Crawler tilted his head one way, then the other.  He rumbled, “Fine.”

“Which only leaves you, Cherish, our errant rookie.  You’re dejected because you know Bonesaw has a punishment in the works.  But you mustn’t lose heart.

“We’ve got something awful planned for you, but stop worrying so much!”

You’ll still have a chance to redeem yourself, and maybe even escape reprisal for your juvenile stunt.  I think Mannequin should start us off, and he’ll be penalized one day from his time limit for his loss tonight.

Huh. Well that ought to help motivate her.

As for Mannequin, is it fair to penalize him retroactively like that? I’m not sure either way.

And you’ll have to deal with the bug girl, to make up for this embarrassment.   Make her suffer.”

Hm. Either this is a hell of a coincidence, or Jack knew where Mannequin was. Mannequin hasn’t done anything to indicate who defeated him.

Mannequin tapped once on the blade.

I know we established already that this means yes, but I suspect he would very much like to use it on Skitter.

So Mannequin is now officially Skitter’s assigned enemy. Fair enough! I’m not sure I’m interested in a one-on-one rematch between them, but Wildbow could make it work. He certainly did with Lung, though Lung’s power is unusually well-suited for scaled-up rematches.

Lung has been quite thoroughly removed from the main setting and overshadowed in terms of threat level, but there’s still a small part of me that says we’ll be seeing him at full power for a round three.

“Ah, you feel your only road to self-improvement is your power.  While I would love to return to this particular debate, I can agree to disagree so you all can get back to your fun.

I guess they’ve discussed this a lot.

Look at it this way.  Our usual method has our quarry running scared.  To even get them to fight, you have to corner them, which you are admittedly very good at doing.  Like this, however, they have reason to band together, to fend us off, and protect the candidates who decide to eschew our tests and face our reprisals instead.

Of course, the Undersiders in particular are quite limited in who they can band together with right now.

More would fight you, and you’d have a higher chance of finding another individual who could harm you.”

That’s probably true, yeah.

There were nods or noises of agreement from Bonesaw, Burnscar, Siberian and Shatterbird.

Mannequin can’t exactly nod right now, even if he does trust Jack to make it fair.

“Mannequin?”

Mannequin tapped one finger on the blade that still extended from the base of his hand, drawing forth a single ‘clink’.

One clink for yes, two for no?

“That’s five of you in agreement.  Crawler?”

I guess that does mean yes, then.

…can Crawler speak? He does have a mouth, at least.

The monster stretched, his musculature rippling.  When he spoke, his voice was a rumble of broken sounds that only barely resembled words, “No point.”

Ahh. Not one for games, huh?

“True.  Would there be any complaints if we added another restriction?  Perhaps a time limit?  We take turns.  Three days each to carry out our tests.  A failure, such as the one that Mannequin evidently suffered tonight, and you’re penalized one day.

It seems they’re actually going to be on board with making things harder on themselves. They’re mostly in it all for fun, so they’re willing to turn up the difficulty of the game in order to make it more fun.

This might’ve been a better move on Tattle’s part than I thought.

A successful test might add some hours to your deadline, while the removal of one candidate buys you an extra day.”

I suppose this works.

“That’s not very fair to the first few of us to go,” Bonesaw said.  “They’ll have to test more people in less time.”

Oh yeah, good point – it’d work better if it wasn’t turn-based.

“They also have an easier time removing candidates from the list.  More chances at a longer run.  In fact, just to be fair, we may have to adjust the time awarded for a successful test, so there’s less for the first few of us to have a turn.

I guess that’s true too.

Do you all trust me to decide on something fair?”

Not really.

“Too bad.” Jack shrugged, then he went on, “This Tattletale wants to play a game, leveling the playing field between us and the others.  If we cannot reduce our selection to a single candidate, we take the first to volunteer and we leave.  Our loss, and a hit to our collective reputation as a penalty.”

This isn’t quite how I remember the deal, which suggests I may have misunderstood it.

“Why?  It’s a bad idea,” Cherish said, “She knew you’d want to do this, knew you’d set yourself up with a situation where you could fail.  Where we could fail.  There’s no reason to do it.”

She’s right. For now.

Tattletale kind of let the Slaughterhouse Nine come up with the terms for what happens if they win, and I don’t think that’s a good thing.

Jack shook his head.  “Oh, but there is.  Limitations foster creativity.  Tell an artist to paint anything, and he may struggle, but tell him to create something specific, in a set amount of time, for a certain audience, and these constraints might well push him to produce something he might never have come up with on his own.  We grow and evolve by testing ourselves.  That’s my personal philosophy.”

Ahh, so basically he sees the additional creativity it takes to make the tests hard enough to with certainty whittle it down to one nominee as a reward in its own right.

I’m not so sure the others will agree with that.

“That’s not really a test,” Shatterbird spoke, “There hasn’t been a round of testing since I joined the group where we didn’t whittle it down to one candidate.”

Fair point.

“We could forego the final test, pitting them against one another.”

Shatterbird turned to him, “Ah.  But, again, the last test where we had to go that far was… mine?”

I wonder who she defeated.

“After, Crawler!”  Jack shouted, “You can fight him another time!  Group meeting!” 

Crawler hesitated, then loped over to their gathered circle.  Burnscar lobbed a fireball high over their heads, and then dropped down from the airborne projectile to land in a crouch.

Heh, that’s a nice way to do it without setting fire to the ground around her allies.

Somewhere in the background, there were the screams and explosions of the fourth or fifth cycle of Bonesaw’s work.  Of the crowd that had been gathered in the street, only stragglers remained.

These people are pretty damn deadly.

“I wanted to give you all a chance to cut loose before we got down to business,” Jack said.  “It seems a teammate of two of our prospective members wants or wanted to strike a deal.  Cherish, do you happen to know if she is still alive?”

“Y’know, just so I don’t have to say stuff like ‘wants or wanted’ all the time.”

“Tattletale lives.  She’s very close to the buried girl right now.”

Oh, so they took her to Coil’s base, then. Seems reasonable.

“Oh, you hear that, Crawler?  Your candidate and this Tattletale might be friends.”

“No,” Cherish said, avoiding eye contact with anyone in the group, “They barely know each other.”

It’s a small world.

Siberian watched as the boy ran, then turned as if she intended to give chase.

“No,” Jack instructed.  “Let him go.  We need to leave some alive.”

To tell the tale?

He had other motivations, but he would remain quiet on that particular subject.

…hm, interesting. Got something planned for Scrub like with Purity/Theo?

Crawler’s brain grew back to its full beach-ball size in one or two seconds, followed closely after by the healing of the skull, the reappearance of his facial muscles, then his skin, hair, spines, scale and armor plating, roughly in that order.

If he were fighting Taylor in addition to Scrub, he’d probably have a bunch of bugs buzzing around inside his head now.

He shook his head like a dog with water in its ears and looked around, searching for his quarry.

Hehe, I like how he’s literally shaking off having his face and half his brain removed from existence.

We didn’t even need Greenfire this time!

Mannequin pointed the blade in his hand at Shatterbird, a threat and a warning.  Jack tensed, studying Shatterbird’s expression, waiting to see if this would start something.

Does that sound entertaining to you, Jack?

“A loss is allowable,” Jack said, when the fight didn’t erupt.  “Most of us are more forgiving than Siberian, and allow a failure or two from our candidates during the rounds of testing, no?  It’s okay to let them win from time to time.

But this wasn’t one of the candidates.

It gives them that spark of hope, so we can snatch it away and leave them all the more devastated.”

Right, of course Funtimes McEdgehog would be the type to think like this.

He looked at Shatterbird and she inclined her head in a barely perceptible nod.

“Which raises an interesting topic,” Jack said.  He spotted Siberian and indicated for her to approach.  Two corpses were stacked on her arm like meat on a kebab, and she cast them aside with a motion of her arm before approaching their circle.

The involvement of food in this description is probably not an accident.

Crawler was one of the two group members who had yet to rejoin the group.  He was engaged with a young man with a glow that suffused his hair and emanated from his eyes and mouth.

Is that Scrub? I seem to recall something like this from Infestation, but I think I just assumed it was because his power was going haywire.

White flashes appeared with little accuracy and devastating effect, carving spherical chunks out of the brute.

Yep, that would be him.

I’m sure Crawler loves this – it’s a power he’s unlikely to be immune to, and which adds lots of space for new body parts to grow from.

This only encouraged the monster, and Crawler eagerly paced closer, his wounds closing together with a startling rapidity.  So few things could hurt Crawler these days that Jack rarely got to see the regeneration in full effect.

Yep, he loves this. Let’s see what he gets!

Crawler’s healing powers appeared to play out in fast-forward when compared to even the regenerators who could heal wounds in seconds.  Hundreds of pounds of flesh were replaced in one or two heartbeats.

Damn!

One eruption of light hit Crawler in the dead center of his chest.  It made him pause, no doubt removing one of his hearts and some of his spinal cord.

Crawler is kind of like Aegis but without the looks and way more deadly.

The boy with the glowing hair pushed his power into overdrive, calling forth a series of flashes that exploded in close succession.

Oh neat, so that’s a thing he can just choose to do now.

One caught Crawler in the face, revealing only a cross-section of his head, complete with a bisected brain, a skull six inches thick and the interior of Crawler’s mouth.  Crawler collapsed.

Ooh… how long until he gets back up?

I mean, there’s no way that’s gonna kill him. After all this buildup and with the nomination plot ongoing, having Crawler just unceremoniously die to Scrub, within the first chapter we actually see him in no less, wouldn’t fly.