Chapter 46

SNAKES IN A SNAKEPIT

The portals winked out as Augustus released his hold on them. The last shimmer faded, leaving him and Annie standing in the lobby facing off against two superheroes and over a dozen guards.

Beside him, Annie cracked her neck as metal rippled up to replace the top half of her body.

Across from them, the guards’ rifles ripped free of their hands. Augustus didn’t even need to look to know it was Alexander. They spiraled upward, clattering together in a tangled mass near the ceiling. Some discharged in the crush; others exploded. The guards panicked, scrambling for the exits or for cover, as shrapnel fell down around them. A moment later the whole collection collapsed, raining now useless scrap across the tiles.

The big man in the pink tank top, a caricature of physical strength, half-turned, eyes widening as Alexander strode calmly down the hall away from them.

“Does this asshole really think he can just walk away from us?” the man growled, disbelief twisting into rage. He moved to follow.

Annie didn’t give him the chance. She dashed forward, one metal arm curling into a long scythe. She leapt, swinging for his neck.

He was fast. Too fast for his size. A massive hand snapped up, catching her by the mask mid-strike. The other seized her scythe-arm, the blade carving deep into his palm before biting to a halt.

He laughed cruelly, shaking her like a toy. “Is he really gonna let the midget fight me?”

Annie’s snarl came muffled against his grip. Then spikes punched out from her scythe-arm, driving through his hand.

The man roared, slamming her head down onto the floor hard enough to crack the tiles. Then he flung her sideways, body spinning toward the wall.

Metal flooded her legs in an instant. She hit the wall with a crunch, absorbed the force, then launched herself back at him.

This time she caught him square in the face with a bulging metal fist, the blow snapping his head around and drawing blood. They continued across the lobby, exchanging blow after blow.

Augustus turned his attention to the woman. She stood there quietly, arms behind her back while she studied him in turn. They had minimal intel on this hero, knowing only that she was a recent transfer from another facility.

She raised an eyebrow. “I am Basilia. I am content to wait while my partner defeats yours, if you do not mind.”

“You are very confident in him,” Augustus said, chuckling.

Basilia nodded. “Yes. He is very big man, and your friend is little girl. She will break soon,” she said, accent slipping out.

“Then I’d best hurry and help her.”

He snapped his wand down. A portal bloomed beneath Basilia’s feet, space folding away into black.

For an instant she dropped; then a serpent erupted from the crown of her skull, hissing as it shot upward. Its scaled body stretched impossibly long in moments, fangs latching onto the ceiling. Basilia stopped short, suspended by the living tether. Slowly, almost mockingly, she lifted back out of the portal until she dangled safely above it.

Augustus froze, surprised. What the hell…?

He stepped sideways, wand sparking. A bolt of fire ripped across the intervening space toward her.

The snake swung her wide in a smooth arc, carrying her out of the flame’s path before releasing itself from the ceiling and vanishing. The moment her boots touched tile, more snakes spilled from beneath her pant legs, slithering free in a mass of scaled bodies. They fanned out across the floor, their heads swaying and their beady eyes fixed on him. Hissing filled the air like a threatening chorus.

Augustus conjured a portal behind him and stepped through, reappearing across the lobby in a blink. Lightning leapt from his wand, bolts lashing out in rapid succession. Each found its mark, striking a serpent and causing it to vanish in a puff of smoke.

Basilia didn’t flinch at their deaths. She punched a hand toward him from across the room, far too distant to land a blow. But in that instant, another snake materialized, launching from her outstretched fist like a whip of living muscle.

Augustus conjured a curved shield across his forearm, bracing as the snake slammed into it. The impact rattled his bones, heavier than he’d expected, but the barrier did its job as both serpent and shield broke down together, vanishing into nothing.

She smiled at him, lowering her hand. “You are better than I thought you would be.”

Basilia stretched upward, elongating in a way no human body ever should. Her jaw flexed and cracked as it stretched wide. Her legs merged, stretching and twisting out behind as her entire body morphed into a half-human, half-snake Naga.

“Let’sss see how you deal with thisssss!” she hissed, a long snake-like tongue flitting between her lips.

Augustus glanced over at where Annie was currently being smashed repeatedly into a wall.

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I wonder if she’d be willing to trade opponents?

They stepped out of the elevator into the deepest subbasement. The kind where the elevator didn’t even have a button you could press to access it, not that it was a problem for Alexander to bypass.

As they made their way down the hallway toward the server room, Talia glanced over at him.

“Are you really not worried about them?” she asked.

Alexander shook his head. “Of course I’m worried,” he said. “But if I’m right and some influence is causing people to grow stronger through conflict, then we’re heading for a very fucked-up future. One where we need to be as strong as we can get, as fast as we can.”

A guard rounded the corner, rifle swinging down toward them. Alexander had already sensed the metal moving closer, and ripped it out of his hands with a casual thought. Talia sprinted at the surprised man and delivered a quick punch to the throat, which put him down.

“And training, even against each other, just doesn’t give us the same… growth,” he concluded.

Talia knelt down and took the guard’s comms device, hacking it with quiet efficiency and routing the signal to her wrist tablet.

“Still, it’s risky, and they won’t be fresh for the fight to come,” she said, catching up to him.

Turning down another hallway, Alexander pushed out with the full suite of his senses. Since discovering his third power, he’d noticed that the reach had expanded considerably, and now included electrical activity and metal. His ability to affect the things he sensed was still relatively limited, with Technopathy’s reach far exceeding the others.

I wonder if that’s part of the synergy?

“Annie is a bit reckless, but she has the greatest need to grow quickly given her role,” Alexander said. “And Augustus has more experience than the three of us combined, so if things go wrong, I trust he’ll get them both out.”

Talia walked alongside him in silence, considering his argument.

Alexander could sense the server room up ahead, behind layers of thick physical barriers and extensive digital security. He could also sense several people in the room, two of them likely guards based on the weapons and comms devices.

“I understand your reasoning, but I’m still worried about the Throne of Scales,” Talia said at last. “Drawing them down here has its advantages, but one disadvantage is that we’ll be trapped down here with them.”

“As long as we have Auggy, we’ll never be trapped anywhere,” Alexander said with a smile.

Approaching the server room, Alexander reached into the door’s control panel with ease, slipping past layers of security and ignoring complex protocols.

Unlock the door.

The panel beeped, and the door swung open with a push. Inside were rows and rows of highly advanced computer systems, buzzing with so much activity it almost distracted Alexander from the guards rushing for cover, pulling rifles around.

Reaching out with Metallokinesis, he seized every bit of metal on their persons; belt buckles, helmets, guns, knives, and even a titanium rod in one of the guys' bones. With a flick, he flung them both into the ceiling with a crack, knocking them both out before lowering them to the floor.

Talia stepped over and secured their weapons, then tied their wrists together with their belts.

The third person had hidden behind rows of servers, but Alexander could feel the collection of expensive Santiago Systems cybernetics. He expected a Will to contest his efforts, but when he grasped for the metal and lifted the man, floating him over the top of the servers toward them, all he found was what he now recognized as mundane resistance.

What are the criteria for someone to possess enough Willpower to resist? Clearly it’s not just having cybernetics or powers.

Seeing them masked and waiting for him, the man struggled, causing expensive cybernetics to whine and grind uselessly.

Alexander floated him down in front of them, then pressed him into the floor.

“I wonder what brings the facility director down into the server room during an active supervillain attack,” Alexander said with amusement.

Talia grinned at him. “Whatever it is, it must be very important. More important than saving his own life, even.”

The director sobbed against the floor. “Please… please… I can pay you! Or—or—I can give you the best cybernetics money can buy! Just don’t kill me!”

Alexander watched the man thoughtfully. For the longest time, he’d assumed superpowers were the only special thing in this new world he found himself in. Then he’d learned some people with cybernetics were stronger than normal; not in the sense that they were physically stronger or faster, but that his powers were less effective despite them having no real defenses against them.

To make matters more complicated, resistance to powers was inconsistent, too. When he’d fought the augmented humans in the sewer, following Flashpoint’s first attack, his Technopathy had barely worked on the bounty hunter’s cybernetics despite being the power he was most skilled with. Electrokinesis had ripped through the man, destroying in an instant what he’d failed to manipulate.

Later, he’d realized that powers which manifested real, tangible effects required the ability to physically resist; likely relating directly to their Constitution stat. Of course, blocking or evading such attacks remained possibilities, and were even superior options over simply taking the hit. In other cases, a superpower conveyed a form of resistance. Annie’s Thermal Flux Control was an obvious one, but Alexander was confident that he was highly resistant to electricity. Thinking back to his prison escape, he’d assumed at the time that the stun baton was faulty or out of juice. He’d been a terrible mix of exhausted and high on adrenaline, not to mention suffering from malnutrition and hurting all over, so that aspect of his power had gone unnoticed for a long time.

Which meant Willpower was the likely culprit for resisting powers that were intangible, such as his Technopathy. Of course, just like with physical attacks, things weren’t always so straightforward. The ability to resist was not entirely passive, because resistance could be worn down or flare up stronger with motivation. And even if he couldn’t affect someone’s cybernetics directly, Willpower didn’t stop him from sending a hovercar to ruin their day.

The man babbling on the floor before them was a key example in proving the theory. Expensive cybernetics that were probably not available to the public, a long and successful career, and yet he clearly lacked a spine despite the highly advanced replica of one inside him.

His Willpower was simply absent. Whatever was going on in the world, this man was not a contender.

What remained was whether he could still be useful.

“He’s all yours, Talia,” Alexander said, stepping over to a server console. “You should take this chance to test the limits of what you can do with your Mind Palace.”

Talia knelt down beside the man and pressed her hand to his head. “Anything in particular?”

Pushing his senses into the server, Alexander slipped past firewalls and routing traps while looking for the deepest, darkest corners where he’d expect evidence to be tucked away. There were hundreds of thousands of directories, millions upon millions of files, and more data than he’d be able to process even with two lifetimes to pore over it.

“Secrets,” Alexander murmured.