Collateral Damage [Worm AU]

With Are You Afraid of the Dark, I created a fairly badass Danny. People seemed to like it (though I'm guessing the John Wick connection had a lot to do with that).

In what is almost certainly a step toward the abyss of irredeemable crack, I've pushed the concept to its logical extreme.

This is a Danny that nobody wants to push.

Disclaimers:
1) This story is set in the Wormverse, which is owned by Wildbow. Thanks for letting me use it.

2) I will follow canon as closely as I can. If I find something that canon does not cover, I will make stuff up. If canon then refutes me, I will revise. Do not bother me with fanon; corrections require citations.

3) I welcome criticism of my works, but if you tell me that something is wrong, I also expect an explanation of what is wrong, and a suggestion of how to fix it. Note that I do not promise to follow any given suggestion.

 

Collateral Damage


Part One: Blowback


[A/N: AU elements are introduced in the text. You won’t even have to look hard.]

[A/N 2: This chapter has not been beta-read, because I just wrote it to get it out of my head. Further chapters will probably be beta’ed. If I write them.]


The city stretched out in all directions. At one time, it had been thriving. It might even have been beautiful. Now, it was anything but thriving, and any definition of ‘beautiful’ it might meet would be suspect in the extreme. Enormous swathes of it had been extirpated down to the bedrock and beyond. Smoke and dust hung overhead in great palls, the former fed by fires which had broken out here and there.

The man standing on the rooftop, at the centre of the destruction, might have called it beautiful had there been anyone to ask him. He was tall, over six feet. Heavy black leather armour covered him from neck to toe, though it did less to protect him than the angular metal harness that rested on his shoulders. The harness, made of flexible metal straps and heavy plates, supported a transparent sphere containing a deep indigo vortex in the middle of his chest. Covering his head and most of his face was a grey-black helmet that showed his eyes behind a translucent visor, yet concealed the majority of his features. Over each shoulder, on top of the harness, was a pair of bandoleers, each with loops for a dozen cylinders. Each cylinder was six inches long and two thick. Half a dozen cylinders lay scattered behind him and to his right, smoking and discoloured. These matched the seven empty loops in the bandoleers, with one to spare.

In his arms rested a weapon that could be likened to a rifle or shotgun, save that it was almost as tall as its owner, and bore odd mechanisms up and down its length. He braced it with his right arm and pushed down on the barrel with his left; with a deep k-chak, the weapon broke open. Pushed by some internal force, the seventh cylinder popped out of the breech of the long-arm and arced neatly over his shoulder to join the other six. As part of the same move, he withdrew another cylinder from the bandoleer and slotted it into the weapon. Pushing it home with his thumb, he straightened the gun with another k-chak. A high rising hum emanated from the weapon.

“Ragnarok. Stand down.”

The words were in English, which was why he did not turn and fire on the instant. Slowly, keeping the weapon at the ready, he inclined his head to look behind him. Three figures of modern-day myth and legend hung there in the air, hovering over the street far below. The Triumvirate. Some would say, the most powerful heroes in the world. He agreed with this, as he was no hero.

“Why?” All the pain in the world crackled in his reply.

Legend drifted half a pace forward. Wisely, he showed no sign of any intent to attack. “You’ve destroyed three-quarters of the city. Killed half the population. They’ll be decades in the rebuilding.”

He might have said more, but the leather-armoured man wasn’t listening. Half a dozen brightly-costumed figures were arrowing in from over the horizon, moving at well over the speed of sound. They flew close together, in tight formation. This was their undoing.

Smoothly, he raised the weapon to his shoulder. There was no need to lead the shot, as they were closing directly on his position. Less than half a second after he registered their existence, he pulled the trigger.

The weapon didn’t make any noise, at least in the conventional sense. A coruscating violet beam imprinted itself on the world—and on the retinas of the Triumvirate—for a good three seconds. When it vanished, the six figures no longer existed. Nor did any clouds in that direction, and a cookie-bite had been taken out of a mountain on the horizon. The k-k-k-k-KRACKKK-BOOOOMMMMMMMMmmmm that followed was the result of air rushing into the vacuum that had been created within the passage of the beam.

Again, he broke the weapon open, allowing the expended power cartridge to eject itself, then reloaded once more. Notably, none of the Triumvirate attempted to stop him doing this. It appeared that they could learn.

“They started it,” he said flatly. “I’m finishing it.”

“‘They’? What ‘they’?” demanded Eidolon. He gestured, showing reasonable manual dexterity with the arm that had been blown off, once upon a time. That had been a warning shot; a rare concession. It was why Eidolon was exercising the restraint that he was. The next shot, everyone knew, would not be a warning.

“The CUI,” retorted Ragnarok. He raised the weapon to his shoulder and began to sight in on his next target.

“Wait, you can’t just decide to declare war on an entire country,” Legend protested.

“Why not? They declared war on me. Fair’s fair.”

“But … most of them didn’t even know what was going on.”

The steel helmet turned to face him. “They should have. Their leaders should’ve known not to mess with me. They tried it. Now I’m hitting back.” Every word radiated absolute certainty.

“For God’s sake, haven’t you killed enough of them already?” Legend sounded near tears.

“Is she alive again? Has my wife been brought back from the dead?”

Eidolon grimaced. He’d tried hard enough, to no avail. “No.”

“Then, no. I haven’t killed enough of them. When their leadership finally realises that the only way to stop me is use their capes to bring her back, then I’ll stop killing them.”

Alexandria drifted in front of Legend. “Listen. You destroyed their entire command and control three shots ago. Even if they had a cape with that ability, you killed them two shots ago. Right now, all you’re doing is kicking a corpse. Once we leave, every neighbouring nation is going to descend on this city, on this country, and tear it to shreds. You’ve won.”

“They’re not a crater yet.” Pain was still evident in his voice. “Then I’ll be done.”

“What, like Houston?” Eidolon clenched his fists. “It’s still a radioactive crater.”

“I killed Behemoth.” The statement was matter-of-fact. I stepped on a cockroach.

“Along with eight million people! Not to mention three-quarters of the capes who showed up that day!” Eidolon was shouting. “You killed more than he’d done in his previous three attacks!”

Legend put a hand on Eidolon’s chest and pressed him backward. “We appreciate the fact that you destroyed an Endbringer, but the fact of the matter is, your tech is far too destructive to everything around you, not just the target. This is why we asked you to retire, the last time.”

“And I would’ve stayed retired,” retorted the man called Ragnarok. “But you had to keep tabs on me, didn’t you? And someone talked. And someone else listened. And the CUI had to try the stupid ploy of kidnapping my wife to get leverage over me.”

They’d fucked it up, of course. In what was perhaps the most idiotic move ever performed by any human organisation anywhere, they’d accidentally killed their prospective kidnappee. Worse, he’d found out about it. The PRT had promptly told him who was responsible (more as a matter of self-preservation than anything else) and he’d gone on the warpath. Both figuratively and literally.

A streak of energy arced over the horizon, traced around, and homed in on Ragnarok. “Oh, shit! Cover!” shouted Alexandria. Eidolon disappeared inside a green bubble, Legend vanished into the distance in a streak of light, and the flying brick braced herself with her arms crossed over her eyes.

The explosion was impressive, destroying a chunk of the surrounding area, but somehow touching neither the man in the steel helmet or the building he was standing on. As Alexandria brought her arms away from her eyes, she saw energy building in a globe around Ragnarok. It intensified, brighter and brighter, before streaking away in a reverse path to the way the attack had come in by. A moment later, from over the horizon, there was a distant concussion, followed by a mushroom cloud rising into the air.

“You need to stand down,” Alexandria said. “These idiots will keep escalating until they kill not just themselves but everyone within a hundred miles of them. And some of them might decide to go to Brockton Bay for revenge. After all, you still have Taylor—”

She broke off, mainly because she was suddenly looking down the barrel of the gun he was holding.

“You don’t talk about my little girl,” he whispered. “You don’t even think about going near her.”

“That wasn’t a threat,” she assured him hastily. “Just … advice. Do you want to bring war back to your home town? Your daughter can’t count on your protection forever. Let it go. Stand down. Please.”

Behind the helmet, he grimaced. “You know what they did.”

“And they’ve paid.” She gestured at the devastation. “You’ve done more to them than a thousand enemies over a thousand years.”

His long slow sigh was a sign of surrender. “Fine. You win. I’ll retire and be a dad again. Do my normal job. And I won’t kill anyone at all.”

She let out a sigh of her own. “Thank you.”

“You might want to step back,” he said, and slung the gun over his shoulder. “I’m about to make a crater.”

She obeyed, pulling hastily back. Actinic light glared from the sphere in the middle of his chest, then with a flash, he was gone. So was the building he’d been standing on. She turned and flew off. There was nothing more to be done here.

Hopefully, this time, Ragnarok would stay retired.

<><>​

Two and a Half Years Later

“Oh, shit.”

Alexandria looked up. It was rare indeed that Legend swore, but the look on his face showed that it wasn’t some random impulse. His eyes were wide and he looked as though he were in shock.

“What?” she asked.

“Taylor Hebert,” he said hollowly. “Someone locked her in her locker with some pretty nasty stuff. She’s in the hospital now. Psych ward.”

“Motherfucker!” She stepped forward to scan the report he’d been reading. “Why are we learning about this from a police followup report? Why isn’t Director Piggot burning up the phone lines to my office already? How the fuck did this even happen? I thought we had a Ward in that damn school!”

“We do!” protested Legend. “I made sure of it myself!”

“Then why weren’t they keeping a closer eye on her?”

“Because the Brockton Bay PRT doesn’t know about Ragnarok. We don’t want another damn leak.”

Alexandria wanted to scream, or break something. Damned if they did, damned if they didn’t. “Okay. Damage control. Contact Danny Hebert post-haste. Make sure he doesn’t do anything stupid before we find the perpetrator and make a very fucking thorough example of them.”

“On it. Doorway to Brockton Bay.”

Alexandria watched as Legend disappeared through the portal. They’d once tried using a similar portal to exile Ragnarok on a different Earth, but his weapons had proven capable of blasting their way through the dimensional barrier back to Earth Bet. Attacking him merely invited a thoroughly disproportionate response, and the mere concept of attempting to Birdcage the man brought her out in a cold sweat. Even the Simurgh stayed over the horizon from wherever he was at all times.

She just had to hope that Legend could make Ragnarok listen to reason.

The alternative had too many bad endings to be contemplated.


End of Part One

 

Collateral Damage

Part Two: Backlash


[A/N: This chapter beta-read by Lady Columbine of Mystal.]


Legend emerged from the portal in midair, and pulled a tight turning spiral to get an idea of where he was over Brockton Bay. The second reason for his quick survey was to make sure there still was a Brockton Bay, which seemed to be the case. At least, there were no obvious craters, no fires, and no mushroom clouds over the city.

For the moment, anyway. He had zero doubt that this state of affairs could change in a matter of seconds. Every time—every time—Ragnarok cut loose with his weaponry, he rendered the word ‘overkill’ laughably inadequate.

<><>​

To Legend’s knowledge, the weapons Tinker had never built anything that didn’t cause mass destruction. The harness Ragnarok wore took incoming attacks—even relatively harmless ones—and sent them back to their starting point, multiplied by tenfold or more. His teleports destroyed the local area on either the starting point or the landing point. And his offensive weaponry simply ignored all defenses and obliterated the target, plus anything near it and everything behind it, out to the horizon. He was constitutionally incapable of building anything that could perform a pinpoint strike.

<><>​

Once Legend had orientated himself, he turned and hurtled toward a particular house. Since Behemoth, the PRT had declared Ragnarok a ‘hands-off’ cape. Despite Eidolon’s frothing fury at the destruction of Houston, the Protectorate and Cauldron both had gone along with that assessment. Too hard to kill and impossible to exile or imprison; the only real option was appeasement. Leave him alone and hope that he didn’t decide to go Endbringer on the population. Eidolon had initially ignored this decision and confronted Ragnarok personally. Legend hadn’t been present for the event, but it had culminated with Ragnarok blowing Eidolon’s arm off, the one and only known incidence when the cape had shown even minor restraint. It said something about Ragnarok that the loss of a limb counted as ‘restraint’.

Of course, even after this, the policy hadn’t been foolproof. As far as Legend knew, two separate attempts had been made to snipe Ragnarok; once after Houston, and the other after he obliterated the CUI. The second attempt had been with a Tinkertech rifle from six miles away, and the shooter had teleported away as soon as the trigger was pulled. Despite Ragnarok being out of his protective harness, on both occasions an energy bolt had travelled back up the path of the shot. The first shooter hadn’t had a chance to get away; the bolt had taken the top floor off the building he was sniping from, and blown the shooter himself into a fine mist. No such explosion had taken place on the second shot, but Legend knew for a fact that an entire city block had detonated for no known reason in downtown Johannesburg at the precise second the retaliatory blast from Ragnarok had fizzled out in Brockton Bay. Legend supposed that the extra damage was Ragnarok’s tech saying in effect, “If I’ve got to come find you, I’ll make it hurt more.”

<><>​

Hebert’s car was in the driveway, which was not a good sign. It meant that the man was at home, almost certainly after visiting his daughter. The girl was alive, which was the only ray of hope here; Legend had absolutely no doubt that if she’d died, Brockton Bay would’ve gone the same way as Houston and Beijing. The man held no particular respect for human life, which was perhaps the most terrifying thing about him. Apart from his ability to casually decimate a city in a few minutes, that is.

<><>​

He recalled the last moments of Houston. This was no great feat of memory; every detail was seared into his mind. Behemoth raging across the city, destroying buildings like childrens’ toys. The defenders trying to pen him in, throwing up barriers of all types. Ragnarok stepping up, striding toward the oncoming monster as if out for a Sunday stroll. Some had shouted for him to get back, but he’d ignored them.

He’d taken aim with that goddamned shotgun he carried, but he’d stumbled on a bit of rubble just before he fired. Instead of obliterating the thing in one shot, he’d merely blown off Behemoth’s right arm, searing it to the shoulder. Behind Behemoth, the top half of a skyscraper crashed to the ground. That got the thing’s attention, and it unleashed a burst of lightning that skipped across the ground and impacted Ragnarok full in the chest … or at least, tried to. Ragnarok’s retaliation field took the lightning and threw it back, a raging wall of energy that smashed into Behemoth and drove him backward.

Behemoth had roared and redoubled his attack; as a final fuck-you, he leaped forward to bring Ragnarok within his kill-field. Energies unsurviveable by all but a select few crashed and battered at the cape’s protective field, and were thrown back in such quantities that everything electronic within ten miles shorted out and fused into an unsalvageable lump. In the meantime Ragnarok ignored the goings-on, ejecting the used-up power cartridge for his shotgun and methodically reloading.

Silvery flesh literally being shredded away by the backlash of his own powers like a mad giant throwing glitter in the air, Behemoth roared once more and brought his surviving arm around to strike the impudent attacker down. The resultant explosion deprived him of that arm as well. Ragnarok’s gun hummed its rising note, then the cape raised the gun and aimed it at the Endbringer’s centre mass. He pulled the trigger. This time, he didn’t miss.

Legend had woken up fifty miles away, sprawled on the roof of a truck stop. His costume was half-gone, and his hearing didn’t come back for two days. To the south, he saw a tremendous mushroom cloud climbing over the horizon. It took him two tries to get airborne, and then he flew back toward the scene of destruction.

It had been a catastrophe. Three-quarters of the defending capes were dead or dying. The only one untouched by it all was Ragnarok himself, who strode out of the centre of the radioactive crater that Houston had become, his shield flaring and spitting as it repelled the rock-melting heat and dangerous gamma rays still emanating from the debris. With his shotgun over his shoulder, he told the surviving capes that Behemoth was dead and he was going home now. The explosion when he triggered his teleporter destroyed one of the few surviving buildings.

<><>​

Landing just in front of the doorstep, Legend stepped up and knocked on the door. There was no answer. He knocked again, harder. After what seemed to be an eternity of waiting, the door opened. He stared up at Danny Hebert; the man was unshaven and had a can of beer in his hand.

“May I come in, please?” asked Legend. Most times he said ‘please’, he was being polite. With Ragnarok, he was trying to avert the end of the world. Or at least, a large chunk of the eastern seaboard.

Hebert grunted and turned away, but he left the door open. Legend took that as assent and he entered, carefully closing the door behind him. He had no doubt that the PRT covert surveillance teams in the surrounding houses, all working in civilian guise, had noted his arrival. These people were akin to the tornado chasers or hurricane hunters that he’d seen on the weather channel; normal people putting themselves in harm’s way to provide the first line of defence against a natural disaster of unmitigated proportions. If something went wrong, they’d never know until it was far too late.

These were all volunteers from the Washington office or farther abroad, he knew. Each and every one had been personally vetted and recruited by Alexandria in her Costa-Brown identity. The local office hadn’t even been notified of the op, for reasons of security and deniability. Legend had made that decision himself, after seeing the confidential report on the PRT ENE information security rating. At least two of the gangs in the city had moles inside the building, and that didn’t even include Coil, who was a mole unto himself. Legend’s nightmares about Taylor Hebert being kidnapped by any of the above were only surpassed by the ones where Ragnarok decided to take over the Empire Eighty-Eight and show them where they’d been going wrong.

“Mr Hebert, we know what happened to your daughter,” he said. “Right now, we’re working very hard to find out who did it and bring them to justice.”

Danny Hebert glowered at him over his beer. “You were watching me. Still are.” He gestured at the walls of the house. “Think I’m so stupid I don’t notice when my neighbours move out and young, fit, professional couples with no kids move in? People who spend more time mowing the lawn than cooking dinner? If you were watching me, why the goddamn hell weren’t you watching to make sure nothing happened to Taylor?”

Legend took a deep breath. “Because we knew we were treading a fine line even keeping you under surveillance. If anyone watching Taylor had overstepped the mark by even an inch, and you’d taken offence, it would’ve been on us. As it is, there was a vigilante enrolled in the school from the same day she was. When the vigilante joined the Wards, I made sure she stayed in Winslow, to help keep things more orderly. Safer for Taylor.”

“Shadow Stalker,” Hebert muttered. Well, Legend couldn’t fault the man’s cognitive faculties. “So why the fuck did she fall down on the job? How did this shit happen on her watch?”

“The decision was made to not inform her of Taylor’s situation,” Legend said carefully. It had been an unavoidable part of the whole ‘don’t tell the locals anything’ plan. “We figured that Shadow Stalker, as someone with crimefighting experience, would make sure that bullying as a general thing would not happen to anyone in her year.”

“Well, that fuckin’ turned out just fine, didn’t it?” snarled Hebert, stomping over to glare at Legend from close range. “So, is your ‘find out who did it’ going to be any more effective than your ‘stop it before it happens’?”

“As we speak, the Chief Director is having very strong words with Director Piggot of the local office,” Legend said steadily, trying to ignore his increased heart-rate. “She will no doubt be sending the local Protectorate head to the school to meet with the principal, and with Shadow Stalker if she’s available.”

“Better off sending the second in command,” Hebert said flatly. “Fire the people in charge because they quite obviously fucked up, and their next in line will try all that harder to avoid going on the chopping block as well.”

This was a course of action that Legend hadn’t quite considered, though it was brutally effective in its methodology. The philosophy of pour encourager les autres had been around for centuries, after all. Normally he would’ve taken his time to think about it, but given Ragnarok’s quite obvious unhappiness with the situation, he decided that a grand gesture was probably not a bad idea.

“I can do that,” he said, and pulled out his phone. Alexandria was almost certainly on the phone to Piggot, but she was capable of multitasking, so he sent a text message. Fire Piggot and demote head of ENE Protectorate. Let 2i/C handle matters. Sends a message to everyone else not to fuck up. He hit SEND, then waited.

A few seconds later, an answer came back. Done.

“Piggot’s been fired, and the Protectorate head demoted,” he announced, showing Hebert the phone with the messages. “We are going to make sure this gets sorted, and never happens again.”

Hebert lifted his chin. “I meant everyone in charge. You and the fucking Chief Directer as well. Step down. Let your second in commands take over. You fucked up, just as much as they did, or even more. Wear it.”

“Wait … I … what?” Legend stumbled over his words. “But … we have to fix this. We can’t just … I mean …” He’d never thought that when Danny Hebert said ‘fire everyone in charge’ he meant ‘everyone’.

“Fuckin’ thought so.” Hebert turned his back on Legend and headed out of the dining room.

“Wait!” Legend went after him. “We can talk about this! My deputy isn’t ready to step into my position yet!” Not to mention, it’ll pull Cauldron totally out of the loop.

“And whose fuckin’ fault is that?” Hebert stopped in the kitchen and prodded Legend in the chest with a hard forefinger. The kinetic backlash sent Legend stumbling backward four or five paces. “If your deputy isn’t ready to take over at a moment’s notice, then you’re doing it wrong.” He opened the door he was standing next to, and went downstairs into what was apparently a basement.

Legend rubbed the bruise that was even now forming on his chest, and hurried after him again. By the time he got to the top of the stairs, Hebert was at the bottom. The man stumped across the basement to where a bunch of tools were leaning against the wall in a patch of shadow. Reaching into the mess, he pulled out something that initially looked like a short-handled sledgehammer with an oversized head. Then Legend recognised the mechanisms built on to it, and his eyes widened.

Oh, fuck. He didn’t just build guns and shields.

Danny Hebert drained the last of the beer and tossed the can aside. “You know why I was drinking when you came in?” With little in the way of obvious effort, he hefted the hammer on to his shoulder.

“Uh … no?” Halfway down the steps, Legend froze, unsure of his next move.

“It was Annette,” the most dangerous man in the world replied. “She always told me to drink a beer before I made any decisions I can’t go back on. I’ve had my beer. Now I’ve made my decision.” He lifted the sledgehammer over his head, holding it in both hands.

It struck Legend that the floor of the basement was composed of smooth concrete. Very new looking concrete. Which Hebert was about to attack with the hammer. “Wait—”

“I’m done waiting.” Hebert’s muscles bunched and he swung the hammer down. Legend had barely enough presence of mind to go into his energy form just before the weapon struck its target.

The explosion was … considerable.

Tumbling through the air, his ears ringing with the concussion, Legend finally managed to bring his ballistic arc under control. When he turned around, it wasn’t hard to tell where the Hebert residence was; or rather, where it had once been. An honest to goodness mushroom cloud was roiling into being above the crater, and all the houses surrounding it were either collapsed or on the way there. Legend flew back down toward the epicentre of the destruction.

As he arrived, Ragnarok finished fitting the helmet on to his head. The harness had already been strapped on, and the indigo vortex glowed brightly, as if eager to commence the task of destruction. Attaching the hammer to his belt somehow, Ragnarok picked up the shotgun that he’d used to destroy Behemoth and Beijing. Taking a power cartridge from his bandoleer, he fed it into the breech of the gun. The k-chak as he closed the weapon sounded louder than a thunderclap.

“Now we do things my way.”


End of Part Two

 

Collateral Damage

Interlude One: Taylor

[A/N: This chapter beta-read by Lady Columbine of Mystal.]


On a world known to its inhabitants as Earth Bet, another year has just dawned.

In a medium-small city on the northeast corner of one particular nation on one particular continent (yeah, this is Brockton Bay) children have returned to school. There has been laughter, fun, frivolity.

There was also screaming.

Three girls, dominant in their year, chose to lock a fourth away in a steel box, along with items that did not belong in the immediate vicinity of a teenage girl.

They, and their hangers-on, were the ones doing the laughing. She was the one doing the screaming.

This was all a very bad mistake.

They will come to regret it, some quite briefly.

<><>​

Behold, a moment frozen in time.

The mechanics of a Trigger Event are a classic black-box incidence. It’s possible to see what goes in (a traumatised human) and what comes out (a human with powers) but nobody has ever managed to truly observe what goes on during. No, not even Bonesaw.

In order to get all the data from this situation, it will be necessary to frame it in metaphorical terms.

Welcome to the Shard Bar.

<><>​

Across the front doors is strung a banner: ‘Closed, Due to Trigger Event’. There are only two shards inside, as well as the bartender, who has a peculiarly golden tan. One of the shards is rather pretentious; her mode of dress involves diaphanous swirls of cloth that seem almost to pass through one another. On a leash, she has a vicious attack dog. The dog is currently licking its own butt.

The second shard is looking critically at a large beetle—at least a foot long—which is lying on its back on the bar, legs twitching feebly. At the same time, she’s playing Tetris on one phone and texting on another, while talking to the bartender. The one in diaphanous swirls is doing her best to ignore her.

“Okay, I get it,” says the multitasking shard. “Bug control. It’s pretty classic, and if she’s at all on the ball—”

“She is,” interjects the bartender. “I checked.”

“Okay, fine.” It’s clear the multitasking shard dislikes being interrupted. “But you do realise she’s going to be useless for the longest time, yeah? It’s going to take her forever to start interacting with reality again, and even longer before she starts using me in any significant fashion. Because that one over there—” She gestures at the other shard.

“Hey, don’t look at me,” says the one with the attack dog, holding her hands up defensively. “I just made a few suggestions. Not my fault that my host took them and ran with them.”

“Conflict is the name of the game,” observes the bartender. He begins to polish a metaphorical glass.

“Well, we’re not going to get any out of this one for the foreseeable future,” says the multitasking shard. She prods the beetle, eliciting a sound not unlike urk. “I mean, look at her. You’ve hamstrung her. I like a challenge, but this is ridiculous. Either detect or control bugs? She’s currently stuck on ‘detect’ with no way to know that she can flip to ‘control’. And just detecting them is overloading her.”

“All right, I get it, I get it.” The bartender huffs and pours a drink. “You want a second trigger. Here you go. Happy now?”

The shard somehow manages to empty the glass without dropping either phone. When she puts the glass down, she looks brighter and more cheerful. The beetle has managed to roll itself over and is now wandering around on top of the counter.

“It’s a start,” she says. “But check this out.”

“Oh, for the love of— what now?” demands the shard with the attack dog. “How long is this gonna take? I’ve got places to be. My host has a conflict requirement too, you know. Heads need to be kicked.” Leaning down, she scratches the attack dog’s ears. “Who’s a good little psychopath? You are, that’s who.”

“I just did a projection,” says the multitasking shard. “Even with full access to her powers, she’s been so traumatised—” She shoots an evil glare at the shard with the dog, who loftily ignores her. “—that it’s going to take her more than three months to get around to doing anything significant. How do I kick-start this? I want conflict straight out of the gate.”

“Hey, don’t look at me,” says the shard with the attack dog. “I offered you a ping and you wouldn’t take it. No backsies.”

“Or from me,” the bartender says. “You only get one second trigger. It’s all up to you now.”

“I don’t want extra power,” says the shard with the beetle. “I just want something to make her more active than reactive.”

“Oh, that’s easy.” The diaphanous-clad shard smiles widely. “Ramp up her aggression. It’s what I did with mine. She was a pushover before, and now she can’t stand to lose.”

“Well, you do get a lot of conflict.” The multitasking shard frowns a moment. “Okay, so how did you pull that off?”

“I adjusted the hormone levels in the brain, like so.” The shard with the dog takes out a phone and fiddles with it, to show a series of slider bars. She hands it over to the shard with the beetle. “Just shove them across a little way, and you’ll have all the conflict you want.”

“Oh, okay. Cool.” Using sleight of hand only possible in a metaphorical scenario, the shard with the beetle takes the phone and nudges the sliders across a little. The bars begin to change hue from deep green to a more yellowish shade.

With a tremendous smash, an imposing figure erupts through the side-wall of the bar. Taller and broader (in a metaphorical sense) than the other shards, it is composed of metal, with actinic violet light glaring through the joints. Snatching the phone from the bug shard, it swipes its hand across the screen, slamming all the sliders into violent, flashing red. Then it crushes the phone into powder.

“DESTROY!” it booms, then lunges toward the closed doors. Normally impervious to all forces metaphorical and otherwise (just as the wall was supposed to have been), the doors burst outward. Seconds later, the intruder is gone.

The shard with the dog stares at the one with the bug. “What the hell …?” she begins, but then breaks off to stare at the beetle. As they watch, it starts to glow and vibrate slightly. Then its wing cases fall away, to be replaced by something a lot sleeker, metallic and more dangerous. Piece by piece, it transforms from a happy, fat bumbling insect into a form akin to a stealth fighter. Its eyes are a deep red, and it’s hovering a few inches over the bar, without using its wings.

“Who the hell was that?” demands the shard with the dog.

“My host’s progenitor’s shard,” says the multitasking shard. “I wonder what ….”

As if in response to the statement, the ex-beetle ignites rocket thrusters and accelerates around the room, out through the wreckage of the open doors, then vanishes into the middle distance. While the bartender and the shard with the dog stare in shocked surprise, the multitasking shard runs after the representation of her host. “Wait for me!” she calls. “Wait for me!”

There’s a distant crash, and the attack dog starts barking and straining on the leash. The bartender blinks. “Well, on the upside, we’re definitely going to get conflict now.”

In a moment of inattention, the leash slips through the diaphanously-clad shard’s hand. The dog runs out the door, barking ferociously. The shard runs after it. There’s another crash.

With a sigh, the bartender takes a toolbox out from under the counter and starts repairing the hole in the wall. These ridiculously overpowered shards, he decides, are making a mockery of the whole thing.


End of Interlude

 

Collateral Damage

Part Three: Outburst

[A/N: this chapter beta-read by Lady Columbine of Mystal.]



Legend was still talking, but Danny had stopped listening. He turned his head, calculating distances and directions. Technically, it would be possible to walk to the hospital, or perhaps drive there …

No, not drive, given the mess he’d made of the car when he blew up the house. He hadn’t thought twice about it, which suggested to him that he’d subconsciously known that his time as meek, mild Danny Hebert was at an end.

Up until now, he’d subsumed his darker side so completely into his civilian identity that sometimes he’d managed to ignore that that aspect of his life for days or even weeks at a time. But that time was over. His hand had been forced.

While it wasn’t the first time this had happened, he’d done his best to leave those in power in no doubt as to how dire the repercussions would be if they ever attacked him or his again. And they’d not only allowed Taylor to be attacked, but they’d refused to accept responsibility after the fact. Enough was enough. It was time to act.

The only reason Brockton Bay was standing—in fact, the only reason he hadn’t yet set about obliterating the entire eastern seaboard—was that Taylor was still alive. Now, he had to make sure she stayed alive; once he started reminding the world why nobody screwed with Ragnarok, at least one idiot would insist on targeting her. The sooner he got to her and made sure she was able to gruesomely murder anyone who tried to step on her, the better.

Resting the loaded shotgun over his shoulder, he entered coordinates by eye, and triggered the teleport. The last thing he saw before the swirling indigo energy took him away was the look of shock on Legend’s face.

The shockwave he created on arrival in the parking lot of Brockton Bay General Hospital was a minor one by comparison; only three cars were wrecked and two more overturned. Turning his head, he looked back toward the even bigger mushroom cloud just now climbing into the air over where his neighbourhood had once been. A few seconds later, the rolling boom reached his ears. He wondered idly if the surveillance teams had gotten out. If they’d had any sense, they would’ve started executing emergency bug-out procedures the instant Legend knocked on his front door.

Scratch that; if they’d had any sense, they would’ve flat-out refused orders to be on the surveillance teams in the first place.

Another explosion reached his ears and he turned to look up at the seventh floor of the hospital. He knew it was the seventh, because that had been the floor Taylor’s ward was on. Now, several windows and a chunk of wall were tumbling in shards and flames toward the asphalt below; smoke was beginning to roil upward from the newly made hole. Danny Hebert wasn’t a huge believer in coincidence, but he wasn’t quite sure what the connection was here. Then his eye fell on a PRT van parked inconspicuously on the far side of the lot, and it all fell into place. Somewhere up there, some idiot had tried to strongarm his daughter, and she’d responded appropriately. That’s my girl.

Sighting on the now-open side of the hospital, he triggered the teleport again. As with the last jump, he made sure to leave most of the damage behind. It would create a crater in the parking lot and destroy a bunch of cars, but that wasn’t his problem. People were messing with him and his, and he was about to make that their problem.

“… and stay the fuck out of my way!”

Lights were flickering and sparking as he arrived at his destination. The structure was creaking and groaning, which made him suspect that more bits were going to fall off, but his main focus was on the high-pitched scream. That was Taylor, but sounding angrier than he’d ever heard her before. As angry as he felt right then, in fact.

Good. It’s healthy to express a bit of anger every now and again.

Moving forward, he noted something interesting; intense indigo glowing points of light, made much more visible by the intermittent lighting, flying to and fro like fireflies on steroids. Still, it wasn’t his problem. “Taylor!” he boomed, his armour taking the word and amplifying it. “It’s Dad! Are you all right?”

“… Dad?” She still sounded angry, but not at the level of tear-the-city-down rage. A door creaked open, then gave up the ghost and fell off its hinges to land on the floor. His little girl stepped through, fists clenched, wearing the clothing he’d left for her on his first visit. More of those indigo fireflies were orbiting her.

Lots more.

“That’s me, honey.” He slung the shotgun and stepped forward. With a gesture at the surrounding area, he tilted his head. “You do all this? Nice work.”

“Wait … what? Dad, you’re Ragnarok?” Just like a typical teenager, she managed to sound curious and pissed-off, all at the same time. “What the fuck, Dad? Why did you never tell me? Why did you never do anything about all this shit? You could’ve blown the whole fucking school up, and I would’ve fucking cheered!”

“Yeah, that’s my bad.” He sighed. “I kind’ve said I’d retire after China. After your mom. I guess I should’ve been more alert. But I thought they’d do what they goddamn well said they’d do, and make sure nobody bothered you.”

“Well, no duh, Dad!” She turned her head, and screamed, “I said, fuck off!” With a gesture, a dozen of the orbiting fireflies zoomed off through the open doorway and disappeared. A moment later, a rolling boom echoed through the hospital. As if nothing out of the ordinary had happened, she turned back to him. “Wait, Mom? I thought she died in a car accident! China had something to do with that? That’s why you wiped out the CUI?”

Inside the helmet, he grimaced. “Yeah, basically. Nobody fucks with a Hebert.” Reaching into a pouch, he pulled out a linked-metal necklace with a tiny glowing indigo gem at its centre. “Here, put this on. I made it for your mom, but they managed to bypass it to get to her anyway. So I improved it. I’ve been meaning to give it to you for the last year, but it never seemed the right time.”

Taking the necklace, she frowned. “What does it do?”

“Same thing the one built into my watch and my chest-piece does. Incoming attacks are returned to sender, with interest.” Danny nodded impatiently. “Put it on.”

“Yeah, yeah, keep your shirt on.” She was doing a fairly good job at maintaining control over what seemed to be a vast pit of rage. He could see the anger simmering inside her. It was what he saw in the mirror most days. Up until now, he’d kept it securely locked away. No more. It was time to let the monster out to play.

Monsters. Plural.

The necklace clicked into place, and the gem flared briefly. She bared her teeth as she looked up at him. “Okay, Dad. I’m Ragnarok’s daughter. Kind of explains the exploding bugs. Why the fuck am I not freaking out more than I am, right now?”

He cracked a feral grin. “Because if you’re anything like me, you’re too pissed off to be freaked out. Exploding bugs, huh?”

“Yeah.” One of the little indigo fireflies buzzed ominously past him, then settled on an undamaged section of wall. With a loud crack it detonated, blowing a fist-sized chunk out of the wall. “I can see and hear through them, and I can make them go bang.” She shook her head. “I had no fuckin’ idea what was going on ’til just a little while ago, when the PRT guys showed up and started harassing me. So I got mad, and this shit happened. Turns out they don’t much like bugs going bang.”

Danny smiled proudly. “That’s my girl.” He looked out through the hole in the wall. Even over the creaking and groaning, and the crackling of flames, sirens could be heard getting closer. “You said something about blowing up Winslow. Still want to go do that thing?”

She grinned broadly, and he was pretty sure he could see an indigo glow in her eyes. “Oh, fuck yes.”

“Good. So, first things first. That necklace of yours? Doesn’t stop anything that’s blunt and slow, just sharp or fast-moving. Like so.” Stepping in next to her, he grabbed her by the scruff of her neck and back of the pants, and threw her out through the hole.

“What the fuuu …” Her voice rose in a shriek as she vanished from sight; a moment later, it was drowned out by a detonation from ground level.

Laughing harshly, he stepped to the edge of the hole and jumped. A couple of seconds later, he collided with the ground; or at least, his protective field did. There was a moderately large explosion, and he found himself standing in a crater. About ten yards away, Taylor was climbing to her feet in the middle of another crater. She’d landed on a car, which had not survived the experience. “Seriously?” she shouted. “You threw me out of the fucking building?”

“Got your attention, didn’t I?” He paused as an indigo firefly zipped in toward him, then detonated. He barely felt the shockwave as his protective field funnelled it back toward Taylor. The resultant blast blew her ten yards backward, through another couple of cars. Debris flew everywhere, but she got to her feet unharmed once more. “Maybe you don’t remember me saying that anything you send my way gets sent right back. Just be glad I gave you the necklace first.”

“Yeah, yeah, laugh it up. Dear diary, my dad’s a kickass supervillain. Just my luck he’s a raging asshole too.”

“Damn right I am, and don’t you forget it.”

“So why the fuck didn’t my shield shoot back at you?” she demanded, pushing her hair out of her eyes.

He snorted derisively as he climbed up out of his crater and headed in her direction. Each time he reached a piece of rubble, he kicked it, sending it flying into the middle distance. “I designed the tech. You think I’d leave a loophole like that in?” Without bothering to give her time to answer, he went on. “So, you ready to go make a shithole into a smoking crater?”

“What part of ‘fuck yes’ did you not get, the first time around?” She came to meet him, her eyes still glowing that eerie indigo hue. “Might take me awhile, though. Bugs are great, but they’re one use only.”

“Bugs, pfft.” He took the kinetic sledgehammer from his waist and handed it over to her. “This’ll work better than any bug bomb.”

The look she gave him was pained. “Bug bomb? Seriously? Your dad jokes are worse than your fucking powers.” She hefted the hammer with a grunt, holding it with both hands. “What’s it do, anyway?”

“You’ll see.” He looked around as police cars screeched to a halt on the undamaged areas of the parking lot. “Well, they’re a day late and a dollar short.”

“Fuck ’em.” Taylor began to stalk toward them, swinging the hammer back and forth. “I’ve been itching to fuck someone up since I got my powers, and they just volunteered.”

Danny rolled his eyes. While it would be entertaining to watch Taylor smack around members of Brockton Bay’s finest, it would also be an immense waste of time. Quick strides caught him up with her, and he grabbed hold of her shoulder. As soon as he had a firm grip, he triggered the teleport.

“What the fuck, seriously?” As they emerged in front of Winslow High School in a blaze of indigo light and a moderate explosion, she pulled her shoulder free from his grasp. “Fuckin’ warn a girl, why don’t you?”

“You couldn’t wait even half a second, could you?” yelled Danny right back. “You had to go after the most unsatisfying target in the fucking city!” He pointed. “That’s the place you want to hit, right there!”

Taylor’s head swivelled, and she stared at the school frontage. “Oh … fucking … yes!” she crowed. Apparently forgetting the entire argument, she headed for the front doors of the school. Half a dozen glowing bugs zoomed in before she even got to the top of the steps; the doors disintegrated in splinters of wood and shards of glass.

Stepping past the rubble, Taylor entered Winslow like an avenging angel on a mission of total destruction. Which, all things considered, was a reasonably accurate summation of the situation.

Barely had she gone out of sight when the explosions started.



End of Part Three

 

Collateral Damage

Part Four: Payback

[A/N: This chapter beta-read by Lady Columbine of Mystal.]



“Oh, Emm-mmaa,” sang Taylor, dragging the hammer behind her by its handle. It danced and skipped over the vinyl flooring, every tiny impact sending traceries of cracks spreading out in all directions. “Come out and plaa-aay …”

Cold fury roiled in her guts and arced out to the bugs that surrounded her on all sides, converting more and more every second to tiny glowing sparks of pure destruction. She couldn’t believe how long she’d just rolled over and let Emma and her toxic little coterie push her into the dirt. But now, that was done. Now, she was back. She was pissed. And payback was gonna be an absolute cast-iron bitch from hell.

Taking up the hammer, she tested the weight thoughtfully. Emma wasn’t in the classroom beside her, but she knew who was. If she hadn’t been in the hospital, she would’ve been in this room. Learning absolutely nothing useful from Mr Gladly, while he played up to the popular kids and ignored the rest.

She’d already used the hammer to blow in a few walls of empty classrooms, just to get the feel of its heft, so she was pretty sure that people knew she was there. But there were no students clogging the hallways, which meant they were trying to lie low rather than get away. Which wasn’t surprising, given that every single attempt at an evacuation drill had led to utter chaos, wasting half the day.

Bringing the hammer up and around, she hit the wall just beside the door. The wall blew in, along with the door, leaving a hole several yards across.

“Heeere’s Taylor!” she carolled as she stepped over the rubble of the wall and what had once been a desk. Her eyes, burning indigo, searched the students huddled on the far side of the room and stopped on one pair. “Oh, hey, Madison. Julia. Long time no murder. Guess what. I woke up with powers, and I’ve got absolutely no reason not to get me some serious payback. So, you want it fast or slow?” She began to swing the hammer back and forth, back and forth.

“Y—you can’t do this!” shouted Madison. “It’s murder! They’ll send you to the Birdcage!”

Taylor started to laugh. It wasn’t the fun, friendly sort of laughter, or even the mirth that comes about when one hears a good joke. It was the sort of laughter that accompanies a good solid dose of schadenfreude. “Oh, Madison. You ignorant little twerp. You really don’t know, do you?”

“Taylor?” It was Mr Gladly. “You don’t really want to do this … do you?” He approached her; hands held out to the sides in an attempt to appear harmless. “Think about it. Once you do this, you can’t go back.”

“Great little speech, Mr. G,” she snarled. “Love the sentiment. But you’re saying it to the wrong person, and you’re saying it about twelve months too late.” She rested the hammer on the floor and pointed at Madison with her free hand. “She really did want to do it, her and her friends. She did do it. And you’re right. There is no coming back from what they did.”

“Look, even if they did do something to you,” he tried, patting the air between them. “If you take revenge now, you won’t be any better than you see them to be.”

He was close enough now to try to make a grab for the hammer. Taylor saw the intent in his eyes, clear as day. She had to admire his guts in trying to defend his favoured students, but she wasn’t going to let that fly. So to speak.

“You’re assuming that matters to me,” she shot back. “Now, fuck off.” As he lunged for the haft of the hammer, she met him halfway with a palm-strike to the chest. The gem on her necklace glowed momentarily; with a thunderous crack and a burst of indigo light, he was blasted backward through the air until he hit the window. The glass shattered but the bars beyond held with a metallic thunngg. Slowly, he fell forward to the floor.

Amid the screams from the others, Taylor turned to look at Madison and Julie. “Now that the useless adult is out of the way, let’s see about you two.”

“Y—you don’t dare touch us!” shouted Julie. “They’ll Birdcage you for sure!”

“Birdcage, Birdcage, Birdcage,” Taylor retorted, rolling her eyes. “Everyone keeps saying that like I should be scared of it. But do you know why I’m not?” She lifted the hammer in two hands, and took a practice swing.

“Kill order!” shouted Madison. “If they can’t Birdcage you, they’ll put a kill order on your head!”

Taylor snorted. “Like fuck they will.” She pulled the hammer back and sighted on her target. Madison and Julie, belying their brave words, were huddled at the far side of the classroom. The rest of the students, showing a remarkable sense of self-preservation, had managed to sidle well clear of the pair. Taylor was pretty sure more than one had pissed themselves. “Because if they even try, much less succeed, my dad’s gonna be real pissed. As it is, with what you already managed to pull on me, he ain’t happy. And when he’s not happy, the Protectorate finds a hole and pulls it in on themselves.”

“So who the fuck’s your father that he can tell the Protectorate to step off?” asked Madison. “I can’t see the Dockworkers’ Association having any sort of pull there.”

A thoroughly evil grin crossed Taylor’s face. “Oh, the Association’s got nothing to do with it. Turns out my dad’s a cape. You may have heard of him.” Her expression hardened. “Ragnarok.”

The penny dropped with an almighty thud for every kid in the room at once. Just observing the expressions of pure enlightened terror was almost worth all the crap she’d gone through. Julia went dead white, and she looked like she wanted to faint. Madison’s eyes opened wider than Taylor had ever seen them before, even when she was putting on the innocent act for the teachers. “Fuck,” she whimpered. “Fuck, fuck, fuuuuck.”

“Language, language, language,” Taylor said, showing her teeth again in what might have otherwise been a smile. “Madison, Julia … as of this moment, you’re expelled.”

Five desks separated Taylor from the pair. Pausing just for a moment, she swung the hammer at the first one, putting everything she had into it. The head of the hammer, already glowing indigo, struck the desk like a Mach 5 homing missile. With a BOOM that echoed through the building, the desk exploded into a myriad of tiny shards that blasted away from Taylor at transonic speeds. The attendant kinetic shockwave that accompanied them hit the second desk, demolishing it in a fraction of a second. In pieces scarcely larger than those of the first desk, it hit the third desk along with the ongoing kinetic wave of destruction. That one came apart as well, and it just kept going from there.

Madison and Julia didn’t even have time to scream.

When the dust and smoke cleared, there was a broad swathe of destruction right across the classroom, and a hole had been smashed out through the wall. Pieces of the desks were embedded in the wall around the hole, which had taken out part of the floor. Of the two girls, there was no sign.

Humming to herself, Taylor hoisted the hammer on to her shoulder and strolled out into the corridor through the hole she’d entered by. Now, if she remembered correctly, Emma was attending English class just down—

“Hold it right there!”

Casually, Taylor turned around, hammer still over her shoulder. A hooded figure stood twenty feet away, aiming a crossbow at her. The figure was female, black, about her height, and was wearing gym clothing along with a mask portraying a stern-faced woman. “Help you with something?”

“You’re gonna stand right there or I am gonna put an arrow through your eye,” the hooded girl continued, ignoring her words. “Put the hammer down. Slowly.”

“Fuck off,” Taylor said carelessly. “No, I mean it, Shadow Stalker. Fuck off. You’re not even a real hero. You’re a second-rate vigilante turned edgelord Ward, and you’re since not the one I’m looking for, do yourself a favour and take your skanky ass back to gym class before someone misses you. Or before I don’t.”

“I can’t do tha …” Shadow Stalker blinked as her voice trailed off. She leaned forward, staring at Taylor. “Hebert? Holy fuck, is that you?”

“I dunno who told you my name, but I’m not interested.” Taylor deliberately turned her back on Shadow Stalker. “You can fuck off or you can die. Those are your choices.”

She’d taken two steps down the corridor before she heard the twang of the crossbow. The gem in the necklace flared briefly and she heard the scream of pain from behind her. Turning her head, she saw Shadow Stalker lying on the ground, her right arm missing from about halfway between shoulder and elbow. Gore was sprayed over the corridor behind her, revealing where the missing limb had gotten to. As the vigilante thrashed in agony, her mask came off and rolled across the corridor, revealing her face.

“Well, fuck.” Taylor came to a halt and turned around again. Unbidden, the hammer came off her shoulder; she bounced it up and down in her hand a couple of times as she took in the sight before her. “So Shadow Stalker is Sophia fucking Hess. And you’re a back-shooting coward. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.”

By now, Sophia had more control over herself, and was wrapping her cloak around the stump of her arm to curtail the bleeding. “I wasn’t … shooting you … in the back …” she managed through gritted teeth. “Disarming … shot … only.”

The sound that came out of Taylor’s throat was almost but not entirely unlike laughter. “Disarming shot. Right.” She looked down at Sophia and wondered why she’d ever been scared of someone so small, so utterly pathetic. “You’ll keep, Lefty. I gotta go find Emma.”

This time, as she walked away, she tagged Sophia with a couple of her non-explosive bugs. If the idiot even survived the attempt to shoot her from behind, Taylor didn’t want to have to waste too much time or effort hunting her down.

It didn’t take her too long to find Emma’s classroom, but just as she was coming up to it, some of her roaming bugs found another person sneaking toward a fire exit. She couldn’t be certain, but they seemed to think the person had reddish hair and was about Emma’s height. Briefly, she formed a large arrow from bugs outside the school, pointing in toward the fire exit in question. Then she hustled.

She got around the corner just as Emma arrived at the fire exit. Taylor almost had to hand it to her; if it weren’t for the warning from the bugs, her ex-best friend might even have gotten away. Or at least, made it much harder to catch up with her.

Emma hit the escape bar and pushed the door open, only to stop and look up at Ragnarok as he stepped into the opening.

Tall and imposing in the leather and metal armour, with the indigo sphere in the chest-piece spinning and fluctuating in an unsettling manner, Taylor’s father would’ve been a scary figure even if he hadn’t been the cape who had been asked not to show up to Endbringer fights.

Not that the remaining Endbringers attacked anywhere except Perth, Australia anymore. The city was more or less abandoned by now, along with the surrounding communities. Taylor didn’t know of any capes who even bothered to show up anymore, except for Eidolon.

“Going somewhere?” asked Danny. He placed one hand on the door and stopped it from opening any farther.

“M—Mr. Hebert?” squeaked Emma. Apparently, she hadn’t gotten the memo until now. No doubt Sophia had messaged her, but Sophia didn’t know about Ragnarok. “Is that you?”

“No.” Taylor had never heard anyone else compress quite so much menace into a single syllable. “Not anymore. Not since you hurt my daughter.” He looked over her head toward where Taylor was advancing down the corridor and nodded. Then he pushed the door shut once more.

The interlude had been useful, in its way. It had given Taylor time to think about what she was going to do next. Her swarm of explosive bugs rolled forward, enveloping Emma as she turned around. The redhead’s shriek of realisation that Taylor was right there hit an entirely new peak of terror when the bugs settled all over her, covering her in a soft glow of indigo light.

“T—Taylor!” she yelped. “Y—you have to understand! I was doing it all for you!”

Setting the hammer down and placing one foot possessively on the head, Taylor leaned against the wall and folded her arms. “Oh, this ought to be good,” she said, raising her eyebrows expectantly.

“It was all about making you strong,” Emma babbled, apparently emboldened by Taylor’s attitude. “We were pushing you to fight back, to stand up for yourself. And now look at yourself! You’re strong again! It worked! We can be friends again!”

Mentally, Taylor ran through half a dozen situations where she’d tried fighting back or standing up for herself, none of which had turned out well for her. “Well, you’re right about one thing,” she drawled, straightening up from the wall. “I’m strong. The rest of it … not so much.” Picking up the hammer, she rested it over her shoulder. “I’m not strong because of you. I’m strong despite you. I’m not sure if you comprehend just how fucked this makes you.”

“But why are you taking this personally?” whined Emma. “It was all for your own good! You were weak and now you’re strong!”

Taylor shook her head. “You fucked with me, sunshine, and now you have to wear the consequences. You see those bugs I’ve got on you? The glowing ones? They explode. Not a big explosion; just about enough to take a finger off. But here’s something I’ve found out. If I have more than one on a target, the force of the explosion’s not additive. It’s exponential. Two bugs explode like four bugs. Three bugs explode like nine bugs. On you … I have one thousand, three hundred and twenty-seven bugs. Feel free to do the math in your head.” Unless Emma had suddenly become a mathematical prodigy in the last couple of years, that wasn’t going to happen. “Oh, and if you try to sweep them off, crush them, make loud noises, move violently, or basically do anything to disturb them … they explode, and you die.”

There was a little more to it than that. The bugs could also direct the explosive force in any way Taylor saw fit. Half of these ones would direct the blast inward, while the other half would explode in all directions at once. Emma would become the epitome of ‘pink mist’ while the rest of the explosion would do a lot of damage to the structure of the school around her.

Emma bit off a sob, apparently only just now getting exactly how far up shit creek she was, with no paddles in sight. “So you’re just gonna straight-up murder me? Give me no chances at all?”

Taylor barked out a laugh. “Like the non-existent chances you gave me? Dream on, bitch.”

“But we never tried to kill you!”

Taylor considered that for half a second. “True. So, tell you what. I’m leaving Winslow once I get back to Sophia and finish fucking her day up. Once I’m out of range, these bugs will go back to normal. It’ll take about an hour. If you don’t move, speak or otherwise disturb them in that time, you get to live. Got it?”

“O—okay,” the redhead whimpered. “I’ve done six-hour model shoots. I can do this.”

“Bye, Emma.” Taylor didn’t look back as she walked away. At the same time, she relaxed the control over the bugs on Emma. They couldn’t leave the girl’s body, but now they were free to roam wherever they liked. At the same time, Taylor set the explosion requirement to ‘only if disturbed’. It was out of her hands now.

Emma lasted longer than Taylor had thought. She was almost back to where she’d left Sophia when Emma broke and started frantically trying to evacuate the various bugs from under her clothing and in her hair where they’d been exploring. She must’ve realised her fatal error when they all started heating up at once. There was time for one brief scream before the bugs all detonated at once.

Taylor weathered the shockwave and looked around with interest at the massive cloud of dust and smoke that billowed down the corridor. There was a distant—and not so distant—rumble as stuff started collapsing. Good. She had no further use for Winslow, or anyone in it.

Now people started evacuating. Or rather, herding frantically down the corridors in search of a way out. Taylor ignored them; anyone who bumped into her was thrown bodily across the corridor in a burst of indigo light, so they soon learned not to bump into her. The bugs she’d left on Sophia were still in the school, but one floor up.

Taylor took the stairs two at a time, ignoring the way students who jostled her were shoved brutally aside or even (in extreme cases) hurled over the rail. They’d get down to ground level one way or another, and she really didn’t give a shit about any broken bones. They’d messed with her, or they’d allowed Emma to mess with her, for over a year. Everyone in the building was complicit, even if only by inaction.

She tracked Sophia down to a supply closet. As she closed in, she heard the girl’s voice, obviously speaking to someone over the phone.

“—gone kill-crazy! She’s tearing the fucking school apart! Send your biggest guns! Send the Triumvirate! Send fucking everyone! I dunno how many people she’s killed so far, but you’ve got to take this bitch down hard!” She sounded close to hysteria.

Taylor paused outside the closet. Sophia didn’t speak for a moment, then resumed, clearly in an answer to the person on the other end. “Yeah, I got a name. Hebert. Taylor fucking Hebert. The biggest loser in the school. And now she’s got some power, she’s … what? No, don’t fuckin’ say that. Do not say that. Why can’t you send anyone?”

There was another pause. Taylor put her hand on the door handle.

When Sophia spoke next, her voice was hushed. “Oh, no. No. Fuck me, no. Not him. He can’t be her father. Tell me you’re joking.”

She wouldn’t get a better entrance line than that. Pulling open the closet door, Taylor gave Sophia a crooked grin. “They’re not joking.”

Sophia screamed in pure terror and dropped the phone. She kicked off from the floor of the closet, going shadow at the same time. Taylor watched as she vanished through the back wall; unlimbering the hammer, she brought it around to smash into the wall. The resultant shockwave blasted a huge hole in the wall, revealing a classroom beyond as well as the corridor above. The bugs she had on Sophia blinked back into being, another floor up.

Standing on her tiptoes, Taylor clustered bugs under her feet and then set them off, directing all the force upward toward her. The floor beneath her was obliterated from the blowback, but she was propelled upward and forward, on to the next level of the building.

She started running, zeroing in on Sophia. Any time a wall or a door got in the way, she smashed her way through with the hammer, leaving a trail of utter devastation behind her. When Sophia tried going up again, Taylor was ready for her. Under the impetus of more explosive bugs, she burst out onto the roof in a cloud of dust and smoke, making a small crater where she landed.

Winslow was more than half collapsed by now. It appeared that setting off multiple explosive blasts in confined areas in an already-unsafe building hadn’t gone well for it. The section of roof upon which she currently stood wasn’t very large.

Sophia huddled near the roof edge, the makeshift bandage around her arm stump soaked through with blood. In her shaking left hand, she held a crossbow, pointed at Taylor. Tellingly, she didn’t shoot. It appeared that she could learn.

“You killed the others, didn’t you.” It wasn’t a question.

Taylor nodded briefly as she paced toward Sophia. A distant rumble signalled another part of the structure deciding that enough was enough. “They fucked with me. You fucked with me. Guess what. You all fucked up.”

Sophia eyed the hammer, then her eyes slid up to Taylor’s face. “You’re gonna kill me, too.”

The grin that stretched Taylor’s face made her lips hurt. “You tell me, bitch.” She hefted the hammer, raising it to shoulder level. “How do you want this? Fast or slow?”

Sophia stood up, her eyes on Taylor. “Fuck you. You do not get to kill me.”

Taylor’s grin never left her face. “Like you’re gonna stop me on your best day.”

“Watch me!” screamed Sophia, and for a moment, Taylor thought she was going to shoot the crossbow anyway. But instead she tucked it up under her own chin and pulled the trigger. The string didn’t even have a chance to go twang as the razor-edged arrow lodged itself up inside her brain.

Slowly, Sophia tottered backward and fell off the roof. A second or so later, there was a dull thud, three stories below.

“Well, fuck.” Taylor snorted. It was one thing to kill her enemies. When they committed suicide rather than face her wrath? That was another thing altogether. Stepping forward, she looked over the edge of the roof. Sophia lay sprawled untidily in death, the shattered crossbow lying near her left hand.

With a shrug, Taylor looked around. Picking a spot on the corner of the roof, she braced herself and swung, hard. The hammer impacted with the wall, sending a shockwave down through it, spreading out in all directions. She felt the collapse beginning, the final demise of the institution that had once called itself Winslow High School. As the roof subsided, she rode it down, then stepped off the pile of rubble that had become Sophia Hess’ impromptu burial mound. Would they even bother retrieving the body? She didn’t know, and didn’t care.

Her father came to meet her, his shotgun resting on his shoulder. “Nicely done, honey. Got any more business here?”

“Nope.” Taylor smirked and held out the hammer. “Thanks for the loaner. It was fun. What are we doing now?”

“Keep it for the moment,” he said. “Now that the minor annoyances are out of the way, it’s time to go deal with the bigger fish.” Slinging his shotgun over his shoulder, he cracked his knuckles. “Let’s blow this popsicle stand.”

She cast a sideways glance at what remained of Winslow. “Pretty sure that’s already been achieved.”

He rolled his eyes. “Now who’s pulling the dad jokes?”

Taylor’s smirk widened. “I learned from the best.”



End of Part Four

 

Collateral Damage

Part Five: Accidentally (Danny)

[A/N 1: This chapter beta-read by Lady Columbine of Mystal.]
[A/N 2: This chapter is part one of a two-parter, showing how power can destroy even without meaning to.]
[A/N 3: Trigger warning: this chapter references suicide.]


As a mushroom cloud began to rise over the ruins of Winslow High School and the somewhat traumatised survivors of same (nearly everyone had made it out, some through large holes in the walls which hadn’t been there at the beginning of the day) a smaller explosion echoed from the frontage of the Brockton Bay PRT building.

Cars swerved, horns honked and alarms went off. Standing in a small crater (hardly there at all, really, more of an extremely scorched and slightly depressed section of sidewalk) the armoured form of Ragnarok looked around to get his bearings, then uttered two phrases which have caused more worry and regret than nearly any other in the English language.

“All right, then,” he said briskly. “Let’s do this.”

<><>​

Taylor

I looked dubiously up at the PRT building. “Big fish?” I asked. “Here?” I couldn’t think of anyone in the PRT who might have pissed Dad or me off. Well, there was whoever had been supposedly in charge of Sophia as a Ward. But she hadn’t attacked me as a Ward; she’d done it out of costume. Reluctantly, I decided to give them a pass on that.

“Oh, there’s nobody in there that I’d normally consider wasting a moment of time on.” Dad’s voice was definite. “But I want to see if Legend did what I told him to do. And they probably have information on people I do want to deal with.” Unspoken was the clear assumption that they’d share that information with him. I couldn’t see it going any other way.

Still, it sounded boring as batshit. I hadn’t had my powers for long, but already there was a fizzing sensation in my head. I wanted to get out and do shit. Break something. See if I could goad some suicidal fuckwit into mugging me. Being cooped up inside that building was not a good idea for new and improved Taylor. I’d probably end up launching the coffee machine into orbit through the roof or something. Which would be amazing, but Dad might get pissed if he didn’t get the information he was after.

“That sounds cool and all, but is it okay if I just wander for a bit?” I asked. I pointed east down the street. “I’ll be down at the Boardwalk. If you want to find me, just blow something up.”

“I’m sure I can manage something,” he said dryly. “Did you want to take the hammer with you? People might notice.” He tilted his head. “Or did you want people to notice?”

“Nah, I’ll be fine without it.” I handed the heavy implement over. “It’s too heavy to go on a serious walk with, anyway. I don’t know anyone else in Brockton Bay I want to kill right now, so I’ll probably be fine without it.”

He nodded, then gestured at my face. A moment later, I realised he was indicating my eyes. “You’ve got a glow going on there. Just so you know.”

“Ah.” That was a sucky detail I hadn’t known about. I thought about it, then relinquished control over the explosive bugs I still had hanging around. They stopped glowing, and a subtle coloured overlay on my vision went away. “Is it gone?”

Dad nodded. “It is.” He patted me on the shoulder just as the front doors to the PRT building opened, and armoured soldiers poured out. I had no doubt that more were emerging from other exits and spreading out to capture the culprit responsible for setting off the explosion. Well, that would be their intention, right up until they saw Dad.

“Have fun,” I said with a smirk. Turning, I headed off down the pavement. It was about three blocks to the waterfront, but I could definitely handle it. After getting my powers and destroying Winslow, I felt full of energy. It was a brand new day. And once Dad got the information he wanted, we could go and lay down some well-deserved smackdowns (the type that came with mushroom clouds and the occasional glowing crater) on the sort of people who wiped their asses with Santa’s Naughty list.

I couldn’t wait.

<><>​

Deputy Director Renick, PRT ENE

“What’s the latest news from Winslow?” Paul Renick hated the desperate tone in his voice. He’d just been catapulted into the hot seat in the PRT building at the worst possible time; right when Ragnarok decided to emerge into the public scene once more. The fact that one event had everything to do with the other did amazingly little to either console him or amuse him with life’s little ironies.

So far, the body count was remarkably low. One of the surveillance teams at the Hebert house had failed to make it out in time, though the other five had gotten clear. Half a dozen people were injured, a couple critically, at Brockton General. He didn’t know if they’d pull through without cape assistance, but he’d issued a directive that Panacea be kept away from the hospital just in case Ragnarok and his daughter decided to return and level the place, as opposed to merely causing extensive damage to one wing. The last thing he wanted was for New Wave’s golden child—well, their other golden child—to be accidentally obliterated by the man who had managed to out-monster Behemoth. For the same reason, he’d given orders for her to be also kept away from Winslow until they knew more.

He had no reason to believe that Ragnarok would do anything of the sort, but he didn’t know that the man wouldn’t, either.

“Emergency services have confirmed that they’re gone,” Miss Militia reported, eyes unfocused as she concentrated on the radio earpiece. “They’re moving in now. Winslow is … Winslow is gone. Collapsed. It’s a pile of rubble. There’s … there’s students. Survivors. They’re saying that they’re seeing survivors.”

Renick let out a quiet sigh. “Thank God,” he murmured. Any survivors was a good thing, where Ragnarok was concerned. “Do they see Shadow Stalker?” He’d already listened to a recording of her last known phone call, including a scream that he would be hearing in his nightmares for some time to come, and he had a horrible presentiment that the answer would be in the negative.

“They’re not saying so,” Miss Militia said. “Still, she might not have had time to costume up.”

The translation was horribly easy: She’s dead and we both know it.

This time, Renick’s sigh was unhappy. “I suppose …”

Whatever he supposed was lost to posterity when the phone on his desk rang. He jumped violently and put it on speaker. “Dep-, uh Director Renick,” he said, stumbling over his brand-new promotion. “What is it?”

“Sir, it’s Stephenson down in the lobby.” He recognised the voice. Lieutenant Stephenson was a devoted family man, a health nut who maintained a rigorous fitness regime, a veteran of innumerable skirmishes against villainous capes, and as fearless a man as could be found in the ranks of the PRT. Right now, his voice was shaking. “Ragnarok’s here. Right here, right now. He wants to come up and talk to you.”

Renick froze, hand clenched around the receiver. A tiny whimper climbed out of his throat. With a heroic effort, he prevented his bladder from releasing its contents. Eyes wide, he met Miss Militia’s gaze over the desk. She had to be as terrified as him, but the bandanna concealed many of her facial tics and gave her an unfair advantage.

There was really only one answer to give. If Ragnarok wanted him dead, he would’ve already been part of yet another mushroom cloud decorating the Brockton Bay skyline. The man was as harsh and unforgiving as any other force of nature, but he didn’t lie and he didn’t prevaricate. If he said he wanted to talk with Renick, then they would talk.

What about, he had absolutely no idea. Topics favoured by people sporting an eight-figure body count and a Do Not Engage standing order were not his area of expertise.

“S—send him up,” he croaked. He didn’t even bother asking what Ragnarok wanted to talk about; the chance that the man would assume he was being delayed and simply obliterate Stephenson and the guard force was too great.

“Yes, sir.” Stephenson’s voice was still shaking, but he didn’t query the order, which probably saved his life. Renick barely heard him, as he was scrambling to his feet and heading for the tiny en-suite that was built on to the office.

“Where are you going?” asked Miss Militia curiously.

“If he gets here before I’m finished, tell him I’ll be right out!” Renick shut the bathroom door in her face, then faced up to the toilet. He unzipped just in time, did what he had to, then fixed his clothing and washed his hands as briefly as he dared. Hearing voices in the office beyond, he hastily dabbed his hands dry and opened the door.

Ragnarok stood there, looming over Miss Militia even though he was half the office away from her. She stood with her hands at her sides, empty. On his desk, several feet away from her, was her trademark weapon. Currently, it was a pump-action shotgun. Mentally, Renick commended her for her forethought.

“I apologise for the delay,” Renick said, as briskly as he could manage. “Call of nature. You know how it is. How can I help you?”

Ragnarok nodded briefly, though whether he was acknowledging the comment about the call of nature or Renick’s offer of assistance, Renick had no idea. “Shadow Stalker,” he said bluntly. “She’s one of the people who put my daughter in the hospital.”

Right then, Renick died a little inside. He was intensely thankful that he’d already drained his bladder; that news would have easily emptied it on the spot. We are so, very, intensely fucked.

“I—I’ll arrange for punishment, juvenile detention—” He was so eager to avert what he saw as an impending catastrophe that he would have happily sentenced that stupid fucking ignorant child to the Birdcage if the slightest hint to do so had been made.

“She’s dead.” Ragnarok’s voice cut him off at the knees. “So are her accomplices.” He took two steps forward and loomed over Renick’s desk at him. “What I want is your black file.”

Renick blinked. “My … what?” He knew what Ragnarok meant, of course. ‘Black file’ was informal PRT code for any collection of unactionable data about capes; usually villains, but it sometimes included heroes with a question mark over them. Potential identities, family members, cold cases that were suspected but not proven to be their work, all the hunches and half-assed guesses and speculations that could be gathered. These were focused on the big names, the ones that could do real damage if they stepped over the line and went rampant on the population. The black file was there for if they ever had to pull out all the stops on a particular cape. What he hadn’t been aware of was the fact that such an obscure part of PRT internal culture had made it out into the world.

“Black. File.” Ragnarok tapped the desk twice with his fingertip. Tiny cracks spread across the veneer from each impact point. “You know what I mean. There is no way you would not have one. Hand it over now.” The words ‘or else’ hung in the air in imaginary neon colours. Renick didn’t want to face the ‘else’.

The trouble was, he didn’t know if Piggot had kept one. If she had, he’d never seen it. Black files weren’t spoken about in any but the most roundabout of terms, and data was only shared between them in the most dire of circumstances. And if she had, he didn’t know if it included anything on Ragnarok.

There was only one way to find out. Reaching for the phone, he dialled a number from memory. It was the number of his old office.

“Deputy Director Emily Piggot. What do you want, sir?” No, she wasn’t bitter about the sudden demotion. At all.

He took a deep breath. “Emily, I need access to your black file. Effective immediately.”

Her breath hitched, audible even over the phone. “Sir, I’m not sure what you’re talking about. We have a dossier on the Blackwell woman from Winslow High School—”

Renick’s heart rate increased dramatically. “Cut the crap, Emily. I have Ragnarok standing in my office, demanding access to my black file. If you don’t have one, we’re the only facility our size anywhere that doesn’t. Besides, I know you. If you don’t have a file on every non-Protectorate cape in town, I will be greatly surprised.” And, knowing her, every Protectorate cape as well.

There was a long pause. “I used to have one. When I was demoted, I erased it. It’s gone.”

She almost sounded convincing, but Renick shook his head. “No. No, no, no. One more time, Emily. Ragnarok is standing in my office. If he chose to, he could snuff out every life in this building. You were the one who taught me to always keep an offsite backup. Is it worth dying, is it worth sacrificing the lives of everyone in this building, to keep that information from him?”

When Emily Piggot spoke next, she sounded defeated. “Is that a direct order, sir?”

This was going to rebound on him in so many ways. “Yes, Deputy Director Piggot. It is.”

“Very well, sir. I will be mailing the file to your inbox. Do with it what you will.”

He felt a huge flood of relief. “Thank you, Emily. There will be no repercussions for this, I guarantee you.”

“If you say so, sir. I, Emily Piggot, hereby tender my resignation from the Parahuman Response Teams, citing irreconcilable differences between my stated duties and the orders given to me by my superior officer. Effective immediately. That is all.” She hung up.

Oh, shit. That was a consequence that he hadn’t foreseen. But he couldn’t follow it up, couldn’t call her back and urge her to reconsider her position, not with Ragnarok in the room.

There was a musical note as his inbox registered a new message. He clicked it open, and found a PDF labelled ‘Accounting Backup 2008-2009’.” Double-clicking on that, he watched it unfold into something that certainly wasn’t an accounting backup. Facts, figures and pictures; they were all there. Emily had been busy.

Just as he hit the button to send the file to the printer, a distant shot sounded. He turned his head. “What was that?”

“I’ll go see.” Miss Militia was out the door in seconds; her weapon flickered and vanished a moment later.

Renick glanced at Ragnarok, but the armoured man didn’t seem concerned at her absence. He had other worries to deal with; mainly, that his previous office was in the direction he’d heard the shot from. A growing suspicion turned into a queasy certainty. Emily was an old warhorse, whose dislike for capes in general would have found a laser-focus in someone like Ragnarok. Being first demoted and then forced to hand over valuable data to someone she absolutely despised … he didn’t know how he would’ve taken it, and he didn’t have her issues.

But as much as he wanted to go to her office and check for himself, he couldn’t. He dared not. As Ragnarok looked on impassively, all he could do was watch and wait while the sheets of paper slid out of the printer.

In the back of his mind, he couldn’t help but wonder if Emily had taken the easy way out or the hard way out.



End of Part Five

 

Collateral Damage

Part Six: Accidentally (Taylor)

[A/N 1: This chapter beta-read by Lady Columbine of Mystal.]
[A/N 2: This chapter continues the theme of unintended consequences of power being thrown around.]

Taylor

It was nice to be in the open air on the Boardwalk, just strolling. Thoughtfully, I tucked the necklace Dad had given me into my shirt. No sense in drawing too much attention just yet. There would be time for that later.

Nobody seemed to be looking twice at me, which was good. I still had the bone-deep anger roiling inside me, and the urge to break something, but the interlude at Winslow had helped a lot with both. Despite it being midwinter, Brockton Bay’s famously warm climate was in full swing. The sun was bright, the breeze was only a little bit chilly, and I was able to enjoy myself and forget about the bullshit of the world for just a little bit.

“This is total bullshit!”

Well, it had been nice.

I looked ahead to where an argument was going on between a teenage girl and her parents. They looked vaguely familiar, but I was pretty sure the girl didn’t go to Winslow. Emma would’ve definitely had a rival for queen bee if she did. Another girl, probably the first girl’s bestie, was leaning against the rail nearby, looking bored.

“Mind your language, Victoria,” the woman said sharply.

“Well, it is,” the girl retorted petulantly. “Ames and me should be able to help if we want.”

“I said no and I mean no!” The girl’s mother made a chopping motion with her hand. “End of discussion. We can’t risk either one of you.”

Just as I was beginning to parse that statement, the girl turned away from her parents. “Bull fucking shit!” Raising her foot, she stamped on the wooden boards. One cracked through with a loud report.

“Victoria Dallon!” snapped the blonde woman. “If you can’t restrain yourself, you are grounded!”

Puzzle pieces began to drop together in my head. Brute strength … Victoria Dallon … shit, that’s New Wave!

That was as far as I got before Victoria Dallon punched a light-pole with a loud “Grrrah!” of frustration, leaving knuckle-marks in the metal. All around, passers-by recoiled, either from the display of violence or possibly from something else. At the same time, I also felt … something. A gentle wave of sensation that was there and gone in an instant. And Victoria Dallon screamed and fell over, clutching at her head.

“Vicky!” shouted the frizzy-haired girl I had taken to be her bestie. If they were New Wave, and Victoria was Glory Girl, then that made her Panacea. She hurried to Glory Girl’s side and knelt down. Placing her hand on Victoria’s face, she concentrated.

“What is it?” asked the guy … if that was Victoria’s father, that would make him Flashbang. He’d spent the entire previous conversation saying nothing at all, but now he was looking outward, a glow building around his hands. “Has she been attacked?”

“Looks like an aneurysm leading to a stroke,” Panacea said curtly. “A bad one. Lots of bleeding in a short time. I’ve sealed off the arteries and reclaimed the blood, but I can’t do anything about the damage it did before I got to her.”

“An aneurysm?” The woman stared at her. “How could you have not detected this coming? And what do you mean, you can’t fix the damage?”

“I didn’t see it coming because there were no signs!” Panacea pointed at Glory Girl. “She went from nothing to a total intracranial aneurysm in the last two minutes! And I can’t fix it because I can’t do brains!”

The blonde woman took hold of her shoulders and shook her violently. “TRY!” she screamed, from a range of about six inches.

I wanted to walk away. I really did. This shit was not my problem. But right now Panacea wasn’t a superhero who could handle herself. She was a teenaged girl who was being bullied by someone bigger and stronger, that she couldn’t fight back against. That pattern had repeated itself far too often in my life, and now I couldn’t stand to see it happen again.

“Hey!” I said sharply. Stepping forward, I grabbed the woman’s arm. Brandish, I vaguely recalled. “Leave her the fuck alone, you bitch!”

I hadn’t actually intended to swear like that. It was just how it came out. On the upside, it certainly got Brandish’s attention. This was the only upside.

Without even looking, Brandish pulled her arm free of my grip and backhanded me. It was almost certainly an instinctive move, gleaned from countless combats. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it would’ve been the right move. This was the hundredth instance. The necklace flared under my shirt and a blast of kinetic energy knocked Brandish ass over teakettle, sending her tumbling half a dozen yards along the Boardwalk.

“Hey, you okay?” I asked Panacea, who was standing there looking a little shell-shocked.

“What the hell … who are you?” Panacea blurted, staring at me. “How did you do that?”

“Name’s Taylor. I’m Ragnarok’s daughter.” I glanced at where Brandish was picking herself up, looking decidedly more ruffled than before. “Word of warning? She attacks me, she dies. Just saying.” I didn’t much care either way, but it had sucked to lose Mom, and I figured a shitty mom was better than none at all.

“Step back away from my girls.” Flashbang moved toward me, his hands glowing more brightly. “I won’t warn you a second time.”

I sighed. “Ragnarok’s. Daughter. Try to keep up.” Did having powers make people deaf and stupid? It really seemed that way.

“Dad,” Panacea said tensely. “Back off. I don’t think you can take her.” She glanced at Glory Girl, who was still unconscious on the ground, and back at me. “You hit her with ten times her aura, didn’t you?”

“I dunno. Maybe?” I shrugged. “I felt something just before she collapsed, but it never affected me.”

Panacea seemed to take that on board. “Did Ragnarok really blow up Brockton General and Winslow High School?”

“Nope,” I said cheerfully. “That was me. PRT dicks were bugging me in the hospital, and there were people in Winslow who really needed to die.” I waved my hand casually. “I left most of the hospital still standing. Just be glad it was me who got to the school and not my dad. A whole chunk of the city would be missing now if he had his way.”

“I’ve heard enough,” snapped Brandish. She had manifested a glowing blade as she stormed up alongside Flashbang. “You’re under arrest for … well, you’re under arrest. Surrender peacefully and you might just escape the Birdcage.”

I rolled my eyes and yawned theatrically. “I’m not under arrest and you’re not sending me to the Birdcage. Bored with this conversation now. I’m gonna walk away. Hope Glory Girl gets better.”

“There are ways of imprisoning you without attacking you,” Brandish snarled.

“Dad can teleport and pull me straight out of anywhere you try to put me,” I retorted. “And he will fuck the shit up of anyone who tries. Just like he fucked up the CUI for killing Mom. Wanna try your luck? Go right ahead.”

“Carol,” said Flashbang tensely. “Amy’s right. We need to stand down, right now.”

“She’s a villain!” shouted Brandish.

“A villain who was attacked by Vicky’s aura!” Panacea retorted. “I’ve told her and told her to tone it down. She never, ever does!” She stepped in front of the blonde woman, her arms out to her sides as if to bar her way.

“She doesn’t scare me,” scoffed Brandish. “By her own admission, she’s a murderer, probably several times over. She could’ve killed my daughter, just for having a little fear inflicted on her. That’s vastly disproportionate.”

“Hello?” I said theatrically. “Ragnarok’s daughter, here. Of course we do disproportionate. It’s how we roll. It’s the only way we can make sure idiots like you understand that it’s not worth trying to fuck with us. Because nothing else fucking works. Assuming they’ll understand doesn’t work. Asking doesn’t work. Telling doesn’t work. Screaming in their faces doesn’t work. Giving them back one for one doesn’t work. Going to the authorities doesn’t work. People still fuck with us. So we give them back ten for one. That works. Worked with the CUI, worked with Behemoth, worked with the little bitches who spent a year bullying me. You’ll notice none of them has fucked with anyone since.”

All around us, unnoticed by all except me, I was building my swarm up. None of the bugs were landing on anyone, and they weren’t clustering around peoples’ faces, but they were there all the same. It would only take me a second to empower them, and they would be capable of blasting any given foe into pink mist.

I stared Brandish in the eye. “I’ve been trying to tell you not to fuck with me. You haven’t been listening. Keep this shit up, and I’ll stop telling you and just let it happen. One way or the other, you’ll never fuck with me again. I guaran-fucking-tee it.” Lifting my hand, I tapped my chest, just over where the necklace sat under the shirt. “So make your move or back the fuck off. It’s all the same to me.” I began to turn away.

“You can’t threaten me. I’m immune to my own powers, you stupid child.” Brandish’s voice held more malice than I’d ever heard from anyone except Emma or her friends. “Get out of my way!”

“No!” shouted Panacea, at the same time as Flashbang yelled, “Carol!”

Something tapped me briefly on the right shoulder. The necklace flared, quite brightly. I heard a sound like the world’s largest bottle of tomato ketchup unclogging itself. A wash of warm air rolled over me.

Slowly, I turned around. Brandish wasn’t there anymore. Or rather, she was everywhere. Everyone within ten yards (except for me) was wearing her. There were no large pieces, no intact bones, no recognisable organs. It was almost as though she’d been spread like butter, or perhaps run through a woodchipper and sprayed evenly over the area.

Panacea was lying on the boardwalk, nursing her wrist. It looked like she’d been shoved roughly aside and fallen badly. She and Flashbang were both staring at me, eyes wide. Both were coated in a layer of Brandish. Intellectually, they’d known how dangerous it was to push me. But they hadn’t known.

She might’ve been immune to her power, but she wasn’t immune to my dad’s tech.

I know for a fact that I warned her.

Whoops.

I was pretty sure that nothing I could say would fix the situation, so I turned and walked away.

Well, that could’ve gone better.



End of Part Six

 

Collateral Damage

Part Seven: Accidentally on Purpose

[A/N 1: This chapter beta-read by Lady Columbine of Mystal.]

[A/N 2: For those who are unfamiliar with the format of this story, I'm doing two shorter chapters per post instead of one longer one. This is the first of the two. The second will be coming up in 24 hours.]

Relevant Side-Story


Grue

The windows rattled again, and Regent frowned. "What the hell is doing that? It's very distracting."

"Some asshole cape doing asshole cape stuff." Bitch knelt on the floor next to her dogs, which were whimpering and whining and showing the whites of their eyes. "The dogs don't like it at all. I've never seen them this scared."

"Lisa?" asked Brian. "Any ideas? Some bomb Tinker, maybe?"

Tattletale chewed on her lip, looking extremely pensive. This got Brian's attention; usually, she was ready to dish all the revelations her power was giving her. But right now, she actually appeared to be worried. "Not a bomb Tinker. Well, not a Tinker specialising in bombs anyway. I'm thinking … something bad. The whole city might be in danger right now."

"What, like an Endbringer?" Regent scoffed and shook his head. "Behemoth's dead, remember? The others don't attack anymore."

"Oh, shit," whispered Tattletale. Grabbing her laptop, she frantically started typing. Her expression became more and more fraught with each tap of the Enter key. "Shit. Shit, shit, shit."

Her phone rang, and she snatched it up, still typing with her free hand. "Boss," she said curtly. "I know what you're going to say, and the answer is no." Ending the call, she dropped the phone beside her and kept typing. Her face was so pale by now that her freckles showed up vividly across the bridge of her nose.

"Wait, what?" Brian stared at her. Tattletale liked to stir the boss up from time to time, and pull his chain a little, but she'd never used that tone before, and she'd absolutely never hung up on him. "What did you just do? Why did you—?"

"Because he wants us to commit suicide!" Tattletale shouted. "This is—" Her phone rang again, and she picked it up. "I said, fuck off!" she screamed at it before ending the call a second time.

"This is what?" asked Regent blankly. "This is your life? This is the Twilight Zone? What is this?"

Tattletale ran her fingers through her hair, destroying her French braid, then scrubbed her hands over her face. "Uggggh. Okay. Pop quiz. Who's the scariest cape in the world?"

"Ragnarok, duh." Regent rolled his eyes. "A few years ago, he totally fucked up what used to be the CUI. Before that, he ganked Behemoth and blew up Houston. But nobody's seen him since China."

"Exactly." Tattletale typed some more into her laptop, looking more on edge all the time. "There's been explosions at Brockton General, Winslow High School, some house in the suburbs—still getting the skinny on that one—and someone splattered Brandish all over the Boardwalk about two minutes ago."

Brian's phone rang. He pulled it out, distracted by Tattletale's unfolding narrative, and looked at the number. It was one he'd never seen before. "Hello?"

"Hang up." Tattletale pointed at the phone. "It's the boss, and he wants us to do something truly moronic."

"Hello, Grue." It was a voice he didn't recognise. "My name is Coil. I pay your extremely generous retainer, and I make sure your sister stays out of your mother's hands. I have a job for you, for which I will pay each of you one hundred thousand dollars."

"Wait, I want to hear more about Brandish," Regent objected. "When you say 'splattered', is that a figure of speech, or—"

"Shut up!" Tattletale put her laptop to one side. "Brian, hang the fuck up. Whatever's going on, we do not want to get mixed up in it."

"Yeah." Bitch soothed her dogs with gentle touches. "They hate it, I hate it."

"A hundred thousand?" That was a real payday, but between Tattletale's pushback and the amount offered, Brian felt justified in asking for more details before committing himself to it. "What does this entail, exactly?"

"No!" Brian felt the phone plucked from his fingers; when he looked around, Tattletale was holding it. "Not a fucking chance," she said to the handset, then ended the call.

"Whoa, wait a second." That was Regent, his prurient expression replaced by one of distinct greed. "A hundred K? I definitely want to hear more about that."

"No, you don't." Tattletale shook her head.

Brian took a step toward her, clenching his fists. "One, you don't call the shots in this team. I do. Two, give me back my goddamn phone."

"Okay, here you go." Tattletale handed the phone back, then drew a deep breath. "Guys, the boss is probably gonna call one of you to try to get us to go and check on the person who's been causing the explosions. This is a really fucking bad idea."

"But a hundred thousand dollars …" Regent whined. His phone began to ring.

"It's Ragnarok!" shouted Tattletale. One of the dogs barked at her suddenly raised voice, then quieted as Bitch shushed it. "I don't know exactly what's going on, or why a hospital and a school got blown up, but Ragnarok's in the middle of it somehow. And we do not want to fuck with Ragnarok."

"Fuck …" Regent didn't even look down at his still-ringing phone before he declined the call. "You're certain about this? Not one of your wild-ass guesses that goes totally down the wrong rabbit hole?"

Bitch's phone rang; looking Tattletale right in the eye, she answered it. "Is it true?" she demanded. "Are you trying to send my dogs out after Ragnarok?" Coil got a dozen words in before Bitch ended the call. "Fucker talks too much and says nothing at all."

"I mean, I get Brandish, kinda," Regent mused. "She's always been just a little bit too trigger-happy. But why a hospital and a school? Ragnarok only blows up places that have pissed him off."

"Oh, shit," whispered Tattletale. "I think I just figured it out." By now, she looked positively ill. "They never said why he wrecked the CUI, but I think I know. He was married, and the CUI killed his wife. Probably tried to kidnap her or something just as fucking moronic."

Brian nodded slowly. "Yeah, that tracks. So why is he blowing stuff up today?"

Regent got there first; to be fair, she had given out the right clues. "He's got a kid. Someone fucked with them at school, so they ended up in the hospital. He went to get them, someone at the hospital fucked with him, he blew the place up and they went back to the school and blew that up …"

"Not just that." Tattletale shook her head. "The kid triggered. The PRT must've been pressuring them. He didn't blow up the hospital and the school. The kid did."

Brian felt the ice-cold chill spread down his spine. "Oh, fuck. There's two of them."

"And that must be what happened to Brandish," Tattletale added. "She'd know enough not to attack Ragnarok, but she thought his kid was fair game."

Regent was normally hard to push into any kind of worry, but right now he looked downright terrified. "Is it too late to find another universe to live in?"

Brian was pretty sure he wasn't kidding.

<><>​

Taylor

With the necklace still hidden safely under my top, I strolled on down the Boardwalk. Brandish's abrupt end had dealt with New Wave's aggression, and it had taken a little of the edge off my anger at the world, but not all of it. Not even most.

Life had been fucking with me since forever. It wasn't just Emma, as huge a malevolent bitch as she'd been. Someone or something had made her that way. Sophia was one of the major suspects, as was Madison, but they were no longer in the picture. Still, I couldn't see how a couple of teenage wastes of time and oxygen could've turned her so totally against me in such a short time, so there had to be something more.

Due to having been blown into pink mist by yours truly, Emma was unable to answer questions about what that could be, but no matter. She still had living parents. I could always ask them. While I was at it, I'd also ask them why they didn't do a goddamn fucking thing while their daughter was happily tormenting me for months at a time.

If they were lucky, I might even accept the answer they gave me.

A deep BOOOM rolled out over the city. I looked around and saw a mushroom cloud climbing into the sky from where I figured the top of the PRT building was. It wasn't big enough to destroy the whole building, so I guessed they hadn't been so stupid as to actually attack him. He was probably just finished with his business there, and was trying to get my attention.

I sent up a column of bugs, stretching a hundred feet into the air, using my other power to charge them all up so they glowed indigo even in the midmorning sunlight. When they went off in sequence, it was like the world's coolest string of firecrackers, ripping apart the morning quiet and scaring the fuck out of the birds. I didn't much like birds either, so that didn't bother me in the slightest.

Thirty seconds later, there was a smaller explosion about five yards away; Dad appeared in the middle of the cloud of flying splinters, none of which did anything to me (of course). The pedestrians around me had backed off when I did the exploding column, so they only ended up with light flesh wounds. As I went over to him, I noticed that he had a Manila folder in one hand.

"Hey. Got what you wanted?" I asked. A moment later, I heard the louder BOOM rolling in from the top of the PRT building; if I was any kind of judge, they were gonna have to resurface the rooftop.

"I did. Anything going on down here that I need to know about?" He shaded his eyes and peered down the Boardwalk. "Isn't that New Wave coming in for a landing?"

I sighed and rolled my eyes. "Yeah, it is. Glory Girl was pitching a shit-fit and hit me with her fear aura, so she got a massive aneurysm out of it, then Brandish tried to hit me from behind when I went to walk away."

"Really?" His tone got dangerous—well, more dangerous than normal—and the glowing ball attached to his chest armour started spinning up. "Where is she now?"

"All over the place." I waved my hand casually. "Think 'chunky salsa' without the 'chunky' part."

"Nice." He nodded approvingly as the ball slowed its roll. "Rule number one: nobody fucks with us. Rule number two: nobody survives fucking with us."

I shrugged. "I tried to warn her. She didn't listen."

"What's this 'warning' bullshit?" He snorted and folded his arms. "People know who the fuck we are. They shouldn't need a 'warning'."

"No, they know who you are." It was only a minor point, but I felt it needed correcting. "Me, they've never heard of. If we don't educate 'em, they won't know enough to stay out of the way."

He snorted. "You're too soft-hearted. Survivors can learn. Next of kin can pass on warnings."

"Yeah, good point."

"Of course it is." He hefted the folder. "Let's go see what we've got here, shall we?"

I stepped up close to him, and he triggered the teleport. I was pretty sure that we were going to make a crater in the Boardwalk, but it wasn't my Boardwalk so I didn't care. When the indigo flash cleared, we were on top of Captain's Hill.

<><>​

Secret Underground Base

Coil

Thomas Calvert was both frightened and pissed off. He hadn't even had to split timelines to manage it. Merely having Ragnarok active in the same city had that effect on him.

Worse, his Tattletale had chosen this time to lash out and try to break contact with him. From the sounds of it, she'd influenced the rest of the Undersiders to also turn on him. Still, it was a better result than in the other timeline, where his mercenaries were right at this moment assaulting the infamous cape and dying in droves.

On an up-note, she had confirmed it was Ragnarok out there. He'd suspected it but not been certain. Now, he could turn his mind toward coexisting somehow with the insanely dangerous cape and, in time, working out a profitable arrangement with him.

He toyed with dropping the other timeline; after all, he had his answers. But there was still an outside chance that his men could kill Ragnarok, and in that timeline he hadn't alienated the Undersiders. And to be brutally honest, mercenaries were relatively easy to hire, while capes with useful powers were a lot more difficult to come by.

One by one, his men dropped off the radio net. One thing that puzzled him was how some of them were referring to 'they' instead of 'him' when it came to Ragnarok. Could it be that the man had a partner or a sidekick that he'd also equipped with his tech? That was an unpleasant thought.

The last mercenary standing didn't bother trying to kill Ragnarok where all his comrades had failed. Instead, he cursed Calvert over the radio link, ceasing only when Ragnarok got to him. The radio stayed open during Ragnarok's interrogation of the mercenary, which basically consisted of the mercenary readily giving all the information he had on Calvert's operation and the location of the base.

He was just making a note to ensure no important information was ever passed on to that particular man when the base in the other timeline was rocked by a tremendous explosion; Ragnarok had teleported into it. That version of him was thrown across the room, and suffered several broken bones. Parts of the other-timeline base were on fire, and a large chunk of concrete had shattered his computer desk.

At the same time, in the timeline he'd decided to keep (it really was no contest), he felt a tremor through his chair. A sprinkle of dust fell on the desk; looking up, he saw cracks snaking across the roof, right where the concrete had fallen out of the roof in the other timeline.

How in God's name …? He'd heard rumours that Ragnarok had once escaped exile in an alternate universe by shattering the dimensional barrier, but this was ridiculous! Nobody from a different timeline had ever affected him before! That was impossible!

The sliding door locking his office off from the rest of the base was already hanging off its tracks. The version of Calvert in the other timeline looked up weakly as Ragnarok loomed in through the doorway, the spherical chest-piece illuminating the darkened room with actinic indigo radiance. In his hands, the murderous cape held a sledgehammer with high-tech modifications, now glowing here and there with the same indigo light.

"Fuck around," growled Ragnarok. "And find out." He raised the sledgehammer high, then brought it down with earth-shattering force on the floor.

Even as the other timeline vanished from Calvert's perception, he was thrown across the room. The explosion in his office was nowhere as powerful as the one in the ended timeline, but it was sufficient to upend his computer desk and send him smashing into the wall. Breath driven from his body, he slumped to the floor, consciousness slipping away.

Distant sirens, combined with a recorded voice echoing through the base, dragged him back to wakefulness. He wheezed, out of breath, a sharp pain in his side suggesting fractured ribs. His computer desk was still on its side, the keyboard trapped under it, though one of the screens was still lit up and working.

beep

beep

beep

His head came up, eyes widening in alarm. The sirens and recorded voice finally made sense to his scrambled wits: the computer system had been set up to trigger the base self-destruct if it or the base were ever significantly damaged. The trouble was, the timer was only for five minutes, so he had no idea how long he had left.

Painfully, he dragged himself to his knees, then pushed himself to his feet. While he'd figured that if it ever came to this point, he would already be on the way out of the base, or have another timeline to fall back on, there was still a failsafe. He staggered over to the desk and pulled the one functioning monitor around so he could view the status of the countdown.

10

9

8

"Shit!" He scrabbled for the keyboard. It was half under the desk, so he strained to lift that for a moment before sliding it out and typing in the password that would halt the countdown.

5

4

3

Horror filled him as he realised that half the letters he needed to finish the password were shattered and useless from the desk falling on them. In his final few seconds of life, Thomas Calvert screamed and pounded uselessly on the keyboard anyway.

BOOOOM

<><>​

Captain's Hill

Taylor

The distant explosion drew my attention from the printouts Dad was examining, spread out on one of the picnic tables. I looked down at the city, finally spotting the cloud of dust rising from what looked like a collapsed office building. "Was that you?" I asked, pointing toward it.

He looked around briefly. "What do you think? I've been here all this time."

"Oh, yeah. Good point." I shrugged. "Place the size of Brockton Bay, I guess the chances of some idiot playing with matches is pretty high. Especially if they're pretty high, too."

"That's one way to put it." He tapped a sheet of paper lightly, so as not to shred it. "So, you're the reason I've come out of retirement. Who do you want to go after first? Big fish or little fish?"

I looked over the papers. As far as I could see, they contained all the best-guess information that Director Piggot had collected on the capes of Brockton Bay. Some of it was probably wrong, but that was always the case with anything that couldn't be directly verified.

Out of morbid curiosity, I looked up what she'd had on Shadow Stalker. The file had her name correct (unsurprisingly), and there was the suspicion that Stalker had killed a few people before the PRT hauled her in and threw her into the Wards program (also unsurprisingly). Someone had surmised that she was romantically involved with Emma, which I would've been more than happy to believe. But what interested me more was that there was no mention of the bullying campaign; if Piggot had known about it, it wasn't in the file.

I looked a bit further, then frowned. "Is it just me, or does your name not even come up at all?"

"I'd be surprised if it did." He shook his head. "After the total fuckup with your mother, the Chief Director made sure the local PRT didn't even know I was in town, much less who I was. They kept an eye on us while making sure Piggot and her goons didn't harass me. Given how riddled the local system is with backdoors, they wanted to make sure I didn't have to go scorched-earth with all the gangs to make sure nobody tried anything with you." He snorted derisively. "And yet, here we are."

"Here we are," I agreed. "I'm thinking we squash the bigger players then pick off the smaller fry, one by one."

"As good a plan as any." He began to gather the papers together again. "Biggest player in town is the Empire Eighty-Eight. Take out the big hitters first, or start at the top and work our way down?"

"Start at the top," I decided. "That way, the big hitters will come to us."

Slowly, he nodded. "That's not a bad idea. Saves us time and effort. If there's even one villain in this city who might decide to be stupid, they die."

I pointed at the papers. "Coil sounds like someone who might decide to be stupid. From what I read, he thinks he's some kind of criminal mastermind."

Dad rolled his eyes. "Ugh. Thinkers. They are honestly the fucking worst. Always 'I've analysed this fight a dozen ways and there's no way you can beat me,' and they're always so fucking surprised when I blow their guts out through their assholes. If Coil comes after us, I swear I am going to utterly destroy that smug sonovabitch. I'll unload so much whoop-ass on him that his alternate from Aleph will feel it."

I tilted my head. "How do you know he's smug? Did you fight him once?"

He waited for me to step up close to him. "They're all smug."

I couldn't argue with that. "We'll do him next. But first, let's go kill some Nazis."

"Way ahead of you." He triggered the teleport.

<><>​

Kaiser

There was something seriously wrong going on around Brockton Bay. Explosions had been going off all morning; one in the suburbs, one at Brockton General, a whole series that destroyed Winslow High, another that took the entire roof off the PRT building, and one that destroyed ten yards of the Boardwalk. Max had also heard that Brandish of New Wave was reported dead down at the Boardwalk, literally splattered over a hundred square yards by someone who claimed to be Ragnarok's daughter.

Ragnarok. There was a name to put a chill down the spine and an urgent desire to be elsewhere in the soles of the feet. His last public outing had involved the destruction of the CUI, and the one before had seen Behemoth demolished and Houston reduced to a radioactive crater. There was a persistent rumour that Heartbreaker's corpse had once been found in Brockton Bay, his brain half-melted and his eyeballs exploded, and that this was somehow linked to Ragnarok as well, but Max had always discounted it.

He wasn't discounting it now.

"James, no," he said urgently into the phone. "Listen to me. Ragnarok can't be bribed and he can't be frightened away. We need to move all our special holdings out of the city and—"

The explosion tore through his office; the lights shattered, every window blew out, and Max was thrown back against the wall. His desk stayed right where it was, mainly because it was built into the floor and was made of wood veneer over plate steel. Picking himself up dazedly, he peered through the smoke and dust that had been generated by the detonation. Two figures stepped forward, outlined against the light coming in from outside. One bore a swirling indigo sphere in the middle of his chest, while the other hefted an ominous-looking sledgehammer.

The one with the sledgehammer spoke; for all that she sounded like a teenage girl, the single word she said was the most ominous Max had ever heard.

"Dibs."



End of Part Seven



[A/N: Some people will be wondering exactly what happened to Coil.

Well, it goes like this. Disproportionate Retribution (my name for Ragnarok's shard) always finds a way to destroy anyone who attacks his host. When Coil's power (Simulation) modelled Ragnarok to fill in his part in the psychic flash that Simulation used to generate the other timeline, DR noted Simulation peering at it. So, when Coil was experiencing the modelled version of Ragnarok's retaliation, DR shoved a whole lot of energy into the model, to the point that some of it bled through into the real world. Not nearly as much as would have happened if Ragnarok had actually been there, but still enough to fuck over Coil. Because Disproportionate Retribution don't play.]

 

Collateral Damage

Part Eight: Totally on Purpose

[A/N: This chapter beta-read by Lady Columbine of Mystal.]



Taylor

"Dibs?" Dad turned to me disbelievingly. "You can't just pre-emptively claim a kill like that."

I snorted in derision. "Sure I can. You're just salty because I said it first."

"Are you honestly trying to compete with me on kills?" He still sounded like he was trying to make sense of it all.

"Compete? No. Catch up, maybe yeah." I gestured broadly. "You've got a massive head start on me. Behemoth, Houston, the CUI. I've got the Bitches Three plus Brandish. If you jump in every time we're facing someone who needs to die, I'll never get enough notches on my belt to ensure nobody's willing to fuck with me when you're not there."

"Hm. I suppose so. Have at it." He gestured magnanimously at the solid wall of steel columns that had appeared between us and Max Anders. He'd been strongly suspected to be Kaiser by Director Piggot, but never by quite enough margin to act upon; the barrier definitely proved it, but also blocked him away from us.

Or so he might have thought.

Stepping forward, I flexed my hands around the haft of the sledgehammer, then swung it into the face of the steel wall. The hammer wasn't light, but even if I'd swung a normal hammer with all my strength, there would've been nothing more than a dull clang and an embarrassing rebound. I could've pounded on that wall all day long and done nothing more than mar the finish here and there.

The hammer, being Dad's tech, was anything but normal. At the moment that the head made contact, the mechanisms he'd built into it flared with indigo light and released a truly staggering burst of kinetic energy. The harder the impact, the more powerful the resulting kinetic burst; I hit the wall even harder than I'd attacked the desk back in Winslow.

There was an explosion like a baby nuke going off (though my ears were protected from the worst of it) and when my eyes cleared, the wall had been shredded. So had the desk, the wall behind it, and indeed most of the top of the Medhall building. Chunks of concrete and steel and glass were likely raining down all over Brockton Bay, but that was kind of an ongoing theme with us.

I stalked forward, fully aware that Kaiser wouldn't have survived the blast if he was fully exposed to it, but interested in seeing if there were bits and pieces of him left behind. Instead, I found the square opening of an elevator shaft where there should be no elevator shaft. Supervillains and their secret exits: what can I say?

"Great," I groused as I kicked random bits of rubble aside and peered down the shaft. "He probably got away because you were pissed at me calling dibs."

"Me?" Dad gave me a Look, like I'd just tried to sneak an extra piece of pizza on TV night. "You're the one who called dibs in the first place!"

"And I was utterly within my rights to do it, like I already told you." I rolled my eyes. "You know what? Fuck it. I am totally over this argument already." Holding the hammer up out of the way—I didn't want to destroy the whole building, at least not yet—I jumped into the open shaft. However far down Kaiser had stopped, I figured, was where I wanted to be.

I fell for a couple of seconds, then I hit something hard. Just like when Dad threw me out of the hospital, the necklace flared indigo and blew a crater in my landing point, which happened to be the top of the elevator as well as the walls of the shaft. As usual, the explosion cancelled my downward momentum, which was useful because I saw a bunch of faces staring at me out of the hole in the side of the shaft, including Kaiser's. Faces I really, really wanted to talk to. (And by 'talk to' I meant 'blow the fuck out of'.)

However, I was about to start falling again, and I couldn't depend on the elevator to stop me, because me running into it had more or less destroyed it; what was left of it was falling too. I didn't want to fall all the way to the basement and have to climb all the way up again (because that would just piss me off more) so I did the only thing I could think of.

Twisting sideways, I pulled some bugs to the soles of my feet and exploded them to redirect my fall through the hole into the area the Empire capes were staring at me from. This wasn't controlled flight, or anything like it. I had only the vaguest means of steering, and it was dependent on having enough bugs for forward thrust, but in this situation it was good enough.

Blasting in through the gaping hole I'd blown in the wall of the elevator shaft, I landed awkwardly and tumbled on the floor. The hammer wasn't the easiest thing to hang onto, and I lost my grip on it. Striking sparks from the floor, it clattered away from me until it was stopped by a foot.

Hookwolf's foot.

I looked at it, and gauged the distance to it. Then, as I climbed to my feet, I watched as he leaned down and wrapped his metal-clad hand around the haft. For a moment, I hoped Dad had maybe built a Mjolnir effect into it, but no such luck. He picked it up just fine.

For some reason, the knowledge that I really needed to work on my landings pissed me off even more. "You're gonna want to give that back," I said.

He shook his head and grinned at me as he hefted the hammer. "You know, I don't think I will. So you're what, Ragnarok junior? The kid trying to step into the old man's boots?"

"Right for the first bit, wrong for the second. Learning the trade alongside him." I ignored the rest of the Empire Eighty-Eight as I walked up to Hookwolf. He was a fearsome sight, already bulking out into his metallic battle form, but I was more angry than scared. "You're gonna give that back right now, or shit is absolutely going to get real."

He looked at me for a moment, then he hit me with the hammer.

The necklace flared indigo as it absorbed the impact, but to my disappointment, it didn't explode Hooksy into a million shards of bloody shrapnel, or even send him flying. I was the one who was slammed backward, rolling across the floor until I hit the far wall. It blew out, of course, but I stopped first.

"Well, that was a bit underwhelming," Hookwolf said, looking down at the hammer. "Hey, Alabaster, hold still a moment."

"What? Why?" Alabaster frowned, then the penny dropped. "Uh, you think that's really a good—"

Holding the hammer in one hand, Hookwolf hit him almost casually with it. I wasn't entirely sure what he was expecting, maybe for Alabaster to be thrown back against the wall like I'd been. Instead, he got the Brandish treatment. There was a brief flash of indigo light and Alabaster exploded, like someone had shoved a live hand grenade up his ass and pulled the pin.

Make that two or three grenades; Alabaster went everywhere. It was actually pretty impressive.

"Jesus fuck!" After wiping some of Alabaster out of his eyes, Hookwolf stared at the hammer with a whole new level of respect, while the rest of them looked around as though they expected their teammate to just pop up again out of nowhere.

Off to the side, Othala gagged as she evidently realised what had happened. "I got some in my mouth!" she choked out, before she started throwing up.

"Give me that!" Kaiser, now wearing his trademark armour, reached for the hammer. "What were you even thinking?"

"That it wasn't turned on or something," Hookwolf protested, reluctantly giving up the weapon. "She took it okay."

"That's because she's his daughter, you inconceivable moron," Kaiser hissed. "Do you honestly think he'd give her a weapon she could be hurt by?"

All eyes turned to me; I carefully didn't look down at the pendant Dad had given me. I did, however, start belatedly gathering more bugs together. Making them bite people was plan A, while making them blow the shit out of people was also plan A. Call it plan A plus.

But if Dad came down here and saw that I'd lost the hammer to the Empire Eighty-Eight, I'd never live it down. So I had to get it back. And it seemed that even Hookwolf swinging it couldn't do much more than pinball me around; the pendant would save me from harm to anything but my dignity.

But I was totally done with assholes taking my shit and playing keep-away with it. "Hey, Kaiser," I said. "I'm gonna need that back. Hand it over right now, and I won't shove it up your ass and light you up like a road flare."

He hefted the hammer as he looked around at me. "You already tried to kill me once, girl. What makes you think I'm going to let you have a second chance at it?"

I was all out of fucks to give. "You're a villain in Brockton Bay. The fact you're not running for the city limits as fast as you can means you are gonna die. Nothing you do or say is gonna change that, so why be an asshole about it?"

Hookwolf let out a derisive bark of laughter. "Christ, girlie, you've got stones bigger than your father's. Do you even have a name?"

I shook my head. "I'm not like you. I don't have the urge to play dress-up, to put on a face that isn't mine. Now, I've asked you to give me my hammer back three times. I'm done asking."

"Oh, the fuck with this!" Crusader pointed his spear at me. "Just fucking kill her already!"

Kaiser shook his head. "Not a great idea. Any attack that hits Ragnarok bounces back on the attacker ten times over. I'm guessing she's got something of the same going on."

"But Hookwolf hit her with the hammer and he's still here!" Crusader turned to look at me, and I saw it happen. I'd seen it before and I'd probably see it again, but never quite so clearly as right then: the birth of a Truly Stupid Idea.

"It's her hammer, you ignorant fuck," Hookwolf reminded him. "You think it wouldn't be shielded against whatever the effect is, in case she accidentally hit her dad or something?"

"Don't call me ignorant! I know it's her hammer! Kaiser, give it to me for a second!" Crusader's eyes were alight with the fervour of his plan. It was clear as day to me: he thought he'd figured out a loophole.

Loopholes, Dad had once told me, were a great way to stick your neck out and get it chopped off.

"I wouldn't bother trying to hit her with it," Kaiser advised, handing over the hammer with more than a little reluctance. "Hookwolf tried, and it only knocked her around."

"And if you knock me off the building, I'll only blow a hole in the sidewalk, then I'll be right back up here," I added. "I will come after you, and I'll kill every one of you."

"Not if you're dead." Crusader looked around at his comrades. "Watch this."

"You forgot the 'hold my beer' part," I jeered. I had quite a few bugs gathered now. Hiding a bunch of them behind my back, I fired them up with the indigo glow. Whatever Crusader did now, I was going to get the hammer back.

"Shut up." He did something that pulled all his ghosts back into himself, then made them come out again. This time, they were carrying replicas of the hammer. "This thing hits really hard, and my ghosts bypass normal protection, so fuck you. You're going to die."

"You're forgetting one thing." I braced myself, knowing I'd get one chance at this before I had to call on Dad for help, which I'd never hear the end of.

"Yeah? What's that?" He didn't bother to wait for my answer. Two of his ghosts rushed me, swinging their hammers.

I felt the slightest tap of impact, then the pendant flared indigo. Crusader's armour flew off in all directions and he was crushed and torn apart bodily, like he'd just come between the collision of an eighteen-wheeler and a diesel locomotive. Even as the hammer slipped out of his grip, I detonated the bugs at my back, rocketing me forward so I could snatch it out of the air.

Hookwolf grabbed for me on the way past, but I was pretty sure that was more a reflex move than a consequence of considered thought. Given the way his arm explosively shattered all the way up to the shoulder, I got the impression that he probably hadn't meant to. He was armoured up, so the explosion caused a spray of shrapnel in all directions.

Kaiser and Menja and Fenja were protected, and Cricket did some cool acrobatic-ninja bullshit to get out of the way, but Stormtiger took a big hit and so did Purity. Both of them went down hard, with what looked like critical wounds. Othala was another unarmoured one, but Victor got in the way at the last moment, shielding her from the flying razor-edged steel.

"Never fuck with Ragnarok's tech," I said, and tapped the hammer into my palm. "Okay, who's next?"

"Secure her!" shouted Kaiser. "Nothing damaging! Nothing even remotely lethal!"

"Make me invincible," Victor said to Othala. "Make it so nothing can hurt me."

I raised an eyebrow. "You realise that even if I can't hurt you, I can spread her all the way across Brockton Bay. Then, once she's dead, I can hurt you. Moron."

"Dizziness isn't lethal," hissed Cricket. "And I'm real interested in seeing what it is that's flashing under your shirt."

"Too bad," I sneered. "You can die in ignorance." Note to self: get Dad to figure out how to block the glow.

Pivoting, I hefted the hammer in both hands, prepping to piledrive Victor into the next county. As he came in, Cricket opened her mouth again. I wasn't sure what that was supposed to achieve, but the pendant flared and Cricket was blown backward. Everything from her sinuses down to her lungs erupted from her body, leaving her face and chest a cratered mess of bone shards and steak tartare.

I swung the hammer at Victor, but he got his hands around the haft and pulled it out of my hands. So I punched him instead, in the face. It didn't faze him in the slightest, but Othala went over backward with a cry of pain, blood spraying from her nose. When I tried to punch him again, he got behind me and put the haft of the hammer across my neck. He was bigger and stronger than me, and I didn't have the strength to stop him.

But that was okay. I didn't need it. Grabbing the hammer with both hands, I lifted both feet off the ground and drove them back against his kneecaps. There was a double crack of bone shattering, and Othala shrieked with pain as she collapsed.

Still, he had that thing up against my throat and it was starting to press pretty hard. I tried to elbow him in the ribs, but he swayed to one side. Menja (or maybe Fenja) came at me, and I kicked upward at her; my foot made contact and she was launched upward through the ceiling in a welter of blood and gore, leaving one armoured foot behind. I wasn't sure if she'd make it out of the building, but I didn't much care either.

I was tall for a girl, but Victor was taller. This gave me an idea but before I could implement it, the other Valkyrie ran at me. Screaming a name that sounded like "Nessa!", she swung a sword overhand at me, carving a huge gash in the remaining ceiling tiles.

By the time the sword came down on my head, she was scraping what was left of the ceiling, but she could've been at full height and it still wouldn't have helped her. The pendant flared, and what she would've done to me happened to her, only ten times as lethally. Shredded down the middle as messily as if I'd used a circular saw, her head more or less missing in action, she fell apart into two extremely rough halves. Her sword clattered to the floor.

I jerked my head backward, thumping it into Victor's armoured chest. It wasn't a serious impact between me and Victor, but it was for Othala. Already on the floor due to her shattered knees, she was slammed onto her back by an invisible impact that caved her chest in. Lying there with blood leaking out of her mouth and nose, she turned desperate eyes toward where I was still struggling with Victor, reaching out toward him.

Even without looking at her, I could tell the moment the light went out of her eyes and her body fell limp. I had the nails of one hand digging into Victor's wrist and the other on the haft of the hammer, and between one instant and the next, the texture of his skin went from as unyielding as granite to the consistency of marshmallow. It wasn't that I was super-strong; Dad had explained that to me. But while I was wearing the pendant, anything that had the potential to do harm now did a lot of harm.

He was strong and he was trained, but all the will in the world was useless when I plunged my nails through his wrist and ripped half of it away. Letting out an ugly sound of agony, he let me and the hammer go, and fell away to the side. He stared up at me from his knees as he nursed his ruined wrist, and I thought I saw something in his eyes change. About one second later, I realised what I'd seen was his eyeballs melting and dribbling from the sockets as he screamed—briefly—and clutched at his head before falling over.

I didn't even know what that was about, but to be brutally honest, I didn't care either.

As I turned toward Kaiser, hammer raised and ready, he broke and ran. I didn't really blame him; the rest of the Empire Eighty-Eight had tried their best against me and failed utterly. The only one left alive was Hookwolf, still missing the arm, but stepping between me and his boss all the same.

If this had been a movie, there would've been a tense standoff between me and Hookworm. Something along the lines of me saying 'let me past' and him knowing he was going to lose but saying 'I can't do that'. There'd be a fight, which I'd win, but it would delay me long enough for Kaiser to get away until the ultimate clash in the third act.

Like I gave a shit about dramatic pacing. A bunch of my glowing bugs flew straight into Hookwolf's face, burrowed under his mask, and blew his head clean off. I didn't so much as break stride as I ran past him.

For a guy wearing forty pounds of articulated metal armour, Kaiser was pretty damn fast on his feet. All I could think was, he must have had a lot of practice. He dashed out through a door and slammed it behind him; I heard the lock click.

Of course, he'd neglected to recall that I was carrying the Hammer of Oh Fuck, which doubled as the ultimate lockpick. I took the door off its hinges, and the frame clear out of the wall, without slowing down. As I reached the corridor, I saw him ducking around the corner.

I decided to take a shortcut, so I hit the wall in front of me and shattered a massive hole through into what looked like a server room. The servers looked really expensive but they were also really in my way, so I swung the hammer a couple more times to open a path. Amid more sparks than the Fourth of July, I reached the far wall, opened a hole there, and emerged no more than a few yards behind Kaiser.

There was no way he could get away now, but he was going for it anyway. He bolted down the corridor to the stairwell exit, and slammed the panic bar to open the door …

… only to find Dad looming in the doorway.

I had to admit, Dad could do a really good loom. He had the 'silent menace' thing down to a fine art, and the glow of his chest-piece just put the icing on the cake. Kaiser certainly didn't go any farther, and he'd been the uncrowned king of the Brockton Bay underworld for years.

"Really?" I asked. "You're stepping in now, when I've basically got this over and done? You know I would've caught him anyway."

"I know." He shrugged. "I was just thinking we could hurry things along. I've got a reputation to uphold, and this is dragging on a bit."

Kaiser stared from him to me and back again. "So you were here all along?" he demanded. "Why didn't you step in earlier?"

Dad shrugged. "She called dibs. As childish as that might be—"

"Hey!" I objected. "It's a perfectly valid claim!"

He rolled his eyes. "And childish. But anyway, what sort of a father would I be if I didn't step back and let my daughter cut loose once in a while? So here we are." He turned to me. "Anyone left?"

"Only Krieg, I think." I frowned, thinking. "And Rune. Maybe Night and Fog. But everyone back there's either dead or dying."

Dad nodded. "Good. Okay, finish this and we can get going."

I grinned and hefted the hammer. "Okay, Kaiser. Any last words?"

"Wait, wait, you don't have to do this." Kaiser raised his hands in supplication. "I'll turn myself over to the PRT. Testify to everything the Empire's done. Work at fixing the damage."

Dad snorted. "Do we look like heroes to you?"

While Kaiser was looking at him, I swung the hammer. It hit Kaiser in the chestplate; there was a massive flash of indigo light, and a CRACK of the sonic boom as he went out through the wall. More precisely, all the walls. I wasn't sure all of him had made it out of the building, but I didn't much care either.

"Empire Eighty-Eight, done," Dad said, taking out a notepad and drawing a line through one entry. "We can mop up the remnants later. Coil next?"

I raised an eyebrow. "Do we even know where he is? The notes said he was fairly tricky."

He smiled in a way that boded ill for anyone crossing him. "They also said he was suspected of using minor gangs as his catspaws. Shall we go talk to them?"

I grinned in reply. "Let's do that thing."



End of Part Eight