54

Chapter 54: Tyranny 6-8

Tyranny 6.8

We weren't in the air for long. Twenty, maybe thirty seconds, total. She carried me up over the Trainyard, far above the scattered railcars and the gravel-covered ground, and took me back towards the fight, where Noelle and the other heroes were.

It was a massacre.

That was the only way I could think of to describe it. Towering walls made of the same frosted panes as that first barrier created a sturdier, more complete arena, penning Noelle in without leaving even the slightest of gaps for her to escape through. They shone faintly, but combined, were bright enough to cast the whole area in an eerie glow. In the air above, Legend still flitted about, peppering her with laser after laser that streaked through the air and tore into her massive flanks, carving her apart one little bit at a time.

Eidolon, by contrast, had retired to another pane of frosted light, standing atop it with his hands outstretched. He was no longer flying on his own, and he had stopped firing blasts of pressure at her.

Because he'd changed powers, I realized after a moment. He'd swapped, at some point, so he could…maybe, increase the strength of his barriers? I could only guess.

And arrayed all around the arena, standing safe behind Eidolon's barriers, were the other heroes. As I watched, Noelle turned in one direction, and behind her, the barriers lowered and the heroes now exposed launched attacks directly into her back, blasting her without pause or mercy. Streaks of light, multicolored beams spat from Tinker guns, the staccato pops of Miss Militia's power, formed into an automatic rifle. Anything and everything they could throw at her from range, they did.

Even so, they weren't doing much damage, not nearly enough to seriously threaten her, but it didn't seem to matter, because she couldn't touch them. The moment she began to turn back around, the barriers rose again and the heroes were once more protected.

It was a bit incredible, I thought as Alexandria set me down atop a railcar, sat behind one of the areas without a Blaster to harry Noelle. The way these disparate teams could come together and fight so cohesively. The way they all seemed to know what they were doing and how to compliment one another, despite the fact that most of them had probably never met each other before today.

Still —

"Is this going to be enough?"

The problem remained the same as before. They weren't doing enough damage fast enough that Noelle…that Echidna wasn't simply healing most of it before they could hit her again. Unless they were trying to —

Death by a thousand cuts, I realized suddenly. No, that made perfect sense, didn't it? Not only did No — Echidna regenerate flesh at a rapid rate, they had to be careful of the people still inside her. Then, the best thing they could possibly do was whittle away at her slowly but surely, always taking off only a little bit more than she had recovered, until they found her hostages.

"It'll be enough," said Alexandria.

And just as she said it, Legend fired another disintegration laser that ate further into Noelle's body, dissolving the flesh to reveal…a head? No, that was an arm, too. Shoulders. Clothing.

One of the hostages.

"GO!" roared Armsmaster's voice.

One of the barriers that made up the defensive wall shimmered and vanished, and through the gap sprang a single cape — Grace, from the Chicago Wards — who leapt up and into the air, towards Noelle, foot first. She landed with a disgusting, obscene squelch, driving her leg into the mass of meat up to her knee, right above the hostage, and with another, equally obscene sound, the hostage's body was pushed out, along with more of that bile that replaced her lower half's blood.

Then, with an agility and motion befitting her name, Grace kicked off and landed lightly next to the hostage, before she bent down and lifted the unconscious person — not Lisa, not Amy, probably another homeless person — up onto her shoulders in a fireman's carry. She was already sprinting back towards safety as Noelle spun around and realized one of her hostages had been rescued.

"NO!" she screeched, giving chase.

But even with her incredible speed, she was too far behind. Grace made it back to her group, and the barrier sprang back up into place immediately after, leaving Noelle to slam into it impotently. It didn't even crack.

And behind her, positioned on the opposite side, one of the barriers went down again and the Blaster team there unloaded onto her again. She spun again, quickly enough to take a few hits to the front, but by the time she was in motion, the wall was back up and there was nothing she could do.

Up above, Legend fired off another laser, and more of her flesh disintegrated, like evaporating water. She screamed again.

"STOP IT!" She sounded, now, less like an intimidating monster and more like a little girl who wasn't getting her way. "STOP IT! STOP IT! STOP IT!"

Underneath her, one of the mouths on her lower body spat out another person — naked, with leathery skin, so it must have been a clone. This one looked much more like the Fingerpainter than any of the other clones, but she still had Amy's hair.

"KILL THEM!" Noelle shouted.

But the Amy clone had barely a moment to pull herself to her feet before a sizzling laser from Legend blew her head directly off of her body. The disfigured corpse collapsed back to the ground.

Something nasty and cold jolted through my stomach, squirming there, and I took a step forward. "What the hell —"

A hand on my shoulder, fingers firm like a steel vice, stopped me and pulled me back. I spun around towards the grim-faced Alexandria, who didn't seem at all surprised or upset. It just made me angrier.

"He just murdered — !"

"We have been extraordinarily fortunate," she cut me off, speaking calmly and evenly, "that the clones of Panacea that have so far been encountered possessed powers that were not only wildly divergent from the original's, but also self-contained. It was agreed upon by all the leaders here that we cannot take the chance that we will continue to be so fortunate."

"But summary execution…!"

I had no illusions about the likely fates of Amelia and Claire. Even the Fingerpainter…she might just have committed the cape equivalent of suicide by cop. There was a very stark and important difference, however, between killing the enemy in a fight to the death and casually blowing someone's head off before they had even had a chance to speak.

"And if that clone had had exactly the same powers as Panacea, only with the range of a Shaker?" retorted Alexandria, still so damnably calm. "If she had used them to strike down everyone here with late stage cancer, or make all our bones so brittle they collapse under our weight? Would the lives and health of all of these brave heroes be worth it, in order to sate your conscience?"

No.

I bit my tongue against what I wanted to say and gritted my teeth, because she was right. Maybe there was a way to hold that Amy clone, maybe there was something someone here could have done to figure out a way to stop her if she tried to do something like that, but one life wasn't worth everyone else here that she could have killed if she put her mind to it.

It felt like it should be. I'd been fighting those sorts of compromises for four months, now, because they led down the path I hated. The road to hell.

But she was right, in that as much as I hated it, I had to admit that by the time we would've found out whether or not that Amy clone could've done anything like that, it would've been far too late to fix it or stop her.

Fists clenching impotently, I turned back around to the fight, watched as the heroes carved out more flesh little by little. Hated that there really wasn't anything I could do about it, without using her. Hated that the only thing I could do was stand there and wait.

"STOP IT!" Noelle screamed. Her lower half thrashed while her human body squeezed her eyes shut and threw her arms around. "KROUSE! KROUSE, WHERE ARE YOU? THAT STUPID BITCH WAS WRONG! WHY AREN'T YOU HELPING ME?"

For a long moment, there was no answer, and even the heroes paused and looked around, as though expecting someone to pop out of the woodwork and come to Noelle's aid.

My lips pulled tight.

That wasn't how Trickster worked, though. His power wasn't built for head-on fights, it was built for subterfuge and sowing confusion. That was why I looked down and around the arena for anything he could use to switch out with Noelle. Anything that was big enough, massive enough, that he could swap it for her.

The problem was, there was too much. I didn't know his limits, except that there was probably a limit on the difference in masses, and even if there wasn't a way around that limit (and there probably was, since he'd swapped a Lisa clone for Noelle in the first place), there were way too many things he could use.

In that regard, picking the Trainyard, with all of these railcars, as a battleground was a huge tactical advantage.

"KROUSE!" Noelle screamed again.

CRACK

But the sound didn't come from the Trainyard, it came from above it, and when I looked up, Legend had been replaced by —

A dragon?

It was twice the size of a man, with large, bat-like wings, flapping vigorously to hold it aloft, that accounted for maybe half of its mass, a long, lizard-like body that stretched maybe nine feet from snout to the tip of its tail, and sleek, black scales that made it seem to almost disappear against the night sky.

"SHOOT IT DOWN!" shouted Armsmaster's voice.

The dragon let out a roar and swooped down and into the arena, leaving the spray of quick, poorly aimed shots to soar through the air where it had been a moment ago. It didn't go on the attack, as I expected it to, as the gargoyle had before. Instead, it landed on all fours in front of Noelle, just barely out of her reach, reared up and wings flared out, as though it could protect her from whatever the Blaster teams tried to —

No. A nasty sense of foreboding curled in my stomach. No, that wasn't what it was doing at all.

"KILL IT!" I yelled down at the nearest team. They jumped and looked up at me, startled. Idiots. "KILL IT, NOW, BEFORE —"

CRACK

Suddenly, in the space between one blink and the next, the dragon and Miss Militia swapped places.

"NO!"

I rushed forward, even as the dragon bowled over the other members of the team and took off into the air, again, but Eidolon's barrier stood in my way, and I couldn't do anything except watch as Noelle leapt forward like a lioness onto a gazelle and sucked Miss Militia into her body.

I pounded my fist against the pane of frosted light. It didn't so much as crack.

"Damn it!"

Lisa, Amy, Miss Militia… Was she going to take every person who had ever shown me any kindness, just to twist the knife as deep as she could?

"You see?" whispered Lisa's voice in my ear. I flinched back, gritting my teeth. "You can stop this. You know you can. But you're so damn scared of it that you won't, leaving everyone around you to suffer the consequences of your cowardice. And this is the girl who beat Lung and called herself one of the strongest heroes in the world? It'd be funny if it wasn't so pathetic."

SHUT UP! I wanted to scream.

The only thing that stopped me was the knowledge that I was the only one who could hear her. It took an enormous effort of self-control, but I couldn't afford to be benched if the other heroes thought I was losing it and talking to people who weren't there. Worse still if they enacted whatever counted for Master-Stranger protocols here and took me out of the fight for that reason, instead.

No, I had to be here. I had to be here, to make sure that my friends made it out of this. That was what held my tongue.

The dragon, by this point, had made its way back to Noelle's side, standing protectively in front of her again. Not without injury — it was pockmarked with charred burn spots and gashes that bled a kind of black ichor instead of blood — but intact enough that it didn't seem overly concerned with its wounds.

Of course not. It was a projection. It could and would fight until something disrupted its form enough to destroy it. Even then, with how lifelike this one was, it might take a decisive fatal blow.

And I could do nothing, because even if I tried, Alexandria would likely hold me back so I could play healer when all was said and done.

Damn it. Damn it.

I just had to sit here, helplessly, waiting for these heroes to try and rescue my friends, hoping that they didn't hurt Amy or Lisa and that no one else had to die because of my mistakes. I had to sit here and pray to whatever heartless god might be listening that all of these heroes could thread that needle against a nascent Endbringer and a menagerie of monsters that could take on any form they liked, with who even knew what kind of limits.

Even as I watched, the dragon's wounds were starting to slow and heal, closing before my very eyes, just…like…

Lung.

No.

Something cold jolted through the anger and the frustration, and I pressed myself up against the pane to try and get a better look. Up above, Legend reappeared in a flash of light and let off another sizzling laser, the same kind that had eaten so effortlessly through Noelle's flesh, before.

But the dragon turned its wings into a shield, blocking the shot, and that powerful beam seemed only to take away the outermost layer, dissolving away the hard scales to reveal raw flesh underneath.

It was not a killshot, even though it should have been, even though it had been on that clone, even though a single arrow to the head from Atalanta had killed that gargoyle. The dragon had survived, almost unharmed, and even now, the wound was slowly healing.

I remembered, then, the utter certainty I'd had that first night, as I used Siegfried. That as Lung became more and more dragon-like in shape and form, he would suffer too a dragon's weakness to Balmung. But the flipside of that was that he would also gain a dragon's strength; its tough, scaly hide, its immense strength and power, its robust fortitude and constitution. How much of that had been his power, and how much he had gained from borrowing the image, the concept of a dragon, if any at all, I didn't know.

Was I witnessing it here, now? Was this monster, a projection in the shape of a dragon, also borrowing the power of one?

Legend tried again and again and again, blasting the dragon with a variety of different lasers, but though one pierced the scales and scored a deep, penetrating wound, the one that set things on fire flickered against them impotently, and the one that froze things only left a thin layer of frost where it hit that cracked and shattered and fell away when the dragon moved.

And the other heroes watched, uneasy, as though wishing to fight but unable, because Noelle stood free and able and the tactic they were using before didn't work the same when she faced one direction and the dragon faced the other.

Eidolon didn't seem willing to take any chances with it, either. The pen he created had been left completely up and closed, and he hadn't opened a spot for the capes arrayed around it to fire into, again. Not since Miss Militia had been taken.

I glanced at Alexandria.

And if I tried to do anything, she'd stop me. My own personal minder, who was staying out of the fight just so she could babysit me.

A great swell of anger, frustration, and disgust surged suddenly through my belly and exploded in my chest. In that instant, I hated her, hated everything she represented, hated that I had ever looked up to her as a child, and even as I hated her, I wasn't entirely sure why.

Fuck her. Fuck her. If she thought I was just going to sit here and watch…

"Hey!" I called over to the nearest cape, a boy about my age with streaks of white set into his dark costume.

He startled and looked over to me. Raymancer, that was his name. One of the ones I hadn't recognized earlier.

"Gimme something!"

"Like what?" he asked back incredulously.

"Anything!" I snapped. "A rock, a piece of gravel — I'm not being picky!"

He hesitated for a second, and the other capes around us kept glancing over, like they were trying to keep an eye on both what was happening here and Noelle at the same time, but eventually, he bent down and rummaged about on the ground for the largest piece of gravel he could find. After a moment, he straightened and tossed it towards me.

"Here!"

I snatched it out of the air effortlessly and turned away from him without bothering to thank him.

Alexandria was already there, ready to block my way.

"Apocrypha," she said, voice firm and brooking no argument, "you're not going in there."

"I'm not," I agreed coldly, and that seemed almost to surprise her.

I didn't offer her anything else, I just made my way to the back ledge of the railcar, to give myself enough space, then I took off like a shot from a cannon and pushed off with all my strength.

I'm not sure what it said, about her or about the situation, that Alexandria didn't try to stop me, because I knew for a fact she was fast enough that she could have.

I leapt up, high into the air and above the tops of the barrier, so high up that I could look down and see the entire arena. As I reached the apex of my jump, time seemed to stretch outwards to infinity and I hung there for what felt like an eternity, pulling my arm back in slow motion, condensing my strength into a single point, focusing the power needed, taking aim.

Then, I whipped my arm forward and let it all go through the pebble in my hand.

Thunder Feat.

"HA!"

CRACK

The pebble, propelled forward with a technique that had been used to slay men, monsters, and gods alike, grew red hot as it shattered the sound barrier. It flew like a bullet, moving so quickly that only maybe the Triumvirate was fast enough to see it, and it collided with the dragon's head like a battering ram.

It was obliterated. Both the rock itself and the head of the beast, the impact destroyed them utterly, and everything above the dragon's neck simply ceased to exist. Like someone had taken an eraser and just removed them from reality. A handful of seconds later, both the dragon itself and the brackish ichor that had splattered over the gravel vanished, too, just like the gargoyle before them.

The recoil of my technique pushed me back, and I landed, with a nimbleness that surprised even me, back behind the frosted pane of Eidolon's barrier.

In the aftermath, there was a long moment of silence, like the entire battlefield had been surprised by what I'd done. Some of the heroes were looking at me, as though they hadn't realized I could do something like that or be so lethal. Mostly, it was the Wards, more than the Protectorate.

This was no time to be gawking, though.

"WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?" I shouted at the Blaster teams. At Eidolon, who needed to let them in to fight. "GO! NOW! GET —"

But it was too late. Noelle had had enough time to finish the gestation, and from the mouth of one of the monstrous heads sticking out of her lower half, there came a great spray of bile and a single body that flopped onto the gravel limply.

A clone.

The clone was naked, as they always were, but looked mostly human. There were rough spots, places where her flesh got tough and leathery that corresponded to the real one's fatigues, but it was the face where she got most inhuman, where her nose and mouth had stretched out into broad triangle that merged smoothly with her cheeks and chin, ending in a limp flap that hung over the front of her neck — as though she was wearing a scarf or a bandanna.

Legend was already lining up another killshot, just as he had with the Amy clone, but Noelle put her bulk in between him and the clone and took the laser with little more than a grunt as her flesh burned and more of that bile spilled out onto the gravel.

For a fraction of a second, a moment so brief, a delay so short, that I myself only barely saw it, Legend hesitated, then he swooped around to take aim from another angle — but it didn't matter, because that fractional hesitation was enough for the Miss Militia clone to be swapped out.

Instantly, she and a figure in Spartan-like armor — Dauntless — switched places, leaving Dauntless to be swallowed by Noelle and the Miss Militia clone to strike with snake-like speed at the heroes he'd been grouped with.

But it was not an attack, like I'd been expecting. No slap. No punch. No power lashing out at them violently, horrifically. It was almost gentle, the way she pressed her swollen, misshapen fingertips against the parts of their faces left open by their masks. Almost affectionate, the way the gnarled pads ghosted over their cheeks.

The pair of them — Revel and a man I didn't recognize — flinched back from her, and the two groups nearest turned as though to fight, but she was already gone, swapped out for Armsmaster, then gone again before his team could rally against her, then again, replaced with Gallant, and again, and again.

I moved to help, more on instinct than because I thought I could do anything as I was, but Alexandria's hand took my shoulder and held me back. I spun to face her, and her mouth was pulled into a thin line.

"Wait," she ordered. "Look."

I turned back around to see Revel fumbling with her lantern, handling it as though she suddenly had no idea how to use it, while the man beside her flinched away from everything, like he was afraid of being hurt by anything he touched.

Or destroying whatever he came into contact with.

I realized what she wanted me to see just as she spoke into the microphone in her helmet.

"All teams, be advised," she said, even as more of them were moved around, "the clone, dubbed Reversal, is a Striker-Trump with the ability to swap the powers of any two capes she touches. Engage at range, or else retreat —"

But it was already too late. The cape beside Revel disappeared, and the clone, Reversal, was suddenly standing next to Armsmaster, already in motion.

Then, Revel traded places with Eidolon, and Eidolon was right in front of Reversal, within striking distance, and she reached out, viper quick, pressing her fingers along Armsmaster's jaw and reaching back into Eidolon's hood —

The barrier wall flickered, then died. The faint glow it provided, illuminating the battlefield, disappeared, plunging everything into darkness. Beneath the distant light of the glimmering stars, a menacing, monstrous figure stood, unfettered, a vague outline against the blackness of the night.

Noelle was free.

— o.0.O.O.0.o —

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