Wearing the Cape 5: Ronin Games Read online

  Wearing the Cape: Ronin Games.

  by Marion G. Harmon

  Copyright© 2015 by Marion G. Harmon

  Cover by Jamal Campbell

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  Ronin

  Historically, a masterless samurai (lit., a wave-man). Outside the political power-structure, ronin lived as mercenaries and bodyguards, or as outlaws and robbers when work could not be found. In Post-Event Japan “ronin” is slang for Active Non-Government Powers (ANGPs), freelance superhumans, criminal or otherwise, who use their powers without government sanction.

  Barlow’s Guide to Superheroes

  Contents

  Ronin

  Episode One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Episode Two

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Episode Three

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty One

  Chapter Twenty Two

  Episode Four

  Chapter Twenty Three

  Chapter Twenty Four

  Chapter Twenty Five

  Chapter Twenty Six

  Chapter Twenty Seven

  Chapter Twenty Eight

  Chapter Twenty Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty One

  Epilogue

  Episode One

  Chapter One

  “Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.”

  Sun Tzu, The Art of War

  “Don’t let them see you coming, and don’t let them get back up.”

  Atlas

  * * *

  Artemis dropped out of mist and onto the table, and that would have pretty much ended the poker game even if my bursting through the warehouse’s high windows in a shower of glass above them hadn’t ruined the players’ night. Lit by the crackling halo of her electrostatic field, Lei Zi floated through the shattered windows behind me and fired off a carefully calibrated electromagnetic pulse, the sticky charge of free electrons washing past me to send an electronics-killing surge through any unshielded devices inside the zone. “Go, go, go!” she chanted in my earbug on the open channel.

  I let myself fall with the glass. No sense rushing anywhere while I was still picking targets.

  “Hard targets here and here!” Shell used our neural link to outline two of the players at the table in virtual green. Painting them directly through my visual cortex, she left all but one of the rest in yellow and painted the last target in red: unidentified. I angled right. The green icon on Big Blondie identified him as a straight up A Class Ajax-Type, but the green three-headed dragon icon on the black haired man beside him named him my target—Zmey Gorynich.

  A thrill chased through me like a shot from Lei Zi, equal parts excitement and nerves; three weeks work and prep, and tonight we got to rid Chicago of its latest monster. “I’m on Zmey! Svyatogor—”

  “Is incoming!” Even dropping into a desperate fight, I could hear the laughter in Shell’s voice. “He says ‘Don’t be greedy!’”

  Below me Artemis snapped multiple stun-shots into the red unknown target with her electrolasers before leaping up and back into mist to clear the way for me. I fell right through her to destroy the table, swinging Malleus without pausing to straighten up—straight into the open, shocked face of the man Shell identified as Zmey. My hit threw him across the wide-open warehouse space.

  An all-in hit backed by one hundred pounds of titanium maul would do that to anybody, and I had one horrific moment to wonder if our intelligence had been bad and I’d just killed someone I’d never met—but there was no blood, no brains, no unspeakable mess; just a man flying backwards from the force of my unrestrained hit. “Score!” Shell cheered. “Don’t let him touch—”

  “I know!” I shot after him, ignoring Blondie and the others still at the table. Svyatogor’s briefing had let us know just how small the window we had in which we could hurt Zmey without paying a price, and I was going to get in every hit that I could in before the window closed. Behind me Artemis’ elasers snapped again as she dropped back into flesh to engage the rest of her targets. The crunching smash of brick and mortar outside my field of attention told me Svyatogor had entered the warehouse. On my right Riptide blew a loading door off its hinges in an explosion of water. I kept my eyes on Zmey.

  The warehouse wall stopped the Russian boss’s bouncing roll and the cadaverously skinny man made it back upright before I caught him again. My hardest hit from Malleus hadn’t even shaken him—just taken him off his feet—and the eyes he turned to me glowed.

  “NO!”

  Whatever his roaring, spitting denial meant, it was all he got out before I hit him again, smashing him back into the wall—this time it felt a lot heavier, like I’d hit an elephant.

  Crap! Crap crap crap crap! The man was changing already!

  “Down!” Shell yelled in my earbug and I dropped to the floor and rolled away as an iron club as big as me spun through the space I’d occupied and smashed Zmey again. A retina-burning flash of lightning-strike from Lei Zi lit him up, shaking even him, and then I was back in the air and out of his reach with Malleus held ready as he continued to change into something else.

  “Yeah, that’s not good,” Shell said.

  “Really? Do you think?”

  Four hits from us had barely shaken him and now, stepping away from the wall, Zmey thickened and stretched. His long fingers grew longer, turning spidery, his skin marbling and darkening to coal-black as heat poured off him in waves. A volley of snaps behind me marked Artemis’ continued work on the street-villains at the table. I ignored them. The liquid hiss of rushing water told me Riptide was doing his job, pulling in and backing up a load of his own ammunition, waiting on me. Another loud crash told me someone else—probably Grendel—had arrived to deal with the remaining Ajax-Type, but I didn’t look around. Shell would tell me if there was a problem.

  Speaking of which… “Shell? How’s the evacuation coming?”

  “The CPD Superpower Response units are clearing the street and adjacent buildings. So far Rush, Variforce, and Watchman haven’t had to keep anything in here from getting out there.”

  “Zmey…”

  “I know—that might be about to change. They’re ready if it does.”

  That was good to know; Svyatogor had told us the Russian Bratva preferred to make their meeting places in urban areas, where heavy fighting could easily bring on heavy civilian casualties—this base sat right in the middle of a half-gentrified Chicago warehouse district. The former warehouse across the street had been turned into lofts, a shopping arcade, and a club, and half of this building was a restaurant and club now. We’d have rather fought absolutely anywhere but here, but this was our best—and maybe our only—chance to catch the Bratva captain and his soldiers all in one place.

  Zmey yelled something Russian at Svyatogor, his words a shiver-inducing crackling hiss. Svyatogor just laughed as his iron club whirled through the air and back to his hands. As big as it was, it looked small in the Russian giant’s grip.

  “That is so cool!” Shell enthused, and I had to agree. I gripped M
alleus hard. Svyatogor had made it crystal clear that I wasn’t to directly touch Zmey once he’d changed or let him touch me under any circumstances.

  “Shell? How are we doing?”

  “Grendle’s got blondie down, Artemis and Lei Zi have got the rest, Riptide is almost ready—”

  Zmey charged, arms wide, the cement beneath him cracking and bubbling. “Rip, now!” I yelled. Lei Zi had left the order to me since I’d be closest.

  Ready or not, Riptide cut loose with all the water he’d gathered behind us. Twin jets blew past me and Zmey disappeared in a back-blast of explosively superheated steam.

  The expansive force of water-to-steam off his body threw Zmey back again, the vapor cloud filling the open warehouse space hiding him from sight except as a shining infrared beacon to my super-duper vision. Even I could feel the superheated water vapor, burning points on my skin as I held my breath. Then the steam cloud retreated, pushed back and up under Riptide’s control, and I gasped as cooler air washed over me.

  Zmey had fallen to his knees. He rose again, still roaring, but I could feel the difference—he’d lost a lot of heat in explosive energy-transfer to Riptide’s jets. Now. I launched and swung, smashing him down again—

  His flailing hand swiped me in passing, pouring blazing agony on my leg. “Hope!” Shell shrieked with me as I flew up, somehow keeping hold of Malleus.

  “Astra, withdraw!” Lei Zi shouted as Riptide hit Zmey below me and Svyatogor pounded him again with his dancing club.

  Pulling back to just under the ceiling, I fumbled with the catches of my leg armor. The Vulcan-forged ceramic armor had blackened and cracked where Zmey’s hand had just brushed it. Under it, my leg felt dipped in fire.

  Blinking, I squeezed my eyes shut to clear the tears. The pain was a good thing—it meant my nerves hadn’t been destroyed—and under my blackened uniform my calf presented only cooked red, no blistering or blackened flesh. I let the broken armor piece fall and scanned the scene below me.

  Lei Zi, Artemis, and Grendel had accounted for Zmey’s soldiers. Except for blondie, who had needed Grendel for the beat-down, the Bratva members were mostly street-villains. Blackstone’s intelligence had been solid.

  “Are you okay?” Shell whispered in my earbug—a totally pointless question since she had to know exactly what I was feeling through our neural link.

  “My leg is on fire,” I gasped, voice a shaky whine. “Other than that, I’m peachy.” And Zmey hadn’t even touched me directly. Lesson learned. The air rang with another hit from Svyatogor’s dancing club.

  “You have got to get one of those return-to-sender things.”

  I controlled my breathing, tried to match Shell’s nonchalance. “Svyatogor told me it’s enchanted? Made by one of their Baba Yagas? He called her his ‘little Babushka’.”

  “Hey! Maybe Ozma can do something with Malleus?”

  Another air-shaking impact in the thickening vapor clouds. Every time Zmey tried to close with the giant Svyatogor—who could have made three Grendels and was a big and relatively slow target—Riptide punched him back into the wall with another explosive reaction of brick-cracking heat and cold water. Despite being heavy brick, the wall didn’t look like it could take a lot more of it.

  “Lei Zi?” I called through my earbug. “It might be a good idea to have Variforce buttress the north wall? He can just ask Watchman where the hotspot is.”

  “Good call. On it.”

  I relaxed a little. Zmey’s near-blinding furnace heat had started to dim with each hit, so the precaution might not needed, and it was possible that Variforce’s variable-property fields could even handle the energy-transfer from direct contact with the Hell’s furnace that Zmey was now.

  Then the Russian mob boss divided.

  “There he goes!” Shell gasped as he split into three, even though we’d known it was coming. The two new Zmeys flanking the original broke right and left past Riptide’s latest water jets, charging for Svyatogor, Artemis, and Grendel. I dove without thinking.

  “Astra fall back!” Lei Zi cut in.

  Not insane, I led with Malleus—brought it down hard on the left Zmey’s back to crush him to the floor. Mere proximity to his sprawled limbs washed me in searing heat, his reaching fingers missing me by inches as I hit the ground and leaped up again.

  “Astra! Fall! Back!”

  Jacky had retreated into mist again, effectively invisible in the oven-hot and steam filled building. Grendel had been braced to smash his own Zmey with what was left of the table, but we’d drilled together enough that he dropped it and caught my grab for our double wrist-grip as I flew past and took us up. Water jets strong enough to carve rocks blasted past below us as Riptide shifted targets.

  The nearly concussive explosion of superheated steam wasn’t so concussive this time. “Lei Zi!” I yelled over the near-deafening crackle and roar. “The Zmeys are cooler! They’re cooling down!”

  “I know!” Below us, Svyatogor battered the Zmey reaching for him with an air-shaking hit from his club.

  “Astra.”

  I looked down at Grendel. He was reshaping himself—I could feel the skin around his wrist thickening under my grip, taking on texture.

  “Drop me.”

  “What—”

  Below us, Blondie was getting up from Grendel’s beat-down. That put three Zmeys and Blondie against Svyatogor and Riptide and we were losing the ground-fight. Grendel look up past our linked arms to give me his toothiest grin. “You take the Ajax, I’ve got Zmey.”

  A few months ago I’d have asked Grendel if he was sure. Now I just let go and dove, dropping so fast I beat him to the ground.

  Blondie didn’t see me coming and I smashed into him sideways, maul-first, to punch us both through the warehouse wall opposite the hole Svyatogor had made coming in.

  “I’ve got him!” I shouted as we hit the street in a rain of bricks. The street outside was empty of civilians, lit by flashing police lights.

  The blond guy agreed. He yelled something Russian as he twisted and his elbow came up, and my vision exploded into sparks of light. I rolled desperately to get beyond his reach, but he caught me again with something and—the breeze smelled of spring and I looked up at the waving branches above me. Flashes of dappled sunlight through the blossom-heavy branches touched my face and I sighed happily. Sitting up, I—

  “Hope! Hope!” Shell stood over me, slapping me with virtual quantum-ghost hands that felt like she’d picked up bricks for extra weight.

  “What?”

  “He kicked you in the head! Get up!”

  I looked around. Above the red and blue strobe of the police lights, camera-flash lit the night. Ten feet from me, between us and the police barricades, blondie hung suspended in layers of Variforce’s fields—a fly trapped in golden amber. Not that he was frozen; he fought hard and I could see the fields holding him flex and strain as Variforce laid more down.

  “Right. Thanks Shell.” I stood up, bent to lift Malleus from where it lay on the street as the crowd behind the barricades cheered. My head felt like he’d almost kicked it off and everything had a slight halo around it, but it was my turn.

  * * *

  The fight was over when we stepped back through the hole after handing blondie over to the police, unconscious and fitted with Blacklock shackles. Steam and smoke choked the air.

  “Well, that was fun…” With no need to worry about distracting me, Shell had decided to hang around virtually. Her clean athletic shirt and cutoff shorts didn’t match the burned out and drowned space around us. Her shirt read “If you can’t take the heat, stay out of the kitchen,” red on black.

  “Really?” I gingerly worked my head side to side, testing my range of pain-free motion. “Define ‘fun.’”