The River King 17
Taylor Hebert
I stood firm. As a hero, I couldn’t target a civilian, not even a backstabbing, two-faced bitch like Emma. I didn’t feel much for her anymore, I’d thoroughly outgrown her in both power and problems, but I didn’t think I could call myself a hero if I crossed that line.
That was all well and good, but I still had the same problem: the gang war. No power-up meant I’d have to work things out with what I had. Knowing my luck, it’d involve getting blown up a few more times until I found a way.
I bid Tahm farewell and headed back home, both because I needed food and dad needed reassurance. Now, in the privacy of my room, I read about the ongoing conflict and replayed the battle in my mind.
The biggest change in the city was obvious, announced like the blaring of an endbringer siren by every news outlet and radio station and picked up by PHO: Lung had arrived. The Dragon of Kyushu had finally deigned to take the field, and it had been every bit as devastating as people feared.
Kaiser had to act. This war, being pressed by only Bakuda and Oni Lee, was a humiliation he couldn’t let slide. And so, he moved. He gathered several of his capes–Krieg, Crusader, Alabaster, Rune, and a newcomer by the name of Stahlarm–and launched a counterattack deep into ABB territory. Their goal was the destruction of several known ABB holdings, a gesture meant to prove the Empire would not stand idle.
It hadn’t gone well. Lung emerged, already pissed and eight feet tall from letting his own men jump hi. When he first arrived, the Protectorate needed everyone just to contain him. Five Nazi capes, one of them Rune and the other Alabaster, weren’t even close to enough. Lung killed Crusader before Rune ferried the surviving Nazis away to lick their wounds.
Eventually, the Protectorate and New Wave arrived in force. As PHO told it, Dauntless, Miss Militia, Lady Photon, and Laserdream were able to output enough concentrated firepower to force Lung to back down, but it had been a close thing that really only ended because Lung had been satisfied with Crusader’s death.
Personally, I thought Lung chose to back down because he was fighting in the heart of his territory. No sense burning his own hoard to ash.
As it was, Assault and Triumph sustained life-threatening injuries. I saw the very much NSFW video: Assault had half his chest caved in and Triumph got immolated until his Roman-esque armor fused to his flesh. It was only thanks to Panacea’s timely intervention that the two survived.
The message was clear: Hitting the heart of ABB territory meant disturbing the dragon’s hoard. At the end of the day, a lazy dragon was still a dragon.
As much as I wanted to call him on his arrogance, I knew I couldn’t. I doubted my water manipulation could overwhelm his fire, at least, not for long. Even if I succeeded in some kind of assassination attempt, that’d mean giving Bakuda access to the entirety of ABB resources, not whatever chunk Lung allocated for this war. It’d only make the gang war worse.
No, my priority had to remain Oni Lee and the wannabe grenadiers. By now, I was getting decently good at identifying different types of bombs. Bakuda preferred color-coded stripes on the spheres, probably so they’d be idiot-proof.
So far, I found only two intact bombs, one with a red stripe and another with a violet stripe. I was pretty sure the red was just a cluster bomb, but the purple could be something special. I wanted a few more before I made my move, just in case.
I hid them in that Empire-owned storage yard I looted a while back. If Bakuda had a way of tracking them or detonating them from afar, then well, I could live with that, too.
Alas, they were wising up. Most unpowered bombers didn’t have the fancy shit anymore, just big booms, clusters, ones that exploded like shaped charges, or ones that tracked hostile targets for a short distance.
Which brought me to my own battle. Thinking back, I noticed that Oni Lee did not rely on esoteric grenades, either. At least, not as much as I expected.
He could have won easily by using a time bubble or a transmutation bomb. Either would have temporarily deprived me of water and zoned me out of position. That disintegration bomb he used when he first arrived and the pain bomb PHO talked about probably couldn’t be blocked by water, either.
Yet, he didn’t use any of them. I wondered why.
PHO said he could copy everything he carried, bombs included. I was inclined to believe them. With an arsenal like that, literally glassing the city in an endless tide of transmutation bombs or something equally crazy should have been easy.
I didn’t know what kind of man he was out of costume, but he wasn’t stupid. He was a veteran who’d fought pretty much every cape in the city at least once. No way in hell he didn’t know his options.
Nor was he senselessly cruel. The cape wiki had several pages of reports about his MO. He appeared, killed, and left. Whatever else could be said about the man, he did not take sadistic pleasure in prolonging his battles.
That must mean that, for whatever reason, he wanted to conserve the bombs. Which meant that… PHO was wrong and he could not copy tinkertech?
No, that didn’t sound right. He used multiple special grenades in one fight before, most notably when there were multiple Empire capes. Did he have some kind of quota? One special bomb per cape per engagement?
That sounded ridiculous and arbitrary. Unless he happened to be weirdly neurotic, I doubted that was the case. He could have just been carrying a larger stock then, and had run low when facing me, but that felt too optimistic. At the very least, he could have reused the disintegration bomb he first dropped on the twins and me.
For now, I chose to work under the assumption that he could copy tinkertech. Which meant there had to be some other reason for his reluctance to waste the special bombs on me.
The next most likely conclusion was that there was a limit to how often he could use copied tinkertech. Were Bakuda’s bombs too complex to copy? Did his clones suffer some kind of degradation, like a faded t-shirt that had been washed too many times?
I’d tagged him multiple times with my bugs. I remembered him ferrying them along when he teleported, but could not recall if I noticed anything different about them. Maybe tinkertech was much more complicated than bugs. Or maybe the bombs were just special. It could even be some kind of Manton limit, bugs were organic while his bombs were not.
I didn’t like it. There were too many unknowns. Even if I was on the right track, there was no telling that mine and Bakuda’s definition of “complex” were the same.
Still, it was a decent working theory, as good as I’d likely get. It gave me some ideas for how to approach things next time.
X
Francis Krouse
I resisted the urge to shoot Fog. Along with his wife, Othala, and Victor, we five made up the strike team meant to lynch Monarch. Well, the Empire had more skinheads, but they were distractions at best.
I hated Fog the most. I hadn’t expected to be ranking Nazis like wine based on how badly they made me want to shoot them, but here I was. Earth-Bet was truly a font of new experiences.
It wasn’t even because he was a Nazi. If that was all, I’d hate them all equally. No, I hated him because he was fucking creepy.
He had this weird, unnerving gait and wax statue expression that triggered all my uncanny valley senses. He was unerringly polite, with a small, inoffensive smile that probably would have looked pleasant enough in a photo, but that only made him look more like a statue come alive.
Next creepiest was his wife, Night. She had that same, wax statue theme too, but she leaned heavily into the stepford, trad-wife schtick. Seen but not heard, don’t speak ‘til spoken too, the whole nine yards. At least with her, I could pretend she didn’t exist.
Compared to those two, Victor’s alpha male, “I can do everything better than you can” bullshit and Othala asking if I “had any thieving gypsy in me” was damn near refreshing. I was half tempted to tell her I was Romani just to watch the bitch seethe. Alas, Coil was listening in on the comms and he did tell me to play nice.
Besides, I was alone other than Coil. The rest of my crew was guarding his territory from the ABB so making my new teammates hate me would be unwise. That, and I wouldn’t put it past the bitch to refuse to heal me if something went sideways if she thought I wasn’t “clean enough” for her.
I watched from a nearby rooftop as the creepy couple got ready on the street below. Next to me were Othala, Victor, and two of the most stereotypical skinheads I’d ever seen. Burly, with knives, bats, and pistols, basically just Othala’s meatshields that I could swap around as necessary.
The plan was simple: The goons accompanying Night and Fog would wreck havoc in her territory. She was a hero; she was bound to show up if they burned down a convenience store or something. Really, it was her fault for claiming turf; now all her enemies knew where to find her.
Then, Fog would ambush her by entering his breaker state. We were working under the assumption that Monarch still needed to breathe. So long as she was inside Fog, the Nazis were confident that Night could overpower her. She didn’t need to kill Monarch by herself, just knock her around often enough that she couldn’t teleport away.
My only job was to keep her from escaping once she inevitably tried to run out of the fog. I could swap her out of the puddle, reposition an Othala-enhanced Victor, and help pin her in place until Fog reformed his breaker state around her.
It left a bad taste in my mouth that had nothing to do with the cigarette I was puffing. I had no quarrel with Monarch. Hell, I could even approve of all the Nazi-punching she’d been doing.
But as they said, war made for strange bedfellows. This little gang war needed to stop. The city needed to be stable or Coil wouldn’t feel comfortable dedicating resources into helping Noelle. Monarch made too many waves, too fast. Nothing personal.
“What happens if we run into another hero?” I asked over the comms.
“That is unlikely,” Coil said. “New Wave is concerned primarily with the hospital and college. The Protectorate has been diverted.”
“And if she doesn’t show? She’s been seen running up and down the border. She might not even know her territory’s on fire.”
“Then we adapt and adjust. It is thought that her safehouse must be in the area. We’ll just have to try until we get a response.”
“So be it. Let’s begin.”
X
Taylor Hebert
It was purely my good fortune that I caught them.
I was heading home from responding to a completely pointless attack. It wasn’t even a fight between Empire and ABB. Some ABB fuckheads decided to take advantage of the chaos and shoot up a Target.
Apparently, “Tweaky Tsun” knew the day manager there. The guy was seeing the ganganger’s sister and they didn’t approve. It was stupid. After spending several minutes losing brain cells listening to that bullshit, I kneecapped them all and tossed them into the dumpster before moving on.
So, understandably, I was in a poor mood already. I stopped five morons from killing someone at a Target, an objectively good thing, but it didn’t feel very satisfying. I spread my swarm out to get a better grasp of my surroundings. If I was lucky, I’d catch another ABB strike team, this time ones that carried bombs.
That was when I noticed three Empire capes on the rooftops, not even a single block from where Hookwolf used to have his dogfighting ring. They had a few skinheads with them, but I dismissed them as threats. One of the capes was smoking a cigarette, which a fly had been lucky enough to smell.
I didn’t recognize him, but he must have been Empire. He wore a suit and top hat that reminded me a bit of a stage magician. If the black and red gang colors weren’t a good enough hint, Othala and Victor next to him was like a billboard sign.
I had no idea where the Empire kept getting these idiots. There was that Stahlarm guy, too. Was white supremacy really that attractive an ideology? Did Nazis grow from the ground like carrots?
Still, even knowing this was probably bait, I couldn’t resist. I didn’t usually get into fights with unknown capes, but this was Othala, their healer. She was arguably the single most important person in their entire gang, Kaiser excluded. Taking her out would be a huge step forward.
Two blocks away, I began to prepare. I took a few minutes to warp to the pier and get more crabs before jogging back. I considered picking up my special grenades but decided against it. They were for Oni Lee. Along the way, I located a few yellow jacket nests. It was spring; these murder-bees were just starting to become more active.
The plan was to hit them hard and fast. If I hit them before they could react, I figured I could kill Othala in the initial skirmish. I traveled down the River, emerging in the closed off stairwell, just before rooftop access. The smoker cape didn't react, no supernatural senses then.
Grinning, I readied my swarm and lunged without warning. The door of the rooftop access flew off its hinges as I shouldered it aside. At the same time, a hive of yellow jackets buzzed angrily, supported by a swarm that outmassed the three capes twofold.
A lot of things happened at once. Victor's stolen skills overpowered the surprise he must have been feeling. He immediately interposed himself between me and his wife, smoothly sinking into a combat stance with a knife in each hand. I focused on the skill-thief. If he wanted to volunteer, then so be it. I didn’t know what he could get from me, but taking him down first wasn’t a bad plan, either.
Othala was much slower, but found courage at her husband’s back. She reached out and tapped his shoulder, no doubt giving him her vaunted invincibility power. It would have been sweet, husband and wife staring down an army. Then again, they were the racist bigots here.
Then my swarm arrived. They didn’t quite blot out the sky, but they made a solid attempt at it. They descended all at once, prioritizing the new cape.
“Fuck, she’s here!” he yelled. He spat out the cigarette in his mouth and drew a pistol.
But rather than than rush towards me or take aim, he fled, dodging towards one corner of the roof where he scrambled atop an HVAC unit. Blaster? Shaker? He wanted some space to operate and I refused to give it to him.
My swarm and two crab constructs followed even as I tossed out two water whips at Victor. The two mooks next to Othala were just her meatshields so I left them to my swarm.
Then, I suddenly was not in front of Victor. My whips lashed into thin air. My wasps stung me, only for their stingers to be unable to penetrate my skin. I was atop the HVAC unit.
I felt a bullet hit the back of my head, a dull sting that reminded me of an airsoft gun. I whirled to confirm what I already suspected. Mover, then, a body-swapper.
“Watch it!” the new cape yelped as Victor almost opened his throat.
Victor was quick to take charge. “Shift-four, dear. Trickster, keep her off us.”
Othala tapped his shoulder again. He windmilled both arms and spouted twin gouts of flame from his palms, roasting a good chunk of my swarm.
I couldn’t have that. I tried to shoot him with a bullet of brackish water, only to find that same water smashing into my own head. Victor now stood atop the HVAC, a better position from which to toast my airborne army.
I was getting sick and tired of teleporters. Trickster was a pain in the ass. He had to go first, or this shit would keep happening. I now knew why he tried to make distance; he had to see both his targets unless he himself was one such target.
I filed that away and began to plan. Things were far from hopeless. They’d trapped themselves to lure me here. If Trickster went down, they had no way of getting themselves off the roof before I killed them all.
That, and they’d focused so much on me that my crabs got to encircle them. Eventually, it wouldn’t matter who Trickster swapped around. Crab wave tactics worked on Hookwolf and it looked like it’d work here, too.
I reached for Othala with a crab. It found itself wrestling one of its brethren instead. The healer was further away now, but that gave me the chance to move towards Trickster again. He switched places with Victor, who blasted me in the face with twin flamethrowers.
I grunted in pain as an armor of water formed around me. It boiled and I felt my skin begin to blister. I felt uncomfortably like a fish in a pot. More importantly, I couldn’t see him directly. He stepped back as I tried to power through, keeping me in the optimal range.
I kicked towards him. Spikes of water, each as durable as my crab constructs, erupted from the ground. He dodged the attack with grace born of stolen experience and moved towards Othala.
“Victor, help!” she shrieked as I made one of my surviving beetles crawl up her nose. I no longer had the swarm to strangle her, but her dear husband wouldn’t set his wife alight, either.
“Shift-one!” he yelled back. “Stick to the plan!”
I had my crabs rush them; they couldn’t be allowed to touch each other. That only got me swapped with Othala. The beetle up her nose suddenly found itself floundering in the liquid armor that exuded from me. My crabs bowled me over. The couple made contact and fire was replaced for something else.
I summoned the River to me. Not for the first time, I lamented how slow this version of teleportation was. Trickster noticed the telltale swirl and teleported me out of it, replacing me with Othala. She sank into the water and emerged next to the mover, which left me near Victor.
Victor grabbed me from behind in a bear hug. “Got you, bitch. You’re not going anywhere.”
“I’m not running.” Spikes of water erupted from me and the ground. They found no purchase in his body as he held me in place.
I thrashed but couldn’t move him; it was like pushing against the ground. He raised me into the air as his two goons finally slapped the bugs off themselves. They smashed wooden bats into my head, making it throb dully.
I swept them aside with a water tentacle as thick as my torso. The blow tossed one off the roof with a terrified scream and the other probably wasn’t getting up again, either. I then shrouded us in a bubble of water in an attempt to drown Victor.
He didn’t let go even as he held his breath. For a brief moment, we were stuck in a stalemate. Victor, with Othala’s invincibility, could hold me in place while Trickster kept my constructs at bay. I thought I was winning. Eventually, my crabs would catch him and I’d drown Victor.
Then, I noticed him running to the edge of the roof. The Nazi jester did something I didn’t expect: He jumped, kicking himself off the ledge as far as possible.
He looked down at the street, then at me. With a jaunty wave and a tilt of his top hat, I found myself airborne.
I flailed momentarily. A long tentacle formed from my right arm. Swinging around like Spider-Man wasn’t something I’d tried before, but there was no reason I couldn’t learn now.
Before I could pick up a new hobby, a plume of corrosive fog rose up to envelop me.
Author’s Note
Oni Lee’s power leaves a lot of what-ifs. I’m just making shit up to be honest.
Here’s a bonus animal fact for ya: Taylor doesn’t know this, but flies are incredibly sensitive to strong smells like rotting meat, pheromones, or smoke. Some of them can identify and follow a scent trail from four miles away.
So no, her noticing Francis taking a puff on the rooftop wasn’t purely luck. It’s funny, but she continuously underestimates the scope of her own power, thinking “bugs = gross and weak.”
I don’t know if it was entirely obvious, but Victor was stealing her ability to command effectively. Things like coordination, focus, general mindfulness of her troops and positioning, etc.
Othala’s invulnerability is distinct from super strength. That said, her invulnerability is, as far as we can tell, true kinetic negation. We know this because Victor remained unmoved even after tanking a direct punch from Leviathan.
Animal Fact: Alligators will move aside for manatees.
When a manatee wants to travel upriver, it will nudge an alligator that is in the way. More often than not, the alligator will move aside to give the manatee the right of way. This is thought to be because adult manatees can be a thousand pounds. With their thick skin and fat, they're too big and energy-inefficient to hunt.
However, this nonchalance has been fatal to many manatees. They mistake motorboats for alligators and try to nudge them aside. And well, a propeller's gonna propel.