Shaking, shivering, and pouring entirely too much sweat, Bedevil soars over Houston after Gabe. Plumes of smoke rise just south of downtown, from Gabe’s march toward the Shrine. She wants to fly faster, to push harder, but her stomach already wants to flop out of her mouth, and her legs and arms tremble just from the effort of manipulating the density of the air around her.
She prays to Metis, the old Christian God, and whoever will hear her: “Please don’t let me barf and I’ll become a nun.”
Bedevil dives down, stomach whirling. Bile rises up her throat. It burns, but she holds it down. But just as she manages to get her stomach under control, she flies into a cloud of smoke, losing sight of everything. She screams, falls, hits the side of a brick wall and tumbles.
She tries to cushion her fall by conjuring a pillow below her but hits the ground before she can finish. The landing knocks the wind out of her. Thankfully, she’s still Heavyweight durable. Otherwise the fall might have killed her.
“Well, I didn’t throw up,” she thinks. “Gotta become a nun.”
Better than being a cape at this point. She catches her breath, rises to her feet.
Ahead of her, there’s screaming, explosions, and the other notes of Affected battle. This Gabriel is carving his way through Houston like a butcher. She stumbles out of the burning wreckage, trying to get back into the sky to chase him down. She’s less than a quarter mile behind him now - she could catch up fast if he’s taking his time to fight capes on his way to the Shrine.
A single shining point rises out of the smoke, a star piercing the veil. It ascends above the city and then shoots downward, and a rumbling earthquake follows. Bedevil gasps as the world shakes below her feet. The star rises again, this time a bit further, headed toward the Houston Shrine. It falls again. Another quake.
The beat of Gabriel’s march picks up, reaches a crescendo, each rumble coming so fast that they begin to slur together. Bedevil thinks, somewhere distantly in her lizard brain behind her Affect and working mind, “I should take cover. I am going to die if I do not hide.”
A shaft of white light pierces everything, without sound, without a rumble like before. Bedevil remains transfixed by the death wave barreling toward her. The silent power touches buildings and their outer shells become dust in a rolling wave that moves from front to back so fast Bedevil can barely process it. It shatters the windows, scatters the plume of smoke and the clouds that have gathered in a single ring, spreading out over the city.
Bedevil, at the last second, remembers her vulnerability. She pulls herself about six feet down into the ground, just as the silent beam of power becomes loud, raging, its roar putting all other sound to shame. She screams, but the wall of sound consumes it, consumes all other sounds. The vibration goes into her bones.
When it passes, she pulls herself back up out of the earth, staring in horror at the broken world around her.
A soup of pyroclastic smoke swallows Houston. What’s left of the skyline peeks out of the black-gray shroud, bits of glass and steel glowing red-hot from the immense meteoric impact of whatever the holy fuck that just was.
She’s got to get to him now. If she doesn’t, a lot more people are going to die. She wraps tendrils of her power around the wall of a crumbling building and a leaning light post, creating an invisible slingshot. She pulls back, increasing the elasticity of her invisible limbs, pulls and pulls and pulls until it feels like they might snap from the pressure.
Then she lets go. Her invisible wings catch on the superheated wind. She rises high above the streets, and from here she sees the extent of Gabriel’s destruction. Towers cleaved, highways crumbled, molten concrete flowing. Veins of fire spread along his path going from PK’s campus to downtown.
Bedevil feels like she’s diving through the skies of hell. She flies through clouds of smoke belched up from the blazing inferno beneath her, coughing and choking, searching for him. And there he is, an immense, bright star in the smoke below her. Her heart skips a beat.
She pierces the smoke, and her heart skips another beat as she sees Gabriel with one hand buried in a blue-armored cape’s chest, pulling him along like a broken toy as he stalks after another cape, a muscled brute beaten to a bloody pulp, who’s trying to crawl away across pavement hissing with steam. The armored cape is still clinging to life, grasping helplessly at Gabriel’s arm.
She sheathes herself in her power, shielding herself from the intense radiation. She can feel it washing over her, swallowing, decaying, melting. Her engramic reinforcement might protect her a little while, but not very long. Mateo would have seconds. Paul might not even know what had hit him.
Megajoule had told her once that if he wanted it, he could wash everything around him in lethal poison, bathe it in radiation. Gabriel must be doing that now, turning the very air around him into a killing weapon.
Her whole body trembles from the effort of protecting herself… how can I fight him if I’m barely able to survive?
But she falls to meet him anyway. Because there is no choice. Bedevil has made up her mind – she’s going to save Gabe or she’s going to die trying.
Ten feet above him, as he holds his hand up in a motion to flick something at the cape trying to crawl away, Bedevil whips out a tendril, snapping Gabriel’s hand away from a killing blow. Her sudden arrival causes him to look up, passively, as if she’s an annoying fly rather than an incoming threat. But when he sees who’s come to face him, his face splits into a malevolent grin.
“If it isn’t the sidekick!” He tosses the armored cape to the side. “I was wondering if you’d show up after I chased you away! I’m glad you came back.”
Metis. Every expression, every word, sounds and looks like him. Julian, her Julian. Only her Julian would never talk like this. Would never do something like this. It’s the same body, same face, same icemelt blue eyes watching her. But whereas Julian watched her like a leader, a mentor, a man who saw her as nothing more than his underling, and Gabe watched her like an equal, like a man, Gabriel watches her like a wolf. Like his next move is to tear her throat out with his teeth.
“You look a little unsteady,” Gabriel says. “Must be quite a shock, after everything, seeing my face.”
“You’re not him,” she says, although he’s not wrong. She is shocked to see him, has been since Gabe took off his mask. She glances over her shoulder, sees that the other cape has crawled out of sight. Hopefully she can buy him and anyone else nearby enough time to evacuate. “You’re not Gabe.”
“I am Gabe,” the thing controlling Gabe says, “And I am Megajoule. I am the shadow they cast together.”
“You’re a parasite. Nothing more than that.” She flexes her power, willing as many tendrils out of her shield as she can. Eight of them, an invisible force ready to transmute everything around them. If she can change the battlefield, she can keep him from charging up. She just has to survive. Just long enough to bring him to Paul.
Gabriel approaches her, his eyes wild. “Do you think you can actually stand up to me? You’re just a sidekick. A helpless little puppy still head over heels for a man who never loved you back! I’ve got all of his power AND Home Run’s. I’ve got more than he did when he died, and I can feel more coming in by the second.” He flings his arms wide, whirls around like the hills are alive with the sound of music, and he laughs like a maniac. Then, he locks eyes with her again. “You’ve gotta know you can’t ever hope to beat me. But since you were his sidekick, I’ll give you a courtesy. What did you come here hoping to accomplish, since you know you can’t kill me? You must have some request.”
Bedevil looks up at the city, burning to death. At the ruin and wreck of Houston. She’s hated this city from the moment she arrived, but seeing it like this fills her heart with a despair so cold and deep it might never leave her after this. She turns her gaze back to Gabriel. The one who did all of this.
“Yeah. Die.”
She launches herself into the air with her tendrils, slingshotting out of his immediate attack, while also dissolving the ground below him into sludge. He sinks only a few feet before breaking into hyena-laughter again. She loses sight of him.
Then he’s above her - she feels the shift in the air before his blow lands home, and she thinks, “This is it. He’s going to kill me.”
The blade of his hand hits her shield with atomic power. Light and sound swallow everything, and she knows she’s going to die - cleaved down to cells by this force. She tightens her shield on instinct, so dense that not even radiation can pass through it, and for that split second she is submerged in darkness until she crashes into the ground. The earth buckles and erupts underneath her landing, throwing molten debris into the air.
At first she thinks she’s definitely dead, ripped in half by Gabriel’s immense power… but she’s okay. She took a blow dead on and she’s alive.
Bedevil gets to her hands and knees and looks at the impact crater. Two unfortunate buildings in the radius crumble from Gabriel’s attack. The man himself floats down, still laughing wildly.
“Wow! Anybody else and they’d be dead. You’re something else, sidekick!”
No time to waste. She pulls herself up into the air, rips up chunks from the earth and launches them at him. Dozens of light-pole sized spears, and Gabriel meets them with his vicious smile. They glance off his body without so much as a scratch in his clothes.
His counterattack - a playful backhand as he warps within a foot of her - hits her shield and cracks it. Bedevil has to stop herself from screaming. Rail gun rounds have bounced off her power, even missiles have fallen short.
But Gabriel is beyond strength.
Another blow, this time aimed at her stomach. Blazing fingers that could melt through steel beams. She concentrates her power there, protecting herself before he can run her through, but the power of it launches her into the sky. Glass and concrete shatter against her back as she smashes into an office building. People shriek in fear as she flies past. Gabriel chases her through the office like a mad dog, his teeth bared, every limb carrying him in a loping run like a beast.
Holy fuck, holy fuck, holy fuck.
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He brings his heel down on her in an axe kick. There’s a bomb’s worth of energy in his foot. The building bursts. All those voices, all these lives, silenced. Bedevil cries out as everything collapses around her.
She’s got to mount a response. Her stomach whirls, her body shakes, but she has to try. She sends out as many tendrils as she can manage, snatching up all that debris and forming it into a cloud of swords. A thousand cuts all aimed for Gabriel - she doesn’t want to kill him, doesn’t even think it’s possible, but maybe it’ll be a mercy if she does manage it somehow.
“There we go!” Gabriel calls, floating forward through the slashes. They don’t even cut his clothes. He claps his hands in mock applause. “That’s what I’d expect of the most famous cape alive.”
While he’s busy making fun of her and powering through the cuts, Bedevil reaches out with another tendril and transmutes all the smoke above him into a rock hard diamond the size of a football field. The effort churns her gut, makes her want to vomit, but she keeps pushing until bile runs up her throat.
Gabriel stops clapping, visibly surprised by the appearance of the massive weight just above him. The diamond crashes down, flattening everything, including Gabriel.
She spits the acidic taste out of her mouth and conjures more weapons, surrounding herself in a whirlwind of death, and waits for him to emerge. She glances over her shoulder, looking for Mateo’s signal. Green strobing light shines from the top of a tower not a mile away.
The diamond starts to glow from within. She returns her attention to the battle.
Gabriel shatters through it, unharmed, still laughing as if this is all just a joke.
Bedevil launches her next attack, dancing into range like a spinning ballerina, intent on hitting him a few times and retreating to force him to chase her toward Mateo and Paul. She smashes her invisible armory into him with everything she has and tries to pull back.
“I can see it!” Gabriel cackles. “I can see your power! The movement, the flow of it!” He reaches a blazing hand up and grabs one of her tendrils.
Oh fuck.
The ruined city whirls around her in a quick panorama and then she’s flying in the air - away from Mateo’s light. “No!” she screams, trying to adjust her flight in midair by conjuring invisible parachutes.
Gabriel warps behind her and grabs her by the scruff of her neck. “Oh, man, you doing okay? You’re looking a little pale around the gills, there.” Another insane, reality-melting attack follows this as he turns her around and flicks her shield right over her face. It’s all she can do to keep him from vaporizing her defense - and to keep the fight heading toward Paul and Mateo.
She finally lands from that last blow, crashing into the second floor of an apartment. Hitting the wall knocks the wind right out of her. Gasping for breath, she stares at the hole she made, knowing he’ll charge through it any second. A full third of Houston’s skyline crumbles, smolders. Drones fall from the sky like wasps dying by fire.
Bedevil now knows she has never seen an apocalypse. Not like this.
This is the real end of the world.
I knew that he had more engrams, that he’d be stronger. I’d always known that about Megajoule, always wondered about how a fight between us would go…
Lights flicker above her head. Whimpers draw her attention to a family of three cowering behind a kitchen table ten feet from her. Their living room is in tatters. “S-s-sorry,” Bedevil manages. “Are you ok-okay?”
The mother of the family, a woman in her 40’s with black hair turning silver, says, “Are we okay?”
And then the devil is at the door. Old Grinning Gabriel slinks through the hole Bedevil made in the wall, his body glowing with power. She can feel the energy inside him. The storm that she once sensed in Home Run, a blip on the radar compared to this immense strength. A summer shower versus the Red Spot on Jupiter.
Gabriel tsks her. “You’re not done, are you?”
Before she can do anything, he warps behind the family with a superheated gale. They scream as the air around them hisses with the sudden influx of heat. Gabriel leers at them, raises a hand. “Nobody move or you’re dead!”
Everyone complies. They don’t even breathe. Terrified, Bedevil tries to work out how she can save them before he makes a move.
Gabriel stares down at the family cringing at his feet. He chuckles and asks, “Do any of you capes care about these people? Or do you only see them as batteries?”
“H-huh?” Bedevil asks, trying to catch her breath enough to transmute the floor or conjure a wall.
“Don’t use your power. I’ll know, I can see it, remember? If you do…” His grin widens, his outstretched hand shakes with excitement. “I’ll kill them all before you can blink.”
“W-what do you want?” she asks. He must want something, otherwise he’d be killing everyone in this room right now.
“I want to know where I can find the miserable wretch that started all of this. The woman who made me,” Gabriel says. “I want Oracle. I want to eat her heart while she watches. I want the world to see their god die before they do.”
Bedevil couldn’t ever give him that. He has to know that. But she’s got to buy time to save this family. “Why? Why her?”
The monster wrinkles his nose in disdain. “You… you all have control of this system. The economy of emotion, of engrams. Manipulating everyone into giving you power. And for years and years you have used my face to do it. You strung me up like a corpse on your walls to gain power. Because what’s good for Megajoule is what’s good for the capes, and the man wasn’t around to use it himself, was he? But doing that meant people have been making payments into my account. Thousands of engrams every second. Hundreds of thousands every hour. Millions every day. You never thought about where all of that was going? Who had the credit card? The key to the vault?”
It was theorized that all those engrams were just spread out evenly among the capes. But doing the equations on such a large engram transfer… it’s difficult to get the numbers precise. They always assumed any excess was cast off, evaporated.
“We know one thing about this universe.” Gabriel raises one finger of his free hand, keeping his threat steady with the other. “It’s that energy is neither created nor destroyed.”
“That doesn’t answer my question,” Bedevil says, finally catching her breath. She rises to her feet, seeing if he’ll allow the movement. He does, but she never takes her eyes off him, just in case.
“You all made me! Oracle had me made physically, but the rest of the world kept me alive with their thoughts and prayers. I’m here entirely against my will, if I’m being honest.” He looks down at the family, almost in pity. “Maybe if I kill Oracle first, maybe if I break the hope of the world, I won’t have to kill them all, and they’ll let me die at last. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”
His Affect exudes sorrow for a split second. The father, mother, and young son look up, wondering if they’re going to be spared.
But Bedevil knows what a practiced liar looks like. Because she’s a practiced liar. She tries to worm her tendrils through the floor, hoping he can’t see them moving through solid material. “No. I don’t want you to die. I want you to let go of Gabe. If all you want is to fade away, then give him back the reins.”
Gabriel’s facade cracks into a malevolent smile. He looks down at the floor.
“You got me monolouging!” Gabriel raises his hand to slaughter the cowering family, the tips of his fingers glowing like lightbulb filaments -
And halts, halfway through the motion. Gabriel’s whole face turns red, his veins stand out, and his neck bulges as if he’s struggling with the world’s heaviest squat attempt. He looks back at his hand, stuck in the air, his eyebrows arched in confusion.
He’s still in there. Gabe’s still in there.
Bedevil pulls the family through the floor and into the apartment below them, landing them on a soft cushion of air. With them safe, she leaps at Gabriel. She coils a thousand fibers of invisible air around her right arm, giving herself a huge, muscled tricep and shoulder, and slams a hook into Gabriel’s distracted face. This punch launches him out of the building, thankfully without bringing the whole thing down.
Gabe’s fighting for his body. And Bedevil knows there’s a chance now - there’s hope, there’s a chance to save everyone. And if Bedevil is anything, she’s an old school cape. If there’s even the slightest chance to save everyone, she’s going to try.
She slingshots herself after Gabriel with every ounce of her power, catching up to him as he tumbles toward that distant, still-hopeful signal from Mateo.
“Gabe! Gabe! Please listen to me! Keep fighting it! We’re going to stop him!” Bedevil cries, wrapping Gabriel up in an envelope of invisible air.
“You’re talking to a dead man, sidekick!” Gabriel screams back at her. Even though he can’t move his right arm, he brings his knee up with explosive force, shattering the trap. The blast pushes them apart, but their trajectory is still taking them to Paul and Mateo.
Bedevil snarls, pulls out every weapon she can think of, and hooks herself to Gabriel with as many ropes as she can conjure. He launches a flurry of blows, breaking Bedevil’s transmutations with each one, but she keeps them coming. Even though her body runs with chills and her stomach threatens to spill out of her mouth, she wedges everything she can into the crack Gabe seems to be making for her.
Gabriel locks eyes with her, and what she sees terrifies her. Hatred. Immense, unending hatred, and the will to enact it. His body starts to shine again, radiating all the power coiled in him. Bedevil tries to block it out, but it’s so much energy it’s impossible. If not for her engramic reinforcement, she’d be boiled alive in her own envelope. They revolve around each other like twin stars about to collide, and Gabriel fights with his own body as much as he fights against her power.
“Come on!” she yells. “Gabe, it’s your body!”
Gabriel, his mouth and eyes wide, drags her closer to him by her bindings. The air howls from the energy radiating off his body. Sweltering heat kisses her cheeks and starts to actually burn.
“You’re your own person!”
“No, he’s not,” Gabriel says, his maniacal joy finally evaporated into pure rage. He scowls at Bedevil and flexes his right hand to show he’s regained control. “That’s enough out of you, little brother.”
She risks a look up at how far they are from Mateo’s light.
It’s gone. Oh, Metis. That’s it. I’m going to die.
Gabriel rips free of her tendrils and slams his fist onto her head, sinking her into the ground up to her waist and completely halting their momentum. Her mind spins, dazed by the blow. Then another blow flies at her face, and her shield can’t stop all of it.. The energy is just enough to smash into her nose, pull her up out of the ground, and send her rolling down the street. She lands on her back, looking up at the sky.
She prays: Metis. I know I keep moving the goal posts, but one more thing. Please. And I’ll definitely never drink again and never have sex again and never-
Gabriel strolls up to her, his face dark, his Affect radiating with malice. “I guess that’s it, sidekick.”
“I might be a sidekick but at least my body does what I want!” she shouts, slinging up to meet him once more. “And if you think I’m even close to giving up, you’re delusional.”
Her next moments are not truly conscious, just instinctual, trying to weave shields to block Gabriel’s attacks, blazing air washing over her, absolute terror. Metis, she tries. She fights with everything she has. An arsenal of transmutations. They collapse the city block. Explosions thunder in the sky. The terror of an already terrified city. The already fragile power grid goes down with a sickening pop during one of their clashes. The highway below them rips to shreds. The sky churns like the ocean.
And above it all, Gabriel’s braying laughter and absolute strength. He’s right. She can’t beat him - it’s simple math.
By the end of it, she’s utterly exhausted and she hasn’t made a scratch on Gabriel. She lands, tries to stay upright, but can’t. She collapses to her knees, her chest heaving, her suit drenched with sweat. It’s her fault for not being serious about becoming a nun.
“I suppose I’m a bit sad,” Gabriel says, appearing out of thin air next to her, lording over her, picking at his fingernails. “The rest of the world will probably be much less of a challenge than you. For that, you should be proud. You’re the best of them.”
He brings his fist up. Bedevil half expects Gabe to take control now - that’d be the good ending, right? She managed to get Gabriel to spend all his strength on her – he isn’t even producing radiation anymore. Which must mean he’s tired. And maybe… inspired by her bravery, her relentless battle, Gabe manages to take back his body from the exhausted demon, to finally be his own person, and he runs away with Bedevil and they fall in love and everything is wonderful.
But Gabriel’s fist doesn’t stop midair. His shoulder turns and it begins the downward arc to end her life. She can’t even find the strength to block it.
A glowing disc intercepts the blow, shattering like a glass plate hitting the kitchen floor as Gabriel punches it - but it deflects him from killing Bedevil.
“No!” she whispers as Mateo drops from the sky on another glowing disc. He’ll never survive. If she had no chance to touch Gabriel, Mateo is doomed within seconds.
Gabriel’s wild eyes fall on them and his grin widens even more. He warps to the kid, snatches him off his own board, and drags him to the ground in one fluid motion. Mateo doesn’t even have time to yelp. “The brat! Metis, are none of you smart enough to run? I’d feel bad if you weren’t so stupid!”
Bedevil tries to stand, to save Mateo, but she’s utterly done. She falls to her knees, steadying herself with one hand, and reaches out feebly with her Affect to transmute something between them. But she’s not going to make it.
An old, shaky hand grabs Gabriel’s wrist.
It’s Paul, his skin blistering, his clothes catching on fire. He shouldn’t have come this close, this wasn’t the plan. He’s going to die just from the burns alone. But he’s here anyway, grabbing Gabriel’s - Gabe’s - arm.
Gabriel’s eyes go wide. “No! I’m not going back in there! You can’t lock me away, you old bastard!” Red fire licks from his fingertips, and he whips his fist around, smashing it through Paul’s chest.
Paul’s face twists as if to scream, but he makes no sound. Instead, he grabs Gabriel’s face, and holds him like a son.