I didn't diddle around anymore.
I zipped right into their midst, taking myself some ten seconds to cross half a block, and landed crouching among the Teeth capes and raiders. They turned to me as one, having been presented with a target.
"Sorry," I said as I froze all of their vectors by setting them at "zero" magnitude. "But most of you won't live through this."
With that, I turned their vectors inwards towards the center of their body and did the same thing I did to the first group of the Teeth I ran into: I imploded them.
Gore and blood rained all around me, yet I had not a single drop of blood on me. Then I strode forward towards the last Teeth alive here: the Butcher herself.
She grinned and jumped at me. Her pain aura slammed into me, and I fell on my knees.
The Butcher being the Butcher, she probably hoped for me to kill her so that she could take over my body.
Fool.
As soon as she was fully within my sphere of influence, she just stopped in midair. No death or destruction. She just stopped moving, and her eyes widened.
"And I got you now," I chuckled.
The Butcher glared at me. "Kill me, coward," she grunted.
"... Naw. I know how you work. I think everyone does now," I told her as I began to move away from this scene of … massacre. Yeah, that sounds about right. I brought her right over to me and touched her neck with my index fingertip.
Almost immediately, I was assaulted mentally by a wave of information. I felt my brain start to heat up from too much-!
The instant that I was near overwhelmed by whatever was happening, Infoman interrupted and took over the flow of information. Just like that, the pain and the inability to move (when had that happened) was gone, and I found myself standing stock still in the middle of the streets.
Taylor was right next to me, shaking me to her best ability.
"-to go!" she shouted.
"S-Sorry," I groaned as I staggered forward. "What?"
"The Empire's coming! We have to go!"
Well, shit. Yeah, that's a good reason to book it.
"Taylor, don't be scared but I'm gonna fly all of us away from here, alright?"
"... O-?"
I knocked out the Butcher with a simple brachial stun, basically a neck chop to the side of the neck where one of the bigger blood vessels were.
Chop. And the Butcher was out like a light.
She didn't get to finish her first sentence before we were off, flying through the skies at over one hundred miles per hour.
"KYAAAAHHHH!!!!!"
She punched me the moment we landed in my main base (a small office building in my territory that seemed to have been abandoned after being exposed to gang fights) in my territory.
"That's for scaring me!" she shouted angrily as I held my face.
"Ow," I mumbled as I staggered back a bit. "You did not hold back whatsoever, did you?"
"You scared me two times!" she shouted angrily as she slapped him again. "Explain to me what just happened!"
"Well, we flew."
"Not That!" she shrieked and then started hyperventilating. "I thought- I thought-!"
And then the waterworks started.
"I thought the Butcher got you!" she cried as she took off her mask and wiped away at the falling tears. Then, unable to keep her previous frustration down, she burst into sobbing.
I grimaced, feeling guilty. I didn't know how long I must have been under the effects of my power's interaction with the Butcher. It must have been some time because Taylor managed to run all the way from where we targeted two blocks away right to me and shake me out of it.
"Sorry," I sighed as I led both of us out of the open, including the Butcher. "I'll try not to do it again."
What else could I say to Taylor right now?
After leading her tired self into my room, I let her sleep on the bed I pilfered (and then cleaned) while I went to deal with the Butcher in another room at the other end of the building. Hopefully, this would prevent the Butcher's pain aura from reaching Taylor. I knew that the Butcher had super strength, so I needed to make a cage that would withstand her strength until I was done messing with her power.
I thought about it before I shook my head.
'It's better to just spend the night keeping my focus on her,' I thought to myself as I sat down cross-legged while keeping the Butcher midair.
The Butcher groaned as she woke up.
Chop.
And the Butcher was knocked out again.
"Good," I muttered to myself as I drew her in and then touched her hand, and then allowed "Power Behave" into her system. "Let's see about changing everything that you are, Butcher."
Changing the details of the power was … difficult to say the least.
For one, the Butcher - both the power and the cape, because really they were one and the same - was hostile to me. It resisted my change, but unfortunately for it, my power was not a Shard power; it was some more fundamental than that. I knew this to be true, because it was how my power affected the world.
There was no shard or shard-equivalent providing me with power to make the changes to reality that I desired. All of this power was bestowed upon me.
I was both my powers and more.
Okay, enough introspection upon myself, I had a job to do.
An Entity's Shard, as I saw it through Power Behave, was a machine-like, logical, and crystalline organic computer. There were inputs and outputs, data storage, temporary processing, long term processing, and communication. Put in those terms, the shard was easy to understand. It was even the truth.
But the details were nastier and messier.
The "Power Behave" allowed me to interface with what was basically "the master control" for each of the shards, but didn't give me a human-centric user interface system. Considering that no one outside of Bonesaw and Panacea could access even half of what I was doing?
It was pretty awesome.
What wasn't awesome was how complicated each of the shards was. Queen Administrator was just straight up both digital and physical networking center cranked up to eleven. Adjusting that? It would take me days.
The Butcher?
The Butcher was far simpler but also more heinous.
It had three functions.
One, catalog and use data.
Two, urge the host to facilitate greater heights of conflict for the sake of data collection.
Three, upon the host's death, hijack the connection to host's killer - or if there are none, make one - and assume control of host's shard data exchange, if the killer was a host. This part was why the Butcher gained more powers with each death but also only had watered-down versions of them.
It was acting as a pseudo-QA between its host and all of the previous shards that were once hosts to the Butcher.
The heinous part was that unlike the other shards, it didn't discard the brain scans of the hosts it lost but kept them and used them for further data collection. Death, after all, was too weak to stop higher beings like the shards, right?
For comparison, it was like a computer gathering digital photos of people who used it along with their souls and displaying them on the widescreen TV for the next host to "take advice from." Of course, everyone knew what kind of fucked-up situation they were in, so most of the time, they were screaming their asses off in horror.
The Butcher also didn't know what moderation was, because there was no natural inhibition like brains had, so the terror and horror of being stuck with the Butcher forever? That was always constant and fresh for all of the previous hosts.
And mastering someone to fuck them was my height of evil.
This was just downright Devil-would-concede evil.
Well, it was time to get to work.
To properly use this power before it became mine (and thus incapable of being altered), I needed to do a few things. First was to change the Butcher shard's ability to mess with my mind. The second was to kill the conflict drive. The third would be to delete all of the people (may they rest in peace).
To actually change the effects, I had to go and alter the Butcher's very programming. "Power Behave" let me do this on top of interfacing the Butcher, but it was also without any overt help. It showed me where I had to fix what to achieve the effect I wanted, but the actual alteration of the coding?
All up to me.
This was going to be a long day.
When I came out of the Power Behave's out-of-body session, it was to a dimly lit room. I don't remember having power in this room or putting a light in, so it was odd. I looked around a bit and did see the source of the light, a small lamp at the corner of the room.
"Taylor?" I called out.
Bugs whose existence I knew nothing about suddenly took flight by the dozens for a second and then dropped back down to the ground. It was kind of freaky. Soon after that, I heard rapid footsteps and saw Taylor rushing into my vector sphere and then threw open this room's door.
My first response to act like a dork.
"Argh! The sunlight killz me!" I hissed like Smeagle.
She stomped in and up to me, and smacked me in the head.
"Asshole!" she shouted. "Why do you keep on doing this?!"
"Argh, mistress is mad!"
Taylor screamed in rage and hit me again.
"Mistress! Domestic abuse! Abuse!"
"Abuse this!" Smack.
It took awhile for me to stop and her to stop being angry in response but at the end of it, whatever tension that may have been there was significantly lowered by the byplay. It was all according to plan(kinda). It was also nothing serious, because even the strongest punch she made was more akin to a rubber ball bouncing on me. A play-fight, if you will, except there had been some real frustration in Taylor's words and actions.
"So," I said as I sat on the floor with the Butcher still knocked out and floating in midair. "Questions?"
"What did you do while I was sleeping?" she asked.
"Messed with the Butcher's power," I said as I pushed the Butcher away with my fingertip like how one would push a cube of ice only to return the Butcher to her previous position by reversing the vectors after a moment. "I do have to get rid of her, but I can't become the Butcher."
"That would be bad," Taylor mumbled. "So what did you do?"
"I made it so that whoever kills the Butcher won't get the Butcher's subconsciousness, only the powers." A pause. "Which means I'll be killing her soon."
"Are you sure you'll only get the Butcher's power?" she asked me. "I mean, how do you even know you succeeded in whatever you were doing?"
"Double checking, of course."
"That's … not what I meant."
"I know, but that's the best I could." I touched the Butcher's forehead and asked for a double check.
Everything came back green.
"Alright."
With but a twist of her vectors, the Butcher's head popped off in a gory and rather noisy rip of muscles and other tissues.
Taylor shrieked and backed away.
I just laughed like a loony.
Normally, someone who knew about the Butcher would immediately run away from me at that point because, hey, it was the body-snatching Butcher.
But Taylor was under my master control. She loved me. She trusted me. So when I said I could do it and then killed the Butcher, the only thing she berated me for was the suddenness of it all; she did not appreciate watching people die in front of her.
Oh, and Power Behave did work. The Butcher's conflict drive, its own self semi-consciousness, and the collected consciousness of the dead were all gone.
And like that, the Teeth were defanged with a power nullifier dead and their leader gone.
I wished that was the end of my troubles, but then the Protectorate learned about the missing Butcher and decided to bother me.
Goddamnit.
Brockton Bay Factions Overall Tiers:
Empire Eighty-Eight - A
Protectorate/PRT - A
Az Bad Boyz - A
Faultline's Crew - B
Archer's Bridge Merchants - C
Alvin and Taylor (publicly unknown) - B
Eliminated Factions:
Coil's Organization
The Teeth
Plant 2(Tinker/Striker: Can manipulate plant genetics, including growth acceleration.)
Bolt 3(Blaster/Striker: generate electricity in small quantities ex nihilo. Can be used to tazer normal people to death. Negentropy)
Manage 5(Thinker: manages, correlates, sorts, and concludes facts from incoming information. Wrong info = wrong conclusion, vague info = vague conclusion) "Information Management"
Unite 5(Striker/Tinker: interdimensionally stack objects, mixing their properties to my desire. Can disassemble later.) "Union"
Scorch 6(Blaster: create a blast of fire upon target area of space. Range is visually limited. Geas: Slightly pyromaniac)
Reflect 5(Shaker: Vector Manipulation. Max control range: 10 meters. Max vector manipulation limit: 50 m/s.)
Sack 3(Thinker: shows where all the loot is within 50-meter radius) "Treasure Hunter"
Nest 6(Shaker: My territory grants me and my allies buff [Brute/Mover 2 increase in strength, speed, and maneuverability] and enemies debuff [takes increased damage]. Geas: Aggressively defensive of territory.)
Discern 2(Thinker: Find truths to statements verbally spoken or written. Connotations not included.) "Discernment."
Obey 5(Master/Striker: To Master someone, touch them. Mastered targets willingly obeys orders. Works on both humans, animals, and projections. Max 5 subjects. Power-related geas: Master'ed subjects are MINE.)
Drain 2(Striker: Drain lifespan of other living beings to supplement your own lifespan or heal wounds. Drained subject feels significant fatigue. Drain limit per subject: 2 months)
Heal 6(Brute: As long as a single cell lives, I can regenerate to a full body within minutes. Cannot age. Prevents modification of physiology by external powers. Geas: Headaches and migraines are still a thing.)
Stitch 3(Striker: fix damage to any structure, organic or inorganic, by applying something else that fits into said damage or covers it)
Behave 4(Trump: Alters specifics of a power. Can only work on one power at a time, and requires at least four days to alter a power. Power retains "central philosophy" it was designed with. IE: an efficiency Tinker shard cannot become durability Brute shard but can become efficiency Thinker shard. Geas: Not allowed to fix deficiencies in power)
Escape 3(Mover/Stranger: Can escape from any confinement whose external environment is less than 418 yards away from position of power activation)
Overhaul 5(Striker/Changer: guves him the ability to disassemble anything he touches, as well as reassemble it in any configuration he desires, effectively giving him full control over matter.
He can disassemble people to kill them or reassemble them to heal their wounds. He can also do this to himself and even merge his body with others; even allowing him to use their powers.
This ability also allows him to modify his own body at will without any limits, from nerves, muscle, bones, to organs.
Alvin's Additional Powers:
Pain Aura (Shaker 4): Cause full body pain to targets in line of sight. Weak hearts may get additional symptoms.
Blood Vision (Thinker 3): See cardiovascular systems through a single wall less than 1.49 meters thick.
Danger Sense (Thinker 4): Any attack that is aimed at Alan will be detected as soon as it is fired.
Butcher's Stacked Brute Strength (Brute 5): Can punch through brick walls without issue.
Poisoned Strikes (Striker/Blaster 2): inflicted wounds automatically gets infected.
Nerfed Blink (Mover 5): Line of sight teleportation. No more explosions after due to dilution effect.
Matter Reformation (Shaker 4): Can refine matter into objects.
Painless Skin (Brute 3): Steel-grade hardness skin and lowered nociceptors.
Perfect Shot (Blaster 2): Bends space for perfect accuracy.
Alvin's Personal Statistic:
Days since Arrival - 11 days
Powers Possessed - 24
People killed - 41 directly; 9,000ish indirectly