Seen from a great distance, the few hundred shapes gleaming in the morning sun might have seemed like any other flock of birds. Then the discrepancies would start piling up; how quickly they were circling, how oddly they'd gleam in the sun, how far away their croaks could be heard, how their apparent distance was oddly wrong as if they were far too close. Until one of them would swoop down and pick up an abandoned truck in its claws only to drop it on a bridge from a mile high, and then you'd realize just how huge they were. Another would drop low and breathe fire on a roadside motel while a small group would throw a rain of metal, exploding feathers all over its parking lot. Not birds at all, but monsters.
"Birds @ 25 ml ^ of border" Mark typed into his communicator. Taking a mental tally of their numbers and doing a quick calculation of speed vs distance and firepower the black hero in training added. "Confidence high. Engage?"
CB: "Stymphalian Chickens are tough, hit hard and explode," came the reply far faster than the fastest typist could have managed.
CB: "You are cleared to engage. Make sure you employ long-range anti-armor measures."
"Did read the report," he typed back and rolled his eyes at the advice. "By your command, Helicopter Mom :)" Seriously, she did not need to hold his hand for something as simple as this. However dangerous large groups of monsters might be against most opponents, Mark had long since prepared perfect counters for all such enemies the General had given him threat assessments for.
In this particular case, he would not even need to engage them conventionally. Of the three 'slots' his power had, one was already configured to give him the abilities of the A-10 Thunderbolt II, one of the best close-air-support jet planes ever built. For all they were fragile, airplanes were his favorite machines to imitate and the 'Warthog', as the A-10 was often called, was the one he liked best for the offensive options and maneuverability it gave him even though it didn't even come close to the top speed, flight ceiling or firepower of others. But this is where his power really shined; covering up the weaknesses of what he imitated while combining their strengths.
His second slot remained as it was; a single mass of solid steel weighing one and a half thousand tons. At the upper limit of what his power could imitate mass-wise, its only purpose was to let him borrow the resilience and inertia of such an object and concentrate it down to his human-sized body. He knew better than anyone how hard people with superpowers could hit, being one of the rare supers whose baseline form would not survive even one of his strongest hits.
His third slot though? It had contained a high-altitude spy drone but was already shifting into something much larger. It grew and grew and grew until its wingspan exceeded two hundred feet and its fuselage became even longer. Soon, it was mimicking the Boeing YAL-1. An experimental system that used a megawatt chemical laser to intercept missiles, it had been scrapped due to high costs and low efficiency. Mark's power didn't care about that though; all that mattered was that the laser turret could hit airborne targets up to two hundred miles away and was a line-of-sight weapon.
But that alone would not destroy monsters with more durability than main battle tanks, so Mark leaned on the second aspect of his powers. He combined the laser turret's range, accuracy, and practically instantaneous hits with the firepower of the JDAM 500lb bomb carried by the A-10 he was mimicking. Then he took aim and fired.
More than thirty miles away one of the Stymphalian Birds exploded. Even as the swarm reacted, a second monster was similarly torn apart then a third and fourth. The monsters went wild, flew in crazy evasive maneuvers, looked everywhere for the attacker. They could not, however, see a human-sized target from such a distance and Mark's weapon had been designed to hit much smaller, much faster targets from much further away. Combined with the heavy but instantaneous firepower of the bombs so it would not need to keep on target for several seconds, it let the African-American teenager simply delete a target every few seconds without fear of reprisal.
"Birds destroyed. Looking for more targets," he typed into his communicator.
BITCH: "I C YR birds + r^ ya @wight battalion."
CB: "Cindy, no. Hold position and don't cross into enemy territory."
BITCH: "Cindy yes!"
Mark sighed in exasperation. And things had been going so well.
xxxx
Only seven months after the Invasion and most of Florida had been turned into an uninhabitable land of eldritch horrors. If it wasn't the unnatural weather hitting the area with violent storms, persistent fog banks, rains of mutant frogs or the occasional whirlwind of boiling tar, the crawling swamps, forests of steel spikes and tentacled vegetation would still make large swathes of land inaccessible. But the worst problem was the surviving monsters.
Mot's temper tantrum at being denied an easy victory had turned him into a giant monster that would give Godzilla inadequacy issues. His march through the state had caused enormous devastation and supernatural violence that were only compounded by everyone else's attempts to bring him down, Yours Truly among them. The problem with that was that Mavethan sorcery fed on violence and the Invasion had seeded the land with magics that in the aftermath of the final battle had all the fuel they needed to grow.
Now monsters were breeding all over the place, practically spawning off the ground like people in the eighteen hundreds had believed flies did. The US Armed Forces had tried to kill them, of course. But soon it became apparent trying to violently kill monsters on top of the violence-fed magic that spawned them only made the problem worse. The Army's response was to hold the line just outside the afflicted area, kill any monsters there while everyone waited for a solution to be found. And while the soldiers had done an excellent job all things considered, this stopgap measure was full of holes - especially when a large enough swarm of monsters aimed at one of the weaker points of the line.
Word of exactly such a swarm getting through the defenses was why I'd decided to bring the three munchkins here. Well, that and another training exercise; otherwise I'd taken care of the swarm personally. Their mission? Scout the admittedly very broad portion of the front that had yet to be properly fortified for signs of the monsters, locate the actual swarm, then engage them in the best way they could come up with.
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I groaned and rolled over in my impromptu bath, rivulets of molten rock and metal sliding off my skin. The communicator was the only thing I was currently wearing, protected from the intense heat by my powers as I relaxed in the sinfully warm and bubbly environment. The device beeped again as more frantic messages from Mark came in. Honestly, that kid was too uptight, took everything far too seriously instead of living a little, then had the temerity to call me "Helicopter Mom".
Not that the kids knew what I was doing while they ran after the monsters. In at least this the General was right; I wouldn't be able to protect them forever and sooner rather than later they'd need to fight real threats. Thus I'd tricked them into thinking I was watching their every move then basically cut them loose as soon as they reached the border. The monsters up here so far from Mot's arrival point on Earth were hardly a threat to those of their level of power. Worse came to worst, they'd get a bad scare that would teach them some badly needed caution - especially Cindy. That girl still acted as if she was invincible, an attitude she needed to lose posthaste, so when she'd ignored orders and crossed the border I just spared a minute's worth of super-senses to be certain of the situation then returned to my bath.
A basalt mix at two and a half thousand Kelvin was the best environment to sit back, relax, and see how events would unfold.
xxxx
Even in the blighted, disgustingly smelly, pulsating wasteland, Cindy was everywhere. Well, not in that boiling tar pit or inside the bus-sized spike that crackled with purple lightning. Nor in that stream of green slime either. But everywhere else in a radius of several city blocks there was an instance of herself, doing anything that she could have done and wanted to be doing. Those instances weren't visible, or audible, or detectable by any mundane method because Cindy did not want them to be. Thus they really weren't there as far as anyone else was concerned... until the time came for Cindy to do unto others lots and lots.
Most people quickly grasped the combat and mobility implications of a power that let her be and not be, act and not act in thousands of different ways and places at a time. They did not realize that the real number wasn't thousands but had no upper limit, and the utility applications were even greater than the combat ones. Cindy heard and saw and smelled and felt everything in the radius of her power she wanted to, from all possible angles. While she was not physically affected except by things that could affect all versions of her at once (or those she allowed), information remained and her mind didn't have any problems processing or remembering it.
As she jogged along the border, she looked at each and every direction with a million eyes, listened with a million ears. Even with bog standard human senses scouting would have been a breeze; with the enhanced baseline all supers got finding the monsters had been a foregone conclusion. Those evil chicken things she'd seen about an hour before, but left for the boys to deal with. Flying was the one thing she couldn't do yet, so she went further ahead to find something she could actually engage with. And what do you know? As soon as she climbed that ridge she saw the army following in the birds' wake.
Several hundred of her thought of the monsters' movements, their coordination. While those instances worked through the tactical and strategic implications, the rest of her dissected the latest anime and fanfiction, or thought of her next posts in the three and a half million sites she followed online... for when the team returned back to civilization. If anything beyond the stench made this place a real wasteland, it was the no signal sign on her phone.
Ten minutes later, a widely smiling fourteen-year-old brunette stood in the way of several thousand undead warriors. Whatever intelligence directed the band of monsters and the Stymphalian Birds both was given pause by how the teenage girl cackled loudly and with far too many unseen mouths before taking a hundred-foot leap into the undead front lines. It was surprised even more how hundreds of undead warriors all across the small army's line toppled and were subsequently crushed to bits by seemingly nothing at all...
xxxx
"Cindy is being her usual insubordinate self again?" Gabby said as he flew next to Mark on top of his latest sword. The three-pronged, magical blade glowed and crackled with yellow lightning yet contrary to appearances it wasn't really an offensive weapon. What it could do was both fly at helicopter speeds... and teleport faster than normal people could blink either within a city block or to any one of Gabby's other blades... such as the green-glowing butter knife Mark held out to him.
"No, keep it. It's a safety net for both of us," the Hispanic boy added to his partner. Then he held up his left hand, holding a short sword with a dark red crossguard jewel. The jewel glowed and the crossguard's tines wrapped around Gabby's eyes like overly thick wire-frame glasses even as the sword's blade lengthened. "Wow. Look at her going to town on those poor monsters."
"At least it's not us," Mark grumbled then frowned at his friend's creation. "Only you would make a sword that's also a telescope," he huffed in annoyance, to which Gabby just rolled his eyes. It was not him his friend was annoyed with.
"Hey, don't dish the Eye of Thu-"
"And now you gave it a lame name, too," Mark sighed and slowed down to a hover. "Why are you even here, Gabby? We were supposed to scout the whole area for monsters that slipped through. Am I the only one that followed orders?"
"There's more to a team than orders," Gabby countered, then his voice took on a dreamy tone even as his eyes widened, staring at seemingly nothing. "And you wouldn't call it lame if you'd seen what I have seen; it's far more than just a telescope."
"Great, now you sound like a stoned-out doomsayer, proclaiming the end of days," the dark-skinned boy huffed and turned away. "Why do I even put up with you?"
"Because stoned-out or not, I'm here to stop you from doing something you'll regret," the Hispanic hero in training shot back, suddenly quite serious. Mark glowered at him at that, fists clenching at the thinner boys' sides, but he said nothing. They both stood... and watched...
xxxx
I gave the molten rock and metal mix another dose of heat, until its deep red hue turned into a brighter orange. Its viscosity plummeted and it became almost as runny as oil, if a great deal heavier and less sticky. Then it went further into yellow, its radiance blinding to a normal person and gained the consistency of water. Perfect for washing off everything tangled in my hair and dissolving everything that had no business clinging to my skin. Yes, I could have just negated friction and let everything fall off, but that just wouldn't compare to the relaxation and fun of a proper hot bath.
Then I extended my senses again, bridging the distance of miles to watch my three charges and the drama about to unfold. As I basked in the heat, I wondered whether this would be the moment that would forge them into a proper team or destroy them for good. I was hoping for the former but despite training them for weeks there was too much bad blood between them that could still tilt the scales towards the latter. The situation could simply not be allowed to fester any further.
Even if there was more behind this push through the borders than just another group of monsters...