Summus Proelium

It was a very special convoy that made its way south away from the currently-quarantined city of Detroit. Consisting of five armored (and armed) SUVs riding shotgun around what appeared to be an ordinary full-sized semi-truck like any other on the freeway that could have been delivering food or other supplies across the country, some might have been a bit confused by the sight.

But this was no ordinary semi. The walls of the trailer were made of a particular alloy that would stand up against a direct missile strike without revealing a blemish. Adding to that, a Touched-Tech generator within the cab of the truck projected a nearly-invisible energy shield, which not only added to the protection level but also prevented virtually any sort of teleportation in or out of the truck. Sensors within the trailer part monitored the number of occupants and would deploy countermeasures both within the general area, and directly into the intended occupants themselves should any additional, unintended people arrive within that space despite the teleportation blocking shield. The same sensors monitored any movement in that area, which should have been quite minimal given how well-secured the passengers within were.

Passengers, or as they actually were in truth, prisoners. This armored semi-truck, and the convoy it was attached to, carried the remaining members of the Scions of Typhon. Aside, of course, from the one called Cup, who had betrayed them and her own brother so effectively. Nine Touched prisoners were contained within. Three of them fully established Touched members of that gang of psychopaths. Fork, the fully human man who looked like an anthropomorphic porcupine and was able to project and mentally direct his explosive quills. Box, the man capable of creating orbs that would explode into various elements. And Anchovy, who could force any person he focused on to have incredibly bad luck on anything they were attempting to do at the time. Each of them alone was responsible for dozens of murders personally, and as a group… they were some of the most prolific serial killers in recent memory.

Meanwhile, the other six prisoners were all those who had been actively attempting to join that group. Each killers in their own right, each so very dangerous. Trove, the girl with the gems of various colors and abilities. Stogie, the man who could change himself into a smoke shape that could transition between solid and not at his will. Label, who projected a blast of concussive force followed by a bolt of electricity with his roar, the target of which would sprout suffocating mushroom spores. Slipper, a woman who could create ghost-knights under her direction. Plate, a metal manipulator who grew incredibly strong when touching that metal. And Tractor, whose concussive waves of energy incapacitated any living being through nausea and pain while creating explosions of various effects when targeted against nonliving material.

Needless to say, no one was saddened to see those nine monsters being taken away from Detroit. The city had enough problems as it was, and hardly needed them adding to the situation. Especially now. These nine would be driven to a maximum security prison in Ohio, before being taken through the court systems and almost certainly sent to Breakwater once their trials were over. But all of that would happen well away from Detroit, even if witnesses to their crimes needed to be carefully brought out of the city should it still be quarantined at the time.

Everyone involved truly hoped the Sleeptalk situation would be resolved by that point. Not simply for logistical reasons, but because the city of Detroit very much needed the break.

The journey was intended to be about four hundred and fifty miles. With the occupants of the truck very securely strapped down, including powerful tranquilizers that would deploy the moment they attempted any sort of escape, and half a dozen armed men just within the trailer alongside them, the escort was taking no chances. Each of those five SUVs contained another four heavily-armed and armored troops, and the vehicles themselves were capable of deploying enough weaponry to challenge a decent-sized army. These were the Scions, what was left of them anyway, and no one was going to risk allowing them to escape this time.

All of which was why the convoy began taking lesser-traveled highway paths, staying away from the much busier freeways as much as possible. Having fewer other cars around presented less in the way of possible hostages or other victims should anything go wrong, and also allowed the escorts to keep a closer eye on those few vehicles that did travel near them. There were fewer potential problems to watch, allowing them a much better chance to spot trouble.

And yet, despite all of those precautions (and many others besides), when the lead SUV came upon the sight of three people, a woman and two small children, walking along the side of the road while looking dirty, cold, and injured, they did the only human thing they could do: they slowed down. The driver pulled alongside those three, while the man beside him lowered the window and grimaced slightly at the sight. The woman and her apparent children looked like they had just walked away from a terrible wreck, or possibly a house fire, given the state of their clothes and the soot across their faces. They also appeared to be exhausted, trudging along more on instinct than out of any conscious effort. Their eyes were bloodshot, with that thousand-yard stare of people who had been through a horrific tragedy. The children were all-but walking out of their damaged shoes, the remnants slapping against the pavement with each step.

“Excuse me, Miss?” The armed man in the passenger seat called out. “Do you need to use the phone? There might not be much of a cell signal out here, but we have a satellite connection so you can call someone to pick you--sorry, what happened? If you or your kids need any medical attention, or--”

“Thank you,” the woman in question interrupted, giving him a sad, defeated smile with no real trace of relief or gratitude within it. She was afraid, that much was clear. No, not afraid. Terrified. “But you’ve done enough just by pulling over. We were afraid you’d keep driving. But you didn’t. You stopped. Thank God, you stopped. You stopped, so she’ll let us go. She’ll let us--”

In that moment, the woman and both of her children blew apart in an explosion that sent the SUV skidding sideways before flipping over onto its side. Bloody remains decorated the side of the vehicle and the face of the man who had been talking to them. The explosion was so sudden and so loud, that the rest of the escort and the semi-truck itself, who had been approaching that spot, all skidded frantically to a halt. The prison truck swerved, nearly upending itself before coming to a stop, while its four remaining escorts all formed a wall between it and the horrifying incident ahead of them. None understood what had just happened. Nor did they have any idea what was still about to come. But one thing was clear, this was an attack.

The first thing they did, once the convoy had stopped, was call for immediate air assistance. They had a helicopter flying overwatch, complete with its own weaponry and a heavily-decorated sniper capable of taking the eyes out of a driver doing eighty down the freeway, through reinforced glass. Anything the support trucks couldn’t handle, their eye in the sky would.

Or should have. But the next sign that something had gone terribly wrong, while the men in the overturned SUV were still orienting themselves and shaking the ringing out of their ears (and, in one case, wiping bloody remains out of his eyes), was static on the radio when the escorts called for immediate aerial assistance.

That static was quickly followed by something much worse: the sudden and violent arrival of the helicopter itself. It came plummeting out of the sky, slamming into the nearby empty field with a terrifying explosion that seemed so much louder and more violent than it should have. It sent a shockwave across the freeway that rocked the occupants of the vehicles, and knocked the SUV that had been on its side all the way over to its roof.

Once the deafening noise of those two explosions in rapid succession, one coming from the mother and her children, while the other came from the crashed helicopter, a very different sort of sound filled the air. The sound of laughter. Not just soft chuckles, but loud, full-on guffawing. A woman appeared in the middle of the road, just in front of the overturned SUV, itself a couple hundred feet from the rest of the convoy. One moment that part of the road was empty, and the next, the woman stood there. She was doubled over, laughing so hard she could barely keep herself on her feet. With the thick cloud of dust still filling the air, it was hard to make out details, but it was clearly a feminine form and voice.

“Oh--oh God, oh my God, you should’ve seen your faces!” she guffawed the words, stumbling a bit to the side before catching herself against the overturned vehicle. “She was like, ‘we’re safe now, she’s totally gonna let us go’ and then boooooooom! Spuuuulaaaaaatchaaaaaaaach!” Pantomiming the explosion as well as the way the remains were dripping down the vehicle (and the one man’s face), she cackled a bit more, seemingly too distracted to notice the guards in the other SUVs leveling their weapons. Without another wasted second, they opened fire. There was still too much dust for them to know precisely who they were shooting at, but she was clearly too dangerous to simply demand a surrender. All twelve men from those four SUVs opened up on her. Eight with their own highly destructive rifle-shaped beam weapons, while the drivers simply utilized each vehicles’ mounted laser cannons. The sheer level of firepower being directed toward that single female figure should have been enough to transform her into the equivalent of the dust that continued to obscure her form.

And yet, in the next moment, the dust was abruptly and instantly cleared. The figure simply gave a slight gesture with two fingers, and the cloud was gone. Which revealed her full, unobscured form as she stood with her other hand outstretched. A small black orb, about the size of a beach ball, floated in the air just in front of her palm. Each of the lasers being directed toward her, from the individual rifles and the mounted cannons alike, were being bent toward and sucked into that dark orb. When the troops saw that, they stopped firing. And then they saw exactly what--who they were facing. A woman in a black, skin-tight suit encompassing her entire body from neck to toes. Red-orange cloud patterns decorated the arms and legs of the suit, while a red smiley face, consisting of slanted diamond-like eyes and an unnatural-looking V-shaped maniacal grin that rose too close to the eyes, covered the front torso. Her face was obscured by a black helmet with a red visor that had two black dots serving as the 'eyes' and a wide, smiling black mouth.

She required no introduction or explanation. Every person in the civilized world knew the figure in front of them, by name and reputation. And no one would dare dress to imitate her, lest they draw her attention. Known for killing Fells as readily as she did Stars, the one known as Casura had no gang, no army, no followers or minions.

She didn’t need them.

When they saw her, when they recognized what they were facing, half of the assembled troops bailed immediately. Vaulting themselves from their vehicles, they dropped their weapons and fled. Or tried to. Those six men barely made it twenty feet before a flick of the woman’s finger made the rotors from the crashed helicopter tear themselves free of their housing, shatter apart into hundreds of much smaller pieces, and launch themselves at the men like they were being fired from a minigun. The fleeing troops were cut down in an instant.

Of those who remained, four tried opening fire once more, one floored the pedal in his SUV to send it hurtling straight at her, while the last produced a pair of grenades from his belt and launched himself that way.

With a sharp gesture from one hand, Casura took control of the incoming lasers and bent them back around to cut through the men responsible for them. The single much larger blast from the mounted cannon on one of the SUVs vanished through a portal she created with her other hand and reemerged from an identical portal set perpendicular to the row of trucks. Normally, that single shot would barely have been enough to rock the first vehicle it collided with. Yet, after passing through the portal, its energy had been enhanced dramatically. Such that, in an instant, all three trucks were vaporized. Both actions, cutting through the troops with their own manipulated laserfire, and supercharging and redirecting the shot from the mounted cannon, came simultaneously.

In the next moment, the SUV that had been rocketing toward her collided with the woman. Or it would have, had she not become intangible in that second. As the vehicle barreled through her ghost-like form, she stuck one fist out and allowed that single part of her body to become tangible just long enough to collide directly with the driver’s face before shifting back to its ghost-like state once more. With the speed he was going, the entire structure of his skull exploded instantly, while the SUV kept going on off the road and through the field for another hundred feet or so.

Finally, the man who came charging toward her with those two grenades released his hold on the pins, screaming the whole time. He didn’t expect to come out of this alive, but maybe, just maybe, he could put this monster in the ground on his way out.

Instead, Casura snapped her hand out in his direction. The blood from the driver’s vaporized head, which had been hovering in the air around her, sailed that way. Both of the grenades were torn from his grasp and encased within the blood, which immediately hardened into a pair of shells strong enough to contain the ensuing explosions little more than a few cracks to show for them.

Left stumbling to his knees on the pavement, the man looked up to find Casura standing over him. Her head tilted one way, then the other as though considering him. “You were gonna blow yourself up to hurt me.”

“Please, I--” the man started, only to be stopped when she pressed a blood-covered finger to his lips.

“Shhhhh, we’re bonding now,” Casura cautioned. “Don’t ruin it by talking. I think…. hmm, yeah, this could work. You were willing to kill yourself to stop me. That’s worth something right there. That’s a story. And if you’re the only survivor, the one man willing to die is the one who lives? That’s kinda funny. Sure, yeah, that sounds good. You can be the one who lives.”

Instinctively and without thinking, the kneeling man’s eyes shifted to see the troops in the overturned SUV, who were still recovering from the shock of what had just happened over the past few seconds. Already, they were trying to scramble out through the shattered windows.

“Oh yeah,” the dangerous woman murmured thoughtfully, “I suppose we don’t want that ‘only’ to have an asterisk next to it, do we? Good call, buddy. You really are ruthless.” Her hand closed into a fist. At the same time, the SUV crumpled itself into a ball of metal about a quarter of its original size, with the dazed troops still inside.

As a horrified retching sound escaped the surviving man, Casura straightened up to walk around him. “Hey you wanna know the real funny thing?” she called over her shoulder on her way to the waiting truck. “That lady and her kids aren’t actually dead. I just made them switch places with a huge pig that had a metric shit-ton of Semtex shoved down its throat at the last second. Right now, those three are laying in a muddy field wondering what the hell just happened! Sure looked like they blew up though, didn’t it?”

By that point, she had stopped in front of the semi truck. Its loudly revving engine grew even more insistent. The driver had been attempting to drive away, backwards, forwards, anywhere that entire time. Yet throughout the entire encounter, seemingly without spending much effort or attention in the process, Casura had kept the truck rooted in place. It had barely budged an inch or two for all that effort.

“Hey buddy!” she called up to the driver, who was still flooring the pedal desperately. “See, we’ve got a real problem here. I was totally gonna let you go, but your friend over there had this great idea about being the only survivor of this whole thing, and he seems to be a real stickler for it. Between you and me, I think he needs something special like this in his life. I’d say we should delve further into that, but for some reason there’s not a single accreditation office out there that will give me a psychologist license. And, well, in your case there’s the whole dead thing. Unless, of course, you can talk to your buddy and get him to call it off. But I’d uhh… I’d talk fast. Try calling him! I’m sure you have his number.”

With that, she began walking past the far side of the cab, just as it was seemingly spontaneously engulfed in flames. The fire erupted instantly, filling the interior of the cab while the man within screamed and frantically tried to open the stubbornly-locked door. Casura, in turn, pantomimed holding a phone to her ear and pointed back toward the still-heaving man who had tried to blow himself up to stop her.

Humming offkey, the woman skipped cheerfully to the back of the truck. Extending one hand, she summoned blood from the remains of the men who had been cut in half by their own lasers. The cloud of reddish-black liquid enveloped her arm, forming a much larger facsimile of one. That blood arm was shaped like a ten-foot long bear’s paw, complete with claws. With a single swipe, she cut through the back doors, ripping a hole through them.

Immediately, the men inside, who had been waiting, unleashed every bit of firepower they could into the woman. Five held similar powerful laser weaponry as their companions outside, while the sixth stood at the controls of a mounted gatling-style vulcan cannon. It was capable of firing thousands of shots per minute, and in those first three seconds, it lived up to its reputation. Hundreds of bullets rocketed straight at the woman, accompanied by those four deadly lasers. And, just like their companions moments before them, none of their attacks mattered. In this case, Casura simply allowed the bullets and lasers alike to strike her. They accomplished precisely nothing more than creating a deafening cacophony. And even that was taken away almost immediately as the woman used another power to create a sound-dampening field, silencing everything in the area aside from herself. It came from the same Touched whose powers she had used to project her voice for the men in the SUVs to hear while she was laughing earlier.

“Now see,” she remarked in a bored tone, “if it was that easy to put me down, don’t you think someone at some point would have managed it. The dude double-fisting grenades, ready to take himself out to slow me down? That was cool. That was some action movie shit. This is just sad.” With that, she gave a sharp motion with that oversized blood paw. It broke apart into six different spears, which flew out to impale the desperate-firing troops. The spears cut through their armor, lifting them off the floor before sending them flying backward to leave them pinned to the far wall of the trailer like an assortment of dead butterflies. The minigun finally stopped spinning, its bullets tapering off with a few last seemingly half-hearted shots that pinged uselessly off the woman’s face.

Then all was silent, save for the distant sounds of the man throwing up near the front of the truck, and the crackle of flames within the cab. The driver had fallen very silent after far too many seconds of agonized screams.

And yet, rather than walking up into the trailer, she paused, drumming her fingers along the side of her helmet thoughtfully. “I feel like I’m forgetting something. What was it? Oh, right--” In an instant, moving too quickly for the motion to be followed with the naked eye, she pivoted precisely one hundred and eighty degrees, hand snapping up to catch a glowing red bullet in midair barely an inch from her eye. “--the other sniper.” It was a Touched-Tech bullet, of course. One meant to cut through even the strongest durability. And yet now, it simply sat between her fingers.

Or it did sit there, until she narrowed her eyes to stare off down the highway, somehow seeing the source of the bullet over a full mile away, where the trailing truck had stopped, its driver frantically calling for assistance while the sniper on the roof sighted in for another shot. Yet before the driver could get any response, and before the shooter could pull the trigger, Casura snapped her wrist, sending the bullet flying back the way it had come. It ripped through the skull of the man who had fired it, before the bullet stopped in midair and reoriented to face the truck itself, deliberately aiming through that and at the back of the driver’s head while he started the vehicle and began to hit the gas.

A second later, it was over, as the bullet broke through the roof and into his skull, leaving his lifeless body slumping over the wheel as the truck drove into the ditch.

All of which soon left Casura standing in the back of the trailer surrounded by those nine heavily-drugged Fell-Touched who had either been part of or attempting to join the Scions of Typhon. Seeing them there, she rubbed her hands together in anticipation. “Mmmm, where to start…”

“Hey--hey!” The girl, Trove, snapped from where she was strapped down. “You think you’re hot shit because you tore apart some jackboot losers? Let us out of here and we’ll show you a real fucking fight.”

For a solid two or three seconds, Casura stared at her in silence. Then she doubled over, hysterical laughter erupting from the woman as she almost fell down. She laughed so hard she almost cried. And just as suddenly, that laughter was cut off entirely, silence returning to the trailer. Silence, save for the heavy breathing coming from all of the now-frantic and terrified strapped down former Scions.

“No, see, that’s your problem,” she informed Trove and the rest. “You all thought you were the big bads, truly epic villains. The truth is, you’re not even mid-game bosses.” While speaking, the woman raised her hand, a motion that made all of the prisoners suddenly begin frantically blurting demands, promises, threats, anything they could say. She ignored all of it, speaking over them. “What you really are…” Her hand closed into a fist, prompting the ceiling of the trailer to break itself apart into dozens of metal spikes, which lashed down through the prisoners. They were all impaled, their blood pooling together along the ground before floating over to be absorbed by Casura. She took every ounce of blood they had, and their powers along with it.

“... is lunch.”