It was several minutes after we left Julia's not-so-secret supervillain pub that my sister spoke.
"This..." she hesitated, fidgeting for a few moments, then... "This was great! Could we do it again sometime?"
"Anytime, munchkin," I told her fondly, patting her head.
"I am NOT a munchkin!" she shouted and stomped the ground. The sidewalk naturally shattered, flinging concrete chips all over the place. A quick force-field caught them in mid-air, preventing them from scything into the oblivious tourists all around us like an antipersonnel mine. I brought the fragments together, holding them in a loose mass between us as I raised an eyebrow in challenge. Anne flushed and lowered her head. "Sorry," she muttered. "I just hate being treated like a little kid."
"You've never actually fought, have you?" I asked her instead of a thousand other things I could have said. "With your powers as they grew after the Invasion, I mean."
"...no? You know I don't like fighting." She was confused by the non-sequitur. "What does that have to do with anything?"
"You have a primary ability with effectively global reach, Anne. All supers get better bodies as they get more powerful and while your powers are greatly skewed towards the immaterial with a total power that large the boost is still significant." Which was problematic if she did not expect such strength in everything she did. "Let's say you're only as strong as a tank. Tanks can knock over walls just by moving around." I reached out with Proximakinesis through my legs and into the cratered sidewalk, pulling concrete back into place, unpacking soil and gravel and pulling back the missing bits to fill the small crater. "Kicking someone under the table because you were annoyed with them would literally explode them into bloody bits if they didn't have powers."
"What?" My cute little sister gaped at me in shock and fear. I felt like shit ruining the mood but this was important. No matter how smart and mature she was mistakes happened and she'd feel a thousand times as bad if she killed someone by accident. "But... but it has never happened before!" Which was probably the cause of the problem.
"Let me guess; since the invasion you've lived with Amanda and Jerry and their group of munchkins... all of which are supers." We stared at each other in silence for a moment as she finally understood the issue.
"Oh God!" Her eyes swept from the filling crater, to the floating fragments, to the busy Miami street. "Oh God, I almost killed them!"
"No, you didn't." I sent the sidewalk fragments back into the crater, superhuman awareness and mental speed letting me reassemble them like a jig-saw puzzle in moments. "You were with me tonight and I am faster than a speeding bullet. There was never a chance that you'd hurt someone before I could intervene, but that will not always be true in the future." I kneeled and placed my hands on her shoulders as our eyes stared into each other's, brilliant blue on brilliant blue from less than a foot away. "You must become familiar with your new strength. Control is not hard, you only need some time to try."
"How?" she demanded in disbelief and anger. "My hands and feet are like cannons now!"
"Silly Anne," I told her and pulled at her cheeks like I did when she was a little kid. "Mine are like atomic bombs but you don't see this city turned into a crater, do you?" Her worry faded as she realized that yes, that particular problem would be far worse for me than any other super and also yes, I had found a quick solution since we've both had our powers for the same time. "Better," I told her as she calmed down. "And don't worry, you won't have to fight. It'll even be fun!" Really, she had already done most of the work with her sculpting. She did have the control, she just needed to make a habit of applying it to people too. I just needed to see when General Rinaker could spare some of his people for it. "Now, what else do you want to do? Something fun! We can't let our day have such a downer ending."
"Could we just go back to the station?" she asked glumly. That simply would not do.
"Fine. Just hold on as best you can, OK?" Behind us the fragments had already been fused back into a solid sidewalk via sufficient application of force. It would probably be a lot stronger than the surrounding material even, but that was a problem for whatever future crew was sent to do roadwork there, not us.
"What do you mean, as best I caaAAAAAA-"
Reducing the pull of gravity to near nothing, I held Anne by my side with one arm, raised my left fist overhead, and kept pulling both of us with the maximum force Proximakinesis could apply. That being many thousand tons we shot forth like a shell out of naval artillery and kept getting faster from there. The only reason we didn't reach orbit in mere seconds was the initial air resistance as my fist literally punched the air out of our path in a supercavitation effect. The complex force-field I'd constructed around my sister earlier in the day kept around enough air for her to breathe and feel comfortable in while mostly uniform propulsion kept the felt acceleration to no more than half a dozen gravities.
Then the bulk of the atmosphere was behind us and we were speeding almost as fast as I had in the Invasion's final battle when I circumnavigated the Earth in eighty seconds. In the distance my enhanced senses picked the Valkyries' space station like a tiny dot and we made for it at a good forty or fifty thousand gravities. Without a plasma sheath to obstruct the view or the nervousness of her first ever orbital drop, Anne was looking at the curvature of the Earth below with such sheer awe and joy I wanted to develop a power that would preserve this moment for all time. Unfortunately, true control over time was not among my powers.
"This is the best gift ever," my sister said as entire countries swept by below us, her voice heavy with emotion to my super-senses. "Do you think we-" then she blinked and looked ahead. I was pretty sure her normal senses couldn't see for thousands of miles but since the space station was under the effects of her power she could probably sense its relative location. "Sis, stop! Stop! We passed the halfway point!"
I kept accelerating us, of course. This was revenge for all her bratty behavior and I was determined to milk it for all it was worth. So we kept going faster and faster and faster until I started feeling the beginnings of our mass measurably increasing. The world below became the tiniest bit redder while a dot in the distance that was a space station shifted a single shade towards blue. Then we were there, instantly coming to a dead stop as we slammed against the station's airlock.
"What... what the fuck...?" My cute little sister gaped as we weren't blasted apart by the impact. The station wasn't torn to bits, messily killing everyone aboard. In fact, all our speed disappeared in an instant without either of us feeling anything at all, in blatant violation of all known physics as well as common sense.
"A field of invulnerability to c-fractional collisions extended just enough to apply to both us and the impact point a few nanoseconds before contact," I explained with a wide grin. "Well, sis? How do you feel to be one of only two humans who've ever moved at one percent the speed of light?"
She stared at me in silence for a moment. Then she started kicking me in both shins as hard as she could.
xxxx
Another twenty seconds after leaving an outwardly annoyed but secretly very pleased Anne at the space station I was back in Miami with, as far as I could tell, nobody the wiser. I might no longer have Anne's perception filter around, but my new ability to become intangible by eliminating any interactions of force between me and my surroundings was almost as good. It was no real stealth power that would work against super-senses as evidenced by my own sensory abilities working through it. However, the vast majority of supers focused more on flashy powers than went boom than information-gathering and I was pretty confident I could hide from my current target through my other abilities.
As much as I'd have wanted the entirety of the day to have been about family, there were certain responsibilities that could not wait for that. Though responsibility was a curious word. I'd taken it upon myself to ensure the world did not explode into a global conflict that would make the world wars look like a hiccup and reduce the planet to a monster-infested, radioactive wasteland... at least until governments or other organizations cottoned up to the situation and could handle things themselves. When seen from a certain point of view that was not so much responsibility as the sheer arrogance to not only decide the future of the entire world but see to it through personal effort that things went this way rather than being just another good Samaritan among faceless thousands. Yet as I had been repeatedly told and experienced personally, in a world of superpowers individual and often unilateral action was the norm, not the exception. In the comics the selfish supergenius accused the physical powerhouse of having the ego of and taking actions like a god, but was it ego if it was true?
I decided it was ultimately irrelevant and I sneaked around invisibly to deal with the first issue for the night.
A very tall, thin, sickly man stepped out of Julia's club with a slight stagger to his steps and a stiff, slightly bent spine. A pale face that might have been pretty once had been reduced to skin and bones but still sported a hard gaze that looked at everything and everyone as if they were ugly, offensive, or both; the very image of lean and mean, except for the beard. It, like the cheek inserts, the colored lenses, and the carefully applied make-up were parts of a disguise as elaborate as it was useless. Just as Julia had informed him earlier, such things would not work on anyone that paid even minimal effort to gain information-gathering abilities. Unfortunately for him, Tomio had always been a stubborn bastard with an over-inflated idea about his own capabilities and worse, his decisions.
He walked through Miami, pushing through the crowd of unpowered humans with the sheer physicality even a crippled super scraping at the dregs of his power could bring to bear, paying no mind to those he carelessly shoved aside, casually stepping on people's feet and once even almost breaking the arm of a man that demanded an apology - almost because I'd reached out and reduced the force he applied by a factor of twenty. That at least had him hurrying on in the belief that random pedestrian had been a minor super, someone that he did not dare face in his crippled condition.
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He'd gotten worse since our last encounter, not better. Once he'd been personable, charismatic even, enough to draw people to him in the middle of a monster invasion. He'd also used his less physical powers to mind-control said people in a bid to gain greater power for himself but he'd at least been capable of civilized conversation and a modicum of common sense. His missing thumb and how he'd lost it earlier was proof of that decline. In his arrogance, perhaps madness, he'd tried to threaten Julia who not only was a far more powerful super now than Tomio had ever been but one of Tomio's past victims. If anything, I was rather surprised she hadn't killed him out of hand.
Immutable Force, the ability that resisted any external, direct powered alteration, rejected a wave of mental influence. As a non-physical power my senses could not pick it up directly, but I was pretty sure Tomio was using his mental powers to scan his surroundings now. Judging from how strong the influence felt, those had not only grown stronger since our last encounter but Tomio was better at using them from how he immediately changed directions towards an odd super-powered presence half a mile to the North. He hadn't been able to use them as a long-range sensor back during the Invasion.
Super-senses revealed Tomio's probable contact to be another super of Asian descent. Given the idealization process supers underwent guessing their actual ages was near-impossible, but the man appeared to be around twenty-five years old, with a build that was more lean than muscular. He was dressed casually in a loose shirt and pants, wore sneakers a size too large and rather thick round glasses, with a multicolored knit cap covering his short-cropped hair. As disguises went it was far better than Tomio's gangster chic style, but under it he wore a simple martial arts uniform in a dark-red power-wrought fabric and under that there was a palm-sized Chinese logograph burned into his chest.
棐
Well, shit. I might not read Chinese but quite a lot of people in the superhero business were becoming familiar with that particular symbol. It meant "Empower" and was used by the minions of the supervillain known as the Red Dragon. We didn't know how it worked, let alone how many of his men had it but after a tide of terrorist attacks all throughout China various intelligence services had seen multiple supers with that symbol on them. Supers who served the Red Dragon as soldiers in his quiet war with the Chinese government, who had never set foot on Florida or any other place with notable monster or super activity, and who seemed to have extremely similar or possibly identical powers. And now one of them was about to meet with Tomio on US soil in an attempt to gain Julia's services. That would go over with General Rinaker's people about as well as gasoline and fertilizer.
Tomio took his time to arrive, doubling back several times and repeatedly using his powers to check if he was being watched. When civilians in the area started getting headaches and I thought I'd have to intervene he finally decided he was not being followed or watched and went to meet his contact on the North side of 167th Street. Like many major metropolitan areas Miami had its own Asian community, though unlike San Francisco or New York this one wasn't a full Chinatown. It was still enough for one unobtrusive and one very suspicious Asian guy to meet without drawing the attention of mundane people, so someone a lot smarter than Tomio was had put some thought and planning into this. It could be the contact Tomio was meeting, but I doubted it; though his acting was fairly good, to my experienced, super-senses-backed eyes he walked and acted more like a soldier than a spy. Too much discipline interrupted by repetitive efforts to appear casual rather than the practiced smoothness of a more broadly skilled agent.
"Did we get an agreement?" the soldier covertly but impatiently asked the moment he and Tomio walked close enough to hear each other's mutters through the din of the crowd.
"Yes," Tomio grunted in obvious displeasure. "But why do we need-"
"Because the Dragon said so," the soldier shot back in admonishment. "You do not question the Dragon."
And that was that for the conversation. They went their separate ways, trying to disappear into the crowd. To most people a personal meeting for a single confirmation would seem cumbersome and impractical, but even half a century before electronic communications had hardly been secure. Nowadays, some departments of the US government were beginning to put supers with danger-sense in their big black surveillance programs. Even half a minute's advance warning that yes, there was actual danger to the United States from that location and also yes, it would be this particular device it would be made from was a huge deal... especially since such senses might not care how well the conversation was encrypted. It also meant that whoever had planned this operation was at least partially aware of an initiative so secret the President had yet to hear of it - not that it surprised me one bit. I was not supposed to know myself, after all. Thus, I moved.
In less than a second, I had touched both Tomio and his contact with Proximakinesis, delivering a vibration calculated to produce mild concussion and unconsciousness to someone with their level of durability. Having - among many other things - observed over twenty-five thousand concussions in the range of my senses over the past few months, I found little difficulty in repeating the process. Then once both were unconscious and could not object, I phased both targets out of the physical world and into the void I was in while intangible. They could not remain there for long; neither of them was powerful enough to survive what was effectively vacuum for more than fifteen minutes or so. That time however was ten times longer than I needed to carry them to more appropriate accommodations.
Tomio appeared in the middle of General Rinaker's office, still unconscious and tied to a metal sheet on which I'd hastily scrawled all pertinent information. Tomio's contact I carried a little further to a cave in the Rocky Mountains where I thoroughly chained him up in both physical restraints and force effects. Both Anne and I could sense the location of power effects we created ourselves regardless of distance or interference. Not many other people could say the same, but I was not betting the secrecy of any of our bases or other important locations on the Red Dragon being unable to do it.
That done I returned to Miami, deep in thought for most of the transit.
The second big problem here was more of a long-term issue compared to the spy games of a foreign supervillain but potentially of even greater importance. It involved the wall and Miami's overall situation. Anne had grasped the first half of the issue, in that the government was attempting to make an army of supers. She was mollified by how they would be individually weak and with powers reliant on equipment in that we wouldn't all be rounded up one day and forced to work for Uncle Sam. She had not seen that those two flaws were not flaws at all but deliberately engineered in how the army chose to empower their soldiers.
A super that wasn't more powerful than a tank by himself could be countered by mundane forces. A super that needed expensive, military-grade equipment to use most of their powers but when doing so could hit above their weight class was not a super at all but just a new type of soldier because the government would have control of said equipment and thus hopefully maintain the monopoly of force. On one hand, this was a very logical thing for the people in positions of authority to attempt. The government couldn't lose monopoly of force and remain a government so in the interest of not becoming puppets of some super with grand ambitions and very little grasp of how much governing a nation sucked, they had put a hundred thousand people into a grand experiment without telling anyone about their real purposes.
On the other hand, there were the twin problems of foreign reaction and foreign response. There was no way the true purpose of the wall would remain a secret long-term because with the continued if slow appearance of supers abroad the mechanics of the simplest way of empowering people would become known... and then every other nation would scream bloody murder about the US intentionally creating this army. The political and economic shitstorm that would follow would at least rival the Invasion itself because then it would not affect just a single country. And after that initial reaction would come the actual responses from governments that could not afford to not have such armies of their own seeing the US already have one. The politicians and military analysts had been secretly debating the implications for months in Washington and elsewhere; this wasn't even their first attempt at mass empowerment. Their consensus is that they could handle the issues the issues as they came.
My consensus given prior experience with similar efforts in their secret Kaiju program was that they were idiots. To that end, I had wanted to put a stop to it for the several days since I'd become aware of the issue. The problem was how to do it without making the situation explode early. Whatever I did it could neither reveal what was happening in such a way that any major powers took it seriously, nor do it in an obvious way that would turn the program's backers against me, nor shut it down in a manner that endangered the soldiers themselves or exposed the population of the city to monsters.
My original thought had been to create a giant force-field that simply blocked monsters from getting to the wall and the city beyond. No monster battle, no empowerment, no threat to the city. Plus the project's backers wouldn't be able to move against me without admitting that their goal wasn't to keep the city safe but to make more low-end supers under their control. Unfortunately, that idea was shot down hard by the sheer magnitude of what I needed to do to make it happen. A force-field over a hundred miles long and ten miles tall that was also powerful enough to stop both monsters and weapons fire cold? I could work on it for a year and not be halfway finished.
Since then I'd wrung my mind for another alternative that would cover all the goals at once but hadn't found anything. Not until a comment from my little sister gave me an idea. Sometimes you needed to hear what you already knew from someone else to start thinking in a new direction, or at least it had happened to me more than once while teaching both Anne and my students. Now, I wasn't sure if the idea would work but as I was both intangible and was taking a break from everything else there was no reason not to try.
I approached the northern part of the wall, less than half a mile outside the town of Jupiter, flew at one of the steel and concrete towers and the forty-millimeter autocannon firing at an approaching group of wights. Three soldiers, minor supers already, were infusing the gun with their active powers, enhancing its firepower and muzzle velocity by a significant margin. Still invisible and inaudible to them, I extended my own powers and senses into the weapon and took in its operation, augmentations and all. The powers themselves might be magic but kinetic energy and velocity were still routed solidly on physics, force, and Force was the core of my abilities. A field of Force Adjustment shaped itself over the gun, adjusting various forces up and down to my desires.
What I desired? For the buff from the soldier's powers to be reduced to near-nothing and an identical enhancement to be applied to the gun by my own Force Adjustment. Making the force field able to adjust to different buffs within a limited scope required some fiddling with conditions and contingencies and making it permanent required an expenditure of effort but it formed correctly and, more importantly, the next time the gun killed a monster I felt an almost infinitesimal trickle of power. People gained from monster kills according to their actual contribution, and equipment did not count. By replacing the effects of the soldiers' buffs with mine their contribution was almost eliminated without noticeably changing the performance of the gun. Unless they developed far more refined power-sensing, something that would not happen with this method of empowerment, the soldiers wouldn't even know why their improvement had slowed down. It was not a permanent fix but it worked.
Now the only thing left was to apply it to the other three and a half thousand weapon emplacements on the wall.