6.4 Emergence
New York, USA
Tuesday, the 12th of June, 2012
12:05 p.m.
As Chris’s body tensed, her first thought after the villain announcement was about Ryan. Stunned silence fell across the stadium as tens of thousands of people held their breath, waiting for someone to reveal that this was all just some sick joke.
Overdrive’s mouth fell open and he stared wide-eyed at the illusionary hand. “Oh, shit.”
After a long moment of nothing, shouts of surprise and protests rang from the crowd. While the shouting echoed a thousand fold throughout the stadium, more and more people jerked to their feet, but no one was leaving. Not yet.
Chris dug her nails into her cheek as she squinted across the spectator stands. There will be a stampede before long. She expected her danger sense to go off any moment now and overwhelm her senses with an unmanageable flood of danger potential and pain.
Overdrive grabbed her arm, yelling over the roar of the crowd. “What the fuck do we do now?”
Chris climbed atop a nearby seat for a better view of the playing field. “We find the bad guys.”
“You hear me, you fucking lemmings?” the disembodied female voice blared throughout the stadium. “You’ve got three minutes to get out before this place is toast.”
Once those words rang out, panic spread like a brush fire. People scattered from the stands, abandoning their seats in search of the nearest exit. The faster and more determined ones muscled their way past others who hadn’t yet managed to stand which kicked Chris’s danger sense
bruises roughly elbowed sprain kick snapping bone
into action. The feedback from countless impending injuries assaulted her senses, their intensity and severity increasing as the mass exodus escalated. The relentless flood of danger feedback made it hard to focus on anything else.
She projected as many force fields as she could manage onto the people nearest to her, doing her best to pinpoint the smallest and most vulnerable targets,
rolled ankle elbow in the stomach
but her effort was futile. People now flooded across the stands in one gigantic mass that threatened to sweep over the weakest among them. The stairs became congested with the jostling, anxious crowd, blocking the way of those who came after it. The retreat was relatively orderly, not a full-on stampede, but Chris suspected it was only a matter of moments before it would escalate. Her danger sense strummed her mind like a chord stretched too tight.
Overdrive snapped her out of it. “Chris, pull yourself together! We have to find the villains!”
Focus. I have to do something about this.
Gritting her teeth, she pushed the pain and the flaring images of impending disaster to the back of her mind. Even though the pain was still bearable, it increased with each second.
“Attention, please!” Athena’s voice came from every loudspeaker in the stadium. “This is Athena speaking. Please stay calm, and remain by your seats. There are heroes present who will address the situation.”
Mirage’s response boomed from the center of the ball park. “You’re so full of shit! Let’s see how long it takes before everyone figures out you aren’t even here.”
Ignoring the outburst, Athena broadcasted her message in other languages. She didn’t succeed in stopping the mass exodus, but people slowed enough that Chris’s danger sense calmed.
Focus.
Chris climbed down from her elevated position, gesturing for Overdrive to follow, before making her way to the nearest stairway. While doing her best to navigate between stomping feet and shoving elbows, the people who recognized her costume moved out of the way the best they could.
“Mirage’s illusions center on herself,” she told Overdrive over her shoulder. “She has to be down on the field.”
“But how are we supposed to catch her if we can’t see her?” he asked, standing right behind her.
Good question.
“We’ll just have to figure something out.”
“Wardens,” Paladin said over her earphones. “What is your location?”
Chris adjusted her dislodged microphone before responding, weaving her way through the press of bodies. “We’re headed to the ballpark. Mirage has to be somewhere down there.”
“I could hit the area around the illusion—”
Athena cut Samael off before he could finish. “No. If One Fell Swoop is present, your attack is bound to trigger a chain reaction, killing you along with countless spectators. We cannot risk it.”
Chris had a different idea. “I think it’s all a bluff. My danger sense didn’t go off until people panicked. If the villains were actually going to blow up the stadium, I would have sensed the impending explosion.”
Paladin spoke up in a tense voice. “Then what is their purpose here?”
“Educated guess?” Chris ventured. “To kill you guys.”
By now she and Overdrive were stuck on top of the last set of stairs leading to the ground level exits. The way ahead was choked with people who were trying to make their way through. Tempers flared all around the pushing and shoving which hadn’t turned merciless yet, but that could change in a heartbeat.
“Hold off on any attacks until we’re sure One Fell Swoop is not present,” Paladin instructed. “Wardens, I’m heading your way.”
Chris’s headset went quiet, and the stadium was once again filled with Athena’s automatic-sounding announcements urging everyone to remain calm.
Chris projected more force fields onto any children she spotted in the crowd, adjusting the size and shape of her barriers so they wouldn’t slow their movements. What she did not find was a way to the ground level. The packed throngs of people made it impossible to advance more than an inch at a time. Someone elbowed her side while her attention was on lower deck, forcing her up against the railing. The pain wasn’t too bad, but it caught her off guard and she nearly doubled over.
The man muttered an apology before he moved on and cleared a path for himself.
Overdrive addressed her through the headset to be heard over the surrounding din. “Why don’t you protect yourself?”
“I will when it’s necessary,” she said, her voice weak.
She turned as far as the press of bodies allowed to look for Ryan among the desperate crowd, and she wasn’t surprised when her eyes landed on him because his whereabouts were never far from her consciousness. Unlike most of the crowd, he hadn’t budged from his seat.
Hate me even more if you want, but I’m doing it again. She erected a force field around him without waiting around to see his reaction.
Overdrive called out to her from somewhere, his voice sounding tiny over the headset. When she turned, she saw that her teammate had fallen some ten feet behind her, pinned by the mass of people pushing their way past him.
“O.” She spoke over the microphone, pointing at the center field. “I’m going down there.”
“But how are you going to—”
Chris barely heard him because she was too busy adjusting the size of the field around her teammate, making it as small as possible while still covering the vital parts of his body. Satisfied with the result, she heaved herself up onto the stairway railing, hoping that the hyperspeed she was about to activate wouldn’t provoke a mass panic. “Keep Athena in the loop,” she said.
Overdrive didn’t get the chance to respond. The sound of the crowd became a low-pitched rumble as the time-slowing effect of her hyperspeed kicked in. She rushed down the length of the railing tightrope style, like in a Parkour competition, even though her bulky bear costume made movement more difficult. Fortunately, her power’s time-slowing effect allowed her to keep her balance and avoid stepping on people. It gave her a precious moment to realign herself whenever she slipped. The crowd recoiled in slow motion, surprised by her speed. Their voices emanated as a low-pitched din from the spectator stands behind her.
After what felt like minutes, but was probably less than a second, Chris rea
ched the bottom of the stairs on the lower deck and leaped off the railing. The instant her feet made contact with the grassy playing field, she created a force field around herself before running to the gigantic hand whose white-and-blue middle finger poked to the sky.
The message was clear. Fuck the Covenant.
“Fuck you too, Mirage,” Chris muttered.
Bracing herself for the danger sense trigger she would get if she was about to collide with invisible villains, she dashed through the center of the area under the effect of Mirage’s illusion. Her vision briefly turned blue as she passed through the hand at top speed. She was already through the illusion and halfway across the field before she realized she hadn’t made contact with anything.
The hand isn’t the center of the illusion.
She didn’t remember the range of Mirage’s power, and couldn’t risk terminating her speed to ask questions over her headset. She was out in the open now, identified as a heroine on her way to interfere, and the stadium was a tinderbox which would ignite the instant the villains decided to stop barking and start biting. She had to diffuse this situation before anyone got hurt.
She glanced back at the stands to see Overdrive where she left him. His mouth hung open, a look of shock frozen on his rigid face. He was speaking into the headset. His lips moved so slow they didn’t look like they were moving at all.
She spun around to charge at the illusion from a different angle, aiming for the palm of the hand. Again she passed through it without hitting anything or triggering her danger sense. Her third charge wasn’t any more successful. She swallowed her frustration as she jogged around the hand in a wide circle. She was done with taking blind shots in the dark. A plan was in order.
If I was Mirage, I’d place the illusion in a way that doesn’t reveal where the center is located.
Chris sped up and made a pass around the field, giving the illusion a wide berth as she followed along the field’s outer edge, darting through the speckling of people who had risked the climb down from the stands to search for alternate exits. Her danger sense flared before she even made it a quarter of the way around. Despite the protection of her force field, the premonition
crushing bones, sharp pain
nearly knocked the wind out of her. She came to a sudden stop, stumbling as she brought her speed down to a fraction of what it had been.
Her force field collided with something and collapsed with startling suddenness, giving off a burst of energy that seared across her skin. Her momentum tumbled her into a second collision, harder than the first. On impact she heard several sounds like snapping twigs.
She barely had the time to think Oh, fuck before time sped to normal and she crashed onto the AstroTurf, thrown back by the force of the impact. Before she knew what was happening, she found herself sprawled on the grassy ground beside the surprised face of a blonde woman who had appeared out of nowhere after the impact. The woman made a low gurgling sound that sent a shiver down Chris’s spine.
Mirage.
Chris gritted her teeth and rolled to the side, away from the woman’s pained, accusing eyes. A stab of agony ripped through her legs and one of her arms, more intense than anything her danger sense had channeled during the past few minutes. She gasped to keep herself from crying out. She didn’t need a doctor’s license to know that some of the twigs she heard snap were her bones.
Now that she was on her back she caught a glimpse of overcast sky, unobstructed by any illusions. A dark gray figure floated high above her, surrounded by a corona of whipping silver ribbons. The next pulse of pain filled her eyes with a mist of tears, blurring her vision.
“Mascot. Move away from the target,” Samael commanded through the headset still clinging to her head. His harsh tone implied what hung in the air between them: given the area-altering aspect of his power, he couldn’t kill the villain until she got out of his way.
Do I look like I can move?
If Chris wasn’t in too much pain to lift herself from the floor, she might have raised a middle finger of her own. She wasn’t in the right frame of mind to figure out why her force field had collapsed on impact, either.
Movement drew her attention back to Mirage. Chris turned her head to see the blonde woman in jeans and a grunge metal t-shirt drag herself half an inch across the turf before collapsing with a whimper. She wasn’t going anywhere, and she didn’t look capable of creating any more illusions.
Her danger sense told her that the villainess had no real intention of blowing up the stadium. The woman’s motivation was to spread panic, nothing else.
She’s incapacitated. Do you really have to kill her?
She wasn’t sure if the thought was directed at Samael specifically or the Covenant in general, but it gave her the push she needed to pull herself together. As she dragged one leg and one twisted, dangling arm up off the fake grass, every half inch of progress was marked by a sharp gasp and clenching teeth.
The crowd’s ear-piercing screams engulfed the stadium before she dragged herself more than a foot away from Mirage. Looking up to see what had caused the commotion, Chris saw a myriad of floating objects, ranging from water bottles to solid chunks of concrete, shoot through the air from the stands and converge in a telekinetic vortex around a dreadlocked man who had appeared from out of nowhere to stand beside Mirage. He must have been concealed by the illusion until Chris’s charge canceled the effect.
As the vortex grew, she realized that the crowd’s screams were punctuated by a low, thundering sound. The sound of thousands of feet stirring in unison, trampling their way to the exits.
Stampede.
It was her last thought before the feedback from hundreds of simultaneous injuries caused her to black out in agony.
6.5 Emergence
San Francisco, USA
Tuesday, the 12th of June, 2012
12:12 p.m.
Before the blackout and the overwhelming pain triggering it, Chris’s world had been reduced to a precognitive loop of breaking bones, dislocated joints, and bruised skin. Her danger sense overtook her, blanketing everything else out.
Until it stopped.
When she regained consciousness, she felt nothing. No pain, no fear, no regrets. A steady, familiar humming sound filled her ears. It was reassuring, somehow, but her dazed mind wasn’t ready to reason why. She felt weightless, too. Cool air brushed against her skin as though she was flying.
The absence of pain sparked a single thought.
I’m dead.
Something tickled her face. She opened her eyes just far enough to see strands of dark brown hair swaying in the air current in front of her. Glancing down, she saw a pair of brown furry arms dangling against the backdrop of an overcast sky. Unsure whether they belonged to her, she made an effort to move. One of the dangling arms responded by swinging from left to right.
Those are my arms, she realized. I’m upside down. Why?
Now that her dazed mind was clearing, Chris discovered she was held by a pair of arms clad in gun-metal armor, and she saw a huge sword and two armor-plated legs extended below her.
Those aren’t my legs.
But the thought didn’t concern her. She felt safe and comfortable despite the fact that she was hanging upside down in midair, resting against a warm, humming metal surface which vibrated against her skin. She was draped over a broad metallic shoulder and secured by a heavy hero’s gauntlet.
Paladin. That’s his armor.
It dawned on her that she was floating over some kind of open-roofed arena, far above the cacophony of rumbles which came from that direction. It took her a moment to piece together what the noise meant. To remember.
When the memory came flooding back, it stirred a sickness in her gut.
Oh, God. All those people. She winced. Why can’t I feel their pain? And where—
Her thoughts flashed back to her teammate. The last time she saw Overdrive he was at the lower-level railing near the stairs, his expression frozen in time. Wher
e was he now? And—
Oh, no. Ryan.
She opened her mouth to ask about him, but a groan alone escaped her. Her tongue felt numb and heavy in her mouth.
“You’re awake,” Paladin rumbled. “How are you feeling?”
“Christina? Please do not try to move,” Athena’s voice said in her ear, speaking through the headset which Chris was somehow still wearing. “Paladin will set you down at a safe location. Your friend is being escorted outside right now.”
“Ryan?” Chris’s murmur was carried away by the wind.
Athena went on, unaware of her question. “He will be debriefed at HQ and given the rest of the day off.”
Chris squeezed her eyes shut. She’s talking about O, not Ryan.
Samael’s harsh voice cut into her thoughts. “Mascot. I need another force field down here.”
“Huh?” she managed, groggy.
As she struggled to lift her head from the metal plating of Paladin’s back, the hero adjusted his grip to steady her. He slid her legs a few inches down the front of his power armor, allowing her to straighten herself and get a better view of the gray expanse of sky surrounding her.
She spotted Samael’s gray-and-silver figure floating just above the upper deck of the stadium in what would have been the nosebleed seats. From there she saw the mass of people crushing themselves to the exits, tens of thousands of people pressing together, clawing their way past one another and over those who had fallen to the ground.
“Mascot!” Samael yelled through her earpiece. “Down here. I need a force field, now!”
She gathered all of her willpower to project a barrier onto the silver-masked hero who floated below her, wing ribbons streaming in the air around him. As usual, she received no thanks in return. Too exhausted to feel offended, she let her head sink back down against the back of Paladin’s bulky power armor, dizzy and breathless.
“Chris, you got her! You got Mirage!” Overdrive’s voice chimed through her earbud, whooping with juvenile cheer. “The Covenant is—”
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