Grue blanketed the back doors of the ambulance in darkness to mute the noise as he cracked it open to cover the outside as well.  Noiselessly, the four of us backed out of the ambulance.

Four…? The driver, Grue, Skitter… *scrolls back* Oh, there was a woman in the front passenger seat. I completely missed that, focusing too much on the dialogue surrounding that bit of narration.

Grue flooded the block with darkness, and I scattered my bugs out from the surrounding area and the compartments in the ambulance’s interior to follow in the wake of the darkness, spacing them out to cover the ground and the other objects around us, giving myself a swarm-sense of my surroundings.

I know I’ve said this a few times now, but I love how this has become a standard tactic.

I grabbed the hand of the woman ‘paramedic’ and pulled her away from the middle of the street, toward the sidewalk.  Brian brought the driver in the same general direction.

My bugs felt someone come after us, fast.

Ah, shit. I guess Hookwolf’s metal form might have some way of sensing through the darkness?

I didn’t have time to get out of the way and lead Coil’s faux paramedic to safety as well, so I shoved her in one direction and leaped in the other.  The man leapt into the space we’d vacated, and I felt a rush of wind set my hair to whipping around my face.

Hm, wind seems to imply Stormtiger.

There was an explosion of sorts, a blast of wind powerful enough to lift me off the ground and push away a fair share of Grue’s darkness.  Stormtiger stood in the epicenter of the clearing, reforming the translucent ‘claws’ around his raised left hand.

Definitely an airbender.

I wonder, is Cricket obnoxiously loud at night?

Stormtiger, the man with the chains and tiger mask, and Cricket, the girl, apparently tied back to the same circles of parahuman prize fighters that Hookwolf had once been part of.  I couldn’t begin to guess their motivations for following him, but I suppose it hardly mattered.  Hookwolf was dangerous enough on his own.  With friends?

“We run,” I muttered.

Yeah, if you can, you should. It’s the only way to salvage the “no direct confrontation before meeting up” thing, and also what gives the best chance of survival at this point.

So, uh, the driver? Is he still alive, or…?

Hookwolf and his buddies had their backs turned to us and were walking toward the police barricade.  Stormtiger flexed his hands, and the air blurred around them, congealed into a half-dozen pale, translucent blades that jutted from each hand.

“We have guns,” spoke the driver, “We shoot them from behind.”

Okay, so a) the driver is alive. I think I misinterpreted the exact location of Hookwolf back there, reading him as having ended up inside the car, while he was actually just in front of it.

And b) Stormtiger, as expected, has an offensive power on top of his tankiness. It seems to be a form of airbending with which he can form things such as these “claws” out of thin air – literally, by thickening it to the point where it’s practically solid?

“No,” Brian spoke, “It won’t hurt Hookwolf, and I suspect Cricket and Stormtiger could do something about it, or they wouldn’t be so brazen about walking towards those cops.  Skitter is right.  We retreat.  Ready?”

Yeah, let’s go.

The blender of dangerous looking metal bits dissolved, each of the hooks and blades retracting into the skin of the man at the center of the thing’s chest.  As the front legs withdrew into his shoulders, he dropped into a crouch on the street.

Eyy, I was right. Transformation power!

He wore a wolf mask of sheet metal that had been crudely bent into place, framed by long, greasy blond hair.  Hookwolf.

Rumor had it that Hookwolf, back in the day, had been one of the top fighters in a parahuman fighting ring in New York.  He’d grown greedy, killed the man that ran it for access to the vault with the night’s earnings, and had made a good number of enemies in the process.

A parahuman fighting ring, huh? Interesting.

And these days he’s running dog fighting rings, at the very least. The more things change, the more they stay the same, I guess.

It had been a group of white supremacists local to that area that had given him shelter and support, happy to side with him because the man he’d killed had been an ‘acceptable target’.

Ah, naturally.

Maybe the ideology was real for Hookwolf from day one, maybe it was an act that had become reality when he found he enjoyed having people celebrate him for enacting his most twisted impulses and racking up a body count.  Either way, I suspected that  there were few things he wouldn’t do for his ‘Empire’ nowadays.

Either way, he’s a piece of shit.

It was hollow, its limbs were thinner than the dogs, and I couldn’t really draw a line between what was the actual ‘meat’ of the body and what wasn’t, because the entire thing was a chainsaw whir of serrated blades, hooks and needle points, shuffling and shifting around one another, rising and falling, all moving too fast for the eye to follow.  Altogether, it maintained a general quadruped shape with a tail and elongated snout.

This is clearly Hookwolf’s doing. I mean, it’s literally a wolf made out of weapons, among them hooks.

Or maybe this is a transformation-based power and this is literally Hookwolf himself.

Walking on either side of it were two people.  There was a pale, tall man with the sort of muscle-heavy build you only saw on cons and bodybuilders.  He wore black slacks that were in tatters around his feet, had chains wrapped around his forearms, hands and calves, and a blue-white tiger mask.

Stormtiger. Definitely does look like a tanky fellow.

I guess the other person is Cricket, then?

On the opposite side of the metal beast was a twenty-something girl with a gymnast’s build and scars criss-crossing her exposed skin.  Her hair was shorn to a bleached blond buzz cut, and her face was covered by a metal cage.

Named after a tank model in turn named after the animal, dressed like a player of the sport. Well played. :p

Grue rubbed the back of his neck, “I’m not sure I’m as good a person as you’re making me out-”

An impact rocked the ambulance, tossing Grue out of his seat and nearly knocking me heels over head.  The ambulance veered out of the driver’s control, tipped, and landed on its side, bringing Grue against the underside of the stretcher I’d been sitting on.

Well, then. This surely isn’t a good thing.

Did Purity spot them?

The spare gurney and the contents of drawers and lockers around the interior spilled free and scattered around us.

“Fuck!” the driver swore.  “Fuckshit!”

*pat pat* Don’t worry, it’s okay, just let it out.

I pulled free of the tubes and the half of a gurney that had fallen around me, and crawled toward the front to look between the two front seats.

It didn’t look so different from Bitch’s dogs in general shape.  It was a little larger, too, maybe, but that was a hard call to make.

Fuck. Fuckshit.

We slowed down, and Grue leaned towards the front of the ambulance,  “What’s the holdup?”

“Blockade coming up,” the driver spoke.  He and the woman in the passenger seat were Coil’s people, decked out in paramedic’s uniforms.  “No sweat.”

Yeah, probably a good call to block off non-ambulance drivers from going into the area.

He flipped a switch, and the siren blared.  Seconds later, he was revving up and moving without difficulty.  I looked through the rear window, and saw a line of police cars and PRT vans behind us, moving to close the gap they’d just opened in their formation.

“Hey, are we okay?” Grue asked me.  He was outfitted in costume, helmet on and visor down.

Ah, here we go. Regardless of whether they are or not, the two of them really need to be on the same page about this, ideally before the combat.

“Hm?”

“I get the feeling you’re angry.”

“If I’m angry at anyone for that thing outside the mall, it’s myself.  Can we just drop that topic forever and forget it ever happened?”

From a rational point of view, I don’t think you should be angry at anyone for it, but I get it.

“No, no.  I mean, are you angry that I didn’t jump out of my seat to go fight Empire Eighty Eight, before we knew everything that was at stake?”

Ah, yeah. I should’ve mentioned this too, two comments back. I thought about it, figured there might be some residual bitterness about that on top of the mall thing. Not sure why I didn’t say anything.

That said, I don’t think Taylor is the type to hold a grudge about this kind of disagreement, but it might make her view of Brian a little less overwhelmingly positive.

“Oh,” I flushed, and my ear throbbed in response to the rush of blood.  Could’ve kicked myself.  “I honestly don’t know.  I wasn’t expecting it.  I see the lengths you go through to take care of your… family member, I think of you as a pretty honorable guy, you know?”  This was veering closer to the conversation-that-was-not-to-be-spoken-of than I’d like.  I deliberately left that thought hanging.

I guess Taylor is seeing that Brian is closer to true neutral than neutral good on the DnD alignment chart.

■

“You see kids get their ears twisted in the movies and on TV all the time.  What you don’t get is how much it fucking hurts,” I touched the part of my mask that covered my bandaged earlobe.  It was throbbing, due in part to Brian’s ministrations.

Sounds like we’ve skipped ahead to the trip.

“Just leave it alone.  The painkillers will kick in soon.”

“Alright.”

We sat in silence for a few moments.  I stared out the small window at the back of the vehicle.  Very few cars were going in the direction we were.

Purity’s rampage area is quite understandably not where people want to be right now.

The interior of the vehicle that Coil had procured for us was filled with medical equipment.  There was a gurney, which I sat on, a second smaller type of gurney that could be disassembled and reassembled as required, up near the ceiling.  The interior was efficiently packed with medical supplies: an oxygen tank underneath the bench where Grue sat, a heartbeat monitor, lifejackets, tubes of all shapes and sizes, lockers and drawers with pills, splints and bandages.

Huh, nice. I guess that’d come in handy if the vehicle needed to pick up some hurt Coil lackeys.

I’m including the Undersiders in that term, for the record.

It was, to all appearances, a real ambulance.  I couldn’t say whether it had originally been an ambulance, and Coil had added extra compartments for weapons and for my bugs, or if he’d gone the other way and built the vehicle from scratch, to accommodate his additions.

Does it look like an ambulance on the outside too? If so, that’s a good disguise for a vehicle moving towards a disaster zone.

“Holed up on the far side of the Trainyard, with the dogs,” Lisa answered, “Not a bad spot.  Better than the building Purity tore down.  Don’t know why she was set up there instead of here.”

The Bitch works in mysterious ways.

I heard a voice on the other end that was probably Bitch’s, though I couldn’t make out the words.

“So.  We meet?” Lisa asked.

Somewhere in the middle, maybe?

“We meet,” Brian replied.  “I’m going to call Coil for a vehicle, and to ask him a few questions, hear for myself that he talked to Kaiser.  However long it takes for the ride to get here, it should give me time to stitch Skitter up.”

I winced.

Sounds like a decent plan.

“Patch her up?  Why?”

“Not relevant to the current situation.  We’ll explain later,” he said.

Oh, yeah, I can imagine that would sound bad out of context – or rather, put into the other context due to lack of awareness of the original one.

Did that make sense? I think so.

“Later then.  Take care of yourself, Skitter”  Lisa hung up.

Brian held up the needle and thread, “Let me apologize in advance.”

Let me say ow in advance.

“So what’s next?” I asked, “I think we should do something to step in, but Brian was saying that he thought we should continue to lay low.  Before Purity said her piece, anyways. Not sure if he’s changed his mind.”  I gave him a look.

I don’t think he has. Not fully.

“I haven’t,” Brian spoke, loud enough to be picked up by the phone.  He dabbed ointment on my ear, making me wince.  “Sorry.”

Yeah.

I wasn’t sure if the apology was over his stance in the discussion or the medical care.

Heh. I first read it as the former, but both work. And hey, it could be both.

“According to the news and my, um, inside source,”  Lisa spoke, referring to her power, “Purity hasn’t stopped.  She’s doing strafing runs across the Docks.  She moves too fast for anyone but Dauntless or Velocity to catch, and she hits harder than both of them combined.

To be fair, Velocity doesn’t exactly add much to that last part when he’s at his highest speeds.

She’s knocked down four more buildings while we’ve talked, I’m pretty sure. How long before she happens to knock over our hideout?”

Brian pursed his lips.

Yeeah, the Loft might become a casualty here.

“And she leads her own sub-group within Empire Eighty Eight, so I’m betting that Fog, Night, Alabaster and Crusader are on the streets, doing their own thing.

Oh, so Alabaster is also in her group. Alright, maybe we’ll get to see their power before this Arc is over, then.

I dunno about you guys, but I have friends in our neighborhood.  I’m very not cool with that.”

Brian sighed, “Fine.  We go.  But no direct confrontation until we have a game plan, especially not before we reunite our two groups.  Where are you guys?”

Sounds like a good call. This is very much not a case where the Undersiders can rely on brute force.

Hm… I wonder what would win out between Purity’s light and Grue’s darkness. In theory, the darkness should stop it, but that’s pretty clearly not normal light she’s tossing around.

…I suppose the same can be said about Triumph’s shouts, except with sound instead of light, explaining why Grue couldn’t just cover Triumph’s mouth with darkness to incapacitate his power. (That said, I still don’t get why he removed the darkness from the heads of the Protectorate members in the first place.)

“Tattletale,” Brian spoke, “Did you talk to Coil?”

“Coil says he told Kaiser straight up that he was responsible for the emails.  I believe him.

Hm. But Kaiser hasn’t informed Purity about that?

If Purity and Kaiser’s other subordinates don’t know, Kaiser either hasn’t seen fit to tell them or he’s intentionally keeping them in the dark.”

“What?  Why would he do that?” I raised the phone closer to my mouth to ask her.

Maybe he actually appreciates his subordinates targetting the Undersiders. This gives Kaiser an excuse to attack the Undersiders as well, which he may have been actively looking for in the Hookwolf case. Coil is the bigger enemy, but the Undersiders are also in the way of taking over the Docks.

“It makes a warped sort of sense to me,” Brian answered for Lisa.  “He lets his people believe we’re responsible, with Purity’s group gunning for us and the Protectorate.  Hookwolf hates us anyways, because of Bitch, so he goes along.  Kaiser lets them deal with us, with all that fury and hate and no-holds-barred torture, murder and maiming that comes with blaming us.  When we’re dealt with, or when it’s convenient, he tells them the truth, turns that bloodthirst against Coil.  His people won’t ever be scarier or more vicious than they are right now.  Why not maximize the damage?”

Ah, right, that’s a good point, too. He can turn it around and hit both enemies.

“Doesn’t that fall apart if Coil admits, publicly or to the members of Empire Eighty Eight, that he’s responsible?”  I asked.

Yeah, but is he willing to go that far?

I suppose telling it directly to Kaiser wasn’t that different, given the assumption that Kaiser would send the information along.

“Yes,” Lisa’s tinny voice replied, “But Coil won’t.  He was willing to talk to Kaiser, fess up to the man himself face to face, but going with a more public route risks putting him in the spotlight, drawing attention to himself, and he’s not going to do that.  I suspect Kaiser knows that and is accounting for it.”

True, Coil is more the type to sit in the background, controlling the puppets and chess pieces in the foreground but being out of focus himself.