Chương 33: Every Monster Has a Lair

Alexander couldn't help but laugh at the chaos on the rooftop. Stepping out of the portal, he'd expected at least a brief fight to subdue the remaining hero. Instead, he found Talia's weapons, some bent at odd angles, scattered across the rooftop. One section of the roof was scorched and shattered, while the rest was cracked from heavy impacts. Talia leaned against the low wall at the roof's edge, favoring her side, while the hero slumped at the far end, clutching a wounded arm. Annie rushed over.

"Are you okay, T. K.?"

"T. K.?" Talia muttered, shaking her head.

"I'm fine. I'm sorry, I wasn't much help." Alexander grabbed her shoulder.

"Not your fault. The heroes attacked us too. Grab your things." He turned to Auggy.

"Another portal, please. Back to base." Auggy nodded and began the conjuration. Annie darted around, scooping up scattered weapons. Alexander knelt in front of the hero. The man tensed, wary.

"We're going after them. If you get in our way again, my team will treat you as part of the problem. Do we have an understanding?"

"You won't find them. No one knows where—""I will," Alexander said, already walking away.

"It won't matter!" the hero shouted.

"A professional team was assigned this morning. From the Throne of Scales guild." Alexander pinched the bridge of his nose.

"Annie, would there happen to be professional superhero guilds I don't know about?"

"Duh. Everyone knows about the pro guilds." She smacked her forehead.

"Oh, right—you don't know anything. I forgot." The portal snapped into place and the team filed through. Auggy flicked his wand, summoning Alexander's tonfa from where they'd fallen in the store, then followed.

"…so powerful families and superhero teams that didn't want to be corpo slaves or government attack dogs started forming their own groups. Then legislation happened, and suddenly there were guilds. Started a couple years ago." Alexander pulled off his mask, taking a deep breath. He raised a hand to cut Annie off.

"And how strong are these professional heroes?" Augustus and Talia removed their masks. Auggy closed the portal with a flick of his wand, while Talia unpacked her kit to check the damaged weapons. Annie shrugged, mask off.

"I dunno. Flashpoint was in some guild out east before coming here, so… maybe that strong?"

"Hm." Alexander considered.

"It shouldn't matter, not if they were only assigned this morning. With luck, we'll be done with this problem soon." That caught everyone's attention.

"I was hoping you'd have a plan," Auggy said. Alexander crossed to the refrigerator, grabbed a bottle of water, drank deeply, then exhaled.

"I do. Once things went bad, I had a mini-drone hide in Mercy's pocket while she was unconscious. It's pinging me regularly, so I have a rough sense of its direction. Once it settles, I'll need you to help me triangulate it." Annie whooped.

"Baby drones for the win!"

"Good," Auggy said.

"Just tell me when."

"For now: clean up and get some food, then we review footage," Alexander said.

"The moment the drone stops moving, we go." The drone stopped less than a couple hours later. In that time, they had reviewed the footage again and again. Auggy and Talia had disappeared to borrow some specialized hardware. Alexander did a poor job stitching the wound on Annie's head. She'd made the mistake of waiting until the others were gone to bring it up.

"So you can really just… phase out wounds as long as you have metal?" Alexander asked. Annie crunched on popcorn.

"Yup. My metal doesn't just spread, it replaces whatever part of me I want. And even if I lose metal chunks or limbs, the real me comes back when I release it."

"So, in theory," Alexander said, snagging some popcorn, "you could stop aging once you can replace your whole body?" Popcorn spilled from Annie's mouth.

"Ohmigod. I'm gonna be wrinkle-free forever!" Alexander pulled the last stitch tight, knotting it with little finesse.

"Hey!" Annie growled, glaring up at him.

"Did you just use popcorn-y fingers on my wound?" He looked at her, then at the wound, then back at her. Without a word, he grabbed a bottle of isopropyl and sprayed it liberally on the wound.

"Ouch!"

"Don't be a baby." He stuck his tongue out, packing the medkit. This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

"Just you wait," Annie huffed.

"You'll need stitches one day, and when you do—""I'll ask Talia," he said, savoring her betrayed look. A new ping froze him mid-motion. He stretched his awareness along the signal's path as far as he could reach. Augustus and Talia stepped into the room, freshly returned. Annie immediately launched into a dramatic retelling of her 'horrific bullying' at Alexander's hands. They entertained her until Alexander interrupted.

"It's stopped moving," he said.

"Auggy, I'll need two more locations to triangulate. Sorry to put more strain on you." Auggy straightened, voice steady.

"Whatever it takes. Besides, that's what Endurance is for." The others murmured agreement.

"Get your things. We leave in five." They scattered to prepare. Alexander repacked drones and slipped a few grenades into his belt. Talia pulled him aside, hauling a new weapon. He eyed it, widening his gaze.

"That's going to do damage."

"I hope so," she said, then hesitated.

"I want in on the assault. Properly this time, however it plays out." He studied her. She had proven herself at the museum, even holding off a Tier 2 hero. Still, she'd taken injuries; not severe, but noticeable even hours later. This time, they'd be attacking where their enemies held home-ground advantage. Likely indoors, with no decent overwatch position.

"Alright," he said. She opened her mouth to argue and stopped in surprise.

"Really?"

"Yes. But if we're forced to split, you're on sidekick duty. You support. You do not engage alone unless there's no choice."

"Understood." She straightened.

"It's been a long time since I actually got to make a difference. I've missed it." Less than twenty minutes later, they stood on their third rooftop of the day. In hindsight, the location was obvious. Too obvious. An old district gutted during an abandoned renewal project, left to rot between other half-finished towers. It was quiet and forgotten, and dead center of the zone Talia predicted. The building below was an eight-story apartment block, once low-income housing, now derelict.

It remained only because it would cost more to demolish. Despite its abandoned state, the building hummed to his Technopathy. Electricity coursed through the building, powering a range of devices. His senses brushed over what remained of a long-dead security system, cameras and sensors mostly destroyed; what few remained functional had been blacked out. He released his drones, dozens of them, feeding their outputs to Talia's tablet.

He sat cross-legged, eyes closed, as Annie and Auggy crowded behind Talia to watch the feeds. The drones swept the building slowly in stealth mode, near-silent but slow as a trade-off. They slipped inside vents and broken windows, floated down stairwells and hugged ceilings. The building revealed itself one floor at a time. Sixth floor. Ripper's domain. The walls across the entire floor had slices carved through them, reminiscent of medieval arrow slits. Only both horizontally and vertically.

All the cuts and hand-crafted passageways converged near the center of the level, where human skins hung on walls and racks. Some lay out across the floor, painted with crude blood-art. Ripper stood shirtless at the center, sharpening a curved blade. He was humming to himself. Third floor. Pandora's sanctuary. If Ripper's floor was a butcher's gallery, hers was a surreal palace. Curtains of every color draped from ceilings and across furniture. Dust-streaked light refracted into shifting rainbows.

She reclined on a massive round bed in red velvet, boots off, painting her nails. All around her, stolen goods littered the floor in chaotic piles: gemstones spilled over designer jackets, tangled jewelry and broken lockboxes. Haphazardly stacked gold bars sat next to damaged sculptures and broken collector's items. Fine porcelain lay shattered, spilling beneath a bedside table. An antique long-case clock, something that belonged in a museum, lay toppled against a wall.

And across the room from Pandora, were three prisoners chained and seated against the wall. They sat, tears long cried and since dried, holding themselves as still as though afraid to even breathe. Basement carpark. The stairwell door hung from a single hinge. A drone spotted cracked pavement that widened into a rupture, leading to the sewers. Skeletons stood in loose formations, some twitching as they pathed back and forth. At the center of them all knelt dozens of prisoners, sobbing openly.

Mercy paced inside a repurposed security office, filthy with takeout containers and a blood-smeared couch. Her hair was matted, her voice hoarse as she shouted at a plain man in glasses; the Puppeteer.

"…I told Ripper it was too risky! All for some measly art! Do you have any idea how much it hurts to be crushed into—" The Puppeteer sat silently, strings drifting between his fingers, eyes fixed on her with obsessive devotion. Alexander exhaled.

"That's all of them." He opened his eyes and stood. The team had seen what he had, and Annie's concern made her thoughts plain. Augustus raked fingers through his hair.

"We'll have to split up. There's too much risk that one of them escapes, or kills their hostages if we don't." Talia nodded.

"Who takes whom?"

"Neither of us matches up well against Pandora or Mercy," Alexander said, thinking.

"But Annie and Augustus have good odds."

"Pandora's mine," Annie said.

"As long as nobody interferes again, I can take her."

"Annie… you know how this ends, right?" Alexander asked. The question was loaded, but he knew she'd understand. They had walked out of that prison with blood on their hands; neither of them had come to terms with it yet. And that had been self-defense, while this was premeditation.

"I know, Alex," she whispered.

"I'll do what needs to be done." He nodded.

"That means Mercy is yours, Auggy. Talia is with you to offset the skeletons or the Puppeteer." Auggy and Talia shared a glance.

"That leaves you against Ripper," Talia said.

"I'll manage. Between the tonfa and this coat Auggy provided, I can take some hits. I just need to get close enough to end him."

"He's an aeromancer," Annie said.

"What if he can just… pull the air from your lungs?"

"That should be a problem," Alexander said.

"But I've been reading up on powers, and you already know that two people can have the same power and use them completely differently. As Auggy said, power matches the person. And Ripper seems like a fairly unoriginal psychopath. I think we've seen all of his tricks."

"What if he's hiding something?" Talia asked.

"That's just a chance I'll have to take."

"Let's hope you're right," Annie muttered.

"I'm taking the same risk as all of you," Alexander said, changing the subject.

"Let's discuss our approach. I'll head down from here."

"I'll portal us to the ground floor," Auggy said. He looked at Annie.

"Talia and I will head down. You'll need to hit the third floor quickly if we want to engage at the same time."

"Don't wait for me. I'll be there," Annie said.

"I hate to be mercenary about it," Alexander added.

"But Auggy, recover what you can of the stolen goods once this is all done. We'll need it." Augustus and Annie laughed.

"Sure thing, boss." And just like that, they were ready.