Amalgamate 4: Catalogue (Patreon)

Amalgamate

Chapter 4: Catalogue

-VB-

Exposer.

That was her cape name now.

It was the title forced upon her by the new leash holder who made Coil seem … not bad.

The only reason she wasn't killed - her new owner bluntly told her - was because her power wouldn't be useful if it was only 50% effective.

He had told her that night, surrounded by the broken bodies of her teammates, that she had to choose from two choices: accept becoming a pet or die.

She hated herself for it, but she chose to live. It helped that her choice also determined if her former teammates lived or died as well. It was fucked up, but what could she do against the Scion Killer?

What everyone underplayed was his ability to use all of the powers he conquered with his clones.

And outside of Steelsilver himself, only she knew how many powers he had.

"And … I am part of this expedition?" she asked warily while staring at one of the Steelsilver clones.

“Yes,” the clone replied with Steelsilver’s deep baritone voice. None of his clones walked around in his deer skull mask and makeshift road sign armor anymore. This particular clone was a bureaucratic clone on top of that, and took to wearing suits very often, complete with a name tag that said “Bureaucratic Steelsilver.” “Be grateful that we are giving you this choice as others weren’t.”

She tried her best to not shiver in her seat as she remembered what Steelsilver showed her.

“We are wasting time. Make your choice.”

“I-I choose to work!”

The clone nodded. He reached into the desk’s left drawer - A lot of files are in the drawer. Files are not for Steelsilver but for his “workers” - and pulled out a single manila folder. He handed it to her. “This is your job’s details. You are to work for ten hours each day with two thirty minute breaks in between. You are given Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday off. You are paid in Earth Aleph’s dollars. Dismissed.”

She hurried out of the office, ignoring the nine other capes - seven of them are here involuntarily. Two are here for jobs - and made her way to her apartment unit.

Did she mention that she was in Earth Aleph and that, mere days ago, Steelsilver apparently conquered Aleph’s Cuba?

No?

Well, now she did.

From what she knew of the event, Aleph Cuba had parahuman soldiers of their own, but against Steelsilver’s fifty clones with numerous shared powers and twelve thousand plant-cyborg gorillas - Four meters and fifty-three centimeters tall. Armed with back-mounted artillery and shoulder-mounted automatic miniature turret - which were impervious to small arms, Cuba had fallen quickly.

Aleph went crazy, of course. Steelsilver was the first parahuman warlord that they had encountered, and Cuba was not a slouch when it came to its military. The fact that the nation had surrendered to the warlord in days was the cause of the international commotion.

Already, there was a coalition of nations led by the United Nations and the United States of America to put down Steelsilver, but if they truly knew the scope of the creature’s power…

She shivered.

However, Steelsilver’s martial and superpower prowesses were not what immediately affected her. What affected her was the lengths she needed to go to avoid that fate.

Lisa gulped as she followed behind Steelsilver in a corridor made out of darkness. Though her boots’ heels clicked against the ground - not concrete or any known material - and she felt cold air breeze past her, she knew that this place she was walking through as if it was a corridor was not an actual place.

There was light at the end of the tunnel.

She snorted at her own thought.

When the two of them walked through and left the corridor-not-corridor, she found herself staring at a long corridor.

“While it is not known to most people, I actually have chosen a title for myself, Lisa,” Steelsilver began, calling her by her own chosen name. She tensed up, even if this wasn’t the first time he’d called her by that name.

Wants to show you something.

“I chose to be called ‘The Depraved,’” he began. “Because I know from the bottom of my heart that once I gained power, all I could do was follow my hedonistic desires to my heart’s content. I have a lot of bodies to do exactly that, even if I won’t be doing anything stupid like narcotics. After all, what use is the ability to change the world if I can’t even perceive the world properly?”

“Uh huh…”

He stopped in front of a door four doors down from where they entered this drab concrete corridor.

“I’m not nice. I know this for a fact. I’m here to enjoy myself now that I’ve done my good deed of killing the genocidal alien god.”

Wait, what?

“I spared you because of your power, yes,” he continued as he turned to look at her. Without his signature deer skull mask and wearing a suit, he looked pretty normal with his short-trimmed black hair, narrow jaw, average nose, and cold black eyes.

Okay, they made him look like a cold killer or heartless businessman.

“But I could also use you for activities other than those involving your power,” he said as he pushed the door open.

Lisa looked and froze.

Slowly, she turned back to Steelsilver, trying her best to ignore the choking moans, wet claps, and repetitive pounding.

There was only one woman in that room but three Steelsilver clones.

Woman is looking at you. Asian. Unable to speak with a penis in her mouth. Begging you to help her.

Lisa ignored her and her own heart’s pounding beats in her ears.

The clone in front of her pulled the door shut, returning the blessed silence to the room.

“The woman in there used to call herself Bakuda, and she was the ABB’s first and only Tinker before I took her down. Like you, her power is too useful for me to simply erase her from existence, so - like you - I offered her the choice of becoming a pet or being put to work however I saw fit.”

He paused and leaned just a bit forward, and Lisa looked down but dared not step back.

“She spat on my offer.”

He leaned back.

“Now, she’s nothing but a breathing and living body for Steelsilver to enjoy. Forever barred from Tinkering. Forever kept alive, healthy, and fertile.”

Lisa began to shiver.

“Should you turn down my offer,” he said as he stepped up to her and cupped her left tit. Her breath hitched. He squeezed, groped, and pinched but his action was without any carnal desire or need. It was closer to an owner checking the status of his goods. “Should you fail me,” he continued slowly and with a deeper tone as he let go of her tit and lifted her chin up for her eyes to meet his eyes.

Cold cold cold-

“You know as well as I do that I have many means and the imagination to make your life hell.” He paused. “Understood?” he asked quietly.

She nodded hastily.

He backed off, pulling his hands back to his side. “Good. I think I know what you prefer, now that you are aware of exactly what the other choice will be at minimum. Let’s go back to the office to finalize it, nonetheless.”

Lisa found herself in front of her apartment unit, pulled out her key, unlocked the door, stepped in, locked the door, and walked into the large living room. She ignored the pristine furnitures and tasteful decorations as she made her way to the bedroom, fell on the bed, and cried.

-VB-

On Earth Bet, a similar situation was playing out in Africa.

Steelsilver and his monster army, composed of hundreds of thousands of plant-animal-machine hybrids on top of the hundreds of the man’s own power-sharing clones, stormed Moord Nag’s capital city and killed her.

It wasn’t long before Steelsilver’s army had a giant, dark, and gaseous xenomorph a quarter of the size of the dead warlord’s infamous python projection.

Unlike Earth Aleph, Earth Bet remained ambivalent to the rise of a new warlord, though there were fears that this one may be here to stay for a very long time.

They were wrong to remain still.

In a single month, he conquered Central and South Africa. It took him one more month to conquer East Africa.

World only realized upon the fall of Ethiopia that they had let this warlord go for too long, but it was too late.

-VB-

“What’s patrolling the skies?” Admiral Mark Javins asked the sensor tech.

“Monsters, sir,” the sensor tech - a lieutenant in charge of the radar, ladar, sonar, and more - grimaced as he patched the image he was getting through Tinkertech ladar to the admiral’s own computer. “Blas- I mean, they appear to be Steelsilver’s monsters.”

The admiral, standing behind the sensor tech, looked down at the computer display available to him. He saw the flock of monsters and did his best to school his features.

“How many can we take out?” he asked while staring at what had to be at least a few hundred of these fliers. Even as he asked the question, he too was calculating based on what he knew.

USS Lake Champlain was a classical Ticonderoga-class cruiser commissioned by the US Navy, and its five escorts were Arleigh Burke-class destroyers. They didn’t have enough firepower to take on a few hundred flying monsters whose capabilities were unknown. Maybe if they had an old style battleship, which would have the firepower necessary to the swarm on but he didn’t.

"Not many, sir," a chief warrant officer to his right answered quietly, and he agreed.

Knowing that there was no way his ship and his escorts would not win against the swarm with its traditional armaments, he turned to the representative of the parahuman marines.

While the Parahuman Response Team has always held a monitor over federal parahuman employees, the one place that they did not have hold over was the Marines for a simple reason.

Despite what the propagandas might say, the marines were the President’s private mercenary organization used for the sake of the nation, but private nonetheless.

"How well would we win with both of our forces working in unison?" he asked the marine officer leading the parahuman squads on his ships.

"A loss, sir" the Thinker parahuman wearing the insignia of a major replied. "There's no way we can win what we see… and I suspect there are more in hiding."

Grimacing, Mark looked back to the swarm of monsters. "We're going back home. This mission is a bust."