Industrial Strength Magic

Chapter 34: Out Of The Frying Pan

There were four other supers on site when they arrived, barely visible under the swarm of wasps and blazing heat until they go close enough to reinforce them, some fifty feet away from the massive concrete structure.

Through all the insect legs and heat, Perry could barely make out the fortification the bugs had made.

It seemed a lot smaller from the air. It was about three stories tall and wider than he’d expected by a huge margin. With the way some of the windows of the building revealed more activity beyond, Perry was fairly sure the nest had grown into the building itself.

Damn.

“Thanks for the backup!” A woman in a colorful bikini wielding a pair of revolvers with unnatural skill shouted.

It’s not my place to comment on someone’s super decisions.

“Titan,” Tung-stan said, his neck rocks grating against each other as he nodded. Perry wasn’t sure but he thought he saw the rock-man’s brow lower.

“Tung-stan.” Titan said.

“I live ‘round here,” the giant pile of blackened rocks rumbled between squishing massive bugs.

Ah. They might be professional villains, but nobody wants to live in a wasp nest.

The other two supers were a man with a flame theme who was entirely incapable of causing appreciable damage to the bugs with the massive gouts of fire blasting from his hands, and a woman with a clock painted on her torso.

Flambe and Clock-stopper, Perry remembered from evenings of idle wiki-ing.

Flambe was pretty self-explanatory, but clock-stopper had the power to freeze people and things in time for a limited amount of time. She was among the best at nonlethal takedowns.

As Perry was thinking this, a wasp rushed the woman, and she reached towards it at the same time.

The wasp froze in midair and crashed to the ground, tinkling against the asphalt like a piece of glass. Clock-stopper stopped the creature’s slide with her foot and stabbed it with a dagger right in the central nervous system.

The creature immediately began writhing, sending searing heat in every direction as the super danced back.

Speaking of searing heat…

Wraith was retracting her head into her hyperweave like a turtle, Manic was donning a hyperweave hood, and Warcry was surrounding her head with her own energy, mitigating the heat.

Titan didn’t care about the heat.

Hyperweave hood: $15k, probably.

Still he should get one for both of them, for situations just like this.

“How are you fine in this heat!?” Perry demanded of the bikini’ed gunslinger.

“Magic hat,” She said, tapping the brim of her cowgirl hat before going back to work, blasting away wasp after wasp, the muzzle flash suspiciously colorful.

Oh, God, not a magic gunslinger…magic gunslingers are trash tier magic hybrids. She’s shot way more than twelve shots since I got here, too…Perry thought, curious as to where the extra bullets were coming from.

But there were more important things going on.

“DEBUFF GOING OUT, DUCK!”

The surrounding supers crouched low as Perry held his hand straight up and set the Melt beam to its widest angle.

Melt.EXE

The diluted blast wasn’t enough to noticeably weaken the creature’s armor, but their wings turned just a bit floppier, which played hell with their flight.

Why the wasps were even able to fly given that the air was hundreds of times thinner relative to their new size…only God knew.

Wasps began tumbling every which way as their normally totally rigid wings betrayed them, sending them tumbling violently down to the ground, and making the swarm just a bit more manageable for the assembled supers.

“I’ve got a team-member in there!” Titan shouted, pointing at the enormous three-story nest. “I need to get him out!”

“He’s probably dead already!” Tung-stan said.

“Until I see it for myself, I’m going to act as if he isn’t!” Titan shouted.

“Well, good luck!” Tung-Stan shouted back, pointing at the nest. “Those tunnels are too small for you and me, and ripping it apart is an absolute bitch. It’s not just brittle concrete, it’s concrete reinforced with some kind of organic laffy taffy! Even if you can break the concrete, it just stretches!”

Titan frowned as a wasp landed on him and tried to penetrate his armor.

The giant idly squished the wasp in his grip, a small explosion of heat emanating from between his fingers as he eyeballed the nest.

“Warcry, you’re our quarterback tonight!” he shouted, turning to face the energy user.

“What?” Warcry asked, turning to look at him.

“I need to you to -LOOK OUT!”

Manic tore the wasp off Warcry’s neck an instant after it landed, but it had managed to get a bit of its stinger under the skin.

Warcry clapped her hand over the tiny sliver of exposed skin between her energy hood and the hyperweave, coming away with a little droplet of blood.

“I’m probably fine, right?” she asked before her eyes rolled back in her head.

Energy users are often human baseline.

“Warcry!” Titan screamed, his voice breaking a little as he caught her before she hit the ground, her neck beginning to swell to outrageous proportions.

Perry’s skin turned cold.

Need some kind of heal, right now. Right now, right now, right, now…

If he hadn’t messed up the healing spell so bad, he might be able to do something right NOW.

A thought sparked. If time was the problem, buy more time.

“Clockstopper!” Perry shouted at the top of his lungs, gaining the super’s attention.

She glanced quickly over her shoulder and saw him pointing at Warcry, who was going into messy anaphylactic shock, her neck swelling to cut off blood and breathing.

Without needed further explanation, the super reached a hand out towards Warcry, and the girl froze in place, her grisly death halted.

“Ninety seconds!” Clock-stopper said, returning her gaze back to the fight at hand.

“Get her to a hospital.” Titan said, his tone ominous as he met Manic’s gaze. “Be sure to mention the wasps and anaphylaxis.”

“Got it,” Manic said, shoving the rest of a Snickers into his mouth before picking up the rigid girl and vanishing in a streak of light.

Titan cursed as he lunged back to his feet.

“I was gonna have Warcry cut our way in to rescue Jetset! Perry, Hardcase, how fast can you cut through the nest?”

Let’s find out, Perry thought, lunging forward alongside Hardcase’s mech-suit and taking a stab at cutting through.

Melt.Exe

Perry hit the nest with a concentrated melt, then scooped it out with his BFS…only to reveal more nest six inches deeper.

“It’s fluffy!” Perry shouted.

“What does that mean!?” Titan demanded mid-squish.

“It’s designed with air pockets between layers of stone,” Perry said. “It makes it insulative, and lighter than it should be and it sucks at propagating the melt ray!” Perry shouted back.

He tried hacking at the nest with purely physical force using the Big Friendly Sword, but it was just as Tung-stan had warned. Beneath the concrete were strong, stretchy strands that held the nest together and gunked up his sword like nobody’s business.

“My cutter’s down!” Hardcase said beside him, the massive sawblade jutting from her arm totally covered in sticky gunk.

“Shit.” Titan scanned the group and isolated Flambe.

“Flambe!” Titan shouted.

“Eh!?” The fire-user asked, not looking away from his mostly meaningless battle with the same wasp as fifteen seconds ago.

“Can we get your assistance with the nest!?” Titan asked.

Flambe was covering the gunslinger’s back, allowing the more deadly member of his group do her job.

“If you take my spot!” he shouted. “Thrillshot, you okay with that?”

“Do your thing!” the gunslinger shouted, her voice nearly disappearing into the repetitive blasts of her guns. Which are six shooters, and I’ve counted at least fifty shoots.

A moment later, Titan and Thrillshot were back to back while Flambe was rushing over to them, propelled forward by a blast of fire.

“Alright, we’ll take turns,” he said manifesting a jet of white-hot fire on the blade of his hand, which he thrust elbow-deep into the nest, before dragging it through in a circle.

A moment later, Hardcase stepped forward and tore a two-foot deep chunk of reinforced concrete out of the wall, revealing more concrete layers, and the edge of a tunnel barely big enough to a standard human to crawl through.

Shit, this isn’t gonna be fast enough, Perry thought.

“I could get in there!” Manic said, his voice somewhat muffled by the heat-resistant hyperweave.

“Me too!” Wraith said.

“What happens if you get lost or surrounded?” Titan said. “We need a man-sized tunnel that we can escape out of just as easily as we can get in!”

“I can do it!” Manic said, “I can get him!”

“Manic, don’t –“ Titan cursed as Manic disappeared into the hole in a blur of motion.

Shoot, this could get really ugly, Perry thought.

“Go in after him. Stick to the walls, try and keep them alive, but…leave ‘em to die if you have to,” Perry said over Wraith’s channel.

Wraith nodded and dove for the two-foot wide hole, morphing to crawl along the sides of the wall. Ideally she could ooze around any obstacle a wasp might present, something that Manic couldn’t really claim.

Only having two members in there, with no backup and little in the way of staying power was a recipe for disaster, and they knew it.

We need a faster way to cut through the nest, Perry thought, scowling. Unfortunately the material was hard, stretchy, insulative, layered, interwoven, and a dozen other things that made it an absolute nightmare to cut through with any physical medium.

Warcry would’ve been a home-run because her power was much better at cutting than Flambe’s. She would’ve just disintegrated huge swaths of the nest at a time, which had been what Titan was banking on.

Paradox’s eyes widened as a solution clicked into place.

“Got an idea! Be back in about a minute!”

“Better be a good one!” Titan shouted, punching a wasp so hard it exploded, its stinger lodging itself in a distant concrete building.

I sure hope so, Perry thought, kicking on his jets.

***Jetset***

Jetset was resting on top of a pile of corpses interspersed with pale eggs in little stone alcoves. Here and there, jetset witnessed the miracle of birth, as little grubs the size of his arm crawled their way out of the eggs and began to crawl towards him, attracted by the scent of carrion.

Jetset pleaded with, and cursed every divinity he’d ever heard of in equal measure, albeit totally silently.

It wasn’t only squishable grubs in here.

Here and there was a wasp turning the eggs or having a snack between shifts.

Jetset desperately looked for a miracle, but all he found was a section of wall with a shallow divot that a man could conceivably squish himself into to cover his sides and back.

That was about as much miracle as he was afforded. All the tunnels leading out were crawling with wasps.

Beggars can’t be choosers, Jetset thought, lifting himself silently off the ground and floating towards the last-stand dip in the wall.

If he could become part of the wall and present a solid surface of hyperweave by covering his head and neck, he might be able to last long enough to get a rescue. Titan wasn’t going to take his disappearance sitting do- Oh shit!

One of the wasps recognized motion and began barreling towards him, crawling across the ceiling, its wings fluttering menacingly.

Jetset put on the speed, slamming into the dip in the wall, immediately wishing it was much, much deeper.

A moment later, the wasp was on top of his nook, biting and stinging relentlessly. Its razor-sharp stinger was stopped by the hyperweave, but it still felt like an MMA fighter had mounted him and begun raining blows down on his forearms.

Its bite was far worse, as Hyperweave didn’t provide nearly as much protection against crushing damage.

Jetset cried out in pain as the monster’s jaws seized around his wrist and began crushing. Sensing this, the hyperweave seized up, but it was only enough to keep his arm attached to his body.

Crack!

Jetset gritted his teeth and punched the monster in it’s stupid soulless compound eyeballs, his baseline human strength unable to do jack to deter the insect from trying to make him into a meal.

Get off, get off get OFF! Jetset thought as he punched over and over, accomplishing almost nothing, the creature’s venom-dripping stinger coming precariously close to his face.

The heat is gonna kill me first, Jetset thought, his face stinging from the sheer heat radiating off the wasp.

He heard buzzing and chittering, but thankfully they couldn’t see him, and perhaps even better, he couldn’t see the hundreds of wasps waiting their turns to assault the spandex-wearing monkey.

Not when he couldn’t even beat one.

Crunch! The wasp adjusted its grip and broke his arm further down, wrenching another scream out of him.

There was a hiss of split air and a harsh buzz as a fist hit the wasp a thousand times in the exact same spot.

With a screech and the flailing of limbs, the creature was catapulted away, it’s grip on his messed-up arm broken.

Manic’s hooded face appeared in his view.

“Ma’am, you’ve got a serious wasp problem,” Manic said. “This is gonna cost…at least five hundred dollars to remove.”

Jetset laughed until he cried at the unfunny joke, while Manic pried him out of his nook in the wall.

Finally they were standing side by side, facing the hundreds of holes in the semi-spherical room they were in, each leading somewhere different.

“You, um…didn’t happen to catch which hole I came in through, did you?” Manic asked, scanning the identical holes that dotted the walls and ceiling.

“You can’t be serious.” Jetset said.

“Umm….” Manic tapped his chin as wasps began to pour into the room like water.