Thanks."

She gave him a smile through her helmet, which dropped the moment Chevalier and Assault walked into the room, striking up a quick conversation with Dovetail near the entrance to get the facts about what was going on. They were followed soon after by three capes that looked heroic, but that Longinus didn't recognize.

Longinus immediately turned away, as to hide his already hidden face from Chevalier. The shame burned and sparked in his chest, the moment he remembered their conversation about perspective.

It also reminded him about the taxi driver. She talked to him about that, too.

Aegis led the Wards to the corner of the horseshoe table, sitting down or standing near the very tip on the heroes' side. Grue looked at Longinus for a moment, then his gaze dropped. Everyone in the room had returned to conversation on some level - private talks, rather than group discussion that included everyone. Legend, Tattletale, and Piggot were talking, with Imp chiming in at Tattletale's behest for whatever reason - about the things she found out from Coil's commander, maybe?

"You holding up alright?" Grue asked, trying to strike up a conversation. To break the awkward silence between them, since they were sitting the closest out of the Undersiders.

"I was on the brink of a panic attack three times now, but yeah, that aside, I'm holding up alright," Longinus answered, letting out a shuddering sigh.

Grue looked at him with a suddenly pained expression. "Uh, sorry. I didn't-"

"It's not a problem for me to talk about my problems. Not thinking about them is not something I do to cope," Longinus reassured him, shrugging.

"I'm not good at… giving therapy, I guess. At being empathetic? But you can talk to me. Can't promise I'll give you good advice, though," Grue said, with a shrug. He was trying to look tough on the outset, but there was a hint of awkwardness deep down.

"There's no need for you to push yourself, Grue. I'll get better, I… I just need time."

"Right. Yeah, me too," Grue said in agreement.

"That… abomination," Longinus started. He might as well talk about it.

"I don't know what kind of relationship you had with them," Grue said, beginning some kind of longer speech. "I didn't really know Laserdream at all. I knew Miss Militia, but not outside of the… well, fights we've had. I know they were both good people, though. It… sucks, you know? I don't really know what to say. I fight… we fight the heroes, but everyone's still just a person trying to live their life at the end of the day."

Longinus nodded, feeling a knot tie itself in the back of his throat. He swallowed, getting it undone, and spoke again, "Y-yeah." He didn't want to mention the fact that he was starting to have brief flashes of suicidal thoughts. He didn't have anything left to lose, really.

The conversations began to hush down, quieting. There was a jarring silence, which followed after one of the PRT workers said something which Grue and Longinus couldn't make out.

Moments later, the doors of the conference room opened wide, as Eidolon strode in.

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Birdsie

Dec 8, 2019

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Birdsie

Birdsie

Sharp Talons Cleave The Worthy

Dec 8, 2019

#4,249

Perhaps the most powerful man in the world after Scion scanned the room briefly, and nodded in Legend's general direction, before stepping around to join Tattletale, Director Piggot, and Legend in their conversation.

Longinus gazed at Eidolon for a brief moment, and the world turned grey.

He was blinded, and his power began to fizzle out.

Red, blue, green, cyan, magenta, yellow - every color of the rainbow, plus silver, gold, black, white, and others. They weren't full colors. Just glimpses of them, swirling in a chaotic mass around Eidolon's head, with three at the forefront: one of them was some kind of Mover power, for long-range teleportation that had the selective potential to cause electromagnetic interference by turning the user into radio waves and moving them across space without actually budging solid matter. Two others appeared to be distinct Thinker powers. One of them used for the analysis of spoken words, to detect lies, discrepancies, and overall lend an advantage in social settings. The second one was rather bland, but very highly accurate precognition up to five to ten seconds into the future, but only available in bursts, with a cooldown of twenty to thirty seconds on each use.

In that exact moment, something within the arrangement shifted. The dark-purple of the precognition left to join the elemental ring around it, before another, a dark blue flowed into its place. The precognition power was dropped, and replaced by some kind of enhanced sight that allowed the user to view images through walls. It was replaced again, by another power. He was cycling through them, looking for something useful, or something specific.

Longinus kept admiring the process, in blank awe.

It was plump, and almost opaque, unlike most of the other passengers he'd seen. The effects were spilling out, in the same way that Jack's passenger had. The shard was fed with information, nurtured with data gathered over years of combat. There was also… something else to it. There were veins of emptiness within, signifying what Longinus understood to be energy, or rather, the lack of thereof.

Eidolon is losing his powers.

Its name, or as close to a translation as the power-vision could come up with, was Priest. Or High Priest, or the Hub, or the Network. Its purpose was to act as the heart of something vast and great, and it was not supposed to be given out to a human.

Longinus felt the gears in his mind turn, and then, they clicked. Scion was traveling alongside another towards Earth. When doing Armsmaster's exercise, he used Oracle to ask what Scion was: its answer was vague and mostly wrong, given his current knowledge, but something about the answer stuck.

'Scion is dealing with loss,' which meant that Scion's partner, had been somehow killed off. Maybe Eidolon's shard was one of the vital elements of the other being traveling to Earth, alongside Scion?

Next to him, Legend's passenger stood out with a bright corona of plasmatic starfire. Coruscant, his shard-sight approximated the name of something too complex to name accurately. It was the primary energy-gathering tool, as well as something used for space travel by something vast. It absorbed the light, radiation, and heat of stars to produce fuel for offense, defense, and locomotion.

Longinus blinked and, when he opened his eyes, the world was back in full color. He sighed and relaxed in his chair. Looking at other powers decompressed the crap out of him, for some reason.

"The famous Eidolon," Tattletale retorted to something the man had said, "I thought that I made it clear to Legend that we shouldn't bring in anyone who we can't beat in a fight."

"Don't concern yourself over it," Eidolon said. His voice boomed and reverberated, in an effect similar to Grue's when he used his smoke to cover his face. "I can render myself immune."

"We won't know that until it happens," she replied.

Longinus stood up and walked up to the group, silently listening to the conversation as it unfolded. Eidolon's back was turned to him, and so he didn't see the approach, as he continued to answer Tattletale. "Are you looking for a chink in the armor? Some sort of advantage?"

"Yeah, I am," she admitted without shame. "We might have to fight you. Or an evil version of you. Whatever. I really don't want to fight Slaughterhouse Nine-brand Eidolon."

"She's being cautious, dad," Longinus said from behind him, arms crossing around his chest.

Eidolon turned around at the voice, looking Longinus square in the eyes without speaking for a long moment. They regarded one another in silence. Legend spoke, instead of him, with a slightly annoyed expression but a carefully chosen, diplomatic tone, "That's rather disrespectful, Longinus."

"Is that what you call yourself now?" Eidolon didn't look at Legend as he asked it, his voice devoid of emotion.

"Yes," Longinus answered Eidolon's question with a deadpan voice. When the green-robed hero didn't answer, Longinus looked at Legend. "Given the striking similarities in powers, and how Scion looked at us in basically the same way - in disgust - back when Leviathan attacked, I'm starting to believe that rumor."

Tattletale glanced at Eidolon for a long moment, then snorted and covered up her mouth to keep herself from laughing.

A crossed Director Piggot asked for everyone's benefit, "What?"

"He's a virgin," Tattletale whispered, continuing to laugh. Behind her, Regent and Imp exploded with booming laughter, extending their fingers to Eidolon, holding their stomachs, and holding their backs for each other. Some other people in the room quietly chucked, mostly Haunt, while a lot of them were too scared to even smile.

"Thank you," Eidolon marveled in synthetic gratitude. With a sigh, he continued, "For the rather enlightening exploration of my private life, Tattletale. I'm sure my 'evil clone' will keep it in mind."

"There's nothing wrong with it," Longinus crossed his arms and gave Tattletale an irked look at making fun of the strongest man in the world, then faced Eidolon with a softer expression. "But yes. Centurion is gone, unfortunately."

"Noelle is going to target you," Tattletale changed topics, back to the one at hand, as she looked at Eidolon. She then glanced between him and Longinus and added Legend into the mix soon after. "Actually, both of you. All of you. I really don't want the Evil Triumvirate plus their boy-scout member razing the world."

Longinus looked briefly worried, but then shook his head. "My main offensive power is a Blaster one. I won't have trouble staying away," he reassured her.

"I will render myself immune, and even then, keep myself out of reach if that helps alleviate your paranoid worry," Eidolon related, looking at her with a dismissive quality to his language. "I've been in more than one Endbringer fight. I know to play by the engagement rules."

Longinus briefly looked at Eidolon, with a sort of curious expression. Maybe he had some way of boosting his power, with his own one?

"Forgive me for not having total and complete faith in you, Lord Eidolon," Tattletale jokingly answered.

One of the PRT plainclothes workers spoke up in that moment, declaring to Piggot, "Ma'am! You might want to see this!" He raised a TV remote, and she nodded.

Longinus turned towards the television and waited for it turn on, to watch what it was going to show. The people in the room went quiet, as the TV turned on to show a feed from a drone flying some sixty to eighty meters above the ground. It had a small 'live' in white, small-lettered text in the corner.

The TV showed a feed of Coil's base. From up above, one could see an elephant-sized mass of green, brown, black, red, and gray meat, slithering. Wolf heads, cloven feet, tentacles, and tendrils grew on it, and at the top, as if crowned, there was a girl, from the pelvis up. She was shaking, laughing, stuttering, not entirely in tune with reality, as she moved alongside the members of the Nine, and Trickster who was constantly touching her and sinking into her mass gradually. There was a group of naked men around them, looking almost like Trickster, but not quite. One of them didn't have any eyes and was visibly shorter and stockier, like a fat midget.

She stopped moving, and the Nine stopped alongside her. Bonesaw's delight was visible even from this distance. Noelle's body opened up, with a giant maw, as she vomited out a slick green-red-brown fluid, depositing a pair of naked women on the ground, one of them lacking her left arm.

One of them had dark hair, and a swirl of furious green-white energy floated around her, before coalescing into a bow with a flaming arrow in her hands. The other one surrounded herself in a corona of red energy, before taking off ten feet into the air. Longinus stared at the screen, quietly.

"Who are..." Eidolon asked, then answered his own question with a shocked voice, "Miss Militia and Laserdream."

"Fuck. No chance to talk her out of it now," Tattletale muttered, pressing her fingers into her elbows, her arms folded.

Longinus began hyperventilating, moving to leave the room in a panic. This is my fault.

Tattletale's arm caught his shoulder. "Wait, Longinus." It drew some sharp attention from Legend and Eidolon.

Longinus suppressed a yell of fear; doing so hurt his throat and forced him to grit his teeth in indignity. He backed away from Tattletale's grasp, breathing faster and faster by the second. "D-don't t-touch me," he pleaded, sounding like he was on the verge of exploding at her.

"Just..." She pulled her arm away to herself, visibly. Some people in the room were unsure what to stare at, now - them, or the live feed. "Don't go too far away, okay? We need you."

Longinus nodded briskly and walked out of the room with a hurried step, his breathing becoming more regular. However, his body felt like it was absolutely burning up with all sorts of emotions, familiar ones he had grown to recognize: self-loathing, guilt, anger, fear, anxiety, and panic.

Within moments - what felt like flashes of reality, with time skipping forward - he was outside, on the rooftop, standing near the edge. He collapsed to his knees and took off his helmet, his fast-paced breathing filling out his throat and lungs with the cold night air, humid yet dry. He sat there for several seconds, thinking about nothing in particular, not even concentrating on calming himself down - just being there, kind of blank.

"Are you okay?" The familiar voice cut him out of his state. Taylor.

Gabriel didn't answer, but instead clutched his head in pain. Yet another person he had disappointed whom probably hated his guts. Great.

"I got your letter," Weaver said. There was a pause, as she shook her head. "The other Wards didn't believe it, except Vista and Transfusion."

Gabriel's breathing completely stopped for five seconds. His gaze shifted from looking at the ground to the girl standing behind him. There was a swarm of bugs around her. Spiders, beetles, and ants on the ground, and butterflies, wasps, bees in the air, alongside other species he didn't recognize. He sunk his gaze into the two, yellow, honeycomb-patterned lenses of her visor.

"...What?" Gabriel asked, more disbelieving than confused or curious.

"The letter," she repeated herself, speaking slower this time. "I got it, and I read it. And I believe it."

Gabriel's eyes reflected the moonlight that came from the sky and, after he blinked, a couple of lonely tears went down his cheeks, with no other physical reaction to his crying. "Really?"

"Yes." There was no place for doubt in her voice. "Because I've been in a similar place before."

His breath hitched, and his expression turned into a pained one.

"Clockblocker is mad at you," Weaver said, with a depth to the voice. He realized that the swarm around her was buzzing in rhythm with her words, giving it a deeper value - she realized it, and stopped the effect before she spoke again. "Earth-shatteringly mad. I don't think he'll ever forgive you. The reason he acted like that in the first place is because you were apparently getting transferred to Houston, and after Kid Win died, and the promise you two made, he thought you were bailing out on him. What you did pretty much convinced him that not only he was right, but it was way worse than that."

Gabriel's eyes didn't stop releasing tears. "I'm so sorry," was the only thing he could muster up.

She stepped closer and knelt next to him. "Nothing to be sorry for. If I'm honest, you really screwed up, but… well, this will sound stupid, but it happens to the best of us. Tattletale told me about it, before the Endbringer memorial. That you were probably going to snap one day and do something stupid. I didn't believe her back then."

"I disappointed you, didn't I?" Gabriel inquired, feeling his head spin. He put a hand on the concrete floor to stop the spinning.

"She also said you were genuinely heroic, and attempting to be a good person," Weaver added, with a carefully neutral shrug. She was calm and controlled, as she continued. "And compared to Armsmaster and Shadow Stalker, it's really hard to disappoint me at this point. You can't really get much lower when the bar that's been set is pretty much underground."

He looked up at her, with slight confusion in his gaze. "H-how are you so calm?"

"You noticed that?" Weaver asked, cocking her head to the side with a sigh. Frustration at herself, probably for not hiding it well enough. "I can offload some of my emotions into my bugs. It's easier to talk to people that way. I'm really not disappointed, though. I couldn't hide that if I were."

"...Then what are you feeling?" Gabriel asked again, cocking his head to match hers.

"To start with, I'm pretty angry that the guy who used to say he's going to destroy the Endbringers is crying on a rooftop while one of them is running free in our city," she said, standing up and offering him a hand to do the same. "Come on. Let's go join the others."

Those were the words he so desperately needed to hear. Gabriel felt a surge of newfound energy and determination rush through him, and his expression turned visibly from sullen and depressed, to what it used to be two months ago. A hero. He raised his leg and put a foot down, placing his hand onto hers and gripping it tightly, standing up.

"Thank you," Gabriel said.

When they walked into the room, the capes and PRT officers were dead quiet, as Dauntless spoke, "-hard to reconcile."

Jack Slash's voice answered, amused, "That's rather sad for you."

Weaver and Longinus' heads swiveled, to look at the drone feed. The machine was flying and some kind of connection was established, allowing them to talk to the Nine. "I don't disagree," Dauntless said, with a forceful note to it, "But it's going to be much, much worse for you, once we strike."

Jack smiled, over the feed. He laid one hand on the Siberian's shoulder, as he walked around and behind her. "Really? That played out unexpectedly poorly the last time the Triumvirate tried it. And with our Noelle here, it may just play out even worse. I'm waiting for you to make the move."

Longinus smirked, looking at Jack through the drone feed. "Hey asshole, how is your hologram girlfriend?" he asked, crossing his arms smugly.

Everyone in the room sharply and abruptly turned to him, in shock. Dauntless moved his hand beneath his neck to one of the techies, to cut off the sound. Director Piggot was standing up, even as she approached one of the computers to do it herself. Haunt was pointedly ignoring the commotion.

Jack heard him. Over the feed, a smile crept onto the man's face, slow yet full. Bonesaw gasped and raised her apron to show off the autograph to the camera, while Jack spoke with delight, "Ah, Longinus. Good to hear from you. Playing fast and loose by the rules as always, I see. I'm certain everyone in that room is cringing right now."

"I couldn't care less. After all, I'm just a free man, trying to do what he t–" There was a mocking inclination in his tone, before something interrupted him.

Eidolon raised a clenched hand, and Longinus felt the air shake itself in his lungs, before going out and leaving him quite literally breathless. Eidolon stepped up to him, then slapped his hand on Longinus' back, causing a green bubble forcefield to emerge and contain the two of them. Every sound on the outside was blocked.

"What are you doing?" Eidolon asked, almost barking. His voice hummed with his power.

Longinus crossed his arms, looking up at him. "I don't really know. I just wanted to insult him, in some way. He took away my life."

"So he comes here? So he kills civilians in your name?" Eidolon asked, staring him down through their helmets.

Longinus' lips thinned at that. "Right."

"When I open this forcefield, you will stay quiet. You've already interrupted an attempt at convincing the Nine leaving this city, so we can fight them where we don't risk thousands of lives," Eidolon said, with an intense sense of ire to it. Eidolon raised his hand, and then began lowering it.

"Before you open the forcefield," Longinus hurriedly stopped him from dropping the bubble. "When I spoke with Shatterbird about a… certain subject, she mentioned you."

"Me? Shatterbird?" Eidolon shook his head in confusion, with leftover anger remaining in his movement from Longinus' interjection. Eidolon shook his head in puzzlement, gesturing at the screen where Shatterbird was visible in the background. "What does that insane woman have to do with any of this?"

"It's a sort of unrelated question. I just want to take advantage of the privacy we are sharing, right now," Longinus said, tapping his foot. Should her, or should he not do this? There was only one real chance to act here. "Are you aware of Cauldron?" he asked, dropping the bomb.

"How do you know about them?" Eidolon perked up, alarmed.

"I took a suitcase with six vials, drank three of them in a row. And I'm pretty sure an agent contacted me. A girl in a fedora, if I remember correctly," Longinus spoke.

Eidolon's shoulders sagged, as he shook his head in blank disbelief. "She didn't kill… no, of course she didn't. She wouldn't target you. The fact you're here means Cauldron wants you alive, just as they want me."

"Your power is fading."

"Yes," Eidolon said, without preamble or any attempt at hiding it. "Cauldron products have managed to stave off my loss, but it's burning out one way or another."

"I may be able to fix that for the foreseeable future." He stepped forward, injecting desperation into his tone, "I need Cauldron's help."

"I don't know if it's possible for me to contact them," Eidolon explained, shaking his head. He looked across the room at the screen of the TV, trying to follow the conversation as much as possible through the bubble. "You don't exactly come to them, or call them on the phone. When the time is right, they send one of theirs to you. That woman in the fedora, she's their bogeyman."

"I assumed so," Longinus answered, thoughtfully looking at him.

"What did she tell you?" Eidolon asked, facing him. "If she didn't kill, maim, or injure you, then she passed on a message of some kind."

"I'm pretty sure she tried to sway me back onto the heroic path." Longinus shrugged.

Eidolon didn't say anything for a short, tense moment. Once he did, it was in slow, measured words. "Then, for your good, and quite possibly the good of everyone you care about, I strongly suggest you follow her advice. You can't beat her, I'm not sure I could, if she decided to eliminate me," Eidolon said, shaking his head with just the slightest touch of despair.

"With the threat of the Birdcage glooming over me?" Longinus asked, crossing his arms.

"Trust me, Longinus, or Centurion. Gabriel. If Cauldron wants you to be a hero, you will be a hero," Eidolon said was if it were a fact of life. "If they want you to be in the Birdcage, Legend would have managed to arrest you already."

"Is Legend a member of Cauldron?" Longinus asked, curiously.

"Not that I know of," Eidolon answered, shaking his head. "Alexandria isn't either. We've first heard of them in the eighties. They were around for as long as powers were, from what I know. We've had dozens of incidents involving them, but we strive to cover up each one because there isn't any other option."

"I have a theory on how they make their vials. It's not Tinkertech," Longinus sprang.

The hero shook his head. "I'm aware of how they make them. Listen. I'm going to drop this forcefield in exactly ten seconds, otherwise, our prolonged conversation will look too suspicious. Talk to me after the battle with Noelle, and we will discuss this in greater detail," Eidolon offered.

"Tattletale knows as well," Longinus added, hoping to get that out there.

"I know she knows," Eidolon said, nodding along to it. "I intended to speak with her as well, after this. If Cauldron didn't kill either of you already, it means you're important. More importantly, it means they allow you to know. If you know, they know you know. Do you understand? We strive to coordinate people like that."

"Yes. I understand," Longinus nodded in understanding.

Eidolon nodded, then raised a hand. The forcefield broke, bright shatter-lines appearing alongside it in rough diamond shapes, before each shape shrunk into nothingness. The sound of Dauntless speaking returned, "-not survive. I assure you of that."

"I assure you to the contrary, Dauntless," Jack said. "Come to us, and we'll see."

Then, Jack nodded up at someone. The copy of Laserdream floated down, level with the drone. She created a red forcefield in front of herself - kind of like a focusing lens. She raised a finger, shooting a weak ray into the lens, which focused itself into a giant death beam visible only for a fraction of a second before the screen on the TV turned into white-black static dots.

"Well, shit," Tattletale said, with the barest note of amusement. "Isn't that great? And evil Laserdream's power was different, too."

Longinus sighed at Tattletale's words. It really was a shit situation.

"Prepare," Eidolon said, his voice booming over all others, "We don't have much time to plan. We'll treat this like any Endbringer situation. We'll attempt to sequester them near the crater, surround them, and attack them. I'll teleport the first strike force into place, and then we can add in reinforcements as necessary, swap out injured capes."

Legend nodded, then stated, "Strider is teleporting in more teams downstairs. I'm going to go get an aerial view."

"Let's get ready to rumble," Imp said, standing up.

Tattletale walked over to where the Undersiders were, at the horseshoe-shaped table. "We have confirmation that Bonesaw revived the corpses of the capes in the bunker," Tattletale informed them. "And they prrrobably fed those power-zombies to Echidna. So basically everyone who died..."

"Is gonna be our enemy," Grue said, nodding to himself.

Longinus scratched the nape of his back. "Do we hold back, in any way shape or form?" he asked.

"No. This is an S-class situation. Every clone, member of the Nine, and Noelle herself are prime targets for nuking," Tattletale replied to his question without shame. She looked back, and her eyes found Weaver. "Give me a sec," she said, and walked over to the Wards, striking up a conversation.

Longinus turned towards Haunt. The man, or boy - hard to judge his age with the grim-reaper looking costume - was sitting, calmly, at his spot at the table. The only thing lacking to complete the image was a cup of tea he could savor as everything descended into chaos.

"Oi, come here a moment!" he waved for him to come closer.

Haunt looked over at Longinus, then stood up and walked over to him, without saying anything.

"Can you transform by using solely one person's fear?" Longinus asked in curiosity, having a bright idea that will surely end up very bad.

"I know what you're talking about," Haunt answered, and promptly shook his head. "I can, but it won't yield the results you expect. Fears are rarely pure. Fear is tainted by expectations, or the denial of expectations. Even if you fear something powerful, it's not always the power itself, and even then, if your fear is limitless in scope, my power is. I could try, but I'm not sure what… reactions, it would yield." Haunt looked across the room, at the capes.

"Right," Longinus sighed, shaking his head. "Thanks for clarifying. Sorry to have bothered you," he said.

"I can try," Haunt said, head whipping to look at him. "Just say the word. Do understand that you will feel when I use my power on you, and it won't be very pleasant. You've felt it before, but I was only drawing on fringe elements. It's very interesting on my end. My trigger caused me to lose the ability to feel fear-associated emotions to some extent. This includes excitement and awe - they all seem dull, but when I use my power I can draw on that from other people."

"I'm used to fear," Longinus reassured him, closing his eyes for a brief moment.

"Is that permission?" Haunt queried, looking down a little below his neck.

Longinus breathed in, then out. "Go ahead," he squinted, preparing for the ungodly amount of terror he'd feel.

It passed by in a second, but he literally felt his heart thump against his chest, producing physical pain as enough adrenaline flooded his system to match his blood at a one-to-three ratio, before going away again.

At the end of the process, Haunt's black body seemed to melt into the background of reality, replaced by some kind of golden, bipedal beast, glowing and giving off energy. It didn't have a mouth, and instead of eyes, it had two bright holes that seemed to shine with radiant halcyon shafts of light, like you were in a cave, and light was coming in from a hole in the ceiling. Like floodlights. Instead of fingers on his legs and arms, he had sharp, knife-like talons that didn't bend, causing him to take forward clumsy steps. In favor of walking, Haunt floated up.

He looked at Longinus, ostensibly attempting to communicate, but failing. He couldn't speak, and just like he said, didn't seem to have Scion's emotional aura. Maybe because Longinus wasn't afraid of the aura itself. Like Haunt said, the form was Scion, but it was undistilled Scion. Tainted by beliefs and expectations. Were the knife-limbs referring to Jack Slash? Some element that was irrevocably connected?

"What the fuck is that?" some nameless cape asked. People whipped around to see, and everyone poised themselves for combat.

"He's your doom, foolish mortal," Regent answered, with a sense of glory, like a priest announcing the end.

Longinus raised a hand high in the air, "It's a test! Calm down!" he shouted, to reassure everyone in the room. After that, he lowered his hand and sighed deeply. "Alright, it didn't work. You can turn back now, if you want."

Haunt floated down to the ground, and shook his head. Tattletale stepped in to interpret, saying, "He can't, or doesn't want to. Probably the former."

Aegis approached Longinus, only to hand him one of the standard Endbringer situation armbands, without saying anything. Longinus accepted it, looking down at his reflection in the screen.

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Birdsie

Dec 8, 2019

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Threadmarks Dira Necessitas 11.z (Short Donation Interlude: Fedora Lady)

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Birdsie

Birdsie

Sharp Talons Cleave The Worthy

Dec 9, 2019

#4,264

Disclaimer: I wrote Donation Interlude for shits and giggles. No one's actually paying me for this, so chill.

Cauldron had originally agreed to a non-interference policy in Brockton Bay, to ensure that the Terminus project could undergo with minimal interference.

That plan sunk low, and then even lower when the path informed her that the prime road to having Gabriel join them would begin with placing him in Brockton Bay.

Rather annoying, that, but no one argued it. And like that, it was agreed he'd be kept there, until the very moment he could be transferred elsewhere, preferably under Eidolon or Legend. A path was already laid out, with careful preparation, to have him join the Wards ENE by finding out about them from a shop vendor, then nudging Director Piggot into being more trusting and laid-back in the process of accepting him. They could transfer him in two months after that, once he'd gained sufficient exposure to the parahuman world to deal with threats like the incoming tinker drone attack on Houston, which would occur on the fourth of July.

Naturally, this came with problems. Gabriel would develop a poorly-mannered tendency of falling into trouble. Contessa would have to spend a mediocre amount of time steadying his progress, nudging him towards carefully pre-selected conflicts so he could gain experience while pushing away fatal threats.

Almost like one of the Entities, in that regard. The thought made her frown. She looked forward, to see glimpses of the steps she'd have to take to protect his life.

Contessa tied the length of the rope around Hemorrhagia's right foot, crouched, in three concise movements, before kicking her away and turning to toss the dagger straight into Animos' ankle, to prevent him from transforming. Redbone managed to let out a wilting shriek of sonic energy, and Contessa tilted to the side, stepping away just on time. The force of the blast caused the cinderblock the other end of the rope was tied to fall off the ledge of the construction site, making Hemorrhagia ascend into the air.

Contessa was on a vantage point, on the edge of a five-story hotel. She held her Beretta M9 up, aimed at a very specific point, and waited. Three seconds later, Centurion flew parallel to her sights. She fired the pistol at an exact angle, point, and moment, causing a tinker sniper bullet to curve just slightly out of the way to hit his leg instead of his torso. Somewhere, Coil's sniper was very irked right now. The sound of the sniper's gunfire concealed her own silenced pistol's discharge.

Like that, steps three-hundred and fifty-six through seventy-one were completed. Contessa walked back, as a door opened behind her.

She roundhouse-kicked Thirty-Six in the face, slamming him into the ground with enough force to stun him for at least half a minute. Contessa raised her pistol and aimed, firing three bullets and disabling Thirteen, Seventeen, and Twenty where they stood, non-lethally. It wouldn't do to eliminate worthwhile parahumans.

Contessa picked up the unconscious Forty-Four by the collar, holding the gun up to fire back when the rest of the Yangban would step through the doorway. "Door us," she whispered, as a portal opened behind her. She walked back, firing eight times in quick succession to prevent Thirty-One and Twenty-Two from entering the room and firing bolts of lightning at her.

Moments later, as they came into the room, they found the fedora-wearing woman and Forty-Four gone.

Contessa nodded to herself.

Business as usual.

Last edited: Jan 19, 2020

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Dec 9, 2019

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Threadmarks Mens Rea 12.1

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Birdsie

Birdsie

Sharp Talons Cleave The Worthy

Dec 9, 2019

#4,277

After the armbands were handed out to everyone, and the protocols for safe usage explained, there was a period of wait. Drone feeds on multiple screens showed the Nine walking around the Fortress Constructions plaza, alongside Trickster and 'codename Echidna' as the PRT had decided to call Noelle.

The people in the conference room, excepting the PRT workers and Director Piggot, were all standing up and talking, with teams attempting to form strategies. Every half a minute, Strider, Myrddin, and half a dozen other lesser teleporters or Movers came into the room, teleporting in the next group to the combat zone in advantageous positions.

Vista walked up to Longinus gingerly, lacking in confidence. Aegis and Clockblocker were staring at her back as she did, which was probably the cause of her unfirm foundation. She looked up at Longinus, into his eyes. "Hey."

Longinus felt a smile appear on his face. "Hi," he responded, waving.

"I don't believe what they all say," she exclaimed, kind of blank in tone. Trying to keep herself emotionless. "Please come back?"

"If… If I do come back to the PRT, it'll be in Houston," Longinus answered, his voice a little sad.

"Oh..." Vista looked down, hiding her disappointment by keeping her face and voice blank. "That's okay, I guess."

"Not because I don't want to, but… people here associate me with somebody who… did bad things. And Clock wouldn't have me back, and I get him," Longinus spoke, shaking his head.

"No! I get it," she said, looking up at him and nodding slowly. "And, yeah, he's… mad at you. He's changed. He Second Triggered, you know? After the… thing."

Longinus swallowed hard. "I assumed something like that would happen…"

She nodded, slow, hesitant. "I'm not sure if I'm allowed to talk about his new power. The PRT didn't have me sign any NDA's, but, still… I guess, basically, it's selective now? He can touch and move objects he freezes, without them unfreezing. Lots of fine control stuff. He can freeze a person and let them think and move their mouth, with everything else frozen, or keep them from thinking but push them elsewhere or tie them to a chair, or something."

Longinus smiled weakly, looking down. "I'm… it'll sound bad, but this is good for him. He's always wanted a power-up, right? Even if the circumstances were horrendous," he said.

"It'sss not a straight power-up, though. His duration dropped a lot. It was up to ten minutes before, now it's only three if he gets really lucky. Usually less than one," she clarified, with a smile that almost looked apologetic.

"That's usually how Second Triggers go," Longinus shrugged, sighing. "I'm sorry, about it all."

"I don't want to scare you," she began and looked behind herself with a kind of fearful glance. Clockblocker wasn't looking at them anymore, but even Longinus noticed that he had a different air to him, a distinct aura - he was just… pissed. Shadow Stalker kind of pissed. Eternally-angry-looking. "But I think he kind of went off his rocker after all that. We've been talking to him, and Piggot got us one of the best therapists in the PRT, but it's not helping. He's kind of… okay, yeah - don't want to scare you, again - but I think he's kind of obsessed with hunting you down and doing harm to you. You and the Nine. If he wasn't in the Wards, I'd be scared if I were you. Just saying." She shrugged.

Longinus shrugged helplessly. He wasn't scared, maybe a little off-put, but not scared of him. Maybe it was an arrogant thought, but he knew he was significantly stronger than him.

"Oh, and he can pass on his effect through thrown objects. He freezes a pebble, throws it at you, and you freeze too," Vista said, then scratched the back of her neck awkwardly. "Really feels weird saying this, since… you're a villain now, and all. I feel like I'm committing a borderline federal crime."

"Vista," Longinus stopped her, putting a hand on her shoulder. In the background, Clockblocker tensed, indicating he was watching them from the corner of his eye. "I don't… intend to be a bad guy. That's… not me."

"I know," she said, nodding. There was a sadness to the move, a kind of stiffness, a reluctance. Like she didn't want to compromise or felt she was losing some kind of argument or discussion. "I know you're not. Yeah. Gallant… uh, called us about you. Asking how you're doing."

Longinus' eyes widened in surprise. "Really?"

"Yeah." She looked up at him. "That's what I was supposed to start with, uhm… this conversation, I mean. Kind of went off-tangent. Heh." She smiled, showing her teeth, one of them missing with a hole into her mouth. Just a dopey kid underneath it all.

Longinus chuckled and shook his head. "What did you tell him…?" he asked, getting serious again.

"I didn't, uh, didn't anything. I'd said I would ask if I ever saw you, so I am," Vista clarified, looking him in the eyes kind of expectantly.

He thought for a second, taking his hand off her shoulder and putting it under his chin. "I mean… not longer than twenty minutes ago, I was legitimately considering killing myself, but…" he stopped for breath as if saying that punched the air out of him. He also ignored the shocked widening of her eyes. "Weaver came to the rooftop. She talked to me, and… she said something that gave me newfound determination.."

"Oh, that's ironic. You're gonna laugh at this," Vista said, shaking her head with a snort and a smile on her lips. "Clockblocker and Weaver get along now. There's rumors in the media they're dating, but I'm like, ninety-eight percent sure that's not true. They're begrudging friends. He keeps making quips about her bugs… well, as much as his… new attitude lets him."

Longinus didn't laugh, or smile. He didn't react at all to those statements. In fact, he froze for a moment. The head honcho of Longinus-Hate-Club, getting along with one of the few people he can call a friend? Bad business for him.

"And the branding department wants Weaver to sell honey, you know? As like, starting her own brand of that? Her own beehives? I'm not really eager to have bees in the Wards HQ, but it's kind of a fun idea," Vista said, moving her hand, and trying to shift the conversation topic to something lighter.

Longinus was broken out of his thoughts by that, and he laughed. "Oh, that's nice," he chuckled.

"Yeah," Vista said, nodding at him.

In that moment, there was a thundercrack and flash of light somewhere outside the room. A PRT uniform called out from a list, "Wards ENE!"

"Sorry, gotta go!" Vista said, waving to him as she broke off into a run to rejoin her team. Weaver looked back at the Undersiders, at Longinus in particular, and have him a dim nod, before walking out.

Longinus waved at her as she left.

Down on the screen, with the drone feeds, action was taking place. Capes visible in numerous places were being directed to ambush 'codename Echidna' and the Nine.

Echidna appeared to be eating corpses of the people the Nine killed, consuming them for biomass, even as she spat out more clones.

Longinus frowned, when he noticed something that was either Trainwreck or just a heavily mutated humanlike blob. The creature slithered across the ground, and its body reached out like a bacteria, picking up trash with pseudopods, and beginning to use it as an extra skin layer, before it slithered away even further, presumably to tinker up the armor for itself. Down across the street, another naked clone tipped over a trashcan and took out a small object from it - a rotten apple - before he ran back to the plaza and began to dig in the earth, to plant it. Shatterbird floated over him, looking at him as he did it.

None of the Nine were making clones of themselves, interestingly enough.

A green-blue blur descended, humanoid in shape. Eidolon, followed by a squad of other capes. The two sides regarded each other for several moments, with a feed from Eidolon talking about a last chance for them to surrender. Jack laughed at him.

In that moment, a number of Blasters began firing at them from the rooftops. One of Flechette's projectiles impacted Echidna in the center of mass, emerging from the other side. The trail left by the projectile outlined the trajectory it flew.

Echidna screamed, and a Laserdream clone rose into the sky. She created twin lenses of forcefield in front of herself, then zapped them with wide, but transient laserbeams. The lenses focused the shots, hardening and compounding the light and causing massive twin beams of light to hit the corner of the rooftop, causing concrete to spray across the street. By that time, Flechette had already used her power, holding a needle and using it to slow down her descent by tearing a gouge in a wall and decreasing its effects gradually as she descended to the ground.

Elsewhere, Eidolon dodged some of Jack's and Shatterbird's attacks. Some of them hit, causing a forcefield shaped like a diamond egg to appear, flickering around Eidolon's body to protect him, with a faded gradient on the side away from the impact. Eidolon lobbed a ball of green energy at them in response.

Trickster, or one of his clones, used his power. Eidolon was swapped out for a clone of the combat thinker from Coil's base, only recognizable from the characteristic, efficient gait he used to stride forward. What was his name? Crackpop? Something like that. Longinus didn't bother to remember.

The hero reacted in an instant, releasing a half-dozen blue sparks from each hand. They grew until they were each three feet across, crackling with electricity, moving at a walking pace as they slowly homed in on the Nine and Echidna. The Tricksters used their power, trying to mitigate the damage, swapping Noelle for a minivan, Jack for one of the heroes. Eidolon kept releasing the sparks, as he walked in closer to them. With every moment, the frequency of his releases grew, building up, as the entire battlefield grew into a hell of homing electric bullets.

The characteristic thundercrack of Strider's teleportation broke the capes out of their reverie, as he took another squad of capes. The Boston Wards, this time. Longinus saw as Weld said something to his team, before Strider took them.

Myrddin, bearded, and wearing his brown robe and staff, walked up to the Undersiders, saying, "I can fit in five more into my pocket dimension."

Longinus looked behind himself. Tattletale, Grue, Imp, Regent, Bitch and her dogs, and Haunt's current golden monstrous body.

Tattletale shrugged at them, stepping away. "I'm not going to be much use, my power is strained as it is."

Grue hesitantly reached out, and Myrddin nodded to him. He extended his staff, and Grue seemed to compress - his head and feet distorting inwards until they touched at the point where his navel would have been, where he disappeared with a flash of light and yellow glitter.

Longinus nodded briefly, reaching out as well. Myrddin tapped him with his staff, and Longinus saw a flash of light, a half-second of darkness, and then a flash of light again. When the sudden colors ended, he, Grue, Imp, Regent, Haunt, and several other capes were on a rooftop. He recognized some of them, if only by loose association with news - a Protectorate heroine with several vision modes and a Striker punch that varied in force depending on the mode she was using, a tinker villain from Albuquerque specializing in chemicals and crystals - what was he doing here? - and several others that he only recognized by costume, if not power.

A cursory look with Shard Sight gave him the context; a glass manipulator capable of forming weapons from glass - good counter for Shatterbird, Longinus thought - and eventually compressing them into a single large wrecking ball kind of like Sundancer, and a Thinker/Breaker who had three options for exotic hearing. The woman with the variable vision modes and enhanced punch was a Cauldron cape, he noticed.

"Alright," Grue said, looking over the edge of the rooftop. The fighting was taking place maybe one block away. At the corner of the street, Longinus spotted Eidolon not flying, but running at superspeed on the air, leaving behind a trail of fire. Echidna roared - a surprisingly loud but human sound - and released a scattershot of vomit, which Crawler mimicked with roaring laughter - forcing Eidolon to dodge.

Longinus looked at Grue and stretched briefly. "What's the plan?" he asked, turning the rest of his body towards him.

"Kill Jack Slash," Grue answered simply. "And Noelle, too. That's pretty obvious."

"Noelle is to be considered unkillable, for now," Longinus pointed out, as he burst into golden flames as he pumped up his environmental shield to the maximum setting.

"Eidolon sure is trying his best," the Thinker/Breaker answered, craning his head in the battle's direction.

Down on the street, Strider teleported in Chevalier and the Philadelphia team. Chevalier ran down the street, his blade collapsing to be smaller, as he jumped into the air. At the apex of his rise, the sword became longer and heavier, and he used its weight to guide his fall straight into a Trickster clone that was saved at the last moment by one of its own kind. Chevalier instead killed a Laserdream clone, slicing her cleanly in half between the eyes and down to the genitals.

"We're definitely not holding fucking back," Grue muttered, then looked at Longinus. "Can you get us down? Not much good that we can do from up here."

Longinus nodded and extended his hand outwards. He oozed golden energy from his fingertips, which slowly flowed down the ground and condensed into a golden rope. "Hold on," he said as he threw the rope down. It was just long enough to reach the ground.

Eidolon raised a hand, and the visible light around Noelle altered itself, distorting like there was a black hole within it. Noelle screamed, with multiple mouths on her body, as a chunk of her body tore off and immediately began to regenerate. The effect caught Shatterbird, consuming her left arm and leaving behind a stump. At this distance, Longinus could hear the song, in tune with her shocked breathing. Jack pointed and said something, and Shatterbird looked up in terror as Echidna sat on her and swallowed her whole.

"Don't let the meal be wasted," or something along those lines. That's what Jack said, Longinus realized. He felt a creeping sensation of how fucked up the situation was.

The capes began to descend the rope down to street level. To their left, Myrddin floated down and brought in a Wards team from some city that Longinus didn't recognize. On the western coast, maybe? One of them was a Cauldron cape. Longinus stopped using his Shard Sight to focus on the fight in front of him.

Echidna spat out a naked Middle Eastern woman, malformed, missing her eyes. The woman screamed, and the glass panes and windows across the street broke, before flying towards her and beginning to form a storm that protected her.

Eidolon swooped down, shot a pebble of the distorted air power - some kind of gravity alteration - at her, and the Shatterbird's neck was crumpled with sickening crunching sounds, ending her life before she could exercise her power any more. After that, the hero zipped up to avoid an attack from Burnscar and Crawler's spittle.

Longinus flew up in the air, charging up a laser and shooting it directly at Jack. It was meant to be explosive: even if he dodged it, he'd get some form of damage.

Jack noticed the attack coming, looking across the battlefield and leaping aside. The explosion would have caught him anyway, but in that moment, Jack was replaced by a large, blobby monster that was a Trainwreck clone. The creature died instantly, its weaker body succumbing to the force and turning into a bloody gelato pulp.

Longinus took a secondary look around the battlefield. All of the Nine, plus clones of Laserdream, Miss Militia, Trainwreck, Crackpop, Forest, and now Shatterbird, as well as the occasional unpowered clones of ordinary humans were being aided by the Slaughterhouse Nine and a large proto-Endbringer. All of this, fighting against the combined might of the Protectorate.

It wasn't even an Endbringer fight. It was a full-out war. The very height of escalation. The only thing that could've made this worse was if the Teeth saw it going down from Captain's Hill and decided 'fuck it, we might as well join in.'

Echidna moved across the street, and one part of her body swung a mighty talon-ended bird foot at Chevalier. He grunted, thrown down the street, but by the time he stood up, Echidna was already over him. She moved her mass into him, and Chevalier stuck to her, as if glued. He tried to move, but couldn't, and was soon absorbed alongside his sword and armor, disappearing beneath her skin.

Longinus saw Chevalier get swallowed by Echidna's mass. "No!" he shouted, blasting the elephant-sized monstrosity with a laser worthy of Leviathan.

A Forest clone used a shard of glass left behind by a Shatterbird to cut his palm open. He tipped it downward towards the air, with vines leaking out and touching the ground, then expanding across it, slithering into the concrete. Within moments, gourds and pumpkin-like growths began to emerge. In seconds more, they had vine and bark bodies, either bipedal or humanoid, and were trying to extricate themselves from the earth like zombies.

Ostensibly tired, the Forest clone collapsed into the arms of one of them, before it tossed him aside without respect or ceremony and picked up the shard of glass he used to cut his palm as a weapon. The pumpkin soldiers mounted the bipedal monsters and rode out in a cavalry charge, before Legend swooped down and blasted them into pieces.

Echidna spat out a giant, fat, oversized woman, almost grotesque and macabre. Covered in roiling layers of fat, her head itself as large as a tire from a car. She began to crawl, then the lights on the street flickered and gathered, covering up her body in motes, before she was a ball of light. An overcooked Purity.

Soon after, she was followed by a Stormtiger and Fog, similarly obese and grossly mutated. One of them had three eyes, but Longinus wasn't sure if it was the Stormtiger or the Fog. The Fog, it seemed, judging from how he turned into yellow sickly gas and moved upwards to follow Eidolon and Alexandria.

Longinus enabled his Shard Sight to look at Alexandria briefly. She was too far away. He'd have to get closer, and that might not have been a good idea in this climate.

Grue was using his power to cover up the capes in way of the pumpkin cavalry's charge, causing the attackers to diffuse and get taken down by one of the Protectorate brutes.

A Laserdream clone slammed into Longinus, dragging him across the tarmac, hands on his shoulders. She screamed at him. The left side of her face, including the eye looked like melted cheese, revealing bits of flesh and flowing blood, while the right side was mutated with gross bulges and bubbles of meat.

Longinus screamed out in unrelenting anger, punching her in the face so hard her neck snapped backward, killing her instantly. "You're not her!" he shouted.

A Miss Militia reacted with joyous laughter, free and unbeholden by any kind of restriction. She raised a pair of AK-47s and began to fire shots at him, five of them peppering across his chest and causing him to feel force equivalent to very strong pokes. A laser pierced through her brain the very moment her rifles opened fire. "You're a fake," Longinus reassured himself, talking through grit teeth as he clenched his fists.

"You holding up alright?" Grue yelled from across the battlefield.

"Yeah!" Longinus shouted, waving at him to reassure him.

One of the Trainwreck clones returned, wearing a steaming hunk of garbage, with an old, eighties-looking fridge as a chassis, and using the spinning propeller from a ventilation duct as a weapon. He swung, cutting bright gray lines in the concrete, and laughed as he charged. Regent exercised his power, making him trip, then someone sunk a dagger into the back of his neck. Imp?

In the background, Legend managed a strafing run on Echidna's body, unleashing a volley of freezing lasers, then burning lasers, followed by disintegrating ones. Chevalier just barely managed to crawl out of a hole in Echidna's body, before it closed up behind him.

Something changed, in the battlefield. In Echidna's strategy. She was barking orders at her clones, using the Tricksters to swap herself with cars, vans, and objects in the area, to avoid Eidolon and Legend - Alexandria wasn't exactly a viable counter for her, since attacking Echidna would require getting near.

Jack stopped using his power for a moment, to approach Siberian and Echidna, and told them both something, before pointing across the battlefield.

The Siberian smiled ferally, then jumped ten meters into the air and landed behind Echidna, mounting her like a steed. The reaction from the Protectorate was utter despair, as everyone broke combat and began to move to get out of their way. Echidna tumbled down the street, significantly larger than the size of an elephant. She trailed the bodies of clones behind herself; a Purity, a Miss Militia, another Trainwreck, and several others. A Stormtiger picked himself up, creating gauntlets of air and beginning to rush his way towards the Boston Wards, where Weld jumped into his way and engaged him in melee combat.

Echidna roiled, and jumped in Longinus' direction, looking down at him with a bestial grin matching the Siberian's.

Longinus flew upwards as quickly as he could, but he felt a sudden blow to his chest. As he began to tumble, he just barely spotted Jack Slash standing in a post-slash position with a kitchen knife, grinning at him from a distance. Echidna was already waiting below him, with her arms reaching out. With all of her arms reaching out, over a dozen animal or human-like limbs with different varieties of fingers trying to catch him like a mother catching a baby.

He changed direction suddenly with a blast of kinetic energy and found himself blocked off by a Laserdream clone who produced half a dozen lenses in his way to deny him a second of movement. A Purity clone used that time to her advantage, loading up a charge of kinetic light and firing it at him. Longinus's shadow-warp power moved him out of the way of the blow, but it was his last use.

Fuck fuck fuck fuck, fuck, fuck! he shouted in his own mind, flying away as quickly as he could, terrified. Not for his own life, but for the consequences of him falling into Echidna's embrace.

Myrddin floated down and touched him with his staff, and everything blinked out of reality. Longinus found himself in a white empty space, devoid of any sound or anything else besides the… the whiteness of the place. The ceiling, walls, and floor were just infinite white, so much so that the difference between them couldn't be told. In a single spot ahead of himself, there was a distortion of crystalline lines, gathering together to form a translucent image of what Myrddin was seeing.

The wizard wove between attacks. Crawler moved in his direction like a dog eager to play with a chew toy, and Myrddin moved his staff to draw a blue 'S' shape in the air, adding a sideway line that curved on the right side. The symbol seemed to click into reality, with a second layer of white and a third layer of blue on top, before it became a circle and fired out as a long cannon of compressed air. Crawler was pushed back, and dug in his heels and tentacles to stand in place, trying to walk against the pressure. Myrddin left the air cannon there, as he floated to a rooftop and extended his staff.

With that, Longinus reappeared, looking at the exhausted wizard who hit the ground and breathed in. "That was quite something. It seems Jack Slash told her to focus on you and other capes with strong powers."

"Thank you," Longinus said. He raised his right hand, launching a burst of blue flames all over the wizard. Myrddin stood a little straighter, and breathed in one last time, before floating up and teleporting in a flash of light.

Longinus looked down, and found himself a single city block away from the fighting. One of the Purity clones was engaged in mortal laser combat with Legend for what looked to be the entirety of eleven seconds, before he got tricky and managed to fire a spray of rays behind her, which curved around and slammed into her back with enough force to shatter her spine.

He spoke in his Endbringer armband. "Should I retreat to focus on healing the injured?"

Dauntless' voice answered him candidly, eight seconds later, "Your choice, Longinus."

Longinus nodded to himself and checked the armband for closeby injured people. The Movers were depositing them at the edges of the combat zone, far away that no one save maybe Burnscar or Shatterbird could get to that area in time. The nearest one was one-hundred and sixty meters north-west-north of him.

He floated up from the rooftop and aviated there, quickly accelerating to his top speed. Within seconds, he was in sight of a girl in a purple-violet costume that he recognized as Flechette, holding her bleeding shoulder. She waved to him one-handedly. "Hey!"

Longinus floated down next to her and touched his feet on the ground.

"Mannequin caught me," she explained, with a hiss of air. "I got him too, though. Bastard got his arm cleaved off in exchange for nicking mine."

Longinus nodded and put his hand on her injury. His hand burst into blue flames, which attached themselves to Flechette's wound. The golden liquid filled her wounds out, glowing and releasing sparkling motes into the air.

"Holy shit, are you the Holy Grail or something?" she asked, extending a hand, asking him to help her up without words.

Longinus lifted her up and shook his head. "Nah, I'm just an asshole who made bad life choices. I'm working on it, though."

"Hey, don't beat up yourself over it, Gab," she said, whispering the last word knowingly. "I don't really know you too well, but I trust Vista enough to know that you're probably not as guilty as Clockblocker seems to think."

"Can I, uh, ask a question that I want answered, since there's a chance I might die today?" Longinus inquired.

"Shoot," she said, picking up her arbalest and looking at a nearby rooftop. Another silent request, to be moved over there.

Longinus exhaled, releasing golden streaks from the soles of his feet. They moved over to Flechette and wrapped around her in a bubble, linked to his environmental shield through a tether.

"Are, uh, Weaver and Clockblocker actually dating?" he asked, as they both floated off the ground, towards the rooftop.

"What?" she asked, looking at him with the kind of look you gave to someone who asked you if the sky is red, and if you, too, can see the gnomes dancing across the celestial firmament.

"I'll take that as a 'no' then," Longinus shot back, withholding a sigh of relief. They touched down on the rooftop, and the bubble around Flechette faded into nothingness.

She nodded to him thankfully, then loaded a needle into her arbalest, before stepping forward and putting a foot down on the ledge of the rooftop. She barely aimed down, before releasing a power-enhanced shot at Jack Slash. He didn't even have to move, as a Trickster clone swapped him for another Trickster clone, causing the insides of its head to pop out of the other side in a pink mist. Flechette cursed, then took cover as bits of concrete chipped off where she stood.

Longinus floated off the rooftop and checked his armband for other wounded. He flew across the one-hundred meters of space, only to find himself suddenly stopping as something on his ankle pulled taut. He looked down, and saw Mannequin standing there, with his hand's fingers wrapped around Longinus' shin, a length of chain connecting them both, while Mannequin employed the help of a snarling, mutated Trainwreck who'd assembled armor for himself from a car to hold them both in place.

He groaned in frustration, using a blade construct to cut off the area Mannequin had grabbed, leaving him without a foot. The pain flooded his system, and Mannequin reacted in surprise while Longinus screamed and lost control of his flight, tumbling down to the ground and stopping near a lamp post.

Mannequin didn't really seem to care too much in the end. He dashed forward, accelerating to the speed of a car in a single step, his single arm trailing behind him. As he got a second away from contact, Mannequin's torso rotated around its own axis, his arm raising itself as a telescopic blade popped out, prepared for a whirlwind slash.

Longinus exercised his telekinesis to push himself out of Mannequin's range, behind himself.

The bladed arm extended on a chain within seconds, and slashed Longinus' helmet hard enough to go through as if it were made from styrofoam, causing a sideways crack to develop between his eyeslits, connecting them. There was a brief surge of heat, as he felt his torn nose regrowing itself.

Mannequin was already moving in for a second attack, when one of the Blasters took advantage of his relative lack of cover and shot a purple, paper-like projectile at him. It slammed into Mannequin's neck and decapitated him on the spot, causing the remaining white body to stumble forward three steps, before slumping on the ground, dead. Jack's whistle could be heard across the street, over all of the fighting.

Longinus shot a piercing laser at Mannequin's center of mass. It left behind a slightly gray scorch mark on his enamel chestplate, but didn't do anything else. At the same time, Longinus flew up and away from the body and Trainwreck's clone.

Echidna moved to swallow the remnants of Mannequin, which startled to move in the last moment as if to escape her desperately. She didn't care, reaching out and swallowing Mannequin's foot, dragging him across the road. He dug his fingers into the ground, trying to keep himself from being swallowed. When his knees were consumed, he turned onto his back and slashed at her body desperately with his blade, only for his sword to get stuck as well, and consumed.

Longinus peripherally observed the situation, and he felt a pang of satisfaction. It was so good to see a member of the Nine panicked and scared. Genuinely. He kept flying away, as far away from the fight as possible, so that he could regain his composure and check for wounded.

As he looked down, he saw that Echidna consumed a gravity-manipulator and Grue, absorbing them into her mass. He paused, as he saw Grue's black-leathered hand reaching out in desperate attempt at extricating himself. Echidna yelled something, about how everyone will pay for making her like this. Something else, about how the world conspired to make her life a living hell. Jack nodded, and yelled something in affirmation of her suspcions, fueling her paranoid conspiracy theories.

Echidna screamed in rage, and her body opened up, pushing out clones from various holes, kind of like turds. He didn't see Regent get eaten, but a boy very eerily similar to Regent emerged from her body, before whipping his hand and causing Legend to tumble out of the air, before he picked himself up and annihilated the clone with a blast of thermal radiation colored a blue-purple hue.

Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!

Longinus kept flying away, checking his armband for information on the injured. Fifty-six meters south, and twenty-two downwards.

He followed the directions, trying to stay out of sight from any of the vill- enemies. One of the Impurities noticed him, weaving up to intercept him on his path, firing a triple-helix of light at him, three streaks weaving around one another.

Longinus spun around to dodge the triple helix, and fired an array of piercing lasers aimed at the Purity clone's head and chest. She dodged much like him, blasting back with her own shot. It hit Longinus in the chest, causing him to tumble and leave behind a streak of gold visible to his own eyes.

He felt his back crack a little, as he impacted something hard yet flexible. Looking around himself, his vision a little dizzy and blurry, he saw a wrecked car had stopped his fall.

Hah! Life inspires art, he thought, getting up as the heat of his healing power fixed his spine well enough for him to stand. The Purity floated down, accompanied by a Trickster, and two Miss Militias.

Longinus looked around in a desperate attempt to find support. He was utterly surrounded. The fight with Echidna was taking place a single street away from him - he had to fight.

The Militia on the left raised a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, while the one on the right instead used some kind of mutated crossbow with a box on top that must have been a magazine. The bolt at the front was ignited, with the use of a red crystal at the bottom. The real Miss Militia definitely couldn't do that. They both fired at the same time.

He felt adrenaline in his veins, as a single bolt slammed into the space just below his neck, pushing him and causing the back of his legs to hit the hood of the car again. He almost fell onto it, as the RPG released its grenade at him. Longinus closed one eye in anticipation, raising a hand and creating a golden wall between them. The rocket exploded, shattering it into pieces that were flung everywhere.

He looked up, and saw the Purity had used that time to charge herself up. She fired a massive blast of light with both hands, and Longinus closed his eyes, trying to reinforce himself with as many layers of construct armor as he could… it wasn't necessary, the blast never hit him.

He opened his eyes, and saw a man in green, scale-covered power armor, a single glowing ring connected to a small backpack-sized generator with three metal coils. In his right hand was a spear, its tip a blurred gray-green, and to his right, there was a green suit, floating in the air using a jetpack, but not using a ring.

"I got you," he said, in a mechanically distorted voice, but one that was familiar. A brief flicker of a green environmental shield propelled him upwards, and the man swung his spear into Purity's stomach. There, the environmental shield reactivated, as he moved around and threw her at the Miss Militia to the right, while the Dragonsuit that accompanied him released a spray of micro-missiles that blew up Trickster's head, and killed the other Miss Militia clone.

The green lantern ring-user hovered down and offered his hand to Longinus. "My name is Defiant," he introduced himself.

Longinus looked at him in disbelief, taking his hand and standing up on his now regrown leg. The only thing he could say was a single word, a name, which came out as a whisper.

"Colin?"

90

Birdsie

Dec 9, 2019

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Birdsie

Birdsie

Sharp Talons Cleave The Worthy

Dec 10, 2019

#4,300

It's time for a meth sequence.

"Let's go," Defiant said, helping Longinus up from the dented hood of the car.

"Do you have another one of those?" Longinus asked, as his body loaded with confidence. If Colin was here, he knew he could make it.

"Only this one," Defiant answered. He held up the ring. It was bigger than in the comics, its radius reaching halfway to the other fingers, and it was long outwards, too, as long as a fingernail. There were three cables extending from the band itself, going down into Defiant's armor and then emerging on his back, where they connected to a little generator the size of a particularly modest suitcase. "I tried to miniaturize as much as I could, but it's a rather demanding project. Dragon installed a helper AI for managing the functions and constructs. I think it's one of the most complicated things I built. The charge only lasts a few minutes, and I think I'll need years to even-"

"Boys, I hate to interrupt, but we have a job to do," Dragon crashed the boasting session, looking down the street. Echidna screamed, as she moved and swallowed up Clockblocker's extended hand. He looked briefly surprised when his power didn't work, then three hands grew out from Echidna's body, pushing his back to make him sink in further into her flesh.

Weld ran forward, raising his forearm to protect himself from Crawler's acid spit, which left giant holes in his body and caused him to scream. He punched into Echidna's gut, making her scream as well, before the Siberian emerged from a ruined store. The striped woman was holding Rime, one of Alexandria's subordinates in hand, and tossed her into Echidna, before striding over in Weld's direction.

Alexandria stopped herself for a moment, seeing this and clearly hesitating for a brief moment. It took her a second to steel herself, before she blasted down into the ground and swopped Weld away, the Siberian almost managing to claw her back, had Alexandria not tilted her body perpendicular to the ground.

Longinus loaded up a laser of pure kinetic energy. Enough force to crack concrete or shatter a human skull. He blasted it at the Siberian, hoping to put some distance between her and Alexandria, but the Siberian didn't react. Her flesh didn't even budge, as if his laser was just some kind of cosmetic fog and she was a wall of steel.

But it did make her notice him. The Siberian turned, looking at Longinus, Defiant and Dragon with a feral grin, then bounded across the street, leaving behind cracks in the places her feet stepped on.

Echidna spat out another batch of clones. An undercooked Grue, missing his left foot and forced to crawl, helped up by a Trainwreck clone who used his blobby physiology to connect himself to the stump, then around the Grue's body, creating some kind of fucked up symbiotic organism. There was a Clockblocker, his right eye's sclera black and the irises a sickly puke yellow, and the area around the eye was covered in blisters.

The Clockblocker picked up a shard of glass, then tossed it at a cape that Longinus didn't recognize - the cape stopped moving, and Clockblocker crossed the distance. He took the shard of glass once again, holding it tightly and stabbing it into the cape's stomach, even as they were frozen.

Siberian bounded and leaped from the ground, managing to catch the Dragonsuit's left arm in her jaws, and tearing it off before spitting it out. Defiant used a construct shield to keep her at bay, before she simply walked through it as if it didn't exist. He changed his tactics, wrapping up Longinus in a large forcefield bubble and tossing him into the air before he began to retreat himself.

Longinus broke out of the green bubble, flying away from the Siberian as well, following Defiant. The Dragonsuit remained, as its back opened up to reveal four long, narrow panels with what appeared to be LEDs on them. Instead of floodlights, they shot out finger-thin lines of curving light, which impacted the Siberian's body to no effect. The panels closed, and the Dragonsuit floated higher out of reach to avoid an attack, before it went back down to try something else with a flamethrower that spouted black-blue flames.

Defiant and Longinus reached the edge of the Leviathan crater, where the gist of the fight was happening now. A single man, naked, terrified and weeping, was sitting in the corner and playing around with trash and wiring. He had dark, dirty-blonde hair, cut short enough that he was near-bald.

"Oi!" Longinus called out, poised for combat, ready to fire a laser through the man's head if he happened to be a clone.

The man looked up, muttering something, "Need to hide, need to hide them, need to hide myself. Need to hide, need to hide them, need to hide myself. Can't see me. Can't see me. Can't see me. I am not here. Need to hide myself..." He kept repeating this sequence as if stuck on a loop.

"Alan Gramme," Defiant commented dryly. "He doesn't look to be of his right mind."

"Is that… Mannequin?" Longinus said, eyes wide.

"That's what I said," Defiant remarked, looking at him in stoic reception.

Longinus shook his head, and then turned to Alan.

"-need to hide myself. Myself. On the moon. The moon is nice, don't you think? Helen? Are you there? I need the moon, we'll be safe on the moon. The moon is safe. The moon is ready. On the moon, on the moon. On the moon, Helen, we'll hide on the moon. Need to hide, need to hide them, need to hide myself. We'll hide on the moon. On the moon," the clone kept muttering, as he continued to assemble whatever he was assembling. A white box the size of an old nineties computer - probably made from exactly that - with a single tire stolen from what must have been one of the wrecked cars nearby.

Longinus turned his gaze to Defiant. "Should I… put him out of his misery?" he whispered, to so that Alan wouldn't hear.

"I don't know," Defiant said, shrugging with his head. "He doesn't look dangerous, but he might well be. He might well be part of the Simurgh's plan, or maybe the Simurgh's plan is for us to find him and kill him, which would lower our morale because he looks innocent and tortured. I really don't know." Defiant raised his spear, and guardedly moved forward to the Mannequin… no, not really a Mannequin - to the Sphere clone.

"I need to hide. Hide myself. Hide them. And myself. There, we can hide on the moon. Helen, are you okay? I need to hide..."

"I'm sorry about this," Defiant said, then promptly sunk his spear into the man's head, instantly killing him. The Sphere clone looked gormless, eyes widened, for half a second, before his fingers lost their strength and dropped whatever kind of drone he was creating.

Longinus sighed deeply as he turned away for a moment, shaking his head to himself. "What now?" he asked.

"We rejoin the fight," Defiant answered, before extending his hand. A green light projected from it onto the tarmac, taking a moment to crystallize into a wireframe of some kind of object. Within seconds, the wireframe filled itself with panels and became a bike not dissimilar to what Armsmaster used back in the day. Defiant mounted it, then revved the engine and blasted off in the fight's direction. Longinus floated off the ground and went after him.

Echidna was fighting a massive creature, at least twice as big as her. It was a white-skinned wendigo, with blood running down its heavy claws and black eyeholes. It swung down a claw, separated some of Echidna's flesh, causing her to squeal.

Five Laserdream clones formed lenses, aimed at the monster's chest, then fired near-simultaneously. The explosion was loud and bright enough to shake the ground and blind anyone looking at it directly. When it was over, Longinus saw Haunt dropping from the air, unconscious, before Echidna moved to swallow him.

Myrddin's face said, 'oh, fuck, no, I'm not fighting that,' as he dropped everything else he was doing and tackled Haunt's unconscious body into his pocket dimension, before teleporting away, much to Echidna's annoyance.

A girl with familiar dark hair interweaved with trash hid in an alleyway, watching Longinus with a grin as her nubbed teeth slotted themselves between each other. Dirty rats moved around her body, climbing up her feet and her arms, one of them sitting on her shoulder and chomping on a bit of green-blue cheese. A Weaver clone that used rats?

Longinus felt a pang of burning rage hit his gut, which he released in the form of a thick laser. It burned the clone's head off, leaving behind only a burning ashtray where her neck should have been.

In that moment, he saw a blur of a shadow above himself, before the Siberian slammed into his torso, feet-first, and made him collide with the ground. She stood on top of him triumphantly for a moment, before she took his wrist and dragged him forward in Echidna's direction, like a jail warden dragging a prisoner to the chopping block.

"Fuck! Fuck!" Longinus struggled against the Siberian's grip but to no avail. He tried firing lasers at her, but that didn't work either. Telekinetically-aided struggle didn't work as well.

A naked Laserdream floated down, the left half of her face melted and disproportionate, and her left leg shriveled up as if it was dried on the desert for several years. She grinned at the sight, utterly pleased by it. A Grue clone wheeled around, saw the sight, and a tiny curve of satisfaction graced his lips. A Miss Militia watched the Siberian approaching with the sacrifice, and she let out a bloodthirsty laugh as she kept shooting in the direction of the Protectorate's capes.

In moments, they reached Echidna, and Jack Slash approached the two of them, taking both Longinus and the Siberian by the shoulders. His face was flushed with amusement; he looked almost intoxicated. Drunk with death. Infinitely pleased by the destruction he'd caused today.

Without further ado, Jack said, "Welcome to the family, son."

The Siberian grinned and tossed Longinus into Echidna's body, facing out. He stuck to her outer layer, feeling himself lose a grip on his powers. For a brief moment, his environmental shield flickered on his body. He tried to exert himself and shoot as many lasers at Jack as he could humanly manage, but he felt the stores of energy being drained to nothing.

He saw Legend up in the sky. The man hollered, loud and abrasive. Some kind of order to get Longinus out.

A contingent of capes moved, but Jack kept touching the Siberian as he withdrew a machete from his belt. He swung, and a quarter of them collapsed to the ground, clutching injuries, gashes on their chests, bellies, or legs. He swung again, and again, making them all fall, and further hurting those who'd already fallen. Bonesaw spiders picked the ones who weren't responsive up, and began to drag them in Echidna's direction.

Longinus didn't notice before, but she'd grown larger, at least twice as much. She was as large as Leviathan, if not more.

In his last moments, before he lost any vision of light, he noticed Defiant screaming something and attacking Echidna.

'Caring about someone means worrying about them.'

The text read, 'Stop caring, then.'

Five minutes of walking later, Gabriel was at his destination.

It was cold. It was so fucking cold on the beach that night.

He stood on an expanse of gravel, rocks, and limestone. The waves crashed against the shore every ten seconds, causing the white foam to spread between the cracks. Far behind him, there was a treeline of a forest, on a small limestone wedge, and a stairwell he used to walk down here.

He wasn't muscular, didn't have a well-toned figure, and wasn't six foot tall. He was a slightly chubby kid, with pudgy cheeks, who intended to go to the gym but never got around to it.

Gabriel was staring blankly into the foamy sea. The waves swirled around themselves chaotically, almost as if Leviathan was going to burst out of the ocean at any moment. He did see the green glow, somewhere down there - the Endbringer was just waiting for the right moment to drown him. Maybe anticipating the nadir, to make things worse.

"She doesn't want me anymore, does she?" Gabriel spoke to himself, in a blank tone to match his expression. "Why am I even alive?" he chuckled.

The world in front of him looked blank, neutral and meaningless. Like the vastness of the galaxy was too busy with itself to even pay a modicum, a smidgeon - a pinch of attention to him.

Gabriel took off his brown boots, setting them near the shore. He took a deep sigh, looking down at the jumbling waves.

And like that, the world crumbled on him. The rocks of the beach began to clatter down an endless chasm. The forests in the background collapsed, falling into the abyss. The starlit sky darkened until it was as black as the end itself. He was sitting on a small island of limestone, three meters in diameter, sitting on it, while the remnants of phantasmal water touched the nubs of his toes.

In the distance, in the darkness, a floodlight appeared from above, and showed him the corpse of Kid Win, mangled and covered in seaweed, the skin rotted, green, and covered in parasitic barnacles that sucked the remains of life out of it. The preventable death, which he failed to prevent.

The floodlight winked out, and showed him the body of an abomination. Twin pigtails, black and blonde. Double powers; lasers, and armaments twisted into death. Two things he loved, combined together in the worst way possible, to create one thing he hated more than anything else.

He saw Skidmark, making promises he'd never get a chance to fulfill. Clockblocker's blow, catching him under the jaw and making his world spin. And of course, he saw Weaver, staring down at him with a disgusted sneer. Like nobility at dogshit.

"It's my fault," he muttered, not feeling like himself.

The world reacted, shifting very subtly. The rocks around him solidified forming a path forward. The waters, chaotic, were there, but there was a path within them. The only way to move was to push onward and find an exit out of this place.

Did it really matter?

Gabriel turned to the side, staring at the black abyss of the swirling ocean. Was it the ocean, or was it just the end? Entropy? What was he really looking at?

"It doesn't matter."

He pushed himself off the ground and walked to the edge of the chasm. The cliffside went down for maybe five or six meters before it was covered in gray, and then in darkness. Ten meters down, there was nothing. All it'd take for him to disappear forever would be to take one step down. It would be that easy, and it was that tempting - one step to achieve eternal tranquility and peace, in neverending quiet. A sacrament of silence to bless his death.

He looked to his left, and saw the corpses of his friends lying down on the ground of the path. There was only one person standing, at the end of the road. He recognized her very faintly. A shimmering outline of Hope.

Should I?

He hesitated.

Gabriel shook his head, a pair of tears forming in his eyes between blinks. They slid down his cheeks. He didn't even bother cleaning them off, as he took the step forward and allowed the gulf beyond to claim his soul.

He screamed, and the void snapped back to reality around him, as he tumbled down the rocky dam, into the chaotic ocean. He shouted out in pain, as he impacted the side of a building, and it echoed in for eternity.

He impacted another building, in an alleyway, then landed down and found himself at the end of a long street. He was alone, with every other street dark - the only lamp posts that worked were from where he stood down to the Boardwalk, where Leviathan slowly emerged from the sea, upsetting the waters in a paranormal way. They moved with malicious sentience, intending to destroy and rip apart his world.

Leviathan moved, swimming alongside the waves. He was surprisingly gentle and slow, and stopped only a dozen paces away from Gabriel, towering over him. The four-eyed brute looked straight at him, and there was a link between them.

The Endbringer raised his right hand and moved it to the top of Gabriel's head, pinning the top with one finger and causing water to slide down Gabriel's body. For a moment, he thought that it might caress him. In that moment, Leviathan gripped, not hard enough to crush, but hard enough to apply bone-cracking pressure.

Gabriel felt foam-water worming its way into his nose, mouth, eyes, and ears, into his body. Moving down in trickles, beginning to drown him. Leviathan stared impassively.

In the real world, Longinus wheezed, breathed in, and spat out a bit of phlegm. His body shuddered, as he heard a bestial scream from the outside.

Something pleasant, this time…

He looked around, and saw that he was in an empty conference room. The lights were turned off, the chairs empty. Looking down, he saw that he was wearing his form-fitting Centurion costume. The costume, not power armor. The PRT building seemed empty, and looking outside the nearest window, he saw no stars in the sky - just a black, endless void.

He was surprisingly self-aware, no longer feeling like an actor in a scene where he had no control over himself, like in the previous vision. He had agency, here, almost. Even if the agency felt two steps removed from his intent.

Gabriel looked around the room, confused. He took a few steps and left the conference room, finding himself in the hallways of the PRT HQ. Around him, PRT soldiers were on guard, standing stiffly with their rifles and armaments, fully armored. They didn't say anything, and when he looked under their faceplates, he noticed they didn't have any faces; just blank expanses of flesh where faces should have been.

He shuddered in disgust and fear, as he explored the building itself.

The lobby's gift shop was stocked full of Clockblocker merchandise, and one of the shirts had, 'Murder Gabriel and Chill' written on it in red-white lettering, with a bloodthirsty, helmet-less Dennis in the background, using a shard of glass to impale a crying Gabriel in the neck, blood covering them both.

Gabriel turned away, and left the HQ itself, walking out onto the street. Brockton Bay didn't exist. There were some parts of the sidewalk, but existence blurred into nonexistence at roughly fifteen meters away from the doors of the PRT building. If he strained his eyes, he could see, just barely, a floating dead Hookwolf in the distance, next to a dead Victor, and the rest of the Empire 88. There was a statue of Centurion towering over them, holding a spear and impaling Kaiser in the head as he stood on Hitler's corpse.

He shook his head and re-entered the building, going down to the Wards HQ. The elevator wasn't smooth, shaking as it went down, and the once-fluorescent lights were a dirty, dingy yellow color instead of their pure white. The elevator stopped, its doors barely opening, with sparks of electricity coming out of unstable and broken wiring.

Gabriel forced the doors open and walked through. The chrome corridor was rusted, everything covered in a layer of age.

He walked into the common room, and saw that it had been rearranged into a throne room. The Wards, Protectorate, and Triumvirate - every single member of the organizations that he remembered, including Hero who should have been deceased - were kneeling in front of a twenty-step stairwell leading to the top of a dais, with a red carpet directing him to it.

He shook his head. "That's not my place," he whispered to himself.

"But it is," a voice like his own answered.

Centurion looked behind himself, and saw the real Centurion standing there. His armor was golden, instead of silver, with a red-black cape and a gladiatorial helmet. He was wielding a spear, almost like a mockery of both Dauntless and Armsmaster. "It's my throne. I claimed it, by cleaning away the pollution and leaving behind a better world. Now everyone worships me."

"You're no better than the very thing we swore to destroy," Gabriel spoke.

"Quoting the Revenge of the Sith at me won't do you any good," Centurion answered dryly. As he continued, he gesticulated with a tone of grandeur. "I'm better than you, I've gotten better. It took me months, years. But now I'm smarter, faster. I got over my issues, and I cleaned the world one monster at a time."

"You're a figment of my imagination," Gabriel stated, shaking his head.

"I'm a very real possibility. An option of what you could achieve. Look, look," Centurion prodded, and he gestured with his hand. Gabriel felt his entire body forcefully snap to attention, as he looked around and saw the Triumvirate kneeling in front of him obediently. Heads lowered in veneration, knuckles resting against the floor in readiness to stand at his order.

"Don't you like this sight?" Centurion asked, almost tempting him. He whispered into Gabriel's ear, "Maybe it's not enough? Maybe you want more? I can give you more."

Gabriel gulped. The sight didn't please him, but he was curious.

Centurion clicked his fingers, and the Triumvirate screamed, as their bodies burned with a purplish flame. In seconds, they were on the ground, writhing in the violet inferno, outlining their black bodies, which quickly evaporated into skeletons, which themselves became ash; the fire faded away in the air. Gabriel's eyes widened in shock.

"I know what you most desire," Centurion said, leaning in as he clicked his fingers, "Because that's what I want too."

Signal appeared in front of them, smiling at them. "Hey."

Gabriel's knees wobbled and his stomach curled around itself like a ball of crumpled up paper.

Centurion walked around him, before him. He took Signal's left hand, clasping it in his own as he turned to look at Gabriel. "It's what you want. You can have it. All you have to do is give up control to me, and dedicate yourself."

Gabriel shook his head darkly. "If I give up control, you'll be able to make clones of me, huh, Noelle?" he said, looking up at the sky, as if talking to reality itself.

"Noelle isn't here," Centurion answered, shaking his head with a note of pity and amusement. "You're talking to me, and there's already a real me in the real world. My current goal is to capture Eidolon, and put him in here as well, so he can experience himself more fully. Do you want to see what I'm talking about?"

Gabriel's fists clenched. "I…" he didn't know what to say.

"You do," Centurion insisted forcefully. "You just don't know it yet. Let me show you." He clicked his fingers, and the world shimmered. He, Signal, and Gabriel were moved into a different place.

Centurion pointed ahead of them, at the members of the Slaughterhouse Nine. Jack Slash, Bonesaw, the Siberian, all of the others. Even former members, including Gray Boy, Screamer, and so on. The ones whose appearance he didn't know appeared as gray-black shadows, including King himself, towering over everything in the far background, recognizable by a blood-red crown on his head.

"What do you want me to do to them?" Centurion asked, in a voice that hinted he already knew the answer.

Gabriel's fists clenched. "Destroy their image. Make them look like powerless, worthless children. Just like they did to me," he said through grit teeth.

"Of course. Allow me to show you," Centurion said. He raised his left finger, and began to draw on power from some distant well, that felt infinite in size. It was literally infinite, the counterpoint of entropy, with as much fuel as the user needed. It was a kind of power in tune with the galaxy, breathing in a rhythm with the universe's very fundamental elements.

Everything darkened around them, as Centurion drew everything into his finger. All light, heat, cold, fire, plasma, lightning, darkness, earth, stone, water, air, sky, clouds, rain, wind, space, time, past, and future. A flick of his hand, and everything of that was bent.

The world shook, as Behemoth himself obediently rose out of the ground, towering over the Nine and preparing to annihilate them. A crashing wave, as the Leviathan fell from a stormcloud in the sky. The Simurgh descended from the heavens, singing a beautiful resonating bird call that promised devastation. The ground ahead of them was infected by a swarm of purple crystals, and from the crystals rose up a fierce lion-man in crystalline armor, twice as savage as Behemoth. A tide of mist washed over everything and a woman with arms of steam reached out to tear apart the cloud, revealing a leather-garbed woman like the Siberian, but far more bestial. The rising sun fractured into rainbow light as a tidal wave as long as the east coast of the United States appeared, with a man swaying in the wind on top of it. A needle-thin pillar of dirt and concrete stretched out like an endless tower into the sky, accompanied by its sibling with three faces. A snap of air, as a monster that looked like a crystal ball with an upper and lower body attached manifested and began to alter time.

More came. Teleporting, flying, walking, running, stepping in through portals, descending from above, burrowing in from the ground, streaking in as energy, and one of them having been there all along. And then, the sun itself descended to meet Centurion as its equal. And the sun smudged out, revealing Scion, who turned around and raised both hands, utterly serious.

Centurion clicked his fingers, and all of that focused their attention on the Nine. The vision-

Longinus opened his eyes for a brief moment, seeing a crack of light. "Get out, damn… it!..."

It was so cold on the beach. It was so fucking cold on that beach.

Does it matter?

Gabriel took off his shoes and set them aside on the rocky shore, only to then walk to the edge of the dam, looking down at the swirling waves.

There was no green glow.

There was no void.

There was no promise of metaphysical tranquility.

Only him, and the need for relief.

A single step, and he fell into the water below, which immediately buried him deep due to the sharp, impetuous, underwater currents.

His animal instincts took over, and he trashed underwater, desperately.

Fuck! I don't wanna die, fuck, help! Please!

His lungs filled with salt-water as he screamed, and he could only see darkness.

But then, a bright light appeared at the bottom of the ocean and a familiar, smooth feminine voice echoed through the water, muffled. He remembered he had heard the voice before, on a taxi.

"We need you."

I lost consciousness.

"Get out, Longinus!"

When he woke up, it was a tedious process. Like drowning deep underwater and swimming to the surface, even though the water pressure pushes back against you, in an attempt to force you down.

He woke up, and saw that Hope was holding him up. He remembered.

"Dai, (Come on,)" she said, in their native language, helping him push onward.

He remembered. It was the food. The water. All of it became infected, and suddenly people began to turn into things.

"Dobbiamo uscire da qui, (We have to get out of here,)" Hope said. There were tears in her eyes. "Per favore, muoviti. Su! (Please move. Come on!)"

The food and water were infected. He ate the infection. He wanted to throw up, but found that he couldn't. The coldness had been in him for barely a minute now, in his stomach, sitting and brewing there, waiting for a way it could trigger itself to do something to him. To turn him into one of the monsters.

Please, make it stop…

Gabriel felt a transmission from somewhere deep down. Awaken.

His eyes opened, as Defiant pulled him out with a green forcefield bubble and tossed him dozens of meters down the street.

69

Birdsie

Dec 10, 2019

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Birdsie

Birdsie

Sharp Talons Cleave The Worthy

Dec 10, 2019

#4,328

When Longinus came to, he was covered in disgusting, green bile, with the smell of rotten meat and vegetation. He almost threw up, then activated the environmental shield and felt the bile slough off and clean itself, with the majority of the vile smell dissipating. Some faint wisps made their way into his nose, the very definition of bitter-sweet.

His energy stores were almost empty. Did Echidna absorb them? Ugh - he swayed to the left, and took hold of the wall to support himself.

In the distance, Echidna was fighting the Protectorate, alongside a figure wearing black construct armor, with white lines on the edges. He floated in the air, weaving between Legend and Eidolon's attacks. He used a burst of energy, propelling himself to dodge Alexandria, then caught her in a forcefield prison, before tossing her into the mass of Echidna's roiling flesh. Alexandria impacted near the crown of Echidna's body, then struggled as she attempted to get out, but failed, and sunk deeper in.

A Centurion clone, Longinus realized in bleak panic.

Eidolon raised an arm. Four portals snapped into existence, like springs. They uncoiled, shooting forth spiraling, curving blasts of lasers moving at the speed of flying birds. Centurion moved in the air, weaving around and dodging before he answered with an optic blast of pure dark energy with white outlines. Eidolon flashed and teleported to safety just moments before the laser hit him.

Defiant floated down, his environmental shield flickering on and off every few seconds. He moved up to Longinus, laying a hand on his shoulder and looking him square in the eyes. "Are you alright?"

"Absolutely not," Longinus responded, staring back at him with what was pure existential dread in his gaze.

The memories of what he saw inside of Echidna's bowels were freshly pressed into his mind. Burned in there, even. But he felt a kind of cold distance claiming them, gradually, making the memories crumble and collapse. Not as quickly as his post-Trigger visions, which he only remembered for the fact that he'd remembered he forgot something important that day, but he wouldn't remember half of the hallucinations in maybe six to ten minutes.

Defiant shook his head, and said, "Stay out of the fight for now. Echidna spat out a clone of you earlier, and Legend managed to kill it very quickly. This one is more formidable."

Longinus clenched his head, staring down at the ground, shaking. "I'm sorry," he said, bringing his knees to his chest.

"Stop moping and focus," Defiant ordered sharply, bringing him up to his feet with a flash of green light. "Weaknesses. What weaknesses do you have? Once Echidna spits out an Alexandria clone, Eidolon will have to fight her, and the rest of us will have to deal with your duplicate."

Longinus shook at the thought. Was a clone of him that efficient, when he couldn't even hope to take on that many people by himself? "My energy stores run out, my constructs can break, I have a danger sense that warps me out of deadly injury but only four times."

He realized another weakness, after a two-second pause. "Mention Hope, and how she doesn't want me. That will do something, I think," he proposed.

Defiant shook his head dejectedly. "He's not exactly in a state to listen, even if I did." They both turned.

The Centurion swooped down, extending a blast of constructs instead of energy. Chains, manacles, hands, and other grasping appendages. He caught two heroes in his grasp, then swung them at Echidna with a timed dismissal of the constructs, throwing them like a basketball player trying to score points in the hoop.

Jack Slash was clapping his hands on a rooftop, alongside Bonesaw and the Siberian. They weren't even fighting anymore - just watching the carnage they'd set into motion, utterly convinced of their invulnerability with the Siberian's touch protecting them.

He didn't see the rest of the Nine anywhere. It was safe to assume Crawler was too busy trying to find someone who could hurt him, like Eidolon or Legend. Burnscar and Cherish were probably either dead or being copied.

"He's... smarter than you," Defiant claimed, unsure what else to say. "Or maybe not smarter, as much as more skilled. I'm sorry to say this, but it's just true. He's been covering up new clones in armor, and drawing fire to himself to recharge his shield. I've seen him use techniques I didn't see from you."

Echidna spat out several more clones, all of the Undersiders, some of the Wards ENE, some of the Boston Wards and a bunch of others he didn't recognize. Chevalier immediately got to shooting his cannonblade at the most dangerous ones, before he lunged and slashed at Echidna's stomach, releasing Alexandria from the gut. She took to the air, flying and putting distance between herself and Echidna.

Defiant raised his spear in anticipation. He shook his head, kind of absent. "I'm going to go back into the fight. Chevalier announced a plan of attack, while you were unconscious."

"Should I participate?" Longinus asked, feeling his environmental shield slowly get charged up

"If you feel capable, and won't get caught again," Defiant said, nodding once. With that, his body wreathed itself in a furious green corona as he bounced into the air. At the apex of his ascent, he swung his spear, the green-gray blur deactivating and hiding itself only to be replaced by a zipline, which he used to move over the streets. He dropped himself near Echidna, environmental shield flaring as he cut Noelle in the chest with his spear's tip only to blow past her and into the midst of Miss Militias and Tricksters, whom he began to fight alongside Legend, Chevalier, Cinereal, and several others.

Longinus flew to the nearest vantage point, on the rooftop directly above him. Flechette was there, alongside Transfusion. They were moving down the length of the ledge and stopped when Longinus landed in front of them. "Oh, hey," Flechette said, blinking. "You got eaten earlier."

"You don't fucking say," Longinus shot back, applying the full strength of his telekinesis to himself to load his energy stores. They were maybe a tenth full, or slightly less than that; nine or nine and a half percent, which was enough to significantly harm if not outright kill a human being either way.

"Chill out," Transfusion said, stepping past him. Her armor's chestplate unlaced itself into fluid blood, before segmented spines emerged and became something not dissimilar to skeletal wings. Taking tricks from Marquis' book? She flapped the wings and began to hover, then flapped them again and rose into the air, and out of sight.

Longinus sighed. He increased the pressure of the telekinetic pressure on his body. There was a pressure, building up in his environmental shield. The pale gold flashed once, becoming a shade brighter to indicate it'd been filled out. "Throw pebbles at me with your power," he requested, looking at Flechette.

"You sure?" she asked, leaning over and picking up a loose piece of gravel from the rooftop's base. She clutched it in her hand, then looked at him warily.

"Not too hard," he said.

"Okay." She tossed the pebble up and down in her hand, catching it repeatedly, before she quickly withdrew her hand and swung forward lightly, at a soft upward arc. The pebble was headed for his chest, and almost immediately, Longinus felt and heard the sound of sizzling heat, as a hole developed itself straight through his sternum, scraped his lung, and then went out the other side. He moved back, the hole burning with the phoenix's might, but he was effectively disabled and found it taxing to breathe.

"Shit!" Flechette cried, starting. She walked to him, catching him before he could fall from shock. "I thought you could take it!"

"I'm okay!" Longinus exclaimed, coughing, falling to his knees. "Yeah, me too," he shook his head to himself.

God, I'm stupid.

"I'm never doing that again," Flechette warned him, frowning with furrowed eyebrows.

"Yeah, I know. Damn, though," Longinus spat out, coughing a bit more. He felt slick, oily blood in his throat, coming out of his mouth. The hole was almost closed up now.

"Goddamn it, do you need medical help of any kind? It seems to be healing," she said.

"It's healing, but I'd rather get some help to get healed quickly instead of waiting. Though… let's keep this between us. It's kinda embarrassing, you know?" Longinus said, scratching the back of his head.

Flechette sighed and snorted simultaneously, coming out as a kind of exasperated sound. "You're an idiot. Seriously. Go ask Behemoth if you can swim around in his kill aura, why don't you?" She began to laugh at him, before clutching her arbalest and loading a needle in it. She looked over the rooftop and frowned, then took aim and fired a second later, punctuated by a distant, shrill scream, presumably from a Shatterbird.

"I'll call the wizard," Longinus said, clutching his armband but not pressing the button yet.

"Myrddin's not a healer," Flechette muttered, firing another needle. A Purity fell down from the sky, rolling down the ground.

"He can bring me to a healer, no?" he asked, cocking his head to the side.

"If you're smarty-pants enough to talk, you probably don't even need a healer," Flechette answered. She loaded a needle, and lowered her arbalest - instead of aiming, she was looking for a viable target. After three seconds, she found someone, tracking them with her eyes. She raised the arbalest, barely had an eyeblink's time to aim, and squeezed the trigger.

"I'll be disabled and unable to fight for several minutes," Longinus stated, sighing. He felt a thick clump of blood make its way out of his throat with a cough.

"We have a problem," Thunderstrike's voice rang over the armbands.

"What kind of problem?" Legend asked, with laser discharges singing both in the background of his transmission as well as in real life, roughly two streets away from them.

"I'm seeing the Teeth approaching hot on our location from the south-west," she answered, with a rather miffed tone.

Flechette grit her teeth, and irritably fired one bolt at a Trickster, eliciting a scream of 'my aaarm!'

"Damn it," Longinus breathed out, pushing more of his healing flame into the wound, to make the process faster.

"Definitely don't allow the Butcher anywhere near Echidna," Alexandria ordered, "That spells disaster for everyone."

"Okay. I'm going to go find another vantage point," Flechette said, using her armband and pressing a button to call for a Mover. "You stay here and heal up. And obviously run if anything shitty approaches."

"Will do," Longinus nodded. He increased the telekinetic force on himself even further.

"Shitty? Like what?" a naked Aegis asked, looking at them with a psychotic glare.

"Crap-" Flechette barely had time to raise her arbalest, when he'd already rammed into her, holding one hand near the weapon's stirrup, and using the other to punch Flechette over and over. She squeezed the trigger on instinct, and a needle imbued with her power went through his stomach. Aegis ignored it, using his chance to pull the weapon out of her hand, then throwing it off the rooftop.

Longinus extended his hands, extending six golden chains. They wreathed like snakes, in accordance with his thoughts, as they attempted to catch Aegis. He nimbly evaded each one, flying in closer to pummel Longinus instead. As he extended his fist back to throw a punch, one of the chains clamped around his wrist and pulled back. Aegis grit his teeth and pulled against it. Realizing it was futile, he hooked his foot to deliver a sideways kick to Longinus' helmet, before the chains reeled him away.

"You're the shitty one!" Aegis cried out, pushing and straining against the chains as he was held in place in the air.

Longinus stood up from the ground and flew off the concrete surface, covering Aegis in layers upon layers of spherical constructs. The constructs themselves got smaller and smaller until they began crushing Aegis.

Flechette picked up a pebble and tossed it. Aegis' head developed a circular hole, as he screamed in anger.

Aegis kept struggling, yelling, "Fuck you! You piece of shit! You abandoned us! You're worse than Jack Slash! Murderer!"

Longinus flicked his wrist in silence, and on the inside of the bubble, thousands of barbed spikes thrust through every single bit of Aegis' body: the spikes focused on the head, retracting and extending repeatedly in different places to completely annihilate the brain, including the corona.

The Aegis clone screamed and thrashed as the spikes tore into him. His naked body developed red, bleeding pinpricks, and in moments, he was covered in his own gore, continuing to screech until one of the spikes went across his esophagus and probably tore out the vocal cords, leaving him with a shrill, empty sound.

For a moment, his flesh bubbled, and then he stopped moving, covered from head to toe in enough blood that if one were to add in a pair of horns to his head, he'd look right at home in the depths of Hell.

Longinus continued to stay in silence, as blades ejected from the inside of the bubble, cutting Aegis' clone's body into tennis-ball-sized bits. He began to scream again, shrill and lacking in the ability to form proper vowels and sounds; he was begging, "pleadh, pleadh… no, no… please..."

Behind himself, Longinus heard Fletchette retching.

"I didn't want this," Longinus whispered to himself, throwing the bubble with Aegis in it far away. The moment he was far enough, the construct disappeared, sending bits of Aegis flying in every direction like a rain of gibbed body parts.

Flechette was still vomiting, on her knees. She had pulled her hair back to avoid covering it. Moments later, a flying hero in a silver-white costume with black overtones landed in front of them, a bright double 'AA' emblem on his chest, with the A's overlapping slightly. "What the hell happened?" he asked.

"I took care of one of Aegis' clones," Longinus replied dryly.

"Christ. Which one of you called for transport?" he asked, looking down at Fletchette as if already knowing the answer. She finished puking, then breathed in a few times, shuddered, and promptly stood up.

Longinus looked at Flechette briefly. "Sorry," he spoke quietly.

"You're disgusting," she answered, not offering anything else. She extended a hand to the flier, and he accepted it, taking off. "Take my arbalest from down there, first." Her voice trailed off as they left him behind.

Longinus shrugged to himself and touched his chest with one hand. The wound was properly healed now. He inhaled and exhaled, not feeling any discomfort. There were sparks and embers of heat in his chest, still, but nothing remotely debilitating. He reached for his armband, "Where am I needed?" he radioed in.

A PRT suit answered within seconds, "Support required cleaning up clones in the northern commercial district. Three Vistas, two Tricksters, three Miss Militias, a Laserdream, a Purity, and possibly more were spotted."

"Give me two minutes," Longinus said, kneeling down. He exerted the entire, unbridled strength of his telekinetic on himself, to recharge as quickly as possible. It was constricting, and he wouldn't be able to move any faster than a snail, but it'd regenerate his environmental shield really fast.

"We're taking hits!" Weld spoke over the radio, "I need medical support for Young Buck!"

"Inbound!" Longinus responded, releasing the pressure and zipping off the roof.

He bolted across the sky in the direction the armband directed him towards. Within moments, he could see the battlefield. Weld and Young Buck were hiding behind a tinker-deployed forcefield bubble, from another Ward that Longinus didn't recognize. From different directions, Miss Militias, Laserdream, and the Purity clone peppered them with their attacks, while the Tricksters and Vistas kept the battlefield in place. Young Buck looked injured, clutching some kind of chest wound.

Longinus felt adrenaline burn through his veins. Within moments, he released twin phoenixes that swooped down to meet with Young Buck. The Purity took notice instantly, soaring up to meet him, slinging a silvery blast his way. The Laserdream was next, setting up a wall of red lenses to get better coverage of different spots and angles, before she began to fire at him.

He took advantage of Laserdream's lenses as he swiftly avoided the attacks, firing his own lasers through the lenses. They didn't react exactly as expected, diffracting into almost chemical-looking golden light, like someone tossed down a golden flare at the lenses he hit, before they fired backscattered, thin streaks of his own energy at him, with blobs of golden light leading the streaks - the effect looked significantly stronger than his own blasts.

Okay, he thought, dodging around the place, the lenses are a one-way-street. Good to kno-ugh!

One of Purity's blasts caught him in the chest, making him hurtle down. He fell at an angle, colliding with a building, then bouncing off of it and down onto the sidewalk, cracked and covered in scorch marks from previous encounters. Two months ago, this fall would have killed him, or broken enough bones that they'd penetrate his internal organs and kill him seconds after the impact. Right now, he was moderately inconvenienced and somewhat bruised.

A Miss Militia finished the process of shifting her light machine gun into a bazooka, as she knelt and took aim. One rocket went off toward him, followed by a second one in quick succession. She didn't hold back, standing and walking right, as she fired off a third and changed her weapon into a grenade launcher.

Longinus thought it was a good time to get funny with his constructs, and made a giant tennis racket. The moment he swatted one of the rockets, it exploded, destroying itself and the tennis racket. This caused the second one to visibly veer, before going through the window of an orphanage and exploding within. Red fire and smoke poured out of the windows.

Thank god this place is evacuated.

He rocketed up, just on time to dodge the third rocket. He zapped out a rapid volley of piercing lasers at the Purity clone. She reacted immediately, gracefully soaring up, then diving back down, his lasers constantly on her tail, but failing to impact her exactly. She flew parallel to the ground for a moment, lobbing a substantial double helix of hard-light at him.

Longinus shot his own double helix just to piss her off. They connected in mutual self-annihilation, sending out a shower of white-gold fireworks across the sky. Purity was closer to the blast, and the shockwave caught her off-balance, giving him a chance to let out a sharp salvo at her. In less than a second, she was dropping from the air, the light across her body fading away to reveal several bullet-sized holes stretching across her lower torso, primarily the midriff.

He looked down, and saw that the tinker boy maintaining the forcefield bubble raised a hand grenade of some kind. He pulled off the pin, let 'er cook for three seconds, then flickered the bubble off to toss it at the two nearest Miss Militias. The two of them cursed, trying to move away, before it exploded and locked them in a forcefield not unlike the one protecting the Wards. The forcefield bubble then shrunk, shriveling the Miss Militias with them, before it was the size of a crystal ball with two, mice-sized gun-wielding sociopath women inside.

The remaining Vistas and Tricksters began to use their powers to high-tail it out of there, but Longinus didn't let hem. A high-precision barrage to their backs solved the issue with some pained cries, grunts, screams, and several spurts of blood.

Longinus flew down to Weld and Young Buck. The tinker Ward dropped the forcefield the moment it became safe, while Weld ran off to catch the last Miss Militia that Longinus didn't bother himself with.

"Are you two okay?" Longinus asked worriedly, looking over both of them to see if they needed any more healing or help of any kind. Young Buck had a red-black hole in his chest, with a pool of blood around it. Two more streaks ran down the corners of his mouth, as he wheezed and breathed out, his face twisted into a grimace. He looked as though he had one foot in the grave already.

Longinus knelt next to Young Buck, pouring blue flames all over his wound from his hand. It burned there for a moment, spreading golden embers throughout. Young Buck allowed himself to lie down wordlessly, while the tinker Ward knelt, took his wrist, and checked the pulse.

A moment of tension passed by, as the Ward tinker nodded.

"He'll live," the boy said.

Longinus sighed in relief, slumping slightly. "Do you need healing?" he asked, turning at him.

"No," the Ward said, grim in voice and demeanor. He picked up his forcefield projector and put it on his belt, then turned to Longinus.

"Cover me for a moment, I need to do something," Longinus said, not standing up from his spot. He closed his eyes, and briefly entered the powerscape.

Seven charges floated around the fountain's rim, with one more halfway cooked to completion. The background was bright, undulating, with what looked like atoms of color interweaving and pulsing with life. There was something else, in the distance, that was hard to make out from here.

Longinus reached out for the distant thing, and immediately, he felt a sharp knife lodge itself into the back of his skull, with a sting of feedback. One charge was stolen from him, then a second one, with a sense of mockery and triumph. He'd been too reckless - he reached out, instead of looking. It was apparently unsafe, in some way.

He turned his awareness away from the distant thing. My fucking clone.

In that moment, he exercised his power, and used the five charges he had for a power that would make him able to aim with his lasers and preemptively fire at the spot where the target was going to be: following their trajectory. Advanced homing, in a way. His power flashed in orange and purple, and the five charges moved into a floating arrangement - one could draw a pentagram, and each charge would lie at the place the lines angled, but the charges failed to connect. Either because of his clone's interference or because they didn't know how.

"I hate to interrupt whatever meditation you're trying to do," the Ward Tinker started, "But we're leaving to rejoin the fight. The Nine are fighting the Teeth, apparently."

Longinus shook his head and opened his eyes. "I'll come with you," he said, standing up and clenching his fists. The Nine against the Teeth? That's a sight to behold.

"Right," Young Buck said, clutching his chest injury. He looked at Longinus for a moment, and somewhat reluctantly expressed his gratitude, "Thank yew for healin' me."

Longinus nodded his head once. "Don't mention it," he said with a friendly tone, floating off the ground. "Let's go!" he prompted, zipping in the direction of the fight. But he stopped in place, looking and realizing that the rest of them can't fly. With a sense of awkwardness, he turned back and reapproached them. Right.

"We're waiting for Myrddin or Strider," Weld clarified, looking up at him. Pieces of his metal body had been burned, with black marks covering his right arm and some of his face. In others, Longinus saw the half-incorporated bits of metal, from bullets or metal-based superpowers.

"I can bring you there," Longinus said, constructing opaque golden platforms for every single Ward present. There was some brief hesitation from them, but Young Buck stepped on without ado, while Weld tested his own for a moment with one foot, before stepping, followed by the forcefield Tinker boy.

"Apply forcefields to every platform for added protection," Longinus suggested, as both he and the platforms with the Wards on it ascended into the sky, floating quickly towards the fight.

"I'm a Tinker, not a miracle-worker," the Tinker boy answered, shrugging. "Can't do it in any way that's safe."

They soared across the sky, and it looked like the fighting had redistributed itself across the city's western districts evenly. If the beginning of the fight was like someone slapping butter down onto a toast, then the state of the battle right now was as though someone had just spread it across, in a slim movement.

Longinus observed the state of the battle. Echidna and Siberian were southwest of the Leviathan Crater, and he only really noticed them because Echidna was big and the Siberian had an ironically distinctive color palette.

The Siberian ripped a lamp post from the ground and thumped it down onto a hapless Brute of some kind. He raised an arm, and the pole bent around it slightly, the light flickering out as a spray of glass fell onto the earth behind him. The Siberian raised the pole again, then swung it from the side instead, knocking him into a building like an oversized golf ball. Crawler instantly opened up his long mouth and sprayed green acid spit into the building, like a firefighter's hose. A distant, muffled scream reached Longinus' peeled ears.

Echidna was looking oddly calm, with her upper body almost dead, while her lower body spat out more clones. A Rime, an Alan Gramme who began to mutter and crawled into an alleyway, and several others that were indistinct enough that he didn't recognize them. Was Noelle coming down from some kind of bipolar, emotional high, and going into a depressive episode?

"Set us down over there," Weld said, pointing down at a street where Chevalier and his subordinates were killing Purity, Stormtiger, and Grue clones.

Longinus complied and set their platforms down, before flickering them out. He landed next to Chevalier.

"What's the outlook?" he asked, only to be instantly tackled to the ground by a maddened, raving Stormtiger. The clone raised both claws with the intent of gutting Longinus, before Chevalier bisected him from the nipples and above, spraying blood into the air, and throwing the upper body away.

"Not good," Chevalier answered, shaking his head. "Echidna is spitting out less clones, but the ones she already made are all across the city. Jack Slash went to fight the Teeth, alongside Bonesaw and the rest of his band, the last I saw them. Hopefully the Butcher will disembowel the bastard."

Longinus used telekinesis to stand up, looking at Chevalier inquisitively. "My clone?" he asked, afraid of the coming answer.

"I don't know," Chevalier said. He stabbed his oversized sword into the ground, then moved the hilt upward while the sword remained stuck, causing the cannon integrated into his blade to pop out. He pressed the trigger, and there was a thundercrack sound and muzzle flash, followed by one of the Grue clouds dissipating, its source no longer having a torso. How the fuck did he make that shot into the literal dark?

Longinus spun towards the other cloud and turned on his Shard Vision. It revealed the vision of a corona around the Grue's head. Before he could take action, Chevalier had already fired a second cannonbolt and took the Grue's head off of his shoulders. The dark cloud dissipated like small explosions of ink in water, but in reverse, small individual bubbles shrinking to a point, until they disappeared.

Longinus turned to Chevalier in mildly pleasant shock. "Do you see parahumans through walls and obstructions?" he asked, eyes wide.

Chevalier shook his head. "Not exactly, no." He withdrew the sword from the ground, and it shifted subtly in his grasp as he ran off in the direction of another Stormtiger.

Longinus re-enabled his shard vision so he wouldn't be blinded by the Purity clone's light. He released a volley of kinetic lasers, and felt the sickening crunch of her bones cracking under her flesh - she was too distracted by keeping tabs on a Case 53 girl with a shovel and one of the Chicago Wards.

Longinus flew up to the Case 53 and to the Ward. "Do you guys need healing?" he asked, offering his help.

The Case 53 was a girl, extremely muscular and standing at eight feet tall. She had a severe hunchbacked look to herself, with thick scarring in a lot of places on her body. She shook her head, while the Ward nodded. "Yeah. If you can spare anything?"

"What's the injury?" Longinus asked, approaching the Ward.

"My chest," he clarified. The Ward gingerly touched his hand to the general area, saying, "One of these Stormtigers - was it? - threw an air bomb at me. I think it's only bruised, but it's kind of hard to breathe."

Longinus nodded and extended a hand. He sprayed out a golden-blue liquid that set aflame on the Ward's chest, making him flinch in surprise. "Whoa! This heals, right?" The flames and gold liquid began to sink into the suit.

"Yup," Longinus reassured him with a nod. Then, he checked his armband.

The earth shook, hard enough that the Ward in front of Longinus was forced to take a step back to stabilize himself. Moments later, the Butcher tumbled, feet-over-head, before impacting a wall and spreading a trail of concrete dust everywhere. Out from where she'd been thrown stepped in Jack, Siberian, and Bonesaw, the former whistling some kind of merry tune as he strode in the Butcher's direction, leading the other two.

"Save the Butcher!" Alexandria ordered over the radio.

Longinus constructed a bubble of golden material around the Butcher, thrusting her in the sky as he flew alongside the bubble - mimicking Defiant's own tactics from earlier. He didn't make it two seconds, before a blow caught him in the side of the head, slowing his ascent and flinging him to the side. Before he could take control of himself, two follow-up attacks struck him and dumped him down.

Jack twirled the meat cleaver in his hand, continuing to whistle, as he prodded the Siberian to approach the Butcher.

The woman stood up with a growl. She didn't have her bow and was unarmed, but her armor granted her some degree of protection as Jack swung his cleaver at her head, causing a chink to develop in the armor.

Longinus constructed a massive bow for the Butcher, right in front of her, alongside a quiver with ten oversized arrows, and generated additional armor on her body, just on time to defend her from another one of Jack's strikes. The Butcher grudgingly clutched the bow, and loosed an arrow that halted as it struck Jack's body, cracking into a hundred fragments and then becoming dust upon compression.

Jack swung his cleaver, and the Butcher's construct armor buckled but didn't crack. He frowned and looked at Longinus. Another swing of his cleaver, making Longinus tumble down into a window of an abandoned Leviathan-wrecked building. Moments later, a cape appeared at the nape of the window where he'd fallen through. A shirtless man, his skin sagging and stapled together, with a second husk of a face attached to his back like a tumor.

Longinus let out a burst of lasers at Hatchet Face, trying to flee through the building as he did so. The Hatchet Face duplicated, creating new bodies along every window. One of them caught Longinus in a grapple, and he felt his power sapping away. His constructs began to flicker off, while he, himself, felt his flight failing as the feedback from telekinesis faded into the background. The Hatchet Face began to strangle him.

He began trashing against his grip, hitting anything that he could come in contact with, trying to rip away the stitches that held his body together.

After a moment, the Hatchet Face exploded, becoming a mess of gore, blood, and ash, as its lifespan expired.

Longinus fell to the ground briefly. The vacuous space that Hatchet's Face created in his power was quickly refilled with the information and feedback that he'd gotten used to, and the brief pulled string of panic within him relaxed. He took off from the ground and flew outside, but from the window opposite of the one he had been thrown into. He emerged on the opposite side of the abandoned building, ostensibly away from all of the fighting.

Longinus zipped up into the sky and circled around the building in such a way that would make his return to the battlefield unnoticed. It didn't matter. Even as Legend and Eidolon pelted Jack, Siberian, and Bonesaw in their attacks, they didn't do anything except scorch and destroy the city infrastructure around the trio. The Siberian was holding the Butcher by the throat, granting her the same invulnerability, as Jack superficially deliberated on what to do with her.

Longinus didn't know what to do. His fists were clenched, and his teeth were grit in frustration and fear. Any of the Nine, with the Butcher's powers?

In several moments, Jack looked up and nodded at a group of capes within the attackers' ranks. He, Bonesaw, Siberian, and Butcher were swapped for them using Trickster's power, blasting the four capes as the attackers - primarily Eidolon and Legend - weren't able to redirect themselves quickly enough. The fire stopped for a brief moment, as the two capes looked in shock. Eidolon flew down, and exercised some kind of healing or stabilization power on the injured capes, while Legend wheeled in the air and sprayed freezing rays into the Siberian's path. She walked through them unhindered, and the group made their way to Echidna, presumably with the intent of feeding the Butcher to her.

Longinus burst out of the alley he was hiding in and flew up into the sky, up to Eidolon and Legend. "We have to do something!" he exclaimed, pointing in their direction with his arm. Fuck, was he scared and absolutely terrorized.

Clockblocker lunged out of a crowd of capes, and tossed a piece of metal rebar at the Slaughterhouse trio. The Siberian froze for a quarter of a second, then flickered, before digging out a chunk of concrete from the ground and tossing it at Clockblocker at enough force to send him reeling back. Surprisingly asinine for her.

"Get clear," Flechette exclaimed, "I have a shot on the Siberian. Firing in three, two..."

Clockblocker leaped aside, knowing he couldn't take the shot even with his armor frozen. Longinus made way and took cover in an alley, perpendicular to the street.

Flechette loosed her bolt through the Siberian's head, between the eyes, but the woman flickered back as she did with Clockblocker's attack. Jack raised a knife, swung, and Flechette dropped down from the rooftop she was on, clutching her neck with one hand. Myrddin managed to catch her in mid-air, being the closest, then placed her in his pocket dimension and teleported away with a bang.

Echidna crossed the street corner alongside Crawler. The two large monsters appeared to be engaged in conversation, following the scent of warfare to rejoin with the rest of the Nine.

Eidolon raised a fist, and a purple-black lightning bolt fired out of his palm. It coiled around Jack, Bonesaw, Siberian and Butcher, licked itself alongside their bodies, forming something almost like a cage, and setting them onto violet-white fire, but doing nothing otherwise. He repeated the attack fruitlessly once, then paused to change powers and try something else.

The Siberian wasn't patient enough to wait for him. She approached Echidna and deposited the Butcher within her mass, with a stifled cry of denial from the Butcher.

Longinus focused, and threw five charges into a concept: protection from the Butcher's voices. The gears and sprockets turned, but the result came too late - the Butcher had already sunk into Echidna's skin, even as a Purity clone emerged, alongside a Rime clone, a Grue, and two Forests, followed by a Stormtiger, a Crackpop, and several others.

The power was useless, either way. The ability to resist Master powers for the entirety of twelve seconds, with the vague awareness someone is trying something.

"Damn it, free the Butcher! Focus all efforts on opening up Echidna's stomach!" Legend ordered through the armbands.

Jack Slash raised a hand, knifeless, as if to ask a question, and then loudly declared, "Ladies and gentlemen, might I have a minute of-" someone shot him with a laser to no effect, "-and like that we're back to our usual program." He drew a knife, and nodded to Echidna behind him. Crawler stepped forward with a grin, charging down the street, while Echidna began to move away - escaping. The Nine were satisfied with their spoils, and were going to flee town.

"Should we let them go?" someone asked.

"Hell no," Chevalier answered.