Summus Proelium

No wonder they had put out the call for so many people to join in on this little mission. Now we had a way to get the Scions out of that apartment building, but they could end up anywhere in Detroit after that. Not to mention all their hostages. There was a whole massive city out there full of buildings, streets, parks, alleys, and more for them to pop into. The only real advantage we had on that point was that according to all the calculations the big brain people had done, no one would end up appearing thirty feet in the air or anything like that. They couldn't determine exactly where they would go but it would always be somewhere with solid ground under their feet and enough space to fit in.

Oh, and of course we also had the scanner things so we could actually find them. But even then we were going to have to move around with the things until something pinged. We had to hope all the bad guys ended up close enough for any of us to find them quickly, because even with everyone who had shown up for this, it was still an awfully large area to cover. I was having terrible thoughts about Pencil somehow managing to squirm his way out of this and past all of our searchers just so he could end up doing something even worse before we could find and stop him. Especially if he was separated from his sick sister. Seriously, how would he react to that?

I didn’t want to think about it, no matter what the voice in the back of my mind kept whispering. We were going to do this because it was our only real choice. Pencil knew his group on the outside had been taken down, which had to mean he would be getting even angrier in there. He had been utterly unpredictable at the best of times. Now? With his back against the wall, his sister in trouble, and all his new recruits plus one of his longtime partners in custody? He was about to explode and everyone around him would be caught in the blast. We couldn’t let that happen to those people.

Of course, all of this also risked people who hadn’t been involved getting hurt, or worse. We couldn't control where these psychopaths would end up. This whole thing could go horrifically wrong. But we had to do something. We had to try at least. I was just glad I wasn't the one who’d had to make this choice. I wasn't sure what I would have done.

But now the choice was made. We were doing it, and we just had to do everything in our power to make sure it didn't blow up in our faces. Please, let us get through this without being responsible for any more deaths. If Pencil got free and lashed out…

No, stop thinking about that. I needed to focus on what I could affect right now.

To that end, I looked around the roof of the office building I was standing on along with Alloy and Qwerty. Across the wide street and down a fair distance I could barely make out the roof of another building where Poise, Trevithick, and Calvin were. From here, I could basically only make out vague shapes. Turning the other way revealed a building in the opposite direction where I could see the tiny forms of Style and Hobbes. All three of our groups had our own scanner, and we were spread out enough to cover as much ground as possible, each at the very edge of the other group’s range. If any of the people in that apartment building, good or bad, showed up around here, we would pick it up. All over the city, every other team was doing the same, splitting into smaller pairs or trios and getting ready to jump into action. And speaking of jumping into action, my eyes flicked upwards to look at a countdown timer that was projected on the inside of my visor. Forty-five seconds. Less than a minute before they were going to hit the building with that beam and scatter everyone inside.

All traffic in the city had been stopped. At least as much as we could, on any of the big streets. One of the last things we wanted was to end up with people appearing in front of a speeding semi that couldn’t stop in time. Every cop, firefighter, ambulance, hell even garbage trucks, anyone that could be put into service had been sent to shut down the streets. No one was told exactly why they had to stop, and they weren’t exactly happy about it. But they’d just have to deal with it and find out what was going on once this was over. Something told me they wouldn’t object nearly as much once we could explain.

At least, assuming this entire situation didn’t blow up in our faces.

“Don’t worry, Boss,” Qwerty cheerfully encouraged me while tapping the top of my helmet from his place on my shoulder. “We can deal with this, right? We've got it!”

Alloy, stepping up beside me, gave a quick nod of agreement, though her voice caught a bit. “Yeah, we've got it.” She was looking intently at her own phone, where she also had a timer counting down. The phone shook slightly in her hand as she trembled before catching herself and steadying it. Considering her mom was one of the hostages in that place, I was impressed that she was keeping herself as together as she was. I wasn't sure how well I would be doing in that situation considering how bad it was just to have my parents affected by the Sleeptalk shit. If they had been in a situation where Pencil could kill them at any moment? I… I wasn’t sure what I would’ve done.

The timer was down to ten seconds by then, and I took a breath before holding up the scanner. It seriously just looked like a cell phone. The screen showed what looked like a map of the surrounding area with the streets and buildings labeled. With one eye on the countdown timer and another on the screen, I waited anxiously.

“Teams prepare,” came a voice through my helmet as one of the coordinating people back at Ten Towers gave a five second warning. “Three… two…. one, engage.”

Obviously it would take a moment for them to hit the button on their device, then another moment for it to do its thing, and yet a third for the people to end up sent wherever they were going to go before the scanner in my hand would pick them up. But that didn't stop my stomach from dropping when I didn’t instantly see any dots appear. Not only did I immediately start to think that none of the people had been sent near us, but something in my brain decided that the device had failed to work at all. Maybe they hadn’t been teleported anywhere at all and all of this was for nothing. Or worse, what if it had backfired completely and everyone is that building was… was…

Dots began to appear. Four of them. Four dots were right there on the screen. Two inside the very building we were standing on top of, one in the middle of the street below(making me reflexively glad we had stopped all traffic), and a fourth somewhere further down, on the very edge of the scanner’s range but well within the area that Style and Hobbes were covering.

We didn't waste a second. As soon as the dots appeared and the scanner beeped I leaned over to look down below. Sure enough, a man was standing there in the middle of the empty street, looking around fearfully like he had no idea what was going on. It had to be disorienting, not to mention terrifying. One moment he had been a hostage to the Scions, and now without any warning at all, he was standing somewhere miles away.

Shouting for Alloy to check the nearest one in the building, I dove off the roof. But I wasn't heading for the guy down on the street. At a glance, I could already tell he was one of the hostages, and there were people there to deal with those like him. Already, as I dove straight down, I could see a couple police officers jogging up to take him into protective custody. Until we sorted this whole thing out, everyone who had been in that building would be held by the police, even if they appeared to be innocent victims. There was just no way to be immediately certain whether they were hostages or part of the Scions. They’d just have to sort all that out later, once everyone was safely contained.

With Qwerty plummeting beside me, loudly squealing his delight with those wings of his spread to catch the air, I watched the scanner in one hand. There. Two dots had appeared inside the building. I had sent Alloy after the nearest one, which was labeled as being on the thirtieth floor (out of forty-five). The two of us were in constant communication, and could link in the rest of the team with a word. If she ran into trouble, she’d let me know.

Meanwhile, the other dot was marked as being on the eleventh floor. I let myself fall almost that far, then used a bit of orange paint for protection before shooting twin lines of red and black at a window one floor up from my target. The red yanked me that way, while the black ensured I wouldn’t instantly give myself away if there was a threat inside.

Landing smoothly against the glass on my hands and knees with my head angled down toward the street, I waited until Qwerty came down against my back and clung there. Then I carefully leaned down to peek through the window of the floor right below this one. If this scanner was accurate, the person who had been sent there from that apartment building would be riiiiight--

There he was. It wasn’t Pencil, a fact I was both glad and upset about. Part of me wanted to see that bastard so I’d know exactly where he was, while another part didn’t want to get anywhere near him. But it wasn’t a normal hostage either. No, the person I saw looking wildly around what turned out to be an open floor full of cubicles was Fork. It couldn’t be anyone else. The guy looked like a five foot, eight inch tall anthropomorphic porcupine. There were some people who thought he was a mutated TONI, especially with that very rodent-like face. But no, he was a man who had been altered by his powers to look like this. And right now, he looked very angry. Confused as well, of course. But mostly angry. I supposed you didn't really need to understand the intricate details about what was going on to know that you had just been royally fucked over.

If any of us spotted any of the Touched members of the Scions, we were supposed to pull back, call it in, and wait for reinforcements while simply keeping track of them on the scanner so they couldn't disappear. That was the plan, anyway. But there was an immediate problem with that in this case. Namely, there were innocent people inside that office. I could see a bunch of random employees who had apparently been working very late all cowering on the far side of the room, trying to keep the cubicles between them and the monster who had just appeared in their office. And from the way Fork was turning toward them, he had no intention of waiting to find out they hadn't had anything to do with this. He was pissed off and about to take it out on the nearest target.

No matter how dangerous it was, I couldn’t let those people be that target.

So, I quickly blurted the command to link me not only to my team, but also to the people back at Ten Towers, letting all of them know what was going on. Then I used pink paint to make a circle on the window. Just before the angry Scion could take it out on the people in there, I swung myself over and down, kicking through the circle with my feet to fling myself into the room. On the way, I shouted, “Boy, is Scotty’s aim off with that transporter or what?!” The second my feet touched the ground, I was already launching myself upward, using a tiny bit of blue on my shoes to make sure I rebounded immediately toward the ceiling. “You ask for a quick trip to Tahiti and end up working a nine-to-five!”

Yeah, nothing I was saying actually made sense. The words were just one step away from being complete gibberish. It didn’t matter though, given the entire point was to get Fork’s attention before he ended up hurting anyone. And at that, I was wildly successful. No sooner had those last words left my mouth, as my Wren-provided boots kept me upside down against the ceiling, than I had three different dangerous quills shooting straight at me. The quills sliced through the air like hurled knives. But the real danger wasn’t in them cutting me. Any time he wanted to, Fork could make those quills explode. Sure, the explosions weren’t huge, but they were still enough to put me down for the count, especially if all three hit me at the same time. Not to mention what they would do to poor little Qwerty, who was still clinging to my back.

But I didn't dodge the incoming quills. I did nothing to avoid them at all. In fact, I flung myself off the ceiling and straight at them. I could see a small smirk playing at Fork’s rodent-like face, a smirk that turned into a vindictive sneer as he triggered all three explosions right when the quills were directly in front of me. He might have been confused about how he ended up in this place, but one thing he knew for certain: he was going to enjoy hurting me.

It was an eagerness he ended up immediately regretting. Because I had painted both my back and Qwerty with a mixture of orange and blue. As we passed through the trio of small explosions that sent the chairs and desks around us flying in every direction, it was Fork who ended up taking the brunt of that damage. The orange-blue paint reflected all that concussive force right back onto him, bringing a startled squeal-curse as the mutated man was flung backward to slam hard into a filing cabinet. Even as he bounced off it and staggered, I had already used red paint on the wall behind him to send myself flying that way, so my feet crashed right into his snout with enough force to knock him down completely.

My momentum carried me over the falling figure, and I felt Qwerty jump off to glide off to the side. Rolling as I hit the floor, I shouted for the other people in the room to get out of there, to run! Then I dove to the side, vaulting up to catch the side of a cubicle wall so I could throw myself up and over it. In the process, I left a spot of red on the front of that cubicle wall, activating both that and a matching spot I’d left on Fork’s face when I crashed into him. He’d just barely managed to lift his head before taking the thing right in the snout.

Qwerty had glided around to the far side of the open office floor by then, and his colorful form passed over the heads of the fleeing civilians as he called out for them to keep running and that we were there to save them. Meanwhile, I could hear Alloy saying something about how she’d secured a civilian up there and was already on her way down. But I couldn’t wait for her, or for any of the others. Fork wasn’t going to play nice for that long. He’d already figured out that shooting at me was a bad idea. But all those office workers were another story, and they hadn’t made it out of sight yet. Even as I was scrambling back to my feet from where I’d flung myself, seven quills were shooting that way, too quickly for me to do anything.

But I wasn’t the only one here. Qwerty dove, using one of his wings to smack a quill out of the way, even as his paws grabbed two more and flung them into another pair. He was spinning like a tornado, one of his back feet lashing out to kick the sixth quill up into the ceiling. And that last one he took right in the chest just as it exploded. But, of course, he was still covered in my blue-orange paint. So not only was he protected, but the force went slamming right back into Fork. Just like that, my tiny parrot-squirrel friend had saved all those people by stopping seven dagger-like quills in midair.

Fork, meanwhile, was reeling from that reflected explosion, which I was ready for. As the man stumbled backwards, he stepped on a blue-red circle I put right under his feet. That made the floor incredibly slippery, sending him crashing down onto his stomach with a cry of rage and disorientation. In the next second, I was already there. His position left those dangerous quills facing me, but before he could do anything with them, I dropped in front of him, grabbed his extended hands, and hooked a set of stay-down cuffs onto them. Then I used red paint to yank over a discarded windbreaker from its place on a nearby chair, and wrapped it around his face as a blindfold, tying it as tightly as I could.

By the time Fork had any idea what had happened, he couldn’t go anywhere, and he couldn’t see. But he could still talk, and was busy cursing up a storm about everything he was going to do to us once he got out.

Quickly stepping away from him, I looked over to see the elevator doors closing as the fleeing civilians finally got out of there. Qwerty was perched on the back of a chair, panting as he stared at me with wide eyes before giving a thumbs up. And a moment later, the stairwell door slammed open as Alloy came flying through on one of her marble hoverboards. She took in the scene, stopping short to float there on her board.

Before I could respond to either of them, a call came over the communicator. “Hey--hey anyone out there, we need help. The radio’s damaged so I don’t know who’s getting this. We’re holding them back as much as we can but--but--” The voice sounded terrified. “It’s Pencil, him and--and some of his people. They’re in the building. They’re trying to break onto the hospital floor.”

Then the voice told us where they were, and my blood went cold. Oh…. oh no. We’d been afraid of where these guys might end up, but I’d never even considered this possibility.

Pencil was in the Conservators building, and he was about to break onto the floor where my parents were.