Denise and I were cruising around our usual route a week later, when our console made a terrible screeching noise, like a tornado siren or an old Amber Alert.

“Oh god,” Denise said. “It’s early. It’s not even September yet, and it’s early!”

“What? What’s early?”

“The river monsters. The giant shit that crawls out of the Charles River. The attacks get really bad in fall and spring, but they usually take winter and summer off. They don’t usually start again until late September, but we’ve got an all-hands general alert here. Every hero in the area is supposed to respond.”

She sounded scared, but I was way too excited. “Am I gonna get to punch a giant monster?”

“No,” Denise said firmly. “We’re on crowd control. Our job is to keep civilians away from this thing and make sure everybody can get to a shelter. Bluestar 7 will be handling direct contact, and if it’s big enough, maybe even Bluestar 3.”

“Denise, dammit! Don’t sideline me! I can tank this thing! I’m ready!”

“No, you’re not, and no you won’t. This is not our job. I’m gonna use vines to keep people headed in the right direction, and you’re gonna try and calm down anybody who’s freaking out. This job needs people skills, not punches.”

We zoomed up to the entry point and I got my first good look at the monster, a lumpy brown mishmash of joints and muscles, dripping moss and river water as it crawled onto dry land.

“Oh fuck,” Denise said. “It’s a Spawner. Okay, Tim, new plan. We are not just crowd control. This thing is gonna lay eggs; not eggs exactly, but pods full of these things like giant worms, each about as long as your arm. They have teeth and spikes, and they like to burrow into people before they explode.

“If you see one of these pods, we’ve got about five minutes to kill it, burn it, incinerate it before those things get out and start looking for holes to crawl into. National Guard will have guys with flamethrowers, but they’ll be on containment, stationed at choke points.”

“Wait,” I tried to interrupt. “Holes, what? What was that thing about holes?”

“They’ll be expecting us to search and destroy. If Bluestar 3 was here, Randall and B7 would be on pod duty, but this time it’s just us. You still got that air-fire thing you used at King’s Chapel?”

I nodded. “Yeah, but it takes a shitload of magic, and it’s still hard to aim.”

“The spawn pods are pretty big, so I’m hoping you can just blast them apart. I can burn them with explosive pellets, but I think your stuff is gonna work better. I’ll try and keep you charged up.”

I wanted to make a joke about Denise charging me up, but her face was way too serious.

* * *

I wish I could say I had a badass monster fight, grabbing this thing by the tentacles and swinging it around like Captain Cobalt, but I spent all my time on the ground trying to guide mobs of panicked people to an emergency shelter, while Denise used her vines as an improvised rope line.

Then the Spawner made a gurgling bellow that carried halfway across the city, and I felt my bowels loosen in response. What the fuck was this thing?

Monsters had been crawling out of the Charles River since 2023, taking the summer and winter off like they had vacation homes in better cities when they weren’t working.

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But when they were active, there was a new one about once a week. Sometimes it was slime creatures and dinosaurs, sometimes it was amphibious blob things with tentacles, and once, there was even a pink ape, looking very surprised and very upset to be climbing out of the water.

The Spawner was one of the nastier ones, a monster that didn’t just do property damage, but something that spread out and went after people on the ground.

We got the first wave of people in the shelter, and I got my first good look at the monster. I didn’t realize how short a nine-foot demon prince was until I saw a thirty-foot river monster.

The next wave of people was running a lot faster and screaming a lot louder, and some of them were wet. A voice on my new Bluestar ear filaments yelled, “Pod!” and my optics lit up with a red navigation line.

I left Denise to handle the crowd and ran for the pod, using levitation to leap over panicked people headed the other way. The spawn pod cracked open as I arrived, looking like a mass of bad Chinese food.

I yelled, “Clear! Everybody get clear!” and waited as long as I could before I blasted the thing with a flaming artillery spell. Chunks of burning worm went everywhere, including one bit that landed right on my face, giving me a closeup view of spikes and suction cups underneath.

I didn’t scream in front of the civilians, but I jumped back, threw it down and stomped on it until I was sure it stopped moving. Then I stomped on a few other half-burned worm things trying to crawl away, until I was sure the whole thing was dead.

Then my display lit up with another navigation line, and I jumped over another mob of people as I followed it closer to the beast.

I repeated this process three more times, until all the civilians were gone, and all the pods were destroyed. I was super close to the monster now, watching Phil and Randall unload on it with a combination of rockets, grenades, and laser blasts.

I looked out over the team and noticed a weird hole in their formation, right up front, the hole where I would have been, if I had been cleared to fight this thing.

I opened a channel, about to beg Denise for a chance to jump in, when some kind of fast-moving hoverbike soared over my head, and two hundred pounds of superhero dropped right into that space from above.

I recognized him instantly, even from the back. It was Sonny Mao. After a whole childhood watching his movies and pretending to be him on the playground, I was standing like twenty feet from Sonny Mao.

The Spawner swiped a tentacle at him, and Sonny just grabbed it and ripped it off. The monster screamed and I noticed Jade for the first time, right-on top of the big monster’s head, digging in with her claws like she was trying to crawl into its brain.

Everybody was busy fighting the monster, so there was nobody available to intercept the civilian car that was flying way too low over the monster’s head. The Spawner whipped a tentacle up, wrapped it around the vehicle, and threw it like a quarterback, going for a Hail Mary pass.

It would have sailed a damn mile, but I caught it with levitation, and lowered it gently to the ground, pleased to see that I was getting better at catching things, and stopping them, without hurting the people inside.

I helped the terrified couple out of the car and yelled, “Follow the vines!” as they took off running for the shelter.

Then I got on my private channel with Denise. “Hey, I’m not allowed to punch the monster, but if it throws a car at me, can I throw it back?”

Sonny took a flying leap and landed on the Spawner’s face. Or about where its face would have been if it had one and started punching it full power. I thought I was pretty good at punching, but Sonny was hitting this thing so hard, he was sending shockwaves through the monster’s whole body. He punched it four times and it just collapsed.

Then Sonny cracked a hole in its skull and Randall tossed a grenade in, going in for the kill. The grenade exploded, and the whole team was covered in monster guts. I even got a little on me.

Jade climbed over the Spawner’s shattered head and gave Sonny a high five. Then she hugged him as they wiped monster guts off each other.

Denise tended to a few people with minor injuries and came up beside me, patting my back like I had taken the monster out myself, instead of just watching the real heroes do it.

Then Sonny Mao, the strongest man on Earth, star of ten of the worst movies ever filmed on planet Earth, looked over and gave me a little nod. Then he leaped fifty feet straight up, landed on his flying motorcycle, and flew off into the night.

The leader of Bluestar 7 was walking up to us, and I braced myself for whatever he was about to say, trying to imagine what I had done wrong.

But he just looked over at Denise. “How many pods?”

“Five,” she said.

“Casualties?”

“Minor injuries, no dead.”

Randall didn’t quite believe her. “You guys took out five pods without losing anybody? Nice work.”

“Tim took out the pods. I just kept people out of the way.”

Randall nodded and went back to his team, actually patting me on the back as he walked off. I was trying to be cool about it, but Denise could tell it was, briefly, the best day of my life.