Anna burst through the door at the top of the stairs, stumbling into the hall.  She put her hands on her knees and leaned over, her breath coming in ragged gasps.  She was so out of shape.

Tyrese barreled out after her, putting his hand on her back to urge her to keep moving.  On the way up he could feel the stairs vibrating with each step of their pursuer.  Atonement.  He was a rather controversial member of the LC, and considering Tyrese knew him better as his former nickname, Bloodlust, Tyrese understood why, even under his new name and mission in life, such a person wouldn’t be the ideal choice for a team of super heroes.

Carlos Garza had been an enforcer for a Mexican drug cartel.  The drug queenpin dabbled in the arcane and cursed Carlos to get stronger and faster as he was hurt.  She turned him into a human juggernaut, nearly impossible to take down without outright killing him.

When the DEA had enlisted the LC in bringing the cartel down, the queenpin enchanted him with regenerative abilities in order to save his life after Aegis had nearly killed him.  The queenpin had died in the raid, and Carlos had been arrested.

Lady Sapphire had recruited him, getting him pardoned in exchange for a chance to redeem himself, a chance to atone for his sins.  His regenerative abilities drastically cut down on his original curse, but made him nearly impossible to kill.

He was still capable of amazing bursts of strength and speed before his healing abilities kicked in.

Atonement hadn’t killed since he’d joined the LC, keeping his rage in check.  Not fully under his own control though, that could change.

Tyrese pushed Anna to get her moving again.  She stumbled forward, clutching her side as a cramp ripped through her.

Tyrese noted the look in her eyes as she glanced back at him.  He turned back to the stairs, in time to see Atonement round the last bend in the stairs, charging up towards him.  Tyrese slammed the reinforced door closed.  He just barely managed to snap the security lock into place when the door shuddered with sudden impact.  Tyrese spun, pressing his back against the door as it rattled on its hinges again.

The door buckled as Atonement slammed into it again and again, each strike hitting harder and harder as he damaged his body railing against the reinforced steel.

Tyrese slid to the floor, bracing his legs against the wall.  Just inches above his head, a fist sized indentation erupted from the smooth metal.  Tyrese stared up at it, wide eyed.

Anna started laughing.

He looked at her, eyebrows raised.

“What are we doing here?” she signed to him.

Tyrese shrugged, cringing as another fist indentation appeared above him.

“We don’t belong here,” she signed.  “We’re going to get ourselves killed.”

He glanced up at the growing dents in the door, nodding.  “Probably,” he signed back.

She apologized for dragging him into this.

He shook his head.  He wanted to tell her that it wasn’t her fault, but before he could, the pounding on the door stopped.

Tyrese stood up slowly, keeping his back pressed to the door just in case.  Anna walked over and pressed her ear to the door.  Nothing.

She nodded and tentatively tried the door.  The metal was warped and bent out of shape, impossible to open.

“There’s another staircase that goes back down.  You should get out of here.  There’s nothing we can do,” she signed.  She turned her back on him before he could respond, walking away.

He grabbed her shoulder, roughly spinning her around.

“What about you?” he signed.

“What about me?”

“You said there’s nothing we could do, but you only said I should get out of here.”

“You’ve got nothing to do with this.  But this.  All of this,” she threw her arms wide, the sign not doing it justice.  “It’s on me.  I’ve got to get to the top of this tower and at least try to stop the Sea Witch.”

She turned again, not giving him the chance to respond.  His jaw tightened, and he followed her.



“Calm down, you’ll be fine.  You’re done fighting, but you’re not going to die.”

Impaqt struggled to get her breathing under control.  She stared up at Barrage, wide eyed, her mouth moving as she tried to form words.

“I stopped teaching you because you weren’t ready to learn control.  You wanted power.  But control is the difference between you lying on the floor right now, unable to fight anymore, and you being dead.”

She choked and gasped, still trying to form words.

“If you can, stay down.  I don’t want to hurt you any more than I already have.”  Izzy stood back up and turned to leave.

Impaqt raised her heels up off the floor and slammed them back down.  The whole building shook, glass windows shattering as the floor exploded beneath her.

Izzy tried to run, but the floor dropped out from beneath his feet.  He fell to the level below, tucking and rolling as more of the ceiling fell around him.

Impaqt pulled herself to her feet.  “Shut up, you arrogant prick,” she gasped.

Izzy turned, the corner of his mouth curling upwards in a thin smile.  “You were holding back.  So you did learn something from me.”

“Fuck you, Barrage.”  A piece of the ceiling fell right above her.  She jumped up, performing a rainbow kick, sending the hunk of debris hurtling towards Barrage’s face.



Lynx bore down on Mirage as the elevator doors closed on the illusionist, Mira rapidly punching the buttons.  The doors closed just before Lynx’s claws shot out and sunk deep into the metal doors.  She grunted as the chains snapped apart, wrenching the doors back open.

“There’s no hiding from me,” she said.  Mira backed into the corner of the elevator.  

Lynx’s foot didn’t land on solid ground as she stepped into the elevator.  “Shit!” she swore as Mira flicked her off before shimmering and disappearing along with the elevator, revealing the empty shaft.

The real Mirage slammed into Lynx’s back, driving her knees into the base of her spine.  Lynx spun as she lost her balance, one claw striking out.  Mira threw herself to the floor, the claw just grazing her shoulder as it ripped back past her as Lynx fell into the elevator shaft.

Mira felt her shoulder, her hand coming away bloody.  She considered herself pretty lucky to walk away with only a small scratch.  She crept to the edge of the elevator and peered down into the darkness.

“What the hell, better safe than sorry.”  She pulled out another stun grenade and tossed it down the hole.

The illusionist hopped to her feet and took a better look at her shoulder.  Three long scratches ran over the back of her shoulder, but they weren’t deep.  Lynx was known to coat her claws in poison from time to time.  Mira could only hope that she didn’t do that while sitting around the tower.

Mira froze.  Her breath generated a thin fog over the wound as she examined it.  She watched as her breath got thicker, and her sweaty body felt rippled in gooseflesh.  A chill ran through the air.

“Hello Lini.”

Elizabeth Marron got her nickname from the liquid nitrogen her strange blood most resembled, pumping through her veins at well below freezing.  

“You shouldn’t be here,” Lini said, stepping out from around the corner behind Mirage.  She was wearing her full battle suit; a frosty blue and silver body suit designed as much to protect her allies from frostbite as to help channel her freezing abilities.

“You gonna stop me?” Mira asked, not turning around.

“If you make me.  You can surrender now and-”

“And you’ll just put me on ice until this blows over?” Mira cut in.

Lini frowned.  “Please.  Don’t make this harder than it has to be.  I have no wish to fight you.”

“Neither do I!” Mira roared, spinning around, her hands outstretched.  A huge gout of orange flames erupted from her palms. Lini threw her hands up, freezing the very molecules in the air before her.  But there was no heat, no flames.

Lini glared down the hall at Mira, already high tailing it off in the other direction.  She sighed and ran after her.



Anna stopped in front of another stairwell, pointing down and signing to Tyrese that it would get him most of the way down.

Tyrese stood, folding his arms across his broad chest, not moving.

She signed more emphatically, telling him to go.

He shook his head.

“Go!” she shouted, as if somehow he might hear her, hear the desperation in her voice that her hands couldn’t convey.  “You can’t die here!”  She pushed him, her hands slamming into his chest, immoveable.  “She can’t take you too!”

Tyrese could read her lips well enough, but it was the emotion in her face that sold him.  He felt the tremors in the floor even before Anna heard the heavy footsteps, drawn by her shouting.

Atonement, Lynx, and Impaqt had intimidated Tyrese despite being smaller than him.  They’d struck a terror in his core that he’d never felt before.  Mammoth, on the other hand, was the very definition of physically imposing.  At nearly eight feet tall, he towered over the deaf fighter.  Were he smaller, the jutting brow and neanderthal features might have been comical, there was nothing funny about Mammoth.  The six inch ivory tusks that protruded from his lower jaw were anything but comical.

Tyrese took one last look at Anna.  Her hand went to the pipe tucked in her belt, and then fell loosely to her side as she realized the pipe would do nothing to the prehistoric monster before them.

His voice was horse from years of lack of use, and without a tongue, he couldn’t pronounce the G, but Anna knew exactly what he meant when he opened his mouth and grunted “Oh!”  

Tyrese charged the giant, leaping into the air and throwing a powerful overhand punch at Mammoth’s face.



Ursula was starting to get annoyed with Lady Sapphire.  She’d been fully prepared for the fact that she probably couldn’t actually kill the most powerful sorceress that probably ever lived before her apotheosis, but she had thought she could do a better job of keeping her out of the way.  

The Sea Witch cursed her rival’s ability to fly as Lady Sapphire flew out of range of her tentacles before diving back in for another attack.  The Sorceress of Sapphires seemed to know she couldn’t get past Ursula’s defensives, but it was doing a splendid job of splitting her focus and keeping her from completing the complicated rituals necessary to her task.

Lady Sapphire sailed through the wall of black tentacles like a missiles, sheathed in blue crystalline armor, hurtling towards Ursula.

The witch grit her teeth and spun, slashing open her forearm with her black nails, whispering incantations.  Reality shimmered, and Lady Sapphire soared through empty space, crashing into the roof.  She rolled to her feet, spinning and throwing a fragmented sapphire shard.  Blue lasers burned from the points of the jagged crystal.

Ursula did a backflip, dodging the laser beams.  She starred at the burn marks on the roof, and the sigils they had broken.

“You wanted my full attention,” Ursula said.  She rolled her hands over, palms up, spreading her fingers.  Lakes of black ink flowed up from her veins, and miniature tentacles erupted from the tiny pools of magic.  She whispered the arcane words, and dozens of black tentacles erupted from eh roof, surging towards Lady Sapphire.  “You got it.”



Izzy ran his hand across his forehead, wiping away the blood that was headed for his left eye.  The tile and concrete Impaqt was sending his way exploded as soon as her feet made contact, behaving like buckshot, nearly impossible to dodge and even harder to shoot out of the air while it was speeding towards him at over 100 miles per hour.

“I’m sorry,” he said, shaking blood from his fingertips.  “I underestimated you.”

“You’re damn right you did.”  She flipped up a large broken piece of cinderblock with her toe and kicked it at him.

Barrage took a single step backwards and pointed both index fingers forwards, blasting the fragments out of the air one after another, a gunslinger full of trick shots.  He blew on his fingers one at a time.  “I won’t underestimate you again.”

“And you think I’ve underestimated you?”

“I know you have.”

She charged, closing the distance between them in a flash, leading with a powerful kick.  He sidestepped her, ducking under her follow up uppercut with his uncanny speed.

Every move she made, he moved with her, always backing out of range of her lethal strikes.  She switched tactics, changing up her move set, but he still was one step ahead of her, dodging out of the way in the knick of time.

Always keep something up your sleeve.  It was a lesson he’d taught her, and even though she didn’t have anything up her short sleeves, the small chunk of tile palmed in left hand would do just fine.  She unfurled her hand as she threw it up, releasing the chunk, and immediately reversing direction, bringing her hand down to spike it right into Barrage’s smug face.

He stepped forward, nudging her arm ever slow slightly.  She missed the tile, her hand swatting through empty air.  He pointed at the chunk, blasting it, exploding it in her face.

“If you’re gonna pull that shit, don’t favor your right so much.  You betrayed yourself,” he said as she leapt backwards, coughing dust and debris, clawing at her eyes.

“You still have a lot to learn,” he said, standing comfortably in front of her.

“Like hell I do!”  Impaqt spun around in a powerful roundhouse kick.

She froze, her leg suspended in mid air.  Her vision was blurry, but there was no mistaking Barrage holding her suspended leg with one hand.

She hadn’t felt anything.  Not event he diminished impact of such a blow that should have shattered every bone in his hand.

“We’re done.”

Impaqt screamed as the bone in her leg shattered.  A wave of force exploded behind her, the wall and floor cracking.

She fell to the floor, clutching her broken leg to her.

“You’re powerful,” he said, walking over and picking up his fallen hat, dusting it off.  “You went all out, and it was impressive.  But it wasn’t enough.”

“And so you beat on your less experienced teammates, ones who you were supposed to teach.”

Izzy spun at the new voice.  “Please tell me you’re not going to try and stop me.  I respect you too much to beat the shit out of you.”

Gallant’s face was set.  The old man held his arms easily at his sides, but Izzy knew from experience that he was a he could draw his cursed sword in the blink of an eye.