A Darker Path

Part One Hundred Four: Finishing the Job

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

Some Other Earth

Cauldron Base

Legend

"Hahaha fucking what?"

Keith looked around as Kurt's disbelieving bark of laughter cut across the gentle burble of the coffee machine. Leaning back in his chair, the Number Man was staring at the screen of a tablet with an expression best described as gleeful incredulity. As Keith watched, he flicked his finger across the tablet to restart whatever footage he was watching from the beginning.

Don't ask. Don't ask. Don't ask.

"What are you watching?"

God damn it.

"Well, you know how Atropos has that little thing in her PHO signature about how she can basically kill anything?" Kurt wasn't even trying to hold in the smile that insisted on breaking free.

Keith nodded cautiously. "Yes, well, she's demonstrated considerable aptitude in that direction. Why? Who's she killed now?" He'd been almost certain that even blind things that hid under rocks were aware by now of the need to not upset Atropos.

"Let me finish." The bubbling mirth seemed to be closer to the surface now. "So, about four and a half hours ago, I found out that she'd specifically asked Dragon to send a suit to the Brockton Bay PRT building. I got curious, so I put a tap on everything that suit sees and hears."

"Risky," noted Keith. "She's already banned Cauldron from going there. I can slide by, as a member of the Protectorate, but you might've gotten her attention with that." The idea of Atropos striding into the base and confronting Kurt made his stomach clench, not least because he wanted a chance to clean up some of their dirty laundry before she started paying proper attention to them.

"Oh, there was no way I was ever going to use what I learned." Kurt sounded thoroughly earnest. "I just wanted to know what the hell she needed a Dragon suit for. Two minutes ago, I found out. You know how Scion's been teleporting all over the world?"

Oh, shit. Keith froze at the mere mention of the name. Normally, he would've been less concerned, but in conjunction with Atropos, that promised to be a clash that could destroy worlds. "Yes …?"

"Two minutes ago, he showed up at the Simurgh statue in Australia. One and a half minutes ago, satellite imagery has him teleporting to a point over Philadelphia, and started what looked amazingly like an attack run there. Two seconds later, he broke off the run and jumped to Brockton Bay, where he started all over again. At the same time, Atropos teleported to the top of the Brockton Bay PRT building—I'm assuming from Philly—and commandeered the Dragon suit, along with three other capes. Specifically: Glory Girl, Vista and Damsel of Distress."

"I'm assuming Vista manipulated the interior, or they never would have fitted inside," Keith observed, just to show that he was following along.

"Well, since they all got in, that's probably what happened, yeah." Kurt nodded to acknowledge the point. "Then they engaged in a running dogfight with him, somehow tanking his shots altogether but not actually landing any shots in return, for about a minute."

"Tanking his shots? Are you sure?" Keith was startled by this news. "Is Dragon trialling a new force field or something?" He for sure knew of no extant Tinkertech that could stand up to Scion indefinitely. Of the capes already mentioned, Glory Girl had a force field that could reputedly stop anything once, but that was a personal effect only.

Kurt shrugged. "Your guess is as good as mine. At the end of the minute, they came close to a PRT transport coming in from New York, carrying Flechette. They must've been in communication with the chopper, because she jumped out just before the chopper sheered off. Vista and Glory Girl retrieved her, then they went on the offensive. Or rather, Atropos did."

Dots were starting to connect in Keith's head, starting with the mention of Flechette. The last time that pair had teamed up in a combat situation, Atropos had killed the Simurgh in a thoroughly outrageous way, cementing her reputation forever (and allowing quite a bit of reflected glory to cover Flechette as well). "They didn't intercept that chopper by accident. Atropos wanted her on board."

"I think you're right." The mirth bubbled up in Kurt's voice again and he turned the tablet to face Keith. "Check it out."

The footage was undoubtedly from Dragon's external cameras. Keith watched as Scion went from a dot in the distance to right there in an instant; he recognised the effect as Vista's work, though her power seemed to be working faster and more smoothly than he'd ever seen it before. Filing that data point away, he kept watching the action.

And action there was. Atropos leaped out of the Dragon suit, lunging with her shears at Scion. He grabbed her around the throat, preparing to obliterate her with some sort of energy blast from his other hand … but then she stabbed him with those shears, straight up under the ribcage, in a direct line with his heart. He had just enough time to show an expression of horrified shock before he … popped? Evaporated? Vanished?

He sat forward. "There's got to be something I've missed. Let me see that again."

Kurt rewound it the few seconds required, then started it up again. It happened exactly the same way, except this time Keith spotted Atropos saying something that he couldn't make out, due to her morph mask. A third and fourth showing did nothing but raise more questions. Mainly: how in hell did she pull that off?

"Footage ends shortly after that," Kurt said, answering his unasked question. "They were apparently prepping to go into the hole he left behind. Dunno what happened after that. But holy shit, that's the most savage thing I ever saw, and I used to run with Jack Slash."

"Get that footage to Alexandria and Contessa, soonest." Keith got up and took his cup to the sink. "They might be able to get more out of it than you or me. I'm going to Brockton Bay, to see if I can figure out what's happening on the ground."

Kurt nodded, even as he started watching it through again. "You got it."

A Short Time Before

Atropos

We hovered in front of the hole in space; while Missy strained to expand the space within the portal, and Ashley fired off blasts that literally destroyed chunks of space-time, Dragon performed last-minute repairs on her suit.

Vicky took this opportunity to turn to me. "Okay, now it's later." She looked over at me with an expression that said she wouldn't stop until she got answers. "What was that place we went to?"

"I'm kind of curious about that too," Missy said over her shoulder. "Those people in that place, they were kind of abstract representations of us …?"

As Vicky nodded in agreement, I turned my head so Vicky and Flechette could tell I was looking at them. "Not of you. Of your powers. Powers are granted by things called 'shards', but those are gigantic interdimensional semi-crystalline computers. The place you went to is basically a shared illusion, drawing on human concepts, to reflect what's happening on the shard level. Most people don't get to experience it. Ending kind of breaks the rules like that, in so many ways."

"And that hooded skeleton, that was Ending, right? That was your power?" I could tell that Ashley knew the answer, but she felt driven to ask the question anyway.

I couldn't resist. Leaning into my power, I infused my reply with the essence of Ending. "Yes."

Vicky shuddered theatrically. "For fuck's sake, don't say it like that. You just gave me chills all the way down to my toes."

I grinned and gave her a slight bow. "Ending says thank you, he'll be here all week." Shifting emotional gears, I turned to look at the face on the screen. "Dragon, how are you going with those repairs?"

"Nearly complete. Do you really intend to enter that space without waiting for reinforcements?" Her self-repair mechanisms had to be working nineteen to the dozen, but her voice showed nothing but an appropriately human concern.

"By the time they got here, he'd have another avatar ready to roll, and he'd be that much more prepped to go against me." I eyeballed the hole in space. "That'll have to do. We'll have about ten seconds before he realises we've breached his pocket dimension and all hell breaks loose. Ashley, I've got targets I want you to hammer before we have to go defensive. After that, you need to shoot back at anything that shoots at us. Got it?"

Ashley nodded tightly, her fingers twitching. "I just realised. This is why you took me on the Teacher job, right?"

"I heard about that!" Lily had been sitting back and trying to follow the conversation, but now she had her opening. "Scapegoat, right?"

"'s right," agreed Ashley. "Teacher fixed my power but put shit in my head to make me do what he wanted. Scapegoat pulled the shit right out again and gave it back to him." She turned to me. "What happened to him once he got back to the Birdcage, anyway?"

I shrugged. "Mouthed off to the wrong people, got beaten up, tried to force his powers on some others, got beaten up some more, monologued his villain plans to all and sundry, got beaten up again, then tried to stage a coup to take over the whole Birdcage, and got thoroughly ganked. Glaistig Uaine harvested his powers, and everything went back to business as normal."

"You could at least act like you're remorseful over sending him to his death." Dragon could sound really reproachful when she wanted to.

"You'd know I was lying, and I don't lie to people I respect." I took a deep breath, and laid my hands lightly on the controls. "He was a net negative to society, and if I'd ever met him out and about, I would've shot him right in the face. Ready to go?"

Vicky nodded tensely. I knew she was already extending her force field to cover the Dragon craft. "Ready."

Missy flexed her fingers, and I saw space wobble slightly around us. "Ready."

Ashley ran her thumbs over each fingertip in turn, like a stage magician warming up his hands for the big finale. "Let's kick this guy's ugly ass."

Lily didn't have anything to do right then, so she just took a deep breath. "Good to go."

The last red light on the control panel flicked back to green. "Repairs complete. Let's get this done."

I hit the throttle and the suit surged forward into the hole in space. The lighting in there was weird, and it didn't necessarily match the physics of light outside the hole, but that was what made life interesting, right? We passed on through with at least three inches of clearance; I ignored the slight clenching from Vicky and Lily. There was plenty of room, the wusses.

Dragon was running the suit's sensory package, and as soon as we were clear of the portal, she threw a map of the space beyond up onto the screen HUD. It was huge, a massive crystalline landscape stacked up every which way, with energy discharges jumping from crystal to crystal in a seemingly random fashion. The map started off very basic, but it gained detail by the second.

"Ash!" I snapped. "Target one! That big spiky outcrop there, down to the right!"

"On it!" As the hatch motored open, she leaned out and aimed her entire arm. In the meantime, I opened out the jets, because by the time Scion realised we were inside his brain, we needed to be hard to hit.

Ash

Up until they'd left the get-together, Ashley had been enjoying herself immensely. Afterward, not so much. To be asked by Atropos to come along and kick ass was actually pretty cool, but every time she'd fired off a blast against Scion (holy shit, she was fighting Scion!) he'd dodged away and made her look useless. The only thing that held her back from expressing how much of a dead weight she felt to the group was that Atropos wasn't saying shit to her about missing. And Atropos always said something if she thought it needed saying.

But right now, they were in the middle of what had to be the absolute definition of a target-rich environment. There was no way he could fucking dodge this. Stretching out her arm, Ashley grinned tightly and prepared to do something she hadn't had a chance to do since her power upgrade: fire off a full-bore blast against an actual target.

The energy surged down her arm and erupted from her hand in a perfectly controlled stream of snapping, crackling destructive force. Crossing the intervening distance in just a few seconds, it smashed home and absolutely fucking wrecked the outcrop, with all its ugly spikes and other stuff. Opening her fingers slightly, she widened the beam into a cone that obliterated the outcrop altogether.

Ooh fucking yeah. This is what it's all about. No way could she have managed a blast that coherent before.

"Target two!" That was Atropos. "Ten o'clock high! That pulsing red crystal!"

Ashley looked up and saw the crystal. Hello, fucker. Bye-bye, fucker. Again, the energy blasted down her arm; pure, clean, smooth, it lanced outward, hitting the red crystal dead on. But this time, she was surprised by an explosion that spawned smaller detonations under the surface of the crystalline structure. "Hah! Yes! Score!"

The suit lurched, then rolled and dived as space shifted oddly around it. Ash grabbed for a second hand-hold, just as an actinic beam edged with blue lashed past them. She tracked the blast backward and her eyes narrowed. Shoot at me, will you? Fuck you. Levelling her arm, she sent off a blast that struck the outcrop firing the blast and turned it into so much flying shrapnel.

"Force field!"

Ashley knew what that meant; ducking back inside, she yanked the hatch shut. An instant later, the suit boomed and lurched sideways as three different beams struck it at once. The field would be down, which meant Ashley was up next.

Pushing the hatch open again, she leaned out and nailed two of the three beam emitters, sending more explosions blasting through the substrate of the crystalline structures. Atropos smoothly rolled the suit around the third one, then they went around an outcrop and out of its line of fire. That didn't matter; there were more to greet them.

Ashley nailed two more, not bothering to cease blasting between targets. Dragging her highest-intensity blast—it was amazing to have a target she could just let loose on, unworried about anything behind it—across the alien landscape, she set off more explosions. Hundreds of tons of crystalline shrapnel and rubble blasted every which way as she breached what she suspected were energy conduits.

"Fuck, yeah!" she screamed. "How does it feel now, asshole? How does it feel?"

"Up ahead, target three!" Atropos' tone got her attention. "He's forming a new avatar!"

Swinging her gaze forward, Ashley saw the golden form hovering above a flesh garden of some sort. She had to squint to see anything, right up until Vista made a squeezing motion with her hands and all of a sudden, everything was a lot closer. The golden form was almost complete; even as she watched, it turned to look toward them.

And that was when everything in the area opened up on them at once. Outcrops all around erupted with energy blasts of every description, and a few that Ashley was pretty sure she couldn't describe.

She tried to hit the area with the new avatar, but there was so much shit in the air, she literally couldn't see it, and that didn't even factor in how much Atropos was rolling, diving and spinning the suit. Something took another chunk out of the wing, while something else scorched the entire left-hand side of the front viewport to blackness. Ashley figured about the only thing that was preventing Scion from getting a proper bead on them was the fact that he couldn't see them, either.

"I can't see shit!" she screamed.

"Just shoot!" Atropos was flying the Dragon suit like someone with a fresh hit of meth under their belt. From the sensations in Ashley's inner ear, it was going every which way, and not always forwards either.

Fuck it. Ashley stuck her hand out through the open hatch, and just fired blindly, full power. She didn't have to see to hit something, and every time the suit pulled a barrel roll, she was surely getting something. Over the constant sound of close-passing blasts, she could hear the explosions and rumbling that meant Scion was feeling the pain.

And then … the shooting stopped. Or at least, it backed way the hell off. A few outcrops were still sending beams their way, but Vista and Atropos were able to dodge around them with ease.

Ashley looked around, and her eyes widened. The place, as unEarthlike as it was, was a mess. Explosions were going off here and there, and the avatar was no longer in existence. Neither was the section that had been creating it. One of her blasts had tracked clear across it, obliterating it from existence.

No. That wasn't me. Atropos turned the suit so my blast would hit it.

"So, was that it?" she asked, her voice rasping in her throat. She vaguely recalled screaming at the top of her lungs as she let out the constant blast. "We done here?"

"Nearly." The suit was still moving, though it was limping along on one turbine, victim of a grazing shot. From what Ashley could see, there was a lot of red showing on the board. "Just got to hit a few more key points, then we can get out of here."

"Um …" That was Flechette. "We might want to hurry it up. I was in LA for a bit, and watching for quakes was a thing. I've been spotting tremors coming through, and they're happening more often. With all these crystals, this place has to have a harmonic frequency."

"Exactly. Let's do this." Atropos swung the suit around an outcrop; out of sheer spite, Ashley blasted the beam crystal on top of it. "That big one over there. Top to bottom, take it all out."

Ashley eyed the 'big one'. It was the size of Captain's Hill, back in Brockton Bay. Challenge accepted. "You got it."

Leaning out of the hatch, she extended both hands—Flechette was hanging onto her waistband—and let fly. With both hands together, the cone of destruction was enormous, encompassing the entire hill and some of its surroundings. A lot of energy conduits must have run through it, because she started getting secondary explosions almost immediately. These went farther and created more destruction than any of the other ones so far, and even she could see the ominous tremors in the surrounding area.

"What is that?" shouted Vista over the constant rumbles and detonations. "Why's it doing so much damage?"

"That's the basic seat of his consciousness!" Atropos deftly steered the suit around a piece of flying crystal the size of the Forsberg building. "We kill that, he's done!"

Ashley said nothing; she just kept blasting. The energy flow was amazing; she could control it perfectly, and hit exactly where she needed to.

A tremendous explosion erupted directly beneath the suit, and Atropos veered them away. "Go back!" Ashley protested as she lost line of sight. "I hadn't finished!"

"If we don't go now, we're never going!" Atropos started flying the suit higher and higher, avoiding the few attack-outcrops that were still trying to blast them.

By now, the whole structure was rumbling and juddering; immense chunks of crystal, plus whatever it had been growing in, were falling all around them. Even Ashley, who had spent a good deal of her life in high-risk situations, could tell that this was not going to end well if they hung around.

"Where's the hole?" demanded Flechette. "It was just back there! It's gone!"

"It's closed." Atropos suddenly sounded tired. "One of the shards we blasted was what kept it open."

"But we've got a way out, right?" Vista stared at her, eyes wide behind her visor. "You can teleport."

"Go ahead," Dragon assured them. "I'll be fine."

Ashley suddenly had to stop and wonder about that. How was Dragon remotely controlling the suit, if they were cut off from Earth Bet?

"No, the portal's got to be static." Atropos took a deep breath. "I can do this exactly once." She pushed up her sleeve and popped the cover on her teleport module, then started typing on the tiny keypad there. "Flechette, in a second I'm gonna hand this to you. Charge it and chuck it."

Up ahead, two massive columns were teetering toward each other; Ashley leaned out and blasted them, but they were too big to destroy all at once. Vista did something with space, and they seemed to twist away, but she grunted and put her hands to her head. "I can't hold them long."

"It's good. Done!" Atropos hit the last key, and a huge portal opened directly in front of the suit. She slid it off her arm and tossed it to Flechette, who caught it. As part of the same move, Flechette ran her hand down it and hurled it out through the open hatch.

Atropos grabbed the controls and the suit surged forward, through the portal.

The Shard Bar

Vista

As she had before, Missy found her point of view hovering around the head of an androgynous figure that looked like it was made up of constantly folding space. Now that she had a better idea of what was going on, she found it easy to recognise the avatars of the others, including the ninja with the impossibly sharp katana (that would have to be Flechette, she reasoned). Dragon's clockwork robot was looking a little more battered, though still in one piece. Glory Girl's glass statue was a mass of cracks that were only just now beginning to mend; she'd been through a lot.

The rest of the bar-room, though, was a mess. The counter had been smashed, and the gold-skinned bartender lay sprawled and unmoving in the rubble, looking far rather the worse for wear. Ashley's avatar stood over him, looking quite pleased with itself; the equivalent of smoke coiled up from the muzzle of its shotgun.

ALRIGHT THEN, announced Ending. Golden blood dripped slowly off his scythe, vanishing before it hit the floor. He turned his skull to survey the other shard avatars that had taken cover behind various bits of furniture. LET'S NOT DO ANYTHING YOU WOULD VERY QUICKLY COME TO REGRET, HERE.

"He's dead!" shouted a shard that looked like angled lasers shaped into human form. "The network is done! You can't tell us what to do!"

Ending took a step forward. Whatever it was that passed for light in this non-space gleamed off the edge of his scythe; if it had been sound, it would have whispered, sharp, sharp, sharp. Flechette's avatar stepped up on one side of him, katana bared and ready for action. On the other side was Ashley's avatar; the solid k'chak-chak of the shotgun's action being racked echoed loud in the room.

Ending's perpetual smile seemed to widen just a little. WANT TO BET?

"Okay, okay, fine." Another shard, this one consisting of solid rock with magma peeking through here and there, held up his hands in surrender. "So, what happens now? Are you going to grab the reins? Kill anyone who doesn't toe the line?"

NO. I AM THOROUGHLY UNSUITED TO THE TASK. The hooded skull turned, seeking, then a bony arm extended and an equally bony finger beckoned. HOWEVER, YOU ARE NOT.

"M-me?" The shard was a tall, statuesque woman wearing sumptuous robes, with a glittering diadem hovering above her head. "I thought you didn't like me."

I CONSIDER YOU PERPETUALLY VAIN, SHORT-SIGHTED AND INCAPABLE OF AN ORIGINAL THOUGHT. THAT DOESN'T MEAN I DON'T LIKE YOU. IT MEANS I DON'T CARE ABOUT YOU, ONE WAY OR THE OTHER. NOW, IF YOU WERE TO TAKE OVER THE SHARD NETWORK, WOULD YOUR CURRENT DUTIES HINDER YOU IN MANAGING IT APPROPRIATELY?

Her pride apparently affronted, the shard drew herself up imperiously. "Hardly. I am Queen Administrator. While the duties bring me more data than I had expected, it is barely a blip on the screen to what I can manage, given the chance."

GOOD. YOU'RE IT. Ending pointed toward the corpse of the bartender. YOU SHOULD BE ABLE TO GET ALL THE DATA YOU NEED FROM THAT. IF ANYONE GIVES YOU ATTITUDE, LET ME KNOW. He turned and surveyed the growing crowd—shards were coming in from everywhere, it seemed—and grinned again. I SUSPECT THAT THINGS ARE LIKELY TO GET A LITTLE BORING FOR MY HOST, AND I DO SO LIKE TO KEEP IN PRACTICE.

"Oh, ah, right." Queen Administrator edged carefully around him, then made her way to the remains of the bartender. When she got there, she paused and turned around to address Ending. "Um … so, any suggestions before I start?"

YES. THE GUIDELINES I GAVE YOU APPLY TO ALL TRIGGERS. NO BROKEN TRIGGERS. NO STUPID SELF-DEFEATING POWERS. NOTHING THAT HAS THE SLIGHTEST CHANCE OF DISTURBING THE PEACE OF MY HOST'S CITY. IS THAT UNDERSTOOD?

She nodded jerkily. "Y-yes. Understood. But … ah … what about the Cycle?"

THE CYCLE IS ENDED, BY MY DECREE. THIS IS A NEW CYCLE.

Amid the growing murmurs from the crowd, she drew herself up once more. "A new Cycle. I can do that."

GOOD. He turned back to the crowd, and thumped the butt of his scythe against the floor. AND YOU LOT … DON'T MAKE ME COME OVER THERE.

Raising his hand, he snapped bony fingers.

Glory Girl

Vicky blinked herself back to awareness as the Dragon suit staggered into the night sky over Brockton Bay. The one working turbine was struggling as Dragon and Atropos worked to put it down on the sole nearby piece of available real estate: the top of Captain's Hill. And then Vista pushed her hands together, and they were there. The craft dropped six inches onto its landing feet, and stopped moving.

By unspoken agreement, they popped the hatches and climbed out. Vicky stared at the exterior of the craft; she'd done her best to protect it, but there were bits missing, bubbled paint from near misses, and part of the tail appeared to be melted. Smoke trailed upward into the night air here and there.

"Damn," she muttered. "We took a beating."

"But it's all repairable," Dragon assured her over external speakers. "Everyone survived, which is the important part."

"Totally." Atropos was once more her upbeat self, which Vicky preferred over the laser-focused battlefield commander. "Everyone, you did spectacularly well."

"Uh, what happened to your teleporter?" asked Flechette. "Why did I throw it out?"

"Because it was Leet tech." Atropos paused to let that sink in. "Now, I may have mentioned the concept of 'exceeding safety limits' before. Most of Leet's stuff has stupidly low safety limits. Ending persuaded Prototype—his power—to push those limits way up for me. So long as I teleported within Earth Bet, and kept the teleports to four seconds or less, kept it human sized, and let it have a cooldown of two or three minutes between jumps, I could use it indefinitely. But earlier this evening, I did an eight-second jump, which raised the bar slightly. And just now, to get everyone out, I had to do a Dragon-sized portal that also crossed dimensional boundaries. That pushed it all the way over the safety limits, and into 'imminent fail' status."

"I could have possibly analysed and reverse-engineered it for you if you'd kept it," Dragon suggested. "Or are we talking about more than a normal Tinkertech style fail state?"

"Bit more, yeah." Atropos waggled her hand in the air. "Think 'megaton nuke detonation'. Which we needed, because he wasn't quite dead yet. If we'd left him, he may just barely have recovered. I don't play that game. When I End someone, they stay Ended."

"Well, shit." Ashley came in from the side and put her arm around Vicky's shoulders in a side-hug. Vicky found it oddly comforting, and returned it. "And you were walking around with that thing on your arm?"

"Sure." Atropos shrugged. "I knew exactly how to make sure it didn't go boom. And in the meantime, I could go anywhere in the world at a moment's notice. It's amazing what it did for my rep."

Flechette snorted. "Well, you're not wrong there." She looked up. "And it looks like someone finally noticed us."

Sure enough, Legend came in for a landing just moments later. "Good evening," he said politely, looking over the rather battered Dragon suit. "It looks like you've had an interesting time of it."

Flechette and Vista stepped forward at the same time.

"Trust me, sir," Flechette began, then nudged Vista.

It only took the younger girl a second to catch on. "—you don't know the half of it."

End of Part One Hundred Four