I blame
@Ac3Royale. For the record.
(If I could get at least 100 likes on this thing, I might literally die of happiness.)
TO STARE AT DEATH
Max Anders wondered, how had it come to this?
This was supposed to be their moment of triumph, their final victory. Lung was dead. Oni Lee was dead. Bakuda was dead. The ABB was supposed to be in disorder and disarray, too weak, too divided to resist as Kaiser's Empire crushed them underfoot. A single cape was said to stand on the throne that had once been Lung's, a young girl barely Theo's age, so obviously and woefully out of her own depth that she had enlisted the help of a Thinker - obviously, when one gave it any significant thought, Tattletale, who had been poached from the Undersiders after Coil was removed from play and that gang of miscreants disbanded.
Max Anders - Kaiser - had smelled his victory. After all, what sort of resistance could a panicking gang and a fifteen year old girl prove to be against Hookwolf and Stormtiger and especially Fenja and Menja? Any fool would have bet on the Empire. Kaiser
had bet on the Empire.
And why not? Even without Purity, they were a force to be reckoned with. Even without Purity, they were so strong that the Protectorate and the PRT daren't do more than nip at their heels and round up their more expendable foot soldiers. It had only been a matter of time and planning before Brockton Bay belonged to the Empire, the Asians broken and beaten and the heroes driven out. It had only been a matter of time until the great Lung was brought low.
And without Lung and his leadership, what was the ABB but rabble huddling together to stop the inevitable?
It was supposed to be easy. Strike while the ABB was weak, break them, shatter their spines, and bring them to heel. Strike before someone else, someone strong and competent, came in and deposed the little girl playing at Queen.
Except...Rune and Krieg hadn't come back. Of the six groups sent out to blitz the ABB's weak points, theirs was the only one not to report back, and of those who
had returned, they'd brought word of well-fortified strongholds and hellions who could set others ablaze with a look.
How? Kaiser had goggled. How had this new leader managed to find more capes to follow her so soon after taking control? Did she have some kind of connections, or had she simply found a few who had triggered from Bakuda's rampage and brought them in, forcefully or otherwise?
As for Rune and Krieg and their group, it hadn't taken long to find out what happened to them. Only an hour and a half after the last group had returned, a single girl in a red jacket - the ABB's new leader - had appeared in front of the Medhall building.
She hadn't looked like much. She still didn't, Kaiser found himself thinking, as she carelessly dismantled Crusader one ghost at a time. A slip of a thing, tall, yes, but lean and willowy, like a stiff breeze might knock her over or a single punch might put her down. Flecks of blood dotted her cheeks and great splotches of it darkened her jeans and her hair.
And behind her, Kaiser's Empire was in ruins. Several security guards, the first to try to stop her, lied in pools of blood on the ground. Any civilians that had stood in her way were similarly removed. Hookwolf, ferocious and powerful, had gone down with a single slash of her knife, and lay as scattered shards of metal and flesh all over the front steps.
Fenja and Menja had each been taken apart, and they lied in a pile of limbs too muddled to distinguish which was which. As easily as breathing, that little slip of a girl had maneuvered around them and cut them into ribbions, ignoring their powers entirely.
Alabaster - and Kaiser could only think him a fool, now - had been defeated with a single blow, shredded as though he were an ordinary man.
Cricket's head was somewhere out of sight, and her body and severed arm had dropped unceremoniously to the floor like so much trash.
Stormtiger was one of the few left alive, yet, and he was supporting Crusader, but he might as well not have been there - the girl was slashing apart his wind blades, even as she dodged Crusader's spears with a preternatural skill (not grace, because it was not graceful, but unnatural) and destroyed his ghosts with a single swipe of her knife.
As for Viktor and Othala... Kaiser grimaced. The less said about their fates, the better.
He turned away from the fight for a moment to look further behind the girl, at the carnage left in her wake. Several PRT troopers, Triumph, and Dauntless himself lied in pieces, victims of her wrath for having tried to stop her rampage.
They'd made a mistake, Kaiser was forced to admit. Where, how, he wasn't sure. What Rune and Krieg had done to invite this vengeful goddess of death upon them, he didn't know. Guesses and suppositions were all he had, and with so little known about the ABB's girl leader, those were worse than useless.
He'd thought about running. Max was not a true believer, so he wasn't someone willing to die for the Empire's cause. He'd considered just running away while the others held her off.
But he knew, with a terrible certainty, that it wouldn't stop her. She'd continue to pursue him until she exacted whatever revenge burned in her heart. She was a girl on a mission - she'd chase him to the ends of the Earth.
And even if he escaped, what then? The world now knew that the E88 were connected to Medhall, and it was only a matter of time before the connection was made between Max Anders and Kaiser. If by some miracle he made it all the way to Europe, he would just be another of Gesellschaft's pawns, and there was no way to get back Max Anders' good name.
He was cornered, forced to watch as everything was sliced apart around him. There was no path ahead of him. The walls were to his back.
Max Anders summoned his armor and became Kaiser.
The only thing left to do was wait for those electric blue eyes to turn his way.
