by John McCrae
The ‘shoulders’ of her lower body scraped and dragged against the sides of buildings as she stampeded through the back alleyways. She kicked a dumpster and sent it careening as she ran, brushed against a fire escape with enough speed and force that it was ripped from the brick wall.
She was very nearly out of my power’s reach when Myrddin cut her off. He waved his staff and a group of heroes materialized around him. Tecton and Chevalier were among them.
The heroes around me were trying to get sorted into squads again. I was aware of someone driving the van that held Scapegoat. Taking him in the wrong direction.
I drew arrows with my bugs on the dashboard and prayed that whoever the cape was behind the wheel, they were aiming in the right direction.
Seeing how the heroes were struggling to get organized, suffering for the lack of armbands to help them navigate and get essential information, I decided in an instant that I needed to guide more than just the van.
I began drawing out arrows and letters.
I drew out an ‘E’ with an arrow pointing in Echidna’s direction, a hundred times in a hundred places. Above Echidna, I set swarms of insects to flying in formation, tight circles and figure-eight loops, vertical or horizontal. Letters and words formed. Echidna, Myrddin, Chevalier. Did the ‘e’ go after the ‘i’? Couldn’t remember. Was supposed to be ‘i before e, except after c’, but there were more exceptions to the rule than there were correct uses.
Shaking my head to stir myself awake, I tried to refocus, paying attention to the primary site of the fighting.
Echidna charged Myrddin and the heroes that accompanied him. He used his staff to draw something into the air. My bugs could feel a vibration, see the white blur of a light source.
The sign he’d drawn exploded outward, striking Echidna on her right side. It was enough to alter her course, and her shoulder slammed into the corner of one building. Her body dragged against the building’s face until that she had to stop and pull away.
Chevalier pointed his sword at her, fifteen feet long, and pulled a trigger. A blast erupted down the center of the sword’s mass, and a cannonball caught one of Echidna’s monstrous heads between the eyes. Through the composite vision of all my bugs, I could get a sense of the damage that had been done, the spray of gore.
I was too tired to be focusing on my bugs to this degree. My awareness of my real self was faltering. I was unconsciously updating the positions of the arrows to allow the heroes to home in on Echidna, but I also had to work to keep myself close to Scapegoat, and I wanted to make sure I knew where Bitch and the others were. Atlas was following my unconscious commands, but that meant I was straying a dangerous distance from Scapegoat. Had to be safe.
The arrows I’d drawn for each of the heroes were working, though. Heroes were moving towards Echidna with purpose, now, and the van with Scapegoat inside was moving in the right direction. I caught some squad captains giving orders. A cape that could speak over distances was relaying information to Myrddin and Chevalier.
Tattletale was on the ground, but she didn’t advance toward the scene of the fighting. She had gotten her hands on a cellphone, and was speaking steadily into it, relaying information. I only caught some of it – I couldn’t devote that much focus to her. It was about Noelle.
Chevalier and Myrddin made an effective duo. Chevalier’s power had made his armor virtually impervious, his cannonblade massive, each effectively many times as dense and/or many times as large as they should be, but he was still able to treat them as though they were the normal size. He swung his sword as though it were barely there, and when he found an opportunity to strike out with a gauntleted fist, the effect was always far greater than the hit deserved.
Not so different from Fenja and Menja, only his gear was the focus, not himself, and he was a little more versatile.
Myrddin, for his part, coupled versatility with raw power to devastating effect. He had a bag of tricks and switched from one to another without hesitation. Echidna spewed a stream of bodies and gore, and Myrddin drew a dark sign into the air, suctioning the incoming matter into it. I sensed Chevalier and Tecton slamming their weapons into the nearest surfaces to avoid being pulled in, catching hold of allies who weren’t so capable. Then my own bugs were yanked toward the crevice and violently crushed against all of the other debris, leaving me momentarily blind in that area. More of my bugs flowed in, giving me time to see Chevalier delivering a series of powerful sword strikes and cannon shots at Echidna, not letting up. He paused, throwing himself into a side-alley as Noelle tried to stomp on him, and Myrddin released the matter he’d suctioned in as a condensed bullet of gore, dust, crushed bodies and dead bugs.
Perhaps the strongest thing about the partnership between the two heroes was how well it accommodated others. Heroes with ranged powers were free to unload on Echidna while the other two fought, and heroes like Tecton could offer further support, destroying the ground beneath her feet. She was big enough now that he couldn’t trap her, but he could make her stumble, or bring concrete from the nearby buildings raining down on top of her.
The Triumvirate flew straight over Echidna, and Legend opened with a laser beam I could see from three blocks away. He killed some of the bugs I’d been using to draw words in the air in the process. That was as much my fault as his.
Echidna was more or less trapped, forced to back away, but unable to fully turn around with the walls of the alley on either side of her. Eidolon threw down another slowing bubble behind her, and Alexandria dropped to ground level to stand behind Echidna and stab the metal pole of the street light through the knee of one of Echidna’s back legs.
There was nothing for me to do beyond helping to organize the others. I made sure to draw arrows and words high enough above the buildings that anyone approaching the scene would be able to tell that Alexandria and Chevalier had Echidna flanked.
Atlas carried me above the scene, a distance away from the Triumvirate, but still close enough to see into the alley.
Echidna was sustaining a beating, and there were only four directions she could go. She could go up, which was the only route available to her that didn’t involve going through a solid surface, but that involved running face first into the laserbeam that Legend was firing straight down from above. Going down involved tearing through pavement and whatever was below the road. Even if there was a storm drain or some other underground space to enter, she was doubtlessly sustaining too much damage to take the time to get that far, and she was too big to fit, unless the area was cavernous.
That meant she was bound to head either left or right, through walls of brick or concrete. I was careful in how I positioned my swarm, putting them on walls so I could tell if she knocked one down on her way through, while keeping the bugs out of her likely path. Cloned bugs were the least of our problems, but I wasn’t about to contribute to her arsenal.
I’d drawn heroes closer to the scene of the fight with my directions. Now I had to communicate the danger.
I spoke through my bugs, moving each closer to the capes. The swarm was spread out, which made the resulting voice thin and reedy to the point that I wasn’t sure if it was audible over the noise of the fighting in the alleyways.
“Incoming,” my swarm buzzed.
More than a few heroes jumped at that.
“Look for my signal,” I said, “She’ll have to go through the walls to escape.”
Many of the squads were in or around the alleys but not actually participating in the fights. With arrows and the movement of my swarm, I did my best to indicate the ways to the walls she might head for, and I drew exclamation marks on the faces of the buildings next to her.
It didn’t take her long to reach the limit of her patience. She tried to advance on Chevalier, only to get driven back by Tecton, Myrddin and one or two ranged capes. Backing up meant running into Alexandria, who was stabbing and swatting with the pole that had held the traffic light.
One claw ripped through brick and wood, and she plunged i
nto the building to her left. She was tall enough that she had to hunker down, and she was still shoving her way through the flooring that separated the first and second floors. Her route put her on a path for where the fighting had originated, where the majority of the heroes were now waiting.
She could wade through brick and concrete and leave a building folding in on itself in her wake, but dealing with a mass of capes proved more difficult. Forcefields blocked her movements, and a half-dozen heavy hitting capes like Grace were waiting to blindside her.
A heartbeat after the first wave assault passed by, Chronicler’s replicas of the melee assault group tore through Echidna a second time.
Echidna fell over, and was in a position to see Legend, Alexandria and Eidolon overhead.
Some capes had stayed in the fray, including types like Weld and Wanton, who couldn’t be absorbed and couldn’t be affected by the capes with ranged attacks. They joined in with the Triumvirate’s attacks on the fallen foe.
She vomited, but it wasn’t the same as before. Her vomit this time was thick with bodies, to the point that it didn’t spray. The vomit tumbled from her four mouths as a sludge that met or exceeded her total body weight in sheer volume. Worse, where it had maybe been ninety percent liquid and ten percent people, before, the numbers had inverted.
Legend raked a laser across the piling, writhing, reaching bodies, but Echidna was getting to her feet, throwing herself into the building behind her. She’d done enough damage with the last maneuver, and her return trip brought a wall crashing down. Powers of all kinds were brought to bear as the capes on the ground did what they could to save themselves and their teammates.
I could have stayed, helped with the wounded, but the van with Scapegoat was moving on, and I was worried about what might happen if Echidna managed to get away. She was wounded, but regenerating, and bodies kept pouring forth from her mouth. It would be best to leave the wounded and dying to the less mobile capes. I was more useful in the fray, though that didn’t say much.
She was moving at a good pace. Only the fastest were able to match her in speed, and few of those were also capable of slowing her down so the rest of us could catch up.
A trail of clones flowed in her wake. All of them were capes, and even though they were unclothed and unarmored, some were taking more than a few hits to finish off. Worse, at least one of the people she’d caught was a cape in much the same vein as Prism had been. A self duplicator. It amounted to scores of bodies, where one in twenty were capable of copying themselves, and maybe three or four in twenty were tough or borderline invulnerable.
I joined in with the other heroes who were fighting to kill or mop up the clones before the psychotic things could get organized. They were lumped together as a tangle of limbs, heads and torsos, and each was tacky with the fluids of the vomit. My swarm made contact, and began ruthlessly doing as much damage as I was capable of.
Myrddin caught up and hit her with one of his ‘spells’. Echidna promptly disappeared in a clap of thunder, and Myrddin went very still, floating in the air.
From his controlled breathing and lack of celebration, I could only assume that Myrddin was concentrating. Echidna wasn’t dead and gone, only held at bay for the time being. I was willing to bet it was the same effect he’d used to carry Chevalier, Tecton and his other teammates into the fight in the alleyway.
In the meantime, the rest of us were left to dispatch the clones as quickly as possible. They were frailer looking, with features missing. There were clones without ears, clones without noses, clones with missing fingers. Half finished, their skin was so thin as to be translucent, and most lacked hair or their hair was so sparse as to barely matter. The skin of most broke and bled where my bugs bit, as though it were little more than wet paper.
If my swarm was made up of countless tiny surgeons, doing strategic damage, Rachel’s dogs were the opposite. Bentley plowed through the ranks of the clones like a living bulldozer. He wasn’t running full-bore, but he wasn’t slowing down at any point either. The other dogs followed, each roughly the size of a pony, chained to Bentley’s harness. The dogs fought among themselves in their struggles to attack and wound the clones, but I could see Rachel doing what she could to ensure that none of them were killing.
She’d done the same with Bastard. It made sense, in a way, that she didn’t want them to get accustomed to killing before they were fully trained.
The clones weren’t wholly helpless, though, fragile as they might be. They did have powers. Through the bugs of my swarm that lingered on the combatants, I could track the fallen. Two heroes down, injured or dying, another deceased.
We were outnumbered, and we couldn’t afford to lose one person for every twenty clones that fell. Echidna had created at least a hundred clones in the course of her last getaway. She would create a hundred more when she reappeared, if we didn’t find a solution.
Legend found a position to open fire from, and sent a barrage of lasers down toward the trail of bodies, while Alexandria followed the direct path that Echidna had taken, darting left and right to strike out and kill even the tougher capes in a single hit.
In the midst of the chaos, a speaker began blaring at the top of one containment van. The same voice that had come from the armbands.
“The following information has been disseminated, and remains unconfirmed. Echidna is in a rage state. The monster is in control, not the girl. Seventeen capes are currently within her. Her rate of regeneration and production of clones is derived from a central core within her lower body that produces an endless quantity of biological material. A body part severed from the core will die. Destroying the core in entirety will destroy her…”
Tattletale, I thought. She’d passed on the info she’d gleaned.
Scapegoat was out of the van and shouting. Weld was among the capes that came to his assistance. He held a female clone in his iron grip, with one hand over her mouth.
Tecton and Wanton moved to help, and Scapegoat looked up at me, gesturing.
Pointing at the ground.
Would have been easier if he’d just said it. I found a clear spot on a rooftop and landed.
The second I was settled, Scapegoat laid his hands on the clone Weld had caught.
As before, the sensations hit me. Phantom sensations of every possible texture and experience rippling across my entire body.
This was why he’d told me to land. He’d been worried I might lose control of my power, maybe losing control over Atlas and fall.
I just had to endure. I could control my bugs to some extent, though flight wasn’t so possible. One of the clones had broken away from the fighting, and my bugs were both attacking her and pointing the pursuing capes in the right directions. She split off into four copies. The heroes killed three of the four, only for the survivor to split off into a quartet once again.
If I’d been thinking about containment, I might have set triplines at each of the major intersections, cutting them if and when heroes passed through. As it was, I couldn’t stop her retreat, and could only try to blind her, choke her and distract while they closed the distance with my direction.
But she was fragile, like most of her fellow clones. Mandibles tore her paper-thin skin, and more bugs found her jugular.
Just like that, she died with blood spouting from her throat. She created duplicates of herself, but they were created with the same injury.
The capes caught up to her. One murmured, “Kudzu.”
“…s not her, Jouster,” another said.
Elsewhere, Regent was dispatching other clones. He deftly tripped up the more mobile ones and closed the distance, then executed them with a quick stab of a knife.
The sensations kept hitting me. It was a deeper sensation now. Tastes, vision, hearing… everything under the sun, fragments of a million different sensations. Picking through the noise was nearly impossible. I had to find refuge in my swarm’s senses, disassociate from my body…
If I hadn’t been trying so
hard, I might have missed it. It was more subtle than the first time I’d heard it. A keening noise that my own ears couldn’t hear. Even many of the insects were unaware.
Using my swarm, every bug in the four block range, I buzzed out the alert.
“Shatterbird!“
Some capes reacted fast enough. Helmets with visors were torn free, intact armbands and cell phones discarded. Some erected forcefield barriers. I was tearing off my mask, bundling it in the fabric that hung around my legs.
There were others too caught up in the fighting, yet others dependent on hardware with silicon chips that they couldn’t shirk so quickly.
It wasn’t as strong as her last big attack; there was less glass in the city to carry the effects. Still, I could hear the resounding crash of everything glass in this half of the city breaking. A tidal wave of destruction rolled past us, leaving countless injured in its wake. The attack was weaker, but not necessarily weak.
Tecton had been left immobile, components of his suit destroyed. The clone and Scapegoat were down, struck by the glass from the van’s windshield. Chevalier had been caught by something, a fragment of glass that had penetrated a slit in his visor, and he was struggling to fight three clones and avoid hitting his teammates, all while partially blind.
I checked myself. I could breathe, I wasn’t blind. All despite Scapegoat’s disabled state.
Had he transferred the conditions to the clone? Was I in the clear?
I wasn’t sure, and I wasn’t sure I could afford to take the risk and stray beyond that one-hundred and fifty foot range of his.
The direction the attack had come from… Shatterbird had stayed behind, used her power from the base. I’d assumed it was because Echidna had eaten her, but it was all too possible that they’d found another route. Inducing temporary unconsciousness? Or perhaps Echidna had eaten her and then spat her out right away, to induce enough weakness that Regent couldn’t use her. I’d have to ask Regent for details, and that wasn’t an option.
No, there were bigger worries. Battle lines had broken, and simply by virtue of being more numerous than we were, many clones were still standing. It made only a small difference, but it was still an advantage for their side: the clones weren’t wearing or carrying anything glass. An advantage of being naked.