Chapter 23
"... Where are the other mercenaries?" Miss Militia suddenly asked, looking away from the screen and over to where Taylor was sitting calmly in the air, waiting for Miss Militia to finish reading the reports that Coil had compiled- some hundreds of excessively complicated PDFs full of charts and graphs that she could only really understand due to having literally pulled the knowledge out of the man's head. "The employment registry says that Coil had two hundred and twelve mercenaries on payroll, all of which were supposed to be on-base due to recall and bunker-down procedures, but right now you stated that you only have fifty five, even including the on-staff medics and cooks. Forty two if we don't count non-combatants."
".... The other mercenaries….?" Taylor blinked slowly and floated over, her wings buzzing slightly but not fast enough to actually lift her into the air- she was simply floating as she pleased. She hummed as she looked over the registry, navigating through to compare and contrast which ones she'd kept and which ones seemed to have vanished.
She blinked again.
"... Every single mercenary that's unaccounted for is guilty of multiple crimes outside of, well, working for a villain. Murder, rape, larceny, robbery, pedophilia, manslaughter, embezzlement, assault and battery- oh, wow I just noticed how awful those two hero names are with each other-, child abuse, spousal abuse- the list goes on and on but those are the more common charges." Taylor spoke quietly, just loud enough for Miss Militia to hear the faintest whisper of pure, lethal disdain in Taylor's voice. A cold, dripping emotion suffusing her words with nothing short of purest intent to kill. Miss Militia shuddered a bit, swallowing thickly and thanking the fact that her bandanna covered half of her face and her leather jacket kept the cold sweat from showing.
"... I don't know where they went. But I can't find their minds anywhere on the planet," Taylor finished, sitting back and rubbing her chin, her lips pursed into an almost cute pout as her wings fluttered gently on her back- Miss Militia wasn't entirely sure, but she had a sneaking suspicion that Taylor wasn't even aware of the fact that she'd sprouted wings a few minutes ago.
Wait.
".... Oh no."
"Oh no?" Miss Militia blinked, scooting her chair back and staring at Taylor, who seemed to be in the middle of having a furious debate with herself- quite literally, since she could see Taylor's lips moving even though she was completely silent, either speaking too quietly for Miss Militia to hear or deliberately silencing herself to achieve the same effect.
Either way, Taylor came out of it looking pale- her almost literally porcelain features taking on a cast that was distinctly sickly despite her currently mechanical nature, looking over at Miss Militia with a haunted gaze.
"... I think… I may have made a terrible mistake," Taylor gulped slightly, then began explaining how, while she had been traipsing through Coil's base, she'd been holding all of Coil's mercenaries inside of their vehicles or out of sight in the parking garage proper, keeping them from just leaving en masse. Almost all of them had tried to leave in their own personal vehicles, and since all of them were alone in a confined, darkened space…
"... I don't have any conscious recall of using my powers, and I would have known if they activated on instinct, but something… I think something activated my shadow powers without me realizing it. I was spaced out for a good while twice today already, so…" Taylor pursed her lips, then abruptly stood and headed for the door. "Sorry to cut this short, Miss Militia, but I really need to check on something. Could you get one of the guys to escort you out? I promise I'll explain once I figure this out but it's… not gonna be pleasant to watch."
"What? Hold on-" Miss Militia followed after Taylor, one hand held out awkwardly as she tried to catch up with the younger girl. She furrowed her brow as Taylor raced through the corridors of the base, with Miss Militia following along at a steady clip until the two of them found themselves in a large storage bay- about large enough to hold several vehicles at least, and almost three stories tall. She wondered what the purpose of such a room was when Coil had it, but apparently Taylor had turned it into a… pool… of some kind. One that glowed with an ethereal silver color and filled the air with an almost audible hum of indescribable power.
Miss Militia gulped silently, walking forward as if in a trance. She stopped at the edge of the pool and stared down into its depths, blinking slowly even as she just barely heard the sounds of Taylor's distress just barely a foot away.
It was mesmerizing.
A shining sea of infinite possibilities, of infinite power and infinite purpose, a substance that could make and unmake entire worlds. She swallowed thickly and knelt down by the pool, reaching forward slowly, slowly, fingertips just barely about to brush the surface and-
"No!"
Taylor screamed as she violently shoved Miss Militia away from the pool, a burst of telekinesis lashing out and pinning the heroine to the wall for a brief moment before letting go. "Don't! Touch it!"
Miss Militia groaned and shook her head, slowly pushing herself off the ground and wincing at the bruises that were surely now forming along her back. "I… what is that stuff? I've… never seen anything quite like it…?"
"It's Energized Protodermis. I don't know what it's made of and I don't know what it wants, but what I do know is that if you're not someone that it has specifically chosen to transform, you will die horribly the moment it touches you." Taylor stood between Miss Militia and the pool, keeping her wings spread wide to block the heroine's view, just in case she had the bright idea of trying to touch a pool of eldritch liquid again.
".... Noted…" Miss Militia muttered, stepping away from the pool and focusing once again on Taylor, taking a deep breath as her weapon flickered with an air of uncertainty around her hips in response to the emotions flowing through her mind. "Ah, um… did you… find out what happened to the mercenaries?"
"... Yeah. I did." Taylor sighed, wings drooping as she trudged forward and led Miss Militia out of the room, locking the door shut behind them so no one else would fall in. "I don't know why, but for some reason, when I threw all those mercenaries into my shadow, whatever it was that activated my power chose to throw them all into the pool… to… to feed the Energized Protodermis. That must have been why I spaced out earlier…"
Miss Militia just stared blankly down at Taylor, blinking slowly as she tried to process what she'd just heard. "... Ah."
How the hell was she supposed to respond to the fact that apparently, for some godforsaken reason, the person who was potentially the single most powerful parahuman on the planet didn't actually have full control of her powers, and said powers apparently decided to murder some hundred fifty people to feed a fucking pool of what seemed to be eldritch liquid metal?
"... Feed…?" she settled on asking the simplest question, coughing awkwardly into her fist to clear her throat when her first attempt at speaking came out as a feeble almost-whimper. "What do you mean… Feed?"
".... Okay so-" Taylor chewed her lip and raised a single hand and pointed a single finger upwards, her other hand gripping her chin while she crossed her second pair of arms. "I think… I don't really have any concrete evidence of this, per se, but while I wasn't specifically conscious, my mind still saved memories of what I was doing, and um… Okay. The thought process was… I was kind of… following what I felt was right? Like… there was this really big sense of Destiny that I had to follow, one that really needed me to carve out that pool in that room specifically, and… I had to fill it with raw materials, right? I dumped in all the weapons in the base and also I think maybe a few cars, filled it with acid and… well. Metal, for mass and substance, some kind of liquid, for a base… and… organic material… for raw potential. So… so I think that, while I was taking over the base, I was… partially already fulfilling that sense of Destiny by grabbing a bunch of mercenaries. And then I carved the pool and I spaced out and… I don't really remember seeing anything, but my mind went blank and my shadows dumped out the mercenaries into the pool and when I woke up all of the stuff in the pool was Energized Protodermis."
"... Ah." Miss Militia nodded along with Taylor's explanation, pretending that she understood everything while really understanding absolutely nothing at all. Good thing she was wearing a body cam to record everything.
".... I'll… I think that's um… everything for now. Oh- actually, one more thing. Director Piggot wanted me to ask if you'll be available for power testing this Friday, Around three in the afternoon?"
"Uh… yeah. I don't think I'll be doing anything that day?"
"Great, great. I um… suppose I'll see you then."
With an awkward wave and the sinking feeling that she really ought to be more horrified about the probably painful deaths of over a hundred fifty people even if they were criminal scum, Miss Militia left the lair as fast as she physically could without drawing attention, her motorcycle roaring out into the streets mere minutes later as she made what was going to be the first of some very long phone calls.
