Summus Proelium

That-A-Way, Raindrop, Carousel, Wobble, all four Syndicates (though only one of them was solid), Fragile, Poise, Style, Calvin, Hobbes, Qwerty, Trevithick, Alloy, and me. It was a large group. But I honestly had no idea if it would be enough to stop whatever Pencil had planned. We were just going to have to take this one thing at a time. And the first thing was getting into the building that loomed in front of us.

It might not have been a skyscraper or anything. But the building wasn’t small either, and my first instinct was for all of us to split up to cover more ground. Especially since that would mean I could safely go straight to my parents to check on them. But I knew that was a bad idea. When Pencil was involved, especially if he’d actually planned this whole thing out like I now thought he had, our best bet was to stick together. We had absolutely no idea what we might run into. With any luck, more help would be on the way as soon as physically possible. Then we’d be able to search the building faster, assuming the whole situation wasn’t over by then, one way or another. But for now, both of our teams needed to stay in a group and deal with whatever we found together. Because if there was one thing I was completely sure of, it was that Pencil was ready for people to try to get him out of there. We just had to hope he wasn’t ready enough.

On the other hand, as it turned out, I didn’t have to make up an excuse to check on my parents first. Wobble did that for me. “That side of the building,” he announced while pointing right to the general area where I knew my mother and father were being kept. “That’s where they keep the… VIPs. It’s where Pencil would go if he wants the best hostages, and where the guards will fight the hardest to hold. We should go there.”

Even as he said that, the very large (seriously, he was over a foot and a half taller than me) boy glanced down toward Izzy, and I realized what he was really doing. Obviously, Wobble knew that Izzy had been adopted by my parents. He was giving her a chance to check on them, without realizing he was giving me the same opportunity. And his logic still made perfect sense. It really was a good idea to go straight to the area most likely to both be targeted by Pencil and be the most protected. We could get in there, assess the situation, and then figure out what to do from that point.

Even as those thoughts were running through my mind, I realized the others were all looking at me. Before my panicked, stressed little brain could freak out about what I’d accidentally given away, Carousel spoke up. “You have your shade of pink, which can get us through in a blink? Easier than trying to use a great and mighty smash to break through and take out the trash.” Though her rhyming was as casual as ever, I heard a very hard edge in that last word. Trash. She wanted to hurt Pencil, and part of me wondered how much of that was because she hadn’t really had a chance to show Whamline what she thought of him before he… before he died. Pencil wasn’t the one who had betrayed their team, but he did represent it. Whamline had betrayed them to join the Scions. Pencil was the leader of those Scions. Obviously, if it wasn’t them, Whamline would’ve betrayed the team for some other person or group. That was just who he was. But in this case, in this situation, I didn’t think Carousel cared about that sort of thing. She wanted to show someone how pissed off she was. So it might as well be that particular psycho.

“I can get us right up to the wall.” That was That-A-Way, her own voice tight. “But they’ve laced the wall and the windows themselves with something that stops me from teleporting straight in. It’s supposed to stop anyone from teleporting in. I guess Pencil’s method bypassed that. Probably why he had to set up all these hoops for us to jump through to get him in there in the first place.” She all-but spat those last words, fists tightening. Carousel wasn’t the only one who wanted to make Pencil regret ever setting up shop in this city.

One of the intangible Syndicates put in, “That stuff they mix into the walls stops people like me from getting in there too. It’s like running into--uh, well, a wall. Even when I’m like this.” He indicated his ghost-like form. “And even the windows are strong enough to stand up against a hell of a lot more firepower than we can hit them with. That place is supposed to be impenetrable even if all-out war happens. Hopefully when they were putting that together, they didn’t plan on something like your paint.”

“And,” Wobble pointed out, “the people who would normally be in charge of the actual manual defenses won’t be trying to keep us out.” His voice turned a bit flat. “Or if they are, it means we’re already too late and Pencil’s crew has total control of the building.”

“Yeah,” I quickly agreed before any of us could dwell too much on that possibility, head bobbing. “I can get us inside. Or at least try. You know, if whatever sort of material they use that stops you guys from teleporting or ghosting your way in doesn’t also stop my paint. But even assuming I can make a hole, we don’t know what sort of defenses he’s already got up to stop people from interfering. There could be anyone watching from those windows, with any sort of weapons.”

Poise spoke up firmly. “We’ll cover you. You focus on getting through the wall and into that building.”

“She’s right,” another of the Syndicates confirmed. “Just think of us as your own human shields.”

“Yeah!” Fragile piped up. “They can shoot me all they want. I’ll be their target practice.”

“I’d really rather not,” I shot back. “Keep your eyes open and don’t get shot. Or, in your case, don’t let whoever happens to be standing behind either of you get shot.” After looking back and forth between the intangible Syndicate and the glass-bodied Fragile, I nodded to Way. “Ready when you are.”

We all gathered around her, close enough for all of us to be touching. Before teleporting over there, Peyton formed every marble she had aside from the gold and silver ones, which were maintaining her currently sentai-like armor, into a long, thin board for our team to stand on while we were gathered around Amber. Meanwhile, Fragile made a platform of glass for her own team.

A second later, the world shifted around us as Way sent our group across the street and right up to the wall several floors up. The marble and glass platforms held. But I was also acutely aware of just how exposed we were. At that very moment, there could be very bad people with guns watching us from any of these windows. Most of them were blacked out, making it impossible to see anything inside. There could be a dozen machine guns rotating to point at us from all sides.

Forcing that paranoid, unhelpful thought out of my head, I focused on my part of this. I had to trust the others on both sides of me to keep an eye out for anything wrong. Calvin and Hobbes had their Wren-guns up and ready, while Trevithick herself was hovering nearby with her wings and a special rifle of her own, which looked way too big for her. Poise and Style were looking around rapidly, obviously taking in everything. From his perch on top of my helmet, Qwerty kept turning in circles, his bird-vision and squirrel paranoia working overtime to watch for any threat. And on my other side, the Minority people were doing their part in playing lookouts as well. Including Fragile, who had even more glass shards of various shapes and sizes hovering around us, ready to go flying off into any threat that presented itself.

I had plenty of eyes looking out for me. All I had to do was let them do their part, while I got us into the building. To that end, I raised both hands and sprayed pink paint on the wall and glass. Part of me really expected the paint to simply disintegrate or something as soon as it touched the material. And why not? They had planned against other methods of intrusion, going so far as to have some sort of material that could literally stop people like Amber from teleporting in, or Syndicate from going through while intangible. It really wouldn’t have been all that surprising to find out that they had also come up with a way to stop my pink paint from sticking properly.

But, to my relief, they apparently hadn’t gotten around to that yet. The paint stayed, forming a wide circle right in front of us. Before reality could change its mind and decide it really hadn’t meant to give me that much of a victory, I blurted, “Now, hit it!”

Murphy and Roald reacted immediately. Pointing their guns that way, they sent those physical energy beams slamming into the pink circle I’d made. The beams spread out around the painted material, before the pair retracted them. The circular bit of material, about four feet in diameter, was ripped right out of the wall, revealing a hallway beyond.

“Go, go!” Syndicate snapped, even as he jumped through the opening. He was followed immediately by Way, Carousel, Wobble, Raindrop, and his other three bodies, which had floated over to join us. Style was right behind them, followed by Poise. Then the rest of the team. I gave one last look around, spotting nothing untowards, then jumped through the opening last.

I knew the hallway we were in. Quite well, in fact. About twenty feet to the left was the door that led into the wing where the VIPs were kept, including the observation room for my parents. And quite frankly, in that moment it was all I could do not to ignore absolutely everything else to just go sprinting right in there to make sure they were safe. We couldn’t see or hear anything in that immediate moment. Which, to be honest, kind of scared me even more. It was eerily quiet. The fact that we hadn’t run into any problems getting in here and even now couldn’t hear fighting or anything? It sent chills down my spine.

“We’ll check this way,” the solid Syndicate announced, already starting to move the way my parents’ room was. “You guys look that way. Don’t go too far. We need to figure out what’s going on in here.”

Of course he was claiming that direction for his team. As far as they knew, it was just Izzy’s parents in there. So he was trying to give her a chance to check on them. They had no way of knowing that it was also my parents. And I couldn’t expose that fact. Especially not right now. It wasn’t the time.

So, I ignored the part of me that wanted to shove him and everyone else out of the way. Izzy and I shared a very brief, yet meaningful glance. I couldn’t see her eyes, but I didn’t need to. She was silently promising to check on our parents and keep them safe. That was just going to have to be good enough for now.

Turning the other way was one of the hardest things I’d ever done in my life, but I did it. “Come on,” I started, willing my voice not to crack too much, “let’s see what’s going on this way. Pencil and his people have to be somewhere in here. Maybe they haven’t broken through all the defenses yet.” That was a possibility, right? Even with most of the emergency personnel spread through the city to deal with that whole ‘teleport everyone in that apartment building to random places’ thing, the Conservators headquarters wouldn’t have been left undefended. Maybe the guards had managed to hold off the invading Scions on one of the lower floors.

And hey, while I was at it, maybe I could hope that they’d already managed to subdue the son of a bitch, or made him give up and run away. Miracles could happen, right?

Forcing that dour thought out of my head with some effort, something I was getting better and better at doing (at least in the short term), I jogged down the hall away from where my parents were. Izzy would check on them, and if there was anything wrong, she’d let me know. I trusted that, I trusted her in all things, but especially this. If I had to leave anyone to make sure they were still safe, I was glad it was her.

Meanwhile, our team jogged the other way down the hall and almost immediately found three masked men with guns. Fortunately, they were already unconscious--no, wait, they were dead. All of them had a single entry wound right in the center of their foreheads, as they lay scattered across the floor.

Paige immediately put a hand over Wren’s eyes, turning her away from the sight despite the girl’s protests that she had seen dead people before. That was something I both did and didn’t want to know more about considering I was pretty sure she wasn’t just talking about those zombie guys, but this wasn’t the time. So, like everything else, I set it aside and focused on looking at the fallen figures as we moved quickly past them. From the look of things, they had been coming this way, headed for that VIP wing, when someone got the drop on them. But where was that someone? Were they back there for the Minority to run into? If so, they’d know that those guys were on their side, right?

Right, that was just what I needed at this point, another thing to be paranoid about.

We found three more bodies further down the hall, near the elevator. It looked like they had seen the other three go down and tried to run away, before whoever had hit the first group shot them as well. This time the entry wounds were in the back of their heads. Still a single hole. And still no sign of the person or people responsible for it. If they were guards for the facility, they were remarkably good shots. Which sure, made sense, but the fact that there was only a single hole in each of these dead people along with no sign of any other damage in any of the walls or anything? That seemed odd. This wasn’t the work of a security team or anyone like that. They would’ve fired and kept firing. There would be signs of their misses, holes and other things like that. And they definitely wouldn’t be able to fire a single shot to kill each of these guys dead center in the head. This was more like an assassin. Hell, part of me immediately thought it could be Bobby from what I now remembered about how he fought. But no, he was still recuperating. I’d called in earlier and been told by the doctor that it would be a few more days before they released him.

On the other hand, the Ministry having other people with that sort of skill made sense. And they would definitely send someone like that in to protect my parents. Maybe we’d get really lucky here and find out this maybe-Ministry person had already dealt with this entire problem. God, wouldn’t that be nice?

As we all heard Izzy and the other Minority people report through our phone link that everything in the VIP wing seemed secure and that there were several doctors and a couple security guards still in there who said the Scions had never made it into that area, I noticed something. I'd been wrong when I thought that all three bodies here had a single hole in the back of their head. One of them didn't have any visible holes at all. Pausing, I crouched by the elevator and touched one of his arms. “Hang on,” I started, “this one--”

That was as far as I got before the ‘body’ rolled over. I immediately recognized the face in front of me. It was Nick Sanvers, Pencil. He had been lying there with the other two actual corpses, playing possum. When he saw me, he grinned and held up a small pen-like device before snapping a short, “Surprise.” Then there was a flash of light and the floor dropped out from under me, turning completely intangible. Suddenly, I was falling. Several floors went rushing past my vision over the next couple seconds, and I barely managed to put orange paint on myself before slamming into solid ground on my feet. The shock of it was enough to make me stagger backward and stumble against a table that hadn't been there before, then put my hand out to steady myself against the wall. But the wall wasn’t there and I almost fell over.

By then, my vision had cleared and I looked around to find myself some sort of basement room. There were filing cabinets all along the walls, along with a few sturdy wooden tables and scattered chairs and stools. The room itself was thirty feet long by twenty feet wide. And right now, its only occupants were Pencil and me. And I had absolutely no idea where we actually were, or how far we were from where we had just been. Above me, the ceiling had gone back to being fully solid now that we had fallen several floors away from everyone else.

“Guys? Guys!” I tried contacting the others through our phone link.

“Oh don’t worry, your communications are cut off,” Pencil informed me, cracking his neck while hopping briskly off the floor. “And my other friends should be entertaining yours right about now. Both sets of them, in fact.” He produced a pistol in one hand with a snap of his wrist, and a long, wicked-looking knife in the other. “You know, you weren’t my number one target today. Not even close. But you are kind of a symbol of when shit started going wrong. So I’ll make do.

“And when I toss your unmasked carcass out on that front parking lot, maybe the people out there will take me seriously when I tell them I want a cure for my sister.”