《Superhero life? Super-Sized troubles!》


 01: Destiny Shopping

    As I stepped into the Mall, people noticed. The security guards were the first; one just gaped, the other was already pressing a panic button to notify his superiors. Then the shoppers and passers-by started taking note and the staring and whispers followed. Once upon a happier time they wouldn''t have. At most, there would have been a few boys checking out the pretty blonde; a nice ego boost and maybe a laugh at some idiot making a fool of themselves.


    Nowadays, a good-looking enough person wasn''t just eye candy but potential danger or opportunity, so the stares multiplied. If most still were of the awed gaping variety, they at least had cause; even in jeans and a sweater, a seven-foot supermodel stood out. That wasn''t the problem; the problem was the minority throwing apprehensive looks in my direction, or even angry scowls. People like the manager of the Urban Outfitters shop just ahead.


    "I''m sorry Ma''am, but we''re closed," the reedy, late middle age guy told me as I was about to enter. He was giving me a pretty furious scowl but his face was pale and the only reason his hands weren''t shaking was because they were crossed, more like trying to hold onto something than anything else.


    "Really?" I looked down at him - he was a foot shorter than me - to the shop''s interior, then to the half open door behind him. "Because you have two dozen customers inside right now." I gave him a raised eyebrow and half-smile for good measure.


    "I..." he paused, swallowed nervously, scowled. "We only just closed. We''ll just finish with everyone inside... it''s only polite... but... like... we really had to close just now."


    "At nine thirty in the morning?" Now he was just being silly instead of saying what he really meant.


    I''d heard of managers behaving like that; everyone who''d seen the news lately would have. The main reason I''d flown to Destiny USA, Syracuse all the way from New York was all the troubles over the past months, the Fulton mall burning to the ground, a riot starting when a shopper Awakened during an argument. I hadn''t expected to stumble into just such a reaction on my first shopping trip.


    "Be that as it may... we''re closing now," the manager said defensively, then firmly flipped the sign on the door from ''open'' to ''closed''. "Have a... err... nice day?"


    "Oh, it was nice," I shot back before turning around and walking away. Making a scene was the opposite of what I wanted, and not just because it''d be a huge waste of time. Shopping was supposed to be relaxing, it was supposed to be fun, and it was something I''d really missed living on my own for months in Bumfuck, Nowhere. Arguing with idiots was not something to waste time on so I moved on to greener pastures, satisfied with the knowledge this would be almost a days'' worth of lost sales for that guy.


    Neither the manager nor anyone else at Macy''s had any problems so the next few hours were spent trying to find some nice clothes that were also my size, a not inconsiderable problem when you''re seven feet tall and more ''amazonian'' than ''slim''. Everyone was very accommodating though, especially once the trickle of new customers ramped up into a flood of would-be fans.


    Shirts, jeans, the occasional dress; it took dozens of tryouts for each bit of clothing that fit well, but I did not mind. Every outfit was committed to memory whether it fit or not, their style and cut stored for later use. Artistic talent was not among my powers but copying what worked was a time-honored tradition. In the end, I settled for the red strapless maxi that got the most catcalls - if you have it, flaunt it.


    "Two hundred, ma''am, with the management''s compliments," a smiling cashier that couldn''t have been older than I was told me, though she looked younger. I returned the smile with interest as the cash changed hands; I''d been expecting close to twice as much. I got out of the store with a spring in my step, feeling better than I had in a long time...


    ...then the Mall''s doors exploded.


    xxxx


    Have you ever seen those movies where the bad guy bursts through the front door and everyone starts running in a panic? There''s lots of screaming, people frantically searching for a way out, sometimes stepping all over other people? My first supervillain attack (the invasion did not count) was nothing like that.


    The guy did come in floating a foot over the ground, hands crossed behind his back, glass shards sliding down his bare chest. The only thing he wore was a pair of exercise shorts, if exercise shorts were made of tightly woven steel wire. His bare chest was impressively muscled, not in the fake way of bodybuilders but how serious heavyweight boxers or martial artists tend to look. He was also ridiculously good-looking, with twelve-pack abs, a chiseled jaw, baby-blue eyes and a face so symmetrical and flawless it looked the barest bit uncanny. In other words, he stood in my weight class looks-wise, except he was doing his best to show off instead of playing down his superhuman looks.


    "We''re all dead," a middle-aged brunette next to me whispered. "We''re all dead and this is Heaven."


    "Hey everyone!" Mr. Shirtless spoke in a deep, powerful baritone. "This is a robbery. You hand over the money and there will be no trouble. Just a small donation to the Yours Truly Appreciation Fund and you can go back to your shopping, no muss no fuss."


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    Half the crowd moved to comply - most of them women - while everyone else stood there, watching. It took me a moment to realize that I was staring too... and not because of the low-key compulsion woven in the guy''s words. Hey, you try living for months in the middle of nowhere, with zero contact or social media and tell me you wouldn''t be a little bit distracted by superhuman good looks.


    Setting aside my bag and the dress in a theoretically safe corner, I sighed and made a beeline for the gallant super-thief. It involved some elbowing, stepping of toes and much gnashing of teeth, but I persevered through superior size, reach, and the knowledge I was saving these girls from bad influences.


    "Ladies, ladies! No need to push!" he spoke again and everyone seemed to calm down the moment they heard his voice; I revised my estimate of his vocal compulsion several ticks upwards. "You''ll all have your turn; Mister Amazing is here for everyone!"


    "Really?" I couldn''t help but ask. "That''s the name you''re going with?"


    "It''s the unvarnished truth, fair lady," he told me, then did a double-take when what he''d just seen registered.


    "We both know there were several layers of power-granted varnish involved in our looks," I shot back. Superpowers did take most people closer to their idealized self but usually you had to actively try for superhuman good looks. "That aside, you have superpowers now and stealing from a Mall was your first idea?"


    "Bitch, please. It was a great idea. Nobody here is gonna miss a twenty or two when they''re wasting hundreds on designer clothes. Besides, it''s not as if they''re gonna remember anything." He gave a smirk at the wide-eyed girl mechanically dropping five-dollar bills at his feet. Then he turned back to me, really took me in from head to toe and sneered. "Don''t tell me you''re one of those bleeding heart heroic idiots. Real power comes from taking, seizing things for yourself. Whether it is putting down some monsters or making money."


    The longer he spoke, the more the pile of cash at his feet grew, the better looking and more muscular he became. Most people wouldn''t notice, the change was small and slow... but I''d been specifically looking for it and good looks were far from the only thing I''d gotten from the Invasion.


    "I was about to say the invaders'' methods are not the only means we can be powerful but I see you already know that." I scowled and took flight to match him. "You already chose to do what you''re doing. How disappointing."


    "Of course I knew, you dumb bitch! Were you living under a rock for the past month?" He chortled darkly. "The secrets of powers have been all over the dark net for weeks now. Not even the government can keep it secret any longer."


    "So that''s why there''s so few details on the actual invasion..." I mused then shrugged. Then I slapped him in the face. That wiped that stupid smirk off his face and dropped him on his pile of cash, curled up and moaning.


    "Fuck! FUCK!" he roared, recovering faster than a normal guy would have. "How the Hell did you do that!?" He flew up at me erratically, pulling back to deliver a ridiculously telegraphed punch like you''d see in B-list action films. "I''ll punch the shit out of you!"


    "Cute," I said as he did just that, delivering blow after amateurish blow anywhere he could reach. Even under normal circumstances they''d have hardly been dangerous; as things stood, they felt like i was being hit by a giant pillow.


    "This is bullshit! BULLSHIT!" he roared, picking up his pace a bit, alternating punches and kicks. "I can throw cars across half a block! Lift and carry Mack trucks. How are you doing this?!"


    "Like that," I said and the moment his next punch landed he toppled to the ground, once more cradling his family jewels. "Whereas you wasted much of your power in toying with other people''s minds, I invested mine in adjusting forces, including those you exert on me." I smirked. "To dumb things down for you, whether it''s your punches or mine, I decide what they hurt."


    "You think you''re so smart, huh?" he spat back, floating to the air again. "Ladies? if she cheats again please murder each other." His voice echoed strangely and the whole crowd stilled. That was actually good; it meant he could only give one order at a time. His orders were also vocal and obvious. "What are you going to do now, huh?"


    Instead of answering I gave him an actual punch. My fist sank in his gut with a meaty thunk, hurling him out of the Mall''s broken entrance. His brief, involuntary flight ended all the way across the parking lot, through the perimeter fence and head-first into a puddle of mud. The few passers-by were shocked out of their stupor at the impact, shaking off the passive influence of the guy''s presence then breaking into a run.


    "You bi-AAARGH!" As he was getting up I was already there, kicking in his shin hard enough to crack. Not much of an impediment to a flyer, but it made for a brief distraction. Before he could give another command, I grabbed him by the jaw and lifted him off the ground.


    "Not so amazing now, are we?"


    Instead of speaking he punched me in the gut, which meant he could be taught. It was just enough of a push to get out of my one-handed grip, swing almost a full circle then punch my face as hard as he could. I shook off the sting in a moment while his knuckles broke against my nose.


    "You... you''re a S-Survivor! An Original!" he stammered, eyes wide, every bit of bravado vanishing as if cut off by a knife. I could hear the capitals as he spoke, saw his fear in his paling skin and quick glances towards potential escape routes. "I... I didn''t know, I swear! Y-you didn''t have any marks... n-not a Valkyrie... not one of Everyman''s... y-you can''t be an Iron Soldier... you got all the fleshy bits... you''re a Spook? No, no, no, no... don''t kill me! Please! Please!"


    He broke down to incoherent sobs after that, terrified I was one of those Spooks and would disappear him. Nothing I said or did could break him out of the... I wanted to say ''hysterics'' but it didn''t really fit. Anyone who got powers, who could shape them to his desires, shouldn''t be breaking down just because he''d suspected what I was. He shouldn''t be terrified of what sounded like gangs with powers, not unless things had gone all twisted rituals and human sacrifice again... which they shouldn''t have any reason to, with the invaders gone.


    What the Hell was going on?

 02: After Action Heroing

    "Your first bad guy?" asked the middle-aged security guard five minutes into the long wait for the police. The dark-skinned, grey-bearded was far from the only security around, but he was the only one not gawking... or futilely trying to hold back the throng of gawkers. A pair of them were dragging away a girl that... "wanted to see if the villain''s face was real", were her exact words. It wasn''t the oddest thing the shoppers and passers by had shouted since the end of the fight. It wasn''t even in the top five.


    "I wish," I told the chatty old timer with a sigh. "Just the first time I stuck around for the police to arrive."


    "Huh..." he gave me a strange look I couldn''t quite decipher. "You don''t look like a vigilante. That crowd is usually masked - and Masked, if you know what I mean."


    "Not... really?" Because that had sounded like some specific terminology rather than just words, terminology I lacked the context for. A few dozen of the gawkers were waving, jumping or otherwise trying to catch my attention, more still waving cell phones in my direction. Maybe I shouldn''t have picked Destiny USA, one of the largest Malls ever, for the shopping trip but the name had just called out to me in the first cursory internet search. And now it looked like a good third of the shoppers were more interested in meeting the new superheroine than further shopping. Still better than what Destiny, Florida had been at the end.


    "You must be very new then," the guard mused then picked at his beard for a minute or two, eyes staring at nothing. Another attempt to approach us jolted him out of his thoughts but the pair of screaming teens were quickly returned to their mother by another guard. "OK, them vigilantes wear masks, right?"


    "I suppose," I agreed, because what was I going to say, that I''d been out of contact for the past six months?


    "But why would masks hide their identities?" he went on, speaking faster as he warmed up to the subject. "We live in the age of cell phone cameras and data mining A.I.s; the government should be able to tell not just who they were but what they had for breakfast! And yet for some reason nobody can or if they can they aren''t talking."


    "Powers?" Not the oddest thing I''d seen powers do. Not by a long shot.


    "Powers. Seems it''s damn easy to spoof all those cameras and computer stuff because lots of them can do it," he explained. "Unlike that idiot over there," he pointed at the still near-catatonic Mr. Shirtless "keeping their identity a secret is a point of pride for them. Everyone calls them Masks, or Grey Hats. That and rumors is the most us people in the street know about them."


    "I see..." Guess in a world that powers were shaped by belief, desires and choices, hiding from Big Brother would be one of the first things people would want to do, right after the Most Common Superpower and the other Most Common Superpower. Three guesses what those were and the first two did not count.


    Could I use my powers to hide my identity if I ever wanted to? At that question I felt my awareness of forces and their interactions stirring, followed by the portion of my abilities that could make shapeable fields that adjusted forces within or exerted them outright. Finding any machines or people that observed me was... not really simple but doable. There would be patterns of interaction that correlated to or derived from other patterns in me, such as my appearance as generated by and transmitted through the electromagnetic spectrum.


    As it turned out, the power to perceive forces was not that useful by itself; finding anything specific was a crapshoot even with greatly accelerated awareness; it showed too much because forces were everywhere. I hadn''t made any advances in handling the full sensory input, so in the time-honored tradition of students everywhere I''d cheated. Giving our powers restrictions was something anyone with open-ended abilities could do because when a power did less it became less costly to use. But in the case of sensory powers, what if you restricted the sense to perceive only what you wanted to find? Classic example of Superman''s hearing; listening to millions of people at once would be useless, but if he could only listen to crimes or calls for help, it actually became useful. The logical counter to this was, what mechanism decided which sounds would fall under the restriction? Fortunately, powers didn''t have to obey causality or logic and Superman wasn''t driven mad by his super-hearing while I could detect as specific things with my power as I needed, only complicated by their being expressed as forceful interactions.


    And once those patterns were found, through them any observers effectively identified, then came the time for force fields. Long, narrow beams of force could be directed at them, either on command or automatically upon detection if I wanted to expend the effort and time to create a lasting construct.


    "Nope," I muttered, reining in the almost reflexive response from my powers. We were not setting up a "Detect observers and turn them to greasy smears" field, no matter how sweet the wailing and gnashing of teeth from all the gawking idiots losing their cell phones would be... because they''d lose more than cell phones. The idea was filed under the "What Would Dr. Doom Do?" folder, which had been steadily growing since my decision to bite the bullet and interact with humanity at large once more.


    Luckily, the sound of police sirens a mere two miles away provided a much needed distraction.


    xxxx


    "You can''t be serious!"


    The police had finally arrived nearly half an hour after being called. Tracking the police cars'' progress, I saw them stopping a few city blocks away from the Mall, completely beyond normal sight and not even entering the area. There they''d stayed for fifteen minutes, until several other vehicles had joined them, before proceeding into the lakefront and Destiny USA. The reason for that delay was now pointing several dozen guns at my face.


    "Drop to the ground with your arms behind your head!" the SWAT officer demanded quite unreasonably. "Drop to the ground right NOW!"


    I shrugged and did just that. "This is probably unnecessary, you know," I told him as a pair of troopers approached me with a weird contraption that looked like a pair of foot-wide rings linked together by two wires as thick as my wrists. It took me a moment to realize they were supposed to be handcuffs.


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    "Shut up, prisoner, and stop all power use!" I rolled my eyes - not that he could see with me face down - and did exactly as he so politely requested, no more, no less. The troopers roughly grabbed my arms and tried to put them in the handcuffs... ''tried'' being the operative word. They pulled and pulled and pulled, huffing and puffing from the effort, to maybe push my arms around a fraction of a millimeter.


    "Sir, the prisoner is resisting arrest!" the trooper shouted, and as far as he knew it was true. In reality, I was doing exactly as I''d been asked. Ever considered how Superman could stop a speeding train or push around large airplanes, how he could tank artillery fire or missiles without being pushed back? The same effect applied here, my inertia scaling to my strength passively. The troopers could no more manhandle me than they could manhandle a locomotive.


    "Prisoner, cooperate or we will use force!" the SWAT officer bellowed as two dozen rifles clicked ominously.


    "I am cooperating," I told them, still looking straight down to conceal my smirk. "Your inability to move me is due to passive resilience that doesn''t turn off." Someone was snickering and it was neither me nor the SWAT teams. We were also drawing an even bigger crowd now than before their arrival; the civvies could apparently smell the drama.


    "You will turn off your powers or we''ll shoot!" Well, somebody was being willfully stupid.


    "Go right ahead. I''m not going anywhere." More snickering from the peanut gallery. "Just get everyone watching to a safe distance so you don''t accidentally kill anyone via ricochets."


    More threats followed, as well as kicks, pulls and other minor violence. Nobody actually shot, which was better than I''d expected. As for the rest, since they didn''t actually order me to walk up and go wherever they wanted to get me, they were summarily ignored. Now all we had to do was wait.


    xxxx


    "Hot chocolate?" the redhead in the black suit, black boots, black tie and black sunglasses offered.


    "Thanks," I told him, taking a sip from the cup. It was very hot, slightly bitter, and only as sweet as it needed to be. Perfection. But just in case... "You do realize poison won''t work either, right?"


    "Whyever would we want to poison you, Miss Wennefer?" he asked with an easy smile. "If you had really wanted to cause trouble, the SWAT teams couldn''t have stopped you." His smile faded, replaced by a frown as he continued in a grim tone. "I''ve seen it happen, you know? When someone with powers cuts loose against... unpowered people. Twice in person, far more times than I''d have liked in recordings." He took a sip from his own cup, something with a lot stronger kick than chocolate. "The troops have, too. Those that aren''t new recruits, that is. New York was hit by a villain group the month before last, back when City Hall still thought we could handle the new Outbreaks ourselves."


    "Oh, I do not blame them," I assured him. Despite their stubbornness, the SWAT teams had been rather reasonable; they''d only tried to get me towed away once. "Sorry for the circus, by the way."


    "No, you''re not," he countered. "I can tell when someone is deliberately causing a scene to draw attention." The two of us watched the enormous crowd barely being held back by a line of struggling police officers. News vans from major channels and local reporters had arrived by the dozens, ignoring the light drizzle or the icy breeze coming from over the nearby lake. There was even a pair of news choppers flying overhead.


    "Well, I didn''t want to make more of a mess than the bad guy had done but neither did I want to waste hours being ''processed'' by whatever system you''ve set up to handle powered people." Because from what I''d gathered from the news and the ''net, it was a shitshow. The authorities had until recently been in complete cover up mode, scrambling to keep the magnitude of the disaster from civilians. Hard to do when half the state of Florida was still a wreck, the other half being even worse. Then new superpowered people had started appearing everywhere, like mushrooms after a rain. "Complying with lawful authority is all well and good, as long as said authority has a clue. I came to New York to help, not twiddle my thumbs in a cell while everything went to Hell in a handbasket."


    "A bona fide super heroine, then?" the agent smiled again as he asked, but it didn''t reach his eyes. He didn''t know that I could see through his sunglasses to the cold, calculating gaze beneath so he kept pretending to be friendly and approachable. "What, no plans to take over the world, or sacrifice virgins to boost your power? Just offering help to your country, no strings attached?"


    "Taking over the world sounds like too much work." As for the other, we both wished he was joking. We really really did. But he wasn''t. It had happened, almost certainly would happen again. "The reason I made enough of a fuss to draw your attention is that if I waste time with the fiddly bits, there''s less time left to actually help people. And since helping is all I''m interested in..."


    "The fiddly bits?" he asked after about a minute of quiet contemplation, but I could already tell I had him when I turned down world domination. The government really couldn''t afford to ignore help from supers. They wouldn''t have even under normal circumstances, but against hostile supers even more so.


    "Warrants, waiting for the police, doing after action reports, data analysis and crime scene investigations, flight plans, crossing state borders while carrying unusual cargo, keeping the newsies at bay, getting a new house, paying taxes, groceries and housework" I shrugged. "You know, the usual things superheroes in comics don''t do even though someone has to. Easy things for the government to waive or see done while I''m tackling giant monsters or kicking supervillain backsides."


    "You have given this some thought, I see," the agent nodded and gave me the first hint of respect I''d gotten since this whole debacle started.


    "More than just a little." Six months working out the stress of mine and my friends'' nightmare of an origin story, preparing for the changes the world would see. "Was I the only one? Everyone seems to be scrambling, reacting at best, doing whatever they think in the moment at worst."


    "It''s the worst disaster on record, cut us some slack," the agent played up his friendly disposition again despite the seriousness of the matter. "You think the Great Recession was bad? The pandemics? Compared to this, they were mere hiccups. There''s a guy in Denver that can brew plagues on demand extorting us a hundred million a day. Some super-hacker hiding behind a secret identity froze intercontinental transactions until we sent relief efforts to Orlando. Half of them were eaten en route by bands of roaming monsters. And then there''s shits like the one you beat that get a mind control power and go wild." He slumped, seemingly defeated. His eyes still were like two pieces of flint behind his sunglasses. "If you''re offering help we''ll take it, as long as your demands aren''t too unreasonable."


    The initial negotiations concluded as the drizzle turned into a proper rain, the water shower cold enough to freeze normal people to the bone. We shook hands. The good news was, I would not be arrested and would meet with his superiors in the new agency handling supers. The bad news... I''d probably delayed my reveal more than I should have. In retrospect, being there to prevent some of the... issues might have helped more than having all my ducks in a row, being as ready as I could be. Only time would tell.


    Recriminations later; it was time to be a superhero.

 03: Flying Colors

    "I just talked with my superiors and they agreed to a meeting in our New York facilities," the agent told me after I came back from retrieving my wallet and shopping bag. "We need to get there anyway to process the guy you beat."


    "How are we getting there?" I had my suspicions given what had landed on the other side of the Mall but confirmation would be good. "And what''s your name? I can''t keep calling you ''Agent''."


    "My name is Stone, John Stone," he told me with a straight face, straightening his tie and offering me his hand to shake. We did, very official-like, then we both smiled. "As for the coming road trip, all our teams travel by air. Driving is simply too slow to cover all the incidents while we''re still stretched thin."


    We made some small talk as we walked, but my mind wasn''t in it. I wanted to fly ahead, or at least run, because the whole day so far felt like it had been too slow. It was the hardest part of getting used to doing things like a normal person, especially after months of training with my powers. Imagine a highly energetic but otherwise normal person having to move at a literal snail''s pace; three and a half hours for a trip to the bathroom, two weeks of travel to get some groceries, a legendary journey of forty years to get from Egypt to the Levant.


    It was a good thing that the difference in mental speed could be largely made up by texting on the dozen cell phones in my bag at the same time. Handling them was good training for the telekinesis skill I wanted to develop, which for some reason sucked no matter what I did. Oh, it could do texting, juggling, or even slapping a guy across a street but trying to exert any higher force than that had it collapsing into uncontrollable shock waves... and I had no idea why. My awareness of forces didn''t reveal anything; since it was at least as good as my normal vision even working through objects, it should have. At least the texting was not going entirely to waste.


    "John Stone, huh?" I asked my escort as we approached the weirdly shaped aircraft at our destination. It had a broad, flat tail with two stubby vertical fins at the sides, two thick, only slightly less stubby main wings, and huge, helicopter-like rotors on the ends of those wings. From what I could see of the mechanism they were meant to tilt forward, making the aircraft a hybrid of a helicopter and turboprop plane. "Any relation to the WildStorm comics character of the same name?"


    "...OK, you got me," the redhead agent that had to be at least twenty years my senior said with a self-deprecating smile. "In my defense, my first name really is John."


    "Nothing wrong with wanting to use a cool line," I told him, marking the cell phone experiment a qualified success, if not in the goal it had been intended for. The sound and wind was picking up the closer we got to the were-helicopter, the rotors already powered up even before a quarter of troopers in military gear rather than SWAT had packed Mr. Shirtless in a harness of inch-thick cables. Frowning, I checked the harness and the comically oversized handcuffs again, looked up some cable specs online then shouted enough to be heard over the craft''s engines. "Speaking of lines, are you sure that handcuffs-and-harness getup is secure? Because finding it isn''t when the guy wakes up mid-flight and decides to flee would be inconvenient."


    "Don''t worry," John shouted back, the wind making his short-cropped hair shift in odd patterns in time with the rotors'' beats. "The cuffs are rated for superpowered prisoners and without leverage he''s not getting out of the harness either."


    "You don''t know that," I told him, stopping before boarding the aircraft and turning to face him. "In fact, you can''t know that unless you''re certain you''ve accounted for the entirety of his powerset." This being a newly powered person, nobody would know but them. "Those bindings are only two inches thick so they can safely hold a sixty-ton load. They can handle only a hundred and fifty at the outside, and briefly at that. And that''s if he doesn''t have a corrosive touch or other power to directly attack them."


    "...''only'' a hundred and fifty?"


    "Let''s just say I''ve fought stronger." Way, way, way stronger. "It would really help if you had someone with powers geared towards crafting make better handcuffs for you." The suggestion made John scowl as if he''d chewed on something bitter.


    "The LA group recruited a guy like that right after the invasion. It took him only a week to flip them and we nearly lost two more groups bringing them down." Beneath his ever-present sunglasses his eyes were glaring at things only he could see. "Post-battle investigations showed his metal enhancement could do more than just reinforce what he built. He could infuse metals with anything thematically appropriate. Something like steel could get enhanced toughness. Gold could get enhanced beauty and perceived value. But heavy metals? Turns out he could make those more poisonous, literally or metaphorically. He poisoned the whole team with infectious ideas like some sort of superpowered cult. We had to put the survivors on suicide watch for months until his influence faded." During the telling of the story his fists had clenched so hard his knuckles creaked, nails biting into his palms. "And that is why we don''t use power-wrought gear."


    We got into the were-helicopter with no more advice on my part.


    xxxx


    I crossed my legs, uncrossed them, tried to settle the belt in a way that would fit comfortably... failed. The designers hadn''t accounted for seven-foot-plus amazons, or comfort in general. I stared at the guy on the seat across from mine; he was somehow listening to music despite the cacophony of the engines and chewing bubblegum. Or maybe just chewing in time with some song he''d memorized.


    "Are we there yet?" I asked Agent ''Stone'', using my powers to be heard. He turned around and looked at me as if I''d asked something stupid.


    "We only took off a minute ago!" he shouted back to my great disappointment.


    I settled back in my seat. Then fidgeted. Then fidgeted some more. I reached out for my cell phones but there was no signal and I''d never been a fan of Solitaire or Minesweeper. Argh, this was taking too long!


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    Looking around with more than my eyes, I followed the play of forces over the contours of the aircraft. The intensity surpassed anything human bodies would normally be exposed to but as far as complexity went... they were simple. That was drag pushing us back, slightly compressing and heating the air all around. Aerodynamic lift and the plane''s weight balanced against each other. The propellers turning air resistance to forward impulse to pull the plane ahead. The balance of forces within the engines themselves, along with turbulence sending vibrations through the plane''s frame. The forces holding the frame itself together. The individual components were far more numerous of course, but all that mattered was their collective result.


    Hmm... what if drag was adjusted a couple dozen times down? Same with the weight of the plane, since now there was less aerodynamic lift. And then impulse magnified by the same margin... no, that would break the propellers wouldn''t it? But they wouldn''t break if we also adjusted cohesion forces along the entirety of the were-helicopter''s frame, making it a couple dozen times stronger...


    "Sir! SIR! Something''s wrong with the Osprey!" the co-pilot shouted and John got up to see what was wrong.


    "Show me!" the agent demanded over the sound of engines... that wasn''t as loud as it used to be?


    There was a good idea; why endure all the cacophony when you did not have to? Sound was just vibrations propagating through physical mediums and with the hull being basically held together far more firmly they were partially impeded. But why rely on a side effect? There, the forces caused by sound vibrations were reduced by a couple dozen times and suddenly everything was as quiet as in an underground cave.


    "...can''t rely on our instruments, sir! They''re reporting a speed of fifteen hundred knots!"


    Hmm, the hull was beginning to heat up. The engines too. This was probably bad for people that weren''t super-tough, so time for another adjustment. At its core, heat was no different from sound. Its vibrations - or collisions in case of fluids - were just a bit more chaotic. They also couldn''t be adjusted willy-nilly. Or rather they could, but then you had to deal with spontaneous combustion or absolute zero, depending on which side of the mark you missed and how much. So a small adjustment - a tiny one really - so with each movement atoms would lose a tiny bit of their internal energy until they settled into a lower equilibrium at... say... minus twenty Centigrade? Yeah, the process was still imprecise.


    "What the Hell are you DOING?" I found John shouting right in my face the next time I opened my eyes.


    "I''m making us go faster," I told him with more than a bit of satisfaction. "It''s two hundred miles from Syracuse to New York, it was going to take us forever with this slow were-helicopter thing you got. Now we''ll be there in a minute or two." He stared at me. I stared back at him. He stared at me some more. "You''re welcome," I added when it became clear he was at a loss for words. His response? He wordlessly turned his back on me, walked back to the cockpit and slammed the door behind me.


    Some people have no appreciation for a good speed boost.


    xxxx


    "...violated seventeen different laws and air traffic regulations, tampered with a machine you clearly were not qualified to fly let alone alter, put the crew and your fellow passengers at risk and under considerable emotional stress, and did all that without asking for permission or even warning anyone of what you were about to do," a man in military fatigues and so many medals I did not bother counting berated me through an eighty-inch plasma TV. Why would a secret underground facility hidden in an abandoned subway tunnel beneath New York City had need of an eighty-inch plasma TV, I was not sure. Maybe it was so people of high rank would look bigger and more impressive through it than they were in real life. The guy in his sixties doing all the talking - dubbed General McWhat''sHisFace since if he''d said his name I didn''t catch it - certainly seemed to believe himself impressive, but compared to several miles tall demonic invaders he had a long way to go.


    "Well?" he finally demanded when his overly-long tirade was finally over.


    "Well what?" I asked him, faking confusion.


    "What do you have to say to justify yourself?!" he insisted, apparently missing my point while thinking I''d missed his. Behind me, Agent John Stone facepalmed white at least one of the two technicians my age was struggling to contain his mirth. But since subtlety was apparently lost in remote communications, full explanations it was.


    "Why would I say anything at all?" I flew off the ground to be at the same level as the old man''s face in that giant screen, stared him in the eye and let the weight of my superhuman presence add to my words and said. "General, you seem to be laboring under the misconception that I work for you, answer to you, or have to follow your orders... or that I came here to do any of those things. I don''t." His expression soured and I bet it was far from the only one; if our conversation was not being recorded and analyzed six ways from Sunday then listened to by far more than just one guy, I''d eat my hat. And my hat was made of diamond... and about two hundred million miles from Earth.


    "The only reason I came here was because I wanted to help people. Because if I didn''t come to you first, told you what I''d be doing at least in general terms and opened some level of negotiations you would send your soldiers and military vehicles and that would mildly inconvenience my efforts to help." He did not deny it, of course; he was a military man and this discussion had caught him by surprise. Bald faced lies was more a politician''s job. "You, the government in general, could also do away with all the legalistic and bureaucratic inconveniences that would inevitably turn up when helping people." Because they would. "Like flight plans or crossing state borders when a supervillain is about to level some town in the Midwest. Using my powers to apprehend lunatics or prevent disasters when a legion of armchair analysts would be fear-mongering about what else I could potentially do with them. Or waste months trying to re-establish my identity or get a home when there''s so many more important things to do."


    "Laws exist for a reason, young lady," the old guy said. Contrary to my expectations though, he was neither angry nor laughing at my demands. In fact, his current expression of polite interest was making me think I''d somehow been tricked. "What makes you think we would bend them for you?"


    "Two reasons." More like five, but I was reserving the other three for when public relations failed. As the more cunning than his initial attitude would suggest general looked on, I retrieved two basketball-sized objects from my second bag. The first was an iron disc with a spike through the middle; when set on the ground, it started turning by itself balanced on the spike. The second was a shiny golden metal sphere a lot heavier than iron would have been. "The disc is enhanced with perpetual motion; it will keep turning forever and would take considerable force to stop. The sphere is obviously gold."


    Powers could help in a lot more than just punching things.

 04: Underground Flexing

    In the end, nothing was decided in that first meeting. Both sides had known it would be so coming in; for them it had been a first look at the only, to my knowledge, person with powers that had come to them rather than being recruited or being a surviving soldier that had fought in the invasion. For me it had been the one chance to set or at least influence the tempo of future interactions between the government and heroes. We''d both been wearing masks; what remained to be seen was how much either side had projected what they wanted to appear as and how much they''d perceived of the other side''s true colors.


    Both the gold and the spinning disc had been left for government scientists to examine. I doubted they''d find much. The former was a hundred percent pure, leaving no traces of where it had come from or how. When they realized where I''d spent the last few months they''d probably think it came from asteroid mining. As for the spinning disc, I''d given them the impression I could make simple telekinetic effects permanent. The good thing about fighting in melee like a brawler was how everyone saw you as one, then missed the implications of phrases like "force adjustment" and "force redirection". Unfortunately, the underestimation did not quite save me from my escort.


    "I can''t believe you tried to bribe your way out of paying taxes," Agent Stone said, incredulity warring with amusement in his tone even as his face remained largely expressionless. "I mean, what superhero does that?"


    "All of them?" We left the conference-slash-interrogation room behind us and moved deeper into the gloomy underground tunnel. The lack of proper lighting and the musty tang of the air made it seem more like a cave than a base. Or the base it will one day become, given how unfinished and empty every room looked. "I doubt a reporter could afford a giant fortress in the arctic and how many genius playboys declared their underground or orbital bases to the IRS? There''s countless crimes involved with being a superhero beyond the obvious vigilantism charges, which is why I wanted a government waiver in the first place."


    "I can already hear the arguments your requests are going to cause," the thirty-something redhead said with a chuckle. "Thank all the powers that be handling that is not in my job description." We were going through a part of the tunnels that was entirely empty, except for a power line just lying on the concrete floor and the occasional halogen lighting.


    "Speaking of which, what exactly is your job description Agent Stone?" Why had he been sent to follow me around and not, say, a group of guards? "And where exactly are we going? This part of the base doesn''t look very functional."


    "Most of the base isn''t," he carefully stepped over the power line then slowed down as we went on almost as if... oh, right, most people wouldn''t be able to see well in the gloom, would they? "One of the first areas completed was the gym, which doubles as a testing chamber. It''s the deepest and most secure part of the tunnels by necessity so most of the half-finished sections are between it and the working facilities."


    "Don''t you mean it is IN the deepest part of the tunnels?" Neither of us brought up the first question he''d not so cleverly sidestepped.


    As it turns out, he really did mean the gym was the deepest part of the tunnels. We eventually stopped before a metal wall that was at least six feet thick, with a vault-like, cylindrical door that was pulled back and rolled aside by heavy hydraulics. Unlike in a bank vault, the door itself was solid and significantly denser than steel; its eight hundred ton bulk made a horrible grinding, squealing sound as it was opened. Beyond it stood a series of contraptions that were still recognizably exercise machines... except the smallest of them was the size of a car and they grew in size the deeper we walked.


    This part of the tunnels was straighter and gave off a truly cavernous atmosphere, due to its lack of dividing walls. Beyond the exercise machines and other instruments the tunnel extended into the darkness for another half-mile, empty of anything except a giant obstacle course that seemed to be fused to the walls. Said walls were metal too, and beyond them was not concrete but a much stronger material between ceramic and organic. Had I been a chemist I might have discovered more but as I was not I could only rely on my awareness of forces for its rough physical properties, and the material''s name remained unknown.


    "This... is not a gym, is it?" At a second glance, many of the obstacles in the tunnel were shaped like vehicles of various sizes, others like the corners of buildings. What I''d thought were simple if narrow barricades had the images of people painted on them.


    "It can work as a gym," Agent Stone hedged and I gave that answer the respect it deserved by snorting derisively. "OK, it''s also an urban warfare course, made to somewhat simulate the crowded streets and narrow sight lines of a city. All of our research so far has shown that powers are fed through conflict, defeating opponents and challenges. If we could provide that even in part to any future recruits while also teaching them how to limit collateral damage... all projections said it would help."


    "Well, they weren''t wrong," but not entirely correct either and generalizations could lead to serious errors. Especially since powers were consciously or subconsciously tailored by their users, and may people with said powers would very much want to screw over the government. For friendly newbies though, the course could work... which they should have already known instead of relying on projections. Unless... "Just how many other supers have you managed to recruit?"


    "This facility is brand-new Miss Wennefer. Unfinished, even. There wasn''t time..."


    "Yes, yes, new facilities, forces stretched thin, you''ve said so before. But be honest with me; how many supers of significant power do you currently have on roster?" He quickly opened his mouth to give me a canned reply but I cut him off. "Those that are clearly more powerful or useful than a tank, across the whole country?"


    "...twelve," he finally replied and something told me that number may not be a very objective or even honest tally.


    This was going to be harder than I''d initially thought...


    xxxx


    The jaws of the titanic hydraulic press descended with glacial slowness, a metal cylinder as thick and wide as a washing machine seeking to reunite with its compatriot below. Between them, trapped as in the maw of a predator, lay a delicate hand of flesh and blood.


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    "Fifty!"


    OK, not nearly so delicate; I barely felt the pressure as hardened metal plate met my hand, and my hand endured. It was only annoying because of how long it took to ramp up, but the researchers insisted on going slowly to avoid "unfortunate accidents".


    "One hundred!"


    The mousy old Professor had an impressively loud voice for his size, but then he had to in order to do this kind of testing and still be heard over the whine of the hydraulic press. What he and his pair of interns were trying to do were to measure both my strength and durability with this simple test. I''d told them this was not going to work, that powers were not nearly as simple to measure but they had insisted.


    "Two hundred!"


    Agent Stone had, naturally, supported them. The government had wanted to test my powers ostensibly to better understand my capabilities and make use of me in the field. In reality, there was no way they didn''t have contingencies and countermeasures in mind. It was effectively the first clash in our tentative cooperation and we''d barely even met. On one hand, I couldn''t really fault them for being paranoid given the number of villains around. On the other, giving them an idea of my exact limitations could prove to be bad for my health in the future. But I had a plan for that.


    "Eight hundred!"


    As the amount of force kept ramping up, I was beginning to think the tiny Professor might not be a scientist after all. The hydraulic press was giving a read of eight million Newton for the total force it applied, so why was he shouting the equivalent in tons, which was entirely the wrong unit? Maybe some of the politicians secretly watching the live feed had no idea what Newtons were, or something. That thought made me smile despite being treated like a glorified Guinea pig by my supposed allies.


    "Sixteen hundred!"


    Oh well. If they insisted on being rude then I could be rude back. The pressure against my arm was beginning to become uncomfortable. Without force manipulation, a thousand tons were about the limit of what I could lift. By messing with gravity I could lift far more than that but that was less lifting and more making things lighter to begin with. Similar manipulation could magnify my punches or reduce incoming damage, but playing with physical laws wasn''t remotely the same mechanism as strength. Trying to spoof advanced instruments much further was going to get complex and eventually the Professor''s better knowledge of physics would get me caught.


    "Thirty-two hundred!"


    I winced. My powers however could be focused to achieve greater results in much the same way focusing the same total force could achieve higher pressures; the punch stopping against a wall but a hammered nail going in. Similarly, my Force Adjustment did not have to alter all forces upon me, or all the forces the hydraulic press could exert. It could be narrowed down to a single, specific interaction - the pressure exerted to me by the hydraulic press - as long as I was familiar enough with that interaction and had about a minute to adjust the effect. I was and I had so an alteration of physical law finally settled and that interaction was negated. Suddenly, my previously painfully squished arm felt all the weight on it going away.


    "Six and a half thousand!"


    From that point on it did not matter how high the pressure went; as far as my arm was concerned a feather would have more of an effect.


    "Twelve thousand!"


    The jaws of the press were beginning to creak ominously. Supposedly, the device had been rated for up to fifty thousand tons but that was for relatively even applications against materials that deformed or compressed; even normally incompressible fluids would if the pressure ramped high enough. Against an uneven surface that was completely immovable, the machine behaved quite differently. The tungsten alloy it had been made of was incredibly stiff and resilient but mundane matters had limits; I could already see microfractures forming.


    "Twenty-four thousand!"


    My own focus narrowed down as I brought a second ability to bear. The same second seemed to stretch on and on until with a crack louder than a thunderbolt the jaws of the hydraulic press shattered. For a room-sized machine capable of no more than four million Newton of force, such shattered pieces could bring down brick walls, shatter bulletproof glass and reduce people to bloody bits. For a house-sized machine failing at two hundred forty million Newton, the fragments could go through tank armor.


    Hundreds of fragments ranging in size from a dime to that of a medium shopping bag spun through the air, tearing through the protective barriers - two inches of transparent aluminum - as if they weren''t there. Then they rapidly slowed until they came to a stop in mid-air as time stood still. Well, not really; I was simply moving outside it. I got off my seat and flew towards the nearest intern. Every moment was as tiring as running around a city block would have been to an unpowered person. Less than it had once been, but still exhausting in the long term.


    The intern did not react as I scooped him up in a princess carry and moved him out of the room. Neither did the other intern, or the Professor himself; for them it would be as if no time had passed at all. Had they possessed any amount of supernatural power they would have been beyond my ability to move like this, but they didn''t so everything was OK.


    ...OK, not really. There was still the explosion to deal with. I flew at the largest, most dangerous pieces, those that would hit like artillery shells. Then I pushed them, not just moving them around but stopping their outwards trajectory. The smaller pieces were far more numerous though, and I was already beginning to sweat. Thus I took hold of the nearest wall firmly and reduced any forces it and any adjacent surfaces would take from the explosion. My influence spread like an invisible film and then I let go of my hold on the flow of time...


    xxxx


    "I told you it was not going to work," I was complaining to Agent Stone only a minute later while shaking metal dust out of my hair and clothes. "Tell me we got a bathroom."


    "This facility does, indeed, have a bathroom..." he said and trailed off.


    "And?" I glared at him in suspicion.


    "It... should be operational sometime tomorrow..." In an amazing showing of self-control, I held back from kicking his ass and then making him feel like I had just kicked his ass for the rest of his natural life.


    "Great, just great!" I threw my arms towards the concrete ceiling above and kicked a piece of transparent aluminum at the nearest wall. The wall being solid steel for at least two feet, the piece shattered into fine dust. Then the dust flew up and formed the word "FUCK!" in two-foot glittering letters in mid-air. "Do me a favor; next time you and your group of hacks have an idea and I tell you it is a dumb-ass idea, do listen to the expert with months'' worth of power use under her belt."


    "But it shouldn''t ha-"


    "I don''t want to hear it!" I interrupted him and got up. "I''ll be in my room, waiting for the rest of you to realize that powers are dangerous, unpredictable and none of you had any idea what you''re doing!" I stomped off for a good eight steps then stopped. "Hey, which way is my room in?" If everything went well, the fifty million plus in damages will make them rethink any further poking at my powers and hopefully make me seem more trustworthy.


    Because sometimes, for a hero to save lives the politicians had to be treated like mushrooms.

 05: Run Back

    "I could have flown in," I said ten minutes into the traffic jam. "It would have taken ten, maybe fifteen seconds." Thousands of cars took up the street further than the eye could see, standing bumper to bumper in what I was beginning to realize had to be normal traffic conditions for New York; the drivers were not nearly angry enough for it to had been uncommon.


    "And violated half a dozen laws in the process?" my driver for the evening asked then shook his head. "You''ve yet to receive authorization for low altitude flights over cities except in cases of emergency," Agent Stone quoted General Rinaker''s very specific refusal back to me. "Besides, do you even know where our destination is? New York is not as easy to navigate for first-time visitors." Well, there was that... and at least I''d learned the General''s name in the process.


    "All I know is that when I asked where my room was, I was told the base is not suitable for long-term habitation. Something about underground construction and concrete particulates, was it?" Not that it would have mattered to someone that had literally breathed plasma and survived, but they''d insisted. "And what''s with the brand new base? The government had half a year to get into gear since the invasion, this superhero outreach can''t be a new program."


    "It isn''t." The traffic broke up next to an exit and Agent Stone turned the company Prius into it. The tiny little car was in its element, taking openings larger cars would never have fit through, slipping through the lines like an eel... and at about the same crawling speed, unfortunately. Better than being stuck in traffic still, but not by much and the way the car''s doors and roof seemed to close in against my seven-foot frame made the trip more of a chore than ever. Fortunately, a distraction presented itself at just the right moment.


    "Agent Stone, why did a full Agent volunteer to drive me to my new home and not some... well..." I did not say the word ''grunt'' but both of us heard it. I kept an eye on Stone''s reaction to the question, and two more eyes on my surroundings. "Turn left here, by the way; the street is empty."


    "Huh, so it is. Your super-sight can turn around corners then?" the redhead asked as he followed my suggestion.


    "Force Awareness is not actually sight," I explained while looking both ahead and behind. "It is more like Proprioception. Oh and take the right, right again, do not slow when you see the red light as it''ll turn green by the time we''ll reach it, then no matter what ignore the idiot going the wrong way." He did as I asked and when we finally came bumper to bumper with the red pickup truck I shoved it off our path, killed its engine and bound the driver to his seat with invisible bonds of force. "Yeah, he was stupidly drunk but he''s not getting moving for at least two hours. Want to call the cops on him?"


    "No, I''d rather we got to our destination sooner than later," the very by-the-book officer told me and seeing an open road stepped on it. Curious and curiouser. "What were you saying about your Force Awareness?"


    "It works less like sight and closer to a database; it''s more knowing instinctively what''s around me than seeing it though it gets closer to sight when concentrating on specific things." Hence the many eyes. "Also, pull to the left after three blocks and rapidly speed up as much as you feel comfortable."


    "What?" He took his eyes off the road and the car swerved hard before he corrected it. It worked even better than I had in mind.


    "Never mind, we missed the exit. Keep going and I''ll tell you when something changes," I fibbed and he must have caught it because his eyes narrowed and his hands clenched at the wheel. It turns out not all government agents were good enough drivers for a highway chase. And now that I thought about it... "How come we''re using me as a GPS instead of a cell phone?"


    "Mobile phone use has been prohibited within ground vehicles in motion in the states of Alaska, Ohio, Illinois and New York, as of the month before last," he told me as we slowed down due to another traffic jam and I laughed. I could imagine how much grumbling and curses that particular law had caused. One more thing to put on the list for powers being great; never having to deal with this kind of bullshit myself


    "Hah, that was good," I said, wiping a fake tear as I settled on the seat and reached for my powers. We would be cutting it close but hey, I''d only come up with the plan two and a half minutes earlier; Agent Stone should be happy there was a plan at all. "Now, whatever happens, whatever you see or hear, do not stop until we get out of the city and keep all your limbs inside the vehicle."


    "What- no, I don''t need to know," he muttered under his breath and I nodded my agreement. Explaining would have taken too long, made it too obvious and could have messed everything up so instead of doing it I reached out to my powers fully for the first time in weeks. They all responded like little twinkling lights in the back of my mind, some of them dim, others blazing bright but all of them vibrant and instantly responsive.


    Once upon a time, my powers had been far less instinctive and closer to the dry and cumbersome mechanics of a page full of math. They had been rigid, set, measurable to the point I knew exactly what they could do. A near-death situation, an epiphany and six months of training later, they had become living things and far stronger for it. More extensions of myself - extra limbs - rather than something concrete, they had gained in many ways but somewhat lost in others.


    Proximakinesis, the ability to exert force on everything adjacent, and Force Adjustment, the ability to magnify or reduce existing forces on or around me flared instantly. Of all my abilities, they and Force Awareness were what I used the most. Immutable Force, the ability that resisted any changes not on the physical level slotted in almost as easily for it, too was becoming second nature. What wasn''t nearly as easy to grasp was Field Creation, the ability to apply other force-related abilities to a volume rather than their normal application. My powers shifted, not quite meshing as they should, then rearranged themselves so Field Creation and Force Awareness formed a pair while Proximakinesis, Force Adjustment and Immutable Force linked together in a trio that somehow gave off a sense of completeness.


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    If bringing out Field Creation felt odd, the next power sent tremors of dissonance through me. Lasting Force; the ability to extend the duration of any force effects, possibly even permanently. The power tried to link to the trio of Proximakinesis, Force Adjustment and Immutable Force and was summarily rejected, bouncing off around my mind and ringing my brain like a bell. Then slowly, almost tentatively, linked to Force Awareness and Field Creation, forming another triad radiating completeness.


    "Are you OK?" the redhead Agent asked, but I was too busy intertwining the two triads and get what I wanted from them to pay much attention.


    Comics depict force fields as physical things, objects made of some "force" or "energy" yet obtaining solidity. Actual force fields did not work like that. Picture the area a magnet can affect iron in or the Earth''s gravity well; that''s a standard force field. What I could do was similar, a volume where forces applied or were altered, intangible and also shapeable. This time I did not see a reason to shape said volume in anything but the standard spherical shape, with our car in the middle. Within that sphere, Proximakinesis would repel anything harmful moving above certain speeds. Making the sphere last for the next ten minutes was similarly if slightly less taxing than holding up the sphere myself for those ten minutes, as long as it was done slowly. Since this was a rush order, anchoring it to reality over a few seconds was more like mild exercise for the same time.


    That done, I raised a second field. This one would not exert force itself but adjust existing forces. The aforementioned Proximakinesis? Magnified. The cohesion and durability of the car? Also magnified. Any force on the car from external, non-environmental sources? Those would be greatly reduced, as would be any force speeding up anything towards the car. Those and a few other surprises were baked in and with another sacrifice of effort the second field became a lasting , intangible, invisible construct around the car itself.


    BOOM!


    The explosion shattered windows, cracked brick and mortal, upended cars and scorched everything nearby as something akin to a thunderbolt struck the car from the side... and fizzled pointlessly. No, not fizzled; the blast dissipated all around us, crackling lightning burning through the air. A thousand, a million or maybe more azure fingers reached for the car but turned aside before they touched it. Score one for force fields.


    POP!


    Compared to the prior detonation of thunder and lightning, the sound of the next attack was nothing impressive. The black bolt passing through the recently raised defenses entirely unimpeded, drilling through the car as if it weren''t there and clipping Agent Stone''s right ear was far more alarming precisely because it was nothing. More specifically, one moment I could feel air and glass and flesh in that volume, the next there was a vacuum air rushed in to fill. The car''s rear glass had a perfectly round two-inch hole cut into it and Agent Stone''s lobe-less ear was bleeding.


    POP!


    "Shit!" I drew the parking brake and held the car with Proximakinesis at the same time, stopping us so quickly our belts and the Agent''s ribs nearly failed. We did miss the second black bolt going through three cars, a tree trunk, a dog and the outer walls of a nearby building without slowing down. "MOVE!" I shouted at Agent Stone as I ripped both our seat belts off then blasted both our doors off their hinges. We got out of the car and a split-second later a third black bolt drilled through it lengthwise from bumper to bumper.


    "What..." the agent puffed as he dived behind a line of more parked cars. "What the fuck was that?!"


    "Null Lance," I told him as I peeked around the car to the right. The fourth attack clipped the side of my face and sizzled like acid.


    "What the fuck is a Null LaaAAA-" I dragged the confused agent along as I vaulted over several more parked cars, more black beams fired in our direction.


    "A beam that makes all matter it touches disappear," I explained, pointing at my cheek. Instead of instantly negating it, the attack had been slowed down by my resilience and defenses, leaving the skin, fat tissue and even muscle pockmarked with holes that hurt like they were on fire. "Did you see where it came from?"


    "No! All I saw was holes turning up where they shouldn''t." He touched his now slowly bleeding ear and hissed. "What''s going on?"


    "I was hoping you''d tell me." More black bolts, black not because they had a color but because they disappeared all light passing through them, shot out from our pursuer. "I noticed we were being followed halfway through our trip, thought it was a minder the General set after me or something." At least if Agent Stone could not see him it explained why most bystanders just looked around in confusion instead of screaming at the top of their voice.


    "General Rinaker doesn''t have the resources to waste on theatrics." He drew his gun, a tiny little thing that wouldn''t have done much against a zombie let alone our current attacker. "The attacker is fucking invisible, isn''t he? God, I hate super-snipers."


    A pair of clawed, scaled, digitigrade limbs pushed against one roof, then another, pushing a bulk the size of a bull elephant from skyscraper to skyscraper even as four limbs aimed a huge rod of gleaming silvery metal in our direction.


    "He cannot be normally seen, yes," which was a good thing; he was fugly. "Whether he was also breaking public decency laws... eh, fifty-fifty." The monster, for that definitely wasn''t and had probably never been human, stopped on another vantage point. "How close are we to my new house?"


    "How can you be thinking about houses while under heavy fire?" he demanded with incredulity.


    "It''s fun; everything you do should be fun otherwise why do it?" I smiled at him and gathered my powers for a different defense bubble. This would be the first time I tried to apply Immutable Force to something other than myself. I hoped it worked but if not... eh, we''d burn that bridge when we got to it. "Now how far is it?"


    "Four blocks? Six? You''re the human GPS, not me!" Agent Stone shouted, his eyes too wide as I pulled him aside from another bolt that skewered a trashcan and would have done the same to him. "Why?"


    "Because if it''s my neighborhood it is also my job to make bad neighbors shut up and sit down!"


    And with a laugh, I took to the skies...

 06: Entertaining Guests

    The moment my feet left the ground, I dropped Field Creation and Lasting Force off the roster of active powers and reached for two others. Being able to infuse objects or volumes of space with various applications of force was endlessly versatile and, if used correctly, very powerful but it was also both slow and costly. In a fight where the situation can change between one second and the next, I could not afford to be slow.


    In the distance, the electromagnetic field twisted into layers of alternating vectors down the length of a cylinder in a very familiar way. Compared to the field intensity of anything nearby, the unknown attacker''s weapon shone like the sun in my awareness, multiple orders of magnitude more powerful than even the electrical transformers in the city''s main power distributors. It was how I''d noticed the stealthed sniper over the clutter of New York''s electromagnetic emissions earlier, and having seen a similar effect before I did not wait for the weapon to be pointed at me to start dodging.


    Moving myself via Proximakinesis was closer to free-fall than flight; I could just choose the direction to fall towards. With force evenly applied, the only sensation of acceleration came from the howling wind against my face, its pull against my clothes. The freedom it offered paired with the weightlessness, the sheer speed and the awesome view as the people in the streets diminished to the size of ants and the city sprawled out beneath my feet... it really was an experience beyond words, one that deserved all the time in the world to be appreciated.


    Unfortunately, it was not to be; more than a mile away an electron beam was shot through a gauntlet of alternating electromagnetic fields, oscillated relativistically and shot out a beam of light that could have cored out a tank. The beam missed as I went through a supersonic barrel roll and I laughed, but it kept following me around, burning into the clouds above as it flickered to and fro. The briefest of touches disintegrated both my shoes and socks and left behind reddened, irritated skin... which was when the two powers I''d reached for finally got working.


    The first was the most visually impressive as everything I wore near-instantly melted into a thin coating of mist. It was not real mist; for one, it was not blown away by the wind. For another, it did not stay a mist for long; just as quickly as it had appeared it spread to hug my every curve before solidifying into a skintight, red and silver superhero outfit covering me from the neck down. The next time the energy beam got a glancing hit the new fabric was barely singed, less damaged than my skin had been. Superheroic pro-tip: unless you feel like getting naked every time you fight a real threat, find some way to make a durable costume with your powers. It might take months to get it right unless you limit yourself to single-color, one-piece suits but it''s definitely worth it.


    The four-armed sniper held their telephone-pole-sized weapon a bit differently and the electromagnetic fluctuations cut off. The weapon was hotter now than at the start of the fight, hot enough that tendrils of smoke spoiled their visual invisibility cloak. I took this opportunity to charge straight down at them, pulling enough gravities of acceleration that I shot almost as quickly as an artillery shell out of the barrel of a cannon then kept putting on more speed. The air boomed as I broke through the sound barrier, then settled into a dull roar of violent compression and rapid superheating I could still hear through my bones. Then the sniper''s weapon grew a void in my awareness, a narrow slice of volume in which no forces existed before shooting it in my direction.


    I intercepted the null lance with my bare palm, gritting my teeth as it attempted to chew through skin and soft tissue like an acetylene torch. That was when the second new power triggered and new skin grew over before I''d even flown half the distance to the sniper. By the time I''d reached the four-armed monstrosity, the burns across my face were well on their way to healing too. As in the tests and back when I''d first fought with this power, the Regeneration took in the damage and returned it as a jolt of energy like a dozen hot chocolate drinks charged up with lightning. I laughed again, the sound carried away by the wind, and the sniper shot me full in the face; that did nothing to stop my fist from slamming into their weapon at Mach seven.


    The weapon rang out like a giant gong, shattering windows within half a city block. More importantly, the shockwave broke whatever effect was keeping the sniper invisible, revealing the monstrosity in all its scaled, four-armed glory. It was the size of a bus and twice as heavy, a solid yet flexible mass of dull greenish scales, silvery semblance of flesh and glowing wiring. My awareness could not identify the materials it had been made of, but both their flexibility and durability far exceeded what was physically possible of normal matter, flexing to absorb the blow that would have crumpled battleship-grade armor.


    Four clawed arms the size of tree trunks grabbed the metal rod that was the futuristic rifle and used it like an oversized baseball bat, with me being the baseball. That single blow actually hurt, which made it more powerful than a tank''s main gun, possibly even as strong as my own diving charge had been. It also knocked me half a mile away before my own powers could adjust my trajectory. Then the sniper charged his weapon in a different way. Space itself seemed to bend within in, twisting like a coiled spring... or at least the three-dimensional projection of a more complex phenomenon looked like that. Echoes of that layered disruption of normal space spread through the weapon''s wielder and the monster stood before me between one moment and the next.


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    The swing that followed seemed to take no time, the metal pole leaving afterimages in its passage as if it occupied the entirety of the space it crossed and when it struck my palm it was with the momentum of a speeding train. The surprised expression on the sniper''s vaguely reptilian snout when their best blow came to a dead stop was hilarious.


    "That''s a cool trick and all but endangering the whole city to test your new toy is not." Grabbing both the weapon and its wielder with Proximakinesis and Force Adjustment I pulled us upwards and despite doing its best to resist the pull or even let go of the weapon the monster could do nothing but come along for the ride. "Don''t struggle. There''s no point trying to get this thing back," I told the remote operator controlling the mass of micro-scale cybernetics and staring at me through the hundreds of sensors built into the technological monster''s bulk. "You misuse it, you lose it."


    While I could see the control signal, it was quickly lost in the city''s unbelievably tangled network of communications, both wireless and not, and wherever it was coming from it had to be far enough away that I didn''t pick up any tech remotely similar to what the invisible monster had been made with. What compounded the problem was the amount of sensory devices built into the attacking machine. There was only one reason one would have literally thousands of different sensors, most of which did not seem to be working through conventional physics, and the longer this fight lasted the more the sniper''s unknown creator learned about me and my abilities.


    When we got so high up the air was no longer breathable for humans, I gripped and tore at the bus-sized monstrosity. Scales creaked but held, tissues that resembled both naked musculature and a tangle of piano wires bent, strained but refused to tear. The best steel wiring could handle three hundred thousand pounds per square inch and some materials could handle more; I was exerting ten times as much and the artificial creature''s body was holding up. Conventional weapons and most superpowers that applied mundane forms of damage would not be enough to damage it, which spoke of a design meant to counter just such threats... or hunt them down.


    The artificial creature strained again even as dangerous forms of radiation started building up within its body. In response I kept taking us higher and higher until the curvature of the planet spread beneath us and the faint blue of higher atmosphere gave way to the diamond-like clarity of space. The metal pole that was the sniper''s weapon gleamed an eye-searing pale blue as it discharged enormous amounts of gamma radiation and exotic particles in a futile attempt to poison and kill me.


    Finally, I decided we''d climbed high enough. At this point I could magnify my physical strength or reduce the structural integrity of my target and tear it apart without worry its irradiated insides would prove a threat to the city nearly three hundred miles below. I could similarly focus my Proximakinesis to narrow beams and drill it full of holes, or multiply vibrations in it until it melted from within. None of those or other similar methods were particularly quick though, which meant whoever had built it would get a lot of data on my abilities. With no idea of said creator''s identity, intentions or skills, giving them anything not absolutely necessary was a bad idea. The answer to those issues was why I''d brought us both so high up.


    The first step was to ditch Costume Creation as a power. My suit did not suddenly vanish, but without an application of Lasting Force I had no time to perform it did lose its exceptional durability and other special qualities. In the place of Costume Creation I brought up Focused Invulnerability. Becoming invulnerable to any one specific thing was extremely useful when you could choose what said thing was, even if it took an entire minute to charge up and solidify as an exception to physical laws as they applied to me. No, I did not pick anything the cybernetic monstrosity would do to be invulnerable to. Rather, I chose what I was about to do, or rather its consequences. Finally, I reached with Force Adjustment within the cybernetic creature I held captive.


    The only reason this application of Force Adjustment worked was because the target was not, technically, a living being. Something about being both alive and aware prevented my own powers from reaching within enemies and, say, squeezing their hearts or scrambling their brains with minimal force, or messing up biology, chemistry or physics within their bodies. It was a barrier I''d been told would eventually be surpassed with enough power, but until them most enemies would only have to fear largely external threats from me... but the cybernetic drone had no such protection.


    So I reached out to the strong nuclear force and begun to adjust it downwards. It was an application I''d tested mostly on rocks, with results ranging from violent disintegration to nuclear transmutation. Fun fact; the nuclear binding forces in atoms were roughly ninety-one times more powerful than the electromagnetic repulsion between protons. It was why nuclei with atomic numbers higher than ninety-one were always unstable, radioactive. It wasn''t the sole factor but it was the most important... so what would happen if said binding forces were suddenly cut to half? To a fifth? By a factor of twenty?


    Three tons of cybernetics and artificial flesh suddenly exploded. Every atom other than hydrogen or helium making up their mass suddenly found themselves incredibly unstable, with half-lives measured in picoseconds. For a few brief seconds a second sun shone in high orbit, a multi-gigaton explosion casting huge amounts of radiation out into space. Indestructible and immovable specifically to the effects of this explosion, my standing below said mass deflected a good portion of the blast upwards, creating a beautiful flare across the entire electromagnetic spectrum. The Northern Lights made a brief appearance across much of the East Coast, bright enough to be visible under the late afternoon sun.


    Then the lightshow was done and along with it my warning to other would-be supervillains.

 Interlude I: Shadows

    In a secure chamber deep underground, three men and two women sat before an ancient, bulky CRT screen, watching a video for the seventh time. The shaky images illuminated the gloomy area, reflecting against walls of rough, grey-black metal that seemed to suck all color and left everything appearing washed out like an old photograph that had stayed too long in the sun.


    The oldest of them, a tall, thin man in a military uniform with many medals was not looking at the video; he had, after all, seen it before. His cold eyes were watching his four companions, coldly taking in their reactions as the images of a brief, very fast-paced battle went by in what appeared to be fast-forward but was actually slow motion many times over. The middle-aged pudgy guy in the lab coat was staring at the screen with obvious hunger. The younger military man in the fatigues devoid of rank or other insignia showed no reaction, as he had been trained. The fifty-something civilian woman was in a bit of a shock, actually flinched when the most violent bits played. But the most interesting reactions of all in the old man''s mind were those of the youngest person in the room. If her clenched fists and flinty glare were any indication, the young woman barely had a handle on her rage.


    The last and slowest playthrough came to an end, the old VCR player clicking and clacking before starting the slow rewind of the tape. None of them spoke for a minute, digesting the new information. "Well?" the General finally demanded, disinclined to giving them more time. In his experience, this particular crew had a tendency to overthink things and if he allowed them too much time to stew they''d probably stop being productive and start sniping at each other... again.


    "General Rinaker, sir," the younger military man begun first. "What was the actual duration of the fight? Halfway through everything but the combatants looks..."


    "Frozen?" the General smiled mirthlessly. "Our new drones caught it with billion-frames-per-second cameras. From the moment the action speeds up till the explosion it''s only eleven and a half seconds. Both targets were hypersonic for the majority of the action." And wasn''t that a nasty surprise? Many supers could move quickly, especially flyers and teleporters but to actually fight at such speeds in melee was much rarer and often was the super''s only major ability. "Conventional countermeasures were deemed insufficient," which was the biggest understatement he''d heard in the past six months, "so this is where your areas of expertise come in."


    "None of our first-tier operatives would be more than a speed bump in a hostile encounter," the rank-less military man admitted with a frown. "Not even if we deployed all of them at the same time. Second-tier... we have a few that might land a hit but from what we have on her durability... no." He shook his head. "In an ambush or subtle attack they might manage it but not if we are on the defensive. As the other problem cases have shown time and again, numbers are least effective when working above their tier."


    "What I want to know is why she called those black bolts the drone was launching ''Null Lances''," the researcher interrupted. "There is nothing like them on record, or from witness statements, or even the conflicting reports we have of the invasion itself. The enemy did not use cybernetics or technological weapons, they used extradimensional energies."


    "Magic, Dr. Brown," the youngest woman said with the air of repeating something for the umpteenth time. "They used magic. You could tell from how they could raise the dead, summon monsters and control the weather."


    "Magic is just science we don''t understand," the Doctor countered. "There is nothing magical about creating tools to control previously unknown energy forms or enhancing peoples'' bodies to do the same."


    "Oh really?" The young woman gestured and a golden bar fell heavily on the steel table, making it ring like a gong. "When I do this I don''t control any form of energy. I don''t access cybernetic implants, or any other tools. I don''t apply any sort of new knowledge or methodology. Gold appears because I want it to appear."


    "And do you really understand what you''re doing? We humans have used our bodies for thousands of years before we learned how they actually wor-"


    "Enough!" the General interrupted the argument with a booming voice that could not be denied. "We''re here to come up with solutions to our many problems, not cause more of them by infighting. Dr. Brown, what did you discover about the items the target gave us?"


    "The gold was very lightly irradiated and contained trace elements not usually present in gold deposits," the Doctor said, eagerly accepting the change of subject. "Said trace elements formed microstructures that do not form during any known smelting process but exist in some naturally occurring minerals. From that we are fairly certain the gold was produced via nuclear transmutation of existing matter. We even tracked down the potential origin of the original minerals and you wouldn''t believe what we-"


    "The Seventh Fleet fought a giant monster off the coast of Japan the day before yesterday," General Rinaker interrupted drily. "The extent and capacity of my beliefs has been greatly expanded of late, Dr. Brown. Where did the gold come from?"


    "Meteors. It contained trace elements common in certain meteors but almost impossible to find in earthen minerals at the same ratios." Dr. Brown''s eyes gleamed with excitement. "We don''t know the specific point of origin, too much of the original mineral was transmuted, but it definitely wasn''t Earth. Either our new friend intentionally used a meteor rock to create her gold, or she can travel to outer space!"


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    "She caused a nuclear explosion over New York City," the older woman scornfully interjected for the first time. "That maniac is a loose cannon and definitely not our friend."


    "Technically, the explosion was not nuclear but an extremely intense burst of charged particles with no traces of gamma radiation. That''s why it was so easily caught by the planet''s atmosphere and-"


    "Nobody cares that it wasn''t nuclear, Doc," the younger woman shot back. "All we care about is that she could level a city if she tried. Every single person with powers has gone off the reservation at least once; it''s a prerequisite for getting powers because you either did something horrible or had something horrible done to you. Who''s to say they -we- won''t do it again?" The young brunette clenched her fists and the walls groaned. "That''s why we need to have a counter for anyone with powers above a certain level."


    "Speaking of which, Warden," the General spoke up again, "how goes the construction?"


    "Well ahead of schedule, General Rinaker, sir," she responded stiffly, as if trying to stand at attention despite still sitting at the table. "We can now contain first-tier individuals indefinitely, regardless of special abilities. Second-tier is still hit and miss but as the power-resistant metal we can produce becomes more effective we hope to complete construction of the second-tier facility within two months." The young woman''s -Warden''s- eyes flicked to the screen where the video had been played and she sighed. "However, we are still nowhere close to dealing with higher-tier threats."


    "That''s OK, Warden," the old man told her in a tired tone that carried the weight of all his six decades. "The best we can do is the best we can do. Sarah, what''s the word from our backers?"


    "Screaming for blood, running around like headless chickens, or hiding their heads in the sand depending on the faction. You know, the usual," the older woman said with a shrug. Her shoulder-length, thin grey hair added to her wrinkles and lack of makeup to make her seem older than she really was. "Our new problem child''s latest stunt is going to boost our funding by at least fifty percent in the short term, but long-term the economy can''t afford to support our current rate of development. In the face of continued enemy action their confidence is going to tank no matter how much nationalist bullshit we ram down their throats." She frowned. "That reptile cyborg thing was enemy action, right?"


    "Unfortunately," General Rinaker informed the group. "Added to the giant lizard off the coast of Japan, the fog-making spiders in Texas, and what we recovered from last month''s attack in Norfolk, we''re up to eleven incidents involving artificial monsters. Someone is making those things and deliberately targeting either our operations or high-value conventional targets with them."


    "Great, more crazies. Just when the Everymen and the Valkyries stopped bothering us and started their little spat, another group rears their brainless head," the Warden grumbled and both the Doctor and Sarah nodded in agreement. "At least this time they went for the bait and not for our bases." She looked at the others, the General most of all. "That was a baiting operation, no?"


    "Need to know, young lady," the General shot down that line of questioning but everybody in the room knew that meant ''yes''. "Doctor, what about the other artifact our new prospect left us? Any progress finding out how it manages perpetual motion?" Because while gold was a nonissue and knowing their new recruit had nuclear powers was important, engines that did not need fuel were a big deal.


    "Unfortunately, our tests were inconclusive," Doctor Brown admitted. "Nothing we tried has discovered any mechanism for how the disc keeps spinning. What we do know is that it isn''t any form of telekinesis or other effect that applies extraneous force. Our latest scanner can detect any kinetic manipulation down to a few nanojoules and revealed nothing. Stopping the disc or moving it around does not interrupt the effect either; it starts spinning again if stopped. Though if turned upside-down it will stop then start spinning in the opposite direction."


    "Keep working at it," the General ordered. "And look into developing a broader power detector, if possible."


    The rest of the discussion was just minutiae of individual projects that were of less interest to the General and more about exchanging ideas. These meetings were the only way they could do so as securely as possible, with the Warden providing the latest in power-blocking measures, the Doctor bringing in improved versions of analog technology information-manipulation and super-hacking powers could not affect and more mundane measures plus several layers of subterfuge disguising the fact that the meeting had taken place at all. By the end of the two hours they had available, everyone was somewhat relieved that their funding, security, powered forces and power research were going as well as they could have, under the circumstances.


    "That will be all, ladies and gentlemen," the General said. "Dismissed. Warden, stay behind for a moment."


    "Another covert assignment, General?" the young brunette asked as the heavy metal doors closed and sealed themselves with a loud hiss after her three older compatriots'' departure.


    "Not this time," the old man denied. Then he took out a cigar, lit it with a flick of his finger, then puffed out a small cloud of acrid foulness. The smoke shifted and momentarily took the shape of a five-headed dragon before being sucked in by the ventilation system. "What do you know about Maya Wennefer?"


    "...Sir?"


    "None of that, now," the General said, blowing out two more puffs of smoke. One shifted into the image of a horned giant stepping on skyscrapers that barely reached its knees, the other condensed into a bullet that struck the back of the giant''s head and burst it open. "I was in the command center back when we lost half the state of Florida, you know. Did search and rescue in the Hell left after the invasion, too, so I know quite a bit more than those that weren''t there that day." One last puff of smoke, taking the shape of a caped, catsuit-wearing girl in flight. "Is she who I think she is?"


    "Unfortunately," the Warden admitted as the scene of the giant being killed played again. "Any one of the original survivors would recognize her on sight. She probably was the strongest of us."


    "Interesting..." The General''s cigar turned to dust, the dust carried away by a puff of wind and into the ventilation system. "You will tell me everything you know about her. Then we''ll brainstorm all the ways our knife-edge balanced operations could be messed up by another original survivor and what we could do about it."


    "Yes, sir."


    "And Warden?" All the smoke in the room was sucked away into the ventilation by unseen currents. "Not a word to the others."

 07: Houses and Cards

    I looked at the building before me, then at the GPS on my cell, then decided that if this turned out to be a practical joke General Rinaker would be seeing everything purple for the rest of the year. The ''apartment'' the government had promised appeared to be a manor house and a huge one at that. Agent Stone was probably busy with all the paperwork I would not be doing so with nobody else to contact for information I just flew on ahead.


    A ten-foot brick wall surrounded grounds slightly larger than a football stadium, both it and the cast-iron main gate half-hidden within a copse of oaks and elms. The trees made an excellent job of hiding the three-story house from view, which only came into visibility once one walked through the gate proper... or if they possessed some form of penetrating senses. Architecture wasn''t something I had even passing acquaintance with but if pressed for an opinion I''d say the manor had to be over a century old. Its windows were glass in cast iron frames, its walls were brick and stone and mortar, and its interior and furniture looked like things rich old people would pay a hell of a lot to get their hands on.


    In short, it was the kind of house questionably-genius, probably-playboy philanthropists with way too many items hidden in their budgets would favor instead of the fortress of anti-bureaucracy I''d been hoping for. Worse still it was occupied, as I found out the moment I landed in the back yard.


    Heavy-looking gardener''s shears dropped from an old woman''s hands, barely caught in a force-field before they could prune her toes rather than the admittedly well-maintained roses she''d been fussing over. Two men about a decade younger than her late sixties also stopped to stare, but as they were in a van three hundred yards away and looking at a camera feed they could be safely ignored for the time being.


    "Miss?" the older woman rallied with commendable quickness - or appeared to. "Are you the new owner?"


    "That depends," I caught the shears from where they were hanging in mid-air and handed them back to her. "Are you one of Rinaker''s people?"


    "...what?" she acted a bit surprised.


    "Right..." More posturing I didn''t have time for. "The house is good, the garden was a nice touch, but you really shouldn''t have tried to pass as the gardener." I took hold of a bit of rosebush and gently bent it to show its underside and the remains of the thorns on it. "Most people wouldn''t grip it hard enough to crush, gloves or no. Gained any enhanced strength lately?"


    She stared at the rosebush, then at her hands, then kicked at the ground in frustration. Bits of brickwork cracked and she winced. "Can''t believe you made me in less than a minute!" she complained then her face began to bubble and melt like a candle in an oven. In a few seconds the old woman had been replaced by a tall, bulky man in his mid-twenties. his body already straining against his humble gardener disguise. "Told them it wasn''t gonna work but I didn''t think it would happen so quickly."


    "It wouldn''t have worked even if I hadn''t made you specifically," I told the spy with a smirk. "Huge house for the shock factor, one few people would turn down, but it comes with a maintenance crew because it''s so big? It was a bit too obvious, you have to admit."


    "You''ll turn down all this?!" the shapeshifter whose name and true appearance I still didn''t know demanded incredulously.


    "Nope! I''d just throw out everyone else," I told him. Then the field I''d applied to him when handing over the shears triggered and he was lifted twenty feet off the ground.


    "Now, wait a minute. Let''s be reasonaaaaaaaa-" A bubble of invisible force carried him away and not towards the main gate. General Rinaker wanted to play silly games, his people could win solo airlifts to the top of Mount Marcy. And with that, there was only one decision left to be made.


    Hot bath or taking out all the little presents the General''s people had undoubtedly left behind?


    XXXX


    In the end, neither the master bedroom nor the bathroom had cameras or other tiny electronic gifts left behind by the good General''s people, but that cursory examination convinced me the bath would have to wait for another day. When I''d first gained enhanced senses it had been in an active battlefield, where all my attention was taken up by inhuman horrors wanting to tear off my face. In the several months of quiet after the invasion, as I''d slowly gotten used to and trained with my abilities, most issues of everyday life had taken a backseat to the wonders of the wider, newly magical universe. Now that I was getting back to a more normal life I''d finally been confronted with one of the great mysteries of the world. What did Superman do all the times he wasn''t fighting off alien invaders? The answers were not at all comforting.


    "Fry you filthy multi-legged scum! Fry!" I cackled in glee as I turned pockets of air within the walls radioactive.


    Having already fried all the listening devices around the house was the only reason General Rinaker was not already on the warpath to take down the insane superwoman. Imagine being able to see everything you share your house with, from the spiders in the basement, to the roaches around the garbage disposal, to the wasp nest in the attic, to everything in between. Yes, including the four hundred and eighty-six bed bugs in your mattress, those two dead roaches clogging the water filter and the very much alive rat climbing up the sewage pipe. Hence this little foray into extreme pest control.


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    Even without any active defenses I could go to bed with a plutonium plushie and wake up feeling warm and happy; the radiation fields would only kill the menaces. However, unless I wanted to burn enough effort to make them permanent, the enemy would eventually return. If I did, electronic devices within the house would eventually get fried too, fabrics would fray and yellow, food and plastics would spoil and mundane visitors would get lethal radiation doses in about a minute. Thus for permanent pest control I needed to get creative.


    With Field Creation the largest volume I could affect was about two dozen cubic yards, an order of magnitude more than I''d been able to when I''d first started. That still was nowhere close to covering an entire house or even a large room but it didn''t need to be. By making the field as thin as a pencil it could be spread out to several thousand square yards and by using a dozen fields I could cover a complete sphere to a radius of fifty yards, just enough to enclose the house proper. Within that volume I weakened cohesion forces to almost nothing, causing any matter that would cross the field to be reduced to individual molecules and disintegrated. Then, before I actually cast the fields, I limited the effect to categories of matter I did not like; weapons, bugs, anything parasitic and/or infectious, non-civilian technology, power-enhanced objects I did not create, disguises, so on and so forth.


    Making the fields permanent with Lasting Force was far simpler when it didn''t need to be done in the middle of a fight. Instead of burning enormous amounts of effort to force the effect to stabilize near-instantly, my power could flow into the result I envisioned over a longer period. The longer the period the easier things became; limiting myself to fifteen minutes per casting was like a normal person keeping up a good run for the same time, given the difficulty and extent of the field. All in all, by the time I was done with phase one I''d worked up loads of sweat, I was famished and felt like taking a short break, so I did.


    Peanut butter and corned beef over white bread, with a side order of hot cocoa; the breakfast of superheroes. And the good General won back some lost points for leaving the kitchen well-stocked.


    Phase two involved doing everything all over again, this time for a field of Proximakinesis rather than Force Adjustment. This time it was aimed against people. Nothing nearly as lethal as disintegration, or as complex as applying the effect to specific categories of people. It was a simple repulsion and it would affect everyone that hadn''t been directly and personally given permission to cross by me in the past twenty seconds. No passwords, no keys, nothing that could be changed or hacked even if I wanted to, unless someone could mess with powers directly. Without Force Adjustment to enhance it, someone as strong as I was could simply walk through. However, the ''barrier'' could still push back with several hundred tons worth of force and as it had no physical substance it couldn''t be attacked through conventional means. The vast majority of people would be unable to get inside to annoy me, no matter their rank, authority, wealth or press credentials.


    There was a reason lots of heroes had their version of a Fortress of Solitude before they started their heroic careers; it paid to be proactive with those things.


    xxxx


    As every homeowner will tell you, the number one expense after taxes and fees was utilities. Taxes and fees were easily dealt with by not having a bank account for them to be applied electronically, not letting anyone in to demand them physically, and having an understanding with the government that it was less of a headache for them to waive such things than having me deal with economics. Theoretically, the same understanding applied to utilities. Practically, trusting the government to prevent blackouts when you were taking hot baths or watching your favorite TV shows was a fool''s bet.


    Power was the easiest to deal with. All it took was a generator, a tiny Proximakinesis field that gave it perpetual motion and another one of Force Adjustment that made it effectively immune to wear and tear plus completely silent, and a plug to gain energy independence. It was the other three utilities that proved more complicated.


    Water could theoretically be gained through filtering sewage or other fluids. Practically, however clean that might actually be, I was not going to do it. I wracked my brain for other solutions, but all had either accessibility issues such as desalination or resource and legal issues such as drilling for it. About an hour into my brainstorming I remembered the number one byproduct of air conditioning units and the rest was history. A proximakinetic bubble served as both filter and pump by preventing the passage of most gases and particulates... but sucking in water vapors. It also acted as a condenser since it gathered more and more vapor until it got full of water. At that point, running a pipe from it to the house''s water supply was simple enough. It could produce roughly four tons per hour until it reached equilibrium and automatically started production as soon as I took some water out.


    Sewage was a nonissue; I ran everything through a disintegration field, basically instantly turning complex and smelly organic (and other) waste into matured fertilizer. A field to separate heavy metals was the only speedbump and that only because more than actual heavy metals needed to be reclaimed. The Thorium nitrides were stockpiled for future nuclear transmutation experiments. Everything else... eh, I might make an automatic transmuter when the basement overflowed, or something.


    The only utility that I could do nothing about - yet - was cable and internet access. Theoretically, I could pick up the signals just fine and make fields to transmit my own. Practically, I could more easily juggle Mt. Everest than make even simple programs so using my powers to interface with communications would probably take a few years and/or decades. I''d have to negotiate with Rinaker for them, probably, which meant having to listen all about how he had to save his guy from Mount Marcy via helicopter or something.


    Oh well, those were future Maya''s problems. Now it was finally time for that government-free bath.


    ...which was when my cellphone rung.

 08: Meet and Blast

    "This better be important, Agent Stone," I said in lieu of greeting while I reached for my powers. Since it probably was and a relaxing bath was no longer in the immediate future, Force Adjustment reduced friction and cohesion of everything in contact with my skin that wasn''t clothing or a phone. The normally imperceptible layer of grime, sweat and less pleasant things all of us accumulate over our daily lives disintegrated and fell off, leaving my skin and hair perfectly clean... but it still didn''t even come close to a bath in the relaxation and comfort departments.


    "One of our bases is under attack and local forces are getting overwhelmed," he told me and I immediately took flight even as I used the one power that made me a superhero more than any other. Halfway to the nearest window my clothes were already melting and shifting. "How quickly can you fly to Alaska?" By the time Agent Stone asked his question, they had already shifted into a skintight, aerodynamic, full-body suit from my neck to my toes, hugging my every curve but leaving my head open to the air and my long golden tresses free to dance in the wind. A bit vain? Well-earned if it was.


    "In less than a minute, but we need to be done with this call first. Anything else I should know?" I informed him even as I hovered half a mile above the ground already. Prior experience had revealed that cell phone networks started to have issues beyond this height, and flying at any speed made it worse. Any faster than a mile or two per second and the network simply couldn''t keep up.


    "The base is a testing facility for people with low-end powers but last week they found a pair much stronger than average. Our analysts think that''s why the facility was targeted now." Gee, he thought? Eh, he was a government worker; stating the obvious was part of his job. In the meantime I''d brought up a few maps of North America in general and Alaska in particular and committed them to memory. I was still pants at Geography, but powers had improved my memory enough it might as well be photographic in the short term.


    "Hostiles?"


    "Four crystalline non-humans making weapons malfunction and capable of cutting through tank armor with effort. Two women and one man, all masked and hanging in the back, powers unknown." Great, more supervillains. If they were taking on a military base they weren''t pushovers like that idiot in the Mall either. "The attack started three minutes ago, taking out the hangar by surprise, then cutting down both land vehicles and crews rushing to them."


    "Then there''s no time to lose. I''m off," I cut him off, put the cell under a small safety field in my belt and launched myself straight up. The pop of a breaking sound barrier came almost instantly, the rush of wind quickly turning into a roar even with Force Adjustment reducing air resistance as much as possible. In moments I was higher than most commercial airplanes would ever go. Just a few heartbeats later and the bulk of the Earth''s atmosphere was forming a glorious azure dome beneath my feet.


    For a moment it seemed as if I was standing still, the air thin enough at this height its resistance could be negated entirely at my current speed. Weightless in the silence of space, I took in a view that would never stop leaving me both in awe at the beauty of our home and determined to protect it. Then I really dipped into super-speed. Proximakinesis pulled me with a force of several hundred tons towards my destination. Forced Acceleration magnified the speed at which all forces produced results on me, effectively making my personal time go a few times faster. Force Adjustment magnified both effects by more than an order of magnitude.


    From one heartbeat to the next I was pushing against a river of fire, friction and air resistance creating a sheath of heat more intense than the surface of the Sun despite all I could do to limit it. That Force Awareness could see thought it meant I would not be ramming any satellites at a hundred miles per second, but only just. From the state of New York to Alaska I wrote upon the sky a line of fire. Three and a half thousand miles crossed in under half a minute, the faster I''d ever gone without stepping outside of time entirely.


    Could I go faster? Certainly. But the side effects were nasty enough I was not willing to risk it. Space, especially space near planets, was by no means empty. The thin atmosphere was already hot enough to leave me sweating but the real problem was debris. Dust, micrometeorites, even a small pebble could become dangerous if one went fast enough. How dangerous? At the speeds I was going a one-gram pebble would hit as hard as a cruise missile and while I could shield myself from some effects of those impacts, I couldn''t do the same for others. My first deep space flight had proven that and made what I''d thought would be a short hop into something longer.


    Twenty-nine seconds after my conversation with Agent Stone ended, I was already diving towards a snow-covered, forested hill, and explosions and fires large enough to be visible from space...


    xxxx


    The forest was on fire and it was the attackers'' fault. If fighting in the invasion had taught me anything was that environmental factors like fog, smoke and temperature differences had a huge impact upon both normal humans and most technology. However advanced their gadgets, unless they had powers people were basically blind when near a large fire. Vehicles, military or otherwise, had similar issues because fireproofing them was bulky enough and expensive enough it would be all they could do, making them next to useless for actual fighting. Conversely, actual fighting vehicles were not fireproof, not to the level of driving through a serious wildfire.


    This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.


    Which made the raging inferno surrounding the hidden military base a smart choice for the superhuman attackers and bad for the rest of us; smart enemies were the worst enemies. Even as I slowed my approach to avoid killing people through an explosive landing, I could see groups of soldiers hugging any surviving cover religiously as they tried to shoot through a thickening layer of choking smoke. Good news? Most of them wore gas masks so the smoke was less of a danger than it''d otherwise be. Bad news? Every single weapon I could see kept jamming no matter what the soldiers did - and they did a lot.


    What Agent Stone meant by "testing facility for low-end powers" was that many of the soldiers had powers that enhanced combat ability. Some of them were covered in force-fields about as strong as inch-thick steel plate. Others were strong enough to carry autocannon that weighed over half a ton if you included the ammo. Many could enhance their weapons with various energies, though my Force Awareness couldn''t see exact details. None of that helped because the guns failed to fire, clicking uselessly again and again. Some were not working at all, others had odd things happening in the firing chamber. The result was the soldiers having to retreat again and again as four almost elephant-sized, bat-shaped things seemingly made of petrified amber went from defense position to defense position and tore everything they could reach apart.


    Seeing one of the monsters reach through a pillbox, slowly tearing reinforced concrete open like unfolding a present to reach at the soldiers taking cover within, I aimed at the monster and charged... then a split second later crashed into an invisible wall that knocked me out of breath. No, not a wall; it wasn''t anything physical. It was more like trying to fly through molasses, the air itself simultaneously being impossibly thick and viscous as well as perfectly normal. Force Awareness revealed nothing; there was nothing wrong with the forces trying to accelerate me, I simply seemed incapable of going faster than an Olympic sprint no matter the force.


    The monster had ripped the pillbox open, already stooping low to dive through the opening and I couldn''t fucking reach it! So I reached for Forcefield Creation, paired it with Proximakinesis, and lashed out with a beam that could core through a tank. Unfortunately, whatever strange power was slowing me down also kept the field from extending, reducing it to a crawl barely ahead of my position. The monster''s arm was closing around a soldier''s torso in slow motion as I put everything I had into moving faster, then the world blurred.


    No, going faster had not worked. Using Chronal Leap to send me where I''d be a couple of seconds in the future however had, so I did it again and again until I was in arms'' reach of the monster. Its enormous claw had engulfed the screaming soldier''s torso but I came out of what was basically teleportation swinging, my fist going through its center of mass with such force the monster''s amber-like body shattered into thousands of tiny bits... bits that moved through the air in unnatural slowness, like a bad bullet-time effect in a b-movie.


    The soldier was trying to say something in slow motion and I realized my mind was still working as quickly as it should have; whatever was slowing everything down was only working on my physical position alone, not internally. That meant it wasn''t a temporal effect, and it wasn''t force or my senses would have picked it up. There was something akin to a shadow, a little film of interference between me and my surroundings, at the very edge of perception not in sight or hearing or smell, but something more tactile. The ghost of a pressure that was like force but wasn''t a force... which powers being what they are, left too many damn possibilities open.


    "Have everyone pull back to the main building," I told the traumatized soldiers once I dropped out of the no longer useful superspeed. "The attackers will be dealt with." Whether they listened because they knew who I was or they had been scared enough by the monster to take the first way out I did not know and did not have time to worry about. I blinked to the second monster, one tearing into the only vehicle hangar still standing. It either was no faster than a normal person or the slowing effect was non-discriminatory, because it didn''t react fast enough to my appearance behind its back. Like the first, it went down to a single punch, shattering into yellow shards no harder than ordinary stone. If the defenders still had use of their guns the monsters would not have been a threat at all.


    The remaining two monsters charged at me through the smoke, again moving no faster than normal men at a dead sprint. Their limbs were longer, their loping gain sent them further with every step. but their individual actions were slower than normal, as if moving underwater. A pair of Chronal Leaps and casual punches shattered them to bits... then a strange purple beam burst out of the smoke and struck me. Much like the slowing effect, it had been entirely invisible to my Force Awareness because whatever it was was not a phenomenon of physical forces. Unlike the slowing effect, it was intensely disorienting and unpleasant. Imagine going through insane, balance-destroying aerobatics as a normal person; your guts writhing, your ears feeling like they''ll burst, your every sense feeling like it''s been twisted around. To that add the worst migraine in your life and a military-grade taser and the combined result might approach the purple beam''s effect.


    It only lasted for a few moments, enough to knock me out of the sky but immediately fading as my superhumanly fast recovery got to work, cutting what would probably have been hours-long incapacitation to only a few seconds. When I got up, a trio of teenagers were walking through smoke and fire and rubble with not a care in the world. Two boys and one girl, still with the athletic slimness of youth under the skintight, matte black costumes that covered them from head to toe.


    Unfortunately for their attempts at a secret identity, my senses cut through their costumes to reveal a broad-faced, blue-eyed boy with short-cropped hair the color of straw and a shit-eating grin, one more serious and narrow-faced brunette with a cute sprinkling of freckles, and another arrogant-looking brunette with the kind of superhuman beauty one often saw in those with powers, especially us girls. I immediately hated her smug grin, not that more reasons were required for the righteous face-punching she was about to receive.


    With their minions out of the picture, the supervillain trio had finally entered the battle...

 09: Hollerith Trio

    In the comics, fights between superpowered beings are often evenly split between banter and action. They''re clashes of ideology and goals as much as they are physical contests, with the victor just as frequently being decided through the moral high ground and persuasion as anything else. The closest real fights come to that is the posturing between gang members or personal rivals, between people that have many more commitments than just the fight, that lack training, that may in the end shy away from lasting conditions on themselves or others.


    The way the trio stalked up to me, with the presumably physically powerful guy taking center stage while the two girls with less direct powers hanging back to support him at a distance while they said nothing, it was already clear this was not going to be one of those fights... if the destruction and loss of life they''d caused hadn''t already clued everyone in of the fact, that was. Their stance and coordination spoke of practice or at least familiarity with fighting as a group, if not necessarily extensive experience. But their tactics also made clear who their heavy hitter was and that whichever of the two girls was responsible for the slowing field, they either were overly cautious or weren''t as confident in their defenses vs a single opponent.


    I was content to let them get close instead of moving out to meet them. In the meantime I used Force Awareness to get as much information as possible to adjust my tactics accordingly. The problem with all serious fights was twofold; first, the sheer variety of abilities that existed meant that one couldn''t rely on a single plan because you couldn''t know what enemies could or would bring to bear. Secondly, unless killing was on the table from the get go, one shouldn''t hit enemies fast and hard because one couldn''t tell whether they could survive any given attack or power. Being able to perceive physical forces gave me a great advantage in such situations because many powers relied on physical components and because durability was a result of such forces.


    Specific powers aside, superhumans had almost universally better bodies than humans. The two girls in the back were tough enough to be largely bulletproof and had the kind of false density that let them take a hit from a truck and not be sent flying but not much more than that. They also moved in a choppy, fast-forward-video kind of way that spoke of boosted speed without the agility to match. The huge guy taking point was another matter. His frame appeared to be denser and tougher than a wrecking ball, with inertia to match; a tank could hurt him but not lethally and if he got his hands on it the tank would be shredded in little time. There was also an odd echo around him, his image flickering in my perception. Far more dangerous than the idiot I''d fought in the Mall, but not as much as the invisible monster... which made no sense with the amount of destruction around the base.


    It was that last bit that made me decide to dodge his first exploratory blows, while settling on which powers to use. Proximakinesis, Force Adjustment and Force Awareness were a no-brainer, easily slotted into the first triad of available power "slots". Forced Acceleration was mostly useless with the slowing field in effect so it was set aside in favor of a more conservative approach. Immutable Force formed an invisible bulwark around me, fighting against any power that tried to directly alter my body or mind. I felt it seeking out to the slowing field but if it made any difference I could not tell; the hard way it was, then. Keeping it, I filled the remaining slots with Empowering Regeneration and Chronal Leap.


    "Tag! You''re it!" the bad guy shouted when I dodged a telegraphed uppercut of his, only for a far more sneaky right cross to come under my blocking arms. I tried to dodge again, but the slowing field limited my speed in a way that messed with my every move, something the attacker was both used to and getting advantage of. His fist slammed into my ribs with the force of a tank''s main gun... which shouldn''t have hurt nearly as much after being diminished by Force Adjustment. I reeled, feeling as if I''d tanked the blow without using my active defense at all.


    Glowering at the shit-eating grin I saw through his mask, I returned the favor with a bit more force than initially planned. A tank would have been beercanned by that blow, even the largest wrecking ball ever seriously dented and hurled over the horizon. That did not happen with my opponent. Instead, my fist came to a dead stop, its kinetic energy vanishing. No, not vanishing; it was split to two dozen smaller packets which were subsequently converted to some other form of energy instead of pulverizing superhuman flesh and bone. If I hadn''t been watching closely I''d have said the effect was identical to my Force Adjustment, but no.


    The bad guy capitalized on my brief surprise to shock me in the jaw. Even as his blow''s force was reduced by my Force Adjustment, the blow itself seemed to overlap two dozen times. The net result was an actual increase on the force he delivered so while he was still physically weaker than me it did manage to hurt... for all the good it would do to him.


    Before I could retaliate, the black cloud the girl with the arrogant expression under her face concealing mask had conjured finally reached and engulfed us. It, too, was being impeded by the speed limiting effect, but its other abilities did not seem to be. First, while it appeared to be entirely intangible it could exert physical force about on par with a several-hundred-horsepower engine. This might not seem like much where superhumans are concerned... until it is focused down on strangling a target or drilling through their eyes. Against me it tried to do both... to no effect since Force Adjustment and my normal resilience were enough to handle it. Then, it tried to freeze me solid by draining away my body heat... but Immutable Force blocked it entirely. Even with its direct offense failing it would have been crippling against most opponents due to how it absorbed light, heat and sound, leaving them blind and deaf... but Force Awareness was already better than my other senses in a fight and all it did was make the battlefield less distracting.


    Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.


    The big guy I creatively dubbed Big Guy for his raw melee power did not stop attacking when his partner''s black cloud engulfed us both, his balance and accuracy undiminished. The other girl, however, did not. Either the cloud blocked her senses... or she was the source of the slowing field and it was her only power. Considering the field could affect me with no apparent strain, it being a solo ability of very great potency made sense. And with that bit of critical information, a plan was already forming.


    Big Guy went through well-practiced martial arts forms I couldn''t even recognize, let alone match. On the other hand, my Proximakinesis allowed me leverage and attack angles impossible for a human body that still had to play ball with the laws of physics in everything else except scale. Skill fought against impossible leverage and skill won, with a two to one ratio of solid blows to his advantage. Every time I hit him the kinetic energy was split then absorbed, every time he struck his blows were both divided then multiplied by our respective powers with a little bit going through... exactly as intended.


    In the meantime Shadow-Girl had settled into another tactic. Instead of trying to freeze or strangle me, her cloud was now trying to cut through the back of my neck, first with what felt like an industrial saw, then with a force akin to a giant drill, then with a laser. Most of my regeneration was focused on stopping her from succeeding, because her output seemed to be growing. No, she didn''t have a dozen different powers like me. It took me a minute to realize, but like the other girl she had a single, very strong power; within a given volume she could redirect and transform energy. It looked like a black cloud because she absorbed sunlight, it could freeze and deafen by absorbing heat and sounds, and it could mimic various attacks by delivering the absorbed energy in various forms.


    The problem? The longer the fight lasted the more the cloud spread and the more energy she had to redirect. She was already tapping into the raging fires in the surrounding forest and the air currents around us, enough energy to rival a medium-sized power station. Thus, the next time Big Guy tried to punch me, I let him... and when his fist drove into my ribs, I caught it with Proximakinesis. His own powers reacted, Proximakinesis splitting as if trying to hold two dozen guys, while any kinetic energy it applied was absorbed.


    "Ah, I see. There''s two dozen of you overlapping in the same space," I exclaimed because yeah, it was a rather cool power. "When I hit you you split the force across them so each of you takes less than a twentieth the blow, when you hit me you combine your blows to one two dozen times stronger. Neat!" He tried to pull back, grunting, huffing and puffing and... accomplishing nothing in the end. "Your second power though? Kinetic absorption is not nearly that good. Even against direct force it has things it won''t work against." It was my time to smirk as he stood there, motionless. "Like, say, someone trying to hold you rather than punching you," I informed him before holding his chest immobile as well.


    His previously disciplined attack devolved to a frantic struggle. With our multiplicative powers working in opposition the net result was his base strength contesting with my Proximakinesis, which scaled beyond my own body''s base strength. Not only was I stronger than him to begin with, but the more and longer Escalating Regeneration worked to heal me, the more powerful I became. Our little duel was a foregone conclusion; all I needed was to wait out a body that might be superhuman but was also heavily exerting its every muscle to break my grip.


    Shadow Girl tried to help by shifting her cloud''s energy output to moving him. Her every attempt to break my grip however was either diminished into uselessness by Force Adjustment when applied to me directly, or was split and absorbed by her comrade''s own powers. So she tried to get clever. First my head got hit by impressively powerful Radio waves; apparently she was trying to kill me the way Radar stations would kill birds and small animals.


    It was less painful than her attempts at a laser, though the result was closer to a serious migraine than a burn. The nausea it came with was the worst bit and it even gave me a nosebleed. Against someone as tough as I was that could not regenerate it would even have worked if they didn''t prioritize attacks on her but here, no dice. Scowling, she shifted to radiation and a good, relaxing, full-body warm-up.


    "Bitch, please," I mocked her with a laugh. "I''ve stood in the heart of nuclear explosions. Your little tantrum will, at best, give me a nice tan."


    She did not give up. As the extent of her cloud slowly ramped up, tapping into the heat and light of more burning trees, reaching to higher and faster air currents, so did her output become more lethal. But the more injuries she piled up, the faster my Escalating Regeneration healed them and the more powerful I became. Two minutes later, Big Guy stopped struggling against my grip. Shadow Girl made a last-ditch attack of light and sound that was brighter and louder than all flash-bangs in the world combined. It deafened, blinded and hurt me but it was only temporary and I did not need to see or hear to finish this. Fifteen seconds after that the fuzziness around Big Guy''s body winked out, his neat overlapping power turning off as he fell well and truly unconscious.


    I let him flop bonelessly to the ground, scanning his body with Force Awareness. Like every physical powerhouse I''d fought before, he seemed to have a good measure of enhanced recovery, though not to the level of in-combat regeneration. Safe in the knowledge that any wound he could crawl away from wouldn''t kill him and no longer having his stronger power interfere, I broke both his legs at both ankles and knees. Recovering from that would take days and by then he''d be in custody and not my problem.


    "You are done," I told the two female supervillains, then used Chronal Leap to effectively teleport closer, slowing field or no slowing field...

 10: Questions and secrets

    Chronal Leap transported me just behind my target. Not Shadow Girl, who had proven to be the most offensively powerful of the supervillain trio but the other woman, the one I was ninety percent sure was the source of the slowing field. There was no sound, no flashy lighting; one moment I was standing over an unconscious Big Guy, the next I loomed over the smallest supervillain''s back, already reaching out in the annoyingly slow speed the field allowed.


    Somehow, despite the darkness her partner had been creating, despite being apparently taken by surprise, the smaller woman dodged. She ducked under my arm without having to look, then moved around me in a burst of speed and agility that would have left the Big Guy in the dust and left me grasping at nothing. The moment I turned around, my upper body muscles suddenly found no resistance to their movements and exploded forward, only for my lower torso to fail to keep up and the difference to hammer my spine with a spike of agony as my own full-body strength was turned against it.


    On one hand, I now knew how someone with such an apparently passive power could be a seemingly equal member of a team with a physical powerhouse and an energy manipulator; she could choose to exclude things from her field, at least at close range, including herself. Since the field limited everything to peak human speed and she was superhuman, she could always be faster than her opponents no matter how fast they were. On the other hand, I now lay on the ground with a damaged spine, unresponsive legs, and an energy beam trying to shorten me by a foot even as the air around me was turning liquid.


    "GO!" a voice that hadn''t come from anyone''s throat appeared directly around the third villain''s head, the energy manipulator using a tiny fraction of her redirected energy to create the sound without needing to speak. I immediately committed the trick to the list of things to try with my own powers in the future, then tracked Slow-Field Girl through Force Awareness. She was darting deeper into the military base now that I was apparently incapacitated, which spoke of some sort of goal other than blowing it up. Interesting. The burn at my neck chose that moment to intensify, pulling me back to my more immediate problems.


    Another Chronal Leap put me right next to Shadow Girl, already up and kicking. My regeneration might still be fixing some self-inflicted spinal damage but, unlike most people, I was not limited to physical muscles to move around. Proximakinesis already held me up during flight, after all. The villainess frantically backpedaled even as the air around us suddenly became thick as molasses. No, not thick; she was draining all kinetic energy from it, essentially holding it still, on the thought that I needed to go through this new obstacle to get to her.


    BOOM!


    The explosion of disintegrating air molecules in her face disabused her of the notion and knocked her on her ass. Making an effectively solid object out of the air when your enemy''s powers worked on solid objects? Dumb. On one hand, maybe the bad guys hadn''t known who the government could call upon for reinforcements when they planned the attack. On the other, far be it from me to interrupt said enemies when making a mistake. Before Shadow Girl could recover, I extended my Proximakinesis through the ground, the same ground she now lay on, ripped a fifty-ton piece of asphalt and concrete then flipped it as hard as I could with her upon it.


    Kinetic energy drained from the imminent concrete sandwich like a river, slowing everything down considerably. Unfortunately for Shadow Girl, once the ground she stood on had been flipped she no longer had to fight just my powers but Earth''s own gravity as well and while her power had vastly greater reach than mine, it was nowhere as intense. All attacks on me as well as her attempts to spread out the wildfires to have more energy to draw upon stopped, as she was forced to redirect all her efforts on saving herself. Caught between our powers, the Earth''s gravity and its own inertia, the piece of asphalt imploded before scattering into red-hot, sizzling pieces pelting everything nearby.


    The ground shook again, a beam of energy powerful enough to flatten a city block focusing directly on me from above, hot enough that even the secondary effects were vaporizing stone. My abilities rose in response. For the first time in months, power flowed through my body like an oceanic current as I faced an enemy even close to my weight class. Most people underestimate just how much power a wildfire can give. It''s just fire that can be put out with enough water, right? If you could throw around rivers, maybe, because a square mile worth of blaze unleashed the energy of a small atomic bomb every second.


    It was clear that my opponent had never really tried to redirect that much energy before. Her reactions were sluggish, the only reason they could keep up being the slowing field limiting everyone''s mobility. The effects were largely unfocused and inefficient, using only a fraction of the energy she had available... or maybe that was just the shock from being hit by a truck-sized lump of concrete. I doubled down on this way of attack, using Force Adjustment and Proximakinesis to rip a mass of bedrock the size of a house and throw it at the maximum speed the field would allow, then teleported in her way when she started to dodge.


    Having seen that a melee engagement would be an instant loss, she blasted a narrow path through the boulder instead, then shattered the rest into a thick cloud of choking dust. At the same time, half a dozen muddy lumps took roughly humanoid shapes and rose off the ground. Within seconds, seven decoys with an outward shape identical to the original formed, then they copied her emissions across the whole electromagnetic spectrum; visual light, thermal, ultraviolet, bioelectric field, even the trace levels of natural radiation. To any conventional sensor or even comicbook x-ray vision they would have been indistinguishable... unfortunately for her my awareness relied on more than just electromagnetism.


    Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.


    That was not to say the decoys were useless; moved around through direct addition of kinetic energy they could block my path, try to grapple me, or even punch and kick convincingly enough, while being effectively invulnerable to physical attacks because she could simply reform them. More delaying tactics while she built up? Perhaps. On the other hand, her latest stunts have left nobody alive for several hundred feet, all the remaining survivors being in the deepest underground layers of the military base... the same places the other villain seemed to be moving towards.


    "Time to end this charade," I said and from how my opponent braced several layers of debris and condensed air around her I was certain her powers had picked up my words just as mine would have. It did her no good, for the very next second every bit of solid matter in contact with me became unstable.


    Nearly a ton of mud, rock, molten asphalt and powdered concrete had all electromagnetic binding forces reduced by a factor of twenty. Molecules burst apart, atoms spontaneously ionized down to the last electron, a ton of normal mass becoming a ton of literal lightning. Knowing what was to come in advance, I''d traded Chronal Leap for Invulnerability to the initial, titanic discharge. Less radiant and explosive than the equivalent nuclear bomb, the literal shockwave was more disruptive and disabling and had only so many conductive targets to ground itself in.


    The world flashed a brilliant, eye-searing azure, then faded into normal daylight for the first time in minutes. The surrounding area looked less like a military base and more like the surface of the moon, a dark grey, cratered, blasted wasteland for a good quarter mile radius, thick grey dust falling from above like the snows of nuclear winter. Beyond it, the wildfire was still raging in a ring of red and black that would cut off mundane access but barely faze superpowered enemies.


    Of said enemies, two were unconscious, not even close to all right, but alive. Their body-concealing costumes were more scorch marks than not, even melted on top of damaged flesh in places, and if they ever had any tools or other gadgets with them they''d all been reduced to slag. Normal people would have been nor merely dead but reduced to blast-shadows from the energy release, but supers were made of sterner stuff. Even grievously injured as they were, their enhanced physique alone already had them slowly healing. From what I could see, Big Guy would be fine in a couple of hours. Shadow Girl would be down for a couple of days, postponing the inevitable question of containment.


    Big Guy was not much of an issue; a tough enough prison, possibly enhanced with my help, would suffice. Shadow Girl though was a problem. Had she had any less broad and versatile powers, I''d hand her over and have her be General Rinaker''s problem... but Energy Manipulation? There was no environment devoid of energy, or barrier that could passively resist it. But that was still future-Maya''s problem; I still had the third supervillain to deal with.


    xxxx


    Slow Field Girl got out of the depths of the base three thousand feet away, through a small service tunnel to the facility''s water and sewage pipes. She and her cargo thus bypassed the ring of burning forest and all ways of conventional pursuit. She briefly scanned her overgrown surroundings, hefted her load to a less awkward carry, then made to disappear in the Alaskan wilderness.


    A split-second later she was frantically dodging a series of teleport-attacks. Under normal circumstances, her slowing field would have let her easily outpace any opponent, but carrying two still-living, cuffed, and very thoroughly bound people around her size slowed her enough it became a struggle.


    "So that was your target," I mused, sending a shockwave through the ground that made her stumble. I''d had several minutes to prepare for the chase, thinking of ways to counter her mobility advantage while securing the two other supers. "I assume the kids have powers, like us?"


    Not that I had to assume; the enhanced durability in both the boy''s and girl''s bodies was a dead giveaway. Keeping the fact that my senses could be used as a radar for supers on the other hand was worth some dissembling. From the extent of the teenagers'' durability, they either were less toughness-focused than most supers or had below-average powers. Not as weak as the large number of soldiers that gained powers during the Invasion, but not as tough as a tank either; that made them vulnerable to collateral damage and problematic hostages if a fight lasted for long.


    "Stand back!" the last villain threatened, speaking for the first time. "Stand back or I''ll kill them!" Her voice sounded strangely empty, almost without inflection beyond anger or aggression.


    "No, you won''t," I said, cutting off her retreat via teleportation. "Your operation included attacking a secret military base, leveling a square mile of forest, and indiscriminately killing dozens to hundreds of personnel to get to your goal. You even left your own companions behind to get to those two, so I doubt you''ll kill them out of hand."


    "You''re willing to stake their lives on that?" she hissed menacingly.


    "I''ve seen people captured by mass-murdering supervillains before; dying would be an arguably better fate." Especially if the worse forms of mind control and sacrificial powers got involved. "Besides, are you willing to stake life, limb and more on the result?"


    "I left some surprises back at the tunnels," she tried to threaten in a different way. "You could fight me... or you could save more than a hundred survivors back there."


    "They''re soldiers and this is war," I shot back making another teleport-grab she barely dodged. "Give up the hostages, surrender and I will not kill you."


    "What manner of- AAH-" she slipped, crashed through a tree and almost dropped the teenage boy "-hero are you?!"


    "The effective kind."


    I blinked before her, making her leap back, then punched at the ground, grabbed the root beneath it and spread my Proximakinesis to the tree beyond. Then with a tremendous pull I ripped the forty-foot pine tree out of the ground, complete with roots and swung it at her like a baseball bat. If she expected it to shatter like wood usually did against supers, she was sorely disappointed, emphasis on "sore", as Force Adjustment made it tougher than it had any right to be. The impact threw her in the air and a teleportation took me just ahead of her and within reach while she had no ground to stand against. She only managed to avoid being grabbed by throwing the hostages at me.


    "Fuck this shit, I''m out," she growled and disappeared into the woods. Without the hostages to slow her down even using teleportation to keep up would not let me actually catch her so I did not try. I teleported back to the base instead, scrambling to disarm her "surprises" while a hundred and fifty-nine survivors slowly made their way through the partially collapsed, smoke-filled tunnels...

 11: After-Action Mess

    The bad guys had been beaten or forced into retreat, but that was only the simplest of the night''s problems solved. For one thing, I very much doubted a team of three teenagers was the entirety of the enemy that had discovered and organized an attack on a secret military base. Neither their powers nor their attitude made for effective information-gathering or strategy-making tools and the fact that Slow-Girl prioritized the kidnapping above helping her allies had disquieting implications.


    At a closer examination, the two kids were cold. Not frozen, but serious hypothermia levels of cold for no apparent reason. It was the same thing Shadow Girl tried to do to me, one of the few ways of disabling most supers regardless of toughness or regeneration. They were slowly recovering, their level of enhanced healing ensuring no long-term damage would remain in a few hours, but that did nothing to protect them from further kidnapping attempts. Even if I kept them at my side, I could not ensure their safety in case of ambush by unknown powers, let alone during another large-scale battle. Another solution was needed, which meant math.


    Two point two pounds a day, half a percent safe limit... no, that would exceed my force field volume. While working on downsizing the potential solution, I carried the two of them next to the two still-unconscious villains. Big Guy was healing at the same slow rate but Shadow Girl... she was already close to waking up. Even without active power use, her body soaked in warmth and radiation passively, using it up in speeding natural healing. Since the enemy heavy hitter waking up would be bad, I applied a light choke with Proximakinesis while Force Awareness allowed me to track blood flow, blood pressure, brain activity, oxygenation, even the overall trend of chemical exchanges in her cells. I was no doctor, but balancing out the effects of the choking against her enhanced recovery only took a few adjustments.


    Once I was certain the effect would neither kill her nor allow her to wake up on her own, I used Lasting Force to make it permanent and let her body become her prison. Now, even if some other villain or automatic recall power took her away she''d be useless to them and no threat to civilians until they managed to remove the choker. A choker that had no physical substance to break, that was no wound or curse to heal, that was entirely undetectable through conventional means because it was a force that existed only for the prisoner and nobody else. Not impossible to remove, but very, very unlikely.


    Ensuring the safety of the former hostages wasn''t as simple. Instead of preventing a single event such as a captive waking up any protection would have to deal with countless potential hostile powers. No defenses I could come up with would prove invulnerable to every hostile power I''ve ever met, let alone all the others that had appeared in the six months since the invasion. Ultimately, safety would be possible only if the bad guys could not reach the still passed out teenagers at all.


    To that end, two spheres of force with a radius of one yard formed around the kids, their shapes outlined clearly by the rapidly condensing air they caught and drew in. Even as the air was compressed, the pressure it could exert on the spheres'' occupants was adjusted to remain within human norms until the pair of younger supers were within their own greyish spherical cloud with about half the density of water. Several more adjustments to cool the spheres if they overheated or create warmth if they froze were added, then the outer barrier was made permeable to carbon dioxide and monoxide. Finally, everything was made permanent before the spheres fell upwards into the smoke-filled sky above.


    When in doubt, throw them into space. That particular adage worked for far more than getting rid of enemies; once the spheres left the ionosphere in about three minutes and adjusted their course as programmed, the abilities required merely to find them, let alone catch up with them and remove the occupants, became powerful and complex enough even whole groups of supers should not be able to do it. Adjusting to space was not a trivial issue even for supers and whoever simply slapped on a green forcefield and tried it was in for a rude awakening.


    Handling the still raging forest fires was simple in comparison. A disc with a thickness of one foot and a diameter of forty was the largest force-field I could make on quick notice. Within that volume, air pressure was adjusted downwards as far as I could make it so air would be compressed without producing extra heat. Then gravity and permeability of the field were adjusted so the denser air would escape downwards while being replaced by all gases except oxygen. The moment it left the field and those adjustments though, it became a mass of pressurized gas that suddenly decompressed, rapidly cooling in the process of forming a football-field-sized freezing and suffocating cone.


    One small violation for the laws of thermodynamics, one giant fire extinguisher for the superheroine in need!


    xxxx


    "...and then I filtered the smoke out of the tunnels so that the survivors would not suffocate," I finished my report of the whole thing over the sound of Agent Stone typing in page after page of notes. One of my non-negotiable demands for the government was that I''d never have to write, type, dictate or otherwise personally input data in any way, for any reason, ever. It was face-to-face interviews or nothing. Bureaucrats could all go die in a dumpster fire.


    "I see..." Across the table, General Rinaker''s thin, aging face looked more worn than it had the first time we met, not that I blamed him. This would not be their first base that got attacked in recent times. "Good job."


    "Good job?!" the dark haired woman to his right asked incredulously. "She threw the kids into space!" Older than me by a year or two and dressed in a conservative yet immaculate grey business suit, it had taken me longer than it should have to recognize Liz, a fellow survivor of the initial demon invasion in Florida.


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    "An unconventional but sound judgement call," the General backed me up to everyone''s surprise. "Recently shed light on some of the enemy''s methods has me convinced none of our assets should be within easy reach of kidnappers. Wouldn''t you agree, Warden?" Liz scowled but neither at the General nor at me, her favorite target in these meetings. To the people around this table she was known as ''Warden'', for reasons that had not been explained but could be guessed at well enough. Was I about to get a confirmation?


    "No, sir. The enemy combatant designated as..." she sighed and rolled her eyes at me "...Big Guy was proven to be the sole recruit lost along with the New Mexico base. Medical records, genetic tests, brain and power scans all concluded he is the same person... to the limits of our own tests of course." She handed over a paper full of hand-written jargon I could not make heads or tails of, though perhaps reading it upside-down and at an angle did not help in that. That it was hand-written in this day and age meant they were worried about super-hackers, too. "Despite multiple examinations, no evidence of a secondary kinetic absorption power was found. The only power in evidence was his own overlapping duplication."


    "How reliable are those results?" I asked her. "Because if I wanted to play supervillain the first thing I''d do would be to develop a power that scrubbed evidence." I paused, looked at the serious military types across the table and shrugged. "Well no, I''d probably build a Moon base with a giant railgun, but then I''d never seriously consider being a supervillain. The point still stands though." Also, why build a railgun when you can be the railgun?


    "They are reliable enough," General Rinaker stated with finality, interrupting whatever Liz was about to say. He flicked through the papers, adjusted his glasses, then rapped a finger near the end of the text. "The other captive. She was responsible for the incidents in Brazil?"


    "As far as my department can tell without on-site examination," Liz admitted after a bit of hesitation. "Even if someone else had the same power it''s unlikely they''d have it to the same extent."


    "Unless they deliberately tried for just that. Powers are malleable, fitting both the choices and beliefs of their users. If someone wanted to imitate somebody else, they could have." My favorite superheroes certainly had affected the development of my own abilities more than a little.


    "Our tests showed the amount of violence needed to generate a major super," the old Professor whose hydraulic press I''d broken up a few days before informed me. "It''s not something easily hidden. Not in another country where the levels of magic propagation would be lower and extended super activities at that level could not be maintained."


    "Sorry Doc, but that theory of yours is plain wrong. Magic does not have ''levels'' and does not propagate like that." If it did, our problems would not have been nearly as great. "For one thing, my powers had no problem working in space earlier today. There wasn''t even the slightest change, whatever the distance."


    "Maybe you didn''t go far enough..." OK, no, as soon as he discarded my words without even asking how far both me and the kids had gone I tuned him out as yet another idiot with a pet theory he wanted to be right. Fortunately, neither the General nor the other people on the table were so myopic, which was good. The next point was something I didn''t have evidence for but hopefully they''d still take my word for it and prepare.


    "For another, given all the problems we''ve been seeing, the usual methods of raising power aren''t the issue. Liz, do you remember the enemy''s final surprise during the invasion?"


    "Hard to forget my own steel fortress crushed underfoot," the dark haired woman said with a shudder. "Why bring up that thing? It is dead; half the US strategic arsenal made sure of it."


    "Maybe, but if we believe what both Lovecraft and Einstein had to say, its power had to have gone somewhere." Because the Mavethans'' little secret in successfully conquering multiple worlds was that killing their monsters generated more power than the slain monster had... as well as that killing the monster pushed you towards becoming the next monster. "Now, I dunno about you, but a few thousand tons'' worth of force is how high my powers can go without exploiting the environment. The invaders'' last monster was the size of a mountain, and was throwing thunderstorms and earthquakes around like there was no tomorrow." If it had not been stopped, there really wouldn''t have been a tomorrow. "Let''s be generous and say that all us survivors that fought that thing and lived got one hundredth of its power, collectively. Maybe another one or two percent went to any military forces and civilians still in the state after the ashes settled. What happened to the remaining ninety-seven percent?"


    "You believe that demon''s lingering power is responsible for the incidents," the General immediately caught on. "That either new supers unconsciously tap into it, or that someone is deliberately doing so."


    "Collaborators were a thing during the Invasion." Because when a genuine, for-reals Dark Lord offers immortality and superpowers there''s always those who''d say yes. "From those that were turned into wraiths against their will to willing idiots that got into the human sacrifice business with a laugh. And then there are those who plain enjoyed the power, who needed no instruction to become like the invaders before we even met them." I very carefully did not look at Liz at that. She hadn''t been as bad as others and it was obvious she was trying to turn over a new leaf but one could never be too certain. "My suggestion is we get in contact with known survivors of the big battle, check out they haven''t been dabbling into things they shouldn''t have."


    "The council will keep it under advisement," the General said. "Anything else?"


    "Yes," I shot back a bit more abruptly than was strictly polite. "If my latest performance finally convinced you I''m not an enemy in disguise," and I didn''t plan to be unless they did something incredibly stupid, "I want to check out whatever you have that lets you analyze powers."


    Because if things were going to escalate, it was high time I checked out why my powers no longer had an interface and whether what solution the government had cobbled together could provide an alternative.

 12: Return of the Box

    The half-finished residential and storage levels of the New York base left behind, my escort and I walked through the cavernous power training level. Metal walls that had not been there before gleamed in the gloom and flared oddly in my Force Awareness, apparently only as heavy as water yet tougher than the toughest steel I''d ever seen. The material itself simply broke down into a fuzzy mess when observed at a microscopic level, more the result of a lasting power effect than conventional physics.


    "It was an interesting puzzle, trying to build something that could stand up to superpowers" Liz said from my left, her hand caressing the metal wall. Where she and the metal touched, electromagnetic forces were twisted into impossible configurations before being absorbed by the wall, fractionally strengthening it. "There are so many different powers, so many possibilities, that trying to ward against them individually was a fool''s errand. In the end I went for simple resilience, both physical and metaphysical."


    "I''d ask why you didn''t collaborate with other supers in this, but..." I shrugged. Security was obviously a major issue.


    "That is need to know," Agent Stone told us apologetically but firmly. "Unless you fully join the Project, you do not need to know."


    "Play the grunt for the military? Pass."


    The statement effectively killed that line of conversation so we walked in silence until we reached an enormous, vault-like door that was thirty feet wide and fifteen thick, a solid slab of bronze-like metal that repelled my Force Awareness even better than the walls. It wasn''t the only thing that did. On either side of the door stood gigantic humanoid statues of dull green-black alloy, in the shape of bulky, heavily-armored knights. The top of their faceless helmets almost touched the ceiling as they stood looming before us, the air heavy with their presence.


    "Let me guess; if someone attempts to force their way through, the statues come alive and fight off the intruder."


    "That is also need to know," Agent Stone immediately said.


    "But you could try to force your way through and see what happens," Liz added, rather hopefully.


    "Just give her the evaluation, Warden," Stone insisted, glaring at both of us. His lack of trust was... OK, it totally made sense. Liz and I were not exactly friends.


    "Spoilsport," the older brunette muttered, then touched the vault-like door with one finger. The bronze-like metal glowed an eerie emerald green before sliding down into the ground with an enormous grinding sound... the ground where no place for it to retract into existed. It literally faded into the floor, absorbed by the metal plating there like so much water poured on a desert dune.


    My Force Awareness strained, delving into the material with effort. Call it curiosity, call it stubbornness or not liking having my senses blocked, I persisted until I found where several thousand tons of metal went to. The floor across the whole area had become denser but not heavier, toughness and inertia added to it but not mass. It worked... pretty close to the ''water in the desert'' analogy and I suspected Liz could extract the door easily enough when needed.


    "Give me your hand," the Warden demanded as soon as we walked into the even darker and emptier chamber beyond.


    "I rather like my hand where it is, Liz." I quipped. "Both of them."


    "Oh for heaven''s sake," she grumbled, grabbed my left hand and pulled at my middle finger. Moments later, thin bands of gleaming silver energy wrapped around it before solidifying into five bands of metal fused together; one gold, one silver, one the shiny red-brown of freshly cast copper, the fourth was black like cast iron and the last was the ash-white of pure aluminum.


    "Huh..." I raised my hand at eye height, looked closely at the new ring. "I hope this doesn''t mean we''re married, because you''re so not my type."


    "Shut up and walk into the circle," Liz said, pointing me at the center of the chamber and the circle carved onto the floor that definitely hadn''t been there a few moments before.


    It was like the ring writ large, five bands of metal from gold to aluminum cast into the ground. Something about the whole thing pricked at my mind, some memory or idea I couldn''t quite remember. Frowning, I examined the concentric bands of metal more closely but couldn''t find anything. No figures, runes, or any sort of marking, no mechanisms or wiring, nothing special except for their composition and Liz''s power coursing through them. No relation to a certain long-lasting sci-fi series involving mythically significant aliens then.


    For a moment I entertained the idea that the whole thing was an elaborate trap. Both the location and situation would be almost perfect for it; an underground vault to contain the collateral damage, a weird artifact that could easily be a weapon. It could as well be... or could have, if we weren''t in the middle of New York. Nobody in their right mind would set off a potentially city-killing encounter, not unless the extra casualties were the point. Both Liz and the military were methodical, calculating beasts, not insane mass-murderers.


    Then the moment passed, I walked into the circles and the light show began in earnest.


    First, the circles of metal glowed with an inner radiance of varied color, gold, silver, crimson, emerald and brown. Then lightning that was more magic than electricity crackled across them in rainbow arcs, rising higher and higher as the glowing metal rings seemed to rotate in more than the three conventional dimensions. Each of the rings drifted beyond normal space-time, each metal band shifting to a different layer of reality... then the energy coming off them grounded itself in the smaller respective bands around my left middle finger.


    Magic lightning crackled across my skin, danced like an unseen wind in my hair, then completed the circuit by returning to the larger rings on the floor. It shone, it tickled, it smelled like ozone and fresh-spilled blood, then it subsided and darkness reclaimed the chamber. I stood there in the gloom, the rings on the ground red with heat as they slowly cooled from channeling enough power to light the whole city above us for hours and... nothing. One minute, two minutes, at the five minute mark with no further activity I lost patience.


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    "Was something more supposed to be happening now?" I waved at Liz and Agent Stone. "Because I''m not seeing it. Is my own power assessment ''need to know'' only, or some similar malarkey? Did I need to actively use my powers and somebody forgot to tell me?"


    "No, it should have worked," Liz said, then gestured at the now cool metal rings. A pattern of vibrations went through the whole ring, echoing between the bands in complex enough ways they probably worked like some computer program. "The main array fired properly, the anchor drew the effect to you, but there was no return effect, no interaction." Liz scowled at me as if her power scanner failing was my fault. "It''s like you completely absorbed the scan."


    "Weird, yet uninformative. Are you sure your doohickey worked properly?"


    "It''s not a ''doohickey'', you trailer-trash ignoramus, it''s a sophisticated mental-spiritual resonance sensor!"


    "Nice technobabble, but we both know magic works however the caster believes it to work and not on any scientific principles." Which meant the problem was either in Liz''s beliefs or... "What exactly did you intend it to do? How is it supposed to work in simple, generic terms?"


    "The big ring gathers raw magic from me, throws it into whoever wears the small ring, then collects it and sees how it was changed," Liz explained in a long-suffering sigh as if she''d had to give the same explanation for the thousandth time. Since she was part of the military and had to write reports for everything, she probably had to do just that. Sucked to be her, I guess. "We all know and shape how our own powers work, consciously or not, and that shapes all the magic we use so..."


    "Oh, so you scan the mental process that shapes our powers, not our actual powers." It was a clever workaround since the powers themselves had no observable source or mechanism. "One problem though."


    "What is it?" I was getting the idea that Liz''s patience was running out for some reason.


    "How does your device work if the super to be scanned has mental defenses?"


    "..." Liz stared at me. I stared at Liz. Agent Stone stared at both of us then took a big step back, and another, and another... "Are you fucking with me? Do you think wasting people''s time is a game? Turn off the damn mental defense!"


    "How should I have known to do that?" I asked, quite reasonably in my opinion. "Apparently, I didn''t ''need to know'' how your scanner worked so how could I''ve guessed which of my powers would cause problems?" Maybe they should have shared more information. It''s not as if we''re allies or anything! Oh, wait.


    Needless to say, the whole situation devolved into shouting and blame games for the next fifteen minutes. I put some of my attention into following that and coming up with the occasional second-grade insult as the situation warranted, while most of my efforts were put in extending my Force Awareness to the city above. By the time the argument got going, I''d already found various TVs playing Saturday morning cartoons in the city above. By the time both Liz and Agent Stone ran out of steam and/or regulations to quote I was in a much better mood.


    "DONE!" I finally shouted, Liz and Agent Stone turning to glare at me for interrupting their argument. "I mean, my mental defenses are turned off. I can only keep them down for a short time though," I lied.


    That got them going in the right direction and Liz''s scanning device powered up for the second time. More magic dancing across my skin, more of my hair thrown around by an unseen wind. The difference was, I could feel power flowing through my body. It was similar to when my own powers grew after a particularly intense fight or noteworthy heroic feat. A feeling of euphoria, of boundless energy like drinking the spiritual equivalent of a warm cocoa while having a city''s main power flowing through you. Except this energy was a temporary charge from Liz, not a permanent addition to be claimed, and it inevitably slipped through my grasp to return to its source.


    The ring on my finger was white-hot now, hotter than an incandescent light bulb yet it being magical prevented its quick meltdown. Maybe the greater power the wearer had, the more power the scanner needed to, well, scan them properly? No idea, but it certainly made the ring a little too hot to the touch. Hopefully other supers did not cause the same reaction, otherwise trying to scan them would come with acute loss of fingers.


    Then an image flickered into my field of view and drew all of my attention:


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 87.0595%; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 37.9235%">Name: Maya Wennefer</td>


    <td style="width: 62.0194%">Bio: female human, 17y10m9d</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 37.9235%">Known skills:


    </td>


    <td style="width: 62.0194%">Points: 13/206


    </td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 37.9235%; border-style: none; vertical-align: top">


    Chronal Leap, Empowering Regeneration,  Focused Invulnerability, Force Adjustment, Force Awareness, Forcefield Creation, Forced Acceleration, Greater Proximakinesis, Immutable Force, Instant Action, Lasting Force, Retributive Defense, Super Suit, Spatial Distortion, Spatial Leap


    </td>


    <td style="width: 62.0194%; vertical-align: top">


    Attributes: Might 48, Agility 24, Reason 6, Vigilance 12, Ego 24, Luck 6


    Word of Force: Power IV, Control III, Versatility IV, Number of Effects III, Range II, Scope II


    Word of Self: Power IV, Control III, Versatility III, Number of Effects III, Range II, Scope I


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    When my friends and I had gained powers during the Invasion, the first of us to gain them had thought powers worked like a computer game. He wasn''t entirely wrong for more reasons than we knew back then, but because of the subconscious element in all powers many of us had ended with a game-like interface. For all that it didn''t really fit the ideas some of us had of our abilities, it had been a convenient means of tracking them. It was also something I hadn''t seen in over six months, since the final battle of the Invasion.


    Now, thanks to Liz''s scanner, it was back. It was also very different than I remembered... and if correct, it would explain many of the discrepancies I''d been feeling...

 13: Arbitrary Measurements

    When I first gained my abilities, interaction with them through a mental interface had allowed me both to boost my physical and mental abilities as well as get lasting superpowers shaped by my needs, desires, and the amount of power I''d accumulated. The numerical representation for physical and mental abilities had used an odd scale; numbers one to ten had represented human levels of ability, from inept adult to maximum human potential. From eleven to twenty, things like strength or agility compared to animals, while mental abilities compared to humans assisted via technological means. Beyond that I only had comparisons from my physique, which had matched increasingly powerful machines.


    Even without the influence of power effects, the scaling increased deceptively quickly. From "strongest man" to "bull elephant" to "armored truck" to "locomotive", each jump in strength scaling represented nearly an order of magnitude of difference. Compared to comic book feats though, lifting a single mountain was as far beyond me as lifting a supertanker was to a normal human. This is where powers had come in.


    Originally, powers had been individually ranked by their overall effect, from rank 1 where by themselves they might match a strong human to rank 4, where fighting whole groups of enemies with that power alone was possible. Power progression had come along with increases to physical and mental abilities advancing in parallel. Looking at the new interface, all that had gone out the window.


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 87.0595%; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 37.9235%">Name: Maya Wennefer</td>


    <td style="width: 62.0194%">Bio: female human, 17y10m9d</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 37.9235%">Known skills:


    </td>


    <td style="width: 62.0194%">Points: 13/206


    </td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 37.9235%; border-style: none; vertical-align: top">


    Chronal Leap, Empowering Regeneration,  Focused Invulnerability, Force Adjustment, Force Awareness, Forcefield Creation, Forced Acceleration, Greater Proximakinesis, Immutable Force, Instant Action, Lasting Force, Retributive Defense, Super Suit, Spatial Distortion, Spatial Leap


    </td>


    <td style="width: 62.0194%; vertical-align: top">


    Attributes: Might 48, Agility 24, Reason 6, Vigilance 12, Ego 24, Luck 6


    Word of Force: Power IV, Control III, Versatility IV, Number of Effects III, Range II, Scope II


    Word of Self: Power IV, Control III, Versatility III, Number of Effects III, Range II, Scope I


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    The biggest change was that powers had been renamed into "skills" and no longer had ranks at all, whereas the two lines under "attributes" indicated that my abilities had been pooled under only two broader powers; my ability to manipulate force and my ability to enhance myself. Instead of being spread across multiple separate powers, all my available power was concentrated into those two pools.


    The change in the interface echoed how my powers worked post-Invasion, at least in approximation, and it was a good reminder that what I was seeing here was a mental construct describing my abilities based on both scans and my own memories, not an actual system dictating how everything worked. That came with as many potential pros and cons as the changes to my abilities themselves and needed some thorough testing.


    "Everything OK in there?" Liz asked after I''d been silently contemplating the changes for some time.


    "It seems to be working," I told my two minders. "Is there a way to test that what it shows is actually correct?" Because if you ever got a game-like interface, trusting what it told you without checking would be dumb... especially if the interface came from some not-so-friendly ally''s magical scanning device.


    "I assure you, my scanner is accurate," Liz proclaimed confidently. "But far be it from me to prevent you from testing your powers. The base''s gym has been considerably improved since you broke that hydraulic press."


    "Do we need to bring the machines in here, or something?" That would be quite inconvenient.


    "No. The anchor ring takes care of that," Liz explained, pointing at the glowing band around my middle finger. "With the detailed scans to get a baseline and a memory delve complete, you could call up the interface anywhere, at any time. The ring alone is sufficient for recording changes through everyday use."


    "Convenient." I wondered what else the ring recorded. Being a magical item enchanted through Liz''s metal-themed magic, there was no way to tell what it actually did from looking at it, even with my senses being able to look at its internals.


    As Liz, Agent Stone and I left the scanning chamber behind, I wondered if the convenience of the interface was worth being tracked by the government and Liz in multiple different ways.


    xxxx


    "How much... is that?" I asked as I strained under the ten-foot-wide, fifteen-foot-long metal cylinder. Liz made a gesture and the cylinder grew minutely longer within the frame of metal rails that kept it upright as all my muscles protested. My body strained further, making even talking difficult as copious amounts of sweat rolled down my skin.


    "Six hundred tons..." Liz said, then made a note in the PDA she had at hand. "Are you sure that''s without any powers, just raw physique?"


    "Why would... I... lie?" Holding up a lump of tungsten heavier than the largest passenger planes ever was already hard enough. Why make the test last any longer than it had to, supernatural endurance or no? It wasn''t as if the exact numbers would matter for much longer.


    "The strongest enhanced human we previously measured could only lift three hundred and eighty tons," Agent Stone informed me. "There have been those stronger, but it was due to superhuman size which is categorized as a power rather than the baseline everyone gets for having powers at all."


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    "Cool to be number one, I guess," except six hundred tons was less than I thought my strength had been. On the other hand, I''d done my measurements under a different gravity, using hand-crafted measures and my own senses so I was bound to have made mistakes. "OK, changing to Proximakinesis."


    I slotted that particular "skill" into my first pool of magical energy, the one the interface called "Word of Force". Almost -but not quite- in the blink of an eye a third of the raw energy in the pool flowed in, for lack of a better term, the shape of the "skill" and became Proximakinesis. Paying close attention let me track how that bit of my power turned into the ability to apply force on contact. Over the course of several seconds the cylinder of tungsten became lighter and lighter as more of its load was taken from my physical muscles and handled by my power.


    The process surprised me in two ways. First, that Proximakinesis could exert more force by itself than it ever had before and secondly that it no longer was a reflection of my physical strength. There was no sense of fatigue that carried over, no strain, nothing that made it a projection of my own physical strength but a power entirely fueled by the energy invested into it. And secondly, that as long as I paid attention I could control the forces exerted both more finely than I ever had and with a sort of mental feedback that helped with that fine control.


    Complex things I''d only tried before in desperation, such as preventing a friend from bleeding out by holding his wounds closed per individual blood vessel, would now be routine even without using additional powers or requiring my entire focus to do. Plus the amount of force I could exert unaugmented was nothing to scoff at.


    "Eleven hundred tons..." Liz muttered. "You''re using that unfair physics adjuster now, right?"


    "Yes, because your ability to both create, move and magically alter massive amounts of metal is fair," I shot back and rolled my eyes. Liz''s powers didn''t even work via magnetism or telekinesis, the metal seemingly moving by itself for no apparent reason. "And no, I''m not using Force Adjustment. Now let me try something else..."


    Suddenly, the by now enormous cylinder slipped as Proximakinesis momentarily deactivated. My body strained to hold up the weight by itself but my legs simply folded and I toppled under the cylinder. By the time Proximakinesis reformed it was too little, too late, and the tremendous impact of the cylinder crushing me between its bulk and the armored floor of the tunnel was deafening.


    "Ow!" I most eloquently exclaimed. In my defense, the whole thing felt like someone twice my size sitting on me... but only momentarily. Force Adjustment had activated on its own, slotting in the first pool of power and lessening the impact. Apparently, my powers could now activate reflexively, just as if they were extensions of my own body.


    "What the hell did you do?" Liz demanded before lifting the cylinder with her metal manipulation. "This is serious testing, not a time for you to play games!"


    "Well I did try to test my second pool of powers. There was just a minor delay I did not expect." Yeah, understatement. Proximakinesis worked just as well under Word of Self - or almost. It felt stiffer, less flexible, and its ability to extend through contact to other objects to exert force at a distance was almost nonexistent. In return, the sensory feedback felt a lot more detailed, as if the power truly was an extension of my body, something that acted more naturally, though resulting into less conscious control with it.


    "Well, don''t do it again!" the older girl demanded with a huff.


    "Why? It''s not as if you couldn''t fix any damage to the equipment in moments. Reshaping metal is what you do." Hell, the huge cylinder had not even existed before the testing session had begun.


    "Because if you don''t take this seriously I won''t help you again," she hissed and gave me a good glare to boot. "We''re doing science here, not fooling around."


    "I thought the only difference between science and fooling around was writing things down?"


    Liz screamed, the pair of ginormous metal statues came to life, and the careful, professional testing devolved into an impromptu combat session...


    xxxx


    Half an hour later, I was finally convinced; punching into solid tungsten alloy is the opposite of fun. Especially when it''s a magical alloy and thus resistant to my attempts to disintegrate it with a single touch. Not that this saved the giant statues in the end, because Force Adjustment still worked externally and even without it I''d proven strong enough to shatter the alloy bit by bit. It had just taken a hell of a lot of punching, especially with Liz fixing the damage almost as quickly as I could make it, and had left my knuckles bruised and aching before rapid recovery had kicked in.


    On the other hand, blowing off some steam had made us both calmer and less snippy with each other, which let the rest of the testing progress far more quickly. It turned out that many of my powers could work with both Word of Force and Word of Self, though with subtle differences between them. Manifesting them with energy from the former tended to make everything more mechanical, more precise and controllable. Doing the same with the latter made every boost more natural and seemingly an extension of my own body''s abilities.


    Then there were the "skills" that only worked with one of the two pools. No matter what I tried, neither Forcefield Creation nor Lasting Force worked as self-buffs. They were explicitly skills that extended beyond and were separate from myself, thus they clashed with the second power pool''s theme. Inversely, Chronal and Spatial Leap did not work with the Word of Force, and Empowering Regeneration was clunky and slow when forced to manifest as a force effect.


    Super Suit on the other hand worked just fine as a force effect, for a given definition of "fine". It produced even more flexible and effective designs, without needing to rely on my own skills as a seamstress-or lack thereof. The trade-off was that everything it made was translucent at best, scaling back to entirely transparent if I did not pay attention. Not something I''d be using in the field any time soon.


    Ultimately, the greatest difference was that all the "skills" scaled to the same overall level of power instead of developing individually. They no longer were different powers but ways in which I could use my only two actual powers. Their limitations hinged on the limitations of the power itself, and those could be changed by spending points on the rankings.


    "Power" was quite obviously the raw strength of each effect; the fourth rank made Proximakinesis capable of lifting locomotives and Force Adjustment enough to multiply a given force by a factor of twenty - both much, much higher than they''d been in the climactic battle of the Invasion.


    "Control" was how much precision and fine detail I could get out of my powers; at the third rank my powers were more precise than any human fingers, or even mundane tools could get.


    "Versatility" was all the different uses I could put a given effect in, such as selectivity, contingencies, even simple automation. At the fourth rank, power use could be as versatile as any purely mechanical devices.


    "Range" and "Scope" were how far from their point of origin my powers could extend and how great an area they could affect. They were the weakest areas of my abilities, the reason I still had Proximakinesis instead of Telekinesis and how despite their development most of my abilities applied at touch ranges at most. That was OK though. It was better to focus on having more raw power than more range, because with enough speed range ultimately became less important.


    "Number of Effects" were obviously how many "skills" I could have going at once. Six slots seemed too few and I was tempted to immediately increase it. The thirteen points representing my untapped, not yet invested power would be more than enough for it, but I held back. Six slots were enough for all my general, overall "boosts" so one more wouldn''t increase my raw combat power. It would increase my versatility in a fight... but was a bit of extra convenience worth the expense? There were countless powers out there; trying to match them with versatility was a fool''s errand. Overwhelming power so that tricks became irrelevant had helped me survive through an invasion of magical aliens; I was not about to change things now.


    "I think we''re done," I told Liz and settled the latest iteration of the tungsten cylinder slowly to the ground. At twelve thousand tons it might have pierced through the floor had I let it drop and then Liz would have chased me out of the base.


    "Finally!" the brunette exclaimed. "I''m going back to my forge. Don''t call unless aliens are attacking, or something."


    "The General will be pleased with the new information," Agent Stone told me as we walked back to the residential portion of the base. "Now that we have a more complete picture of what you can do we can better plan actual missions. We could start solving all those problems threatening the whole country." He seemed happy with that development, so I left him to deliver the good news and write the reports.


    Now, what was the quickest way to make all that data obsolete without showing my hand?

 Interlude IIA: Steel

    The black-hulled giant looming over the much smaller civilian aircraft in the LaGuardia airport seemed too vast to use New York City''s smallest primary airport. At first glance, someone knowledgeable on the subject might recognize it as a Boeing C-17 Globemaster III, one of the largest military cargo planes ever built. But on a closer look, discrepancies would begin to pile up.


    First was how it dwarfed every other aircraft present, because it was much larger than a normal Globemaster should have been. Secondly, what at first might have appeared to be four engines hanging from its wings proved to be ovoid metal masses devoid of openings. Whether external fuel tanks or ordnance pods, they begged the question of where the plane''s actual engines were. And third, the entire plane was devoid of identifying markers of any kind, something simply not done in either civilian or military aviation.


    All those peculiarities drew the attentions of civilians, especially the few tourists that had not been scared away by all the superpowered events over the past six months. The airport workers and officials on the other hand knew not to even approach the winged Goliath. Nobody came near to perform refueling and cleanup. No engineers performed inspections or maintenance most aircraft would have needed after every trip in order to fly safely. No protests were made of the strange plane occupying more than its fair share of space for hours.


    Just as several civilians urged by curiosity and a complete lack of information were finally braving an approach on foot, a line of three military personnel carriers drove up to the massive craft. They drew just as many eyes as the plane had in their brief approach, due to their... unconventional use of the three APCs. Four soldiers stood on top of each vehicle, each of them armed with improbably large weapons almost the size of the M61 Vulcan rotary cannons carried by the APCs. Even more unconventional was the squad of soldiers surrounding each APC and keeping up on foot... despite the small convoy exceeding 50 miles per hour upon its entry.


    It took the confused observers about a minute to realize each and every one of the military personnel had to be supers like the ones on the news. Their military discipline, uniformity and lack of flashy powers such as flight or blasting everything in sight with exotic energies clashed with how supers had been presented on said news so far. Maybe the differences were precisely the point? Maybe these people were not like those supers but something else? Or maybe the news had intentionally misinterpreted the nature of superpowers in more ways than one - not that the civilians realized that, or the newscasters should be blamed. It was not in the former''s skill set to pick up on such fabrications or in the latter''s purpose to fabricate the news to begin with. That was the government''s job.


    Before the two approaching groups could meet, the enormous cargo door on the rear of the plane dropped to the ground with a dull thud, forming a ramp leading to a cavernous hold as large as the typical cargo ship''s. The military convoy drove up the ramp, barely slowing down, and disappeared without fanfare. Then the ramp and cargo door closed up, much faster than they should have given their size. Two long slits opened at the base of the enormous plane''s tail and torrents of air howled out of them with the force of a tornado. The enormous aircraft quickly sped up down the runway, much faster than any civilian aircraft could have. In less than ten seconds it had exceeded a hundred miles an hour; in twenty it was already taking off, having crossed a mere two thirds of a mile and using less than half the runway length much smaller civilian craft would have.


    Those civilians that had approached closer than a thousand feet were blown back by the backblast, hurled several yards away only to land hard on the tarmac or on top of other people. Many would be carried to the hospital for treatment, only for their insurance to fail to cover the expenses. Attempts to sue would be made but would be thrown out due to lack of evidence as not one of the airport''s thousands of cameras and other sensors held any records of the black plane''s existence and every official from air traffic controllers down to janitors would swear no such plane had ever existed. The incident was declared a freak accident, all the civilians charged with trespassing and airport security violations.


    All protests and complaints from that incident and countless others would not even be a side note in the thunderous birth of the New Age.


    xxxx


    "General on the bridge!" an Ensign announced and everyone in military uniform saluted. The civilians taking up most important positions on the bridge did not, but then they weren''t members of the US military.


    "As you were, ladies and gentlemen," the thin, tall, silver-haired General with the piercing eyes commanded as he carefully surveyed the command center of the new craft. Normally, no military operation would have even imagined handing over control of anything to civilians, let alone worked with a mixed civilian-military crew on one of the most important operations of the century, but it could not be helped. Powers were already rare enough and random enough that they appeared more often in the civilian population than not. Powers that complemented specific duties on what was essentially a flying fortress? They''d been searching for months and only just covered the bare essentials; nobody could afford to be picky, least of all the government force trying to ride herd on the rapidly spreading chaos.


    "General Rinaker, welcome onboard Forge One," the often most annoying but also the most cooperative and critically useful of said civilians greeted him.


    "Neither of us have time for pleasantries, Warden," General James Rinaker reminded the young woman who sometimes behaved like a new recruit and others showed the level of maturity expected of a high-rank peer. "There''s a new crisis on the West Coast that the President wants us to handle as soon as possible." Unfortunately, not informing anyone of this had been part of his orders and, in light of the enemy''s nature, common sense. "What''s our ETA for Seattle?"


    "One hour, at our nominal cruise speed," the strongest metal manipulator on record replied. Beneath them the massive aircraft was already moving, the instruments on the pilot''s position seemingly moving of their own accord. James Rinaker knew different. "We could fly faster, but the National Missile Defense would get annoying again. They''ve already sent several complaints about how the new stealth system makes Forge One look like a missile on their new satellites."


    Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.


    "An hour will suffice," the General decided. "Everyone has an itchy trigger finger nowadays, let''s not invite any ABMs." He made a gesture for Liz - the Warden when in costume - to follow him then walked off the bridge and towards his new office aboard the craft. On the short walk across the enormous plane, the General thought of how much like military uniforms the costumes heroes and villains tended to wear were. For all they were flashy and obvious - Liz wore form-fitting black plating as the Warden for example - he actually preferred them over the alternatives. Combatants without easily identifiable uniforms that also basically were weapons of mass destruction? No, thank you. The impact of superpowers on international law were already bad enough. Speaking of...


    "Do we have a flight plan this time?" he asked.


    "What would be the point? All but the most advanced detection systems can''t see through the stealth enchantments anyway." The young super shrugged. "Do we need air traffic controllers halfway across the nation scrambling to find the ''lost'' plane? Plus we''re already violating over a hundred laws and regulations flying a customized, officially untested, completely black project. What is one more?"


    "As long as we avoid mid-flight collisions, that is fine," the General told her while keeping back a smile. In the current situation, one had to find humor where they could.


    xxxx


    "Tell me of our latest headache," Rinaker ordered as soon as they were both sealed into the privacy of his office and Liz''s superhuman senses had confirmed said privacy as much as it was possible to do without being a mile underground and under fifty feet of enchanted metal.


    "She hit Tier Four," the Warden said without preamble.


    "Shit," the General voiced what they were both thinking. Superpowers were as complex as human imagination and just as varied in scale. Just about any proposed system of categorization had failed to adequately represent every known super and their powers. The "tier" system was a very simplistic and often misleading ballpark estimate of Supers'' overall impact. Powers that were no better than civilian capabilities and personal equipment were not given a tier at all; the government did not need to be concerned with someone that could change hair colors or could create small, temporary lights after all. Tier One were supers that could be as powerful as soldiers, with a numerical rank indicating how many soldiers they could match. Tier Two were supers that could contend with military vehicles such as tanks or jet fighters. Tier Three were supers equivalent to capital ships or army formations of comparable value. Tier Four were supers equivalent to strategic arsenals - not individual strategic weapons - those that could prove a threat to entire countries by themselves if they wanted to.


    "Did you at least manage a workable scan and do we have her..." the General sighed "character sheet?"


    "That''s the one piece of good news," Liz said and handed him over an actual printed sheet. In the age of super-hackers and technokinetics that was far more secure than any electronic storage. The General found the physical sheets comforting. When he''d first joined the military, electronic storage and digital communication were in their infancy and had seemed almost as maddening back then as superpowers did now. One disliked field invalidating the other felt like a very thin silver lining, but he''d take what he could get. "The numbers are, of course, in her personal scale that we''d need to translate into something usable but we can track relative values as well as progress."


    "And it''s one more success for Project Gamer," he agreed with a nod. When it had first been proposed to him, the very idea had seemed absurd. Limit the variety and scope of superpowers by tricking supers into using a common interface? Ridiculous. Or so it had seemed until trusted subordinates who knew a few things about fantasy literature explained to him the concept of LitRPGs and their impact on that market. If the introduction of numerical representation had led to fictional supers being, on average, more about big numbers than weirdly unpredictable powers, what would such systems do to actual supers that subconsciously formed their own powers?


    If the choice was between a potential enemy faster than a speeding bullet and more powerful than a locomotive, and a ghost that could completely ignore physics and turn people into more ghosts, every sane military commander would choose the former. Thus James Rinaker had green-lit ''Project Gamer'', the government''s attempt to subtly influence supers into having both easily categorized and less exotic powers. So far, results had been mixed but hopeful. Unfortunately even simple, mundane force could prove beyond their ability to control if present in sufficient quantities.


    "What do we have about how she uses her powers when pressed?" he asked. "Theoretical specifications and practical application can be very far apart." That was also something any successful military commander came to know sooner or later.


    "I fabricated an argument close to the sensors," the brunette said with that self-satisfied smirk she often had when manipulating those she considered less intelligent. It was, in Rinaker''s opinion, the young woman''s most obvious tell as well as a serious character flaw and one he''d been trying to wean her of during the past few months... but he''d allow it just this once. "We argued, we threw around insinuations, cursed each other, typical teenage girl interaction until it escalated into a fight." She frowned. "I''d prepared my two best golems for the occasion, used the best materials I could get, enchanted them to within an inch of overload. She dismantled them in only a couple of minutes."


    "How tough golems are we talking about?" And wasn''t it weird that an ancient Hebrew myth was now part of the forces under his command?


    "Two thousand tons of Tungsten alloy each, enchanted with enough strength to move their own mass with some agility, enough extra durability and inertia that any conventional weapon would do no more than scratches, slow self-repair, the usual beam weapon scaled up to their size." Liz''s smugness gave way to frustration. "Any other super on record would have been forced into retreat at best, reduced to a charred husk at worst. She used one to beat the other into a scrap heap."


    "At least now we know," the General cut off what might have been several minutes of childish whining. Or maybe not so childish, compared to his recent discussions with  political oversight. "How soon would Project Tartarus be able to contain her, even theoretically?"


    "Unfortunately, I have no idea," the Warden said grimly. "Using my powers as much as I do leads to slow but noticeable growth. Can we afford to assume the same is not the case about any potential target? As is, the nullification aspect of Project Tartarus is not going to work."


    "Keep working on it and ma-"


    Whatever the General was about to say was interrupted by the overhead lights flashing red and a very loud alarm echoing around the airplane.


    "General Quarters, General Quarters. All hands man your battle stations. The route of travel is forward and up to starboard, down and aft to port. Set material condition ''Zebra'' throughout the craft. Analog-Arcane system substitution engaged. Switch to planar magnetic propulsion underway."

 Interlude IIB: Strike

    When rumors of imminent supervillain action in Seattle came, they gathered in a field in New Mexico in the middle of the night on the off chance an opportunity would come. With the US armed forces stretched thin fighting off both monster infestations and keeping the peace in the devastated south east, border patrols were lighter than they''d been in decades and had never been meant to stop people on foot moving at more than fifty miles per hour.


    When their men in New York sent word both the Big Fish and the Iron Bitch would be on the same flight, the off chance of an opportunity became reality and the small group of ''tourists'' visiting the newly rebuilt attractions in Roswell, New Mexico were in position. The confirmed existence of actual aliens, if magical ones, had rekindled tourism in the supposed alien crash site to such an extent nobody noticed a group of a hundred camping in the desert. There were thousands of RVs and hundreds of other camp sites already, after all. This state of affairs fit the Everymen just fine.


    Rumors, horror stories, even a smattering of real information about a growing powered crime syndicate had abounded for months, with only limited reaction from the authorities. When new villainous or outright crazy supers mind controlled people or abducted mayors in broad daylight, who had time for rumors in the dark? When FEMA and the National Guard had been deployed in no less than six states to suppress mass panic, looting and anarchy, who would notice a scant few elements moving with purpose? That state of affairs fit the Everymen too.


    The reality of the Everymen was both more and less than rumors said. Everyone had been sent scrambling by the advent of powers six months before, because everyone who was anyone realized what a new source of tangible, easily usable power could do in a situation where the world''s greatest superpower had just had its teeth kicked in out of the blue. And while government forces were grasping for those powers they could understand and fit their delusions of control, other actors had less political or moral restrictions and were already used to moving in more violent, bloody circles.


    The hundred men eagerly drank down the strange green concoction they''d been provided. Most of them already used to mundane drugs, none had issues with using a potion distilled from human blood, especially if it boosted them with the strength and vitality of the victims used in its creation. In moments, their existing borderline-superhuman enhancements doubled and a haze of bloodlust that sharpened their senses and skills instead of dulling them fell over the group.


    Then came the suits. They looked like neater, lighter and streamlined astronaut suits, with a few differences. The first was their durability; despite seemingly made of flexible fabrics, they''d all been infused with the essence of several tons of metal through strange rituals. In addition to the color of a blood-spattered, ominously gleaming bronze, they had the resilience of all the metals used in their creation as well as a good portion of their weight. A thousand pounds of extra load was a more than welcome trade for resistance to antitank weapons for the newly minted enhanced criminals however. Then came the turbines. Similar to but smaller than those used in some rapid rescue units, they were powered by rods of wood made by a lightning mage from the British Isles. Nobody knew how they were made but rumors had it the mage had drawn the attention of the Red Queen, the poor sod. At least the men could now joke about "bark reactors" in his memory.


    But what everyone had really been waiting for were the guns. Cylinders as long and thick as a rocket launcher tube but filled with weirdly colored cables wrapped around a piece of rainbow quartz the size of a man''s arm, they didn''t look like any guns the ragtag group had used before. Their design was simple enough though, and newly enhanced strength let them ignore both the eighty-pound weight and the significant recoil.


    Drilling, preparation, speeches; those weren''t the things those violent men were used to. There was only eagerness and anticipation, pre-battle jitters and a bit of "friendly" roughhousing. If a couple of bones were broken... eh, you can''t make an omelette without breaking eggs, right? Then word came in that their target was in the air. With more laughs, boasting and the occasional curse, the ragtag group took to the air.


    Only their newly enhanced agility prevented several crashes then and there...


    xxxx


    In the months since the invasion, defense systems across the US were in high alert. From monsters to flying supers, from the creations of Mad Tinkers to enhanced military technology made through powers, entire classes of new airborne threats arose practically overnight. Despite being stretched thin and worked to the bone more than they''d ever been since the Cold War, both existing organizations and newly minted counterparts meant to track the new threats did not fail when a hundred new contacts suddenly appeared over New Mexico moving North.


    Preliminary evaluations discarded both the possibility of conventional ordnance due to small size but high speed and range, and that of a monster swarm due to their radar profile. Their speed of a bit over twice the speed of sound and cruising attitude of twenty-eight thousand feet was carefully noted, analyzed and potential targets were warned. Due to the usual internecine conflict between Agencies and the covert nature of the operation, nobody in Air Defense Command was aware of a certain flight by Superhuman Response, thus the unknown bogeys'' target remained a mystery.


    That did nothing to delay the response, for the defenders had learned to hit back at monsters and crazy supers quickly to avoid civilian casualties. Dozens of anti-air batteries went into rapid fire, launching fast but conventional missiles against the targets. The bogeys did not react, either incapable of noticing long-range fire like many monsters were, or simply not caring. Use against man-sized, non-ballistic targets was not something most anti-air missiles had been initially designed for, but both many skirmishes and rushed R&D over half a year had allowed for significant, if somewhat unreliable upgrades. Of the hundred bogeys, forty-seven took direct hits. Of those forty-seven, twenty-one went off-course for a few seconds before rejoining the main group, eight slowed significantly for minutes possibly due to damage, but only one was shot down.


    In response, the large group of bogeys broke up into five smaller ones and started evasive maneuvers. The next barrage of missiles only got nineteen hits with no enemy casualties and several missiles were shot down short of their targets. The third wave fared even more poorly, half their number being intercepted early, the rest only scoring ten hits and causing no apparent damage. The consensus of all analysts looking over the data in real-time was that the bogeys were learning. It was something the defenders had observed time and again; monsters and supers rarely trained at all, far less against actual military weapons. Initial engagements were always the ones that caused the most damage to such targets, while repeated attempts had weapons designed to bring down human-piloted craft fare poorly against those with superhuman abilities that were ready for them.


    The bogeys'' profile, numbers and overall threat being deemed too much to let go unchallenged, a plan to overwhelm them was quickly made. Interceptors were scrambled from two dozen military airports in the enemy''s trajectory, intending a converging intercept where they both outnumbered and surrounded the enemy. But conventional forces would not suffice by themselves, so the interceptors were designated the "anvil". The "hammer" would be the kind of first strike one would have seen only in action movies before the Invasion.


    Quick-response missile defenses originally intended as an anti-ballistic umbrella to defend American cities against long-range nuclear bombardment were launched. Sprint missiles redlined their drives, accelerating at over a hundred gravities for the mere eight seconds needed to reach their targets. At those speeds they were neither very accurate, nor guided from the ground as they formed a sheath of plasma from the sheer speed of their flight. Naturally, the intended targets saw the attack coming... and responded by scattering with unnatural reflexes a split second before seven Sprint missiles each carrying a small nuclear warhead turned night into day.


    Despite their superhuman reaction and the toughness of their armor, twenty-eight would-be terrorists died in nuclear fire and the rest were sent reeling by both the actinic glares and the shockwaves. Then they were swarmed by dozens of the best fifth and sixth generation fighters the US government could bring to bear. Unfortunately, this time the defenders had miscalculated. The conventional munitions on the interceptors proved incapable of damaging the targets sufficiently to blow them out of the air even after multiple direct hits, and the autocannon the interceptors were equipped for close-in engagements simply bounced off the armored humans. Worse, the enhanced humans under those suits were already recovering far quicker than any mundane person could have, and struck back at the defenders. Their suits sped up, easily outpacing the jets before turning around and either employing ramming tactics or climbing on top of the jets and ripping them apart piece by piece. After the eighth such casualty with nothing to show for it, the interceptors were forced into retreat.


    More interception plans were being made when communications with Superhuman Response finally went through and the decision was grudgingly made to let the professionals handle it. That would not have happened a mere two months before. More missiles would have been launched, heavier forces would have been sent, the day would have been won by the good old US armed forces and nobody would have needed help from a bunch of weirdos. Six months of skirmishes with monsters and lunatics with real power, the slow depletion of ammunition stockpiles while the economy was circling the gutter worse than any other crisis in half a century and mounting casualties on a domestic front were forcing everyone that had laughed at the idea of ''costumed freaks'' to reconsider.


    Because if supers fought at the front lines, maybe more red-blooded American soldiers wouldn''t have to die...


    xxxx


    "Talk to me people," Liz demanded as she took the Captain''s seat. "What are we up against?"


    "Radar and LIDAR make it seventy-one bogeys moving at Mach two point five and rising, at an altitude of thirty-two thousand feet," Lieutenant Geary at the sensor station replied immediately. "Arcane Sense makes it four, no, five times that many Tier-One powers, which makes little sense when they''re all single humanoids." The eighteen year old redhead was the same age as Liz herself but looked painfully young and uncertain in his first aerial battle and the fighting had not even started. Unfortunately, his ability to sense other powers extending through equipment, whether they were a simple cell phone camera or the most sophisticated military sensor array had made him a shoe-in for the Tactical officer position despite his originally having been a new recruit during the invasion. His survival during the monster attacks in Northern Florida at least meant he wouldn''t freeze at the first sign of a super or monster.


    "On the contrary, it makes perfect sense if they''re using multiple enchanted items each," the youngest Captain in the army''s history informed her less experienced subordinate while checking the seals of the Warden battle suit. Metallokinesis was all well and good but it only took one mistake at the wrong time and place to get you killed. Besides, while Liz would never admit it, the manual checks calmed her nerves.


    "Air Force is saying those people were resistant to conventional munitions, highly maneuverable, and dangerous in melee," the Comms officer informed Liz while she made a final systems check. He wasn''t a super so she hadn''t bothered to learn his name; he''d be replaced the first time they found a support power even tangentially helpful to his position.


    "Ma''am, that kind of durability doesn''t fit a Tier-One power signature," Geary interjected as Forge One shook while it reconfigured.


    "And what does this tell you, Lieutenant?" Liz asked after lowering her faceplate. Her voice became dull, deep and mechanical, and totally not reminiscent of another superpowered figure in black armor doing government work.


    "That they''re cheating, ma''am," the boy concluded after only moments of thought. "It can''t be done through a low-end durability power, but nothing would stop them from building a ginormous armor then shrinking it with a low end power or similar."


    "This is war, Geary," the Warden''s metallic voice boomed. "If you''re not cheating, you deserve to lose. Also, we''re the US military. ''Ginormous'' is not a word here."


    Laughter broke through the tension, which meant the banter had served its purpose. Then the whole craft was shaken by several seconds of metal grinding on metal, followed by crackling like a hundred naked high-voltage lines before everyone but Liz was slammed into their seats by an invisible giant''s fist.


    "That''s it, people. Forge One is now flying through magnetic levitation against the planetary magnetosphere." It had been a bitch to get that part of the enchantments right and it was totally untested, but nobody needed to know right now. On the other hand, there were the benefits. "That means you don''t need to worry about fuel, or the occasional love tap if we''re hit by a missile or two."


    At the horizon limit for Forge One''s current altitude, Warden picked up the approach of the bogies. Their armor had a lot of metal, though not all of it was ferromagnetic. Not that it made as much difference as people thought; any metal moving through a magnetic field produced observable electromagnetic phenomena. The more the metal and the faster it went the easier it was to perceive them, though that was only a tertiary aspect of her powers at best. Metallokinesis itself was no more limited to ferromagnetic substances than Hydrokinesis or Pyrokinesis were after all; that they carried metal and that they were within her range was all that mattered.


    On the other hand, this was an excellent opportunity for further tests and enemy action had provided acceptable targets. At a mental command from her, a dozen of the seventy indentations on the left side of Forge One''s hull fully opened up. From a distance they were easy to mistake for the windows civilian planes invariably sported. They weren''t windows though; they were something far more interesting. At her command a dozen peculiar enchantments activated and with a barely audible puff the objects they''d been cast upon were launched through the gunports.


    Each of the four-inch spheres were made of the hardest, most magically fortified alloy Warden knew how to make. Their flight enchantment was Aristotelian and capable of moving a one-ton mass at a hundred miles per hour while ignoring Newton''s laws of motion. For the twenty-two pound spheres instead, the same enchantment could move them at two miles per second. Directing them felt less like piloting and more like holding each sphere in a giant''s fist in her mind''s eye, a fist that could move at any direction at up to nine and a half times the speed of sound with instant acceleration.


    Getting used to her new toys, Liz sat back in her Captain''s chair and directed them at the enemy. General Rinaker would have called them drones but Liz was far more of a Harry Potter fan.


    xxxx


    Ted, no last name, was on top of the world. When he''d learned about powers, he''d decided he wanted some for the same reason he''d wanted a gun; blowing things up was awesome. But then the news had started talking about monsters, and dangerous powers, and loads of people killed. Bunch of propaganda bullshit, obviously. The Man was getting scared that everyone would get their God-given right of blowing shit up now and that the goons in the suits would not be able to tell them what they could and couldn''t do no more. So Ted had looked shit up in the ''net, he''d listened to rumors, he''d even gone to a couple of gatherings under bridges. Most of those had been just the usual tit and pot but not all. No, Ted had looked and Ted had found, just like the Good Book said.


    The Everymen had been more than Ted had hoped for in his wildest dreams. Guns? Yep! Powers? Yep! Cool as shit armor like in the movies? Hell yeah! And all he had to do for it was just listen to them about how to better stick it to The Man. Ted had never been very, whatcha call it, educated? Yeah, that. He''d always wanted to stick it to The Man only he didn''t know how. And the Everymen would tell him how to do just what he wanted in exchange for all the awesome stuff they were giving him. Win-win! So what if a couple chinks or heebs had ta bleed for it? Who the fuck cared, right?


    You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.


    So that''s how he came to be on top of the world. He was flying higher than the fucking clouds, man! Pumped to the gills with that glowing green stuff that gave powers, and wasn''t that crazy? The comics were right! Green juice made you a mutant shit and then you were just better! Stronger, tougher, faster, smarter, harder! Like, he didn''t need no fucking glasses any more; he could see that dog on the ground wagging his tail at that bitch a bazillion miles away in the dark. And he had a huge gun as heavy as a sofa and could shoot it one-handed. He could even make trick shots, man.


    And the best part? Them Everymen had found the plane a General and a powered Bitch building a secret prison were flying on. A prison for evil supers! Bullshit, total bullshit. The Man just wanted to take everyone''s new powers or lock them away ''cause The Man was scared. Including Ted''s new powers. It was like Civil War all over again and those guys were like Stark and Richards. It had sucked then, for years. Ted knew it would suck even more now, could feel it in his bones over the howl of the wind. He couldn''t let the suck become real, he couldn''t let The Man win.


    They were closing in, Ted knew. All the boys the Everymen had armed and given powers to had already clashed with The Man not once, not twice, but three fucking times. Ted thought how it felt to take an anti-air rocket in the chest and tank it with his new armor like it was nothing. How they''d seen The Man''s wrath coming down on them upon wheels of fire, how they''d scrambled madly to scatter at the last moment then had ridden a wave of fucking nuclear fire! It had been glorious, never mind the blindness and burning pain. His new powers had fixed him quickly and he was like, "Rawrr, bring it bitches!" then the fighter planes came. How he''d tanked that autocannon then ripped off the jet''s canopy and crumpled the pilot like a beercan. They had to be closing for The Man to fight so hard - and they were winning! Soon Ted and the boys would be free to have all the guns and all the powers and nobody would be able to tell them no!


    Ted caught a glimpse of some distant glimmer too low on the horizon to be a star and his eyes narrowed under his visor. He turned around and readied himself for trouble but didn''t see the projectile clearly until it was less than half a mile away. By then he had less than a quarter of a second to react. A normal man wouldn''t have made it in time but after two doses of the green and glowy stuff, Ted was easily twenty times as strong and fast as a normal man and even tougher. He wasn''t the Hulk - the big guy had had a whole nuke''s worth of the green stuff while Ted got only a few sips - but that was enough to make a half-turn to provide a smaller profile, present the thicker shoulder plate armor against the threat and brace for impact.


    The projectile - a metal sphere - hit hard enough to send Ted in his heavy armor tumbling, hard enough to hurt even through the armor. But then Ted''s newly gained combat instincts and old but reinforced bloodlust roared in response and he ignored the bruise on his maybe-broken arm. It would heal soon enough and he had bigger problems. With an effort of will backed by enhanced agility and everything a couple hours flight experience had taught him Ted got out of the tumble, checked that his weapon still worked and searched for the projectile that had hit him.


    He found more than one, and the world around him seemed to slow. A dozen of the things were already harrying his new buddies, with a dozen more coming up and probably more in the distance. So he hefted his huge gun and glared at the rapidly redirecting metal spheres as if they were the clay discs that had mocked him back in the practice range over ten years before. Yet despite repeated failures, Ted had not given up then. So he raised his new gun and lined it up carefully while the battle around him unfolded in slow motion.


    A shooter maneuvering at jet fighter speeds in mid-air, a metal sphere four inches across shifting like a hummingbird at twice that, it was an impossible shot for a man. But now Ted was more than a man! He was super-Ted! Even for someone of his superhuman reflexes, perception and agility the shot would have been hard, very hard. But unlike his fellow recruits into the Everymen, Ted had practiced with his shotgun religiously for years and his enhanced instincts translated that skill to his new gun. He turned the power adjuster all the way up, led the metal sphere for the second it took his weapon to charge to maximum and fired.


    The Everymen''s new blasters were the wet dream of any red-blooded American, in Ted''s opinion. At their standard mode they fired as rapidly as an assault rifle and hit as hard as a grenade launcher while being unaffected by gravity or the wind. At full auto their rate of fire exceeded those of rotary cannons, with similar firepower but superior range. But he''d picked max power so when the fat, rainbow-colored bolt of energy struck the metal sphere there was a pink thunderclap and the offending projectile was blasted to bits.


    Ted roared in triumph and went hunting for more spheres. Seeing his counterattack, his cornered buddies made his own roars of approval - only audible on their internal comms - and tried to copy him with limited success. Even superhuman combat instincts and physical ability wouldn''t let them fully learn his skills, not in how short the fight turned out to be. Deep down, Ted was proud to be the best shot, even if his buddies being worse shots meant they were hit more times by the metal spheres. He blasted his fourth sphere with a smile.


    He never did see the sphere that hit him in the back of the head.


    xxxx


    "Well... that was disappointing," Liz muttered as the distant fight concluded.


    "Ma''am?" Lieutenant Geary queried tentatively.


    "The new defense system only took out one of them," she explained with a displeased, some would say petulant, scowl. "I guess ordnance perfect for anti-missile and anti-air roles is not as effective against armored supers. No matter; we''ll use Forge One''s original defense."


    "The enemy is regrouping, ma''am," Geary needlessly informed her, though due to operational security he had no idea that it was, indeed, useless. "They''re less than fifty miles away and are aiming for a zero-zero intercept in four minutes."


    "Thank you, Lieutenant," she said. At this range, her own senses could see the power armored attackers as clearly as Geary''s enhanced sensor system, especially with two spheres of her own enchanted metal remaining just close enough to stay out of weapons range while allowing her to channel her awareness through.


    These were the Everymen of the rumors and dark net stories then. Their armor had better performance than expected, a combination of engineering and low-end powers providing more than powers alone would have. Liz wondered whether they could get their hands on the supers responsible for the suits and weapons then dismissed the thought as wishful thinking. The Everymen recruited from population groups that only needed the thinnest excuse to turn against the government. When whatever super with enhanced persuasion and charisma they had was done with them, the recruits would be fanatically loyal and believe it to be their own idea. And since General Rinaker as well as the civilian oversight were too afraid of getting subverted themselves to recruit someone with similar powers, turning any prisoners would not be happening... assuming they even got any.


    Speaking of the Devil, Rinaker was sitting on the observer''s chair, silently watching the battle unfold. They had long since discussed tactics in case of such an attack, drilled for it, commiserated over all the things the civilian oversight and political correctness committees would never allow them to do. Without powers of his own, or deep understanding of powers in general, the Old Man was already doing the most effective thing he could have done; nothing.


    Liz would admit - if you tortured her in a furnace till she talked that was - Rinaker was the best superior she''d ever had, in any venue. He knew when to help, when not to hinder, the right questions to ask, how to promote understanding, instill loyalty and actually get supers to cooperate. Unfortunately, he did not have powers and thus would never grasp the reality of the new world they all found themselves in beyond the theoretical. As a manager he was the best Liz had ever dreamt of; as a General during a very real war he was lacking. Liz knew who''d she''d put forward as his replacement, but the politicians would never hear of it... for now.


    "Enemies in close weapons range, Ma''am," Geary warned. "Should we activate the defenses?"


    "No, Lieutenant. I had something better in mind for them," Liz said and gave a mental command.


    Immediately, the whole Forge One rose higher as it became several hundred tons lighter. The bus-sized metal ovoids it carried where the engines would be on a normal plane detached but instead of dropping like rocks they flew on their own levitation fields. Then they began to transform. They grew longer and a bit flatter, then the lower half split in two even as the outer portions of the upper part also split from the waist up. Tons upon tons of metal bent and twisted like so much play-doh, forming rough humanoid limbs. Finally, upon thick and broad shoulders of tungsten alloy an almost nonexistent neck led to a metal orb of a head with no other features than a single, enormous eye that glowed an ominous yellow.


    "Let''s see what our new friends will make of four of the newest Sentry golems."


    xxxx


    When Ted came to he had an awful headache, sported a lump the size of a child''s fist in the back of his head, his helmet was both cracked and malfunctioning, and the only reason he hadn''t slammed head-first to some mountain at jet fighter speeds had to be the suit''s... whatcha call it... autoplot? Something like that; it wasn''t a gun so he hadn''t really been paying attention when it was explained. He also felt more than a little dizzy, his eyesight was looping between normal and double and something in his suit had to be leaking because he was soaked.


    It took him half a minute to realize it was the back of his head that was leaking, or had been. His new healing was just about done fixing that. Even better, his new gun was still with him because it was strapped to his waist with a quarter-inch steel wire. The Everymen had explained it as a safety feature and Ted had seen its usefulness immediately. No more dropping a gun when surprised or forced to dodge. No more getting easily disarmed by the enemy. And now it had ensured his gun hadn''t been lost while he was unconscious. He was so teaching his nephews the gun strap trick when he went back.


    In the distance, Ted could see fierce exchanges of fire around the black shape of a plane. He wasn''t about to lose the fight, so he boosted his speed as far as it would go and the air around him shattered into an endless roar surrounded by total silence. Something in his suit broke a bit further and it began to shake. That was not good, but he had no idea how to fix it. The only thing he could come up with was finish the mission as soon as possible, shoot down The Man''s plane and get back to the Everymen. They''d know how to fix it; they''d made the thing. Content with having found a solution, he ignored the slowly worsening shaking and focused on the battle ahead.


    It was not looking good. His new buddies, his fellow recruits were giving it everything they had... but they were facing giants! Four humongous, black-skinned, one-eyed freaks that were covered in matte black armor with absolutely no fiddly bits. No backpack, no turbines, no buttons or straps, not even a gun or tools. And yet the giants were still winning. They somehow flew without engines and shot yellow beams brighter and louder than lightning bolts. Ted''s buddies pelted the giants with shots from their guns, but every shot from full auto to aimed overcharged attacks simply bounced off no matter where it struck. And when the giants shot back with their beams, they were deadly. Glancing blows singed and blackened armor. Direct hits, even for a moment, set Ted''s buddies on fire. And holding the beam on someone for a second just blew them apart, armor and all.


    Ted knew what he had to do then and thanked God he''d been knocked out and left behind so he could see what was going on. He didn''t know how they were going to beat the giants but he knew they weren''t going to do it like that. A third of his new buddies had been shot down already. So Ted unlocked his cracked helmet and let it fall apart, forgot at least five minutes worth of warnings he''d been given, and got out the flask of green stuff from his backpack. The one he was supposed to only take a sip from every hour, or bad things might happen. It was like alcohol, really; too much of a good thing just turned you dumb and senseless. But before the dumb and senseless bit you got the good stuff, right? Right. So Ted downed the whole flask of green stuff that was supposed to last him for a week in case the mission got delayed.


    Immediately, a giant explosion of energy rose from his gut, making the two other bursts he''d felt earlier seem like tiny sparks in comparison. The green stuff lit a wildfire in him that spread to every bit of his body in seconds. Pain followed as his muscles pulled and stretched so hard they tore, veins burst, even bones snapped under the power of the green stuff. The green stuff didn''t care; it just healed him up in moments, only for his body to tear itself again, only to be healed once more. And the more it tore, the more it healed, the stronger Ted felt. It might have taken seconds, or a whole lifetime. He neither knew nor cared; all that mattered was that when it stopped his suit was stretched to its limits over a body at least a foot taller and a couple hundred pounds heavier. The sheer might contained in that new body was godlike... and it was all Ted''s.


    The frantic air battle slowed to a crawl. Ignoring the giants, Ted raised his gun, flicked the switch to max power, and proceeded to pump shot after overloaded shot into the plane. Why kill the giants if they can''t stop you from your goal? Except while his shots cratered the plane''s armor at places, the damage they did was too light and the plane so very large that even if all his friends followed his example now the giants might win before they brought the symbol of The Man down. If only they''d all shot the plane from the start! Now it was too little, too late. The hard way it was.


    Ted roared and charged at the nearest giant. The thing ignored him to better fry another flyer it had caught while the next giant over caught another of Ted''s new friends with both of its grossly overgrown arms and tore him in half. But that was a mistake because they let Ted get close, and Ted knew guns. He knew a lot about guns; how to shoot them, how to clean them, how to secure them, what to do and what not to do with them. He knew a lot about eyes too; he''d burst someone''s eye in a brawl not once, not twice, but three times. And he reckoned the big one the giants got they shot beams with? That was both an eye and a gun.


    So when he landed on the giant''s torso, he charged a shot but didn''t fire; he waited. The giant''s empty stare that must have killed near a dozen of his new friends slowly turned towards him, filling in with that deadly glow of an eyebeam about to fire. And when it was all full and glowy, Ted shoved his overloaded new gun into the giant''s eye and pulled the trigger. The resulting explosion hurled him back with such force that his armor crumpled, his ribs hurt and his back slammed against the plane''s hull. The whole thing left him dizzier than the hit to the head had, only clinging to consciousness due to his super-boosted healing. But the giant? The thing''s head had been blasted to bits, leaving its body to fall to the ground far, far below. Ted liked that trade. Now all he needed was to find three more guns.


    Before he could fully recover from the explosion, an enormous hand clamped around his waist like a giant metal vise. Another giant''s head stared at him as its eye slowly powered up, obviously preparing a sustained blast that would fry him to ash like so many of his buddies. But unlike his dead friends, Ted had taken the risk to drink all the green stuff at once. Even then his body burned like fire, both slowly tearing itself and getting stronger. So Ted roared and pushed with all his newfound might against the giant''s grip in the strange slow, dreamlike reality the whole world had become.


    Ted''s ribs broke, his muscles tore, but finally the giant''s hold slipped. He didn''t care if he forced the metal hand open or tore his own torso open to slip away, all he cared was that now he could reach the head. Then the giant fired its sustained blast, burning off Ted''s skin. That was its mistake, because Ted set his feet against the giant''s torso, grabbed the head with both arms, and forced it to stare at the plane above them. Not at the armored cabin his shots had failed against either, but at the plane''s tail; the thinner and least armored part he could see. The giant''s beam held for a full two seconds, obviously not built to cut off early. By the time it did, one of the smaller wings on the tail was gone completely and the other two looked a bit melted.


    "Take that, ya bastards!" Ted roared. Then two more giants blasted him with their beams. His greatly boosted healing and toughness fought against the impossibly hot beams for about a second then were overwhelmed and he was turned to dust.


    His last thought was how he''d never get to teach his nephews the gun strap trick.


    xxxx


    "This cannot go on, Liz," General Rinaker told her in private after the repairs were finished in flight and Forge One was about to land, seemingly untouched by the attacking force that had so troubled both the Air Force and Missile Defense Command. Ugh, politics.


    "Forge One was never in danger. I enchanted every part with separate flight spells; it could be cut into pieces and still not crash." Well, that one guy had taken her by surprise but it ended up barely worse than some scraped paint. Five minutes of conjuring metal, another fifteen of quick and dirty casting and it had all been fixed.


    "And what about the next time?" the Old Man insisted. "Normal soldiers backed by enchanted weapons were all well and good when we only had to face monsters but now the bad guys are doing the same thing." He harrumphed angrily. "I was never comfortable with just parity with the enemy. ''Peace through superior firepower'' has been a thing since the days of Hadrian for a reason." He paused, walked around the room once, twice, then stopped. "We need actual supers in the field yesterday."


    "They are not ready," Liz immediately countered, because it was true. "None of them are an original survivor. Even if their powers are good, they''ve not seen real combat. Not with stakes that mattered to them, not intense enough to burn through civilian mentality. Plus, they''re teenagers."


    "In case it slipped your mind, you are still a teenager," the General responded drily. "I don''t care what you''ll do, get them ready for the field. Even if you need to get your old friend to run herd on them."


    "Wennefer is not my friend," Liz shot back in immediate vehemence. "Plus she''s younger than I am!"


    "You went to the same school, beat each other up a time or two, that makes you old friends in my book," the tall, older man told the young brunette with a shrug. "Besides, you keep reminding me that experience and power are more important than age or image. Time to put your money where your mouth is."


    "...damn."

 14: Meet the kids

    "I''m bored!"


    Halfway into my third flight on a government plane, I''d already concluded that planes were slow and boring. Yes, for most people they might be flimsy metal frames going dozens of times faster than either the frame or its passengers could survive an impact at, overlooking the world from thousands of feet higher than most people would ever get on their own, and the quickest way to travel because the government couldn''t afford maglev trains... but for someone who had experienced space travel under her own power, all the excitement of mundane flight had been leeched away, leaving only the bad cell reception and an even worse view.


    "Am I allowed to make the plane go faster? At least have the pilot hit the afterburners!" I pleaded, more than ready to get off and push if it would cut our travel time by an hour or two. "Save me, General Rinaker, you''re my only hope!"


    The tall, thin, sixty-something man with the silver hair in a military cut gave me a look over the newspaper he''d been perusing for the past hour, said nothing, then went back to reading as if it were the most engaging activity imaginable. Scowling, I used my Force Awareness to sift through the material of the newspaper and how sunlight from the cold desert morning outside was reflected and absorbed until my mind parsed the collective image not as an interplay of forces but letters on a page.


    I snorted half in amusement and half in disgust. The old man was reading an article about the economic impact of the latest Wall Street nosedive after the battle of the Everymen terrorist group with government forces had somehow been caught on camera and spread over the web two days before. It was full of rampant speculation, fear-mongering, and either inaccuracies or deliberate propaganda, including caustic commentary of the Superhero Response Agency for losing the fight.


    "Why are you reading that trash anyway?" I asked him since there was nothing else to do. "We''re several decades and a magic alien invasion into the twenty-first century, who still writes in dead tree format?"


    "Our enemies, of course," he responded immediately as if he''d been waiting for the question. "Which is why I''m reading it to begin with. A wise leader must know his enemy as well as he knows himself before making decisions of strategy."


    "The Everymen use print media?" I asked incredulously. "The supertech-selling, progress-crazy, transhuman nutjobs? Those Everymen?" I couldn''t see it. The anachronism alone went against their professed goals of uplifting humanity through the fruit of superior technology.


    "You''d be surprised how often one''s actions do not match one''s stated goals in the field of politics, young lady." The General''s voice took a patronizing tone that set me on edge. Over our few encounters so far, that had only happened when he''d deliberately antagonized me to make a point. "While the Everymen appear to be your usual terrorist group only enabled by the advent of powers, there are hints of both deeper organization and competent use of misinformation on a grand scale in their actions. Hints in how their pawns act and what they say - or don''t." He indicated the newspaper article. "Besides, as you have already found out, even the most abnormal military campaigns contain far more waiting time than they do action."


    "Only because you insisted I accompany you on a flight to nowhere, on a mundane plane!" I shouted and threw my arms at the stupid machine around us. "It doesn''t even have afterburners, does it?"


    "Most cargo planes don''t, even military ones," the General informed me with a smile. "Don''t worry, we''re getting close. Less than an hour''s worth of flight, barring unforeseen events." He probably meant another Everyman attack.


    "You still haven''t told me where we''re going or why did you have me come with," I grumbled and looked through the plane at the ground below us and up to the horizon. "Desert, desert and more desert for hundreds of miles. Unless we''re going to Vegas." I shot him a suspicious look. He couldn''t mean.


    "Not quite. A little bit further to the Northwest." He smiled, turned a page and started working on a crossword.


    "You can''t be serious!" Because it was dumb. "Area Fifty-One, really? You built another secret facility in the one restricted area everyone knows about and every conspiracy nut salivates about breaking into? Man, no wonder your bases keep getting attacked."


    "Three times in the past two months," General Rinaker admitted almost... proudly? ...then scribbled in the word for five down - six letters, widely distributed ancient art across Europe, Africa and Asia, most numerous in Western Europe; particularly in Ireland, Great Britain, and Brittany. It was, of course, MENHIR. "Your friend Liz did a great job building up the defenses in her position as the Warden. She''s on her way right now in our flagship, escorted by a dozen of her war golems... including one shaped and colored to look like you."


    Three horizontal, ten letters, most difficult to understand; ABSTRUSEST. I was beginning to think the good General was having fun at my expense and the Everymen both. "Which is exactly why we''re flying slowly and covertly to an entirely different base in the same area." Security through obscurity on top of stupid mind games. "Forty-five minutes till we land, by the way. My suggestion would be to find some way to pass the time creatively. This will be far from the first time you''ll have to hurry up and wait."


    OK, so he did have good reasons for the slow flight. Did he have to be so smug about it? No, no he didn''t, but he chose to. Well, now I was choosing to be arbitrarily contrary. My powers shifted until Costume Creation came to the fore and I delved into it without actively using it. Military base, probably stuffy older guys all about firepower, discipline and uniformity and kicking individuality to the curb... and here came yours truly with more firepower than they had in an amazonian supermodel package. Could I come up with a new costume that would either annoy or dazzle while still being awesome and cool?


    Let''s find out.


    xxxx


    I strutted out of the plane in a strapless, snow-white catsuit that was as form-fitting and low-cut as I could make it without being indecent. Knee-high blue boots with an inch and a half of heel, white gloves up to my elbows, and white belt that hung very low on the hips with a bronze, v-shaped clasp to better draw the eye. The whole thing seemed to be made of high-quality real leather, yet flexed and stretched in ways impossible for that material... or most other things you could normally make clothes out of. The closest analogy would be a second layer of living skin, that looked natural at first sight but had a subtle Uncanny Valley effect the more you looked. The final piece was a long, sky-blue cape falling down my shoulders, only a shade darker than my eyes. It hung around my throat seamlessly and fluttered in an unseen wind without folding up, getting skewed or caught into anything. My long, wavy blonde tresses were left to dance in the same unseen force that handled the cape, giving me a "natural" windswept look.


    Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.


    The escort of soldiers waiting for the General and I stared in open-mouthed stupefaction, exactly as they were meant to. Having spent most of the past week either around supers - both allies and enemies - or jaded men like General Rinaker and Agent Stone, my superhuman appearance had not had much of an impact so the contrast was all the more noticeable. Supers tend to be better than unpowered humans in everything physical, and beauty is no exception; it comes with powers being a manifestation of each super''s personality, desires and beliefs. At first, our bodies simply lose any flaws and improve in physique. As we grow more powerful, the effect magnifies. First matching models worked over by make-up artists, then enhanced pictures, then surpassing anything realistic.


    The soldiers got an amazonian underwear model mixed with a serious athlete''s physique in a way human biology simply could not produce, with the effect boosted by the first hints of supernatural allure on top of the uncanny valley of perfect symmetry, in a costume designed to show a lot and hint at everything else; they did not stand a chance. The further we walked through the base basically unchallenged, the more annoyed ol'' Rinaker grew, which was the cherry on top of a whole cake of satisfaction.


    "You know if a villain that had really pushed the social influence powers came here, the whole base would be toast, right?" And it would take far less power than I had if that was the only thing they could do. "Normal humans could convince whole groups to commit suicide or start genocides under the right circumstances. Ten times human charisma isn''t harder to get than ten times human strength; it''s a street-level power... until its user gets access to mass media."


    "There''s a cruise missile with their name on it if they try," he said through gritted teeth. We walked to an aircraft hangar in silence, then the old man''s lips stretched into something only an idiot would take for a smile. "Now since nobody else did, let me welcome you to Tonopah Test Range and your new assignment." He pointed at the hangar. "It''s in there."


    "That''s all I''m getting?"


    "Oh, you''ll know it when you see it," the old man said with that same nasty smirk. "Try to have fun."


    And with that ominously inadequate mission briefing, he stalked off to do what Generals usually did in secret weapons testing facilities. Hopefully it wouldn''t involve the nuke stockpile I''d felt buried under the hill we''d passed on our way to the hangar.


    xxxx


    "...and I''m Everywhere ''cause I''m everywhere. Behind bad guys, and in the boys'' locker rooms, and under that hill, and that creepy medical lab, and the armory, and the closet with those guys being gross, and..." the fourteen year old brunette kept on in that vein for about a minute, her body flickering in and out of visibility half a dozen times a second, leaving behind afterimages that lasted longer than they should have. It was an effect I''d only seen once before, which had left me so surprised the moment I walked into the hangar that I had failed to react as she''d picked me up and suddenly we were fifty yards into the cavernous space, sitting on a table that must have served as an improvised mess hall.


    "...and in the old nuke silo, and in the General''s room looking at his files. And that''s why they call me Everywhere!" The torrent of words finally came to an end and the familiar-looking teenage super glanced across the table at the two boys her age sitting there. "And those are Blast and Slash, I guess. Don''t mind them, they''re just being stupid." Well, gaping at me even worse than the soldiers had probably counted from her point of view. "You know that''s your fault, right?"


    "Really?" I decided to humor the younger girl while trying to remember why she seemed familiar. "They''re the ones gaping, how is it my fault?"


    "I was there when you got off the plane. Heard your not-talk with the old man, too," she said with probably criminal levels of smugness. "Plus even if I weren''t, trying too hard is always intentional," she told me in a near-whisper and a sagely nod. Cheeky brat but hey, truth was truth. "Hey, wanna see something cool?"


    "As long as it doesn''t break anything and wouldn''t cause the General to tell you off if he knew," I immediately set terms that should limit long-lasting consequences and serve as an impromptu test of her decision-making skills. Never give teenagers free rein; that I knew from just the crap my year-mates and I had come up with in high school.


    "Aw man, you''re not nearly as much fun as I''d thought you were," she whined, then made a show of looking around for a target. And it was obviously a show; both her heartbeat and a super-quick glance across the table gave it away. "Oh, I got it!"


    Then the two boys leaped up with concurrent yelps, trashing the chairs they''d been sitting on with reflexive use of superhuman strength, before crumbling to the ground in fetal positions and cradling their obviously abused privates. The strangest thing about their whole scene was that I hadn''t seen the girl do anything, or even move beyond her normal flickering around her seat. The force of the blows had come seemingly out of nowhere.


    "Fuck you, Cindy," the shorter, dark-skinned brunet moaned through gritted teeth. "I''ll fucking kill you!" He, too, had that same faint aura of familiarity as the girl.


    "In your dreams, Mark," the just named Cindy said and blew a raspberry contemptuously.


    "Not again..." the other guy grunted, then got unsteadily to his feet. He was a year or two older than the other kids and in my force awareness his body''s durability and strength were far higher. He looked vaguely Hispanic, possibly Mexican, but that was less important than the sword of lightning he just threw in Cindy''s direction. In an infinitesimal fraction of a second the immaterial blade shattered in a dozen arcs of electricity that crackled all over the girl.


    "Meh, still a wimp I see," an entirely untouched Cindy scoffed, then got off the melting chair as if nothing had happened. Sword-boy hadn''t missed. The lightning bolts had simply... passed through where the girl had been sitting despite my senses insisting she''d remained physically present rather than going intangible or dodging.


    "You''re such a cunt, Barnes," the fifteen year old hissed. "One of these days... one of these days I''ll make the right sword..." his hands clenched as if wringing a neck. Then he turned around and stared at me. His eyes began to widen, his jaw about to drop, then his eyes narrowed in anger. "All girls are fucking bitches," he said, turned around and walked off, kicking another chair in his way in the process.


    "Want me to kick him again?" Cindy asked oh-so-innocently.


    "No," I immediately shot back. "In fact, from now on you won''t do it again or anything similar unless it''s in a proper spar, understood?"


    "Aw, and I thought you were fun!" she complained then shrugged. "Well, if you''re gonna be another rules-Nazi, I''m off."


    "Telling you not to hit your teammates is not being a rules-Nazi, it''s common sense," I shot back. She was beginning to annoy me and worse, she was acting like a bully and an idiot.


    "Teammates with those two idiots?" She burst into laughter for a good fifteen seconds, time which I put to good use setting up an area force-field. "That..." she wiped an imaginary tear away, "Hah... best joke I''ve heard in a week. And I listen to everything the soldier boys are saying after lights out." She laughed some more. "Well, your intro was fun enough but everything after that? Yeah, it totally flopped. See ya later, Cape Barbie!" And with that she flipped me off and vanished, entirely ignoring the barrier that was supposed to prevent just that.


    My new job of whipping those three into a team suddenly seemed much harder. In his office, a certain General was cackling evilly.

 15: Audition

    It is almost a rule of comics that when two heroes meet for the first time some sort of misunderstanding will happen and the two of them will fight for the thinnest of reasons, sometimes for no reason at all. It is an even more widely established rule that both heroes and villains fight personally, even those with powers that should allow them to sit back and drown their opponents in indirect attacks from a continent away. A good portion of that, many experts on comic books agreed, was due to how comics had started as stories of vigilante heroism and crime-fighting.


    While everything I''d read online on the subject over the past month largely supported this as the main reason, the truth was that conflict sold. Pretty much all fictional stories ever written, comics or otherwise, were centered around conflict and the easiest way to draw reader attention was to escalate conflict in scope. What this said about human nature I''d leave to academics; I was far more worried about its impact on immediate matters.


    Enter the advent of powers in a sudden, random, largely inexplicable, and highly disruptive way. Even if survival against monsters had not been a significant influence, what would the random person in the street do if given supernatural power? If your answer was "think things through then try to avoid trouble" I had some bridges to sell you in Florida. The radioactive, monster-infested part of Florida at that.


    No, humans being humans, deep down we''d want to be a superhero. Or a powerful sorceress. Or a genius, playboy, billionaire that put on a suit and punched armed criminals in the face. Or the new cool that was living life like an RPG, gaining more power from killing monsters. The common thread behind all those things was conflict and how to win in various forms of it. And because that''s what almost everyone would ask, that''s what powers provided.


    Here''s the thing, though; you can''t give someone those kinds of abilities, have them repeatedly use said abilities in fights, and not expect them to be changed by it at least a little. Power often comes with not having to follow rules because normal people can''t make you, and once you break enough rules you get used to it. You come to expect it and feel entitled to it. This, of course, is on top of any other issues emerging from repeated high stress.


    It was something I got from painful personal experience; during the Invasion, the majority of the survivors had behaved like assholes. It was not so much power corrupting them, as it was their choosing to be assholes with it. Because being a violent asshole is cool, while cooperation and critical thinking is boring. The bad guys, of course, had been aiming for precisely such a reaction on the thought that once the most violent and psychotic supers were the only ones standing they''d have lots of new recruits buying into their murder and human sacrifice ideology. It had not worked for them in the end, but the knock-on effects as powers spread around the world on top of humanity''s predisposition towards violence had caused and was still causing no end of trouble.


    All of it put together made my goal of teaching those kids how not to die in a serious battle, how thinking first and being a violent asshole second was more effective, and how to make a proper team far more problematic. I was already putting together a lesson plan. The big problem was getting them to follow it, because from what I was seeing things between them had already been left to fester and teenagers would never willingly listen to an older and wiser individual.


    I should know; I was still a teenager, if only chronologically.


    xxxx


    "So your power is swords?" I asked the Hispanic boy as soon as I caught up with him. It was the safe, reliable subject; almost everyone would talk about the cool things they could do, or even the awesome stuff they possessed and I reckoned a power of "making swords" counted as both. And teenage boys liked to boast a lot.


    "Why is that your business?" ...or maybe not. He picked up the pace, having already filed me under the "dangerous bitch" category for obvious reasons, and having been taught the only way to win was not to play from proximity to the worst of the three problem children. But my plans for dealing with Cindy''s obvious problems required tackling the boys first and unfortunately for him, running away wasn''t something I could afford to let him do.


    "Because I''m making it my business," I told him as we both jogged away from the hangar and into the surrounding desert.


    "You mean the General brought in a ringer after Cindy sent all the other trainers packing," he shot back and picked up the pace, going from the equivalent of an Olympic sprint to a desert bike going all out. Naturally, I kept up effortlessly.


    "That sounds like a story," I invited further discussion with a raised eyebrow. "What did little miss ''Everywhere'' do?" Instead of answering he sped up again and again, trying to leave me behind. For my best guesstimates of his level of power he''d focused much on his overall physique and we soon went from ''desert bike'' to helicopter levels of speed, then to that of the fastest Maglev trains, then we were pushing against the land speed record and the sound barrier both.


    The ground shook as we got further and further from the base, dust and gravel exploding at every hundred-foot step and the turbulence of our passage raising an enormous dust cloud in our wake. But for all his enhanced physique, the boy''s level of raw power was but a fraction of my own and his active powers didn''t include anything that would help with the physical limits of ground movement, such as some sort of super-speed, flight or time dilation. After hitting his limit at around the sound barrier, he kept sprinting for a good two minutes, giving me an occasional glance to see how well I was keeping up and, given his deep flush the one time he''d noticed me staring back, to check me out. When he realized he could not, in fact, outrun me he just stopped, setting his feet down and digging a six-inch-deep, forty-feet-long ditch as he messily braked to a stop.


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    "Shit," he concluded in a word when he also noticed my own flawless stop, the lack of even a mote of dust on me, and the absence of sweating like he did from the effort. "There''s no way I''m getting away, am I?" He fell on his knees and started panting for all he was worth.


    "Nope!" was my cheerful reply. I flicked a finger at him, causing every bit of dust, grime and sweat to simply fall off. Not quite a bath but good enough for government work. "Your endurance is shit, by the way. A two-minute sprint for someone of your power? Train some more unless you want a bad case of astronaut sickness."


    "What the fuck is astronaut sickness?" He made a sword appear from nothing, a broad, dull one made of wood, set it to float in mid-air then sat on it.


    "This is a guess on my part but you don''t have passive regeneration of some sort, right?" I sat next to him on nothing, held aloft by Proximakinesis. He didn''t answer my question so I went on as if he had confirmed my guess. "It''s not exactly the same, but when astronauts remain in space for longer than a few days, their bodies begin to atrophy because their muscles only need the most minor exertion to get them anywhere. For people as strong as us, moving our own body in normal activities is similarly negligible effort. If you don''t have a power to compensate and you don''t exercise, well, you''re not going to have it as bad as astronauts because baseline super-strength and durability won''t let you, but stamina? Many people forget about it and if you don''t remember your powers won''t either." I flicked his forehead to help him focus on my words. "Your powers are shaped by you, after all."


    "Yeah, I got that four months ago, about a day after I made my first sword," he countered, but it was a weak argument and his mind was elsewhere. A few seconds later he was holding a second blade, one small enough to belong to a doll or other toy. It was a classic longsword with a cross guard, its two-inch blade glowing white. He stabbed it into the meat of his right palm between forefinger and thumb with a wince, but instead of blood coming out he slowly relaxed, tension going out of his body with every heartbeat. His breathing evened out, sweating stopped and then very, very slowly he began to recover at a deeper level.


    "A healing sword?" I asked. I was beginning to see how his power of ''swords'' went a lot further than simply making empowered weapons for him to throw around.


    "A bad one," he told me, his voice sour. "Power goes along with size and it''s about a thousand times smaller than a two-foot sword. It''d take, like, half an hour to heal a real wound, let alone a full-body problem." He laughed mirthlessly. "Of course, the alternative is to get stabbed by a bigger sword." He fell into another moody silence so I settled into waiting him out. Five minutes, ten, half an hour... on the two-hour mark his patience finally ran out and along with it his ability to give me the silent treatment.


    "Don''t you ever give up?!" he shouted, more whiny than angry. He jumped off the hovering wooden sword, letting it vanish in the process, jumped forty feet back, then summoned a blade that was entirely black from its round pommel to its serrated tip. It also happened to be forty feet long, but that didn''t seem to be any impediment in his wielding it.


    "I learned not to way before powers were even a thing," I shot back. And because all the conjured swords had given me a bout of nostalgia, I made a glass out of compressed dust, filled it with bubbling, clear liquid and took a sip. It had a bit of a kick but was otherwise tasteless, odorless, and quire refreshing. "Compared to the week before cheerleader tryouts, two hours of mildly passive-aggressive one-upmanship is nothing."


    "Fine! FINE!!!" he shouted, obviously meaning freaked out, insecure, neurotic and emotional. "We can do whatever training and teaching bullshit you got in mind. At least it''ll give Cindy a new target for a day or two until you quit and it might even be a good show..." he gave me his best glare but I was unfazed. "If you like fail videos, that is."


    "Any specific hints?" I asked, giving him a smile.


    "Oh, no," he denied, shaking his head violently. "If Cindy thinks I snitched my ass is grass and you never know when she''s listening in." He shuddered, then gave me a challenging look. "If you think you''re that badass, you get to deal with the whole horrible package like we did for the past couple of months."


    "Oh, I intend to." And the plan was slowly coming along, too. It just needed a few more bits of information. "But you just won a trip back to the base the fast way for that cheek."


    "I won whaAAA-!!!"


    His words were carried away by the wind as I grabbed us both with Proximakinesis and the world became nothing more than a blur to anyone without enhanced senses. Turbulence roared like thunder and air molecules were mashed into a tangible wall we had to wade through to get anywhere even as a brief bout of over a thousand gravities of acceleration made for a near-blackout... for him. We hit terminal velocity for the combo of my proper flight form and the tangle of flailing limbs that he had been reduced to in moments, briefly bathed in friction-produced near-plasma, then came to an abrupt halt even faster than we''d sped up.


    One teenage boy super, slightly singed, fell to the ground in all fours as his breakfast vacated the premises.


    "Huh, nine point eight seconds." I checked our time in the General''s watch. The guy was still reading reports and writing out orders - on actual paper, not electronic. Paranoid much... in a world where super-hackers weren''t a thing. "Horrible drag coefficient, less flailing next time, please."


    "N-next t-time?" he stammered.


    "Actions have consequences," I informed him with a nonchalant shrug. "Maybe look back, see what you did wrong and refrain from repeating it? Or don''t; high-g maneuvers are a great exercise and you do need the work-out."


    And with that piece of advice, I flew off to tackle problem number two.

 16: Hook

    I found the other boy in the base''s library, which was surprising. Not that it existed; I''d known about military libraries ever since I''d gotten lost in one as a kid well over a decade before. No, the really surprising thing was that the boy, whose name was Mark unless Cindy had just called him by a fake name, was actually reading the books. What fourteen year old in this day and age of cell phones, tablets and social media actually reads books? Especially the kind of dense technical manual about a specific line of military transports that was probably meant for military engineers with college-level education? I''d have been bored within a quarter-hour, tops, and I had a couple of years on him.


    "You do know the Officer Candidate School requires graduating college and finishing basic training, right?" I asked him to announce my approach.


    "You''re done wrangling the other two already?" he shot back, not lifting his eyes from his book. "That was quick."


    "No, I left Cindy for last so it''s your turn." I sat across the table from him without bothering with a chair. "Tell me about your powers."


    "Of course, special treatment for the princess," he muttered with a scowl and tried to focus even harder on his reading.


    "Oh, she''s special all right," I said and he flinched. It was a small, reflexive thing, the tension at the fear of reprisal, the relief when it failed to arrive. So brief; blink and you''d miss it, but there. "Which is why I''d rather talk about you. It''s not as if you''re really reading; you went over the same line nine times in a row."


    "The fuck do you think you know?" His reaction was angry; lashing back at the first available target. "Huh? You come here from whenever the General had you stashed, get involved in shit that ain''t your business, think you know everything. Well, you don''t!"


    "None do, but I''m rather confident about the line thing." I crossed my arms and leaned back on thin air, getting comfortable. "You see, once objects are no longer visual impediments and your senses are sharp enough, it''s not hard to notice what people are looking at. Useful, too." Especially if they didn''t know you could do it; almost everyone looked at what they meant to attack in a fight.


    "So I''m too wound up to read the damn book," he spat. "Care to guess why? No, you got a program like all the other teachers the General picked, ticking lines off your check list. Except whoops! Somewhere between lines five and nine you''ll trip down a flight of stairs." Eyes like hot coals glared at me even as Mark smiled nastily. "You''ll be in the mess hall at the time, probably, and it doesn''t have fucking stairs." The smile widened, less nasty and more deranged. "Just an accident! No big deal, your powers came with toughness, right? Well, you sit down to eat and it''s salty as fuck. You go for a cup of water to wash it down and whoops!" He waved his hands around wildly. "Somehow, between the water dispenser and your lips, the cup was spiked. Ever tasted battery acid? It sucks." He threw the textbook down and sat heavily, arms jittery and eyes shifting rapidly, trying not to miss a thing.


    "But let''s say that doesn''t scare you off. You''re one tough broad, you won''t let a few inexplicable incidents stop you." Mark rolled his eyes at that particular notion. "Next day, all your clothes fall off in pieces the moment you walk into the briefing room with the Big Brass watching via teleconference. It''s somehow caught on camera - despite the room being searched for bugs four times a day - and uploaded on YouToob. The Brass can''t afford to keep someone after that impossible blunder so off you go." The anger, the disgust, the worry, they evaporated leaving behind only listlessness. "And that''s why we are where we are. Still want to be our fourth, no, fifth training instructor?"


    "That sounded like a challenge. I like challenges." In another room, in the nearby housing for the soldiers'' dependents and visiting civilians, a pair of purple eyes narrowed, making me smile. Step two, just as planned. "But enough about me and/or your other teachers. Cards on the table, Mark. What will it take to get you to cooperate? Not just pretend to do any training but put in some genuine effort?"


    "You think a bit of talking will convince me? Who do you take me for, Gabby?" Presumably that was the other boy''s name, which I''d forgotten to ask. Maybe there should have been a file about them? But no, writing things down was trackable and with the government having lost monopoly of force that would have been just asking for a bad guys to try a snatch and grab... wait a minute! A memory hit me and the pieces fit. They should have earlier, but in my defense Force Awareness only reveals colors if you really focus and that situation had been too much of a mess for it. Later - Mark was talking and it sounded important. "...only thing I want is to kill that bitch. Can you give it to me?"


    "That escalated quickly." Well, it wasn''t unexpected. He was a teenager with a combat-worthy superpower getting bullied, of course he''d want to hit back. "Aren''t you worried she''d hear of this?"


    "I tell her I want to kill her at least twice a day. Bitch thinks she''s invincible, you know?" He was actually calming down as he talked about it, less angry teenager and more ''this is my serious face'' vibes. That did not bode well for steps five through ten in the plan, especially the bit about the kids not devolving into full psychopaths. "So how about that, Teach the Fifth? How do you see my chances?"


    I had been wondering why General Rinaker had handed over those three to me when he did not fully trust me instead of, say, sending me to hunt down every bad guy they had even limited information on. It couldn''t have been just the incidents ramping up because training a bunch of kids did not an immediate response make. Maybe there were political considerations I did not know about - slash that, they certainly were. They were just less important on the short term. But if he had had the three kids for some time and saw their relationships turning toxic, not three sidekicks that could grow into heroes but a bunch of little villains about to go for each other''s throats and take out a couple of bases in the process... yes, I could see him throwing the one invulnerable gal he knew at them. Was it the latest attack by the Everymen that had forced his hand, or the still unknown enemy that had attacked that base? Note to self: ask for updates on the two captured villains.


    The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.


    "I don''t know about your chances specifically, but I know it''s doable." Instantly, the watcher from about a block away gave me her undivided attention. New step three; underway. "See, I just remembered where I saw you before."


    "What are you talking about?" the black boy told me, giving me a look that practically screamed ''you are stupid''. "You think I''d ever forget meeting someone with your looks?"


    "Probably true... unless I saw you while you weren''t in a condition to look back." Already focused to the maximum and paired with Forced Acceleration, my Force Awareness saw a certain not so good girl flickering closer to the library. Not in the way normal people did, just momentary, flickering afterimages hanging around a spot that was no longer so distant... and the barest, infinitesimal flickers in the library itself as it became more of a focus of her attention. Gotcha. "Were you in another base, oh, about a couple weeks ago and fell unconscious during a villain attack?"


    "Shit, don''t remind me of that black... thing." He shuddered. "One moment I was reading a neat article about a new alloy, the next the room was full of tentacles coming out of the walls. Tried to blast my way out but there were coming from all sides and everything felt like bathing in liquid nitrogen. Next thing I know, I''m in this base''s infirmary, it''s three days later, and Barnes is even more of a bitch than usual."


    "Liquid nitrogen feels refreshing, actually." Well, maybe not at his level of durability but it wouldn''t hurt him that much. "What you felt was energy being drained away. Kinetic and thermal both, which was why you couldn''t move through it and... blasting was it? Yeah, that wouldn''t have worked. No real tentacles involved."


    "Thank God!" Having been on the receiving end of real tentacles before, I shared the sentiment. So much acidic slime... "So it was a villain?"


    "Three villains. We got two, one escaped." And therein lay the question; had Shadow-girl incapacitated both of them, or had it been one of the other two that had taken down Cindy?


    "Huh." He thought about it for a moment then asked the question he was meant to. "Did the General have to bring out all of his hidden assets, or something?"


    "Nope!" I gave him a wide, self-satisfied smirk and patted my... chest. "I got all the assets that were involved right here."


    "Yeah, right," the boy snorted, but only after giving me another once-over. "You single-handedly took down the three villains that flattened a whole base and took me and the bitch out so quickly we didn''t even notice until days later."


    "I did, Mark," I told him, this time my tone serious. His initial reaction was disbelief, but the General was still on the base and he could confirm it - would confirm it once quietly told why it was a good idea to breach operational security and need-to-know for this one thing. Because this impromptu lesson was about to serve multiple purposes at once. "There''s no game balance in the real world and everything has counters. Even for very broad or very versatile powers, trying to cover every angle of attack will just spread you thin and open to a brute force approach. Consciously or otherwise, we all have specific themes our powers are strong in... and others we''re far weaker in, or against." I picked up the very manual he''d been reading and pushed it back at him.


    "From a point of view, powers are exactly like military vehicles. Like them, they are the greatest threat from and to a specific angle." I pointed at the image of a tank, though one being carried by a heavy logistics vehicle. "If the designer tried to add weapons pointing everywhere, mass, ammunition and mechanical constraints would greatly limit each weapon''s size and power. But a single main gun can be big enough to be deadly in a narrow aspect, with a few tertiaries to handle other angles." Then I pointed at the tank''s wheels. "Similarly in defense, there''s only so much armor the vehicle can carry. Put the same thickness everywhere and you get mediocre toughness. Put most of it in the aspects that will face the bigger threats and you get a powerful defense there... at the cost of weaknesses elsewhere."


    "You talk of powers as if they''re designed," he muttered thoughtfully. It wasn''t really a question but got him an answer anyway.


    "Aren''t they? Hasn''t the Warden tested her scanning devices on you?"


    "Oh, that game-like thing." He shrugged. "Yeah she did, and it worked. What about it? My powers didn''t change any more than a vehicle does because someone measured its length and mass."


    "True, but the scanners couldn''t have worked without powers being measurable." And there was one of the most interesting tidbits shared by the only friendly alien I''d ever talked to. "Powers explicitly break physics; it''s how they work. If they were random we''d be seeing a lot more crazier and nonsensical things, such as villains that summoned cats and each summon shrinking their enemies by an inch until they vanished, or heroes stopping crime with cheese; eat feta and the bad guy drops all crimes to take a vacation to Greece, eat blue cheese and the bad guy rots from the inside-out." Before the advent of powers, some people hearing that would have laughed. We knew better now. "Instead we all get powers that we like, that fit our skills, interests and personalities. Unless there is some alien intelligence out there that custom-makes powers for us..." Not that this was far-fetched, just less likely than the alternative. "...then the designer of the obviously custom powers is ourselves."


    "That..." he raised a finger, paused, thought about it, made to answer again, paused, scrunched up his face in confusion, then scowled. It was pretty funny, at least for us watching on the outside. "OK, it makes sense, is largely consistent, fits the evidence. What about people that do have a game interface, though? I mean, there were two dozen soldiers with minor abilities that had it in the last base."


    "Ideas are easily shared and also intrusive. Someone got an interface first because he liked games, told others powers work like that, everyone else had the idea in mind when they got their powers and that''s why those two dozen soldiers you met had them. In the meantime, the Invaders got power from murder and human sacrifice, what they did got out, and now we have every terrorist, religious fanatic, would-be cultist, psychopath, nutjob, or plain bastard trying the same things with gusto. And that''s how we got the Everymen."


    "Well... shit." It was obvious he''d heard more through the grapevine about the Everymen''s atrocities than most people in the street because just bringing them up put a damper on everything. "Soo... what''s the chance my powers will change now that I know they can change?"


    "Changing was the whole point because now you can put conscious effort into improving, not just rote repetition." I floated to an upright position and pulled at him with a force-field. "Now let''s go put that theory into practice, shall we?"


    We went. Not much further behind a flickering presence followed. Step four; just as planned.

 17: Line

    Once upon a time, the Tonopah Test Range had been used for nuclear weapons stockpiling and delivery system testing. The harsh, mountainous, rocky badlands between two small mountain ranges surrounded the airfield, the new fortified bunkers and hangars and the old, now abandoned residential area some half a dozen miles to the North. Two roughly round, bowl-shaped expanses of ice equally likely to have been frozen lakes or small glaciers took up two spots some four miles wide each, one pretty close to the airfield''s East, the other a dozen miles away to the South. Either accidents or deliberate testing had left pockets of residual radiation in multiple hot spots, possibly hot enough to cause issues to normal people after a decade or so, but irrelevant to supers. The air was cold, crisp, and clear enough to see for dozens of miles even without sensory superpowers.


    In short, it was the perfect place for some tryouts for General Rinaker''s new villain-stomping cheerleader team, name trademark pending. The good General''s exact words about what level of shenanigans were appropriate were "If it doesn''t come within a mile of the base and can''t be seen over Kawitch Peak you can do whatever". Said peak being over nine thousand feet high, I was feeling pretty good about what was to come.


    The boys definitely weren''t. Gabby say-my-full-name-and-die the Sword Guy looked rather apprehensive. The sword he was using as his personal transport kept shifting from English long sword, to Egyptian kopesh, to Japanese katana, to those huge cleaver things from that movie with the Orks. It had already caused him to lose his balance twice, only superhuman reflexes saving him from an ignominious face-plant. It also got me asking about ancient sword types, because what the fuck was a Kopesh? A hybrid of axe and sword with the first half of its blade bending to form a rounded minimalist axehead, as it turned out.


    Mark of my-powers-are-not-your-business was flying in lazy, haphazard low arcs like a helium balloon with chicken wings, spending half his time complaining about our inefficiently low speed and the rest trying to nail the rest of us with paintballs which shot at whatever he pointed. If those two powers were the entirety of what he could do I was going to wring a few necks then invent a new word called ''Generalcide'' just so people could understand which practical jokes were acceptable and which crossed that line that would get me... creative.


    Last but not least there was-


    "Are we there yet?"


    -that. The dread bitch of Tonopah, the boys'' bane, wannabe pain in my ass, her royal highness Cindy Barnes and the actual reason we were walking in the first place. See, for all that she looked down on them it turned that both Gabby and Mark had means of rapid travel while she did not. Oh, she could put on a good act, translocating instantly over short distances with her flickering afterimages, but every time our pace went over fifty miles per hour, little miss ''Everywhere'' fell behind. It was by no means instant or consistent but every delay pointed towards the same conclusion; she might be untouchable in a given area but shifting that area around had some sort of cost she wasn''t used to paying. Unnoticeable for people more or less confined within the same secured area but more and more apparent the further we went. At the same time, how would she keep annoying the boys or ''overhear'' all the interesting info if she didn''t come with the rest of us?


    "Yes, as a matter of fact." I came to a stop, sat in mid-air and examined the open land between the frozen lakes and the small mountain rage. I''d already done so of course, but that way I could surreptitiously observe the interactions between my charges without them getting suspicious.


    "But... that''s in the middle of nowhere!" Mark said as he landed. "There''s nothing here!"


    "Exactly. Nothing to break, nothing for people to sue us about, nobody to accidentally blow up unless we go overboard." Throwing a glare at the three teenagers I added. "Do NOT go overboard unless I tell you to. You won''t like what happens, I guarantee it." At least two out of three nodded their agreement vigorously, if not sincerely. The third gave me her best innocent look then looked around for trouble.


    "Now, the main reason we came out here is some proper power testing, in the time-honored tradition of superheroes everywhere." I took to the air with a thunderclap, adding the sound effect by very briefly breaking the sound barrier. "In case you three aren''t fans of comics, or the movies over the past decade or so weren''t to your liking, that means we''ll spar. Since I''m the newcomer you''ll find some reason to get into a fight in me, which will be a thinly veiled excuse to show off our respective powers and for me to establish how badass and cool I am through some absurdly one-sided victory."


    "And if we don''t want to fight?" Gabby challenged, his summoned sword flickering between a dozen different blade colors.


    "Chicken," Cindy added sotto voce.


    "Then the comic''s writers will have to get creative and engineer a clash anyway," I told him, ignoring the comment from the peanut gallery. Then I gave the boy a smile. A very, very wide one, with lots of teeth. "Veeery creative."


    The young Mexican super struggled with himself for a few moments as two titanic forces within him clashed; the urge to keep his head down and avoid any sort of confrontation since experience told him it wouldn''t achieve much except to make things worse against every young teenage boy''s dreams to beat people with an oversized stick and look awesome doing so. Having stacked the deck in the latter''s favor, I wasn''t surprised when less than a minute later he spoke up.


    "Fuck it, let''s do this!" His sword carried him to the air even as it began to grow. "What do I have to lose anyway?"


    xxxx


    The first thing Gabby did upon joining me in the air was conjure a new sword, a Japanese katana the size of a telephone pole. The blade both extended and thickened, gaining a reach of thirty feet, while the handle largely maintained its size. Despite the incredibly imbalanced shape, the giant sword responded pretty much instantly as if it weighed nothing. A glance of Force Awareness revealed it acted as if it had zero mass when interacting with him, while being far more massive than it should have been towards anything else. Plus there was one more detail that almost had me laughing.


    "You realize that being made of a million layers of metal means it has only been folded twenty times, right?"


    Apparently that was a sore point because he immediately launched into a flurry of blows so fast I needed Forced Acceleration to even track them. According to the internet and a brief search of both myths and facts about swordsmanship, the best mundane swordsmen could cut a baseball down mid-flight... a baseball launched at over four hundred miles an hour. Gabby was easily twenty times faster than any human and his skill with his conjured weapons was supernatural. Instead of the haphazard barrage of blows and ridiculous posturing seen in the vast majority of movies and anime, a continuous flow of feints, stabs, cuts, lunges and backstrokes came together to intercept my every move.


    Our spar devolved into a supersonic aerial furball, one where the air thundered faster and more loudly than any autocannon from brief flickers of supersonic flight and a sword literally cutting lines of plasma through the air due to friction. In the beginning, relying on sheer speed to dodge got me multiple shallow cuts against my costume and the occasional scratch against skin because my flight kept getting intercepted. It was as if the most skilled swordsman on Earth had studied each and every move I was making in detail, then came up with and trained the exactly right counter until it became instinctive. I wasn''t sure Gabby understood more than the general shape of what his powers were doing but it proved enough to hold me at bay for a few seconds - a long time given the relative speed of our fight.


    Then I picked the pace up a notch, backing my Proximakinetic flight with more and more Forced Acceleration, effectively getting more and more subjective time. At about three times my unboosted air speed the young Mexican swordsman missed for the first time. His form was perfect, his anticipation of a barrel roll had been spot on, his counter done just right to come in mid-maneuver when my back was turned to him... but came an infinitesimal fraction of a second too late. That threw him for a loop and he missed several interceptions in a row, letting me close in and take a swipe he only mostly dodged.


    The glancing blow knocked him three hundred feet back before his own flight could stabilize him and left him with an angry, red, fist-shaped welt over his right hip. It would probably heal in a few hours but until then it would serve as a reminder not to be overconfident. After letting him regain his balance and momentum - a real enemy would have capitalized on the opportunity but this was just a spar - I charged in once more. The aerial furball resumed... only this time his counters were no longer perfect. A hair short here, a millisecond late there, they started missing with greater and greater frequency. He tried to compensate, but his ability to simply anticipate my actions was falling behind.


    This narrative has been purloined without the author''s approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.


    It was a simple fact that any mind, no matter how fast, could only process things so quickly. There was always a delay between perception and reaction, then an even longer one between thought and action. At Gabby''s level of speed and reflexes, by the time he acted I had already moved on and no longer were where he thought I was. In a straight line that could be compensated by leading an opponent''s actions with your own but in a three-dimensional fight against someone who could and did change trajectories inside your reaction margin no amount of instinctive prediction would help. Not that it was a new idea; both movies and anime had made use of it, though usually in a dumbed-down format that didn''t explain anything except the opponent being too fast.


    Then I used Proximakinesis, Force Adjustment and Forced Acceleration to kill my own speed instead of dodging, momentarily coming to a dead stop. Half a ton of steel slammed into my right hip at a dozen times the speed of sound while massing many, many times more than it should have... and exploded. Superheated fragments scattered everywhere, cutting into soil and rock and ice all around us but managing no more than a shallow cut two inches long. The scrapes from earlier were already gone; this, too, would vanish soon. The... unconventional block surprised the younger boy and I used the opportunity to charge him again, only for a slightly larger than normal sword to appear in my path.


    "Not... again..." Gabby panted, sweat running down his face, his hair a mess and his surplus military uniform reduced to a smoking, hole-filled rug. I turned around him and the sword followed, interposing itself as I flew in a tight circle. So I sped up, going more fully into superspeed like before but unlike Gabby''s own actions there didn''t seem to be any delay in the sword''s maneuvering; it was more an automated construct, not something guided by a living brain. Not that there were no ways to bypass or overcome it. Taking a hit again would have worked, as would have half a dozen other things, but if I brute-forced it neither of us would learn anything. No, the idea was more to put Gabby against a target he could cut loose on safely, then pressure him to do exactly that.


    He did not disappoint. More swords appeared all around us in a multitude of colors. Some crackled with lightning, others were seemingly made of fire, a good percentage were made of various metals while some were pure black and didn''t seem to be made of anything at all. They came in all shapes and sizes, from tiny daggers the size of my pinky to claymores larger than the katana he''d initially used. The first to appear engaged me immediately, buying time for more and more to manifest.


    That none of them attacked with the same superhuman anticipation and countering as Gabby had in the beginning was a bit disappointing but expected; a super''s powers rarely extended to what we summoned or created and when they did they came at significant costs. They still came at me with more than human skill combined with the mindless tenacity and lack of self-preservation only expendable drones could have. Anything remotely physical simply bounced against my defenses or shattered beneath my strikes, but those weapons made of more exotic substances proved more effective. Needle-point blades made out of explosives were basically impossibly focused shaped charges that detonated on impact, lightning cleavers delivered their whole enormous charge on impact, and the chemical jelly blades just stuck on. The former felt like getting repeated flu shots by an inept nurse, while the lightning ones stung annoyingly. The jelly ones were just disgusting, weaponized skunk stink turned up to eleven that was also a superglue that just piled on and on and on with each strike.


    A spin at Mach seven paired with negating chemical bonds got rid of everything that had piled up without spreading the skunk juice to everything within a mile. Then I decided to take it up another notch by copying a move of famous flying bricks everywhere; twin, invisible forcefields no wider than an inch but a mile long came out of my eyes. Within those fields Force Adjustment effectively nullified electrostatic forces applying to electrons in anything inanimate, rendering all matter I stared at, from rocks, to swords, to the air itself into plasma. Red eyebeams lanced out at every sword in sight in super-speed, obliterating the majority of them with even the briefest exposure. Only those swords made of lightning, fire, or that black material I still couldn''t pick anything about with my senses survived intact. Of the three, fire and lightning were having negligible effects except for the absolutely largest swords and while the black ones kept giving me angry red welts they couldn''t do anything more.


    Gabby saw that his attack plans had fallen apart and tried to summon more swords. Unfortunately for him, he was nearing exhaustion from both the numbers of summoned swords and the pacing of the fight and I decided to call the fight. I momentarily dropped Forcefield Creation, reslotted Force Awareness to my suite of force abilities and reached with my suite of personal enhancement for Chronal Leap. The Mexican boy was halfway through summoning a black sword the length of three city buses in a row when I reappeared behind him and punched him in both kidneys hard enough to briefly shock and disable him. He screamed, wobbled for a moment then dropped out of the air. The impact with the ground hurt nothing more than his pride, but the lack of focus also caused every blade to simply vanish.


    "Fight''s over," I told him as I landed then walked over the scorched, cratered terrain at normal human speed.


    "I... figured..." he struggled to speak between gasps, then lay on the cleanest patch of soil to catch his breath. "Got any more... costumes like... yours? Mine''s... toast."


    "Sorry, it only works for me." I did not sit back down or made any attempt to relax as the last few scrapes and a rather annoying rash regenerated while my costume fixed itself. For one thing, appearing to have gone through the fight effectively intact would get me more respect. That it happened to be even more true than the kids would think was just a bonus. For another, there were still two more fights to go through and the first one had left me with enough extra energy eager to be spent. "Your power is elemental, right? A sword elemental?"


    "I... think so?" Gabby gave me a so-so gesture along with a grunt. He seemed to have trouble getting up. "Specifics are still iffy."


    "Oh, I know. Otherwise you wouldn''t be experimenting in the middle of the bout." That made him blush, his expression like that of a small boy caught with his hand in the cookie jar. "Plus your focus isn''t any better than your stamina was yesterday, your summons don''t persist, and your range is maybe a thousand feet? That''s less than most enemies can engage you at. Bog standard human enemies at that."


    "Hey! Cut him some slack!" Mark chose to interrupt angrily. "We''ve only had our powers for a few months!"


    "That''s OK, we can can take it easy. We can do some proper exercises, have more spars to build up your form, maybe get the General to bring in some monsters for you to fight, power up while getting used to things," I told the boy what he wanted to hear and it was true enough. We could do just that. Then I strangled every bit of hesitation and empathy I felt for him and also told him what he didn''t want to hear. "It''s going to cost you, though. Two hundred and forty-seven."


    "What, dollars? Bitch, I''m broke." All of them were, being refugees and all, but being rude about it was part of the problem, not a solution. "And if it''s more of these fucking spars you can li-"


    "Lives," I cut him off. And if he kept being deliberately disrespectful just to get a rise out of me, I''d send him to stand in a corner like a five-year-old. There were corners on Neptune, right?


    "...what?"


    "Two hundred and forty-seven lives lost to monsters and villains... every hour we''re here, spending valuable time to train you up to prevent such deaths." I glared at the three, finally finding something to be angry about. "This means three since you interrupted less than a minute ago. So think carefully how you spend out time."


    "Easy for you to say, you''ve had your powers for what, half a year? More if you''re from Florida? Bet the Army evacuated you, you got lucky to power up from the chaos, then you volunteered to the General''s new project." He scowled. "Well, I didn''t volunteer. None of us did. The General got us conscripted because we''re the strongest his Agents could find in the rest of the US."


    And I thought Cindy Barnes would be my biggest headache. I''d thought we had at least some rapport, but Mark was shaping up to be just as big an issue in his own way. Resentment worked like that, often enough. People lashing out at the closest target. Unfortunately, we really didn''t have time to get over his issues slowly. I needed to know whether these three kids were strong enough to back me up, whether they could be trained do so, and it needed to be done yesterday. That being impossible, I''d settle for immediately instead...


    ...or I could give up on them, tackle the immediate problems one at a time, and hope all the other problems such an approach would create wouldn''t bring this whole house of cards down before my old friends could return from handling their own problems elsewhere. It was tempting, becoming more so the more they behaved like brats, whatever their reasons. But it wouldn''t be the right thing in the end, so I''d try one more time.


    "Do not try to bullshit me," I glared at at the very angry, very short-sighted black boy. Wait, were his eyes glowing? "You weren''t singing the same song yesterday and the moment the villains that wanted to kidnap you were mentioned you got scared. You could have left this base at any time. All of us could have and, as you said, I am the only one who volunteered to fight the bad guys. Why are you here, Mark?"


    He didn''t like that, but there was a limit to the amount of crap I was willing to tolerate, no matter his circumstances. From the beginning he''d been the one to hold back the most out of the three, the one trying to play it safe. That he had tolerated the General''s heavy-handed approach to recruitment or even bullying from Cindy meant that he had his own reasons for staying around. Me cutting straight to the point would just save us time and more weasel words. That it also made him want to punch my face in? That was just a bonus.


    "Fine! You want us to spar?! You want me to use my power so we can all train and be buddies, and take on the big bad villains with the power of friendship?" His eyes shone like twin red suns. "Try this on for size!"


    And then he blasted me in the face.

 18: Sinker

    Mark''s attack would have looked like a continuous torrent of orange-red energy to normal eyes, not a beam of fire but a continuous linear explosion that blasted apart everything it aimed at. Seeing it under the kind of speeds supers could get to and the enhanced perception many of us had to be able to maneuver at such speeds painted a very different image. While still almost a blur, it was clear that it wasn''t a continuous jet but dozens of individual orange-red projectiles that exploded upon impact.


    When the first barrage hit me I was pushed back by the force of the explosions - explosions that were curiously shaped and directed even if no mechanism for a shaped charge seemed to exist. Traveling at over ten times the speed of sound, they crossed the distance between me and Mark in under a hundredth of a second and hit with tremendous force. They actually stung, each individual blast powerful enough to turn a tank into bits of slag scattered over a city block, and they were a confusing jumble under my Force Awareness.


    I was knocked into the ground, the torrent of fire blasting me half a mile back and carving a trench in the process. More confused than hurt, I tried to make sense of what Mark was shooting me with. At their base they were the shape and size of bullets from an autocannon, thirty, maybe forty millimeters across and massing around a pound. But over that flickered the image of a solid metal cylinder of around fifteen pounds and on top of that was a much more complex arrangement of mass and forces that might have been a hundred-pound missile had it been in realspace but was just a twisty mess the way it merged into the base projectile. Worse still, my senses kept insisting the projectiles were moving at Mach three, Mach eight and Mach one point three at the same time, but they somehow remained connected and slipped through realspace at the combined velocity of all components much as they had the combined mass while also having the individual masses.


    Powers made no sense, I reminded myself as I accelerated out of the way of the attack. That was underscored by how the projectiles turned to follow my flight like homing missiles. Because of course they did. Their acceleration didn''t come close to mine though, so while they could somewhat maneuver at relatively high speeds there was a limit to how much they could follow. It was a major difference over the close combat attacks Gabby had used, though a more conventional opposition to face despite the warped physics involved.


    As for Mark himself, the boy was also wrapped in multiple layers of scrambled physics. His normal body with an enhanced physique commensurate with his powers was less lopsided than Gabby''s had been; significantly less strength and toughness, about the same agility, and if what I could tell of his bioelectric field could be relied upon he had a level of enhanced awareness that matched my own. I could not tell the exact nature of his mental powers or senses but from the sheer number of synapses firing up in absurd frequencies, he was handling a massive amount of information. On top of that were jumbled layers of extra mass in configurations far larger and far more complex than the ones in the projectiles he fired, their physics entangled in impossible ways with his realspace body so that their properties would be reflected and combined. Whatever they were - and there were several instances of things looking strangely familiar - they were as far from human anatomy as humans were from the composition of the average rock. Maybe even further in some cases, though simpler and more streamlined in others.


    Wanting to test the effects of such an unusual power and much like my fight with Gabby before, I took things up a notch by way of speed. It immediately became clear that while Mark could hit a lot harder than his friend if in conventional means, his flight was rudimentary as far as supers of our level were concerned. He could only fly a bit faster than he could run, maybe six hundred kilometers per hour or so though my senses insisted there were two different objects each moving at about half that speed using entirely incompatible methods of locomotion. Like, Mark seemed to be running as far as his body''s physics were concerned except he was not actually moving his legs, while one of his extra... bodies for lack of a better term was held aloft by dynamic lift via giant rotor while being pushed around by... turbofans? ...what?


    No, not important for the moment. What was was another extra body layer changing from a mass of high-energy wiring discharging enormous loads of current shifting as I approached, only to be replaced by a much denser, much more uniform mass shadow that could have belonged to a metal cylinder weighing several hundred tons. Similarly, more strange arrays of warped physics that somewhat resembled larger turbofans accelerated his third extra layer, adding another four hundred miles to his speed and a significant boost to his maneuverability. Not that he would be going anywhere like that; he was still barely breaking the speed of sound.


    Mark must have realized just that, because the near-continuous barrage became slower, more scattered, but more maneuverable and harder-hitting glowing projectiles that moved like light missiles but hit like thousand-pound bombs. Individually these hurt a lot more than his previous barrage had - almost like slaps to the face - but there were far fewer of them, not the dozens per second he''d blitzed me with. Mistake; he''d just made outmaneuvering them so much easier due to much lower numbers. To show him the error of his ways I gave a burst of speed and was suddenly next to him, a leg kicking into his gut.


    The impact forces went crazy. At the same time they struck hundreds of tons of solid steel too thick to easily move or damage, they also hit much lighter targets they should have hurled miles away. And while some layers were incredibly stiff but fragile, others were just solid toughness and his realspace body was both tiny in comparison and greatly flexible. The whole thing was jumbled enough to confuse the laws of Physics; it had certainly confused me. Instead of a decisive blow that would have stunned the boy, momentarily knocked him out of the fight and maybe broken a rib or two, the combined warped physics soaked the attack with only a bruise to show for it and only a few dozen feet of knock-back.


    Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.


    Electromagnetic radiation came out of Mark''s eyes, some of it infrared and ultraviolet coherent beams, some in microwave pulses in various wavelenghts and finally something that looked like... R.A.D.A.R.? Yep, military radar frequencies. Two of them even, jumbled so far beyond recognition it was a wonder Mark himself could pick up any information like that. I got ready to give him another blow when things shifted once again. The huge metal sphere was still there - for certain definitions of ''there'' - but one of the layers providing him with flight grew larger and larger until he seemed to fly similarly to the largest military cargo planes. The other changed even more and became a bloated, elongated mass of over a thousand tons over a powerful but pitifully slow ground impulse system and a huge mechanical... arm? Barrel? It felt like fifty feet long and very threatening but the physics had become even more nonsensical and I couldn''t make heads or tails of how it was supposed to work.


    Then Mark knocked me out of the sky. I didn''t see how; it was simply too quick for even my senses. One moment I was about to hit him, the next I lay in a twenty-foot crater on the ground with my diaphragm insisting it had been hammered by every single gun on a battleship at the same time. It took me a few seconds to get to my feet, then he shot me again in the back. A tremendous explosion - at least by conventional standards - slammed me back down like being kicked by someone with my full strength getting enough time to bring it to bear properly. Gritting my teeth against the first attack that had truly hurt across both spars, I flew out of the crater.


    The dark-skinned teenager was flying several miles overhead at a lazy six or seven hundred miles per hour, turning around to keep me in sight. His eyes glowed and that time I caught the energy discharge in that weird mess of physics that were his powers early enough to dodge. There was a pulse of light, an energy discharge lasting only a few microseconds, then an explosion larger than a dozen cruise missiles put together blasted another thirty-foot-deep crater where I''d been flying over only a moment before.


    My senses reported the blast was equivalent to an explosive, armor-piercing cell moving two and a half times the speed of sound and massing over seven tons, three orders of magnitude bigger than shells from a heavy tank''s main gun. It was the kind of hit that, without defensive powers to reinforce the intended target, could have blasted through a super''s baseline durability in even a glancing blow. A direct hit would have been enough to cut a battleship in half or reduce even a very tough super to a greasy smear against the ground.


    The kid could dole out such ranged attacks with a line-of-sight beam every couple of seconds and he was angry enough to do so in a spar. Part of it was my fault and needed to happen, but if he pulled similar stunts in the field, especially in civilian areas? That would be bad, if he didn''t learn control. Lesson plan noted for the future, I charged him once again. His low speed and maneuverability were already known quantities; what was left to test was his mettle and planning under threat by a superior opponent... and his ability to survive.


    Mark''s powers had already proven capable of adaptation on the fly, to a point, a significant advantage over more static enemies. But while I expected him to, even gave him time to make new plans with a slower approach than before, he doubled down on what he was already doing and also revealed his big beam had a sustained fire mode. Unlike before I was braced with Proximakinesis, had amplified it with Force Adjustment, and was using Forced Acceleration to its fullest to give myself effectively a much faster flow of time.


    The beam still hit with tremendous force, and kept hitting in a sustained burn. It was delivering the same power as the instant explosive blow spread out over a second, less explosive and more a giant-sized blowtorch. Instead of doing the practical thing and dodge, I kept pushing against it. Even as my costume''s gloves blackened, even as my skin reddened, sizzled, then began to burn, I slowly overpowered the pressure, feeling like I was holding up an entire warship. Crossing that half a mile to the angry little black midget took over half a minute but in the end Mark was forced to cut off his attack lest he, too, burn in the backblast.


    As soon as he did, I flickered forth, grabbed him by the legs, gave a couple good turns for speed and launched him at the ground. Due to his powers, he massed enough that manhandling him wasn''t negligible effort even for my full strength, but that made his own impact crater all the larger when his back struck the ground at thrice the speed of sound.


    Bruised all over, bleeding, with at least a couple broken bones, he still tried to get up and ready another attack. So I flew straight down and punched him hard enough to flatten him once more.


    "A for effort, Mark, but this fight is over." That it had to be said was all the proof anyone needed to see it had been harsher and uglier than just a spar near the end. "You did surprisingly well." My gloves were actually melted against my fingers, every bit of exposed skin below the face looked well-cooked, even my hair was a bit singed at the ends. Of course, for supers both my and Mark''s wounds were superficial at best, but the kid had neither prior battle experience nor the kind of pain threshold countless injuries and necessity had forced me to build up.


    "Yay..." the black teenager said in his moody, unimpressed away. Or maybe he was too exhausted and injured to speak up.


    "Don''t... don''t those hurt?" Cindy asked, sounding uncertain for the first time ever. She was pointing at all the red blotches of second and occasionally third degree burns over my neck, shoulders, arms and chest where the costume did not cover and Regeneration hadn''t had time to fix. With better control over it now I''d concentrated it on keeping my face intact and only after my landing had it started trickling down to the rest. It was like a mudslide of new, pristine skin and would be done soon.


    "Of course they hurt, but if getting hurt stopped me from fighting I''d have died long ago," I told the proud, previously overconfident girl. "Plus they''ll be gone in another fifteen to twenty seconds. Up for our spar?"


    "Of course I am!" she said, suddenly standing tall and perky. "Who do you take me for, those idiots? As if a bit of fire and explosions could ever touch me!" OK, still overconfident. More bitchy that proud too. Why was I trying to teach those kids again?


    Riiight, fate of the world at stake. Let''s see how overconfident she''d sound after our little spar, shall we?

 19: Caught

    Unlike the two boys, Cindy did not appear to be in any kind of hurry to attack. The fourteen year old brunette practically skipped out to the battlefield, as if she had all the time in the world and made exactly zero effort to defend herself against attack. The whole charade - because it took deliberate effort to look that nonchalant - made it look like she was taking a morning stroll through a park. She was obviously not taking the spar seriously, and seemed to be proud of it.


    "You do realize most crisis events are on a timetable, right?" I told her. Being willing to blow the combat part of the evaluation was one thing; not everyone had direct combat skills or even wanted to fight after all, though she might regret doing so by the time we were done. Wasting time was another. "Enemy armies advance towards objectives, hostages can get killed, bomb timers run out, wildfires spread, disaster victims expire, and if you''re particularly unlucky you get monsters that grow with every step they take. In a crisis time is the most important commodity you have. It does not matter what skills you have or how great and strong your powers are if you never reach the field in time to help; you will fail before you can even begin."


    She scowled but, miracle of miracles, chose not to talk back for a change. That was a relief; it meant she could tell when she was obviously in the wrong no matter how much she might hate it. That was not a given for many people her age - and quite a few adults never developed that skill either. It meant that however difficult, however arbitrarily contrary and spiteful she might choose to be, she could actually be taught.


    Changing attitude, she instantly flickered to the middle of the designated sparring space, a smattering of very brief afterimages filling the intervening space. Her method of travel left no footprints, the loose gravel, snow and dust entirely undisturbed by her passage - as they had been for the entirety of our trek out to the wasteland. Once she came to a stop a span of time briefer than a normal human''s eyeblink later, she crossed her arms petulantly and looked up at me.


    "If you are the bad guy then why aren''t you attacking? Or at least advancing to some nefarious goal?" she turned my own words against me. "I got here before you. Does this mean I win some prize? I collect cat plushies in case you can''t decide what the prize should be."


    "There''s many types of bad guy. For example, someone that wants to attack a building you got to defend." And with that I flickered forth, not due to some weird esoteric effect but from sheer speed. Before she could react I flew within an inch of the two of us colliding, narrowly bypassing her as I crossed the mile-wide sparring area to reach a house-sized boulder on a nearby hill. Plowing into it at twenty times the speed of sound let me tunnel through the rock as it liquefied instead of exploding, coring the boulder in an instant before getting back to my starting point. "One building down, all civilian targets killed, you lose."


    "No fair!" Cindy shouted and stomped her foot, flattening a circle of earth about thirty feet in diameter as if tens of thousands feet stomped all over it at the same time. "You didn''t just fly around the others, you fought them!"


    "Because I had a reason to fight them," I reminded the recalcitrant teen. "Enemies with goals other than killing you specifically don''t have to engage you. Avoiding a fight is faster, less expensive and generally easier so most people will try to," I told her while a voice whispered about filthy hypocrites in my mind. Then again, isn''t it every teacher''s goal to train her student into surpassing or at least being less idiotic than them? "But it''s true that some enemies will try to fight you, and both supers and monsters tend more towards it than avoidance."


    "Then why aren''t you-" She winked out mid-sentence as I punched her in the face faster than she could react, or at least tried to. She flickered more than normal, several afterimages forming around me and her old position for a split-second before she reappeared fifty feet away. "Oooh, sneaky! You got me talking then tried for a sucker punch, how very villainous." She giggled, hardly worried about being attacked faster than she could react. So... her power was either reacting on its own, or a passive. Both had their own advantages. "Guess I should strike back, right?"


    Then I got punched by a little girl. Not just once, or ten times, or even fifty. Every single part of me got on the receiving end of every type of attack as I was punched, kicked, pinched, karate-chopped and headbutted from all angles at the same time. There was even hair-pulling and eye-gouging involved, and all in all the attack was one of the most uncomfortable things I''d ever gone through. Not that painful per se, because Cindy simply wasn''t strong enough to hurt me with her bare hands and whatever power she was using didn''t make her blows more damaging. But suddenly getting the memories of having endured each and every one of those blows, of getting the sensation of all of them happening was... imagine just standing there and having a little kid trying to hurt you, trying different things for hours.


    "Interesting," I said, seeing shallow scratches as if from a determined kitten vanish as my Regeneration got to work. "You said you were ''Everywhere'' back when we first met. I guess that includes doing ''Everything''?"


    "Why should I explain when Mr. Dreadlocks didn''t?" she shot back and her image flickered once more, followed by another series of attacks. "Huh. I usually only need to do this once but you''re too tough. Let''s try again and see what happens."


    Yeah, she was annoying... so I eye-beamed her in the face. Or at least I tried; what appeared to be her simply vanished, the beam passing through with no effect, while Cindy reappeared immediately next to it. So I did it again, and again, and again, and again, and again, as fast as I could manage it with Forced Acceleration cranked up as far as it would go. But even as the rest of the world slowed to a crawl, even as fragments of rock and puffs of snow from where my beams landed flew through the air at literal snail''s pace while Cindy''s own attacks on me took longer and longer to conclude despite falling all together across my body, there was no appreciable difference in her discorporations. No matter how closely I looked with Force Adjustment, there didn''t seem to be a time interval between my shooting her, her body blinking out of reality then reappearing somewhere nearby.


    What if there wasn''t any interval at all? What if she didn''t wink out or reappear but simply wasn''t really there, or anywhere? Force Awareness insisted that the blows were delivered across my body by someone, each blow connected to another identical body. Yet if the bodies my senses insisted were there and all acted at the same time really did exist, there would not have been enough space for them to fit around me. And when I tried to pinpoint where her center of mass was, where gravity was applied to her, where she stepped on the ground, where she breathed, the forces were stretched out over a couple city blocks as if her molecules had been blasted across that whole space at once. Frustrating - almost as much as her repeated attacks.


    You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.


    So I reached for the power of Instant Action, stepped outside of time, and everything became clearer. Tens of thousands of Cindies appeared around me, not visible but still perceptible through Force Awareness. Her claim of being "everywhere" suddenly seemed far less absurd, because her overlapping positions took up every bit of space in a two-block radius, every single position she could have taken in that space filled up... except for where I was standing. Like the proverbial Schrodinger''s cat, the younger girl was both here and there, in front of and behind me, in my left and my right at the same time. She was both about to punch me in the nose, and kick at my shin, and pull at my hair, and claw at my throat, all at once. Every possible location and action both taken and not.


    Unlike Schrodinger''s cat, what she could be - and thus was - doing wasn''t limited by observation. By using Instant Action I''d opened the proverbial box and looked because with time stopped her condition could not change, and yet she hadn''t ''collapsed'' to a single possibility. She still was in each and every place she could be - wait! That was it! The one spot not taken up by Cindies was my own position, because being in my place flat-out wasn''t possible. She couldn''t move me or at least had not moved me, so she couldn''t have been in my space, just like she wasn''t underground because she hadn''t dug any holes or flying overhead because she had no flying powers.


    I shot eyebeams through the nearest Cindy-image. It winked out as the beams would have touched it, as did the image behind it and the one behind that and so on and so forth till the end of the Cindy-occupied area. The beam cut a path through space, clearing it of Cindies because Cindy wasn''t hit by the beam... ergo she never was - and couldn''t have been - in the space the beam crossed. Now, under normal time the beam would have stopped and after it no longer burned through that space, Cindy could have occupied it again. But we weren''t under normal time. We weren''t under sped-up or slowed time. In Instant Action we were under no time at all.


    I blasted ahead with the eye-beams again then turned, sweeping them through each and every Cindy-image I could see. Places she could have been were no longer possibilities as I collapsed the probabilities through direct interaction. A million potential Cindies were left, then a hundred thousand, then ten thousand, then just hundreds until the beam went full circle, scouring the entirety of the surrounding area. Finally, the last image did not vanish. With every possible position she could have been and avoided the beams disproven, Cindy could no longer avoid them. Smiling, I returned to the normal flow of time.


    "Aaaaaiiiieeee!!!"


    The girl''s scream as she was blasted back into the ground was very satisfying. Mark and Gabby gaped as dozens of Cindies flickered out from the impact site, but all of them were covered in dust, had their blouse torn and were cradling a bleeding gash in their right side. No matter where she flickered or what she did after the fact, the untouchable girl had been touched.


    "Not so invincible now, are you?" So I did rub it in so what? Everyone would have done the same - it would have taken a saint not to.


    "How... HOW?" she screeched in distress, her voice echoing from several dozen places at once as she frantically looked for the reason her power had failed. The boys were still undecided between being stunned... or looking at me with stars in their eyes.


    "You can be everywhere you want but that''s not very useful if there''s nowhere for you to be." I smugly explained. I was about to go into specifics in a way that would have totally been a lesson on how to watch out for her weaknesses and not a twenty-minute boasting session about the awesomeness that was Maya Wennefer when I got hit in the face by every boulder in a two hundred yard radius. And after every boulder she could have thrown at me was indeed thrown at the same time, she tore up the ground to find even more boulders. A reminder that while she was the physically weakest of the trio, she could still lift a couple dozen tons and throw around car-sized projectiles with impunity.


    With an eye roll, I used Instant Action again. Instead of eye beams projected via Force Field, I simply flew through every position she could have taken, eliminating them all until Cindy was forced into the last one. Then I grabbed her by one arm before returning to the normal flow of time. Ten seconds of Instant Action and I was beginning to feel the workout, but the frantically flickering girl hanging from my hand when nothing she could do could get her out of my grip was reward enough.


    "As I said earlier when you were probably not paying attention," I said while ignoring all the kicks she sent at my knees and shins, "all powers have weaknesses and limitations. From that it shouldn''t have been difficult to realize that finding yours safely, before a bad guy managed it in the field, was half the point of these spars, the other half being all of us getting some hands-on experience with each other''s powers." The brunette was finally slowing down, the realization that she couldn''t escape my grip giving her a constipated expression.


    "All right, I''ll admit that was impressive," Mark said, his glare at Cindy shifting into a calculating expression. "How did you do it? We''ve fought dozens of times and I''ve yet to hit her once, never mind doing... well... this!"


    "I''m sure now that you''re a team and everything, Cindy will tell you," I told him drily.


    "Like hell!" the girl herself interjected.


    "Just as I''m sure you''ll explain all your powers to your friends," my smirk took on a dangerous sharpness "and not contemplate how to use their own weaknesses to murder them, or something. Cindy paused in her flickering to shoot Mark a very indignant look. "Killing people for anything short of life and death matters is a bad idea for more reasons than-"


    I stopped, let go of Cindy and took flight. After hitting five hundred feet I better focused on what Force Awareness had just picked up. With the Earth''s curvature no longer interfering for at least a couple dozen miles and thus no longer having to parse through countless bits of useless information, I could see and hear Tonopah Base clearly... and all the alarms ringing there while soldiers moved with a purpose.


    Not for the first time, I cursed the fragility of cell phones and other communication devices. I''d left mine behind in preparation for the spar. Given the amounts and different types of damage superpowers could dole out even indirectly, trying to protect a phone from them would have either also sealed it from incoming signals or bricked it outright. Now I was regretting that decision. Maybe I should have had one of the kids waiting for their turn hold it during the spars? Yeah, no, they''d have probably crushed it or lost it by "accident", or something. Well... nothing that could be done about it, I guess...


    "OK, kids, gather up," I told them after landing a split-second later, only to find them bickering like typical teenagers. Or at least Cindy and Mark were; Gabby was staying out of it in a wary silence. "There''s something going on in the base and we need to get back yesterday so we''ll do it the fast way."


    "What''s that?" Gabby asked suspiciously, the other two still giving each other glares that promised violence.


    "You''ll see," I told him cryptically and reached out with a force field...

 Interlude III: Avalon

    The sky was black, the midday sun hidden behind cloud cover so thick it made everything as dark as night. Howling winds raged against the surrounding hills, slowly but steadily growing towards a proper hurricane and throwing around both raindrops and small debris hard enough to hurt. Lightning flashed overhead in greater and greater frequency, thunder shook the sparse trees for miles around and bolts of energy that most definitely weren''t natural left craters at hilltops and lowlands both.


    Anyone sane had evacuated the village of Keswick, as well as the rest of Lake District National Park in North West England, hours before. The dozen or so figures pressing to reach the top of the nearby prominent hill were not sane, as was evident by their willingness to charge a throng of enemies a hundred times their number as well as their casual disregard for the laws of reality. Fireballs, lightning, beams of light and pink bolts that looked like molten bubblegum launched by the few attackers clashed against clouds of shadow, swarms of insects, and flashes of sickly, ominous green radiance from the hundreds of defenders ringing the hilltop.


    Another crackle of alien energy flashed overhead, illuminating the battlefield in eerily strobing radiance and revealing the stark differences between the two battling sides. Seven out of the small attacking group were flying low, some of them on brooms, others with wings of energy growing from their back. All seven of them were female, the youngest a slip of a girl that could only barely be called a teenager, the oldest a burly, thirty-something woman that hurled energy bolts at anything nearby by violently punching the air. The other five attackers were on the ground, keeping pace with the fliers through bounding leaps enabled by the obviously superpowered armor they were wearing. Their gender was a bit more ambiguous under said armor than their aerial comrades'', but as all of them either had needlessly feminine shape to their armor or said armor was flexible and form-fitting enough to show off their curves, it wasn''t much of a difference. These ladies, too, blasted at the ring of opponents blocking access to the hilltop, not with magical-seeming blasts but with technological weapons built into their suits. Lasers, glowing projectiles, shining swords, torrents of fire, all were thrown or swung around with abandon. The fire was pink, and both popped and smelled like bubblegum.


    The force defending the hilltop were monsters. Misshapen lumps of flesh in vaguely humanoid, child-sized packages made up the front lines, shark-like fangs oversized for even their bloated heads, clawed limbs that not once matched in size or shape and often numbered three or more per body, eyes that glowed in the dark with malice... and those were the least of the young women''s foes. In the air, dozens of winged, gargoyle-like figures attacked their vastly outnumbered human opponents with various forms of foul-smelling sorcery, from the black smoke with the consistency of boiling tar, to the angrily buzzing insect swarms, to green flame that stuck like napalm. Larger, even more monstrous figures stood in the back, some of them rotten and skeletal, others demonic and inhuman, wingless gargoyles writ large. The worst were the thousands of shambling or crawling figures outnumbering all the rest combined. They might have been taken for human at a distance thanks to both wearing clothes and lacking monstrous features or magic, but up close their slack, pale features, still gaping but no longer bleeding wounds and obviously dead state revealed their nature of walking corpses. While not particularly dangerous individually, the zombies did not feel fear or fatigue, did not care about random body parts being blasted off, and even when decapitated or hacked apart their pieces still tried to attack.


    The flying women had tried to break through the ring of monsters several times already, using their superior mobility. This time they closed ranks, bulled their way through a swarm of gargoyles, dodged around the more powerful enemy spells with superior coordination and teamwork, then launched themselves at the hilltop when no further obstacles seemed to bar their passage. This turned out to be a mistake, because all seven of them slammed into an invisible wall and bounced. The youngest almost toppled from her broom, coming a hair away from falling to the rocky hillside beneath before one of the other girls caught her and helped stabilize her flight. A couple of the others seemed a bit dazed from the impact but there were no serious injuries, so the girls immediately started work on breaching the barrier.


    Three of them concentrated their firepower at a single point while the other four turned around and stood guard over them. The more mobile monsters - the gargoyles first among them - were quick to turn around and batter their position with sorcerous attacks. Instead of dodging, the four guards raised small barriers of their own. Bolts of shadow, clouds of foul smoke and sickly green flames splashed against that defense and were held back, though with intense effort from the young women. Return fire blasted gargoyles out of the sky by the dozen but there always seemed to be more of them and the less mobile monsters were now joining the fray. Hulking forms threw boulders, fiendish entities blasted with fireballs much larger than the gargoyles could make, swarms of thrown darts or even arrows pelted the general area.


    The worst came when the skeletal-looking monsters came together and combined their foul powers like the apparent witches were doing. Instead of foul darkness or thundering death, their group-cast spell summoned a large cloud of furiously buzzing, strangely glowing wasps. The ominous mass spread and blotted out all light even more than the supernatural hurricane had done, then crawled over the barrier maintained by the defending women. They could not pass through it, but the barrier was not complete either; where an attack formed a crack or lapsing concentration weakened it, a few glowing insects at a time went through. Once inside, they immediately swarmed the girls, both the defenders and those trying to get through to the hilltop. Layers of secondary defenses activated, spreading anything from glowing auras to skintight force-fields over the young women, but those were far weaker than their combined defenses, especially with their attention split, and the insects were not mundane. With powers of their own, they stung and bit at the inner layers of protection and began to leech energy from them.


    At the same time the battle near the top of the hill was raging, the countless zombies and almost as numerous child-sized monsters swarmed the five ground-bound and now unsupported women in power armor. The intensity of the fight rose and rose as the heavy combatant''s weapons spat death and destruction as only automatic weapons firing on ranks of massed infantry could but try as they might the five of them were just not enough to break through. Crawling corpses half-torn to bits and sneaky, multi-armed, gremlin-like foes managed to engage them in melee and started crawling up their armor. Said armor was tough enough and powerful enough to mostly ignore attacks from such weak beings, but being grappled en masse stopped the knights'' progress entirely and forced them to switch to melee weapons that would make blasting their way through the throng even slower... and time was not on their side.


    "It is done, wizard," a monstrously bloated figure stretching its black robe almost to bursting growled at its much smaller compatriot at the top of a hill. Its voice was the grinding of stone of stone, the tearing of flesh under claw, the weak wailing of dying men as they were ground to meal. "Your enemies will never reach this place in time to stop the ritual, so I want my reward." It pointed with a wasted, oozing, clawed arm towards a circle of standing stones. "A few of your spares will do."


    "We''ll see," the far more normal-looking man despite his archaic cloak and fully concealing hood said. "The agreement was that payment would be rendered after completion of the task."


    "Bah, you new worlders are so skittish," the larger figure spat. "Why, if we were back in Maveth..."


    "But we are not," the robed man said in annoyance. "Now summon a few more lesser fiends. I want those meddling witches that dare call themselves Valkyries beaten and in chains in time for the next phase of the ritual. The greater the sacrifice, the greater the gain."


    Behind them, on the very top of the hill a circle of standing stones a hundred feet wide loomed. Before thirty-six out of forty stones stood a robed figure holding a dagger of bone and at the feet of each lay six smaller figures, bound and gagged. All of them were girls or young women, shaking from both the icy rain and obvious terror. Just that continuous trickle of terror and suffering had already been enough of a sacrifice to get the services of the bloated otherworldly figure and its small army of summoned monsters.


    The wizard and his acolytes were eager to see what new powers six times six times six human sacrifices in a properly dedicated and ancient site of power would bring.


    xxxx


    A thousand miles above the Earth, a mass of metal lay in orbit. It was the size of a large cargo ship and matte black and even from up close it was a lot harder to see than it should have been. Here and there turrets jutted out of the main hull haphazardly, more like the branches of a tree or something else organically grown than anything that came out of a construction yard. In other places it looked not so much unfinished as just as haphazardly expanded after the initial construction had been complete, with the bulk of new chambers, turrets and several dozen feet of length added to the hull itself with little rhyme or reason, let alone a plan. It was as if whatever the metal construction was, it was undergoing repeated overhauls.


    Within that enormous for any artificial satellite hull, lay rooms of all kinds. Rooms for habitation, rooms for training, rooms that doubled as labs so any occupants would not have to leave their experiments behind to eat or sleep, storage rooms, even rooms of alien geometries that had windows overlooking forests or active volcanoes or the bottom of the Laurentian Abyss. Most of the rooms were empty but not abandoned, signs of both frequent and lasting habitation in several of them indicating a small group of people making use of the facilities for weeks at minimum. Strangely enough, despite no evidence of a reentry vehicle or other method of resupply, the kitchen held fresh produce, several boxes of New York pizza only hours old, and a chicken. The chicken had feathers of purple and gold and glow-in-the-dark eyes. It was also annoyed at how its habitual feeding had been delayed for several hours and pecking at the emergency pizza cupboard. Its beak was leaving deep dents in the hardened steel all the furniture on the space station appeared to be made of.


    Far from the kitchen and the angry, hungry chicken, in the chamber everyone in the group of the station''s inhabitants agreed was the bridge but who could never agree where on the ship''s structure it should be located, was a control station with twice as many buttons, levers screens and warning lights as a 747''s cockpit and half again as many on Tuesdays, and on that control station sat a young man. Tall, broad shouldered but only lightly muscled, with unkempt brown hair that fell halfway to his shoulders and eyes that shifted colors when he used his powers - that was, all the time - the maybe twenty-year old looked at the screen and did not like what he saw. He pressed a series of seemingly random buttons, pulled a lever down twice without pulling it up in between, then turned a button widdershins thrice. The button did not appear capable of turning at all yet it did, and one of the screens showing some disaster movie with a lot of fire and explosions in rural France blinked a signal about "establishing a direct uplink".


    "Amanda, we have a serious problem," the young man spoke into this ''uplink'' without preamble. "How soon can you disengage?"


    "Disengage?" a woman''s voice sounded clear as crystal and more musical than an opera recording, cutting through the sound of more explosions coming from the screen. "Jerry, this stupid gathering of wannabe warlocks we''ve been tracking managed to find some actual, working Mavethan spells on the Darknet, summoned a humongous bunch of minor monsters and are now trying to use the Carnac stones as their site of power with their monsters raiding the surrounding area for sacrifices."


    "Mandy..." the young man tried to cut her off but she talked over him.


    "...then I got those idiots from the local commune protesting about national heritage and protected sovereignty and a bunch of other irrelevant bollocks when they have bloody monsters raiding their houses and abducting children."


    "Mandy!" Jerry shouted more insistently, but whoever the woman was on the other side of the connection, she was on a roll.


    "Bunch of buggering wankers. Don''t they realize that I can''t properly blow up the monsters and save the hostages if I have to worry about stupid six-thousand-year-old rocks?! They''re not even magical. The bloody planet didn''t have any magic a year ago, let alone in the Pleistocene!"


    "The girls are in danger!" Jerry shouted, trying to talk over a voice that was louder than the tiny megaphone should have allowed for and barely managing it.


    "I''m listening," the woman said in a suddenly very dangerous tone. The background explosions on the screen stopped, showing many scattering wolf-like beasts in a field of hundreds of menhirs. The disaster movie had not been a movie at all.


    This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.


    "Our sensors picked up The Wizard twenty minutes ago in Cumbria, Britain. Three minutes later there was the flare of a proper summoning, followed by dozens of smaller ones. Considering how the guy operates, that meant sacrifices..."


    "Jerry you didn''t!" the woman demanded and despite a distance of over five thousand miles the whole station was filled by the ominous pressure of her ire.


    "Jace demanded they go, said the whole reason they were training was so no more girls would suffer as they did." The young man sighed. "When they learned the Pachyderm wouldn''t get in position for another forty-nine minutes, there was no way I could convince any of them to stay."


    "Only you would name a spaceship like that," the woman said with fond exasperation before her tone sharpened once more. "And what do you mean, ''convince'' them? Are you a technopath or not? They were in a hundred kiloton steel mass every last inch of which is infused with your powers, a thousand miles from breathable air. If you wanted to you could have canned them like sardines and there''d have been nothing they could have done!"


    "Can we do this later? The girls are still in danger." Jerry looked at another screen with line after line of rapidly shifting code and his face paled. "Their stamina and magic are rapidly tanking for all of them! How quickly can you go?"


    "Hold that thought," the woman said and the screen showing the fleeing monsters suddenly blanked out from a blinding actinic flare. When the flare subsided seconds later, only the shadows of monsters remained against smoking rocks and cooked, partially glassed ground.


    An incredibly good-looking woman with long, wavy hair of gleaming crimson so intense it couldn''t have been natural glared through the screen with almond-shaped, bloody-hued eyes. Perfectly symmetrical, ruby-red lips were pursed into a displeased frown and the force of her presence somehow reached through the screen to press Jerry back against his seat.


    "This is the last time I''m leaving you in charge," she vowed threateningly. "Don''t think you''re off the hook either. We''ll talk more after I''ve retrieved those idiots." Then there was another actinic flare and she vanished from the screen.


    Jerry sighed in relief that the girls would not get more than a very extensive scolding and the hope that by the time she was done with them Amanda''s anger would have cooled down before the two of them met face to face. And with that forlorn hope, he got off the Captain''s Chair and went to feed the chicken.


    xxxx


    Neck-deep in monsters, using her light magic to its fullest to protect her friends while they desperately tried to breach the Wizard''s ward and get to the vile man before he could murder more innocent girls to feed his vile hunger for power, Isa was only certain about one thing. If they survived this, she was going to kick Jace''s ass six ways from Sunday and never listen to anything she said. Older and wiser her ass; that meathead had probably gotten them killed.


    Back when they''d first started their lessons, both Lady Crimson and the Engineer had warned them that if they wanted to be proper frontline combatants they should never shape their magic to have an expendable resource. Yes, they''d lose out on peak output and absolute magnitude of single workings, but the ability to keep casting combat workings again and again for more than a minute or two would be invaluable. Seeing as that form of magic was what the most powerful sorceress around used as well, she had readily agreed.


    Not all of her fellow rescuees did. Some preferred the Engineer''s style of building up both artifacts and magitech during their downtime so they could face any battle with stockpiled firepower as well as full reserves to throw into a few really big spells. In almost every normal fight, against a reasonable number of opponents, that would have worked too. They''d outnumbered The Wizard twelve to one and forced him into retreat before so they thought it would be fine this time too. They never expected him to have recruited no less than forty acolytes as well as summoned something big and nasty from the Abyss the sacrificial sorcery of the Mavethans gave him access to.


    Aisha had been the first to fall. The mage-knight had been the last of them to join their little band and only six weeks of build-up had left her enchanted armor dangerously fragile, comparatively. Then Hasna, a middle-eastern girl they''d saved from a cult that had wanted to infiltrate and mind-control the Indian government, had been downed by a powerful curse that slipped through their outer shield during the enemy''s last attempt to storm their position. That had left only two girls working to breach The Wizard''s magic, which all of them knew would not be enough. With the defenders already pressed hard and the four remaining knights unable to reach and join them, it would only be a matter of time.


    Isa strained in her casting, demanding more of her light magic than ever before. More damn spell-bugs pressed against her inner barrier, their dispelling claws clacking against it and sending dangerous destabilizing vibrations through her magic. One tiny dispelling was insignificant, but five hundred? She had already made the mistake of ignoring it, leading to a tiny crack and just one of those bugs getting through. Now its sting was buried in her left armpit, not only stinging like a bitch but also being a minor but noticeable drain on her magic. The worst thing was that if she tried to remove it she''d have to lower the only defense keeping the other four hundred and ninety-nine bugs back.


    There was no way she''d do that during the fight. She diverted more of her magic to her defense for good measure, because she''d seen what happened when Mumbi dared try the opposite to help clear the monsters faster. The older African girl was shaking like a leaf under the assault of several spell-bugs, barely any of her magic left for more than holding her shield.


    But that left Isa with not enough of her light to matter. She might splatter goblin things with the one beam she could throw at a time or burn zombies all day long, but one kill at a time was not enough to matter. She gritted her teeth when another knight fell barely a hundred feet away, leaving only three of them standing. The fight was so chaotic she couldn''t even tell who the fallen girl was.


    Her beam speared three goblins in a line then blasted a zombie''s head completely off. Unlike with her friends'' attacks, the headless corpse did not stumble on to attack them until it had to be incinerated or hacked apart; Isa''s beams burned out the animating dark sorcery in its entirety and shone a bit brighter for the accomplishment. Just a little, a practically minuscule increase. Now if she could do that another few hundred times in a row...


    Mumbi fell to her hands and feet next to Isa, barely contributing to the outer barrier any more and Isa struggled to take up the slack. The big ugly things on the back line decided that was the best time to throw rocks at the trapped girls, trying to batter their defenses. Or rather, the malicious intelligence behind them did. Isa was certain that vile mind was guiding all the monsters somehow, even the bugs. They were too coordinated for anything else. As rivulets of sweat ran down her face and her body protested as she forced it to fuel the barrier magic, she cursed the nameless fiend, she cursed The Wizard, but above all else she cursed herself and her friends for their stupidity. They could have waited a few minutes, couldn''t they have? Now they were lost and The Wizard would either kill or sacrifice them to his big, stupid ritual just to get more power. She could already feel it, the sacrificial magic pulsing under the earth.


    Then she got an almost certainly stupid idea, but since they were going to die anyway... closing her eyes, she stopped attacking at all and reached for that beating pulse of black magic. Being trained as a Valkyrie, helping hunt down evil wizards that played with alien magic downloaded from the Internet with zero idea of what they were doing, Isa had been trained to recognize just that type of magic. You couldn''t face the enemy without knowing the enemy, Lady Crimson always said. She realized that she remembered the words of several rituals and given what The Wizard was trying to do, possibly the actual spell that bastard was using. Like, she was sixty percent sure.


    Her previously racing heartbeat had slowed, matching the pulse of the ancient sorcery. That alien world the invaders had come from had had magic for thousands of years, according to her teachers, with powers that made even nuclear weapons seem like firecrackers in comparison, if allowed to work out to the end. That was how they''d first spread powers to Earth; by starting a huge, open-ended sacrificial ritual and feeding every single death they could cause to it to build magic that would be native to the planet that could then be used for further rituals, or be indirectly tapped by non-mages.


    Isa didn''t care much about the theory; she only cared that what she was trying to do was technically possible and that with her back literally against a magic wall she saw no other way out. So still with her eyes closed, she carefully formed a bolt half out of her light magic, half out of the ritual''s energy and offered its kill to the ritual. The spell was primed with a tangible malevolence that slid like an oil spill over her soul, an endless hunger that whispered promises of power if only she would feed it life.


    She opened her eyes to find a five-armed goblin thing leering at her from only three feet away. Next to her, Mumbi was shaking in agony, swarmed by bugs and unable to even think of casting any more. There was nothing Isa could do about the black girl so she cleaved the goblin''s head from its shoulders. Power. Sweet, restoring, energizing magic flowed through Isa as her target was consumed utterly. Half of it boosted her own strength, the other half was absorbed by the ritual. Even with getting only half, her net gain was easily ten, twenty times what she got from using her powers to purge necromancy.


    She hastily made another bolt, aimed carefully, and cored two monsters that had climbed on one of the still standing knights and were banging on her helmet. More power flowed through her, not just exercising her abilities, not just sticking to a theme her teachers had told her would fit best with her talents or killing monsters to push her growth a little faster, but unmaking the little shits in their entirety and feeding on the results. He body was already halfway through purging her previous fatigue and the nasty little bug at her armpit didn''t seem like such a point of agony any more. She threw another blast and another, then two at once. She thought about feeding some of the extra magic to the defense, but if the bad guys stopped her before she could kill and devour them it would all be over.


    Already more attacks were pounding at her defenses and the ritual just behind her back progressed faster; she was running out of time. if she wanted to save her friends, she could not afford to play it safe. So she tapped deeper into her newly growing strength and tried something she''d been practicing in her free time, something she''d seen in a movie once and wanted to replicate with her light but never managed before. Except this time she did, and it was glorious.


    A blast of searing light came out, thicker than her wrist and brighter than a thunderbolt, more powerful than anything she''d ever attempted. It also wasn''t white but a deep crimson, same as a red-hot bar of iron straight from the forge. It didn''t go out in a straight line either; that would have been a waste. No, it angled in its path, a jagged judgement chaining between targets it immediately obliterated and reduced to ashes. A dozen, two dozen, three; a massive torrent of stolen power went through Isa and she laughed out loud. She could save herself and more! She could protect her friends, smash The Wizard''s barrier and save all his victims.


    So she repeated the chaining beam attacks again and again, crushing the monsters with her power, cackling without a care in the world. Then finally, just as the closest monsters were starting to flee, she felt a weak, forgotten spell cracking... and spell-bugs poured through her breached inner defense. Hastily, she poured power into it to force the breach closed, but her magic was far more volatile now and hard to control. There was more to control of it, too, a raging river where before it had been an easily guided stream. When she finally closed the breach, far too many spell-bugs had gone through. Immediately, she wove more barriers to seal parts of her body they hadn''t reached, but the damage was done.


    Painful, draining stings bit into her sides and armpits, feeling like hot needles driven into them. More bit around her navel, each bite like a punch to the gut. Her body had felt powerful only moments before, invincible; now she couldn''t even lift her arms and she was swaying on her feet. Most of her new power was drained away by magical parasites, what was left barely enough to hold her own defenses. Without her contribution the outer barrier collapsed and monsters poured onto them. A whole group of both zombies and misshapen goblins pounded on her failing inner barrier while the parasites left her powerless to strike back. She was going to die...


    Then a blast of fire an order of magnitude brighter than the jagged beams she''d been so proud of before flashed waist-high, incinerating everyone and everything above that. With all of the girls hurled to the ground by monsters it safely rolled over them; the monsters could not say the same. Then a wave of draining magic, similar to that of the parasites but different, invisibly lashed out to the smaller monsters and those with the reflexes to have ducked the first attack. For a moment it didn''t look like as if anything had been accomplished... then every single remaining monster shattered to pieces, every bit of their internal heat violently sucked away.


    A towering pillar of fire came down from the sky and took the shape of a woman. It was so blindingly bright Isa''s eyes hurt just looking at it but she couldn''t help herself; the Crimson Lady had come and they were saved! Just her presence alone was like a gravity well and heat so intense it made stones crack hit them all... but left them unhurt. The parasitic bugs on the other hand instantly perished, like so many leaves in a forge-fire.


    An immensely strong magic ripped the dark ritual apart, the backlash bringing half of the forty dark acolytes to their knees and incinerating the weaker ones were they kneeled. Isa screamed; she felt like being bathed in molten iron, thrown into the heart of a star. Her stolen power raged within her soul, struggling against annihilation. For the first time Isa noticed how dark and sinister it had become, fed on the souls of hundreds of sacrificed enemies. In a river of darkness only a few patches of her original light remained. But she had no time to lament her own foolishness; it was work with the black magic, use it to save herself, or be annihilated.


    A battle raged fifty feet from Isa''s back, The Wizard and his remaining apprentices forced into retreat or slain outright, but she had no attention to spare. She put every last iota of effort, every bit of her soul, her natural light and the stolen darkness into fighting off a fraction of the backlash caused by her own teacher. By the time she won she was utterly spent and could do nothing but pass out. And in her torpor, Isa the former Valkyrie began to change...

 20: Higher Stakes

    The moment we touched ground outside the barracks, Cindy fell on her hands and knees and emptied her stomach on the ground. Little miss ''Everywhere'', it turned out, was motion sick... or at least travel-at-mach-thirty sick. With the war sirens still wailing loud enough to wake the dead, we couldn''t afford to waste even a moment so I''d pulled all the stops my passengers could survive and gotten us back faster than they had ever flown. Leaving the slightly dizzy kids to recover just outside the barracks, I flew just below the speed of sound, using my powers to limit turbulence while getting to the General''s office in only a few seconds.


    The good General was watching several feeds of an ongoing battle, some of them the black and white of thermal cameras, others the shaky but full colored view from hand-held cameras, almost certainly cell phones. In the feeds a line of National Guard armored vehicles, Special Forces in black uniforms and face-concealing helmets with no obvious insignia and maybe forty people in military fatigues shooting much heavier guns that a normal person could ever lift or making the shots of mundane weapons glow like sci-fi lasers were desperately trying to stem a tide of more obviously powered attackers.


    They were losing horribly, already close to the point of breaking as they came under attack from within and without. People in matte black power armor suddenly appeared in their midst, shooting energy weapons with the fire rate of semi automatics but the firepower of light rocket launchers. It wasn''t teleportation; the hostiles came out of the shadows, the cameras catching them a split-second before the soldiers did. It was either some form of advanced stealth or the power armor wearers had some sort of minor concealment power. Considering the uniformity, I was betting on the latter.


    The stealthy power armors were bad enough but the real threat about to overrun the defenders were the towering, vaguely humanoid statues of black metal. Thirty feet tall each, they lacked articulation, their metal bodies bending as they walked. From a singular, cyclopian eye-hole in their heads came blasts of energy on par with a tank''s main gun, blasting apart barricades and other cover as they slowly advanced. Most of the National Guard''s heavier vehicles were already burning and those that still survived were all but useless. A tank fired at one of the giant metal statues practically point-blank, barely knocking it back a step and denting its metal chest. In retaliation, another statue closed in with the tank and punched down. The statue''s fist struck like a wrecking ball, bending the tank''s gun barrel. Then it punched again and again, crumpling armor, breaking its suspension and bending its treads from the extra weight before finally flattening the turret with its third blow.


    The video feeds were so engaging in a horrible sort of way it took me several seconds to notice a very familiar building in the background, then the rest of the familiar skyline. The battle was taking place in Manhattan, and unless I missed my guess about the attackers'' objectives, all of the General''s carefully arranged plans must have just been hit in the gut, caught and drawn behind the mess hall while they were reeling, then shot repeatedly until they were reduced to an unrecognizable mess.


    "Good, you''re here," said General said with an aura of forced calm over barely restrained violence ready to blow up against the first available target. "How soon can you and the kids be there?"


    "I can be there whenever you want," I told him, ignoring his immediate scowl at my tone. "The kids won''t be going."


    "They are the most powerful supers in the entirety of the US after you and the Warden, recruited to solve exactly that kind of problem." He tapped his hand against the nearest screen a bit too hard, toppling it. It fell off the desk and cracked against the floor, the image winking out with a crackle. "This is a national emergency, an all hands on deck type of situation. Plus, it is not your decision."


    "They are untrained fourteen year olds, maladjusted to their powers, and under enough stress to pop a vein, enhanced physiology or not. The most likely outcome of throwing them into that clusterfuck is them to start blasting the bad guys without a plan or coordination and setting off the powered equivalent of a ten-ton bomb in the middle of the city, killing everyone in a two-block radius." Mark might even do it deliberately if he got angry, frightened, or surprised enough. "Besides, not my decision? Your fastest transport needs a ten-minute warm-up followed by a three-hour flight to get there... which will be a hundred and eighty-five minutes too late, the way the battle is shaping up.


    I stared at Rinaker''s lined, prematurely aged, too-thin face. Two pale green eyes stared back like chips of stone. In the background a clock was ticking away seconds while the many feeds ticked away lives. He had seen wars, faced politicians and Presidents, possibly fought himself more than once and built that iron will over forty years in the US military. I, on the other hand, was less than a third his age and had been just a schoolgirl less than a year earlier. But I had fought my own classmates and teachers turned flesh-eating monsters, lived through the ruination of my home state in ways that made the worst of the World Wars look tame, faced a demon in combat and lived. In the end, it was the General that turned away.


    "Fine, we''ll do it your way. But there will be consequences, and every life lost because you fell short will be on your head."


    "I''m well aware of the hero''s burden," I told him. It was something I''d long since reached a resolution on, the very day I''d chosen to be a superhero and not just someone with powers. Superspeed gave far too much time to think between or even during events for introspection to be avoided even for someone as thick as the small-town high school cheerleader I''d been. The conclusion it had led to was that helping in these situations was my choice, but I''d do it my way. I''d listen to advice, use contacts and information, but ultimate responsibility would fall to me and me alone. Otherwise I would either die as a hero trying to follow the moral judgement of others, or live long enough to become a monster out of rejecting said moralizing in all its facets.


    "That remains to be seen," Rinaker threatened, but there was a glimmer of respect behind the rage. "And Wennefer? Those responsible for this attack must be crushed, whoever they are. It must be done and it must be seen or we''re all done."


    "You think I didn''t notice the UN headquarters in the background?" I asked with a raised eyebrow, but most of my attention was on the feeds. I couldn''t just barge there without a plan so I needed every last bit of information I could get before my arrival. If that meant delaying for a minute or two and more soldiers dying... I couldn''t save everyone and trying anyway might lead to saving no-one. "It''s not Liz, though. I''ve fought her golems and these mock-ups are not hers. The street is barely cracking under their feet instead of being crushed under hundreds of tons of metal. The energy beams are barely stronger than conventional cannon, and being dented by an Abrams tank''s main gun? Liz could make a beercan tougher than that."


    "I know it''s not her. If the Warden had betrayed us things would have been worse and I''d be dead," Rinaker said with some exasperation. "No, this is someone trying to make supers look like a threat." At that I raised both eyebrows and gave him a smirk. "More than you already are, anyway. The 9/11 attacks started a decades-long worldwide campaign against terrorism and pushed through heightened security measures that would have seemed insane before. This one is going to be worse. Far worse."


    "Why? The UN building might be a symbol, but it''s not unique and don''t tell me various parties in other continents won''t prefer the Geneva building become the official HQ." In fact, there was something about this whole attack that was off. Why such an open attack? It was still broad daylight in New York and the whole thing was televised too. Criminals, supervillains or otherwise, did not usually go for that level of public attention.


    "They might have under other circumstances." The General frowned in distaste. "Certain political oversight committee thought it a good idea to convene and discuss the whole ''super'' conundrum because the covert approach was not working and more and more people became aware of the phenomenon. They talked to the President and some of our allies." He shrugged, feigning nonchalance. "Apparently, they were convincing. I was not informed due to my previously speaking out against such a convention." He punched the desk and the desk broke. "Those absolute fucking morons!"


    "...how many foreign delegates are in there?" I demanded, suddenly a bit apprehensive about charging to the rescue on my lonesome. If some country''s delegate was killed on my watch...


    "It''s a major convention about the most important matter of our time, secrecy or no." The bastard had the temerity to laugh at me. "All of them are there, of course."


    Well... shit.


    xxxx


    I was flying closer to Utah, ascending at a steep angle while pulling on the acceleration as the air became thinner. Unlike my single trip around the world months earlier, I could not afford to move outside of time for too long. I had no idea what other surprises the bad guys had prepared for me in New York. Because if they''d known about a supposedly secret gathering of the UN there was no way they didn''t know about me; I''d made enough appearances that even if the various alphabet-soup services had managed to keep a lid on them, those that knew what to look for would have gotten at the data. All the difference was between how much they knew, how much the General knew, and how much there was to know and keeping my most tiring yet most unusual ability in reserve until I could see the situation up close and personal might make all the difference.


    To that end, there was one more thing I could not afford to procrastinate about;


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 87.0595%; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 37.9235%">Name: Maya Wennefer</td>


    <td style="width: 62.0194%">Bio: female human, 17y10m19d</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 37.9235%">Known skills:


    </td>


    <td style="width: 62.0194%">Points: 14/207


    </td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 37.9235%; border-style: none; vertical-align: top">


    Chronal Leap, Empowering Regeneration, Eyebeams, Focused Invulnerability, Force Adjustment, Force Awareness, Forcefield Creation, Forced Acceleration, Greater Proximakinesis, Immutable Force, Instant Action, Lasting Force, Retributive Defense, Super Suit, Spatial Distortion, Spatial Leap


    Stolen story; please report.


    </td>


    <td style="width: 62.0194%; vertical-align: top">


    Attributes: Might 48, Agility 24, Reason 6, Vigilance 12, Ego 24, Luck 6


    Word of Force: Power IV, Control III, Versatility IV, Number of Effects III, Range II, Scope II


    Word of Self: Power IV, Control III, Versatility III, Number of Effects III, Range II, Scope I


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    One of these days I''d start checking my character sheet more often and not leave investing my growing magic for the last second. That day would probably not be today, so I used my new ring to do the old song-and-dance. Liz had been certain the anchor ring she''d given me could show a visual representation of my abilities at any time and place after the initial scans had been completed... and she was proven right. If that hadn''t been the case I''d have had to wing it, access the well of power that were my abilities instinctively and try to boost myself blindly. Saving power against future needs did not make sense with the fate of the world at stake.


    The Earth''s atmosphere thinned out, giving way to the harsh, crystal clarity of space. Far in the distance and just disappearing under the horizon to the West, something larger than the average satellite or even space station had loomed. Someone was building orbital bases already? I''d check it later, after I ensured the latest crisis did not blow up in everyone''s faces and the super-terrorists laughed as the New Cold War of superpowers suddenly became nuclear-hot - and I was not speaking figuratively.


    There were changes in my sheet beyond my age. Apparently, the few fights I''d had along with the sparring against the kids had finally pushed my powers to grow just a little. That was represented in part by an extra free point, a little more raw power to be invested either in my various active powers or to further boost my base attributes. However, the other half of it was the development of the "Eyebeams" skill, probably due to how often I cobbled together such an effect through Forcefield Creation. An attempt to see what the skill did had my ring getting warm as it tried to parse the instinctive knowledge from the actual power to the limited representation that was the blue-colored interface.


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 86.4504%" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 100%">Eyebeams: twin beams of force as powerful as the user''s base melee blows but narrowed to one square inch each. May reduce applied kinetic energy to increase momentum or the inverse. Beams attenuate by 1% per cubic yard of total volume covered and can be reshaped to any cone or line shape within volume limits. May add one Force effect to the beam''s volume, or replace the base effect for a total of two Force effects.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Even before Liz''s ring displayed it for easy perusal, the instinctive understanding that came with my powers let me know how useful the power was. Superficially, it seemed like a worse version of Forcefield Creation that was limited to beam shapes and attenuated with distance. In reality, they had twice the raw power of the other skill, made using the beams in complex trajectories a lot easier than trying to shape a Forcefield on the fly, and could be adjusted to produce several interesting effects. All in all, they were more a combat skill than Forcefield Creation''s utility. Plus their appearance now hinted at how creating new skills worked; once upon a time each new power would have taken a permanent expenditure of my accumulated magic but my powers'' versatility seemed to have grown enough that skills could be gained through practice. Who was I to say no to another power-up? The only apparent downside was that skills couldn''t be gained in emergencies if at high costs, but I''d not actually checked.


    Now, what would be the best way to invest against the chaotic but highly delicate situation I was about to enter? Trying to see if I could still get new powers through investiture was right out. Anything I got would be brand new and with battle a minute away I''d be as unskilled in its use as the kids. Plus the more my raw power grew, the more dangerous testing new things around other people became. Doing so within spitting distance of the United Nations delegates during an already complex situation? There were probably easier ways to start World War three but off the top of my head I could not find one.


    That left boosting my force-based powers, boosting my self-oriented buffs, or boosting raw physical and mental abilities. Immediately, I saw that there wasn''t enough accumulated magic to increase the most useful aspects of my active powers. The magnitude and versatility of either force effects or personal buffs would take sixteen points for each aspect of each category... and I was two points short. Increase the number of active effects then? Going from a total of six to seven would help... but wouldn''t really add something I could not already do, only more convenience. Range and especially scope would have been great... for an open engagement across the Rocky Mountains or for fending off a giant monster by the coast. The coming fight in the middle of the city? My powers'' current reach was plenty.


    No, this was the wrong way to go about it. What did I really need for today''s Charlie Foxtrot? What boost would be the best option to see through things to the end without making a mess of half of Manhattan or being surprised by one of the bad guys'' plans? When put that way, the answer was obvious.


    First, to deal with any enemies that had been given leaked information about my abilities. My exact physical strength was something I''d downplayed, holding back on both using it to its fullest and fully enhancing it when anyone had been watching. The military might have the numbers from the scans, but with the scaling lacking reference points or known units what that gave them was estimates. Anyone that had leaked info would hopefully be under similar misconceptions, but just in case I put two points into Might.


    As with every other time I''d invested energy in this way, I felt my body ever so slightly shifting. Once upon a time, increases to physical strength and durability had been accompanied by bulking up or even gaining inches of height. These days, in order to accommodate my other abilities my body gained toughness, stiffness and inertia, the better parts of being denser without an actual mass and thus weight increase. The subtlety was appreciated; I was already an even seven feet with a mostly amazonian build and the proportions of a far shorter person. There might have been taller women still but none with my size that weren''t also, well, fat. Call me vain, but I  didn''t want to put on weight, let alone become a mountain of muscle. It was something that would happen without keeping my attributes balanced and since I''d seen how easily supers who invested too much into physicality could become like the Hulk it was something I always kept in mind.


    That balancing was done with another point each to Agility and Ego so they were no less than half my Might score. The former required my body be more flexible, which it couldn''t be if there was too much muscle for my limbs to flex or my size too large to be maneuverable. That requirement put limits in physical growth and forced my powers to go for effectively denser muscle and bone that could not become impediments and looked better in the process. Ego was, well, the attribute of being awesome. Not just beauty but symmetry and, at the levels I had it, perfect streamlining and a flawless rapid healing that both prevented ugly scars and did away with crippling wounds. But if that had been all, I''d probably have invested just enough to get the model-level looks I''d always wanted then saved further investments for other fields. But Ego was also perfection of self; strength of personality, charisma, willpower and resilience vs trauma. Superheroes had to deal with a lot of trauma, and without a literally superhuman sense of self I''d have probably become a PTSD-riddled wreck... or a monster. That it also helped shrug off pain in a fight or let me stand before a certain General and tell him "no, you move" that was just the icing on the cake. And if it came with a bit of extra pride and vanity? Well, nobody was perfect and I''d take those two as my reward for fixing the world''s messes.


    Then I put the remaining ten points into Vigilance and my perception practically exploded. Even without Force Awareness, my vision became both telescopic and microscopic to at least some extent. My hearing picked up the turbulence of the incredibly thin atmosphere at this height as well as the crackling of both radio waves and other forms of interference at the very edges of hearing. Balance, proprioception, timing, interoception all skyrocketed to the point I could get more than millimeter precision with my every move near-instinctively and could track my own pulse and other vibrations through my body. Slowly the increased sensory load integrated and fell into the background, not filling my every thought but the information there and internalized. Patterns in everything became sharper, easier to both notice and follow so that the shape of cities below was feeding me information about local conditions based on what I knew about how city life worked. The movements of clouds and pattern of air currents paired with my perception of forces made predicting weather for days the matter of a single look. For a field where I had more experience such as athletics or combat? Enemy body movements would be like an open book.


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 87.0595%; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 37.9235%">Name: Maya Wennefer</td>


    <td style="width: 62.0194%">Bio: female human, 17y10m19d</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 37.9235%">Known skills:


    </td>


    <td style="width: 62.0194%">Points: 0/207


    </td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 37.9235%; border-style: none; vertical-align: top">


    Chronal Leap, Empowering Regeneration, Eyebeams, Focused Invulnerability, Force Adjustment, Force Awareness, Forcefield Creation, Forced Acceleration, Greater Proximakinesis, Immutable Force, Instant Action, Lasting Force, Retributive Defense, Super Suit, Spatial Distortion, Spatial Leap


    </td>


    <td style="width: 62.0194%; vertical-align: top">


    Attributes: Might 50, Agility 25, Reason 6, Vigilance 22, Ego 25, Luck 6


    Word of Force: Power IV, Control III, Versatility IV, Number of Effects III, Range II, Scope II


    Word of Self: Power IV, Control III, Versatility III, Number of Effects III, Range II, Scope I


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    I even noticed how paying attention to my powers sheet while flying had made me overshoot the halfway mark and keep accelerating all the way to New York. Now I was flying so quickly that I''d leave the whole state behind in seconds and be all the way to Britain by the time I could brake to a more normal speed... at least conventionally.


    Oh well. The Heinlein maneuver should work as an alternative braking method...

 21: Dynamic Entry

    By the time I was flying over New York I''d accelerated to a bit over two hundred miles... per second. At that velocity any attempted landing would have results somewhere between the orbital drop of the International Space Station and one of the smaller atomic bombs so I did not aim for the city but a hundred miles further out to the sea. With my newly enhanced senses picking an area without sea traffic for at least a few kilometers was easy and a split-second later a falling star named Maya was born. A lance-shaped forcefield ahead of me cut a path through the water with greatly reduced resistance, spreading the deceleration along a greater depth of water and preventing the creation of even a small tsunami. The impact was probably recorded and some scientists might get excited about a potential extrasolar meteor; nothing in orbit within the solar system should have been faster than about fifty miles per second, after all.


    Rising out of the depths, I flew low against the surface of the water but very quickly, studying the city during my approach. This last part of the trip took longer than flying all the way in from the Nevada badlands had taken but was highly informative. Before my recent boost I could probably have read a whole page in a second; no superspeed, just high perception. Similarly, I could have noticed dozens of different people or points of interest from miles away. Now, scanning through a crowd of thousands at the same time from ten times the previous distance was possible. Looking through a whole city and picking up a screaming reporter from twenty miles away in a metropolis of millions was still beyond me, but looking over a few city blocks or through a large skyscraper and its dozens of floors was doable.


    What I saw was not good news. The most mobile of the terrorists had used stealth and superior ability to simply blow through the defense cordon of normal humans and invade the United Nations headquarters before anyone could respond. At the same time the heavy robots masquerading as Liz''s golems had systematically dismantled most of the National Guard then intercepted the first wave of Army reinforcements. Any defense normal security could put up against even the weakest supers in enclosed space had been laughable and in the only two minutes of my argument with Rinaker and traveling here the bad guys had already invaded the main chamber and taken the delegates as hostages.


    The worst though were the bombs. Standard terrorist OP; trap everything and let the other guy stumble into it had been applied here writ large. The robots were trapped to blow if they took crippling damage, something I was certain their pilots did not know. The bombs being supertech, I could not be certain of their yields even with Force Awareness feeding me a great deal of info so taking them out would require more than the usual smash and move on. If that had been all it would not be such a problem, but the terrorists had taken smaller explosives with them, bombs they were even then strapping on to various senators. Last but definitely not least were the bombs hidden in the underground passages and maintenance runs of the UN headquarters, all of which were armed and linked. Suppose somehow the terrorists were taken by storm, their other failsafes removed and the hostages getting freed? Someone sitting on a cafe far away from the action might press a button, blow the whole thing to Kingdom Come then have the blame fall on whoever "botched" the rescue attempts.


    The ramifications became clear enough as soon as I thought about what the terrorists needed to accomplish. The whole point of this attack was not to capture the delegates or to make demands. If actual supervillains were running the show they''d need to do two things; discredit the one government organized against them already, then prevent other governments from getting organized in turn. That was easily accomplished by killing the delegates... as long as the blame did not fall on them. Even if this whole attack was revealed as a setup, as long as foreign governments had no immediate target available they would have no chance but treat all supers as enemies of the state - and we''d all seen how that one ended. Maybe there was a genius playboy philanthropist running the whole setup behind the scenes?


    Ugh, this was going to be even worse than I thought.


    xxxx


    Anderson Harlow was terrified. Somewhere between his taking a brief coffee break in a nearby Starbucks and getting ready for another round of questions and answers with the channel''s news anchor on the very hush-hush arrival of foreign delegations, New York had exploded. Heavily armed and armored men had rushed the police cordon while giant freaking robots were exchanging shots with the Army and winning! And what did that bastard of an Editor say upon receiving his frantic call? Was he glad two of his people were still alive? Did he tell them to evacuate, save themselves? No! He''d even threatened them to get them to stay put. Harlow would have to report live on the whole thing of forget about his next payday! He was just a lousy field reporter for God''s sake, not some international war correspondent!


    His boss did not care. Nobody at the station did for anything except the ratings and revenue from advertising. Television was a slowly dying breed, they said, we all had to contribute to make ends meet, they said. Harlow was not about to contribute to meeting his end, though, he was smarter than that. Plus they would never give him that raise anyway so why bother trying? He dropped his mike, his backpack and his work phone, stepped on the latter for good measure, then ran for the hills - or at least the nearest bridge out of Manhattan.


    In the street outside the little cafe, the National Guard were getting slaughtered. Their reinforcements had been caught from the side by a pair of those robots straight out of a comic book and had been blasted with, like, super phasers straight out of Star Wars, or something. What had happened to the good old firearms spewing bullets at your enemy? Or rocket-propelled 40mm exploding shells, at least. Who made beam guns instead of stuff that made sense? Why did they make beam guns instead of stuff that made sense? Mama Harlow''s little boy was not stupid enough to stay and find out.


    The robots, of course, had different ideas. One stepped on the station''s sole news van in its haste to join the main battle, just before Harlow could get in and leave. A few seconds later and he would have been out of this warzone, damn it! On the other hand, a second or two later and he wouldn''t have just fallen back to the ground with the van''s door on his chest; he''d be beercanned along with said van. Cursing for all he was worth, he struggled to get out of the crumpled piece of metal without getting cut on a sharp end.


    That was when the second robot came through. It didn''t even notice Harlow as it fired blue energy beams from its head at everything nearby. Cars, shop fronts, the upper floors of buildings; a constant stream of shiny explosive death was doled out with no rhyme or reason as far as the trapped reporter could tell. Any vehicle hit blew up instantly, like in a cheap action movie. Harlow knew cars weren''t supposed to explode like that - he''d even written an article on it! His damn editor had cut it off the informational column with the excuse that it was poorly researched but Harlow knew best; the online articles were "curated" to support the entertainment industry nowadays after some shady deals between the station and some guys in Hollywood.


    The reporter realized he was in shock, his mind fumbling uselessly through old memories only tangentially related with his situation while he lay pinned under the van door for the robot to step on him. He forced the trip down memory lane to a halt then got his arms and legs to move. They were shaking and sluggish in his terror, barely able to get a grip as the ground shook; the robot was coming closer. Then the shadow of something large fell on Harlow from above and he blinked. Was that a piece of wall? Time slowed as the huge mass tumbled in the air, breaking apart even as it fell from maybe the fifteenth floor above him. The largest piece narrowly missed the reporter''s head, dropping on the sidewalk with a powerful, ground-shaking boom and shattering in a hundred pieces that pelted everything nearby. Harlow got a cut on his right cheek from it and something about his left ear no longer felt right. He was really, really lucky to be alive, he realized. Unfortunately, he was just as unlucky because a much smaller piece of masonry landed smack in the middle of the van door, crumpling the metal against his solar plexus and leaving him both cross-eyed and barely able to draw breath. Worse, another thirty pounds had just been added to the damn thing keeping him pinned.


    The robot finally noticed him. Maybe it had been his panicked shouting or maybe it had finally come close enough that its single eye that was also a gun could notice him. Seriously, talk about a sub-par design; how could it even fight at a distance if its sight was that poor? More irrelevant tangents flooded Harlow''s mind as it tried to flee the realization of his imminent, unavoidable death. The robot looked down and its eye shone like the flash function on a cell phone camera. It should have looked silly. It did not look silly at all.


    Then the most beautiful woman Harlow had ever seen flew between him and the robot. A blonde taller than him by at least a head with a face and curves to make the centerfold of the century, she also had the kind of muscles Harlow was certain could twist him in a pretzel then juggle him with zero effort. Was the reporter seeing his first angel? He had to be because when the robot fired the flying woman just stood there and tanked it to no apparent damage. From where he was pinned, the reporter could well believe he had gone to heaven because those legs, that ass... there was no way they were no less than heavenly. ...wait, didn''t he need to die before getting to Heaven? And if he had to look up to see that image of celestial beauty and/or power, while being buried under torn metal and concrete in the middle of a blasted, burning hellscape... was he in Hell instead? He knew he shouldn''t have stopped going to church all those years before.


    The young man''s theological ruminations were interrupted by the flying woman punching the robot in the face. There was a sound like a dozen clay cups falling on the ground from the third or fourth floor up and the robot came entirely apart, shattering like said cups would have. Legs, arms, head, armor plating and finger-thick cabling, an engine spewing oil and sparks and other things, they all crumpled at the idle blow - more like a love tap - and collapsed into a pile of broken machinery. Halfway buried in that pile was a man in a diver''s suit and a comically large helmet, dazed and moaning and in even worse condition than Harlan himself, but still alive.


    The angel, demon, and/or goddess landed next to the trapped reporter, leaned over and coincidentally gave him a very good look at two of the Wonders of the world as she effortlessly picked up the metal door he''d been having so much trouble lifting. Then again, if she''d reduced a giant robot to pieces in a single punch, of course a measly square yard of twenty-gauge metal would be nothing to her.


    "Sir? Are you feeling good enough to walk?" the best voice he''d ever heard cut through the din of battle, delegating all sounds of guns and explosions and death to a vague, barely audible background. Large, almond-shaped eyes looked him over, their color a blue so intense it outshone sapphires. Then the dreamlike aura the world had taken was shattered by an energy beam hitting the angel/demon/goddess in the side of the head, leaving Harlow blinking away tears and the afterimage of the painfully bright attack.


    This book''s true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.


    The woman was, naturally, entirely unharmed. If anything she looked annoyed at another approaching robot and with a casual flick of her wrist she threw the van door hard enough it slammed into the robot''s eye socket and stuck there. "Just stay here, sir," she told Harlow, not unkindly. "The paramedics will get to you soon." Then she vaulted the fifty feet to that other robot in an instant and tore through it like she had the other.


    Anderson Harlow lay there as instructed and cursed his past self. He''d finally accepted he was not dead, that the events around him were really happening, gorgeous savior included. That he''d seen similar scenes in movies helped him grasp what was going on, banished confusion and panic and replaced them with awe - along with even more curses. What had possessed past-him to drop his gear when movies and comic books became reality all around him?! He could have been filming all this! Capturing it for posterity, being the first to upload it, boosting his amateur video channel - maybe even getting an interview with the superheroine like some modern, more awesome version of Lois fucking Lane but nooo, he''d had to drop everything and run.


    Others would get to report this and reap the rewards now and all Anderson Harlow would get would be a reaming from that tight-arsed boss of his. What was he going to do now? Should he even wait for the paramedics? Shit, he had barely enough cash to eat, let alone pay for any medical bills. Those damn doctors always overcharged and made more tests than were needed to line their own pockets after all. Grunting, he got up to very unsteady feet and shambled closer to the action.


    If he was lucky, he might get another look at the superheroine in action!


    xxxx


    Another punch, another robot shattered and its pilot wrapped up for a future delivery to justice, or at least police custody and then quick disappearance to some black site owned by some alphabet soup Agency. If they were lucky, they might even hold him long enough to get some info before the probable suicide implant at the base of his spine blew him up. The terrorists, who I was beginning to suspect were either backed or directly recruited and equipped by the Everymen, had been thorough and while my senses could see it, my powers did not extend to the interior of living bodies so I had no reliable way to disable it. Whatever, the guy''s ultimate fate was not my business. He''d made his bed and me getting involved beyond stopping his rampage was a bad idea for all kinds of reasons.


    The next robot in line shot an actual rocket at me. It was a tiny, cute little thing, no larger than my fist and with delicate angled fins. It also detonated in a sphere of plasma ten feet in diameter, a tandem explosion-implosion effect that kept its area of effect contained not to avoid collateral damage but to increase its density and temperature. I shrugged it off like I had everything else so far, only wincing slightly at the heat. It was like getting into a slightly too hot shower; briefly painful but ultimately harmless to me... and absolutely deadly to everyone else in the battlefield. The last couple of minutes alone I''d used my speed to intercept projectiles, beam weapons and explosions rather than dodging them well over a hundred times when letting them hit would have killed people or collapsed buildings. It was an entirely different way of fighting but I was getting the hang of it.


    The robot loaded another missile to its launcher, so I sped up next to it, ripped off its arms and caused its frame to tear open down the middle, delivering another bad guy for a quick disabling and capture more or less intact. That was another thing I''d had to learn on the job. Flying through each and every one of those bozos at twenty times the speed of sound and smearing them halfway across the plaza would have taken five seconds, tops. But in order for them to live to spill their guts under enhanced interrogation and/or truth-telling powers and for me not to terrify everyone watching this on live television any further, I''d needed a different way to break evil terrorist robots... and wasn''t the fact I could say that phrase with a straight face kinda awesome?


    Anyway, the answer had been to layer my strikes with both Force Adjustment and Proximakinesis, drawing upon Forced Acceleration deeply to effectively slow the world as I worked while holding both my punching and flight way, way, way back. Force Adjustment worked on the robots'' frames to make them incredibly fragile, Proximakinesis broke any explosive traps just right to prevent detonation, and my actual hits shattered the barely-holding-together machines just strongly enough to give the bad guys a good knock-out. That way nobody died, nobody still conscious to complain did, and all threats were neutralized; win-win.


    Another group of enhanced enemies were trying to force their way into the UN building, but without the distraction provided by the robot artillery they were having a much worse time of it than before. Not every soldier on our side was bog standard human and while they''d been primary targets in the opening moves of the fight they were also far more capable of survival than their normal comrades. Of the forty or so enhanced soldiers on our side thirty were still combat-effective, firing at the power-armored group with oversized or empowered firearms, or engaging them with their limited powers or even hand-to-hand. They also outnumbered that particular group three to one so they''d probably win.


    Problem was, we could not afford a single enemy getting in right now. The bad guys inside were still rounding up hostages, gathering everyone at the main chamber, and setting up even more explosives to prevent any conventional assault. Of the two things I''d done before openly joining the fight, the second was to set up a force-field around the UN building. Most electromagnetic signals involved a negligible amount of force macroscopically-speaking, so negating them and cutting off communications had been barely a moment''s effort. If this had been a professional military force that would have warned them something was wrong, but they were disposable patsies at best so they had not realized no news did not necessarily mean good news, giving me time to settle the battle out here before going in properly. All of that would go out the window if a terrorist fled inside, because I hadn''t had time to also make the field stop people in addition to signals.


    I hurled a robot at another robot hard enough to disable both without them being under my weakening touch and trusting my new awareness of angles and motion and the increased control it afforded to do it just right. Their pilots got a bit banged up, but no more than a car accident at forty miles an hour and that let me finish with both two seconds faster. Instantly, I was across the plaza with the power-armored bad guy that had given the defenders the runaround slamming into me and bouncing before he could get any further. I grabbed him by the chest plate, fingers sinking into the hardened metal as if it were clay then simultaneously shifted the durability of his whole armor while giving him a good shake. The whole thing fell apart under its own weight like a cheap theater prop but the pilot landed on his feet, boots cracking the pavement, then punched me in the throat with a yell. His finger bones cracked and he cradled his arm with a scowl between rage and pain that only managed to make him look constipated. Rolling my eyes, I backhanded him half a city block away.


    Then I waded into the firefight between the enhanced troopers on our side and the group of terrorists in power armor. A kick sent the closest of them through a van across the street hard enough to give him a concussion. Grabbing the next pair in line, I weakened their armors and slammed them together hard enough to knock them out, grabbed a supertech rocket out of the air and crushed it between my hands to contain the plasma burst then walked my eyebeams over another bad guy, reducing his armor to ash and blasting him with the equivalent of several full-body slams. The remaining terrorists broke into a run. Some schoolyard tripping paired with weakening touches had them face-planting into concrete and those three were not enhanced. Their flattened, bloody noses and broken teeth would be the least of their problems.


    "Who''s in charge here?" I said as I landed in the midst of a mixed group of National Guard and the spec-ops troops with the unmarked uniforms. A few of them nervously covered me with their rifles or even sidearms, very much aware they''d do exactly nothing after seeing me smash enemies tougher than main battle tanks with my bare hands. Most of them were staring on in awe though, with a great heap of shock and a side order of some fairly insecure attraction. Sometimes, being able to see through things was a mixed thing at best and the fact that most of the soldiers had neither fought in nor been briefed about the mess in Florida didn''t help. Fortunately, despite the total upheaval of their worldview the appearance of giant robots and a superheroine in the middle of New York must be to them, a few of them retained a good head on their shoulders.


    "That would be me, ma''am," a neat, short-haired, dusky-skinned guy with blood-shot dark brown eyes, a serious mien and the shade of a goatee in his grime-covered face told me. "CSM James Aaron Bates." As he walked closer, I noticed that his balance was off and there was a hitch in his step. A single glance with Force Awareness confirmed my suspicions.


    "Your lieutenant colonel didn''t make it?" I asked then almost instantly shook my head. "No time for that. I took down all their heavies within six blocks and can''t see any more of them in the city but that''s no guarantee." Another look into the UN building revealed the head bad guy was done spouting his self-contradicting and asinine manifesto and was ready to ''have fun'' with the delegates so I had to rush things more than I felt comfortable with. "Now, I can''t give you orders or anything, but it would be a good idea if you held the perimeter against further sudden attacks while I saved the hostages."


    "With all due respect ma''am, we don''t know you," he reasonably told me even as he tensed and behind his back he flicked some sort of signal to his subordinates. "we''ve certainly never seen you before and even if we had we''re under orders not to let anyone in." He raised his hands in the usual ''what you can do?'' gesture earnestly. He was a fairly good actor; most people without super-senses would have bought it. "Now personally, and having seen how you saved our lives and everything, I''m fairly sure you''re a friendly that means well. Unfortunately, the US military doesn''t pay us to disregard orders or have opinions and there''s no superhero-related exceptions in the regs. So if you try to go any further we''ll have to stop you."


    "That''s OK, sergeant major, I understand," I told him and a couple of his people relaxed minutely. "Trusting one unknown superhuman when you were under attack by unknown superhumans would be just dumb. Just don''t try to enter the building through the ground floor entrances, they all have multiple explosives traps set up." Not entirely true, but they didn''t need to know that.


    "How do you know?" one of the other soldiers blurted, causing several of his fellows to stare reproachfully and me to internally thank him for asking the question.


    "Your briefs are UFM polyester and beige." He immediately went beet red and quite a few others burst into laughter. I, on the other hand, pointed at the spalling in the barricade he''d been sitting behind. "Next time try for the ballistic fabric. Some of those fragments missed you by maybe an inch." Also not quite true but it sounded right plus beige polyester sucked. In the midst of more laughter I took to the air, aiming away from the building. The soldiers didn''t try to shoot or even aim at me for more reasons than one, though I chose to believe it was due to my likable personality. "And sergeant major? That knee of yours has three hairline fractures. If you want to be able to walk right come next year you''ll stop putting weight on it now."


    And with that last piece of advice, I flew off. Hopefully, they''d trust me enough not to get themselves and the hostages dead, or at least be delayed looking for the bombs I mentioned. Once I was far enough away and high enough those men wouldn''t see me, I flew back in from above faster than people on the ground would notice.


    The rooftop access was way cooler, anyway.

 22: worlds reflection

    Three burly terrorists patrolled the top floor of the Secretariat Building, for various meanings of ''burly'' and ''patrolled''. All of them were as tall as I was, possessing the sheer bulk of physically-focused supers but lacking both the streamlined bodies and the less tangible aspects of a super''s physicality and inner life-force. They also wasted their time kicking, punching and tearing at the machinery supporting the building''s functions, from air conditioning and waste disposal to the elevators. I guess when your planned to blow the building up as part of your exit strategy, breaking bits of it to pass the time and vent steam between battles seemed like a no-brainer.


    Using the bad guys'' own cacophony to cover my own entrance, I broke through the roof not by using the access staircase but by turning a four-foot-wide part of the ceiling near the south-west corner into dust. Several hundred pounds of dust dropping a dozen feet and onto metal were not exactly quiet even against that terrible racket, but the terrorists weren''t paying attention. They thought anyone trying to stop them would either have to come through the stairs or the sound of breaking masonry from their entrance would be obvious; despite being granted some level of powers from whoever was backing them they didn''t seem to grasp the possibilities of such new abilities in both open and covert conflict. Eh, if they were smart they wouldn''t have been patsies for the real bad guys.


    Speeding through the gloom under flickering, mostly defunct lights, I got in sight of both their bomb and communicator and disintegrated both supertech devices with my new eyebeams. Then I turned around and blasted all three of them with the same before they could react, turning their power armor to dust. Instead of being fazed by their sudden loss of weaponry, the three of them charged me in their underwear. Unfortunately for them, I didn''t have time for fun and games. One burst of speed later, they were all sporting broken jaws, shattered teeth, a mild concussion and a huge headache for when they woke up. Unfortunately for me, I had no idea when that would be. Their internal biology - not just their metabolism - was undergoing random surges, everything from blood pressure to temperature, to the shape of the circulatory system and the density of their bones and organs changing significantly in a dozen places at a time, completely at random.


    It was far from the first time I''d seen biological boosts or rapid mutations but even the most newly-formed monsters tended to be more stable than that. The overall boost was similar to but stronger than the bad guys I''d beaten outside and my best guess was that they had exceeded the safety margins of whatever enhancing power or supertech they had been given. Not by much and knocking them out had actually helped push them towards stability but there was no telling when the effect would run its course or what its result would ultimately be. Leaving them was a bad idea but with the situation rapidly changing the only other option was killing them and I wasn''t about to do that.


    Seeing no other patrols nearby and no booby traps, I left the mechanical penthouse through the stairs. The next few floors were mainly offices that had all been recently trashed; there even were a couple of fires here and there but otherwise no signs of either their normal occupants or the invaders. Curiously, the building''s fire suppression systems were not working or responding at all, so I had to put out the fires on my own. A closer look revealed worn, broken wiring, clogged pipes, rusted through emergency batteries, even the plastic bits looked old and rotten. That would explain the lack of lightning and power, but what had caused it?


    Things were even worse in the mechanical floors, with all the machines responsible for the building''s everyday function having broken down completely and fallen apart. If anyone tried one of the elevators now chances were they''d simply drop into the shafts rather than going anywhere. That was true for all three such levels, in floors six, sixteen and twenty-eight. Bad news was, of the over two thousand people that had been working in the many offices, conference rooms, meeting rooms and committees, none were present. Good news, there were neither corpses nor signs of obvious deaths such as pooling blood or severed body parts and my senses could pick a huge group of people packed in the fourth basement under the three levels of underground parking lot. The only bombs I could see were on the aforementioned parking lot, stuck to the building''s structural supports. No different than the General Assembly Building, really, except here the collapsing mass of thirty-nine floors of concrete, glass and steel would bury and crush the hostages rather than being killed directly by the explosion.


    I''d initially thought to go to the General Assembly Building first and deal with the situation there. Official delegates from countries all over the world held great political importance. They had also been the terrorists'' goal from the beginning. But when I saw four times as many hostages held here... lives were lives. And while the political impact might be less, most people around the world associated the United Nations with the Secretariat building, not the General Assembly. It coming down in an explosion and killing two thousand people in the process... the truth was, I had a plan to deal with both. Because when the bad guys chain two different hostage groups onto bombs and tell you to choose one, it is the hero''s job no not play their game, punch them in the face and win the day anyway.


    I just had no idea how realistic that would be when actual villains ran the script instead of guys in a movie doomed by the script to lose.


    xxxx


    The parking lot was empty when I got there. And I did not just mean empty of people. There were over fifteen hundred parking seats here, it had been a day with an enormous workload to prepare for the session of the General Assembly, not to mention the thousand and one other committees, agencies and subsidiary organs that never stopped working... so where were the cars? There was not a single sign of them anywhere, just as there hadn''t been the first time I looked. Flying through the parking lot worriedly and scanning everything with my Force Awareness, I couldn''t find a single clue about what had happened and I only had a minute to spare at best.


    "Looking for this?" a voice called out, echoing as if from a great distance, and a man in a fully-covering, black bodysuit was suddenly there in the middle of the parking lot, tossing a remote control from hand to hand. Apparently I''d miscalculated; I hadn''t had a minute to spare at all.


    "Possibly," I shot back and came to a hovering stop. "Is it the control for the bombs or not?"


    "Yo, chica, slow down!" he told me with a cackle, like he was making an in-joke I couldn''t understand. "Deep questions like that are for after the second date, right?"


    "Why would I ever go on a date with you? Have you seen yourself?" I gestured at the layer of black latex fully covering his head. "Eyes too round and squinting, broken nose, a real bad case of acne, but the worst part?" I pretended to think about it. "That''s probably the buck teeth. Seriously, both powers and medicine offer loads of solutions to such things. Why not just pick one and fix things?"


    "Because it''s my face, you fucking bitch!" he suddenly screeched, going from affable villain to total psycho in an instant. "Mine! Mine! Mine and only mine! Not yours or anybody else''s. It''s mine and NOBODY IS GOING TO TAKE IT FROM ME!" And with that he charged. I guess Terrorists R Us take all types, especially the crazies.


    He was the first proper super among the bad guys I''d seen so far, instead of someone wearing power armor or having been enhanced by someone else''s abilities or supertech. That didn''t mean he was particularly powerful. Physically, he seemed to be a step below Cindy; absolutely deadly to any mundanes, capable of denting tank armor with his bare hands if given the chance, but someone I could have taken halfway through my first month of having powers, maybe. He was also very skewed in his abilities, little in the way of strength or speed, with more than half his enhancement going into durability. A strange way to do things, from my point of view. I couldn''t even raise strength and durability independently of each other. His powers had to make sense to him of course, and he seemed to be crazy.


    My surprise when he narrowly dodged the punch intended to end the fight quickly became even greater when he nailed me in the ribs in turn with bruising force. His blow was powerful enough to overcome my Proximakinetic flight and push me back a little. No matter what my recently improved senses were telling me, he was actually a hair stronger that me. He had to have a power multiplying his strength and a great one too, because he could actually match both my physical strength and Proximakinesis when both were enhanced by Force Adjustment!


    "What''s up, bitch, cat got your tongue?" he mocked. "You liked it earlier when you were making fun of me, didn''t you?" He sent a jab at my jaw which I pulled back to avoid, only it proved to have been a feint when his other fist sank into my solar plexus and cut off my breath. "Do you like it now that the shoe''s on the other foot, huh?" He kicked out, narrowly missed my knee and got me in the shin.


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    We exchanged several blows, and he proved he was actually skilled in hand-to-hand, very skilled. With our speed and strength near-evenly matched - and him actually holding the advantage - I used Forced Acceleration to go to full superspeed. Somehow he kept up, caught my right arm in one of those fancy martial arts holds... then broke it. He tried to trip me up too, pin me with his legs in another fancy maneuver, but his leaping around did not quite match up with my flight''s maneuverability. I shook my arm, fingers flexing to test it was healing properly, then shot him a glower. Under his mask he had on an ugly leer, a silent promise to all kinds of nasty shit.


    Why was I wasting time on the madman when I had more hostages to save? I stopped time and moved to beat him down to paste - or at least to mild unconsciousness with no permanent harm. Then he caught my good arm, twisted it around behind my back, caught my other arm and pulled it over my shoulder, then his legs wrapped around my own from behind, pushing them off-balance and controlling them. We struggled for a second or two, but his hold was better than anything I could have done and try as might I lacked the leverage to break it.


    "Whoa, chica, that was a good fight. Almost got me good." he told me as we still strained against each other. Or rather, I was straining; he seemed to be pretty relaxed. "But ya got ta get way better to get the drop on Master Mirage, ya ken?"


    "Get off you bastard," I growled, more to keep his attention while I found another way out. While I could still move us around both with flight, we were in a pretty fragile building so ramming anything was out. And with his strength being what it was, if I stopped using Proximakinesis to reinforce myself he''d break my limbs like twigs.


    "Nope! It''s pretty comfortable here." He pulled at my arms and legs, getting an even better hold on our relative positions. "No need to struggle now, it''s not that bad. Just admit that you lost, you''re already getting all sweaty."


    He was right... he was actually right! Most of the fight had taken place under Instant Action. In fact, time for the rest of the world was still effectively stopped, which was why the exertion was actually tiring in the only minute or two our fight had lasted... so how was he capable of not just moving around but exceeding my speed within my own power? It didn''t make sense, not unless he had much greater raw power than I was, or was a dedicated speedster. But a speedster he wasn''t; his build did not fit, my senses insisted his agility was low, and with his strength matching mine he couldn''t have dedicated all his power to one attribute. I ran the whole battle again in my mind, reviewing what both my senses and my enemy had told me. Master Mirage, was it?


    "Come on, woman, you''re getting obviously weaker now," he growled as my efforts to break his grip redoubled. He pulled at my limbs to break them and it hurt, but he didn''t actually manage to dislocate let alone crack bones. "Give up!"


    "If I''ve already lost, why are you so frustrated, eh?" I asked, dialing my Proximakinesis down even more. Instead of overwhelming me as he should have, our struggle stayed about even. "If I''m weakening and you are not how come you haven''t won?"


    "Shut up!" he growled and tried to choke me but he had the wrong grip for that and it wouldn''t have worked anyway.


    "Could it be that you weren''t strong to begin with? That it was all a trick?" He pulled at my arms then pushed, trying to bash my head against the floor. I let him; reinforced concrete might as well have been loose sand for how much it could harm me. There was a reason most real super fights did not involve throwing cars around or using masonry as improvised weaponry; those things simply didn''t stand up to the durability of supers.


    "Shut up! Shut up! Shut uAAARGH!"


    His entirely uninventive cursing turned into a scream as I used Proximakinesis to deliver blows to him without layering it over my strength. I broke both of his wrists, then his knees, then his clavicle with strikes through his own hold on me, his durability entirely insufficient in resisting them. Then I pushed aside his broken grip, got up and stretched to make sure all my joints were working properly after being in that hold for subjective minutes.


    "Pro-tip," I told the feebly struggling villain on the ground, copying the same mocking tone he had used before. "When your power is to copy people''s strength and speed and add it to your own, don''t call yourself Master Mirage. It gives away the trick and then you''re the one getting beaten up."


    "Screw you!" he shouted and somehow made that controller appear in his left hand. He still retained enough mobility to press the red button... but nothing happened. "What?"


    "Pro-tip number two," I continued in proper smug mode. "If your enemy has set up bombs, defuse them before the fight starts then pretend to still be looking for them to make him turn up. When he realizes the whole thing was a trap meant to draw him away from the hostages, his expression is going to be hilarious."


    And it was, his barely coherent insults only adding to it. Except the fight had been way harder than it had to be because I''d gotten overconfident. The information advantage from Force Awareness and my enhanced senses in general paired with my usual speed and power advantage should have made everything a breeze. One unexpected power plus newbie mistakes in the fight itself had nearly cost me time and two thousand hostages their lives. With how sweaty, worn down and fatigued I was from my Instant Action abuse, it had also cost me a good half of my endurance.


    I kicked the villain in the face, sending him from la-la land to the land of dreams. Then I descended the stairs to the last basement where the hostages had all been shoved into like sardines in a can. They weren''t tied up but why would they be? Nothing they could have done would have harmed the guy upstairs and he''d just piled broken masonry against the doors until it was too heavy for them to move and impossible to break without tools. Good thing he was crazy; a logical villain would have just collapsed the stairs.


    "Are... we free... to leave now?" an older guy in a torn suit asked. He was covered in plaster dust from the wrecked offices in the upper floors, with a small but bloody wound on his forehead. He didn''t seem surprised by the fact I was there, only a bit awed by my looks, disheveled though I was. Those people must have overheard my banter with the bad guy, hadn''t they? At least the beginning and the end of our fight which had not happened outside of time. Good thing I had not said anything particularly dumb or embarrassing, then.


    "The villain is out cold and the battle in the plaza ended four minutes ago." I shrugged. "It is by no means safe but you could be evacuated by the National Guard and looked over by paramedics somewhere that... hasn''t been invaded by terrorists with superpowers?" Yeah, a public speaker I wasn''t. Dance and/or perform in a skimpy outfit before a huge crowd? Absolutely. Talk to said huge crowd? Not on your life. It was not a matter of confidence, I could just never find anything elaborate and properly pompous to say. The superpowers did not help; under all the boosts, my personality and preferences remained the same.


    "Are you, like, a superhero?" a much younger woman that was shaking like a leaf asked next. She was wearing a Greenpeace shirt, was cradling a broken arm and had to be a decade older than me but just then she looked small and afraid. So I momentarily forgot about being held down by a probable psychopath just a minute before, or the delegates I''d yet to save and acted perky and friendly.


    "Well it comes with the cape, doesn''t it?" I set that glorified blue sheet to waving in a nonexistent wind without folding up or catching into anything. It looked awesome and lots of glum or fearful faces actually perked up upon seeing it. The superpower of proper props, everyone. "Plus it would be pretty hard to punch giant robots to scrap if I weren''t one."


    "The terrorists have giant robots now?" the old guy who''d first asked a question spoke up again. "Unbelievable. It''s like the nuking of Florida all over again. What''s next, dragons?"


    "We had dragons in Florida six months ago," I informed him with a shrug. They were scaled, flew, and breathed fire, so it counted. "Maybe that''s why everything was nuked?" No, it had been something much, much worse than that, but apparently the government had kept the details close to the chest and from the amount of hallucinogenic, mind-warping and memetic hazards thrown around I doubted mundane civilian survivors could have gotten their facts straight.


    "Could be... could be... the world''s a broken mirror now..." he muttered before going loud to be heard all over the other whispered conversations. Unfortunately, most of them were about me and super-hearing let me listen to all the nasty comments along with the good. "OK everyone, we''re leaving! Double file, no pushing, just as we practiced in the evacuation exercises." Maybe they''d suffered too many shocks to argue, maybe they had just been looking for someone to organize them, or maybe people could stave off our inborn lemming instincts and think in the face of adversity, if only we were given the chance. Whatever one chose to believe, the hostages were finally moving out and I had some delegates to save.


    I''d done everything in my power to minimize any potential issues; isolated the General Assembly Building from both information and outside interference, defeated the terrorists'' diversionary force wrecking havoc in the city, helped save the surviving National Guard, prevented the bombing of the Secretariat Building and the death of thousands, and defeated one of the actual villains that wasn''t just an enhanced pawn. And all of that in only a few minutes, which meant there was plenty of time still.


    So why did the thought of getting in one of the most famous places on Earth, fighting another villain and his minions and saving some very important people did not seem like a good task to tackle solo then and there?

 23: the world that is

    Approaching the General Assembly Building I felt hesitation once more. The majority of my fights since before gaining powers I''d simply charged ahead and dealt with them. Be they as insignificant as a cheerleader tryout or as terrible as facing a demon in battle, there had been little in the way of hesitation or second thoughts. Objectively, what I was doing today did not even rank in the top-ten of difficult encounters I''d gone through. Conventional explosives, five guys with weak, cut-rate powers granted by someone else, a bunch of civilians the bad guys didn''t even want to eat messily while still alive then convert into monsters? Nothing my senses had revealed so far was particularly threatening, even if I''d have to limit myself so as not to bring down the building.


    It wasn''t the responsibility that made me hesitate, I concluded, but that I''d have to perform for an audience. The whole battle in the plaza had been a performance already, probably recorded a hundred times over from all angles - records that would be analyzed in the days to come, commented upon by talking heads and other idiots with a lot of social capital and zero expertise in what had actually gone down. Everyone in the country would have an opinion, even if that opinion was just "hot girls rule" or "it''s a hoax; see all the CGI? The Earth is flat, by the way."


    If the first public appearance of a powered hero that couldn''t be covered up would be talked a lot, that was still nothing to what would be said about the first time a powered hero personally shaped world politics. Because that was exactly what this whole thing was about, what the villains were trying to do here. A huge political statement that would also conveniently weaken the greatest obstacle to their plans; the world cooperating with heroes. Because let''s say Herakles existed and acted as he did in the most heroic of his stories? People would be partying in the streets because someone that might as well be a god cared about their lives, helped protect them and kept the worst bad guys in check without asking for payment. And governments? Governments would love the guy. Yeah, they couldn''t control him, but why would that matter if he brought more economic stability and market confidence for free and never did anything against their legal-yet-corrupt methods of gaining more power? Herakles''s Twelve Labours were done at the behest of a corrupt government, after all.


    But say that instead of the God of Heroes the first widely seen and even more widely talked about super was Dracula. Not the romanticized novel character but the warlord that staked people in public as warnings and burned whole towns down to the last woman and child if they annoyed him. And that he also happened to be a cannibalistic monster who could turn the corpses of those he''d murdered to more cannibalistic monsters, spread plagues through summoned bats and rats that made a joke out of any disease control measures and could and would call down storms to lock down mass transportation, cause widespread damage and destroy crops so whole states would starve. Suddenly all normal people from governments to the least capable civilians would start an Inquisition against everything super because supers would become existential threats in their minds.


    For those reasons I was far less comfortable applying my usual blind charges, especially since a guy that had not been the leader of this whole operation had already proven a bit of a challenge. So I took a bit extra time to look into things before going in, stretching another half-minute to a subjective ten with Forced Acceleration and using Force Adjustment to note each and every detail that might matter, from the positioning of the hostages to all the resources the bad guys could access, to their apparent power level - and keeping in mind that the latter reading might not always be reliable.


    Invisible to the naked eye, the thin dome of signal negation around the building was slowly fading already. I''d charged the quarter-inch-thick field to last for only ten minutes, reversed Proximakinesis suffusing its volume and countering any force applied by non-visible, non-thermal electromagnetic radiation. That effect still destroyed any signals passing through, similar to destructive superposition except the wave did not reappear beyond the other side of the effect; unable to propagate it disappeared permanently. Beyond said shield and below the building proper, below the basements used as conference rooms, storage for visual media, refreshment and sanitation, there were a series of tunnels, both for maintenance and for other uses. Several of those were not in the building plans one could find online or the official documents either but somehow the bad guys had found them. Enhanced senses probably, or a form of super-senses; I couldn''t actually tell. The evidence of that were the no less than six bombs spaced together in a ring of passages, linked together with short-range communication lasers, each in view of two others. Presumably, both interruption of the wireless links and tampering with one bomb that could be detected by the others would trigger them - and they had a lot of sensors. Self-diagnostics obviously, temperature and vibration sensors that would prevent cutting into them, a gyroscopic system that would detect attempts to move them, a Faraday cage mesh wrapped fully around their mechanism that both blocked most signals and would detect if anything cut through with only millimeter-thin gaps for the laser to go through, even air pressure, radiation and chemical sniffers though how those would help was anybody''s guess.


    None of those sensors could outright detect powers, or changes at the molecular level applied within the bomb itself with no apparent means of application, and there hadn''t been any exotic sensors whose function I couldn''t guess at. So I''d extended an inch-thick force-field at them from outside the building, with a bulge at the end that I could apply Force Adjustment to. Six adjustments later, the explosives in the bombs had a lot stronger molecular bonds. That made them burn and explode about as well as solid iron - that was to say, not at all. Those fields were also active still; being vastly smaller than the dome over the building, they could be made to last with only a minor amount of stamina expenditure.


    Further up, most of the rooms were entirely empty. The only exceptions were the two atriums; the larger one at the front most observers, support stuff and other officials came in through, and the smaller one at the back reserved for each country''s delegates. Those had their gates locked and barred, with nobody to guard them. It was the detail I liked least in all of this; why would the bad guys not post any sentries there? Were they so confident of their other preparations they didn''t care about a potential assault? Whatever the case, I decided my plan would not include an assault through there, or the building''s roof. Repetition was the mother of predictability and I did not want my enemies to be able to guess at my moves.


    The Main Assembly Hall was a hundred and sixty five feet long, a hundred and fifteen feet wide and seventy-five feet tall. It was closer to a small stadium than a room and could accommodate eighteen hundred people on its amphitheater-like seats. Only a fraction of those seats were occupied but two hundred and ninety-seven people almost evenly spread between ethnicities. These had to be the delegates; short of personally knowing them I couldn''t actually tell that they really were, because it was a secret assembly. It wasn''t as if I could look those people online and nobody official had the authority to tell me, for obvious reasons. It was another bit of the situation I really did not like, because how could I tell them apart from ringers, collaborators, or outright terrorists that might be in their midst? I had to take that into account in any plan that included any sort of interaction with the hostages until the authorities arrived with more information. My best bet was to put them all in a safe area and limit their movements and access to communication with me standing ready to stop any shenanigans.


    Complicating that part of the plan were the bomb vests each and every hostage was wearing. Those were wired all together and while they lacked the extensive tamper-proofing of the bombs in the basement, setting them all up that the others would go boom if one was disabled or removed would be fairly easy, turning each hostage into a deadman''s switch for all the rest. Simple, effective, hard to overcome with the bad guys ready to press the button at a moment''s notice and absolutely punishing of any mistakes. Each vest held two pounds of C-4 explosive sandwiched between three thousand steel balls each one eight of an inch in diameter. The terrorists had obviously read up on Claymore mines and liked them very much, though I wasn''t sure their slap-dash upscaling and redesign would be nearly as effective. At four times the mass of said mine though, and with the hostages all sitting within half the effective range of a Claymore, that did not matter. Any one vest going off would kill or maim the majority.


    I had not dared extend any force fields into the chamber itself, out of worry that at least one of the bad guys had super-senses and all of them had a level of sensory enhancement. Even if the chance I''d be actually detected was minimal, risking it was not worth it... especially since I''d have to directly modify three hundred vests one by one. That would probably take half an hour, leave me even more fatigued than I already was, and the villains would certainly not stay put for that long. There was the obvious solution of destroying them under instant action, but I was hesitating. What if another villain could react to that? Unlikely, but you did not disregard a capability the enemy had already used against you, especially when a plan of yours hinged that he did not. I had another idea but it was similarly risky. We''d see.


    Last but definitely not least came the bad guys. Four mountains of muscle even larger than I was, though again lacking the other signs of overt superpowers. Whatever had given them their abilities had made them even tougher and stronger than any of their fellows I''d already met, and they wielded an assortment of supertech weapons whose functions I could not read with how their physics warped to something that definitely didn''t work like the theories we''d been taught in high school. Their rifles looked like the ones on the robots outside, so there was a good chance they wouldn''t be a problem. Their clothing was mostly mundane, except for an armored mesh over their normal fatigues. It looked like medieval chain mail, though it had multiple supertech attachments in the neck, belt and boots and even more physics-warping around the right glove and a tiny knife in the off-hand sheath. All of those were objects though, and however dangerous they might be, their ashes would not pose nearly the same threat. From there, just some conventional beating would do, as long as the fight didn''t spread to the hostages.


    The fifth guy was not like the others. He just wore normal clothing, had no supertech, no obvious weaponry no matter how hard I looked and his physical attributes were actually lower than those of the obvious guards. What he did have was a remote control with multiple buttons, a cell phone that couldn''t connect to anywhere outside the building and a short wave radio. Underestimating someone because he didn''t seem to have combat-oriented powers was a bad idea but at least his gear were entirely mundane. None of them were dead men''s switches - I''d checked and none maintained a continuous connection to anything via wireless means. Barring powers on the fifth guy''s part, they should be easy to destroy but on the off chance he had something to counter me, taking them out would not be my first move.


    All the enemies accounted for, I focused on myself and activated the access ring Liz had given me.


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 87.0595%; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 37.9235%">Name: Maya Wennefer</td>


    <td style="width: 62.0194%">Bio: female human, 17y10m19d</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 37.9235%">Known skills:


    </td>


    <td style="width: 62.0194%">Points: 1/208


    </td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 37.9235%; border-style: none; vertical-align: top">


    Chronal Leap, Empowering Regeneration, Eyebeams, Focused Invulnerability, Force Adjustment, Force Awareness, Forcefield Creation, Forced Acceleration, Greater Proximakinesis, Immutable Force, Instant Action, Lasting Force, Retributive Defense, Super Suit, Spatial Distortion, Spatial Leap


    This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.


    </td>


    <td style="width: 62.0194%; vertical-align: top">


    Attributes: Might 50, Agility 25, Reason 6, Vigilance 22, Ego 25, Luck 6


    Word of Force: Power IV, Control III, Versatility IV, Number of Effects III, Range II, Scope II


    Word of Self: Power IV, Control III, Versatility III, Number of Effects III, Range II, Scope I


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    The last couple of fights had given me another point, a trickle of extra growth compared to what I already had. Probably the fight with that Mirage guy who''d managed to push me for a short time... and given me a stark reminder of the dangers of overconfidence. It could not change much, but just in case I tried to expend it to make another custom skill now that I knew the situation. There was feeling of gathering tension, of strain against an unseen weight within me and the anchor ring grew warm. The more I kept at it the warmer it got, until I worried the little band of heavily enchanted metal would melt. I stopped trying before it got to the point and considered the sensations. The weight felt great, but not immovable. Maybe twice the magic I had available for spending? Two points of permanent expenditure then, for something that could be done for free with either months of dedicated effort or doing something clever with my abilities and using it in high stakes situations a few times. Not an unfair exchange for when there was need, especially if the new skill could be shaped exactly to my specifications just before tackling a major but known threat. I made a mental note for future-Maya to save two points when she had the chance.


    Now though I needed every last advantage I could get. Would some extra Vigilance help? Agility or Might? Attributes were not linear, each increase was a noticeable boost and every little bit helped. I needed this thing to go as perfectly as possible... wait, that was it!


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 87.0595%; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 37.9235%">Name: Maya Wennefer</td>


    <td style="width: 62.0194%">Bio: female human, 17y10m19d</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 37.9235%">Known skills:


    </td>


    <td style="width: 62.0194%">Points: 0/208


    </td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 37.9235%; border-style: none; vertical-align: top">


    Chronal Leap, Empowering Regeneration, Eyebeams, Focused Invulnerability, Force Adjustment, Force Awareness, Forcefield Creation, Forced Acceleration, Greater Proximakinesis, Immutable Force, Instant Action, Lasting Force, Retributive Defense, Super Suit, Spatial Distortion, Spatial Leap


    </td>


    <td style="width: 62.0194%; vertical-align: top">


    Attributes: Might 50, Agility 25, Reason 6, Vigilance 22, Ego 25, Luck 7


    Word of Force: Power IV, Control III, Versatility IV, Number of Effects III, Range II, Scope II


    Word of Self: Power IV, Control III, Versatility III, Number of Effects III, Range II, Scope I


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    I little bit of luck went a long way. Normally, I preferred to have control over things, to beat everything any enemy could bring up by simply being the immovable object and the unstoppable force, but when the stakes were so high... stakes were chance, and chance could be affected.


    There were other minor details like exactly who was standing were, how they stood and where they were aiming, or what furniture, interior walls and mundane tech was present but those would only need minor adjustments instead of dictating the plan itself, or could be ignored because their impact was negligible. Having all the information I could reasonably gather and done everything I could think of to tilt things in my favor without showing my hand, I spent the rest of my super-sped time to put everything together...


    xxxx


    I went into the General Assembly Building the standard method; through the door. The door itself on the other hand was anything but standard; a maintenance access hatch for a sewer tunnel or perhaps storm drain older than the building itself, it had been sealed and filled with both poured concrete and debris. Its original purpose I had no idea about, but with a bit of wiggling and disintegration of obstacles I got very close to a sewer line and from there into the restrooms with only a single toilet seat destroyed. An impermeable force field covering me from head to toe dealt with both the sewage and the smell and the barest flicker of disintegration dealt with anything clinging on said field before it was dismissed. I certainly did not sing any spy movie themes, no sir.


    Now inside and from what my Force Awareness could see still undetected, the time for stealth and hesitation was past. With a speed only slightly under the sound barrier, I broke through the back door to the main chamber, reached the stage in under a tenth of a second and blasted with my eyebeams at the bad guys'' apparent leader. His short wave radio and his cell phone turned to dust but the blast at his remote control met a black barrier that stopped it cold - a barrier that my Force Awareness did not detect at all.


    "Hah!" the very young-looking man shouted and waved, three more black barriers appearing around him and almost entirely hiding him from view. "You thought it would be that easy, Hero? Minions, get her!"


    He sounded like a Saturday morning cartoon supervillain. Why did he sound like a Saturday morning cartoon supervillain? No, asskicking now, questions later. As the four ''minions'' approached warily, their main weapons fell prey to copious beam spam faster than they could aim. Their chain armor was made of sterner stuff though, each of my shots splashing against the metal mesh with no effect - almost. The supertech device in their back triggered every time a beam was nullified, sending out a wave of something that displaced air but couldn''t be perceived by my senses. It was that effect that did not adhere to conventional physics that caused the nullification, but each time it worked the device that produced it grew hotter - by a lot. I was guessing it would only stop half a dozen more shots at best. Hmm... blast them more or get on in with the program?


    Deciding on the latter, I speed-blitzed the much slower enhanced. Tough they might be, they lacked the additional powers of full supers and their equipment had no answer for purely physical bashing; in moments they were all down for the count.


    "You dare attack us in our moment of triumph? Fool!" their leader cried out. "Witness what befalls all those who oppose us!" And with that, he pressed a button on his remote. It was big, it was red, and it was clearly labelled "do not press". When he did just that... nothing happened.


    "Were you expecting something impressive, perhaps?" I mocked him, the hostages safe from the detonation signal behind another signal-negating barrier. With me present in the chamber and the volume to be covered vastly smaller, I''d raised it the moment I burst onto the stage.


    "How is this possible!" he protested... rather childishly. Then he pressed the button several more times. Was this really the villain behind this attack? A man-child barely my age with gadgets, lots of followers, heavy equipment and an elaborate plan that... didn''t really fit the image he was showing just then? Something smelled rotten in the state of Denmark.


    "What are you, five?" I told him even as I charged, shattering three quarters of the shadowy fields around him. More formed, but I could destroy them faster than they regrew; this would be barely a delay. "You assaulted the United Nations, kept delegates from almost every country on the planet as hostages, kill thousands... for what?"


    "I was promised a showdown with a hero," he whined nasally, then attempted to tie me up with more of those black force fields. They were cold to the touch, almost unpleasant mimicries of physical objects, but even layered they were relatively fragile. The single bands he could get around my limbs tore and shattered like chalk before disappearing into puffs of black smoke. The only way my Force Awareness could detect them was from the air they displaced, while my eyes could see them just fine. "Instead I get a barbie that can''t even act the role."


    "You''re insane!" He really, really was. Should the other villain being mad have clued me in? But even he had been reasonable at first; he just had a weird hangup and a berserk button I''d kept pressing. "So many lives lost..." and it was all for nothing. Some idiot''s delusions growing deadly because he''d gotten his hands on some power... wait. He''d said ''he had been promised''. "Who put you up to this? Who gave you your powers?"


    "Insane?! Insane?!" he was actually spitting in his rage, though his own shield caught and kept it from infecting anyone else with his stupidity. "For stringing a bunch of useless fossils up and crushing their little tin soldiers?" He cackled. He actually cackled. "Look around you. The world is changing! The day of old fogeys in their assemblies and back room dealings deciding the fate of the world has passed. Now people like me have the power. We could bring governments to their knees, do whatever we want and no-one could stop us." He sneered at me and even more grasping shadow-chains tried to tie me up. They failed. "Except people like you would serve them like loyal dogs, upholding the status quo. Why are you even wearing a costume? You''re a glorified cop, doing what they want. You have some measly measure of power, you could carve a small place to rule, a village or town but no. You''ll just die here... and then I will remake this world in MY image."


    "The problem with that is that you''re ugly," I told the delusional idiot then turned around and unleashed my eyebeams at the delegates. There were some belated screams but they all stopped when they saw what had just happened. Disabling the explosives individually would never have worked, so I had angled the beams'' trajectory into a zing-zagging but continuous path that burned through every singe bomb in sequence. The three hundred bomb vests were less than a thousand feet apart in total while the beams traveled at the speed of light; they had all been harmlessly disintegrated before any detonation signals could go anywhere. As a bonus, most of the wires keeping the delegates tied up had also been cut through, leaving only their legs still bound.


    "No! NO! I REFUSE!" the rather pathetic villain cried and threw his remote control at me. It bounced off his inner shield then hit him in the eye, doing next to nothing but providing a brief distraction. At the speeds I could more, that was more than enough to burst through his barriers and punch him in the face. Then I did it again and again, the third blow leaving him unconscious at my feet.


    "Governments exist to protect people and allow civilization to flourish, dumbass," I told the unconscious villain, then kicked him in the ass for good measure. All those deaths, all the chaos, the fear, the political upheavals to come, for nothing. "I happen to like civilization; it has houses and pizza, and the internet. Rule the world?" I grumbled and turned around. "Way too much work."


    Then I realized what I''d just said and before what audience, and prepared to rip open the ground and bury Yours Truly and her big fucking mouth.


    "I happen to disagree," a very deep voice called from behind me and I turned around only to see a humanoid shadow crawling out of the unconscious villain''s gaping, painfully dislocated mouth. Red glowing eyes flicked between me and the delegates and the voice went on in an agreeable, civilized tone that immediately set me on edge. "Let''s discuss this as civilized people, shall we?"


    And with that the three hundred delegates and their escorts dropped every attempt to free themselves, sat back down as one, then raised their left hands to their throats. Shadowy knives manifested in their grip, their edges an inch from each delegate''s skin...

 24: the world that could be

    Three hundred hostages holding magic knives to their own throats. One shadowy bad guy that might be a ghost, a remote sending, an illusion or something else because there was zero matter or energy to his - its? - form. One ''request'' for civilized conversation, with the obvious threat of what would happen should I not agree. There was only one option for the time being.


    "What did you do to them?!" I demanded loudly, glowering at the red-eyed shadowy figure for good measure. The option was to stall, while looking for possible ways out of this for the civilians in superspeed.


    "Oh don''t worry your pretty little head, they are perfectly fine," the shadowy bad guy chortled. "Trapped in their frail human bodies, free to see and hear and feel and think as they will... but with their bodies following my every desire. Neat, huh?"


    "It''s disgusting, that''s what it is," I said with a shudder that I didn''t really have to feign. "The worst kind of slavery with their own body being their prison." I shuddered again. I had... issues with confinement but this was not the time for trips down memory lane. i was supposed to be thinking of a solution.


    "Is it really so bad to give up your freedom in service to a higher power?" the Big Bad was asking, his shadowy body floating around me in slow circles. "To be protected from the harshness of the world, shielded from the depredations of others, empowered to accomplish your dreams? Many would give much for such a gift. Many more have killed for it."


    "Gift? Self-determination is the purpose of life and the duty of all." Standing where I was, doing what I was doing, it felt right to speak those words. "As for killing, it is a sign of weakness. Of one who lacks the power, the intelligence, or the self-control to succeed without destroying others." I shrugged. "Plus it feels wrong and that''s enough for me."


    "Is that what you believe, little hero?" the shadow hissed menacingly. "Let''s put it to the test, shall we? A wager, if you feel so secure in your self-righteousness. A difficult task for you here and now, one nigh-impossible without getting your hands dirty but oh so easy if you do. And for every twenty heartbeats you are not done, one of the little people that thought they were great will perish by their own hand." The wraith stopped circling me and stared into my eyes in challenge.


    "Those terms are not just horrible, they are insulting." Mostly because to take the deal I would have to be the most vain, conceited and blind person ever, with a blatant disregard for the lives of others and willing to sacrifice them to serve my own ego. But also because... "Measuring time in heartbeats with no qualifications? There are eight billion people on this planet, the hostages would be dead before I could blink."


    "At least you''re somewhat intelligent," the shadow whispered then floated over the still-unconscious idiot of a villain. "This one here wasn''t. He bargained for the power to achieve his goals but not how that power would be gained or what form it would take. He bargained for a hero that would be his opposite, not specifying in what ways that opposition would manifest. He bargained for a place in the stage of the world, not defining what that place should be or how long it should last." The ominous spirit tsked. "All in all a poor showing. And poor showings lack a certain substance."


    He suddenly stood before me, having changed positions so quickly I almost had not seen him move... but only almost. Looming up close, he looked me up and down, from front and back, glowing crimson eyes trailing my every feature.


    "You do not appear to be similarly lacking, little hero. That is good, but denying what you are is not." He cackled again. Frankly, the repetitions were becoming annoying. "You of the bloody triumph and change by force. If you will not wager these pitiful creatures, if you will stand by them, perhaps you can be made to obey to protect them." The shadow''s meaning was clear enough, causing me to clench my fists and glare back. "You are angry, that is good. Shall we bargain?"


    "Let''s not," I said, finally fed up with his bullshit. Then I stepped outside of time. I''d claimed I would neither wager nor bargain, but I was wagering now, taking a risk that the bad guy could not follow me through Instant Action. It had been either that or playing along with his demands, because I could see no other solution.


    Mindful of my limited time, I ran to the closest delegate and looked at the old Japanese man with Force Awareness. Nothing. No unusual forces or abilities seemed to be acting on him... or at least none Force Awareness could detect. Whatever the shadow''s powers were, we worked on entirely different wavelengths, unable to detect or interact with each other''s workings. This was both good and bad. Good, because he could not follow into or prevent Instant Action. Bad, because I could neither free the hostages from possession nor prevent them from killing themselves with their loaned shadow powers... or could I?


    A wave of my hand through the space the blade occupied shattered it without a trace. The principle of reciprocity still applied then; if they could cut through matter and impart force, then matter could break them and force be imparted on them. Problem was, I had no idea how strong the shadow powers coming from the hostages were. Just powerful enough to make knives? As strong as that idiot''s shields and chains? More? Nothing for it, then, but putting in full effort. Touching the closest hostage I layered him with a force field, one that would prevent him from moving but still allow him to breathe or blink. It would also repel the Big Bad''s shadow constructs too; if they were weaker they''d be deflected or shattered, if they were just as strong simply stopped. If they were stronger? Well, there was a reason the field was as powerful as I could make it. And then, I gave it a charge of magic to make it last.


    A small but noticeable portion of my stamina was used up to fuel the force field, on top of the steady trickle drained by Instant Action. Quickly I moved to the next hostage, rapidly forming another field. Too slowly and I''d run out of time as it was steadily costing me stamina like intense exercise turned up to eleven. Too quickly, and the cost of forming a stable force field skyrocketed. It was a delicate balancing I could only manage thanks to long practice with my powers as well as the new boosts that helped with precision. Finding a pacing that worked, I shifted between hostages every four seconds.


    The first few times only took a bit of concentration. By the twentieth, I was warming up. Another thirty delegates protected later, sweat started running down my face and throat. Another twenty and I found breathing was taking some effort too, now. By the hundredth hostage, I was panting, a little thirsty and red in the face. There was no water to be found, of course, not unless I stopped my weaving of protective barriers to go looking for it in the basement or the restrooms in other floors. After twelve more people shielded and hopefully safe from immediate harm, I was beginning to suspect I would not make it. A hundred and twelve people shielded and I was already feeling my body slowing down. There was no way to layer defenses on another a hundred and ninety eight; they were simply too many. But the cost of my constructs depended on volume and strength and duration at a pretty fixed rate; creating a lot of constructs repeatedly did not make it any easier because it was not really a matter of skill any more than doing a given work could change in cost beyond a certain point no matter the skill.


    I started stretching the barriers over two adjacent people each. That made it thinner, weaker, but as with many other things there simply wasn''t any other option. By the two hundredth hostage I was panting heavily. By the two hundredth and fiftieth, I was sweating like a pig. From then on it became a slog, pair after protected pair like going up stairs in an infinite staircase, while chased by bad guys. I clenched my fists, held my head down and settled into it as my muscles seemed to burn. It didn''t become much harder than that after that point, but maybe that was the exhaustion speaking. All the previous fights had offered some temporary energy, a boost, due to progressive regeneration. But that boost scaled with damage and faded after the fight; the breaks between the battles had let it weaken and the brief discussion with the Big Bad had let the last of it vanish. The fight with that strength and speed copier had burned through some of my reserves; maybe if I hadn''t made a mistake I would have finished all the shields properly. Finally I was done, and not a moment too soon. Only a few seconds after going over the last pair and ensuring their defense was stable despite the intense strain over the last five castings, Instant Action collapsed.


    "You seek to flee?" the shadow demanded the moment he saw I''d vanished only to reappear at the back of the stands from his perspective. Immediately several of the hostages tried to move but strain as they might they could not. Moments after that there was a pressure on the defenses from no apparent source, but it snapped off without any shadow blade growing. Now that I thought about it, had any of the constructs ever appeared on their own without extending from someone possessed? No space to grow due to skintight protection, no shadow constructs it would seem. "No, not flee. You warded the weaklings... but it cost you."


    "Most good things do," I quipped then I tried to catch my breath.


    "Oh?" the Big Bad floated closer again. I sent an invisible blade of force at him but it moved through his form like, well, like through a shadow; no resistance, no impact because nothing appeared to be there. "Let''s see how costly granting that protection was." A thick stream of shadow lanced out, not a coherent object like before but more like smoke. It splashed against my face and immediately there was a pressure, something trying to enter through my mouth and nose. Not like a real object though, the pressure was not physical and closing my mouth and pinching my nostrils did not stop the sense of intrusion.


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    Not wanting to be intruded upon, rejecting the shadowy asshole who was obviously going for another possession gambit? That worked just fine. I''d been on the receiving end of mental effects before. Has I been fresh the possession attempt would have been nothing more than some mist scattered at the first touch. Now it was like smoke from a cigarette; a cloying, lingering stench that was annoying and lingered but hold your breath for a moment and you can walk through it or have it swept away by a breeze. In short, it was not particularly impressive.


    "I''d give you ''A'' for effort, shady guy, but a big fat ''F'' for effect," I told him and it was my time to laugh. "Take your cut-rate Imperius curse to someone else. Or can you only affect unpowered people?" Obviously he''d possessed that idiot, but that had seemed more like a willing carrier to me. I wanted to kick him on his way and get over this whole mess, too, but that was only because he had not even noticed my repeated attempts to slice him to bits. I doubted punching was going to work either.


    "No, I think it only needs a bit of extra work," he said menacingly as he loomed closer. "You should have made that wager instead."


    "Why, are you gonna- ARGHHH!!"


    Energy crackled over my body, wracking my every nerve with pain then numbness. I found myself on my hands and knees, my limbs shaking as four eight-foot-tall linebackers walked out of a patch of shadow. They were the same guys I''d knocked out earlier, except they were healed... and the shadowy bastard must have concealed them in an illusion or something.


    "Wonderful things, tasers," the Big Bad was monologuing again. "So little power yet effective in their niche. I tried to upscale them, there were complications but I think I got them right. What do you think?"


    Instead of answering I shakily got to my feet to see all four of those overmuscled enhanced downing the contents of a small bottle each. They were liquid, they were glowing, and my senses insisted they were a mix of spinach and cranberry juice with a lethal mix of chemicals added for flavor. Even as I watched the enhanced men were growing, their bone and muscle getting denser from nowhere, their nerves and muscle fiber twitching faster, their bodies bloating up in a grotesque way reminiscent of the most extreme body builders. Then I realized I should not just be watching and forced myself to the air in a grunt of effort.


    With a grunt of his own, the nearest musclehead reached out lightning fast, grabbed me by the right ankle and slammed me into the ground. The building shook, the floor cracked, the blow actually hurt a little. I was about to kick the guy off when one of his friends grabbed my other leg.


    "Fine, be that way," I muttered and flew up, carrying them along for the ride. They were nowhere near my weight limit so the flight should have been easy if not for the fatigue, and the mental attack, and that quadruple super-taser shot. Feeling more than a bit vindictive and justified for it, I blasted them with an eyebeam each, followed by slices of invisible force. The eyebeams fizzled - right, that damn supertech gadget - but the sharp force-fields cut through their mesh armor and deep into their flesh.


    The now near-giant enhanced did not cry in pain, or wince, or react at all. They doggedly held on, trying to punch the same leg each of them were holding on to. They felt like kiddie league blows but from the fact I felt them at all it was clear they were still getting stronger. Then double red-hot spikes struck at my lower back, or so it felt. My body arched and shook painfully from the dual shock, flight cutting off to drop us to the ground once more. The big guys landed on their feet, pointed their off-hands with those metal gloves at me and threw another double dose of shock down my front. I gasped and shook, managing to give one of the near-giants a flailing punch to the side that audibly cracked ribs, the other a backhand that flattened his nose.


    "No, no, it needs some good group effort," the shadow-asshole commanded and floated closer. Why was he even speaking, didn''t he have those guys possessed? "Like this." Chains of shadow stretched out of him, wrapping around my arms. They either were a lot stronger than the ones his idiot patsy had used, or I was having a hard time fighting properly. They caught on to me and with some effort I broke them. Then they got me again and I broke them again, then a third time and a fourth. "All together now," the shadow said, and I got who he was talking to. He was laughing at my expense.


    Before I could get back at him, four super-tasers struck my front as one. I shook and writhed and shouted but though they took near-crippling blows the two enhanced held onto my legs while my largely uncoordinated attack played out. Then their other two friends pounced, grabbing an arm each. With four of them holding on and concentrating on my powers near-impossible after the last shock, I could not budge them. They slammed me to the floor again and the floor collapsed in a shower of broken masonry that didn''t hurt except by getting dust into my eyes.


    "Careful, we don''t want to collapse the building yet," the Big Bad crooned then floated until he was face to face. "But I think we''re getting somewhere. Let''s keep it up and see what happens." Another four energy bolts grounded through me, locking every muscle in my body for several seconds. At the same time, the same smoky stream of the possession magic was pushed against my face. It didn''t go anywhere, but it didn''t make things any more pleasant. "No, it needs more work."


    From there, the bad guys'' attacks took on a regular rhythm. First they''d give me a quad super-taser shot to shock my body and disrupt my focus while the Big Bad tried his possession spell. Then, while their gadgets took a bit to recharge they''d kick repeatedly with their big stompy feet for six or seven seconds, trying to get some damage in. As soon as the taser-gauntlets were ready it was shocking time again, then possession attempt, then more hits.


    None of the attacks were even as strong as the kids had given me in sparring, but the point wasn''t to win in one hit or even injure heavily. It was a one-two-three punch perfect to keep most supers too disoriented to fight back. Like a boxer that had caught an opponent in the back foot, they were piling the hits to widen their advantage. The first time they did it in the chamber above I was a bit shaky but kicking. The second quad tasing and them working together had left me staggered and uncoordinated. The third, after we collapsed to the basement, had left me dazed for a few seconds - but a few seconds was all the one-two-three punch took to repeat. The proverbial boxer had his opponent in the corner now, working her over while she was too stunned to fight. Slowly the bruises were piling up, the muscles locked for longer and soon, the inevitable would come.


    "Something''s off," the Big Bad smelled a rat. "She should have been knocked out by now."


    "Yeah," I grunted and sent all four of the meatheads reeling with a much stronger Proximakinesis blast than normal. I stood up, then grunted as four super-tasers fired off. It locked me up for maybe half a second. "You''re not the only one good at theatricality." I stretched, getting the kinks out of my body as it healed up, the regeneration charged up along with everything else.


    The minions didn''t give up that easily. They got out knives of all things, though knives that looked magical to my senses. Unfortunately for them, it wasn''t nearly the same fight it had been before. Faster than they could react, I delivered blows that staggered them, broke limbs, delivered concussions or cracked jaws with the first strike. They got a few stabs in and those actually managed to pierce through my costume and give me a few shallow cuts that healed up faster than they could bleed. Then they were all down and twitching feebly. Unlike the cornered boxer, I''d done a very brutal comeback because if your enemy can bring you down with four enhanced goons and a bit of roughhousing, you deserve to lose.


    "They are dying, aren''t they?" I asked conversationally while quietly palming a magic dagger. "Overdosing on whatever gave them their powers. Two hours, maybe three. If I hadn''t had to put them down hard, possibly..." I shook my head. "Shame."


    "I told you you''d get your hands bloody," the shadow said with glee, both as if revealing something incredibly profound and proving that he was just an evil asshole. "What will you do now, hero?"


    "Wait for the authorities to take the hostages to safety, probably," I mused then stretched both my hands over my head and incidentally snatching another weapon. "Then go punch some monsters that are easy targets to work off this frustration." I rotated my head, my spine cracking audibly. Another metal bit found its way to me, as well. "Violent workouts are great and energizing and all, but sometimes a girl needs to relax, you know?"


    "You think you''ve won because you survived a few minions? I have hundreds!" the shade roared his anger as he grew and grew, covering half the basement. "That I''ll let those mortals go? I will parade them on the streets, have them kill all that come close with borrowed powers. I''ll send them after their own families, after kids in your little apprentice gatherings!"


    "They''re called schools," I informed who I was now certain had to be some magical entity summoned from beyond Earth rather than a human with powers. "You become a lot more bitchy and boringly evil when you don''t get your way, don''t you?" It was my time to mock for effect and I thoroughly enjoyed it. "You lost your best chance to possess me while I had no idea you existed and you caught me by surprise. All this ''set up an encounter with a hero'' that idiot thought he wanted, you were just looking for the best possession target, weren''t you?"


    I ran my hands down my body provocatively. "Well, you can''t have this awesome target right here and I''m suspecting you can''t get too far and keep the hostages under your thrall either. Otherwise you''d have just taken over a major government and bidden your time." I turned to face him, stretching my arms behind my back again. "So you either stay here and wait for more heroes that can potentially hurt you... or flee like a little bitch." I stalked, almost strutted closer. "So what will it be... bitch?"


    "I will go, and prepare, and return when you least expect it," he loomed even larger and more terrible. "And then we''ll see whether you''ll escape my snare again, little hero."


    "Maybe... but you know what they say about overconfidence."


    Before he could react, I threw all four of the magic daggers at well beyond the speed of sound. Perhaps they wouldn''t have hurt him under normal circumstances, but I''d enhanced all four of them to magnify their impact as far as I could, to pierce physical barriers and disintegrate conjured objects. Believing himself invulnerable, the shade had also made himself a huge target in his attempt to intimidate me. Two of the daggers slammed into his center of mass like antimateriel shots on a human, spilling shredded shadow-stuff everywhere. The other two found those eerie red eyes of his and pierced straight through, coring what passed for the shade''s head instantly.


    The dark spirit screamed, an inhuman, impossibly loud wail that cracked the walls, warped the floor, and caused every bit of furniture and storage box in the basement to rot in an instant. Then, still wailing and trailing shadow-stuff from both ends of all four holes I''d drilled into him, the specter vanished into the ground.


    I''d hoped for a kill, but he''d proven too powerful for that and I had no means to stop him. He was almost certainly going to survive even such grievous injuries - in my experience undead were notoriously hard to kill for their level of power - and probably make good of his promise to... deal with me. Never give an enemy a small injury, they say, but mine should be good for some time.


    And if he came? I now had four magic daggers and a hell of an incentive to learn how to harm spirits like him.

 25: World News

    It hadn''t even been a day, and most signs of the battle had been cleared away. When I''d offered to help with the cleaning the General had informed me his people could handle their own clean-up. Over twenty low-end supers had been in the field by the time the battle was over, with a dozen more arriving with the reinforcements that had been just out of reach. None of them had had powers particularly useful in non-violent work, but powers were not the only thing even the weaker supers had going for them.


    For one thing, enough strength to lift and carry up to a medium-sized car or bend metal and break concrete with their bare hands paired with the stamina to do it literally all day and standard human agility that machines simply did not have made the grunt work go by far more quickly than any similar operations could have managed before the advent of powers. For another, every super invariably had improved looks. It wasn''t immediately noticeable with low-end supers, but when forty soldiers that were all as good looking as Hollywood movie actors gathered in one place, they stood out... especially after the third shirt got "damaged" halfway through the cleanup; Kevlar doesn''t tear that easily.


    And with that realization came another; while jumping from crisis to crisis and playing catch-up against the bad guys'' actions, I''d only had a vague idea of the public image of supers. After a quick crash course on current affairs, how odd the public''s reaction to me had been in a certain mall two weeks before truly struck. I''d assumed that the existence of supers was a matter of public record. That after six months and the greatest disaster the country had suffered in living memory everyone would know at least the main points of what had gone down and what was up with powers.


    You know what they say about assumptions.


    What General Rinaker was now doing was building an impression that supers were more than the countless contradictory rumors made them out to be... or the small glimpse of large-scale violence the people of New York had gotten. Showing off minor but useful abilities in helping people, using the soldiers'' looks to shape public opinion on top of a mountain of lies. I crushed the three-hundred-page briefing in my hands, sheets and print-outs crumpling before being squeezed between my fingers. Six months. Six fucking months and everything publicly available was still either deliberate misinformation or conspiracy theories, and one carefully controlled, highly curated interview coming up.


    We''d see about that. The Earth''s gravity reasserted its grip on me as I turned Proximakinesis off and entered a near-silent free-fall towards the repaired plaza, the impromptu stage and the sea of reporters waiting below.


    xxxx


    Humans do not look up; even with all-around super-senses I sometimes forgot to and that was with Force Awareness lacking the horizontal bias and aversion to elevation built into human vision. At a good hundred yards per second and with a gloomy, overcast sky on my back I was already at the podium before anybody noticed. That my arrival came ten minutes before the interview was supposed to start helped, and that the introduction and preliminary small talk had yet to be carried out by the government representatives sealed the deal.


    Force Adjustment and Proximakinesis ensured my three-point landing remained silent, and a split second later Forcefield Creation had done its job of extending a layer of invisible influence six feet thick across the whole crowd. With a thought, the usual cacophony of such crowds was silenced and the cameras got rolling without the cameramen''s input. Over a hundred signals, connections and sensors that had no right to be where they were were cut off, while dozens of people in news stations around the city scrambled to do their jobs earlier than they''d expected.


    "Good evening, people," my voice boomed, getting everyone''s attention. The microphone on the podium was still unpowered but I wasn''t using it anyway. "I''d welcome everyone to your usual government-scheduled press conference but as you can see, some things are quite different than usual tonight."


    The crowd focused on my seven-foot frame, the white costume with the blue boots and cape, and tried to enter the classic reporter feeding frenzy. They failed and after a moment or two their efforts stopped before the total, sound-devouring silence. Behind me, several people in uniforms scrambled in the podium''s direction for a few feet, then were rebuffed by the force field.


    "Some other people were supposed to do a brief introduction before my arrival but they''re currently indisposed, so we''ll skip the theatrics and get to the point; supers and giant robots." That hadn''t been how the government representatives would have put it, but beneath no less than a dozen pages of ass-covering and political correctness they''d have meant the same thing... probably. "But before we get to the good stuff, some ground rules." I stretched, cracked my knuckles, and stared at about a hundred newsies and their hangers-on challegingly.


    "I point at you, you ask your question. No shouting, no raised hands or anything else will get you more so don''t." There was a bit of silent grumbling at that, but nothing compared to the arguments going on in several news stations across the building. There was talk of cutting the transmission among certain parties, but most of those parties knew that would not go over well with the newsies. This was the biggest news since the atomic bombs; everyone wanted in on it. Plus said parties would have gotten my warning by now. "Try to stay remotely on topic, and no personal attacks." And with that I pointed at one of the reporters at random.


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    "Carrie Bolling, Fox News," the thirty-something brunette introduced herself before asking. "Did you just... take over the press conference?"


    "More or less," I admitted easily. "I mean, I was already supposed to answer questions but the whole thing was so staged it might as well have been Shakespeare. Never liked theater or staged things, so here we are." A few of them laughed and were pleasantly surprised to find they weren''t muted. I pointed at the next reporter.


    "Is that legal?" a tall guy sporting a logo for an online news service asked without introducing himself. "Will you get in trouble for it?"


    I raised a perfectly arching pale eyebrow. "More trouble than fighting giant robots and throwing down with supervillains in the middle of the UN Assembly?" More laughter at that. "They''re the government. If they want to, they will make it legal." The next reporter in line was an older man from...


    "Anderson Harlow, CNN," he said more seriously than the previous two had done. "You punch giant robots, wear a costume and cape and can fly, you''re obviously a superhero. Then there''s all the rumors about odd events. How did that happen? Are we suddenly living in a comic book now?"


    "The short answer is energy from another dimension." Because explaining magic, alien invasions and other worlds then and there would cause far too much confusion, sound too unbelievable. Better get a bit closer to the official line. "Like radiation mutations, but less lethal and more useful."


    "Is that what happened to Florida!?" a reporter asked out of turn. "Bioweapon research gone bad? Are all good-looking people going to mutate? Is that where the MONSTERS COME FROM?!" He was shouting to be heard over loads of whispered commentary by the end. "WILL WE-" and then his voice seemingly cut off. He was still obviously trying to speak, but nothing could be heard.


    "I warned you about the shouting," I told the somewhat wary but very indignant reporters with a sigh. "And before everyone brings it up, I''m not preventing him from speaking. I''m preventing the rest of us from hearing him and the microphones from picking it up." I also wasn''t the government, so certain laws did not apply to begin with. "Next?"


    "Dexter Osnos, the New Yorker," a short, balding, Middle-Eastern man said. "What did happen in Florida? All we have are a few words from survivors, second-hand data that don''t make sense and that bioweapon scare. Half the state is still in quarantine."


    "Get used to things not making sense," I told them, but nobody laughed. "Florida was where the extradimensional energy was released. It scrambled communications, wreaked havoc with the weather. It''s a disaster zone from that alone. And if you go on foot, I''m not flying in to save you from your just deserts."


    xxxx


    Fifteen minutes. Fifteen whole minutes to disprove the usual rumors, shoot down fear-mongering, clarify the basics about what had happened six months ago without revealing frightening details, and ''mute'' two more idiots. By then an entire ring of government goons had formed around the limits of the force field but the press conference was still transmitted live and unedited. Well, mostly unedited; they''d beeped over those two idiots'' cursing. I''d also noted an oddity; if there were any reporters of foreign news media present I''d yet to find them. All in all, not as well as I''d hoped, but a lot better than my worst estimates.


    "Maria Marshall, The Hollywood Reporter," a young, energetic blonde introduced herself, fidgeting with her phone. "How did we get from ''strange energy equals powers'' to a superheroine protecting the UN from giant robots? Why heroes and villains at all?"


    "Because if you could be anything, what would be your first pick? A bit of magic, a bit of wonder... all of us have dreamed we had superpowers at least once, right?" Even genius playboys with bat fetishes. "Suddenly, the dream somehow becomes real... except you''re in the middle of a disaster zone with threats everywhere and people dying. What would you choose to do?" I shrugged. "Some people choose poorly. Others were already bad guys before getting powers. Some of us try to help." And with that I gestured at the next reporter in line.


    "Wait, you''re saying this energy makes dreams come true?" a neatly-combed, sharply-dressed man from a local tabloid I''d never heard of before asked, aghast. "What if some crazy guy gets hold of it?"


    "We''re all a little crazy," I told him with a small smile. "Good crazy, you get a hero. Bad crazy, a villain. Rational people wouldn''t get powers, they''d get a giant pile of money." Joke was on them, though. With all the disasters, rampant inflation was all but inevitable.


    Little by little we got through the important stuff, including the reasons for the attack on the United Nations. That just gave the reporters an axe to grind, and not for my neck. It turns out that learning of a secret Assembly none of them had been invited to any press releases for annoyed them a lot more than my hijacking the press conference had.


    But all good things come to an end. Unfortunately, inevitably, we got to the type of reporters - and questions - that I''d been trying to avoid. I''d picked those from the more serious media first, then the most reputable of the rest... but I''d finally run out of excuses.


    "...what made you decide on such a risque and revealing costume?" a reedy, older woman all but demanded and I was very tempted to mute her despite her feigned politeness. Bitch please, hadn''t she seen the latest fashion atrocities the rich and famous tended to wear? A tube-top leotard was nothing.


    Unfortunately, the sharks smelled blood in the water and powers or no powers more questions like that would follow.

 Interlude IV: Outbreak

    Seventy-five miles east of Xi''an, near the southeast corner of the Ordos Loop section of the Yellow River basin, south of the Wei River valley, at the eastern end of the Qin Mountains, in Southern Shaanxi Province lay one of the steepest mountains in the world, the Western of the Five Great Mountains of China. At barely one and a half miles, it wasn''t really a very great mountain, at least physically. It still was a towering mass of rock with near-vertical sides, looming imposingly above the surrounding sparsely populated areas.


    For over two millennia of human habitation it had been accessible through a single narrow ridge, followed by a foot-wide series of planks against the sheer mountain side. Twenty-two centuries of tradition and religion, for it had had a Daoist temple for longer than most other places in the country had known Daoists existed. And then came the vast political changes of recent times and since the 1980s it had been turned into a tourist attraction. Even more recently new changes swept through the area, subtler and more insidious.


    The two guys watching the international news on a rickety portable television that crackled and hissed didn''t care at all about the ancient, near-forgotten traditions of the rocks they stood upon. They cared far more about the freezing wind, the abysmal reception, and the source of their entertainment being on its last legs. The screen flickered and scrambled up into white noise until one of the men - a thirty-something native in rather worn clothes - slapped the back of the device. Miraculously, the white noise resolved into images of an unearthly beautiful blonde in a white and blue costume giving yet another interview on the other side of the Pacific.


    "...tell us where you live?" a reporter''s partially garbled voice asked. "...public has a right to know."


    "Nope!" came the cheerful reply and even through the abysmal quality of the old portable TV the woman''s voice rang like crystal. The two men paid more attention, while several older people gathered around them to watch as well. "...need to know, and frankly you don''t. Besides, ...can be anywhere on Earth ...few minutes and feel as comfortable inside ...volcano as I would in a warm bath. ...would I live in just ...single location?"


    Canned laughter, real laughter, and ribbing at the reporters'' not so subtle demands for more access to the costumed heroine''s time followed, most of them shot down with a megawatt smile and a toss of her long, silky blonde mane. Canned questions about her latest activities continued in this vein as they had over the past week. One reporter was shut down, finding himself cut off mid-sentence and unable to speak when he became too aggressive in his questioning. The men gathered around the telly laughed at that, and money changed hands between the two original watchers with the air of a long-standing bet rather than something more spontaneous.


    By then the woman''s interview had gathered a small crowd around the portable television, almost all of the tourists that had been on the mountain''s peak gravitating towards it. Or perhaps they weren''t tourists, for there were no foreigners among them. No children either. Men, women, young, old, they were all Asians between the ages of twenty and sixty five. A strange crowd - and so absorbed with the news that they failed to notice when their surroundings subtly... changed.


    Shadows lengthened despite the early morning. Silence spread, followed by an odd chill. Small paper talismans hanging from the corners of the ancient monastery and the narrow staircase leading to it both flared an unnatural black then pale, sickly white before being reduced to ashes. Four people, three older men and a young woman, that had not gravitated around the TV noticed and scrambled, eyes widening and faces paling. A split second before they could cry out a warning, everyone''s shadows rose from the ground and grabbed at their heads.


    Everyone distracted by an interview halfway across the planet died before they could even notice anything wrong as their own shadows decapitated them. The four that weren''t managed to draw more of the paper talismans just in time and brandishing them against the shadows made the unnatural entities disperse. Then they drew fans, sword canes, even a hand axe, all with more of the talismans stuck to them and frantically looked around for the source of the threat.


    "Tsk, you guys just lost me a bet," a young, nasal voice whined from nowhere. "You could have died quietly but nooo, you had to be vigilant and shit." The shadows of nearby trees, wooden posts, even buildings stretched unnaturally to grasp at the four survivors that shook like leaves in a hurricane but again their obviously enchanted strips of paper flared with protective energies that dispersed them.


    "Stop complaining and kill them, boy," a much older man''s voice harshly demanded, it too lacking a point of origin. "Should we tarry much longer the eyes of our enemies will seek us out."


    "Oh shut up, Wizard," the first voice shot back derisively. "The Girl Scouts are in South America dealing with your new pet, aren''t they? By the time they notice we''ll be gone and these scrubs will be dead."


    A greenish smoke started spreading over the plateau. It looked at least as ominous and unnatural as the shadows had, a fog bank glowing venomous green even as it took the shape of fanged maws and leering faces. Those apparitions descended on the four survivors, who started shooting energy bolts out of their fans and swords at them. Unfortunately, for all the bolts burned through the fog with no resistance, there was always more fog and the apparitions reformed instantly. What was more, their protective talismans did not react to the obvious attack at all. The moment an apparition touched the older, white-bearded man among them he started shaking. Those shakes turned to full convulsions in moments and bleeding first from the mouth, then the nose, eyes and ears. Despite the bleeding being far too little and any other evidence of damage being entirely absent, the old man died in seconds. The other three followed.


    "Told ya they were scrubs," a young, thin, wasted-looking Mexican said as he faded into visibility.


    "This was not part of the plan!" the older man''s voice hissed, its owner still invisible. "Return to cover immediately!"


    "Calm down, old man," the teenager cackled. "The Chinese were so paranoid after Webhead''s latest stunt, they scrubbed all tech from their black sites and then some. There''s no digital shit in a ten mile radius."


    "Oh? What about that thing behind you?" the older voice demanded testily.


    "That''s an old analog TV, you filthy luddite. These guys must have a transmitter set up across the valley or something. What the grunts will do for entertainment, am I right?" He picked up the still working portable television and whistled appreciatively at the continuing interview. "Can''t blame the poor sods, Wennefer got a killer bod."


    "She''s also one of the few people that could still stop us so drop that thing and get to work."


    The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.


    "Nah, all brawn, no brains," the teenager countered, brown mists puffing up from his skin and reaching for the nearest building. "Reckon I could take her."


    "We shall see," the old man''s voice said.


    A thin layer of brick and mortar crumbled as soon as the brown mists touched it, falling to dust as if from the weight of centuries, only to reveal plating of reinforced steel. The mist changed color, becoming a reddish-brown, and the metal rusted, pitted and wore away as easily as the brick and mortar had. In maybe a dozen seconds where a fake renovated temple had stood now was empty air and a gaping pit descending into darkness.


    xxxx


    Fifteen million, six hundred and eighty-four thousand, one hundred and three...


    Fifteen million, six hundred and eighty-four thousand, one hundred and four...


    Fifteen million, six hundred and eighty-four thousand, one hundred and five...


    He kept the count as he always did, each number to a beat of his heart, each beat matching the one before and the one before that, back to the beginning. For three beats he breathed in, for one he paused, for three he exhaled. It was not traditional, but he''d never cared for tradition. If he had he''d have never left his village, he''d never found glory. It was orderly though, which helped temper his rage.


    A thick, solid piece of steel engulfed his legs up to above the knees. Two of equal thickness, one on each side, engulfed his arms almost to the shoulders. Little space was left in the lightless, deeply buried cell, nothing beyond him and his bindings. That had enraged him at first, but now it was only pleasing. Would they have treated him so if they did not fear him? Would they have left him alive if they didn''t know the time would come they would need him? He was not a prisoner here, for what men both feared and needed was no prisoner. No, he merely waited... and practiced.


    He drank in the fear, the bowel-loosening dread felt by those in power that knew of him, those who went to bed every night secure in their power only to see him in their nightmares. He took in the sacrifices; the wealth, the effort, the sweat and blood expended to keep him contained in this place. Resources sacrificed in the altar of their terror, ultimately addressed to him so he would not destroy them. What fools were they, to believe this was a prison. To bind themselves to him in such a way out of fear... but then, few even among those with magic understood how magic worked. How it had originally been intended to work, by the dark gods that, in their benevolence, spread their glory among the unworthy of Earth.


    But he was not unworthy, so the terror and the sacrifice coalesced around him. He took them in, gathered the power in his core, cycled it through every corner of his body so all would be exposed to and nurtured by the power in turn. The excess he gathered and compressed with his will, shaped with his desires. The fools that built this temple of terror to his name thought him bound and powerless, but why would one need limbs to wield power? Limbs could fail, limbs could be broken. The mind could not, as all that made you "you" continued to exist.


    Recently though, the quality and quantity of the power gifted to him so freely had dwindled. For over a week the sweet nectar of fear and doubt had been reduced to a mere trickle. Something else had drawn his subjects'' attention away from him, stolen their fear. Thus he had changed tactics. Yet once again, the unworthy that sought to entrap him had offered the means of his advancement to him on a silver platter. For while the entirety of his temple had been originally meant to contain him, he no longer was its sole occupant. There were others here; still unworthy, but so much more than the powerless, mewling beings that wanted to use him as much as they were terrified by him. He could work with that; he''d learned to do so what now seemed so long ago.


    So he waited and worked. Channeled a trickle of power not to himself but to a little tree.


    —’


    A curious little thing, with roots to dig deep in the foundation that was already there, leafy branches to drink in the nourishment that would be provided. A link to the seed that gave it birth as it, in turn, would be linked to its own seeds. And for once, it did look nice and traditional. So he did it again and again, and little by little his forest grew... until things changed anew. Sudden and great terror, very close but not at him, flaring briefly before being abruptly silenced. He could sense it through those subtle little links that let him see and hear, felt whom they thought themselves his jailors die to newcomers that offered something entirely different than fear. His temple was cracked, invaded, yet it no longer mattered for his long patience had brought opportunity.


    The thick, reinforced metal door to his cell rusted away between one breath and the next, leaving not even dust behind. From the gloomy passage gaping open came a teenager with features a mix of Mexican and American and of the age he''d long since outgrown along with his blind rage and short-sighted plotting.


    "Yo gramps," the boy that looked two decades his junior said in lieu of greetings. "We are busting all prisoners of this joint. Feel like coming along?"


    "What makes you think I am a prisoner here?" he asked. Then he shrugged, and two-foot-thick broke with a tortured squeal of tearing metal. "No matter. You came at precisely the right time, as you were meant to." He walked out of his too-narrow cell, leaving the surprised teenager in his wake.


    "I don''t get it," the boy said but followed anyway.


    Of course he did not get it. How could he, when he had not drank as deeply from the well of fear as he had? He would learn, for he was strong and worthy. But it was not yet his time. He walked out of the deepest basement and onto the first layer that had any lighting at all.


    "Whoa, gramps, you''re ripped," the boy marveled at his stature, as he should. "Bald, though. Too many push-ups, sit-ups and squats?"


    He ignored his babbling and walked to the next heavily reinforced door. With some effort, he ripped it away and gained access to the cell and his dismal-looking occupant. A wasted person, yet with a little flare of power to his eyes. Just not enough to set him free, not at his wasted state. The pitiful prisoner looked up to him in fear.


    "It is not yet your time," he told the man, then lifted a hand and power flowed. Flowed and formed one little tree. "But it could be. I could give you the power to leave this place, to go after those that did this to you... but there is a cost." The little tree got closer to the wasted man. "It will hurt. A lot." He bent lower until his glowing eyes were at the same level as the prisoner''s rheumy orbs. "Thus the question; do you accept the gift that I offer?"


    The prisoner barely had the strength to nod, but the gesture was superfluous; he''d long since learned how to read people like books... most of the time. The little tree descended until it touched the man''s chest... then it became purple hot.


    —’


    The man screamed and writhed and tried to flail but could not... and in his agony he was reforged. Bones grew from little twigs to thick branches. Muscles swelled with power. Sickly skin became not only healthy but hard as steel and more. Greying hair gave way to lustrous black tresses, full of youthful vim and vigor. Eyes glowed with newfound power, power generated from the man''s fear of his imprisonment yet far greater terror towards the unbearable agony he''d just experienced. It was that terror and the man''s freedom that burned as sacrificial fuel for his rebirth. But the effects did not stop here; a tiny portion of the new power went towards perfect memory of the transformation. Every time the man saw the symbol that had taken root in his chest he would remember the agony he had experienced and he would fear. Every time he saw his new Master, or use his powers, he would fear their source. A single event and some subtle reminders would ensure a lifetime of low-key fear. And the fear of a person with power gave more back to the Master than a thousand worthless monkeys fleeing in terror.


    He got out of the cell, his new disciple in tow; he had many more trees to plant.

 26: Team Effort

    Seen from a great distance, the few hundred shapes gleaming in the morning sun might have seemed like any other flock of birds. Then the discrepancies would start piling up; how quickly they were circling, how oddly they''d gleam in the sun, how far away their croaks could be heard, how their apparent distance was oddly wrong as if they were far too close. Until one of them would swoop down and pick up an abandoned truck in its claws only to drop it on a bridge from a mile high, and then you''d realize just how huge they were. Another would drop low and breathe fire on a roadside motel while a small group would throw a rain of metal, exploding feathers all over its parking lot. Not birds at all, but monsters.


    "Birds @ 25 ml ^ of border" Mark typed into his communicator. Taking a mental tally of their numbers and doing a quick calculation of speed vs distance and firepower the black hero in training added. "Confidence high. Engage?"


    CB: "Stymphalian Chickens are tough, hit hard and explode," came the reply far faster than the fastest typist could have managed.


    CB: "You are cleared to engage. Make sure you employ long-range anti-armor measures."


    "Did read the report," he typed back and rolled his eyes at the advice. "By your command, Helicopter Mom :)" Seriously, she did not need to hold his hand for something as simple as this. However dangerous large groups of monsters might be against most opponents, Mark had long since prepared perfect counters for all such enemies the General had given him threat assessments for.


    In this particular case, he would not even need to engage them conventionally. Of the three ''slots'' his power had, one was already configured to give him the abilities of the A-10 Thunderbolt II, one of the best close-air-support jet planes ever built. For all they were fragile, airplanes were his favorite machines to imitate and the ''Warthog'', as the A-10 was often called, was the one he liked best for the offensive options and maneuverability it gave him even though it didn''t even come close to the top speed, flight ceiling or firepower of others. But this is where his power really shined; covering up the weaknesses of what he imitated while combining their strengths.


    His second slot remained as it was; a single mass of solid steel weighing one and a half thousand tons. At the upper limit of what his power could imitate mass-wise, its only purpose was to let him borrow the resilience and inertia of such an object and concentrate it down to his human-sized body. He knew better than anyone how hard people with superpowers could hit, being one of the rare supers whose baseline form would not survive even one of his strongest hits.


    His third slot though? It had contained a high-altitude spy drone but was already shifting into something much larger. It grew and grew and grew until its wingspan exceeded two hundred feet and its fuselage became even longer. Soon, it was mimicking the Boeing YAL-1. An experimental system that used a megawatt chemical laser to intercept missiles, it had been scrapped due to high costs and low efficiency. Mark''s power didn''t care about that though; all that mattered was that the laser turret could hit airborne targets up to two hundred miles away and was a line-of-sight weapon.


    But that alone would not destroy monsters with more durability than main battle tanks, so Mark leaned on the second aspect of his powers. He combined the laser turret''s range, accuracy, and practically instantaneous hits with the firepower of the JDAM 500lb bomb carried by the A-10 he was mimicking. Then he took aim and fired.


    More than thirty miles away one of the Stymphalian Birds exploded. Even as the swarm reacted, a second monster was similarly torn apart then a third and fourth. The monsters went wild, flew in crazy evasive maneuvers, looked everywhere for the attacker. They could not, however, see a human-sized target from such a distance and Mark''s weapon had been designed to hit much smaller, much faster targets from much further away. Combined with the heavy but instantaneous firepower of the bombs so it would not need to keep on target for several seconds, it let the African-American teenager simply delete a target every few seconds without fear of reprisal.


    "Birds destroyed. Looking for more targets," he typed into his communicator.


    BITCH: "I C YR birds + r^ ya @wight battalion."


    CB: "Cindy, no. Hold position and don''t cross into enemy territory."


    BITCH: "Cindy yes!"


    Mark sighed in exasperation. And things had been going so well.


    xxxx


    Only seven months after the Invasion and most of Florida had been turned into an uninhabitable land of eldritch horrors. If it wasn''t the unnatural weather hitting the area with violent storms, persistent fog banks, rains of mutant frogs or the occasional whirlwind of boiling tar, the crawling swamps, forests of steel spikes and tentacled vegetation would still make large swathes of land inaccessible. But the worst problem was the surviving monsters.


    Mot''s temper tantrum at being denied an easy victory had turned him into a giant monster that would give Godzilla inadequacy issues. His march through the state had caused enormous devastation and supernatural violence that were only compounded by everyone else''s attempts to bring him down, Yours Truly among them. The problem with that was that Mavethan sorcery fed on violence and the Invasion had seeded the land with magics that in the aftermath of the final battle had all the fuel they needed to grow.


    Now monsters were breeding all over the place, practically spawning off the ground like people in the eighteen hundreds had believed flies did. The US Armed Forces had tried to kill them, of course. But soon it became apparent trying to violently kill monsters on top of the violence-fed magic that spawned them only made the problem worse. The Army''s response was to hold the line just outside the afflicted area, kill any monsters there while everyone waited for a solution to be found. And while the soldiers had done an excellent job all things considered, this stopgap measure was full of holes - especially when a large enough swarm of monsters aimed at one of the weaker points of the line.


    Word of exactly such a swarm getting through the defenses was why I''d decided to bring the three munchkins here. Well, that and another training exercise; otherwise I''d taken care of the swarm personally. Their mission? Scout the admittedly very broad portion of the front that had yet to be properly fortified for signs of the monsters, locate the actual swarm, then engage them in the best way they could come up with.


    You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.


    I groaned and rolled over in my impromptu bath, rivulets of molten rock and metal sliding off my skin. The communicator was the only thing I was currently wearing, protected from the intense heat by my powers as I relaxed in the sinfully warm and bubbly environment. The device beeped again as more frantic messages from Mark came in. Honestly, that kid was too uptight, took everything far too seriously instead of living a little, then had the temerity to call me "Helicopter Mom".


    Not that the kids knew what I was doing while they ran after the monsters. In at least this the General was right; I wouldn''t be able to protect them forever and sooner rather than later they''d need to fight real threats. Thus I''d tricked them into thinking I was watching their every move then basically cut them loose as soon as they reached the border. The monsters up here so far from Mot''s arrival point on Earth were hardly a threat to those of their level of power. Worse came to worst, they''d get a bad scare that would teach them some badly needed caution - especially Cindy. That girl still acted as if she was invincible, an attitude she needed to lose posthaste, so when she''d ignored orders and crossed the border I just spared a minute''s worth of super-senses to be certain of the situation then returned to my bath.


    A basalt mix at two and a half thousand Kelvin was the best environment to sit back, relax, and see how events would unfold.


    xxxx


    Even in the blighted, disgustingly smelly, pulsating wasteland, Cindy was everywhere. Well, not in that boiling tar pit or inside the bus-sized spike that crackled with purple lightning. Nor in that stream of green slime either. But everywhere else in a radius of several city blocks there was an instance of herself, doing anything that she could have done and wanted to be doing. Those instances weren''t visible, or audible, or detectable by any mundane method because Cindy did not want them to be. Thus they really weren''t there as far as anyone else was concerned... until the time came for Cindy to do unto others lots and lots.


    Most people quickly grasped the combat and mobility implications of a power that let her be and not be, act and not act in thousands of different ways and places at a time. They did not realize that the real number wasn''t thousands but had no upper limit, and the utility applications were even greater than the combat ones. Cindy heard and saw and smelled and felt everything in the radius of her power she wanted to, from all possible angles. While she was not physically affected except by things that could affect all versions of her at once (or those she allowed), information remained and her mind didn''t have any problems processing or remembering it.


    As she jogged along the border, she looked at each and every direction with a million eyes, listened with a million ears. Even with bog standard human senses scouting would have been a breeze; with the enhanced baseline all supers got finding the monsters had been a foregone conclusion. Those evil chicken things she''d seen about an hour before, but left for the boys to deal with. Flying was the one thing she couldn''t do yet, so she went further ahead to find something she could actually engage with. And what do you know? As soon as she climbed that ridge she saw the army following in the birds'' wake.


    Several hundred of her thought of the monsters'' movements, their coordination. While those instances worked through the tactical and strategic implications, the rest of her dissected the latest anime and fanfiction, or thought of her next posts in the three and a half million sites she followed online... for when the team returned back to civilization. If anything beyond the stench made this place a real wasteland, it was the no signal sign on her phone.


    Ten minutes later, a widely smiling fourteen-year-old brunette stood in the way of several thousand undead warriors. Whatever intelligence directed the band of monsters and the Stymphalian Birds both was given pause by how the teenage girl cackled loudly and with far too many unseen mouths before taking a hundred-foot leap into the undead front lines. It was surprised even more how hundreds of undead warriors all across the small army''s line toppled and were subsequently crushed to bits by seemingly nothing at all...


    xxxx


    "Cindy is being her usual insubordinate self again?" Gabby said as he flew next to Mark on top of his latest sword. The three-pronged, magical blade glowed and crackled with yellow lightning yet contrary to appearances it wasn''t really an offensive weapon. What it could do was both fly at helicopter speeds... and teleport faster than normal people could blink either within a city block or to any one of Gabby''s other blades... such as the green-glowing butter knife Mark held out to him.


    "No, keep it. It''s a safety net for both of us," the Hispanic boy added to his partner. Then he held up his left hand, holding a short sword with a dark red crossguard jewel. The jewel glowed and the crossguard''s tines wrapped around Gabby''s eyes like overly thick wire-frame glasses even as the sword''s blade lengthened. "Wow. Look at her going to town on those poor monsters."


    "At least it''s not us," Mark grumbled then frowned at his friend''s creation. "Only you would make a sword that''s also a telescope," he huffed in annoyance, to which Gabby just rolled his eyes. It was not him his friend was annoyed with.


    "Hey, don''t dish the Eye of Thu-"


    "And now you gave it a lame name, too," Mark sighed and slowed down to a hover. "Why are you even here, Gabby? We were supposed to scout the whole area for monsters that slipped through. Am I the only one that followed orders?"


    "There''s more to a team than orders," Gabby countered, then his voice took on a dreamy tone even as his eyes widened, staring at seemingly nothing. "And you wouldn''t call it lame if you''d seen what I have seen; it''s far more than just a telescope."


    "Great, now you sound like a stoned-out doomsayer, proclaiming the end of days," the dark-skinned boy huffed and turned away. "Why do I even put up with you?"


    "Because stoned-out or not, I''m here to stop you from doing something you''ll regret," the Hispanic hero in training shot back, suddenly quite serious. Mark glowered at him at that, fists clenching at the thinner boys'' sides, but he said nothing. They both stood... and watched...


    xxxx


    I gave the molten rock and metal mix another dose of heat, until its deep red hue turned into a brighter orange. Its viscosity plummeted and it became almost as runny as oil, if a great deal heavier and less sticky. Then it went further into yellow, its radiance blinding to a normal person and gained the consistency of water. Perfect for washing off everything tangled in my hair and dissolving everything that had no business clinging to my skin. Yes, I could have just negated friction and let everything fall off, but that just wouldn''t compare to the relaxation and fun of a proper hot bath.


    Then I extended my senses again, bridging the distance of miles to watch my three charges and the drama about to unfold. As I basked in the heat, I wondered whether this would be the moment that would forge them into a proper team or destroy them for good. I was hoping for the former but despite training them for weeks there was too much bad blood between them that could still tilt the scales towards the latter. The situation could simply not be allowed to fester any further.


    Even if there was more behind this push through the borders than just another group of monsters...

 27: Seen and Unseen

    "This is terribly boring."


    There was a reason teaching had never been a career I''d ever considered and it hadn''t been my terrible grade in social sciences. Kids - teenagers especially - usually vacillated between two overall conditions; gleeful maliciousness and misanthropic isolation. At least that had been my experience as a teenager for half a decade and having to run herd on the superpowered version was only reinforcing that opinion.


    Half an hour of idle blasting at monsters with zero communication, either with me or with each other. Hello? This was supposed to be a team-building exercise, not some pop quiz to be completed in silence. Except I could not tell them that, could I? Looking back at my own teenage years with the perspective granted by growing up and a superhuman level of awareness - mostly the latter, adulthood by itself was shit at making you a better person - it was clear as daylight that talking to the idiots would have the opposite effect of the intended cooperation. I would be seen as an outsider, a meddler, a semi-parental figure from a prior generation that definitely couldn''t understand them and certainly couldn''t be trusted. Some things they had to discover by themselves.


    Groaning, I stretched in the golden pool of superheated magma, trying to relax. Something had me on edge since my return to the world and it wasn''t the fighting; at this point, fisticuffs with the superpowered dregs of humanity and monsters from another dimension was just business as usual. Was it the media and their incessant attempts to drag me into politics of all stripes? It did not feel like it; humans being humans, of course they wanted to appropriate the new power for their own crusades and petty clashes of opinion. The organizations of supervillains that kept cropping up? Not really. Horrible as they were, all the destruction they''d caused and would cause in the future... I''d long since known would happen and come to terms with it. Worrying about it wouldn''t solve tomorrow''s problems; it would merely mar today''s leisure.


    I dove into the pool, the use of Force Adjustment to sink into it as if it weren''t four times denser than the human body as easy as breathing now. It was something I''d noticed with the powers I used the most; their raw strength might not grow with use but the ease and quickness they responded with scaled with familiarity. A brand new ability felt like driving a car; a bulky tool with complex controls. Those used often, like Instant Action or Chronal Leap were akin to familiar tools or weapons or clothing; an extension of myself easily directed. Force Adjustment, Proximakinesis, Force Awareness and Regeneration? They felt like another limb I''d been using since birth. But despite the improvements, there was something that didn''t feel quite right, a mounting pressure at the back of my head.


    Bursting out of the surface of the pool, splashes of molten rock and metal sizzling against its banks, I threw another glance at the kids. Still no change; they were killing monsters at a steady pace. A mere thirty seconds had passed since the last check-up. It''d felt much longer, because of course it had. Even if I turned Forced Acceleration off, my perception of time was... not faster but more encompassing than most people''s, denser. More things to do, to think about, smaller events noticed, vastly more information dealt with from my senses. Was this the source of that mental pressure, the not-quite-migraine that was there and not there?


    On a whim, I activated my ring, the only thing other than my communicator I was currently wearing. The little metal band gleamed oddly and grew hot, something it had failed to do on contact with the yellow-bright magma. The enchantments and programming Liz had built into it moved in a complex wave of forces resonating with my own powers. With my senses sharpening over time, I was beginning to see how the tiny artifact measured and assessed my abilities through that resonance, though I was still far away from making such artifacts of my own.


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 87.0595%; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 37.9235%">Name: Maya Wennefer</td>


    <td style="width: 62.0194%">Bio: female human, 17y11m21d</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 37.9235%">Known skills:


    </td>


    <td style="width: 62.0194%">Points: 10/218


    </td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 37.9235%; border-style: none; vertical-align: top">


    Chronal Leap, Empowering Regeneration, Eyebeams, Focused Invulnerability, Force Adjustment, Force Awareness, Forcefield Creation, Forced Acceleration, Greater Proximakinesis, Immutable Force, Instant Action, Lasting Force, Retributive Defense, Super Suit, Spatial Distortion, Spatial Leap


    </td>


    <td style="width: 62.0194%; vertical-align: top">


    Attributes: Might 50, Agility 25, Reason 6, Vigilance 22, Ego 25, Luck 7


    Word of Force: Power IV, Control III, Versatility IV, Number of Effects III, Range II, Scope II


    Word of Self: Power IV, Control III, Versatility III, Number of Effects III, Range II, Scope I


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Huh. My birthday was coming up, chronologically speaking. I really had not noticed and wasn''t really sure it mattered. The Old Man had turned himself into a monster even before powers and had disappeared during the final battle of the Invasion, while Mother had made it clear she was not interested back when I was twelve. Just thinking about them made the migraine come back with a vengeance; a normal human''s head would have already exploded.


    Plus, due to extensive use of Forced Acceleration and Instant Action since I''d gotten my powers, my body''s biological age had hit twenty-five some time ago and hadn''t physically aged since then. Six and a half subjective years as a super... it didn''t really feel like it. According to a certain annoying authority on the subject, a super''s body reflected their ideal self and that effect scaled with our level of power. Wrinkles would only happen if we wanted them to happen - or if someone with the right hostile power forced them on us, I guess. Hurrah for vanity.


    Grunting, I flipped over and took a few backstrokes. Thinking about this was dumb and left me feeling like shit. No, far better to focus on something more tangible and actually useful; powers. Tangling with those terrorists at the United Nations building had pushed my abilities, brought in new potential. Surprisingly, handling the kids for these weeks had provided just as much. Or perhaps not so surprisingly; I was one of the few to reject the invaders'' paradigm of being empowered through violence, choosing another principle to champion. Forcing some idiots to shape up and become a proper heroic team seemed to count for something, even though I wasn''t clear on what my principle actually was. Eh, that was future-Maya''s problem.


    This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.


    Ten points. Resisting the immediate urge to sink all those points into my Might stat and boost my physicality to even greater superhuman heights, I went through the other options. Any attribute taken above the rank of ten was effectively a superpower even without actual powers that worked off it. Agility already made me as quick as a bee and as accurate as a robotic surgeon by this point while Ego gave both fabulous looks and eliminated mental problems from all the fighting and other horrors I habitually faced. What would happen if I made myself luckier, or smarter?


    Probably not much. Contrary to their portrayal in comics, luck and intelligence did not immediately made you a combat god. There had been several examples of that during the invasion, most notably my friend Jerry. For all his investments in mental boosts, as soon as he run out of magic he was basically crippled in a fight. Plus if you split your investments between physical and mental power, those who specialized in one or the other would beat you in their field. But the real reason was that I felt comfortable being the strongest gal in the room; punching giant monsters in the face made sense to me. Getting better at planning and plotting and being smart about it? I wouldn''t know what to do with that kind of abilities.


    The last option was skills. For my power, new ways of using it could be discovered through effort and repetition, just as with any mundane skill. It had happened with my eye-beams... but that was the only time it had happened. Just as with learning a mundane skill, it took a long time to apply forces in a different way. Two "points" and all the time and effort could be bypassed to create a skill immediately. It sounded incredibly useful and I''d wanted to try since I''d discovered it.


    With ten points to burn, the only question was what skills to try for...


    xxxx


    Gabby''s fists clenched at his sides as frustration boiled in him. While Mark had been taking potshots at the monsters across the border for the past hour, he just scanned the miles upon miles of blighted terrain while flexing his sword powers. Unlike his friend''s mimicry of weapons, the blades he manifested couldn''t move more than fifteen hundred feet from him. While that was a major improvement in the few weeks they''d trained under Maya, Mark was still disappointed in himself. The blonde superheroine kept telling him how useful the sheer versatility of his power was, but what was the point of endlessly varied magic swords if they couldn''t hit the enemy?


    Mark could shoot across whole counties, even states if he mimicked long-range missiles. Their teacher could reach enemies in the blink of an eye. Cindy was more limited, yes, but if the enemy couldn''t actually touch you, that was hardly an issue. Case in point, how easily she''d taken apart that small army of wights and was even now daring the wasteland''s monsters to attack her. Gabby wanted - no needed to do something awesome of his own. Something to catch up to his peers and impress their teacher; maybe then he''d be one step closer to being a real superhero like he always wanted.


    As he sat on top of a flying sword a thousand feet above the ground, the wind pulling at his hair and sunlight gleaming against the blades of a hundred magic swords moving around him in a loose spiral, the Hispanic boy decided to experiment. He started with dismissing most of his other swords, letting the magical constructs fade to nothing. Only having to maintain his floating blade, he poured all his power and attention into something new, something... bigger.


    It begun with something he''d read in a web novel years before, a seemingly simple knife that projected its cuts at range. Not the usual sword-beam or slashing wave of anime either, but direct, instantaneous projection without a projectile that could be parried or dodged. The knife in his hands shimmered and sparked as power poured into it, but the results were underwhelming. Feeling out the enchantment, Gabby was certain it couldn''t cut much further than twenty or thirty feet. But that was just a knife, and Gabby''s swords became more powerful the larger they were.


    The knife grew longer, its blade wider, its handle thicker. From a simple knife it grew into a proper dagger, then a short sword, then the standard double-edged, three-foot-long blade of a medieval knight. It didn''t stop there, though; it quickly surpassed even the largest seventeenth century swords, its blade lengthening and broadening until it was larger than a telephone pole - and then kept going. The handle only grew as thick as one of the thinner water bottles but nearly a foot and a half in length, the greatest size Gabby could grip properly. By that time the blade had grown to absurd proportions, easily a yard wide, several inches thick at the thickest, and well over sixty feet long. Despite weighing as much as a dozen buses, it swung as easily and quickly as the knife had in Gabby''s hands thanks to his sword elemental powers.


    Merely holding the monstrous weapon Gabby got a feeling of accomplishment, of his power taking a small but significant step forward. The enchantment crackled with barely restrained power, dwarfing everything he''d created before by a huge margin and the original knife by many thousands of times. Tentatively, he swung it once in the rough direction of a giant, horribly mutated palm tree several miles away, a twisted thing with a trunk of steel spikes and green whip-like tentacles for leaves that snatched at everything living nearby, seeking to drag prey closer and impale it upon the spikes to be sucked dry of life and nutrients. The distant monster-plant was instantly split in twain from its top to its roots, then the fissure kept going, splitting the hill itself.


    Gabby stared at what he''d wrought in shock for several moments. Then he snickered. Snickering became chuckles, chuckles grew to laughter, and laughter soon turned to the kind of cackling often associated with mad scientists and evil witches. He''d done it! He''d finally accomplished something really impressive with his powers, and all he had to do was try hard enough! He couldn''t wait to show the others!


    ...Maya must have already seen it with her super-senses. What would she say about his new technique? It had to be awesome, right? Or at least good enough Gabby was no longer falling behind, certainly? Maybe... maybe he should practice it more, try to force more power into the magic sword. He would try until he could cleave the tops off three hills with it and name it Caladbolg! Then nobody could say it was not enough.


    So focused was he on his new sword, he did not notice the very unusual cloud floating towards him against the wind...


    xxxx


    Two hours of milling around monster-land and Cindy was sure of one thing; beating monsters was a hell of a lot of work. The fourteen year old brunette wiped rivulets of sweat off her face but it was a fool''s errand. She didn''t know if it was the humidity, the oppressive Florida heat that had only grown worse since the state had been warped by black magic, or the sheer effort involved in mowing down wights and mutant zombies, but she was drenched, muddy and stank to high heaven. All the many instances of her being were the same, and she hated it.


    How had it happened? She''d deliberately left instances sitting out of the fights, doing nothing but lazing around and trying in vain to get enough bars to browse the net yet exhaustion had crept up on her anyway. Now she''d resorted to having instances actually sleep, on the thought that they could relax and recover while the rest of them fought so at the end she could reject the exhausted copies of herself and keep the well-rested and perky ones. For some reason that was not working.


    Countless instances of herself dismantled the latest group of wights attempting to reform from the remains of previous battles and stomped on the pieces for good measure until they were reduced to disgusting greasy smears. Yet the black ichor drenching the soil like so much ink slowly oozed back into the under warriors'' brutally pasted corpses. In ten minutes, a quarter hour on the outside, some of the undead would have reformed and be in need of a good stomping.


    Cindy leaned on her knees and took in deep, panting breaths. This sucked. It wasn''t the monsters'' regeneration that bothered her; beating on tenacious but otherwise helpless targets was her whole shtick. It was fun even! Well, it did not feel fun any more. Why was she feeling so wrung out? She was a superhuman badass, two hours of stomping on vermin should have been nothing. It was like there was this phantom weight on her shoulders, like every single instance of herself had to do everything while carrying a ten-ton wrecking ball.


    She found some boulders to lay on next to her sleeping selves and dismissed the instances that felt the most exhausted. Something was wrong here. Even as she lay there she was beginning to feel cold, drained as if mildly sick. Bullshit. Supers did not get sick. All studies and her personal experience both indicated that they physically couldn''t. And yet, here they were. Her thoughts felt sluggish, molasses oozing through a straw, and her head was growing a serious migraine.


    She was still coming to grips with how shitty everything felt when arms came out of the ground and clawed at several of her sleeping selves...

 28: Lessons Learned

    The first hint Mark got he was under attack was feeling like needles of ice were stabbing into his right bicep. Numbing cold was seemingly injected into his veins, throwing off his aim in the process. A dozen miles away a bog with water like molten tar exploded instead of the group of zombies the torrent of explosive shots had been meant for.


    His attacker was a translucent, barely-visible figure floating in mid-air. He - inasmuch as the figure ascribed to such things - was an emaciated man of impossible age, all bone and loose skin and a twisted snarl full of hate. A gaping maw of pointed teeth seemed to be drinking in the light from the surrounding area with each of the figure''s rattling breaths and spindly, clawed fingers swiped at the flying boy with great ferocity despite the man looking like he''d died of hunger. The only spot of color was the apparition''s cold blue eyes, the rest of his body and clothing seemingly made of shadows.


    "Nope!" Mark shouted, gave the ghost-thing a full burst of depleted uranium armor-piercing shells that would have blown up a small building, then put in the acceleration in a bid to keep his distance. Unfortunately, two more unearthly figures appeared in Mark''s path. No RADAR signals, no trails, no sound of them approaching; one moment the sky was clear, the next they were crowding in his airspace and swiping their hideous claws at him.


    The black boy tried to turn, but his power worked against him. Even the most agile jet fighter might as well be a thrown brick when compared to anything human sized and shaped, let alone superpowered individuals. All he could do was cover his face with his arms and a split-second later more needles of ice were cutting into his forearms. His flight continued entirely unimpeded however as if he hadn''t just collided with a pair of monsters. Or perhaps he had not.


    Mark opened his eyes to more figures blinking into visibility, all of them twisted and corpse-like as if they''d come straight from some World War Two concentration camp. Men, women, even children; the things resembled people all right but were just another form of monster. The first attacker was among them, his ghostly form full of gaping holes that seemed to impede him not at all and were quickly vanishing even as Mark watched. Great, regenerators.


    Then the superhero in training noticed the other changes. With each spectre added to the throng all light grew a bit dimmer and the figures grew... not brighter but more defined, denser, the dead light of their dead eyes reaching further yet illuminating nothing. The air grew colder too, swirling mist forming into darkening clouds.


    "Come, you bastards! Find peace through superior firepower!"


    A torrent of thirty-millimeter shells flew out from the boy''s extended arm, the primary weapon of the Fairchild Republic A-10 Thunderbolt II brought to bear with his powers. Each such shell further contained the explosive force of a two-thousand-pound bomb, the weapons overlapping to combine the best of both their capabilities and Mark was shooting them at sixty rounds per second.


    The monsters, whatever they were, did not seem to care. Armor-piercing shells tore through their bodies by the hundreds meeting zero resistance but if that caused them any pain they did not show it. The extra firepower of the spatially-folded bombs in the shells did not even come into play because neither the shells nor Mark''s own simulated sensors could tell the spectres were there at all. And as soon as the torrent of fire was over, the ghostly figures reformed in moments. It was like trying to shoot mist!


    What followed were several minutes of the worst aerial furball the continent had ever seen as the young super blasted indiscriminately, trying to find a combination of weapons that worked while using his superior speed to keep his distance. His ghostly adversaries on the other hand relied on superior agility and their ability to wink across distances instantly to engage him in melee with their ghostly, insubstantial claws. Blinding, deafening roars of explosive ordnance marked a sky that was getting darker and darker even as a storm brewed overhead.


    THOOM! THOOM! THOOM! THOOM!


    A tremendous, unseen force rent half the group of shades in twain even as it extended further to cleave a half-mile-long ditch into the swamps below. The shockwave of its passage sent even Mark reeling as the attack was repeated three more times, slicing the ghostly monsters to ribbons. A few moments later the familiar figure of Gabby flew in on one of his flying swords, wielding something closer to the size of a small passenger train than a sword.


    "Hey Mark!" his friend shouted to be heard, the magnified abilities of supers the only thing making it possible. "Have you found how to kill those things yet?"


    "You mean your ludicrously oversized magic sword didn''t do them in?!"


    The ghostly monsters confirmed just that by blinking closer to the two boys, claws slashing. Their bodies had already reformed.


    "They''re wraiths, man," Gabby shot back, manifesting a much tinier blade to cut at the ghostly figures too close to him for his larger weapon to bear. "They''re already dead. Real dark fantasy shit."


    "This is not one of your stupid fantasy novels, Gabe!" Mark shouted back while frantically maneuvering away from more ghostly claws. "We''re fighting for our damn lives here! How do we kill those things?"


    So far, despite being a lot more painful than most other things they''d had to endure, the wraiths'' blows had not wounded the two boys at all. The sharp, needle-like stabs had not even drawn blood. Instead, each blow that landed had injected a numbing coldness into the teens, a concentrated dose of the unnatural chill they seemed to radiate with their presence alone. It might not have caused any physical harm so far, but both boys could feel their limbs stiffen and grow heavier, their breaths coming in faster and harder, a deep-seated ache growing in their bones. Neither had any idea what would happen if they grew weak enough for the ghosts to mob them and even less desire to find out.


    "I dunno man, I only know stor- GAAH!" Gabby backpedaled and almost fell off his floating sword when one of the ghosts got close enough to try and claw out his eyes.


    "Fucking guess!" Mark shouted, barely fending off his own attackers.


    "Fire! In the stories they''re vulnerable to fireeee!!!!" distracted, the Hispanic boy actually slipped and fell towards the swamps below.


    "No! Gabby!" the black boy tried to get to his falling friend but the entire swarm of wraiths mobbed him. Not having an alternative, Mark mentally shifted the enormous block of steel whose durability he''d been imitating into the M67 flamethrower tank from the Vietnam war. A jet of flaming napalm over three hundred feet long sprayed the swarming specters. Instead of burning like people would have, the ghostly monsters screeched angrily and winked out for a moment, reappearing without the flames and with any burns the attack dealt to them already healing.


    "Great," Mark hissed angrily. "Where''s Captain Barbie when you need her?"


    xxxx


    Wraiths were supremely annoying. They did not show up in Force Awareness, only made sounds when they felt like it, tended to ambush you when you least expected and worst of all, did not have the decency to die when blasted to bits. Whoever had sent this particular swarm to interrupt my lava bath was in for a serious bad time when I got my hands on them.


    A storm of insubstantial claws scraped against my skin like a herd of damn cats, annoying and painful but not immediately dangerous. Wincing, I summoned my costume... and promptly found out they could cut me through it, the layers of super-tough material and forcefields no bar to their viciousness.


    Quickly slotting in Forcefield Creation I formed my own intangible construct over the nearest wraith, anchored to the wraith''s volume and designed to follow it where it went. The forces involved in countless billions of imperceptible collisions between air molecules were amplified in that volume, amplifying the chaotic motion of said molecules rapidly. And what was chaotic motion if not heat? Just like other wraiths during the invasion, this one found what it felt to coexist with plasma hotter than the surface of the sun. It tried to disperse, but the forcefield molded to its shape. It tried to blink away, but each time it reappeared the forcefield was there, and so was the white-hot flame. With a piteous wail, it burned away to nothing.


    The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.


    Unfortunately, there were still dozens of its fellow intangible horrors to deal with. Fortunately, these did not wield the destructive sorcerous powers of the spirits under the invaders'' control and relied on their intangible claws and aura of darkness. Three more wraiths followed the first one into burning oblivion while I considered the situation.


    For all that it had been a staple of fantasy since forever, ghostly critters being able to claw you while you could not punch them did not make sense. Yes magic worked on the user''s beliefs, not reality, but here I was, believing that I should be able to punch those things back while unable to. Why did the magic of a bunch of lesser spirits matter more than mine? Either they were backed by a very powerful necromancer, or I was doing something wrong.


    Two more wraiths immolated as I thought. A necromancer backing them wasn''t impossible. In fact, the way the spirits were working in a coordinated group, had approached under cover and hadn''t fled the moment they saw my powers could burn them were all indicative of remote control by someone more intelligent than the near-mindless undead spawned by the corrupted swamps of Florida.


    On the other hand, spirits could affect other spirits seemingly physically and my own forcefields were anchored to them without issues. More to the point, these wraiths could be seen and vision was just our perception of light interacting with the physical world around us. This was proof that interactions of physical force with the wraiths were not merely possible but happening even as I watched. What the magic of these spirits did then was allow for selective interaction... and if they could do it...


    Closing my eyes against the continued distraction of their attacks and unearthly screeches, I layered a forcefield over my arm and willed it... not denser. Forcefields did not have any density at all so that would make no sense. No, I willed it to reach out in the same way the wraiths tried to ignore the mundane world, bridge the distance between the physical and the immaterial. Force and distance were merely two sides of a coin, one defining the other. Why should it matter that the distance was not mundane but magical?


    Then I reached out and punched the first wraith to volunteer itself. Instead of my fist merely passing through it or even the ghostly undead parting around it like mist, there was resistance akin punching at mud. The wraith gave off an ear-piercing way as it was hurled away, floating to a stop a good fifty yards away. The barest signs of a bruise marked its pale, decrepit cheek, sluggishly fading away. Oh well. I couldn''t expect to get a brand-new use of my powers to full strength from the first attempt. It would probably need weeks of effort and thousands of wraiths punted into orbit to get as good as my abilities during the invasion...


    ...or would it? Before the ghostly undead interrupt, I''d been considering what new skill to spend my points on. Was it worth to burn two points worth of potential to skip the training montage and develop this new ability immediately? A slap with the cludged-together version I had now sent several wraiths reeling. With these sparring dummies conveniently being volunteered by their unseen controller, getting a head start would be possible given a few hours of throwing hands. It wasn''t as if they were more than an annoyance to me. On the other hand...


    A split-second of looking at what the kids were doing showed something weird. All three of them were frantically moving around and throwing attacks at nothing in particular. They had either gone crazy in the few minutes I''d not been paying attention... or were fighting something my long-range senses could not pick up at all. Fighting and losing, from how they seemed to be flailing and their bodies were shaking uncontrollably.


    No time to waste, then. With an act of will I ''burned'' two motes of untapped potential, forming a churning vortex of possible paths of growth based on my actions and the nature of my powers. The magic ring in my off-hand translated those half-glimpsed options to more clear descriptions for me to pick instead of following the paths of growth instinctively.


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 98.5636%">True Strike: as long as your total speed is greater than your opponent''s your melee blows can''t miss, be dodged, parried, redirected or evaded in any way.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Not quite what I was looking for. In some ways far more powerful than just punching the incorporeal because of how many different forms of active defenses it could just ignore. But it was limited in other ways, namely that it only worked in melee. Mindful of the time limit imposed by the kids'' fights, I reached towards more potential options in my mind.


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 70.3325%" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 100%">Unified Field Bubble: in your immediate presence selectively force interactions between forces of any type.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    That stretched what I''d asked for in the other extreme; instead of a narrow but overwhelming effect it allowed the broadest effect possible. It would let me as well as others punch ghosts, yes. It would also do the same for fire or lasers or gravity, or let us grab active magic as if it was a physical thing. On the other hand, not only did it not guarantee the outcome of these interactions but also conferred no advantage in or special protections from them... and trying to punch the dark magic giving a wraith shape would not be pleasant if said magic had an equal and opposite reaction. A potentially broken ability of great potential, but not the best for the current situation.


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 94.8849%" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 100%">Action and Reaction: if a creature, object or power can potentially interact with you, then you and your abilities can interact back to equal measure.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Now that... that looked exactly like what I''d wanted. If they could touch me, I could touch them back. If they could see me, I could see them. If they could affect me with their weird shadow aura... smirking, I confirmed my choice.


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 99.6164%; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 38.0572%">Name: Maya Wennefer</td>


    <td style="width: 62.024%">Bio: female human, 17y11m22d</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 38.0572%">Known skills:


    </td>


    <td style="width: 62.024%">Points: 8/218


    </td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 38.0572%; border-style: none; vertical-align: top">


    Action and Reaction, Chronal Leap, Empowering Regeneration, Eyebeams, Focused Invulnerability, Force Adjustment, Force Awareness, Forcefield Creation, Forced Acceleration, Greater Proximakinesis, Immutable Force, Instant Action, Lasting Force, Retributive Defense, Super Suit, Spatial Distortion, Spatial Leap


    </td>


    <td style="width: 62.024%; vertical-align: top">


    Attributes: Might 50, Agility 25, Reason 6, Vigilance 22, Ego 25, Luck 7


    Word of Force: Power IV, Control III, Versatility IV, Number of Effects III, Range II, Scope II


    Word of Self: Power IV, Control III, Versatility III, Number of Effects III, Range II, Scope I


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    "It''s past midnight, you insufferable wailing wretches," I roared at them as I slotted in the new skill and formed a gigantic force bubble with Forcefield Creation. "And the only one who could remotely said to be a witch here is me!"


    Then the force bubble began to contract. From a thin barrier of force more than a hundred feet wide it became barely wider than a small truck, the air escaping freely as it shrunk. The wraiths, not so much. They were all trapped in an impenetrable - to them - sphere, already reduced to a tangled, screaming mass of ghostly bodies. Then the sphere contracted further; the screaming intensified. It shrunk again and again and again, the wraiths compressed as if made by some form of gas. For all I knew, they really were; they looked fluid enough.


    When the orb had finally shrunk enough to fit between my palms, I combined Force Adjustment, Greater Proximakinesis and my own physical strength to crush it. With a clap louder than a thunderbolt, the wraiths were obliterated.


    Then I was gone, flying towards the one of the three kids that was handling their own pack of wraiths the worst...

 29: Team-Ups

    Cindy admitted she''d made a mistake, if only in the confines of her mind.


    A ghost-thingy floated out of the mud, clawed arms swinging. Before she could try to stop it, a pair of Cindy''s instances popped like soap bubbles as the undead monster tried to eviscerate them. Fortunately for the fifteen-year-old girl, avoiding deadly experiences by vanishing the versions of her that would experience them had long since become an ingrained reflex. Unfortunately, some things could not be thus avoided; the stench of the swamp, the exertion of running mile after mile, the unearthly wail of a murderous ghost being robbed of its meal. And there were far too many such ghosts.


    The brunette shivered despite her muscles burning from running through the mud and twisted undergrowth. She''d tried punching, kicking, headbutting, grappling, stabbing, even throwing rocks but the dozens of incorporeal undead trying to mob her remained unmoved by all her many efforts to get rid of them. Just like with fighting a certain blonde bimbo, it did not matter that she could repeat any number of different attacks a practically infinite number of times if none of them could actually hurt or hinder the enemy. The same applied to anyone trying to attack her in reverse, of course; the vast majority of unpleasantness could be simply ignored by deleting any instances of her that experienced it, for all intents and purposes making it so they never existed. Unfortunately, the ghosties had proven one of the few enemies that could affect Cindy despite her nature, if barely.


    Another murderous ghost screamed as its intended target vanished, the Cindy it saw never having been there for it to catch. One of the hardest implications of her power for most people to grasp was that she didn''t exist as they saw her to be; where people saw her as was merely what instance of herself Cindy allowed to visually interact with them. In reality, Cindy was no single instance but all of them, simultaneously being and not being at all locations her power reached. Using this to confuse people in a fight was dead easy, especially since she could appear to be in different locations for different people - or even multiple locations at once. There was no "real" Cindy for the enraged ghosts to pin down; the ''fake'' Cindy always turned out to be the one they attempted to murder.


    Her problem was that, just like in little kids'' games, when both sides could ignore each other''s attacks at will, the winner was whoever could keep going the longest. Now, Cindy knew she was awesome. In addition to fabulous looks, her fifteen-year-old body was juiced up to superpowers that let her jump small buildings in a single bound, outrun most bicycles on foot, or throw around most European cars as if she possessed the full powers of a Cindy-sized radioactive insect. Her stamina however was her lowest stat. For most things that didn''t matter as she could shift through instances until her goal was accomplished, but that didn''t work in fighting these ghosts. She couldn''t have some of her instances sleep, as the ghosts'' frequent unearthly screams affected all of them. She could not have some sit out the trip, as all of them needed to run to get out of monster-land. And all of them had to deal with the stench, the mud and the twisted, infested wasteland.


    The sweaty, muddy, stinky, panting, and entirely fed-up teenage girl was beginning to get annoyed. What the hell was everyone else doing? Hadn''t they noticed she was being chased by ghosts? Were they just sitting back and laughing at her predicament? When she got her hands on them...


    "aaaAAA!!!"


    Her elaborate revenge plots involving itching powder, caltrops, hidden cameras and certain people''s underwear were interrupted by rapidly intensifying shouts from above, followed by one of the targets of her righteous vengeance falling out of the sky a mere three hundred feet out of her path. Seizing on the opportunity, Cindy leaped off the narrow patch of solid ground and into the swamps, employing her superhuman agility to vault again and again before she could sink. Not all of her instances managed the maneuver. In fact, the vast majority of them got the timing wrong, or landed badly, or were snatched out of the air by ghosts. Being able to try every single permutation of the leap however meant that at least one instance got it perfectly and it was the successful instances she kept and propagated again and again, succeeding as long as it was possible for her to succeed.


    "Hello Gabby!" she greeted the Hispanic boy with a fake smile and falsely sweet voice before growling. "Where the fuck were you? Murderous ghosts have been trying to kill me for the past quarter hour!"


    "Dodging more murderous ghosts myself," the boy replied with a groan before hopping out of the crater his fall had carved into the mud. He looked up and winced. "Not that it worked any better for me."


    "What the hell are you... no, no, fuck you Gabe! You did not just bring in more of those things!" Unfortunately for both Cindy and the boy, the huge cloud of ghosts descending from above in Gabby''s trail was every bit as real as the one Cindy had briefly left behind with her leaps.


    "Shut up, bitch! As if I wanted to fall out of the sky with rejects from the underworld on my ass," Gabby shot back, ignoring the girl''s furious scowl. Yes, Cindy might try her stupid power-assisted hazing again if he didn''t grovel but they would both be dead long before she got the opportunity if they didn''t find a way out of this.


    "Thanks for nothing, dumbass," the brunette bitch retorted as both groups of wraiths surrounded them, their unearthly screams sending shivers through both teenagers'' bodies - shivers Gabby was certain was their life and stamina slowly being drained. From Cindy''s sorry state the boy was sure even her tricks did not help against it. "Don''t just stand there!" she added as he saw half a dozen Cindies getting popped by ghostly claws in half as many seconds. "Do something!"


    "Yes, because you''re doing so much better!" She wasn''t. Yes, invisible punches and kicks swept through every single inch of the attackers, minutely pushing the wraiths to and fro but otherwise amounting to nothing. "I tried stabbing them. Normal blades, magic, fire, lightning, disintegration, void, everything!" He rolled frantically under a trio of wraiths trying to claw his back; most of the enemies seemed to be focusing on Cindy but a few attacked him every so often. "Most just passed through. Even the ones that seemed to work they healed from in moments."


    "Useless as always. Why am I not - wait." So many Cindies turned around to stare at Gabby that they fused into a single mass with no respect for human anatomy, Euclidean geometry, or common sense. "Did you just say one of your stupid swords could hurt these things?"


    "Well, yeah!" Gabe forced his magic into several dancing swords to fend off the latest attempt to eviscerate him and nearly doubled over. After making Caladbolg and having his connection with it snap, it felt as if he had nothing but dregs in the tank. Just forming a lightning longsword and two sabers of white flame left him weak-kneed and about to puke his guts out - and not because of the swamp.


    "Is it one of these?" a Cindy appeared before him and demanded even as dozens more of her kept the wraiths at bay by merely becoming more inviting targets.


    "Is it one of what?" Gabe asked in confusion. Either the battlefield was becoming weirder or he was experiencing a hallucination; where was all that blood coming from?


    "Yes or no, Gabe, can these three swords hurt the wraiths?" the brunette demanded then gasped and nearly doubled over, her face pale. "Quickly, I''m literally having to die to distract them."


    "Yes, lightning and fire work, a little," the boy admitted. "But I can''t make enough. Couldn''t even up there."


    "Yeah, you can''t," Cindy spat, though Gabby got the impression her fury was not directed at him. Then the girl grabbed his lightning longsword and flickered. A split second later there wasn''t just one sword, but thousands, maybe even missions - more than Gabby''s power could count, filling every cubic inch of space within several hundred feet. "ROUND TWO MOTHERFUCKERS," a million identical teenage girls'' voices shook the air.


    Then the wraiths died. It wasn''t a fight, or even a slaughter. It didn''t last any span of time Gabby could perceive, couldn''t be perceived as separate blows or even a storm of them. One moment the wraiths were there. The next, every bit of space their incorporeal bodies had occupied was taken up by crackling lightning blades. Before his mind broke trying to track what had happened and why, there was only one lightning longsword again, held by just one Cindy standing before him.


    This book''s true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.


    "OK, Brownie, I take it back," the most terrifying and second prettiest girl Gabby had ever met gave him a genuine smile for the first time. "You can be useful on occasion."


    Around them the smoke-like remains of a hundred incorporeal undead were carried away in the wind.


    xxxx


    "Repeating the same action and expecting different results is the opposite of reason, you know."


    Mark ignored me in favor of blasting his swarm of wraiths with various combinations of more and more powerful military weapons. Statistically speaking, he should have stumbled into a combination that worked in part if not in whole by then... but he was being neither methodical nor random. He was currently trying timed-burst bombs in combination with some form of rotary autocannon, delivering an impressive weight of fire to his surroundings. Unfortunately, that was all he did.


    "You are faster but less maneuverable, so stop trying to dogfight and pull them into a stern chase," I added for good measure, but he once again ignored my advice.


    "Either start helping or shut the FUCK UP!" the African American boy roared over the blast of a dozen explosions, the only reason he was heard despite the cacophony being my enhanced senses.


    "I am helping," I told him, using my powers to speak directly to his ears from a distance. "Killing these wraiths for you would only help you today, for this one fight. Teaching you how to kill wraiths yourself will help you for the rest of your life."


    "If you don''t stop with the pseudo-philosophical bullshit, I swear I''m gonna blast you out of the fucking sky!" Mark shouted at the top of his voice right before he got a face-full of murderous undead spirit for his troubles. His anger was part of the problem he was refusing to acknowledge and until he did all my attempts to actually help him instead of just solve his problems for him were not going to work.


    That did not mean I couldn''t keep him alive until he changed his mind; it just needed to happen in ways he did not notice as help. A gust of wind here and a wraith that could have clawed his back open fell short. A few invisible pushes there and the claw that would have cost him an eye scraped against his left cheek. A subtle but broad adjustment on the wraiths'' method of locomotion and their tireless flight matched his own instead of quickly overwhelming him as he grew more tired, his weapon mimicry became sloppier, his speed and reflexes diminished.


    It wouldn''t, couldn''t last forever. Wraiths were undead spirits and even the least knowledgeable person about the monsters that invaded our world would eventually realise I was basically directing the flow of the battle for my own ends. Or maybe Mark would pass out through exhaustion and sheer, single-minded obstinacy... but that was unlikely. Teenagers, inasmuch as I remembered being one a bazillion years (six months) before, were almost as lacking in patience as they were in common sense. In fact, if I''d judged Mark''s character correctly...


    "The fuck are you just sitting there, anyway?" he demanded about fifteen minutes after my arrival. That he''d mostly given me the silent treatment for that long was quite impressive. "Are you not supposed to be the resident adult, or something? Well? Adult these stupid things away!"


    "Oh? Is the great and mighty Mark finally ready to listen to older and maybe... possibly... wiser people?" I snarked back, flinging away the wraith that tried to assault me half a mile away with a flick of my finger and an invisible application of force.


    "...yes damnit!" the boy yelped as I allowed a wraith to get just close enough to bite at his ear. He was a fairly powerful superhuman; the missing bits would regenerate in a day or two, tops. "Tell me how to fucking murder these things already!"


    "You can''t; they''re already dead." Heh. This bullshitting teacher gig could be fun, at times.


    "YOU KNOW WHAT I FUCKING MEAN!" Mark exploded, and I meant that literally. He detonated a few really big mimicked bombs far too close to his own hide, leaving him with a torn costume and dozens of superficial but still bleeding scrapes and bruises. Wraiths I could protect him against; his own idiocy, not nearly as well.


    "Right... listen up, kid." From how he immediately bristled he obviously hated being called kid by someone who was only a couple of years his senior, biologically speaking. I waited a couple of seconds for him to curse me to high heaven, back-talk, or make snide remarks but nothing came. Good; that meant he was finally willing to swallow his I-know-what-I''m-doing-but-you-can''t-understand-me attitude and actually listen. Getting him to that had been the whole point of letting him flail against the wraiths for so long. "Wraiths are both incorporeal and regenerating. This means anything mundane will go right through them and even if you do hurt them some they''ll just reform."


    "Gee, I hadn''t noticed," he scoffed but kept listening, even forgot to evade properly while paying attention. I held back the wraiths trying to mob him from behind; couldn''t have the stupid ghosts ruin things now that the kid had finally opened up.


    "Point is, they still interact with the world, especially both the most fundamental and the most mystically significant bits." I gestured at the swarm around us. "You can still see them, for one. For another, you don''t see them left behind because they ignored the planet spinning around itself and the sun. Plus they can cut you up even if they''re incorporeal. What does that tell you?"


    "That gravity or light might work?" he asked but then immediately shook his head. "No, that doesn''t make sense. They''re still floating and they''re mostly see-through... they can choose to ignore stuff!"


    "Exactly. Being incorporeal IS their power, so they can choose how it works. But we can also choose how our powers work, to a point," I told him, repeating the insight I''d gleaned from my own fight earlier. It would have been better if he''d come to the realisation himself but if getting thoroughly trounced for twenty minutes had not pushed him to it, it was unlikely he would before passing out.


    "You''re telling me I can choose to hit them? Just like that?" He shook his head in obvious denial. "Bullshit."


    "Magic IS bullshit; we do choose to ignore reality in the ways we like." We just needed to have the power to do so. "But here you''re trying to choose to hit the wraiths while they are choosing to avoid being hit. They got a thematic advantage because ''avoid getting hit'' is all their power is about. Even so they aren''t avoiding everything so..."


    "I need to use something they don''t usually avoid that I''m also trying to make it hit them?" he finally worked it out. "Like light but as a weapon! And since it''ll be a power rather than natural I can actively tell it to hit them!"


    "More like mean it to hit than speaking out loud, but yes," I agreed. "Now do you have something like that? We don''t have all day."


    "What do you..." he turned around, saw all the wraiths struggling to push through an invisible barrier and scowled. "Fuck, this whole fight you kept the training wheels on me?"


    "This was supposed to be a training exercise," I shrugged. "Now get going, Gabby and Cindy already killed their wraiths, no training wheels needed." He shot me a half-furious, half-wounded glare before turning around and tapping into his power. The shadows of two enormous military vehicles formed over the boy''s space, the peculiar spatial distortion of his weapons mimicry combining them into something more than the sum of their parts in a way I still couldn''t read beyond the fact that all three of them were aircraft of some sort.


    "Come here you fucking ghostly shits!" Mark shouted, not that anybody other than me could hear him under the circumstances. The wraiths certainly could not, but I let him have his moment. It would help with remembering the lesson in the future. "EAT WAVELENGTH!"


    A deafening, impressively bright beam burst out of his pointing arm, halfway between an actual laser and a continuous explosion. With me keeping the wraiths from fleeing, what would have been at least a few minutes of tiring pursuit as their swarm split in a dozen directions was reduced to a mere twenty seconds of very cathartic blasting.


    xxxx


    "Team exercises fucking suck," Cindy stated as she dragged her sweaty, filthy, exhausted body on a rock before collapsing. "They suck mutant Dodo wang."


    "Dodos became extinct in the 17th century," an even more messed up, grimy and lightly bleeding Gabby countered, then collapsed next to the girl. To Mark''s great surprise and my satisfaction, he was not immediately assaulted by invisible Cindies, only wordlessly shown the finger by the panting brunette. "But yeah, Teach. This totally sucked." Mark just added his own low-key grumbles and fell face-first before even reaching the boulder. Fortunately for the black teenager, the ground was not particularly muddy where he fell.


    "What are you talking about guys, you did great!" I announced in my perkiest, preppiest voice, once used for demotivational purposes in cheerleader meetings. "You got all the wraiths, used teamwork or Yours Truly''s sage instruction to do so, even took the first steps into overcoming your worst flaws - assuming you don''t return to being misanthropic little beasts the moment you feel better." I stretched, not coincidentally showing off my perfectly clean, completely unblemished costume, freshly washed hair and very pleasant body odour with not a hint of sweat or foulness. "And I got to take an awesome, steaming hot bath, skinny-dipping in molten magma." Exhaustion or no, the kids immediately attempted to drown me in the nearest swamp.


    Team cohesion: improving.

 30: Field Trips

    "OK gather round, it''s time we left this swamp," I called out to the kids. Proximakinesis and Forcefield Creation reached out in an invisible line less than an inch wide towards the nearest mud pit. There, the field widened and force was applied to its contents. Soil, dust, organic debris, pretty much everything but water was pushed back while the water itself was drawn in much like filtering a liquid through reverse osmosis. Soon I had an orb of crystal clear water about a foot in diameter, drawn in at the end of an invisible tether.


    "Whoa Teach, did you develop Telekinesis?" Gabe asked as the three of them got closer, suddenly more interested in what I was doing than their usual roughhousing and boasts.


    "Nope! General telekinesis has so broad and varied applications that developing it would either result in a very weak ability, or its cost in power would be so prohibitive it would be the only ability even strong supers could get. That tradeoff between strength and versatility is pretty much the only rule every magical has in common." I gave the Hispanic boy a smirk. "That doesn''t mean you can''t cheat."


    "Oh come on!" Cindy scoffed and rolled her eyes. "You have been recorded to fly, invisibly strike or restrain opponents, create barriers, negate attacks, create and control both heat and cold, reshape matter, add to your own strength, speed and toughness and do dozens of other things. There''s no way you can do that many things without a broad thematic skill." The brunette poked at the floating sphere of water but her hand always came out dry. "You''ve just sunk enough power into it to overpower most people in their specialties, like the Warden or the Red Queen."


    "Who?" I shook my head. "Nevermind, it''s not important." The girl''s arbitrary contrariness was giving me a headache again. "Maybe if I was confident that I could overpower everyone out there I would have done exactly that, but I''m not."


    "Then how do you have both power and versatility like that?" she demanded. "You''ve had powers maybe twice as long as we have, you shouldn''t have been able to beat us in ten seconds flat."


    "Your powers are not exactly lacking in versatility," I reminded her without correcting her assumption. "If you ever meet a super as powerful as you that only has a single narrow ability, try not to challenge them in their specialty." It would probably end up worse than the fight with the wraiths for her... but maybe Cindy needed to have the arrogance beaten out of her a few more times so I''d give no further warnings. Honestly, my own near-death experiences during the invasion had been the best cure for any belief of invincibility that came with powers. Everyone gaining abilities post-invasion not having such experiences was probably contributing to the abundance of villains and idiots. "But the trick you''re missing is this; how many letters does English have?"


    "What does English have to do with... no." The girl''s eyes widened as she got the implication. "No, that''s bullshit. There''s no way that would work."


    "No, it would," Mark interjected. "My own power''s versatility comes through combinations. If you could combine power abilities instead..." He glared at me. "I agree with Cindy, that''s bullshit."


    "Isn''t it? Something to keep in mind as your power grows." The still-floating water sphere nearly touched the ground before widening and thinning into a disc. "Now hop on, there''s something I need to show you."


    The kids did, the now transparent disc not even budging from the weight as an adjustment of the force fields holding it together made them non-permeable to the four of us. Then they stretched further and bent upwards, thinning and spreading until the end result resembled a giant soap bubble with us within. Our new transportation complete, we started floating away.


    "Why water?" Mark asked as we rose rapidly, several gravities worth of acceleration having minimal effect to people who could get through a serious car crash and barely even feel it. "You could have done the same with force alone - have done so more than once. Why the theatrics?"


    "Because the theatrics are cool," I told the perpetually serious black boy. "Plus sometimes it''s better to have something physical for more complex powers to work on rather than keep everything in your mind. What if you lost concentration, were distracted by something?"


    "It''s just a fall," Cindy interrupted with a shrug. "Even those of us who can''t fly would survive."


    "So sure of this, are you?" I asked the overconfident teenager with a smirk.


    We were really picking up speed now, breaking through the cloud layer faster than any plane and many missiles, though not quite all of them. In those discussions our military minders thought were safe from being overheard in those remote bunkers, options for intercepting flying supers had been discussed, some of them quite dangerous - for the kids, at least. But that was part of the great list of Future-Maya''s problems.


    The pale blue of the sky started to give way to the utter darkness and diamond clarity of space, the Earth seeming rounder and rounder beneath us when the kids finally got what was going on. Gabby was actually the first to realize where I was taking them.


    "No fucking way!" His face stuck to the now-frozen but still transparent water bubble, taking in the awesome view of more than a hundred miles above the tallest point on the planet. "We''re in freaking space!"


    The kids, naturally, went wild. Even the most jaded workaholic or deluded pseudo-rationalist would have their first time of leaving humanity''s home behind - unless they were putting their all into saving humanity from a giant monster more than two miles tall. Often power and the choices that went with it really ruined such opportunities and since the fate of the world was not on the line quite yet I''d wanted the kids to see that magic could be awesome beyond the fields of combat or worse, politics.


    Ignoring another stab of pain from my irregular migraine, I shared the glory of achieving orbit with my students for the next half-hour. The General would have to shift his schedule just a little to account for even people with powers being human.


    xxxx


    "You''re late," was Old Man Rinaker''s greeting as I floated into his office thirty-one minutes later.


    "A superhero is never late, nor is she early," I quoted back to him. "She arrives precisely when she chooses to."


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    "How long were you waiting to use that one?" the General asked with a tired smile. He looked worn, his salt and pepper hair with a few more strands of silver than before, the frown lines on his long face a bit deeper. But the cold, steel-grey eyes still stared out with enough force to nail some brainless fool to the nearest wall.


    "Since I sneaked away to see the movie at age eleven. My old man did not approve of such... frivolities." I gave Rinaker a smile that was quite a bit more teeth than mirth. "He was a military man, see."


    "Dishonorably discharged, yes. I read his file." The old man''s fists creaked as he clenched them hard enough to hurt. "Liz told me he was a traitor to humanity as well. Joining the invaders for more power." He harrumphed as only old people tend to do. "There''s fools and monsters in every war."


    "More of that going around in this one; it was designed this way." I leaned back, using my powers to sit on thin air. "But you didn''t call me here to speak of ancient history." Less than a year was that, the way things were progressing, and I''d rather talk about anything else. Ugh, why had I brought the guy up again? The past gave me even more headaches than the kids did.


    "What is your team''s readiness? How quickly could they be deployed independently?"


    "Let me guess; the politicians are whining again." I sighed and shifted in my nonexistent chair. "They do realize these are fifteen year olds, right? Teenagers armed with a whole army group''s worth of firepower, who have been through several traumatic events, were exposed to an ideology that actively, supernaturally brainwashes those it affects, and have had less than a third the training time of recruits that only have to shoot a rifle instead of highly complex powers?" I glanced through the wall at the mess hall where the kids were arguing tuna versus corned beef and their use in sandwiches without a care in the world a mere hour after fighting for their lives. "And they really want to cut them loose inside cities to handle anything more complex than tying their shoelaces? Are they mad?"


    "They are desperate, as I remember telling you the last time we had this discussion." The old General pinched his nose, then sat back and rummaged in the drawers of his overcrowded desk. What he came up with was an old-fashioned Zippo lighter with silver designs and a gasoline reservoir instead of natural gas, plus a case of old cigars. "Want one?" he offered. "They''re Cuban."


    "They also stink and are cancerous." Not unlike politicians in that respect.


    "You take baths in molten stone, I doubt cancer is something you have to worry about." He lit the cigar slowly, then took a long, slow draw before continuing. "Then again, you rarely worry about things we all should. Take the economy for example. Do you have any idea what losing a whole state did to our bottom line?"


    "No, because I don''t need to." I took a fake pensive pose and spoke in a way too cheerful tone. "In fact, as I remember telling you the first time we had this discussion, not having to worry about money is one of the terms of working with you. I put in the powers, take the physical risks, and you and your people deal with non-power-related stuff because I don''t want to."


    "Cute. Way behind the times but cute." He pointed at me with the cigar. "This whole mess makes every other disaster in the history of ever look like a hiccup. We got over a thousand people with minor powers propping up the economy where we could since the Florida refugees came in. Without them we''d be a lot worse and several other countries are already chomping at the bit to do the same." He grimaced, then snuffed out the cigar against his palm. Either the cancer stick had spoiled, or the General was changing in the same ways that had me taking lava baths if I wanted to feel the warmth. "Problem is, however much the economy is propped up, lack of security is getting to people."


    "We both know three half-trained kids won''t help with actual security, only with the appearance of security." Because that''s what the politicians always wanted in times of crisis; to be seen to be doing something rather than solving the problem, because the problem was usually impossible to solve as quickly as the public felt like it should be. "Your people must have thousands of powered refugees and soldiers from the invasion by now, why not use them?"


    "Because none of them actually matter, Wennefer. No amount of guys that can sense danger a few minutes ahead of time or build tech on the bleeding edge with a box of scraps could stop even one moderately powerful threat. For some reason, other than you five, all the powerful people that came out of Florida either disappeared, or became the very problems that we need to solve." He grunted and adjusted his chair as if it didn''t quite fit. He''d probably notice his body adjusting soon enough; no need to tell him and spoil the surprise. "In the meantime, people with strong powers have started appearing in half a dozen other places around the globe. It is... disquieting."


    "You mean the guys at the big chairs saw all these new supers as belonging to the government and are throwing hissy fits because nobody is getting on with their program." I copied Cindy and rolled my eyes as childishly as possible. There was something about what the General had said that struck me as odd and I''d look things over again after our meeting, but for now I needed to make my position clear. "That''s the real reason they want the kids to waive the flag, right? Well, I''m officially telling you it''s not going to go well. I want it on the record so I can tell them that I told them so when everything blows up in their faces."


    "What, no refusal to cooperate?" Rinaker asked, thick eyebrows rising in mild surprise.


    "What would be the point? You wouldn''t be insisting if they were willing to take no for an answer." I shrugged. "Pressing the point would mean either taking the kids and disappearing or smashing the government until it vaguely fit my ideas on how it should work. And both of those would be too much work and cause too many problems down the line. I don''t want to run the country and I''m pretty sure neither do you."


    "Curious... but in a way it fits that image of a blunt instrument you''ve chosen to present." He gave me a nod. "Just warn me if you ever change your mind."


    "If I ever change my mind nobody will need the warning," I told him and with just a look we both knew where we stood with this. "OK, since this is going to happen anyway, you''d better fill me in on the plan for the kids'' debut."


    "It''s less a plan and more of a wish fulfillment on their part. Unfortunately, we have to make it work." He took out an old paper map and unfolded it across his desk, then took out several coins to use as markers. Apparently, the governments semi-justified paranoia about super-geniuses and technokinetics spying them through electronics had reached a new high. Considering how I could spy on them directly through super-senses every time I flew over the capital, they might not be paranoid enough. "This is Devon island in Canada. Used to be the largest uninhabited island in the world."


    "Used to be? What changed?"


    "Nothing much. Just the CIA''s new training grounds, complete with monsters relocated from Florida."


    "Awesome. Fantastic. There''s absolutely nothing wrong with that statement and everything is copacetic." I facepalmed, feeling another headache brewing. I could swim in fucking magma and only feel pleasantly warm, how the hell was I getting headaches? "In entirely unrelated news, has anyone there in Langley seen the Jurassic Park movies? Maybe any of the Godzilla films? No?"


    "It seemed a good idea to them at the time. Unfortunately, the training grounds have suffered... complications," Rinaker deadpanned. "The plan is for the kids to go there, resolve said complications, get filmed doing it. You will keep overwatch, but from far enough that you don''t appear on camera if there are no problems the kids can''t handle."


    "This might actually work... if everything goes as planned," I said and chuckled. We both knew nothing ever went as planned. "Now why don''t you share exactly what the CIA did in that place and why do they think went wrong."


    He did. Then I really started swearing...

 31: Preparations

    Before flying off to the frozen ass-end of Canada to clean up some mess the usual suspects had concocted in some secret lab, I was in desperate need for some me time. Superhuman powers might come with a lack of a need to sleep, but rest periods were still important. Maybe the headaches were a warning sign, a hallmark of too much work and too little play, because since coming back I''d only rested for more than an hour at a time just once... and that had been several weeks before. Stopping monsters (human or otherwise), doing emergency relief, training the kids, testing my always developing powers, showing the flag and talking to the press; everything had snowballed until my days had become a continuous, never-ending chore.


    Enough was enough. I''d convinced the General that the kids needed at least a day of mental, if not physical, recovery after their last battle, preparations for their first deployment and appearance on camera included. It had the advantage of being true; that I''d vanished as soon as said downtime began was entirely coincidental.


    Flying from the base in Nevada to my new house in New York at the leisurely pace of a couple miles per second was actually relaxing for once. No kids to watch over, no emergency to scramble to, no debate or interview to prepare for. Just me, the stratosphere, and the Earth spread out below in all its majesty. Flying was, is, and will continue to be the most awesome of my powers'' many applications. Nothing, not the adrenaline of combat or the accomplishment of saving people and creating new things could compare to the sheer freedom it offered. I might be a hero first and a person second these days, but not nearly to the extent of many comic book heroes... except for Superman. For all his powers, modern fiction''s greatest hero chose to spend more time in his career as a reporter or his personal life than actual heroics. While I''d always agreed with the realism of that portrayal only now that I had my own powers and responsibilities did I understand why.


    It was impossible for someone with super-senses to remain ignorant of all the bad things that happened around us. People were fragile, people made mistakes, errors of judgement, fell prey to accidents... people died. In any large metropolis like, say, New York, someone died every two and a half minutes. Someone suffered considerable harm every ten seconds. Even if I spent every single second of every day rushing from place to place, I would not be able to help everyone in even a single such city. Moreover, to intervene in most of those cases would be to intrude in people''s homes... and though they would be grateful that day, they would hate to be under observation every moment of every day for all their lives.


    So for both their peace of mind and mine, I chose not to watch or intervene. Chose to aim supernatural help against supernatural threats and natural disasters and left everyday problems to be resolved by mundane solutions... or not. At least that''s how I saw things while flying upside-down sixty thousand feet above the ground. Philosophy wasn''t really my strong point. Who knows? Maybe my perspective would change once my legs no longer pointed at the sky.


    xxxx


    The manor house the government had bribed me with remained as I left it; empty of people and free of bugs of both the living and electronic kind. From countless tracks across its grounds, clues and details barely visible to human eyes without a crime investigation kit and a lot of skill, it was clear that several hundred different people had tried to bypass the security measures I''d left behind. Or possibly far fewer people wearing shoes of different sizes and carrying various loads every time, I guess. After discovering the apparent sixty-year-old lady gardener was actually a twenty-something agent with shapeshifting powers on my first day in the house, I would not discount the possibility, no matter how remote or absurd. Occam''s Razor died the moment powers became a thing.


    A thin circle of dust surrounded the three-story building, a perimeter marking the outer limits of the protections I''d left. Occasionally, the circle was interrupted by corpses of rats, squirrels or other small animals, all invariably missing their heads and sometimes the upper half of their bodies. Landing lightly on the ground, I frowned at the mess. When I''d set up the disintegration barrier I hadn''t considered the obvious in retrospect issue of animals crossing it head-first and dropping dead before they could be entirely disintegrated. Just as obviously, any municipal cleaning crews had been avoiding the apparently deadly use of powers. Yes, the barrier was entirely safe to humans. No, I had not left any signs saying so and I doubted most people would believe them - especially if any sticks or pebbles they tested the barrier with disintegrated.


    Fortunately, the minor oversight had a quick solution; I simply pushed the remains into the house''s defenses with my powers, disintegrating all visually unappealing sources of stink. Then I pressed against the invisible dome and with only minor difficulty went through the repulsion effect that to an ordinary person would effectively function as an impenetrable wall. Then I stopped and checked the barrier with Force Awareness again, then facepalmed.


    It was a good thing I had not invited the kids over. The barrier had been set to disintegrate, among other things, all sorts of disguises. A close examination of the construct''s magic showed that ''disguises'' was taken to include all clothing. The reason I had not realized was that "items of power made by me" was another of the exceptions and thus my costume had remained unaffected. Had I used the option to invite guests in the barrier would not disintegrate said guests - but it would disintegrate their clothing.


    Problem was, the properties of the force field were permanent. They could be added to by adding more fields or partially modified by layering effects together, but they couldn''t be changed at their base. It wasn''t the only problem either; more issues of interpretation or unclear intent just made trying to fix them more trouble than it was worth. With an exertion of Greater Proximakinesis'' and Force Adjustments'' ability to negate forces entirely I shattered both the repulsion and the disintegration then got to work.


    It was time to protect my new house properly rather than throwing up some quick and dirty enchantments.


    xxxx


    Nearly two hours later, a new five-layer dome had been finished. A better-worded disintegration field, a repulsion layered with a weakening effect that would make attempts by supers to force their way through far more difficult than before, then a nullifier of any signals from sources that hadn''t been approved by me. Last but definitely not least, a field of Immutable Force and Action and Reaction layered over all the others so the enchantments would be far more resistant to tampering by other powers and would affect intangible things too. All in all, a far higher level of security than before.


    It was by no means impenetrable, of course. Its greatest weakness was that it was just a thin dome rather than a solid sphere; anything that could bypass the need to cross the barrier was simply not subject to the defenses. That had been easy to prove just by using Spatial Leap to teleport across it, but far harder to fix. The field couldn''t be extended deeper into the house. For one thing, that would take far more effort and time. For another, the defenses would kind of negate having a house in the first place, especially the disintegration effect. For about five minutes I''d considered a second field that simply attempted to crush anyone without permission. Then I remembered that this was supposed to be my home, not a Bond villain lair. Bond villains tended to die to their own traps anyway.


    Perhaps a field to evict intruders by force? This had similar issues with the crusher, in that it would both take too much power to fill in the interior and would cause unfortunate incidents if *someone* forgot to invite people properly. Sitting in the living room''s probably-antique, definitely old fashioned sofa, I closed my eyes and mentally went through all the various security ideas I''d come up with or read about in fiction, that my powers could make reality. Animated objects that hunted down intruders. Invisible swords or hounds of force. Trap bubbles that activated when an intruder crossed through specific areas. A field that prodded, tickled or needled intruders until they gave up. A similar one that simulated various accidents which I eventually gave up as too complex to program in any sort of reasonable time. A massively amplified gravity that pinned anyone invading the premises with their own weight.


    All of them were unfeasible for one reason or another, inefficient, or hilariously dangerous... but they were also fun. Like that another two hours had passed in the blink of an eye and I found myself feeling relaxed, even happy. All the stress of the past weeks was... not gone but not pressing down on me either. Magic was so much fun; changing how the laws of physics worked locally not for some grand design or eldritch purpose but just because you could and because it was cool and awesome. I was enjoying myself in a way that I hadn''t since... forever, really.


    I should be making something useful, more than just glorified security for a house I only spent a day in every other week - and I would. All the work with barriers had given me the perfect idea for it, even. But first I would see if I could block teleportation.


    Slowly and just for one corner of the living room I extended a forcefield very different from all the previous ones. It didn''t directly apply force to intruders, disintegrate them, alter gravity or make some offensive construct. Thin filaments of force spread in a dense yet gossamer web, a complex network that strained both my Force Awareness and my mind''s ability to handle sensory information through my superhuman Vigilance attribute to their absolute limits. Again and again and again the field simply failed, beyond my ability to visualize and guide my powers in its construction.


    So don''t try to visualize it all at once, dummy, the rational part of my mind chided the rest of me for taking the idea and running with it. Slowly, painstakingly so, I visualized layer after layer of what I wanted Forcefield Creation, Action and Reaction and Focused Invulnerability to do. Inch by inch the field took shape, an entirely immaterial thing that was also very physical and tangible from a certain point of view. It was the hardest, most complex enchantment I''d ever done, a kludged-together, overly complex field that only covered a couple dozen cubic yards and seemingly did nothing.


    The two force-based powers had to be added to my "Force" slots in the correct order along with Lasting Force, while Action and Reaction had to take up a "Self" slot along with Force Awareness. The only reason it was possible at all was that everything except Forcefield Creation was both a "Force" ability and a "Self" ability, allowing all five skills to work together - barely and with great difficulty. But they did work and the result did stabilize instead of exploding with all the power I''d spent an hour pouring into it, turning New York into a crater.


    ...in retrospect, maybe experimentation should be done in uninhabited areas in the future, right? Right.


    Wiping sweat off my brow, I prodded the field with both my powers and a finger, to no apparent result. That was... more or less as expected? It wasn''t supposed to do anything except in one very specific situation. Holding my breath, I dropped the powers I''d used to create the construct, slotted in Spatial Leap and teleported.


    Then I found myself on my elbows and knees on the floor, feeling as if I''d been kicked in the gut by someone with my own strength. It was by no means pleasant. More importantly, the teleportation had failed. Bracing myself, I tried again. The second failure ended with me lying on my side and trying to puke my guts out while nausea twisted my stomach like a pretzel. But I had to be sure, certain that this thing would not rupture if someone tried to overcome it repeatedly and we got to the Crater York situation.


    This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.


    I woke from the third failed teleportation with blood dripping off my nose, a deep-seated ache in every inch of my body as if I''d pulled apart and put back together only halfway, plus the mother of all migraines. My regeneration had slotted in automatically, my power''s way of telling me I should stop doing stupid things, so I just sat there and recovered for the next half an hour. It was very different from any physical or magical wound I''d ever been on the receiving end of before and I suspected someone without my level of durability would have had their atoms splattered all over the living room instead.


    The construct showed no signs of strain whatsoever. That had been the theory, but it was good to have confirmation. How do you stop all the various transportation powers others could develop? In fiction there were always magic wards against such things but no details on how they worked so I''d improvised. The one thing almost every transportation needed was a viable destination. Trying to teleport inside a wall was supposed to do bad things to you, which made sense. A normal barrier of force might not work for this though, not to mention how it would block use of the barred room to normal entry.


    The solution I''d come up with was to bestow Focused Invulnerability to air molecules within the field. The one thing they would be completely invulnerable against? Being moved aside by transportation powers. As far as incoming teleporters were concerned, the air within the field would count as if it were completely solid for the moment of their teleportation. An invulnerable solid in fact that would refuse to be pushed aside for them to appear, so their teleport would fail. Or it would succeed and they would get messily tele-fragged. And for the clever intruder that teleported while intangible, Action and Reaction would let it affect them anyway.


    Sweaty, bruised, but thoroughly satisfied, I shambled over to the bathroom to relax after half a day of hard work.


    xxxx


    Once again I lay in a pool of molten, steaming rock, playing with the viscous, glowing orange fluid while thinking of my three students. There were even bubbles courtesy of impurities being burned away into slightly corrosive, lethally poisonous gas. The smell was a bit strong but the heat was just right for my level of durability after all my various active enhancements had been adjusted to let the lava through.


    The kids were terribly unprepared. They still sniped at each other, had a tendency to charge blindly and not think things through, had terrible situational awareness, and the plans they did make were worse than no plan at all. Basically, they were typical teenagers. They were also a couple of years younger than my class had been when we''d been thrown into zombies, and over ninety percent of my class had died horribly. Unfortunately, I could not protect them any more - or so I''d thought until I had started toying with defensive barriers for the house.


    I was far more of a brawler than a wizard. The old Maya had been a cheerleader and a more than a little violent girl taught to throw a punch by a disgraced ex-marine that had laughed at proper parenting guidelines. Gaining powers had not changed that much. I liked thinking up enchantments as a hobby and could use them in an emergency, but Mandy had been the sorceress and Jerry the engineer. Me? Give me something to pound with my fists or violently explode with short-lived power combos and I was golden.


    So before I worked on something the kids'' safety might depend on tomorrow, something had to change.


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    <td style="width: 38.0572%">Name: Maya Wennefer</td>


    <td style="width: 62.024%">Bio: female human, 17y11m23d</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 38.0572%">Known skills:


    </td>


    <td style="width: 62.024%">Points: 8/218


    </td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 38.0572%; border-style: none; vertical-align: top">


    Action and Reaction, Chronal Leap, Empowering Regeneration, Eyebeams, Focused Invulnerability, Force Adjustment, Force Awareness, Forcefield Creation, Forced Acceleration, Greater Proximakinesis, Immutable Force, Instant Action, Lasting Force, Retributive Defense, Super Suit, Spatial Distortion, Spatial Leap


    </td>


    <td style="width: 62.024%; vertical-align: top">


    Attributes: Might 50, Agility 25, Reason 6, Vigilance 22, Ego 25, Luck 7


    Word of Force: Power IV, Control III, Versatility IV, Number of Effects III, Range II, Scope II


    Word of Self: Power IV, Control III, Versatility III, Number of Effects III, Range II, Scope I


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Eight points to spend, so many ideas, so little time. For once, Might was not going to help. Raw power I had plenty; I just needed to use it better. The option of adding more known skills directly was also discarded. Enchanted items were made with a combination of skills that was as much an art as it was experience; one or two extra skills I had never used before would probably interfere with the rest; better stick to what worked except try for more of it.


    To that end, I put two points in Vigilance. Making the anti-teleportation barrier had strained my perception and ability to handle information to the breaking point; just loosely visualizing the molecules in a few cubic inches of air and how they moved made tracking the people of a large city seem laughably easy in comparison. Vigilance was also intuition, finding patterns and opportunities and using them well. With two more points I was already seeing mistakes in my prior enchantments as my grasp of what Force Awareness showed me increased, almost insignificant flaws and how they could be fixed. Both my thoughts and actions flowed better, seamlessly, not in ways they couldn''t have before but reaching and keeping at the best I could manage more easily. In many ways it was only a few percentage points of increase, in others the difference between getting things right the first time, every time.


    Those were not the only changes, but by this point being able to see a broader spectrum of light, listen a few more steps up the frequencies than what animals could do or accurately count the leaves of a tree half a mile down the hill was not particularly important. Force Awareness might be less detailed than my other senses but it exchanged that for accuracy and penetration and I''d been using it for so long adapting to the changes only took a minute or two.


    Sensory ability was not the only issue with my enchanting though. Power combinations, especially the more complex ones, only came with great difficulty and the results were tiny in volume. Whereas even a relatively weak wizard could throw a street-filling fireball and sorceresses like Mandy could throw around city-block-sized enchantments on the fly, it was the work of an hour for me to fill a small room. If I was to do more with this aspect of my powers that had to change too.


    I used two points to boost the scope of my Word of Self array of powers to the second rank. Then I spent the last four points to do the same for Word of Force, raising its scope to the third rank. Immediately, I felt all my powers that affected an area expanding significantly. This had little impact to purely personal effects as long as I used them, but slotting them into a Forcefield? That became several times easier, faster and less costly. Fields for the powers I had more experience using could now easily fill three or four small rooms at once, or a single large one like the manor''s living room. There was also a small gain in control simply because the individual skills wouldn''t strain to spread across a volume, letting me focus more of my attention into detail work.


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 99.6164%; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 38.0572%">Name: Maya Wennefer</td>


    <td style="width: 62.024%">Bio: female human, 17y11m23d</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 38.0572%">Known skills:


    </td>


    <td style="width: 62.024%">Points: 0/218


    </td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 38.0572%; border-style: none; vertical-align: top">


    Action and Reaction, Chronal Leap, Empowering Regeneration, Eyebeams, Focused Invulnerability, Force Adjustment, Force Awareness, Forcefield Creation, Forced Acceleration, Greater Proximakinesis, Immutable Force, Instant Action, Lasting Force, Retributive Defense, Super Suit, Spatial Distortion, Spatial Leap


    </td>


    <td style="width: 62.024%; vertical-align: top">


    Attributes: Might 50, Agility 25, Reason 6, Vigilance 24, Ego 25, Luck 7


    Word of Force: Power IV, Control III, Versatility IV, Number of Effects III, Range II, Scope III


    Word of Self: Power IV, Control III, Versatility III, Number of Effects III, Range II, Scope II


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    It might not be the leap in sheer power that would let me punt giant monsters into orbit, but artifice should be much easier. Just to test things out, I combined Forcefield Creation with Proximakinesis to pull a lump of soil from the front porch, through the foyer and living room and finally into the bathroom where I''d made my lava pool. The pull was faster, easier.


    I amplified vibrations in the lump of clay with Force Adjustment, then filtered its constituent substances with Greater Proximakinesis as they melted, then boiled away. There was only half a percent of Titanium in the mixture by mass, but about ten grams should be enough for three rings. I tore the compounds apart by lowering their binding forces via Force Adjustment then extracted the pure Titanium and shaped it. It was faster, not nearly as costly in effort as it would have been before. Alternating through multiple different fields and tracking their overlapping effects was easier with sharper, more streamlined senses, making shaping the rings as easy as writing a letter of the alphabet.


    Three lustrous silvery bands floated over a pool of lava, like that scene from my favorite movie from more than a decade before. Now, what enchantments were appropriate for three overconfident kids about to have their first solo mission?

 Interlude V: Tokusatsu

    In the darkness of space a thousand miles above sea level, enhanced sensors and hacks into various satellites parsed through terabytes of data for patterns. Patterns of violence. Patterns of sudden large-scale change or movement. Patterns of energy not explainable by natural effects. Even outside the two incursion points in North America, thousands of such events were reported daily; the magical levels of Earth had been slowly rising for most of a year and were rapidly approaching another major milestone.


    Experts from another world would say that "magical levels" were a misnomer. Magic was not energy, or a substance, or a force, but an idea, a pattern. The warning system had not been programmed with this knowledge and it would not matter if it had for it didn''t really track magic, but its results. Said programming picked up and correlated indicators of the use of magic, and while magic itself could not have "levels", its spread and frequency of appearance did.


    *Priority Alarm*


    *Macro-scale arcane bioform detected*


    *Threat level Bravo*


    Disrupted tidal patterns, movement of heat sources and marine life forms, eldritch weather activity, seismic activity, data from planet-based military sensors were all put together, overlapping phenomena analyzed for correlation and causation before results were pooled and an initial evaluation was made.


    *East Pacific Ocean, projecting vector...*


    *Apparent destination: 35¡ã41¡ä23¡åN 139¡ã41¡ä32¡åE, ETA 2580 sec*


    Initial evaluation made, the system followed the standard protocols for delegation of interception and emergency response. Hacked tactical and strategic networks would be tapped, far less capable systems directed at the potential threat through anonymous info drops, altered operating procedures, falsified communications or, if the threat algorithms calculated the necessity, outright hijacking of assets. Before actions were taken however, predictive algorithms calculated potential results on the available data and evaluated them according to the system''s programmed directives.


    *Designation: Tokyo. Strategic Value: Absolute*


    *Evaluating Orbital Strike...*


    *Accounting for target size, velocity, arcane intensity, atmospheric and oceanic cover...*


    *Success chance per attempt 37%, Military casualties: 0, Civilian casualties: 455.000 - 508.000*


    *Conclusion: results unacceptable. Orbital strike aborted*


    Having judged use of the asset both unlikely to work and against its programmed directives, the system searched for further potential assets in engagement range.


    *Evaluating DF-53 ICBM strike...*


    *Accounting for target size, velocity, arcane intensity, atmospheric and oceanic cover...*


    *Accounting for macro-scale bioform documented energy absorption...*


    *Accounting for local weather patterns and evacuation protocols...*


    *Success chance per attempt 14%, Military casualties: 0, Civilian casualties: 320.000 - 380.000*


    *Conclusion: results unacceptable. ICBM strike aborted*


    Long-range, first-strike interception having proven unacceptably costly, the system began searching for more conventional counters. However, conventional units had a much higher travel time. Given the target''s recorded speed and estimated time of arrival, the list of units that could intercept before the macro-scale arcane bioform made landfall was short. For that theater of operations, it came down to a single major unit with a secondary list of minor ones.


    *Evaluating interception, US 7th Fleet + special assets*


    *Accounting for macro-scale bioform documented resilience, mobility, natural weapons*


    *Estimating conventional ordnance effectiveness and accuracy*


    *Estimating tactical ordnance effectiveness and accuracy*


    *Accounting for US 7th Fleet combat effectiveness @73% due to prior MSB engagement*


    *Success chance 43%, Military casualties: 29.432, Civilian casualties: 220.000-250.000*


    *Warning: no repeat attempts possible + inconclusive outcome


    *Conclusion: results unacceptable. Fleet interception aborted*


    The evaluation of smaller units did not change the results beyond a few percentage points. None of the conventional assets had sufficient firepower to present more than a distraction and their inclusion only served to increase military casualties in the end. While unmanned conventional assets did not cause additional military or civilian casualties, they were also insufficient to guarantee a successful interception.


    *Strategic and Conventional asset failure. Evaluating Special assets*


    *Local Special assets negligible. Recommend international asset deployment*


    *Threat level insufficient for full mobilization*


    *Recommendation: maintain Sanctuary protocols*


    *Analyzing orbital Valkyrie insertion effectiveness...*


    *Success chance 31%, Special casualties: 10-15, Civilian casualties: 220.000-250.000*


    *Amending simulation: adding Special asset Golden Knight*


    *Success chance 85%, Special casualties: 8-10, Civilian casualties: 220.000-250.000*


    *Analyzing causes of civilian casualties...*


    *Amending simulation: adding Special asset Red Queen*


    *Success chance 87%, Special casualties: 0, Civilian casualties: 0*


    *Recommendation: deploy Special asset Golden Knight on primary target*


    *Recommendation: deploy Special asset Red Queen on environmental disruption*


    *Recommendation: deploy Special assets Valkyries on sheeple herding*


    xxxx


    As far as spaceships went, the Pachyderm blew everything else mankind had ever built out of the water. Easily a hundred times more massive than even the Saturn V rockets, the solid mass of enhanced alloy, automated turrets, capacitors both mundane and arcane, robotics and habitation models was also several orders of magnitude tougher and was usable more than once.


    What it wasn''t was fast. Despite all Jerry''s technopathy and Amanda''s sorcery could do when combined, accelerating a ship that had exceeded the size of most supertankers remained problematic, especially since the Pachyderm''s power core was providing energy to far more major systems than just the engines. While normally this would not be an issue in day to day operations when the ship was just a base and launch platform for both people and long-range artillery, emergencies that required a direct deployment were another matter entirely.


    "I still think I could take that thing," the gorgeous redhead standing next to Jerry''s command chair complained. "If the previous three attacks were any proof, they''re not nearly as tough as their magical footprint would indicate. The Americans took out one with their fleet, even!"


    "And suffered considerable damages in the process. The monsters are improving," Jerry told his girlfriend - and wasn''t that a surprise? A bit over half a year before he''d been just a nerd chugging along through high school. Now he was the world''s number one expert in magitech and his better half was the most gorgeous redhead in the world. "Someone is building those things and their designs are upgraded with every subsequent attack."


    "All the more reason for me to take point," she argued. "You would be taking a huge risk. What the damn machine proposed has never been tested and I don''t like that eighty-seven percent success chance. It implies a thirteen percent chance of failure." Jerry knew that Amanda was right and if pressed would admit to being nervous about the whole thing. Despite his meteoric advancement, being cool in a fight had never become his strong point. On the other hand...


    "What about the civilians, then? The attacker is throwing off enough uncontrolled magic to wreck the weather merely by moving. Engaging it in a fight will make it worse." He stared at the redhead sorceress that had somehow accepted him as a partner, doing his best to look and sound determined. "Both of us can beat that thing. Only one of us can do weather control and the first waves are already hitting the shores. You know what we have to do, Mandy."


    "Well, I don''t have to like it," she grumbled, arms crossed. The Pachyderm, a mass of over three hundred thousand tons as of the latest upgrade, immediately registered a four Kelvin temperature drop. An unearthly chill filled every corridor, every nook and cranny, a mere side-effect of Amanda''s displeasure. "If you die, I''m bringing you back just so I can beat the stupid out of you, understand?"


    "Yes ma''am!" Jerry mock saluted; the temperature dropped another two and a half Kelvin.


    "Oh, get over here," the redhead demanded, pulling him out of the Captain''s Chair with the level of superhuman strength Jerry doubted he''d ever develop. A split second later, impossibly-red lips locked on his own far more natural ones and a raging storm of sensation burst through his body. It was as if all of the energy drained from the massive spaceship had just shot through him. Or maybe that was just how being thoroughly kissed was supposed to feel. He would not know; he''d never kissed a girl other than Mandy.


    "For luck," she whispered next to his ear then vanished in a flash of fire, leaving him alone on the bridge. Well, almost.


    "We''re not failing this," he told the mutated chicken that had become the Valkyries'' mascot. On its perch next to the Captain''s chair, the magical bird blinked then burped a small burst of fire. "Yeah, yeah, everyone''s a critic." He sat on his chair and got to work. Unlike Amanda''s instantaneous teleportation, there was a pretty involved procedure to go through before he could unveil his latest project.


    *Reactor output increasing*


    *Potentia coils engaged*


    *Metacapacitors at 88%, temperature nominal*


    *Energy bus supercooling activated, superconductivity state in 5... 4... 3... 2... 1...*


    *Radiator array disengaged.*


    *Nullspace heat sink active. Operational time limit: 2200 seconds*


    The entire spaceship rung like a gong then rapidly began to heat up as he redlined power core while simultaneously disconnecting from the bulky heat management modules that maintained the ship''s heat balance during normal operations. The vastly lighter and more compact heat sink designed for combat operations would handle the load. It was a simple array of heat pumps integrated into a superconductive sphere built around a massive cooling spell. Amanda had used her magic to somehow create an area of negative heat that could absorb any excess theoretically indefinitely. Practically, the magic started to fluctuate after a bit over thirty-six minutes with the power core redlined. That was six minutes longer than Jerry would need.


    *Habitation module disconnected*


    *Primary life support disconnected*


    *Main sensor array disconnected*


    *Defensive systems module alpha disconnected*


    *Orbital stabilizer disconnected*


    *Deep space engines disconnected*


    *Engineering module disconnected*


    *Lab module disconnected*


    *Training and gym module disconnected*


    *Orbital dock module disconnected*


    *Separation from Sanctuary Station complete*


    Originally, Jerry had built the Pachyderm as an exclusively orbital craft. It could not land by itself, it could not maneuver quickly, its overall abilities in anything other than being a space base had been strictly limited. In exchange it could accomplish its purpose of a base and orbital support platform exceedingly well. But then the phenomenon many designers termed ''feature creep'' had struck. As days, weeks and months passed and its crew expanded, Jerry found himself adding more and more of his inventions, the craft''s configuration changing and being expanded practically every night.


    Project Golden Knight was by far the largest and most ambitious addition, outmassing all the other modules combined. It had taken months of effort, tremendous amounts of magical enchantment and help not just from Mandy but every other member of the group to finally complete. If it worked though, the group would finally have a second heavy hitter, one not limited to orbital strikes and remotely taking over other people''s technology.


    The problem was that the original ship had not been designed for work inside a gravity well. It might be solid enough and its engines powerful enough to maneuver within the Earth''s biosphere, but most of the first-generation modules were too bulky and unwieldy in anything approaching a combat situation under standard gravity. Jerry''s powers allowed him to reconfigure technology in minutes, but as the ship had kept expanding it had eventually exceeded his ability to repurpose it not just during combat but even if given an entire day to work.


    Thus the separation. By reconfiguring the various modules in two overall groups, one consisting of every space-only module and the other of those capable of terrestrial operation there was no longer need to adjust the whole ship. The half of the ship that would remain in space had become Sanctuary Station while the more combat-oriented parts could deploy by themselves.


    *Engaging gyroscopic stabilization*


    *Deploying pilot inertia equalizer*


    *Aligning bow-wave plasma separator*


    *Activating vibration nullifiers*


    *Retracting secondary sensors*


    Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.


    *Polarizing observation windows*


    *Engaging atmospheric impulse module*


    *Calculating re-entry vector. ETA: 180 seconds*


    Acceleration struck Jerry like a giant''s hand, pinning him to the Captain''s chair. Its suspension creaked under the weight of several tons but easily held; it had been designed with far greater stresses in mind. The detached craft assumed a re-entry angle that would make any NASA operator blanch before starting a meteor-worthy descent. The famous space shuttles had taken half an hour from the beginnings of their orbital descent to coming to a stop on the ground. More modern spaceships were, if anything, even slower on the descent to minimize the mechanical stresses and friction heat involved and increase the longevity of components and the safety of the crew. Inversely, the Golden Knight aimed to do the drop at a mere tenth of the time, increasing air friction and mechanical stress by two orders of magnitude. Even with all Jerry''s powers could do to enhance both the materials and the craft''s performance that would have been a lethal proposition without additional measures. The craft would survive with moderate damage, but Jerry would be reduced to a carbonized husk even if he somehow survived upwards of seventy gravities of acceleration.


    To prevent instant barbecue, a series of safety measures had been built. The first to deploy was an egg-shaped shell around the Captain''s chair that quickly filled up with a transparent, low-viscosity, non-Newtonian fluid. Matching the density of Jerry''s body it effectively eliminated acceleration differentials and absorbed most of the mechanical shocks, leaving him comfortably weightless. There still was an odd sense of full-body vertigo caused by density differences between Jerry''s own organs but the tidal stress was minuscule compared to what the acceleration would have caused and easily handled by his minor superhuman physique.


    The second countermeasure was basically an energy cannon on the craft''s nose. It fired upon the bow-wave of plasma generated by hypersonic travel, splitting it before it could affect the craft and generating the equivalent of a supercavitation bubble. The roaring plasma sheath of re-entry was repelled just enough that it did not touch the majority of the craft''s outer surface, minimizing both turbulence and heat transference. It was a device that had been used in experimental spacecraft before the advent of powers, one Jerry had copied and enhanced in effectiveness many times over to make rapid insertion without frying the crew possible.


    The third safety feature was a network of pipes carrying non-Newtonian fluid throughout the craft''s hull. They were meant to absorb the tremendous vibrations generated by both atmospheric turbulence and the craft''s own engines. Without them, Jerry''s eardrums would have burst, his eyes would have cried bloody tears and moderate bruising would have formed in all his organs, while a normal human would have been torn apart. They also doubled as a secondary cooling system and increased the effectiveness of the craft''s armor in a fight.


    But for all the dangers, all the safety measures he''d had to build, nothing beat the awesomeness of coming down from the Heavens on a pillar of fire to do battle with the enemies of mankind...


    xxxx


    Japan had been one of the few places in the world to remain entirely untouched by superpowered violence, no matter how much some people had been obviously trying. There had been no plagues of monsters like in the Americas, no warlords like in Africa, no cults worshiping Eldritch beings similar to those proliferating in Europe, no unexplained mass disappearances barely hidden from public awareness by an increasingly paranoid government as was happening in China and India. For the time being the island country was at peace and Mandy was determined to keep it that way.


    Following her argument with Jerry about the plan, the red-headed sorceress had appeared over the sea just outside the city of Tokyo in a crackle of red lightning. It wasn''t that she did not understand the necessity of their respective roles, but hated that Jerry had to take such risks. The frustratingly brave boy refused to stay behind in emergencies despite being so very fragile compared to most other supers. It was a point of contention in their relationship that had led to many arguments in the past ever since he''d nearly died using an unarmored exoskeleton in monster-infested sewers because his main armor would not fit... but Mandy would not stop him from doing as he willed. As much as it often frustrated and sometimes scared her, Jerry could make his own decisions and had chosen to join her in being a hero. That she would never change, not in a thousand years.


    But now she had a lot of frustration to work off, so she scowled at the cause of half a million future civilian casualties and readied her magic. The storm front rapidly approaching over the horizon was an unearthly purple and green, the result of chaotic, uncontrolled magic in enormous quantities. At the storm''s heart the sea churned and boiled as a massive black shape as large as a hill and as hot as a wildfire leaked that magic as it tore its way through the ocean. Jerry had been right; the monster was larger than those in previous events. It was large enough that its moves created miniature tidal waves, waves that rapidly grew as they soaked in the wild magic leaking from it.


    She snorted in contempt. However much magic someone had put into the monster, its enchantment was shoddy and barely functional, the work of an amateur... or perhaps many amateurs. One of the few explanations for what her magical awareness was picking up was a massive group working involving dozens, possibly hundreds of casters that only had a rough idea of what they were doing. Recruitment would also explain the rapid increase in the magic they were working with and would increase their threat priority. Collaboration could lead to powerful results as her own group knew well.


    Unfortunately, she wasn''t there for the monster. A near sixty-foot wave approached her at sixty, maybe seventy miles an hour. In response, she latched into its kinetic energy with her magic and pulled. The wave lost velocity rapidly and within the span of half a mile collapsed to nothing. It was far from a simple energy drain though. Instead of directly negating the wave''s energy and momentum, her spell redirected it into a second energy tap and the sea began to freeze.


    Where sorcery was the use of free-form magic through an application of will, wizardry was the use of existing forces and situations to bring about greater results. In that way it was similar to technology, but unlike technology it used magic to initiate phenomena instead of tools. Unlike sorcery it relied on knowing what you were doing but also unlike technology it used magic to bend or break natural laws just enough to guide results to the desired outcome. Magic transformed the kinetic energy of the wave into transfer of the thermal energy of the ocean with an efficiency no thermal pump could achieve, moving dozens of joules of heat for each joule of initial kinetic energy.


    Amanda raised her arms to the sky and lightning thicker than the average skyscraper connected the ocean to the clouds above. The entire storm jolted like a movie missing several frames as she combined sorcery and wizardry to apply the energy of the sea upon the storm in exactly the right points that would start a chain reaction of rapid changes. Where sorcerers had massive power to bring what they willed to existence but relied on their own strength, wizards had little power of their own but could greatly multiply it through existing resources. Combining the two was the obvious next step and Mandy had been studying The Wizard''s tricks for months now. Little by little, the magic within the storm was brought to heel even as the more mundane energies were dispersed.


    A second wave came in, stumbling into the invisible network of enchantment she had erected. Instead of moving on to smash into the shore, level buildings and snuff out thousands of lives, it gave its energy to power mechanisms that would stop worse disasters to come. More lightning crackled upwards and the Eldritch weather weakened a little bit more. Even a mundane storm had the power output of an atomic bomb every second; one with magic could be far more destructive. All but the most powerful of supers would fail to affect it, either lacking the raw power or the sheer scope in their abilities to affect hundreds of square miles. With a combination of sorcery and wizardry that was not required; Amanda was beginning to turn the storm''s own magic against it.


    More energy taps formed over the course of the next couple of minutes, drawing upon the storm''s own kinetic energy and momentum to form further energy taps that would draw even more power and multiply in turn. Even with the main threat still leaking energy like a hundred reactors the storm''s advance had slowed and she calculated would abate entirely in another few minutes. A weather control spell of enormous magnitude reduced to less than ten minutes of fairly routine ritual work. Unfortunately, they did not have ten minutes.


    The ocean swelled in something more than a wave and a vast shadow moved underneath. A four-fingered arm the size of a skyscraper broke through the surface, swinging claws the size of train cars faster than the speed of sound through the space the sorceress had been a split-second before. Mandy diverted as much power as she could to her flight without compromising her weather control, dodging the attack by a fair margin.


    Then the rest of the giant monster rose from the depths. It had a head and torso like a titanic deep-sea worm, a gaping maw a city block across followed by a tubular frame covered in overlapping scales larger and thicker than main battle tanks. From that central core jutted two flexible, boneless arms akin to the tentacles of some mythical cephalopod, but ended in the aforementioned mostly reptilian claws. The supertanker-sized monstrosity was obviously neither the result of natural evolution nor the steady enhancement of innate magic but a carefully engineered collage of features from wildly divergent animal groups. More than that, its tremendous bulk was not flesh alone; lines of metal crisscrossed just beneath the translucent surface, forming a flexible beehive of inorganic conduits that somewhat resembled a stupendous, three-dimensional circuit board.


    Realizing its initial attack had missed, the monster turned to track Amanda''s flight with neither eyes nor ears and aimed repeated blows at the sorceress. With most of her power tied up to fighting the storm, she could not strike back at it with fire and lightning no matter how much she wanted to. They had cut their intervention too close; any delay now would allow the storm to make landfall, causing significant damage to the city.


    But just because she couldn''t use enough power to significantly threaten a real-life kaiju did not mean Amanda had no options. She diverted less than a hundredth of the magic she was using against the storm, then shaped it into a quarter of humanoid constructs tied to herself. In moments, said constructs appeared hundreds of feet away from her and from each other, all of them visually, electromagnetically, audibly and magically identical to herself, at least to surface observation. The monster was not particularly sophisticated; whatever base instincts, rudimentary intellect and limited programming it might have, it could not distinguish between Amanda herself and her four decoys. All it saw was additional threats and reacted accordingly.


    For the following several minutes the dance of kaiju, decoys and magical girl took a meandering course through the sea as the ginormous attacker tried to claw, bite, blast and scream at perceived threats while she kept on her efforts against the storm above. Soon enough though, she found out that whatever she did, however distracting her efforts might be, the monster slowly moved towards the shore, all her attempts to divert it eventually failing.


    That was fine. Handling the monster had not been her goal. As a tremendous roar one far louder than even the kaiju itself split the skies, the redhead sorceress smiled. Reinforcements had arrived.


    A mass of metal and advanced alloys almost as large as the monster itself struct the shallows between it and Tokyo City like a meteor, causing its own tremendous splash and adding more energy to her weather control spell. Two hundred thousand tons of gleaming golden plates shifted and rearranged, reconfiguring into the shape of a futuristic knight the size of the Eiffel Tower...


    xxxx


    Jerry had just dropped from orbit in a spaceship of his own design, powered by magic and nuclear energy. Said spaceship was also a giant death robot with an array of supertech weapons he had also designed and built himself in violation of at least a dozen international treaties while co-leading a secret organization of superheroes that fought villains with powers and governmental corruption all around the world. The organization''s second leader was one of the most beautiful women in the world, a powerful sorceress and his girlfriend and they were in the middle of fighting the bastard offspring of an alien space worm and Godzilla before it could stomp the city of Tokyo to the ground.


    He promptly concluded that yes, God did exist, and His plan was as ineffable as it was awesome.


    The worm-like kaiju roared threateningly, sending off shock waves powerful enough to shatter windows a dozen miles way. In response to that terrifying display of sheer power, Jerry pressed a red button. It had been intentionally made larger and flashier than it had to be, had been left unlabelled and the red paint on it was not quite dry; exactly according to plan. Also according to plan was the powering up whine of the energy weapon module built into the Golden Knight''s right arm.


    The monster was the size of a large skyscraper, with armor plates thick and tough enough to laugh at conventional missiles backed by flesh tougher than steel and enough superpowered muscle to crack a mountain side in one blow. All of that proved woefully insufficient against the white beam brighter than the noonday sun that blasted its way through a couple miles of air then curved a gaping, steaming trench through the monster''s armor and flesh - one large enough for a bus to drive through. Ichor, viscera and molten metal exploded in the beam''s passage, sending the monster reeling momentarily.


    The kaiju responded immediately. Half a dozen teeth the size of locomotives crackled with black lightning inside its gaping maw, then shot out yard-thick beams of nothingness that annihilated all matter and energy in their path. They struck the Golden Knight''s stupendous breastplate, cratering the reinforced alloy. Had Jerry''s tech relied on matter and energy alone, the Null Lances would have pierced all the way through and into the Golden Knight''s power core. The resulting explosion would have killed everyone in the Tokyo metropolitan area, the kaiju included. But his artifice had been reinforced by magical abilities many times above what mere physics indicated its resilience to be, stopping the attacks only a couple of meters deep. Non-Newtonian fluid dripped from the relatively tiny holes like so much blood but otherwise the Golden Knight remained intact.


    Jerry aimed through the command seat''s mind-machine interface, then pressed the button again. Another blindingly bright beam struck the monster in the side of its titanic maw, drilling through chitin, superpowered muscle and cybernetics all the way through. The weapon Jerry was currently using had been built to fight a far vaster, deadlier enemy compared to which the kaiju was barely a footnote. Where its original target had suffered only the equivalent of cigarette burns, the kaiju looked like a piece of meat someone had worked over with an industrial plasma cutter.


    The problem was, whoever had designed and was probably directing the monster was by no means stupid. For one, the monster''s gaping wounds were slowly closing, indicating a level of regeneration. For another, when faced with long-range firepower far greater than its own the monster dived underwater. Jerry fired again and again at its underwater shadow, but water was an excellent cooling medium and almost as good ablative armor; the majority of his beam''s power was spent on the waves rather than wounding the rapidly advancing behemoth.


    About a minute later, the monster burst out of the water, towering over the Golden Knight in the shallows. Its half-megaton mass slammed into Tokyo''s defender like the mother of all battering rams. That proved to be a mistake. Having studied simulations of the fight as well as videos of previous kaiju attacks, Jerry was prepared for the ambush tactics. The same move had been used by a previous kaiju against US Navy ships. Unlike them the Golden Knight had arms, and each arm was armed with a piezoelectric-driven, noncrystalline blade eighty feet long. The kaiju''s own momentum drove the diamondoid edges through its scales and deep into its own flesh.


    In a move practiced over ten thousand times in various simulations, Jerry had the Golden Knight press its opponent back, raise its right leg and kick out. Magnetic actuators the size of small buildings whined, tens of thousands of miles of artificial muscle fiber strained, and the monster found itself being launched back.


    At almost the same time, tiny gunports on the upper part of the Golden Knight''s torso opened, in the span between its shoulders and neck. Barely noticeable compared to either the giant robot or its opponent, they spewed a torrent of tiny missiles in rapid-fire sequence. Barely the size of a backpack and massing only a hundred pounds each, the missiles struck the reeling kaiju with negligible force... then detonated as powerfully as a few thousand tons of TNT each. Modeled after man-portable nuclear demolition charges from the Cold War, the missiles had been specifically designed for giant, slow targets in mind and magically enhanced for penetration. The left the monster with gaping, horrendous wounds any one of which might have been lethal to a human of equivalent size.


    But the giant monster had been designed for battle. Despite its mangled appearance it was still largely combat-capable. Worse, the multiple nuclear detonations had temporarily blinded the Golden Knight''s sensors. While Jerry used his powers to repair them, the giant worm pounced. Its maw clamped down on the robot''s right arm, seeking to disable its primary weapon. Its claws swung wildly but with tremendous force, repeatedly cracking against its armor plates and denting its frame in many places.


    Jerry responded with a melee slugging match as well as firing all of the Golden Knight''s close-in weapons. Smaller lasers and missile tubes embedded across its frame blasted crater after crater in the Kaiju''s body, pitting superior firepower against its regeneration and coming slightly ahead. Chitinous plates were blasted off entirely, muscles were seared and torn, cybernetics were slagged and limbs were mangled. In turn the titanic, magically and genetically engineered monstrosity crushed the beam weapon, crippled the Knight''s main arm and nearly ripped it off, bent its right knee into uselessness, dug holes and cuts into twenty percent of its armor plating, damaged the sensors in its head and partially compromised its overall structural integrity.


    The slugging match continued in that vein for one minute, then two, then three, with Jerry''s supernatural piloting skills sorely tested as more and more damage was piling up. He was continuously triggering his repair power, the magical ability that in any other situation had made his combat designs unfairly resilient. Had it been a smaller-scale fight or a less intense one against a less powerful opponent a victory by attrition would have been assured. But the kaiju had its own regeneration ability and had been empowered by either hundreds of supers working together, or a super as powerful as Jerry himself upgrading and empowering his work for months. Either way Jerry''s magical reserves were running out and the battle''s outcome was still uncertain.


    That was when the monster surprised him with its tactics, doing something the simulations had not accounted for; it disengaged. Its guiding intellect had decided that the brutal slugging match had compromised enough of the Golden Knight''s ranged weaponry that at long range its regeneration could outpace any wounds it would be dealt at range. Jerry crunched the numbers in his mind and cursed; his unknown adversary was right. Then he noticed the difference in their surroundings and smiled; the storm had stopped.


    A titanic lightning bolt, as bright as his beam attack''s earlier but a crackling purple-red fell from above and grounded itself through the kaiju''s body. Monstrous muscles were locked by the current and as the lightning bolt kept going and going for an unnaturally long time, the kaiju fell into uncontrolled, near-helpless convulsions.


    "Hey Jerry?" came Mandy''s voice through a magical sending. "I looped its own leaky magic back into itself. Am I awesome or what?"


    Yes. Yes she was. Grinning like a loon, the nerd-turned-superhero advanced with decisive steps, the blade in the Golden Knight''s off-hand both lengthening and glowing a shiny gold. It was a new power he had developed lately, one that multiplied both the cutting power and the shininess of edged weapons. Maybe he could have eked out a few percentage points more efficiency if he had focused entirely on the former but often style was just as important as getting the job done.


    With a thousand-foot-wide swing, the Golden Knight beheaded the incapacitated giant monster, then retrieved its head. He''d get Mandy to incinerate it and the body both; with regenerators it was the only way to be sure. Adrenaline fading as the battle was finally over, Jerry collapsed on his Captain''s chair.


    Tokyo was safe once more. They had won.

 32: To Boldly Go

    Devon Island - or Tallurutit in Inuktitut language - was the largest uninhabited island in the world. Situated north of Canada, its surface area of over twenty thousand square miles made it two thirds the size of Ireland but unlike the greenest place on Earth it was a barren wasteland. In fact, with the exception of the polar oasis in Truelove Lowland, it was entirely barren; a field of jagged red-black rocks and permafrost sparsely covered by snow in the western half of the island, an even dome of ice most of a mile thick covering the eastern half. If not for the thick blue atmosphere and sparse cloud cover I could have believed I were back in the Martian ice caps.


    Its surface and conditions resembled that of Mars so much - more than any other place on the planet - that several countries around the world had built research stations specifically for researching the conditions and preparing people for a future mission to the Red Planet. Despite this, the island still did not have any permanent population whatsoever and according to the information package we had been given any active science stations at the time had been evacuated for reasons both real and fabricated.


    I''d studied that particular information package as well as anything I could find online for several subjective days. That along with my habitual constant use of Force Awareness led to the discovery of the first problem almost as soon as we reached the island''s shores. As we flew over the Truelove Lowlands, several discrepancies between the information package, what my supersenses were picking up and what my eyes could see became evident. I wasn''t the only one to notice them, though the kids had no way to see the real issue.


    "Nice flowers," Cindy pointed out as we flew over a field of gold and silver petals. "I didn''t know something that pretty could grow in these freezing conditions," she obliquely complained as she huddled and shivered, hands under her armpits."


    "They normally can''t; these aren''t normal flowers," I told her drily. Unlike her and to a lesser extent Gabe, I had no problem with the temperature of two hundred and fifty Kelvin, a rather mild one for winter so far up into the arctic circle. I redirected our force-bubble transport towards the nearest patch of ground free of abnormal growth and had us land.


    "This place sucks!" the teenage brunette huffed. "The one pretty thing we find in a rocky wasteland as far as the eye can see and it''s some mutated magic crap. We should get back to the Osprey."


    "Weren''t you complaining that the Osprey was far too loud and far too slow?" I asked as I uprooted the closest golden flower with a forcefield and examined it both physically and with my senses. The golden color was due to a strange oily sheen coating the petals, a thin layer of viscous, honey-like liquid with golden flakes suspended in it. As in actual metallic gold, as far as my senses could tell. "Besides, we agreed to scout ahead before the camera crew would land. We wouldn''t want them to get eaten by a Grue before they can film your public debut, would we?"


    "Ugh, speak for yourself," Gabby muttered. Unlike Cindy, the Hispanic boy had dressed properly for the cold in multiple layers of insulating cloth, faux leather and fur in a suit designed to mimic northern Canadian styles. "I grew up in Mexico City: the last time it snowed was before I was born. I thought that base in Alaska we''d been hiding in was bad but this is far worse." He jumped in place repeatedly in an attempt to warm up until Cindy slapped him in the back of the head. "Hey! What was that for!?"


    "Are you a sword-wizard or not?" she demanded after her patented eye-roll. "Make us a sword of fire so we can warm up already!"


    "Oh, right," the boy muttered and blushed in embarrassment before a floating great-sword made up entirely of glowing hot molten metal appeared between the two teenagers.


    "Idiot," Cindy huffed rather more affectionately than I''d been expecting and huddled next to Gabby, basking in the sudden warmth. "Hey Teach!" she suddenly called out. "Aren''t you a Florida girl? How come you aren''t freezing with the rest of us, especially with how... low-cut your costume is?" She glanced at my sleeveless, shoulderless top with obvious envy. "Is it some secret power? Could we learn it before our bits freeze and fall off?"


    "Just natural awesomeness and self-confidence," I shot back while examining a silver flower. "Oh, and acclimation over time and exposure. Superhuman durability means we won''t be hurt by the cold, not that we can''t feel it. Our brains just need time to get used to what''s normal for us, much like some people will happily swim in subzero temperatures while others think the sea''s cold even in the summer." The flowers were identical down to the shape of the petals and the strange oily coating except for the metal flakes being silver in the second one. Pure metallic silver, which was obviously the result of magic as much as the gold was. Neither metal was abundant enough for the flowers to have drawn them in any significant quantity through the soil; they had to be creating them magically much like Liz did with her powers. Maybe if-


    "This is a waste of our time," Mark suddenly spoke up. "There''s nothing here but a bunch of useless plants. We should move ahead to the research sites and investigate the scientists'' disappearance." The black boy had his usual scowl in full force and kept kicking at the flowerbed. Silver and gold flowers tore against his idle attacks, stone crumbled and gravel was launched dozens of feet away, but that was all his venting managed.


    "Is it?" One eyebrow rose and my lips turned upwards in a challenging smirk. "Look around more carefully. Tell me what''s wrong with this picture." Well, apart from the silver and gold production that in a simpler world would have made even the most clueless person drool at the sheer profit potential.


    "What''s wrong?" the boy snarled. "What''s wrong is that we''re freezing our asses off on a fool''s errand. That we''re pandering to the press when there''s a hundred problems we should be handling. That we''re playing with flowers in the most remote place on Earth when we should have been at least training, improving to be able to deal with supervillains, not doing... whatever this stupidity is!" He kicked at the flowerbed more forcefully this time, tearing a few dozen flowers at once. "Maybe Cindy is fine with sitting around and looking pretty but I''m not!"


    "That''s because you suck at it," the brunette shot back, stretching to show off her skintight pink catsuit with a Hello Kitty image and the legend ''#1 Schr?dinger''s Cat'' stretching over her chest in rainbow glitter. "All you wear is military fatigues, all you do is brood and read about guns, all you think about is training. When do you have fun?"


    "Um guys..." Gabby tentatively muttered.


    "The world was invaded by man-eating monsters, cultists and terrorists got superpowers, over a million people are already dead and all you think about is looking pretty," Mark sneered at Cindy. "We''re at war, or did you miss the memo?"


    "Oh excuse me for not wanting to become a brooding wind-up soldier," the girl shot back over her shoulder, faking more interest in the flowers than the guy she was arguing about. With her back turned, she worked into making a crown of flowers in silver and gold as if Mark''s words were not worthy of her attention. "There," she said, wearing the crown primly. "A bit of cuteness. Now the trip is not a complete waste, exactly as you wanted."


    "Guys!" Gabby interjected more forcefully but was ignored again.


    "Since when did you care about anything other than being a bitch to everyone for no reason?" Mark spat back angrily. "Or did you forget the half dozen instructors you terrified, several hundred people you played malicious pranks to, hitting Gabby and I every day for over a month?"


    "Well maybe if I hadn''t been conscripted into the military whether I liked it or not, maybe if I wasn''t treated like a bomb about to go off from the beginning, maybe if most of the people on base hadn''t been uptight assholes obsessed with discipline I wouldn''t have done any of that," the teenage brunette countered with equal vehemence. "Uptight assholes like you who wouldn''t know fun if she danced naked before you."


    Gabby blushed furiously, and from how Mark''s face glowed in infrared and his blood rushed beneath his skin he was blushing too. There had to be a story there, because Cindy was exactly the sort of person both capable and willing to flash a bunch of soldiers and get away with it. It wasn''t as if anyone on base could have stopped her before I came around, which begged the question; how had General Rinaker managed to conscript her? But that was a mystery for future-Maya to investigate, because things in this remote Canadian wasteland were heating up.


    Dozens of root-like strands shot out of the flowerbed, complete with silver and gold blossoms, and wrapped around all three of the kids. Even Cindy got wrapped up in them despite her usually insurmountable elusiveness, probably because her argument with Mark had taken up the entirety of her attention. Had she subconsciously dismissed her other iterations by accident? Not even my senses could tell but I suspected that was the case because she didn''t immediately flicker out of the mutated plants'' grasp. All three teenagers had multiple strands wrapping around their limbs but Mark had more than twice as many as the other two, possibly because he''d been kicking the flowerbeds. Was that an indication of built-in instincts, rudimentary intelligence or pre-programmed response? I guess we''d find out.


    "And that, kids, is why we pay attention during a wilderness mission to investigate suspicious disappearances," I told the three, making no move to get them out of the situation they had put themselves. I sat in mid-air instead, waiting to see how they would handle things.


    xxxx


    "And that, kids, is why we pay attention during a wilderness mission to investigate suspicious disappearances."


    Stupid, stupid, stupid. How had she let the damn flora get a grip on her, Cindy wondered. Mark''s "perfect little soldier" routine wasn''t something new but for the first time in a good long while it had made her blood boil - figuratively at least. The dumbass should come off his high horse because he wasn''t perfect any more than the rest of them. Soldiers did as they were told and kept their mouths shut, probably because they knew they did not know enough to say anything smart. Mark on the other hand thought he already knew everything and was always happy enough to say so to everyone who would listen. It was the second reason Cindy could not stand him, other than his enjoying the military life. Did he not realize they''d been strong-armed into working for the government?


    She tried to split to more instances and only managed to flicker in the same space. With these mutant flowers wrapped around her limbs all the potential locations she could have been were all in the same spot, every single one of them tied up. Worse, the root-like tentacles were strong, stronger than steel. Physical strength was Cindy''s weakest area by a fair margin and while individually the roots were no match for her, a dozen of them combined meant trouble. On the other hand, she didn''t need to force her way out like some meathead.


    The brunette split into as many different instances as possible under the circumstances. They all mostly occupied the same space but each and every one represented her if she struggled a little bit differently, if she was more or less lucky, if she stumbled into and tried out different ideas to get free. In the same moment the teenage girl took every possible different action, followed every potential timeline that branched from the same starting point at the same time.


    In some instances she made a mistake, turned the wrong way in her struggles, lost a tiny bit of leverage and the roots got the upper hand. In others she slipped on the permafrost, or was tripped, or was distracted by a root poking her eye; the moment she fell down losing the struggle became a foregone conclusion as more roots reached and wrapped around her before she could get up. In some, the roots lucked into a winning strategy by wrapping around her neck. With her hands indisposed, nothing preventing that one strand from squeezing down, she weakened quickly; even superhuman constitution would eventually succumb to being choked. All those instances she dismissed the moment it became clear there would be no winning outcome.


    Those, however, were far from the only possibilities. With her on even footing with the mutant flowers, the majority of instances had them on even footing. A minor disadvantage here, a minor advantage there, but nothing special in and of themselves. The actual benefit of having many inconclusive repetitions of the same events was information; each Cindy had her own senses, her own brain, could make her own observations and conclusions but all of them shared what any one of them knew. It took her barely a second to understand how the plants fought, another to map the patterns to their reactions and which of them had the greatest impact in the struggle one way or another. Only half a second more to combine everything into plans because even restrained she had enough instances their collective brain power outmatched a supercomputer.


    This was where the third type of possibilities came in. Instances where she happened to pull just right for a strand to miss, for an arm or a leg to loosen the flowers'' hold just a little. Others where different mutant flowers got in each other''s way, got tangled up, or just didn''t do as well as they could have. Instances where luck was on her side and many of their attacks failed. In theory, with enough repetitions it was possible for every attack to miss or fail against a given Cindy, or all of a Cindy''s efforts to succeed. In practice, there was only so far she could stretch her power. Shoot a target at random at a thousand feet while blindfolded? Done. Shoot the gun at an angle so it would bounce off a bird''s beak two miles up, drop and ricochet off a soldier''s helmet, go through the window and splash into the General''s coffee while she had the alibi of being off base? She''d tried repeatedly; no dice.


    But as long as she could gain any advantage at all, it was enough. She deleted instances where her struggles were going nowhere and then continued from instances where she had succeeded, splitting more possibilities for the next step. First step, a root missed. Second step, an arm got a bit loose. Third step, she leveraged prior successes to slip out of a wristlock. Fourth step, her foot twisted enough to tear one of the smaller roots. This was made vastly easier when she knew how the plants would react and had planned the steps in advance through her prior observations. Little by little she was getting free and the plants, assuming they had a brain at all, would not see how it was done beyond her seeming incredibly lucky and implausibly competent.


    She''d get out of this and then kick Mark in his everywhere for getting them caught.


    xxxx


    "And that, kids, is why we pay attention during a wilderness mission to investigate suspicious disappearances."


    What a bitch, she wasn''t even helping them deal with the attack...


    A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.


    ...no, no, she was right. Arguing with both their leader and among themselves in the middle of a mission was a huge error of judgement and now they were suffering the consequences. Mark could admit as much if only in the privacy of his own thoughts. And just in case some mind reader or remote observer had access to them anyway, fuck off assholes! Brains were private property!


    He pulled his right arm with all his strength, some of the alien flowers snapping or losing their grip but more crawling up at him from all over the flowerbed. Well, right or wrong he was in a right pickle. Presumably Captain Barbie - who did not hold any actual military rank whatsoever - was using this relatively non-lethal incident as a teaching moment and to evaluate their performance and would intervene if things got much worse, so there was no reason to panic. As soon as they either passed or failed the test she could get them out in literally zero time, so why was he having a hard time convincing his body to stop flailing and think clearly? He should focus. It was just one more training exercise, easily solvable as long as he maintained control.


    Resolution made, he banished Cindy from his mind and all her antics. His impotent fury every time he got pranked, or tripped, or pushed for no reason whatsoever with zero evidence or witnesses it had actually happened. His anger at the lost time every time his books and personal effects had their positions changed, his shoelaces tied together or removed, his notes turned into paper airplanes during lectures. His rage that despite being stronger, tougher and faster, despite having an offensively overwhelming power, he had never managed to lay a single finger on the vanishing annoyance either during practice matches or in the few ambushes he had tried during the early days of their time together. OK, the bitch didn''t show one iota of discipline or interest in serving her country. Did she have to take it out on the rest of them?


    With a roar and tapping into the horsepower of three locomotives he ripped his way out of the plants'' grip... then promptly slipped, fell face-first to the ground and was mobbed by more plants before he could do anything else. Right, locomotives moved on rails, not broken rock crawling over with bullshit alien flowers. He tried to calm down and think things through before he made the situation any worse for himself.


    OK, those alien roots were tough. In retrospect he should have noticed the first time he kicked them without the whole flowerbed exploding instead with only a couple of them getting torn up like normal flowers getting kicked by a normal person. Was that what Wennefer had meant when he told him to find what was wrong with the picture? If so, he''d totally missed it. Super-strength was still new to him, he was not used to how the world reacted to his actions, let alone how it should react and what that said about his surroundings. Being shown how short-sighted and oblivious he was, Mark resolved to do more practical training in the future. But to do that he first needed to get out of this Charlie Foxtrot.


    Mimicking airborne platforms was right out. Most of them had next to zero mobility or firepower on the ground and while he could use them in weapons combinations he had never actually tested them in such situations and didn''t know if their drawbacks would negatively affect him in this terrain. He really needed to make more practical tests with the options he already had instead of just memorizing more vehicles to mimic, but hindsight is always twenty-twenty. That his superhuman eyesight was better than that was just irony adding insult to injury.


    Similarly, sea vehicles would not work well. Not only might they suffer similar issues with airborne platforms, but Mark''s power didn''t give him access to all ships, or even most. His mass limit for mimicry was low enough that the vast majority of warships was right out. What was left was patrol boats, the smaller submarines and destroyers and various civilian vessels... which would not amount to much. Oh, they''d still add their significant mass and firepower to any combination, but with zero additional mobility they weren''t efficient choices unless all he wanted to do was tank the damage and wait to be rescued. Screw that bullshit!


    That left land vehicles. Trains were, as he had seen, problematic. Their horsepower still added to his strength which would let him burst out of the alien plants easily enough, but they actually made his mobility and balance worse since he was nowhere near any train tracks. On the other hand, if he could find a sufficiently stable vehicle to counteract that issue, that extra mass and horsepower should help.


    Whatever he decided to do he had to do it fast; the flowers had completely tied down his arms and legs and now were wrapping around his torso, squeezing hard enough that he was beginning to hurt. Immediately, he shifted two slots to mimic GT1s, a Russian train engine that was the most powerful non-electric locomotive ever produced. With over eleven thousand horsepower and two hundred and twenty thousand pounds tractive force added to his own strength per engine, suddenly all the plants on him felt a hell of a lot more brittle. The added durability of a little over seven hundred tons of bulky steel construction did not hurt either.


    He flailed around, tearing through the plants easily enough. His balance and overall stability had become bad enough though that he couldn''t actually stand. That called for the trusty old M1A2 Abrams tank. Powerful treads for good traction, a wide and low-profile hull for stability... he could move again! With the crack of shattering rock he burst out of the alien roots'' grip, then sprayed them with mimicked machine gun fire and explosive shells from a hundred and twenty millimeter gun... which didn''t do much against a field of flowers tougher than steel and loose and flexible like a fishing net. The conjured bullets actually bounced!


    Well then, how about something different? He dropped one of the locomotives, feeling the now wildly attacking plants getting relatively stronger as he lost access to its immensely powerful engine. But then it was replaced by the M67A2 "Zippo", the last purposefully designed flamethrower tank in US service. A torrent of napalm shot out at the flowerbed as Mark aimed to obliterate that annoying eyesore.


    The flowers went mad. Instead of burning up like kindling as he''d expected, they resisted the red-hot flames that clung to them. Silver and gold blossoms shone like lightbulbs as the entire flowerbed woke up. Where before only the alien plants in the group''s immediate vicinity had attacked them, his use of incendiaries made the soil for at least half a mile boil and writhe as tens of thousands of square yards of alien vegetation crawled towards the source of the attacks at the speed of a fast jog.


    Eyes going wide, the teenage super frantically hacked at all the tendrils that kept attacking him. They needed to get free right now! If a few dozen tendrils were giving them trouble, the entire tide that had woken up would bury them via sheer mass alone.


    Their only chance was to get airborne in the next few seconds...


    xxxx


    "And that, kids, is why we pay attention during a wilderness mission to investigate suspicious disappearances."


    Unlike his two teammates, Gabby had not been lost in their usual arguments. They''d been repeating the same song and dance since almost the first time they''d been put in the same room and out in the wilderness wasn''t the time to hash out arguments that wouldn''t, couldn''t be resolved any time soon. Besides, things had been getting better since Maya had turned up. A super that not only had joined with the military but actually fought in battles before was someone Mark would listen to despite her dressing like a pin-up model. A super that could take all of them in a fight with absurd ease and had an irreverent, independent streak as wide as the Atlantic was someone Cindy could respect - even look up to if Gabby was any judge of character. With the two worst-clashing members of the team opening up and behaving to a point, things had been actually improving.


    As for Gabby himself, he''d always gone with the flow. Said flow getting towards his team actually becoming a team was something he could get behind. Maybe, just maybe, after many trials together, lots of talking and maybe a bit of therapy they could possibly be friends? It would be nice to have some, after everything that had happened. He did not regret getting powers - being a superhero was totally awesome - but they could be so very isolating. Not just being different because he could do things others did not, but the physical changes. Normal people didn''t, couldn''t understand.


    But for now, flowers. Even a split-second''s delay had let whatever alien, mutant, magical growth this was get its tentacles on him - because Gabby was not fooled. For all the pretty flowers, their innocuous plant-like nature, their deceptively calm initial appearance Gabby knew tentacles when he saw them. All those hours on the internet were finally paying out now that he was a mighty Defender of the Earth... or at least a trainee to eventually achieve that dream.


    Gabby might not be the strongest of supers, he might not have broken powers that made him untouchable, but unfortunately for the plants he already had a magic sword out and a flaming one at that. With a mental command, he directed the magical weapon towards the nearest tentacle holding him down. The edge of fire bit down and barely severed a single strand. Not enough. He needed to make the blade more powerful. Instead of struggling towards freedom physically, he just poured more of his power into the construct. Some experimentation after the wraith debacle had revealed that he didn''t need to make his swords larger in order to make them more powerful. It was just harder to push the magic into them but with enough motivation...


    More intrusive tentacles crawled up his limbs; he felt more than sufficiently motivated.


    The magic sword turned from fire to light, a harsh white radiance that was painful to look at. Its next swing sliced through a whole bunch of tentacles, leaving the severed edges sizzling as they practically melted. He quickly directed it to hack all the grabby alien/demon things he found apart even as he poured more and more power into the weapon. While having multiple weapons might let him strike at many targets at once, splitting both his power and attention like that wasted too much of both. Better to have a single powerful weapon he knew would be effective and keep a small amount of power in reserve for utility and emergencies. By the time he got out of the initial entrapment the sword looked more like a silver thunderbolt than anything else.


    Looking around, the Hispanic boy found out he''d not been the first to make his escape. While Mark frantically blasted the rapidly increasing number of tentacles assailing them even as he tried to free his legs, Cindy had somehow completely escaped her own bonds and was even now dancing and contorting her way through an increasing number of attempts to grab her again, managing to remain completely untouched.


    Gabe... just watched. In his defense, the brunette was very pretty as all supers tended to be and cut an alluring figure in that tight bodysuit. He was a teenage boy, damn it! When such a spectacle was freely offered, he was contractually obligated to watch or forever turn in his bro card. His magic sword could defend him automatically for a few seconds so no harm do-


    "Ouch!"


    A rock somehow struck Gabe''s forehead with such force that not only did he feel it, it was going to leave quite the bruise too, superhuman durability or no. He looked around for the source of the unlikely projectile; what he saw made his heart beat like a drum in terror. An enormous wave of alien tentacles taller than a three-floor house and as fast as a Marathon runner was rapidly approaching from all around them. If they did not leave immediately they were all kinds of screwed and not in a fun way.


    He looked around again, taking in all details and evaluating all avenues of escape. Not many presented themselves; all he could think was to fly out of here. Except... swallowing a hell of a lot of nerves, Gabe made a split-second decision. He immediately started creating a second blade enchanted for unrestrained movement and flight, slamming all his available power into it. At the same time he made his way towards the one possibility he could see.


    "Cindy, use this!" he shouted to be overhead over the roar of the alien tentacle tidal wave and Mark''s rapid fire high explosives. The moment the girl noticed him, he thrust the sword''s handle in her direction and hoped this worked.


    The brunette understood his intent instantly and perfectly. She grabbed the sword''s handle... then immediately dropped it with a hiss and an angry glare in his direction. Wha- oh, the handle had to be a bazillion degrees with how much power he''d poured into the blade.


    "Sorry! Sorry! My mistake!" he placated the understandably vexed girl before one of her legion of copies could invisibly kick him between the legs, or something. Then he grabbed the last dregs of his power and added a freezing effect to the sword''s hilt. The effort left him gasping, the only reason he hadn''t been grabbed by the tentacles again were both his swords rapidly rotating around him and slicing anything that tried apart. "It should be OK to use now."


    Giving him an unimpressed look, Cindy somehow grabbed and pulled the sword out of its rapid rotation with the same ease and swiftness she''d managed to still avoid all attacks despite getting distracted by the sword burning her. Then the girl smiled widely, raised the weapon into the air... and every single alien tentacle in a rapidly widening ring fell apart into multiple sizzling, blackened pieces.


    The ring of hacked apart tentacles included Mark a split second later, freeing the black boy to open up with his powers unimpeded. Instead of standing his ground and fighting as Gabby had expected him to do, Mark immediately rose to the air.


    His cry of "Fly! Fly damn it!" was barely audible over the roar of the titanic tentacle tide, now only fifty yards away and looming taller than most residential buildings.


    Shaking in terror, Gabby bit his lip hard enough to draw blood, put one hand around Cindy''s waist and with his other gripped the handle of his flying sword so tightly his fingers hurt. Less than a heartbeat later, his right arm was almost dislocated as the magical implement pulled the two of them up faster than a missile. They cleared the edge of the alien tide with only a few yards to spare, an infinitesimal fraction of a second separating freedom from being buried alive and... suffering whatever alien tentacles did to people.


    "OK, apology accepted," a voice like spun crystal rang next to his ear some undefinable span of time later, pulling him out of his shock.


    He blinked, looked around, found a heart-shaped face with laughing hazel eyes, red lips stretched in a vulpine grin and framed by silken brown locks dancing in the wind. Oh, it was Cindy. They''d both miraculously survived... and he was still carrying her by the waist. Well... he hadn''t been stabbed yet, so all was well?


    "Cat got your tongue?" she demanded in her usual, familiar tone then confused him by sounding serious and... actually grateful? "Thanks for the save, too."


    "..."


    "Ah, you''re still in shock." She nodded as if that explained everything - no it fucking didn''t! - then turned towards the third member of their team. "HEY DUMBASS!" she shouted so loudly it was like she was speaking with a thousand voices. Given her powers, she probably was.


    "What?" Mark demanded with his usual scowl. At least some things were consistent.


    "Aren''t you gonna blast the plants with some heavy ordnance now that we''re out of the blast radius?" she asked, pointing at the still writhing mound of alien biomass trying futilely to reach them from the ground. "We don''t have all day! This isn''t even our actual mission!"


    "Screw you, Cindy!" Mark shouted back.


    "Only in your dreams, Soldier Boy!" the brunette retorted and her again familiar mannerisms calmed down some of Gabby''s utter mortification. His face felt so warm and close to exploding he had to look like a fucking tomato; there''s no way anybody would possibly miss it, not from practically on top of him. He... he wanted to disappear... except he couldn''t. Cindy could not fly. If he let her go not only would she immediately notice and know why it had happened, she''d also drop into the alien tentacles... and nobody deserved that. The only option was... was... to pretend nothing was happening at all?


    Grumbling, Mark followed Cindy''s advice and unloaded a huge amount of imitated bombs into the blindly waiting alien mass. Hundreds of explosions, each one powerful enough to level a good sized building, blasted the thing apart in less than half a minute. Then its remains were drowned in a literal lake of napalm. They had... they had actually won!


    Good. Now they could land and he could flee somewhere else, somewhere where Cindy wouldn''t find him for at least until the end of the year. His life probably depended on it - maybe he should create a teleportation sword?


    "Great!" a woman''s voice shouted from just behind their backs, making all three of them jump in mid-air. Gabby barely managed to hold on to a momentarily flickering Cindy and almost certainly only because the girl let him. "You kids handled your first real ambush reasonably well," Maya told them with satisfaction as they hovered. None of them had noticed her arrival - or so Gabby assumed from his teammates'' expressions. In fact, he did not remember even seeing her during their very brief, very intense battle.


    "However, you did do a number of mistakes," the amazonian blonde added and started explaining every mistake they made then and there. NO!!! Instead of quietly fleeing, Gabby would have to listen to all his blunders being exposed to the others immediately...


    ...and he was still holding on to Cindy with the girl showing no signs of wanting to leave.

 33: Where Others Have Gone

    The Bell Boeing V-22 Osprey was pretty neat. A tiltrotor aircraft which meant the propellers at the tips of its wings could tilt between horizontal and vertical, it was capable of vertical takeoffs and landings in pretty much any terrain that could physically support it and quite a few that couldn''t. It could carry a surprising amount of cargo or troops for its size, fly quite far especially with aerial refueling and it looked pretty swell with those odd twin-tails.


    It was also pretty damn slow for a plane. Faster than a helicopter - who isn''t? - but slower than most commercial flights, let alone any proper military planes. For someone with my speed flying on it was the equivalent of walking instead of riding on a Japanese bullet train. That was the main reason I''d gone ahead with the kids to "scout", not that I''d ever tell them. Who uses something that slow to move around when they can get anywhere much faster, or make their own transports?


    Problem the first, neither the reporters nor the soldiers making up their escort were willing to fly Air Maya, either being carried along or using my newly patented Sky Bubble. They preferred a too-loud, too-cramped, six-hour trip instead of maybe two minutes in a sub-orbital slingshot with all the nasty effects of acceleration nullified.


    Problem the second, this was actually the fastest conventional way for people to get from the US to Devon Island. Most planes couldn''t land on the island and the only available landing strip was too close to the station that had gone dark to be trusted. Helicopters were even slower, and the less said about the speed of naval vessels the better.


    Problem the third, with magical terrorists being a thing everyone was worried about attacks and any conventional plane was something even a newbie super or some idiot with a rocket launcher could shoot down. Thus they were asking me to play escort. As in, fly by their side with nothing else to do for six freaking hours when the need for it would not exist if I used my powers. Because the plane had been declared off-limits to power use. How was I supposed to protect the passengers then, fight off any attackers and hope nothing they did actually hit? Not that I could intercept them early, because I was supposed to remain within a thousand feet of the craft.


    "Yeah, I''m not doing that," I told the gal imperiously insisting that I consign myself to indescribable boredom. "These orders stop me from doing my job in the dumbest way possible." Plus what to her would be six hours in a cramped aircraft to me would be several subjective days of doing fuck-all.


    "Right, that''s insubordination then." Seeing her too-serious facade twisting up first in indignation and anger then satisfaction under those military fatigues clued me in that something was wrong. "I''ll have you arres-


    "You can''t be serious," I said, looming a little over the much smaller, dark skinned woman. "I don''t take orders from you," from anyone that dumb, really, "and resorting to empty threats won''t change that. Stop wasting everyone''s time."


    "Listen here you upjumped tr-"


    "Hold that thought," I said as she froze instantly and completely mid-sentence. Before any other idiots could make a mess of things, I flew off the hangar, left the military airstrip near the borders of Canada behind and reached the vacuum of space in a few seconds. From there it was a matter of half a minute to do a sub-orbital skip all the way to Nevada, descend upon Area 52 and fly into the General''s office.


    "The Captain was directly assigned by you, wasn''t she?" I asked without preamble. To his credit, the old man did not react to my sudden arrival beyond raising an eyebrow at me. It was the same expression of challenge I tended to use, identical down to the exact fraction of an angle his head was tilted.


    "You couldn''t have used the phone?" he asked.


    "Getting here was faster than waiting for the staff to connect me." It was an exaggeration, but only by the barest of margins. "Plus this way there''s no option of people saying you are ''busy'' or you not picking up."


    "That this is factually true or so close it makes no difference has quite a few people losing sleep at night," Rinaker told me, closing his eyes for a second or two then opening them up to glare mildly. "You do not want to scare them any further."


    "Then some people should stop being idiots and some others should stop meddling," I retorted. "That Captain was staring at me as if she was seeing a useless recruit she could play like a banjo. When that didn''t work, she became irrational. She either had a problem with me, or no clue how to handle supers." I crossed my arms and returned the glare. "I wouldn''t have minded if her orders hadn''t been entirely useless, a danger to civilians and she hadn''t repeated them several times while acting as if I was filth she needed to scrape off her shoe."


    "That does not surprise me. Marcia developed a... distaste for supers during the invasion when the rest of her unit gained powers." General Rinaker admitted, sounding tired. "I''d hoped this mission would help her get over it one way or another."


    "Well, it didn''t." I shrugged. It was no skin off my teeth, unless this conversation lasted longer than three minutes. "Now about the Osprey?"


    "What about it? You didn''t blow it up to make a point, did you?"


    "Nooo..." but I''d keep the idea in mind for future altercations. "It''s just so damn slow and the stupid reporters won''t use one of my transports."


    "They don''t want to fly in a literal water bubble maneuvering at a hundred-plus gravities with the only thing between them and instant death being the attention span of a hyperactive former cheerleader?" the old man mock-asked with a smirk. "Gee, I wonder why."


    "Fine, fine, they can do things the boring way as long as it''s not so damn slow." My eyes lit up as I thought of the possibilities, arms fidgeting as if reaching for that plane two thousand miles away. "I want to enhance the plane," I stated in no uncertain terms.


    "How''s that any different than the water bubble?" he reasonably argued, falling into my trap.


    "Because I did it before and nothing went wrong," referring to my last trip on a plane with him. "And because the reporters won''t realize until it''s too late."


    xxxx


    I got back to the remote airfield near Canada with at least a minute to spare, walking in with a spring in my step. Some guy that hadn''t been there before was talking on the phone with the Military Police, while several other soldiers were getting things ready for the trip and actively ignored Marcia the idiot. A couple of the bravest reporters - a freckled twenty-something guy that looked way too pretty for his own good and a slim brunette that was maybe thirty years old and had a no nonsense attitude - were examining the still immobile, super-hating Captain. ''Aversion'', my perky little backside.


    "Ah, the woman of the hour," the female reporter greeted me with as I approached. Her eyes flicked to the immobile Captain and back. "Can we have a few words before the mission starts?"


    Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.


    "Nope!" I told them after making sure none of the approved recording devices were active and all the ones that had been smuggled in were turned to slag. Then I broke the forcefield surrounding the idiot.


    "GAACK!!!"


    She promptly fell to her knees, gulping down breath after breath as if she''d just come out of a deep dive. Well, the forcefield had barely allowed her to breathe for the past four minutes or so, though it had lacked the other adverse effects of diving with limited air supply. It had also been made to collapse as soon as the woman lost consciousness, just in case the General had not agreed to my proposal quickly enough. The idiot did not know that, of course, which was why her distaste and imperious superiority had been replaced by abject terror. As for the two reporters, they were looking from me to the woman in apprehension.


    "May I have your attention please!" I demanded and everyone in the hangar, from the group of reporters, to the escorting troops, to the refueling and engineering crew did just that. "It has just been made clear that at least some of you were not adequately informed about this mission and its potential risks. To avoid misunderstandings in the future, I will now brief you on the basics. You may pay attention at your discretion."


    Everyone did pay attention at that, though their reasons were less than clear. Certainly most of the reporters had already been keeping me under observation when they thought I was not looking and most were currently interpreting the exchange between me and the Captain and reaching various conclusions. Guessing their thoughts from their reactions was interesting but not particularly useful, so I went on the moment I was sure they were listening.


    "First, this is a mission to an active warzone. Every location with confirmed supernatural activity and any hints of wrongdoing is automatically considered such. Pay attention to your surroundings, do not split the group, do as the closest super tells you. That means me. We''ll also be using an advanced craft to get there more quickly and safely." There were a few mutters, mostly of surprise from the replacement pilot, a bit of worry and only one or two snorts of incredulity or dismissal. So far so good.


    "Secondly, enemy presence has been recently confirmed. This is no longer just a photo op. If you are a war correspondent consider yourselves warned. If you are not a war correspondent, consider turning back now. Either way, while we will put considerable effort into keeping you safe we can''t actually guarantee your safety." Aaaand... none took me up on the offer of abandoning the mission. There are even a few indignant mutters and that old woman looking down on who she saw as a kid. Eh, no skin off my teeth.


    "Third, nobody can tell you what to expect. Monsters and powers are unpredictable. New threats developing mid-fight is a frequent occurrence. If there is any doubt, err on the side of caution. If under threat run back to the Osprey if you can, hide if you can''t. Do not take chances. If I tell you something is dumb you actually listen." I pointed at the hyperventilating idiot. "Out there, something innocuous-looking could kill you instantly if you dismiss it as harmless, so don''t ignore anything unusual or act as if you know best. Any questions?"


    Predictably, they all tried to talk at once. They were reporters after all. That''s why I gave them the silent treatment until they calmed down and started talking like normal people. Enchanting the Osprey took time, after all.


    "Where are the three young supers we came to film? Won''t they be flying with us?" asked one middle-aged man from the back.


    "They went ahead to ensure the landing site remains secure." More like sitting under the force dome ensuring said security and told to stay out of trouble for half an hour. But they didn''t need to know that so I moved to the next question.


    "Shouldn''t we be getting bulletproof vests and helmets for this?" a younger, more nervous guy nearly stammered. He was the one who''d reacted the most at the mention of monsters.


    "That would be counter-productive. Their weight and rigidity would slow you down and no body armor ever manufactured could stop any but the weakest monster attacks." Maybe enchanted gear would have, but my enchanting was too slow to provide significant protection to even half the group in the time we had. "That is why remaining alert and running from threats is important." Needless to say, the guy didn''t take the news well but he still did not quit. Some people took unreasonable risks for their job and yes, I was aware of the irony of me saying that. On the other hand I had come back from getting nuked once, though it had taken me months to get over the trauma.


    "Have there been any news from the research station? They have been out of contact for a week by now," asked the oldest female reporter, a middle-aged woman with a serious, even grim expression, flinty brown eyes and hair tied in a practical bun. With her practical denim attire, complete with usable pockets, she actually seemed to be taking this seriously rather the usual feel-good operations the press preferred.


    "No, not at all. From what we can tell, the station has been abandoned." I''d actually scanned the place with Force Awareness till I was confident enough to leave the kids within a few miles from it. Since this was the kids'' turn to show their stuff though, I wasn''t going to share the juicy bits. "When we get there, my team members will scout ahead while we observe from a safe distance."


    There were quite a few more questions after that, taking up the full ten minutes I''d allotted to the "interview" while I got the actually important bits done. Quite a bit slower than I would have liked, especially with Forced Acceleration making everyone seem to move and act at a crawl, but I''d promised Rinaker to not half-ass the enchantments or skimp on safety features. When I was finally ready, I had the soldiers load up the craft with our reporter cargo while I sat in the cockpit with the pilot.


    "Hey there, Captain Addams, is it?" I greeted him as I got in. "Did General Rinaker brief you?" There was a brief pause as he stared - everyone stared the first time they met me, I was mostly filtering out their initial reactions by now - then he swallowed nervously and nodded. "Great! I''ll guide you through the alterations so you won''t have to do it by trial and error." Now he was really nervous for some reason.


    "No need to worry, just follow my directions and everything will go perfectly..."


    xxxx


    "It is so quiet!" the pilot marveled as we rose to the sky at a decent rate.


    "It is, isn''t it? The forcefield that makes it tougher also muffles the sound," I explained, rather happy at how the Maya Osprey 0.8 was turning out. "Now watch your altimeter and speed indicators; it''s time to switch to horizontal."


    "What?!" He did check his gear and blinked. "Five hundred knots? That''s definitely a malfunction, the Osprey can''t fly that fast." He still made the transition to horizontal flight with ease that came from long experience, then tried to find what was wrong. Too bad that several other indicators were significantly off.


    "No, it''s correct. I just upgraded the engines." And they were working perfectly.


    "Upgraded them how? It''s now saying we''re going Mach two at thirty-five thousand feet! Turboprops are physically incapable of something like that!"


    "Yes, it was an interesting puzzle." As it turns out, the way propellers provided thrust meant they dropped in efficiency the faster they turned until air resistance became prohibitive. Actually turning them faster with a force effect would have ruined the engine''s internals, which were kinda needed in far too many ways for the craft to function. "The solution was to make the turboprop part not actually matter. Instead of producing thrust by interacting with the air, there''s now a force effect providing thrust proportional to the prop''s rotations per minute. Said thrust is a lot higher than what the prop would give and air resistance is not an issue, which is how we''re going faster." Of course, the engine itself still needed air to function, which is why an air compressor effect fed it at higher altitudes.


    "But... that''s not..." the pilot sighed. "Ma''am, could you just tell me how the... Osprey handles? I''m... trusting you that it won''t explode because the General asked me to, but I''m not comfortable with it."


    "Don''t worry, it''s simple. Forty newtons per rpm, air resistance beyond the craft''s max weight is negated." I pointed at the speed indicator. "Above half power it''s like we''re a missile with increasing acceleration, to a max of one gravity and no max speed. We just hit Mach seventeen, by the way."


    "And what if we want to slow down?" Well, at least he was still thinking instead of panicking.


    "There was a reason I didn''t negate air resistance entirely..."


    In the end, it took us another ten minutes to finish what would have been a six-hour trip because the pilot wanted to take things slow and avoid crashing into mountains.


    Eh, the collision invulnerability would have handled it.

 34: And Really Messed Up

    By the time the pilot was confident enough to fly the modified Osprey, we were already flying over Canada. Bypassing the relatively crowded airspace of Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal and Quebec City, we crossed over New Brunswick and entered Quebec proper. The verdant green of one of the wildest forested lands in the world spread beneath us, occasionally interrupted by the dark gleam of many lakes and the white of snow and ice. Soon enough we slipped through and away from the more populated areas and into the true wilderness of the North before turning to fly over Hudson Bay.


    In a curious interaction between my basic forcefields, the enchantment intended as a sound nullifier, the collision invulnerability and the basic properties of the Osprey''s alloys, the plane had turned out all but invisible to radar detection. Even its own sensor systems had been somewhat reduced in range and accuracy, the radar waves'' wavelength distorted by the side effects of the enchantments'' interactions. It was something for me to look into in the future, but for now we had to fly far from established passenger plane routes as a precaution against accidents. My Force Awareness remained better than any radar ever built but the pilot was not feeling confident enough to fly on my directions through crowded airspace. Since he''d been more than accommodating to everything else I decided not to press him. It wouldn''t cost much time in any case; Canada was far less crowded than most countries.


    A few minutes later we passed by Mansel island and Southampton island, leaving Hudson Bay behind and entering the Northwestern Passages. From there we crossed over Baffin Island, second largest of the arctic landmasses and almost as large as Texas. We got pretty close to the coastal town of Arctic Bay then turned northwest. Devon Island was only minutes away so we cut the engines and began our descent and deceleration. While the modified Osprey had hit a good two thirds of the space shuttles'' re-entry speeds there was neither a bow wave nor sheath of superheated air to worry about as physics and forces were warped by magic, but we still needed to slow down before we could land.


    The Osprey could have handled the couple gravities worth of deceleration even before its enhancement but fortunately for everyone onboard but Yours Truly, all but the mildest deceleration was handled by the prototype inertia dampener. The forcefield applying to the Osprey''s interior was not really an inertia dampener because inertia was a manifestation of mass and not something that separately existed and could be adjusted by my powers. How the field actually worked was by spreading out acceleration forces evenly across the occupants bodies and equipment instead of them applying on just the points of contact between the occupants and their seats or any other surfaces. There was a bit of leak-through because its precision was not perfect and there was an upper limit to the total force it could handle, but for a crew of thirty anything below a hundred gravities should be fine.


    Devon Island appeared over the horizon, a stretch of barren wasteland over a hundred miles wide, the left half covered in ice, the right a field of reddish-brown broken rock so very similar to the fields of Mars. Or at least it should have been. The closer we got, the clearer the slight haze over the whole island became to see. It was less like smoke or mist and more like the light had grown a few shades dimmer. Since the near-polar illumination had not been exactly strong to begin with, the haze made a bigger difference than it would have in a southern land. And unless my senses were malfunctioning, the atmospheric disturbance had grown much stronger in the half-hour since the kids burned that field of mutated growth.


    We turned away from the glaciers and the single centuries-old abandoned settlement in the East and flew towards the Haughton impact crater. About thirty million years before, a meteor a good mile in diameter had struck there, creating a crater fourteen miles in diameter. It was a relatively shallow and worn depression compared to most other large craters in the world and in any other place would have eventually formed a lake. But Devon Island was so devoid of water sources and annual rainfall that the crater was mostly a barren basin of jagged rocks with a bit of ice at the bottom. Or at least it should have been.


    Mutters, exclamations and calls for cameras were heard from the cabin as the reporters saw their first large-scale supernatural phenomenon. The light steadily dimmed the closer we got to the crater until by the time we were above the landing site the area was well into twilight. The crater itself was a lake of thick black mist with a green and purple aurora, the obvious source of the darkness, but worst of all was the sky because the stars were moving in an eerie, almost hypnotic undulation.


    Whatever the source of the strange phenomena was, the kids'' recent actions seemed to have woken it up.


    xxxx


    The actual landing site was just a cleared rocky plateau devoid of life, soil, or even dust. A good half-mile from the research station itself, it was still covered by the visibly outlined dome of my powers as they kept the alien dark smoke at bay. Whatever the light-absorbing substance was, it crept out of the crater and formed a thin layer over the ground like the fake smoke of B-movie special effects. It should have been cheesy and fake but was really ominous and for anyone who had lived through the Invasion like I had the atmosphere seemed downright malevolent.


    The Osprey went through the force dome unimpeded just as planned then landed with barely a thump. We got off quickly, the reporters excited at more evidence of the supernatural they could film, the soldiers nervous. As for me, I was more than a little angry. Whatever the CIA had been doing in this place, they had managed to induce the same warped environment that had plagued my home town during the Invasion. The mist had not spread out enough to cut visibility anywhere beyond the crater itself but it was already scrambling communication signals and presumably satellite observation since the General had no useful information to give us. The total lack of earlier warning signs except for the signal loss meant that someone or something was actively covering their tracks and had been at it for a week, only dropping concealment when several people with strong powers had come to investigate.


    "Hey there, Boss," Gabby greeted me, the other two following just behind him. "Things have started to look really spooky, eh?"


    "Yes," I tersely agreed, fists clenching. For a moment I considered abandoning this whole dog and pony show, leaving the kids and the even more fragile mortals under the force dome then venturing out at super-speed and slaughtering all the monsters that were certainly breeding in that crater.


    ...no. The kids needed the experience and wielded a lot more power than I had in the early days of the invasion. They needed to see how dealing with a thinking mind behind the darkness was entirely different than battling mindless monsters and the reporters needed to show the world that the darkness existed and that heroes fought against it. If what all the signs pointed towards was here we''d be killing several Stympalian Chickens with one blow.


    "Come here you three," I ordered and for the first time in all our days of training they all did so without a word - not even Cindy threw one of her usual snide remarks. "Put these on." I opened my hand to reveal three simple metal bands gleaming under the alien illumination.


    "Teach! This is so very forward," Cindy mocked but it fell flat, the joke chocked by the unnatural mist that filled the many square miles of crater just beyond. The kids examined my gifts in silence for a few moments before Gabby and Cindy put them on. Mark on the other hand still looked at his own ring with suspicion.


    "What does it do?" he demanded with his usual scowl.


    "It makes it so I can find you with my powers far more easily than normal. It binds you up in some protections so that you won''t die horribly at the first ambush. It can bring you to safety in emergencies." Well, not exactly, but I doubted they''d agree to wear them if they knew everything the rings could do and how.


    "Neat!" Cindy chirped, momentarily forgetting the gloomy atmosphere or that they were here to search for the crew of an entire research base who had gone missing. Before she could add anything else, I interrupted.


    "What they don''t do is make you invincible." Because you always had to make that clear with teenagers; most of them already thought they were invincible even without magical artifacts that helped ensure their safety. "They are for emergencies and they can''t save you from everything, so you''ll have to rely on your own abilities just like you did earlier."


    "Ew, will there be more tentacles?" Gabby asked, a glowing sword taking shape by his side. Maybe he''d dismissed his earlier weapons to conserve stamina or whatever resource his powers used, but hopefully he''d learn he needed to be armed at all times.


    "Who can say?" Certainly not the super with advanced senses that could see through barriers. "You stick together, remain vigilant and rely on each other and you should survive." And if something unexpected happened, I''d intervene. "Are you ready?"


    They said yes, of course. Everybody always does the first time.


    xxxx


    "This is so spooky, guys," Gabby muttered as they approached the research station. He was already so sweaty even his palms were slick, and it had nothing to do with the environment. The two magic broad swords floating by his side hummed ominously in reflection of his mood and the much shorter blade in Cindy''s hands gleamed as eerily as the strange mist at their feet.


    "It''s not spooky, it makes total sense," Mark countered. "Whoever is running things here noticed we took out his sentries so they are applying electromagnetic warfare to deny us visibility and communications, area denial to make navigation slow or impossible and psychological warfare to impact morale." He muttered some more about tactical jargon that Gabby could make neither head nor tails of, then picked up a rock and threw it. It sailed in a high and wobbling arc through the gloom, disappearing into the crater over a mile away. "Did you notice?"


    "Notice what, Soldier Boy?" Cindy shot back with her new favorite nickname for the black boy. "Your throw was a bit wimpy, that was all there was to it."


    "I wasn''t trying to throw as far as I could have, you insufferable-" Mark visibly controlled himself, teeth clenching in anger. Then he spoke once more with the tone one used on five year olds. "I was trying to measure visibility in the gloom. A mere five hundred feet is going to seriously mess my ranged options, not to mention the wobble."


    "What wobble?" the brunette demanded.


    "The way the rock''s trajectory wavered, I saw it too," Gabby added then looked up. "It''s just like the sky that seems to be... um... undulating? Really has me worried..." he fiddled with his magic, a sword shifting between styles and sizes by the second but not fully taking shape. He didn''t have an idea how to counter this phenomenon, after all. "But Mark, what do you mean five hundred feet? We saw the rock going into the crater and that''s way further than that."


    "That can''t be right!"


    "There''s nothing wrong with the sky."


    Both Mark and Cindy spoke over each other then exchanged looks both with Gabby and themselves. All three of them looked rather confused, though Mark was the angriest about it while Cindy didn''t seem to much care.


    "You go first, Gabe," Mark ordered and Gabby could see Cindy bristle at Mark''s taking charge. "What did you mean you saw the rock land? I threw it far enough that it vanished in the mist."


    "Isn''t it obvious? We''re all seeing different things," their more aggravating teammate said before Gabby could answer Mark''s question. "All I''m getting is a bit of gloom but both of you are a bit confused about directions and Soldier Boy is seeing a lot more mist than the rest of us are."


    "We''re on a mission, this is no time for jokes," Mark shot back angrily.


    "You don''t believe it because it''s me saying it." The girl smiled. "I can already see this mission going swimmingly, guys."


    "That''s because you''re an untrustworthy bitch, Barnes," the black boy hissed and rose a couple of feet off the ground. Gabby would bet anything that he''d just slotted the most destructive attacks his power could give him and was ready to throw down at the thinnest excuse, not that he could win against Cindy.


    "No, what I am is independent, which your rules-worshipping ass hates," she was happy to explain. "Doesn''t mean I''m lying, and I can prove it."


    That''s how they found themselves throwing rocks at a distant boulder and soon enough Cindy was proven right. Both Gabby and Mark''s throws went invariably off-target, their inability to correctly judge direction and distance at range confirmed. Cindy on the other hand got a perfect throw each and every time she tried.


    "This is bullshit," Mark said after a minute, throwing the last rock he''d picked up to the ground in disgust. "OK, our senses are being messed with but apparently, little Miss Perfect is immune."


    "Don''t worry, Soldier Boy, I won''t get us lost." She winked. "All you have to do is trust me." Then she skipped ahead, hopping from rock to rock in a zing-zagging path.


    Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.


    The two boys groaned. This was going to be a very long night.


    xxxx


    "What are they doing?" That was the big question among the reporters who were filming everything the kids had been doing for the past ten minutes with telephoto lenses. Unlike fallible human eyes or other sensors, the cameras seemed to cut through both the strange wobbling of the world and most of the mist, though the gloom was still there.


    Night vision was also non-functional, but in a rare showing of preparedness and common sense most of the TV crews had brought gear with as little electronics and digital features as possible. The issues with modern sensor technology and magic was apparently well-known in some cycles ever since the Florida invasion. The few idiots that had scoffed at such "rumors" were now angrily twiddling their thumbs as all their gear was useless.


    "They are testing the sensory distortion," I decided to be more accommodating and explain. "Like us, the three of them are affected by the magic concealing the area but have abilities that might be able to see through it." As at least one of them had discovered, though it was odd that it had been Cindy. Then again, she might only be pretending to be unaffected and instead be using some trick of her multiple existence to filter out the interference.


    "So that''s what that rock throwing was about," Madam Colvin said, not taking her eyes from her telephoto lens. I was more surprised to hear the old woman had been married twice with than learn she was both divorced and widowed during the pre-battle banter. Apparently, she had been trekking across battlefields since right after college, a bazillion years before I was born, and was famous in some cycles for surviving an assassination attempt by the Syrian government. No wonder she''d been more prepared than all her juniors, she''d had long experience with hairy situations.


    "Look, they reached the research station," one of the younger men called out, referring to the stubby cylindrical habitat near the crater''s rim that had once housed the Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station. Painted white and made of polymers and light alloys, the building was less than fifty feet across and not much taller. It was topped by a roof dome, surrounded by a few solar panel arrays and smaller outbuildings, with a tiny hangar housing the three tractor-like wheeled transports that were the entirety of the station''s fleet. Not that any other vehicle type would have lasted for long in the environment; even mountain bikes would have been ruined after a few dozen miles.


    "Doesn''t seem to be anyone there, though," someone else noted and they were right. Still, the kids searched the station and its surroundings meticulously and thoroughly, finding nothing of interest other than the vehicles.


    According to General Rinaker''s files, the building was supposed to have been evacuated of its normal crew of scientists just after the Invasion of Florida, with a joint task force between the CIA and the Canadian government replacing them in researching... well, the files didn''t actually say. Most of the pages were full of black lines, redacted to hell by government stooges caring more about secrecy and security than common sense. From the lake of ominous fog extending in a fourteen-mile-wide disc just beyond the facility, I suspected that whatever the CIA had been doing here they had done it inside the crater rather than the station itself. Call it an educated guess.


    The kids must have had a similar idea because once they completed their search of the place, they slowly advanced towards the crater''s rim. Cameras clicked and whirred as Gabby conjured more of his swords and Mark took the rear and hovered twenty feet in the air. The visual distortions had to be playing havoc with his abilities if he only barely rose above the ground. Cindy didn''t do anything obvious to prepare but the closer the group closed towards the rim, the more she flickered until the girl''s image in cameras appeared as if seen through a broken mirror.


    "Odd visuals," Madam Colvin commented from my side. "That''s the girl''s power, I take it?" She nodded to herself, not needing an answer for something that simple. "What does it do?"


    "It''s complicated," I said and got an eyebrow raised in challenge from the older woman. She reminded me of the General a bit, and I wasn''t sure it was a good thing. In any case, she was far from the only one waiting for a real answer to that question so I decided to throw the press another bone while mostly keeping Cindy''s real power a secret. After all, the dumbest thing Superman ever did was give a detailed explanation of his powers, on record, to Lois Lane. "She can be at many places and do several things at once."


    "Oh, like Shadow Clones," one of the younger reporters muttered under his breath, but I at least heard him clearly and gave him a wink. He blushed tomato red and I smiled. In that much at least I agreed with my more rambunctious student; messing with people could be fun - as long as you didn''t take it too far.


    Seeing my willingness to dispense information the press sent more questions my way but they were too late. Time was up, and what I''d been waiting for since we encountered those flowers finally happened.


    "What the fuck are those things!" a guy who''d kept his eyes on the action instead of trying to ask questions cried and everyone focused their attention to what he''d seen. Most of them blanched. One guy who had brought a more powerful telescope-sized viewer, got a good clear view at what came out of the mist and nearly lost his launch.


    The monsters had finally arrived.


    xxxx


    Mark had been expecting the ambush for some time. He''d slotted the best vehicles he could get for both maneuverability and firepower in the alien terrain, did all he could to minimize interference with his senses and ranged powers and kept an eye on the crater rim.


    For basic firepower without losing maneuverability he mimicked the General Atomics MQ-25 Avenger, one of the better unmanned drones in service that could be armed with the AGM-114 Hellfire missile, 200 lb bombs and 2000 lb bombs for a varied arsenal. In addition to the above advantages it also had a very advanced sensor system, including a composite optical camera that was less affected by the distortions.


    For horsepower, basic durability, artillery fire and handling the terrain, he mimicked the XM1202 Mounted Combat System, the still experimental replacement to the M1 Abrams tank. Then he had made a break from his usual military-oriented copying and mimicked the abilities of the latest model flight suit from Gravity Industries. The sheer maneuverability it allowed him on air compared to even the most agile aircraft was worth its abysmal capabilities in all other categories and as Mark did not need to worry about fuel, its limited flight time was not an issue.


    None of that prepared him for the grotesque, mutilated corpses jumping out of the mist from behind the team. All of them were men in ruined military uniforms, deep gashes exposing internal organs, melted faces that had partially sloughed off to reveal the skulls underneath... and the same mutated plants they had met before literally growing out of their wounds. They looked like people who''d died in a jungle full of man-eating plants and now their plant-ridden corpses roamed in search of more victims.


    Disgusting as they were horrific, it was not their appearances that disturbed Mark so but the sheer improbability of sneaking up to them, even with the warping of senses and the alien environment. He might be heavily affected by the enemy magic but Gabby could see through any fog that wasn''t part of the dense lake forming over the crater and Barnes proved to be entirely unaffected... so how had the enemy snuck up on them through ground they had already thoroughly searched?


    Unfortunately, he was not given time to come up with a working theory; the plant zombies all extended familiar tendrils to capture them. Unlike the previous fight however, all of them were now prepared for such a tactic. Gabby''s blades fended off the attack by themselves, clashing with tendrils and making the alien growth writhe and sizzle on contact even as the Hispanic boy created more of his magic weapons to cover multiple angles. The shrew proved untouchable, as usual, then retaliated not with a storm of stabbings but with a thrown rock. A single rock, that was, thrown in countless different ways by her countless instances, flickering copies of the rock thrown with superhuman strength persisting only long enough to slam on the dozen closest zombies like a literal avalanche while the girl kept the original rock at hand for further split-second duplication.


    Mark himself was already flying so he just increased his distance from the ground then shot back with the firepower of the AGM-114 Hellfire combined with the rapid fire rate of the twenty-millimeter autocannon from the Mounted Combat System. He grimaced as the vast majority of his shots veered off-course, but he''d already taken that into account and aimed for the zombie reinforcements coming up from the surrounding areas in large groups. There it didn''t matter if he missed the main target because even if his fire spread out in a fifty-foot circle, the explosions still covered the whole group with their collective areas of effect.


    "Use heavier ordnance!" came Barnes'' voice through the cacophony of battle, her trick of speaking with thousands of voices at once allowing her to be heard even over the explosions.


    "What?!" he tried to shout back but it was futile - or so he thought because the girl rolled her eyes at that annoying manner of hers, clearly noticing his confusion despite all the interference.


    "They''re still getting up after you blast them!" she explained and when he looked back at the blast sites he found out that he was right. Singed and only lightly wounded zombies were using the dust and smoke produced by his attacks to scurry off under cover then reinforce other groups in their attacks. Scowling at being deceived by zombies and that antitank missiles were proving insufficient, he searched for something that would work that wouldn''t also risk blowing the rest of his team into the giant, mist-covered crater.


    It was ridiculous. Yes, he was not getting direct hits, but he had not expected mere plants and corpses to stand up to even that much firepower. Something was wrong here, different than the attackers they''d faced in the previous fight. Was this the monster evolution Wennefer had taught them about? Had their killing the field of flowers earlier made these monsters stronger despite over thirty miles of separation? How?


    Gabby was having more luck than him, the entirely black great sword rotating around him in tight circles scything any zombie getting close to pieces. Another blade that shone a sickly green stabbed into zombies and caused them to literally melt, dissolving them to greenish goo. It took a second or two for each blow to completely destroy each plant zombie but it was more effective than his own attempts at least. Curiously, the white-hot blade he had started with was having problems even wounding the enemy, barely singing shallow cuts into their bodies. It could deal with the grasping tendrils well enough, but was proving as woefully insufficient against the corpses themselves as Mark''s own explosives. Hmm...


    Barnes''s flickering had grown entirely beyond any of her prior showings, completely filling a half-circle at Gabby''s back with short-lived copies of herself. Countless of them threw rocks at the slowly growing horde while an equal number held the line with that large magical machete Gabby had given the girl. Now she was returning the favor, keeping his rear clean of enemies while he focused on deploying his more powerful weapons. Mark would give the bitch that much; she had proven dependable every time the chips were down. But how could they possibly trust her after what she had done to them for months?


    ...no. Better to keep his head in the fight. But Gabby''s magical blades and their varying efficiency had given him an idea. For some reason the enemy was tougher than they should be... but not universally tough. Thrown rocks seemed to work disproportionately well compared to his explosions and Gabby''s fiery sword was almost useless compared... to whatever mechanism the other two were using. If the enemy''s defense worked better against conventional attacks then he needed to become unconventional.


    He dropped the MQ-25 Avenger as well as the XM1202 Mounted Combat System. For all that they were very powerful in combination, they were strictly conventional in both their methods and their weapons. For a few moments he felt naked and vulnerable, the majority of his power gone with only a measly flight suit and his baseline abilities to fight with. But the enemies did not know that, for his power had no visuals except for when he was actively firing. He had a little time until they noticed, time to be unconventional, time to use something that wasn''t exactly a weapon.


    He mimicked the Boeing Airborne Laser and wobbled as he had to adjust to the different abilities it provided. Combining its flight with that of the flight suit allowed him to retain the aerial agility and hovering capabilities while giving him a better flying speed. The converted airliner was basically useless for anything else except mass... and its oxygen-iodine chemical laser, a beam weapon that could sustain fire for up to twelve seconds at a time, had an enormous range, zero flight time, could partially correct for atmospheric disturbance and was really accurate.


    His second free slot he reached not for some military vehicle or experimental craft but for a simple industrial tool; the largest plasma cutter ever built. Its cutting beam was five times hotter than the surface of the sun and could slice through two hundred millimeter thick steel plating like a hot knife through butter. It was not a weapon but it was an energy projector and that was enough for his power to let him combine it with the airborne laser. The better range of the two, the better firing time, the better energy density and temperature, and the better beam width. He still felt naked with so little in the way of protection against enemy attacks, but now the enemies would feel the same against his... and unlike them he could fly.


    A beam brighter than a thunderbolt tore through the mist, banished the gloom like the noonday sun, and burned everything it was pointed at. Mark swept it through the battlefield, causing alien plant growth to explode at its mere touch, super-tough zombies to be reduced to ashes and blackened bone, rocks to boil and the ground to turn to molten glass in its wake. He methodically hunted down every zombie group within a thousand feet, prioritizing not those attacking his teammates - they would handle themselves - but those at the fringes of visibility or any attempting to flee. Once those were obliterated and a ring of molten rock had surrounded the area he worked his way inwards.


    The zombies - or maybe whoever was in control of them - turned frantic. Instead of trying to flee or slowly ground down their resistance in a battle of attrition, they charged as one towards Gabby and the girl. Mark scoffed; this was just a repetition of the flowerbed''s tidal assault and this time they were ready for it. The zombies might be stronger, more dangerous and a hell of a lot tougher than the plants individually, but they could not bury them in the same way those flowers could have. Gabby just made a powerful enough sword, handed it over to their teammate and she went to town as was her usual wont. Tendrils were hacked apart by flickering instances, swarms were casually annihilated in melee and those that refused to get close were perforated by dozens, hundreds of temporary copies of the magic weapon. The stragglers were incinerated a minute or two later by Mark''s beam.


    "That... that wasn''t so hard," Gabby gasped, hands on knees as he gasped through his adrenaline crash. "Maybe we could- HEY!" he shouted as the girl whacked him in the back of the head. "What was that for?" Typical, really.


    "That was just a skirmish, a test," the brunette said and stomped her foot like a five year old. "Don''t jinx things when we''ve only just started."


    "I concur," Mark was forced to admit. It wasn''t that she didn''t have a brain; she just chose not to engage it.


    "But, but there can''t be any more of them, can there?" the sword-wielder complained. "I mean, we killed hundreds of these things - over a thousand. Re-killed? Whatever, the point is that the research station could only have so many people. Even with whatever teams the spooks sent that had to be all of them or close enough as makes no difference." He shrugged. "Even if there are more they shouldn''t be in groups even close to the one we already beat so we basically won."


    "True, except for one tiny little detail, minuscule really." She pointed first at the few blackened remains of their foes, then all around them. "If these were most of the bad guys, who or what brought on the mist and the dark and the swirly stars? Because they must have had a ginormous amount of power to do all that and I seriously doubt any zombie or even large group of zombies could possibly manage it."


    The three of them looked out at the ominous, fourteen-mile-wide lake of alien mist and prepared for the worst to come.

 35: Black Growth

    "Shouldn''t we be getting closer? They''re about to enter the crater."


    One of the reporters finally gave voice to what several of them had been thinking since the conclusion of the ''Battle of Devon Island''. Yes, that was what one enterprising young journalist had coined the short-lived fight the kids had just won and from how the term was being bandied about it was highly likely that''s what would be written in the papers.


    Over the course of the past hour the press teams had been steadily splitting into two camps. The first were those willing to listen to my advice, respect the limits of the defensive force-field, let the soldiers do their jobs even if they had to abandon the best camera spots for security reasons and generally behave as reasonable adults with a developed level of caution and a healthy respect towards things that could reduce them to chunky salsa in a fraction of a second.


    Then there was the other camp; those always pushing boundaries to get the best story for themselves and their networks, those that were willing to take risks or ignore help freely given in favor of what they thought was best, those loudly making demands in the name of the ''freedom of the press'' or other such tripe and generally making a nuisance of themselves. In short, they were only stopped from being zombie fodder by the shield and my presence and did not even realize. This second group mostly consisted of the younger journalists in the group, but not entirely. The two that had seen what had happened to the super-hating pilot were firmly in the ''common sense'' side of the equation, which proved that occasionally my Old Man was right no matter how much I hated most of what he stood for.


    Ignoring the sharp stab of a brewing migraine, I walked towards where Marie Colvin and another older journalist were taking time to drink, eat a sandwich and smoke. The old war correspondent had limited herself to cigarettes but her companion had brought out a pipe and some tobacco leaf. Not the cheap ones either.


    "Those will kill you," I told them in lieu of a greeting.


    "Young lady, when you get to be my age you''ll realize that quite a few things all people do will kill us, growing old first among them," the old man responded with a half-patronizing, half-fond smirk. "Human survival is a miracle with an expiration date and ours is coming up soon, I''m afraid."


    "I wouldn''t know, I stopped ageing half a year ago," I retorted, took a seat on thin air and stretched. They both stared at the casually dropped bombshell but had too much self-control to gape as less experienced people would have. "I''m also experiencing time a couple dozen times faster than you are now, a ratio that is slowly growing along with my powers. While I''m chronologically merely eighteen, biologically I''m in my early twenties while mentally I''m thirty-two. By this time next year who knows?" I threw my hands in the air. "Maybe I''ll have lived longer than either of you. This is the Age of Wonders; nothing is set in stone."


    "So you reckon you''ll live forever?" Madam Colvin asked with the air of someone humoring a younger, more naive associate.


    "Nah, I''ll probably go down swinging," I answered without hesitation. It was something I had chosen by taking up the mantle of a hero because who knew when an enemy greater than I could handle would turn up. "So also shall I lie low when I am dead. But now let me win glorious renown," I quoted.


    "Homer''s Illiad?" the older gentleman''s bushy eyebrows tried to disappear into his receding hairline. "Color me pleasantly surprised."


    "That makes two of us," the old war correspondent whispered, nodding to herself. "This whole no ageing thing, how did it happen?"


    "Powers push you towards your ideal self and nobody''s ideal self is a corpse," I told them, then glanced towards the kids in the distance. They were finally going over the rim after their own brief rest; that was going to light a fire under the dumb group''s collective asses pretty soon.


    "Wait, I remember this," the old man said. I wanted to stop calling him ''old man'' but he hadn''t volunteered his name and he must have his reasons. Maybe I should have read more of that paperwork General Rinaker had handed over... nah. "It was in that interview you did for Oprah. About why all supers were pretty?"


    "Don''t remind me, that thing was a shitshow," and it was. It really, really was. "Too much social justice crap about unrealistic role models when being better than human is the whole point of superpowers. Besides, supers aren''t pretty because we want to be role models." And if people thought about it very few would really want to be Superman; their family and world dead, they being refugees to a world that often turned against them and having to risk their lives every so often. Being me wouldn''t be as bad, mostly because I had worked hard to keep the Earth from getting blown up. "We are pretty because deep down we''re vain, some of us more than others. But hey, if given the opportunity to be a better version of themselves wouldn''t everyone choose to be pretty?"


    Before we could continue that very interesting conversation, we were interrupted by a commotion near the defense perimeter. People were shouting at both the soldiers and each other, banging against the forcefield with sticks, rocks and their own bare arms and generally making a scene. I sighed, took another look at the kids to confirm they were fine - for certain definitions of the word - then got up to deal with whatever new malarkey the brainless half of the equation had come up with.


    There were several reasons I''d never taken up any baby sitting jobs as a high school student and this whole mission was reminding me of every one of them.


    xxxx


    "Ow! Fuck you, stupid slime, and the alien space magic you rode to Earth on!"


    Cindy was not having a good day. Yeah, there had been plenty of opportunities to needle Mark. Plenty of monsters to kill and chances to be awesome, too. But why did everything have to be so ugly? First, there was this whole wasteland of an island they were on. Barren, broken rock as far as the eye could see with no trees or other plants - alien ones aside, no animals, no people or buildings, not even mountains or hills. Just a big, empty, ugly nothing. Then it was the freezing temperature. It had to be minus thirty out there and even without wind that had become painfully cold very quickly, especially with the sun dimmed to almost nothing. She had not noticed at first because Boss Blondie had done something to warm the air near her - the better to keep the civilians from dying, probably. But the moment they''d been left to ''guard the landing site'' everything had gone South or, considering where they were, North. She knew it wouldn''t kill her but it felt unpleasant enough she almost wished she''d worn more than a pink catsuit.


    The monsters were ugly, too. The plant zombies had splashed grey-green goo everywhere each time they were cut or blasted, somehow combining the worst of both plants and zombies. Cleaning up had been as easy as letting the affected instances fade then recreating them, but that didn''t do anything about the visuals - visuals Cindy was forced to see from literally thousands of slightly varied perspectives.


    Now even the environment was against them, or was that another monster? The three of them had been following power cables and pipes extending from the research station into the crater on the thought that whatever the CIA had been doing here they''d still need water from the condensers and power from the solar panels, neither of which would work too well inside the crater itself. That line of thinking had led their little group several miles down an uneven slope of mostly mundane, bare rock with occasional patches of this sticky green jelly whose appearances increased in frequency the deeper they ventured into the thickening mist. The patches were sizzling all around them and the teenage brunette suspected they were producing whatever gases the mist was made up of. Worst of all, once they reached deep enough into the crater, everything was covered in the green slime... and the moment they''d started walking on top of it it had started spewing caustic gas.


    "Ugh, it''s like cutting up onions all over again," Gabby agreed with her, rubbing his eyes in a futile attempt to get rid of the stinging. "You think it''s dangerous?"


    "Doubt it," Mark said, having joined them on the ground for once. "Oh, I suppose normal people would have died and turned into those things we fought earlier but our bodies are much tougher than that. For us it''s not even as bad as tear gas."


    "Speak for yourself Soldier Boy, I''m dying here." And the worst part was her usual trick of shifting between instances was not helping at all here. "We''ve been breathing this shit for some time. How do we know it doesn''t add up?"


    "If you''re so worried why didn''t you turn back the moment we encountered the first slime patch?" Mark demanded.


    "And have to explain why the two of you got lost? You guys can''t see straight in this crap, remember?" That and if the two of them went in she didn''t want to be the one to chicken out.


    "We wouldn''t have gotten lost, we could have followed the-"


    "Guys, I think I''m hearing footsteps," Gabby interrupted them, making his three magic swords grow bigger. "Or rather squelching, like our boots are causing with every step into this green crap."


    The three of them went back to back to better cover all possible approaches. Visibility was so limited even Cindy, who could best see through the concealing magic, could only see vague shapes beyond a hundred feet or so. Mark had it so bad he could not risk flying or he might never find their group again. The enemies shambling out of the mists seemed to have no such problem.


    They were huge, bloated things half again as tall as a man and three times as wide. Muscles had haphazardly grown over their limbs and torso to such proportions they made even the most grotesquely hyperthyroid body builder seem lanky in comparison. Their skin was split in many places but instead of blood or the green-grey goo the earlier plant zombies had had, a sickly yellow light was pouring out of the cracks. Their heads were misshapen lumps of flesh with six eyes in all the wrong places, none the same size as another. Their single mouth was a gaping hole with no teeth, a too-loud death rattle coming out of it with each of their bodies lumbering, squelching steps.


    "Bogies! Six of them," Mark called out, hovering only a few feet above the ground.


    "Pretty sure we both noticed them before you did," Cindy couldn''t help but retort despite the obvious threat bearing down on them. Needling the boys was just fun.


    "I''m going for it," Gabby said, throwing a torrent of dancing blades at the nearest enemy. Near a dozen of his magic swords flew like arrows... only to bounce off the monsters'' hide. "Guys, they''re tough!"


    Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.


    "We can see that," the brunette muttered under her breath, sending her army of copies to stab the pair stomping their way to her with her borrowed magical blade. Her copied weapon stabbed into the two monsters too many times to count but despite Cindy''s considerable strength and whatever magic it had it only caused scrapes and cuts less than an inch deep. There were enough of them to turn her targets into pincushions but the monsters hardly seemed to care. They pressed through the range of her power, trying to wade through her countless instances but coming up short. They might be larger and stronger than her, but there were far more of her than them.


    Mark blasted one of the walking dead brutes with that terribly intense beam of his, burning a hole into its torso. A very shallow hole that though it grew deeper the more he held the beam at the same spot it was questionable if he''d manage to kill one before it reached their position. Gabby was having similar problems, his swords only superficially cutting into their foes. That he was also splitting his attacks on both of the monsters coming for him did not help. They needed to use heavier attacks, but before she could shout that out to the boys, the monsters attacked - and not in the way she''d been expecting.


    The closest of the brutes... flashed for lack of better words. Each one of the glowing cracks along its body became brighter than the sun for a split-second, spilling that sickly yellow light all over the place. It was blindingly bright, and not in the way a lightning bolt was. Cindy cried out as she felt like red hot pokers had been stabbed into her eyes. Not just her but all of her did, her instances similarly affected. Her eyes shut involuntarily and her instances collapsed reflexively before she could feel the same pain reflected in all of them.


    She shook her head, stumbled, tried to blink the afterimages burned into her retinas. The disorientation receded and she tried to take stock of the situation, then the second monster flashed like the first. More pain stabbed into her eyes, sending her reeling. The dizziness increased and a high-pitched whine was all she could hear despite the flashes producing no sound themselves. The waves of warmth she felt on her back told her that her teammates were on the receiving end of similar attacks.


    She spread a new wave of instances to scout but didn''t open her eyes herself. Either the enemy was ready for them or those flashes were automatic because they kept coming. Many of her already disoriented instances failed, catching the blasts full-on. Others managed to avert their eyes but now that the pair of brutes were among them the waves of twisted magic radiating off them at every blast could add to their shock and lack of balance whether they saw them or not. Cindy tasted bile. When had she fallen on her back and why did she feel like shit? Oh, it was the bad guys'' fault. Each time they used that unfair area stunner, it felt like a blow to the head and a kick to the gut in one big awful package.


    Enormous arms picked her up with great strength, but the bad guys had finally made a mistake. Up close and personal she didn''t need to open her eyes to know where the enemy holding her was and she still had that magic knife. She shuddered as a blast washed over her point-blank but the moment the monster had used it she burst into an army''s worth of instances. Four seconds; that''s how long it took for the pair to throw another blast, she''d kept count. In the first of those seconds the magic knife stabbed half a dozen times in each and every spot Cindy could reach. The monster''s arms slacked, most of those huge muscles reduced to hamburger. Second number two she broke its grip but instead of fleeing she blindly charged, reaching and stabbing even more of the enemy. The brute collapsed and she managed to reach its head. Then it was slice after slice after slice into its neck until it severed the monster''s spine.


    A powerful wave of pure euphoria coursed up the arm she''d decapitated her foe with then burst throughout her body. Pain and dizziness subsided just a little and she felt an urge to burst into instances, as many of them as she could for the hell of it. The elation was short-lived. Something huge grabbed her leg and pulled her bodily off the ground only to slam her around and back down with tremendous force. Rocks were pulverized, the layer of slime was thrown back and splattered everywhere by the impact. Cindy gasped, winced, and involuntarily opened her eyes, only to receive a stun-blast to the face by the second brute.


    Huge hands gripped her arms and lifted her up, then pulled in opposite directions. She kicked out, connecting with its massive torso, then redoubled her efforts by splitting the possibilities and delivering as many potential kicks as she could Another blast caught her point-blank. Closed eyes or not, it still felt like a kick to the gut by a giant. Her instances winked out but she recreated them and repeated her attack. She got the very satisfying sound of monstrous ribs shattering under her barrage but the monster did not fall. Another point-blank blast and her stomach felt as if a giant''s fist was squeezing it into a pretzel. If she got out of this, she soo was going to improve her durability any way she could. She made as many instances as she could handle and kept kicking; the only way out was through...


    xxxx


    Mark felt his jaw cracking as a rock shot him out of the sky. A damn rock! Why hadn''t he thought the monsters could do that? Had the enemy not proven they were using advanced tactics and combinations of powers rather than the swarm tactics mindless zombies should have been limited to? Hindsight was even more of a bitch than Cindy.


    The area stunners had caught all of them by surprise, especially with that enemy heavy infantry not having any apparent weapons but their size and obvious strength. One moment they thought they had the range advantage, the next they were being overwhelmed by a shock and awe attack. With a proper area stunner too; if it worked on supers like themselves, it had to be much more powerful than a simple flashbang. Modern combat forces had been looking for something like this for nearly a century and the magical, technologically-backwards aliens had it. Because of course they did; nothing could ever be easy, or make sense.


    He fired his beam at the big bastard with a foot-deep hole in his - its? - torso. Something like that should have killed any reasonable enemy but of course, they were fighting zombies now, weren''t they? The black boy aimed for the thing''s knee; if center-of-mass did not work he''d settle for crippling its mobility before he went for a head shot.


    The brute stumbled as he kept the beam on target, burning through long-dead flesh. Did it count as dead if it walked and fought, and roared like a beast? At least it did not talk and the damage made the second rock it threw miss. That didn''t help at all with the rock the second brute threw, but Mark was ready this time; he dodged with time to spare. The pair advanced on him, flashing their stunner in tandem. Twin stabs of pain went through his brain and the nausea nearly made him puke, but the effect was less than it would have been up close. He wanted to open the distance further and escape it altogether but he couldn''t; if he went too far he wouldn''t be able to see anything in the fog and if he no longer held the pair''s attention they''d go after his teammates. He needed something to finish them quickly.


    Thinking hard and trying to remember the layout of the battlefield hidden beneath the enemy''s obfuscation, he dropped both the laser and the industrial plasma cutter. One slot he then filled with the Fairchild Republic A-10 Thunderbolt II, his old standby for close-in attacks. The second... the second he filled with the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast. The so-called Mother Of All Bombs could strike with the force of eleven tons of TNT, enough explosive power to flatten a reinforced building or cut a battleship in half. He doubted those two bastards could stand up to such explosions but just in case...


    Using the maneuverability of Gravity Company''s latest flight suit, he moved himself so he was between the pair and the rest of the team. He was just high enough for the stun blasts to still hurt but not threaten to disable him, but still low enough to see his two teammates still fighting. It was not going well. Gritting his teeth, Mark combined the MOAB with the A-10 Thunderbolt''s rotary cannon. He wanted to turn that pair into confetti so that he could go back and help Gabby before his opponents overwhelmed him. He breathed in, breathed out, then took careful aim. Better to do this properly the first time.


    The last thing he expected was one of the monsters to cross the hundred feet of distance that separated them in one titanic leap the moment he pulled the mental trigger for his attack.


    xxxx


    "You can''t keep us here!" one of the idiot reporters shouted. "We have rights! This is false imprisonment!"


    "The barrier is for your own protection!" I shot back, rapidly approaching the end of my patience. "Do you really want to get out there and get killed by suddenly appearing enemies?"


    "There are no more enemies, the other supers beat them all," another idiot shouted. "There''s no way that small a station had more people than the hundreds we saw. Even if stragglers still exist I''m sure you could handle them while escorting us there." That, of course, conveniently ignored the fact that monsters could multiply if provided the right environment and sufficient violence, or more could be summoned if a powerful dark mage was present. I was about to point that out before someone managed to come up with an even stupider idea, somehow.


    "Aren''t those three supers just teenagers? Does the US government advocate child endangerment now?" That particularly egregious example of human stupidity managed to sound smug about his asinine accusation. "We have laws about such things, you know!"


    "It''s not just child endangerment, it''s child labor and child soldiers too!" someone else added, jumping on the bandwagon of seeing everything the government did as stupid and evil, missing the slight tremors that had some pebbles vibrating right outside the shield. They probably thought that if some so-called social justice warriors shouted loudly enough all the world''s problems would be fixed - or at least they would have a good story to write about that would get them a fat paycheck.


    I so... didn''t have time for this. A look at the kids showed that they were being approached by tougher enemies now, because the larger and uglier zombies got the more powerful they tended to be and those looked bigger and uglier than anything I''d faced other than my Old Man or the Big Bad himself. For a few heartbeats, I thought about dropping the shield and letting them out. If they''d started this stupid protest of theirs a few minutes earlier I even might have, but now... now they were about to be given a lesson they would not soon forget. The ground shook a bit more.


    "Are you retarded?" I asked the initial instigator, a thirty-something, somewhat-muscular guy from some network I''d never heard of before. "Or do you not understand the difference between your cozy city life and a war zone out here in a wilderness full of man-eating monsters? Are you even a proper journalist or some media influencer that bought a place on the plane by relying on fame, because real journalists have a brain and use it."


    "Bitch you did not just say that to me." Yeah, he was some sort of weirdo here to push an agenda. Fortunately, our locally-sourced teacher was about to arrive. A glance at the kids showed them fighting hard. I should be out there, helping them through the hardest obstacles, but that would defeat the whole purpose of this excursion. They were clever, strong, resourceful enough and needed to grow up. And if they failed, they had the rings too.


    The ground just outside the shield exploded. Pro tip; when making a defensive barrier, always make them a full sphere if you can, covering underground approaches too. If the dumbass showing off his stupidity on record was waiting for my reply he would have to settle for a live demonstration because a green-grey tentacle as thick as I was tall burst out of the earth and stretched towards the sky. Then it stretched some more, and more, and more, until it rose to the height of nearly six hundred feet.


    A localized earthquake shook everything for a couple of miles as more tentacles sprouted out of the plateau like weeds, dragging behind them a bulbous, disgustingly slimy mass the size of a residential building; a large one. While the giant monster bore some resemblance to much, much smaller alien plant specimens I''d seen during the invasion it was certainly uglier and its ability to burrow and relocate under the earth increased its threat level even more than its enormous size did. It was basically a kaiju that could ignore any above-ground defenses, most long-range detection as long as it burrowed deeply enough, as well as early interception by the majority of heroes. In short, it was a weapon of mass destruction custom-built to counter most current opposition.


    I wondered if it shared a common designer with the other two reported kaiju, the attackers on the General''s earlier bases, or the attack against me in New York. If so, these showed an alarming trend of both qualitative and quantitative improvement between the monsters, as if their designer was both ironing out kinks in the process and using data from prior battles to develop new designs. Then I decided the answer did not matter in the current situation. I had to fight this thing either way because the shield hadn''t been built to handle attacks from enemies of that power for long and the safety of the reporters had been entrusted to me... no matter how badly some of them wished it hadn''t.


    At least the overtly aggressive guy that had instigated the protest against me had just pissed himself...

 36: Black Rot

    Enormous tentacles fall onto the forcefield with tremendous power... and almost come to a stop. They are slowed so much, like insects caught in molasses, but the giant monster has enough strength to push through the field. The barrier does not break, of course. Force cannot break forcefields any more than a large weight can break gravity. The forcefield is just that; a given volume of space where force is applied in specific ways. It is neither a physical object nor something that can be deformed, but an intangible effect with the illusion of solidity.


    My eyes glow and twin beams of power lash out at the attacking monster. Where they pass the air catches fire not because of increased energy but because the Force Adjustment part of the Eyebeams weakens molecular bonds enough that air molecules simply fall apart. The beam splashes upon the nearest tentacle and though it is slowed it still cuts through. The monster, like anything with its own power, is resistant to outside interference to an extent. No amount of durability should have helped when the forces the durability of matter depends on to begin with are reduced, but magic keeps working anyway. Our powers clash and I prove the victor, two tentacles severed and the rest retreating through the barrier. I kick the still twitching remains, fleshy cables the length and thickness of subway trains, out of the barrier before their power can take root or they begin to radiate mutating beams. You never know with monsters, so better safe than sorry.


    "Stay inside the shield!" I shout at the helpless civilians, half of which are in various states of shock, the other half frozen in abject terror. I only get nods in return from the four soldiers and the Osprey''s pilot, not that they would have any better chances than the journalists and cameramen if the kaiju decided to focus its attention on them. Then I''m off.


    A sonic boom splits the air as I leave the speed of sound in the dust but before I can really get going a tentacle slams into me like a meteor. Despite its size it is impossibly fast, the bulbous core of the monster being capable of whipping it around faster than a human eye can see. I am hurled into the ground with the force of a ship-killing missile but before the monster can line up a second blow I''m airborne again. In a split-second I become faster than a speeding bullet, a bullet exceeding three hundred pounds with all my momentum concentrated behind an outstretched, invulnerable fist. Invulnerability to collisions leveraged to effectively break the equations of motion means my momentum remains unchanged; I punch a gaping hole through the next tentacle to attempt an interception without slowing down at all, the rubbery flesh and metal wiring of its cybernetic endoskeleton severed completely at my passage.


    Another tentacle slams into my back and while it is also a collision it is more of a combat blow for the monster. Themes matter more than reality or logic in powers and Focused Invulnerability has a very narrow application. I drop like a rock from the impact, spine hurting, then slam into the rocky ground and go through as if it were water. This gives me a split-second to get my bearings, reorient and think the next few exchanges through while out of the monster''s immediate reach. Could I get time for a high-speed ram? No, it''s already turning towards the civilians, probably in an attempt to force me to fight up close where it has the reach and limb advantage. Acting outside of time is an option, but I don''t know what trump cards the monster has. Big enemies always do and I''d rather not be tired when they invariably come out. On the other hand, I got my own trump cards to bring to bear.


    I blast out of the ground with Forced Acceleration helping push me at a decent Mach seven, searing through another tentacle at the other side of the beast from where the civilians are. As I hoped, it turns around to engage me. Whoever is responsible for making this thing, they would hardly care about a bunch of civilians. No, their goal is a strike at Yours Truly and the kids, the only hero team currently active in North America. I dodge through half a dozen consecutive tentacle-whips thinking that that''s a terrible name for a hero team to have.


    Focused Invulnerability is on its near minute-long counter to be able to change what it protects again so I drop it and bring up the Eyebeams once more. Directly invisible, matter-disintegrating rays cut a path through both the air and monster flesh in whatever trajectory I can visualize, turning impossible corners seemingly at random but actually hitting the softer underside of the monster''s many limbs, slicing into the titanic muscles and melting through cybernetics. No tentacle is severed but more than half are wounded in the process. The beast roars, its cry more akin to a blast wave than sound. It scours snow, dust and rocks from all around down to bedrock with the force of a kiloton-level explosion, but the shield around the journalists easily holds against a measly fifty pounds per square inch.


    Far more worrying is that the monster is regenerating. The first two tentacles are almost fully regrown, the many wounds it took since then also partially healed. Even the cybernetics underneath the slimy flesh are self-repairing if at a slower rate. A direct blast with my Eyebeams carves a trench into the central mass'' side, revealing tougher layers of muscle so finely interwoven with cybernetics you need a microscope or super-senses to tell the difference. That new layer is more resistant to my attacks, having an additional defense similar to but weaker than my Immutable Force skill.


    Whoever made this thing put in a lot of thought and effort, probably months of work to get at this point... but where did they find the power? The mass and muscle they could get if they had a biotechnology power themselves but while it''s possible to grow magical ability through other means, violence and murder are still the number one sources on the planet and that thing is way too powerful, with enough varied abilities any sacrifices to feed it should have been noticed. Forget the disappearance of a research station, this would have taken thousands of sapient beings as materials.


    The gash at the monster''s side is already closing. Three seconds of not significantly harming it and it turns to the reporters once more, one of the newly regrown tentacles splitting length-wise into quad gripping claws before ramming down. I''m already there to punch it away, and the next tentacle and the next, shattering their internal structure and forcing them to limp back until an impossible feint followed by a quick grab from nowhere gets me wrapped up in the second tentacle to evolve into a grapnel. Before I can break out, a city''s worth of electricity grounds through my body, causing all my muscles to spasm. Then it happens again and again before more Eyebeams can reduce the monster''s limb to sludge.


    I fly out of the monster''s grasp and evade its next few blows, relying on Eyebeams to deal more damage until Empowering Regeneration deals with my still-twitching limbs. An euphoric wave of energy follows as all my abilities grow slightly stronger. The more the fight lasts the stronger that effect will be, but I''m not the only one who is adapting. That electrical discharge was another straight-up power, one strong enough to hurt through my defenses. That''s not a claim most supers can make so how is the damn kaiju doing it without equivalent power of its own? All I can sense is the power level typical of minor supers, just spread out throughout the central core.


    I guess I''ll have to punch that thing open to see what makes it tick...


    xxxx


    Mark came to with a groan. His whole body hurt, from the back of his head to his toes. Every bit of exposed skin felt raw, he was pretty sure his ears had burst and he didn''t want to open his eyes out of the fear they were no longer there. That scare proved unfounded, though they still ached and he still couldn''t see for shit. A few moments later his ears popped, the rapid healing all supers shared just finished repairing his eardrums. The rest of him on the other hand was worse than he''d thought.


    His costume had actually melted and stuck into his skin and was full of holes where fragments from what must have been multiple powerful explosions had pierced deep into his body. Those wounds were slowly oozing blood, not as bad as gunshot wounds would have been but still pretty gnarly. Several of his bones were definitely cracked - his ribs hurt too much for anything else - and from the way his lungs hurt with every rattling breath he was pretty sure he had blast lung. That was basically a death warrant without specialized medical attention... for normal people that was. Normal people couldn''t regrow their eardrums, after all, though Mark had never tested the limits of his recovery. That would have been a dumb way to go, cutting himself up to see if he would heal.


    All in all it meant that he was impossibly, unbelievably, incredibly, gloriously alive! He did not have any durability enchantments worth mentioning and while his base durability could maybe take shots from a hundred-millimeter cannon, even a single MOAB point-blank should have been a hundred times worse than that. He was pretty sure he''d shot about dozen just as that zombie brute was slamming into him. He should have been not just dead but blown to very tiny, bloody bits.


    A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.


    Yet he had somehow survived. And since he was alive, he still had a battle to finish.


    Flight with the Gravity flight suit came easily but he didn''t dare climb more than a few feet. The Haughton impact crater might be as deep here as the Eiffel Tower was tall; if he lost sight of the ground he might never find this location again in the mist. He also had no idea where this place was, though. He''d been flying during the explosion; the blast must have thrown him back and now he had no idea where the others were, no way to find them. With the magic here distorting all his senses he was already hopelessly lost with no means to find the others but get out of the crater entirely and start from the beginning. Given how badly the fight had been going they might be... might be... but he couldn''t do anything else. It was his only option...


    ...or was it? He mimicked the abilities of the General Atomics MQ-25 Avenger followed by the Fairchild Republic A-10 Thunderbolt II. Then he ignored all the guidance systems, all the sensors, even much of what his own sight was telling him and focused on their inertial navigation systems. Systems that needed no access to any external signals, any reference points, landmarks, or outside information at all. You could seal them in a box and they''d still work to tell you which way you were going because they relied entirely on measuring your own acceleration and simple mathematics to chart a course. Maybe if they had been actual, technological systems, the enemy''s magic could have still messed them up through direct interference but they were not. They were just his powers mimicking those abilities so there was no actual tech to mess with. He made a turn and the mimicked flight systems worked to chart it perfectly. More than that they recorded it and now that he had dismissed the malfunctioning sensor-equivalents they were giving him useful data.


    He did not whoop triumphantly. There was nobody around to see so it didn''t happen. He just set a course in a widening spiral that would sweep his surroundings and sooner or later stumble where he needed to be. Moving at the highest speed his superhuman reflexes could handle so close to the ground, he swept the area at four hundred miles an hour. He also made almost no sound whatsoever, because he did not have actual engines like the vehicles he mimicked any more than he had an inertial navigation system. Before long he could already hear the sounds of battle. He adjusted his trajectory, flew just a bit higher to ensure he was out of melee reach of the enemy, and moved in. What he saw was not the worst he''d been expecting, but it was far from the best as well.


    Gabby was on the ground, surrounded by three of the brutes and one floating sword. All three of the enemies were sporting deep cuts, one even had one of its arms entirely severed while another''s leg was barely attached but the Hispanic boy was seriously injured too. Both his arms had been broken, as had his nose, and he was cradling his ribs and limping both. The only reason he was still standing at all was the sword automatically defending him... but it was just one. Mark didn''t know if his condition didn''t let him control more than one sword or his power had been simply exhausted but what he had left was not enough to fend off the monsters. They would feint in an out both with their limbs and their tentacles then another brute would attack from Gabby''s blind spot as soon as the sword got out of the way. Mark got the distinct feeling they were just toying with him.


    Barnes was actually worse. The girl was held off the ground by her arms by one of the monsters, a severely wounded one. Wounded or no, it was still strong enough to grapple the brunette and pin her arms completely while it threw a stunning blast from point-blank range every few seconds. Between stunning attempts the girl would flicker, her feet kicking wildly at the monster, their blows multiplied until they dealt some damage, but not enough. Mark had no idea how many times she had been hit by that stunner but instead of an uncountable storm of duplicates, she seemed to be limited to just a few. From what he could tell she was still holding on via sheer willpower while the monster was toying with her every bit as much as the other three were doing with Gabby.


    Mark wanted to puke and not because of his wounds. The moment he entered the fray, drew attention to the fact he had survived in any way, the monsters would stop holding back. Worse, he could not use any heavy ordnance, not with his teammates in the blast radius. In their condition he did not know how much more they could take either. And with a total of four brutes to deal with, monsters that had proven themselves resistant to his attacks, there was only so much even a surprise attack could do. He had a choice to make.


    For the first time in his life, Mark hated his choosing to be a hero...


    xxxx


    Cindy was done for.


    She knew it, Gabby knew it, even the monsters tormenting them knew it. She''d lost count of how many times she''d been blasted with that aura up close and every last one of her muscles was not cramping only because of the lingering dregs of power she''d gained from killing the other brute. That power was the only reason she was still clinging to consciousness, making her a little bit tougher but it was not enough. With the stunner hitting her like a punch to the gut and a shock to her nervous system every few seconds she didn''t have the strength to break the monster''s grip or the focus to make enough instances to kick it to bits. She''d even dropped the magic knife Gabby had given her seventeen, no eighteen stunners ago. By this point she was only continuing to struggle out of spite. Like hell would she give those bastards the satisfaction of giving up.


    Then a torrent of explosions chewed up the brute''s back. Both she and it were sent tumbling away and in the process it lost its right arm. Cindy didn''t care how it had happened or why, only that it did. Before the mangled monster could recover or attempt to stun her again, she flickered between positions. Her legs found themselves bracing against the thing''s arm and she pushed with all her might. Her shoulder burned as her arm was dislocated and nearly torn off, but she had stopped caring about mere pain four minutes and thirty stunners ago. Slick with gore, her arm slipped through the fingers of the monster''s remaining hand. A fraction of a second later she had flickered to the edge of her range, next to her fallen knife.


    Mark, who had somehow returned from the dead after getting himself exploded by his own powers, was busy trying to help Gabby against three of the brutes. Both of the boys were getting creamed as the enemy started using stunners on them but for the moment, Cindy did not care about that either.


    She took a stunner at nearly max range, laughing at how the mild nausea and disorientation barely made her flinch. Then she split into as many instances as she could and swarmed the bastard that had been tormenting her for no reason. Unlike the monster, she did not take her time. Before its stunner''s eight-second recharge could finish she had literally hacked it apart. A powerful wave of euphoria thundered through her veins and her everything no longer hurt so much.


    She walked towards the rest of the fight but unlike Soldier Boy she did not charge right in. The moment the three brutes used their stunners on the boys, she ambushed them with as many instances as she could make - which were a lot more than there had been before her latest kill helped her recover. She didn''t try to kill them; a dozen instances around each of their legs crippled their ability to stand upright in three seconds flat. Then those instances manifested ahead of the brutes and kicked out... launching them a hundred feet back with their combined strength. Each monster in a different direction of course.


    See, she''d had nothing to do over the past few minutes than attempt to kill the enemy or fantasize about killing the enemy... and even at her lowest she had more than one head to think with. Separating them so that they could not mutually support each other with their stunners was the key. Crippling their mobility so they could not close in was another. Growling like a wounded animal and not caring at all that the boys could see, she charged. A stunner hit her, but she was so juiced up on adrenaline and murder-created power that she forced herself and most of her instances through it, then stabbed down with a hundred blades. A few seconds later yet another, even stronger wave of euphoria burst through her. She could really get used to these murder power-ups.


    Cindy was about to deal with the other two as well, when she remembered Mark and Gabby were there, too. A look at the boys was enough to tell her they were badly beaten up, maybe as badly as she had been when Mark saved her. Had that really happened? Had Soldier Boy really saved her life after all those times he''d shouted his hatred for her to anyone who would listen? She took a moment to collect herself, then walked to the two... she couldn''t call them idiots any more, could she? Eh, maybe only on Tuesdays.


    "Didn''t you blow yourself up?" she greeted the black boy as she joined them.


    "I got better," he boasted but she did not miss his own confusion at the fact. Looking at things from hundreds of perspectives was so damn useful.


    "Really? Because from where I''m standing you both look like shit," she told them then pointed her thumb in the surviving monsters'' direction. "Bag one of those brutes each. They''re strong enough that killing them gives enough of a power high to heal, maybe more."


    The two boys looked at each other then at her questioningly. She could see it written in their stupid faces. ''Why didn''t she claim the kills herself'', they''d ask. She rolled her eyes and had a few instances push them towards the crippled undead.


    "Just get the healing before more of them come, you idiots!" And there went her new resolution, only lasting ten seconds. They made it soo hard to stop calling them names with their antics! "Then we can hunt down whoever made those things and feed him their remains before we horribly murder him."

 37: Black Rebirth

    The first time I felt a pinprick of something invisible bouncing off my defenses during the monster fight it was sufficiently distracting that I got slammed into a hillside five miles away from a pair of tentacles. It was like being in a boxing match for the title and suddenly feeling a pin tapping at your back. I frowned, didn''t see anywhere the faint attack could be coming from, then used the five mile long acceleration run to ram in the base of those tentacles and sever them while carving up the rest with my Eyebeams.


    The second time I felt it was while trying to see if different methods of tearing the kaiju''s tentacles or the number of different wounds would have an impact on its regeneration speed. Neither did; in fact the monster seemed capable of healing all of its wounds at the same speed as a single wound, no matter how many wounds added up. That was odd to say the least. Regeneration abilities shouldn''t work like that, not unless they were specifically designed to scale but at the kaiju''s sheer size you''d need an immensely powerful ability to conjure all its missing mass. Just as odd was that phantom pinprick getting back stronger or rather... feeling like two pinpricks?


    Our battle had slowly pushed the monster further and further from the force bubble where the civilians and the few soldiers guarding them were as time passed. It was a deliberate tactic on my part, one the tentacled horror was willing to accommodate as long as I kept engaging it in a fight. By now, I was pretty certain its creator had to be controlling the thing from some remote location, yet no signals my Force Awareness could detect came anywhere near it. That did not mean they did not exist, merely that they did not use methods my own senses could pick up. For all I knew the creator communicated with the tentacled freak through psychic powers or communication spells, neither of which my force-based abilities could detect.


    That made sense. If the designer had been using conventional communications someone would have picked his location up by now. There had been other kaiju attacks, after all. I flew a circle around the monster, scanning it from all sides. The tentacles tried to snare me several times but I blinked among them, changing trajectory with rapid uses of Spatial Leap. Teleportation wasn''t something I used often in my fights after my return, but that was because most opponents in this time could be easily overpowered without proper tactics. The thousand-foot-tall behemoth was tough enough that I couldn''t just splatter it, on top of wanting to find its link to its master. Because the killing monster wasn''t the goal here; finding the monster-maker before he could make a bigger, uglier monster was.


    The pinpricks returned as I flew around the monster, a hair stronger and more numerous than before. Tracking their origin wasn''t easy, with the kaiju being an aggressive specimen that refused to stay still on the proverbial examination table, but I persevered. I also tore off several tentacles until one of the pinpricks... winked out? Zeroing in on the last bit of torn-off flesh I found something that did not really fit the mountain of misshapen muscle that was my enemy. There, at the base of the torn-off, subway-train-sized tentacle was a human eyeball. Flying between attacking limbs of similar size, I picked the one with the eyeball up and carried it away from the kaiju''s immediate reach. Then I narrowed my perception to the one feature that did not fit and scanned it with my senses.


    The monster''s internal structure was very much unlike both Earth animals and the monsters that came in during the Invasion. For one thing, its tissues were simplistic. It didn''t really have different cells, not as such. Sure, there were some cellular structures in that organic sludge it was mostly made of, or approximations thereof, but no nuclei, no outer membranes, no infinitely complex network of perfect symbiosis making up a greater whole. It was as if someone had taken the bare minimum they needed from biological sources, rebuilt it on a grand scale and called it a day. It should not have worked - wouldn''t have, except for the addition of magic. The same animating spells that provided locomotion to the undead were woven throughout the monster''s structure. Fused in its mass in the same way they would have been applied to corpses, they provided a mockery of life without needing the kaiju to be a living organism. Curiously, it was not a single massive animation spell doing this, but countless individual ones woven into the monster''s fake muscle strands. Then there were the cybernetics.


    The kaiju roared its complaint that I was not giving it my undivided attention, then the pinpricks on my back multiplied. I momentarily ignored both distractions as I studied the cybernetic additions to the sample I''d extracted. At first glance, they looked metallic; thousands of strands of metal circuitry woven through the monster''s musculature as a form of diffuse endoskeleton providing both mechanical support and whatever technological functions the designer wanted that biologic and magic alone could not provide. But on closer inspection they were revealed not as metal but structures of organometallic composite with similarities to limpet teeth. At such enormous scale and with more wire-like configuration they became flexible while remaining several times tougher than steel... before the magical reinforcement. Because they were effectively a form of bone, the same spells that gave various undead their great durability compared to the human corpses they originated from could be applied here, to proportional results. Yet because they were also organic, the monster'' regeneration worked on them just fine.


    Someone was being too clever for their own good, mixing biotechnology, necromancy and outright powers, but how was all that linked to the human eye growing out of the monster''s skin? One of the thinner wires extended up to the monster''s skin, like a grotesque mimicry of both blood vessels and nerves. There it delivered an organic fluid out of which the eye had grown... and that fluid contained human cells suspended in some thick nutrient paste. Then the wire delivered nutrients and oxygen to that human eye, essentially growing the very human organ on top of the kaiju''s entirely different internal structure. A human eye that emitted power entirely different than the monster''s animation spells or its regeneration.


    Shit.


    I turned back to the kaiju and the sources of the now two dozen pinpricks I''d been feeling during my two or three seconds of superspeed investigation. More human eyes growing from random spots on the kaiju''s skin, each generating its own weak offensive power. Given what I''d seen of the tentacled atrocity''s internal structure, it was theoretically capable of growing a few eyes per square yard of skin. If even a small percentage of that potential was realized, it would mean not dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of eyes but several tens of thousands...


    xxxx


    Mark, Gabby and Cindy had been following the original power and water lines deeper into the crater for some time now. The mist had been thinning out for the last mile of their cautious advance, replaced by an eerie green illumination with no apparent source. The slime under their feet had thickened into a layer more akin to muddy soil just solid enough to support their weight. Testing with one of Gabby''s swords had revealed it was several feet thick at this point and steadily growing thicker the deeper they went into the crater. They were already nearly five miles in, with only two miles to go to the crater''s center, but the thickening of the slime had slowed them down. Not because its stickiness in any way impeded the teenage superhumans beyond its ickiness factor, but because of what it could be hiding. Mark was of the opinion that more enemies would be hiding under it, ready to ambush them as they advanced on the enemy stronghold. It was what made tactical sense and it was very much possible. Gabby on the other hand argued that the slime itself would animate and swallow them when it best fit its alien master''s plans. Forget about humanoid enemies, how do you fight when the alien environment itself is the attacker? Understandably, none of the three was in any hurry to get even deeper into the alien growth.


    "Ew," Cindy exclaimed, the girl''s jade eyes flickering between several different places ahead that the boys could not yet see.


    "Barnes, why did you stop?" Mark demanded somewhat impatiently but with far less hostility than before. Zombie movies might show survivors often fight each other for petty reasons, but the dark skinned boy had found nothing bound people together more than saving each other''s lives. He might still hate the girl for all the bullshit she''d pulled and would probably continue to pull back at base but when standing with her against undead horrors he trusted her to have his back. Or at least, he amended in his mind, he trusted that she wanted to kill the smelly, ugly, slimy and generally disgusting things a hell of a lot more than she liked to mess with him.


    "Because both you and Gabe were both wrong," she said, her face scrunching up in disgust. "And it is worse. So, so much worse." She sighed, looked around, then scowled. "Screw this slime covering everything. There isn''t even a place for us to sit." There was a crackle of magical energy at her complaint then a wide, floating sword appeared by her side, complete with sheath. She smiled and hopped upon it. "Thanks Gabe, you''re a lifesaver," she said, tossing her long hair over her shoulder and winking at the other boy. "Or at least a pants saver, that green sludge is disgusting."


    Aaand... they were back to fooling around. The sword-wielder''s face went so dark it was almost black and had they been under a more normal light Mark was sure he''d look like a beetroot. But at least it was far friendlier than all the so-called pranks she''d pulled back at base, let alone the actual attacks when she got angry. From the way that Gabe blushed and averted his eyes he might even enjoy the attention of the pretty brunette. Mark on the other hand would leave his teammate to his delusions and quietly distance himself from the borderline crazy girl that was her own army.


    "You still have not explained why we stopped," he very neutrally asked instead.


    "Because we''d rather heal up before the next fight and trust me, from what I''m seeing there will be a next fight." Flickering instances of her spread out in the surrounding area, half-glimpsed images of what the boys knew was a far more numerous force. "You two are still healing, right?" In both their opinion, Cindy''s ability to make her other selves effectively undetectable when she tried was the scariest bit about her power but... was it a trick of this alien environment or were the flickers more numerous than usual?


    "I... I''m still healing, yeah," Gabe admitted, opening and closing his fists as he examined his until recently broken arms. "It''s s-slower now but I still feel... the power? Yeah, the power working to fix them." Of the three of them, he''d had the most broken bones as three hulking undead had basically treated him like a sandbag during the earlier fight.


    "I''m mostly fine, I think," Mark lied, which only got him an eye roll from the girl. Yeah, sure, he wasn''t a hundred percent after his own explosions had done a number on them but he would be. He could feel the power Gabe mentioned working to return him to tip-top shape from dozens of deep flesh wounds and organ damage from the blast wave he''d taken point-blank. People got it wrong; flesh wounds might not hurt as much as broken bones, but muscle actually healed slower than bone and for normal people always imperfectly.


    Barnes... no, Cindy had done them a huge favor letting them kill those crippled hulking zombies earlier. Both he and Gabe had been wounded enough to be useless for days and the power boost from the kills had not only fixed it but maybe made them a bit stronger too. Cindy had been in just as bad condition and yet had still thought of them instead of claiming more kills for herself. That was the primary reason Mark was reconsidering... some parts of his interaction with the girl.


    "Great!" she chirped, annoyingly. "So when the army of zombies attacks, you''ll be fully ready to fight, yes?"


    "What army of zombies?" Mark demanded, several mimicked weapons systems jumping to the forefront of his mind as hie instinctively reached for the biggest stick he could find. No! That''s how he got wounded before. He needed a measured response, one tailored to the situation. And he needed to be able to think of one on the fly, for when his first plan did not survive on contact with the enemy.


    "There really is an army of zombies out there?" Gabby asked her more... politely than Mark''s own demand. He''d soon learn that the leopard did not change her stripes, she was just biding her time. Or maybe Mark was too cynical and the girl was finally shaping up... nope. He could not even think it with a straight face.


    "You''ll both see it soon enough, I''m trying not to right now." She was actually sitting on the floating sword with her eyes closed. "It really is that ugly." She leaned back, lying upon the sword while her limbs dangled limply off the sides. "Gabby, could you make me another dagger? Something small that can be easily concealed yet can cut through durability?"


    "I can try," the other boy replied, a bit uncertain. Mark remembered how his most powerful swords had always been the largest. "But first... I think... yes!" The world seemed to twist upon itself until a new floating sword faded into existence, this one over fifteen feet long and glowing green. Immediately Mark felt the lingering aches in his slowly healing wounds subsiding, his recovery greatly boosted. Cindy had noticed too, and immediately got up to examine the new artifact closer.


    "You can make a healing sword?" she asked in awe. "Why aren''t you touring hospitals, or something?"


    "B-because it boosts everything?" Gabe responded with his usual awkwardness. "The Warden said it would be like cancer to normals. I''ve been trying to fix that but no dice." His face hung as if his inability to turn an already magical healing into a proper miracle on demand was some sort of huge failure. Mark always thought Gabe had inadequacy issues. Maybe growing more powerful would fix it?


    "It''s great!" Cindy actually encouraged the boy and Mark had to do a double take. This was still Cindy, right? He tried to find some way his powers could check for doppelgangers or possession but came up empty. Eh, she''d either turn on them or she wouldn''t. The only confusing bit was which a real Cindy would choose.


    They sat around to catch their breath from the earlier battles and try to get some better coordination between the three of them, yet Mark felt a rising urgency as if their time was running out. He wanted to suggest that they charge ahead immediately but he could already see the other two would not listen... and both he and Gabe needed to heal. Maybe he was wrong, maybe he wasn''t.


    And he was not ready to find out.


    xxxx


    A thousand eyes sent out invisible attacks that felt like tiny needles against skin along with wordless accusations. "Why didn''t you save us?" they seemed to say. "Why weren''t you there?" The artificially induced guilt was beginning to get on my nerves. All the eyes were near-identical, implying a single DNA source being somehow replicated. Some CIA agent with this kind of power must have been among the vanished team we''d been sent to find, got himself killed, then his power was somehow replicated in the kaiju. Problem was, powers were not genetic. They propagated through ideas, memetics, not biology. To Maya''s understanding, they shouldn''t be copy-able like that. If they had been, the invaders wouldn''t have needed mass sacrifices in the hundreds of thousands and an intentionally dragged-out battle to spread their undead and demons across Florida. Power seemed to be coming out of thin air here.


    The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.


    I flew a loop around a grasping tentacle, then teleported away from a giant grapnel that crackled with lightning. Those things gave a nasty shock even to someone with my durability and I didn''t want to underestimate my opponent again before I understood how it worked. The more I looked at the kaiju, the more certain I became it had been engineered with a specific target in mind, namely me. Despite being slower, it could somehow keep up with my high-speed flight, its tentacles often appearing in my path out of nowhere. It could also regenerate from any gross physical harm, its healing scaling with the damage I could deal, and it was tough enough and large enough that to kill it in one blow would have unfortunate geographical ramifications - the type that included the redrawing of maps. It could also do some weird remote attack through the eyes it grew, whose number increased as the fight went on. All in all something that could, theoretically, take me out... but not kill me. In fact, however violent its attacks might be to most, to me they would be non-lethal.


    Someone had a big idea of themselves, if they intentionally aimed to capture me.


    I flew around the monster faster than it could turn its torso but the sensation of pins and needles did not abate. It had grown eyes all around its body now, so no matter which direction I attacked from it could keep sending me those baleful gazes, complete with stabs of psychic force. Were they actually psychic? Who knew? My Force Awareness did not register the gazes as natural forces, in fact did not register them at all. My defenses on the other hand did register and oppose the harmful forces, though that might have been long and repeated use slowly expanding the effect of those skills. It was unclear, especially since my costume had not suddenly gotten any new holes added to it. It was worrying not to know, to doubt my own senses, to be unclear on whether my tactics and abilities functioned properly. Maybe I should pull back and...


    Yeah, no. This was just further evidence of psychic attack. Filling the enemy with self-doubt was a good way to cripple their decision-making mid-fight. Unfortunately for the would-be tentacled kidnapper, minor powers hardly affected me through the cover of Immutable Force, even the combined weight of thousands of them. As more and more eyes formed on the kaiju they became annoying, maybe a bit distracting, but nothing truly serious.


    Using Spatial and Chronal Leap interchangeably, I plotted a convoluted force around the monster. Shifting my trajectory with teleportation rather than having to turn around physically enabled me to keep accelerating in a straight line without needing the space to do so. I went faster and faster and faster until even my reflexes barely let me teleport between tentacles as I now moved faster than the fastest shooting stars. Then one final teleportation and I rammed into the kaiju from below at over sixty miles per second.


    The impact was tremendous especially when amplified with my powers. The entire million-ton bulk of the enemy rose into the sky even as my body drilled into the central mass ten feet, twenty, thirty, until I got tangled in foot-thick strands of extremely tough material and came to a stop. Then what felt like a massive electric current grounded itself through my body. Force Adjustment partially deflected it but a lot less than it should have against a normal- oh, it was a power. The metaphysical weight of the kaiju slammed against my own even as the kaiju''s physical form crashed back into the ground. I won the clash, but the difference was much less than I felt comfortable with and instead of reducing the attack by a factor of twenty, my defenses only adjusted it by a factor of five. It hurt more like a taser than something lethal but I was forced to pull back instead of trying to drill through the monster''s core and destroy it from within.


    The moment I got into the air once more, a grapnel tentacle almost caught me. Burning through it with Eyebeams, I reconsidered my tactics. My initial plan of holding back and trying to find the kaiju''s controller was not working. The monster had stopped growing eyes and was somehow relocating its tentacles in fractions of a second in an attempt to catch me, meaning it was activating another power. Regeneration, power resistance, electricity, baleful eyes, warping tentacles, that made five on top of its physical enhancements. Could I afford it to activate more in an attempt to catch its master?


    I pulled back and activated Eyebeams again. Instead of a single-point attack like before, the beams struck in one place, then arced out to strike in another, and another, and another. There was a limited amount of volume they could affect, especially with the monster''s resistance, but human eyes were tiny things. In moments, I had disintegrated more than a thousand spots on the monster''s surface, robbing it of its line-of-sight weapons. Suddenly I flew straighter, thought faster, even breathed easier. It was as if an unseen weight had been lifted from my shoulders. Had the eyes been affecting me without me noticing? In retrospect, Empowering Regeneration should have given me more of a boost during the fight, especially after getting tasered by the monster''s insides. The difference was easy to miss as it had been gradual, but the five percent change it felt like was small yet significant.


    Scowling, I flew through the grasping tentacles without holding back even as I prepared another trump card to use just in case. This time I did not stop at severing one tentacle or two or three; I kept ripping them apart instead of dodging while the kaiju roared in pain. Why had it been designed to feel pain? It made no sense in a weapon. Not that it mattered to me as I trimmed it down to size. In one last, desperate attack, a grapnel snapped shut around my waist then flooded my body with that electrical power. In response I grabbed the beak-like protrusions and shattered them, leaving the kaiju with a mere dozen tentacles and only a third of them grapnels, twice as many already torn apart. It was time to end this.


    The monster''s controller must have been thinking that, too because the humongous blob opened tens of thousands of glowing eyes. The effect struck me like a kick to the solar plexus, followed my the realization it had never stopped growing new eyes. It had just been keeping them closed, hidden until there were enough of them to make a difference while the monster''s power resistance blocked my senses enough I would not notice unless I specifically looked. And I hadn''t.


    In my momentary distraction, the four remaining grapnel-tentacles caught on to my limbs and delivered all the lightning power the kaiju could produce...


    xxxx


    Gabby walked through the twisted alien field, barely holding his breakfast in. The plant-zombies had been disgusting in a more clinical way, that of dead bodies and unhealthy growth. The brutes had been scary in a physical way; they could hurt them, kill them, even cause pain for fun like the worst bullies Gabby had ever known. The slime had just had the ickiness of wading through green alien snot and the mist and gloom invoked the fear of the unknown, but this?


    The mist had retreated, forming a ceiling of clouds a hundred feet above their head that dripped green slime at a steady rate. Below it, a vast expanse of strangely mutated plants stretched out ahead of the three teenage superheroes, dwarf trees that had short, dancing tentacles instead of leaves. Golden and silver blossoms grew from them, glowing like countless lightbulbs against the greenery that stretched as far as the eye could see. A plantation of many square miles hidden inside a crater in one of the most remote and inhospitable places on Earth, behind magic that had concealed it from view until they had both gotten close enough and fought their first battle in Devon Island. If Mark had not upset that flowerbed where they first landed would they have ever found this place?


    But that was not the horrible bit; what made Gabby either flee and not look back or blow this place up with extreme prejudice were the people. The smallest trees were near the edges of the field, barely the size of a typical kiosk. From their trunks and boughs bulged huge, transparent gourds the size of a fridge, filled with yellowish, pus-like fluid. Floating naked in that fluid and dead to the world was a toddler of two or three years old, their entire head wrapped up in a flesh-like mask of plant matter connected to the roof of the gourd and the tree beyond with a green umbilical. Some of the smaller-looking trees held newborns instead of toddlers, while in the row behind were slightly larger trees holding kids from five to fifteen. And the fully-grown trees covering most of the fields? Those held adult men and women, not asleep but writhing helplessly, blindly trying to escape. And that was not all.


    Further in the trio saw the gourds of a tree being cut open by a dozen plant-zombies. The people were released from their prisons, the face-hugging tentacles removed... only for them to start gasping and writhing in the ground even worse than before. Before either Mark or Gabby could react, Cindy was already there, cutting down every single zombie to bits and then trying to help. There didn''t seem to be anything wrong with the people apart from their being naked except one by one their struggles weakened rapidly till they died. During the whole couple of minutes none of them had made a single sound.


    Cindy blinked towards a gourd, ready to cut it open with the new dagger Gabby had made for her but Mark stood in the way.


    "It''s no use," the other boy said in such a dull tone and with such a lack of expression Gabby thought he might have fallen into shock. "There''s nothing we could do to help here."


    "Explain," Cindy demanded, the air around her buzzing from how fast her body was flickering. "Right now."


    "They can''t breathe," Mark pointed out what the two of them had not noticed. "These... growing pods are sealed and the face masks don''t actually provide air. All these people, they''re grown by magic, obviously meant to die. Remember what Wennefer said about sacrifices and magic?" The other boy kicked one of the zombies, hard. "They want to turn them into zombies anyway. Why would they give them the ability to breathe when not doing so ensures there is no possibility of escape and no need for extra work to kill them before the conversion?"


    "That''s monstrous," the girl glowered. She was actually shaking, in rage or horror Gabby could not tell. Her eyes... if that murderous stare had been directed at him Gabby would have started running and not stopped until he had at least an ocean between him and its source.


    "We are fighting monsters, yes?" Mark replied in that same dead tone. "Every police officer, firefighter, doctor and rescue worker knows you can''t save everyone. Every soldier knows that often all you can do is efficiently dispatch the target before it can do worse."


    "Sure, let''s go bag us some monsters," Cindy agreed with a half-crazy cackle. They went.


    While they marched in silence and the other two kept a lookout for enemies, i.e. looked everywhere but the trees and their... fruit, Gabby checked out a growing suspicion of his via some napkin math. A tree every thirty feet or so, grounds four miles across, minus the roads, multiply by one to two dozen gourds per tree...


    "Guys," Gabby spoke, the urge to flee making both his hands and his swords shake. "I don''t-" he gulped, looked around frantically. "I don''t think we killed nearly enough zombies."


    "What do you mean?" Mark asked with a frown. "We killed thousands."


    "Yeah, but there must be three hundred thousand of those trees here." Both of his teammates stopped dead at that number. So many. That number terrified Gabby, and not just at the prospect of a tide of zombies. Four to five million people, the population of an entire freaking city, doomed to die. What would the bad guys do with that many sacrifices? What could they do? Ruin another whole state perhaps?


    "Maybe... the plantation is new," Mark hypothesized slowly. "Maybe the trees are only now reaching maturity."


    "Yeah," Cindy added, her body flickering even more wildly. "Maybe we are lucky, for once."


    They weren''t lucky.


    First by ones and twos, then by dozens, then by larger groups the same basic plant zombies they had fought earlier approached them through the trees. Gabby quickly started forming the largest and thus most powerful sword he had ever made before, the imitation of Caladbolg of legend that could split the tops off three hills with one swing. His version might not be nearly as powerful, at most capable of splitting a single hill, but it should do something, right?


    Mark was already firing, a storm of bullets every single one of which exploded with building-flattening force on impact. He walked his fire over the largest groups approaching, hitting them with enough firepower to level a small town every second. It was an impressive show of force, devastating to both zombies and trees where it landed, throwing their shattered remains all over the area... but it could not be everywhere. The zombies moved fast, faster than their fictional counterparts in any Hollywood movie and there was an endless sea of them. Neither the blasts themselves nor the burning, napalm-filled craters they left in the fields could hold back the tide... but they could slow it.


    Thousands of zombies came close to the trio of teens... where their advance stumbled upon a line of thousands of Cindies. The girl was throwing out a storm of magical blades, flickering copies of the one he''d made for her while her original stood next to Gabby, dagger in hand. The blade was not meant to be used that way but Gabby would never tell her. She looked... fierce. Unfortunately, even with her efforts adding to the slaughter the zombies were still advancing, climbing over mountains of the dead or wading through napalm in their efforts to reach them.


    Then Gabby''s sword finally finished, a floating blade as long and wide as two city buses from end to end. He''d tried to make it smaller, but it had been a compromise between unwieldy size and rapid manifestation. Wielding almost the entirety of his power in a single weapon, he swung. A teeming mass of zombies almost the size of a city block were instantly reduced to paste, the energy of their slaughter pouring into Gabby like a stream. So he did it again and again and again, annihilating thousands of square yards'' worth of the endless horde with every blow.


    The enemy lines staggered, the combined efforts of all three teenage superhumans managing to hold back the tide for a time. One minute, maybe two, they took on the legions of Hell and came out ahead. Then the bad guys sent more than just their basic infantry.


    Mark was the first to be targeted. Brutes showed up in the distance by the hundreds, throwing rocks, bone spears, still flaming, blown-up pieces of trees, even other zombies with such force that the barrage reached the flying boy as quickly as arrows could have - real arrows, not the slow ones used in most movies so audiences could see what was going on. He dodged again and again, his return-fire blowing up the Brutes where they stood, but in the end there were too many of them. He was clipped once, twice, then a rock the size of a washing machine smashed into his chest at maybe a couple hundred miles an hour. He was knocked from the sky not dead or even seriously wounded, but when he landed in a throng of zombies far from Gabby or Mandy he was quickly overwhelmed.


    Gabby tried to do something, anything to help, but his enormous sword was good for annihilating huge numbers. It was far worse at sparing a single specific person out of said numbers. He sliced at the edges of the horde Mark had dropped into, killing the majority of them but in the end he saw a bloody, unconscious Mark being carried away.


    "Gabe!" Cindy yelled for his attention and when he took his eyes off Mark he saw she was being quickly overwhelmed, the lines of her flickering copies being pushed back as many of them disappeared under a tide of dead flesh. Gabe guessed that no matter how many copies she made, how many times she tried, it was pretty hard to dodge attacks if there was no empty space for her to dodge to.


    He brought his giant sword around, pushed himself to create several smaller dancing swords from the power gained from recent kills but with only him and Cindy they could only slow the horde down, not completely stop it. They were probably going to die here, weren''t they? Well, if they were to die then he had one final fuck-you to give those bastards. He poured more energy into his giant sword and the multi-ton blade started to vibrate and crackle with energy as its material... changed. He''d asked Teach about this and knew it was possible. All he needed was to do it quickly enough.


    "They are not trying to kill us," a rather exhausted Cindy said by his side. "I think they''re trying to capture us." She was twitching less now and panting as if she''d run a marathon, her catsuit entirely drenched in her own sweat but untouched by just about anything else.


    "Can you get away?" he asked her seriously. He had no idea how long he could stand on his own before he''d have to trigger his final trick but...


    "No," she shook her head tiredly. "Maybe if I was fresh or they had fewer brutes but with both at once..."


    "What happened to being untouchable?!" Gabby demanded.


    "Maybe I grew less suicidally overconfident," she shot back even as her lines of copies flickered and vanished. "Now don''t try anything stupid and kill us all, OK?" As the zombies swarmed them, Gabby cursed and threw his giant sword away with as much force as his powers allowed. Seconds later, the two of them fell under the grasping, choking, punching tide.


    A few more seconds after that, Gabby''s giant sword partially turned to plutonium and detonated. His powers weren''t fast enough to turn more than a few pounds of the multi-ton mass into the highly unstable metal before the chain reaction blew it up but the explosion was still comparable to several thousand tons of TNT. It blew an entire square mile of the horrendous plantation to bits and formed a small mushroom cloud over the smoke.


    Gabby''s last thought before unconsciousness took him was the hope that the explosion would be seen and help would come soon.

 38: Black Heart

    Mark woke up with the worst headache in his life and a terrible feeling of breathlessness, of his lungs being stretched out and his diaphragm strained so much he was only capable of shallow breaths. Disorientation followed. He''d been unconscious but the planet''s gravity was pulling towards the wrong way as if he was...


    He blinked the haze of a really terrible sleep from his eyes to find himself hanging from metal cuffs as thick as suspension bridge cables in nothing but his boxers. More steel - or probably some space age metal enhanced with powers - wrapped from his ankles till halfway to his knees, pulling at his legs with the force of a few dozen tons. That was probably the reason he could hardly breathe; while the force was not quite as bad as being crucified would have been to a normal person, it was still unpleasant and left him with a lingering pain so he fumbled for a vehicle with a lot of horsepower to stop feeling so weak.


    The electrical shock that followed made him scream and shake against his bonds, looking for something, anything that would make it more bearable. Yet the tougher he made himself the stronger it seemed to get, adjusting to always be painful, scrambling his mind with PAIN! PAIN! PAIN! until all thoughts of using his powers fled. Only then did the agony stop, leaving him even more panting for breath than before.


    "Ah, young Mark," a rather pleasant but otherwise unremarkable man''s voice drew his attention away from his singed nerve endings and towards his surroundings. It was neither strong nor weak, neither young nor old, neither warm nor cold, neither sharp nor mellow, and had no signs of any accent, emotion or inflection beyond that initially pleasant demeanor. "I see that you, like your friends before you, have discovered the downsides of the Warden''s two hundred and seventh failed attempt at a cell that can hold supers."


    Mark blinked again and tried to find the source of that voice. Its total absence of identifying characteristics made it so remarkable to his brain''s pattern recognition that he could easily track it across the chamber he found himself in. Not the shallow, open metal pod all around him but the room beyond that in his slowly focusing eyes were now taking in. It looked nothing so much as a doctor''s office, complete with medical charts, examination tables, various surgical equipment and countless bottles of various substances, both in various colors and transparent. The examination tables might be thicker and sport wrist-thick steel cable restraints, the surgical equipment might double for heavy duty industrial tools but it was all oddly fitting... except for the glowing green crystal walls with the embedded silver and gold circuitry... and the giant tube of lard of a man wearing a doctor''s uniform so stretched out it was ripped in places.


    "...was only a failed attempt because of how it restrained prisoners." Oh, the tube of lard was still talking. "See, after a long series of trial and error in cooperation with several other supers, the Warden managed to build a device that could roughly detect a super''s powers. It could only get details with the super''s consent but for just detecting the presence of powers and their physical impact it worked." No, not a tube of lard. The enormous man just had a layer of fat over the kind of grotesque musculature Mark had seen in the undead brutes they''d fought. Given his size and girth and how the solid metal chair he was sitting on strained under his mutated bulk he had to weigh well over a ton. "...that detection in place, the proper motivation to discourage use of powers could be applied without risk of killing the prisoners."


    So basically a giant version of shock collars? Mark made a note to have Maya ask the General about what the fuck the research teams had been doing and how come it had ended up being used against them. Or... he could listen to the still monologuing supervillain.


    "Told them it was perfect, but they dismissed it out of hand! Told me my research was too unethical, that I should stop it or there would be consequences. They could not see the whole new fields of research. The potential for curing all human frailty, achieving biological immortality not just in our lifetime but in less than a year." The mutant doctor sighed. "Fortunately other, less super-influenced parts of the government were more eager to listen. They wanted not only medicine or control methods but weapons that would make a difference in the dawning new Age. Weapons I am finally capable of providing!"


    "So you just went full mad scientist," a very familiar, derisive, female voice cut into the mutant''s monologue. What the hell was Cindy doing? Why was she antagonizing the crazy mass-murdering freak with the zombie army instead of shutting up for once in her life until they found a way to esc- oh! That''s why she was incensed enough to throw caution to the wind.


    Mark was pretty sure he was concussed now. There was no other explanation for not noticing his two teammates while taking in the room before. Like him, they were each strapped into their own lidless, upright, metal pod with restraints powerful enough to hold even people with super-strength. Also like him they''d been stripped of everything except their underpants, which had left the frequently annoying girl naked from the waist up. She caught him looking and her pale skin flushed prettily while her glower promised they''d have words about this if... when they managed to get out. Mark shrugged as much as he was able in his bonds. What was he supposed to do, keep his eyes shut? Besides, it wasn''t as if Cindy herself hadn''t flashed both him and Gabby just to get a reaction in the past. He shook his head. Either the view of the admittedly gorgeous brunette was getting to him or his concussion was worse than he thought because for a split-second he could have sworn he saw a flicker behind the supervillain''s back.


    "Madness and genius are often the same thing, girl," their host said in that far too reasonable tone of his. It was more than just an unremarkable and simply pleasant voice, it somehow made the horrible things the guy, no, the monster before them spoke of sound just as unremarkable and maybe, possibly, reasonable... if the three of them hadn''t nearly died several times fighting off those ideas'' applications. The voice had to be some sort of power. "Using the funding and raw materials my benefactors provided along with the freedom and secrecy afforded by this place I''ve accomplished more steps towards my ultimate goal more quickly than I''d thought possible. Not only just curing all the flaws of the human condition, but taming this alien magic and granting them to those truly worthy of it."


    "All I''m seeing is a fat bastard with a fetish for bondage and mass murder," Cindy mouthed off and Mark winced. "How can you claim to have cured all human flaws when you''re still a bloated sack of ugly?" For a moment he was sure the girl had gone too far, that Mark would get a front-row seat to one of his teammates being tortured. Even a week before he''d have paid to see that. When this mission started he would have been mostly indifferent, discount Barnes as just a bitch that made her own bed. Now... when had he started thinking of her as a real teammate? Before he could resolve his newly confusing reactions, the monster of a man just laughed. Despite being two thousand pounds of undulating flesh, he still sounded pleasant.


    "I''m so glad you asked, my dear," their host explained. "There hasn''t been anyone around to share my thoughts on the project for a good long while. It feels good to share information, to educate the... less erudite, I always thought, but even my benefactors'' men failed to understand the glory of our undertaking in the end." Probably because even the kind of men the CIA would use for their black projects would see horror and monstrosity where this madman spoke of glory, Mark thought.


    "The process of developing powers is simple enough if one has enough fuel. That the fuel requires a level of rudimentary intelligence is solvable with cloning; where problems arise is granting the desired powers to the desired subject. See, what powers we develop fit our... character for lack of a more scientific word. We can''t truly pick anything we want; even those of us who seemingly have endless options to pick from will somehow always end up picking thematically appropriate abilities rather than the most efficient." His enormous hand shot out, crumpling the nearest examination table in a sudden fit of fury that Cindy''s defiance had failed to cause but just one hang-up in this... project had him raging about in an instant. For a good minute he yelled and beat at the medical table until it was a shapeless, crumbling heap. Mark could have sworn he saw more flickers of Cindy during it, but it was probably his imagination. Then as if a switch had been flicked, he was perfectly calm once more.


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    "Excuse my outburst. These arbitrary, unscientific limitations make me so angry, you know?" The deranged, mutated madman took in several long breaths in silence, before sitting on his chair once more. "Where were we? Ah, power transference." His bloated, beach-ball-sized boulder of a head gave the three teenagers a smile that would come up in their nightmares, Mark was certain. "Despite such obstructions, the invaders somehow fielded whole legions of troops with identical abilities so picking the powers we wanted had to be possible. That simple fact got me through the most fruitless period of my research and into the eventual breakthrough." The monstrous face twisted into a self-satisfied grimace as if it couldn''t quite express human emotions any more. "Through trial and error I found that clones of the original super would develop the same powers if fed enough fuel. Did this mean powers were genetic? How could this be when even the dead or incorporeal beings could have them? I couldn''t find an answer to those questions but ultimately it didn''t matter for I found that sufficient... donation of raw material fed with further fuel would let a patient develop the same powers himself!"


    "You didn''t need all the exposition, I could already see where this whole spiel was going from the start," Cindy scoffed and teammate or no, Mark felt like murdering the stupid girl right then. Why could she not shut up for once in her life? The longer the fat bastard talked, the longer they had to find a way out of here or wait for reinforcements!


    "Really?" their host asked, for the first time showing genuine emotion in his voice; curiosity. "You do not wish to play for time like your teammates are doing? How unusual. Every other single super either delivered to me or captured would invariably try to prolong things when given the opportunity. They would test the limits of their captivity, try to find weak points in their restraints, even beg for their lives in the end. The results got repetitive after the first hundred subjects or so but proper research requires sufficient sampling until actionable data is found." The madman stood up, walked over to where Cindy was stretched out and leaned forward to examine the mostly naked girl from far too close for Mark''s liking. It wasn''t sexual, but the kind of look a greedy man throws a major paycheck or a very expensive jewel. "You on the other hand just tested your restraints once and have since deviated from the behavior of other supers. What makes you so atypical?"


    "I''m just special," the girl said with her usual mocking eye roll. Was she... was she daring the mad supervillain to kill her, or something? "Now can we get to the good parts of this plan of yours and why you believe you''ll get away with this?"


    "Ah, I see." The monster moved away from Cindy and back to his desk where he started searching his drawers for something. His enormous hands were having great difficulty fitting into the too-small openings so he kept his every move slow and delicate to avoid breaking things. After a good minute of searching, he came up with a remote control and even more carefully started fiddling with the buttons. "You are confident enough to banter so not because you have a death wish but because you have faith in your teacher. Allow me to... ....which button was it... aha!"


    There was a click and a viewing screen deployed from a slit in the green wall, a single pane of gleaming white material roughly in the shape and size of a large flat-screen television but using some sort of alien tech. If Mark didn''t know better - and he didn''t - he''d say the whole thing was made up of tooth enamel. Then it turned on and the white surface became a viewing screen showing a distorted view of four tentacles holding a human in their grip. Either the human had been somehow shrunk to only a couple of inches or the tentacles were of a truly stupendous size, a couple hundred feet long at the very least. Since the human shown was a rather... stacked blonde woman wearing a white and blue costume, Mark was pretty sure the latter was true. To his great dismay, he could also see the figure he was pretty sure was Maya not just held against the ground by those massive tentacles but twitching as lightning crackled around her form.


    "As you can see, I prepared sufficient countermeasures against the greatest threat to the project. There is no need to bravely hold on as you wait for rescue, for your would-be rescuer will soon be a captive herself." He sounded inordinately pleased to have just crushed all their hopes, Mark noted idly as a suffocating numbness spread across his thoughts. What could they do now? "In fact, our little discussion was a pleasant way to pass the time until your teacher could join us - or did you think I was monologuing for the sake of it?" He snorted and unlike his voice it was not pleasant at all, more like a dozen pigs doing so than a man. "I am a man of reason and progress, not some comic book supervillain."


    "She''ll get out of this and come save us," Cindy said, sounding mulish and hopeful and not very Cindy-like. "You think whatever you cooked up in your little lab will succeed where the invaders failed?"


    "Of course it will, my dear. The core concept of technology is using tools to exceed what our bodies and minds are naturally capable of. With enough time, knowledge and resources, what we build will always surpass what we are." He pressed more buttons and unseen machinery in Cindy''s cell began to whine. "Your teacher is the strongest superhuman on record, orders of magnitude more powerful than the dregs the CIA provided for my experiments, but that just means I had to go for quantity over quality. Were you not paying attention? I succeeded not just in copying powers but transplanting them. Even if most of the samples I had were trash, I only needed to stack enough copies. My latest creation masses half a million tons while the human brain a mere three pounds. It''s not as if I was going to run out of space."


    "You move around powers by stealing brains?!" Cindy screeched. "Wait, does this mean you got extra brains yourself? Eww... that''s so fucking gross!"


    It was, it really was, but Mark was too busy testing options to be disgusted. They were running out of both time and possible outside assistance, if they were going to escape they had to do it now. The problem was this containment system they had been put in. Not only could it detect powers and punish them until they stopped using them or passed out, but the bindings were too thick. Even if they were just steel, a wire an inch thick could hold thirty tons? Maybe fifty? He could not remember exactly but it was around that ballpark and he could not trust they were only that strong given the supertech. Since they were also several inches thick, there was no way for them to burst out just with their basic strength... or it hadn''t been a day before.


    "Sacrifices have to be made on the altar of progress," their host proclaimed like every mad scientist ever. "Speaking of sacrifices, I''d been hoping to have all four of you in my grasp before we proceeded to the harvesting, but your teacher is proving stubborn and you girl are far too ungrateful for this opportunity to see progress made." The whirring of unseen machines intensified and green tentacles started growing from the walls of Cindy''s pod; it was do or die time.


    Their one chance was given by their own captor. For all his protests, the monster was very much a textbook mad scientist, complete with monologuing and wanting to gloat over his beaten enemies. How had he put it? Even those supers with endless options would somehow always pick stuff that fit a theme? Mark would appreciate the irony when all three of them were safely back home and this bastard was dead and buried, but until then he would use the information the enemy had so helpfully provided.


    The superpower detector was inaccurate and lacked detail. It had almost immediately started frying Mark when he copied the abilities of a locomotive, noting the great strength increase. But how broad was this inaccuracy? Mark had killed hundreds of the hulking zombies earlier and tens of thousands of the smaller ones; the power he''d gained from the last battle was even now slowly increasing his abilities without the machine shocking him at all. Could it tell the difference, or was its margin of error larger than the bad guy wanted them to think? There had to be a better reason than morality the Warden and the General had discarded the device; neither of them had struck Mark as very caring about morality.


    While the enemy played games, he tested just that inaccuracy. First with a wind-up toy adding practically nothing to his own base attributes, then with a remote-controlled car, then with a motorbike and an actual car. He didn''t dare go much higher than that but a speed increase of a good twenty percent over his baseline didn''t trigger any response. He similarly checked for horsepower and durability, always keeping to the margin he felt his new power growth afforded him. Then came the real test; a gun. No response. A rifle. The same. A machine gun nest. Still nothing. Feeling bolder and also his available time dwindling he tried for something bigger; a surface-to-air missile system. The machine remained unresponsive and Mark''s heart skipped a beat. Could it not detect abilities he was not actively using?


    A glance at Cindy''s pod saw the girl uncharacteristically unresponsive as the first slowly growing tentacles reached her arms. Gulping and hoping he was right, he reached for the combination he was sixty percent sure would get him and by extension his teammates out of there. Then the screen showing Maya struggling in a giant monster''s grip exploded. A split second later all the glowing bits over the walls followed. His eyes widening at the convenient distraction, Mark grit his teeth and activated his chosen powers.


    And he screamed in pain...

 39: Black Death

    Muscles contracted at random as power-enhanced electricity coursed through my body, completely ruining any coordination and leaving my everything weak as boiled noodles. Pain was something I''d been familiar with long before I''d gained powers and something I''d gotten unfortunately exposed to often during the Invasion of Florida. When monsters have repeatedly set you on fire, the equivalent of being tasered doesn''t seem that big of a deal in comparison. No, the annoying thing was how an amount of damage almost completely negligible when compared to my overall durability or what my regeneration could help with could be so disabling. The drawbacks of still having a human body under all the enhancement; there were still some human weaknesses left.


    The additional pressure of countless minor psychic pinpricks further drained strength and stamina like a constant low-intensity beating, Empowering Regeneration struggling to keep up with the weakening attack. While my body''s full abilities grew faster than the rate of weakening, the end result was far worse because the weakening was applied to my effective strength during electrocution. Then the giant monster''s tentacles stretched me out, removing all leverage other than my own powers... powers that partially relied on my own physical strength.


    I pulled, twisted, strained as much as possible under the circumstances but it didn''t work. No slipping an arm free, no budging of the tentacles holding me, no obvious strain on my opponent as I struggled. There wasn''t even an opportunity to capitalize on enemy mistakes because as soon as it got a good hold the monster was content to keep it, stand there and regenerate from its prior wounds while it had me at a disadvantage. Knowing it was a long shot, I used Spatial Leap to just blink out of its grip.


    In an instant I got about a hundred feet from my prior position. Of course, that did nothing for my unresponsive muscles, the additional weakness from the eyes, or the disorientation caused by their combined effect. The tentacles got a grip on me almost instantly and slammed me into the ground for good measure. I tried again and again and again, with similar lack of results. The only change was the monster clamping the fifth electrified grapnel it had just grown around my torso and upping the current by a fourth.


    Somewhere in the distance a powerful explosion formed a mushroom cloud over part of the crater and from the radiation emissions my Force Awareness picked up the blast was definitely fission-induced. Either the bad guys had access to tactical nukes, Mark had learned how to mimic them, or Gabby was trying that trick of changing his swords'' metal into a fissionary. That last one worried me most of all because none of the kids had the durability to stand up to a nuke point-blank, even a small one. I''d thus advised the kid not to attempt it unless he had no other option. This was... probably bad? They still had their rings, though. If they were dangerously wounded or were hit by something lethal, the enhancements on them would activate, offering the kids several additional options. Until I could get out of this predicament, it would have to be enough.


    In another attempt to escape the kaiju''s grip, I activated my Eyebeams. Blasts of energy shot out... then flailed uncontrollably around. My body was shaky enough and my focus disrupted enough that all my attempts to aim the damn things went even worse than trying to leave the monster''s grip via teleportation. Beams of disintegrating force burned trenches into the ground, drilled into distant hills, vanished into the sky above. Some did hit the monster, carving trenches into its flesh but they did not stay in the same place long enough to cause significant wounds against its power resistance. The monster''s response was to just turn me around so I would be looking outwards instead of at it and trying to aim around my back with Force Awareness went quite badly. I had to stop after one of the beams hit only a few yards away from the force dome the civilians were hiding in.


    After a minute of no further reaction from the monster I tried to slip its grip again, just in case it had lost focus or grown overconfident like human fighters often get, but no dice. I kept trying constantly for the next few minutes anyway. By then my body was drenched in sweat, my muscles were beginning to cramp by the constant involuntary contractions, a numbing, unnatural fatigue was settling in and I was beginning to have trouble focusing in entirely mental tasks. I had to give it to whoever had designed the monster; it had good counters for every one of my better-known abilities. The combination of the shocking power, the draining eyes, the regeneration, the power resistance, the instant reflexes was very good at keeping me on the ropes once caught so I''d either exhaust myself or more bad guys turned up. As things stood, it would probably be the former; as far as the bad guys knew, I was well and truly caught.


    Whatever programming ran the kaiju either thought just that, or had been given further orders because my captor started moving towards the crater at a good clip for its stupendous size, which meant faster than any land vehicle could have had in that terrain. Even as it did, both the pressure from the psychic eyes and the electrical power it could generate increased as its internals developed further. Something about its fight with me and especially how it kept me captive was either feeding it more power or helping it apply its abilities. The ache of being tasered turned to pain, then the agony of dangerous levels of electrocution. At the same time its psychic draining left me almost completely paralyzed.


    We descended into the mists filling the crater, the kaiju too large to be completely hidden. Having to ensure I did not slip its grip was probably why it was no longer moving underground, that and delivering me faster to... wherever it was going. It only took another minute and I was seriously doubting I could hold on much longer when we stopped. We had arrived at the center of the crater and the complex it held here.


    Well, something had finally gone well at last. As the kaiju held me and cranked up all its efforts in a bid to knock me out before presenting me to its master, I reached for my power slots. I fumbled once or twice but the third time managed to slot in Retributive Defense. Suddenly all the lightning and psychic pressure resisted by Force Adjustment, as in the majority of the physical effects, were turned back on the kaiju. After so long getting pummeled by the enemy, Empowering Regeneration had strengthened my abilities enough so what was reflected back at the monster was actually a good deal stronger than its original attack.


    The monster was large and powerful but ultimately not as tough as I was. By waiting to flip the tables for so long I was also sure the return hit would be overwhelming. Had I been in its place I would have passed out immediately; the monster had all its musculature and cybernetics fried, its semblance of nervous system shredded and by the time it stopped twitching it was a well-cooked wreck.


    I dropped to the floor of a crater with a groan, surprising the significant force of super-sized, super-ugly zombies. Even without the constant electrocution and energy drain I was still severely weakened, exhausted, with my regeneration working hard to fix it. That meant the first zombie to lay its hands on me was merely torn in half from my punch instead of exploding.


    The rest of the army charged in what promised to be a brutal but short-lived fight before I had words with whoever had the great idea to attempt to capture me.


    xxxx


    For the first time in all her days, Cindy''s life depended on keeping calm, quiet and out of the way. It was supremely boring.


    When it had become clear the zombie army would overrun Mark, Gabby and her she''d quietly started ''disappearing'' instances of herself, making them not interact with the perceptions of everyone nearby. It was quite amusing to the teenage girl that the same application of her powers that let her spy on the soldiers in the base after lights out would prove critical against an army of brainless, blindly marching walking corpses.


    Some of those instances bumped into some undead and had to be deleted, others were shot through either by the enemy or her teammates own attacks, but Cindy could always split more of them a split-second before she deleted the old ones so there were always more. Fighting her way out of this pit would never happen, but sneaking? The way those less powerful undead swarmed they''d hardly notice if whoever was stepping on them was a fellow zombie or a Cindy-instance their minds would tell them was simply not there. When the time came to flee she''d just delete her visible instance and disappear in the confusion. She felt a pang of guilt at planning to leave Mark and Gabby behind, but she''d feel a lot worse getting torn apart by monsters, right? Right.


    Except when Mark was shot out of the sky he was not killed. The monsters beat him up until he stopped trying to fight back, then carried him deeper into the complex. That changed things. It changed them a lot. First, she switched which was her primary instance before the zombies overwhelmed her defensive lines. Then, because the boy was probably thinking he was about to die, she threw Gabby a few sappy lines about not dying and not being overconfident. As if the great Cindy Barnes would ever stop pushing boundaries of herself and others but hey, it kept him from doing something stupid, didn''t it?


    Then came the harder part; pretending to get captured. Not only did she need to keep her hidden instances away from anyone''s notice, not only did she keep the one visible instance there as a distraction, she actually had to feel that body being beaten to unconsciousness. Letting it wink out to save herself the pain would obviously ruin the ruse so she concentrated on the instances that weren''t beaten up and did her best not to scream out with any of them.


    From there, things got easier. Following her own body as it was carried through a mad scientist''s lab as built by the lowest bidder - because government contractors, right? - she finally got to see the big kahuna, the supervillain responsible for all the ugly she had to see, hear, feel and occasionally even taste. Having accomplished her super-stealthy, super-spy, super-infiltration all the way to the heart of the enemy complex, she immediately regretted it.


    Not only was the Big Bad a big-ass sack of lard, not only was his megalomaniacal plan a cliche piece of crap repeated ad nauseam in comic books, but he had stripped all three of them down to their panties. Cindy had no problem getting naked to make a good distraction for her extra selves especially when the only ones who''d get to see would be the boys and a dead man walking, but the fat bastard had not even pretended to show any interest in her looks. He had tried many needles until one worked, taken blood samples from all three of them with equal professionalism, then strapped them all into those torture machines pretending to be restraints without even copping a feel.


    Pouting, the girl resolved to be as annoying and arbitrarily contrary as possible just to see if she could get a reaction out of the guy. It had worked reasonably well. She''d mouthed off, then gotten a bit shocked for it. Gabby had woken up then and gotten shocked too, followed by Mark. Both boys had shown perfectly normal reactions by gaping and maybe drooling upon seeing her near-naked body, then the bad guy started monologuing. Cindy didn''t even need to hide particularly well to avoid notice, merely parrot the right words every kidnap victim gave to every supervillain kidnapper sooner or later and she basically got free rein to explore the bad guy''s office. She found every light hidden behind a crystal, every power cable masquerading as something cooler and more alien, every door and every lock. The computers were all biometrically locked but that would not help the bad guy if they all suddenly got gutted.


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    Sitting through the whole explanation of how he farmed people for powers and how he had several extra brains into that huge skull of his was supremely icky, but then something interesting finally happened. The Big Bad showed them video of Captain Barbie getting captured by his pet kaiju. For a few moments Cindy was really worried, then remembered the villain had them all captured. Maybe they''d see Maya tied up and naked too? Then the guy went and ruined it because he couldn''t wait. That would have been worth so many blackmail points but noo, he had to start his stupid experiment on Cindy''s captured instance.


    The instance was about to wink out and clue him in that something was off. She had absolutely no desire to see what that experiment felt like it especially when brain extraction was in the cards, so she had to act soon.


    Then the screen showing their teacher getting schooled exploded, forcing her hand. In under a second she had sliced every cable, broken every light, gutted the computers, closed and locked the doors and was well on her way to freeing Gabby. She had no illusions about the doors holding for any length of time but they would at least slow down the zombies that fit into the corridors and the three of them shouldn''t need too long to blow up one giant asshole.


    Naturally, that was when Mark started screaming as he caught fire.


    xxxx


    Mark screamed and not just because the pod he was strapped into tried to force him to stop using his powers. One of his slots mimicked the biggest mass of Hafnium Carbide his powers would allow, a ceramic so refractory and heat resistant its melting temperature exceeded seven thousand degrees Fahrenheit. The second slot mimicked a plasma cutter and the third a good soak into gasoline that is then set on fire. Combining the temperature of the plasma torch with that sheath of flames still hurt because even the most heat-resistant substance on earth can''t endure flames five times hotter than the surface of the sun.


    On the other hand, even that flame would take time to burn through fifteen hundred tons of Hafnium Carbide'' worth of heat resistance while it melted his bindings with absurd ease. He jumped off the electrified prison and lost his balance as his feet literally melted into the ground. But that was great because he fell forward... and grabbed the Fat Bastard''s arm on the way down. Fat and muscle sizzled, blackened and burned on contact but didn''t fall apart as he''d been expecting. Instead the Big Bad threw him halfway into a wall with a base strength greater than Mark''s own.


    That was fine. Mark could do strength, too. He dropped the flames to mimic two copies of the largest non-electrical locomotive in the world and replaced the Hafnium Carbide with an equal mass of modern armor plating. The next time the Big Bad punched him he barely felt it and when his eyes glowed bright yellow the stunner just rolled over Mark with no effect. A solid lump of armor could not be stunned. Mark''s answering kick to the knee also barely bruised his target but that hadn''t been his goal anyway.


    "Stupid brat. You think I wouldn''t give myself extra powers too?" the bad guy boasted like every supervillain ever. "It would take more than the likes of you to- ARRGH!!!"


    "I dunno about that," Cindy said, having finished turning the Fat Bastard''s left foot into hamburger. "You seem pretty stabbable to me."


    Mark had no idea where the girl had come from or why she was in her pink Hello Kitty catsuit instead of near-naked but he welcomed the reinforcements. That she had the presence of mind to also free Gabby and borrow one of his swords to fight with while the other boy recovered was even better.


    "DIE!" the enemy screamed, shooting a black beam at Cindy''s center of mass. The girl only flickered in place, the beam passing through her to cut a hole deep into the ground. No, not cut; several cubic meters of rock were just gone, vanishing without trace. Mark decided not to try and tank the beam if it was used against him but Cindy had no such problem; she kept daring the Big Bad to shoot her, ignored it, then cut up his enormous body bit by bit. "Why won''t you die you insufferable menace!" he whined, getting only more slices for his trouble.


    "What''s up, Big Guy? Weren''t we just stupid brats about a second ago?" Mark mocked, then kicked the knee Cindy had cut up and already weakened.


    "Where''s your scientific superiority now?" Cindy mocked him, cutting into his other leg. Instead of responding, the guy glowed green and his wounds started healing before flashing yellow. All of Cindy''s instances staggered and most of them vanished and the Fat Bastard turned tail and ran.


    "Oh no, you don''t!" Mark clamped his arms around the guy''s good leg and held on. A giant fist slammed into the side of his head but it barely fazed him; he''d received more painful hits while sparring.


    "Yeah," Gabe said as he entered the fray with half a dozen of his own blades. "If you''re so powerful, why flee?" Black energy crackled over the man''s hands but before he could blast Mark and Gabby, Cindy''s instances chopped them apart, leaving behind only slowly regrowing stumps.


    "Fools! Strike me down and my creations shall wake up and spread all over the- URK!!!" That particular proclamation of doom was literally cut short by Cindy jumping onto the guy''s back then cutting open his throat. Then the girl flickered into a storm of stabs until the bastard''s head fell apart.


    "I''m taking bets," a gore-covered Cindy said as she landed on the floor uncaring that she looked like a demented serial killer. "How true do you boys think his threat was?" The proposed bet only added to her appearance.


    "Cindy, you know you''re completely crazy, right?" Gabby asked her while manifesting more swords just in case things somehow turned worse. "Yeah, you''re our crazy teammate but don''t you want to, I dunno, cool down sometime?"


    Whatever the girl''s answer was going to be they never heard it because the building started falling apart then and there.


    "Ugh, I hate load-bearing bosses," Gabby complained as all three of them ran for it. Eerie crystals shattered, metal walls were mangled, concrete and armor plating exploded to bits as they hopped, skipped and blasted their way out of a labyrinthine lab designed by a madman. Mark very carefully did not look through the doors they passed by. The ''farm'' outside had already more than taken up his monthly nightmare quota.


    "I don''t think it''s the dead guy causing it," Cindy voiced her opinion as they kicked through a wall and found themselves back outside.


    "What makes you say that?" Mark couldn''t help but ask.


    "Dunno," she shot back as a horribly inhuman cry split the air and painfully pounded against their eardrums. "But something tells me the giant tentacled horror thrashing the building is a good clue."


    Mark couldn''t help it; he looked back. A mass of green-black tentacles oozing boiling tar was indeed dismantling the labs in a blind rage. Praying it would not notice them he pushed himself to run a little faster and the other two followed. "Anybody know which way is out?"


    "It''s a round crater, Soldier Boy," Cindy snarked. "Every way is out."


    Just to prove her wrong, the universe provided another obstacle. Just ahead of them the ground shook and flowed like a stormy sea before another giant monster burst out of the ground. Instead of tentacles this one was a giant worm - if worms grew to several hundred feet long, were covered in armor plates as thick as whole tanks and had a maw filled with teeth longer than Mark was tall.


    "I hate you, Cindy," he said with feeling. "Soo fucking much!" Then the giant worm exploded. A figure wearing a familiar white and blue costume flew through it as if it had had the consistency of jello, mangling its head beyond recognition and killing it instantly.


    "Why are you running?" Maya casually asked as if this was just another training exercise and not a nightmarish battle with the creations of a demented supervillain. "At least two of you have flight powers, you should have fled by air."


    "Well excuse us for getting beaten and captured while you played hooky with a giant tentacled monster," Cindy shot back in her usual form.


    "If you can joke you can still think so you have no excuse for losing your heads," their teacher told them with zero signs of having been embarrassed by the girl''s words. "Fly back to the landing strip, pack the journalists into the Osprey and flee the island."


    "What about you?" Gabby asked, looking a bit worried. In the distance more monsters burst from the ground. None were as large as the one they''d seen in the video but all were at least the size of a small skyscraper and there were several of them.


    "I will make sure none of these beasts leave here," the pale-looking blonde replied. She was a little less perfect than usual, with black circles under her eyes and signs of exhaustion showing through her serious expression. Even if she had won the battle with the largest of the monsters it must have not been easy. How would she deal with another half-dozen or more? "That and remind certain people why they should keep their stupid ideas to themselves instead of funding black research programs."


    xxxx


    My punch sent the runty, blade-covered kaiju flying ass over teakettle, caving in its ribcage in the process. Unfortunately it would regenerate and it had lots and lots of friends. I briefly accelerated halfway across the island then flew back, ramming into one of said friends and pushing back into the crater. Ever since the kids had killed the guy that made them, every monster on Devon Island was scrambling to swim out to sea. The small ones were not an issue; they were too slow to reach the coast in time so their numbers were useless. It was the dozen giant monsters that were proving a problem.


    All of them were smaller than the big one that had almost captured me but none of them were exactly small and only the smallest had been weak enough to kill quickly. Would I get them all in the end? Probably, but not even I could hold them back indefinitely while they were trying to escape. I had no idea what other surprises that madman had put in them; for all I knew they could release a dozen engineered plagues the moment they hit the water. Good thing was, I only needed to delay them until the squishy people hauled ass.


    A glance with Force Awareness showed the kids had done as instructed and the Osprey was leaving. Even the journalists were quick to pack up when told to flee; maybe having a front row seat to a real kaiju attack had helped them grow some healthy level of fear for the monsters after all.


    One of the ugliest monsters, a giant green ooze that disintegrated everything it touched, attempted to engulf me. A concentrated blast from my Eyebeams dissuaded it and it fell back, hissing hallucinogenic mist from every square inch of its surface as it did. A forcefield around me and holding my breath for a bit ensured that attack got nowhere and then it was time.


    I didn''t do anything fancy, I simply picked up a decently sized boulder and flew off. At a mere hundred tons it wasn''t a threat to even one of the kaiju by itself but as I got higher I added Proximakinesis to hold it together for a while longer and Force Adjustment for that final step, both of them in a forcefield and the second with a short delay build into it. The moment I hit two miles up I dropped it and flew away.


    Ten seconds later, actinic radiance brighter than the sun split the skies and shook the earth. A fireball twenty-five miles wide in diameter swallowed the ancient crater, obliterated everything within and burned several hundred meters into bedrock. The shockwave that followed would be heard all over the world to at least some extent and shatter windows two hundred miles away. Force Adjustment applied to the nuclear force on one hundred tons of rock had turned it into a six hundred megaton fission weapon.


    It was both clean-up and warning, a warning further supervillains would better heed or suffer my... displeasure.

 Interlude VI: Bait

    "...complaints from no less than thirty-four foreign governments that we''re weaponising the new phenomena. Even our allies are uneasy about the latest developments and the numbers of non-government organisations very publicly screaming about your people''s latest stunt continues to grow," a bespectacled, chubby, middle-aged man finished summing up more than two hours of official questions, even more official whining, and an entire month''s worth of political ass-covering. He hadn''t paid attention to it yet could have repeated most of it word for word from similarly useless paperwork he''d received in the past. "Honestly, General, we created your current position to handle the situation yet all we''ve seen is things continuing to get worse."


    "No, you created my position in a bid to put people with powers under government control, not understanding the ramifications of that action." The tall, thin, ageing man most people in the underground bunker this ''conference'' was taking place knew as General Rinaker puffed out a cloud of cigar smoke that shifted into the shape of a tentacled monster fighting a tiny flying woman. Several members of the so-called Oversight Committee flinched, whether at such a minor display of powers or at the images he''d chosen to display he could not tell. "Now, when one of your messes blew up on international television because you did not even consider adhering to the rules and guidelines we all agreed to, all you can do is blame others. Secret bioweapon tests and human experimentation? Cooperating with super-powered terrorists? Carrying out assaults on both allied governments and American targets?" It felt great, finally being able to speak up against such idiocy. "Were you trying to get us all killed?"


    "Now, now, General. We both know how the game is played," a middle-aged, black-suited, bespectacled man in the back of the small group of Committee members spoke up. He had such a stereotypical ''spy'' aesthetic it could be nothing but deliberate and from both his tone and the fact that Rinaker had neither seen nor heard him enter the room or take up a seat, he liked this whole cloak-and-dagger scene far too much for everyone''s health. So the General narrowed his eyes and puffed a few more clouds of cigar smoke, his attention fixed on the potential complication. "This is nothing every major government has not done before, openly or otherwise. The Invasion cost this nation tremendously, but also offered us unique opportunities. For the moment, we are the only country that can reliably source powered individuals but the phenomena are steadily spreading. If we are to keep our lead and recoup military and economic losses..." he shrugged. "Sacrifices will have to be made."


    "And I suppose the Commander in Chief authorised your operations? The Joint Chiefs? The Congress, perhaps?" No reply came. Rinaker snorted. "No, this was a move from your old playbook. The one everyone who had sufficient knowledge of how powers worked, or a good enough head to notice all the traps told you would not work." He crossed his arms and stared at the oldest Committee member. "In fact, I remember both the Warden and I warning you such methods constituted a dangerous approach of powers, Dr. Brown. More than once, in fact, during your work on power evaluation in our New York base."


    "I only remember being fired-" the old scientist snarled but the Committee Chairman interrupted what promised to be an entertaining and illuminating tirade.


    "Enough!" the bespectacled man whose name Rinaker had already written off his mind shouted. "This is not a debate to air grievances. It is not a discussion, or a court of law." He scowled at both the Committee members who''d spoken up and Rinaker himself. "It''s a tribunal to decide whether General Rinaker''s handling of the super known as ''Maya Wennefer'' makes him responsible for the third power-based nuclear detonation on North American soil and the threat it represents to both our allies and this nation."


    What followed was a long, dull, obviously scripted question and answer session. Had he ordered Wennefer to the Devon Island facility? Had he been aware of her nuclear capabilities? Why did he involve himself and his people in a situation he''d been told to ignore? Why had he not informed the Oversight Committee of the CIA''s unofficial requests to investigate the matter? Why did he not send a proper military escort with the reporters instead of an asset of questionable reliability? Why did he not confiscate the reporters'' equipment, their recordings of classified information, on their return?


    The line of questions and their very obvious answers lead to a rather unfavourable outcome for him and if he''d actually considered the entire procedure anything more than a sham he might have been worried about it. Unfortunately, he had bigger and uglier things to worry about. Things he had been worrying about for the past seven months that, unless he really missed his guess, were finally coming to a head.


    "...in short, it is this Committee''s finding that General Rinaker''s conduct constitutes sufficient grounds for his immediate detainment under article seven of the Secret Homeland Incursion Protocol."


    "Huh, you went for it. Brought up the Shitty Treaty and everything," Rinaker mused as several guards slowly approached. "That''s a bit of a snag." Instead of getting up like the Committee goons were waiting for, he sat back in his chair and puffed out some more smoke.


    "Excuse me?" the bespectacled idiot demanded like all politically powerful but personally weak people that felt they were being slighted. At least Rinaker finally knew he was stupid rather than merely poorly informed or unwittingly manipulated, and at their level there had only ever been one punishment for stupidity.


    "You seem to be labouring under a misconception about the purpose of this meeting," the General explained, smiling for the first time in over the week. "It had never been about my actions; it had always been about yours."


    The fool just gave Rinaker a look of total incomprehension, but several of the other Committee members either scowled in hostility or widened their eyes in realisation. And the four guards that had been approaching ostensibly to arrest him? They did not disappoint at all; without warning, without a hint of their intentions, they drew far heavier than normal sidearms and started shooting from less than fifteen feet away.


    This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.


    Gunshots were always loud. Up close they can even be flashy, especially with the larger caliber guns. In the gloom of the underground conference room and from point-blank they were both deafening and blinding. So the General blinked and shook his head a few times, scratched at his ears, then fixed on his face the same confused expression the bespectacled idiot had thrown at him twenty seconds before.


    "That was horrible trigger discipline, boys," he told his would-be killers. "And why are you shooting blanks?"


    Their response was to shoot him again, filling the room with even more puffs of smoke than his old Cuban cigar had. They hadn''t, of course, been shooting blanks and at least none of the four were stupid enough to stop and check. Great at being soldiers, but either poor at being human beings or under someone else''s thumb. As for the Committee members? None, not even Dr. Brown had shown any surprise at the initial shots but many were showing confusion or disappointment now.


    A knife came at Rinaker''s head from apparently nowhere, its thrower neither seen nor heard. The old General rolled to his feet in a single fluid motion, then turned his head just enough for the blade to pass a hair''s width from his nose and embed itself in the left wall... the wholly solid, foot-thick steel wall. Then the four men tried to grab and pull him down, but they were only human. Rinaker''s once creaky, ageing joints flowed through the relatively slow and clumsy attacks like so much smoke with about as much effort as he put in his morning stroll.


    The smoke clinging heavily to the room''s atmosphere started moving. First to manifest was the image of ropes, snaking around the soldiers'' limbs seemingly on their own accord and pulling them back. The four troopers struggled but physical force and integrity was not what had given shape to the things binding them to begin with; trying to break them with it was useless. More ropes lashed out at the suddenly panicking Committee members as he walked up to the fool that thought had been their leader.


    "I am curious," Rinaker asked the shorter, paler, heavily sweating man. "When we sat down and wrote the articles for the Incursion Protocols, wasted night after night to put words on paper I had always known could never be enforced, did you already know you were going to break them all in the most heinous manner known to man?"


    "You idealistic fool!" the traitor shouted more in fear than in anger. "Work with supers? The mere existence of powers shatters the premises modern governments are based upon. When a mere handful of people can do what great armies cannot we only have two options; either gain such power for ourselves, or destroy it."


    "Who is this ''we'' you keep talking about?" the General mockingly asked as more of his smoke pacified the remaining Committee members. "You do not represent the US government; your prior actions and your conduct today made that clear enough. You don''t have powers and from what you just said your representation of supers would be laughable. Given your history and current state you''re too cowardly to act alone... so who do you really work for?"


    Another thrown dagger came from nowhere. Instead of dodging, Rinaker made the image of a steel wall out of smoke and the blade sank into it with the scream of metal grinding into metal. But the knife had only ever been a distraction. That was proven conclusively when the image of a wrecking ball intercepted the entirely invisible, inaudible figure that had made a beeline for the trapped Committee members and slammed it against the wall with, literally, building-breaking force. The air between the smoky wrecking ball and the wall flickered and cracked like shattering glass to reveal the very obvious spy that had spoken up earlier.


    "Well," the trapped black-suited man said, "This is awkward."


    "By which you mean you were supposed to kill those fools and blame it on my people, so your patsies in the government would have a proper excuse to dismantle the super cooperation program," Rinaker said as if discussing the weather.


    "...what gave us away?" the would-be assassin asked in the same genial, even friendly tone as if he hadn''t attempted to kill him several times in the past few minutes.


    "The invisible, inaudible people sneaking into my base?" the General answered. "Or maybe the odd absence of several high-end members of the government from anything to do with supers? Maybe the repeated terrorist hits on secret sites or highly defended positions across the US?"


    "Huh... your smoke? Probably smoke displacement, then" the assassin mused. "But we were careful not to approach you before today."


    "We live in a world of cars, guns, and heavy industry, boy." Rinaker sneered. "Do you really think there are places on Earth without smoke of some kind?" The smoke in the air took the form of a rocket already flying towards the assassin faster than normal human eyes could see. A split second before it struck, the assassin vanished into his own shadow and reappeared across the room, already running for the exit. The General let the rocket fade back into smoke and conjured the image of thick metal bars blocking the exit.


    The shadow-assassin blinked between shadows once more, reappearing in the corridor beyond. He turned around and mockingly waved goodbye at Rinaker. Then the assassin''s legs were shredded from heel to hip as huge metal blades sprouted from the ground faster than he could react. The blades then grew further and split into more blades, carving him to pieces so fast he looked as if he''d exploded.


    "Very thorough," Rinaker commented when a steel statue of a girl walked out of the corridor''s metal wall. "Messy, though. Do you have to scare the janitors so?"


    "It''s flesh and blood, they have a metal content," Liz, the super known as The Warden responded in a dull metallic voice in her full-metal form. "Honestly, sir, I''m handling a whole prison complex by myself. A little messy spot is nothing in comparison."


    "And it did help you vent," the General added, then shrugged. "Keep it limited to useless enemies and it''ll be fine."


    "Does that mean we got the useful enemies, then?"


    "Oh yes. It went more or less like we expected." Really, the only bad part about the plan was having to live through the discussions. "Four boys under mind control for your people to examine and as proof of the threat, and at least some people that had a hand in writing the enemy''s playbook if the assassin''s attempts at clean-up mean anything."


    "That''s step four done with, then," the much younger woman commented with a scowl. "Now comes the hard part."


    "Ain''t that the truth," the General agreed with feeling. Cleaning up a government of traitors during an undeclared war... one mistake too many and the whole thing would collapse into anarchy at best, a rampage of unkillable monsters at worst.


    Fortunately, he had the perfect way to draw everyone''s attention away from the really important bits...

 40: Return

    The moment we got back in US airspace and the reporters were relatively safe, I dropped the kids back at the base then flew off before anyone could accost me. They could handle writing the after-action reports; after the clusterfuck of epic proportions we''d had to deal with because some people had decided to meddle with forces man was not meant to wield, I needed a break from dealing with fools. Besides, reminding certain people of the not so binding nature of our relationship was a good idea.


    For about twenty seconds the world stopped as I stepped outside of time. There would be no sonic boom, no lightning-like streak in the sky for anyone to see as I exited the atmosphere. By the time everything started moving again I was in space and no satellite ever built would pick a human-sized target moving faster than a falling star over a thousand miles away. I settled into the superpowered equivalent of a steady jog, the diamond clarity and absolute silence of space quite welcoming after the cacophony and frantic decision-making of combat. It was a good way to clear one''s head and the awesomeness of space travel never got old, not even after six months in the void, six months that had subjectively been several years.


    My powers pulled me into higher and higher speeds with very little to show for it, until I could have crossed a whole state in a second back on Earth and the Moon had grown from a thumb-sized disc to a massive vista taking up most of my field of view. Then I was there, slamming into one specific small crater at speeds so great the impact should have shattered mountains yet instead brought me to a complete stop without even disturbing the moon dust beneath my feet. A simple forcefield rising an inch from my skin and infused with Focused Invulnerability had made both me and what I touched immune to the collision, obviating the need to brake and reducing the whole trip to a mere six minutes.


    I got to digging, revealing a massive, crudely-made trunk of solid black iron that had been buried under the moon rocks. It had the same layered forcefields as my home, with further instances of invulnerability against being pushed, pulled, lifted, punched, kicked, elbowed, kneed, rammed, drilled through, every type of projectile or melee weapon and tool I could think of, blast waves, fireballs and radiation from both conventional explosives and nukes. It still was far from truly invulnerable as a mere application of proximakinesis opened the lid just fine when no hand could have regardless of conventional strength. That was the flaw of that form of invulnerability; each field would protect from a single specific thing at a time and at nearly half an hour each to make permanent on an object it would never cover even a fraction of potential attacks. But as a preventative and delaying measure if people did reach the Moon, did find this particular random crater, did dig up the trunk and tried to steal it? It should suffice.


    Yeah, OK, it had been a vanity project plus powers training during my vacation when I''d had months with nothing to do. Now? It served a rather critical role befitting such an artifact. With the lid carefully opened via powers alone - it wouldn''t even budge if I pushed it by hand - I took out a thick stack of hundreds, careful not to break the far weaker protective field around them. After withdrawing and double-checking twenty grand or so, I closed the trunk and buried it once more. Six minutes later I was back on Earth.


    Faster, safer and way more private than any bank on the planet, whether you walked there or used electronic means!


    xxxx


    A brief venture to Portland, Oregon got me to Powell''s City of Books, one of the largest physical bookstores in the world. Parking myself ten miles above the city-block-sized store, I used my super-senses and super-speed to browse through their four million, two hundred and eighty-one thousand, five hundred and seventy-four books, both new and used. The rare tomes, author-signed copies and special editions I largely ignored. The same for everything non-fiction; having read through the entirety of Wikipedia at super-speed, I felt content with my level of general knowledge. No, it was time for some light reading so I focused on the fantasy section, with quality writing, decent action, and length of the series being my primary criteria.


    Some half an hour later I saw one of the registers was free, so I stopped time. Then I sped through the frozen store, picking up titles and wrapping them up in a forcefield until I had a decent-sized stash. When the pile of books became larger than the average washing machine, I walked up to the free register, put it down and let time resume.


    The girl manning the register jumped in surprise since, from her point of view, both the pile of books and I had seemingly appeared out of thin air. When she actually took in my appearance her eyes widened to the size of saucers and her chin threatened to fall off her head. Sure, I''d shifted my usual costume into a loose sky-blue blouse, dark grey jeans and a simple pair of boots, but I was still a seven-foot-tall blonde that would give Greek statues of both athletes and goddesses inadequacy issues.


    "Ring these up," I told her to break the poor girl out of her stupor, pushing the half-ton pile of literature forth.


    "...err," she stared at the books, then at me, then at the wad of hundreds at my hand. "...I''ll have to talk to the manager..."


    "No problem," I said cheerfully then gave her a heads-up. "Just try to hurry; it won''t be long before the press swarms the store." Already every customer nearby was staring and several were taking out their phones. I reached out invisibly with tiny fields of Force Adjustment, rendering thin discs of air over the phones'' cameras far less transparent than usual. Anything they tried to record in line of sight of me for the next hour would just be a blurry mess. That would delay the issue without harming the phones but the newsies would still come eventually.


    Fortunately, the store manager was quick on the uptake. He pushed through my small mountain of purchases quickly, finishing just in time for the first news van to arrive. As its crew hurried into the store, I paid him a full eighteen thousand dollars - which came with a two hundred dollar tip, winked, and disappeared a split-second after the first newsies saw me. That ought to give the store some publicity.


    A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.


    xxxx


    I got back home to the unpleasant discovery of a perimeter of new vans, fans, placards, and small groups of protesters that had formed around the house''s outer defenses. Several people were even trying their luck against the invisible dome of telekinetic force either by pushing against it or throwing everything from eggs and rocks to tomatoes. The latter would have been especially dangerous against normal people since there were still in their cans, but the few police officers present - a mere two patrol cars - did not seem interested in breaking up the crowds.


    I saw the whole mess well before they saw me, even with the telephoto lenses some of the newsies had, and came to a stop several miles out. When did the press learn where I lived? Hell, when did the public? It was probably an intentional leak by the government because I''d asked for the house to specifically not be in my name, or the paperwork to be associated with me. For all anyone doing a background check on me should have known, my only known address should have been a blown-up trailer in a monster-infested trailer park in Florida.


    Frowning at the implications, I stepped outside of time and got in along with my new purchases without anyone noticing. For now, the crowds could sit out there and do whatever they wanted; the defenses should prevent entry of both people and the sound of their protests. As soon as I was inside, I removed and disintegrated every trace of dirt, grime, sweat and other foulness, shifted my costume to a nightgown and leaped on my very comfy king-size bed, made all the comfier by fine applications of Proximakinesis and Force Adjustment until the mattress felt softer than physically possible without bending so much under my weight it seemed to swallow me. On my left side was two hundred pounds of pizzas kept both warm and fresh via adjusted heat transference and a form of force-based stasis, while on my right were the twenty books of an urban fantasy novel series that had looked promising. Banishing every thought about villains, monsters and politics, I turned off my superspeed and immersed myself in the world of a wizard detective and his chronic inability to stop getting into trouble.


    It would be four days and eleven books later that General Rinaker would finally contact me.


    xxxx


    I glided through the air at a leisury seven hundred miles an hour, the concrete jungle of New York sprawled below me as far as a normal human eye could see. Several specks followed my route at less than half that speed, easily two dozen helicopters of all kinds. Since what many international news stations had dubbed ''the Scouring of Kaiju Island'' their numbers had been steadily increasing. This was facilitated by General Rinaker''s instruction to both me and the kids to ''show the flag'' by carrying out what looked suspiciously like patrols... but weren''t.


    In many superhero stories, the powered defenders of Justice would spend most of the time in the streets. Whether jumping from building to building, running around faster than speeding bullets, driving a car-shaped, animal-themed tank or simply flying, patrols would make up much of their active hours. They would inevitably stumble into criminal activity, stop it, then keep going until they stumbled into a major villainous plot requiring their full attention. This, as the kids had quickly found in the days after our destruction of Kaiju Island, did not work nearly as well outside the pages of a comic book.


    Patrols are for military and security forces and their primary goal is deterrence; except in wars or general civil unrest, criminals and hostiles avoid the authorities because they simply lack the level of force to engage with them. Any sign of patrolling authorities suppress criminals and hostiles due to that disparity of force and thus ultimately no force actually needs to be used in ninety nine percent of situations.


    But you could not deter a monster or a villain. The former lacked the sapience and self-preservation for such tactics to work while the latter would gleefully engage in violence anyway because violence only fed their superpowers. Also, because anyone that would deliberately go for violence and murder fueled superpowers in the middle of a city is crazy. Patrols, assuming you even found superpowered enemies in the first place, would only provoke such enemies into an all-out fight in the middle of the area you wanted to protect. Considering the scope of powers available to both sides, that would not be good for the civilian population; one only had to look at what remained of Florida to remember the consequences. Thus patrols were counter-productive.


    The proper way to engage superpowered threats was to find them before they got inside cities or, if they were already inside, remove them in the most expedient way possible. That we had been put into mostly fake patrols could only mean two things; either something big was already going down and we were deliberately made into bait, or our presence was indeed used as a deterrent... but not against monsters or supervillains. Either way the whole situation stank of politics, and Rinaker had been keeping things close to the chest for once.


    Having completed another full run of my assigned course and reaching the city limits, I turned around. Almost immediately, the helicopters shadowing me adjusted course to keep up as best they could. So did twice as many surveillance drones in a loose ring nearly ten miles higher than my flight level and twenty miles away. I might not be the military buff at least one of my students was but I was pretty sure several of the drone models were not from the US. Not just politics then; the international mess that passed for such since the advent of powers.


    It was the exact thing I didn''t want to deal with, one of the main reasons I''d signed up with Rinaker''s little gathering of American supers. From the average person''s point of view it was even understandable. Powers were scary; monsters were even scarier. For the first time since the middle ages there existed events and phenomena with greater impact on the world than human governments. Far too many interests saw their importance dwindle, and that was on top of almost all supers being amazingly photogenic by choice.


    The problem was that being a celebrity was the full-time job of pandering to public opinion, and public opinion was objectively unqualified. It was impossible to properly do any specialist job while being a celebrity, especially jobs with moral ramifications - which was the main issue with modern politics. And if doing politics as a celebrity caused problems, those problems paled in comparison with trying to do the same as a superhero. Thinking about public opinion when deciding whether to blow up an island to stop the monsters had a high chance of said monsters eating the public in the end, opinions and all.


    Unfortunately, there had never been a question that this whole situation would come to a head eventually; it was just happening earlier than I''d expected due to some idiots playing with giant monsters. Constant surveillance had already started; soon would come the official invitations to defamation campaigns disguised as public debate, then would come registration and legal separation from normal humans followed by the governments'' attempt to continue their monopoly of force. It was like watching a train speeding towards a cliff, and I did mean seeing it happen; super-senses meant I was literally picking up the gears of bureaucracy working on it.


    The question was how to derail that line of thinking before the country imploded...

 41: Hat Trick

    When someone wants to use you as a distraction from even bigger problems and a convenient target for both their allies and the easily duped masses to unify against, the best way to respond is to disappear. Not just because being under surveillance was annoying but disappearing from it was the best initial way to disrupt many of the plans set in motion. Not that staying low would do anything to change the politics involved but because the politics themselves were set in motion by people who were used to being in control and were used to make convenient targets out of enemies that had to be seen in order to act in any meaningful way.


    After weeks in the modern world with my new senses it was impossible to miss how much information on pretty much everyone was gathered, analyzed and recorded. We lived in the era of cell phone cameras, of digital government, of data mining and advertisements everywhere; all important and/or self-important people relied on tracking and knowing things. The recent heavy surveillance on me and other supers was a knee-jerk reaction to some authorities'' lack of control more than anything else.


    In how the political game was usually played, disappearing - if it could even be accomplished given the nature of the Information Age - meant ceding initiative to the other side, losing popularity due to the extremely short-term memory of the masses, being away from contacts and allies, and letting your economic power base erode from lack of direction. It also meant effectively confirming any spurious accusations the other side could make because if you were blameless why were you running?


    Except none of that applied to supers in general or me in particular. Our power did not depend on popularity, or economics, or political alliances; in fact, preparing away from prying eyes was why secret lairs and secret identities existed in the first place, both in reality and in the majority of comic books. Simply put, when all power was personal and direct, doing things in secret was both possible and more effective... thus everyone playing games while the world teetered on the edge of a knife was about to be disappointed...


    xxxx


    The world came to a stop. The helicopters following me froze like insects caught in amber. The people and vehicles below, like so many ants around a kicked hive, paused mid-step even as the over ten million people in various buildings within the range of my senses stood as still as the appliances and decorations around them. Instant Action still was as awesome as the first time I''d ever used it half a year before, though back then I''d lacked the perspective to enjoy the view or grasp the full ramifications.


    When my nosy escorts started moving again, I was already gone or so they thought. Being far from my first disappearance, they were certainly annoyed but not exactly worried. Soon, I would be seen in some shop across the country, or eating food in some restaurant, or engaging in battle with some monster before coming back to resume showing the flag like I always had. By the time they realized I was nowhere to be found hours would have passed and the first phase of my plan would already be in motion.


    For now, I just flew out of the city. Being able to tell exactly where all the people and cameras were and what they were looking at paired with very quick, silent, three-dimensional movement made it absurdly easy until the next spy satellite came up. Avoiding that would have been easier underground and a non-issue via Instant Action, but I wanted to try something new and awesome. What was the point of superpowers if you didn''t have fun doing awesome things?


    Up until now I''d used the "Word of Force", my overall ability to manipulate physical forces, mostly for simple and crude mechanical effects; going faster, punching harder, tanking blows, or sensing existing forces. Creating barriers of force had been more flexible but not really complex; causing or stopping fire and sounds were the most complex things I did. None of those applications were remotely stealthy but from a Physics point of view, stealth was not about being sneaky. It was about not being interacted with.


    Slowly, almost tentatively, I used Force Adjustment on myself to make any forces between me and anything that was not me less and less until they were effectively nullified. Daylight seemed to dim even as colors distorted, the Earth''s pull became lighter, the roar of wind in my ears and the sounds of the city faded away until the world became like the depths of space in its emptiness. Except I could still see... or rather, I could still observe everything through Force Awareness. With it, I saw how the air, dust motes, lights and sounds were now passing through me as if I weren''t there... because what did being there mean if I did not interact?


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    <td style="width: 100%; text-align: left">New skill discovered: Forced Intangibility</td>


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    Now that... that had potential.


    xxxx


    The first test for the new ability was to apply it to things that were not me, and thus leaves, beer cans, sticks, pebbles, blades of grass and a particularly fat rat were sacrificed in the altar of Science!!! That was more immediate in the case of the rat as the moment it was made intangible it suffered explosive decompression because for it nothing else physically existed, certainly not the air pressure keeping its guts on the inside. That saved it from the even more explosive return to reality suffered by everything else as they suddenly rematerialized... in the same space occupied by air molecules and other impediments. To prevent this hilariously thorough disassembly, I either had to apply a separate force effect to push away other matter as the intangible objects reappeared, or to slow the reappearance enough for the impediments to be pushed out of the way.


    The test also thoroughly explored how my powers could still interact with the world just fine even when my own body could not. This had already been quite obvious from my Force Awareness alone, but the ability to poke things with Proximakinesis and various forcefields without making myself tangible or even perceptible was even more fun, because who had never wanted to be a ghost as a little kid? It was also a diametrically different approach to my usual methods, which made sense in retrospect. If a fire mage could make themselves immune to fire, why couldn''t a force manipulator make themselves immune to force? It had just needed a different perspective.


    The second test for my new ability was to apply it to my home and everything within, layering triggered effects carefully until all of them could be applied at once. It took two hours and my multitude of stalkers had yet to take my disappearance seriously... but things were about to change. One moment, the ring of reporters, news vans, protesters, anti-protesters, police, covert operatives and plain gawkers around my home''s bubble shield were pointing countless cameras at a manor house half-hidden behind several trees, the next they were looking at a crater. A near-perfectly symmetrical depression where a whole manor house and its foundations used to be.


    Of course, everything was still there but no method of surveillance or interaction based on physical force would be able to tell. To all observers my home had instantly and thoroughly disappeared... exactly as if it had been air-lifted away too quickly for them to notice. Even if they could get through the original forcefield defenses, they could walk through the whole building and neither see or touch anything.


    As hundreds of very confused people started arguing outside, I lay down on the bed and relaxed. I was half-tempted to go on vacation, just spend an entire month AWOL sitting at home and doing nothing while everyone else wasted time and resources trying to find me or adjusted their plans due to my apparent absence. Unfortunately, this whole "slayer of monsters, defender of the world" gig was something I needed to take seriously. Not because someone else wanted me to, not because of duty, but because I''d chosen to and because giving up on the first major difficulty was pathetic.


    Now if I was to seemingly disappear for a time, but actually stick around invisibly and mess with everyone''s plans, what was the one thing I needed the most?


    xxxx


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    <td style="width: 44.0577%">Name: Maya Wennefer</td>


    <td style="width: 55.9078%">Bio: female human, 17y11m29d</td>


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    <td style="width: 44.0577%">Known skills:


    This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.</td>


    <td style="width: 55.9078%">Points: 12/230


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    <tr>


    <td style="width: 44.0577%; border-style: none; vertical-align: top">


    Action and Reaction, Chronal Leap, Empowering Regeneration, Eyebeams, Focused Invulnerability, Force Adjustment, Force Awareness, Forced Acceleration, Forced Intangibility, Forcefield Creation, Greater Proximakinesis, Immutable Force, Instant Action, Lasting Force, Retributive Defense, Super Suit, Spatial Distortion, Spatial Leap


    </td>


    <td style="width: 55.9078%; vertical-align: top">


    Attributes: Might 50, Agility 25, Reason 6, Vigilance 24, Ego 25, Luck 7


    Word of Force: Power IV, Control III, Versatility IV, Number of Effects III, Range II, Scope III


    Word of Self: Power IV, Control III, Versatility III, Number of Effects III, Range II, Scope II


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    It had been some time since the last time I''d checked my progress in my mental character sheet. Part of it was that I''d never really liked this aspect of my powers. Yes, having a numerical representation of what you could do and how you progressed was supremely convenient, but the fact that you could change yourself through anything as abstract as numbers had always felt a little disturbing. It wasn''t something I... would have considered... Its disappearance after the Invasion''s final battle and its return only through a magical ring that helped quantify and numerically display my abilities made it feel even more intrusive.


    One of these days I needed to have a meeting with Liz, the totally-not-ominously-named Warden, to clarify exactly how the tiny bit of jewelry worked and what else it could do; it really had skipped my mind with all the emergencies coming up one after another. Yet as I sat invisible and intangible on my equally ghost-like sofa I... felt that once again other things took precedence. Much like Liz''s ring gave this very helpful mental representation of my powers, the one thing that would help the most against enemy plans and plots would be more information. Power I had aplenty - more than enough to deal with any threats that have come up so far with a single exception. It was knowing how to best apply it that would make a difference and I already had the tools for acquiring more information.


    In theory my Force Awareness had enough range and precision to finely observe people from dozens of miles away; in practice, even with super-speed there were only so many things I could pay attention to simultaneously. That limit might be hundreds, even thousands of times greater than a normal person''s but even in the countryside there usually were at least a million people in range of my senses, let alone in any large metropolitan area. General trends or important events stood out but if I wanted to spy on an unknown number of political opponents I would need more than that.


    With a firm decision and a bit of mental effort, I used one of my accumulated "points", my interface''s way of abstracting accumulated magical power, and increased Vigilance, the attribute that represented my ability to pay attention to my senses and handle a larger intake of information, among other things. I braced for the usual changes; every time my innate capabilities got boosted they always came with some sort of physical or mental adjustment that always felt odd and took some time to get used to. Except... this time nothing happened. No altered perception, no sharper detail in everything I saw, heard and felt, not even a hint of the dissonance or mild synesthesia that came with changes to this particular attribute. For a moment I thought that being outside of the normal world must have caused it, except I still had Force Awareness very much active. Besides, there were multiple senses about our own bodies that should have been affected. Did the attribute increase fail somehow?


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 99.6164%; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 44.0577%">Name: Maya Wennefer</td>


    <td style="width: 55.9078%">Bio: female human, 17y11m29d</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 44.0577%">Known skills:


    </td>


    <td style="width: 55.9078%">Points: 11/230


    </td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 44.0577%; border-style: none; vertical-align: top">


    Action and Reaction, Chronal Leap, Empowering Regeneration, Eyebeams, Focused Invulnerability, Force Adjustment, Force Awareness, Forced Acceleration, Forced Intangibility, Forcefield Creation, Greater Proximakinesis, Immutable Force, Instant Action, Lasting Force, Retributive Defense, Super Suit, Spatial Distortion, Spatial Leap


    </td>


    <td style="width: 55.9078%; vertical-align: top">


    Attributes: Might 50, Agility 25, Reason 6, Vigilance 25, Ego 25, Luck 7


    Word of Force: Power IV, Control III, Versatility IV, Number of Effects III, Range II, Scope III


    Word of Self: Power IV, Control III, Versatility III, Number of Effects III, Range II, Scope II


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    No, it didn''t. Not according to the ring''s interface at least but why would the magical artifact stop working now? Something was off here and determined to find out what, I increased Vigilance once more. This time something did happen, though not nearly what it was supposed to have.


    Ever gone up a staircase in the dark or blindfolded? One you''re familiar enough with to not miss a step and take a nasty tumble, but not so used to you can navigate perfectly without seeing? You can''t be entirely sure where you''ll get to the end so when you do you expect another step up instead of level ground it leaves you unbalanced. For a split second it feels like the ground disappearing under your feet, because your mind expected another step up, adjusted for it but it did not come. Adding another point to Vigilance felt like that... except in reverse. Like something was really there for a split second and then disappeared. Things do not disappear for no reason and since I''d been expecting something to happen I''d been focused enough to be sure this had not been a trick of my senses. At least not a trick coming from me.


    My whole body tensing in the void overlapping but not interacting with the physical world, I added another point to Vigilance... and found myself on my hands and knees trying to puke my guts on the invisible, intangible floor. It was no sudden dizziness, no loss of balance, my mind had actually skipped at least a couple of seconds while my body ran on autopilot. Worse, there was an almost imperceptible flicker to my senses, like a badly edited movie skipping between scenes. When I tried to focus through the sudden vertigo, some things in my Force Awareness looked like an old 90s cartoon, back when everything had been hand-drawn and blocky computer graphics hadn''t been a thing yet. In those cartoons you could almost always tell which parts of the image on the screen were about to move because they were painted ever so slightly differently. The same thing showed up on my Force Awareness now, subtle edits, things that did not quite fit. Or maybe... maybe they always had been there and only now could I actually perceive them. Getting angrier by the moment, I put two more points into Vigilance at once.


    The difference felt like taking a club to the head before gaining powers and yes I''d unfortunately experienced exactly that more than once when I was young. Just like back then, the blow seemed to rattle my brain and almost cause me to black out for a moment. Then the pain exploded in magnitude, feeling like my skull had actually shattered. I screamed and it was a good thing I was intangible otherwise the shockwave would have killed unprotected people within several city blocks. When I could think clearly enough to stop reflexively amplifying my own attempts at screaming, when my senses stopped being a jumbled mess and my hands stopped idly shredding the house''s floor, I could finally see what I had been missing.


    Just about everything in my awareness was ever so slightly tidally stressed. For normal people it would be imperceptible; for a science lab it would take specialized gear to even notice. For me, it was as obvious as a giant glowing sign in the night sky. Because for someone that could literally see gravity, that had good enough telescopic vision to see the radiation-bleached American flag on the Moon, missing a new million-ton satellite orbiting the planet should have been impossible... and yet it had happened. It had also come with a vast, friends-and-family-shaped hole in my memories, friends and family I had not even noticed I''d been missing. No, there had been instances I''d subconsciously noticed, that my train of thought led there from as recently as a few minutes earlier up to all the way back to my arrival on Earth... only to be subtly diverted by whatever power had been messing with my head.


    Screw politics. I had people to see and briefly talk to about invading the minds of others.

 42: Overdue Visits

    The only reason everything within a city block wasn''t reduced to rubble from the literal shockwave of my anger was my currently intangible form. Villains, terrorists, giant monsters, news anchors and politicians, all those I''d handled in relative calm. Unlike the days of the invasion, not much in how the world was shaping up had truly threatened my life or the lives of my friends so far so there was little reason to lose it - or so I had thought. Mental intrusion that had been going on for months. The last time I''ve felt like blasting away with my power indiscriminately had been after many life and death battles at the end of the Invasion.


    In some ways, mental powers were the worst not because they were more ultimately hurtful than any other form of assault but because they could be so insidious you might not even realize you had to fight them off. Normally passive resistance was enough, but those that specialized in mental intrusion could sneak something through that resistance given enough time, a moment of vulnerability, or even trickery. This was exactly what had just happened with improving my Vigilance attribute; somehow the perception-modifying intrusion had bypassed both my awareness and my resistance but once I was aware of it, that had been enough for the influence to be shaken off. It had almost not been enough either, if my trying to puke my guts out from the mental pressure was any indication. This was entirely unacceptable.


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 99.6164%; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 44.0577%">Name: Maya Wennefer</td>


    <td style="width: 55.9078%">Bio: female human, 17y11m29d</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 44.0577%">Known skills:


    </td>


    <td style="width: 55.9078%">Points: 10/232


    </td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 44.0577%; border-style: none; vertical-align: top">


    Action and Reaction, Chronal Leap, Empowering Regeneration, Eyebeams, Focused Invulnerability, Force Adjustment, Force Awareness, Forced Acceleration, Forced Intangibility, Forcefield Creation, Greater Proximakinesis, Immutable Force, Instant Action, Lasting Force, Retributive Defense, Super Suit, Spatial Distortion, Spatial Leap


    </td>


    <td style="width: 55.9078%; vertical-align: top">


    Attributes: Might 50, Agility 25, Reason 6, Vigilance 28, Ego 25, Luck 7


    Word of Force: Power IV, Control III, Versatility IV, Number of Effects III, Range II, Scope III


    Word of Self: Power IV, Control III, Versatility III, Number of Effects III, Range II, Scope II


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Not hesitating a moment, I put an attribute point into Ego, then another and another. If Vigilance contributed to willpower because it helped you notice the problem and provided clarity of thought, Ego did so by fortifying one''s identity so there was more of you to fight with. Whereas the first ten points of the attribute had made me more comfortable in my own skin, more confident, better-looking, less prone to fear, stronger-willed and less affected by mundane mental harm, while points eleven to twenty had taken all those things to superhuman levels along with an aura of presence and solidity, going into the high twenties made me, my personality, more than it was in a more esoteric way.


    As it hit a score of thirty, I felt the world itself giving way to my presence and will, becoming malleable just a little. In the comics, supers with great willpower seemed able to go beyond their limits or even physical laws if they tried hard enough and now I sensed my own force of personality bend the world a tiny bit. Where what I could do had once been rigid my powers would now stretch both numerically and thematically. The difference had come slowly enough it had taken spending multiple points at once to notice but in retrospect some of the things I had been able to do should not have been possible or at least not as easily.


    The other thing that would help against insidious magic was being direct. When someone smarter than you or at least better at preparation and planning than you would try to trick you the solution was not to try to catch up. With their head start that might not even be possible. No, the answer was to sit in the table with them then punch them in the face faster than those plans could set things into motion. The significant numerical and qualitative increase in my resistance to mental effects would hopefully force any mind mage to deliver their magic personally if they wanted it to work rather than acting remotely and indirectly, so now it was time for handling the "faster" bit. Point after point, I put my remaining reserve of power into Agility.


    At first, this attribute had been about mundane balance, coordination, flexibility and speed. After the first ten points, beyond a steady numerical increase in all that, their effects had become increasingly superhuman. My own ligaments and bones had become a bit stretchier without losing strength in ways biology simply could not make them and my precision exceeded that of any machine my own size. Now that the attribute was in its twenties, more overt supernatural effects became apparent. My reflexes became the slightest bit prescient, my coordination acted instinctively on information that did not exist, and my proprioception gave me a sense of where my body was and where it should be well beyond what my Force Awareness could do. When I had no more points to spend, I felt comfortable I could rival most arachnid-themed comicbook heroes in Agility.


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 99.6164%; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 44.0577%">Name: Maya Wennefer</td>


    <td style="width: 55.9078%">Bio: female human, 17y11m29d</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 44.0577%">Known skills:


    </td>


    <td style="width: 55.9078%">Points: 0/232


    </td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 44.0577%; border-style: none; vertical-align: top">


    Action and Reaction, Chronal Leap, Empowering Regeneration, Eyebeams, Focused Invulnerability, Force Adjustment, Force Awareness, Forced Acceleration, Forced Intangibility, Forcefield Creation, Greater Proximakinesis, Immutable Force, Instant Action, Lasting Force, Retributive Defense, Super Suit, Spatial Distortion, Spatial Leap


    </td>


    <td style="width: 55.9078%; vertical-align: top">


    Attributes: Might 50, Agility 30, Reason 6, Vigilance 28, Ego 30, Luck 7


    Word of Force: Power IV, Control III, Versatility IV, Number of Effects III, Range II, Scope III


    Word of Self: Power IV, Control III, Versatility III, Number of Effects III, Range II, Scope II


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Looking at the changes in my sheet I felt a great deal better about facing powerful mental attacks now, but by no means satisfied. With six skill slots overall, I could not have everything I wanted active at once and even if I could have using combination effects in the middle of a battle sometimes took up too much time. But both of those limitations could be worked around.


    Immutable Force was my go-to skill for resisting non-physical alterations. Being transformed, energy drained, cursed, mentally influenced, it worked against all those things on the idea that from my whole body and powers down to the tiniest particle or field, I was made of forces and Force was what I was. And through my mastery of Force and Self I could tell the forces that made me up to remain unchanged except through interaction with physical forces. It was not an absolute effect but it still blocked the majority of such attacks. In cases where the majority was not enough? I slotted in Retributive Defense and tied it to Immutable Force. Now whatever part of those attacks the latter blocked, the former would reflect back at their source.


    This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.


    Problem was, that defense ate up a third of my available skill slots, which was a considerable amount. So I slotted in Forcefield Creation to project any force-based powers followed by Lasting Force, allowing me to grant force effects a long duration or even full permanency without me having to keep them active personally. Using all those skills together, I attempted to grant Immutable Force and Retributive Defense to myself... and stumbled against the usual limitation; I was already being affected by these powers so I could not be affected again. This "stacking" rule was what prevented everyone with long-lasting powers from layering the same effect as many times as they wanted and thus getting boosted without limit. No, to do this I needed to be indirect.


    I slotted in Super Suit and recreated my usual costume as I did after every stat upgrade. Since it scaled to my body, it was as tough, flexible and as quickly recovering as I was, barring active Regeneration powers. Wielding the other four powers in unison again, I applied the forcefield I created not on myself but on my suit. From there it extended to cover me as well; it still would not stack effects but as the target it would emanate from did not have that effect it could be anchored and made to last. Normally, there was little point in doing this; not just because the benefits would not stack but because my costumes often got destroyed more than once per fight and the time and expense to enchant them was just not worth it.


    Even now that I had a specific goal in mind and time to prepare, putting the effort to make something that powerful was considerable. In only a minute I was beginning to sweat as I kept pouring my power into the costume. Two minutes in I was breathing heavily. By the time the process was complete two minutes later, I was gasping and drenched in sweat and felt what an unpowered athlete would probably feel after a four-minute mile.


    As my sweat sublimated in the void of intangibility though, I saw with Force Awareness both Immutable Force and Retributive Defense radiating out from my costume. I dropped those two powers off my active list and the effect from the costume spread to my body. Ten minutes of checking its effects while I recovered ensured it worked properly and didn''t have any unexpected flaws... except for being anchored to an item that couldn''t share my regeneration or grow. But that was a common limitation for everyone making use of shared or granted powers, whether the source was a gadget, a permanent spell, a super-serum or most anything else.


    In the six slots now available, I placed Force Awareness, Force Adjustment, Greater Proximakinesis, Forced Acceleration, Empowering Regeneration, and left one variable slot that currently maintained my Forced Intangibility. It was the setup that made me both fast and sneaky while leaving me most of my physical power, a good general approach until I knew what specific counters I needed to reach for. That done, it was time to see what that big ugly box in the sky was about.


    xxxx


    Flying while intangible was a surreal experience. Even in outer space there was some resistance when one went fast enough and dust motes scraped even very tough skin unless a forcefield was enabled. Stars too had songs of their own, fluctuations far beyond the visible spectrum that one with enhanced senses or advanced technology could listen into. Then there was the everpresent pull of gravity that bent space differently according to where you were. Not so with intangibility; physically, the only thing that existed was you and the rest of the universe seemed an empty, silent, absent void.


    As my power pulled me out into the void, I became faster than a speeding bullet, faster than any rocket ever built, faster than a falling star in total silence. Forty-five seconds later I was in geosynchronous orbit, matching the giant brick that was the previously hidden space station. A grey mass the shape and size of a very tall, rather fat skyscraper would blot out the stars in normal vision, but since I was still incorporeal I was seeing things only via Force Awareness.


    Annoyingly enough, even from the distance of a mere ten miles, my senses failed to penetrate the station''s hull. I could sense the light and other force-based phenomena around and behind it but my awareness perceived the station as an opaque, grey brick. Some power that was not a force-based effect prevented deeper assessment of potential threats but what I could already see was ominous enough. The nose of the brick-shaped craft, for it seemed to have engines and not be just a satellite, was a gun turret the size of a football field. The gun itself looked somewhat like a telescope rather than a conventional firearm, but that only indicated a beam weapon instead of a projectile. Two rows of what were very obviously missile tubes along the craft''s sides could fire over a thousand missiles at a time at unknown firing rates and given the size of the hatches and their being augmented by powers they certainly wouldn''t be the cuddly, conventional ordnance that could barely blow up a city block each.


    Most impressive or alarming of all, depending on one''s point of view, was the titanic humanoid robot strapped along the length of the craft''s hull. The size of a supertanker and massing nearly a million tons given its gravity well, it possessed relatively smaller but not less impressive versions of the energy weapon and missile tubes the main ship had. This had to be the robot that fought off the multiple kaiju attacks in Japan along with the US military. While in many ways dangerous, its presence greatly allayed my worries about this whole thing; the builder or builders of the station were heroes and less likely to actually attack me if they hadn''t so far. The station''s erasure from my perception was probably part of their base''s defenses rather than something malicious... but that did not mean I''d let them off easy. Whatever their intentions, their actions had still caused a big hole in my memories.


    Plus trying to come up with a reason why they would erase my friends and family only gave me a headache...


    I flew in closer. Even mundane spacecraft had sensors that extended for hundreds, even thousands of miles; if they had not detected me yet at what was effectively knife-fighting distance it was safe to assume they could not detect me out here. Eyeing the plaque declaring the craft the "SSS Pachyderm", I resisted the urge to facepalm and flew into the ship''s enormous mass.


    For the first time ever while intangible, I felt resistance. It was a sensation as alien as flying through the void because while my speed was cut down as if flying through molasses and my kinetic energy disappeared, no actual force was exerted on me. That oddity was followed by intense cold, as something drained my thermal energy - again without directly interacting with me. Keeping my figurative eyes peeled, I scanned the material I was slowly floating through with everything I had. Dozens of different faint impressions revealed themselves, effects that worked on physics without being physics themselves. They stretched oddly across more than four dimensions, even into dimensions that did not exist or existed solely for them. The two strongest effects by far were a general "Enhancement" that somehow magnified what the hull was and how it acted without altering it physically, and a general warping of "Energy" acting in alien to me ways.


    I had seen many such effects during the invasion; arcane magic. Instead of using power to act through physical laws and their alteration, this form of power seemed to add or subtract new laws that didn''t previously exist and was supremely annoying because there was no common interaction through which someone could calculate and predict what the effects were meant to do, other than directly observe and experience said effects. Fortunately, the field of Immutable Force around me resisted any changes to me, which was why I could fly through the hull at all. Otherwise, its material would have been entirely solid and trying to pierce through it would have resulted in more than the equivalent of a cold shower.


    Then I was in, crossing invisibly into a large chamber in the middle of the ship. It looked like some sort of superpowered gym, where several dozen kids aged ten to sixteen and a half at the outside practiced their many and varied powers on either stationary targets or against robotic opponents. A good eighty percent of the kids were girls and seemed to be a lot more enthusiastic about blasting away with everything from summoned bees to orbs of molten glass, while most of the boys were gravitating towards several workbenches heavy with supertech gadgets. I guess the adage "boys and their toys" applied even to superpowered people... or maybe the boys didn''t feel confident mixing it up with a large group of magical girls.


    Snickering to myself I flew in closer... then an alarm rang loudly enough to rattle every free-standing item in the chamber. Before any of the kids could even blink - even those with obvious speed powers - a thick red band that seemed to be both liquid metal and solid energy lashed out at me from the ceiling. I accelerated away rapidly, but instead of falling behind the band matched and exceeded my acceleration, wrapped around me solidly, then dragged me to a dead stop.


    "Intruder!"


    "To arms!"


    "It''s a spy!"


    "We''re under attack!"


    I ignored those and a dozen other cries to action and flexed against the tentacle binding my arms to my sides. It stretched but didn''t break, absorbing some of the energy of my efforts and redirecting it to reinforce its own structure. It was also entirely tangible to me and in fact contact with it had forced me to be partially physical and thus visible because the enhancement portion somehow improved the energy portion to allow it to affect the intangible, while the energy portion fed back into the enhancement so said enhancement could be stronger. The two unified themes created a feedback loop whose full effect I could not see, but I was certain anyone without Immutable Force or similar resistance to supernatural effects would have been completely immobilized. As it was, I could break this thing with enough effort, especially if-


    Two figures approached, completely derailing my plan to break out of this trap then demand questions of the ship''s crew. The first was a young man of eighteen years, with short-cropped brown hair, a heart-shaped face that usually sported a shit-eating grin but had now stretched into an uncharacteristic frown, and a short but well-toned form that did not indicate any sort of physical power. The nearby tables and equipment liquefying and reforming around him into a golden suit of power armor proved he had another type of power entirely, and the lack of glasses that he''d finally gotten around to fixing his bad eyesight.


    The scowl on the redhead woman''s face on the other hand was very much habitual of the face''s owner. Taller than the man but shorter than me and of distinctive, even exaggerated Irish descent, she fixed me with glowing emerald eyes even as her crimson tresses partially turned to crackling flame and sizzling lightning. She was superhumanly good-looking as much as the man was relatively plain - then again both of us had had our good share of vanity and powers tended to reflect that.


    "Hi Jerry! Hi Mandy!" I greeted my old friends as I struggled for anything else to say. It was a difficulty the woman did not seem to share.


    "If you break out of that band we''ll assume you are hostile and act accordingly," she said sharply, the corona of lightning around her intensifying. "Now explain; who the hell are you and why are you impersonating our best friend."


    Huh. Out of anything I''d imagined her saying at our reunion, that did not even make the list.

 43: Misapprehensions

    "Again with the impersonation, Mads?" I asked my best friend then rolled my eyes. "Haven''t we been through this before? As if anyone else could be as perfect - and blonde." I scoffed and crossed my arms exactly as she''d seen me do countless times during our high school years, only moderately impeded by the band of crimson magic trying to immobilize me. "It was me in those underground passages during the invasion, it is me again today." Mentioning the last time Amanda had been her usual paranoid self wouldn''t hurt my credentials, either.


    "Yes, because knowing some past events can somehow explain your turning up after so long, never mind all the other discrepancies," she fumed. As in, fumes literally wafted off her eyes as they glowed a darker red and the temperature of most things nearby suddenly rose by half a dozen degrees. "You''ll have to do better than that, impostor!" I''d make the usual jokes - Amanda had always filled more than her share of stereotypes - but Jerry would probably be cross with us if we blew up his spaceship.


    "OK, let''s talk discrepancies." With a flicker that had all the younger kids jump back and several of them almost blasting me, my white, low-necked, tube-top costume and its blue cape shifted into a more conservative full-body suit of red and blue with a silver bodice. "I am a blonde flyer with enough super-strength and durability your security tentacle can''t fully hold me and I also have the power to generate my own costume." I made my eyes glow for emphasis and because it was cool, before a force-field bubble as strong as I was strained against the magical band and slowly forced it open. "There''s also the close-range force manipulation and the super-senses. Does that remind you of anyone?"


    "How do we know you have super-senses?" a green-costumed kid blurted, momentarily mortified at the attention that gave him before doubling down and aiming an improbably large, ominously humming gun at me. "How do we know you''re not just saying it, huh?"


    "I dunno, maybe it is because you''re wearing dental braces?" I smiled. "Which are entirely useless to supers by the way. Our powers tend to push us towards idealized looks." It really was the most common superpower; the kid only needed a bit more confidence to get it to work for him... though his frog-themed full helmet really did not help.


    "Leave Cody alone!" one of the kid''s friends shouted back and suddenly there was some middle school drama all over our high school reunion as more than half the young supers in the chamber started shouting and hurling expletives. In the interest of diplomacy, I refrained from laying down a silencing field though nothing could stop the sigh and the facepalm.


    "ENOUGH!" a voice like a roaring furnace cut through the noise like a knife. "This is a space station, not a school yard! Return to your rooms immediately; you''re obviously not ready for any hostile encounter," Amanda disciplined her... students? Sidekicks? Underlings? They listened to her too, which made me instantly jealous. Just three kids and my team was a disaster at the best of times and here she was riding herd on dozens. How did she do it?


    "And you!" Oh, she was shouting at me again. "I don''t know what twisted powers let you mimic Maya like that but if you think we''ll fall for such a sloppy act you''re sorely deluded!" The temperature spiked again and a red halo formed around the very stubborn redhead even as she... grew? Yes, she was definitely growing, an inch every couple of seconds even as the lights around us flickered and died and her no longer dainty hands now held a sword of crimson flames.


    "Amanda, please!" Jerry intervened, putting a power-armored hand around her arm. The plating of his power armor hissed at the contact and almost instantly became red-hot.


    "What!" Mandy spat, but her growth stopped.


    "Maybe before we knock the station out of orbit in a possibly needless fight, we should actually explain?" Logic in a superhero meeting? What was this heresy?


    Joking aside, I had been worried about a brawl the moment the impostor card was played. In the comics superheroes fought because conflict sells but for almost everyone with powers after the invasion violence was not merely habitual; it was both the source of our powers and selection bias because most non-violent powered people had either remained weak or died to the monsters. For all her temper, Mandy had once been the least aggressive member of our little group. Seeing the changes in her... it made me feel a bit sad. We had all survived, but not in our entirety.


    "Fine!" she finally growled after a minute or two of whispered conversation I intentionally refrained from listening to. "Let''s tell the spy how to come up with better excuses." She was still angry but after Jerry had talked to her there was no aggression. I was suddenly reminded that the brunet boy had been the first among us to reject the invaders'' use of violence as a power source - and not just among our group of three.


    "Thanks, love," he whispered back then turned to me. "OK, here''s the deal. While everything you just did and said would be normally convincing, there''s a few serious issues with you being Maya Wennefer."


    "Like what?"


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    "Well, you don''t look like her in one major way." He opened his mouth to say more, closed it, then gave me a neutral look. He wasn''t willing to share specific details a stranger might not know but the real Maya would. Then again, he didn''t have to.


    "Several major battles and subsequent power boosts. I am Maya, visuals included. I''m just more than I used to be." That bit he had to know was coming; he and Amanda were more obviously superhuman too, but still recognizably themselves. So why didn''t he look... ah. "Plus you do remember I have a superspeed power, right? Turns out using it all the time means you age faster."


    "How long?" Jerry asked, and Mandy looked curious too - but still too suspicious as well.


    "It hit a factor of twenty after the nukes so my body became biologically twenty-five months ago." Both of them winced and I could relate. The battle that had ended the invasion had been a Charlie Foxtrot of epic proportions for everyone involved. "Then I stopped ageing altogether. Didn''t feel like becoming an old hag, you know?"


    "I''ve stopped too," Jerry admitted which was... odd? He was only eighteen, biologically. "Mads hasn''t but that''s fine. I like older-" He was interrupted by a vicious elbow that actually dented his suit, followed by the redhead''s patented killer glare that promised even more punishment later. He just smiled back fondly. "Anyway, there''s also the matter of how you got here. Maya was many things; immovable, unstoppable, stubborn... explosively destructive. The one thing all those traits aren''t is subtle."


    "You get hounded by reporters and government spooks for months and you''d get subtle real quick, too," I growled, because that whole debacle was still in the air. Recovering the memory of my friends had just pushed it down a bit in priority. "And what do you mean I wasn''t subtle? I can do invisible, mostly undetectable forcefields so I''m plenty subtle! Going intangible is just another application of force manipulation; all I needed to do was negate any force-based interactions."


    "...how did you not explode?!" Jerry yelled, alarmed. "Or turn to dust? Or just vanish from the physical universe entirely?"


    "Because I''m awesome?" Also, I could make myself immune to accidents while experimenting. "That''s more proof I''m myself, by the way."


    "Along with your lack of humor," he deadpanned. What did the nerd know? I was hilarious. "Why didn''t you turn up earlier?"


    "Why didn''t YOU? No, you thought I was an impostor," I mused before he could reply. "Well, Jerry, for some peculiar reason nobody notices this ginormous space station you all live in despite it being large enough to see with the naked eye. There''s no news of you either." And I''d checked. "Doubt you get any visitors at all, what with everything about you being magically concealed."


    "Liar!" Mandy triumphantly interjected. "The sanctuary doesn''t hide us from anyone who knew us personally before the invasion and has no hostile intent!" She pointed an accusing finger at my face with a blazing violet spark at the tip with a temperature hotter than the Sun''s core. "You had to breach it to get here and that makes you our enemy!"


    "You mean my sister''s power? The power that hid us from even the invaders just before the big battle?" Anne had always been an overachiever. She was also twelve, and I''d had to rescue her from the invaders'' stronghold. Even recalling those events made me want to punch something... or someone. Knowing that her very existence had been erased from from my mind for months... something creaked and when I looked down I found my fists had squeezed halfway though that red security spell. "One won''t try to break what they don''t know is there, but that''s not what kept me away. Anne''s power did not make me forget any of you back then, merely unable to notice you."


    "What do you mean, forget?" For the first time, Jerry did not sound like he was suspicious of me, just confused. Well, I was more than happy to explain.


    "I mean I did not remember any of you even existed till a few hours before. Anne''s power is a perception filter though, not a memory filter."


    "That... would explain quite a few things, actually." He closed his eyes and bit his tongue in the way he usually did back when we had a difficult test in school. It was Mandy''s time to look on with fondness and even I could admit it was a bit cute. But we had way bigger fish to fry. "Tell me Maya, does remembering us now coincide with any major events? Something that troubles you, that you might need help with?"


    "Trouble?" I snorted. "You want the list alphabetically or chronologically?" Then what he''d actually said registered. "Wait, you believe me?"


    "Come on, Jer, nothing she''s said explained the biggest discrepancy," Amanda said unhappily. There was no longer any anger or triumph in her tone, just exhaustion that the talks weren''t over.


    "Didn''t it?" the ex-nerd and current greatest magical engineer in the world wondered. "If you exclude that one detail everything else fits perfectly."


    "Yes, but it''s a pretty big detail," Mandy countered. "We both saw-"


    "But is seeing believing? Are eyes often not deceiving?" His powers crackled like lightning and a tiny piece of his armor formed into a small screen... a screen that seemed black and empty to me but apparently showed quite a bit to him from the way his eyes kept flickering across it. "I, for one, am beginning to have serious doubts about a single drone photo and an unreliable scrying spell given the parties involved."


    "OK, that''s enough beating around the bush," I told them. "Explain that last discrepancy that for some reason holds more weight than all the other evidence put together. What could it possibly be that you find it so hard to believe me?"


    "We saw y... Maya''s body, you ass!" my best friend cried. "Just before the last round of nukes that fried the big bastard, my scrying got through and Jerry got a drone close enough. We... we''d been trying... for a rescue."


    My mind ground to a halt. Of course. Of course they had seen me die. Nothing else would ensure they''d take all my appearances since as the work of an impostor. Given the existence of shapeshifting and similarly tricky powers, a look at the body followed by my months-long absence and my never trying to contact them even after my apparent return would make all signs of my continued existence seem like either a copycat or an actual trap. The world being as shitty as it had been the last few months, even several other details had aligned just right to give the wrong impression, a wrong impression they could not afford to expose themselves to confirm. And it had all started by my waking up far from Earth and given time to ''recuperate''.


    "Oh that conniving, underhanded bitch..."

 44: Reunions

    "...then that damn perception filter broke and I finally remembered you," I finished recounting the past few months while Jerry and Amanda listened. The three of us were sitting in a very well-stocked kitchen and private dining room that simply hadn''t been there when I arrived... because of course the space battleship could reconfigure into a luxury resort on demand. "Now spill; what have you two been up to that you didn''t even come close to the States?"


    "Only preventing the rest of the world from blowing up," Mandy snarked, downing a whole bottle of whiskey in her eternal quest to fit as many Irish stereotypes as possible. Given the enhanced physiology of supers, I doubted it was physically possible for even the kids to get drunk. The proof still needed work though, as my best friend had sent them to bed early. "Yes, most of Florida is monster land and the rest of North America is lousy with supers, but with developing powers being possible everywhere lots of people try and by people I mean crazies."


    "We tried to bury the details of how powers work and so did the Army, but far too many parties quietly leaked it," Jerry added in a falsely cheerful tone. "After all, why shoulder the expense of developing powers safely, when you can make it known conflict works best then recruit the survivors? There''s nothing that could go wrong with that, right?" He seemed to deflate before chugging down his own bottle of liquor. "Terrorists, pirates, cults, organized crime, third-country warlords, government-backed black ops... most are blindly fumbling their way into an ability or two but even they are dangerous."


    "You''re telling me guys that can barely lift trucks or throw a fireball are a global problem?" I asked, eyebrows rising in incredulity. "Mere wights during the invasion were close to that level and we took on hundreds of them. Thousands for the bigger battles."


    "Them being people makes it a problem," Mandy countered. "For one thing, none but the craziest supers openly use their powers from the beginning."


    "That sounded like a personal attack," I mock complained. The redhead stared back unimpressed. "If you are awesome why not show off?" Unlike the two of them, I slurped down some chocolate milk. Ah, sugar and dairy; the two primary food groups.


    "It''s a lot harder for authorities to track you if the first power you develop is a secret identity that works," Mandy snarked back. "Nothing like our level of total concealment, just a minor power to scramble mundane surveillance and just finding the bad guy becomes either a matter of luck or a job for us with powers."


    "Huh, so that''s why nobody noticed all the villain attacks everywhere until they tried to blow up the UN building." From both the bad guys'' point of view and comic book tropes, a working secret identity made sense. No wonder Rinaker''s people were surprised time and again. "Still, things can''t be that bad if there''s no mention of major disasters from all around the world. Everyone should know if only through word-of-mouth."


    "We managed to keep casualties under a million total so far," Jerry said with a shake of his head. "That''s barely above the yearly deaths due to genocide and most people don''t even notice those even without superpowered efforts to keep things quiet. The only events outside the US that made the news were the Kaiju attacks, and that was mostly your doing."


    What? I stared at the two of them. That couldn''t be right.


    "Jerry, I don''t care how many secret identity powers the bad guys have, there''s no way a million people died and nobody noticed." That was just impossible and/or stupid. "The Invasion itself had fewer victims and that was with a two-miles-tall asshole throwing around strategic spells like party favors before getting repeatedly nuked." Like, what the actual fuck?


    "Tell that to the Wizard," Mandy shot back, her eyes and hair momentarily flaring into red-hot flames. "He and his little cult have been attacking ancient historical sites every six days like clockwork for the past half a year. Thirty-one mass sacrificial rituals and if we didn''t stop them every time who knows what that madman would have used them for. Natural disasters? Plagues? Worse?" She snapped her arm over the table and our drinks chilled nicely while the forgotten plates of food became as hot as fresh from the oven. "And that''s just one guy and his posse."


    "It was not just stopping villains," Jerry added, leaning back. The chair gleamed blue then molded itself to him, and he seemed to just melt into it. Effectively custom-fitted furniture not just to his body but his stance; neat. Though I still preferred flight and not needing furniture at all. "We stopped the Invasion because everyone that could help worked together but we were very nearly too late."


    Jerry shuddered. Mandy and I scowled. Yeah, it had been really close. As in, maybe a minute or two later and the enemy''s superweapon would have grown and adapted to anything we could have done. And maybe if we''d been earlier I wouldn''t have had to spend half a year recovering.


    "Mandy and I," the former nerd and current super-inventor continued, "we decided to search for new heroes from the beginning this time. Or even just people that wanted to help that could be trained." He waved at the sci-fi dining room all around us. "That''s why we built this station. It didn''t quite turn out how we wished but still..."


    "I hear ya, buddy. Training kids is hard." If their students were anywhere close to as unruly as mine... I shuddered. There were almost fifty teenagers with powers on this station, though judging from what my senses could tell about their physical abilities all except one did not even come close to Mark, Gabby''s and Cindy''s level. "How did you get so many of them anyway? I got supersenses and the US government has a ton of people searching and we only found three that could fight in the field."


    Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.


    "It helps that we aren''t meatheads like a certain former cheerleader," Amanda said with the air of someone making a huge revelation, the little shit. "You get to punch giant monsters in the face, we get to make things with broader utility."


    "Uhuh." I nodded sagely. "And the broader utility of a thousand-foot-tall robot would be... what exactly?"


    "Deep sea exploration. Large scale robotics research. Testbed for various technologies, from new sensor types, to aerospace travel, to insulation and electronics, to the new field of magitech" shot back a list that sounded a bit rehearsed. "But mostly? Bragging rights. I made it first, I made it bigger, and I made it better than anyone else."


    "Are you sure you aren''t overcompensating for something?" I asked in a fake sweet tone but was immediately shot down.


    "No," Mandy said, smiling widely. "No he isn''t."


    "I see." So that''s how it was. I thought I saw some signs back during the Invasion but I wasn''t sure. Good for them, though I felt a bit sad about the half a year of lost time. I would have liked to have been there for them, gave some support or proper teasing. Not advice though; relationships were the field I sucked in the most. "Say, is that fire-breathing chicken in the ship''s bridge a fruit of your new... collaboration?"


    I stepped out of time for a good five minutes just to fix their expressions of incredulity and indignation to memory properly...


    xxxx


    The space station''s habitation module was more like a garden than a residential building. It had wide, well-lit corridors with double lines of growing pots on both walls where various odd-looking plants flowered... while bearing fruit at the same time, fruit I did not recognize. Growing plants in space was odd due to the absence of gravity and plants being confused at which direction to grow but not that odd. Besides, the station did have artificial gravity. No, I suspected the oddities were power-made modifications.


    Doors to living spaces interrupted the lines of pots every so often, each door as well as the room beyond it personalized to the individual. Out of respect for the kids'' privacy, I avoided paying attention to the interior as much as my senses and my search allowed. I walked by walls of steel, of wood bearing elaborate carvings, of plastic that flowed like water while maintaining its shape and other, entirely alien materials that were obviously power-wrought until I came to a door of solid light, if light had been spun into crystal. There was no doorframe, no hinges or keyhole, just a pane of crystallized light in the shape of a door with a triangular handle.


    Except there was no door at all, was there? My senses just showed empty space, both in the entrance and the room beyond. As far as my awareness of forces was concerned, there simply was nothing there. No pane of crystal, no glowing, pale yellow light, nothing but the air and the normal illumination that seemed to pass through the door as if it weren''t there... because it really wasn''t. I walked up to the entrance and lay my left hand upon the door, touching and feeling nothing. No texture, no temperature, as if my hand had come to a stop on its own accord. So I pressed down more, but not with my strength. Not with my powers either, but with conviction. I did not just want to pass or believed I would pass but knew I would, as much as someone would walk through an empty archway and not even think that they could not because what would stop them?


    It was counterintuitive and illogical, but anyone thinking logically would not have been able to pass through. Once upon an uglier time I''d forced myself through a similar barrier by being too tired and too angry to care that it existed. The attempt had hurt in a deeper way than just the physical. This time, though the curtain of light seemed far more solid, I walked through after only a token resistance, a push back that felt more like hesitation on my part, like not really wanting to go through. Except my certainty exceeded the barrier''s compulsion and I walked through it to a room like from some grand museum.


    Row after row of crystal shelves lined the chamber''s walls, loaded with countless objects of that same glowing crystal, from flowers perfectly carved into the unearthly solid, to board games of all types where both boards and figurines were works of art, to statuettes of various supers and monsters half a foot tall done in impossible detail. There were even books with pages of wafer-thin glass and glowing letters. In the center of the room stood a tree, a tree made of glowing gems spun into veins of wood, silver and gold spun into leaves and flowers akin to tiny suns. Instead of the symmetry and rigidity of a statue it seemed alive, from its roots growing into the soil, to its trunk where fluids oozed through translucent fibers, to leaves where oxygen, carbon monoxide and water wafted through millions of tiny mouths.


    It was beautiful, the most complex power-wrought item I had ever seen, yet I barely gave it more than a cursory glance. Most of my attention was focused on the room''s sole occupant. A tall, slim girl of ten or eleven, with long, straight, platinum-blonde hair, eyes of cerulean blue and skin a shade paler than my own despite the halo of sunlight that seemed to emanate from her head. In short she looked like me, a me a good ten years younger and many battles and cheerleading practices more innocent.


    "Hello Anne," I greeted her fondly and a bit tentatively. "Long time, no see."


    "You''d think so, wouldn''t you?" my younger sister answered without even turning to look at me. She busied herself instead with a foot-tall sculpture of a superheroine in flight, half-carved out of a solid mass of power-created crystal. As I stood there waiting for her to say something, anything else, she kept pointing a finger at the crystal, shooting a hair-thin beam of golden light that simply vanished the crystal little by little, carving the sculpture out of it with painstaking slowness.


    It took Anne nearly an hour to carve the heroine''s clenched fist out of the crystal, the statue''s fingernail-sized hand rendered in such impossible detail my senses could pick up the texture of its skin. That done, my sister continued as if she hadn''t been ignoring me for fifty-seven minutes straight. She still did not turn to look at me, though.


    "Apparently, the several layers of will-barriers pushing against any intruders weren''t enough of a hint," she said in accusation. "But of course, no matter how backed by powers the social cues, they still won''t work on the great and powerful Maya Wennefer."


    Then she turned around and glared at me with eyes that were not the blue my senses saw but pools of liquid gold.


    "Well, big sis? What was so important that you broke into my sanctuary?"

 45: Celebrations

    "Heya, Squirt. Is that a new way of telling me to get out of your room?"


    Those were the words that came out when I opened my mouth. What does one say when their ten year old sister accuses them of ''invading her sanctuary'' with a straight face? I had either spent long enough in superspeed to forget how kids were supposed to talk, or...


    "Yes, because you''re the only one to have been changed by your powers," she said with a roll of her eyes that was textbook teenager. "Some changes were a lot less physical than yours." She twisted her fingers as if pulling at invisible strings, silver-white radiance forming between them as she whispered too low for most people to overhear;


    ''There is neither this world nor the world beyond nor happiness for the one who doubts.''


    The glow between her hands flashed with blinding intensity for an infinitesimal moment so short even under superspeed and enhanced perception it could barely be said to have happened at all. Then there was an invisible, intangible film of the same power as in the room''s many decorations wrapped around the entirety of the space station. In a similar way to my own intangibility it was both there and not, not physically where it didn''t exist at all but at the level of perception and communication.


    "That''s a very odd force-field," I commented, wanting to avoid an argument and grasping for any subject to fill in the conversational space. "What does it do?"


    "A seed of doubt in the awareness of observers. It prevents bad guys from knowing we even have a base to attack," she said, then sat not on a chair but on the desk of crystal, feet kicking in the air. At least in that, she still looked her age. "You know, like the other barrier you tore through on your way here?"


    "Excuse me for wanting to clear my mind of external influence!" I shot back, annoyed. "What are you doing, using mind magic like that?"


    "Hiding," she shot back, either completely missing the point or deliberately ignoring it. "What are you doing in my room?"


    "Talking to my sister, who I haven''t seen for a subjective ten years." And failing, probably. Then again, I''d never been good with relationships - or talking. "Some mind magic kept me away, thought I should ask at least one of the people involved."


    "You were dead, Maya," she explained, gathering more light in the palm of her hand. "Verity said you needed time in safety to get over it, I offered to help. I am Sanctuary. Safe time is in my job description." The light formed a sculpture like all the other decorations for a split second... then burst to pieces. "Damn it! Why do your visits always have to be annoying?"


    "Annoying am I?" I smiled, then grabbed her in a headlock and messed up her hair. "Silly little Anne, annoying you is in MY job description. If I weren''t annoying, I''d have to burn my Big Sis card." We both ignored her sudden tears. "So... Sanctuary huh? How''d you get a cool superhero name before I did?"


    "Because you suck at names, that''s how," she shot back with a brittle chuckle. "When the Old Bastard decided he wanted a second pet project and threw me at the monsters, I swore I''ll never become like him. Then this..." more light flashed in her palms "...happened out of nowhere. I could stop everyone from harming me but it wasn''t until Verity taught me that I could hide others."


    "So... it was exactly what you wanted, just more?" That sounded familiar.


    "Well, yes. I never wanted to fight, just make pretty things." The crystal objects all around the chamber chimed pleasantly. "Staying here... it kept me away from the battles and let me help those that did fight. It was perfect, given the situation."


    "So I shouldn''t punt Verity into orbit next time I see her, got it," I nodded sagely. Every time that otherworldly fake-midget had meddled I''d always gotten something that was needed down the line. Though the methods differed, this seemed the same though I was sure it could have been done without my best friends and family being kept away. Maybe Anne could have visited Mars? "What have you been up to while I was gone?"


    "Other than hiding the good guys from the bad guys?" She lay back on the crystal table and made an all-encompassing gesture at the room around us. "Made these things, mostly."


    "Huh, cool." I walked up to the now finished statue of the heroine in flight. She looked suspiciously familiar, though the proportions were closer to my pre-powers life and the costume was wrong. A flick of my finger rung the crystal in a pleasant, ringing din that filled the chamber for a few seconds. "But what do they do?"


    "They look pretty and building them makes me feel better," Anne said with another roll of her eyes. "Not everything has to be about utility, sis."


    "But sculpting?" I protested with confusion. "I thought you liked painting and escape room games. What changed?"


    Instead of an immediate answer she reached for the room''s far wall and a crystal cube lifted itself from the shelf it was on and flew to us. It looked a little lumpy and uneven, a far cry from the impossibly lifelike statue Anne had just finished. "Break this and I''ll tell you." My sister said and threw the cube at me at an oblique angle.


    I sped up just enough to catch it before it could fall and break. "Is that a challenge?" I asked, bemused. "Why would I break one of your works?" Sure, it might look silly and crude but then so did all those famous paintings she''d been fan of as a kid.


    "Don''t you want to know why I sculpt instead of paint now?" she added with a glint in her eye. Yeah, definitely a challenge.


    "Look, Anne, I wanted to see and talk to you, not break your things." Unlike some other people we both carefully avoided talking about. "I want you safe and happy, not..." I trailed off, not knowing what to say. Breaking the thing had been her own idea, not mine.


    "It''s just an early, failed piece," she waved off my concerns with an air of nonchalance, but it was very hard to deceive someone that could see microexpressions clear as day. "Go ahead and break it. I don''t mind." For some reason, my little sis was feeling very smug right now.


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    "No," I said, unwilling to fall into the trap, whatever it might be. "Can''t you just tell me?"


    "Nope!" she giggled and for a split second she sounded like the little kid she appeared to be. The cute, happy little sister that lived with our grandparents because the trailer park was no place for a kid to grow up in - though in reality because everyone knew what an asshole our father had been. "You know, I bet you can''t break it! Strongest gal on Earth, stopped by a crystal cube."


    "Forget it," I said, staring at the fragile-looking crystal in my hand. For a moment I felt like clenching my fist and grinding it to dust but then I shrugged, shaking the thought off. "How long have you been cooped up in this place, anyway?" I asked as I threw the crystal across the room, nudging it just right for it to land perfectly on its shelf. Given the sheer number of sculptures filling the place, I was sure Anne had spent most of her time carving up those things with her powers.


    "I like it here," she shot back, still with that smug grin. What did she have to feel smug about? "At least here nobody is going to associate improved looks with superpowers, or ask me to tackle some alien monster."


    "Anne, you hid an entire space station and the hero group living on it from the entire planet. You''re telling me you couldn''t hide a few supers in plain sight for a few hours?" She gave me an open-mouthed look of total stupefaction, as if the idea was some sort of great revelation. Teenagers.


    "Get up," I told her. "We''re going out for some fun and I know just the place."


    xxxx


    For NASA, re-entry is a matter of millions of dollars'' worth of equipment, years of training and hundreds of people crunching numbers to make possible. For all mid-tier supers and above, it''s just a particularly long drop from a high vantage point. By the time we have sufficient strength to throw around tanks, endurance has increased to the point we could hold our breath for an hour and re-entry friction is just a warm breeze. I wasn''t about to take risks with my baby sister of course, but neither was I particularly worried; nobody with abilities of that scale was really fragile.


    "This feels odd," she said, pulling at the transparent layer of force that hugged her body like a glove. "What does it do?"


    "Wouldn''t you like to know?" See sis? I can be arbitrarily contrary, too.


    "Do you really want to do this? Now?"


    "Fine!" I could never tell her no, and she knew it. "It gets rid of harmful things while keeping in a layer of air."


    "It''s less than an inch thick, how much air could it hold?" she asked in a dubious tone.


    Instead of answering I pushed her off the space station''s hangar bay and into the void. A small adjustment of gravity and she was dropping like a meteor, screaming obscenities I''d never have heard without super-senses. Shrugging at the camera in the corner - and an idiot ex-nerd laughing at us from all the way in the ship''s bridge - I leaped after Anne, accelerating hard.


    At a pretty sedate fifty gravities of acceleration, we''d arrive at our destination in a mere eight minutes despite starting further away from Earth than the vast majority of satellites. Flight in the exosphere was completely silent even at several miles per second, the air molecules being so few collisions didn''t happen often enough for sound. That didn''t stop my super-senses from listening to Anne cursing me in various creative ways as she tumbled, or using my powers to talk to her directly.


    "Calm down and stop flailing," I spoke by vibrating the force-field around her. "The field is trying to stabilise you but can only do so much." Miracle of miracles, she listened to and followed my advice; her tumbling stopped and soon she was flying straight with minimal nudging on my part.


    "You kicked me out of the airlock!" she shouted at the top of her voice, my Force Awareness picking out the vibrations in the thin sheath of normal-pressure air around her.


    "Would you have taken that first step if I hadn''t?" I shot back as I overflew her by a few feet then turned around, dropping with my back to the distant ground. "We''d still be talking and you''d be missing out on this!" I spread my arms, indicating the void around us and the planet below.


    "Fine! Just never do it again!" She tried to pout but there was just enough tidal effect to twist her features into a funny grimace. I''d meant for her to get the exhilarating sensation of acceleration through a slightly uneven force field but had not predicted the funnier results. The entirely coincidental result set me into a fit of giggles, which only made Anne try to pout more.


    "Stop laughing!" she demanded, which naturally only made me laugh more. Which probably explained why she conjured a pillow-shaped effigy with her powers then started whacking me up the head with it. That quickly escalated to a full-on pillow fight, where I had the clear advantage. We both could and did make our pillows invisible, but now that I was aware and looking for it my senses could just peek through her concealment power. I totally didn''t exploit this to trap Anne in a fortress of invisible pillow-constructs and nobody can prove otherwise.


    We were both red in the face and panting when the atmosphere became dense enough to ignite in our passage and I had Anne''s force-field clamp down on the speed of air molecules within, keeping them cool. At the same time, it started pulling in oxygen to replenish what my sister had already breathed. It wasn''t a perfect solution, mostly because it needed at least some oxygen in the environment for it to work. I had some ideas on how to make an entirely self-contained life-support field that could provide breathable air indefinitely even in outer space, but I''d need more time and rats to perfect it and this was a day for having fun with friends and family, not experimentation.


    "This is awesome!" Anne shouted as she rode down on a sheath of plasma. "...except I can''t see through the fire. Is that normal?"


    "Don''t worry, it''ll go away way before we land," I told her then enjoyed the blast of steel-melting warmth. In some ways it was even better than bathing in molten stone and once Anne''s durability got a bit better I vowed to expose her to both. They were the kind of surreal, entirely supernatural events only people with superpowers could experience and once again I was reminded that for all the horror that had come with our powers, there were enough mind-boggling, miraculous experiences that I never regretted getting powers or stopped looking for more.


    Finally, after nearly a minute and a half of fiery fall from the heavens, our velocity was reduced enough that the plasma curtains dissipated and Anne could see again. Maybe one day I''d discover how to share my own senses with others, but until the lab rats'' brains stopped exploding Anne would have to settle with the minor annoyance of brief visual obstruction during re-entry trips. Maybe it wouldn''t be so bad if-


    "Wait, that''s Florida!" Anne exclaimed, pointing at the sprawling expanse of said state a mere twenty miles below us. "Why are we going there? It''s full of monsters!"


    "True, sis, but it''s also full of cool things," I told her as I nudged her trajectory South, South-East.


    "Monster hunting is NOT cool, it''s a stupid way to get killed!" she retorted and started flailing again, nearly sending herself into a tumble. "Get me back to the ship! This is the worst sister-bonding trip ever!"


    "Stop being such a drama queen, we aren''t going monster-hunting," I explained as our flight took us over a sprawling urban landscape with countless people crawling across a towering, gleaming edifice separating a major city from the monster-infested wasteland.


    "No, little sis, we''re going to Miami."

 46: Walled City

    Seen from space, Florida was mostly dark. The thick golden band of the Miami metropolitan area was the only place that shone as brightly after the invasion as it had before. From it, a dotted line of night lights hugged the coast, towns and small cities shining like little stars in the darkness stretching up to the much brighter beacon of Jacksonville. I''d seen the old photos on the ''net of course; all of us survivors had, some for remembrance, others for bitterness, more than a few out of morbid curiosity. That line of lights had been twice as thick only a year before and it was hardly the only place diminished.


    The Tampa area was not as bright either, with a jagged lightless line going through it like a thunderbolt. One of the Invaders'' "iron quake" strikes had rolled through it all the way into Tampa Bay, iron spikes growing taller than trees and spreading faster than a runaway train, a devastation half a mile wide shredding everything in its path. Since then, the area had been struggling a little; you can''t cut roads or railway tracks through a forest of iron spikes after all. Of course, the Tampa area had gotten off lightly, even with roaming monster bands approaching the Bay with alarming (for any sane people) frequency.


    Where Orlando had once been there was only blackness. Winterhaven, Lakeland, Sanford, Deltona, Arcadia, Port Charlotte, Fort Myers, Cape Coral; the entire central area of the state had now become a swampy, overgrown, monster-breeding ruin. The southernmost major town left other than the isolated Tampa and Miami areas was Gainesville, two hundred miles north of the initial invasion point. About half of that destruction had happened the very last hour of the invasion when the enemy leader had turned into a demon the size of a mountain and rampaged before dying to the concerted effort of supers and a generous helping of nuclear fire courtesy of the US military.


    The other half? That had been the geological and ecological disaster that followed, the spreading of violence-fueled supernatural corruption, and the birth of new monsters. The initial efforts to purge the area of monsters had failed disastrously, of course. You can''t fight violence-fueled sorcery with physical weapons, you''d only make the problem worse. After the particular nature of the problem was confirmed most of the remaining population was evacuated and purely defensive lines had been set up.


    The Northern Defense Line was where I''d taken my students for a live-fire exercise a couple of weeks before. It was more of a series of guard stations by the US military supported by occasional super patrol but functioned more because the majority of monsters did not travel that far North than because a line in the sand and a few tanks could hold a state''s worth of mutants and undead - not that most of the government accepted that fact even many months after the Invasion. Things in the South were a bit different.


    As Anne and I descended beyond the cloud cover, the sheath of plasma surrounding us completely dissipating as we slowed down, the Miami metropolitan area came clearly into view even for people without super-senses. Several large planes were flying through the nearby airspace and hundreds of smaller ones, a huge amount of air traffic even for a city of that size in such a geographically important location. More than half were military craft, flying constant patrols against aerial monsters or transporting soldiers, vehicles and supplies in and out. But that was far from the biggest change.


    "Is that... a wall?" my sister asked, pointing at the silvery-grey line stretching almost straight North to South between Miami and the Everglades. From more than a dozen miles up it still looked impressive, a solid construction that looked more like a small dam stretched out to the horizon than a wall. Thousands of tiny forms moved over it like so many ants and with my enhanced hearing I could pick up the bark of weapons, at least one or two firing at any given time for every mile of wall across its entire length.


    "Welcome to the modern Walled City," I told Anne as we slowed down further, dropping at a sedate pace of four hundred miles an hour - only about twice terminal velocity. "While most of Florida was evacuated, Miami was deemed too major a city, too important to abandon. So the government decided to build this wall around it instead."


    "That''s just stupid," my cute little sister snarked. "Lemme guess; far too many people didn''t want to evacuate plus losing a big city would be horrible optics. Maybe the public would start thinking the Invasion wasn''t stopped by the indomitable might of the US military after all."


    "When did you become so cynical?" I asked and got the Mark One mocking eye-roll for my sisterly worries. "But no, the situation was more complex than that. As I was told-" and certainly didn''t overhear by spying on the government with my super-senses "-the main issue was preparing for future invasions. It had been ninety years since the US last was in a serious war, more than a century and a half a major conflict took place on US soil. Lots of people blamed the enormous losses on lack of readiness and not enough military spending and pushed for both rearming and integrating new developments to the armed forces." That was the meaning behind several thousand hours of political double-dealing, lawyer-speak and weasel-words anyway. Anne was smart; it only took her a few seconds before...


    "They''re using the wall to make supers!" she exclaimed. "They''re exposing all those soldiers to monsters under controlled conditions. Providing a big target to draw monsters that is also a fortification that will blunt their attacks!" She narrowed her eyes at the figures in the wall as we finally dropped under five miles and started moving laterally away from the wall and towards the waterfront. "Is it working?"


    "There''s a hundred thousand troops on the wall, rotated often to avoid long-term fatigue. They''re using crew-served weapons because the only man-portable weapons that could harm monsters are too expensive for mass use." Sixty thousand dollars per shot that killed an enemy tank was acceptable. The same shot killing just one of endlessly regrowing monsters was not. "You tell me, sis."


    "There''s a whole army of good guys so the gains are split too many ways," she started, thinking the implications through. "Plus if they''re using big guns they''ll develop powers related to said guns. And they''re barely putting in effort with the guns doing most of the work so..." She was biting her lip now, her nose scrunching up cutely. I refrained from flying close and messing up her hair; prior experience showed that was counterproductive with both teenagers and little sisters both. "Maybe slow overall gains and minor powers? I don''t expect they''d get more powerful than tanks even after a year, maybe with the occasional unique trick. That... doesn''t seem enough for all the effort?"


    "Maybe it is, maybe it isn''t. Time will tell." What Anne was missing and I wasn''t quick to explain to her was that a hundred thousand tank-equivalents were twenty times more than the army currently had, and more than the rest of the world had combined. Plus the much smaller profile and stealth and mobility advantages of a person with the power of a tank over an actual tank meant that said person could be far more effective, especially in urban environments. With how recent events had showed security against supervillains was sorely needed, training such an army made sense to a government that had its monopoly of force threatened. Its future implications on the other hand were... iffy and not just on attempted militarization of supers. What would other countries do without convenient access to monsters to develop their own supers? What about supervillains getting their powers in said countries as the ambient magic level kept rising?Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.


    But those were future-Maya''s problems. A really unlucky gal, wasn''t she? For now, I pulled my sister into a sisterly hug, messed up her hair, and dodged her retaliatory attacks as we landed on the crowded Miami beach. Thanks to Anne''s powers nobody noticed the pair of abnormally pretty blondes coming down from the heavens to slum it with normal humans and only moments later I''d shifted my superhero costume into a far more mundane-seeming bikini. Anne paused to look at what I''d done for a moment, then her own clothes started wriggling and shifting into a one-piece swimsuit of glittering white color. With my super-senses I could see the thousands of threads like spun diamond she rearranged with her powers, the same supernatural material she built everything out of. With that we looked a lot less like two supers that casually violated the laws of physics and more like two supermodels out for a day at the beach. We still were abnormally pretty but this was Miami, Florida, one of two places on Earth where too-pretty blondes would never stand out.


    It was time to forget about the problems of the world and spend some time with my little sister.


    xxxx


    Night had fallen by the time we finally stopped playing in the sand. Beyond a certain level supers only had a stamina limit when they pushed their powers and after a full nine hours of water sports, sandcastle construction and non-stop fooling around I was pretty sure Anne had hit that level some time before. Our day started with water-skiing, continued with beach volley, sunbathing that didn''t really do anything for either of us, then we spent four hours building in the sand. We stayed out of anything contest-related as that wouldn''t be fair for our opponents and if we put any amount of real effort against each other we''d probably wreck the beach.


    Shaping sand was actually fun, though. We kept our building speed on the upper limit of human and went for more detail than volume. I decided to build the White City from Tolkien''s books while Anne went for a familiar-looking fantasy castle by a lake that I couldn''t quite place. It was distinctive enough I should remember where I saw it before but my usually infallible memory came up blank. We kept working at it, both cheating outrageously in subtle ways, and soon we had an audience. I used Proximakinesis to minutely rearrange sand grains and pack them more tightly together so that even after the effect faded the result would be denser and tougher than sand would normally be. Anne on the other hand was converting half the sand grains into the magical material she used for everything, then worked the result with superhuman precision and skill despite not using any other active powers. The level of detail she put into it blew my own efforts out of the water and soon most of the watchers were crowding her and even taking pictures or recording video with their cell phones as she worked. By the time she somehow started started shaping a forest out of loose sand I admitted defeat and bowed to her vastly superior artistic skills. I still had my sisterly revenge as we left, though.


    "You know those guys in the Panthers swimwear were flirting with you, right?" I asked with a shit-eating grin as she stumbled and her face turned beet red.


    "You''re one to talk," she grumbled, looking anywhere but me. "There must have been over fifty guys checking you out in the end there," she tried to shoot back and I laughed.


    "One hundred and thirty-seven, actually," I informed her, still grinning and completely unruffled. "In the immediate vicinity anyway."


    "What''s that supposed to mean?"


    "It means, little sis, that I have appeared on national television in the past and I have super-senses." And though most people knew both of those things, they didn''t think them through to the logical conclusion.


    "So what?" Case in point.


    "So I know exactly how many people within fifty miles are watching videos of me and why," I told her with a shrug. "I''m not going to be embarrassed by the few guys at the beach just looking without even knowing who I am."


    "Ew!" Her cute face scrunched up in disgust. "Ew, ew, ew! Why would you ever bring that up!?"


    "Because it''s something that happens with most celebrities?" I explained as we left the beach and the first line of hotels behind, flying deeper into the city. Nobody accosted us for the superpowers and we were far from the only girls in swimwear. "One of the downsides of world-shaking importance, real or imagined."


    "Stuff publicity in a black hole," Anne grumbled, grimacing in distaste. "If that''s what happens when you''re famous I''d rather stay cloaked behind my powers and remain an absolute nobody. Public opinion is stupid anyway; half the population has below-average intelligence by definition."


    "Below median, actually," I corrected her idly before guiding us towards a boxy, windowless building straight in the middle of downtown Miami. "Though the average is pretty close."


    "Semantics," she said, giving me another typical teenage eyeroll. "Most people don''t know the difference between average and median without looking it up."


    "Sure, but do you want to be like those people?" We touched down on the parking lot behind the boxy building then walked up to the line stretching some hundred feet to a small back door flanked by a pair of overly-muscular, very good looking bouncers. "If so, I can start describing what said people are doing in sufficient detail."


    "Oh shut up," Anne told me and kicked me in the shin for good measure. Thanks to a quick application of Focused Invulnerability I didn''t even feel the hit. "Where are we going anyway? That looks like a military warehouse but it''s in the middle of the city and the line really doesn''t fit."


    "It''s a club house, obviously." Though the bouncers being supers wasn''t as obvious and the sheets of metal within the walls partially blocking my senses even less so. "You''re still keeping us cloaked, right?"


    "Since we''re not hounded by your not-so-little fan club that should be obvious too," Anne huffed in annoyance. "Why? Are you worried about being carded at the door?"


    "Unlike you, sis, I''m an adult now. There''s a General that will back me up on it, too." No, the issue was a little different this time.


    "Probably a member of your fan club, isn''t he?" my no longer cute sister told me snidely as we skipped to the head of the line without anyone protesting. This perception filter business was the good stuff; we could have probably skipped inside undetected, but with the level of security I knew the club had I decided not to risk it.


    "Why, are we feeling jealous, little sis?" I couldn''t help but tease as the bouncers took in the two gorgeous blondes standing before them and immediately waved us in.


    "Keep it up and the cloaking might start applying only to your clothes," she threatened. We kept bickering like old times while hydraulics slowly opened a door that would have fit more on a military installation than some club.


    And with that we slipped into one of the most exclusive clubs in the world a good three months before my ban ended.

 47: Club Cur

    The moment we went through the foot-thick metal door, the hazy image of the building''s interior cleared up to my super-senses. There would be time to look into the new information later though; for now, I took note of how everything outside blurred instead, my enhanced senses reduced to the equivalent of looking through translucent glass. Everything within a dozen feet was still clear enough but with little detail and things further away were reduced to just their outlines. The blockage wasn''t as good as Anne''s perception filters and was the opposite of subtle, but as far as maintaining privacy was concerned it was good enough... and as long as someone was unwilling to outright attack the place privacy was good enough.


    Not that most attacks would fare better. The boxy brick and concrete walls were a thin disguise for the layer of familiar metal spreading under them all through the construction, thicker than the door and built into beehive-shaped reinforcing pattern. It was a gunmetal grey I''d seen before into the guardian golems and reinforced underground labs of the General''s secret bases, a power-resistant material created by Liz the Warden. The last time I''d encountered it it had proven difficult but hardly impossible to damage and with only a minor impact on my senses. This one was not only an effective enough super-senses blocker but it seemed somehow... denser without having any actual extra mass. Physics seemed to be affecting it less - by a factor of four if I was pressed to make a guess. But I did not have to; the power seeping into the material and altering its nature was another familiar one.


    My attention turned away from the barrier in favor of the club''s interior, the gloomy, candle-lit atmosphere and dozens of velvet-and-gold-covered tables where people sat in silence bringing with it an air of both mystique and relaxation. Impeccably dressed young men and women in form-hugging translucent fabrics of spun gold, silver and precious gems in styles reminiscent of ancient Greece or Egypt roamed the space with superhuman grace, taking the patrons'' orders with radiant smiles or making suggestions in musical, perfectly pitched voices, hair spun in incredibly elaborate works of art dancing as their owners shifted their stance every so often, subtly showing off without being provocative or obvious.


    It was cleverly done, I had to grudgingly admit. Everything was perfectly orchestrated to imply the staff were supers, displaying physical abilities, skill and appeal of low-superhuman scale, wearing understated but obviously power-wrought clothing if one knew anything about fashion. It was all an elaborate deception, of course. Oh the clothes were indeed power-wrought, making diamond threads hadn''t been done anywhere outside a lab, but that was the work of a minor super at best and they did not look so impossibly perfect and regal naturally. They, along with the staff themselves, were affected by the same power as the metal barrier, augmenting them by a factor of four. The products of a niche power were turned into gowns fit for royalty while well-trained and pretty but human staff became temporary supers. Show-biz at its finest... and all that were just the opening moves.


    I found Anne where she''d strayed deeper into the club and couldn''t help but smirk. She stood rooted just before the stage where the first act of the evening''s entertainment was about to start, gaping at the singer that was about to begin the solo act. Her face was even redder than when the subject of flirting had turned up earlier and if not shaken from her stupor she''d soon be drooling. Not that I blamed her, or all the patrons who gave the stage their undivided attention.


    If superpowers had given both me and Anne borderline-superhuman looks that might just be possible for unpowered people to achieve via excellent genetics, a lifetime of effort, surgeries, an army of the best beauty experts in the world and some creative photo-editing, the twenty-something brunette on stage had the looks of a goddess... or possibly the result of the latest image-making a.i. fed the wildest dreams of a million men. Skin of impossible perfection that also glowed like polished ivory, body symmetry down to nanometer scale, gravity-defying proportions designed to maximize instinctive appeal while ignoring such trivial things as conforming to human biology, all layered with the same power effect as the rest of the club to magnify the influence of those looks by a factor of four.


    Then she started to sing and my annoyance at the mental trickery melted away. A lot of sins could be excused for a superhumanly good composer that was also a superhumanly good singer. Maybe in some distant future where both technology and social studies had advanced enough it could be replicated, but for now it was literally beyond human ability to both equal and replicate. What little I could grasp of the technical bits of the performance included bouncing sounds off the surrounding surfaces to deliver uniform performance to the individual ears of close to a hundred people, the song we were actually hearing being a result of superposition and actually different than what she was singing.


    We all stood there, entrapped by a beauty more fundamental than bodily appeal until the song was over. The singer bowed and smiled and sent lots of hearts fluttering. I sighed and walked up to Anne. My sister was still rooted to the same spot but no longer blushing. No, it was much worse; she had that look of awe and hero-worship teenagers get when they are seriously into some trash band or another, except I couldn''t do my sisterly duty by explaining how her time would be better spent on more useful pursuits. The song had really been good enough to be worth the attention. I shook her off the stupor instead.


    "...bwha?" She looked around, blinking unfocused eyes before visibly shaking off the mental stun. "Maya? What... who was that?"


    "The club owner," I said as I gently pulled my sister to an open table for two. "She must have been practicing. The music wasn''t nearly that good a couple of months before."


    "You... know her?" Anne''s eyes shone with eagerness and anticipation that I''d unfortunately have to deflate. "Could you introduce us? Please? I''ll... I''ll do anything!"


    "Don''t be stupid," I told her, flicking her nose just hard enough for her to wince. "You are never to repeat that offer, to anyone, no matter what. It was dumb in the age of drugs, Rock ''n Roll and human trafficking. It is even dumber in the age of super-disguises, black magic and human sacrifice." There were far too many very dangerous people that would gleefully take up my baby sister on her offer and actually deal fairly just to get an in with someone that could hide giant space stations from the entire world. "And no, that singer and I don''t see eye to eye on some things." Mostly the mental influence, which she deemed harmless but was anything but. Also, some of her side-gigs which did not have much respect for the law.This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.


    "Aw, come on!" she whined and gave me puppy dog eyes.


    "Name one instance in which that argument ever worked," I shot her down then started reading the menu. Its contents were little different than most other five-star restaurants I''d been or looked into via super-senses. The menu itself on the other hand was made up of sheets of black silicon carbide with the contents engraved in platinum, because of course it was. Ostentatious displays of wealth and/or superpowers were always in vogue.


    "If you didn''t want me to meet the singer, why did we come here?" my little sister grumbled sourly.


    "Because regardless of my personal disagreements with said singer, her songs are still the kind of experience the existence of powers has begun to produce that I want you to enjoy first-hand. Magic can be incredibly violent, but violence is only its crudest use." I settled on the East Lothian beef, braised truffle barley and Scottish girolles, the Spring Carbonara, and the Saffron risotto with forest mushrooms. "Being who we are we often face the worst this new world has to offer, but we also have access to the best if only we reach for it. All it takes is putting in a bit of effort."


    "Are you sure you''re Maya and not a bazillion-year-old guru under some clever disguise?" Anne demanded as she played with a gleaming red glass that captured the light in its many-faceted surface and seemed to shine with an inner fire. "Because that sounded halfway wise."


    "Yes, I am," I answered with a small smirk. "And if you keep studying and living healthily and eating all your vegetables for another decade or two you might become half as wise as me in turn." She kicked me in the knee under the table and I fended it off with Focused Invulnerability. Then we had to stop fooling around because one of the waiters approached us and took our orders.


    Some time passed and we heard another superhumanly good song while we waited, but they were spaced a good half an hour or more apart, the interludes filled with borderline superhuman but not supernaturally intense or inhumanly perfect music. My eyes and senses scanned over the patrons and to my relief while I saw more than a few tears and some slack, stupefied expressions, they gradually faded over time, at least until the next song. The owner, it seemed, had listened to my arguments at least in part. Extreme sensations could actually damage the unshielded mind and cause permanent personality changes with repetition but given more time to adapt humans could be very resilient. The songs were still intense enough to be addictive, but probably no more mentally harmful than smoking or sugar highs. I''d try to sneak in some experts on the subject if Anne cooperated, but recordings didn''t help; they couldn''t capture even the sounds properly, let alone the supernatural influence.


    While I people-watched, Anne fiddled with the cutlery and dishes to alleviate the nervous energy all teenagers seemed to generate regardless of the situation. She started with spinning a spoon faster and faster until it almost flew off the table. Then, when that was no longer amusing and/or distracting, she picked up one of the golden knives, examined it closely with narrowed eyes and when that didn''t satisfy her, bit it. I couldn''t help but snort. A super at her level could probably bite through armor plating; trying to test for real gold like that would be completely useless. She glared at me as little sisters are wont to do and I answered her glare with an indulgent smile that made her scowl and return to examining the teeth marks she''d left on the knife''s handle as if they were the most important thing in the world.


    It didn''t last. Soon it was the gleaming red glass that had drawn her attention and it was put under the old "test" of rapping it with a spoon and hearing it ring. One of the patrons on the next table over looked around for the source of the sound with an annoyed expression but failed to find it. Anne''s perception manipulation might not be a flashy application of power but it was little incidents like that which reminded me she could hide a space battleship from the world with the same effort as most people breathed, or stab someone to death without them noticing they were being murdered with even less effort than that. Still, I formed an outbound sound barrier for propriety''s sake; no need to be more annoying than we had to.


    "Say Maya," she finally asked after several more rounds of testing. "What kind of glass is this? It''s both pretty and pretty tough."


    "That''s not glass, Anne, that''s ruby." A single near-perfect crystal of the precious gem, the imperfections matching naturally sourced Myanmar rubies perfectly - I''d checked the first time I''d come by looking into nearby jewelry stores with super-senses.


    "Wait, really?" She stopped ringing the glass and started looking at it with something approaching respect. Then she looked at the other glasses and the dishes in other tables and understood. "Power-wrought?"


    "Of course." Because if you had niche superpowers, why not use them to tweak the noses of gemstone experts via an obviously artificial stone that was indistinguishable from natural ones? The answer was because you had made a few hundred stones, not just one, and sold those that were not obviously power-wrought for hundreds of millions.


    "...isn''t that a crime or something?" my sister asked tentatively, looking at the club around us with a new light.


    "There is no law against using powers to provide real gems and whoever is responsible could claim to be summoning them from deep reserves beyond human reach or alternate uninhabited versions of Earth instead of conjuring them and none could prove otherwise." Plus if anyone tried to make laws against using powers for profit, industrial accidents and substandard material failures would start happening to all businesses benefiting from it until said laws were thrown out.


    "Huh." Anne dropped the knife and I fixed the dents on it with a minor force-field. "Do you have any good ideas for profiting off our powers?"


    "I''m working on it." In my copious free time between fighting off superpowered terrorists, wrangling artificially-created Kaijus, fixing messes for the government, appearing on national television, training teenage supers, or sitting on civilian idiots that insisted on charging into war zones. God, my life was a mess. I sooo needed a vacation. Then a vacation from my vacation because several of my jobs had been intruding into this one. I was mentally tallying possibilities - Europa had a nice ring to it - when our order finally arrived.


    The food smelled positively divine, a single breath enough to leave both our mouths watering. I passed Anne the risotto since she wasn''t as much of a pasta lover as I was then tucked in with gusto. The spaghetti was somehow both al dente and well-boiled, combining the benefits of both and the drawbacks of neither. It was of course fresh from the machine, none of that cheap mass produced crap. The green beans popped in the mouth as if fresh but despite maintaining that texture they tasted as if cooked properly. The sauce proved even better, a slight difference in taste indicating that something other than chicken eggs had been used for it and made it all the better. Then there was the beef; cooked with unsalted butter and thyme and rapeseed oil, with sauce of barley and garlic garnished with whipping cream and ground truffles, accompanied by spears of broccoli and air-dried girolle mushrooms. Perfection. That each mouthful exploded with four times as much taste and sensation as it should have without actually adding any substance that would not fit only enhanced the experience.


    "The bad guys can come kill us now," my little sister declared imperiously half an hour later.


    "Really?" I asked her with another fond smile.


    "Yeah. That way we can die content instead of stressed out or terrified in the middle of some grand battle."


    "Uhuh." I wiped my mouth on the silken napkins and stretched contentedly. "Does that mean you don''t want dessert? The chocolate fudge is pretty good."


    "Dessert or I''ll make everything you wear invisible forever."

 Interlude VII: Duality

    Another song was starting and he couldn''t help but glare. It was an insult, and indignity and he would have his... he paused, counted to twelve between slow, deep breaths and focused on his purpose. The song was not his purpose. The overpriced menu was not his purpose. The mocking displays of wealth and fake culture were not his purpose. His hands clenched into fists for a moment then loosened as he mastered himself and got up. His purpose was not here.


    The tall, pole-thin man with the beard walked off the table with a slight stagger, his gait uneven and his stance not quite perfectly straight. His exquisitely tailored costume felt like it was two sizes too large over his sickly frame, making him look more like a scarecrow than a man. More indignities heaped upon him not by the world but by others; the accounts would be balanced in time. With that thought of a pleasant future in mind, he retreated from the salon quietly and slowly made his way to the unobtrusive staircase in the back. There he staggered some more. He entertained the thought of procuring a walking aid for a few moments but ultimately rejected the notion; he already stood out as it was. Adding such an item would make him too distinctive even for his erstwhile ally''s powers to hide.


    Unlike the room above, the winding staircase was annoyingly long and uncomfortably narrow. Twice he had to catch himself when he slipped, his fingers digging into the metal of the handlebar. Not his fault, he thought with a scoff. Whoever designed this part of the building should have been shot for their incompetence. Yet he persevered; his goal, his mission was too important to fail. Staggering onwards, fueled by dreams of that happy future when he would be whole once more and able to explain to the club owner''s exactly why they shouldn''t have put him through such badly designed access points, he finally reached the underground levels of the facility.


    The doors to the men''s and women''s bathrooms stood to his left and right but he ignored them in favor of the instructions he had been given. He walked down the corridor at a steady pace, passing first storage rooms of various types, then the very busy kitchen and washing rooms, then the changing and rest rooms for the club''s staff. He was further annoyed but not terribly surprised to see they had separate, much improved access points to the lounge and stage both. It could be no less than deliberate design meant to heap affronts upon himself by forcing him through the gauntlet of those stairs, by revealing then ridiculing his infirmity. He knew the owner, after all; such a deliberate slight was exactly the kind of thing she''d do.


    Bolstered by his righteous anger and indignation he picked up speed, marching further into the depths of this monument to the owner''s ego, past the doors to offices and hidden rooms for private meetings and shows, until he came to the blank wall at the far end of the underground corridor and the tiny service door to the side, almost hidden behind an oversized and gaudy water-cooler for the staff. Whoever heard of water coolers made of diamond, especially for glorified servants? No matter. He''d get rid of it along with the rest when the place belonged to him.


    The service door led to a broom closet, full of useless clutter for the wastes of space and oxygen that called themselves a cleaning crew. He had to hunch down and strain to fit himself inside, the narrow confines of the place making his old injuries ache. Unfortunately, his instructions were very clear on this part so he grumbled, pushed, and broke some brooms until he was fully inside and had closed the door behind him. After a ten-count in the dark, cramped, annoyingly smelly place there was a loud, metallic click and a crack appeared in the seemingly solid back wall. The loud grinding of metal on metal and the turning of gear followed as two-inch-thick metal plating retracted into the ground, opening the path to the hidden underground chamber beyond.


    With more pained grunts and oft-repeated vows of retribution towards all those responsible for his current state he had finally disentangled himself and crossed to the actually important part of the building located under the fake club and thus came all the closer to his goal. His aching bones tingled with anticipation and he had to rein in his impulse to smirk. He wasn''t supposed to reveal how close he was to gaining all he desired. No, he was supposed to glower and snarl and behave exactly as his target expected of him, which wasn''t exactly hard given the annoyingly mocking premises and witlessly blundering staff. His only consolation was that he''d only have to go through this charade once and with a little bit of luck his superior skill and ability would be both recognized and rewarded. With that happy thought in mind, he marched on as quickly as his old injuries allowed.


    The hidden underground chamber was vastly different than the silly club and restaurant above. There were no faux silk cushions and draperies, no tableware of false gems or other mockeries of prosperity. The tables were fewer but far more heavily built of a gunmetal grey substance that quietly radiated both solidity and threat to his senses. The chairs were the same, more weapons than furniture; merely touching one brought a wince to his face as the power he was using to blunt the pain of his old injuries began to flicker and fail at the point of contact. The glassware were simple affairs of steel but their contents were anything but; all were filled with hard alcohol mixed with the strongest poisons and drugs modern chemistry could produce so they could actually affect the robust physiology of up to mid-tier supers.


    All the patrons here were exactly that sort of beings. A dozen hard-faced men built almost as large as he used to be before his injuries sat in silence and enjoyed being able to feel a buzz they would not find at any other club. Like him most of them hadn''t wasted any power on looks... except for enhancing the intimidation factor of their appearance. He knew their type; criminals and lowlifes that had developed powers in the sudden boom of magic right after the Invasion, who had discovered said powers fed on violence and instead of flinching away from that simple truth or trying to find alternatives to pander to their pathetic morality, they had embraced the source of their strength and been tempered by it. The US had seen the rate of murders and disappearances rise several times over in the past year and these were a few of those responsible for it. The handy, reliable, useful sort... as long as you could meet the price and favors they demanded. They were the first part about this club he wholeheartedly approved of.


    There were women sitting about the place, too. Here, a tall Latina wreathed in dancing shadows. There a brunette as scantily clad as any whore but with a dangerous gleam to her blood-red eyes and with pointed teeth poking between her mockingly smiling lips. Across the room a tower of muscle that had to be over eight feet tall, with green-tinted skin and more than a few curves but not a single bit of softness and an expression as murderous as his own. A little slip of a girl with ebony hair caught in twin braids that couldn''t be a day over fourteen... but with the cold, dispassionate look of a killer that was somehow looking at seven directions at the same time and gave the impression that nothing slipped her watch in this or any other day. They were pretty, all right, women were wont to be wasteful with both money and power on petty things... but in his expert opinion they were on average more powerful than the men. They had to be in this line of business and unlike many idiots in the streets he knew not to underestimate them. It was such a mistake that had landed him in his current situation after all.The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.


    None among the criminals and killers gathered in this secret place threw him more than a casual glance except for the little girl with the seven-fold gaze that seemed to be looking at everything at all times. All their attention was in the stage beyond and he did not blame them for here there were no idiotic musical numbers or pandering to people with too much money and too little power to really matter in the grand scheme of things. No, the stage was actually a dueling ring and upon it a match was taking place; three men in black fatigues and face-concealing helmets wielding swords of that power-resistant metal against a scantily clad brunette wielding a staff.


    The woman was almost as abnormally, supernaturally gorgeous as she was supremely skilled, her staff a blur shifting between forty or fifty strikes, parries, deflections or blocks each and every second. There was no superhuman speed powers or time dilation; he had first-hand experience with both and could tell none of the combatants were using such at all. There was also some sort of resistance, or dampening. He did not know if it was something built into the ring itself or the cumulative effect of so much power-resistant metal built into the walls of the building, but none of the combatants moved with superhuman speed and strength. To the absolute limit the human body was theoretically capable of, yes. Outright superhuman, no. The swordsmen - wielding a traditional katana, a High Middle Ages knightly sword and a Spanish rapier respectively - were exceptionally skilled, perhaps more skilled than any human had been before the advent of powers. They were also losing, the brunette woman''s fluid, lightning-fast offense and defense maneuvering them steadily but inevitably towards defeat. They coordinated abnormally well, timing their actions perfectly to exploit even the slightest openings presenting themselves but there just weren''t any. The woman was somehow performing two or three simultaneous defenses and attacks by using both the ends and the middle of her staff with the kind of perfection that looked like an over-choreographed action scene in some Hollywood grand production... except the audience here knew better.


    He stood and waited for the inevitable conclusion. The men would have been served better by staying on the defensive or even retreating in sequence to achieve victory through attrition but this obviously wasn''t the goal of the exercise. Thirty seconds later they were all down and the woman was bowing and smiling to the audience exactly as the singer was doing in the stage above, which didn''t come as much of a surprise. She did, after all, appear to be the singer''s identical twin... though appearances could be deceiving. Performance complete, the warrior retreated to her private rooms in the back, but not before fixing her eyes straight at him for a moment then signaling for him to follow. Finally, he''d soon be done with this charade.


    The back room sported a minimalist, almost brutal style, as if the interior designers had lavished all their attention to the facade of a club above and had nothing left to spare when it came to this final room. It fit both him and the woman just fine. She threw her weapon at a basket of similar armaments in the corner, walked around the metal desk and retrieved a bottle of liquor and just one glass. She sat down, poured herself a glass of the glowing green, obviously magical drink and started sipping it in silence while staring at him over the rim of the glass. He just waited with forced patience, his rage at further disrespect churning in his gut until-


    "Get rid of that ridiculous thing," she demanded as if something about his presence, conduct or attire offended her by its mere existence.


    "What?" Instead of explaining she flicked her fingers and with a sudden searing pain in his chin, his beard fell off and shrunk into a sorry-looking tuft of salt and pepper hair.


    "A fake beard? Really?" she laughed derisively. "Who do you think you are fooling? Certainly not your enemies; were they able to look through these walls they''d recognize you instantly."


    "That is my business, Gemini, not yours," he couldn''t help but retort angrily. Oh, the time would come when he''d no longer need to pretend, when he''d be restored and made even greater than he''d once been. And then there would be a reckoning.


    "Oh you poor, crippled thing. Not feeling so good now that you can''t have others do your dirty work, that you have to beg and grovel at mere scraps from the tables of the high and mighty?" She laughed like rung crystal as if it was the greatest joke in the world and she hated her all the more for her pretense at perfection. "But you didn''t come here to banter about the good old days, did you? What is your business in my not-so-humble abode?"


    "I come with an offer of collaboration at-"


    "No, thank you," she interrupted before he''d even finished, talking over him before he''d even finished. He couldn''t even protest for momentarily his voice had faded to a mere whisper. "I am feeling rather content with my current projects. You know how it is; entertaining the rich and self-important, making connections in the criminal underworld. Those things take time, even with double the days and bodies as anybody else." He felt his voice return to him and it grated on his pride that he was allowed to answer or not at her whim.


    "It would be wise not to discount this proposal," he said darkly, allowing a sliver of his rage to show in his expression and color his voice. "It would be useful to my allies. And useless things have a way of quietly disappearing."


    There was a pregnant pause in their discussion, a heavy silence hanging between them heavy with meaning and menace. Then something in his right hand exploded, splashing minute amounts of blood and gore all over the place. Not even a single drop landed on the brunette, who merely tsked in annoyance while he stared at... his grotesquely bulging thumb? What?


    "Oh, you deluded fool," said one half of the supervillain known in certain circles as Gemini, as she reached across the desk with a dainty-seeming arm and nearly pulled his arm out of its socket as she forced it closer to her eyes over all his attempts to resist. She forced his fingers open with as much ease as a grown man doing the same to a baby and fished out the oversized bloody bones that had appeared there. "Amazing isn''t it? No matter the super''s physical toughness, their thumb phalanges and metacarpal suddenly doubling in size will explosively tear through their flesh."


    She let the rest of his hand go, allowing him to fall back into his chair with a pained grunt as she carefully took the bloody digits away, turned around and opened a large drawer built into the wall behind the desk. The drawer was almost full but there still were several open spots so she picked one and deposited his bones there after letting them return to their normal size. The spot even had a neat little label where she wrote only two words. His eyes were wet and unfocused from the pain, but he was pretty certain it was his name. Then she pushed the drawer closed and turned around with a small smile as if she''d done nothing more notable than adding another line to a ledger... instead of adding a trophy she''d literally ripped off him in a repository of hundreds of similarly bloody trophies, each neatly named and catalogued for future perusal.


    "Now that you were made better aware of the situation, explain it to me," she said with that same knowing, infuriatingly smug smile she''d had ever since they were unpowered children. "Why shouldn''t I repeat that particular application of my power on the sorry, degenerate, rarely-used excuse of a brain in that head of yours and double its dimensions? You might even experience average-level intelligence for a brief moment before it violently explodes out of your skull."


    "Because the proposal came from the Red Dragon," he quickly explained, mouth dry. When she did not show any reaction he gulped and added, to his shame... "And because exploding brains are messy."


    "That is why my office is so spartan, you idiot; ease of cleaning." She laughed again. "It is good that you finally grasp the vast gulf in our relative position... as much as someone as dim-witted as you ever could. But a proposal from the Red Dragon? Color me intrigued." She waved a hand and the blood and gore from his recent maiming sizzled and hissed and went up in smoke almost instantly, only to be sucked in by the ventilation shaft overhead, leaving no evidence of what had happened behind. Then amber eyes met his own with a dangerous gleam.


    "Tell me more," he was ordered and hastily complied.

 48: Subtle Touch

    It was several minutes after we left Julia''s not-so-secret supervillain pub that my sister spoke.


    "This..." she hesitated, fidgeting for a few moments, then... "This was great! Could we do it again sometime?"


    "Anytime, munchkin," I told her fondly, patting her head.


    "I am NOT a munchkin!" she shouted and stomped the ground. The sidewalk naturally shattered, flinging concrete chips all over the place. A quick force-field caught them in mid-air, preventing them from scything into the oblivious tourists all around us like an antipersonnel mine. I brought the fragments together, holding them in a loose mass between us as I raised an eyebrow in challenge. Anne flushed and lowered her head. "Sorry," she muttered. "I just hate being treated like a little kid."


    "You''ve never actually fought, have you?" I asked her instead of a thousand other things I could have said. "With your powers as they grew after the Invasion, I mean."


    "...no? You know I don''t like fighting." She was confused by the non-sequitur. "What does that have to do with anything?"


    "You have a primary ability with effectively global reach, Anne. All supers get better bodies as they get more powerful and while your powers are greatly skewed towards the immaterial with a total power that large the boost is still significant." Which was problematic if she did not expect such strength in everything she did. "Let''s say you''re only as strong as a tank. Tanks can knock over walls just by moving around." I reached out with Proximakinesis through my legs and into the cratered sidewalk, pulling concrete back into place, unpacking soil and gravel and pulling back the missing bits to fill the small crater. "Kicking someone under the table because you were annoyed with them would literally explode them into bloody bits if they didn''t have powers."


    "What?" My cute little sister gaped at me in shock and fear. I felt like shit ruining the mood but this was important. No matter how smart and mature she was mistakes happened and she''d feel a thousand times as bad if she killed someone by accident. "But... but it has never happened before!" Which was probably the cause of the problem.


    "Let me guess; since the invasion you''ve lived with Amanda and Jerry and their group of munchkins... all of which are supers." We stared at each other in silence for a moment as she finally understood the issue.


    "Oh God!" Her eyes swept from the filling crater, to the floating fragments, to the busy Miami street. "Oh God, I almost killed them!"


    "No, you didn''t." I sent the sidewalk fragments back into the crater, superhuman awareness and mental speed letting me reassemble them like a jig-saw puzzle in moments. "You were with me tonight and I am faster than a speeding bullet. There was never a chance that you''d hurt someone before I could intervene, but that will not always be true in the future." I kneeled and placed my hands on her shoulders as our eyes stared into each other''s, brilliant blue on brilliant blue from less than a foot away. "You must become familiar with your new strength. Control is not hard, you only need some time to try."


    "How?" she demanded in disbelief and anger. "My hands and feet are like cannons now!"


    "Silly Anne," I told her and pulled at her cheeks like I did when she was a little kid. "Mine are like atomic bombs but you don''t see this city turned into a crater, do you?" Her worry faded as she realized that yes, that particular problem would be far worse for me than any other super and also yes, I had found a quick solution since we''ve both had our powers for the same time. "Better," I told her as she calmed down. "And don''t worry, you won''t have to fight. It''ll even be fun!" Really, she had already done most of the work with her sculpting. She did have the control, she just needed to make a habit of applying it to people too. I just needed to see when General Rinaker could spare some of his people for it. "Now, what else do you want to do? Something fun! We can''t let our day have such a downer ending."


    "Could we just go back to the station?" she asked glumly. That simply would not do.


    "Fine. Just hold on as best you can, OK?" Behind us the fragments had already been fused back into a solid sidewalk via sufficient application of force. It would probably be a lot stronger than the surrounding material even, but that was a problem for whatever future crew was sent to do roadwork there, not us.


    "What do you mean, as best I caaAAAAAA-"


    Reducing the pull of gravity to near nothing, I held Anne by my side with one arm, raised my left fist overhead, and kept pulling both of us with the maximum force Proximakinesis could apply. That being many thousand tons we shot forth like a shell out of naval artillery and kept getting faster from there. The only reason we didn''t reach orbit in mere seconds was the initial air resistance as my fist literally punched the air out of our path in a supercavitation effect. The complex force-field I''d constructed around my sister earlier in the day kept around enough air for her to breathe and feel comfortable in while mostly uniform propulsion kept the felt acceleration to no more than half a dozen gravities.


    Then the bulk of the atmosphere was behind us and we were speeding almost as fast as I had in the Invasion''s final battle when I circumnavigated the Earth in eighty seconds. In the distance my enhanced senses picked the Valkyries'' space station like a tiny dot and we made for it at a good forty or fifty thousand gravities. Without a plasma sheath to obstruct the view or the nervousness of her first ever orbital drop, Anne was looking at the curvature of the Earth below with such sheer awe and joy I wanted to develop a power that would preserve this moment for all time. Unfortunately, true control over time was not among my powers.


    "This is the best gift ever," my sister said as entire countries swept by below us, her voice heavy with emotion to my super-senses. "Do you think we-" then she blinked and looked ahead. I was pretty sure her normal senses couldn''t see for thousands of miles but since the space station was under the effects of her power she could probably sense its relative location. "Sis, stop! Stop! We passed the halfway point!"


    I kept accelerating us, of course. This was revenge for all her bratty behavior and I was determined to milk it for all it was worth. So we kept going faster and faster and faster until I started feeling the beginnings of our mass measurably increasing. The world below became the tiniest bit redder while a dot in the distance that was a space station shifted a single shade towards blue. Then we were there, instantly coming to a dead stop as we slammed against the station''s airlock.


    "What... what the fuck...?" My cute little sister gaped as we weren''t blasted apart by the impact. The station wasn''t torn to bits, messily killing everyone aboard. In fact, all our speed disappeared in an instant without either of us feeling anything at all, in blatant violation of all known physics as well as common sense.


    "A field of invulnerability to c-fractional collisions extended just enough to apply to both us and the impact point a few nanoseconds before contact," I explained with a wide grin. "Well, sis? How do you feel to be one of only two humans who''ve ever moved at one percent the speed of light?"


    She stared at me in silence for a moment. Then she started kicking me in both shins as hard as she could.


    xxxx


    Another twenty seconds after leaving an outwardly annoyed but secretly very pleased Anne at the space station I was back in Miami with, as far as I could tell, nobody the wiser. I might no longer have Anne''s perception filter around, but my new ability to become intangible by eliminating any interactions of force between me and my surroundings was almost as good. It was no real stealth power that would work against super-senses as evidenced by my own sensory abilities working through it. However, the vast majority of supers focused more on flashy powers than went boom than information-gathering and I was pretty confident I could hide from my current target through my other abilities.


    As much as I''d have wanted the entirety of the day to have been about family, there were certain responsibilities that could not wait for that. Though responsibility was a curious word. I''d taken it upon myself to ensure the world did not explode into a global conflict that would make the world wars look like a hiccup and reduce the planet to a monster-infested, radioactive wasteland... at least until governments or other organizations cottoned up to the situation and could handle things themselves. When seen from a certain point of view that was not so much responsibility as the sheer arrogance to not only decide the future of the entire world but see to it through personal effort that things went this way rather than being just another good Samaritan among faceless thousands. Yet as I had been repeatedly told and experienced personally, in a world of superpowers individual and often unilateral action was the norm, not the exception. In the comics the selfish supergenius accused the physical powerhouse of having the ego of and taking actions like a god, but was it ego if it was true?


    I decided it was ultimately irrelevant and I sneaked around invisibly to deal with the first issue for the night.


    A very tall, thin, sickly man stepped out of Julia''s club with a slight stagger to his steps and a stiff, slightly bent spine. A pale face that might have been pretty once had been reduced to skin and bones but still sported a hard gaze that looked at everything and everyone as if they were ugly, offensive, or both; the very image of lean and mean, except for the beard. It, like the cheek inserts, the colored lenses, and the carefully applied make-up were parts of a disguise as elaborate as it was useless. Just as Julia had informed him earlier, such things would not work on anyone that paid even minimal effort to gain information-gathering abilities. Unfortunately for him, Tomio had always been a stubborn bastard with an over-inflated idea about his own capabilities and worse, his decisions.


    He walked through Miami, pushing through the crowd of unpowered humans with the sheer physicality even a crippled super scraping at the dregs of his power could bring to bear, paying no mind to those he carelessly shoved aside, casually stepping on people''s feet and once even almost breaking the arm of a man that demanded an apology - almost because I''d reached out and reduced the force he applied by a factor of twenty. That at least had him hurrying on in the belief that random pedestrian had been a minor super, someone that he did not dare face in his crippled condition.If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.


    He''d gotten worse since our last encounter, not better. Once he''d been personable, charismatic even, enough to draw people to him in the middle of a monster invasion. He''d also used his less physical powers to mind-control said people in a bid to gain greater power for himself but he''d at least been capable of civilized conversation and a modicum of common sense. His missing thumb and how he''d lost it earlier was proof of that decline. In his arrogance, perhaps madness, he''d tried to threaten Julia who not only was a far more powerful super now than Tomio had ever been but one of Tomio''s past victims. If anything, I was rather surprised she hadn''t killed him out of hand.


    Immutable Force, the ability that resisted any external, direct powered alteration, rejected a wave of mental influence. As a non-physical power my senses could not pick it up directly, but I was pretty sure Tomio was using his mental powers to scan his surroundings now. Judging from how strong the influence felt, those had not only grown stronger since our last encounter but Tomio was better at using them from how he immediately changed directions towards an odd super-powered presence half a mile to the North. He hadn''t been able to use them as a long-range sensor back during the Invasion.


    Super-senses revealed Tomio''s probable contact to be another super of Asian descent. Given the idealization process supers underwent guessing their actual ages was near-impossible, but the man appeared to be around twenty-five years old, with a build that was more lean than muscular. He was dressed casually in a loose shirt and pants, wore sneakers a size too large and rather thick round glasses, with a multicolored knit cap covering his short-cropped hair. As disguises went it was far better than Tomio''s gangster chic style, but under it he wore a simple martial arts uniform in a dark-red power-wrought fabric and under that there was a palm-sized Chinese logograph burned into his chest.


    —’


    Well, shit. I might not read Chinese but quite a lot of people in the superhero business were becoming familiar with that particular symbol. It meant "Empower" and was used by the minions of the supervillain known as the Red Dragon. We didn''t know how it worked, let alone how many of his men had it but after a tide of terrorist attacks all throughout China various intelligence services had seen multiple supers with that symbol on them. Supers who served the Red Dragon as soldiers in his quiet war with the Chinese government, who had never set foot on Florida or any other place with notable monster or super activity, and who seemed to have extremely similar or possibly identical powers. And now one of them was about to meet with Tomio on US soil in an attempt to gain Julia''s services. That would go over with General Rinaker''s people about as well as gasoline and fertilizer.


    Tomio took his time to arrive, doubling back several times and repeatedly using his powers to check if he was being watched. When civilians in the area started getting headaches and I thought I''d have to intervene he finally decided he was not being followed or watched and went to meet his contact on the North side of 167th Street. Like many major metropolitan areas Miami had its own Asian community, though unlike San Francisco or New York this one wasn''t a full Chinatown. It was still enough for one unobtrusive and one very suspicious Asian guy to meet without drawing the attention of mundane people, so someone a lot smarter than Tomio was had put some thought and planning into this. It could be the contact Tomio was meeting, but I doubted it; though his acting was fairly good, to my experienced, super-senses-backed eyes he walked and acted more like a soldier than a spy. Too much discipline interrupted by repetitive efforts to appear casual rather than the practiced smoothness of a more broadly skilled agent.


    "Did we get an agreement?" the soldier covertly but impatiently asked the moment he and Tomio walked close enough to hear each other''s mutters through the din of the crowd.


    "Yes," Tomio grunted in obvious displeasure. "But why do we need-"


    "Because the Dragon said so," the soldier shot back in admonishment. "You do not question the Dragon."


    And that was that for the conversation. They went their separate ways, trying to disappear into the crowd. To most people a personal meeting for a single confirmation would seem cumbersome and impractical, but even half a century before electronic communications had hardly been secure. Nowadays, some departments of the US government were beginning to put supers with danger-sense in their big black surveillance programs. Even half a minute''s advance warning that yes, there was actual danger to the United States from that location and also yes, it would be this particular device it would be made from was a huge deal... especially since such senses might not care how well the conversation was encrypted. It also meant that whoever had planned this operation was at least partially aware of an initiative so secret the President had yet to hear of it - not that it surprised me one bit. I was not supposed to know myself, after all. Thus, I moved.


    In less than a second, I had touched both Tomio and his contact with Proximakinesis, delivering a vibration calculated to produce mild concussion and unconsciousness to someone with their level of durability. Having - among many other things - observed over twenty-five thousand concussions in the range of my senses over the past few months, I found little difficulty in repeating the process. Then once both were unconscious and could not object, I phased both targets out of the physical world and into the void I was in while intangible. They could not remain there for long; neither of them was powerful enough to survive what was effectively vacuum for more than fifteen minutes or so. That time however was ten times longer than I needed to carry them to more appropriate accommodations.


    Tomio appeared in the middle of General Rinaker''s office, still unconscious and tied to a metal sheet on which I''d hastily scrawled all pertinent information. Tomio''s contact I carried a little further to a cave in the Rocky Mountains where I thoroughly chained him up in both physical restraints and force effects. Both Anne and I could sense the location of power effects we created ourselves regardless of distance or interference. Not many other people could say the same, but I was not betting the secrecy of any of our bases or other important locations on the Red Dragon being unable to do it.


    That done I returned to Miami, deep in thought for most of the transit.


    The second big problem here was more of a long-term issue compared to the spy games of a foreign supervillain but potentially of even greater importance. It involved the wall and Miami''s overall situation. Anne had grasped the first half of the issue, in that the government was attempting to make an army of supers. She was mollified by how they would be individually weak and with powers reliant on equipment in that we wouldn''t all be rounded up one day and forced to work for Uncle Sam. She had not seen that those two flaws were not flaws at all but deliberately engineered in how the army chose to empower their soldiers.


    A super that wasn''t more powerful than a tank by himself could be countered by mundane forces. A super that needed expensive, military-grade equipment to use most of their powers but when doing so could hit above their weight class was not a super at all but just a new type of soldier because the government would have control of said equipment and thus hopefully maintain the monopoly of force. On one hand, this was a very logical thing for the people in positions of authority to attempt. The government couldn''t lose monopoly of force and remain a government so in the interest of not becoming puppets of some super with grand ambitions and very little grasp of how much governing a nation sucked, they had put a hundred thousand people into a grand experiment without telling anyone about their real purposes.


    On the other hand, there were the twin problems of foreign reaction and foreign response. There was no way the true purpose of the wall would remain a secret long-term because with the continued if slow appearance of supers abroad the mechanics of the simplest way of empowering people would become known... and then every other nation would scream bloody murder about the US intentionally creating this army. The political and economic shitstorm that would follow would at least rival the Invasion itself because then it would not affect just a single country. And after that initial reaction would come the actual responses from governments that could not afford to not have such armies of their own seeing the US already have one. The politicians and military analysts had been secretly debating the implications for months in Washington and elsewhere; this wasn''t even their first attempt at mass empowerment. Their consensus is that they could handle the issues the issues as they came.


    My consensus given prior experience with similar efforts in their secret Kaiju program was that they were idiots. To that end, I had wanted to put a stop to it for the several days since I''d become aware of the issue. The problem was how to do it without making the situation explode early. Whatever I did it could neither reveal what was happening in such a way that any major powers took it seriously, nor do it in an obvious way that would turn the program''s backers against me, nor shut it down in a manner that endangered the soldiers themselves or exposed the population of the city to monsters.


    My original thought had been to create a giant force-field that simply blocked monsters from getting to the wall and the city beyond. No monster battle, no empowerment, no threat to the city. Plus the project''s backers wouldn''t be able to move against me without admitting that their goal wasn''t to keep the city safe but to make more low-end supers under their control. Unfortunately, that idea was shot down hard by the sheer magnitude of what I needed to do to make it happen. A force-field over a hundred miles long and ten miles tall that was also powerful enough to stop both monsters and weapons fire cold? I could work on it for a year and not be halfway finished.


    Since then I''d wrung my mind for another alternative that would cover all the goals at once but hadn''t found anything. Not until a comment from my little sister gave me an idea. Sometimes you needed to hear what you already knew from someone else to start thinking in a new direction, or at least it had happened to me more than once while teaching both Anne and my students. Now, I wasn''t sure if the idea would work but as I was both intangible and was taking a break from everything else there was no reason not to try.


    I approached the northern part of the wall, less than half a mile outside the town of Jupiter, flew at one of the steel and concrete towers and the forty-millimeter autocannon firing at an approaching group of wights. Three soldiers, minor supers already, were infusing the gun with their active powers, enhancing its firepower and muzzle velocity by a significant margin. Still invisible and inaudible to them, I extended my own powers and senses into the weapon and took in its operation, augmentations and all. The powers themselves might be magic but kinetic energy and velocity were still routed solidly on physics, force, and Force was the core of my abilities. A field of Force Adjustment shaped itself over the gun, adjusting various forces up and down to my desires.


    What I desired? For the buff from the soldier''s powers to be reduced to near-nothing and an identical enhancement to be applied to the gun by my own Force Adjustment. Making the force field able to adjust to different buffs within a limited scope required some fiddling with conditions and contingencies and making it permanent required an expenditure of effort but it formed correctly and, more importantly, the next time the gun killed a monster I felt an almost infinitesimal trickle of power. People gained from monster kills according to their actual contribution, and equipment did not count. By replacing the effects of the soldiers'' buffs with mine their contribution was almost eliminated without noticeably changing the performance of the gun. Unless they developed far more refined power-sensing, something that would not happen with this method of empowerment, the soldiers wouldn''t even know why their improvement had slowed down. It was not a permanent fix but it worked.


    Now the only thing left was to apply it to the other three and a half thousand weapon emplacements on the wall.

 49: Detect Magic

    "...and that''s when I left him in a cave in the Rockies and came to get a second opinion," I finished my explanation and sat back on the abnormally comfortable, retro-futuristic revolving seat. "The physical stuff I get and tech I can muddle along, but this empowerment business is very odd."


    "You could say that again," Mandy said as she took a sip of a radiant orange liquid in a metallic black cup. Said cup looked way too dull and solid for having a temperature of over four thousand Kelvin, according to my senses. "The information we have on the Red Dragon is largely contradictory. We don''t even know how his powers work, let alone how he made his disciples."


    "Should I prepare for a field-trip, then?" Jerry asked lightly and he and Mandy exchanged a look. In the few seconds that followed I saw them going through an entire silent conversation, micro-expressions shifting dozens of times in response to each other with not a single word uttered out loud. They''d either invented some form of telepathy magic, or they were so head over heels for each other their brains were just different states of the same quantum superposed whole.


    With Anne and the other kids asleep for the night - the orbital superhero school had a strict curfew - the three of us had retreated to the bridge to have a discussion on the new information from Miami. Said bridge was reminiscent of those 70''s science fiction shows with less science than the average medieval fairy tale, complete with color-coded stations that had magically comfortable chairs and boards of buttons and screens that pretended to be computers. The buttons were near-identical, mostly unlabeled and not actually connected to any electronics.


    According to Jerry''s eager explanations, as long as you believed you knew what you were doing and had permission to do so, you could use all of a station''s functions regardless of what combination of buttons you pressed. Anyone sitting in the tactical officer''s or Captain''s stations could, in theory, correctly fire the grazer lances or launch the protonium missiles via random button sequences. The only exception was the big red button labelled ''self-destruct''. Pressing that always teleported you to the brig, naked, with your head in the toilet seat. That was nerd humor for you.


    "I''ll get my new staff," Mandy said and vanished in a flash of fire after draining the last of her drink.


    "I haven''t seen her excited for a field mission for some time," Jerry mused as he got off the Captain''s chair and walked towards the nearest wall, a door already forming on it as he did so. "All our outings lately devolve to chasing down The Wizard before he can use another ancient temple for a mass sacrifice, or summon a fiend to devour some remote village in exchange for power."


    "That guy still bothering you?" I said as I swung round and round in the science officer''s seat. "How come you haven''t dropped a protonium missile or that giant death robot of yours on his head yet?"


    "He''s not stupid, he keeps hitting inhabited areas." The wall was unfolding before Jerry now, what looked like a soup of liquid gold with dark brown sprinkles forming around him into a stoutly built suit of thick overlapping plates as his powers rearranged the material at the molecular level. I was pretty sure the armor was not gold but a copper-beryllium-scandium alloy over a graphene filament matrix. The composite''s physical resilience was ridiculous even before magical reinforcement from Jerry''s powers but it was far more vulnerable to heat... but that was only a problem for engineers who hadn''t hooked up with the best fire sorceress on the planet. "Dropping the Titan on him would cause too many casualties. A protonium missile would end up like your latest party in Canada."


    "Hey! Devon Island was uninhabited and I needed to stop those kaiju." While the exterior looked about done, the internals of Jerry''s suit kept shifting as more material came out of the wall. Solid-state power systems, free electron beam weapons, piezoelectric artificial musculature, even a miniaturized Thorium reactor; whole cubic meters of components shoehorned into a suit less than twelve feet tall. I guess he''d discovered a new way to improve his devices besides directly boosting their base capabilities. "Maybe drop a message the next time you''re against The Wizard? He thinks he''s figured out another escape strategy then wham! Mountain-busting fist to the face faster than he can cast."


    "I''ll tell Amanda but I don''t think she''ll agree. She''s taken The Wizard''s repeated escapes personally," Jerry said in a loud mechanical voice after his helmet finished forming. A golden dome with an angular, mouthless, noseless face-plate and triangular glowing eyes looked back; quite intimidating and oddly familiar. As in, I was sure I''d seen a similar helmet before.


    "I''ll go see what''s taking her so long, she only had a staff to pick up." He took a loudly clanging step into the newly formed corridor then stopped and looked back at me. "Don''t touch anything you shouldn''t. Spaceships are more fragile than Canadian islands." And with that parting remark I was alone in the bridge - or nearly so. Just me and the rainbow-hued chicken.


    ...why was there a rainbow-hued chicken on the space battleship''s bridge? How was there a rainbow-hued chicken on the space battleship''s bridge? Not having an answer for those fundamental questions beyond ''a wizard did it'', I searched for something to do while I waited. Taking a few spins in every station''s revolving chair, I decided that the Security Officer''s chair spun both the longest and fastest for a given amount of force, but the Executive Officer''s was by far the most comfortable. The Captain''s Chair had the oddest gimmicks, such as built-in vibration and heating, ion-drive based locomotion, a personal magical shield, deployable Virtual Reality headgear, an automated restraint system and micro-missiles that were loaded with various condiments and drinks? Engineers were weird, all right.


    I slowly retreated from the crime against interior design, decency and common sense and brought up Focused Invulnerability while checking Immutable Force was on. Lately, I''d been keeping that power in my standard load-out on account of resisting mind-control or spells that could turn me into a duck but it was always best to double-check and if in doubt, double-check that you''d double-checked. Moderately confident in my own invulnerability, I pressed the big red button labelled ''self-destruct''. For a split-second I was surrounded by a bluish light and felt little pins and needles all over my body but when the lightshow was over I still stood on the bridge, fully clothed.


    "Convoluted security measures are no match for good, old, overwhelming power!" I stated.


    The rainbow-hued chicken belched a three-foot-long burst of flame. The flame was black with bright pink spots.


    "Meh. Everyone is a critic."


    xxxx


    Mandy, Jerry and I were in the station''s airlock when I felt one of my forcefields wink out. I reached out with that part of my powers that kept me vaguely aware of every twisting of of physics I was either actively holding on to or had permanently created. Most of them were back on Mars, a couple were on the Moon, but the majority of the more recent ones were on Earth. Those in the last category were under a hundred, if you counted the defenses on my house and a couple other secure locations as a single field each, but focusing on each one took significantly longer and it involved more than a little blind fumbling compared to checking anything with my senses. Unfortunately, said senses simply weren''t good enough after the first few dozen miles so the slow way it was. I was about halfway down the list when the second force-field winked out. Acting on an educated guess (totally not a random whim) I checked a certain cave in the Rockies and...


    "Guys, we have a problem," I told my two best friends. "Two of the bindings on the prisoner just went kaput." I scowled harder on the next bit of feedback. "Three, now."


    "How many did you put on him?" Mandy said and started pulling a massive amount of power. Her new staff, a single rod of reddish violet crystal of beryllium, magnesium, aluminum and oxygen, glowed brighter and brighter.


    "Forty-one, for redundancy." Plus it was a prime number one less than forty-two. It felt appropriate. "But at this rate they''ll be all gone before we land."


    "...are they winking out for no reason?" she asked, her glowing amber eyes looking at something I could not see. "As in, the prisoner is not doing anything?"


    "Yes, another just vanished." It was very odd. Then again, I couldn''t exactly get detailed information from orbit and halfway around the world to boot. "How did you know?"If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.


    "No time to explain." She touched me with the magic stick and an odd film of alien power spread all over my costume, skin and hair. It was somewhat similar to Anne''s constructs, in that my senses could not tell me what it did. Whatever it was, it did its job without interacting with physics at all. "How good are you at stealth?"


    "I snuck through your defenses the last time I flew by, didn''t I?" I reminded her somewhat impatiently, mindful of another binding vanishing.


    "Good enough," she decided with a firm nod. "I''m about to transport us. It will be flashy and loud and as long as you hide the moment we arrive, magical detection should not be able to tell you''ll be there at all."


    I wanted to ask why that was important but there was no time to waste. Crackles of magic flew out of Mandy''s staff like bad CGI, like lightning but red and not made out of electrons or any other particle I could name. Not made out of particles at all. Then the sensation of being exposed to more heat than the heart of a nuclear explosion came without the accompanying flesh-melting pain... except all three of us did melt and turn into the same crackle of energy.


    We speared through the airlock and the more intangible defenses of the station as if they weren''t there, leaping through the great distance between the station and the planet below as if taking a single step. No, not leaping; being pulled back by a sucking, howling force so hard that the whole world turned on its head. It lasted an instant and a day and all the spans of time between, until a crackling bolt of crimson struck somewhere in the Rocky Mountains an infinitesimal fraction of a second before our departure.


    Crackling energy reformed into bodies and I forced myself to act through dizziness and disorientation, fading from the physical world before the flash of magic fully subsided. The moment I entered the void of intangibility the world righted itself, my thoughts and senses unscrambling. We''d arrived earlier than we''d departed?! No, no, I was going to leave that can of worms to be dealt with later. For now we had a goal and Mandy had instructed me to go full stealth for a reason.


    I had no idea what that reason was, but then the more supernatural aspects of magic were still alien to me. Mandy was the expert here and whatever she''d realized about the situation from what little I could say about my disappearing force-fields, I trusted her to have a plan. It was more than I did and in situations you knew little you always followed the expert; anything else would be stupid.


    Snow and gravel crunched under Jerry''s metal greaves and hissed and boiled under Mandy''s bare feet as they advanced up the steep incline. We were somewhere in Montana, on a pretty average-height peak for the three-thousand-mile long mountain range. I''d picked the general area pretty much at random when transporting the prisoner, chosen the particular peak because it was in the middle of a mostly uninhabited region and did not stand out in any particular way. I didn''t even know its name, though if I looked into the nearby towns with super-senses I''d probably find a few signs with it. How had Mandy even known to bring us here? Precognition? Detecting traces of my own powers? Probably not mind-reading, given my defenses.


    The wind howled as we marched on, though I only sensed it at one remove while intangible. At a height of a good eight thousand feet at night, the weather was already going for what promised to be a nice snowstorm. It didn''t physically impede any of us but it did make searching our surroundings for the reason the prisoner''s bindings were failing a bit more complicated. Mandy marched ahead confidently, needing no directions to step right to the almost invisible crack in the mountainside that marked a cave''s entrance. A boulder jutted out right in front of it, making it nearly impossible to see from a distance for anyone without super-senses or that did not already know where it was. The cave itself snaked through rock, wide enough for even Jerry''s armor for about a hundred feet before narrowing too much for anyone larger than a child to go further.


    It was at that point that we found my prisoner, still unconscious and in exactly the same spot that I''d left him. His immobility was enforced by invisible, intangible force-fields of Proximakinesis, shaped like inch-thick ropes tied all over the man''s limbs and body on one end, the other stretching a good five miles into the heart of the mountain below. With each force-field able to exert a good hundred million Newtons of force and being anchored deeply in a mass of well over fifty billion tons, even I could not have escaped through main force. As for breaking the bindings, unlike in comic books they were not physical things but areas where a preselected amount and direction of force was applied. If more force than they could counter was used, whatever exerted it would simply pass through as there was nothing physical for it to break. A supernova could sweep away the entire planet and they would remain behind completely undamaged... so how then had they been broken?


    "Ah, I see," Mandy muttered mostly at herself, moving her hands over the bindings as if she could touch them. Normally I''d say she couldn''t have because they were not set up to exert force against anyone but the prisoner, but she seemed to be interacting with the magic itself rather than its applications. Her hands slipped an inch over the bound man''s bare chest and the Chinese logograph thereon, the red raw skin where the symbol had been burned into him momentarily flashing crimson. "This is very clever. Very clever indeed."


    "Amanda, love, I''ve told you before," Jerry''s artificially amplified, oddly distorted voice echoed from his golden helmet. "The rest of us mere humans do not see as you do. I can''t tell what you find so clever about a letter messily branded into a man''s chest because for me it''s just some bit of cruelty... and probably neither can anyone else."


    "Right," the redhead said distractedly. "This is not really granting the guy powers. It''s a complex spell that mimics the abilities of a super, laid over him and put under his control."


    "How''s that different from actually having powers and why is it important?" he asked exactly what I wanted to, because if it mimicked the abilities of a super and was under the man''s control, didn''t that make him a super?


    "It''s like the suits of armor you built for the kids," Mandy explained, fingers splayed over the symbol and wriggling oddly. More flashes came from it, in increasing frequency and intensity. If I didn''t know better - and I didn''t - I''d say they were either a distress signal or a self-destruct. "It might not have physical components but it has similar benefits; enhanced strength and durability instead of artificial muscles and armor, triggered spells instead of built-in energy weapons, enhanced senses instead of a heads-up display, sensors and v.i. combat assistance, rudimentary telepathy instead of communications." The next flash from the symbol lasted a good three seconds and was blindingly bright. It looked like a warning. "Most of the bigger spells I''ve cast were about more esoteric effects or had much higher power. This is simplistic, mid-tier magic in comparison, but sturdy and... standardised? Honestly, it feels more like your magitech than a spell."


    "Oh, so that''s why he can keep casting them on people." Jerry whistled appreciatively. "He''s also skipped the issues with both designing and using artificial intelligence for combat by giving it to people just like we do. You''re right, it''s clever."


    "That''s not all," Mandy said, then stepped on the man''s side for a moment. Her bare foot made his flesh sizzle and burn where she touched the same way she''d been leaving footsteps on the bare rocks. The symbol started glowing and the sizzling stopped almost entirely and the glow did not stop when she removed her foot. The second-degree burn on the man''s side started glowing too, slowly getting smaller as we watched. It wasn''t nearly as fast as my own regeneration but that it provided healing at all was a big deal. Most supers did not have access to healing powers, let alone those capable of healing others. "I was not sure before examining it while it went active, but this is not just magitech or an an enchanted item, it''s an active power."


    A glance and a wordless conversation went through my two friends once more, Jerry starting to look quite worried. Since I was neither familiar with enchanted items the way the two of them were nor shared into their couple''s telepathy, I prodded Mandy and Jerry in the back with Proximakinesis. Jerry caught on before she did and spoke out loud what had the two of them so worried-looking.


    "If it''s an active power tied to him, whenever empowered soldiers use it in combat most of the violence will fully feed back into the Red Dragon instead of them, as it would if the powers were theirs, or just making the item stronger as in enchanted items."


    Wasn''t that just like what I''ve done at the Miami wall? Maybe I should sue his Scalyness for copyright infringement. The courts would ruin him and we wouldn''t need to face him in a big battle. ...wait, no, he lived in China. It would never work, copycats were part of the cultural identity over there. Even if it could have, they''d probably dismiss my claims of his using precognition and/or time-travel to steal my idea as spurious.


    Far less worried about copyright infringement and other intellectual property theft, Mandy had returned to making odd gestures over the unconscious man''s chest. The brand was flickering madly now and... I blinked, then blinked again. Was it actually moving?


    "What are you doing?" Jerry asked, curious about the brand''s newfound mobility as well.


    "I''m fairly sure the empowerment is supposed to be detachable," the sorceress muttered, her eyes glowing brighter and brighter to match her staff, her hair first partially then fully turning into flames and her shadow starting to move and flutter like a cape in the wind. "If I can find a way to move it myself or even just turn it off, much of the Red Dragon Army''s threat will go away without us having to fight a single battle."


    Apparently, someone did not like that idea because the mountain shook more than in a hundred earthquakes, as if it had been struck by the fist of a god. With a roar louder than a small nuke the peak shattered and millions of tons of rock buried the cave and all within it...

 50: Bait and Switch

    Before our arrival, the bindings on the prisoner had been breaking. Before our arrival, Mandy seemed to have an idea on what was going on and had told me to remain hidden. Even as the mountaintop shattered and massive amounts of earth buried the cave and all within it, I could have chosen to act, reach out with my powers and try to stop the collapse or, more likely, shield the cave itself from them. But that would have meant dropping out of intangibility or creating force-fields, neither of which would be conductive to stealth. In the end, I pushed my worries aside and chose to trust in Mandy and Jerry to know what they were doing and focused on what we currently lacked; information.


    Most city-dwelling folk don''t quite grasp how large mountains are. Humans have an odd relationship with large numbers and scales above our own, with a tendency to eyeball things and render them down to a human-centric worldview. Us being tiny little dust motes in the grand scheme of things, that worldview is skewed towards the sizes, distances, speeds and numbers we can easily handle. I had known this was a thing before getting powers, but only really understood it once my own capabilities increased and my own view was forcibly expanded further through superhuman senses. Only then could I instinctively grasp how much bigger and more powerful a tank was than a person, a ship from a tank, a large skyscraper from a ship, a city from a skyscraper.


    This was relevant to the peak of the mountain collapsing in the implications of its size. It wasn''t even a large part of the mountain itself, a mere quarter of a cubic mile. For someone that could flatten a battleship with a punch or manhandle a skyscraper, it wasn''t particularly impressive, right? Yeah, no. It was a mass of three billion tons suddenly knocked downwards at the speed of a runaway train. For comparison purposes, that was four times larger mass-wise than New York City. As in, every building, every street and sidewalk, every tunnel and sewer and foundation, every vehicle and every person within the largest city in the United States some titanic force had kicked down, hard, four times over. It was something that would take a nuclear bomb to do and it''d have to be one of the larger ones, point-blank. I could also have done it, had I applied my powers in their most destructive, least controlled forms. But it was not something the vast majority of supers, or even groups of supers could do - which was a good thing. It meant that supervillains could not flatten cities when they felt like. That had been a state of affairs I - and most sane, reasonable people - had hoped would last for a bit longer, but had known would not persist forever ever since the invasion.


    I slipped through the layers of still-shifting rocks and soil, superhuman senses scanning my surroundings for the origins of the attack. Someone had not only pushed the world a dangerous step closer to a superpowered war but had given killing my best friends the good old college try. This was not acceptable, and I was feeling eager to explain to the unknown assailants the error of their ways with extreme prejudice. Except my senses didn''t pick up anything; as far as I could tell the mountain hadn''t been kicked down by an outside force any more than the bindings on the prisoner had been removed by someone other than the still unconscious and securely bound guy. Which was obviously bullshit and quite reminiscent of Anne''s perception-diverting powers, so I made sure my mental defenses were as solid as could be and looked again.


    Sound was mostly useless. The mountain''s collapse was not only incredibly loud, its sounds came from literally billions of individual moving sources that had spread over several square miles and were still going. It was a lot harder than hearing a single human speak across an entire city because first, human speech followed patterns all of us were familiar with and second, because when you could also see the human you were looking for you knew where the sounds would be coming from. Here I had neither and thus had not only to defeat whatever concealment effect the bad guys were using but find where to look for it with nothing to go on.


    Vision was better. Humans and most of their works were highly visible in the wilderness. There was zero chance to mix most anything artificial with the nature around us and assuming the source of the attack was within normal super combat ranges of up to six miles, that left only nine hundred cubic miles to check for visual discrepancies of someone using a concealment power without perfectly accounting for all the countless minor details they affected in their surroundings. It should only take a few minutes - or less than one under Forced Acceleration speeding everything up for me. Except when you''re in a fight seconds matter and if that was true for unpowered humans, it was even more so for supers that could move, think and act a lot faster. The enemy''s next move came before I could uncover them.


    One moment the sky above was mostly clear, only the cloud of dust naturally rising from the mountain''s collapse marring it, the next a blood-red translucent film started spreading across it. Despite being able to see the difference in the illumination, the sunlight warping and shifting in wavelength as it passed through the boundary of the rapidly forming dome around the mountain, my senses could not perceive the dome itself. It didn''t have mass to curve space-time with its existence, it wasn''t held together by complex networks of electromagnetic interactions, it wasn''t made up of particles given shape by nuclear forces. The only reasons I could tell it was there was its warping effect on the light it passed through, and its volume obstructing the passage of dust motes but, notably, not air molecules. In a way it was very similar to my own force-fields in that they were not made of anything physical at all but could exert an effect on their surroundings. It was just the nature of the effect that differed; since it was not force, my senses could not pick it up directly.


    But that gave me an idea and I ignored the usual sounds and sights the human mind prioritized to focus on the other information my senses brought in. Things like density, temperature, pressure, cohesion, electrical charges and molecular motion, all information that people knew about but did not have personal experience with because human senses could not pick them up. And with the thought that a competent bad guy would try to hide themselves at those levels too, I looked for discrepancies. Because like a color-blind woman trying to coordinate an outfit, you could still partially account for things you knew little about but the end result would be mediocre and obvious to experts. With a dozen times more different things to deal with than just color, it did not take me long to find the bad guys'' mistakes; several hundred human shapes hanging in the air above the mountain but under the new red dome. They seemed to have the density and temperature of dust-filled air, but the minute variations were too uniform. They lacked the tiny build-up of static electricity from air friction and all the dust in the air. The cohesion of dust grains in those volumes matched pure quartz and not the random mixture of granite and marble dust, tiny basalt fibers and a dozen other types of possibly volcanic minerals in the rest of the dust cloud. Plus whatever masking power they were using didn''t account for the randomness of Brownian motion properly.


    Six out of ten, even my baby sister had thought of all of those things.


    A pile of shattered rocks in the shortened mountain below us started to glow a bright orange-red before it turned into a puddle. Molten stone bubbled and hissed before exploding outwards as Jerry''s spinning armored form flew out, Mandy held in a tight embrace. They performed a contest-perfect dancing pirouette in mid-air, globules of glowing boiling minerals thrown off by centrifugal forces as they rose, leaving behind pristine golden plating, gleaming red fabric and mildly flushed skin. Mandy was smiling like a prom queen on the dance floor, for what greater stage could be found for the pair than the crumbling mountain they had melted themselves out of in their dance? They were totally, stupidly in love with each other and it was so blatantly obvious you couldn''t help but be inspired by what they''d found in each other despite horrible adversity - or at least wish them well.


    The hidden villains proved their maliciousness by immediately taking advantage of the pair''s distraction to shoot them in the back. Lines of the same reddish construct that had formed the dome linked the bad guys, all focused to a single point before lancing down in a single bolt with their combined power and the force of a meteor. It was, I realized, how they had brought down the mountain, half a thousand supers pooling their powers together into one grand combined effort. Jerry and Mandy did not even look up; they had eyes only for each other even as the bolt struck Mandy in the back. The red-dressed sorceress glowed for a moment, the staff orbiting the pair with opposite spin crackled ominously... and a crimson wave blasted out of my best friend and hammered the unseen supers against their own barrier dome.Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.


    "You''ll have to do better than that, Wizard!" Mandy laughed as the enemy''s efforts at stealth were shredded by their own reflected assault, revealing five hundred Asian-looking men in red and black martial artist uniforms picking themselves up - or rather down - from their own dome. Five hundred of the Red Dragon''s soldiers, more than even the most pessimistic Intelligence weenies predicted he had. But they were not alone. In the middle of their formation floated a tall, black-haired, black-robed, pale-skinned guy that looked more like a priest than anything else. A very disheveled-looking priest now, one that seemed pretty mad that his second assassination attempt had been thrown back at his face. "Honestly, an amateurish Five Hundred Pillars formation?" Mandy kept taunting. "I''m insulted that you thought such kiddie-league pseudo-mysticism would suffice. It''s not even a century old!"


    "We''ll endeavor to be suitably impressive as we crush you and your toymaker," the man sneered, managing to make his narrow, angular face even uglier. "Or is it boy-toy these days?"


    None of us were merely bantering. Mandy''s magic was already swirling in a dizzying tornado of hundreds of individual effects, each no larger than a dime but as bright as plasma torches. Jerry was conjuring more material inside his armor and fusing it into existing components in ways that defied three-dimensional engineering, adapting his existing weapons and defenses to what he''d seen or guessed of the enemy. The Red Dragon''s soldiers were flying into a different formation, their powers flaring as they did. The Wizard - probably the same guy Mandy was complaining about earlier - was moving his arms like a conductor, pointing at various points in the soldiers'' formation in turn. That was somehow able to direct their flaring energies into constructs that linked them together in more and more complex shapes.


    As for me? I was flying around invisible, inaudible and intangible, going through the soldiers one by one with no outward effect because for the moment the bad guys did not seem to know I was around and turnabout was fair play.


    "That sounds like sour grapes to me, Wizard," Mandy added the exact moment Jerry''s armor finished upgrading and his suit''s weapons started charging with an ominous hum. "Just because you can''t get willing attention from your preferred demographic without copious payment..."


    The insult was cleverly calculated and, from the Wizard''s enraged scowl, had found its mark. Perhaps everything since our arrival had been planned in the little time Mandy and Jerry had to work with since learning the prisoner was being freed. If so, I was more than happy to sit back and let said plan unfold while I worked in the background. It was a reversal of our usual roles and dynamic from the Invasion, and also a sign of how my friends had grown in my absence. Plus setting up a few proper surprises for the unwelcome foreigners took both time and effort. It would be a shame if their visit to the US went without a proper answer for their mountainous vandalism and assassination attempts.


    "Shut up and die," the Wizard growled, his voice echoing like thunder. "Baited, spell-trapped and overwhelmed by mere novices is fitting for someone coasting on innate power instead of true study of the Arcane." Neat! I''d heard of bitter academic rivalries before, even ones where things turned violent or even murderous, but hadn''t seen one up close.


    The huge glowing glyph linking the soldiers together rained bolts of crimson magic, hundreds of them. With the benefits of superspeed and enhanced senses I could tell only one point of the formation was firing at a time, concentrating all of the enemy supers'' powers for a tiny fraction of a second before shifting the firing point. The first few dozen bolts were caught and absorbed by Mandy like their initial attack had been, but soon the fire rate and rapidly changing angles were outpacing her ability to shift her focus. That was when her own spells flew out by themselves, each one intercepting and mutually annihilating with one of the bolts the Irish sorceress had failed to absorb. Casting more of the interceptor spells seemed to be far more easy than direct absorption too but like my own creation of force-fields it seemed to cost something to my friend. An insignificant amount of effort per individual spell perhaps, but hundreds every second pushed her immediately on the back foot and steadily ate through her pre-cast magic.


    Jerry was not idle while this was happening. Not only was he firing at The Wizard with all of his suit''s energy weapons but he was sending a veritable swarm of miniature, pencil-sized missiles at the Red Dragon''s soldiers. Each of those missiles had a milligram of Protonium in its tiny warhead. Also known as antiprotonic hydrogen, it was a material whose atoms were made of one proton and one antiproton, equal and opposite amounts of matter and antimatter. The moment the missiles impacted and destroyed whatever method Jerry had devised to keep the Protonium in them relatively stable, the exotic material self-annihilated and each missile detonated with the force of two dozen tons of TNT concentrated into a point no larger than a thumbnail.


    Unfortunately, the enemy had come prepared for just such kinds of attacks. The Wizard had wrapped himself in a sheath of darkness that protected him from both Jerry''s energy fire and the occasional missile sent his way by the simple expedient of vanishing any particles more energetic than gas molecules that strayed into it. No matter how much power Jerry''s artifice put behind its attacks, the Wizard''s spell was vanishing the method of delivery as easily as Jerry conjured materials for more missiles or reactor fuel.


    As for the Red Dragon''s soldiers, with this "formation" business combining their powers, the layer of the construct over them was proving strong enough to handle Jerry''s attacks. Maybe if Jerry had brought his giant death robot he could have overwhelmed them. Certainly if The Wizard was not coordinating all our enemies into one giant combination their individual abilities would not be up to the task. But as things stood, the bad guys were winning this exchange.


    This kind of tactical and strategic application was a far cry from the near-mindless monsters we''d fought through most of the Invasion, or the somewhat coordinated but still not well thought out attacks by terrorist supers drunk on their own power. Their plan was good enough to deal with Mandy and Jerry so far, and I suspected the big red barrier around the mountain was meant to keep any interfering heroes out until Jerry''s energy reserves ran out, Mandy was exhausted trying to hold back hundreds of supers, and my friends were overwhelmed and killed. It showed that the bad guys were not just getting smarter but that they could also adapt to the abduction of one of their own and come up with a viable plan and trap in under half an hour.


    That kind of improvement deserved a reward and with the hundredth tiny but quite powerful surprise set up I prepared to give it to them. The key to their plan here was obviously The Wizard. He was also a despicable guy that put his considerable magical talent and intellect into performing mass human sacrifices and repeatedly getting away with it. He also knew I existed and would suspect I was around as he probably was the one to break my bindings on the prisoner. Maybe if I suddenly appeared out of thin air and punched him in the face with the force of a small nuke he''d trigger some clever contingency spell and once again get away with all the horrible things he had done and was still attempting to do. He looked like a shifty weasel, he was probably smarter than me, and he was using a form of magic I was not familiar with so being prepared for me was very possible.


    So I did something I''d never done before, not even as a test, on the thought that if I didn''t know I could do it The Wizard would not know to prepare against it. Also, that I had no need for a mass-murdering dark mage and neither did my friends, so I extended one fist through his chest and another through his head while still incorporeal. Then I turned my incorporeality off while activating the hundred surprises I''d generously spread around.


    The Wizard''s heart and brain simultaneously exploded, forcibly shoved out of the way of my materializing fists. It hurt like someone had just hit both my hands with a sledgehammer and left my suit''s gloves, my skin and even a bit of muscle torn up, but I could handle that much while presumably the bad guy couldn''t handle all his most critical bits getting redecorated.


    Then the shockwave from a hundred explosions reached me, carrying with them bits of blood and gore. My powers could not directly be applied to the internals of living beings. It was something I''d yet to find how to do, or maybe my type of magic didn''t work like that. But people have a lot of empty places in them and mashed up, half-digested food and stomach fluids weren''t actually alive. Cue in a hundred coin-sized Force Adjustment fields left inside soldiers'' stomachs, set to adjust the nuclear binding force by about an order of magnitude downwards. I do not care how tough your big formation defense might be; if a tiny atomic bomb goes off inside you and you are not immune to nukes you''re getting wrecked.


    That had just happened to a fifth of the enemy soldiers at the same time as a literal decapitation strike on their leadership. It would throw them into disarray, rob them of their biggest weapons, shock and awe them and have them either fleeing or reduced to easy pickings for my friends and I.


    The Red Dragon''s soldiers seemed to disagree, mobbing us en masse the very moment I became physical...

 51: Red Guard

    The strategy of rapid dominance, more simply known as "shock and awe", seeks through overwhelming superiority and spectacular displays of force to paralyze the enemy''s perception of the battlefield and destroy their will to fight. Confusion, information overload, a perception of invulnerability and horrible casualties dealt to the target combined to make even highly trained soldiers psychologically and often physiologically incapable of fighting. It often worked regardless of bravery, loyalty, or the target''s skill, for similar reasons to why traumatic stress could not just be pushed through with the same qualities. For somewhat adjacent reasons, ten percent casualties over a short time would often cripple the average military unit''s combat ability.


    The Red Dragon''s soldiers did not react to losing both their field leader and a fifth of their numbers anywhere near to what such doctrines predicted. Instead of reeling, they charged with abandon. Instead of being confused, they acted as one. Instead of being emotional, impacted by fear, rage, confusion or shock, they acted almost mechanically and in total silence by launching four hundred energy blasts in the direction of those responsible for their losses. It was bloodlust, a murderous urge but a cold and calculated one... and they all reacted in exactly the same way.


    I shielded my face with my arms as crimson energy blasts struck me en masse, each one no more than a slap or a rough prod to my much greater comparative durability. Then they did it again and again, several blasts from each enemy all delivered in the span of a second. Their formation broken, they were acting individually now but their attacks were still dangerous. The crimson magical energy was not just a physical hit; it was corrosive and little by little my normally white and blue power-wrought costume started to blacken and sizzle. Without a suit just as durable as myself, it would have felt like being pelted by lit cigars would have to a normal person. As things stood, with the costume as an ablative layer their combined efforts only barely hurt but they were also odd. I''d seen how much power The Wizard could get out of them and they gave off more since his death. Maybe he''d just sucked at it? Too late to ask him now, he was too busy littering the place to answer.


    Since they didn''t seem like they''d stop any time soon, I moved. Just with flight and my significant agility I was faster than most supers. With Forced Acceleration speeding everything up they seemed to be crawling through air as thick as mud and even their attacks had slowed down enough to be no faster than bullets. Before they could react I was in the midst of the closest group, shattering clavicles, punching at armpits to dislocate arms, kicking in knees. Without my friends being at risk of dying, I could afford to disable instead of kill - or at least so I thought at first.


    Flight makes immobilising people by simple limb damage an exercise in frustration. Enemies not needing their limbs for locomotion would only stop due to pain and shock, both things to which supers were more resistant. The addition of energy attacks complicated things even more, because the obvious fanatics did not need to be physically well to use them effectively. Only unconsciousness or complete incapacitation worked, and even then only for a time.


    That left disengagement or surrender up to the enemy, and they seemed to be too blood-lusted to understand either. Abandoning ranged attacks against me completely, they mobbed me in melee. I was faster, even a lot faster, but with several hundred flyers approaching from all around under the relative confines of the magical dome they managed to grab me eventually, then started to stab with dagger-constructs at everything they could reach. I soon disappeared under a swarm of crazed berserkers and while a tough costume is great against slow corrosion, it is less effective against stabs and lunges. Their efforts amounted to little more than paper cuts, but a dozen paper cuts were annoying. A hundred might leave someone hurt. A thousand were starting to become serious.


    I went incorporeal for a moment and all my injuries flared into agony as the void seemed to suck out my blood at alarming rates. I dropped back into the physical world with a yell, finding myself still within stabbing range. Note to self for future reference; going into a super-vacuum while having a bazillion leaks was not a good idea.


    A blast of force pushed the dozens of enemies mobbing me for a moment, affording me a glimpse of the rest of the fight. Jerry was shooting arcs of lightning out of his everything, as if his armor was some giant, man-shaped taser. He looked scuffed up, scrapes and scorch marks pitting his armor plates, but mostly OK. Mandy was playing tag with the hundred or so bad guys that had gone after her, blasting them as they closed, teleporting away the moment they got within reach. Both my friends were slowly whittling down the opposition, already over a dozen incapacitated, crippled, or maybe even dead fanatics littering the shortened mountain beneath us all.


    A force-field got me some breathing space by keeping the two hundred or so Red Dragon soldiers still focused on me beyond stabbing distance, forcing them to start with the corrosive blasts again. This gave my Empowering Regeneration time to not only start healing the countless tiny cuts I''d taken but also slightly boost my physical ability. It was far less effective than it would have been against a single powerful opponent but that small power-up would keep trickling in throughout the fight. Like in martial arts or combat sport movies, the intrepid heroine would initially be on the back foot but she''d keep adapting to the villain''s tricks or just get plain better until the bad guys exhausted themselves.


    Except something behind all the near-mindless aggression and robotic coordination of the soldiers noticed me doing just that and decided that it would not do. A hundred and eighty crimson bolts slammed into my force-field and I felt the pressure against my mind. It tasted like fear and savagery and scrambled thoughts, and the force-field flickered. I was reminded of how the prisoner''s bindings had just vanished earlier and laid down a second barrier behind the first. It was good that I did because the second mass attack dispelled the force-field entirely.


    That was not fair. Weren''t these guys cultivator expies from some xianxia novel where all enemies were pathetic screw-ups whose strength evaporated the moment the main character came up against them? Why did the enemy seem to get a vote the moment these powers stopped existing in mere stories and intruded into real life? I didn''t want to have to hurt these guys either, no more than absolutely necessary to get them to stop trying to kill my friends and/or act like mindless pawns to a terrorist cult leader.If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.


    My eyes flashed with piercing force and destructive energy, twin blue-white beams lancing out through the third force-field I raised unimpeded. They lanced through the bodies of brainwashed cultists launching themselves at me with no regard for their own life and limb. Beams that could core out naval warships met enhanced human flesh and the beams won. Stomachs, kidneys, lower spines, groins; the beams dealt gaping, searing wounds in the most painful but not immediately lethal manner possible, leaving enemies twitching helplessly in agony and incapable of further action. People with superhuman durability and vitality would not die to such horrific injuries as unpowered humans would have and given time they could make full recoveries from anything that didn''t kill and didn''t prevent further healing.


    Little by little the enemy was whittled down, two hundred foes being reduced to half that number, then to only fifty, then to a bit over a dozen. It was a painful, tiring slog to fight that many enemies while also playing defense and doing my best not to kill them out of hand but after the halfway point they could no longer bring down my defenses and deal more injuries. The battle seemed to speed up even as it wound down.


    Jerry and Mandy were winning their own half of the battle. The futuristically armored artificer had reconfigured his armored plating into some sort of semi-liquid metal that functioned as both a fluid and a solid. Dents formed on this new protective layer with every blow but almost immediately smoothed out. The only damage that did not vanish was the small amounts of material ablated away by the corrosive properties of the enemy''s red magic, material Jerry had little trouble replacing via a huge internal reservoir that to my senses was larger in volume than the armor and him combined.


    Offensively he had modified his mini-missiles again into what felt and sounded like hugely overpowered flash-bangs. Individual explosions were no stronger than a ton of TNT each, enough to stagger and even injure relatively low-powered supers like his targets, but the actual take downs came from how they generated flashes powerful enough to blind through both closed eyelids and protective magic, while also generating shock-waves that disrupted the central nervous system.


    The red-haired sorceress used the same tricks of magical manipulation as before, absorbing enemy magical blasts and either converting them to more spells of her own or reflecting them back to the source. Without several hundred of them fighting her at once, the Red Dragon''s soldiers did not seem able to overwhelm her defense and mobility. Those of them that chose to engage her in melee fared even more poorly as Mandy drained their reserves out of their bodies and returned them as lightning that intensified the closer they got to her. Those cultists that had not been taken out in the initial volleys or the lightning discharges stood back and used their enhanced strength to hurl boulders almost as fast as bullets. Their indirect tactics landed a few blows and by the time the last superpowered martial artist fell unconscious she was wrung out, dirty, dusty, and very annoyed but otherwise intact.


    "That was exhausting," Jerry exclaimed when we were finally done. "These kind of ambushes are why I don''t like taking the field without a quarter megaton of fusion-powered, antimatter-armed robot wrapped around me. Magical invisibility that beats two dozen different sensor systems and mountain-busting attacks the bad guys can pull off without breaking it are both bullshit."


    "Nah, it''s perfectly OK as long as we are the ones doing it," I reminded him. The Valkyries had taken advantage of Anne''s even more extensive cloaking skills for months now.


    "You don''t get to talk, Miss I-am-always-regenerating," the formerly hopeless nerd and currently greatest tech guy on the planet said as he waved an armored finger in my direction. "Five minutes from now you''ll probably be A-okay while the rest of us will still need to deal with what happened."


    "You''re telling me you don''t have a similar skill?" I challenged, making my eyes glow. It wasn''t needed for any of my powers to work but I''d found visual cues very helpful in reminding people of which comic book character I more closely resembled. "I''m scanning your body right now and it''s recovering abnormally quickly for a non-physical super."


    "Yeah, but I actually had to build my version out of scraps," he shot back with a smile. "Hooked my ass into a Thorium reactor and started converting its output to mana and everything. You? You get to do better all the time and without any invasive probes."


    "That''s because I''m awesome, baby," I countered and jiggled my probe-free backside. "Mads, tell him I''m awesome."


    "You''re both idiots," the sorceress growled at us. It was always funny when she got angry, especially since she was perhaps the shortest adult super I''d ever seen. "Now shut up, I''m trying to see why the exclusion dome is still active."


    "It is?" I looked up and yeah, giant red dome. That was the downside of super-senses; live with them too long and things that could hide from them could blindside you even when they should have been obvious to your more mundane perception. The dome still being up was an oddity, because who was maintaining it? It had been put up by a big formation of a hundred supers working together, could it have been well-made enough to need no maintenance? Just in case I looked around for more oddities... and found them. "Guys? Does it look like to you that half these cultists have grown larger?"


    On hearing this said cultists, who should have been too injured to mess around, got up like puppets on strings. With perfect coordination down to the millisecond, they all conjured the same daggers of crimson magic that had been giving me papercuts earlier and stabbed them through the hearts of the still-unconscious cultists. A hundred and forty deaths swept through the mountaintop like a freezing gust, a disquieting whisper, the last breath of a dying man and suddenly the air felt heavier.


    They were added to the ten that had died despite our best efforts to capture the Red Dragon''s minions alive, to the hundred I''d killed earlier to break the trap meant to kill my two best friends. And as the weight of those murders added to the atmosphere of death and destruction, the awake cultists recovered from their wounds before our eyes even as they grew in size, their limbs becoming longer, their skulls thicker, their muscles bulging monstrously.


    "Damn, sacrificial link," Mandy muttered and I rolled my eyes.


    "Gee, you think? Half of them just died before our eyes," I reminded her, rolling my shoulders and preparing for a second fight.


    "Not just those, all of them," she shot back, her staff glowing with a loud crackle of power... but not as loud as before. "The empowerment is not safe and it''s been set up so each one who dies makes the rest stronger."


    "Aw crap, that bullshit again!" Things like that had been pulled off by the invaders. They''d absolutely sucked for everyone back then and I didn''t expect them to suck any less now.


    The only good thing is that we no longer needed to decide what to do with the Red Dragon. If he was already using that kind of black magic on his own followers what he''d be willing to do to everyone else would be worse.


    Why did villains always have to go for the worst thing they could do? This was why we couldn''t have nice things...

 52: Counter Fire

    As half the surviving enemies coldly executed their comrades to absorb their enhancements, Mandy, Jerry and I understood that the Red Dragon had not made soldiers; he had made sacrificial pawns and suicide bombers. Force Awareness meant I could make a pretty good guess on how much tougher any material was. From how the enhanced men''s bones, muscles, soft tissues and skin had more than doubled in resilience and the power generated through their every move had similarly increased, they seemed to have grown at the same ratio of dead to survivors. If their other abilities had grown at the same rate then the overall abilities of the opposition hadn''t changed, they had been concentrated.


    As even a basic understanding of concentration of force would indicate, a twice as powerful enemy can produce far more than double the results. A combatant with twice the toughness for example could largely shrug off multiple attacks from weaker enemies and keep going, while even glancing blows from their twice as powerful offensive powers could devastate said weaker targets. That''s not even getting into how twice the speed would make them harder to target and let them perform attacks faster, while double the accuracy would make hitting others far easier.


    The second potential problem was something that needed confirmation, so I let loose with my eyebeams on a trio of targets. One lost a leg at the hip, the limb sliced off by a brief sweep of a beam. The second I blasted through the stomach with a narrower shot. The last was struck in the face, the burning energy and piercing force leaving him blind. All three were injured to the point of either shock and pain rendering them temporarily incapable of fighting or loss of sight unable to fight effectively. Almost immediately, their fellow enhanced turned on them and executed them with either point-blank shots or repeated stabbing with a blade construct. Even if I''d expected them to do so seeing them actually carry out such tactics left a sour taste in my mouth not from the gore and death - the Invasion had desensitized most of us to such things - but for the callous disregard for their fellows.


    They launched themselves at us en masse with the same lack of strategy or care for their defense as before, not because they couldn''t but because such things were irrelevant. Us killing them was acceptable because it wouldn''t change their group''s combat ability; if anything, it would make the survivors stronger overall. A force-field dome stopped them for a few seconds. I didn''t bother with the effort to make it last more than twenty seconds since at best they''d bring it down in three, instead using the brief respite to create a dozen layered forcefields behind the first.


    "That should give us some breathing space," I told the others as our enemies started bombarding the outer force-field with corrosive constructs. "I''m still miffed they can damage my force-fields. There''s nothing about them that should be damageable; it would be like trying to cut down the Earth''s gravity well by swinging at it."


    "They are not dealing damage through physics, they''re destroying the fields much like you can create them," Mandy explained. "You want your fields to bar their attacks, they want their attacks to blast through and hit us, your respective powers are both active and thematically opposed." She shrugged. "Frankly I''m not surprised the Red Dragon employs counterspelling if he was allied to The Wizard."


    "Great." It really wasn''t. "Any ideas?"


    "How long can you keep creating the domes?" Jerry asked. "I think I got something that might work but I need to do some rebuilding."


    "I could keep layering fields from within," I told him, thinking. "As long as they''re not meant to last they''re not hard to make." The thinnest I could make them while still stopping attacks was an inch thick and each lasted two or three seconds under fire, thus... "It would hold them back maybe ten minutes. Eight to be safe."


    "Do it," Jerry''s golden armor nodded before its internals started shifting. "What I have in mind will be tricky but it might be a solution."


    I nodded and both of us got to work. Layering more force-fields to keep the storm of destructive attacks was nice, pressure or no. Honestly, I felt better building defenses than smashing things, even if I was better with the latter than the former. Given the nature of the opposition we might have to do more of the latter in the end but there was a difference between only ever using violence as a solution and only using it as a last resort.


    Besides, I had two ideas of my own. One of them was iffy. The other... I''d wait and see how our unwanted guests reacted to everything else first...


    xxxx


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 77.4809%; background-color: rgba(132, 63, 161, 1); margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 69.8057%">Name: Jerry Norris, HP: 2088/2088, SP: 3000/3240, MP: 3952/1440+2880</td>


    <td style="width: 30.2787%">Class: lvl 72 High Artificer</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 69.8057%; border-style: none; vertical-align: top">


    Skills [0/15 super-skill pts]


    Academics lvl 52, Assessment lvl 54, Ceramics Creation lvl 43, Damage Reduction lvl 48, Deception 2, Emergency Recharge lvl 13, Energize lvl 53, Energy Reserve lvl 40, Energy Weapons lvl 71, Enhanced Armorer lvl 71, Enhanced Biological Engineer lvl 11, Enhanced Electrical Engineer lvl 72, Enhanced Nuclear Engineer lvl 38, Enhanced Roboticist lvl 63, Fast Healing lvl 30, Fabricate lvl 72, Fuel Creation lvl 51, HEMA lvl 34, Instant Repair lvl 39, Language: English lvl 5, Language: French lvl 2, Metal Creation lvl 58, Persuasion lvl 13, Rapid Recharge lvl 54, Piloting: Battlesuit lvl 38, Programming lvl 37, Magical Miniaturization lvl 28, Transdimensional Engineering lvl 14


    </td>


    <td style="width: 30.2787%; vertical-align: top">


    Stats [0/360 pts]


    Strength 24, Dexterity 100, Constitution 69


    Intelligence 160, Wisdom 50, Charisma 20


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    With an Intelligence of a hundred and sixty and a superhuman level of Academic skill, Jerry had all the time in the world to look at the upgrade to his sheet and consider his options. He''d put another five points from the last level into Intelligence, which was the same as he''d done for a good half a dozen levels now. The old grumbling of the game-like stat being more like mental speed and data analysis/synthesis than real-life genius was barely an afterthought nowadays as said mental speed as well as the effects of his various crafting skills picked up noticeably. Being "merely" a comic-book scientist was more than an equitable exchange in his not so humble opinion, because he could actually push the limits of technology beyond what reality allowed.


    The superpowered ''skill'' he''d taken at level seventy was the key to both his current armor and his weapon idea for trying to bring down the Red Dragon''s human experiments on forced empowerment. Transdimensional Engineering was a game-changer. He''d only had it since his last big fight against the Pacific Kaiju and he''d spent the majority of his waking hours pushing it to level fourteen because of how useful it was. One effect was that it enabled him to "fold" or "compress" his designs, fitting more than was physically possible in the same space. A second effect gained after it had hit level ten was the ability to overlap different designs on the same volume without unwanted interference, essentially giving that volume an extra ''depth'' dimension that could contain different layers of material. Alternatively, he could overlap materials but have them fuse together, creating impossible new composites through dimensional overlap.


    His armor''s internals were already being rearranged through his Fabricate skill, leaving cavernous new spaces where Metal Creation, Ceramics Creation and Fuel Creation deposited conjured matter to be shaped in the second stage of the construction. The five-point intelligence increase might not seem like much, but compounded through all his various skills it allowed him to add two one-ton compartments for the new weapons, weapons that would be a good twenty percent better than he could have previously made.


    As he proceeded to the actual design, how Jerry''s intelligence stat and its associated skills worked different than reality showed their real worth. Real research and development was the work of years, decades even, from dozens of people at minimum but more often hundreds or thousands. For Jerry, it was the work of a minute to analyze the implications of how further he could push physics now, four or five minutes to come up with a new design with seven and a half million components and troubleshoot it in his mind, then as soon as he was sure it would function properly, spend another five minutes on actually building it with Fabricate, component by component.Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.


    His mana fell sharply as two bundles of finger-wide tubes formed on his suit''s shoulders, superconductive wiring extended to the enhanced, miniaturized Thorium reactor and electricity-multiplying Potentia Coils on his back, then led to the slowly forming body of eight hundred missiles. The basic idea behind them was the optically-tracked, wire-guided missiles of the US Army, with major improvements in their speed, handling, accuracy and ruggedness to be able to actually hit supers that were faster than jet fighters and more agile than cats. The second problem was actually making the missiles'' components tough enough to survive impact without shattering, because these missiles wouldn''t carry the micro-scale protonium warheads the rest of his armament did.


    He was pretty sure he could kill the opposition in one alpha strike now, but he was also certain their enhancements would just feed on the violence of said attempt then rubber-band back to their creator only to be applied to more brainwashed victims for the next battle. Efficient, expedient, simple; it was what an engineer and Jerry himself would have done in the bad guy''s place... if he ever became a megalomaniac mass-murderer with delusions of godhood. So the real engineering challenge was to produce a non-lethal, largely non-violent weapon that worked on people tougher than tanks.


    Jerry''s rarely-used Biological Engineering skill was more of a hobby for when he was too wound up to build another orbital laser and worked on his pet chicken or made half-hearted attempts at a cure for old age despite all the issues that can of worms would bring. Its comparatively low level reflected this but it still was high enough to give him the specs to make his idea into reality. Electrical Engineering helped provide the power but even with Magical Miniaturization and Transdimensional Engineering, putting that power through a hair-thin guidance wire was proving impossible with common materials.


    After a bit of thought, Jerry formed microscopic tubes of diamondoid filled with Lanthanum Decahydride dimensionally fused to a super-strong, super-elastic ceramic fiber. The ceramic fiber and the diamondoid tube kept the Lanthanum Decahydride pressurized and a sheathe of microscopic heat pumps of diamond and liquid helium would maintain a temperature of two hundred and fifty Kelvin even while the wire was under maximum current. Under such conditions, that particular Lanthanum composite was a superconductor, enabling the transfer of large amounts of power. Overall, the design was clunky and inefficient for its size and without reinforcement would have been too fragile to work, but with magical enhancement it became viable.


    Finally came the more mundane bits; gyroscopic system, optics, guidance and over four hundred microprocessors per missile, each the size of the average human cell or the smallest natural insects. Other than their size these components were largely mundane, redesigns of military technology that existed since the nineties. Despite that they were the most physically complex part of the weapon and the reason modern anti-tank missiles cost as much as sixty smartphones a pop; military electronics were stupidly overengineered but necessary. Not even Jerry could finely control eight hundred missiles at the same time so basic navigation would have to be automated.


    A very loud boom and the sounds of over a hundred supers blasting at a force-field made Jerry''s bones shake even in his armor. Glancing up from his work, he found that Maya''s protective dome had shrunk to a mere fifteen feet across, barely enough for Jerry''s armor to stand within and from how it barely distorted visibility it must have been worn down to the last couple of layers. Heat from those red magical blasts came through as the dome began to flicker. He was cutting things way too close, but what was new?


    The two clusters of missile tubes on his shoulders spread out like blossoming flowers as he manually acquired targets with the guiding lasers. Each tube should have had its own sensor system but there had been no time to program one and his Fabricate skill could shape matter but not information in electronic media. Something he''d been meaning to fix since before the invasion but there had always been another priority - too late, now. The missiles would be slow at these distances, too, possibly allowing the enemy to see the attacks coming and dodge. Each tube should have had its own magnetic acceleration system to counter just that, another system he didn''t have time to build. He scrapped the staggered launch plan, assigned six missiles per target for a cluster launch and kept a mere two dozen in reserve for the second wave.


    The force-field was flickering more and more as the final second of systems checks stretched out in his dilated perception before bursting in a shower of crimson blasts. He forced a hard override on the checks and launched immediately, pencil-sized missiles fanning out from his armor''s shoulders like a hedgehog going supernova. Each flew forth at eight thousand gravities of acceleration on its hybrid chemical-ion drive. The super-high-speed camera he''d built into his helmet on a failed attempt to track Maya when she went all-out, captured the event in the diamond clarity of two hundred trillion frames per second for future perusal.


    For those few moments, all of Jerry''s mental resources were taken up by adjusting trajectories to account for enemy action, with nothing to spare for anything else. Here, a pair of supers had seen the missiles coming and were using their flight powers to accelerate away; change the approach vectors to intercept. There, others had started blasting at the projectiles instead; evasive maneuvers on manual to both dodge and avoid the wires from tangling up. Fully half the missiles were having problems adjusting due to latency of all things! Well, he had copied the two-mile-long wiring from the original design. The next iteration would have wireless guidance for short ranges; for now he''d use his powers to assume direct control.


    Even with all he could do, twenty percent of the missiles missed. Another seventeen percent were destroyed, intercepted via a barrage of crimson magic. Twenty-three percent had their wires severed, becoming no more than kinetic projectiles that could hardly take out a tank, let alone any but the weakest supers. One percent failed due to unexpected design flaws or freak accidents, such as impacting dust particles at exactly the wrong time and place and getting their guidance fins stuck. But the remainder thirty-nine percent worked exactly as they had been designed to, at least two hitting each surviving enemy within six milliseconds of Maya''s force-field getting breached. The single enemy that managed to dodge or intercept all six of the initial salvo assigned to him was targeted by all twenty in the second salvo, going down with fourteen hits.


    Upon impact, tiny tines of carbon composite and silver on the missiles'' noses pierced the targets'' dermis and embedded themselves like miniature harpoons. Then massive amounts of current flowed through the superconductive wires linking the targets straight to his suit''s main reactor, delivered in extremely short, powerful pulses. Automated modulators read each super''s electrical resistance, adjusted for the measured reinforcement from their enhancement, then shifted the intensity and duration of the pulses for maximum neural disruption.


    One hundred and twenty-nine targets spasmed and shook involuntarily as they were electrified, suffering total loss of voluntary muscle control all but instantly and experiencing enough sensory overload to scramble any attempt at a coherent response. Their flight kept them in the air for one to three seconds before shorting out and dropping them to the ground. Super or otherwise, humans still had a vulnerable nervous system and without powers specifically tailored to protecting it they could be incapacitated with far less effort than it took to actually hurt them and no need for physical violence.


    "Oh, nasty," Maya said, prodding one of the Red Dragon''s brainwashed victims with her toe. "I''ve been on the receiving end of lightning attacks and they''re never pretty. One out of ten, wouldn''t recommend."


    "All the times you got knocked out during the Invasion was what gave me the idea, yes," Jerry couldn''t stop himself from retorting with a cackle now that they were no longer in immediate danger.


    "Hey, that was just me being too tough to kill!" the blonde complained. "And it didn''t happen that often either."


    "Not that often?" he shot back in incredulity. "It happened near a dozen times, including during the final battle... twice. Everyone noticed it happening."


    "Everyone''s a critic," the Amazonian blonde huffed. "But that''s ancient history-"


    "It was six months ago," Amanda muttered, sotto voce.


    "-what are we going to do with these guys now?" Maya finished, speaking over the two of them and kicking the nearest flailing foe. "How long will this super-taser of yours last?"


    "Good question. Hold on a sec," Jerry told the girls before he fell fully into the dilated perception of what he called ''tinkering mode''. He measured the temperature of the superconductors and electrodes and its rate of increase in parts of the system that weren''t affected by the heat pumps. He checked for deformation in the diamond coating from repulsion between electrons and accumulation of faults from high-speed electrons jumping out of the superconductor via the occasional quantum tunnelling phenomena. Damages from vibration and other mechanical stress that would normally not become relevant for months of normal use but were far more frequent during battlefield conditions.


    One of his skills steadily drew on his mana reserves to make instant repairs, but repairs were never as perfect as the original and would cause further errors to appear faster and faster. A better-designed system that wasn''t a total rush job would have accounted for many of those but as things stood... "Six and a half minutes before the first component failures. Given redundancies, maybe ten minutes before one or two of those guys go free."


    "Not much time, then," Amanda said, stalking forth decisively and waving her hands over two incapacitated foes, palms-down. "If you two are done bantering, I''ll see about removing this... destructively overclocked enhancement from these poor souls before it kills them."


    Sometimes, he thought Amanda worried too much. He''d tried to get the redhead to relax a little, but deep down his... whatever she was to him nowadays still felt like the little girl who''d had a nervous breakdown on the first day of the Invasion. Maya in contrast never seemed to worry enough, always bantering even in the most horrible situations imaginable while beating her way out of them with her own two fists. The blonde had nearly turned into a zombie after being bitten in their first monster encounter ever, then shrugged it off overnight. Jerry and Amanda had seen her going down several times, thought she''d died, and she seemed hardly affected by it. Was it courage or madness? Was Amanda''s worrying common sense or a weakness he had to help her overcome? Jerry didn''t know and his over-inflated Wisdom score did not help at all.


    After this was over, he''d take Amanda and the kids for a short vacation to deep space, come hell or nuclear war. Both were actually likely nowadays.

 53: Relocation

    Magic is the act of Creation: the translation of one''s ideas and beliefs into universal laws.


    That was what Amanda had been told in her first magical lesson by an extra-dimensional entity with the shape of a little girl. It was why every supernatural could develop their own powers with unique mechanics while at the same time magic could be taught, copied and researched to significant extent. It was why concepts and methodologies in its use seemed virulent, why the level of magic on Earth kept increasing, and part of why supernaturals grew with personal accomplishments.


    The unpleasant corollary was that Magic could also be an act of transformation or destruction and that such efforts were easier if more limited than creative ones. After all, if you could make new laws of reality, it followed logically that you should be able to change or repeal existing ones and to blindly fumble into making something work differently or stop working altogether was simple than making something that worked from the ground-up. Case in point, the so-called ''enhancements'' she was currently examining.


    The Red Dragon had not created new supers whole-cloth. The making of new sapient beings that not only thought in the way he wanted them to but also possessed the capacity for magic to begin with would have been a truly impressive accomplishment. Even the Mavethans during their invasion had not been capable of that. They could create monsters from the remnants of those they had murdered, warp existing life-forms in something more to their taste, or summon beings either from an outside source or as reflections of existing monsters but most of the monsters that had not been people ended with almost no ability to shape and choose their own power.


    From what Amanda''s delving into her incapacitated foes could tell, the Asian terrorist hack had circumvented most of the difficulty by starting with other supers. People who had already unlocked magical abilities, who had taken the first steps into having powers of their own and growing them. Then he had branded them with his own power, with a spell that showed them what the Red Dragon''s own power was in excruciating agony and never letting them forget the experience. Thus he engendered abject terror about him in his victims and through constant conditioning a fanatic devotion.


    The horrendous ''trick'' was that the victims knew what the Red Dragon''s magic was. They could not forget it and were forced to keep thinking about it all the time which, paired with their conditioning, had them thinking they were extensions of his power. And by believing in it, living it, they became it. Whatever power they had was transformed through their fear, fanaticism and constant reminders into the transferable ability to copy a portion of the Red Dragon''s own abilities. What seemed from the outside to be a powerful if painful boost was in fact a horrible, mind-destroying curse. It turned people into hollowed-out shells whose only purpose was to carry it, victims who''d be eventually, unavoidably discarded so a grown, stronger curse could be put onto another.


    Examination done, the sorceress pulled at the curse tied to the weakest super among the prisoners. The logograph on the man''s bare chest burned with a baleful crimson glow the moment her own magic touched it, resisting her attempted manipulation with impossible tenacity for a power coming from such a minor super. It anchored itself with power it shouldn''t possess, slipping through Amanda''s magical grasp like a handful of sand gripped too tightly. Annoying, but something she''d been half-expecting. The Red Dragon wasn''t a fool to leave his work unsecured, but how had he done it?


    Fire illuminated. It banished darkness and cast forth light that revealed. It destroyed fears and doubts, provided comfort and security against enemies. It also transformed and was the foundation of industry and human civilization. Amanda knew it, believed it, had lived it more than most in this age where people took so much of human knowledge, security and industry for granted. So when the flame she held in one hand grew and became brighter, she used that belief and understanding at a more supernatural level to uncover what the enemy wished to keep obscured. The tangled threads of the curse became clearer, easier to follow and understand, and she saw the tiny immaterial lines linking the curse with its other iterations.


    "The enhancements are linked," she said for the benefit of her friends who did not see as she could. "Trying to remove one is almost as hard as removing all of them and they''re too many for me to overpower them quickly."


    "Linked how?" Maya asked immediately, her eyes sweeping from cursed victim to cursed victim in an effort to find what she couldn''t see. "Could the links be broken? Subverted? And what do they do beyond just making it harder to remove?"


    "Links of intent, similarity and origin, not actual physical connections," Amanda added. Even if they might appear to be so in her sight, because in magic one could often become the other. Her earlier magic lessons were very frustrating when places and distances didn''t work as she expected them to and her human mind interpreted what her magical senses revealed in confusing, inaccurate manner. In the months since she''d gotten better and better at not making assumptions from apparent evidence because in magic there was such thing as evidence or causality only so far as the caster wanted them to be. "I suspect they are how the power passes from one recipient to others when they die and why these... people fight more like a single-minded horde than individuals." Also how their powers remained near-identical despite being different people. If their minds had been chained together beyond just suffering under the same brainwashing and magical conditioning, power exchanges would be smoother and the group would be less affected by deaths. It would seem like more husks discarded without mental impact rather than members of the group dying. Maybe they even thought the Red Dragon would give them new bodies?


    She examined the idea before scowling and clenching her fists. The fanatics may believe it would, but she very much doubted the Red Dragon did. Transferring the curse to another super would just corrupt them in another mindlessly fanatic extension of the Red Dragon, not reincarnate those previously killed. Though... if their minds by that point were entirely mangled into what that bastard wanted, would his victims notice the difference? Amanda resolved to put that vile man under his own curse when she, Maya and Jerry finally caught up with him. He should not miss out on the opportunity to feel exactly what his victims experienced before they burned him out of the universe with meteor swarms and nuclear fire.


    "If the enhancement is powered by the big bad, could we cut it off from him?" Jerry added as he channeled more of his stored magic - mana he called it - to maintain his hundreds of enhanced tasers that kept their enemies incapacitated. Amanda always thought it odd but interesting how what her boyfriend''s magic actually did was separate from and different than the effective function of his devices. A separation similar to how the curses copied but were apart from the Red Dragon, perhaps?


    "Not a bad idea," she muttered and shifted the focus of her divination. Yes, there was the connection she had been missing. What was that vile man''s ultimate goal? An army of brainwashed soldiers? Amanda doubted it. No, such men didn''t see people, they saw tools. The only thing of importance to them was themselves. An army might be useful in the short term but the ultimate goal of this much effort and thought... ah, there it was! When through consumption of supers or subsequent violence the collective power of the curse matched his own, became in essence identical and capable of fully mimicking him, he could recall it, put it on himself without any dissonance, merge with it and double his power. "I don''t think we could do it at this point though. Maybe if we''d caught them earlier." The link of similarity was too strong. But what if... yes, yes that could work.


    She reached out with her magic to the captives not with some complex transformation, thematic manifestation or obscure effect but with the simplest, most basic application of fire magic; thermokinesis. Both to see what she was working on from minute energy variations and to be able to transfer that energy away. She tested her idea, carefully watched for a minute to see if complications would arise, then once she confirmed it would work applied it to all the brainwashed victims. It was an application that wouldn''t occur to most fire magic users and from the initial lack of reaction from the curse she''d bet all the gold she''d alchemically transmuted that it hadn''t occurred to the Red Dragon either.The author''s tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.


    "What in the name of..." Maya stared at the victims with surprise. "What did you just do? Are you trying to freeze their heads off?"


    "Not their heads, only their brains. And only cool them down, not freeze them." She gave her friends a satisfied smile for a job well done. "See, the bastard responsible for this entire situation is not nearly as clever as he thought he was. His vile human experimentation relies on the victims'' fear of him to corrupt them. Fear to make them think of how terrible and powerful he is and how they should be his willing slaves."


    "Oh, I get it. If they can''t think at all..." the amazonian blonde nodded. "But wouldn''t the brain freeze kill them?"


    "It''s not brain-freeze, it''s more like cryogenics," Amanda countered with a bit of annoyance at the other woman''s tendency to joke about even the direst of matters. "Which is where it gets interesting, because cryogenic suspension is cooling down the brain without harm as much as possible. These guys'' defenses rely on a violence-fueled enchantment meant to mimic a specific pattern, they''re not flexible enough to recognize this as an attack and throw it off. It just keeps healing the side-effects."


    "So that''s it, we won?" Jerry sounded relieved. "I can stop maintaining the jury-rigged connections on these people and you can cuff them, pack them and send them for long-term care?"


    "Oh, it gets better than that." If the sorceress sounded a little smug, well, if being a hero was a job then messing up the plans of magic-abusing hacks would be her hobby... and she was good at it. "The curse is an active effect, not a permanent power. It''s healing them to keep them alive for a transformation that can''t be completed any more, so it''s basically left acting against its violent purpose with no means to stop. Sooner or later it will just break and there''s nothing that bastard can do about it from all the way in China."


    That was when every symbol on every captive flared with actual blood-red flames and the curses reached out for any superpowered bodies with sapient minds to host them...


    xxxx


    One moment Mandy was telling us how we''d won and we could go home, the next she was screaming. Jerry scrambled close, trying to find a way to help then he toppled with a shout and started convulsing. I didn''t know what had happened; my senses weren''t picking up any threats or even other people for miles. Then I felt it; a massive weight that both was and wasn''t there, like being trampled by a horde of ghosts.


    The weight was not physical but mental, throwing itself against my mental defenses like a battering ram. It struck again and again and again like an endless tide, each individual blow insignificant but when hundreds were added together they amounted to more than the sum of their parts. I started hearing voices, countless shouts, cries, wails of pain, roars of anger, the sound of snapping bones, the gasps of someone being choked to death, nails scraping against metal walls, a machete''s dull thud as it cut through flesh, screams of agony over the crackling of flames as people were burned alive, a bloody piece of rebar beating against a mangled body, hopeless whimpers in the dark, someone trying to crawl away as they bled out from the stumps of their legs.


    The more I heard, the more images started accompanying the sounds, the more images with sounds yearned to become memories. But the memories of those horrors were not my own and I refused to add someone else''s failures to my recollection, especially when they did not see them as failures but as their rise to power.


    "Look upon me and despair," they seemed to say. "Know the greatness of my works and cower," they whispered as they tried to crawl inside my mind.


    "Fuck off, you filthy degenerate," I told the echoes of a monster that had tortured and murdered his fellow men and women in all the twisted ways he could imagine just so he could grow his own powers beyond what he''d earned with actual accomplishments and work. What the memories showed was no reason to despair, cower, and vanish silently into the night, but to burn and rave at their owner, rage against the murder of fellow people and their plight.


    Those thoughts more than even my mental defenses seemed to throw the mental attack back, make the hundreds of partial copies of the villain''s mind recoil from my own. Senses and thoughts unscrambling, I rose and looked around, searching for a way to help my friends too.


    Fire burst from Mandy as the five and a half feet tall redhead stopped being a human of flesh and blood and became a towering tornado of elemental force. Smoke and shadow spread all over the shattered peak and in its heart a crimson blaze assumed the vague shape of a woman over thirty feet tall. In her right hand she wielded a thin crackling bar that blazed brighter than the noonday sun, maybe a wand, maybe a staff, maybe a sword, the weapon shifting from shape to shape from one moment to the next. Whatever it was she swung all around and with a deafening wail the mental pressure vanished entirely, the ominous, oppressive aura that had fallen upon the area burned away in its entirety.


    For a moment the elemental giant stood tall, defiant against her enemies. Then her weapon faded away, its light swallowed by the night. The dark aura drew itself in even as the fire dimmed and diminished, growing smaller and smaller and smaller until she was once again my friend Mandy, retching and coughing as she barely clung to her feet.


    "That..." she muttered, pausing to wipe at her mouth with the back of her arm, "...was vile."


    "No, I''m pretty sure it was fucking awesome," I argued and helped her regain her balance. "Of course, I''m referring to how my best friend became a towering terror of flame and shadow that shanked some losers out of our collective mind-space with a literal bolt of lightning. The bit before that was a solipsist''s failed attempt to claim real estate on the back of people''s heads, which makes it just pathetic."


    "Jerry?" she pleaded cutely. The nerd was a lucky guy.


    "He''s out of it but seems fine," I reassured her, super-senses peeking through Jerry''s golden armor to check on him. "No signs of becoming a beefy Asian supervillain, or even spontaneous weeb mutations." Instead of being reassured she kicked me in the shin. A lot of people were doing that lately.


    I set Mandy down on a nearby boulder then had to disentangle several wires from my hair. Jerry toppling in his armor had brought those things down too, and from how they were beginning to smoke and crackle with foot-long arcs of lightning they had to be well on their way to self-destructing.


    "What do we do now?" I asked the redhead after I blinked a drop of molten silver from my right eye. I grabbed the snapped wire it had once been attached to as it flailed way too close to my face and electricity stung my fingers. "Are these guys safe to transport, or are they about to wake up?"


    "Neither." She popped her knuckles then stretched, spine creaking audibly as if we hadn''t gone through at least a serious warm-up with all the fighting. "Where''s my staff?"


    I flicked a finger for theatricality while throwing the long crystal bar at her with a force-field from where it had toppled after her transformation.


    "Thanks." She fiddled with it for a bit, muttering incomprehensibly before... "...there''s good news and bad news."


    "Give me the good news first, this whole situation so far was shit."


    "After the curse tried to detach from them these guys are done for. They''re technically alive but I doubt they''ll survive much longer." I stared at her, trying to find if she was having me on.


    "Those were the good news?" I finally asked.


    "They simplified our decision-making. In hindsight, all three of us suck at healing, I doubt we could have saved them no matter what we tried."


    "...and the bad news?" I braced for it, beginning to suspect where this would lead.


    "The moment they die, the curse rubber-bands back to its origin and the Red Dragon doubles his power," she said, confirming the worst outcome. "Probably not enough to beat you in a straight fight, let alone all of us, but as you saw he won''t go for the straight fight."


    "Yeah, no. He does not get to win," I told her then started forming an intricate force-field I''d used a couple of times before, except this one was meant for far more people.


    "Unless you can heal the hosts to prevent the curse from getting free or find someone else who can in about ten minutes, I don''t see how we could stop him." Magic crackled around her sluggishly. "At best, if you could feed me enough heat for a power-up I could try to destroy the curse outright."


    I thought about it but then shook my head and continued with my preparations. Mandy said she could try, not that she was certain she would succeed, and the possibility of one of the biggest villains in the world becoming that much stronger was too much to risk on a maybe.


    "It''s still an active power, right?" I asked, eyeballing the load and doing the math in my head.


    "Yes, but-"


    "Then you don''t need to worry," I interrupted. "Get Jerry back to your ship, kiss him awake or something."


    "I will set you. On fire. Forever!" she hissed but I was already extending the forcefield I''d made, showing all the confidence in the world.


    If this worked none of us would have to go nuclear...

 54: When In Doubt

    Proximakinesis lashed out at a hundred and thirty-nine targets, pulling them together in a room-sized bundle. Since I didn''t have the time to form the force-fields slowly, I burned through stamina to create them near-instantly, leaving me gasping and almost cramping in a way that fifteen minutes of battle never could have. If anything, after shrugging off the mental assault I had been feeling a good buzz as my Empowering Regeneration had been boosting me throughout the fighting. Most of that extra energy was now gone because I needed each force-field to be semi-independent, last at least twenty minutes on its own, and I needed them to be ready yesterday.


    The moment they were all done, I didn''t bother with any fiddly bits and launched off the shortened (topless?) mountain. Still linked to me, the force-fields followed and we burned through the atmosphere for a fraction of a second. They were not as powerful as my own Proximakinesis directly applied to make me fly, nor could they be amplified with Force Adjustment without spending a great deal more effort to layer a second array of more costly, more complex force-fields to do just that. Forget about using Forced Acceleration or Instant Action to speed everything up; the former would not only be costly but also mess with the duration of other effects and also make the Red Dragon''s victims die faster, while the latter was a strictly personal effect. My cargo''s acceleration was thus limited to partially scaling off my base, unaugmented strength.


    That did not mean it was slow, by any stretch of the definition. While my base strength could only push around a battleship instead of tearing a skyscraper off its foundations and whacking a kaiju over the head with - a move as awesome as it was impractical that I was so going to try one of these days - none of the guys in the cargo massed more than three hundred pounds. Acceleration being force divided by mass, we punched through the lower atmosphere and its drag like breaking through a solid wall and hit the K¨¢rm¨¢n line at a good a hundred and fifty thousand gravities. Since my cargo was already mindless, self-healed physical injuries and would die in minutes no matter what I did, I hadn''t bothered with safeties, atmospheric pressure and oxygen replacements or other life support concerns either.


    Something small crossed the entire envelope of my senses faster than I could react and struck my right fist with the force of a small atomic weapon. One moment everything was fine and we were speeding away from the planet, the next I nearly staggered off-course due to a freak, one-in-a-million impact with space debris. Every bone from my wrist down shattered and my fingers were left more than a little mangled but my regeneration was on it and this was a good reminder not to be an idiot. I immediately shifted Focused Invulnerability to protect from high-speed collisions; had the same thing happened a few minutes later into the trip my whole arm would have probably exploded. Then I activated Forced Acceleration and slowed down to match the cargo just so I could better react to unforeseen events.


    Twenty-one seconds after leaving Earth we flew over the Moon, leaving Earth''s sole natural satellite behind us and below as our flight was randomly angled above the ecliptic. It was a bit of extra preparation that felt like paranoia, but you''re not paranoid if there really are such things as invisible spectres that want to devour your mind. From there we only sped up in total silence except for the microscopic firecracker-like impacts that started to gain noticeable intensity a few minutes into the trip and slowly ramped up in both intensity and frequency from there. I''d never traveled anywhere close to such velocities before, not even during my travels around and back from Mars, so I''d never seen them before. I suspected however that they were collisions with interstellar dust; at the speeds we were going even a nanogram of dust would hit with the force of a bullet. Irrelevant to supers... as long as it was only such tiny quantities or less every time. An actual grain of dust would shatter a main battle tank; all those fictional space-ships that didn''t have shields? Those should have been scrap metal.


    We were halfway to Jupiter when the first guy died. He was one of the physically smallest in the group and all the rough treatment from the battle, the violent incapacitation, the Red Dragon''s attempts to kill them and get his investment of power back and the unprotected trip so far finally became too much. His heart stopped despite the constant slow regeneration and his brand flared, the flames turning black more than red before rapidly expanding. In only seconds, his entire body was consumed leaving nothing behind, not even dust. The red glow from this magical incineration floated around for a few moments in a vaguely humanoid shape, accelerating along with the rest of us. Whatever he had become, my own power still clung to him at least a little. Then he dispersed, my force-field lost its anchor and failed, and the light was sucked in by the one hundred and thirty-eight survivors.


    With my senses I saw them becoming a little tougher, their healing coming a tiny bit faster. Presumably their other powers would be boosted by about another percentage point, maybe a bit less, but it didn''t matter. Here, what Mandy had meant about the enhancement being inflexible became obvious. A normal super''s durability was not just physical toughness; it depended on our perception and if we saw something as harm it would resist more than an unpowered person would have proportionally to our overall toughness increase. But if someone boosted only toughness with some external effect such as me using Force Adjustment on someone else, it would have no impact on resilience that wasn''t part of toughness, such as how easily they could be poisoned or in this case simple cold. No matter how tough the enhancement made them, it hadn''t been designed to restore heat drained away from a body part. Their healing helped, but they''d need regeneration much faster than their current levels to restore their brain faster than Mandy''s spell could cool it.


    From that point on it was a race as more and more of the Red Dragon''s victims died at a steady rate. Those initially weaker or older, those more worn down by injury, those with the occasional genetic fault or other underlying issue since they hadn''t been supers long enough for their self-image to completely overwrite the bodies they had been born with. Being boosted might make them more powerful, but it also stressed their bodies more and more the further they got from their baseline. Like overclocking a processor, no matter how efficient and powerful cooling you added there was a limit to how quickly you could remove heat based on its physical make-up and beyond that point it would quickly fail. Or in this case how rapidly you could put a person back together before they exploded.


    First by ones and twos, then by small groups, their hearts failed and the symbols on the unconscious martial artists'' chests flared into flesh-consuming fire. They left behind those same reddish shadows the first one to die had before those, too, dispersed and their power was absorbed by the survivors, prompting another small leap in power and another round of deaths. The ramp-up was not particularly fast but it was exponential as more and more power was spread to fewer and fewer people. Like in a fission device, there was a critical point where their average power level would far exceed most of the underlying bodies'' ability to handle it. And just like in such a device, the end result promised to be violently explosive.


    A bit farther out than the asteroid belt, which we''d left well below us in the ecliptic plane by now, the one thing I''d been counting on happened. Unfortunately, it happened to the wrong set of spells. Mandy''s set of brain-freezing spells (and they were brain-freezing, no matter what she claimed), started flickering and getting out of control. One prisoner had their whole head freezing over and crumbling away under the rough acceleration. Two more had their heads explode as every bit of moisture inside their skulls flash-boiled. The rest of their bodies were consumed by red-black flames an instant later, much faster than simply getting worn out. Then, with less than a hundred mostly-mindless shells left, all of Mandy''s spells winked out. It was because of the distance, of course.


    More than half a year ago, I''d attempted to throw a boulder into the Sun in a fit of stress-induced rage. It had been just after the Invasion''s final battle, we''d barely scraped a Pyrrhic, and it had left me clinically dead for some time. So on waking up in an unfamiliar place I''d grabbed the nearest convenient target, wrapped it up in a propulsion field and thrown it at the distant Daystar from all the way on the top of Mount Olympus - the one on Mars, not Greece. While the impromptu missile had eventually hit, that had been more because the Sun was such an enormous target with such a powerful gravity well that hitting it wasn''t hard even from a hundred and fifty million miles away, not because my spur-of-the-moment construct had lasted all the way. It had not run out of duration; my powers simply couldn''t extend to and support active effects at such enormous distances back then. Maybe more experienced mages in other worlds could weave active spells that worked in perpetuity or reached across dimensions; the Invaders were capable of both. But magic on Earth was less than a year old; even if it was possible, nobody here knew how to make lasting magic without rigidly attaching it to a physical object.Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.


    Mandy''s spells had just faced that particular issue. Outside the reach of her control, active, loosely-anchored magic dispersed and failed over the course of only a few seconds. The cursed enhancement the Red Dragon had created was a lot bigger, with a stronger link, but it was also much more complex than just some heat draining. I was betting that sooner or later it would start failing too; I just needed to take it a bit further first, so I kept accelerating.


    This was complicated by the rapid recovery of the still-living, still-strengthening hosts of the curse. Ten seconds after Mandy''s spells failed they started wriggling around and trying to fly off. There, my choice to put each of them in their own force-field paid off. They might have the power of several of their fellows each, but when it came to physical force and its applications, I was by far the strongest superhuman on the planet - or the solar system, as long as aliens weren''t around. They only had a fraction of my power and proportionally less of it went to their strength and by extension locomotion. Then they had to deal with the disorientation of massive acceleration through deep space, and their own rapidly failing bodies. All of that put together meant they weren''t going anywhere until it was too late.


    It didn''t take them long to realize just that and they stopped trying to escape in favor of pelting me with those red blasts of theirs. We weren''t on Earth though, we were in deep space and another thing they lacked was super-senses. With no landmarks or other reference points, no means to feel most of the acceleration except for tidal stress from rough handling on my part and zero experience under such conditions, their accuracy was pitiful. Me on the other hand? Flight, especially in space, was a core aspect of my powers, something I had put thousands of hours in, and my favorite activity overall. I was flying circles around their efforts and I was barely breaking a sweat.


    By ones or twos or half a dozen their numbers dwindled further. The bodies died and the red shadows migrated, each time brighter and more defined than the last. They were no longer people but empty vessels for copies of the originator of the curse that were rapidly nearing completion. Finally, with only about thirty of them left it happened; all the remaining hosts died in a massive cascade of crimson energy that almost immediately condensed into a solid, opaque, humanoid shape that looked like it was made out of blood. It looked like a tall, bald, thirty-something man, dressed in an open robe and an archaic culotte. He had a mid-length beard narrowing down to a point and went bare-chested to better display a muscular but still somewhat lean torso. All in all perfectly normal for an Asian pseudo-guru cult leader except for the color... and his eyes. Said eyes were lidless, pupiless yet somehow fully expressive despite being twin black pools full of hate and cold rage.


    The... effigy easily overpowered the single proximakinesis field still on... it? Him? Let''s go with ''him'' and attempted to close with me as we flew. With five hundred times the power of the original soldiers he was solidly in my weight class and proved it by actually keeping up. Then he made a sharp, demanding gesture that I stop immediately just as it cut off its own acceleration, as well as something else that I couldn''t read properly but could guess at its meaning. Probably something about bowing and scraping at his feet if he was true to the original''s personality and culture so I just laughed and used the field to make it audible.


    "Just speak. I can both talk and hear in space just fine," I told him, my tone, expression and body language showing how supremely unconcerned I was about his presence and demands.


    "So be it," it attempted to growl but of course there was no air. I could read the intended words in his body just fine but the lack of actual sound robbed it of emphasis and tone and made it more than a little funny. "Take us back now sh¨¨ngn¨·, or you''ll regret it." Those eyes weren''t focused on me, though. They kept scanning our completely empty surroundings.


    "I don''t think so," I called the bluff immediately. "We''re not on Earth anymore, we''re in deep space and space is MY domain. Yes, you can fly, but I bet even now I can put a lot more of my power in sheer speed and maneuverability than you can. Without air resistance or stationary targets that I have to stop and defend you will never catch up."


    "I don''t need to if you''re still in my reach," he sneered and started firing bolts of red thicker and longer than telephone poles. Far faster than the fist-sized ones his hosts had thrown before, too, each glowing with power. But I was faster still, side-stepping, barrelling over or under, or teleporting around one bolt then another, then another and another. After about a dozen he stopped, recognizing the futility of trying to hit me like that.


    "Told you you''d never catch me," I bragged because I knew it would enrage him further. He was probably the kind of person that demanded others respect him even as he trampled them underfoot; how he''d treated his fanatical followers proved it. That kind of attitude only cemented my decision to not show him any respect whatsoever. "Now why don''t you put your tail between your legs, turn around and snap back to daddy? Oh wait, you can''t."


    Instead of responding he formed a dozen man-shaped constructs and hurled them at me. They were humanoid and capable of action and almost as fast as his bolts had been. I stood my ground and punched the first one to get within reach. The construct shattered after only moderate resistance but my newly healed fist also felt like I''d punched a piece of jagged ice, sharp pinpricks of pain biting into my fingers. The second and third shattered too, to more bites but the third got a punch in and the fourth grabbed my leg. The sensation of needles or perhaps cat-like claws returned and lasted longer before I slammed the constructs together with shattering force then popped the rest with rapid thrusts and the occasional kick.


    "Was that your best effort? I barely felt it!" I taunted again, the aches disappearing. "Did you really expect such feeble constructs to work?" I laughed at him and was rewarded with a slight narrowing of those empty black eyes. "Then again, what else can you do? There are no landmarks here but the sun so you don''t know where we are. The Earth is too far for you to see, but would a terrorist even have the grasp of astronomy to know where to look? Plus how fast can you fly? Would you get back in hours? Days? Weeks maybe? How long do you have without a host?"


    "Long enough," he spat, then several somethings struck me from behind, bands as thick as my arms and more wrapping solidly around all of my limbs and pulling. They were the bolts he''d fired first and missed with, except they had not been merely magic bolts but fully articulate constructs themselves. They didn''t hurt like the humanoid ones but with three per limb they had a pretty firm hold that they used to get me within the bastard''s reach. He swung for the fences, burying his fist in my diaphragm. "Are these working now?" It was his turn to taunt as pain exploded from that one blow as if I''d been impaled.


    "Meh, three out of ten," I struggled enough to shrug. "I''ve been nuked before, dumbass. Shot with lightning bolts as thick as the Eiffel tower, bathed in plasma and dark magic, punched by a demon with a fist the size of Hoover dam. Your little temper tantrum is barely annoying, and being an annoyance is the last thing you have left."


    He didn''t like that as evidenced by the rain of punches, uppercuts and kicks sent my way. He was maybe two-thirds as strong as I was and I was a lot tougher than I was strong. With Focused Invulnerability against his pain touch he couldn''t even make them hurt. Then he staggered, flickered, and the outline of his previously solid form began to slowly leak red mist.


    "Pro tip: an object in motion stays in motion and in space you can''t tell if you''re actually moving due to lack of landmarks and air resistance." My eyes flashed, eye-beams slicing through the oh-so-inescapable bonds he''d put on me. "We are still moving at about half the speed of light and we just left your daddy''s control radius five million miles that away," I pointed behind him and smirked. "Sorry, six million miles now. Or is it seven million? It''s increasing so quickly you certainly can''t count that fast."


    The slowly destabilizing simulacrum turned around and fled. So I stepped outside of time, got ahead of him, and reentered the time-stream at just the right place to slug him in the face. It was extremely satisfying... and sent him hurtling away like a rocket. So I did again, and again, and again, and again, and again. Unlike some people I couldn''t keep that up forever... but I could do it a hell of a lot longer than a dwindling disembodied construct.


    "Hey look! You''re leaking all over the place!" I taunted and kicked him in the gut. "What was that you said about me regretting it?" I asked and shattered his nose. "Nothing clever to say? It is the last chance you''ll get!" I shattered his right knee. It didn''t regenerate. "Or is it that you only boast and bluster and threaten when the other side in the conversation can''t talk back?" He started with threats again. Then curses. Then followed the pleas, even begging. In the end he was reduced to a flickering empty sack of a construct, black eyes wide with terror. He had the full mind and sapience of the original and could tell exactly what was about to follow.


    "See, when mentally screwed evil monsters like you," I crushed what remained of his left hand, "get it into their maggot-ridden noggin that people are things which only exist for their amusement," I crushed his right hand as well, "the rest of us object as is right and proper." I grabbed him by his now scrawny, misshapen neck as his construct body deflated worse than the meanest starvation victim. "We object by getting together because unlike you we actually have friends, corner you in dark, remote places like this one, and don''t stop kicking until you either change your mind or you croak." I shook him until the last bit of him was flickering erratically.


    "Understand this as you die, ever-loathsome, ever-fool." He flickered one final time and blew up into red mist, dispersing in the cold dark depths of outer space. I waited until every last bit of the simulacrum faded, then groaned. I needed to trek all the way back and then we''d need to repeat all that with the original asshole.


    So much for my vacation.

 55: Hidden Depths

    Dill City, Oklahoma, was one of the smaller and quieter towns in all of the United States. In fact, with a population of barely half a thousand and a surface area of half a square mile, it could barely be said to be a village by most peoples'' definition, but legally still was a town and not a village or even a minor settlement. Looking it up, I''d found that there were quite a few ''towns'' that boasted a single house in some less populated areas of the country, more evidence that legal-speak was an alien language that had been backdated before the Invasion via time-travel. Or maybe that was just the usual Wyoming weirdness.


    The town itself was just a main street, a couple of side-streets, a gas station and RV repair center, a school right next to said station, a farmer''s co-op and a little over two hundred houses. It also had no less than four churches for some reason, five if you counted the ''City'' Hall that was, according to the guide I''d read, a partially rebuilt church. There was nothing truly remarkable about the town at first glance and its people liked it that way. They liked the town''s failing economy less, but you couldn''t have everything. At least one of their two larger roads was Rambo Street?


    The whole place was rural, not quite in the way of vast open fields much like a lot of the Midwest, but still far from the bustle of any city. It wasn''t really isolated, but it was overlooked. Small farms and ranches, dried out fields, some hills with sparse vegetation, a single line of green trees while much of everything else was brown or olive drab. The people were mostly uninterested in strangers and nobody accosted us as we flew down State Street Forty-Two, the mile and a half long road that had been built specifically to serve as the town''s access point. The answer to life, the universe and everything it wasn''t.


    Mandy, Jerry and I landed before that line of trees, then walked through a field of anemic grass that could really do with some more water, then to an empty, unpaved lot, gravel crunching underfoot. Still nobody intercepted us or even looked our way despite Jerry''s newly rebuilt and polished armor, the few passers-by that crossed our path not even looking in our direction. That probably had less to do with the locals'' passive attitude and general indifference and more with the basketball-sized cube of diamond-like crystal Mandy was carrying in her arms.


    The fight in space had taken me all the way to Jupiter and a little beyond, and it had been the work of over an hour to get back to Earth. Anne, like most of the rest of the kids, had still been contentedly asleep by that time but Mandy and Jerry had of her several enchanted objects that worked as portable cloaking devices for emergencies. The cube had been the largest, capable of extending a cloaking field with a radius of exactly ¦Ð times the height of the person that held it. It was also the most annoying because to my super-senses it looked like a sphere exactly one foot in diameter while physically it looked like a perfect cube of the same material and mass, which meant it had the same volume. Apparently, Anne had sent it to Jerry along with a note saying "I squared the circle, stop bothering me" and never went to his Math classes from that point on.


    "This doesn''t look like much," the aforementioned superpowered engineer said dubiously as we stopped before the yard-high rusty fence separating about half the unpaved, gravelly lot from the rest. Equally-rusty signs such as "No Trespassing", "Risk of Tetanus" and "Boredom Generator" hung from it, warning people away from the even rustier ten-foot-tall superstructure of a sixty-year-old drilling platform in the center of the lot. It consisted of a few thick and leaky pipes that practically oozed rust and decay, stairs and platform that were largely falling apart, and a sealed-up hole in the ground the pipes disappeared into. The quintessential useless, pointless, nameless abandoned lot that nobody would ever want to be found in, we could practically feel it killing curiosity in a quarter-mile radius by its mere existence.


    "It has been abandoned since the late nineties, what did you expect?" I told him with a roll of my eyes then walked at the sign proclaiming the "Boredom Generator". The fence slipped through me or I slipped through it, its metal completely intangible to my passage. The moment I set foot beyond it, the view changed radically. Gone was the unpaved lot, the crumbling drilling platform and the hole. They were replaced by a single, foot-thick plate of grey metal covering most of the area, two faceless, vaguely humanoid, thirty-foot-tall statues of a slightly different metal with a green hue so dark it was almost black, and what looked like a bottomless pit between said statues, one just wide enough for the statues to drop into without touching the walls.


    "Simple, utilitarian, dull," Mandy commented as she followed me in with Anne''s cube. "Yes, this does have Liz''s fingerprints all over it."


    "She goes by ''Warden'' now," I told her, looking up at the two statues with mild interest. Twice as dense as lead, from a material with enough toughness to build a tower to orbit with, they also slightly obscured my senses. Not like the walls of the supers club I''d taken Anne for dinner, but enough to indicate decent levels of power resistance. I also knew first-hand that the statues could not just move but fight, and fight well. Idly, I wondered what additional enchantments had been built into them; they did serve as the Pit''s outer guards after all.


    "A mildly clever nickname with obvious connotations and little originality," the redhead sorceress snorted dismissively. "Just like her arguments in the Debate Club."


    "To be fair, most of modern civilization works by not having originality," I shot back with a smile. The easy banter was relaxing after having to put down the simulacrum of a madman and the half a thousand victims it had brainwashed to oblivion. "Also, you''re still annoyed they made her Club President instead of you."Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.


    "She got it on a Rationalism vs Objectivism debate!" Mandy complained. "A guy in the IT Club wanted to study a flame war and hacked us to replace the random argument generator," she went on, her voice getting louder and louder as she picked up steam. "...instead of scrapping the thing due to interference, the rest of the Debate Club went for it!"


    Yeah, she was still annoyed after most of a year, an alien invasion and our home town''s total destruction happening in the meantime, so I wisely said nothing. Especially given my less than stellar opinion on that whole situation and its aftermath. Give me a Cheerleader Team to run any day. At least the conflicts there had a basis on practical matters.


    "...wait, where''s Jerry?" Mandy hastily broke off her tirade to scan our surroundings. "He was right behind us, he should have been here by now."


    When a quick look around did not immediately produce a former nerd in a twelve-foot-tall battlesuit, both of us tensed. The lot was empty, both the fenced-off part and the rest. So were the fields around it, the treeline or the street beyond. A quick scan of the city with my senses revealed none but the normal residents within and as I expanded my attention first within a mile, then five, then twenty, I still couldn''t find any sign of the missing super engineer.


    "If something happened to him on the government''s dime," Mandy growled a lot more furiously than her previous nagging about her ancient history with Liz, "I''ll turn this place into a new volcano." Literal flames danced in her eyes and hair and you could hear a wildfire''s roar in her voice... or maybe a volcanic eruption. "Then I''ll ensure the ash clouds concentrate over every airfield for the tourist season, see how they like that."


    "Let''s not be too hasty, I doubt Liz would try something and General Rinaker wouldn''t let her anyway," I made an attempt at calming the now literally fiery Irish girl. "There''s probably a simple explanation."


    "Sure, he got lost in the open, empty lot twenty feet away in the fifteen seconds we weren''t looking," she snapped. Then she stared at me and I stared at her as we considered it.


    "...it can''t possibly be something this dumb," I protested weakly all the while focusing my senses a lot closer but also a step along the w-axis. The answer was yes. Yes it could. Sighing, I walked out of the hidden facility through the same bit of the fence we both had come in through, the fence''s metal once again behaving as entirely immaterial. The moment I stepped outside, I heard the calls of a lost and slightly confused Jerry.


    "-on, girls, where are you?" the slightly metallic-sounding, very loud voice coming out of the golden battlesuit asked the empty air. "This is not funny!"


    "I disagree," I shouted back, making the whole suit leap in surprise. "From where I''m standing it is at least a little funny."


    "Maya!" he shouted in relief, his suit''s arm coming within an inch of striking the rusty old superstructure. It was good that it didn''t, otherwise Jerry would have added ''vandalism of American cultural heritage'' to his list of crimes. Since said list included things like "International Space Treaty violations" or "possession and production of nuclear weapons" I decided I didn''t need to mention that bit. "Where did you girls disappear to? Was Amanda messing with the cube again?" he asked with the fond yet long-suffering tone of someone that had been on the receiving end of hijinks from loved ones many times before.


    "Again?" I asked, raising an eyebrow in interest at the possibility of further blackmail material on my best friend.


    "Ugh, forget I mentioned that, will you?" He came out of the lot in his big stompy battlesuit, stepping over the short fence in the process. I resisted the urge to facepalm.


    "Fine, be a spoilsport." I''d ask Anne for all the juicy bits when we next talked. I bet she had lots and lots on everyone on that station with how her perception-based powers spread throughout it. "Now remind me, Jerry. What did I say about how we get into the Pit?"


    "Er... go over the fence?" In the comfortable, dimensionally-expanded piloting seat inside the armor I saw him scratch his head awkwardly.


    "You weren''t paying attention while I explained, were you?" I should have expected it, he''d been way too focused in rebuilding his suit. "I specifically said ''through'' the fence."


    "Why would that matter?" he asked, still confused. Instead of replying I walked up to his suit, picked him up with Proximakinesis, then carried him along as I stepped through the portion of the fence with the "Boredom Generator" sign, making sure that at least part of the suit went through the intangible fence. Immediately, the empty lot with the abandoned drilling platform was replaced by the Brutalist-style solid-metal entrance to the Pit, its twin towering sentinels and one slightly bored, somewhat irate redhead sorceress.


    "Oh!" Jerry exclaimed. "That was why."


    "It''s a simple dimensional overlap," I told him, somewhat downplaying Liz''s accomplishment. "She probably got the idea from Harry Potter." If she''d wanted praise she''d have at least prettied up the place. Slapping simple grey slabs on everything was so boring.


    "It''s an actually interesting enchantment," Mandy grudgingly admitted. "I still can''t find how she anchored one that big, in this little town of all places. It''s not some ancient ruin, old temple, Native American graveyard or monument. Nor is it a place that''s been lived in for millennia, with mentions throughout human history."


    "It''s the Bertha Rogers Borehole," I told her. Predictably, I got only blank looks in return. "The deepest borehole in the entire continent and once deepest in the world? It goes down six miles."


    "Huh." My best friend nodded. "That does thematically fit an underground facility but..." she frowned and looked around again. "It kinda lacks in similarity."


    "It also stands almost exactly halfway between the geographical center of the conterminous United States and the geographical center of Texas, the state with the most prisons," I started counting on my fingers, "The oil drill failed due to hitting a deposit of molten sulfur and we''re in the Burns Flat area, so there''s that nice Hell association which is another prison. The place has been long abandoned and the whole purpose of the spell is to keep making it look abandoned. Plus the people living here are some of the most uninterested in, least aware of the outside world I''ve ever met and the lack of traffic and things of interest keeps curious eyes away as much as the Boredom Generator does."


    My friends stared at me in surprise.


    "What? You thought I wouldn''t look up the thematic associations for the first-ever prison for supers in the world?" In the New Age of powers we found ourselves such things were soon going to matter for a lot more than optics and publicity stunts. "Now let''s go see a General about an invasion of China."


    We still needed to talk with some Red Trash about his unacceptable recruitment practices and/or continued existence.

 56: Pitfalls

    Stairs were cut into the wall of the Pit, a sharply descending spiral winding down into the darkness of a hole that vanished even to my greatly enhanced eyes and other senses, fading into obscurity after hundreds of feet of power resistant metal. What purpose the stairs might serve when the descent was far too long for normal people to traverse on foot we did not know, but we did not need to either. All three of us could fly, after all. Still, it would be the height of impropriety to simply barge in and might create some awkwardness if we didn''t announce ourselves, so we tried the stairs at first. Besides, trying to sneak into the prison under cover of Anne''s cube might not go over well.


    The staircase only went down fifty feet before our descent was interrupted by wrist-thick bars forming a gigantic horizontal grate that spanned the whole width of the Pit. The grate itself had either been invisible or not existed at all until we set foot on that floor and I suspected that anyone that tried to fly or drop down the apparently empty hole from above would have been in for a very nasty surprise. Next to the staircase, at the same depth as the grate, lay a cavernous depression into the wall, leading to an obvious rest area after only a small tunnel. Seats of flexible metal fibers lined the walls as well as several gleaming silvery tables with odd linear script along their rim as well as smaller circles of more such symbols across their surface. It was the first bit of art we''d seen in the entire complex, though I suspected they were hardly art at all.


    The room was illuminated by no apparent source, a constant low level of lighting being maintained in all of it at once. It made for an odd, slightly eerie atmosphere in that it did not allow the formation of shadows, any difference in illumination negated by what to my senses felt like a vibrating electromagnetic field occupying all empty spaces... except a fifteen-foot radius around Mandy where it fell into stand-by mode. Light coming from the rest of the room still mostly broke up shadows and maintained the mystique of the place, but like all good tricks it became less impressive now that I knew how it was done. It was only the truly great tricks that became more spectacular when they were revealed, mostly because they were no tricks at all.


    "Mandy," I told the redhead in a whisper, "disable the cloaking."


    "Why? Wouldn''t it be funnier if we jumpscared Miss Warden in her own den?"


    "And then we''d be politely asked to leave, by however many guardian golems she''s managed to build since the Invasion." If anyone had told me even just a month earlier that I''d be advocating against messing with the girl that had helped backstab me and several others during the Invasion, I''d ask them if what they were smoking worked on supers and whether I could have some. Now... we had bigger problems to deal with and none of us were who we had been back then.


    Jerry put one giant robotic arm on Mandy''s shoulder in either admonishment or reassurance and with a sigh my best friend let go of the crystal cube that was also a sphere. It being my little sister''s work it refused to do the predictable thing and drop to the ground. Instead it floated in mid-air, in the exact spot it had been left. The cloaking field did turn off though, and the illuminating enchantment started working in the volume it had previously been unable to detect existed. Whether the cube had an actual off switch or this was because the cloaking field''s radius became zero with nobody touching it, I did not know. It wasn''t the only change in the room though.


    Molten metal appeared from thin air before us, seemingly oozing up through the metal-covered ground. My super-senses put the lie to that, little droplets of silvery liquid smaller than the eye could see clearly teleporting in or being conjured before melding into a greater mass. It looked like ferrofluid in a rapidly shifting magnetic field, except the magnetic field did not exist. The Warden did not need such intermediaries when she had direct control over metal. Silver, grey, black and a hundred other shades between them, the mixture flowed upright until it formed a six-foot-tall pillar then started flowing into a more complex shape.


    First it formed a rough head, then split four featureless limbs from the main mass that was beginning to look like a torso. It soon was vaguely humanoid, gaining fingers, nose, ears, eyes and mouth, before it grew even more in detail. It first became a familiar girl then formed clothing of metal just as the skin gained almost human texture, forming not just large-scale features but also hair, skin pores, tiny little wrinkles and even fingerprints. Metal fluids of different hues shifted under that skin, forming veins and arteries of silver even as my senses revealed deeper shifts that created muscles and bones, organs and soft tissues, an entire human body sculptured out of various alloys down to the cellular level. I was pretty sure it lacked biochemistry entirely, but the materials it was made up seemed to be enchanted to mimic it. Its heart beat, sending a liquid metal mix coursing through thousands of miles of artificial blood vessels, muscles of tiny metal wires flexed as its chest expanded at its first breath, eyes of metallic glass opened up and took in the world for the first time. The entire process, the making of a hundred trillion metal replicas of human cells in an interconnected whole, took all of ten seconds, only seeming longer due to my dilated perception of time.


    "Oh, it''s you," the statue spoke with Liz''s voice. "I shouldn''t have made this place so obscure, no villains ever visit. Taking out some terrorist trash would have been nice, for a change."


    "We could go a few rounds if you want," I offered. The last time Liz had tested her golems against me had been fun.


    "Tempting, but no. The government still needs Oklahoma," she joked before her surprisingly expressive metal face retreated into the cold aloofness of the statue it really was. "Now spill, what''s the situation? You wouldn''t have come here if it weren''t important." She glanced at Mandy and Jerry. "And it better be important if you saw fit to tell your friends about a secret government facility."


    "We wish to talk to General Rinaker about a matter of foreign affairs," Mandy spoke while I was still thinking how to phrase our request. How does one even ask about organising what would basically be an invasion of another country, including the use of weapons of mass destruction? Knowing the government, there was probably a form for it. It was probably named something bland and alphanumerical and seriously misleading not due to strategic or public relations considerations but because that''s how bureaucracies were.


    "You want to talk now? After moving out of the country to avoid dealing with our organisation out of some misguided conscientious objection?" My best friend and the statue of an old enemy stood there glaring at each other for a good fifteen seconds without a word being exchanged. OK, so there was more to Mandy''s hostility toward Liz than just ancient schoolyard arguments. On one hand, that meant two of the most powerful supers around weren''t being immature idiots. On the other hand, that would have been a good thing to know before walking into what was probably the biggest and most important military installation in the country short of Cheyenne Mountain.


    "Maybe the General should hear us out before the arguments start flying?" I said, breaking the standoff. How was it that I was the voice of reason here?


    "Fine!" Liz''s glare swept from me to Jerry in his battle-suit, to the inactive cube. "But do not use that... whatever it was that hid you, stay close and no funny business. This is a military installation, we can''t have you breaching its security for unannounced visits," she told us. "Such acts are called incursions, you know."


    Well... she was right on at least that much. Maybe we should have called ahead, but this place did not have communications with the outside world except through powers. It seemed not to have an electrical grid either... or water and sewage systems... or even ventilation. Everything was probably handled through powers, which made it dependant on Liz and gave it a single failure point. On the other hand, without conventional systems it was completely invulnerable to both conventional intrusion and the majority of attempts to compromise it, superpowered or otherwise.


    Liz''s construct led us not to the stairs but straight to the hole of the Pit, a levitating platform of metal forming beneath her feet the moment she walked out over empty air. We followed as instructed, the platform handling the weight of Jerry''s armor without budging a hair out of position. Then the platform descended, dropping into the seemingly bottomless shaft like the world''s scariest, least safe elevator. The people at OSHA would literally cry in horror if they ever saw - which was the secret main reason the facility was both an official secret and magically hidden.


    The metal grate did not interrupt our descent. The platform passed through it as if it weren''t there with us upon it, and I realized this was another security measure. To pass through the grate its enchantment had to detect us and grant us access. Had we been actual intruders using Anne''s cloaking device to bypass security, the grid would have been an obstacle we''d need to blast our way through, immediately revealing ourselves. Even incorporeality of our own might not help due to its power-resistant properties, not unless we were intruders in... well... our actual weight class. At that point the US government would have far bigger concerns than who snuck into a prison.


    After the grate there followed a hundred feet of empty shaft, its grey metal walls not smooth but carved in a scrollwork-like pattern. Physics ever so slightly shifted around each and every one of the literally millions of symbols in patterns that formed circles similar to the ones in the restroom''s tables but much, much larger. If those circles back there had been for teleportation of food and drinks as I suspected, then the ones in the shaft were probably meant to bring defenders or further security measures. Considering the largest circles were fifteen feet across, any intruders would be swarmed in smaller versions of the metal golems Liz liked so much. Then, there were the spikes.Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.


    Black iron protrusions extended out of the walls by at least a couple of feet, five of them spread out every fifth of the total length of this portion of the bore. They definitely looked like iron to my senses, pure and crude and roughly cast, but were as tough as the toughest mundane armor plating, their resilience exceeding their material properties in a very familiar way. Similarly familiar was the way currents of electrons moved within their mass, pressing towards each spike''s sharp point and giving it a bright silvery shine that would have been visible even to normal humans.


    "Why do you have Mavethan lightning spikes here?" I demanded sharply, pulling the whole platform to a dead stop with Proximakinesis, overwhelming its power resistance with brute force.


    "Because they''re cheap to mass-produce, quick to enchant, rugged, easy to repair, and an actually decent security system," Liz''s statue answered with a hint of annoyance in her voice and an impatient tapping of her foot against the platform. "Now stop holding the elevator or I''ll kick you off."


    "Very well." I relaxed my hold and the platform continued its descent. "But if I hear anything about you or the government starting blood sacrifices it will be my turn to threaten you." And while this entire facility was built to be as anti-super as Liz and the General knew how to make it, it was not anti-asteroid.


    We crossed a second grate, followed by another length of borehole full of lightning spikes and teleportation circles, then a third and a fourth. The air began first to whistle past then to press and roar with tornado-like force as we picked up more and more speed before hitting terminal velocity. By the tenth grate I was fairly sure there were small but important differences between each hundred-foot length of the tunnel. By the twentieth, I was certain. While they seemed identical, both the grates and the other defenses were enchanted differently even if the end result was the same. Intruders that managed to break through the first through anything other than overwhelming force would not have gained any advantages in overcoming the layers that followed and tricks developed by examining the first layer from the outside might not work on the deeper ones.


    As we went deeper and deeper, another quality of the Pit''s defenses became clear. Nowhere did we see any actual living creatures, either as guards or as support staff. Everything was done through enchantments and physical matter, both in the passive and active defenses and in the golems that would presumably be brought in to fight off intrusions. Any super that gained power through murder, violence, lifeforce-absorption, blood, fear, or similar methods would get nothing out of their long, long trek into the depths of the Earth. No, they would either be slowly worn down through attrition, or overwhelmed by large numbers of teleporting mindless constructs all the while fighting in a place where everything was power-resistant.


    After a mile and a total of forty-two layers of defenses, we came before what looked like a massive vault door spanning the entire tunnel from wall to wall. It was the size of a five-story apartment building, every inch of its face carved with runes whose magical properties visibly distorted physics, and it was not a door at all. It was actually a wall, a solid block of power-resistant metal and an extension of the Pit''s walls themselves. The entire metaphysical weight and power resistance of the massive facility coursed through it. Attempting to affect a portion of it with powers would be as difficult as affecting the facility in its entirety and from how my senses were stopped cold by it I would probably have to put so much effort to do so I''d be halfway to exhaustion.


    Liz had no such issue. She had built the facility herself over the course of months, infusing the material with her power every time she added an expansion. The platform, the golem she was remotely piloting, and the rest of us accompanying her passed through the barrier as if it weren''t there because Liz decided the facility would be momentarily permeable to us and so it was. After thirty feet of darkness we were through to the next portion of the Pit. Seeing it from within let me know the "door" had no means of being opened or bypassed built into it. The Warden had to actively allow people to pass and since it was a homogenous solid no amount of stealth or skill would help. Enough brute force would still work, but attackers would need nukes - plural - or equivalent.


    The portion of the Pit behind those massive defenses was very different. It still had defensive runic enchantments and lightning spikes but most of the space in its walls was taken up by tunnel entrances. At first the tunnels were only ten feet tall and twelve wide, twenty such entrances for each "floor" of the facility we passed through. They were long though, long enough to disappear into the darkness. Their contents varied, from simple storage lockers and habitation spaces, to machine workshops, chemistry labs, greenhouses and supply depots of all kinds. Smaller tunnels branched out from them, places we got little more than a glimpse into as we flew by.


    The enchantments here were more about regulating temperature and atmospheric pressure, both of which had become quite oppressive more than a mile under the surface. Normal people already wouldn''t be able to live here without them, or some other means of protecting themselves, which made the thousands of people we saw, both soldiers and civilian experts, something of a surprise. There were three hundred floors of such facilities with a total of six thousand primary tunnels, any one of which could have comfortably fit every inhabitant of the small town on the surface. This part of the facility was a city - a large one. And it was only the second part we were seeing.


    Another giant wall pretending to be a vault door followed. It was physically identical to the one before but its enchantments were different. They served the same purpose of defense and separation though, so they weren''t terribly important in the grand scheme of things. We passed through it and that was that.


    "How long did this place take to build?" Jerry''s... slightly awed voice came from his suit''s external speakers.


    "You''re assuming it is finished," Liz''s golem replied as we sped through the next section. "It is not; I am always building, even as I escort a trio of international-sized problems to those that can take them off my hands."


    None of us had anything to say to that, so we watched more tunnels speed by. These ones were nearly twice the size of those in the previous section, a good fifteen feet high and wide. They all had actual vault doors protecting them, slabs of six feet thick metallic glass. They were also mostly transparent, so we could see what was behind them with only slight visual distortion. The tunnels here did not have people, or living and employment arrangements meant for them. They were strictly storage places, warehouses for things that were either dangerous or restricted. Many of them were still empty or even lacking their vault doors, evidence of the facility''s still unfinished nature. Some of them were not.


    Several entire floors contained what were clearly tanks, of a make none of us had seen before. They were significantly larger than the old M1 Abrams, taking nearly the entire fifteen-foot width of their tunnels, with a thicker chassis and a hundred and a five-point-one-inch main turret large enough and with enough barrel length to have a place on a naval warship. Far more concerning was what my senses could tell me of the tanks'' internals. Electrical motors of mundane design took surprisingly little space in their frame, obviously enhanced beyond what physics could account for. Those weren''t the concerning bits. What would provide the electricity for them was; a five-ton slab of layered thermoelectric cells, mirror-like aluminum-tungsten plating and thicker, duller sheets of lead-tungsten surrounding a narrow empty space at the center. There was only one purpose for such a component.


    "Those tanks are all nuclear-powered," I accused with a scowl.


    "When you can conjure any metal resource and give it whatever shape you need, many technologies that previously were prohibitively expensive become viable," Liz easily said. "Besides, don''t pretend that a few thousand paltry radiothermal generators hold a candle to what any of you three can do. After the last kaiju battle where you blew up an entire island, the politicians were grasping at everything that would make them feel even a little in control of the situation. Volunteering some big guns worked... for the time being. Do not do anything too crazy to further destabilise the government through your mere existence, OK?"


    We passed more tunnels, some with more vehicles of various types, others with planes, more still with missiles or even satellites. Others held raw materials instead; steels of various types, enhanced armor plating, silver with enhanced conductivity, semi-conductive crystal wafers perfect for industrial electronics production, metallic glasses, rare earths in enough quantities to crash their global markets, and of course fissile materials along with enhanced radiation shielding. Four thousand tunnels along another mile of borehole which would hold tens of millions of tons of what was essential resources for slightly enhanced mundane war. Their presence also explained the US Army''s ability to build and arm the Miami wall in months without crippling an already damaged economy.


    Yet another massive barrier followed. We passed it in silence as well.


    The section of the facility that followed had even larger tunnels, a mere seven per floor. They were thirty feet wide and a little higher than they were wide but just as long and branching as the others before them. Only a hundred floors this time, for a total of seven hundred tunnels, the majority of them still empty. Those that were full however, contained only giant statues of metal. Some were only ten feet tall and a simple metallic grey, with four layers of them stacked on each other''s shoulders. Some were twenty feet tall and bluish black, double-stacked. The largest were a towering thirty-five feet of green-black alloy like the guardians at the top of the facility, built thickly enough to take the whole width of their storage tunnels. With each tunnel disappearing in the darkness we couldn''t tell how many of the golems there were, but even with less than ten percent of the tunnels occupied the total had to be over fifty thousand.


    It was an absolutely massive, enormous army by any measuring, utterly dwarfing the attempted creation of tank-equivalent soldiers in the Miami wall if not in numbers then at least in capabilities. I knew that the golems could fly fast enough to keep up with subsonic aircraft and had long-range attacks that could kill weaker supers in only a handful of shots. Those had been smaller, older golems with the grey and blue tinted skin; I''d never fought or seen the green ones before. With the teleportation circles built into the facility having an undetermined range but capable of at least deploying them outside where they could proceed to fly to their destination, they were a literal ace in the hole on the side of General Rinaker, Liz, and the part of the US government they represented.


    Their presence here also altered the situation we''d come to talk to the General about considerably, at least as far as the immediate threat was concerned.


    "Welcome, guests, to Sheol," Liz''s metal body-double announced formally as we got to yet another massive wall, presumably the final one. "The first and only prison for superpowered criminals, foreign or domestic." Instead of escorting us through, she shaped the metal to form a corridor just wide enough for Jerry to walk through in his armor if he crouched. "The General and I are expecting you in the first conference room to the right. Do try not to overstay your welcome." And with that not so subtle warning, the Liz-shaped golem vanished. One moment it was there, the next it was gone, leaving only vacuum for the rushing air to fill.


    Well... at least it hadn''t been boring so far.

 57: Advice and Politics

    "Are you three out of your fucking minds?"


    We had just asked the General about going to China, and the first reaction we got was a bit worse than we''d been expecting. And things had been going so well. Finding the conference room in the unfamiliar facility had not been an issue, not with my senses and Mandy''s divination. It was a rest area pretty much identical to the one we''d found at the facility''s entrance, complete with enchanted metal tables and chairs. There we had found both Liz herself in the flesh and General Rinaker going through a stack of printed - and coded - reports. Or, since they were reading the apparent gibberish on those papers just fine, maybe it was some sort of weird shorthand they''d developed in self-defense against bureaucracy. Things like that were why joining their organization or any other sort of government had never crossed my mind.


    The aging military man had been surprisingly accommodating, pausing in his work to listen to whatever we''d come to say. He even welcomed Mandy and Jerry and made polite small-talk about "joint efforts against criminal supers", "international outreach" and "coordinated efforts" for a couple of minutes. There was some noncommittal back-and-forth, teleported refreshments, a lot of smoking on the General''s part and even more boredom on mine - and I hadn''t even joined that part of the conversation.


    It was after said introductions where things got interesting. General Rinaker let us explain the situation without showing any response to either our mention of the battle and shortened mountain or our report on the enemy''s capabilities. He sat back in his chair, chin resting on steepled fingers, old wooden pipe puffing smoke like a ships funnel. He didn''t look as well as the last time I''d met him. There were dark circles under his eyes, his face had an unhealthy pallor and his lanky frame had lost quite a few pounds over the past week. However his body was a lot stronger, its durability reinforced by a growing well of power and its measured movements those of a man that knew he could break things at a touch if he wasn''t careful. I''d seen the same before on new supers who''d grown rapidly but wasn''t a problem I''d really experienced myself due to awareness and control of forces being my primary power.


    The old man hadn''t asked questions of us either, letting Mandy and Jerry explain most of the events with my only contributions being about the fight in outer space. He seemed... not tired, supers bounced back quickly while outside actual battle, but worn down. I suspected the changes to his appearance had more to do with his self-image than anything else. If he saw himself as an aging man struggling under the weight of new responsibilities then that would be what he would appear as even when his actual body was healthy enough to bounce rocket-propelled grenades.


    No, the real downer and constant source of interruptions in the debriefing was Liz. The black-haired woman kept questioning everything; our tactics, our intentions, our decision to engage in a battle at all when the enemy had come prepared for it rather than fleeing via superior mobility, not identifying ourselves and demanding the brainwashed fanatics leave the country, and so on and so forth. Honestly, I''d been tuning her out for most of an hour, waiting for Rinaker to cut in with his own opinions or questions or at least a reaction on his part, but he never did. But the moment Miss "Warden" started throwing around insults and curses, I''d had enough.


    "You seem to be laboring under the misconception this is a debrief or interrogation. That you are in any way entitled to disparaging us for our conduct as if you were our superior," I told her and the General both. "It is not and you aren''t. It is instead a courtesy call and a request for coordination between allies, in order to deal with a dangerous new foe. Stop treating us like that or we''re leaving."


    "Why, you-"


    "Liz, enough," Rinaker spoke between puffs of his pipe. "They are our allies. They are right in at least that much."


    "Really?" Jerry said dubiously. "After fifty-seven minutes of letting her-" he pointed across the table at Liz "-build up steam?"


    "The reason I did not speak earlier is perspective," the General told him. He set his pipe on the table where it kept smoking on its own. "Whatever else you may be you''re all young. Young as people but also young to your powers and young to having power in general. You are making lots of things up as you go, improvising and discovering. How could you not, when the entire world was stood on its end, when this whole situation is new to us all?" He sat back in his chair, fingers clicking against the table as he looked across it at us with those old green eyes of his. "This makes everything you are involved in unpredictable. Your decision-making, yes, but also what options you have available since you keep making new ones, let alone which option might be the best at any given moment."


    "Do you claim to be different, then?" Jerry asked him, causing the General to chuckle.


    "Not at all, young man, except for one thing. I understand the importance of perspective." He smiled rather self-deprecatingly. "I am a lot older than you. This has given me time to make my own mistakes, youthful or otherwise, for me to see the world changing and how newly appearing options are best handled, even if the changes I saw before the Invasion were not as great as those since."


    "As so you... sat back and listened as Liz belittled us?" It was Mandy''s turn to be confused and annoyed.


    "Listening, I''ve found, is the one thing leaders should do the most if they want to be good ones," Rinaker said in turn. "And not belittle, challenge. Some of what you came to tell me was valuable information, and for that I thank you. But some was opinion instead, or assumption. In war those two can be dangerous." He waved at the table and the smoke formed tiny little figures fighting over a broken mountain. Three of said figures, maybe a quarter inch tall at the most, looked suspiciously familiar. "The Fog of War represents the uncertainty in situational awareness experienced by participants in military operations. The term seeks to capture the uncertainty regarding one''s own capability, adversary capability, and adversary intent during an engagement, operation, or campaign." The figures fought on a blurry battlefield half-hidden by puffs of smoke, their positions and actions becoming increasingly hazy. "The newer and less tested the weapons employed the greater the uncertainty, and powers are very new. The less experienced the combatants on either side the greater the uncertainty, and youth aside, neither you nor those brainwashed fools had ever been in a similar situation."


    "So you''re telling us what?" Mandy charged on confrontationally, "that we did not know what we were doing?"


    "Allow me to answer your question with a question." From his tone, the General did not seem at all offended by my friend being angry at him. "Not having met this Red Dragon or seen him engage in a battle where he was pressed, how confident are you that your assessment of him and his goals was correct?"


    "Pretty confident-" Mandy started saying but she was interrupted by Jerry''s armored hand on her shoulder.


    "We are not entirely confident, no," the magical engineer admitted, "but we do have concerns about the threat that presented itself and attempted to kill us. Whether we underestimated, overestimated, or assessed it properly, the threat exists and we have to do something about it, no?"


    "That is true, but the decision about what to do to counter said threat does not rest on you alone," the old man told us. "Not when you asked me, as a representative of the US government and a leader of the organisation of supers responsible for its security, to aid and support you in said efforts. It is a significant commitment to begin with, further complicated by situations and considerations you might not be aware of. This is why there was need for perspective, both for me and for you."


    "In other words you want to talk without doing anything definitive," Mandy ''translated'' with more than a little disgust.


    "Young lady, who do you take me for, a politician?" Rinaker chuckled again. He really seemed to be enjoying himself in this role of... what? Teacher? Wise old man? Young super wrangler? I had no idea because even with super-senses I could not read him. All the reactions, the attitude he was showing, could be a fabrication as easily as they could be the truth. "No, we cannot allow enemies to grow unchecked, especially one who has skipped declaring war and went straight to launching terrorist attacks within US borders with impunity." He nodded, pleased. "Yes, that is good. By phrasing it like that to the people in Washington we''ll be afforded a broader mandate to act, though we''ll still have to handle the international complications with care."Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.


    Not a politician? Who was he trying to fool? Any military officer had to play politics because politics, interactions with other people, were the source of military power in the end. Or at least they used to be. A military officer of flag rank? Those were politicians first and in the military second. They had to be; whether that was a bad thing depended, as always, on the individuals involved.


    "Which means what, practically speaking?" my friend insisted. If she was looking for a definitive answer... from what I''d seen over months of people-watching via super-senses, decisions that big weren''t made in a day. I wasn''t sure if that was a good or a bad thing either.


    "It means seeing what options we do have to deal with it before we actually pick one." A gesture towards Liz got one of the teleportation circles on the table flaring momentarily, replacing his spent pipe for a new, already full one. He picked it up and by the time it reached his lips it was already lit and puffing merrily. Utility applications for superpowers; far more interesting than politics. "Now tell me," he said, suddenly more serious. "What exactly do you have in mind for dealing with this Red Dragon? Walk me through what happened and what you intend in as much detail as you remember so I can see if there are things you missed."


    xxxx


    "...to sum up, storming China with a group powerful enough to guarantee quick victory is problematic for several reasons," the General concluded after another hour and a half of back and forth. "First, we do not know the nature and numbers of his allies and since he already leveraged your personal nemesis to set up a trap for you, we already confirmed he is not acting on his own."


    As it turns out, our knee-jerk reaction to strike back as soon as possible was not very well thought-out. Who would have thunk it? That we didn''t know what other supers were cooperating with the big bad was a serious problem because a single middling power could turn the tide in a battle, if it was the right middling power. The General had given a couple examples just out of the files of supers imprisoned in the Pit alone. More worrying was the second possibility of an alliance, though.


    "What are the chances the enemy has found more than newborn supers to... enhance and how quickly could he assimilate them?"


    "His curse wouldn''t work with willing hosts," Mandy said. "They have to fear him or hate him, a strong negative emotion they will keep thinking about and that will be reinforced by their use of boosted powers."


    "So he can''t lure in recruits with false promises. He has to take them by force. That is good." The General waved his hand and a map of Asia formed out of smoke with hundreds of denser spots across it. "Here''s what we have about super appearances abroad. We suspect the incidents to be underreported, but even so their rarity indicates a sharply declining rate of appearances the further one gets from Florida, Baffin Bay and the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Japan. You just cost him five hundred hosts; in the short term - that is, two to three months - he can''t replace them without abducting them from outside China. Such a wave of abductions would be very noticeable."


    "Which is why we need to take him down now," Mandy immediately and predictably said.


    "Where would you find him?" the General asked with apparently genuine curiosity. "That''s problem number two to your offensive approach, by the way. He''s a terrorist, the enemy of a government that, unlike ours, would nuke their own people if it meant getting rid of him. They''d consider even a million casualties worth it, given how much of their cabinet has inexplicably disappeared since the Red Dragon blew up their own version of a super-prison."


    "And yet they won''t agree to us helping them beat the guy," Jerry noted with a tired chuckle.


    "Welcome to politics, young man," Rinaker said with a shrug. "Two and a half millennia after their invention of Realpolitik, East Asian politics are still based on hierarchy and ritual obligation as a bedrock principle. To ask for help would be to lose face, admit inferiority and generate obligation towards whoever helps them. Things will have to get a lot worse before they do so."


    "That''s-"


    "Their culture?" the older man sat back. "If you want to be heroes, my suggestion would be to stay away from trying to meddle in that. It never goes well, for either side." Was he speaking from personal experience? He was a General and our country had a history of foreign... adventures. "Which brings us to problem number three; the political reaction any unilateral international action on your part."


    "Here we go again," I said with a roll of my eyes.


    "You don''t get to talk," Liz shot back immediately before anyone else could. "You''ve used nuclear explosions on US soil twice, of course people were going to freak out."


    "The Canadians would be very interested in this claim that Devon island is part of the US," I snarked in turn. "Also, the place was uninhabited so no harm done."


    "Wherever the enemy is hiding won''t be," Rinaker put a stop to our little argument. "And if you thought mostly domestic use with support from the authorities caused a bad reaction, you definitely won''t like the one to outright invasion of a global superpower. Even with the Agency keeping the true extent of top-tier superpowers a secret, aided by sheer disbelief, lack of familiarity and some amount of deliberate obfuscation, both governments and government-adjacent organizations are screaming bloody murder. If that very thin veneer of secrecy is pierced by your blatant violation of the parts of international law they actually care about, I can guarantee that arms races with the explicit purpose of killing you will start in more countries than not."


    "Ugh, I should have stayed on Mars," I groaned and stared at the ceiling. On one hand, protecting the world from villains that would murder literal millions for a power-up was something that needed to be done. On the other, being the cause of global mobilisation and eventually war was not my cup of tea.


    "Wouldn''t such reactions be inevitable, then?" Jerry wondered. "Wouldn''t the villains trigger them the same as we would?"


    "Perception and public relations matter," the older man countered. "Imagine if you will that a distant relation, someone that still counts as one of your in-group if barely, had gone crazy and was causing trouble. Suddenly, some people from a rival family or mildly hostile business break down your door, barge into your home with heavy weapons, and wreck several rooms while shooting said crazy troublemaker to death. Now imagine instead that nobody intervenes and the crazy man wrecks the rooms himself until you are forced to ask for help to stop him. Which situation would likely lead to you hating your rescuers?"


    "OK, I''m convinced," the power-armored ex-nerd admitted. "Is it really that simple, though?"


    "Politics is anything but simple," the General warned. "...but first impressions matter a lot even in this. It is why we''ve been holding back the chaos by the skin of our teeth, slowing down reactions and letting people come to the conclusion that you''re helping on their own. It is harder to do in some cases," he shot me a glare "which is why I''d appreciate you not acting as openly and grandly if you can help it. People''s perceptions have to be eased into the new situation slowly, or they''ll shatter."


    "But what do we do if we shouldn''t take him out as soon as possible?"


    "Why, the same thing he has been doing." The smoke-map of Asia shifted instantly to that of North America, one with far, far more super activity markings stuck to it. "He did not set that trap for you without knowing about you, without building up his forces and growing stronger, without finding like-minded allies."


    "What trap?" I demanded. "We captured one of his people and started looking into the Red Dragon''s secrets, not the other way around."


    "And he had five hundred people ready to hit you with very well-researched tactics... how exactly?" the General asked. "You captured one of his people, yes... in a city you''ve visited several times in the past few months, in a bar you were known to have previously frequented, following one of your former classmates that you rightfully feel contempt for, who was so badly disguised and self-controlled he couldn''t have become more obvious if he had tried That, my dear, was undoubtedly a trap."


    "Maybe." Though I was not fully convinced. There was more going on here than we had so far discovered.


    "I can see my persuasion has missed its mark. No matter. We''ll know one way or another by the time this entire situation comes to an end." He rested his chin on steepled fingers once more, returning his pose to how we''d found him when we first entered the room. "Now, to preparations."


    "Are such preparations why you''ve been building up this base to this?" Jerry asked not the General but Liz.


    "That was one of the reasons, yes," the brunette nodded. "As far as we know, the monsters are here to stay so we''ll unlikely to run out of growth fodder. In fact, their numbers have only been growing. But everyone can kill a few monsters every day; to prepare ourselves for the battles to come we''ll need all the improvement and build-up we can get."


    "That''s an idea I can get behind, provisionally," the engineer admitted. "But the armaments and infrastructure you put into this place. Just the city portion of the base could, based off a rough calculation, accommodate six million people. Don''t you think this is too much?"


    "We all prepare for the dangers we can see," Liz said with a smirk. "The magnitude of the preparations has to do with the extent of my foresight."


    And there was the boasting again. As if showing off her base in a six mile long descent when we could have just teleported had not been more of the same.

 Interlude VIII: Wages of Sin

    It burned. It burned. It burned. It burned...


    Searing agony crashed through his body, peeling away skin layer by layer, setting fat aflame, shredding muscle thread by thread, gnawing upon his bones and grinding them to meal. It went deeper, spiked higher, sent magma coursing through his veins. It was what he imagined being staked with a bar of white-hot iron would feel like as the blazing piece of metal was slowly hammered in strike by strike. But even that pain, stronger than anything he''d ever felt in his life, paled in comparison to the unbearable, indescribable torment that followed in his head a few seconds later. It felt as if his hair had turned to dust, melted away by acid, followed by the skin falling away in flakes, then his skull sizzling and hissing as it was washed away by the corrosive mass. He screamed, he thrashed, all coherent thought shattered beyond repair. In the midst of that Hell, trying to resist did not even occur to him. And then he died.


    ...


    The pain! The pain! The pain! The pain!


    Darkness and blessed oblivion were cast back by the baleful glare of a supernova, the impossible, unbearable heat of its coming penetrating to every corner of his existence and forcing a broken, pale imitation of awareness upon him. He writhed and shook and flailed until bones broke under muscles that tore themselves apart in the mindless, futile struggle to throw off the excruciating weight of this new existence. But try as it might, his own body could not self-terminate. They were bindings placed upon him, unseen but not unfelt, restrictions that stopped him from tearing out his own throat, from gouging out his madly rolling eyes, from punching himself in the throat to crush his own trachea. Anything to escape the twin bolts of annihilation that had speared through him, but something prevented him from putting an end to it all and his own body healed too quickly to succumb to the rest nearly as quickly as he wanted it to. So he wailed, and cried, and begged for release until his throat had been scraped raw and even his voice failed him. There his body kept slowly shaking itself apart little by little until the agonizing light of existence faded away. And then he died for the second time.


    ...


    No! No! Not again! He didn''t want this! He hadn''t asked for it!


    Reality did not cooperate or even listen to his wordless pleading so he tried to speak them out loud but the pain was too much. His chest felt like it had caved in, his head crushed by an unseen vise. All that came out were screams and then more screams and then even more screams. As the sensation of being crushed grew and grew and grew and grew, his shouting became weaker and weaker, both the air with which to scream and the will to act squeezed out of him like water from a sponge. He lay down that way in a bed he only knew was there in his most lucid moments, fading in and out from consciousness for longer and longer periods as exhaustion seemed to mount every time he blacked out. But of course it did. How could it not? You could not breathe or get blood flowing with a crushed chest and even one such as he would eventually die without both. So there he lay, waiting for the inevitable, trying to grasp at the last fleeting moments of awareness. His last thought before the darkness was a confused realization. How could he think with a crushed skull? And then he died for the third time.


    ...


    Awareness crashed through him like a thunderbolt.


    Just like with a real thunderbolt, it came with searing agony and a great deal of shock that thoroughly banished all traces of unconsciousness from him. Fortunately, the sensation of being torn apart from within did not last long. It soon subsided in the twin pains of a spike being driven through his chest and the mother of all migraines pounding in his head. He ignored them as best he could and took stock of his situation. He was lying on an impossibly soft, comfortable bed that practically oozed restfulness and recovery, though perhaps ''strapped down'' would be a more accurate description. There were no chains or bindings or any actual straps to this, but a metaphysical pressure, a suppression of his ability to get out of the bed by himself. Other people could have come and pulled him up as easily as any other person of his height and build, but his own attempts to do so, conscious or otherwise, were stymied. Perhaps it was for the best. The bed, after all, was helping in his recovery, speeding it up a lot more than any bed should have.


    Even so, he could not linger on it until his body had mended from this... whatever it was on its own. He had things to do, plans in the works that required either his direct contribution or his guidance, even some responsibilities and obligations despite what he had become. Being delayed by mere infirmity, whatever the cause, was unacceptable in many ways. To rectify this, he reached for his magic, that deep well of power that allowed him to rearrange reality to his desires, transfer and exchange, transform and sacrifice. The well was as familiar as it was welcoming and even in the exhaustion and suffering of his current situation it was a pleasant balm to his woes. Soon it would be more than that, it would be swift restoration, the banishment of his recent woes. He reached into the well for a handful of raw Change, the metaphysical substance that allowed him to do magic. It felt a little odd, different from what he''d used before. Perhaps a hair denser? No matter, he would study this change further after he restored himself. With a nod to himself, he shaped a spell of healing of only middling power but still a hundred times greater than the benefits of the bed. The spell formed for an infinitesimal fraction of a second, then it wavered, then it collapsed catastrophically. And then he died for the fourth time.


    ...


    Awareness came to him slowly but steadily.


    With it came memory, followed by comprehension. Churning thoughts brought with them spikes of pain all the way through his brain... but it was only pain. Not flaying skin and melting muscle, not gnawed away bone, let alone brain actually pulped by crushing force. Those sensations were figments or maybe echoes, things he felt that were not actually happening to him. So, too, for his chest. His heart hurt as if it had burst, but was still beating to pump blood. His lungs burned as if an explosion had happened inside his chest cavity but he was still breathing, if with great difficulty. Said chest cavity might feel not just broken but shattered, his ribs splintered into a thousand fragments that had been driven into the delicate organs they should have been protecting and his spine pulverized by a lethal projectile, but in reality it was not so. Pain, memories of pain, or perhaps echoed sensations like phantom limb syndrome. But the pain would only be passing. That had already been proven by his slow but steady improvement every time he relived the experience, each round through death and back. That he did not actually die, that he felt all the things with whose memory his nerves tingled and shook, the kind of damage that had it been real instead of imagined would not have hurt at all... there was a price to all things. That, he knew very well.


    So he didn''t try to get up, he didn''t try to make his recovery go faster, or force his jumbled memories into coherence. He lay back and only reached for the tiniest bit of Change he ever had. But even tiny things were far from the least significant and as a pale white light no brighter than a torch flickered on the tip of his shaking index finger he remembered the shadow, the monster that had waded through an entire group of survivors, shredding the warriors and gunslingers that had grown out of his fellow club members as if they were nothing, screaming at his feeble spell before being consumed by it... as had the rising shadows of its latest kills. It had been his very first use of magic in combat, converting the dozen wraiths of his old life into enough of a power boost to flee the doomed state of Florida through the simple, purifying, exalting act of sacrifice. And thus his life had been set on its new course.


    Stabs of pain came as the spell flickered in his weak mental grasp and despite his suffering, his exhaustion, the entire cursed aftermath of whatever had happened to reduce him to this state, he persevered. The light grew stronger, more stable, further-reaching and after a long, long time the mental stabs started coming slower and weaker. Eventually he faded into unconsciousness but for the first time in these cycles he had not experienced his own death.


    xxxx


    He was awake once more and slowly recovering from strangely lingering exhaustion when a woman walked into the room.


    No, "walked" was an entirely inadequate description for the way she flitted step by step with superhuman grace and perfect balance with not a single sound. She wore a sports bra and yoga pants of what looked like spun diamonds, glittering in the gloom with their own inner light like threads of some fantasy metal, but where before such garments of alien material, supernaturally skilled construction and so steeped in enhancement they had their own metaphysical weight would have caught the entirety of his attention now they were only momentary distractions from the vision of loveliness they were wrapped around. A subtle play of muscle under soft yet perfectly proportioned curves and flawless golden skin drew the eye like iron filings to a magnet then kept it there with the hypnotic dance that was just her casual walk.


    He had never spared much time or thought for the so-called fairer sex, more interested in the mysteries of the world, both mundane and fantastic. Well, he felt like he had been given several compelling reasons to reconsider, his jumbled thoughts sluggishly churning into half-formed plans of getting his new desire. In a dim, distant corner of his mind, the calmer, more rational part of him screamed he was being supernaturally influenced but he pushed those silly thoughts aside. Even if they were true, this supernatural influence was a hell of a lot more pleasant than his aching chest and pounding head had been so whyever would he choose clarity over comfort? Thus decided, he returned to something far more important; his new plans.


    Should he prostrate himself and beg? No, a goddess would never lavish any attention whatsoever to something so pathetic. Should he attempt to show his prowess, hunt some great beast and deliver its still-bloody head to her? The thought had a certain crude appeal but he had never been much of a hunter or a warrior. Moreover, the more he thought about it, the more his mind worked through the fog, the more he realized someone so easily impressed by crudity and simple physicality could hardly be called a goddess. No, he should show off his magical prowess, the great mastery of the Arcane Science he had painstakingly earned first through the accidental killing of those shades, then through months of study of Mavethan ruins and the hunting of more monsters, the sacrifice of supers to better understand how magic manifested, then the summoning of spiritual tutors for exchanges of lives and souls for the only thing of value; true knowledge.


    Yes, his accomplishments would certainly be impressive. And if not? He now knew many binding spells for both spirits and supers, gleaned from the Invaders'' remains or paid for in full from otherworldly sources. Some he had even invented himself. So he would show off, display his true value while biding his time for an answer. If it was not the answer he wanted? Then he would simply Change it. For what was a goddess to a Wizard?


    xxxx


    "Ah, you are finally awake," she said as the crippled man stirred. No, not crippled, at least not any more. His recovery had come along nicely. "I was beginning to worry your earlier attempt to cast a spell had broken something important," she lied as she took in his condition by multiplying first her diagnosis and cold reading skills, then dividing the chance she had guessed wrong on all the details she had to guess about. It was not infallible, but even on things she''d have normally gotten wrong every time, two halving of failure meant seventy-five percent chance of success and she had it on good authority her luck was at least twice as good as any other super''s at her level. That was about as much effort she was willing to waste on an overconfident idiot like this guy. Supers or otherwise, idiots were of limited utility in and of themselves. Fortunately, that did not diminish their worth in the matter of connections. In fact, it only made it easier to get them to share, if this guy''s obvious reaction to her multiplied appeal and influence was any indication.


    "Worry not," he croaked with a voice raspy from hours of prior screaming, "my own magic is no more threat to me than my own shadow." That was quite a boast. Was he forgetting or maybe ignoring his own spell blowing up in his face earlier?


    "You are being reckless again," she said, putting some feigned worry into her voice and expression. Well, not entirely feigned; if he killed himself due to his own stupidity, she''d lose the opportunity he represented. And she''d invested too much of her time to allow that. "I warned you your plans were risky, that the only guarantee I could give was you suffering no permanent harm from them," she lied again. A bit of luck and recklessness adjustment had turned a frankly insane level of risk into a guaranteed failure. However this idiot had convinced the Red Dragon to make the attempt, her own plans could not afford an unlikely success to make the Dragon more powerful than he already was. A near-peer could become an ally even with a small difference in strength; a clear superior would demand subservience instead and the only one Gemini was willing to serve was herself.Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.


    "The plan... the ambush..." the Wizard muttered, clutching his pounding head and struggling to remember. "It failed, didn''t it?" He hammered his fist against the bed, the solid metal frame bending. Even in his condition, even being a spellcaster instead of a physical powerhouse, The Wizard was powerful enough and careless enough with anything but himself to be a danger to furniture everywhere. "How... why... what happened? I cannot quite remember."


    "You came to me a week before with a mutually beneficial offer," Gemini reminded the villain after doubling a chair to sit by the Wizard''s bedside and continue her pretense of care. "I would help you carry out an ambush on the Red Dragon''s enemies to further assess their capabilities and, through the violence of the battle, generate enough power to hasten the Dragon''s next step to ascension." On the surface it was a well-thought-out plan, simple, straightforward and adaptable. The Wizard''s abilities with magical manipulation would combine the abilities of many scrub-tier minions too brainwashed to use their own powers with true initiative, bringing to bear enough raw power to achieve at least two of the plan''s three main goals. It would have probably worked... if one of the three supers involved hadn''t been miss Nuclear Barbie herself. "But then, just as your plan was beginning to work, you were slain and here we are."


    The woman who had once been Julia remembered being casually dangled in the air, fingers wrapped around her throat and digging in with bruising force despite her superhuman physique, any attempts to multiply her own resistance or halve the force applied making no difference whatsoever. That had been the blonde who most people saw as a real-life version of Superman. They conveniently forgot she had gained her powers in the same way as the rest of them, through the deaths of monsters. And instead of weapons, or ranged powers, or minions, or trickery, she had literally beaten monsters to death with her bare hands.


    For all that she was a hero - and whatever their differences Gemini had no problem admitting the woman chose the right thing far more often than Julia herself ever had - heroes still grew through conflict. And that incident where Gemini had almost been choked because she had made a joke was before the blonde had gone on to kill the Invaders'' leader. No, Gemini would stay far, far away from the up and coming face of North American supers. That did not mean she would not profit from this. In fact, she already had in more ways than one.


    "...I died. I think... I think I remember it. The battle is coming back to me now." The Wizard sounded lost, a man that spoke as if reciting from a script rather than someone remembering events he had experienced first-hand. "I united the hosts, channeling their collective power into the formation and shattering the mountain. It was glorious!" His beady black eyes shone with mania, as dangerous as it was repulsive. "The Red Witch and the Golden Knight survived of course, but by the time they got out they were already trapped under my dome, worn down by a sustained barrage of fire by a formation of my own invention. Victory was at hand."


    Gemini rolled her other body''s eyes so the Wizard would not see her exasperation. She had seen enough reverses during the Invasion so she doubted the greatest mage and mad scientist on Earth would go down as easily as this guy thought they would have. No, it was more likely they had been playing the obvious threat, drawing enemy fire to allow Wennefer to act. Quite unexpected; usually it had been the other way around with those three, on account of the blonde being able to survive far more than most other human supers.


    "What of the third target?" she had her body by the Wizard''s side ask.


    "I do not recall seeing her there," he said with further confusion. "Unfortunate, really. The Red Dragon wished to evaluate her capabilities the most."


    "Gee, I wonder why," Gemini mocked with her other body beyond the Wizard''s hearing.


    "Then suddenly... I... d-died..." The man''s voice shook at the admission. "I felt the agony of my heart and head exploding from within." He shuddered, his previous arrogance gone. "But how is that possible?!" he whined. "Super or no, a man can''t die like this and feel it, experience every detail! Plus you promised I would be safe!" He turned to Gemini with unhinged entitlement to all his failures being undone, to never have been his failures to begin with.


    "And you are safe. Here you sit with me, still alive despite being thoroughly and brutally murdered." Not that she had expected anything else, really. "Just as I explained to you when I used my power to double your existence, allowing you to both fight in the battle as well as stay safely outside it. While one part of you died, the other, still linked to the first half, retained all the experiences and gains from the battle."


    "Gains? What gains?" he demanded with another whine. "I suffered through all that for nothing!"


    "Did you now?" she countered with a knowing smirk. "If you want to utter falsehoods in my presence perhaps you should learn to dissemble better."


    "So my magic is changed," he glowered, the infatuation caused by her charm fading as his anger rose. "What of it?"


    "Changed... or grown? Five hundred supers died in that battle, sent to their doom by the Red Dragon and you. The violence of the battle itself must have added to that tally."


    "Fine, fine, yes, there were some benefits but they were small." If his total gains were less than the Wizard expected... he had fought in the battle, yes. But the instance of him that did so was made by Gemini''s power so the majority of his share came to her. And with the little probability manipulation she''d enacted affecting the outcome, she also got a share of the final spoils. It was the same thing she did with all supers that asked for a combat cheat or a temporary boost towards their plans'' success. "Now, when will this weakness fade? And can you boost me again? Those bastards must be laughing at how their backstabbing took me down, but they won''t be laughing when I get my revenge."


    How could the guy have so little self-awareness? She considered denying him then and there but the possibility of repeating her gains from such a huge battle without actually having to risk herself were too tempting. Plus if The Wizard failed once again, there were always other tantalizing outcomes to be found with one finger already on the scales.


    "Very well. But I do not think I should double you again so soon after the last time." Because if she kept repeating herself, even her most awesome accomplishments would become boring.


    "If you can''t double all of me, what else can you do?" He sat up in his bed and paid her even more attention than during her attempt to charm him. Yeah, the guy was a power junky through and through.


    "Almost everything can be doubled or halved but you know how it is. The broader the effect, the more costly the spell. Something as broad and useful as doubling all of you was about the limit of how far I could boost you at once, but doing multiple weaker effects at once is possible" she half-lied. The actual limit was that she couldn''t produce any temporary effect more powerful overall than herself, nor could she produce permanent effects on people with the exception of having doubled her own existence.


    "A similar limit to my own magic, then." He thought about it. "Could you double the output of sacrifices? That should be both narrow and highly useful."


    "That is possible, yes." Of course his mind would go there. Why not something more straightforward, like doubling his own magical power or skill?


    "How difficult would it be? Would it take more than half of the total available enhancement?"


    "No?" If he kept to smaller individual sacrifices it would barely take anything at all.


    "Good... that is good..." He nodded to himself, already thinking of potential exploits through mass murder. Unfortunately for the poor, misunderstood, always-failing little Wizard, he had just given her an excellent idea. "Could you also enhance all the parameters of my summoning magic? Double my skill and power with it, halve its cost and casting time, things like that?"


    "I can, but that would reach the limits of what help I can provide." He was going for the ol'' demon summoning ritual. Predictable yet potentially disastrous. Gemini was already adjusting her plans to fix that though - and reap all the benefits in the process. All it would take was one more doubling and she wouldn''t even have to sabotage the Wizard''s efforts themselves.


    "That is fine. For what I have in mind for the witch and the knight that will be more than enough..." His voice trailed off as he blinked, then blinked again. He just sat there on the bed for a full minute before a baleful red glow surrounded his hand and the temperature of the room dropped a good ten degrees. This he rubbed against his brow, the glow growing stronger the more he did and less flickering and unstable. His eyes focused and regained some of the sharpness from his visit before his ill-thought plan and death. Then he proceeded to do the same with his chest, rubbing the glow repeatedly over his chest, One more minute of that and he was already sitting straighter and his skin had lost the pallid color of a walking corpse and regained most of its vitality.


    Gemini watched the obvious magic in fascination. Every super had some sort of power, a theme he could use actively in addition to the passive physical boosts they all shared, but few could cast actual spells. The way she understood it, what separated true mages from the rest was the ability to create varied effects with effectively limitless versatility. Gemini herself could do it within her own theme but she was at the low end of the versatility curve for a mage. The Wizard, as far as she knew, was at the upper extreme and pretty much the best spellcrafter she''d ever seen. His only weakness was that his magic always had a cost to be paid for every spell, but he could choose to pay it with anything. If he hadn''t been so small-minded and petty he''d have been as powerful as the Red Dragon by now.


    When the red glow faded and the warmth it had stolen slowly returned to the room, The Wizard was no longer feeble, aching and confused. He was alert, awake, and he had both a satisfied and shrewd cut to his expression.


    "Gemini," he called out with newfound confidence. "I did not thank you for this opportunity. Allow me to do so now." He slid a finger at the wall, then rubbed the tiny bit of dust he collected between his fingers. The dust seemed to grow and multiply, grains of it dripping down to collect at his upturned palm. They soon became a small pile of dust, before solidifying into a pebble, which grew into a larger rock, which grew into a piece of quartz, which turned to iron. That iron turned to lead, the lead to zinc, the zinc to tin, the tin to copper, which in turn became silver and then gold. The gold lump grew in size until it weighed several pounds, before it took on the bright silver-white color of platinum. The rod of platinum became a grey-black metal whose name Gemini did not know but had seen before in the Warder''s creations. Then it took on a bluish tint before turning a green so dark it was almost black.


    "And now, for the last step." The dark green metal shifted into the shape of a foot-and-a-half leaf-bladed sword with a simple cross-guard, a banded hilt and a heavy round pommel. Then The Wizard held the hilt with both hands, grabbing it so tightly his fingers creaked. Tiny beads of sweat started forming on the man''s forehead as he gritted his teeth in obvious strain. Then his arms started shaking and his eyes cried tears of blood. He started yelling, then as the bloody tears multiplied into thin crimson streams running down his cheeks, the yells turned into roars. The streams flowed faster and wider down The Wizard''s neck and started to smoke. They turned left and right across his clavicles, burning through his shirt as if they were molten metal. They reached his shoulders, at which point they caught or perhaps turned into fire and those streams of liquid flame snaked down The Wizard''s arms until they reached the sword.


    The blade''s metal drank in the fire with the wail of a dying man, growing darker and darker and darker with every second until the sword''s wail became louder than The Wizard''s roars. Then all sounds cut off as if by a knife and the smoking, sizzling-hot blade had turned not just black but like a piece of the void itself, a hole in the fabric of existence that had somehow been cast in the shape of a sword. Then the madman chuckled.


    "I admit the sacrifice took more than I''d initially thought it would but that''s OK. It also took in all my frailness, exhaustion, pain, fear and lingering mental anguish from my recent ordeal." He very carefully pointed the sword down and let go, the blade dropping point-first to the metal floor from about a foot up. There was no sound of impact, no slowing, no resistance whatsoever as the blade buried itself to the hilt in the power-resistant material.


    "A sacrifice of... negative qualities?" she asked with an odd tone in her voice. "How does that even work?" It was her time to be confused and she didn''t like it.


    "I did not say those negative traits were all I sacrificed but when one is working off unequivalent exchange, sacrificial magic opens to many options that were previously impossible." He reached down and picked up the sword before handing it over to her. "The Mavethans call the material this blade is made of Gloomsteel. It has the curious property of being near-inviolable. It is my gift to you."


    "Thanks." Gemini received the weapon carefully, not having missed either how it cleaved through the floor or how The Wizard had been very, very careful to only handle it from the hilt. It was quite a gift if even with her boosting The Wizard had struggled much to make it.


    "And now, to more important matters." The Wizard rose from the bed, his ruined shirt becoming pristine once more. "What payment do you want for your services to the Red Dragon?"


    "Payment?"


    "A favor for a favor. You fulfilled your end of the deal. It was not your fault the plan itself failed."


    "Very generous," she said and when The Wizard waited without offering a response she continued. She''d known what she''d ask since before the arrogant mage had first crossed the door of her establishment. "I''d ask for a temporary alliance with the Red Dragon with the goal of mutual benefit. His position has not only risen rapidly in the past weeks, he''s about to engage in larger, more dangerous fights. Fights in which my power could tilt the scales one way or another."


    "I see..." he nodded immediately. "Truth is, the Red Dragon had already asked me to look into obtaining your services longer term. He and his allies have a plan that could greatly benefit from your contribution. Not as a combatant but as support. He is willing to pay very generously for your services."


    "Interesting." Less lucrative than meddling in combat though, unless... "What kind of contribution does he have in mind?"


    "One of the simpler ones you can provide, but to a significant extent. The boosts you have given me would let me handle it via magic but the relevant spells are a bit slow. We''d have far better results with your direct help." He turned towards her, smiling pleasantly. Gemini did not trust it at all. "How good are you at permanent duplication?"


    She told him, finding no reason not to. The Wizard laughed and laughed and laughed, proving his ''recovery'' had only made his madness worse.

 58: Time of Growing

    Looking at my personal assessment through the magic ring Liz had given me months ago, I had a rather sad realization.


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 99.6164%; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 44.0577%">Name: Maya Wennefer</td>


    <td style="width: 55.9078%">Bio: female human, 18y0m11d</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 44.0577%">Known skills:


    </td>


    <td style="width: 55.9078%">Points: 9/241


    </td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 44.0577%; border-style: none; vertical-align: top">


    Action and Reaction, Chronal Leap, Empowering Regeneration, Eyebeams, Focused Invulnerability, Force Adjustment, Force Awareness, Forced Acceleration, Forced Intangibility, Forcefield Creation, Greater Proximakinesis, Immutable Force, Instant Action, Lasting Force, Retributive Defense, Super Suit, Spatial Distortion, Spatial Leap


    </td>


    <td style="width: 55.9078%; vertical-align: top">


    Attributes: Might 50, Agility 30, Reason 6, Vigilance 28, Ego 30, Luck 7


    Word of Force: Power IV, Control III, Versatility IV, Number of Effects III, Range II, Scope III


    Word of Self: Power IV, Control III, Versatility III, Number of Effects III, Range II, Scope II


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Sometime between all the monsters, the meetings with old friends and family, the battles with superpowered terrorists in deep space, and political discussions several miles beneath the Earth, the world had turned, new days had dawned and I had become an adult as far as human calendars were concerned. My birthday had come and gone and I had missed it. Was it because I was doing far too many things too quickly that I was distracted and forgot? Was it because for me the passage of time and worse, the perception of time, was so much faster that calendar dates were no longer really important? That living close to a dozen years of subjective time while less than one passed with the rest of the world kept pushing me further away from what was considered important, let alone normal?


    I could not decide. I did not even try to. Instead I closed the mental projection that summed up everything most other people would consider important, closed my eyes for a moment, then stepped outside of time. Then I flew off. With time and me being out of sync and collateral damage thus being a nonissue, I sped away much faster than I would otherwise have. In only a couple of heartbeats, I was in space. In a couple dozen more, I was landing in the dark side of the Moon.


    Instead of rejoining the timestream immediately, I flew around until I found a nice, deep cave. Caves are a rare thing on Luna due to the lack of both liquid water and significant geological activity. Most of them that do exist are the result of meteoric impacts interacting with previous impact sites or unusually differentiated rock formations. Still, some caves exist and they are not terribly hard to find with penetrating awareness of forces that extends for dozens of miles. The one I found was an underground cave, its uppermost reach a good thirty or forty meters below the surface.


    Feeling nostalgic more than anything else, I folded space through the Spatial Leap power, finding myself inside the cave in what felt the blink of an eye. Since I was still outside the normal flow of time and causality, it didn''t actually last as much as an eyeblink but happened in no time at all. The interior was dark and this being the moon, it was also silent. Silence was... not something that happened on Earth - ever. People may think a particular place is quiet but that''s because they can''t hear the vibrations from cars in the street outside, the grinding of concrete and metal as the skyscraper sways left and right, the water running in thousands of miles of pipes, or their own breathing and heartbeat. And then there''s other people, of which there are from hundreds to tens of thousands within easy walking distance in most places on land. The sea, of course, is neither still nor silent, it just has different things to hear. But the Moon? The only sounds here were the occasional impact from a meteor and the almost constant but very, very distant vibrations of faint moonquakes coming from more than six hundred miles below.


    It was relaxing, to be able not to listen. Liberating, even. Out here, accidents and crimes did not happen within range of my senses every second of every day. I did not have to ignore far too many things lest I become first a tyrant over others, then a slave to my own desire to help. I still remembered exactly how petty, arrogant, greedy and generally stupid people chose to be from months of having super-senses active inside a major city. But I was not reminded of such things via a constant bombardment of such incidents coming up in range of my awareness either.


    Some would say that I did not have to fly to the Moon just to enjoy some peace and quiet. I could turn off my super-senses instead and raise a force-field that blocked vibrations in just about any place and any time. It was something I had done when I was first getting used to my abilities, several times. But the longer I had my powers and the stronger those powers became the more natural it felt to use those senses. Turning them off was not just like closing my eyes, it was entering a sensory deprivation chamber. Blocking them with force-fields was even worse because my awareness extended to active powers I created. It was like wearing a blindfold that itched mightily, or making earmuffs out of bubble-gum and feeling the stickiness where they touched skin.


    So for my belated birthday gift to myself I flew somewhere I could relax without having to roughly disable who I had become. I set a force-field that enhanced atomic vibrations on the cave floor until it turned a nice, glowing orange color, dismissed my suit, banished every bit of dirt and grime clinging to my skin from past battles and splashed into the molten stone. It felt comfortably warm the way water baths nowadays did not. So I added a force-field to press the magma against itself before upping the heat generation until its color shifted from orange to yellow, then to white, then a pale cyan that finally felt toasty hot at around fifteen thousand Kelvin.


    The heat had turned up enough it was on the very edge of becoming pain but before it took that final step it was just as hot as I wanted it to be. An adjustment of gravity allowed me to sink up to my neck into the denser liquid without having to swim downwards and thus I sat back and relaxed. I finally rejoined the normal flow of time when my stamina was utterly spent maintaining it, leaving me pleasantly worn out and with my body protesting against any further activity. Before I knew it, I was fast asleep.


    xxxx


    I woke up an indeterminate time later feeling refreshed and in no particular hurry to return to the political minefield I''d left behind. The radiant cyan liquid stone was just as toasty as before and after soaking in it for what had probably been many hours I was feeling a faint dizziness and the oddly pleasant discomfort that came before a heatstroke. With my natural recovery outpacing the actually harmful effects of too much of a good thing, I stretched like a lazy cat before flying out of the pool.


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 99.6164%; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 44.0577%">Name: Maya Wennefer</td>


    <td style="width: 55.9078%">Bio: female human, 18y0m12d</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 44.0577%">Known skills:


    Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.</td>


    <td style="width: 55.9078%">Points: 9/241


    </td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 44.0577%; border-style: none; vertical-align: top">


    Action and Reaction, Chronal Leap, Empowering Regeneration, Eyebeams, Focused Invulnerability, Force Adjustment, Force Awareness, Forced Acceleration, Forced Intangibility, Forcefield Creation, Greater Proximakinesis, Immutable Force, Instant Action, Lasting Force, Retributive Defense, Super Suit, Spatial Distortion, Spatial Leap


    </td>


    <td style="width: 55.9078%; vertical-align: top">


    Attributes: Might 50, Agility 30, Reason 6, Vigilance 28, Ego 30, Luck 7


    Word of Force: Power IV, Control III, Versatility IV, Number of Effects III, Range II, Scope III


    Word of Self: Power IV, Control III, Versatility III, Number of Effects III, Range II, Scope II


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Yep, another day had passed, or at least my ring''s programming claimed so. Looking around me at what would have been an ongoing plasma explosion without a force-field squeezing the molten stone into fluid, I wondered how the ring even survived all the bullshit I put myself through. Maybe I should ask Liz the next time I met her? I made a mental note to do just that then thought about what the new day would bring. I knew what I should be doing but I wasn''t feeling particularly productive. The molten stone bath had done wonders at both cleaning me up - I''d yet to see the dirt or bacteria to survive temperatures nearly three times hotter than the surface of the sun - and burning away accumulated stress, but it was only the first step.


    Still, mild guilt and discomfort of not preparing enough for the coming battles motivated me into spending my current accumulated points. Not feeling like doing any extensive cost-benefit analysis or introspection, I spent eight of those points on Might at once. Fighting the Red Dragon''s wraith and seeing Liz''s underground fortress-prison first hand had showed me that other supers would not remain behind forever. As much as I wanted to relax, evil never slept and tyrants did not remain idle. My own growth had been slower after the Invasion. Fighting powerful foes and defending the world against terrible threats like any hero should have had kept pushing skill with my powers and let me cover some weaknesses as well as learn new tricks, but in the end of the day every fight I''d won was by leveraging my abilities in the right way to overwhelm my enemies. Ensuring I had the superior force at least individually was my best bet with how my powers worked in concert as well as their fundamental nature.


    Adding eight points of Might at once to the fifty I already had did not cause any outward physical changes. With Agility and Ego being at a good, round value of thirty, I could have up to a Might of sixty without being forced to either alter my self-image or lose effective speed and range of motion from bulking up like many male supers tended to. The differences at a deeper level were another manner entirely. By this point, my bones were already some type of crystal instead of the sponge-like internal structure of mundane human bones. Crystal spun into threads woven into layers upon layers until the end result was both incredibly hard and flexible. With the significant addition of power into the stat that governed both strength and durability, those changes both intensified and spread to the rest of my muscles and organs.


    What had been cells comprised mostly of water adjusted their entire chemistry into something different, somehow without compromising either the end result or the nature of my consciousness. Water was entirely replaced by non-Newtonian fluids. Protein structures turned metallorganic. Cycles of chemical energy turned from lipids, sugar and ATP into denser, longer molecules whose names I did not know. Everything shifted further, extending a hair into additional dimensions that hadn''t been there before, much like how Jerry had built his armor. My body didn''t just have a different biology at the molecular level while still pretending to be the same macroscopically, but could now shoehorn a lot more mass and structure into the same space.


    I was also seeing some reinforcement of the same type I could do with my active powers begin to be woven into that new biology. With eight points the effect was far from complete but my body was well on its way to not depend on active Force Adjustment to get the most use out of its innate abilities. That specific application would become not just passive but innate, part of me in a way that most powers weren''t. No longer would my base and full strength and durability differ by a factor of twenty; with eight points over the milestone of fifty a good forty percent of the maximum values were now permanent even as the base values themselves were also majorly boosted.


    This change wouldn''t make Force Adjustment useless, of course. Powers like Proximakinesis or Forced Acceleration still got enormous boosts from it and its applications in force-fields were endless. It just made things like surprises, power negation, or disabling attacks less of a concern, a major plus in my book. It also felt nice for the majority of my strength to not rely on a trick and not waver as wildly as it did for supers in the comics.


    There was only one point left. I could put it into Might as well, but there had been something I''d been meaning to get, a field of my powers I''d been meaning to improve for some time. For more than half the time I''ve had powers, I''ve kept adding tricks, utility and varied offensive options to broaden both the scope and the versatility of what I could do. What had allowed me to survive my first battle and about a dozen hard fights I would have otherwise lost badly was not something I''d improved for some time; my Regeneration. It was time I got a second Regeneration skill and since trying to develop one when I already had another and my baseline healing was quick, I was willing to burn a point on it.


    With an act of will, I searched through the nigh-infinite list of countless potential powers on automatic, asking for contenders for the best regeneration skill according to my needs and desires. The results were half a dozen possibilities, some of which I''d seen before, all of them intriguing.


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 87.9771%" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 100%">Devoid Regeneration: Heal at a decent pace. This does not count as regeneration, healing or a power and ignores effects working off such descriptors. It also ignores alphabetic order.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 75.5725%" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 100%">Adaptive Regeneration: Heal at a decent pace. The more you''ve healed from a specific source and type of damage, the more resistant you become to it. </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 75.7634%" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 100%"> Holistic Regeneration: Recover from everything at a very slow pace. Everything means everything as long as it''s on you and negative, not just bodily harm.


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 75.8588%" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 100%"> Progressive Regeneration: The more times you''ve been injured by a given attack and the longer injuries lasted, the faster you heal from it.


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 86.0687%" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 100%">Redundant Regeneration: This ability counts as a copy of any other regeneration, ongoing healing or lasting recovery effect on you. If you don''t have those, it doesn''t do anything.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 80.1527%" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 100%">Retroactive Regeneration: The timeline and causality you occupy regenerates. Paradoxical and paracausal changes to it are slowly undone as if they never happened.</td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Well now, those were some interesting and scary options...

 59: Time of Eating

    It was often said that Swiss chocolate was the best for its milky smoothness, while Belgian chocolate was the best for its stuffings of cream, praline and caramel and more elaborate mixes. Maybe that was true fifty years before, but after eating my way through over a hundred of the highest rated shops I could say with confidence that modern travel guides either threw recommendations to the highest bidders or consumers nowadays had no idea what quality tasted like. Because it turned out that Norwegian salted chocolate was superior to all other options.


    Troms?, Norway, often referred to as the "Paris of the North", was a vibrant place that captivated with its fascinating mix of modern culture and breathtaking nature. Here you could immerse yourself in the rich cultural history, enjoy the vibrant city life and explore the untouched Arctic landscape at the same time - all while wolfing down a two-pound bar of the best chocolate I''ve ever had without superpowers being involved. That I was sitting on top of the bridge connecting the two halves of the city, looking up at a brilliant night sky where the green-blue band of the Aurora Borealis danced overhead only enhanced the experience.


    A brief activation of my senses revealed the mechanism behind the dynamic patterns of brilliant lights that appeared as curtains, rays, spirals, or dynamic flickers covering the entire sky. I''d known it was due to an intrusion of the Solar Wind on the Earth''s magnetosphere but the precise details gathered by my senses showed me the phenomenon under a new light. If I wanted to, I could probably make something even more impressive with enough effort - as in, months of forcefield creation - anywhere in the world. With far, far less effort, maybe a couple of hours, I could build a field that generated high-energy particles similar to those in the Solar Wind, projecting similar phenomena far beyond the field itself. It wouldn''t have nearly the same interesting and complex patterns though. Maybe one day that idiots would not have the power to cause great harm I''d be able to go on a real vacation and do some inspirational power-assisted art. Florida could do with its own Aurora to go with all the monsters, right? Right.


    I ate the last pieces of salted chocolate and stretched again. I''d been procrastinating for half a day now, but I felt pretty entitled to the break. It wasn''t every day that someone realized they''d forgotten their official birthday for more than a week. On the other hand, the bad guys waited for no-one and if my powers list was right there was at least the potential for time-travel bullshit eventually. So with a sigh, I focused back to my pick of a new power. I''d run out of chocolate anyway.


    Immediately, I discarded all the options that just gave me more of the same healing I already had. Doubling up on regeneration might look good on paper, but each active power used the same limited slots all the other powers also used up. Six abilities at once might seem like a lot, but when one had over three times as many options, it became a significant limitation. Thus Redundant Regeneration was out and with some hesitation so was Progressive Regeneration. Maybe when I had the points to upgrade my active powers capacity to the next level I''d consider it.


    Adaptive Regeneration was nice, but ran counter to my existing Empowering Regeneration. Sure, with enough exposure I''d eventually become immune to standardized weapons and mass-produced monsters but with every power of every super being essentially unique, it was less effective against them unless we''d already fought once and I survived to adapt to them without them developing their powers in the meantime. If, on the other hand, the fight was dangerous enough that survival was questionable, I would want to grow stronger through Empowering Regeneration as quickly as possible.


    Devoid Regeneration was cute. Its healing rate was nothing impressive or special, but by not counting as healing or even a power, it could not be countered by things that stopped them. It couldn''t be enhanced either, but I didn''t have any enhancers for Regeneration yet. Were it a standalone effect, a permanent one, I''d take it in a heartbeat. Having an ace in the hole precisely for those situations the enemy thought to bring a counter to your known abilities was always good to have and unlike trying to double up, this power would replace a better Regeneration skill at the times it failed to work. A strong contender.


    Retroactive Regeneration was the odd one out. It was not a healing skill at all, it undid temporal bullshit and reality warping. I already had a general resistance to such shenanigans in Immutable Force though, and I kept it almost always on. While being able to reverse changes that had already overcome my resistance or happened during times my resistance skill wasn''t active, requiring a second active power to do so was too much of an investment for a form of attacks that were exceedingly rare as far as I could tell.


    Finally, we came to what I thought was the best option of the lot; Holistic Regeneration. It gave recovery from everything negative, however slow. This didn''t mean just damage or direct harm but the kind of indirect shenanigans magic like transformations or curses was known for. Sure, it was a lot weaker than the other skills in their specialty, but by being a very broadly-applicable option it made sense for someone with a limit on how many powers could be active at a time. It also meant that it would cover possibilities that the other skills would not touch at all. There were far too many ugly, twisted possibilities out there, not the least of which the corrupted empowerment the Red Dragon forced on other supers. In the end, between it and Devoid Regeneration I picked Holistic Regeneration.


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 88.5496%; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 44.1448%">Name: Maya Wennefer</td>


    <td style="width: 55.9235%">Bio: female human, 18y0m12d</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 44.1448%">Known skills:


    </td>


    <td style="width: 55.9235%">Points: 0/241


    </td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 44.1448%; border-style: none; vertical-align: top">


    Action and Reaction, Chronal Leap, Empowering Regeneration, Eyebeams, Focused Invulnerability, Force Adjustment, Force Awareness, Forced Acceleration, Forced Intangibility, Forcefield Creation, Greater Proximakinesis, Holistic Regeneration, Immutable Force, Instant Action, Lasting Force, Retributive Defense, Super Suit, Spatial Distortion, Spatial Leap


    </td>


    <td style="width: 55.9235%; vertical-align: top">


    Attributes: Might 58, Agility 30, Reason 6, Vigilance 28, Ego 30, Luck 7


    Word of Force: Power IV, Control III, Versatility IV, Number of Effects III, Range II, Scope III


    Word of Self: Power IV, Control III, Versatility III, Number of Effects III, Range II, Scope II


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    xxxx


    As I flew over the Everglades and the more alien terrain at what had once been my home town and the Invasion''s intrusion point, I set my powers for general combat. Force Awareness, Force Adjustment, Greater Proximakinesis for mobility, scouting and defense/offense combo. Forced Acceleration because doing everything faster was always a good idea. Immutable Force, because when delving into monster central it was always good to have a general anti-bullshit protection. Last but not least, Eyebeams. Several types of monsters couldn''t easily be affected with kinetic force so having a broader type of attack made sense. I could have slotted Action and Reaction instead to be able to affect the incorporeal and the intangible, but the added benefit of range often gave considerable tactical advantages.


    Since this was not an outing where I''d want to pass as somebody else or a mission where I''d remain hidden to ambush enemies, I was back in my white, blue caped, blue-booted costume previously created with my Super-Suit power. The monsters would certainly not care and if someone saw, well, I was a superhero. Recent evidence to the contrary, I was supposed to be seen and recognized. My relationship with mass media wasn''t the best, mostly because I absolutely refused to tolerate their canned, prefabricated bullshit, but being captured on cellphone cameras would not be the same. Not that it was likely to happen, given what the plan was.


    They were called subjugation missions in various computer games before some idiots who shall remain nameless introduced the idea that superpowers should look and function like such games. In truth they were just killing monsters for hire, whitewashed into sounding cooler for the masses. That particular practice had been reality for millennia before games were a thing, of course.Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.


    Now, due to the nature of how monsters spawned in the corrupted state, going in and killing monsters always made things worse. But General Rinaker had an idea that bypassed the problem. Me, I was just the best we had at applying said idea. If it worked we might be able to stabilize the situation or at least limit loss of life on a grand scale. If it didn''t... it wasn''t as if we weren''t facing an unsolvable problem already. Even if it backfired though, foreign villains were already growing dangerous. We had to keep improving and General Rinaker had rightly scolded me for holding back on the monster fighting. It was time to stop procrastinating and fix this.


    I picked up speed, going faster and faster as I moved North across the wastelands. Even with Force Adjustment reducing the side effects, the air first howled then ignited in a plasma sheath as my speed exceeded that of any man-made spaceship four times over. Even at speeds they could survive without burning away, said spaceships would be flying deaf and blind as their own plasma sheath would block both electronic signals and visual observation. Yet thanks to Force Awareness allowing me to perceive the world at the level of forces and their interactions, I was not blind. I could see monsters over two dozen miles away so even at my current velocity I had over a second to see their approach and react to it - and react to it I did.


    Eyebeams lanced out of the plasma sheath, blasting targets as quickly as my senses could locate them, firing out as quickly as I could aim with the benefit of superhuman agility and Forced Acceleration effectively multiplying the flow of time for me. A tenth of a second was the Guinness world record for firing from the hip; my rate of fire was an order of magnitude higher, and it was so slow only because I had to pick my targets with care based on several criteria.


    A large group of shadows died as I made a fly-by attack from six miles up. Shadows were among the most dangerous mid-tier undead due to their incorporeality. For soldiers that relied on firearms, even enhanced ones, or supers with a crippling over-reliance on physical attacks they were basically an unkillable nightmare. Before the advent of powers a single shadow could have killed the entire US army if it caught them. Things were less lopsided now but not far enough; even individual shadows still were terrifying for the rank and file and an unacceptable threat. They had to go, so I did the spiritual equivalent of clean-up.


    Instead of rapid fire, a continuous blast swept through a small murder of Stymphalian Chickens, then another and another. Unlike several depictions of that particular labor of Heracles, the overgrown magical avians were the size of a medium tank, made of solid steel that could shrug .50 caliber machine gun shots like rain, could throw sword-sized razor wings that exploded like grenades and breathed fire. Even all that put together wouldn''t have made them truly dangerous to a modern army, except for two things; they could fly as fast as a military-grade helicopter and would explode like a heavy artillery shell once sufficiently injured. They could still be stopped but in the open they could set dozens of fires before antitank missiles did them in. Fortunately, their numbers rarely exceeded twenty thousand across the entire state. My sweeping beams culled every murder I could find, massively thinning their numbers in only a few minutes. If the General''s suggestion didn''t work though, they would all be back quickly and in greater numbers than before.


    The third target group were casters. Many people who had unlocked their powers in the invasion still died. Outside our own group of survivors who got our powers early and were given help by a non-human ally to boot, the majority died in fact. Most of those that did came back as one type of undead or another. Thousands of returned horrors with the mind of a human, the twisted instincts of a monster - undead were cannibalistic - and the ability to understand that killing others made them stronger. Then they were those that hadn''t been killed and brought back but willingly chose to embrace undeath by collaborating with the Invaders. Those had been initially few, but developing abilities to convert more to their service was not hard, it even came build-in with some undead monster types.


    Both types of intelligent monsters I killed wherever I could find above anything else, often blasting entire areas when they were hiding inside ruins or underwater. Unfortunately, the solution would be even less permanent to them than it would be for other monsters because every one of them still left was capable of reformations. Specters just came back. Ghouls who''d fed on enough lives just spent some of their stored life-force to rise from the site of their death anew. And liches, skeletal undead capable of inventing their own spells, could anchor themselves to places or objects and regenerate given time.


    There were ongoing debates on the internet on whether the monsters had been influenced by the ideas and myths of Earth, or been invented by the Mavethans whole cloth. There were ongoing debates between survivors on whether the flame wars caused by said debates were contributing to the problem through the mechanism of generating magic through violence that all Mavethan sorcery was ultimately based on. Not being personally interested in either discussion but having been repeatedly annoyed by proponents of all debated ideas over the past month, I would be very happy if General Rinaker''s plan worked and all such arguments were suddenly made irrelevant.


    I made one pass North, a second on the return trip, then repeated the whole thing twice more, blasting all the while. A small percentage of the monsters'' power was transferred to me but the overall magic generated was more than the difference, I could see it from how the surrounding monsters were responding as the magic levels started to rise. That was the usual response of the cursed lands to any attempted purge of the monster infestation. It was not some giant spell the Mavethans had cast, some ritual that could be conventionally interrupted, it was entirely the cause of how they had shaped the nature of their sorcery. It was meant to corrupt, it was meant to create random monstrosities out of the tainted earth... so it did. But there was one way to ensure the magic would not taint the land.


    After my tenth pass, my tactics shifted. Instead of engaging with my eyebeams at range, I flew lower. Not on the area I''d scoured of the enemies we wanted, but on the areas directly struck by Mot''s rampage. Places where fields of gigantic iron spikes had replaced towns and ravaged cities, where abundant twisted growth created impassable fields of plants that weeped poison and bore fruit that could walk and wail and whale on anyone that got too close. Areas where lakes had been turned to boiling tar, or the land itself was partially animated and given a hatred for all that walked on two feet. Through all those places I set my course, dropped the Eyebeams skill in favor of Focused Invulnerability and an immunity to high-speed collisions, then I flew faster.


    I became a burning streak, a human missile that crashed through everything in her path without slowing down. At twenty miles a second everything I slammed into exploded as if hit by a meteor, molten fragments flying for over a hundred feet. Overgrowth detonated with the force of cruise missiles. Steel spikes liquefied in a two-yard-radius then blasted in showers of glowing, searing ejecta, the air itself was blasted off my path as a plasma sheath. Most monsters were simply obliterated. Each crossing of the state took a dozen seconds; in an hour I''d blasted my way through a strip two miles wide. Then I did it again and again and again and again.


    By the time the Sun was low on the horizon, a dozen burning strips had been blasted through many of the most corrupted, most heavily infested areas. Individually the monsters slain by this were mere cannon fodder. Collectively, their millions of deaths had a profound impact on the magic levels in the area. It wasn''t about clearing the area, though the destruction of permanent obstacles might help in future reclamations. What it was about was killing the larger populations of monsters faster than they could regenerate. It was drudge-work, utterly exhausting, and I''d need a week to do it to the entire state. But for the time being it had left temporarily high magic levels with temporarily very few monsters in those places. The results were about what General Rinaker had predicted.


    The monsters that hadn''t been killed, only a few thousands instead of millions, drank in the released power like a bottomless pit does water. They immediately started mutating at rates never seen before, not even during Mot''s rampage that killed hundreds of thousands of people. Each of them took in the power of hundreds, even thousands of fellow monsters, growing in power individually until they matched the smaller kaiju that had been artificially created in Canada, or the stronger middle-weight supers. Each was as powerful as a battleship now and from how they bloated in size and ugliness like mutant balloons, some might approach the size of one.


    But they were only equivalent to battleships. Not long-range missile batteries. Not nukes. Not towering monstrosities that could lay waste to cities. They were also dumb, because the plan had deliberately targeted the smartest, more unusual and dangerous, more experienced monsters first. They might have been given massive amounts of power, but something that started as a simple undead brute would only develop relatively simple and straightforward abilities. The most amount of power concentrated to its least effective forms. And this was what the entire outcome hinged on.


    I flew towards the closest mutating freak, a skinless, two-headed monstrosity with arms the size of locomotives, legs even thicker and larger, and hundreds of gaping sores all over its body oozing corrosive sludge. It massed less than a thousand tons though, so it was no more difficult to pick up with Greater Proximakinesis than a particular unruly puppy. Then we flew straight up at close to a hundred gravities. In ten seconds we were out of the thicker lower atmosphere and its high air resistance so we sped up faster. In forty-five seconds we were a thousand miles away from the Earth with five and a half times escape velocity.


    I reached for a patch of toxic sludge. It did not feel alive to my powers. If it had, I''d brought along a few pounds of mud as a spare. Then I shifted my invulnerability to what I was about to produce and reduced the nuclear binding force in the material by a factor of twenty. A pound of slime became a ten-megaton pseudonuclear blast that completely annihilated the monster. Some of the unleashed power was absorbed by me but the rest had nowhere to go. There were no monsters here for it to feed. No material objects to anchor it. No active rituals to claim it. And the Earth was moving away at a good few kilometers per second. Like the destruction of the Red Dragon''s shade, the energy dissipated into space. By the time a fraction of it reached Earth it would be so dispersed it wouldn''t be able to form monsters at all.


    I was back on the ground in ten seconds flat to pick up the next monster.

 60: Time for Reaping

    The entire operation of grabbing a monster, taking it high enough in orbit that there wouldn''t be anything for the power to latch on, vaporizing its entire mass with a pseudonuclear blast of sufficient power, then returning to find another monster took a minute. There were thousands of large monsters now, all of them slowly growing more powerful as they absorbed more magic, all of them hungry for more. When they were done growing, they would be blindly lashing out, pushed by instincts born of Mavethan sorcery to cause more violence and generate more dark magic. The General''s idea to use them to collect all the extra corrupt magic into relatively few vessels that we could launch into space and get rid of was ingenious, but it had the problem of a very sharp time limit. If they started killing each other, not only would much of the stored power return to the environment but their battles could also create kaiju-tier monsters that wouldn''t be nearly as easy to get anywhere.


    Thus the frantic pacing I had to keep up. Just killing enough of the wasteland population to force the energies into the hosts had already been the work of a whole day. Sending off enough of them would be just as enormous a hassle, probably taking the rest of the night. Creating forcefields to do the job was out of the question. At two force-fields per monster, made to last at least a minute and at maximum volume so as not to tear the monster apart in transit, the fields would be too costly. A hundred monsters would have been a cakewalk. Three hundred a chore. Half a thousand would be about my limit. There were at least twice as many waiting their turn, so I was forced to do this manually.


    At first, most of them were corrosive brutes, easy to handle for me but deadly to anyone susceptible to their slime. Then came the armored brutes, tougher and heavier and a bit slower to lift so I had to push to make the plan work. After the first hour or so, the brutes started growing spikes all over their body in increasingly large numbers, progressively more jagged and sharpened, even with increasing length. They were also trying to impale me with them. Futile for monsters so relatively weak, but annoying.


    That continued for another two hours with various brute designs, from fanged giants with biting maws all over their body, to fat giants that were too delicate to grab but whose fat was incredibly toxic and mildly hallucinogenic. That lost me nearly fifteen minutes when one of them burst on launch and had me seeing monsters that weren''t there until my new regeneration handled it. From that point on I kept Focused Invulnerability on the monster''s more dangerous gimmick, shifting to nuclear blasts only a split second before triggering each detonation.


    The mutations weren''t entirely random. There seemed to be an element built into the corruptive magic that sought to turn the mutated monster to the most horrible and threatening form it could to better overcome those the monster was meant to hunt. That was fairly odd and not something we had seen back in the Invasion. At least I think we hadn''t. Mot had been the guiding intelligence behind the monster army, summoning or guiding the mutation of whatever monsters he best thought would deal with the opposition. He had even made weird customized soldiers to deal with me, Mandy, and a group of other powerful survivors that attacked his big, overcompensating tower. But there was nobody like that here.


    Shrugging and continuing the slow slog through the enormous amount of monsters, I soon settled into a rhythm and went through their numbers more mechanically than anything else. First minutes, then quarter-hours, then hours passed by in a blur, the sheer repetitiveness of the task more exhausting than anything else. It was well past midnight that I had finished almost half of them and that was only notable because the monsters had returned to being random mutations. One had grown incredibly irritating feathers that caused a severe allergic reaction regardless of health or durability and had sent me choking for a few minutes even as it caused an incredibly strong itch. Others had grown eyestalks that shot low-end blasts of variable intensity and effect. About an hour past midnight one had been born without a head but with a dozen different arms, all ending in freakishly long scythes. Those had just shattered on impact but their fragments levitated along and kept trying to stab me all the way to orbit.


    From then, more odd mutations had followed instead of dangerous ones, from a fat giant that grew a swarm of biting slugs from its skin, to an emaciated one that felt freezing cold to stand around, to a twisted, inhuman skeleton that had been perpetually on fire. Earlier mutations started reappearing, depending on which area of the blighted lands I flew in, often in random mixes, sometimes even in the same giant monster as they grew slowly larger and got more available space. Soon, I was fairly sure that the odd mutations were mostly near the place where Mot''s huge-ass tower had been, from where Mot himself had grown into a towering demon two miles tall. The ruins of my hometown were there, or what remained of them. Of Mot''s once titanic corpse there was nothing to be found, not even bones. He''d either been vaporized by the nukes and my magnifying their effect on his demonic ass, or rotten away in the months I''d been away on Mars. I looked into the crater for old time''s sake but found nothing. Just more metal spikes and odd roots, like they had been spread all over the entire state.


    It was nearing four in the morning and the giant monsters were beginning to thin. As if sensing the end coming, they all gravitated towards the same general area and started to fight each other. I had to intervene several times to break up fights, launch one or both of the mini-kaiju into space before they killed each other and spilled magical radiation all over the place. I was tired, I was cranky, and the last few days had not been very nice either. With an angry growl at nobody in particular I sat down and brought up the mental representation of my abilities through Liz''s magic ring.


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 88.5496%; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 44.1448%">Name: Maya Wennefer</td>


    <td style="width: 55.9235%">Bio: female human, 18y0m13d</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 44.1448%">Known skills:


    </td>


    <td style="width: 55.9235%">Points: 4/245


    </td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 44.1448%; border-style: none; vertical-align: top">


    Action and Reaction, Chronal Leap, Empowering Regeneration, Eyebeams, Focused Invulnerability, Force Adjustment, Force Awareness, Forced Acceleration, Forced Intangibility, Forcefield Creation, Greater Proximakinesis, Holistic Regeneration, Immutable Force, Instant Action, Lasting Force, Retributive Defense, Super Suit, Spatial Distortion, Spatial Leap


    </td>


    <td style="width: 55.9235%; vertical-align: top">


    Attributes: Might 58, Agility 30, Reason 6, Vigilance 28, Ego 30, Luck 7


    Word of Force: Power IV, Control III, Versatility IV, Number of Effects III, Range II, Scope III


    Word of Self: Power IV, Control III, Versatility III, Number of Effects III, Range II, Scope II


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    The massive number of deaths had given me another boost, it seemed. Not enough points to buy something impressive but I had a few points to improve how this whole crappy situation felt. Two points into Might boosted my strength, my durability and, most importantly, my stamina. Suddenly I was a bit less tired. Instead of being at the edge of exhaustion I felt I could keep going for another couple of hours. The passive benefits of Force Adjustment into my body got a few percentage points closer to completion. By the time I hit Might seventy in the future, they''d probably be done. My biology became denser still in a multi-dimensional sort of way and all the chemical changes that had started with the previous much bigger boost to Might meshed together in something that was bigger and better than the sum of its parts. In everything above the cellular level I''d still look human, but a proper look at the fine details would reveal I was a completely different being. Huh. Was that what being a perfectly humanoid alien looked like?


    I was tempted to add more points into Might to see what new changes they''d bring but the main reason I''d brought up the character sheet now was because I felt shitty about this whole job and the past week. This should have been my vacation. It should have been seven days spent with friends and family, or with a good book, or watching funny cat videos. Instead villains and politics had intruded despite my attempts to keep my distance. I had spent a day with Anne and another with Mandy and Jerry, but the rest had been annoyance after chore after battle after debriefing. How had this happened? And why did it feel so shitty now when it had not before?


    Screw it. I opened the sheet again and dropped the other two points into Ego. Immediately, my flagging will reasserted itself against what I recognized as both stress and lingering issues from non-physical attacks. Soon, I promised to myself. Soon I''d go spend a couple of days in a spa, with my new Holistic Regeneration fixing the unnatural issues and the harmful effects of the stress and I''d be fine. "No, I''d be better than fine. I''d have finished throwing the damn beasts into space thus considerably reducing the volatility of the wasteland. I''d have robbed a superpowered terrorist of his army and his go-to method to get even stronger. I''d have reconnected with my sister and friends. And above all else I''d have made a lasting difference despite everyone else''s attempts to screw up the world beyond recovery for petty, asinine reasons!"


    It was the closest mini-kaiju not just staring at me but coming closer to investigate that clued me in to the fact I''d been shouting there at the end. I punted the headless thing with the yellow grasping tentacles half a mile away. Instead of bursting as I half-expected it regenerated. Sure, that was definitely gonna help it escape or survive a nuclear blast. Tagging it, I flew it into space and blew it up, ignoring the tentacles that failed to rip me apart all the way there. It was... not easy but dull. Two points of Ego made me feel better, strengthened my will to handle the fights, even helped regain some confidence but the one thing they hadn''t helped was with how repetitive it all was. All the other fights I''d been in had at least been exciting. They''d had real stakes. There wasn''t anything like that here. So I opened my sheet again.


    <table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 88.5496%; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto" border="1">


    <tbody>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 44.1448%">Name: Maya Wennefer</td>


    <td style="width: 55.9235%">Bio: female humanoid, 18y0m13d</td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 44.1448%">Known skills:


    The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.</td>


    <td style="width: 55.9235%">Points: 0/245


    </td>


    </tr>


    <tr>


    <td style="width: 44.1448%; border-style: none; vertical-align: top">


    Action and Reaction, Chronal Leap, Empowering Regeneration, Eyebeams, Focused Invulnerability, Force Adjustment, Force Awareness, Forced Acceleration, Forced Intangibility, Forcefield Creation, Greater Proximakinesis, Holistic Regeneration, Immutable Force, Instant Action, Lasting Force, Retributive Defense, Super Suit, Spatial Distortion, Spatial Leap


    </td>


    <td style="width: 55.9235%; vertical-align: top">


    Attributes: Might 60, Agility 30, Reason 6, Vigilance 28, Ego 32, Luck 7


    Word of Force: Power IV, Control III, Versatility IV, Number of Effects III, Range II, Scope III


    Word of Self: Power IV, Control III, Versatility III, Number of Effects III, Range II, Scope II


    </td>


    </tr>


    </tbody>


    </table>


    Nope, no new points just yet. No easy way to feel better about all this. Sighing dejectedly, I turned the magical ring off and flew out, searching for the next giant monster to get rid of. It didn''t take long to do just that. Then go and do it again and again until they were all gone. It was so, so-


    WHAM!


    xxxx


    The ground had struck me with massive force, enough to leave me dizzy and making me lose a couple of seconds. Except I was pretty sure the ground was not supposed to be capable of moving or whacking supers out of the air - or drag them towards that tar pit. The realization woke me up from the stupor this attempt at cleaning up the wasteland had left me and I saw a thick, spiky band of red-black material wrapped around my legs.


    Not the ground, the roots. The same roots that had grown out of Mot''s tower as he returned from death and transformed, the same roots that had spread through most of the state of Florida during his rampage. Immobile, plant-like, mostly harmless - or so everyone had thought. Well there now was some pretty damn persuasive evidence that they were anything but harmless. I grabbed at the root wrapped around my legs and pulled. There was stiff resistance at first, but then it failed, the root tearing apart. Then out of the boiling tar came five more of the wrist-thick bands of Mavethan metal.


    I went incorporeal as they struck out and immediately discovered what a mistake that was. The roots were there in the void, somehow thicker and even more solid than they were in reality. Merely touching them felt so cold it hurt even through the suit and I dropped back to the physical world to avoid freezing for the first time in... I did not quite remember.


    I was thrown into the lake of boiling tar and every doubt, every discomfort, every fear, every ugly emotion I''d felt in recent memory burst out of it in an invisible wave and fell down my throat. This body was a lie. I was not the real Maya. I was just a violent thug, like my father. My sister would never accept me. My friends would vanish now that they had a life of their own. Humans were petty, cruel, and shortsighted and the world was not worth saving. There were enemies I could not fight, and this was one of them. I''d never be happy with my own choices.


    No. Fuck you!


    With a surge of strength I ripped all five roots apart, what had seemed so difficult before now happening with absurd ease. What? I flew out of the tar pit and a metal root as thick as a tree trunk struck me in the face like a meteor. I reeled from the force of the blow but tellingly, I had neither been stunned nor left dizzy despite this blow being stronger than the one that had knocked me out of the sky. The earth churned and collapsed, revealing a lake of not tar but liquid black magic that smelled like rot and blood and week-old corpses left under the sun. It was wider than a football stadium and full roots covered in swords, or perhaps masses of swords half-molten to be fused into a malleable whole with only the sharp points of their blades remaining.


    I lashed out with eye-beams, slicing through dozens, but each one I killed the darker thoughts in the back of my mind renewed themselves. The air became oppressive, like a black hole hanging in an empty sky sucking in all light and warmth. I made to fly out but was hammered in from multiple angles, each blow only slightly weaker than my own and adding to the dark thoughts gnawing at the back of my mind. The worst about it was that those dark thoughts, the feelings of inadequacy, that I''d never be more than what my Old Man had tried to make me, that try as I might the Earth and humanity were already infected by something that had no cure, those were my own. Stupid, pointless, baseless worrying we all get in our worst moments.


    These giant root things were not affecting my mind at all. They, and all the monsters I''d been killing over the last day, had been affecting my powers. Trying to twist them back to the more violent, less benevolent, callous woman I''d have probably become if I hadn''t chosen to be a hero. All of us survivors started by killing monsters. All of us got most of our powers from monsters. And though we decided to use something other than violence as our core theme, it was clear that whatever this twisted plant was, it still had some claim on me at least. Was it because of all the monsters I had killed? Or was it simply trying so hard only now because we''d actually found a working plan to destroy this endless source of monsters?


    I was betting the latter because if not, why was it revealing itself now of all times, the day the cursed magic on Florida had grown weaker for the first time ever? It was acting on both desperation and an opportunity because I was overstressed, because I was exhausted, and because this was the first time I''d come back to the ruins of my home town where it lay hidden. By trying... whatever the funky interference was I lost something I relied upon while at my lowest. But it had made a mistake. It had rushed, not waited another hour for me to get exhausted again.


    I stepped outside of time and the power interference vanished. With my powers no longer out of whack, I was perfectly capable of handling the stress from all my issues just a little longer. And I was very, very, very angry at being messed with by a stupid alien plant that should have left well enough alone. I switched to eye-beams, switched my Focused Invulnerability against its stupid energy draining, and still under stopped time started burning all its exposed tendrils not just to the pool but to the bedrock and below.


    One, five, a dozen, a score, a hundred, I sliced them all apart until most of this stupid plant was a burning ruin. By the time my stamina ran out completely and I was left gasping for breath, all of its thicker roots were gone, half its deeper connections to the rest of the state were severed and left to burn in pools of molten rock and everything that was left was twitching in agony.


    The ground shook again, deeper cracks forming that went down for miles, and a larger mass the size of a city block rose from the depths. It was an orb of plant matter similar to another, vastly smaller plant that had once grown in my old school during the first days of the invasion. It had had tentacles too, and it could invade and take over corpses and even some monsters to do its bidding. It was one of my more disgusting memories of back then and seeing a similar plant of much greater power... only made me angrier. When the creature''s surprisingly small maw shot out in a bus-sized tentacle I charged to meet it.


    My fist slammed into its fibrous metal mass with enough force to beercan a battleship, shatter a hill, hard enough to make my own knuckles hurt. A crater three feet wide and half as deep formed on the monster''s core, making it recoil and its sword-roots to writhe. I did not smile at this proof that its body was soft enough to hurt, that it could feel pain in the first place. I just punched it again and again.


    The enormous pincers around its maw snapped shut around my torso and squeezed with enough power to make my ribs hurt, but I was no longer under its weakening influence. I grabbed both pincers and ripped them apart then started on its connections, its roots extending deep into Florida both to the North and South. I pulped one, then another, and a third and a fourth, ignoring its retaliatory blows in favor of destroying it root and stem. Did alien demon metal plants even had stems? Let''s dissect the thing thoroughly and find out.


    CRACKTHOOM!


    The massive black lightning bolt struck me between the shoulder blades, extremely powerful magic frying all my nerve endings at once, sending liquid agony pumping through my veins, leaving my every muscle a burning, twitchy mess. Instead of finishing in a flash it kept going for one second then two, then three, then I was too out of it to keep count.


    "Hello, there!" The disgustingly pleased voice was only audible through my Force Awareness, both my eardrums currently burst, bleeding wrecks. "I''ve been looking everywhere for one of you three little shits when, what surprise, what stroke of luck, my divinations showed you at a site of an enormous magical distortion." The voice sounded familiar, but it was the robes, the spindly limbs and dark, beady eyes that gave him away.


    "You''se supposd''t be ded," I tried to say through an unresponsive jaw, couldn''t tell how much got out.


    "That''s funny, so are you!" the Wizard cackled with dark amusement. "I gave you my best shot in the back and everything." I tried to move, but too little time had passed for my regeneration to fix this and whatever the spell had been it was way more powerful than I''d expected from the second-best mage in the world. Not even Mandy could hit that hard and I''d seen videos of her rip kaiju apart. "But you''re tougher and younger than poor old me and the spell didn''t explode your heart from within. Should I have tried for the head?"


    A greenish bolt struck me in the face, leaving a green, corrosive flame behind. It knocked me back and hurt my eyes but didn''t do so hot. Nothing compared to the black lightning. At most it made my hair all frizzy. I tried to step outside of time again but the power simply failed. I was too exhausted, too banged up to use it.


    "No, not even a scratch. Young people these days, so hard-headed." He shook his head though his eyes gleamed with malicious glee. "Let''s try another angle, shall we?"


    CRACKTHOOM!


    This time the black lightning hit me in the chest while I lay in the crater the green blast had thrown me. It was, if anything, even worse than the first, locking down my every muscle as it seared my body from within, leaving me unable to even scream. It continued like that for even longer, long enough for me to black out once or twice. When I was next coherent, my body was still twitching uncontrollably, red raw Lichtenberg-Figur marks cut through my skin, a spot a bit smaller than my fist sizzling and blackened over my heart.


    "It didn''t dig deeply enough," the bastard said through gritted teeth. "And now I don''t have any more prepared sacrifices to repeat it. How unfortunate... for you." And then the obviously unhinged mage cackled again. I tried to move, but if my body was not cooperating before, it now felt like a half-melted brick. Something did move me though, a grip around my waist.


    "I don''t know if you''d noticed, but this little eldritch baby here seemed quite desperate to get you." He laughed as we moved. I tried to burn him with Eyebeams but he wasn''t in my field of view and my head lolled bonelessly as I hung in mid-air. "It wasn''t strong enough, but its delicious corruptive aura seemed to leave you quite drained. So if it is so hungry... why not feed it?"


    I tried to struggle but didn''t manage more than a moan of protest. Even Force Adjustment didn''t seem to work on the grip around my waist.


    "Oh please! You think I''d use a physical grip against a kinetic manipulator? You filthy back-stabbing murderous whore!" he roared in fury. "The Red Bitch and her Tin Can were in plain sight, they couldn''t have done it. It was you that killed me and this is your just deserts. That thing can have you while I stay out here to knock you back in if you somehow manage to escape." And then he threw me into the boiling tar where the enormous, state-spanning monster was still twitching.


    A few seconds that felt like an eternity later, a blade-like protrusion poked me. When I failed to react, it poked me some more. The... whatever it was was barely clinging to life and it didn''t feel like taking more risks. But as my inability or unwillingness to act continued, little pokes pushed me deeper and deeper into the opaque black liquid. Then a spiky root wrapped around my left arm. It wriggled and struggled, its spikes far smaller than the ones I''d previously destroyed and its strength lacking... until finally it pierced through my skin. More roots followed on arms, legs, chest, waist. Where my suit still covered they failed to penetrate but elsewhere they stung... then started leeching blood. Already struggling to heal me from the lingering cursed magic of Wizard''s spells, even both my regeneration powers barely broke even against the continued damage...

 Interlude IX: Truth and Dare

    "There is one true ideal in the universe, that is, the light of knowledge."


    The perfect sphere of a material that was neither crystal nor liquid nor light, neither matter nor energy, made of neither particles nor waves, seemed to shine with an inner light. It cast shadows of strange shapes against the white walls as a hundred hundred sculptures of various sizes and shapes gleamed like so many holiday ornaments. The light was reflected and refracted, split into beams and multicolored hues whose superposition cast ever-shifting concentric waves of gleam and gloom.


    And then the sphere was no longer a sphere but a hole, a window to the beyond. Looking through it she saw not a distorted image of the wall behind it but countless visions of distant places. Some had existed long ago but no longer. Others were firmly rooted in the present, whether they occurred the next room over or were distant beyond the count of men. And a tiny fraction of them yet still infinite in number had not yet come to pass. Such was the function of the sphere; to connect to and reveal wherever there was light, to illuminate histories forgotten, reveal secrets of the present, or taunt with glimpses of the world to come.


    The endless torrents of visions spun into each other, forming an endless silver sea that should have been impossible to grasp with any detail whatsoever. Yet it was also within the function of the sphere not merely to grasp far-flung information but make them known and understood to its wielder, truth realized. An endless ocean of facts pressed against her thoughts like the crushing pressure of abyssal depths sought to crumple a submarine like a beercan underfoot. A computer would have crashed as every last bit of data storage was filled in an instant then exploded from the heat of that memory being constantly rewritten. Most people would have fared no better, brains of chemicals and shifting ions just as incapable of handling the output. It was a natural side-effect of the sphere''s function, but also an effective security measure against unauthorized access.


    Having more than crude matter on her side, the young blonde girl could glimpse into infinity without being annihilated. Such many supers might handle; interpreting what they saw from a human frame of reference was a fair deal harder. It took a superhuman level of focus to sift the visions relevant to her interests from the rest; it took even more, even with her powers being designed for handling information, to see what she desired.


    "Show me not what was or will be, but mine own family."


    Anne''s words echoed all around, countless vibrations interacting with innumerable particles, shifting the world in patterns of complexity beyond her understanding yet through the guidance of her powers doing so in just the right way to alter the world to her own desires, if only a little. Her mentor could harness the randomness of the microcosm to rearrange a battlefield with a wave of her hand, create a storm with a word or set up events for years to come with a brief conversation. Anne was but a mere novice in comparison, only able to control the randomness in a single room. It was why she used artifacts like the sphere instead of acting directly but with the right preparation tools could be just as powerful as any more direct phenomena. Humans had won dominion over the Earth with tools and their bare hands, after all.


    What had been a storm of random images became a streamlined vision of an older, taller, curvier blonde whose face was almost identical to Anne''s at a casual glance; her older sister Maya. Dressed in a costume fit for a comicbook superhero she was flying through the blighted lands around the invaders'' arrival point, doing superhero things; slaying legions of undead, leveling many miles of broken, twisted terrain, battling giant monsters and throwing them into space. Were they able to see her as Anne did many would view her sister as the invincible vanguard of the dawning Age of Heroes, a goddess of the new world every bit as grand and glorious as those in ancient legends.


    Anne did not need her truth-sense to see the falsehood of such views; she''d lived enough years with Maya to know her faults. Moreover she felt that this idea of new gods, one altogether too many supers eagerly embraced, was both hollow and dangerous. The invaders had been powerful too, their leader so much greater than any super on the planet he''d tower above them like a grotesque Goliath to their tiny little David. But as anyone knew the ending of that particular legend, Anne felt compelled to look in on her sister when her danger sense ability had started blaring like a trumpet.


    So she''d fired up her little imitation Seeing Stone and sat back to watch. Impressive at first, Maya''s actions soon became repetitive and even boring. There were only so many times you could watch imitation Supergirl throw a kaiju into orbit before your hands started itching to change the channel, and Anne drew the line at one thousand, three hundred and thirty-seven. She''d never been a fan of comic books or superheroes; she liked her fantasy with a more classical lean. Besides, if it had been movie the vision would have flopped before you could say Detective Comics.


    Unfortunately, instead of slowly fading at the lack of threats her danger sense kept blaring like an air raid siren so Anne kept watching. She had to turn down Lizzy and Bert''s invitation to all-powers-allowed, zero-gravity football. She skipped both her paleo-anthropology and religious iconography classes. She even had to summon food straight to her room instead of having lunch with all her friends on the station, because a strange premonition kept telling her the worst could happen the moment she looked away. When one''s past experiences of ''the worst'' included extra-dimensional zombie invasions, mountain-sized demons trying to destroy the world, estranged abduction-happy relatives and eight-hour-long lectures on surveillance ethics, taking risks was a fool''s errand.


    Then, after an entire night of watching her older sister punching monsters in the face, the threat her danger sense had warned her about finally revealed itself. A crackle of what looked like lightning but was actually insidiously destructive black magic shot out of a veil of magical obfuscation, hitting her sister in the back. A wizard their group had fought many times before, the same man Amanda told everyone had been killed during their last battle, seemed to be very much alive. And then he blasted Anne''s sister again, then threw her into a boiling tar pit full of giant monster.


    The young girl turned the Seeing Stone off, walked up to a part of the wall in the back of her room that appeared to be entirely blank and lay a hand on it. Just like its blankness, its metallic construction was misleading. The whitish metal receded under Anne''s touch, her fingers sinking into a cool, frictionless liquid until they grabbed a much more solid ring. That she pulled with all her strength, but no amount of physical force could move it for its weight was more than physical. Against it she pitted not muscle, superhuman or otherwise, but her desire for it to move. The harder she willed it to respond the greater its resistance as the very moment of the pull stretched and stretched until it ponderously, grudgingly started to shift under her continued determination.


    In the real world it took but moments to drag a person-sized casket of crystal out of its liquid prison; for the one doing the pulling it took subjectively much longer. When teaching her this spell Anne''s mentor had suggested she set its duration to one Cycle of Creation, proving that insanity was not the sole domain of regenerating, British-sounding aliens. Instead she''d set it at one week of maintaining both pull and willingness to retrieve it. Many people far stronger than Anne would have given up out of boredom or frustration, for the more powerful one was, the less patience they seemed to possess.


    "By the power of truth, I, while living, have conquered the universe."


    As grandiose pronouncements went, that one was close to the top. For some people it could even be true; for the blonde girl using it to open her super-secure storage box would suffice. The lid of near-indestructible crystal clicked then popped open, revealing several archaic bits of equipment. A simple rod the length of seven spans, inflexible and unyielding. A straight, double-edged blade, long as a yardstick and sharp as sharp could be. A chiton that seemed to glare fiercely more than the light its polished thread reflected should make possible. A shining breastplate like the purest silver and polished crystal both. A pair of sandals, impossibly light and perfectly sure-footed. A cloak like warmth and fierceness made cloth. Last but not least a helmet that was all but invisible, except for a single crystal shining with light upon the brow.


    Those tools Anne put on one by one and when she felt adequately armed and armored for what was to come, she quoted and cast.


    "Knowledge is the wing wherewith we fly to heaven."This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.


    The entirety of the young girl became information, which was light, which resided in all things. Then with a single step she left the space station and high orbit behind and with the next she came upon the place of her birth and with both feet took possession. What had once been a small but vibrant town in Florida was now a blasted wasteland, only a few dismal ruins still standing in memory of its prior existence. Most of it was twisted growths and jagged spikes and roaming monsters, with a giant pool of boiling tar where the Invaders'' stronghold had once been. The pool shook and sloshed like a kicked bucket while a tall, gangly man sat on a conjured chair upon its northern bank and watched while eating conjured popcorn. Anne rolled her eyes and walked up to him, rod and sword held at her sides, ready but not yet raised.


    "Greetings, Wizard, and opposition," she loudly said from about a foot behind his back, with the hilarious result of him leaping off the chair and almost falling face-first into the tar pit.


    "Fuck!" the Wizard shouted and turned around, a staff materializing at his hands. "Who are y- oh!" He looked Anne up and down, his eyes shifting from artifact to artifact before staring at her face with suspicion and annoyance. "You''re one of those brats, aren''t you? Where are the rest of your little friends?"


    "If you''re referring to the Valkyries, most of them are asleep." She shrugged in feigned nonchalance. "How unobliging of you to resurface way past our bedtime."


    "You''re ruining my fun. Perish." A jagged bolt of black lightning shot out of his staff. It grounded itself in Anne''s shining breastplate, its ruinous magic shattering and deflecting into a dozen smaller bolts striking random targets nearby. One of them came within an inch of the Wizard''s own head.


    "No sacrifice? No circle or incantation? You''ll have to do better than that," she scoffed and raised her rod and blade, pointing them at the other super in challenge. "Also, you''re messing with my sister. Only I am allowed to do that."


    "Insanity becomes wisdom; death becomes life. Here is where illusions are poisoned, and all categories and conceptions are deconstructed until nothing is left."


    The world seemed to pause as the Wizard uttered an incantation, the universe holding its breath as the magic manifested. Ruins, jagged spikes and the bones of monsters bled all around them. That blood was black and burning, the ground sizzling and melting into slag in its passage. The ruinous sludge pooled together and bubbled upwards into a pair of inverted legs, then a bulbous torso large enough to belong to a giant. From it sprang countless arms, none of which had the same number of elbows as they twisted through distorted, geometry-defying angles, but all of which ended into eyeless catlike heads whose enormous maws gaped wide, seeking to devour everything in sight.


    Reality screamed at the presence of a Gamchicoth Qliphoth and a tidal wave of terror and hatred crashed against Anne''s mind. Nightmares of hunger slipped through to twist and consume affection and good intent, to shatter the minds of mortal men for miles around. But there were no men here, only monsters human or otherwise, and Anne had glimpsed Infinity. Even if that had not been enough to face the Devourer, her cloak sheathed her in enough energy and eagerness to overwhelm its corruptive aura.


    "While mercy and grace go beyond what is required, it is in truth''s light that no lies abide."


    The Qliphoth charged and Anne met it with a sword shining like a star, its impossible straightness and transcendent sharpness slicing into the warping of reality that was the Devourer''s body like a burning branch through a spider''s webs. It screamed with its a thousand thousand eyeless maws, countless arms severed and burning away at her every swing with no end in sight. For whatever they might appear to be Qliphoth were not material things of finite dimensions and no more could they be killed than could a shadow. But shadows could be erased by light or have their source unmade by other means and under the judgement of her blade the fiend was ended.


    "I am mighty Time, the source of destruction that comes forth to annihilate the universe. Even with all your efforts, all arrayed against me shall cease to exist."


    The blonde girl scowled as the Wizard butchered one of the most misquoted texts in all of human history for his spell of crude destruction. All the space between them was leached of all color in an expanding wave. Ruins, spikes, bones, twisted vegetation, even the ground itself cracked and flaked away unto dust under the weight of centuries, millennia and more seemingly passing in moments. It was not really time though but entropy and ruin, only one half of the equation of change and progress. Like all the Wizard did it was twisted and foul, a corruption of the awe-inspiring wonder and creative force that was magic. Again and again Anne''s sandals pushed her into leaps and bounds that were seemingly instantaneous, her slightest shift propelling her beyond the expanding wave of ruin again and again and into safety. But entropy could neither truly be outrun nor was it an evil stopped by safety and peace.


    "Let there be Genesis, for creation is Truth and I am its humble servant."


    The crystal upon Anne''s brow glared. Its light pushed back against the wave of annihilation, refuting entropy through ex-nihilo creation. Brighter than a torch. Brighter than lightning. Brighter than a star. Brighter than a thousand exploding suns. In its wake colors returned to the world, dust turned to fertile soil, grass and flowers sprouted when there had been wasteland. The Wizard''s spell exhausted itself trying to return to nothing that which sprouted from nothing and was undone.


    BOOM!


    The lake of tar behind them exploded into a titanic ball of nuclear fire, the blastwave of its birth pushing against both Anne''s and the Wizard''s defensive spells and artifacts. Within the rapidly forming mushroom cloud tentacles as thick and long as suspension bridges writhed as their alien flesh burned and sloughed off in great half-molten bits the size of buses. The Wizard scowled and made to run, but Anne rapped her rod against the ground.


    "Nope!" she shouted as the force of the nuclear explosion folded around them into a dome, leaving them untouched but also sealing them inside. "You tried to kill my sister. You don''t get to flee before she expresses her displeasure about it."


    "Insufferable child," the old man spat back, hurling more bolts of black lightning at her at a furious pace. Some she dodged by stepping to areas of peace and safety. Many shattered against her armor as before, their ruin finding no purchase in its integrity. Others still she sliced out of the air with the judgement of her sword. "Die! Die! Why won''t you die?!"


    "Oh, there are many reasons," she said, giving him a shit-eating grin as he huffed and puffed from exertion. "But the truth is you suck as a wizard, Wizard. How many times did you run from the Valkyries? For all your human sacrifices and foul deals, even a novice like me can delay you until your appointed end catches up." Anne glanced at the immense tentacled horror in its death throes amid the slowly cooling mushroom cloud. "She won''t be long, now."


    "And when your sister comes, I will greet her with your corpse!" she spat and started casting, his body smoking as he burned a major portion of his own life-force as a sacrifice to this last spell. He''d probably be weakened for months, maybe even years, but he was powerful enough that such a sacrifice could grant him enough power to win or possibly escape... if only he had not been such a shitty wizard.


    Human sacrifice? Raising the dead? Summoning abominations from beyond reality? All so destructive and dreadful and banal incarnations of evil sorcery with not an ounce of creativity and imagination. All they could do was break things, which they did extremely well as long as there wasn''t anyone around with the proper counter. But Anne was a creator and a diviner. She could forge answers to situations as long as she knew they were coming, and with half her magic being about information she usually knew when they did. So when the Wizard put all his power into one final fuck-you curse, she raced his spell with one built on her second-favorite quote.


    "All Truth is but shadow, and aspect-Shiva destroys the great illusion. The ultimate essence of being, upon which all others are built, collapses as the Way is foreshortened and the branches of Yggdrasil wither and die."


    "I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content."


    A blast of nothingness shot out from the Wizard''s upraised staff, collapsing reality as it spread at the speed of light. Anne met it with her upraised rod already swinging. Ruinous curse met creative thought and both clashed together as if they were real things. The Wizard had declared it first; everything was illusion. But if he could make it so, then Anne could declare that said illusions were equally real; whether their amount of reality was zero, full, or anything inbetween was ultimately irrelevant. And if his stupid null-blast was just as real as her stick, well, why couldn''t she beat it back with said stick?


    So she did just that swing after swing after swing, parrying and deflecting and pushing back physically as if both she and the Wizard were wielding physical weapons. Thus she Conaned her way through his bullshit spell and his bullshit plans and his bullshit nihilism just as Robert E. Howard had intended, until she struck a two-handed blow with her rod against the Wizard''s staff. The staff broke, the spell ended, then she whacked the bastard in the head until he passed out, as was right and proper.


    Maya flew in about a minute later, suit torn and burned, limbs and face full of slowly healing cuts, burns and bruises, but victorious over her Japanese anime foe.


    "Heya, sis," her older sister greeted her with a fond smile. "You got the wizard? Color me impressed!"


    "Someone had to do it after you, Amanda and Jerry bungled it up," Anne huffed then fell back to the ground, completely exhausted. "I''m officially cancelling your awesome older sibling card, by the way. Henceforth you''ll be known as the-annoying-sibling-whose-errors-must-be-fixed."


    "Eh, nobody''s perfect, not even me. I''m still prettier, though," Maya shot back with a snicker. "Wanna go for ice cream after we secure the Wizard?"


    "You''re on," Anne half-grumbled in response. If she poked her cloak just right, it would probably remove her exhaustion.


    If not, she could always sneak into the Valkyries'' potions stash.