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Wretched Joy
Chapter 2

-VB-

It took a while to rummage through my own stuff, but I got the money and stuff. I never kept a lot of money in the bank (inevitability of Golden Morning made modern financial institutions kind of useless to me), so I had access to all of my cold hard cash of thirty-thousand dollars. I also had some spare police and military equipment, occlusion knives, guns, vests, and more. I took them all with me.

The first thing I did after I secured my belongings?

I got some camping gear. I could teleport to anywhere I have been, so why should I risk being discovered in the city? No, when I was much younger, my grandmother took me out to camp in the woods in New York (not the city). I set up a small base there, just a tent, a campfire, and a few of my more precious personal items, and then I waited.

I waited because, from the things I remembered about Worm and how self-inserts came, there was a small possibility that my power was … that it could be something amazingly powerful.

So I waited.

The sun set.

The stars came out. Galaxies, planets, and distant stars all glimmered in the night sky while I set by my campfire with anxious patience. Too jittery to read or enjoy the nature around me. Still too shaken from my death.

And then it happened.

Three more motes of energy appeared like pin pricks in my mind and then swirled until they were bigger.

I quickly checked the ring and grinned. The enchantment I put on it was still there.

I laughed.

I had a ridiculously powerful Trump power.

Actually, considering how I died, it kind of made sense; I had been outnumbered and against a parahuman. According to what I knew and from PRT analysts mumbled about powers, a Trump power came in when powers were involved somewhere in the Trigger Event.

Dying by power-related execution and then waking up in a coffin (how was I even alive then?) apparently fit the type of Trigger Event necessary for becoming a Trump.

Now… Now I would be a parahuman and an one-man army.

I put all three into the ring again.

I smiled in glee as the ring stored all six motes, three from yesterday and three from today. Teleportation was now faster. There was no limit, merely a cooldown of one minute.

With a power that grew every day, I could afford to be patient. Or rather, it was better for me to be patient. Perhaps I’ll be here for upwards to a month, silently gaining power with no one the wiser of my growing might.

That thought amused me, and when I returned to Brockton Bay, I would find joy in eradicating the Empire like the parasitic scum they were.

This power, however, left me with a question: how would I balance action with upgrades?

The longer I waited, the more powerful I would become. The longer I waited, however, the number of victims would increase.

To … find the "optimal" intersection of those two facts, I needed to know a few things. I already knew how many people died to E88 each day: 11. However, I did not know how my power upgrade an item. Was it linear? What was the value of each mote?

It took me a week to figure out that there was no set rhyme or reason to how upgrades worked. I learned this by infusing a pebble with one mote of energy to explode and another mote with two.

I tested this out for two days and got two different results.

The level of development was inconsistent. A pebble with one mote on the first day exploded and left a scorch mark two inches in diameter. The same mote on a similar pebble on day two left a scorch mark only one inch wide but which penetrated into the boulder I used as target practice.

It took me another two days to realize that the cause of the inconsistency had been me; the thought, concept, and image I use when enchanting an item decided how the mote of energy was used.

A pebble with "boom" exploded. A pebble with "TNT" exploded and penetrated, but lacked the total "oomph" of the Boom pebble.

A pebble with the image of an exploding TNT in a rock got me more penetration but a pebble with an image of an exploding TNT next to a rock got me less penetration and more force.

Every single detail mattered, and so the most important part of the enchanting process was the first mote of energy used to bring thoughts, images, and concepts together.

By the end of the first month, I found that an item could only hold five enchantments, and none of those enchantments could be conceptually opposite of any other. Fire and water weren't opposites but up and down were.

With all of the information, I set about creating a gear set to match my needs…

-VB-

Cricket grimaced as she hastily raised her kamas into a guard but the next strike from her opponent sent her arms flying off to the side.

She jumped back and rolled away, not even bothering to use her power. Or rather, she already did it once and it didn't work. Her kamas looked… they were useless. Her opponent's metal bat had dulled all of the edges.

She glared at the bastard that had ambushed her in her civilian identity.

"You fucker," she hissed at him with a sneer. "You think you'll get away with breaking the rules?"

"Rules are for children like you and the other capes," her opponent sneered as he tapped his pristine metal bat on the ground. “Besides, it’s not like you lot care about the rules in the first place.”

He wore a tinted motorcycle helmet painted completely in white. He wore a thick white jacket over a black Kevlar vest and a red hoodie underneath that. He had a cheap plastic thigh and shin guards, painted white as well, anyone could buy at any costume store, but her sonic-vibration enhanced kamas had failed to cut them off. He wore light blue straight jeans underneath that and wore a pair of light brown metal-toed boots. For some reason, he had a compass as well when he first found her.

"Rookies always say that before they realize how much they fucked up," she cackled at him.

"Hmm? But I've already died once. I had to crawl out of my coffin," he said. “It’s only been a month since then, though. Ah, how the time flies, right?”

She lashed forward while he was distra-!

He swung, while sidestepping her attack, with speed she's only seen from Velocity and slammed his bat into her thigh. There was a crack, and she screamed as she fell down.

Sirens rang in the distance.

"... probably not coming for you. Probably some poor soul is getting eviscerated by one of your gangsters," he droned on with taking his eyes off of her. He jabbed his bats at her shoulders, and she gurgled in pain as she felt all of the bones break.

Blinding pain kept her from fighting back, but she heard him still talk.

"The first Empire cape to die is the cape that helped kill me… isn't that ironic, Cricket?"

She briefly felt the bat on top of her head-.

---

I teleported to a river near my camping site after executing Cricket with a good skull-crushing bash …

And I have to admit that I have never felt more alive than I did at that moment. Getting back at my killers!

I stood there on the riverbank with blood and brain matter dripping from my bat.

I… hadn't been wrong to choose this. This was right. This was good. I have not only avenged myself but others who died to the Viking-wannabe.

I wanted to do it again.

I wanted to do more. Why stop here? These bastards wouldn’t stop, so why should I? The more of them that remain permanently removed from their honestly fucked up campaign, the better off the rest of the world was.

Yes… yes…!

This was but a declaration of war and the first strike against E88.

"Oh, Max," I sighed faux-regretfully. "I'll have to not kill you right now, even though you're the easiest one to strike at. I need you to keep the Empire nice and tight in one place while I whittle it down, you know-. Wait, I'm talking to myself."

I stood there in shocked silence.

"Is this why villains monologue when they're victorious? Because it feels good?"

I stood there some more as the shock slowly faded before I shrugged, physically and mentally.

Whatever.

I was a killer. A vigilante. A villain. It didn't matter.

The only thing that mattered to me right now before I moved on to other endeavors was the total destruction of the Empire.

I whistled cheerfully as I began to clean my gear of the bloodstains. Too bad I didn’t think to make an item specifically for cleaning. Maybe later? Like a wooden ladle like the one people used for washing in the old days but buffed to “hit the stains out” better?

Oh, I could even make it “hurt more than it should” just in case I need to discipline people. Wouldn’t that be funny? People fearing a ladle more than they fear the likes of Lung and Kaiser.

Soon, this city will be free of its long-time tormentors. Perhaps I could even focus on greater problems once the likes of the E88, ABB, and the Merchants were gone.