Brainpunch - CHAPTER TWENTY: The Dead (Patreon)

We all die the day we receive our powers. Some of us just take longer to realize it.

- The last words of Atomic, S-rank Kinetic and founder of the Cataclysm Rapid Response Team; at the time, it was estimated that he was directly responsible for over 1,500,000 deaths

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Vivian didn’t have the time or desire to think twice about her decision. Apparently, neither did the rest of the Echelon team.

With the suicide supers dead, Amazon, Shockwave, and Lycoris rushed over to the two halves of Barbarian.

There was some hushed discussion. At least, Vivian assumed it was discussion—they were moving and gesticulating in conversation-shaped ways, but the ringing in her ears was still so damn loud that she couldn’t tell if they were actually saying anything.

Slowly, she wandered over. After her burst of cold, hard… not anger. Anger was too soft a word for what had just overcome her.

After she’d killed yet another man, Vivian felt like her emotions had swung back all the way around. She’d been intensely, inescapably focused on the situation, but from the moment she’d finished tearing him apart, she felt like she wasn’t even here at all. She may as well have been an observer in her own body.

Vivian didn’t want to walk over to Barbarian. He was—had been, maybe—a powerful Shifter, and his forms were brutishly strong, so there was a chance he was alive, but Vivian didn’t want to confirm her fears. The painful state of purgatory was preferable to walking up and being told that he was gone. If she didn’t know, she could still hold out hope.

Instead, she looked at the man she’d killed, his face frozen in a tortured scream. She looked at the woman Amazon had finished off. That body was completely unrecognizable, the flesh marred and ruined by the gore-covered spine lying next to it.

This should have shocked her more, right? Why was she so okay with killing, with witnessing the horrific results of what she and her team had wrought, but she couldn’t even bring herself to check on her teammate.

What was wrong with her?

I wonder if this is normal for superheroes, she thought stupidly. I wonder what this would look like in a promotional video.

Vivian didn’t hear the pop of Lycoris’ power, but it must have gone off, because when she looked back, half of Barbarian had disappeared. Unless someone else had a spatial manipulation power they’d been holding back on, that must have meant Lycoris had teleported him.

Barbarian hadn’t been anchored. I wonder how she did that, Vivian thought.

She ambled over to the group of supers, her head numb. The entire world seemed to be buzzing—but that could have just been because she couldn’t hear a damn thing. Vivian was growing entirely too accustomed to the sensation of what she had learned was called “shooter’s ear.” In her defense, she hadn’t tended to be the one shooting.

“…..—ey, Mantis!” Amazon was shouting. Her expression was serious but calm and collected.

So this was what differentiated someone like Vivian from a real professional. Mantis had gotten the killing part down, but the normal girl within was twisting and cracking.

“Mantis,” Amazon repeated, louder. She put a surprisingly gentle hand on Vivian’s shoulder “You’re spacing.”

Vivian shook her head, blinking the daze out of her eyes. “Sorry. I’m here.”

The residual ringing from the gunshots was fading, though it was doing so unevenly. She’d been firing the pistol with her dominant left hand, and it definitely felt like the right side of the world sounded louder than the left.

This was going to be a pain in the ass.

“If you’re going to fight, keep yourself useful,” Amazon said. "The other supers may still be active. Whiteout, at least, certainly is.”

“Zach?” Vivian asked. She winced at herself, then tried again, putting her thoughts in order. “Barbarian. Is he okay?”

“I anchored him to an Airsoft pellet and shot it,” Lycoris said, appearing next to Vivian with a muted pop. Her usually indefatigable cheer was gone. “He’s survived worse hits, but he was in a form that could regenerate, then. Shockwave’s on the phone with Mass Casualty Response right now. There’s nothing else we can do right now. Lock in.”

“Yeah,” Vivian said, unsure what else to say. She drew on her power, brushing the blood from her boots as best as she could. “This is… a lot.”

“I figure,” Lycoris said. “The blood usually gets toned down for TV. I should have warned you better.”

“You couldn’t have seen this coming,” Vivian said, shaking her head. The colder part of the numbness was returning, which she decided was a good thing. Better to be numb and regret her actions later than to be a mess and commit a lethal fuckup now. “Where do we go next?”

“That’s what we’re trying to figure out,” Lycoris replied. “Judging by the fact that it’s still cold as balls, Whiteout’s still active. Unless someone else happened to snag a kill, there’s still a temp super, Trickstar, and Whiteout.”

“A Mover is inbound with Safezone,” Shockwave said, tapping the side of his ear. Ending a call, presumably. “Barbarian is out of our hands now. Let’s deal with the current threat. We’re not going to be any help in getting him out.”

Vivian wasn’t entirely sure about that. Surely there was something they could do about Barbarian. She could read between the lines, though. Shockwave was saying that whatever help they could give Zach, it was going to be far less effective than continuing on with the mission.

That didn’t sit well with her. Abandoning someone who had helped her in his time of need… she’d done that before, and it hadn’t turned out well then.

It made sense, but still. It sucked.

“Alright,” she said. It wasn’t like she was going to be able to influence them, anyway. She was an intern at best, while the entirety of this detachment of the Echelon team was in agreement on what they were doing. “Where to next?”

She just needed to focus on the right things. Not the sick sensation in her stomach, nor the numb confusion coursing through her head. That had to be pushed aside. Earlier, she had seized upon a golden instant of clarity. Vivian just had to return her mind to that state.

Inhale. 2. 3. 4.

“Lachlan told us that a temp super is on the tarmac with Whiteout and Sunrise,” Amazon said. “Sunrise is strong enough to hold his own. We find Trickstar and shut her down.”

“Casualties are likely still stacking,” Shockwave added. “Where the shit are Venus and Safezone?”

Vivian looked around, glad for something concrete to do. Venus had just been with them, hadn’t she? The Washer had been with them just five minutes ago, but she’d already disappeared. The terminal’s central hallway was entirely straight. That bitch of a Guardian must have run immediately.

“I think she dipped into a gate or a store,” Lycoris said. “Indy didn’t give us her tracking data, so I can’t tell where she is, but she definitely doesn’t have a Mover or Hider ability in the registry. There were some living normals.”

She smiled, posing for some unseen camera. Wait, no—she was directly in Vivian’s view, which meant it was for the cameras in Vivian’s… mask? Did she have cameras there? They hadn’t specified, but at this point, she really wouldn’t have been surprised.

“How do we find Trickstar, then?” she asked, pushing aside the unease that Lycoris’ immediate return to casual cheer. Everyone has their own way to deal with shit. It’s not my place to judge.

“If I had to guess,” Shockwave said drily, “probably by following the bodies.”

“Trickstar is definitely in this terminal,” Lycoris said. “Unless one of the temps mimicked his power, he’s got a Marksman-Ruler deal with a nasty habit of leaving holes in people.”

Vivian immediately failed to not judge. How does she make every sentence she says sound like it’s at a red carpet interview for a shitty PG-13 movie?

“Body freshness?” Amazon asked.

“They were recent,” Vivian said. “When Lycoris put her hand in one, the blood was still flowing even though they were dead. Trickstar doesn’t have a preservation power, right?”

“He doesn’t,” Lycoris confirmed. The Eso leaned closer to Vivian. Though her eyes were obscured by a visor, her body language practically screamed curiosity. “You know more about this than I thought you would.”

Death scared the shit out of Vivian. It had for a long, long time, ever since the first time she realized as a child that there would eventually come a day where she would simply not be for the rest of eternity. Paradoxically, that had meant periods of obsession with the biological processes of it. They had tended to intensify around times where death had made itself present in her personal and family life, and given how much of that there had been, she was more than acquainted with the literature.

“I did a lot of research,” Vivian droned. She should have felt more, given the subject matter, but right now, she’d cycled through all her emotions to get back to dead cold—or, more accurately, the confusion and shock had lost their grip on her, and she was back to baseline. “The bodies are fresh enough to pump blood when prompted, and there’s still color in the skin. That means no pallor or livor mortis, which means it’s probably been less than twenty minutes.”

“Twenty minutes is still a hefty window,” Shockwave said. “Trickstar could be anywhere by now.”

“Not behind us,” Amazon countered. “If their goal is to cause chaos and inflict casualties, they’ve certainly succeeded, but Trickstar’s power hasn’t been applied past these few gates.”

“There’s no alternative exit from here, and I’m pretty sure the gates end at the end of this hall,” Vivian said. “Is Trickstar still in here, then?”

“Are any windows broken?” Lycoris asked.

“I can’t see,” Vivian responded. “Maybe—“

“Okay, great,” Lycoris said, cutting Vivian off. The other super looked at her apologetically. “Sorry. Not all of the intel guys want to talk with the newbie.”

Oh. At another time, that might have hurt.

“The windows,” Vivian prompted. Her feelings didn’t matter right now. She could always sort them out later, but they couldn’t let Trickstar get away free and alive.

“Intact!” Lycoris chirped.

“Then she’s hiding in here somewhere,” Amazon said. “She’s a setup Ruler.”

“Is Lachlan available?” Vivian asked. “Wait. I can just call him.”

She couldn’t figure out how to use the call feature on her earpiece, so she used her phone instead. Miraculously, it was still intact but for a single crack running through the screen protector.

“Your call has been forwarded to an automatic voice messaging system. Four. Six. Three. Two—“

Her phone buzzed with a notification as she ended the call.

Lachlan: syr on call with slike four dfi teams rn this fucking sucks

Lachlan: tstar in aiprot with u

Lachlan: her pwoser is arleady active rnad has been for a bit

Vivian parsed the message as best as she could and mentioned this to the team she was a part of for the time being.

“Great work!” Lycoris said. She pouted. “He never talks to me when he’s busy.”

Vivian didn’t know how to feel about that or how to respond to it, so she ignored it.

“If she’s been setting up for a while, then it’s likely not somewhere where we can easily see it,” Shockwave said. “Trickstar historically works more effectively in more enclosed spaces.”

“She could be hiding behind a register or something,” Vivian suggested. “We haven’t seen that far into any of the stores yet. Does she need, like, a box shape or something? If she likes closed-off areas, then I think we can rule out the gates.”

“You should’ve familiarized yourself with the footage,” Shockwave replied, annoyed.

“He watches all the footage,” Lycoris stage-whispered. “Hey, Shock. Lay off her, will ya? You’ve been working here a hundred times longer than she has.”

“Right,” Shockwave said. He didn’t sound any less annoyed. “Amazon, do we make the push now or wait? I’m leaning towards now, but you’re squad lead. It’s your call.”

“Do it now,” Amazon agreed. “Venus is unlikely to be much help—“

“Fucking Guardian,” Vivian commiserated under her breath.

“—and is a potential point of failure in a fight,” Amazon continued, ignoring the interruption. “Safezone will be able to stabilize Barbarian once he gets there, but it’s highly unlikely that he’ll be ready to rejoin in a normal amount of time.”

Shockwave nodded, electricity running up and down his body. “Every second we delay is one in which Trickstar can make it easier for her to take out another one of us. Let’s not let that happen.”

Vivian, again, was not entirely sure about this. It felt too much like a trap. A Guardian conveniently missing, a mass murderer holed up inside one of the remaining rooms in the airport? Killjoy had proven himself to be extraordinarily effective at generally fucking shit up in this city. She felt like this, too, went a little deeper than the surface.

But she wasn’t the one with experience. The sum total of Vivian’s time as a superhero was roughly one and a half months.

She decided to stay on her guard, but that was just status quo.

One of her pistols had fired every last one of its bullets, but she had one more. Vivian wasn’t sure if she was going to use it, but the comforting coldness of the lethal weapon in her hands calmed her just a bit.

“Split up and search,” Amazon ordered. “Stay within fifty feet of each other if possible, but don’t get too close, either.”

“The last thing we need is multiple of us getting fried by the same chunk of superpower,” Lycoris said brightly.

That’s one way to put it.

The teleporting, resurrecting girl decided to take point, unsurprisingly. Amazon wasn’t far behind. Vivian followed along at a slightly-faster-than-walking pace with Shockwave. The Marksman must have decided to account for her general inexperience by hanging back with her.

“I’ve been on the periphery of a fight that included Trickstar before,” the man in question said, as if that explained why he wasn’t sprinting alongside both of the others. His hand crackled with energy. “If I put enough power into one blast, I can neutralize her traps.”

“What do her traps actually look like?” Vivian asked. “Hell, I didn’t know she had traps until just now.”

“She’s a Ruler,” Shockwave said, like that explained everything. “She forms ten by ten by ten cubes and moves them. Her actual power manifests in rainbow-shaped lines within that cube.”

“The sparkles,” Vivian said, recalling what Lycoris had dug out of some poor corpse’s chest cavity earlier.

“The sparkles. Avoid them if possible. If it’s not, try to keep yourself from getting them on your skin. Enough of them put together will…” Shockwave gestured outwards with a lightning-infused hand. “You get the idea.”

The corpses had not, in fact, been very intact. “I got it.”

Amazon and Lycoris were going fast enough thanks to their respective powers that Vivian wondered what the point of her also searching alongside them was, but Shockwave seemed to understand the assignment.

“They’re checking gates and large shops,” he said. “Let’s do bathrooms.”

“What do we do if there’s people in them?”

Shockwave deliberated for a moment. “Get them out. It’s cold already, but it’s only going to get worse if Sunrise doesn’t kill Whiteout.”

Yeah, that made sense. Vivian had nearly forgotten that Sunrise was still here. His power was flashy, but it wasn’t very loud and hadn’t intersected with their path yet. She hoped he was doing alright.

“You do men’s, I’ll take women’s?” Vivian suggested.

“That works.”

Further down, Lycoris and Amazon alternated shouting CLEAR back at them. They had abandoned all pretense of stealth, which made sense given the fact that they were still practically wading through bodies.

This was just one location, too. There had been at least five other outbursts like this. How many dead did that add up to? Vivian was genuinely curious.

Not the time. She patted herself on the cheeks, forcing herself to focus.

ORD had a bunch of bathrooms to look through, even in this small section of the terminal. They wasted no time in entering them.

The acrid scent of blood and drain cleaner rose from within the bathroom, differentiating itself from the general scent of death with the sterile addition. There was only one body, as far as she could tell. Judging from what might have been a severed arm, Vivian guessed the temp who’d sliced Barbarian apart had been in here.

No Trickstar, though. She moved on.

She checked three women’s bathrooms. The ones further up had more bodies in the stalls—they must have been some of the first victims, or maybe they’d taken shelter there. It was impossible to tell. A few of them had been exsanguinated, and the sheer mess of it meant that a ton of the bodies were unrecognizable.

Vivian was just about to enter a fourth when she heard Lycoris yelp in surprise up ahead, followed shortly by a sound like crinkling paper magnified a hundred times. She turned just in time to see Lycoris’ head separate from her body.

Pop. Lycoris disappeared and was back on her feet before the first droplet of blood could hit the ground.

“I think I found her!” she shouted.

Vivian ran as fast as she could without tearing her stitches, which wasn’t very fast. Shockwave left her in the dust, using his lightning to dash faster than she could possibly manage.

She was close enough to see where the Echelon team was converging. Trickstar had set up shop in a Hudson Booksellers, apparently, and Amazon had backed up to group up with Lycoris and Shockwave.

“I can tank Trickstar’s power,” Amazon said, her voice coming through the built-in earbuds in Vivian’s mask.

“We clear, you fry,” Lycoris suggested, clearly talking to Shockwave. “This is a good matchup.”

“Ready,” Shockwave said. “Three, two, one.”

Amazon and Lycoris took off at the same time. Vivian watched their figures disappear into the Hudson store.

Lycoris reappeared next to her a moment later.

“Oh what the shit,” Vivian said. “You had an anchor on me?”

“Slipped it into a pocket when I was giving you backup,” Lycoris replied. “I’ve only got one more for myself or you, so try not to die, okay?”

“Wasn’t planning on it,” Vivian said.

The paper-crackling sound came again, and this time, it was accompanied by a flurry of colorful lines drawn through the air. They reminded Vivian of fireworks, if someone had managed to put fireworks in dripping watercolor.

Ahead of them, Amazon practically flew out of the Hudson, bouncing twice on the ground before rolling to a stop atop a bloody child-sized suitcase. She was bloodied—though whose blood she was coated in was impossible to tell—but looked otherwise uninjured.

A second figure dashed into view. By process of elimination, it had to be Trickstar. Her outfit was as colorful as her power, though it looked horrendously impractical. Though the iridescent puff skirt complemented the rainbow hues that she drew through the air, it had to get caught on things easily.

Amazon got back up as more of the watercolor fireworks seeped forth from the Hudson. Trickstar released her power like she’d had the aurora borealis stored in a can.

There was less than Vivian had thought there would be. Lycoris and Amazon “clearing them” by throwing themselves into the lethal light had done work.

The Aegis continued through the barrage of lights. The watercolors seemed to melt onto her and glitter brighter as she dashed through more of them, clearing a path through the light. Once again, Trickstar’s power sounded out.

This time, though, as the colors detonated with a shower of rainbow sparks, Amazon only tumbled back a little.

“Stand back,” Lycoris warned. “Shockwave’s about to do his thing.”

The thing in question was apparently just pumping a honest-to-god lightning bolt straight into the thick of the power.

Vivian shut her eyes a second too late, and she could still see the entire world light up from behind closed eyelids. When she opened them again, she was seeing spots.

Wait, those weren’t just spots. Trickstar’s power was still active, though there was far less of it now. The lines that had been circling around her were mostly gone, and a massive swathe of them had been obliterated by either Amazon’s body or Shockwave’s lightning.

At the center, though, where Trickstar had been, there was nothing.

Movement elsewhere in Vivian’s vision drew her attention. A section of wall discolored and resolved itself into the form of a human woman, then started running.

“Is that her power?” Vivian asked, heart jumping in surprise.

“It’s new,” Lycoris said, tilting her head. “She’s coming our way.”

Trickstar looked up at the two of them, then threw both hands in front of her. The wall coloration slipped away from her body and morphed into further ribbons of light.

She was still out of Vivian’s range. The watercolor explosions were going to reach her first.

Vivian pointed her functional pistol towards Trickstar, used her telekinesis to adjust her aim, and fired.

A ribbon twisted, covering its owner, and Trickstar continued running. Vivian shot again, then again, but both times, Trickstar’s power protected her body.

“I’d back up,” Lycoris advised.

An arrow of light spiraled towards Vivian. She flinched instinctively, ducking as it soared towards her.

That flinch saved her life. Trickstar’s control over her power must not have been nearly as fine as Vivian’s was, because it sailed straight to the side of her, only barely grazing the muzzle of her pistol.

The glittering sparkles on the gun didn’t seem super bright, which potentially meant that it wasn’t going to do much damage, but Vivian wasn’t going to take chances. She tossed it aside and stumbled backwards. Ideally, she would get into range to kill or cripple Trickstar with a single telekinetic blast, but that wasn’t going to be possible when her power could potentially carve a hole out in her.

Vivian was trying to figure out what was happening and how best to address it when Trickstar’s entire body seized up.

“Fu—AUUUGH!” the villain screamed. She fell flat on her face, twitching, and her power started dissolving in the air like salt in water.

Trickstar’s screams increased in intensity as Shockwave put another bolt of lightning into her back. He paused for a second, and the villain panted, clearly steeling herself to try to speak.

“I,” Trickstar grunted. “I s—“

Shockwave redoubled the intensity of his lightning.

“Guardians aren’t going to like that one,” Lycoris said, raising her voice to be heard over Trickstar.

“We’re not the Guardians,” Shockwave replied gruffly.

“True enough.”

The villain’s voice reached a breaking point, and she devolved into broken, wracking gasps of pain.

Vivian watched uncomfortably. Logically, she knew that she had done basically the same thing to the temp super earlier, but it somehow felt more cruel when she was watching someone else do it. That probably made her a hypocrite, but Trickstar screamed like Vivian’s roommate Sarah had when she’d broken an arm during first semester last year. She sounded entirely too human to be suffering like this.

I did that too, Vivian thought. What’s the difference?

Lycoris put an end to it with a knife to Trickstar’s neck.

“Our girl Mantis here was looking a bit queasy,” Lycoris explained to Shockwave. “You really don’t kill fast.”

Shockwave shrugged. “You know how it works. I do better where it actually matters.”

“I’ll put in a call to HQ updating them,” Lycoris said. “Where’re the Guardians? Should we deal with Whiteout, too?”

“Venus is still gone,” Amazon observed. “Safezone isn’t here yet. Reprioritize. Trickstar may have been hiding here to ambush heroes, but the other two are still engaged with Sunrise. We return to Barbarian.”

“Sounds like a plan!” Lycoris said cheerily. “Sunrise can deal, right?”

“Probably,” Shockwave said.

Their discussion continued, but Vivian didn’t participate.

A quiet beep indicated that there was someone new on her comm line.

“Vivian,” a familiar honeyed voice whispered into her ear. “Can you hear me?”

Her vision went red with anger.

“Where the fuck are you?” Vivian asked. The Washer had been missing for a while already. “And don’t fucking call me that.”

“Who are you talking to?” Lycoris said. She hadn’t received the call?

Wait, then that meant that Venus had called her privately. Her power didn’t extend to phone lines, Vivian was pretty sure, but still. This was weird.

“Oh, I’m still in the airport,” Venus replied. Vivian could picture the smug shit-eating grin on her face right now. “By the by, have you heard of the myth of Aphrodite?”

A phrase that she’d forgotten surfaced in her mind.

If I say ‘Aphrodite,’ drop everything and obey.

All of a sudden, the airport went dead silent. There was nothing but Vivian and the person on the other side of the phone. Her best friend.

“Tell them you’re fine,” her friend said.

“I’m fine,” Vivian repeated.

“Now then,” her contact replied, obviously pleased, “shoot Shockwave in the head.”

Vivian obeyed.

She drew her pistol from where it was stored on her leg.

“Did you see something?” Amazon asked.

She used her power to fix her aim once again, turning the ironsights until it was focused on the back of Shockwave’s skull.

Vivian squeezed the trigger.

___

Author's notes: Sorry it's been so long! I recovered from a concussion just to immediately get sick, but I should be back now. Thank you all for sticking with me.