As if the last couple minutes weren’t strange enough, looks like we’ve a second surprise visit from… something. What the hell is that?

I don’t know but it looks grotesque. And it’s- holy shit!

Its dark skin was glowing, radiating blue pulses of gentle light. It spread its arms, hands balled into fists, and then struck its knuckles together.

Lyssa felt the hairs on her neck raise. Her ears picked up the quiet clattering of debris.

“What just happened?” She asked uncertainly. The answer landed a short distance away from them. A camera drone. All around them the observation devices that brought the games to the audiences at home fell onto the ground, dead.

“Go,” Victory said.

Lyssa got to her feet and began to move, though she didn’t know where. She moved towards the finish line, until a shadow moved over her. The way was suddenly barred as a piece of uprooted architecture landed in front of her. The aftershock was enough to make her fall back to the ground. The other students who had not made it past the finish line met similar resistance trying to leave the grounds of the game.

“HQ? Hello?” Victory tapped the device in her uniform’s collar. “Shit.”

“What do I do?” Lyssa said. This was the first time she had been fully awake during one of these events. A Self usually took over by now. She was spent as well from that impromptu attack against the mind of the most prolific hero of their age. A move that in retrospect seemed as silly as it was impossible. She opened her palms. White force-fire wavered like a candlelight. She could barely generate a breeze, let alone lift off.

“Stay out of the way! This isn’t a good match-up for me,” Victory called out to the students.

What did that mean? Victory was the strongest hero who has ever lived. There wasn’t a single opponent she could not defeat. There couldn’t be.

A nudge from deep within her mind told her to look around. The other students continued trying to leave. But it was as though the earth itself was moving, forming walls wherever they climbed. The monster screeched and lunged at a group of students trying to escape together. It grabbed one of the female students. She fought back with blasts of energy from her fingertips, but it did not even faze the beast. As she pelted its hide with her attacks, it placed her thin legs between its fingers and in one smooth motion bent the bones in a direction it should never turn.

The student screamed, and everyone stopped moving, turning to look in horrified curiosity. The wails from the student chilled Lyssa to the core, producing a phantom feeling in her own legs out of empathy. Little by little, the students backed away the walls. Satisfied, the monster left the whimpering girl on the ground and turned its attention on Victory.

“Fight… me…” It said, each syllable rasping through inhuman vocal cords.

Victory obliged in an instant, blurring in transit as she closed the distance between the monster’s chest and her fist. Lyssa expected the enemy to disintegrate into a plume of pink mist. Instead its slabs of meat warbled like dense jelly before coming to a stop. With a sonorous cry a wave expanded from its skin brushing aside loose debris, chunks of asphalt, and people. The student with the broken legs was tossed against the earthen wall that kept them in. Mercy allowed the impact to knock her unconscious. The others in the group carried her away.

Victory must have noticed, for she did not strike again. The monster had no such reservation. It was the first time Lyssa had seen someone else’s knuckles find purchase on Victory’s face. The hero withstood the blow, leaving two scars on the ground deep enough to meet her knees as she skidded back. She looked more annoyed than hurt, but did not retaliate.

“Fight…me…” The intonation came again.

Victory raised her arms to block the incoming flurry of manic punches. Despite her inaction, each time the monster’s fists met her blocks, its prodigious musculature wobbled from the impact, producing waves of rebound force. The students were stuck in a game of trying to avoid the unrequited boxing match.

The remaining students congregated, perhaps out of habit. Lyssa maintained her distance. Her minds raced. Selves chattered, proffering solutions that contradicted each other. She did not know what to do.

--

The control room was in chaos. Personnel spoke hastily into headsets, wrangling with their own resources to get their orders through with mediocre success.

“What is going on!?” Whitworth’s voice boomed through his hall of officers, reaching even the last row of consoles in the back. His words would be loud and clear, even through the noise in their headsets. “Come on, give me something to work with!”

“We can’t allocate any other professional,” one of his employed thralls told him. He checked his electronic clipboard for updates. “They’ve all been occupied. It’s as if we just won the lottery for simultaneous break outs of gifted violence.”

“What is the incident density?”

“Four per square mile.”

“Across all of New Langshir?!”

“A-Approximately,” the officer stuttered.

Whitworth watched the roster’s status on the big screen hanging from the ceiling.

A cat-4 teleporter was dropping citizens from several storeys in the air. Fleetfoot was busied trying to prevent anyone from being splattered in the middle of the road. A fire that seemed impervious to ice was occupying Everest. Ace Pilot was trying to stop a horde of people from jumping off the edge of their place of work, their eyes glazed over with foreign control. And somewhere far away from the center of the city, deep in the old neighborhoods, a toddler projected to have had a weak gift suddenly came into his power. A shard of the sun enveloped his family’s apartment and continued growing until an orb of white-hot atmosphere the size of a city block began to move in panicked directions. If one had sharp enough hearing, the screams of a confused boy might be audible at the center of the orb underneath the immense overpressure of heat. The dreams of being a hero suddenly forgotten.

No hero was free. Everyone was taken. And it was not enough. The more proactive among the ungifted citizenry took their safety in their own hands quite literally, having recently purchased personal defense firearms. Some took the opportunity to loot in the chaos. Vigilantes in identity concealing garb worked alongside a beleaguered police force. But without official identification, it was hard to tell who were the criminals or the would-be heroes. Accidents were had.

A call came in. Whitworth took it instantly, daring to hope.

“Sokolov? What are you doing right now?”

“I met those federal goons halfway in my investigation. They think this was planned.”

“I think we’re past the point where that’s a noteworthy deduction,” Whitworth said with ailing restraint.

“We’ve discovered a trail of manipulated people. All gifted. All with signs of mental tampering. It’s like a thousand superpowered lunatics were suddenly dropped into the city.-” The sound of tires skidding. “-We’re following a lead now that could lead us to the people involved. We could use the overwatch, boss.”

“I can’t,” Whitworth said. “Keep going.”

He left the call and marched out of the room, mentally ordering his technicians to ready the psychic amplifier.