“What are you looking at?” Monolith demanded, eyeballing the megadeer who was in turn eyeballing the corn cob in his fist.

“I will punch you right in the snout.” Monolith said, raising his fist, allowing the black energy inside him to flicker around his knuckles.

The megadeer gave a dismissive snort and went back to munching on corn.

“That’s what I thought,” Monolith grumbled, taking a bite out of the cob while snapping off a few more and shoving them in his waistband. It was basically the last piece of his clothing still serving it’s function.

His t-shirt had holes in it the size of the Mississippi, and his pants were less-than modest.

I’m starting to get why capes wear hyperweave, Monolith thought.

He’d always prided himself on not wearing the stuff, viewing it as a crutch. But sometimes you just want clothes that aren’t gonna fall apart or burn off.

Maybe I can get some tailored so it doesn’t look like a gimp suit.

***Perry***

“Have you been brushing your teeth?”

“Yes, but not yesterday, I was busy,” Perry said.

“You gotta brush your teeth every day.”

“I’ll try,” Perry said. “How’s grampa doing?”

“He’s a bit of a sourpuss not having anything to do, but other than that, he’s fine. How’s your trip going sweety?” Mom asked over Perry’s comms.

“It’s been pretty exciting,” Perry said as he put pressure on Heavy Metal’s wounded leg. The conjurer-type gritted her teeth and groaned in pain as they secured the wadded-up cloth bandage.

“It’s actually been pretty exciting over here, too.” Mom said. “The prawns have been coming hot and heavy for about thirty hours now. there’ve been a dozen or so minor wall breaks, but we’re keeping up.”

“We got hit by a squad of replicators.” Perry said, moving on to the next wounded super, helping Heather patch him up and handing him a complementary Bargand’s Favor.

“They herded the prawns! I told you!” Perry heard his dad shout in the background.

“Save that for the signal,” Perry said, switching his mic to external and waggling his finger at the wounded fellow. Bargand’s Favor might allow you to ignore pain, but that wasn’t always healthy.

“Replicators!? Are you okay!?” mom said.

“I’m fine,” Perry said. “Thank dad for the HP system for me, would you? There’s no magical princesses around to save my ass.”

“I could be there in seconds,” mom said.

“Do they need you on the wall?”

“….”

“Your mother is sweeping as we speak,” Dad said, coming closer to the mic.

“I’ll be fine. We’ve got a plan.” Perry glanced at the conductor, pacing back and forth with a snarl, the glowing symbol on his forehead making him easy to pick out in Jerry’s crowded office.

“You know, you’ve got your work cut out for you when you get back, that Chemestro punk is kicking some major ass here. If he wasn’t underage and so obviously a plant, he might even be upgraded to an Anchor.” Dad said.

An anchor was one of the supers in line to succeed Solaris in the unlikely event that the super died or went mad.

A sadly common occurrence in the super world.

“How are Heather and Hardcase doing?” mom asked. “Can I talk to them?”

“Sure,” Perry said, flipping the speakers on.

“Hi, Wraith, hi Hardcase!” Mom’s voice came out of Perry’s speakers.

“Hi, Mrs. Z,” Wraith said, waving bloodied hands. Hardcase was currently patching up her shredded armor and gutting the escape pods, deep in her Tinker Twitch.

“Hardcase can’t hear you, she’s working.” Heather said.

“It’s fine, my husband gets like that all the time. How have you been, girls? Is my son behaving himself?”

“Maybe even a bit too much. When we came out of the cabin shower a couple days ago, he turned over in bed to avoid looking at us.”

Mom chuckled over the phone. “What a gentleman. Oh, sh-“ Mom’s voice was partially occluded by the sound of a distant explosion.

“I tell you what,” she said after the rumbling subsided. “I gotta go, but I’ll make Manitian stir fry for everyone who comes back alive. With real beef!”

“Sounds good, mom,” Perry said.

“Looking forward to it, Mrs. Z.” Heather said.

“Sounds great, Paradox’s mom,” Jerry added his two cents.

The surrounding supers nodded and spoke in agreement. A stir-fry party after this did sound good. As did surviving to attend.

Natalie grunted in acknowledgment, copper and plastic melting unnaturally under her fingers as she patched together her new weapons. If you watched her work too closely, it could give you a headache as things got a bit…non-Euclidean.

Click. Mom hung up.

“So how likely is this going to get us killed?” Heather asked.

“Eh,” Perry waggled his hand. “We got a good shot at making it to car fourteen, I think. After that, it depends on if the conductor’s surprise is as good as he seems to think it is.”

“I’ll tear ‘em into scrap and turn ‘em into coffee makers and shitters,” Conductor Walther’s growled to himself as he paced back and forth, still sorting out the influence from Bargand’s Favor.

Perry stood up, tiptoed over the rows of wounded supers and addressed Jerry, who was smoking in the corner, watching the ongoings with interest.

“Sorry about intruding on your office, Jerry,” Paradox said, nodding in contrition. Now that everybody knew about it, there wasn’t much chance of Jerry keeping it.

“Are you kidding?” Jerry asked. “This is the most useful moment this area has ever had. I can always find another place to take a siesta.”

“You’re alright Jerry,” Perry told the wild-eyed janitor, clapping him on the shoulder.

“Seriously though, clean up your Silk & Spandex magazines,” Perry said, blasting one in particular with his disintegration beam on the extra small setting.

The girly magazine was instantly turned to ash except a fragment bearing the title:

Silk & Spandex ©1999

Glamour Girl Talks Wardrobe Malfunctions!

“Um…Okay,” Jerry said.

“Here’s the situation,” Perry said, turning away from Jerry. “The replicators have taken over the armory and the surrounding cars, which are in between us and car fourteen, where conductor Walthers has placed some Replicator repellant,” Perry motioned to the conductor to continue.

“With our current fighting force, our options are run or die. The replicators are too strong, too smart, too quick, and too organized.” Conductor Walthers said, catching his breath from the adrenaline.

“If we run, we might live a little longer, but Washington City is hanging on by a thread, and Franklin city is about a week away from starving, so running isn’t an option either. Not for any moral man.”

“There is however, one possibility.” Condutor Walthers said.

“Car fourteen has a weapon of last resort. A Magnum Opus.”

Perrys skin prickled. Sometimes, a Tinker made something no one could ever hope to replicate, and it usually drove them mad. A creation on par with a Sweeper.

Among Tinkers, they were both aspired to and feared. Going down in history as someone who made one weighed against most likely losing your life in the process of its creation.

Some even said that a magnum opus stole part of its creator, which was why it was so damaging to make one.

If there was one on car fourteen, it definitely had the power to repel the replicators.

“Get me to car fourteen, and I’ll set it free. Then we hope it doesn’t develop a quirk from being active during High Tide.”

That’s why he didn’t use it earlier, Perry thought, nodding. Tinker tech was prone to malfunction during high-tide, especially if the creator wasn’t there to stabilize it with their presence.

“Hardcase, how’s it going?” Perry asked.

“I’m good to go,” Hardcase said, standing above her creation, a beach-ball sized buckler for her mechsuit, studded with quantum foam batteries. It created a massive dome-shaped shield out of solid magnetism.

“Alright, I’m going to make a distraction in the armory, and it’s going to soften up resistance going through that area. Hardcase is going to lead the way and tank the hits, while I shoot through the light-permeable field with my disintegrate ray.”

“The rest of you guys follow behind and watch our sides and back.” Perry said.

“Does everyone have one of Paradox’s stickers?” Conductor Walthers asked.

The assembled supers raised their Bargand’s Favor stickers.

“Let’s tear these machines a new one,” Walthers growled. “Ladies and gentlemen, apply your temporary ass-kicking tattoos.”

Remotecontrol.EXE

Perry’s skin felt the cool sensation of the printer connecting him to the magical computer back home, which was in turn connected to the Mk. 3’s in the armory.

***The Armory***

The armory was swarming with basketball-sized replicators, designed to be anti-personelle traps that made retaking the vital facility nearly impossible.

The standard replicators walked through the flood of bladed limbs without worry, hoisting tinker tech and ammunition through a hole in the ceiling. Once the armory was empty, there was no need to defend it from recapture, and they could move on to dismantling the train for raw resources.

One of the power armors reached over and grabbed a bazooka-like weapon, hoisting it and firing before it was swarmed.

A hexagon stapled itself to the wall, each corner bearing a white-hot phosphorous candle. Suddenly the smell in the room changed, like someone had opened a window to a land of rot and decay, which was not inaccurate.

A massive, sickly yellow hand the size of a man’s body reached out of the center of the chain hexagon.

The replicators, ever the quick thinkers, focused their fire on the chain and candles, tearing them to shreds in a matter of seconds.

A distant howl, more felt than heard, echoed through the armory as the portal snapped shut on the greater rot demon’s arm, severing it at the elbow.

The sound caused the replicators to seize up as vital systems in their bodies were corroded.

The bigger machines had more backup systems and a better surface area ratio. They were less affected by the corrupting scream.

The smaller replicators were frozen up with rust and decay and would need to be recycled.

Six of the previously inanimate suits turned themselves on, somehow bypassing the signal blocking they had deployed around the armory.

These power armors engaged the replicators with a will almost as fast and unified as their own.

***Perry***

“Well, they’re distracted,” Perry said, holding his aching head. Running six armors via mental controls was the absolute limit of his concentration. “The greater demon did what I was hoping it would.”

“You made another!?” Heather demanded.

“Can’t hear you, too busy saving our lives!” Perry shouted, his entire body jostling as he rode on top of Hardcase’s cockpit.

Sprinting behind Hardcase’s umbrella of hardened magnetism was a horde of wild-eyed supers, practically frothing at the mouth to tear apart their enemies.

Another oversight on Perry’s part was that Bargand’s Favor had a social component. On one person it made them confident and aggressive. But when a large group of people had the mark of Bargand, it seemed to reinforce and amplify itself through human’s natural propensity for shared emotions.

In short, Perry was riding a berserker charge.

There’s one, Perry thought as a replicator ducked out from behind a wall, its shots pinging off Hardcase’s insanely expensive hacked-together shield.

Perry nailed the solid steel wall it was hiding behind with two hits of medium sized Disintegrate, the light flowing through the shield effortlessly. The second shot ashed the replicator, dropping it.

How long before they start shooting lasers at us instead?

Contrary to science fiction, laser weapons had never been practical. The sheer mass-to-energy-to-damage ratio was horrendous.

And a laser cauterized it’s own wounds, making them less dangerous to organics.

Why spend a dozen times the energy on a laser to only do a tiny fraction the damage?

Replicators were highly logical, and therefore had next to no laser weaponry, unlike tinkers, who were crazy bastards often more concerned with style than logic.

That didn’t mean they had none, though. They were probably breaking it out even as Perry thought about it. Replicators were fast.

But we’re gonna be faster.

“Left!” Perry shouted, pointing at the unfolded armory doors.

“Got it!” Hardcase shoved her way into the armory which was coated in rust and decay, tiny rusted bots spraying up around her ankles like seafoam.

I hope nobody gets tetanus, Perry thought, hauling himself off Hardcase’s mechsuit and running up to his ammo case while the surrounding supers leapt on the harried replicators in a berserk rage.

Bargand’s Favor glowed bright as the replicator’s attacks seemed to slip off the maddened humans rather than deal damage.

Perry kicked the lid off the ammo box, shattering the lock and revealing a dozen wrist thick hexagonal crystals.

Click. Rattle.

Hundreds of thumbnail-sized bits of spent crystal rattled out of Perry’s forearm and onto the ground. He shoved another wrist-thick disintegrate crystal into the magazine, the spring coiling up behind it before he slapped the casing closed.

Ready to rock, Perry thought, sliding three more crystals into his chest storage compartment.

“They’re coming from further down!” Rapidfire shouted, the speedster ducking out of the way of ballistic fire.

“Take this,” Perry said, taking his obsidian sword from the rack and handing it to the speedster.

“That will cut anything. Do not take your eyes off it,” Perry said to the speedster. “Follow me.”

“Hardcase, take the main entrance. Keep their attention.”

“Got it,” Hardcase said, nodding, her mechsuit charging back out into the hall. A hail of gunfire began pinging off her shield the instant she stepped out.

Perry took a half-dozen steps to the side, oriented himself parallel to the hallway, and began firing.

Melt.EXE

Melt.EXE

Melt.EXE

…

Perry made a secondary hallway by turning the walls into liquid.

“Flank ‘em,” Perry said to Rapidfire.

The speedster turned into a green blur and a moment later the assault on Hardcase’s shield came to a halt.

“AAAAGH!”

The riot of berserk supers flooded down the hall, pushing replicators aside with their new weapons.

Boom!

The Dreadnaught shelled a portion of car ten, flattening the construction to keep them penned in.

Perry melted the obstruction, and Heavy Metal created an umbrella of steel above them to make it a bit harder to target them directly.

Hardcase faced her buckler upward and everyone crowded around her massive machine as they barreled toward car fourteen, shrapnel pinging off the invisible shield above them like rain.

They got most of the way there.

WOOOOOMM

The distinctive sound of a laser caught Perry’s attention as he glanced over and saw Hardcase tumbling from her half-melted cockpit. It was glowing white-hot, having been hit by a pot-shot from the Dreadnaught above them. It had likely calculated the position of the shield based on observable shrapnel ricochets.

Perry’s joints cried out in protest as he changed direction mid-stride, turning on his jets and catching Hardcase before rejoining the flight into the eleventh car.

Just three more to go, Perry thought, his lips pressed tight as they ran, leaving Hardcase’s shield behind.

“Are you burned!?” Perry asked as he ran.

“Burned? I’m PISSED!” Natalie shouted, her eyes bloodshot as their positions were reversed, with her riding on him. “Do you have any idea how much my new model took to build!?”

Bargand’s Favor glowed bright through her shirt. The pre-canned armor spell was quickly becoming an MVP through sheer lives saved.

Just three more.