Countless Joyful Dawns - Chapter ?? - 24: Incessant Pests II (Patreon)

I was flying over the city when I felt crushing despair overtake me.

What was I doing? I was - once again! - in a completely new world. New people. I’d lost everything again. I didn’t even have any friends with me.

This was my life. This was my fate. To be an undying cockroach, the last survivor of the apocalypse. To see everyone around me die and leave, time and time again, until my [Manor] was nothing but a gigantic stone wall, etched with hundreds of thousands of friends. A tomb, a memorial for one. A hundred thousand names and lives that lived on only in memory, who would only be spoken and given voice once a year.

What was the point? Why should I struggle above the waves? Why not allow them to swallow me whole, and drift into the deeps?

What was the point of life?

I shuddered as the depression and ennui overtook me. Not this again. It wasn’t the time or the place for a breakdown or depressive episode.

Fortunately - and I was using that term extremely loosely - I was used to the crushing despair.

Depression and suicide was the leading cause of death for Immortals. We tended to be too quick, too strong, too tough to die to mundane accidents. Fighting and war did take a number of lives, but the vast majority of Immortals lived as civilians, just like the vast majority of mortals did. But it only took a single bad day, one long depressive episode, to make us feel like there was no point to living. White Dove came for us all, ready to reap our lives.

This will pass. 

I held fast onto the thought, and spun off a few mental iterations to handle the crushing depression.

I was absolutely suicidal, but thinking of how badly it’d hurt my friends, my family, kept me from doing anything too drastic. That, and ironically enough, my [Oath].

First, do no harm.

Suicide was definitionally harm, and I refused to examine the idea more closely, in case I managed to justify it to myself. Happy not-depressed Elaine always wanted to keep living, and if I simply got through this part, I’d get back there. I just needed faith in myself, that the one thought that had kept me going through every other depressive episode would get me through this one.

This will pass. Things will get better. Give it time.

Stupid, trite, not particularly helpful, but it worked.

I refocused my mind on what needed to happen.

The first thing I tried to do was work with the locals. Lisa sounded terrified on the phone, and had assured me that the Slaughterhouse Nine was one of the ‘monsters’. People or entities so terrible that everyone would put aside their differences to fight them.

I was skeptical. Sure, I’d seen a mob boss muster his men to help defend a city against invading forces… while absolutely wringing out every last coin he could out of the situation. More often, the criminal element took advantage of the chaos, regardless of who it hurt. Yeah, it was easy to say ‘everyone… well, most people… stepped up against the gigantic threats’, but in my experience? It was a rare thing, and I fully expected nonsense.

I also expected it from the local vigilantes, AKA the Protectorate. Just like I’d side-eye the crap out of the local pirate captain coming to mebe and saying ‘there’s a kraken coming! We’ve got to fight it together!’ I fully expected them to side-eye me. But, well, Lisa was convincing, and if nothing else, when in Brockton Bay, do as the Brocktonians. Brocktonites?

I called the PRT hotline, did a whole song and dance with them, and I swear one of them nearly fell out of his chair when I said ‘Yes, I’d love to come in and talk with them!’

“Meet me on the roof! I’ll be there in three seconds.” I told him.

There were some sputtered remarks as I closed the phone and landed on the roof, exactly three seconds later. The guards there half-heartedly brought up their confoam sprayers. I waved to them with a cheery smile.

“Hi! No donuts today, sorry! I’m in a bit of a rush.”

“Dang. Think you can pick some up and swing by with them later?” One of the guards asked, dropping his sprayer.

The other guard hit him.

“Hey! What was that for?” He asked.

“Don’t let your guard down! Don’t chatter with her!” Grumpy admonished.

Happy rolled his eyes.

“It’s Dawn. She’s practically a hero. She’s dropping off a new villain every other day. We can’t exactly stop her, might as well be friends.”

“It’s unprofessional.”“It’s free donuts.”

The two bickered until Miss Militia and Dauntless joined me on the roof. They took the elevator instead of going a more fun route, a shame. Her weapon was flickering through a number of different forms, while Dauntless still hadn’t internalized that I could see through masks and was pulling faces.

“Dawn. You said you had something urgent for us?” Miss Militia said.

I dropped my happy face and put on my serious face.

“Yes.” I said. “I’ve gotten credible intelligence that the Slaughterhouse Nine is in town. It was suggested that we try and work together. I’ve got a number of suggestions, but if you’ve got preexisting policies in place, I’m willing to listen to your plans.”

Granted, if they were stupid plans I wasn’t going to follow along. I was confident in my experience and the thousands of years building on ‘how to handle these types of situations’, as opposed to the few decades they had here.

However, Earth Bet did have quite a few things going for it in terms of problem-solving. Five billion people was a lot. Nearly everyone was educated, and fast communication was revolutionary. It was entirely possible that they’d come up with better solutions to the problems. Plus the whole ‘Parahuman powers are slightly different than Pallos’ thing going on. Like Masters.

Frowns all around. Excellent. Good response when ‘there’s a bunch of mass serial killers in town’ is announced. Buuttt… wait. They’re clearly surprised as well. Did they not know? How the fuck did a teenage girl figure it out before the local cops?

When all of this was done I was getting water samples. 

“How do you know the Slaughterhouse Nine are in town?” Miss Militia said, her frown never leaving her face. Her weapon was swapping into larger and more menacing shapes, like the world’s deadliest fidget spinner.

“Lisa, errr, you’d know her as Tattletale, told me. She’s put together a bunch of clues, like the displayed triple murders, and concluded they’re around. What’s the plan?”

I got a number of lectures. ‘Iillegal to hack the police database’, ‘Tattletale is a wanted criminal’, ‘bring you in as an accessory’, and a few legal threats. I patiently sat through it all, not cloudgazing at all, no siree, hoping I’d get something useful out of it all.

“Are we doing anything about the Slaughterhouse Nine?” I asked.

The two heroes glanced at each other.

“No.” Miss Militia said. “We’ll go on higher alert, but until we’ve confirmed they’re in town, we’re not going to incite a panic or go chasing shadows. We’d appreciate it if you restrained yourself.”

We all knew that one wasn’t going to happen.

“Not going to declare martial law?” I asked. That was step 1 of how I’d do things.

“We can’t declare martial law.” Miss Militia sounded patient, but exasperated.

I grinned. It wasn’t a happy grin. It was a ‘I’m about to cause so much semi-intentional chaos’ grin.

“Oh, good thing I can then!” 

Legally, I could. No other recognized governments, Sentinels could lock down a town, oh boy. This trip was basically a laundry list of ‘All the extreme powers Sentinels have in a tight spot but we never get to exercise’. 

I’d tried working with the locals. I really had. 

But I wasn’t going to let the entire city get wrecked because they didn’t want to listen to the presented intelligence. Shatterbird’s ‘song’ alone was a city-killer, one I hadn’t seen before. I might have to redact that out of my report - my [Oath] got displeased when I handed out new and better ways of murdering people. Might privately tell it to Night and Arachne, and keep it there. I was willing to go to bat on Lisa’s analysis, because she was on my team and I supported my team. 

I mentally checked what spells I had available in my grimoire, and yes, I still had the ‘giga announcement’ spell. Just one, I’d have to rewrite it and it was a gigantic pain in the ass to write. 

First I flickered through the PRT building. I didn’t intentionally go to the armory, but one of my teleports put me close enough to it that I looted a few grenades. Just topping up my own armory, but the locals were going to need the rest. I ended up in one of the closed office spaces, landing in one of the trooper’s laps. The advantage of being tiny!

“Hi!” I said, before smacking the Endbringer alarm.

Sirens erupted all over Brockton Bay. A single long, wailing call that froze the city in its place. I teleported out of the building and climbed high into the sky, pulling out my grimoire. I blew off a layer of dust, then flipped it open to the right page. I put my hand on the parchment and ink and let my mana flow through it, lighting it up and giving me the ability to make city-wide announcements.

“Attention Brockton Bay! Under my authority as Sentinel Dawn, I am declaring martial law effective immediately. Curfew begins immediately. Shelter in place. Shelter in place. Shelter in place. The Slaughterhouse Nine are in town, and operations will commence to remove them. Repeat. Shelter in place. Curfew begins now. Curfew will be lifted in four hours. Repeat. Shelter in place for the next four hours. Thank you.”

It was like I kicked the hornet’s nest. Cars honked, people started running around frantically, and my phone started to buzz incessantly. I glanced at it. Texts were flying by so quickly that the software couldn’t display them all, and froze up. It stopped displaying at 12 incoming calls at once, but I was sure there were more. 

I ignored it all. I stuck my phone back into my pocket dimension, then went invisible.

I wanted to go to my business and reassure people, but that wasn’t what I needed to be doing. I continued to hover high over the city before spotting what I was looking for.

Yes! I’d guessed right!

From what Lisa had told me about them, and from what I knew about human nature, the S9 wasn’t going to try and quietly slip away after I’d called them out. They weren’t going to give people the time to prepare themselves to defend against their attacks. Already, people were boarding up their windows, even if it was just throwing some blankets over them. People were ducking and covering under their desks, avoiding the computers that could explode on them.

The more time they gave people to prepare, the more harm would be mitigated. Sure, my alternative bet was they’d try to lay low for a few days, let things return to normal after my ‘false alarm’, then go for the sucker punch - but they’d already left their ‘quiet calling card’ of three sets of triple murders, with their victims displayed.

I had a sense that I wasn’t getting any rest in my [Manor] for the foreseeable future. That, or I’d leave the door open, to allow my healing to spill out and cover the city. Mmm… I sent off a thought process to debate the pros and cons of each method.

Until then, I had Shatterbird in my sights. She was covered in glass that she telekinetically controlled, flying through the air on shimmering wings. I carefully stalked her from sixteen blocks away, and much higher up in the air.

This wasn’t my first mass-murder, but my first one without a team at my back. I’d already gone over the logic before.

I couldn’t strike first, not here. I still needed to wait for them to take a hostile action, because I had sworn to only raise my knife in defense of myself or others. Now, granted, the bar for ‘they’re going to harm someone’ was on the fucking floor when it came to these people, but I still needed to wait.

Shatterbird paused, and I felt the first tiny vibration carrying through the air.

Good enough for me!

I zeroed in and focused.

Glass was a pain in the ass. Not as bad as mirrors, but almost as bad. It distorted and reflected light, which could also distort and reflect my [Radiance Beams]. Most of the time, that wasn’t a problem, but here it was. If I wasn’t careful, I’d hit Shatterbird with my Radiance, and all of her glass would turn her into a disco ball of burning lasers. Said disco ball could carve through all the nearby highrise buildings in downtown, murdering thousands on the spot before collapsing at least a dozen skyscrapers. It’d be more devastating than her song.

But it was still doable, hence being very, very careful about it.

My first shot had no power behind it, and was purely a ranging shot. I noted how all of the light dispersed around her, and started to mentally consult the glass tables I had in my head. I looked up the various melting points of the glass types I thought she was carrying with her, and adjusted my power based on how I thought her glass would warp and change the refraction of my beams.

Then I fired the killer beam. A single bright flash, a beam lancing at the speed of light across sixteen blocks, and Shatterbird was very, very dead. A good portion of her had evaporated as the water instantly turned into superheated steam… but she was surrounded by molten glass. Which was basically like setting off a glass bomb in the middle of the sky. 

Crap, I hadn’t been expecting that interaction.

More beams lanced out and vaporized the worst of the glass, while I took a fast dive down to catch the remaining half of Shatterbird before she could do her best ‘vase from 32 stories up’ impression. It was an easy catch and an easy dive, and I teleported her remains into one of the many ‘throw toxic crap in here’ lead-lined rooms I had. Wasn’t the first time I needed to secure something volatile or dangerous, wouldn’t be the last. 

With Shatterbird handled I swooped back up, eyeing up the city.

One down, seven to go.