Amaranthine

“I am not eating your ass!” Gwyn protested, when it became abundantly clear she wasn’t going to be keeping up with Cait or Kennedy.

With the raw power of Cait’s boomsprint, she absolutely has the edge in straight line speed, but the twisting tunnels weren’t exactly the best environment to take advantage of that. A lot of the pipes had girl-shaped indents at the end of them where Cait misjudged how much distance she had until the next turn.

Kennedy, on the other hand, had the lithe, scuttling speed of a xenomorph in her draconic form, taking the twists and turns of the tunnels using the walls or even ceilings as speed sinks to smooth her turns. She hadn’t voiced any protests about Cait’s proposed prize, but until the last stretch, it wasn’t clear who would be on the receiving end.

The last bit being a ‘stretch’ clinched it though, and even with Kennedy passing Cait on the final turn, she still boomed past her and into another cistern, just in time to see a glint of silver scurrying into another tunnel. She blasted over, grabbing an ankle just before it disappeared into darkness. She spun, and activated her tech to swing the man out of the tunnel and down into the cistern floor with enough force to shake decades of dust from the ceiling.

Cait was on him instantly, sat on his chest in a combat mount before slamming enchanced punches into his silvered dome. After a few, blood was starting to run from his mouth, and he spluttered a surrender.

“Dios fucking mio stop!” he coughed through a mouth quickly turning to mush under Cait’s fists. His voice was heavily accented, and not just by a swelling jaw. Cait slammed her next strike into the stone next to his face, and he flinched back from the spray of shards.

“Call off your monsters now!” Cait roared, other fist cocked back in explicit threat. The man’s eyes hazed over, similar to how Lira’s did when using her abilities.

“It is done!” he said, after spitting out another mouthful of blood. “It is done!”

“Gwyn?” Cait asked as the girl hurried over to join them. Kennedy already stood over them, wickedly sharp tail whipping in agitation. Gwyn summoned her tablet, then nodded.

“Horde is…. Well, its not fleeing the city, but no Ironhides in it I can see,” she reported.

“Silvered civilians?” Cait asked, mind working ahead of her words, and reaching a terrible conclusion.

“Fuck, Cait… I mean, looks like they turned back, but they were in the middle of a mass of raging Coonbeasts, so…” Gwyn gave her a helpless look, and instead of being sad, Cait got mad.

She turned her fury on Powershell, only barely able to stop herself from shoving her fist into his mouth and seeing if she was strong enough to splay her fingers.

“Five seconds to convince me not to kill you right now,” she hissed, and given the look on the man’s face, he believed her.

Good, only lie is there’s a good chance I kill him regardless.

“I- I am a mercenary! Not a fanatic!” he said, words fighting each other to leave his mouth. “No loyalty! Will give information you can trust!”

Fuck, if that’s true…

“Goddamnit,” Cait sighed, lowering her fist. “I was hoping you wouldn’t convince me. You’ve earned a few more minutes of life, at least. Start talking. What even was the fucking plan here?”

It had been bugging her since things started popping off. This had been a hell of an invasion force, easily enough to take the city, as woefully unprepared as they seemed to be for a subterranean assault. Why had they waited to spring it until more superheroes were in the city?

“Fait hired me to run a quiet insurgency on the normals in the city,” Powershell explained. “Back when I started on this, years ago, I could just infect people with bot commands. The plan was a slow corruption of the cities populace leading to what seemed like a peaceful transfer of power to Altereds. The issue is it was not perfect, not permanent, and was not entirely undetectable. We manipulated things enough to get Splice the attention of The Council, and move the defense of the city to being more Altered-centric through her.”

“Okay…. Yeah, I mean, that probably would have worked,” Cait said. Manipulating elections and local governments was a tried and tested part of the radical playbook. “Why the fucking monsters?”

“The original Ironhides?” Powershell responded, “Experiments with my ability, mostly.”

He inclined his head towards Gwyn.

“Nano-smith gave me the idea, actually,” he said, with a smile that was probably meant to be flattering. Cait grimaced, looking over to see Gwyn’s eyes flash almost literally red. Kennedy saw it too, and stepped between them to catch the nanolance Gwyn lashed out with against her scale armor.

“Later, Gwyn,” Kennedy said, in a tone of command that brooked no dissent, but authoritative or not, Gwyn’s fury was palpable.

“Want to explain that?” Cait hissed through grated teeth, “Maybe in a way that doesn’t make her want to rip you apart from the inside? Honestly, if she really wanted to, we couldn’t stop her.”

For his part, Powershell looked a little confused, and a lot scared.

“Not personally!” he stammered, “The ER has an operative in the AEGIS bunker, they were able to sneak out designs sometimes. Nano-smith’s ideas on the applications of external nanotech were of immense interest to me. With my ability to command remotely, I realized I could entomb creatures in a shell of nanobots, and thus control them, and also make them infinitely more durable.”

“Fucking WHO!?” Gwyn roared, with more bass than Cait had thought her capable of generating.

“I swear, I do not know,” he said, cringing back as Cait brandished her fist. “I do not know! Their identity was always anonymous, it is possible Fait himself does not know. I feel as though it should be clear I am not hiding things by now.”

Cait felt the unfamiliar mind of Firewall drop from Kennedy’s link, and a scared but calculating one take its place. Kennedy took a beat, then sighed.

“I don’t think he’s lying,” she said. “Plus, he really is going above and beyond spilling his guts. Doubt he’d hide this. Doesn’t matter anyway, Mom will have Lira scan everyone in that building the second we tell her.”

“Fine,” Cait said, glaring down at Powershell. “Keep going. The shifting Silvered citizens?”

“I, uh, I am worried she will kill me when I tell you,” he responded, eyes bouncing anxiously between Cait and the irate Gwyn.

“Gonna have to risk it,” Cait said with a shrug. “If she does, it’ll be quicker than me beating you to bitchpaste for not answering.”

“Dios mio they do not make superheroes like they used to,” he muttered under his breath, eyes boggling. He collected himself, and continued. “I got the idea from your suit, Amaranthine. When our operative leaked the way it is stored in your pores, I realized how that could be applied to my own shells, without hosts even noticing.”

Cait glanced over to see Kennedy staring down Gwyn, who all but literally had steam coming out of her ears. ‘Ethical Nanotech’ was perhaps the foremost value the girl held, and hearing her work had inspired perhaps the worst misuse of it thus far in history would not be going down smooth. Still, she held back.

Bet just so she can get him alone. This motherfucker is pretty reprehensible, but with how mad she is, and what she can do, I’m not even sure I want to see how he dies.

“Okay,” Cait breathed, letting out some of her own fruatration. “So, and this is honestly my biggest question, why the fuck did you wait to really kick this all off until the biggest badasses in existence were in town?”

The look on Powershell’s face clearly began as a smirk, but he quickly redirected it to a grimace.

“You have heard everything I just said, correct?” he asked, like he was actually confused how Cait wasn’t getting this. “While the initial plan was that ‘peaceful’ Elevated Race bullshit, I had developed the power to be a god. But it was all derivative of her work. As long as she lived, I knew she would do…”

He nodded dejectedly towards the chamber they had come from.

“Well, what she just did. The risk was necessary.”

“Heh,” Cait chuckled, “You fuckin’ idiot. You were fucked the second she stepped in the city. Guess you can always trust a merc to be greedy.”

Cait stood up, keeping a foot planted on Powershell’s chest.

“Aight,” she announced with a theatric yawn, “Gwyn, carbonite or kill this guy, I don’t care which.”

“Que-?” that was all Powershell managed before he disintegrated into dull grey dust, breaking down even further until it was like some big purple bastard had snapped his fingers.

“Huh,” Kennedy commented, turning to look at the blank space that had just recently held a supervillian. “Gotta be honest Gwyn, I expected that to be more brutal.”

“I made sure it hurt,” Gwyn hissed, and something about the hard gleam in her eyes made Cait believe her.