A Darker Path

Part One Hundred Three: Boss Fight!

[A/N: This chapter beta-read by Lady Columbine of Mystal.]

PATOR

Just Before It All Went Sideways

Atropos

I sat opposite Mrs Yamada in a comfortable armchair. She had a cup of tea, while I was going without for the moment. While I could've probably gotten away with pulling my mask up to eat or drink something, I didn't want to put too many dents in my mystique if I could help it.

"So, there's something I've been wanting to ask you, if you don't mind." Her teacup was almost empty; she finished it and put it aside.

"Go ahead and ask." I spread my hands to demonstrate my openness, ignoring the fact that I was literally wearing a full-face mask. "If I refuse to answer, I'll at least tell you why."

"I suppose that's fair." Clasping her hands together, she leaned forward slightly. "Your power is focused on killing people, while your aim all along has been to make Brockton Bay a safer, more prosperous city. What happens when you achieve your aims, and there's nobody else you need to kill to make it work? Are you concerned that it might turn on you? I've seen problematic scenarios before, with other people who are trying not to use their powers."

"My power's not just about Ending people." Not wanting to sound argumentative or self-serving, I moderated my tone carefully. "I can End concepts, things, and even legacies. As Brockton Bay's influence in the region spreads, there will inevitably be those who have a vested interest in maintaining their version of the status quo, even when it's something that needs to End. When that happens, I'll be there."

Or, as I privately called it, the Law of Infinite Assholes.

"Yes, but what about—"

I was no longer listening, because between one instant and the next, the niggling sense of danger I'd been feeling all day had exploded into a full-scale DefCon One. My threatscape lit up like a Christmas tree plugged into a nuclear reactor; eyes wide and staring behind my mask, I sat up hard, my heart hammering in my chest.

It's Scion. He's learned my name, and he's coming after me.

In that instant, I knew exactly where he was and what he intended to do. In order: in the upper atmosphere but descending rapidly; and destroy me utterly, with no holding back.

It was a good thing I'd been moving my pieces into place, because right now I had exactly zero wiggle room.

00:08

"Vista, Vicky, Ash!" I yelled, launching myself up out of the armchair. Not caring who saw it, I shoved my sleeve back, popped the cover on the teleport module, and started typing in coordinates as fast as I could with my right hand. "It's go time!" At the same time, with my left hand, I delved into my pocket for my phone.

00:07

Vicky popped her head out of the kitchen, then she came swooping toward me, dodging around Roderick as she came. Missy was also on the ball; she grabbed Ashley by the wrist, compressed space between us, and moved them both across the room in one step.

I continued typing in the coordinates, and woke up my phone at the same time. Tapping out a message for Dragon, I sent it, then started another one for Flechette.

00:06

"Atropos, what's going on?" Mrs Yamada began to get up out of her chair. Opting to ignore the question—I could take the time to explain or I could live, and I chose to live—I finished entering the coordinates and opened the portal. Even as I completed the text to Flechette and sent it, I dived through the portal onto the roof of the Brockton Bay PRT building.

Vicky was next through, followed by Ashley and Missy. I stabbed the button to manually close the portal before anyone else wandered through, then slapped the cover shut, dropped my phone into my pocket, and turned toward the northeast corner of the building roof.

Okay, that bought us about three seconds. Let's use them wisely.

Panacea

Amy stared as the portal winked out. "What the heck?" she managed. "Where'd they go? What's going on?"

Now on her feet, Jessica Yamada looked decidedly unsettled. "Does this—" she began, then cut herself off as an actinic golden glare blazed in through the window, only to flick out an instant later like a light switch had been flipped. "Ah, does this happen often?"

Rubbing at her eyes, Amy tried to blink the spots away; the light had been that bright. "Sometimes, but she usually explains what's going on first, and I'm generally the one who gets to go on the trip. And the light was new, too. I have no idea what's going on with that."

"I see." Jessica looked around at the assembled group. "Is everyone alright?"

"Everyone appears to be okay." That was Miss Medic, looking far more serious than Amy had ever seen her; in this incarnation, anyway. "But I think we should stay away from the windows for the moment, just in case."

Tenebrae nodded. "I agree. Do you have an interior room we could shelter in for the moment? Also, it's probably a good idea to call in the PRT and Protectorate, at least until we know it's all clear out there." The protective hand on Miss Medic's shoulder showed exactly where his priorities lay.

"It's all clear." Cherish spoke confidently. "There's nobody within ten miles who wants to do us harm. Most people are wondering what that lightshow was all about. And in case you're wondering, I picked up a very brief reading of someone who was truly pissed off, but they're gone too."

Mrs Yamada nodded as she absorbed the information. "Thank you, Cherish. That's good to know." She looked around at the four capes. "So … what should we do now?"

Miss Medic shrugged expressively. "Tenebrae was right. We need to call in the PRT, to let them know what we saw. But also to get a lift back to Brockton Bay."

"On it." Tenebrae had his phone out as he spoke.

Amy leaned in toward Cherish, lowering her voice. "Do you have any idea of what's going on? Why she tore out of here like that?"

Cherish grimaced, then glanced around before speaking just as quietly. "I'm pretty sure I do, but I don't want to talk about it where anyone else can hear us. All I can tell you at the moment is that she's been on edge all day because of it, then just now she went from irritated to 'oh, shit' in half a heartbeat. I'm pretty sure I know who's coming after her, and if she'd taken two seconds longer, none of us would be alive to talk about it."

Though unable to counter her logic, Amy still wanted answers. "Okay, so let's find someplace private."

Atropos, wherever you went to, bring Vicky home safe. Please.

PRIVATE MESSAGE
To: Dragon
From: Atropos
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Moving a Suit

Need that suit warmed up NOW NOW NOW

In the Air, 30 Miles Southwest of Brockton Bay

Flechette

Lily had her phone out to check the time when the text message popped up. The sender's name was enough to make her open the message immediately, but the body of the text made her frown and read it through twice more.

Prepare to jump. 1 min 12 sec.

That was all it said; no reason given, no mention of what was going on. Just a straight-up order from Atropos to her. There wasn't even the cheerful banter or teasing tone that Atropos usually employed. Which told her something very important: either something was seriously wrong, or it wasn't Atropos sending that message.

A moment later, common sense kicked in. Nobody was stupid enough to impersonate Atropos, because Atropos would be waiting for them when they tried. So this meant that something had seriously gone wrong.

She had a perfect sense of timing thanks to her powers, so in her mind she began a countdown, subtracting the few seconds she'd taken to work out the problem. At one minute and twelve seconds, she would be bailing out of the chopper, come hell or high water.

Whatever was going on, she trusted Atropos with her life. It was that simple.

Atropos

00:05

"Dragon suit!" I was already running in that direction when Vicky scooped me up from behind, hands under my arms. Half a second later, Vista and Ashley arrived in front of the suit in one physics-mangling stride. As we approached it, I saw lights powering on as Dragon ran it through its self-checks at high speed. The side hatch began to open.

00:04

There was room inside for just one person (or two of us if we were okay with being very friendly), but I'd thought of that already. "Vista, make it a five-seater! Dragon, prep for takeoff!"

Missy stared at me. "But there's only four—"

"Five!" I shouted over the rising whine of the jets, scanning the skies. He was up there, on the way down, right now. This was going to be very close indeed.

00:02

As we watched, the seat expanded while the cockpit didn't actually change size. I didn't bother trying to figure out how it worked; I just shoved Missy ahead of me (ignoring her protests) while I climbed in, dragging Ashley with me. Vicky got the hint and levitated in, even as the suit began lifting off and the hatch closed behind her. "Altitude!" I yelled to Dragon. "Vicky, force field!"

"But I can't—" extend my force field, she began to say.

I didn't have time to hear it. We didn't have time to hear it. "Yes, you can!" I leaned hard into my power, to remind her power of the deal we'd made.

00:00

We'd cut it too close. Already, Scion was swooping down at us, a vast golden glow building around his hands. Dragon kicked in the afterburners, powering up past him so he had to stop short and turn to target us.

Grabbing the controls—yes, Dragon could fly her own suit just fine, but nobody could second-guess Scion like I could—I threw us into a crazy spiral just as he fired. Assisted by Missy expanding space, we almost evaded the blast, but red lights sprang up here and there on the control panel as Dragon lost a wingtip. On the upside, we were still flying. Not for long, if this kept up. "FORCE! FIELD!"

The Shard Bar

Glory Girl

With Atropos' shout still ringing in her ears, Vicky abruptly found herself … elsewhere. She could almost have believed she was asleep and dreaming, considering how detached from reality her surroundings had become. But instead of an oversized rabbit-hole with a thematically-matching fluffy bunny carrying an oversized pocket watch, she was in what looked like a bar-room of uncertain dimensions, populated by beings that were essentially humanoid, though none of them were actually human.

Her point of view was inconstant, hovering above and around the head and shoulders of a hollow glass statue of a woman in a ballroom gown. But that wasn't the worst part.

As the glass statue—who demonstrated an amazing amount of agility, despite having to crack and fracture at every movement—ducked and dodged across the bar-room, she was being berated by a tall skeletal being in a robe, carrying a scythe. Accompanying them were a humanoid being composed of constantly refolding space, a clockwork robot hissing steam from a punctured cylinder, and a being of exploding and reforming energy, who was carrying a shotgun.

The reason they were carrying out evasive action was the bartender, a man with a peculiarly golden tinge to his skin. An expression of rage on his face, he was firing a machine-gun at them, the bullets whipping past them and throwing up clouds of splinters from the floor. And then they were backed into a corner, despite the best efforts of the folding-space person.

WHAT PART OF 'BE MORE FLEXIBLE' DID YOU NOT UNDERSTAND? demanded the skeleton with the scythe. His voice carried the overtones of inevitability with it; when he made a pronouncement, it was closer to a prediction of what was to happen. Within the eyesockets of the skull, twin blue flares had ignited into supernovas.

"But … but … she doesn't believe she can do it!" protested the glass statue, her words emerging full-formed from her mouth despite the utter lack of larynx or even lungs within.

CONVINCE. HER.

With a rippling crackle of fracturing glass, the statue turned to look up at where Vicky's point of view was, just as the homicidal bartender slapped another belt of ammunition into the machine-gun. Vicky looked into the statue's eyes; glass lips whispered a single word. "Please …"

Vicky found herself convinced.

With that, the glass woman began to pirouette, faster and faster. Her skirts expanded outward as she spun, parting to allow each of her companions within. When the machine-gun fired again, the glass shattered, but the people were protected.

For now.

Atropos

Gritting my teeth, I tried another evasive roll, but this time he was calculating which way the craft could go, and was spreading his beam to hit us no matter where we went. The golden glow bloomed, and we were caught in it—

—but we were simply swatted across the sky as Vicky's force field flickered and died on our outer hull. The jets howled, and the airframe creaked and groaned while Dragon fought to bring the suit back to an even keel. At the same time, Missy gritted her teeth, bending and twisting space to take us out of Scion's line of fire.

"Motherfucker!" shouted Ashley, opening the hatch and leaning out. Hanging on with one hand, she pointed the other at Scion and fired off a screeching blast of pure devastation. "Fuck off and die!" He dodged it, of course, but that also disrupted his own attack run.

Well, maybe she hadn't gotten over all her anger issues.

"What the hell was that?" demanded Vicky. "Where did I just go? Yeah, yeah, I got it. 'Force field'." She grabbed a hand-hold and concentrated.

"I think I was there too," Dragon said hesitantly. "Wherever 'there' was."

"Later." I was being a lot terser than usual, but I was trying very hard not to die to an overgrown spacegoing slug. "Chopper incoming. We need the person who's on it."

With the assistance of Ashley's counterfire and Missy's space-twisting, I was able to evade the next two shots, but he wised up and pulled a homing blast that should have torn us in half. Again, Vicky's force field saved us, but he was learning, and my ability to bypass his combat prediction wouldn't help if he could hit us everywhere while we were unprotected. We were running out of time; we needed to go on the offensive, and for that we needed Lily.

Flechette

"Hey, you see that?" The pilot's voice came over the headset Lily was wearing. "Looks like a cape battle, dead ahead."

The copilot's voice suggested that he was frowning. "I thought Atropos didn't allow that sort of thing inside Brockton Bay's airspace."

"She doesn't."

The pilot sounded very sure of himself. "Whoever those two assholes are, she's gonna fuck their whole lives up when she catches up with them. In the meantime, I'm calling a divert."

Hastily, Lily hit the microphone button on her headset. "No, keep going! I have to get closer!"

"Ah, that's a negative, miss. We're not armed, and you're not a flyer. We get too close to that, we'll just end up as collateral damage." As the pilot spoke, the helicopter began to bank away from its original course.

"No, you don't understand! Atropos texted me! She wants me to get closer!" In Lily's head, the countdown was inexorably approaching zero.

There was silence over the intercom for a second, then the pilot spoke. "Shit. What do you think?"

The copilot didn't sound any happier. "She was in Canberra for the Simurgh."

Lily decided to weigh in again. "Twenty seconds. That's all I need." The numbers were ticking down in her head.

"Okay, twenty seconds, then we're outta here." The pilot sounded like he was kicking himself for agreeing to even that much, but the chopper banked back on course again.

"I really, really hope you know what you're doing, kid." That was the copilot, his voice tense but controlled.

So do I. Lily put one hand on her quick-release catch, and the other on the latch for the sliding side door of the chopper. Twelve. Eleven. Ten.

At 'six', there was a BOOM and a massive flare of electrical discharge that had both the pilot and copilot swearing over comms; what looked like a Dragon suit came tumbling through the air, shedding long streamers of electricity. Even as far away as it was, Lily saw the side hatch beginning to open.

Okay, this is it.

"We gotta go!"

shouted the pilot. "Whatever you were gonna do, kid, do it now!"

Lily did it; pulling the latch open, she wrenched the sliding door open against the slipstream. At the same time, she hit the release catch, freeing her from the five-point restraints. "Get out of here!" she shouted into the intercom before tearing off the headset.

Before she could talk herself out of it, she grabbed the doorframe and hauled herself into the shrieking wind-rush. As the countdown in her head reached zero, she launched herself out into space.

Atropos

Whatever Scion had just hit us with, it was massive. Fortunately, we weren't over the city anymore; down below, about a square mile of trees had been simply incinerated by what looked and felt like God deciding he just didn't want them anymore, plus all their friends. Even with Vicky's force field protecting us, it rang our bell but good. We hadn't suffered any actual damage, but more red lights were popping up on the control panel as Dragon fought to restart the starboard turbine.

On the upside, I'd managed to bait him into hitting us precisely hard enough to put us where we needed to be. Way off to the side, a PRT chopper was just turning away from the battle as the side door opened and someone threw themselves out. Not just any someone: that was Lily, right on time.

Using the one working turbine, I adjusted our flight path so that for one fleeting second, our directional vector coincided with that of the girl who'd just thrown herself out of a helicopter a mile above ground. "Vista, Vicky, get her!" I shouted.

Ashley didn't need to be told to provide covering fire. She hadn't hit with a single shot yet, which had to be frustrating, but she was doing a fantastic job of keeping him honest. Without her peppering the sky with shots capable of eliminating his humanoid body like a soap bubble in a blast furnace, he would've closed to can't-miss range by now, where he could kill us at his leisure.

Missy concentrated, shrinking the gap between us and Lily to mere feet, bringing the chopper to within yards, its straining gas turbines screaming in my ears. Vicky leaned out through the already-open hatch, and snagged Lily just before she would've passed us by. "Gotcha!"

Just as quickly, Missy dropped the space-crunch, then added about a mile of distance between us and Scion. Vicky hauled Lily into the cockpit, then plopped her into the seat between me and everyone else. "Hi," I said. "Glad you could drop in."

"Ah. Right." Lily looked at me, then at everyone else. "Good to be here. Simurgh job?"

I could tell Scion was building up to fire another massive shot, and Vicky's force field wasn't going to be quite ready. It was now or never; pulling my shears, I held them up in front of Lily. "Simurgh job. Vista, get me to knife-fighting range."

Dragon got the starboard turbine up and running just as I slewed the suit side-on to Scion and popped the hatch on my side. Lily ran her finger down the blades as she'd done once before, charging them with her power. As soon as that was done, I leaped outward with the shears leading the way.

Missy did her job magnificently. One instant, Scion was an incandescent dot in the distance; the next, he was literally in my face. The look on his face, mostly anger, added another element: vicious satisfaction. He'd literally been chasing me all over the sky, and now I was right there, within his reach.

His hand shot out to catch me around the throat, while the glow in the other continued to build ominously. I could feel the heat emanating off it, like staring into an open kiln. He was taking no chances with me dodging, this time.

But that was fine. If I couldn't dodge, neither could he.

"Hey, asshole," I husked. "Existence is a privilege." Then, using both hands, I drove my shears into his eye, all the way to the hilt.

In my line of work, there was a certain satisfaction to be had in the expressions of those people who realised far too late just how badly they'd fucked up. For all the times I'd seen it, it never really got old. Just before Scion's avatar popped like a cheap balloon, his face took on the same expression as all the others.

Released from his hold, I began to fall, but Vicky grabbed me by the collar of my long-coat (Missy must have done some fancy space-bending) and hauled me back inside. We hovered there for a moment, looking at the Scion-shaped hole in the air that he'd left behind. "Okay," I said after I caught my breath. "Well done, everyone, but we're not finished yet."

"Is he dead?" Vicky stared at me, and at the weapon I still held in my hands. "I can't believe you just killed Scion with your shears!"

"Wait, why were we even fighting Scion again?" Lily both looked and sounded lost. I didn't blame her; it was a lot to be taking in all at once.

"I had that very same question myself." Dragon's 'face' appeared on one of the screens. "Was he the 'monster at the end of the world' you were talking about?"

I cleared my throat, which had the effect of shutting everyone up. "He's not dead yet, but yes, he's actually the big bad guy. Get us closer. Vista, open that hole a bit. Ash, if you can trim off the edges, that would be good. We need it big enough to fit a Dragon suit through."

Vicky raised a finger as though asking a question in class. "Correct me if I'm wrong, but from the way you're talking, we're going in through that hole. What's on the other side?"

I grinned. "The rest of him."

End of Part One Hundred Three