11

I honestly think they didn't recognize me without the jeans, tattoos, and my mask, at least until they heard my voice.

Just as I'd hoped.

Still, to waste this advantage here, now, was unfortunate. I had hoped to get a bit more mileage out of anonymity.

Such is the winds of fate.

<What now?>

Now, I wage a war of futility and attempt to ask nicely if they'd let me leave.

<Really?> I could feel her skepticism.

Yes, really. There is supposed to be a bit of an unspoken rule about attacking someone in their civilian attire. Naturally, that seldom applies to me, hence the snipers.

Lee stepped behind me, becoming my shadow as he had so many times.

My glasses shifted slightly, as I'd practiced yesterday night, becoming more like one-way mirrors.

Every little bit helps.

---===---​

This was bad. Really really bad.

Battery had expected a quiet grilling of the Principal of the school about the whereabouts of a missing Ward. A quick favor to Miss Militia, who had to take care of something.

And then a man stepped out with Oni Lee, a large Asian man striding like he owned the place with his hands behind his back, reflexes took over.

And then the man spoke.

Everyone in the PRT knew what Lung sounded like, at least when he was mostly human. There were enough videos that some even spilled onto the internet, which was a technical violation of his identity.

"I don't suppose we can ignore this... gaff, and you'd let me be on my way?" Lung rumbled, sounding amused. "I don't want to get anything on this suit after all."

"Keep him talking," Assault whispered.

More time standing still was good for her as well. Perhaps she could charge up enough to take him out in one shot.

"Why are you here?" She shouted across the distance.

---===---​

I could hear the whispers. Assault had tilted his head away from me and was whispering like mad.

"{Fire alarm.}" I said in Japanese while nodding. Oni Lee tapped the back of my clasped hands and was gone.

"I suspect I am here for the same reason as you." I boomed. My normal speaking voice if I don't restrain it or whisper.

"Requesting backup at Winslow Highschool. All of it! Lung and Oni Lee are fucking here!" Assault whispered, face carefully concealed behind his partner's profile. As if I needed to see his lips to know what they were saying.

"We are-" she began, but I cut her off.

"Now that isn't wise. More enemies only make me stronger." I drew a hand from behind my back and waggled a finger reprovingly. "It is already going to be hard enough leaving you arive as it is."

Assault started, then looked directly at me. His whispers ceased.

Naturally, that was when Lee pulled the fire alarm.

---===---​

A bad situation was getting worse by the second.

As the alarms kept ringing, teenagers started spilling out of all exits. Some were herded to their designated waiting spots, but others, many others, had seen the distinctive glow of Battery's outfit, and decided to investigate.

Word was quickly spreading when Lung burst out laughing, cause unknown.

She could feel his laughter as much as she heard it, it was like the impact of drums.

So did the kids at the school. Some fell back, others, adorned in gang colors from all three gangs, came forward.

And a skinny girl with glasses crept closer.

---===---​

"Lee, break the fire alarms, I need sirence."

When I broke out the bad English, he knew it was time to perform.

Children gasped as he swept into a bow, then collapsed into ashes. All around the school, fire alarms were torn off their walls by men who also collapsed into ash.

In less than ten seconds the ringing around the school had stopped.

The Heroes should be smart enough to realize that means that everyone in the school was in the range of Oni Lee, had I wished their death.

<But you won't, right?>

Of course. I need no slaughter to prove a point, but they don't know that.

"I am here because of the children. I am rike a father to many of them." I gestured to where the ABB colored Asians had clustered. I heard their cheers and their hearts rise in pride. "And children have gone missing. When the rumors reached me that this school was also missing children, I came to investigate."

"We are-" She tried again. Easily I cut her off again.

"You are here because of a missing person, yes, I know." I nodded. "To the best of my knowredge, you two have never come to this school, not even once. Nor do you care about children going missing or you would have been here yesterday when the rumors began."

That set the children abuzz with whispers.

"But unrike me," I kept the topic on a razor point. "You have a very obvious reason to come." I leaned forward with as sinister a smile as I could. "Tell me, which one of them was the Ward?"

I heard hundreds of gasps from hundreds of mouths. Only one mattered.

Taylor's heart raced like a rabbit running from dogs.

Just a little more...

"Probabry the brack one." I chuckled as I continued to run the English language through the stereotype grinder. "I smelled something famirar about her rocker as I passed it." I wonder if they'll ever notice that I pick and choose which L's to mangle?

I heard the nail of rage pierce her heart.

"That's-" She tried to get a word in, she really did, but when Lung decides to talk over you, you'd need a sound system in a heavy metal concert to overpower me.

"Besides the point, I know. The real question is this: Are you going to fight me here, in front of all these children?" I gestured not only to the ones in the ABB, but the other gangs, the hangers on, the cape nerds, Greg, who was the nerd that nerds were to other people.

And my hand swept past one trembling girl.

I had to keep them off balance, I had to keep them from falling into what they were trained to do.

<What's that?>

To fight their instincts, to not escalate matters. To solve this peacefully.

<Really?>

It's covered in a thousand different ways, branding, promotion, catch phrases, 'Good Guy' antics, all to distract, all to keep things under control.

We can't have that.

"I tell you what, let's make this sporting," I said, clapping my hands together with a sound not unlike a cannon.

Most of the children flinched and realized just how close to me they were. Even my own.

One didn't though. Just one.

"Our ring will be this parking lot. I won't use my fire against you two, I'll do my level best not to kill you both, and, Oni Lee will not assist me after I step into the ring." I looked at the man in question. "Understand?"

He glanced at me and nodded, before turning back to examining his handgun. Rapid-fire teleports sometimes caused some of the gun's lubricant to stick.

His antics near the children were another warning. Accept or else...

"We-" She said, before stopping, anticipating my booming interruption. When it didn't come, and Assault snorted behind her, she continued. "We don't have a choice, do we?"

"You always have a choice, you simply choose not to accept them." My accent was gone again, as was my booming tone. "You aren't strong enough."

She glared at me, which was easy to ignore. I nodded to the man behind her. "He understands, more than most I wager."

Assault, suddenly being the focus of both our attention, only smirked slowly while shaking his head.

"I'll tell you later Puppy." He said almost sadly. "When you're ready."

"Lee," I commanded. His gaze was on me. "Help me with this suit."

I could gingerly put a tie on, but there was only one way Lung takes a tie off.

"It's a rental." I explained to the gob-smacked Heroes across the lot.

---===---​

There were titters from the teenage girls, watching a man help undress another man.

They stopped when the tattoos were exposed.

I am not a handsome man. Not by any stretch of the imagination. My face lacks many of the qualities women find attractive, and the bloodshot eyes, the tattoos, and the scales only made it worse.

But I am a large, muscular, powerful looking man, and the power I could radiate bare-chested clad only in jeans was one I carefully decided to be the upper limit before it moved beyond imposing and into being ostentatious.

<Showoff. We're both ready on this end too, I think. It won't make you too much bigger, but everything soft inside you; heart, guts, brain, it's already been replaced. It really doesn't want to give up the fire.>

Tell it I need it for later. Can't give away too much in one go.

<I'll try. Thanks for wearing underwear by the way.>

I had carefully undone my belt, keeping the spikes of my tail held in, and got my pants off with minimum fuss, leaving me clad in only my fundoshi. Made of thick leather and dyed white, it would hold until the scales and bones had changed enough to protect it.

I had put much emphasis about protecting that area, remembering how it had been the target of someone's spiders and subsequent necrosis.

<Not sorry, it worked.>

Indeed it did. And never again if I had a hand in my path.

Head. Heart. Testicles. In. That. Order.

I felt the scales under my skin, though they didn't itch, they tingled, almost in anticipation, as my tail swept back and forth, almost pointing at the Heroes.

K-Redirect! Gauss-Engine!

I felt my foot itch strangely.

Assault by this time had called in their plan, namely to delay me as much as possible until proper reinforcements could arrive, and to check over the recording of my speech.

<Of course they recorded it. That means Armsmaster->

Will see the truth of my words. I have yet to lie.

"Are you ready?" I asked them almost cheerfully. That set their hackles up.

A cheery Villain is a very dangerous villain.

<I found calm explanations worked better.>

When you deal with that which crawls and skitters, yes, it is quite good. But imagine if you had started a fight with 'Now who's up for some bees!' in a cheery sing-song voice?

<Well...>

I stepped forward, letting my itchy foot lead the way.

The instant my foot touched the asphalt, Battery struck with everything she had.

---===---​

It understood Gauss-Engine. This host had fought it before. A brilliant reversal of cause and effect, it utilized the essence of relativity and magnetics in reverse order, using the dimensional delay to invert the process.

An object going at increasingly relativistic speeds had ever increasingly higher mass, towards infinity, thus needing infinite energy to accelerate.

But use dimensional folding to spike her mass with an overlapping immense amount of iron, just for a nanosecond, and her potential energy grew immense. Then let go.

And with the mass no longer there providing the source of the energy, a little magnetic induction on her modified tissue, and presto, a living Gauss projectile as the universe tried to sort out where all the energy had to go.

And on impact, collect the excess energy, redirect what it couldn't as electrical energy, all while keeping the host alive, and recycling to start again.

Gaussian filters were also needed to keep her from disintegrating, but that was a trivial cost in comparison.

All this it understood from the impact damage of the host's scales, the electrical damage, and how the fine metal grains bent thanks to the magnetic fields she radiated the instant Battery started and stopped.

Now to test its theoretical countermeasure.

It only had metal and fire, but you could do a lot with that.

Heat, for example, could change the magnetic structure of metal.

Heat could produce electrical energy. Redirect it.

And when two magnets had repelling fields...

[TEST.]

---===---​

The instant her fist grazed my skin, there was a spark, followed by an immense crack of noise.

My foot, the itchy one, had angled it's newly sharpened toes and stabbed into the asphalt all the way to the instep. This kept me from being sent flying like Battery had.

Even then I scraped back nearly three feet backwards. And I weighed at least four times what I ought to have thanks to the changes inside me. That was an immense amount of force.

Assault had been discretely back in position to catch her, should I block and swat her back, but the speed and force she had, which was nearly twice what she had started, was immense.

At his touch, nearly all her kinetic energy transferred to him, the remainder spiraling her body around his outstretched arm, before landing her like a figure-skating team. The excess force left the back of his feet, and there was a lot of it, causing huge rents in the asphalt as it looked someone running on loose carpet.

Their pose together looked very familiar to their poster, which meant they had practiced this. But her trembling limbs hinted at how much it had taken out of her.

"W-what was that?" Battery stuttered, looking at her shaking hands.

---===---​

What was that? I asked inwards. Another of your ideas?

<No.> She sounded as perturbed as I felt. <It did this.>

Success!

I looked down at myself.

From where her fist had hit my liver, there were scales, only, instead of a uniform pattern, they rippled out in all directions of the impact zone.

Ever see iron filings radiate around a magnet on a piece of paper? It was like that, but in three dimensions.

A trail of scales had also emerged, leading down to my leg, the foot, and into the ground. Grounding me from the electrical effect her namesake had.

I hadn't expected this.

My powers had protected me, without my knowledge, intent, or consent.

What else would it change to get what it wanted? What had it already changed?

Kenta would have been horrified at his body changing and fighting without cause or care for him.

Taylor had done that very thing to become Khepri. She knew where it would lead.

But I was Lung, and the stage had been set.

---===---​

The Heroes and the teenagers, the children and the teachers, all watched as the leader of the ABB stood straight and smirked.

"That." He boomed as his voice became ever harsher and more metallic. "Was your only chance."

"Pity." There was no humanity in his voice."That it was nowhere near enough."

Scales emerged, and the man became the dragon.

"Children." His voice was a storm of knives and stones on their eardrums. "Ready for another lesson?"

Everyone inched back, clutching their ears, save two.

A man in a leering demon mask who no longer could.

And a girl in glasses, in the throes of learning how her world now worked.

---===---​

Of the two, Assault was the more dangerous. This I learned quickly.

I charged, using a trick I, and many Brutes had learned over the years. Being a Brute with neither an 'off switch' and past a certain level of strength meant that if I walked too hard, I bounced like I was a beach ball on the moon. My size and mass increase helped compensate for this, but only so far. But lean forward, tip further and further, then kick off like a track runner, and you shot forward nearly horizontally.

Stopping was a pain, both for the feet and the roads, but you could move very very fast in brief spurts.

I stopped directly in front of the two in under a quarter of a second. My fist aimed for him with enough force to crumple a two-ton truck.

His hands flew wide, one touching the car behind him, the other to the shoulder of the woman still leaning on him.

I struck him square in his chest, I should have liquefied his heart, and I did absolutely nothing at all.

A fraction of the force left his hand and went into Battery, sending her in a graceful arc away from danger.

The rest went into the car he was touching, which found itself moving in a smooth arc towards me.

The impact of being swatted with a car sent me flying, but I was much heavier now and landed in the center of the parking lot with a crunch of stone and a low boom to the ears of those watching.

Yes, in a game of pure kinetics, Assault was the more dangerous.

But I could push him further, and drive the lesson home.

I could break the Hero.

"You. I know you." I growled in alarm. Not in fear, but in wariness. "That power. You are Madcap."

The teenagers muttered, not knowing the name. Greg blanched, and quickly started spreading the word.

I timed my low chuckle to begin just as Taylor heard the damning words.

"Imagine that, a Super-Villain turned into a Super-Hero." Another nail was driven into the coffin of a girl's dream.

My chuckles ceased as I stood and clenched my fists. The knuckles cracked and popped with the sound of bone and iron. The children heard the echoes.

"That means I cannot take you lightly, for you are willing to go as far as it takes, like me." I took a step forward, towards him. "But I must wonder, what made you turn?"

With fine theatrical timing, I turned to the still shaking Battery. "Ah". I crooned, putting every reptilia rumble I could into it. "Her."

When I looked back at Assault, the smile was gone.

"I wonder." tapping a clawed finger on hardened cheekbone. "What would happen to the Hero in you if you lost her?"

There was only Madcap now.

We both lunged towards Battery in unison.

---===---​

The shakes were fading, her power restoring to what it was, but it was still another half-minute of numbing feedback.

And death was charging towards her with claws and scale, mere seconds away.

As her power charged, her perception of time slowed, as it always did in the instants before she used her power, letting her plot her course.

The seconds ticked by as those claws drew closer to her eyes.

And then Assault was there, screaming in slow motion as he destroyed one of his legs to propel his entire body in the speed he needed. Taking all the energy his body could provide, putting that energy in his own comparatively fragile bones instead of the world around him.

But his fingertips touched Lung's arm mere inches from the claws piercing her eyes.

Lung's hand stopped cold. His body stopped cold.

Lung's kneecap took all of the force instead. It shattered, forcing him back, making the dragon roar in pain.

Both men stood in front of her now, eyes only on each other, each with a ruined leg.

But one could heal, and had endured much worse than just a broken limb.

And balancing on his one good leg, Assault, no, it was Madcap she saw, stood his ground.

And for twenty seconds they swung at each other.

---===---​

The only thing that could hurt me was me it seemed.

No longer being gentle and just slapping the force back at me, Madcap was redirecting all of it into pinpoint strikes.

I destroyed my shoulder blades when I swung at his temple.

I felt my spine splinter as my clawed kick landed against his knee.

I tried to pick him up off the ground, but found myself tearing the scales and flesh over my heart off instead, leaving dangling scraps off of my bones.

I healed, but painfully slow in comparison to what I was taking.

I was growing, though as agreed, not too much, as I had to remain a recognizable man, not an inhuman beast. Not now.

When I was maybe eight feet tall my teeth became fangs despite my wanting them not to, and when I lunged in to bite him, I found my teeth's force being redirected towards my own throat.

I nearly bit my own head off.

---===---​

The school watched as man battled dragon and blood and scales flew.

They watched as a Hero, one they'd sneered at as being 'lame' and 'gimmicky' was bathed in sizzling red blood, though his red costume meant most was hard to spot. Though the blood running down his clenched teeth and off of his chin, his hair soaked in the blood of a Super-Villain, that was something they noticed.

Violence, real violence was happening before them.

The chanting of 'Assault' started to rise amongst one side of the crowd.

And a girl stayed silent and watched.

---===---​

When I heard that chanting, I knew enough was enough, time to win.

I figured that I could disable him the same way he had been taken down before, with my own variation on it.

Slap my hands really, really hard in front of his face, forcing him to concentrate on protecting himself. A little bright flame to blind him, then use heat and vacuum to suffocate him. It might collapse his lungs, but I was willing to take that risk.

We both stopped and stared, me healing, him unable to do serious damage to me without me providing the force for him to exploit. His hand slowly crept to a belt pouch in his back.

"Well done." I managed around the mess of my face. "Pity I-"

His hands came forward, pulling the pin on the hand grenade in his hand. My eyes widened.

That was one way to get a lot of kinetic force if I didn't supply it.

How many seconds before it blew? How could I stop him without fire?

He leapt upwards towards my face, one hand clutching the grenade tightly to his torso, the other...

A fingertip touched my face.

There was an explosion.

---===---​

The children shrieked as the hand grenade went off.

Aside of the noise, they felt nothing, no shrapnel struck them.

It all went into Lung's eye.

---===---​

Thank you glasses.

Not just a fashion accessory, they were also hardened metal scales that directly attached to the orbital sockets of my skull.

My head was snapped back, and I heard bones in my neck break, but it was a lot better than having a fingertip transmit all that force into my eye. Or my brain.

My head lolled limply to the side on slowly knitting bones as Madcap landed on his bad leg. He fell, biting back a few choice swears.

I pulled my hands wide to clap, to drive all the air away from his face.

"Now Puppy!" He roared.

From her curled position on the ground, Battery shot forth, going faster than anyone had ever seen her before.

The distance wasn't far, just a few steps.

The target, the hole in my armor.

Where Madcap the Villain, no, Assault the Hero had opened my defenses moments before.

Brilliant.

I found my mind turning to think about the dragon Smaug as Battery's knife hand strike emerged from the back of my torso. At how he too had a weak spot that caused his undoing.

A book I'd never actually read.

My blood painted the silver minivan behind me.

Ah well, I'd have time to read it in my cell...

---===---​

Enough was enough.

It understood that there needed to be restraint, but the host was taking far more damage than was necessary.

Hole in the torso, cracked bits everywhere, all because it wouldn't use the fire.

And it didn't understand why.

A decision was made between one heartbeat of the host and the next, even as said heart was held in the hand of an enemy.

Don't use fire? Fine. It had other options.

Other tools.

Like the brain-scale amalgamation of the merging of Host and the outside structure, colloquially known as 'Taylor'.

It reached for it, detached its connection from the host, and examined it briefly. And readied it for use.

What they knew only as a tail swept forward and touched Assault's boot. In his exultation and pain, he didn't feel the addition of a tiny needle pierce his boot.

---===---​

One instant Taylor was watching the battle unfold, wincing as she saw, and felt Lung's heart leave his chest, the next, there was blackness.

She was alone, but felt something all around her.

She recognized this presence, both from her time trying to convince it to either do, or not do things.

It was different now, it wasn't just a voice, or a presence behind a thin wall, now there was nothing between them.

A tiny ant before a skyscraper.

She felt herself moving without a body.

A connection she was familiar with, one she did a million million times without ever thinking about it.

The trail of nerves. From Lung's brain to his tail, the tail to a heel, the heel to another brain.

Now she was between TWO Skyscrapers.

What was going on?

Why was she here?

---===---​

[KEY!]

{OKAY...?}​

[GIMME!]

---===---​

Suddenly there were vectors, everywhere in my vision.

Force had lines, redirectable lines.

Madcap's power...

Taylor? How did you do this?

There was no answer.

My burning scaled heart beat in Battery's hand as I blinked and began to smile.

---===---​

The students watched as two seemingly lame Heroes who were on every "Don't do drugs" commercial in Brockton Bay put holes in the single most dangerous Villain in Brockton Bay.

And then Lung smiled. He had a lot of teeth to smile.

"Nice."

His left hand grabbed Battery's arm, his right Assault's torso. His limbs were longer now, making him even less human.

And then it was over.

---===---​

I looked down upon my work.

Using Assault's power to force the minivan's frame to spread around them as I pushed down hard, it made for excellent cocoons and cages.

As soon as I stepped back a voice was in my mind once more.

<I understand now. I'm not just a copy of her... I'm a record of all the permissions she had as well.>

I could think quickly as I was now, and there wasn't many things she could be talking about.

Assault?

<He was drinking his life away in a bar when the Golden Morning was happening. I used him to keep buildings from falling on people as they ran into the portals... He lasted forty-five seconds.>

I felt, and watched, as my tail came to life without my control. Watched as the thin, metal, wire-like spike left Assault's boot and retracted back into its spike. One of six on the end of my tail.

Said tail flicked from one side of me to the other. Like it was examining the pinned bodies below me.

<I was such a fool. I picked this because it looked like a tail, but it's more than that. That's why it accepted it with so little fuss.>

[Squeedly-Spooch!]

The tail swept close to Battery now. Another of the six spikes shot a needle-line which pierced her suit. She yelped in pain.

<She died before I became... what I was. I can't access her.>

Neat.

Spike retracted, I turned and strode slowly towards my van, Lee, and the students.

And my student.

The scales started to recede, my limbs shortened, and my heart clicked into place.

"I hope you learned something." I boomed. "I'd hate to have to come back and educate you some more."

I was almost a man again. The Fundoshi had stretched a bit, but held. There was no tittering from the women now.

"Lee, get the van ready, I won't bother dressing here." I rolled my shoulder and cracked my neck with a satisfied smile. "Next we-"

"Crap! Sorry I'm late!" Shouted a voice behind them. "I had to stop and pick stuff up."

I blinked and turned. The smile left my lips.

Crap indeed.

I had just lost.

Velocity was here.