Chapter 1: The Mountain Upon Which All Blades Break
The iron curtain blacked out the sun.
Blocked the sky and caged this city inside to die.
My fingers twitched with barely restrained power. One golden charge collapsed, I had always wanted power. Feeling the raw possibility course through my veins was addicting as the charge collapsed inwards.
Perfect Physique, a foundation for the rest of my powers. Optimizing the hardware before needing to use difficult software. The next four charges collapsed together into a single white tower within his soul.
His own eye of sauron staring out and taking in everything within this dome. Limited omniscience, past, present, near future all was laid bare within the city's distance.
The fight between to gangs of parahumans, all with such delicious powers to copy. Five charges remained, and quickly collapsed into Adaptive Regeneration. Closer to Mahoraga or SCP 682 than Crawler it was essentially a failsafe.
Death is a real possibility in this world, but simply surviving for about a week would net me enough power to fight anyone. But that was boring.
I first looked at the three case-53's. Each were monstrous, but my omnisience told me they had good hearts. Something in me wanted to help them, so I lept from the side of the building. Plummeting to my death I laughed as wings adapted on my back, and flapped sending my flying forward haphazardly.
Riot's gas spread through the battlefield, but only seemed to hamper Frost more than anything. In retaliation the knight covered in armor of diamond hard ice placed his hands on the ground. The ice spread forwards reaching for the feet of the monsters. It simply turned to steam and burned away like Riot's gas when it smalled into crag's flaming body.
He was essentially a walking volcano wit a goatlike head and two sickle like blades for horns. He stood nearly nine feet tall, and stepped in front of Slither. The snakelike case-53 recoiled from the ice, cold blooded nature naturally making him weak to the element. His four blade like claws clacked together before his venom built up and he spat it forward towards the knight.
It was then Warlock struck, his power essentially a flaming aura version of Shigaraki Tomura's decay. He moved with supernatural grace, and like a horror movie fell upon the third case 53. His bladelike fingers closed around the four legged vaguely centaur shaped beetle monster's wings, and ripped.
His laughter rang out even as the only monster cape able to speak cried out in agony. Riot lept forward gasmask hiding all facial expressions, and shifted the composition of his gas.
The gas directly between crag and slyther transformed into Nitroglycherin and exploded sending the snake cape ragdolling broken and bleeding. Crag simply weathered the storm and sent a vicious glare towards the responsible cape.
Six blades of ice flew forward like spears as Frost slashed down with his frozen greatsword, at the same time Riot's gas turned to aerosolized fire extinguished, and had Crag collapse to the ground screaming. The icy blade but about a foot into the beast's chest, but Crag simply slammed down like a man fighting a child.
One punch then he was smashing the armored knight into the ground, each his tearing a bestial scream from the monster's throat. Frost did not buckle as his body mirrored the ice of his armor, a living crystalline shield. Spikes grew across his armor and had Crag scream in agony, even as Warlock disappeared back into Riot's standard smoke.
I knelt before the snake, Slither, brushed my hand gently across his scales.
"Poor baby," I murmured, and healed the dead shard. Gave it new life under me, changed the power to be a changer. Taking control of the girl's power I forced it to churn, biomass born in great cloning chambers on some distant earth before it replaced the damaged mater with whole.
Adding that as a standard feature, I rose to my feet, even as Slither returned to a human form for the first time since being taken by Cauldron. She was small, five nothing on a good day with signs of prior chronic illness.
She had lived for decades in agony, perhaps Cauldron's vial was a mercy. Warlock's superhuman senses caught me, as he turned to meet my eyes. He tried to disappear into the fog, but both of our eyes never left the other. Eventually the demon masked man stepped forward, bandages wrapped around his crotch almost like shorts, and a small black cloak that fluttered through the air.
It was like a charcoal butterfly flapping its wings. Bloodlike flames built menacingly across the bridge of his hand, grew across his fingers like talons. I felt my copy of the resurrected Slither Shard blaze to life. Modifying my personal expression and ramping the power to the max I laughed.
Maybe the power creation wasn't the best part of Power Manipulator. Scales of graphene began growing across my body before they flicked into invisibility. It grew across the wings, and even as my muscle fibers were replaced with synthetic biopolymer supermaterials I entered a fighting stance.
Under his mask the Warlock's lips twisted in disdain, but he wasn't my target. Attempting a sneak attack Riot lept from his smoke, and—oh fuck that would have been cool. I saw the possibility and cut through it.
Punched forward and as Riot's eyes shifted and he lowered a hand to Bakugo his way over me I slammed my arm backwards in a hammer fist. The arm dislocated and replaced itself with a bundle of a dozen serpents that lept for his vitals.
Instead of allow himself to be bitten he detonated the gas between him and the snake bundle. He burned, even as Frost broke free of Crag's stunlock, and desperately created a small mountain of snow to catch his explosive teammate.
Ignoring the combat I casually walked forward, and spoke to the wary now two winged beatle centaur. The case-53's crablike claws clipped together as he spoke in garbled english, "Why help us?"
I just smiled, "Greed,"
Before he could respond I cancled his power sending a perfectly whole human man collapsing to the ground. Fixing his power in a similar way, I allowed both Slither and Chitin's powers to work in tandem.
I grew nearly three meters taller, and each of the snakes in my whip arm grew claws. Densely armored chitin grew across my form, even as I demanded to all the parahumans, "If you wish to fight, fight me. I am the mountain upon which all blades break, be my whetstone precorpses."