A Darker Path Pt 21 (Patreon)

Part Twenty-One: Three, Two, One, Zero

[A/N: This chapter beta-read by Lady Columbine of Mystal.]

PRT Building ENE

Director Piggot's Office

Emily didn't quite know why she was jittery. There had been no explosions in her city, with or without mushroom clouds, all morning. No call-outs for a sudden case of death for any given bunch of criminals. The local gangs—non-powered, as well as Uber and Leet—were keeping their heads all the way down, which in her own mind was the smartest thing to do with someone like Atropos on the prowl. Nobody wanted to be the first to get her attention.

Of course, she'd also announced that she would be ending the Nine as a matter of course. It had carried the same kind of casual assurance as someone saying that they'd be spending the day at the Boardwalk. Which suggested to Emily that Atropos would be spending the day out of town, because in order to kill the Nine, she'd have to go to where the Nine were. It wasn't as though she could give them the glare of death from a thousand miles away or something.

Still, she had the impending feeling that the other shoe was about to drop, and it was getting stronger all the time. Maybe those late nights I had screwed with my head. It wouldn't have surprised her in the slightest. The job was not conducive to mental well-being at the best of times.

Her inbox pinged. She glanced that way, and it was from Renick; the title read, 'You have to see this'.

The unprofessional tone was what warned her. Paul Renick was always formal in his communications to her. Something was going on, and all her foreboding suddenly made sense. Moving the mouse, she clicked the email to open it.

It was a single image. She knew the type; nosecone cameras on missiles took them just before impact, to verify a good kill. There were the crosshairs, indicating the point of aim … which happened to be Crawler's open mouth. With Hatchet Face directly above him. Missiles wouldn't normally affect Crawler (unless they were an exotic Tinker tech warhead) but Hatchet Face's presence entirely derailed that.

Off to the side was Atropos, very sensibly going for cover. Emily even recognised the fact that she had her thumbs in her ears, so as to save her eardrums. Smart girl.

Having taken in the individual details, Emily took the time to survey the image as a whole. Atropos had engaged the Nine; there was no other interpretation. The notation on the image showed that Dragon had fired the missile, and the time-date stamp was … one minute ago.

And then her eye fell on the latitude and longitude of the designated coordinates for the missile's aimpoint. They went all the way down to the fractions of a second. This had been a missile pre-loaded with coordinates to place it within inches of where it was supposed to be. Dragon was good, but she wasn't that good. I'm betting that Atropos supplied the coordinates.

And then she looked at the numbers again, and blinked. Wait a minute … those coordinates gave a location inside Brockton Bay. On the outskirts, to be sure, and in an area that was only technically part of the city anymore … but Atropos hadn't left town to go to the Nine. They had come to her.

That was when she started swearing.

<><>

Atropos

Even thirty feet away, on the other side of a car, with my thumbs blocking my ears, the explosion was way too loud. But I knew the ringing would go away soon enough, and my power would be able to compensate for it, so that was okay. When I poked my head up, my first impression was that there had been a whole lot of Crawler, and now he was everywhere.

Just behind me, stuck in the side of the building, was Hatchet Face's axe. The asshole himself was lying groaning about twenty yards away, covered in bits of Crawler. The explosion seemed to have shaken him up, but he wasn't actually injured in any significant way.

That was fine. I intended to remedy that situation myself.

Standing up, I braced my foot on the wall and pulled the axe free. The Snitch emerged from wherever it had been hiding, and followed behind as I stalked toward Hatchet Face. He and I had a play date, and I intended for it to be his last.

He'd gotten through all of his previous encounters with capes by being a cheating cheater, as I'd noted before. Ranged capes had to deal with his impressive durability; I doubted that even being dropped off a building would make much of an impression on him. Meanwhile, anyone (except me) who got within the radius of his no-power aura would suddenly be a normal up against a super-strong asshole with an axe. Which was the way he liked it.

Well, sorry (not sorry), but he wasn't going to get everything his own way. Or anything, really. Not anymore.

His skin was tough, sure. I wasn't going to be able to cut through it, even with his axe. But it was flexible. No hard carapace, here. Underneath, even though he undoubtedly had an impressively high pain threshold, he still had a nervous system. And the human nervous system came with all sorts of exploits just waiting for me to make use of them.

Not with my own fists and feet, of course. I could punch and kick him all day, and barely tickle him. But he'd thoughtfully supplied me with a long wooden handle equipped with a heavy metal weight on one end. I wasn't Archimedes, and Hatchet Face wasn't the world, but this lever was definitely long enough for me to move him to where I wanted him to go.

Specifically, the morgue.

I wouldn't even need to use the sharp edge.

Hefting the axe, I strode over toward where he lay.

Batter up, asshole.

<><>

Hatchet Face

Motherfucker.

I am going to murder her in ways that give me fucking nightmares.

Head ringing, he lay there, covered in bits and pieces of Crawler. They'd never been close, but being a member of the Slaughterhouse Nine had a tight-knit pride all of its own. You earned your membership in blood, and you only left if someone had the audacity and the capability to kill you.

He didn't know how Atropos had blown Crawler the fuck up, but he was going to make her pay for it in spades, even if Bonesaw had to bring her back to life a dozen times before he was satisfied. Raising himself to one elbow, he rubbed shit from the explosion out of his good eye—yet another reason to be pissed at that black-dressed little cocksucker—and began to look around … just in time to catch a tremendous blow to the face that smashed his nose in.

Eye filling with tears, he fell onto his back, hand coming up to cup his throbbing face and caved-in cartilage. "What th' fuck?" he mumbled.

He hadn't yet recovered from that before another thundering impact rocked his head sideways, sending his brain sloshing around in his skull. He tried to pull himself together, lashing out blindly, but he contacted nothing. The next hammer-blow smashed into his ear on the other side, compressing the air in his ear canal painfully and coming close to bursting his eardrum.

He'd always prided himself on being able to take a beating, but this was ridiculous. Being smacked around like a piñata, not being able to catch his bearings between one hit and the next, that wasn't his thing. He was the one who dealt out the damage, not the other guy.

Forcing himself to roll over despite his jangled wits, he pushed himself up into a crouch, head hanging down. Out of the corner of his good eye, he caught the faintest flicker of black before the next smashing impact caught him on the base of the skull in a classic rabbit-punch, dropping him face-first into the gory dirt once more.

It was more pure blind stubbornness that made him get up again. Apart from his nose, he wasn't injured as far as he could tell, but his skull was well and truly rattled, and it was getting harder and harder to make his limbs do what he wanted. But if he could just get his hands on Atropos ...

This time, he made it all the way up onto his knees before his vision cleared and he saw her standing before him, hefting his axe. He began to sneer at her; not only for not being strong enough to use it one-handed, but also for holding it the wrong way around. She side-stepped his grab like they'd choreographed it ahead of time, then she swung the axe in a deadly blur. Blunt though the back of it might be, it still hit him in the throat hard enough to make him choke and fall over backward.

He found he could still breathe, barely, as she loomed over him and spoke for the first time.

"I've only had to do this once before. She was an annoying little bitch, too. But she was on her second warning, so she got a pass. You're all out."

Before he could find his voice to curse at her, or say anything really, she slammed the head of the axe down into his solar plexus. His eye widened and his mouth gaped open as his difficulty with breathing became a total inability. Fuck! Fuck! What did she do? This was some Bonesaw-level shit, and he had no idea how to get out of it.

As his hands twitched feebly and his eye rolled in its socket, he saw her nod toward the little floating sphere he'd seen before. "Five down, three to go." Then she set off at a steady jog, out of his line of sight.

The last thing he heard as the darkness closed in was her receding footsteps.

Fuuuck ...

And then there was nothing.

<><>

Bonesaw

Jack's head came up, just as Riley heard what she thought was Hatchet Face shouting. It was probably something rude, she decided. He was always being rude when he thought he could get away with it.

"… something's going on," Jack said. "I think there's a fight."

"Is it a cape, like Hatchet Face said?" asked Riley.

Jack tilted his head, as though listening to something far away. "… no. I'm not sure what's happening, but I don't think—"

The explosion shook the ground and raised a cloud of oily smoke, several blocks away. Riley stared at it, then at Jack. "What was that?"

Now Jack actually looked concerned. This was a new expression for him. "I think it might be the PRT, to be honest. They must have tangled with our friends. No capes involved, or very few."

"Who won?" Jack would know. He always knew.

"We're leaving," Jack decided. "Now. No more waiting." He turned and hustled Riley toward the RV.

"What about the others?" Riley wanted to know. "Why aren't we waiting for them?"

"Because they aren't coming." He more or less lifted her on board. "Strap in, poppet. We're going to be driving far and fast."

She was too used to obeying his commands to argue. A good girl always did as she was told. As she was clicking the belt into the latch, Jack yanked the door shut—the Siberian was already in the RV—and settled into the driver's seat. The engine burst harshly to life, and he pushed it roughly into gear.

What did he mean, they're not coming? How could something kill them all? Especially Crawler?

The RV started off slowly, gradually accelerating over the potholed asphalt. Riley could feel the suspension creaking and groaning as Jack tried to force the massive vehicle to do something it wasn't suited to.

Then she heard Jack swear.

<><>

Atropos

I knew which way they'd come in by, and which road led back to the highway, so I probably could've figured out which way they'd go when Jack lost his nerve and tried to flee. With my power giving me a helping hand, I not only had that down, but also the precise second I could step out onto the road, pistol levelled. And as it happened, the escape route wasn't all that far from where Hatchet Face was resting in peace, and Crawler was resting in pieces.

Jack accelerated of course, swerving to aim directly at me. I could see him struggling to open his window, so he could lean out with a knife. The big RV, engine chuntering, bucked and rollicked through the potholes on a more or less direct course for me.

I fired four shots in quick succession.

Two went into the windshield, one on either side of Jack's head. Aiming at his head would've been useless, unless I made a very difficult shot; possible, but not in my plans. The entire pane of safety glass, of course, immediately crazed all the way across, making visibility a thing of the past.

My next two shots hit the passenger side front wheel, one blowing the valve stem clear off. The tyre began to deflate rapidly, catching Jack unawares and forcing the RV to veer sharply. Then I took three quick paces; not back into the alley I'd come from, but out into the street.

The RV blew past me and rammed into an electricity pole, going from a relatively sedate twenty miles per hour to a dead stop in an instant of time. It subsided, the front end more or less wrapped around the pole, the engine dying on the spot. The only way it was going to be moving again would be with outside assistance.

I re-holstered my pistol and pulled another small item from my pocket—a metal ring with a bent metal pin attached to it—as the side door opened and the Siberian emerged. In the distance, as the RV's engine cooled with ticks and pops, I heard another engine kick over.

The tiger-striped woman moved up to me in almost stop-motion fashion, her razor-sharp nails crooked like claws. I didn't try to flee, or even draw a weapon. "I'm sorry," I said.

She tilted her head sideways, as though trying to convey that all the 'sorry' in the world would do me no good right now.

"No," I clarified. "I'm saying sorry because I don't have a funny or witty or ironic death for you. I'm just going to kill you." I gently spun the ring on my finger, so the pin went around and around. "Here," I said, and tossed it to her.

She automatically caught it and stared at it for a moment. Then her eyes came up to meet mine, as I drew the shears and held them up between us. Deliberately, I snipped at the air, with a sound of metal sliding on metal. "Goodbye."

Her eyes went very wide, then she popped like a soap bubble. As the grenade pin fell to the ground, I heard the distant explosion of the grenade I'd taken it from; the one I'd carefully set up under William Manton's van before doubling back to intercept Crawler and Hatchet Face. A small fireball climbed into the sky, about ten blocks away.

Oni Lee, I suspected, would be pleased with that, if nothing else.

It was time for weapons again. I drew the pistol with my left hand. This time I had both Bonesaw and Jack Slash upset with me, but seriously, I'd warned them. What did they expect, coming to my city after I'd said I was going to kill them? A stern warning not to do it again?

Bonesaw stepped into the doorway at the same time as Jack Slash came around the front of the bus. She pointed, and a swarm of spider-bots poured past her, scuttling in my direction. Jack brought up the sharp-looking knife in his hand, aiming to disarm and then cripple me. Aww, he thinks he can bend me to his will and have Bonesaw remake me. That's almost cute.

I had twelve rounds left in the pistol, and Bonesaw had fifteen spider-bots. Each one was independently active and was armed with a neurotoxin that would paralyse me almost instantly. Off to my right, Jack Slash was highly skilled with his knife, and knew just where to cut for the greatest effect.

Closing my eyes, I took a deep breath. In my mind's eye swarmed the fifteen dots as they came toward me. One leaped at me, and I fired; the bullet went through it and one of its fellows. More came at me, climbing over each other in their eagerness. My pistol twitched back and forth, each shot taking a toll of the opposition. As I disposed of them, I moved closer, step by deliberate step.

Neither was my right hand idle. Jack's power swept over me, doing its level best to slice through my costume and draw blood. Unlike the other aspect of his power, which my power was currently glaring at and tapping a fist into its palm, this could actually hurt me if I chose to let it.

I didn't choose to let it.

The bodice shears I'd stolen from Kaiser's collection mere days ago (and were now counted among my most prized possessions) were made from solid high-quality steel. I could feel the impact of Jack's power as I used the shears to block it, like a gentle pressure trying to nudge past the obstacle. No matter where his cutting-effect went, I either wasn't there or had the shears in the way. From the way he was swinging the knife back and forth, he was getting more and more aggravated all the time.

Not that I could really blame him. He'd been playing the cape game on easy mode all his life, and now he was facing a deathmatch-level player. Being thrown in at the deep end like this would leave anyone feeling somewhat aggrieved.

Not that I really gave a fuck about his feelings. Welcome to what my world used to be like.

When the last of the spider-bots fell, I still had two bullets left and I was just a couple of paces from Bonesaw. Still fending off Jack's ever more desperate attacks with my right hand, I lunged forward. She came to meet me, fingernails popping metallic extensions which were no doubt treated with some horrific biotoxin or other.

I faked to the left, evading her attacks, then went to the right. A quick flip of the wrist sent my pistol spinning into the air, further distracting Bonesaw, then I reached out and grabbed the tool I needed from a pocket in her bloodstained apron. Specifically, a long, sharp medical probe.

While she was still reacting to the theft, I stabbed it into her ear canal, all the way into her brain. Her eyes rolled up into her head almost immediately, even as I was pulling it out again, and she collapsed on the spot. Discarding the probe, I caught the pistol again and fired a single unnecessary shot into her skull.

Unnecessary in that it wouldn't do a damn thing to her, given how armoured her bones were. But the fact of the shot, and her stillness thereafter, would serve to convince nearly everyone that she was dead. As a matter of fact, she was merely unconscious; I'd used the probe to give her hypothalamus a good nudge, damaging the part that regulated sleep. She would be out like a light for the foreseeable future, which left me free to concentrate on Jack Slash himself.

Turning toward him, I deliberately started forward. "That makes seven." Almost casually, I deflected another attempt at slicing me open. My pace was nice and steady, all the better to intimidate him. "Your turn, Jack. How do you want it?"

Even before he opened his mouth, I knew the bullshit was about to start flowing. It was his modus operandi, his bread and butter. Mastering capes with his voice was how he'd survived for so long.

Unfortunately for him, every time his power tried to get its hooks into me, it was met with the equivalent of a nail-studded baseball bat. My power didn't play. He had to be trying to figure out why he wasn't getting any hunches about me ... but once again, I gave no shits whatsoever.

"Ahh ... you're very good at what you do. I can totally respect that." It wasn't the best start in the world, but he was used to being able to cheat, so I didn't deduct as many marks as I might have.

"You've never respected another human being in your life. Lie to me again, and you die." He was going to die anyway, so I was telling the technical truth. The best kind, in my opinion. "What are you doing in my city? I believe I already put the word out that I was going to kill you. Just how stupid are you, anyway?"

It wasn't a warm day, but I could see a sheen of sweat on his forehead. "I ... uh ... the truth of the matter is, we weren't coming to kill you. We wanted to recruit you."

"Recruit?" I repeated the word with all the enthusiasm I would use for handling a thoroughly deceased skunk. "What on earth gave you the idea that I would allow a bunch of losers like you to associate with me? Your methods are tacky, self-defeating, pointless and utterly lacking in anything resembling a sense of style. Hell, I wouldn't recruit you, let alone allow you to recruit me."

His eyes flared at that. I'd attacked his pride, which wasn't difficult; it was the easiest target on him. His ego should've been visible from space. "Now, hold on there—!"

As he raised his voice, he spun his knife, then tried to use his cutting attack again. Firing from the hip, I shot the knife from his hand, the blade shattering in mid-air. At the same time, I surged forward, getting right up into his face. My shears pricked at the flesh under his jaw.

He froze. I knew he had subdermal mesh, and he knew he had subdermal mesh, but he couldn't be absolutely certain that I was unable to punch the shears up into his brain anyway. Or kill him in half a dozen other painful or unforeseen ways; Lung's demise had certainly taught all and sundry to be wary of me.

Also, he'd seen me vanish the Siberian with a snip of the shears, but he hadn't seen the grenade pin or figured out how I'd defended myself against his attack. For all he knew, they were a piece of ungodly powerful Tinkertech that could disintegrate him at a thought.

"You get a one-minute head start, Jack," I said quietly. "And that's being generous. Go."

He tried briefly to stare me down, but it wasn't exactly an option to use on someone who was wearing a morph mask. Then abruptly, he turned and bolted.

I was in no hurry. Strolling into the alley, I retrieved Hatchet Face's axe from where I'd stashed it behind an ancient dumpster. Then I reloaded the pistol, waited exactly one minute, and set out at a steady jog. Not in pursuit; the word suggested a chase of some kind. Instead, I went to where he'd be.

<><>

Jacob

Jack Slash ran for his life. Sweat dripping into his eyes, breath rasping in his lungs, he forced himself onward, looking for someplace he could hide and maybe ambush Atropos from surprise. Recruiting her was no longer on the table; she'd torn through his entire line-up like a bandsaw on steroids, and there was no indication that she felt like being any more merciful to him.

Staggering into a narrow alleyway, he leaned against the wall and tried to catch his breath. It wasn't fair; he was never the one who had to run for his life. That was the victim's job. What he'd usually consider a fun and bracing diversion was no such thing when seen from the other side.

The pause gave him a chance to think. If I double back, I can get behind her. All I need to do is catch her off guard just once.

Looking up gave him the clue he needed to put his plan into action. A fire escape, rusty and partially fallen apart, hung almost to ground level. Its saving grace had been the narrowness of the alley; where it was detached from the wall on one side, it was able to lean against the other.

Seizing the rungs, he began to climb upward, careful to minimise the amount of creaking. The higher he got without Atropos appearing at either end of the alleyway, the more confidence he regained. Think you're so smart, do you? Well, I've been doing this since before you were born.

Finally, he scrambled up onto the roof, his hands scraped and sore from the rough metal. Two of his nails were broken, and the sleeve of his dress shirt was torn. You're going to die, just for that. Drawing a knife, he kept low by instinct and circled around the perimeter of the rooftop, looking out for a black-dressed figure or a bobbing sphere. Neither one appeared, which meant she'd probably passed him by altogether.

A lesser man would've given up on getting the better of her and simply left Brockton Bay for greener pastures and the chance to start rebuilding the Nine, but Jack Slash was cut from tougher cloth than that. He had been winning against capes since the beginning of his career, when he killed King for the leadership of the Nine, and he didn't intend to stop now. He thought he'd figured out her secret already, and he was going to kill her then display her corpse for all of Brockton Bay to see.

"Think you're so smart, don't you?" he muttered to himself as he used a tanto knife to force open the rusting door at the top of the stairwell. "A normal using Tinkertech to pretend to have powers. Well, you're not the first one to think of that. Not by a long shot. Once I figure out how to get around your tech, you're going to be just as dead as everyone else who's come up against me."

Cautiously, guiding himself with one hand against the wall, he descended into the shadowed depths of the building. A little light filtered through here and there, but most of the windows were boarded up to one degree or another, so it mainly served to accentuate the darkness. He breathed carefully, trying not to inhale dust; the last thing he wanted was for a random sneeze to alert his pursuer.

When he reached the first floor, he took up a position around the corner from the main entrance. The front door was barely open, with a thin line of light spilling onto the floor within. He'd know if she passed by, or if she tried to gain entry. Either way, he could attack from surprise, and she'd never see it coming.

Savouring the moment of atavism, he worked his fingers on the hilt of the knife. The moment she let him out of her sight, she'd signed her own death certificate. He had the advantage now, and he wasn't going to let it go—

From right behind him, a voice murmured, "Dark in here, isn't it?"

<><>

Atropos

He froze for half a second, then with a scream partly composed of anger and partly of terror, he pivoted toward me, knife hand coming around. I ducked under the effect of his blade, then swung the axe. The difference between our two attacks? He thought he knew my location, whereas I definitely knew his. More specifically, I knew where his wrist was going to be.

He'd been armoured and reinforced by Bonesaw, but only so much could be done for his wrist. When a heavy axe propelled by a moderately determined set of muscles encounters the delicate collection of bones and ligaments that make up the average adult's wrist, it's usually the wrist that gives way.

His hand separated from the rest of him and fell to the floor, the knife clattering alongside it. At that moment, his scream hit a decidedly higher pitch, going from 'terror plus anger' to 'oh my god what happened to my hand'. "Fuuck!" he shrieked as I wrenched the axe from where it had buried itself in the wall. "What did you do? What did you do?"

I'd kind of thought that was obvious. "I cut your hand off, duh. Might want to put some pressure on that, it's going to start bleeding badly in a moment."

Once my words penetrated his consciousness, he actually reacted correctly. Maybe his decades as America's most hated murderhobo had actually instilled some useful skills, after all. More or less tearing off his shirt with his left hand, he wrapped it tightly around the stump of his right wrist and pulled it tight. Blood soaked through it immediately, of course, but he wouldn't bleed out in the next few minutes.

Once he had it secured as well as he was going to, he turned to me. "I'm not getting medical attention, am I?"

"No," I said quietly. "You are not."

"You were waiting in here for me, weren't you?" There was still a spark of the old Jack there, keeping a lookout for a chance, but he wasn't reaching for a knife just yet.

"Yeah. Came in through the front door while you were climbing the other side."

The conclusion had to be obvious. He might've been an unrepentant mass murderer, but he wasn't stupid. "You … knew where I'd be. You knew where we'd all be."

I swung the axe up to rest across my shoulders. "It wasn't all that hard to figure out. Honestly, Jack, you're getting predictable in your old age."

He let out the ghost of a pained snort. "Not that predictable. You're like me. A monster who knows how to read people. So, why are you opposing me? If we were on the same side, we could be so much greater than the sum of our parts."

And there it came once more; the inevitable attempt to turn this around with his infamous silver tongue. As my power smacked his power across the face, it was my turn to chuckle dryly. "Hardly. You flatter yourself if you think you're anything like me. I set you on this Path the moment I killed Oni Lee and announced myself, and you've followed every footstep ever since like a good little puppet, right to this moment. As for being a monster, we're still nothing alike."

"Monsters are still monsters, no matter how they pretty themselves up," he argued. "You're just playing the nice guy for the peanut gallery. One day, you'll realise that they only like you for what they can get from you. You should start taking your due now, rather than waiting until it's almost too late." I could feel him beaming, sure he'd made his point.

"Oh, I'm definitely a monster," I agreed. "I'm someone who commits atrocities and breaks the social contract on the regular. That's me all over. But what you don't get is the difference between you and me. See, I'm reliable. I announce what I'm going to do, and I do it. I warn people if they're a problem for me, and I let them live if they change their ways. You kill people for fun, at random, for no good reason except that you want to see their blood run down your blade. All that effort does nothing but earn you negative press, which makes the whole thing self-defeating. Not to mention, tacky as fuck."

"Oh, I see," he sneered. "A monster with a code. How very dreary. Did you give Oni Lee any kind of warning before you shot him in the face? How about us? Or do you just break your code whenever it's convenient?"

I had to chuckle. "You don't get it, do you? Oni Lee was the warning, to everyone in Brockton Bay. You're the warning to everyone outside of it. As for codes? I don't have one. Codes can be manipulated and exploited. I just do what works, to keep my life as simple as possible."

"Still boring," he challenged me. "I've splashed the reputation of the Slaughterhouse Nine in blood across the public consciousness for more than two decades. They'll forget you the day after you hang up the mask, but they'll be scared of me for years to come."

"No," I said. "They won't. You see, Jack, I don't just kill people. I end things. And one of the things I'll be ending is your legacy. Your reputation. By the time I'm finished with you, you'll be nothing but a footnote, a cautionary tale: 'Don't be an idiot. Don't be like Jack Slash'. When the kids play heroes and villains … not even the edgiest of edgelords will want to be you."

Now, finally, I had penetrated to the core of him. I saw him shake his head, no longer playfully, but desperately. "No," he said. Where he wouldn't plead for his life, he would plead for this. "You wouldn't. You can't."

Smoothly, I stepped to the side and brought the axe off my shoulders. "I can, I have, I am, and I will. Time to cut this short, Jack."

"Wait—"

He turned his head in the darkness, his left hand grabbing for one of the knives he was still wearing, but it was too late. The axe hissed through the air, its carefully honed edge still razor-sharp despite the trials it had been through. It struck squarely between the second and third cervical vertebrae, splitting the armoured mesh and severing his spinal cord.

Jack Slash fell, a puppet with his strings cut. I put my foot on his back and wrenched the axe out, then struck again and again, deepening the first cut. It took some effort to get all the way through the 'improvements' Bonesaw had added to his neck—attempting to cut his throat with anything short of a chainsaw would've been utterly useless—but eventually his head rolled free.

Picking it up by his hair, I put the axe over my other shoulder, and left the building. The Snitch hummed out after me. I took a moment to enjoy the afternoon sunlight, then headed back toward the RV.

Nothing had disturbed the scene, and Bonesaw still lay half-in, half-out of the vehicle as though she'd just lain down for a nap. Her fingernail extensions had automatically retracted, which was a good thing; I didn't want to risk anyone getting hurt. I dropped Jack's head beside the RV, then put the axe down for a moment. It took me both hands to sling Bonesaw over my shoulder, and one to steady her once she was in place; she was heavy, but I wasn't going to be carrying her far.

Turning to the tiny floating ball, I gestured with my free hand. "Show's over," I said.

Obediently, it stopped recording and headed off toward where Dragon was still waiting patiently. The PRT would absolutely want the footage it had gathered. Picking up the axe again, I strolled out of the area, back toward civilisation; or rather, toward the car that had pulled up on a quiet side-street, two minutes ago.

Dad looked a little askance as I deposited Bonesaw's still-sleeping form on the back seat of the car and pulled a blanket over her. "Do I even want to know?" he asked.

"Part of ending the legacy of the Nine," I explained as I wrapped the axe head in the cloth I'd left there for just that purpose, and placed it on the floor of the car. Then I removed my hat and mask, and climbed in.

"And the axe?" He raised an eyebrow.

"Hatchet Face doesn't need it anymore," I said lightly. "Plus, I just beat him to death with it, and cut off Jack Slash's head. I figure it's earned a break."

He shuddered slightly. "I wish I could say I was surprised, but I'm really not. And what are we going to do with Bonesaw?"

I grinned. "I've got that sorted. Someone owes me a solid."

Part 22