The Portal had just closed when I got the alert from DiDi, ergo, -FUUUUUUCK!-

I groaned without getting anything else. -What now?- I /asked her, wincing even as the Markspace started to blow up with something.

-Stamford!- she /swore. – The New Warriors...!-

I didn’t even bother to glance at the news being transferred on, just looking down at the Connecticut town with my Cosmic Awareness from twenty minutes away across the Solar System where a meteor seeded with a flesh-melting spore release was being vaporized, and the black operators to cleanse the Kree fanatics who’d sent it on were already on the way.

Big explosion. Really big. Right in front of a school. Couple kilotons, at least. There was a crater a block across, and half the town was leveled by the shockwave, which was what had killed most of the people.

The kids at the school were simply blasted apart.

The New Warriors were dead, also annihilated in the point-blank blast, except for Speedball. It had been caused by... Nitro? The exploding super-villain?

I narrowed my eyes. Not a fuel-air bomb?

-Compile all footage of blast radius and power of Nitro,- I /ordered the Markspace, freezing activity and then redirecting it in a frenzy. -I’m on him.-

He couldn’t hide his lifeline. I Portaled into Connecticut, following the line north towards Maine as the reconstituted man fled. He’d jumped in the back of a pick-up truck driven by a contractor, who likely had no idea he was aboard, and was looking around wildly for evidence of anyone following him.

Well, I wasn’t going to let him blow up on the highway and repeat the mess. I zipped in over top of the unaware pickup driver a few seconds later, above and in front of him. Vier reached out with TK, tossed Nitro into the air, and I Cast a Portal in front of him.

He only had time to shout in surprise as he went through and suddenly found himself in the North Dakota plains, a very long way from anything resembling civilization, or even a road.

He promptly detonated again as the ground came up to meet him, a killing impact at his speed.

Like only a short time before, the explosion was quite large, a couple kilotons in power, at least ten times bigger than any of the visual evidence I was being shown in Markspace.

Someone had boosted this guy’s power to the max.

I let the shockwave sweep past me, keeping my place coldly, and simply watched and waited as gases gathered and converged, swirling together to reconstitute the man.

He shook his head, and then gawked after he saw I was right in front of him. Without another word, I took off for the sky, while he grabbed at my arm and tried to wriggle free.

My hand was stuck to his chest, burning with unwhite flames, and I could feel the molecules there starting to grow agitated in reflex. With a blink of my eye, I shut down half his powers as his eyes started to glow.

“Go ahead, powder my hair,” I told him kindly, stopping in place. “It’s a half-mile to the ground when you reconstitute. Think you’ll be able to survive the fall, if I don’t just sit here and catch you again?” I asked him flatly, and he glared at me, unable to move my arm in the slightest.

“I’ve got more power than you think!” he yelled at me. “Not even the High Guard can stop me now!” He thrust a hand at my face and blew it up.

It was powerful, like a block of military explosives going off in my face. It blew my hair back, and I didn’t even close my eyes against the flash, Specs taking it all like a champ and no-selling it all the way.

“Is that so?” I replied, as if he hadn’t just tried to blow my head off. Obviously, he was confident of blowing up just before hitting the ground and reconstituting himself. “I will have you know you’re a dead man, Mr. Hunter. You just killed over six hundred people, including sixty schoolchildren. More precisely, you managed to run and get away with it, which means that if you disappear forever, nobody is going to know who or why or how you died, if I don’t tell them.”

“You can’t kill me!” he grinned wildly, his eyes growing ever brighter. “Let’s see if you can take ground zero yourself!”

I opened my mouth to say I already had, and then he blew up before my palm as, just to be on the safe side, I flicked up a skin-tight Seraphamic Shield.

This time the fireball and shockwave were all around me, and I still no-sold it. I imagined the sound would carry for miles, but they’d have to be looking right this way to see it.

-What,- Sama /asked me directly, -are you doing in Dakota?-

-I just watched Nitro suicide himself,- I /explained politely. Naturally she was aware of interspatial movement in Tribal territory.

I could hear her mental flicker. -Wasn’t he just in Stamford?- she /asked slowly.

-Portaled him out here, then suppressed half his powers. Also, had a vivic flame up on my hand while stuck to him.-

-You... shut down the aspect of his powers that allowed him to reconstitute himself?- There was a hint of wicked glee in her words. -You are so mean!- she /chided me with only appreciation behind it.

-He was boosted with MGH.-

-Mutant Growth Hormone?- Her tone was ugly. That was a very new, very potent drug coming out that could temporarily grant powers to some people, or boost powers in other humans. It was made by draining spinal fluid from mutants, and was just about as appreciated as vampiric blood-sucking by those in the know.

-Given to him by Robert DeClun of Damage Control.-

She accessed my mental files of the man, shuffled over from DiDi, and scowled. -You read the bastard’s mind while he was ranting and not protecting his thoughts.- I /fed her a view of the pill container in my hand, deftly removed from his jacket before he’d blown himself apart. -And you picked his pocket!-

I looked around the area, but Nitro was now dead, his ability to reconstitute himself removed and vivus making sure the dispersal was indeed very final and he wouldn’t miraculously find the power to regather himself in a few hours.

No, no, he was staying quite dead.

-You’ll have to forgive me, but I have an MGH trafficking ring to see to, and a CEO to crucify.- Which was a bloody shame, as his company had worked pretty closely with Grimm Construction in their rapid reconstruction efforts. They even employed a lot of superhumans for a States company, and had a good reputation as far as their workers went.

My thoughts went down a dark tangent, and a specialist in this stuff. -Mr. Castle, how busy are you?- I /inquired in a darker corner of the Markspace.

-This about Stamford?- he /replied instantly. -I’m staking out a coke buy at the moment.-

-Mutant Growth Hormone trafficking ring, funded by the Crux and an arm of the Zodiac. It’s big. You’re going to need friends.-

-I’ll send out the word to the crew. I think The Mick is in between Rides, and Spector and his lot are always up for some fun.- He /paused thoughtfully. -Blaze might even kick in for something of this scope, right?-

-His wife and in-laws are mutants, so, yeah.-

-I’m on it. Feed us the leads, and we’ll get the process started,- he /agreed grimly.

-The New York Shields are already converging on Robert DeClun of Damage Control there. He’s been Crux his whole life, it seems. His company is clean. They’ll find stuff, it will lead to other stuff, but I have the location of three milking farms already.- I /paused significantly. -Caribbean. Run by vampires in partnership with Zodiac for distribution.-

-Old home week,- he /growled. -Blade’s been getting depressed with the lack of targets in his usual haunts. He’ll be happy to hear that.-

-He’s been doing good work rooting out some old monsters in hiding,- I /agreed. -This is going to be tougher. Newer, savvier vamps using tech, not old school.-

-Got it. We’ll be ready for some serious stuff.-

Gotta keep the underhands of the world busy, too. There was always dirty stuff out there that didn’t like being exposed to the light. Speaking of which...

-I want immediate monitoring on political forums and backlash from this incident. My guess is the Crux and Zodiac have agents in place to turn this into a political wave. Anyone who starts advocating loudly and unreasonably for some sort of lockdown laws is potentially a mouthpiece.

-Also, get the Constitutional lawyers up and ready. If they try to get some anti-Powered law passed, I want it shut down before it even reaches the Supreme Court on Constitutional grounds.-

-Woo Hoo!- the action lawyers all /exclaimed. To Staters, arguing Constitutional law was what put you on the ranking board of the most elite lawyers in the nation. Those who argued before the Supreme Court the most had the best chances of serving on it, after all. You could almost hear the buzz of preparatory briefs being drawn up, and the backchannels were lighting up with the various arguments and approaches those who thought themselves sly were going to use, and quite importantly, the renegades who would try to use some off-the-wall arguments to try and justify discrimination against Powered and the amendments which precisely disallowed such things.

Some heroic fights were done with fists, and some with paperwork. The reason the Markspace was big was because the little heroes getting things done outnumbered the Big Fists by thousands to one.

The timing couldn’t be worse, of course, but happily most of the extraplanetary affairs had nothing to do with the States, and inner turmoil here wouldn’t affect the High Guard to a measurable extent.

There was going to be a whole surge of street-level pressure swarming in to fight the Crux, and especially when the stories started breaking of who was bound to who, the whole thing should end up diluted and mixed up in a war of words going nowhere, even if there were some protests involved.

Six hundred dead in Stamford from a supervillain. They’d want to blame the New Warriors, but once we brought it out that Nitro had been in the pay of DeClun, well, that was going to put a nasty money-oriented spin on things, where it was obvious that someone intended to profit heavily from the explosion and the resulting human misery.

By this time tomorrow, I expected pretty much the entire workforce of Damage Control to quit.

DiDi was already drawing up the papers for a new Grimm Reconstructions, and getting ready to call the workers. Probably should be able to pick up their assets for a song, and... what were the odds DeClun’s bankers weren’t involved at some level? The Crux and Zodiac both loved the banking industry. Time to look into them, too...

-Hoy, oversized meme-lady of Dynamic Destruction!- Corsair’s /voice came in on a section of Markchat totally separate from that involved on Terra. -That little conference you had us start up is a go. The different Skrull factions have all sent representatives, or come themselves.-

My Cosmic Awareness swept out to a certain point beyond the Skrull Empire’s border, where the Starjammer was floating in empty space, the carefully distant delegation ships of the other imperial power gathered.

Seemingly something like this could have been argued in the Quad-Galactic Council, and that was coming next. This, however, was going to be both empires’ first look at what was coming from the Negative Zone.

======================

Editor’s Note: The Galactic Council in Marveldom is sort of a joke, and is actually restricted to just the Milky Way, Magellanic Cloud, Andromeda, and Shi’ar Galaxies. It has no forces of its own, and basically is just a place where various races can talk without shooting one another. The members with seats on the Council change with the influence and backing of the many member species, too.