Leaf
Chapter Five
When Lisa joined the Undersiders, she had wanted to run ops. She'd be the girl in the chair at the computer, feeding intel to the team from a position of safety. Bitch had shot her down right from the start.
"If you're taking an equal share," she had said, "you're gonna get your hands dirty too."
It was rare to find a career villain so self aware. Usually people in their line of work got good at lying to themselves and told themselves that they weren't hurting anyone who didn't deserve it, that their hands were as clean as they ever were. Bitch was as crude and as cruel as they came, but she saw through that.
Lisa had never gotten the chance to take the backseat role she wanted, but her team kept her safe. Besides, working on the front lines gave her a chance to talk to so many interesting people.
"Hey, Fei Hong," she said to the fine owner of the Sea Dragon. "How's business? Looks slow, and on karaoke night too."
Fei Hong kept his hands where she could see them and away from the counter.
Keeps glancing at counter. Keeps gun and silent alarm under counter, but won't use either. Used to submitting to authority, comfortable under authority, too much to leverage.
Leverage. Debt? No, not in debt. Family. Large family, grew up in large family, started large family. Multiple college funds for children. Three, four children, probably four.
"You d-don't need to do this. I've paid my fees for the month."
Practiced stutter to appear afraid. Lung appreciates shows of fear in underlings. Not afraid. Practiced subservience.
Tattletale shut off the flow of information and rolled her eyes. "Yeah, to the ABB. Though you do a lot more than that. This little place is Lung's favorite club when he's out of costume. Can't say why. I guess it's the ambiance, but personally, I prefer a place with a dance floor."
Sophisticated. Small tables placed far apart. Designed for groups of one to four clients, favoring privacy and quiet over customer traffic. Strong oriental influence on decoration. Performances and lighting designed to relax instead of excite.
She looked over at Bitch who was pouring gasoline all over the floor. "What about you? Does this place seem fun to you?"
Bitch gave her a full body scowl that was perfectly readable through her plastic dog mask. "I thought we were torching the place."
Tattletale shrugged and turned back to Fei Hong. "I guess she's not a fan." She glanced down at his wedding ring, a simple gold band.
He touches it when he's nervous. Has siblings nearby to help out at home in case of emergencies. Timid. Insecure about masculinity. Relies on others.
"By the way, how many of your wife's four kids do you think are yours? The second one looks the most like you, but he looks a lot like your brother too."
His eyes widened. "You ... you leave my family out of this!"
Tattletale held her hands up in a placating gesture. She needed to keep him off balance, but not manic. "Just making small talk, but if you want to get down to business, then let's get down to business. This is a robbery, so I'll need all the money in your cash register, all the money in the safe in your office, all the money in the secret safe behind the Xia Gui drawing in your office. You know the drill."
He did know the drill, and the robbery took no time at all. Again, Fei Hong was used to rolling over at the first sign of trouble. Or maybe he was just smart. Lung was a pyrokinetic and Oni Lee had a fondness for grenades, so after the gasoline was on the floor, the last thing he wanted was to call either of them for help. Bitch and Tattletale were at least willing to let him and the rest of the workers and patrons out before the building went up in flames.
After riding to a safe distance on Bitch's dogs, she sent a text to Grue telling him to go ahead. He'd hit an ABB facility on the other side of Lung's territory right when the man was on his way to the Sea Dragon. Lung was strong, but he wasn't fast enough to get to Grue's target before he got out. Oni Lee was, but out of all of them, Grue's power countered Oni Lee's the best. Besides, Grue was the most—no, the only professional member of the team. He had enough experience to pull out before he got into trouble. Bitch was the strongest, but she wouldn't make the call to run when she had to run. Tattletale was the weakest, but she knew when to get out which was why they were paired together. Regent wasn't as lazy as he pretended to be, but he didn't work that much better alone than she did.
And then there was Leaf. She could have been one of the strongest capes in the city if her ruthlessness matched her potential, but she feigned childish innocence in every word she spoke. She had grown up surrounded by people who were less likely to hurt a child, instead of by hardened gang members who would only be encouraged by an easy target. She had experience, but the problem was that she had all the wrong experiences for this sort of job.
Tattletale wondered if Leaf had ever participated in an Endbringer event.
A growing part of her wondered if Leaf even knew what that was.
But for the most part, she waited. She stood on a rooftop hearing nothing but the low, coarse breathing of Bitch's dogs, watching Grue's target through a pair of binoculars. If something bad happened, her power would pick up on some faint clue and warn her of trouble.
Tattletale smiled at the double entendre, and she waited. From the safety of a rooftop, she looked through a pair of binoculars at the location where Grue was striking, hoping that her power would warn her in the case of trouble.
And it did. She pulled out her phone to call him, but it didn't go through. That was one of the downsides to his power. It blocked cell phone reception, whether he wanted it to or not.
So she waited and hoped for the best. It wasn't like she could do anything else. Besides, Grue could take care of himself. Yeah. Everything was fine.
WWW
Grue was surrounded by the blind and the deaf, the mute and the invisible. They waved guns around wildly and called for help in voices that only he could hear. He answered their cries by punching them.
That was his approach to most problems. Bored? Punch something. Worried? Punch something. Angry? You better believe he was going to punch something. It didn't matter if the thing he was punching was a face, a bag, or a wall. That was just how he dealt with things.
Of course, there was some finesse involved. He had to take care that the thugs were facing well away from each other before he decked them, lest any of them get hit by stray shots. He'd also learned to prioritize the twitchy ones first before they could just start shooting wildly. It took patience and good timing to land the right hits. But in the end it was always the moment of impact that made him feel like he was accomplishing something.
When he was finished, he shook some feeling back into his hand and set about the next part of his job. The warehouse was full of heroin in the process of being packaged. Skidmark's gang was most known for drug dealing, but that was because he wasn't any good at anything else. All the major gangs got in on the trade if they were big enough to hold territory, and the Azn Bad Boys was no different.
He began loading the drugs into a large duffle bag he brought with him, thinking about his mother. Was this what had nearly killed her? Had she gotten her drugs from the ABB before ending up in the hospital? Part of him wanted to take the drugs and dump it into the sewer as soon as he got outside, and let Brockton Bay's rats and cockroaches deal with the overdose for a change.
Another part of him, a treacherous, practical part, thought, Heroin costs about fifty to a hundred dollars per gram. If I have five kilos in this bag, that could be worth half a million dollars! The Undersiders didn't deal drugs, but that was more due to the lack of a distribution infrastructure than anything else. The boss agreed to buy anything they stole, though, and even if he offered ten percent of the selling price to cover distribution, well, fifty grand went a long way.
He opened the door, but he didn't go out yet. Instead he took cover and let his darkness flow out before him. He heard gunfire.
Fantastic.
He'd only beaten up the men who had stayed. Several other gangsters ran off when he showed up, and depending on how much help they'd managed to summon in a few minutes, he could be in trouble. His power worked best in enclosed spaces, but in the open anyone could fire at the moving pool of shadows until they got lucky. Making a run for it wasn't an option. Neither was calling for help. He was on his own.
That was fine. The plan was to hit three major ABB buildings right after each other to send Lung's people running before they had time to regroup, so the Undersiders had to split into two groups of two and one group of one. There wasn't a single member of the team Grue trusted to make a hit alone besides himself.
Continuing to pour darkness out into the street would just prolong the fight, and the ABB had more reinforcements than he did. Instead, he dispersed the darkness, letting it fade. Hiding in the darkness wouldn't be enough; he needed to catch his enemies in it, and that meant luring them in.
He heard some voices from outside, too muffled and distant for him to make out any words.
Then Oni Lee appeared in the room with him.
Grue made a noise that he was grateful no one on his team was around to hear. In his panic he threw up a cloud of darkness that enveloped Oni Lee before the man could attack. Too close. Oni Lee was a teleporter, but he required line of sight. When he was blind, his powers didn't work at all.
But the man didn't panic. Instead, he tossed a grenade up in the air without a care in the world.
Grue couldn't tell if it had a pin in it. He decided not to stay to find out.
He dove for the only cover within reach. That meant jumping through the window, but he'd risk getting shot from a distance over getting blown up at point blank.
The grenade exploded behind him, but his darkness muffled the sound for everyone besides himself. His first thought was to run. The job wasn't an attack, or even a heist, but harassment to put Lung on the defensive, and Grue had done that.
His second thought was that he had left behind a small fortune worth of drugs, and if the grenade hadn't destroyed the bag, then it would take only a few seconds to jump back in and grab it. If the grenade had destroyed the bag, then he was inhaling a massive amount of narcotics right now.
His third thought was that Oni Lee must have teleported the instant after he appeared to escape Grue's darkness. He wouldn't have had time to turn his head, so he could only have teleported forward. He was probably still in the warehouse. If Grue could trap him in his darkness, he could beat him up, break the man's legs, and put the most mobile member of the ABB out of commission for the better part of the next month.
His fourth thought was that people had started trying to shoot him, and if ABB gangsters were here and Oni Lee was here, Grue didn't want to wait for Lung to get here too. He ran, empty handed but alive.
WWW
Regent looked down at his phone. "Alright, we're up."
"Finally," Leaf said. "Robbing people ain't supposed to take so much waiting."
He shrugged, indifferent to the whole matter. Of course, he had been spending the last twenty minutes playing Cut the Rope on his phone, which Leaf didn't have yet. Which was a shame. The kid would probably enjoy a game that focused entirely on eating.
It wasn't his idea to get paired up with the new girl. They were the two least responsible members of the team, so the idea was that they would keep each other out of trouble. That didn't make much sense to him, but he was too lazy to put much thought into it.
"Since you can heal yourself," he said, "why don't you go first?"
She cocked her head. "I can heal you too."
"Yes, but I don't like getting shot."
She nodded. "Yeah, you seem like you wouldn't be good at dodging. If I had a gun, I'd shoot you first."
He shrugged modestly. "I do tend to have that effect on women. And men. And dogs." Rachel had said that the gun went off on its own, but Angelica had always had it in for him.
The target was an old office building, or at least it used to be. Like most buildings in the docks, it had been adapted to whatever people needed it for. These days, the ABB used it as a safehouse to keep what Regent hoped was large bags of money, but Leaf's imaginary friend Wyndle had found Lung's dinner in there too.
They slipped in without any trouble at all. Between Leaf's knife that could cut through anything and her imaginary friend/clairvoyant ability scouting ahead, the kid was a natural sneak. She spent a lot of time stopping and waiting for ... something. Her power to recharge or something. It was odd considering how impatient she had been earlier, but they managed to avoid running into any unexpected trouble.
She stopped in front of a door, turned to Regent and put a finger to her lips. Then she held up five fingers, made a gun with her hand, made a fist, conjured up a crowbar, a knife, and then a baseball bat with her power, and gave Regent a serious look.
Regent had no idea what any of that meant, so he gave her a thumbs up.
She nodded, held up five fingers, then four, three, two, and on, and then cut the door off its hinges with a sword. On the other side of the doorway, five men sitting at a table looked up in surprise before grabbing a gun, a crowbar, a knife, and a baseball bat.
Oh, Regent thought. That's what she meant.
Leaf slid into the room on her knees like soccer players sometimes did while celebrating a goal. Before the man with the gun could bring it to bear, she'd smacked it with her hand. The firearm glowed faintly and promptly fell to pieces. Another man took a swing at her with the crowbar, but she rolled out of the way. The linoleum tiles began to let off the same white smoke that Leaf was, and the man slipped and crashed into his comrade, sending them both to the ground.
As the glow faded another man charged her with a baseball bat. Leaf dove between his legs. When he turned around, he tripped over his suddenly untied shoelaces. The unarmed man tried to grapple her but couldn't seem to get a grip. It was Leaf instead who climbed up his back and pulled his shirt over his head, causing him to flail blindly before finally tipping over. While that was going on, the remaining man with the knife was sneaking up on her from behind.
Regent figured the kid had everything under control, but to avoid being obviously useless, he reached out with his power and forced the knife hand to spasm and release the weapon.
Leaf then manifested a metal rod in her hand, which she swung upwards right between the man's legs. Regent cracked a smile as the man groaned, clutched his privates, and fell to the floor.
Ah, nut shots. Will they ever not be funny?
He zapped a few of them with his scepter while they were down, tasing them into submission. When they were finished (and the whole fight had taken no time at all), Leaf went over to a girl tied up in the corner.
The girl was about Regent's age, but other than that she wasn't that interesting. To him, at least. The whole frizzy hair and glasses thing had never done it for him. A hell of a chin, though. You could stab someone with a chin like that. "Here she is," Leaf said, removing her gag. "Lung's dinner."
The girl's eyes grew wide. "I'm his what?"
"Dinner," Leaf repeated. "Lung was gonna eat ya, but he ain't gonna no more."
Her face went pale. "He eats people?"
Leaf nodded. "All the time. It's his main thing."
"I ... I thought that the giant flaming monster thing was h-his thing."
"Nope," Regent said, joining in. He had never heard of Lung's unique diet either, but the girl's reaction was pretty funny. "It's ninety percent eating people."
"Oh, god."
"But he ain't gonna," Leaf said. "'Cause we're stealing you. What's your name?"
The girl took a deep breath. "I-I guess that's better than staying here. I'm Angela."
Leaf smiled. "I'm Leaf, and he's Fancypants."
"Fancypants?" Angela repeated.
"That's Mr. Fancypants to you," he said, sticking out his chest.
Angela looked down quickly. "Sorry Mr. Fancypants."
Regent smiled behind his mask. He had no idea where Leaf was going with this, but so far it was fun.
"An-ge-la," Leaf said, enunciating each syllable. "Look at me. Life before death."
"W-what?"
"Say it. Life before death."
She swallowed. "Life before death."
Leaf nodded. "You're scared. That's fine. Be as scared as you need to be. But you ain't gonna die tonight, 'cause we're stealing you right proper. But before we do, we gotta steal some other people too."
"Other people that Lung is going to eat?"
Leaf shook her head. "No. People he's already eaten."
WWW
As they traveled further into the building, Angela talked about how she had ended up there. Her father owned a gas station. It wasn't a gold mine, but it was a business, and every business owner in ABB territory was expected to pay protection money. Angela didn't know if her father refused, tried to renegotiate the price, or just asked for more time, but the result was the same. Some ABB thugs broke into her home and dragged her off, either as payment or as a hostage to insure payment.
Regent was barely listening, though Leaf seemed to want to keep her talking. Lung and Oni Lee weren't here, and the few ABB members that were weren't a threat, so it didn't matter either way.
The next fight had more people in it, but turned out to be way easier. Their powers worked well together, and whenever he got close to over exerting himself, she could heal him before his power backfired. Honestly, he could have handled everyone in the building by himself with Leaf just supplying healing ... but that would have been too much work.
Still, they made a good team. She ran around like a cartoon character, he made everyone trip and drop their weapons like dumber cartoon characters, she healed him, and he tased them. He actually felt useful in a fight. It was like working with Bitch, only completely the opposite.
The prize turned out to be even more girls stuffed in a closet, so more of the same. These ones were cut up, though. Disfigured. It was an ABB thing, but not one that had never made sense to him. Okay, he understood sex slaves just fine. He had practically been raised by sex slaves, but those ones had been flawless—on the outside, at least. On the inside they were probably as messed up as he was, but at least they looked good.
These ones didn't. One was missing an eye, and it looked like whoever had carved it out had only a general idea of where the eye was located. The next one had a fresh glasgow grin, preventing her mouth from closing all the way and leaving a trail of blood down her neck. The third had her nose cut off making her face look like a skull.
Why? he thought. If you're going to have sex slaves, why go out of your way to make them as ugly as possible? That's just dumb. It was some sort of initiation ritual, and you couldn't get anywhere in the ABB unless you could carve someone's face up for no reason, but still. Dumb.
Leaf breathed light into the first one, and the girl's eye reformed inside her head. "What's your name?" Leaf asked, wiping dried blood from her face.
The girl blinked rapidly, taking a moment to look at everything inside the room besides Leaf. "W-what? Who are you?"
"I'm Leaf. That's Fancypants. Who are you?"
"I-I'm Emily." Emily had brown, wide-set eyes like a deer, though they remained unfocused as though she were trying to look at the whole room instead of at any one person. Her newly healed eye twitched and she blinked forcefully. "Why ... why are you here?"
Leaf took a finger and jabbed it at Emily's forehead. "You," she said slowly, "ain't forgot."
"O-okay."
"Say it. You ain't forgot."
"I'm ... I ain't forgot."
Leaf nodded. "Remember that." Emily's lip quivered and her eyes filled with tears, and Leaf moved on to the next one.
The girl with the glasgow grin looked up at her as Leaf approached, both eager and afraid. She received her healing like the first, and the loose flaps of skin along her cheeks reconnected. "What's your name?"
The girl ran her hands across her face, feeling for a scar that wasn't there. Her fingers came back red and she wiped her hand on her ripped and dirty jeans. "I'm Stephanie." Her blond hair was matted with blood and clung to her round face.
"Hello, Stephanie. Can you still smile?"
The corners of her mouth twitched, but that was as far as she got. She sagged and shook her head.
Leaf nodded. "That's okay. You don't gotta be strong every day. Not yet." She gave Stephanie a hug as the girl sat there, fists clenched but body limp.
"Are you people heroes?" the noseless girl asked, her voice muffled. "Are you here to rescue us?"
Leaf shook her head. "We ain't heroes." She blew in the girl's face, making her nose regrow. "Heroes don't hear people like us. We're thieves, and we're gonna steal you from Lung until you figure out how to steal yourself. Got a name?"
"It's Natalie." Natalie had dark skin and braided hair, and her eyes seemed too big for her head. She wiggled and touched her nose as it reformed, and wiped the blood off on her sleeve. "But—man that feels weird—but if you're saving us, doesn't that make you heroes? Like, by definition?"
Leaf shrugged. "You'd think so, but the world's messed up. You lot ready to go? Remember, we're thieves, so you gotta all be quiet."
The girls nodded and stood up. Regent turned to leave, trusting them to follow, and Leaf fell into step beside him. "You good?" she said under her breath.
Had he given any indication that he wasn't? "I'm fine," he said, but his voice came out kurt and snappish. Maybe ... maybe he just felt out of place watching her little first-aid therapy session. They were all bursting with fear and hope and anger and sadness and, and he was just watching, like he was deaf at a concert. He could tell things were happening, but they were all happening to other people. He felt left out and confused, and like most of his feelings, that translated into annoyance. "I'm just ready to get going. This is a heist, not a slumber party." God, he sounded like Brian.
Despite the time Leaf had spent being friendly with them, no one shot them on their way out. Either the men they fought on the way in were still unconscious or they had woken up and left, deciding that cape fights were above their pay grade.
"Well, mission accomplished," he said, tossing his scepter into the air as they emerged from the building. "I'd say see ya later, but I don't really keep in touch with people."
"What?" one of them said. Angelina, probably. "Y-you're leaving us? Now? At night? What if the ABB comes back for us? You can't just walk away."
Regent rolled his eyes. You have no idea what I can walk away from.
"Hey, Fancy Pants," Leaf said, eyeing a van parked on the side of the road. "You know how to drive one of these car things?"
He glanced at the van and held his arms wide in self-presentation. "Girl, you are looking at the team champion of Mario-Kart." He let out a breath. "No idea how to hotwire one, though. You'd need the team champion of Grand Theft Auto, and that's actually Grue."
A small key appeared in her hand, made out of the same silvery metal as her sword, and she unlocked the van door.
She grinned at him.
He grinned at her.
Then he got hit by a truck.
Ow. The truck had long claws that dug into his shoulder as he was lifted up in the air, and tough, scaly skin. Lung. He got hit by a Lung. Typical. I'm the only guy here, and he goes after me first. This man clearly does not respect women.
He tased him, and Lung grunted. Not the reaction I was hoping for. Then Lung crushed every bone in his right arm. He could feel the fragments of bone grinding against each other. The pain was so intense that it forced an involuntary gasp from him, a pure physiological response. Definitely not the reaction I was hoping for!
Regent hit Lung with all that his power could give, hoping to force him to let go. And it worked! Nice. He was worried that Lung's transformation would have made him immune or something, but the dragon man actually dropped him.
Only to kick him like a soccer ball. Bigger ow. Regent felt a moment of weightless disorientation before abruptly slamming into a brick wall. His body seemed to be pumping an awful lot of adrenaline into him and for a moment he felt strikingly aware of things bursting and breaking. Then he felt nothing at all below his waist. Well, there goes my spine.
A fair number of his internal organs too, he suspected as he slumped to the ground, though he doubted that a doctor would show up any time soon to give him the details. He wondered if he was going to die. Brian had died, just last night actually. He had barely talked about it, but Regent got the impression that the experience was horrific beyond imagining.
Honestly, that made him a little curious.
Leaf appeared in front of him then, shining in the darkness. She breathed into him, and the parahuman healing hit him like a bucket of ice water. His bones unbroke, his organs unburst, and sensation returned to his legs. Leaf pressed something small and metallic into his hand.
Then she turned to Lung. "Hey Lung!" she shouted. "You are Lung, right? Never met you, but I heard you're real ugly and got the power to get even uglier."
Lung growled something incoherent and charged. Instead of scrambling out of the way like a sane person (or Regent), she charged too. She was less than half his partially transformed height and had to be a fraction of his weight, but when had the laws of physics ever applied to cape fights?
She dove onto her belly at the last second and slid between his legs like a penguin, leaving a glowing trail behind her. Lung tried to stop and turn to follow her, but as soon as he stepped on the light he slipped. Watching an eight foot tall mutated flaming dragon-man fall on his face would have been hilarious if he weren't trying to kill everyone.
Actually, cross that. It was still hilarious.
Too bad that he couldn't stay to watch. He glanced down at the object Leaf had given him. The key from earlier. He never took the initiative in fights like these. If he started, people would expect that to become a habit, so he prefered to follow the lead of others.
And he knew that Leaf would want him to focus on stealing Lung's dinner.
He ran to the van as Leaf drew Lung further and further away from them. "Ladies," he said, opening the door. "Your carriage awaits."
WWW
Are you sure you can handle this without me? Wyndle asked.
No, but sure was boring. Lift could end this fight in three seconds if she used Wyndle as a Shardblade, but she was a thief not a fighter, and thieves didn't leave bodies. Using him as a rod or a shield might come in handy, but not as handy as getting Lung's dinner the storms out of here. Besides, what was Lung gonna do to her? Bite her head off?
Maybe.
Hey Wyndle. Remember what Ol' Whitehair said about thievin'?
The man who jumped into a greatshell's mouth and waved back?"
Yup. Said that the most important thing a thief can steal is herself. She had done that long ago, and had never given herself back.
Lung raised a clawed hand and a stream of fire flew out of it like a skyeel. Lift slid out of the way, but she still felt the heat. Asphalt melted behind her and the air crackled as he tried to track her with the flames. Even as she evaded a direct hit, Lift could feel her skin blistering and searing, her awesomeness working swiftly to repair the damage. She dove and took shelter behind a parked truck.
The second most important thing is pride.
The van Fancypants and the girls were in started up, and Lung turned toward the sound. Storms. If he went after them, well, Lift wasn't sure she had enough awesomeness left to heal them all. She had to keep his attention focused on her. Fortunately, she was Reshi, and her people had perfected the art of war.
"Hey Lung!" she shouted, sticking her head out from behind the truck. "You seem angry. Is it because you're hungry? Are you hangry because all your food has been going missing?"
The Reshi didn't stab each other like some brain dead Alethi. They just yelled insults at each other until one side gave up and walked away. She had never been to the Reshi isles, but she could only assume that they were the best at everything and everything they did made perfect sense.
"'Cause your lunch wasn't even that good, honest. It didn't have no cookies like it ought, so I gave it to Fluffy's dogs."
Um, Mistress? Wyndle asked in her head. Are you certain you don't need my assistance?"
Lung turned to her as the van Fancypants was in drove off. He was bigger now, covered in metallic scales and human shaped in only the vaguest of terms. Another eel of fire flew towards her, but hit the truck she was hiding behind instead. The corners of her lips twitched upward. Was he even aiming with those—
The truck burst into flames. Lift scrambled away from it as a wave of heat hit her, and flames pooled underneath and licked up the sides of the vehicle. How? The thing was made up entirely of metal. How could it burn?
Then a crash hit the truck, interrupting her train of thought and knocking it over. She kicked away with her feet and slid on her butt to avoid being crushed as several tons of burning metal rolled toward her. By the time it stopped, Lung jumped over it holding a twenty-foot long street lamp in his hands like a club.
"Really?" she said, looking up at him. "You need a chill pill." She wasn't entirely sure what a chill pill was, but she suspected it had something to do with ice cream.
Lung raised the lamppost and swatted at her like she was a cremling that had gotten too close to the pie. With every strike he left craters in the asphalt, and on the third try he hit her, crushing her wrist with enough force to bend the metal pole. That wasn't deliberate on Lift's part, but she'd take it. She poured awesomeness into the lamppost, making it so Slick that when he raised it up into the air again it slipped right out of his grip. He stared at his empty hands and Lift scrambled to her feet.
Lung tore after her, shoving aside cars and signposts and any other obstacles in his way. Right, she could use that. She was small and could go through things that Lung would have to push out of his way. Could she jump through a window that Lung couldn't fit through? No, there might be people in that unlucky building, and she couldn't risk involving them. But what she could do was ...
She darted down an alley and scrambled up the ladder of a fire escape. Lung caught up with her before she could climb the stairs, and even with his feet still on the ground he put enough weight on the platform it sloped toward him. He was nearly large enough to grab her with his freakishly long arms, but nearly was only nearly what he needed.
Lift poured almost all of her remaining awesomeness into the fire escape until the whole thing glowed, waved at Lung, and did a completely necessary backflip off the platform right before five stories of stairs and railings came crashing down on Lung's head.
"But anyway," Lift said, never one to leave a good insult half done, "Fluffy's dogs didn't want none neither, and little One Ear widdled in the rice, so in the end—"
A sharp pain struck at her knees, cutting her off mid-taunt. Lift cried out in surprise as much as pain as she fell face first to the ground. A man with a monstrous mask kicked her onto her back and skewered her through the shoulder with a sword, pinning her to the ground. Lift gritted her teeth as she felt her awesomeness draining to keep her alive.
"Shall I kill her on your behalf, sir?" Oni Lee asked, without taking his eyes off of her. "Or do you wish her taken alive?"
She couldn't feel her feet. Why couldn't she feel her feet? She lifted her leg and looked down and found stumps where her knees used to be. Um, Wyndle? If you really want to, you can come back now. This might be easier with both of us.
Lung didn't say anything. He wasn't big like a thunderclast or a greatshell, but when you were Lift-sized he was big enough. The air around him rippled with heat, and even Oni Lee winced and turned away as he drew near. Lung raised one massive, clawed hand over Lift. It burst into flames.
Wyndle? Are ... where are you? She could regrow her legs with enough time and food, but she had neither right now.
Without warning Oni Lee ripped the sword out of her, but he stumbled as though off balance—then his arm jerked and he stabbed himself in the foot. Lift immediately Slicked her back and pushed herself away ... only to bump into another copy of Oni Lee who had teleported behind her.
"No fair!" she yelled as Oni Lee raised his sword, and then everything went black.
Lift opened her eyes wide, but it was still black. Black and as silent as ... as Skullface's darkness. Paddling with her arms she slid along the road until she could see again.
The Oni Lee that had chopped her legs off crumbled to dust, leaving only the Oni Lee trapped in the darkness. She had a feeling Skullface was in there with him, punching him in the face.
Meanwhile Lung was where Lift had last seen him, but now had Fluffy's three dogs all over him. Their monstrous forms were regrowing flesh and bone as fast as Lung could incinerate it. Lung himself was bigger than ever now, but two of the dogs had each seized an arm in their jaws, while the third did its level best to bite his head off. Fancypants was there too, standing in the distance and waiting for his moment while Knowitall glanced up and down at her phone.
But the most important person she saw was Wyndle. "You're back!" she said as his vines grew in a circle around her. "What took you?"
"Distance, Mistress. Cars can traverse a great deal of it in a short time. Of course, after I abandoned physical form, I could no longer communicate directly to your mind."
Lift nodded. "So you was sulking 'cause I left you behind?"
"What? No, that's not—"
"Wanna be a sword?"
"Er, what?"
There was an explosion of fire and searing heat, sending Fluffy's dogs flying. Lung's mask was gone, revealing a split mouth and inhuman face, and he was still growing. His carapace covered his entire body making the dogs' teeth about as useful as Lift's own, and he now had skeletal stubs sprouting from his back.
When they had planned for the night, the Undersiders had decided not to fight Lung no matter what. They could run, hide, and distract him, as long as they got away. But the only way the whole team could outrun him was by dog, so Lift needed to come up with another way to slow Lung down.
"His twitchy friend stole my feet and Lung eats people. Wanna be a sword?"
Lung stretched out his arms and filled the street with flames, sending the Undersiders scrambling for cover. Fluffy cursed as she got burned, and her dogs made sounds closer to yips and whines then growls.
"Oh alright," Wyndle sighed. "But please be careful. I'm very sharp."
Lift didn't hold her hand out for him just yet. She needed her hands to move. Lying on her stomach, she Slicked her body and slid toward the fight. Lung spotted her out of the corner of his eye, but he ignored her as one of the dogs leapt at him. People that big always ignored people as small as Lift, especially when they were busy with more important things like the jaws of a giant dog.
The ground was sizzling hot and partially melted as Lift got close. It burned like a stove and would have cooked her alive if not for her awesomeness by the time she reached him. At the last second, she held out her hand and Wyndle filled it as a blade of silvery metal, and she sliced through Lung's legs. Wyndle blurred as he made contact, ignoring Lung's flesh and bones and instead cutting through the spirit that filled them.
Lung let out an inhuman scream and crumbled to the ground. The two remaining dogs piled on top of him, trying to bite through his armored shell.
"Bitch!" Knowitall said. "Time to go!"
"I can finish this!" Fluffy said. Lung flailed around, but even though he was stronger than her dogs, he didn't have a leg to stand on and the dogs could play tug-of-war with his arms.
"No need! White hats incoming. Let them clean this up."
The cloud of darkness disappeared, leaving Skullface standing over Oni Lee, who was lying on the ground. "How much time?"
Knowitall shrugged. "Just enough, give or take."
He nodded, ran over to Lift, and picked her up. "Alright everyone, we're pulling out."
Fluffy called her dogs off of Lung, Skullface covered him in darkness so he couldn't throw any more fire at them, and the Undersiders rode off into the night. They didn't go very fast with one of the dogs to hurt to run, and that was fine because Lift was hurt pretty bad too. She wasn't bleeding anywhere, but she had run out of awesomeness before she could heal her burns, and between her stumpy legs and the gnawing hunger in her stomach, she would have fallen off her dog if Skullface hadn't been hanging onto her.
"Hey, Skullface?"
"Grue," Skullface said. "Yes?"
"On the way back, could we stop to get something to eat?"
WWW
"Well, I think we can say that the plan was a colossal screw up."
Lift let the conversation go on around her while she focused on more important things, like regrowing her feet.
"Screw up?" Lisa said. "It went better than expected. The heroes would have brought Lung in after the state we left him in, and they might be able to hold him long enough to put him on trial. Oni Lee too if we're lucky, and if we're not he's still going to be in a wheelchair for the next month. The only cape left in the ABB in fighting shape is the bomb Tinker, and she'd have to be completely insane to come after us after the beating we laid down tonight."
Lift scarfed down her third burrito and felt a tingle in her stumps. It was weird not having legs, like, she could still wiggle her toes, but her toes didn't have a body anymore. Her power helped to ... refill the gaps? Sure.
"That's the point," Brian said. "The plan was to not fight him at all. We were supposed to harass his territory to distract and wear him down until he was forced to go on the defensive. Instead we did the opposite of that. We won, but the plan failed. We were just lucky, and lucky isn't good enough."
They had stopped by a Taco Bell on the way back while Rachel was tending to her dogs. The pale, blotchy fellow working there looked at them in their costumes, muttered a complaint about how little he was paid, and didn't ask any questions.
"Okay, okay," Lisa said. "So we learn from our mistakes. We underestimated how smart Lung was. We hit one of his buildings on the north east side of his territory, then the south east, and he caught on that we were going to attack something in the west right after that. But we were stronger than he gave us credit for too, so it all balances out. And this way we can say that Lung got beat up by a little girl."
Rachel looked up at that. "What? My dogs did most of the work."
She had a point. They took most of the hits too, but it turned out they were dogs in dog suits, and only their suits got damaged. After they stopped to pull the dogs out, they were fine.
"It was a team effort, so we all beat Lung," Brian said. "And we're going to stick together as a team from now on. No more splitting up, no matter how clever it seems at the time."
"Don't you know," Alec said in a singsong voice, "you never split the party. Clerics in the back, keep those fighters hale and hearty." He stopped when he noticed the look Brian was giving him. "What? You've heard that song before. You're not mad at me, are you?"
"You left Lift to fight Lung all by herself. So yeah, I'm mad at you."
He shrugged while lying down on the couch. "It was her idea. I thought she could handle it." He hesitated. "Okay, now that I say that out loud ..."
"And I could," Lift protested, speaking up for the first time. She swallowed the remains of her fifth burrito. "I was fine until Twitchy-Twitch showed up. But Alec was able to get Lung's dinner out of there, and that's what matters."
"You know Lung wasn't literally going to ..." Brian started. "Nevermind."
Yeah, she knew what Lung was going to do to them. Of course she knew. She'd met plenty of whores and knew more than a few slaves, but to force someone into being both at once and carve 'em up inside and out just to prove you could, well, there just weren't a whole lot of words for that.
She'd have to visit them some time. Angela, Emily, Stephanie, and Natalie. Just because the four girls had made it home didn't mean that she could forget them. Everyone else would, but she'd made a promise.
"Maybe," Alec said, "we should be asking the important questions. Like whether or not Lift can eat an entire Taco Bell party pack by herself, and if her Brute rating is high enough to handle the fast food version of Russian Roulette."
Lift stuffed the sixth one in her mouth. "Ahm haff ay 'ere."
"Lovely display, Lift," Lisa said. "Truly, beautiful. You should never not push yourself to the limit, no matter how sick you make the people watching."
Lift smiled, her cheeks full of beans, cheese, and tortilla wrapping. The texture reminded her of something she had gotten from a Herdazian once, but they didn't have cheese on Roshar. Which was a starvin' crime. Chocolate neither, which was an even bigger crime. Hmm. She needed to try a chocolate burrito some time. Until then, the normal kind got the job done.
For the first time since her fight with Lung, stood up. Her legs still felt a little tingly, but they worked, they were hers, and ... and they had never touched Roshar. The legs that had carried her from Rall Elorim to Azimir and all through Shadesmar, the legs that her mother had taught her to walk with when she was a baby ... she had left them behind because it was easier to regrow a leg than reattach it to a closed stump.
She didn't like thinking about that, so she didn't. She chewed and swallowed. "So. What are we robbin' next?"
WWW
A/n So here's the next chapter. A huge thanks to Exiled Immortal who beta read and edited this chapter, as well as shared his unequaled talent of writing fight scenes, which I have never been good at.