18

Summoner - Chapter 18 - SomeoneYouWontRemember - Parahumans SeriesChapter 18

It was only about fifteen minutes from the meeting point when Lisa screamed something, something that sounded like actual words rather than her previous yells and curses.

She brought her closer, and ignored the scowling glare as Lisa thrust her burner phone at her, flashing with a call.

She squinted.

Faultline.

Her brows furrowed, and with a flick of her finger, the phone was torn out of Lisa's hand before coming to hers as she abruptly slammed to a halt, the notion of momentum nothing but a suggestion to Syndra's ridiculous power. 

"Oh, thank fuck. " Lisa groaned, mildly green and queasy as she tried to squirm, not succeeding because Taylor was keeping her pinned in a cast of energy from the waist down, just to make her feel a bit more secure.

She clicked the button and brought the phone to her ear.

"Renata? We have a problem, you said to call if we need back up!" Faultline yelled over the sound of yelling and general chaos.

Was that a gunshot?

She groaned inwardly.

For fuck's sake. So much for them being professionals.

"Not Renata, other agent. What's the situation?" She calmly asked, expanding her personal field a little and tightening it to block sound as well, just to not have the scream of air make the phone useless, before snapping back into motion as she swapped to the rune of Domination, 'Ultimate Hunter' instantly picking up on Newter's location.

Six minutes away, maybe. If she had to extract them and fly them to the rendezvous point, she also had to conserve some strength for the trip back.

Speaking of which, Faultline cussed, and after a brief commotion, Newter's voice came through.

"Hey, it was a lure! We tried to stop the transport and got it easily, but half the damn cars on the highway stopped and started spewing PRT agents before we could grab them! We're surrounded, the entire road is fucked becase boss dug a giant trench around us, nobody can move vehicles in or out, Trainwreck's holding most of them off- fuck!" He yelped, and she heard the screech of crumpling metal.

"There's also two heroes! We're right in the middle of it, if you could send someone to extract us we owe you big time , but there's no way we can grab Canary and the other fucker in there! Our backup transport's just a couple minutes out towards the woods, it's a beast so we can get away if you have a- a teleporter or something, I don't know!"

Her eyes narrowed, her lips pursing.

She wasn't letting Canary go to the fucking Birdcage for a simple misspeak. And she was not giving up on not one, but multiple possible capes.

She could just give up on the entire operation for secrecy's sake, and it wouldn't even be ill advised, but she'd lose both Faultline, and what she made all this fuss for in the first place.

"Sending a telekinetic, of sorts. Hold your ground for five, maybe six minutes. And we will cash in that favor." She said, leaving no room for argument, before she hung up.

Newter tried to peek for an angle, some kind of way to get out and make them an opening to slip through.

He saw nothing but lines of flashing lights, nozzles, and two costumed idiots trying to find a way to break into their defensive perimeter, a broken mess of overturned cars turned to cover by Trainwreck, who was missing an arm right now because he got clipped by a bit of foam which quickly began to expand with enough speed to make him think it would eat up his entire torso.

So he'd just detached it like a crab. It was kinda cool.

How much that damn thing could expand was ridiculous, so it was likely he wasn't even wrong.

All around the makeshift walls of shoddily glued and welded together cars, a deep ten foot trench had been sunken in beneath them, and Elle's power was slowly transforming their jagged circle into a giant messy fortress of jagged steel and razorwire, metal pipes and walls slowly rising around them and mixing with what was already there in a manner he imagined looked similar to what the chicks in the club saw when they were tripping out on his spit.

He jumped when the ground below him abruptly turned coarse and rough, and blinked down at rust-red flooring, then hurriedly kicked off a wall to dodge a rubber slug that had just zipped through one of the windows, sending broken bits of glass everywhere.

Six minutes.

They could do six minutes, maybe, if it wasn't for that Tinker guy zipping around and jumping over them like a jackrabbit, trying to take potshots at Elle. Then they could definitely do six minutes.

He didn't think much of Trainwreck yet, but he had to give it to the guy that his armor could take a damn beating despite it looking like crap, and he had a pretty good sense of battle tempo.

He went from protecting Elle when Gregor was spewing his own version of containment foam out at the troopers to seamlessly dashing back to take Gregor's place to unload his armcannon as Gregor recharged, and vice versa. As well some quickjob repairs. Usually by tearing chunks and doors off the cars melting into the walls, but they had enough to work with here.

If he hadn't blocked enough shots and grabbed enough cars to make temporary barriers around them, they'd have been bowled over by foam and rubber bullets by now.

He was still a bit of an asshole, but he was smoothing out quickly.

Newter's job was simple.

Playing baseball with the frickin' foam grenades, at least until Elle reached the rooftop of whatever building she was making and they had aerial cover.

Speaking of which, he saw another poke-ball looking thing leisurely shoot out of the jumping Tinker's hand as he made another pass over them, and Newter quickly raced up the half-formed walls in a spiral to slap it back out, once again just barely managing not to catch any of the foam on his hand.

He hit the ground twelve feet below with a roll, then glanced around at where Faultline was using a mirror to check through the windows and crumble the road around and under the troopers, mostly to cause enough chaos to stop the bombardment of suppressing fire.

He breathed out a short sigh of relief.

One of the other capes finally decided he had enough at that very moment, and Newter jumped away from the sudden gap in their half-transformed fence, frozen pieces of jagged metal flying all about as the hero crashed through, a peek of crackling ice armor the only thing he managed to catch before a cannonball slammed into the dude's stomach and threw him back out like a pingpong ball.

"Nice shot!" He yelled over his shoulder at T-wreck, and winced when he noticed all the jagged metal that had punched a couple holes into Gregor as he stood protective vigil over Elle.

Fucking idiots. What if Gregor hadn't been there? Elle would have had a hole or four in her. Great heroes, the lot of these assholes. Weren't even following the appropriate escalation Rule.

A whistling sound rapidly approached him and he blurred out of the way as a bola tried to rush through the rapidly repairing fence, only to get tangled in the wire, then consumed into the metal wall that ate them both.

Elle could buy them six minutes. Well, more like three now. Two? He couldn't say he had a good sense of time.

But honestly, he wasn't sure there was a point. What the hell was a telekinetic going to do against all this crap?

They hadn't even waited for him to give them a location. The meeting point they'd agreed to was like an hour away. Felt like hot air, honestly. They'd probably just leave them here, they seemed the secretive type to pull that kinda stuff.

He went back to lightly jogging around their inner perimeter, keeping his eyes in the sky and peeking through the tiny gaps in the walls and windows, watching out for anything he could do.

Which wasn't much, not in this kinda situation.

It had been a bit too long since the Tinker had made a pass at them.

And because the world hated him, that was when the right side of the cylindrical structure Elle was making abruptly froze and exploded again.

Newter dashed to the left, racing along the half-formed building's surface on all fours up to the right, aiming to drop on whoever entered from above right as they came in.

The ice-armored prick came in first, a shield of ice on his hand, having learned his lesson from Trainwreck, and just over his shoulder, the silver-shining tinker guy was aiming something right at Gregor, a strange thing that looked like a sphere with a handle on it more than a gun.

Newter decided not to chance whatever that was, and dropped onto the Tinker, kicking him in the helmet with one leg as his tail yanked the sphere-thing upwards to the sky.

An electric pulse from the guy's suit briefly made him seize up, long enough for the Tinker to buck left and send him spinning off of him, just a tad too far from the ground to abuse his power and move out of the way as the sphere-thing was yanked to aim at his chest.

Then a dark, black purple aura suddenly flared around everything in sight, including him, and he was left frozen midair, feeling like someone had made a cast of steel around his body, unable to move even an inch.

The sudden silence was both disturbing and incredibly jarring after getting so used to the constant chaos around them.

At least he could move his eyes enough to try and look around, and found his brows metaphorically raising as he saw lines and lines of troopers half-hidden behind their vehicles, all frozen in the exact same way he was, a faint wispy smoke, black-purple, holding them down.

Then he turned his eyes upwards, and his eyes widened as a giant black sphere lined with the same black and purple energy descended from the sky, lowering itself into their makeshift fortress.

The cast around him loosened abruptly, and he fell on his ass before jumping up and spinning around to stare warily at the sphere.

"Is the transport the middle van in the distance, with one door open?" A voice came out of the thing, one that would have been sexy if not for the echoing, imperious nature of it.

"Uh, are you Summ's gal?" He asked now that he could actually move his jaw, glancing around in complete befuddlement at the hundred or so troopers and at least two enemy capes he could see, all locked in place like faintly squirming and struggling statues. He felt a pressure weight him down in warning, and he grimaced, raising his hands.

"Shut up. Yes or no?" The voice asked in a near snarl, now sounding far angrier, and he twisted his head a little to peek through a window, squinting.

"Yep, that's them."

The voice did not reply for a moment, the feeling of a weight pressing down on his shoulders fading. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw movement amongst the sea of purple-black statues, and turned his head.

He sputtered out an incredulous laugh as he watched the PRT van float up a dozen feet before slitting open like it was made of paper with a distant screech of metal.

"Holy shit. " He laughed.

"Impressive." Faultline and he spoke at the same time, and after sharing a brief glance, they both turned to check who else had been freed.

Thankfully, just their team.

The Tinker guy looked mad as hell. It was kinda funny. 

He turned back to the van, and watched two giant metal chair-looking things float up out of the van, which was carelessly dropped back into its spot.

Then the world went from zero miles an hour to a thousand, and even with his increased perception, his eyes widened as the scene around them flashed away almost comically fast.

Barely ten seconds of spinning confusion and thunder roaring in his ears later, they were embraced by impossibly soft-looking white fog and slammed to a halt.

Curiously, he did not splatter against the top of the bubble when they did so. Momentum fuckery, something he was quite familiar with.

It took him a moment to understand what the hell had happened though, until he saw a ray of sunshine peek through the fog like some kind of divine light falling on his face, and then it clicked.

Clouds.

He watched dark shapes move through the clouds, until they all were close enough to see each other, wisps of cloudy fog parting from the movement, the bubbles they were all held in suddenly allowing air and moisture through, sound as well.

His first thought was that he'd never seen Elle- or Labyrinth, right now, so present before, her eyes wide in wonder behind her mask as she gaped at everything around them.

He'd also never seen Faultline so startled, her chest racing up and down as she lay on her back in her bubble, legs and arms pressed against its insides as she panted.

Trainwreck and Gregor both just looked awed at the novelty of literally floating inside a cloud.

Then the people in the transport gently floated up to the sphere in their mangled metal chairs.

Canary was fucking terrified, yikes. Like, barely not sobbing in fear terrified.

"Canary, relax. We don't mean you harm. "

He almost burst into laughter as he suddenly remembered a scene from some old movie about a horrifying creature in the clouds going like 'be not afraid' to the mortals below while looking like the most terrifying thing in existence. Some religious thing or another.

He wasn't sure, but he got the impression of a dirty look from the sphere thing that was holding all of them up with visible purple-black threads like chains, a very striking visual.

"I'll drop you off at your runaway vehicle. Shouldn't take more than a minute, but first, I'd suggest not removing the collar until Miss Mcabee has calmed down. Sorry Miss, but you look panicked enough to try to Master our current employees into releasing you. As for Oni Lee, Newter, do not let him out of your sight for a moment. Keep him drugged at all times.  He'll try to kill every single one of you the moment he wakes up. The IV system keeping him sedated got left behind in the truck."

Canary mouthed something, shaking in her boots and tearing up. He grimaced. How the hell did people decide that chick was cage worthy? Nuts. The sphere abruptly disappeared, revealing a gorgeous woman dressed in what looked like a mix of a costume and a BDSM outfit, curiously bereft of any face covering. A face which held the most arrogant look he'd ever seen on a face.

Said woman floated closer, and a bit below, Canary.

"I can lip read, do not worry. I am Syndra. I work for Summoner. They have been paying attention to the travesty that is your trial, and have decided to free you. We have zero desire to hurt you. Someone more… social than me will come to talk to you soon, will come to offer you a place by our side. If not that, then at least, protection in exchange for not joining anyone else. Now, we're late, and I'm getting tired. Don't waste your air screaming."

With those not at all ominous last words, the spheres shifted.

Faultline and Trainwreck spoke, but not a sound escaped their bubbles, and they both seemed to realize it as they slumped.

Newter sat down in his sphere and tried to get comfortable, leaning back to enjoy the journey.

Not many chances to experience something this bizarre.

They tore through the clouds once more in much the same fashion, from zero to a hundred.

Except this time they went over the clouds, and man, he could get used to this.

It was over all-too-soon however, barely more than a minute before the chick in the bubble seemed to spot their ride, swivel abruptly to the side, and speed to the ground like a comet.

He did not even disconnect from the bottom of the bubble as they did so, and that was such a blatant and odd disregard for physics that he couldn't help but feel a bit confused. Not even his power could pull crap like this.

Whatever this woman was, it was not a telekinetic, not really.

The nondescript large van they used as a transport, a necessary upgrade after incorporating an eight foot tall Tinker power armor, came into sight, parked on a dirt path off the road and well-hidden enough by the trees to make it difficult to track them until it was too late.

The trees glowed purple and parted to let them fly down with a deafening series of cracks and creaks, like the hand of god was peeling them back for their landing, and after one more abrupt stop, they were all floating half a foot off the ground.

Without another word, the bubbles dissipated, and the woman rocketed back up to the sky.

He stared up at her, as did most of them.

"Whatever favor they're asking, if it's reasonable, we're doing it." Faultline deadpanned, then walked over to the metal chairs, waving him over.

He jogged over.