It wasn't so long ago that speaking in front of strangers was just about the most terrifying prospect you could've proposed to me. Stage fright had plagued much of my childhood. There had even been a time when I'd received an F on a test because a presentation in front of three teachers was beyond me.
I wouldn't go so far as to say I’d completely gotten over it, but it wasn't so bad in recent years, even with everyone treating me like I had an infectious disease. Maybe it was just because the vast majority of my attention was more concerned with my lack of powers, pushing out any room for other concerns.
So I had a bit of incomprehensibly out of place anxiety. It was ridiculous. I was in a life or death situation, watching my best friend fight two grown men who were more than likely supervillains, and the thought of drawing attention to myself made my stomach drop. Never mind that I'd been bantering with them a handful of minutes ago. The human mind was a strange thing.
But the fact that remained that my friend was in danger here. My anxieties were trifling compared to that.
And hell, as long as I told myself these were supervillains, it suddenly seemed a lot easier.
Lifting my right hand and stretching my arm to its full length above my head, I clawed my fingers like I was cradling an invisible orb and bellowed at the top of my voice, “ENOUGH!”
There was a hoarse, gravelly quality to my voice that gave it quite a bit more gravitas than it probably deserved. Unintentional on my part, but it helped to catch everyone’s attention, so I’d take it.
Silver’s eyes stayed locked on Ashika, but Blonde was distracted long enough for her to nail him with a right hook that sent him tumbling to the ground. It was like a building had just fallen over nearby. The floor shook.
Getting back to his feet was an awkward matter, leaving a long lull in the fight where Silver didn’t dare to engage Ashika on his own. I took note of that for later, but for now I took advantage of the reprieve.
“I really don’t want to use my power right now,” I said, my voice coming out in a thin rasp that was, again, not faked. “But it’s starting to look like I won’t have a choice.” I let out a ragged breath. “It’ll be a shame to have to go out like this, but at least I’ll take you fuckers with me.”
“Don’t flatter yourself, kid,” Blonde said. But he didn’t move to attack even after he’d managed to stand.
Silver’s eyes were fixed on my hand.
Ashika, bless her, immediately caught on to my ruse. She snarled as she was bouncing in place to keep her charge, “Emmett, no! Don’t you fucking dare sacrifice yourself. I can beat these guys.”
There was a raw emotion to that declaration I wasn’t expecting. Unless Ashika was a much better actress than I knew, she was probably drawing on something genuine. A second passed where I just blinked at her dumbly, before I shook my head. Back on track.
“See, I have a meta power. A pretty good one, if I do say so myself.” That wasn’t even a complete lie. If I could grow it to the heights I dreamt of, it’d be amazing. Obviously, it wasn’t even close to that yet. “Do either of you blockheads know what a meta power is?”
“Don’t gotta be patronising, you little shit,” Blonde rumbled. Even his voice sounded heavier.
“It’s a power that works on other powers in some way,” I explained anyway, taking on the most condescending tone I could muster, channelling that one asshole teacher from middle school who tried to explain to me that my dad was asking for what happened to him. So maybe it came out kinda angry, too. “Now, if you know anything about meta powers at all, you’re probably thinking they’re usually pretty weak. And you’re not wrong. You could even say mine is weak, honestly. See, all I do is… tweak things.”
“Emmett,” Ashika hissed. “If you do that here, it might get me too, and I’ll go all fuckin’ berserker mode like last time.”
I smiled at her. I appreciated the help, but that wasn’t exactly what I had been trying to imply. It worked well, though. The thought of the girl they’d just been fighting two-versus-one against losing her compunctions would surely give them pause.
“True,” I said, deciding to run with it. “And these bozos will undoubtedly struggle to deal with you if they’re not used to their powers.” I grinned at Blonde. “Like say, hmm. How do you think you’ll get on if your power makes you lighter, rather than heavier?” Then to Silver: “And what will you do to defend yourself if you’re forced to micromanage your biology?”
“We’ll adapt,” Blonde said, but his inaction was telling. His eyes were on my hand now too.
My laugh carried every bit of mocking I could channel. I hoped it infuriated them. “See, that’s the thing. If I just tweaked your powers, that would probably be true. Maybe you would survive against my friend here long enough to get the hang of your new abilities. But I’m thinking that whatever I do is going to knock me the hell out, maybe even kill me, so I might as well go all out with it.” I took a deep breath, as if gathering courage. Really, I was just fortifying myself to spew utter bullshit. “Unfortunately for you, there’s another thing I can do. It’s what she was worried about. I call it the scramble. Completely fucks up the powers of everyone in my vicinity for a while, as if they’d walked a completely different Path in all the years since they had their first Revelation. Last time I did it, Ashika here had one of her Aspect change—it went from giving her more clarity of thought as she ramped up to making her angrier and angrier as she ramped up.”
There was a moment of silence.
I tilted my head. “I wonder what it would do to you guys. Shame I wouldn’t get to see it.”
“We can’t let you go, kid,” Blonde said with a sigh that sounded like an avalanche. “You don’t understand what’s riding on this.”
“Oh, I know plenty,” I said. “I know you’ve got hostages in that building next door. The mayor’s family right?”
Blonde said nothing to that, but his eyes narrowed. “Like I said: a lot’s riding on this. Mayor ain’t squeaky clean himself.”
“Okay. Let’s say I believe that. Why does his family get dragged into it?”
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“That’s just the way things go in this game. If you get to grow up to be a superhero yourself, you’ll see that.”
I felt like my head was going to catch fire. “I know that plenty already.”
The villain stared at me. “Maybe you do.” He sighed again. It wasn’t as forceful as the last one. “Look, assuming you’re telling the truth, I don’t care about this job enough to die. At the same time, I care enough about staying out of jail that I’m not going to surrender. So the way I see it is like this: either we all walk away, or none of us do.”
His words hung in the air for a long moment.
The silence was broken by Silver clearing his throat. “Sorry,” he said, voice thin and raspy. “Had removed voicebox. Needed to grow it back.” He pointed at me. “Bullshit.”
He wasn’t wrong. “Yeah? If you think I’m lying, why aren't you attacking?”
“Time on our side,” he said.
I raised an eyebrow. “You sure about that? Pretty sure we’re the ones at the advantage in that regard.”
Except I wasn’t so sure. The explosion at the mayor’s house had happened about an hour ago now, and my distress beacon had been on the whole time. Surely, USHA’s automated systems or someone else would’ve picked up on that by now and sent people out here? This kind of situation was an all hands scenario. Rapid response teams would’ve been dispatched in minutes. Frankly, they should have been swarming the area before Ashika and I were even able to begin our reconnaissance mission.
I narrowed my eyes. Had these villains prepared for that? Interfered somehow? Given they seemed to be a bigger and more prepared outfit than I had first thought, I couldn’t rule that out.
It didn’t feel right, though. Interfering with USHA systems to that degree seemed way above the resources of a group that was hiding out in a warehouse in an out of the way industrial district you could barely see Foresight Tower from. It didn’t make sense.
Something else was going on. At the very least, Silver seemed to believe that the longer this went on, the better their chances. Why? My first thought was Brunette the Shadow manipulator, but my signal sense was passively telling me he was still here, having not moved from the doorway. Had he called it in after all? Or was there something about his power that grew over time? That seemed to be the theme with the other two, and it was undeniable that the walls were still darkening. We’d reached the point where it felt like we were standing in a black void, only a hint of light breaking through from the LEDs.
The temptation to send out a pulse and analyse his power struck me, but I resisted. I wasn’t sure whether I had another one in me, at this point. Knocking myself out now would probably be fatal.
“Y’know, I’ve been wondering about you,” I said to Silver, squinting at him like I was a kid who’d lost his glasses. “If you can change your own biology, why’ve you made yourself ugly?”
It wasn’t just a childish insult, though it was oddly satisfying. Powers were deeply personal things, and they told you a lot. The first revelation was generally something simple and often a bit silly, because it was thought up by a teenager. You tended to see a lot of faux-deep stuff that they’d cringe about later in life.
But that didn’t mean the foundation was meaningless. Especially when the path they walked generally kept up with the same sort of theme; it was common for people to try and diversify their abilities, personalise. The fact that Silver had self-change at his foundation was important. That he’d kept to it…
Silver’s eyes narrowed on me. “Watch yourself.”
“It’s just funny, is all.” I smiled at him. “Did you ever think about aiming for a revelation that might give you good taste?”
The man was still as a statue once more. From previous experience, I suspected that meant he was making significant changes to himself.
I shook my head solemnly. “And the fact you inflicted that on your comrades? That’s the really fucked up part, man. Making yourself ugly is one thing, but why be so bitter about it to make other people ugly, too? Bringing them down to your level?”
“For a kid who claims to want to live,” Silver said, “you’re really pushing your luck.”
“Nah. If you try to do anything to me with your power now, I’ll just set off the scramble and let the heroes scrape you off the walls. You’re no threat to me now.” I paused, waving my raised hand for emphasis. My shoulder was starting to ache. “Unless we take powers out of the equation.”
Blonde grumbled a quiet sentence, but that was by his standards. We heard him clearly: “This is the most obvious bait of all time.”
“I’m taking it,” Silver said. “I don’t need my power for some kid.”
“Awesome,” I said. “Release my legs and reverse whatever bullshit you’ve done to yourself, and then I can kick your ass.”
“Michaels,” Blonde started in a warning tone.
“Just deal with the girl,” Silver said—now named Michaels, but I preferred Silver, so I was sticking with it.
“Easy for you to say,” Blonde grumbled.
A moment later, Silver unfroze. He shook his limbs out one by one and did a few little stretches. Once he was done, he glared at me, and the feeling of burning in my leg muscles vanished like it had never been there.
Standing up was one hell of a challenge when my soul was utterly battered, but I managed it with some effort.
“I’m gonna enjoy this,” Silver said.
“I don’t think you are,” I said as Ashika’s fist rammed into his face at impossible speed, sending him cartwheeling across the room. This time, he hit the wall upside down and sunk halfway into it before the shadow spat him back out. There was a ripple in the darkness like a stone had been tossed onto a pond. Silver hit the ground, faced down, and didn’t move. A trickle of blood snaked out of his visible ear.
A beat of stillness passed. Only Ashika moved, bouncing on her feet to maintain her charge. Then she turned to Blonde, and the hulk of a man clenched his fists at his sides.
“So fucking obvious. I told him.” Blonde then looked at Ashika. “Look, soon I’ll be heavy enough now that you’re not gonna hurt me. We can still all walk away.”
“I don’t think we will,” said a disembodied voice that seemed to come from everywhere at once.
Blonde’s eyes went wide with alarm. “Umbral, don’t—“
“I have to concur,” came another voice, far less disembodied than the first.
What happened next took me a moment to decipher. There was a buzzing sound like every space in the room had suddenly been filled with invisible hornets, and a chill went down my spine. The next millisecond, the shadows covering the walls disappeared. They didn’t recede. They didn’t fade. They were just gone.
A man appeared where my signal sense told me Brunette had been. Had been. Brunette was now prone on the ground, his signal had gone silent, and another had replaced his signal in almost the same space. I could only assume it belonged to the nondescript person wearing a black bodysuit and a blank white mask that covered their entire face.
They stared at Brunette for a moment, then turned their blank gaze to me.
“Oh fucking shit,” Blonde murmured, and his abject terror took me off guard. “Look, this isn’t my operation—“
His voice cut off. I spun to face him, only to find he was prone too, and another person in a black bodysuit and white mask had taken his place. This one held a touchscreen smartphone in their hand, already set to a call with an unknown number. They held it out towards me.
Absolutely fucking baffled at this point, I walked over and took it gingerly. Held it up to my ear. A voice came through the line immediately, and I hated that I recognised it.
“Mister Shaw,” Marquise said. “Proceed outside to the parking lot, if you’d be so kind.”
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Auramaxxing
When demon-spewing portals appear and plunge the world into chaos, John Woods is granted the worst possible ability for a socially anxious loner: in order to gain the power he needs to survive, he must make people think he's cool.
