by Wyatt Kane
Ty was still musing upon the possibilities when, with a characteristic pop and with the smell of ozone, Lilith appeared in the workshop.
5: Ty’s Best Friend In The World
The demon woman was covered in dust from the wreckage, but there was the fire of determination and passion within her. As a superhero, Lilith preferred to help those in need than to fight bad guys. Disasters like the one Concussion had manufactured made her feel valuable.
“Are you ready to go?” the demon woman asked, clearly eager to return to the ruins.
Ty nodded, and braced himself as Lilith reached for him.
The cold place between two points of existence was far from Ty’s favorite thing to experience. But this time, it wasn’t as bad as it had been before. Perhaps it was because Ty had turned off the house shield. Or maybe he was distracted by the thought of what he was about to face. It could even have been the chemicals sloshing about in his system somehow protecting him from the worst of it.
Either way, when he and Lilith blinked back into existence, hovering in the air above the ruins, it was with less discomfort than usual. The demon woman gently floated to the middle of rubble, and Ty had his first good look at ground zero.
There was nothing about the ruins Ty could recognize as his apartment building. Yet at the same time, he again felt a sense strong sense of déjà vu. A couple of days earlier, he and Lilith had searched for survivors in a similar scene of destruction. This brought back the memories of what they’d done there in full force.
Ty had helped to rescue more than a dozen victims of Concussion’s destructive power. But there were others they hadn’t been able to save. Many of those had died before Ty and Lilith could reach them, but one, a young boy named Jason, had been conscious and talking when Ty found him.
Ty hadn’t understood the severity of the boy’s injuries until it was too late. Jason had died in Ty’s arms, the healing nanites Ty had conjured unable to help.
Ty gritted his teeth. He was determined not to let anything like that happen again.
At the same time, he could immediately see that this collapse was different. There was no fire, for one thing, and for another, this building had been taller than the one Concussion had collapsed before. The pile of rubble and broken masonry made a steeper hill. And Ty had a personal connection to it.
“Ty?” Lilith asked. She was still holding him steady. “Are you okay?” the demon woman asked.
Ty drew a deep breath in an effort to calm himself. He was not okay. Not by a long stretch. Somewhere in the rubble beneath their feet was the remnants of the apartment he’d shared with Brad. It hadn’t been much of an apartment, just a small kitchen, a lounge that was barely big enough for a sofa and a gaming console, two small bedrooms and a bathroom held together by no more than habit and grime. Ty had experienced highs and lows while living there, but one thing was always the same.
Brad. Ty’s best friend in the world.
And now the gamer might be gone forever.
Nevertheless, Ty nodded. “I’m okay,” he said.
Lilith took him at his word and let him go. But before she could do anything else, Tempest flew over from the far edge of the ruin and landed in front of them.
The blonde superhero’s expression was grim. “We’ve rescued the few survivors from the surface,” she said by way of greeting. “The first responders are here, but they’re limited in what they can do. Their focus is around the edges, leaving the top of the ruin for us.” Tempest swallowed, and Ty could see that even she was having a rough time of it.
“I know there are people still alive, trapped in the ruins,” she continued, “but aside from calling out and listening, there’s not much more we can do.” She looked at Ty imploringly. “I hope you’ve been able to come up with a better option?”
Ty wanted to reassure the blonde woman, but couldn’t muster a smile. Instead, he reached for the pokeball on his belt, the one with the crawlers. He cracked it open and poured the metallic bugs onto his palm.
“These will help,” he said. He activated them and flung them about in an arc.
Tempest and Lilith both watched as the crawlers landed on chunks of concrete and brick, only to scamper away.
Lilith had a vaguely puzzled expression, but Tempest must have understood intuitively what they were for.
“Is there enough of them?” she asked.
Ty nodded. “I used the healing nanites as a base. They can self-replicate as they come into contact with survivors. In half an hour or so, there will be a few thousand of them scouring the ruins. They’ll signal me if and when they find someone still breathing.”
When Tempest had first approached Ty and Lilith, she’d looked like a woman who had forgotten how to smile. But, as Ty spoke, some of the weight seemed to lift from her shoulders. She managed a grin.
“Ty, when was the last time I told you how amazing you are?” she said.
Ty smiled back. “You know, I don’t think you ever have,” he replied.
Tempest smiled more broadly. She stepped toward him and held him close, then pecked him on the lips. “Well, consider yourself told. You are amazing. I am extremely happy that Zach’s device came to you. I don’t think we could have chosen better if we’d tried.”
Ty didn’t know what to say. Of the three women in Ty’s life, Tempest was the one he’d known first. As such, there was a connection between them that was special. It wasn’t necessarily stronger than what he felt for Dinah or Lilith, but it was subtly different.
She was the first. In his heart, she would always have a special place.
And he knew she felt the same. Dinah had once said that Tempest couldn’t refuse Ty anything.
At the same time, it wasn’t something either of them had fully expressed. Sure, Ty had said he loved her, but it wasn’t like they sat around analyzing their feelings for each other. Dinah was more likely to do that, being more introspective. But Tempest had always been Tempest. Pragmatic and capable, and perhaps less in need of the words.
The blonde superhero held him for a moment longer, then stepped away. “Come on,” she said. “All this standing around isn’t going to help anyone. Let’s get on with it, and see how many people we can save.”
Ty activated his shield and got to work. Tempest had already completed a visual sweep of the entire area, using her speed and ability to fly to good effect. Yet with the amount of dust in the air, it was always possible that she had missed someone. Now Ty, Tempest, and Lilith all separated so they could cover more ground, each of them pausing every so often to call out, doing their best not to miss any survivors.
It wasn’t long before Ty received the first alert from his crawlers. He activated the holographic display on his device, and saw that his crawlers had mapped a considerable portion of the ruins already. In Ty’s mind, the display reminded him of the maps in some of Brad’s videogame, complete with a highlighted red blob to one side.
Ty had made it as intuitive as possible, the three-dimensional map orienting around himself at the center. It didn’t take long for him to see that the survivor his crawlers had found was somewhere under a huge chunk of masonry Ty couldn’t hope to shift by himself.
Fortunately, he didn’t have to. “Tempest! Lilith!” he yelled, and both women were at his side in a moment.
He showed them the image. “We’ve got one. Under here,” he said.
Tempest didn’t need any more explanation. She moved to the side of the masonry closest to the survivor and took hold. Without waiting for Ty to offer his help, Tempest heaved.
Ty couldn’t guess how heavy the block of masonry was. He knew that Tempest was impossibly strong. He’d seen it firsthand when she’d held an amusement park ride aloft, complete with fifty passengers. For all Ty knew, this block of masonry could have been far lighter than that.
Or it might have been heavier.
All he knew was that when Tempest put in the effort, the block of masonry rose into the air.
Ty hadn’
t realized how much he’d hoped that the survivor was Brad. He would have given anything to see the gamer’s untidy mop of red hair in the dust. But it was a middle-aged woman who sat, still buried in smaller chunks of debris, blinking at them with an expression of shock.
“Ty!” Lilith said.
Despite his disappointment, Ty didn’t want to let this woman die. “Hold it,” he said to Tempest, and without waiting for her acknowledgement, stepped in to root out the smaller chunks of rock. He knew that Tempest might lose her grip at any moment, but trusted his shield to keep him safe.
“What … what happened?” the woman managed.
Ty lifted a chunk of rock that would have weighed more than he did and set it to one side. “The building collapsed,” Ty said.
“You’re that guy,” the woman said. “You live on the floor beneath me.”
Ty paused for a moment to look at the woman more closely. Dimly, he thought he recognized her. Maybe he’d seen her on the stairs a few times, carrying groceries or just making her way down to work. He had the vague idea that she had a husband, but didn’t feel brave enough to ask. He just nodded and went back to work.
The woman looked dazed and confused, but as they worked to free her, she sought to express her gratitude. “Thank you,” the woman said, and Ty saw she was weeping with relief.
“Any time,” Tempest said, and that was enough. Ty turned to Lilith. “Can you get to her?” he asked.
The demon woman nodded. She moved in, and moments later, she and the woman were gone.
“You can let go now,” Ty said.
Despite his words, Tempest didn’t simply drop the masonry into place, but instead lowered it gently. Ty understood. She didn’t want to risk upsetting the rubble, causing it to shift. There was no telling who might end up being crushed if she did.
Ty might have said something to her, to commend her for her strength, but before he did, another crawler sent an alert to his device.
6: Bad News
They settled into a pattern. When a crawler found a survivor, all three of them would head to the location. Tempest would do the heaviest lifting, with Ty and Lilith doing what they could to help. The first couple of victims were near the surface, but after that, they had to dig, doing their best not to upset the balance of the rubble.
In this way, they managed to save half a dozen people, but none of them was Brad, and none of them was Sarah. Yet Ty and the others never even considered giving up. They were still saving lives, even if those lives weren’t the one Ty was after. And for the most part, Ty couldn’t even tell if they were close to his old apartment or not.
Until, that was, he caught a glimpse of the corner of a poster.
One Punch Man, his bald head clear even in the dust.
For a moment, Ty could do nothing but stare. He knew that poster. When last he’d seen it, it was covering a large hole in the wall, made by Tempest and Bain as they fought in his apartment. For what felt like the longest time, that hole in the wall had been a major worry for Ty. Without a job, he’d been deeply concerned about how to get it repaired, only recently coming up with a solution.
He’d planned to program his nanites to rebuild the wall as best he could. Perhaps he would have had to get a glazier to replace the window glass, but he thought he’d be able to rebuild everything else.
If it weren’t for his time-consuming activities as a superhero, he might have already done it. As it was, he hadn’t even told Brad about the possibility.
Ty looked around near the poster to see if he could spot anything else familiar. The couch, maybe? Perhaps part of his bed? But there was nothing. With a heavy sigh, Ty checked the holographic image to see another survivor had been found.
Once more, he called Tempest and Lilith to him.
◆◆◆
The crawlers proved to be swift as well as effective. Within a couple of hours, they’d worked their way through the entire pile of rubble all the way to what had once been the apartment building basement, mapping the ruins all the way.
When they were done, they had located nearly twenty people still alive in the rubble. More than Ty had expected, but far fewer than the hundreds he knew to have lived in the building.
Yet even that number was more than he, Tempest and Lilith could easily handle. By mid-morning, they’d fallen behind with their rescues, and only started to catch up around noon, after Ty had recalled the crawlers to him, deactivated them, and collected as many as he could. They had proven to be legitimate lifesavers, and he wanted to keep them on hand in case he needed them again.
There were now just three survivors left buried in the rubble. Ty knew by then that the odds of any one of them being Brad were increasingly slim, but he had to hope for the best. Anything else was more than he wanted to face.
The rescues themselves were becoming more and more complex. No longer were the survivors buried close to the surface. He, Tempest and Lilith had to burrow deep into the pile to get close, and doing so was increasingly dangerous. Not to them so much. Tempest was proof against a collapsing tunnel, and with his shield, so was Ty. As for Lilith, even if the worst should happen, she could blink away from trouble in a moment.
But the lives they sought to rescue were more delicately poised. A single wrong move might be fatal.
As he worked, Ty found himself contemplating how to turn his shield into something more. Sparkles had been able to shape the energy he produced into enormous hands made of power, and Ty couldn’t help but think how he might do the same. Then, in brightest day, in blackest night, no evil would be able to escape his sight.
The problem lay with the synaptic link. It gave him the ability to adjust his shield to mimic Tempest’s strength, and to use his projector discs as a blaster, but it was too rudimentary for the fine control he would need.
Then there was the problem of the projector discs themselves. The discs projected a force field of a set size and shape, at a set distance of millimeters from the discs themselves. What Ty needed was more variable. He needed to define the shape of the shield force field more closely.
If he’d spent his time figuring that out, perhaps he could have used his energy projection to hold open a tunnel while Tempest and Lilith reached through for the victims. And if he happened to find himself facing off against Concussion or even Steam or Massive, it would be truly satisfying to reach out with fists the size of a car to hammer them with.
It wouldn’t be a simple adjustment, but Ty was sure he could do it. Even without the boost of the AZT-407, he could do it.
Maybe.
They rescued another survivor, a teenage boy in bad shape, both of his legs broken, and Lilith blinked him to the hospital. Ty looked at Tempest, her movie star looks still apparent despite the layers of dust clinging to her hair and skin. The blonde superhero favored him with a sad smile, and Ty knew what she was thinking. Of Ty’s three girlfriends, only she had met Brad in person.
“We’ll find him,” she said, doing her best to sound positive. She reached for him, just to hold his hand for a moment, a gesture of reassurance in the rubble.
Ty nodded despite knowing that the odds were fading fast, and then Lilith was back.
They were about to head to the next survivor when Ty’s device signaled an alert.
At first, Ty thought maybe it was Brad returning his call, but then he realized it wasn’t the phone part of the device. It was Dinah. He signaled Tempest and Lilith to stay, then answered.
The deerkin’s beautiful face appeared in holographic form in front of him.
“Hey,” she said. “You look a sight. All of you.”
Despite everything, Ty had to smile. “Thanks,” he replied. “You look beautiful,” he added.
Where Lilith might have blushed at the compliment, Dinah just grinned more broadly, accepting it as her due. Then she sobered, and Ty understood the call had a serious purpose.
“What is it?” he said.
“I’ve got a bit of bad news,” she said. “You have to
get out of there. You’ve been recognized from the art museum as the person who knocked all those cops on their asses. You and Lilith both. They’re looking for a way to get you away from the rubble so they can take you in.”
Ty just stared at her. “You’re kidding,” he said.
“I wish I was. There’s a news story doing the rounds with you as the star of a video. Here, I’ll show you.” She did something in the background, and the screen changed to a scene of himself in the art museum, surrounded by half a dozen armed police. When Lilith appeared beside him, it looked like Ty’s shield erupted into an explosion of white fire. The screen was briefly overloaded, showing nothing but white, but the audio continued to function. Ty heard shouts of pain and groaning, and then the video gradually returned.
He and Lilith were both gone, leaving behind the police on the ground, in various states of discomfort.
Ty cursed under his breath as Dinah reappeared on the screen.
“Yes,” she said, agreeing with his curses. “The news story suggests you and Lilith were responsible for all the damage. They don’t even mention Spit Bitch at all.”
“Idiots,” Tempest muttered, and even Lilith seemed irritated by what she had seen.
“There is still work to be done here,” Ty protested.
But Tempest shook her head. “Lilith and I can manage these last two. Get out of here. The last thing we need is for the cops to make things worse.”
Ty was reluctant, but he could see the logic. He turned to the demon woman and saw the same conclusion written on her exquisite face. “But they’re after you too,” he said.
Lilith gave him a smile. “Do you think there’s anyone who can hold me against my will? I’d like to see them try to arrest me,” she said. “In a blink of an eye, I can be literally anywhere else.”
It was a good point. Ty breathed a sigh. “Take me back to the mansion,” he said. “And let me know if anything happens here.”