Make it Count 1

The watch beeped and I stepped back through the portal, the sound of the cold howling wind filling my ears and sending a shiver down my spine. I savored the moment, drinking in the unique sensation.

The rooftop felt cramped, nearly bisected by the metallic tube stretching across its length. The tube was held up by flimsy looking supports which looked as if they could easily be snatched up and carried away by the wind. The tube grew more rectangular in shape as it approached one of the edges, passing through a white edged portal to extend past the edge of the rooftop. The whole machine audibly thrummed with built up energy, drowning out the sound of the rain. A portal was above us, keeping us dry and shining light down onto the God Driver. Two giant claws rose from white portals on the ground, perfectly still as they awaited commands. The thrum of the God Driver sounded off. It was far too loud and far too high.

I pulled out a second timer from my pocket, staring at it. Three minutes behind schedule. I’d spent too much time mocking Lab Rat and it had cost me. The God Driver was starting to overheat and I didn’t have time to disassemble the God Driver just to prevent it from misfiring. Twelve minutes wasn’t nearly enough time.

 Two capes loitered on the edge of the rooftop, one of them wearing a black robe that wrapped around him, highlighted by lines of crimson that framed and crossed over it. His face was shadowed under the cloak’s hood, only the lower half of his face and a dark looking goatee visible. Spikes and jagged looking shards of metal adorned his robes, and an assortment of liquids in carved glass bottles drew a line from his hip to his shoulder. He held a twisted black rod topped by a blood red crystal.

“Give me a portal to the... outside of the energy chamber but still within the Driver. Point it at the burnt wall.” A white framed portal opened before me, and heat radiated out of it. The hum of the charging energy was deafening, only contained by a steadily vanishing wall. I clapped twice, raising my voice to be heard over the sound. “You! Robe guy! Reverse that by... three minutes and twenty seconds.” I pointed at the portal and held up a hand, dropping it after the watch ticked forward a few seconds. The robe wearing cape stared at the scorched wall, and the burn marks quickly vankshed. It wasn’t a seamless transition where you could see the burn marks clear, but it was closer to a broken stuttering reversal that was anything but seamless. The transition was one where if you blinked you missed it, and in moments the wall looked pristine. The portal narrowed to a point before blinking out of existence.

Cauldron made it so much easier to make Drivers, but it wasn’t perfect. The portal cape was an utter moron at times, especially when it came to Drivers. It was far easier to collect materials, and Cauldron had provided two time manipulators, but the portal cape was so much of an idiot that it almost wasn’t worth it. They were also Cauldron capes and that was something else I didn’t like about it. They obeyed Cauldron first and Cauldron was effectively immune to any of my Drivers. I couldn’t destroy something I couldn’t find.

I glanced at my watch again. I didn’t have enough time to improve the God Driver by factoring in Cauldron’s portal cape or the time manipulators. They already had improved it by leaps and bounds by allowing me to actually hit a moving target. I looked over the God Driver a final time before deeming that my greatest creation wasn’t about to suddenly backfire. A portal yawned open at the edge of the rooftop, showing the sun shining down onto a crowded platform. Showtime, then.

I approached the black robe wearing cape, pushing a stopwatch against him. “Reverse the entire energy chamber off again in... two minutes and.. twenty seconds. Try not to be an idiot and forget to do something that simple. Got it, robe guy?” I walked off before he could respond.

His raised voice caught my ears as I stepped through the portal, “The name’s Epoch!” Right, Epoch. Not robe guy. It didn’t really matter to me, he was just one of Cauldron’s time manipulators. I didn’t bother to acknowledge that I heard him.

The sound of waves and the constantly shifting ocean rose up to meet me, and I smiled. The smell of it assaulted my nose and I sighed. It had been so long since I’d been near the water. A man in green and yellow power armor stepped before me, an overly large halberd held effortlessly in his hands. I’d seen him once, but his name didn’t jump out at me. Unimportant, then. I crossed my arms, waiting for him to move. “Tick tock. Six minutes.”

“String Theory. Is your weapon-

I cut him off. Every second counted here. “Finished? Yes. Now get out of my way.” The man stepped aside, and I stepped up onto the platform. A breeze blew across the oil rig, and I turned into it. I peered out over the edge of it, staring out at the endless horizon. The whole wide world stretched out before me. It was pristine, vulnerable. And it was mine to leave a mark on. My lab coat flapped behind me in the wind. I was glad I had grabbed my old costume.

My lips moved before I could stop them, forming words that sickened me and filled me with glee all at once. “Portal to Lab Rat. Keep it out of sight somehow.”

A slit opened in the air before me, a wide open field far below. Black shapes scurried about, moving like the ants they were. “Closer.” The portal winked out of existence, forming into another slit a moment later. It was still too far, and I had to squint to make out the figures below.

Lab Rat was easy to pick out from the crowd. He passed a bag to someone, who then went about distributing its contents. I scanned for Lab Rat, having lost him briefly in the crowd. He stood still, a portal opening before me. He stepped through, and the narrow viewing portal snapped shut. A moment later, it reappeared, hovering far over the oil rig. I could see myself standing at the edge, arms crossed and staring into the portal.

I turned, and the portal slid shut. I made a point to walk quickly without hurrying. It wouldn’t do for me to appear to rush over to Lab Rat. No one stepped aside for me to pass, forcing me to weave through the mess of capes. That wasn’t right. People should step out of my way, bow before me and beg for mercy. My reputation didn’t precede me as it should have, and my costume hid the fact that I was in the Birdcage, that I was too dangerous to be free. I reached Lab Rat right as he finished talking to the power armored greeter.

Our conversation wasn’t worth the effort it took to speak to him, which was unfortunately par for the course. Nobody said Lab Rat was bright. Or brave. Or effective, really. It was to be expected. His devices drew on things to fuel their transformations and Lab Rat had been in the habit of self experimentation before he’d been captured. There was little doubt that they’d drawn on his brain cells, which weren’t being put to much use anyways.

Lab Rat and I didn’t see eye to eye. We couldn’t see eye to eye. Height disregarding, we were too fundamentally different. Lab Rat was wrong in his opinions and he refused to back down about them. He wasn’t self aware enough to hold onto them simply to spite me. He genuinely believed that quantity made up for quality. Lab Rat’s monsters wouldn’t do anything against Scion. They were too simple and straightforward to survive, too slow and too grounded to reach him, and too weak to do any damage. Scion had killed Behemoth, Lab Rat wasn’t anywhere close. He could have all the monsters he wanted and he still wouldn’t be.

My approach was simpler, easier, and better then his. It was brutally efficient quality compared to his ineffectual quantity. The Firmament Driver has nearly blown up the moon had the Protectorate not sent in a time manipulator to delay it. The God Driver was a few steps up from that. If it missed, everyone would know. I couldn’t think of a single thing that could survive it, Scion included.

I stared at the assorted items Lab Rat had dropped at my feet. A badge, no one of his injections, an armband, and an earpiece. I glanced around, snatching the earpiece and armband off the ground when I was sure Lab Rat wasn’t looking. I wasn’t about to allow him that small victory. I moved the injection badge to the platform’s edge with my foot. Lab Rat’s monsters were durable, but they were Lab Rat’s monsters. They were mindless pawns to be sacrificed. I didn’t trust whatever abomination Lab Rat had chosen for me.

I kicked the badge off the edge. It didn’t go as far as I had hoped before it plunged beneath the water’s surface. Satisfied, I turned away and put in the earpiece. The armband came on next, prompting a name. It wasn’t about to get a real one. “String Theory.” The armband verified it, the display showing a number seven.

A man raised his voice in the center of the platform. He resembled a knight, with silver and gold armor. Chevalier, he led the Protectorate now. He began to give an absurdly long winded speech, which I promptly tuned out. I didn’t need instructions or morale. The God Driver would fire in... three minutes and thirty two seconds regardless of how eager the crowd was. I didn’t need to be pepped up, I wasn’t going to be fighting, all I had to do was sit back and watch as Scion fell to the God Driver.

I grimaced as Lab Rat’s words came to mind unbidden. He’d called me a coward for letting my weapons do the work. It wasn’t like he didn’t do the same thing! His weapons were people, mine were Drivers. I couldn’t get into the fray of things like he could.

I banished those thoughts. Lab Rat was too unimportant to focus on. I wouldn’t have to see him again after I won the bet that we had made.

A woman’s voice spoke over the earpiece. It was vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place a name, “String Theory, darling, what’s the time remaining for the gold driver?”

My hand hurt. I looked down to see that my nails had been digging into it. I recognized the voice now, it was Tattletale’s. She mocked the Firmament Driver after I went to her to get everything arranged. I grit my teeth, “The G stands for God. As in God Driver.” I paused for a few moments, forcefully exhaling. Tattletale would not get to me. “Exactly three minutes until it fires.”

“Make sure everything is all prepared, then. We might have to move you up in the rotation. Be ready.”

“I’m always ready.” The number on my armband changed to a five. The first group was already attacking. Chevalier and Ingenue. I ignored them, lifting the stopwatch to my face. With each second that passed, my heart felt like it beat just a tiny bit faster. Apprehension welled up in me as the God Driver got closer and closer to firing. I had two time manipulators in easy access of the Driver. One of them was a hero. It would be trivial for them to ruin everything. They would most likely die, but they could do it. I would lose the bet with Lab Rat, and any hope I had of making an impact would be gone.

I caught Lab Rat’s eyes from across the platform. He smirked. It physically hurt to look at him smirking, to see such a look of superiority directed towards me. The fact that it was Lab Rat made the problem infinitely worse. I resisted the urge to wrinkle up my face in disgust, instead giving him an insufferably smug smile.

“-ring Theory. String Theory, you’re up.” Those word’s made my heart skip a beat and my eyes locked onto the timer. Fifty seven seconds.

I made sure to take my time walking over to the the rooftop portal. Less then a minute but all the time in the world. “Open one of those portals. My lab.  Right in front of the G-driver.  Point the other end at the target.” I peered through the portal, making sure Cauldron’s resident moron or one of the time manipulators hadn’t fucked it up. There wasn’t time for an in-depth analysis, but on the surface everything looked fine. It would have to do.

I blinked. The portal was nowhere to be found. “Portal to the portal,” I muttered under my breath. A narrow rectangle yawned into existence before me, showing a large, rectangular port in front of the energy chamber. “Idiot! That’s not the opening! Put the portal on the other side of the machine!” The portal narrowed to a point and vanished. A quick check told me that it was now in position. “Better.” I looked at the stopwatch and forced my leg to remain still. “Twenty two seconds. Use it to give me coordinates.”

Tattletale’s voice spoke out over the ear piece, replaced by a man’s voice a few minutes later. I fed the portal cape the coordinates. The portals around the platform slid shut like a window, blocking me from having a view. This was my God Driver. They didn’t get to decide that I couldn’t see the aftermath. I was the one who was going to land a decisive shot, the one who would end this. They knew it and I knew it. “Give me a view.” I phrased it in a nice, polite way. To give them the illusion that they could deny me. I was going free in... sixteen seconds, and no one was going to stop me.

Chevalier denied me anyways. Idiot.

“A view! Now! Or I’ll make it miss!” Chevalier gave in, and a portal yawned open at the platform’s edge. The landscape beyond is was in an uneven chaos. Burning grass, large chunks taken out of the landscape, random divots in the earth. It was incomplete. It was utterly mundane. If this was all that Scion could do, then the God Driver was overkill.

I could change things still, ask the portal cape to take out Tattletale for being a smug bitch. I could take out Lab Rat too if I angled it right. The God Driver had almost no collateral damage, it would be pitifully easy to end the idiot and run. But I couldn’t. Scion had killed an Endbringer. Scion had been the first hero and he was known strongest. As weak as he currently seemed, he had a reputation that made him the perfect target.

The God Driver fired. There was a zap followed by an imperceptible whoosh of air as the wall of the energy chamber decayed and nothing held the energy back from launching out of the Driver. A shimmer tore across the sky, and Scion was launched somewhere far past the moon. The fact that he even had a body to be launched after being hit with the God Driver said something.

I let out a clear, my arms sweeping out to my sides as a grin spread across me face. It worked. Scion was dead by my hand and everyone knew it.

Some kid in a green costume stared at me, saying what the watching crowd was whispering about and thinking. “What was that?”

I almost told that the kid that what she saw was greatness beyond her wildest dreams. Instead, I said, “G Driver.” I spent the next minute informing everyone about the God Driver. It was the least I could do to remind all these capes that even with Scion gone they were still ants. The only difference was that they were ants to me.

Tattletale’s voice spoke over the earpiece and my mood fell, “He’s coming back.”

Coming back? I had hit him with the God Driver! He shouldn’t have been alive! He wasn’t the Siberian, an immovable object, so he shouldn’t be able to come back so soon. It had barely been a minute!

A burning fury came over me like an unstoppable wave. I let it sweep me up, I let it fester and grow inside of me. Lab Rat stared at me from across the platform, and I knew he was mocking me internally. I had told him off for thinking small, I had made a bet and I was on the verge of losing. I didn’t lose. Fuck Scion. If he wasn’t going to die to the God Driver, then I would just have to move on to the H Driver. And then the I Driver if he still wouldn’t stay down. I would escalate until I won.

A quiet gasp came from one of the capes. And then it came from two more capes, then four more, spreading through the crowd like a disease. I looked up. A golden glow spread across the sky, a golden man staring impassively down at the crowd below him. He looked at us like we were ants, like we weren’t even worth the ground we stood on. The aura of intense bloodlust told me otherwise.

“Portal.” I whispered under my breath. The portal never came. “Portal,” this time a little louder. Nothing happened.

Cauldron had abandoned me.

I couldn’t die here, I had too much left to do. I had barely tasted freedom and already the rug was being pulled out from under me. I hadn’t left an impact on the world. Everything I’d done before the Birdcage hadn’t been lasting. The Cardiff football stadium had been rebuilt, the Indonesian gas stations replaced by a strip mall, the moon preserved. I wanted to laugh and cry all at once. I wanted to flail out like an indignant toddler at the unfairness of it.

The golden light around Scion solidified into a ball of pulsing light. The ball fell, plummeting down towards me, towards everyone on the platform. I took a step back instinctively. Then another step, and another.

My foot met open air and I fell over the edge.

A scream tore itself from my throat as I dropped. The platform sped away from me, utterly unreachable and increasingly distant. I flailed, my arms trying to grab something, anything. There was nothing to grab. My lips moved, the word lost in the rushing wind. “Porta-“

My teeth violently slammed together as I hit the water. My body erupted into a solitary mess of agony that drowned out all other thoughts. It hurt to exist and movement only worsened the pain.  A numbing blackness swam at the edge of my mind, beckoning me towards it. It called to me, becoming more and more irresistible with every passing second. My head swam, a dizzy, lightheaded sensation mixing with the blinding pain. My throat was tight, and my limbs were too heavy to lift.

The urge to cough joined the light headed agony. My throat burned and ached, the siren call of the numbing blackness growing more and more appealing. My limbs flailed weakly. The cold surrounded me, weighing me down and dragging me into the abyss. I pushed my limbs to response. They were sluggish, ineffectually fighting against the weight holding me down. The burning in my lungs increased, and I gave in, inhaling only for my throat to descend into further burning agony as it ached and begged for air that it wouldn’t get.

A weight seemed to lift off of me, and my limbs all flailed. I could give in so easily here. If I stopped I wouldn’t move again, I just stay adrift in the cold numbness forever. I pushed harder, ignoring the blinding pain, ignoring how every instinct in my body told me to simultaneously fight and to give in.

I broke the water’s surface and coughed out water, eagerly wheezing in greedy, stuttering breaths of air. My arms felt heavy. My whole body felt heavy, an intense ache that seemed to fill my entire being pulsed through me ceaselessly. My arms hung uselessly by my side as I weakly kicked out with my legs, desperately trying to stay afloat.

Two of the oil rig’s pillars were missing, with only jagged concrete stumps jutting out of the water. The platform was a jagged, crooked line between the two remaining pillars, the rest of it slumping down at a steep angle towards the water. Scion glowed above the platform, only visible due to the golden glow. I kicked the water harder at the sight of him. Figures filled the sky above him, only to vanish in a flash of golden light. Capes rose from the platform, the distance making them look like ants.

Exhaustion fought me, steadily eating away at my floundering strength. My lips dipped below the waves for a minute, my kicks weakening as I tried to stay afloat. I couldn’t stay like this for much longer. I focused on my legs, on keeping a steady rhythm going. Kick. Kick. Kick. Something brushed my leg, but I ignored it, delving further into the pattern. Time passed in moments, each kick upwards blurring into the next, forming a hazy stream of movement. My eyes drooped shut, only for me to force them back open. They dropped again, exhaustion joining the pattern. Kick. Kick. Droop. Kick. Kick. Droop.

A white rectangle formed above me, the bottom expanding out to push into the water, drawing it in. Water flooded the pristine white hallway that lay on the other side of the portal. I let the water pull me in, I couldn’t afford to break the pattern for even a second.

The feeling of solid ground made my body erupt in pain and let out a short, uncontrolled laugh. I’d survived, I’d actually lived. Something small bumped into my arm, having been caught up in the rush of water. A familiar looking badge may next to me. Lab Rat’s injector.

A familiar numbness pushed at the edge of my mind and I couldn’t be bothered to resist it. I welcomed it, letting unconsciousness take me.