Isaac waited on the corner of Sixteenth and Spring, just outside the rebuilt zone and only a few blocks from the foster care center. He’d gotten there just ahead of the ten minute time limit, but saw nothing other than a few pedestrians. The usual background noise of sirens and the dots of flying supers made it seem exactly like any other time and place, yet he still felt completely detached from reality.

  Suddenly there was a sound like a crack of thunder from the clear blue sky, and a dark rent tore itself open less than an arm’s length away. Isaac recognized the woman who stepped through — the transporter that had brought Crash after the drone attack, someone who seemed to be made out of clouds and nebula. Other supers followed. A thin, almost skeletal man in an unrelieved white bodysuit and mask; a man in a baby-blue suit and bowler hat that was three feet tall and three feet wide, his build practically spherical; and behind them a figure in burnt orange armor with a glass dome filled with crackling electricity for a head.

  Blacktime himself arrived last. A black three-piece suit, white shirt, black tie, and a red handkerchief in the pocket to set off the unrelieved starkness of the image. He had no visible face or hands; instead he was entirely shrouded in the characteristic darkness of the man’s power, as if he were carrying shadow wherever he went. If anything, Isaac was a little surprised that Blacktime had come himself, but this was personal.

  “Ravdia,” Blacktime said, his voice hollow, sepulchral, echoing from somewhere within the shadows as the transport woman vanished again. “Since you can resist the depowerment effect, you will be the vanguard. But you will follow our direction.” The cold, hard delivery of the statement left no doubt that it was a requirement, a statement of reality more than a demand.

  “Ravdia understands!” Isaac replied, saluting as the magical girl should.

  “Go ahead,” the bowler-hat super said, waving for Isaac to take the lead and then waddling after at a surprising pace for someone so short. Isaac only vaguely recognized the team; he knew Blacktime’s current lieutenants well enough, as they’d all been in the news, but his personal strike supers were less in the public eye. He was pretty sure bowler hat was Fantabio, whose power had something to do with the color blue.

  In a way, Isaac was surprised that Blacktime deigned to actually walk, but no machine could be trusted when brought into the domain of a tinker. He half-expected Blacktime to extend his power outward and blanket everything in a time-freeze — but after a moment of thought he realized why that wasn’t going to happen. The depowerment ray worked on extensions of power and not just the individual, so that kind of area denial was just begging for an easy shot from some hidden drone.

  Isaac preceded them along the sidewalk toward Greg’s apartment, and while he didn’t know if Greg would be there at the moment, there’d probably be some link to his lair or control center. Or at least records; he assumed that was part of the reason for the other supers. He sure didn’t know how to trace whatever evidence might be found at the apartment. They attracted some attention, as obvious supers, but he was pretty sure nobody actually believed it was Blacktime himself strolling down the sidewalk, especially given the low quality of the surroundings.

  “Go on in,” Fantabio said, flipping a small pin to Isaac as they neared Greg’s address. A communicator the size of a shirt button, not quite as good as Cayleb’s tech but still in a similar vein. “Once you have cleared any depower projectors, we will address the remaining defenses.”

  It seemed a serious assumption that the depowerment rays would be the outermost layer of defenses, and that he could weather whatever other defenses existed, but Isaac did have some level of toughness. And he didn’t think that they’d want someone who could deal with the depowerment rays to die, so he suspected there’d be some non-obvious protections. It wasn’t clear what the other supers could do, after all.

  “Ravdia will ensure communication remains clear,” he said, stopping at Greg’s door. He dropped his inertial investment enough to pound on the door without putting his fist through it, not really expecting a response. There wasn’t one, so Isaac pushed his inertia back up and punched through the doorknob and locking mechanism. The metal squealed as it deformed, but the door opened. Blacktime’s supers said nothing, though he was sure they could have opened it more easily, as he was the dedicated bait for any potential depowerment setup.

  “Greg?” He said, dialing up the volume on the voice changer, but there was no answer. Isaac stepped forward into the apartment he’d seen before, one cluttered with normal – a relative term when it came to tinkers – mechanical devices, most of them only half-finished. Justice for Hire hadn’t included any real training for how to sweep a building, and Isaac hadn’t asked since he’d never wanted to learn that, but now he wished he’d at least read a primer.

  The silence and stillness of the apartment put him on edge, but Ravdia walked confidently deeper into the building, checking doors. Not because Isaac expected to find Greg there, but because he was hoping to find a stairway to the basement. He’d had time to think about what must be going on, and Greg needed to have a lair to store all the Mechaniacal stuff. A lair Greg could get to secretly, which meant it was underground, connected to the apartment. Of course, Isaac could be entirely wrong, and boy would that be embarrassing, but Blacktime had agreed enough with the reasoning to show up.

  One of the doors finally yielded a staircase descending into shadow, and Isaac flicked the light switch before double-checking both his physical and his ontological inertia. He couldn’t make himself invincible like mystical artifacts, nowhere close. His power wasn’t all that strong to begin with, and his ability to apply it non-physically was still weak and unrefined. But he could give himself more resistance than anyone else in the world to what the ray did, perhaps enough that he wouldn’t have to grapple with the effect as much as the first time.

  He'd also tried investing in the inertia of their search, to make it harder for anything to stop or deflect their purpose, but he had no idea if that had done anything or not. Something that abstract was as far from his own inertia as the ontological concept was from physical, so there was no actual feedback. Not that he’d be able to tell anyway, since separating a small and subtle push from the normal working of the world was impossible. He doubted even tinkers had invented the kind of instruments necessary to measure that kind of influence, so he sure as hell wasn’t going to rely on it.

  “Ravdia is descending to the basement to look for a bolthole,” he reported over the comm-pin, and thumped down the stairs. Even if they were concrete, they felt a little fragile beneath his invested feet, but he didn’t dare pull back any of his protections. And a good thing too, because on the fifth step a depowerment field triggered. Or rather — it was merely a suppression field since, while he could feel the effect, it lacked the impact of the ray from the big drones.

  Unfortunately, he had no idea where it was coming from. He raced down the stairs to the actual basement, finding it cluttered with more machinery — but it was easy to tell the difference between Greg’s original work and Mechaniacal’s. They were similar enough, but Mechaniacal’s creations were sleek and smooth, aesthetic in a way that Greg’s were not.

  Some perpetual motion engine clicked away in the corner, powering a drivechain and some partially-encased gears, leading to a smooth crystalline matrix braced in a clearly Greg-produced framework. Tubes of some liquid connected the casing to what were clearly sensors simply taped to the outside of the stairwell, a very simple tripwire alarm. Isaac simply reached over and pulled the crystalline case from the contraption, and the suppression effect lifted. After a moment of consideration, Isaac just smashed it against the nearest wall; while part of him hated breaking such a device, the alternative was to let Blacktime get ahold of it and that wasn’t happening.

  “Suppressor neutralized,” he said to the comm-pin, looking around the basement but not seeing any exit. At least the presence of the technology confirmed his guess, even if he didn’t see where the lair might be. “Ravdia doesn’t spot any immediate exits.”

  In the next moment, the entire group was downstairs next to him. He almost jumped, unsure whether time had been frozen thanks to Blacktime’s powers, or if the villain had simply accelerated everyone else. For all he knew, the villain had the transportation super running overwatch or something.

  “Mangonel,” Blacktime said, faceless suit turning to regard the basement. “Find the bolthole.”

  The lightning-headed suit lifted both burnt-orange hands, palms ejecting spiked balls of electricity that relentlessly smashed into the walls, starting from one side and methodically sweeping the destruction around the room. Each impact left a scorched crater in the concrete of the basement walls — at least until one grounded on a perfectly hidden metal door. A pair of much larger follow-up balls blew the thing off its hinges, the thick metal looking more like a vault door than anything else. It made an earsplitting racket of screeching metal as it crashed down another stairwell, landing at the bottom and reflecting the red light of emergency illumination.

  “After you,” bowler hat said, waving a pudgy hand at the stairs. Isaac rolled his eyes, but started down. There might not be any active hostility from Blacktime’s crew, but they clearly didn’t see him as worth treating seriously. Though it was hard to blame them; Ravdia was a small-time mercenary at best, Blacktime was sovereign-class, and his people were probably extremely heavy-hitting tactical-class. The only reason Ravdia was there was to soak up the depowerment effect.

  He carefully stepped over the remains of the door, peering down the hallway. It extended quite a way, possibly part of some ancient escape route or maintenance before Greg – or maybe even Mechaniacal – had claimed it as his own. Isaac’s hands gripped the flails as he walked forward, keeping an eye out for any potential motion. Though considering the strange tinker-weaponry that the drones used, he wasn’t sure that was enough.

  The hallway was eerily silent, lit only by the red bulbs set in the ceiling, and Isaac felt like he was in some kind of horror movie. The hapless victim, wandering through the monster-infested facility. It took him a moment to shake off that impression, continuing down the hallway and wishing he actually had super-strength so he could take the door as a shield.

  Isaac made it another twenty feet or so before the defenses activated. A whine spooled up somewhere in the wall, and he jumped back just far enough to only be clipped in the shin by a bright blue energy bolt. The top layer of his armor sizzled, little bits rising into the air and disintegrating, but it did its job and protected him. For how long, Isaac had no idea.

  The turret that had fired at him was on the ceiling, some twenty feet ahead, and the brief illumination had showed half a dozen others. All of them seemed to be simply bolted to the metal of the hallway, clearly added on after the fact. Charging into that would be idiocy, so he didn’t bother to try.

  “Ravdia spots seven turrets, forty feet from the entrance, ceiling-mounted.” Surely Blacktime’s group could provide backup.

  “Yeah, okay,” said bowler hat, and a moment later a powder-blue sheet of fabric flickered forward over Isaac’s head. The turrets all hummed to life, but were summarily smothered under the blue-ness. Silence followed, and Isaac stepped forward to find that, in the dim light, the ceiling and the weapons had all been turned to that single color of blue, and were drooping as if they were fabric imitations.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  Now feeling very much like he was in a horror movie, Isaac hurried under the altered area and pressed forward, finding the hall ended in an elevator. Which Isaac was not going to trust. Even if there hadn’t been any training for it, it only took about six seconds of thought to realize that getting into an externally controlled tiny room where the destination was unknown was simply asking for trouble. Instead he wedged the corner of one of his flails in the elevator doors, denting the metal slightly, and used it to pry them open.

  The elevator shaft descended into pitch blackness beneath him, at least until he flicked on the illumination for his flails. It wasn’t much light, but it was something, and he made a note to integrate some kind of headlamp the next time he designed a costume. It was embarrassing that ordinary darkness was a problem for him.

  “Ravdia has found an elevator shaft. Descending,” he reported through the comm-pin, and reached out to grab the elevator cable. His inability to affect mass and gravity helped him here, as the cable wasn’t about to snap under his weight even when he was fully invested. He would have preferred to drop his inertia down to make his landing easier, but he didn’t dare give up even the slightest bit of protection.

  Unfortunately, it also meant that once he started down, it was damned hard to stop. Maybe he could ignore the inertia, but his grip on the cable couldn’t, and he was forced to hastily divest some of what he had put into his armor after all, so his downward motion wouldn’t compound beyond what he could stop. The illuminated flails swayed from their positions at his hip, sending pastel light dancing down the elevator shaft. Metallic sounds bounced up and down the shaft, warbling up and down the scale as wire under tension complained about the extra load.

  A distant hum and a sparkle of a dozen targeting optics heralded more defenses appearing below him and confirming his decision not to use the elevator itself. Unfortunately, that still left him completely exposed to the weapons — if they activated, anyway. He hurled one of his flails down toward the cluster of machines sliding out of the wall of the elevator shaft, wincing at a sudden, unholy racket of tortured metal where the flail tore open the side of the shaft, crashing through machinery there. Artificial light poured through a rent somewhere further down, and Isaac could have kicked himself. He probably hadn’t needed to use the elevator shaft at all, if only he’d thought to punch through the floor.

  Rather than staying in the shooting gallery, he used his remaining flail to punch open the side of the elevator shaft where light leaked in and swung himself through, the cable vibrating dangerously as he released it; the world’s largest plucked string. Isaac burst through into a large warehouse-like space, filled with racks of machinery. He tumbled down to the ground, dropping his inertia to turn the fall into something more like a drift as he landed, then dialed it up again as clicking and whirring sounded all about him.

  Multiple spherical drones rose from the shelves, including one of the big ones, all of them targeting him. The distortion of the depowerment ray built around the primary drone as it maneuvered through the aisles made by the racks, and Isaac scrambled to brace himself as it fired. This time it really did have force behind it, and he could feel the way it shoved at his power, the very core of him. But at the same time, he’d had more practice with investing himself, and more time to reinforce his own resistance.

  The endless moment passed, and the depowerment ray faded, exhausted. Only for all the other drones to arrange themselves into clear firing lines, tiny covers sliding back to reveal the barrels of arcane weapons. And all he had was one remaining costume flail.

  “Heck.”

  ***

  “Stop Motion reports Blacktime, Mangonel, Fantabio, and Fingerthin entering a house on Spring Street.”

  Ike’s fingers paused atop the controls for the room display as Vilmonica’s voice broke into his meeting. He looked between Mocker and Captain Bulk, then shut down the projection of the Fireshrike swarm that was coming up from the south. That would keep for another day or so, but this might not. Instead he pulled up the map of the city on the wall-sized screen, expanding the area around Spring Street.

  “Thank you, Vilmonica,” he said over the intercom. “Details?”

  “They were following a super registered with the mercenary guild Justice For Hire by the name of Ravdia. Magical-girl type.” Ike typed in the name to the records database, and frowned as it pulled up a few blurry images and a familiar file. He’d looked into this super before, in connection with what was now Isaac Hartson’s casefile, but she hadn’t fit the pattern and he’d put her out of his mind.

  “Thoughts?” He asked Mocker, fingers twitching as he suppressed the urge to pull up all the ancillary data and clutter the screen.

  “Where exactly is that?” Mocker said, half to himself as he stared at the map view. Ike helpfully re-rendered it in a larger area, beyond just the immediate street names. Off to the side of the slums, near the industrial district, just on the edge of respectable.

  “I thought so.” Mocker wrinkled his brow, forehead creasing as he considered the map. “That’s in the dead zone. Magic doesn’t work there, so she can’t be a magical girl. Not and have her armor out.” There were obvious exceptions and caveats, as nothing was universal when it came to powers, regardless of their source. But if he smelled a rat, Ike wasn’t going to argue with his magical expert.

  “So is she a foreign super, a spy, under coercion, or…” Ike thought aloud. While he didn’t want to jump to any conclusions, when it came to Blacktime’s movements there were no coincidences. There was no reason for the super to be in that area of the city, not with his whole combat crew, unless he was hunting a very specific someone. The man had even called Ike soon after the depowerment incident, asking – demanding, they both knew, but Blacktime was icily polite – for information about their Mechaniacal-alike. Unfortunately, Ike had nothing to give him, save for what they both knew about the permanency of the suppressor.

  “If Blacktime’s target – and it has to be our false Mechaniacal – is somewhere in the dead zone, that would add another layer to why we can’t locate him,” Mocker said. “I should have thought of it myself, but we’ve never been able to track Mechaniacal. He’s not from this reality; magic doesn’t stick to him quite right.”

  “Vilmonica, tap all our transport and rescue crews, we’re going to want to evacuate the area.” Normally Blacktime was careful not to involve civilians – one of the reasons why it was politically difficult to put together serious force to deal with him – but this was a unique matter. It was personal to the supervillain, since it involved Glorybeam, and it was a sovereign-class confrontation. With a tinker, which meant all kinds of weaponry was possible.

  “Except Sparkle Motion and the Glitter Girls,” Mocker added, and Ike grunted agreement. Of course magical girls couldn’t help in the dead zone, but fortunately there weren’t all that many magic users, so only a few people needed to be excluded from the exercise. Magic was much rarer than the nebulous category of powers and, while sometimes there was a crossover, for the most part it was the domain of Lunarians.

  “Bulk, I want you and Attention Sink at the perimeter. We’ll want to jump on the first opportunity we have.” Ike didn’t have anyone who could contest Blacktime directly, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t apply pressure. “If nothing else we can block Nebula from just teleporting them out. Make it harder for them to loot any tech.”

  “Yes, sir,” Bulk said, lifting his massive frame out of the specialty chair.

  “Mocker, see if you can find out anything about this Ravdia,” Ike instructed. “If she’s not a magic user, what is she? I’m sure Justice for Hire can give you something.” There were both laws and customs surrounding meta identities, but under the circumstances those could be bent at least a little.

  “I shall,” Mocker declared, following Bulk’s example but vanishing in a swirl of shadows rather than using the door. That left Ike alone with his databases and projectors, but that was fine. Thanks to Machine Head, he no longer had to rely solely on secondhand accounts. His chair controls let him access one of the new surveillance drones, the tiny thing stationed at one of the safehouses in the northeastern quadrant of the city.

  Ike launched it, watching the camera feed play across the screen as he directed the drone toward the area in question. The feed bobbed and wobbled, the small drone’s lift engine fighting the wind currents, but it was better than relying on second-hand reports. There were, at least, no fires or explosions as yet, but first responders were beginning to appear.

  The alarms had triggered for the area, which would at least get people out of their houses and to the shelters, and supers went around sweeping up people and directing them – or transporting them – out of the combat zone. Hopefully that wouldn’t be necessary, but Ike didn’t want a repeat of the original incident with Blacktime and Glorybeam. Those that lived there might consider the area cursed, but the truth was there had been dozens of such evacuations over the past few decades, as threats presented themselves and then were crushed.

  If there was one irony, it was that he wouldn’t have been able to use Glorybeam for this operation anyway. Of course, he would have had more people he could divert to containment and control without the losses from the leaks and the crime wave brought on by her absence. Blacktime was doing Ike the favor of targeting one of his greatest headaches anyway, and Ike wasn’t going to try and stop him.

  But even if Blacktime succeeded, Ike wasn’t looking forward to dealing with what came next.

  ***

  Greg scowled at the display in his lab, foot tapping unhappily against the tile floor as the idiot super wrecked Storage Room A-2. He didn’t like magic users at all – found the entire concept ridiculous, in fact – and so had just directed all of the Storage Room’s defenses at her. But the longer he watched, the less certain he was that this particular super was, in fact, magical.

  There were no bolts of energy, no area effects. Nothing approaching the flashiness he expected from magical types, nor was there any spooky action at a distance. The apparent invulnerability to his depowerment ray – something that even a true sovereign could not deny – was more than a little irritating, as was her general toughness.

  He did find something odd about her power, though. Bringing up the video of the flail destroying the elevator shaft – and wouldn’t that be annoying to fix – he ran a few calculations on the apparent physical properties of the thing. Then he applied that same modeling to the super that was ducking behind storage racks while drones tried to get a clear shot. Sadly, Greg couldn’t use the real powerful weaponry without destroying his limited supplies or exposing his laboratory to the world. There were protections around his inner sanctum, but the rest of the hidden base was not designed to withstand a flux implosion or ichor inverter detonation.

  While the analysis worked, he wondered exactly how she’d found his sanctum. He knew that the stealth generators on the drones – something that shifted them to a different dimensional resonance, or possibly an entire alternate timeline – remained impenetrable. If Star Central had broken the concealment, there wouldn’t just be a single super, there’d be an entire team.

  His mechanical computer clicked at him, displaying a wall of equations as it broke down the physics involved in the super’s movements. While powers meant that almost any meta had hidden variables to their interactions, those variables had rules and limitations. For physical supers it was usually quite easy to derive their particular parameters, but this one seemed to be a little more subtle. Things appeared to hit harder or be tougher than they should, yet there was no excessive speed or acceleration obvious in the super’s movements. If anything, it was the reverse — there just seemed to be more energy, or less, completely independent of physical motion.

  Greg blinked slowly, then blinked again. He had seen that phenomenon before, after running a very peculiar scrap of cloth through his laboratory. On one hand it seemed unlikely that specific super would manage to find him — but then again, if any super would be immune to the adjustments, it would be that one. And the pressure of events might well drive her to find the bits of her power she’d left behind.

  He tapped the controls of his machine interface, relays clicking as he paused the attacks of the drones he had in the warehouse — though he wasn’t stupid. He arranged more weapons outside it, just to be careful. Even if the super had a useful talent, it didn’t mean she had a usable brain. Most people didn’t.

  The super seemed glad of the respite, but the body language analysis software suggested suspicion, even without a facial analysis to confirm. She slipped along the racks, grabbing a wad of container netting from a bin, clearly ready for trouble but also not noticing the optics he was using to monitor the room. Definitely not expecting Greg to toggle the intercom and speak into the pickup.

  “That’s a fascinating power you have,” Greg said, and watched the super’s attention snap toward the speakers on the ceiling. She didn’t reply.

  “I have found it extremely useful in my own efforts,” he said, his mind racing ahead to all the things he could accomplish with access to such a talent. “Without a sample of that ability I never would have been able to amplify the suppression effect. So I want to give you a chance.”

  “A chance for what?” She asked at last. His console informed him that there was a significant probability there was an artificial component to her voice, but that was hardly unreasonable. People concealed their identities all the time.

  “To join me, of course,” Greg replied. “It’s not an offer I extend to just anyone.” After all, few people were genuinely useful. Most supers were too stuck in their ways, or their powers were just something that sufficient technology could reproduce. It was only a scant handful of individuals, like that Harkeem fellow, who offered resources and information that Greg could make truly useful. “But if you cannot serve, then you will have to be removed.”

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