Athwart History (Closed)

[CurtailedAmbrosia]

He’s hit with the blast and he’s certain it’s singed his eyebrows-but the gnawing, thousand pinpricks burrowing into his flesh ceases, the disgusting things falling away from him, some still caught in the sticky blood-deeper than he thought. The risk of infection was high the wounds burn, and it has nothing to do with the short heat blast. He’s never heard of so aggressive an insect anything aside from those killer African ants-Vanessa steps up beside him and he ignores her worried whatever she says-eyes moving to the dirt pile that had downed the fly. It doesn’t so much as shift.

“My six.” Is all he says to Space Contortionist as he raises the stones from the pile, particularly the boulder he’s been using this whole fight to lethal results. He leaves it resting for the lighter projectiles, slings them through swarms-Vanessa’s distortions increasing the speed at which they travel.

"VIP sighted!"

Tectonic freezes mid swipe of the dead maggots, head snapping up and over as Backdraft also half turns. Modal was alive? His muddy green eyes narrow on the grievously wounded, half decaying figure. He won’t make the flight home, these things have done a number on him. He looked-

He looks…

Tyler snaps to attention, a barked “Barry-” But too late, something bursts out of Modal’s chest before he can even finish the order to return, chomps down on Barry’s left arm.

The stone projectiles drop out of the air and Tectonic starts forward same as Ashley does-but Blaise beats them all there, as primed for violence as ever. More bugs burst from the hole and Tectonic makes an impatient gesture with his right hand-the boulder raising and flying through a slew of them, snapping through one of the distortions to catch and slingshot three of the beetles, turning them into paste against what was left of Modal’s house.

Another of those damned things comes down and the ground rocks beneath them-he steadies Vanessa and then points back towards the barriers as El Cid cuts half the legs on the thing.

FUTILE.

Tyler’s stoic, flat expression shifts, a flicker of surprise-and then disgust. The boulder flies from the house, lifts- “With our target dead, I can stop up that goddamned hole-” the rock comes crashing violently down through the hopper with Vanessa’s help- just as Barry is kicked into the open door of the bunker.

Mother fucker.

There’s an explosion of air as more of the humanoid, two legged things pour out of the popped corpse, Tyler already starting to trot backwards towards the gaping door and his howling comrade. He stomps and a short fissure opens that they tumble into-and then he turns to move for the bunker in earnest.

“Burn it all and let’s go.” He grounds out to Backdraft-and then he’s sprinting. He hears screeching and flames but doesn’t spare it much of a glance-dirt gathering to him again, packing tight even over his open wounds-not much of a golem this time but just a dirt packed human figure, a few inches of armor with stones about the size of his hand across the shoulders and down his arms, rebreather affixed to his face. This is armor he’s carrying physically rather than with his mind, and it slows him down a tad but offered weapons and protection as he reaches the stairs. Ashley isn’t far behind him, and Ness shortens the space so they get down there that much faster.

They pound down the stairs and it’s teeming with life-this is a bad idea.

But he’s not cutting Barry loose as a loss yet. The single word less spoken and more felt rings in his ears-which is probably exactly what Marrane wants. Psychological warfare-and he’s not falling prey to it one way or the other.

“We extract Barry, we nab Modal’s body, and we leave. I’ll bring the entire place down on the fuck’s head.”

“Barry!” Ash shouts as Tectonic stomps down and crushes bulbous masses beneath his dirt packed heel, a swathe of flames brightly lighting the space around one of the barriers. He heads for where the barriers seem to be coming down around-and keeps his companions firmly in his awareness.

 

[Obuzeti]

Barricade is putting his power to maximum use, sprouting walls from the ceiling that hammer down and paste whatever gets in their way. He's already constructed a half-ass maze in his efforts to keep himself safe - the centipedes he'd spotted above are down here, and they're unbelievably fast, skittering out of the way of his stone swatters. There's at least three, but the basement itself (some kind of underground garage) had collapsed into a series of narrow tunnels underneath in spots, and that means the most he ever saw were flickers of hot orange chitin and brown carapace, as they whir in and out of his sight faster than he can keep up. He manages to hold his own for about ten seconds and then one snakes out of a traphole behind him and about bites his shoulder in half, crunching down to the bone. He screams and punches at it and only manages to hurt his fist.

That's when Cid makes it down the stairs, stronger and faster than his students thanks to the power boost from the brand, and he saws the giant insect off right behind the head and then yanks that away with brutal expediency. The fangs tear out of Barry's flesh and he collapses to a knee as Cid swerves to stand over him, opening fire on another massive centipede with both sword and turret. "Man down! Backdraft, cauterize him, we can patch up later!"

Blaise comes down second, sliding down the stairs as if he's surfing, and he claps both hands onto the ground as soon as he makes contact with it. The floor underneath the winding insects goes pearlescent, their legs skidding from its surface and sending them crashing to the soil, easy targets.

Barricade groans and raises a hand then makes a fist - the tunnels the centipedes had been using clap closed with walls of solid rock, crushing one halfway along its length and leaving the squirming remainder flailing on the slick ground above. He takes a breath and sags back, already paling. Probably eight inches of his shoulder is just gone, chewed off by threshing mandibles in under a second. The bone is visible underneath, cracked along the length. He's deliberately not looking at it.

Cid glances around, tense. The ground is rumbling, but the only things in sight are the rapidly crisping centipedes. He doesn't like any of this catastrophe, but this has the chance to turn apocalyptic. "Tectonic, seal the ground underneath us. Nothing gets through."

 

[CurtailedAmbrosia]

There’s blood everywhere. It’s even worse than when Lyndis had had that arm break, jagged bone sticking through her skin. This looks like Barry had lost his pound of flesh.

God help him, God help all of them-her heart pounds in her chest and she can feel the panic starting to rise-but she’s better than that. Better than this. But not by much. Her hand comes down on his opposite shoulder and her eyes snap to his through her visor, tugging down her rebreather for just a moment.

“You’ll be alright-grit your teeth-” She says with firm confidence and then warning before her other hand lights up and comes close but not quite touching on his shoulder. The sickening scent of charred flesh makes her stomach turn-but it’s what they can do to keep him from bleeding out. Her eyes flick to fast moving chitin somewhere past and behind him. This was a terrible mistake, coming here. Who the hell cared about revenge in this nightmare? She just wants to get everyone out and home-which meant burning through the things still in the space with them.

Fine. That’s what she’s here for.

She rose to her full height and stepped around her fallen friend-and went to lay waste to the crawling nasties.

~*~

Blaise was doing his part, Backdraft was burning the shit out of another one of those centipedes not far from Barry and Cid, who was covering the opposite angle. Even Vanessa was proving her use, one of those strange, mind bending distortions lengthening the distance at the mouth of a tunnel. Their leader had recovered and was taking charge of the situation-which lets Tectonic focus, coming to a side wall and collapsing one, then two of the tunnels no one was covering. He closes his eyes and concentrates-a pulse through his fingers, his feet. The earth and stone beneath and around them, packs it tight, the ground tremoring due to more than the churning life around them.

Man sized somethings chew and claw beneath and to the right and he crushes them in by sheer dint of will, brow furrowing as he pushes his powers to the far reaches of his awareness and control. Quakes are easier. Far easier.

A pulse, and he’s aware of the earth even deeper beneath them, the disturbed and tremoring dirt. And then it reaches his sphere of awareness, the size of a bus and coming fast.

It’s coming so fast. “We need to move-”

And then it strikes the edge of the stone and packed dirt 40 kilometers beneath them and keeps on going. Tectonic recoils as if he’d been struck in the chest, a lurch of his lungs and stomach-it’s coming, it’s coming right the fuck now-

 

[Obuzeti]

Barricade's eyes roll into the back of his head as the scorching heat soaks into the exposed bone marrow and the nest of nerves there. He doesn't pass out, but what come through his lips is nothing dignified, a gobbling shriek of pain that buckles his knees under him, but he catches himself before he falls - face the color of fresh ash. His mouth opens and his eyes go glassy as he wavers, holding himself up by nothing less than sheer force of will. His hand instinctively pulls up a barrier to hold onto at waist height.

It's what kills him.

Blaise hears Tectonic's warning and shifts, the air gaining a faint shimmer as he rockets away. He pulls Tectonic and Backdraft with him, one over each shoulder, his feet gliding smoothly over the ground without resistance or acknowledgement of their weight for the brief moment of lift. Cid manages to shove Vanessa aside as well, and turns to reach for Barry, who's still steadying himself. His grip on the barrier keeps him stable.

The ground opens underneath him instead, a pit a dozen feet wide, and a fang-filled maw comes up and through where Barry is. It closes on him, and there's a split second of a noise like a cat being gutted before it smashes into the ceiling and splatters blood for ten feet in any direction.

The thing is all trunk, seamless earthworm segmentation but thicker and tougher and a thousand times longer. The body bulges and swallows. Then it draws back and looks at Cid, with that mouth of blood-stained fangs. There's bits of meat strewn in between the ivory teeth, and strips of kevlar. And there, in the very back of the throat, amid the darkness of flesh, is a glowing amber eye, too bright to seem real. Like a flashlight, a reverse image burned onto the brain.

It speaks.

▂▂▃▃▄▄▅▅

Cid, frozen in time and staring at the bits of Barry still caught in the thing's mouth, takes a bolt of sick yellow lightning in the chest that throws shards of metal flying and drives him through the air into a rolling tumble across the ground. The brand on each member of the team flickers and goes dim as his control lapses, his body jerking and convulsing with horrific arcane energy.

Another centipede slithers down the staircase out of the bunker, blocking most of the ambient sunlight. Rather than attack, it turns and winds back on itself, blocking the exit with its own body, squirming as it tries to make a tighter fit.

 

[CurtailedAmbrosia]

Backdraft blasts some kind of spider or ant or-she’s no fucking expert, something she barely glimpses around the blinding edges of her flames, something with too many legs and about to die. Marrane had this place on lockdown-she can only imagine he’d been burrowing in the vicinity for a while before finally striking, forcing Modal into his bunker, to call for help-only for the things to tear through it. She’s seen villains and their work before, but not...not people dying. He killed Modal. That broke the rules. Rahab had been a beast, though, and Marrane-god, these monstrous fucking bugs. Some kind of sentient being existed, though-she had heard it speak. Futile...

”We need to move-”

The earth rumbles as she takes a step back-flames cutting off as she nearly takes a spill, turning to see if they were retreating. ““Well stop with the quake and we can-” Tyler lurches, a flitting look of pain and a slight curling-and then Blaise is there, half clotheslining the both of them effortlessly. And then the ground she’d just been standing on explodes and her absolute worst nightmare occurs right there, right the fuck in front of her eyes. She hears Vanessa scream, but her own dies in her throat as her jaw dropped in shock, honey colored eyes wide with horror behind her visor.

No. No, no, no, no, they were all going home. They were all supposed to go home!

God. Oh God. Maybe none of them were going home.

Ashley sucks in a short breath and fights back on her own hysteria, fingers tensing on Blaise’s arm as her eyes snap to him. What was he, eighteen? Nineteen? His time as a Ward had been spent locked up in his own Wing, a pariah to end all pariahs. And Vanessa? Twenty, Tyler had said.

Beside her, Tectonic is unnaturally still in this strange, twilight moment that seems to stretch on forever, his face slack and his eyes rooted to the thing before he his expression firms-and suddenly she’s fifteen years old, having failed to convince her hot headed, older friends to stay put, to follow orders, to please, God, please don’t go out there to die-watching the wreckage on a television screen beside a stoic, seemingly unfeeling Tectonic.

And then time collapses on itself again, crackling yellow lightning striking out and hitting the knight straight in the chest, a second scream from Vanessa-she feels a loss, a brief groggy feeling and some of the heat leave her fingers-and then a striking moment of clarity in all the chaos. She’s not fifteen, she’s twenty fucking three, and she’s not going to let this awful thing take anyone else. No more monsters, no more death, no more anything.

She ducks around Blaise and feels the heat behind her eyes, in her chest-and blasts the fuck straight into that nasty mouth and past those bloodied, kevlar and flesh strewn teeth-for the eyeball, for Barry’s pyre, for justice and right and good in the face of what had to be pure evil.

~*~

Vanessa scrambles over to El Cid, hyperventilating and scared out of her mind. It’s never been this bad, this crazy. They go to face some guy in a mall, they beat him up, they shake hands with the police and get their photos taken-and then they’re done. She can’t even fully process what she had just seen, choking on her own panicked, hitching breaths.

Someone is stuttering through prayer and it’s an entire minute before she realizes the words are tumbling nonsensically from her own lips, remembered and instinctive despite it being five years since she’d set foot in a church. The Knight jerked and twitched with spasms, his armor twisted open and smoking even as she places a hand to his chest.

”Get to the stairs! Ashley shouts over the din of flames and screeching-and legs. Vanessa glances wildly around-and then behind her at the tunnel she’d previously been guarding, just in time to see a dog sized ant come for them both mere feet away. She threw out a hand an a distortion, tears still streaming down her face as she keeps the ant-oh God there’s more-off both of them.

She hadn’t noticed at first because of the light of Backdraft’s flames-but the sunlight that had been shining through the entrance wasn’t there anymore-and another of those horrifying centipedes, the things that had torn into Barry’s shoulder-

“C-can’t get out that way!”

Oh God oh God-they’re going to die. They’re all going to die.

Tectonic was suddenly there, a rock slinging around her distortion and rocketing through the ant’s head, splattering sickening green something against the wall of the tunnel-which then collapses with a rumble. The veteran assesses Cid but has no idea what he was just hit with or what the hell could be done for him in the meantime-he just hauls him up part way and pulls him away from the side wall, turning to the panic stricken girl he’d brought into a warzone. “You stay, you keep shit off of him, off of you.” He says flat and firm, strangely calm in the chaos. She nods as she sinks down beside their leader, tear streaked and now moving from hysterical to shell shocked. A distortion ripples into life in an arc over the pair, and now he gets to work on an exit-after a failed attempt to dislodge the the centipede with an earthen punch-only to find more resistance and potentially-a stairway full of the fucking things.

The packed earth drops in a pile at his feet and he steps toward the sidewall-a hard impact as if the man controlled a wrecking ball mallet, dirt shoving in about two feet. He moves again, and another impact, another two feet. By the third he’s satisfied even as he twists to knock into a tunnel-before he lets the dirt cascade down in a torrent, directing it around him and into that network of tunnels, hurtling insects further into the deep and the dark while at the same time packing on armor again, readying himself for another fight.

He doesn’t think about Barry. He only thinks about the soldiers still remaining and how he can get them out now, before another casualty happens. Thinking was for later, survival was for -now-.

 

[Obuzeti]

The brand falls off Blaise and he shakes it off like a dog throwing water from his fur, then snarls right back at the horrid thing that had just eaten one of his own. When Ashley steps up and throws fire down its throat, he reaches for a version of his power he's only ever used in training, and reduces the friction of oxygen inside the thing's mouth just as the flames start to reach in. The resulting thunderclap of detonation starts inside of its head and chains all the way down its length, and probably would have killed them all with the force involved if Blaise hadn't magnified its skin friction to hold the shockwave inside of it. The clashing, destructive forces core the thing like an apple.

Then he turns, smooth as silk, reaches one hand to either side, and surrounds the area around their team in two overlaying friction fields separated by but an inch, hanging at shin height, One he decreases to zero; the other coefficient, he exponentially increases. Air and matter stops dead atop, and accelerates underneath. A vacuum field forms as the disparate speeds increase, and Blaise snarls as he torques the two fields, a drop of blood shimmering as it tracks down within one nostril.

The forces involved hammer anything not already on the ground into it, then drag it at accelerating speeds towards the exit he's left, the only open-air access: the stairwell. As the coup de grace, he raises the floor friction just in front of it.

There's a horrendous noise as the stairwell landing turns into the world's largest cheese grater, and Blaise feeds everything moving in the room that's not human into it. He staggers, afterward, and shakes his head again, then pops his knuckles almost out of habit. It clears some of the glaze out of his eyes.

Cid doesn't notice any of this, still twitching minutely on the ground.

The floor's been momentarily filled in between Tectonic's packing of the tunnels and Barricade's former barriers, but that can clearly change at any time. Blaise inhales and drops to loop one of Cid's arms over his shoulder, lips going thin as residual shocks tremor through his system. "Trade out," he says to Ashley, as he turns to head for Tectonic's escape route. "We take turns clearing. Maximum efficiency. No need to court Catalysis."

He glances down at Vanessa and jerks his head towards Tectonic, already carrying the other man's senseless weight.

Of course, that's when the ceiling of the bunker shatters in on the opposite side, pouring out a wave of enormous, thick-legged ants, each about the side of a large dog with vicious, evil-looking mandibles cocked back like bear traps. They skitter in a black wave towards their little group, and Blaise just turns back around and picks up the pace.

 

[CurtailedAmbrosia]

“Smart.” Backdraft says with strained approval to Blaise, her eyes still on the ruined corpse of the thing they had killed. She sees him stagger out of the corner of her eye, she’s concerned-but all she can think about is how quickly Barry had been killed, and how painful the last moments of his life had been up to his violent death.

Dead. He wasn’t going home. Not even in a body bag.

She finally glances back to Tyler.

“Waiting to see what the movement draws.” Is all Tectonic says as he continues to bulk up, manipulates earth. She’s not even really sure what the hell that means, eyeing the pile of shredded bodies at the base of the stairs-and then the ceiling tears open and she snaps back to attention, eyes widening at the sheer number of the things coming in, a flare of anger in her chest.

One of those, ANY of those could easily take a man’s leg off. It’s overkill. It’s all overkill, and she hates Marrane for it and for this trap, this cruelty. Killing Modal wasn’t enough? He had to wait for his would be rescuers? Barry wasn’t enough, he wants his friends too? Well fuck him. No more. None. She sucks in air with a hiss and lights the oncoming wave up. Her steady streams of flames widen, the scent of burned chitin and ant flesh heavy in the air as she cuts through the oversized colony. There’s so many, but she has enough burning flame for them all.

Her flaming fists come together in a clap before her-and from that impact a flame cyclone spirals into life, blue at the base and spiraling into yellow at the top. She fires it forward, watches as it carves a path of destruction and death, creates a symphony out of the popping trapped air and roasted insides within the armored shells. Somewhere beyond the space she sees it unfurl and she leaves a cleansing wall of yellow orange flames blazing so she can mow through what remained on their side of it, eliminating the onslaught solo and with prejudice.

The temperatures within the underground space were beginning to rise to dangerous levels. She might be heat resistant, genetically wired not to suffer a heat stroke-but her companions not so much.

~*~

It’s a fairly typical ‘day off’. Marie mysteriously had less for the team to do when Sarah came to visit, and since Jenna didn’t go on patrol in South Bend until later in the evening-the Coulee was currently a scene of restful relaxation for the hodge podge handful of heroes.

They were playing Scrabble on the coffee table, a Lord of the Rings movie on silent, subtitles on. It was Jenna’s turn and she was mulling over her tiles with a bit more care than usual. Judging by the rather full board, her own tiles, and Jenna’s contemplative look, Sarah felt she had a fairly good idea where the harder to place letters might be.

“This is the longest turn you’ve ever taken.” Lana levels from the edge of her perched seat, luminescent yellow eyes looking down the length of the coffee table and at the Filipina sitting cross legged on the floor across from her. In yet another pair of pajamas, these ones with little cats in hats all over the capri pants, and a shirt with cat ears, whiskers, and the word ‘Meow’ instead of a face.

Lana has never met Jenna’s mother, but she’s heard they were carbon copies of each other-and imagining the matching pajamas on the pair was both adorable and immensely silly.

“Well you told me to be slower.” Jenna says, picking up a tile, hesitating-and then putting it back down again, another frown on that bow of a mouth.

“No, I told you not to cheat.” Lana corrects.

“I wasn’t cheating, I was word scrambling.” She picks up another tile, bumps the one on the far right over-and slips it in between. Lana was decently sure that besides the empty, playful banter-Jenna was doing that just to mess with her.

“The rest of us can’t vibrate in order to scramble and unscramble five hundred words in a minute- so yes, that was cheating.”

“You can’t even make five hundred words out of some-most combinations, c’mon Lana.”

“Which you would know, because of all that cheating.”

Jenna cracked up, and Lana’s sharp toothed grin reappeared-and then vanished as the the speedster finally managed to spell out “quacks”.

“Are you serious?”

“If it quacks like a duck and walks like a duck and-”

“I wanted to play Pictionary.” Sarah reminds Lana serenely as Jenna dips into some sort of silly phrase or poem or song-she wasn’t sure which. Nearly the whole game, the speedster had managed to spell all bird related words-it was sometimes a stretch, but Lana had thought she’d finally run dry. Nope. She shook her head and gave Sarah a ‘suspicious’ look.

“You and Elias always win at Pictionary…probably because you’re cheaters.”

“How would anyone cheat at Pictionary?” Sarah inquires with a touch of laughter-and then felt a vibration against her hip. She was in costume today-usually was when it was a ‘surprise’ visit.

Sarah paused, reaching just behind the golden sash around her hips and to the more practical belt behind it, withdrawing her gold plated communicator, the Heroes Association one. Her eyes catch sight of the red blinking light and she stiffened. “The Tower.”

Glowing fingers fumble with the device as she rose to stand in a contrastingly graceful, fluid movement-before she finally manages to press in the side button.

“Daybreak? It’s Backdra-Ashley. It’s Ashley.”

“What’s happening? I’ll be right home-”

“Not the Tower.” The same rushed, strained tone. “I’m in the field with El Cid, with the Honor Squad. We’re beneath Modal’s house. He activated a distress beacon, but we were too late.”

Sarah’s eyes flick from the communicator to Elias, lips slightly parted and her brow furrowed-and then her attention snaps back to the little device as it chirps again.

“Now we’re fighting-” The last of what she says isn’t audible over whatever was going on on her end. The glow illuminating Sarah’s fingertips spreads, now enaminating softly all down her forearms and up to her elbows.

“Who?” Cid was there. She doesn’t understand why, she can’t remember the last time he’d been on the field-but then again, she’d paid so little attention to so much for so long- but Cid was there. She attempts to control her rising panic with that fact. “Fighting who?”

“Paul Marrane.”

“What?”

That tore it-Sarah was suddenly all sunlight, from woman to goddess in a flare of warm, glowing energy, holding fast to the communicator.

 

[Obuzeti]

Blaise starts to carry Cid out through the tunnel Tectonic had created, but the armored leader recovers and shrugs off the Ward's arm, turning with a vicious snarl towards the wave of ants. He's been upset, infuriated, irritated, but now he is apocalyptically angry, face flushed full red in what little can be seen of his cheeks and neck between the armor plates. He ignites his saber, jams it into a slot in his oversized shield, and then turns that sideways. A piston fires into the ground for recoil control, and then the entire front of the shield opens up into a massive emitter barrel. "HEADS UP!" he bellows, and then punches the red canister slotted into the underside of the shield.

It crunches and dumps about a petawatt of energy straight into the saber, overloading it and detonating it in a violent fission reaction that is channeled through ablative mirror arrays through the emitter barrel. What emerges is an ultraviolent blast of energy out of the visible spectrum; the effects are much more obvious, though, as everything in its path crumbles into constitutent cations and free radicals. He keeps the beam focused on the exit tunnel, disintegrating a hole right through the earth and into the free air beyond, corkscrewing it until the exit hole is nearly twenty feet across. Finally, the reaction fails and the shield ejects both the spent canister and the saber fragments.

"Ashley, cooldown! Vanessa, evac!" he barks next, shouldering past the younger woman as he unclips a second saber from his belt. The horde behind them is reduced, but still visibly coming even through the heat shimmers in the underground space. The air is baking hot - he's sweating under his armor. "Tectonic, rearguard on me! Blaise, carve a path!"

Blaise laughs, joyous, and turns to the exit path. Another monstrous hopper bounces into their way, seven feet tall at the overarching leg joints and with sharp, piercing fangs; the moment it lands, Blaise gestures casually at its legs. When it tries to launch off again, the ropy muscles that propel it audibly snap and tear as its entire body locks against itself, paralyzed by internal friction. The opposing forces are so powerful that the launching energy of the legs actually snaps two off like popcorn kernels inverting, scattering microscopic shards of chitin everywhere.

For a moment, things look good.

Then a blur of ivory comes through the bunker floor above them like a jackhammer, and opens too many fingers wide, curling in unnatural ways; an arm, not chitin but bone picked clean and shining, no flesh to be seen. A wave of distortion visibly pulses from it, and that pulse rings in their ears - and then detonates, like a little firecracker inside of their heads. Cid's helmet protects him, but Blaise immediately topples over with an agonized screech as his inner ear is crushed like an egg.

~*~

Elias, watching Sarah silently from his own seat on the couch, simply nods and rises. He strides across the living room to the corner table; there's a hat rack there, and it's been repurposed to hold a half-dozen teleporter rigs. He promptly slings one around his waist, not even bothering to change out of his flannel and pajamas, and then turns to Sarah.

"Get me some coordinates," he orders. "Rescue is on the way."

 

[CurtailedAmbrosia]

“They must have taken the Firebird, but I don’t know how to-”

“Modal’s house is located on 42.0667 degrees North and 85.1361 degrees West. Approx 906 feet above sea level.” The coords are delivered without preamble in a flat, terse growl from the small speaker that sat on the fireplace mantle, timely and exact as usual.

Sarah glances at it. Was the vigilante here or in Samson? How long had she-it doesn’t matter. She just needs to get there, and now.

“Hold on Ashley-we’re coming.”

Jenna had disappeared and reappeared in the time it took her to try and fail changing frequencies for Cid-and Sarah gives her a sharp look from within her glowing aura of light.

“You stay here, Jenna-”

“Velocity is a hero in her own right.” Lana corrects firmly, already on her feet and heading towards the back hall at a fast clip. “She’s one of us, here. Go, we’ll be right behind you.”

Jenna’s uncharacteristically quiet as she adjusts a pair of goggles she hasn’t seen before-they were still that mirrored silver paint, but looked more technical on the sides, a button or two that hand't been there before-but Sarah’s too panicked to argue or notice as she moves to her pajama’d best friend.

Paul Marrane. Her kids, her husband-fighting Paul Marrane.

“God help us.” She hears herself say as she reaches out for his arm. God, please. Not one of hers.

~*~

The ground rumbles and a second, uglier golem falls out of the dirt wall, half formed and rapidly solidifying-and launches itself at the arm, the earth on either side of…it crushing in above, or trying to. Whatever was coming through, it’s nothing good. With Cid alive and aware enough to give orders, Tyler can again focus on the fight-and the skeletal arm and Blaise’s instant pained reaction were all the invitation he needed.

Screeching in the far distance, back towards that wall of flame-comes a second wave of dog sized ants, this time with stranger nasties mixed in.

Ashley sees this as she hauls Blaise back up, (entirely too nervous about anyone standing or laying in one place for too long), and for a brief, very brief moment, she hesitates. The only job she’d been given was to hold on-but just holding on wasn’t going to get anybody home. Tectonic could tank the big stuff, but unless he could block them off or in, the smaller nasties would swarm around and-

“They’re trying to get in here too!” Vanessa’s warning is sharp and panicked, the girl reapproaching hysteria as she throws a distortion out and around the mouth of their exit.

“The flames are getting too hot for me to fight near any of you.” Ashley finally says to Cid. Blaise was injured, something with his ears-Vanessa couldn’t fight, and Tectonic was busy trying to keep the bigger monsters at bay, slow down the skeleton. It left the two of them. Her and Cid, and Cid had already taken a hit too many-how long before the next magic bolt dropped him for good? Another fanged worm?

Her gaze fixed as she steadies Blaise as best she can and takes a step towards Tectonic’s back. Her honey colored eyes are intensely focused behind her yellow visor, the strain and the panic and the anger fading into a near calm, grim surety. He’d told her to cool down, but there’s no time.

There’s just no time.

“But Daybreak is on her way. We only have to hold on until then.”

The sidewall sees a sedan sized ant bursting through, and the original golem, the one with Tectonic inside, twists to meet it head on, earthen hands catching and curling around each side of the open mandibles. The golem’s feet slide back a scant few inches before Tectonic seizes on what was now himself-and throws his impressive bulk forward to march the thing back three heavy steps. A pillar of earth shocks up at an angle to knock a smaller one aside, pin it’s squirming body and legs to the opening of the newly dug tunnel-and out pours a stream of foot long spiders that Ashley burns to puffed cinders. The golem’s arms jerk before steadily pulling away on the original, larger ants mandibles-ripping the ant’s head in half and slinging both the body and the partial carapace aside, seemingly oblivious to the licking flames at his heels.

More things are pouring in-the earth rumbles, fissures and quakes-and she accepts a forceful rolling toss to send her into the advancing second wave-where a plume of white blue flame immediately bursts into life.

 

[Obuzeti]

"She's fought Marrane before, and she has my trust," Elias says, and his voice is absolute. "If you need any other reason, she is the fastest medivac we're going to get."

He reaches out with either hand, one for Jenna's and one for Sarah's, before he twiddles his belt to the given coordinates. Light begins to faintly twinkle around his fingertips and in his hair. "I'm going ahead. Give me three seconds to clear an LZ, then follow."

Elias takes a deep breath, and then hammers a fist down into his own thigh. It audibly cracks and distorts, and his breath catches in his chest - but a blast of aurora coruscates down the limb a moment later, righting it into place, and the glow swells from a faint aura into an encompassing nimbus of starlight. His knuckles pop, and his teeth show. Without another word, he activates the teleporter and vanishes.

~*~

Blaise is struggling to contribute. His head feels fucking awful, and he knows for certain that there's blood trickling out both his ears along with some other fluid. He can't so much as put weight on anything without instantly losing his balance, and the world keeps tossing and turning every time he dares to roll over. It's the worst he's ever felt.

He snarls, and waveringly reaches up a hand, turning the ground ahead of Tectonic frictionless. The ants assaulting out of the side tunnel there abruptly lose traction and begin sliding in flailing piles at the mouth of the entrance there, giving the big golem as juicy a target as he can manage. The effort makes him want to throw up as the pain in his head corkscrews tighter. When the ivory arm punches through the roof, and tears it wide to reveal a spindly bipedal body with the spines and shells of a grasshopper, he just barely manages to laugh. Cid turns to fire off twin shots from his saber and turret, but it ricochets from the hole in the ceiling to the floor to dodge both him and the golem, and then flings something at Blaine so fast all he sees is the blur.

Then, with a faint pop and fizzle, Adamant appears in the way. The projectile bounces off his chest, revealing a shelled thing that uncurls into too many sharp legs and mouthparts, like an ugly, oversized tick. He's wearing plaid and pajamas, and there's some kind of fancy gadget slung 'round his waist - but on the other hand, the deadly light already dances around his body in a thick cloud. Cid and Marrane both pause for a brief instant and turn to look at him.

Adamant catches the half-formed golem by the shoulder as it staggers by him, lifts it, and swings it like a baseball bat. The earth composing it collapses halfway through from the horrific acceleration imposed, and turns into a shotgun blast of rocks and dirt that tear into the crowd of swarming ants in front of him, either launching them away or battering them into pieces. Then he turns to look at Marrane, and the insectile being hisses at him. The earth rumbles and distorts as tunnels form under the surface, more of his seething horde coming to their master's call: everything that slithers and crawls, a thousand variations all mutated and twisted, wrong and broken by malice from nature's form. The far edges of the room, in every direction the eye can see, begin to blur with motion. The dark crawls, alive.

"I," Adamant says, darkly satisfied, "am about to be your second biggest problem."

Then he steps forward, kicks up the louse-thing that Marrane had tried to hit Blaise with, and throws it. Halfway through the motion he explodes with light, and there's an instant of agonized squealing as the louse breaks the sound barrier and vaporizes, then ignites from air resistance. It crosses the space between him and Marrane in microseconds. What actually hits him is supersonic flinders heated to about a thousand Celsius from speeds approaching reentry. It's enough to make him flinch, and then Adamant is in his face. The older hero tanks one of those horrid lightning bolts to the chest, and then hits Marrane. The other thing takes the blow, but the shockwave is enough to blast Blaise into a short roll even twenty feet away, and he can hear Marrane tumbling away in a screeching mess, the crack of supersonic acceleration echoing again through the bunker.

And all Cid can do is stare, petrified, as his worst dreams come true.

 

[CurtailedAmbrosia]

“You three should go in higher than Adamant. Satellite imagery has a lot of movement on the surface.” Protagonists disembodied growl says.

Jenna’s hand reaches and squeezes Sarah’s. “It’s going to be alright.” She says softly. Lana returns mostly equipped, still pulling on a boot-and with a pop, the three women vanish from the safety of the Coulee and into the breech.

~*~

Deeper into the space than any of them, Ashley is single handedly tanking an army of medium sized monstrosities, torching everything that moves in spiraling infernos and walls of blue flame, fires so hot she’s cutting through the medium sized things that continue to throw themselves at her, drawn to the heat, drawn to her power, drawn to their death. Behind her rebreather her teeth are tightly grit together and her lips curled back in a snarl as she keeps the veritable army back.

Within her chest the heat is burning hot, power coursing through her as it never has before-and she pushes yet further, determined to turn all to ash and smoke, raze this army completely. She can feel it behind her eyes and in the pulse of her blood, each pump of her heart. No more. No more-they all go home, what was left goes home, they just have to hold on until rescue comes.

Over the din of violence and mayhem, screeching and crackling of flame-a screaming bell tone sounds over the rush in her ears, unmistakable and cutting both on the air and through the comm.

”Ashley, back off the flames-let me tank them, block them off-”

But then something else gets in his way, he’s beating it into paste, driving his fist down what he can make out of it’s gullet. It’s fangs scrape at the hardened dirt and actually manage to rake divets into the golem’s arm-which feels like daggers flaying his actual skin.

Something appears, lands heavy on the dirt floor near Blaise and Cid-and it’s not until he speaks and his voice carries through someone’s comm that he realizes who it is. It wasn’t just Daybreak that been called in-Adamant was here-evidenced further when the second golem was seized-and used as a club as he breaks connection with it just in time. Logistically, this was the best thing that could have possibly happened-he doesn’t care about whatever disaster it was, the forced cooperation of Wards and Cid with Adamant-he just wants to get his team out of here, get El Cid out of here-without him, the Tower falls apart. Without him, Sarah was a widow.

At the other end of things, the open air mouth of their escape tunnel, Vanessa feels like her head is splitting. Prayers weren’t even tumbling from her lips anymore-just ragged, pained starts and stops of air. “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t-” Vanessa falls to a knee and has one hand thick in her hair, pulling at it while her other one was held skyward, the entire arm violently shaking, muscles straining reflexively as her power works. But cracks are visibly appearing in that impossible distortion of reality-and then it shatters.

The implosion draws the surrounding insects and the girl into the same giant ball of writhing chitin and flesh-and then there’s a shimmering blue streak cutting through it that retrieves her, the fist sized bugs flying aside in her wake.

Velocity materializes some twenty feet away, struggling to support a rag dolled Vanessa, one of the girl’s arms pulled across her shoulders and the other snaked behind her back. Incongruously, the speedster had been holding a shovel, the blade sunk deep in the ground beside her.

Lana and Sarah arrive seconds after her. It’s a hell scape. Sarah takes in the devastation and the insects pouring from the various holes in the ground, the limp form of Space Contortionist-and all her panic, fear and dread turns to absolute fury. She kicks off and rockets skyward, blazing as brightly as the sun with a scream of rage-and solar flares burst forth out of her hands in an inescapable beam of cleansing daylight, utterly destroying the scratching, mandible snapping, disgusting insidious life racing for two of her kids.

Lana’s wetsuit and scales sparkle in that reflected lighting, an inch thick sheen of water coating her six foot tall, amazonian form. She sweeps her trident and the water spirals down the length of it, clearing the path of smaller insects before her as she pulls the weapon back, leaps-and drives it through the head of a dog sized ant. Jenna carefully lowers Vanessa to the ground-and then rockets to work in tandem with Lana, Atlantean and speedster covering more ground with lethal results-while guardian angel Daybreak cuts through the masses on her side of the field, flying over and firing beams of energy down through the tunnels where the things are spewing out.

From underground, rays of exploding light can sometimes be seen flashing from the dark reaches of the tunnel. Daybreak had arrived, and she was unleashing holy fury from above.

~*~

Rocks rocket out of the walls and ceiling in the twisted metal of the ruined bunker, and when the stairs clear with a concentrated beam of light from a supersonic aerial attack fired from Daybreak’s hands far above-his impossibly heavy boulder even comes blasting down the stairs before landing with a thud.

From within his tightly packed earthen body, Tectonic was providing things for the veteran Leaguer to throw, all while beating the shit out of some monstrous spider mantis hybrid with the rock tipped punches of the golem.

It’s paste in a hurry, and he drops and tramples over it as he barrels further into the cavern for Ashley’s position. He has no idea how much time there is between that note and Catalysis, and in the direct path and center of her flames, he can feel rock turning to magma. Seeds and organic matter burn in the earth around her. There’s something rising somewhere in his chest, but he dismisses it, because he has to keep his focus. Without his God like control of earth, he is just a man in a chewed through, torn costume, sandwiched and physically restrained by hundreds of pounds of dirt. And if he lost that giant of a body, he was decently sure the heat coming off of those flames would roast him alive without ever having touched him.

“Ash, back off your flames-” The ground beneath him shudders and he seizes on it-but it betrays him, the ground beneath him opening up into another maw. The stones at the edges of his club like arms spiral to the front and he throws them wide, stealing from the golems legs to do so-and punches into the flesh on either side of him, stomach rolling. He’s moving, disoriented as the thing twists and turns him upside down, then sideways-before he thinks he’s righted again. Flames cut through it, slice it open-and he lands hard, losing purchases and falling heavily onto his back.

They’ve fallen into the cavern the insects, giant worms, and he himself had created-and the golem reforms rather than physically raising itself, even larger now in the expanded space. Things are crawling over him and he tears them off and in half, the earth shaking violently in concentrated lines as fissures open beneath the teeming life and close up again, crushing what he can.

Somewhere behind him, Ashley is here too-and she’s still burning hot.

He almost orders her to stop again, but if she does-she’s dead. There’s so many hostiles down here, he’s barely keeping them off of himself-and flat failing. A wall raises on her right, he’s trying to block off what can get to her-and then the earth rumbles-and another worm tears through, this time striking the golem in the shoulder and the side of the golems chest-and pain rockets through his physical form as the armor is shorn away, his actual arm suddenly unfeeling and agony in his side bad enough he actually makes a rough pained noise, not quite a scream but definitely more than a pained grunt. The earthen form spins from the force of it, crumbles on the edges before he forces control, staggers back. And then an armored spider strikes him hard in the golems lower back. It wraps it’s legs tightly around what was left of the golem’s torso and its remaining arm and he goes down. Impossibly, the legs are tightening enough to crack and sink into him-and he can’t reform or escape, the dirt he’s tightly packed into the only protection he has-and there’s not much left of it on his right side, a mere two feet of hardened earth. The spider bites into the golem’s shoulder, and Tectonic mentally slaps himself for feeling it so vividly.

He is out of control, and the only remaining Junior League survivor was trying to burn her way to Catalysis.

~*~

Jenna zips down the tunnel with Lana-and then zips back to the bleeding Blaise. “You don’t look so good.” And without so much as a glance or acknowledgement of Cid, or permission from Blaise-she zips around behind him and spirits him out and to the unconscious Vanessa.

 

[CurtailedAmbrosia]

Through Jenna’s goggles, in the starts and stops she can actually see or process anything-how the hell was Jenna processing that fast, even?-Marie watches things unfold from Jenna’s point of view. Daybreak’s righteous beams of cleansing light, Lana’s vicious, powerful attacks-but she’s only getting bare glimpses here and there, because for the most part-it’s stretches of blurred everything faster than her eye-or the camera’s eye-can entirely capture. She’d slow it down later. For now, Jenna was her instrument of data collection.

Peter was here. It has Marie ready to cut the feed if something gets serious. He’s a fourteen year old boy. It’s counterproductive, but...he’s a fourteen year old boy.

But she doesn’t entirely like that she’s taking that into consideration. That uncomfortable, old winter jacket again.

She tenses when Jenna is suddenly underground in some kind of tunnel-but then the speedster is back out again, the boy in tow with blood trickling from his ears, a serious sign of injury-but from his movements, she guesses it’s his ears and not something worse. Two kids in a bad state so far. She’d seen a glimpse of Cid when Jenna had been in the tunnel, his armor was damaged. She can’t imagine what the hell he’d been hit with for that to happen.

She spares a glance at the recorded readings so far, Jenna’s energy use. Another monitor displays wireframe models in a 3D space, occasionally going black when the speedster moves too quickly. Her eyes refocus on the camera feed. She decides she doesn’t like this. She doesn’t know what El Cid was thinking-it’s not like him to go into anything blind. Sarah visiting Elias again had him potentially acting irrationally.

Elias always had been one of the very few things to ever inspire any sort of visible emotion in the bastard.

 

[Obuzeti]

Adamant glances over at the volcanic wasteland the young Ward had made of the area around her, crouches, and then launches off like a rocket. Unlike the others, he's not aerodynamic and has no way to move in the air, so really what happens is that he smashes into a nearby rock pillar, skids off, and lands in a bubbling magma pool of melted quartz. He doesn't so much as cringe as he wades out of it, skin raised and red and bleeding for a second before it fades, and instead focuses on Tectonic. The worm grinds and chews deeper into the golem protecting him, and Elias takes two long strides forward, seizes either side of its head, and without ceremony tears it in half up and away from its target. The body starts to thrash, and Adamant responds by trying to pull it up and out of its tunnel; unfortunately, it's too well stuck in, so it tears off at about fifteen feet in, showering everything in the area in green gore. What's left underground twitches once and goes still.

Elias looks at the chunk of death-worm in his hands, sneers, and hurls it wholesale past the young fire-user. It's a lot like standing next to a passing bullet train - the wind buffets her as it sails past, tumbling, and crushes an entire field of oncoming insects and hostiles like a steamroller.

"Get her out of here!" he barks to Tectonic, and leaps to take the forward role, but an ivory blur intercepts him halfway and drills him into the ceiling so hard the entire underground chamber shakes with the force. Marrane's body is visibly cracked, a hairline fracture running through the flawless bone of his chest, but horrific yellow limns the break and it closes millimeter by millimeter. The puppetmaster scrambles back and away as Adamant retaliates with a backhanded swing, but gravity takes its toll and the Leaguer helplessly starts to fall to the floor, no leverage to be had in the air and too twisted up to bring a thunderous blow to bear.

A nova of heat and light pulsates from Marrane's open mouth, like a blast of hot wind, and then a finger of amber punches through the world. It connects from that tooth-filled gap, through Adamant's chest, and continues straight down through the rock in a straight and unbending line. Then there is a thunderclap, and everything along that line collapses inward. Approximately a square foot of Elias's chest is sucked into a space the size of a marble, punched right through the left side of his chest.

Adamant hits the ground, rolls over, and gets up anyways with a shake of his head. The hole in his chest doesn't even bleed, and instead burns with its own witchfire light as it starts to close, his skin going black and translucent as starlight begins to shine through.

Then the earth cracks open beneath him, as bone-white phalanges spear up and through him, pinning him like a bug on four separate pins, long and delicate. They impale him and go right on through into the roof, punching through into sunlight: two in his chest, crossing through the open hole still smoking there, one straight through his left kneecap, and one in the meat of his right arm. It's a grotesque sight.

Adamant bucks in pain, once, then rears up and slams his fist through the pin in his arm. It cracks but holds firm.

~*~

Blaise coughs a breath in acknowledgement of Jenna, who shows up in front of him in her characteristic blur. He can't hear anything she says, and starts to raise a hand to ward her off, but knowing her -

Yep. The sensation of a whole lot of movement in a short time plays merry fucking hell with his destroyed sense of balance, and causes him so much pain he instantly blacks out as his head feels like it splits in half.

~*~

Cid staggers to his feet, the feeling of failure multiplying endlessly. This hadn't been the plan - Sarah shouldn't have been here at all, much less the rest of the remnant League, and fucking Adamant -

His teeth close so hard he feels something pop in his head, and he turns with a snarl to where Ashley and Tectonic are fighting. He pushes himself forward, and the saber hisses out and savages a hole through the onrush of enormous ants, hacking through them in great twenty-foot sweeps. It's enough to work up a beachhead, and he manages to sprint up beside Tectonic's golem as Adamant launches off again, tangling with Marrane.

Cid can taste bile in his throat as he watches Elias shrug off things that would have killed any living thing, anywhere. Marrane had never spared him more than a moment of derision.

Instead, he turns to Ashley, and his shoulder plate deploys up and launches a dizzying array of miniature missiles that spam the area around her, destroying handfuls of frothing ants, but it's nothing against the oncoming horde, just little pockets of air against an oncoming tsunami of chitin without the multiplier of the Brand to give him power, and there's no time to reapply it.

Cid deploys his saber, and shouts, "Retreat! Get out of there!"

The ground cracks even further, and more of those delicate spines pierce up and out - and something peeks through the soil as it shifts. Something enormous, spreading the soil around itself like water as it surfaces on the shore of the earth, unnaturally sliding through the dense rock, which begins to bubble and melt under their very feet.

Something pushes to the surface under Ashley, shelled with a clear lens, and then opens up - an Eye, so large that its pupil surrounds her on all sides. Black and endless, staring up at her, the heat she emits nothing against its translucent shell. Amber, freakish light collimates on her form, and Marrane turns to look at her at the same time.

It speaks.

I AM AHASVER

AND I SEE YOU

BECOME PUTRID

The command is a fishhook, plunging into Ashley's brain through the godless, cyclopean gaze of the unnatural behemoth below her, like to yank her soul out her empty staring eyes. The words are just a frequency in the air, a series of vibrations, but something is moving beneath them. Reality bulges as Ahasver's will inflicts itself on the world, on Ashley, and for this moment the senses recoil as he reaches out and violates everything that she is.

He feels like filth; like putrescence. Ahasver is the genesis of creation in decay, the brief and loathing spark that comes from the corpse of life. There is nothing new in him but endless mockery; nothing to treasure, nothing to protect, nothing sacred. The world is a mound of corpses for him to worm through, and reclaim what is rightfully his from those who have stolen life from his squirming kingdom of forever. The living steal his power, and the dead deny him his glory. Only the dying are his subjects, united in his perpetual passage through the barrier, caught before the great end like a fly in a web; recycled and emptied, corrupted and blighted, dumped into one thrashing body after another until the mind erodes away under existential horror. Ahasver does not kill people. He takes everything of what they are, but death is not his gift. It is dying, eternally.

This is the vile secret at the heart of Ahasver, and he thrusts it into Ashley's brain like a hook of charred glass and tears it out.

 

[CurtailedAmbrosia]

The fallen golem had begun to reshape itself out of its prone, half eaten form as El Cid runs up, earth curling and then regathering in a standing position. It was smaller and looked ill-dirt shakes off and respirals before it can quite hit the ground, rejoining to the armor in seemingly windblown circles.

“Heard her chime over the flames earlier-” He relays through the comm to Cid. He’s speaking over grit teeth, breath short and hissing. He’s focused. He’s here, packed in a dirt body that was not his. It was not his- The golem recollects more firmly, packed and hardened once again. But he still can’t feel his right hand, from fist to elbow. It’s not psychosomatic. He’d be more alarmed, but the ticking clock in his head wasn’t counting seconds for him.

Cid manages to do what he hadn’t-he grants the young woman breathing room, a chance to retreat.

And she doesn’t. A pulse, and he’s even more aware of the life seemingly all around them, the sensory input confusing, difficult to sort.

“Ash stop burning hot, for fuck sakes-” It’s a rare break in form to hear Tectonic do anything but bark orders and coordinate his squad-let alone sound exasperated, frustrated. And when she responds, the unacknowledged dread rising in his chest solidifies, and his heart seizes.

“I can’t.”

~*~

Ashley felt as if her very core was molten magma-the unrestrained use of her powers had pushed her long past the point of no return, that earlier shrill tone not even the indicator of it, not to her. She’d known that point instinctively and had barreled past it anyway, warnings and tones be damned.

El Cid buys her a brief respite, a chance to cool without the risk of being overrun-and she literally cannot do it. She looks down at her hands and the blue white flames that still licked at them. She feels the heat of her, that repressed burning fire that ever hungered, demanded fuel and tinder, things to burn and things to consume. A fire that had driven her father mad. A fire that had fed into the sociopathic nature of his mother. For her...a tool of destruction she had sought to do good with. Now she stands in an insectoid, fiery hell lit with her own flames. But she had bought them time.

“I’m sorry.” She says through the comm, brings her fists up and together for another swirling inferno to rocket across the rapidly shrinking space Cid had cleared. “I couldn’t watch...couldn’t let anyone else die.”

"Retreat! Get out of there!"

“The Flame cannot be sated, now.” Grim surety, death on her mind.

The ground rumbles beneath her and then begins to shift, vibrating out from beneath her feet as she finds herself rising-atop a ginormous eye. She’s burning so hot, how-?! And when even a rock melting blast of fire fails to so much as singe, melt, or damage it-she takes a surprised step back over its inescapable stare, the amber light outshining even her flames.

~*~

Across the space, Velocity materializes into view and stumbles before being seized by the arm and steadied by her Atlantean partner. Halfway across the country Marie’s readings begin to skyrocket-which made no sense to the vigilante, because Jenna, according to her visuals and the 3D renders-was standing still.

“Jenna-” Lana’s pupils are huge, the narrowest strip of yellow around each one, glinting lenses in the black. Her lips are pulled back and she’s still coated in water-she’s fighting as far from the heat as possible, but it’s still hot enough down here to put a serious strain on that Atlantean physiology.

“I-” The speedster shakes her head at normal speed-then twists, catching sight, barely beyond the flames, of Elias, skewered in multiple places. Oh no- “Berightbackbecareful”

And then she was gone, a blur streaking towards the flames-flames Lana doesn’t dare go near-and definitely can’t head towards now, as more nasties zero in, apparently vying for death.

Lana gives it to them.


Jenna rematerialized near Elias, all her usual energy funneled into obviously concerned, fraught anxiety. “Hang on Elias-I’m sorry, hang on-”She doesn’t immediately seem to know what to do, accidentally speaks while moving-fast enough she’s invisible and suddenly just there at a pin, both of her silver gloved hands wrapped tight around it as she gives a hard pull upwards using her legs and shoulders-but it doesn’t budge.

Her arms and hands blur when she tries it at speed- but all that happens is they slip up and briefly dangle her on them before she drops back down, that bow of a mouth curved in a rare frown, a note of distress-and then the golem that housed Tectonic reached over her head, grabbed hold of the pin-and yanked it free out of his arm.

I AM AHASVER

AND I SEE YOU

BECOME PUTRID

Jenna staggered back a step into Tectonic, caught herself-and then sidestepped in a blur with a hand to her head, looking sick.

~*~

Ashley’s thoughts dump themselves as she stares down at her own reflection, utterly transfixed by the state of it as she sinks into the mire. The all consuming flames are a backdrop within and without her, helpless in the face of decay. Foul -something- spills from beneath her reflection's rebreather, viscous black slime overflowing from within a decaying puppet. The eyes are empty, staring, unaware.

In her mind, a violating filth, a promise of desolation where all was futile, no hope, no choice, no meaning-just whimpering, mindless subjugation. Everything that she was, everything she had ever loved, cherished, or cared for, all of her efforts, all of her blood, sweat and tears-it meant nothing.

That blazing heat retreats to the center of her chest. The flames at her fingertips dim to orange and yellow flickers. She was only meat, cattle to be culled and dangled over the precipice of oblivion

Ahasver.

There is no escape.

The Flame.

There is no escape.

Futile.

There is no escape!

She would be consumed. This vile thing, this monster, it would make her his, strip her of everything that made her her.

Consumed. No escape. Always a price, but there is also always a choice.

Her choice.

Ashley’s hands twitch and she stomps into a stance, back snapping straight and her tightly fisted hands suddenly at either side of her shoulders as she rips her gaze away even with his name on her lips, the near failing of her willpower. “I am my own Ashaver, and I’d rather the pyre!” Marrane’s would be victim goes nuclear, an oxygen sucking explosion of blue flames that doesn’t just burst into light-it detonates like a bomb. The power was staggering, the damage undeniable-and for the briefest of moments the girl is visible in the epicenter of it, the aftermath-completely unharmed.

For a moment. And then there’s a heart stopping, outraged, agonized scream as the girl herself bursts into flames, The Flame finally consuming the flesh that housed it as the woman’s body immolates itself. It burned hot and spiraled upwards as the scream abruptly cut off-and then a charred remnant fell backwards where there had once been a living human being-one who had chosen to defy The Wandering Jew even at the cost of self immolation.

 

[Obuzeti]

Adamant howls something wordless, a denial, and thrashes on the spines holding him aloft. The one in his leg goes first as he kicks against it, finally snapping it and tossing it loose, and that gives him the leverage to kick up and roll backwards. There's a sick sound of rent flesh as he pivots around the twinned thorns still criss-crossing in his chest, and then rests both feet against them, doubled-up in the air. He takes a deep breath, and then forces himself upright, and in the process disembowels the entire left side of his chest. Elias acknowledges it only with a ragged breath, and then drops to the ground, catching himself on one knee.

It starts to heal even as he pushes himself to his feet, the sides of his torn chest melting back together, like spreading syrup, flesh tones dissolving into that starry midnight-sky. Adamant pulls himself up, catches both Tectonic and Jenna by a shoulder, and then crouches to launch himself again, back into the fight -

And then something surfaces under Ashley, and Elias has a moment of black, encompassing horror. He sees the blank, staring eye, the raw size of it, and knows that this is Rahab, come once again to take everything he loves.

And Ashley dies, agonized and screaming in fire, and Adamant screams with her, raw and painful, and Catalyzes again. If hers had been the peal of a bell, high and perfect, then his is a sledgehammer applied to a gong - it rattles the bones, and he vanishes from beside the two younger heroes to slam right into that glaring, exposed eye, and that great clear shield cracks visibly, Adamant's fist sunk up to the elbow in the lenscap. The eye turns to look at him, and focuses, the pupil contracting to a tiny dot: hot amber limns his body, and above Marrane begins to speak.

Adamant shrieks, wordless, and rips his fist out. With it comes a twenty-foot chunk of the clear lens over the eye, gouging it with its shredded edges horribly, and he turns and flings it one-handed up at Marrane. It catches him dead-on and propels him right through the floor of the bunker and into bright daylight, shattering the intervening surface like paper mache. A froth of dirt and concrete erupts from the surface as Marrane sails into the sky, tumbling and crippled: the impact had completely crushed in his abdomen, though it begins to crinkle back out even as his arc smooths out.

"Sarah!" Adamant bellows, the furious shout echoing across the battefield, as the leviathan beneath him starts to buck, tossing him from his feet and into a rolling tumble, "KILL HIM!"

~*~

Cid knows the plan had been for two to die. But to watch another kid burn - one of his -

His teeth grit, and he pivots, cold and furious. His saber flashes out and he extends it to maximum length, some forty feet of blinding-bright energy, and then activates his jump jets. They blast him into the air, and he lands right beside Elias, driving it full-length into the thing's ruined eye. Then he reaches out and tags Adamant's bare, star-skinned chest, and the Brand flashes into being for only a second.

"Now!" he shouts, and Adamant responds by reaching out, taking the hilt of that ridiculously-oversized energy blade, and tearing it up and out of the underground leviathan in a vertical slice that arcs through half a football field of rock and bioengineered flesh. A wound the size of the cave itself is opened up, weeping whole rivers of green, gushing blood, and Cid promptly opens up with the shoulder turret, which overcharges with a shrill alarm and starts cooking the interior with a coherent beam of light that sunburns Adamant just from being near the source.

~*~

Marrane levels out in the air, and snarls something too loud and gutteral for the size of his form, like diamond grating against lead. Twin glossy wings unfold from his back like a dragonfly's, and he spreads his arms to the skies above and lets out a cricket's call that reverberates in the bones, resonating among the thousands of his children present. The sky above darkens momentarily, and then something pounds out of the stratosphere into the space where Cid and Adamant stand with the force of a meteorite, throwing them both dozens of feet away along with shredded rock and insect flesh. Another handful hammer down at Jenna and Lana like man-sized bullets, and they keep coming: each lethal shot preceded by a bone-rattling chirp that Marrane orchestrates.

When the smoke and rubble clear, the missiles are revealed as glittering ruins; insects with perfect, crystalized shells that would shed heat and air pressure, rained down from some vast distance above in an orbital barrage. The impact completely destroys them, but is equally disastrous for whatever they manage to hit.

 

[CurtailedAmbrosia]

Adamant doesn’t wait for further help-the man rips himself off of the spikes in so brutal a fashion even Tyler-stone faced, straight thinking, triage minded Tectonic-is briefly taken aback. For a moment he thought the man had lost his mind-but as his chest melds back together with twinkling galaxy, he remembers just how durable Adamant supposedly is.

The man can handle himself, and Tectonic would let him. His focus needs to be on protecting (and hopefully extracting) the Knight and then getting what was left of his squad out of here. Potentially Paige, the brat was a Ward too-

“I am my own Ashaver, and I’d rather the pyre!”

Tectonic’s golem collapses as Adamant launches himself at the impossibly large eye and Backdraft’s death stage- the man rising from a crouched position within it, dirt shaking off of him. He doesn’t think. Doesn’t process. Only the arrayed and seemingly endless enemies are on his mind, warring with the rising chances of survival-for what was left.

Deep Blue calls for Velocity sharply and with a strain of anxious, angry emotion than he found prudent-and he glances to the speedster beside him. She’s frozen in place, that bow of a mouth open and her russet colored skin drained of color. He gives her a light shove that snaps her out of her horrified reverie, makes her jump. “Go.” He tells her as he lowers his hands to the ground, lean, gnawed on body taking a racing start position, nearly. He still can’t feel most of his right arm, and now that he’s not encased in a golem being manipulated by his mind-he realizes how heavy it is, and how immobile his fingers and hand. Doesn’t matter-she goes as Marrane is struck, Adamant’s bellowing call following after the thing.

Tyler digs his left hand into the earth and leaves the back of the right one resting against the earth, turns his eyes back on the beast-and as Cid leaps into action and before the beast could sink back into whatever damnable place it came from-he works to hold it in place and bury the life still surrounding them-the ground quakes as earth presses in tight on the thing, the falsified tectonic plates of earth forced in opposing directions like to tear a lesser beast in half.

~*~

A golden energy beam fires from somewhere above and slightly to the East of Marrane, the construct striking hard for his shoulder and knocking him off course in a spin-only for a second, narrower beam to fire into and through one of those gossamer wings.

A streaking comet flies for him from somewhere high above the unconscious forms of Blaise and Vanessa, a golden bullet that hits him dead on and sends him crashing through the remnants of the house while she snapped back and floated there a moment, not a woman but a goddess, wreathed in that warm, golden light that shone from within. Her hair floated behind her head in a swirled halo, tendrils of sunlight at her fingertips and across her skin, an impenetrable barrier of light shining brightly around her person.

There was no broken, fragile woman within that light. There was only Daybreak, an unearthly, terrible angel wielding a righteous fury for the filth that scratched in the dark, that had dared-and a fierce love for those she sought to protect.

A dome shaped golden construct appears over the prone forms of the two Wards, the insectoid missiles obliterating themselves against it before the pieces roll harmlessly off the sides of it. Out of the corner of her eye she sees the one that nearly craters Elias and Cid, and somewhere below and to her immediate right, the place Jenna and Lana had both been standing was now a cloud of dust-and further from that, a new spectre of shimmering light blue mixed with the dark black and blues of Lana’s costume.

Her head snaps up at the still darkened sky and she snarls, abandoning the shield construct to throw both of her hands skyward, palms flat-and golden light seizes the missiles, dead stopping their hurtling descent with little more than a slight strain of her arms. She curls midair to bring her arms to one side-and insects collect there, gold rimmed ornaments of death. There’s a rising din of furious buzzing from within the ruins of the house. Daybreak turns a disdainful eye upon it, offended by the very nature of him.

“What right have you, Paul Marrane?”

Her normally serene, beautifully graceful voice now resonated with the power thrumming through every syllable, greatly aggrieved and intrinsically offended.
In response, a spell of sickly yellow light and purple glowing hornets fire from the house, crackling with a charged ancient evil. An evil Daybreak answers with the weapons of his own creation, bringing her arms down and sending the totality of his bombardments crashing into and utterly obliterating what remained of the house.

“To crawl from your den of pestilence, to seek to sully that which is ours?”

Her graceful hands come before her and frame a growing orb of yet more sunlight.

”Did you think we would not come for you?”

Paul explodes out of the house with a torrent of foul flying creatures surrounding him, yet more foul and ancient light building at his fingertips-and she unleashes the charged attack, the force of her power rocketing her back several feet, causing his spell to miss. It blasts a hole through his chest, completely destroys the swarm that had risen with him-and she follows it up with yet more energy constructs, a wall of light appearing behind him, her left palm flat in it’s direction-while her right forms another one within the gaping hole-which then widens violently outward, ripping the skeleton into pieces.

This creature offends her every sensibility, violates everything she believes and protects and lives for-it was foul, and she and her glowing sunlight would cleanse that foulness and eradicate it.

 

[Obuzeti]

The beast below the ground groans like a whale, rolling away from the assault the League presses on it. Acres of milky grey flesh arch by and sink into the soil, leaving Cid and Adamant behind and passing through Tectonic's walls of stone and earth like the soil around it: it's not digging but repulsing matter around it in some way. In a contest of force between his powers and its own, sheer size comes to the fore and it limps back into the earth's crust, with the tail surfacing last and slapping both League men into a skidding roll across the cavern with a flick.

Marrane, above, faces far more trouble. His arcane spells and blasts glance off Sarah's sunlit energy, failing to oppose it in any meaningful manner; it boils off on contact. It even works on his constructed flesh, scorching it black on contact and noticeably not healing as it has against all physical intrusion. He snarls before she simply blasts him apart. A spark flares from the dying, biological chassis and leaps to the leviathan below, which makes its exit into the earth with graceful speed.

On the shattered earth above, Modal's crippled body drags itself up the stairs with its one working arm, the other torn and hanging loose from its use as bait by Marrane's horde. It looks up at Sarah and smiles, all teeth and tight muscles in the cheeks. It's a monkey's expression, a threat display, and has nothing to do with the human equivalent.

"I came for yours," the corpse says, even as the flesh starts to liquefy, collapsing inwards as the rot accelerates. "There is nothing left to bury."

The body collapses in a pile of bone and putrefaction, and the insects finally fall silent, the chirping cacophony that had echoed throughout the fight ceasing.

~*~

Adamant peels himself up off the stone, shaking off the dizziness of his tumble and jerking Cid up to his own feet with one hand. The other man tries to shove him off and almost knocks himself over instead. Elias doesn't notice, and shouts, "Sound off! Who needs aid?"

The big bruiser himself is already clean, not even scratched from his long tumble across the stone, flesh already more resistant than steel thanks to his power. The pajamas are ripped and torn, and one leg is completely bare, the cloth torn off from the thorn that had punched through it. He stands bare chested and furious, but the rapid ripples of starlight through his planetarium-chest give him an odd sense of modesty; flesh isn't relevant to what he is now.

Cid forces out a breath and checks his team's status on the integrated team radar. Two flatlines, of course. Tectonic's bleeding and burned, Blaise compromised. Vanessa likely traumatized. Naturally, the responding Leaguers are untouched.

What a fucking trainwreck.

"Tectonic, get to evac, get the other two on board the Firebird," Cid says, the post-battle exhaustion already settling in. "Get some burn salve on that, we don't know what the hell is in what Marrane uses. I'll - clean up down here. Talk."

He spits the last word.

Ignoring them both, Elias advances up the long slope of the cavern and takes a knee beside Ashley's carbonized skeleton, his mouth tight and his shoulders set. He says nothing.

 

[CurtailedAmbrosia]

"I came for yours."

Sarah turns, lifts a hand-and then hesitates.

Modal. One of the few veteran heroes she had seen after Rahab, spoken with, talked to. He had designed the Tower.

Too late, Ashley had said.

And here now is what remains.

"There is nothing left to bury."

Sarah blasted the twisted caricature with a cleansing ray of light. Somewhere out there, in some twisted hole-she can almost feel Marrane cackling.

~*~

He hadn’t kept the worms out, and now he can’t keep this behemoth in. The fingertips on his other hand begin to numb as the beast rolls through his defenses regardless-a vain attempt. He hadn’t managed to keep the worms out, and now he can’t keep this behemoth in. Tectonic releases his hold, and he lets it go.

He straightens to his feet and casts a glance across the silenced battlefield, eyes drifting to the place he’d seen Ash fall back to. Cid gives him an order. Tyler’s eyes shift to him a moment before he gives a curt nod-and gets one step in that direction before Daybreak touches down in front of him. Everything he wasn’t allowing himself to feel threatened to come undone just at the sight of her, golden light fading inward and her hair falling back into place, sash no longer held aloft in light- goddess to woman once more. His chest is tight.

He does not want to be here for this part.

~*~

“You look terrible.” Sarah says with a furrowed brow, taking him in in full-Tyler’s suit had been chewed through across the chest and shoulders, his thighs-that ruby studded ‘T’ was flapping loose. What she can see of his bloodied chest is caked in mud-mud she belatedly realized was a mix of blood and dirt. His face was reddened and sunburned looking where his helm hadn’t covered him. Too close to Ashley’s flames. His right gloved hand was stiffened and the arm hangs a little awkwardly-she reaches for it and he stepped smoothly back, drawing that shoulder away from her. She frowned.

“I have to get the others onto the Firebird.” He says in a softened monotone.

“Deep Blue and Velocity are doing that.” She says as her eyes shift to Cid, not letting go of Tyler’s shoulder-she wants to see that arm-the Knight’s armor had been damaged but he’s on his feet-thank God- Vanessa she’s sure had just overextended, Blaise is hurt- “Are you alright?” She asks her husband. “Where’s Ashley?” Tyler stiffens even further. Her eyes back to his face, and it’s a tight mask. He won’t look at her.

Sarah steps back and towards Cid, brow furrowing. “She called me on the comm. Sent the emergency signal.” She hasn’t seen anyone but the three, so far. Lana and Jenna return, the speedster uncharacteristically mute. She pushes her goggles up over her hairline, and her eyes are rimmed in red.

Fully alarmed now, Sarah stepped up to Cid. "Where is she?"

 

[Obuzeti]

Cid head jerks. His neck trembles, and he looks sharply aside to recompose himself. His leg begins to jump as it convulsively trembles. What a fucking mess this is, he thinks, and even if he is the coldest man who makes the hardest choices, this guts him to say. He opens his mouth, and swallows before he manages to get it out. "Marrane got her," he says, finally. "She Catalyzed rather than be taken. Mark Postlen is gone too. Both confirmed KIA."

The Tower commander wavers on his feet - almost reaches for Sarah - but doesn't really know how to offer comfort. He's not her kid. He doesn't know how to pretend like he was their surrogate father, like they were anything more or less than troops to him. The failure of it burns him, but it's not personal, the same way he's never really engaged with other humans his entire life. Their capacity for emotion befuddles him, a little. And now, he least desires another long, drawn-out show of false sentiment he doesn't feel in the first place.

Ashley was useful, intelligent, and to the very end pursued her purpose. It was worthwhile, even if her dying her is . . .

What?

Cid feels lost.

"I'm going to go check on the others," he says, after a moment. "Blaise, Vanessa. Elias is checking the remains. You should -"

He pauses again. Would it help her, to see the body? He has no idea if it will hurt her less or more. At least Ashley left something behind. He glances around, tries to see where Barry died, but the ground is so broken and scarred that the bloody stain where he'd been crushed isn't visible anymore, and a lake of dead insects crunches under their feet to cover up the bits of kelvar. There hadn't been anything bigger than a hand to find of him in the first place, Cid would bet.

"You should go talk to him," he says, finally, seizing the compromise. Elias is better at this shit anyways. He's always better at it, at everything. Came here in his goddamn pajamas and everything just in time to watch Cid fail and not save anything, again.

But this time it's not his fault, is it.

Cid's mouth twists and he starts to trudge back up the long slope towards the Firebird.

Elias himself remains immobile, hands clenched tight where he kneels.

 

[CurtailedAmbrosia]

"Marrane got her,"

Sarah openly stares at him, stormy grey eyes fixed on him in that helm, the damaged armor. It’s briefly too terrible to process.

"She Catalyzed rather than be taken. Mark Postlen is gone too. Both confirmed KIA."

She opens her mouth. She closes it. And then she makes a low, heart wrenching noise as she sways backwards-caught by the arm and shoulder by both Velocity and Tectonic-each of whom had moved at the same time. “She was...but I...but I? And Mark?” It was as if her synapses weren’t fully firing, she was still staring at El Cid, uncomprehending. “Gone? Gone?”

He says something else, but Tectonic barely hears him-his eyes are rooted to Sarah’s face in profile, her wide, horrified eyes. She looks around even as Cid turns and walks away, the fishwoman hesitating-and then following after him. Sarah’s fingertips are glowing in a soft ebb. Her eyes drift to Elias over the ridge, a pile of dirt obscuring his lower half. She moves to step, her entire body trembling-and he tightens his hold on her upper arm.

“Don’t look.” Tyler says without thinking about it. Her heart was going to break. She was going to break, and rather than feel irritation or derision, the tightness in his bloodied, gnawed on chest threatens to undo him. He’s not sure why he says it. He has no idea what in the hell he’s doing here, either. El Cid had walked away, charged his wife’s care with the supposed enemy. Tyler doesn’t know what to think of that. He’s not paid to think. It occurs to him he had failed to follow through on an order, that his commander had just walked away to do the task himself-and he almost doesn’t care.

He’s not an emotional man. He’s not paid or expected to think. But if he had a conscience, any sort of true moral fortitude-it only surfaced in Sarah’s presence. And if she breaks here, if he has to see her shatter-

“Y-yeah, Miss Sarah.” Paige says as she comes around to the front of her, reaching for the woman’s glowing hands. “Don’t look. It’s not...it’s not her anymore. You don’t-”

A sob wrenches from Sarah’s chest and she pulls the much smaller heroine tight to her chest-and Paige hugs her back just as tightly. Tyler stares at them both, the tears that streak down the that rounded russet toned face and the wracking sobs of a woman he’d charge through a hail of cyanide laced bullets for.

He turns and rapidly walks away, his heart hammering. He had done this. He had let them die, he had failed to protect them, and he had driven a knife through Sarah’s already fragile heart. Ashley had overclocked because he hadn’t been able to push the horde back alone. Barry had died because he couldn’t keep the thing back.

What good was he in any of this? If he didn’t have it in him to effectively fight-

“Adamant. Mr. Halwell-” His face is as flat and stony as ever, but there’s a tightness to his voice, a crispness that belied his internal conflict. He can hear Sarah crying, and now he can see Ashley’s charred and unrecognizable body, more bone than anything. He had brought her here, asked her to come with him. She hadn’t wanted to. She hadn’t been in the field in years, hadn’t wanted a spot on the Squad-but when he asked for her help, she answered him, and when he could not keep back the horde alone, protect what remained of his team after letting Barry die- she had stepped up, she had pushed hard-knowing the price she would have to pay for it.

He had asked, and she had answered because she was his friend.

And now she was dead.

“Sarah.” His eyes briefly betray him, a flick back to the two women and a tightening of his left fist, a sharp rise in his bloodied, mud pasted chest. “Please.” It’s a word that leaves his lips for the first time in probably fifteen years. He hadn’t been in any sort of position to make requests, not him, not since he was ten years old and his mother had still been alive. But he can’t stand it, he can’t stand this, and neither his pride nor his loyalty nor his general disaffected nature could stand in the way of asking for the older man’s help.

He can’t help her. He’s the one who did it to her.

~*~

Marie turns off the display, and she stares at the greyed out screen without seeing it. The girl had burned to death. Agonizingly consumed by her own power, her own abilities. In her mind’s eye, clear and crisp and as if she were seeing it in real time-Marie sees the flash of two colorful costumes in the steam, remembers the sickening feeling of almost being too late-and knowing the inevitable.

And then, worse-she remembers what it felt like to burn to death.

She shoves hard at the console, legs flexed in their own physical agony but it doesn’t root her to the present, keep her grounded. She tries to shut it back out with an enraged growl, her fist pounding down hard on the more ravaged leg- but it’s too late-it’s too fucking late. She feels it blistering her skin and cooking through her flesh, melting body fat while the residual heat boils her eyeballs and bursts them, internal organs exploding.

The hysteria, the fear, the agony-and that desperate, dying message-God. God, why couldn’t her head had been immersed first, why couldn’t that death have been instant and painless, the heroine as unaware as she would have been when the magma cooked through the proteins of her skeleton and turned her to ash? Why had she had to suffer, and suffer alone?

Marie sucks in a choked breath-and realizes she’s sobbing, her face wet with tears and snot and sweat, her hands tight on her wheels. She feels, she’s feeling, and she despises herself for the lack of discipline, the lack of-Protagonist could not be vulnerable, Protagonist could not-

But that refuge and armor was gone, torn away and leaving a weak, bawling, pitifully useless thing behind.

Sam. Sam.

She should have said something.

~*~

“Cid-” Lana hikes the shaft of the trident a little lower in her right hand and lopes after him. His stilted response to Sarah bothers her in a way-but she imagines he’s no less traumatized by the incident.

The awful memories that it brought-

The six foot tall Atlantean matches his pace, an empty gesture across the field. “It’s no consolation, but at least it wasn’t a complete eradication.” She says, matching his pace. “Paul Marrane rivals the worst of our former enemies.”

 

[Obuzeti]

The force of the detonation had destroyed her costume. Fire consumed her flesh, leaving bare bits that clung to her ribcage and spine - the limbs almost totally consumed (a higher surface area to volume ratio, goes a rattled factoid in the back of his head). The skull remains, burnt clean, but everything below shoulder or hip is gone. It's mostly the back half of a torso and a head. Elias stares at it, and his throat works as he tries to remind himself that this isn't how Grace died - in pain.

The worst part is not knowing.

It all feels unreal again, and he stares at that carbonized skeleton until a voice disturbs him and he glances up at Tectonic, who's said something that Elias didn't even hear. It focuses him, though, because as bad as this is, it's not his first time through this (God, what a thought), and anything that doesn't kill Adamant the first time around won't the second. It just sucks.

Elias heaves a breath, and pushes himself up to his feet. He's tired of hurting, but he heals. There are others without that fortune, though, and he nods to Tectonic and says, "Come with me."

He trudges over to Sarah and Paige, where they're huddled together, and without ceremony pulls the other man into the mass when the big man wraps his arms around them all. The other man's shoulders go tight and rigid when he does, and Elias tells him, "She was one of yours, too."

Friend or family or whatever distant, mildly-useful appellation that Cid would have dispensed upon her: this woman is worthy of grief. Elias himself doesn't cry, anymore, but nuzzles tiredly into Sarah's hair as her body shakes with the force of her grief.

He wonders how bad it will hurt her to know what the rest of the League has come to. Wonders if that's ever a thing that will happen, if she's capable of surviving that blow. Sarah's always had a deeper capacity for grief than anyone else he's known, part and parcel of how much she loves the people around her.

"I'm sorry," he says to Sarah, and that's all there is to say. No condolences, no promises of better tomorrows or a better place. He doesn't know about any of that. Today is for loss.

~*~

Cid exhales as Lana catches up, and acknowledges her with a stiff nod. He's limping now that the attention is off of him, his left leg gone stiff inside the suit as it automatically dispenses painkillers. "I appreciate the gesture," he says, emptily, "But there is no positive to take from these. He killed two of my best, another member of the League, and got away from it clean even with all the aid that could be called in. He knows he can get away with it, now, in a pitched fight. How long until he starts picking away at patrols, or Wards out to visit their families?"

He pulls off his helmet and sets it aside, running a hand through that cropped-short black hair. "Not right now, obviously, but soon, you need to get your group together, talk with me. There's stuff coming down the legislative pipes concerning heroism. It took awhile to filter down, but the company that owned that oil rig Elias wrecked has been lobbying day and night, and I can't block it at this point."

He glances back up and nods stiffly to Lana. "I appreciate you coming. It could have been much worse."

Everything could have ended. Marrane hadn't responded to the signal to stop, despite what Caliban had said. He had kept going, and only the swift aid from the League had saved the rest of their lives. Whatever else happens, Marrane needs to die first to keep everything from collapsing into anarchy. That much is clear.

 

[CurtailedAmbrosia]

Tyler doesn’t. He turns to watch the large man trudge over to the two-and just pull them into his arms. It bothers him. It bothers him that El Cid had walked away. Maybe that made him a hypocrite but...Sarah was his wife.

He turns back to what remained of Ashley. She’d bucked every expectation and tradition her family of criminals and nutjobs had had to join the Junior League. Chose a different path.

Rather the pyre…

And Barry had been the reliable glue to form that vital team cohesion. Unassuming, genial, effective. Jack was going to be devastated. She was going to want to know what had had happened. So would Harv.

And Tyler doesn’t know what he’s going to tell them.

~*~

Legislation concerning heroism. Lana hesitates, nearly makes a flippant, disgusted remark about the people and their betrayal-but Cid wouldn’t understand that. He had come out largely unscathed, even ahead, after all. Nor does she bring up Protagonist having chosen the target. Marie would have been aware of who controlled the thing, what consequences could result. She just wouldn’t have cared.

To be fair, that did have them possessing teleportation technology instead of the bad guys, so perhaps...

“We will do that Cid, thank you.” She finally decides. “We need more than a shared speedster between our two groups. We’re on the same side, much as we always have been-so open communication is a must.” Her eyes drift across the battlefield. “Division can be deadly. Marrane has claimed enough of what Rahab ‘spared’.” Did Cid know the full scope of that? Did Marie? Elias had claimed-well, Lana needed to inquire further about it. That would require talking to Marie directly though, and she...she’s not sure how to approach the woman, still.

~*~

THE TOWER

In the unobserved, low lit hall outside a string of examination rooms, Tyler fell heavily into a cushioned bench lining the wall. He sat slumped there a minute, still mostly not thinking-Ashley was in one of these rooms for later examination and study. In two others, Blaise and Vanessa. Inner ear problems on one. The second had minor bleeding on the brain and had apparently been on the verge of a stroke. Both were going to be okay.

His lower back is taut and sore from the scald. He needs to get cleaned up and bandaged also, scrub the dirt out of his own wounds-which he’s sure will feel great-but he’s giving it another minute.

Another, long minute.

His head turns look at his right hand lying on his gnawed on thigh. He lifts the heavy appendage with effort, the fingers of his left hand catching at the cuff of the dark red glove and tugging it off. What meets him isn’t flesh but craggly, unmoving rock. Beneath the sleeve of his costume, it’s stone all the way down to just an inch or two above his elbow.

Well. He hasn’t seen that in a while.

There’s a sharp intake of breath to his left-and it’s Paige, again. She’s wide eyed and frozen in place. “Are you-”

“Yes.” Tyler yanks the glove back down over his hand as he straightens off the wall, glowering. “What are you doing here, Paige?”

“I was just...I was coming to check in on Blaise and Contortionist.” She frowns, a flicker of a glance to his sheathed arm. “On you.”

“I meant here.” He reiterated as her shoulders straightened in response to his hostility, a slight purse of her lips. “In the Tower, playacting as a ‘Ward’.”

“Sarah asked me not to quit.” The speedster said with a hint of stubborn in the same soft voice. “So I didn’t quit.”

Well, that explained some of that. Tyler looked away. He doesn’t want to think about Sarah, either. She hadn’t come back with them in the Firebird. Cid hadn’t commented on it. Given who he’d left her behind with, Tyler’s not sure what to make of that.

The girl sits down. She’s maybe three, four feet away. It’s not far enough. She’s spinning that watch on her wrist-he can see the nervous movement out of the corner of his eye.

“...Paul Marrane’s no joke.” She says after a moment. He lets it stretch longer. “...I’m sorry about the others. About...about Ashley. I should have grabbed her, something.”

“Why didn’t you?” He asks acidically as his eyes snap back-and the girl flinches. He pauses. Maybe it’s Sarah, maybe it’s Ash-or maybe he’s just fucking tired-but he doesn’t have it in him to antagonize the upstart, not right now. Not after he’d watched her cry with Sarah like that, hurt for her.

“...it wouldn’t have mattered.” He relents. “She was going to Catalyze long before you got there. I heard the tone, and she kept pushing.” His head thumped against the wall as he slumped back into it, letting his eyes drift ceiling ward. “She was already dead. Ash...knew what she was doing, knew her limits better than most.”

“Defied Paul.” Jenna adds, softly.

I am my own Ahasver, and I’d rather the Pyre!

“That’s not...that’s not easy to do.” She continued anxiously.

“She got lucky, catalyzing at the right moment.” He says with a listless shrug.

“No.” Jenna corrects, a little less soft. “Wasn’t luck. She did that on purpose. I saw it in slower motion than you guys. There was an explosive attack when she resisted, defied him. And then...and then she Catalyzed, after it.”

She’s staring at nothing, her brow furrowed and her expression rattled. There’s horror there. Horror, and dread. With what happened to her predecessor, Tyler can’t say he blames her. It had to be on her mind somewhere-she wasn’t entirely stupid.

“...Ash was always stubborn.” He finally says. “It didn’t matter what the easy thing was. She wanted...needed to make the hard choices herself.”

“Like joining the Junior League.”

Tyler was quiet, remembering a stubbornly persistent rookie with honey colored hair and eyes, a kid with a firm sense of right, wrong, and faith in the family you chose rather than the one you were born with. She’d been disowned on one side and was stigmatized on the other-but she’d kept at it. It was her path, her choice.

“Yeah. Like joining the Junior League.”

She would have been some kind of hero, had Rahab not turned the world upside down. She…had been some kind of hero.

 

[Obuzeti]

The double doors at the far end of the hall swing wide, and Cid strides through - the mauled armor discarded, unusually, for repair and refit. Instead he's something strangely reminiscent of a mechanic's outfit, with pockets and thick leather. When he spots both of them, he stops short, then moves to join the two younger heroes. He looks disgruntled.

"Jenna," he acknowledges heavily. "Tyler."

There's a long moment where he just searches for the right words. People are so difficult, and they're both obviously incompetent at the moment. He needs to find something that's not just a command, and the words aren't fitting together in his brain right the way they did previously. The key scratches against the lock, but he manages to think of it. "Sarah's been tranquilized for the moment to keep her from doing anything rash. Lana's looking over her for the moment while I take care of final details and the AAR."

He glances at Jenna again, then shakes his head and keys something into the wrist-mounted terminal he carries even now. The doors on either side of the hallway beep and lock, and he drops himself onto the bench opposite the two Wards and stares them down. Even now, he doesn't really look tired; emotional inflection just never comes easy to Cid. He just looks flat, same as always.

"Listen to me, both of you," he says, with that even stare. "Do you understand what this fight meant? What the consequences are?"

 

[CurtailedAmbrosia]

Both heroes came to their feet immediately, one in a blur and one with a flicker of discomfort. Jenna glances to Tyler-who’d gone stone faced and stiff again the instant Cid had entered- and then back to Cid.

"Sarah's been tranquilized for the moment to keep her from doing anything rash. Lana's looking over her for the moment while I take care of final details and the AAR."

Poor Sarah. It occurs to Jenna that that left Elias alone-and he shouldn’t be alone. She remembers what he had sounded like when Ashley had Catalyzed-it’d been awful.

Cid sits down, and Tyler does too-but straight backed and square shouldered, more on the edge of the bench rather than properly seated. For all his visible injuries and caked on dirt, his hand-he looks perfectly and completely focused. Stoic and surly.

She feels a measure of anxiety being in their presence again, alone. But she didn’t do anything wrong here. Right? Right. She had shown up to help. If nothing else, she’d gotten Vanessa out of a bug pile before those nasty things could eat her or something.

Jenna slowly sits back down. For once, she manages not to fidget.

“It’s not the first hero Paul has tried to hit, or even killed.” Jenna ventures slowly. “But other than me,” She’s not sure she counts, “It’s his first brush with the Tower. And his most recent veteran kill. Protagonist didn’t know Modal was still alive, I don’t think. She’d counted him among the lost, anyway.”

She’s talking too much. Tyler still hadn’t spoken. Waiting, she feels like. Maybe she should have waited too. “Sorry. What do you think it meant, and what's the fallout?"

 

[Obuzeti]

Protagonist hadn't known because Modal hadn't been alive. His body had been moving, certainly, but that has nothing to do with the person that had inhabited that body. Cid's gorge rises and he shakes his head, casting away that thought. "Intel on Marrane is notoriously unreliable," he says, which has the air of a pardon being granted. "But that's not the point."

He folds his hands over his knees and meets Tectonic's gaze first. "We met Marrane in open battle with the best I could bring. I don't fault anyone that came for what happened. The team covered each other, fought tooth and nail, and he still killed two of my best, and got away even under attack by everything the old League could bring to bear. Daybreak, Deep Blue . . . Adamant, all of it. It couldn't bring him down."

A pause. Even the mention of his name sends a sickening pulse of red through Cid's brain. He rolls his shoulders.

"I have no way to protect anyone outside this Tower," he admits. "Not from Marrane. I don't even know if I can protect the people inside of it, though I'll damn well make him fight harder for it. We can't rely on the League, and Sarah's out of commission. I'm going to pull everyone I can back to the Tower, and enact some reforms. I've run this place to my own tastes for almost a decade, but now it's the last refuge we all have. I'm not spending the lives I'm responsible for on anything else, now, because we are under siege by Marrane and his ilk. On top of that, I got a tip that Congress is organizing a national response. There's a law coming that will ban parahuman activity outside the Tower. Someone got a report to them about Marrane, something about - a city block that got swallowed, or something, and then a satellite got footage of the last fight. They're screaming about it."

He glances over at Jenna, and his expression slackens a little. It's not quite a proper facial expression, but it's not his mechanical stare either. It lacks something. "I'm tired of trying to control you, and I can't cover for you against Congress," he admits. "Do what you want. You still have a room here, regardless, because Sarah has always wanted you here, and no one deserves what Marrane inflicts. I'm also organizing a conference with Lana and the League to try to figure out how we can combine forces."

Cid leans on one elbow, still directing that empty look at Jenna. "That's on you, though. I'm offering what I can, but I've got to take care of my wards. I won't enforce anything on you and - the whole bunch operating out of that cabin, but I can't defend you either. What comes down on you all out there is yours to deal with."