The Devil of Brockton Bay - Chapter 71 (Patreon)

“You guys are running a little late. Long line at the donut shop?” I joked, ignoring the gun pointed in my direction. If you stripped out nearly all of the context and politics between our three groups, I was currently the biggest threat here.

For the sake of my sanity, I was going to assume Miss Militia decided to cover me with her gun because I had taken out the giant twins, nearly vaporized Purity with a giant laser beam if it wasn’t for trump-granted invincibility, and wore down Hookwolf to the point a hard enough breeze might knock him over while barely being winded. Not because she somehow came to the conclusion that I was more objectionable than the mass-murdering Nazis.

“A Hero may be the last to arrive, but once he does the people can rest easy knowing he will make things right!” Paladin declared dramatically. “Now Lucifer, my rival, are you ready for another climactic battle between good and evil? For us to decide who Fate favors today?!”

“Sorry, I’m gonna pass on that.” I said with zero hesitation.

It was actually hilarious how quickly Paladin’s expression went from ‘confident hero’ to ‘kicked puppy’. If this was a less serious situation, I definitely would have broken out laughing.

“What? Why not?”

“Because right now I have the chance to remove the leadership for a gang that makes people afraid to walk outside because of who they are or how they were born.” I said seriously. “The people that say it's okay for certain groups to be beaten or even killed in the streets for the color of their skin or what they believe in. And I’m not going to let them crawl away after what they’ve done tonight. So if the Protectorate wants to fight? Fight with me! Otherwise… go back down that street and tell the corpses of Hookwolf’s latest victims they didn’t matter enough.”

Was I being a little dramatic myself?

Yes, absolutely.

And while part of my little speech was definitely my true feelings about supremacists of any kind – it was also insurance against the PRT pulling anything unless they wanted to get crucified online.

After all, it was almost impossible to positively spin ‘we ignored the bodies in the street caused by literal Nazis to fight a teenage girl trying to stop them’.

And if they tried anyway? It wouldn’t even matter to most people I’d be fighting against the ‘good guys’. Any reasonable person would think them either stupid or corrupt.

“Aw man, I was really looking forward to a proper rematch.” Paladin almost whined before shaking himself and puffing up his chest. “But you’re right, Rias! The heroic thing to do is to take down the ones causing the city’s suffering, our rematch will have to wait till next time!”

“Paladin…” I heard Miss Militia say warningly.

“No, he’s right, MM.” Triumph added, turning to better face the three remaining Empire capes. “We have a chance to take down the Empire 88 for good.”

“You’d be disobeying a direct order from the Director!" Miss Militia hissed. “Both of you would!”

“Then write us up after we put Kaiser in a cell.” Triumph said dryly. “You with me Paladin?”

“Of course! Which one do you want?”

“I’ll take Hookwolf. I should be able to handle him. You take Purity, and we’ll leave Kaiser for Lucifer since she’s the one of us with an actual grudge against him?”

“I’m good with that.” I piped up, beyond amused that the bit of PR protection I’d been aiming for had turned into straight up insubordination. “Just as a heads up, Othala is also somewhere around here.”

I got nods from two of the heroes while Miss Militia just looked lost and unsure of what she should be doing – which was a little sad. But I couldn’t pay much more attention to them because the Empire hadn’t been just standing there watching us talk.

Hookwolf managed to regenerate a bit more, and Kaiser had seeded the area with spikes he could use to generate his own metal faster. Purity was glowing brighter than she had before, but I couldn’t tell if that was because she was putting out more power or because she was trying to hide her nervousness because her temporary invincibility had worn off.

“Should I take that to mean the Protectorate has decided to ally with the Peerage then? Paladin always made such a racket about Gremory being his rival, I’d have thought he’d be more eager to fight her again.” Kaiser asked, probably hoping to buy more time for himself or create an opening he could use to slip away.

Unfortunately for him, Paladin was the type to actually believe in following the shonen hero rules he set for himself. A rival not wanting to fight? I figured that meant there was no way of Paladin starting something himself as long as I wasn’t doing anything ‘villainous’.

Something the idiot reinforced almost immediately. “The Forces of Justice and Villainy might be fated to constantly do battle – But! – even they can come together when faced with True Evil!”

“You heard the man.” Triumph said as he stepped forward.

And then he roared, sending a wall of sound down the street straight towards the Empire capes.

Kaiser countered as best he could by raising a wall of spikes to break up the attack, but while he was able to stop the force of Triumph’s roar – he couldn’t completely stop the sound from hitting them.

Paladin shot forward right afterwards and ended up chasing Purity as she tried flying upwards.

I wasn’t far behind him either, though my target attempted to skewer me instead of running as his form of defense.

Actually – I thought as I shattered the incoming metal spikes with my gauntleted arm – that might have been why Purity ran so quickly. Much easier to launch indiscriminate attacks if you didn’t need to worry about friendly fire. And I doubted Hookwolf cared much about a few pokes if getting torn in half barely slowed him down.

“You’re probably next, you know that right?” Kaiser hissed as he threw himself away from me using some poles grown from his armor as improvised pistons. He was even smart enough to make them so they broke away when I grabbed one intending to use it to smash him into a nearby wall. “You heard it yourself, the only reason those heroes are working with you now is because they are acting against their orders. Do you think that will stay the case when you are the only other Parahuman group in the city?”

“That the best you can come up with, Max?” I taunted, firing a bolt of solid magic at since he was annoyingly shock resistant in his full metal suit. “So what, should I help you all escape instead so the PRT has someone else to focus on? Even if I believed that for a second, it isn’t as if you wouldn’t be working against me the moment you could get away with it.”

I chuckled a bit when he growled but didn’t deny it.

That honesty curse had to be pissing him off more than anything else I could have done to him.

[Boost!]

That didn’t mean I wasn’t going to try though!

I rushed forward again and quickly blasted the wall of metal Kaiser threw up, only to narrowly miss him as he used his powers to escape once again. I followed up with more magic blasts and this time they started leaving visible dents despite being fairly weak spells only Boosted once.

That sequence of events quickly repeated several times with minor variations as we played what was essentially high-stakes keep away.

Kaiser’s power was good against anyone not tough or fast enough to deal with it, but the trade off was even with his armor – he was only a little tougher than a normal person. Not to mention if his opponent was tough or fast enough to deal with his power, he had no real options of dealing with that. His minions had always been his answer to whatever his power couldn’t handle. The second I got a solid hit was the second this fight was over. And both of us knew it going by how most of Kaiser’s actions were now desperately focused on trying to escape rather than beating me.

That wasn’t exactly working out for him either, because even the minor hits I did land alongside some of the moves he pulled to dodge the bigger stuff were stacking up injuries. His armor was now scuffed and dented all over the place, he was keeping his weight mostly off of one leg, and he was holding his left arm after he’d landed badly at one point and dislocated his elbow.

I was tempted to see how many more injuries he could rack up before he just decided to surrender.

‘Glad you’re having fun, Partner. But you might want to wrap things up soon.’ Ddraig spoke up. ‘It sounds like the others finished their fights. It’d be embarrassing if your toy slipped away because you kept playing around.’

I felt a flush rise on my cheeks at Ddraig’s deadpan rebuke. ‘Too much sadism?’ I mentally asked.

‘I’ve had wielders that were worse. Go crazy with it if you want, just as long as you don’t let White’s wielder get one over on you because of it.’

‘Right… maybe I should just wrap this up.’

I got the impression Ddraig just huffed at me.

[Boost!]

[Explosion!]

I didn’t give Kaiser time to do anything fancy.

I just speed-blitzed him and kicked him in the knee.

The problem for him was that I didn’t bother pulling the attack much so the kick ended up folding his leg the wrong way despite the armor he was wearing. Kaiser instantly collapsed to the ground – too busy screaming to try and attack me or get away again. Not that he was going far with his leg in that condition. Not by himself.

But having learned my lesson about playing with my opponent, I didn’t try to gloat.

I reached down and ripped his helmet off his head before knocking him out with a quick hypnosis spell for effect, and a punch to the jaw for show.

Just in time, since Paladin flew over the nearby buildings and landed a few feet away – an unconscious Purity slung over his shoulder.

“Hey Rias! You’re done too?” He greeted before looking down at Kaiser. “Though don’t you think you were a little rough?”

“Putting aside the fact he’s a supervillain and the head of one of the biggest gangs on the East Coast, he outed my Peerage and put their families in danger. He’s lucky this is all I did.” I pointed out. “Besides, where he’s going it’s not like he’s going to be running marathons any time soon anyway.”

Paladin grimaced but didn’t fight me on that. “Yeah, guess not. And you do normally vaporize your opponents. So… uh, you want to help take these guys to a holding cell?”

I raised an unimpressed eyebrow at him. “One, the Empire still has gang members running wild all over the city. Me – actually, hells, both of us – playing delivery person instead of stopping them is a phenomenal waste of time. Two, don’t you have a bunch of Troopers whose entire job is to provide you with transportation and backup? Why are you asking me?”

“Well, yeah, we have them but…” Paladin looked awkwardly off in the direction we’d originally left Triumph to fight Hookwolf. “Militia and Triumph are kinda going at it right now, and I don’t wanna get between that to ask them to call for backup.”

“And why not just call it in yourself?”

He sighed. “I can’t. I lost my earpiece at some point fighting Purity.”

Sucks for him, but not actually my problem.

“Like I said, my Peerage is still dealing with the Empire. I need to go check on them.” I shrugged. “Or are we going to have a problem later?”

“I don’t think so?” He tilted his head at me, confused. “I mean, I get that we’re going to have to fight in the future but right now you guys are helping people so we’d be pretty terrible Heroes if we stopped you from doing that.”

I was surprised. This was actually turning out to be a reasonable—

“Besides, when we have our big Rival fight I want the two of us to be at our best so when I win you and your friends can join the side of Justice and properly pay for your crimes!” Paladin continued with a bright smile and a thumbs up.

…aaaand he ruined it.

“Yeah, my crimes… I’ll be sure to do that.” I replied in a dead voice. Like the reason I was initially called a villain wasn’t staring me in the face, or that he worked for a government agency that wanted to exploit the things I could do.

I wasn’t about to hang around and explain that at the risk of losing more brain cells being in this idiot’s vicinity. So without another word I just flared my wings and started flying back towards the rest of the city.

I couldn’t help but smile though. Because even if no other members of the Empire were captured tonight…

The Empire as a major power in Brockton Bay was finished.