A/N: I'm gonna be putting this warning on all of my fics for the next rotation: updates may stop being so regular in the near future, as my backlog empties of chapters. My dad was on death's door a few weeks back, and while he made a frankly miraculous recovery, he still has a long road till he's able to take care of himself at all. Between the stress, the incoming holidays, and the occasional road trips we may be making to visit him, rebuilding my backlogs necessarily takes a backseat. If I go quiet for too long, just know that I'd make an official announcement if a fic was going to be abandoned, so unless you see that then I just haven't gotten back to it yet!
If you want more updates on writing setbacks, plus bonuses like writing prompt responses and life events, or just want to have a friendly conversation, feel free to check out my profile page on Spacebattles.
This chapter was beta-read by Undead Robot. The song near the end is Video Killed The Radio Star by The Buggles.
Tango 2.7
Bakuda had whipped up something in the last minute, presumably a second flash-bomb. I was giving her hands as much trouble as I could, of course, but the cape had been frustratingly good at keeping herself from making a fatal mistake while she'd taken the bombs apart. The flash-bomb was thrown into the darkness.
"Eyes shut!" I called weakly. The bomb flashed, and in the aftermath we could see Grue's fog burning away like cotton candy with water on it, shriveling and burning away in patches. We staggered and limped our way into a retreat around the end of the building. Bitch's dogs gathered around us, now the size of horses. Without warning, they grew another half a foot, spraying us with gore and their backs split open and their skin was shed for bone and sinew. Regent and I weren't fit to ride, but they'd be powerful in a fight.
"Thank god you disarmed them all earlier," Regent said mildly. "We would have been Swiss cheese just now."
"No problem," I said through gritted teeth, leaning on Tattletale as I dragged my leg forward. One of my bats spotted something. "Shit," I said with a groan, "They're spreading out minions to flank us, and they've got a jeep. I'll buy time."
I sent in the wasps and raccoons to harass the three capes as the jeep pulled up. Chittering creatures dove from rooftops onto the three pains in our asses, a few of them getting in solid wounds in the initial attack. Once Leet summoned a sword and passed it to Uber, though, I was forced to let the raccoons make a fighting retreat, the mother dying in the assault.
As a wasp sunk its stinger into Uber's eyelid, I quietly hoped they had to get rabies shots. I heard those were painful.
"We're getting surrounded," I reported, biting out the words. "Two minutes till I have them. Need a plan." I sent every rat and squirrel I could spare to attack the gang members that were closing the net around us.
"Right," Tattletale said, "Bomb bitch wired up her gang members and civilians, so we need to keep them away from us. She's got some kind of selector in her mask to set them off, but the trigger is somewhere else on her body. Didn't get enough of a look to figure it out."
"Something we can use, Tattletale," Grue said pointedly. The jeep roared to life with the three villains loaded up, and Bitch whistled a few times in quick succession. Brutus and Angelica moved to guard the side the jeep would come form, while Judas guarded our flank.
"We've got to keep her talking. She was expecting to monologue before maiming us, if we surrender we can get her to do it again!"
"That's risky," Grue said, but it had no heart in it.
"I'll be as discreet as I can," I agreed. "Can't talk much. Trust you."
The jeep came tearing around the corner, and Tattletale threw her hands up in surrender. "Whoa, whoa, you got us!" she called out over the engine.
"Tell her to cut it out, or our friend starts blasting!" Uber called out in that annoyingly deep voice, pulling the jeep around to face us. Angelica growled out a challenge, but was quickly silenced by a grunt from Bitch.
I cut my power's effects down to the minimum I could without totally giving up control; they might have issues with speaking in an odd cadence, be overly restless, and might incorporate lyrics into their speech, if the Wards and hostages had been any indication. Unfortunately, cutting back in one way meant cutting back in another; just like at the bank, it was going to take maybe three or four times as long to get to the point that I could tap into their senses or actively control anyone again, which meant we needed to keep her talking for a couple minutes if we wanted to go that route again.
"It's done," I said.
"Ah, so it is your new friend after all," Bakuda crowed from the back seat of the jeep. The mask was doing strange things to her voice, modifying it to a monotone robotic burr, but I could get hints of how it sounded to her own ears. She made a point to turn her mask to look at me. "I was wondering about that. So you're the one who made Lung dance his way into custody?"
ABB were coming out of the alleys now on all sides, some of them carrying backup weapons, others armed with chunks of asphalt, broken bottles, or other improvised weapons. They began to form a semicircle around us, filling the lot between us and the fence while leaving our backs to the container Bitch had been stored in.
"I did," I managed to get out without sounding pained.
"I have to thank you for that, actually. Lung would have been a difficult obstacle in my plans. Can't take over a castle without killing the dragon, after all." She laughed once, a strangled hiss from her gas mask.
"So you're the head of the ABB now?" Tattletale asked. "Why bother slumming it with these dweebs then?"
"Hey-"
"Shut up," she said simply. "Tattletale, right? These two dweebs led me right to your group. After all, I had to thank you. You helped me gain power, and now you're going to help me cement it. But first, let me share a lesson."
I did not like where this was going. Bakuda had already shown that she was willing to kill her own minions to bloody our nose, and that probably meant she was going to kill us at the end of this conversation. I just had to hope I had enough control to stop her if it came down to it.
The snitch came down close to the ground, hovering at an angle where it could easily swivel between Bakuda and our group. If we weren't currently in a situation where our lives were on the line, I'd have swarmed the damn thing with bats. Uber and Leet were filming this? Fuck. Them.
Bakuda gestured to two of her minions, one dressed in a blue plaid flannel and the other in ABB colors. As they walked over to her, she said, "Lung may have been an obstacle to me, but he was also a mentor. His first lesson was simple, one every leader learns at some point." She grinned, invisible beneath the mask. "You can only trust people when they fear you."
She gestured to the two men, then the larger group. "As you may have noticed earlier, everyone here has a bomb nestled somewhere in their skull, courtesy of me. Even my most loyal went under the knife; the brain surgery was so simple I could do it with my eyes closed. Did, for some of them. I can set them off with little more than a thought, and there's no telling if the effects of any bomb will be cleanly lethal, or any number of special treats that would make anyone wish to die." She stroked the cheek of the closer man as if he were a lover.
"So you're an equal opportunity imploder?" Regent said, completely unfazed.
Bakuda froze, and everyone froze with her.
"I think I like you," she said, breaking the silence. "Don't interrupt again. Now, I think the public deserves a demonstration. You, give me your gun," she said to the man she'd touched on the cheek.
He handed it to her without complaint. She backed off, checked the chamber, and handed the pistol to the civilian next to him.
"Now," Bakuda commanded, "I want you to shoot yourself in the foot." She stepped back to give the camera a better look.
The man in plaid shuddered, his face shifting between horror and determination. After a moment, he aimed down, shut his eyes, squeezed the trigger, and fired into his own boot.
Bakuda just stared our way a moment, the man's tortured sobbing unacknowledged in the background. "You see? Complete loyalty," she commented, turning back to the pair. "Ha Min, take back your gun. You, shut up with that noise."
The ABB member reached down to pry the gun from the sobbing man's hands, but had difficulty. A moment later, he'd been pushed off, and the civilian was bringing up the gun to point at Bakuda-
And with a sound like a bucket of marbles poured onto glass, the man shattered. His body fell into a thousand finely-cut pieces of meat and bone, blood dribbling into deep cuts in the asphalt beneath his remains. The ABB member who'd been retrieving his gun lost a leg to the dicing effect, his gun in scattered chunks on the ground as blood poured from the jagged stump.
Nobody, not even him, dared to make a sound as Bakuda began to laugh once more. For my part, the only reason I wasn't retching was that I was still aching from every nerve and offloading a lot of my mental processes into the swarm. Several onlookers weren't so lucky. The man without a leg began to crawl away from the madwoman, losing far too much blood for it to be survivable.
"Ah, Number 463. That one is always fascinating to watch," she said eventually.
"I'll say," Regent agreed. Her head snapped his way, as did almost every set of eyes in the crowd, including mine. Regent seemed completely unaffected by the scene, not even showing discomfort.
"Don't mock me," Bakuda demanded, raising her grenade launcher as we all tensed up.
Regent raised his hands placatingly, fighting off a twinge of pain. "What? No, I'm serious. It's cool to see how someone looks on the inside like that, you know? Movies never do it right, and it's not exactly an everyday thing. Sort of a morbid curiosity."
Bakuda lowered the weapon, nodding. "Right? The human body is just a big, wet machine, so easy to disrupt. It's incredible how easy it is to take apart, and how hard it is to put back together. This one works with spatial microfracturing, but I've made others that work on just the body, you know; six-eighteen would render a person to red slime in moments with vibrations, and this," she gestured to a particular grenade on her bandolier, "will warp a person inside-out without being lethal on its own. I had to get scans of Vista's effect-"
"Whoa, whoa," Regent said. "I just thought it was cool, you know? The technobabble isn't really all that interesting to me. Those all sound interesting, don't get me wrong, but in a gross, creepy, fucked up kind of way, like watching videos of train accidents or disasters."
"Yes," she said excitedly, "it's that primal part of our brains that wants to know the bad possibilities, I think. Morbid curiosity, a dark humor most people hide away." She sighed, a shuddering, rasping sound thanks to her voice changer. "It's really too bad. This has been a fun talk, but it's time we got to business." She snapped her fingers, gesturing to the two villains in the jeep. "Stop the recording here, and get to editing it. I want the highlight reel done in an hour, cut out the chat, and get a shot of the stuff in the alleyway. We'll record the rest in a bit."
"You're the boss," Leet said, pulling out a tablet. Bakuda turned back to us just as a new song shuffled into play.
I heard you on the wireless back in '52...
"Now, Undersiders. You're trapped here, surrounded by my loyal servants. I could make another example of you, a pedestal to set my throne on, but it would be such a waste," she said, shaking her head dramatically. "Instead, you get a choice. Serve, or die."
I genuinely considered it. Bakuda was, in a word, a monster. If I could have been a hero in the eyes of the public, she was the type of villain I would have targeted first, the kind that has no regard for anyone but themselves. Even as a villain, I'd hoped to hold on to those morals, to never break bread with the irredeemable even if it killed me. When it came down to it though, it was one thing to say that kind of thing, and another to be presented with the choice between my principles and oblivion.
But I had a third option, cheerily singing away in my ear. A lesser evil. Sometimes, to fight a monster, you had to become a killer yourself.
Video killed the radio star! Video killed the radio star!
All it took was a twitch to Bakuda's trigger finger, still resting on the handle of her grenade launcher, aimed down and to the left. She didn't even have time to react before the grenade hit the asphalt.
Pictures came and broke your heart.