Earning Her Stripes
Part Forty: Round Three
[A/N: This chapter commissioned by Fizzfaldt and beta-read by Lady Columbine of Mystal.]
Flechette
Lily watched as the PRT troopers erected a marquee over Blockade's massive powersuit. There was a certain efficiency in their movements that told her they'd done this before. "So, what's this for?" she asked. "It's not exactly a secret that there's someone inside that armour."
After a chnk-chnk-hsss noise, the armour opened up, and a petite teenage girl, maybe five feet tall, climbed out. "True, but it is a secret that I'm not some big hunky guy. Hi, nice to meet you at last." She offered her hand; as Lily shook it, the power of her grip was quite impressive.
"Okay, yeah, that is a point." Lily watched as the armour folded itself up into a solid metal box, then a holographic overlay shimmered into focus, making it look like a steel-bound wooden crate. She suppressed a snort of amusement as she read the large sticker that appeared to be plastered over one side: 'KEEP OUT. PROPERTY OF BLOCKADE. THAT MEANS YOU, DIRECTOR.'.
"Very funny," Director Piggot observed dryly. "I suggest we go downstairs to Conference Room A, while I make a call. If Butcher's not already on the move, she will be soon. I need to get a status update so we can make our plans accordingly."
Monochrome nodded. "I know the way if you want to take care of that. Come on, guys."
As Piggot got out her phone, Lily followed Monochrome and the others into the elevator. It went down a few floors while the Director exchanged a few terse words with the person on the other end of the call, then seemed to listen intently. The call ended just as Monochrome opened the door into the appropriate conference room.
"We may have a problem," the Director stated. "Operations just got a call from Tattletale of the Undersiders. Butcher is chasing them, so they're coming here."
"Oh, for fuck's sake," muttered Firebird. "They're the ones who hooked March up with Butcher in the first place. Why is nothing simple around here?"
Director Piggot snorted. "Welcome to my life."
"Okay, so what do we do?" Monochrome's costume rippled, increasing her apparent bulk one moment then lying flat to her skin the next. Lily had no idea how that worked, but it definitely seemed to be superior to her own. Except for the fact that it only worked in black and white and shades of gray, of course. "Do we intercept her while they're still on the way here, or wait until they reach the building?"
Blockade looked around at the conference room, then focused on the screen at the far end of the room. "Can you bring up a city map on there, with the locations of the Undersiders and Butcher on it, as well as the Teeth?"
Lily hadn't even thought of that. Trust the Tinker to come up with a tech solution.
Piggot seemed to have the same thought running through her head, with the way her eyebrows hitched up. "I can definitely call around, see if my people can make it happen."
"In the meantime," Firebird said, grabbing a chair and spinning it around so she could sit on it with her hands clasped around the back, "let's talk fight strategy. We know what March's powers can do. Butcher's super-strong, she teleports, and she jumps into your head if you kill her. What else can she do?"
The Director ticked off points on her fingers. "Her ranged shots never miss, she can cause pain and inflict wounds in people just by thinking about it, she can target people through walls, and she can apparently send people berserk, also just by thinking about it."
Blockade nodded at each point. "Super-strength isn't really a problem, I can deal with the teleportation, and I've got ideas for the rest of it."
Lily stared at her while Piggot got onto her phone. "What do you mean, 'ideas'? You've run into March twice. Monochrome nearly died the first time, and you retreated from her the second time. I've seen your good steel and I've been getting told how Monochrome's force field is all that, but I'm starting to wonder if you're as amazing as Director Piggot seems to think."
"I was absolutely overconfident the first time, for sure." Monochrome put her hand on Lily's shoulder. "That was my bad. I've learned from the experience, and she can't hurt me that way again." She glanced over at Firebird. "You, she can hurt. I'm thinking you deal with the other capes. Intercept them before they can get to her, and take them off the board, yeah?"
Firebird wrinkled her nose. "Much as I hate to admit you're right, you do have a point. What are you going to be doing in the meantime?"
"For the moment, we slow her down." The petite teen cracked her knuckles, the sound echoing in the room like muted gunfire. "To properly stop her, I'm going to need some workshop time. But we can definitely put a hobble on her right here and now."
"Workshop time?" Lily knew she shouldn't be pushing back, but she couldn't figure out where Blockade was going with this. "What kind of a weapon are you going to use against her? Did you want to kill her, and have her end up in your head?"
Blockade rolled her eyes. "Honey, I've already got a gun that could evaporate her, if I turned it up to its highest output. But that wouldn't help, so I'm not going to use it. I've got something else in mind. I've just got to make it first."
"You said 'for the moment, we slow her down'." Director Piggot put her phone away. "How do you intend to do that?"
Firebird pointed at Blockade. "You're thinking you and Monochrome for the main event, me and Flechette for the tail-enders?"
"That's the idea I've got," agreed Blockade. "If we're careful, we can handle whatever Butcher can throw at us, until we can put the slowdown in place."
"You grab, I apply, yeah?" Monochrome looked thoughtful. "I'll have to go triple or quad layer, just in case."
"Whoa, whoa, wait," Lily objected. "What are you guys even talking about? The tail-enders?"
Firebird nodded. "Yeah. I could probably deal with them myself, but I can always use competent backup. You in?"
Director Piggot cleared her throat. "You are aware, are you not, that you aren't the only capes in the city? You're definitely getting more backup than just Flechette."
"Not for Butcher," Blockade said hastily. "The Teeth, sure. The more the merrier. But if anyone other than Monochrome or me goes after her, she'll kill them."
The screen at the end of the room flared to life, and blinking dots showed up, superimposed on a map of the city. They were more or less in sequence, progressing toward the PRT building. Each was marked with a label, which would've been useful if all present hadn't known who they represented.
"Okay, then." Firebird stepped up off the chair and indicated the middle dot. "Butcher's close behind the Undersiders, but she's some distance ahead of the rest of the Teeth. I'll take whoever Director Piggot is okay with me having and make sure they never catch up. Blockade, Monochrome: give her hell."
Blockade nodded. "Damn right." She raised her right hand and gave Firebird a high-five on the way out of the room, while Monochrome did the same with her left hand.
Lily watched them go, then turned to the Director. The older woman nodded to her and made a quick call. Moments later, the PA system kicked into action. "All on-duty capes …"
Butcher
May grinned savagely as she teleported yet again. A passing car was blasted away from her by the resultant explosion, but she didn't give a fuck. Nor had she ever; it was everyone else's job to stay out of her way, not hers to worry about them.
As the flames cleared, she saw the crappy ride the Undersiders were using as it vanished around yet another corner. She could've caught up with them a lot faster, but this pursuit had never been about catching them. It was about stampeding them to where her other prey awaited. Two birds, one stone, et cetera and stuff.
They probably thought they were outsmarting her by always keeping out of direct line of sight. This meant they didn't know about her ability to see their vital points even through buildings, and had likely forgotten about her ability to charge a projectile and send it through any obstacle. Really, they were dead already; she just had to pick when she pulled the trigger on them.
She teleported again, to the intersection where they'd turned. Once more, they were making a hasty right to avoid her. But this time, it was different. A twinge of danger alerted her half a second before the roar reached her ears; she looked up to see the bulky powersuit as it swept into view over the rooftops.
Any idea she might've had that it wasn't there for her was immediately dispelled as it changed course, angling downward and performing an end-over-end manoeuvre so that it could slow its descent with its leg thrusters. It was right about then that May realised the suit had a passenger, a familiar black-and-white patterned figure crouched on the suit's shoulder.
The sense of danger grew stronger, though May had no idea why. When she'd first encountered Monochrome, she'd either killed or badly injured her, and Blockade had run from her on their second meeting. Whatever they could do to her, she could do ten times as bad to them.
"Butcher." It was Blockade. "Stand down and surrender and we'll see you're treated properly."
"Haha fuck you." May hadn't spent all this time herding the Undersiders toward the PRT building just to be distracted by two heroes she could find and kill at any time. Leaning slightly to get a viewpoint on the next intersection around Blockade's bulk, she triggered the teleport. Flame erupted as she arrived, but as they subsided, she realised she was staring at Blockade's midsection from a distance of about six inches.
Her awareness of danger flared high, and she instinctively teleported a dozen feet back, just as Monochrome landed a dropping elbow strike where she'd been standing. It didn't quite reach the asphalt, but the blurred quality of the move bespoke extreme speed. Any faster, May suspected, and the strike would've generated a sonic boom.
Damn. I would've felt that for sure.
Even with the physical separation, she was still feeling a distinct sense of peril emanating from the pair, and she wasn't sure why she hadn't been able to teleport past Blockade. It was probably some Tinkertech shit built into the suit, but it didn't stop her from teleporting away, just past. And she could work around that.
"I'm gonna kill you both, you know that, right?" She scooped up two handfuls of what had previously been asphalt, and formed them into throwing blades. Blockade was easy to predict, but Monochrome seemed to drop in and out of her awareness. This didn't matter; it just meant she'd have to try harder.
Monochrome shook her head. "We had other issues to deal with then. Now we're back."
"Your funeral." The blades in her hands powered up nicely, but she held off on throwing them. Both Blockade and Monochrome were hard to target, mainly because the power that let her see the perfect place to shoot someone was glitching in and out with them. However, she had another trick up her sleeve.
It was a lot easier to hit someone if they were screaming in agony on the ground, so she unleashed a wave of pain toward the two heroes. Nothing happened for the longest time, then Blockade spoke up. "Are you actually doing something, or are you just constipated? Because this is getting a little bit awkward."
While it was technically possible for a Tinker to program a suit to not show any outward sign of what the pilot was doing, Monochrome wasn't in a battlesuit. The trouble was, like Blockade, she was giving absolutely no indication of what should have been happening.
May gritted her teeth and changed tactics. "I'll show you awkward." Being able to withstand pain was a relatively common power, especially among Brutes and the like, but actual wounds were another thing altogether. Her lips drew back to reveal a savage grin.
Neither hero so much as twitched.
"Wait," Blockade said after another few seconds. "I'm not sure if I know the rules here. Is it supposed to be our turn? Were you waiting for us?"
May dropped that power too. They were cheating somehow, but that was something she could account for. Once she spent a little more time fighting them, she'd be able to model them well enough to step past their best shots and still nail them where it hurt, cheating powers or no cheating powers.
"Okay, fine." She flexed her fingers, the blades sticking out between them, ready to throw. "So you can block my ranged stuff. Let's see how you do close-in. Monochrome, I seem to recall that you kinda suck in that regard."
Monochrome said nothing, but made a come-at-me gesture.
May obliged.
Armsmaster
Colin guided his bike through the back streets of Brockton Bay, closing in on the currently-known location of the Teeth. Crouching on the back of the bike, in a posture Colin would've considered impossible to maintain without actually holding on, Firebird had her arms half-spread. As far as he could tell, she was using the discs clipped to her forearms as airfoils to keep herself steady and stable, and in fact seemed to be marginally improving the handling quality of the bike while she was at it.
They weren't the only heroes on the road. Flechette was riding behind Miss Militia in a somewhat more conventional fashion, and a PRT van was following along with Assault, Battery, Triumph, and Aegis on board. Colin didn't truly think they needed all those numbers to beat the Teeth, but he wanted to beat them quickly. If Butcher caught wind of the fight and doubled back, the chances of someone getting hurt would escalate dramatically.
He checked the HUD and activated his helmet radio. "Up around the next corner. We'll pull up there and intercept them."
"Copy that," the PRT trooper driving the van responded. Miss Militia simply looked across and nodded to him.
He slowed for the corner; Firebird, predictably, sustained her position on the back of his bike. The blinking dot on the HUD was just coming up on the other end of the block as he stepped off the bike, Firebird having vacated her position before he'd quite come to a halt. Flechette and Miss Militia got off the other bike as the van doors opened and the other four capes emerged.
The car holding the cape contingent of the Teeth accelerated as it approached their position. Colin readied his halberd, preparing to take out a tyre as it went past, but Flechette acted first. Her arbalest came to her shoulder and she shot a single aluminum dart into the engine block, seizing it solid and bringing the whole vehicle to a juddering, grinding halt.
The Teeth piled out of the car, ready to do battle, and Colin went to meet them.
Monochrome
I wasn't totally sure what Butcher had been trying to do, but no punches or blades had been thrown. Something had been going on, given that my protective field had cut me off from the world totally for seconds at a time; I just didn't know what it was. Still, it hadn't affected me (apart from shutting me off from the world) or Madison, so that was a plus.
On the other hand, it seemed she was finally willing to come to grips with us. This was exactly what we wanted, so I made the classic beckoning gesture I'd seen in a dozen bad kung-fu movies, and she came at us. Or rather, she faked coming at Madison, then teleported right into my face.
Trying to maintain separate layers of force field over my skin was mentally taxing, to say the least. One, I could handle without even thinking about it, and two were still easy. Three layers were on the difficult side, and four were about all I could handle without standing dead still and concentrating on nothing else.
It was also a good thing that I'd fixed on this course of action before the fight started, because she was fast. I'd just registered that she was heading for Madison before she vanished and appeared next to me, and the blade in her left hand was already slicing at my eyes. My outer force field popped, and she stabbed me up under the ribs and tried to slash my throat before I pushed my last field out and rebuilt the ones under it.
At the same time, I tried to grab her, but between her natural speed and my distracted state of mind, she teleported away before I could lay a hand on her. The explosion of flame was on top of Madison's armour where the arms didn't reach; Butcher emerged from it with her blades already grinding and sparking at Madison's armour plates.
"Shit, what kind of metal is this?" she demanded as she gouged at the suit with the points of her knives. "I can cut anything but I'm barely scratching the finish, here."
"It's called good steel, bitch." Even through the electronic distortion, Madison's tone was heavy with derision. "I'd offer to make you a knife made out of it, but I don't accessorise losers."
"I'll show you who's a loser." Butcher stabbed her blade toward a gap in the plates. "This thing can't be totally made of that good steel shit. I get contact with that, I blow your whole little tin can apart with you inside it, asshole."
Thinking quickly, I reached out and grabbed the powersuit's leg. When I exerted my power, the suit became entirely impervious to all harm; even the rubber seals became ten times as durable as before. Up above, I heard the knife grating against the good steel, even as the rubber hoses that led from upper arm to lower arm quietly unclipped from the detachment points at the bottom end.
"Oh, come on," Butcher muttered. "Light the fuse already, goddamn it."
Madison had kept the hoses from the first iteration of her suit as a fuck-you to anyone who thought they could exploit a weakness by ripping them off during a fight. The first time, I hadn't been there, but Emma had cheerfully told me how Madison could guide them to point wherever she liked, and blast live steam through them. This was exactly what she did now.
Butcher had apparently been distracted by her attempt to disable the suit, and a double helping of steam to the face at close range did her no favours whatsoever. It was true that she was somewhat more durable than the norm, but that only goes so far. She teleported fifty feet away, clawing at her eyes, and I went after her.
She could apparently still see, even though her face was bright red and starting to swell, and my eyesight blinked out a few times. The thing was, I knew exactly where she was, and during the blackouts, I just kept running. I had to get her back to Madison, and if I gave her half a chance to think about what was happening, I'd never get her there.
As I came up to her, she lashed out at me with her rapier, again aiming at my eyes. During the sensory blackout, I grabbed at her with one hand and the rapier with the other. There were only two layers of force field on my hand, and it popped both of them and cut my hand before I reinforced the layers again. But I had hold of her with my other hand, and I slammed her into the ground with as much force as I dared.
When I picked her up again, she was still alive but she looked kind of dazed from having her face steam-cleaned just before headbutting some good solid Brockton Bay asphalt. That was good enough for me; turning on the spot, I hurled her back toward Madison. I kept hold of the rapier, though; the fewer weapons we let that bitch keep, the better.
All our teamwork had paid off; Madison fielded her like I'd tossed her a ball in the back yard. One large good-steel-plated hand closed around Butcher's arm, and she was going nowhere after that. As an external storage container opened in the side of the armour, Madison reached in and took out a collar similar to the ones we'd deployed on Shadow Stalker, Oni Lee and Crusader.
"What the fuck?" Butcher demanded. She scrabbled at the hand that held her, but her bare fingers weren't about to do much. Even so, I watched her trying to trace spirals and lines on the metal components, with exactly zero effect. "Let me go, you son of a bitch!"
"How about no." Madison held out the collar toward me as I strolled toward them. "Would you like to do the honours?"
I grinned. "Totally." Accepting the collar, I opened it up then closed it around Butcher's neck. The closure was a simple spring-clip, except that the spring itself was made of extremely high-tensile steel, unable to be reached from the outside, and requiring force comprising multiple tons per square inch to compress it. I could remove it, of course, but nobody else could. As the latch snapped into place with a noise like a gunshot, I grinned. "Enjoy walking everywhere, bitch."
Flechette
The Teeth came out of the car looking for a fight, but Lily wasn't inclined to give them one. Neither was Firebird, apparently. Vex's razor-shards were only just starting to spread out when a hard-thrown disc bounced off her head, then caromed off Animos' before ending up back in Firebird's hand. Both slumped to the ground, out for the count.
Reaver was coming for the heroes when Flechette coldly and without a moment's hesitation put a dart through his knee. Panacea could deal with that injury later; for the moment, it wasn't lethal, and it would take him out of the fight. Hemorrhagia and Spree were the only two left, the latter popping out copies faster than the eye could count, when Battery zipped up to the incipient crowd and unleashed a widespread electrical burst. Stunned, they went down, the copies fading out of existence.
Hemorrhagia looked at the heroes arrayed against her.
Assault and Aegis cracked their knuckles and popped their necks, in unison. The latter also drifted upward into the air, just to make the point that he could.
Armsmaster's halberd blade began to glow ominously.
Miss Militia racked the slide on a very large shotgun.
Triumph cleared his throat.
Slowly, Hemorrhagia put her hands up.
End of Part Forty