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Rating:
Teen And Up Audiences
Archive Warning:
No Archive Warnings Apply
Fandoms:
Parahumans Series - WildbowVampire: The Masquerade
Characters:
Taylor Hebert | Skitter | WeaverLasombra Antediluvian (Vampire: The Masquerade)
Additional Tags:
Canon-Typical ViolenceAlt-Power Taylor HebertCompetent Parahuman Response Team | PRT
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English
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Published:2025-06-22Updated:2026-02-11Words:157,182Chapters:25/?Comments:650Kudos:1,403Bookmarks:540Hits:75,925
Abyssal Escalation
Zahariel_Scholar
Chapter 20: Predator
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
TEETH RETURN TO THEIR ROOTS
The PRT has issued a warning that the infamous gang known as the Teeth, who left Brockton Bay years ago following a series of violent clashes with the Empire 88, Marquis, and the Slaughterhouse Nine, are returning to the city.
In a press conference this morning, the BBPD and PRT have issued a joint statement recommending all citizens remain indoor at night until the situation has been dealt with. However, most Brocktonites we've reached to ask about this believe that Lasombra will be the one to handle the Teeth …
Extract from the headlines of the newspaper Bay Gazette, March 3rd, 2011.
Dinah turned and tossed in her bed, trying and failing to fall asleep. There was nothing wrong with her bed or her room : when Dinah had been sent to New York the moment it had become clear the Teeth were coming to Brockton Bay, the PRT had made sure to secure comfortable accommodations. Dinah wasn't sure how much of that was due to her family's wealth, and how much to her immense value to the PRT, but she suspected it was more the latter.
No, she couldn't sleep because she couldn't stop thinking about what was happening back home. The adults had tried to keep her from hearing too much, because they were still treating her like a little kid when they weren't asking her questions about what some of the worst gangs in the USA were planning, but she could put two and two together just as well as anyone else.
She hadn't been allowed to use her questions to help the PRT plan their response to the Teeth because her handlers feared that she would somehow end up inheriting if her predictions led to the Butcher's death. It was a fear Dinah understood all too well : she might be too small and weak to be able to use her power for herself, but the PRT had been able to make great use of Omen's predictive abilities. If she became the host of the Butcher collective, added her precognition to their sheer parahuman might … she wouldn't be invincible, but it would take the likes of the Triumvirate or Lasombra himself to deal with her.
(And she didn't want Lasombra to have to fight her, and not just because he was the Endkiller. It was Lasombra who had killed Coil and stopped the supervillain from abducting her, despite her power's repeated warnings that it was inevitable.)
So it made sense that the PRT would keep her away from that mess, even more so than the rest of the Wards who had been evacuated from Brockton Bay. Missy wasn't happy about it; she'd complained that they'd stayed in the Bay when faced with the Empire or Lung, but were running away from a bunch of drug addicted cannibals. The rest of the team had been surprised when Clockblocker, of all people, had told her that a Butchered Vista was a nightmare scenario none of them wanted to have to deal with, because she would be unstoppable by anyone but 'their beloved King of Darkness, hallowed be His name'.
And that had been that. A heartfelt, serious moment, followed by a joke to lighten the mood. Clockblocker could be smooth when he felt motivated to, and according to Missy, he'd been a lot more motivated ever since Panacea had gotten around to healing his father, now that her workload had been lightened thanks to the gangs being crushed by Lasombra. She liked Clockblocker, even if Missy found his jokes lame. She had a feeling Missy said she didn't like his jokes more because she wanted to be treated as an adult than because she actually didn't like them.
She tossed in her bed again. And again. And again. After another twenty minutes or so, she couldn't help herself. She reached out with her power, and asked :
Chances that Lasombra is possessed by the Butcher by tomorrow morning ?
As always when it came to the Endkiller, her power was completely silent. It was a comforting silence, and finally, Dinah fell asleep, holding on to her belief that the world would be better tomorrow – a belief that still felt strange, even now; and, she suspected, not just to her.
To say that Freddy wasn't feeling confident about the Teeth's return to Brockton Bay would have been a pretty fucking massive understatement. He hadn't been part of the gang when the Teeth had left the city (apart from Butcher, almost nobody was left of the Teeth back then), but he had heard the stories, passed down from one member to another. The gangs of Brockton Bay had made the rest of the Eastern Coast's criminals look like amateurs when it came to sheer violence, and the heroes had counted some of the most powerful white hats outside the Triumvirate on the continent before the city had become the personal territory of the cape who had single-handedly wiped out the two top gangs and then gone on to kill the fucking Simurgh.
From the way Butcher talked about it, it sounded like she wanted Lasombra to kill her, just so that the inheritance could get a stronger host. And sure, having the Endkiller as the Butcher sounded great … for the Butcher collective, who would become the strongest motherfucker on the planet (bar Scion, maybe, but even the golden boy had never been able to kill the Endbringers). Not so much for the rest of the Teeth.
But talking back to the Butcher when they were in one of their moods was a quick way to get yourself killed. So nobody had said anything where the boss could hear. A few had run away before the departure, claiming to be going out to get supplies and never coming back. Cowards, the lot of them. Freddy had stayed with the gang, and not just because he'd been hammered out of his mind until the time had come to board the fleet of cars, vans, and trucks the Teeth had 'acquired' in Boston.
Still, once they'd arrived, Freddy thought they should have found some place to hide in the outskirts and waited for dawn. But Butcher had ordered the gang to go straight in, start shooting in the air, drive the locals before them, and steal everything that wasn't nailed down. It wasn't like Lasombra really needed it to be night to go out; everyone knew that the cape had blotted out the fucking sun and sky in order to fight the Simurgh in the middle of the day. But maybe, just maybe, the Endkiller wouldn't pull out the big guns just to deal with the Teeth. There were rumors online that he'd really needed to push himself to do that in Canberra, and had taken days to recover, after all.
Fuck it. It was done; he might as well enjoy it. There was no denying the excitement they all felt from doing this underneath the tension and the fear that no amount of bravado (and drugs, let's not forget the drugs) could suppress. There were very few gangs in the United States who would dare to roam the streets like a horde of barbarians, and the Teeth were the baddest and biggest of them.
It was a challenge to the heroes, daring them to come face the wrath of the Teeth. And, predictably, one that they had answered, which was why Freddy was taking cover behind the burned-out husk of a car that had gotten caught in the crossfire, shooting blindly in the direction of the PRT troopers, while the capes clashed with their mighty powers.
It was chaos, and Freddy couldn't help but love it. Amidst the buzzing of bullets and shouting, with death just one mistake away, he felt alive, in a way no combination of drugs, alcohol and sex could ever really match. Overhead, he saw the Butcher leap from roof to roof, trading shots with Armsmaster and Miss Militia –
Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.
That sound. Freddy had read about that sound, had heard it from the transmission from Canberra's homage ceremony, even as the images stopped coming due to its source's Stranger effect. It cut through the mayhem of battle, far louder than it had any right to be, and all who heard it knew what it meant :
Lasombra had come. Out of nowhere, he was suddenly walking down the street toward the Teeth's position, looking for all the world like he was taking a relaxing evening stroll instead of walking straight into a cape fight.
From where he and Battery were engaging Vex, Assault laughed.
"You absolute morons," he gasped, out of breath. "Do you realize just how fucked you are ?"
Freddy had been in enough fights with capes to know that the whole thing about people freezing in fear when someone strong joined in only happened in comic books. In the real world, cape fights were short, brutal, and messy, and only a rank amateur would freeze – and there were no amateurs in the Teeth.
But this was different. This was Lasombra. This was the Endkiller. He radiated a presence that weighed down on everyone around him. Here was a cape who had blotted out the fucking sun, taken on the Simurgh, and decapitated the fucking feathered bitch by using a fucking gate to Hell as the guillotine.
Maybe it had been different before, when nobody knew what exactly Lasombra was capable of. But now ? You couldn't just ignore that kind of rep. It drew attention, and commanded respect.
It reminded Freddy of a book he'd read one day, while taking refuge from the cold inside a public library, back when he'd just been another runaway, before he'd joined the Teeth. He didn't remember the title, just that it'd been about a bunch of elves terrifying the shit out of a bunch of peasants, before being stopped by … had it been witches ? He wasn't sure. The point was, there'd been something in that book about words and their meaning.
Anyway, to paraphrase the old guy who'd written it : yeah, Lasombra was awesome. He caused awe. And yeah, he was terrific. He caused terror. And Freddy could feel that terror like a cold hand closing around his heart.
Back when Freddy was a kid, his family had been very religious. His mom had done her best to try to make it take in him too, but he'd never believed like she did. Even as a brat, it'd been obvious to him the whole world was going to shit, and there was nothing anyone could do to stop it.
Looking at Lasombra, it was very, very hard not to feel like God was real, and He had sent the darkest of His angels to Earth-Bet to clean up the mess the uppity monkeys had made of Eden.
It was Butcher who broke the stand-off. She jumped down right in front of Lasombra, bow in one hand and an explosive arrow in another.
"Hey there, Shadow Guy," she greeted Lasombra mockingly. "We've been waiting for you for a while now. What, you scared ?"
"BUTCHER," Lasombra said, and that single word carried in it enough threat to make all but the most strong-willed capes turn tail and run – or, given Butcher's laughter, the most insane.
Fuck, but Freddy wished he'd had the good sense to not get drunk when Butcher had announced they were going to Brockton Bay and run away in the night with the rest of the cowards. Sure, he'd probably have gotten arrested within the week, but at least he wouldn't be standing within twenty meters of the thing which could talk like that.
"Lasombra," Armsmaster called down from the rooftops. "Don't do anything hasty."
"Aww, let him, you metal fuck. How about it, Shadow Guy ? If you kill me, you become the next me," the Butcher taunted. "And if you don't, then I'm going to wreck this city until everybody accepts it's mine. So what's it going to be ?"
Again, there was silence. And then, Lasombra said :
"ENOUGH."
The Endkiller flickered, and suddenly he was right in front of Butcher, his black hand wrapped around her throat. There was an explosion as Butcher activated her teleport to escape Lasombra's grip, reappearing on the roof of a nearby building, already drawing her bow. But Lasombra wasn't where she was aiming – he was right behind her, having moved in the time between eye blinks. Butcher's Combat Thinker power (at least, Freddy assumed that was what it was) kicked in just in time to avoid being smacked over the head by Lasombra's cane. Instead, it hit her shoulder, hard enough that Freddy heard the crack all the way down in the street.
She screamed, dropped her arrow, and reset her arm into place with another sickening crunch, before leaping backward to avoid another strike.
Freddy had seen the Butcher fight a bunch of times. Except when they were fighting in the pit, against a challenger for the mantle, they always had the advantage that their opponent was holding back, scared of accidentally killing them and ending up with the collective in their head. Combined with the fact the Protectorate didn't dare send any of the real heavy-hitters after the Teeth out of fear of exactly that happening to them (which was a shame in Freddy's opinion, because the mental image of Alexandria as the Butcher was metal as fuck), it was very rare for the Butcher to face someone who could genuinely give them a run for their money.
Right now, though ? The Butcher was the one forced on the defensive. Lasombra didn't fight like a cape; he fought like something out of a horror movie, flickering all across the battlefield and sending black tentacles at Butcher, forcing her to keep using her own explosive teleport to dodge. Whenever Butcher managed to get enough distance between them to fire an arrow in his direction, he either caught the projectile before it hit (which shouldn't be fucking possible given what Freddy knew of Quarrel's power) or tanked the explosion as if it was a fucking firecracker.
Freddy kept watching the fight, until someone punched him in the jaw. He had a brief flash of Battery, and then fell unconscious, while around him the fight resumed, the side of the law a lot more motivated now that Lasombra had arrived.
As I chased Butcher across the neighbourhood's rooftops, I felt my temper steadily rising.
When I'd received the news that the Teeth were coming to Brockton Bay, I had already been rather annoyed that someone had seen fit to barge into the Undersiders' lair and threaten them.
The woman Lisa had described had clearly a powerful Thinker power, but one that couldn't handle me for the same reason Lisa's couldn't (or the Simurgh, for that matter). Whatever the origin of parahuman powers was, it didn't understand the Abyss and the abilities Lau-Som-Bheu had derived from it.
Lisa thought the woman in the fedora was a representative of some sort of conspiracy at the highest levels of parahuman powers, which Alexandria (in both her identities as superheroine and Chief Director of the PRT) and Legend were apparently involved in. She'd admitted to me that it was possible that her power had come to erroneous conclusions; it had happened before, particularly where I was concerned.
For now, I hadn't accessed the link to a PHO chatroom the woman had left with the Undersiders. I'd wanted to take some time to think about it (and, if I was honest with myself, to stamp down on my initial response, which had been to track down the woman by any means necessary and express my displeasure to her in a pointed manner). Then the news of the Teeth arriving to the Bay had hit, and I'd had more pressing concerns than a nebulous parahuman conspiracy wanting to secretly make contact with me and deciding the best way to do so was to threaten my associates.
This had all left me with quite a bit of frustration to work out, and I wasn't above using the Butcher as a punching bag. Her regeneration meant that they could take more of a beating than any parahuman I'd fought since Lung (well, except for Alabaster, but I didn't really count our singular encounter as a 'fight', and the Simurgh didn't count because it wasn't and had never been a parahuman), and was similar enough to the vampiric Discipline of Fortitude for Lau-Som-Bheu's memories to continue assisting me in holding back my strength just enough to avoid killing her by accident. Which, unfortunately, was still a concern I needed to worry about.
As much as I'd told the PRT I had a way of dealing with Butcher's inheritance, doing so without collateral damage was still something of an issue. I was reasonably certain I didn't need to be scared of inheriting myself : I wasn't a parahuman, after all, and the entities behind the powers clearly had difficulties grasping my existence. The issue was keeping the curse of the Butcher from passing onto someone else. The most obvious solution was keeping the current Butcher alive, but her teleporting power made that difficult.
Even if I hit her hard enough to knock her out, she would have to wake up eventually, unless the Protectorate had some plan to keep her continuously drugged unconscious – and if they did, there was a risk she'd react badly to whatever Tinkertech drugs they'd need to use to overcome her regeneration, at which point the Tinker would be in danger of inheriting. Given what I suspected about the origin of parahuman powers, I had a feeling trying to 'game the system', so to speak, was guaranteed to not just fail, but backfire horribly, and I couldn't have that.
If for no other reason than maintaining my reputation, I needed to deal with the problem in a permanent manner. Fortunately, a few hours of thinking hard about this and delving into my inherited memories had led me to the answer.
I just needed the right opportunity, but Butcher wasn't making this easy. By now, she had run out of arrows for her bow and thrown it away. Her offensive powers didn't work on my projection, so she was forced to choose between trying to escape or going for close-quarters fighting with the cape who had traded punches with the Simurgh.
Predictably, she chose the latter option, and charged me with a ferocity that wouldn't have shamed one of Troile's brood.
I dodged the Butcher's attempt to hit me with her impractically large sword, then caught her wrist and slammed my cane into the Tinkertech blade, causing it to explode into a burst of shards that embedded themselves into the ground, the nearby buildings, and Butcher herself. She screamed, more in outrage at seeing her weapon destroyed than in pain, and before she could recover, I tore her mask away, revealing a face covered in scars and tattoos, and stared into her eyes. She immediately froze in shock as my Domination took hold, and the inner workings of her mind were revealed to me.
Fuck. This … this was bad.
Her mind was a mutilated, feral thing, driven to madness by the voices of her predecessors, only allowed brief moments of sanity whenever it suited their purpose – and right now, that purpose was to get her killed by me so that they could add the Endkiller to their collective. She hadn't been a good person by any stretch of the imagination before inheriting, but nobody deserved to have this happen to them. It reminded me of what the worst of Malkav's brood had been capable of, when they really cut loose with their abilities and unleashed the full, horrific power of their Clan.
However, this wasn't Dementation. From what Lau-Som-Bheu had been able to figure out (and even he had been wary of studying his cousin's gift too closely), Malkav's descendants worked by messing around with the connection between soul and body, whereas the Butcher's inheritance worked on a purely material level. The 'voices' were the result of the Butcher's power directly interfering with the brain of its host, while it emulated … engrams, that was probably the best word for it, of the previous Butchers. This wasn't true necromancy or immortality, merely a collection of flawed echoes grafted unto the latest host's psyche by her power, who now sought to discard her and replace her with me.
Ha. As if I would let that happen.
I could help her, but not as easily as I had Night and Fog. It was time to enact my plan, and hope that I hadn't made a potentially terrible miscalculation.
I seized the Butcher, and dragged her with my projection into the Abyss. It took effort to keep Lasombra from dissipating back into the shadow-stuff from which I'd sculpted him, but I managed it. I didn't want to just chuck the Butcher into the Abyss and forget about her; it would have dealt with the problem, yes, but she was still a person, not the Simurgh, and how much she'd been in control of her own actions at any point since becoming the Butcher was something I didn't feel comfortable deciding until there was absolutely no other option. Also, for all I knew her power would be able to curse someone else anyway if I did that.
We appeared in the Abyssal reflection of Castel d'Ombro, still standing even after I'd defeated Lau-Som-Bheu's remnant. Specifically, we appeared in the mirrored corridor Dad had described to me, the one where he'd first seen Queen Administrator on his way to the throne room.
"What the fuck – " Butcher began, but I silenced her, one hand held tight around her jaw.
"STOP," I ordered her, and she froze in place. My command would also keep her from using her powers – I was curious to see if her teleport still worked here, but not enough to risk her getting loose.
Queen Administrator was connected to Dad, just like every parahuman had something connected to them. When planning this confrontation, I had assumed that, if I brought another parahuman in the gallery to stand before the memory echo of the Mirror of Revelations, it would show something similar.
In the Butcher – no. In Quarrel's case, however, she didn't have a single connection, but several – one for every Butcher before her. Over a dozen horrors, smaller than the Queen, pulling and tearing at Quarrel's psyche. Furthermore, one of them, the largest, had things I could only call tentacles burrowing into the flesh of the others – presumably, this was the original Butcher power. Another tentacle was unique in that it looked dead, the only motion it made caused by the Butcher power puppeteering it like some demented carnival attraction.
The Mirror did more than just make the connections visible, however. One advanced manifestation of vampiric mind-control (a power which was one of the Lasombra Clan's hallmarks) was the ability to possess a body and pilot them remotely. One of the uses of the Mirror was to expose such possessions, and make it possible to break them – violently. The elders of Clan Lasombra had done precisely that many times, both against their rivals and against spies sent by the other vampire bloodlines. But they had all learned the trick from watching Lau-Som-Bheu himself do it first, and later improved on the technique, only for the Antediluvian to steal all their tricks for himself.
I wondered if any of the Clan of Shadows had ever realized that one of the main purposes of their existence was to provide improvements to Lau-Som-Bheu's mastery of his own blood's mystical power in order to fuel his quest for power. I suspected Montano, at least, had had an inkling of the truth before his sire had abandoned him and the entire Clan when he'd orchestrated Gratiano's 'assassination'.
It didn't matter. Lau-Som-Bheu was dead and gone, and I had enough problems on Earth-Bet without travelling the Abyss trying to find his trail back to the world he had come from.
Drawing upon the plundered memories of my predecessor, I conjured a blade of shadows, and, using the reflection for guidance, started by cutting off the Butcher power from the others, so that even if it found a new host, that poor bastard wouldn't end with fourteen powers and fourteen powers screaming into their head.
I didn't know which connection was Quarrel's original power, and frankly, I didn't care. I severed all the connections between her and the lesser powers, and the moment each creature wasn't linked to her, it disappeared, unable to maintain its existence in the Abyss without a connection to a human soul through its host. Maybe it killed them in the process, like the Simurgh, but I doubted it. It was difficult to put into words, but I felt like the horrors revealed by the Mirror were only the link between parahuman and the entities responsible for bestowing powers upon their chosen host.
Queen Administrator had spoken to Dad, but none of the powers tried to communicate with me; or if they did, I couldn't hear them through my projection. Maybe the Queen had only been able to talk to Dad because he was its parahuman host, though I'd never heard of a parahuman talking with his power before.
Eventually, only the Butcher power was connected to Quarrel. Dad had described Queen Administrator as 'a spider in the same way Leviathan was a fish', and I saw what he meant now. If Queen Administrator was a spider, then the Butcher was a squid, its severed tentacles flapping around impotently.
I thought of all the evil the Butcher had done, of the trail of bodies they had left across the United States. Of the hero who had become the third Butcher, back before the truth of the inheritance had become known; of how a good man had been driven insane by the emulated voices of two murderers, until he'd returned to the Teeth just so that someone would kill him and end his torment. I thought of all of that, and used it to fuel my rage.
"NEVER DO THIS AGAIN," I said to the power, cut it from Quarrel, and sliced it to pieces before it could fade away from the Abyssal pressure.
I had no idea whether this would do anything. Dominate wouldn't work on the entity; it was meant for human minds, and whatever these things were, they weren't human in the slightest.
But if nothing else, I wanted to send a message even the entity would be able to understand.
Legend landed on the street and took in the devastation. Many of the nearby buildings had been damaged, though mercifully there hadn't been much in the way of civilian casualties. The heroes had drawn on as much Thinker support as they dared to predict the direction and timing of the Teeth's approach, and used that information to keep people from being caught in the crossfire – but the data hadn't been perfect, and so people had died all the same before the PRT and BBPD had been able to deploy.
The moment Lasombra had vanished with the Butcher, Legend had moved out, flying from PHQ to the site of the battle in a handful of seconds. Until then, the possibility of a Triumvirate member inheriting had forced him to stay back, but that threat was gone. Before the remaining Teeth had been able to recover from the disappearance of their leader, he and the heroes already on the scene had been able to neutralize the gangbangers and villains.
Now it was done. The police and PRT vans were arriving to take custody of the criminals, while the capes … waited. Perhaps in vain : Lasombra's Mover rating meant that he could be anywhere by now, and he might not return to this location. But just in case –
Tap. Tap. Tap.
It was remarkable how loud a single sound could be, even with the ambient noise of dozens of people close by. Every hero (and everyone else, apart from a few EMTs who were too busy or professional to give in to the impulse) turned to look at the source of the sound.
Lasombra walked out of an alleyway, his black suit as impeccable as ever. A burst of relief nearly overcame Legend as he saw no change in the cape's behavior compared to before – no twitches, sudden movements, or anything else indicating he was currently being verbally assaulted by the voices of thirteen deranged maniacs and one hero who'd been driven over the edge of sanity.
And behind him, dragged by the collar of her ridiculously overwrought armor as if she weighed nothing more than a kitten and looking about as threatening by comparison, was Butcher.
"LEGEND," Lasombra nodded in his direction, before turning to Colin and doing the same. "ARMSMASTER."
"Lasombra," asked Legend. "Are you still yourself ?"
The Endkiller nodded once more.
"And what of Butcher ?" asked Colin.
Lasombra tossed Butcher on the street between them. She didn't move, but Legend saw from the rising and falling of her chest that she was still alive.
"POWER. GONE." The shadows said, just as creepily as when Legend had heard them at Canberra. "VOICES. GONE."
Legend blinked as the meaning behind the words dawned on him.
"You … you removed her powers ?" he asked, unable to believe what he had just heard. "All of them ?"
"YES."
That was … terrifying, if true – and Legend didn't have any reason to think Lasombra would bother to lie about this. Cauldron had ways of achieving the same things, sure, but it required a lot of setup, and the parahuman they used for it was only capable of doing this thing, and nothing more. Lasombra being able to do this in addition to all his other powers was … well.
He was going to strangle Doctor Mother if her asking Contessa to lean on the Undersiders to get in touch with Lasombra backfired. The Endkiller wasn't some warlord or supervillain Cauldron could threaten into compliance, and he trusted Tattletale enough to have her act as his intermediary with the PRT. Given that they were pretty sure the Thinker had figured out Rebecca's double identity from just the remote meeting at PHQ, they absolutely shouldn't have given her ammunition against them.
This was a symptom of something wrong with Cauldron on a deeper level, he was forced to admit to himself. They had become too used to not only rely on Contessa's power, but also on harsh methods, because for the longest time, these had been the only things that seemed to work. They had tried to be kinder, softer; God help them, but they had tried, and the reality of their hopeless struggle had ground their principles into the dirt. It wasn't until Lasombra had killed the Simurgh that Legend had been able to look himself into the mirror and honestly think he looked hopeful, rather than plastering on a smile to reassure others.
He shook his head and refocused himself. As much as he wanted to apologize to Lasombra right now, he couldn't, not when there were other people around who would ask questions.
"Thank you for your assistance, Lasombra," he said to the Endkiller. Lasombra stared at him, or at least he assumed so, given the other cape's lack of visible features.
"UNDERSTOOD," he said, and that single word seemed to carry a wealth of meaning – as if he could see Legend's internal struggles and empathized with them. "I –"
Suddenly, Lasombra stopped talking, and his head snapped to the side, staring into the distance. Following his gaze, Legend didn't see anything out of the ordinary.
"What's wrong ?" he asked Lasombra, while preparing to fight if the other cape had detected some threat the PRT hadn't noticed yet.
"SOMETHING … SOMEONE. IS. CALLING. ME."
And then Lasombra was gone, swallowed once more by the darkness, leaving the Triumvirate member very confused, with the unconscious ex-Butcher laid on the ground at his feet.
Legend blinked.
"Does anyone have eyes on Lasombra ?" he called out over the radio, only to be met with a chorus of negatives. Next to him, he heard Armsmaster ask the same to Dragon, whose mechanical eyes were ironically best suited to detecting the Endkiller's presence, even if the AI couldn't see him.
Nothing, despite the Protectorate having deployed a number of camera drones over Brockton Bay tonight in preparation for the Teeth's arrival. Of course, Lasombra had shown that his Mover power reached far beyond the city …
… but the last thing which had drawn the Endkiller outside of Brockton Bay had been the Simurgh's attack on Canberra. So what the hell had attracted his attention now ?!
Jack smiled as he took in the devastation. It was, in his humble opinion, a good start to the festivities.
As usual, they had sent Shatterbird ahead to soften up the little, insignificant town they had chosen to be the site of their next art project and to make sure nobody would be able to interfere with their work. Every window and phone screen was in pieces, and just to be sure, Alan had built something which would block all transmissions in and out of the area. In time, someone would notice the dead zone and come investigate, but they would be long since done and gone by then. All that would be left would be the art pieces they'd have made, and Bonesaw's party favors for the late guests.
He chuckled to himself. Yes, he was going to enjoy this. After days of denying Crawler his wish to travel to Brockton Bay to throw himself at Lasombra, this would make a pleasant distraction.
The sound of screaming near by drew his attention, and he saw Hatchet Face walk out of a small home, dragging a couple by the neck and bringing them toward Bonesaw's field 'hospital'. They struggled, of course, but to no avail.
Time to see what his poppet would come up with this time, he decided.
Notes:
AN : Sorry about that cliffhanger. In the original draft, there was supposed to be a pause between the Teeth and the S9, but people on the SB thread kept mentioning that Taylor has demonstrated she can feel strong enough emotions across half the planet if they are strong enough, and then Jack did Jack things.
And now he is going to pay for it. With a lot of accrued interest from the last ... *quick wiki check* ... 24 years ?! Good Gods.
I didn't plan for the next chapter to be released in the Halloween season, but I couldn't have timed it better if I'd tried, could I ? I'll try to have the next chapter ready before Halloween as well (rigth now, it's over 3k words).
Someone on SB mentioned that this story's version of Cauldron reads like they all are suffering from PTSD, and once I read that comment, I realized that yes, that does sound like what I've been trying to convey. Sure, we readers enjoy clowning on the discount Illuminati who couldn't even realize that one of their own was the source of the Endbringers. And don't get me wrong, it's fun and cathartic to read fanfics where they get dunked on. But for this story, I was going for something different : that they are desperately trying to keep civilization running and some portion of Humanity alive, and if it means they'll burn in Hell forever, well, you tend to lose faith in God after the umpteenth Endbringer attack anyway.
Still, as a lot of people commented on the last chapter, Taylor isn't exactly happy about Contessa threatening Lisa at the moment. They should probably feel relieved that she's been kept busy with more important problems ... or not, given what she's doing to said problems.
Oh well. Facing your mistakes is part of the process of becoming a better person, after all.
As always, I hope you enjoyed reading this chapter, and look forward to your thoughts and comments.
Zahariel out.
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Fandoms:
Parahumans Series - WildbowVampire: The Masquerade
Characters:
Taylor Hebert | Skitter | WeaverLasombra Antediluvian (Vampire: The Masquerade)
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Canon-Typical ViolenceAlt-Power Taylor HebertCompetent Parahuman Response Team | PRT
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English
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Published:2025-06-22Updated:2026-02-11Words:157,182Chapters:25/?Comments:650Kudos:1,403Bookmarks:540Hits:75,925
Abyssal Escalation
Zahariel_Scholar
Chapter 21: Monsters
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
When the windows had exploded, Dad and Mom had told Lucy to hide in the closet and to stay very, very quiet, because there were monsters around. Then they had left, because the closet was too small for them to hide inside with her, promising her that they would come back once it was safe for her to go outside.
They had been lying. Lucy was only six years old, but she'd known her parents were lying to her, even if she didn't understand why. But she was a good girl, so she had done what they had told her to do. She had stayed under the clothes they had thrown atop her, not moved, and not made any noise.
It had been a long time inside the closet. Or at least it felt like it. Lucy was scared. She could hear people screaming outside the home, and explosions, and other things she didn't recognize.
Lucy remembered something she had seen on the TV. The reporter had been talking to a woman who'd been in the shelters when the Simurgh had come down in Australia. For once, her parents hadn't told her to go to her room because the TV was showing grown-up stuff; instead, Mom had been hugging her and crying (but she'd told Lucy those were happy tears, which Lucy had found weird).
The woman had said that she had prayed for help, and that La-sonh-braa (Lucy had thought it was a weird name, and Dad had said it was Spanish, but Lucy hadn't started learning that in school yet) had appeared out of nowhere to save them.
So …
Please, the six-years old prayed as she cowered in the closet under a pile of her parents' clothes, thrown atop her in the desperate hope that it would be enough to save her life from the living nightmares who had ridden into their town. Please, Mister La-sonh-braa. Help us.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
That noise. She knew that noise, from that other time they'd watched the TV even though it had only shown people sitting at a desk looking very confused and embarrassed.
Slowly, Lucy opened her eyes, and looked through the crack of the closet's door.
And he was here, looking just like the drawn pictures shown on the TV. He was tall, and wearing all black, and he should have been very scary, but Lucy didn't care. She ran out of the closet, but her feet got caught on the clothes, and she started falling –
But La-sonh-braa was here, catching her and helping her stay up. She looked at him, her vision blurry with tears.
"Please," she begged, not sure what exactly she was asking for.
She must have gotten her message across, though, because La-sonh-braa nodded.
"SLEEP," he told her, and Lucy felt her eyes close.
But she didn't have any nightmares as she slept.
After laying down the sleeping child as comfortably as I could, I walked out of the house and into the main street, which was lined with wrecked cars. The night sky was lit up by several burning buildings. Shards of glass cracked under my feet, and there was the sound of screams in the distance. I could feel my projection twitching, flickering in and out of its human form in time with my rage, as I struggled to keep it under control. I couldn't lose control, couldn't go on a rampage. I needed to be calm, or I would regret it later.
But calm was very difficult to reach at the moment. The Simurgh had been a machine, soulless and mechanical. Its evil, while far greater in scale than anything the Slaughterhouse Nine had ever been able to cause, had been impersonal, as devoid of malice as a combine harvester toward the mice whose habitat it destroyed.
But this ? This was the work of humans, of people with free will.
I should have come here earlier. I should have dealt with the Teeth faster, and felt the terror of the people of this town the moment Shatterbird had screamed and the survivors had realized what it meant. But I had been in the Abyss instead, performing the eldritch equivalent of surgery on Butcher to remove her powers without having to kill her or condemning anyone else to the inheritance. It had been a worthy goal, but I should have done it quicker, or kept a metaphorical ear out for any other disturbances in the shadowscape.
And now, because I hadn't come fast enough, that little girl was going to be traumatized by this. Even if, by some miracle, her parents were still alive, she would carry the memory of this night to her dying day. It would haunt her, just like thousands of others whose lives had been shattered by the Slaughterhouse Nine across the country – so many that there were entire support groups dedicated to helping the survivors of the Nine's rampages. Even if I saved every person who was still alive in the hellscape the Nine had wrought around me, they would still be scarred for the rest of their lives.
And that. Made. Me. Angry.
The anger I had felt at the woman threatening the Undersiders to get to me, the fury that had been stoked by the Butcher's attack of my city, was nothing compared to what I felt now. I wasn't just going to kill the Slaughterhouse Nine. I was going to destroy them.
I would make it so that, when people read about them in history books a hundred years from now, they wouldn't be the terrifying monsters that had haunted the nightmares of millions of people; they would be nothing more than a footnote in Lasombra's own legend. Just a bunch of murder-hobos who eventually got quashed by someone stronger than they were, without having achieved anything of worth. A monument to their own evil and stupidity, and a warning to all other parahumans – no, not just parahumans; a warning to everyone, because I was not so blind as to believe only parahumans were capable of such evil – about the consequences of sinking so very, very low.
I took my rage, and forced it to go cold, hardened it into unshakeable resolve. Only then, once I felt confident I wasn't going to raze this town to the ground with a wave of my hand, did I cast my perception into the shadowscape. Immediately, I knew where my targets were; they all blazed with such cruelty in the Abyss, it was impossible to miss. I slipped into the darkness, and my projection reappeared deeper into the town.
Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.
I made no effort to conceal my presence, and within moments, I sensed someone flying above me. Seconds later, a storm of razor-sharp glass shards flew in my direction. I ignored them as the burst against my projection harmlessly and looked up to see the source of the attack : a figure hovering in the air, clad in an armor made of pieces of glass wrought together into something which might have been beautiful in less nightmarish circumstances.
Shatterbird, I thought. A parahuman with the ability to control silicate products, which included almost every single piece of electronics every produced. Out of the Nine, she was the one with the power most suited to immediate wide-scale destruction – and so, she was the one I needed to take out first, to keep her from killing every survivor at once in a fit of pique.
I saw her open her mouth, but didn't let her speak. Instead, I slammed my cane into the ground, and called forth a bevy of dark tentacles that leapt into the air, too fast for Shatterbird to dodge. She lashed out with blades of glass, but that did nothing.
I felt the tentacles close in around her, for they were as much part of my projection as Lasombra's humanoid body. I hesitated for half a second, and then squeezed. There was some slight resistance, which promptly gave way as I increased the pressure, and when I withdrew my tentacles, a crushed mass of gore and glass dust fell from the air and splattered on the street.
It had been … easy. Far, far too easy. Killing someone shouldn't be that easy, even a monster like Shatterbird. But I would have time to unpack how to feel about this later. For now, this was one down, seven to go, based on what I remembered of the Slaughterhouse's current roster.
I reached out through the shadowscape, but before I could find the next one, she found me instead.
Suddenly, there was fire, all around my projection, hot enough to melt the pavement under my feet. I felt the pain of the fire burning away at Lasombra, but I forced myself to endure and turned to look at the source of the flames : a pale-skinned young woman with badly cut brown hair and what looked like cigarette burns forming some kind of parody of a grin on her face, wearing a red robe that looked like it belonged in a cabaret rather than an active battlefield.
Burnscar. Pyrokinetic. Possibly the one of the Nine with the power I was the most vulnerable to, given the weakness of vampires to fire and of Abyssal creatures to light in general. The instincts I'd inherited from Lau-Som-Bheu made me want to flinch, to run away, but I ruthlessly stamped the impulse down. If I had managed to defeat Purity and fight through the plasma beams of the Simurgh once it had stopped playing around, then that pyromaniac bitch wasn't going to be the one to beat me.
The most she could do was hurt me by damaging my projection, and what did my pain matter compared to the devastation around us ? Nothing. But setting the town ablaze would still be bad even if it couldn't do any real damage to me, so I needed to take her down quickly.
I flickered my projection, pulling more shadowstuff to repair the damage in the time between moments my awareness was back into the Abyss, and reappeared directly in front of her. She startled, and before she could react, I hit her with my cane.
I felt bones break and organs burst, and Burnscar crumpled to the ground, bleeding and broken, yet somehow still alive. She should be dead; I had enough inherited knowledge of the human body to know that. I frowned internally, then remembered that Bonesaw was a Biotinker, who could perform surgeries to augment her test subjects – it was just that she was most infamous for the monsters she created from the Slaughterhouse's victims. In Shatterbird's case, I'd been brutal enough that it hadn't mattered, but Burnscar's augments were keeping her alive despite her grievous injuries.
"It hurts," she whined from the ground. "It hurts …"
It sounded … weird. Pitiful. Not at all what I'd have expected from a pyromaniac with a body count in the hundreds. She looked up, and I met her gaze, tentatively exploring her mind.
My first thought, that she'd been influenced by a Master effect, disappeared immediately. Instead, she was suffering from kind of mental disorder that let her dissociate between the self which killed and the rest of her. The shock of her injuries had thrown her off-balance, eliminating her ability to dissociate and forcing her to feel the full agony of her broken body.
In the end, however, it didn't matter. She might push the responsibility for her crimes onto some other part of her, but it was still exactly that : part of her. And even if the courts might have decided she wasn't legally responsible for her own actions as a result (a dubious proposition due to her being part of the worst group in all of North America, and the fact that any member of the Slaughterhouse Nine who was taken alive would have the entire country baying for their blood), she was still dying from her injuries, just more slowly.
I could end her suffering, at least, if for no other reason than Lau-Som-Bheu wouldn't have bothered, and doing the opposite of what he would have done was as good a moral compass as any. Moving too quickly for Burnscar to realize what I was doing, I brought my cane down onto her skull; she was dead before she knew what was happening.
Two down. Six to go.
Again, I cast my perceptions through the shadowscape. It didn't take me long to find the most immediate threat, and I flickered across the two, reappearing directly between a handful of people cowering in the backroom of the local supermarket and a hulking brute of a man, with a bald, scarred head twisted into a cruel leer and holding a hatchet that was already dripping blood onto the floor.
A corpse was laying on the ground behind him, surrounded by a pool of blood. Another person I hadn't come in time to save.
"What the fuck ?" the killer said, looking at my projection in shock.
Hatchet Face. Already a serial killer when he'd Triggered as a result of being confronted by a parahuman relative of one of his previous victims, his power shut down other parahuman abilities close to him, which, combined with his Brute status, made him a dangerous parahuman killer. Many heroes had fallen to his blade, promising careers cut short for no other reason that because Hatchet Face felt that a power the PRT would have paid a literal fortune for was better used cosplaying a horror movie monster.
"Lasombra, huh ?" he snarled. "Well, let's see what you really look like under that shadow bullshit !"
Unfortunately for him, I wasn't a parahuman. His power could do nothing to me, and my strength was far greater than his own. I let him get close, and then caught his wrist as he moved to strike me, holding him in place effortlessly.
"W-what ?" he gasped in shock, eyes wide behind his mask at my strength and the fact what he thought was my Changer form hadn't been dispelled. "How are you doing that ?"
I didn't bother answering him. Letting him die in ignorance and fear was the least of what he deserved. Instead, I conjured a blade of shadows in my free hand and rammed it through his heart, before ripping it out through his collarbone in a shower of gore. He stumbled back, his weapon slipping from his fingers. Incredibly, he was still alive; more Bonesaw's enhancements, it had to be. I swept my shadow sword once more, and his head tumbled from his shoulders, killing him once and for all.
Three down. Five to go.
I didn't need to use the shadowscape to find my next target, as the sounds of large-scale destruction reached me all on their own from outside. I flickered away in their direction, and found a monster rampaging through a car concession store, ripping the vehicles to shreds like a child who'd gotten bored with his toys.
The monster looked like something that had come out of the laboratories of the most insane Tzimisce flesh-smiths, probably after killing the Cainite who had made the mistake of creating something like him. He was a six-legged beast the size of a monster truck, covered in obsidian scales that gleamed in the light of the fires burning around us. His claws and teeth were cutting through the metal of the cars with ease, and the drops of saliva that fell from his maw hissed wherever they fell.
"CRAWLER," I called out, and the hulking mass of flesh froze briefly, before contorting to look down at me. What was left of Crawler's face twisted in what I must assume was recognition.
"You … I know you," he said, in an impossibly low voice that made the ground vibrate. "You're Lasombra, the one who killed the Simurgh ! Oh, that's great. I've been looking forward to this ! Come on ! Show me what you've got !"
It was said Crawler could adapt to anything, and regenerate from even the most grievous injuries. A parahuman cockroach, who had joined the Nine solely for the thrill of battle and to get stronger and stronger, no matter how many people got horribly killed in the process.
I knew exactly how to deal with him.
"MARCHOSIAS," I said, pulling on my connection to the Abyssal she-wolf. "KILL."
Jumping out of my shadow, Marchosias leapt on Crawler and bit down, her teeth effortlessly piercing through hide that had evolved to be able to resist anything from small-arms fire to rocket launchers and whatever punches the Brutes that had crossed his path could throw.
Now that I'd access to Lau-Som-Bheu's memories, I had a better understanding of just what Marchosias really was. She was a creature native to the Abyss, her form shaped by the circumstances of her summoning. She was a canine because I had used the bodies of dead dogs to create her physical shell, and she was a wolf because I had been very angry when I had brought her into being.
I should probably be a bit more worried about having summoned a spawn of the Abyss, but honestly, compared to some of the monsters I remembered Lau-Som-Bheu calling up in the Castel d'Ombro (to say nothing of the greater beasts that had savaged him when he'd shed his physical form and entered the Abyss as a pure spirit), Marchosias was little more than an adorable puppy.
Crawler started screaming. Just like when I had sent Marchosias after the Simurgh, I had given a simple order to my familiar : keep at it until Crawler was dead. He might be able to adapt to anything, but I had a feeling his power wouldn't be able to protect him from my familiar's fangs and claws.. The Abyssal she-wolf wouldn't hold back, and all of Crawler's monstrous strength didn't mean anything if he was paralysed by agony after so many years of sensory deprivation.
He wanted to 'feel ?' Fine. Let him feel a fraction of the pain he'd inflicted, until not even his parahuman power could keep him alive. If he ended brain-dead as a result, I would throw him into the Abyss and let the liminal realm annihilate his remains. Actually, I probably should do that anyway; better than let them be taken by the government, who would no doubt end up doing something stupid with them.
I was about to cast my perceptions into the shadowscape again when something hit me, harder than anything except the Simurgh itself ever had. My projection went flying and crashed into a wall with enough strength to reduce an ordinary human to paste.
I played dead, looking around for the source of the attack. I hadn't felt anything in the shadowscape, but none of the remaining members of the Nine should be capable of ranged attacks, so what was going on ?
Then I saw her. A naked woman, her skin stripped black and white and her mouth and fingers dripping with blood, was walking toward me, smirking. I recognized her immediately : the Siberian, the world's most infamous Brute, who had tangled with Alexandria and come out on top.
I peered into the shadowscape again as I made a show of rising to my feet, but again, I found nothing. The Siberian had no more soul than the Simurgh. But the vicious smile she was throwing at me had far too much malice to be the result of a soulless intelligence mimicking human expressions – oh. Of course. The answer was obvious, though I guessed I'd an unfair advantage in figuring it out where so many others hadn't.
The striped cannibal in front of me was a projection, not a parahuman. I reached into the shadowscape again, this time searching for the source of the emotions its smile was showing, and – there. A soul that wasn't feeling fear, but instead the same sick enjoyment the rest of the Nine did.
I flickered across town toward the source and appeared in front of a van that looked like it'd come straight out of a PSA video warning kids about stranger danger. Without pause, I ripped it open, revealing a middle-aged man staring up at me in shock.
He was … small. Ordinary, except for the tattoos on the backs of his hands – one an omega symbol, the other a stylized swan – which I recognized as having been used to mark the victims of the Simurgh. Despite those, and his general poor state of hygiene, he could have walked into a crowd anywhere in the United States and not drawn any attention.
And yet, this was the man who had killed Hero, who had torn out Alexandria's eye. This was the man who had used the Siberian, one of the strongest Brutes in existence, to indulge in wanton, monstrous cruelty across the United States for years instead of doing literally anything else with that incredible power.
I didn't waste time talking with him; there were still monsters at large and innocents in danger, and if he got over his shock and called the Siberian to his location, the Brute would able to share its invincibility with him by touching him, which would make things more complicated. I simply reached down, wrapped my left hand around his skull, and squeezed until it popped, then let the headless corpse fall back into the van. Even Bonesaw would take time to rebuild that, time that she wasn't going to have.
At the same time, I noticed that Crawler's screams had stopped, and a quick check with my mystical perceptions confirmed that he was dead, his soul gone from this reality and onto whatever awaited him in the afterlife. I pulled on my tie to Marchosias, and the great wolf reappeared next to my projection, licking her lips.
Five down, three to go.
Peering through the shadowscape, I located my next target : a roiling ball of horror and self-hatred, endlessly churning around a core of grief dense as a black hole. This time, I emerged in a public park, with a few attractions for children and scattered toys laying in the grass, where they'd been dropped by fleeing children.
Standing at the edge of the sandbox was a nine-feet tall white figure, made of smooth parts linked together with chains. It had no eyes, nor mouth, nor anything else : its head was as faceless as Lasombra's.
Mannequin. Once one of the world's greatest Tinkers, who had dreamt of carrying Humanity to the stars and build a better world through his inventions – before his entire life had come crashing down.
Mannequin started twitching, head circling around. I didn't know how exactly he was aware of his surroundings inside that thing, but it seemed whatever Tinkertech had gone into his body's construction wasn't immune to the Clan curse that made any use of my power impossible to see or record through technology.
Part of me wondered how the rest of the Lasombra Clan were dealing with this in the modern day, with everybody carrying a camera in their pocket. Perhaps the curse was less intense on them, since it was inherited rather than directly bestowed by Caine; or perhaps Clan Lasombra had been wiped out by the other Clans as a threat to the Silence of the Blood.
Regardless, simply being near me was make Mannequin blind. He wasn't completely helpless : as I walked closer, his torso started spinning like a top, his arms stretching out while a number of blades came out of hidden openings. He shredded a couple of nearby trees while running blindly, but I caught the bladed arm in my hand and pulled him off his feet and closer to me.
Before he could pull some more Tinker bullshit, I grasped what passed for his shoulders and ripped off his arms, before doing the same to his legs and his head. Breaking the chains linking each part to the rest required some serious effort, but I managed it, and was left with the torso which, given I could sense Mannequin's soul inside it, must be where he was hiding his brain, behind plating so tough I was fairly sure it could take a tank shell without any damage to the fragile organ within.
It didn't help him. Out of mercy for the well-known fact his descent into madness was a Simurgh plot, I made his death quick : I plunged my hand through his armor, through the layers of protection surrounding his last remaining components, and crushed them. I vaguely remembered reading somewhere that there wasn't pain nerves in the brain; for the sake of the man who had once been Sphere, I hoped that was true.
Six down, two to go.
I closed my eyes, and searched for pain. There was a lot of it – the initial attack by Shatterbird had left nearly the entire population hurt one way or another. But there was a spot where the pain was concentrated, and I moved there next.
I found Bonesaw inside the local pharmacy, which had been gutted and turned into a field laboratory. There were people stretched out on tables and counters all around her, in the process of being cut open and sewed back together.
She looked up from her latest surgery, her hands still red with the blood of a woman who was only kept alive by the various devices connected to her torso, and smiled. She was wearing a blue dress with a white surgical apron three sizes too big for her and covered in blood.
"Jack said we would go look for you, but that we should let the others take their turn first," she said, with a sickeningly childish giggle. "I'm happy you decided to come to us, though ! I have sooooo many questions about how your power works !"
Things skittered on the ground around her and towards me, repugnant amalgams of flesh and surgical instruments. I slammed my cane onto the ground, and they were all snared and crushed by my shadow tentacles.
"That wasn't very nice," Bonesaw pouted. "I went through a lot of effort to make those, you know !"
I teleported right in front of her. She jumped in surprise, but I caught her by the neck before she could try to run away. She slapped at my arms with surprising force (clearly she'd operated on herself as well) but I ignored it, and gazed into her eyes.
Her mind was broken; there was no other way to describe it. There was more at play here than trauma and manipulation by a charismatic psychopath. It was subtle, but I could see traces of a Master power having been used on her – not just once, but over and over again, over a period of years. Except, none of the Slaughterhouse Nine were known to possess a Master power – well, apart from whoever the Siberian's source had been, I supposed.
I couldn't just kill Bonesaw, for a number of reasons. First among those were the risks of doing so : I had read the theories that the most infamous Biotinker in existence had implanted deadman switches in her own body that would release all manner of nightmarish plagues if she died.
Even a surface look through her memories with my powers was enough to confirm that yes, she did have several such switches in her body that would trigger if she died, all of which had the potential to result in the death of millions of people, to say nothing of knock-on effects.
I hesitated, then decided I would deal with this later, once there wasn't any other member of the Slaughterhouse still running around.
"SLEEP," I commanded, and Bonesaw went slack in my grip. Unlike the child whose fear had called me to this town, I didn't hold back with the command : she would continue to sleep until I allowed her to wake or she died from thirst. Lesser wielders of Dominate couldn't force someone to do something that went against their basic survival instincts, but my power was far beyond these limits, thanks to Lau-Som-Bheu's ruthless experiments with the Discipline.
I considered just leaving her here next to her victims, but decided it was best not to. Expanding my awareness to every shadow in the vicinity, I found an empty basement in a nearby house, and dropped her there for the time being.
Seven down. Only one left, the vilest and most horrendous of them all.
Jack Slash. The leader of the Nine, despite his only known power being the ability to turn any bladed tool into a long-range threat.
Except, now that I'd thought about it, the source of the Master effects I'd detected in Bonesaw's mind was obvious. Jack Slash had been part of the Slaughterhouse Nine for literal decades, and had led the gang for most of that time. He had survived where several other members had died, despite being just as easy to kill as a random civilian prior to Bonesaw's recruitment.
It didn't make sense … unless there was more to him than that. Like, for instance, a subtle Master power that let him influence the other members – or, given he'd been the one to forcefully recruit Bonesaw, any nearby parahuman. I didn't know the details, and I didn't need to know.
All I needed to do was kill him.
Predictably, Jack Slash was running away when I caught up to him. He'd abandoned his fellow murderers without hesitation in order to preserve his own skin, jumping into a car and driving out of town the moment he'd realized something was hunting the Nine down.
In a way, he reminded me of Lau-Som-Bheu, which wasn't a comparison that flattered either of them. A coward with delusions of grandeur, who had been granted power he didn't deserve and had completely wasted in order to indulge his god complex on people who couldn't fight back.
My projection appeared on the road, right in front of Jack's car. He tried to run me over, but I stretched a few tentacles behind me to cushion the impact and smashed my cane into the vehicle, stopping it dead in a shower of broken glass and warped metal.
Through the wind-shield, I saw that Jack was still alive; in fact, he was barely hurt by the crash, thanks to his own augmentations from Bonesaw. I smashed the cracked glass to pieces, then grabbed him by the throat and hurled him out of the car, throwing him on the pavement – and if I used enough strength to break a few of his bones in the process, well, that was hardly the worst of what I was going to do to him before this was over.
"Ah, Lasombra," he began, trying to give me what he no doubt thought was a winning smile. "What an honor to have you come visit us ! You know, I was looking forward to meeting -"
I kicked him in the ribs, hard, and sent him sliding across the road, before walking toward him, marking each step with my cane. It was theatre, yes, but I knew it was intimidating, and I wanted that piece of garbage to be scared before he died.
Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.
The smiling mask of control began to slip from Jack's face as he watched me approach. I wondered : how much of his ability to influence other parahumans was a conscious thing, and how much was his power feeding his subconscious clues on how to manipulate them to get what he wanted ?
What a waste of an incredible power. But then, that summed up the Slaughterhouse Nine as a whole, didn't it ?
He opened his mouth to say something else, but before any more words could pass his lips, I seized his lower jaw and ripped it off, along with his tongue. His eyes bulged in shock, and I stared down at him, peering through them and into his mind as blood poured out from the wound.
What I found there made me feel sick, even though my perceptions were removed from my physical body at the moment. I wished that I could say I hadn't thought human beings could be so monstrous before, but the memories of Lau-Som-Bheu had taught me otherwise.
Still, there was a difference between academic, inherited knowledge, and evidence of such depravity right in front of me.
Enough. It was time to end this.
"HELL IS REAL, JACOB," I said, and bloody tears ran from his eyes as the full power of my projection's voice hammered into his misbegotten skull. "YOU ARE GOING THERE. AND YOU WILL NOT ENJOY IT."
Much as I was tempted to, I didn't open a portal to the Abyss to throw him through. He still had a soul, withered and blood-soaked as it might be, and I didn't want to risk him somehow returning as some kind of Abyss-empowered nightmare further down the line.
But that didn't mean I couldn't make this hurt. Holding him firmly trapped in place with one hand on his shoulder, I plunged my right hand into his chest and tore out his heart, drawing on the experience of Lau-Som-Bheu in dealing with disobedient descendants to guide me.
I held the still-beating organ in front of his face for a few seconds, making sure he realized what I had done before his brain started starving for oxygen. Then I jammed it down his throat, pressing down his skull as I did so until it burst apart, and the corpse of Jack Slash hit the ground.
For several seconds, I stared at my gore-splattered hands. The murderous rage faded, leaving only the realization of what I had done in its wake.
Note to self, I thought. Tell Dad that I did inherit his temper after all.
Silence fell upon my surroundings, broken only by the wailing of the survivors. Much as I wanted to help them, I wasn't a trained medical professional, and they needed a lot more help than any one person could give.
I took a good look at the Abyssal reflection of the town, committing it to memory so that I'd be able to find my way back even without the Nine acting as some kind of evil beacon. Then I dismissed my projection and opened my eyes back in my bedroom. I picked up my phone, logged onto my new, Lasombra-certified PHO account, and sent a message to the account I'd been told to use as a point of contact.
The message was short and to the point :
'SH9 IN BLUETOWN, INDIANA. DEALT WITH THEM. SURVIVORS REQUIRE ASSISTANCE.'
I waited to confirm the message had been sent, and then, without waiting for a reply, laid back down on my bed and closed my eyes. My mind sank back into the Abyss, and I reached out for the town I had just departed. I found it quickly, and reformed my projection in the basement where I'd dropped Bonesaw.
I stood above the unconscious form of the twelve-years old serial killer, and considered my next move. The rest of the Slaughterhouse Nine had been the first people I'd killed. I didn't count the Simurgh, who hadn't really been alive, and certainly hadn't been a person.
Their deaths weren't going to haunt me : even in all the memories I'd inherited from Lau-Som-Bheu, the only thing that came close to the Nine's atrocities were the Baali, whom even the Antediluvian hadn't wanted anything to do with. And, now that I'd thought about it, I knew I could kill Bonesaw without worrying about her contingencies : I could simply drag her into the Abyss and kill her there, leaving her body to dissolve in the emptiness between universes. It would be easy, and she wouldn't even be awake to feel or fear it. I didn't know for sure what would happen to her soul if I did that, but the memories I had of Lasombra's sire passing down Caine's own (admittedly rather biased) experience with God made me think it wouldn't prevent her from being judged one way or another.
The question was, could I do it ? Could I kill a twelve-years old girl, who had caused unspeakable horrors, even if doing so hadn't been her choice but the result of Jack Slash's power-aided manipulations ?
Yes. Yes, I could. I didn't like to acknowledge that about myself, but I was forced to face it. Whether it was because of the memories I'd inherited from Lau-Som-Bheu or because of some ruthlessness that was all me, I could kill Bonesaw. I had it in me. The next question, then, was : should I ?
Nobody would blame me for doing it. Each of the Nine had a Kill Order, and wiping out the gang like I had would net me almost as much credit as killing the Simurgh had, though only in the United States.
But that didn't mean it was right. I had helped Night and Fog when I had fought them. They, too, had been manipulated into becoming monsters, though Gesellshaft's methods paled in comparison to what Jack had done to turn Riley into Bonesaw. As part of the Empire, they had done horrible things, slaughtering dozens of minorities on Kaiser's orders for intimidation purposes.
But while they'd been forgiven by the law and, last I'd heard, were on their way to recovery and rehabilitation, Bonesaw was one of the Slaughterhouse Nine. She would never be allowed to live a normal life. The court of public opinion would never forgive her, nor forget what she had done, and I couldn't blame them for it. There was a level of atrocity where no excuse could possibly be enough, and the Slaughterhouse had crossed it years before they'd stumbled on the girl who'd become Bonesaw.
Her story was publicly known, mostly due to Jack's own desire to make everyone aware of how he'd turned an innocent young girl into the most feared member of the Nine since Grey Boy. Even the Siberian hadn't matched Bonesaw in that regard, because for all her supposed invulnerability and cannibalism, the worst she could do was kill someone.
Bonesaw was very different. Like Crawler, her work reminded me of the Tzimisce, those descendants from one of Lau-Som-Bheu's kindred who had discovered a way to reshape flesh using their vampiric powers and used it to make monstrosities out of both their servants, their enemies, and themselves. Her joining the Nine had made them exponentially more dangerous, and the horrors they'd left in their wake had only been surpassed by those they'd caused when Grey Boy had been part of the group. You could never know for sure whether the survivors left in their wake had merely been lucky, or if they were carrying some 'surprise' from the bio-Tinker that would trigger days, weeks, or even months later.
There was a very good reason so-called 'wet' Tinkers were so feared and hated in the United States, and it was only partially because of Nilbog.
I thought about this for long enough that I started hearing the sound of helicopters in the distance, as the PRT arrived to secure the town ahead of the paramedics. I was running out of time to make my decision; if I didn't choose soon, the PRT would take the choice out of my hands.
In the end, what made me decide was the realization that killing her would be the easy, convenient option. The one which would cause me the least trouble.
And I wouldn't take the easy path when it meant hurting someone else. Never. That was what all the silent witnesses had done back at Winslow, and I refused to be like them.
Acting before I could second-guess myself, I placed my hands around Bonesaw's head, and moved us both into the Abyss, within the throneroom of the Castel d'Ombro where Dad and Marchosias had found me after my breakdown. If I was going to do this, then this place was as appropriate as any, and I found some dark amusement at the thought of doing something that could generously be called justice in the reflection of a place that had probably never seen anything remotely like it in over a thousand years of existence.
"WAKE UP," I commanded Bonesaw, breaking the previous compulsion.
Her eyelids twitched, and, before she had time to properly wake up and do anything that would have forced my hand, I gazed into the eyes of the last living member of the Slaughterhouse Nine, and went to work expunging every trace of Bonesaw from her mind. I didn't just block out the memories of her time under Jack's influence, but burned them out completely, so that no amount of shock, reminder, or parahuman power (in the latter case I was banking on this taking place in the Abyss preventing the more esoteric powers from working) would cause them to resurface. In their place, I left a dim awareness that bad things had happened to her, but only in a distant manner, like reading about it in a book rather than having lived through it.
It would most likely still be enough to traumatize her, but there were limits even to my power.
Days, weeks, months, years were burned away, all the way back to that fateful, horrible day where the Slaughterhouse Nine had come to Riley Davis' house and tortured her first into Triggering, and then into breaking apart and letting Jack put the pieces back together in his own image. I hesitated, unsure whether I should erase her last memories of her family; but after taking a good look at what those memories entailed, I decided it was for the best. She would know that something bad had happened to them all, and that her family was dead, but that was it.
Once I was done, I made Riley fall back asleep, grabbed her, and teleported us both to a warehouse on the Brockton Bay Docks that Dad had told me I could use if I needed somewhere to meet someone discreetly, or do anything lair-adjacent. I laid her down onto a crate that had been gathering dust ever since the Bay had been blocked (something I would have to do something about at some point, or all the money I'd earned from killing the Simurgh wouldn't be enough to help the city in the long term).
There was still work to be done, but for this next step, I would need help. Unfortunately, diplomacy wasn't exactly my strong suit, so I would need to get in touch with Tattletale first.
Notes:
AN : This chapter took some time, mostly because I was busy writing my Halloween specials, but also because I needed to decide how to handle Bonesaw and the implications for the rest of the story. Still, it was fun to write the SH9 being curbstomped by someone who doesn't need to play along with Jack's power-induced plot armor.
And yes, I did invent that bit about Hatchet Face already being a serial killer when he Triggered. But come on, look at the guy.
Also, Jack's execution was inspired by the Homelander VS Omni-Man episode of Death Battle.
As always, I hope you enjoyed reading this chapter, and look forward to your thoughts and comments.
Zahariel out.
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