Apparently there are a lot of laws about using parahuman powers to get rich quick. I mean like, just a gigantic number of laws. NEPEA-5 was the big one that everyone knew about, but there were all sorts of other restrictions out there both in the States and abroad to stop capes from one-upping normal humans.

Fortunately for me, a lot of that wouldn’t be a problem as long as I got far enough away from the coast. Unfortunately for me, there were a ton of other problems I would need to deal with. There were apparently all sorts of stupid, tricky regulations and political shenanigans that could get in the way based on who owned what and which countries had a claim to the wreckage for whatever historical reasons.

To my surprise, the one issue I’d been expecting Carol to warn me about––the giant, city-destroying sea monster lurking in the ocean’s depths––was apparently not that big a deal. Outside of occasionally attacking a coastal city and leaving it a sunken ruin, Leviathan was shockingly passive.

He had only ever been observed attacking people at sea a handful of times, and each of those had just been a case of the people being in the wrong place at the wrong time. He’d wrecked two submarines, a few deep-sea drones, and one very unlucky ship whose bow had rammed directly into the monster during a routine crossing of the Atlantic.

After some back and forth with Carol over the phone, we decided that Carol would have some of her associates look into the least-troublesome ship they could think of for me to salvage, and then I would go grab it. She was rather skeptical of my ability to find an arbitrary sunken wreck from centuries ago, but I was absolutely certain I could do it and she seemed willing to humor me.

That left me with no particular plans for today. After Crystal left for university, I spent an hour in the Pelham’s backyard doing drills, ate again, washed my clothing, and then found myself floundering for a bit unsure of what I should be doing. Eventually, I decided to go look around some more. It seemed that this city was probably going to be my base of operations for the near future, so I should probably get to know it a bit better.

Barely ten minutes after I left the Pelham’s house, the phone in my pocket started buzzing and beeping loudly, startling me briefly before I remembered what exactly I was carrying in my pocket and swiftly dug it out.

I stared blankly at the flashing red and green buttons on the screen, then jabbed the green one and raised the phone to my ear. “Hi?” I began slowly before I was interrupted by the flat, emotionless voice on the other end of the call.

“This is an automated messaging syst––” the voice cut out and was replaced by that of a middle-aged man.

“This is console, please confirm your identity?”

I glanced around, but there was no one particularly close to me on the street. “Uh, I’m…Riptide?” I said haltingly, still slightly unused to the name.

I heard a whisper that sounded suspiciously like ‘thank fuck’ and then the man’s voice reapeared. “Riptide, I’m agent Parker with the PRT. Headquarters is being attacked by the Empire 88 trying to bust out their buddies and we’re calling in whatever reinforcements we can get. Can you––” a muffled crash echoed through the phone’s tiny speakers, drowning out the rest of the man’s words, but I’d heard enough.

“I’ll be there soon,” I said sharply, hoping that the agent could still hear me, then poked the end call button and shoved my phone in my pocket.

I’d been expecting something like that to happen soon, and realistically I was pretty sure the PRT had been too. PHO had taught me that the organization had a bad reputation for its ‘revolving door’ prisons, with many villains being taken into custody and then broken out by their fellows days later.

The E88, the biggest gang in the Bay, had lost four capes in less than a week, a crippling number for most organizations and a damaging blow even to the largest cape group in the city. Getting all their members back was a major priority for them, and especially Hookwolf.

I’d looked into the man who hurt Crystal and he’d already been sentenced to the Birdcage––an inescapable cape prison for the worst of the worst––but escaped on the way there twice. If they didn’t get him out quickly, he would quickly be put out of their reach forever.

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. Carefree Percy enjoying his walk vanished in an instant, replaced by Percy Jackson, Hero of Olympus and Vanquisher of Titans.

Carol and I had driven to the PRT headquarters, but I had a pretty good sense of direction and I knew generally how to get there. I ducked into a narrow pathway between two houses, stepped around a pair of overfilled trash cans, and summoned my armor. I didn’t particularly care about how secure my secret identity was and that was all the delay I was willing to tolerate.

A moment later I was springing down the road faster than the cars driving around me, my body little more than a shining bronze blur. I dodged around some cars and jumped over others, carefully avoiding running into any pedestrians. When I ran out of road going in the right direction I moved up onto the rooftops, jumping onto the roof of a two-story building and using the added height to boost me over the small office building in my way.

I reached the PRT headquarters less than five minutes after I’d gotten the agent’s call, crossing the entire distance at a ground-eating sprint that put the greatest mortal athletes to shame yet didn’t even leave me winded.

I slid to a stop on the roof of the office building across the street from the blocky concrete monstrosity that was PRT’s Brockton Bay headquarters. On most days, it looked much like any other office building. The exterior was all mirrored windows, with only a shield logo with the initials P.R.T emblazoned on it to distinguish it from the dozens of similar buildings that filled downtown.

On one side of the building was a four-story parking garage that I knew also extended several floors underground. On the other side was a small, blocky hospital with its own parking lot that primarily served the needs of the PRT but also had an emergency room that was open to the public.

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Today, it was very obvious that the headquarters wasn’t just any old office building. The street in front of the building was utterly destroyed, the concrete pockmarked with craters and dozens of long, metal blades protruding from the ground. Several patches of containment foam covered the ground, the broken remains of two foam cannons sticking out from either side of the building’s doors.

Fenja and Menja were fighting Assault and Battery in the street, the two giant valkyries swinging their enormous weapons around and causing a huge amount of property damage, but completely unable to hit the two heroes. They were however successfully keeping the two heroes occupied, and I know that when it came to numbers, the Empire still had an advantage over the Protectorate even with several of their members behind bars.

Of the rest of the heroes and villains, there was no sign. I assumed they were all inside the building while Fenja and Menja ensured they didn’t get surrounded and kept a few of the heroes busy. From what I knew, the twin villain’s strength and durability scaled with how big they grew, making them pretty useless inside the confines of a building.

I took a deep breath and out of the corner of my eye noticed a young man staring at me from behind an air conditioning unit. He had his phone out and pointed at the fight between the two three-story giantesses and the heroes.

Well, that probably meant that whatever I did next was going to end up on PHO later, huh. That was kind of weird––I was still used to the mist blinding people to what was really going on, but here recording cape fights seemed to be the norm, even if people tended to get yelled at online for not running away. At least this guy had chosen a pretty safe spot to record from.

I gave him a small wave, then broke into a sprint and leapt from the edge of the roof. The first two times I’d gone into a real fight in this world––my little brawl with the undersiders didn’t count––I hadn’t been feeling particularly serious. Things just hadn’t felt urgent or dangerous the same way they had back home. I was fighting people, not monsters that wanted to kill and eat me. I had been treating it like practice, like sparring with some of the other half-bloods at camp, and not a real battle with stakes that mattered.

I’d done a lot of thinking since my fight with Hookwolf. Crystal had gotten hurt because she thought I was in danger. I’d been messing around, and she could have very well died if Hookwolf had been just a bit faster or I a bit slower.

I’d promised myself that I’d do better in the future, and the time for that was now. I could see blood on the edges of some of those blades and splattered across the sidewalk. There were no bodies, but I remembered the two PRT troopers that had been standing by the doors of the building when I was here the first time around. I hoped they were okay.

There were a lot of people inside the building. Hundreds of visitors and employees caught up in violence that they should have no part in. The PRT troopers and heroes were one thing. This was their job, something they’d signed up for. The cooks in the cafeteria, the secretaries, the assistants and janitors…they were probably terrified.

I twisted in mid air and slammed feet-first into Menja’s helmet like a celestial bronze comet. I timed the blow perfectly, slamming into the giantess at the same time as Battery crashed into the back of her knee.

Her leg buckled from the force of Batteries impact, but she managed to brace herself with her spear and keep her footing. Then I crashed into her as well from the opposite side and she lost her balance, her massive hands flailing through the air as she toppled to the ground.

I didn’t wait to see what happened. Using Menja’s head as a springboard, I leapt away and landed heavily on the ground, cracking the already horribly damaged pavement beneath my feet. My gut clenched and the fire hydrant beside me burst open, spewing a fountain of water into the air. A moment later, a pipe that had been badly damaged by the fighting tore open as well and a column of cold water tore through the pavement above it and into the open air.

Menja’s body crashed into the ground beside me, shaking the earth and knocking the air from her lungs with a huge whooshing sound. Before she could recover, the water streaming from the fire hydrant rushed to cover her, pouring into her cavernous nose and open mouth and binding her limbs to the ground with watery chains. Menja choked and sputtered, her arms and legs flailing as she fought against the bindings, but she wasn’t strong enough to fight through my control of the water.

With her taken care of, I turned to her sister who was just starting to react to what had happened. Assault was bouncing around the battlefield like an over-excited five year old after eating an entire chocolate cake. Every few seconds he would slam into Fenja from an unexpected direction, keeping her constantly off balance but never quite able to bring her down.

I charged towards the two of them, the water rushing out of the burst pipe flowing towards me and starting to coalesce into a personal cyclone. Assault leapt out of the way just in time for Fenja to turn around to see what had happened to her sister and receive a towering torrent of violently spinning water to the face.

She swung her sword at me, but the blow was slow and clumsy. I parried the tree-sized blade with Riptide, then slid between her legs and slashed my sword through the back of her ankle, metal and flesh effortlessly giving way before Riptide’s blade.

Fenja screamed in pain, her voice all but lost in the torrent of water, wind, and noise surrounding us. Her leg collapsed out from under her, the injured limb no longer able to hold up her weight. I spun around, lunged, and made a matching cut on her other leg.

Then I leapt up into the air, the water around me propelling me up into the sky on a makeshift waterspout. My knee slammed into the small of her back, tearing another shout of surprise and pain from the giantess as she collapsed face-first onto the street.

As with her sister, the water around me flowed down to cover her limbs and then flooded into her open mouth. She struggled and writhed, but it was no use. Menja was already unconscious, her body shrinking down to the size of an ordinary, if unusually tall, woman. I pulled the water from her lungs, allowing the villain to breath before I could inflict any permanent damage. Just in case, I kept a cocoon of water around her with just her head exposed to the air, but that could easily change at a moment’s notice.

I spun around as Assault suddenly landed beside me, the man’s bright red costume covered in dust and grime. He was breathing heavily and there was a pained, but relieved smile on his face. “Riptide, thanks for coming.” He looked over at Fenja, whose writhing was starting to die down as she ran out of oxygen. “Good takedown, nice and fast.” He took a deep, gasping breath, “Really saved my bacon, I owe you a drink sometime.”

He was injured, I could see it in the way he was holding his weight on just one leg, but it didn’t seem overly serious. Panacea should be able to deal with it after the fight, but I wasn’t sure how effective he’d be from now on.

Battery ran over to us a moment later, the lines on her costume glowing brightly. She looked unharmed, but still winded. She stopped beside Assault and he wrapped an arm loosely around her shoulders and leaned on her for support.

Battery looked between the two of us. “They’re still fighting inside. Armsmaster is trying to stop them from getting to the containment cells, but he’s losing ground. Riptide can––”

I cut in before she could finish what she was saying. There was no time to lose. “Assault, can you watch Menja and Fenja? I’ll try to keep them bubbled up, but my focus might slip if I get too far away. Battery, I need you to show me where to go.”

Assault frowned, but we both knew his injury would make him a liability when facing down some of the more dangerous Empire capes. “I got it,” he told me tightly, “puppy, stay safe, okay?”

Battery rolled her eyes, then pulled away from the other cape. “Let’s go.”