The mass of hooks and spikes that Hookwolf had become paused. Seated deep within, protected by a screen of whirling blades, a torso emerged.
"Who?"
"As you said, I put the word out throughout the gang. Others would hear — not all of our rank and file are as committed to the cause as they should be, yes? And of those others, who would dare to strike at us together?"
"Lung. You're mad if you think you can beat him in a fight."
The villain in question continued his walk toward them, just slightly over a block away by now. He still looked entirely human… for now. And, depending on when his improved senses kicked in, he might already be able to hear them.
"Herr Hookwolf, you have a touching fondness for straightforward conflict. It has its uses. But, if you have an enemy you cannot beat in a fight? Then do not fight him."
Cricket's head was fixed on the approaching Lung. Had she heard him? Over the argument? She tapped Hookwolf's steel leg twice.
Everyone turned to face the walking man.
"And here's our guest now." Krieg's smile broadened, and he raised his voice to carry. "Lung! Careful with the flames, yes?"
Cricket and Hookwolf turned to stare at him momentarily.
I didn't blame them.
The fact that Night and Fog weren't staring was either proof that they knew what he was up to, or proof that they were just that cold. He fiddled with a radio a moment, then said "Ready, Fenja?"
A burst of static and noise indistinguishable to my swarms' ears answered.
"Excellent." He interlaced his fingers, stretched them out before him, shook his hands, squared up to Lung, and gestured upwards, pulling.
Lung launched into a high arcing trajectory, flailing in the air as he went. Fenja, atop her squat cylinder, surged to her full height — but with shield and sword still slung. Little cracks of fire detonated among the E-88 group as Lung passed over, Krieg turning to track him visually, hands making small movements to direct his flight. In the four or five endless seconds that Lung flew through the air, I heard a faint sound through my insects.
Krieg was humming.
Beethoven's Ode to Joy.
Finally, he shoved both hands to the right, and Lung, some fifty feet above the ground flew toward Fenja. She caught him with both hands, and slammed him down through a hole at her feet, before shutting a hatch over it and twisting the lock.
Krieg turned back to Hookwolf and continued in an unruffled tone. "Do not permit him to gather his strength, and he is just another Brute, no?" He glanced at the squat tower that Fenja was even now leaping off of, waited a few heartbeats, and then smiled again. "Though cunning enough to not activate his flames immediately in a strange situation." A quick double tap of his radio was answered by another double burst of static, and then a triple.
Gesturing grandly to the south, he spoke. "Shall we adjourn to the biergarten I have rented for the evening? The facility to my left is where they store the bunker fuel left over from when the port was in operation, and at some point either Lung will try his flames… or a breach will be detected, and Victor's explosives will go off. A sight like that is better enjoyed from a distance, yes?"
"Victor's with you now?" Almost a snarl.
"Fear not for your wounded Stormtiger. Victor is… not so much with me as against Lung."
Hookwolf shook himself as he shrunk back down. "You really think that'll kill him?"
"Ah. As to that, I cannot say." The smile again, broad beneath the gold-rimmed circles of his sunglasses. "But I am willing to find out! And to try again, as may be necessary."
Hookwolf nodded, greasy hair spilling over his mask. "You know it looked a lot like you stabbed Kaiser in the back, at the end." His voice was casual.
"I know you think that of me. Just as I suspect Purity, or whomever her source really is… if there ever were a 'source' other than Purity." Krieg's hands were behind his back now, and he stood in parade rest.
Fenja jogged up to group, nodding to Hookwolf and Cricket. Cricket nodded back, but Hookwolf never looked away from Krieg.
"Couldn't figure it. You're a lot of things, but I never figured you for a traitor. And not her, either." The same slow, casual, speech.
"Nor am I one. Might we continue this at the biergarten? Victor will have already started transferring additional fuel to that bunker, and the minimum safe distance is only getting larger."
Victor, here? On site? I began shifting swarms, angling for a look at the man in the office, searching out other places.
"You were always the planner. Why didn't we try this the first time?" His voice, his body… he could have been discussing the weather. But his eyes! They burned.
Krieg bowed his head briefly. "The Kaiser of honored memory rejected this plan. He sought something more public, more dramatic, more personal… and with less collateral damage. And so I gave him a second plan. And it should have worked!" With the last sentence, Krieg's voice had risen for the first time I'd heard. "If only Oni Lee had truly been dead, if only we'd been a minute faster in using the crane, if only Kaiser hadn't been thrown into the air by someone…" His smile now was wider than a human's mouth should go, and had nothing of joy or happiness in it. "Who will receive their just due in time…"
He sighed, a long gusty exhalation.
Well, Krieg was on my list anyway — the fact that he'd kill or torture me if he could wasn't really going to move him higher on it. The kind of thoughtful planning he'd just showed would and did, though. Seeing that Lung couldn't be fought successfully, and seeing how to beat him without fighting… I'd have to learn from that. Krieg wasn't dangerous because of his power. He was just dangerous.
And if he did manage to kill Lung, that would move him up further, by simple process of elimination.
My insects saw up the white van returning from the south, a dozen blocks away. Krieg's ride.
Another swarm got a look in through the sole tiny window: the man in the office was indeed Victor. I had felt him, but not recognized him, just as I'd seen Oni Lee and looked right past him the last time the Empire tried to ambush Lung.
Something to work on.
It wasn't enough to see everything, I had to understand it too. Or I'd keep getting caught out on things like that.
Fine.
So what did I need to understand? The situation was that the Empire had arranged a truly titanic improvised bomb, thankfully in a part of town where few lived. Even so, could I disarm it? I could use my insects at maximum range, probably safely… for me. But the bombs were, per Krieg, set to go off on tamper in order to fail-deadly to Lung.
Maybe. Insects could in smaller places than you might think, Victor was no Tinker, and I was pretty sure standard explosive triggers weren't designed to resist intelligent swarming insects.
Maybe.
But I wouldn't bet on it.
Cricket tapped Hookwolf's shoulder.
He half-turned. "Hear something?"
"Opposite."
His eyebrows rose.
Mine did too. I checked through my swarms.
Nothing.
Should I detonate it early? Try to catch most of the Empire's parahumans in the blast?
No. Krieg had picked his position not knowing whether Lung would light up the bunker on being tossed in — he planned for that, and expected to survive it. The only one it would be sure to hit would be Lung, and maybe Victor… and I agreed with Krieg that leaving him out of the fight as long as possible, filling the bunker as much as possible, was the way to go when fighting him.
Even then, it might not be enough.
Victor was isolated, and while he probably could do that 'kill a fly with your chopsticks' trick, I was pretty sure he couldn't effectively fight his own weight in bugs. Or ten times that, if necessary. If I wanted to try and kill him, I didn't need to set off the bomb.
Should I try to kill him? He was on the list. The Empire he served had done a tremendous amount of harm to the people living here. But… deliberately killing someone, in cold blood would be something new. Bakuda I'd killed in a cold rage. Oni Lee I'd killed in self-defense. Kaiser… Kaiser I'd jostled at a critical moment. But even then, I didn't know whether he would kill Lung or Lung would kill him.
All the innocents, and the ABB members too, who died when Bakuda's deadman switch went off… I hadn't had any idea that I was sentencing them to death when I killed Bakuda.
And yet… I told myself I wouldn't let things get that far. That I'd cut problems down before they got that bad. Did that mean having to kill in cold blood? Could I restrain him, call in the Protectorate? Force him to disable his own precautions? Or… was that the wrong calculus?
Was the death of Lung well worth the kind of damage this would involve? Should I rejoice, that my foes fought among themselves?
My internal debate was interrupted when Krieg's white van, one block from the waiting group, launched itself almost straight up, pinwheeling into a nearby building.
What?
A shimmer where it had been, and suddenly there was an enormous monster truck with a cowcatcher sized for Fenja, roaring like a dozen ships' diesels, and glowing with neon lines of lights everywhere, with two enormous man-shaped figures clinging to the sides. A vaguely man-shaped giant, who looked to be made of sand. Mush? A robot, or man in bulky powered armor. An unknown, but I could guess that he'd hit hard.
It was being conned more than driven, with a large open platform atop it, carrying what looked like cannons… and two people. A man in a cape — not one of the ones who could pull it off. Skidmark. A woman, overweight and underdressed, at what looked like a ship's wheel and a panel of levers and buttons. Squealer, the Tinker whose singular lack of taste led to… this. And probably to me being blindsided: apparently she could manage an invisibility / inaudibility field if she wanted.
Tinkers.
The truck drove most of the way through the intersection before coming to a stop, Empire capes diving out of the way. The Harley crunched under one of the tires and emerged a crumpled piece of scrap.
I stood, and stepped outside my little hide. Should I try to intervene in the fight? Or consider this chaos success enough? No bystanders that I could sense, really. A few at the very edge of my range.
Skidmark shouted through a microphone. "Steal what's mine? Pay up, assholes!"
One strand of my attention registered the profanity-laced rant that followed while another noted the quick aside between Krieg and Hookwolf.
"Dead?"
"And quickly. Nearby conflict might revive our first guest."
Hookwolf nodded in reply, and metal sprang up all about him.
Fenja erupted to her full height, sword snaking out toward the armored man. It glanced off his forearm, and he continued moving toward Night, who was backing up. Fog had already gone gaseous, and was rising, drifting toward the platform. Hookwolf also leapt for it, leaving Krieg alone against Mush, landing on the blue-glowing edge and being launched back off. Cricket… Cricket was moving at a deceptively swift run towards me.
Super-senses of some kind. Probably hearing, from what Hookwolf had said earlier.
Well.
Next time there's a fight, go for the sensor first. Fighting from range, through my swarms, wasn't going to do me a lot of good if someone could just find me. Of course, I didn't remember Cricket's wiki entry listing her as having superior senses, just very quick reaction times. I had a brief mad vision of trying to update it accordingly and being told that I needed to cite a published reliable source, since original research is deprecated. She was moving more quickly than I could, and my Vespa was a few blocks away.
So… fight it was.
I diverted one of my rooftop swarms to her path, pacing it, and then falling down to engulf her, directed them to sting and bite.
A booming noise sounded out, and I took a moment to focus on the main fight. Fog was attempting to drift onto Skidmark and Squealer, but being blown back by something. Skidmark's power at work? The metal man was methodically slamming Night into the ground. Fenja was flat on her back, and actually injured. Squealer's cannons? Hookwolf was ripping at a steadily deflating Mush, who was flailing ineffectually. And Krieg? Krieg was on his feet and smiling. He reached out both hands and pulled: Skidmark flew toward the edge of the platform. On reaching the glowing bands of his own power, he only accelerated. Another pull produced a similar result with Squealer, though the truck started moving slowly forward and to the right.
Unenhanced humans could survive falls of twenty feet, or indeed considerably more. Sometimes even if preceded by being flung headfirst into a wall at those speeds. In the middle of combat like this… neither of them would make it out.
Then I lost resolution, my bugs scattering. Some kind of sound, disorienting them. Centered on… Cricket.
Wow.
Had she gone out of her way to hide her real powers?
I admired that a little, even as I thought about how, exactly, I was going to go hand to hand with a pit-fighting veteran and live. Hide? Hope she couldn't sense and disrupt at the same time? Disrupt her concentration, and try bugs again? Try to win with tools alone?
While I was thinking about that, my hands dove into my backpack, retrieving the taser and the baton, which I promptly shook out to its full length.
She rounded the corner and I raised the taser. I couldn't get the bugs to obey me right now, but I could still sense them. And that meant that I could mentally draw a perfectly straight line from my hand to any of the bugs still on her. More: I could use all the bugs on her, refine my targeting. I aimed to split her beltline — one dart above her belt (if she'd been wearing one); one below — and fired.
She spun her kamas and knocked the darts out of the air with the blades.
She didn't even break stride to do so.
So, I guess at least the wiki information about her having inhumanly fast reflexes was accurate.
I dropped the taser, one-shot wonder that it was.
Well. Plan A: 'don't get found' was a bust. Plan B: 'bugs!' not working. Plan C: 'taser' also no-go. Plan D… working on plan D.
If I got out of this, I was going to have better contingency plans.
I readied my baton, and swung as she closed with me. A sharp impact to my left hand, followed by a series of blows. The good news was that the costume was still knifeproof, and Cricket didn't have some kind of super-sharp blade power up her sleeve (though at this point, I would not have been surprised). The bad news was that the experience was exactly like being beaten all over with some heavy sticks, by someone strong and vicious.
Sparks flared across my vision as one of my lenses cracked under a particularly heavy blow, and I tried to fall back under her assault.
To buy space, buy time.
She let me, slowing into a slinky walk that was as much performance as gait. I continued crabbing backward, opening the range to just over ten feet while I thought.
Why?
She liked to play with her victims, to play to the crowd. Habits from pit-fighting?
Memories of Sophia, of Emma, of Madison of being someone else's toy to torture rose up, were discarded in the urgency of the moment. I needed an answer now, and badly. She would disassemble me in close combat. Any ranged attack would be knocked aside. My bugs were useless. No one else was near enough to intervene… and actually, everyone else in the area was an enemy anyway.
Working solo could have issues, apparently.
What did that leave me with?
I scrabbled in my pouches with my working hand. Pepper spray? Range of 5-8 feet. Dodgeable, given her unearthly reflexes. If she could chop taser darts in mid-air…
There. My hand closed round two hard twists of paper, and I stood. She kept to her pace. I threw, and the kamas blurred, slicing the paper apart… and spreading the pepper within.
She burst into a series of uncontrollable sneezes… and my bugs stopped feeling/hearing that disorienting noise. I set the ones on her to biting. I sent the ones on me to join in, as I limpingly jogged past her. She'd dropped to the ground, apparently having difficulty fighting the bugs and the sneezes… but my window wouldn't last long, and she was unlikely to fall for the same trick twice.
I grabbed the taser, and turned back to Cricket. Three hobbling steps, and I jammed it into the small of her back and pulled the trigger, holding it down while the battery discharged.
Eventually, it ran out, leaving me standing over an unconscious woman.
My precautions against Bitch's dogs tracking me turned out to be more widely useful than I'd thought.
Fine.
Lesson learned.
Prepare more contingencies.
While I dwelt on that lesson and picked up my baton, my swarms showed a picture of the intersection: the Empire was victorious. The armored man was skating away on what looked like steam-powered roller skates built into his armor, the other Merchants were smears on the ground — literally — and every Empire cape in the intersection looked upright and uninjured. Even Night, who last I saw had been nearly dead. She had healed herself? In that short space of time when I didn't have eyes on her? She was supposed to be a Changer, so it wasn't impossible.
I dragged Cricket off the street, handcuffing her to a fencepost. I could call the PRT for pickup later, when half of E88 wasn't standing there ready for another fight.
Well, the Merchants had been broken tonight. I wasn't sure why they'd charged in like that, but I couldn't complain about the results.
I was halfway back to my scooter when a bright light threw my shadow out before me.