“So, Victor and Othala?” I asked. “I know that Othala is the healer, but what’s Victor’s thing?”

Triumph, who was staring out the window of the PRT van that had picked us up barely thirty seconds after console had contacted us, turned to look at me. “Oh, right, I forgot for a moment that you’re new to Brockton. Um, Othala isn’t just a healer, she can give anyone she touches one of several powers. Invulnerability, fire control, and regeneration are the big ones, but she can also do flight and super strength. Maybe some others, but we’re not entirely sure.”

I nodded, filing that factoid away for later. That sounded like a pretty handy ability. “And Victor?” I prompted.

“He’s a skill thief. If you’re close to him, he can slowly take your skill at certain things, faster if you make eye contact. He keeps the skills permanently so he’s pretty dangerous, but unless he drains a skill completely you’ll get it back pretty quickly.”

Now that was a dangerous power. “Got it.”

“Good, because we’re here.”

The van pulled over and Triumph threw open the doors at the back, barely waiting for the van to screech to a stop before jumping out onto the pavement. I followed after him, rapidly scanning the street around us to assess the situation.

Two rows of dilapidated apartment buildings stood on either side of a poorly maintained street. There were a half-dozen cars parked along the sides of the road, with large stretches of garbage-strewn asphalt littered with potholes between them.

It was strange to see such a rundown part of the city so close to the considerably nicer street that I’d been patrolling down with Triumph. The difference was night and day, and there wasn’t a single person out and about, though I could see a number of people watching furtively from upper-story windows up and down the street.

Our target was pretty obvious. It was the one with a broken-down door surrounded by three zip-tied skinheads. The gunfire I could hear ringing inside was also a bit of a clue.

Velocity was nowhere in sight, and Triumph was clearly waiting for the half-dozen troopers accompanying us to pile out of the van, but I didn’t feel like waiting. Riptide appeared in my hand and I charged up the half-dozen steps leading to the apartment building’s entrance, ignoring Triumph’s shout of surprise as I blitz past him.

I could feel the fighting up on the second floor. Velocity––a weirdly blurry mass of water to my senses––was running down a hallway while two more figures seemed to be fighting in close quarters. The gunshots had fallen silent by now, but I could still feel half-a-dozen men standing clustered around a much smaller shape that I assumed must be Othala.

The apartment’s lobby was empty except for another skinhead, this one with a very prominent eagle tattoo on his neck, lying bent-over on the ground near the door. I barely spared him a moment of attention, instead slamming the door to the stairs open and taking them two at a time.

Beneath my armor, I carefully unscrewed a water bottle from the inside, allowing the seawater within to pour out and flow up to fill the space around my shoulders. I was instantly energized, my movements coming faster and my senses going into overdrive as I rushed into the hallway.

My assessment had been completely correct. A man I assumed had to be Browbeat––massive muscles, mask, clearly fighting the dude who was probably Victor––was getting slowly taken apart and pushed back down the hallway. His opponent, a masked man wearing a black breastplate over a bright-red shirt and black pants, was clearly far more skilled than he was, and looked completely unaffected by Browbeat’s occasional grazing hits.

On the other side of the hallway, Othala stood surrounded by six more skinheads. Two of them were using rough walls of fire to keep Velocity from getting close, while another was floating in the air behind her. The other three seemed content to simply shield her with their bodies, making me think that they must have been granted invulnerability just like Victor probably had been.

I made a snap judgment call. Browbeat was getting pushed back, but he seemed to be keeping Victor reasonably occupied and was mostly uninjured. Velocity also looked fine, but was making no headway against the two fire controllers. They would be okay for a few more seconds while I dealt with the biggest threat.

The pipe I could feel almost directly above Othala’s head burst open, and a powerful torrent of water punched clean through the flimsy ceiling panel and flowed down towards the neo-natzi supervillain. Fortunately at the last moment I remembered that this was a person I was trying to capture, and not a monster that needed killing. Instead of cutting straight through her skull like I’d originally planned to, the torrent of water simply knocked her off her feet.

A moment later, the water split into seven streams. Six knocked the gangsters off their feet and away from Othala, while the last streamed down to join the original burst in enveloping my primary target.

The two fire controllers yelped and cried out in pain as they were sent sprawling on the floor. The flier managed to get out of the way at the last second, but the stream turned one-hundred-and-eighty degrees directly behind him and hammered him into the wall. The invulnerable trio barely seemed to feel it, but they were no stronger than ordinary men and it was easy enough to pin them each to the ground with strands of water as hard as steel beams.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

“Victor!” Othala just managed to cry out before suddenly Velocity was there. He stopped directly above her and dropped a containment foam grenade directly on top of her, enveloping her body in rapidly-expanding yellowish foam.

The moment she was taken care of, I was already turning to deal with Victor. I’d emerged from the stairs just a scant few feet behind him, and dealing with Othala and her escorts hadn’t taken long at all.

Hearing Othala’s scream, he sharply kicked Browbeat in the knee with his boot, then spun around to see what was going on as the independent hero dropped to the ground. The point of my blade was there to meet him as I cooly leveled Anaklusmos towards him, the blade hovering a scant few millimeters from his exposed neck.

I felt something touch my mind, worming, questing tendrils brushing against the edges of my thoughts, but the crashing of waves shoved them away in an instant and Victor flinched. “Surrendered,” I ordered firmly. Then I remembered that I was trying to do the superhero thing. What did superheroes say again? “You’re under arrest,” I added after a moment’s thought.

Victor’s eyes flicked between me, Velocity, who was still standing over Othala’s rapidly expanding prison of containment foam, and then the window a few feet to his left. His hand came up, swatting my sword away with his palm, and he lunged towards the window. We were on the second floor, but if he was invulnerable like I thought he was that wasn’t really a problem.

Unfortunately for him, I hadn’t let my guard down. Victor lunged at the window and he was several steps closer to it than I was, but ultimately he was a skilled mortal and I was a demigod.

I lunged after him and caught him by the scruff of the neck like a disobedient kitten trying to run away from its mother. “I guess we can add resisting arrest to your charges,” I quipped, remembering a similar line from a TV show Paul sometimes liked to watch.

I turned towards Velocity. “Do you have another one of those grenades, or should I just hold onto him for now?” I shook Victor slightly for emphasis.

Velocity blurred over to stand beside me, looking almost like he’d just walked over except with the motions played in fast-forward, and looked down at Victor’s limp body. “Could you get him down to the troopers? They should have proper restraints in the truck and whatever power Othala gave him is probably going to run out any second.”

“Yeah sure.” I gestured to where I was still holding the six Empire gang members down with watery nets. “Watch out for the guy with the black shirt, he’s trying to grab his gun.”

“Thanks! Send the solvent team up here when you get down, we should try and secure both Victor and Othala as soon as we can before any other Empire members arrive. We––”

And that was when an air conditioner crashed through the wall and nearly turned Victor into paste. His eyes bulged as I pulled him out of the way in the nick of time.

“Rune! Watch where you––”

This time it was a chunk of pavement, and I roughly tossed Victor aside before I smashed the hunk of masonry into the floor with my armored elbow. Victor tried to scramble to his feet, but water was still flowing out of the pipe I’d burst open––I felt a little bad about the property damage, but the two big holes in the side of the building were considerably more damagey than what I’d done so maybe it wasn’t so bad––and I used a few gallons of water to pin him in place.

Looking out through the new gaps in the wall, I saw a girl with blonde hair in a black and red robe standing on a floating manhole cover, three more chunks of pavement floating around her. Triumph was shouting up at her from the street, standing protectively in front of several PRT troopers. The van we’d arrived in was a total loss from the look of it––the girl, Rune probably, had half-crushed it with a makeshift boulder.

“Give me Victor and Othala and no one has to get hurt,” she told me authoritatively, but I could hear a faint tremor in her voice. “I don’t know who you are, but you don’t want to cross the Empire!”

Yeah, no. She didn’t sound nearly as scary as she clearly thought she did. “How about instead you drop those rocks and go to jail, go directly to jail, do not pass go, do not collect your buddies?” Okay that sounded a lot better in my head.

Rune’s answer was to launch another one of her floating projectiles at me. I waited for it to widen the hole in the wall, then dodged easily out of the way and rushed forward. Two steps took me across the hallway and then I leapt, twisting my body to fit fully through the awkwardly-shaped gap in the wall.

Rune clearly wasn’t expecting that and reacted far too slowly. Her platform flew back several feet and then I crashed into her anyway, pinning her arms against her sides and sending both of us careening clean off her platform.

Rune shrieked like a little girl on her very first roller coaster, or maybe an Aphrodite camper that had just found a rat in her makeup kit. I tucked her thrashing body against my chest and then turned my body just before we hit the ground, absorbing most of the impact on my indestructible back. Rune still certainly felt the impact, my armor didn’t make for a particularly soft landing, but I was pretty sure that even a squishy mortal like her could survive such a tiny fall. She kept screaming even after we hit the ground so that was probably a good sign.

I stood up and pinned her to the ground with my armored foot. “Are you guys alright?” I called out to Triumph and the troopers. “Was anyone in the car?”

“Everyone got out in time!” Triumph called back. “How did everything go up there? Is Rune okay?”

“Velocity foamed Othala and I think probably Victor too by now,” I rattled off quickly. “Browbeat looked hurt, and Rune’s still moving so she’s probably fine.”

“Good. Console says there's another van on the way. Good work, Riptide.”

“I was happy to help!”

And that was about the end of my first ever fight as Riptide, superhero extraordinaire. Easy enough. Unfortunately as I would soon learn, fighting bad guys really was the easy part.