[Brainpunch + an apology] CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE: The Return (Patreon)

That new hero in town is back. Do not cross her. Do not speak to her. If you see her, run for your life. She’s goddamn fucking insane.

- Internal communications recovered from West Lafayette villain Pine, 2024

#

It was strange how only a few days could change a place so much. Or maybe it was more accurate to say the person who viewed it had changed.

Vivian had been a superhero for one or two months now, and her powers had been active about a month longer than that. During that time, she’d grown further detached from her life in school, steadily caring less and less about her classes. Still, she’d thought of the college as her second home. Even if she hadn’t been getting everything she could out of the experience, she had still gone about her daily life, attending classes, finishing homework in the nick of time, and going out with friends every now and then, super and normal both.

Now, after less than a week away, the campus looked totally alien.

It was so calm here. Vivian couldn’t tell if it was too loud or too quiet, but the knot in her chest told her that this was wrong, so wrong, how could they be living like this after she had been through hell and back how dare they go about their days like nothing—

Breathe, she told herself.

It was 7:34 AM, and she was late for ASS class. At this hour, the only people outside were dedicated runners, service workers, and other poor saps like her who’d slept past their alarm and were now hurrying to class.

The class itself was abuzz with conversation about the recent goings-on. Of course it was. It wasn’t every day that such a major conflict occurred so close to home.

Vivian tuned it out as she found a seat, nestling her head into her arms and hoping she could get some more much-needed sleep.

“I mean, the locals obviously screwed up,” the guy sitting next to her was saying. “All they had to do was work with the Guardians, and they went too far. No way this escalates to a Dyad-level incident if everyone’s just working together.”

What did you just say?

Vivian looked up at the projector, read the words Group Discussion - Chicago, “Killjoy Incident” and put two and two together.

“The Guardians were part of the problem,” Vivian hissed, interrupting whatever this idiot was about to say next. Realizing that being too adamant about it would both come across as odd and potentially lead people to some uncomfortable conclusions about it, she toned it back. “They paint a pretty picture of themselves, but even with everyone working together, Killjoy was going to be a problem one way or another.”

“My uncle’s friend’s roommate was there,” the boy replied smugly. “He says that if the superheroes had gotten to Sears Tower faster, it wouldn’t have fallen. Ten thousand people would still be alive.”

Vivian flinched at the number, her heart thumping with the reminder of—no, Sunrise wouldn’t want her thinking about failure right now.

Besides, this guy was pissing her off.

“Did you not see the footage?” Vivian asked, doing her utmost best to regulate her voice. “Killjoy’s forces were spread across the entire city. By the time everyone coalesced at the tower, everything already went to hell.”

The idiot snorted. “So you watched a couple of videos and now suddenly you think that it’s like you were there. Well, I know someone who was, and I can tell you exactly what he saw.”

“I was.” Vivian regretted the words the moment they slipped out. The more identifying information she gave to randoms, the more likely it was that she could be identified.

At this point, I don’t know if I care.

No. Those were bad thoughts. Dangerous thoughts. Her father was uninvolved in any of this, and she couldn’t put him at risk just to make a point.

“No you fuckin’ weren’t,” the guy said, jarring Vivian out of her thoughts and into another bout of anger. The other people around them shifted uncomfortably. “Nobody who was in Chicago would come back for a 7:30 on a Monday. This dude I know, Jackson? He—“

Vivian didn’t hear the rest. The thundering, incessant buzzing was back, slightly but indisputably different from how it’d been in the monh before she’d begun. Then, the buzz had ceomf rom the power wanting to be able to stretch its legs.

Now, it was from her. Bile rose with her anger, hot blood rushing to her head, and she clenched a fist.

After only a week of heroing in Chicago, her instincts were to jump to using her power. For a moment, she was in the burning tower again. Seconds mattered, and it was all she could do to identify whether a vague figure was friend or foe before ending a life.

She blinked, hard, forcing herself back to the reality of right now. Vivian wanted a coffee and she wanted to punch this dumbass in the brain, and the latter instinct had a telekinetic needle formiing right in front of his eye.

That was what finally scared her enough to snap back fully into herself. A moron’s provocation had almost driven her to kill someone that hadn’t even done anything wrong.

She tood up abruptly, knocking over the chair she’d been sitting in.

“Whoa there,” the boy she’d almost murderered in hot blood said. “I call you out on your BS and you act like this? Bitch, I think you need to see someone.”

Vivian’s fists were clenched as tight as her chest felt. She needed to breathe. She couldn’t let this overtake her.

And her power was buzzing, buzzing, buzzing.

Inhale for four Hold for five. Exhale—

“Hey. I’m talking to you.”

She took two steps forward and slapped him across the face, stopping herself from giving him a full-force punch at the very last second. The unexpected motion knocked the guy into the desk, garnering a pained shout from him and gasps from those who were at the table with them.

As the idiot fell to the ground, cradling his head in his hands, Vivian realized that the class had fallen silent. All eyes were on her.

For a moment, she wondered if she’d accidentally used her powers, but no. If she had, he would be twitching on the floor, dead or permanently damaged. The two hundred-odd students in this class were just looking at her because she’d slapped someone hard enough to knock him to the ground.

That, for some reason, she found hilarious. This wasn’t even in the top fifty most violent actions she’d taken in the last three days, and yet here she was, a full lecture hall staring at her like she’d just executed someone on live television.

She might have actually done the latter. Vivian didn’t know who had been recording what while within the tower, nor did she bother watching the forecast after. Rachel had texted her about Vivian’s involvement, but hadn’t gotten into the specifics.

Vivian chuckled, then started to laugh. She couldn’t stop herself. It was—this was sso fucking stupid. Of all the things for people to be upset at her for, of all the things for her to be upset about, this meant literally nothing. She was still angry, yes, but it was roiling, pit-in-the-gut kind, overpowered by the absurdity of the situation.

“You’re lucky it stopped there,” she said, still laughing.

“Vivian Li,” Professor Lionel enunciated clearly. “Come see me right now.”

Vivian walked up to the professor, finally getting her deranged laughter under control.

Isntead of waiting for him to tell her what she did was wrong, Vivian turned ninety degrees and walked out of the classroom.

“Vivian!” Lionel called after her.

She didn’t care. He still had a lecture to run. The good professor wasn’t going to abandon all the rest of his students to chase one woman. At worst, he’d call the campus police, and Vivian knew by now how ineffective they were when faced with anyone who was even a little bit of a threat.

What was the point in this class anyway? The smartest students in her so-called “advanced” superhuman class paled in comparison to even one day of her experience in Chicago. Nobody here could be useful to her, and she had a suspicion that they weren’t going to want her here for much longer.

She started walking, unsure of her destination. It was getting a lot chillier now, and the skirt and leggings she wore were not enough to protect her legs from the biting cold, but Vivian barely felt it. She was too thankful for the bitter chill, the air that hurt to breathe when she inhaled too hard.

Somewhere between her leaving class and walking off campus, Vivian started laughing again. There was no humor in this one, just crazed, desperate relief that she hadn’t done anything worse.

You’ve gotten enough innocents killed, she told herself. Don’t add even more to that count.

When the cold got bad enough that she realized her fingers had gone numb, Vivian ducked into the closest coffee shop she could find and pulled out her phone.

There were too many unread messages. Her father, Rachel, Lachlan, Sunrise, Ayaka, a dozen contacts she’d nearly forgotten she’d had.

Vivian didn’t want to read all of them. She didn’t want to talk to Dad. She didn’t want to bother Ayaka, who was still dealing with the fallout of Chicago. She didn’t want to deal with Lachlan, who’d been complicit in the whole fiasco with the Guardians and Venus.

But she needed someone to talk to.

sparrow: are you holding up ok?

The message was from last night. Vivian had gone to sleep instead of replying, not wanting to give a canned answer that Rachel would know was fake or a real answer that would dig fingers into fresh wounds.

This, though, warranted a message.

vivy77: I almost killed a classmate

vivy77: ended up just punching him but almost put a telekinetic dart through his skull

Rachel didn’t reply. She usually did within minutes, no matter the situation, but—oh. Right. It was barely eight in the morning here, so it would be five for Rachel. She wouldn’t be up yet.

Vivian ordered a latte and tried to calm down from her nervous high, warming her numb hands around the hot drink and sipping from it, glad that she’d picked a place less likely to burn their coffee than Starbucks. 

She needed to do something. Drinking coffee had maybe not been the best idea, because like it or not, she was awake now. The combination of the frigid weather and the anxious hum running through her had made that certain, and all the latte could accomplish was warm her up and make that buzz worse.

Caffeine had never done that much for Vivian. She’d heard a lot about how people needed the kick of energy it gave them, but for her, drinking coffee was less about the energy and more about the focus it sometimes granted her. That was a bit paradoxical, given that it also often made her already anxious mind even worse. It was mostly the ritual of going out to buy overpriced coffee that she used to center herself, though even that worked with debatable efficacy.

Her phone vibrated. Vivian opened her messaging app, leg fidgeting as she did.

sparrow: oh shit

sparrow: good that you didnt. You should vent it smwhere more prodcutvie

sparrow: *productive, fuck

sparrow: or even unproductive. This is uhhhh SRU says it’s usually a ptsd + power trauma response type thing, they want to be used

Vivian was more than familiar with the concept of her powers wanting her to use them. It had been a persistent problem when she’d just been starting out, after all.

That felt like an eternity ago, but it really hadn’t been that long ago, had it? Just over a month ago, she’d gone out for the first time.

Back then, it had taken weeks if not months for her power to build up to the point where the buzzing proved to be too much.

Today, she’d nearly gone over the edge after less than a day without. Hell, the days before had been by far the most she’d ever used her telekinesis.

Was that the reason why? Had the parasitical fragment of the Pacific alien decided that the chaos of the last few days—the “Killjoy Incident,” as the media was putting it—was her new normal? Did it just expect to be used to the same extent that it had before?

vivy77: you’re up early

sparrow: busy day. only going to get busier. u take care, ik you dont want to go to official places or the guardians but u shouldnt push urself too hard

sparrow: frankly speaking if school isnt giving u any ties to normalcy u coul dprogably ditch it

vivy77: I’ll keep it in mind

The buzzing wasn’t going away.

Vivian finished the rest of her latte in three inadvisably large gulps and stood up abruptly enough to hit the table. There were a few other early-bird students in the coffee shop with her, and they turned to look at her as she left, but she couldn’t bring herself to care.

There was no point in going back to class or even pretending to do her assignments anymore, was there? She’d already seen for herself what difference it made when heroes took action, and worse, what difference it made when they didn’t.

Vivian Li was a superhero, and she was not going to sit around wasting her time almost murdering her classmates.

The problem came, once again, in the fact that she didn’t know where to start. That had stymied her for a while when she’d still been blissfully unaware of how much shit she could get herself into.

Guardians acted as a sort of extended police force, but they had the benefit of an infrastructure and oversight that guided them, not to mention any number of Espers that could get them information on potential incidents before they even occurred.

For an independent hero like her, finding major engagements came largely from her collaboration with other supers that had actual organizations, which was a fancy way to say that she had relied entirely on Lachlan and Lycoris to find trouble for her.

Sure, she could listen to the police scanner and hope she found trouble that way—she’d done that the first time, when she’d killed Jester—but Killjoy had skipped town and found himself an early grave, and Vivian doubted that the other villains in the area were going to want to attract attention to themselves when scrutiny over the area Killjoy had come from was suddenly lighting up.

It was semi-common knowledge that Killjoy had operated out of Lafayette, and though much was being done to keep that quiet in the media, she’d heard inklings of Guardian Espers and SRU units being deployed to her college town to surreptitiously examine traces Killjoy might’ve left behind.

There was no way Vivian was going to be able to find whoever else was still in the city on her own. She remembered that there was a villain named Pine who ran the largest opposing group to Killjoy’s, but she knew basically nothing else about him.

Vivian used her power as quietly as she could while she walked, her feet taking her in no specific direction other than away.

Reluctantly, she checked her messages from Lachlan.

He’d messaged her through direct texts and a messaging app, apparently through two different lines. In one of them, he extended an official-looking olive branch, subtly informing her that the Guardians were willing to look the other direction for any potential transgressions she’d committed against the law (read: ripping a heroine’s eyes out and disabling her throat).

In the other, he apologized personally. She skimmed over it with dead eyes, not particularly caring what he had to say.

There wasn’t much she could bring herself to care about right now, period. The buzzing was steadily growing to the point of an actual migraine, and it just wouldn’t shut up.

I’m about to do something stupid, Vivian thought.

Self-awareness was not absolution, but even knowing that wasn’t going to stop her from making that stupid decision anyway.

She tapped on Lachlan’s contact and called him.

One ring. Two. Three.

“Mantis,” Lachlan said on the other end. He sounded like he’d just woken up. Vivian could hear cloth rustling in the background. “It’s early.”

“It is. You’re not awake?”

“Resting off power overuse,” he replied drily. “Not that that’s going terribly well. Look, about—”

“You owe me,” Vivian said, cutting him off. “I’m calling to ask for a favor, which I think I’m due after you decided to find me in my private life, risk exposing me to your organization, and almost got me executed by Sunrise.”

That last part wasn’t entirely true, strictly speaking, but he’d been part of the movement that had nearly put her in severe danger just for fighting back against a Washer that had tried to kill her, Shockwave, and the rest of the EHC group she’d been with—not necessarily in that order. Execution might even have been preferable to the alternative, which as far as Vivian was aware would have involved a padded cell and a significant amount of mind control. She was sick and tired of having to deal with Washers as a fact of life when it came to the Guardians.

“That’s fair,” Lachlan said, resigned. “This line isn’t being actively monitored, though I’m sure it’s being recorded somewhere. They’ll have plausible deniability about whatever I say over this, but that’s all I can do.”

“I don’t need you to come here,” Vivian said. “I don’t want you here, either. I know you’re being tracked, and no matter where you go, you’ll bring a load of Guardians with you, and that means everything that comes with your organization.”

Lachlan laughed bitterly. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you didn’t want to be talking to me at all.”

“I… that’s not exactly it,” Vivian said, huffing out a breath that misted in the air. She’d crossed the Wabash River at some point and barely noticed. “Sorry. I’m dumping a lot of anger on you that shouldn’t be aimed at you—at least, not entirely. I like you, Lachlan, but I can’t divorce that from the fact that your organization has tried to fuck me over one too many times.”

“Also fair. What do you need?”

“I’m going to guess that you were actually running intel for the Lafayette Guardians while you were here and weren’t just running around playing cops and robbers with me.”

“I was. What about it?”

“There were two groups in this area, correct? Killjoy’s and Pine’s.”

“Yeah. I can see where you’re going with this.”

“One of them turned out to be a self-replicating threat that killed twelve thousand people.”

“The toll is at thirteen thousand now,” Lachlan corrected her.

“Fucking fantastic. One of them managed to kill thirteen thousand people. The other one kept territory in the same place. What the hell does he do, where does he do it, and where can I find him?”

Vivian could practically hear the grimace on the other end of the line. “It’s too early in the morning for this.”

“I’m sure you have records somewhere,” she replied, doing her best to keep the snippiness out of her voice. “If you could forward them to me, that would work too.”

There was a pause on the line, then shuffling.

“Probably doesn’t work,” Lachlan said through a deep yawn. “They track my traffic. Sending out classified info is a step too far.”

“But talking about it isn’t?”

“It’s only Guardians that can tap into this line. If I send it out onto the Internet, no matter how safely we try to get it moving, it’s out there forever. Nobody wants the PR disaster that would result from someone violating that barrier, especially not us.”

“Except you do violate that barrier. Regularly and with prejudice.”

“Yeah, but we like to keep that quiet.”

We, Lachlan was saying. Not too long ago, he’d acted like he was separate from the organization and had just been there because they’d paid him, but the recent events must have made him integrate into the system more.

“So you do,” Vivian said, trying and failing to hide the bitterness in her voice. “So, what can you tell me?”

“You might want to get out a pen and paper.”

#

Vivian had to find another warm building to step into—a bakery, this time—before Lachlan was done giving her the information. When all was said and done, it had been nearly forty minutes of conversation and clarification.

“I’m going back to bed,” Lachlan announced after all was said and done. “I understand if you don’t forgive me, but I hope you can see that I’m on your side.”

“I see it,” Vivian said dully, the buzzing overpowering her rational thought. “I appreciate it, Lachlan. I’ll see you when I see you.”

The Esper had gone into a frankly scary amount of detail about Pine’s operations.

As it turned out, Vivian had possessed somewhat of a poor understanding of what villain groups did in the United States. Drug running was one of their pursuits, but that alone wasn’t enough to single-handedly maintain an organization that involved literal hundreds, especially not in a city this small.

Many of them—including Pine’s, apparently—operated more like companies. Though the illicit sale of drugs and alcohol made up a portion of their business, the bulk of their income came from real estate.

It had been strangely disappointing to learn that. Although a good deal of the real estate was acquired illegally, most of it had been legally purchased with illegal money. They charged predatory prices and generally had bad practice with regards to upkeep, but there was an understanding that Pine’s group would get involved if there was trouble in the neighborhood.

That wasn’t all. They also had several fronts that were legitimate businesses of their own, each of them run by unpowered associates of the group. There were some two or three hundred “employees” under Pine directly and indirectly. In terms of supers, they had twenty-one, which was more than she’d expected.

Then again, the bulk of those were relatively low on the scale of power at C or D-rank, which put them at or slightly above the level of an unpowered human with a gun. After she’d run the numbers, it had made more sense. Most of the weak ones just weren’t the type that made the news, and they were so infrequently a problem that they hadn’t even come up on her radar. Rachel probably would’ve heard of a bunch of them if she’d come to the same school, but Vivian had never been that into the scene until she’d been forced into it.

She had wondered aloud why they didn’t have that same urge to use their powers that she did. Well, Vivian hadn’t mentioned herself since the cashier had been not very subtly eavesdropping, but Lachlan had gotten the idea.

Apparently, Pine was the ringleader of pay-per-view superhuman fighting rings, which Vivian had vaguely remembered hearing about in San Francisco at some point. That felt like much more traditional villain behavior, but more importantly, explained where those powers were being used.

These fights occurred at irregular times and were streamed with enough delay to keep Guardians from using them as intel. The last time Vivian had looked into them, she’d thought of them as a sort of legal grey area, and Lachlan had confirmed that assumption. They were a way to keep potentially violent villains from letting their anger loose on civilians, and though there were often fatalities, the Guardians had determined that it would likely cost more to shut them all down than it would to just let them keep going.

During his stay in Lafayette, Lachlan had found something approaching a schedule for those fights. They varied their times across weeks and months, but on a larger timescale, patterns had emerged. Normally, that wouldn’t have been viable thanks to the secrecy of these rings, but Lachlan’s Esper power was so strong that he’d been able to tell exactly when a fight was going down.

The schedule relied on a number of factors and a surprising amount of math, which irritated Vivian to no end, but she had worked out when and where the next one would be.

Lachlan had been right. This was a level of oversight that would be devastating to reveal. She was honestly surprised he’d been willing to share as much as he had with her.

Maybe he actually was sorry. Wouldn’t that be a trip.

One way or another, she now had a sheet of paper that looked like the ramblings of a madwoman and something akin to a plan.

There was nothing going on today, sadly, but there would be soon. That was fine. It gave her time to prepare.

Vivian started laughing to herself, sparking a concerned look from the cashier.

“I’m fine,” she said, not sure who she was trying to convince. “I’m fine.”

#

“Vivian,” Sarah said, a note of surprise in her voice. “I didn’t think you were coming back.”

After so much had happened during her week out, it was a trip and a half for Vivian to see her roommate just doing homework in their dorm. It was so… mundane. It hadn’t been all that long since they’d seen each other, but it already felt like they were worlds apart.

“I got back yesterday night,” Vivian said. “You weren’t home.”

“Yeah, I just got back too,” Sarah said. “Where’ve you been? You weren’t picking up calls.”

Vivian winced. She’d silenced her personal notifications after her dad calling had nearly gotten her killed.

“Went to Chicago,” she admitted. The closer a lie is to the truth, the easier it is to remain consistent. “Stayed with a friend. Needed to clear my head. We all saw how that worked out”

“Oh, Jesus,” Sarah said, swiveling in her seat. “Are you alright? I saw the news.”

As a reply, Vivian sighed deeply.

“I’m always here if you need someone to talk to,” Sarah said.

That’s the last thing I want right now. Vivian didn’t voice her thoughts. Sarah had literally nothing to do with any of this besides the time she’d been captured by Killjoy and hospitalized. She didn’t want to hurt her more.

“I’ll be alright,” she said, managing a tired smile. “It’s been an exhausting week is all. I’ll get back in the saddle soon enough.”

“If you say so,” Sarah said hesitantly, clearly worried for Vivian’s well-being. “Take care of yourself, okay?”

“You got it.”

#

Riverside Storage Solutions was, for most intents and purposes, a legitimate storage area in bumfuck nowhere Lafayette. The complex it housed was composed of several dozen storage units that had fallen into slight disrepair. They charged slightly above average prices and didn’t have great service, but they didn’t ask many questions and the humidity of the storage units was well-maintained. Sarah had used this place to store part of her extravagant wardrobe one summer.

Vivian walked into the office that oversaw the place like she wanted to make a reservation of her own with a pistol in one hand. She’d ultimately decided against wearing her full costume, though she had pieces of its armor on under her oversized shirt and loose jeans. It would make her a bit too obvious—though she’d taken the mask, obviously.

There were two men at the counter, though neither of them even looked at her as she entered, too focused on the computers in front of them.

“I’m looking for the fight,” she said. “Could you show me the way?”

“Lady, I have no idea what you’re talking—“ the clerk cut himself off as he looked up to see Vivian’s gun floating in the air beside her, pointed straight at him.

“I’m going to ask one more time,” she said. “I’m looking for the fight.”

To be honest, she wasn’t sure what she was going to do if he turned her down a second time. It had been almost a week since she’d gotten the schedule, and this was the first fight that was supposed to occur. She wasn’t sure if they would even be holding it what with the Guardians watching and all. If it turned out that he was just a civilian…

“Sorry, ma’am,” the clerk said, which was a bit odd given that he seemed to be twenty or so years older than her. “Ronny, keep the register running, will you?”

“Yes, sir,” the other, younger man said. He had his hands raised even though Vivian wasn’t even aiming at him.

The clerk got to his feet, nervously eyeing Vivian, then gestured for her to come along.

He led her to one of the storage units and opened it, her gun trained on him the entire time. From the outside, it looked like any other, but there was an open hatch with a ladder in the center of an otherwise empty unit within.

Vivian nodded appreciatively and walked in. “Thank you. Does the door open from the inside?”

“Yes, ma’am,” the clerk said. “You see that switch over there? It’ll open it.”

Vivian suspected that the red-marked switch that looked suspiciously like it would trigger an alarm of some kind was not, in fact, the way the door opened, but the clerk had been helpful enough.

“Thank you,” she said. “You can go now.”

He ran like his life depended on it. Vivian watched until the clerk was out of sight, then clambered down the ladder.

It led into a tunnel that continued basement of some kind, brightly lit by fluorescent LEDs.

She was not the first one here. There was an audience of a couple dozen normals, mostly men that appeared to not be entirely sober, forming a loose circle around a roped-off area that was at least twice as large as what she’d assumed a boxing ring would be like.

To be fair, powers did need a slightly larger area to work in.

The first contestants for the night were warming up, both of them exercising powers that didn’t look too high-rank. They were dressed in enough costume to hide their identities, but it was clear that they’d simplified to make a simple brawl easier.

Nobody noticed Vivian arrive except a single bouncer, which seemed like insufficient security until she remembered that there were literal superhumans in the ring already. The security was present in the event itself.

His eyes widened as he registered her, then the gun, and he inhaled—

Mantis barely even looked at him as she pulverized his vocal cords. She did it more cleanly than she had with Venus.

Practice made perfect, and she’d had quite a few people to practice on.

“Sorry,” she said, her voice nearly inaudible over the general noise of the room.

She kicked him in the gut, not trusting herself not to hit something in a lethal manner if she used her telekinesis, and he folded over.

She walked forward, her steps masked by the cheering that came when the two fighters stepped into the ring together. She tucked her gun into her back pocket as she did, hiding it from plain view.

She drew some attention as the rare college-age girl who had somehow found her way into one of these, but the bulk of the attention was focused enough on the college girl and not enough on the masked part. While the hungry stares and “accidental” brushes with her made her skin crawl, they served her purpose, which was getting close enough to the center to get her targets within range.

Mantis started drawing more attention as she got closer to the middle of the arena, so she drew her pistol and fired it into the air.

The overlapping conversation in the room rapidly coalesced into some variety of shit and fuck before silencing quickly.

She’d made sure to get to a clear enough area that nobody wanted to be the one to charge her. Now that they were all paying attention to her, more people were realizing she was a super. With that and her gun, not a single person wanted to risk attacking her.

“You two,” Mantis said, the crowd making way for her as she approached the arena. “You work for Pine?”

“Who the fuck are you?” one of the fighters said. His arms had blue-white spikes growing out of them—a power manifestation of some kind. “What’s it matter to you?”

“That’s a yes, then.”

Mantis punched him in the spinal cord.

__

Author's note: It's been several months since my last Brainpunch chapter, and I owe all of you an apology for this. I stopped posting for a couple of reasons. First, this story is difficult to write, both in terms of figuring out what I want to do and on a personal level, since it's the fic I have the deepest personal connection to. Second, to be frank, the series wasn't, isn't, and likely will never make me that much money, and I do need to make rent.

To those who wish to unsub, please do. I am not providing value for the amount you are paying, but I can't change the tier price because of Patreon's tomfoolery. I will write likely 1-2 more chapters of this before finishing book 1, where it will likely go on long-term hiatus. I'm sorry I can't promise more.

Thank you all for your support.