The Enhancer series Box Set

by Wyatt Kane

“You have one chance,” Tempest said. “Tell us what we want to know, or I will give you to her! Do you understand?” The man, held up by Tempest strength, shot a terrified glance at the demonic form of Lilith and managed to nod. “Where is her father?” Tempest asked.

  “Prison,” the man managed.

  It was an answer that made no sense at all. Yet it was enough to make Lilith pause. She reined in her power a little.

  “What do you mean?” she demanded.

  The mercenary was too scared to look at her as he spoke. “It’s a block and a half away. Decommissioned prison. If he’s anywhere, he will be there. That’s where they keep all of them.”

  41: Life Or Death

  To Ty, the way the man said, ‘all of them’ was ominous. Yet at the same time, it gave him hope that they hadn’t ruined things for Lilith’s father. Nor was he the only one to think that way. The atmosphere in the room became suddenly lighter, and the shuddering from Lilith’s power stopped entirely.

  Tempest glanced at Ty, then focused her attention on Lilith. “You can home in on our devices, correct?” she said.

  Lilith looked vaguely puzzled. “Yes.”

  “Good. This man is going to show me where this prison is, and when we get there, I want you to follow with Ty. Okay?”

  Lilith nodded, and that was enough for Tempest. Without waiting for Ty to figure out what was happening, the blonde superhero marched the mercenary to the door with the hole in it. She didn’t try go through the hole or even unlock it. Instead, she simply kicked it hard enough that it burst wide open.

  Then she was gone, leaving Ty and Lilith alone with the other mercenary.

  Ty gave Lilith a hesitant look. He felt awkward for having messed up her rescue and didn’t know quite what to say.

  “We’ll find him,” he said, trying to reassure her.

  The demon woman nodded but didn’t say anything. She still looked angry and hadn’t forgiven him for his failure. The mercenary at the desk looked from Ty to Lilith and back again.

  “Um,” he began, but Ty didn’t want to listen.

  “Unless you have something useful to say, just shut it,” he said. The mercenary clamped his mouth shut and nodded. Then Ty had a thought. “Take out your weapons and place them on the table,” he said. “No false moves. You know what we can do.”

  The mercenary did as Ty said. As well as the usual blaster, the man took out a police baton and a nasty looking knife. Ty picked up the blaster and looked to Lilith.

  “Do you want this?” he asked.

  The demoness nodded, and he handed it over. Then he picked up the knife and broke the blade and tucked the police baton into one of his pockets. That done, he spent a moment looking for the blaster he’d lost when he’d tripped through the hole in the door. He found it resting against a filing cabinet.

  He wasn’t sure if he still needed the weapon given his latest enhancements, but he certainly didn’t want it falling in into the mercenary’s hands, so he tucked it away through his belt and turned back to Lilith and the man at the desk.

  “What should we do with him?” Lilith asked. She was pointing her blaster at the mercenary, her expression grim.

  Ty looked at her seriously. “Your choice,” he said. “He kept you prisoner. Let him go, shoot him in the face, whatever you wish. He deserves it.”

  Lilith’s expression turned into a snarl of righteous anger, and the mercenary started to cower.

  “No!” he said. “Don’t hurt me! I was just doing my job!”

  “Well maybe you should have thought a little harder about what your Master asked you to do,” Lilith said. Ty could see the tension in her trigger finger. She wanted to do it. Nor would he blame her if she did.

  But he had another thought. “Do you know where the Master is?” he asked.

  The man looked terrified. It was as if he thought his answer to Ty’s question would determine his fate. Unwillingly, he shook his head.

  Ty made a face of mild regret and shrugged his shoulders.

  “Oh, well. I guess you’re not much use to us then, are you?” He looked at Lilith, curious to see what she might do, but really didn’t care whether she shot him or not.

  But the man cared. He cared a very great deal.

  “No, wait! I don’t know where he is, but I can find him! I can help!”

  Ty considered. The mercenary may have been telling the truth or just trying to save his own life. Either way, Lilith seemed unwilling to pull the trigger. If she wanted to, she would have done it already.

  “What do you think?” Ty asked her.

  Lilith’s beautiful face was still creased in anger. Ty could tell she wanted to hurt the man, but her need for revenge didn’t stop with just him. The Master was the one responsible for keeping her and her father captive.

  She kept her blaster aimed.

  “How can you find him?” she snarled.

  Before the man could respond, Ty’s device sounded an alert. He answered, and Tempest’s beautiful face appeared in hologram form.

  “We’re here,” the blonde superhero said. “And the party is about to begin. I suggest you get here as soon as you can,” she said, and she was gone.

  Ty looked at Lilith. “We can return to this later,” he said, then turned to the mercenary. “You. Get in Lilith’s cell. Do it now.”

  The mercenary whimpered, but he had no choice. He stood and walked into the dark, empty cell, with Ty following closely to shut the door behind him. When the lock clicked into place, he turned back to Lilith.

  “Take us to Tempest,” he said.

  ◆◆◆

  Once more, Ty endured a moment of cold like no other. He didn’t know if it was possible for a soul to freeze, but if it was, then five minutes in that space between universes would have done the trick. Even the brief moment he was there was enough to make him feel as if he would never be warm again.

  Ty hadn’t yet seen Lilith’s character sheet or power schematics. Maybe he never would. If he did, he knew he could probably come up with a technological equivalent of her power. It was what his skill enabled him to do.

  Yet he didn’t want to. He would spend his days flying if he could, but even the thought of teleportation was like an icy hand gripping his spine.

  To him, it felt unnatural. It was hideous, an experience he would prefer never to have, and he was extremely grateful when he and Lilith blinked back into the darkness over the city of New Lincoln.

  Lilith beat her leathery wings and hovered in the sky with Ty in her arms. Ty’s heart was beating too fast, and he breathed in short gasps. He was acutely aware of the demon woman’s close presence as he held her tight to keep from falling. He saw that they had appeared almost within touching distance of Tempest. The blonde superhero was carelessly clutching the mercenary who had provided directions, gripping him by an arm as he dangled in an ungainly way, a look of pure terror on his face.

  Ty couldn’t help but wonder at the image they offered to anyone who might have been watching. Four people hovering in the darkness, and only one of them had wings. It was so surreal that he might have laughed out loud if he hadn’t felt so awkward.

  His awkwardness increased at Tempest’s expression. The blonde superhero was looking at the way he was holding Lilith. She didn’t seem angry, precisely. Nor jealous. Consternation, Ty thought, was the best word to describe her expression.

  He looked away, in part to avoid Tempest’s attention and in part to get his bearings and saw that they were hovering above a building in ruins. The old prison was in the process of being demolished, probably to make way for another mega-corporate structure. Much of it was hidden behind fences, but from his vantage in the sky, Ty could see everything.

  The lot was in rubble, with construction equipment scattered about. Excavator and bulldozers, abandoned for the night. Yet there was a full wing that hadn’t been touched, and from where they were, Ty could see lights shining within.

  He looked at Tempest. “Do we have a plan?” he asked.<
br />
  “We need to confirm that this is the right place,” Tempest began, but that’s as far as she got.

  Lilith had made up her own mind as to what needed to be done. “Father!” she cried at the top of her voice, and then Ty was plunged into the cold once again.

  An instant later, he was inside the prison, surrounded by concrete walls and iron bars. He stumbled, catching his balance, and in that instant Lilith vanished again.

  42: Prison

  To Ty, the prison looked like every prison he’d ever seen on the entertainment screens. He was standing in a narrow hallway outside of an empty cell, with his way blocked ahead and behind by doors made of steel bars of the sort that wouldn’t stop an android made of liquid metal. Despite the late hour, it was brightly lit, and Ty could see Lilith appearing and disappearing in sequence along the hallway.

  “Father!” the demoness shouted. “Father!”

  Her efforts attracted attention. Not only could Ty hear voices exclaiming surprise or hope as she passed, but already, guards were appearing in the hallway behind him.

  If the partially-demolished prison wasn’t enough, the guards themselves told Ty all he needed to know. They weren’t regular prison guards at all, but were more of the Master’s mercenaries. They wore the same uniform and armor, and those approaching had already drawn their blasters.

  Ty gritted his teeth. There was no way anyone here was being held for anything other than the Master’s purposes, whatever they were, and that alone was enough to inspire Ty to act. He rounded on the mercenaries who had come up behind him.

  “Who are you?” “Don’t move!” two of them shouted in unison from beyond the steel bars.

  Ty could have waited for them to open the door, but he did not. Instead, he reached for the door and with an augmented heave, ripped it from their hinges. The mercenaries looked at him in shock and fired their blasters, but to Ty they may as well have been hurling feathers his way. In moments he was upon them, heaving the door at them and then laying about with his fists, and seconds later the first wave of mercenaries was down.

  Ty stood over their groaning forms with his fists clenched. He could hear others rushing up from downstairs and considered going to meet them, but before he could move, the concrete wall beside him erupted into a cloud of dust and rock.

  Despite his shield, Ty flinched away from the noise, then turned to face the new threat.

  It was Tempest. She had crashed through the solid wall just to be by his side.

  The blonde superhero, completely unscathed by her efforts, took in the situation at a glance. “Where’s Lilith?” she said.

  “She’s gone to find her father,” Ty replied.

  Tempest nodded. “Well, we’d better go help her,” she said.

  Before they could move, more mercenaries appeared behind those Ty had taken care of.

  “New plan,” Tempest said. “You help her. I’ll deal with these!”

  There was no time to argue. As the blonde hero confronted the mercenaries, Ty started to work his way down the corridor. Many of the cells he passed by were empty, but some were not. The first person he saw was a young man dressed in normal street clothes that had become very grubby.

  Ty asked him why he was there, but the young man couldn’t answer. “I don’t know. I was kidnapped,” was all he managed to say.

  It was enough. Ty wrenched the door open. “We’re getting you out of here,” he said. “Hang tight.”

  He intended to move onto the next cell, but before he did, Lilith appeared beside him with her distinctive pop! and whiff of ozone.

  “Mercenaries!” she said as she reached for him.

  Ty didn’t even get a chance to offer his help before being plunged into cold once again. They reappeared at the opposite end of the corridor from where Tempest was, but the situation was the same. At least a dozen mercenaries were swarming toward them.

  Ty stepped protectively in front of Lilith. “Is your father here?” he asked.

  “Yes, he is.”

  “Then take him to safety. And the others. Take all of them. I’ll deal with these–they won’t get near you.”

  With that, Ty put Lilith out of his mind and turned his attention to the approaching men.

  It was a short but brutal fight. The mercenaries had no answer to Ty’s enhancements. They carried blasters and police batons, but no nets. They couldn’t hurt him at all, and he could hurt them a very great deal.

  To Ty, the fight was an angry blur. He yelled at the top of his lungs as he swung his fists left and right, bashing faces and chests and anything he could reach with sickening strength. He even used his new ability, letting rip with a mighty energy blast from his projected discs.

  The blast tore through half of the men all at once.

  Within the very few minutes, Ty was the only one standing.

  He breathed hard as he looked at the carnage. Ty knew that he had likely killed men before, and he had no compunction against doing so again. But the evidence of what he’d done this time was more visceral. It was more real.

  He hadn’t pretended that this was a video game. Nor was he actively protecting Tempest, Dinah, or himself. He had just let his rage at the Master and Bain take control and had done as he wished.

  The results were awful enough to bring the bile up to his throat. He thought he was going to be ill and turned away.

  He couldn’t stay there. He couldn’t face the evidence of his rage. So, he made his way into one of the empty cells and sat on the bunk. Then he closed his eyes and tried not to think of the men he had killed.

  ◆◆◆

  He didn’t know how long he’d been there before Tempest found him. All he knew was that one moment, he was alone in the cell, staring blankly at the wall, and the next moment Tempest was there, sitting beside him and holding his hand.

  Ty hadn’t seen her come in and had no idea how long she had been there. All he knew was that she was looking at him with deep concern in her eyes.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  Even though he wasn’t sure that he was, Ty nodded. “I just…” But he didn’t know what to say.

  Tempest nodded anyway. “It’s okay,” she said.

  Ty took a deep, steadying breath, and nodded again. “I’m okay,” he said, speaking with more confidence this time.

  “Good to hear. You did well.” Tempest said.

  Ty did what he could to push the horrors of the fight away and looked at her. “Lilith?” he asked.

  “She’s gone. And so are all the others. The prisoners.”

  “She said she found him,” Ty said. “Her stepfather. I told her to take him–all of them–to safety.”

  “Good,” Tempest said, sounding relieved.

  They lapsed into silence for a time, neither of them saying anything. Tempest just continued to hold Ty’s hand, seemingly content to sit with him for as long as he needed.

  It worked. After a while, Ty felt better. He knew he would do the same thing again if the situation called for it. It was just that he hadn’t been prepared for the sight and smell of so much carnage.

  No game could duplicate it. Nor would he want to play one that did.

  Ty looked at Tempest’s beautiful face and started to smile. “Home?” he said.

  Tempest returned his grin. “Home,” she agreed.

  43: A Comfortable Chat

  Ty, Tempest, and Dinah were relaxing in the cozy den at the end of a long day, all three of them enjoying the long, leather couch, with Gremlin curled up on the deerkin’s lap. The remnants of a cheese platter complete with grapes and sliced melons lay on the coffee table, and there was soothing music playing in the background.

  Ty was feeling very comfortable wedged between the two amazing women. He’d made a point to shower when he and Tempest arrived, and while it hadn’t negated the things he had seen and done, he at least felt refreshed.

  He was at once satisfied and disappointed with the outcome of Lilith’s rescue. They were no closer to st
opping Bain and the Master’s plans than they had been before. Yet they had freed Lilith, and she in turn had done as Ty said and teleported the other prisoners to safety.

  As usual, Tempest and Ty had brought Dinah up to date with everything that had happened. There weren’t any cameras near the decommissioned prison that the deerkin could access, so she hadn’t been able to see the action as it transpired.

  But she had seen evidence of Lilith dropping the prisoners off at a local hospital.

  There was more than a dozen in all. Men and women both, and the most surprising thing to Ty was that Dinah knew some of them.

  “I looked into their records as they were admitted to the hospital,” the deerkin said. “You remember how I thought I recognized Lilith? Well, she wasn’t the only one.” Dinah glanced at Tempest. “We both know some of them.”

  The deerkin activated a holographic screen on the den wall. It was smaller than the one in her screen room, but it was more than enough for her purpose. She brought up the list of names, complete with images of the people they belonged to, and Tempest responded with confusion.

  “But… how?” the blonde superhero said.

  Ty had no clue what they were talking about. “I don’t understand,” he said.

  It was Dinah who explained. “During the Architect’s experiments, he had a list of people he was looking at as potential wearers of his device. As you know, not many people have an actual skill locked away in their DNA. Of those that do, only a few of them showed the personality characteristics he was looking for.

  In particular, he was looking for people who are neutral-good. Those who would act to help others in need, but who weren’t necessarily bound by the rule of law. She shrugged. “Like us,” she said.

  At that point, Tempest took over the narrative. “My father rejected those who didn’t fit the profile. True neutral, anything to do with evil, those who are drawn to chaos. Lawful good as well. These people–I remember them. They were on his list.”

  As the blonde superhero spoke, she sounded decidedly glum.