Bryce Kiley
2010, December 15: Brockton Bay, NH, USA
The Forsberg Gallery was a mess, not that I’d expected any different. There were eight patrol cars in the gallery parking lot, with officers looking unsure of themselves. Rather than move in and try to arrest the Undersiders, they seemed more eager to corral the news crews and the rubbernecking bystanders.
Was it Cauldron’s influence over the cultural zeitgeist that kept them from engaging? Had they so thoroughly convinced themselves that this was “cape business?” Whatever it was, they just waited around for the PRT like that was all they were good for. It was honestly a little depressing to watch.
On the way over, I saw half a dozen PRT vans led by Armsmaster’s motorcycle moving in. They’d be here in four minutes or so.
I wondered if Dauntless and Triumph would be joining us. Given that most of the Protectorate and Wards were out of the city, there were even odds that Piggot would keep one or both of them back in case something went wrong elsewhere.
“Good, it looks like we’ll get there before the PRT,” I told SAINT. It was a little unwieldy, but the Pledge Regalia hung off my back like a cross-shaped tombstone. It might get in the way in a physical contest, but I was hoping that its ability to project sound waves would help me navigate Grue’s darkness.
I actually wasn’t sure about that. In canon, Grue’s darkness prevented Shatterbird from manipulating glass because her vector was sound-based. On the other hand, Cricket, whose power included echolocation, was able to use said power to navigate the darkness.
All I could conclude was that there was a frequency and decibel range which was less hampered by Grue’s darkness. If there was anything in my kit that could no-sell Grue and find that sonic sweet spot, it was the Pledge Regalia.
If all else failed, I could use it as a big, metal club.
I brought up the gallery’s blueprints. It’d help to have security camera footage. “SAINT, can you hack the gallery’s network?”
“Gon,” he chirped, almost offended that I’d even ask. A public museum’s internet security against a porygon-2? Yeah, fair enough.
I alighted on a nearby skyscraper and scoped out my surroundings while SAINT got me the gallery’s camera feeds. I’d been right to arrive stealthed. Sure enough, there were six men with sniper rifles aimed at the gallery from varying angles, three pairs of snipers and their spotters.
No doubt Coil wanted me dead or captured. Even if he lost the entirety of the Undersiders here, leverage against The GOAT would be worth it from his perspective. Had I rushed in with my usual bombastic flair, he’d have had a bullet in the back of my head before I ever reached the Undersiders.
I considered taking them out, but right now, no one knew I was here. If I were Coil, I’d have taken a day off and sat at home, coordinating two timelines. So long as he didn’t know I was here, he’d have to upkeep both timelines and hold everyone on standby. His power was fairly reactive in that sense; he could simulate and correct a mistake, but taking the initiative was much harder for him because his power wasn’t true time-warping, just simulations. He still had to commit.
He could try to be proactive, maybe shoot up the surrounding buildings to get a rise out of me, but that’d make this no longer “cape business.” The police would respond, and with SWAT gear, not pistols and handcuffs. Assuming I was his target, that’d just tie up his mercs and give me freedom to act more openly.
“Three snipers in position,” I told SAINT. “How’s the hacking coming along?”
SAINT’s response was the entire gallery’s camera feed dumped onto my screen. The mosaic of feeds removed themselves one by one until I was looking at a cluster of black screens. They were in the west wing of the gallery, presumably where the surrealist painters like Dali were.
Grue’s power, no doubt. If the Undersiders had been told to remain and play hide and seek with me, or lay a trap for me, then they’d want to obscure their exact location.
I wouldn’t put it past Tattletale to somehow know the moment I stepped into Grue’s smoke. Sensory deprivation was supposed to hamper her power, but what did I know? Her power was supposed to be all about inferences, but she seemed to occasionally pull knowledge out of her ass whenever things got desperate without any logical chain.
Or maybe I was just stupid and it was my fault for not being able to follow an interdimensional supercomputer’s breadcrumbs. That was also a possibility.
“Thanks, SAINT. Let’s assume they’ll know we’re there as soon as we step inside. Our goal is to activate the Pledge Regalia, find a sound wave that lets us navigate the smoke, and take out the Undersiders.”
“Pory?”
“We don’t need all of them. It’d be nice, but letting one or two go is fine. Our targets are Tattletale and Bitch, their intelligence and their heavy muscle. Grue and Regent won’t be able to cause too much trouble even if they go free. Ready?”
“Gon.”
“Good. Let’s do this.”
X
Lisa Wilbourn
“Guys, Creed’s here,” I said based on his estimated response time. The cameras were hacked, meaning The GOAT had eyes on us, or at least the cloud of smoke we were hiding in.
We were in the west wing of the gallery, just outside the office of the curator. Regent had nabbed the painting and rolled it up unceremoniously into a tube. It lost more than ten grand in value from the way he mishandled it, but it wasn’t the priority anyway.
Grue had enclosed us in a ring of darkness, enveloping us like a donut. Bitch’s dogs kept a watchful vigil, through I wasn’t sure if that’d help any. The smoke hindered them just as much as it hindered humans. After all, Bitch’s commands could easily get lost in the darkness.
I suppressed a frustrated sigh. Coil was fucking us over and there was nothing we could do about it. With The GOAT’s cyberattack, Coil was desperate enough to use us as bait. The bastard wanted to use us to draw him out so one of his mercs could take him by surprise.
It was meant to be revenge, a message to The GOAT that Coil didn’t need to compete in cyberspace. If Creed could be captured, Coil could leverage The GOAT’s protege against them, even as he drugged Creed to the gills in an undisclosed, completely offline safehouse. And if Creed died, that’d be fine too: It’d mean The GOAT would be forced to either abandon the Bay completely, or invest greater resources, showing more of their hand.
I disapproved of this plan. I couldn’t emphasize how not okay I was with this. There was a very real chance that Creed would stop pulling punches when he was put in danger. He certainly didn’t hesitate to off Arsalan in Syria. As goofy as he liked to portray himself, it was an act: Creed was fucking dangerous and the only thing we had to mitigate Creed’s wrath was his promise that he was a hero now.
Coil wasn’t nearly as brilliant as he thought he was. I didn’t know how, but The GOAT knew. They knew what Coil was planning. They knew that this was a trap. They knew what Coil’s power was, and somehow before I did. Worst of all, they wanted this confrontation to happen anyway.
If that wasn’t a clue that we should back the fuck off, I didn’t know what was. Coil knew and didn’t care. He was relying heavily on his power, a power I’d figured out when he called me in earlier this week. He thought he’d get as many chances as he’d need. In any other circumstance, on any other person, I might have even admired that kind of absolute self-confidence.
It was unsettling, knowing I’d probably been tortured, raped, and murdered countless times across countless possibilities, but I put the thought out of mind. Making an enemy out of yer another powerful thinker was the last thing on my to-do list, but I had no agency here.
I was just the tasty, blonde bait dangled before a stupidly powerful tinker who could potentially compete as a peer with the Triumvirate. My saving grace here was that Creed wouldn’t resort to lethal measures if he could help it.
“Tats, where is he?” Grue asked.
I was sorely tempted to make a blind joke right now. He was the only one of us who could see through his fog. “No clue, but he’s in the building. Expect contact within the minute.”
‘You said this guy dominated a warzone. Why are we baiting him again?” Regent whined like a bitch.
“Because the boss is paying us a hundred grand each. He really wants to test Creed for some reason. If we get caught, he’ll have us broken out within two days.”
The team didn’t even know who “the boss” was, never mind the snipers positioned around the gallery. Regent wouldn’t care, but it’d affect Grue’s performance. Our leader would subconsciously hesitate and very likely fuck things up. If it all went well, Creed would chase us, get shot, and my team would just think we’d managed to lose him in the darkness.
If.
Then, my power twigged onto something: The wind had picked up, sending a cool breeze through the air and slightly scattering Grue’s smoke. The AC was on, as was usual in galleries like this, but that couldn’t account for this.
[There is wind. This wind is generated via a small, but powerful rotational force. Creed wears motorized skates. Creed is here. Wind would not impact a large area in Grue’s power. Creed is clo–]
“Duck!” I cried.
The four of us hit the floor as Bitch’s dogs began to bark. That was the rub: Because Grue’s darkness muted all vectors, it became hard for Bitch’s dogs to smell intruders.
A bolt of lightning sizzled above us, roughly at my shoulder-height. It would have hit Bitch’s shoulder, though only barely.
[Creed knows the rough location of people in the darkness. Usual accuracy suffers]
“Rats, guess I missed,” came Creed’s muted voice. “Impressive deduction. What gave me away, Tats?”
[Joking,] my power informed me. [Motor does not need to be running constantly. Wanted you to know he was here. Arrogant. Believes you are not a threat.]
I groaned. And here I thought he’d gotten over all the showboating he did as a joke villain. Then again, he wasn’t wrong either. We had nothing that could breach his layered force fields and he didn’t have a convenient weakness like some capes did.
“Your motors are loud, idiot,” I taunted. I wanted to keep him talking as we hastily mounted the dogs. “Why do you even have an invisibility cloak if you’re going to sound like a jet liner?”
He stepped out of the darkness. He stood atop a platform of hardened air, looking down at us with what I just knew was a smug, languid smirk beneath his helmet. On his back was a large, tombstone-like object he hadn’t had before. “It’s not very nice to lie, you know. My skates aren’t that loud and Grue’s darkness mutes noise anyway. Really, how’d you know?”
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
“I read minds. Did you know yours sounds like a little bitch?”
[Cross-shaped tinkertech is a sonic manipulation device. Was used in Damascus. Is currently emitting vibrating pulses. Used that to map the surrounding area. Signal is muted in darkness. May have a delay in tracking moving targets.]
“Excuse you, my mind is a treasure,” he snarked back.
[Creed enjoys talking to you. Thinks it’s a rite of passage. Is genuinely appreciative to hear your sass.]
That was weird. Why would talking to me be a rite of passage? Unless he had some weird hero-villain romance kink. He’d hardly be the first, but eww.
I quickly refocused. I didn’t need to know what his fetishes were. The tinkertech on his back was the bigger issue. So long as he had that, he’d be able to track us down.
“Stick together,” Coil’s voice came through the line. He began rattling off instructions.
“We stick together. West exit, straight down the street. We can turn off McAllister Boulevard,” I parroted. Knowing his power, he probably had us split up in the other timeline. One way or another, he’d get Creed in range of the snipers.
We began to move, Brutus with Bitch and Grue first, then Judas with me and Regent. Angelica had no rider, leaving her free to run circles around us and intercept any chasers.
“Keep the smoke light, Grue. Boss wants us to play tag,” I told him. It’d help Creed follow us even without the cross-shaped sound emitter.
“Got it,” he grunted back.
We crashed through a large, floor-to-ceiling window. A bolt of lightning followed us. It almost hit Grue before Regent wrenched our leader’s torso to the side.
I frowned. That wasn’t right. Creed’s aim suffered in the smoke like everyone else’s. Even his sonic-tombstone thing couldn’t track moving targets perfectly. Or maybe it was his own vision that couldn’t process the information fast enough.
So what was doing the job for him?
[Internal system assists with aiming,] my power informed me.
“Fucking Creed has an aimbot!” I swore into my mic.
“Angelica, hurt!” Bitch yelled behind her. The third set of heavy footsteps faded as Bitch’s hound turned to delay Creed.
I twisted to look behind me. Angelica was almost the size of a minivan now and weighed well over a ton. With bone growths and scales covering her body and bulging muscles that tore through the skin at points, she was a fearsome sight.
She charged at the partially obscured figure with a snarl. Bitch’s training was impeccable. She’d grab and shake, maybe break a few bones and leave him with whiplash, but wouldn’t kill.
Creed met her head-on. His skates roared to life, creating enough noise to be heard in the dampened field. He swirled his cape around himself as a golden-yellow force field made of concentric hexagons formed around him. It was immediately followed by a green, spherical force field, forming what was probably the most memed move by a Brockton cape.
“Giga Impact!” he roared as he rammed himself into Angelica.
The two flew apart with a deafening crash. Angelica didn’t look fast, but she was a ton of muscle and bone moving at highway speeds. Add in Creed’s own momentum and the blow easily rivaled the coup de grace from his first appearance.
Angelica slid to a stop, her claws digging trenches through the gallery grounds. My power told me that her shoulder was mangled, all but caved in until the joints dug straight into her chest cavity.
Creed responded likewise. He caught himself on a flagpole by lodging the pole between the wheels of his skates, before using their rotation to spin himself around like the world’s most bullshit pole dancer. He lost virtually zero momentum before launching himself at Angelica again.
I squinted, doing my best to see in the smoke. Though it wasn’t as thick as could be, Grue’s power was still a bitch to work with. I knew I’d regret this later, but I opened the floodgates and let my power run wild as the two clashed over and over again.
[One flickers before another. Creed has two force fields. They are powered separately,] my power informed me. [Creed is waiting for Coil.]
I frowned. Creed had swerved around Angelica, using a copious amount of electricity to paralyze her momentarily. He quickly darted away from her, hopped into the air, and made good time towards us.
“He’s gaining,” I told my team. “Regent, trip him up!”
“On it,” he replied with unusual seriousness.
Then, I saw something get a hold of Creed. He jumped onto a wall, seemingly tripped, then kicked off with enough force to faceplant into a marble statue of a woman. The statue broke, but he’d wrapped his arms around the woman’s head in midair and used that to reposition himself. Like a cat, he landed on his feet and kept dashing towards us.
[Creed has excellent proprioception. Never loses balance despite losing control of his limbs.]
“It’s like he’s a fucking cat,” Regent complained. “It’s less effective the more I do it, like his suit’s locking his legs in place.”
[Creed has a software that can control his suit. Tied to his targeting software. Is annoyed.]
I frowned. Of course Creed was annoyed. He just made out with a statue of Persephone.
I let out a sigh of relief as we emerged onto McAllister Boulevard. We were only a dozen yards from the killzone. Whether Coil’s mercs killed him or not wasn’t important anymore. Even the tinker wonder should be distracted by multiple snipers. Then, I could have Grue output more smoke and get us out of dodge.
X
Thomas Calvert
I slammed my fists into my desk as both timelines played out before me.
In the first timeline, I had them stick together, making a beeline for the McAllister killzone. There, the smoke would disperse as the street widened from the gallery entrance and two of my sniper teams would have a clear line of sight on the tinker.
Creed was happily wrestling with one of Bitch’s dogs, shields sparking like fireworks. I didn’t know how the charges worked, they could run off Coca-Cola for all I knew, but I was happy to let him waste the energy.
Then, as the Undersiders crossed into McAllister Boulevard, the smoke thinned and gave my men the perfect shot.
My men were some of the best of the best. They had experience fighting against both capes and conventional military forces. Two got their start as mercenaries in Africa. A third fought the cartels in South America before joining a mercenary company that took him to the Middle East, where he met his partner.
Whatever could be said about their lack of scruples, both sniper cells were filled with experienced sharpshooters. They had no trouble picking out the flamboyant cape through Grue’s purposely lightened smoke
“Take the shot,” I commanded. This was power, the right to choose life or death. Perhaps The GOAT and I were not so dissimilar in that. But where he chose to nurture and cultivate a hero, I would take and destroy.
Then, Creed blocked the bullet, not with his shield, but with a duck.
- Balloon. Duck.
It was obviously related to the one that he’d debuted in Damascus. I wasn’t sure why this one had rounded edges and bolder coloration, but the duck generated a force field that easily stopped the round.
Then, Creed stomped the ground and produced a column of fog. Compounded with the darkness, there was nothing my team could do to keep track of him.
“Fuck!” I heard Tattletale yell.
It was followed by a brief shriek of pain. Electrocution, if I had to guess. I knew what that sounded like by now.
The Undersiders were likely lost. I made a note to reacquire them as soon as this mess was over. My most reliable moles may have been expunged from the PRT, but bribing a few officers here and there was certainly within my abilities.
X
In the second timeline, the undersiders were to lead Creed out of the gallery through a different exit. That exit had been rigged with enough explosives to collapse most of the building. If the explosion killed a few of the Underisders, then so be it. Even if Creed somehow survived the explosion, the third sniper I had in waiting would have plenty of time to shoot him.
At least, that was what should have happened.
The gallery shook with a tremendous explosion as the Undersiders crossed the threshold. Creed followed after them, just in time to detonate the trap.
He survived, of course. A sphere of green and gold intercepted the blow. I’d expected that much. He’d taken a salvo of rockets from Squealer’s truck a few months ago.
“Take the shot as soon as the shield comes down,” I ordered.
The men did as required of them, but still failed to so much as draw blood. That same fucking duck emerged from his helmet, blocking the bullet. It was some kind of automatic defense, a counter that would trigger regardless of Creed’s own ability to perceive the attack.
I growled as fog covered the gallery in this timeline as well.
X
Bryce Kiley
“Well, that was easy,” I mused. “Thanks, buddy.”
“Porygon. Pory-gon,” SAINT chirped, no doubt chiding me for this harebrained scheme of mine.
Still, I considered this the best method moving forward. The Undersiders could easily be bribed or coerced via contingencies to break Coil out, release Empire names, or cause any amount of trouble even after I took Coil off the board. None of them liked Coil, but they sure as shit could be bought. Though they weren’t very powerful, they were free agents, almost completely detached from Coil’s network, and that made them dangerous in their own right.
I needed to arrest them first to ensure they would not be around to save Coil or destabilize the city. At the very least, Lisa needed to be taken into custody so as to deprive them of information. Bitch, if only so she’d stop provoking Hookwolf.
And if I wanted that, the best way to take them out was to play along with Coil’s misconceptions of The GOAT and act like I was interested in flipping them. So, I’d gone along with Coil’s attempt to assassinate me via dangling his pet capes as bait.
Now, since I was working under the assumption that Coil could simulate me, I had to assume that he had two timelines going at the same time so he could target me from two separate vectors. One was the snipers obviously. The second was the bombs SAINT found rigged near the south exit. He would undoubtedly simulate both methods and choose the best outcome.
However, Coil wasn’t actually manipulating time, no matter how much he deluded himself into thinking otherwise. Which meant that whatever Coil saw, he was working in the same timeline as the rest of us, just with additional information.
Thus, if I knew the vectors, I could predict the “crossroads” he’d chosen for himself. And if I knew the crossroads, I could tell when he’d decided to commit to a timeline.
From his perspective, he probably saw both possibilities. But from mine, he could only act with a bit more added information. Assuming both assassination attempts failed, he’d naturally try to preserve what assets he could. In this case, that meant he’d choose the timeline in which the Undersiders had a slightly better chance of escape, the one in which they hadn’t taken an explosion with me.
Hence, the moment SAINT blocked the sniper round aimed at the back of my head, I knew I had him: He’d committed.
Oh, he’d try to split the timeline again, maybe take a few more shots, but that was easily remedied.
“Mirage Road: Fogbank!” I shouted, bringing my heel down in a textbook-perfect ax kick. A colossal plume of mist enveloped the area, shrouding us all in a thick, impenetrable fog.
It didn’t matter how many timelines Coil had if he couldn’t see through this fog. The information he could glean from both timelines would be the same: fuck-all.
“Now that Coil’s played his hand, we can stop pulling punches,” I told SAINT. Discharge. Focus on knocking them out.”
“Gon.”
We split up, as much as SAINT was willing to leave me alone in a fight anyway. I went low and skated forward, ducking under Angelica’s lunge.
My hand rose up and gently rubbed her belly as I passed. I’d not brought Major Armstrong’s gloves with me, but these organic variants were arguably better. And, knowing that the rhino-lizard-dog wasn’t actually the dog, just the meatsuit, helped immensely in ridding me of my inhibitions.
Angelica stumbled with a surprised whine. Her legs collapsed under her and she skidded into a car, denting it under her massive weight. She tried to rise, but failed to put her forelimbs beneath her.
Normally, I’d never have done this to a patient. Hell, I didn’t like performing any kind of human transmutation unless I had a medical prognosis chart made by a professional and several minutes to examine them. But this wasn’t a precise operation.
Quadrupeds were all roughly similar, monster dog or not, so I’d transmuted the connective sinew in her shoulders into something far less flexible. They’d snapped from the tremendous force of her charge, leaving her effectively crippled but unharmed.
I twitched and stumbled, catching myself in a cartwheel. Regent. I almost forgot he could sense neural impulses. Even without being able to see me, he’d found a way to make himself a nuisance.
Then, the twitching stopped as SAINT’s Discharge colored the fog.
I rushed forward and crippled each of the dogs before dragging the incapacitated Undersiders further into the fog.
That was it. It was that simple. The Pledge Regalia to navigate. SAINT for the aim and continued monitoring of Coil’s men. A quick burst of Air Gear tricks and some budget alchemy. That was all the Undersiders amounted to.
“Come on, SAINT,” I called as I tied them up and set them somewhere they wouldn’t be a bother. “Let’s go clean up Coil’s mercs.”
Author’s Note
Not much to say. Bryce has a convoluted plan for Coil. Is it a good plan? Ehh, not really.
I’m of the opinion that Coil is best dealt with by not playing the game. Either get Cauldron to handle him somehow (John Soprano), or simply be so overwhelmingly powerful that Coil’s game is irrelevant to you (Atreus). But hey, Bryce will Bryce.
Animal fact! Or… paleo fact…?
Scientists have a specific name for fossilized feces: coprolite. It’s usually found preserved via desiccation, though mineralization does occur.
The biggest example of human feces on record comes from York, UK, from a man thought to have been a viking. His shit is a hefty log roughly 8 inches long and 2 inches wide. It also has fossilized parasitic eggs inside. Joy.
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