Blackvein breathed deep in the dark of the staging area, four blocks down from the bank. In, out. In, out.

  He knew where everyone was within the nearest 600 meters, because he was truly stretching himself. The bank was 400 meters away, and it was a 100 by 100 meter wide building. Mostly empty. It was mostly destructible on the inside, too, according to Noel, who stood 15 meters behind Mark right now.

  Noel was going over final checks on cameras and crewmen. It was 9:58.

  Blackvein was supposed to walk out onto the street at 10:00 on the dot, his crew behind him, all of them making their way to the bank within 2 minutes and in full view of everyone. The plot was pretty simple. Go to the bank, demand money, meet some small resistance and then knock it down, and then take the money for themselves. Tartu’s crew would bust in when they got the vault open, or after 4 minutes, whichever happened first, and then the fight would begin.

  Noel wanted at least a few taunts and talks at the beginning, before the fight. What everyone said was mostly up to them, but Noel wanted Mark to include something about ‘unjust charges’ and ‘I have my ways of getting adamantium, and wouldn’t you like to know’ and whatever else Mark felt like adding…

  Whatever Blackvein felt like adding.

  This conflict was supposed to happen on March 20th at the settlement, but it appeared to be happening today, tomorrow, the next day, and then finally on the last day, when Mark would either be captured, or Mark and his team would ‘capture’ the gatehouse, ousting Tartu, before ‘selling’ it back to Memphi.

  Whatever money Mark captured from the bank today was ‘going to be used to buy mercenaries’ to assault the gatehouse, later. In reality… it would probably be more complicated than that. It would probably involve a trip to the Villain’s Association, or whatever they called that organization here… Blackthorn had told Mark, but that name escaped him at the moment.

  Noel had told Mark best what to expect.

  “Treat it like a series of spars. Today’s spar might last at most 30 minutes. Other days might take hours.”

  There was some reasonableness to that suggestion.

  Mark was gonna treat it like a grudge match, though—

  The clock to the side struck 10:00 AM.

  The door opened.

  Cold light from a frosty morning streamed into the staging area. The sky was clearing from the frosty overcast it had been just an hour ago. The day was looking pretty great, actually.

  The street lay ahead, and the only people out on that street were actors and trained professionals. Years in the future, for events like this one, there would be people who won lotteries and super fans of various kinds out there among the actors. But for now, it was just actors. People who knew what they were doing.

  Maybe some of them were actors of the Collective, but probably not. Most of those paladins were one street over, furious at being denied their quarry. Mark absolutely knew that if the gods told them to act, they would act, but the fact that they hadn’t acted meant that the Pantheon was silent on this small action, happening here today. Maybe, years and years in the future, the gods might have things to say about Mark and his actions, and the actions of his team. But not today.

  Today was a day for ‘villainy’.

  Blackvein stepped out onto the morning sun, head held high, chest out, shoulders level.

  Platinum Princess giggled as she caught up and smirked. A hand rested on the hilt of an incongruently thick sword attached to a black belt on her miniskirt, her dark eyes dazzling.

  VeryHuman’s coat writhed underneath the surface, as he comfortably strode on Blackvein’s other side.

  … And Sally, well. She had a temporary name, for now.

  Sally was Miss Masher.

  Miss Masher took up the rear of the team, standing well over 2 meters tall and weighing in at a whole lot of kilograms.

  An old lady, the first target of the day, walked out of a coffee shop just ahead, a big paper mug in her hand. She saw Blackvein and startled, yelping as she threw the coffee up into the air. The coffee cup went flying upward, only spilling a little.

  In a flagrant disregard for Power use in the open, and right on cue, Blackvein plucked the coffee from the air with adamantium claws. It didn’t spill much at all. In a flagrant disregard for etiquette, Blackvein sipped the coffee himself, but he only pretended to sip the coffee. In reality he beat his heart with purity and cleansed away whatever it was in his mouth. Because it wasn’t all coffee. Sure, there was a little coffee in there, but that wasn’t the main thing.

  There was shavallian hidden in that drink, and it tasted exactly how Mark had researched. It tasted like clay.

  The actor who had thrown the coffee into the air didn’t know what they had done, though. The coffee had been dosed without them knowing it, and some of the paladins one street over were waiting for Mark to falter. Not all of them, though. Just some. All of them were waiting for him to get captured by Tartu, but only a few knew of the shavallian.

  There was a plot there, and Blackvein saw it, and he avoided it.

  Blackvein beat his heart with moisture and drew from the world, into his mouth. He spat, perhaps a bit too heavily, and then he dashed the coffee cup on the ground, telling the old woman, “Drink better coffee.”

  Right on cue, as though nothing was wrong at all, the old woman stuttered, disbelieving everything she was seeing, and then she stood up straight. “Well I never! Didn’t your mother teach you better!”

  It was not the line they were supposed to say. Mark forgot what they were supposed to say; he had only been exposed to the idea of all of this 10 minutes ago.

  The world darkened. Adamantium clawed at the ground.

  Blackvein shot back, “Demons killed her.”

  The old woman paled, stumbling back against a wall. A bystander stopped her from falling to the ground.

  Blackvein walked on.

  Quark wrote on his visor, “Your spellbreaker half-activated. Spit more.”

  Mark flinched hard, but he spat several more times until the taste was more than gone; all he could taste was pure water. Isoko touched Mark with a concerned Union. Several people watched, wondering what had just happened.

  Behind them, the old woman was concerned, too. She picked up the coffee cup and had no idea what had happened. The man who had prevented her from falling had no idea, either.

  Mark let go whatever oddness had just happened, because the show must go on. He shook his head at Isoko, saying not to worry about it. Sally and Eliot got the same message, too, though Sally glanced back at the coffee cup a lot.

  Isoko acknowledged that Mark wasn’t injured, so she moved on.

  Platinum Princess leaned in, saying, “So tense, Blackvein! Jobs are supposed to be fun.”

  “Look lively,” VeryHuman said, taking his cue. A visor poked out of his trenchcoat and layered over his eyes. “Target ahead. ETA to Hero Association arrival clocks in at 4 minutes on average, and the AI systems have already targeted us as suspicious. We break the door and the clock starts.”

  The team stopped across the street from the bank. They surveyed the target.

  The ‘First Bank of Memphi’ was like a U-shaped 3-story building surrounding a city block, with the entire center space layered over with a glass facade. It was like having a rather open and well-lit courtyard in the middle of office space. Big, easily breakable doors separated that courtyard from the street. A large brass vault door held in the back of the U of the building, easily visible through the glass from way out here.

  A few cars went this way and that way on the street, but they were the same cars that had been sent back and forth ever since Blackvein and crew had stepped out into the open.

  Miss Masher stepped forward, drone cameras floating all around. She tried not to look at the cameras as she mumbled, “Don’t lose… the… uh… line?”

  Platinum Princess rapidly whispered, “ ‘Don’t lose nerve; I’ve always wanted to do this.’ ”

  Sally stood tall and strong, her muscles flexing under her partially transparent webweave. She had put on a black half-mask sometime when Mark wasn’t watching. She looked like half of a match for Mark’s own adamantium mask, but without the crown of claws, which Mark still didn’t have on.

  The actor-driven cars turned around on the road and came back.

  Miss Masher said, “Don’t lose nerve.” She grinned, even though she was sweating heavily, and said, “I’ve always wanted to do this.”

  The cars passed.

  Miss Masher touched off of the ground and sailed across 20 meters of road, several meters of sidewalk, and crashed right into the glass facade of the bank. With a ripping tear, she destroyed the glass and the frame holding the glass, and then she was in.

  People started screaming inside. People on the street ran away. Someone shouted about calling the Hero Association, and that last one was surely caught directly on the drones flying around.

  Platinum Princess giggled and followed Miss Masher in mostly the same way as the giant woman, but now there was a giant hole in the glass for her to go through, and she moved much faster than Miss Masher ever could. As Platinum Princess flew through the air her speed modifier made her look like she was moving fast forward on a video, and her platinum everything made her look like a flowing mirror. It was uncanny, really.

  She was also wearing a black half-mask that Blackvein hadn’t seen her with until that moment.

  They were hiding those masks from Blackvein, weren’t they—

  VeryHuman smiled as he walked ahead, turning to Blackvein as he donned a black mask of his own that covered everything but his mouth, as he said, “Last one in gets the smallest share!”

  Blackvein laughed, and it was a real laugh. And then he focused and flowed across the ground, hovering, his caltrops letting him move almost like a real flier. “You’ll get everything that is left over from capturing the gate from the city.”

  “I’m fine with that, too!” VeryHuman said, as he reached the smashed-open wall. He melted the broken doors and glass into ornate turret guns that pointed at everyone in the bank, as he yelled out on speaker, “Everyone shut up and get down on the ground!”

  Weak bullets, which were more like mechanically-propelled chips of metal, ratta-tat-tatt’ed out of the turret guns, shattering displays and cracking across stone. Paintings ripped under the gunfire and people screamed and got down.

  And then Blackvein arrived, floating above them all, hands out to the sides, bits of adamantium floating like shards of absolute black around his right hand. A spike of black, curling and twisting and very pointed, waited for action by his left fist. More shards floated around his back.

  The bank was mostly subdued, but not really at all. Actors were on the ground, hands behind their heads. Four guards waited ahead, stationed behind alcoves where they could shoot with guns at anyone who came inside the place. They were shouting.

  Platinum Princess had her sword out and laid against the neck of a cowering woman in a red suit, who had a button in her hand. Platinum Princess shouted back at the guards, “Slide the guns across the floor or your manager gets a head shorter.”

  The manager said, “I already called the Hero Association! They’ll be here in 3 minutes.”

  Platinum Princess tapped the woman on the back of the head, saying, “Shut up.”

  The manager went limp. She was still fully awake, but she was ‘sleeping’ now.

  Some of the actors on the ground cried. One woman wailed a little.

  Platinum Princess pointed her thick sword at the wailing woman, and threatened, “Quiet.”

  They went quiet.

  Miss Masher said, “3 minutes ain’t a lot of time.”

  VeryHuman said, “Get to the vault and I can get it open.”

  That was the cue for the four guards by the vault door. They came out shooting, almost heroically. The bullets were just tier 0 stuff, though, so—

  Mark felt a thump in his chest, right next to his right shoulder, followed rapidly by another thump that was very clearly a second bullet entering his stomach, piercing his webweave and lodging into his guts. Other bullets pinged off of Isoko’s platinum form and Sally’s Giant Strength skin, and Eliot’s rather normal Body-enhanced flesh. Eliot was the only person here who Mark was worried about when it came to actual injury, because he couldn’t heal himself that well.

  None of the guard’s bullets hurt them at all, which is how it should have been.

  He shouldn’t have needed to worry about injury at all because he had a PL 60 Body, and normal bullets were a tier 0 material, because these were bullets from Earth. They couldn’t do anything against anyone with a good Body, and Mark had a good Body score. He had Healthy Body, even, so he had a real Body Talent; not just a boosted Body score because it was one step over in the Power Hex, that went Body, Shaper, Mind, Natural, Arcane, and Arch, and then back to Body.

  And then Mark noticed a vector that he hadn’t noticed before. It had been too far away. It was still too far away, but it was focused on Mark with an intensity that bordered on fanatical.

  “3 minutes, huh?” Blackvein mused, as he joined his Union with the world, and against the sudden coordination from the other Union users out there, just out of sight, trying to deny him power.

  Blackvein almost mused about hidden traitors, and subterfuge. He almost ranted about how he had been lying about selling Addavein’s adamantium, because the alternative was being outed as adamantium blooded, and that seemed a lot worse. It was worse, really, as evidenced by nations working behind each other’s backs, making sure the secret didn’t get out, that this fight was solved in the shadows instead of openly. An open war for control of Mark would probably be a lot worse than this shadow war, though, so Blackvein went along with this decision, because it benefited him to do so.

  So instead of talking about anything, because Kardi didn’t seem willing to follow the plot, Blackvein reached into his body with adamantium and plucked out Kardi’s, AKA Luckygun’s, bullets. He felt Kardi’s distant vector twitch again, beyond the clouding vectors of all of the Unions out there organized against him. Kardi was either hateful, or she had shot another shot, and the answer was probably both.

  Blackvein raised a thin shield of adamantium in front of himself—

  A bullet slipped through the broken glass roof and splattered against Blackvein’s shield like so many sparks, drawing eyes his way. Somewhere beyond the cameras, Noel knew what was happening and he was on the phone, or something like that, shouting at someone.

  Platinum Princess knew something was up; she felt the other Unions out there suddenly work against her.

  Miss Masher was focused on the mission, though. She was acting against the guards, easily ignoring their bullets, saying, “Don’t ya got any good bullets? Ha! Guards ain’t worth crap! I hope the heroes are better when they get here!”

  Blackvein said, “They’re already here. VeryHuman, subdue the guards.”

  It was a break in the plan. Sally was worried, now.

  Platinum Princess leapt toward Miss Masher, saying, “Let me help!” And then she started swinging her sword, faster than most people could follow. Some guards held out their guns while trying not to be too obvious about it and Platinum Princess carved right through those guns. The last guy tried to stand his ground, but Platinum slapped him across the face with the back of her blade, in a way that he told her was okay by just tapping the side of his face once. The last guy went down, and Platinum stood tall, saying, “No trouble at all!”

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

  Miss Masher had taken a swing at one of the guards, and that was it. It wasn’t a very good swing. The cameras would probably make it look better in post.

  VeryHuman smiled anyway as he stepped forward and twisted the clothes on the guards, turning parts of their clothes into ropes and ties and locking them up with their legs and arms tied to each other, behind their backs. And then he approached the giant bronze vault door, holding solid in the back of the room like a rising sun.

  VeryHuman touched the door, and said, “Enchanted! Can’t do it!”

  None of them were aware Mark had been shot, and that was fine. He would tell them later.

  Miss Masher raced forward and put hands on the vault door, saying, “One minute.” And then she started pulling with her Tactile Telekinesis. The door groaned. Stuff clicked on the inside.

  One of the guards said, “You’ll never get it open in time! Surrender!”

  Blackvein deflected another bullet from the ceiling, shot from a good 500 meters away, he estimated, because now he could feel Kardi out there, beyond the mist of the interfering Freyalan paladins in the block next door. Kardi didn’t have great targeting at that distance, but she could still hit him if she tried.

  Blackvein said, “500 meters away and coming closer— 300 meters. They’re on a hovercar— They’re here.”

  Blackvein looked up, and the cameras looked up with him.

  A shadow loomed overhead and then there was a thick-walled hovervan that was made for war and infiltration. It crashed through the roof, scattering metal and glass everywhere, a little bit of snow falling in and instantly melting in the heat of the bank. People yelled in confusion. This was not part of the plan, but Tartu, and the paladin of the Collective driving the hovercar, had wanted to cut off that direction of escape.

  The paladins outside of the space protected all of the actors, who were now truly fucking terrified because this should not be happening. Then the exterior paladins inflamed that fear response, and the actors all yelled and began to race out of there.

  Eliot panicked, looking up, yelling, “The FUCKING hell—” He opened up a wall and slipped the tied-up guards away, turning the ground briefly into a conveyor belt, and then he slammed the wall back shut, yelling overhead, “The FUCK!”

  “That’s an edit-in-post,” Platinum Princess calmly reminded Eliot.

  Blackvein centered his team, ripping away the exterior Union of fear and calm out of Eliot, and Eliot relaxed, becoming VeryHuman again, and then he realized he had been fucked with and now he was furious. He was prepared to do something, but he didn’t know what. VeryHuman’s vector sunk into the floor and the walls and he was set to do something, but he needed targets, first.

  Platinum Princess and Miss Masher were ready for a fight, too.

  The vehicle opened up overhead, disgorging a hero team wearing mostly white and a little blue, from Shawn, the tank, Lenny, the mud mage, and then Kardi, Luckygun, and Tartu, the leader. Spherix.

  They should have leapt into the middle of the room, to look like heroes for the cameras, while Blackvein’s team stood around in the shadows, looking threatening. There should have been insults and taunts. There should have been words. None of that happened.

  Lenny —with a hero name Mark didn’t remember— threw balls of mud at Isoko as he launched out of the side of the transport van, his vector angry for a rematch.

  Shawn kicked off of the hover van, striking a pillar in the bank, and then he leapt off of that, aiming his big sword toward Sally, which was the best possible match up for both of them, from a narrative perspective. Two paladins of Drakarok, both with Retribution, would make their fight a good fight for the camera.

  Shawn was still following the program.

  Lenny was, too.

  Luckygun descended from a rope, automatic rifle in hand as she opened up on Mark. Kardi was not following the program. From how far those deflected bullets chunked into the marble floor and the stone walls, she was shooting PL75 materials. Or maybe just really good alchemical silver’d bullets. Both were bad options for fight safety.

  Spherix threw out diffuse spheres of Domains onto every member of Blackvein’s crew. They were designed to block Union, and they were like drawing a cover over Blackvein’s sight. Tartu’s second round of spheres were more like balls of contained ice that he blasted out like snowballs from a wand concealed under his left wrist.

  Those balls of frost impacted everyone, though Blackvein was already shielding himself from Kardi with an adamantium shield and that ball of frost merely dissipated. VeryHuman’s trenchcoat reached up and slapped the frost orb away. Platinum Princess stepped to the side. The ball of frost aimed for Miss Masher hit her directly, and did exactly fuck all.

  For a single moment, Mark almost let the fight happen as it was supposed to happen.

  But then someone flowed through the room like an unseen force, their vector moving too fast to see, dashing behind Eliot and grabbing him and then removing him from combat entirely. Eliot was here, and then Eliot was gone.

  It had been a speedster.

  It was always possible, Blackvein supposed, for a speedster to do that. A true speedster, anyway. Not like Isoko with a 2x modifier. But someone else, like Inquisitor David, with a 35x modifier? Yeah. He could have ended the fight before it even began, really, just by stabbing Mark with a syringe full of shavallian. But he hadn’t done that.

  He had just gotten Eliot out of there, while leaving the rest of them to fend for themselves.

  Mark was pretty sure it had been David, too, because that vector had felt familiar, but it could have been someone else. Maybe.

  Probably not.

  Blackvein decided to stop playing around. Perhaps he should have stopped playing around when he tasted shavallian on his tongue in the coffee, but that wasn’t the actor’s fault. Even right now, in these two seconds after Eliot had been removed, Noel in his command booth and all of the actors who had run away screaming, were all wondering what had happened. Most of them, Noel especially, were starting to get really mad.

  Blackvein was already furious, though, and this time he didn’t stop himself.

  The world darkened.

  Black veins beat out across Mark’s skin, into the air, connecting him forcibly to every Union out there that was trying to fuck him up, to take away his freedom. All of them were working for people they didn’t even know were lying to them, who were trying to be tyrants, to oppress.

  Mark could play that game, too.

  Obedience, and free will.

  Mark became the center of freedom, and everyone would bow to him.

  Black lightning tore through Domains, slamming into Tartu, making the guy fall onto his face instead of onto his feet. Kardi’s gun slipped from her fingers as she finished sliding down the rope. She went sprawling to her knees in the broken glass, in the slippery snow. Lenny teetered over and slammed face first into the ground, while Shawn threw his sword away, twisted like he was a puppet on strings, and crashed his face into the ground, in Mark’s direction.

  Outside, out of sight, paladins behaved. Some of them bowed. Some crashed to their knees.

  The world was silent, except for the tinkling of falling glass and distant screaming.

  And then distant screaming turned obedient, too.

  Silence.

  Mark walked, slowly, across the ground, to Tartu, who stared up from the floor at Mark, eyes full of wonder and subservience. Mark paused and looked at him. He said, “Spouting lies to the media, huh, Tartu? Or maybe I’ll just call you ‘Traitor’, from now on.”

  Tartu almost tried to say he was sorry, to say something else, but anything he would have said would have been under the influence, so Mark shut him down with a single turn of his head, a single hint of an order to remain silent, and Tartu remained silent. Tartu stared at the ground, and thought about what he had done, and how he had failed Mark in every way possible.

  Mark ignored him and walked on to the vault.

  He turned a few bits of adamantium into a long, thin blade, and then he pierced the minimally-enchanted vault door and whipped the blade around in a wide circle, drilling a slightly-tapered hole into the bronze. The bronze protested meekly, with a whimper and sparks, and then it was broken.

  Mark floated backward as the door slammed outward, cracking the floor with its tonnage.

  Piles of fake gold lay under bright lights along with jewels and other costume stuff that almost looked real. Two crate-stacks of 100-goldleaf notes, each of them a meter cubed, were perhaps the shiniest things in the room. It was fake goldleaf, of course. But fake goldleaf shimmered with that same flecked-gold look that real goldleaf had.

  Mark looked for the only real thing in the place, and he found it.

  Four duffle bags sat open in the back of the place, each of them filled with fake goldleaf, but each one was still worth 50k goldleaf. According to the parameters of the mission, Mark and them were supposed to attack the bank and then get run off or captured, and depending on how well the fights went, they could have a certain number of bags, without issue. If they got away with all of the bags, though, then they got to keep them all.

  It was some complicated thing that Mark had heard, but he didn’t really understand, and he didn’t care to really understand, not after all the shit that had been pulled on them.

  There were now cop cars outside of the place waiting to capture them, and according to that scenario, Mark and them should walk away in handcuffs. The cops weren’t supposed to arrive for… a while.

  How long?

  Oh.

  Mark remembered that detail, but did details really matter in the face of power?

  The cops were the hard 10 minute time limit. The team would have gotten money based on how much they could take in the allowed time for the mission. If they were in and out, they got all 4 bags.

  “But we’re not following all the rules, are we,” Blackvein said to Platinum Princess.

  Platinum Princess and Miss Masher were both very worried about everything they were seeing, but they weren’t in Mark’s Union right now. They were, however, in a Union with each other, with Isoko protecting Sally however she could, and Sally’s skin glittering with golden spikes as she protected herself, too.

  Mark’s spillover of Obedience and Free Will were affecting them, even though he tried not to. But when you were connected to the world, you were connected to the world.

  Blackvein grabbed all four bags and handed one each to Platinum Princess and Miss Masher, and then he began floating out of the bank vault, saying, “I suppose when VeryHuman shows up again, he can get his share then.”

  Black sparks glittered on the ground where Mark’s caltrops kept him aloft. Black sparks glittered on Tartu, and Kardi, and on everything.

  Mark floated onward.

  - - - -

  Isoko felt the world bear down on her, on everyone, black veins sparking out of every person and on the edge of every surface. It was like Tartu’s Domain, but on another level entirely.

  Isoko held on to Sally as best she could, keeping them out of the effect, her own Full Platinum offering her a good amount of defense against this attack, but only because she had Union to sense Mark’s intrusion and to keep it out. It was all she could do to keep them separate. Sally surely would have fallen under Mark’s sway if Isoko wasn’t constantly plucking black lightning away from her. Sally’s own Retribution was only working in the after effects of that plucking, to heal her from Mark’s effect.

  Sally shook her head again, trying to clear her mind.

  Mark floated past Tartu on the ground, and Tartu’s body crawled with black lightning.

  Tartu whimpered as he pressed his face into the broken glass on the ground, and not because of the pain, but because he knew he was not repentant enough.

  … He would be fine, right? As soon as Mark stopped this?

  Isoko normally wouldn’t give a shit about Tartu or the others on his team, because yeah, they had turned traitor by siding against Mark—

  Isoko plucked black lightning out of her body and she focused on doing that for herself and Sally, and walking, and that was all she could do. Mark wasn’t even targeting her, not directly. The spillover was, though.

  Isoko wondered what Freyala was doing right now, but not too much. Not too strongly. She was still plucking black lightning out of herself and Sally.

  They moved onto the street, with Mark floating ahead.

  There should have been a safe zone up ahead down an alleyway, but cop cars were everywhere. Some of them were hovercars. Some of the hovercars were Collective cars. Some of the people were normal cops, in blue and silver. Some were guards of Memphi, in black and yellow. Some were paladins, wearing breastplates. If there were actors among the crowd, Isoko couldn’t pick them out.

  All of them were bowing to Mark, though some of them looked more like they had crashed onto the ground, face planting into the asphalt, rather than taking a bow.

  Mark floated forward, never deviating around any vehicle, for he casually moved any offending car out of his way with a push of adamantium. One particularly offensive vehicle, parked right in front of the designated exit to the scenario, Mark cut in half. He pulled the pieces apart, tossing metal to the sides, unblocking the way forward.

  Drones floated in the air around him the whole time, just like his shards of adamantium; organized and careful.

  And then Mark walked down the side street to the exit. Isoko and Sally were right behind him.

  He crossed the red line of the safe zone, and Isoko and Sally were still behind him.

  Mark sat down on a bench, and for a moment, he looked like a tired king.

  And then his black lightning retreated inward, and the world relaxed.

  Sound returned all at once. Isoko hadn’t noticed that no one had been speaking at all, anywhere, until everyone started talking at once. Had she even noticed the screech of metal when Mark had torn that car in half? Yes, she had. But it had been muted.

  The world was at full volume right now and that volume was angry.

  Cops demanded things. Paladins yelled. None of them approached too close.

  Mark sat there, tired in every way possible, even though his adamantium was ready for a real fight.

  And then Archmage Blackthorn descended from the sky, smoking his massive cigar. “Good show! I already picked up Eliot. Let’s get back before everyone gets really mad, though it’s not like they didn’t deserve it after putting shavallian in that coffee.”

  Isoko went from uncertain about everything to furious as fuck. “They did WHAT?!”

  Sally turned ice cold and hateful. “Should have kicked Tartu in the guts for that.”

  Mark stood, waved a hand, and said, “Most of the people here didn’t know what was really happening.”

  “Hm hm hm!” Blackthorn said, smirking. “Do you know what is happening right now?”

  “All I know is I never want to have to do that ever again.” And then Mark said, “I’ll take that rescue, now.”

  As they ascended, as Isoko gripped an adamantium hand that felt so very hard in her own platinum grip, Isoko looked down at Noel Oliphant, who had raced out into the open.

  Noel shouted upward, “Great job!”

  Some paladins started arguing with him, and he yelled right back at them.

  It hadn’t gone like Isoko had expected at all, but…

  She smirked.

  No matter the outcome of today, her name was out there now.

  What would Mom and Dad and Grandma say?

  The program wouldn’t broadcast until tonight, but tonight was pretty close!

  The coming argument about Mark subduing everyone’s free will would be happening much sooner, but Isoko was prepared to shut that down. Mark had already said he didn’t want to do that ever again. That should be enough. You could acknowledge the bad you did and promise never to do it again if you had to, but you always had to have options. Morals would get you killed out in the real world.

  Isoko was glad Mark didn’t apologize, though.

  Fuck those guys from the Collective!

  Like seriously!

  What was happening there!