Brainpunch - CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: The Incident (Patreon)

The Killjoy Incident took place on October 16-17, 2024. The ongoing ramifications of the event are still being examined, but the most notable are as follows:

1. 2024 dissolution of the Indianapolis Guardians

2. Establishment of martial law in Chicago

3. Prematurely triggering Cataclysm 107.

4. ~10,000 lives lost.

#

“Mantis here. Is this Lachlan?”

“Holy shit, HQ is crawling up my ass right now.” Lachlan’s voice came across much more harried than he had been at any point before. “Venus’ vitals just went to shit. Indy is not happy.”

“Why are you calling me about it?” Mantis asked, oddly calm. She should have been panicking, she was sure, but the numbness from before had returned. “Echelon took point on this. I’m an intern.”

“I don’t like corporates,” Lachlan said. “I have direct access to you, too. Also, I just located you, and you’re the nearest one to Venus. What the fuck is up with that?”

She glanced down at the prone, twitching Washer.

“She’s still alive. Venus used her power on me and tried to get me to kill Shockwave. I’m not sure if she was under Washer influence or something, but she took a hit and I broke out of it. I decided I didn’t want her trying to use her power on me again.”

Were the CCTV cameras in here working? If they were, then they would show that the latter part of her statement was true. That Venus had taken a hit was technically true—the only part she hadn’t been clear on was that she was the one who had dealt that hit.

Hopefully any footage of this wouldn’t show her using her power. Or, at least, hopefully it would be from an angle that made it unclear. Vivian had started to grow a bit unsure about hiding the more dangerous part of her power, but she’d just had the importance of doing so shoved in her face. In this world, with the Guardians being what they were, she had no guarantee that her actions would always be hers.

If Venus had known that Mantis could telekinetically assassinate people, Shockwave would be dead.

“Shit, okay, well,” Lachlan started. He paused, and Vivian heard someone shouting in the background, followed by what sounded like a lot of keystrokes in short succession. “Sorry about that. They’re saying that they found and executed a separate traitor during one of the raids on the Gravekeepers.”

Vivian raised an eyebrow. “Any names I would recognize?”

“Cardcounter,” Lachlan said.

“Nope. How are the raids going?”

“Completing, with one notable exception.” A pause. This time, Vivian could hear Lachlan’s response. “Yes, I’m asking. Do you want to call her? No? Okay, then let me take this!”

“You can review the footage if you’d like,” she said. “I’m sure Echelon stored video from my mask.”

Which I’m not wearing, she belatedly realized. Oops. She’d torn it off to get Venus out of her ears, for all the good that had done her.

That left her standing here without something that could confirm her story, without a mask, and in otherwise full costume. Less than ideal, if she said so herself.

“Echelon won’t hand over the footage without a fee,” Lachlan said. “I doubt Indy wants to pay that fee. If there are working CC cams, we can take a look at those, but this is as much a warning as it is anything else. Indy wants you for questioning at minimum.”

“Fuck that,” Vivian snarled. The surge of anger that rose like bile surprised even her. “Put me in a box and have another Washer come to fuck with my head? The last time that happened, it was Venus. Do you know what happened to her?”

“I’ve been made aware,” Lachlan said drily. “There’s no warrant out for you, but they’re not going to like that answer. Just a heads up.”

“Tell them they can kiss my ass,” Vivian said, keeping an eye on the groaning Venus. She didn’t seem capable of making anything approximating speech, but it was possible that Mantis hadn’t savaged her vocal cords enough. “Or, if that’ll lose you your job, that I’m not really interested.”

“V—Mantis, this is a pretty serious case,” Lachlan said. “I’ll pass the sentiment along, but make sure to let me know if you change your mind. I think it’d make a lot of things go easier for you.”

Of course you do, Vivian thought. You’re a Guardian.

And an Esper, at that. He could tell when a Washer power was being used on him—or, indeed, when a Washer was even in his proximity. Of course Lachlan didn’t have as many problems with it. Vivian still had an identity, friends, and a father to protect, and she never knew when a Guardian might just step up to her and tell her to kill one of them. Or herself, for that matter.

She wondered if joining a corporate team would even provide the benefits she needed. Being part of Echelon hadn’t stopped Shockwave from being targeted by Venus’ assassination attempt, and the Washer had used her powers on other members of the squad, too.

“Hold on,” Vivian said, affronted. “You keep talking about me. Are we going to ignore the part where Venus tried to fucking kill my teammate?”

“No,” Lachlan said. “Look, the other Guardians there are en route. Just stay put, okay?”

“What the hell, Lachlan?” Vivian hissed. “You act all like you’re on my side, and then you leave me out to dry? I don’t have a fucking mask on and I’m trying to make sure that the Washer I barely managed to subdue won’t take control of my goddamn mind, and it’s me that needs to wait? Come the fuck on!”

“Look, just stay where you are,” Lachlan said. “I’ll update you.”

The call ended.

A moment later, a hastily-written text popped up on her notifications.

Lachlan: mb they on me rlly bad get mask from store get echeleon theyll help go

Lachlan: oth stiation devleoing

…the hell was that supposed to mean?

Vivian took a few moments to parse the hastily typed text. If she was reading this right and had an inclination to believe Lachlan, he wasn’t able to help her because the Guardians that were presumably in the same building or even room as him were laying down a bunch of pressure for him to get Mantis into custody.

So his suggestion was to instead… get a mask from a store and contact her squad. That part, at least, was reasonable and easy to understand.

The second message was obvious. There was another situation developing somewhere.

Vivian didn’t know where she’d dropped her mask, and she definitely wasn’t going to go back all the way to where they’d been fighting earlier to try to pick it up. Venus was still twitching on the ground, moaning in pain. Mantis wasn’t familiar enough with first aid to tell whether or not she was going to be able to regain usage of her vocal cords in the immediate future.

She briefly considered just shooting Venus and being done with it. Thanks to Lycoris’ anchor, all of her equipment had been restored to the state it had been when they had entered the airport, which meant that both of her pistols were loaded and functional again.

Why was she even thinking that way? There was no way Vivian could manage anything approaching non-lethal with a throat shot, and though she had very good reason to hate Venus, she wasn’t going to kill her.

…why not? A quiet, insistent voice asked. It took her a moment to realize it was her own.

That realization sent a fresh surge of anger twisting through her. The fact that she had to pay attention and actively parse her own thoughts to determine whether it was herself or someone else in there talking was nothing short of unacceptable, and whose fault was that?

The woman laying at Mantis’ feet didn’t deserve life. Vivan could say that without a single doubt in her mind.

Killing her, however, would have consequences, and she wasn’t even prepared to handle the storm that was coming in the wake of her merely disabling the Washer. Vivian couldn’t discount the possibility of rolling a kill order if she went all the way.

She looked at the struggling Guardian with disgust. Venus was a mess. Though her power was still active, making her more attractive than she already was, it couldn’t hide the fact that she was bleeding from her now-empty eye sockets. It painted a ghastly image.

“This look suits you,” Vivian spat.

She still wasn’t confident that Venus was entirely out of commission, but the clock was ticking. The Guardians were sure to be closing on her position, and Echelon was likely coming as well.

There were a handful of convenience stores in the area. Vivian went to the same one she’d looted the noise-cancelling earbuds from earlier. They sold cloth masks here, the kinds for travellers coming to and from plague-ridden areas of the world—Nova Scotia, Greenland, parts of the UK, and other Cataclysm-stricken regions.

They weren’t perfect at hiding her identity, but they could at least hide the lower part of her face. Sunrise was here, and he was definitely going to be able to recognize her if she didn’t cover up.

A separate store sold sunglasses, and Vivian picked a pair without a prescription. Since she’d been wearing a costume without glasses, she’d been forced to use her contacts. Thankfully, they hadn’t fallen out or otherwise irritated her eyes like they so often did, and it meant she didn’t have to waste time finding a pair of sunglasses that matched her prescription.

Her phone rang again.

Call from: Lycoris, Echelon B-Rank

Vivian picked up. “How did you get my number?”

“Lachlan gave it to me,” came the reply. “Venus is down?”

“Are you still affected?”

“No. Amazon was, but she hit me and I reset, so I’m all fine now!”

“And Amazon?”

“She snapped out of it a couple minutes ago. Hasn’t stopped apologizing. Where are you?”

Vivian used her telekinesis to hold the phone to her ear as she stepped back out into the open, both hands clutched around a pistol.

“Venus is down,” she said, answering the question from earlier instead of answering directly. “She tried to kill me. How’re things looking there? Safezone? Sunrise?”

“Flying back. The temp is dead and Whiteout’s passed out, so Sunrise is carrying them both. Convenient for us!”

Vivian breathed out a sigh of relief. That was truer than Lycoris knew.

“Lachlan called me,” she informed the other heroine. “He said to expect more Guardians on the way.”

“I imagine so!” Lycoris said. “Did you know Venus is the only one to go down after the fight’s already been resolved?”

If that was true, it gave some semblance of an explanation as to why the Guardians had called immediately after Venus and presumably hadn’t for the others. Surely there had been other Guardians who had suffered major injuries or deaths during the process. EHC had lost a member, which Vivian hadn’t even properly processed yet. It had been strange that Venus was the only one that they called for.

Or maybe she implanted a suggestion in them, Vivian thought. That was a scary but entirely realistic possibility.

She shook her head. The moment mattered more than fringe possibilities. That way lay intense paranoia, and she’d had enough experience with that for a lifetime.

“Do you know how the other raids went?” Vivian asked.

“Sure! We’ve got a bit of data on them,” Lycoris replied. The faint sound of fingers hitting a phone keyboard came over the crackly connection. “Looks like three Guardians plus a traitor dead, basically everyone hurt, ten villains dead, another ten or fifteen in custody. There’s still fighting over at Killjoy’s home base.”

“Where’s that?”

“Need-to-know info, which is Guardian-speak for ‘take a hike,’” Lycoris said unhappily. “They might call us in to deploy on them.”

“Bureaucratic mess, huh?” Vivian asked.

“One hundred percent. Let’s deal with Venus first, then figure out what to do next. We’re homing in on you. Don’t shoot me, ‘kay? I’m almost out of anchors.”

“You got it.” Vivian hung up.

The remainder of the surviving EHC squad showed up less than five minutes afterwards. Shockwave and Amazon looked understandably disturbed, though the flavor of it was different. Shockwave flinched at small sounds, reacting to his environment more fiercely than normal. He’d had a close brush with death. Vivian didn’t know much about human psychology other than the parts that she had done a little too much research on, but she could guess that that kind of event would make anyone jumpy.

Amazon, on the other hand, trawled along like the sun had been extinguished. Vivian felt kind of bad for putting it that way, but the A-rank definitely didn’t have as much pep in her step as she had. Her arms had practically been coated in blood, and if Vivian remembered the details of the call right, then that blood wasn’t only of their enemies.

“You got Venus,” Amazon said. It wasn’t a question.

Vivian toed at the body of the Washer. Venus coughed, hacking up blood. Even her coughs were labored. She seemed particularly ghoulish now, Vivian noted with a certain degree of satisfaction.

“The Guardians seem to want her back,” Vivian said. “Thoughts?”

Shockwave snapped his head to look at her. His gaze was intense to the point that Vivian thought his signature lightning was about to burst out of his eyes. “Fuck that. She tried to kill me, tried to kill you, tried to kill Lycoris, did kill Barbarian. I say we return the favor.”

“No,” Lycoris and Amazon said near-simultaneously. Lycoris gestured, letting the older woman speak. “We cannot afford to anger both the Indianapolis and Chicago Guardians at the same time. Echelon will choose to preserve their relationship with the government over their relationship with us should we kill her.”

“Won’t they do that anyway?” Vivian asked. Her palm was sweaty, but her grip on her pistol had never been so sure. Her fingers itched to squeeze the trigger, to finally attain true revenge.

“Not if she’s alive,” Lycoris said. “They have Washers and Metas that can overcome her innate resistance and get her to talk, and Echelon has lawyers and liaisons specifically for scenarios like this. We’ll be fine!”

“If you say so.” Electricity danced around Shockwave’s fingers. “This goes a bit past what I’d say is acceptable, though.”

“We’re not killing Guardians today,” Amazon said. “That’s final. She seems to be… slightly inhibited.”

“That’s one way to put it,” Lycoris said. “Great job, Mantis. You really fucked her up.”

I wish I could have gone further. She didn’t suffer enough. “I did what was necessary.”

Lycoris laughed. “That’s my girl. I’ve got zip-ties. Those work?”

Nobody dissented, so they got to tying Venus up at the ankles, wrists, elbows, and knees.

Lycoris picked up the phone at some point—maybe ten minutes in, Vivian wasn’t sure—and she spoke in a rapid-fire Japanese and English pidgin that Vivian couldn’t decrypt. She didn’t seem very happy.

“Sunrise is coming back,” Lycoris said. “All the local Guardians are focusing on Killjoy. It’s… not looking great. Three more are down. They’re calling in other support from local cities.”

“And Venus?” Amazon asked.

“That’s the first stickler. They’re going to patch up her throat and send her back in.”

It took a moment for that to sink in.

“What?” Vivian said, aghast. She’d thought herself numb to emotion in the face of the incredible violence she’d been committing, but this sent a shock through her system. “No.”

“No fucking way,” Shockwave added. “She just tried to murder us, Lycoris. We’re not letting her back in.”

“I also veto this,” Amazon said, her voice taut with frustration in a way that made Vivian think the team leader already knew that it was futile. “How high up is the order?”

“Tsunami,” Lycoris said grimly. “It looks like we have bigger problems on our hands.”

“You said the first. How bad?” Amazon asked.

Vivian recognized the tone of her voice. Amazon was similar to her father, in a way. The Aegis might have been far more experienced than her, but they both tried to be pragmatists.

She’d entered damage control mode. The fire was large enough that extinguishing it was out of the question. They were past the point of trying to stop it from happening and at the point of figuring out what to save.

“Killjoy took Sears Tower,” Lycoris said. “Or Willis, or Actune, or whatever you want to call it. Civilians weren’t able to evacuate.”

“Casualties?”

“Unknown. He’s got hostages, but the Guardians are saying to assume they’re all lost. Killjoy is creating an army of temps. Buildings around are taking heavy damage, too.”

“How the hell is that happening?” Vivian asked. “I thought Killjoy was using existing vials to make his own. There’s no way he has enough to make an army.”

“Army is an exaggeration,” Lycoris said, then paused. “Wait, hold on, how big’s the Soviet group? Or the 401st, for that matter.”

“Get to the point, Lycoris,” Amazon snapped.

Lycoris winced. “Sorry. Instinct. Forty or fifty. There’s a couple of theories. First is connected to the disappearances, second is worse.”

“There’ve been disappearances?” Vivian was absolutely not in her element here. She wasn’t familiar with Chicago, with the heroing scene beyond what she had looked up herself, and most certainly not human disappearances.

“That’s unimportant,” Amazon said. “Assuming Lycoris is right—”

“—Which I am, always—“

”—Then however it works is immaterial. A self-propagating power creator? This is all hands on deck.”

“I thought it already was,” Vivian said.

Amazon shook her head. “That was all hands in the company and the local Guardians. This is something where we need to call in every resource we have. This is Dyad-tier.”

Vivian’s heart skipped in place. “That bad?”

“It’s looking like it,” Lycoris said. “We missed the party. This is big.”

The last time she had seen him, Killjoy had been a somewhat threatening low-level gang boss. What the hell had happened? It had only been a couple of months.

“I should have killed him,” Vivian whispered. “I fought Killjoy before. This is—this is on me, isn’t it?”

“Nah,” Lycoris said, dismissing her pent-up concerns with a casual wave of the hand. “If we went to lethal force straightaway on everyone, guess how well Cataclysms would go.”

“I’m guessing not well.”

“Yep. It’s a shame, really. Odds are good that they’re going to try to stop him from becoming a Cataclysm-level threat of his own, but if he had cooperated, imagine the PR! Army of citizens gaining temporary powers to kill the shit out of some kaiju?”

“Not the time, Ayaka,” Amazon said sharply.

“Yeah. Sorry. On the upside, there’s a pretty decent chance that Venus dies here. Even with a strong Healer, I doubt she’s going to get back fully. Going into a Dyad-tier threat with a limited, close-range Washer power?”

A muffled moan came from the ground, where the very immobilized Venus was struggling to move.

“Still seems like more than she deserves,” Vivian said. She was physically here, but her mind was a thousand miles away, a passive observer in her own body. Mantis was cold and unforgiving and all that she could dredge up. “But if she hates the idea this much, I’m for it.”

“Fuck,” Shockwave growled. “Alright. It’s not like I can say no, is it?”

“Not exactly, no,” Amazon said. “I don’t like this either. Patch me in.”

“On it,” Lycoris said, fiddling with her visor.

Amazon tapped her ear, waited, then spoke hurriedly with whoever was on the other end. Her expression soured as she spoke.

“Worse than expected,” she said. “Half the supers there are trying to keep the tower from falling. Anyone who’s in fighting shape is being called. It’s an open call.”

“Open call as in corporate and Guardians?” Vivian asked.

“No.” Shockwave sighed deeply. “It’s the same deal as with Cataclysms. It’s everyone.”

“Didn’t we just declare war on a villain group?”

“The Gravekeepers are, by and large, in the grave,” Lycoris said. “We mopped up most of their team, but now Killjoy’s doing his own thing with the scraps. I doubt the people whose competition we just wiped out are going to want to fight against us.”

Vivian had read a study or two about something like this, hadn’t she? Something about how the Cataclysm response had been formed and normalized—she didn’t remember the details, but the broad strokes sounded similar.

“I’m going to fight,” Amazon said. “Martial law is in full effect. Every temp has a kill order on them.”

Lycoris frowned. “Those are civilians, right? How are we planning on spinning that?”

“They were. Give me your phone. Mine isn’t intact.”

Lycoris handed it over, and Amazon tapped a few buttons. “Here. Look.”

The phone had half a dozen video feeds on it. Helicopter footage, it seemed, with the exception of two that displayed the smoky insides of a burning building.

“Jesus,” Vivian muttered.

Massive translucent forcefields glimmered in the sunlight, propping up Sears Tower from the outside. Smoke vented out from strategically placed holes in the power.

Even from the outside, the situation was a mess. Pieces of the forcefield regularly broke away, and glowing figures—temporary supers, likely—leapt straight from them. Gunfire, manipulated concrete, and assorted powers knocked some of them out before they hit the ground. Others simply splatted in a gorey mess as they landed.

The last group became problems.

It wasn’t any better on the inside. One of the heroes never stopped moving, taking fights with temp supers at literally every floor they moved up. Another was searching through the rubble of fallen shops and offices, searching for survivors.

When the temps showed up on the interior cams, they barely seemed human. The cameras were shaky, owing largely due to the fact that the heroes piloting them were actively engaging in combat but the glimpses they caught were disturbing.

Back when Vivian has been on her greatest horribly-scared-of-death phase, she’d explored a lot of ways to die out of morbid curiosity. She’d accidentally navigated a LiveLeak video of a man in the late stages of rabies. That had been enough for her to get up and stop using the internet for a solid few days afterwards.

These people reminded her of that video. Feral, frothing at the mouth, twitching like they were zombies in a bad B movie—it gave her the creeps.

Judging from the sharp intake of breath from the others, that feeling seemed to be mutual.

“Killjoy’s given them some rage or fear drug. Doesn’t matter that much. PR will cover it, and we need to put the threats down before they can hurt more civilians.”

“Fair point. We might want to limit footage. This could get messy.”

“I turned my body cam off a while ago,” Shockwave said. “It’s best practice if you want to take every necessary step. Some things we did today wouldn’t fly in court.”

“I need the footage,” Lycoris sighed, exasperated. “But I’ll put it somewhere secure this time and wipe the main file.”

“You’re going, then?” Amazon asked. “There is no obligation to attend an open call.”

She looked pointedly at Mantis as she said that. Vivian was unsure whether to take that with relief or offense.

“Status?” Shockwave asked. “I’m up on charge. I’ll go, if only to make sure the Guardian here doesn’t get out of line again. You hear that, Venus? One wrong move…”

His fingers twitched. A bolt of lightning flickered, connecting his hand to the Washer’s chest for a brief second. She convulsed, letting out another wheezing groan.

“I’m almost full up,” Amazon said.

“Didn’t you just fight Whiteout?” Vivian asked. “Did you not spend resources there? I don’t think my power has any variance in it, if that matters.”

“Sunrise did the bulk of the work for us,” Amazon said. “Credit where credit’s due. Whiteout would have passed out from exhaustion if he spent much longer fighting.”

“For what it’s worth, I have one anchor, then I’m spent,” Lycoris said. “I can do S&R, but battle? Eh. Not now.”

Vivian was, in all honesty, very tempted to do one of two things. One: kill Venus here and now, blame it on a sudden stroke, and skip town, which fed into two: avoid the hell out of the Sears Tower. She hadn’t exactly struggled with taking down the temp supers here, but seeing Barbarian die had been a harsh reminder of the stakes at hand. It was just a matter of luck that she hadn’t been the one who’d been frozen in time and cut into two.

This was no videogame. There would be no second chances if she fucked up once and got herself killed.

But then, she hadn’t just become a hero to make money and leave when things got challenging. She’d seen enough heroes utterly fail at their jobs. Vivian had no interest in being another one of them.

Her power urged her forward, too. It had never been so quiet as it had been the past couple of hours, but once she considered leaving this group, the buzzing came back full force.

“I’ll go,” she said. “Even if it’s just search and rescue, I can do that.”

“You’re not equipped for this,” Shockwave said, dismissing her with a hand. “You’re a D with short-range telekinesis. Zach saw something in you, but he saw something in everyone. Against this?”

He took Lycoris’ phone from Amazon’s grasp and showed her the footage again.

“This happened in the last fifteen minutes,” he said. “There are As and S-ranks on site. You’d only get in the way.”

Fifteen minutes? Where had he pulled that number from?

Oh. Right. Vivian wasn’t patched in to the Echelon network anymore because she’d discarded the mask with the bone conduction audio earlier.

The rest of his sentence finished parsing, and Vivian’s brief confusion morphed into a much more familiar emotion.

“Fuck you,” she said, slapping the phone out of his hand. She caught it with her telekinesis. “You know shit all about me.”

“I know you’re registered as a D, and I know that Ds have the highest attrition rate in open calls because Fs are at least self-aware enough to not go. I like you, Mantis, believe it or not. You’re competent, you’re smart, and you’re persistent. I don’t want you to die.”

“We can always use more bodies,” Amazon said flatly. “If you’d like to come, you can come.”

“This is for your own good, Vivian,” Shockwave said. “Live. I’ve seen too many promising stars like you end their careers before they can even begin.”

“This is for your own good, Adam,” Mantis said, hot hatred filling her head. She’d always had trouble with controlling herself when she got mad. Powers had ameliorated that some, but Vivian was the same girl she’d been at the core. “How about you don’t get in my way, and I won’t end your goddamn career. I didn’t become a hero so pompous asses like you could tell me what I can or can’t do. So unless you want to end up like our friend here, I suggest that you fuck off.”

“Jesus,” Shockwave said. “I’m trying to save your life here. I’m not the enemy.”

“We’re wasting time,” Amazon interjected. “Shockwave, you can’t save them all.”

She doesn’t believe in me either. Somehow, that stung worse. At least Shockwave had been vocal about his dislike for her from the start.

“We’re not wasting time while we’re waiting for Sunrise to ferry the Healer over,” Vivian pointed out. “What you’re wasting is my goddamn patience. Do you know how fucking close Venus was to ending all of you?”

“I’m aware,” Shockwave said drily. “You tried to shoot me.”

“And the three of you nearly killed each other,” Vivian shot back. “Lycoris ran out of anchors because Amazon killed her. God knows what you were doing. She implanted commands in you, and they stopped, and guess. Fucking. Why.”

“I get it, you’re angry,” Shockwave said.

Mantis took a deep breath, mentally drowning out whatever he said next before she could be tempted into leaving him a vegetable.

“You don’t fight like a D,” Amazon acknowledged, bringing Vivian back to reality. “You’re hiding something.”

“I respect that,” Lycoris said. “Everyone’s hiding something. If it’s your power level? Even better.”

You don’t respect me, though, Vivian thought. She tamped down on that thought before it could fester further. Lycoris, at least, was friendly.

Respect was earned, not given, but had she not done enough? They’d seen her power at work. She refused to believe that they hadn’t seen her torture the temp. Vivian was going to have his face in her nightmares for a long, long time.

Yet they still didn’t think she was capable.

Maybe she wasn’t. Maybe the best course of action here really was turning away.

A few months ago, maybe Vivian could have. Before she’d gotten her powers, when she was nothing more than a girl trying to recover from the trauma of too much life happening in too short a period of time.

But Killjoy was her fault. She had had the opportunity to kill him, and she hadn’t. This was her responsibility.

There were heroes and there were heroes. Most heroes—damn near everyone, as far as she was concerned—were the former. It was a job that brought fame and glory and let them use their powers to their full extent.

Then there were the latter. They were rare and far between and they weren’t always perfect at what they did, but they were heroes.

Heroes saved people.

“If it comes down to it, just leave me,” Vivian said. “I won’t take offense. If I get in your way, clear me out of it. Kill me if you have to. I cannot describe the depth to which I don’t care. I’m going.”

“I can anchor you,” Lycoris said.

Vivian shook her head. “Then you’re at risk. Don’t make me prove Shockwave right to protect me.”

Truth be told, she probably needed the protection. Though she’d seen the video, Vivian knew the full weight of the situation wasn’t going to sink in until she was actually there. Her full power definitely wasn’t D-rank, but she didn’t have any innate defenses.

She flatly refused to leave this mess alone, though.

“Time’s up,” Amazon said, tapping her ear. “Heroes inbound.”

Heroes inbound apparently meant “hey, watch out, a window is about to blow in,” which it promptly did.

A familiar voice boomed out from the fresh hole in the O’Hare walls.

“Five minutes, Replacement, and then I’m taking her. We could really use someone to defuse this bomb right about now.”

Sunrise.

He glowed with the same stellar light that he had before. In the wake of the bloodshed and the utter destruction of so much of the airport, one of the few men Mantis considered to be a hero drifted to the ground.

With him was, presumably, the healer, who had a sort of mad scientist/Red Cross thing going on. He walked with a horrendous slouch, using a cane to support his weight even though he looked to be in his late 20s at most.

“I’m told one of you attacked a Guardian,” he said, his voice coming out raspy like he’d just inhaled a cloud of cigarette smoke. “Don’t attack me… he won’t attack you. Okay?”

“Understood,” Amazon said diplomatically. “The same goes the other way around.”

“She attacked us,” Shockwave said, considerably less diplomatically.

“We can discuss who attacked who later,” Sunrise said, the authority in his voice quieting the other Echelon heroes down. “For now, the Sears Tower is under attack. Killjoy—“

“We’re aware,” Lycoris said, making a face. “Amazon and Shockwave are going to fight. Mantis and I are going for search and rescue. We’re answering the call. Can you take the two of them?”

“I can carry two, but one has to be the Washer,” Sunrise said. “Which ones of you can move?”

“All of us but her,” Shockwave said, sticking a thumb towards Mantis. She bit down a snarky retort and the punch to the face that would’ve followed.

“Then I’ll take Venus and… holy shit.” Sunrise trailed off.

“What new fire is burning this time?” Mantis asked, annoyed. She’d had it up to here with this day already. If there was something else, she was going to kill someone. Again.

“…Vivian? What are you doing here?”

Oh, fuck me.