How to Beat Fried Worms
Disclaimer: Worm is owned by Wildbow because nobody else wants it.
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Chapter 90: Faith
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Alec had questions. Quite a lot of them, if he were being honest. And they were questions that he did not, in fact, want answered.
Finding the two children in the women's side of the facility hadn't been too bad, not with the Fairy Queen's instructions. The mothers... presented quite a few of the questions that Alec did not want to ask.
Neither of them were... traditionally attractive.
Crysalis was a trio of floating gemstones in the vague shape of a human woman. Her very touch could freeze just about anything solid. The fact that she'd... somehow gotten pregnant. Successfully conceived a child. Given -birth-.
It boggled his mind.
She hadn't initially trusted him when he said he would take her baby boy out of the Birdcage. And he really didn't blame her. He might have had to do something akin to Teleporting her outside to prove what he was saying but her rotations and gyrations froze midway into an attack on him.
A quick glance behind himself and Alec could only catch a glimpse of blond hair, disappearing to the side.
It seemed he had Glaistig Uaine's favor on this mission.
The next woman presented much the same issue. Marble was a hunched over behemoth at five meters tall and her flesh was made of solid granite.
Alec wasn't asking any questions about the mechanics on that one.
Unlike Crysalis, Marble was able to talk back when Alec tried explaining things to her. And, for all of her size and strength, the woman was surprisingly gentle. She was honestly afraid of harming her own child, a little girl that was smaller than Marble's own hand.
There hadn't been any fight in the woman as Alec sent her little girl (Jade) off to his van, to Minerva's waiting hands.
She'd just made Alec promise to make sure the little girl got a better life than Marble had.
Alec's departure from the women's side of the prison was quiet, the man himself in a somber mood.
The third stop, Teacher's Classroom... filled Alec's very soul with dread.
Teacher, Benjamin Terrel, was a Master slash Trump. The man could give out minor powers to anyone that formed a connection with him...
And they, in turn, would be enthralled by the man.
Initially, that aspect of his power had gone unnoticed. He'd collected countless 'students' in much the same way Horace Slughorn of the Harry Potter series had. Then, once the number had reached critical mass, Bennie turned his thralls, all with Thinker and Tinker or even Master powers, to the grisly task of killing politicians and pundits that he disagreed with.
Of course, Benjamin himself was not especially intelligent, despite what he might wish to believe. He'd been captured in short order and then...
Rather than be executed as a domestic terrorist, cult leader and a myriad of other very valid charges? He'd been Birdcaged.
Ostensibly due to the risk his thralls presented and the unpredictable nature of their powers in relation to Teacher's health.
In reality? He was considered to be incredibly valuable to Cauldron. His powers had been used to shore up the mental and physical handicaps in a number of their more valuable capes such as the Slug and the Clairvoyant.
Which meant that, while Cauldron's upper management like Doctor Mother or Alexandria might not be compromised, all of the slaves kept in the Cauldron base could be.
Walking into the silent, sterile hall of Teacher's cell block, Alec had to repress a shiver. There were more people inside of the cramped environs than Alec had seen anywhere else. Easily a solid twenty people.
And none of them were Teacher.
The mage pursed his lips and carefully walked around the people. Some of them were focused entirely on a woman that was barely dressed in a very heavily modified jumpsuit. Others were lined up along the wall, their foreheads pressed into the ceramic.
Getting close to them, Alec could hear them mumbling under their breath. All of them in unison. All of them in sync.
"-59825349042875546873115956286388235378759375195778..." They said, a long string of number that... Alec honestly did not know the relevance of.
Fearing the worst, Alec silently summoned a number of his phantoms. They appeared in the shadows and doorways, slipping just out of sight as they waited and listened.
Passing by Ingenue, Alec began checking the individual cells.
In the first one, he found a mosaic of a bald, bearded man with glasses. Painted in blood.
...Spoopy but not entirely unexpected, honestly.
The second cell had someone sleeping inside. A hulking mass of muscles that snored loudly.
The third cell...
Alec was glad that he didn't have anything in his stomach.
He'd found the third child. A boy, and the oldest of the three he'd been sent to find by the looks of it.
And the child was strapped to a table, a blank, empty look in his eyes as he stared straight up to the ceiling. He was surrounded on multiple sides, one of his captors being Teacher himself. The other was a tall, wire-thin cape with a hood covering his face.
Alec slid his hand into his jacket and summoned his Omni-Weapon, transformed into a heavily modified Smith and Wesson Mk 22 'Hush Puppy'. The magazine was filled with tranquilizer darts and the barrel, while threaded, did not have a silencer attached. With all of the improvements the Omni-Weapon had gone through, it didn't need one.
"Well, well, well. We have an unexpected guest!" Teacher declared as he turned around. The man's eyes, wide and wild behind his glasses, slid over Alec without stopping. He frowned for a moment before grinning and turning the rest of the way around, his hands clasped behind his back. "A Stranger? In my classroom? Why don't you come to the front of the class and introduce yourself?"
Alec, rather than play along, crept forward with both hands on his gun.
"...Did nobody teach you any manners?" Benjamin asked, his voice dipping in disappointment. "Well, as an educator, I feel it to be quite in my capabilities to teach you myself!"
Benjamin once again turned around, his eyes darting around where he thought Alec was.
Alec, however, had crept around the man to get a better look at the boy. There were... tubes hooked in at the boy's hips and a series of thick, rope-like scars along his arms. Those were concerning and sickening but it was the boy's face that turned Alec's stomach.
The child had a pair of white, star-shaped scars situated just under his hairline.
"Is our newest student just shy, perhaps?" Benjamin asked. "Or are they simply rendered speechless at the artwork my class has created?"
Looking up, Alec could see Teacher looking down at the boy and smiling widely, all of his yellowing teeth on display. The monster reached down, running his fingers through the unresponsive child's hair.
"Very well. A good Teacher must take pride in the products of his students, yes? Especially one of such... magnificence." The tone in Benjamin's voice... He was a better copy of the Joker than Jack Slash had been. "Students come to me from all walks of life, you know? Every background, every demographic. This boy's mother came to me to help her come to grips with her power. She would grow and grow and grow... and the tumors that came off of her? They were not very willing to listen to her commands."
Benjamin chuckled, actual humor in his voice.
"So I helped her. And, once I was sentenced to the Birdcage alongside her, she helped me. Her child, with a bit of help, developed quite the regenerative power..." Teacher broke down into a dark chuckle. "And he's been very, very helpful in keeping some of the more difficult capes in the Birdcage fat and happy."
So. The kid was a regenerator. His power had been tampered with. Teacher was a piece of shit.
Alec leveled his gun at the still-silent cape next to the boy, across from Teacher, and pulled the trigger-
And the nameless cape caught the dart.
"Oh, naughty, naughty..." Teacher continued as he reached across the boy to pull back the hood of the cape, revealing a face without eyes and a nose that was sunken flat. "But Victorious has a Danger Sense that-"
Alec didn't care.
He lunged, his fist slamming out with the accumulated force of [Escalation], growing the entire time he'd been traversing the birdcage.
Victorious put his hands up-
And his hands, along with his head, were pulped into a fine, red mist.
"What?!" Teacher croaked, his voice breaking in shock. "That wasn't part of the- This isn't how this is supposed to-!"
Alec stepped around the fresh corpse, still twitching on the ground, and activated [Priority]. The gore slid from Alec's form, leaving a trail of red and gray along the ground.
"No!" Teacher babbled as he backed away, his eyes almost bulging as he stared at the bloody footprints on the ground. "This isn't right- This isn't right! Stay away from me!"
Alec lunged.
"Stay awa-!""
And Teacher dropped through the ground, into a glowing hole.
Into Cauldron's hands.
Alec closed his eyes and inhaled softly, listening to the chaos breaking throughout Teacher's Classroom.
Then he snapped his fingers and his Phantoms began to act. Began to use their newfound power, the copy of the Fairy Queen's gift...
To [Rewind] the capes in Teacher's Classroom. Reverting them to the moments before Alec had made his currently failed attempt on the monster.
Alec glanced back at the boy, the child that Teacher had been harvesting the flesh from, that Teacher had been using to barter with the monstrous, cannibal capes trapped in the Birdcage.
And, as red began to creep into Alec's vision and his heart raced in fury, the man snapped his fingers. Twice. Each time summoning ten Phantoms.
They would get to work on turning the flesh puppet back into a child.
Alec snapped his fingers once again, activating [Planescape] to follow after Teacher.
He would get to work on ending the monster's life.
One way...
Alec clenched his fists, magic crackling under the surface of his skin.
Or another.
