VT - Chapter 24 : BLUE SHIELD! (Patreon)

Disclaimer: Worm belongs to the one and only absolute chad, Wildbow. Enough said.

Somewhere on Earth Bet

–Simon–

It had been three weeks since Ashley received the suit and had put it on after accepting the terms and conditions provided to her as part of the onboarding process. He was not really worried about her rejecting him, especially after she agreed to read the terms and conditions. 

The conditions were not really that restrictive. In fact, they could be even more restrictive, based on the amount of firepower available in the suit, per Ashley. She was a really cautious and temperate individual, taking her time with the suit to get used to most of the functions before she even thought of taking on criminals or capes. 

Hell, she outright told him that she was not going to actively hunt down any cape, even if she possessed the capability to do so. When he asked her if that was the case even with capes from the ABB, she went silent. He made sure that she knew that he could take care of Lung as well, quite easily at that, but after taking a long time to process it, she told him that she did not want revenge.

She wanted her brother to walk again. Now, there wasn’t much he could do regarding that; he had been pretty upfront about that. All he could do regarding that was give her a steady source of income. It was laughably easy getting her a bunch of cash.

Opening a Number Man account would have been the standard procedure for any cape who wanted to launder their ill-gotten wealth, but he knew who Number Man really was and what organisation he worked for, so he did not do that. He advised her to just use the cash for day to day activities, and her salary for her brother’s expenses.

She agreed with him, and told him that she was not going to change her lifestyle, even if it meant that she was far too exhausted being a doctor during the day, and a cape in training during the night. It was stressful, but she told him that she was going to cut back on the hours at the hospital once she actually became an active member of the cape scene.

It was going to be an issue going forward about getting the people money without relying solely on cash, as one day, the tax bill was going to come regardless, and he did not want PRT to try and strong-arm them using just tax evasion as the charge. He could definitely see Cauldron doing that and then try to justify that it was just white collar crime and they were not targeting the people who were working for him.

After all, he had to take these kinds of scenarios into account as he was no longer just one man piloting a bunch of equipment that was rigged to blow and destroy itself the moment the situation became even slightly inconvenient. He was going to have people working for him, and if he was unable to safeguard one of them, then it was only going to get harder to recruit more people.

Though he didn’t think he would ever run out of people who would want to experience what it was like to live inside a super advanced armour.

Shaking her head, he dismissed those thoughts for later, when he was going to have more than one person working for him, and focused on the task at hand, which was Ashley’s first outing as a hero. She’d taken more than three weeks to get to know the suit given to her, and tonight, she had finally deemed herself ready to take to the streets, properly this time. Not just the flying above Docks that she usually did as part of practice.

She had switched to flying far above the clouds when it was clear that, due to that one post on PHO, done by that surprisingly restrained druggie who only partook in the product once or maybe twice a week, Ashley had stopped flying too low, as people were actually risking their lives and camping in the docks just so they could get a glimpse of the suit.

It was also a matter of confidence, as flying just above the buildings in a suit gave her perceived safety, as opposed to flying above the clouds as practice. Even if she fell from her earlier practice heights, she would have been severely injured, something she should have known, being a doctor, as the armour itself was quite heavy and without the Arc Reactor to power the kinetic dampeners, she was essentially going to get all the shock from all that metal hitting the ground at once. He didn’t say anything, as that just worked out in her favour, and now she was confident in flying about.

She was quite smart as well, devising strategies, with the focus being on hit and run tactics. She was not planning on hitting any capes as of now, and even if she did, there were only a couple of capes that could actually reach her if she wanted to go as high as she could. Hell, technically, the suit was rated for space travel as well, so theoretically, she could just escape the atmosphere and escape any cape, due to the Shard limitation, but there was the matter of the Big Elephant in the sky that had to be addressed before any space exploration could be done.

The Simurgh was something that scared him the most out of all the active Endbringers. A Human Master was scary to him, let alone an Endbringer master. He was genuinely terrified of the Bird and getting caught in its song, so to speak. So, until he was confident enough to go against all active Endbringers, he would prefer not to provoke the bird needlessly.

Technically, it was the easiest of all three active Endbringers to target and bring down. It just floated up there, in space, visible to anyone with a sufficiently advanced telescope. Leviathan was deep into the ocean, and constantly moved about. Behemoth burrowed deep underground, and could only be tracked when he began moving towards a city due to the unnatural seismic vibrations.

Simurth was the only one out of the three of them that was constantly visible, and as such, could be targeted with ease. Unfortunately, while it looked like a juicy target, it was also a trap, and a very fatal one at that.

“Alright, talk to me,” A very nervous Ashley blurted out the moment she put on the suit. Well, more accurately, the suit put itself on her, as it was of the nanotech variety. More accurately, it was the Rescue armour, a less firepower focused but far more agile and sleek suit that Tony Stark once made for Pepper Potts.

She had been informed that all her actions would be monitored, for safety reasons. Yes, even the actions she took outside the suit would be surveilled. It was kind of a non-negotiable, and he had a feeling that if he didn’t already have multiple achievements as Grand Chariot under his belt, then she would have been a lot more resistant to always being under surveillance. 

While her actions would be monitored, she was also told that she was mostly independent, and while help could be asked for, he wasn’t going to just give it to her, barring the most fatal of situations.

But since this was her first night out, it was understandable that she would be nervous, so he checked if the voice modulator was activated or not before replying, “Hello, Ms.Brent.”

“Call me Ashley. You know so much about me, so you can call me that.” She rambled on, so he acquiesced to her request.

“Alright, Ashley. How are you feeling? Nervous?”

She laughed nervously. “Ha. Am I that obvious?”

“Well, I am cheating, but yes. So, ready to go out and kill some crime?”

“Kill?!” Her shrill voice echoed in his office as he sighed and clarified his mistake.

“Crime, not Criminals.”

“Ah. Haha. I am sorry.”

“That is fine. Now, where would you like to go first? Do remember that tonight, we are finally going to start patrolling, and you are going to introduce yourself as a cape. So, what are you going as, Ms…?” he asked her, as tonight she was going to actually catch criminals, and then wait for cops, and interact with people. Tonight was going to be her first night as an actual cape and hero, so PR was a must.

He didn’t really care about PR much, as these people would be untouchable as long as he periodically showcased his overall might to the world, but the people piloting the suits themselves must feel good about the whole thing. A bunch of fans rooting for you would please anyone, so he was going to make sure she had a good image.

The number one step for that was to have a cape persona. A name, a color scheme, a personality, something that tied well to her power. In her case, she did not really have a power, so he’d told her to go ham and choose whatever name she wanted. 

“.....Um, I don’t know?”

He sighed back in his office. Apparently, Ashley had trained her butt off and damn near made him almost hang up on her calls after one too many calls about demanding explanations regarding the many features built into her suit. Once, she purposefully took a deep dive into the ocean and turned off the thermal regulation feature before coming back up and activating the heaters.

It felt good, like taking a hot shower after coming home with snow outside, were her words, if he recalled correctly.

“Ashley, do you seriously want to be known as Blue Suit? Because that’s what people will call you if you don’t name yourself.”

“No! That is horrible! Why would she do that?!” She whined in her suit, all the while she stood in a shady alley, on the other end of the town, in preparation for tonight, as she did not want her address to be outed. The poor girl did not know that the moment it was made clear that the suit she was using was even tangentially related to Grand Chariot, Cauldron and the Federal Government had pulled all the stops to identify her. They were simply not going to take any chances at getting their hands on some of that juicy tech, and even beyond the tech, their main goal was him.

The location of Grand Chariot’s base, and its members and all related intel, was far more valuable to them than just a single suit, but since that was all the connection they were aware of, they were going to investigate the heck out of her. They probably had her entire Genome sequenced multiple times to see if there was something different about her.

Well, no need to frighten the girl by telling her about that. That was his headache, and the moment they tried to pull something on her, he was ready with all the assets he already had in and around Brockton Bay. 

“You know why she did that. She said so in her post. She wanted you to respond to her provocation, but since you did not, they ran with the name. We think tonight is your last opportunity to change it. If you don’t, the first responders are going to write your name as Blue Suit in their official reports, and that’s it, then.”

“Oh, god, why is it so much more difficult than choosing to go out and stop crime?!” She literally crouched on the ground, using the suit he made her to create patterns on the ground. Only this was the city, and there was no sand, only concrete. She was using the suit’s enhanced strength to literally carve into concrete, instead of actually choosing a name for herself.

“Ms.Brent, maybe you are not suited for this life, then.”

His words had an immediate effect as she straightened up like a rod. He winced as he saw the readings on the kinetic dampeners. Her mental feedback to the suit, if there were no kinetic dampeners, would have snapped her spine in two due to the force and speed of her motion.

Once again, she did not really need to know all that.

“No! I can choose. How about Blue Shield? You know, since I am primarily going to act as a defender of the people, instead of going on the offensive.”

“....I suppose it is better than Blue Suit. Are you sure you want to go out like that?”

Well, it wasn’t like he was any better. He literally named his organisation Grand Chariot, so Blue Shield was fine.

“Sure. Let’s go with BLUE SHIELD!”

“Very well. Now, come on, we should turn on the radio, lest we miss what little overt crime is happening in the city.”

After all, ever since her first public appearance and his silence on PHO, tacitly approving of the message that she was a part of Grand Chariot, criminals, capes and non capes both, had decided to lay low, afraid of the big hammer known as Grand Chariot descending on them.

Since the world had only seen him in action twice, and both times he had obliterated the criminals without any hesitation, they thought better than to make trouble with the suit flying overhead.