"Showdown"

For a long moment, the assembled figures were as still and quiet as if they were in repose, like carefully arranged chess pieces between the moves of thoughtful grandmasters. The vacant lot was devoid of motion, except for the flickering of shadows cast from the guttering light of the burning factories to either side, and the swirling smoke issuing from those fires. Bad Blood stood in the lot’s center, and LocoForce had assumed widely spaced positions around the perimeter, awaiting some unknown signal. Even when a large section of the easternmost factory’s roof collapsed into the fire and sent showers of sparks up into the black night sky, neither hero nor villain flinched.

Pierce moved first, rising up from the asphalt on one foot as the other connected in a roundhouse kick to Protocol’s kidney. Before he had delivered the follow-up strike, a right cross smashing into Protocol’s jaw, the rest of LocoForce charged at Bad Blood, like a sprung trap snapping shut.

Ember was airborne instantly, blazing toward Genocide. “I still owe you a burn for that lightning bolt you hit me with at the Somme*,” Ember growled at the armored man-mountain, “and I definitely plan on striking the same spot twice.” No sooner had Ember finished his threat than he was pummeling the sides of Genocide’s head with his fiery fists.
(*That would be back in Bad Blood #13 – DWG)

Genocide withstood the blows for several seconds, seemingly unfazed, then lashed out with a savage backhand that sent Ember flying backwards. Ember halted his own progress in mid-air several dozen yards away, then turned and flew back towards Genocide. This time Ember did not stop before his opponent, but delivered a pair of uppercuts as he flew past. His speed in flight added a power to the attack that caused Genocide’s head to snap back from the impact.

As Ember continued flying some distance away before returning for another strafing run, Genocide fired his crimson techno-organic rifle at the sky. As the scarlet bolt of energy disappeared into the darkness overhead, a small tornado appeared and touched down near Genocide. The vortex of winds lifted Genocide off the ground, responding to his mental commands, and moved through the lot toward Ember’s retreating glow. When Ember executed a hairpin turn in the air, he found himself face to face with Genocide, who smashed a silver fist between Ember’s eyes.

Bayonet soared down from his perch toward Hangfire, his forearm blades snapping out of their housings with orange firelight gleaming along their razor edges. Hangfire dropped to a low crouch and unholstered a pair of guns, emptying their clips at his attacker. The bullets were real, but Hangfire aimed for non-vital parts of Bayonet’s anatomy. Bayonet, for his part, veered away, deflecting some of the incoming fire off the metallic surface of his wings. The bare-chested villain looped in mid-air and fired twin bolts of black energy at Hangfire. The darkforce struck its target, but bounced harmlessly off Hangfire’s personal forcefield.

The black beams rushed past Pierce and Protocol, but neither man paid them heed. Pierce squatted to deliver a low leg sweep, which Protocol jumped over easily. While at the apex of his leap, Protocol kicked out his right leg, and his boot connected squarely with the front of Pierce’s helmet, knocking the Checkmate knight onto his back. Once his feet touched the ground again, Protocol lunged to press his advantage, but Pierce detached his bo staff from its gauntlet clamps and pointed the end of the baton toward Protocol’s sternum. The staff telescoped to its full extension, and as the end drove into Protocol’s chestplate it forced the Russian backwards across the asphalt.

On the other side of the lot, Loki advanced on Sojourn, his lean purple-clad body seeming to undulate through the billowing smoke blowing across the ground. Loki’s demonic grin widened across his oblong skeletal visage, as he raised his hands and raked them down again through the air. His fingertips tore gashes in the empty space, and the gashes bared rows of impossibly sharp teeth along their edges. The disembodied mouths flew towards Sojourn, flocking around her like nightmarish bats. Sojourn tried to ward off the fang-filled orifices, too terrified to shift safely into the spirit realm. Instead she simply retreated backwards, step by step, as Loki leeringly followed her into a dark corner of the lot.

More closed the distance between himself and Silencer in a few strides. Silencer aimed both of his wrist magnums at More and fired a series of shots, their reports nullified by the assassin’s power. More ducked easily, and the bullets sailed upwards over his shoulders. More grabbed Silencer and spun him around, deftly locking Silencer in a full-nelson headlock. Overhead, a wide section of steel pipe which had been Silencer’s real target fell from the side of the nearby burning factory. Silencer’s null-sound field extended straight up, masking the approach of the plummeting metal, which soon crashed into the back of More’s head, driving him to his knees. Silencer quickly scrambled away from the strongman.

Still in his prone position, Protocol leveled his gauntlets at Pierce, firing a non-stop volley of miniaturized grenades from launchtubes along the underside of his arms. Pierce backflipped out of the way as the small but powerful devices exploded, each blast closer to him than the last. Pierce executed a final handspring and then brought his own gauntlets to bear on Protocol, unleashing a wide wave of sonic energy. The vibrations detonated the grenades, and the chain of explosions began to rush backwards, until the most recently fired mini-bombs exploded mere inches from Protocol’s hands.

Protocol rolled off his back and onto his feet, his bearded face contorted in naked rage. Pierce rotated one of his hands palm up, and beckoned Protocol forward with a flick of his fingers.

Protocol charged, fingers splayed high like talons, and Pierce caught the Russian’s hands in his own. The two warriors grappled, struggling back and forth for advantage. Slowly, tendrils of vapor began to rise from their intertwined knuckles, as Protocol’s gauntlets released a chemical agent that dissolved Pierce’s own hand weapons. Pierce twisted Protocol’s arms down to his sides and released a variant frequency from his own gauntlets, so high and fast that it broke down the structural integrity of Protocol’s armored gloves. Both men let go and stepped back, each throwing his now useless gauntlets down to the ground.

As an illusion began to wrap itself around Karnival’s body, he approached Minotaur. The illusion made Karnival appear taller and more muscular, with bronzed skin covered by a dazzlingly white toga. In his hand appeared a long golden sword, glowing with innate power, which he pointed at Minotaur’s heart. “Minotaur, meet your Theseus,” Karnival intoned gravely.

Valence shot like an arrow in Headhunter’s direction, steel cables magnetically uncoiling like metallic tentacles. He flew low to the ground, and as Headhunter raised one hand overhead and began to produce a sloping stream of ice to meet him, Valence angled his flight upward to avoid it. At the same time, Headhunter shot another ice beam from the hand below his waist, angling the floe away from the ground. Massive blocks of ice formed over and under Valence, trapping him in mid-flight between them as the merged into one frozen monolith. Only Valence’s head was visible; the rest of his body was completely encased in ice a dozen feet above the asphalt surface of the lot.

Headhunter calmly walked toward the tower of ice, and created a frozen staircase at the base which allowed him to ascend to Valence’s level. When the two were eye-to-eye, Headhunter asked, “Why are you here?”

“Are you gonna try and tell me that it wasn’t LocoForce who blew up these factories and painted the big invitation on the lot?” Valence asked skeptically.

Headhunter chuckled. “Certainly not. I claim neither innocence nor ignorance. My associates and I wanted Bad Blood to come here, and knew what would get your attention. ‘Why did you accept the invitation?’ might be the more appropriate question. Do you even know?”

Valence only glowered at his captor, so Headhunter continued, “It’s about motivation, really. Do you ever stop to think about that? About what drives you to do what you do and make the choices you make? Is it the fact that you see yourselves as the ‘good guys’ and us as the ‘bad guys’, forever locked in struggle? I hope it’s nothing so trite, but I suppose that’s possible.” Headhunter turned away to gaze over the urban battlefield beneath them. “Or is it some overdeveloped sense of social responsibility? As if demolishing two abandoned facilities in one of the most Godforsaken pits in the country were some horrible crime, the perpetrators of which must be brought to justice immediately.” He looked over his shoulder at Valence, and despite the navy blue mask covering his entire face, the angle of his head indicated he could only be rolling his eyes in disbelief.

“Perhaps it was fear of what we might do next?” Headhunter resumed. “If you ignored us when we set fire to Hub City’s useless manufacturing district, we might pull the trigger on the populated slums. Would you not be able to sleep at night if that were to happen, and you knew it could have been avoided? Or maybe … just maybe … you simply don’t like us, and all we had to do was let you know where to show up for a chance to take out all that … hostility.” He paused, turning to face Valence again. “You don’t know, do you? Whatever level the decision to come here was made on, you’re barely conscious of it at all.”

“You can drop the psychobabble, Reinhart, it’s not working,” Valence said. “Unless you expect to bore me to death.”

“I expect LocoForce to win this round, my friend,” Headhunter answered. “And the reason is simple. We know exactly why we’re here, and it’s markedly different from our encounters in the past. No extraneous bull. No magic mirrors to keep you away from, no objectives to meet, no paying customer to satisfy. We’re here for one reason and one reason only. To beat you down. To cause you pain and humiliation. If you’re all very, very lucky, we’ll enjoy it so much that we’ll let you live, so that we can all do this again some time.

“But don’t bet on it.”

In the swamp outside of New Orleans, the Riverboat kept its silent vigil over the wild green surroundings, awaiting the return of the heroes that called it home. Small shapes moved across the weathered wooden surface of the Riverboat’s exterior, skittering up the uneven gray hull to the top. The eight shapes gathered around the entrance hatch, and one by one slithered into the Riverboat. The swamp seemed to breathe a palpable sigh of relief.

Karnival thrust his illusory sword deep into Minotaur’s breast, spilling dark blood down the front of the villain’s suit. Minotaur closed his eyes, as if meditating on the sensation, and when he reopened them, he smiled. “Two problems, slick,” Minotaur smirked. “First, I know what you do isn’t real, and if I know that, I can get over it.” Minotaur reached out with a lightning quickness belying his size, and throttled Karnival by the neck. He hoisted Karnival off the ground, and tossed him like a rag doll into a pile of smoldering rubble that had once been a section of factory wall.

“Second,” Minotaur continued, “Theseus was a tragic hero.”

Hangfire stood tall near the edge of the lot, presenting an easy target to Bayonet. He trained his weapons on the flying villain, but did not fire them, making it even easier for Bayonet to take aim with his own blasts of dark energy. The black bolts beat against Hangfire’s forcefield in a non-stop torrent, each one veering away like a speeding comet of ichor, temporarily under Hangfire’s mental control. The dark bolts seemed to fly off harmlessly into the night, but high above in the gloom, each one reversed its course and began to streak toward Bayonet. In one explosive instant, all of the black energy blasts which had been individually deflected from Hangfire struck Bayonet in concert. Bayonet possessed an inherent resistance to the effects of his own power, but nevertheless the sheer force of impact drove him down to the ground.

Granted a moment’s reprieve, Hangfire opened the sub-audible communication channel. “We’re doing something wrong here,” he announced to his teammates, scanning the rest of the battlefield to gauge the situation.

Apparently, More was the only other one capable of answering. “What, like, we shouldn’t have showed up?”

“Like we shouldn’t be outmaneuvered,” Hangfire answered. “They were waiting for us with a plan, and we walked in blind. We …” Hangfire cut himself off as he spied Minotaur, walking away from Karnival’s crumpled form, casting about for a new target. “We need to stop letting them dictate the terms of this fight,” Hangfire resumed. “Everyone needs to focus on Minotaur. NOW.”

“Great,” More groaned, as he caught sight of Silencer’s green spandex-clad shoulder poking over the edge of a pile of rubble. More threw himself at the pile, colliding with it in what should have been a deafening crash, and spilling the huge chunks of ruined brickwork over Silencer. The assassin struggled briefly under the crushing weight of the masonry. More punched him in the face for good measure, then rolled off the rubble and ran for Minotaur.

Hangfire, reloading as he ran, was converging on the spot with More, as Ember, with great reluctance, tore himself away from Genocide. Ember flew downward in a spiral path, tracing the outside of Genocide’s cyclonic conveyance, his blazing surface creating a column of superheated air that forced the tornado even higher into the night sky, and Genocide with it.

Valence, like Ember, had heard More and Hangfire’s conversation on the sub-audible. He looked to Headhunter, still standing nearby on his ice staircase. “There’s reasons behind reasons,” Valence said.

“Be that as it may,” Headhunter answered non-chalantly, “you should at least make an attempt to understand them. Saying that there is no end to the layers you could uncover upon examination is no excuse for putting off the examination entirely.”

“I’m not talking about us,” Valence replied. “I’m talking about you.”

Headhunter turned to observe the goings-on below again.

“You know you’re here to destroy Bad Blood,” Valence pressed. “Why? You already admitted it’s not because someone’s paying you to or anything like that. Is it because we stand in the way of something else you want? Is it because you just want to see if you can, if you’re up to the challenge?” He swallowed, a painfully difficult act while his throat was encased in a collar of ice. “Is it a matter of honor?”

Headhunter snapped his eyes back to Valence’s, but said nothing. Valence continued, “I had a feeling it might be that. So I have to ask again, why? What’s the point? I never understood honor among thieves. Who cares how much honor a scumbag has? If it’s that important to you, maybe you’re fighting on the wrong side.”

“You, my boy, are on the wrong side,” Headhunter retorted coolly. “The wrong side of a very cold tomb – the inside.” With that he raised his hand in front of Valence’s face and encased his head in a massive block of ice.

Valence had been slowly extending his power outward, gathering as much material in his magnetic reach as he could. Now, completely paralyzed by tons of ice, he pulled the magnetic force toward him. Where the invisible lines of power had extended into the burning foundations of the exploded factories, sprays of red-hot metal erupted, broken beams and severed wiring and nails and screws super-heated in the banked fires, all charging at the looming icy construct. The scrap metal bit into and melted through the block with power enough to blast Headhunter off his perch. Guided by the magnetism at his command, the slag cleanly freed Valence from his frozen prison.

Headhunter broke his own fall with a slide of ice, but Valence ignored him, flying swiftly toward Minotaur, currently besieged on three sides by Hangfire, More and Ember. With unrelenting ferocity, the threesome had backed their opponent into a defensive posture he was holding to tenaciously. Valence arrived in time to deliver the finishing blow. An electromagnetic flex yanked an underground pipe up through the asphalt between Minotaur’s legs; the heavy iron cylinder cracked savagely against the center of Minotaur’s pelvis and brought him resoundingly to his knees.

“Whoa, someone’s a little angry,” More observed.

“Just wait until I get my hands on Headhunter,” Valence answered.

“I gotta finish things with Genocide,” Ember added, beginning to rise into the air.

“Pierce,” Karnival said weakly, his voice barely reaching the others from several yards away, yet still giving them pause.

“What about Pierce?” Hangfire asked as he reached Karnival’s side, kneeling beside his teammate and checking him quickly for serious injuries.

Karnival simply pointed, directing the other members of Bad Blood’s attentions to the continuing duel between Pierce and Protocol. The two warriors were now trading punches and kicks less hurriedly, but no less viciously. Protocol caught the underside of Pierce’s helmet with a sidekick, then staggered forward toward the Checkmate knight. Pierce barely stepped aside in time to avoid being tackled, and brought both hands in a double ax-handle crashing into the lower part of Protocol’s spine.

Ember, More and Valence looked back and forth uncertainly between Karnival and the grappling duo. “I know, we’re all pissed at Pierce,” Karnival nodded, bringing on a coughing spasm which made him wince in pain. “But now is not the time. Now we need to be a team. Or at least act like one.”

Once again, the heroes were galvanized to action, as Protocol threw a roundhouse punch at Pierce, and stopped mid-swing to grab the arm Pierce had raised to parry the blow. Protocol turned and executed an ugly but effective judo throw, sending Pierce tumbling away. Before Protocol could follow after him, he found his feet sinking into a river of molten asphalt, originating a few yards away, superheated by Ember’s hands. A length of Valence’s steel cabling snaked around Pierce’s waist, and tugged him away from Protocol. Several rounds of suppressing fire from Hangfire’s handguns kept the Russian off-balance, as More charged in and scored a knockout punch.

“Thanks,” Pierce nodded as his teammates regrouped around him. “Where’s the girl?”

Ember, Valence, More and Hangfire looked at each other questioningly, as Karnival limped toward them. Quickly they looked around the lot, trying to remember where they had seen Sojourn last.

A sharp snapping noise brought all of their eyes to a shadowy area of the lot. Loki backpedaled out of the darkness and fell flat on his back. Sojourn followed a moment later, flexing the fingers of her right hand and rubbing her knuckles.

“Told you she’s a keeper, Pierce,” Karnival observed.

“Clearly,” Pierce agreed. “That’s Protocol, Loki and Minotaur down. Let’s finish this.”

“No. Not like this.” The dissenting voice belonged to Headhunter, who appeared on the crest of a wave of ice. He raised his hands and in an instant a clear cone of ice thirty feet high had formed around Bad Blood. “Perhaps some other time,” Headhunter offered, pressing a button on his belt buckle. The teleporters for the members of LocoForce were activated, and all of the villains began to glow with white light.

“More. Lift. Now!” Pierce barked.

More picked up Pierce and tossed him easily into the air. Pierce raised his collapsed bo staff and allowed the ends to telescop outward, shattering the thin ice at the top of the cone. He flipped forward over the braced staff and landed on the lip of the ice cone, facing Headhunter. Headhunter formed an ice cocoon around himself as he began to fade from view.

Pierce turned around while detaching a device from the side of his belt. He threw the device down at Minotaur’s hulking, unconscious body. Tiny electrical arcs zipped all around the device as it attached itself to Minotaur, and the white glow of the teleportation signal began to disappear, while Minotaur’s body remained firmly in place.

Ember rose up next to Pierce, followed by Valence, magnetically holding More, Hangfire and Karnival aloft, and the ghostly form of Sojourn. “Nice trick,” Ember commented. “How’d you manage that?”

“Little toy Enigma came up with. Prototype, really. Just got its first field test for disrupting teleports. Looks like it passed,” Pierce replied.

“But everyone else got away,” Sojourn said, disappointed.

“Not … entirely,” Valence said, adding “never mind,” in response to Sojourn’s quizzical look.

“All right, we’ll drop Minotaur off at Belle Reve, and then head back to the …” Pierce stopped himself. He looked at each of his teammates in turn, then said, “We drop off Minotaur, then everyone go home. Rest. We still have a lot to sort through, but it’ll keep until morning. It’ll keep.”

The Ohyn scuttled through the Riverboat, crawling with a blind fervor from room to room. Ultimately their seemingly directionless clawing and groping brought them to the lounge area, where the Magna of Illusion sat on coffee-table legs before a threadbare old couch. The Ohyn clambered around the Magna, squirming about the short wooden legs like newly-hatched maggots.

Without warning the Magna of Illusion swelled to fill the entire room, yet never moved or changed size. The impenetrable blackness of its glassy surface threatened to swallow the lounge, the Riverboat, perhaps the world … then the moment passed, and the Magna was nothing more than an obsidian mirror parallel to the floor.

But the Ohyn were gone.

MESSAGES WRITTEN IN BLOOD ...

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