One of the biggest complaints about the State Guardians, the government-sponsored superteam of Illinois, was how they didn't do enough against organized crime. Once upon a happier time, like most of her peers, Valerie had speculated as to why that was. Now that she had finally found out, she was too busy dodging fireballs to regret indulging her curiosity on the matter.

"There she is! Get her! Get her!"

The black-leather-clad member of the Red Disciples gang threw another foot-wide orb of liquid fire at her and missed. The flaming projectile flew over her head as she hastily ducked and struck a brick wall thirty feet ahead, bursting like a six-pack of Molotov bombs. The acrid stench of burning naphtha spread over the alley, carried on a cloud of smoke and steam as the burning fluid sizzled over hard-packed snow.

Not daring to slow down and invite another fireball she leaped over the wall of flames, superhot fumes stinging at her eyes and lungs. The leap took her over the rest of the alley entirely, leaving her pursuers behind, until she landed hard on a parked car. The thin metal of the roof crumpled underfoot like cheap tinfoil, all six windows shattering in a shower of safety glass fragments and snow that burst out in a wave.

Valerie winced but kept going. Given how... explosively the car was totaled it was probably her fault, but she had bigger fish to fry. A smaller leap got her off the wreck a split second before the shredded safety glass could fly through where she'd been but carried her straight into a snowball swarm. The impacts wouldn't have seriously hurt even a normal person; that wasn't the point. No, the attacker's goal was to blind, disorient and delay, something the dozens of translucent disembodied hands throwing everything they could grab were very good at.

"She's running for the park!" an older male voice shouted from above, its owner dragged after her by even more disembodied hands.

"Shut up, Handsy," she shot back at the third powered gangster she had met that evening, throwing a broken bottle at him. Like everything else she'd hurled with her strength it flew straight and fast like an arrow but got intercepted by a few of the man's ghost-hands. The translucent obstacles burst into glittering smoke but the impromptu projectile was shattered and stopped too.

"My name is Handyman!" the not so super villain roared, his hands grabbing everything they could reach and throwing it at her in retaliation. Snow, mud, rubble, garbage bags, even an old boot were sent flying... and missed as she leaped ahead once more.

"Well, I can't tell the difference," she shouted back at him and laughed. "Maybe if you stopped groping everything in sight and started actually fixing things..." Or wore something more distinctive than motorcycle leathers and a red bandana; if not for his powers he'd be practically indistinguishable from any other member of the Red Disciples... which was probably the point.

"Screw this chase, screw orders and SCREW YOU!!!" he roared again and every translucent hand flew back to him. Most of them joined those holding him up from his hands and feet, and suddenly he was flying a great deal faster - quickly enough to keep up with her leaps. "I'm killing you right now, blondie!"

"Oh yeah? You and what army?" she challenged him back while trying to run even faster. It wouldn't do for his army of friends to catch up right after she- "EEEP!"

A frantic roll to the left was all that saved her from the literal storm of gunfire that showered her previous position and even so half a dozen bullets still hammered into her back, even more ripping at her legs. Individually they felt like thrown pebbles but all of them together still hurt.

"I don't need an army, I am the army," Handsy boasted, a dozen of his ghost-hands aiming guns at her as others drew even more from the hiking pack strapped to his back. "Now stand still, this will only briefly hurt," he lied.

Another storm of bullets flew her way... and most of them disintegrated on the hundred pound sewer lid she'd picked up while he was monologuing. A few hit her fingers, lower legs, anywhere the lid simply couldn't cover, but with her body covered she avoided some serious bruising or worse, her clothes getting more holes than Swiss cheese.

When Handsy ran out of bullets a couple of seconds later, she just threw the lid like a frisbee. A hundred pounds of iron went through dozens of ghostly hands with only being slowed down, before hitting him in the gut hard enough to make him puke out his breakfast, the previous night's lunch and most of his feelings of superiority.

Then his ghost-hands winked out and he fell feet-first into asphalt from forty feet up.

"These sure look like two broken legs," she commented over his gasping form, the blow from the sewer lid leaving him too out of breath to shout. "Sucks to be you, I guess."

"She got Handyman!" someone shouted and suddenly the side-street was invaded by way too many Red Disciple gang members. She only recognized two; the one that had been chasing her down with fireballs and the rapidly healing guy that had totaled a car for no reason and started all this.

That did not mean the other eight or nine gang members were not a threat; every one of them had guns and she was all out of sewer lids. As the bad guys caught up with and surrounded her, Valerie took the only available escape route.

She jumped into the sewer.

xxxx xxxx

Like every major city, Chicago's sewage system was as extensive and as complex as it streets. The tunnels beneath the city were easily large enough for people to walk in upright, with some of the larger ones wide enough for city buses to go through. That did not change the fact they were sewers; the air was stale and so heavy with rot and foulness to send the unprepared gagging, the ground and walls were covered in grime and sewage and, naturally, it was too dark to see.

That last bit did not apply if a fireball-throwing maniac was chasing you, Valerie had found out.

The Red Disciples had not given up on catching her even after an hour-long chase in the depths of the city and after running near-blindly through tunner after tunnel the blonde heroine was so covered in grime, slime and worse things none could tell her hair or costume colors. And while the former had survived dirty but otherwise intact thanks to her invulnerability, the latter had been reduced to scorched tatters and not just due to hails of bullets. That idiot with the fireballs had caused underground explosions from igniting the methane and other flammable fumes not once, not twice, but four times during the chase and instead of that making him take care he instead had become even wilder and more trigger-happy. She was pretty sure he was not just taking perverse enjoyment in the whole situation but somehow growing faster from it, his fireballs more destructive.

A couple of bullets flew by, one of them stinging her right earlobe and ruining her sense of balance. Half-running, half-falling, she turned into a side tunnel at random and sped up. It was wider, rougher and didn't look manmade in what little light was there to see by. She'd seen such tunnels before, almost as many times as she'd seen collapsed ones; the sewers were a mess, well beyond just needing some maintenance. Even the tunnels that were closest to normal were more crooked than straight, making it painfully easy to get lost in the gloom. Yeah, totally the tunnel's fault, that.

She hit a cave-in face-first, having entirely missed it in the darkness. Instead of slowing down she got a brief moment of vertigo, of sinking through something soft and slimy, before the barrier of mud, sludge and rubble simply burst apart and she fell into a newer, much larger tunnels. It looked large enough to be a storm drain, and somehow had enough light for anything to be visible at all which was... OK, it was weird, but Valerie didn't have time to wonder about it then and there. She needed to get to the nearest manhole and get out of the foul, ugly, stench-filled hell before her pursuers caught up.

Unfortunately, it was not to be. Half a dozen guys in Red Disciples gang colors came out of a nearby side-tunnel and started shooting. She tanked the shots, way past caring what happened to her already ruined clothes, bowling through them with superior strength and knocking them around like ragdolls. Ten seconds into this near-blind, all-out brawling one of the bad guys barely blocked her puch with both hands, then kneed her in the gut. She was thrown back more by surprise and loss of balance than pain, then yelped as she slipped and fell. Damn slippery, filth-covered sewers!

"Hey bimbo, remember me?" he taunted, as if she would forget his annoying, regenerating ass. She'd just missed him in the gloom, a near-darkness he didn't seem to be impeded by if the way he held his own now was any indication. "Did you have enough yet, or are you looking for more of us?"

"Shut up and fight!" she growled, throwing one of his fellow thugs at him and missing. What she wouldn't give for super-senses right that moment.

"Why did you want with us, anyway?" He kicked her below the right knee and punched her in the solar plexus twice while asking. It wouldn't have done much when they first fought but she'd gotten worn down a lot since then.

"You're criminals, a plague upon this city." She nailed him in the face and his nose crumpled; it was very satisfying. Something big exploded in one of the side tunnels and red light momentarily pierced through the darkness enough to reveal his blood-spattered, slowly regenerating form. Pasted nose or no he was still sporting a mocking smile, so he punched him in the face again. "Someone needed to take out the trash!"

"You think WE are trash?" They struggled for a little bit and Valerie forced her tired limbs to fight his lower-end but tireless superstrength, pull him in one of the few martial arts holds she knew. "Lemme guess; you just got powers and just thought you'd be a hero, do what no other heroes have done and take back the streets? Boy, aren't you all the blond stereotypes."

"Shut up! Shut up! SHUT UP!" Each repeat of her demand was followed by another punch as she abandoned her hold and tried to literally punch his head off for daring to mock her dreams. She would be a hero; the greatest superheroine the city had ever seen, no matter how many told her she could not!

Another explosion came, much closer this time, and flames spread into the main tunnel at their creator stumbled into it. The fireball-thrower raised both arms to launch another of his incendiary projectiles, but instead of aiming at Valerie he was focused on the tunnel he'd just come out from. Before he could launch it though, a silver beam struck his chest and threw him on the ground, shaking uncontrollably as if he'd grabbed a live power line.

The Red Disciple thugs that had finished reloading turned towards the new threat and opened fire against the two people walking out of said tunnel. Fortunately, their bullets all bounced off a barely-visible translucent dome that formed around a pair of newcomers. Waiting just at the edge of the dome stood a fifteen or sixteen year old boy in silvery metal armor with a purple undershirt while a robed girl of the same age came in his wake, holding up what looked like a small crystal sphere that shone blue.

"Hey, neighbor," the teenage girl greeted Valerie enthusiastically, "is this a bad time?"

"Just keep up the shield, Haruspex," the boy in the armor said with a long-suffering sigh, aiming a thin metal rod at the regenerating bastard Valerie was grappling with. Another silver beam, another bad guy knocked down and convulsing as if electrocuted. She took the opportunity to punch him some more and that was, finally, too much for him. He fell unconscious, his limbs still twitching.

"Thanks for the assist," she told the younger hero somewhat grudgingly; she'd been on the receiving end of his beams before. "What are you two even doing here, though?"

"You're kidding, right?" the girl, Haruspex, blurted excitedly. "We've been looking for you since morning! Now that we've found you we can get to the real awesome part of the plan!"

Suddenly, Valerie was more worried than she'd been facing superpowered gangsters.