Talks were being planned. Government officials rose groggily out of bed to startling news, and found that they needed no help waking up. Enemies captured, and enemies yet hiding felt a surge of purpose, fear, emboldenment, vindication. How many cells nestled in dark prisons were occupied because of a disagreement with the greater world? Many of those occupants remembered only one face before they were buried in the complex, a dispassionate, unemotional expression, exuding serene competency. Whitworth’s face. Some of the defeated had made peace with it. After all, villains were just ambitious people with a differing opinion.
But in the corners of austere dining rooms and out of reach places in the prison corridors, television screens played, describing what a great man had done. He was a valiant defender of humanity and the system upon which we had agreed to live in for better or for worse. Now revealed to be a hypocrite. It was not news to many people he had put away. It was probably the reason they opposed him in the first place.
All around the world, eyes trained on the Director for an explicit violation of his mental powers. Meanwhile a great gathering of heroes waited before Victorious Stadium.
“We won’t have psychic overwatch this time,” Jackson was saying through their earpieces. “Just me and the team.” The faint sound of keyboards echoing in a vast room could be heard in the background.
Surveillance machines hovered into the scene, newly built and protected from infiltration. High above the atmosphere, a Nova satellite watched, rendering the urban battlefield in quadrillions of pixels. The stage was set, and nobody was watching.
There were more heroes than Lyssa had ever seen in front of the massive entrance. Unceremoniously, they moved in. Lyssa had half-expected a battle cry, or some sort of shout. The situation felt uncanny. Dozens of people, some small, some struggling to fit through doorways, dressed in tough suits of designer colors. The mood felt simultaneously too serious and not enough.
There was wide hall between the entrance and the fields. A row of turnstiles stretched from one side to the other. Lyssa followed the heroes as they passed through them without paying fare. During a game this place would have been filled to the brim with activity. A ghostly quiescence hung over the place in that moment, sustained by a pale light spilling from the fields ahead. Spotlights.
They stepped into the light, boots first. The light travelled upward as they strode, revealing their liveries.
Lycosidae’s near pitch black uniform seemed to swallow up a human-shaped space. Ace Pilot rose several feet in the air, catching the light, the top of his head matching the height of some of the larger heroes. Lyssa could see them all clearly now, a ring of uniforms and dozens of different powers primed like curled fists. However there was no one to receive them; the stadium was empty.
“Where are they?” Lyssa asked.
Lycosidae held a finger to her lips.
Jackson’s voice came through to their earpieces.
“Beneath you!”
Explosions of dirt and grass blossomed all over the fields. Behind them detonations collapsed the entrances, shutting them in. A shimmering bubble closed over the stadium.
“…ello? Damn- … respond…” Jackson’s voice broke up in transit.
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“That’s a scrambling shield,” a hero named Firebrand said. She was clad in an energetic armor made of overlapping ropes of fire. “No one would be able to teleport in or out.”
“So much for support,” another hero, The Tower, said. He was accompanied by shards of stone, orbiting him in dangerously speeds. The stone formed a platform for him, giving him a few feet of vantage.
Enemies were assembling in the field, the perpetrators of the chaos that had been wreaking havoc across the city. Hero and villain exchanged familiar looks; this was not their first meeting. The past couple of months had been busy for the professionals. Their work had been behind the scenes, above even the prying eye of journalism, which had gleefully speculated on the ineffectiveness of heroism.
How did heroes continue to work knowing the world was so ready to hate them on the slightest assumption? Lyssa struggled to understand how they could motivate themselves so easily. There was no hesitance as the new opposing sides engaged each other. Even as the very earth itself remolded around the torrent of gifted energies, fighting words were exchanged.
“I have yet to pay you back for what you did!”
“Feel free to borrow some more!”
Lyssa leapt away, taking cover behind the bleachers. Shards of rock were thrown. A stray bolt of energy landed several feet to her left. She flinched as wood and metal disintegrated. Amidst the chaos, she was able to formulate one thing. The enemy were just as gifted. No team of low category enhanciles would have been able to evade capture for so long in a city full of superheroes. Could there be so many gifted who dislike the correct way the world is stratified? Those with powers had an inherent advantage, especially in the west. Something wasn’t adding up.
A giant made of steel crashed into the bleachers, interrupting her thought. She reacted, arresting his momentum with her metallokinesis.
“Thanks,” Vigil said, then he sprung back into the fray.
Lyssa looked up at the bubble of energy closing the stadium off from M.A.G.E.’s support. If she understood the situation correctly, this battle had been planned by the heroes. But it seemed so unlikely the enemy would blunder like this.
She needed to contact the school. Lyssa enveloped in black mist, reappearing by the bubble at the edge of the stadium. She did not understand Mercurial’s power. Was it simply high speed movement or was it related to teleportation? She imagined herself on the other side of the bubble, and felt the floor rise up to greet her cheek. Groaning, she picked herself up. Her skin felt tingly. She was still on the wrong side of the barrier. Whatever it was, it seemed to stop her twitch walk as well. She tore underneath the barrier with fire claws, only to see the energy extending past it, phasing into the stadium wall. No doubt it reached under the ground as well, forming a complete sphere. She would not be able to tunnel out.
It had been worth a shot.
Telepathy. It was an abstract gift. Lyssa reached out with her mind, touching the warbling energy, and then past it. The barrier did not stop telepathy. She could attempt to contact Jackson directly. The school was far. She would need Bildungsroman’s power, all of it. Bil, like all her Selves, were independent because she neglected them as parts of her own psyche. Using it was a reminder she was Bil. That hate and resentment was coming from nowhere else but within.
“Screw it.”
The world unraveled. She could taste its substance, feel the low level mental energy suffused through all matter. Pale forms wearing loose jerseys and waving flags stood up onto the bleachers roaring silently. The psychic emanations were dense in such a place, where the thoughts of so many concentrated. It was loud. And annoying. She wanted to tear the whole thing down.
“Focus,” she barked.
Without moving, the distance between the stadium and the school shortened. She pulled the campus closer. Its gardens swept past. She swam through the buildings and dove underground where most of the iceberg that was M.A.G.E was hidden. It was difficult maintaining the projection. She was so far away. But she was so close she could feel its foundation. A metaphorical wall struck her with a painful shock. She cried out and fell back onto the floor, reeling.
Her vision was blurred. Tears welled up in her eyes. A ringing headache reverberated inside her skull. Each pass brought different kinds of pain. Later, she would retrospect on the attempt, noting that it was obvious there would be psychic defenses in place for such a facility. For now she could only seethe in frustration as someone she did not enjoy being welled up inside of her.