Paragon certainly looked like the world’s second most prominent superhero. There was a prestige to him, an archetypal majesty that probably had something to do with him establishing the archetype almost a hundred years ago, despite not looking a day over thirty-five.
His costume was primarily spotless white on the upper body and arms, with the bottom being a deep sapphire. The divide between the colors was accented with a metallic yellow-gold stripe that shot outwards from the iconic winged chevron on his chest—the Seal of Paragon, an emblem recognized the world over. He wore a blue mask, but everybody in the world knew the face beneath it.
He had a cape. It was white and gold, an homage to his stint as part of the Sentinels. Big and billowy. Nobody wore capes anymore. People thought they were corny. I didn’t get it. Anyone who looked at Paragon and saw anything other than pure stylistic perfection was deluded.
My costume designs had always featured capes. Big billowy ones.
The one I was wearing now didn’t have one. Anymore.
Hyperion hadn’t liked it.
Paragon looked down on me, impassive, the very model of a modern major superhero. “Darkstar, you're in danger—”
I screamed, lifted off of the ground, and launched myself at him with the speed and purpose of a cruise missile.
His eyes widened briefly, but that was all of the reaction I got before he fell back, skimming over the ground, exactly matching my pace. I threw wild punches at him, barely aimed, but thick in volume. He dodged or deflected every single one of them.
We crossed the half mile to the other side of the square in five seconds, the world blurring around us. I knew instinctively that he would cut in a different direction rather than plow straight through the buildings on the other side, and that was the only reason I anticipated it. Planning was out the window. Reason was out the window. The puzzle was out the window, and so was the table it had been on. Paragon wore blue and white, but all I saw was red.
I launched a blast of white light right as he broke upwards. They always broke upwards. My attack hit him square, and drove him back into the wall.
And stopped. The energy just froze.
I realized half a second before it came howling back at me—with interest—that it had been psionically preempted by a greater ability.
Then it hit me.
The light and force engulfed me, blinding me, filling my ears with a deafening thunder—and, oh yeah, hurting a lot, like a baseball bat swung into every part of my body at once. I tried to channel it myself, but it was more energy than I could handle. I managed to, just barely, gather enough force to make a psionic wall and push the stream of energy to the side, just enough for me to slip out and—
—hit the ground hard enough to plow a furrow in the pavement for a dozen meters.
The world tumbled, and the only thing that kept me from losing track of it all was my unyielding rage. I bled away the excess force and, finally, managed to get my feet beneath me and stop. I righted myself, lifting off once more and looking for Paragon, but the wake turbulence from our initial burst had kicked up a dust cloud all around me.
“Control yourself,” he said from directly behind me.
“Fuck you,” I snarled, then twisted and lobbed another punch at his face on pure instinct.
Before it could land, a telekinetic bolt took me in the shoulder and spun me away from him. It took me all the way to the ground, but I kept my feet and oriented on the hero once more.
He floated above me, psionic power radiant as it cascaded across his body—except his had a notable blue tint to it.
Now I’m going to say something strange here and I need you to follow me: Paragon wasn’t actually psionic. As a former cape nerd, I was intimately familiar with his power, and it was a gamebreaker like few others.
If fighting was a puzzle, Paragon was a trick question: He was designed to beat you, and the only way to answer correctly was to avoid it altogether. His power was literally your power, but better—on top of having enough native strength and speed to make him an Omega, he absorbed characteristics from every metahuman near him, merged them together, and added it on top of what he already had. That’s why his name was Paragon—the ideal hero. The peak of the mountain. Anything you could do, he could do better.
Like I said, superpowers aren’t fair.
He was considered basically unbeatable, save for the obvious exception to every rule. He’d even fought Revenant to a draw once, and remained one of the few non-Guardsman metahumans to ever face him one-on-one and survive.
He’d take Hyperion. He’d take everyone in the Skip. In fact, the more metas you sent against him, the stronger he’d get.
And I was going to rip his head off of his shoulders.
Just don’t ask me how.
“Anna Jones,” his voice thundered, unnaturally loud. “Stop what you’re doing. Now.”
“Make me!” I shouted back, naturally loud. I am, now, painfully aware of what a lame, underwhelming comeback that was. I wasn’t then, but to be fair, I wasn’t aware of much of anything at that particular moment.
I was too busy gathering power.
I put the heels of my hands together, aimed them towards Paragon, and channeled every bit of energy I could muster directly at him.
A beam of white light thicker than me and blindingly bright lanced across the space between us, enough force to level a city block.
It hit Paragon and split around him, the proverbial immovable object.
Then he rushed me, slicing it down the middle as he came.
I poured on more force, but it didn’t matter. He parted my attack like cobwebs, closed the distance, and clamped his hands around my wrists. He pulled them apart, and my force beam turned into an amorphous wave that kicked up dust in a half-circle around us, and not much else.
“Have you lost your fool mind, girl?” he demanded, holding my arms and locking me in place.
“Duh,” I spat. “Where have you been?”
And then I kicked him in the balls.
It wasn’t the gamechanger it would have been had there not been a hilarious gap between our relative strength levels, but it was the only thing I’d done so far that had gotten any reaction at all—he let out a husky breath and bent forward. I’m not even entirely convinced that it was anything more than a reflexive reaction, but I took full advantage.
I jammed energy out of my arms, creating enough separation between his fingers and my wrists to slip free. Then I punched him once across the jaw, and it actually landed this time. Then again, then again.
I don’t think it did any damage at all, but it felt amazing.
I screamed while I did it, repeating what I’d already said, but with a layer of meaning not even I fully comprehended at the time. “Where have you been!? Where have you BEEN!? WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN!?”
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
On the last punch, he caught my fist, much like I had done to Roadrage.
He looked tired, and quietly said, “Enough.”
I disagreed vehemently. I tried to pull free.
He twisted my arm with one hand and pressed the other on my shoulder, forcing me to turn and bend or risk popping my shoulder out of its socket, or possibly tear the ligaments on my elbow.
“Enough,” he repeated. “I’m not here to fight.”
“You weren’t here at all,” I said, the words falling out of my mouth without passing through my brain. “You weren’t here when they hurt me. You weren’t here when he killed me. None of you were. Where have you been?”
“I’m sorry,” he said. He sounded exhausted.
“Not yet,” I growled.
I twisted against his hold exactly the way I wasn’t supposed to. I both heard and felt my arm snap, crackle, and pop, and somehow hearing it was far worse. My shoulder dislocated and my elbow ripped itself in half.
But he let me go, alarmed.
I put everything I had into one last punch before he could recover.
It landed, and I detonated enough power at the point of impact to derail a train.
An explosion of white light shattered the ground around us.
And every bone in my right hand.
Paragon rocked backwards a single step.
And then it was over. The dust settled around us. I panted like a racehorse, a sprinter on an endurance track.
Paragon recovered, then touched his lip. A small spot of red dotted the end of his finger, and he seemed to marvel at it.
“Where have you been?” I asked, my voice small.
“Not where I was needed, and I'm so sorry for that,” he answered. He looked back at me, eyes sharp. “Darkstar, you need medical attention immediately. You’re bleeding badly.”
I frowned, then remembered that I still had one of the iron pinions sticking through my arm, on top of everything else. I mumbled, “It’s fine. Plugged.”
“No, look down.”
I did.
A flap of skin about the length of my hand hung grotesquely away from my ribcage. The amount of blood leaking from it was both appropriate and distressing for such a wound. I saw bone.
That graze from Razorwing earlier apparently hadn’t been a graze. It had nearly disemboweled me.
“Oh,” I said. Belatedly, I added, “Ow.”
I collapsed.
----------------------------------------
You’re probably wondering why I freaked out like that.
A minute later, I was too.
Paragon propped me up against a wall at the side of the plaza, then he took something off of his utility belt, a small, tapering device, like a stubby, oversized digital thermometer, and pressed the end against me. He called it a Medico, and said it could diagnose my injuries, and would keep me stable with “self-replicating biomechanical nanobots” until I could get medical attention. I comprehended very little of it, but I heard it shnick and felt it pinch. Warmth spread from the spot on my shoulder it touched, and he told me not to move too much.
Then he gathered the other villains, laying their unconscious bodies near me, touching the Medico to them too. He was so fast the air cracked like thunder, emphasizing just how quickly he could have ended our little scuffle if he’d been so inclined. He’d taken it easy on me.
I sat in dull silence, staring at the redheaded psion and her backwards arm, until the warmth started to feel deeper and hotter once it settled into my wounds. It wasn’t entirely unpleasant, but it wasn’t exactly comfortable either. My various breaks and gashes rearranged themselves, pressing themselves back where they should be with a sensation that made my skin crawl. It hurt too, I guess, but the bleeding stopped.
The four villains started shifting too. At first I thought they were waking up, but then I saw the psion’s arm start to twist back around in the right direction. If she were awake, I felt like she’d have been screaming. Maybe there was an anesthetic or sedative effect to the Medico. I think he’d mentioned it while telling me about it, but I hadn’t been paying attention.
Nanobots. Neat.
To distract myself, I thought about what had just happened.
I was well aware that I might have a few issues and complexes revolving around superheroes here and there, but this was the first time I’d ever lost control like that. Alex had never triggered that kind of reaction in me, but thinking about it, I barely considered her a superhero. We’d met in Club Hellfire, where she had been partying—apparently, a lot of superheroes with hazard-zone access went there in disguise for a night out. I hadn’t realized she was one of the Skip’s most feared bounty hunters for a full week, until Hyperion had pulled me aside and told me to stay away from her, that she had probably marked me. He had referred to her as, and I quote, “an annoying, meddling bitch,” so naturally we’d become fast friends.
And besides, even if we’d met under other circumstances, Fury wasn’t Paragon. Fury didn’t represent one of the cornerstones of superheroism. Fury’s poster hadn’t occupied a significant section of my limited wall space in my teenage bedroom, nor had her costume been morphed into a purple and gold variant for my diary.
Paragon’s had.
God forbid I ever meet Millennium, I thought.
Paragon was kneeling in front of me. I’m not sure if it took me a second to notice because I was fading in and out of consciousness from the truly staggering amount of pain I was in, or because I was losing touch with reality. Or, hey, why not both?
“Can you hear me, Darkstar?” he asked.
“The others,” I said. “The four I was fighting. The villains. Are they going to make it?”
He frowned. “They were beaten up, but alive. One of them might have been touch-and-go, but I think the Medico will be enough to help even without a healer.”
I took a deep breath. “The psion. The other one, I mean. The redhead.”
He raised an eyebrow. “No, she was fine. Well. As could be expected, anyway.”
“Razorwing?”
“Clever name, with the wings.” He shook his head again. “No. Grisly, but not him either.”
I looked up at him, puzzled.
“The man with the laser eyes,” he said. “He was bleeding into his brain. Has no one told you how dangerous blows to the back of the head are?”
I raised my hand and telekinetically blasted him in the nose with everything I had left.
It wasn’t much. I barely ruffled his hair.
“Feel better?” he asked archly.
“No,” I said. “You’re still alive.”
He gave me a small little smile. “And I plan to be for many years to come.”
“Good. Let your guard down.”
He chuckled. “I never realized I had an archnemesis waiting for me over here.”
“Well, you know.” I sighed. “Everyone needs a hobby.”
“Maybe next time, pick one that’s more appropriate for someone who’s going to be off to Aurora soon,” he said.
I thought about earlier that night, my plan evaporating right in front of me, the course of my life solidifying into yet more pain and misery as everything around me crumbled, and the few people I cared about died. Maybe I’d die when Hyperion finally decided to roast us all. Maybe I wouldn’t. Maybe Hyperion would just cut and run—but whatever happened, my last moments would be with him.
I’d gotten control of my power, and lost control of myself. I’d taken my life in my own hands, and somebody took it away. I tried to help people, tried to fight the injustice that had shaped my life and my world, and I wasn’t allowed.
I’d come so, so far, and ended up right back at home.
I didn’t realize I’d started crying until Paragon wiped a tear off my cheek.
It was annoying, and inconvenient, and embarrassing, and I couldn’t stop.
Why couldn’t I just stop?
“Darkstar,” Paragon said. “What’s wrong?”
“This isn’t right,” I said. Well. Sobbed. But I’m just going to keep saying “said” and leave it to you to do the substitution. “This isn’t how it’s supposed to be. This isn’t how I’m supposed to be. And whenever I try to make it better, it just makes everything worse.”
He listened solemnly. “It sounds to me like you’ve already taken a big step forward.”
“He’s never going to let me go,” I said.
“Who?”
I shook my head. “Just arrest me now.”
“Darkstar. I’m obviously not here to arrest you,” he said. “I could have you and the others in a cell already if that was the goal.”
“Why are you here, then?”
“I was just in the area looking for someone,” he said. “A girl. But I provide our mutual friend bill with updated SCAR duty rosters every month, and in return, he keeps me informed about important happenings in the Skip. Imagine my surprise when he tells me that our resident college-bound supervillain basically challenged the entire borough to a free-for-all melee.”
I had several questions, and had to pick one. “You know bill?”
“Everyone knows bill,” he said dismissively. “Darkstar, what were you thinking? Do you have any idea what’s at stake? What you’re endangering with stunts like this?”
I shrugged. “I dunno. My future?” I snorted. “Don’t worry, I don’t think we’ll have to worry about that.”
He sighed. “No, not just your future. Darksta—Anna Jones. You’re the talk of the metahuman community. You and Fury haven’t just kicked a hornet’s nest. You decided to play a full game of soccer with one, and then you insulted the hornets’ mother and told them your home address. Do you know who the hornets are in this metaphor?”
I frowned. “SCAR? I heard they’re really after me now.”
“That’s putting it lightly,” he said. “You are a direct challenge to everything they’re trying to achieve, child. You could be the first domino that tumbles over and eventually brings down the HERO Act.”
“I—what?” I shook my head. “I knew we were giving them the finger, but that seems like a bit much. I’m just…me.”
“You’re just you,” he agreed. “A worryingly powerful psion with a widely known, sympathetic backstory who just happens to be deeply connected with several key figures in the metahuman community, now including myself. You think Fury picked you at random? She was asked to make contact with you. If this works, if Aurora University can train you into a superhero, it challenges everything SCAR has been asserting for almost a decade. Since the Horror. You are, at the moment, the biggest threat to them walking the planet Earth.” He ran his hands through his hair. “So I ask you again, what were you thinking?”
There were so many new and surprising pieces of information in his speech that I struggled to comprehend it all. People knew me? I was a threat to SCAR?
Alex…hadn’t just decided to be my friend?
Bile churned in my stomach.
“Oh,” I said after a minute. “I should probably…get off the street, then.”
He sighed. Then he shook his head. “Too late for that.”
My eyebrows furrowed. “What do you mean?”
He met my eyes, and then looked up. I followed his gaze.
In the sky above us, a Hunter drone hovered silently, gun fixed on us.
One of hundreds.