I was getting tired of this, and my fatigue was wearing on my already thin patience.
“Bitch,” I said. “Do me a favor and clear that window?”
She didn’t respond, but she didn’t hesitate either. She was on her feet as soon as she’d lifted Bastard off of her lap, and kicked the plywood free of the frame before anyone could protest.
I brought every bug I’d had outside the building into the room. They swirled around me, the Undersiders, and the handful of capes on the far end of the room. I could sense three of the four Wards getting into fighting stances, noted how two of the boys and the girl shielded the one other boy, forming a loose triangle formation between him and us.
The movements of the bugs gave me the ability to feel them out, drawing a complete map of what they were wearing and carrying.
The boy in the very front, the tallest and largest of them, would be a tinker. The rods that supported his heavy gauntlets were oiled, suggesting they were pistons, and I noted the presence of blunt-tipped spikes inside his gauntlets. The setup wasn’t unlike the blades in Mannequin’s arms, but these weren’t extending into his body, and I somehow got the impression they were intended for something very different. His armor was heavy, supported more by engineering than by his own strength, and his helmet covered his face, but not the back of his head, with a single lens on a telescoping nozzle, dead center.
The other boy in front was narrower, with flowing clothes. He sported a surprising lack of equipment and weaponry. It gave me the sense of someone who thought of their body as a weapon.
The girl was similar, but I did note that her gloves were reinforced for striking, a framework of some sort of metal, with rivet-like bumps over each knuckle, each etched with a fine design I couldn’t make out and metal filigree feathers at the edges. She had padding with a similar design and near-identical feathers.
The one in the back wasn’t in a fighting stance. He stood with his legs together, heels touching, back straight, one palm extended toward us. He wore a mask that covered one eye and put an oversized lens in front of the other, with spikes radiating from it like the rays of a sun. His costume was a very lightweight covering of layered and interlocking metal plates, more stylized than functional, but there was a coat-tail length of cloth extending behind the back, hanging to his knees.
I was careful in how I condensed the bugs around me. I kept my team obscured as I pulled the bugs away from the four wards, leaving enough bugs on them that I could covertly follow their movements. They hadn’t been stung or bitten, and they didn’t have a clear shot as the bugs moved away from them. It meant, at least, that they’d get a chance to realize they weren’t under attack.
The bugs filled the necessary pockets of my costume, then carpeted the exterior, including my mask. They connected to the ends of my hair, and moved beneath it, giving it more volume and helping it come little alive, the ‘ends’ moving in the absence of wind. Where I had excess, they trailed several feet behind me like the hem of a royal gown.
“That’s better,” I said, augmenting my voice a touch. It was. I felt more centered, more secure and confident with the bugs close. I’d just alarmed the people we’d be working with, but a small show of power would help ensure we got respect and cooperation.
“Your names and powers?” Tattletale asked the Chicago Wards. She gestured toward the door and we started walking briskly toward the exit.
“Tecton,” said the power-armor wearer. He had to raise his voice to be heard over his heavy footfalls and the rattle of furniture around him. He indicated the boy to his right, then the girl, “This is Wanton and Grace. Our ranged attacker here is Raymancer.”
“Isn’t Wonton a kind of noodle?” Regent asked.
“And Raymancer?” Imp asked. “They’re really running out of stuff to call superheroes.”
“Play nice,” Grue warned.
“Yeah,” Tattletale said, “A wonton is a kind of dumpling, not a noodle. Get it right.”
“Wanton,” Tecton said, stressing the pronounciation, “Is a breaker-stranger class cape. He can turn into a localized telekinetic storm. Raymancer is our long-range fighter. The three of us are more close-combat types, but Raymancer manages to make it work.
“Grace is a martial artist. She’s got a power spread. Faster perception of time, enhanced agility, and a striker-class enhancement for select body parts at a time; invulnerability to both powers and general harm, as well as increased effect on contact.“
“And you? Tinker?” Grue asked.
“Tinker and thinker both. Architecture and geology sense. Armor lets me ‘ground’ kinetic energy like you might do with electricity. These are piledriver gauntlets,” he patted one gauntlet, “For creating fissures, generating localized earthquakes and other controlled demolition.”
“Having tinkers against Noelle is probably our safest bet,” Tattletale said.
“Because she won’t copy their gear,” I said.
Tattletale nodded.
“Good. Thank you, by the way, for sharing,” Grue spoke to the Wards. Tecton nodded. Our groups had reached the door that led into the stairwell. There were officers handing out armbands, and the elevator was in use, forcing us to wait as people got their armbands and hurried downstairs.
“You need our info?”
“No,” Grace said. Her voice was hard. “We know who you are.”
Imp cackled, “We’re famous!”
I hung back a second as one officer held an armband and my armor compartment out to me. I gripped it, but he didn’t let go.
He wanted to play it that way?
I let my bugs drift away from my armor to surround it. He acted as if I’d set it on fire, letting go and backing away. I handed it to Tattletale as we passed through the door to the stairs, then strapped on my armband. I spoke into it, “Skitter.”
How had things gone with Leviathan? My username would appear. I held my armband to Tattletale, and she pressed a button.
“No trackers hidden in your stuff,” she said. “Want help putting this on?”
“Please. When we’re at the bottom.”
We were at the tail end of the group, and consequently we were the last ones out the door. The dogs were already mostly grown, and we paused as Bitch increased Bentley’s size to the point that we could ride him.
“We have too many people and not enough dogs,” Grue commented.
“We’ll drive,” Tecton said. “Just need to requisition a van.”
“I’ll ride,” I said. “Rachel?”
She nodded. She was up first, and she gave me a hand in getting up. I had to fight coughing for a minute.
“Assault’s going to try to screw us over, if we cross paths,” Tattletale said.
“I suspected,” I answered.
“And if this goes south, they will come after us. The bit Miss Militia said about Battery? That loses its cachet when people start to feel like the people of this city would be better protected if they turned us in than if we were helping. We’re going to have to stay on top of this. Turn around, I’ll help strap on your armor.”
I nodded and turned around. I moved my bugs out of the way as she fiddled with the straps, threading them through the appropriate areas. I blinked a few times, looking towards the nearest light source to try to gauge if my vision was any better. No improvement. Short of a thorough check by an optometrist, I wouldn’t find out if I’d regain my sight, or how much I’d recover if I did.
Everything I’d been through, and I got the long-term injury as a civilian.
Within two minutes, the Wards had pulled a containment van up beside us, with Tecton behind the wheel and Raymancer sitting in the passenger-side window, holding the headrest of the chair inside to help maintain his position. The back popped open, and Imp, Regent, Tattletale and Grue climbed in.
Ballistic as our first stop. Then Parian.
I winced at the pain in my side as Bentley started running. And maybe collect Atlas while we’re in this area of town
.
Tattletale was right. This situation being classified as a level-A situation instead of a class-S situation wasn’t doing us any favors. I just had to note how things were different from Leviathan’s attack. There were no air raid sirens. People weren’t being evacuated.
Helicopters flew overhead. I could hear them, even if my bugs didn’t reach that high. I knew Miss Militia had assigned us capes, for the inevitable event of Noelle sniffing us out and coming after us. I didn’t sense them on the ground, so I could only assume they were in the air.
Was it better that people weren’t being evacuated? They weren’t on the streets, in the line of fire if the psycho-Vistas or Noelle came after them. It meant we didn’t need to deal with unpowered clones.
But it also meant that there were that many more people here if things went south.
There was a potential kill order on our heads, and there were innumerable heroes in the city who had reason to throw us to the wolves, or to Noelle if they thought the situation called for it. The stakes were higher, and there was a lot more room to fail. Noelle just needed one lucky maneuver to go from class-A to class-S threat in moments, and we weren’t getting half the backup this situation deserved.
Not to mention that I was worn out. Physically, emotionally, I felt like I’d been pushed to the limit, wrung out and then pushed to the limit all over again, and that was just dealing with Coil and rescuing Dinah in the past twenty-four hours. If I got into the past few months, or how the very way I thought had changed-
I felt a touch dizzy just thinking about it.
No. It wasn’t dizziness. My surroundings really were off kilter. The buildings around us and ahead of us were stretching and shifting en-masse.
“Trouble!” I informed Bitch. I used my bugs to notify the others in the containment van: Vistas.
I had to sweep my bugs over the area before I could find any of them. One was perched on a rooftop, one block ahead. She wasn’t in costume.
It had been dumb of me to expect them to be in costume. I hadn’t even considered it, but Noelle wouldn’t spit out anything but the people themselves. The bugs noted the hardness of her face, more like a mask than flesh, her angular, almost artificial chin, and the thin hair on top of her head.
The others… too many places to check… I found another, three blocks over, making a beeline towards us. Noelle had ordered them to space out, to catch us if we crossed her perimeter.
Bastard yelped to my left, skidded to a stop. Rachel seemed to read something in his response, because she pulled Bentley to a hard left, veering straight into the van’s path.
She was going to hit it? I had to adjust my grip, lifting my leg out of the way before she could follow through and have Bentley bodycheck the vehicle. I sensed Raymancer dropping from the window to his seat as the dog hit, only an inch away from serious injury. The van turned and skidded to a stop, and I fell, rolling.
A block ahead of us, a building toppled. I ducked my head low and covered it as dust and debris rolled past us as a thick cloud. The building wouldn’t have hit us, but the debris and dust might have left us incapacitated long enough for the Vistas to act.
We’d ground to a halt, and sure enough, the pseudo-Vista on the rooftop was slowly starting to work on the buildings around us, thinning walls and twisting supports. She was spreading out the work and laying the groundwork for future collapses, I realized. The second psycho-Vista, busy trying to close the distance by folding the space between us and her and stepping across the shortened distances, was raising the street between two buildings, creating a steep incline that even Bitch’s dogs would struggle to climb, cutting off one avenue of retreat.
And I was aware of a third one. The tall Vista Grue had described. She’d stretched like taffy, her bones curving to the point that each was more a crescent than straight. Narrow, so thin it felt like she’d break, with a face twisted into a perpetual, distorted scream, she was picking her way through the rubble of the fallen building. Her power was twisting the largest pieces of rubble around her until they were wisps, chunks of concrete slowly corkscrewing in space until they were nothing more than dust.
Three of them.
And Noelle nowhere to be seen. Not in my power’s range of four-ish city blocks. She’d be going for the others. For Ballistic, or Parian. These troops were only to slow us down, buy her time to make another move, find another set of powers.
Fuck me. Noelle was employing the same basic tactics I did: sensing the opposition, strategically deploying the offensive troops, acting as the heavy hitter and problem solver in the center of the chaos her minions generated, working towards complementary or wholly different goals than the ‘swarm’.
Worse, she was better at it than I was. She was faster, her senses reached further, and the individual at the center of her army was a nightmarish force unto herself.
We couldn’t afford to get caught fighting. Not while Noelle hit our other allies.
Still flat on the ground, I choked back the next spell of coughs and touched the button on my armband, “We need reinforcements, fast.“
18.06
“ Help is on the way,” Miss Militia’s voice came over the armband.
“Three Vistas,” I said. “And Noelle is probably north of our location, going after-”
“Skitter!” Tattletale shouted, interrupting me, “lose it!”
“What?”
“The armband! Toss it!”
I pulled at the straps. As I gathered bugs onto the armband to get a better sense of what I needed to do with the straps, I could tell that the entire thing was swelling, distorting. I could hear the screen crack.
I pulled it free and threw it, simultaneously climbing to my feet and scrambling away.
“Grue! Cover it!” Tattletale shouted. “Use your power on anything that one breaks down!”
Grue threw out a stream of darkness, then dissolved the darkness that wasn’t covering the area where the armband had been. Without the ability to see, I had only my bugs’ senses to go by, but I could track where he’d laid down the darkness by the way the air seemed thicker.
From Tattletale’s words, I’d expected an explosion, but it simply twisted away into wisps of thick smoke.
“It’s radioactive,” Tattletale intoned. “Everything she’s dissolving like that.”
“Unless I cover it?” Grue asked.
“Unless you cover it. Should cancel out the effects. But you did want me to let you know when I’m making an educated guess. This is one of them.” Tattletale said. “I hope I’m right. We could win this fight and still wind up dying in a hospital bed a few years from now, because we got too close as that stuff dissolved.”
Oh shit.
“Doesn’t matter, does it?” Regent said. “World’s ending in a few years anyways.”
“Let’s avoid the extreme radiation poisoning,” I said. “Regardless of whether the world’s ending or not.”
The other Undersiders and the Chicago Wards were out of the van, and we were collectively backing away from the nega-Vistas. More specifically, we were retreating from the one who was creating the radioactive dust.
The first one I’d noticed was still on the rooftop, spreading out her efforts, thinning walls and twisting supports. Her progress was slow, but I was willing to bet that half of the city block would be collapsing onto us in a matter of minutes. If not sooner. If I had to guess, her power operated in a different manner than the original Vista’s. It affected a wider area, it was slower, and she didn’t seem to be suffering for our presence.
The bugs that I was sending her way were having a hard time approaching. They kept veering around so they flew clockwise around her instead of straight. I had only a few bugs attacking her, but the same effect that I’d seen with her face had hardened her skin and there weren’t many places left to attack. Her mouth was little more than a lipless slit across the lower half of her face, firmly closed, and only the smallest bugs could get at her eyes. She barely flinched at
the bites and stings my swarm was delivering.
Meagre as my efforts were, they still should have left her blind, filling her eye sockets with ants and no-see-ums, but her power was still steadily working on the buildings around us. Another peculiarity of her abilities? The ability to sense the layout of whatever structures she was affecting? Did that extend to sensing us?
The second one had arrived, creating footholds and handholds to ascend the section of road she’d raised into a vertical wall, twelve feet high. She was now perched on top, crouching. In the time that it had taken me to lose the armband, she had started to work on cutting off our best avenue of retreat. The road we’d traveled on to get here was raising behind us, bulging upward into a similar barrier. As far as I could tell, her powers were most in line with the regular Vista, and she seemed to be reacting most to the bites and stings. I wished that would make me feel more confident about these circumstances.
That left the freakishly tall one. The Vista with limbs that zig-zagged, who was apparently turning matter into radioactive dust. She’d climbed past the wreckage of the fallen building and now stood on solid ground again, facing us.
“We off the radioactive one first?” Tecton suggested.
“No,” I said. I used my bugs to draw an arrow in the air. “Priority’s the one on the roof, over there.”
“There’s a third one?” he asked.
Apparently he hadn’t caught my message to Miss Militia.
“She’s going to bring down more buildings if we don’t take her fast,” I said.
“Raymancer,” Tecton ordered, “handle it.”
Raymancer stood like he had before, feet together, one arm extended. I didn’t sense any energy blast or ray from his hand. The Vista didn’t act as though she’d been shot either.
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