Wyrm Lord of Brockton Bay 14 (Patreon)

To make sure that no one found out about my visit to Boston, I kept myself disguised as someone else. According to documents within the small bureaucracy of paperwork filed away in the electronic folders of the Dragonteeth, Wyrm stayed “fornicating” with his ladies at the bottom of the Lair while one of his trusted cape employees, a Shaker capable of controlling the earth, went to visit future recruits in Boston.

This was Lisa’s almost paranoid defense against any Thinker trying to keep an eye out for my movement. I only called it almost paranoid because Thinkers were real and they were capable of fishing out even little tidbits of information like that. 

Now, the planted information wasn’t completely false because last night, I fucked Lisa until she knocked out and then did the same with Taylor. I couldn’t wait to go back home, actually, to love them again. 

At the same time, I was growing annoyed. I was following the instructions Lisa gave me to find this Case-53 community, but following said instruction was weird and annoying. 

For example, why did I have to spin around five times in front of a sandwich shop called “Herald’s Sandwich Cafe”? 

From there with a few of my trusted soldiers, I walked into an alley where there were way too many doors. This alley, despite being so close to the coast, was also dry when the rest of the city was still wet and suffering from water damage. How? I looked around and realized that even though I had just entered the alley and took maybe five steps, the alley’s entry was almost a hundred yards away from me.

‘Definitely some Shaker shit is happening,’ I thought to myself. Because I wasn’t a dragon, my ability to sense through the earth was minimal, but I tried nonetheless. 

“What’s wrong, lil’ boss?” one of the soldiers not in the know about my identity asked, hefting his Uzi underneath his trenchcoat. The other two carried the same gun and wore similar trenchcoat that hid their bulletproof vests and uniform.

“We’re in a Shaker’s field of effect,” I replied. My earth sense bounced like a rather every time I tapped on the ground. The ground itself was still there and nothing seemed off about the ground itself. 

I stopped when my ground radar pinged off an invisible structure from the direction we just walked from. 

A wall? There was a wall that my eyes were not seeing between me and the exit. Then I felt a door open at the edge of my earth radar, which was some fifty feet away, behind me. I turned towards the opening door yet my eyes could not see the door open. I saw the door, yes, but it wasn’t open. My earth radar told me that it was open.

‘A Stranger?’ I thought to myself. To my surprise, the cape in question undid their own effect. To my surprise, a Case-53 walked out. Clad in normal human attire, the mass of tentacles that made up their head and hands were anything but human. My three Dragonteeth soldiers quickly held up their guns  from within their trenchcoats but remained silent. I also noticed that the Case-53 didn’t seem alarmed by the sight of the guns...

“H-How did you get in here?” she asked nervously. Tentacle head she may be, but I definitely saw boobs on her chest. She squirmed when she noticed that my eyes were on her chest. “H-Hey, I’m asking you a question!”

I looked up to her tentacle head. The closest terrestrial analogue to its appearance would be a snake ball. I wondered what it felt like. 

“I’m here as an envoy of the Dragonteeth to the Case-53 community housing Mantellum.” But it would be rude to ask and I wanted to go home as quickly as possible. “Mantellum was the closest of the Coalition arrayed against the Dragonteeth and its liege, Wyrm. We merely came here to talk, hopefully to ask Mantellum to leave the Coalition.”

The Case-53 froze. “Y-You work for that monster…?” she asked hoarsely. She began to backpedal towards the door.

I didn’t want to appear threatening because I was definitely not going to be able to get into where this community was based if I did, so I raised my hands up. “If it suits you, then I’ll come alone, provided that they will not be harmed?” I asked, gesturing to the soldiers behind me.

The Case-53 hesitated before nodding. “Okay. I’m gonna have a friend of mine come and verify y-your words.” She left through the same invisible door she came through

I nodded and then gestured for the soldiers behind me to wait outside the alley. It was at this moment that the wall I’d detected earlier … slid into the walls. Was I already in their base? The base must have had some kind of camouflage to prevent outsiders or civilians who entered it on accident from finding out about this place. 

I looked up towards the sky and saw New England’s regular murky and cloudy summer sky. It was cool how they were able to make this kind of illusory tinkertech. I wondered if they would sell that tinkertech. I do have new Tinkers under my employee now, so they could fix the tinkertech I buy.

I pushed my ground radar up along the walls. 

Oh wait, it actually doesn’t have a roof. Kind of shoddy defense then. Nevermind. 

Standing there quietly while I waited for whomever was in charge of this community’s security to come to a decision was irritating. For the past half year or so, I stood as a king among rabble. My patience may have atrophied a bit from a lack of use. Ah,yes, people would describe my current attitude as impatient. 

Still standing there, I finally noticed after about five minutes or so when that Case-53 returned with someone else on my ground radar. 

They came through the invisible door again with the Case-53 in the front and her Thinker friend behind her. To my naked eye and not my ground radar, it looked like they were stepping out from nowhere. 

The Thinker was also a Case-53 almost a footer taller than the first Case-53. He also had no human form, looking very much like a slug and a tiger fucked like rabbits and gave birth to a million slimes that acted together as a single organism that moved on the ground like a slug but had “fur” like a feline. 

The slime-slug Case-53 looked at me for a second. “Holy shit, Casey. Why the fuck did you let Wyrm inside?” it asked, its voice very much like what it looked like; slimey, gooey, and composed of more than a thousand tiny voices speaking out at the same time. Despite the fact that its voice sounded like a thousand tiny children squealing, the end result was a deep… squealing? Did it mean that this Case-53 was a guy?

“He knew the password!” she -Casey, huh?- whined while turning around to complain to the slime-slug. The slimug(?) didn’t turn away from me but did glance down at Casey with its seven eyes. Why did he have an eye on top of his head?

The slume(?) looked at me before he gurgled. “What are you here for, Wyrm?” he asked. “Casey said something about meeting Mantellum, but I can’t let you meet him.”

I didn’t say anything for a moment. I wanted to show them that I clearly did not mean that hostility, that I was here in peace, mostly because Lisa asked me to be “gentle.”

“I already know what the Coalition wants with people like Mantellum,” I said, stressing “people.” If their appearances are anything to go by, then the thoughtless, regular people would be like they always were and hurt the Case-53 like Casey and the slime-slug (really couldn’t think of a name for this guy) with their words and actions because all Case-53s were different and most of them were “unsightly.” “The Coalition wants to use people like them to blind me or something, right?” I asked. “It wasn’t hard to figure out.” Because Lisa did the figuring out for me. “But I think they’re mistaken about exactly how that would go.”

“How would that go?” Casey asked, a little nervous but also curious. She seemed like Taylor if she hadn’t been bullied: ever-curious and a little fearless. After all, she just stepped out to meet me when I had three gunmen with me despite the fact that she was alone. Maybe there were other defenses and she obviously had powers, but her curiosity led her to meet me regardless. 

“I would not stop myself from growing.”

“... What?” Casey asked. 

“My size when I was fighting Leviathan was not the largest I could be, merely what was the largest I had gone to at the time.”

The two Case-53s grew a little stiff at my correction of their misconception. “And just because you mess with my sight and ability to see through my power, you aren’t exactly stopping me from rolling my body around like a thrashing snake. Can you guess how that would go?”

“I can,” the slime-slug responded. “So why come specifically to our community? You must already know about us if you weren’t surprised by meeting Casey.”

Hmm, were they watching me? I did indeed not show any surprise… 

Also, why were they so open with saying their names around? Sure, they were Case-53s and thus lacked a lot of the legal rights like citizenship, but that didn’t mean-.

Ah. 

I came here knowing exactly how to enter through their first line of defense, which was password and camouflaged entry point. If I knew that, then I “had to” know more about them. Names were not that hard to discover compared to thinks like passwords. 

They were overestimating me (and Lisa), maybe. Should I match that expectation or underplay myself?

I smirked. “The Coalition already knows-” they did for the next bit of information. “-that I can’t think rationally once I grow past a certain size. The only reason why I stopped growing against Leviathan was because I couldn’t see him anymore. What happens then, my neighbors, when I start fighting an ever smaller and smaller insects who refuse to give up and attack me in my home?”

Casey’s snake-ball head paled. The slime-slug grew even more stiff. “You start destroying everything until nothing is left.”

“Exactly like a cornered beast that lost its family would,” I replied. “Because I do have family, and any attack against my Lair would mean that they would put my family at risk.” I dropped my smile. “And what do you think I would do once I return to being rational to find all of New England burning to the ground?”

“... Not pretty.”

“Exactly. Any and all collaborators of the Coalition would be chased down and killed. Their cities would burn. I would not stop at just America and start crossing the ocean. Hell, I might not even bother to stop growing. Where would I stop?” I shrugged. “Even I would not know.”

“You’re lying,” Casey whispered. “All powers have limits.”

I shrugged again. “I can certainly show you. I can take a dive in the ocean, grow even bigger than how big I was when I fought Leviathan.” I stopped myself from further boasting. “But I’m not here for that. I simply wish to talk Mantellum out of this endeavor because he is one of two capes from Boston who is a part of the Coalition. I took on a solemn face. “And if he refuses to leave the Coalition, then I would have to consider him and those who house him to be my enemies. I’d rather not kill if I don’t have to.”

“B-But you killed Kaiser.”

“He’s a Nazi. Nazis and all other ethnic supremacists don’t deserve mercy. If it strikes fear into the hearts of everyone else to leave such ideas behind, then I will kill them, their families, their friends, burn their cities, and salt the earth by bringing the literal ocean to sweep away at the remains.” I immediately changed my serious stare into a smile. “But Kaiser’s death seems to have scared people out of idiotic moves before I had to escalate. Isn’t that grand?”

And I really would have. Shits like Nazis don’t deserve to live. Their poisonous ideology had consequences further down the line. 

The fact that Kasier got in my way right after I was in need of some stress relief was secondary. It was definitely secondary.

“So,” I said with a teeth-showing grin. “Can I meet Mantellum?”