Leaf
Chapter Seventeen
Vista ran, gasping for breath. She couldn't stop, she couldn't fight, she could only keep running.
"There she is!"
Vista used her powers without thinking, folding the space between her and her attacker in a right angle and stretching the distance out an extra hundred yards. Was Panacea nearby? Or Tattletale? Heroes should stick together, but right now she'd take anyone who wasn't—
Something moved by the rafters out of the corner of her eye, and her heart skipped a beat. She twisted the space like a corkscrew, feeling a phantom blade across her neck that she had to tell herself was just her imagination. It was probably just a pigeon that had flown inside.
If it were Oni Lee, she'd be dead.
Sorry Panacea. Sorry everyone. I can't do this.
The floor rose up and swallowed her whole, wrapping around her like a blanket.
I hope you can get through this without me.
But I can't die again.
She clenched her eyes shut in her makeshift bomb shelter. She was alone in the dark, but she was safe.
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Lift was alone in the dark and bored out of her mind. The vegetable stalk Panacea had made for her had gone from bland to retched, and not even the mind numbing monotony of her situation could make her take another bite.
"Hey, Wyndle," she said. "Tell me a joke."
Wyndle's vines grew toward her, sprouting a face of leaves and crystals. "A joke, Mistress?"
"Yeah. Entertain me, whinespren."
"Um, alright. Let me think. Hmm. Ah, yes!" He chuckled. "You're going to really enjoy this one. So, an Honorspren, a Highspren, and a Cryptic were—"
"I hate it."
"But I haven't told it yet."
"And it was still terrible." She stood up and gave him a sad look. "Sorry buddy, but you might not be as funny as you look."
"Well, the punchline was buttocks, so the moral of this story is that patience—wait, where are you going?"
"Outside. Think I'll steal Bakuda's dinner while I'm waiting."
"What? No. Your colleagues are handling that. You should wait here where it's safe and you are less likely to be shot, stabbed, blown up, or spontaneously trapped in time for an eternity."
"Probably," she admitted. "But I'm bored. Nothing's happening he—aagh!"
A massive, monstrous face, all long fangs and bony ridges emerged through the black cloud surrounding her and dropped a dead body at her feet. After her heart started beating again, Lift recognized the monster as one of Fluffy's dogs, and the dead body of the grumpy dog girl herself. Or at least, the nearly dead body.
Lift blew some awesomeness into her face through her mask, and Fluffy groaned. "Hey, Fluffy."
Fluffy glared at her as she sat up. "Don't call me that. You know my name's Bitch."
"Uh-huh. How's the plan going? Did you make it to Bakuda's workshop?"
"We made it. Then she blew me up."
Lift nodded. Bakuda tended to do that. "What now?"
"I'm going back."
Right. Because if it didn't work the first time, she just needed to try harder. That was the mind of a master thief right there. "Got a better idea. Let's steal her dinner."
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"And then she blew us up," Grue said, his hands up, staring into the barrel of Miss Militia's rifle. Either Bakuda had wanted to take them alive, or she hadn't wanted to damage her workshop too much.
"But you lost Vista."
"Yes." If Tattletale had been there, she might have been able to spin things so it didn't sound like they had dragged a traumatized twelve-year-old into a warzone, but she had been left behind too. Tattletale, Vista, and Panacea, three top-tier support capes with the total offensive power of a wet noodle.
Bitch was most of their fire power, but she was gone, hopefully dragged to safety by her dogs, and Regent was lying unconscious on the floor. That left Grue and Grue alone, and it took everything he had just to stay on his feet.
"Let's make a truce," he said. Miss Militia wasn't in a position to arrest them, and she wasn't likely to shoot him in cold blood. "You're here for Vista, we're here for Leaf. We can work together until they're safe." Leaf wouldn't be safe until Bakuda was dealt with, but he didn't need to mention that.
Miss Militia lowered her gun, but she shook her head. "Go home. Take as many of your teammates as you can, and stay out of my way."
Grue cursed under his breath as he watched her leave. They could have helped each other, but ... but she had no reason to trust him. Vista had trusted him, and where had that gotten her? He hoped she was okay. He hoped Miss Militia found her before anyone else did, but the hero was right. He needed to take his team and get out.
"Hey," he said to Regent. "Are you really asleep, or are you just faking it?"
Regent sat up. "Just waiting on you," he said, sounding perky.
He had been further away from the blast than Grue, so of course he wouldn't have been hit as hard. "Thanks for the back up."
Regent laughed. "Older women are more your field than mine. If I had tried to talk to Army Milf, she would have blown my head off."
He grunted, pulling him to his feet. They'd head back to where they had left Leaf and ... work things out from there. With Miss Militia drawing fire, they might even make it out alive.
If they weren't dead already.
He looked down at the floor at the body of Bakuda's decoy. Bakuda must have cut the woman open and implanted an explosive into her abdominal cavity just to catch them in a trap. This place was a death trap for friends and foes of the ABB alike, and he never should have come here.
"You know, I've never been in a mad scientist's secret lab before," Regent said, eyeing the random assortment of contraptions. They were in good condition despite the explosion, as though it had been designed to cause pain instead of damage. "It's ... kind of disappointing." He twirled his scepter around in his hand as he walked over to a whiteboard covered in notes and graphs. "Project: Armageddon?" he read. "Pfft. That movie was okay, but it doesn't need a remake."
Grue spun around. "Wait, what?"
Regent ignored him and turned toward the door. "Welp, our work here is done. Let's blow this popsicle joint."
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Amy walked with her hands up and two armed men behind her. She cooperated with them fully, not even making snide comments in her head.
"You're sure Bakuda wants them alive?" one of her captors said as they marched her through the warehouse. Crates and shelving units were strewn across the floor from the Undersiders' mad charge from before, and clouds of Grue's black smoke still hung in the air.
"I don't know," the second man said, sounding tired. Amy could relate. She wanted to sleep as much as she wanted to stay alive. "But she surrendered, so ..."
"Because Bakuda said to deal with them. Deal with them. That seems pretty clear to me, and I don't want to bother her with anything I don't have to."
"Because of her random acts of violence?"
"Because of her random acts of—"
Gunfire rang out behind her, and Amy dropped to the floor and put her hands over her head. Once, twice, thrice, then silence.
The two men lay on the floor, one curled up on his side, the other on his back, staring up at ...
Tattletale.
Of course. It had to be her. It couldn't have been the PRT or the cops or Miss Militia, it had to be her.
"Hey, Pan." She strode toward her, a revolver in her hand. "Sedate and stabilize these two, will you?"
Amy reached out and touched her former captors as she glowered at her. "I was going to do that anyway."
"And be quick about it. You're going to heal Leaf as soon as we get back."
Amy took a deep breath and focused on her patients. Putting them to sleep was easy, but one had a hole in the lung and the other in the intestines. "I already told you, I don't do brains, and asking me again isn't going to change that."
Tattletale gave her a look that was cold and distant and ... tired. That surprised Amy far more than it should have. "We're out of options. Going after Bakuda nearly got us killed and my last contingency went down the drain, so we're going back to plan A."
"A for Amy?" She sneered. "Do your worst."
Tattletale tilted her head. "Do you see anyone around who might stick up for you? Leaf's on the other side of the warehouse and Vista's God knows where. Not even Grue is around, and you might think I'm joking, but he would hold me back. No, there's only you and me, and I'm not asking." She took a breath to regain the veneer of self control. "You don't know what sort of things I'd do to get my friends out of here alive, Panacea."
One of her captors' guns lay just a foot away from her, and Amy didn't even think about it. She couldn't afford to think, if she had any chance at all. She lunged for it, and—
The sound of gunfire went off like an explosion in her head, and Amy stared at the red blood splattered on the floor and dripping from her arm. Then pain blossomed up as her skin and flesh and bone cried out, and Amy choked on her own scream.
"But the fact that I get to do those things to you," Tattletale continued, "is just icing on the cake."
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Miss Militia tore through the warehouse, the only one in control in the midst of the chaos. She launched a tear gas canister at a group of ABB members, then transformed her launcher into a light machine gun and fired a stream of rubber bullets. The people still rubbing at their eyes scattered, leaving behind the bizarre construction they had gathered around.
The entire area of the warehouse was marked with strange geometries, the floor bent and twisted, walls stretched out and warped, and in the center of it all was a bomb shelter built for one. Concrete spiraled up and around like a massive cocoon, and within it Miss Militia knew she would find Vista.
I'm here for you, she thought, walking towards it. I'm taking you home.
A single footstep was the only warning she got, and it was all she needed. She dove into a roll and shot behind where she had been standing.
Oni Lee's clone burst into white dust.
She scanned the catwalks and the shelving units as she pressed her back against Vista's cocoon. "Vista?" she said. "If you can hear me, stay put. I need to take care of something."
Something that didn't require rubber bullets. Oni Lee's kill order had been signed after the attack on the PRT building. The man had killed a Ward, and even if that Ward had recovered, that behavior would not be tolerated.
"This will only take a minute."
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You shouldn't've shot her.
One of the last things Leaf had said to Tattletale. One of the last things she might ever say to her, if this didn't work out.
No, Tattletale thought. I should have shot her at the bank instead. Then Panacea wouldn't have healed Oni Lee, Oni Lee wouldn't have screwed up their prison break at the PRT building, and none of them would be in this mess. Well, Tattletale herself might have been pounded into a fine paste courtesy of Glory Hole, but overall ...
"Let me lay it down so simply, you'll be able to understand it even with blood loss," she said.
Panacea clenched her teeth, clutching at her wounded arm. It wasn't bleeding as much as it should have, which was all the better. "I already know what you're going to do. You're going to tell Victoria that I ... how I feel about her, and tear my family apart. That's what you said at the bank, right?"
"Your family? Oh no, you don't have a family. They never wanted you in the first place. I threatened to tear Glory Hole's family apart. If you want to feel included, sure, I can tell her all about your sick fantasies, but she's dealt with creepy fans before. And let's be honest, telling her who your father was isn't going to do much. But Glory Hole finding out who her father is? Now that's some spicy gossip."
Panacea sucked in her breath in a way that had nothing to do with the pain in her arm. Tattletale had been looking forward to this moment ever since she got out of the hospital. Rescuing Brian and then Lift had taken up her focus, but her dreams had been filled with nothing else but this moment of breaking down the girl who had hurt her so casually, so completely, and then left her in the dark waiting to die.
But now that the moment had come, Tattletale wasn't enjoying it as much as she should have. There wasn't much satisfaction in breaking someone who was already broken, in hurting someone who was constantly miserable. Or maybe Lift was rubbing off on her. If Lift were here, she'd ...
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Knees' eyes flashed open, locking on Lift. Not that there was much else to look at, here in the dark and her glowing like a sphere after a Highstorm. "W-what happened?" he asked. "I ... I remember ..."
"A big ugly dog monster catching you in its teeth and dragging you off to eat you?" Lift offered. "Yeah, we're in its stomach."
His eyes widened. "What?"
She laughed. "Ha! No, the dog just brought you to this safe room and I took the bomb out." As far as dying went, his ice bomb wasn't that bad. Just turned him into a corpsicle with none of the blood, guts, or missing bits that the last one she had to deal with. But ... he didn't need to know all the details.
"You did what?" He sat up and felt the back of his head, and his whole face lit up. "It's gone! I don't believe it, it's gone!" He said something in a foreign language, shinji-whatzits, but she got the gist. She gave him a hug.
"What do I do now?"
Lift shrugged as he stood up. He was tall, taller than Brian at half the weight. "You're free, so do whatever you want. You could go home now and ain't no one would stop you." Most had. Weren't a whole lot who would get rescued from Damnation then turn around and jump back in. "But if you have any friends out there with tickers in their thinkers, you could try to bring them back." Fluffy's way with people involved a lot of kicking and screaming, and the rest of the ABB might take better to someone who didn't have massive fangs and claws.
He nodded. "Okay."
"Or," Lift added, "if you're feeling really brave ..." Her stomach growled. The only thing that kept her from throwing Amy's ever-growing vegetable away was the fact that Fluffy had nothing to eat but dog treats. "Do you know where they keep the snacks?"
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If Lift were here, she'd offer kindness to people in a way that worked, in a way that left everyone better off while having fun the whole way through.
But she wasn't. Tattletale was. And she couldn't afford to lose, so she did what she did best.
"You've checked," she continued, Panacea whimpering on the floor. "You know whose bastard she is. Not even Brandish is one hundred percent on that one. What do you think Lady Photon will do when she finds out she's been betrayed by the two people closest to her? What do you think Flashbang will do when he finds out that no one ever loved him, that Brandish only married him because he was weak enough to be controlled?" She didn't feel like smiling, but the performance required it. "New Wave has reached a critical mass of family drama. It will be the biggest fallout since Fluer."
Panacea glared at her with tears in her eyes. "You're a monster."
Tattletale didn't answer. Instead, she clung to two memories, one of herself lying in that hospital bed, and one of Lift coming to heal her in the other. The agonizing seconds. The miraculous reprieve. The darkness. The light.
She was almost done.
"Heal Leaf. Then we can all go home."
Gunfire rang out in the distance. Screams. People fought and died, clung to life and gave up, her power interpreting every sound as their time slowly ran out.
"Or it ends here. For everyone."
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Most grenades had a time delay of four to five seconds. The one at her feet had three seconds left, and Miss Militia sprayed bullets into the crowd of Oni Lee clones.
Two seconds.
It was simple math. A clone had a timed life of five to ten seconds, barely long enough for the grenade to detonate. All she had to do was hit the one who threw it before ...
One second.
She kicked it away and grabbed a clone who lunged at her with a knife, using him as a human shield. The M67 grenade, which she hoped it was, killed at fifteen feet and injured at fifty, and the clone provided as much protection as a scarecrow. The blast knocked her off her feet, white dust covering her and fragments lodging in her kevlar-lined combat fatigues.
Her head rang and she couldn't see straight, but she couldn't stop now. A 9mm formed in her hand, and she fired it on autopilot, shooting a clone that had tried to pounce on her, knife first. She scrambled to her feet, shooting one clone as she rose, and turned her gun into a saber to block another clone's sword swing. With her left hand on the blade, she shoved his sword away and shot him before he could recover, and—
And was promptly stabbed in the back.
Oni Lee's knife didn't pierce the fabric of her costume, but if he had aimed for any of her exposed flesh the fight would have ended. She was going off of luck, and she couldn't afford to. Not with Vista counting on her.
She only had one idea of how to end this. A terrible one, but she didn't have the time to think of anything better.
She ducked under a sword swing and lunged past the clone's defenses, shooting him point blank. The air filled with white dust, obscuring vision for the second it took for her to turn her gun into a flashbang, pull the pin, and hide it in her jacket. It was a thin deception, but it only needed to last four seconds.
She spun out of the way as a knife flew through the air inches from her face.
Three.
She caught the blade of a sword in her elbow, wrenched it free, and stabbed the clone with it. Both sword and clone turned to dust.
Two.
Oni Lee swung his sword down on her from behind, missing her head but crushing her collar bone. She choked back a scream as her right arm fell limp.
One.
She threw the flashbang into the air, closed her eyes, and everything went white.
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"Alright," Panacea said at last. "I'll do it."
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Miss Militia couldn't hear, but when she opened her eyes, she was the only one who could see. Oni Lee's clones lay scattered around the floor, and she mowed them down until she found one that bled.
The true Oni Lee let out a cry and writhed in pain, but his powers were sight based, and he would be blind for the rest of his life.
She considered saying something, a last word before she sent the murderer straight to hell, but there was no point. She shot him in the head and never paid him a second thought.
Kill order executed.
"Vista," she called out. If the shelter had air holes, the girl could hear her. "It's safe to come out."
Her arm hung limp at her side, she was still partially deaf, and she was exhausted to her bones, but none of that mattered.
"Let's go home."
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A/n I know I keep on saying this, but I ended up splitting the final chapter in half, so the next one will be the last one of this arc. Thank you for your patience.
This one ... this one was really stubborn. My original plan was completely different, where Amy would realize that villains are people too and people are more important than rules while Lisa would realize that the ends don't justify the means and Lift wouldn't want her to crush Amy's spirit to save her life and they would both meet in the middle and it would be beautiful and inspiring and completely out of character for both of them.
A better writer might have been able to pull it off or set it up better, but after telling myself for the tenth time that in just one more rewrite the scene would be as good on paper as it was in my head, I ended up deciding to let the characters be themselves. People tend to be more stubborn under pressure instead of less, and Amy wouldn't put her loved ones at risk by breaking her rules to help someone she hated as much as Tattletale any more than Lisa would risk her loved ones to go easy on someone she hated as much as Amy.
And it works, at least compared to all the other versions that none of you will ever see. Take my word on it.
Or don't. Because, sadly, I just lost my editor and if the above average amount of typos in this chapter are any indication (I know they exist even if I didn't see them no matter how hard I looked), I need a new one. If you're interested, PM me. Special considerations will be given to those who are insightful, brilliant, and are willing to work for long hours for no money.
Anyway, I just wanted to get all of that off my chest. Thanks for sticking with me for so long. And I'd especially like to thank my Patrons, Exiled, Prime 2.0, Sphinxes, Kelsey Bull, Hubris Prime, Apofatix, Janember, Yotam Bonneh, Svistka, LordXamon, Victoria Carey, and Kurkistan. You guys are the best.
I'm planning (not promising, but planning) to get the next chapter out by the end of the month. See you then.