Countless Joyful Dawns - Chapter ?? - 25: Incessant Pests III (Patreon)

First things first. I flew back to the PRT building and landed on the roof. The troopers were much less amused than normal to see me, but I was able to rapidly adjust their attitude.

I teleported Shatterbird’s corpse out onto the roof. It was still smoking, and some of the glass was still molten and red-hot.

“One member of the Slaughterhouse 9.” I said, seizing the moment. The PRT was in the middle of printing out the S9’s file, so at least they weren’t complete ostriches. As a bonus? I got to read everything they knew about the team! Disappointingly, it was mostly the same as what Lisa had told me, although this was far more detailed.

Huh. Hadn’t she mentioned something about hacking their servers at one point? It was another one of those electronic things I was clearly missing. I thought she was a Thinker, not a Stranger who walked in and read their files over their shoulder or turned on the computer that had the files. A question for another day. 

“Believe me now? Anyway, I’m off, good luck!”

Without waiting for members of the Protectorate - they’d had their chance - I was back in the air, running a search grid.

Unlike the Empire 88 and other parahumans in town, the Slaughterhouse 9 had a few members that were impossible to miss, who couldn’t blend in like normal. Mannequin and Crawler were decidedly not-human in looks and appearance, and I could probably detect the Siberian, given that she was literally black and white, like a human-shaped zebra. Or at least, that’s the description I was given. The rest of the team could blend in, if they wanted to.

The entire time, I was thinking. Of ways to handle the S9, of tactics I could try and strategies to implement. Plus, the entire ‘we’re the Slaughterhouse 9 but we have 8 members’ had me thinking of the Sentinel’s smoke and mirrors - if they publicly had 8 members, who was to say they didn’t actually have 9, 10, or more? Like, that’s how I’d run things if I was leading a band of merry killers. At the same time, their killing sprees were semi-public, and it’d be kinda hard to hide an extra murderhobo. Unless the murderhobo could copycat what the others were doing, or had a Stranger rating of some sort. 

I was pushing myself, and I managed to find Crawler lurking by the docks in under 10 minutes. Dude was hideous. He’d mutated from a typical person into some sort of multi-legged centaur-slug thing with too many tentacles. His body was black and iridescent with armor plates, he had a bunch of extra eyes running in rows along his side, mismatched fangs, scimitars on his rear ‘legs’... yeah, dude looked like a full-on biomancer’s experiment, and not a particularly well-educated biomancer at that. There were no other members of the S9 around, although he had a few unlucky victims that he was torturing. Mostly by spitting acid on them then guffing as they burned in agony, getting regenerated by my healing as quickly as the acid was burning through them.

If his acid could also adapt, I supposed it was theoretically possible to adapt to my healing as well, which would be bad. Well, this was a clear and easy defense of others, and I had a plan for dealing with Crawler.

I flashed in and immediately unloaded everything I had on Crawler, trying to annihilate him from his head to his ‘tail’ in a single powerful alpha strike of burning, golden light. The same thing I’d done to Shatterbird, except with more power and less control. I’d also remembered a rare aspect to my skill that virtually never came up.

I turned off his healing. But, critically, I turned off what the System considered to be healing, I had no idea if it would apply here. 

I managed to burn away his head and torso, but my mana was running low by the time I’d reached his ‘waist’, and I stopped. If that wasn’t enou-

He was already regenerating, putting himself back together. Damn. I guess he wasn’t healing, he was adapting, and creating new flesh. The System specifically had healing as ‘restoring to the baseline template’, and Crawlers adaptations were not that. Except… I flickered Crawler off the blacklist, and nothing happened. Yup. His baseline was clearly changing at the same time, because otherwise I’d be reverting him back to what he used to have, not what his new form was like now. Dang, this was weird, I wanted to study how that worked. 

Fine. Time for plan B. According to Tattletale - and the PRT psych files I read - Crawler was always down for a fight.

“Run.” I told the survivors. Crawler’s eyes were mostly tracking me, and I didn’t want to pull his attention to his victims anymore than needed. I did put my red cape back on, hoping it’d be like a matador’s flag.

Then I added on every little bit of intimidation I had in my kit, trying to make myself look as mean as possible. Which was fucking hard at 5 foot nothing and a slender build. I did much better being the ‘harmless’ one of the team, and leaving the intimidation to my wife, who was roughly the size and shape of a brick shithouse, or Fenrir.

Everyone crapped their pants when an 80 foot long wyvern got up close and in their personal space. ‘My fangs are roughly the size of your entire body’ touched on a primal part of the brain.

I started juggling a number of gemstones the size of my fist, twinkling with the promise of unleashed magic. If basically anyone from Pallos saw what I was doing, they’d be terrified. The maximum amount of mana, and hence the potency of the skill, scaled with the size of the gemstone, and I was handling the biggest ones in my [Manor]. I hoped the confidence and scope of what I was doing would bleed through a bit. 

Crawler was back in shape worryingly fast, and I was pretty sure he’d already adapted to my Radiance. It wouldn’t surprise me if he’d gotten exposed to similar skills and abilities before, which was mildly annoying. I knew if he didn’t have significant [Resistance] already that I could’ve gone through him. Fine, less brute force, more finesse. I mentally estimated his weight, doubled it - he was probably made out of Dense Bullshit - and ran a calculation against my magic power. 

I had enough, but with a very thin margin of error. He was front-heavy, and with that added in, the margin of error became a little larger. 

Given that he had the potential to entirely trash my home and destroy my memorial wall, my orchards, Auri’s kitchen, Iona’s art studio, and Fenrir’s pipe collection… yeah, the stakes were high.

“Is that the best you’ve got!?” He screamed as his mouth reformed. He started to rear back, and I could see his acid gland working, preparing to spray me.

“No, it really isn’t.” I said. 

He tried to spray me anyway, and I easily deflected it with a solid shield of shimmering stars. Excellent, I’d gotten an excuse to show my shield off. I didn’t drop it, instead moving it up and over to the side, then summoned a bunch more in the shape of a scutum and slowly spun them around me.

Look at me! Look at my shields! They’re so pretty. I use shields, a lot, see, see? The whole time I continued to juggle the gemstones. I suppose an analogy here would be juggling nukes. Since, you know, they were both ‘one small thing, one city gets erased’ sort of object. Except Bet had no nukes, something about Scion removing them all… not that I’d bring them back anyway. That was just asking for trouble. Nah, this one I wasn’t even going to tell Night as a possibility.

I was possibly laying it on a bit thick, but I was useless at this type of smoke and mirrors. I was quite good at hitting a problem and hitting it hard, or being countered and going back to my secondary attacks, or having a team at my back. Or looking harmless. Or being so wildly outclassed the answer was ‘run like hell!’

“Hit me with it!” He roared at me.

I smiled. The psych profile just might be right.

“I can’t.” I sighed, laying it on thick. “We’re in a city, and all of these could erase the city off the map. I’m one of those suckers who doesn’t like mass murder, although I don’t extend the same protection to wildlife.”

Crawler roared and charged me. I just floated out of the way, and let my scutum–shields block the tentacles that tried to grab me.

“We could go somewhere else, where I can unleash these on you.” I said. “All of them. This one creates an earthquake. This one has enough phoenix flames to completely blanket a city, although I can probably get them to all land on you. Magical things, phoenix flames. This one accelerates a 30 ton rod to terminal velocity. This one…”

I lied my ass off. The phoenix one was accurate, the rest of them were blatant lies. I was not revealing what I had in my arsenal, I just needed it to sound good. And something that would interest Crawler.

Like ‘This mold will slowly spread underground and eat all the wood and other organics in the city’ was not going to interest him, no matter how much it was a solid city-buster. Hell, almost all of these were decorative, unusable for one reason or another.

Ethics. Usually the reason was ethics, and ‘I wasn’t one of the Sentinels that wanted to bring a city to it’s knees’, along with ‘my wife might actually murder me if my Oath didn’t get me first’ and the like. 

“You lie.” He accused me.

“Nope.” I lied. “Look, I’ve got a pocket dimension. It’s my home. Hop in, we can go somewhere deserted, and I can unleash all of these on you. Destruction on a scale only seen on my world. You’ve seen my healing, you might have heard of how widespread it is. Imagine power on that scale, but tuned towards destruction.”

That part was true.

“And if you never let me out?” Crawler asked, suspiciously. But we were talking.

“It’s my home.” I repeated. “I’ll ask you nicely not to break things, because I live there. I want you in there for as little time as possible. Fifteen minutes, tops, while I reposition to a place with enough wilderness.”

Crawler frowned.

“Or we fight here!” He roared. He liked doing that.

I floated up, towards the top of the warehouse. His victims had shown some common sense and scampered. Thank goodness nobody was having a meltdown in here.

“Or… I could just leave.” I pointed out, still juggling the gems. “I can’t beat you without the gems. I see no point in fighting you, I’ll just go and handle the problems I can manage.”

We had a stare-off for almost a full minute, while I was sure that he’d decline.

“Show me.” He demanded.

I floated down, ready to teleport at any moment, and opened up my [Manor].

Hmmm.

HMMM.

I could probably close the door on him and try to slice him in half. It’d work, I just doubted it’d be a proper killing blow. Plus, he wouldn’t be actively trying to hurt me or a patient in the moment.

Crawler peered around.

“Why does your house look like a disaster hit it?” He asked suspiciously. I groaned.

“Because I keep having to arrest assholes and this is the waiting room while I put them in jail.” I said.

He backed away from the door.

“Ah! That’s what you’re planning!” He said. I massaged the bridge of my nose, sending up 1024 curses.

“Why would I put you somewhere that would just make a ton of victims?” I asked. “I know you can eat-melt-bullshit your way out of any prison, and murder half the inmates and guards. Why would I give you a target-rich environment, instead of hitting you with my magic? Again. Home. Please don’t wreck.”

I suppose I could stick him in the Birdcage, I was absolutely fine with that. Except he’d murder the inmates and probably destroy the entire cage on his way out. I said that to him.

“Look, I’m a medic.” I continued. “I want to save lives, not serve them up to you.”

It took another few minutes of back and forth, but Crawler was eventually persuaded, and entered my [Manor]. I took off at high speed over the Atlantic Ocean.

Originally, I’d been planning to go to the Arctic Circle, but it’d take me too long. I didn’t have faith in Crawler’s patience.

I was trying one of the rarest of the standard four Ranger solutions to problems. Tolerate, kill, appease, and the last one - drive off. Kill was the default, the rest only came in when it wasn’t a solution. 

I couldn’t kill Crawler. Not with my skills, not with my equipment, not with my power. I’d hit him with my absolute best shot, and he’d adapted to it. I had no doubts that people from Bet had tried slicing, dicing, and a large number of my other tricks. I just plain couldn’t kill the man. Like, sure, I could experiment with some of the skills I had lying around and see if I had something esoteric enough to kill him, but Pallos magic generally didn’t work on odd axises. I’d rather save them.

I could remove him from the board. Assuming I could coax him out of my [Manor]. Seriously, if he stayed in there and rampaged, I’d have a very, very bad day. [Manor] was generally my safe retreat, not an offensive tool.

My terrible funk half-lifted as I rocketed away from Brockton Bay, which I chalked up to a change in scenery. The place was undeniably depressing, no matter my best efforts in improving it. 

I stopped after about 12 minutes of traveling, and snapped out an entire ‘box’ of solid star shields - the dawn configuration - about a meter above where the waves were cresting. Top, bottom, left, right, I made a full arena out of them, looking like the inside of a box. Then I turned my [Radiance Beams] to a weak, wide-bore attack, and started to cleanse the interior. I swept my annihilation shield - the dusk configuration - back and forth through, then teleported in fresh air from [Manor] into the box.

I didn’t want it smelling like ocean at all. That might tip him off that something was wrong.

At 14 minutes, I opened the portal, and sighed. That was going to be a bitch to remove. I grabbed the gemstones and started juggling them again.

“Ready?” I asked. “Come at me.”

I gave the ‘come at me’ hand motion, while juggling the priceless gemstones with one hand.

Crawler stopped dissolving one of my tables - I’d liked that table, dead friends of mine had carved stupid stuff into it - and charged right at me with, surprise surprise, another roar. 

Well. That was much easier than I’d hoped for. 

Every thundering footstep of his smacked against the slick, solid star-studded surface of my shields, draining my mana. The mana drain wasn’t the issue so much as the pure weight. My shields were meant for blocking, not supporting literal tons of weight. I waited until he cleared the portal before closing it. Then I dropped all of my shields, and took off into the sky.

“Bye!” I called down to the monster, who was already sinking into the waves with an outraged roar.

It wasn’t going to fix the Crawler problem. He was still alive, and could swim back to shore.

Some day. And the odds of him finding the right shore, the right place, and the rest of the S9 being there?

Nah, it was a very fancy exile. His biology was going to adapt him to the deep ocean, and it was filled with food. He was barely under the waves, and I already saw multiple gills sprouting, and some of his tentacles becoming more paddle-like.

I waved, and took off.

Towards Antarctica.

If he decided to follow my path? Well… that was just longer until he made it back to dry land. After 30 seconds of travel, when I was sure I was over the horizon, I popped my invisibility and turned, heading back to Brockton Bay.

Man, if each of the S9 took this long, it’d take me all day and make an absolute liar of my ‘4 hours of curfew’ announcement. I had to step up the pace!