Amaranthine

Cait’s head snapped to the left involuntarily at the unholy roar from the battlefield.

“Jesus, what does Bookfucker have that makes that noise?” she asked, getting only a shake of the head from Qi on her shoulders, whose own eyes were wide with shock. Cait turned to look at Kennedy, finding the girl hadn’t broken focus or stride.

“Keep the fuck up,” the goth ordered, beckoning them sharply. “Gotta stay even with Warhawk and Kev.”

Cait shared another, softer, concerned glance with Qi before she adjusted the dragon on her back and hustled after Kennedy.

The plan was working perfectly. They’d passed within yards of numerous patrols, without so much as a glance in their direction. Even their noise retention seemed to be working, as the time Cait had slipped on gravel under Qi’s weight had garnered no attention.

They were counting on the Bookkeeper’s flair for the dramatic to find him. Lira had pinpointed two likely landmarks for a final confrontation, and they headed now towards the first, the St. Boniface Basilica. Deep enough behind the battle to be a good redoubt, plenty of majesty and symbolism to get an old idiot hard.

Unobstructed as they were, the group was making good time. Periodic check-ins with Warhawk let them know that Bookkeeper had minimal aerial forces. Enough random Altereds they probably couldn’t have just flown in undetected, but not so many that Sandra couldn’t easily keep them out of Kevin’s exclusion zone.

Despite Kennedy’s brooding mood, Cait refused to be pulled into it.

“How you holding up Kev? Haven’t felt any rain, so I’m assuming you haven’t introduced Warhawk to watersports.” Cait heard a muffled chuckle from Qi before Kevin responded.

“Fuck you! Doing great, locked the fuck in you know? Do kinda have to pee, bu—”

“No the fuck you do not,” Warhawk interjected. “Bold of Cait to assume I ain’t done piss play, but I sure ain’t doing it with the teenager strapped to my tits. You plug that bladder up tight boy.”

“Uh, roger!” Kevin squeaked. “Doing just fine Cait! Going radio silent!”

Cait chuckled to herself, shooting a pleased glance up at Qi when the dragon gave her a half hearted smack of reprimand.

“What? No reason we can’t have fun taking down a supervillian.”

She might have been right for herself and Qi, but the quiet, searing rage that was coming off of Kennedy in waves was a different story. Cait knew Kevin would be getting that too, and it was half the reason she kept trying to keep the kid’s spirits high. It was near overwhelming even for Cait, and she’d been linked up to Kennedy near constantly for a month.

Her attempts to check in with her girlfriend had been unsurprisingly but uniformly rebuffed, and Cait had stopped trying verbally. Instead she brought her battle inside, doing all she could to keep the rage from burning Kennedy alive.

“Eyes on the basilica,” Warhawk reported. “Y’all are less than a click out, should be breaking into the surrounding park real soon.”

Almost as she said it, the urban landscape gave way to a well maintained greenspace, the gleaming white stone of the basilica rising above the trees. Kennedy raised a fist, and Cait had seen enough special forces movies to know that meant ‘halt’.

They scanned the treeline. Still, until what Cait had taken for a particularly lumpy bush in the twilight moved.

“Roidrage,” Cait said, and Kennedy nodded.

“Good chance he’s here,” Kennedy agreed, and moved forward.

All of them kept their heads on a swivel now. There was no telling what forces Bookkeeper had on personal reserve. Their side already had a few exceptions to Kevin’s power, no guarantees he didn’t have one they didn’t know about.

It turned out, he didn’t, but he did have something largely as effective.

Too late, Cait noticed the blue blur weaving between the trees, far to fast for eyes to track.

“St—” she began to warn, but it was too late. Freeflow shot through their exclusion zone, before spinning to a halt just outside. That aggravating soft smile had no place being on Chance Walker’s face

“Well I certainly didn’t put a blackout zone in my own base!” The Bookkeeper said, jovially, through Chance’s throat. “Kennedy, dear, are you playing hide and seek with your old Granddad?”

Kennedy’s shriek tore through Cait physically, emotionally, and she’d swear it pierced straight through her soul. Her black scales covered her faster than Cait had ever seen, forming armor that looked damn near demonic, even before her eyes burst into literal flames. She lunged forward, but Freeflow was already gone. As Kennedy tore towards the basilica, Cait realized she was suddenly very visible.

“Ugh, if it isn't Kennedy’s aggravatingly durable little toy,” said Freeflow from behind her. Qi growled, and Cait felt her gaining mass before she even dropped from her back. “And some kind of fantasy creature! How quaint.”

The idyllic park was on fire before the sentence was finished, but Freeflow was faster than flames, and it looked like Bookkeeper had been practicing with Chance’s body. Qi dropped to one knee as Freeflow’s shin crashed into the back of it, she raised her hands against a flurry of blows to her face before Cait stepped in front of her. Freeflow’s fist stopped a millimeter before her face, quickly shifting to a scolding finger.

“Ah ah ah!” he said, a cheery note in his voice. “I got enough of Mr. Walker’s memories to know what happens when I hit you full force.”

Cait responded with a nano-punch, finding nothing but air. That began a war of holding patterns. Freeflow would dart in, hit one of them where they were most vulnerable, and be gone well before the other could react. Cait remembered Chance’s lessons on how to beat someone like him, but crucially, those lessons had never included a way for someone like her to actually kill him. Even if B-man were here, she doubted they’d have better luck. If anything they had been lucky that first time, that the Bookkeeper was still unused to Freeflow’s insane speed.

They’d talked about this, of course, deciding the best course of action was Kennedy and Qi’s Inferno Protocol. However, that required Kennedy and Qi. While Qi was more than capable of making enough fire on her lonesome, she couldn’t do it before Freeflow put a fist down her unprotected throat.

“Fuck it!” Cait yelled, jumping up and wrapping herself around Qi’s face, to a surprised ‘mmph!?’

“Blaze away babe! These abs are fireproof!”

Cait was pretty sure she heard Qi laugh before the fires of hell unleashed into her belly. The flames cascaded down around them, turning the surrounding parkland into a passable semblance of the surface of the sun as Qi’s flames continued to intensify.

“Hmm, well, couldn’t take your life, but certainly took your dignity. An absolute clown show, the both of you,” Bookkeeper sneered through Chance’s mouth. “Let’s try a different tactic.”

A high pressure jet of water flashed into burning steam as it fought against the blaze, and Cait tracked it to an unfamiliar man covered in seashell-like growths. She only had a second to examine him before a much more familiar figure vaulted over him, swinging a lollipop club down with enormous force.

Cait pushed Qi out of the way, catching Munchkin’s blow on crossed forearms. Her calves were pushed a good foot into the dirt by the force of the blow, and she kicked off, bursting out of the ground to carry the resurrected enforcer away before he could bring his weirdly inordinate strength to bear on Qi.

“You know we already killed this guy right?” she snarled, into Munchkin’s softly smiling face, a far cry from the ever present snarl it had worn in life.

“We?” he responded, as they landed like an earthbound meteor, both of the supernaturally tough combatants springing up as though they’d fallen onto a feather bed. “I believe it was Elizabeth Swan, wielding Excalibur, that killed Munchkin. Have you any mythic blades on you, Amaranthine?”

“Nah, just all the science a tentacle fetishist can muster,” Cait responded, punctuating the point with an overhand nano-punch that slammed Munchkin back into the dirt. “And a body that won’t fuckin’ quit.”

She hadn’t really gotten a chance to fight Munchkin before Swan took his head off. It was too bad, since the pairing was the kind of superpowered brawl that would get replays for years. Titanic blows that caused distortions in the very air, combatants being hit so hard they flew out if view only to come charging back in to deliver an even harder hit in reprisal. It was the kind of fight that, against Cait, couldn’t be won.

Bookkeeper’s Characters didn’t really seem to fully experience the normal effects of greivous injury, but under the repeated force of blows that could cause tectonic activity, Munchkin’s body eventually began to simply give out, while Cait’s remained perfect and unscathed. Standing over a tattered Munchkin, whose legs had finally given up the ghost, Cait sneered down at him.

“Slugfests are only worth it if the hits do anything. I’m fuckin’ invincibleidiot.” He was still smiling as her fist caved in his face, and as hot glue covered her, fist still buried in the ground, she understood why.