Agitation 3.8 Last Chapter Next Chapter
"Any trouble?" Grue asked Tattletale.
"We're okay for now."
We'd gone over the plan until I'd been worried I would start murmuring about it in my sleep. I joined Tattletale, Grue, Bitch and the largest of the three dogs as we headed to the sealed vault door. Regent watched at the front doors with the two other dogs. His power had a good enough range that he could delay any approaching opposition long enough for us to get into position.
Tattletale took hold of the stainless steel wheel that jutted out from the front of the vault and spun it, then stopped it. She repeated the process, going right, then left, then right again, for an indeterminably long time. Just when I had the hopeful thought that maybe she wasn't able to get in, there was a sound of something heavy shifting inside the door.
The four of us hauled the door open, and Tattletale sauntered off to where the bank manager worked. She sat herself down at the computer, putting her feet up on the corner of the desk, and began typing away. From there, she could keep an eye on the media, watch the surveillance cameras and remotely control the door locks and alarm systems. All with the right passwords, of course, but that wasn't a problem for her.
Grue, Bitch and I started strapping a canvas harness onto the one dog that wasn't standing at the front doors. I was gradually working out which was which. I think Bitch called this one Brutus. He was the biggest, with the meatiest body, and he had a shorter snout. He'd been the Rottweiler, before.
He turned his massive head towards me, until the deep set eyeball was just to the left of my head. The pupil narrowed into a dot. There was just the bloodshot white of the eye and the yellow-gray of an iris as broad as my handspan.
I knew the worst thing to do would be to show fear or nervousness, so I was careful to breathe slowly and focus on buckling the straps and making triply sure they were fastened tight. I was maybe being a little too firm, just to ensure the Brutus didn't think I was weak or shy. Not that it mattered. I seriously doubted I could make him flinch, even with one of my weapons in hand.
With the harness securely fastened, we headed into the vault, Brutus standing at the door. The vault was stainless steel from top to bottom with neatly banded bundles of bills organized into stacks. The stacks, in turn, were organized by the size of the bill, all neatly set up against the wall. On the wall opposite the stacks were drawers like an elaborate filing cabinet. They were pretty much just that. The bank kept copies of all important documents for the local branches here, in a fireproof vault, in case of disaster. The far end of the vault had another door, opening into an elevator that went down to the garage basement, where the armored trucks could be loaded. It was a shame it wasn't an option for an escape route.
The door, the elevator and the garage itself were all firmly locked outside of specific times and days.
Bitch dumped an armload of bags onto the ground, and she and I got on our knees on either side of the pile and began stuffing one of the bags with cash. She took off her mask to see what she was doing better. Grue, for his part, withdrew a short crowbar from within the darkness that smoldered around his body. He set to cracking open the filing drawers with the squealing noise of metal creaking and bending.
As Bitch and I filled the first bag, we buckled it closed, cinched the accompanying strap tight around it, and with mutual effort, slid it across the slick metal floor towards Brutus. Grue turned away from the drawers to grab the bag, haul it up and attach it to the dog's harness.
It was a staggering amount of money. As Bitch and I worked, I started trying to count the money I was putting into the bag. Five hundred, one thousand, one thousand five hundred. Bitch was working just as fast as I was, so I could double that. Just taking a second to wrap my head around what the total amount would be per bag made me lose track.
We filled a second bag and slid it towards the door. Grue grunted as he heaved it up to the opposite side of the first bag and clipped it in place. While we filled the third bag, he clipped on one more – a bag filled with the contents of the first drawer he had opened. According to Lisa's briefing, the drawers would hold deeds, liens, insurance forms, mortgages and loan information. Apparently our employer was willing to buy these from us. I'd speculated about why – the most obvious possibility was that he could ransom them back to the bank. More intriguing was the thought that he wanted the information itself for his own purposes. Or, on a similar note, maybe there was something specific that would be found in the midst of the paperwork, and he was willing to buy it all if it meant keeping his true intentions unclear.
"I'm going to be sore tomorrow," Grue groaned, as he recovered from strapping the bag of papers into place, "And we haven't even been in a fight yet."
"Sore and rich," Bitch spoke. I glanced at her and saw her grinning. It was disquieting. I'd only ever seen her sullen and hostile, so any smile would be kind of creepy. It was worse than that. Hers was the kind of smile you'd see from someone who had never seen one before and was trying to replicate one from what they'd read in books. Too many teeth showing, I suppressed a shiver and focused on the work.
We slid the third bag across the floor. Grue hooked it into the harness.
"We can't put any more on here without it being a problem," he decided.
"The weight is even?" Bitch asked.
"Close enough."
Bitch stood and crossed the length of the vault to where her creature waited. She rubbed her hand on Brutus' snout like you might see a horse owner do, except Brutus most definitely wasn't a horse. She was rubbing her hand on exposed muscle, calcified tatters of flesh and
bone hooks that jutted out of gaps and knots in the muscle. She managed to look almost affectionate as she did it.
"Go, baby. Go," she commanded, pointing to the front door. Brutus obediently loped off to the front of the bank and sat, his prehensile tail absently coiling around the door handle.
"Hey!" Bitch called out, then whistled twice, alternating between short and long. The smallest of the dogs, who was only recognizable now by her missing eye, bounded towards us in her excitement. Some of the hostages screamed in alarm at the sudden movement.
I winced. I didn't want to think about the hostages. They were already heavy on my conscience, and they were constantly on the periphery of my attention, as long as I continued using the bugs I'd planted on them to keep alert for any movement or talking.
"That's the one you call Angelica?" I asked, to distract myself. "The name doesn't seem to fit with what you call the others."
"I didn't name her," Bitch said. As the creature approached her, Bitch slapped her a few times on the shoulder, hard. It didn't hurt the animal though – Angelica just lashed her tail in what I realized was a warped way of wagging her tail. Bitch snapped her fingers twice and pointed at the ground, and Angelica sat.
I had already partially filled a bag when Bitch rejoined me.
"She had previous owners then."
"Fuckers," Bitch swore.
"They were the ones who made her lose her ear and her eye?" I asked.
"What? You think I fucking did it?" She dropped the money she had in her and and stood up, clenching her fists.
"Woah, no," I protested, shifting my weight so I could move out of the way if she got aggressive, "Just trying to make small talk."
She took a step toward me. "Coward. You know you can't take me in a-"
"Enough!" Grue shouted. Bitch turned on him, her eyes narrowing.
"If you can't work over there, then take over here." His voice was steady, firm. Bitch spat on the floor and did as he asked, taking the offered crowbar from his hand as they passed each other. Grue took over the bag filling where Bitch had left off. We quickly got a rhythm down, and four more bags were filled in a matter of minutes.
"We want to stay to load up the third dog or run for it?" I asked Grue, then added, "No use getting greedy." I would be happy to leave as soon as possible. I wasn't interested in the money, and I definitely wasn't interested in going to jail for it.
"How much do we have?" he glanced over in Angelica's direction
Tattletale answered for me, from where she stood at the door to the vault, "Forty one thousand, eight hundred. It looks like that's as much as we're going to get. The white hats are here, and it's not looking good."
We were out of the vault in a flash, and we joined Regent at the front doors, peering through the gaps in the wall of darkness.
Tattletale hadn't exaggerated. Our opposition was lined up on the sidewalk across the street, the colors of their costumes bright in the midst of the gloom of the rain and the gray of the city. Aegis, tan skinned, was wearing a rust red costume with a matching helmet, both with silver-white trim and a shield emblem. The cockroach, I'd come to think of him. The boy with no weak points.
A dozen or so feet to his right was Vista, wearing a costume with a skirt, all covered in wavy, swooping lines that alternated between white and forest green. She had some body armor worked into her costume design. Her breastplate was molded to give the illusion of a chest, but that didn't do anything to conceal the fact that she was still young enough that I could have kicked her ass in a straight up fistfight. If she was older than twelve, she was a late bloomer.
Clockblocker stood to Aegis' left. He wore a white costume, skintight, with interlocking panels of glossy white body armor placed wherever they could give him protection without inhibiting his movements. I couldn't see it through the rain, but I knew from TV that the armor had images of clocks on it in dark gray. Some of the images on the armor were animated so they drifted across the surface, while others were fixed in place with hands ticking. His helmet was faceless, just a smooth expanse of white.
"Tattletale," Grue growled in his echoing, reveberating voice, "You know how I say you're a fucking dumbass sometimes?"
The three weren't alone. Kid Win was floating in the air to one side of Clockblocker. His brown hair was damp in the rain, he had a red visor and body armor in red and gold. His feet were firmly planted on his flying skateboard, which had a ruby glow radiating from the bottom. His hands were gripping matching guns. Laser pistols, or something in that vein. Kid Win was saying something to Gallant, who was standing a ways to his left. Gallant was an older teenager in a gunmetal and silver costume that blended the appearance of a pulp science fiction hero with a medieval knight.
On the opposite end of the line was someone I didn't know. He was big in a different way than Grue was big. The kind of bulk that made you think powers were at work. His muscle laden arms were bigger around than my thighs, and I thought he could probably crush cans between his pecs. His costume was little more than dark blue or black spandex with a diamond print. His mask was full-face, except for the eyes, and had a crystal attached to the forehead. He was the only person standing there who didn't have body armor. He didn't look like he really needed it.
"Who is he?" I asked, pointing.
"Browbeat," Tattletale sighed, "He's a point blank telekinetic, which means that he can move things with his mind, but only if they're within an inch or so of his skin. He can use it to throw punches that hit like freight trains, or shield himself from incoming attacks. He's also packing personal biokinesis, which means he's got a kind of ability to manipulate his own body. He can heal just by concentrating on an injury, and he's used it to bulk up. He might be capable of doing more on the fly, depending on how much he's trained since we saw him last. He's been a solo hero in Brockton Bay for a little while."
"What the fuck is he doing here?" I asked.
"We crossed paths with him once, Regent and Bitch beat him. Either he's here for revenge or he's joined the Wards very, very recently. My power's suggesting it's the latter."
"That's is the kind of thing you're supposed to inform us on well in advance," Grue hissed at her, "And there's not supposed to be six of them."
"There's seven," Tattletale said, wincing as Grue slammed his fist against the wood of the door. "There's someone on the roof. I'm not sure who, but I don't think it's Shadow Stalker. Might be a member of the Protectorate."
"There's not supposed to be six or seven!" Grue roared in his unearthly voice "There's supposed to be three, four at most!"
"I made an educated guess," Tattletale spoke in a low voice, "I was wrong. Sue me."
"If we get out of this in one piece," Grue spoke, his tone low and menacing, "We're going to have a long conversation."
I rested my forehead against the window. An armored section of my mask clinked against the glass, "Educated guess. It would have been nice if you had said it was an educated guess, way back when we were planning this."
Of our group, Bitch seemed the least daunted. "I can take them. Just let me go all out."
"We're not going to fucking risk killing anyone," Grue told her. "We're not maiming anyone, either. The plan stands. We have the money, we run for it."
Tattletale shook her head, "That's what they want. Why do you think they're lined up like that? We bolt with the money from any of the exits, the person on the roof tackles us, incapacitates us or keeps us busy while the rest close in. Look at how they're sort of spaced out. Just far enough apart that if we try to go between them, one of them can probably close in fast enough to nab us before we get away."
"With my power-" Grue started.
"They still outnumber us. There's at least five ways they could take one of us down while we're running, even if they were going in blind… and Vista's in the equation. Figure any distance we need to cover is going to be much farther than it looks, and things get ugly. It wouldn't be a problem if there weren't so many of them."
"Fuck," Regent groaned.
"We can't just stay here," Grue said, "Sure, they're getting cold and wet, but our odds aren't much better if we force them to come in here after us, and if we wait too long, the Protectorate might show, too."
"We have hostages," Bitch said, "If they come in here, we take out one of the hostages." Somewhere behind us, someone moaned, long and loud. I think they'd heard her.
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. It was a bad situation, and worse, I was afraid it was my fault. I'd warned Armsmaster something was going to happen. I could believe that he'd told the teams to be ready to go out in force. Even worse, he could be the unknown person on the roof. If that was the case, and Tattletale caught on, I was supremely fucked.
Fuck.
"We need to catch them off guard," I didn't realize I was speaking aloud until the words left my mouth.
"Sure, but how are we going to do that?" Grue replied.
"You guys are masters at the getaway, right? So we change gears. We fight them face to face."
Agitation 3.9 Last Chapter Next Chapter
I can imagine how it looked to the Wards. One moment they were standing in the rain, waiting with a tense readiness. The next, the front doors of the bank slammed open, revealing nothing but total darkness. Just a moment later, eight hostages came stumbling through the darkness, out the doors and down the stairs.
Aegis' eyes opened wide behind his mask. He turned to look at Clockblocker, who gestured madly towards the ground. Turning back to the scene, Aegis bellowed, "Everyone leaving the bank! Get down on the ground now!"
He didn't get a chance to see if they listened. Darkness swelled at the bank's entrance, then flooded into the street like water from a broken dam. In seconds, the hostages were hidden from sight and the Wards were forced to retreat several paces to keep from being swallowed up.
Inside the bank, Grue mused, "That should give them a reason to think twice before blindly opening fire where they can't see. I'm liking this. We ready for part two?"
"Just don't hurt the hostages," I said, glancing back at the thirty that were still inside.
"The ones we sent out are staying put?" Grue asked.
I felt out with my power. The bugs I'd put on the hostages couldn't see or hear anything, and I wasn't sensing movement. "They're doing as we told them. They ran as far as they could before your power hit them, and then they lay flat on the ground, hands on their heads."
"Then I'm going," Bitch announced. She grabbed a bone spike that was jutting out of Judas' shoulder and heaved herself up to a sitting position on his back.
"No," Tattletale said, grabbing at Bitch's boot, "Wait."
Bitch glared down at her, clearly annoyed.
"That hesitation before Aegis gave the orders to the hostages… it didn't fit."
"If you've figured something out, spit it out," Grue spoke in his echoing voice, "We need to move now, before they get reorganized!"
"Bitch, you're going after Clockblocker. Stay away from Aegis, got it?"
Bitch didn't even respond, digging her heels into Judas' sides and ducking her head to avoid hitting it on the top of the door as they raced out.
"What the fuck are you doing?" Grue growled, "She's going-"
"They switched costumes. Aegis is wearing Clockblocker's costume and vice versa."
I would have liked to see the expression on Brian's face, but as Grue, his mask covered everything. He just turned his skull-helmet back to the window, silent.
It dawned on me how badly that could have fucked us. Bitch's dogs would have attacked the person they thought was Aegis, and gotten tagged by Clockblocker instead. In one fell swoop, we would have lost the majority of our offensive power.
"Good catch," I told Tattletale, before raising my hands and directing a good portion of my bugs to drop from the ceiling and flow out the door.
Tattletale only grinned, before she made made her way back to the computer to continue her mad typing. Grue and Regent headed out the doors, leaving Tattletale and I alone in the bank lobby.
For my part, I walked to the corner of the bank and peered out through one of the tall, narrow windows by the loan officer's desk. Tendrils of Grue's darkness still clung to the window, but I had a pretty decent view of the battlefield.
As I watched, that view distorted, as if I was looking into a funhouse mirror, or through a drop of water. The street, including the area with the darkness covering it, began swelling, broadening, and widening until the two sidewalks on either side of the street were more like semicircles than straight lines. It hurt my head to think too much about how Vista's powers worked. Or maybe the headache I felt looming had something to do with the fact that I was sending my bugs into the area Vista had distorted. It wasn't outside the realm of possibility that my brain was having trouble relaying my bug's positions to me as well as it should, in that area where geometry wasn't working quite as it should.
Either way, something was getting to me. I raised my hands to rub my temples, remembered my mask, and sighed, folding my arms instead.
I sent my bugs through the darkness and the warped space of the street. Each time they collided with someone inside the cloud of darkness, it took me a moment to figure out who the person was. Grue was the first I ran into, and the easiest to identify. Some of my bugs had tiny hairs on their bodies that could sense air currents, and the steady output of darkness around Grue generated something like a steady air current around him. Regent was harder – I almost mistook him for a hostage – but he was wearing the hard mask over his face. I left him alone.
I found the person I was looking for, Bitch, and tracked her movement through the darkness. My bugs could feel the vibrations of the dogs' footfalls on the street, the hot, moist huffs of air from Judas' nostrils, and the smells of the dog. His smell made a dozen instincts of mosquitoes and carrion flies kick into action, his scent was one of blood, meat and gristle, the vaguest hints of diseased flesh. I shivered. As Bitch and her dogs burst from the darkness, towards Aegis and Clockblocker, I had my bugs follow immediately after them.
She was going straight for Clockblocker, who was dressed as Aegis.
"No, no, no," I muttered, "You idiot."
At the last possible second, she changed course and went for the real Aegis.
Aegis bolted the second the dog changed course, but it was too late. As he tried to fly out of reach, Judas leaped, nearly twice as far and high as I might have guessed something as big as he was could. The dog's prehensile tail wrapped around Aegis' torso. As they all fell, mount, rider and ensnared captive, Bitch shouted something I couldn't hear, and Judas whipped Aegis straight down, adding the force of the throw to the momentum of the fall.
I thought I might have heard the impact from the interior of the bank. Or maybe it was as auditory illusion and my bugs were the ones who heard it. Either way, Aegis hit the ground hard enough to kill an ordinary person.
He wasn't down for one second before he was on his feet again. In the same motion he used to get to his feet, he lunged for the dog and swung a fist at Judas' snout. He might have connected, but Bitch was already steering her steed back into the cloud of darkness. She flipped Aegis the middle finger before disappearing from view.
At the same time, Clockblocker was fighting off the bugs I'd sent out. Within a fraction of a second of a bug making contact with Clockblocker or his costume, he froze it. My power simply stopped telling me the bug was there, as if they had disappeared from the face of the planet. In reality, they were just suspended in time. Stuck in the air, immobile, untouchable.
But that same power could work against him, I was thinking. I made my bugs surge forward, surround him, aiming to cover his entire body. I was pretty sure he couldn't disable the effects of his power, so if he wanted to freeze all of the bugs I had crawling on him, he'd trap himself in a prison of his own making.
He was good at thinking on his feet, though, or he'd faced similar tactics before, because he had an answer for that. Clockblocker spun in a tight circle, freezing the bugs as his body rotated, so that they were only affected when the part of his body they were on was facing away from the bank. The result was that a cluster of bugs was left frozen behind him, and he was free to dash straight towards Aegis.
While I'd been distracted by Clockblocker, Bitch had set Brutus and Angelica on Aegis. He was fending the two dogs off, but the white pane of his helm – Clockblocker's helm – was shattered, now, and his costume was torn with one piece of ruined armor dangling by a string of cloth at his armpit.
Brutus lunged for Aegis, but as he passed over the edge of the area Vista had distorted, he fell short. The dog's jaws clacked shut a foot away from Aegis' face, spittle flying.
Aegis responded by slamming both fists, fingers interlaced, into Brutus' snout. The dog crashed onto its side, giving Aegis the time to take flight once more, heading straight for the sky.
Angelica followed, leaping through the air just like Judas had a minute earlier. She missed, and hit the side of a building hard enough to make the windows around her explode in a spray of glass. I waited for her to fall, but she apparently had no plans to do so. She gripped the stone of the building and windowsills around her with her four claws, tensed, and leaped again from the side of the building.
If I was surprised to see that display of acrobatics from one of the dogs, I doubted there were words for what Aegis' must have felt, just then. Angelica seized the teen hero in her jaws and they plummeted together.
Angelica didn't land with all four claws beneath her, and she sprawled as she hit the ground. When she stopped, though, she still had Aegis, one of his arms and half his torso clasped between her teeth. She whipped him around like a dog might shake a toy. When she paused, he was still fighting her, slamming his free hand against the side of her head over and over. Loops and strings of drool mixed with blood hung from her mouth. At least, that's what I thought it was, from my vantage point inside the bank, peering through gloom and pouring rain.
Clockblocker had slowed down as I started throwing more bugs in his way. I kept them between him and Aegis, so he couldn't close the distance and touch the dogs. He'd
responded by ducking, weaving, spinning and swatting or brushing them off with his hands, so he could freeze them without setting barriers in his own way.
Then he decided to try ignoring the swarm. I seized the opportunity to bite and sting him twenty or so times. The surprise and pain distracted him from his evasive maneuvers, and he wound up clotheslining himself as he froze the insects on his face while still running forward. He went from a head on run to landing on his back with his feet still in the air.
I probably wouldn't get a better chance. I set the majority of the swarm on him while he was lying on the ground.
Keep them on the defensive, Brian had told me, while we sparred. Keep them guessing, change the way you attack.
I directed the bugs to the areas where his skin was exposed, and piloted them into the gaps between his skin and his costume.
Even with innumerable insects biting and stinging him over and over, he managed to climb to his feet and return to his attempts to reach the dogs. He knew as well as I did that he couldn't freeze them now that the bugs had made their way inside his costume. He'd have to rip his costume with his own strength if he did. I doubted it was that easy to tear, either.
It was ironic. I wouldn't have been able to do this if he hadn't switched costumes with his teammate. Clockblocker's usual costume covered every inch of his skin, like mine did. Probably for much the same reason.
"I'm so sorry," I murmured, just loud enough that only I could hear it. I gave the bugs a new order.
When the bugs started crawling up his nostrils with relentless intent, he managed to keep going, pulling himself to his feet and resuming his efforts to freeze the bugs while advancing towards the dogs. He snorted to try and clear his nose so he could keep breathing, but then he was left with the problem of needing to inhale. He couldn't do that without bringing bugs further into his airway, so he made the mistake of opening his mouth to breathe.
When a mass of bugs forced themselves into his open mouth, he staggered and fell. I think he was gagging, but couldn't see or hear well enough from my vantage point to tell.
At my instruction, more bugs forced themselves under the gaps in his costume and into his ear canals. Yet others, smaller ones, crawled in and around his eyes, using deceptive strength to try and force themselves in between and under his eyelids. I couldn't imagine what that felt like to him. Everyone had probably experienced the sensation of having a lot of bugs crawling on them, but these bugs were operating with a human intelligence backing them, to penetrate his eyes, ears, nose and mouth. They were working together, with a single minded purpose, instead of mindlessly crawling where their instincts directed them.
I don't know if it was calculated or something he did in a moment's panic, but he used his power. Every bug that was touching him disappeared from my reach.
Once I'd realized what he'd done, I pulled away every bug that wasn't affected. I didn't want to suffocate him, and he'd effectively pinned himself to the street with his power. The worst thing that could happen now was that he'd panic and throw up, choking on his own puke. I could do my part to avoid that.
I'd won. I wasn't sure what to feel. I felt a kind of elation mixed with the quiet horror of what I'd just done to a superhero.
I could settle that inner turmoil later and decide on a way to make amends to Clockblocker at the same time. There were still five Wards and a stranger on the rooftop to be taken out, if I wanted to stay out of jail.
Agitation 3.10 Last Chapter Next Chapter
Six good guys were still in action, as far as I knew. Clockblocker was down, and posed no threat unless someone walked into his reach where he was lying down, or unless we took longer than the ten or so minutes it would take his power to release him. Angelica and Brutus were playing a macabre game of tug of war, using Aegis as the rope.
The rest of the battlefield was chaos. Patches of darkness covered everything, and the landscape was distorted. In some of the areas Vista had warped, the rain wasn't falling in a straight line. One spot in particular had the rain moving horizontally before it dropped to help fill a massive puddle thirty feet across, where her power had made an indent in the ground.
Aegis and Clockblocker were more or less dealt with. As Vista was the last remaining priority target, I directed my remaining swarm towards her. They wouldn't reach her quickly though, as the rain bogged them down, and both puddles and distorted space forced a more roundabout route for the bugs.
Bitch, still riding Judas, came rushing out of a cloud of darkness, splashing through the huge puddle. Kid Win and Gallant opened fire on her with laser beams and painfully bright blasts of energy. She was moving fast and unpredictably enough that Judas only took one or two glancing hits. The distance between her and Vista rapidly closed.
Vista raised her hand, and the surface of the street bulged upward into a short wall. As it grew, the wall caught one of Judas' forepaws, tripping him. He fell, and his rider was sent tumbling head over heels.
Bitch got to her feet before Judas did, but only managed to take a single step before one of Gallant's blasts clipped her. I winced. His light blasts were charged with energy that made the people struck feel a particular emotion. Gallant could blast you with one that made you hopeless, scared, sad, ashamed…
Bitch screamed, and it was a long and primal noise, filled with rage. I was still inside the bank, watching things unfold through the window, barely able to hear it, and it still made my
skin crawl. So he'd shot the dangerous psychopath with a blast that made her angry. Someone would have to explain that one to me at a later date.
Whirling, still screaming, she pointed at Gallant. Apparently that was order enough, because Judas charged at the teenager that was dressed like a science fiction Lancelot.
Bitch didn't attack him though. Without her dogs at her back, essentially without powers, she went straight for Vista. She was focused enough to stay on the priority target.
Vista was ready, though. As Bitch tried to close the distance, the roadway between her and the young heroine stretched out, until the distance she had to cover was two, three, four, five times as far. Vista then pinched the space behind her closer together, crossed a third of a block with a single skip, and then returned it to normal. I swore under my breath, and not just because my bugs had a lot more distance to travel. My head was pounding again, and it was getting steadily worse.
Was someone's power at work, giving me a headache? There wasn't anyone in the Wards, I was pretty sure, who could mess with your head like that. Gallant could mess with your emotions, but he had to hit you with a light blast to do it. The person on the roof, then? I was fairly confident there wasn't anyone in the Protectorate or New Wave who could affect me like this.
Bitch gave up on Vista and whistled for Judas. The dog responded immediately, abandoning his skirmish with Gallant, who was trying and failing to stand. A wash of darkness consumed him before he managed to pick himself up.
Kid Win opened fire on Bitch as her dog returned to her. Given the excessive distance between them – it would have been a hard shot to make before Vista stretched the area that Bitch was standing on – meaning his aim was wildly off target. He stopped, changed a setting, and fired a fresh salvo. This time, the lasers came out in more of a staccato spray, like you'd expect from a machine gun. One of the lasers caught Bitch in the center of her stomach and laid her flat. Judas guarded his owner by hunkering over her, blocking further shots and obscuring my view of her.
Near Vista, a large figure staggered out of the darkness, shadows still clinging to him, bellowing and screaming incoherently about bugs. He thrashed for several moments, then collapsed into a heap a short distance from Vista. Someone that large could only be Browbeat. Vista apparently reached the same conclusion I did, because she took a few steps closer to him, looking around helplessly for a way to help him.
An instant after I realized that I didn't actually have bugs on Browbeat, the figure struck Vista across the side of the head, laying her flat. I saw the briefest glimpse of Grue's skull mask before he and Vista were covered by a fresh tide of his darkness.
"Bitch, Vista, Clockblocker, Gallant are out of action, I think," I called across the room to Tattletale, who was still hammering away at a keyboard. "We've got Aegis handled for the time being. Not sure what happened to Browbeat, but there's only him, Kid Win and the person on the roof to deal with, now. We can make a break for it soon."
"One last thing to do," Tattletale grinned to me, "I'll be right back. Keep an eye on things here."
"What? No – Tattletale! Dammit!" I shouted, but she was already running, heading back into the offices that we'd been through on our way to the bank.
I didn't have time to dwell on her leaving. Flickers of light outside the bank caught my attention. Kid Win was flying fifteen feet above the ground on his hoverboard. In front of him, pieces of a massive device were materializing, shimmering into existence like you saw with the transporters on Star Trek. It was only one or two steps away from being complete, but you could tell what it was. A gun, no less than fifteen feet long, with a barrel three or four feet across, all turret mounted on a circular platform not unlike the board he was riding.
"Shit," I whispered to myself. I sent my bugs after him.
He swiveled the cannon to face Judas, who was still guarding the spot where Bitch had fallen. A bolt of light erupted from the cannon and sent Judas flying beyond my field of vision. He fired another shot, at a greater distance, presumably at the fallen dog. Then he swiveled and fired off two more shots in quick succession, blasting Aegis and the two dogs that were gripping him.
The dogs and Aegis were all sent flying into the wall of the office building opposite the bank. While the dogs didn't get up immediately, a bloody and tattered Aegis was on his feet in an instant, and in the air a moment later. He got to a good height – maybe two or three stories up, and stayed there, likely to get his bearings and survey the situation.
As my bugs approached the Kid, he took notice and maneuvered his cannon to decimate the swarm. I spread them out, but he simply pulled a lever and released a flamethrower-like blast of lightning and sparks, eliminating virtually all of the bugs I'd sent out into the street. The scant few that that remained, I sent towards his face, to crawl beneath his visor and into his nose and mouth. It wasn't enough.
Then Kid Win aimed the cannon straight at me.
I jumped for cover the moment I realized what he was doing. There was a muffled sound, more a very large person someone hitting a punching bag than what I'd expect a laser cannon to sound like, and the window exploded.
What was he doing? We had hostages inside. I turned to check, and saw there weren't any hostages near me. Did he know that? Heat sensors in his visor? Was someone watching me through the cameras and passing him info? Damn it! There was too much I didn't know, and Tattletale wasn't around to fill me in.
Grue sprinted between two clouds of darkness, raising one hand to send a blast of his power towards Kid Win, obscuring the Kid's line of sight. Kid Win responded by ponderously maneuvering himself and the cannon out of the top of the cloud of darkness.
I swore under my breath and sent a command for more of the bugs I had inside to drop from the ceiling and go outside to attack. There were a good few bugs near Clockblocker, who were getting free of the time stopping effect he'd laid on them. I added those to the assault.
My legs buckled as my headache worsened tenfold. Worse, the response from my bugs was sluggish, like I was ordering them to move through mud. I felt a momentary panic, but there wasn't really anything I could do. I grit my teeth and ordered the attack anyways, then forced myself to run for the other side of the bank, in case he could somehow detect me and shoot through the walls to hit me.
I glanced through the windows for Aegis as I passed them. Through the rain, and the darkness that lingered on the surface of the windows, I spotted him. His white costume was wet with rain and ridiculous amounts of blood, and he was diving straight for the bank like a human missile. Damn it.
Inexplicably, his descent wavered, then curved. He flew straight into the ground, full force, hard enough to crack pavement. One of the dogs, I couldn't tell which, had managed to extricate itself from the rubble of the shattered wall and rushed at the fallen Aegis.
Kid Win was occupied trying to do three things at once – he was maneuvering out of the way of the clouds of darkness Grue was setting in his way, making return potshots at Grue as Grue zig zagged between spots of cover and with every free moment, he was blasting hundreds of my bugs out of the air. If my power was at full strength, my bugs probably would have reached him already, but something was interfering. That, or I'd overexerted myself. The bugs were slow to react, slow to move and some were slipping from my grasp, returning to their instinctive behavior. Making matters worse, I wasn't blind to the fact that every time I gave a command, my headache got exponentially worse.
With Kid Win occupied as he was, the dog had a clear path to Aegis. Aegis didn't try to run this time. He stood his ground and reached for his utility belt. He retrieved something that looked like a miniature fire extinguisher.
Then he pulled the pin.
For the second time in a matter of minutes, I dove away from the window. It wouldn't be a grenade, but the option that made the most sense- I squeezed my eyes shut and covered my ears just in time. The explosion the flashbang grenade made was enough to leave me breathless, and there was a stone wall and some fifty or so feet between us.
I chanced a careful look through the window as soon as I'd recovered, hands still over my ears. The dog was reeling, making pained sounds, and Aegis was pummeling it, using his flight to close the distance and add more momentum to his swings. When the dog, Angelica, I saw, looked like it was starting to recover, he grabbed two more flashbang grenades from his belt with one hand and pulled the pins with the other, dropping them to the ground just below him.
I ducked behind cover again, but they didn't go off. When I chanced another look, I saw the tables had turned. Where the flashbangs had been dropped, there was a smudge of Grue's
darkness covering the ground. Angelica was having it out with Aegis, and Regent was striding out of the darkness, in Kid Win's direction.
I'd forgotten about Regent. It made sense that he was working from a discreet position like I was. He probably would have been the one to alter Aegis' flight path.
Seeing Regent approach, Kid Win turned his turret-mounted cannon in his direction. Before he could fire, though, Regent raised two fingers, and Kid Win lost his footing on his flying skateboard. The cannon shifted until it was pointing straight up, as the young hero dangled from the handles, his weight altering the trajectory of the cannon. His board clattered to the ground a few feet away.
Regent made a dismissive wave, and Kid Win let go with one hand, his fingers and arm curling backwards in a palsied fit. Regent repeated the gesture, and Kid Win lost his grip on the controls, dropping a good twenty feet to the asphalt.
As Regent approached to stand over him, Kid Win reached for his laser pistol. He scowled in frustration as his fingers continued to twitch and curl involuntarily, instead of closing on the handle of the gun.
With an almost relaxed air, Regent shoved the end of his tazer into Kid Win's side.
I don't know if it was the sense of relief, but I couldn't help but laugh as Regent collected the fallen skateboard and began a wobbly ascent to the floating cannon turret. He aimed and began firing at Aegis, who was forced to scramble out of the way.
"What's so funny, psycho?"
I whirled to face the voice, and saw the freckled, brown haired hostage that had been glaring at me when we'd first taken control of the bank lobby. After that, I saw only stars as she slammed something large and blunt into the side of my head.