Worm A Complete Web Serial
Gestation 1.4 Last Chapter Next Chapter
I felt a chill. A part of me really wished that I had thought to get my hands on a disposable cell phone. I didn't have a utility belt, but the spade shaped section of armor that hung over my spine hid a set of EpiPens, a pen and notepad, a tube of pepper spray meant to hang off a key chain and a zippered pouch of chalk dust. I could have fit a cell phone back there. With a cell phone, I could have alerted the real heroes about the fact that Lung was planning to take a score of his flunkies to go and shoot kids.
At least, that's what I had heard. I was in a state of disbelief, turning the words around in my head to think of a different context that would make sense of it. It wasn't so much the fact that he would do something like that. I just had a hard time wrapping my head around the idea that anyone would.
Lung answered a question for one of his gang members, lapsing briefly into another language. He grabbed one of his minion's arms and twisted it to an angle where he could get a look at the guy's watch, so I guessed it had something to do with their timing or when they were leaving. The gang member who'd had his arm twisted winced as Lung let it go, but didn't complain.
What was I supposed to do? I doubted I could find any place in the Docks that would be willing to let me inside to use their phone. If I headed to the Boardwalk, I wasn't sure I would find any places that were still open, and I didn't have change for a payphone. That was another oversight I would have to correct for the next time I went out. Cell phone, spare change.
A car pulled up, and another three guys dressed in gang colors got out and and joined the crowd. Shortly after, the group – twenty or twenty five in total – started walking north, passing below me as they walked down the street.
I was out of time to consider my options. As much as I didn't want to face it, there was really only one option that I could have no regrets about. I shut my eyes and focused on every bug on the neighborhood, including the sizable swarm I had gathered on the way into the Docks. I took control of each of them.
Attack.
It was dark enough that I could only tell where the swarm was with my power. That meant I couldn't even tune out the swarm if I wanted to have any idea about what was going on. My brain was filled with horrendous amounts of information, as I sensed each bite, each sting. As the thousands of insects and arachnids swarmed over and around the group, I could almost see the outlines of each person, just by sensing the shapes of the surfaces the bugs were crawling on, or the areas the vermin wasn't occupying. I focused on keeping the more venomous types at bay for the time being – I didn't need any allergic thugs going into
anaphylactic shock from a bee sting or getting serious complications from the bite of a brown recluse spider.
I sensed the fire through the swarm before I realized what I was looking at with my eyes. My power told me of the bugs' recognition of the heat, but I didn't even have time to devote conscious thought to block out the instincts the fire set in motion before the damage was done. The primitive thought processes of my bugs were reduced to confused impulses to alternately flee and to pursue the heat and the light they so often used for navigation. Many bugs died or were crippled by the heat. From my vantage point, I could see Lung lashing out with streams of fire from his hands, directing them at the sky.
I suppressed a laugh, feeling heady with adrenaline. Was that all he could do? I directed the swarm to gather, so those who weren't already biting and stinging were in the midst of the gang. If he wanted to turn his flames on the swarm, he would have to set his own people on fire.
The heated air and the smells gave me enough information, by way of my insects, to tell where Lung was in the crowd. I took a deep breath, and then sent in the reserves. I took a share of the venomous types I'd held at bay and directed them to Lung. A handful of bees, wasps, a number of the more poisonous spiders, like black widows and brown recluses, and dozens of fire ants.
He healed fast when his power was working. Everything I'd read online said that people with healing abilities would shrug off the effects of poisons or drugs, so I knew I'd have to pump him full of enough venom to overwhelm that aspect of his power. Besides, he was a big guy. I judged he could take it.
From the information that I could glean from my bugs, Lung already had maybe a quarter of his body covered in armor. Triangular sections of metallic plating were piercing through his skin, where they would continue to grow and overlap until he was nigh impenetrable. If they weren't already, his fingertips and toes would become like blades or metal claws.
I felt a sadistic glee as I organized the attack on Lung. I directed the flying insects to attack his face. With distaste, I focused the crawling ants and spiders on… other vulnerable areas. I did my best to ignore the feedback that I got from that particular attack, as I most definitely did not want the same kind of topographical map that the swarm had provided just a minute ago. Lung was bad news, and I needed him out of action as soon as possible. That meant delivering the hurt.
Rationale aside, I did feel a stab of guilt about taking pleasure in someone else's pain. I quieted that moment's remorse by reminding myself that Lung had spread tragedy, addiction and death to innumerable families. He had been planning to kill kids.
Lung exploded. No metaphor there. He detonated in a blast of rolling fire that set his clothes, several pieces of litter and one of his gang members alight. Almost every bug in his immediate vicinity died or was crippled by the wave of extreme heat. From my vantage point on the roof, I watched as he turned himself into a human bomb a second time. The second explosion turned his clothes to rags and sent his people fleeing for cover. He stepped out of
the smoke with his hands burning like torches, the silvery scales that covered nearly a third of his body reflecting the flame.
Damn, damn, damn. He was fireproof? Or skilled enough at using fire to superheat the air around him without burning himself? The meager scraps of clothing that covered him were burning away, and fire licked and danced around his hands without him seeming to care.
He roared. It wasn't the monstrous roar one might expect, but a very human sound of rage and frustration. As human as it sounded, though, it was loud. All the way down the street neighborhood, lights and flashlights flickered on in response to the explosions and the roar. I even saw a few faces peering through windows to see the action. Idiots. If Lung's next attack shattered any glass, they could get hurt.
From where I was crouched on the side of the roof, I directed some of the more harmless insects to attack Lung. He lashed out with fire the moment they started crawling on him, which I had more or less expected. He was managing to kill the majority of the bugs with each burst of flame, and knowing what I did about his powers, I knew his flames would only get bigger, hotter and more dangerous.
In a typical fight, you figure someone would get weaker as the fight dragged on. They would take their lumps, get tired, exhaust their bag of tricks. With Lung, it was the opposite. I found myself regretting that I had used only a relatively small number of the more venomous bugs, because it was becoming clear that what I'd used wasn't having much effect. He had no idea where I was, so I figured I still had the upper hand, but my options and the number of bugs in my swarm were running out. Despite my earlier glee, I wasn't sure I could win this anymore.
I hissed through my teeth, all too aware that time was running out. Before long, Lung would set fire to the city block, become immune to bites and stings in general, or destroy my entire swarm. I had to get creative. I had to get meaner.
I focused my attention on a lone wasp, and piloted it around Lung's back, up behind his head and then had it circle around to his face and straight at his eyeball. The wasp touched his eyelash, and he blinked before it could hit the target. As a consequence, the stinger only sank into his eyelid, prompting yet another explosion of fire and a scream of rage.
Again. I thought. A honeybee this time. I wasn't sure if he eventually got armor plated eyelids, but maybe I could use the stings to make his eyes swell shut? He wouldn't be able to fight if he couldn't see.
The bee struck home this time, sinking his stinger into the ball of Lung's eye. It surprised me in that it didn't stick or kill the bee, so I had the bee sting again, and this time the barbs let it stick in the skin at the corner of his eye, at the side of his nose. The bee died that time, leaving some tiny organs and a venom sac hanging from the stinger.
I expected him to explode again. He didn't. Instead, he set himself on fire, head to toe. I waited a moment, poised to attack with the next wasp to attack the moment he dropped his
guard, but as the seconds passed, I realized he wasn't planning on extinguishing himself. My heart sank.
Surely he was burning up all of the oxygen in his vicinity. Didn't he need to breathe? What the hell was the fuel source for his fire?
Standing in the street, he turned around, searching for me, with the flames that licked and rolled over his body casting light where there had been only gloom. Abruptly, he hunched over. I wondered if – I hoped – the various toxins and venoms in his system had done the trick. Then his back separated into two. A meaty looking gap appeared along his spine, followed by an eruption of long metallic scales all down the gap. After bristling for a few moments, the scales lay flat like dominoes falling. He stood and stretched, and I could swear he was a foot taller, now with an armor plated spine.
Still on fire, head to toe.
If the 'constantly on fire' thing had tipped the balance of the fight to futile, watching Lung grow and look stronger than ever had pushed me to the point of being spooked. I started thinking about an exit strategy. Rationally, I figured, Lung's men were scattered to the four winds and they were probably in pretty rough shape. Whatever Lung had been planning for tonight, chances were he wasn't going to be able to carry out whatever plans he'd had after this debacle. I had more or less accomplished what I needed to, and I figured I could run and find a way to contact the PHQ just in case.
That was the rational perspective. Justifications aside, I just wanted to leave, right then. If things dragged on and I stayed put, there was a very real chance that Lung would give evidence to the rumor that he could grow wings, at which point I would be spotted for sure. I wouldn't be able to beat Lung at this point, anyway, which left only a graceless retreat as the remaining option.
Lung had his back turned to me, so I lifted myself up, slowly. Crouching, I backed up to retreat to the fire escape, watching Lung carefully as I set foot on the gravel of the roof.
As if a gunshot had gone off, Lung whirled around to stare at me. One of his eyes was just a glowing line behind his mask, but the other was like an orb of molten metal.
A victorious roar filled the air, less human than the outcry he had made earlier, and I felt a kind of resignation. Enhanced hearing. The package of powers the bastard got from his transformation included superhuman hearing.
Worm A Complete Web Serial
Gestation 1.5 Last Chapter Next Chapter
You don't properly appreciate what superhuman strength means until you see someone leap from the sidewalk to the second floor of a building on the far side of the street. He didn't
make it all the way to the roof, but he came to a point maybe three quarters of the way up. I wasn't sure just how Lung kept from falling, but I could only guess that he just buried his fingertips into the building's exterior.
I heard scraping and crunching as he ascended, and looked to my only escape route. I didn't harbor any delusions as far as my ability to get down the fire escape before Lung came over the top of the roof and deduced where I'd run off to. Worse, at that point he could probably just beat me to the street level by jumping off the roof, or even just shoot fire at me through the gaps in the metal while I was halfway down. The irony of the fire escape being anything but didn't escape me.
I wished I could fly. My school offered the choice between Chemistry, Biology and Physics, with Basic Science for the underachievers. I hadn't picked Physics, but I was still pretty sure that no matter how many I could gather together, jumping off the roof with a swarm of flying insects gripping me would be just as ineffective as the 9 year old superhero wannabes you heard about in the news, jumping off ledges with umbrellas and bedsheets.
For the time being, I was stuck where I was.
Reaching inside the convex armor that covered my spine, I ran my fingers over the things I had buckled in there. The EpiPens were meant to treat anaphylactic shock from allergic reactions to bee stings and the like, and likely wouldn't do a thing to Lung, even if I could get close enough and find a point to inject. Worst case scenario, the injections would supercharge his power by prompting a surge of whatever hormones or endorphins fueled his power. Not useful, dangerous at best. I had a pouch of chalk dust that was meant for climbers and gymnasts, I had seen it in the sports store when I was buying the lenses for my mask. I had gloves and didn't think I needed the dryness and extra traction, but I had gotten the idea that it could be useful to throw at an invisible enemy, and bought it on a whim. In retrospect, it had been kind of a dumb purchase, since my power let me find foes like that with my bugs. As a tool against Lung… I wasn't sure if it would explode like regular dust could when exposed to flame, but fire didn't hurt him anyways. Scratch that option.
I tugged the little canister of pepper spray free from my armor. It was a black tube, three inches long, not much thicker around than a pen, with a trigger and a safety switch. It had been a gift from my dad, after I had started to go on my morning jogs for training. He had warned me to vary my route, and had given me the pepper spray for protection, along with a chain to clip it to my belt loop so it couldn't be taken and used against me by an attacker. In costume, I had opted not to keep the chain for the sake of moving quietly. Using my thumb, I flicked the safety off and positioned the tube so I was ready to fire. I crouched to make myself a smaller target, and waited for him to show himself.
Lung's hands, still on fire, were the first thing to show up, gripping the edge of the roof hard enough to bend the material that covered the roof's raised lip. His hands were quickly followed by his head and torso as he hauled himself up. He looked like he was made of overlapping knives or spades, smouldering yellow-orange with the low temperature flame. There was no skin to be seen, and he was easily seven or eight feet tall, judging by the length of his arms and torso. His shoulders alone were three feet across at the very least.
Even the one eye that he had open looked metallic, a glowing, almond shaped pool of liquid-hot metal.
I aimed for the open eye, but the spray fired off at a sharp angle, just glancing off his shoulder. Where the spray grazed him, it ignited into a short lived fireball.
I swore under my breath and fumbled with the device. While he brought his leg over the edge, I adjusted my angle and shot again. This time – with a small tweak of my aim mid-shot – I hit him in the face. The ignited spray rolled off of him, but the contents still did the trick. He screamed, letting go of the roof with one hand, clutching the side of his face where his good eye was.
It had been vain to hope that he would slip and fall. I just counted myself lucky that however metallic his face looked, there were still parts of it vulnerable to the spray.
Lung hauled himself over the edge of the roof. I had him hurting… I just couldn't do anything about it. My bugs were officially useless, there was nothing left in my utility sheath, and I would hurt myself more than I hurt Lung if I attacked him. Making a mental note to pick myself up a concealable knife or baton if I managed to live through this, I bolted for the fire escape.
"Muh… Motherfucker!" Lung screamed. With my back turned, there was no way to see it, but the roof was briefly illuminated before the wave of flame hit me from behind. Knocked off balance, I skidded on the gravel and hit the raised lip of the roof, just by the fire escape. Frantically, I patted myself down. My costume wasn't on fire, but my hair – I hurriedly ran my hands over it to make sure it hadn't been ignited.
Small mercies, I thought, that there was no tar used on the roof. I could just imagine the flames igniting the rooftop, and just how little I'd be able to do if it happened.
Lung stood, slowly, still covering part of his face with his hand. He walked with a slight limp as he approached me. Blindly, he lashed out with a broad wave of flame that rolled over half the roof. I covered my head with my hands and brought my knees to my chest as the hot air and flame rushed over me. My costume seemed to take the brunt of it, but it was still hot enough I had to bite my lip to stop from making a sound.
Lung stopped advancing, slowly turning his head from one side to another.
"Cock. Sucker," he growled in his heavily accented voice, his cussing interrupted by his panting for breath, "Move. Give me something to aim for."
I held my breath and stayed as still as possible. What could I do? I still had the pepper spray in my hand, but even if I got him again, I was running the risk that he would lash out and bake me alive before I could move. If I moved first, he would hear me and I would get knocked around by another blast of flame, probably before I could get to my feet.
Lung moved his hand from his face. He blinked a few times, then looked around, then blinked a few more times. It was a matter of seconds before he could see well enough to
make me out from the shadows. Wasn't pepper spray supposed to put someone down for thirty minutes? How was this monster not an A-Lister?
He suddenly moved, flames wreathing his hands, and I screwed my eyes shut.
When I heard the crackling whoosh of the flame and wasn't burned alive, I opened my eyes again. Lung was firing streams of flame, aiming for the edge of the roof of the adjacent building, a three story apartment. I looked to see what he was aiming at, but couldn't make anything out in the gloom or in the brief second of light Lung's flames afforded.
With no warning, a massive shape landed atop Lung with an impact I could swear people heard at the other end of the street. The size of a van, the 'massive object' was animal rather than vehicle, resembling a cross between a lizard and a tiger, with tangles of muscle and bone where it ought to have skin, scales or fur. Lung was now on his knees, holding one of the beast's sizable claws away from his face with his own clawed hand.
Lung used his free hand to strike the creature across the snout. Even though he was smaller than the beast, the impact made it rear back. It took a few short steps back in reaction, and then rhino-charged him off the edge of the roof. They hit the street with an audible crash.
I stood, aware I was shaking like a leaf. I was so unsteady on my feet, from the mixed relief and fear, that I almost fell over again as two more impacts shook the roof. Two more creatures, similar to the first in texture, but slightly different in size and shape, had arrived on the rooftop. These two each had a pair of riders. I watched as the people slid off the backs of the animals. There were two girls, a guy, and a fourth I identified as male only because of the height. The tall one approached me, while the others hurried to the edge of the roof to watch Lung and the creature duke it out.
"You really saved us a lot of trouble," he told me. His voice was deep, masculine, but muffled by the helmet he wore. He was dressed entirely in black, a costume I realized was basically motorcycle leathers and a motorcycle helmet. The only thing that made me think it was a costume was the visor of his helmet. The full-face visor was sculpted to look like a stylized skull, and was as black as the rest of his costume, with only the faint highlights of reflected light on the surface to give a sense of what it was. It was one of those costumes that people put together out of what they can scrounge up, and it wasn't half bad if you didn't look too close. He reached out a hand towards me, and I leaned away, wary.
I didn't know what to say, so I stuck to my policy of not saying anything that could get me into a worse situation.
Withdrawing his hand, the man in black jerked his thumb over one shoulder, "When we got word Lung was aiming to come after us tonight, we were pretty freaked. We were arguing strategy for the better part of the day. We eventually decided, fuck it, we'd meet him halfway. Wing it. Not my usual way of doing things, but yeah."
Behind him, one of the girls whistled sharply and pointed down at the street. The two monsters the group had been riding on bounded across the roof and leaped down to the street to join the fight.
The guy in black kept talking, "Wouldn't you know, his flunky Lee is there with a half dozen guys, but Lung and the rest of his gang are nowhere to be found," he laughed, a surprisingly normal sound for someone wearing a mask with a skull on it.
"Lee's no slouch in a fight, but there's a reason he's not leader of the ABB. He got spooked without his boss there and ran. I guess you're responsible for that?" Skull-mask waited for a response from me. When I didn't offer one, he ventured towards the edge of the roof and looked down, then spoke without turning to look at me, "Lung is getting creamed. The fuck you do to him?"
"Pepper spray, wasp and bee stings, fire ants and spider bites," the second of the girls said, answering the question for me. She was dressed in a skintight outfit that combined black with a pale shade of blue or purple – I couldn't tell in the dark – and her dark blond hair was long and windblown. The girl grinned as she added, "He's not holding up too well. Gonna feel a helluvalot worse tomorrow."
The man in black suddenly turned to look at me, "Introductions. That's Tattletale. I'm Grue. The girl with the dogs-" he pointed to the other girl, the one who had whistled and directed the monsters. She wasn't in costume unless I counted a plaid skirt, army boots, a torn-up sleeveless T-shirt and a hard plastic, dollar-store rottweiler mask as a costume. "-We call her Bitch, her preference, but in the interests of being P.G., the good guys and media decided to call her Hellhound instead. Last and certainly least, we have Regent."
I finally caught up with what he was saying. Those monsters were dogs?
"Fuck you, Grue," Regent retorted, with a chuckle and a tone of voice that made it clear he wasn't really that offended. He was wearing a white mask, not quite as decorative or made up as the ones I associated with the carnivals in Venice, but similar. He'd placed a silver coronet around his short black curls, and wore a ruffled white shirt with skintight leggings tucked into knee-high boots. The outfit was very renaissance faire. He had a build that made me think more of a dancer than a bodybuilder.
Introductions done, Grue looked at me for several long moments. After a few seconds, he asked me, "Hey, you okay? You hurt?"
"The reason she's not introducing herself isn't because she's hurt," Tattletale told him, as she continued to lean over the edge of the roof and watch whatever was going on at the street level, "It's because she's shy."
Tattletale turned around and it looked like she was going to say something else, but she stopped, turning her head. The smile she'd been wearing faded, "Heads up. We've gotta scram."
Bitch nodded in response and whistled, one short whistle followed by two long ones. After a brief pause, the building was suddenly rattled by impacts. In just moments, the three creatures of hers leaped from the alleys to either side of the building and onto the roof.
Grue turned towards me. I was still standing on the opposite end of the roof, by the fire escape. "Hey, want a ride?"
I looked at the creatures – dogs? They were bloodied, snarling creatures out of a nightmare. I shook my head. He shrugged.
"Hey," Tattletale said to me, seating herself just behind Bitch, "What's your name?"
I stared at her. My voice caught in my throat before I was able to get the words out, "I don't… I haven't picked one yet."
"Well, Bug, a cape is gonna show up in less than a minute. You did us a solid by dealing with Lung, so take my advice. Someone from the Protectorate shows up, finds two bad guys duking it out, they're not going to let one walk away. You should get out of here," She said. She flashed me a smile. She had one of those vulpine grins that turned up at the corners. Behind her simple black domino style mask, her eyes were glittering with mischief. If she had red hair, she would have made me think of a fox. She kind of did, anyways.
With that, they leaped over my head, one of the three beasts hitting or stepping on the fire escape on the way down, eliciting a screech of metal on metal.
When I realized what had just happened, I could have cried. It was easy enough to pin down Regent, Tattletale and Bitch as teenagers. It wasn't much of an intuitive leap to guess that Grue had been one too. The 'children' Lung had mentioned, the ones I had gone to so much effort to save tonight, were bad guys. Not only that, but they had mistaken me for one, too.
Worm A Complete Web Serial
Gestation 1.6 Last Chapter Next Chapter
I heard the cape arrive on his souped up motorcycle. I didn't want to be seen fleeing the scene of a fight, and risk being labeled one of the bad guys by yet another person, but I wasn't about to get closer to the street either, in case Lung was feeling better. Since there was nowhere to go, I just stayed put. Just resting felt good.
If you'd asked me just a few hours ago about how I thought I would feel meeting a big name superhero, I would have used words like excited and giddy. The reality was that I was almost too exhausted to care.
It looked as though he flew up onto the roof, but the six-foot long weapon the man held kind of jerked as he landed. I was pretty sure I saw the tines of a grappling hook retreating back into the end of the weapon. So this was what Armsmaster looked like in person, I thought.
The largest superhero organization in the world was the Protectorate, spanning Canada and the States, with ongoing talks about including Mexico in the deal. It was a government sponsored league of superheroes with a base in each 'cape city'. That is, they had a team set up in each city with a sizable population of heroes and villains. Brockton Bay's team was officially 'The Protectorate East-North-East', and were headquartered in the floating, forcefield-shrouded island that you could see from the Boardwalk. This guy, Armsmaster, was the guy in charge of the local team. When the core group of the top Protectorate members from around Canada and the States assembled in that classic 'v' formation for the photo shoots, Armsmaster was one of the guys in the wings. This was a guy who had his own action figures. Poseable Armsmaster with interchangeable Halberd parts.
He really did look like a superhero, not like some guy in a costume. It was an important distinction. He wore body armor, dark blue with silver highlights, had a sharply angled v-shaped visor covering his eyes and nose. With only the lower half of his face exposed, I could see a beard trimmed to trace the edges of his jaw. If I had to judge, with only the lower half of his face to go by, I'd guess he was in his late twenties or early thirties.
His trademark and weapon was his Halberd, which was basically a spear with an axe head on the end, souped up with gadgets and the kind of technology you generally only saw in science fiction. He was the kind of guy who appeared on magazine covers and did interviews on TV, so you could find almost anything about Armsmaster through various media, short of his secret identity. I knew his weapon could cut through steel as though it was butter, that it had plasma injectors for stuff that the blade alone couldn't cut and that he could fire off directed electromagnetic pulses to shut down forcefields and mechanical devices.
"You gonna fight me?" He called out.
"I'm a good guy," I said.
Stepping closer to me, he tilted his head, "You don't look like one."
That stung, especially coming from him. It was like Michael Jordan saying you sucked at basketball. "That's… not intentional," I responded, not a little defensively, "I was more than halfway done putting the costume together when I realized it was already looking more edgy than I'd intended, and I couldn't do anything about it by then."
There was a long pause. Nervously, I turned my eyes from that opaque visor. I glanced at his chest emblem, a silhouette of his visor in blue against a silver background, and was struck with the ridiculous thought that I had once owned a pair of underpants with his emblem on the front.
"You're telling the truth," he said. It was a definitive statement, which startled me. I wanted to ask how he knew, but I wasn't about to do or say anything that might change his mind.
He approached closer, looking me over as I sat there with my arms around my knees, he asked, "You need a hospital?"
"No," I said. "Don't think so. I'm as surprised as you are."
"You're a new face," he said.
"I haven't even come up with a name yet. You know how hard it is to come up with a bug-themed name that doesn't make me sound like a supervillain or a complete dork?"
He chuckled, and it sounded warm, very normal, "I wouldn't know. I got into the game early enough that I didn't have to worry about missing out on all of the good names."
There was a pause in the conversation. I suddenly felt awkward. I don't know why, but I admitted to him, "I almost died."
"That's why we have the Ward program," he said. There was no judgement in his tone, no pressure. Just a statement.
I nodded, more to give a response than out of any agreement with the answer. The Wards were the under-eighteen subdivision of the Protectorate, and Brockton Bay did have its own team of Wards, with the same naming convention as the Protectorate; The Wards East-North-East. I had considered applying to join, but the notion of escaping the stresses of high school by flinging myself into a mess of teenage drama, adult oversight and schedules seemed self-defeating.
"You get Lung?" I asked, to change the subject from the Wards. I was pretty sure that he was obligated to try and induct new heroes into either the Protectorate or the Wards, depending on their age, to promote the whole agenda of organized heroes who are accountable for their actions, and I really didn't want him to get on my case about joining.
"Lung was unconscious, beaten and battered when I arrived. I pumped him full of tranquilizers to be safe and temporarily restrained him under a steel cage I welded to the sidewalk. I'll pick him up on my way back."
"Good," I said, "With him in jail, I'll feel like I accomplished something today. Only reason I started the fight was because I overheard him telling his men to shoot some kids. Only realized later that he was talking about some other villains."
Armsmaster turned to look at me. So I told him, walking him through the fight in general, the arrival of the teenage bad guys, and their general descriptions. Before I finished, he was pacing back and forth on the roof.
"These guys. They knew I was coming?"
I nodded, once. As much respect as I had for Armsmaster, I wasn't in much of a mood to repeat myself.
"That explains a lot," he said, staring off into the distance. After a few moments, he went on to explain, "They're slippery. On those few occasions we do manage to get in a toe to toe fight with them, they either win, or they get away more or less unscathed, or both. We know so little about them. Grue and Hellhound were working on their own before they joined the group, so there's some information there, but the other two? They're nonentities. If the girl Tattletale has some way of detecting or tracking us, it would go a long way towards explaining why they're doing as well as they are."
It kind of surprised me to hear one of the top level heroes admitting to being anything less than perfectly on top of things.
"It's funny," I said, after a few moment's thought, "They didn't seem that hardcore. Grue said they were kind of panicking when they heard Lung was coming after them, and they were casually joking around while the fight was going on. Grue was making fun of Regent."
"They said all this in front of you?" he asked.
I shrugged, "I think they thought I was helping them out. The way Tattletale talked, I think she thought I was a bad guy too or something." With a touch of bitterness, I said, "Dunno, I guess it was the costume that led them to that assumption."
"Could you have taken them in a fight?" Armsmaster asked me.
I started to shrug, and winced a little. I was feeling a little sore in the shoulder, where I'd tumbled on the roof after being blasted by Lung's flames. I said, "Like you said, we don't know a lot about them, but I think that girl with the dogs-"
"Hellhound," Armsmaster said.
"I think she could have kicked my ass on her own, so no. I probably couldn't have fought them."
"Then count it as a good thing that they got the wrong impression," Armsmaster said.
"I'll try to look at it that way," I said, struck by how he easily he was able to employ the whole 'take a negative and turn it into a positive' mindset I'd been trying to maintain. I envied that.
"That a girl," he said, "And while we're looking forward, we need to decide where we go from here."
My heart sank. I knew he was going to bring up the Wards again.
"Who gets the credit for Lung?"
Caught off guard, I looked up at him. I started to speak, but he held up his hand.
"Hear me out. What you've done tonight is spectacular. You played a part in getting a major villain into custody. You just need to consider the consequences."
"Consequences," I muttered, even as the word spectacular rang in my ears.
"Lung has an extensive gang throughout Brockton Bay and neighboring cities. More than that, he has two superpowered flunkies. Oni Lee and Bakuda."
I shook my head, "I know about Oni Lee, and Grue mentioned fighting him. I've never heard of Bakuda."
Armsmaster nodded, "Not surprising. She's new. What we know about her is limited. She made her first appearance and demonstration of her powers by way of a drawn out terrorism campaign against Cornell University. Lung apparently recruited her and brought her to Brockton Bay after her plans were foiled by the New York Protectorate. This is… something of a concern."
"What are her powers?"
"Are you aware of the Tinker classification?"
I started to shrug, but remembered my sore shoulder and nodded instead. It was probably more polite, too. I said, "Covers anyone with powers that give them an advanced grasp of science. Lets them make technology years ahead of its time. Ray guns, ice blasters, mechanized suits of armor, advanced computers."
"Close enough," Armsmaster said. It struck me he would be a Tinker, if his Halberd and armor were any indication. That, or he got his stuff from someone else. He elaborated, "Well, most Tinkers have a specialty or a special trick. Something they're particualrly good at or something that they can do, which other Tinkers can't. Bakuda's specialty is bombs."
I stared at him. A woman with a power that let her make bombs that were technologically decades ahead of their time. No wonder he saw it as a concern.
"Now I want you to consider the danger involved in taking the credit for Lung's capture. Without a doubt, Oni Lee and Bakuda will be looking to accomplish two goals. Freeing their boss and getting vengeance on the one responsible. I suspect you're now aware… these are scary people. Scarier in some ways than their boss."
"You're saying I shouldn't take the credit," I said.
"I'm saying you have two options. Option one is to join the Wards, where you'll have support and protection in the event of an altercation. Option two is to keep your head down. Don't take the credit. Fly under the radar."
I wasn't prepared to make a decision like that. Usually, I went to sleep at eleven or so, waking up at six thirty to get ready for my morning run. At my best guess, it was somewhere between one and two in the morning. I was emotionally exhausted from the highs and lows
of the evening, and I could barely wrap my head around the complications and headaches that would come from joining the Wards, let alone having two insanely dangerous sociopaths coming after me.
On top of that, I wasn't so ignorant as to miss Armsmaster's motives. If I opted to not take the credit for Lung's capture, Armsmaster would, I was sure. I didn't want to get on the bad side of a major player.
"Please keep my involvement in Lung's capture secret," I told him, painfully disappointed to have to say it, even as I knew it made the most sense.
He smiled, which I hadn't expected. He had a nice smile. It made me think that he could win the hearts of a lot of women, whatever the top two-thirds of his face looked like. "I think you'll look back and see this was a smart decision," Armsmaster said, turning to walk to the other end of the roof, "Call me at the PHQ if you're ever in a pinch." He stepped off the edge of the roof and dropped out of sight.
Call me if you're ever in a pinch. He'd been saying, without openly admitting, that he owed me one. He would take the lion's share of the credit for Lung's capture, but he owed me one.
Before I was all the way down the fire escape, I heard the thrum of his motorcycle, presumably carrying Lung towards a life of confinement. I could hope.
It would take me a half hour to get home. On the way, I would stop and pull on the sweatshirt and jeans I had hidden. I knew my dad went to sleep even earlier than I did, and he slept like a log, so I had nothing to worry about as far as wrapping up the night.
It could have gone worse. Strange as it sounds, those words were a security blanket I wrapped around myself to keep myself from dwelling on the fact that tomorrow was a school day.