Going from killing two of the most dangerous men in Brockton Bay to sitting through first period English should have felt surreal.
For Taylor, it barely registered.
She walked through Winslow's front doors with her backpack slung over one shoulder and joined the current of students flowing through the hallways. The familiar sights greeted her immediately: the cracked tiles, faded lockers, and teachers trying and failing to keep students moving. Nothing had changed.
Well, almost nothing.
Everyone was talking about Lung.
"...found him dead, right?"
"No, seriously, my cousin heard the ABB's already tearing itself apart."
"They said Oni Lee died too."
"There's no way somebody actually killed Lung."
Taylor stepped around a cluster of students gathered near a bulletin board and kept walking, the conversations following her all the way down the hall.
Some people sounded excited, others terrified, and most confused. Which was fair, honestly. Lung had been one of those constants in Brockton Bay. The sort of person people assumed would always be there because imagining the city without him felt strange.
Now he was dead, and nobody seemed entirely sure what happened next.
Even the teachers were discussing it. Taylor overheard two of them talking outside a classroom.
"The ABB won't survive this."
"Maybe. But somebody will fill the vacuum."
"The Empire?"
"Maybe, but the Merchants will certainly try."
Taylor continued past them before she could hear the rest.
The strange thing was that she knew more than any of them.
She knew how many times Lung had killed her, how many times Oni Lee had appeared from nowhere, and how many loops had ended in blood, fire, or both. And yet listening to everyone speculate felt oddly detached. Like they were discussing a movie she'd watched months ago.
She slipped into her classroom a few minutes before the bell rang, and despite more and more students entering, every topic eventually circled back to the same thing.
Lung, the ABB, and what would happen next.
For the first time since the bus bombing incident, nobody paid much attention to Taylor. She was no longer the hot topic, which suited her perfectly.
She took her seat near the back and stared out the window while the noise washed over her. Outside, the city looked exactly the same. Inside, everybody acted as though the world had changed overnight.
Maybe it had. Maybe it hadn't. Taylor honestly couldn't bring herself to care very much. Because while everyone else was busy worrying about what would happen to the ABB, she found herself thinking about a completely different problem.
One item might have finally disappeared from her increasingly long list of problems, but unfortunately, there were still others.
Taylor's gaze drifted lazily across the classroom before landing on a bald kid with two SS lightning bolts walking past her class.
The Empire Eighty-Eight was still out there, and unlike Lung, they weren't conveniently concentrated in a single building.
The entire city was their den.
There was an ever-present fear of the unknown. Most people learned to live with it, whether it was a strange noise in the middle of the night, a medical diagnosis that had not yet arrived, or the possibility that tomorrow might bring something unpleasant. Humans were remarkably good at taking uncertainty and shoving it into a corner where it could be safely ignored.
Parahumans were no different. If anything, they were better at it.
A cape who spent too much time dwelling on all the ways they could die did not remain a cape for very long. Eventually, everyone developed a tolerance for uncertainty, a willingness to accept that some things could not be controlled, and simply move on with their lives.
Kaiser had always considered himself a practical man. He understood risks, threats, and enemies. The Empire Eighty-Eight had survived for years because he knew how to evaluate all three.
This, however, was different.
How exactly was one supposed to prepare for someone who could simply keep trying until they succeeded, leaving you none the wiser until the end?
The official reports surrounding the deaths of Bakuda, Lung, and Oni Lee were sparse, frustratingly so. Fortunately, Kaiser possessed sources within the PRT, and those sources had painted a far more troubling picture.
Kaiser did not believe in coincidences, certainly not coincidences of this magnitude. A child had stopped a bombing on a bus. Days later, Bakuda was dead. Then Lung and Oni Lee.
Looking at any one of those incidents in isolation, explanations presented themselves easily enough. Bakuda had accumulated enough enemies to make her death unsurprising. Lung's position as one of the city's major gang leaders ensured there would never be a shortage of people willing to see him dead. Even Oni Lee's death, improbable as it was, could be rationalized with enough effort.
Yet the timing transformed a collection of relatively unrelated incidents into something far more troubling and difficult to ignore.
Most troubling still, Lung's death should have caused confusion. It should have forced the PRT onto the back foot while they scrambled to understand what had happened and who was responsible. But the reports reaching him painted a very different picture. The organisation seemed prepared for the situation, as though Lung's death was not an unexpected development but merely the next step in a process already underway.
The obvious conclusion was that the PRT had finally decided to stop playing defense. More importantly, they now possessed a cape capable of gathering information that should have been impossible to obtain. A cape who could fail a hundred times without consequence. A cape who could patiently search for weaknesses until one finally presented itself.
That child from the bus.
And if that conclusion was correct, and Kaiser saw no reason to believe otherwise, what exactly was stopping the PRT from turning that weapon against him next?
Nothing.
The answer came to him immediately, and Kaiser found himself frowning.
He stood in front of the window of his office, his hands clasped behind his back as he looked out over the city.
The view was impressive and usually helped him organize his thoughts. Today it did little to ease his frustration
Far below, traffic moved through the streets while pedestrians went about their lives, many of them already discussing Lung's death and what it meant for Brockton Bay. Some were celebrating.
They should not have been.
Power vacuums were rarely worth celebrating.
The ABB would fracture. The Merchants would attempt to seize territory. The remaining gangs would reposition themselves, and violence would inevitably follow.
It always did.
Under normal circumstances, Kaiser would have been planning how best to capitalize on the ABB's collapse. There was territory to consider, assets to acquire, and people who would suddenly find themselves unemployed, frightened, and receptive to new offers. Even though they could never join his gang, for obvious reasons, they could still be useful to him.
Instead, he found himself staring through the glass and wondering whether the PRT was already planning his death.
The thought irritated him.
Fear was useful. Fear kept people alive. Uncertainty, however, was another matter entirely.
He disliked uncertainty.
And at the moment, uncertainty was all he had.