Superhero life? Super-Sized troubles!

By the time I was flying over New York I'd accelerated to a bit over two hundred miles... per second. At that velocity any attempted landing would have results somewhere between the orbital drop of the International Space Station and one of the smaller atomic bombs so I did not aim for the city but a hundred miles further out to the sea. With my newly enhanced senses picking an area without sea traffic for at least a few kilometers was easy and a split-second later a falling star named Maya was born. A lance-shaped forcefield ahead of me cut a path through the water with greatly reduced resistance, spreading the deceleration along a greater depth of water and preventing the creation of even a small tsunami. The impact was probably recorded and some scientists might get excited about a potential extrasolar meteor; nothing in orbit within the solar system should have been faster than about fifty miles per second, after all.

Rising out of the depths, I flew low against the surface of the water but very quickly, studying the city during my approach. This last part of the trip took longer than flying all the way in from the Nevada badlands had taken but was highly informative. Before my recent boost I could probably have read a whole page in a second; no superspeed, just high perception. Similarly, I could have noticed dozens of different people or points of interest from miles away. Now, scanning through a crowd of thousands at the same time from ten times the previous distance was possible. Looking through a whole city and picking up a screaming reporter from twenty miles away in a metropolis of millions was still beyond me, but looking over a few city blocks or through a large skyscraper and its dozens of floors was doable.

What I saw was not good news. The most mobile of the terrorists had used stealth and superior ability to simply blow through the defense cordon of normal humans and invade the United Nations headquarters before anyone could respond. At the same time the heavy robots masquerading as Liz's golems had systematically dismantled most of the National Guard then intercepted the first wave of Army reinforcements. Any defense normal security could put up against even the weakest supers in enclosed space had been laughable and in the only two minutes of my argument with Rinaker and traveling here the bad guys had already invaded the main chamber and taken the delegates as hostages.

The worst though were the bombs. Standard terrorist OP; trap everything and let the other guy stumble into it had been applied here writ large. The robots were trapped to blow if they took crippling damage, something I was certain their pilots did not know. The bombs being supertech, I could not be certain of their yields even with Force Awareness feeding me a great deal of info so taking them out would require more than the usual smash and move on. If that had been all it would not be such a problem, but the terrorists had taken smaller explosives with them, bombs they were even then strapping on to various senators. Last but definitely not least were the bombs hidden in the underground passages and maintenance runs of the UN headquarters, all of which were armed and linked. Suppose somehow the terrorists were taken by storm, their other failsafes removed and the hostages getting freed? Someone sitting on a cafe far away from the action might press a button, blow the whole thing to Kingdom Come then have the blame fall on whoever "botched" the rescue attempts.

The ramifications became clear enough as soon as I thought about what the terrorists needed to accomplish. The whole point of this attack was not to capture the delegates or to make demands. If actual supervillains were running the show they'd need to do two things; discredit the one government organized against them already, then prevent other governments from getting organized in turn. That was easily accomplished by killing the delegates... as long as the blame did not fall on them. Even if this whole attack was revealed as a setup, as long as foreign governments had no immediate target available they would have no chance but treat all supers as enemies of the state - and we'd all seen how that one ended. Maybe there was a genius playboy philanthropist running the whole setup behind the scenes?

Ugh, this was going to be even worse than I thought.

xxxx

Anderson Harlow was terrified. Somewhere between his taking a brief coffee break in a nearby Starbucks and getting ready for another round of questions and answers with the channel's news anchor on the very hush-hush arrival of foreign delegations, New York had exploded. Heavily armed and armored men had rushed the police cordon while giant freaking robots were exchanging shots with the Army and winning! And what did that bastard of an Editor say upon receiving his frantic call? Was he glad two of his people were still alive? Did he tell them to evacuate, save themselves? No! He'd even threatened them to get them to stay put. Harlow would have to report live on the whole thing of forget about his next payday! He was just a lousy field reporter for God's sake, not some international war correspondent!

His boss did not care. Nobody at the station did for anything except the ratings and revenue from advertising. Television was a slowly dying breed, they said, we all had to contribute to make ends meet, they said. Harlow was not about to contribute to meeting his end, though, he was smarter than that. Plus they would never give him that raise anyway so why bother trying? He dropped his mike, his backpack and his work phone, stepped on the latter for good measure, then ran for the hills - or at least the nearest bridge out of Manhattan.

In the street outside the little cafe, the National Guard were getting slaughtered. Their reinforcements had been caught from the side by a pair of those robots straight out of a comic book and had been blasted with, like, super phasers straight out of Star Wars, or something. What had happened to the good old firearms spewing bullets at your enemy? Or rocket-propelled 40mm exploding shells, at least. Who made beam guns instead of stuff that made sense? Why did they make beam guns instead of stuff that made sense? Mama Harlow's little boy was not stupid enough to stay and find out.

The robots, of course, had different ideas. One stepped on the station's sole news van in its haste to join the main battle, just before Harlow could get in and leave. A few seconds later and he would have been out of this warzone, damn it! On the other hand, a second or two later and he wouldn't have just fallen back to the ground with the van's door on his chest; he'd be beercanned along with said van. Cursing for all he was worth, he struggled to get out of the crumpled piece of metal without getting cut on a sharp end.

That was when the second robot came through. It didn't even notice Harlow as it fired blue energy beams from its head at everything nearby. Cars, shop fronts, the upper floors of buildings; a constant stream of shiny explosive death was doled out with no rhyme or reason as far as the trapped reporter could tell. Any vehicle hit blew up instantly, like in a cheap action movie. Harlow knew cars weren't supposed to explode like that - he'd even written an article on it! His damn editor had cut it off the informational column with the excuse that it was poorly researched but Harlow knew best; the online articles were "curated" to support the entertainment industry nowadays after some shady deals between the station and some guys in Hollywood.

The reporter realized he was in shock, his mind fumbling uselessly through old memories only tangentially related with his situation while he lay pinned under the van door for the robot to step on him. He forced the trip down memory lane to a halt then got his arms and legs to move. They were shaking and sluggish in his terror, barely able to get a grip as the ground shook; the robot was coming closer. Then the shadow of something large fell on Harlow from above and he blinked. Was that a piece of wall? Time slowed as the huge mass tumbled in the air, breaking apart even as it fell from maybe the fifteenth floor above him. The largest piece narrowly missed the reporter's head, dropping on the sidewalk with a powerful, ground-shaking boom and shattering in a hundred pieces that pelted everything nearby. Harlow got a cut on his right cheek from it and something about his left ear no longer felt right. He was really, really lucky to be alive, he realized. Unfortunately, he was just as unlucky because a much smaller piece of masonry landed smack in the middle of the van door, crumpling the metal against his solar plexus and leaving him both cross-eyed and barely able to draw breath. Worse, another thirty pounds had just been added to the damn thing keeping him pinned.

The robot finally noticed him. Maybe it had been his panicked shouting or maybe it had finally come close enough that its single eye that was also a gun could notice him. Seriously, talk about a sub-par design; how could it even fight at a distance if its sight was that poor? More irrelevant tangents flooded Harlow's mind as it tried to flee the realization of his imminent, unavoidable death. The robot looked down and its eye shone like the flash function on a cell phone camera. It should have looked silly. It did not look silly at all.

Then the most beautiful woman Harlow had ever seen flew between him and the robot. A blonde taller than him by at least a head with a face and curves to make the centerfold of the century, she also had the kind of muscles Harlow was certain could twist him in a pretzel then juggle him with zero effort. Was the reporter seeing his first angel? He had to be because when the robot fired the flying woman just stood there and tanked it to no apparent damage. From where he was pinned, the reporter could well believe he had gone to heaven because those legs, that ass... there was no way they were no less than heavenly. ...wait, didn't he need to die before getting to Heaven? And if he had to look up to see that image of celestial beauty and/or power, while being buried under torn metal and concrete in the middle of a blasted, burning hellscape... was he in Hell instead? He knew he shouldn't have stopped going to church all those years before.

The young man's theological ruminations were interrupted by the flying woman punching the robot in the face. There was a sound like a dozen clay cups falling on the ground from the third or fourth floor up and the robot came entirely apart, shattering like said cups would have. Legs, arms, head, armor plating and finger-thick cabling, an engine spewing oil and sparks and other things, they all crumpled at the idle blow - more like a love tap - and collapsed into a pile of broken machinery. Halfway buried in that pile was a man in a diver's suit and a comically large helmet, dazed and moaning and in even worse condition than Harlan himself, but still alive.

The angel, demon, and/or goddess landed next to the trapped reporter, leaned over and coincidentally gave him a very good look at two of the Wonders of the world as she effortlessly picked up the metal door he'd been having so much trouble lifting. Then again, if she'd reduced a giant robot to pieces in a single punch, of course a measly square yard of twenty-gauge metal would be nothing to her.

"Sir? Are you feeling good enough to walk?" the best voice he'd ever heard cut through the din of battle, delegating all sounds of guns and explosions and death to a vague, barely audible background. Large, almond-shaped eyes looked him over, their color a blue so intense it outshone sapphires. Then the dreamlike aura the world had taken was shattered by an energy beam hitting the angel/demon/goddess in the side of the head, leaving Harlow blinking away tears and the afterimage of the painfully bright attack.

The woman was, naturally, entirely unharmed. If anything she looked annoyed at another approaching robot and with a casual flick of her wrist she threw the van door hard enough it slammed into the robot's eye socket and stuck there. "Just stay here, sir," she told Harlow, not unkindly. "The paramedics will get to you soon." Then she vaulted the fifty feet to that other robot in an instant and tore through it like she had the other.

Anderson Harlow lay there as instructed and cursed his past self. He'd finally accepted he was not dead, that the events around him were really happening, gorgeous savior included. That he'd seen similar scenes in movies helped him grasp what was going on, banished confusion and panic and replaced them with awe - along with even more curses. What had possessed past-him to drop his gear when movies and comic books became reality all around him?! He could have been filming all this! Capturing it for posterity, being the first to upload it, boosting his amateur video channel - maybe even getting an interview with the superheroine like some modern, more awesome version of Lois fucking Lane but nooo, he'd had to drop everything and run.

Others would get to report this and reap the rewards now and all Anderson Harlow would get would be a reaming from that tight-arsed boss of his. What was he going to do now? Should he even wait for the paramedics? Shit, he had barely enough cash to eat, let alone pay for any medical bills. Those damn doctors always overcharged and made more tests than were needed to line their own pockets after all. Grunting, he got up to very unsteady feet and shambled closer to the action.

If he was lucky, he might get another look at the superheroine in action!

xxxx

Another punch, another robot shattered and its pilot wrapped up for a future delivery to justice, or at least police custody and then quick disappearance to some black site owned by some alphabet soup Agency. If they were lucky, they might even hold him long enough to get some info before the probable suicide implant at the base of his spine blew him up. The terrorists, who I was beginning to suspect were either backed or directly recruited and equipped by the Everymen, had been thorough and while my senses could see it, my powers did not extend to the interior of living bodies so I had no reliable way to disable it. Whatever, the guy's ultimate fate was not my business. He'd made his bed and me getting involved beyond stopping his rampage was a bad idea for all kinds of reasons.

The next robot in line shot an actual rocket at me. It was a tiny, cute little thing, no larger than my fist and with delicate angled fins. It also detonated in a sphere of plasma ten feet in diameter, a tandem explosion-implosion effect that kept its area of effect contained not to avoid collateral damage but to increase its density and temperature. I shrugged it off like I had everything else so far, only wincing slightly at the heat. It was like getting into a slightly too hot shower; briefly painful but ultimately harmless to me... and absolutely deadly to everyone else in the battlefield. The last couple of minutes alone I'd used my speed to intercept projectiles, beam weapons and explosions rather than dodging them well over a hundred times when letting them hit would have killed people or collapsed buildings. It was an entirely different way of fighting but I was getting the hang of it.

The robot loaded another missile to its launcher, so I sped up next to it, ripped off its arms and caused its frame to tear open down the middle, delivering another bad guy for a quick disabling and capture more or less intact. That was another thing I'd had to learn on the job. Flying through each and every one of those bozos at twenty times the speed of sound and smearing them halfway across the plaza would have taken five seconds, tops. But in order for them to live to spill their guts under enhanced interrogation and/or truth-telling powers and for me not to terrify everyone watching this on live television any further, I'd needed a different way to break evil terrorist robots... and wasn't the fact I could say that phrase with a straight face kinda awesome?

Anyway, the answer had been to layer my strikes with both Force Adjustment and Proximakinesis, drawing upon Forced Acceleration deeply to effectively slow the world as I worked while holding both my punching and flight way, way, way back. Force Adjustment worked on the robots' frames to make them incredibly fragile, Proximakinesis broke any explosive traps just right to prevent detonation, and my actual hits shattered the barely-holding-together machines just strongly enough to give the bad guys a good knock-out. That way nobody died, nobody still conscious to complain did, and all threats were neutralized; win-win.

Another group of enhanced enemies were trying to force their way into the UN building, but without the distraction provided by the robot artillery they were having a much worse time of it than before. Not every soldier on our side was bog standard human and while they'd been primary targets in the opening moves of the fight they were also far more capable of survival than their normal comrades. Of the forty or so enhanced soldiers on our side thirty were still combat-effective, firing at the power-armored group with oversized or empowered firearms, or engaging them with their limited powers or even hand-to-hand. They also outnumbered that particular group three to one so they'd probably win.

Problem was, we could not afford a single enemy getting in right now. The bad guys inside were still rounding up hostages, gathering everyone at the main chamber, and setting up even more explosives to prevent any conventional assault. Of the two things I'd done before openly joining the fight, the second was to set up a force-field around the UN building. Most electromagnetic signals involved a negligible amount of force macroscopically-speaking, so negating them and cutting off communications had been barely a moment's effort. If this had been a professional military force that would have warned them something was wrong, but they were disposable patsies at best so they had not realized no news did not necessarily mean good news, giving me time to settle the battle out here before going in properly. All of that would go out the window if a terrorist fled inside, because I hadn't had time to also make the field stop people in addition to signals.

I hurled a robot at another robot hard enough to disable both without them being under my weakening touch and trusting my new awareness of angles and motion and the increased control it afforded to do it just right. Their pilots got a bit banged up, but no more than a car accident at forty miles an hour and that let me finish with both two seconds faster. Instantly, I was across the plaza with the power-armored bad guy that had given the defenders the runaround slamming into me and bouncing before he could get any further. I grabbed him by the chest plate, fingers sinking into the hardened metal as if it were clay then simultaneously shifted the durability of his whole armor while giving him a good shake. The whole thing fell apart under its own weight like a cheap theater prop but the pilot landed on his feet, boots cracking the pavement, then punched me in the throat with a yell. His finger bones cracked and he cradled his arm with a scowl between rage and pain that only managed to make him look constipated. Rolling my eyes, I backhanded him half a city block away.

Then I waded into the firefight between the enhanced troopers on our side and the group of terrorists in power armor. A kick sent the closest of them through a van across the street hard enough to give him a concussion. Grabbing the next pair in line, I weakened their armors and slammed them together hard enough to knock them out, grabbed a supertech rocket out of the air and crushed it between my hands to contain the plasma burst then walked my eyebeams over another bad guy, reducing his armor to ash and blasting him with the equivalent of several full-body slams. The remaining terrorists broke into a run. Some schoolyard tripping paired with weakening touches had them face-planting into concrete and those three were not enhanced. Their flattened, bloody noses and broken teeth would be the least of their problems.

"Who's in charge here?" I said as I landed in the midst of a mixed group of National Guard and the spec-ops troops with the unmarked uniforms. A few of them nervously covered me with their rifles or even sidearms, very much aware they'd do exactly nothing after seeing me smash enemies tougher than main battle tanks with my bare hands. Most of them were staring on in awe though, with a great heap of shock and a side order of some fairly insecure attraction. Sometimes, being able to see through things was a mixed thing at best and the fact that most of the soldiers had neither fought in nor been briefed about the mess in Florida didn't help. Fortunately, despite the total upheaval of their worldview the appearance of giant robots and a superheroine in the middle of New York must be to them, a few of them retained a good head on their shoulders.

"That would be me, ma'am," a neat, short-haired, dusky-skinned guy with blood-shot dark brown eyes, a serious mien and the shade of a goatee in his grime-covered face told me. "CSM James Aaron Bates." As he walked closer, I noticed that his balance was off and there was a hitch in his step. A single glance with Force Awareness confirmed my suspicions.

"Your lieutenant colonel didn't make it?" I asked then almost instantly shook my head. "No time for that. I took down all their heavies within six blocks and can't see any more of them in the city but that's no guarantee." Another look into the UN building revealed the head bad guy was done spouting his self-contradicting and asinine manifesto and was ready to 'have fun' with the delegates so I had to rush things more than I felt comfortable with. "Now, I can't give you orders or anything, but it would be a good idea if you held the perimeter against further sudden attacks while I saved the hostages."

"With all due respect ma'am, we don't know you," he reasonably told me even as he tensed and behind his back he flicked some sort of signal to his subordinates. "we've certainly never seen you before and even if we had we're under orders not to let anyone in." He raised his hands in the usual 'what you can do?' gesture earnestly. He was a fairly good actor; most people without super-senses would have bought it. "Now personally, and having seen how you saved our lives and everything, I'm fairly sure you're a friendly that means well. Unfortunately, the US military doesn't pay us to disregard orders or have opinions and there's no superhero-related exceptions in the regs. So if you try to go any further we'll have to stop you."

"That's OK, sergeant major, I understand," I told him and a couple of his people relaxed minutely. "Trusting one unknown superhuman when you were under attack by unknown superhumans would be just dumb. Just don't try to enter the building through the ground floor entrances, they all have multiple explosives traps set up." Not entirely true, but they didn't need to know that.

"How do you know?" one of the other soldiers blurted, causing several of his fellows to stare reproachfully and me to internally thank him for asking the question.

"Your briefs are UFM polyester and beige." He immediately went beet red and quite a few others burst into laughter. I, on the other hand, pointed at the spalling in the barricade he'd been sitting behind. "Next time try for the ballistic fabric. Some of those fragments missed you by maybe an inch." Also not quite true but it sounded right plus beige polyester sucked. In the midst of more laughter I took to the air, aiming away from the building. The soldiers didn't try to shoot or even aim at me for more reasons than one, though I chose to believe it was due to my likable personality. "And sergeant major? That knee of yours has three hairline fractures. If you want to be able to walk right come next year you'll stop putting weight on it now."

And with that last piece of advice, I flew off. Hopefully, they'd trust me enough not to get themselves and the hostages dead, or at least be delayed looking for the bombs I mentioned. Once I was far enough away and high enough those men wouldn't see me, I flew back in from above faster than people on the ground would notice.

The rooftop access was way cooler, anyway.