The good news was I managed to find Lung before he reached where Newter, Bakuda, and Oni Lee were, which was great, since Faultline’s plan hinged on me giving the rest of the crew time to neutralize Lee. Unfortunately, as is often the case with good news, it was accompanied by bad news. Namely, Lung was monstrous and not in the figurative sense of the word. The metal spears emanating from his back had grown and morphed into wings, his skin was entirely coated in scales, and his head and face had twisted into something elongated and draconian.
Just laying eyes on him sent a shiver up my spine. Faultline had said I got lucky when I fought Lung before, and seeing him like this made it abundantly clear just how right she was.
I would have liked to take time to plan a proper surprise attack—I needed every advantage I could get!—but my arrival overhead didn’t go unnoticed. Lung’s serpentine neck twisted around and up to glare at me, and a deep, distorted, “Ooo!” rumbled out of him.
Before I could even begin to process what he had been trying to say, fire erupted from his mouth towards me, and though I handily dodged thanks to the large distance between us, the air around me still grew uncomfortably hot.
I had the overwhelming urge to babble at him as I shaped some of my reserves into several spears, but all I managed was an inarticulate, “Aah,” sound, since my mouth and tongue were still refusing to play ball. I had more immediate concerns to worry about than my ability to speak though, so I threw my focus into swinging myself through the air to avoid the gout of flames as Lung swiftly twisted his head towards me.
I flung my spears at him, and his inhuman body shifted out of the way well before my attack could land. I had planned to make follow up attacks using the metal in my projectiles once they hit him or were in the ground nearby, but I was forced to abandon those plans when he began spitting a multitude of fireballs in my direction, each with a slightly different angle of flight that left very little room to weave between them. If I had been alone, then Lung might very well have been able to keep me entirely off balance with his assault, whittling away at me until he managed to wear me down.
Fortunately, I wasn’t alone. Kinda.
Armsmaster’s motorcycle rounded the corner with a screech of tires on pavement that put him maybe a half dozen yards away from Lung, and he literally leapt off of it towards the dragon with his halberd in hand. Lung had obviously heard the loud vehicle’s approach because he whirled around in a flash and spat a fireball at him and followed it with a swipe of his now dangerously clawed hand. The Tinker did something with his halberd that deflected the fireball while also reducing its size, and he used the range of his weapon to his advantage to strike away Lung’s swipe before it even came close to his body. This still left him in close proximity to the behemoth, but if he was frightened, then it didn’t show in short, calculated movements as he drove the dragon back while dodging any retaliation.
“Leave the area!” the hero barked, his voice’s volume amplified by some sort of speaker built into his tinkertech armor. He ducked under another swing from Lung and slashed open a hunk of the dragon’s chest. The villain breathed a wave of fire at him, forcing the hero to hastily pivot out of the way and smash the flat of his halberd against the serpentine head to buy himself time to put distance between them. “He’ll just ramp up more!”
I wanted nothing more than to leave—Lung was terrifying to look at, much less be around when he was like this—but Faultline hadn’t given the go ahead. If I left and Lung fled Armsmaster to retrieve Bakuda, then it would be more than just Masuyo’s life on the line. I had no doubt the bastard would tear through anyone in his way, and that meant Faultline, Labyrinth, Gregor, and Newter would all be at risk as well. No—I had to stay.
Still, flying high over the fight without contributing wouldn’t be of much help either, so instead I fell back on my earlier plan, liquefying the spears I had tossed and trying to snake them around Lung’s feet. The son of a bitch somehow anticipated this and leapt forward into a roll that sent him tumbling towards Armsmaster. Despite his inhuman body and proportions, Lung apparently still had precise enough control to lash out at the Tinker with his tail, but Armsmaster once again dodged with what seemed like relative ease. It seemed he wasn’t just the leader of the Protectorate ENE for show.
“Leave!” he once again barked as he shot something at Lung that didn’t seem to phase the monster in the slightest. “I have backup on the way!”
Did he think I was staying just to help him? I wasn’t sure whether I should be flattered he thought me heroic enough to put my life on the line to help some guy I had never even met or whether I should be insulted he thought I was idiotic enough to do exactly that same shit.
I quickly flew out of the flight path of two fireballs Lung sent hurtling my way in response and tried launching a few more hastily constructed spears then repositioning the material I had closer to Lung to grab at him again, but he dodged without even looking my way, which really added insult to injury. Trying the same thing twice and expecting different results had been stupid and a waste of time, which was a precious commodity when the bastard literally grew stronger the longer he fought.
Armsmaster was fortunately taking the brunt of Lung’s focus, but I still needed to shift up my tactics before I got punished for my lack of ingenuity. That was a lesson Faultline had drilled into me back in our first team-building exercise, and once I got to thinking about that time, an idea came to me. The same approach I had used to find Newter in the warehouse could be tweaked to give me the boost I needed to actually trap Lung. Taking care to continue moving erratically through the air to discourage any more fire being launched my way, I began breaking down as much of the area’s metal as I could while avoiding Armsmaster’s equipment and anything actually inside of buildings. Cars, dumpsters, light poles, fences, and manholes all turned to liquid and began reforming into simple one-foot cubes that I scattered all over the street. There was so much of it that I couldn’t control it all at once, but I wouldn’t need to, so I didn’t let that bother me. It was a shit ton of property damage, which I doubted the Tinker would appreciate, but if I could cover the area in what I needed to fight, then battlefield control might just take the day.
A van was racing towards the area at speed, which couldn’t be a coincidence, but I couldn’t tell whether it was conveying friendlies or not, so I didn’t dare damage it. Ignoring it for now, I tried lancing the metal in the four of the cubes closest to Lung at him only to find there was a fatal flaw in my plan that I hadn’t accounted for. It seemed the wings on Lung’s back were not just for show. Maybe they had been when I first found him, but the draconic villain’s response to my distribution of metal all over the ground was to leave it altogether. With a jump and a heave of his wings, he pushed up into the air, and it was obvious he was coming for me.
I didn’t have much materials on my person to work with beyond what I needed to fly, I immediately pushed everything I had into the largest shield I could and shoved it into elsewhere before accelerating as quickly as I could away from the oncoming mass of claws and fire. I had hoped putting something large and immovable between us would buy me enough time to put some real distance between us, but in a surprising show of dexterity, Lung twisted around my shield with almost no loss of speed. I promptly yanked the shield right back out of elsewhere to try and grab at him, and even though I managed to get some on his tail and tried pushing that into elsewhere, he slipped right out of it because the scales of his tail were too smooth to properly get caught.
With Lung too close to properly dodge, there was only one thing I could do. It was probably karmic justice for what I had done to Labyrinth a couple of weeks ago that I was forced into this position, but I too worried about avoiding being roasted to a burnt crisp to appreciate the comparison. I ripped the metal I had been using to fly off of me, leaving only my scarf, and sent it all shooting towards Lung’s face to try and muzzle him in place in elsewhere. It could have been he was so empowered he saw it coming or else he had already been preparing to attack, but either way, he was already spewing fire before the hunk of metal even got close. My sole saving grace was the flames were partially blocked by my attempt, but some still burst past and struck me in the arm, drawing an insuppressible scream from me.
The last second plan had been to lock him in place and to catch myself before I hit the ground with some of the metal I had littered the road with, but my mind went blank from the pain. Everything became a blur as I plummeted, and for several long moments, only one thought actually broke through from the morass of agony.
I don’t want to die.
Something collided with me, and in an instant, the feeling of falling down was replaced with hurtling sideways through the air as something large gripped me tightly. I was still arcing downward, but a second later, whatever was holding me hit a solid surface with a jarring landing that redoubled the pain searing through my arm.
I screamed again, my voice hoarse, and I was quickly set down on my uninjured arm.
“Hang on, we’ve got you!”
Masuyo?
I forced myself to open my eyes, which I had unconsciously clenched shut, and saw my cousin standing over me and yanking off her jacket. Parian still sat upon her lion with her gorilla nearby, and I realized the three of us were on a nearby roof.
Lung roared, clearly not amused his prey had escaped, and I tried to marshal what metal I could to form a barrier between him and us. There was no way I could manage enough in time, and Parian’s gorilla leapt to intercept. The stuffed creature didn’t stand a chance, being immediately set ablaze by Lung, but it did manage to stay solid long enough to disperse his forward momentum and send him falling to the ground. Masuyo hurriedly waved her jacket at my arm a few times, clearly trying to dispel lingering flames, but Lung was already leaping up into the air once more. His silver scaled wings spread wide, exposing the leathery, red flesh that made up the bulk of them, and with a mighty flap, he started forward again, only for the blade of Armsmaster’s halberd shot out and embedded itself into the dragon’s leg, but it tugged free a second later.
I had enough metal by that point to make a shield, but Lung’s head abruptly snapped to the side a moment before he was tackled out of the sky by a vaguely green blur that was followed closely by a pair of red and blue blurs. The van that had been rushing towards us was parked a bit further down the road.
Parian moved her lion to the edge of the roof, and she called back to us, “More heroes!”
“This is going to hurt. A lot,” Masuyo abruptly warned me, then she smothered my arm with her jacket. My vision briefly went white from the sheer pain, and it took me several seconds to realize the sound of someone screaming was me.
“I’m so, so sorry, but I had to starve the last of the fire!”
I shivered uncontrollably as she carefully peeled her jacket off before tossing it away, and I pulled some of the metal I had gathered for my ultimately unnecessary shield over to spell out, [Starve?]
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
“Fire isn’t a thing—it’s a chemical reaction, and it needs oxygen. Now let me look at your arm.”
I didn’t really want to look at my arm, but Faultline hadn’t given the all clear yet, so I needed to know how bad the damage was. It was… not pretty to say the least. A large swath of the skin on my upper left arm had been completely burned away, leaving angry, reddish-pink skin underneath. That was bad enough, but my dress had sleeves that stretched to midway down my forearm, and what remained around the area of the burn looked to be fused with my skin.
“Second degree burns… Thank god! I thought it’d be far worse…”
This was the better scenario? And it was the result of only one hit by him, and not even a clean one at that. Fucking hell. It would take a monster to actually beat him in a fair fight. If I wasn’t off my mark though…
Masuyo brought her hand to her ear, and I heard her echoed through the bud in my ear as she said “Meteor is down and injured with a bad second degree burn, but the Protectorate are here though, so Parian and I will get her to saf— What are you doing?!”
I had begun wrapping myself with enough metal to fly, obviously avoiding my damaged arm and bulking up on my other limbs to compensate, and Masuyo quite obviously took offense. [They need more time.]
“Are you out of your mind?! We’re getting you out of here!”
“Meteor,” Faultline’s voice cut in—the first sound I’d heard from any of my teammates working on Oni Lee. She sounded a bit harried but still managed to sound the consummate professional. “Retreat if you need to. That’s an order.”
She didn’t have the Etch A Sketch out for me to reply, so I disassembled enough of a car near her to spell out, [Got an idea,] which I also relayed to Masuyo as well.
“Meteor—” Masuyo started to say, sounding like she wanted to tear her hair out, but she was cut off by Faultline’s reply.
“If your idea doesn’t work, then go. We need you safe, and that means from the Protectorate as well.”
I lifted myself to my feet, doing my best to ignore the pain flaring in my left arm. Masuyo carefully shadowed me to the edge of the roof while Parian watched, the other cape’s full-face porcelain mask making it impossible to decipher what she was thinking. Just as I had suspected, it was Assault, Battery, and Boudicca who had joined Armsmaster in the fight against Lung. The three newcomers were playing off of one another’s powers with obvious skill, and a few PRT officers with containment foam sprayers were scattered around, though they were clearly holding back for the moment.
Boudicca being present when my arm got fucked up again unexpectedly thrust me headlong into a giggling fit. Yeah, I had figured she would be here.
“Meteor?” Masuyo sounded concerned, and I couldn’t blame her. After all, I was laughing uncontrollably while I had a bad burn and four heroes were fighting Lung nearby without gaining any ground.
At least they weren’t gaining ground yet. Boudicca was quite possibly the only person in the Bay who could take Lung in a fair fight, but her power was quirky. If she got hit, she got stronger and faster, and if she hit someone instead, she became tougher and self-healing. She could also put marks on her targets that boosted how she affected them, which meant the start of most fights for her was a balancing act as she tried to build up momentum.
But what could she do if she was hit a lot?
Despite seemingly wearing bronze armor along with the green cloth, there wasn’t actually any metal in Boudicca’s costume anymore. Fortunately, most of the cubes I had scattered around the area earlier were still around—just knocked aside from the immediate fight area. I broke down several cubes into pellets the size of BBs and waited for an opportune moment, just in case my hunch was wrong. A few moments later she dipped out of the brawl for a moment, and I hit her with every last one of my tiny BBs. She froze for a long second, the BBs clattering to the ground, and I began to worry I was wrong. I’d watched a light smack from Assault empower her in Providence, and I had thought a shotgun blast of BBs would be enough, but what if it didn’t and she interpreted this as an attack?
It was simultaneously relieving and frightening when she whirled around to stare up at me with such speed she literally blurred.
I twisted the last remnants of my would-be shield into as large a message I could. [Fuck him up.]
She continued to stare just a second longer, then she shot towards Lung like a goddamn cannonball. She punched him in the arm, and even from here, I could hear the crack. He stumbled back with a furious roar, and though all the heroes immediately moved in to press the attack, Boudicca’s next hit obviously had nowhere near the same amount of overwhelming force. I had no idea why, but it didn’t matter for the moment. If the hero could only do one attack like that at a time, then that just meant I needed to keep hitting her.
Lung’s arm had begun to heal, and he was visibly growing even larger than his already ridiculous proportions. I had no time to waste. I struck Boudicca with another shotgun blast worth of BBs, and she suddenly surged in speed, delivering a crushing blow that knocked him to his knees. Giving the villain no time to collect himself, I hit Boudicca again. And again.
The other heroes had caught on by the second repetition and moved out of the way, and the onslaught of titanic punches from Boudicca quickly overwhelmed Lung. Up to that point, he had been getting injured but never really enough to slow him down because he immediately began healing. When every blow shattered a bone and obliterated huge swaths of his scales, however, it seemed his healing just couldn’t get up. Where before he had been growing larger and deadlier, his growth stagnated and soon after seemed to be reversing. The final blow came when Lung, with both his arms as well as his wings hanging limp, was unable to shield his head from being struck by Boudicca, sending his neck snapping around and into the road so hard it actually sunk into the devastated pavement.
“Oh my god…” Masuyo breathed out in disbelief next to me, her arm wrapped around Parian as the three of us stared down at the fight.
Seconds passed, and Lung didn’t get back up. My idea had worked.
Just to cap it all off, Faultline reported over the radio, “We’ve neutralized Oni Lee. Everyone disengage ASAP.”
I didn’t get to celebrate our triumph over the ABB for long though, since Boudicca, who I had already hit with another shotgun blast, burst towards me and leapt to the roof where we were standing. We all stumbled back out of the way, but the hero’s hand snapped forward and grabbed me by the neck.
With how much strength she’d had in that moment, I was confident my throat would have been crushed if I hadn’t instinctively shoved my scarf into elsewhere.
Parian screamed, and Masuyo tried to shove the hero off me, but she didn’t budge. What I could see of her face that wasn’t covered by her visor briefly looked concerned but quickly hardened into a cold expression. “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t crush you like an ant, you scum.”
What. The. Fuck?
“Get off of her!” Masuyo yelled at her, pounding at her arm futilely, unaware she was just making the hero stronger.
[What the hell is wrong with you?] I spelled out in the air behind me, staring wide-eyed at her and trying to figure out what had prompted this sudden shift in behavior.
“Wrong answer,” she growled, but rescue came in the form of Assault and Battery, who both leapt up to the roof.
“Boudicca!” Battery barked as Assault moved forward to stand between us. “What on earth are you doing?”
“She’s involved,” Boudicca snarled, spittle flying from her mouth. “I know she is!”
“Even if she is, you have to put the kid down, Boodie,” Assault told her with a surprising gentleness. “Don’t do this.”
In the corner of my eye I also noticed one of the drones that I had spotted during my last encounter with the Protectorate. Were there more in the area? I would have thought so, but generally only the Tinker who made the equipment could actually maintain it long-term, and these looked exactly like the ones Reconnoiter had used in Philadelphia but had no metal in them. I had once asked Faultline why the Protectorate hadn’t requested more capes to deal with the overwhelming numbers of the Empire, and she replied that there was a whole mess of politics involved in transfers, and the biggest cities got the most capes. Brockton Bay had so many that it was actually unclear why Boudicca had been placed here instead of Boston, who had less capes then and still did.
Odds were Reconnoiter hadn’t been transferred, but what did that mean practically here? I had only noticed two the day the Empire tried to jump us. Was that all they could lease out from the Philly cape before he had to cycle new ones to them and repair the old ones? If they only had this one and one other, then most of our escape routes wouldn’t be covered, and I had also managed to outpace them last time. But if there were more…
“Meteor,” Assault carefully said, his eyes still on Boudicca, “you’re a person of interest in a murder. You need to come in with us to answer questions, okay?”
Fuck. Was this about what happened with Aisha? Had she spun them a tale when they caught her, played things off as me being the murderer? We needed an exit strategy, and it needed to be good enough to deal with having three heroes standing literally on top of us. There was only one I could think of, and Faultline wasn’t gonna be happy depending on how it went. I’d just have to hope for the best.
“She helped you!” Masuyo screamed at him, getting right up in his face and raging at him. I could have kissed her for buying me time. “She could have left, but she stayed to help you!”
Lung was over there, and Armsmaster must be taking care of him, or else he’d be up here. The sun’s that way, so with everyone else facing this way…
“Ma’am, there’s no need to be like that. If the kid—” He gave Boudicca another significant glance at that. “—did nothing wrong, then she’ll only need to answer for her other crimes on record.”
Boudicca snarled again but yanked her hand away. I pulled my scarf back from elsewhere but kept my focus on what I was doing. I still needed more time, so I tugged at the button on Masuyo’s jeans, desperately hoping she would get the picture. Keep going.
“Her other crimes on record, huh? What, like the release of that Canary lady? I’m sure you people would just be thrilled to talk to her about that!”
That… hadn’t exactly been what I'd been looking for, but beggars couldn’t be choosers. Nearly there…
“Well yeah, that’s probably—”
“Assault,” Battery hissed, her frown giving her a less than impressed appearance.
“Right you are, puppy! Sorry, ma’am, but we can’t discuss on-going investigations with the public or… y’know, something like that?”
“You people make me sick! We’re supposed to be able to count on you to step in when the villains in this city go wild, but where were you when I was abducted off the street and had a bomb shoved in my spine?”
Assault and Battery both tensed, but Boudicca practically became stone, she was so still.
Here goes nothing.
I slowly began to twist my metal message into new letters, and when everyone started, Masuyo quickly blurted, “She can’t talk! The ABB, they did something to her. She’s just spelling out a message!”
If her warning put them at ease, it certainly wasn’t for long. [↑ Hostages ↑]
“Assault?” Battery said, her costume glowing and her eyes never leaving me. She probably thought I was trying to get them to look away, but shit like that only worked in cartoons.
The red clad hero looked up and paled a bit. “Uh, Armsmaster?” he said, a hint of worry leaking into his voice. “Look up and tell me how much damage each of those might do?”
High up in the air, as high as I could get them, were meteors suspended directly over the homes and apartments below. It had been a gamble to make them—if there had been more drones in the area, then at least one of them would have noticed me forming the meteors at the very fringes of my range. As it was, it had still been more than a dash of luck getting them all into place without the heroes noticing them, but once I’d had even a handful in place, I would have enough leverage to get us out of here. Any one of them would obliterate a sizable chunk and pulverize anyone caught beneath with as many of them as I had up there?
“Oh no. No no no no…,” Parian muttered, wringing her hands together and looking very much so likely she wanted to be anywhere else at that moment. I would have to find some way to make it up to the doll cape in the future—likely paying for her attorney. I had no doubt the Protectorate were going to give her hell for this. Hopefully she would be able to leverage Masuyo’s story about the bomb to her advantage.
[We leave, I take meteors with. Do anything to us, they’ll drop.]
Boudicca was seething, likely wishing she still had her hand around my neck, and Battery looked like she was regretting telling her teammate to stop choking me earlier.
Assault’s lips tugged down into a grimace, and he grimly warned, “You were already on thin ice, kid. Don’t do this.”
[You’re not giving me a choice.]
“There’s always a choice.”
“You were put in a place you should never have been placed,” Gregor had told me as I sobbed into chest after what I did to Aisha. “Made a choice that no one should have to make.”
I reached out to Masuyo. She took my hand without hesitation.
[I choose to leave.]
With the lives of everyone in the several dozen buildings I had marked on the line, the Protectorate was forced to let us leave. Parian left first on her lion after an extremely awkward exchange of goodbyes with Masuyo. After giving her a few minutes’ head start, I flew Masuyo and I away while cradling my brutalized arm. We initially went west before I hastily pulled the meteors down and abandoned them, the two of us fleeing into the sewers. I needed medical attention badly, but we still made a point to move erratically from there before resurfacing and calling Newter to come get us.
It wasn’t the victorious ending we deserved, but it was the best we were able to salvage out of what could have easily turned into a disaster.