Worm

by John Mccrae Wildbow

  “Hold on, hold on. You think you were heroic, before you switched sides?” Koffi asked. “By all accounts, you killed Alexandria and a law enforcement official. You were quoted as talking to schoolchildren about the huge quantities of money you earned from criminal activities.”

  Was he just sitting back, waiting for an opening?

  Grace stepped up to my defense. “She said a little. She fought the Slaughterhouse Nine. She helped the people in her district.”

  “That actually sounds impressive,” Jo said. “If that’s a little, then I wonder what being a little bit of a villain nowadays is like.”

  She tittered along with the audience’s reaction.

  “No response?” Koffi asked.

  They were ganging up on me. I wished I knew who these guys were, what their normal style was, so I could roll with it.

  “I’ll let my actions speak for themselves,” I said.

  Tecton was quick to speak, backing me up. “I think that’s the best way to go about it. It’s untreaded ground, in a way, to have a notorious ex-villain on the team. Whatever happens, people are going to wonder where she stands, if I’ve been corrupted by association, or if this is all some elaborate scheme. But we can work on it. She can keep doing good work, and hopefully a few months or years down the road, I’ll still be able to say that Weaver’s a good person at heart and she’s done a lot for the good of the city and the world, you know? Some people won’t be convinced no matter what she does, but time and reliability should let Weaver prove her worth.”

  “Makes sense,” O said. “We’re rapidly approaching another ad break. I don’t suppose we could get any of you to step up to the plate? A demonstration of powers? A neat trick?”

  I almost volunteered, but then decided against it. I didn’t want to spend more time in the spotlight.

  Annex stood from his chair.

  “One of the new members! Excellent!” Jo said. “We’ve got a crash test dummy, a beat up car…”

  “I can do something with the car. Maybe we could remodel the exterior?” Annex asked. “Maybe the audience could name a car? What should we make?”

  Jo hopped out of her seat, arm raised like a kid in class. She was short. I mentally re-evaluated my estimation of her age to put her closer to her late teens than her early twenties.

  A series of beeps, not even a half-second apart, interrupted all of us. Our phones?

  I was still drawing my cell from my belt when I saw a commotion backstage. People who’d been standing still were running now, talking into headphones.

  My cell phone screen was surrounded by a thick yellow border. A text was displayed in the middle.

  Stand by.

  Disturbance recorded.

  Possible Class S threat.

  The others had identical messages on their screens.

  There were murmurs among the audience members as someone from backstage stepped up to talk to Koffi and O.

  “It can’t be,” Cuff said, her voice quiet.

  “We got texts just like this for the incident where we met Weaver,” Tecton said. “It could be a similar situation.”

  The lighting changed. Tecton stood from his seat, and I joined the others in following suit.

  A studio employee advanced to the front of the stage. When he spoke, the microphone headset he wore carried the sound, “A possible emergency has come up elsewhere in the world. If this blows over in the next few minutes, we’ll edit out anything problematic and resume the show. For now, remain calm while we prepare for an emergency broadcast from the news team upstairs. There is no danger here.”

  My phone buzzed. I checked it to see another text.

  Chicago Wards are to remain at current location.

  Transportation en route. Will deploy to studio B parking lot for quick pickup.

  A little more ominous than the ‘maybe’ the studio employee had given us.

  Panel by panel, the backdrop of the ‘Mornings with O, J and Koffi’ set transformed, images flickering to show a composite of a grainy, long-distance shot of a city. It had been taken with a cell phone, and the resolution didn’t translate well with the size of the ‘screen’. There were tall buildings, neon signs glowing in the late evening. Somewhere in Asia.

  “Japan,” Wanton said.

  The camera was shaking, and the view on the screen reacted in kind.

  Dust rose in clouds, billowing, until they obscured the camera’s view.

  The audience was reacting. Moans, cries of alarm and despair. They knew what was going on.

  “Please be the Simurgh,” Cuff said, her voice small. Grace put an arm around Cuff’s shoulders.

  That may be the first time in history anyone’s thought that.

  She’s right, too. Even the Simurgh would be better than this.

  The timing, the fact that it was happening so soon after Behemoth had died… it was all wrong.

  Behemoth had come from deep underground. Leviathan had emerged from the ocean. The Simurgh had approached from the far side of the moon and descended to hover just above the tallest building in Lausanne.

  The fourth, it seemed, was appearing in plain sight.

  The dust took forever to clear. But for a few mutters here and there, small animal sounds of despair from the audience and studio employees who were watching, the studio had plunged into quiet horror.

  It stood somewhere between Leviathan and Behemoth in height, if I ballparked by the number of stories in the adjacent buildings. I waited patiently for the view to clear, revealing more details. Clues, as if there was a solution to what we faced here.

  I pegged him as a he before I saw too much else. He was broad, a Buddha in physique, if more feral in appearance. He was as black as night, with something white or silver giving definition around the edges of his various features. He didn’t wear clothes, but he had features somewhere between leaves and fins, with elaborate designs at the edges, curling away from elbows, his wrist, his fingers and around his legs. It made his fingers and toes into claws, and left dangerous looking blades elsewhere. His face was a permanent snarl, frozen in place, his teeth silvery white behind the ebon lips. Tendrils like the whiskers of a catfish marked the corners of his mouth.

  All across the exterior of his body, there were gaps, like the gills of a fish, and that brilliant white or silver glimmered from beneath, a stark contrast to the absolute black that marked the rest of him. It made me think of a tiger. And at the center of it all, quite literally, there was a perfect sphere of that same material, a marble or a crystal ball, his body perched on the upper half and his legs attached to the lower half.

  Arms extended out to either side, he took a step, almost waddled. He floated as though he were walking on the moon.

  “He’s not a fighter,” I murmured.

  “No,” Tecton agreed.

  “What is he?” Grace asked.

  People were fleeing, still in close proximity to the site, evacuating tall buildings. The Endbringer stopped and extended a hand. His arms weren’t long enough to reach around his girth, but his upper body rotated on the sphere that formed his midsection, giving him the freedom of movement needed.

  The camera shook as he used his power, and an unseen cameraman had to catch it before it fell. A faint glowing line appeared on the ground, a perfect circle. The light gradually intensified, reaching higher, and the space within the circle seemed to darken in equal measure.

  It moved, the circle roaming, the glowing lines adjusting to scale obstacles and account for higher ground and dips in the terrain.

  When it intersected a building, the effect became clear. Barely visible with the camera’s range, they were nonetheless a blur, moving within the circle’s perimeter.

  “They’re trapped,” Golem said. “He’s manipulating time in there and they’re trapped.”

  Golem was right. How many days were they experiencing in there, with only the food they had on hand? Was water reaching them? There didn’t seem to be power.

  “Oh go
d,” Cuff said. “Why isn’t anyone stopping him?”

  “There’s no heroes on scene,” Tecton said. “Japan doesn’t have many dedicated heroes anymore.”

  It took six or seven seconds for the blurring of their movements to slow. In another second, it stopped altogether.

  He left his power where it was. The glass on the building’s exterior cracked. Cracks ran along and through the other material, in the street and at the edges of the structure. It leaned, then toppled, and the destruction was contained inside the effect.

  Wanton spoke, almost hesitant. “Is that- doesn’t that remind anyone of-”

  “Yes,” Grace said. “The barrier, the time manipulation. It’s similar.”

  Similar to what we did.

  All in all, the Endbringer was there for a minute. The effect moved on, and it left a ruined husk of a building behind. Though there was no sun shining, the stone and terrain had been sun bleached, worn by elements, eroded.

  The Endbringer extended his hands out to either side, and two more glowing circles appeared. Like the first circle had, they flared with light. Like the first, they moved, drifting counterclockwise around him. It was a slow, lazy rotation, slower than a moving car but faster than someone could hope to run.

  He advanced with floating steps, and the circles maintained a perfect, steady distance away from him and from each other, orbiting him like the shadows cast by three invisible moons. Here and there, people and cars were caught inside. He wasn’t a full city block down the street before one circle had a crowd trapped within, half-filling the base of it, another circle perhaps a quarter of the way full.

  He moved through a less populated area, and he left trails of skeletons in his wake, in odd fractal patterns that followed the circles’ movements.

  He chose what entered and he chose what left. An attack form that couldn’t be defended against, only avoided.

  “Movers will be important,” I said. “Maybe shakers too, if we can find a way to stop him or his circles from progressing. His threat level depends on how fast and how much he can move those time-stop areas.”

  There was no reply from the others.

  I glanced at Cuff, and I saw that she was hugging Grace. She was silent, but tears were running down her face. Grace was more resolute, but her eyes were wet.

  The timing, it was wrong.

  Strategy, figuring out a battle plan, it was crucial here. The first attacks were often some of the worst for cape casualties, if not necessarily the overall damage done. Too many lives would be lost in finding out his general capabilities.

  But it didn’t matter.

  I reached out and took Cuff’s hand, holding it. A glance in the other direction showed me Golem. I took his hand too.

  This was the key thing in this moment. Not the future, what came next. Support, morale and being a team in the now.

  Silent, we watched as the heroes engaged. Eidolon and Legend joined the Japanese heroes in fighting the unnamed Endbringer, keeping a safe distance.

  One circle disappeared, and the Endbringer reached out. Defending capes were too slow to escape the perimeter before the effect took hold, a new third circle forming. Eidolon tried hitting the effect with three different powers, but it didn’t break.

  “No, no, no…” Cuff whispered.

  In a minute, the capes were dead.

  Our phones beeped, and I felt a moment’s despair. We’d have to fight this thing.

  Ship is outside if you want it, Chicago Wards. Attendence not mandatory.

  Temp. codename is Khonsu.

  “I’m…” Cuff said, staring down at the phone. “I’m staying.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “You’re going?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  She nodded back, swallowed hard, before she turned her eyes back to the screen. In that moment, the Endbringer, Khonsu, reversed the direction the circles were drifting, extending the distance they were orbiting around him in the same movement.

  Capes who’d been trying to time their advance to close the distance to Khonsu were caught. Four trapped and doomed to die a slow death, a fifth caught between a building and the orb’s perimeter as the circle continued its rotation. When the circle had left the building behind, there was only a bloody smear where the fifth cape had been. Skeletons for the rest.

  Now he stood still, weathering attacks with the same durability the other Endbringers had. Damage to his flesh exposed silver, and damage to the belly or other silver parts showed ebon black. The onionlike layers Tattletale had described, plain to see.

  I tore my eyes from the screen, marching towards the emergency doors.

  So much was wrong with this.

  It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t right. Fucked on so many levels.

  A woman was sobbing in the hallway as we passed. A group of twenty-somethings in dress shirts sprinted down the hallway, carrying bags.

  The dragon-craft was waiting for us outside, ramp doors open.

  Odd, to see the sky so bright, when the battlefield was shrouded in night.

  We stepped inside, entering the center of the craft. I found a seat by a monitor, with a laptop ready and waiting for use, login screen displayed. The monitor was showing the battlefield, roving over the dead, the buildings that had collapsed under the weight of years. Oddly, the cameraman wasn’t focusing on Khonsu or the defending heroes. A few heroes were fleeing, but most weren’t in view.

  “We’re ready,” Tecton called out. “Ship?”

  The craft hadn’t taken off.

  My growing sense of dread was confirmed as the image on the monitors changed.

  Even with those circles being as devastating as they are, it wasn’t enough. There wasn’t the same broad scale, the promise of lingering devastation.

  No. There was something more to Khonsu.

  The monitors showed him in a different city. A caption on the bottom of the screen showed the words ‘Cape Verde’.

  He’d teleported halfway around the planet.

  All of the problems with getting to Endbringer fights on time, with mobilizing and dealing with the fact that half of our best teleporters and movers had been slain in past battles… he was capitalizing on that weakness.

  My phone vibrated to alert me to a new text. I didn’t need to read it to guess what it said. I read it anyways.

  Stand by.

  “No,” I whispered to myself.

  The heroes were engaging, now. Legend and Eidolon had caught up. Khonsu had situated himself near some kind of military installation, and they’d wasted no time in readying for a fight. Missiles and shells exploded around him. The columns of frozen time that rotated around him caught many, and they exploded within the delineated structures.

  For long minutes, he fought. I watched, my eyes fixed on the screen, to see his behavior, to look for the cue.

  He waded into and through the arranged military squadrons with their parahuman supplementary forces. He was as tough as Behemoth or Leviathan. No attack delivered more than scratches or nicks.

  Five minutes, six, as he leisurely tore through the forces he’d caught off guard. Eidolon ducked between two of the pillars of altered time and delivered a punch that sent the Endbringer tumbling. The orbiting columns were pulled behind Khonsu as he moved, and Eidolon came only a hair from being caught.

  Alexandria and other capes joined the attack. Too few. Everyone else retreated.

  Khonsu didn’t pursue. He remained where he was, arms extended out to either side, palms down.

  Then he disappeared in a massive, tightly contained explosion. Trucks and sections of fence were thrown into the air by the movement.

  Long seconds passed. Then my phone vibrated. Another text.

  Cannot deploy until we have a way to pin him down.

  Stand by until further notice.

  I struck the laptop that sat in front of me. One hinge holding it in place snapped. I shoved it hard, and it fell to the floor of the craft.

  “Fuck!” I
shouted. “Fuck it!”

  I kicked the fallen laptop, and it went skidding across the floor, down the ramp and into the parking lot. My foot stung with the impacts.

  The other Wards were gathered, sitting or standing around the craft that was taking us nowhere. There was no way to approach if he’d teleport by the time we arrived. We’d never catch up to him. The others were as quiet and still as I’d been violent, haunted, scared.

  Nobody talked. Nobody volunteered ideas, because we didn’t have any.

  I wasn’t sure any of us knew how to fight this one. Nobody in the Chicago Wards did. Nobody elsewhere. Speaking, commenting on the situation, it would only remind us of what we were facing.

  Above all else, I wasn’t sure I wanted to think about the detail we hadn’t spoken aloud. The thing, above everything else, that made this so fucked up. In the nine years that we’d been fighting Behemoth, Leviathan and Simurgh, they’d never attacked this close together.

  Even if we found a way to beat this Khonsu, to mount a defense and stop him from picking us apart, settlement by settlement, darker possibilities loomed.

  Two attacks, two months apart. Had their schedule changed? Would the next attack come in a mere two months, or would it be more unpredictable than that?

  No, I thought, with a dawning horror. No, it was worse than that. The Endbringer’s schedule of attack had always depended on the number of Endbringers in the rotation.

  If they were keeping to their usual rules, it promised a fifth, waiting in the wings.

  25.05

  Three days.

  Nearly three days and we hadn’t managed to kill him.

  A new target every thirty minutes, give or take. Ten to twenty minutes for the defending forces to get their shit together. The remainder of that time was our capes trying to hurt him. Chipping away at him.

  Sometimes we made headway.

  Sometimes he crushed the bulk of the defending forces and then stood still, drawing those rotating columns of altered time to himself. Not covering himself, but allowing the altered time effects to graze the outer edges of his body. He’d heal, regenerating as much as half of the damage we’d done.