Author's Note:
- I'm putting this at the beginning instead of the end, because I didn't realize FFN was having issues last week. It appears to be back to normal now. Hopefully. If you missed Chapter 53, I'd just recommend going back to read that first before this chapter.
Exsanguination 1
More aid had finally arrived in Brockton Bay. While there was only one major highway open, it was enough to get food, supplies, and temporary shelters into the city. And, for Tagg, more PRT and military officers and military. He had been holding back any actual enforcement because he had nothing that could take on Lung, but now he had more people in his command.
That also made him more eager to enforce his idea of the law. He wanted to force New Wave under the banner of the Protectorate or arrest us on some stupid, made-up technicality.
"Have you made up your minds?" Tagg asked us again, this time with twenty armed troops behind him.
"Yes. We won't work under you. Not today, not ever. Another PRT director, perhaps," Lady Photon told him.
"Then I'll take that as an official declaration that you're villains," he sneered.
"We'll have it cleared up by the Boston PRT within days," she countered. "Try to arrest us and Alexandria herself will bring you down for violating the Truce."
"I won't have to, my goals are still achieved. No more rogue capes causing anarchy in the streets of Brockton Bay. Take your friend Lung with you when you go!"
"We're helping people! You're just an ass!" Glory Girl shouted at him angrily.
"Without rules. Doing only what you personally feel is right is the very definition of anarchy, and the opposite of what this city needs right now," Tagg said to her.
"Glory Girl, we're leaving," Brandish said. "Clearly he thinks he can manage everything on his own, so let's go somewhere our efforts can be appreciated."
We weren't going to go to head to Boston immediately. We most likely were going to head back home to Concord first. While the PRT ENE technically also had jurisdiction over Concord, their presence was greatly reduced. We would be fine living there for a while before deciding where to go next.
For now, it was where most of the patients were being moved, so it made sense. While Manchester was closer to Brockton, it had taken a bit of light infrastructure damage as well. Concord was nearly untouched and could support more people.
Because of Tagg, we couldn't travel with the medical bus, so New Wave was planning on simply flying there. For us non-flyers, Glory Girl could carry me and Panacea, while Manpower had enough speed and endurance on the ground to keep up. I was taking a short break before we all left, when Dragon approached me with one of her small drone suits.
"Hello, Eunoia! Before you head to Concord, I was wondering if you could help me with some problems," Dragon said to me.
"What do you need? Is Tagg being a pain in the ass to you, too?" I grumbled.
Dragon laughed. "Well, yes, but nothing I can't manage. He's trying to shoo me and Narwhal out of 'PRT controlled areas' and delay me with an extra vetting process, but he won't win the paperwork game against me. I'm pretty sure he's just trying to find ways to let himself claim achievements on paper to get another promotion."
"Well… on the subject of actually getting things done… Do you want the southwestern roads cleared up?" I asked.
"No, the asphalt is ruined. Even if we cleared the debris, most cars wouldn't be able to drive through. I have construction drones working on the problem already. Mostly, I just need some more surveillance of the streets. I've detected some supplies, equipment, and most concerningly, some weaponry gone missing. I suspect it's a Stranger of some kind. If we're lucky, one of us might be able to see past them. I've warned Tagg but he isn't taking my suggestions and is blaming Lung instead. It's inside his territory, but he clearly doesn't have the manpower to actually stop it, so…"
"I'll get on it. Half my bots got washed out to sea and the other half is underground preventing a landslide, but I'm building the numbers back up. I'll have good coverage of all the streets within a day. Are we sure it isn't actually Lung?"
"I've kept a close eye on him and his gang since he started rallying them. I haven't seen any trace of the weapons, and he's pretty open with distributing the food. He's probably re-forming his gang, but that's a long-term issue and he's not causing problems at the moment. There are a lot of people entering the city right now, and I wouldn't be surprised at some opportunists taking advantage of the crisis."
"Gotcha. On that note, how are you doing, Dragon? I didn't think we would have had such a huge crisis so soon after you, uh, were up and running again."
"Better in some ways, yet missing in some others. I don't think I'm a parahuman any more."
"Wait, were you a parahuman before?" I asked, confused. Everyone called her the world's greatest Tinker before, but I had to wonder if someone who hadn't been human was technically a parahuman.
"I think I was. Or, I must have been. I have plenty of projects and analyses that were saved, in-progress when you and Panacea fixed me up. I know not all of my memory could have been salvaged, but there are parts and gaps within my own analyses that are difficult for myself to follow. Some of it clearly follows leaps and jumps go beyond logic or processing capabilities of my equipment," she said. "Thus, I believe it was an actual parahuman power that used to enhance my abilities."
That was interesting, and I would have loved to spend more time investigating that under normal circumstances. Though I had built her brain with a generic Corona Gamma and Pollentia, I had no idea how to actually "activate" them, as it were. There was something I was missing, and I didn't quite know what it was. If an artificial intelligence like Dragon could be a parahuman, maybe those brain structures weren't as important as everyone thought, and it was something else entirely that was missing. "But if you don't have that power any more… can you still do what you've been doing?" I asked.
"Oh, don't worry. You removed one of my limits, so what I lack in Tinkering I can now simply make up for it in raw processing power. I'm upgrading all of my server farms as of this moment, and I can multitask even better. As tradeoffs go, I think this one is for the better."
"Really? Thank you, Dragon."
"No, thank you, dad."
I snorted. "Are you still going on with that?" Even though the drone beside me had no facial expressions – barely any face at all – I could sense Dragon's grin.
"Until it stops being funny! In any case, since I can multitask and split my consciousness now, I can offer your team a transport to Concord. Better than flying yourselves in this weather," she said. "It won't even slow down my recovery efforts in Brockton Bay one bit, since I can have better control over more of my drones than ever before."
"Sounds good then. You can focus on infrastructure, I'll take care of the street-level crime," I told her.
"Thanks, Eunoia. It'll make the recovery efforts run a whole lot smoother," Dragon said.
As that drone took off, I went to Panacea first before gathering the rest of New Wave.
"So, Dragon's going to give us a lift to Concord," I told her.
"Really? That's good. That stupid Director's getting on my nerves. I swear, he's just trying to annoy us into submission," Panacea said.
"Yeah, well, screw him. I'm going to try to use Abyssal to keep crime low, Dragon's going to help fix up the infrastructure. Do you want to, you know, help a bit with food production before we leave?" I asked her. "The people seem to be enjoying the berries they've found so far."
"I… I don't know," Panacea said. "It was just a silly thing I did while I was bored, it was never supposed to be a important or anything."
"But it's helping people now. In fact, if you could modify it a bit, it would help me too," I encouraged her.
"What do you need? A plant that sprouts nanobots?" she asked.
"Haha, no. It's just that most of my bots are stabilizing the soil underneath the city right now. It's kind of a waste at the moment, but if your plants could grow deep roots to do that job, it would free up a ton of bots for me," I told her.
"Stabilizing the soil?" she asked.
"Yeah, by my estimates, everything between downtown to Captain's Hill is on the brink of sliding down into the Bay if I lose control. I was hoping you might be able to create a more permanent solution," I told her.
Panacea was silent for a second. "I'll see what I can do."
When we all loaded up into Dragon's transport craft, we were all exhausted. None of us had the chance to nap for a while. There wasn't much talking, but we all appreciated the cushioned seats of the transport. I let my real body sleep while I let some of my other brains take care of the city.
The last shelter had nearly been excavated, and there were plenty of other volunteers working on it. Tagg was being an ass, having his freshly-arrived PRT officers patrolling in a show of force. He had moved on from bullying capes and was now forcing civilians to get out broken buildings. He was forcing some people to get out of the shopping mall, accusing them of looting. He wanted to march them out and get them into designated shelters only. Anyone he didn't have direct command or oversight over was a borderline criminal to him.
People obviously disagreed, and I was spending a lot of my bots trying to find ways to defuse the many flare-ups that occurred. That primarily came in the form of destroying the weapons from both sides. Everything from baseball bats to guns, if people were trying to use them against each other, my bots shredded them. Lung, of course, was a whole separate story, but thankfully the PRT troops themselves weren't suicidal. I think Tagg himself was getting angrier that his own men refused to follow orders that were going to get them killed.
I still couldn't find that Stranger Dragon mentioned, but I did find a cache of weapons, which I disabled. I put a bit more focus everywhere else as well; checking in everything from Boston to Concord. Though the waves had caused a few issues, for the most part it wasn't anything Boston couldn't recover from themselves. Concord was simply flooded with more people, and so was Manchester. Dad and Mr. Dallon were… wait, what was going on?
My bots around Concord weren't working properly. They were damaged? Broken? I had never encountered anything that could harm my bots aside from massive levels of heat, like from a ramped-up Lung or Endbringer. They were tougher than diamonds. But this was different. As I moved more bots into the area, I could feel them being attacked, by something that was as small as they were. And it wasn't random, the way massive heat or pressure tended to be. It was like something simply snipped my bots in half at precisely the same spot on each one, disabling them and taking them out of my control.
There was a weird bacteria that I had never seen before, concentrated at the house, that was excreting some kind of enzyme that seemed to be purpose-built for breaking down my bots. That couldn't have been a natural bacteria.
"Hey Dragon? Can you tell if there's something happen–" I tried to confirm.
At the same time, all the computer screens and lights and panels inside the transport shattered. I felt my phone in my pocket explode, and only my bots managed to protect me from that. Then Dragon's transport began to crash. Dragon didn't say anything through the radio, and the sound of both engines cut off suddenly. I felt the weightlessness as we dropped out of the sky in free-fall.
Everyone reacted at once. Well, they must have been alerted by the fact that their phones had all been destroyed at the same time the transport faltered. The flyers of New Wave instinctively started flying, but with the seat belts pulling them down with the vehicle, they all scrambled to undo the restraints. Meanwhile, I took all the bots I had in the ship and swarmed them over myself and Panacea to form armour. Manpower was a Brute; he could take the impact if he needed to.
Glory Girl ripped herself out of her seat easily. She kicked open the door, exposing us massive winds, and a view of the approaching ground. At least we weren't high enough that the difference in pressure could cause anything to get sucked out. Glory Girl flew outside, gripped the entire transport, and started pulling.
All of us felt the snap as our fall suddenly slowed. Still, this massive, complex machine was bigger than anything I'd ever seen Glory Girl lift. I knew she tried bench-pressing a cement mixer before, but she never tried anything bigger than that because she kind of got in trouble for denting the frame of the truck. I didn't know if this thing was beyond her limits.
We were slowing down, but the ground was still approaching at an uncomfortable rate. The extra few seconds Glory Girl bought me just enough time to reinforce the armour I was giving my team, and add a slightly thicker layer of cushioning. Laserdream managed to get outside, while Shielder formed a bubble around the rest of us.
The impact was not pleasant.
But with our team working together, all of us survived. I was expecting some bruising later, but no broken bones. There was some more tearing of metal as Glory Girl opened up another exit to help us escape. Lady Photon and Shielder helped lift me and Panacea out,
"Alright team, is everyone okay?" Lady Photon asked everyone once we were all on the ground. "I think my leg's pretty scratched up from the broken glass."
"Me too," said Laserdream.
"Me three," Shielder added. There were nods all around. Manpower only took damage to his costume, given his Brute powers, and Glory Girl's shield saved her.
"I can fix up everyone," Panacea said.
"I'll patch you up too," I told her.
I pulled out my phone. What had been one of the top-of-the-line pieces of technology direct from Dragon herself was now just a useless brick. From what I could see with my bots, all glass in Brockton Bay had shattered, along with the most of the cars along the highway. The shattering was progressing towards Manchester. I had to use most of my bots to help all the victims stem the blood loss, but there were so many people injured simultaneously I didn't even know if I had enough.
"Where are we?" Glory Girl asked. We had crashed in the middle of a field with no particular defining features and rather far from the actual highways. However, since I was connected to my network of brains, I could tell where I was.
"Middle of nowhere," I answered her. "But Concord is about fifteen miles that way, and Brockton's about twenty-five that way. Manchester is probably the closest though, only a few miles in that direction." I pointed out the directions for all of them.
"You've got an amazing sense of direction," Manpower said.
"Uh, it's a talent?" I tried to deflect. Panacea and Glory Girl rolled their eyes at my little slip-up. "But let's get to the highway first," I said.
Everyone agreed with that easily. The team mostly flew, with some piggybacking, to the nearest road. Now everyone else could see the shattered glass among all the cars on the highway. Panacea rushed over to help heal each person with a touch.
"There's only one cape I can think of that can do this," Brandish said.
"Shatterbird," Glory Girl said softly.
"Which means the rest of the Slaughterhouse Nine are nearby," Lady Photon said.
"What should we do?"
"Stick together," Shielder said instantly. "This isn't some stupid horror movie."
"Agreed. But where should we go?"
"Brockton Bay."
"Concord."
"Manchester."
Everyone seemed to be of a totally different opinion.
"Manchester's closest. We have the best chance of regrouping with the Protectorate or other heroes there," Shielder pointed out. He wasn't wrong. A lot of people who left Brockton had ended up in Manchester as well as Concord. There were a lot of parahumans, both Protectorate and rogues, that were already working together as volunteers, from what I could see with my bots. But Shatterbird was already there by now, and that city was now in chaos as well. Did we really want to jump into that?
"I want to check up on my dad, so maybe Concord first," I said, trying to hint at the strange happenings I was sensing – or not sensing – from my bots. I knew someone must have been there, most likely Bonesaw. But I hadn't sensed any panic or fear from my dad. Not before, not even now, with the bots inside his body. Whatever was happening was weird, but I couldn't be completely certain he was in danger.
"Brockton might need our help the most, though," Lady Photon said. "I'm pretty sure Tagg is going to be completely in over his head."
"Wait, wait, wait. There's almost nothing left in Brockton as it is. Why there?" Laserdream asked.
"It's probably where they hit. The Slaughterhouse picks on the weak, undefended small towns, and they only hit cities after a disaster weakened them. Post-Leviathan Brockton is probably their ideal target."
I tried looking through my bots to confirm.
There was certainly a lot of chaos happening in Brockton Bay at the moment, but only part of that could be attributed to Slaughterhouse members. Shatterbird had already done her thing and left the city. The most visually striking members were Crawler, a monstrosity the size of a small truck; Mannequin, a tall humanoid robot; and the Siberian, the naked zebra lady. None of them were strolling around the city. The other members were known to undergo regular surgery to change their looks thanks to Bonesaw. And I was pretty sure Bonesaw was in Concord at this point.
However, there were plenty of places for them to hide. There had been dozens, if not hundreds, of trucks and buses passing through the city. Which other ones were still there was the question.
Tagg had received the reinforcements he had requested, though many of them were scrambling to reorganize with their radios all broken. Lung was ramping up, looking for a fight, and his followers were now fleeing his presence. Shatterbird was long gone, though, and he had nobody to fight.
Unless Tagg decided to be stupid.
"Stand down, Lung!" he shouted, and ordered the troops to point their weapons at him.
Did he even look at the file the PRT had on Lung? The Brockton natives, and the troops who had bothered to read, refused the order. Still, the out-of-towners or idiots who just followed orders mindlessly were enough to trigger Lung into ramping up even more.
I decided it was probably safer just to knock them all out. Once they collapsed, Abyssal collected their bodies and dragged them away. Lung looked at Abyssal curiously, but made no hostile moves as his flames began to die down. He gave an amused grunt of approval. Not that I was actually looking for his approval. Damnit.
Meanwhile, I was still trying to help treat everybody across the whole city. There had only just been enough medicine and supplies delivered to treat the Leviathan victims, not an entire slew of new victims from glass shattering citywide. And add to the fact that most of the more potent and expensive drugs were stored in glass vials. All we were left with was basically alcohol sanitizer and some topical creams to work with. My bots had to do what they could with the shortage, and treating everyone at once meant I was having even more trouble keeping watch over the streets with my bots.
Maybe I could ask Dragon – no, wait, Dragon was down. Sure, she was personally safe in Vancouver at the moment, but she had literally just sent over nearly every single drone she had to help with the Leviathan relief effort. Every single one of which was now a piece of scrap lying on the ground, scattered around Brockton Bay. Maybe she had a few reserve suits on the other side of the continent. Maybe she had some Shatterbird-proof suits ready, somewhere. But we couldn't depend on her help for now.
Did the Slaughterhouse Nine have a Thinker with them or something, who always happened to have perfect strategy or something? I had to wonder how they could avoid being annihilated by the Triumvirate and other powerful teams. Then again, the Siberian had killed one of the original Triumvirate. Maybe they were avoiding her specifically, because if someone like Alexandria or Eidolon died, they considered it worse than the thousands the Slaughterhouse killed each year.
For all I knew, they could have been mixed into the population for a long time now. They could have been anywhere. Where could I even begin my search? Who could I rule out? Where could Abyssal direct people for safety?
I suppose, as luck would have it, there was one place within Brockton the Slaughterhouse couldn't possibly be. That final Endbringer shelter buried underground, which had been sealed up since before Leviathan arrived. It had finally been opened up, just before Shatterbird came. The people were exploring the damp, dark, and tilted structure cautiously, looking for survivors. And when Shatterbird did her thing, all the flashlights the people were using now broke, injuring the rescuers themselves.
I had to flood my bots in there to rescue them now and create a safe zone. There was no way these people would be able to climb their way out of the pitch-black, off-angle interior by themselves, and I needed it to be defensible against the likes of the Slaughterhouse.
There was shouting coming from deeper inside. So clearly, there were survivors in there. Deeper down, there was some glowing – green and orange glow sticks. The rescuers paused their evacuation and yelled.
"Anyone there?"
"Hey! What's happening? Who's that?"
"We're the rescue crew! Some shit just happened, and most of our equipment broke. You guys down there need any supplies?"
"FOOD! Raw meat if you've got it!" came the shout back up.
"What? This ain't the time to be asking for a steak dinner, mate. We got some granola bars if we're lucky. Hang tight, we'll get you out!"
The few people started going deeper down into the shelter, lowering more rope as they went. With the flashlights broken, they had to navigate entirely by glow-sticks and shouting. But eventually, they found their way to a group of people at the bottom.
Capes.
The fucking Travellers. So that's where they had been hiding out this entire time. Right behind them was a massive vault door, practically bank-vault sized.
"We gotta get out of here, man. Noelle, she needs help. She's in there," Trickster said.
There was some banging from inside the vault door. It was strong enough to cause the whole thing to shake, causing an ominous gonging sound to echo through the nearly-empty shelter.
"We don't have a way to open that. She trapped in there?"
"Yeah, and she needs food, bad," Trickster said. "I ain't giving up on her. She can only eat raw meat, too, she's got a condition. I ain't fucking around here."
"Alright. HEY, WE GOT SURVIVORS!" shouted the lead rescuer. The message got repeated up the chain to the entrance.
"We're getting them out! There's some more rope and harnesses! Watch out for the glass!"
Damnit. Did these people not realize the Slaughterhouse Nine were here? I supposed in this part of town, all the glass was alreadybroken, so maybe they had chalked it up to equipment malfunction. I quickly formed Abyssal at the entrance and said, "Danger. Slaughterhouse Nine."
Everyone started to panic, rightly so. I didn't actually want them leaving the shelter. As broken as it was, it would have to serve as a shelter for a little bit longer. I had my bots enter the bodies of each of the people I could sense in the area just to check and see if they had any signs of odd surgery to their faces.
"Stay. Don't move."
Excavation crew – nope, nope and nope. Volunteers one through ten – one of them had a nose job, but that was it. Rescuer one – nope. Rescuer two – nope. Three, four, and five – wait, what was up with the second-last guy?
"Oh, I just knew there would be treasure waiting for us in Brockton Bay. Don't worry, if you want raw meat, I'll get you raw meat!"
He was the guy down the line, right behind the man who had been talking to Trickster. He'd been pretending to be a rescuer this whole time?
Even worse was the woman behind him, she was instantly recognizable. She hadn't been there a second ago, and she just appeared there with a hand on the speaker's shoulder.
Naked, striped like a zebra, and fingernails like claws, everyone who saw her knew they wouldn't be getting out of this alive.
One started scrambling up the rope back to the entrance as fast as he could.
One of the Travelers made a last-ditch attempt to kill Jack. Several ball bearings and pebbles flew at him as fast as bullets, and the capes had barely moved.
They just pinged off Jack as if he were made of stone. Heck, at those speeds even stone would chip. Absolutely nothing happened to Jack at all. I tried to get inside his body with my bots as well, with no luck. There was nothing to him, no gaps, not even molecules or chemical bonds for my bots to break through. Whatever protection he had was literally tighter than atoms. Jack grinned.
The rescuer standing in the middle of all of this fainted.
"Well well, I was hoping for a little more so we could share," Jack said. "Siberian, if you please?"
The Siberian sprinted up towards the entrance. Every single person she passed by was killed with a single swipe, ripping through muscle, bone, and viscera like five impossibly sharp knives all at once.
She came back holding half a body in each hand and one in her mouth, blood dripping all over her body.
"What do you want?" Trickster asked, knowing he was outclassed.
"What I want? I just want to make friends! We even came bearing gifts!"
The Siberian clawed at the vault door. The huge reinforced steel hinges and bolts shattered under her strength so quickly they may as well have been made of paper. The entire door fell down with a thunderous crash.
A screaming mass of flesh made of hundreds of mouths and tentacles rushed towards him. The young girl, attached to the very top of the mass, croaked out, "Hungry..." She looked at Jack Slash like he was her next meal. "FOOD!"
"Well, good thing we brought you snacks! You know, if you come with us, you can eat as much as you like..." Jack said.
The Siberian tossed the remains of the rescue workers towards her. The writhing mouths that made up her lower body didn't hesitate to snatch the workers up, tearing them apart as they each fought to get a mouthful.