Brainpunch - CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: The Chaos (Patreon)

Uninformed citizens often assume that Cataclysms are caused by the confluence of superhuman conflicts, triggering a rift to the extradimensional reality where the Pacific alien’s primary body appears to have been stored.

While there is a fragment of truth in this belief, it is dangerously untrue. After over a hundred incidents, a pattern has been established. Large-scale superhuman conflicts that take place within a certain time window (~6 months) after the previous Cataclysm are likely one cause that draws a Cataclysm event, but 87 of recorded events have occurred at least two weeks after the incident—see Cataclysm 107, Lafayette IN.

The most widely accepted theory in superhuman research is that confluence conflicts create two elements that we believe are target conditions for these disasters to form.

First is a large population of traumatized civilians who have experienced extended power exposure—the perfect target for vials. Second is a large number of superhumans breaking boundaries.

If you’ve never seen a group of heroes and villains pushed past their absolute limits, count yourself lucky.

- Material disseminated by the Guardian Agency think tank at the Contingency Superhuman Research Conference, 2024

#

Vivian couldn’t see more than a few feet in front of her. Every time they teleported in was a confusing mess, the choking smoke obscuring literally everything within.

Their impromptu three-man team gelled together surprisingly well. Lycoris’ power was evidently significantly weaker when she only had a single anchor left, so her teleports were shorter range and took longer between uses. She was still devastatingly effective at taking down threats at medium distances, though.

Mantis handled anyone that slipped through the net of defense Lycoris had set up, though it was hard to tell what she was hitting.

There were so many people. That was what struck her the most about the operation. Intellectually, she’d understood that the Sears Tower held a vast number of civilians in it, and she’d heard the ever-increasing numbers of temp supers that Killjoy had proven himself capable of putting it out, but it wasn’t until she jumped in and out again and again that it clicked for her emotionally.

People were dying. While Vivian stood guard, Chroma ran around, trying to find anyone hidden in cubicles, sheltering corner offices, or buried under rubble. One in three of the bodies he dragged back were already so beyond saving that even Vivian knew it wasn’t worth trying.

He sent them back anyway. Though he hadn’t briefed them on it, she gathered that Chroma’s power allowed him to treat any large body of sufficiently new paint as a portal, which was what his paint balloon bombs and occasional gallons of fresh acrylic were for.

They were on their fourth portal now. Chroma dipped in and out, taking anyone who was touching the paint at the time with them. Mantis and Lycoris didn’t return with every run, but they did continually return to the base camp every time the smoke started causing problems, which was often.

A half-remembered article about the California wildfires, one about how it had been greatly exacerbated in 2019 thanks to the knock-on effects of San Francisco’s open season, drifted to the forefront of Vivian’s mind. She remembered it saying that most deaths from fire weren’t because of people burning alive, but because of smoke inhalation causing them to pass out in a burning, collapsing building.

After only a few minutes inside the tower, she could see the truth in that. Everyone that Chroma rescued coughed and wheezed throughout the entire evacuation, hacking up black phlegm and struggling to breathe. Even spending brief, intense moments using her power inside made Vivian’s throat sting so bad she needed the respites Chroma could offer. She couldn’t imagine what it would be like if she’d been stuck in the tower for… almost an hour, now, judging by the time.

As they progressed onwards, the smoke only got worse. Vivian wished she had the helmet Lachlan had bought for her, or at least a strong flashlight—it was getting to the point where she had to shadow Chroma to make sure she was able to keep track of him and any threats that arose to both of them.

The upside of that was that the temp supers weren’t able to find them, either. The frequency with which Mantis had to bring out her punch, so to speak, steadily decreased.

While Chroma cleared the eighty-third floor, Vivian following behind him with a finger on his back to make sure she didn’t lose track of him, she found evidence that the temp supers were dying when she nearly stepped on one’s decaying skull.

It was a ghastly sight. Purple-black alien blood leaked from flesh that looked like popsicles left out too long in the sun. The sheer goriness of it was so over the top that Vivian’s stomach barely even turned at it. To some dumb part of her brain, this was a set. Any moment now, the credits would roll, the props would be cleaned, and the producers would congratulate everyone on a job well done.

Never mind the fact that she’d never acted before beyond an embarrassing stint in school theater during middle school. Vivian thanked that irrational, idiotic part of herself. It kept her from panicking, which was more important than processing all of this right now.

Her heart raced. While she wasn’t afraid of the dark, she was sure any reasonable person would be concerned if they couldn’t see anything next to them but could occasionally make out the bright light of a power making contact or hear the esoteric noises of fleshy bodies falling to alien superpowers. Even if they had powers of their own. Especially if they had Vivian’s.

She couldn’t differentiate hero from villain from target from their powers alone, so she stuck to using the dubiously reliable tactic of assessing whether or not they were wearing a costume. Shouting her affiliation kept her from punching the two other allies they’d run into—one hero, one villain—when they replied with their own.

Vivian hoped she hadn’t inadvertently killed a friendly.

They proceeded in this tense, blinded state for what felt like hours. Person by person, rescue trip by rescue trip the number of people in the triage tent grew. Vivian’s power proved to be helpful for Chroma’s power, distributing the paint better as he dumped another bucket to make a fifth portal, also on the eighty-third floor.

At some point after her unfeelingly piercing a temp’s brain until power-infused blood leaked from his nose and mouth for the sixth or seventh time, the people waiting at the base camp changed.

The paramedics and Healers stood at attention to receive the bodies they’d brought back this time, but there was also a plainclothes government official, recognizable only by the Guardian armband declaring her as having some status Vivian couldn’t be bothered to remember.

“Chroma,” the official said. “Your comms are down.”

“They are?” the hero asked. “Do you have a resupply?”

“Unimportant,” she said.

“Oh, hell,” Lycoris interjected, clearly not trying to force her way into the ongoing conversation but accidentally doing so anyway. She had one hand to her ear. “Sunrise?”

“Sunrise,” the official confirmed. “Floor eighty-six. He’s down.”

“F—okay,” Chroma said, pressing a hand to his mouth. “Any other teams?”

“Two more. One flier, one infil. The building’s not going to hold for much longer. Go.”

Sunrise. Vivian didn’t know what had happened, but judging from the strange lady’s expression, it wasn’t good.

If he was—no. She wouldn’t let herself think about that.

Except she already had, hadn’t she? Even acknowledging the possibility and wanting to ignore it meant she had to think about it, and that made her remember, and it made her imagine the future, one where another person that mattered to her was dead again and it was all her fault again—no, no, no, no, no.

“Mantis,” Lycoris said, shaking Vivian. “Do you need to stay?”

She looked around, unspeakably grateful to her friend for bringing her back to earth—but there were no other supers here.

“No,” she said. “I’m coming.”

If she didn’t, and Sunrise didn’t make it back, she would never, ever forgive herself.

“Making the hop in three,” Chroma announced, heaving in a deep breath.

Vivian tried to do the same to calm the pounding pain in her chest, but she’d inhaled too much ash. She coughed, laid a hand on Chroma’s shoulder, and melted into the paint once again.

No paint that met the requirements for his power had been laid on the eighty-sixth floor—at least, Vivian assumed it hadn’t. She recognized the cleaning supplies in the janitorial closet they’d appropriated. With her power, she took some of what looked like hand soap, applying it to her glasses and rubbing the collected soot off.

It only made her vision blurrier.

“Three floors up,” Chroma said. “Do you have the tracker?”

“I’m getting it,” Lycoris said. She winced at the sound of an explosion going off somewhere a floor above them. “Service is godawful in here, though. It’s going to be a bit.”

Chroma drummed his fingers on the side of his bloodstained costume. “Damn—dang it. Follow me, then.”

Making it from one floor to the next was a treacherous endeavor. When Killjoy’s forces had started breaking down the tower, the elevators had been one of the first things to go. They’d taken the stairs up on both of the previous floors, but they were far from the stairwells now that they’d fought their way through half the building. With the addition of the smoke, getting up three floors was going to be an ordeal.

“Hold on,” Lycoris said. “Chroma, give me a can. I can break into the elevator shaft.”

“Oh, you can ‘port up, right?” he said, handing her a paint-filled plastic water bottle. “Sure. Mantis, hold this point with me.”

“Got it,” Vivian said, trying to keep her voice from wavering too much.

“Don’t worry about me,” Lycoris assured her. “I’m leaving an anchor with you.”

“It’s not you I’m worried about,” Chroma said dryly. “Go.”

Lycoris went.

Vivian kept an eye on Chroma as Lycoris ran off, trying to keep herself from coughing and missing something crucial.

“You’re an indie?” Chroma asked.

“Huh?” The question took Vivian off guard. They were surrounded by bodies, another deranged temp could come out at any time, Sunrise could be dying, and that was what came to mind?

“No offense, but you look like you came straight from the street,” Chroma continued. “You should work on your mask. Just a medical one isn’t going to work. Trust me.”

She could feel the a nervous energy to him, a sort of energy-drink buzz that hadn’t worn off. The way he was speaking gave her the impression that he always wanted to fill the silence, even if what he had to say wasn’t particularly interesting or, as it was now, aggravated the other people he was around.

Then again, maybe that was unfair. She’d known him for all of about half an hour, and most of that time had been spent running through smoke.

“I had an actual mask,” Vivian said, trying to keep the irritation from slipping through into her voice. It wasn’t fair to bother him about it, was it? He didn’t know. “The comms I had access to got compromised, so I ditched it.”

“Right, because ditching it instead of turning the comms off is obviously the logical and reasonable choice,” Chroma said.

“Cut me some slack.”

“You’re that new hero, aren’t you? Mantis Shrimp?”

“That’s me.”

“That makes sense. I saw a video or two of you, and I was going to say—“

Bright lights, three o’clock.

Vivian turned, saw the signature sludgy output that indicated a temp, and attacked.

Ten pounds of force went a long way when it was separated into small, sharp points. Mantis attacked with three quick blows from her telekinesis. One to the spinal cord, which wasn’t necessarily effective at causing full paralysis but lowered the temp’s ability to move enough that any power that relied on them getting closer wouldn’t work. One to the throat, which she’d learned from Venus’ example was a good idea at stopping any sound-based powers.

And, finally, once she’d stopped the immediate threats, a full-power punch to the brain. That had sometimes served its purpose well enough when it was the first thing she did, but the stroke that came with experiencing piercing or blunt-force trauma to certain parts of the brain didn’t always immediately kill the target. With the combination of all three telekinetic strikes and a gunshot to the chest, the temp was dead or dying by the time he hit the ground.

She was getting good at this.

“Thanks,” Chroma said. “Your power really isn’t great for combat, is it?”

Vivian’s instinct was to correct him with righteous irritation, but she shoved that down. The fact that he thought the gun was all she had to wield meant her terrible gambit to keep the plausibility limit break hidden was working. It wasn’t great cover, but the situation was hectic enough that nobody even noticed what she was doing.

The lifeless body of the dead temp twitched. Vivian flinched, firing again.

“Ow,” Lycoris said, her abrupt appearance having jostled the body. “I forgot how loud your gun is.”

“It’s not my gun, per se,” Vivian said. “Sorry. You startled me.”

“I dropped the paint,” Lycoris said. “It’s a goddamn mess up there, though. I couldn’t find Sunrise.”

The moment Lycoris acknowledged that the mission was back on, Chroma’s demeanor shifted immediately. He stopped running his mouth, instead tossing another paint balloon at his feet.

Lycoris didn’t even have time to complain about Chroma splashing her costume with acrylic before the three of them disappeared into his paint realm again.

The smoke was a little clearer on the eighty-sixth floor, giving them enough visibility to see more than an arm’s length beyond.

The tradeoff for that, apparently, was the massive amount of powers being used on this floor.

“I have his location,” Chroma said. “Follow. Protect me.”

Vivian couldn’t even tell what all the powers at play were. Some of them were visual, and they avoided obvious traps like the distorted zone of light where everything looked three shades off from what it was supposed to be like, the battle between two Marksmen firing laser weapons at each other, and the spinning orbs of pale blue light, but many weren’t.

Thankfully, not all of the powers that had been applied to the floor were lethal, but the invisible ones still hurt to run through. Vivian slipped and fell on a section of carpet that had apparently completely lost all friction. Lycoris fell, too, but she caught herself with a teleport, then grabbed Vivian by the shoulder. Chroma avoided it.

That was one of the less harmful area of effect powers, but Chroma had a pretty good eye and kept them from hitting the worst of them.

She wished Safezone had been with them, but he was nowhere to be seen. He’d been ported off by Sunrise after fighting Whiteout, and since then he’d practically disappeared off the face of the planet.

That was uncharitable, but focusing on the frustration kept her from focusing on the gnawing worry within.

Half a minute into their harried dash, the building shook with the force of a California earthquake, knocking all three of them to the ground. A second later, a thunderous crack rang throughout the floor.

“Shit,” Lycoris said after they picked themselves up. “Don’t think the building is going to hold much longer.”

Shit indeed. How many people were still trapped within the tower?

Vivian dismissed it from her mind with scary ease. There was nothing more she could do for them.

“Oh, shit,” Chroma said abruptly. His mask flashed. “You serious?”

“What happened?” Mantis urged.

“They’re giving up,” Chroma said. “Twenty of us are dead. Everyone Indy sent is gone. As soon as we get the Guardian, we’re getting out.”

“There’s still people in here,” Vivian said. The words tasted like ash in her mouth. She didn’t want to die saving someone else. What kind of hero does that make me?

“There won’t be when Contingency hits it,” Chroma hisses.

Vivian’s eyes widened. To her right, she heard a sharp intake of breath from Lycoris.

“Yeah,” Chroma said. “Let’s get moving.”

Mantis killed another temp on their way through. Lycoris got two with knives. Chroma did nothing but lead them hurriedly.

Then, suddenly, there was Sunrise. He looked worse than Vivian had ever seen him, worse even than the time an errant civilian with a cell phone had caught him coming back from a particularly bloody turf war that had left several dozen dead.

Sunrise leaned against a wall, one hand to his torso and the other out in front of him, sweeping the room in front of him with a glowing orb of his power. The cubicles that had been in front of him were in shambles on the ground, metal twisted and deformed and desks torn to wooden shreds. Several dark, greasy stains indicated places where Vivian assumed there had once been living human beings.

Despite everything, her heart jumped with relief at seeing him. He was still alive, and still moving, which he proved doubly true by turning his hand towards them.

“Sunrise,” Chroma said. “Stay put.”

“Not… really a problem,” he said. From the way the tips of his toes barely touched the ground, Vivian could tell that he was using his flight. “Wound’s saw—sawter—cauterized.”

Sunrise coughed, hissing with pain. He was still bleeding, Vivian saw.

“Last batch,” Chroma said, tossing one more balloon of paint up in the air.

“Still more people,” Sunrise said. “So many more.”

“We’ll get to them,” Lycoris promised. “Just come in with us. Hold onto the Mover.”

He hovered over, dripping a concerning amount of blood behind him.

The building rumbled again, but they were already gone.

#

Vivian’s recollection of what came next was shaky.

It was odd. She remembered some of the worst days of her life with perfect clarity, and this one certainly counted, but this one was different. Fragments came and went where she could remember every little detail, but the in between was only numb nothingness.

She drifted throughout the tents, accompanying Sunrise until a Healer told her that she had to leave to protect his identity.

They didn’t go back in. Less than five minutes after they left, the super using the forcefields—Vivian would later learn that his name was Fortress—adjusted them. The drain on his power grew to be too much, and there weren’t other supers that could hold the building up to the same extent that he could.

At some point, she found herself with Lycoris and the rest of the surviving Echelon supers. Amazon had made it out of the building by literally just jumping out of a window when the forcefield went down. Shockwave had last been seen in the ER, missing an arm.

While they were walking to the rendezvous point to wait for a company van, Lycoris started to make a poorly timed, off-handed comment about uploading the footage to her channel, but she silenced herself and apologized before she finished. Even her cavalier attitude recognized that this had been a disaster.

At 3:14 PM Central Standard Time, every phone around them had gone off with the shrill emergency alert service siren, blaring out a warning.

An S-rank superhuman threat has been identified. The Dyad has been deployed. Remain inside. DO NOT APPROACH the Sears/Willis/Actune Tower.

Vivian looked high above, wondering if she could spot Contingency. It was a foolish endeavor. The sky was full of smoke, and he preferred to be in low Earth orbit when he struck.

Thirty seconds later, a bright beam of light that stretched further than the sky split the horizon in half. The last of Fortress’ power absorbed the impact, preventing it from spreading to neighboring areas.

It buried the Sears Tower, taking everyone who was left inside with it.

Vivian remembered hearing the thunderous crash of the collapse. She remembered briefly losing vision from staring straight at the pillar of light that turned fifteen hundred feet of steel, glass, and engineering into rubble.

After that, it was a haze until she reached the hospitals. They were a hectic mess, overloaded with patients both super and not.

She remembered noticing that the Guardians were prioritized over other heroes, who were in turn given favorable treatment over villains, with the civilians ranking last in triage.

Shockwave was one of the first heroes to leave. His injury had been downgraded from immediately life-threatening to only permanently debilitating, and they’d needed the bed space for others.

They hadn’t said anything to each other. They’d just sat there, none of them daring to break the silence.

Vivian remembered desperately searching for Sunrise. Finding that he was going to live, then being forced out of the hospital again.

She remembered the hours after, Amazon and Lycoris frantically running around HQ trying to find out who was alive and who was dead.

There was a digital whiteboard in the Echelon common room, which slowly got updated as new information from the hospitals came in or as other heroes returned. It wasn’t exclusive to the corporation.

Vivian had skimmed over most of the names, not knowing who they were, but there were a few that had stuck with her.

Amazon - alive

Lycoris - alive

Shockwave - alive

Barbarian - dead

Mantis Shrimp (indie, intern) - alive

Jackal (Indianapolis Guardians) - dead

Whiteout (Killjoy affiliate) - in custody, alive

Tsunami - in critical condition

Replacement (Indianapolis Guardians) - dead

Venus (Indianapolis Guardians) - missing, presumed dead

Sunrise (San Francisco Guardians) - hospitalized, alive

Safezone (Chicago Guardians) - missing, presumed dead

She didn’t know how to feel. On some perverse level, she wished Venus had been alive to suffer her own attentions. On another, equally evil one, she was glad the Washer was dead.

The list of names grew and grew and grew.

Nightshade (Indianapolis Guardians) - dead

Solar (Indianapolis Guardians) - dead

Cardcounter (Indianapolis Guardians) - switched sides, dead

All six of the Indianapolis Guardians that had been sent here were dead. Vivian… again, didn’t know how to feel. She’d had no personal connection to any of them besides Venus, and there came a certain point where she simply stopped feeling.

Virtue - missing, presumed dead

Sentinel - missing, presumed dead

Revenant - missing, presumed dead

Cruiser - missing, presumed dead

Hypernova (Zenith affiliate, villain) - missing, presumed dead

Frost Nimbus (Zenith affiliate, villain) - missing, presumed dead

Zephyr (Zenith affiliate, villain) - missing, presumed dead

The list of those who were missing, uncontactable, and otherwise inaccessible was long. Vivian caught a glimpse of it, but it stretched on for far longer. Chroma had said they’d lost twenty heroes earlier, but the number had to be far past that now.

Killjoy - missing, presumed dead

She remembered the blinking cursor over that part of the board, taunting her.

All of this. Everything, all the people brought together, all the civilians, all the heroes, Sunrise-—it could have been avoided if only she hadn’t been such a fucking coward.

She remembered excusing herself to the restroom; she remembered bleeding; she remembered Lycoris; she didn’t remember much after that until the next day.

#

“You made it, Viv,” Sunrise said from the hospital bed.

She’d come to the hospital in plainclothes. Of all the people who’d crowded to pay their respects to the fallen heroes, she was one of a very limited few that had been permitted to visit.

“Twelve thousand,” she said.

“Viv?” Even hooked up to an IV, his visor barely covering enough of himself to obscure his identity, he was worried for her.

She didn’t deserve his concern.

“Twelve thousand dead and counting. Have you seen the news?”

“Unfortunately so,” Sunrise said.

“How do you do it?” she asked. “How? You know I fought Killjoy once before? I had a gun. I could have killed him. I didn’t. Because I’m a fucking failure, twelve thousand people are dead.”

“You’re not a failure, Vivian,” Sunrise said. “You’re a new hero. Nobody could have expected you—”

“I don’t give a shit how new I am,” Vivian said, her voice breaking halfway through her sentence. She could feel that she was on the verge of crying, but tears didn’t come so easy these days. “This is on me. I’ve killed, oh my god, I don’t even know how many people now. And I couldn’t get the one that mattered.”

“No. No, Vivian. If you want to blame anyone, it should be me. I wasted time entering the building when I should have gone earlier.”

“That’s not fair,” Vivian said. “It was already—“

“What about the people before you who didn’t catch Killjoy?” Sunrise asked. “The heroes that didn’t subdue him?”

“I had a shot,” she said. “Those other people—“

“Did as well,” Sunrise said, interrupting her again. He placed his good hand on her shoulder, visibly straining himself to do so. “They’re going to live with that knowledge, too.”

“How?” Vivian asked. She wanted so badly to cry, to sob until all of her emotions were gone, but she had run out of tears to shed a long time ago. “How do you do it?”

“Yesterday has passed,” Sunrise said. “We can’t change that. Asking ‘what if’ is totally natural, but eventually, you learn that the only thing you can change is tomorrow, and the only time you can do that is now.”

“But I—“

“What I saw out there,” Sunrise said, “is a girl I failed. I’m sorry I couldn’t be the hero you needed. I dearly wish you could have found a better mentor. I was selfish. I thought I could help you.”

“You did,” Vivian whispered.

“Except I didn’t,” he said. “You deserve so much better than this, Vivian, but you know what?”

Vivian lifted her head, wiping away the moisture at the edge of her eyes. “What?”

“I’m proud of you,” Sunrise said. “You saved lives. You saved your team. You saved civilians. You saved me.”

“I couldn’t keep the rest of them alive. I couldn’t—my teammate. Zach, um, Barbarian. I couldn’t help him.”

“You can’t save the world,” Sunrise said. “Neither can I. But there are a hundred people who would be dead if not for you. Half a dozen heroes. Every person that we protect from here on out? If you’re going to take responsibility for the bad, take it for the good, too. Our wins are your wins, because we wouldn’t be here without you. Like it or not, Vivian, you’re a hero.”

Somehow, despite everything that had happened, it was the warmth in that last line that finally broke her. First one tear, then another blurring her vision, then another and another and another and—

I’m pathetic, she thought, collapsing onto her knees beside the bed.

“Thank you for saving my life,” Sunrise continued, gently rubbing the top of her head like she was a kid.

“Wasn’t just me,” Vivian said.

Sunrise chuckled. “It wasn’t just the rest of them, either.”

“I’m going back to school tomorrow,” she confided, face buried in the crook of her arm. “Echelon doesn’t want interns here when so many of them, well.”

“Tomorrow is tomorrow,” he said. “For now, would you like to stay and talk a little longer?”

The numbness was still there, but it was a warmer, kinder one than before. The pit in her stomach seemed a little less painful right now, the pounding in her chest ever so slightly less noticeable.

“Yes,” she said. “I’d like that.”

__

Author's note: Sorry these are taking so long to come out. Brainpunch takes a lot more thinking/planning from me than my other stories, and it's a challenge for me to write both in terms of story and on a personal level. Thank you for reading.