Nine-to-Five 032 (Patreon)

Workforce Development VII

~~~

Multiple energy blasts sailed through the air, but Disk nimbly avoided them, his flight path drawing an S on the air. The black knight leaped at him, surging over the snow-covered streets, his fists drawn and ready.

Disk flew up.

“Hey! Get back here!”

Numerous blasts tried to strike Disks’ back, but a steady creation of energy disks behind him kept the hero safe. He studiously ignored the knight’s shouting and returned to his original goal, investigating the 911 calls.

“Coward!”

Somehow, the knight’s blasts always struck exactly where his back would be. It made it easy to know where to create a shield. Still, considering the heavy snow and the fact that Disk was a moving target, it was damn impressive.

“Chicken!”

The knight had already fired over two dozen times, yet there had not been a single stray shot among them. Not once had the blasts struck a building or an unaware passerby (not that there were many of those out in this cold).

“Old!!”

Disk wondered how much of the kid’s aim was the result of personal skill and how much was due to some sort of aiming program in that suit. He knew Slate used one. It had come up during a New Year’s Party.

“I bet your favorite TV show sucks!”

The black knight showed clear signs of youth and immaturity, but how much of it was just for show? The boy did not feel dangerous, not in the way several of the villains he had fought throughout his career felt. One tended to get a sense for that sort of thing.

And yet, there was something undeniably off about him, though perhaps that was a bit rich coming from him.

“We put on fancy suits and go fight crime. We’re all a little bit off if you think about it.”

White Stripes told him that a long time ago. It had been before the Committee heavily streamlined the process for becoming a hero, but this was not a hero he was dealing with. This kid had either built or somehow gotten his hands on a suit clearly made with Exceed powers and was now trying to fight an officially recognized hero. That was not something normal people did.

“Aha!”

The voice came from above. Disk looked up just in time to see multiple green blasts coming down. A large energy disk stopped them, but the one who fired them kept coming down and crashed on Disk’s shield. The knight’s glowing green lenses met Disk’s black visor through the energy disk separating them.

“Almost got you that time,” the knight said, instantly leaping away before Disk could dismiss his energy shield. He landed on top of a nearby building and started firing at him again.

Had the kid used the energy disks he made as springboards to get close to him?

Even if he had the strength to jump high enough to reach them, that wasn’t something most people could do without serious training. To say nothing of the guts required to try something like that. People liked to think Exceeds just needed to slap on a fancy suit to be heroes, but there was a reason why the Committee mandated well-researched training regimens.

So, where did this kid get the experience?

As much as Disk was starting to get interested, his job wasn’t fighting other Exceeds in the middle of the streets. Not today. Disk swiveled left and flew away from the knight once more. The kid’s indignant squawk reached him through the snowstorm, but it didn’t matter.

Good or not, the kid couldn’t match him in mobility.

Disk had read enough online discussions (well, his wife had, and she told him about it over dinner) to know plenty of people didn’t think much of his power. He just created energy disks. He wasn’t a shiny golden god like Alphie. He didn’t have the versatility and power of Bradamante. He wasn’t spooky like Sentinel.

He just created energy disks.

Disks he could control with his mind. Disks he could use to fly by standing on top of them. Disks he could use to shield himself. Disk he could use to attack, not that he needed to do the latter right now. He just needed to stay out of the kid’s reach, something his powers made ridiculously easy.

“Got you!”

Again the voice came from above. Again the black knight dropped down on him. Disk’s estimation of his abilities rose even as his well-trained reflexes let him summon a shield between them.

The knight vaulted over it.

He twisted in the air like an Olympic gymnast, grabbed the disk’s edge with his hands, then spun his whole body right below it. For the second time, they were face to face.

There was no energy disk in the way this time.

The knight’s grip closed around his wrist, and Disk could almost hear the grin spreading across his face as he went for a punch. Disk immediately created another shield, one just big enough to block the knight’s fist.

The knight yanked him hard to the side.

Disk yelped in surprise. The yelp turned into a grunt as the knight’s armored helmet smashed into his face with enough force to put a few cracks in his visor. It was an impressive feat considering it was made with Exceeds in mind. The impact left him dazed, but not so much that he forgot to materialize multiple small disks around them to make it harder for the knight to move.

Unfortunately, there was nothing Disk could do about the knight’s grip on him.

“Not so easy when you can’t get away, huh?”

A blast of green shattered some of the smaller disks around them, and then the knight did something that caught Disk by surprise.

He jumped and dragged Disk down with him into the streets.

~~~

If she kept moving, the invisible people wouldn’t be able to get her.

Not for the first time that day, Amanda wondered where exactly she had gone wrong in her life for a sentence like that to make sense. She wasn’t a bad person. Not really. She’d never broken the law, never cheated on a test (except that one time), and never bullied others. She might have laughed a couple of times when she saw it happen, but so did everyone else. That didn’t make her bad.

She wasn’t even doing anything bad now, working for Regum notwithstanding. She was fighting a bad guy! That was unambiguously good!

Amanda grunted as one of the copies leaped at her. She grabbed it by the arm and swung it around like a mace to keep the others back. She was distantly aware that she was screaming and yelling, but it didn’t feel like her.

“Get back here!” she roared.

Roared!

Who roared?

The way the helmet worked only made things worse. Without it, she’d probably just come across as whiny, but with it, it came as cold and furious at once.

It was like she was watching a stranger. An angry stranger.

“Can you stop him?!” She shouted into her communicator as she ran across the avalanche of bodies. The snow storm had grown so fierce she doubted she’d see Robards without the many sensors installed in her suit.

“Are you kidding?” Gerald said. “You and Robards already left most of the Squires behind. They can’t keep up in this weather. Even if they could, visibility is almost zero right now.”

Which meant they couldn’t shoot out of fear of collateral damage.

In other words, she was on her own.

“Can you at least tell me anything useful?”

“He’s heading to the docks.”

“The docks?!” She shouted as she kept firing recklessly. She would have surely hit one of the surrounding buildings without her aiming systems. “Is he going to meet with Frost?”

That would be bad. Horrible, even. Not because she’d have two fight two Exceeds at once, but because CHEM was supposed to be engaging Frost right now. She’d be running straight into actual superheroes who were sure to have a bunch of questions that she wasn’t sure how she was supposed to answer.

“That’s much further south. Even if Robards were trying to get there, it’d take him too long to reach Frost. The problem is what happens if we fail to capture Robards before CHEM deals with Frost.”

“We’re working on a timer,” Amanda realized before putting renewed effort into her chase. She considered jumping to the rooftops, but there was far too much snow. Bizarre as it might sound, she needed to stick to running over Robards’ copies if she wanted to catch him.

“What am I supposed to do?!” She shouted as she jumped over yet another sloppy attempt to grab her. “Why isn’t Tim backing me up?”

“You should refer to him by his codename when on the field, Tristan. Gaheris is preoccupied dealing with unwelcome interference.” It was not Gerald but the doctor who answered her question. “Unfortunately, he decided to shut down his communicator while doing so.”

They could do that?

“As for your current predicament, you seem to have neglected one crucial factor.”

“Which is?”

“The snow is slowing him down as well.”

Amanda blinked.

Just like that, several pieces clicked in her head. Robards didn’t have any sensors. He couldn’t move perfectly just by visualizing it. Robards... was blind.

That was why his copies were suddenly so sloppy compared to how they had been on the roof. It wasn’t just because there were more of them to control. They could barely see her with all the snow!

Amanda jumped.

The single leap took her right on top of a street light. Like everything else, it was covered in a layer of snow, but she did not slip. She jumped from there to the wall of one of the buildings and twisted her body, landing with her back to it. Her knees bent. Her gaze zeroed in on Robards for the single moment where she was perfectly perpendicular to the building, but before gravity had started to do its work.

She launched herself at him.

Amanda put so much force in her legs that she put a few cracks on the front of the building, but her suit told her it wouldn’t cause any structural damage.

Robards never saw her coming.

She slammed right into him like a human cannonball and took him right out of the mass of bodies he had surrounded himself with. The force of her jump carried them both all the way to a nearby roof. Robards struggled against her as they rolled through the snow while she fired on him multiple times. At last, her hand closed around his face, and she fired one last time.

Robards went down.

Panting, Amanda stood up over Robards’ unconscious body. She had done it. She defeated an Exceed.

“That…” she said, between pants. “Was for my parents.”

“Adequate work Tristan,” the doctor said. “Return to base. Don’t forget to bring the subject.”

“I’m not going to forget…” Amanda trailed off as she looked at the sky.

“What the hell is that?”

~~~

As long as Tim kept hold of Disk’s wrist, the hero couldn’t fly away. He also couldn’t use those fancy shields of his to block anything. Well, he could, but it was way less effective. It hadn’t helped the hero any while they had been rolling on the snow.

The downside of Tim’s brilliant strategy was that Disk’s disks could also be fired.

And they hurt.

They were frisbees of death striking his back and chest and chins and other body parts.

Still, he didn’t let go.

“You are one crazy bastard,” Disk said as he struggled against him.

“Is that a compliment? It is, isn’t it? I can never… tell…” Tim trailed off. His grip suddenly slackened. It was the opening Disk needed to push him back through dozens of energy disks fired at his torso. Tim went flying into the snow, leaving Disk finally free. The hero rose into the air once more.

He stopped.

A pillar of ice rose into the sky. It was so big that it was visible from any point in the city. Above it, there was a giant sphere of ice that seemed to be growing by the second.

“Now, I don’t know about you,” Tim said, pointing at the giant ball of ice spreading over the city’s skyline, “but that sure seems like something that a hero should be dealing with. I sure would appreciate it ’cause, you know, I can’t fly there and all.”

Disk didn’t stick around to fire a witty retort. Even before Tim had finished speaking, Disk was already flying off towards where Jack Frost presumably was.

“Yeah,” Tim said, dusting snow from his body. “That’s what I figured.”

With a thought, he turned on his communicator. A second later, the doctor was shouting in his ear.

“-reckless you have been? You’re lucky Tristan fulfilled her objective. Return to base at once.”

“Yep. That’s about what I figured on that front too.”

~~~