Nail

The mansion was likely going to take a while to clean up. The human sized bone flowers in the front might be taken for some weird kind of abstract sculpture, but there were marks of explosives being used everywhere I could see.

There were dozens of men who had been injured; mostly by thrown weapons from the enemy. Those who had been bitten had inevitably turned into zombie creatures and had to be put down.

I landed next to the largest group of armed men. They flinched and went for their guns. For a moment I considered letting them fire at me in my normal form to increase my damage resistance, but I was unsure that regular guns would even affect me now in my regular skin.

"Sir Integra sent me," I said. "I can help."

"I'll check that," their leader said. He spoke into a walkie talkie, and it took a couple of minutes to get a response. He was smoking the entire time and he had a French accent. He seemed on edge.

"She says to let you help if you think you can, but to keep an eye on you."

I'd heard what she said, but I didn't let on.

Bending next to the first man, I healed him. It took only a moment, and then I moved to the next and the next.

Within five minutes all forty-five of the injured were up and moving, although I'd had to apply healing twice for some of the more experienced men.

"I don't know if Millennium has any more vampires," I said. "But it's probably better to be safe than sorry."

He spoke into his walkie talkie again, and said, "Sir Integra wishes to speak to you."

I nodded.

Hopefully she'd have some information about other elite Millennium members that I could harvest. The captain had been a difficult fight.

I was led by one of the men up stairs and through winding, cavernous hallways. I'd probably have gotten lost as a normal person, but as long as I could send an eye out, I didn't even need a window to teleport out.

I was finally led into a large conference room.

"I seem to have missed all the fun," A tall man in a red overcoat and with a red fedora was saying to Sir Integra.

"We had unexpected help," Sir Integra said. She nodded toward me as I stepped through the doorway. "I'd like your assessment of her, Alucard."

The man turned toward me.

He was wearing a charcoal suit, leather riding boots and an intricately knotted red cravat under his red overcoat with a cape. He had heavily tinted wire rimmed orange sunglasses with goggle sidings.

He wore white gloves, each with a five-pointed design on their backs. He had short hair and slightly elongated canines.

"I look nothing like this guy," I said. Turning to Sir Integra, I said, "I'd think it was pretty easy to distinguish between the two of us."

The man laughed. It was a full-throated laugh.

His form shifted until he was a fifteen-year-old girl. She looked a lot like me, wearing a variation of the outfit he'd been wearing.

Hmmm.

It looked good on her; I wondered how I would look in something like that as my cape costume, since my face was already well known in my homeworld.

He switched back almost immediately.

"So, you're a stranger," I said. "It makes sense, I guess."

"She's not a vampire or a werewolf, or a mystic, ghost or any other sort of mystical being that I am familiar with," he said after peering at me for a moment. "But I can feel her power. It's practically pulsing under her skin. She doesn't have any blood either."

"Who are you?" Sir Integra asked.

"My name is Taylor Hebert," I said. "And I'm not from this universe. Or maybe it's this dimension, or realm…I get confused. The important thing is that this isn't the only Earth…there's other versions, some more similar than others."

Both of them looked intrigued.

"About thirty years ago, some people in my world began developing abilities…nobody really knows why. I'm one of those people."

"And you can move from one world to another?" the man asked.

"Yes," I said.

I didn't mention needing blood or meat to bind me more closely to a universe. The last thing I needed was to alienate my new allies.

'Why are you here?" Integra asked. "Part of an invasion force?"

"I can understand why you'd think that," I said, glancing out the window at the bone garden outside. "But I'm alone. There's a little bit of randomness built into my planeswalking, and I sometimes go off course. I like to explore a bit when I find a new place."

"And you decided to jump into a battle not your own," Sir Integra said.

Alucard leaned forward, staring at me.

"She gains something from fighting."

"New powers from defeated enemies," I admitted. "That get stronger as I use them. That isn't the only reason I went after them. They hit me with a missile!"

"You killed the Captain?" Sir Integra asked.

I switched into my werewolf form for a moment, and then back.

"I feel kind of cheated, really. He was a tough fight and I think I should have gotten something better for fighting him. It's not under my control what I get, though."

"How long have you had your abilities?" Sir Integra asked, after glancing at Alucard.

"I'm not sure…a couple of months maybe?"

"Are all the people in your world as powerful as you?"

"Some are stronger!" I said. "But not many, though. We've got city destroying monsters that I'm getting stronger so I can fight."

Alucard seemed particularly interested in this.

"There are three," I said. "Leviathan, a thirty-foot lizard that can drown entire cities with tidal waves. Behemoth, the hero killer, who is nuclear fire incarnate, and the worst is the Simurgh, who can drive men mad with her song, and who can use those men to drive other men insane. We have to quarantine those cities because those people can't ever be allowed to leave."

I stared down at my hands.

"A good day in the fight against one is twenty five percent casualties. Heroes and villains alike work together; I had to work with the man who murdered my father in the last fight, because otherwise a city and all its people would be destroyed."

Alucard seemed oddly excited by my description.

"I've been fighting since a week after getting my powers, and the more I fight the stronger I get. Seeing people trying to pull off an Endbringer style attack… there was no way I wasn't going to step in."

"So, you consider yourself a hero," Alucard drawled. "Like something out of a comic book?"

I shook my head.

"Neo-Nazis killed my father. I've been making their lives short and brutal. That's not the behavior that heroes have, not in my world, not when every parahuman is needed for the Endbringer fights."

Why was I telling them all of this? Was it because I was in a different world, with people who couldn't use what I was saying against me?

Maybe I was lonely and needed someone to talk to.

I'd been mostly isolated for the past couple of months; longer if you counted the time since Mom died and Dad checked out.

I still had no idea how powerful Alucard was. I was pretty sure he was a vampire, and I'd heard Sir Integra say he was her organization's trump card. That meant he was likely at least as strong as the captain.

"What are your intentions here?" Sir Integra asked.

Unlike the PRT, it didn't feel like a hostile interrogation; instead it felt like she was really interested.

"Mop up whatever vampires are left and then go home," I said. "When I get my business at home done, I might be back."

I hesitated.

"I don't suppose you know of anything that can revive the recently dead?"

They both stared at me.

"I got my father's corpse into stasis a couple of minutes after he died and I was hoping to find a way to revive him."

They shook their head.

"If he were a female virgin, I could turn him into a vampire," Alucard said. "Although I would not without knowing what sort of person he was. I fear I would only create a ghoul if I tried."

"Those zombie things?"

He nodded.

"I can't have my Dad hanging around as a ghoul," I said decisively. "He'd probably start some kind of zombie apocalypse or something, and they'd blame me for it. They're already upset with me because of the last zombie virus I brought home."

At Sir Integra's alarmed look, I said, "I haven't infected anybody; I'm immune to disease. I had a couple of passengers with me who had a low-level infection; that's all. It wasn't a big deal!"

"It seems there might be some inherent dangers in traveling," Sir Integra said carefully. "Have you considered settling down?"

I shook my head.

"I have Nazis and Endbringers to kill. To do that, I need to collect powers and get stronger."

"And once you have done that?"

"I need to find a place where they can resurrect my father. We've got a healer who can restore his body, but she doesn't do brains, and there's a chance that he'll have brain damage from the lack of oxygen."

"If your father is restored?"

"Well, I'll have to find a nice place to live with him, maybe make some money. I've burned some bridges back home; the authorities are kind of narrow minded about killing a few hundred gang members."

"I've found authorities to be quite narrow minded about killing," Alucard said. He seemed amused for some reason.

Sir Integra gave him an odd look.

I thought about using Empathy on the both of them, but if Alucard was a vampire as strong as the Captain, he was probably pretty old. His emotions were probably all kind of alien by this point, and he'd likely know if I did it, too.

"Hey," I said looking out the window. "Your helicopters are back."

"What?" Sir Integra asked.

"You weren't working with those priest guys?" I asked. "I was going to talk to you about them being pretty careless about shooting civilians to get to the vampires. I guess all of them didn't get eaten."

"Iscariot," Sir Integra spat.

I saw the missiles flying toward the house before the others did. I flashed forward, inventorying Sir Integra. Alucard was almost as fast as I was, and he looked startled as I reached her first.

The missiles were the first thing I had to deal with; there were people in the mansion, people that I'd healed, and I was sick of letting people die.

I switched into wolf form and leapt out the window, glass shattering all around me. I was at least four times as fast in this form as in my base form, and I didn't bother taking my armored shell as it would just slow me down.

There were six helicopters that had fired twelve missiles.

Maybe the priests thought the mansion had been overrun by the undead? They'd given me holy water, so surely they couldn't be the bad guys.

On the other hand, they'd named their organization after Judas, which sounded even more sinister than Millennium.

They'd fired from a distance of half a mile. That was more than enough time.

I blinked, landing on top of one missile, inventorying it then jumping from it to the next missile. One after the other I jumped on, acquired and moved on, even as we got closer and closer to the mansion.

Alucard simply stood there watching, as though he had perfect confidence in me. Or maybe he wasn't likely to be hurt by the missiles. That had been true of the last guy.

The last missile got within two feet of him as I acquired it.

I then appeared in front of the lead helicopter.

"Stand down," I said. My voice in this form was much deeper and scary sounding, and I liked it.

They all opened fire on me, and I found myself taking 3 hp per second from all six helicopters- a total of 18 hp.

After to seconds though, I stopped taking any damage at all, as my damage resistance in my normal skin cycled past 99.9%

"You do the nicest things for me," I murmured.

Killing priests seemed like a horrible thing to do. If they could make holy water, didn't that mean they had the approval of God?

Ah well.

"Bone Garden," I said.

I made sure to center the effect further ahead of me than behind so as to not kill the people in the mansion.

All six helicopters immediately began to spiral as the pilots died.

It was too bad they were too heavy to inventory. It would be kind of cool to have my own fleet of helicopters.

They crashed into the bone garden, crushing dozens of bone sculptures into dust.

Blades went flying everywhere.

I ignored the ones flying off into the fields, but caught all eight blades flying toward the mansion. They had to weigh at least two hundred and fifty pounds each.

Two bayonets flew through the air, striking me in the shoulder and the side.

-10 HIT POINTS!

Pulling them out telekinetically, I let them drop to the ground as I stared at a priest who was at the head of an army of other priests.

There had to be more than a thousand of them, and they were coming from behind me, approaching from the west side of the mansion.

I blinked in front of him.

"You should all go home," I said. "I don't really like the idea of murdering a thousand priests."

"We exist to destroy the foul things that walk in the night, and the unbelievers."

The head priest was a tall man, over six and a half feet tall. He glanced back at his subordinate, and the man fell quiet.

"We are here for Alucard," the man said. "Are you his beast?"

I was still in my wolf form; I'd almost forgotten.

"You can call me Harvest," I said. "Do you really want your men to all die for no reason?"

Alucard was suddenly beside us.

"Send them home, Anderson," he said. "And I will give you the fight you wish. Otherwise this young woman will kill them all."

"I really hate killing priests," I explained. "But I will if I have to."

The man frowned, then gestured toward the others.

"Protect the Pope," he said. "Return home."

I released Sir Integra, returning to human myself. The world slowed down around me.

"You must stop doing that," she said.

"Alucard just agreed to fight this guy if he'll send his army home, so I don't have to kill all of them. That seems really nice."

She stared at me, grim faced.

"We'll wait until they are gone," Alucard said. "And then we can begin."

I grabbed Sir Integra, and flew her to the roof.

"You don't have like supernatural toughness or anything?" I asked.

She shook her head.

"Because everybody seems to have it around here. That guy's not even a vampire or werewolf, and he's about to fight Alucard!"

"He is Iscariot's trump card."

With any luck, I could harvest the blood of the loser, and if it was the priest and he was weakened, I could attack him right afterwards and take his powers too without having to fight so much.

I'd also get to see what kinds of powers Alucard had, and what I'd have to defend myself against. It was possible that he had something that could bypass my defenses, like the Siberian had bypassed Alexandria's invulnerability.

"You plan to profit from this, don't you?" Sir Integra asked.

"Are you kidding?" I asked. "My world is dying. I need all the power that I can get, and this is pretty risk free for me. I don't know Alucard; I barely know you, and although I like you well enough, I'm not going to avoid the low hanging fruit."

Besides, I wanted to see what a regular fight between people like this looked like. I'd never really seen a cape fight before that I hadn't participated in, other than Lung and Hookwolf, and I'd been so focused on escaping that I hadn't really gotten to enjoy it.

We both settled down to watch the show.

"Thank you for protecting my city," Sir Integra said. "Whatever your motives."

"I don't like bullies," I said. "And what else are Nazis than schoolyard bullies who murder people?"

I didn't mention the people I had murdered rather than try to save because I had to attack the dirigibles and save more people. There should have been something else that I could do.

I couldn't think of anything. The only way I could have saved them was if I was a lot faster, if I'd been able to wave and make the flames vanish, if I could heal people in an area.

The only way I could keep it from happening again was to keep on collecting abilities until I was powerful enough that nobody dared to attack innocents around me.

"Alucard isn't all that tough," I asked. He was being injured by things that wouldn't even phase me now.

"He's difficult to kill," she said, her eyes never leaving the battlefield.

He was a fast regenerator.

Both men fought at a level I couldn't hope to match, and I found myself enjoying the fight, even as Alucard allowed him to get injured a lot more than I thought was strictly necessary.

Was he sandbagging, or was he just taunting the guy?

I straightened.

"Did that guy just shove a nail into his heart?"