“You know, I’m not even sure we’re gonna get the right people,” Perry muttered to himself as he ambled down the street towards City hall.

It was an obvious trap he was setting up, so all the smartest players probably wouldn’t be caught dead going there…even with the pizza thing.

Matter of fact, that might’ve made things worse. It became more obviously a trap, so only the stupidest, most patriotic men eager to fight to defend their city’s pride would show up.

Ideal soldiers.

Well, I wanted the city’s leadership, but as Solaris said, I’ll make lemonade.

If Perry couldn’t round up all the leadership of the gangs of Chicago in one fell swoop, then he’d settle for making an army and such a splash that they decided to skip town.

“You here to see that Paradigm guy?” Perry asked the angry young man with a Vietnam-era assault rifle clutched in his fists as they converged on the road to city hall. Hoipefully his voice sounded a bit different in person.

“Yep, soon as he shows his face I’mma shoot it off. First he calls my family robots, then he insults our PIZZA. I haven’t had a deep dish in six goddamn months, ever since this nightmare started. They may never come back. Anyone who insults their memory doesn’t get a second strike.”

“Good to know,” Perry said, nodding and scanning the surroundings as the crowd grew thicker the closer they got to City Hall. It was almost 100% male, young, and angry, and completely lacking in leadership.

Perry heaved a sigh.

I guess it’s lemonade time.

Perry spent a couple minutes chatting with the surrounding young men, trying to get a bead on the situation without revealing that he didn’t fit in.

It wasn’t gonna last forever, though, because Perry’s clothes were too clean, he smelled too good, and he didn’t look like he’d been starving the last few months.

Some of the smarter angry young men were were starting to stare at him as he drifted through the crowd. He noted them for future promotions.

Once they started muttering to each other quietly without breaking eye contact with him, Perry knew the jig was up.

“Excuse me, pardon,” Perry muttered, slipping through the crowd packed tight around the entrance to City Hall, the future captains trailing him through the mass of people.

Perry trotted forward until he was nearly underneath the massive, looming building that was City hall. He could feel the eyes boring into his back as he did so, wondering if they’d decide to simply shoot him in the back before he had the opportunity to make his pitch.

Apparently the pizza is a sore subject.

Perry climbed up on an abandoned car, then around to face the sea of sunken cheeks and angry gazes.

Like an army of ghouls.

“Good afternoon, My name is Paradox!“ Perry shouted, raising his voice to reach the far end of the massive angry mob. “I hear you like Pizza!?”

“Get him!” The mob surged forward.

“How would you like to eat it again!?” Perry shouted before they could get their hands on him, buying himself an extra instant of time to talk his way out as they hesitated.

“How would you like to sleep without a gun under your pillow!? How would you like not having to worry about your mom getting killed while you’re away!? How would you like to have a shot at a normal life!? REAL FOOD, instead of that roadkill the gangs bring in every day!?”

This was the reason Perry had spent as much time as possible talking to his new soldiers before they knew who he was: He needed to know what they needed.

“How you gonna do that, huh!? You’re just one guy!” one of his captains (I.E. Critical Thinkers) shouted, riling up the mob again. Promotion for you.

“That’s where you’re wrong! I’m Para-“

Perry spotted a flash of light in the window of the Chicago Title & Loan building across the street a tiny fraction of a second before the rifle bullet struck him in the chest. An instant later, the soundwave washed over the crowd.

BOOM!

HP: 13

You know, it’s really cool I can actually perceive the difference in speed between light and a bullet.

As much as Perry hated raising Body and Nerve because he had to, it was still pretty awesome to think he’d eventually be able to catch bullets.

“-Dox!” Perry finished, plucking the pancaked bullet off his chest and flinging it aside.

Must’ve been one of the gangs. Don’t need to send the whole crew when one marksman with a rifle will do. Shame. They would’ve gotten cushy administrative jobs to take some of the workload off of my hands.

Perry put some force into his voice, making it loud enough to reach the entire audience, whose ears were likely ringing from the gunshot.

“Now, before you guys get excited, I’d like you to meet my second in command: Hardcase!” Perry said, straining his vocal cords as he shouted several times louder than a natural human could manage, his voice reaching all the way to the back.

Boomer jumped off the roof of a nearby building and landed in the street behind the crowd of young men.

Whoever the shooter had been probably high-tailed it outta there as soon as Perry shrugged off a rifle shot like it didn’t exist, and a literal mech arrived on the street.

“This building here,” Perry said, pointing at City Hall behind him. “It’s a symbol. It’s one of the many hooks dragging you down, keeping you stuck in the past. The Chicago you know and love is dead! It died forty years ago!

“But you can bring it back!” Perry shouted. “Dead or no, this is your city, and YOU can bring it back to life, nobody else! I can give you what you need to make that happen!

“But the first step in rebuilding is tearing something down!” Perry shouted.

Twin gatling guns emerged from Boomer’s chassis.

ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ!

A torrent of bullets lanced over Perry’s head and tore a massive chunk out of City Hall.

A rain of shrapnel and massive chunks of concrete fell down around Perry as he watched the crowd’s reaction.

Perry was tapping into the ‘cool guys don’t look at explosions’ part of the human psyche, standing there with his arms crossed while the surrounding men retreated from the destruction, acting like he was unimpressed by the people-squishing chunks of concrete raining down around him. Above it.

As the dust cleared, Perry watched the men beneath him glancing back and forth between their pedestrian arms and the massive, car-sized gatling guns slowly winding down and retracting into the oblong twenty-foot armored mech.

He saw them do the math and decide it didn’t work out in their favor. Some of them even started running. Definitely not officer material.

Nope, no running away.

PPP.EXE

(5/6) Remaining.

A nodule of black tar boiled out of Perry’s and erupted in the air, racing across the distance to create a web fence blocking the streets and reinforcing windows and doors, giving the thousands of new recruits nowhere to run.

“I, Paradox Zauberer, would like to be the first to welcome you to the twenty-first century!” Perry shouted with a grin, climbing on top of a massive piece of rubble that had destroyed the street beneath it, getting even more height above the crowd.

“Come here!” Perry shouted, motioning the formerly-angry-now-terrified mob forward and gesturing emphatically to the damaged building behind him. “This is where your fake mayor deceived you for ten years! This is your past! This is starving! This is losing your family! This is fear! Pick up a rock and help me destroy it!”

It was a classic cult/gang/military team-building exercise. Binding them mentally by breaking the taboo of violence together against a common enemy. Traditionally it was done by stoning a former leader scapegoat to death, according to Gramma, but the symbolism worked well enough with a statue or an important building, and Perry really didn’t feel like defaulting to murder as the first option, no matter how much Gramma wanted him to. He also needed a lair, and there was a certain amount of extra symbolism by taking over the former seat of power.

For a breathless moment after his urging to destroy the building, Perry thought he’d lost them, then a pissed-off looking young man grabbed a piece of rubble and threw it over Perry’s head.

Maybe he was aiming at Perry and missed. Maybe he was actually trying to do as requested. Didn’t matter.

The chunk of concrete sailed beautifully over Perry’s head, catching a second-floor window with an absolutely wonderful shattering noise, causing a shower of glass to rain down above Perry’s head, catching the light and giving him a momentary rainbow halo.

Oh, God, I couldn’t have planned it better myself. Perry had to stifle a giggle.

The floodgates opened, and a thousand angry young men picked up rubble of various sizes and began throwing them through the windows, smashing the streetlights. The artful architecture that was over a hundred years old was defaced in minutes by extremely pissed off young men venting their frustration over the hopelessness they had been steeped in for months.

Perry egged them on, shouting encouragement and insults in equal measure until the wave of mindless anger had crested and retreated, leaving a tired mob, panting for breath and basking in shared catharsis.

Now is the moment.

“It’s still standing!” Perry shouted. “For all your effort, you haven’t destroyed the past and opened the gate to the future. ALLOW PARADOX TO ASSIST YOU!”

PPP.EXE (5)

(0/6) Remaining.

Five webs of inky black with bone-white runes manifested out of Perry’s palms before stretching out until their strands were a tiny fraction of a human hair, engulfing the entire building in razor-thin spell. Perry squeezed, sending the monofiliments surging through the massive building, chunking it in seconds.

City Hall collapsed with a deafening roar that continued for minutes, it’s destruction echoing across the city physically and metaphorically.

As a matter of fact…

Perry could perceive a waver in the souls of the crowd, like a gust of wind travelling across a field of candles, rolling outward from the site of the collapse.

The destruction affected them in more than just meatspace.

Dragor’s Kinesis.EXE

(2/3) Remaining.

For a little extra showmanship, Perry lifted himself off the ground, rising into the air above the cloud of dust, emerging into the light of day above the onlookers, his arms spread wide, as if to encompass all of those watching.

The great thing about Dragor’s Kinesis was that since it manipulated gravity, weight was not a factor, only acceleration.

Perry used the spell to its greatest effect, grabbing the rubble of the old building below him as he rose into the air, creating a double helix tornado of concrete and steel directly beneath him that followed him up into the air.

Once Perry was sufficiently high up in the air, he balled the remains of the former seat of government in Chicago into a tight sphere, subjecting it to so much gravitational pressure that the sphere shrunk in on itself, turning cherry red, then orange as the compression heated up the materials, bonding them together into a single, perfect sphere.

When the rubble was white-hot, Perry used Dragor’s Kinesis to fling it east, creating a speeding meteorite streaking through the sky, traversing several blocks until it arced downward, landing in Lake Michigan, where it sent up a jet of water so massive the people on the ground could see it above the high rise downtown buildings surrounding them.

The water boiled where the white-hot lump of concrete and steel landed, and it would continue to boil for days, a testament to the power of Paradox.

Apologies to the fish, Perry thought as he allowed himself to drift down, cutting off Dragor’s Kinesis and taking over the job of flying with the Pernicious Prison.

The shiny black tar coalesced around him, forming a black suit with scrolling ivory dogma. Something more presentable for a grand entrance.

“You asked how you’re going to rebuild the city you love!?” Perry demanded, staring down at the gawking crowd.

“Here’s how!”

Gretchen’s Idyllic Manifestation.EXE

(0/1) Remaining.

This time, Perry had the advantage of time to plan.

He’d spent hours pouring over the design in advance, manually entering every detail he could think of into his filtering algorithm.

Now the question was: What was the ideal design for Perry’s center of operations while protecting Chicago?

He’d considered something sleek, shiny and black, towering above everything else like the monolithic castle of some dark lord…and decided against it.

He didn’t want to make the architecture scream ‘doesn’t belong here’. He wanted it to seem natural, to imply that Perry was willing to integrate, that he had their interests in mind. He wanted the building to make a statement.

So Perry had kept the design for the new building mostly with the same aesthetic as the one before, drawing from the previous City Hall along with the architectural design of the buildings of a similar age….with a few minor tweaks.

First it was bigger. While Perry had decided not to make a ‘dark lord’ tower, he definitely wanted the new building to be visible from any point in the city.

The spell made it happen.

The tower appeared where the former building stood, replicating the old building’s aesthetic and carrying it high into the sky where it could overlook the entire city. Its steel roots were buried deep into the earth, keeping the towering structure stable against all but the most powerful super attacks.

The art that had decorated the previous building had been adapted, included, and magnified. The figures were bigger, grooves were deeper, the muscles of the statues above the ‘city hall’ sign caught the light in such a way that made them look more alive…more menacing.

The eagle above the door had a sharper beak, so lifelike that it appeared to almost be breathing as it overlooked the street with a piercing gaze, taking up a larger, more dominant position amongst the golden scrollwork.

Perry wanted them to feel proud. Proud of their city, and proud of themselves, proud of their heritage.

And scared of Paradox.