Chương 49: Wake-up Call – Chapter 48 – Piggot [Had] a Plan
"Did you see the bitch?" a gruff male voice asks from right around the corner of the alley I'm hiding in. My currently enhanced hearing tells me the origin of the sound is about a head higher than mine, and I can tell he's almost out of breath and trying not to show it.
Damn amateur. If you need to pretend this much in front of your subordinates, you don't have as much of a grip on them as you should.
… The irony doesn't escape me.
"No, she just vanished like a damn ghost. Maybe she's something like Crusader's—"
"Don't be stupid. She's an obvious Brute—but she still wears armor. Which means she can bleed."
Two more voices, also male.
And they don't know.
[Good.]
Holding back my pained grunt, I finish sliding a sterile gauze between two tactical straps and over where one of the damn Empire goons got lucky with a switchblade right between my left floating ribs. I managed to break his jaw before getting away, so that explains his uncharacteristic discretion, and I'm not feeling anything other than some weakness due to the blood loss, so it seems he didn't nick anything important—that, or Panacea's upgrades are strong enough to make up for the extent of my injuries.
The current situation? I'm stabbed, bleeding, weakened.
But they don't know.
I let out a thoroughly unprofessional, feral grin before pulling a smoke grenade out of my belt and throwing it over the trash container I'm hiding behind and out of the alley.
"Wha—it's her! Shoot! Shoot!" the second voice, the one that didn't think I may be a projection, yells as he slides something metallic out of tight clothing, the likely handgun getting stuck for a moment before fabric tears.
"Don't! You fucking moron, you're going to hit us!" the first voice yells as he snaps an extendable baton open.
Hmmm… The ones with a brain are always more dangerous. It begs the question of what are they doing with the Empire, though.
Not like it matters. Not to me.
So I slide around the corner, pivoting over my right leg so I stop hugging the wall, and I go low as I extend my left leg fully, my weight shifting between the two feet completely silently as soon as I touch the ground.
The smokescreen swirls, diffuse shapes almost indiscernible in the setting sun.
But I remember where Trigger Happy was when he yelled.
I lift my right foot, my weight entirely on the left one as I bring it to my ankle, and then I shoot it right between and past his legs, yet again carefully and silently alighting on the cracked concrete so typical of Brockton Bay's sidewalks, a piece of rubble almost shifting when I brush past it.
Then, I feel the air shift over my extended right leg as the dimwitted, stupid moron seems to realize something's going on.
And I launch.
My extended leg pulls me toward him as the retracted one pushes, reinforced muscles acting in perfect unison as I shift my torso and turn my right elbow into a rising battery ram that strikes at precisely the right moment, my full weight and strength behind the sudden movement, the… the [harmony] of it so satisfying I almost bark out a laugh.
Then, in the slowed time of my fight, I [feel] his sternum shatter, pushed aside as I spear my whole body between his ribs.
"What the fuck—" the first stooge yells as I turn aside, my elbow pushing the dead man walking to my right so he trips over my leg stuck between his.
Then I do something stupid, showy, and that would've made me berate any recruit I ever saw attempt it.
Rounding my back, I throw myself backward and fall, letting my weight roll over my back, from my left hip to my right shoulder so that the fall doesn't go straight over my spine, my left leg kicking up to complete the roll so I land in a genuflection that faces the place where two Empire goons just tripped over their dead comrade.
"She's a ghost! A fucking ghost, I told you, Mike!"
"Shut the fuck up, John! And shoot!"
"Didn't you—"
"Shoot!"
I suppress the urge to shrug and throw myself into yet another roll, this time sideways so I can go back to the cover of the alley I emerged from.
Which is when I strain my forgotten injury and let out a pained grunt.
"There!" Mike yells.
Fuck.
Without time for cutesy acrobatics, I jump back behind the dumpster right as two guns discharge in my general direction. They wouldn't have hit me, they were aiming too high, but there's no reason to take unnecessary risks.
…
The irony doesn't escape me.
So I take as deep a breath as my more noticeably injured side allows me, and pick up something from my belt.
A couple of steel bearings.
The ridiculous extremes capes will go to not to use guns, I swear…
"Did you get her?" the unnamed, ghost-obsessed mook asks.
"I don't know. Just… take it slow. We've got her cornered," Mike answers before two sets of footsteps near me.
The smoke from my grenade has swirled into the alley, but it's not enough to impede vision. They'll see me as soon as they go past the dumpster.
The steel dumpster, filled with enough debris that it's actually bulletproof.
And that is lower than a grown man.
Mike is more robust; his footsteps are heavier.
His companion… a bit shorter, going from where his voice came from.
And he just took another slow, deliberate, careful step.
So I leap to my feet, already throwing the bearing at where I know his head is, and he doesn't have time to turn around fully before the shiny steel ball sinks into his temple and a falling body dully impacts concrete without a single scream or pained gasp.
"Jake! Jake! You… You killed him!"
Mike's panicking.
Good.
"Do you want to be next?" I ask, my voice forced slightly lower than the almost falsetto I've been saddled with since Panacea tweaked all of my muscles. Tighter, more toned muscles lift the larynx, which results in some bodybuilders having the kind of voice one [does not] associate with their bulk.
It was always fun to tease some newbies who had roided a bit too much. It's annoying that I now have to deal with the very same thing.
Wouldn't want any rumors going around that the new cape is too [girly].
I'd rather they focus on the killings.
"You crazy bitch…" Mike unimaginatively says. So, as he expects me to leap over the dumpster for a repeat shot, I instead grab a steel handle on the side of the dumpster and launch myself to the side as I throw the second bearing right at Mike's left knee.
He crumbles to the floor with a scream high enough I stop worrying about my own, changed voice. His cracks, then, turning to wordless sobbing as his whole body cradles his shattered limb.
He's no longer holding his gun.
So I pull myself up by the handle I hadn't let go of in case I needed to jump back to cover and calmly step in front of him, my foot stepping on his Saturday night special—a snub nose revolver with the serial numbers filed off.
Someone has watched too many movies.
"I could kill you, Mike. Right now," I tell him.
And I know what he's seeing.
The traces of smoke are clinging to the ground, near where his tear-streaked face is stained by the blood of his broken leg, so he sees my dark profile blurred by thin, gray curlicues and thick sobbing. He doesn't even get to see my face, not with my helmet's visor lowered.
He just sees a shadow standing over him, calmly telling him he's nearer to death than he's ever been.
And the stench of urine tells me I'm not being overdramatic. Which is a relief, because Panacea seems to have reactivated all of my hormones when rejuvenating me, and there are days when I fear my mental clarity has been thoroughly crushed by the whims of a body undergoing a second puberty.
I wouldn't go back, of course, not to the prison of flesh, pain, and thirst. But it's still annoying.
"Wh—what—" Mike manages to blubber.
So I squat down, perfectly effortlessly, not a single tendon straining at the motion even as my heels remain on the ground. And I cover the bloodied bandage with the angle of my spread legs.
"What can you do so that I don't kill you? Is that what you want to ask me, [Mike]? Well, the answer is quite simple, really…"
I trail off, looking at the disgusting piece of humanity sobbing below me, at the murderous [Nazi] about to spill his guts and betray his comrades, to give me all the information I [need].
Yet again, I let the feral smirk out.
My helmet hides it. There's no need for me to hold it back.
***
"You are reckless," Panacea, a [parahuman], says as she takes my bare wrist and furrows her brow, staring at my right arm on her lap as she sits in front of me.
The irony isn't lost on me.
"I blame the hormones," I tell her. Which makes her brows grow closer with annoyance.
This time, I don't let the grin out. Which is a wasted effort, seeing as she can tell absolutely everything I'm feeling while touching me.
"There. You're no longer hemorrhaging to death—I've also taken the liberty to tweak your clotting factor. It would be an issue to have it this high, usually, but not with the anticoagulants that will be released if your blood flow gets interrupted."
"Oh? Wouldn't [that] be an issue if someone strangles me?"
"I trust that, if that happens, you'll either break their arms or die long before impromptu hemophilia becomes an issue. Who's gonna choke you in this town, anyway? Menja?"
I chuckle.
"I would stab the bitch if it came to that."
"How surprising. I thought you would crush her eyeballs or something."
"Ah, so you've been following me on the news," I airily reply, letting my voice rise to its new natural tone.
And Amy freezes.
Before she notices the release of endorphins, or however it is that she tracks my mood, and I laugh in her face—[at] her face.
Which leads to the grumpy, snarky teenager dope slapping me. Something I barely feel.
"Yes, that brings me to the second point: the pain response. It's too low; I forgot I was injured during the last fight."
"What? I thought that was what you—"
"Amy," I tell her before I wince at forgetting to use her cape name—[again], "a lack of pain is a [liability]. I need to know what state my body's in."
She once again stares at where she's touching me in concentration. A bad habit: her eyes have nothing to do with her power. She needs to be able to function while keeping awareness of her surroundings.
…
Damn it. This is going to turn into another lesson for the allegedly non-combatant, isn't it?
"There. Nociceptors are back. I'll think about what to do to make the pain more manageable without… without losing whatever it is you get from it, you masochistic freak."
This time, [I] dope slap her.
Damn it. I keep slipping. Stupid hormones.
"Third thing: the ribs. Can you put some kind of elastic mesh between them? This time, it was a lucky hit, but a good fighter would have gotten my lung."
"You mean the third, entirely independent lobe of your lung? Yeah, God forbid you ended the fight out of breath."
"You want to get a good combat model to use on your sister, or don't you?"
"That… That wasn't what I wanted—"
"It wasn't. It now is. Enjoy your guilt-free, human experimentation, Miss Mengele."
Amy shoots a dark glare at me, and then I [do] realize I've crossed a line.
Which lets me grit my teeth so I don't bite my tongue off right before Amy activates all my recently remodeled pain receptors.
It lasts barely a moment, but it's a moment of all-encompassing agony, a moment of red vision and roaring blood in my ears, of spasming muscles and nails stabbing into my palm.
When she's done, I'm a sweating, collapsed mess, my body slumped over my armchair like so many times when I had taken too long to go back to my dialysis, to watching my blood pulled out of me so it could be cleansed of the poisons built up merely by living.
… Delightful. I get out of a fight with an entire Empire horde with barely three grunts of pain, and the parahuman [friendly] makes me scream in agony with just a touch. How surprising.
"Speaking of deals… you're killing them. That wasn't part of the deal—" she starts, pretending at cold rage and focused indignation.
She's… an almost insulting imitation of me.
So I, without wiping the dripping sweat off my forehead, without wiping the thin trails of blood off my hand, without doing absolutely anything to acknowledge the inhuman torture, [grin] at her.
"It [was] the deal, Amy. I answer lethal force in kin. That was [always] part of the deal."
She looks at me in barely disguised astonishment. Because she's powerful. Incredibly so. A world-ender in her own right.
But she's also so, [so] green.
"You... They can't [all] have been using lethal—"
"Your sister is bulletproof—well, she's bulletproof [once]—I don't have that luxury."
She swallows, her eyes going from my wrist to my eyes.
I haven't shaken her grip. Haven't taken her hand with my gloved left and twisted it until the joint locks and then threatens to shatter. Haven't made her kneel in front of me with a fraction of the agony she just inflicted on me.
She knows I can do it
And she doesn't let go. Maybe because she thinks she can take me down faster than I can act, or maybe because…
Because I'm a blonde woman with a very young, very fit body. One that is allegedly made for combat yet still has some very noticeable curves, ones I didn't have in my prime, ones I know aren't just a natural side-effect of me being rejuvenated.
There's a spark of something hormone-induced in my chest, and Amy's eyes widen.
Damn it.
So I stare into her wide, frightened eyes. I stare down the world-ender and explain to her the concept of necessary force, of the dangers that are tolerable and those that aren't. I even tell her I'd never take down a prisoner or a defenseless man, that surrendering is always an option and that it must be respected for fear of what happens when the opponent believes fighting to the death is their only chance to live to see another day.
You're welcome, Mike. You piece of shit.
I carefully explain to her how vulnerable a regular human body is. That parahumans are no different unless their powers explicitly allow them to be. I tell her not to ever underestimate a regular person with a gun, or even a closed fist. That she's not one of the lucky ones, and a bad fall can take her out. Permanently.
And today, we even forget about the second part of our deal, the one involving a certain Lisa Wilbourn.
We don't waste time on it so I can teach Amy Dallon more about how to survive, as I do each and every time she comes to patch me out or tweak the latest adjustment to my new, ever-changing body.
And I very carefully ignore both the spark of something in my chest and the way she wets her lips when she looks at me as I let myself get carried away by my lecture.
I also ignore the soothing warmth that washes over my right palm as my self-inflicted cuts fade away, the sensation almost a caress of mending skin and knitting flesh as Amy blushes.
Damn teenagers.
I didn't expect to become one again.
… The irony doesn't escape me.
==================
This work is a repost of my most popular fic on QQ (https://forum.questionablequesting.com/threads/wake-up-call-worm.15638/), where it can be found up to date except for the latest two chapters that are currently only available on Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/Agrippa?fan_landing=true)—as an added perk, both those sites have italicized and bolded text. I'll be posting the chapters here twice weekly, on Wednesday and Friday, until we're caught up. Unless something drastic happens, it will be updated at a daily rate until it catches up to the currently written 88 chapters (or my brain is consumed by the overwhelming amounts of snark, whichever happens first).
Speaking of Italics, this story's original format relied on conveying Power's intrusions into Lisa's inner monologue through the use of italics. I'm using square brackets ([]) to portray that same effect, but the work is more than 300k words at the moment, so I have to resort to the use of macros to make that light edit and the process may not be perfect. My apologies in advance
Also, I'd like to thank my credited supporters on Patreon: Niklarus, Tinkerware, Varosch, Xalgeon, and aj0413. If you feel like maybe giving me a hand and helping me keep writing snarky, useless lesbians, consider joining them or buying one of my books on https://www.amazon.com/stores/Terry-Lavere/author/B0BL7LSX2S. Thank you for reading!
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