Chapter 25
"Yeah, I enrolled in a history course." Flambé was keeping up the important air of someone trying to hide their pre-fight jitters, talking from his corner of the room while sitting on a broken countertop. "I want to actually get a degree eventually—"
"And what exactly would you do with a history degree? What's the practical application?"
"It's just the start. I'll pick up a couple more courses, then maybe think about university." He was counting on his fingers, occasionally glancing through the window at the building across the street we'd been assigned to watch. "Next thing you know, while you're scrubbing toilets and scooping up your scrambled eggs, I'll be making a meaningful contribution to science—"
"The only meaningful contribution you'll make to science is if they start sending monkeys back to space." I finished my cola through the straw and sent the cup in a clean arc into the makeshift trash receptacle we'd assembled in the center of the room. "Though honestly, I could probably get you a certificate. 'World's Dumbest Super.' Custom printed."
"Looking to get burned, water worm?" Flambé ignited briefly, but kept himself in check — partly because the rest of the team had glanced over. "Tch."
"Alright, forget it." Confirming that everyone had finished eating, I turned to the rest of the group. Mal was working through some gacha game on her phone, occasionally receiving extremely unhelpful tactical suggestions from Prizm, who was helping her build a red-haired harem. Golem sat quietly in his corner, listening to Teddy Swims, humming along to the pop track in his terrible bass, entirely off rhythm. "So — what's the plan?"
"I fly in there and burn everyone to hell, that's the plan!" Flambé flexed dramatically, posing with an arm raised. "And then you hose everything down with your little water so the idiots don't actually die—"
"What a magnificent plan. Truly inspired, if I understood it correctly." I massaged the bridge of my nose and closed my eyes, because looking at his smug face would have created an urgent desire to hit it. "Setting aside the fact that you're currently flexing in that outfit and you look less like a hero and more like the loading screen character from Dance Dance Revolution—"
I stopped his indignant response with an open palm held at face level.
"You also want to cosplay an SS battalion and turn that brick building into an actual blast furnace?" The others weren't getting involved, long since accustomed to the fact that Flambé and I had to argue before every job until someone came along and made us stop.
"Oh, the German ass speaks! You of all people—!" The fire had migrated from his wrists up to his shoulders. "For your information, I'm French!"
"Oh, wow. Never would have guessed." I delivered this with maximum sincerity.
"Probably because he lisps when he's angry—"
"More likely because he eats frogs and snails and washes it down with wine—"
The girls delivered these observations in sequence without looking up from what they were doing.
"Grr." Flambé actually growled, now covered almost entirely in flame. He was genuinely angry — though I had the distinct feeling our routine needling wasn't the primary cause. Something else was driving this. "Can we please get started already, where is the actual dispatcher?"
"I've been here since the beginning. I just, unlike some people, also have other responsibilities." Our dispatcher's voice sounded like someone who had been awake for thirty consecutive hours. "Now everyone shut up — take it to private chat or wherever you people send each other things in your off-hours. And get ready."
"Ooh, someone woke up on the wrong side today." Prizm finally set her phone down, leaving her light-copy behind to assist Mal, and stepped forward. "Alright, Roberto Robinson, let's hear the brief, we'll handle the rest—"
"Right. Straightforward enough." A message hit everyone's phone simultaneously — a floor plan of the building across the street. "Confirm the Hammerheads are inside, then go in and—"
Then his voice changed.
"What the hell, Flambé?"
We reacted a full beat slower than our dispatcher, because Flambé had ignited and moved before anyone in the room had processed it — a flash that temporarily blinded everyone in the building, and by the time we could see again the idiot was already inside the structure across the street, fire coming out of every window.
"Right — okay—" No extra words. Muscle memory at this point. I moved straight toward Mal, who already had a portal open, and we went through together, landing at the blown-out front entrance. "Oh, come on—"
Water came off me in a wave immediately, spreading across the street beneath our feet. Prizm hit the nearest hydrants with solid light constructs, blowing them open. Golem stepped in front of all of us — a wide back absorbing the stray shots and fire bursts that Flambé was apparently generating indiscriminately inside. The big man said nothing, just periodically catching bullets and plasma bursts on his shoulder blades.
"Give me sixty seconds—"
"Take your time, Ginger." Prizm blew me an air kiss, leaned out from behind Golem's considerable silhouette, and started laying solid-light panels over the windows — improvised containment for the fire inside. Which then abruptly went out.
Followed immediately by Flambé's fully-transformed body sailing out of the building entrance and tumbling across the pavement.
"Oh, fantastic—"
He skidded to a stop, got one elbow under himself, and lifted a bloodied face toward the doorway. The fire had gone out completely. Right now he didn't look like a force of nature — he looked like a carnival performer who'd been bounced from a bar.
"Okay everyone, since the plan has gone to the usual place—" Robert was still talking in the earpiece, but none of us were actually tracking it, because following Flambé out of the entrance came a crowd of bald men in high-tech armor, gleaming with the fresh shine of considerable investment in personal protection. "—Waterboy, as discussed with Blazer, I can only advise—"
"Move!"
I slid on my own water, scooping Flambé off the ground on the way, while Mal portaled herself and Golem out from under the opening barrage. Prizm handled herself — building a light wall to duck behind as the Hammerhead crew opened up with an impressive variety of weapons.
I sent a water round into the crowd, connecting with one and drawing more attention onto myself — including some members who had apparently decided close-quarters work was appropriate, moving in the clanking armor with worrying momentum.
"GET THEM!"
They were cheering, confident they had us. They shouldn't have split their formation.
Before their shouting had properly finished, Mal and Golem appeared in their rear — Golem carrying Mal, who proceeded to make extremely efficient use of the resulting chaos, the two of them pulling the crew's attention off us.
"You okay?"
"I'll live. Give me a few seconds." Flambé was on his feet, rebuilding the flame around himself, rubbing the patch of his chest that a plasma rifle had apparently unkindly visited. "We need to help them. You're lead today — so lead, come on!"
"Working on it—" Water went forward in a low wave, wrapping around the Hammerheads' boots and working upward, the strange behavior of it pulling attention and breaking focus, taking pressure off Mal and Golem and giving Prizm her window to dive in — shining, hitting everything she could reach, and unabashedly deploying her full physical presence as a distraction.
The water slowed them, disrupted them, occasionally just splashed directly in someone's face. The outcome wasn't in question.
"Stop staring, let's go." Flambé was already laughing at me, taking to the air fully ignited, and a wave of fire hit the largest remaining cluster of Hammerheads — sending them scrambling for cover or sending them down scorched.
Stepping out from behind the overturned car I'd been using, I looked at the wreckage around us. Team members were mopping up the stragglers.
"Alright, Robert — told you this wasn't for me." The channel flipped to private. "Should've put Mal in charge. She has more experience."
"Don't say that to her face," Chase cut in — apparently he'd been patched in too. "Women don't like having their age mentioned."
"Speaking from experience, old man? Don't worry, attitudes have loosened up since your day—"
"Hm. Little garbage person." He wasn't letting go without his closing line. "She's about as much a girl as I am a Boy Scout. And I'm talking about age, in case that wasn't clear."
The sound of his disconnecting followed.
"Back to the point." Robert's signature exhausted exhale. Through the earpiece, probably watching through the nearest camera. "It went more or less alright. I could bury the smaller mistakes in the report, but — Blond Blazer watched the whole operation from the start, so—"
"Miss Blazer was watching?" I adjusted my collar, which had become unexpectedly tight. "And? How bad?"
"…Miss. That sounds so old-fashioned—" Quiet laughter into the mic, probably saying something to Chase beside him. "Sure, let's go with that. Anyway — ow."
"Robert? You okay?"
"Yeah, just — jerked sideways and hit the desk—" Lying was not one of Robert's skills, and I charitably pretended to believe the desk story. "Desks, you know. They get you when you least expect it."
"Right. So about—"
"So, temporary leadership on joint operations — not your thing." A couple of photos came through to my phone, taken from the surveillance camera he'd been using. One look at the before-and-after was sufficient. The street was rubble, another fire, Golem's impact crater had gone through the asphalt to the actual sewer infrastructure, roughly half the Hammerhead gang had escaped through the warehouse's rear exit, and the other half was in medical condition that would require optimism. "That's it from me. Tomorrow morning, swing by the boss's office — she'll fill you in. And don't worry, it wasn't a disaster. No sanctions. Miss Blazer said so personally — ow."
"Robert?"
"Desks, Waterboy. Treacherous, treacherous desks."
---
"You're worrying for nothing." The next morning I walked to work alongside Sonar, who had shown up at my place completely drunk and powdered at eleven the previous night. Two hours of wandering Garvard stories. What could be better — especially given that my slowly progressing situation with Mal had started producing dreams of genuinely pleasant content, which left me with enough energy for anything. "You're top three, you haven't made any serious mistakes—"
"Right."
"At Garvard there was a time when—"
I rolled my eyes quietly while Victor launched into another legendary academic anecdote. I didn't have enough left for one-word responses. I desperately wanted to sleep. Or drink. Or kick the non-stop werebat under a bus — he kept coming to my place instead of his own, and I genuinely didn't understand why.
"Hey, are you listening?"
"No."
"Hm." He shrugged, gave me a couple seconds of his trademark empty stare, and continued walking — holding the SDS office door open for me. "Fair enough."
The building was mostly quiet. We'd arrived early enough that only Blond Blazer and a handful of others were in yet. The superhero sometimes seemed to actually live in her office.
"Alright — I'll go check in with the boss." A wave to Victor, then I turned down the long corridor toward the dispatcher floor — the stereotypical open-plan call center where our operators sat all day, and where, tucked in the center with glass-panel walls, sat Blazer's office.
The glass was usually covered by blinds, but—
Doesn't matter.
I reached the door, hovered in front of it for a couple seconds, and knocked politely — not too loud in the dense quiet of the empty building.
From inside, voices.
I didn't think much of it at first, completely absorbed in my own head. When I opened the door and saw what was in front of me, I understood that voices was plural for a reason.
Blond Blazer was wearing a stunning blue dress with a bold slit at the hip. It fastened up the back — I knew this because she was standing with her back to the door, that back being bare nearly to the point of becoming something else entirely—
And doing up the fastenings was a deeply startled Robert, who was cycling his gaze between me and Blazer's tensed back, clearly understanding that something atmospheric was about to occur involving all present parties.
Blazer herself looked at me over her shoulder, both hands holding her hair out of the way — and her expression went through small startled fear, then built toward something sharper.
"Ah — I k-knocked — I d-didn't see anything—" I got the door shut approximately one second before the light inside the office reached an intensity visible from outside, and then—
I'm not going to pretend. My entire lower body executed a security lockdown that would have stopped a freight train. Even my particular brand of spectacular biological inconvenience couldn't have breached the structural integrity of what my anatomy produced in that moment.
And then I ran.
Down the staircase, all the way to the ground floor, at a speed that would have made a speedster genuinely reflective about their life choices. I vaulted over several colleagues, ignored the justified shouting behind me, and clipped Golem's shoulder going around a corner — he watched my retreating figure with the baffled expression of someone watching a very small animal flee a thunderstorm.
"Run. Run. R-run—"
I hit the street door and pushed through, and the air of the outside world received me. I understood in that moment, with a fullness I had never experienced before, exactly what freedom felt like.
The morning sunlight that had been friendly sixty seconds ago—
A moment. A flash. A thunderclap of broken sound barrier. And the warm light of a good morning was replaced by the arctic absolute zero of inevitable consequence.
In all her radiance, blazing like a small personal sun, she appeared before me.
"AAAH—!" I screamed in a way that would have embarrassed me under any less extreme circumstances, felt my heart do something genuinely alarming, grabbed my chest — and made the only decision my brain produced in that moment. Which was, objectively, a stupid decision, but it worked: I fell backward, simulating cardiac arrest.
The good part was that I wasn't actually unconscious this time, so I was able to hear the superhero's voice, alarmed and immediate, as she shot down to catch me before my head hit the pavement.
"Oh my God! Waterboy, are you alright?" The light was gone. She was cradling me with one arm and looking around for somewhere to deposit me. "I only wanted to startle you a little — it's fine, nothing happened. That was a stupid joke—"
"A-absolutely nailed it, M-Miss Blazer." I gave her a thumbs up from my position as a man apparently in the middle of dying. "T-ten new phobias out of t-ten."
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