I’ll be the first to admit that tonight wasn’t going as I hoped it would, not that I was used to being a normal teenager anymore and enjoying spring break like I probably should be doing. Bank robberies weren’t anything new around here, least of all over the past few months when Lower Olympus seemed to fall apart in the space of a few weeks all of a sudden, but joining a gang and now fighting a thing—hell, I didn’t even know what to call him—was a few steps away from ridiculous. For crying out loud, I was standing beside a villain I had never even heard of before a few hours ago. But I figured it served me right for wanting to get into the Olympiad the easy way.
I wasn’t going to complain about it, anyway. Nothing’s ever come easy around here.
Just do what you have to so you can get what you need, I thought. Still, the muffled sound of gunfire was retreating into the night, and the shadow that had consumed the large ship was beginning to slip off the hull like wet paint trickling down a wall. We had to deal with this guy soon and fast, before anything else went to hell. Besides, without my full abilities on display, I would be darting into that mess handicapped, one hand quite literally tied behind my back.
But… Well, what kind of superhero would I be if I let this guy live?
“How should we do this?” Knuckles whispered, as the ocean’s frothing waves lapped against the rocks just behind the man made of stringy flesh. “I can take his left, then—”
“Hey, Corpse Guy,” I shouted. “Who did you say you were again?”
“The look out, I think, and the distraction,” he said, stepping closer. He was half-naked, with tattered trousers covering his lower half. I could see something shifting beneath his skin, like starving worms were wriggling around his bones and muscles and burrowing through his innards.
I wanted to be sick, but vomiting in a mask wasn’t fun from what I remembered, and the smell of his singed skin wasn’t helping. I figured it came from those pentagrams carved into his body, littering his arms, back, and chest like the twisted scribblings of an asylum patient.
What they were and what they meant didn’t come to mind. I’d never seen them before. Witchling knew, but she wasn’t willing to spill her guts. I internally sighed, frustrated, because I would have to get some kind of leverage to get an answer from her, or maybe I’d just have to tell Lucas as soon as I could, maybe figure out if he knew anything about… what, some kind of cult that could bring people back to life? Did Ava have anything to do with it? Her dad, maybe? I kicked myself, guessing I should have paid a little more attention to the underbelly of Lower Olympus a lot more than just what the police scanner I had on my desk told me every night.
On the other hand, New Olympus was a massive city that only got bigger and grander every year. There were too many nooks and crannies that Rylee Addams couldn’t get into because she wasn’t important enough or she wasn’t rich enough or smart enough to get into, as well as too many shadows lingering around warehouses, rooms filled with Zeus-knows what, that if Olympia tried getting in, it would only be a bloody mess that Damage Control would have to mop up. I learnt the hard way that Olympia wasn’t wanted everywhere in this city, making the job a lot harder than I thought it would be. I only ever flew through a wall when there were bad guys on the other side of it, otherwise, it wasn’t worth collapsing some poor guy’s apartment building.
Either way, it was impossible to keep track of everything and everyone in this city. There were simply too few of me flying around to keep watch all day. The Olympians had it easy, because the world would tell them anything they wanted at a drop of the hat. All I had was Reddit.
Gods, I loved my dad, but a heads up on what hid in the dark would have been nice.
“Why does it matter who he is?” Knuckles asked quietly. “We’ve got to deal with him.”
I rolled my shoulders, hovering a little off the slick rocks. “I figured I should give him a name before I put him away for good.” The slightest twitch of annoyance, something like eagerness, or angered, righteous anticipation, crossed his scar-riddled face. He said he was the look out and the distraction, and I had the slimmest theory on what that could have meant. If his body could come apart and come back together, then maybe he could make more of himself. It was outlandish, I knew, hearing it in my own head, but normal had gone out the window years ago.
The only way to prove I was right was by taking him apart and separating his body parts, maybe to force him to create more of himself in a fight. Despite the sweat dripping down my forehead and smeared all over my back, I was almost… excited. My heart raced, blood whined past my ears. Finally, someone I might actually have to think about fighting properly other than the usual, you know, hit a human so hard they stopped moving because they were missing their guts.
Cadaver grinned wide, showing us his vile dental formula, and that fat black tongue sitting in his mouth. “The more you stand around and look at me, the more the rest of your people—”
I cut him short by planting my fist right into his jaw. His teeth slit my knuckles as I snapped his head around. Tiny splinters of bone buried themselves into the broken flesh of my hand, sharp like jagged thorns. A grunt of surprise from both of us. Pain, brief and hot, shot up my arm. He staggered backward, spat out bits of black teeth, and didn’t waste a second to lunge at me. I ducked, slipped out the way, using the water underneath my shoes to ease my escape. I watched him roll onto his arm, his back, then spring up to his feet like an acrobat, before swinging his arm through the air in front of him. For a moment, I thought he was going to bow and gloat again.
Instead, he smiled, his dark, hollow eyes twinkling, and whispered, “Got you.”
The tiniest skittering sound caught my attention, like spent shells clattering on concrete.
I glanced at my feet. The teeth he spat trembled, warped, cracked and—
Shards of bone burst into existence, fracturing the stone around my feet. I leapt backward, flipped through the air, landed, and pushed off my hands, avoiding bone fragments just as tall as me until—Fuck! Bone sliced through my shirt and across my side, sending pain roaring through my chest, like an iron poker gouging deep into my torso. The cut threw me off balance, stumbling me. Cadaver threw himself my way, forcing me to step back, dodge low, only to get caught by his foot smashing into the side of my face. The mask softened the blow. My jaw ate the impact. My head jerked around, and I threw myself away from him before he could lunge at me a third time.
I used what energy I could spare and flew backward, rolling to a stop in a gasping heap.
The shards of bone, jagged like the teeth of some darkness-shrouded monster salivating at the jowls, its maw wide, glittered with something dark. Something scarlet on their jagged tips.
I got to my elbow, swallowed a swear word, and touched my ribs.
My fingertips came back slick with blood. My blood.
That’s what you get for fighting like you’re Olympia, I thought. Pain forcing against my side as I got to one knee, gasping with the effort, feeling like searing heat was oozing through the cut under my rib. I shook my head, then pressed my knuckles into the thin slice along my torso, pressed and pressed until the warmness of blood spread around my shirt and down my side.
I kept my hand there till the pain made me woozy, crashing into my skull like the waves behind me, until it subsided. I couldn’t heal as quickly like this. Couldn’t use my full strength.
I could try, sure, but what really was this guy if he was the lookout? Were there more of him, all somehow connected by those markings? If I used my powers to their fullest, this fight would have been over, but so would my charade because of what he might be hiding if multiple Cadavers were running around, able to communicate with one another somehow. I cursed Witchling for being so secretive about the marks. Hell, your guess was just as good as mine.
Simply put, I couldn’t risk it. I was Tempest tonight, and she wasn’t going to die here, because if she did, then Olympia wasn’t going out with a bang, but with a whimper in sewer water.
“The way you spoke, it made it seem like you were invincible,” Knuckles said, suddenly beside me. I hadn’t even heard them get here. “Doesn’t look too deep. You’ll live. Hopefully.”
“Thanks for the assist,” I muttered, standing. Grunting in pain, but standing.
“Like I said,” they said quietly, eyeing Cadaver as he slinked around the jagged shards of teeth sticking out from the rock, “We need to think about this. Really think about this, right now.”
“I’m all open for suggestions, ‘cause hitting him hard doesn’t work anymore.”
“His body is his weapon,” they said. Knuckles dived to the side, and I did the same just as fast. Twin spears of bone whistled past us, impaling the rock face behind us. “Cripple him.”
Right, of course, because I was trying to give him a hug all this time.
“And how do you propose we do that?” I asked. Then gasped and buckled over, pain flaring in my side. I clamped my jaw shut to stop myself from groaning in agony. The cut wasn’t any wider, or bleeding a lot more from what it last was, but his blood was mixing with mine, that foul black liquid that frothed and chewed at the edges of my fleshy wound. My skin was tinged green where his blood touched the gash, and it stank, too, of sickly flesh, like it was dead and rotting. I touched it, flinched, and watched, helpless, as my body tried desperately to heal itself.
Knuckles whispered what I was thinking: “What the fuck is he?”
And why didn’t it hurt this badly before?
Cadaver laughed, a shrill noise that split the night and filled my ringing head with sound. Could he do this on purpose, turn it on and off like some switch? Gods, I hated supervillains. My head pounded with curses as I stood, my hand pressed against the gash. The tiniest flicker of golden electricity passed between my index and middle finger, a tiny jolt that felt like pouring frigid icy water on a burn. I breathed, relaxed, but the stink of flesh was still in my nose as I swallowed and glared down at the thing shouting obscenities at us. I could only generate the electricity with my hands; the rest of my body was here for the ride, to heal up on its own when I was at my best.
But I wasn’t at my best right now. For tonight, at least. I had to remember that.
“Makes you wish you wore body armor, doesn’t it?” Knuckles said.
“My skin can tank a missile, smartass,” I said. “His blood would boil you in that kevlar suit like you’re soup in a freaking can. We should put him in the water, somewhere he can’t do that.”
“Why not in the air?” Knuckles asked, gesturing. We stepped backward, watched as Cadaver yelled at us to, “Come fight me, cowards!” and threw dozens of tiny bone fragments at us. They whistled through the air like sharpened needles, impaling the stones at our feet with enough force to flick bits of rock into the air as it cracked. We lunged away. “He’d be useless there!”
“I can’t fly long enough to deal with him.” I ducked, avoiding a spear wet with his black blood. “Besides, even if I ripped him a new one, he’d stick to me and burn me with his blood.”
I had to think about this, more than I had in the past few years. Lucas, I remembered, always told me that everybody—Even your old man, he’d repeated time and again—had a weakness, and if it wasn’t a weakness, then there was something that could stop them, make them hesitate. Pain was out of the question; Cadaver was a dead man walking, and his skin clung to his awkward, muscular body by who knew what, but maybe if we trapped him underneath something, then we could get out of here. I hated the idea instantly. Killing supervillains was the one promise I made dad’s statue after he died, and backing down on it now would be a bruise on my ego.
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But I didn’t have time for my aching ego right now. Not when half of my city was going to get flooded with weapons possibly strong enough to hurt the likes of me. We had to end this.
It was a good thing that I was a quick thinker, then—and one hell of a superhero.
I bounded away from a spear of bone that zipped past my ear and spat black liquid on my shoulder, burning holes through my clothes. I winced, grunted in pain. Cadaver, predictably, lunged toward me, his voice shrill, his teeth slits of sharpened bone. Two quick jabs, both blocked, returned with a hook to his jaw, a waeve, then I slammed my knee into his ribs. Felt a crunch. Grabbed him by the collar bones and smashed him into the side of the rock face. Knuckles was waiting, but Cadaver was ready, back on his feet in a second, punching a piece of their kevlar armor clean off their body with a single blow to the chest. I kicked his lower spine. He spun around. Knuckles punched the back of his skull. He roared in frustration, fury and anger.
I didn’t have time to figure out his real weakness, but pissing people off always worked.
Bone covered his knuckles, and he swung at me. I gasped in pain as his hand slammed into my shoulder as I swiveled away. Numbness exploded through my arm. I shook it out, forced it out.
Knuckles followed with a quick jab, swinging kick, then a blow to his manhood.
Once he turned around and had his back to me, I took my chance and stepped back, swung around, pulled the spear out of the stone, and threw it as hard as I could at Cadaver. I saw his eyes widen, his face go white with surprise under the faint moonlight above us. He was quick, his muscles tensed to move; but the spindle of bone was quicker. It impaled him through the chest, sending him flying to the jagged bone spires he left erected on the rocks far below us, and then impaled him to the them with a sickeningly wet crunch. Seconds later, Knuckles leaped from the short cliff, landed soundlessly beside him, and with one swing, brought their fist to his face.
I hadn’t planned that part, but I was gonna take the credit for it, especially as I watched Cadaver’s head explode into a fountain of bone and blood and what might have been his brain smeared across the rocks. It caught me by surprise at how much power Knuckles had behind their punches, enough that they left cracks spider-webbing around Cadaver’s twitching body. A sound like thunder followed the impact, then the rocks fractured, their cracks snaking and growing, until a large chunk the size of a semi truck split away and collapsed into the ocean, dragging Cadaver with it. Knuckles bounded away, finding their way back to me with a silent grunt of effort.
We watched as the sea swallowed him whole, its waves frothing as they chewed.
Then silence. A long, uncomfortable silence as we watched the inky water still.
I leaned forward, listening for the sound of his faint heartbeat. I struggled to hear anything except my own racing heart thumping against my chest. I didn’t trust that he was dead, not yet. Still, I glanced over my shoulder, at the hulking ship sitting in the water, and the blurred burst of gunfire illuminating the darkness of the abandoned dock yard. The fighting was violent, silent, contained. Nobody wanted the Olympiad to send Capes to come and investigate, it would just screw us all over, and a part of me wanted to join that fight before the Capes eventually got here. All I really wanted to do was to just get the weapons to Ava—not to safety, I didn’t trust her that much yet—and get this night over with, but I couldn’t go to bed knowing something like Cadaver was skulking around the streets of my city. From Knuckles’ body language, I figured they thought the exact same thing: he wasn’t dead yet, but we had to take our chance before he came back.
“I’ve got a plan,” I told them. “I’ll grab his body, and we get into the sewers. We’ll collapse a part of it, maybe near the exit about a dozen feet from us, and trap him under the rubble.”
Knuckles glanced at the foul tunnel, then back at the water. “He’d just escape.”
“And it would buy us time to get the hell out of here,” I said. “Besides, if we collapse several tons of stone on him and make sure it all goes under water, he won’t escape that quickly.”
They shook their head. “Don’t you get it? His body is his weapon.”
“You’re sounding like a broken record here, Knucks.”
Knuckles lifted their hand, and I winced at the sight of their mangled, meaty, well, knuckles. Another punch like that would probably shatter a few fingers. “He gets harder to hit, gets faster, quicker, the more we attack him. Hell, I probably just screwed our chances some more.”
Hold on, I thought. A bubble broke free from the water’s surface, followed by dozens more. His body is his weapon, not because it actually is, but because it adapts to become better.
I cursed. “The more we fight him, the better the chances that he wins.”
Knuckles nodded, silent as we watched the bubbling, angered waves.
“But if he can adapt, get stronger and stronger, then won’t that mean—”
My answer came seconds later, bursting from the waves with a sharkish, vile grin smeared across his pale face. We didn’t have time to react. He landed, swung his fist at me. I dodged, planted my palm into his gut, forcing him backward two steps. Knuckles—using their good hand—slammed their fist into his liver. He stumbled. I kicked his knee, smashing my heel into his joint. A snap. A screeching curse. I staggered as I put weight on my foot, feeling a burst of pain go up my calf and into my thigh. Seconds wasted. Time I should have taken to block. Serrated blades of bone burst from his forearm, and he struck out, swinging wildly, catching me across the forearm as I threw my arms up to save my chest from being gouged open. Then pain. Lots of fucking pain.
Then yelling, lots of yelling as Knuckles swung their foot in an arc and planted it into the side of his neck. And… nothing. Cadaver stood there, stock still, turning his eyes to look at them.
Neither moved. Knuckles tried stepping back, but Cadaver held them in place.
He grabbed their leg, turned to force their blade through their shin.
Then I lunged, desperate, and did what instinct told me to do.
I tackled Cadaver, wrapping my arms around his waist, using as much of my flight energy as I could, and as much of my strength behind the violent grab as I could muster. I felt him wobble, step forward. It felt like I was hopelessly pushing a skyscraper off its foundation, but that’s exactly what I needed, for him to move, then I jerked backward with flight, planting my heels into the rock, bracing my lungs and tensing my shoulder as g-force slammed into me, and heard the loudest snap of bone—his spine, I hoped, and not mine—break through the night as his body suddenly whipped backward far faster than he was expecting. Whiplash, I called it, and usually humans would split in half from where I held them around their waists at this part, a damned bloody mess.
Now, with a reeking, gray-skinned corpse draped over my quaking arms, Cadaver sagged over, his spine snapped in two, his neck broken in several places judging from how it hung.
A fist of wind punched Knuckles away, sending them ass over heels as they rolled and came to a stop against the side of the broken sewer mouth. They grunted, coughed, and held a hand to their side. I couldn’t pay attention to them, though, not with Cadaver jerking in my arms. Trying to fix himself, to swing his blade at me. “Fu–Fuck you!” He gurgled and spat, blood thick in his throat and undoubtedly flooding his lungs. Not for long, though. Not until he was healed.
We had seconds to get him trapped, seconds slipping through my hands like the blood seeping from his wounds. It burnt my skin. It hurt like hell. I bit back pain behind my mask.
“C’mon!” I said, hovering, then falling to the rocks. My head felt like a dozen pounds, and stars briefly flashed across my eyes. I shook my head, which did nothing except make me sick.
Using up too much power, Ry. We’ve still got to get the weapons back to home base.
Gathering the strength I could, I hauled Cadaver’s body onto my shoulder and leaped to the sawtooth-like plane of stones beneath the sewer mouth. Sludge poured out, dropping dead rats onto the rocks with a slap. I dumped Cadaver on a bed of broken stone amongst them, then looked at Knuckles. They were on their feet, the hazy blur still surrounding their body like a heatwave clinging to tarmac. I had an idea, and I’ll admit, I hated relying on someone else for this right now.
But if being Olympia taught me one thing, it was that losing just wasn’t my thing to begin with, least of all to whatever the hell the thing jerking so violently below me was.
I just didn’t feel like losing, in all honesty
And especially not tonight. Not after Lucas said I didn’t take any of this seriously enough.
“Scared of heights?” I asked hurriedly, grabbing Knuckles’ wrist. A force field, I realized, as soon as I met resistance touching their armor. Telekinesis, maybe? But only enough to cover their body, protect them and strengthen them. How much mental willpower did that even take?
I guess we were about to find out.
“What? What do you mean am I afraid—”
“Hit him, and hit like your life depends on it.”
Before they could retaliate, and just as quickly as Cadaver gained enough strength to snap his head back on the correct way, I grabbed Knuckles, spun twice, and threw them high into the night sky. As soon as they left my grip, I fell to my knees, and clamped my hands on Cadaver’s shoulders. I counted in my head, listening to Knuckles’ scream slice through the night. Cadaver bucked, screamed my name and spat his vile blood at me. Five. I slammed my fist into his jaw. It did nothing but split my knuckles. Four. He kicked out, forcing himself on top of me; he punched down, and I dodged, avoiding a blow that cratered the rock. Three. I screamed out in anger, digging my thumbs into his eyes and forcing myself back on top of him, slamming his skull against the ragged rocks again and again. Two. Knuckles stopped screaming; they started falling. Fast. Cadaver pushed against me, his spine back in place, his black eyes wild with anger as he slammed his forehead against mine. Stars. Weakness. I slipped off him, he pushed away. Shitshitshit!
One.
Time slowed a fraction, enough for me to see Cadaver pull me back toward where Knuckles would slam their fist directly into his chest. I was underneath them, right there underneath Knuckles. Cadaver’s grip was firm, furious and steady. His nails dug into my wrist, deep into my forearm. And… I couldn’t stomach it. Not here. Not like this. I grabbed the bone sticking out of his arm, slid my fingers into the folds of skin it protruded from, and yanked it clean out of his body. Shoved him away. Punched his jaw—nothing. Perfect. I planted the spear of bone through his thigh, pinning him in place, then leaped backward, flipped and rolled, and—
Knuckles’ punch landed, and the world seemed to split down the freaking middle.
I’d describe what I saw, explain what I felt and heard, but all I knew a second later was that a torrent of water dozens of feet high erupted from the ocean, swallowing me in its grasping hold. Crashing waves picked me up and slammed me against the rock face, knocking the wind out of my chest. I gasped, wheezed. The mask was trapping water. Clumsy fingers grasped for the clasp until it finally came loose and slipped off my face. I coughed, spluttered. I puked my dinner and tasted blood in my saliva as the waves receded and the rocky mouth of the sewer heaved into the ocean. The sound was loud, garish, violent as it got eaten by the black, murky water. The coldness of night bit my skin as I stood, mask in hand, searching the water for anything that remained.
Knuckles had made sure nothing at all remained of the short cliff and the rock face—you’d be hard pressed to think a sewer mouth was here in the first place. Nothing but chunks of rock floated in this new patch of ocean just beneath me, that and pieces of red and black kevlar body armor. Amongst them were shattered chest pieces, as well as a head gear floating away from me. Head gear with no body attached to it, and gear without its wearer strapped inside of it, either.
I heard coughing and swearing, sounds that were nearly as loud as the low, arduous sound of the ocean dragging thousands of pounds of stone into its depths. As well as Cadaver, too.
The coughing wasn’t coming from a dead person come back to life, though.
You wouldn’t have guessed it from how pale Knuckles’ skin was. Their hair was short and silver in the moonlight, slickened to their scalp. They were on all fours, hacking and wheezing, with only their bottom half covered in gear. The rest of them was open, except for thin black spandex ripped along their side and entirely shredded up one of their arms. I waited, watching, my mask in hand, as they finished coughing. They spat, wiped a hand on their mouth, then swore.
Knuckles stood, staggering to their feet. Instinct nearly took over, making me want to turn them around and look them in the eyes and memorize their face. Instead, I threw them my mask.
It clattered to their feet, and they glanced down at the floor. I caught the glimmer of blue eyes and a scar running along their throat before they turned away again. “You nearly killed me,” they said so quietly it was as if they never spoke at all. “That was foolhardy and reckless and—”
“Just put on the mask and let’s go,” I muttered.
Silence, then, “What about you and your identity?”
It was hard to describe the feeling in my chest, but it boiled down to one simple idea: being protective. I guessed it was that damned human part again, playing up on old scars. I saw their stance, so ready to fight to keep their secret, and hell, now that Cadaver was gone, I could smell things more clearly: dead fish, wet cement, and the pheromones of fear trickling over the scar around their throat. Having a secret identity, I had learnt, helped you keep your lives separate. It helped you understand what part of you was supposed to deal with which problem and when.
But it also meant you could be someone else, someone a little stronger.
Right now, I needed Knuckles at their best, and if they were going to keep sweating fear, keep being so tense and ready to fight or disappear into the night, then I had to keep them hidden. Sometimes it’s easier to not look at yourself in the mirror, Lucas had told me years ago. Sometimes you want to think someone else is doing what you wouldn’t dare dream of doing. As for me, I was used to being free-faced, not constrained by anything, and besides, that mask was beginning to feel a lot like a fucking muzzle.
And I wasn’t going to be Ava’s little attack dog.
“Doesn’t matter,” I said, turning around to look at the ship, and indiscreetly give them room to pick up the mask and fit it to their face. I owed them that, at least. “Let’s get to being villains. I’m at least half sure that we’ve earned our stripes, and they look like they need us, anyway.”
Silent as ever, Knuckles appeared beside me, folding their arms across a chest bound in tape. They ripped off what remained of their tattered under armor, but I wasn’t going to spend time looking. I had enough problems to deal with. “They’re the professionals here, remember?”
“And so were the Olympians,” I muttered. “But someone’s gotta pick up the slack.”