Current Energy: 13

Current Training: None

Monday, February 14th, 2011

Beneath The PRT Headquarters, Brockton Bay

Power, wasn't a feeling. Not a physical one. You couldn't sense it pulsing through your veins, couldn't really tell how much of it you had except in comparisons to its results.

Taylor Hebert - Nexus - had power. Of that there was no doubt. But she didn't feel power. She felt strain. She felt tension. She walked around all day doing her utmost to keep herself contained. Her mere presence, if unrestrained, held the very real possibility of causing lasting harm to the people around her. It was the spiritual equivalent of clenching ones teeth, only if she stopped doing it, everyone around her would start to suffocate or die.

She'd done a lot of reading on the subject. She couldn't say that she found managing her power to be 'difficult' so much as it was tiring. As a teenager with access to the internet she had found no problems finding comparisons. Those comparisons weren't especially flattering. They were - in fact - down right terrifying to contemplate, which is why she often didn't. Her nearest equivalent, at least with regards to her own self control problems, was Ash Beast.

Ash Beast, who permanently stood at the center of an ongoing and seemingly endless nuclear detonation.

Ash Beast, who was widely credited as being better than an Endbringer, only in that he tended to wander aimlessly and obviously, instead of making premeditated attacks.

Ash Beast, who was one of the few Capes on the planet who was so much of a natural disaster that no government on the planet would fault you if you found a way to kill him.

That was what her nearest equivalent was. For one of her powers. She had to have nearly a dozen at this point. Some more dangerous than others. Gaps? She tried not to think about it but 'venting the earths atmosphere into space' was a real fear for her. Magic? If she wanted to she could be worse than Bonesaw, because at least she had to follow the basic laws of physics when tinkering with people.

Worse still, one of her many, many, powers served the sole purpose of telling her how she could use all of her other powers to hurt the people around her as quickly and brutally as possible.

So when her most recent power clicked in to place, when her heart felt as though it was about to literally explode, when her blood felt like it was going to burn its way out of her veins to splatter the ground around her, and her bones began to creak under the sudden reinforcement of her muscles, she did what she always did - she tried to hold back.

It couldn't have been more than a handful of seconds that she had frozen, scrambling to reassess her own strength. Her newest power made that... difficult. It threw everything else out of balance. It made everything better. Her Aura, that semi solid field of energy that surrounded and empowered her, ballooned in strength as her soul was reinforced. Her Spiritual Power too, experienced the same phenomenon, and was contained only by the grace of Nemesis taking the reins and redirecting the sheer unrelenting tide of force she was exuding into itself. She was stronger, which meant she had to adjust how much strength she applied to things like walking. She was faster, which meant she had to determine whether or not she was doing things at a speed her friends could actually perceive.

And she was better, which meant she had to contend with a new wave of suggestions on how to murder everything in a two hundred foot radius.

This is all to say, that when Emmy, her friend and confidant, appeared next to her just in time to pull her out of her panicked introspection, she was painfully aware of the crunching noise his arm made as he batted one of her foes aside.

Which is, of course, when her minded snapped back to the situation at hand. She was in a tunnel full of monsters. They looked like people, but they were not. And they were here to do everything in their power to take from her. She wasn't stupid. She could intuit that Noelle, Echidna really, felt she had taken something from her. She could even admit that technically, that was true. Oliver had been her teammate after all, at least for certain values of the word teammate. His explanation of his various escapades - most of them being 'babysit the psychopathic monster' hadn't exactly scanned as a friendship to her. To her mind, Oliver's old team seemed to tolerate him more than love him, which was just sad.

So in a certain sense, yes, she had taken something from Noelle. Something she was going to cherish and take care of much better than she ever had.

Because deep at heart, Taylor Hebert was a simple woman. She wanted happiness. She wanted to have people to share that happiness with. And she wanted the power to make sure that no one could ever take that happiness away from her.

Put in that context, with the sure knowledge that the beings in front of her were barely even human?

Well, the fact that she had just functionally decapitated an effigy of her idol seemed down right foolish to worry about. The fact that she was worried about controlling herself at all seemed down right foolish.

'Stay close.' She commanded Emmy when it looked like he might be about to do something foolish like bolt into the melee without her. Whatever spell he had cast upon her, it was taking this chaotic melee and helping her think fast enough to really consider what she wanted to do next. Just because she had healed his hand without thinking about it, didn't mean she would forgive him for running off and getting murdered. Even if he could get better from it.

'If you would, miss Hebert' Ozma asked her politely, even as she and Emmy pivoted, Emmy to the left, and she in the opposite direction to swing Nemesis out, cleaving a gap open behind her and ducking just in time for her partner to be sent flying backwards through the portal, re-emerging behind his attacker already positioned to make an overhand chop that would cleave anyone else in two.

In the back of her head she could feel Ozma take over control of both ends of the portal, widening them and rotating the pair so that they blocked Echidna's headlong rush towards her. She ignored the odd sensation of a part of herself moving independent of her will, instead lashing out with her sword and targeting the fake Alexandria in front of her with a quick murderous swipe of her blade that carved a sizable but unfortunately not lethal gash across her neck.

Then Emmy slammed into the duplicate like a freight train driving the hovering heroine into the ground. She didn't bother to maintain focus on that one, as she quickly dodged to the side, narrowly avoiding another attacker. And then another. And another. Each attack took her further from Emmy, who was weathering his own barrage of Alexandria's, only his situation was far more untenable, as he was nearer to Echidna, who - lacking the ability to go around the quickly widening Gap that Ozma was controlling in the center of the tunnel, and being smart enough not to try and go through it, had summarily plowed through the wall to her right and begun walking through the multiple tons of steel and concrete like so much bubble wrap.

She hated it. The feeling that they were being separated again, but contained that feeling for the moment. Combat at this level, where even a single hit could mean life or death, wasn't about how often you could attack. It was about finding the opportunity to land an attack that would matter. Death by a thousand cuts was, in her powers opinion, a pathetic and foolish waste of time.

So she continued to back away, bobbing, weaving, and where possible, deflecting blows. Even with her enhancements, her aura, her spiritual power, her newfound physical prowess - the glancing blows were debilitating, draining large chunks of her protective aura that she was forced to re-purpose the fuel pumping from her heart towards replenishing. Finally, in a span of time that was probably only a few seconds, but had felt like hours, she found her back almost touching the second gap she had made - which she promptly jumped through.

When she emerged, it wasn't through the opposite Gap nearest to Echidna - which was obviously what the Greg clones had assumed would happen. It was a fair assumption. Basic game logic implies that what goes into one portal, comes out another.

But she didn't make portals.

So instead, she took a second to orient herself from within the nulspace that her Gaps lead to, checked Emmy's vision for a moment to orient herself, and then cleaved a new whole into reality behind him, leaping out and tethering the spidery limbs of her Shikai - the technical sounding name for Nemesis' 'First Release' - to one of the clones just as Emmy jammed his sword into her gut and up into her diaphragm.

The fact that their combined powers were enough to hurt the supposed indestructible heroine barely registered to her. Instead, there was only the steadily growing resolve that she was going to make her way through this hellscape scenario.

'Two down.' Emmy sent to her absently, his focused expression slowly peeling into a smile that looked like it belonged on a magazine cover somewhere.

'The Echidna will reach you shortly. Might I suggest moving?' Ozma stated blandly, causing her to nearly roll her eyes. 'The' Echidna. Ozma, as useful as he was as a sort of personal assistant, especially while doing magic, wasn't accustomed to the idea that the only monsters her world had to contend with were other people. He had latched onto the idea that Echidna was a nascent Endbringer with a sort of desperate fervor, not wanting to believe that people could be quite this terrible in the absence of an outside force to push them towards it.

Still, he had a point - which was why she immediately grabbed Emmy and dove back through the Gap with him - just in time to avoid a flailing limb of putrescent green flesh as it impacted where she had been standing. She tried not to smirk at the scream of incandescent rage that rang out behind her as she emerged from the Gap she had originally jumped into to reach Emmy. As it turned out, she did have it in her to be a bully and a bitch.

You just had to threaten to kill everyone and everything she had ever loved first.

Fancy that.

Emerging from the Gap, she could make out the Blaster contingent from upstairs descending behind Echidna and laying down covering fire while the fliers from the group began to evacuate the hostages. Alexandria, she noticed, was not among them - which was for the best. Greg was hard enough to put down without a ready source of brute powers to heal himself with. She made brief eye contact with Eidolon as he started to do... something with his hands that caused Noelle to slow down, and then turned her attention back to the matter at hand.

Which turned out to be a literal hand, as one of the Rat Pack clones appeared from nowhere to attempt to grab her. It was a failed attempt, since, without a conscious effort to hold back, her power had had her reflexively decapitating the thing, but it was what it heralded that honestly proved to be the greater problem. Because from the far end of the tunnel, and veritable wave of bodies had begun to run screaming towards her. People she recognized. People she didn't. People who could fly, jump, shoot, and teleport. An army of capes potentially hundreds strong. It was such a shame that Echidna was insane. This kind of army... it could make a real difference against the Endbringers.

'I can-' Emmy began to state, his blade, Gram (she didn't squeal when she thought about the legendary weapon, she didn't) beginning to glow with an otherworldly light.

'No. Keep the Greglings off my back. I'll do it.' She cut him off grimly, already knowing how such an expenditure of power would draw him closer to his own end. She was tired of never learning her lesson. Of needing Emmy to come up with the solutions.

She was also, really, really angry.

Ignoring the ongoing battle behind her, along with the feeling of several gaps moving about to provide cover for her, she began to concentrate.

Magic was one of those things that she only sort of understood. It had a lot of applications, most of them convoluted, many of them difficult to manage and requiring a significant amount of skill to bring to bare in any reasonable fashion.

The flip side of that, was that it had a few applications that were none of those things. Onmyoudo in particular had one thing, at least in the style she had been taught, that it considered ludicrously easy.

In her hands, a ball of energy began to condense, bright blue in coloration. It was more than just 'energy' though. It was the strength of all the local spirits, which she had asked in mystical terms - very politely - to kill everything in that direction.

It was simple, but it worked.

She barely registered the smile that began to spread across her face as she charged the blast, eight phantom spider limbs reaching out to pull the energy from her hands, and then throw it outward, splattering it against the walls like so much paint, only for each mote of energy to reform into a dog sized arachnid of pure blue energy. Dozens of the fake monsters for each cape facing her down.

Then she pointed Nemesis forward, and the swarm screamed, launching hundreds, possibly thousands of incandescent blue bolts of energy howling up the tunnel.

She didn't bother to see if she got all of them before turning back around to level a glare on Echidna. She didn't need to.

'You are a terrifying young woman.' Ozma stated flatly.

"And don't you forget it." She stated primly, still smiling.