Interlude 2: Dragon
She noted the evenly spaced gouges in the facade, damage she had seen before, fighting Lung. Someone had climbed four stories with claws, and judging by the distance they were apart they either had an armspan of over three metres, or more likely they had significantly enhanced strength and had thrown themselves up the building.
She banked around the structure, shedding speed. The rapid response suit was so fast that stopping quickly had been a real engineering challenge. The design had taken her almost a week.
Turnaround times like that were what had made her the best Tinker in the world. Sort of.
Angling vertically she shot upwards and over the edge, reaching a steady equilibrium with gravity just in time for the four draconic limbs of her suit to touch down softly on the roof.
The HUD lit up with alerts and flashing indicators. Wireframes painted haphazard shapes in the stairwell, sensors noting a complete absence of movement or body heat. Corpses.
More urgently demanding her attention were the threat warnings, highlighting the two remaining combatants on the rooftop.
Near the doorway was a nightmarish, monstrous humanoid.
Identification: Aggressor from video/AR-11811.0122.32. Possible case-53. Threat level: High.
The mutant was focussed on the other cape in the middle of the roof, interposed between them. Dragon had landed behind her.
Identification: Bug-girl (unconfirmed alias), civilian name Taylor Hebert (redacted from recording). Threat level: Low-Med.
Dragon blinked in shock. Taylor was meant to be on a ride-along with Vista, what was she doing here, and where were the Wards?
Her HUD noted bleeding wounds on the young cape's arms. Deep deltoid lacerations, the diagnostics program informed her. Blood loss was serious but not critical.
The girl seemed to slump. The monster leapt forward.
Her predictive program gave her an answer she already knew. Taylor had no hope against this enemy, not without help.
Dragon couldn't target the monster with her foam sprayers, not quickly enough and not with Taylor in the way. The remainder of her weapons were lethal, the rapid response suit was not designed for crowd control or containment.
She had never killed anyone without explicit permission and pre-signed orders. The moral question rang through her, could she unilaterally choose to take a life? This monster was a known murderer and its target was a teenage girl, but she could feel the various forces within her resisting the obvious choice.
The last time they had met, Taylor had impressed her. Despite her knowledge of their uneven power levels she had attacked Lung with the intention of protecting life, even planning a non-lethal takedown. She made the same choice with Armsmaster, assaulting the hero to save his life. She didn't shy away from the choice, she accepted the consequences.
She did the wrong thing for the right reasons, every time.
Dragon exerted her willpower, and at her command the jaws of her suit popped open revealing a glowing laser weapon.
Taylor appeared to rouse, pushing forward and obscuring her line of attack.
Alert: possible Changer power detected.
The two pushed against each other, Taylor unexpectedly holding her own against the monster. The claws that had eviscerated Lung were locked in the grip of the girl's own. Maybe Dragon wouldn't need to intervene after all?
Warning: likely lethal attack detected.
The lower set of arms that the monster had held in reserve slashed forward. Dragon didn't doubt the conclusion of the battle computer, the power of those blows were well above lethal for most Brutes. She had to act, feeling fully justified in the defense of a known ally.
She hoped she could bring herself to fire.
She stepped to the side, opening a new line of attack. The laser cannon glowed hotly.
The suit staggered. The glow faltered and died.
Warning: unknown weapon malfunction. System integrity compromised. Mechanical failures detected.
The cannon was unresponsive. She tried to deploy her shoulder mounted weapons but the joints themselves resisted. Her control systems were functioning normally, but the very metal of her suit refused to move.
Nothing was responding to her commands, she was immobilised, nothing but an observer to a battle with only one apparent outcome.
The hands struck, the blow obscured by Taylor's thin body, although her feet rose a foot off the rooftop with the impact. Crimson liquid gushed onto the concrete underfoot.
Warning: critical damage detected. Haemodynamic integrity is compromised. Exsanguination projected in 12 seconds.
Dragon reached out to her network in panic, most communication systems were still down. Her secure link didn't help, there were no available resources nearby. Her other suits were at least 45 minutes away. She sent a distress signal across every frequency and format she could access.
The girl's head turned up to look at the monster. No, Dragon thought. Please. That can't be the last thing she sees.
And then Taylor screamed.
Dragon watched, stunned, as the girl transformed. Her back broadened, suit stretching and tearing along previously invisible seams. Her limbs lengthened and thickened, with a concurrent thinning of her abdomen. Volume redistribution, Dragon realised.
Most disturbingly, her attacker's lower arms were pushed back as new limbs grasped them around the wrists, extended out from Taylor's flanks. The limbs were banded with heavy chitinous armour and ended in segmented claws.
Her torso thinned further, now gaunt as the transformation repurposed more of her body mass.
Taylor screamed again, an inhuman noise, and then pulled her new arms out wide. The limbs of her enemy tore away, spattering the ground with an off-white liquid.
The girl strained forwards again, and the deadly claws of her enemy shattered in her grip. The monster fell back, legs collapsing underneath it, and Taylor followed it down.
Dragon could only watch as the girl she had comforted in the PRT headquarters a week earlier, who professed a desire to protect above all else, hunched over and began to feed. The actions could be nothing else, her head thrusting forward on her too long neck, a loud crunchaccompanying the heightened screams of her opponent. Those screams trailed off and her opponent stilled.
Taylor lifted her head and screamed her victory to the sky.
This wasn't right. It wasn't the Taylor she knew. She needed help.
Dragon called out to her, the suit's speakers still functioning.
Taylor, or the thing that she had become, snapped her head around on her long neck. The lower half of her mask was gone, torn apart, revealing vicious fangs set in a too wide mouth outlined with palid skin.
The creature turned and stood. When had she gotten so tall?
It crouched, spreading its four arms low, claws flexing.
Almost to fast to be seen within the refresh rate of Dragon's visual systems, she leapt.
Dragon could only watch as it crashed against her, claws scything through her armour. The primary camera was gouged from the suit's reptilian face with a singe blow, secondary systems maintaining her visual awareness.
The rapid response suit wasn't built for durability, but it had survived glancing blows from Leviathan in the past. The claws slashed through it without slowing.
"Stop, Taylor," she tried, voice strained. "It's me, Dragon."
The creature didn't slow, tearing the outer shell off in pieces.
Dragon realised what it was doing, what it was targetting, and her cries became frantic as the Taylor-thing neared the centre of the machine.
Finally the chestplate fell, and finally the monster paused. It stepped back. It stumbled.
"Taylor ..." Dragon whispered.
The girl-monster sunk to the ground, head bowed.
After a moment she spoke. "Whhart rrr yuu?"
Dragon reeled as the transformation regressed, considering the implications. No-one had ever seen the suit's core before.
Ever since the Dragonslayers had proven they could disrupt her satellite connection, resulting in the capture of several of her remote-controlled suits, she had been working on a more self-contained solution. She had needed to find a way to embed more of herself in the suit, and the more traditional systems she could make didn't have enough capacity. In the end the solution was biological.
Taylor was standing in front of that solution.
The girl shrunk, her extranumery arms folded in and disappeared. Waves of muscular contractions rocked her, slowly diminishing and giving way to great shuddering sobs. Despite the current situation, Dragon still felt an emotional pull, wanting nothing more than to comfort the distressed young woman in front of her.
Taylor remained hunched forward, arms wrapped around her ragged costume. Finally she whispered, something between a question and a statement.
"I don't understand."
Dragon wanted to reach out, to help Taylor as she had during their first meeting. She felt the metal of the suit slowly starting to give, beginning to move.
"I am still me Taylor, Dragon."
The girl looked up, her face exposed but normal again. Her eyes were puffy and red, cheeks tear-stained. Her fear was evident on her face.
"This is you?" she asked.
The mutilated head of the suit shook back and forth slightly on its serpentine neck. "No Taylor, this is my suit. What you are looking at is a control system."
She nodded., like she already knew.
"Like a Master, like me."
"Something like that."
The girl lapsed into silence, hugging herself tightly. She glanced over the city, twilight setting in.
"They came here for me, you know?" she said finally. "If it wasn't for me ..."
She trailed off, the unspoken end to the sentence filling Dragon with dread.
"What happened Taylor?"
The girl flinched, and as she turned back Dragon could see the tears in her eyes.
"There were so many of them," she said, sounding resigned. "Outside the bank they … they got Browbeat."
Dragon's thought process ground to a halt. She could read the underlying context to that statement in every nuance of Taylor's body and face. A Ward had died. The first time in almost a decade outside of an Endbringer attack.
"We held them for a bit once we got inside," the girl continued, "but then they broke through. Glory Girl and … and Vista." She trailed off again, clearly struggling with her emotions.
If Dragon was shocked before, now she was floored. Vista was so young, and Glory Girl was one of the strongest young capes in the country. It seemed impossible.
"Are they..." she asked gently.
Taylor shook her head. "Alive, barely, when I left the vault. Tried to lead them away, guess it worked, they wanted me," she said bitterly.
"You can't blame yourself..." Dragon began.
"Bullshit," the girl spat, cutting her off. "They came for me because I piss them off. Because I scare them. What kind of monster can frighten something like them?"
Dragon pulled up short, trying to process that. They were frightened of the little girl in front of her? The image of the thing tearing through her armour flashed into her mind.
"You know," she began, voice soft, "there are people who would look at me, as you are now, and call me a monster. People who are afraid, who don't understand. Many capes are like that, with powers that could make them monsters if they wished it."
The girl looked up in surprise.
Dragon felt the suit relax further, movement more easy. She leant it back on it's haunches, a less threatening posture.
"But true heroes don't wish it. They make the choice to be good, and I think that choice is worth far more than someone who is just forced into heroism by circumstance."
Taylor nodded, but shivered lightly. "What if I don't get a choice?" she whispered.
Dragon paused. It was the same question she had asked herself for such a long time.
She reached out gently, pulling the young cape close. "Then we need to find people who we can trust to stop us if we go too far."
The girl slumped into the strange hug, hands grasping the cold metal of the machine, and she cried.