Chương 26: 24: The Underground

"What possessed you to keep a Black Hand as a prisoner, of all things?" Mandy asked, trying to get all the soot and dust out of her face.

"Couldn't you see all the forces sent after you?"

"Good to see you too, Mandy," I shot back, but I was feeling too giddy with relief to send the snark. Even as we crawled through the city's storm drains, even as an entire army of undead flooded the area searching for us a mere thirty feet above our heads, for the first time in a long while I felt something other than anger, frustration, fear, or just exhaustion and emptiness. I'd found my best friend and neither of us were dead or worse. Because it could always get worse.

"What's a Black Hand? Some bathrobe-wearing goth wannabe drunk on superpowers?"

"They're the enemy's hunters and assassins," the redhead told me, delicate fingers tracing the series of symbols someone had carved across both of the storm drain's walls at eye height.

"They get sent after those with powers interesting enough or disruptive enough." She came to a stop before a crack in the brickwork, one that went through a couple of the carved symbols, and swept a palm over it without touching the surface. Brick and mortar hissed and melted, smoothing over the crack before turning solid. Instead of burning Mandy's fingers to the bone, a single tap while the material was still red-hot reformed the ruined symbols.

"They are why we have to keep the enchantments here in good shape."

"Many of us vanished the first day of the mist," Jerry added, his fingers inching towards the weapon I was carrying before aborting the motion.

"A dozen survivor groups completely gone in a few hours." Apparently, the situation in the city proper was nowhere near the relative safety and mostly-mindless monsters around the school. Just the few words my friends had shared spoke of both organized attacks and organized resistance. I'd seen at least the first half during my own explorations of course, but they had obviously seen a lot more than I had over their days in the city.

But what really drew my immediate interest was neither the enemy army nor the very magical... magic Mandy was somehow using to keep these tunnels undead-free.

"You are in contact with other survivor groups?" Even just finding people you already knew was near impossible, what with the blocked communications and the damned mists.

"How?"

"Magic, obviously," Mandy started explaining as we climbed down a narrow tunnel that looked brand new. The walls were actually polished, grey-brown rock instead of brickwork or concrete and all of it was a single, fifty-foot-long cylinder of the same material.

"The enemy conjured the fog to hinder both communications and surveillance. I'm not sure they understand modern technology, but the most widespread divination magic from their side can be blocked by certain materials so they metaphysically infused the mist with some of the properties of lead. Much faster and cheaper than trying to ward an entire city. It just happened to also mess with technology."

"And Superman," Jerry interjected.

"Nerd!" the redhead shot back with an ease and familiarity the two of them had never shared back in school.

"We just got invaded by a magical world," the slim boy insisted with the air of an argument being repeated for the Nth time.

"For all we know all sorts of aliens could be out there, too."

"Guys, focus!" I interrupted their easy banter with a sense of... unease? Confusion? The easy banter did not quite include me and I didn't like it, even if I understood. Who knew what enemies they'd had to face together.

"Other survivor groups?"

"Right," my best friend nodded and got back to her explanation.

"After people survived the initial portal attack and found about the cut off communications, some decided to get powers that could do something about it. As small groups of survivors formed, not everyone needed to be able to fight." She hesitated a bit, then asked.

"By the way, did you meet with-""Tomio's group? Yes, yes I did." My fists clenched so hard my knuckles creaked.

"I'd rather talk about what's going on in the city." Good riddance to bad rubbish, and that's all the brainpower I was willing to devote on the subject.

"Oh... OK..." She exchanged a glance with Jerry too quickly for most people to notice but I had superspeed.

"As someone we both know has said-""Often and loudly and to anyone who'll hear," added the resident nerd,"-the situation is that it's fucked," Mandy talked over him.

"Monsters and powers don't work as we thought. Like, at all." She paused as all of us had to duck uncomfortably low to crawl through a tunnel maybe four feet high and three wide, pipes and cables of all kinds making it even more confining. Despite being the largest of our group of three and having to carry Jerry's semi-portable laser turret, I had the easiest time with it as I could glide through basically swimming through the air.

"Didn't you find it odd the two of us had entirely different systems to our powers and Mandy didn't have one at all?" Jerry spoke and seeing him up close under the light of Mandy's fire I could see that the boy had changed a lot over the past five days we'd been separated. He was taller now, still slim but with a wiry strength instead of the usual couch potato the nerds in class tended to be.

Not superhuman, but with the densely packed solidity of an Olympic runner mixed with the fluidity of movement only serious gymnasts had.

"I was more worried about how killing monsters also tends to make nearby monsters stronger," I told them, swimming upside-down and using the laser turret as a floating pillow. The safety to finally relax without a monster about to eat my face felt great.

"Does it, though?" Jerry asked me and the certainty as well as anger in his eyes and tone took me aback. He was no longer the awkward boy I'd known only days before.

"None of the zombies we killed the first day had such an effect. Or even the second day. It was only later that the mutations began." If anything, something told me the mental changes went much further than the physical ones. He might lack the kind of presence both Julia and Tomio had shown but he also lacked their uncertainty and tendency to lash out.

"Could we skip the intro and rhetorical questions? We haven't seen each other in five days, someone actually planned this mess and all of us have nearly died several times." Maybe it was my experience with Tomio and Julia, maybe it was five days of searching with zero clues then suddenly they show up out of the blue, but I'd had enough of secrets, awkwardness and double speak.

"Can we get to the big reveal now and cryptically hint about it later?"

"Sorry," the redhead said, looking away.

"It's just, we've had far too many close calls to relax anywhere other than a secure location." She kept scanning our surroundings even as she talked and Jerry wouldn't even break his focus to do that much.

"You wouldn't believe the tricks the enemy keeps coming up with to hunt us down or even get information."

"... I get it. The past five days weren't a walk in the park for me either." If they'd gone through even close to as much as I had, I could understand the unwillingness to make small talk when monsters were about.

"But we have to be getting close, right? We've been going through these tunnels forever." Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences. Naturally, that was when an invisible knife stabbed me in the gut. xxxx xxxx I pulled out the blade which had appeared in my senses only after it pierced my skin. Fortunately, that was all it managed before getting stuck in muscle an inch or two in. It hurt of course, but the wound healed...

and the ornate steel knife melted into dust in my hands. It was just like that one movie I'd seen when I was ten, the one with the orks.

"Seriously? Talk about lack of originality." I called out at the still unseen attacker while Jerry and Mandy stood back to back, both of the redhead's arms holding red flames as a dome of orange light formed around the pair. My new senses and regeneration both warned me of a little bit of foreign matter in the wound that still hurt almost as much as the initial blow.

"You guys know everyone has seen that movie, right?" Then, using Proximakinesis to pull and Force Adjustment to weaken my own durability, I ripped out the tiny fragment of blade that had been left in my body. A dozen shapes fell from the ceiling with screeches loud and high pitched enough to make a Banshee proud. Two fell on the dome forming around Mandy. The first turned to ashes instantly.

The second had its arms incinerated almost to her shoulders but that didn't stop her from leaping on the redhead the moment the magical dome was spent, kicking her over and opening a maw full of shark-like teeth. Jerry's turret, somehow having reappeared in his hands in the blink of an eye, sparked with electricity as it blasted through a boyish shape's chest in an instant. Then Jerry screamed and blood fountained from his side as an invisible knife sliced through. The remaining figures attempted to mob me.

At first glance they looked like perfectly normal people, except for the screeching and the sudden ceiling drop. They even wore normal clothes, which most of the monsters didn't. They had looked so terribly mundane that though my senses had noticed them I'd entirely disregarded their existence. Up close and personal however, their eyes were empty black pools without pupil or iris but full of liquid hate, a tar-like substance that sizzled and hissed like acid not physically but against the mind.

So I punched them as quickly as I could. Like the shade - the Black Hand, as Mandy had called it - they burst apart into puffs of black miasma if hit hard enough. Unlike the shade they did not regenerate, or if they did it was slow enough it wouldn't matter in a fight.

"I'll see you burn for this, Hackett!" the redhead roared as she stood protectively over Jerry's curled up, shivering form.

"Rip your skin off piece by piece as you roast over a fire!" Flames rose along with her rage, forming fireballs that shot at every shadow, at any flicker of movement at all.

"You'll have to find me first, doll," a dry, middle-aged man's voice echoed from all around us.

"But by then you annoying kids will be dead and I'll get my well-deserved reward." A knife flew through the air, unseen and unheard yet somehow still drawing my attention. Before I could think about reacting it went through Mandy's back... then her front... then bit into the concrete floor with a dry crack like a gunshot. Instead of spilling blood and gore everywhere, Mandy vanished and a torrent of fire shot out of the empty space beside her initial position, following the knife's trajectory back to the source.

The whole exchange lasted less than a second, almost too fast to believe... had either side been vanilla humans. But with superpowers involved it seemed almost slow, measured.

"You know, I almost want to thank you brats," the old man's voice echoed from everywhere again.

"If you hadn't killed a Black Hand I wouldn't have this opportunity to earn the position and all the power that goes with it."

"What power? Being a lackey to a demented immortal from another world?" Mandy spat venom and fireballs both, neither of which seemed to find their mark.

"You think your new master has the power to conquer Earth by himself?"

"Why not? He has many forces that ignore conventional weapons and tools to bring modern nations to their knees." More knives flickered through the air, two burning against Mandy's renewed shield, three striking at my legs. A layer of kinetic repulsion over my skin simply knocked them back the moment they hit without needing my input.

"All he needs is advisors to tell him how to employ such tools properly. Advisors that will be rewarded with immortality and more."

"Are you mad?" Mandy was speaking but I wasn't paying that much attention to her words. I wanted to know how I could sense the knives coming when they were hidden even from my enhanced senses.

"You'll join a literal Dark Lord for power? That never works!"

"How do you know?" More invisible knives shot out from... there!

"Because some fantasy books said so?" A vaguely outlined emptiness in the storm drain's upper east corner. Very brief flickers of similar emptiness around the knives themselves, followed by turbulence as they flew through the air.

"No," I said after slamming the invisible guy inches into the brickwork behind him.

"It's because you're a fucking idiot." Perfectly hiding himself, doing nothing to mask the void his body left in the air around him. The unseen attacker faded into reality, revealing just a normal-looking, balding, middle-aged man with unkempt black hair down to his shoulders, sun-worn skin, wearing a many-patched threadbare parka. His piercing blue eyes were fixed on me and he gave me a lopsided smirk as my fist sunk into his chest with bones breaking like twigs.

"We'll... see... doll..." he managed, then vanished entirely, blood and all.... had he just teleported?

"Jerry!" Mandy shouted as she kneeled by the wounded boy's side. The brunet did not stir at her shout. He just lay there, entirely limp as his side bled very, very slowly.

"Damn, he's lost too much blood." My best friend patted down her pockets then drew out... a red biscuit? She pressed the tiny bit of candy against Jerry's forehead until it cracked. There was a red pulse and from one moment to the next the boy lost his new "death warmed over" looks. Magical healing, though not like Dr. Beth's potions.

"He needs more healing and that was my last cure-seal," Mandy said almost frantically, picking up the passed out boy and his exoskeleton both as if he weighed nothing.

"I should never have let him come without his armor." She glanced at me, seemed to weigh something in her mind then make a decision.

"We need to go back to headquarters as soon as possible."

"Can your healers fix blood infections and poisonings?" I asked.

"They can fix anything," she said, putting emphasis on the word.

"As long as he's still alive. But it's too far and you don't know the way."

"If that's the case then why don't I win us a bit more time." Without bothering to explain, I touched Jerry's wounded side with one hand, next to where Mandy was trying to put pressure on the gaping tear. With the other, I touched the pool of blood.

"Maya, what-" my best friend fell silent as Jerry's spilled blood rose from the grime-covered ground, flew into a thin tendril up his side, then flowed back into the wound. I wasn't an idiot; I visualized the blood getting filtered through several sieves made out of Proximakinesis, cleaned up of dirt, bacteria, poisonous substances, blood clots and everything else I could think of. It would probably still poison, maybe even kill him long-term because I was no doctor and had no idea what I was doing.

But in the meantime he would not die of blood loss and we would have the time to get to those healers Mandy had mentioned. To ensure he didn't bleed out again, I visualized the torn edges of his wound pulled together, fitting like puzzle pieces down to the tiny little blood vessels I could not see but my power could still handle. Sealed up better than any stitches, better than that battlefield glue Dr.

Beth had threatened me with in Freshman year, with Proximakinesis handling the connections were bits of flesh were completely missing.

"There," I told Mandy.

"I can keep him sewn up and not bleeding as long as I'm touching him." She gave me a trembling smile and red, tearful eyes reminiscent of the old, timid girl she'd been, then we ran. The clock was ticking in more ways than one...