Industrial Strength Magic

Chapter 35: Into the Flier

***Dazzle***

“So, umm…how’s this work exactly?” Jason asked the police officer keeping his hands behind his back.

“We take you down to Nexus, get you into the system, then do a quick trial and probably a couple weeks of community service.” The cop said.

“Community service? For attempted murder?”

“It’s High Tide, kid. City’s basically under martial law, and a lot of super first-time crimes get downgraded to misdemeanors to keep supers flowing to the wall.”

“In short, you got lucky.” His partner said.

“Indeed. If you ever get the urge to do something like this again, I recommend considering who’s gonna pay for your sibling’s room and board. I guarantee you want that to be you.”

“Growing up in the system sucks,” The partner chimed in again.

“You think your mom wants her oldest to go to prison and the other two to be raised by strangers?”

“I got it, I got it,” Jason said as the cops laid it on thick. He’d heard similar things from his guidance counsellor, but with his arms twisted behind his back by two rather large police officers, it was started to sound a lot more real.

Their heart-to-heart was interrupted by a rapidly growing WHOOOSH!

Paradox landed directly in front of them and jammed his armored hands under Jason’s armpits.

“IGottaBorrowDazzleBeRightBack!” he shouted before the jets in his shoulder guards fired violently, sending them soaring into the sky.

“AAAAAAH!” Jason screamed, barely managing not to reflexively confetti Paradox’s armor and send them tumbling to their deaths.

***Jetset***

“You didn’t mark the entrance you came from? Jetset demanded, spotting his rubber-band gun nestled between two eggs near where he’d woken up. He darted forward and grabbed it with his good arm, flicking the safety off with his thumb

Only six shots. Starting to seem really inadequate.

“Oh, excuse me for saving your life!” Manic said, blurring for a moment and shoving the encroaching wave of wasps back.

The speedster’s strength was human baseline as well, so he couldn’t do much more than toss the armored wasps around.

“No, I’m not going to excuse you!” Jetset shouted, firing the rubber-band gun at an approaching wasp, crushing its head into a paste, gritting his teeth as he caught the rebounding heavy duty rubber band in his wounded hand.

“I would’ve stayed alive the extra ONE SECOND it would’ve taken you to mark the entrance!”

Manic glanced between the rubber band gun and the dead wasp.

“Gimmie!” he shouted, snatching the rubber band gun out of Jetset’s hand.

“Hey-

BAMBAMBAMBAMBAMBAM!

Manic turned into a blur as he fired and reloaded the rubber band gun at blazing speed, pulping one wasp head after another in a hum of squelching insect insides.

The wasps were beginning to be driven back under the unrelenting assault of steel-denting rubber bands. Jetset felt himself feeling a thread of hope that he might not end the day as wasp chow.

Then Manic Manic’ed everything up.

One of the gears inside the gun overheated from the insane speeds, melted and slipped mid-reloading, allowing the wind-up handle to yank out of his hand, swing around the other way and break Manic’s wrist, while the rubber band snapped backwards and hit him in the face at about half power.

“Ugh,” Manic groaned, staggering backwards, blood flowing from his broken nose.

“Well, you managed to waste the gun and get us both killed,” Jetset said, steadying Manic while the speedster clutched his nose. “Congratulations.”

“Got more shots off than you ever would’ve and you know it.” Manic responded, shaking off the brain damage.

“That’s debateable,” Jetset muttered as the healthy wasps began to encroach, climbing over piles of their own dead.

“Can you keep pushing them away?” Jetset asked.

“Maybe.” Manic responded, clutching his broken wrist to his stomach.

Manic blurred out and whizzed past the oncoming wasps, doing his best to shove them back, but not accomplishing much of note.

“I can’t push nearly as well with my right hand busted, I’m dizzy, and I’m starting to get really hungry.” Manic said.

“Yo,” Jetset said, prying a speedster bar out of his pocket and tossing it to Manic, who devoured it instantly, groaning at the horrible taste.

“Why do you have one of these?” Manic asked, mouth stuffed like a squirrel.

“We all have one. Because you’re a bit of a screw up,” Jetset said with a shrug.

“That’s bullshit!” Manic said between rounds of shoving the wasps back.

“You literally just broke your wrist and gave yourself a concussion.”

“You don’t understand my methods!” Manic shot back, wrenching a laugh out of Jetset as the wave of Wasps closed within arm’s length.

Well, I guess this is it, Jetset thought as he felt the heat curling the hairs on his eyebrows and singe his nostrils and lungs.

A spike at the end of a long whip landed on the closest wasp, pinning it to the ground. Wraith arrived, dragging herself rapidly through the air using the spike drilled through the wasp as an anchor.

She landed right beside them.

There was a brief moment where she looked like a beautiful girl with curves in all the right places.

Then things got…weird.

Wraith’s butt, thighs and left arm shriveled up inside her Hyperweave while her right arm expanded to Titan levels, gaining a sharp, bladed edge.

With a grunt of effort, she gave a mighty swing with her torso-sized arm-blade, bisecting half a dozen wasps with a single swing.

“I knew I could do that!” She crowed, her body returning to normal a moment later as all the extra muscle seemed to snap back into place.

“There!” Jetset pointed at the hole Wraith had come from. He’d made sure to pay attention this time.

Only problem was, wasps were flooding out of the hole same as everywhere else. How Wraith had gotten through it while it was so crowded was anyone’s guess.

“Our team’s that way!” Jetset shouted, “Closer we can get to them, the better!”

“Good a plan as we’re gonna get!” Wraith said. “I’ll clear a path.”

Then Wraith did so. Between the three of them, the girl was the most in her element, carving through the wasps like a butcher knife. While she wasn’t as fast as Manic and couldn’t fly, she hit a LOT harder than either of them.

Once again, Jetset was struck with deep, irrational envy.

Maybe I will pay that visit to Dr. Flex. Jetset abhorred the feeling of being the rescuee. If he wasn’t able to fight like a super, he couldn’t really consider himself one.

I could be replaced by a drone.

“I’ll clear the way first!” Wraith said, jumping into the hole, her body morphing to cling to the sides of the tunnel, sharp blades emerging from her flattened body to snip off the head of a wasp that had crawled past her.

“Manic you’re in the rear!” Wraith shouted as she oozed further up the tunnel.

“Aw, man, why put me in the rear?” Manic moaned, crawling into the hole behind Jetset, who tucked in his limbs and floated in rather than crawl.

“Because you can kick anything behind us a thousand times a second,” Jetset said.

“Good point,” Manic said, crawling along behind them.

Is it claustrophobia if the cramped space is crawling with flaming venomous wasps the size of a big dog? Jetset thought as he floated along behind Wraith, his heart hammering in his ears. That seemed like a rational fear.

Ahead of him, Wraith was handily snipping the heads off of wasps as they crawled past her flattened body, shoving the bugs into nooks and offshoot tunnels to slow down the flood of wasps coming in from other directions.

Jetset floated past the hot, wet corpses in her wake and tried not to retch.

They got about twenty feet before Manic gave a cry of pain.

“Shit, get off, get OFF!” Manic shouted, his foot buzzing as he bashed a wasp off his other foot. Manic’s fingers drew lines in the concrete as he was dragged backwards a few inches.

“Grab my foot!” Jetset said.

Before he’d even finished the sentence, Manic had latched onto his leg, allowing Jetset to pull him forward. The wasp’s horsepower couldn’t compare to Jetset’s, but it didn’t let go, mandibles buried deep into Manic’s shoe as they dragged it forward, Manic howling in pain.

“Hold on a sec!” Wraith shouted, turning around in place with the smoothness of a liquid before diving past him, her body narrowing to squeeze past Jetset.

As soon as Wraith left the front, a wasp climbed out of what appeared to be a trapdoor, lunging for Jetset’s face.

Shit! Jetset threw both arms in front of himself, but his wounded arm was too weak and was batted aside instantly. The monster grabbed his healthy arm on it’s mandibles and began savaging them while it’s abdomen pulsed forward.

Crack! Jetset felt his other arm break.

The stinger was directly under his nose.

He could smell the acrid venom.

He tried to pull his head back, bashing it fruitlessly against the concrete as the stinger drew closer.

Jetset’s mind went blank, feeling as though he was watching his own death through a twenty-foot tube.

…

BOOM!

Something detatched from Jetset’s mind and suddenly the wasp was flattened against the far side of the tunnel.

Jetset frowned a moment before the world exploded into colorful paper and tinsel.

***Perry***

Dazzle’s screaming slowly wound down as Perry set him down on the ground. The newbie super collapsed, his legs unwilling to support him.

“Why!?” Dazzle demanded, trying to get back up onto his wobbly legs.

“Rescue mission, don’t get too far away from me, you’re not wearing armor.” Perry said, putting a hand on Dazzle’s shoulder and steering him toward the nest.

“Guys!” Perry called out to the battling supers.

“What’s he doing here?” Titan asked, still covering Thrillshot as Flambe and Hardcase peeled away layers of nest.

“He can make walls disappear!” Perry said.

I gotcha, kid,” Tung-Stan said, the gigantic pile of black rocks said as he came over, hovering near Dazzle. “I’ll keep him alive.”

“Dazzle, we’ve got three people somewhere in that nest. I need you to disappear a circle out of the nest, then Hardcase here can pull out the resulting plug. Make sense?”

Dazzle nodded.

In perry’s mind, Dazzle would turn a narrow slice of the nest into confetti, detatching a cylinder from the rest, and Hardcase would then remove that cylinder, making the most of Dazzle’s power.

Instead the entire nest exploded into confetti, making the entire world a glittering, colorful mess with total blizzard whiteout conditions. Perry couldn’t even see past his elbow.

“Obviously that didn’t make sense!” Perry shouted into the void of glitter. “Or you wouldn’t have done that!”

“Paradox!?” Perry heard Jetset’s voice.

“Holy crap, he’s alive,” Perry muttered before raising his voice. “Over here!”

The other supers added their voices, shouting to direct the rescue team towards them.

As the glitter cleared from the air, Perry could make out the form of Jetset floating along the ground, carrying Manic over his shoulders, Wraith steadying the speedster cargo.

“Hell yeah!”

“Manic, are you okay?” Titan asked.

“I busted my foot, leg and noggin but other than that, I’m fine,” Manic groaned.

“I think you’ve earned a speedster snack,” Titan said, pulling out a brick of concentrated calories and tossing it to the speedster.

Tropical flavored.

Manic half chuckled, half-groaned, gnawing on the brick.

“There’s still a bunch of wasps to take care of, but the bruisers will handle the rest. You guys get to the hospital. Check on Warcry.”

“Okay, boss,” Jetset said, wincing as he got a better grip on Manic before floating up into the air and putting on speed to get them out of harms way before a wasp decided to investigate the wounded duo.

“So…Do you guys want me to put the nest back?” Dazzle asked.

“NO!” Everyone shouted at him. the nest had been an enormous pain in the butt.

“Dazzle, thank you very much for your assistance. Time to go back to jail.” Perry said.

Dazzle blinked. The ground under him exploded into confetti, dropping him into the sewers.

The instant Dazzle’s head disappeared into the darkness beneath, the road reappeared, making pursuit extremely impractical.

“Noo, my capture commission!” Perry lamented. “I was gonna buy some goodies from the Tinker Marketplace. Dangit.”

“You know repelling an invasive species is a hundred K per participant, right?” Titan asked.

“Oh. Okay. I feel better now.” Perry said between squishing wasps covered in melted tinsel.

Now that they couldn’t hide inside their nest, and all the squishiest supers were accounted for, cleaning up the rest of the wasps wasn’t particularly dangerous, just a bit of a slog.

Even when the horse-sized queen emerged from the omnipresent confetti, Tung-stan and Titan just tackled it to the ground and beat it to a pulp, ignoring the blazing heat that drove everyone else back.

Once the wasps were thoroughly exterminated, the supers sat back and rested on the curb, waiting for the Nexus bean counters while Titan paced back and forth, on the phone with the hospital.

“Oh, thank you.” Titan said, tension draining from his entire body. “Good night, ma’am.”

“Well, Warcry is still alive and expected to make a full recovery.” Titan said, turning off his phone with his sausage fingers.

“That’s good.” Hardcase said, leaning back in her seat with the hood popped up to let some fresh air into the cockpit. She had what appeared to be a pink lunchbox in the storage space near her feet, from which she withdrew a neatly cut sandwich and began eating.

I am so hungry right now.

She glanced over and caught Perry staring.

“Paradox, Wraith, you want some?” She asked, pulling out another lunchbox from her storage space. “I brought enough for the whole team, but they’re all in the hospital, soo…”

“You are a freakin’ saint,” Perry said, unlatching his armor and making it most of the way to the proffered lunchbox before Heather shoved him out of the way and snatched up the plastic container.

Hardcase watched, idly chewing her sandwich as The Battle For The Lunchbox raged between Paradox and Wraith.

“You don’t need any extra body fat,” Perry said, yanking on the container.

“Your parents are rich,” Heather said, “You can afford to miss dinner once.”

“Your dad’s rich too!”

“My dad is AWOL, don’t give me that shit!”

“I did more work than you tonight, gimme the sammies,” Perry said.

“I didn’t see you in the nest.” Heather shot back.

“I fell through a two-story building without armor.”

“I killed more wasps than you.”

“Sure, where I couldn’t see it.” Perry said.

“There’s…a lot of sandwiches in that box,” Hardcase said, her voice trembling.

“It’s the principle of the thing,” Heather said, without dropping eye contact.

“Yeah…although it would be kind of silly to fight over more sandwiches than we can eat.” Perry said.

“We should check the contents.” Heather agreed.

“On three.”

On the count of three, the two of them adjusted their grip and allowed the plastic lid to open, revealing sandwiches carefully wrapped in wax paper and tightly stacked from top to bottom, nearly a cubic foot of sandwich.

“Alright, we’ll call it a draw.” Perry said.

Heather took the Reubens, and Perry took the ham and cheese, and turkey with lettuce, ignoring Heather accusing him of being a ‘basic bitch’. They split the roast beef and mushroom.

Needless to say the beef and pork were meat-substitutes, but still pretty good.

“Wraith, can I ask you something?” Hardcase asked, approaching where Perry’s team were devouring their food.

“Ang,” Heather grunted, her mouth stuffed with sandwich before she swallowed. “Sure.”

Hardcase leaned close and whispered into Heather’s ear.

“Probably. It sounded like it.” Heather said, glancing at Perry.

“What?” Perry asked around his turkey and mustard sammich, which had managed to dribble a bit onto his shirt and forced him to clean it off with his mouth before it stained. “What?”