The Wicked Warriors (Parts 1 and 2)

Ashens Square, Armstrong City

The bomb found the west atrium at 9:47 PM. The blast peeled marble from the facade in slabs and the fireball that followed consumed oxygen so fast that windows three blocks east bowed inward, held, then gave up. Inside, the Impressionist wing filled with plaster dust and aerosolized pigment drifting in thermals of superheated air.

Gerald Mackey, third-shift security, had been eating a turkey sub in the east corridor monitoring station when the blast knocked his chair sideways and dropped ceiling tiles on his head. He got up, found his radio, found his legs, and went to look. The west atrium was open to the sky. Marble dust hung in the air thick enough to taste. No fire. A bomb that size should have set the building burning, and the fact that it hadn’t meant it had been built to breach, not to burn. Mackey called it in, gave the address twice, and started toward the emergency exit. Then the sprinklers came on and he relaxed for less than a minute until the water did something that sprinkler water is not supposed to do.

It fell sideways. It pooled upward. In the sculpture court, a column of it gathered from the dispersal pattern of six separate nozzles and assembled itself vertically into shoulders, a torso, the suggestion of a face. He stood seven feet tall and translucent and faintly blue, and he moved without friction, without weight, without any indication that gravity had been consulted.

Mackey dropped his radio and ran.

The intruder crossed three galleries without pausing. Past a case of Qing dynasty jade. Past the Cellini salt cellar on its black marble plinth. Past the museum’s crown jewel, a Velázquez preparatory sketch of Innocent X that insurance actuaries had simply declined to quantify. He did not look at any of them. The destination was Gallery 7-C, a windowless back room most visitors walked past on their way to the gift shop. Inside, under a typed placard reading PRE-COLUMBIAN CERAMICS (MISC.), sat a display case that looked like every other display case in the building.

He laid his palm against it and the case refused him. Beneath its museum-standard exterior, the glass was a borosilicate-ceramic laminate rated for ballistic impact and thermal shock, the kind of material the Department of Defense contracted for high-value containment. It had no business protecting a three-inch Mayan pot in a back gallery unless somebody knew something about that pot that the placard did not. He escalated. The water of his palm went white with cavitation, millions of microscopic bubbles nucleating and collapsing against the surface, each collapse generating for one picosecond temperatures that exceeded the sun’s corona. The laminate shrieked. Eleven seconds of this, and it yielded. He reached inside and lifted the prize: a Mayan polychrome micro-vase, three inches tall, so ancient that its painted glyphs had faded to rumors of geometry.

He folded the vase into a sealed compartment of hardened water at his hip. The sprinklers were still running. He turned toward the wound in the west wall, where the red and blue pulse of emergency vehicles stained the dust clouds, and took one step toward the gap.

“Sorry to rain on your parade, Viscosity. You’re not leaving with that.”

He turned. Five of them stood arranged across the ruined atrium in the loose formation of people who had practiced standing in loose formations. The one who had spoken was in front: lean, maybe nineteen, dark hair spiked upward, a black domino mask fitted tight across his nose and cheekbones. He held a collapsible steel staff in his right hand. Behind him and to his left, a young Black man the size of a collegiate linebacker stood with his arms folded, and those arms were wrong. From the elbows down they were chrome and carbon fiber and softly humming servomotors, and the light from the emergency vehicles played across their surfaces in nervous red flickers. To the right floated a girl six inches off the ground, barefoot, skin white, dark hair hanging past her waist, eyes two solid voids of ink. Furthest back, a girl in a blue-and-gold miniskirt and bodysuit combo and a short cape stood with a compound bow at half-draw, one eye closed, perfectly still, and beside her a kid in a black-and-white striped bodysuit and white face paint simply stood there doing nothing in a way that felt like a loaded weapon.

And Viscosity spoke, “Jackdaw, you aren’t going to risk your team’s lives for a toy, are you?” as he teased the artifact in an orb of water.

“Here’s the thing about this building.” Jackdaw planted his staff on the marble floor. “Everything in it is worth more than you are. So we’re going to keep this clean.” He raised the staff. “Warriors, go!”

Viscosity moved first. He dropped his solid shape and became a wall of pressurized water that screamed across the gallery floor at forty miles an hour. It hit the big man center-mass and drove him backward, his mechanical feet cutting grooves in the marble. He caught the surge against his forearms and held. The servos whined to a pitch that made the surviving display cases rattle, and then he shoved the water off in a single heaving motion, scattering it across the floor.

Engine shook water off his arms and rolled his neck. “That all you got? My shower hits harder than that.”

Viscosity reformed ten feet to the left, already swinging an arm that had hardened to the density of an industrial water cutter. Jackdaw was there. The staff intercepted the arm at its thinnest point and passed clean through, severing it into a splash that hit the far wall. Viscosity regrew the limb in under a second, pulling moisture from the sprinklers overhead. Jackdaw dropped low and swept toward the villain’s legs with a strike that forced him airborne.

An arrow hit Viscosity in the chest before he came down. Ice-compression round. It detonated on contact, flash-freezing a chunk of his torso into a rough sphere of clouded crystal. He hit the ground with the frozen mass dragging his center of gravity forward and lurched sideways, cracking the ice free by flexing his liquid interior until the shell popped apart in wet shards. He sent those shards back toward the archer.

“Ghost!” Jackdaw called.

The barefoot girl drifted into the archer’s space as she dropped behind a toppled column. Ghost raised one white hand and the shards stopped midair, suspended in a field of something dark and faintly luminous. She flicked her wrist. The shards reversed course. Viscosity batted them aside with spray and charged her. She sank through the floor and reappeared behind him.

Viscosity was pulling harder from the sprinklers now. The ceiling pipes groaned as he drew water faster than the system could supply, thickening his body, growing from seven feet to eight, to nine. The museum floor was flooding ankle-deep. Jackdaw palmed a disc from his belt, thumbed it active, and threw it at the ceiling junction where four sprinkler mains converged. The disc expanded on impact into a flat adhesive membrane that sealed across the pipes and cut the flow to a trickle. Two more discs followed, one toward the Velázquez and one toward the jade case. Each burst into a translucent barrier that hardened around the display. “Engine!” Jackdaw called. “Push him south. Away from the collection.”

“Man, I just dried off.”

“Engine.”

“Going, going.”

Engine lowered his shoulder and ran. He hit Viscosity head-on, and the villain simply parted around him, reforming behind his back. Engine had anticipated that. His right arm reconfigured mid-stride, panels sliding apart, and a focused sonic emitter unfolded from inside the forearm. The pulse hit Viscosity at close range and tore his cohesion apart. For two full seconds Viscosity was rain, a dispersed cloud of agitated droplets hanging in the air, unable to find the pattern that made him a person. The droplets strained toward one another, pulled together, and slowly he reassembled. He was smaller when he came back. Thinner. The sprinklers above him were sealed, and the water on the floor was draining through the cracks Engine’s charge had opened.

He had limits. Everyone in the room could see it.

“He’s shrinking,” Morningstar said from behind the column. She already had three arrows nocked. “Knowing him, I bet he enjoyed being ‘big’ while he could.”

Masque sat his hands on his hips, with a large sweat drop forming by his head out of the sprinkler water.

Ghost scoffed and with a dead monotone said,

“Oh I’m sure you know him so well.”

Engine pat Morningstar’s back hard enough to nearly send her stumbling forward, grinned wide, and said with gusto, “I don’t get it!”

“Team. Focus. The less water he has, the faster he goes down,” Jackdaw said.

Morningstar stepped out and fanned the three in a spread shot from three angles. Ice. Electrical discharge that arced through his body and made his surface boil. And a desiccant foam that expanded on contact with moisture, blooming across his left side in a crust of calcium powder that absorbed water and locked it up. Viscosity screamed. The sound was more vibration than voice, a resonant shudder that traveled through the standing water and up through the soles of everyone’s boots. He ripped the calcium crust free and threw it aside, but the mass he lost didn’t come back. He was six feet tall now. Then five-eight.

Engine whistled low. “Morningstar, remind me never to make you mad.”

“You make me mad every day.”

“Case in point.”

That was when Masque stepped forward. The kid walked to a spot three feet in front of Viscosity and pressed both palms flat against empty air. Viscosity lunged at him and hit something. Invisible, solid, and exactly where Masque’s hands said it should be. Viscosity rebounded, tried to flow around the edges, and found more walls. Masque was sculpting them out of nothing, hands moving with the exaggerated care of a street performer, each gesture sealing another gap. The box took shape in the air, open at the top. Viscosity threw himself against every surface, pressurized his body, hammered with cavitation strikes that had cracked military laminate twenty minutes ago. The invisible walls held. They held because Masque decided they held, and Masque, for all that he looked like a fourteen-year-old in face paint, had decided with the quiet totality of a kid who has never once been talked out of anything.

“Masque, hold him. Ghost, finish it.”

Ghost floated above the open top of the box and looked down into it. She raised both hands and a darkness settled over the opening, sealing it shut. The water inside stopped moving. Not frozen. Still liquid. Simply still. Viscosity’s features surfaced one last time in the settling fluid: the suggestion of a face, a mouth open in a sound that didn’t make it out. Then the features dissolved. The water went ordinary. Ghost lowered her hands. The darkness lifted. Inside the invisible walls, a puddle sat on the marble floor, two inches deep, clear, and inert.

The Mayan micro-vase lay on its side in the middle of the puddle, unbroken.

Ghost reached down through the open top, retrieved it, and handed it to Jackdaw. He turned it over in his palm, studying the faded glyphs by the red pulse of the emergency vehicles, then placed it on the nearest intact display surface. He tossed a small cylindrical device into the puddle.

“Containment foam. He’ll re-cohere in about six hours. Plenty of time for transport.” He straightened up. “Morningstar, call it in. Engine, perimeter. Ghost, Masque, keep eyes on the containment until pickup arrives.”

And Ghost wrapped herself in her cloak of shadows and said, “What. A mess.”

The others looked out across the wreckage with her. Nobody argued the point.

They moved without discussion. Outside, the sirens had multiplied into a full civic choir, and the first press helicopters were swinging their searchlights across the shattered west facade of the Kressler Museum. In the puddle, the containment foam was expanding into a rigid white mass, and whatever Viscosity was when he wasn’t being Viscosity was locked inside it, small and neutralized and finished.

The crowd had gathered along the police cordon on Ninth Street, two hundred people deep. They pressed against the tape and murmured and waited for something else to happen, the way crowds always do. Near the back, standing with her hands in the pockets of an oversized denim jacket, a girl watched with the rest of them. Her long bangs hung past her brows and covered her eyes completely. Nobody looked at her twice. Nobody noticed the faint bulk around her hips where, beneath the jacket, something long and furred was wound tight against her waist. She watched Jackdaw step through the gap in the museum wall and raise a hand to the cheering crowd, and her mouth split into a wide, interested grin.

“Capes!”

---

St. Richelieu Academy sat at the edge of Armstrong City’s midtown district, a red brick building with white classical columns and a bell tower that had last been relevant during the Coolidge administration. Behind it, the city’s skyline rose in a wall of glass and steel shining in the morning light. The track and football field wrapped around its south side, still wet from overnight sprinklers. Trees lined the front walk in a row so orderly it felt municipal. An American flag shifted in the breeze above the entrance, and the carved stone frieze above the doors read ST. RICHELIEU ACADEMY in letters that had been power-washed sometime in the Clinton years and never again. It was the sort of school that aspired to look like a prep academy and achieved the look of a courthouse.

Inside, first period had let out eight minutes ago, and the hallways were doing what hallways do. Lockers opening and closing, sneakers on tile, the overlapping noise of two hundred conversations conducted at the volume of one. Yulaan and Kevelnege moved through it shoulder to shoulder, tails cinched tight around their waists beneath their denim jackets, which were oversized enough to hide the bulk and identical enough to look like a uniform. Both wore black spandex tanktops under the denim, the black spandex pants that came with their vitakoze bolyagas, and looked more like school shooters than students.

Kevelnege’s flame-shaped black hair rose from her head in its usual upward sweep, sidelocks hanging sharp at her jaw. Yulaan’s bangs hid her eyes entirely. She walked with her hands in her jacket pockets and her chin slightly raised, sniffing the hallway air for no practical reason beyond the fact that Yabans sniff for food.

The talk that morning was all about the museum.

It moved through the hallways in overlapping waves. At the water fountain, a sophomore with a backwards cap was telling two girls that the Wicked Warriors had taken down some kind of water guy at the Kressler, and one of the girls said her older brother had been in the crowd and seen the whole thing. By the trophy case, three boys were arguing about whether Jackdaw could beat Stormwarden in a straight fight, and the tallest one kept insisting Jackdaw was just a guy with a stick, which earned him a shove. Near the stairwell, a girl reading a folded newspaper showed the front page to her friend: a color photo of the museum’s shattered west wall, lit up by helicopter searchlights, with a headline Yulaan couldn’t quite read from this distance. The word WARRIORS was in it somewhere. The energy in the building had shifted overnight. 

Yulaan stopped at her locker. She did not have a locker. She stole an empty one during the second week and had been using it since, and she leaned against it and listened to the sophomore at the fountain embellish the fight.

“Capes,” she said. The word came out flat. She turned toward Kevelnege. “Hey, Piggy, why didn’t Lord Saké tell me about this?”

Kevelnege was examining the trophy case, leaning in with her finger on her chin. “Tell you about what.”

Yulaan rolled her hand and kickedup a dropped photo of the Wicked Warriors together. “This. Capes. Superhumans. Whatever. When he exiled me here, he specifically said Earth was a low-ki world.”

Kevelnege’s head turned slowly. Her golden eyes locked on Yulaan’s face with the precision of a targeting system.

Then she smacked Yulaan across the back of the head. Hard enough to send her bangs flying forward and slapping back.

“Low KEY, you bone-eating barbarian dumbass!”

Yulaan rubbed the back of her skull. “Same thing.”

“It is absolutely, categorically, phonetically, on every level, not the same thing. He told you this planet was low-profile, and you’ve been walking around thinking he meant low-power?”

“Same thing to me.”

Kevelnege grabbed Yulaan’s tail through the back of her jacket, found its base through the denim, and yanked. Yulaan yelped and stumbled forward. Two freshmen passing in the hallway glanced over, decided they had not seen anything worth processing, and kept walking. Kevelnege hauled her toward the east corridor by the tail.

“Get your ass in the computer lab.”

The entire time Yulaan had gone limp and winced as she said, “You could just ask.”

“I herd bone-eaters, I don’t ask them.”

The computer lab was a long room with a dropped ceiling and fluorescent lighting that gave everything the complexion of convenience store produce. Twenty desktop machines sat on beige desks in rows, most of them still running Windows 2000, all of them producing a collective hum that sounded like a very large insect thinking very hard about nothing. Kevelnege looked around. The room was empty. Second period wouldn’t fill it for another twelve minutes. 

Kevelnege released Yulaan’s tail, sat down at the nearest terminal, and started typing before the chair had finished rolling. Yulaan dropped into the seat beside her and tilted back until the front legs lifted off the floor.

“That didn’t hurt, by the way.”

Kevelnege punched her over her shoulder and sent her to the floor. Then she pulled up a browser and navigated with focused aggression. She found what she was looking for in under thirty seconds: a wiki, independently hosted, with a dark blue layout and the slightly overlapping sidebar text of a site built by one person who knew HTML and half of CSS. The header read METAHUMAN INDEX in a font that wanted to be futuristic. There were way too many ClipArt gifs.

“You will never believe this.” Kevelnege scrolled. “This planet has a taxonomy.”

Yulaan had already collected herself and leaned in to see the front page, which organized Earth’s superhuman population into four broad categories. The first and largest section was labeled CAPES, and the entry ran long. Capes, the wiki explained, were publicly active superhumans who operated under codenames and wore identifying costumes, typically in partnership with or opposition to law enforcement. The page listed known teams, solo operators, and registered villains. There were dozens. 

At the top, in a pop up labeled ‘Recent Heroics,’ were the Wicked Warriors, which linked to its own page, with individual entries for each member. 

Yulaan noted that the page mentioned they lived on their own island outside Armstrong City, which suddenly explained the construct to her. 

There was a team in Chicago called the Vanguard. Another in Los Angeles whose name Yulaan didn’t bother to read. A map graphic, low-resolution and slightly off-center, showed dots across the continental United States with clusters in the major cities. 

Yulaan mumbled, “Protectorate? That’s who Shania was referring to?” She threw herself back into the chair and said too loudly, “Glorified cops and robbers.”

Kevelnege’s tail wrapped around her neck and yoinked her closer. “I’ll slaughter you if you don’t read.”

The second category was HAUNTS. Kevelnege clicked into it and leaned closer to the screen. The Haunts section was shorter, more cautious in its language, and the wiki’s author had added a disclaimer at the top noting that information on Haunts was difficult to verify. Haunts were supernatural entities and practitioners: vampires, lycanthropes, warlocks, necromancers, mediums, and other classifications that the page organized with a diligence that suggested the author had lost sleep over the sorting. Unlike Capes, Haunts did not typically operate publicly. Some held territory. Some were organized into courts or covens. Most preferred to remain outside civilian awareness entirely, and the wiki admitted that the line between Haunt activity and urban legend was often impossible to draw.

“Well that’s more interesting,” Yulaan said.

“Keep reading.”

The third category listed Myths. These were entities deemed divine or supernatural, but not necessarily of the same sinister lot as Haunts. All sorts of demigods, lesser deities, magical  creatures, and supposed cryptids bad been sorted around and about, and here the pages had tags denoting whether the listed entity was still a myth or had been proven real. 

Last was the fourth category which read MARTIAL ARTISTS AND EASTERN DEMONS, and the page was nearly empty. A few sentences described reports of chi-wielding fighters and yokai-class entities operating in East Asia and parts of the Pacific Rim. The information was secondhand and the page admitted as much. An italicized note at the bottom read: This section is incomplete. Reliable documentation on martial artists operating above human baseline is difficult to obtain. Contributions welcome. There was a single external link to a Cantonese-language forum that had been dead since 2001.

Yulaan let her chair drop forward. The front legs hit the tile with a sharp crack, and she pointed at the Capes section. Kevelnege scrolled back. Near the bottom of the main taxonomy page was a table listing power classifications by output tier. The scale was simple. E-class was baseline human. Most Capes fell somewhere in the range between E-class and F-class. A handful of confirmed individuals had reached D-class, and the wiki treated this as extraordinary, noting that D-class output in a human was roughly equivalent to a minor seismic event. The page did not list anything above C-class. Either nobody on Earth had reached it, or nobody on Earth had survived measuring it. 

“Lord Saké did say they were in contact with folks from other worlds already. This must be what he meant,” said Kevelnege.

“E-class to F-class.” Yulaan leaned forward and rested her chin on her fists. “Some of them hit D.”

“For an Earth Sapiens, that’s remarkable,” Kevelnege said as if remarking on someone’s homework. “If that’s the same scale as what  Lord Saké uses, that’s, what, 300 freezypops? The Earth in our universe still has way stronger fighters, but that’s not shabby at all.”

“The capes are corny.” Yulaan said this with a fanged grin and folded arms. “Costumes, codenames, standing around posing… It’s cops and robbers in spandex. The same thing everywhere in every universe.”

Kevelnege sat back and said, “You wear spandex and pose whenever you fight. You literally fought a sentai martial artist troupe on Gorta and beat them by outposing them!”

“Maybe I’m traumatized and need therapy,” Yulaan said with enough snark that Kevelnege considered hitting her again. 

She closed the browser and turned in her chair. She folded her arms across her chest, the denim jacket bunching at her shoulders, and looked at Yulaan with an expression that had passed through amusement and arrived at calculation.

“But you’re interested, right? There’s an actual chance of a challenge here after all, so…”

Yulaan’s bangs shifted. Beneath them, something was working. She didn’t answer for a few seconds. 

“D-class,” she said. “From baseline E. That’s not great. But then again….”

Kevelnege pushed herself over until she rubbed her cheek against Yulaan and grinned with sinister intent. “There’s no reason to think they know everything?”

“Imma see how strong those Warriors are.”

“If they work the same way as the ones in our realm, raw power might not mean anything. You can still get your ass killed by a guy who crawls up your cunt and expands to building size.”

Yulaan blew her cheeks and said, “That’s why I love fighting ‘em.”

---

Don Han’s Laundromat and Poboys occupied a narrow storefront on the corner of Mina Street and Eleventh, in the Wen Ho district of Armstrong City’s east side. The name was not a joke. Don Han did in fact operate both a laundromat and a poboy counter, in the same room, separated by a waist-high partition that did not prevent lint from migrating into the sandwiches and did not prevent sandwich oil from migrating onto the clean laundry. Customers had learned to accept this. Don Han had learned to accept this. The health inspector had learned to accept this after the thirteenth visit, though he had written something very long and very sad in his report. The man made a shrimp poboy that people drove across the borough to eat. He also pressed shirts. Sometimes he did both at the same time. The poboys were exquisite. The laundry was adequate. The lint added texture.

And at this hour, instead of making a celebrity Poboy with a side of laundry, Don Han himself lay face down on the sidewalk in front of his own establishment. He did not appear to be injured. Rather he appeared to be experiencing the profound weariness of a sixty-two-year-old Vietnamese-Louisianan poboy artisan who was currently being stood upon by a man in a purple and green helmet and matching DIY armor and spandex speaking supervillain dialog.

Mina Street sat in the long afternoon shadow of the Akerlund Tower, a glass and steel monolith that swallowed the sun from about one o’clock onward and turned the whole block into a canyon. The light that made it down to street level was reflected off windows across the way, arriving gray and tired. It did the Doctor’s purple and green no favors.

“This district belongs to The Doctor now,” the man in the helmet announced to the empty street, pointing to himself with his thumb. “Every business on this block pays tribute, or every business on this block closes. Permanently.”

A few people watched from windows. A woman across the street was holding a camcorder recording the scene in intense rapture, and this would have been quite the recording if she figured out how to turn it on.

Yulaan had turned the corner while still in the middle of devouring a giant deliciously messy Philly Cheesesteak sandwich. In her coat pocket rested a note from Jóhanna: “Kindly might you pick up something for the kids at Don Han’s? There’s enough extra for you to get 30 or 40 for yourself. <3 Jóhanna”

This plus the thunderous sizzling cheesesteak sandwich made for a lovely afternoon linner.

That’s all this would have been if the Doctor had chosen a different hour.

But Yulaan saw the shakedown, ignored it, and walked on into the building.

All the patrons had thrown themselves to the ground and panicked when Yulaan entered because they thought the emo haired girl was one of the Doctor’s henchmen. That was very evil hair.

“Are you with the Doctor?” one prone man asked, trying to make eye contact.

“Who?”

“The guy outside, he’s holding us hostage so the old man will take his deal. He’s one of the supervillain capes.”

Yulaan finished more of her cheesesteak and said, “Oh. How strong is he?”

“Go get help!!”

She looked out the window with a cheesesteaky frown.

A businesswoman angrily whispered, “How did you even get past him? Get down!”

Another man, this one looking like a younger Don Han, called from behind a corner, “Hey, lady! Get to cover before he sees you! I can’t get in contact with the Warriors. You gotta hide!”

Yulaan recalled him quickly and said, “Oh, hey, Shane. Your dad in trouble?”

He vigorously motioned. “Get! Down!”

She ate the last bite of the sandwich and wiped her hands. “If he dies, this place closes, right? Alright then.”

She stormed out of the door as all the bystanders did different and equally beguiled motions for her to either come back or to call a coroner.

The Doc pressed his boot harder on Don’s spine, bringing out a pained gasp from the man.

“I’m not haggling you, you dumb gook. Seventy’s coming straight to me by next week. And the Wicked Warriors aren’t going to be a factor in this.”

He pulled from his chest cavity a diskcase. “Unless you want to see how many teenage bones a psycho with a Sybarith-brand Golden Dyskette can break.”

The Doc looked like a jock so proud of his own cock he let it bulge in bare spandex uncovered by armor, and this was starting to become a problem for Don because Doc kicked him to stomp on his ribs giving him a massive view of the villain’s sweaty groin. The Doctor scratched it while surveying the audience and it scuffed up.

“Somebody help me!”

The Doctor slotted the Dyskette into his gauntlet and let the charge build into a wide-mawed arm cannon that transformed around his left hand. Electricity crawled up his forearm in white threads. He raised his voice to the windows where the last few spectators were still watching. “See, this is what happens when you rely on children to protect your city. The Warriors are off playing dress-up on their little island while I’m standing on your favorite cook. Anybody else want to negotiate? Didn’t think so.” He spread his arms to the empty canyon of Mina Street and grinned under his helmet. “This is MY block now.”

“Fool.”

The Doctor turned. “Ooh, what’s this? Some goth girl looks down upon me?” He matched her folded arms and sneered. “What’s wrong, sweetheart? Hiding behind that mop of yours? How about you scram, kid. Actually… Those are some evil hips you got, bitch. How about I pick you up for a shindig down by the marina later?”

Yulaan stood atop the building, arms folded. She cracked her knuckles.

“What, you’re gonna play hero? Without a costume even? Okay then.” His voice dropped several octaves. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Yulaan scowled and vanished.

His face shifted.

The Doctor’s stomach caved inward before his brain registered that she had moved. He folded around the impact and his boots left the ground. He flew backward past the bus stop, past two parked cars, and the wall of the building across the street was rushing up to meet him when she appeared behind him.

Three hits. Kidney, ribs, the back of the helmet. 

Each one landed before the last one finished hurting. 

The helmet cracked down the middle and spun off his head and clattered into the gutter. He hit the asphalt chin-first, bounced, and rolled to a stop against a fire hydrant. His face was a red mess. He had bitten through his lower lip on the first bounce.

The woman with the camcorder had figured out how to turn it on. She had been recording for about four seconds and already knew had the most viewed clip in Armstrong City’s history on her hands.

The Doctor stood up. Even he was surprised he could from just  how much his body pulsed with pain.

He got to his feet, swayed, spat a red string onto the sidewalk, and looked at her with one eye swelling shut. The Dyskette in his gauntlet was still live. The charge had been building this whole time. Lightning arced around his body and condensed into his arm cannon.

“You’re responsible for this, you bitch!!”

He fired.

The blast turned Mina Street white. The canyon walls of the Akerlund Tower’s shadow lit up from curb to rooftop. Windows blew in across the block. Car alarms shrieked to life in a chain that reached around the corner. Inside Don Han’s, Shane threw himself across his father. The patrons on the floor covered their heads and screamed. That blast carried enough energy to gut every building on the street. No cape in Armstrong City, however many there were, would have stood in front of it.

The smoke cleared in the canyon draft and blew off and around Yulaan’s body.

Her denim jacket had burned off her shoulders and hung from her elbows in smoldering strips. Beneath it her arms were bare for the first time: corded, scarred, denser than any human limb, built from muscle that had five times the tissue density of anything on Earth. Her spandex tanktop was singed at the edges but intact. Her bangs had blown back and were settling over her eyes again.

His good eye boggled. “I-impossible!!”

“And what was that supposed to be?”

That had been enough power to wipe out a city block. The Warriors would never have dared to try to tank it, especially head on.

He stumbled back as mortal fear overtook him. “What the hell ARE you?!”

Yulaan scoffed and said, “Pissed, for one. I’m a Yaban. But you Earthlings may know me as…”

She dragged it out for fun. Her hair lifted. It rose from her face and off her shoulders in slow separate locks, each one stiffening, climbing, pulled taut by the bioelectricity flooding through her. Low voltage first. The locks thickened and rose past her jaw, past her ears, standing out at angles. Then higher. The strands fused into heavy black spikes that climbed straight up from her skull and crackled with pale light at their tips. Her bangs peeled back from her face. Her golden eyes were fully visible. They looked at the Doctor with nothing in them that could be called mercy or anger or even interest. Just a predator finishing an arithmetic problem.

“A Saiyan.”

The Doctor’s blood ran so cold, it could superconduct. 

“Ah! Impossible!”

“You should have been more careful… Fool. Your human power has failed you!” Her chi spiked. The ground beneath her feet cracked in a radial starburst, asphalt splitting outward in jagged lines, and it all began to pool in her left hand. Around it were tongues of electricity screaming and training behind her body. “Now— you die!“

She closed the distance before the Doctor’s eyes could track her. Her fist connected with the center of his chestplate and the Sybarith Dyskette behind it shattered. His entire upper body came apart. What remained of his torso dropped straight down and hit the sidewalk, and the wall behind where he had been standing was suddenly and violently redecorated.

She let the breath go. Her bioelectricity dropped and her hair fell with it, the spikes softening, separating into locks again, sinking past her jaw, past her shoulders, lengthening and flattening until it hung dead and long around her face. Zero voltage. Her bangs settled back over her eyes.

She sighed.

“So… some Earthlings do have a modicum of power. Excellent. Perhaps I’m not as screwed as I feared after all. But he also mentioned the Wicked Warriors as if they were nothing to him.”

She tilted her head back, letting her bangs rub over her nose and clearing enough for her golden eyes to look at the sky. The Akerlund Tower’s glass face caught the last of the afternoon sun forty stories above her.

“Still. I should investigate when I have the time.”

She walked back toward Don Han’s. 

Meanwhile, the woman recording pulled back into her apartment, cackling with dollar signs in her eyes.

The viewfinder’s lens cap was still on. She scowled.

Inside the joint-shop, Shane had his father on his feet behind the counter. Don Han stood with plaster dust in his hair and an apron that had seen better decades, and he looked at Yulaan and then looked through the window at the sidewalk and then looked at Yulaan again. He opened his mouth. Seeing the half-body on the ground outside, he closed it. He opened it again and said something in Vietnamese that Shane did not translate. Then in English he pointed and said, “You. Lady Wukong. Free poboys. For life.”

Yulaan’s tail unwound from her waist and swayed behind her.

“I was gonna say. I need a bit over forty.”

---

The Wicked Warriors arrived on Mina Street two hours and twenty-three minutes after the fact, by which time the police had also come. Both parties worked together and separately alike, as if the very concept of what the Warriors were offended the procedurals, but they couldn’t possibly get the work done without them.

Six o’clock light on Mina Street was the color of the bruises on the Doctor’s corpse. The Akerlund Tower’s shadow had stretched all the way across the block and halfway up the buildings on the opposite side, and the sky above the canyon was going from blue to a bright blue-bronze fusion that turned the glass faces of the downtown towers into dull mirrors.

A homicide detective named Reyes stood near the coroner’s van with a notepad he had stopped writing in. He watched Masque lift a piece of chestplate off the ground with nothing. No wire, no tool, no visible mechanism, nothing. The piece floated to the kid’s hand and joined the others in midair. Reyes looked at his notepad, looked at the floating armor, and put the notepad in his pocket. A uniformed officer next to him was trying to photograph the scene and kept having to wait for Ghost to finish phasing up through the sidewalk, because every time she rose out of the concrete his camera autofocused on her instead of the body. Neither officer said anything about this. You didn’t make detective in Armstrong City by asking costumed teenagers to explain themselves.

Engine stopped at the edge of the police tape, looked at the sidewalk, looked at the wall, and whistled through his teeth.

Morningstar landed beside him and popped her hip and said, “Whew, lad. What a bloodbath.”

Masque walked up between them, looked at the wall, and for once had nothing to say. After a moment he raised one hand and began collecting pieces of the Doctor’s armor from the ground, each fragment lifting and drifting toward his open palm, assembling against the shape of a box that wasn’t there.

Jackdaw kneeled at the cordoned-off body. What was left of it. He kept his fingers off the scene and studied the wreckage with the focus of someone who had been trained to do this and hated that he had to. The Doctor wasn’t an A-lister. Jackdaw had a file on him back at the tower, cross-referenced with three other files, because the man’s paranoid investigations into off-world weaponry had flagged him as someone who was always one bad deal away from becoming genuinely dangerous. The burnt chassis of his armor confirmed it. The half-spent Golden Dyskette still fused to the gauntlet confirmed it worse. The sick-in-the-head bastard had done it. He had found the means to push himself above anything the Warriors could comfortably handle.

And for whatever reason, he had used it to shake down a poboy shop and got himself slaughtered.

Engine came out of Don Han’s and let the door swing shut behind him. “Talked to the son. Apparently the Doctor didn’t know the old man at all. No history, no beef, nothing. Dude just picked the worst possible target on the worst possible day.”

“Whatever killed him did it fast,” Ghost said, forming out of a void in the air beside Jackdaw. She looked down at the body and her dark eyes registered it the way they registered most things. “One blow. Maybe two. The Dyskette was fully charged when he went down.”

Jackdaw stood. That was the part that ran his mind. The Golden Dyskette was Sybarith tech. Alien manufacture. It pushed a human body past the limits of what human biology could sustain and gave back power on a scale that his team had to strategize around. For someone carrying that to go down in one or two hits meant the opponent either knew exactly how dangerous that weapon was and didn’t give him a chance to use it, or the opponent was operating at a level where the Dyskette simply didn’t matter.

Neither answer was comfortable. His old mentor’s team had some heroes who could have managed with the right powers, and there were a few other super-humans he knew could stand up to that level of force. The Doctor’s gadgets clearly hadn’t malfunctioned, so what could have been so daring to try to tank that level of power? He looked at his reflection in the cracked helmet and wondered if he was thinking about this wrong. Was it a Psyker like Masque, but amped up to the point they could redirect a blast? Was it some sort of reality warp? Special technology? Insta-super shielding? Or was it simply raw, overwhelming force?

Morningstar came out of the shop. She had that look she got when civilians told her things she didn’t expect to hear. “The old man’s son says it was a girl who stops by here somewhat regularly. Named Yulaan.” She glanced at Jackdaw. “He says she looked like Sun Wukong.”

Engine turned. “Like what now?”

Jackdaw’s mask followed his furrowed brow. “Sun Wukong…”

And Engine raked his brain enough that he said, “… Any relation to King Kong?”

“You aren’t—”

And he laughed and teased Jackdawn said, “Chill, bro, I know who Sun Wukong is. I’m asking what that means in the context of a girl flattening a guy with a Golden Dyskette.”

Masque, still collecting armor fragments into his invisible box, mimed a tail swishing behind him and pointed at his own head with his free hand, fingers splayed upward to suggest wild hair, and did jazz hands around his eyes.

“She had a tail,” Ghost translated. “And the hair. And the gold eyes even.”

“A tail,” Engine said, as a question, but without the inflection, trying to imagine the image of a girl with a tail in public.

“That’s what the man said.”

Jackdaw had gone quiet. He was looking at the crater pattern in the asphalt where the Dyskette blast had hit. The scorch marks radiated outward from a single point. Whoever had been standing there when the blast connected had not moved. Had not dodged. Had not been thrown backward. Had just stood there and taken it.

“If a Myth is walking the streets,” Jackdaw said, “we need to make sure she’s not going to harm anyone either.”

“She saved the old man,” Engine said.

“She also turned a person into gore on the wall.” Jackdaw looked at his team. “We find her. We talk to her. That’s it.”

“And if she doesn’t feel like talking?” Engine asked.

Jackdaw looked at the wall again. At the crater. At the Dyskette that had been strong enough to level the block and hadn’t been strong enough to make this girl flinch.

“Then we’ll figure that out when we get there.”

Masque sealed his invisible box and tucked it under his arm. He looked at Jackdaw, then at the wall, then back at Jackdaw. He raised both eyebrows and puffed out his cheeks.

“Yeah,” Engine said. “That’s about how I feel too.”

Masque gave the box over to Jackdaw, who set all the debris into a cyan-lit cylinder and tossed it over his shoulder with a scowl. 

And then Masque’s skin suddenly returned to a far more tan shade as he let go of a breath and he said, “I guess this means no pizza night?”