It was cold and rainy in Chicago, as apparently it often was, though I had held hope that the temperate April we were having would hold the gloom at bay. Alas, it was not to be, but I still tried to remember to appreciate the city giving us a taste of its native climate. If nothing else, I would remember my trip here as it was, no idealized vacation. Chicago was a serious place, and I would remember it as such.

Not that we were here to vacation. There was an Exhuman event brewing, and the P-Force had been selected to respond. The target was violent and dangerous, his powers were deadly, yet not fully quantified, and his Ramanathan Window was still open. It was, in many ways, the worst-case scenario for an Exhuman event, and precisely what necessitated the founding of the P-Force.

Before, such an event would have meant hours or days, or even weeks of carnage, as brave XPCA battled for every inch of urban space, a mad rush to keep the target contained and evacuate survivors, with minimizing damage a distant third priority. For any reason at all, the Exhuman could have decided to move, threatening entirely new swaths of people and property, or worse, injured themselves somehow, introducing the risk of their window adding to their nascent powerset.

But the Ramanathan Window had a blind spot, and it was other Exhumans. It is why Deputy Director Blackett had gathered us, why Director Blackett had founded the P-Force, and why Director Hall had us waiting in a dark bus terminal in downtown Chicago today, abuzz with XPCA activity as recon and strike teams gathered intel, evacuated refugees, and managed supplies.

New downtown Chicago, I reminded myself. There were many abandoned buildings here, the shadow of the Sino war reached long into this city.

The wind slashed the rain into the windows as we focused on briefing. Not much was known about the target concretely. The weather was making it impossible for recon teams to get close, as the rain both obstructed their sensors, and sent optical camo haywire, the constantly-shifting background impossible to reproduce. Plus, the water certainly didn't improve any electronics for its touch.

What we did know was that the powers were capable of knocking down buildings, as two skyscrapers had already been felled. We knew that they were of elemental water, and thus our mark had a prefix of hydro-, and that he could create autonomous constructs from it, -genesist. Whether that was the limits of his capabilities, or if he could do anything himself, or was as helpless as the last genesist we'd killed in the dungeons beneath former Oakland...that was anybody's guess.

He was a dental hygienist before today. He once wielded a pick of water to ward off halitosis. Now his water had killed dozens. How far he had fallen.

I heard something move behind me and did not have to turn to look as the others did. Chariot stepped out of nothingness and entered the room, dressed as we always saw him now.

I opened my eyes to see the faces of the others as they acknowledged him. Tower with the ever-lit flame of optimism, rose and went to embrace him awkwardly. Moon sat in stern defiance, not so much as stirring at his approach. Cosette stood and waited, being in the room only in holographic form to begin with, and returned Chariot's formal salute.

Tem was, as ever nowadays, absent.

Chariot advanced into the circle of light around the holo and waited, motionless, seeming to neither hear nor acknowledge anything anyone said, and so nobody said anything to him. After an awkward moment, Cosette began with the briefing again.

Chariot was there, I could sense it, somewhere inside that exosuit, but it was too tightly wrapped around him for me to make out any detail with my eyes shut, and with them open, all I saw was the blank faceplate. It stood, silent and imposing, eight feet of metal in XPCA-black, optimized for his powers, and a true weapon of war. Compared to him, we were but children, toddling around, waving our powers impotently, whilst he unleashed precision devastation.

In a way, it was humbling. But given that his newly unlocked powers came at the same time as the utter erasure of his personality, mostly it just gave us dread. We had all been surprised to hear Chariot requesting to join the P-Force again, under conditions, and were more surprised to hear those conditions. They had basically amounted to as little contact as possible between him and us, on and off the job.

It was hard not to take personally. Even when Moon and Cosette were convinced that he had abandoned the XPCA, I had believed in him, and had even gone so far as to help him as I could. He seemed normal enough and then...one day...this.

I looked again through my eyes at the blank faceplate and found it a fitting representation for what apparently now lay beneath. No contact outside of missions, no chatter on missions, no leadership role even, he had deferred strike lead to me. What had transpired to transform the young, promising man into this?

I had to suspect that whatever it was, the cause and outcome were intertwined. Something had changed him, and he had no interest in us discovering what it was.

"Any questions?" Cosette asked, the holo before us switching from a display of a map back to our commanding officer.

Chariot raised a broad metallic hand. "Major Dawn, sir," he said, his voice sounding more robot than human, to the point where I could not hear him in it. "The hydromorphs created, have we ascertained their capabilities?"

"As of yet, no."

"Have they demonstrated the capability to die?"

"As of yet, no." She looked around at us, but nobody else stirred. "Very well then. Deploy as soon as you're ready. I will be in your ears and on your holos. Watch each other's backs, Vigilo Ignoto.

"Vigilo Ignoto," we mumbled in reply as we rose.

Chariot, like the robot he now apparently was, simply walked to the door and stood in it, rain blasting him in the face without a care. The rest of us took our time to put our kits together, Tower conferred briefly with a pair of soldiers before leaving Moon's body in their care, and we each did our best to waterproof ourselves in preparation for the incoming wind and rain.

I'd be in buildings the entire approach, of course. My powerset did have its advantages. And I suppose Tower and Moon could deflect water striking them, and Chariot was cozy in his exosuit. Still, it was more the oppressive mood of walking into the storm than the actual trouble of it, I suppose.

Also, the worst possible weather to be fighting a hydroist in. A part of me--the very paranoid part from the old days--considered that possibly, this Exhuman's powers hadn't been revealed to us yet, that the water manipulation was the window counteracting this storm, and his original powers lay elsewhere. It was a small possibility, but a terrifying one.

I moved away, keeping to the front of our small squad. Chariot brought up the rear, his senses heightened by the exosuit's sensors, though still diminished by the rain. Tower and Moon were the center, capable of quickly responding to threats from either side. Without Tem, without Mage, and with Moon and Tower being one unit, our squad felt oppressively small.

It was only a few blocks before we found the danger. Water from the black road began moving irregularly, rising into frothing pillars like fountains until they filled out shuddering, swirling spheres which floated towards the three on the ground with the insistence of the tides.

The P-Force stood ready, back-to-back as four or five of the hydromorphs shuffle-floated towards them, closing the distance to ten feet.

Suddenly, one detonated, violently reshaping itself into a lance of pressurized water. It hit Moon, dead in the torso, but she had been prepared for it, and the blast bounced off her with enough force that the spray was lost in the sky like so many other raindrops. The hydromorph, its bulbous head gone, sputtered as it drew in more liquid from beneath.

There was nothing I could do, I realized. I would stay on comms and keep them coordinated, but I could not cut water with a knife. Charitably, I had grenades as well, but very little of my arsenal had been constructed with sentient liquids in mind, and my utility suffered accordingly.

Chariot, however, had no such misgivings. With a wave of his exosuited arm, he cascaded electricity through the nearest hydromorph, which seemed to do absolutely nothing but make the water crackle violently. Then he brought out a solitary sword, steered it gently into positions with both arms outstretched--

And with a wrenching gesture as though shredding paper, his two arms moved and the sword detonated in a flare which would have blinded my eyes. Down there I knew a blistering wave of heat washed over all of them, and the morph seemed to hiss in protest as it flash-evaporated. For a moment, there was a dry spot on the ground under the blast before the rain reclaimed it, steaming and frothing at the heat of the earth.

But the hydromorph did not reconstitute. Whatever had given it intelligence and life could not survive being evaporated.

The other morphs did not willingly accept their fate. Two of them lunged at Tower, deflecting off of him as Moon had done, and one exploded towards Chariot's relatively vulnerable mechanical body, only to be intercepted by Moon and bouncing off her chest again.

They seemed to have this well in hand, and I progressed forward, keeping an eye closed for the Exhuman I knew to be somewhere in this maelstrom. He couldn't be too far from his minions, they relied on his powers for animation.

I found him, finally, in a tunnel under one of the buildings. He had an army of the damn creatures, and was destroying drainage tunnels with them, their fluid bodies capable of seeping between stones and under metal bolts, expanding to cripple structural integrity already taxed by the downpour. The more he destroyed, the more water backed up in the city, and the greater his apparent glee.

I couldn't jump in without submerging myself at this point, and I shuddered to think what that might do--when I heard a choking noise over comms and the yelling of Tower.

As quickly as I could, I returned to the others to find Moon in distress. One of the creatures had wrapped itself around her head, and from the noise of it, was forcing itself into her orifices. I felt my heart stop as I remembered just moments ago watching them rupture metal and stone by bursting through it from within.

While Tower screamed and clawed at the water uselessly, Chariot did not hesitate, and picked up Tower bodily, the huge man still nothing to the exosuit. He yelled his complaints until Chariot scooped him physically through his own shadow, the strange conflux of Moon being intangible to him, but real to all else in the world allowing Tower's own body to push the water up and out of Moon's ghostly copy of it.

It was not a maneuver I would have considered, and showed that, as much as Chariot may have changed, his study of all of our powers and his ability to think on his feet was never lost.

Perhaps there might have been words sufficient to convey this action, but Chariot had not chosen to use them. Still, the lesson was conveyed, and Tower soon picked it up on his own, exorcising the water from Moon with his bare hands, shoving them straight through her throat and out her face, while she gagged and groaned uncomfortably over comms enough to make me shudder and cringe.

This Exhuman had much to answer for already, and we had not yet even engaged him personally.

Tower's proximity to Moon made him a target for drowning as well, but the two of them just covered each other's mouths and used their free arms to bat at the assailing morphs, suffocating but still struggling until Chariot could intervene. With deliberate focus, he brought another sword near them and hesitated as it hovered in the air near them.

"Sorry," he said. And then the sword shredded into heat and sparks, and the water on their faces boiled away, neither having the breath to scream as their flesh seared.

I was there in a heartbeat, pulling medical gel from a pouch and trying to hold Tower steady as he rolled on the ground clutching at the red and pink where his dark skin had been moments ago.

"Chariot, keep them off of us," I growled into my comms, irritated that it had come to this so fast. His powers may have multiplied in power, but they seemed to have halved in speed, and if he'd just been focused on eradicating the hydromorphs from the start, they wouldn't have reached Moon in the first place.

"Acknowledged, PF-Actual," he said, new swords materializing and wiping out the nearest threats.

I shouldn't have left them to scout ahead, I was the lead and should have issued these orders without assuming, I realized. I knew Chariot was...more unstable now, and my stupid presumption that he knew his role had just cost us Tower's face.

"Epsilon One, Epsilon One, this is Papa-Foxtrot Actual," I radioed while I dressed Tower. The rain was making the gel refuse to stick, and I was having a hard time doing it without touching him already.

"Copy Papa-Foxtrot Actual."

"Please bring the package to our location."

"Confirmed, bringing the package. Over."

I pulled off my waterproof overcoat and wound it around Tower's head to hold back the rain, smearing more of the gel on him while he gave me an apologetic smile.

"Hurts like a bitch," he said.

"I know. I'm sorry, Tower."

Moon, for her part, just stood and breathed, saying nothing, seeming to watch Chariot as he evaporated hydromorph after hydromorph. It wasn't more than a minute before lights approached us from the darkness, and the truck popped open to reveal Epsilon Squad crouched in the back around Moon's body. Tower touched it long enough for her eyes to flicker open with a sigh of relief, and then picked her up again, where she returned whole and hale.

"Are you fit to continue?" I asked him. He nodded, despite the thick layer of goop on his face.

"If I back out, I'd be taking half our squad off the field," he gestured at Moon. "A little pain never hurt anyone, right?" he laughed, and then winced painfully.

"You're a good man, Tower," I said.

"Maybe a rebreather, though...I don't like the thought of drowning on dry land."

I shook my head. "They'd just force their way in your nose and throat around it. I saw them cracking stone that way, forcing your mouth open would be child's play for them." He looked a little horrified at the thought but nodded.

"So don't let them touch me, got it," he said.

"Chariot, keep clearing, we're moving forward. Do not let the morphs approach. Thank you Epsilon, we're going ahead."

I moved away again, both to get out of the rain and to keep watch from the front as the three of them pressed forward. We hadn't come back up on the Exhuman yet, so I was mostly just keeping an eye on Chariot to see that he was keeping up.

He had a few swords out, but kept most of them right at his side, only taking out and manipulating one at a time to shred into the ridiculous blast of heat he'd developed, like he no longer had the attention to manage more than one at a time, or maybe what he was doing now was so complicated it took all his attention. But again and again I watched as he worked with diligent precision, getting the blade into place just so and then detonating it right near the enemy for maximum effect.

But again, watching him work, he felt like an entirely different person. Chariot had always been...something of an act-first, ask-questions-never sort, quick to strike, quick to act, quick to run his mouth. Now he was plodding along with insistent steps, rooted on his heels, his blades flying slowly and carefully instead of lashing out at the speed of lightning. Even his range seemed larger, which I did not think possible. I wondered again what had happened to him.

We'd come up on the target again, but now his work was done and he was leaving, the tunnel he was in now full of water and the building atop it beginning to lean dangerously as the foundation started to sink in displaced earth.

I'd never seen a skyscraper fall over before, and it was quite the experience. It held together much better than I would have suspected, toppling further and further, the top of it sagging as the building swayed under it. As it leaned the top threatened to rest on a neighboring building, but before that happened, something inside gave, and the side of the building exploded all at once in a hail of glass and concrete, as dark and piercing as the rain. Even from here, I could hear it smashing down, a constant, rolling crashing over the rain.

"The fuck is that?" Tower asked.

"A building collapsing," I informed them. "Mind for glass floating in the water."

"Great. Now the water's gonna cut us," he complained. "Because the drowning and stabbing wasn't enough."

"Kindly cut the chatter and focus," Moon intoned.

"Yeah, yeah."

"Would you prefer to die?"

"No, I'll focus, okay? Such a pain," Tower complained again, but this time he actually quieted down afterwards.

At once, something caught my eye, and I hesitated for just a moment before calling it in.

"Lady and gentlemen, prepare yourselves," I said. "The target is approaching rapidly, too quickly for walking. Ready for engagement from twelve o'clock."

I could only imagine it from their perspective. Cold, rainy, and dim, the sound of a building groaning as it vomited glass and concrete into the flooding street below, and suddenly, a surge of dark water and an Exhuman riding within it like a dolphin, straight at them, shards of glass and needles of water at the ready to eviscerate whomever had come into his little domain.

He seemed needlessly ecstatic about dealing with the interlopers. Even underwater, he was grinning as he bore down towards them, truly lost to humanity.

The P-Force shuffled awkwardly as the water around their ankles receded into the growing wave crashing towards them, as wide as the street and a dozen feet tall.

"Target in sight, moving to pursue," Chariot's synthetic monotone came over the comms, as I saw him step forward towards the rushing water.