by wildbow
“Probably,” I agreed. “But my guys are moving out anyways. We’ve never done this much damage to him, and yet he’s sticking around. What I’m wondering is, why?”
Defiant glanced at Dragon, then spoke. “He’s—”
The ground shuddered. Again, as before, the rumbling intensified.
This time, it didn’t stop. It got worse with every passing second.
“Reinforce!” A cape hollered. Someone else took up the call in an Indian language. Hindi? Punjabi?
I could see Annex flowing into the entryway, soaring through the wall’s surface to the ceiling. Golem created his hands, protecting the rows and columns of injured capes.
There was a press as the bodies flowed out the door. I used my flight pack to fly over their heads, but even then, I bumped shoulders with others who could fly. I wanted to help, but there was little I could do inside.
Eidolon and Alexandria had arrived at the building. Eidolon touched the exterior wall, and an emerald green glow started to surround the structure.
The rumbling reached the point where capes were unable to keep their balance. I raised off the ground, but the movement of the air in response to the shuddering was enough to make me sway.
Tattletale. Grue. Parian.
Behemoth emerged with a plume of gray-brown smoke, and the landscape shattered. It was Tecton’s natural power, taken to an extreme. Fissures lanced out in every direction and disappeared into each horizon. Secondary fissures crossed between each of the major ones, like the threads of a spider’s web.
As far as the eye could see in every direction, terrain shifted. Hillsides abruptly tilted, standing structures fell like collapsing houses of cards.
A full quarter of the temple collapsed. The bugs I’d kept to the edges of the room could sense it as a small share of the capes who were in the entry hall were caught beneath the falling rubble. The ones furthest towards the back. Eidolon’s protective effect kept the remainder intact.
Behemoth emerged from the smoke. He was more robust than he had been, but that wasn’t saying much. Seventy percent burned away, perhaps. The regeneration had slowed, but it was still functioning to a degree. He’d recuperated, built his strength, and he’d used the time to, what? Burrow through strategic areas? Had the distant rumbles been controlled detonations or collapses at key areas?
The temple was the one building that stood. Everywhere else, there was devastation.
How many refugees had just died, with this? How many had stayed within their homes, rather than try to evacuate?
I felt hollow inside, just standing there, stunned, trying to take it all in. The area around us was still settling, sections of land tilting and sliding like sinking battleships sliding into the water.
How many of us were left? Seventy? Eighty? How many of them were hurt, exhausted, their resources spent? Could we even coordinate, with so many of us speaking different languages?
“Last stand!” a male cape I didn’t know hollered the words, his voice ragged with fear and emotion.
Behemoth, three or four hundred feet away, responded to the shout with a lightning strike. Our capes were too slow to erect barriers, and the protection insufficient. Capes died. For the first time, I averted my eyes. I didn’t want to know how bad the casualties were. Our numbers were too thin.
I saw our Protectorate, what remained of it, stepping forward to form our defensive line. Our last defensive line. The major ones, the ones I’d been introduced to, too many had died, or were injured. These were unfamiliar faces. The ones who were second in command, if that.
Eidolon landed to one side. The Triumvirate had often posed in that classic ‘v’ formation, with Legend in front, Alexandria to his left, Eidolon to the right, the lesser members in the wings, Eidolon was now apart from the rest of the group. His cape didn’t billow, his posture was slightly slumped. He was tired, on his last legs.
There were murmurs as Alexandria advanced from within the temple. Unlike so many of us, she didn’t flinch as Behemoth struck out with lightning, the barriers holding this time. Golem had raised lightning rods on either side of the road, fingers splayed as if he could gesture for Behemoth to stop.
Alexandria found her way to the end of the crowd opposite Eidolon, to our far left. Satyrical and the other Vegas capes followed her. Only a small fraction of them remained. Others had apparently been injured or killed in battle.
Alexandria glanced over our ranks, and her eyes moved right past me, not even recognizing me. For the briefest instant, I met her eyes behind that steel helmet of hers, and I saw that one had a pink iris.
That answered my question, I supposed. Pretender couldn’t take over a corpse, but there was no reason for him to take over Alexandria if she was alive and well. Cauldron had collected Pretender, and they had him controlling her because she was no longer of any use to them on her own.
Our side was busy getting sorted into groups, spreading out so he couldn’t hurt too many of us at once. We were finding our formations, as our toughest capes absorbed and redirected the lightning he was throwing in an almost experimental manner. He changed tacks, throwing flame, and a team composed entirely of pyrokinetics caught and redirected it with a concerted effort. I backed away, and found Tecton at my back, with the remaining Chicago Wards. Bitch stood just off to one side, her dogs ready.
One structure among several hundred thousand still stood, and our adversary was wounded, though undiminished. Our ranks had been thinned in the most violent ways possible, through fire and lightning and a roar that could render organs to mush. We weren’t stronger than we’d been at the start of all of this. I couldn’t even say that the weak had been thinned out, or that we’d been united through hardship or loss. Behemoth had picked off some of the strongest of us, and the trust between our factions was thin at best, with some eyeing the Yàngbǎn, others watching Satyrical’s contingent. We were just less.
“Hold the line,” Exalt called out. Other capes translated for him, echoing his words with only a few seconds of delay, in four or five different languages. “We defend until the ones inside can be evacuated, and then we leave. There’s nothing left to protect here.”
A thin heroism, but that was heroic, wasn’t it? Protecting the wounded, defending the ones who’d put everything on the line to stop this monster.
If this was all a kind of microcosm for the world at large, that small heroism had to count for something. I wanted it to so badly I ached for it.
Behemoth roared, and the last engagement opened.
Interlude 24
Hero ushered him into the headquarters. “This is the last one. I’d like you all to meet Chevalier.”
There was a chorus of replies. Mumbled greetings with one exceedingly enthusiastic response from a girl in the crowd. It was almost mocking.
Chevalier ventured inside, a touch hesitant. Not afraid. He’d told himself he’d never be afraid again. No. But this was unfamiliar territory. The others were difficult to read. Nine youths.
His eyes roved over the group. Five girls, four boys. His addition made it an even split. Intentional?
The costumes ran the gamut from professional to homemade. They varied in the degree of color, in seriousness, in combat readiness. There was a boy, also, who had a professional looking costume, black and green. It was a costume that had no doubt cost money, with leather and a utility belt, a leaf emblem over his heart. Around him, Chevalier could see a vague nimbus, as though he could see only the brightest and darkest parts of some landscape that the boy stood within. It was a subtle thing, an image that Chevalier could make out in the same way his perspective on something might alter if he had only his left eye closed, as opposed to his right.
A girl beside the boy with the leaf costume wore a less expensive looking costume, but she’d apparently gravitated towards him, a hopeful lackey or a romantic interest. In the same way that the forest seemed to hang in the periphery of the boy, an older woman loomed just behind the girl. She was kindly in appear
ance, like a next door neighbor, with hands burned black from fingertip to elbow. The old woman was moving her lips as though she were talking, but the image was silent.
He started to turn his head, but the image changed. The effect ran over the girl’s skin, as though she were standing right in front of a glacier, the light refracting off of it.
No, the black hands on the older woman… a result of fire? Magma.
The girl caught him looking at her and frowned a little. He averted his gaze. She likely thought he was staring for other reasons.
At the far end of the scale, opposite the two professional, serious looking young heroes, there was a girl with a shield and sword. Her helmet sat on the table beside her, a homemade piece of equipment with ridiculous mouse ears at the sides. It wasn’t a great helmet either; it didn’t offer enough peripheral vision, was more decorative than protective. She stood off to one side, but two others had gathered near her. She was grinning, the one who’d stood out from the rest with her over the top welcome.
And the images, the glimmers, they showed the mouse-ears girl laughing. For her companions, there was a strange writing system patterned on one boy’s skin, and the other boy swirled with a smoke that wasn’t there.
The images weren’t an unfamiliar thing, but this was the first time he’d been confronted with so many in one place. It was distracting, unnerving.
What were they supposed to be, the glimmers?
The remaining two members of the group were a boy, a clear vigilante of the night in appearance, with a costume that was black from head to toe, and a girl dressed in urban camouflage. Chevalier’s attention fell on the girl; her white and gray jacket was short enough that it didn’t reach the small of her back, a blue tank top with a shield emblem on the front. Her scarf, a complimenting shade of blue, was wrapped around her lower face, bearing the same emblem. She sat in a chair, elbows on her knees, toying with a knife.
Odd as it was, she was more grim than the boy who was trying to look dark and disturbing.
“Take a seat,” Hero said. He laid a gentle hand on Chevalier’s shoulder.
Such a minor thing, but it felt somehow critical. What clique did he identify with? What direction would he take?
He glanced over the rest of the group, at the images that had changed, and his eyes fell on the one with the knife.
In that instant, the knife disappeared, and there was a flare. The images were suddenly distinct, glaring, an image appearing in a flash, so brief he might have missed it. A cluster of children, blood, their faces stark with fear and in one case, pain.
It faded as quickly as it had appeared, and the girl held a gun, now.
She’d caught him looking. Meeting his eyes, she changed it again.
The image that flickered was of her, holding a gun with a silencer on the end, pointing it. Her expression was one of desperation.
She’d changed the gun for a machete, apparently unaware.
He made his way across the room, and seated himself in the chair beside her. She didn’t even glance his way, her attention on the weapon as she ran her thumb alongside the flat of the blade.
“Army girl doesn’t even speak english, you know,” the boy in the nice costume said.
“She speaks some,” Hero said. “It’s fine.”
“I’m just saying,” the boy said.
“I think we all know what you’re saying,” Hero answered. “You’ve made arguments about what you want the team to be, your desire to be taken seriously.”
Chevalier watched the exchange carefully. His eyes fell on the figure behind Hero, and he tried to focus his attention on it. It moved with glacial slowness, a four-legged creature with legs so long that the ‘window’ around Hero didn’t even show its main body. Finger-like appendages at the base of each leg carved diagrams and ideas into the ‘soil’ beneath as it walked.
“We’ve got the serious part down,” the girl with the mouse ears said. She drew her sword, thrusting it into the air, “Huzzah!”
“So bogus,” was the mumbled response. “As if her group has the majority.”
“I’m sure you’ll figure it out,” Hero said. “A lot of you have been through a lot, and some of you have only just stopped. Stopped running, stopped fighting, stopped dealing with a long series of crises.”
Hero’s eyes briefly fell on Chevalier. Chevalier lowered his eyes to the floor.
“The important thing to remember,” Hero said, “is that you’ve got time. You have time to figure out who you want to become, time to figure out what this team will become, time to breathe. To be kids again.”
Hero paused, glancing over the room. He sighed. “And you have zero interest in that, I’m sure. You’re in a hurry to grow up, to be heroes.”
“You’d better believe it, boss,” the mouse girl said.
“Just be careful,” Legend said, as he strode into the room. He was accompanied by Eidolon and Alexandria. “This is about training, not thrusting you into the midst of trouble.”
“That comes later,” the mouse girl said.
“If you decide you want it,” Legend answered.
The sheer presence of the heroes here was changing the energy of the room. The listless teenagers had perked up. They were paying more attention, more alert.
It was no longer one more act in a long sequence of hoops and events. This was the main capes of the Protectorate, all here in one place, for them.
“Well,” Hero said, clapping his hands together. “I’m not good at the formalities. Being in charge isn’t my thing, as much as those three like forcing the job on me. So what do you say? Let’s crack open the soda bottles, cut the cake and celebrate our inaugural Wards team.”
The mouse girl’s team cheered and whooped. Nobody else really joined in with even half of the enthusiasm, but there was more of a response than there might have been before the rest of the Protectorate had showed up. Chevalier even allowed himself a cheer, joining in with the clapping.
It was exciting. Exciting and a little scary. Like stepping out over a chasm.
As the others made their way to the table, Chevalier stood from his chair, then glanced down at the army girl. “You want cake?”
She raised her head. “Yes.”
“What do you want to drink? I think there’s cola, ginger ale, sprite…”
“The brown drink,” she said.
“Coke, then.”
He left her sitting in the chair, paying far too much attention to her weapon, and grabbed two paper plates.
“I’m curious why you sat next to Hannah,” Hero commented, as he served himself some cake.
Chevalier glanced at the girl with the weapons. He felt uncomfortable, “People are making it a bigger deal than it is. It was just me sitting down. I didn’t put much thought into it.”
“Maybe,” Hero said. He laid a hand on Chevalier’s shoulder. “But it’s good that you did. She could use a friend. Might make a world of difference, in the long run.”
Chevalier shrugged, stepping up to the tray and placing a slice of cake on each plate.
“We’re all ignoring the obvious reason,” the girl with the mouse ears said, getting in Chevalier’s way as she reached for a plastic fork. “He thinks she’s hot. He wants the poontang.”
Hero cleared his throat in a very deliberate way.
“Don’t be juvenile,” the leaf-boy told her, from the front of the line.
Chevalier shifted awkwardly. The girl with the mouse ears was in his way, and he couldn’t move down the table to get a drink. She wouldn’t budge until this was resolved.
“I got the vibe she and I are similar,” Chevalier said. It was honest. The images he’d seen, of the girl…
And it was apparently the wrong thing to say, because mouse-ears was only more insistent, now. She smiled, cooing the word, “Similar?”
“You didn’t figure it out yet? Chevalier’s the vigilante that went after the Snatchers,” the leaf-boy said.
Hero turned around, and
his voice was a little hard, “Reed. That’s not your story to share.”
“It’s okay,” Chevalier said. “They’d find out eventually.”
Mouse-girl looked confused. “The Snatchers? Are they supervillains?”
“No,” Chevalier said. He used the distraction to push past her and get to the area where the two-liter bottles of soda were lined up. He poured the drinks for himself and Hannah. “They were ordinary people. Bad people, but ordinary. Except maybe the leader.”
“Maybe?” Mouse girl asked.
“I didn’t give him a chance to show me.”
Her eyes widened.
Chevalier felt strangely calm as he spoke, “Not like that. Alexandria caught up with me at the very end. When I was trying to decide what I’d do with him. She told me she’d stand by and let me kill the guy, if I really had to, but I’d go to jail afterwards. That, or I could come with her. Come here.”
Hero frowned, glancing at Alexandria, who had gathered at one corner of the room with Eidolon and Legend. They were looking at the kids, talking, smiling. “I’m glad you made the right choice.”
Chevalier shrugged. I’m not sure I did.
He was still angry. Still hurt. His little brother’s absence was still a void in his life.
“Maybe now you can stop asking questions,” Reed told the mouse girl.
“Never!”
Reed sighed.
“Everyone has their baggage,” Hero said. “Sometimes it’s in the past, sometimes it’s in the present, other times it’s fears for the future. But this is a fresh start, understand? I’m pretty mellow, believe it or not, but I’m going to be upset if I hear that anyone’s holding any of that stuff against a teammate, or if you’re letting it hold you back. Understand? This is a second chance for everyone. You’re here to support one another.”
There were silent nods from Chevalier, Reed and the mouse girl.
“Good. Now go. Eat cake, drink soda, be merry. And when the party is done and us adults are gone, with you kids left to your own devices, check the empty room, the one that isn’t assigned to any of you. I stocked you guys with video games and movies.”