Local SHIELD agents were in the mindnet, manning checkpoints and effectively channeling the werewolves this way and that, or making targets of themselves that gathered numbers of ghouls, Drinkers, or vampires for the kill teams to take care of.
The local police were not equipped to kill anything here, and after some disastrous bravado that ended really badly, they started to listen to the razored voice of the woman in their heads and the voice of the Patriot telling them what to do if they wanted to survive the night and maybe contribute a tiny bit.
Kwannon was coolly spending Valences in place of psi to keep her mindnet going at full strength, while Dealer’s Commune was all the Awareness that we needed, even as Mentor ran electronic communication for everyone else.
I was earmarked as Rampage 1, as an accelerated striker with both range and melee strength and quite a bit of speed, with the power to go right through walls to vampires and werewolves inside homes and businesses and bring the fight to them.
Still, it was a lot of ground to cover.
The villain teams did pretty well, all things considered. Octopus was actually doing well, using a team of drones to snipe down werewolves, and darting homing signals into vampires, which a bunch of flaming rockets then promptly blew to shit. His protégé Octavia’s lasers worked perfectly fine against the vamps with some fine-tuning, and if she couldn’t target through them, that just meant she had to aim better herself... or grab and burn them down before they could bat or mist. Preprogrammed burn patterns did good jobs of taking out the bats, too, and flamethrowers the ones going to mist.
The Basilisk. The Rhino. The Scorpion. Diamondhead. The Shocker. Hydro-man (super useful against vamps). Hells, the Man-Bull was helping out. The Vulture was flying around, swoop-diving on flying vamps or roof-hopping werewolves. Icicle and Firebrand were doing the frosty-hot combos, Stilt-man was stomping ghouls... it was actually a little crazy.
Even Electro was out here, his most recent Balance Band on his head to keep him calm and centered, and he was shooting out iron-cored silver balls through his own magnetic accelerators one by one, twice saving officers trapped in their cars from being mauled to death.
--------
I could follow just about everything without too much trouble. I watched General Rogers utterly destroy whatever master strategy the vamps and werewolves were attempting to pull off, their advance points being continually diverted or annihilated. Our kill teams hit their strongholds and shelters explosively, raged through their ambushes, and intercepted their raids and flanks. Sewers exploded with flames, subway tunnels were cleared with fantastic speed, and here, there, and everywhere men and women very, very equipped to take them on were coming out to shoot them down.
Kwannon and Dealer traded positions as casualties mounted, and people wounded by werewolves began to accumulate and had to have their wounds Cleansed. Being in combat didn’t affect the Battlemind at all, and Kwannon’s ability to absolutely coordinate fire around her made every single shooter in the area feel like they had become transcendent marksmen.
In the interest of fairness, I gave Yellowjacket, Falcon, the Wasp, and Archer the Wrecker Buff, and suddenly all four of them could manhandle werewolves and vampires in personal combat, which they all found MOST refreshing. Making sure they had silver Weapons useful against them was another problem, but Dealer Card-ported them some knives and such, and everybody prospered.
Stark was busting up a LOT of vampires in bat forms, his uni-beam also lighting up any in mist-form quite effectively. He just had to keep his eyes exposed, since his cameras and sensors couldn’t see the vamps.
I found that the Lightburst ability of the twins was plenty effective against vampires when I added Reserve voltage to it. Slap my hands together, bend the vibrational direction of the molecules at right angles to one another, and basically the explosion of electrified light acted just like sunlight and obliterated any vampires too close to me, while really lighting up the night with a loud and crackling show.
Just popping it was equal to a flashbomb going off, a lighthouse burst flaring in their eyes, and not really appreciated by any of them. Subtlety, thy name is me, not...
That was fine, I didn’t appreciate them for anything but easy Karma at this time.
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I raised my hand towards the roof and let off a sustained barrage of electrified hard air through the ceiling.
The master vampire here, some Deacon Guster or something, backpedaled rapidly to escape falling debris as the center of the room came down onto his servant vampires rather quickly, and they screamed as they were crushed flat.
The familiar roar of boot jets preceded the light of a unibeam acting like a solar spotlight. The vampires misting up out from under the stone roof howled in spectral agony as they went up in ghostly flames.
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“Vile thing!” a godly voice literally thundered around us, and the head vampire looked up just in time for the descending thunder god to whip his arm forward, and on the grey of the uru gleaming mithral caught the moonlight.
He might have wanted to scream, but the Hammer arrived far too quickly, and master vampire or no, blessed silver and more kinetic force than a battleship cannon did its job.
The master vampire blew apart, and Stark shifted position so all the spray was inside the uni-beam. Hissing, writhing bits of bloody undead burned away in techno-sun while Mjolnir spun happily back to its master’s hand as Thor alighted on the edge of the roof.
“Hey, Dyna-boots, need a light?” Stark asked as he played the uni-beam around the room.
“You do such a good job illuminating problems, Stark,” I replied coolly, scanning the area, and then calmly filling one rubble-filled corner full of plasma fire. A screaming cloud of bats erupted out, shrieking, and a lightning bolt slammed down to blow the entire swarm to ash. “Shocking, I know,” I added, Voice carrying right through the echoes of the thunder. “Prince Thor, I’m scanning nothing. What’s your Divine Awareness say?”
We were all looking at the mental map of the city, where hostile red dots were vanishing with speed as the fastest or nearest of the blue dots there closed on them and wiped them.
Thor looked around, casting about with simple Divine sensitivity to moments of conflict and battle.
“Something is building over there!” he stated with the certainty of thunder, pointing Mjolnir.
“Seriously?” Stark protested, finishing his sweep at my gesture. I hopped up three floors to the roof, looking in the direction of Thor’s gaze, and everyone in the battlenet cast their eyes that way, wondering what the heck he was feeling.
Me, I just took off in that direction, having full faith in Thor’s instincts. Thor half-smiled, and Mjolnir whipped around and carried him after me. Stark mumbled something about gods and praying, and then the hellfire blew out from the ground of what looked like a baseball stadium ahead of us all the way up to the clouds, painting the whole city in screaming hues of Hellish-red.
“We have a supernatural event happening at Fenway Park!” I announced to nobody in particular, courtesy of the battlenet. The screaming mental roar of that hellfire and the damned souls inside threw a lot of static into the telepathic link, which abruptly stabilized against the rushing screams with a chanting clarity of sacredness that had just about everyone hooked in pausing in wonder.
“I have no patience for dealing with a horde from Hell right now. Anyone feel like tussling with endless demons? I’ll wait for you, or we can shut this down now.”
Everybody /looked at one another, and nobody screamed out for more Karma. -What’s your plan, Dynamo?- General Rogers /asked, even as everybody who could was heading in this direction, just in case.
“Mjolnir, forgive the intrusion, but we’re going to be calling on the power of one of your peers,” I apologized to the Hammer, startling Thor as I turned around, drawing an ivory stick from my Masspack. “Prince Thor, if you would just stop right here. Nobody get ANY closer to Fenway, please.”
Thor hove to, Hammer held firmly in hand, and I swept the stick down on Mjolnir, breaking it against the grey metal of the Divine Weapon. “By the Power of the Monkey King, Ruyi Jingu Bang!
“Prince Thor, Hammer it down!”
Mjolnir EXPLODED in size. A spectral Hammer over two miles high, a duplicate of Mjolnir in every respect, crackling with lightning and thunder, rose into the sky as Thor lifted his Hammer high. Eyes wild, and his grin even wilder as storms spontaneously blew across the sky and clouds streaked madly in reaction to the towering Hammer’s appearance, he clasped it in both hands.
I put my hands on Stark’s eyeslits as he came hovering to a stop, and Thor shouted out, “
It hit that column of arrogant hellfire like it was a nail, descending like the heavens were falling. The head of the Hammer was as big as the whole arena, and it came down with a BOOM and CRASH and CRACK that made the whole world seem to jump and quake.
A hurricane-force wind slammed into me, which I Repulsed aside, incidentally protecting Stark as I had my hand Attracted to his helmet’s faceplate and didn’t let go as it shrieked on by us, this time conveying a really pissed-off feeling of failure and Ouch That Thordammit Hurt!
Fenway looked completely unharmed from this viewpoint. I started forwards to make sure.
“Uh, you can let go now, even Attracted to me as you are,” Stark told me as I dragged him along.
“Oh, thought your gyros went out there.” I let go, and he promptly flipped upside down, started to veer off, and I grabbed him again. “Left stabilizer?” I asked, hand atop his helmet now as I resumed flying through the air, hauling him with me.
“It was perfectly fine fifteen seconds ago!” he swore. “I hate magic...”
“You kicked out into the wind, I saw it spark. Some spirit probably Cursed it in passing. Cut the power to it completely, don’t try to reboot it.”
---
He was just managing to compensate for it as we came over Fenway, with Nova, Jewel, and Falcon flying up to join us for an aerial view.
The X-boys were here. Scott and Bobby had been key to sealing off the subways and clearing them out, as well as numerous sewer outlets. McCoy had been moving them from place to place, and also shuttled around more than a few random individuals from one location to another on General Roger’s quiet orders.
McCoy had the sense to stay low to the ground when that Hammer came down, and the Fantasicar he was flying zipped on up to join us as we hovered over the field. It provided a convenient landing spot for the fliers.
The big black spot in the middle of the field was kind of a giveaway of something having been in place there. Also, there were maybe ten, no, twenty big spots around burning white, looking like something living had been flattened under uncounted tons of asteroid-class impact, which somehow hadn’t even mussed up the green of the infield.
“That was a mighty working, Dynamo!” Thor said cheerfully, grinning ear to ear.
“Yeah, borrowed the power of the Monkey King’s size-changing Staff. Buy him a beer next time you meet him.”
“He is quite the wanderer, that one, but I shall do so!” Thor agreed cheerfully, sniffing once. “Bah, brimstone! Ever the stench of the Damned...”
“Looks like a Satannish pattern to me, Dealer. What do you think?” I asked into the battlenet.
-If there are additional channels there, there, and there, you could be looking at one of the older ones,- Dealer /answered to everyone. McCoy’s fingers zipped across his scanners, and a light played across the ground down there.