"Sir, Please indulge me just this-"
Kaiser rolled his eyes. "I think I've indulged you enough already." He hung up the phone on his lead clinician and scoffed to himself, eyeing the tumbler of scotch at his side longingly. Half drained it was, and half drained it would stay, despite the temptation. It was too early to be seen drinking and have it be socially acceptable, and by the time most happy hours started in Brockton Bay's local bars, he would need all one hundred and ten percent of focus for the fight ahead, and for that focus to be true, his faculties needed to be intact.
Not that he would ever let himself get drunk in the first place anyway, but his liver would be thanking him for it nonetheless.
Max drummed his fingers on his desk to the tune of a song he could not name or place that occasionally popped into his head in the form of a fragmented and hazy reminder of his college years and he stood up and stretched, toes curling and joints popping as he sighed.
It had been a long time since he'd taken the field in a cape-on-cape engagement, perhaps a year, a year and half at most. The most recent engagement he could recall with clear memory was the 'disaster' he'd faced when Kayden had first left the Empire and gone dark. Some of Lung's powered and unpowered lackeys had gotten bold in her absence and started claiming blocks owned by his Empire's triggermen and dealers. Their initial scuffles rapidly went from after-dark street fights to broad daylight gunfights and drivebys once their initial successes had plateaued and his men had rallied and fought back in the worst gang war the city had seen since the aftermath of the Marche's destruction. It was all well and good until his counter-offensive had become too effective and his men began an incursion into Lung's personal territory.
It was then the great Dragon left its lair with a weary sigh. Lung had had enough.
He stopped their offensive cold in two days. He'd pushed them back to their initial borders six hours after that. Three days had then gone by silently until Lung set fire to Hookwolf's personal bungalow.
And he didn't stop there. He went about on a slow march, as lazy and as delicate as he pleased, burning down houses and apartments and warehouses and parking garages and restaurants that had even a tenuous relation to the Empire's business front. It had taken the combined efforts of every cape in his roster, All of New Wave, every PRT member currently stationed in Brockton Bay, locals and visitors, a three million dollar personal donation from his own private account to Faultline, and Kayden abandoning her short-lived retirement to stop his rampage, and at a heft cost for everyone involved. Lung had lost every cape he had but for Oni Lee, but in truth was rendered no weaker for it.
It was a power money couldn't buy, that he could never truly touch or even fully understand.
The power to seize.
Max sighed again, bending over slightly as he stretched further in preparation for the calisthenics was due to perform.
Exercise was relaxing. Fun, even.
Fighting was anything but.
Fighting was a chore.
(X)
My case in point.
Kaiser suppressed a sigh as 'Glory Girl' flew at him with another roar, this time laced with frustration instead of excitement. She was thirty feet in the air at his best guesstimate, fist pointed downward towards his armored helm as she zoomed towards him, intent on knocking him out in a single blow, armor be damned.
His finger twitched, and a spear shucked forward towards that same fist in an instant quicker than a heartbeat.
Victoria Dallon, thinking herself wise to his game, was already preemptively dodging towards the right, where another twitch of his finger sent another spear, this time much slower.
She could have seen it coming from a mile away, so at fifteen feet and counting she had no problem reacting and flying below its intended mark. In the time it took for her to see it, soar below it, and adjust her course, Kaiser counted well over a dozen points of attack leading from that same spear's length to her that would have led to a kill shot.
He left her be until she cleared the ten-foot mark, low enough to the ground and coming at him quick enough he could see the victorious smile on her face.
His fingers twitched upward again, this time with a slight palm movement, and a wall erected itself five feet in front of her, just tall enough to reach her eyes. In a movement that defied all laws of physics as he personally understood them, she halted mid-air, entropy eroding away her momentum, her blue eyes now wide with surprise. It was the natural thing, the instinctive thing to do, to stop yourself in front of a moving object you were about to hit.
It was also the worst possible thing to do fighting against him.
Kaiser let a small smile grace his lips as another sharp gesture had the wall grow taller and taller until it matched the nearby apartment buildings in height in the time it took for his eyes to blink. The pavement at his feet groaned its protest at the weight of the new curtain wall bisecting it, but Kaiser ignored it for the illusion he knew it to be. He couldn't see Dallon anymore, but that didn't matter. One final performative push with his hand and a massive metal cylinder formed from the ground ahead of him and slammed into that curtain wall like a battering ram on a gate.
Instead of splintering and shattering like a stone brick wall, Kaiser watched the thin steel snap off of its invisible hinges as it leaned forward in its entirety, and fifty feet of solid steel began falling down towards the girl, the parked cars, and the dozens of people ahead of them both.
Kaiser turned away from it as it fell, ignoring the screams and calamitous noise of falling rubble and shattering brick as the wall tore through the faces of every building it scratched, stopping halfway through its imminent collapse as he glanced at a flash of light out of the corner of his eye.
He tensed, preparing himself to roll away from or sidestep an oncoming laser blast, only to relax as he got a good look at a sphere of plasma bounce off the top of a parked car and land hard, scorching the paint off of it. Bradley pounced atop it a moment later, leaping from the direction whence it came, metallic snarls rumbling deep in his invisible throat as he batted at it in a way that seemed much more Catlike than his namesake would have suggested.
He took a moment to peruse his mental checklist. With Carol Dallon currently indisposed thanks to Bradley and James having his fun with Neil Pelham, the only members of New Wave currently unaccounted for were 'Laserdream' and 'Lady Photon', though Tammi and Larson should have kept them away from his current engagement as he had dictated.
He turned back to face the curtain wall he'd erected, only to blink in mild surprise as it began falling again, this time in the opposite direction. He erected more pillars to impact it and halt its descent, and he craned his neck back to look up at the furious teenager floating over it. Her hands were shaking, the seams of her dress ripped and torn around her arms and midriff, her muscles no doubt shredded and sprained just as badly. She couldn't feel it yet thanks to the adrenaline coursing through her veins, but in a few minutes, she would.
Oh, how she would.
"You-" She panted, gasping and heaving for breath, vocal cords strained from the force of her screaming voice. "-Fuck. Do you have any-" A coughing fit interrupted her. Kaiser folded his hands behind his back and politely waited for it to subside. "-Any idea how many people you could have just killed?"
"Nineteen."
He saw her blink on reflex, and noted her struggle to hear and understand him from this distance. He looked down a moment and a small pillar pierced the ground below his feet, and he willed it to surge upwards until he matched her height in the air. "Nineteen." He repeated, louder this time. "Four civilians hiding inside their cars, two men and women I noticed watching through their apartment window, nine hiding beneath those same parked cars, three police officers who held their fire for fear of harming interlopers, and of course, you."
She was so taken aback at the lack of anything in his voice that she struggled to speak, to decide whether or not to curse him or hit him. He could see her hands shaking harder, more erratically, rage overtaking her. He felt it creep into his skull, and a miasma seeped into his brain through his ears and nose as he breathed it in, and he very nearly choked on it as he saw her steely blue eyes narrow at him.
He swallowed the sudden erratic and irrational spike of fear down, locking it deep in a place it could not escape, a cell only he had the key to. "I counted nineteen potential casualties in my attack, just as I can count all forty-eight muscles comprising both your arms combined. Of those forty-eight, I'm willing to bet you just tore half. You can't feel it yet, but the longer we talk, the more your body begins to relax, and the more you relax, the more the adrenaline will fade, and now that I've just pointed that fact out to you-"
A blur of motion, almost impossible to discern.
Max stepped back on reflex and let himself fall for a tenth of a second before another pillar caught his fall before it could become a tumble, and he turned around as he stood atop it to face Dallon again as she whirled around mid-air, her fists clenched tight over an invisible throat. She raised one arm to her head and flexed her fingers experimentally, and he watched her face begin to contort, watched her suck in a ragged breath as she bit her lip, the beginnings of the damage registering to her nerves.
"As I was saying, now that I've pointed that fact out to you the pain will soon be setting in. It will quite quickly become debilitating, lest you flee to seek out your sister for treatment. I assure you the ones responsible for today's catastrophe will be arraigned and delivered to the BPPD as soon as they are found, and as soon as you leave the field, I'll call back my Empire. Do we have an accord?"
Said 'Catastrophe' was honestly hardly worth writing home about. He'd received a credible report that some new members who were to attend an upcoming recruitment rally might have federal connections, but he was willing to let sleeping dogs lie, if only to corner and question those men after the rallies conclusion, where they could easily be arraigned and interrogated. Interrogated and arraigned they were, and they let slip they had Parahuman and police backing, and that their backers were to disrupt another rally to be held the following week. James had wanted it canceled, but he'd overruled him to set a trap.
And New Wave had sprung it, to minimal disruption.
Dallon snarled at him like a wild animal. How juvenile.
Kaiser clicked his tongue. "Is that to be your only reply? I assure you, I can kill many more than nineteen if pressed upon. I've been cooped up so long that my creativity knows no bounds."
Dallon snarled at him again in a way that just looked so utterly mortifying that he had to fight the urge to cringe in sympathetic discomfort.
She heaved mid-air, fists clenching only halfway, the wind blowing her hair into her face, blinding her in one eye.
He hummed. She really ought to tie that back before it becomes a liability.
"You let my mom go."
He nearly rolled his eyes. Kaiser lowered his voice like a parent might for a young child who just didn't quite get it. "I said I would, as soon as you quit the field."
Another flash of light, brighter. He saw Hookwolf press a steel paw deeper and deeper still into the orb of light that protected Carol Dallon, and the steel began to glow and soften. Hookwolf ignored it resolutely.
Dallon glanced between him and her mother one, twice, thrice, before shooting upwards toward the sky, banking a hard left back towards home.
Max stepped forward, and a series of spears launched themselves up from the ground in shorter and shorter increments, flattening out at the point to act as a set of stairs, stairs he walked down from all the way to the ground. He marched toward Hookwolf, whose entire left arm was glowing and falling apart at the seams, and whistled sharply. Bradley reared back and away from Dalon and sat back on his haunches like the obedient dog he was. That same sphere pulsed bright enough to blind him a moment, and when his vision cleared, Carol Dallon sat hunched on one knee before him, gasping for breath.
"Another time, my dear." He had no idea as to why that turn-of-phrase name irritated her so, but he enjoyed it regardless.
With his farewell bid, Bradley trundled toward him on all fours, back smoothing out enough that one could comfortably sit atop it. Max did so, hauling himself atop his comrade in arms, and a saddlehorn made of whirring knives and blades formed wide enough for him to grasp.
Grasp it he did, and like just like that, Bradley was off.
He amused himself imagining the look on Theodore's face the whole ride to safety.
This is what he got, for denying him another Saturday. If he had agreed to come to him today, he would have vetoed the entire operation.
With a mental shrug, he put his disappointment with his son in the back of his mind.
Curiously, the Hebert girl was still at its forefront.
Dimly, he wondered if Bradley would mind taking a quick detour before heading off to his own safe house.
No. Kaiser cut that line of thought short and very nearly slapped himself for even considering the idea.
A fifteen-minute chat with the girl wasn't worth the risk.
But in the same corner of his mind thoughts of his son lingered, she was right there beside him.