[SLTS]—❈—09:: Now I'm Pissed Off [I]

eI place my hand over hers. “For Dad,” I say.

Mom’s eyes water. “Yeah,” she smiles. “For your Dad.”

She pulls my head down and kisses me on the forehead, and as I lean back up, a bullet flies through my throat, splattering Mom’s face with my blood.

—❈—

Mom starts as my blood splatters onto her, then her eyes widen in horror as the understanding of what just happened sinks in.

“Aiden,” she screams.

I gurgle, blood pouring through the wounds (both entry and exit) in my neck.

My knees grow weak all of a sudden, and my blood runs cold at the realization that, yes, someone just shot me. In the freaking throat!!!

I collapse to my knees.

Mom goes down with me.

“Aiden,” she says, reaching for my neck, trying to staunch the bleeding with her hands. “Call 911!” she screams at the shell-shocked crowd.

“Aiden. Aiden, please. Aiden, please Aiden please,” Mom says, repeating the words like they’re magic. Like if she says them enough times, I’ll be fine.

I want to smile at her, I want to tell her that of course I’ll be fine. I’m a parahuman, I’m super strong and I heal super fast; a brute 1, at the very least. I’ll totally be fine.

All that comes out is a wet, bloody cough.

It’s getting harder to breathe.

A bullet takes off my left ear and slams into Mom’s shoulder, knocking her to the ground.

I freeze.

…No, wait… I’m not frozen, the world has slowed down around me.

It’s like my brain is in overdrive, processing information at a rate that it never could have before my trigger.

With my accelerated thought comes clarity, breaching through my shock like a bucket of cold water poured on me.

I just got shot. Twice.

And not by a stray bullet or some gangbanger with a pistol or something, no. I’m being sniped. By someone who felt the need to try again, even though they just put a bullet through my fucking throat.

Whoever is doing this expects me to be hard to put down. Harder than a normal person should be.

Meaning they know I’m a parahuman. And this is an assassination. And they’re not going to stop until I’m cold and dead.

…Mom’s in danger!

My teleportation has a range of just ten feet, but that hardly matters when I can use it up to twelve times in one second.

I go straight up, away from Mom, and in less than five seconds, I’m higher up than most buildings in the city reach.

Activating another of my powers, I stand on the air, bleeding, hurting, suffocating, but above all, searching.

I spot them in the same moment a bullet hits me in the chest.

I stagger back, falling two feet as the power keeping me in mid-air stutters, then I collapse to my knees as it reactivates.

My attackers are on the rooftop of one of the tallest buildings in the city; two of them.

They’re at least a mile away, but even with the distance, I can tell, the shooter had reloaded and is taking aim again.

Oh, right. I have a shield.

My shield appears on my right arm just in the nick of time, and I seek shelter behind it as the bullet bounces off with a ping!

I need to get to them, but how? My teleportation has a range of ten feet, and even with the speeds at which I can spam it, I doubt it’s enough for me to get to them before they shoot me again, escape, or I simply drop dead from the bullet wounds I already have.

I could use my portal, I guess, but I don’t think that will work either.

The subspace within my portals always takes ten seconds to cross regardless of the physical distance between the two portals. The moment I open a portal, those guys are likely to book it long before I get to them.

Not unless…

What’s that thing Dad always said? “If you can’t get to them, then bring them to you.”

Sure, he’d been talking about creating opportunities for yourself in the corporate world and not about dealing with snipers, but if it works it works.

I peek over my shield, just to be certain, then I reach for the zipper to the seam through space-time, and I slide it open.

My aim is perfect.

The sniper falls into the portal that opens right under him, and I wait, counting down the seconds, even as I feel my heart beating slower and slower.

3…

2…

1…

There.

I punch him in the face with all my might right as he comes falling out of the portal.

The man spins, falling down to the ground (and certain death) below, only for a red-suited teenager to swoop in and catch him before he can meet concrete.

Aegis of The Wards sets the unconscious man down on the ground gently, and I see Mom, one hand on her bloody shoulder, staring up at me with tears on her face.

Mom’s safe.

The world goes black.

—❈—

Thomas Calvert (Coil)

Thomas Calvert knew a thing or two about dealing with difficult capes.

In fact, with capes like Lung, Hookwolf, and those drug-addled hoodlums calling themselves the Archers Bridge Merchants, running amok in his city, it was more than fair to say that Thomas knew quite a lot about dealing with difficult capes.

The first step, he had long since learned, was assessment; know the threat.

What worked for one cape wouldn’t necessarily work for another, after all, and few things were more embarrassing than rushing in to throw money at a cape, or threaten them, only to realize that all you really needed to do to get them to work for you willingly, was to offer to build them a fucking dog shelter or something equally silly.

Some capes needed you to have a gun to their head, and the understanding that it will be fired at the slightest provocation, while others simply needed money for videogames and junk food.

This was why the moment that Thomas understood that Musa would be a problem, the first thing he did was acquire every bit of information he could about the boy (and his mother) in a safe timeline, and have his Tattletale do a deep dive into his psyche with it.

The result had been clear; the boy did not particularly want to join The Protectorate, and the thing with Shadow Stalker had only soured him to it even more.

On the flip side though, the boy would also rather die than work for, or even with, a criminal.

Despite this, Thomas didn’t just jump straight into trying to kill the boy. He was not a rash man, after all, no, he was a careful one, and so, seeing how the boy had reacted to finding out about Shadow Stalker, he’d decided to capitalize on that.

In a safe timeline, he anonymously sent the boy evidence of all kinds of malfeasance by several members of The PRT and Protectorate.

Everything from Piggot’s bigotry against parahumans, to officials to who were working for, or at least sympathetic to, The E88.

Even smalltime corruption by office drones were included.

Instead of this making the boy turn on The PRT though, the irritating shit went there.

He raised such a stink that the Chief Director got involved in minutes, and, seeing an opportunity to please the golden goose, she launched a full-scale investigation on the entire branch, practically giving the boy carte blanche to interrogate anyone he wanted.

It was a disaster, and the only reason it took Thomas twelve hours to shit down that timeline was because of the same kind of morbid curiosity that makes one unable to look away from a train wreck.

In anger and some desperation, he abducted the boy’s mother, hoping that coercion would work.

It didn’t.

Instead of capitulating to Thomas’ demands, Musa threatened him and then went to The PRT he supposedly hated.

Eager to please, those bootlickers had put all their resources on it, even going so far as to call in for help from outside the city.

Help that was, somehow, for the first time ever, approved.

Within one hour, Thomas was the closest he’d ever been to getting caught.

That was when he realized… the boy had to die.

The first thing he did was blow up their house. In a timeline that he ended needing to abandon because the piece of shit survived.

He considered poison next (some kind of tinker-tech poison was sure to do the job), but, in the end, he scrapped that plan and simply decided to put a bullet in the piece of shit.

That was on Friday, and, like a gift from God, the boy and his mother walked right out into the city on Saturday, making easy targets of themselves.

So, he split the timeline, and in one, sent his two top operatives to handle the job.

And everything was going well, at first. But then Musa summoned a shield to defend himself, and Thomas’ world went black for a moment in both timelines.

When he came to, he found himself in a singular timeline; the timeline where he was trying, and, as he watched, failed, to kill the terrifying new cape in The Bay.

This was not good, Thomas Calvert realized in that moment.

This was not good at all.

—❈——❈——❈—

Please note that if you're in the Jackpot!!! tier, the Jackpot Sr.!!! tier is now THREE chapters ahead of you.

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