Dying – 15.z

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The first thing he looked at when he could see the light again was the computer screen with the numbers.  It took a moment for his eyes to focus.

In red, a 96.1%.  If and when it hit one hundred percent, this would no longer be a war, a raid, nor a petty rebellion.  It would be cataclysm, with his facility at the epicenter.  As he watched, the number changed, to 96.15%, then 96.12%.

In white, the number below displayed 66.8%.  The floor.  What reality as they understood it was willing and able to handle.  Every use of power was a small fraction of damage, and that damage would not heal.  At best, it could be spaced out, controlled, or targeted toward specific problems.

He couldn’t meander.  Remaining in the threshold served nothing and no one.

Teacher stepped out of the back room, accepting the wet towel that his soldier handed him.  Pulling off his square-lensed glasses with one hand, handing them to the soldier, he wiped his scalp, face, neck, and wet his beard, before slicking his beard down.  The soldier handed him a bottle of water, letting him drink while pulling his shirt off, stopping at the armpit.  The soldier took the water back, finished removing his shirt for him, returned the glasses, and went to get another.

He approached a computer screen, tapping keys.  A map of the complex showed a series of blobs, suggesting Contessa’s range of influence, assuming a distance that she could certainly travel, assuming she were capable of walking and running, a distance she could probably travel if she could access the right resources, and a distance for how far her influence reached.  Could she communicate with someone in a location?  That location would be highlighted in yellow.

Saint had noted something on the system, suggesting that one of the parahuman’s hackers had used Saint’s Michael III as a relay.  That was enough to compromise everything, his entire facility and the surrounding region were yellow.  If Contessa had her powers, she had a knife to his throat.

He would manage.  For now, her powers were still gone.  It tied him down, because he had to watch for the moment they returned, and consider the damage she could do, much as he considered the damage she had already done.

But he would manage.  He had been anticipating her for a long time.

Other feeds showed the state of several battlefields, but finding what he needed was laborious and tiresome.  For every glimpse he was given of something he cared about, he saw twelve more screens of white hallways with blood spatters, ruin, and broken structures with bodies.

His soldier returned with a shirt.  He took it and put it on himself, aware that he had lost weight.

“What do I need to know?”

“An event you flagged as priority blue has occurred,” another soldier reported.  In his command center, eight thralls were either at computers or waiting at the ready.  None of his lieutenants were present.

“What event?” he asked.  He raised his glasses and rubbed at his eyes.

“Citrine and her husband were at work, they received a phone call, departed immediately to leave, skipping their usual procedures in their hurry, and were blown up by a car bomb.  One injured, one dead.  It was anti-parahumans.”

“Alcott?  She’s been in the anti-parahuman orbit.”

“We looked in on her.  She’s upset.  She’s meeting Gary Nieves shortly.”

“When it rains it pours,” Teacher said.  How annoying.  He’d been keeping his eye on that for some time, and his plan had been to intervene when things fell down in a particular way.  Stepping in here, putting his thralls in the right places, and calling some mercenaries he had in reserve would give him the city in the same way he had Cheit, and it would put him three moves away from checkmating Shin, who were complicated, and made more complicated by how vigilant they were against another power play.

Now he had to choose.  He could have that but lose this, or vice versa.

For something to be this conveniently inconvenient or inconveniently convenient suggested Contessa.

He turned, and he looked at the door he had come through.  It had been a brief visit, but it had taxed him all the same.  He considered himself brave, and more than that, he considered himself confident, but some things were too dangerous to handle directly.

Let’s assume she’s got me, he thought.  We’ll assume Contessa has that knife at my throat.  Will she use it?  Will I walk blindly into the blade?

“I’ll use your power, Melody.”

Melody was a young Asian woman with the side of her head shaved.  She had some tattoos, but she had more flesh that had been cut out with a scalpel and left to heal as scars, raised lines, bumps, and swirls on flesh.  Some had been self harm, some had been body modification.  She had her demons, and those demons had chased her into his company.  She had been one of the first he had recruited after Gold Morning, when he had become big enough to require managers.

She approached him, hands clasped behind her back.  She met his eyes, and opened them wide, then wider still, until two eyes became one, the one eye became something larger than her face, occluding the rest of her, the room, and them him, in that order.  He could feel it overlap and intersect his lower face, the bridge of his nose, and his own eyes, so they became one singular portal as well.

“Who?” she asked, a voice from nowhere to nowhere.

“Let’s begin with their leadership.  Chevalier.  I sent Christine to deal with him.”

Two spots opened, each a window, showing another viewpoint.  The two were slightly different, a left eye and a right eye, and as they filled his new perspective, they widened and overlapped until they were his eyes that he looked through.  He felt a heartbeat, felt shoes tapping their steady beat as the wearer walked.

He felt lips part and greet him with a, “Hello…”

“…I’m so glad you could join us, Teacher.”

Heads turned, thralls and hostages alike.  She smiled.  Teacher was only here for her.

It wasn’t often that others were looking through her eyes.  It required that she let them.

The room was large, with a fan in the one side and the associated turbine loomed house-large in the space.  Scaffolding surrounded the turbine and more machines fed air into ventilation that reached the rest of the facility.  Much of that was closed off to prevent certain powers from being used against them.

All around them, sheet metal and machinery from broken turbines, broken tile, and broken sections of wall littered the ground.  Bodies and hostages were scattered all around them.

For every person who was down, there were two thralls.  For every hostage who was alert and able, there were two thralls and one of her Fallen guarding them, keeping them in line.  She had no shortage, since Teacher had rescued them from prison and collected them from the city.

More than that, Teacher had given her a world of faithful, and for that, she was willing to let him share her eyes, share her awareness.

Christine clasped her hands together and pressed them against her chest.  She could feel her connection to more than two hundred and ninety thousand souls in the heart of Cheit.  To each of those souls, she granted a small grace.  A part of her watched each one with a separate eye and its own ability to judge and track their actions.  Enough of them were believers that she could give them small blessings.  She made the beautiful more beautiful, the holy more holy.  Crosses on walls throbbed and glowed.  Sacred hearts bled.  Images of martyrs turned their heads to smile down at their blessed with love.

Here and there, she tested, and she judged.  She could nudge, by giving grace to some and giving others a reason to doubt.  Some of these denominations?  No.  For now, she punished those who preached too much peace, with glimpses of the holy that fled or walked away.  She punished those who spoke of God but not of Jesus, or worshiped the Koran and not the Bible, by making certain books, icons and objects rot and twist like snakes, and by making shadows deeper.  She gave them glimpses of hell.

They had only glimpsed her, so she could only touch their eyes.  There would be more opportunities later.  Over time, she would make what she knew replace their mere beliefs, and she would make their most zealous twice as earnest in that zealousness.  She would make brown and black bend the knee to white, once they had served her purpose.  But all of that would come later.  For now she was content to work by increments, to use who she could.

Thralls milled around her, seeing to individual tasks.  She had heard one of Chevalier’s men saying the word, and she’d liked it enough to keep it.  They applied restraints to people who were one step away from being corpses.

All around her, Thralls paid her their worship, and they invoked her.  She allowed fragments of herself to manifest, to look around, and she could see everything.

But with her own eyes she saw Chevalier.  She approached him, and she raised a foot, planting it on his shoulder, while he knelt with hands and knees on the ground.  His armor was too heavy for him to lift.  Teacher had stolen his power.

That touch of foot against shoulder reverberated through the man.

She took that reverberation and she made it into touches.  An embrace that crawled across his skin.

He’d looked at her earlier, and now she filled his eyes.

But more than anything, he had sensed her with something else, something beyond sight.  He had seen her aura, and now she invaded that seeing, took hold of it.  He could look at those blessed with power and know them on a profound level, see memories, history, feelings, and the nuances of power, often in abstract.

So she gave him that.  She gave him herself.  Memories of herself as a pregnant teenager, praying, praying for recourse.  Her parents had tortured her, her school had abandoned her.  She hadn’t even known what pregnancy really was, let alone the labor, and each new aspect of it was a horrible surprise.  The only grace, if it could be called that, was that the state had said it was her right to care for her child.  They did not force her to give up her Elijah to her parents, as her parents had demanded.  Her parents had forced her to choose between home and the child of her womb, and she had chosen the child.

It had not been easy.  It had been the stark opposite of easy.

Particularly when her child, still suckling at her breast, had looked up at her with eyes that flashed, and had asserted his will over hers.  Blessed child.  Cursed child.  One in a million, among those who were one in thirty-thousand.

She had been saved by people who had worked at this facility before.  They had given her power and then by faith or by fortune her power had outstripped their ability to deal with her.  They had asked her for favors and she had done only some of those favors, as she pleased.  They had, after all, enabled her to hold her Elijah without being his slave.

With this and more, she assaulted Chevalier’s eyes with more deep truths that the eyes normally couldn’t see.  With visual representations of feelings he would know to be her fact.  What it felt to be worshiped, what it felt to give all of oneself up to faith.  The security of giving oneself over.

He endured it all.  He knew all of the tricks, the techniques, the things that members of the PRT, Protectorate, and Wards had studied.  He had sweat at his brow and a distant look in his eyes.

She had been told of these things from a Ward named Sunflower, who had gone to meet a boy she had met online, and found that boy was named Elijah.  He had brought her to Christine, and Christine had thanked her by arranging her a husband.  A shame, that Sunflower had been stolen away by the heroes.

As of now, she had two with her who had been brought into the fold much as Sunflower should have been.  Ala and Chort.  They watched over her while she swam in memory, almost floated almost three hundred thousand connections, to eyes, ears, skin, and to other senses.

She felt lighter than air, transcendant, while Chevalier crawled amid broken tiles before her, his friends and allies in the process of being bound by chains, even though many were too injured to move, and the remainder were unwilling to act because thralls and Fallen had the injured hostage.  Chevalier was powerless and she was more powerful than she had ever been.

She ran fingers through Chevalier’s hair, then did it again without touching him with her hands, using her power only.

“Tell me, do you have a means of listening to others?  Do you know if my Elijah lived?”

Chevalier was silent.  He likely knew she could get a small foothold in the mind by being talked to.  It was a benefit of small fractions for her, but he refused to grant it.

“Come, look up at me,” she told Chevalier.  She put a hand at his chin, and Chort helped her, forcing Chevalier’s head up until it couldn’t move any further.  Chort wore a wolf pelt with goat horns over head and shoulders, and despite being only sixteen, was strong on a level that surpassed even heroes like Alexandria.  When he moved, he did so with care.  To him, Chevalier was like eggshell.

She reached for Chevalier’s mouth, and her fingers slipped past lips, fingertips growing wet with saliva.

“Taste me,” she said.  She would have every sense he could give her.

She would have him, eventually.

He twisted, in a movement that might have taken every last bit of strength he had in him, perhaps a scrap of power that Teacher hadn’t managed to cut him off from.  He raised himself up, found a small freedom of movement, and parted his teeth, catching her fingers in them.

With the weight of his armor and the fierceness of Chort’s grip, the collapse back to his former position made his teeth come together with a force that could have cracked them, had her fingers not been absorbing the worst of it.  Her knees buckled, her back arching, and her arm going stiff as she felt flesh part, teeth scraping bone and finding joint.

She smiled.

Every second was glorious agony, as she felt the taste of her blood well in his mouth.  She made it as ambrosia, little by little, and then she twisted the taste and the feeling, took the pain they shared and made it into a new pain just for him, until her blood was as acid, and as far as he was concerned, his every sense was telling him the acid had dissolved the bottom of his mouth, his tongue, throat, teeth, and jaw.

He released her, and for an instant, she saw the horror in his eyes, as he tried to comprehend that his lower face had dissolved.

Then… that inkling of resolve.

“You’re going to join me,” she told him.  “You’ll be by my side, wearing armor crafted from the flesh of the Endbringers you so stupidly challenged.”

Her head turned as she felt a power reach for her and find her.  Close by, someone searched for her feelings.  Christine looked at a wall, and her eyes tracked the source of the power through that wall.

She reached back, faster than they could find her, and impressed her feelings onto them.  She looked at them, and she found the emotional equivalent of frozen-over wasteland.  She tested that wasteland, with a feeling of tranquility, and found little traction.  She gave them hope, and there was something there, something that lingered, that stuck to the walls of the heart.  She gave them a feeling of being loved, and found more ground.

Hope and love.  She twisted at feelings and tried different variations.  Romantic love.  Not so important to this particular heart.  Love for a job.  More important, but not the most important thing.  Familial love?  There.

The woman slowed as the emotions swelled in her breast.

Christine Mathers watched and waited, cradling her injured hand.  A thrall approached to tend to it.  No healing powers -oh, how she had wished to get a healer under her wing- but only medical expertise.

It took only a few more adjustments before she found the right kind of familial love, and then found the exact feeling that struck closest to this wasteland heart.

The love of a mother for the daughter she had lost, and the certainty that she was loved back.  Christine had felt it when Elijah had been days old, before his eyes had flashed as they had.

The woman had stopped.  She might have been crying now.

“Ala,” she murmured.

“Mama?”

Christine touched Ala’s face, put a hand on Ala’s shoulder, then got closer, until her front pressed against Ala’s back.  She lifted Ala’s arm, her own in line with it, and she pointed Ala’s finger.

Clouds began to form, loose and dark, in a vague line that reached out across the room they were in.

The beam of darkness that speared through the middle of those clouds would punch through ten walls of this facility.  It only needed to punch through one to snipe their target.

The floor trembled.  Christine reached out for Ala’s shoulder for balance.

Things gave way.  An attack from below, cutting the floor out from beneath them.  A furrow, cutting into the center of the room, ten feet wide.

Ala fired, but the tremor in the ground distorted her aim.  Christine could feel the target was alive and well, still reeling with emotion.

One of Chevalier’s capes, though handcuffed, used a power to produce a circular pulse around them, extending out a hundred feet.  Her Fallen were alternately pushed and pulled closer to the furrow, the hostages further away.  Chort caught Christine and Ala with one arm, his fingers digging into the ground.

Another pulse from the same cape.  It threw injured and hostages across the gap, Fallen into it, or onto the other side.  Only a few were secure enough or as heavy as Chevalier, and didn’t move as a consequence.

She could hear it, now.  The sound like a blade being drawn from a sheath, but constant.  She could heard the rumble as machinery shifted.

The attack continued, tearing out more floor.

Virtually everyone present had seen her.  There were enough she had touched, that she could give them physical sensation as well.  With that, she gave them waking nightmares, to assault their senses.  Whether their eyes were open or closed, she made them see their friends die in the worst ways, with hallucinated shots from Ala’s cloud stripping away faces, sawing off legs, and inflicting horrific burns.  She saw them scream, struggle, some lashing out or charging.

She made them see floor where there wasn’t any, and a lack of floor where there was.

“It’s not real!” Chevalier bellowed, as the first few fell.  She filled his mouth with the taste of bile, and the feeling of a hand reaching up his throat to grab his tongue.  Still, he managed, eyes shut, his words somehow both a mumble and a shout.  “Don’t move!  Don’t move!  That’s an order!”

“Are you watching, Teacher?” she murmured.  “Send us more soldiers.  Ala, shoot them.  Chort, guard us.  Everyone else-!”

The order she had been planning to give fled her mind as she saw a figure scrambling up a section of floor.

He found his footing, backed up, until he was nearer the hostages.  He turned his full focus to her, glowing eyes peering at her, and there was no connection, aside from a vague buzz of technology that her power reached into.  She had no way into his eyes.

He was supposed to be one of hers.  He had been one of the ones to get away, as Sunflower had, but his escape had been late.

The one who was slicing up the supporting walls  ground rumbled, the floor twisted, the house-sized turbine in the center of the room lost some of its foundation, and the fans it managed that drew in air from the outside and pumped it into ventilation shifted in kind.

The fans still turned, but the turns were torturous, metal against metal.  A continuous screech.

“Rain,” she called out, her voice high and ethereal, disappearing into and emerging from the screech.

He clenched his hands.

But as much as she called his name and invited a response, Rain wasn’t her focus.  When she looked at him, she imagined one of her Fallen.  The Fallen he should have and could have been.

She projected that image into the eyes of Chevalier’s capes, injured, cuffed, and free.  She brought Sunflower into the scene, put this image of Rain there, his hand at her throat, her legs kicking and failing to scrape the ground and find footing.  She made his fingertips so tight at her throat that they dug in and drew blood, the small mechanical arm that extended from his elbow with clawed fingertips having raked the flesh of the phantom Sunflower’s arm.

She watched with satisfaction as the first cape turned against the Fallen Rain to save the teenage heroine.  A punch into the air, that produced a phantom fist that traveled until it struck Rain from behind.

You walk up to them as if you think they’re your allies, that you have their back and they have yours.  But you’re alone, child.  You will always be alone, unless you’re with me.

The second cape lashed out.  A pulse from the cape who had separated hostage from hostage taker, hers from theirs.  Rain was cast aside.

The ground rumbled again.  A section of the room at the end furthest from Christine collapsed.

“Give me my reinforcements, Teacher,” Christine said.  “Now.”

Teacher blinked.

“Five squadrons should converge on Christine’s position at Turbine Four.”

“I’ll arrange it,” his soldier said.

He looked at the numbers.

97.7% in red.  The number steadily climbed, dropped, then climbed again.

67.0% in white.  The number climbed with a glacial slowness.

13% of his facility’s systems were compromised, and that number, at least, was going down.

Dangerous, but not so close that he had to change his plan.

His children crawled out of him and across the floor, scurrying to where a bloodstain had been left behind in the earlier fighting.

He liked moving, enjoyed the languid grace of even the simple action of walking.  His head didn’t rise and fall with his footsteps, and his footsteps were feather-soft on the floor, despite the fact he weighed nearly three hundred pounds.  All muscle.

“Hello there, little brother,” Swansong said.

Don’t call me little.  Agitation sang through every part of his body, mercury-filled hydraulic channels within his body narrowing, muscles tightening.  The children that lived within every cavity in his body stirred, ready to act.

She huffed for breath, crouching on the ground, one hand on the floor and the other on a storage container.  She used the storage container to help find a standing position, then moved a bit further.  Five seconds of effort, pain, and leaning on an object for help, just to cross a short stretch of ordinary floor.

He dropped to all fours and crossed a similar distance with a single step, before climbing up onto a larger storage container, to show her that he could, and to see what she would do.

“A Crawler wanted my sister to use my power on them.  Bonesaw said no, that the evolution it provoked could kill her or hurt others.  Too much.  I thought you might be interested.”

He couldn’t remember much about her.  Someone -he didn’t remember who, and the memory was vague because it wasn’t his own- had commented on Damsel, to say that the more she talked, the weaker she was, the more insecure she felt.

“Want me to annihilate you, little brother?  It will give you room to evolve.”

He stared her down.

“Or are you scared?”  She held her chin higher.

He didn’t move from his perch on the storage container, instead relaxing sphincters all across his body, to make openings large enough that his children could drop out.  They hit the ground, bouncing where ridged backs hit floor, settled on their flat bases, and began scurrying in unpredictable zig-zags.

Twenty, from cavities along his arms, one hundred from cavities at his back.  Thirty from points along his legs.  One from his urethra, two from glands at either side of his mouth.  Almost forty were crammed into his digestive system, and they wormed their way out through gaps and folds, making their way to openings in the stomach.

His entire body reformed and restructured, more gap than physical mass.  Webbings of skin stretched to cover gaps here and there, but they were so thin the light could shine through them.

Swansong used her power as the first of his fist-sized children drew near.  It was slow to initiate, slow to cut off, and a moment after stopping, barked out another brief blast that sent her off balance.

When she went to use her power again, it didn’t activate.

“You have to send your swarm after me because you’re too scared.  You’re smaller and more pathetic than these bugs of yours, Nedley.”

Fluids within his chest and stomach churned.  He could feel protein chains and calcium forming the basic infrastructure that would become full fledged children.  They were stronger now.  He had fed on the flesh from the Black Goat and from two of Valkyrie’s flock.  By feeding he evolved, and by evolving, he improved his children.

She couldn’t catch all of them.  Even if she had access to her full power, she might not have managed it.  They crawled up the storage containers in the hallway of the loading dock, then leaped.  She blasted those.  They snuck low, zig-zagging across the ground.  She caught those too.

But one scurried close to a storage container, masked by a lip of metal above it.  It got close enough to reach out with pincers, snipping the back of Swansong’s heel, like wire cutters through butter.

She blasted it, right hand outstretched but shifted her weight to compensate for the recoil, and in the doing, she put her weight on the injured foot.  Blood spurted, and she lost her balance, the ongoing use of her power throwing her back as she fell.

With sharp eyes, he could see how the lower half of her heel had slid left, the upper half sliding right, until they slid past one another.

She fell, and with pain and disorientation, she didn’t seem to immediately grasp which direction his children were coming from.

Capes from Valkyrie’s contingent joined the fray.  One with needle spines he could fling, to spear ten of Spawner’s children with ten needles.

“You’re pathetic, Spawner,” Swansong taunted him.  “I’ve talked to someone like you.  Someone small, trying to pretend they are something more than they are, and doing a bad job of pretending.  The harder they’d try, the more pathetic they would look.  You’re embarrassing yourself and worse, you’re embarrassing me, because I consider myself related to you.”

“Related?” one of Valkyrie’s capes asked.

“Sure,” Swansong said.  “Close enough to being related.  Same person brought us into this world.  Nedley?  You need to be something more, if you’re not going to make the rest of us look bad.”

He rankled, but he didn’t act on it.  He was Ned and he was Bradley.  There was overlap between the two and he lived in that overlap, drew memories from it, and pieced himself together.  Half of the time, when he reached for memories, he stumbled onto the memories from that overlap between the two characters, seeing them like double vision.  Cockroaches scurrying across a kitchen.  Staring down at bloody hands.  People with twisted expressions shouting at him, so much larger they had to be parents or authority figures.

More cockroaches, scurrying across the kitchen.

Ned would have been driven by those taunts, pushed to attack despite the apparent trap.  Bradley would hang back, trusting his creations to do the work.

But it was a bitter feeling, for those two parts of himself to find their way to shared common ground.  A resentment of himself.

Valkyrie’s heroes scurried before him.  Swansong moved like a roach with legs pulled off.

Ten of his children stirred in his belly.  Acid churned and fed them.  Chemicals dumped into stomach from chest cavity, generating reactions that created more complex components, along with a bioelectric jolt that gave them life.

The ten became twenty, and twenty became forty.  Forty became eighty, and his upper body swelled with them.

When they left his body this time, they were faster, larger, with more durable shells.  He’d colored them to blend in with the poured concrete floor of the loading area.

A cape grabbed Swansong’s arm to help her get back from the spreading tide, and she flinched, her power sparking, her empty white eyes and eyebrows suggesting fear.  Fear that she might destroy the person saving her, or fear because she was as vulnerable as she had been since Bonesaw had lopped off her hands?

Spawner hadn’t been told that.  Ned and Bradley hadn’t been told it.  Still, he had picked it up at one point, and it was considered one of his memories now.

Her composure slipped further, as she tore her arm away, telling the cape to get away from her.  Her attention moved between his children and the capes who were gathering behind her.  She searched.

For his part, he turned to look up at the lovely Ingenue.

Ingenue pointed at Swansong, then formed that same hand into a fist.

A command for him, or-?

Swansong used her power to blast the nearest bugs.  She pulled away as though she had touched a hot stove.

He didn’t look away from Ingenue, trusting smaller eyes at the side of his neck to see the essential details of this ongoing conflict.  Two of Swansong’s fingers crumbled, falling to pieces.

“She gave me my control back,” Swansong said.  “To think I had some respect for her.  She’s an idiot.”

She gave you that control back at the cost of your immunity to your power, Spawner thought.  He was already pumping out more of his children.  The member of Valkyrie’s flock that threw needles missed one that leaped up to the small of his back.  Before he could twist around to pull it free, it was severing his spine.  He dropped to his knees, toppled, and landed in the midst of six more children, who went for the more complex structures of brainstem, eyes, and internal organs.

His collective of children advanced in neat rows and columns, weaving their way through, onto, and beneath anything in their way, from forklifts to storage containers, barrels to chunks of concrete.

She used her power, and the power licked up her arm to eat the flesh there, disintegrating more of her hand.  A one-handed propulsion, that sent her more horizontal than vertical.  His children leaped for her and three were eaten by the blast, a fourth landing on her arm.  Two snips in rapid succession, to carve out a chunk there.

She aimed to fling herself at him.

He flung himself back.

He could heal rapidly, and his creations could use material to piece him back together, but he had been maintaining a Bradley mindset to avoid being provoked, and Bradley was one to run first when he was unsure.

She moved the hand around to her front, bringing her knees close to her chest as she reversed course with her power, hurling herself back toward capes.  She was losing blood from damage to her forearm, damage to her upper arm where the chunk had been cut free, and the sliced ankle.

But she looked at him, and her lips moved.

He could smell it in the air.

A cape caught her, leaping to intercept her in the air.  They landed, and she was deposited on the ground.  She said something to the cape who had saved her.

Captain Claw, Usher, and Leister had descended.  Swansong had Valkyrie’s capes, but Spawner had Ingenue and her bodyguards.

And he had the desire to prove himself.

Time to not be Bradley anymore.  He would be strategic about this, lunge for the more vulnerable targets.

When he moved, he moved with a body engineered by a thousand refinements, a thousand chunks of meat and body parts marinated in the fear and adrenaline of his meals.  He couldn’t eat with the mouth he had now, but he could be fed.

He was swift, and his leaps were as long as Swansong’s were with her blasts.  Skin stretched between elbow and waist, giving him a foot or two of glide.

The cape he chose to go after first was a heavyset man with a torch in each hand.  Spawner hit him like a truck, and grabbed the man by the arms.  Others approached at a run, while Spawner simply held his victim.

Held him, and let his children crawl free and crawl into the man.

He hurled the body at the people charging his way.  Most dodged, but a woman who dodged was ambushed by a bug that leaped from the torchbearer to the side of her neck.

Another overlap between Ned and Bradley is that we are survivors.

He lunged for another, and she threw a piece of paper.  Paper expanded out into a wall, spearing floor and ceiling.  His claws fought to impale the material, but he was able to cling to it.

A fresh batch of his children crawled out, climbing on the paper, racing toward the edges.  Each was programmed with an image of the person they were hunting.

Others used powers, they killed his children, and they tried to stall things.

But the paper wall broke down, dissolving into a million sheets that filled the air.  He had a glimpse of the woman who had created it, being taken to pieces to an extent where she already looked like a vaguely person-shaped stack of beef cubes with bones here and there.

Darkness boiled out of the tunnel that Valkyrie was residing within.  It leaked out as a heavy fog.

The sound of Swansong using her power caught his attention, as the fog swelled from ankle height to knee height, even with the wide surface area.

It blocked their view of his children, but it blocked his children from seeing too.

He saw them leap, hopping up until they were out of the cloud of dark, then leap again once they hit solid ground, for whatever they’d seen.  Most got out of the way.

Swansong was using her power despite the damage it did to her, and she was doing it for no apparent reason, except to hold a bit of her darkness in her hand.

Spawner narrowed a half-dozen eyes.

“Darkness is my ally,” she said.

No, Bradley thought, irrationally annoyed.  That isn’t a good line!

Be more afraid, Ned thought.

He leaped.  She used her power, hopping up onto a storage crate as he’d done earlier, landing on her shins rather than use her injured foot to bear her weight.

He approached, running through the waist-deep darkness, and he saw her surreptitiously place something on the container.  Before he could close the gap and reach her, she threw herself sideways, into the darkness ten feet below the top of the storage container.  Her power went silent as she was submerged.

He tossed one of his children onto the top of the storage container she had occupied, with a simple instinctive command programmed into it.  To seize whatever was there, to jostle, disturb.  If he gave a command, it was to bring the thing to him.  Otherwise, it was to carry it away.

It found nothing.

Leister pole-vaulted himself into the air and extended his trident, making it long and wide, before raking it across the floor.  When he pulled it up out of the pitch black fog, it was alongside body parts and Spawner’s children.  The body parts belonged to someone who had been devoured earlier.

He visited the same spot she’d occupied, in part to get her scent.  He watched as she emerged, approaching Captain Claw, as if he wasn’t a consideration.  Her back was to him, and she didn’t even glance his way.  Claw fought with his hands in his pockets, a phantom image of something large and bestial looming over his upper body and head, clawing and snapping at Swansong and destroying the area around her whenever it missed.  When her power destroyed a part of it, it was quick to be replaced.

Ned lunged, hurling himself after her.  He huffed a breath as he passed Usher.

Someone struck him with lightning, and he felt it burn into his side.  His stored children crawled to fill that void, some to be resources, others to dismantle, others to build something to replace.  It was faster than healing on his own.

Captain Claw looked at him as he charged, giving the attack away.  He used a swipe of his claw to help maneuver himself out of the way as Spawner leaped in.

She twisted, leaning against the wall with one hand, one foot on the ground, reaching out with one hand and using her power.

The power washed over Spawner, and it did only superficial damage.  At the same time, her hand broke in two, a metal pipe jutting from where the armbones would be corroding visibly under the power’s influence.  Flesh blackened and cracked.

Her other hand- she wasn’t using it, he saw.

She slammed the metal spike into his throat, and it penetrated.  Black blood oozed out.  She used her power, and Usher’s protection ensured it did nothing to him, while at the same time destroying more of her arm.  The pipe broke off, and blood weeped from the socket.

“So weak you can’t take me one on one,” she said.  She smiled.  “You embarrass all of us.”

He punched his claw into her abdomen.  One of his children crawled from his arm to his hand, into the open wound.

He preferred his rebuttal.

She used her power, aiming it at him, but she didn’t do it to hurt him.  It was to propel herself backwards, arms spread, into the darkness just below their little platform.

He leaped down, striking out, and he hit nothing.

He’d have to find the source of this nuisance.  She had one of his children inside her stomach, and it would devour her as twenty of his children had taken the Black Lamb to pieces.

He would find the darkness creator, and then he would pick off the rest.

Another common ground of Ned and Bradley was that they hadn’t been good with women.  Ingenue was a spark, a stirring for the soul.  She evoked the worst parts of him, then embraced those parts, and that was an intoxicating feeling.

He wanted to impress, like a schoolboy on the schoolyard wanted to win over the pretty girls.  He wanted to be his best self.

Leister was dispatching two.  Usher hung back, tinker gun in hand, and picked off someone from the very back lines of the enemy group.  Claw was already engaged in a one-against-three skirmish.  Two of those three were injured.

This was Valkyrie’s last stand, and Valkyrie wasn’t even here.

He waited until he had fully regenerated the damage to his throat, and then he roared.

The roar was undercut by a sharp whistle from above.

“The ladder,” Ingenue said, her voice audible only because he had advanced hearing.

He turned, and he saw Swansong there.  She climbed the ladder with only one working hand clenched into a fist, both legs dangling limp, blood covering bare legs to the point someone might think it was leggings she was wearing.  Her arm was a stump that she used to embrace one rung before reaching another rung up.

Still she didn’t look at him.

Was this Bonesaw’s work?  He had never been injured enough to activate any berserker protocol or some innate programming that had been implanted with memories.

But her forward progress was single-minded, laborious, and marked with wheezing breaths.

She went after Ingenue.

He hopped down and waded into darkness, trusting it to make him even more silent in his movements.  He watched for every and any tell.  There was no Captain Claw to give him away, now.

He leaped, pouncing.

She twisted, one arm wrapped around the ladder, one leg dropping from a dangling position to rest on the rung and anchor her further.  The stump,  pointed his way, and the blast that erupted was wider and blunter.  It consumed ninety-five percent of him.

“Leister!  Claw!  Usher!” the Black Goat called out.  “We’re going!”

They abandoned him.  He was their heavy hitter, their unstoppable force.  Bitterness seized him, percolating through what was left of his brain and saturating everything that brain housed.

He got a glimpse of Swansong as she walked past him.  Of a belly with the wound in the side opened wider, a ring of black around it to suggest she’d used her power within the cavity to destroy his child.  Ribs with bandages lying tattered, bones scorched and flesh raw around the edges.  Her arm was a stump.

Her eyes- only one was white from corner to corner, the edges smoking black.  The other was ordinary.

Was that somehow how she had seen him?

She made it roughly seven steps before collapsing.

He watched as the darkness dissipated.  The surviving members of the flock gathered, two going to her side.

“Yellow costume,”

“You asked before.  We got her.  She’s over there.  Right now we need to get you help.”

“Can’t see her.  A little fuzzy.  Give her these.”

She handed the scant remains of one broken syringe and another intact one.

“We need to give you medical attention.”

“Take it from someone who died-”

“We’ve all died once,” the boy in black leather said.  “Most of us.  Not her.”

“I don’t have long.  I’d rather do things.  Make arrangements.  This way.  Over here.”

Every utterance was a little more strenuous than the last.

But the two members of Valkyrie’s flock helped her, almost carrying her to the destination.  The storage container from before.  The one in black went to the one in yellow, who lingered in the background, nursing an injury of hers.

Swansong reached up, and fumbled for a spot on the storage container.

Invisible, almost flush with the container.  Something that resembled a cross between a wire Christmas tree and an antennae.

“I’d give you mine, but-”

There was a lull.  One of the capes who was propping her up gave her a slight shake.

She rallied, with more vigor than before.  “-a friend of mine would be hurt if I gave you mine.  Take it.  It’s like a syringe… maybe it counts.  Flick this, insert the eye.  Supposed to go to yellow.”

“The one in yellow.”

Swansong nodded.

“We could get help.  Go after Black Lamb.”

“No.  No.  Death doesn’t scare me.  I’ve beat it enough times before.  No, don’t let her have me. Val…”

“Is that why you said not to wake her up earlier?”

There was a pause.  Spawner couldn’t see enough to know if there was body language.

“I thought I’d go out screaming and ranting, sick and hating myself for it.  I did… every other time except the first…”

“You said you had a friend?”

She nodded.  “Glad it was me.  Means there’s less chance it’s her.  I can handle this.  Been here enough times.”

“You think you’d learn,” the boy in white said.

She scoffed, a light, soft sound.

There was no more conversation.  More of the flock emerged from the tunnel.  The wounded were gathered and tended to, and they had their own conversations.

The two boys remained near Swansong for a few more minutes, and then they walked away.

“Kid,” the one in white said.  “Can you make heads or tails of this?”

“Looks like a camera with some broadcast tech.”

“Why would she give it to us?”

The conversation overlapped with another, similar one.  The girl in yellow had the syringe, and another cape held the broken traces of the other one.

“What do I do with it?”

“I think you use it, Canary.”

“And the broken one?  I don’t know how I’d get that little fluid in, but I don’t like the ideas, not when it’s mixed with broken glass, or whatever that is.”

“It seemed important.”

There was a pause.  The two groups converged.

The one in yellow injected herself with the intact syringe.  There was a long pause, and then she nodded.

Then she stabbed her upper arm with the broken end of the other syringe.

Spawner saw the group patrolling to look for his children, killing them wherever they were found.  They drew steadily nearer to him.

One locked eyes with the fragment of his head that rested on a forklift seat.

That was enough.  He was dead and done for.  He closed his eyes and waited for the killing blow.

Capricorn and Antares used their powers in alternation.  Stone wall, then forcefield.  Wall, then forcefield.  The attack was relentless, not helped by the fact the Speedrunners were spearheading the attack.

Antares tore apart a section of protective sheeting that covered a sensitive area of wires, and used that as added protection.  Laser beams and bullets tore into anything they tried to put between themselves and the enemy.

“Lookout’s sending us messages.”

“A way out of this?” Tristan asked, through grit teeth.

“No,” Antares said.

“I don’t know how you can read and fight at the same time.”

“I shouldn’t have,” she said, and her voice was dark.

They’d managed to beat a fighting retreat to the next major intersection.  Rounding the corner bought them a bit of reprieve from incoming fire, which let them erect a more confident defense.  Ceiling was torn down and rock wall was drawn out, thick and solid.

“It’s bad news,” Tristan said, quiet.

“We don’t know anything for sure yet,” Antares said, setting her jaw.

There was a heavy bang as an explosive detonated against the wall.  They backed up a few steps and Tristan created a second later.

While he worked, he commented, “Except Lookout’s upset because she knows, isn’t she?”

“We don’t know,” Antares said.

“Alright.  I don’t want to know, so that’s perfect for me.  I’m sick enough over Byron, he was at the very edge of passing out when he swapped to me, what if I switch to him and that’s it?  But I can’t- I can’t not.”

“It’s okay,” Antares said.

“It’s really not.”

“I’ll rephrase.  Yes, it scares the daylights out of me, I can’t imagine how you feel, but it’s a problem for later.  Yes?”

Tristan clenched a fist, then nodded.

“I don’t mean to be a bitch, but-”

“No.  It’s right.  Makes sense.  Plan?”

Antares went on, “We have options.  But I can’t do this.  This right here.  We can’t do this.  We’re pinned down, and I’m supposed to go after Teacher.  We should make a break for it.”

“I’m supposed to hold the chokepoint.”

“You held it.”

He shook his head, and then turned to face the wall.

“Now’s not the time to be stubborn.  You don’t sacrifice yourself because your brother might not be okay.”

“Giving up the chokepoint means they come right after us.  That’s sacrificing all of us.”

The speakers crackled, and then music began to play, an aria, with light instrumentals.

“Master-stranger,” Tristan said.  “That’s getting to me.  I think.  It might be-”

“It’s a power,” Victoria said.  “Working full strength through tech.”

The intensity of the assault on the far side of the wall had died down.  There was a buzz of communication.

“I think it’s from our side.  Swansong’s cape with the yellow costume… there aren’t a lot of them.  Most would be Advance Guard, but they’d be together, not with Valkyrie.  I think that’s Canary.”

“The celebrity?”

“She’s a Warden now.  Under Valkyrie’s wing.  They knew each other in the Birdcage.  She normally only has a minor effect in actual recordings or speakers.  It was Swansong.”

Tristan sighed.

The song continued, tranquil, more hum with percussion at this stage than the aria that had opened things.

“Knock knock!” was the voice on the far side of the wall.  Obnoxious and loud.

“That’s Imp,” Tristan said.

“Back up!” Antares called out.

Then she smashed the wall.

Heartbroken, dogs, Rachel, and Imp were gathered on the far side.  They had attacked from the rear.  From the blood on her knife, Imp had done her share.

“Undersiders scare me,” Tristan said.

“Good,” Rachel said.

There was a look on their faces.  Hurt, hollow.

Tristan counted the Heartbroken.  One was absent- and on the back of one dog, wrapped in a blanket-

“Samuel?” he asked.

Rachel nodded, looking away, angry.  Chastity had her arms folded.  Roman and Juliet looked like they were in a very similar space, weirdly sullen.

“The littler kids are going to be hell to manage,” Imp said.  Her voice wasn’t as lively as it normally was.  “You?”

The question was so casual.

“We’ll see,” Antares said.  “They’re coming.”

Tristan shook his head, switching over to look at the displays.  He could see the markers of each other member of the group, excepting one.  They didn’t have labels.

He could see the messages Lookout had sent and was sending, and the replies.

There was no reason to stay and hold the chokepoint, with the Undersiders having done their share.

They rendezvoused with Sveta.  Wounded, with holes in her arms and shoulder, Sveta hugged Antares.

Every appearance was simultaneously relief and horror.

Then they saw Rain, with Love Lost and Colt.  Colt was covered in dust.  Chevalier and his team followed behind.

They ran into thralls, and found those thralls didn’t have much fight in them.  As the music sounded throughout the facility, cutting in and out as Lookout managed to get her grips on a system, then was blocked or shut down, the thralls gave up their efforts.

“Is this A or is it C?” Imp asked.

“C,” Tristan said, trying not to think about what that meant.  Two members of Breakthrough were supposed to die.

Victoria picked up speed, moving away and ahead of the group, as they hurried to their destination.  She and Ashley had been roommates, or housemates.  Two sides of a peculiar coin, in some ways.

Victoria only flew like she was flying now when she was using the Wretch, keeping a distance, making sure not to get within ten feet of anyone, like a bubble surrounded her.  Except in this case, it did.

They found the tail end of another group.  Legend’s troops who moved on foot, who were disarming a group of thralls that had surrendered.

Antares held up a hand, and Tristan took up a position, getting people to give her a wide berth.  She picked up one of the tinker guns.  She held it in one hand, checked the ammo, and then picked up another.

She picked up another gun, and then another.

She picked up another gun, and then yet another.

Others went on ahead, as Breakthrough remained where they were, diverting the flow of foot traffic, watching, waiting for the remainder of their team.

“Tristan, is Byron-” Rain started.

“He’ll live,” Tristan said.  He wasn’t sure, but… there was no other option.  Even if it meant convincing Antares to let them go to her sister.

Antares carried the guns without touching one of them.  Her hood hid her eyes, and her feet didn’t touch the ground.

She didn’t elaborate on the new trick, and Tristan didn’t ask.  In some ways, he associated new tricks to the way his power had changed when he had murdered Byron.  It made a degree of sense to him.

They reached Teacher’s command center, spacious enough for the leadership of most of the Wardens and a few other team leaders.  Few members of the second wave assault had made it this far in.

The thralls were arrested, and Teacher was there.  He stood in the threshold of a doorway.

Through that door was a special kind of oblivion, with images that swirled in darkness like images on the back of closed eyes with fingers pressed down on them, but image and background were all pitch black.

“I’ve seen that doorway before,” Rain said, his voice a hush.

“Where?”

“Every night,” Rain said.

“It feels like the will that pushes my body to act when I’m not in control,” Sveta said.

“Ashley talked about it,” Antares said.  “Seeing a landscape in her dreams.”

“He found a way into the spaces between worlds,” Legend said.  “Where the things in our heads really reside.”

Contessa stood beside Legend, unmoving.

And Teacher needed only to take a half-step backward or to fall back to enter that realm.

He pointed at the computer.  A number in red showed 95%.

“What does that mean?”

“It means I need only to give the world a little push, and everything crumbles,” Teacher said.  “And I hold the reins of what’s there when our world crumbles away.”

“Why?  What does that serve?” Chevalier asked.

“She didn’t tell you?” Teacher asked, indicating Contessa.  “It gives us the best outcome.  Humanity, mankind.  The clock is ticking, the process of the agents coming together and uniting before shattering our world and trying to reach others never quite stopped.  It simply… lost the pilot.  Lost all direction.”

Legend looked at Contessa.

Teacher went on, “I didn’t have a perfect precog judge what I was doing, so do tell me if I got it wrong.  I’ll accept any and all punishment.”

“You’ll do that anyway, you mangy foreskin,” Imp said.

“No,” Contessa said.  “You’re right.”

Teacher smiled.  “This is the best option.  You’re on my side.”

“Objectively, it’s so close to the best option it’s almost indistinguishable.  But it’s not one of the options I gave them.”

Teacher’s face fell a fraction.  “What-”

“I gave them the options they would be happiest with.  I picked one.  I’m done with the objective best, with the ugliest path to getting there.”

Swansong fucking died and my brother might be joining her, and this isn’t the ugliest path?

Tristan felt bitter, and he looked to his teammates to see they felt the same way.  He saw glares and anger, but no expressions perfectly reflected his bitterness or resentment.

Teacher swayed, like he was going to step back into that darkness.

“You don’t want to do that,” Contessa said.

He hesitated, staring.

Contessa turned her head a fraction, and Teacher followed that fraction, his eyes falling on Breakthrough.  Studying them.  Antares floated above the computer terminals, still holding the guns.  Rain sat in the chair.  Sveta had her arms folded.  Tristan clenched a fist, while studying the man.

Teacher took a step forward.  It put the door behind him.  Like he had abandoned the notion of stepping through it.

What had he seen or figured out?

Teacher addressed the room.  “Within a very short time, the city will break down.  Nothing to do with the recent car bombing of its parahuman mayor.  You’ll wish you’d sided with me.  If you kill me, you’ll regret that I can’t help you find sanity in the madness, when our world becomes theirs.  If you imprison me, you’ll be coming to my cell to beg for help.  Let me go free, and I’ll have things in place.”

“We’re not going to let you go free,” Chevalier said.  “We can talk about whether execution or prison are more appropriate.”

“It’s all going to go to pieces,” Teacher said.

“And you’re going to go into custody,” Legend said.  “Are you done?  You’ve said your piece.  There aren’t too many who are willing to listen when you’ve killed or hurt our friends and subordinates.”

Teacher held out his hands.  The other thralls in the room did much the same.

It was Chevalier who slapped on the cuffs, dragging Teacher toward the door.  The crowd parted.

With nearly every back turned, only a few were looking the other way.  Rain was among them, and the way he startled made Tristan turn.

The doorway to the shard realm flickered, and then it went out.

It was a trick of layers.  While eyes were turned toward the door, someone stepped out of the crowd.  One of the younger capes from the Wards.  They put an arm out, grabbing Teacher, and it was Legend who was fast enough to grab the two of them.

Teacher, Legend, and the junior cape all disappeared in a wisp of blue dust.

Amid the commotion, one by one, the guns Antares had picked up dropped to the floor, some with mangled handles.  After the first, Sveta caught them.

And on the terminal closest to the door that had disappeared, numbers adjusted.  A red number declined to 87%, 85%…  A white number ticked up.  Nearly at 70%.  A third looked eerily similar to Kenzie’s map of her control over the complex.  Steadily and swiftly, she took full and total control of Teacher’s resources, and he had no idea what to feel about that, given what she must be feeling.

He got away and that confirms it’s option C, Tristan thought.  The confirmation drove the point home, and emotions bottled up over days surged to the point he momentarily felt out of his mind.

That it was option C meant Swansong’s death was real, and another death was imminent or connected to all of this.  Possibly fucking Byron.

“Legend will be fine,” Chevalier said, and he almost sounded convincing.  “Let’s get to work.  We’ll assume this is real, and that means there’s a hell of a lot to do.”

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103 thoughts on “Dying – 15.z”

  1. Swansong went out with a bang. Quite a lot of them; she went down fighting. I think Ingenue miscalculated when she took Swansong’s own immunity to her power, and I did like to see that she managed to use the bayonet Bonesaw fitted to her tank barrel. I mean, without the immunity Swansong did die, and her own power did a lot of the damage- but she was less dangerous when she had less control. A pity she didn’t manage to either splat Usher or (better yet) Ingenue, but she was a dangerous woman, went down fighting her enemies, and achieved her mission.

    1. I feel like Swansong ripping herself apart with her own power to destroy her enemies is a perfect way for her to go. At the end, she didn’t bow to anyone and took control of her own fucking death. Admittedly, she was my least favourite member of breakthrough, and I was hoping for her to be one of the deaths, but that was still a fucking powerful death scene and I’m glad she went out like a badass.

      1. I totally agree- except about her being one of my least favourite members of Breakthrough. I have no idea who’s last place (I suspect Kenzie, because she’s just really over the top and not somebody I’d enjoy being with), but it wasn’t Swansong.

  2. Huh.
    So that was Teacher’s plan for “Beating” Contessa: he ran exactly the sort of “Objectively best” scheme he thought she’d approve of.

    And then she refused him anyway…

    And god- Is it weird that the point that really hit me there was the death of Number man and/or fucking Citrine. Contessa just burning their lives away for the sake of distracting Teacher for a few seconds.
    … I wonder if she has just fucked up Alcott’s plan, or if Dinah was upset because all these deaths are PART of her plan.

    also, Ashley was fricken Epic.

    1. Remember Dying 15.1? Citrine said she’d actually be ON THE MISSION. So it’s gotta be a fakeout.

  3. So, Teacher’s best option was…. D: PRETEND to save the world only to rule over it with his army of zombies. Thanks God he was stopped jut in time. I don’t believe him when he said that he was doing for the greatest good. He only tried to manipulate them so thy’ll let him pull the trigger. Contessa APPARENTLY agreed with him only to stop him from doing something stupid (otherwise she wouldn’t have agreed with Breakthrough if she really believed that Teacher was GOOD). A complete monster like him is unable to do anything good for the good of others.

    Everyone else’s best option was C: actually save the world from evil-doers even with the price of self-sacrifice. RIP Ashley, you’re one of my fav HEROES “silently cries over this TRAGIC death”.

    RIP…. Citrine or Number Man? I think Citrine must be dead because Number Man is just too fast to die.

    But I have questions: I’m surprised that Teacher got arrested (Legend grabbed him and his zombie and I doubt Teacher have means to corrupt Legend) yet its still option C. He should have escape during option C and continue to do his evil bullshit. Unless he’ll escape somehow…corrupting Legend? And no important heroes died except for Ashley and maybe Byron. Weird…this smell like something very strange to me. Are we sure this is plan C? Can’t be B either: one of Breakthrough is dead, the other one must be dying. Teacher didn’t got the occasion to pull his trigger.

    What happened to Speedrunners and Mama Mathers? Where did they went? They’re arrested as well? What about Ingenue?

    So, after they’re done with Teacher, next stop will be Dinah with her involvement in anti-parahuman? Cause I don’t like what Dinah is doing. Unless Number Man will get her first as revenge for what her people did to his wife. Welcome in your personal hell, Dinah. yes, she didn’t wanted Citrine to die, otherwise she won’t be upset about this assassinate but she started this whole thing. She’s indirectly responsible for the death of the best Mayor.

    1. I personally expect Kurt to have reacted fast enough to protect Jeanne at his own detriment.
      Speedrunners got Imp’ed. Mama… unsure. With a bit of luck she fell down a few floors and is bleeding out somewhere.
      Ingenue probably fled, her personal power immunity protecting from Canary’s orders and her own power pulling her remaining harem to her.

      1. “Heartbroken, dogs, Rachel, and Imp were gathered on the far side. They had attacked from the rear. From the blood on her knife, Imp had done her share.”
        Yes, but I wonder how many Speedrunners did she killed? All of them? One? Two? The others escaped? Or the rest of them are serving as dinner for Bitch’s dogs :)?
        Ingenue escaped, Mama Mathers probably escaped, Teacher…we’re not sure of how much time he’ll be free because of Legend. All the monsters escaped, unfortunately. While a HERO like Ashley died….Life sucks. Good interlude, but life sucks :(.

  4. “Teacher, Legend, and the junior cape all disappeared in a wisp of blue dust.

    Amid the commotion, one by one, the guns Antares had picked up dropped to the floor, some with mangled handles.”
    What the hell happened to Antares? Did she teleported with them?

    1. The Wretch was holding the guns, and she dropped the Wretch. No Wretch-hands to hold the guns, they obey gravity and fall.

      1. Alright, thanks. But what do you think that happened with Mama Mathers? Did Rain managed to kill her? He’s alive and not mastered so he escaped from her somehow.

        1. I don’t know what happened to Mama. I hope Rain killed her, as he killed her son. Was interesting to learn she’s a Cauldron cape, though, and that Elijah didn’t have a bud of hers like I’d always thought. I fear she’s managed to escape, by making the hostages hallucinate and escaping in the confusion.

          1. @lulu: Ash Beast was natural. So is Teacher, and Ingenue. Probably Sleeper, too. Goddess is another natural cape, and Nilbog and Bonesaw, and Crawler and Breed.

            Not all the worst capes are Cauldron ones, though I suspect a Cauldron vial is a ‘broken trigger’ in some ways if not in others.

          2. Jack Slash was also natural.
            Ok, maybe they didn’t created the worst capes but they surely created SOME of the worst: Mama Mathers, Echidna, Siberian, Gray Boy, Shatterbird, Eidolon (who created Endbringers), Coil.
            Goddess was natural? I was under impression that she was made in Cauldron.

          3. Goddess was a cluster-cape, and Cauldron couldn’t create a cluster with their vials. Cauldron shunted her off to Earth Shin where she couldn’t interfere with Cauldron’s plans regarding Earth Bet, so there is a link there but she triggered as part of a smuggling ring between Bet and Shin around a portal that provided added energy to extend the time limit on a cluster. It’s in March’s interlude, whichever one that is.

      2. I wonder if the fact that Victoria trusted the Wretch to do something that delicate means that she finally figured out that her shard is listening to her requests, and does its best to fulfill them?

  5. Typo thread:
    “The one who was slicing up the supporting walls ground rumbled, the floor twisted,”
    Missing something in the doubled space interval.

    “There was a heavy bang as an explosive detonated against the wall. They backed up a few steps and Tristan created a second later.”
    This ‘later’ feels disconnected, as if Tristan didn’t build that second wall right away. Also mildly confusing since ‘a second later’ is also meaningful because I expected a quick reaction.

    … There’s not enough living Ashleys at the end of this chapter.
    Unsure how to fix this.

    1. > Pulling off his square-lensed glasses with one hand, handing them to the soldier, he wiped his scalp, face, neck, and wet his beard, before slicking his beard down.

      Perhaps this sentence should be re-phrased to avoid repeating the word ‘beard’?

      > For every glimpse he was given of something he cared about, he saw twelve more screens of white hallways with blood spatters, ruin, and broken structures with bodies.

      I think this sentence may be good as it is, but perhaps ‘ruins’ instead of ‘ruin’ would work better?

      > one in thirty-thousand.

      Shouldn’t it be “one in thirty thousand.”?

      > She could heard the rumble as machinery shifted.

      Change ‘could heard’ to either ‘could hear’ or ‘heard’.

      > Through that door was a special kind of oblivion, with images that swirled in darkness like images on the back of closed eyes with fingers pressed down on them, but image and background were all pitch black.

      Perhaps reword this sentence to avoid repeating ‘images’?

  6. And that took a sharp turn into cosmic horror.

    A shard world. Am I understanding this right? Theres a space between dimensions where the shards… reside. And thats the 5th space in Rains dreams. But Ashley has also seen it. (When? I can’t really remember, please help.) And to Sveta it feels like her bodies impluse. Presumably the Wretch works similarly. And I bet the fuck that this is where the cluster member rain killed is now.

    So, creepy shard-verse is an actual, physical place. And teacher says its what, merging or breaking through to the city. And fuck it? I belive him. Hes slimy and evil, but this is such classic wb escalation that it seems legit.

    A fate worse than death. Being out of the game for a long time. Either rain or byron is about to get stuck there, and the other will die. My money is on Rain, because he suffers, but this is potentially where the dormant twin ends up if badly damaged. Now, im shit at guessing wb’s plots, so hey, I hope im wrong. But still. Fuck.

    1. For reference, what we already knew of this was in interlude 26 (of course).

      The focus changes. An interplay of communications, one bouncing off the other, as they designate realities. Each shard needs one, some shards need to cluster and reside across multiple realities. They draw on these worlds for power, for energy, and thus fuel the techniques they have been coded with.

      Each shard, in turn, needs a target. The entity’s focus expands, designating likely partners. Past mistakes have been accounted for, and the shards will connect in a covert manner. They will reside in other worlds, uninhabited worlds, and they will remain cloaked and concealed in areas this new host species is unlikely to explore.

      There seems to be several such places.

    2. It’s one of her dreams, back in Eclipse. Not sure which chapter, exactly, but I suspect an early one.

    3. > a space between dimensions where the shards… reside.

      Could it be the same space where most of Scion was hidden and the Khepri-controlled tinkers had unsuccessfully tried to build a portal to before they switched to constructing a Sting-augmented gun that ended up killing the golden man?

  7. Ok, this has made me think about something that has been niggling at me for a while. Until now, I dont think wb has killed off any female leads in any of his books, including Pact and Twig. I noticed it at the end of Worm, where all the female undersiders survived and the two males died. Considering he has a 50/50 gender ratio in all his books, maybe even slightly more female characters (not complaining, thats still rare across… pretty much everything) I know minor female characters like battery, or antagonists like burnscar died, so I’ve always wondered if this trend was a conscious thing or coincidence, or even if im imagining it and there has been some glaring example I’m overlooking. Thoughts?

    1. I might be wrong, but I think the first cape to die on screen in Worm was the female Bakuda, in Lung’s interlude. Granted, Bakuda’s not a lead, but before Lung killed her the only deaths were a few nameless Azn Bad Boy hostages whose brain-bombs Bakuda set off.

      And the Leviathan arc, the deaths there were decided by WB rolling a d4 for every character involved. The fact that none of the Undersiders died, when all five of them took part, was more luck than intent. Even Skitter could have died then, and if she had, the position of protagonist would have switched to (I believe) Aegis.

  8. 1. Ashley *had* to die with Valkyrie out of commission, so it was a Final Death barring another S9K scenario. Contessa’s plan assured it. Why?
    2. Clockblocker, Grue, Kid Win and Canary were the Flock members that Witnessed her sacrifice.
    3. Antares can have the Wretch use guns? Since when?
    4. What the hell happened with MaMa?
    5. The Ward that took Teacher was one of those MaMa enthralled, right? How does Legend factor into it?
    6. Poor Kenzie. Poor Tristan!

    1. 2: Can’t have been Kid Win; he was killed by the S9K, when Valkyrie was still Glaistig Uaine and stuck in the Birdcage.
      3: She’s been practising with the Wretch picking things up for a while. She might not have been able to fire them properly, but picking up guns isn’t out of the blue- she’s been hauling lumps of concrete around to serve as shields earlier in this attack, and before then, too.
      4. We don’t yet know.
      5. Or he was a Teacher plant, or affected by Ingenue, or a still-hidden Fallen cultist. Legend was the only person fast enough to try and stop the teleport from going through, and failed. He factors in as a spanner in Teacher’s cogs, unless Teacher has figured out how to affect unwilling individuals.

      1. Kid Win died during Gold Morning, not by S9k. It was almost certainly him who was part of the flock.

        1. Ethical is correct. If anyone wants a refresher, Kid Win’s death was described in chapter 29.2 of Worm, and that scene makes it clear that it happened in Glaistig Uaine’s presence.

    2. 3) Victoria steadily grew more familiar and less… outright rejecting, I’d say, of her forcefield’s shape. The accident with her mother might have helped her work through some personal issues.
      Practice makes perfect – the wretch always had plenty of hands to begin with. The crushed handles on some of the guns means she’s still not 100% there, but things are on the right track.

      6) Poor Breakthrough.

    3. 2. It was great to see our favourite darkness-generating Undersider and wise-cracking Brockton Bay Ward back in action. Happy to see Kid Win and Canary again too (especially as she was a key part of the plan).
      4. While MM was musing about Rain being alone, she wasn’t paying any attention to Colt carving up the floor beneath her. It’s cool that the Dream Team are working together, and so beautifully ironic.

  9. 1. Byron is near death. High risk for Tristan to swap.
    2. Best girl is dead. Second or third best girl is back (Canary).
    3. Mathers got away?
    4. Teacher got away, but Legend is after him (which could be bad for Legend).
    5. Dream Realm = Shard Realm confirmed.
    6. Plan B would’ve been Teacher’s “objectively best” plan, but Breakthrough picked C.
    7. Implications for what happens when Shards awaken. Possible hints at Sleeper’s power and the mall cluster dream room monster?

    1. Well, we knew Scion and Eden’s MO before that. It’s just… Scion was so massively affected by Eden’s death, I thought that meant he’d never get off the planet because his cycle was destroyed.
      But apparently not, and the cycle would have eventually completed. He would have been able to leave Earth behind alongside another, if less coherent, counterpart.

      So maybe he was just that destroyed at losing the whole of Eden, and considered any other pairing meaningless, going so far as to aborting the current cycle. Hard to be sure without more shard/worm point of view to expound their mental processes further.

      1. @grinvader
        I rather meant something visual, that if we get to see Sleeper’s power and details on the dream room monster, we might be getting a glimpse at what shards look like in the “real world”, or what they’ll be using to “shatter” it.

  10. Two more points to the lists in the threads above:
    1. Looks like Ashley ended up getting memories of deaths of all of her “clone-sisters”.
    2. Probably the most important point – the cape in yellow did in fact turn out to be Canary, which means that Pizzasgood’s fashion-based clairvoyance has been officially confirmed.

  11. 1. I’m thinking it was to put her in shard space to outmaneuver Teacher. Teacher gives up when he sees Breakthrough, so I’m guessing that he noticed Ashley was dead and realized that it would be nigh impossible to “take the reins” with the de facto leaders of parahumanity having a presence in both meat space and shard hell.

  12. Since Contessa is done with doing “objectively best”, what do you think her new priorities will be? Will she follow Taylor’s suggestions – protect some, pay less attention to others, give less power to bullies with and without powers, or will she try something else?

  13. Mama must have been pretty bad at parenting, for young Elijah to trigger while nursing… although it’s suspicious that Cauldron were right there waiting to “help out”.

    Could it be significant that Elijah’s father hasn’t been identified yet?

    Could it be a problem for Lookout to pwn all of Cauldron’s/Teacher’s systems?

    1. Maybe Mama Mathers simply doesn’t know who the father is? Considering that she didn’t know what pregnancy or labor were, I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that she had sex with multiple men around the time her son was conceived.

      1. Eh, I think the adverb “really” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. She wasn’t a cognitively disabled child when she got pregnant, she was just a child. She knew, intellectually, what pregnancy was. She just hadn’t realized what it would mean subjectively to be pregnant.

        It wouldn’t be common for the child of a strictly religious home to have had multiple partners, but sure, it’s possible. It doesn’t seem as important narratively for her to know the father as for the possibility to exist for the father to be revealed later. Presumably he was a cape, because Elijah triggered very young. Of course the narrative importance of Chekhov’s paternity test might have faded with Valefor’s bisection…

        1. I did understand that you suggested that Valefor’s father could be a cape. I just wanted to point out that between Christine’s young age when she got pregnant, the fact that she seemed to be at least somewhat ignorant about what pregnancy was, her presumably very religious upbringing, and the relationships between the Fallen in her camp, I think it is possible that she got absolutely no sexual education before she became pregnant – to the point where she didn’t know how to have safe sex.

          Who knows? Maybe nobody even told her that what she was doing was sex, and that it could lead to pregnancy before it was too late?

  14. This is a mess.

    The back half of this chapter seems to, uh, skip past at least two climactic fights that the previous parts set up, the Mathers fight and whatever happened to the Speedrunners, while Canary’s boosted power just…disarms the entire base I guess? The confrontation with Teacher feels rushed and the dialogue there is workmanlike, also, I’m meant to believe that Imp just stood there and let the heroes arrest the guy who just got one of her kids killed instead of slitting his throat? If Teacher needs to escape so he can be the bland hypercompetent antagonist again in the future (god forbid, he’s probably the least interesting character Wildbow has ever written) he could at least do it without all the protagonists adding yet another idiot ball to their load.

  15. That was one hell of a swansong for Swansong.
    Died a goddamn hero through and through.

    Still holding out on the faint hope she really isn’t dead, only “removed from the equation” as Contessa said would happen with option three. But if this is the end it was a legendary ending indeed.

  16. Contessa told Antares to block teacher’s retreat… did her presence do something?

    Any said one of her teammates had something in common with Teacher as well… so… something would have gone wrong if he’d tried it?

    You would think they could just ask Contessa now but something tells me she won’t be sharing.

  17. Anyone else waiting to hear that Kenzie has killed herself?

    I guess the other option is that Sveta is dying.

  18. Swansong lived up to her name. I’d say I have a feeling that this was what she wanted, but I feel like that’s a given. I do wish we had learned what made her different from her sister, what specific part of Bonesaw’s construction was changed, but perhaps it’s immaterial. I also strongly feel that she is at least temporarily dead; if she does come back, I’d actually finger *Chris*, but only because that’s absolutely a tragedy and it would be the right kind of awful to make sense. Or maybe Damsel Black gets her memories and shreds of personality, IDK, I want to see more of her but at the same time, she completed her journey. You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain-and she choose to die a hero first (and yes, she choose; she picked C, knowing it was possibly, even likely, her). Trite but true.

    I’d argue that Byron is “removed from the equation”. It’s likely they can’t bring him back long enough to save him, even if he “survives”; Contessa never said dead. The other possibility is that Sveta was supposed to die, and will die, but I find that much less plausible (if Val is here, she almost certainly has someone who can heal something like this, as do the remaining heroes). Everything about her body suggests that she should be resistant to the delayed reaction, and it was not per say lethal; I’d view it as a 95% chance she survives, 45% overlap with torment, 5% chance she dies. I also put maybe a 10% chance that she was supposed *to* die, but that something about how it happened let her live, due to the number lad sparing her (as to why Contessa didn’t see this; perhaps she was more brutal not considering if she killed or spared saint, and this made the lad put her down as such?) but that this was key to Antares making some decision during the final few paragraphs that was critical (Sveta hugged and reassured Antares, perhaps leading to her not doing something like murder teacher in a rage like she was supposed to, etc.; the only action Contessa said that was clearly not done was Antares trying to stop teacher).

    Kenzie is going to break, of course. She’s the other chance for the tormented one. I don’t think she’ll kill herself, like others suggest; for one, she is surrounded by her team right now if I remember, so I doubt she has the clear opportunity (that’s not a long term solution, but it might keep her alive until her friends can get to her). I also don’t think Kenzie is the type *to* kill herself, it’s more likely she’ll go full mad scientist and attempt to tear open the in-between place with a giant “camera” emplacement to find Ashley’s power ghost and destroy all realities, or some similar youthful hijink.

  19. So I guess…this is it? The end of the story?

    I think it’s kind of strange to have the final battle happen in an interlude.

  20. More typos.

    parahumans’s hackers (should this be parahuman hackers)
    everything, his > everything — his
    her, Thralls > her, thralls
    them him > then him
    almost floated almost (should this be amongst)
    transcendant > transcendent
    walls ground rumbled (something missing here.)
    stomach from chest > his stomach from his chest
    Juliet > Juliette

  21. Still seems really weird that this is the “Most optimal”

    Like… Swansong vs Ingenue feels right, but Byron Vs speed runners feels like “You could have mentioned the bomb”, and teacher at the end feels like “You could have mentioned the ward he had compromised”.

    Also, I’m really not sure what “betraying” NM and Mayor Wynn achieved. Was the entire point to distract Teacher for 5 seconds? Or was it in some sense “A goal unto itself”, in that having them dead effects things later on?

    And considering that Contessa sent one of the Number lads to relay that message (I think…)…. she is going to have a whole stack of murder-kiddos trying to “Make her regular” very soon, I imagine.

  22. Considering the possibility of Ashley’s death – could the fact that members of the flock insisted on giving her medical aid in her condition mean that Bonesaw came to the complex with them? If Canary was there, why not Riley?

    1. I’m guessing it’s the same thing that caused the ‘acute’ % to drop instantly down by 8 points when Teacher, his Ward plant and Legend teleported out of the scene.
      A single extra cape escalating conflict in there could have tipped the shards into their next phase.

  23. This Arc ended way too well. Only few heroes, Ashley and Samuel died, one of Capricorns will probably die, Teacher escape but his army was completely destroyed and Citrine died.
    On the other hand, most heroes survive, all the cuvilians survived and are fine (they don’t have a mayor now and anti parahumans are becoming violent but everything else is fine), Teacher’s plan was destroyed and he is almost alone. Too much of a good ending for such a tense arc.

  24. So, the objectively best chance at stopping world destruction and ensuring survival of humanity is gone now?

    1. I think “Objectively best” in this case is used in the “most efficient and easiest” sense- the cold, calculated, one where a huge cost is paid for guaranteed victory.

      1. I’d say if it was huge cost for guaranteed victory, then they should have gone with Teacher – since the stakes are entire human existance. I suspect the odds weren’t guaranteed victory, just a higher percentage. Which is still a big question mark on whether fighting him was a good idea. Granted, his multidimensional plans of conquest were forcing their hand.

  25. Assuming that Swansong is dead, I wonder how the other Ashley will learn about it. Will someone from Breakthrough inform her? Will she dream about it first?

    And of course how will the last Ashley react to the news?

    On the other hand if Swansong is alive, will Ashley Black be the one to tell Breakthrough about it?

  26. I….did not enjoy this chapter. It kind of feels like all the most interesting parts got skipped or ignored. how was mama defeted? how were the speedrunners defeted? what the fuck happened with citrine and the number man? like sure ashley died but i never gave a shit about her in the first place…all her shitty bravado and wannabe evilness just annoyed me. everything else just seems so abrubt and rushed; everyone is defeted offscreen. It’s weird because I feel like the interludes in Ward are just not up the the Worm interludes levels. in worm, events would be mentiond or hinted at and an interlude would show you events to clear things up and add to worldbuilding. In ward the the interludes basically just show you fights from a different persons perspective and then leave you with more questions than answers. The cliffhangers in Ward are also just getting so old. Almost every chapter ends with a cliffhanger.

  27. What I don’t understand is that Contessa told them that for C big name heroes will die (along with 2 Breakthrough and Heartbroken). There’s no big name hero who died to assure that C will happen 100%. Ashley is a hero but she’s Breakthrough. Either they’ll die in the next fights or is more like B and C mixed together (no civilian casualties for C and no heroes dying for B, except for a few).

  28. Valkyrie’s down, tended by her flock but unconscious and maybe dying. And Legend’s just been teleported away by Teacher and a corrupted Ward, to Shards alone know where. The mayor and/or Number Man was killed in a carbomb, and we’ve not seen Miss Militia, Weld or Sprite for a while. What makes you think no big-name hero hasn’t died?

  29. I can imagine Teacher trying to corrupt Legend (as he said that he wants to do) rather than just killing him. Legend is too powerful and useful to him to have him killed. He lost most of his people. He needs people. Legend will be a treasure for him. He’s finished without thralls protecting him.
    Valkyrie’s powers were shut down by Ingenue, she isn’t dead just unconscious. Her Flock didn’t said anything about the possibility of her dying.
    Citrine wasn’t a hero, only an ex-villain turning into a rogue for the good of the City. Yes, she took good care of the City but she was never a hero.
    Yep, you’re right about Miss Militia and Weld. We also don’t know nothing about Dragon and Defiant. Maybe they’re alive or maybe…I don’t want to think at the alternative.

  30. Here is another thing to consider – what happened with Overseer? Did she flee with Teacher like Contessa predicted?

  31. I know what happened to Overseer. She moved to SCP Foundation Universe and became on of its O5 Council members. All of them are anomalies, Overseer would fit there pretty well :).

  32. ….Anyone know where Tattletale went? or Foil? as big name heroes go, the woman that killed scion with a bolt to the head counts…

    on alighter note.

    “undersiders ascare me.”
    “Good.” Rachel gets one word in the entire chapter and it sums up so much, so fast.

  33. Tattletale is with Kenzie, she’s helping her with information and guarding her. I don’t know about Foil or Vista, Golem…Or the BIGGEST MYSTERY or this Arc: CONTESSA’S FEDORA. Where is her fedora?

  34. He pointed at the computer. A number in red showed 95%.

    “What does that mean?”

    “It means I need only to give the world a little push, and everything crumbles,” Teacher said. “And I hold the reins of what’s there when our world crumbles away.”

    And then proceeding to say that it’s the best outcome for humanity. That… doesn’t make much sense. If, by some chance, it’s really the best outcome, then why did Teacher actively prevent it from happening before, keeping the number below 100%, and not giving the push he was saying about but instead using it as a threat, like a terrorist would use a bomb? And why did it happen just so that everyone who helps him either is a fucking monster or would just do anything as long as it’s paid – why didn’t he even attempt to recruit some heroes for his cause? If it’s indeed good, some would join. Normally I would just dismiss it as more Teacher bullshit, but Contessa agreed with it. One more possible explanation is that he actually wanted some other outcome to happen, and that’s what he will be working towards when he escapes (but then, him holding the reins of the apocalypse probably could be the best outcome only in a sense that there’s at least someone holding them). Or maybe Contessa hopes for someone other to hold the reins in a best best scenario (though it still doesn’t explain why Teacher didn’t just go forward and push for his best outcome).

    In the other news, Swansong is immensely cool. Or was.

    In yet other news, Dinah’s involvement with anti-parahumans is comfirmed. That’s quite strange…

    1. I think Dinah’s involvement with the anti-parahumans makes a lot of sense.

      Consider what Amy told Victoria about the ‘thin ice’ in the city – too many parahumans is going to lead to a break.

      Dinah’s power would tell her that more parahumans in the city means a higher probability of a break (and probably lots of destruction and death) – and less parahumans in the city means less likelihood of this break. Brewing anti-parahuman sentiment is probably the best tactic to get parahumans out of the city.

  35. > And in yet other news, reply buttons stopped working for me on the whole site…

    They don’t work for me too, though judging by time stamps some people, like Scorpion451, Kessler, and grinvader, apparently managed to reply to some posts even after it happened, so there must still be a way to do it.

    Could anyone explain how it can be done?

    1. Looks like the issue is browser-dependent – the reply buttons do work in Microsoft Edge, but not in two other browsers I tried to use earlier to post replies since this whole problem began.

  36. As an extra, any attempt to bring Swansong back wouldn’t go right because there are all the additional memories of the other clones, including her still living sister that would come back in the mix.

    About the only thing that could work… oh crud… is an Artificial Intelligence… between everything Kenzie has seen with Dragon’s tech and her knowledge, past actions and VERY good and detailed records gathered and kept by Teacher… I could see it happening.

  37. Actually, Breakthrough is down to only four members with Kenzie still technically part of Chicken Tenders.

    Will they continue as they stand, fold into another group, dissolve or… Recruit?

    I could see Chastity joining them. Her harmless disablement capability would be an asset for a hero.

    Maybe bringing in the Malfunctions but they feel like too much and have they’re own dynamic.

    Colt feels like a maybe, if she’s let out on good behaviour, but I couldn’t imagine LL joining with or without Rain. She’d make a hell of a 2IC for another team though.

  38. breakthrough are downtown four members… The Undersiders (unless you count Cassie.) are effectively at three. Antifi they were to merge,no Mexican bandits would ever invade a poor defenseless village again.

  39. I almost feel sorry for Teacher. Not because of his super-Taylor “here’s the best course of action and why you should all listen to me, nevermind the fact that every plan I’ve proposed ends up benefiting me more than anyone” antics, but for the fact that he has to herd this particular set of cats. Between Ingenue, the Custodian, Speedrunners and now Mathers, it’s like everyone willing to work with him is some kind of crazy pervert.

    At this point I hope Spawner survives enough to get Valkyrie-jacked somehow. He’s the most likeable of the Teacher viewpoint bunch, because at least he’s just a vanilla unhinged predator instead of the sexual kind.

  40. Undersides have Tattletale, Bitch, Imp, Foil and Parian. Possibly others who are further down the chain. We’ve seen both Rachel and TT with parahumans reporting to them.

    That said, I could see Undersiders possibly dissolving and maybe some members joining one group or another. Rachel is fine out in her countryside, Imp doesn’t answer well to authorities and is managing the Heartbroken and Tenders, Foil and Parian might consider it, TT might consider them or another team but I feel doubtful since she seems to think she can do the most good from the criminal side.

    With so many heroes dead, I can easily imagine many teams with few members left or dissolving and absorbing members around the place.

    Fumehood is another possibility I forgot about, working well with them against the mechs. Heck, even Vista is a minor possibility.

  41. Another reason why Swansong might not let Valkyrie have her: if shards start coming together with Valkyrie as a new hub, it might be a good idea not to give her Swansong’s power, considering what purpose does it have in the cycle.

    1. I think that once the critical limit is reached, the shards will converge on their own. It will likely leave the capes dead (as Valkyrie’s forcible extraction does) as a free side-effect. The memories of their human hosts are probably not strong enough to go against their primary goal.
      Once unbound, even without Scion’s will to micromanage things Ciara’s shard can gather all the others, use the Healer to repair their modifications back to full proficiency, then plot a good course to the next destination with various precogs before using Ashley’s to propel them towards it, finally ending multi!Earths after grabbing every bit of energy they can.

  42. Swansong is coming back as a flock member, I’m sure of it. I also half expected for option B to happen as they had him cornered. This door is ominous though, I’m wondering what it’ll mean for in the future.

  43. Ashley specifically said she didnt want to be a flock member. Would be weird as shit if Wildbow put that in there, and then just… went back on it.

  44. There will be nothing weird about it happening. Things that Ashley don’t want to happen to her can still happen to her.

  45. It seems like there’s some (possibly significant?) stuff missing from at least two points in this chapter?

    “The one who was slicing up the supporting walls ground rumbled, the floor twisted,”

    “Yellow costume, ”

    I found myself more confused at these points than a normal typo would usually account for =(

  46. Alfaryn- I LOLed so much at your reply about fedora. Some of your comments are so darn funny. Sorry for replying you here but the reply button apparently started to develop an unhealthy hate towards me :(.

    1. Plenty of people seem to have problems with reply buttons right now. As far as I can tell the issue seems to affect only some browsers. So far I have tried Safari, Firefox, Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer. The buttons worked fine on the last two.

  47. I’d been pleading with Ashley not to die, up until:
    She nodded. “Glad it was me. Means there’s less chance it’s her. I can handle this. Been here enough times.”

    Then I accepted it. And wow she went out like a boss!

  48. Wow, Valeshard. Talk about robbing the cradle. Kind of makes you wonder if maybe Nursery isn’t full of shit.

  49. As soon as I saw the title of this Arc (“Dying”), I figured we’d be losing someone. Always sad to lose great characters, but it’s necessary for this story.

  50. Minor, minor nitpick in an otherwise riveting chapter-post (chaptette?). The percentages that tick up and down, I’ve noticed the number of places after the decimal is sometimes one and sometimes two; it should probably be consistently 2 decimal places, e.g.96.10 instead of 96.1. Digital read-outs don’t generally wander in the number of significant figures like that, the precision of the measurement probably doesn’t change for that one measurement, right?

    I think this is Ashley’s absent sister’s cue to show up…

    1. Actually in interlude 15.x the numbers were sometimes given up to three places after the decimal point, and sometimes up to a full percentage point. Perhaps those numbers are given as precisely as Dinah gave her probabilities early on, and simply none of the characters from whose points of view we see those numbers bother to read more than first 2-5 digits?

  51. I think MM may have made a fatal error in assuming Rain was alone. We know the Dream Team survived, so perhaps her reinforcements came too late.

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