It was nice to be reminded that Garrick had faith in her, but the headache in front of her was even bigger than she realised and the only support she had out here was intelligence.
Okay GalvanGal, use your brain here. You are over the skies of the Cianjhen District of Kaohsiung city. There is an army that has seemingly overnight occupied the, according to Garrick, largest harbor in the country. They say they are here to hunt down a fugitive but they are really here to take back control from the Immortals. The Immortals are using criminal elements as a proxy to control the country. The only way this conflict can end is to take away the fugitive they are using as an excuse to fight.
How do you do that? Go to the Taiwanese authorities? No, if Garrick is right then this ‘Heavenly Way’ has embedded themselves in the government and has already comprised anyone she could go to. The Heavenly Way, through information from official and illicit channels, would surely know more about the status of the boat survivors including the fugitive. If that’s the case, they might already have the fugitive, or even have killed them. Then both me and the security forces would be on a goose chase. But then they would go public with it because having their enemy occupying their country can’t be good for them so maybe they don’t know where the fugitive is? It would be great to work with the police forces, follow their lead, get them to calm down, but they called her out just to tell her to stay away. If she does interfere, what are they willing to do? What is this ‘Yimou Zhang’ capable of?
Ugh, maybe she should have just asked Garrick what to do. Maybe she should be more independent, maybe he won’t always be there, but they were a team, there was nothing wrong with relying on teammates, right? She pulled out her phone and, in the black mirror, saw Hannah Vandimion, the girl who danced in peace while her friends were suffering and the world was burning. She looked up at the city below her and saw corpses and ruin long run cold.
‘When they hold up the ashes and ask you why, will you be able to tell them that you held back?’
GalvanGal zipped her phone away. She was the one here, so she should at least get a better grasp of the situation on the ground before she calls for help.
Electroreception did not expend energy, rather, it attuned her to the rhythm of life. She closed her eyes to shut out unneccessaries and felt the heartbeat of the city. The traffic that ran along asphalt arteries. The electricity being carried along pathways and tracts to power concrete musculature. Botanical skin that absorbed heat during the day and produced oxygen for urban lungs that exhaled carbon. The city was colder with the mouth of its harbor sewn shut by that dissonance. That dissonance had spread throughout the arteries of the city like blood clots, especially in Cianjhen District.
If they are concentrated here then it might be because they have a lead. While her hearing is not usually precise, she can focus it if she has a target, and the dissonance from the Police Forces is the only thing standing out. One group of soldiers have left a building, so she’ll start with them. Okay, so they do have a lead… the fugitive is at… the mall… they are going to recall other teams to the main force to secure the perimeter and any other exit paths… they’ll evacuate the mall and wait on Zimou to flush the fugitive out. The team she was eavesdropping on was a fairly large group and they were getting into their van. Not a bad plan, but, like Captain Force and battlefield experience has taught her, no plan survives contact, especially when the Immortals are involved.
An explosion rocked her ears and forced her eyes open to see the smoke coming up from where that police group was. She regained her composure to focus again; the dissonance of the police forces were gone, and much of the traffic was moving away from where they were. What she heard was the same as that day. A bomb, must have been a car bomb that activated when they turned the key. Other people were caught in the blast, some still alive but injured or trapped in their cars. She wanted to go to them, but there were a dozen more car bombs waiting to go off. When she needed to think clearly, she thought about what he would do; right now, that meant leaving survivors to the local emergency services and focusing on what only she could do: stopping more bombs from going off.
The fastest option would be to send a lightning strike to disable every police force vehicle, but that could risk detonating the bombs. But she’s not fast enough to scoop ‘em all up at the same time before they start their engine. If that’s the case, she can send some errant strikes to buy time.
With no time for a better plan, she bolted into the clouds and unleashed a thunderstorm that would strike near enough to every vehicle but far enough from hurting anyone. Meanwhile, she waltzed from cloud to cloud, bolt down with the lightning strikes, toss the vehicle into the troposphere where the magnetic forces of the thunderstorm could suspend and transport them, then bolt back into the clouds to do it again, clockwise around Cianjhen District.
From Holiday Garden Hotel in Caoya to the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on Fudao Road, to the group by Hawker Stall on Yugang East 2nd Road, circling back up to the Viking Technology Kaohsiung Branch and the Hong Yu Museum of Cuttlefish Ball along Xinsheng Road before heading over to Qianzhen Distribution Center on Qianfu Street. All the arteries were flowing now, whether it was from the bomb or her lightning, but she still had half a dozen to go. The vehicles she captured so far were set down in the harbor; the distance is not nearly as great as in California, but keeping the thunderstorm up drained her power. She crossed over the river to Qianzhenlundu Station right on the bank, then to the Exhibition Center on Chenggong 2nd road, then hopped to the Main Library on Singuang road, Shengxing Park, then to Ershing Park.
The only vehicle left was at the adjoined Jin-Zuan and Kaisyuan Nightmarkets, which together formed the largest in Taiwan. Even now, it should be bustling with people, all tightly packed in one dense area. She waltzed quick as lightning when she felt something carve through her thunderstorm—in a straight line towards her. It was like an unstoppable beast trampled its way through her ballroom.
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She reformed to see the world with her eyes and met the jaws of a liquid dragon that chomped down her and dragged her above the clouds. She tried to push out, but the current had more pressure than she had strength. She tried to zap out, but the water insulation made her electricity sputter into nothing. With her thunderstorm cleaved apart, the energy returned to her which she charged within her body, under the jaws of the dragon, until she burst free from the dragon’s head. The headless beast slithered up in front of her until it looped back down with a new head it formed from the gathered vapor. Stood on a man-made cloud at the charge of the beast was—
“Yimou Zhang!” boomed GalvanGal across the sky, “listen to me: your people are in danger!”
The river dragon reared its head before it spit forth a torrent of water that consumed GalvanGal. Not enough to push her, but enough to hold her as the sparking shimmy she constantly held on her body was frayed by the current. This guy was prepared to sap her energy, while she had no intel on someone with an affinity for water magic. Supposedly, The Immortals had recruited or decimated most mutants outside of Olympus, but they clearly missed this one.
There wasn’t any time for this. She tried to charge up her body again but the sheer pressure managed to fizzle out her efforts. Instead, she strained to line her hands up together and focused all her energy into them until she slammed them together in a thunder clap that reverberated up the water stream to blow the head off the dragon again and knock Zhang off his platform. She made a dash for the clouds. Clouds. Those things that are made of hundreds of tons of water. She realised this when dozens of smaller dragons, each with their own pressurized current, impaled upon her from every angle. They couldn’t consume her like the larger tidal dragon or the torrent from it, but these jet dragons had a stronger concentration of pressure to hit her with. She pushed ahead even as every impact took its due in wearing her down. She popped out of the underside of the cloud, but a bundle of wingless dragons still chased her down to harry her until they were completely boiled away upon her defenses. Zhang was not near as fast, but chased her down after he recovered.
She landed in a flash amongst the confused crowd, further discombobulating them, in the open space near the black van just as the driver began to turn his key. In a split second, fast as lightning, she swung through the van to pull the front seaters out as the explosion erupted under them, connected her circuit tango to give some of her energy to the ones in the back of the van, and created an electrical bubble around the van to keep the shrapnel from reaching the crowd. After that split second, the ones still in the van were consumed by the explosion as she used her back to cover the two in her arms from the shrapnel while the bubble contained the rest. The crowd dispersed with much more haste now to completely empty the market. She let down the bubble and the shrapnel trapped and static fell around the circumference.
She dropped the two in her arms to turn to the bodies of those strewn across the wreckage. The rhythm of life still coursed through their bodies, greater than she expected, and the metal dissonance inside them coursed alongside that rhythm when before it was inert.
A waterfall crashed down upon her, the sudden pressure of an ocean brought her to her knees. Her hands dug into asphalt, it took all what remained of her might to resist being laid flat by the aquatic onslaught. She charged to escape it but a boot hurtled from the heavens by the current landed on her neck and stomped her into the asphalt, with a crack that spread throughout the night market. All that water rapidly evaporated as it spilled across the pavement, leaving puddles on the ground and twinkling mist in the air. GalvanGal, drenched as she was, struggled to find purchase on the slippery surface, with the boot twisted on her neck.
“I knew you were a pawn of the Yao Guai,” said Zhang, “but I didn’t think you would attack so brazenly!”
“I didn’t attack! I was saving your men from bombs attached to their cars!”
“And you just happened to be launching lightning strikes across the city?!”
“I used it to stop the bombs before I could get to them. Ask your men, still very much alive, about the cars dropped by your makeshift base on the docks.”
Zhang surveyed his surroundings. The men who were scattered about were torn up, punctured by shrapnel from the vehicle’s detonantion, but they were still breathing, in no small part thanks to the medicinal implants stabilizing them. Two that got on their feet by now were practically unscathed. Zhang asked how that could be, to which they answered that GalvanGal had grabbed them. Zhang demeded their handheld transceiver to check on the docks. Indeed, the missing vehicles had landed, haphazardly, but upon examination there were bombs attached to the engines.
With the boot loosened, GalvanGal shoved him off; while he fell on his behind, she floated above him.
“See! I told you the truth! If I was a second late because of you, your men and many people around them would have gotten injured and killed! We’ve both wasted enough energy on this!” yelled GalvanGal.
Zhang did not answer back. He listened to some chatter on the radio, returned it to the soldier, ordered them to return to base, and gathered the mist and the puddles into a cloud upon which he sailed away and left his soldiers behind. The soldiers he was so concerned about just a moment ago.
The two that were still standing began to prop up their injured and barely conscious comrades and radio into base for retrieval. The energy she gave them fortified their bodies against being blown apart by the blast and whatever cybernetics they had going on was enough to stop the bleeding at least. One of them held their head together like it was going to fall apart if he let go. Okay, they may be rattled on the inside, but they’ll be fine. One of them had their arm shredded and stained with blood. They must have their own medical facilities prepared, they just needed to make it back to base with their cybernetics to keep them stable. One of them hobbled along as they dragged their broken leg. Their soldiers, they signed up for this, they can take care of themselves. GalvanGal needs to keep her priorities in check.
At the port of Kaohsiung, the People's Armed Police Forces inspected their vehicles and prepared their medical facilities specialized to treat their soldiers with implanted cybernetics. The technicians from Wanmei were both field doctors and scientists, they had the expertise to treat the cybernetics and wanted the opportunity to study the results. Just as the retrieval vehicle was about to be deployed, they were startled by the crack of thunder and again by a flash of light. The bodies they were meant to retrieve were dumped on their doorstep.