Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“If they get any more sweet with each other, I’m going to start throwing Sour Patch Kids at them in self-defense. Fair warning,” Magenta said.

“I’ll help,” I promised solemnly, and both of us not-quite-smiled in benevolent conspiracy. Neither of us would do anything of the sort, but Will and Layla were being sickeningly saccharine, even for newlyweds.

“Tell Zack to play something faster than a waltz,” Ethan said, looking over at Zack’s DJ table.

“He’s promised to stick to their playlist, so no joy there. Unless you want to hear their rendition of ‘Summer Lovin.’”

“Do that and I quit this superhero gig on the spot,” Monica threatened, drawing laughter from the rest of the table. Even Will’s parents joined in along with us.

Out on the dance floor, despite everyone’s complaints to the contrary, the happy couple was finally winding down enough to start circulating amongst their guests. Though they probably had every important person in the city attending, they drifted over to us first.

“If you two were any more pleased with yourselves, you’d pop,” Mrs. Stronghold said with a smile.

Will opened his mouth to make some answer that would probably send Magenta into sugar shock when his emergency ringtone rang out. Everyone froze for a second until Mr. Stronghold plucked Will’s phone from his own pocket and answered it.

“Yes. All right. We’ll be there,” he said, and hung up. He raised an eyebrow at Will’s startled expression. “Come on son, do you think your mother and I would let anyone interrupt your wedding or honeymoon? We’re taking your calls for a few days.”

“Thanks Dad, Mom,” Will said, and quick hugs were exchanged all around before the two older Strongholds slipped away. We started to cover for them as the party kicked into high gear. There were so many guests it was easy to say, “Oh, the Strongholds? I think they’re over by the punch.” Or the presents, or the dance floor, or anywhere but where the asker was. It was a practically a game to us, we’d done it so many times in so many situations. But we’d gotten so good at it that it took a while to realize there hadn’t been a word about them in over an hour.

The Commander and Jetstream were good, damn good, second to none, and it shouldn’t have taken them that long to handle the call. It had been nearly an hour and a half since they’d left. I started to wonder if the call had been overseas, but it wasn’t until nearly two hours after the call that I seriously started to worry.

But it wasn’t until I saw Ethan and Chloe huddled together in a corner, staring at their phones with worried expressions, that I realized what was wrong. Monica realized it too at nearly the same time.

“No news--” she said.

“--Is bad news,” I finished, and both of us slipped through the crowd to join Ethan and Chloe. “Guys?”

“There’s been no super news at all,” Ethan said.

“No sightings of the Commander and Jetstream, no supervillain attacks, nothing,” Chloe added.

And for two Champion Debate masters, they knew every official and unofficial media outlet for super news that there was. If they couldn’t find anything…

“The Bureau is in full media blackout mode,” Ethan said.

“Not good,” Monica said, her voice tight with tension. The last time that had happened it had been the assault on the academy, six months ago. I was about to say something when both of our emergency phones rang simultaneously. It was like the air around us had just chilled. I answered with a sense of foreboding.

“Go.”

“Phoenix, you’re needed at the Bureau hospital immediately.”

“On my way,” I said automatically. A look over at Monica confirmed she’d had the same call. Very much not good. Monica’s pain absorption ability made her invaluable to injured superheroes who couldn’t take normal pain medications, while her pain enhancement and pain sense powers served as a check on my healing fire so I wouldn’t burn myself out. Together we made one of the Bureau’s Hail Mary hopes to save gravely injured superheroes. Add that to the media blackout… I looked over at Will. We needed someone as fast as him to get us to the hospital, but if by some chance it wasn’t his parents, I didn’t want to interrupt his wedding, and if it was, that was a hell of a way to find out.

“I’m calling Brittany,” Monica said. She hit a speed dial button and had a five-second conversation, her voice low and tense.

“If Will needs to know, someone from the Bureau will call him,” Ethan said quietly. “We’ll cover for you. Go.”

Monica and I slipped out the back and Brittany landed a second later, windblown from getting here so fast. Without a word she raised her hands and all of us fell upwards, gravity reversing itself as we fell over the city.

--

The sense of wrongness and pain, the psychic tug that let me know someone was hurt, was always strong around the Bureau hospital, but today it grabbed me and shook me like a rag doll as Brittany landed us on the roof. Monica’s eyes widened and I knew she must be feeling the pain too, and a lot stronger than I was. We ran for the doors, orderlies and nurses expecting us and pointing us to the emergency suites. We ran through the final set of doors to find two burned, mangled wrecks of human bodies wearing the torn costumes of the Commander and Jetstream.

Dr. Egret was between them with a white-feathered hand on each, using her own minor healing power to keep them clinging to life. I moved to Jetstream first, hoping the Commander’s invulnerability would keep him going, when Dr. Egret spoke.

“No, both, can’t hold them,” Dr. Egret gasped out. I hadn’t tried to heal more than one person at a time since the academy attack, but I didn’t dare hesitate. I knelt and touched them both, seeing their life fires and little more than partially animate shadows. The healing ember-fire poured out of me, burning away the darkness, strengthening their life, revealing the flames under the shadows… I could feel they were nearly out of the woods when their fires finally started to flare brightly. And what I saw there was such a shock I was hurled out of my healing trance with no need for Monica’s intervention.

“What?” she asked sharply.

“They’re blue,” I said, shaking my head. Dr. Egret was standing again, anda bevy of doctors and nurses surrounded the Commander and Jetstream, setting to rights what I hadn’t been able to heal. And past the blood and dirt from their fight, and the heated flush that was a side effect of my powers, I could see the half-closed wounds being covered up with bandages and half-healed bones being splinted to finish their knitting. Monica’s face was looked like it was in hard-edged shadow as she channeled their pain to her, and I knew we had barely gotten here in time.

I stared down at two of the toughest, most experienced heroes I knew, now helpless and just starting to come back to life. I’d expected Jetstream to be hurt worse, but the Commander was just as wounded. And that should have been impossible. He was invulnerable, same as Guardian – bullets and blades and most energy blasts just bounced off him. I caught my breath for a second as I double-checked the kinds of injuries they had suffered: bullet wounds, knife, wounds, burns, slashes, even some dark-edged wounds that looked poisoned.

“Cutter’s Crew,” Monica said, paling.

“And the Commander and Jetstream have been cursed,” I said, not quite believing it even as I said it. The only other time I had seen a life fire as any other color than the normal yellow, orange, and red had been with Meduka, Mercy’s teammate. He’d gotten his powers from one of the most old-school ways on the books, a genuine gypsy curse. I’d tried to help him before, and I’d seen his fire was green, his life energy twisted and changed by the serpent curse he bore.

“They’ve lost their powers,” Dr. Egret said, her eyes dull with fatigue, looking at the Commander.

“Hellfire!” I swore. No wonder Will’s dad looked so terrible. Another nurse popped his head into the room, looking shocked.

“We’ve had five others come in, all with power loss,” he said. “And the Director is here.”

“It’s nationwide, at minimum,” Comet said over the man’s shoulder, making him jump in surprise.

“They’ve been cursed,” I blurted out. And it couldn’t have been something the Crew had come up with; they were ruthless killers, but they didn’t exactly have the know-how or resources to power-drain the entire country!

“Phoenix, Mercy, do what you can for those coming in. Mercy, call Meduka, I need him in the War Room. Join me, both of you, as soon as you’re done,” she said.

Mercy pulled out her phone with robotic motions, her eyes wide.

“Phoenix, I’m calling Guardian and Rose Queen,” Dr. Egret said. “And I’ll need you with the others.”

“My mom, the Battle clan--” I protested, caught between wanting to call my family and needing to help the injured. Mom hadn’t been on duty yesterday, but anything could have happened since I talked to her last; superheroes didn’t get called on a set schedule. If she’d lost her powers in the middle of a delicate negotiation… Her powers were often the only thing between her and a lot of angry people with guns, and unlike most other superheroes, Mom wasn’t a black belt or a crack marksman or anything. And the Battle clan depended on their powers just as heavily and a lot more physically. There weren’t that many superhero healers around if they’d gotten hurt.

“The Peaces and Battles are fine,” Comet said quickly. “I checked. We’re still trying to figure out the extent of the power loss. Help the others; we’re still trying to figure things out.”

She was sharp, almost brusque, but I didn’t blame her. Probably the only reason she knew about my family was because I would have been distracted if I hadn’t known. She had to think about the superheroes as a whole. And the idea of superheroes losing their powers, of reaching for that extraordinary strength or ability you depended on and not finding it there… The Crew must have jumped on that sudden weakness like a pride of lions on a crippled gazelle. How had the Commander and Jetstream gotten away from Cutter’s Crew alive let alone all the way back to Maxville?

But I had no more time for speculation as Dr. Egret beckoned us to help with the wounded.

--

“It’s worldwide,” the Director said as we entered the War Room two hours later. The huge screens on one wall were lit up with a map of the world scattered with red dots. Other heroes that had lost their powers? Died? I didn’t know.

“Guardian and Rose Queen are still upstairs--” I began, but the Director cut me off.

“We can bring them up to speed later,” she said. I nodded reluctantly, secretly relieved to not have to drag them down here when Will’s parents were still unconscious. I’d felt terrible about not telling Will in the first place, but he’d been more concerned about seeing his parents than yelling at me about not interrupting his wedding with the news. Actually, that had been a bit of an understatement. I’d caught a glimpse of him as I’d emerged from Lightfire’s room, and Will had barely given me a nod as he half-ran, half-flew into his parents’ room. Layla had been trailing after him and shot me a grateful glance before she’d followed Will in.

I’d stolen a moment after that to call Mom, only to find a voice message on my phone.

“I’m fine, Mom and my sibs are fine, I’m keeping people from panicking, I love you, go back to work dear heart.”

That had been the only piece of good news I was likely to get for the foreseeable future.

“We have a dire situation here,” the Director continued, her back to us, still staring at the screen. “Approximately three hours ago over eight-five percent of Bureau superheroes lost their powers. Several were in active battles, and we had some casualties. Six dead, over two dozen wounded. Those not in active combat positions have reported power loss too. We had some battles with supervillains who also lost their powers, sometimes in a mutual situation, sometimes not.”

“So it’s not just us?” I asked.

“No, but the independent superheroes aren’t required to check in.”

My stomach sank and I pulled out my phone. It was rude to interrupt the Director, but from her expression, she’d expected me to call. I already knew the Battle family was all right, but they were also the most heavily connected to the independent heroes around the world.

“Tobias?” I asked, the second the call connected.

“Warren, I was expecting your call. The Director told you we’ll all right, yes?” Tobias sounded as cool as ever, but there was a hint of heat under his voice I had no trouble picking out. He was angry, and with good reason, but like me had nowhere to direct it yet.

“Yeah. You’re really ok?” I asked.

“Fine, but some of our co-workers are not. You’re with the Director, yes? I’m sending her what I know. Your uncle Anthony will keep the Bureau up to date with everything we uncover,” Tobias promised.

“I appreciate that, Emberkeeper,” the Director said when I repeated what Tobias had said.

“My pleasure, Comet. This is a very dire situation. Phoenix, we will talk later, but now, tend to your own.” He hung up abruptly, but I didn’t have time to be resentful, not when the spots of red on the map were glaring down at us, a worldwide epidemic. I stared up at them, seeing the cluster of dots around Maxville, specifically around Metroplex, where my dad was incarcerated. Mentally I shook my head; powers or no powers, Metroplex was designed to keep people inside in the event of catastrophe. Even if Baron Battle was the only one left in Metroplex with his powers, he still wouldn’t be able to get out. One less thing to worry about; I did not want to deal with more family drama on top of a world-wide crisis.

“Director, how did the Commander and Jetstream get away?” Monica asked as I shut my phone. I shook myself out of my woolgathering to concentrate on her words. “Cutter’s Crew had six months to stew after the academy went down, and none of them are afraid to go for the kill.”

“That,” said a curiously breathless voice, “was my doing.”

I started as a tall, blue-and-white-clad figure walked around me, and there damn sure hadn’t been anyone behind me a second ago. He was slender and androgynous, carrying a staff topped with an hourglass, and it understandably took me a moment to recognize him. This was only the second time I’d seen this hero in the flesh. Chronotrypsis had been at the Redeemer’s trial, keeping all the superheroes cocooned in time so we could make crucial decisions without worrying about someone having to leave for a supervillain attack. He or she (I didn’t know exactly, no one did) never showed up except for world-shaking events. But he usually never intervened in the life or death of a single person. For Chronotrypsis to do that…

“Why?” Monica asked, an edge to her voice.

“It is my power, Mercy, to see all possible futures. And to lose those two today deprives us of some critical factor that we need to keep our world intact.”

“What?” the Director said ominously.

“One possible outcome is the destruction of the Earth. I would assume you’d prefer the planet in one piece?” Chronotrypsis asked in a passionless voice.

“Of course we do,” I said. Why wouldn’t we? Was there some situation where we wouldn’t want the Earth to survive?

“I have been accused of high-handedness before, Phoenix, of choosing the future for all and steering it towards an end chosen by myself and no other. My greatest foe has always been myself. I have learned to do no more good than to save the world from annihilation.”

“And saving the Commander and Jetstream is part of that? They can save us?” I asked. They were good people, experienced heroes, but how could they do that with them wounded and powerless?

“To my grief, I have learned to limit what I say about what I see. I will tell you this – in every future where the Earth survives, in whatever fashion, the Commander and Jetstream do not die today. Also, there is another question on your minds. Mercy, you and the Redeemers had to be formed on that day you first saw me, needed to choose to be on the side of right just then. Any future where those things are not true ends in planetary disaster.”

Monica was shaking almost visibly at Chronotrypsis’ words, and I couldn’t blame her.

“Don’t flatter yourself to think you are to be the saviors. Sometimes fate can be tricky. The possibilities are endless – hero, villain, sacrifice, distraction, purpose, example, even bystander, I have seen you in every role possible. But you had to become the Redeemers that day to keep the planet existing. Beyond that, I will not say.”

“What else can you say?” the Director asked, far more patiently than I would have.

“Only what you would already do. Work together, be compassionate as well as strong, plan with as much wisdom as you possess, use all your resources. What is happening is as grave threat to your existence as a whole.”

“You’re infuriating as always Chrono. Thank you.”

Chronotrypsis bowed and disappeared between one eyeblink and the next.

“I am so glad he’d on our side,” the Director said fervently. “Team, what data do we have?” She turned towards the technopaths working feverishly on the computer banks along one wall. They were the ones who’d helped us against the academy; under the Bureau, they’d become the best data analysts that we had.

“We’re still compiling Director,” Allie said, ducking her head. “But there’s one correlation we keep seeing – everyone who lost their powers has children, or nieces and nephews.”

“But not everyone,” I pointed out. “My mom’s family, the Battle family…”

Allie shrugged and the others followed suit. “We don’t have all the data yet. But it’s one trend we’ve noticed. We do know the power loss took place at virtually the same time worldwide, affecting villains and heroes both, but until we get more information we can’t be specific.”

“There just aren’t that many superpowers that can act on a global scale. I’ve never heard of anything this widespread,” the Director said, eyes focused on the map.

“They’re cursed,” I said belatedly, shaking myself into sharing the most important piece of information we had. Between Will’s parents, the global disaster, and Chronotrypsis’ appearance, it had nearly slipped my mind. “The Commander and Jetstream, Lightfire, Fairweather, everyone I healed who’d lost their powers was cursed.”

“Everyone,” the Director repeated, and her shoulders slumped. She’d heard me when I’d told her about the Commander and Jetstream earlier, but to hear it was everyone… “So whoever or whatever is responsible for this is old. Mercy, is Meduka here yet?”

Monica checked her phone as the Director stared at the map.

“What about the Council?” I asked. This had to be a job for more than just Maxville. The Bureau Council had to be the ones in charge of trying to figure out what was going on.

“Halo Star trusts me. We have the best intelligence setup in the Bureau here in Maxville. They’re getting what we’re getting.” Not to mention Maxville was the only Bureau branch with a half-dozen technopaths used to hacking and information-gathering on its payroll.

“Why Mercy and me?” I asked more quietly, shooting a glance over at my wife. “We should get the others down here.” Some of our best plans had always come from all of us working together. Even if the Champions of Justice were more used to applying enough force to the offending party until they fell down as a general solution, we’d also figured out a hell of a lot about the academy all on our own. I needed my team.

“Guardian won’t be rational about this right now and Mercy can handle the bad news,” she said brusquely.

“I know.”

“The plan to take down Royal Pain’s academy, the most deadly threat we’ve faced in decades, was hers and yours. You two are quick thinkers and willing to contemplate the worst. Also, she’s a leader, you’re a second-in-command, and neither of you have family involved in this,” the Director added in a slightly softer tone.

My heart sank. “The other Champions?”

“Violet Cavy, Brilliance, Rose Queen, and Viscosity’s families were also affected,” the Director said.

“Fuck.”

“The Peaces were not. The Battles were not. Maybe there’s some factor that explains it, but my money’s on Tobias Battle and his lifetime of secrets,” the Director said, switching her gimlet stare to me.

“No way Tobias had anything to do with--”

“I don’t believe he did either, Phoenix, but I do think his family has more history than half the Bureau.”

“Why the Battles and not the Peaces?”

“The Battles have an entire library and two dedicated archivists looking after their papers, and those are just the ones I know about. You told me your mother had to go digging through the attic to find anything about her ancestors,” she said.

I had to concede that point. Not that all families didn’t have secrets, but of the two, the Battles were more likely to have some old record neatly filed away about something. They hadn’t been employed by kings and governments for hundreds of years without picking up some secrets. And a hell of a lot of history.

Monica clicked her phone shut and turned back towards the Director and me, looking very grave. “He’s on his way down right now. I told him what was going on, at least that there was power loss. Director, as a point, his curse is a serious sore spot for him. I’ve heard parts of his story twice – once with the Redeemers, and he had to be absolutely plastered before he spilled his guts. The other time… was at the academy.”

When Monica, as Painbreaker, had probably tortured it out him. That didn’t need to be said.

The Director only nodded in acknowledgement. “Mercy, I understand, but we need this information now. I know how well you all perform under pressure.”

Monica looked like she wanted to protest, but the door chimed and then opened, revealing Duke’s half-shadowed form, his snakes showing an iridescent sheen in the light.

“Meduka, welcome.”

Duke looked about as uncomfortable as he could, stiff-backed, very quiet, his snake-hair half-reared as if poised to strike. I know he had to have been in the Bureau lots of times, and met the Director before, but still held himself like he was expecting someone to hit him. Academy nerves, I knew, with a quick glance at Monica.

“You’ve heard the news?”

“People losing their powers, yeah.”

“Duke, they’ve been cursed,” I said.

His eyes went wide and his hair went into full strike position, hissing loudly. “You’re sure?” he asked harshly.

“Their fire was blue,” I told him, and he nodded very slowly. Then he shook his head.

“Look, if you want me tell you how to get rid of it, you’re out of luck. I’ve been stuck with mine for years.”

“Yes, but you’re the only friendly person we know who has any experience with curses. Most practitioners--”

“Are supervillains, yeah, I know. What do you want from me, then?”

“Tell me how you were cursed,” the Director said.

“It’s already on file,” Meduka said, and flinched at the glare she leveled at him. He took a deep breath and started talking, his voice toneless. I snuck a glance at Monica as he started talking, and saw she’d gone a little chalky. I knew, without her having to say, that this must have been what he sounded like in her academy workroom.

“My freshman year of college, there was this trip, a backpacking trip through Europe. Student discount, cheap as hell, so I went. Half the time we ducked the chaperones and went to parties because we could drink over there without someone hassling us for our ID every six seconds. I was at this rave, hooked up with this girl, Tasha.” He didn’t look at any of us as he kept talking, but his snakes bobbed and wove in the air, as if seeking someone to bite. “We went out of the warehouse, out into this park. Found a private corner…” He vaguely waved his hand, indicating things had probably gotten pretty heated between them.

“Then this old woman walked right by us and started yelling at us for being disrespectful and not keeping our hands to ourselves in public.” The snakes hissed loudly as Meduka fell silent, and he grimaced. “I told her, ‘We’re just having a good time, what, are you jealous?’ And we didn’t stop. We were both kinda buzzed and didn’t really give a crap about her.”

“Then what?”

“The old woman growled out something in some language I didn’t know, and Tasha fainted. Then she pointed her finger at me, and I couldn’t move.” The snakes actually lunged at Duke’s face, and he shouted at them, shaking hard as he wrestled them back under control. “She told me, ‘You will not touch again until you’ve learned your lesson.’ I woke up like this, nearly bit Tasha, and went into hiding until Royal Pain found me.”

Spare as his story was, it was clear every word was as painful as Monica had warned. I took a moment to imagine what he must have gone through, hiding out on the fringes in a foreign country, unable to show his face or ask for help. If he’d had any family or friends, he must have been too afraid to get close to them. Did they think he was dead?

“And the gypsy woman, did she say anything about your lesson you had to learn?” the Director asked gently.

Duke laughed without humor. “Fuck no. And for a while I was trying everything I could think of. I don’t know if it’s respect for my elders or staying out of the park or no PDA or what.”

“There’s supposed to be a way out,” the Director muttered. “Curses always have a way out.”

“Yeah, but Madame Zora or whatever the hell her name was didn’t bother to drop a dime to me, so I’m screwed. Director, I can’t do jack shit for anyone who just lost their powers, because believe me, if I knew how to uncurse myself, I would have done it in a heartbeat years ago,” he said, his snakes hissing to punctuate his frustration.

“Are you sure?” The Director fixed him with the kind of stare she’d favored me with back when I’d gotten tossed into detention. Meduka, veteran of Painbreaker’s torture and academy sadism, crumpled after five minutes.

“It’s… better when I don’t fight it. When I accept them, work with them,” he pointed to the snakes, “rather than against them. It hurts less… and I can do more.”

The Director pursed her lips. “Well, that gives us something.”

--

“Stronghold?” I called very softly from the doorway of his parents’ room. The Director had released Monica and me to do whatever we needed to do until they got new information, which for Monica meant talking Duke through the trauma of having to spill his guts, and for me to find my friends.

Will was still in his tuxedo, bowtie undone, crumpled in a chair between his parents’ beds. He looked up at my voice, his eyes red and swollen from crying. I flicked my gaze over the Commander and Jetstream, pleased to see the vitals on the monitors looking nearly normal. Though they were splinted and bandaged, IV needles in their arms, plastered with monitoring pads, and would probably still be unconscious for a good long while, they were alive and out of the woods.

“Warren,” he said, almost making a question out of it. He shook his head and rubbed his eyes before staring at me again. “Warren. Thank you. Dr. Egret said they wouldn’t have made it if you hadn’t been here.”

“It’s my job,” I said uncomfortably, walking in a few steps. “Stronghold, I’m sorry I didn’t say--”

“No, it’s ok,” he said, waving my apology away. “It’s ok. You didn’t know for sure, and Voidhammer was around to get you here so…” He trailed off and stared at the floor for a long time.

“Where’s Layla?” I asked, as the silence stretched on.

“Home. Her parents lost their powers too, and they’re freaking out,” Will said listlessly. I pressed my lips together, picking up an uncomfortable truth from the stiff set of Will’s shoulders. Layla’s parents were nearly inactive. Granted, her mom could have got into trouble if she’d been trying to talk down a raging lion when the curse had happened, but Sunshine Evans got called maybe four times a year. And today hadn’t been one of those times; they’d been at the wedding when Monica and I’d gotten the call. (Though that brought up something interesting, that no one had noticed they’d been cursed until they’d tried to use their powers.) Will understood Layla wanting to be able to see her own parents were ok, to let them know she was all right once they’d discovered they’d lost their powers, but… Her parents were fine. His had nearly died. I couldn’t blame him for feeling resentment. Will wasn’t a saint.

“It’s a curse,” I said, not sure if anyone had been keeping him updated. “Nearly everyone with powers, heroes and villains, lost them at the same time. The Bureau’s trying to figure it out.”

“The Crew didn’t,” Will said, not looking up, but his voice was full of venom. “You know what was going on, why Mom and Dad got the call? The Crew decided to come out of hiding to try to destroy Mount Rushmore. Just showed up randomly and started blowing stuff up, panicking the crowd, their usual. Mom and Dad showed up, and they laughed, Warren. They laughed. Son of Silver kept firing at them, Cutter kept throwing her knives after Viper had coated them, Skybolt was keeping Mom dodging, Saurian Lord had his mechas trying to pin Dad down, and Bloodtalon was dive-bombing them both. It didn’t work. Mom and Dad were doing great, just owning the fight and then…” Will choked up for a second and his breathing went harsh and ragged. I reached out and put a hand on his shoulder as he got his voice back. How he’d gotten the footage from Rushmore, I didn’t ask.

“Then it was like someone had flipped a switch. One second, they were fine, the next second they went down under the Crew’s attacks like citizens. And the Crew was still laughing.” Will clenched one hand into a fist that I knew from experience could pulverize steel to powder. “There was a flash of blue light and Mom and Dad were gone and the Crew--” He choked silence, flushing in anger. “They started scoring themselves on what they’d done to my parents!”

I could picture it without difficulty. Cutter and Saurian Lord wrangling over whether a knife hit in a vital organ counted for more points than a mecha crushing a bone, Bloodtalon arguing that her hits counted towards their points, Viper trying to weasel his way into the bets… Yes, they would totally do that. But if Will got any more worked up, I was afraid what would happen to the next supervillain to cross his path.

“They’re okay now,” I said quietly. “Your mom and dad are okay. Chronotrypsis got them here in time.”

“Chronotrypsis?” Will asked, paling a little as he lost some of his anger from the shock.

“I was with Mercy, talking to the Director; Chrono got them out. He said… He said they weren’t supposed to die today. The world would have ended if they died today.”

Will was silent for an uncomfortably long time. “If you see him, tell him thanks.”

“I will.”

He sighed and sat up straighter, looking at his mom and dad. “Warren, how many people lost their powers?”

“Eighty-five percent at last count.” And not my family. I didn’t say that out loud, but I was relieved beyond measure that at least I didn’t have to worry about them. At least someone on our team didn’t have that hanging over them.

“We’re gonna be on call. We’re gonna have to take up the slack.” Will shoved himself out of his chair, leaving dents behind, and pulled the bowtie from his neck, shoving it in his pocket. “Any supervillain that’s still up is going to have a field day.”

The second the words were out of Will’s mouth, his phone rang from his parents’ bedside. Will reached out for it, almost in slow motion, and answered it.

“Yes. I understand.” A pause. “Kill-O-Watt Squad in Times Square. We’ll be there.” He hung up and looked at me, looked through me, and I felt a chill of foreboding.

“The Director wanted to talk to you,” I said, trying to stall for just a second, to get that look off his face, and Will shook his head.

“I think I need to go break some stuff. Kill-O-Watt Squad can take it. And… they’re going to need you here, Phoenix, if anything else happens. I don’t… I can’t think right now. You got this?”

Will looked withdrawn, angry, furious, and I was seriously worrying about what was going through his head. The one time I thought someone had physically hurt my mom, when Tobias had dropped by for his first visit, I’d nearly ended up trying to deck him then and there, and that was with Mom telling me not to. If Cutter’s Crew showed their face anywhere where Will could see them, if they decided to throw in with whatever villains were still active just for a laugh, I wouldn’t bet anything on their chances.

Actually… the way Will looked now, I was afraid that the call to Times Square might end badly. When superheroes like Will lost control, very bad things happened. I’d counted us all lucky that the one time Will had been tagged by Bloodtalon he’d been too focused on her to turn his attention to less-mobile targets. But now? Alcohol had brought down cops before, doctors had turned to pills as a crutch, and violence was the ugly bane of superheroes. When you went from “necessary measures” to thinking you could do whatever you wanted when someone broke laws in your line of sight… that’s how supervillains were born.

That’s how my dad ended up in prison.

“I got this. But Stronghold--” I caught his arm as he got up and he shrugged out of my hold like it was nothing. I stood in front of him, giving him the option of pushing past me, or hearing me out. “Will, are you going to be okay?”

“Hell, no,” Will said, looking up finally. “They tried to kill them Warren, and-.”

“--They were laughing about it,” I finished. “I know. You told me. Will, you’ve fought the Crew before. You know how messed up they are. You knew that if they ever got any kind of advantage, they’d push it to the limit.”

“It wasn’t supposed to be them!” Will yelled, waving at his parents. “They took our call; they were there when it was our job. If we’d been there, they wouldn’t have gotten hurt and we could have taken the Crew down for good!”

“You didn’t know, Stronghold. Nobody knew this was going to happen.”

Will looked away, looked down at his dad, and quickly scrubbed at his eyes with the back of his hand.

“Dad doesn’t get hurt by this stuff. Not ever,” Will said, calming down a little. “I don’t think I’ve seen him hurt since Homecoming freshman year.”

Jetstream had taken hard hits before, and Will had to have seen articles about that at least, even if his mom hadn’t told him about those fights. Which I doubted; Mrs. Stronghold didn’t keep stuff from her son. But to see the Commander so badly injured… Will was tougher than his dad, but he hadn’t been worse than scorched since he’d powered up. He’d gotten used to being able to throw himself at impossible situations and not having to worry about coming home in one piece. Will had gotten out of the habit of keeping himself out of the line of fire – the opposite, in fact.

“What if the rest of us lose our powers too?” Will asked, confirming my suspicions.

“If no one has powers, then I guess the police are going to be taking care of stuff from now on,” I said dryly. It was really all I could say. We were speculating enough without coming up with more worst-case scenarios.

Will didn’t even look up at my attempt at humor, just slowly turned away from his parents. I’d been frantically texting with one hand as I’d talked Will down, sending out the all-call to the rest of the Champions, knowing Will needed the least time of all of us to get ready, and we couldn’t leave without him.

“Ok,” he said finally. “I won’t kill the Crew if I see them.”

“I’m going with you,” I added, ducking into the bathroom long enough to quick-change into my Phoenix gear. I had my helmet under my arm when I emerged to see Will’s surprised expression. “Right now, you guys need me more.”

I didn’t specify who I meant. Will didn’t ask, just quick-changed into his Guardian gear and headed for the roof with me.

Chapter Text

The trip to New York from Maxville was deathly quiet once Ethan had given us a quick rundown on our foes, everyone wrapped in their own thoughts. I’d been unbelievably lucky; for perhaps once in my life I was the completely stable one, without family troubles of any sort to distract me. Everyone else hadn’t had as much experience in knowing their family was vulnerable. Mom had been so fragile for most of my life; I hadn’t realized how much of a relief it had been when she took up her title again.

Now everyone else was suddenly feeling what it was like on the other side of the coin.

“Times Square incoming,” Zack called, and Magenta looked over the edge of his pocket, her guinea pig nose twitching as the huge screens came into view. Along with the fountains of sparks, arcs of electricity, and the screaming. It hadn’t taken us that long to get there, but clearly the Kill-O-Watt Squad was loving the fact that virtually every superhero in New York capable of taking them out was down for the count.

Guardian ducked down below the line of the TV choppers, trying to keep us a secret as long as possible, until a ground-bound news crew spotted us. Zack, Layla, and I were clinging to a vine harness wrapped around Will’s body, with Ethan and Magenta shifted and hidden in pitcher plants and pockets respectively, and that was as distinctive an entrance as Comet’s. Just as the roar of recognition went up, people chanting out names, Will powered forward into the Square itself. We didn’t even need a shout from Zack, just threw our arms in front of our faces to protect ourselves from his light assault.

Layla unfurled the vines around us, lowering us down to the ground amidst the curses and shouts of pain from the Kill-O-Watt Squad as the light faded. They’d herded a group of citizens right below the biggest screens of the Square and were keeping them penned in with electricity stolen from all around us. Lightning seemed to be making a dome around them, keeping anyone from making a break for it, and the five-man Kill-O-Watt Squad was demanding some insane dollar amount to keep them from turning the rest of the electricity in the city against its citizens.

“Let them go!” Will thundered, in full Guardian mode. He hovered above us as Rose Queen discreetly cast some of her seed capsules on the ground behind her, growing more plants to be ready if the Squad decided to push their luck.

From the look in their eyes, an arrogance only slightly tempered by Guardian’s presence, I had no doubt Will was going to get to punch someone today. Of all of us, only Brilliance had any immunity to electricity, and his only went so far. Zack was just not powerful enough to absorb any direct hit from supervillains who practically lived in electricity. Viscosity and Violet Cavy were nowhere to be seen, and that was just fine with me.

“I’m south, Viscosity is east,” Magenta hissed through our comms as Buzz and Zapp flanked Overload while he seemingly gave Guardian’s ultimatum some thought. Volt and Wattson kept sucking away electricity, the air stinking of ozone all around it. It was making our hair stand on end, and the citizens inside the electrical fence were shouting in panic.

“Come on,” I muttered under my breath. Another minute and someone was going to freak out and try to breach the dome, and that was an almost guaranteed death sentence. I caught Rose Queen’s eyes, she nodded to Brilliance, and we slowly began to separate, not giving the Squad any single place to target. No use trying to call the utilities department to shut down the grid; the Squad had control now, and they weren’t going to let up for anything. They’d been thwarted by Broadway and the Class Acts for years, a team of three power-adaptors that could handle whatever the Squad could dish out, and not even the son of the Commander and Jetstream was going to make them surrender when their biggest nemeses had been taken out of play.

“How about you just fly on home, little Guardian?” Overload said with a nasty smile. I sucked in a breath watching Will’s face darken at the insult, when another voice rang out over the crowd.

“I don’t think so, Overload!”

All of us, Champions and the Squad, turned to look at the speaker, a broad-shouldered man with a surprisingly animate, expressive face behind his little white domino mask. He was garbed in a costume that managed to gracefully combine superhero armor with a white tuxedo, with a red rose pinned to the clasp of his white-and-red cape. He was old enough to be my dad, but had the underlying toughness typical of the man who’d been one of New York’s finest superheroes for the past ten years.

“Broadway!” Overload said, eyes widening with surprise. Flanking Broadway were two women in Grecian robes, one in a Comedy mask, the other in a Tragedy one – The Class Acts, his sidekicks, posed dramatically to enhance Broadway’s entrance.

“No, no, no, no…” I muttered under my breath, not moving my lips. We’d been called to New York because Broadway had lost his powers. He had to have, or the Bureau wouldn’t have hauled us halfway across the country to save Times Square. Broadway was too vulnerable right now to handle the Kill-O-Watt Squad. What the hell is he doing? Bluffing? I thought.

“You interrupted my performance,” Broadway said, his voice carrying over the explosions easily. “I warned you last time to never do that again.”

“Drop the cage now!” I shouted. “I got Wattson and Volt on the left,” I added quietly over my comm. At least I could stop them from confining the citizens and get their leverage free. “Viscosity and I have Buzz and Zapp, but we’re gonna need back-up. Stun-caps don’t work on these guys,” Violet Cavy said, a wince audible in her voice. Pity, those electrical stun caps were both her and Ethan’s primary weapon, and a good one, but they had other options. Rose Queen flicked her fingers to get my attention, letting me know she had it under control.

“How about… no way you powerless hack!” Overload said, and raised his hands. Showers of sparks came shooting out, not aiming for the very obvious threat of Guardian, but for Broadway. The Champions struck at nearly the same time, my fire winging Volt and Wattson, disrupting the cage as they lost control over their power-siphoning, while Rose Queen’s plants pounced on Zapp and Buzz like trained tigers. Guardian dove for Overload, making him curse frantically and half-abort his attack to try to react to the new threat, and that was the only thing that saved Broadway.

Comedy and Tragedy fearlessly stepped into the sparks, hands up and out, glowing with an odd white light that seemed to attract the sparks like moths to a flame. My eyes widened as I saw them in action. I knew the two of them were power-adaptors, the same as Broadway, but only at Sidekick strength. That was Broadway’s shtick, that he could “take on any role,” literally, by absorbing and using people’s own superpowers against them. His sidekicks could do the same, but they weren’t supposed to be able to handle what he could. For a second I thought they were just trying to absorb enough of Overload’s attack to save Broadway, but I realized Broadway’s hands were up too, and they were also glowing. I narrowed my eyes, seeing something off about the glow, and almost choked. He had some kind of supercharged glowsticks up his sleeves, like the kind Zack sold at raves at Glitterdust, the club he DJed at. Broadway was faking it, faking having powers to keep the Squad’s attention on him and off the citizens, and his sidekicks were helping him sell the role.

My sense of wrongness flared as the sparks finally cleared, and I knew Broadway had to be in a lot of pain, but you wouldn’t have known it to look at him. He smiled as if he didn’t have a care in the world, Comedy and Tragedy standing steadily at his sides, their robes smoking slightly from trying to absorb such a powerful shock. If Overload hadn’t split his attacks, they might have all gotten way more than they could handle.

And hell if the Champions were going to waste that kind of opening. Guardian’s punch landed even as Broadway held a smile on his face, and Overload went flying backwards a few blocks. I didn’t get a chance to see much of the fight between them, because Rose Queen and I were two busy with the remaining four members of the Squad. I kept the flames on them, making them too busy dancing to avoid getting a hotfoot to notice Rose Queen’s vines wrapping around them, eventually turning them into green mummies, ready and waiting to be put in jail. While Layla and I had been auditioning the Squad for the chorus line, Magenta and Ethan had gotten the citizens out of the fire, more or less literally, guiding them past sparking power lines and debris to get them out of danger.

I only caught up with what Will was doing when Overload went sailing over my head a few minutes later, looking much worse for the wear, to collapse against the side of a building. Guardian flew up a moment later, fists clenched, face like a thundercloud.

“Don’t ever do that again!” Guardian snarled, and my eyebrows flew up behind my mask. I saw Will sneak a look over at Broadway, now prone in the street with Brilliance guarding him and The Class Acts nearly covering him from outside view, and had a rush of understanding. Supervillains attacking powerless superheroes about the same age as his parents? Overload should be glad he wasn’t dead.

Rose Queen smoothly went to Guardian’s side, calling up more vines to wrap up the groaning Overload. I could feel the wrongness that meant he was hurt, but definitely wasn’t going to die, and didn’t feel like wasting my power on him. I slipped away to join Brilliance, a new wave of wrongness hitting me as I got near the fallen Broadway.

“Help him, please!” Tragedy cried, jumping to her feet and hauling me next to him. Not dying, no, but definitely in a bad way. Underneath the “show much go on” attitude, Broadway was speckled with painful burns all over, and it hadn’t done the rest of his body any favors to be hit with that much electricity, even peripherally. He was lucky it hadn’t stopped his heart. I was damn impressed; it had taken a lot of guts to face down the Squad armed with nothing but glowsticks and some help from his friends.

“Good show,” Broadway said weakly, managing a smile even as my hands began to burn with the reddish ember flames. I looked up at Zack, and he made a motion as if to dope-slap me. I rolled my eyes but let the ember-fire take over anyway, sure that Zack would shake me out of my healing trance when I was done. Then I lost all awareness of my surroundings as my focus narrowed to brightening the flames shadowed by Overload’s attack.

“Oh my God, are you kidding me, Beau?” Tragedy said, shaking Broadway fiercely as Zack punched my shoulder to pull me out of trance some minutes later. I had sealed over the worst of the burns, but Broadway would still need time to recover. Hell, I figured he needed the time off his feet to keep himself from doing anything else that risky, if Comedy and Tragedy’s reactions were anything to go by.

“You nearly pulled it off. The looks on their faces!” Comedy said lightly, trying to calm Tragedy’s near-hysterics.

“You nearly died!” Tragedy said, glaring up at Comedy.

“With panache!” Comedy said.

I gathered that, at least in the main, this was an argument they’d been having for years.

“It was good improv performance,” Broadway declared, slowly and carefully sitting up. “And bravo to both of you. Bravo!” He winced a bit as they helped him to his feet, but he covered it quickly and grasped my hand in a firm handshake.

“A good show from your team. Though I shan’t hope we need an encore,” he said sincerely. “And fine special effects from you, Phoenix. I take it I should stay off the stage to improve my technique for a bit?”

Zack didn’t quite suppress a laugh, and found Comedy joining him in snorting at Broadway’s theater talk.

“Don’t mind the peanut gallery,” Broadway added with an air that this was a common occurrence in his world.

I shook my head, huffing out a laugh myself. “You nearly died,” I said. “I did what I could, but I didn’t know if we’d get called again soon-.”

“Quite right, quite right, budgetary restrictions and all that. I understand!” he said breezily. “A bit of a retreat is exactly what I need. Rest and reflection, working on improving my craft, all of that.” Broadway kept up his cheer until Tragedy finally heard what she wanted to hear. With a penetrating look at her hero, she jerked her head at Comedy, managed to corral Brilliance, and went to help the police put the Squad in the transport trucks.

“That was suicidally brave,” I said flatly.

“I need to be good for something, don’t I?” Broadway said, his rich actor’s voice going rough. “The Bureau is being cagey about this whole mess and I still have idiots like the Kill-O-Watts running around my city. We lost most of New York’s superheroes to this… whatever-it-is and the Squad only respected me. I had to try to help.” He looked over at Guardian and Rose Queen and narrowed his eyes. “He shouldn’t even be out in the field after what happened to the Commander and Jetstream.” Broadway sighed and held up his hand before I could protest. “I know, I know, who else could take his spot? Tell me, do you have any idea what happened to us Phoenix? No one is talking to us yet. Afraid we’ll do something stupid, I think.”

It was gallows humor, and I cracked a grim smile to match his. What Broadway had done would probably be repeated over and over again until we figured this out. You didn’t lose the desire to help just because your powers were gone. Hell, Will didn’t even think he had powers and still went up against me in a rage in high school because he’d been trying to do the right thing. Normal cops and soldiers and firefighters did the same thing every day, except they didn’t have to deal with people like the Kill-O-Watt Squad.

“We don’t know yet,” I confessed. “But believe me, we’re going to find out.”

“That’s the ticket,” Broadway said. “Break a leg, then.” He turned to limp away, and then turned back. “Break two,” he added, very solemn. “You’re going to need all the help you can get.”

--

“Look at this!” Allie shouted, making everyone jump. She pointed up at the screen, now split between a flat map and a spinning globe, oddly surrounded by floating strands. I looked up from my spot at the table, startled out of my half-trance of numb staring at the maps in front of me. As good as the technopaths were, the Director wanted a second set of eyes, and Monica and I had been dragooned into service not long after we’d come back from New York. Wisely, she’d let the rest of the Champions go home. I hoped Layla was having luck dealing with Will, because we couldn’t risk him going near-postal every time we got a call. If I could have, I would have asked my mom for help, but she was busy defusing mass panic in several major cities. We were on our own.

“Talk to me,” the Director said, standing up.

“We were scanning different wavelengths of energy, using the search parameters you did for finding a way into the academy, and we found this. The powers aren’t gone, they’re here. They’re being streamed--”

“Where?” the Director said sharply. “Who’s the target, who’s taking them?”

“Ah… there’s no terminal point. They’re just orbiting.”

It looked like strands were just pushing out of the Earth, like worms out of an apple, endlessly circling, circling, looking for… what?

“Why the hell would someone go to all the trouble of siphoning off thousands of powers and then not use them?” the Director demanded to the air.

No one had an answer. And the Director didn’t seem to expect one.

“Scratch that; if we don’t know by now, we’re not going to know unless whoever did this steps forward,” the Director said, making a negating gesture with her hand. “Concentrate on who lost their powers, and when. If we can learn that, maybe we can work backwards and find this person through process of elimination.

Allie looked at the others and picked up her laptop with a nervous glance in my direction. I felt a chill for foreboding. “Director, we’re already ready with our report on the first part of that.”

“Let’s hear it; we’re all listening.”

“To the extent of our knowledge, everyone who lost their powers was at least part of a second-generation super family. All had children or nieces or nephews with powers. Some had even more extensive genetic history. Essentially all we have left are first-generation or last-generation powers.”

My heart stopped for a second. That wasn’t right. I shouldn’t be-.

“What else?”

“No common demographics other than that, age, nationality, type of power, nothing. Our database on supervillains is sketchier, but what we do know matches so far. The odd thing is, while there is that common thread among the superpowered, not every superpowered person who fit those parameters lost their powers.”

“Who is left outside those parameters?”

Allie looked over at me with sympathy. My gut turned into a ball of ice. The Director had told me earlier. My family was all right. The Peaces and Battles were all right. But they shouldn’t be. I shouldn’t be either. The last generation superpower in our family wasn’t me, it was my eleven-year-old cousin Thomas.

“The Peaces and the Battles.”

The Director turned to fix me with a stare that outmatched what she’d given Meduka earlier by a factor of ten.

“Go to Berlin. Get Tobias Battle to spill everything he knows. Now.”

--

Tobias looked at the projection of gleaming lines encircling the globe like a ball of yarn. Strands of power were streaming from hundreds of points on the globe, coming up from the powerless heroes and villains on the ground to join the rest of them in orbiting the planet restlessly, the ends waving like they were looking for someplace to take root.

“The Director just gave me some news, along with a rather like piece of her mind. It seems that the worldwide power loss wasn’t so simultaneous as we thought. It spread out in a wave; an exceptionally fast one, to be sure, but it did have an epicenter.” Tobias pointed to a spot in the Alps, his movements oddly stiff. I realized he was afraid, and covering it well.

“What’s there?” I asked, as the silence stretched on. The plane trip over had been bad enough, with the waiting grating on my nerves, but the long conversation I’d had with Mom during that trip hadn’t been much better. She’d been as frightened as I had been that we’d somehow been spared a world-wide curse.

“It’s not what’s there now, but what was there. Or rather, who,” Tobias said, and turned around. “Warren, I believe I know what is going on.” He sat down, tugging his suit straight as I struggled with my temper.

“Why the hell didn’t you say something before?”

“I didn’t know until I saw this diagram just now, and heard that we are going against the trend of power loss. This is ancient history, even for me. But if I’m right… you and yours are going to need everything I’m going to tell you.” He leaned forward and traced a hand on a thin stone block that served him as a desk blotter, fire following in his finger’s wake. “Tell me, Warren, do you know the legend of Prometheus?”

“No way,” I said faintly. “No fucking way.”

Tobias’ lip quirked. “Oh, it’s not quite that way, but the parallels are too obvious to resist. Our family is ancient, Warren. Unbelievably ancient, and we’ve kept records. But this goes back to the very origin of our family, to the day we received our powers.”

The fire trails against the stone flared, died, and flared again as Tobias spoke, the words having the well-worn quality of an old, old story.

“A very long time ago, when our ancestors were just a small tribe, they lived in a rich valley below a mountain with three peaks. A rival tribe wanted their valley for its hunting and sought to drive them off. And though our ancestors were good fighters, there were not many of them, and the rival tribe would be able to drive them away very soon. So the chief decided to pray to the gods of the mountain, and saw in a vision to send his three children to the three peaks, the Peak of Storms, the Peak of Snows, and the Peak of Fire. He sent his two daughters and his only son with instructions to petition the gods that lived there for the power to protect their people.

“The daughters went and supplicated themselves and were granted power over lightning and snow, but their brother took three days to return. He wanted to protect his people, the same as his sisters, but he was hot-headed and demanded rather than asking. The god of the Peak of Fire could see the boy was sincere in his desire to protect, but also desperately needed his arrogance knocked from him. So the god blessed him and cursed him simultaneously and sent him back to his people.”

“Cursed him?” I asked.

“Our indestructibility, Warren. That was the brother’s curse.”

“Healing from virtually any injury and living a few extra lifespans is a curse?” I asked, eyebrow raised.

“Consider the time in which the brother lived,” Tobias said, raising an eyebrow right back. “Scars were considered marks of experience and battle won, and the brother would never have that. If he led his men into battle and failed to protect them, he and he alone would have to return to explain the deaths to their wives and children. He would have to live to see all his loved ones die around him while he continued on and on. The god had found the brother to be arrogant and unwise; he granted him an opportunity to find wisdom.”

I felt a little chilled at that. I had known, in the abstract, how long Battle pyrokinetics lived. And I knew that my father’s prison sentence had been worded the way it had for a reason. But now I could see it from Tobias’ angle. His wife was well into her nineties, the same as Tobias, and he could lose her at any time. He would lose his daughters, even his grandchildren, along with every person he’d known while he was growing up. When he died, another normal lifetime from now, no one would be able to understand what he’d gone through, except for his sons and grandsons, who would be facing the same long, lonely road.

Tobias gave me a moment and continued with the story.

“The god charged him with the same admonition that was given to the daughters. They would be given power to pass to their own children, and their children’s children, forever, as long as the power would be used to protect their people. They must always remember the gods and show them respect, for one day their power would be called to the gods’ service to battle against their enemies.” Tobias tapped the globe. “The call just came.”

“Whoa, what?” I asked. “I thought this was about our family. What about everyone else?”

“So it is. We were not the only family granted power, but we are one of the few to remember their origin. We were given… a temporary reprieve from the call.”

“You said you thought this was a legend.”

“It doesn’t mean I didn’t honor my ancestors. Gods-granted power or not, we worked hard to fulfill our family legacy. To sit by and do nothing is anathema. Your mother’s family became part of us when you were born, and luckily they have at least tried to uphold that philosophy.” Tobias sounded fierce, passionate, as much fire in his voice as his hands. “Warren, our debt is being called in. All the power is being called in.”

Something clicked in my head. “Why?”

“Because something is coming.”

I took a deep breath and thought hard for a few minutes. “The gods’ enemies.”

“Yes.”

“Titans?” I asked, thinking back to the Prometheus legend.

“If you like. They’re not imprisoned under the Earth, but rather…” Tobias raised his hand vaguely upward.

“Aliens?”

“To our world, at any rate. But gods don’t war against gods; if Earth is the prize, they wouldn’t be able to keep the planet intact with their battles. But with avatars, invested with all the power they’ve scattered across the globe in a few centuries? Yes, that will do.”

“Our family… is going to be the gods’ avatars?” I said very slowly.

“No,” Tobias said, scoffing. “Don’t be ridiculous. We were left our powers as a courtesy, to warn those who were truly going to fight.”

“Me,” I said flatly, my stomach sinking.

“Not alone.” He nodded at my start of surprise. “Think about what they’re doing. Look at the diagram. All the powers of the world that they took are just circling and waiting for someone to latch onto. But there are so many more than when this all began. No single person could handle that power; I believe you are in a unique position to speak about that.”

I shuddered slightly. Being the focus for Fire Court’s power, with Mom as my conduit and Monica as my eyes had nearly killed me, and that had been nine people. Hundreds, thousands of powers were floating out there now.

“The gods have always worked in threes. And yet they know our limitations. I think there will be three again. Three groups chosen to represent them, fight against the Titans, and save the Earth. Three groups that they will chose from, if they petition the gods properly.”

“You think?” We couldn’t afford to get this wrong. If there wasn’t a more pressing threat, we couldn’t afford to pull the last few heroes from active duty to go on a wild goose chase if this wasn’t real.

“I know. They have to use more than three people, or their avatars will burn out.” Tobias raised a finger. “One group for the Peak of Snows, to represent unrelenting stability. One group for the Peak of Fire, to represent change and purification. And one group for the Peak of Storms, to represent the power and chaos of nature.”

“The Champions,” I said, ticking off one finger in return. Unrelenting stability – didn’t the Champions of Justice fight for that, instead of letting supervillains throw us into anarchy?

“The Redeemers,” Tobias said, ticking off another. Change and purification – the essence of Mercy’s group.

“And…” I trailed off, anger choking me as I realized who the last group had to be. “Cutter’s Crew.” Chaos and power – their bywords. If anyone could embody the elemental chaos of nature, it would be the Crew.

“All three of you can handle power. And I pray you’ll be able to survive it.”

“How the hell are we going to get the Crew to agree to work with us?” I asked.

“Get supervillains to agree to being infused with enough power to fight gods?” Tobias asked rhetorically.

I grimaced, but nodded.

“Find them. You don’t have much time.”

“They could just stab us all in the back and throw in with the Titans.”

“What does Cutter want?” Tobias asked.

“Our heads on a pike,” I said sarcastically.

“Power, wealth, infamy. They want the world at their feet. They don’t share.” Tobias swallowed. “Consider my son, Warren. Consider your father.”

I looked away, but Tobias was relentless.

“Baron wanted the world under his rule. He wouldn’t have shared. The Titans won’t share either. All humans would be under their thumb, if not dead, and even Cutter won’t stand for that. Find them. Tell them. I’ll show you where you have to be.”

“And if they go to stab us in the back later?” I asked.

Tobias raised an eyebrow. “I hardly need to warn you to be on guard for treachery, do I?”

From somewhere, I dragged up a smile.

--

It would be the first time I’d seen my entire team since the wedding. I totaled the time in my head and was amazed to realize it had only been two days since Monica and I had gotten that fateful call. Two days, and the world was already going a little crazy. With so many superpowers out of commission, a lot of the remaining supervillains had gone into hiding, and the heroes left were disinclined to go looking for them. With good reason. Though the Bureau had suppressed the footage of the Mount Rushmore battle, there was enough gossip through the grapevine to make any superpower worth their tights wary. The single upshot about the situation was that there hadn’t been a single super battle for nearly two days, which had to be some kind of record.

When the Director had heard my story from Tobias, she’d gone very quiet and thoughtful, holding up her hand to me to keep me from talking.

“I understand,” she said finally. “We’ve confirmed an impending threat.”

“You know that for sure?”

“Look at the globe,” she said, pointing to the screen on the wall. “Look how those strands of powers all stay away from that one spot?” I looked and could see what she meant, a curious bare patch somewhere over the Pacific Ocean. “If you push out from that spot, well beyond what most of our space probes can handle, there is a blip. And anything that far out that’s registering is powerful in the extreme. Too powerful for just a dumb chunk of rock. Yes, I believe Tobias Battle.”

She tapped her fingers on her arm and shrugged her hair back, revealing the red scar tissue and scarlet eye she usually kept covered, legacies of my healing rampage in the wake of the academy attack.

“You’re certain that you, the Redeemers, and the Crew are the ones?” she asked.

“Who else?” I asked quietly. “I’m sure Ethan could give you a full break-down.” I’m sure the Director could have too – she’d been the principal at Sky High for years, and she knew most of the teams still active. And those whom she didn’t know, the technopaths could find out for her. They, thankfully, were all first or last-generation powers. She either trusted my opinion, or had her own reasons.

“He doesn’t need to.” She turned to face me. “The same reasons the Champions work as a team are the same reasons you should go. You have diverse powers and perspectives, experience in working together, and great determination. The Redeemers are similar, with a factor of toughness that comes with how they’ve fought for their lives and sanity for so long.”

“You didn’t mention the Crew.”

The Director clenched her jaw. “We could send the Storm Kings, the Geogods, or even the Gaea Avengers, but I don’t think they could handle it. I saw how badly that power meld affected you that day at the academy. For that experience alone, you and Mercy are amongst the best-equipped to handle getting that much power at once. Presumably you’ve spoken about that experience to your team at least once…” She paused, with the implication that if I’d been holding out, it might be a good time for story hour before things went much farther. “So the twelve of you are uniquely suited to playing host to the powers of the world. However, I can’t think of another team left, heroes or villains, who both fits the parameters and has the pure tenacity of Cutter’s Crew. They might be crazy on several levels, but if I had to unleash one of my enemies against a greater foe? I’d pick them.”

She didn’t want to, but she’d do it. I knew the Director had a grudge against Son of Silver too, and if she was willing to pitch him against these Titans, the gloves were truly coming off.

“Guardian won’t like this,” I admitted. Understatement of the century… my brain snarked.

“Guardian has reason. I’m seeing him in my office before we drop the bomb on them. He needs to know a little something about revenge.” She brushed the red scars over the side of her face. “Hopefully I can talk a little sense into him. No guarantees though. Everyone needs to decide for themselves.”

--

“You’ve got to be shitting me.”

Ash might be kind of a dick, but at least he was never really afraid to say what was on his mind. And if he hadn’t said it, Magenta would have.

“Like Warren would haul us down here just to shit us,” she said sarcastically, making Ash shrug. Will’s face was like stone as the others nodded or shook their heads or otherwise tried to deal with what I’d just told them. Since the Director’s office was still standing, I figured that however Will had reacted to Comet’s pep talk, he’d at least managed to keep his temper. I would have given a lot to have been a fly on the wall during that conversation.

“What do we have to do?” Ethan asked, fingers twitching like he wanted to start flipping through reference books.

“Tobias Battle knows where we have to go. We have to… get everyone together there and then, ah, petition to get the power.”

“Petition gods,” Michael said blandly. He didn’t quite believe me, and I didn’t blame him. If I paused to even think about it, I wouldn’t believe me either. It was ridiculous.

“Someone long-lived and powerful enough to siphon off most of Earth’s powers without anyone being able to stop them, so yeah, I’ll call them that until I get a better title,” I said.

“What’s it going to be like?” Layla asked, her hand twisted into the heavy fabric of her sleeve. “What’ll happen to us?”

I had, under mock-threat from Monica, told my friends what my “healing rampage” had felt like a while back, how I’d felt like I’d had limitless power at my fingertips, that I’d been connected to everyone like the stars in the sky, how I could feed all those fires at once. And also how much it had hurt afterwards.

“Like I told you, turned up to eleven,” I said. “And I’m just guessing.”

“Do we have to call Cutter?” Quint asked, his voice just a little unsteady. “Why can’t we handle it?”

The Director had been hanging back, letting us talk, but now stood and gestured at the screen, where the restless strands of power circled the planet aimlessly.

“All of that is going into you,” she said, a wave of her hand indicating all of us. “There’s over ten thousand powers lurking out there, between everyone we knew about, plus everyone retired or in hiding. Not to mention everyone else who has them is going to be giving them up to you.”

“Whoa, what?!” I asked, stiffening in shock. I heard echoes from nearly everyone else in the room.

“Process of elimination, Champions, Redeemers,” the Director said remorselessly. “I don’t know these… beings that are using us as their chess pieces, but I do know they seem to have held an audition and left the youngest and strongest of the remaining superpowered with their abilities. Why? Because they were looking to see who was going to step up to the plate. Who was going to figure out what was going on? They don’t want to power up just whoever was closest, or even who could be categorized as having the strongest powers right now. They want people who are smart, driven, and willing.”

“Why did they just…” Will’s jaw clenched and he spoke through gritted teeth, “pull the plug without warning? People got hurt and died because of what they did!”

“Because they don’t think like you do.” The soft, breathless voice, even and devoid of passion, nevertheless made us all jump as it suddenly sounded from behind us. We all turned to find Chronotrypsis standing there, leaning on his hourglass-topped staff, looking wan and thin, even for him.

“Chronotrypsis,” the Director said, easing everyone who hadn’t met him before off the trigger. Ethan’s eyes were enormous, and I knew if the Director weren’t in charge right now, he’d be reeling off Chrono’s powers and history faster than I could follow.

“Guardian, the… gods don’t think like you do. They acknowledge us as individuals, but the death of a few, or the injury of many, is nothing compared to losing the Earth. In that, they and I are of one mind. Certainly a hero like you knows about sacrifice?”

Will forcibly relaxed himself, a faint embarrassed flush creeping across his face. Ethan got up on tiptoe to whisper in my ear. “Will’s grandfather had to sacrifice a small town to save a hemisphere.” I nodded very slightly. We’d faced hard decisions before as a team, the hardest being the academy attack, but we’d gotten incredibly lucky with that. We’d lost people, but not nearly as many as we could have. But still, Will knew. He knew exactly how that could have fallen out.

But his parents had nearly died at the hands of people we were going to be fighting shoulder-to-shoulder with.

“We know,” Will said quietly, looking ashamed.

“The Crew is bad news, but if I had to pick someone to go against people trying to kill me? I’d pick the Crew any day of the week. They’re crazy, but dedicated,” Ash said, folding his arms, managing to look both defiant and disturbed.

The Director twitched slightly but otherwise kept herself still. She’d once told me she had a grudge against Son of Silver, and I’d seen that in action the first time I’d ever met him. That had also been the day he’d tried to kill me. If he’d been packing slightly heavier ammunition that day, or had been willing to go for a head shot, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t have made it out of that fight.

“We can’t trust them,” Magenta said, crossing her arms in return. “They’re tough, no joke, but I don’t trust them any farther than I can toss Bruin when we’re shifted.”

Michael let out a small, slightly hysterical laugh before catching himself. “Enemy of my enemy,” was all he said. At that, Ethan straightened up, and Monica looked away. The first time we’d met, Viper had nearly killed Magenta, Monica had used her powers on Zach, Will had nearly gone on a rage-fuelled murder spree thanks to Bloodtalon, and Cutter had tried to eviscerate me. They’d nearly succeeded too; if we hadn’t been able to pull it together at the last moment, we would have been toast. They had been the academy’s star team for years, and had evaded us for six months on their own.

No, we couldn’t trust them. But they were the strongest ones left standing.

“We don’t have a choice,” I said quietly, looking at Will.

“Cutter doesn’t like anyone honing in on her turf, and Silver enjoys a challenge. So do most of the others. Give them power and tell them who we’re up against? I think they’ll do it,” Monica said. The other Redeemers nodded, some reluctantly, some shaking from fear, but all of them agreed.

“Will,” Layla said quietly. “Will, we have to.”

“The stakes have never been higher,” Chronotrypsis said. “Believe me.”

Will looked back at all of us. And nodded sharply.

“Get Tobias Battle on the line,” the Director said decisively. Allie pressed a few buttons, and the screen above them cleared suddenly.

Tobias looked down at all of us from the screen, looming like a king on his throne.

“I pray you’ve been informed?” His voice sounded deeper than normal, rough and ragged like he hadn’t been sleeping.

There were tentative nods from around the room, easily seen with the Champions’ bright costumes, less visible with the Redeemers’ muted colors. Quint and Brittany had their hands clasped together half behind her back, their knuckles white.

“Thank you,” he said. “This will be the hardest thing you’ve ever done. I’m going to give you the last records our family has of the old gods, what little we know that you can expect. Beyond that, my only advice to the Bureau is that we let all remaining powers know they need to be ready to give up what they have.”

“Even you?” I asked, alarm making me sick. Tobias was over ninety, but barely looked sixty, and a youthful sixty at that. His indestructibility kept him healthy and youthful, and if that was siphoned off like everyone else’s power, I didn’t know what would happen to him.

“Do you think I would be so selfish as to not lend you what power and expertise is mine to give? You are to be imbued with so much power, and with it, the experience and knowledge to use it. So, in a way, everyone will be fighting the Titans. Just through you all.”

Will looked abashed as he stepped forward, losing the defensive hunch to his shoulders that had been there since he’d come to the Bureau hospital. “Thank you, Emberkeeper.”

“I’m sending you the location of the gods’ home along with what legends our family had preserved. Our hearts go with you.”

The screen went dark abruptly, and the Director turned back to face us. “You have an hour to talk to whoever you need to talk to. Then figure out a way to contact the Crew and go to where you need to go.”

“Time will be critical,” Chronotrypsis said cryptically, and winked out again between one blink and the next.

The Director stared at the spot where he had been and glared at the air. “I wish he would stop doing that.”

Chapter Text

I had a suspicion as to what the Director was doing in the War Room as she chivvied us out and into adjoining rooms where those family members who could make it were waiting. What insight Meduka had given her involving curses and powers she was going to pass on to everyone else who still had their abilities, because every other superhero and supervillain on the planet was going to lose what they had, and she didn’t want a repeat of the injuries and deaths that had rocked our world a few days ago. She was getting the word out to the world, probably through Halo Star and the rest of the Council, letting us step back out of the spotlight for a precious hour.

I tuned out the rest of the Champions as they talked their families (Will, of course, had left to go up to the hospital wing with Layla and her parents), but couldn’t help but notice that the Redeemers had their backs to the room, huddled around each other. I knew, maybe better than most, that there wasn’t anyone they could call. Monica’s family was dead, Michael and Duke had virtually cut off contact with their families when their powers had manifested in order to protect them, and the others were orphans, or as good as. The Redeemers only had each other.

I went to hug Mom, back from keeping the peace, and tried to keep my feelings of guilt to a minimum.

“There’s my brave son,” she said as I hugged her hard. I didn’t say anything to her; there wasn’t anything I could do to reassure her that I was going to be all right. She’d been in the healing meld after the academy attack, she’d watched me wither as my body burned nearly all of its resources to fuel the massive healing and almost go up in flames myself. I couldn’t lie to her and say we had this under control. I couldn’t tell her that we had a solid plan other than gathering up the right people, going to the right place, and hope we said the right thing. I didn’t know how we were going to fight, or even what the Titans were capable of.

We were all going to trust ourselves to a legend and the whims of people so powerful my ancestors had worshiped them. That was the only thing I could say.

“The Director came to you. She trusted you,” Mom said right in my ear. “She trusted your father’s family. And she trusts that your friends and even your enemies won’t let everyone down. You chose right.”

I held Mom almost tight enough to bruise; she always knew exactly what to say.

“I’m going to address everyone left. I want to make sure everyone knows what’s at stake, and what you need to save us.” She pulled away enough to cup my face in her hands. “I’ll be right there with you, Warren. Phoenix won’t fly alone.”

She put one hand over my heart, and I kissed her good-bye.

“Thanks, Mom.”

--

Getting Cutter’s Crew into a meeting was actually pretty easy. They didn’t like us, and wanted us dead slowly and painfully. And after taking out the Commander and Jetstream, they had to be feeling cocky. Showing up at Mount Rushmore, where the scars of their last fight still lingered, was as good as a phone call. Two hours after we arrived, Will spied Cutter’s distinctive flickering as she teleported her team in with enough time for us to be on guard in case they decided to launch a pre-emptive strike instead of pausing for banter. With the Crew you never knew.

Cutter dropped them a short distance away, just enough for a fairly loud conversation, and well within danger range for both of us. Skybolt and Son of Silver could hit us fairly easily from there, but then again Rose Queen, Voidhammer, Mercy and I could hit them too. And everyone knew it. But we’d shown up without issuing any challenges, a couple of days after two of the world’s greatest heroes had almost died. This was as close to a truce offering as they were likely to get, and by now they had to have gotten the news that nearly everyone’s powers were gone. They were too canny to attack us before they’d heard us out, but that didn’t mean anyone was safe.

“You got balls, Champions. No brains, but plenty of balls,” Cutter said, idly flipping a dagger over in her palm. She wasn’t even looking at the Redeemers, which was impressive considering that Bruin was already shifted and snorting softly at her like he couldn’t wait to sink his teeth into her flesh. Mercy wasn’t trying to get him to tone it down either and I didn’t blame her; subtlety was not necessary at this point.

“You want to rule the world?” I asked casually.

That shut Cutter up. She blinked at me, gaping, the rest of the Crew were clearly struggling to understand if they’d just heard me right. Son of Silver glared at us, looking for the catch.

Viper managed to find his voice first. “Uh… yeah. Duh. Kinda always the plan.”

“Well, the Earth is about to be taken over by Titans, so unless you guys like the idea of playing second banana to guys who make Guardian look like a ninety-eight pound weakling, you might want to help us fight them off.”

Son of Silver, oddly enough, didn’t look skeptical. The deadly resignation on Guardian’s face probably had something to do with it.

“Truth?” he mouthed.

“Truth,” Mercy said.

“So, say no BS. If they’re that awesome, we’d be dumb as hell to fight them. We’re not expendable, and we’re not going,” Saurian Lord said, crossing his arms over his chest.

“One third of the power that’s been siphoned off everyone. Yours for the fight, if you help.”

“That’s what happened? They got… siphoned off?” Cutter asked. There was an edge to her voice, real fear behind her usual bravado. While being able to say the Crew had taken down the Commander and Jetstream was worth something, it wasn’t as impressive when they’d been as powerless as regular citizens. As powerless as Cutter could be, and with as little warning.

“Use the power. Save the world. Yes or no?” Guardian asked sharply.

Cutter snorted, and with a quick look at her group and their gobsmacked expressions at Guardian’s offer, nodded. “Yeah. You think we’d turn that down?”

“Never know. You could be as stupid as you look,” Guardian said, his face like stone.

Damn… I thought, looking over at Will. He looked like he was in a really bad place right now and there wasn’t a whole lot I could do to stop him if Cutter pressed his control too far. I hadn’t been privy to what, if anything, his parents had said to him before he’d left, but I prayed it was something about revenge being really stupid right now.

Cutter chuckled. “Oh sweetie, if Mommy and Daddy hadn’t come out to play earlier, we would have been just as happy killing you.”

Will snapped. I would have too. There are some things you just can’t stand.

He flew forward so fast that if Cutter hadn’t been a teleporter, she would have been dead meat. But Cutter’s survival instincts in a fight were exceptional, and she flickered and was ten feet away in an instant. Will could stop on a dime and double back on himself in a flash, and he didn’t even hesitate as he turned and went for her again. Everyone started shouting at once, I let fire flare along my arms, and I was positive there would have been a terrible fight over the mountaintop except for two things: Son of Silver pulled out one of his guns and fired twice into the air, getting our attention, and Layla quick-grew a tree fence and forced us all backwards momentarily.

“Stop it! Don’t!” she cried. I would have ignored her, shoved or burned past the trees to try to help Will, except I saw Son of Silver turn and point his gun at the Crew, keeping them behind him and away from helping Cutter. I didn’t understand for a second, but as Will and Cutter flew and teleported past us again in a hyperfast game of cat-and-mouse, I realized Will’s hands weren’t balled up in fists, ready to punch, but open, ready to catch. Not that he couldn’t hurt Cutter just as easily with a casual squeeze of his hand, but he wasn’t going for instant death. That was actually a little scarier to see, but it gave us all a minute to think up options before something truly tragic happened. Son of Silver hadn’t survived as a supervillain for so long by taking pointless risks, like getting into a toe-to-toe slugmatch with Guardian.

I caught Son of Silver’s eyes and he nodded, grimacing. He gave Cutter a fond smile, and mouthed something I worked out to be, “Let them work it out.”

Oh hell no, I thought. Cutter was good, and so was Will. We couldn’t afford to lose either of them before going up against the Titans, no matter how tough things were between them. All it would take was one false move by either of them, and we could have blood on the mountain again. Cutter shouldn’t have said what she did, but she was a supervillain with a nasty reputation for exceptional cruelty. We should have expected her to say something to try to rattle Will’s cage. I remembered Tobias’ legends of the gods and didn’t think much of our chances if we were to petition them for power after one of our team leaders had either died or killed the other.

“Stop it!” I shouted. “Guardian!”

“Guardian!” Layla cried, her higher voice seeming to carry on the wind better. “Will, please! She’s not worth it! It the Titans’ fault they were hurt. That’s who we’re going after! Please!”

Something in Layla’s voice carried the anguish from Tragedy’s after the fight in Times Square, and that combined with the fact it was Layla’s voice seemed to bring Will back to his senses.

Silver took careful aim the next time Cutter teleported by and managed to pass two bullets right next to her feet as Guardian paused, making her jump and miss her next teleport. She flickered back to his side as Guardian backed down, flipping one of her knives into palm and looking far too calm for someone who’d been inches away from death seconds before. Silver rapidly signed something to her, his metallic hands flashing in the sun, and she nodded reluctantly.

Layla took Will’s hand briefly, and he shivered briefly from head to toe, as if physically shaking off the anger that had taken hold of him. That had been building for days since the curse had begun, and I couldn’t even be surprised that it had broken out of him like this.

It didn’t make it any less scary, but I understood. I caught Layla’s eyes and she nodded at me. I stepped forward to act as our spokesman this time.

“How about you can the monologues and quips until the planet isn’t under threat of death? That too much to ask for?” I asked. I certainly wasn’t going to mention superhero-baiting, and from the look Silver had just given Cutter, she wasn’t going to mention it either. I think maybe he’d gotten through to her that there was a time and a place for personalized death-threats to very angry superheroes, and now was not one of them.

“Probably. You knew what we were when you called us,” Cutter said.

“The scorpion better not sting the frog while we’re crossing the river this time,” Mercy said, raising her hand so her finger blades glinted in the sun.

Cutter glared at her with unconcealed loathing. “How about we get this done so I don’t have to look at your face unless I’m about to plant a dagger in your brain?” Behind her, Son of Silver made an ostentatious showing of running his hand over the grip of one of his guns.

There was a saccharine-sweet smile in Mercy’s voice when she answered. “The feeling’s mutual.”

There were few times I envied Monica’s early supervillain training in Disturbing Quips and Glances. Looking at Cutter’s face as she struggled to keep composure from that comment, and seeing how that kept Will from saying something that might have re-ignited their fight, was one of them.

--

It was amazing how impending doom could be summed up in a few sentences, and a little more amazing how easily the Crew was willing to go with us. Then again, it looked like Skybolt and particularly Bloodtalon would commit mutiny if they didn’t get a chance to fight. The idea of gaining access to hundreds of powers was too big of a lure to resist.

Or, as Cutter put it succinctly, “That’s too crazy for you to lie about.”

That and I was dead-certain she would have unleashed the Crew on us in a heartbeat if she thought we were lying. The Bureau had gotten us a plane to travel to the location, because neither the Crew nor the Champions and Redeemers trusted each other enough to get to the place Tobias had said we needed to go under their own steam.

“All for one and one for all,” Ethan had said softly, once Cutter was on board.

“You actually say that?” Viper muttered, sounding appalled.

It was, perhaps, the most awkward trip I had ever taken in anyone’s company, up to and including a high school road trip with my friends when Zack had gotten sugar high on a suicide of fifteen different energy drinks.

And the aura of tension around all of us dissolved when we got to the base of the mountain deep in the Alps. The Peaks of the Gods.

The mountains soared above us, their tops lost in shadows illuminated by a hundred different colors of lightning – all the world’s powers, just floating up there. Skybolt was practically vibrating with repressed energy.

“So, what now?” Saurian Lord asked. “Call? Yell? Smoke signal?”

“Climb, I think,” I said uncertainly.

“’Think’ Phoenix? Did it hurt?” Viper asked.

“What are you, twelve?” Flamewing asked scathingly.

*STOP*

It was like having a trio of gongs being run inside my head. There was a chorus of voices, incomprehensible except for the single word. When my head stopped ringing, I picked myself off my hands and knees, driven there by the intensity of the voices. Looking around, I hadn’t been the only one. Nearly all of the others were was picking themselves out of the dirt. Skybolt was looking glassy-eyed, Nightsteed was visibly shaking, and Bloodtalon had her teeth bared as if in anticipation of a fight.

The voices came again, a little less overwhelming this time.

*Why are you here?*

Even though no one lost their balance this time, the words still rocked us – it was like getting trapped in a mental windstorm. I couldn’t even speak.

“T-titans,” Layla managed, finding her voice. She’d called plants to brace her body against their power, pulling from strength outside herself.

*Yes. Behold!*

Images flashed in the sky, showing us the starry void. And floating in it, a dying world, hurling through space towards our own. Figures walked on the surface – tall, enormous, primally formed out of stone or lava or ice. More or less human-shaped, but their eyes glowed with Power. I saw them casually obliterate mountains as they passed, drain seas dry, create deserts with their breath--

And we were supposed to fight them. My mouth went dry with fear. What the hell did we think we were doing? We weren’t anywhere near this level of play.

*Our ancient enemies. Our opposites. We create, preserve, they destroy and corrupt. There is enough power here to defeat them, but our home would be forfeit as the battleground.*

“So we take the fight to them!” Bloodtalon shouted, her eyes red with battle madness.

*Yes. All the powers of the world will be given to you to stop them from destroying this place.*

“Can they be killed?” Flamewing asked, his face pale as milk.

*Can a mountain be killed? Can a river?*

“Can we, with all that power?” I asked, my voice nearly cracking with strain.

The voices chuckled and our bones shook. Maybe these beings weren’t gods, but they couldn’t be far from them. They were strong enough to crush us absolutely, longer-lived than anyone I’d ever heard of, and able to sense so much of the world at once… I didn’t have the vocabulary to call them anything else. No wonder my ancestors had worshipped them.

*All things are possible. But why seek to kill them? Such things always exist as long as time spins.*

“Dead enemies can’t bother you anymore,” Cutter said, speaking for Son of Silver.

*You will choose what to do when the time is right.*

“I don’t need this fortune-cookie bullshit,” Viper muttered, somehow managing to crack wise when we were talking with gods. I obscurely admired the fact that his devotion to backtalk had managed to overcome his fear.

“Let us fight for you. Please,” I asked, very mindful of Tobias’ story. I didn’t want to find out what they’d consider an appropriately punitive curse this time around.

*So, centuries of learning patience have finally changed you, Battle’s son.*

I kept my mouth shut and just nodded.

“I’m afraid,” Mercy whispered. “I’m so, so afraid.”

*Why do you fear?*

She was shaking visibly now. “Will we die? Phoenix nearly burned up channeling nine people, and that wasn’t for very long.”

*Do you fear death?*

Tears welled up in Mercy’s eyes, in Layla’s, in Quint’s and Brittany’s, Viper’s and Ash’s and Ethan’s, and Will’s and mine.

“Yes,” Will said, voice raw with honesty.

“No,” Cutter said at the same time, tossing her head. But most of the Crew stood strong, Zack and Magenta, Meduka and Bruin too. People either too crazed, too confident, or too resigned to worry about death. Half of us shaken, half ready. The voices cried out, and everyone winced.

*You are ready. You are our Chosen. Protect this world from those who would destroy it.*

Lightning crashed down from the heights, up from the ground, blew in from the wind, surrounded us in a blinding storm, filling us up. Like a balloon about to explode, we were filled with power until we were nearly ready to burst.

I could see in my mind’s eye my family letting their powers go, letting them join into the stream filling us. Our classmates and friends, everyone who was left with power was yielding theirs up, giving them to the people who were supposed to save the world. With their power came their knowledge, their control, everything we would need to use what we were being given. At the last, I saw my mother’s face, heard her voice, the echo of it quietly urging the remaining powers of the world to stand together and help us.

Like a volcano erupting in reverse, like the mass healing after the academy attack but on a colossal, global scale, the fire poured into me, and alongside it cold and lightning and the powers of heart and mind. The elemental forces were mine to command, nature’s fury my own.

I looked at my friends and enemies and saw them taking control of what was given to them, the world’s forces now theirs. Will had all the physical might of the people, while Skybolt, Rose Queen, and Viscosity commanded sky, land, and sea between them. Bruin, Nightsteed, and Violet Cavy commanded the animal kingdom, while Viper held all the venoms of the world. Flamewing’s wings spread like the mythical giant roc’s, while Bloodtalon seethed with battle madness of ages on the wings of the Furies. Brilliance shone like the sun, like Apollo, while Meduka crackled with all the righteous wrath of all the cursed. All of invention and creation oozed out of Saurian Lord, while Voidhammer held the unseen forces of the world at her command. Mercy was like a statue of obsidian, holding all the world’s pain within her. Son of Silver’s skin flowed with a hundred different metals, the molten core of the planet in his very flesh, while Cutter flickered, holding onto the spaces between.

With the power came knowledge. All I had to do what cast my mind out towards were the Titans were hurling towards us and I could feel their anger. And their treachery. Being at the foothills of the gods didn’t matter anymore. Our purpose was elsewhere.

“They’re coming,” I warned. “Soon. We have to act soon.”

“We take the fight to them,” Cutter growled, her voice distorted by flickering through all the between-spaces.

“They won’t stay and slug it out. We have to be smart,” Guardian warned. I looked sideways at him and saw a glimmer of something in his eyes. Did he share mental powers too, now? Or had he seen something in the images of the sky I hadn’t?

“They have power too. This won’t be easy,” Meduka said. “They want Earth badly.”

“We have to stop them before they get here,” Rose Queen cried. “They’ll tear this place apart.”

“They’re clever. If we leave, they can try to slip someone in behind us. We can’t cover everywhere at once,” Saurian Lord said. “Too big a target.”

“Move the target,” Cutter said. Brilliance blinked at her. “If I know where it is, I can hit things blindfolded. Conceal the Earth somehow, or even blind them, and they can still strike at it. One hit, and unless someone wants to make a sacrifice play, it’s over.”

“Move the target… move the Earth,” Voidhammer said, her voice distant. “Yes, I can do that.”

I was seething with the power of elemental fire and cold and lightning, my mind burning with emotion and the knowledge that I could use in ways my mother had never dreamed, and I still nearly gaped at the audacity of her statement.

“Some of us stay behind. Protect it. Just in case,” Viscosity said. He pointed to Rose Queen, Skybolt, Violet Cavy, Bruin, and Nightsteed. “Land, sky, all the creatures of the world, and the sea,” he pointed to himself, now backed with the power of the ocean. “Add Voidhammer, and we can make Earth an impossible target for anyone who tries to attack it from behind. On home ground they can’t defeat us, and they won’t be able to get many past the rest of you once you bring the fight to them.”

I smiled; that was pure Ethan right there. Under the burden of all that power, he was still playing Champion Debate to win.

“Yes,” Guardian said. “Yes.” He stood and pointed at them, spine straight, clearly forming a plan, “Get ready; we don’t have much time.”

The chosen defenders closed their eyes, testing their new strength, finding the weak places they’d need to reinforce, seeing how they’d need to martial their powers to protect the world against a sneak attack. Plants grew and encased Rose Queen, susurrating around her like they were whispering their secrets. Voidhammer tapped her on the shoulder and flicked her eyes to the north.

“We start at the top,” she said. “And work our way down.” Skybolt laughed at that, the crazed look in his eyes now matching the power crackling around him.

Rose Queen nodded, letting the plants fall from her. “Guardian,” she said quietly, and reached out to him, breaking his concentration. She let her hand trail down his arm to the ring of stitching around his gauntlet, a mock-ring for a married hero. Layla leaned in and whispered something to him, and he pressed her hand in return, smiling solemnly.

Viscosity kept his eyes closed, hands twined together, concentrating on his powers, his plan, Nightsteed and Voidhammer joining him. Skybolt stood in the middle, glowing eyes staring at the sky as the clouds roiled above us. Violet Cavy and Brilliance took a minute to do the most elaborate series of fist bumps I’d ever seen; the more complicated the ritual, the more serious they were about it. They broke apart simultaneously, Violet Cavy stepping back into Voidhammer’s group, Rose Queen joining her, and then all of them were gone, flung into the sky with astonishing speed, heading north to prepare their defense of the Earth.

Guardian stared after them for only a second, his expression unreadable, before turning to me.

“Phoenix, can you see them?”

I nodded distantly as I cast my mind out, one or more of the mental powers within me feeding off themselves synergistically, showing us what we needed to know. I wasn’t quite directing it consciously, but that didn’t matter, not now. “They aren’t hiding. They want to see us coming. They won’t stop.”

“Neither will we,” Mercy said, her power crackling and snapping around her like lightning.

“You can get us there?” Guardian asked, turning to Cutter.

She smiled like a shark and I wondered if she was contemplating what our insides would look like.

“With my new range? Not a problem,” she said, tossing her head. Her entire body seemed to shudder, like a horror movie where they’d pulled out frames of the film to give someone freakish movement.

“Then let’s do this.” Saurian Lord stood and grinned just a few shades less psychotic than Cutter before turning to me. “You see them, Phoenix? Other than being tricky bastards, anything special about them?”

“Other than the fact they’re tough enough to break a planet?”

“Anything fancy about them?” Saurian Lord insisted, and twisted one hand in a complicated gesture, the hidden tech in his costume lighting up at his command. As a supervillain, Saurian Lord presented himself as a primitively-dressed shaman commanding prehistoric animals, when in fact he was a nanobot manipulator and cyborg expert, a technopath on a very fine scale. He used what he had to handle huge robots with the kind of skill you just couldn’t get from a simple remote. But now he had all the power of every technopath on the planet, from Allie and the others who’d rebelled against the academy to Royal Pain herself, all turned up to eleven.

I saw what he meant, and looked again. Powerful, undoubtedly. Tricky, definitely. Smart, of course. And arrogant too, but since they’d smashed their way through other worlds with barely any resistance, I could see why they’d be. But not sophisticated, not at all. The Titans were raw power barely constrained by form.

“Nothing,” I said. Saurian Lord bared his teeth in a snarl of triumph.

“We’re gonna need some things,” he said. “Pressure capsule to ride in, ‘cause as good as Cutter is, we’re not getting to the Titans in one teleport without sucking vacuum.”

She conceded that with a nod. With a gesture, tech materials began to flow together at Saurian Lord’s direction, either stolen from what was already here or wrenched from the raw materials of the Earth, I couldn’t tell.

“Don’t need to bother using the existing space shuttles; not tough enough or versatile enough for what we’re gonna do. I want all my toys custom.” He was assembling mechas big enough to rival small buildings alongside the wedge-shaped vessel that would keep us breathing on the way to meet our fight. The mechas were like huge velociraptors, fast and deadly from nearly any angle, as I had plenty of reason to know; I’d seen his smaller creations in action before.

As Saurian Lord worked, Silver drew one of his guns, reversed it, wagged it at him, and nodded up at the sky.

“I think I can arrange an upgrade,” Saurian Lord said, and gestured again. Pieces of gold-colored metal assembled before him, coalescing into oversized handguns that Son of Silver handled with reverence. As he examined his weapons, Cutter’s hands flickering through some message to him, and he smiled reassuringly.

“Should even be able to handle Titans,” Saurian Lord said, for reasons of his own not dropping the patently fake Australian accent he affected as part of his persona. The cheery way of talking somehow made him seem just that much more sinister as Silver checked out the weapons with efficient professionalism.

Enough to handle Titans, I thought blandly. Enough to hurt Guardian, you mean.

Guardian himself wasn’t oblivious to the byplay, and I didn’t need my new mental powers to know what he was thinking.

The only thing that worried us was whether they’d try to kill us before or after the battle.

Chapter Text

Cutter pressed against the window of the vessel Saurian Lord had made, her eyes seeking some distant glimmer in the darkness of the starry deep, some first view of our enemies. We weren’t going to be subtle coming in; not with Cutter toting huge mechas behind us with her powers and all of us glowing with enough power to kick-start a sun. But subtlety hadn’t really ever been our strong point.

I looked behind us once as Cutter began to teleport us the huge distances to reach the Titans. Earth was moving behind us. Not just from Cutter’s teleporting, but from Voidhammer. There, somewhere above the North Pole, Voidhammer was hovering, cradling the Earth’s gravitational pull from the Sun and moving it further along its orbit, putting it right out of position for anyone who’d thought to try to stab us in the back. Perversely, I almost wish they’d try; I wanted them to understand that no one messed with our planet. According to Will, Layla had been trying to save the world since the first grade. And that was a lot of wrath stored up.

Meduka hissed, a strange, sibilant chorus, and I turned back. A visible shiver ran down his back as he pointed to a point in the star-strewn void.

“You can feel them?” I asked.

The snakes bared their fangs as Meduka answered. “All those curses I have? They’re targeted for the Titans; I know when they’re getting close.”

I looked at him sideways, and Mercy caught my eye.

“Meduka, what do you have?” she asked softly.

“All of the curses,” he said shortly. “All that hate.” Another shudder shook him. “Someone had to have it. Easier for me than any of you, I guess. And the… gods… switched their targets. From people on Earth to…” Meduka waved out the window.

I looked at Meduka, really looked at him, like my mom would have, and could see the red-black auras of hatred and fear overlapping his own, clinging to him like parasites, like living things. Nausea rose briefly in my stomach and I throttled it down. I couldn’t have handled that. Christ, it would have been like being back in the academy again, with mental acid eating away at everything that made me me, and all of it powerful and immediate and pulling at my heart like an anchor. I didn’t know how he was still standing.

Meduka turned to look me square in the eyes, yellow-green slit-pupiled eyes meeting mine. “You may think you had the lock on brooding, Phoenix, but I think I got you beat. What I’m carrying isn’t anything worse than what I ever thought about myself.”

Cursed and alone, too afraid to touch for years until taken into the academy… yeah.

“Besides, the Titans don’t know much about losing. They’ve been swanning around out there for what, thousands of years without any kind of real resistance? Give them a face full of what I got and it’ll knock them off their high horse.”

“Don’t let Nightsteed hear you say that,” Mercy said with a little smile.

“We’re going to miss him,” Guardian said unexpectedly, breaking up our solemn moment. “We lost most of our mobility with everyone who stayed behind.”

Will looked remote, untouchable, and I wondered if leaving Layla behind had been a good idea. As Guardian, Will was used to power, but he’d just had vulnerability throw in his face when his parents had gotten hurt. And now he was pumped up with the strength of hundreds of the strongest on the planet and had a grudge against the Titans rivaling anything Cutter had against us.

I shunted that thought aside for the moment to concentrate on Guardian’s words. With Viscosity and Violet Cavy gone, we’d lost the two people that had been instrumental in our last big win against the academy. Their small size and clever tactics had saved us time and again. Rose Queen’s powers were the most versatile on our team, and we’d lost them too, and with them any real ability for Guardian to pick up more than a couple people at a time. Strong as he was, he only had two arms. Without Nightsteed, Bruin, or Voidhammer, Mercy and Meduka just had their own two feet. Cutter was the only one left to control the movement on the battlefield.

I looked over at her, eyes wide as she concentrated on a distant, glimmering point, the world blinking around us as she shifted us immense distances in an instant. Beside her, Son of Silver was… I looked again to make sure I was seeing this right. He was inscribing marks on his own arm, and then plunging fingers below his own skin to grasp what he’d drawn. I watched in sickened fascination as he pulled another knife from the metallic substance of his own body and laid it down next to the others he’d clearly been making for her. They swirled with the same colors of all the metal making up Silver’s body, some impossible alloy that was probably the strongest our planet had ever seen. Silver laid down the last knife and leaned close to Cutter to drop a kiss on her shoulder before slipping the knives into the concealed sheaths she wore. Nothing but the best for the woman he loved, apparently. The affection I’d seen them display at the academy apparently hadn’t diminished in the six months since its downfall.

Silver caught me looking and slowly, deliberately, picked up the golden guns Saurian Lord had made for him. He put them into his shoulder holsters and pointed one finger at me like a gun.

Pow, he mouthed, and turned back to the viewing portal.

“He’s going to kill you both,” Meduka said flatly, looking over at me and Guardian.

“I know,” Guardian said tightly. “I know.” The scary thing was, I think, deep down, Will wanted him to try.

“We have bigger problems than Silver trying to go for a hat trick,” I said sharply.

“After that, then,” Guardian said, and looked up as the distant glimmer began to grow into a real target.

The Titans’ world was cracked, riven, molten lava running across the landscape like rivers, water erupting like a volcano, stones churning like the tide as lightning, rain, and ice-edged sleet seemed to whip everything into a frenzy. Through the chaos I could see the vaguely humanoid forms of the Titans waiting for us, impossibly tall. And impatient. One of them, a living pile of granite, like a mountain crag given form, began to hurl stones at us, turning into flaming meteorites as they left the atmosphere.

“Flamewing!” Mercy called, holding her hand up to Guardian and me. Not yet, her expression said.

“On it! Saurian Lord, gimme some air on the outside!”

Saurian Lord spread his hands, and out of the viewing portal I could see a blue glow envelop us. Flamewing opened the top hatch to the airlock and looked down expectantly. Saurian Lord gave him the thumbs-up, and Flamewing closed the hatch behind him and fearlessly opened the door to the outside. A flick of sparks and his wings ignited, huge swaths of white-hot flame that he spread as our shield, deflecting, destroying, or absorbing the meteorites as they hurled towards us.

Flamewing was practically dancing in the air, covering our approach, but even he couldn’t counter everything being thrown at us. A half-dozen huge balls of rock and fire flew by him, missing us cleanly, and sped along our backtrail at an astonishing rate. Heading towards Earth. I knew, without even needing to feel the heat of hatred coming off of them, that those weren’t just inert rock, but Titans sent to try to take our planet from us while we faced the visible threats here.

“Rose Queen and the others will be ready,” Guardian said, jaw set, and faced resolutely forward.

The Titans’ laughter could be heard even as we were dodging rocks and weather on our way down to the surface. Cutter had to teleport shorter and shorter distances, Flamewing desperately clinging to the outside of the vessel, constrained to not run into anything in the constantly-changing landscape. The roiling sky parted enough to show images, as we’d been shown on Earth. But these showed the Titans looming over our world, shaking apart its cities, killing millions of people and leaving the rest to huddle fearful obedience or die, forced to worship and praise their captors and masters, cowering before their wrath. The world would be reduced to Stone Age conditions under the whim of fierce and uncaring tyrants.

“No fucking style,” Cutter said, and spat to the side in disgust. Will smiled grimly, for once in agreement with her.

“Get us down there. Let’s show them what we think of their plan.”

As bad as I’d thought the gods on Earth had been, they had nothing on their enemies, not if Cutter and Guardian had agreed on something willingly. Suddenly the power we’d been given no longer seemed like overkill. As we landed, Saurian Lord’s pressure vessel folding down around us, his mechas shielding us from the worst of the wild weather while Brilliance lit up the area around us to let us see what we were dealing with. And I realized, looking up at the Titans even from so far away, that the power we had was not overkill. It might not even be up to the task. The gods had been right when they’d compared the question about killing them to killing a river.

The ground rolled underneath us like an earthquake, rain and sleet pounding against our heads, lightning flashing all around, illuminating the approaching Titans’ progress in eerie lurches and starts. I mentally named each one of them as they were revealed, anything to keep the sudden fear from overwhelming me. The tall crag, the boulder-thrower, was Stone, a mountain of a Titan, stomped towards us with a booming laugh that sounded like an avalanche, hills rising and falling in his wake. Another made of sheets of flame, Fire, erupted from the burning ground and flew straight towards us, bright enough to dim Flamewing and Brilliance together.

A swirling mass of rain and electricity, Storm, circled overhead, her laugh howling like a tornado, while razor-edged Ice leapt like a hunting cat across the ever-changing terrain, frost spreading from every touch.

In my mind, I could suddenly feel the press of the experience of all the heroes whose power I bore, each urging me to a different course of action – run, stay, attack, everyone shouting something different. In the back of my mind, I knew we’d hoped to lure them into the outer ranges of me, Cutter, and Silver, to weaken them before the others took their turn, but not now. Not like this.

The Titans were owning the terrain, the ground shaking and even gaping into chasms beneath our feet, rocks and lightning bolts falling from the sky, keeping us dodging and hauling each other out of trouble instead of being able to fight. Guardian was everywhere, but it was all he could do to keep us from being obliterated by boulders the size of buildings or being swallowed up by sudden canyons. In minutes we were going to be swarmed and overwhelmed, buried and dead with barely a chance to be able to fight back. We’d divided our strength in an attempt to cover every possibility, and now we were going to die from our arrogance.

“Don’t move,” Meduka gasped out, managing to get off his knees, finding a single stable patch of ground in the heaving maelstrom.

“That’s not the problem,” Mercy said, narrowly missing being crushed by a boulder. “We’re pinned down.” Bloodtalon and Flamewing were circling around each other, trying to avoid the flying missiles, while even Cutter couldn’t teleport from all the debris in the air in an ever-changing landscape. Guardian was just above us, smashing the worst of it away from us, but he didn’t dare leave, and everyone else was just scrambling to find purchase to stand somewhere, anywhere. Even Saurian Lord’s mechas were just struggling to stay upright.

“Get them closer!” Meduka demanded, hauling himself upright and bracing himself. I caught something in his voice, and my mind reached out to him. I could see the red-black of the curses around him intensifying, like attack dogs straining to be let off the leash.

He didn’t even need to ask; the Titans were closing in, their crude faces split into ugly grins as they loomed closer. They were tall as skyscrapers, their elemental flesh absorbing stray attacks from the others without damage or even a visible mark. My heart sank, fear chilling me, and I prepared to unleash what I could, knowing the second I stopped to aim I was going to be swallowed by the earth or struck down by the sky, but unwilling to go down quietly.

That was when Meduka moved. He suddenly expanded, grew, muscles, bones and skin cracking and snapping as he towered over us, now able to look the Titans in the eye. His snake hair hissed in eerie chorus, sounding like erupting steam geysers as they struck at the foes surrounding us. Fangs met flesh of fire, water, stone, and ice and Meduka screamed as the pent-up curse energy finally found a home.

Time seemed to stop, light failed for a moment, and then everything came back, Meduka down on the ground, shrunk back to his normal size. But now the Titans were twenty feet tall, not two hundred, and the ground was steady and even underneath our feet. Everyone got fierce grins on their faces; Meduka had leveled the playing field, literally. We’d been given a chance.

The Titans roared, their powers chained, but still formidable. And if Meduka had just robbed them of some of their physical might, it hadn’t diminished everything about them.

“We are not your only enemies,” Fire roared, in a crackling, hollow voice. “Our brothers even now are readying Earth for the death of their heroes.”

From the cruel humor on their faces, I knew they expected us to be shocked, horrified, to let our guards down and try to flee to save our world. They didn’t expect what happened, for Cutter and the rest of the Crew to let out smug, full-throated laughs, Mercy and Flamewing joining. They were villains or ex-villains, they had the experience at doing the evil laughs, and the blows the Titans had just taken had given them reason to respect that kind of confidence.

But Fire narrowed his eyes and extended a hand to the sky, and the heavens were painted with pictures of the cool, blue planet we all called home. He’d regained some of his smugness as the picture came into view, but it rapidly faded as the scene shifted, moving down the Earth’s surface. Six of the smaller Titans were plunging through the atmosphere, all of them looking chipped, eroded, and much worse for the wear. I smiled; Voidhammer moving the Earth had worked. The Titans had had to search for their target, and had wasted valuable time and energy doing so.

Six streaks of light were headed to the ground, just off shore somewhere, when the ocean seemed to move, opening to receive them. I bared my teeth savagely as I saw Viscosity suck them down to the cold depths of the waves, where the pressure was incredible and almost nothing could survive. The Titans could, but that cooled their tempers considerably, and when they’d dragged themselves onto the shore, far worse for the wear, their eyes widened when they were confronted with a nearly impenetrable wall of greenery. And between the trees and vines, you could see the glowing eyes and hear the growls and cries of hundreds of animals. Somewhere in there, Violet Cavy, Bruin, and Nightsteed were waiting. Above the trees, the sky was dark with clouds, lightning flickered and struck the shore, singeing the Titans with Skybolt’s anger.

The Titans looked up. Hauled themselves upright, hands glowing with power. Their smiles were gone.

We looked back down from the cloud-scene at Fire, Ice, Stone, and Storm, and I saw the brief flit of worry cross their faces.

I joined Cutter in smiling as the Titans’ expressions darkened with rage. And then reached for all the power I had to stop them.

The Titans moved faster than anything that large had a right to. Storm and Fire leapt for us, drawing fire from Silver and Cutter, making Bloodtalon fly out of their way to avoid getting scorched. Meduka was still down, gasping in air as his body shook off the effect of burning through all that energy. Viper knelt down next to him, his spear pointing outward.

“Get up you lazy ass!” he shouted. He dropped his hand to Meduka’s head, and any objections I might have had about Meduka’s health stopped when I saw no tell-tale dimming of his green fire. I was strong enough now that I didn’t have to touch him to know he was all right; better than that actually, as Meduka jerked upright, his snake-hair hissing, their fangs smoky with the poison Viper had just imbued them.

Guardian dove for Ice as he came screaming in, freezing cold running before him. I bared my teeth fiercely, knowing I held Winter Court’s power in me and the cold that had been my bane since I’d powered up was now just another weapon in my arsenal. The cold rushed over those of us ground-bound and was stopped by the shield of twined fire and ice I threw up around us. And it was the newness of that, of seeing our power in action for the first time, that distracted us from Stone. His first punch showed they were never to be underestimated, even when wounded.

He came in fast, faster than anything that big and heavy should, barreling straight through my shield, and I was the lucky person who caught the brunt of it. I actually felt my body break and heal around his fist, the pain of it stealing both breath and reason before Mercy’s power came to my rescue.

Saurian Lord’s mechas pounced on Stone, their claws gouging his stony skin, while Brilliance managed to divert the spears of lightning Storm was trying to rain down on us. That distracted him from me long enough for the rest of us to get out of his way and back into the fight.

Viper was, according to Mercy, something of a coward, preferring the odds well in his favor before attacking. But given a portion of the world’s superpowers, team him up with the one person who could take his powers without harm and he’d found his courage without prompting. His spear smoked with whatever lethal poisons he’d coated it with, the same as Meduka’s snakes, and he moved with the sinuous speed of his namesake as Meduka rolled and ducked and wove like a boxer. They dodged the Titans’ strikes as Ice, Stone, Fire, and Storm attacked us in waves, and lunged at them in return as they went for the more tempting targets of Guardian and Son of Silver. Viper and Meduka flooded their systems with poison; with every hit they got slower, their aim worse, their strikes less sure.

And we needed that desperately. I was certain that was what was keeping us alive, because every time they did hit, even Mercy gasped. The pain and damage from those strikes nearly floored me every time they hit one of us, and Mercy and I were busy keeping the others together, her sucking away their pain, me keeping their bodies whole, not needing to touch them now with the power I held. I had us sheltered in a shield of fire and ice and lightning, but Mercy and I had lost our ability to fight if we wanted to keep everyone else in the game.

Bloodtalon was reveling in the fight, shining like steel as she drove Ice to madness, able to hit him while Guardian was keeping him occupied. She ignored the slashes he tried to make to her in return, and when Guardian realized what she’d done, he gave Ice an opening he couldn’t refuse. Ice charged recklessly after him and made Fire scream when Bloodtalon lured him into Ice’s path, forcing them to collide. The steam momentarily blinded them, and when Brilliance set off a flare, backlighting them perfectly, Silver and Cutter shot and threw together. Their hits drew out screams of pain, and Mercy showed none of her namesake as she left off pain-channeling for a moment to give them a jolt of pure agony. Ice and Fire collapsed behind their shrouds of steam as Flamewing dove down, razor-edged wings of flame meeting them to keep them busy.

Guardian flew to meet Stone as he pounded in for another charge and out of the corner of my eye I saw something metallic. Son of Silver had his guns pointed in Guardian’s direction, his aim unwavering, his face expressionless. I didn’t have time to shout a warning when Silver fired, his bullets missing Guardian cleanly and impacting Stone between the eyes. They cracked his hide, making a weak point, and Guardian struck unerringly, blasting him apart with a roar that made our ears ring. Stone fell, shaking the ground beneath us, parts of him trying to rise, clawing at the ground.

Storm howled into our front ranks, hard to hit and even harder to hurt. She towered over us and a wall of water traveled in her wake, trying to drown us. Cutter flashed through her path, unceremoniously sweeping us up in her teleports and depositing us on higher ground. She tossed Mercy a psychotic grin as she let another dagger fly at Storm. Pieces of Stone lurched upright, no more than mobile boulders, but no less deadly for that. Cutter cursed when she realized the boulders were rolling uphill to get to them, and left off tormenting Storm to deal with the more immediate threat.

But there were too many of them, and Saurian Lord shouted at us to, “Stop with the Red Cross tour you two and help us not get squashed into jelly!”

I was in the middle of healing Bloodtalon’s broken wing and Flamewing’s busted arm before one of the Titans could smash them to the ground again, and to turn and start flaming rocks would be to leave them both defenseless. It was only Mercy’s power that was keeping them functional through their pain until I was done. It was either lose both of them, or lose the rest of us. My heart hammered in my throat, as I looked at the surrounding plateau, feeling the vibrations of the approaching Stone-boulders through my feet. Cutter’s eyes flicked from one place to the next, trying to find a way out, and I saw her lips pressed together when she didn’t find one. I didn’t have enough time to put another shield up, not and keep Bloodtalon and Flamewing from falling.

Shit.

With a shout, Guardian dove down out of the swirling maelstrom of the sky, costume scorched and soaking wet. The Stone-boulders froze at Guardian’s appearance, which was more than enough for him. Guardian scooped up the huge things and hurled some of them into the sky, right into Storm, and others into the steam-laden battleground that held Fire and Ice. The boulders screamed as they went flying, the last one actually cursing as Guardian plucked it from running over us and sent it packing into our enemies.

Storm flew high again and stirred the clouds into a frenzy at our takedown of her fellow Titans. Seeing Brilliance illuminating the battle, she ignored Guardian’s danger and focused her power on him. She rained lightning down on him, concentrating on a single point, trying to destroy our beacon and leave us blind. In a second, when I saw Zack’s grin and heard Saurian Lord’s shout of triumph, I knew she’d made a critical error. Those two had been waiting, holding back for just this moment. The Titans were like gods, but they were also old, and hadn’t been on Earth for a long time. They’d missed the Industrial Revolution. They’d missed the rise of the technopaths. The same reason Royal Pain had become a supervillain was about to bite them.

The Titans had had no idea what Brilliance could do; he’d gotten power from his family, electricity manipulators all, but not like Storm, and not like Skybolt. The Cramers worked on a very fine level. Zack could take that power, absorb it all, and turn and use it on the only other person here who could appreciate it. I could see what he was about to do, and joined in Storm’s strike, giving Brilliance all the power he could use.

Saurian Lord howled with laughter as Brilliance channeled the electrical fury into his oversized mechas, giving them enough speed and strength temporarily to do what Guardian could do. Enough to handle Titans. They leapt impossible distances and clawed into Storm, dragging her down, holding her still, bringing her in contact with the ground. She shrieked as she struggled, arching up from the earth like it burned her. And something suddenly fell into place, and the collective experience of the ones sharing their power with us spoke up.

“Bind them,” Mercy shouted. “Bind them so they cause no more pain!”

The gods had been right, the Titans couldn’t die, but we could hold them helpless. Hundreds of voices, a whisper in our heads that had been directing the powers in our blood, read and saw the way.

“Air to Earth, Fire to Water,” Flamewing shouted, and struggled up out of the steam, Ice caught and melting between his wings. He was hauling him towards the fiery pit that bubbled behind him, and Ice shrieked as his substance began to sublimate in the fierce heat. The only reason he didn’t struggle harder to shatter Flamewing’s grasp was Meduka and Viper’s presence, their poison ready to taint his body if he tried to escape. Distantly, I remembered Ethan saying how that was his greatest fear too.

Bloodtalon was perhaps the only one crazy enough to face Fire without protection, but she wasn’t alone. Immune to his heat and commanding the power of cold too, it was my responsibility to bind him so no one could hurt him. Silver ran to my side without hesitation as I hemmed Fire in with cold, his weakened form unable to push past both the freezing bulwarks and Silver’s bullets. I knew how much they could hurt even the seemingly indestructible, and Fire was learning that harsh lesson firsthand. We drove him, Bloodtalon feinting from above, step by step, into the freezing lake where Ice had emerged.

The steam sounded like a thousand volcanos had just poured into the Arctic Ocean, but he didn’t emerge again.

Storm was simple; Guardian drove his fist into the ground, opening up a chasm that would swallow her, and Saurian Lord’s mechas threw her in, shoving the crevice closed behind her. Cutter glittered, her silver costume reflecting off of Brilliance’s light as she teleported all over the field, finding the pieces of Stone that Brilliance illuminated for her and teleporting them skyward, putting them in orbit, trapping him in the sky.

Bound. Held harmless. And at a guess it would take a few thousand years for them to pull themselves together.

From an impossibly far distance, I heard Earth cheering.

--

I’d thought slamming into the Titan’s world had been tough. I’d been wrong. Because the minute Cutter had gotten us into the Earth’s atmosphere, I could feel the power starting to pull away from me. It was spinning away one at a time; it felt like being unraveled thread by thread, and there was nothing we could do to stop it. Weaker and smaller with every breath, Cutter and Saurian Lord barely held us together until we touched down, half-broken, freezing, and exhausted.

The mountains above us were no longer rumbling with power, no longer glowing, just three mountain peaks above a valley with all of us scattered around like toys left by a careless child. I struggled to sit up, steeling myself to look at my own body, remembering all too well what had happened last time I’d played host to powers other than my own. I felt light-headed with relief when I saw myself looking almost normal, albeit feeling exhausted, and not the burnt-out wreck I’d been last time.

Layla was there, looking just as tired at the rest of us, and half-crawled over to Will and held him until he’d woken up to hold her back. She was covered with bits of shredded vegetation and grass stains, her skin scratched and abraded by thorns. The others were in no better shape, Magenta, Michael, and Quint looking thin and wasted, Ethan seeming a little melted; Brittany heavily sat into the ground, leaning against Quint’s shoulder, and even Skybolt perfectly still in his fatigue.

Somehow, Zack managed to find his tongue first.

“Dudes… we won.”

Magenta giggled at that, sounding a little loopy, and Cutter downright cackled at Zack’s tone, her silver costume throwing sparks of light all over the place as she laughed.

Son of Silver pulled Cutter to her feet with one hand, the other still wrapped around his gun. I tracked the deadly thing, foreboding chilling me even more, but wasn’t sure what I was going to do if he decided to take advantage of how weak we all were. I didn’t think I could power up right now, and the bruises and cuts on my skin let me know that my indestructibility hadn’t come back yet either. Even if I could throw myself in front of a bullet, I might not survive it.

Then Will got up.

We all might have been exhausted, at the bare ebb of our powers, but Will had always been the strongest of us. Low ebb for him was more than more superbeings had at full strength. Will stepped forward, ready to shield any of us. Son of Silver took his hand off of Cutter and raised his lethal golden guns Saurian Lord had made for him, pointing them straight at Will’s chest. Silver’s metallic body didn’t tremble with fatigue, and it had always been his deadly accuracy and willingness to use it that made him truly dangerous. Cutter carefully braced herself and brushed the hilts of her knives with her hands as Bloodtalon sprang up, teeth bared.

I could see my wounds slowly start to close, and felt my body adjusting to having just the powers I’d been born with, no longer surfeited with hundreds. Voidhammer was getting up too, and I saw Silver flick his eyes to her briefly. Her gravity manipulation was as potentially dangerous as Will’s strength, but she looked a lot less steady on her feet. The rest of the Redeemers and Champions were beginning to arrange themselves behind their leaders even as the rest of the Crew pulled themselves together. There was no time to think; Guardian would never been weaker than he was right now. Son of Silver wouldn’t have an opportunity like this again. If Cutter had recovered enough the crew could be out of our reach before Will’s body hit the ground.

“We saw you!” Layla shouted unexpectedly. She stepped out behind Will and waved him away fearlessly as she faced the Crew. Will was staring at her with wide-eyed astonishment, torn between wanting to pull her back out of danger and the thought of what might happen if he interfered with her plan. Because she had one, and that put her several steps ahead of everyone else right now.

“In the sky. The pictures in the clouds,” Layla continued. “We saw everything. Everyone did. We saw you fighting the Titans. How you worked together to protect each other and imprison them.”

Son of Silver scowled and Cutter spoke up. “What’d you do to yours, Green Peace?”

Unexpectedly, Voidhammer answered. “After the others soaked them, toasted them, and ran them ragged over half of northern Canada with half the animal kingdom on their tails, Rose Queen wrapped them up until they couldn’t move and I threw them into the sun.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Zack give Ethan and Magenta high fives and flash Layla the peace sign.

Cutter blinked as she took in the damage to Layla’s costume and the strange shreds of plants still clinging to her. Blinked again, probably thinking about how even “small” Titans were still unbelievably strong. And Layla had immobilized them.

“Nice,” she said, sounding reluctantly impressed. But she didn’t move her hands away from her knives or Silver waver in his aim. Behind her, the rest of the Crew as rallying themselves to action. With the Champions and the Redeemers teamed up, our chances of taking them down were good, but I didn’t want to think about the consequences or the price. This wasn’t Rushmore, where everyone had needed each other to stay alive. The Crew wouldn’t go cheaply or quietly. If we started a fight now, people would die.

Silver looked almost ready to pull the trigger, the lifelong prudence that had kept him on the Top Ten Most Wanted list for so long warring with having a nearly unattainable goal within his grasp. Killing Guardian wouldn’t just be everlasting infamy, it would show the world that even the strongest could be taken down. Even those with godlike powers.

Right then, we all heard cheering in the far distance. The standoff lost some of its tension as everyone turned to look. At the edge of the meadow where we’d landed was a huge crowd of people all dressed in bright colors. At the front I could see a solid block of red, sparsely interspersed with pale blues, silver, and right in the middle, a single figure in white. Behind them were others in a whole rainbow of shades, but ones I definitely recognized. The Howards, the Pattersons, the Cramers, the Evans, all my friends’ families. And above them all, close together, were two hovering in red, white, and blue. Despite the seriousness, I found myself smiling. While we had been spending hours returning from the Titans’ world and recovering from being drained of all our extra powers, their rightful owners had been energized by their return. The odds had just been shifted substantially in our favor.

Son of Silver gritted his teeth, refirmed his grip on his guns, and let out a silent snarl as he dropped his aim and reholstered his weapons. Cutter moved her hands away from her knives and the Crew started to cluster around her in preparation to teleport. I furtively tried to power up and my vision nearly grayed out. My wounds were closing, but still not fully healed, and clearly my body wasn’t going to spare the energy for fire until I’d stopped bleeding. If the Crew left, I had nothing in my arsenal to stop them, and I might have been in the best shape of everyone here barring Will.

“Hey,” Will called, making Cutter look at him sharply. “You know, for a few hours, you guys were heroes. And everyone saw it.” He waved at the sky, at the pictures that had been seen worldwide of our battle against the Titans. Cutter shot him a glance of pure hatred before taking a deep breath and teleporting her and the Crew away. I was marveling at Will’s perfect, poetic burn, just as much an attack as anything else he could have done.

We didn’t know how much tech Saurian Lord had escaped with, and Silver still had his new guns, but the Crew had besmirched their villainous reputation for all time. They could go one of two ways – be more proactively cruel and violent to prove themselves evil incarnate, or possibly, just maybe, considering playing both sides of the fence. I wouldn’t hold my breath on the second one, considering the reputations they’d worked so hard to establish, but the Crew had never had it so close to what they’d always wanted as when they’d helped us. For a little while, they’d had unlimited power and the admiration of billions of people for saving them. It would be harder to hide now, harder to get work, harder to convince the right people that they still wanted what they always had, power. When you’d just had a taste of ultimate power, well, it was going to be hard to go back to being just a regular supervillain again. And that was as powerful in its own way as a fist to the face.

Maybe that was a better punishment than anything we could have done. They were going to go down in legend as heroes, and that had to stick in their craws. I guess we’d see, one way or the other.

I looked up at the quiescent Peak of Fire and wondered if heroism was the gods’ way of punishing arrogance this time around. I smiled at the thought as Mercy slipped her hand into mine, the barest flicker of her pain channeling taking the edge off my pain as my wounds finally closed and I felt the hint of fire in my veins again. Our own powers were back.

“They tried to kill--” Ash started, wearily surprised, and Guardian cut him off with a sharp shake of his head.

“They did. That’s what they do. And they’re going to pay for that.”

“Guardian?” Mercy asked softly. “When?”

“They just helped save the world, and they can barely stand. We don’t fight them in their homes, and we don’t go after them on their days off. We’re heroes.” He turned to look at Layla, and she kissed him on the cheek. I could see the tired tracks of exhausted tears on Will’s face and turned away. Even weak, Will was stronger than Silver. Strong enough to kill him, and maybe strong enough to handle whatever ammunition he had left. But he was better than Silver. He was good enough to be good even when it cost him. He was good enough to remember being a normal superhero after he’d been a god.

The sounds of the crowd became a roar of, “They’re back!” Everyone was laughing and shouting as loud as they could as the crowd began to run towards us. Will’s parents touched down first, Jetstream still bandaged and bruised in places, but able to hold onto the decidedly unharmed-looking Commander. Will and his dad met in a back-breaking, bone-crunching hug, only breaking apart long enough to bring Jetstream (delicately) into the fold.

I could see the Battles and the Peaces not too far behind them and felt myself smiling, raising a hand to wave at them, indescribably happy to see everyone alive and well. The rest of the Champions were starting to head towards their families as fast as their exhausted bodies would allow, needing the normalcy more than any potential revenge on the Crew. Behind Monica and me, the Redeemers were leaning against each other, propping themselves up primarily around Brittany’s solid strength. Most of them were just as tired, but there were slowly-growing smiles on each of their faces. Even the usually-nervous Quint and dour Meduka were smiling, the latter with his snake hair lying unbound and contentedly quiescent. Maybe none of the heroes that had come here were family, but none of them would forget the Redeemers. What infamy the Crew had garnered and despised, the Redeemers had wanted badly. For once, everyone had seen what they were willing to do, and there was no denying it.

“And we’re home safe,” Mercy said, her hands twining with mine. I squeezed her hand back, feeling only the returning strength that I was used to, just our own powers in our blood, our own minds in our heads. We were just ourselves again, ordinary superheroes.

I saw my mother and Tobias Battle in the lead as the mass of superheroes engulfed us, and Monica and I found enough strength to move towards them, opening to Mom’s relieved, almost painfully hard hug, and Tobias’ more restrained, formal embrace, neither of them clashing as the rest of the Battle clan closed in around us, smiling and talking. Monica and I were folded in their arms, not even needing to talk; they’d seen what we’d been through for themselves. All their hope and power had been carried with them, and we hadn’t let them down.

I looked over Mom’s shoulder as she claimed me briefly for herself, and blinked in surprise. Chronotrypsis was standing at the edge of the crowd, his pale blue robes and hourglass-topped staff immediately recognizable. He smiled at me and tapped the hourglass. His lips moved, and I thought I saw him say, “You all made the best choice.”

I raised an eyebrow at him, not needing to say anything to tell him, “I damn well hope so.”

Chronotrypsis gave me a very tiny smile and vanished into a fold of space and time. I turned my attention back to my family, not wanting to have to worry about what any of the fallout might be for just a minute. We’d won. We were home. And we’d survived. Somehow I was sure this was going to go down as legend.