Synopsis:

For 30 long years Markus has tried to make himself trigger. Only when he stands at deaths door and accepts that his story has come to an end does he gain power. Now the embodiment of a Black Hole, Markus will tear down the old world order and replace it with a new one.

This time with him on top.

Chapter One - Taylor I

Taylor couldn't sleep, her eyes locked on the black, starless sky beyond her hospital window. The dreary, snow kissed 90s architecture of the office building on the opposite side of the two lane road was just out of sight from where she was half hiding under the thin covers of her bed.

Just a few hours ago her doctor had told her that she would be able to go home soon, now that she wasn't halfway catatonic anymore. Unfortunately instead of the happiness she should have felt, she was just thinking about her return to school and the inevitable humiliation her bullies would have in store for her. Still, things wouldn't be completely the same. She had powers, maybe not the best powers but there were surely things she could do with them, things that might allow her a way out.

Then, just as she started to slip into uneasy dozing, the window rattling roar of a monster pierced through her thin body. A chill of almost primal fear went down her spine, erasing any further thoughts about sleep from her mind. The sky, pure darkness just a moment ago, was suddenly bright as day, a massive burst of fire rising into her field of view almost blinding in its intensity.

Taylor scrambled up so quickly that she almost fell out of the bed, her heart pounding in her chest as she grasped for purchase on the metallic bed frame. Her balance was barely restored before she was already stumbling forward. She ignored the pain of her bare feet smacking on the cold hospital tiles as she pressed her face against the freezing glass of the single pane window.

The almost ear splitting roar had given way to an eerie silence, like the world itself was afraid to move. In Brockton Bay people avoided being outside at this time of night, the gang presence was very heavy in many parts of the city, but it was very seldom that everything and everybody ceased to move simultaneously. It was like everyone was waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Her breath came out in short bursts as she tried to feel through her bugs, their other senses still too much for her to handle, trying to find out what was happening. Maybe she could help and in some way she could prove herself, prove herself more than a vict…

Suddenly one of her smaller cockroaches was kicked, something hurling it end over end in the alley just opposite of the hospital. Her gaze snapped toward the almost pitch black alley entrance, her heart rate spiking once again. Then she spotted a lone figure, dressed in a dark, unzipped jacket, black cargo pants with a stylized bear stitched on his right leg and a black balaclava, stumbling out onto the street. He was clearly in a hurry, as he hobbled towards the hospital as soon as he saw it, the streetlamps, the only visible spots for her after the fireball had burnt out her night vision, allowing Taylor to see how his shirt and parts of his balaclava were discolored where blood was seeping through the material.

Taylor frowned in confusion and worry before another cone of fire lit up the night, closer this time. The roar that followed stung her eardrums as she saw a building catch on fire only one street over, right where the masked man had come from. She even felt a couple of her insects inside the structure dying, their small bodies incinerated before she had a moment to react. Taylor shivered as she felt their deaths keenly, her brain barely able to interpret the still foreign sensation before she managed to center herself again.

"Lung…" She whispered, fear in her bones as she finally recognised the roar, having heard it before on the news when he fought the complete Brockton Bay Protectorate roster, the largest and most well trained group of heroes in the city, and walked away a free man afterwards. Frantically she tried to divine the gang leader's location with her bugs and eyes both. This was almost like a sign, wasn't it? Even if she didn't know exactly how, if she could help the Protectorate catch Lung tonight, they would surely accept her even with her weak power.

She had only a moment to fantasize before the injured man she had almost forgotten about stumbled to a stop in the middle of the street, right under the light of a flickering street lamp. A second darkly dressed man had appeared out of nowhere right behind him. Taylor's eyes widened in shock at the demonic mask on the new man's face, allowing her to recognise him as Oni Lee, a teleporter that left short lived clones behind. He was Lungs most notorious underling and a known murderer. Oni Lee was one of the capes in the Bay that everyone was afraid of, the rumour of him wearing a suicide west and exploding you with one of his clone bodies was persistent enough that there had to be some element of truth to it.

It seemed like the injured man had noticed his pursuer as well and even said something over his shoulder to Oni Lee but Taylor didn't even bother trying to make it out, instead already gathering as many insects as she could in the strip of dead grass in front of the hospital. This was her opportunity to save somebody, to be more than she was before. Her hands were clammy and her forehead ached from where it was still pressed against the cold window but she didn't allow herself to take her eyes off the scene for even a moment.

Then, almost faster than she could follow, Oni Lee moved, lunging forward while at the same time appearing behind his target, a large knife already poised to strike. The injured man didn't even acknowledge the now clone before him and neither did he try to stop the knife ramming into his back as he whipped around. He was way faster than Taylor herself could have moved, and grabbed Lee's face, his thumbs almost perfectly stabbing into the eyeholes in Lee's mask, completely robbing the Asian cape of his vision while at the same time tackling him to the hard ground.

The first Oni threw himself onto the pair, managing another brutal stab into his opponent's back before falling into dust while his other, and now only, body started thrusting his own knife, almost robotically, again and again from below. His opponent, already bleeding heavily through his now tattered shirt, meanwhile continued to keep a desperate hold of the cape's face and smashed the back of Lee's head into the concrete street.

Taylor finally managed to react, the sudden and brutal violence of two men fighting for their lives something she had never personally witnessed. She immediately sent her bugs surging forward onto the criminal as fast as she could, biting and stabbing with spiders, wasps, bees, cockroaches and every other crawley she could manage to gather on short notice. The carpet of insects climbed over each other to burrow below the cape's mask and into his mouth, nose and even squeezing through the gaps of the other man's fingers to get at whatever was left of his eyes.

Taylor wanted to retch at her actions but she couldn't afford to, every second counted.

At the combined assault, Oni Lee finally let go of his knife, still inside the other man's rib cage, and clawed at his attackers forearms and hands, trying to fight himself free of the grip instead of trying to do as much damage as possible. Unfortunately it was already too late for him, her bugs blocking his airways while the other man brought Lee's head up and down with crushing force once again. Taylor shivered as she felt the panic in the cape's desperate last scramble. His every movement, his frantic swallowing, futile attempts at drawing a breath past her insects, everything burned itself ever deeper into her memory.

Then, with one final impact of the back of his head against the concrete street something audibly cracked and Oni Lee suddenly stilled. His arms, so animated in his desperate struggle to survive just a moment before, immediately falling slack at his sides. Taylor swallowed heavily as she felt the literal life go out of Oni Lee's body. She immediately stilled her bugs, pulling the ones that still lived out of his airways, not wanting to continue feeling his slowly cooling insides.

Had she just helped kill someone? She couldn't… A hero didn't… The heroes would never accept… She almost started to hyperventilate before she suddenly noticed the man she had helped try to stand up, his hands pressed against his now completely soaked shirt. His blood was still pumping out of the dozen or so stabwounds and he was visibly wheezing when he jostled the knife still inside him.

Still, he didn't even give the corpse or her bugs below him another look and instead of falling over, like Taylor expected, was forcing himself back up to his feet with the rest of his obviously quickly fading strength before slowly shuffling towards the hospital doors once again.

Taylor had never seen someone with such determined eyes, their color almost completely hidden by the large blown out pupils, clearly clouded with agony. Almost against reason, he put one foot in front of the other. It made her feel ashamed of her own thoughts. How could she think about how her actions could be perceived by others when there was someone still standing after fighting for his life?

She, she should get down there and help him, that's what a hero should do!

Her hospital slippers and the coat her father had brought her for yard time were put on quickly as she hurried out of her room. When she made it to the flight of stairs downwards, she had already pulled her swarm back into the grass but a single fly remaining on the man's body told her that he was still shuffling forward though his speed had dropped even further. Taylor had no idea how he was managing to move at all, her own feet were barely listening to her commands, stiff from the cold and jittery from the adrenalin at the same time as she stumbled onto the ground floor.

She swallowed thickly, the hospital lobby eerily quiet with only a single female nurse nervously looking over the nurses stations desk when she heard Taylors footsteps.

"Y-you should go back into your room, it's not safe right n-now." The nurse stuttered, her almost white face betraying her own fear of Lung.

"T-there is someone i-injured out there." Taylor answered, nervously wringing her hands but also happy to have found someone to help once the man was inside. "I'm g-going to h-help." I'm going to be a hero went unsaid.

"N-no you shouldn't…" The nurse protested but Taylor was already past her and pushed one side of the glass entrance doors open, the cold night air hitting her like a truck, her coat billowing behind her as she forced herself to keep moving forward.

Immediately Taylor could smell the blood in the air, the metallic scent was more intense than she had ever experienced. Her eyes snapped to Oni Lees corpse almost without conscious thought, the lifeless body pulling her eyes towards it against her own will. She could barely hold herself back from gagging and vomiting at the sight of his opened skull, the shadows of the streetlamp almost making it seem like some ethereal monster was leaking out of the cracks onto the stained concrete.

She, she had helped kill him… Tears welled in her eyes once again…

"Gahh!" A pained grunt snapped her out of her emotional shock, the injured man she had come down to save had finally stumbled onto one knee, barely more than ten steps away from where he started. His hazy eyes met her own terrified ones for a moment before she took in the rest of his body. He didn't look good at all, he was wheezing through his balaclava, clearly not getting enough air through the material or maybe because of a punctured lung, while his shirt was so soaked in blood that it had changed color. Even still he got back up to both of his feet, his eyes now locked onto her.

Shaking her head to clear her thoughts, her loose hair tumbling over her face as she tried to give him an encouraging smile which probably came out more as a grimace. She didn't know much about the human body besides what they taught in biology class but even she knew that it took deceptively little time for somebody to bleed out. Thankfully she had made it down in time, now she would only have to get him inside and…

Before she could even move though, another roar echoed through the night, and a mass of silver crashed into the street from above, carving a deep furrough into the concrete, sending chips of road in all directions. Taylor, her eyes wide in paralyzing shock, just saw how the heavily injured man's shoulders tensed and he slowly turned around, looking up at the half dragon, half man beast the asian gang leader had already become.

"'Ound 'ou." Lung loudly warbled through his mutated mouth, elongated like a snake and full of sharp and long teeth. Then his eyes fell onto Oni Lee's still body and all the malicious amusement of a cat playing with a mouse vanished. Only pure rage remained and Taylor's heart sank for what felt like the tenth time that day as Lung stared at the comparatively small man in front of him, his red eyes focused into pinpricks.

Then she saw a fire flash in the dragon's mouth and before she could think about the consequences, she was suddenly running, desperately sending her insects surging forward once again, her fastest in first, the swarm of flies and mosquitos almost forming a dark cloud as she moved to obscure Lungs vision, maybe make him miss, to give them a chance to escape.

Before they could make it to him though, Lungs' fire grew until it obscured his whole head. A moment later it was suddenly moving forward, not in a cone like the videos she had seen of flame throwers, but in a literal, physically impossible ball of fire.

She had barely a moment to register that she had made it next to the injured man, who was staring his death right in the face, before she threw herself with all her might against his body. Taylor couldn't help but think that he probably didn't even register what she was trying to do, too out of it to register anything beside the massive parahuman in front of him. The only thing he did was go limp, inadvertently helping in trying to dodge the attack which smashed into the ground in front of them like a grenade, exploding into an inferno, setting half of the street ablaze in an instant.

Immediately Taylor felt her swarm, which wasn't even close to hindering Lung in any capacity, reduce in size, the small creatures not durable enough to withstand even a moment of the sudden fire. She had never felt so many of her insects die at the same time, their deaths relentlessly assaulting her mind, causing her vision to swim for a moment just as she impacted the ground.

Then she blacked out.

Massive, impossibly big beasts smashed against each other, again and again, hundreds, thousands, millions of tiny pieces, feathers or scales or hairs, raining, seeding. A third creature, smaller but unfathomably faster, darting between, taking and taking, and giving only a single piece of itself in exchange.

A piercing scream of pain tore through the night, louder and more raw than anything Taylor had heard before. She blinked the black spots from her eyes as the man she had watched fight against Oni Lee and come out victorious was now above her, forcing her to stare at his face where his balaclava had burned itself into his skin, patches of raw flesh visible to Taylors widened and horrified eyes in the light of the flickering fire all around them. She felt her stomach roiling wanting to rebel at the sight but then she noticed that he wasn't the one letting loose the high pitched scream.

It was hers.

Where she had felt the biting cold of the night's air, there was now just pain and heat. Her skin felt like it was bubbling, pulling tight as the flames licked at her feet, legs and hands. Her scalp was hot as well and she could smell burning hair. It said a lot about her that that was what caused her the most distress.

"Shh, shh, everything will be alright now." The man's deep voice pierced through the pain and she latched onto it like a lifeline, his no longer clouded blue eyes piercing hers with an intensity Taylor had never experienced. Even though she could tell every syllable hurt him immensely, the way his breath rattled between every word making that obvious enough, she could only detect joy in his tone. "I finally got my power. Fucking finally." She shivered at his tone, the almost rapture with which he said those words overshadowing even the pain she herself was in.

Before she could figure what he meant though, a massive shadow fell over them both.

A pair of silver claws latched onto the man's shoulders and yanked him away from her with supernatural strength. Taylor reached out at the last moment, irrationally hoping that she could stop the gang leaders' attack but she was too weak and slow, her skin pulling and her muscles screaming in protest just from the act of lifting her arms. The man's eyes barely widened before he was brought face to face with Lung again, the criminal's head now almost twice the size of a normal person, silver scales covering his elongated mouth.

"'ill 'ou!" Lung simply stated and suddenly pulled his hands away from each other while holding his victims arms, one in each claw. Taylor wanted to look away but somehow she couldn't, her eyes locked onto them both even though she knew what was going to happen. The same thing that was going to happen to her right afterwards.

"I don't think so." Then from one second to the next, instead of Lung ripping the man literally limb from limb, a ball of pure black, a more intense black than Taylor had ever seen, was suddenly hovering in front of the gang leader. There wasn't any transition from man to object, just one second he was there and the next second he wasn't. And neither were Lungs arms.

Taylor blinked, doubting her own eyes for a moment, thinking that maybe the pain caused her to hallucinate, maybe her own mind wouldn't allow her to see what had really happened. She was even contemplating if this was all a dream, if she was still back in her hospital bed, having imagined this whole night. Then she felt the way her skin pulled even tighter across her arms as while the flames had already burned themselves out, the road itself was now hot enough to still hurt her.

No, this wasn't a dream, Taylor decided as she heard Lungs' roars of rage and felt her field of vision narrowing, growing dark at the edges. If anything, this was too real.

AN: I wanted to write something different than I usually see so the story is told from a couple different view point characters. Its already made planning the story more interesting. Something else to keep in mind, the villain SI will lie and manipulate his enemies and his allies, so some people will think that he has different goals than he really has. Some amount of edge is also very likely.