Brainpunch - CHAPTER SIXTEEN: The Villain (Patreon)

Superheroing is the second most lethal job on the planet, second only to villainy. On average, three in ten superheroes die before their third year. That number is closer to four in ten for villains.

Want a tip? Here’s mine: know when to run. This goes for heroes and villains alike—yes, yes, I know, calm down. Believe it or not, I would rather less people die, not more.

Leaving a fight inherently deescalates it. You reduce the chance of your own death, and you reduce the chance of collateral damage.

Even more importantly: always leave your opponent a way out. Nothing bites harder than a cornered rat.

- Excerpt of a 2020 seminar given by Sunrise of the San Francisco Guardians, an A-rank Marksman and B-rank Aegis-Mover, to the Trailblazer Initiative, an under-21 superhero collective; though TI was eventually acquired by the Guardians, it boasted a 95% hero survival rate in the three years it was active

#

So much happened at once that Vivian could barely process it. Later, she would think back and realize that Jackal had shot Raven with the first half of his magazine, then targeted Jekyll’s prone body, but he’d already been hardened by his power, so the bullets had bounced off.

In the moment, all she could think was, why did Jackal only shoot the one we were supposed to take alive, followed by HOLY SHIT JACKAL’S FACE JUST GOT CAVED IN.

The hero crumpled to the ground like a sack of bricks, and the Echelon squad moved.

Vivian scrambled back, reaching for her own pistol. In that instant, Amazon took three massive steps forward and punched Jekyll in the gut.

The impact sounded like Amazon had used a sledgehammer to strike a gong.

Before she could take her next hit, Jekyll backhanded her, and the blonde hero practically flew.

Shockwave used his power, throwing the ball of lightning at the villain’s face. The momentary distraction Amazon created by crashing straight through the apartment’s shitty TV gave him enough time to land a direct hit.

Jekyll jerked backwards, body convulsing as Shockwave’s lightning made contact with his eye.

He roared with rage, thrusting his fists straight through a wall, and the convulsing stopped.

Lycoris appeared behind him, knife in hand, and she slashed at the back of his neck. If she was using the same knife as before, Vivian knew there would be a paralytic in whatever she hit him with.

It didn’t look like it made contact, though, and Jekyll screamed in range as he punched directly backwards. Lycoris disappeared, reappearing in a crouched position next to the downed Amazon, and the grey man’s fist hit nothing but air.

“He’s already amped!” Lycoris shouted. “His skin’s tough as steel!”

Vivian unclipped her gun and held it in shaking hands, trying to line up a shot, but that line from Lycoris—she wasn’t going to make the shot, and it wasn’t going to hurt him.

She stowed her gun just as Amazon returned to the fray.

“Skurwielu,” she screeched, bodyslamming the giant. “Die!”

This time, she actually succeeded in knocking him back. A second later, Shockwave hit him with another bolt of electricity, and his body convulsed once more.

Drywall and metal shattered as they tumbled through the bedroom, the raw power in their bodies cracking the ground with every impact.

Jekyll struggled against Amazon, flailing his arms and legs.

The Aegis grimaced as one of the punches hit her in the gut with a painful-sounding thwack, and she crumpled, folding backwards and falling off him. It was less dramatic than the first hit she’d taken, but Vivian still winced in sympathy.

She got up faster this time, then tackled Jekyll.

What do I do? Vivian couldn’t get close enough to use her power safely. If even a single one of those wayward punches hit her, she was toast.

“Here we go,” Barbarian muttered. Vivian turned to look at him, eyes wide. “Check on the Guardian, will ya?”

“Uh, check, shit, okay,” Vivian said, stumbling over her own words. She flinched at the sound of one of Shockwave’s balls of lightning and Jekyll’s subsequent roar.

The Echelon hero was so goddamn calm. He hadn’t even flinched at the violence.

She swore she saw Barbarian yawn as he advanced, and then he changed.

Barbarian’s costume involved very little coverage of his torso. Vivian had assumed that it was a thirst trap thing for the media, because despite Zach’s apparent laziness, he did have a very well-defined musculature.

That might have been true, but it wasn’t the only reason. Muscles and bone shifted in his back grotesquely, and his body expanded. Barbarian’s lean frame filled out into the size of a world-class bodybuilder in moments.

Bony spikes burst out of his unnaturally muscular back, and when he spread his hands, Vivian saw that his fingers ended in claws.

If it weren’t for the fact that Barbarian walked forward at the same sedate pace that he might use on the way to get ice cream from the fridge, she could’ve sworn this was a different person.

“Back me up!” Shockwave shouted, crouched form stumbling backwards. He had another ball of lightning growing in both hands, but he hadn’t fired them yet. The hero scurried backwards, stumbling over the unmoving body of the Guardian. “Shit! Barb, hurry!”

Vivian couldn’t see Jekyll through the half-demolished apartment, but she could hear him.

The villain did not sound any happier. From the repeated impact of what she knew to be flesh on flesh but sounded more like a wrecking ball hitting concrete, she was pretty sure Jekyll was whaling on Amazon, who had disappeared out of Vivian’s line of sight into the bedroom.

Barbarian grunted, which could have been because his power didn’t let him talk or because Zach didn’t want to communicate properly, and he lumbered forward into the bedroom.

“Be right back.” Lycoris vanished from Vivian’s side.

Wait, Vivian thought, still dazed from the raw speed at which events were progressing. How am I supposed to check on Jackal if he’s in the doorway?

The fight was in the bedroom, wasn’t it? She couldn’t get there safely. How was she supposed to get to the body?

“Oi, dickhead!” Lycoris shouted from within the bedroom.

An eerie moment of near silence ensued, and then Vivian heard something akin to a watermelon being crushed in a hydraulic press. Ouch.

Shockwave fired his bolts as Lycoris reappeared at the door to the apartment. “Five seconds, Barb!”

Jekyll cried out as the hero’s attacak coursed through him once again, and Barbarian walked in.

Vivian still hadn’t done anything yet.

Shockwave ducked out from under Barbarian’s arm, dragging Jackal with him.

“Shock, are you alright?” Lycoris asked from behind Vivian.

“Fantastic,” Shockwave grunted. “How the hell is he so powerful already? Someone help me with this guy, please.”

Vivian rushed to help him, taking the prone Guardian by the legs. They dragged him back into the dimly lit living room together.

Lycoris walked past them. “Want my guess? His powers trigger off of any strong emotion, not just anger. He was having sex when we walked in, wasn’t he?”

Before they could answer, she dashed forward once again.

“Shit,” Shockwave muttered. Louder, he said, “Mantis, you take care of Jackal. I gotta go support them.”

Vivian could only nod as he ran away.

Okay. Okay, she could do this. First aid wasn’t her strong suit, she knew that, but this time, she wasn’t bleeding out.

She steadied her hands, looking at Jackal to assess the damage. It was hard to see him properly in the inconsistent mood lighting, but she could tell that he must have lost a lot of blood. Am I going to have to do CPR? He took a really hefty hit.

The man was facedown, which definitely wouldn’t help with resuscitation, so she turned him over—and struggled to keep her breakfast down.

Jackal no longer had a face.

She should have known. He wasn’t an Aegis. One hit from Jekyll had caved his regular human flesh in so badly that—she looked away. Vivian was starting to learn to stomach the sight of gore, but this was too much. Far too much.

“Jackal is dead!” she shouted, struggling to be heard over the still-ongoing music. She didn’t know how much that could help them, but they deserved to know what had happened.

There was no response aside from a resounding crash that might have been the bed hitting a wall.

What could Vivian even do here? She suddenly felt incredibly stupid for bringing pepper spray or chalk. This man was an Aegis when his Shifter form was active, and he was only getting stronger. He had proven to be capable of shrugging off gunfire. Nothing she had could harm him.

Before she could consider her options more, the bedroom wall smashed open.

Barbarian created a comically large hole in it as he flew backwards, falling into the adjacent room on the left. A moment later, Lycoris teleported next to Vivian.

“Jackal messed up,” she said. “Real bad.”

Barbarian groaned in pain.

“He’ll be fine,” Lycoris assured Vivian.

Shockwave limped out of the bedroom, a hard look painted on his face.

“We didn’t get him yet,” he said, “but Amazon is scaling with him now. I think he’s hit A-rank in terms of power. I’m going to make a call.”

“Who are you calling?” Vivian asked.

“HQ,” Shockwave replied. “We need backup. None of us have the power to put him down.”

“Wait, didn’t you say his power worked off anger?” Vivian said, a desperate spark of inspiration clicking in her mind. “Can we… deescalate?”

Shockwave grimaced and pulled out his remarkably undamaged cell phone. “You can certainly try.”

“It’s worth a try,” Lycoris said. “I got it. I have a few more major anchors. Here, Mantis. Take this.”

She handed Vivian a knife, handle first, then stepped forward into the broken bedroom doorway.

“Hey, big guy!” Lycoris shouted, somehow managing to sound soothing. “We’re sorry for the trouble. Can we try this again? Slow things down a bit?”

“YOU CAME TO MY HOUSE,” Jekyll roared.

A chill ran up Vivian’s spine. He didn’t sound human. Screams of rage were one thing, but actual words made it clear.

Jekyll was a monster.

“We—” Lycoris started.

“YOU KILLED MY GIRL.”

The bedroom wall finished caving in as Lycoris’ body smashed through it. The heroine vanished and reappeared in front of Vivian with a flourish before her corpse could even hit the ground.

The knife she’d given to Vivian to hold disintegrated.

“Aw, I liked that knife,” Lycoris pouted. “I think I just made him angrier.”

With the wall now almost entirely open, Vivian could see Amazon facing off against Jekyll.

The A-rank hero was proving her worth. After being tossed around like a ragdoll in the first few moments, Amazon was now matching Jekyll blow for blow, much to the detriment of the room around them.

They were destroying everything. Walls, furniture, ceiling, and floor alike suffered.

“Yes, this is Shockwave,” the other Kinetic said, leaning against the apartment door. “Jekyll was already powered up. Yes. We’ve pinned him down, but we need more firepower.”

Did they have him pinned down? Amazon was matching him, yes, but she didn’t have him in a submission hold or anything. And the floor wasn’t going to last much longer. At some point, they were going to fall through.

Vivian still hadn’t contributed yet. A knot of frustration tied itself in her gut.

“I’m going to try something,” Vivian said against her better judgment.

“Don’t get yourself killed,” Lycoris said. “I can’t make an anchor for you.”

“I’ll try not to,” Vivian said.

Now that the balance of the fight had somewhat settled, Vivian could try to get in close without getting killed. Jekyll’s head nearly reached the ceiling now, but he definitely didn’t have ten feet of reach.

She didn’t know if she could reach his brain, but her plan had more than one part.

Vivian gingerly stepped over Jackal’s body, stomach churning in horror and disgust when she accidentally caught a glimpse of him, and made her way to the coffee table she’d seen her way in, laden with familiar Ziploc bags of white powder.

She took one, opened it, and poured it out. Then another. Then another.

Shockwave looked at her, tilting his head quizzically, but he didn’t say anything. He was still on the phone.

“Barbarian, don’t get in my way,” she warned, heart thumping in her chest.

“Don’t worry about me,” came the pained answer from the room next to her. “I’ll get up when Amazon stops fighting.”

Vivian bit back a snide comment and inched forward, carrying the mysterious drug with her power. She was woefully undereducated on drugs, which was either a very good or moderately bad thing, depending on who you asked, so she had no idea what she was carrying. Hopefully it was potent.

Her heart pumped louder and louder as she got closer. Amazon and Jekyll were locked together, fighting for the upper hand. Both were Aegises and Brawlers, and neither had a vastly superior power. Vivian would forgive an onlooker for thinking that this was just a particularly odd MMA match.

Unfortunately, she’d seen what those fists could do, so she took every step forward with caution. They were so focused on their fight that neither noticed her approach, but that didn’t make it any safer for her. One errant hit would put her out of the game for good.

Amazon grunted and kneed Jekyll between the legs. He headbutted her in exchange.

Neither of them were budging, and Jekyll’s back was turned towards Vivian. She was never going to get a better opportunity than this.

The moment Jekyll was within range, she punched him in the brain.

Or, at least, she tried to.

It was like trying to knock a building down with a fan. Jekyll winced, head snapping forward, but his reaction was nothing like the near-instantaneous stroke she’d given the two non-Aegises.

Plan B it is.

Vivian had assumed that the Aegis had protections for his internal organs. Amazon’s brain had been harder to manipulate than a normal’s when she had only just begun to power herself up.

So instead, she decided to give him a stroke the old-fashioned way.

Her power allowed for extremely deft fine control. She manipulated every last speck of the powder she’d filched from the living room and sent it straight up Jekyll’s nose.

The villain coughed, surprised. He tried to snort the drug out, but even if his flesh was protected, Vivian could still affect the space inside him.

She force-fed him three pounds of his drug of choice. Jekyll was strong, but with half of Vivian’s power pounding away at his brain and other half fighting against his breath, he couldn’t exhale hard enough to expel it.

Jekyll’s entire body jerked backward, and he wheeled around.

Shit. Vivian tried to run without turning, tripped, and fell on her ass.

That turned out to be a fortunate mistake, because Jekyll threw a metal bar at the space where her chest had been.

Instead of impaling her, the edge of the spinning steel grazed her helmet. The impact sent Vivian’s head snapping back hard enough to be painful, but she was alive.

Her heart and head pounded with adrenaline as her brain tried to process that she had just avoided certain death by a matter of inches.

Amazon pounced.

Unlike with Shockwave’s attacks, Jekyll didn’t instantly recover. Vivian couldn’t make his expression out in the darkness, but he swayed on his feet. Whatever drug she’d fed him was taking effect already.

The villain wasn’t lucid enough to resist. Amazon knocked him to his knees with a brutal punch to the head, then kicked him in the back.

He fell flat on the ground, body twitching.

Amazon didn’t let up.

She made her way to his head and stomped on it so hard the wooden floor cracked underneath it.

“You may want to look away,” Amazon said. “Thank you for the assistance.”

Vivian took the heroine’s advice and returned to join the other heroes, but even with her ears plugged and music blasting, she heard Amazon crush Jekyll’s skull.

#

Her helmet had broken alongside the rest of the apartment.

Vivian could still see through it, but only barely. The left side of her vision was covered entirely by spiderwebbing cracks where the glass hadn’t completely held, and none of the displays were functional.

All things considered, she knew she was lucky she hadn’t come away with worse. She shuddered, thinking of the close miss. If Jekyll’s aim had adjusted just a moment earlier, Vivian would have joined Jackal.

The hero’s body was still right next to them in the living room. It took everything she had not to look at it.

Even with the gratefulness for having survived in mind, she was disappointed that the helmet was broken. It was the last of the gifts that Lachlan had purchased for her. Vivian had run through them all too quickly. How much had he spent on them, again? Ten thousand dollars?

She didn’t feel like she’d done ten thousand dollars worth of heroing.

Maybe she could pay him back when she saw him again. It was entirely possible, right?

Lycoris whistled. “There’s a lot of cash here for a love nest. Even split?”

Speaking of money.

Vivian used her power to pick up the bundles of cash strewn about the living room. Thanks to Amazon’s brief stint as Jekyll’s punching bag, it was in even more disarray than it had been before, but most of the money was still intact.

Lycoris was right. There was a lot of money here, even after being split six ways—five ways, she reminded herself.

“Barbarian barely did anything,” Shockwave groused.

“I distracted him plenty,” Barbarian said, casually stepping over Jackal’s body like it wasn’t even there. “Tell you what. Let me have my share and I’ll say you saved my life in the report.”

“Done,” Shockwave said immediately. “I’m going to check that.”

“Sure, sure. Shrimp, can you pick up the pace?”

“Fuck off,” Vivian said. Her voice came out shakier than she would have liked. She was still hopped up on adrenaline. “I’m trying to keep our cash from getting blood and coke on it, alright?”

Lycoris got on the phone while Vivian carefully stacked bills together on the mercifully intact coffee table.

“Lycoris here. Yep! Yeah, the job’s done. Raven, Jackal, and Jekyll are dead. No, they’re not the same per—okay, it’s J-A-C-K-A-L and J-E-K-Y-L-L. Yes, we lost two Guardians. Great. We didn’t see any civilian casualties, but the building looks like it’s about to fall. Thanks! I don’t look forward to working with you again!”

She hung up.

“Who was that?” Amazon asked.

Vivian startled. She hadn’t even realized the A-rank had joined them. Thanks to the dim lighting and her broken helmet, it was nearly impossible to make out her features.

Reluctantly, she took the helmet off.

Amazon’s costume looked like its sleeves had been painted red.

“Director Williams,” Lycoris said. “I figured it would be faster to phone him directly instead of going through all the steps.”

Why was it that Jekyll’s blood on Amazon’s hands and legs bothered Vivian less than the sight of her cutting herself? Three people had just died, and she was calmer than she’d been on the night her brother was first hospitalized.

What the hell was wrong with her?

“Good work, everyone,” Amazon said.

“Hey, the hell happened?” Barbarian asked. He’d returned to his human form and taken a seat on the couch, counting bills. “This was supposed to be an easy job. What set them off?”

“We can talk once we’re done,” Shockwave said. “Like Lycoris said, the target building is at risk of collapsing. We should follow protocol and evacuate civilians.”

“Ugh, seriously?” Barbarian groaned.

“Prove you’re worth the paycheck,” Shockwave said. “Come on.”

“I don’t know if I can help,” Vivian said. “I can barely see through my helmet, and I’m not sure if I want to go door to door with my face exposed.”

“That’s fine,” Lycoris said. “Barb, Shock, and Amazon should be enough. I’ll come down with you.”

“Hey, I didn’t agree to that,” Barbarian said.

“Good plan,” Shockwave said. “The backup I called is coming, too. We need someone to meet them. They’ll be able to help with evacuation, if nothing else. I set the meeting point as the lobby.”

“Do you know who it is?” Lycoris asked.

“No idea, but Command told me they didn’t have any Movers on hand who could make it in time, so it’s a Guardian.”

Vivian bit her lip. She was going to have to put the helmet back on. The Lafayette Guardians knew what she looked like already, but there was no point in risking further discovery.

If the others made a formal report for this event, she was sure Amazon would include the part where she had forcibly drugged Jekyll.

Vivian was caught in a strange place. She needed to prove that she could be useful in order to get into Arina—or maybe Echelon. On the other hand, she also couldn’t be too useful, because that just painted a target on her back for someone like Venus to try to sway her onto the Guardians.

“Mantis, handle the money,” Amazon ordered, bringing Vivian back to reality. “Distribute it afterwards. Barbarian, evacuate the floors underneath us. Shockwave, take the odd floors above. I will evacuate the evens. Get moving.”

“What are you going to do with the bodies?” Vivian asked.

“A team is coming,” Lycoris said. “Fifteen to thirty minutes. Hopefully the building will still be intact by then.”

Vivian frowned, but she didn’t press further. It felt wrong to leave three dead supers in this potentially collapsing apartment, but she didn’t want to be the one who had to drag a corpse down three flights of stairs.

“Alright,” she said instead. “Give me half a minute.”

She used her power to gather up the cash, then stored it in her backpack. Vivian took the metal bar Barbarian had made out of the bag and discarded it to make more space.

“Hey, I worked hard on that,” Barbarian complained.

“If you worked half as hard on the job, you would be A-rank,” Lycoris said.

They split once Vivian managed to close her bulging bag of cash.

She put her helmet back on before they left, and then Lycoris guided her back down the waste-scented staircase.

“Are your stitches alright?” Lycoris asked.

Vivian felt around her side. “I don’t think I’m bleeding, so I probably didn’t tear anything. I hope.”

“That’s a good sign,” Lycoris assured her.

Vivian hadn’t been lying when she’d said she could barely see through the helmet. Lycoris had to guide her by the elbow to keep her from tripping down the stairs.

At length, they made it into the lobby in one piece.

The same security guard they’d passed earlier was still there. He’d barely moved.

From start to finish, their excursion into the apartment couldn’t have taken more than ten minutes, but Vivian felt like an entire day had passed. It was odd to see the midday sun still streaming into the lobby.

“A villain has been captured,” Lycoris told the guard, who was staring at Vivian, slack-jawed. “Please evacuate the building. It’s for your own safety.”

He didn’t need to be told twice. The guard nodded, turned to leave—and paused to take his phone out and utterly fail at being discrete in taking a photo of the two heroines.

“Great,” Vivian muttered.

“Let’s wait inside,” Lycoris said. “I assume the Guardian is arriving soon.”

The lobby was small and shoddy, but there were a couple plastic chairs in a corner.

Vivian sat and took her phone out of her pack. A single crack ran across the screen protector, probably from when she’d fallen backwards.

“So what happened?” she asked, opening her texts as she spoke. “You seem to know people.”

Vivian: ay what the fuck lachlan

Vivian: jack jekyl raven dead, wtf was his power

Lachlan: shit ye just heard

Lachlan: cant tell

Lachlan: hard to use power with this many supers

“I can’t say anything for sure,” Lycoris said. “The people who might have been able to tell us are dead. My guess, though, is that Jekyll’s power worked on passion or just raw emotion in general. If his power was already going when he was, you know…”

“Right,” Vivian said. “Why did Jackal just do that?”

“His nephew died in the Guardians,” Lycoris said. “It was under suspicious circumstances. I remember because that news story took precedent over my first big fight. The investigation ended up wrapping up behind closed doors. I think Jackal’s nephew might have been backstabbed.”

“Oh. That makes a lot of sense, actually.” Raven had been a Guardian before switching sides, after all.

“Jackal probably figured the kill order would give him enough lenience to execute a turncoat villain,” Lycoris said.

Lachlan: their calling me in to talk abt this

Lachlan: will update later

Vivian sighed, powering her phone off. “This definitely isn’t going to stop here, is it?”

“Nope,” Lycoris said cheerily. “That means more opportunity to blow up. It also means more opportunities to blow up, but that’s the risk we take!”

“That is an awful pun.”

“Thank you, I’m here until I die,” Lycoris replied. “So probably a few more hours.”

The doors slid open, letting in a whoosh of the cold outside air.

“Oh, are you the backup?” Lycoris asked. “A lot has happened. Let me catch you up.”

“That would be me, yes.”

Vivian was suddenly extremely glad she had put the helmet on, even as nonfunctional and vision-obscuring as it was.

Familiar anxiety squeezed in on her, joined by an entirely new set of worries.

Does my voice modulator work? She needed it to work. It had to.

Vivian looked up.

He’d changed parts of his costume, but she recognized the golden stripes on red and orange armor. She recognized his voice, and the way he casually posed when he stood still, and the soft glow that constantly radiated from him.

“This is Mantis Shrimp,” Lycoris said. “Mantis, this is an A-rank Marksman, Aegis, and Mover from San Francisco. His name is Sunrise.”