Chapter 111: Totally Worth It

Chapter 111: Totally Worth It

Crap, Crap, Crap!

Perry scrambled away.

Zero HP and no armor made for a rather risk-averse Perry.

Perry glanced over his shoulder as he sought shelter, keeping a close eye out for Monolith. Getting blindsided by monolith of all people, and dying of blunt force trauma would be embarrassing.

Speaking of my armor...

Perry’s armor was toppled face-down on the ground, where Chemestro had used his power to disrupt the inner workings enough to cause a system shut-down.

It’s made of self-healing materials. I wonder if it’s managed to fix the fudged-up wiring.

“What are you waiting for!?” The goth girl demanded, throwing away the last of the gag around her neck.

The angular personification of fury was just...sitting there.

Perry’s sprint slowed to a halt as he gawked.

The shiny ebony creation of the newly triggered super just stood there, breathing heavily and being mad at everything. Not doing what it was created to do.

That’s odd.

“Miss, I am in control of my anger.” Chemestro said, his jaw clenched, obviously resisting the creation’s aura influencing his thoughts. If Perry’s guess was right, the donor of the emotions was the most powerfully affected by the aura.

“Oh, OH! Thanks!” the raven-haired beauty smacked her forehead before she pointed at Chemestro. “Kick his ass!”

Like a switch had been flipped, the monster leapt forward, the surge of rage that radiated out of it was ecstatic, and it felt like it was filling Perry up to the eyeballs with joyous rage as it charged Chemestro.

She’s learning to control her powers, Perry thought, resuming his sprint towards his armor. Obviously you didn’t trigger with full knowledge of how to use your powers to greatest effect, but since it was second nature, it could be reasonably expected that a super would experience rapid growth over the first few hours/days of their career, until they hit a plateau, at which they would have to put actual effort into improving.

Perry glanced up at Chemestro, who was bobbing and weaving, using his ability to slip through nearby lamp poles and cars to slow down the hulking abomination.

Can he not just disintegrate it? Is it immune to its donor’s powers, or is he just too angry to think straight? Nah, if he were too angry, he wouldn’t be playing rope-a-dope with it right now.

Perry grunted as he hauled his armor back up to standing and tried to turn it on.

Nope still fried. DAMN

Multi-Tool.

Perry hissed and reached into the armor, summoning a specialized impact driver and using it to pop the hatch on the back of the armor. Normally to mess with his suit, Perry would have to be in the comfort of his own lab with a bunch of specialized drillbits, but he could summon them on a case-by-case basis for modding on the fly.

Superpowers, yay!

The back of the armor popped open, exposing Perry’s spell-discs. The wiring around them was ruined, partially slagged from where Chemestro had been messing with them. Obviously copper didn’t have the same resistance to Chemestro’s power as his specially created laminate, a fact the Catalyst had taken advantage of.

Perry yanked out the Static shock spell disc and rapidly unlatched the suit’s left arm, glancing up to watch the mayhem as he did.

Chemestro flung Wraith off of Monolith, sending the redheaded super sailing into the air, where she turned into a manta-ray shape and flew in a circle above them, assessing the situation.

“Hold on a moment,” Perry said into the earpiece as he reconnected the spell disc directly to the spell-frame, smoothing out the wiring with a specialized tool before housing both of them in his suit’s hollowed out arm. “I’m going to try to reset the board.”

“Wait until she roughs ‘em up a bit,” Wraith said, flying above them like a vulture.

Perry glanced over at Breaker clearing the last of the gunk out of his throat, and Plagius climbing to his feet, brushing himself off.

In the distance, he spotted Hardcase’s jets approaching them, soon to provide some much-needed support.

Perry glanced over at Dazzle and Jetset. The two looked a bit under the weather, knees trembling as they watched their boss struggle with the manifestation of his rage.

“Who do you think you’re talking to?” Perry muttered as he worked. “Of course I’m gonna let her rough ‘em up.”

Perry used a summoned cutter to create a notch for the spell-disc to rest, applied some spray-on adhesive, and secured the spell disk extending out the bottom of the arm like a handle.

Perry let go of the cutter and summoned a battery backup, causing the cutter to disappear before it hit the ground, sticking it to the lingering spray-on adhesive.

Perry connected the new power supply and hefted his new creation:

A Tinker lightning gun that looked like an arm.

“Groovy.”

Chemestro’s eyes widened, and he surprised Perry by darting forward, hiding his body behind the rage-monster’s bulk, holding it in place for the space of a breath, long enough for Hardcase to get a good bead on it.

Thrum, thrum, thrum...

BOOOM!

A wave of invisible force flattened the creature directly onto Chemestro, sending a wave of dust outward that caused the nearby parked cars to slide backwards. The high pressure wave of air would’ve flung Perry backwards if it hadn’t been for the shiny obsidian grip on his shoulder holding him in place.

A surge of near-death adrenaline allowed Perry to drop his gun, raise his arms and slip out of his shirt as a massive obsidian fist swooshed past where his head had been.

“Dick move!” Perry shouted, scrambling forward and snatching up his gun as Monolith’s energy blast nearly put an end to his super career.

Perry rolled forward while turning and leveled the lightning gun on Monolith and pressed the button. The giant was winding up another energy blast when he got struck full-on with Static Shock.

Perry witnessed the lightning invade the bleeding cuts in the bruiser’s skin like a living thing, causing the massive super’s eyes to widen as he began convulsing violently.

Perry shouldered his makeshift lightning gun and surveyed the destruction, panting with exertion and delicious adrenaline.

There was a flat black smudge where the rage monster had been. It was slowly dissolving into black smoke, and it wasn’t moving. The girl was subdued, Chemestro was dead (hopefully) and Perry’s team was reassembled.

Perry glanced over at Dazzle and Jetset as Hardcase, Plagius and Wraith landed beside him. The two opposing supers were shaking the last of the effects of Perry’s lightning and Plagius’s drain.

“You guys wanna keep going?” Perry said, nodding toward Monolith, who was staring at the sky, struggling to breathe, and then to the smudge in the ground where their boss had been alive a moment earlier.

“I see no reason not to.” Chemestro’s voice cut through the silence as he emerged from the solid ground beside his teammates.

I knew it was too good to be true.

“Oh, come ON!” Perry shouted as Chemestro fixed Monolith, and the bruiser climbed back to his feet, wiping blood away from his lips.

“That’s a wonderful piece of tinker-tech,” Chemestro said, glancing at Hardcase. “But I can destroy it faster than you can blink. Save your team the money and humiliation and leave now.”

“WHAT’S GOING ON HERE!?” A voice shouted, drawing their attention toward an old man shuffling towards them on a walker.

“You kids with your newfangled Super-Powers think it’s OKAY to throw monsters through a hardworking veteran’s hydrangeas!? I was there, back in Nam, when the real monsters showed their faces. All you kids playing at heroes are just play-fighting when the REAL heroes are dying up there on the wall? And what’s with those girls wearing spandex that looks like it’s painted on? It’s downright reprehensible, is what it is. In my day, folk’d never do anything so appalling.”

Chemestro’s eyes narrowed as he took in the geriatric shuffling towards him on his walker. “Sir, this is a high danger area, and I advise you maintain a safe distance until it’s over. Nexus will be here to listen to your complaints once the situation has been handled.”

“Oh, the situation will be handled alright,” the old man growled, toddling forward. “It’ll be handled when I CHALLENGE YOU AND YOUR TEAM TO A DANCE BATTLE!”

The old man threw his walker aside and began flossing, a dozen more identical old men appearing behind him, copying his movements.

***Five minutes later***

“Who knew Chemestro was that good at dancing?” Perry said, patting Breaker’s shoulder as the dancer wiped a thick sheen of sweat off his brow.

“You say that like I lost,” Breaker said, glancing over at the Chemestro’s unconscious team, splayed out on the lawn. Chemestro had been the last to go down and he’d used some sort of light refraction to split himself into three copies, giving Breaker a run for his money. In the end, Breaker was the more talented dancer, better optimized to win a dance battle, and had managed to put Chemestro down.

“Without that belt, you would’ve,” Perry murmured to himself.

“Totally worth it,” Breaker said, nodding.

Belt that enhances Breaker’s natural abilities: $60 million in leveraged assets.

Seeing Chemestro finally lose a fight and passed out on the lawn: Priceless.

“Totally worth it.” Perry echoed.

Officially it was the trigger-rampaging newbie super who’d knocked out Chemestro’s team, but everybody knew who’d won.

Perry shrugged and went over to where the Nexus personnel were loading the goth girl into the back of their transports.

“Hey kid,” she said as Perry approached.

“What?” Perry asked, expecting a question about processing, or how long she might be arrested for, or maybe to plead her case about how none of this was her fault.

Something like that.

What came out of her mouth instead gave Perry chills.

“So that Chemestro guy, is he single?” She asked, leaning forward on the truck’s bench, glancing past Perry to where the muscle-bound super lay.

“Oh my god, I don’t care.” Perry said, slamming the door shut.