Gunmetal Crusade 4: War (3) (Patreon)

“We can’t just leave the city!” Taylor shouted angrily. 

“Oh, we certainly can,” Lisa growled. “Have you not heard what I told you, Taylor?!” 

“B-But that just means that we should be the ones defending the city!”

Lisa stared at Taylor for a moment before sighing. Taylor couldn’t understand. Wasn’t this city their city too?

“Taylor, with the exception of Brian and you, the rest of us aren’t from this city. We don’t have a stake here.”

Those words shook Taylor down to the core. Her mouth opened once and closed. Then opened up again before closing because she couldn’t describe what she was feeling. 

This … this wasn’t what she was here for. 

Before her thoughts to take her elsewhere, Lisa spoke to her again. “Taylor, those guys don’t care if you are a hero or a villain. If you make yourself a nuisance, they will kill you and then they will harvest you.”

Taylor shuddered. One of the very few informations Lisa was able to gleam from the video was the fact that they - the ones PRT designated as “Scrappers” - used parahuman heads for something. Since all villains, vigilantes, rogues, and heroes were parahumans, all would be harvest if they got in the way.

Villains, by Lisa’s interpretation of Scrapper’s intent, were already in the way simply because of how they operated. The ABB and the E88 were eliminated because of that. The Merchants were next, if not the PRT, Protectorate, and the New Wave. Lisa had explained all of this already to her.

But Taylor still wanted to do what was right. 

To fight. To defend. To stand.

To be a hero.

Lisa stared tiredly at Taylor. “... Then go. I won’t have your blood on my hands.” Then she tossed a USB stick at Taylor. She caught it and looked at it. It was unassuming… and also one Taylor knew that Lisa had been using to gather all information she could on the Scrappers. “But do be careful.”

Taylor nodded, and left the Undersiders for good. 

-VB-

Gunmetal Crusade

Chapter 4: War (3)

-VB-

It took no more than an hour after the battle in the Docks proper before a video was released that spelled the end of the ABB. The video showed Lung’s decapitation along with Oni Lee’s head being brought to the scene of Lung’s execution. 

With the ABB and the E88’s parahuman leadership gone, only a few villains were left to rule the Bay. Or so everyone thought.

People forgot about the Protectorate. 

Without the overwhelming manpower of the Empire Eighty-Eight and the giant that was Lung and his lieutenant Oni Lee, the Protectorate found itself free to use its manpower to finally bring order to the city, but it was an order they were reluctant to bring because they had next to no information on who or what this beheading fetish power armor supersoldier villains were. 

And before the PRT and the rest of the city could even begin to scout out their own city for where the murderous supersoldiers might be and determine the state of the city, they struck again.

…

“PUSH!” one of the villains roared over the constant roar of gunfire.

Miss Militia gasped in pain while clutching her left shoulder, where a stray gunfire had ripped through. She winced repeatedly from the pounding of bullets upon the armored truck she and PRT agents had arrived in, because they felt like bloody 54mm. 

On top of that, every single one of them carried it, too.

Dnk Dnk Dnk Dnk DNK DNK DNK DNK!

Her eyes widened before she rolled forward and out of the way of whatever heavy thing was running towards her. And if her luck today held out -!

With a mighty crash, the PRT armored truck skid sideways towards her. Scrambling on her hands and legs, she quickly ran away, only to turn around and aim as her AR-15 morphed into M1014 in an instant, and she opened fire. 

The hulking armored villain shrugged off the hits as they ricocheted off of his armor in a dozen different pings on repeat before he pulled up his belt-fed, scrap metal machine gun and opened fire on her. 

Unlike him, she dodged to her left. He turned his weapon around as if to chase after her, and the constant muzzle fire of the machine gun turned the night around her into flashes of day. She rolled and then jumped to the right into an alley. 

The villain came after her, and she changed her gun again.

This time, she changed it into an RPG.

She took aim quickly but painfully and shakily, and just as the villain appeared at the entrance of the alleyway with his own gun trained on her, she pulled the trigger. With a PSHHAWW, the RPG launched its rocket and it slammed into the villain’s head. 

The resulting explosion rippled the air, and Miss Militia screamed as she keeled over from it. The back of her head struck the ground and then she tumbled away. 

Groaning as she slowly got up, she grimaced as the smell of cooked flesh wafted into her nose. She looked up and saw the smoking remains of the villain.

Or most likely, one of his clones. 

She groaned as she pushed herself onto her knees and then her legs. 

Dnk dnk dnk dnk. The ever present march of the enemy grew closer. 

‘Goddamnit.’ She pressed her fingers to her headset. “Console, I need reinforcements. Jackson and 27th Street.”

There was a pause before someone answered her. “{This is Console, Miss Militia. All current units are disabled or pinned down by the villains. Nearest PRT unit is two blocks to your east in 25th and Euglan Avenue. Can you make it over there?”

The marching of the steel villains came closer.

“Negative, I am about to be engaged by the villains.”

Her green RPG flickered and it was reloaded again. She hefted it up and aimed it at the alley entrance. 

…

Assault scoffed as the bullets all stopped dead on his costume and dropped uselessly onto the ground. Bullets rained on him like during a hurriance, but they were weak and useless against him. He was built for this kind of fight. He stood still as forty of these villains - no, killers like Slaughterhouse 9 - shot their guns dry.

When their machine guns finally ran out of bullets with forty simultaneous clicks, he opened his arms to the side and grinned cockily. “Is that all of the juices you have? I didn’t even feel a thing,” he taunted.

The killers looked at each other before a few of them at the center stepped aside and two of them from the back stepped forward with what looked like a lantern in each of their left hands. 

“The fuc-” Assault stopped himself short when one of them stood in front of the rest and held up the lantern.

In it was a masked face Ethan was all too familiar with: Crusader.

There was a zap along the chains and wires from the top of the lantern and its handle, and then suddenly, there were four ghostly projections of the head-lantern holding killer.

And Assault paled as the implication set in just as the ghostly projections, all holding a combat knife as long as his forearm each in their right hands. 

“Shit,” he muttered. ‘If these guys are like Bonesaw and Faerie Queen, then I can’t fight them. All assumptions we made are useless.’ With but a stomp, Assault jumped away and high into the air, clearing five floors in a single instant. He came down somewhere far away from the killers, and radioed this in. “Console, this is Assault. Scrappers are Trump 3’s. I repeat, they are Trump 3’s.”

Unlike all other power categories, Trumps were not categorized by their threat level but how their power expressed themselves. Trump 7 was a parahuman whose power cycled between powers while Trump 3 borrowed, stole, or copy other powers. 

Two best known examples of Trump 3’s were Bonesaw and Glastig Uaine, otherwise known as Faerie Queen, and from the looks of it, they already collected the powers of the Empire Eighty-Eight.

Assault gulped as he realized what they were fighting now. 

It wasn’t just a small army of physically enhanced murderers with tinkertech; it was an army of physically enhanced murderers with tinkertech that stole others’ powers.

“Assault!” 

Assault turned around and was surprised to see someone he wasn’t familiar with. “Hey, and who might you be…?”

“Call me Skitter. I was the one who took down Lung in the first place.”

Assault winced. In a classified meeting (meaning that all information shared during it was subject to information control), Armsmaster reported that Lung had been defeated mostly by another parahuman, one that proclaimed to be a hero, and described the exact outfit he was seeing right now. 

“Oh! You’re the one who Armsmaster met.”

The girl nodded. Geez. Would it kill for the girl to not be so serious?

“Are you here to help with the Scrappers?”

“I am,” she said.

And then she did something that Ethan would never forget. 

From all corners of the city, a dozen and half giant tendrils of swarming insects of all kinds poured out of the city and buzzed angrily and so loudly that his ears hurt a little. 

“Oh. Damn.”

“I’m here to put an end to a threat to my city.”

Assault understood why Armsmaster thought Skitter was a villain at first.