The River King 15
Melanie Fitts
The meeting began as I’d predicted it would. I remained a silent observer as Kaiser and the yakuza lieutenant sniped at each other. They came to blows several times, their behavior only held in check by the presence of so many third parties.
The arrival of the Cornell Bomber, who apparently went by Bakuda, changed things. As it stood, the ABB seemed somewhat divided, though not violently so. Lung didn’t care about anything so long as the money kept flowing. But Bakuda, I identified her as the primary driver behind ABB aggression.
Odds were good that, like any newcomer, she’d want to carve out a place for herself, a reputation as a feared cape in her own right. That fell more in line with the hunger of the rank and file. Lung likely didn’t mind encouraging that so long as he got his due and they didn’t make him look weak.
With each word that passed, I felt the odds of a peaceful resolution draining away. Hiroshi demanded large swathes of territory. Naturally, Kaiser refused and promised retaliation. It was exactly what the ABB wanted.
This gang war was nothing but good for the ABB. Lung’s core territory would remain undisturbed. The hotheaded youth would get to fight. Unpowered lieutenants would get to claim more wealth and territory, which itself was wealth. Bakuda would establish her reputation. So long as they didn’t push too hard, they could make out like bandits. Well, that was assuming they knew the meaning of restraint.
Finally, Coil clapped his hands, forestalling yet more posturing. “If you don’t mind me cutting in, I believe that gives our new neighbor a clear understanding of where the various factions stand. We’ve heard what the Empire and ABB want. What will you do, Trickster? This city’s balance of power is tenuous enough as it is.”
Trickster took a drag of his cigarette before setting it on the lip of his plate of peanuts. “I said the Travelers aren’t here to step on any toes. I meant it. Your gang war has nothing to do with us. Well, at least for the moment. Should a lucrative opportunity present itself however, who can say?”
“Typical, a vulture seeking to profit off the city’s instability,” Kaiser scoffed. “I suppose you will offer us a nominal fee to maintain your neutrality? How fortunate for you then, that you will be paid for sitting still.”
“The ABB are not as pathetic as the Empire. We rely on none but ourselves,” Hiroshi said. He packed even more loose-leaf tobacco into his pipe and began to puff away.
Trickster shrugged. “If that’s how you both feel, I suppose that’s that. I’m sure I can rustle up some business one way or another. A strong team like mine is always in demand.”
“Do as you please. It matters not. Stand against the ABB and you will be cut down.”
“You’re awfully mouthy for a guy in a gang with only three capes. I’m sure this Lung guy is big and scary and all, but he’s ultimately just one guy. It’s not like we don’t have our own heavy-hitters.”
“If you had the strength, you would have territory of your own. Yet here you are, running around from city to city like the scavengers you are.”
Trickster made a show of puffing at his own cigarette and blew smoke into the rafters. “God damn, and here I was hoping real hard that my next contract wouldn’t come from the literal Nazis. You’re supposed to negotiate, not piss off everyone at the table.”
Hiroshi tapped his metal pipe against his plate, dislodging a small cloud of soot. “You are mistaken. The dragon does not negotiate and so I am not here to negotiate. I am here to dictate terms. The Empire will cede territory. All others will stay out of our war. You may accept these terms, or die.”
Coil coughed insistently, drawing our eyes to him before things could spiral yet again. Then again, I wondered if that was what he wanted. It was awfully easy to sound reasonable when paired next to these nutjobs.
“It strikes me that the ABB and Empire have grievances that will not be solved at this table,” he began, getting a round of dismissive grunts. More and more, it was becoming clear to me that he’d set up this summit with a plan in mind. “However, that does not mean this meeting need be unproductive. If I might make a suggestion?”
“Very well, then. Let’s hear what you have to say, Coil,” Kaiser said imperiously. “I trust that you did not drag us all here to state the obvious.”
“This conflict began not through the actions of any faction here, but a hero. The way I see it, eliminating Monarch will have a stabilizing effect on this city. Or at least, it will prevent future problems from arising. I propose a coalition to hunt her down. To this end, I am willing to retain the services of the Travelers.”
“No matter. The dragon cares not for petty kings, Monarch or otherwise,” Hiroshi said with a derisive laugh towards Kaiser. Dumping out the rest of his tobacco, he pocketed his pipe and stood to leave. “Do as you please. I have declared the dragon’s will. All else is irrelevant.”
We watched as he and Oni Lee left. No one stopped him. And why would they? Leaving before the meeting ended deprived you of information and possibly invited collusion against you. It was a laughably arrogant move.
Coil clearly had been planning this with Trickster beforehand. They probably had a contract already. There was a good chance that Coil would extend the same towards me; if anyone could stop her teleportation, it was Labyrinth. And yet, I had no intention of accepting. This was getting far too messy for me.
Regardless, this manhunt for Monarch looked like it’d happen with or without my involvement. Poor kid. She lucked out with her power but was trying to grab too much, too fast.
“Why bother?” I asked, curiosity overtaking me. “Not Kaiser, you, Coil. What exactly is your problem with Monarch? I didn’t realize you had anything to do with each other.”
He let out an annoyed huff. An affectation, no doubt. “If you must know, the Undersiders were mine. They were brought in by Monarch and I lost some useful proxies because of it. As it is, I’ll be spending a small fortune to get them released in a timely manner.”
“Is that right? Your pockets are deeper than I thought if you can afford the Travelers on top of that mess.”
“We all make do with what we have.”
That began a long series of negotiations. Trickster gave a brief overview of his team’s powers. Even assuming he embellished their abilities somewhat, I could admit to being impressed. Genesis was a highly versatile changer. Sundancer and Ballistic were major heavy-hitters. So long as Trickster was half as good at battlefield control as he claimed he was, he had good reason to be confident.
Which raised the question: Why wander? They clearly had the power to capture and hold territory if they wished. Nor were they murderous lunatics like the Slaughterhouse. That implied they were looking for something. Or running from something. Just another reason to leave this city.
In the end, Kaiser agreed to work alongside Coil and the Travelers. Of course he did. The Empire had manpower, but even they would be hard pressed to fight a war against both the ABB and Monarch.
Moreover, few of their capes were capable of dealing with a teleporting master. Trickster’s presence had the potential to change that.
I declined the offer to collaborate, citing a prior commitment in Las Vegas. Really, Monarch was in for a terrible time.
X
Taylor Hebert
Targeting the Empire so aggressively might have been a mistake.
No, I did not regret drawing their attention. Every Nazi deserved to be fed their own teeth and the only good Nazi cape was a dead Nazi cape, with the sole exception of Rune on account of her age. I regretted none of that. The only thing I regretted was this gang war.
I thought I had more time, that I could destroy the Empire and the heroes would finally have the bandwidth to crack down on the ABB. In my mind, it wasn’t quite a neat, step-by-step process, but there was a clear chain of events that would end with the liberation of Brockton Bay from its gangs.
I was naive. It was so much easier to dismiss the violence that would result as “necessary” or “cutting out the cancer.” I thought the casualties would be just another thing to be managed, a brief moment of pain and tragedy in exchange for a Nazi-free city.
This was not so. The Empire didn’t exist in an isolated vivarium. I knew that, but failed to account for just how bloodthirsty the ABB would be. Or rather, I failed to account for Bakuda.
I didn’t know. I couldn’t have known. But that didn’t change reality: My actions weakened the Empire and emboldened the ABB. Bakuda was now using this as an opportunity to establish herself by bombing the ever-loving shit out of everyone in former Empire turf.
Bakuda announced herself in the middle of what should have been a minor skirmish. Glory Girl had swept down to intercept an ABB raid, only for her to drop shrieking and frothing at the mouth. PHO said there wasn’t even an explosion, just a flash of light that bathed everything in twenty yards. They called it a pain bomb, because of course the psycho bitch’s specialization was explosives.
That took care of the only New Wave member who patrolled beyond their white picket neighborhood. The rest of the family turtled up, doing little more than escort Panacea from place to place. It was maddening. I knew they were retired, but surely now was the time to step back into things.
Meanwhile, Oni Lee seemed to be everywhere. Bakuda withdrew after that one appearance, no doubt to keep her minions supplied, but Oni Lee could replicate her bombs along with himself. He rained down pain bombs, bombs that literally turned people to glass, and even bombs that made bubbles of stopped time reminiscent of Gray Boy’s work.
I would have loved to hit Bakuda directly, but finding her was a tall order. She had enough minions that she never had to leave her lab. And given the wealth at her disposal, she could just buy what she needed from any number of stores. Tracing ABB goons from the junkyard back to her lab wasn’t an option.
So, I was left with no choice but to hunt Oni Lee down. I’d never thought of him as such a massive force multiplier before, but he was now. He had to go. Getting rid of him would slow down Bakuda’s progress and finally give law enforcement some breathing room.
That left me in a bit of a pickle. It grated on me to admit, but he was faster than me. We were both teleporters, but he could use his power multiple times while it took me several seconds to call the River. And with skirmishes happening all along the border of ABB and Empire turf, there was no telling where he’d show up next. My only option was to draw him out, to force him to engage with me.
I spread my bugs out around a well-known hotspot. I couldn’t hope to cover the entire border, which practically split the city in half, so this would have to do. I had ropes and pepper spray, just in case it'd help lock him down.
That was how I learned that gang wars weren't bus stops. There wasn't a bloodbath scheduled every hour just because there was a war going on, not that Brockton Bay was ever known for reliable transit.
Still, I got a ping back from my network a day later. My bugs smelled the acrid scent of gunpowder and heard the softly whispered Chinese.
I spread out my swarm in response, flies and gnats, too small for anyone to pay them much mind. A few of the insects with visual acuity more comparable to human sight were thrown in and I saw splashes of red and green, ABB colors. There were fifteen of them. Twelve held the standard fare I’d come to expect of gangbangers while three had saddlebags full of oblong spheres, their equivalent of grenadiers, I supposed.
I marked those three as the most likely to be lieutenants. Surely Bakuda wouldn’t give out her bombs to the average idiot. Either that, or they were the expendable ones.
The battle lines were drawn as soon as the group was recognized. Across the street, an Empire thug shouted for his buddies as he reached for his phone. He must have been a lookout, kinda like a prairie dog from one of those nature documentaries. The shout was taken up by more people, some in upper floors of the nearby buildings.
The street burst into life as Empire gangsters began to gather. One of them got the bright idea to drive a U-Haul. He turned the corner and gunned the throttle, intending to run the invading gangsters down.
The three ABB non-mooks didn’t seem worried. One of them took a pitcher’s stance. He palmed a bomb that looked remarkably like a baseball, maybe slightly larger, and tossed a fastball at the oncoming truck from across the block.
The look of manic triumph on the driver’s face morphed into one of dread and realization. He swerved wildly, slamming into a streetlight in a futile attempt to dodge the grenade.
The baseball-bomb did not explode immediately. Instead, it hit the front of the U-Haul and parted into eight wedges that bounced in random directions. A few seconds later, those wedges exploded, flinging shrapnel in a uniform pattern that covered the entire street, somehow without tossing any of the shrapnel back towards the ABB.
The explosion was devastating. The Empire driver was bleeding out from a piece of steel in his neck; he’d be dead within the minute. The rest of his friends were thrown into chaos. There was something about watching a cluster bomb go off that completely robbed the courage from a gangster. I could almost appreciate Bakuda’s craftsmanship.
The rank and file ABB followed after, already whooping and hollering their victory for all to hear. More than one fired their pistols into the sky. They weren’t trying to hit anyone, but they weren’t trying to miss, either. It was all intimidation, backed by the knowledge that they had tinkertech weapons.
Empire gangbangers were in full retreat. They ran towards a British pub on the far corner. I didn’t know if it was originally an Empire front, but they certainly had no problem commandeering it.
I began to move some of my bugs inside the pub. It was that lull period in the mid-afternoon so they thankfully weren’t open, which meant no civilians were inside, not that any Brocktonite was dumb enough to be caught in the middle of such an obvious shootout.
The only reason they even made it inside was because a few of the skinheads had been wise enough to take up shooting positions in upper floors of nearby buildings. Without any more boots on the ground, they were quickly forced indoors. One got shot, probably luck, and his body slumped over the ledge to leave a bloody smear on the pavement.
I considered intervening. My goal was to draw out Oni Lee. To do that, I planned to use the tried and true method of killing the middlemen until the boss came out. I understood that not all ABB were hardcore killers, but surely these guys counted amongst the most hardline members.
Still, the thought of fighting the Nazis’ battles made me feel ill. So, I compromised. I decided to let the ABB clean up the Nazis before swooping in. Every grenade they used against the Nazis was one less I had to worry about.
And it was a good thing I waited. Rather than try to storm the pub, the one I identified as their leader pulled out a second, metallic sphere. He lobbed it into a broken window and ducked for cover.
A wave of light spread out from the “bomb” and I immediately lost contact with insects in its range. Or rather, they’d turned completely to glass, as had every organic matter in a five yard radius. The wooden tables, jar of peanuts on the counter, and most definitely the people.
The worst was a young man in his mid-twenties who was caught on the edge. The light turned his left arm and part of his torso to glass, stopping halfway up his collarbone. His squishy bits separated from the smooth surface in a slow slide as if he’d been cut by a comic book swordsman. His weak, wet gasps echoed in the pub.
I was fortunate that I didn’t have to see the sight directly with my human eyes, but even my limited bug-vision rose bile in the back of my throat. I shuddered and willed myself to forget. That was one more thing I’d have to compartmentalize, right up there with shoving my own entrails back in my torso.
That was enough waiting; I refused to let them celebrate their victory. The Nazis were dead and the ABB were looting nearby shops. It was the perfect time for me to send in my crab army.
I called the River and began tossing them in by the handful. They were European green crabs, apparently the most abundant in New Hampshire. These were normally about the size of three of my fingers, but emerged clad in armor of brackish water that made them as large as me.
The River opened right behind the three wannabe grenadiers. Before they could react, my crabs leapt onto their backs, wrestling them to the ground. Every reservation about killing these men had fled my mind the moment they chose to glass the pub. My crabs grabbed them by the limbs and began to pull, each exerting as much force as I personally could. And by now, I was a more than respectable brute.
Joints popped. Tendons tore. Screams and begging filled the street. A few of the grenades dropped from a satchel in the struggle, bouncing against the ground. One must have landed just right because it detonated a few seconds later.
Spikes of steel reminiscent of Kaiser’s power erupted from the surrounding ground in all directions. These blades skewered my constructs, shearing watery limbs. Two even managed to destroy the control crabs within. The three men fared no better; they were reduced to bloody giblets hanging from a garden of steel.
The ABB mooks fled in terror. Good. I didn’t want this to be quiet. Soon, people would know that I would target anyone who had one of Bakuda’s bombs. And if I killed enough of them, I would disrupt their chain of command and Oni Lee would have no choice but to find me himself.
I sank into the River and emerged on the street. It felt right. No matter what my reasons, I caused this. Even had the impalement grenade not gone off, I would have butchered these three. It was only fair that I see the carnage with my own eyes.
Carefully, I stalked amidst the spikes. An arm here, someone’s entrails there. Three men had a lot more organ meat than I’d expected.
Well, it wasn’t sentiment alone that brought me here. My foot knocked against a satchel, the only one that hadn’t been disturbed. It was torn and the strap was missing, but the all-important contents within had not gone off. Inside, I found two grenades, spheres that looked far too much like baseballs for comfort.
Just then, the heroes arrived. Assault and Battery, the Protectorate power couple. They were both movers. Assault could redirect kinetic energy and Battery gained bursts of strength and speed after standing still for a short time. The two heroes leapt from across the street, closing the distance faster than I could rearrange my swarm.
“Heroes, on time as usual,” I greeted them dryly.
“Monarch. W-What happened here?” Battery asked, aghast at the charnel house that this street had become.
“What else? Empire and ABB fought. I arrived and mopped up.”
“You killed them?”
“Technically, no. One of Bakuda’s bombs went off. That’s what killed them.”
Assault spotted the two grenades in my hands. Gone was his usual jocular grin. “Turn those over, Monarch. They’re too dangerous to leave around.”
“You don’t even know what these do,” I pointed out. I pocketed them in a waterproof bag I carried for my phone. “For that matter, neither do I.”
“And how will you find out? By using them on the first villains you find?”
“That’s as good a way as any. Why not? Besides, it’d be hilariously ironic if I killed Oni Lee with one of these bombs, don’t you think?”
“You can’t keep killing people; that’s what got us here in the first place! You’re wanted for the murder of Purity, Hookwolf, and if rumors are right, Cricket and Stormtiger, too.”
“Oh? You finally found out about those two?” I asked, more bemused than anything. Armsmaster hadn’t known when we last met.
“You think this is helping? You think this makes you a hero?” Battery accused. “Look around. All this death, and for what?”
“I didn’t start this war, Battery. That’s on Lung and Bakuda.”
“No, you’re just making things worse.”
“Am I?” I asked sarcastically. I waved at the glass funhouse that the pub had become. “I’m not the one making tinkertech bombs. The way I see it, this won’t end until Oni Lee and Bakuda are dead.”
“Is this what that is? Some sick game to draw out Oni Lee?”
“Yes. I don’t need your lectures. What is the Protectorate doing? When’s the last time you even managed to bag a villain?”
“Enough. Surrender the bombs. Armsmaster can reverse engineer them, maybe even learn more about Bakuda’s operations.”
That… That was a good point. Whatever my opinions about the Protectorate leader, he was still the best damn tinker in the city. If anyone could make something of these, it was him. After a long moment of consideration, I had my crabs carry them to the heroes.
I wanted them badly. My firepower was somewhat limited compared to my awareness. But there would be other opportunities in the future. If Bakuda kept giving these out to her unpowered lieutenants, I’d get my hands on a few eventually. And maybe, if I convinced the heroes that I didn’t care too much about these bombs, they wouldn’t investigate too closely when I set them off for my own purposes later.
“Fine, call this a gesture of goodwill,” I said dismissively. “Don’t waste them.”
“We won’t,” Battery said. “Come with us, Monarch. You can’t keep making things worse. For yourself. For the city. This isn’t right.”
“It’s not. But maybe, this war is what we need. Maybe, things need to get worse before they can get better.”
I… I wasn’t sure if I believed that myself. A part of me, the little girl who used to look up to these heroes, whispered that I was going too far, that I was crossing a line.
But that wasn’t right, was it? The line had long since been crossed, way back when I decided to kill for power, when I reinforced and fed the contract between me and Tahm. If anything, the “line” was a distant memory in the rearview mirror.
The River rose. I welcomed its numbing chill as it ferried me away.
Author’s Note
Not gonna lie, part of me wanted to write a scene where Taylor interrupts the meeting, straight up drowning Kaiser in bugs in front of everyone. Alas, she doesn’t know Somer’s Rock is a thing.
I can’t remember if Bakuda’s pain bomb can bypass Glory Girl’s shield. I vaguely remember her not being immune to master effects though. And since the pain bomb basically ignites every nerve on your body or something, I’m assuming it works kinda like Regent’s power.
Bakuda hasn’t started planting bombs in people’s heads yet. Or if they have, no one knows about it. Lung’s yet to take the field. The anti-Monarch strike team hasn’t struck. Things can get so much worse still.
Animal Fact: Tasmanian devils are highly social animals. In fact, their friendships last their entire lifetimes. When they finish nursing, young devils will go out, socialize, and even build dens together. Scientists even found that when given the chance, devils prefer to share food with their best friends.