Roman vs Love Lost

[NOTE: This is all context for Roman's strength, speed, and emotion power for his fight with Love Lost]

“Chastity!” Roman called out.  “Berserk strength!  I know it’s weak but-”

“I have my whip!” she raised her weapon.  She’d managed to keep ahold of it.

“I have to hit someone!”

“Then hit Juliette!” Chastity said, voice pitched.

“Ugh!”

The Heartbroken were running for it instead of taking my suggestion.  ‘Running’ being a polite way of phrasing the way they waded through slime.  It was maybe the first time I’d seen them working together.

I saw the shift in their bodies as Roman used his power.  A burst of raw emotion, rage and hostility flowing through them and making veins momentarily bulge.  It came, apparently, with strength.  Enough for them to leap toward the nearest building face.

‘Leap’.  They had no traction on the slimy roof.  They tumbled forward with some velocity, enough to briefly meet the building face.  Roman slammed his hand against a window frame to adjust his fall, crashing through a window.  Juliette grabbed on with sheer strength, fingertips hooking around holes in the windowsill, and displacing any slime on the rim or on her fingers by sheer strength.

*

Oberon produced a shockwave before hitting the ground.  Slime everywhere rippled out and away from the point below him.

Moving it aside so he had more room to land.  He crashed down, and even that crash was dampened.

But the shockwave was as immense as the one that had leveled a city block.

*

Juliette held on with one hand, her body still but her legs swaying in the wind.

*

Off to the side, the window opened.  Roman, bleeding from a dozen places, reached down for Juliette.

“Massive blood loss is a good look on you, idiot brother,” Juliette said, looking up at him without reaching back.  I could see her fingers moving by small fractions.  Her own blood trailed down from where fingers dug into slimy, hole-riddled wood, like her skin was splitting at the beds of the fingers.

“This building is falling down.  There’s no time to fuck around,” he snarled.

“Saying you’d die too is the most convincing case I’ve heard for suicide yet,” Juliette said.

Her feet scrabbled, trying to get traction and finding none.  She kicked at the window with one boot-toe, trying to stand on the shattered glass edge, but it only crumbled.  She slipped further.

“Bite me,” he told her.  He reached down to her face, and shoved slimy, bloody fingers in her mouth.  I could see the muscles and veins standing out on his wrist as he clutched her lower jaw with every bit of strength he had.

She, for her part, bit down with matching fury.

With that as their hold on one another, Roman hauled Juliette up enough she could get through the window.

- Radiation 18.5

_______

The black haired boy was stepping forward, and Colt had to remind herself she had a job to do.  She aimed high and fired.

It didn’t slow him down or distract.  Fists clenched at either side of him, he roared, a fierce sound, veins standing out on his face.  Kitchen Sink reeled, then started sprinting forward.

“Don’t!” Hookline shouted.

There was no controlling it, apparently.  A headlong berserk rush, meeting the black haired boy, who was still roaring.

Kitchen Sink was all brawn, weapons appearing in his hands, slipping free as soon as he realized he couldn’t use them.  A metal stein became a thing he could grab and swing toward the black haired boy’s face.  In the other hand, the deciding fixture was a bit of piping with a showerhead fixed on the end.

The black haired boy fought with one arm extended, the other held back.  It was a fencer’s pose without a fencer’s foil, grace, timing, and keen reactions contrasting with the way his eyes were bloodshot and veins raised on his forehead.  He swayed back, slapped aside, and stepped in close, driving a knee into Kitchen Sink’s middle.

Faster than a normal person, maybe stronger.  Inflicting rage but suffering it too.  Forced duels.  If he kept doing that-

She raised her gun.

*

The black haired teenager was trouncing Kitchen Sink, despite Kitchen Sink’s relative size and weaponry.  Sink’s swings were wide and reckless, and he almost seemed to forget he had the weapons in his haste to get in close and hurt the teen.

That changed in a flash.  One item fell into his hands, and he hurled it.  It produced a cloud as it hurtled through the air, and that cloud left the black haired boy coughing.

Kitchen Sink slammed his face into the boy’s.  Sink’s face had a heavy porcelain mask strapped to it.  The boy had nothing, and dropped to his knees, one hand to his face.  A second later, veins stood out across his face, more intense than before, and the blood loss accelerated.  He lunged forward, and didn’t quite manage to get off his knees before Sink started pressuring him down toward the ground.  Sink looked pretty affected, almost frothing at the mouth now.

*

Kitchen Sink was battered, Hookline rattled, but those two were up.

*

“You alright, Roman?” Lookout asked.

“Peachy,” Roman said, his voice a growl.  He spat blood onto the snow.

- Interlude 11.b

_______

Silence and a void so empty that even distant starlight barely touched it.  Fragments and facets had only themselves to reveal.

Love Lost’s mask communicated the intensity of emotion to her before her own senses recovered.  The black-haired boy, Romeo.  He was fast and he was intense, eyes wide as he lunged in.

Her claws intercepted the blade, and it slid between the two claws, which redirected the thrust to a point over her shoulder.

She was barely aware of things as she came back from that darkness- that space that was escaping her memory, but she’d been in enough dangerous situations, enough fights.  Instinct prevailed.  He tried to pull the blade away, and a shift of her hand trapped the blade between two edges.  She kicked, the claws on her foot raking for his midsection, and he drew back.

He’d recovered his balance, not just in the physical sense, and when he came at her again, it was with his power roaring.  She felt it wash over her, and it was so familiar as to be ordinary.  Pain and rage, struggling within her, trying to find an angle to push or twist at her to drive her forward.

She retaliated, swiping with claw, throwing the sword he’d let go of aside, then kicking, first with one claw, then the other, a figure skater on ice.  She turned, using the length of her body to hide the claw-lash as she extended it to its length, whipping it-

He kicked the end of it, intercepting.

So capable, and he was just thirteen years old.  She’d had to draw the line somewhere, about what was acceptable.  She’d settled on Ever’s age, at the time Ever had passed.  Too many parahumans were young, and both Breakthrough and the Undersiders were willing to employ the young.

*

Love Lost struck out at Romeo, who ducked the claw-lash’s tip as it cracked.

*

Love Lost reached up to her mask, releasing the catch.  As the mask fell away, she drew in a breath.

She felt the phantom presence of Ever.  The touch, the sentiments that were so predominantly regret.  She felt the anger, the echo of Precipice’s laughter in the seconds after Ever had died rang in her ears, and that anger twisted.  If it were a muscle in one second it was black cancer through and through in the next.

The pain, she felt it, physical.  Choking her, like screaming would be impossible.  She always felt that part – the rest could be there one time and not the next, but the pain and that near-certainty that she couldn’t breathe, let alone scream?

All of it bundled up with fleeting memories.  The breath that went into promises made that weren’t kept.  That whispered hopes and fears to a newborn who would never grow up.  The choked sobs out in a wild crying fit that had scared Lee and Ever both, coming out of nowhere.

She put all of it into a singular scream that she aimed at herself, in more than one way.  Screams were usually at or to someone, but in this, she screamed at her own feet, hunching over, and the effect rippled out in every direction.

Love Lost could see that Romeo had a bullet wound from earlier, and he stopped favoring it as he retaliated.  Less affected than most, but it helped that anger and resentment naturally ran through him.