I expected several possible scenes, stepping out of the safe house. The sight of the giant sword Endbringer being gone, the battle over, was strictly possible albeit bordering on impossible. More likely was the gargantuan beast—creature? that seemed more fitting, if only just, for a living sword monster—still imposing itself upon the horizon, its continued presence a threat of more monsters to come in the near future. Just as likely was the chance of more nightmares haunting the streets I grew up on, lashing out at the helpless or unsuspecting.
What I hadn’t considered, but perhaps should have, was the second Endbringer in the sky.
“Fuck.” The word slipped unbidden but appropriate past my lips as I stared up at Charon, the most infamous of the still living Endbringers. This was my first time laying eyes on the incorporeal, vaguely reaperesque specter, and I found myself shivering and struggling to wet my suddenly dry mouth.
The threat of death was a given when an Endbringer was involved, but Charon’s presence raised the stakes. Dying meant leaving nothing behind to bury. It meant being trapped as the puppet of a capricious fiend that ruthlessly harvested the bodies—and souls, many believed—of fallen heroes attack after attack only to eventually become the threat itself, turning its undead army on the living.
Elle’s hand squeezed mine, hard, and I shuddered, trying to push reassurance I didn’t feel into my own squeeze back.
“Stick together.”
I looked over my shoulder and found Heavensword’s eyes likewise on the Endbringer suspended in the sky, her sharp gaze accentuated by the red streaks drawn over her face.
I looked away and started to move metal into place around Labyrinth and the Teeth, my costume serving the same purpose for myself. “Right, the shell-tur is—”
“No flying.” I shot Heavensword a look, and she didn’t so much as bat an eye. “No flying. If you are affected by another of those waves, there is a very real chance I might not be able to catch you both.”
Left unsaid was that Delible would survive through her freaky regeneration… and what falling to our death might mean in this circumstance. “Fine,” I acquiesced, gently tugging Labyrinth to follow before setting off at a brisk walk, my eyes darting back and forth as I carefully watched for any ambushes. “No flying. Shell-tur is this way.”
The Teeth followed behind, and we all settled into an uneasy quiet as we walked while the city went to hell around us. Unfortunately, the silence didn’t last long. The shrill scream of someone dying tore through the night, emanating from just around the corner of the second intersection we were set to pass. Heavensword quickly but quietly moved from where she had been just behind and to my right, putting her arm and open palm out to block my way as she advanced with a dangerous glint in her eyes.
I grabbed hold of said arm and yanked her back, causing her to stumble and nearly lose her footing as I released Labyrinth’s hand and stalked forward. Not my brightest idea, not by a long-shot, but I was done. I was done with being stuck in the middle of the fight against an unknown Endbringer. I was done with being forced to confront memories better forgotten. I was done with being forced to play nice with goddamn Teeth for the sake of survival.
I was especially done with being treated like I was helpless.
I rounded the corner, and the noise of my approach caused the three nightmares down the street to look up from whoever they had surrounded. A scaly, horse-like creature with a long jaw not unlike a crocodile’s that was riddled with thin, pointy teeth that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a shark’s mouth but for how many of them there were; a woman without a face topped with hair that furiously whipped around, the prehensile tendrils clasping what disturbingly appeared to be several severed arms; and an amorphous blob made of shifting green, silver, and a copper that undulated around its companions. I could just barely make out in the light of the street lamps closest to them that the nightmares were surrounded by the dismembered, brutalized remains of victims.
The crashed remains of an abandoned car were next to them, its hood still partially lodged into the side of the street parked utility truck it had hit. The door of the car surged into motion, lancing through the blob and pinning it in place with its tip while the rest of the vehicles burst apart into a flurry of knives I sent spinning violently through the other two creatures’ upper bodies. The faceless medusa creature never stood a chance as it was rendered into mincemeat by my makeshift blender, but the crocodile horse fared better, escaping with a deep, albeit clearly not debilitating, slash in its flank.
It charged with a swiftness that would have meant trouble for me, except clearly whatever intelligence this monster was imbued with was seemingly limited. It made the mistake of running over a manhole in the street. It might as well have gift-wrapped itself. The lid snapped up around its leg like a bear trap, and it crashed to the ground with an awful snap that likely meant the joint connecting that leg to the body was shattered. The manhole hadn’t stopped moving, already dragging the quadruped back into the whirling blades.
If I hadn’t been as far away as I was, then I doubtlessly would have been coated in the foul substance. As it was, I still had to avert my eyes and fight the bile rising in my throat as the street was showered in ichorous blood.
The victims.
I looked over my shoulder to check on Labyrinth and found her flanked by the Teeth, guarded for what it was worth. Steeling myself, I returned my focus to where the victims had been. It was impossible to avoid look at the gore with it quite literally being everywhere, and I didn’t think I could stomach it for long, so I lifted myself just barely off of the ground and flew over to the person most likely to still be alive and in need of first aid—the person the nightmares had been standing over when I killed them.
I immediately regretted that decision. Faultline had trained us for first aid, not… not this. Now that I was closer, I could see it was a reasonably heavy set man with a beard and glasses.
Each of his limbs had been ripped off, spare one that was lying at an unnatural angle and was distressingly flat. His front was littered with gashes, lacerations—whatever the right term was. Blood was pooling in his mouth and oozing out over red stained lips, soaking his beard and matting the hair. He was bleeding so much and from so many places, I doubted even Amy could have saved him, much less myself.
“Help… me…” the man choked out, their voice wet and almost impossible to understand as they spoke around a mouthful of blood.
John. Not the man—John. I could feel the etching of the name tag on his shirt despite it being all but smothering under a wound weeping right over it.
“I… I…”
I saw the blob I attacked earlier shift in the corner of my eye, but I was struck motionless by the severity of the wounds before me, my wide eyes glued in place. A whistling sound reached my ears, and an instant later, a spike hurtled into it from above, pinning it once more to the ground. Barely a second later a myriad more followed in the first’s wake, the onslaught resulting in a cacophony of noise as the nightmare squealed in agony—an unexpected feat, since I had seen no indication of a mouth—and the street beneath it was pulverized.
The creature deflated, seemingly truly dead, and just as abruptly as it came, the tumult gave way to the distant screams irregularly punctuating the night that had been omnipresent since the Endbringer arrived and the sound of steps quickly approaching me from behind. I tensed for a moment before I noticed the correlation between its approach and the recognizable feel of Heavensword’s metal eluding my power’s grasp.
I still couldn’t look away. “H-Hang on, John. I… I’ll…”
She stepped right up to my side, and I both felt and heard her drop the sword she had been carrying as she just barely entered into my field of vision. “Are you alright? Unharmed?”
She was either the most dedicated actress I knew or… No. No, I needed to focus. What could I do? I twitched, almost as though my body demanded action, but my brain stuttered, stalling out as I tried to figure out what to do. I had to do something, but what? There was so much—too much—that needed to be done, and the queasiness in my gut was getting worse the longer I stared.
Heavensword’s hand unexpectedly came up to cover my eyes. “What—?”
The sound of whistling reached my ear once more, punctuated by a combination of squelching flesh and crunching asphalt. I slapped her hand away and choked on air, unconsciously taking a step back when I saw the spear protruding out of John’s head.
Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.
“Y-Y-You k-k-kuh hrk—!”
It was too much. I finally lost my fight with the bile rising up in me, and Heavensword held back my hair unprompted.
“I granted him mercy,” she denied as I retched, and either my ears were going crazy or else my prolonged exposure to the Butcher’s right hand was having a worse impact on me than expected because I swore I heard regret in her voice.
I was still dry heaving as I yanked myself away from her. I immediately lost my footing and would have fallen face first into the pool of John’s blood had I not grabbed hold of my costume and lifted myself into the air, far up and away from her. My power couldn’t touch her spears or abandoned sword, but I already had an arsenal at my disposal—albeit an extremely… used one—and there was metal all around us.
I brought all of the knives to bear, surrounding her in an instant while I tore apart two more vehicles for material. Almost immediately I felt my control slide off the last, half disassembled vehicle as I hit my weight limit. It hardly mattered. I had already filled the air with blades.
“Stop it!” Delible shouted as she advanced towards us. The flat surface of the asphalt twisted up into hands that grasped at her ankles, dragging her down into the suddenly liquid blacktop. Behind her, Labyrinth was looking off and up to the side, her gaze seeming to be directed at the moon. “Dammit!”
“Mon-stuhr!” I screamed at Heavensword. “Not mur-see! Mur-dur!”
She held up a soothing hand towards Delible, calmly telling her, “I will handle this,” before returning her attention to me as the other member of the Teeth stilled without relaxing. “With wounds that severe and that much blood lost, he would have been dead in little more than a minute. There was no sense in delaying and forcing him to suffer.”
Her equanimity was infuriating. “It’s a game to you, isn’t it?” I seethed, the knives quivering and glinting in the moonlight. “Mur-dur-ing inn-o-sent pee-puhl!”
“No. Far from it.” How could she be so unbothered that she was a second away from being cut into ribbons? How could she be so unbothered by the goddamn Endbringer, for that matter? “Taking lives is never a game. You know that—it’s why you’ve never done it.”
“This isn’t uh-bout me!”
“You say it’s not, but it is. How easy would it be for you to kill someone with your power, Meteor?” She spared a glance towards Labyrinth, and I tensed, immediately shifting some of the clean, unbloodied blades into bands that I wrapped around her so I could move her in an instant if needed. “The same is true for Labyrinth, no? It would be so easy, but you have never killed anyone. Because it is not a game.”
“You kuh-ill-duh him! He c-c-could have—”
“He could have what, Meteor? ‘Made it?’” How could she say that and still not manage to sound heartless? If anything, she was speaking gently. “Do you think my assessment of imminent death was a lie concocted as justification for my actions? You are focusing on the wrong details, dear. Why would I risk ‘murdering,’ as you refer to it, a grievously injured man in front of you and risk your ire now of all times? Becau—”
The air crackled, and we both tensed in anticipation of the wave to come. One second passed, then another. Something was different—wrong. It had never taken so long before.
“Meteor!” Heavensword’s eyes were wide with fear, her calm was gone. “Get down before—”
The eye of the storm passed, taking its own calm with it. The Endbringer’s wave blew past us in a flash, and beams of crimson energy burst from each of us—myself, Heavensword, Labyrinth, Delible… and two from a nearby alley?—merging together at one point. My vision swam as weariness rapidly overtook me, and my hold on my costume began to slip. I began to fall as my power grew more lethargic and unresponsive, but where my nosedive should have been accelerating, my descent instead slowed as I hit air that felt thick as molasses.
I grunted as I landed and tried to disperse the last of my momentum by turning it into a roll—a choice that, though likely sparing me injured legs, meant my costume was now covered in blood and ichor. I dry heaved, having nothing left to puke up, and the draining light finally dispersed, leaving me panting and the effort of staying upright feeling herculean.
“Meteor,” Heavensword asked from outside my line of sight, her words heavy and winded. “Are you okay?”
“Aww, I’m just fine, Mother!” something from nearby responded in the sound of my own voice. Was this my nightmare? Heavensword’s? Each of the ones we had encountered so far seemed to be, but other than the wave that washed over us, nothing else had fit the pattern. “Why wouldn’t I be? After all, you left me with Mom, and we both know she’d never let me be anything but fine, don’t we?”
I forced myself to lift my heavy head and focus. A doppelgänger looking just like me hovered just over the filthy street littered with bodies. It was giving Heavensword a smile with a sinister edge, and she warily watched it in return.
She might have been content to wait and watch, but I wasn’t. The blades I’d formed earlier had all collapsed onto the blacktop during the drain, and some of them were conveniently right underneath the hovering ‘me.’ I grabbed hold and threw them at it.
They stopped. My eyes went wide as I realized this thing was fighting me with my own power, and it turned its unwavering smile on me. Shadows crawled over its skin, and I fell backwards ass first into a pool of blood as it took Aisha’s form but remained hovering over the street.
“You fucking idiot,” it said, perfectly mimicking her voice and inflection and sending shivers running down my spine. “Losin’ your shit all over the littles things again, ain’tcha?”
The asphalt below it began to bulge only to abruptly stop, shaking so violently it almost seemed to be seizing. Aisha—the doppelgänger—turned Labyrinth, its smile shifting into what looked like amusement before shadows engulfed it once more, leaving behind Octavia dressed in casual clothes under a stark white lab coat.
“It’s time you get your medicine, Eleanor. Take off your mask and open wide.”
Labyrinth tugged her mask off and tilted her head, her mouth open wide as the blood on the ground near me ballooned up into a sphere that collapsed in on itself into a swirling mass. My skin crawled as I struggled to breath, each expansion of my lungs feeling like I was trying to suck in air through a straw. I needed to do something, anything.
Delible punched the street, tearing up a piece of asphalt and reared back to throw.
“Drop that this instant,” the nightmare idly commanded, and the hunk fell from loose fingers. “Good. Now sit down and do the only thing you’re good at. Reset.”
Delible collapsed to her knees as the sphere of blood had moved through the air, nearly upon Labyrinth. The thought of her swallowing that filth sent a jolt through me, and the hip compartment and backpack of my costume snapped open as I sent a mixture of my regular and special orbs rocketing towards the doppelgänger Octavia.
My plan—if it could even be called that—was a long shot. Melanie had long since drilled it into me that the best plans relied on minimizing risk. With that in mind, it went without saying that having the first step of my plan depend on a variable outside of my control that could shut everything down at the start was stupid… Fortunately, my hope that this thing would want to give a sense of false hope by letting my orbs get as close as possible for fighting my control wasn’t off the mark. The regular orbs in front flattened into discs as the special ones in the rear simply opened up, letting the powderized pepper spray to shoot out in a directed cloud obscuring the explosive powder packets. The explosive powder struck the discs with a bang that caused the pepper spray to quickly morph from a mild irritant into plumes of fire that struck the nightmare square in the face.
It was the sort of incredible long shot that had no business succeeding… so I suppose it was only fitting that it had no real impact whatsoever. The monster screamed, but that cry of pain quickly morphed into cackling laughter as the damage began to revert itself.
It had my power, it had Labyrinth’s… I should have known it would fucking have Delible’s. “That was a close one, huh?” it taunted me in Octavia’s voice, even as it shifted under the lab coat into Aisha once again. “Stop brea—”
I never saw the bottle coming. At least, that’s what I assumed the glass that shattered over the nightmare’s head had been.
“Bre… Wha…? Wha’ is…?”
The nightmare fell out of the air, smashing face first into the ground. Taking advantage of its incapacitation really should have occupied my full attention, but I was somewhat preoccupied when a goddamn sea of rats began streaming into the area.
“Go for the head!” Heavensword bellowed as she charged forward with swords forming in her hands, apparently unperturbed by a fucking tsunami of rodents.
Still, she did have a point. The blades the nightmare had warded off before rushed up into the air, flinging the rats that had been scurrying over them aside as the rose. Heavensword—and even the rats, seemingly—saw what I was about to do and skidded to a halt as the storm of steel descended. It was reduced to pieces in an instant, and a second later it was less than that.
I thought that was enough. Apparently Heavensword thought otherwise. “Labyrinth! Bury it!”
I saw why when a moment later the blood and tissue scattered over the street and my still airborne blades began to shift as if being pulled back together by an invisible force. I’d seen Delible’s regeneration firsthand on the beach, but this was insane! Didn’t powers function off of a piece of the brain? But then, did these Endbringer nightmares even function off of the same rules?
All of it stopped a moment later, though ‘stopped’ wasn’t exactly the most apt description. It all hung in place, suspended and shaking violently, and Labyrinth collapsed to her knees, panting. Was she trying to hold it all in place, fighting the power the same way it had fought my control over the metal?
The rats surged into motion once more, and for the third time in as many minutes, I found myself dry heaving as the rodents began to eat. Blood, bone, sinew—whatever hunks of the nightmare they could reach, they began to devour. Labyrinth began to calm down, and with everything seeming to finally be over, I rushed to her side.
“Labs! Deep bruh-eths. We’re… we’re gonna be okay.”
A blur of orange flashed in the corner of my eye, and my head snapped up as Newter landed on a nearby car, looking roughed up but otherwise unharmed. “I am so glad that worked.”
“Newter! The gluh-ass—that was you?”
“Yeah, and you do not want to know what I filled that with,” he remarked with an awkward laugh.
Heavensword crossed over to us with Delible in tow, the former’s clothes and body so covered in blood spatter she looked like she’d just finished murdering someone… And now that the danger was past, my brain helpfully reminded me that she had, in fact, done that. “Is everyone unharmed?”
“Uh, one sec,” Newter answered before I could say anything. “Hey, Mischief, you good?”
A bunch of the nearby rats ran together and began to melt into one another, the mass of fur growing in size and reforming into a dark furred, humanoid with golden eyes that gleamed in the moonlight. Said humanoid flopped down into a half-seated position on the ground and ran its hand through the longer fur on its head that must be its hair. “Other than feelin’ both full and nauseated, Mischief is fine… Ugh, eatin’ someone—somethin’, whatever—wasn’t exactly an experience Mischief wanted, y’know…”
Mischief? Mischief from the Blinds? It seemed Newter had finally found them, not that it was worth anything at this point.
Still, I wasn’t to be distracted, and after giving Labyrinth’s shoulder a quick, reassuring squeeze, I stalked towards Heavensword. Delible noticed and stepped in between us with a scowl that twisted the palm of the bloody handprint over her face. “Leave it.”
“No.”
“Delible,” Heavensword calmly said, setting a hand on her shoulder, but the younger of the Teeth promptly shrugged it off.
“I wouldn’t care if she was the second coming of Hero, much less your daughter. She was going to kill you.”
Newter flinched away at that, his eyes going wide. “Oh shit, you’re rolling around with the Butcher?!”
“I am not the Butcher,” Heavensword replied with a hint of amusement.
I glared at Delible, ignoring Newter’s outburst for the moment. “She mur-dured sum-one in fruhnt of me. Did you fur-get?” I snapped, already reaching for the blades I had abandoned on the ground.
“Mercy kill,” Delible dismissed. “Guy was going to die.”
Heavensword started to step around Delible to get between us, but Mischief spoke up before I could say anything, drawing everyone’s attention. “So, y’all do remember there’s an Endbringer fight happenin’, right? Truce is in effect and whatall?”
Truce? What…? Oh. Oh shit. I had completely forgotten that part of Melanie’s crash course on the unwritten rules. I’d hoped it would never apply to me, since this was the absolute last place I wanted to be.
“It’s true, Delible,” Heavensword said as she finally slipped between us, and though she was addressing her younger counterpart, she did turn and give me a significant look as well. “During and just after Endbringer attacks, there is a truce between all capes.”
I grit my teeth, but more than anything, thinking of Melanie reminded me of the trouble the rest of the group was in. “Newter, did you see the safe how-suh? Sum-one’s hurt.”
“Yeah,” our orange crewmate affirmed with a nod. “Was following Mischief’s lead to a shelter, hoping to find everyone. Would’ve thought you and Labs would be with them.”
“Long stor-ee,” I supplied as I retrieved Labyrinth’s mask from the ground. The green, maze covered surface had some blood on it that I rubbed off before helping her secure the mask to the harness around her head.
“Well shit. At least we found you two.” He shot Heavensword and Delible a wary look but didn’t comment. “We better hurry and find them.”