Magic is the act of Creation: the translation of one's ideas and beliefs into universal laws.
That was what Amanda had been told in her first magical lesson by an extra-dimensional entity with the shape of a little girl. It was why every supernatural could develop their own powers with unique mechanics while at the same time magic could be taught, copied and researched to significant extent. It was why concepts and methodologies in its use seemed virulent, why the level of magic on Earth kept increasing, and part of why supernaturals grew with personal accomplishments.
The unpleasant corollary was that Magic could also be an act of transformation or destruction and that such efforts were easier if more limited than creative ones. After all, if you could make new laws of reality, it followed logically that you should be able to change or repeal existing ones and to blindly fumble into making something work differently or stop working altogether was simple than making something that worked from the ground-up. Case in point, the so-called 'enhancements' she was currently examining.
The Red Dragon had not created new supers whole-cloth. The making of new sapient beings that not only thought in the way he wanted them to but also possessed the capacity for magic to begin with would have been a truly impressive accomplishment. Even the Mavethans during their invasion had not been capable of that. They could create monsters from the remnants of those they had murdered, warp existing life-forms in something more to their taste, or summon beings either from an outside source or as reflections of existing monsters but most of the monsters that had not been people ended with almost no ability to shape and choose their own power.
From what Amanda's delving into her incapacitated foes could tell, the Asian terrorist hack had circumvented most of the difficulty by starting with other supers. People who had already unlocked magical abilities, who had taken the first steps into having powers of their own and growing them. Then he had branded them with his own power, with a spell that showed them what the Red Dragon's own power was in excruciating agony and never letting them forget the experience. Thus he engendered abject terror about him in his victims and through constant conditioning a fanatic devotion.
The horrendous 'trick' was that the victims knew what the Red Dragon's magic was. They could not forget it and were forced to keep thinking about it all the time which, paired with their conditioning, had them thinking they were extensions of his power. And by believing in it, living it, they became it. Whatever power they had was transformed through their fear, fanaticism and constant reminders into the transferable ability to copy a portion of the Red Dragon's own abilities. What seemed from the outside to be a powerful if painful boost was in fact a horrible, mind-destroying curse. It turned people into hollowed-out shells whose only purpose was to carry it, victims who'd be eventually, unavoidably discarded so a grown, stronger curse could be put onto another.
Examination done, the sorceress pulled at the curse tied to the weakest super among the prisoners. The logograph on the man's bare chest burned with a baleful crimson glow the moment her own magic touched it, resisting her attempted manipulation with impossible tenacity for a power coming from such a minor super. It anchored itself with power it shouldn't possess, slipping through Amanda's magical grasp like a handful of sand gripped too tightly. Annoying, but something she'd been half-expecting. The Red Dragon wasn't a fool to leave his work unsecured, but how had he done it?
Fire illuminated. It banished darkness and cast forth light that revealed. It destroyed fears and doubts, provided comfort and security against enemies. It also transformed and was the foundation of industry and human civilization. Amanda knew it, believed it, had lived it more than most in this age where people took so much of human knowledge, security and industry for granted. So when the flame she held in one hand grew and became brighter, she used that belief and understanding at a more supernatural level to uncover what the enemy wished to keep obscured. The tangled threads of the curse became clearer, easier to follow and understand, and she saw the tiny immaterial lines linking the curse with its other iterations.
"The enhancements are linked," she said for the benefit of her friends who did not see as she could. "Trying to remove one is almost as hard as removing all of them and they're too many for me to overpower them quickly."
"Linked how?" Maya asked immediately, her eyes sweeping from cursed victim to cursed victim in an effort to find what she couldn't see. "Could the links be broken? Subverted? And what do they do beyond just making it harder to remove?"
"Links of intent, similarity and origin, not actual physical connections," Amanda added. Even if they might appear to be so in her sight, because in magic one could often become the other. Her earlier magic lessons were very frustrating when places and distances didn't work as she expected them to and her human mind interpreted what her magical senses revealed in confusing, inaccurate manner. In the months since she'd gotten better and better at not making assumptions from apparent evidence because in magic there was such thing as evidence or causality only so far as the caster wanted them to be. "I suspect they are how the power passes from one recipient to others when they die and why these... people fight more like a single-minded horde than individuals." Also how their powers remained near-identical despite being different people. If their minds had been chained together beyond just suffering under the same brainwashing and magical conditioning, power exchanges would be smoother and the group would be less affected by deaths. It would seem like more husks discarded without mental impact rather than members of the group dying. Maybe they even thought the Red Dragon would give them new bodies?
She examined the idea before scowling and clenching her fists. The fanatics may believe it would, but she very much doubted the Red Dragon did. Transferring the curse to another super would just corrupt them in another mindlessly fanatic extension of the Red Dragon, not reincarnate those previously killed. Though... if their minds by that point were entirely mangled into what that bastard wanted, would his victims notice the difference? Amanda resolved to put that vile man under his own curse when she, Maya and Jerry finally caught up with him. He should not miss out on the opportunity to feel exactly what his victims experienced before they burned him out of the universe with meteor swarms and nuclear fire.
"If the enhancement is powered by the big bad, could we cut it off from him?" Jerry added as he channeled more of his stored magic - mana he called it - to maintain his hundreds of enhanced tasers that kept their enemies incapacitated. Amanda always thought it odd but interesting how what her boyfriend's magic actually did was separate from and different than the effective function of his devices. A separation similar to how the curses copied but were apart from the Red Dragon, perhaps?
"Not a bad idea," she muttered and shifted the focus of her divination. Yes, there was the connection she had been missing. What was that vile man's ultimate goal? An army of brainwashed soldiers? Amanda doubted it. No, such men didn't see people, they saw tools. The only thing of importance to them was themselves. An army might be useful in the short term but the ultimate goal of this much effort and thought... ah, there it was! When through consumption of supers or subsequent violence the collective power of the curse matched his own, became in essence identical and capable of fully mimicking him, he could recall it, put it on himself without any dissonance, merge with it and double his power. "I don't think we could do it at this point though. Maybe if we'd caught them earlier." The link of similarity was too strong. But what if... yes, yes that could work.
She reached out with her magic to the captives not with some complex transformation, thematic manifestation or obscure effect but with the simplest, most basic application of fire magic; thermokinesis. Both to see what she was working on from minute energy variations and to be able to transfer that energy away. She tested her idea, carefully watched for a minute to see if complications would arise, then once she confirmed it would work applied it to all the brainwashed victims. It was an application that wouldn't occur to most fire magic users and from the initial lack of reaction from the curse she'd bet all the gold she'd alchemically transmuted that it hadn't occurred to the Red Dragon either.
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"What in the name of..." Maya stared at the victims with surprise. "What did you just do? Are you trying to freeze their heads off?"
"Not their heads, only their brains. And only cool them down, not freeze them." She gave her friends a satisfied smile for a job well done. "See, the bastard responsible for this entire situation is not nearly as clever as he thought he was. His vile human experimentation relies on the victims' fear of him to corrupt them. Fear to make them think of how terrible and powerful he is and how they should be his willing slaves."
"Oh, I get it. If they can't think at all..." the amazonian blonde nodded. "But wouldn't the brain freeze kill them?"
"It's not brain-freeze, it's more like cryogenics," Amanda countered with a bit of annoyance at the other woman's tendency to joke about even the direst of matters. "Which is where it gets interesting, because cryogenic suspension is cooling down the brain without harm as much as possible. These guys' defenses rely on a violence-fueled enchantment meant to mimic a specific pattern, they're not flexible enough to recognize this as an attack and throw it off. It just keeps healing the side-effects."
"So that's it, we won?" Jerry sounded relieved. "I can stop maintaining the jury-rigged connections on these people and you can cuff them, pack them and send them for long-term care?"
"Oh, it gets better than that." If the sorceress sounded a little smug, well, if being a hero was a job then messing up the plans of magic-abusing hacks would be her hobby... and she was good at it. "The curse is an active effect, not a permanent power. It's healing them to keep them alive for a transformation that can't be completed any more, so it's basically left acting against its violent purpose with no means to stop. Sooner or later it will just break and there's nothing that bastard can do about it from all the way in China."
That was when every symbol on every captive flared with actual blood-red flames and the curses reached out for any superpowered bodies with sapient minds to host them...
xxxx
One moment Mandy was telling us how we'd won and we could go home, the next she was screaming. Jerry scrambled close, trying to find a way to help then he toppled with a shout and started convulsing. I didn't know what had happened; my senses weren't picking up any threats or even other people for miles. Then I felt it; a massive weight that both was and wasn't there, like being trampled by a horde of ghosts.
The weight was not physical but mental, throwing itself against my mental defenses like a battering ram. It struck again and again and again like an endless tide, each individual blow insignificant but when hundreds were added together they amounted to more than the sum of their parts. I started hearing voices, countless shouts, cries, wails of pain, roars of anger, the sound of snapping bones, the gasps of someone being choked to death, nails scraping against metal walls, a machete's dull thud as it cut through flesh, screams of agony over the crackling of flames as people were burned alive, a bloody piece of rebar beating against a mangled body, hopeless whimpers in the dark, someone trying to crawl away as they bled out from the stumps of their legs.
The more I heard, the more images started accompanying the sounds, the more images with sounds yearned to become memories. But the memories of those horrors were not my own and I refused to add someone else's failures to my recollection, especially when they did not see them as failures but as their rise to power.
"Look upon me and despair," they seemed to say. "Know the greatness of my works and cower," they whispered as they tried to crawl inside my mind.
"Fuck off, you filthy degenerate," I told the echoes of a monster that had tortured and murdered his fellow men and women in all the twisted ways he could imagine just so he could grow his own powers beyond what he'd earned with actual accomplishments and work. What the memories showed was no reason to despair, cower, and vanish silently into the night, but to burn and rave at their owner, rage against the murder of fellow people and their plight.
Those thoughts more than even my mental defenses seemed to throw the mental attack back, make the hundreds of partial copies of the villain's mind recoil from my own. Senses and thoughts unscrambling, I rose and looked around, searching for a way to help my friends too.
Fire burst from Mandy as the five and a half feet tall redhead stopped being a human of flesh and blood and became a towering tornado of elemental force. Smoke and shadow spread all over the shattered peak and in its heart a crimson blaze assumed the vague shape of a woman over thirty feet tall. In her right hand she wielded a thin crackling bar that blazed brighter than the noonday sun, maybe a wand, maybe a staff, maybe a sword, the weapon shifting from shape to shape from one moment to the next. Whatever it was she swung all around and with a deafening wail the mental pressure vanished entirely, the ominous, oppressive aura that had fallen upon the area burned away in its entirety.
For a moment the elemental giant stood tall, defiant against her enemies. Then her weapon faded away, its light swallowed by the night. The dark aura drew itself in even as the fire dimmed and diminished, growing smaller and smaller and smaller until she was once again my friend Mandy, retching and coughing as she barely clung to her feet.
"That..." she muttered, pausing to wipe at her mouth with the back of her arm, "...was vile."
"No, I'm pretty sure it was fucking awesome," I argued and helped her regain her balance. "Of course, I'm referring to how my best friend became a towering terror of flame and shadow that shanked some losers out of our collective mind-space with a literal bolt of lightning. The bit before that was a solipsist's failed attempt to claim real estate on the back of people's heads, which makes it just pathetic."
"Jerry?" she pleaded cutely. The nerd was a lucky guy.
"He's out of it but seems fine," I reassured her, super-senses peeking through Jerry's golden armor to check on him. "No signs of becoming a beefy Asian supervillain, or even spontaneous weeb mutations." Instead of being reassured she kicked me in the shin. A lot of people were doing that lately.
I set Mandy down on a nearby boulder then had to disentangle several wires from my hair. Jerry toppling in his armor had brought those things down too, and from how they were beginning to smoke and crackle with foot-long arcs of lightning they had to be well on their way to self-destructing.
"What do we do now?" I asked the redhead after I blinked a drop of molten silver from my right eye. I grabbed the snapped wire it had once been attached to as it flailed way too close to my face and electricity stung my fingers. "Are these guys safe to transport, or are they about to wake up?"
"Neither." She popped her knuckles then stretched, spine creaking audibly as if we hadn't gone through at least a serious warm-up with all the fighting. "Where's my staff?"
I flicked a finger for theatricality while throwing the long crystal bar at her with a force-field from where it had toppled after her transformation.
"Thanks." She fiddled with it for a bit, muttering incomprehensibly before... "...there's good news and bad news."
"Give me the good news first, this whole situation so far was shit."
"After the curse tried to detach from them these guys are done for. They're technically alive but I doubt they'll survive much longer." I stared at her, trying to find if she was having me on.
"Those were the good news?" I finally asked.
"They simplified our decision-making. In hindsight, all three of us suck at healing, I doubt we could have saved them no matter what we tried."
"...and the bad news?" I braced for it, beginning to suspect where this would lead.
"The moment they die, the curse rubber-bands back to its origin and the Red Dragon doubles his power," she said, confirming the worst outcome. "Probably not enough to beat you in a straight fight, let alone all of us, but as you saw he won't go for the straight fight."
"Yeah, no. He does not get to win," I told her then started forming an intricate force-field I'd used a couple of times before, except this one was meant for far more people.
"Unless you can heal the hosts to prevent the curse from getting free or find someone else who can in about ten minutes, I don't see how we could stop him." Magic crackled around her sluggishly. "At best, if you could feed me enough heat for a power-up I could try to destroy the curse outright."
I thought about it but then shook my head and continued with my preparations. Mandy said she could try, not that she was certain she would succeed, and the possibility of one of the biggest villains in the world becoming that much stronger was too much to risk on a maybe.
"It's still an active power, right?" I asked, eyeballing the load and doing the math in my head.
"Yes, but-"
"Then you don't need to worry," I interrupted. "Get Jerry back to your ship, kiss him awake or something."
"I will set you. On fire. Forever!" she hissed but I was already extending the forcefield I'd made, showing all the confidence in the world.
If this worked none of us would have to go nuclear...