The Loop

Adam reached his awareness as far as it would stretch. He concentrated on the movement of the people approaching. It was clear by the pattern of their movements that they were trying to avoid detection. It was also clear that although they were enemies, and they were there to do everything in their power to kill everyone in town, they were very much humans. This was the good news, as if they had been Abominations, retreat would have been the only option, and a fairly hopeless one at that.

“What’s coming, my friend? Please talk to me,” said Hourglass, and Poltergeist was struck by a nostalgia for the natural synergy of his old team, who had become so accustomed to his subtle mental nudges in their heads in the moments leading up to and during confrontations that he never had to verbalize any of what he was sensing. It had given them a sort of natural battlefield awareness. Poltergeist’s sense of what was happening was the strongest of course, but he developed with the others a sort of mental shorthand so that they got the gist of what was going on at any given time, and if they required any more specific information, he would concentrate a little harder to form his thoughts into concrete words, all while keeping track of everything and moving sometimes dozens of objects around in the space he could sense, and moving his physical body through the chaos to boot.

Sometimes he’d had to work with other Hypes outside of his own team, though, and so he had been forced to adjust to a more conventional method of battlefield communication.

“Humans. About forty … No, forty three. Soldiers of Calamity,” he informed the others.

This was the bad news. The Soldiers of Calamity were a terrorist group that had arisen quickly in a world that was rapidly changing as people with superpowers kept popping up around the globe, with their only stated goal being bringing about the end of the world. Their reasoning, flimsy as it was, was that humans possessing supernatural powers was the surest sign that God had initiated the end times, and they were only doing Him a favor by hastening it along. The logic had never seemed all that sound to Adam, but then the logic of doomsday cults rarely did. The issue with this particular doomsday cult was that their sensibilities had held a strange appeal for millions of humans who were feeling lost and helpless in the chaos of an unrecognizable world. The other problem was that, despite their apparent belief that powers were the sign of the devil and the reason why the earth needed to be wiped clean, they didn’t hesitate to recruit Hypes to their cause, and a shocking amount joined them.

“Not those assholes again. Really? I thought they were wiped out, along with, you know, everyone else,” said Kali.

“My speculation is that the Abominations have spared them so far because their goals are aligned somewhat, at least for now. In the end, I suspect they’ll end up as dead as the rest of us,” said Hourglass.

“I have no compunctions about speeding that process up. What about you guys?” asked Poltergeist.

The hardened looks on his compatriots' faces told him that they did not.

Although Poltergeist could tell from a distance that several of the SOC militants moving in on them had powers, based on the way their thoughts felt, without focusing on their minds specifically—which would have reduced his ability to focus on the rest of the battle—he couldn’t tell exactly what those powers were. This was a textbook example of what made Kali so useful—and so dangerous. He sent her a slight nudge with his mind, and she responded by extending the field of her power to encompass him and Hourglass.

Immediately he felt the effects that her power had on his own. The range at which he could sense things was dramatically increased, as were his ability to focus and his ability to move many objects with complicated trajectories at the same time. Under ordinary circumstances, his power came with an obvious drawback, increasing the granularity and specificity of his focus decreased his overview of things. He couldn’t focus on every enemy’s heart valves and crush them at the same time, because attacking even a single tiny target this way required a great deal of concentration. On the other hand, sensing everything around him at once meant that his telekinesis became crude and uncoordinated. Since his telekinesis and his telepathy drew from the same well of concentration, he couldn’t place more focus on one without having a detrimental impact on the other. Kali changed all that. It was like he now had twenty brains working in tandem. He wasn’t sure how it felt for Hourglass, but he knew the benefits were similar for anyone with powers.

As the first combatants came into view—composed almost entirely of the non-powered members of the SOC—he began launching projectiles at them from positions that no gunner could have assumed. Despite his bravado and the callousness he projected to Kali and Hourglass, he didn’t actually want to kill or even badly injure anyone—not even these misguided psychopaths. He aimed for non-lethal injuries, piercing tendons and bones, taking enemy combatants out of commission without leaving them scarred for life. This had been his default way of fighting for the entire time he’d had his powers, and he didn’t stop now to think of the futility of extending the lives of these men and women who were likely going to die within weeks or months anyway.

While he was pelting them with sharp bits of rocks and other assorted detritus, he was also using his power to pick their guns out of their hands and their bullets out of the air. Simultaneously, he was raising random pieces of wreckage and ruin in front of himself and his allies to block any unexpected shots that he missed with his power.

Kali and Hourglass did not share his tendency toward non-lethal forms of violence. As Kali fed off of the energy of the Hypes around her, her eyes began to glow yellow and she lifted off the ground. There was an intensity to her in this state that Poltergeist had never been able to put into words. She was simply magnificent to behold. Magnificent, and terrible. She began flying around the battlefield, shouting Hindi curses in a booming, otherworldly voice that would have sent any ordinary people fleeing. But their enemies were strengthened by their convictions, and they were not afraid of any false gods. Indeed, the sight of her seemed to provoke a rage in them that made them fight all the harder. Still, the blasts of blinding, loathsome light that she shot from her eyes inspired fear even in the hardest hearts of her enemies.

Meanwhile, Hourglass moved in a wide arc, touching bullets in midair and reversing their trajectories so that they flew toward the people who had fired them, often ending up hitting and killing them. He ran straight toward a woman with her gun raised at him and every bullet she fired immediately reversed its course through time as it struck him. She was strafing left and right in a random pattern that allowed her to avoid getting hit by her own bullets as they came back toward her, stopping in midair where the barrel of the rifle had been when they'd been fired. Still, as he closed the distance between them, the look on her face changed from righteous fury and rage to mortal fear. Faced with a man who wasn't technically bulletproof, but who nevertheless couldn't be injured by projectiles as long as his power was active, she began to turn to flee. Too late though, as Hourglass caught up to her and touched her on the shoulder, causing her body to start working its way back in time, while her brain continued forward. The confused look on her face would have been comical, had it not been so terrifying.

Hourglass applied the same trick to several more soldiers in short order, sending them all marching backwards along the same trajectories they'd followed into the city, utterly confused about what was happening to them.

At least he was only messing with their bodies. Poltergeist had seen what happened when he applied his power to people's minds.

And still he was volunteering to have it done to him.

The battle was over within ten minutes and without a single member of Kali’s militia having to lift a finger.

“My friends,” said Tomas, starting to take off his sweat-drenched mask, “Did anyone else feel that that was too easy?”

“I agree,” said Lakshmi, descending toward them as the terrible light faded from her eyes.

“I think that’s because it isn’t over yet,” said Adam.

“What do you mean, my friend?”

“I mean that was just a distraction.”

From the North side of the square, they began to hear a grating sound that grew steadily louder until it was a solid vibration in the air, making their teeth chatter. A building there—a former bank—split suddenly from foundation to roof, and from the cracks there came forth another contingent of the SOC, and among them were the Hypes who hadn’t taken part in the initial assault, including the force of destruction who had torn the building in half, and a man with the ability to conceal himself and whatever or whomever else he chose from perception—even the enhanced perceptions of people like Adam.

“Fantôme,” whispered Adam.

“I didn’t know you spoke French, my friend?”

“It’s his name,” Adam explained, “It means ghost.”

Fantôme, standing in the plumes of dust created by the disintegrating building behind him, regarded them with disdain. It was a look that none of them could see, even though they were facing him head on and he wore no mask (nor anything else). The three of them and three of Kali’s lieutenants stood alone in the middle of the square facing their enemies. Weren’t there more of us? wondered Poltergeist absently.

Poltergeist felt around with his power, and he sensed the three other Hypes who were with Fantôme, but he had already forgotten the man himself. Something moved with impossible speed to his left and his power caught and held its shape long enough for him to send it careening off toward the brick wall of a building on the West side of the square with a flick of his power. He lost it again, but a few bricks were curiously falling out of an indent in the wall of the building to his left that he could have sworn wasn’t there before.

From the corner of his eye, he caught sight of a man limping away down a sideroad, but when he turned to get a closer look, he saw nothing but an abandoned street filled with debris and waist-deep drifts of sand.

He focused on the three enemies ahead of them, two men and a woman, and concentrated on figuring out their powers. The men were a pyrokinetic and an acrobat, common enough power classes. The woman, though, was more of a rarity. She could create copies of herself and control each of them through a shared hivemind, but the more of them she created, the less coordinated they became. It was a limitation of focus, the same sort of limitation that Adam’s power had. But limited or not, he thought his power was more than sufficient to wipe the floor with the three of them, and once he accounted for Hourglass’s help, it was no contest.

The pyrokinetic man exploded into flame and launched toward him with an unforeseen burst of speed, and Poltergeist saw that he had another trick up his sleeve; the hotter he became, the faster and stronger he would be.

Poltergeist reached out and pushed against the man with his power, but it was a losing battle. The man was moving with such speed that by the time Poltergeist’s power brought him to a stop, he would have already passed through Hourglass and himself, setting them both ablaze. Poltergeist launched himself skyward with his power and drew his sword—which he had discarded on the ground earlier—back to his hand. He shoved Hourglass unceremoniously to his right at the same time, and the man fell over on his side.

Meanwhile, the acrobat had entered the fray and was doing back handsprings in Hourglass’s direction, with daggers held in both hands. Poltergeist paid him no mind—Hourglass could handle an attack as straightforward as this without his help. Hourglass gave the man a gentle brush with the back of his hand as he rolled gracefully out of the way and back onto his feet. The man’s course was instantly reversed and he flipped amusingly back in the direction from which he'd come.

In the meantime, the woman had created eight copies of herself, and Poltergeist saw in her mind that this was the most copies she could reliably control. Past this point they’d be limited to swinging their arms wildly and toddling around like infants. But eight was more than enough to circle them while the two men had had them distracted.

“Help!” shouted a voice that Poltergeist almost recognized from a rooftop somewhere nearby.

The woman—all eight of her—had drawn rapid-firing, self-loading crossbows and was preparing to fire. Poltergeist yanked the bows away from two of her while the pyrokinetic man, who had overshot his mark and crashed into a building on the South side of the square when Poltergeist and Hourglass had moved unexpectedly out of his path, regained his senses and was turning his attention on Hourglass. Poltergeist was trying to concentrate his powers on dealing with the many arrows of the woman’s many bows.

Why crossbows? he thought. But then he had to remind himself that he carried a sword. A big part of Hype life had always been theatricality and showmanship.

The acrobat, having returned to his initial position in front of the ruined building at the North end of the square as Hourglass’s temporal reversal wore off, was now beginning a new angle of attack. He was jumping and launching over bits of rubble, and leaping off of arrows in mid-flight in an attempt to gain enough height to tackle Poltergeist out of the air. It took speed and reflexes well beyond anything Poltergeist had seen before. This was unlike any power-enhanced acrobatics he'd ever seen, and he was willing to admit that he'd underestimated the man's powers. He was almost impressed; it had been a long time since he’d encountered a truly new use of a power. Still, he thought, he can’t really get up here like that, can he?

Hourglass was injured somehow. Poltergeist hadn’t seen or sensed what had happened, but the man was discarding his flaming jacket and the sand at his feet was stained red with his blood. The pyrokinetic was dead. He had approached Hourglass at blazing speed, and, rather than reverse him, Hourglass had opted to speed time up for him as he stepped out of the way, sending the man careening out of control toward a concrete barrier that a woefully outclassed military had set up in defense of the city months ago. His power required him to touch the object he was altering, though, and this meant that he had been badly burned in the process of taking out the pyrokinetic. It didn’t explain the bloody gash across his chest, though. Had he been shot? No, there were still few enough things moving and arrows flying for Poltergeist to vaguely keep track of them all. But something had cut him up, and badly.

The acrobat’s wild plan to gain height by jumping off of flying arrows, which Poltergeist had at first dismissed as impossible, was actually working, and the woman seemed to have caught onto what he was attempting.

“Focus your fire underneath him!” shouted the man, “I’m almost there!”

Many arrows filled the space below Adam as he tried to move himself to a less open area, but many more were blocking his path. His power picked up on and prioritized the ones that were coming straight at him, and he managed to stop these in their tracks and drop them out of the sky, but if he didn’t start dealing with the others, or their source, the acrobat would soon be at his level and attempting to stab him with his daggers.

He allowed his sword to drift out of his hand and start spinning like the rotors of a helicopter. It spun so fast that it formed a sort of shield, blocking and chopping arrows out of the air. It advanced slowly in the direction of one of the woman’s copies, but this was a distraction, the obvious attack that would keep her from noticing the concrete blocks that were about to fall on the heads of two other copies. He gleaned enough from her mind to know that as long as a single copy remained, she couldn’t die, so he had no moral problem with killing the rest. Two of them fell with their heads caved in.

She created two more.

Hourglass was getting unsteadily to his feet. He looked nauseous and confused. Stay down, Poltergeist thought in his direction, afraid that the woman would notice that he wasn’t dead and direct her attention toward him, which was exactly what ended up happening. This was to his benefit, though, as her brief distraction caused her to lose focus on keeping a stream of arrows underneath him for the acrobat to climb. The man, having gotten within eight feet of Poltergeist, now found himself suddenly without any footing and fell unceremoniously twenty feet to the ground where he crumpled and lay unmoving.

Now there was just the woman to deal with, and Poltergeist, having been out of practice using his powers, was quickly getting the hang of things again. Fewer targets to focus on, and fewer powers to keep in mind meant that he had a sudden advantage. He didn’t hesitate to push it. He dropped suddenly out of the air, bringing up several layers of debris in front of Hourglass to protect him at the same time. The woman hadn’t had her full focus on him and was momentarily unsure where he had gone. He recalled his sword to him, causing it to take a roundabout path that cut the Achilles’ tendons of two of the woman’s copies on its way by. He had realized that it was better not to kill her copies, moral compunctions or not, because killing them allowed her to simply create more to replace them, perfectly healthy and uninjured. Leaving them wounded enough to be unthreatening was better because she still had to maintain her focus on them while they provided her no tactical advantage. She attempted to create one new copy to replace the two he had decommissioned, but now she was pushing her limits of focus, and it showed. Her aim was getting worse and she wasn’t moving as quickly.

Poltergeist pressed his advantage further, leaping toward one of her copies with his sword held overhead. He deflected an arrow that was about to put a hole through his neck, and sent it into the hip of another of the woman’s copies instead. With his sword, he cut the right arm clean off of the copy he was leaping at. There were now five fully intact copies, and four who were nothing but a drain on the woman’s focus. She was getting sloppier. Poltergeist felt her weighing her options in her head. Should she create another copy, further limiting her focus and the coordination of the copies, or should she try to shore up what focus she had on the copies she had already created?

She made a snap decision before Poltergeist could see what she was planning. She shot and killed the damaged copies and replaced them almost instantly with new ones. The new copies were obligated to originate from the locations of existing ones, which meant that now all nine copies were in front of Poltergeist. The fight and the rapid use of her power was clearly draining the woman’s reserves of energy, and Poltergeist decided on a new course of action before she could regain the upper hand.

He pressed toward her, using a combination of his sword, random items scattered around, and the woman’s own arrows to pick off copies at a startling pace. Each one was replaced a little slower than the one before, and cracks were starting to show in the perfection of the copies. One emerged from its originator missing an arm, another had legs without bones.

He slowed his approach as the fight seemed to be going out of the woman.

“Surrender,” he said to the woman. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

There was pleading in his eyes, but hers remained hard and bitter.

“It’s a little late for that,” said the woman, laughing miserably. “And it doesn’t matter now, anyway. I might be done for, but so are you.”

Without warning, each of her copies raised a knife to its throat and yanked it sideways, leaving Poltergeist seemingly alone in the middle of the street. But his perception of being alone didn’t last long.

“Hello, Adam,” said a man’s voice to his left. He saw the shape of a person moving out of the corner of his eye, and his power caught a flicker of movement and a lightning bolt of thought, but when he turned toward the man and focused his power, all indications of him disappeared. Poltergeist forgot he had been there.

“You don’t remember the trick for dealing with me, do you?” the voice asked. Poltergeist was struck by a bout of déjà vu. He tried once more to turn toward the voice, to focus his power toward the movement, but caught himself before he lost it.

“That’s right, Adam. You’re remembering.”

It took all of Poltergeist’s willpower to keep his attention focused away from the man. He studied one of the woman’s corpses to keep his mind occupied, and as he did so, his memories and understanding of the man in his periphery became clearer. And something else: he remembered that Kali was nearby, and he realized that while he and Tomas had been fighting their three Hypes, she had been occupied battling several of her own. Their battles had been happening right on top of one another, and neither group had been aware of the other.

“Ah,” said the man, “how quickly one forgets things.”

The vaguely French accent, the condescension; he had fought this man before. Fantôme, he thought. He remembered, more or less, how his power worked. He was impossible to perceive directly, and he could teleport other objects and people slightly out of phase from one another, so that they became imperceptible to each other. Any people he had put out of phase from one another would forget the others existed until his power was broken.

“Kali!” shouted Poltergeist, “Lakshmi! I know you’re here. Talk to me!”

He felt around for her, but he was careful not to focus too hard, fearing he would slip back into unknowing. Unlike Fantôme himself, he could perceive her directly and remember her permanently if he knew where to look, but Fantôme was an expert at hiding things well. And besides, he was as hidden to her as she was to him, which meant that she couldn’t hear him shouting. The only way to shatter the illusion was to incapacitate the man responsible for it.

“So you want to challenge me to a duel?” asked Fantôme. Although he wasn’t telepathic, he had a strange knack for guessing what people were thinking.

“Yes, that’s right,” said Poltergeist, addressing him directly for the first time and nearly losing his tenuous grip on the situation.

“And how do you propose—”

Poltergeist didn’t let him finish. The trick to dealing with Fantôme was to simply act and react, basing all movement on instinct. Focusing on the fight meant losing it. He lobbed several heavy objects from all around the square in the general direction of the voice, being careful not to focus too much on where exactly they were headed. Without thinking, he pushed against the ground with his power and shot himself straight into the air, vaguely aware that in doing so he had narrowly missed being gutted by a knife. He sent an unfocused telepathic scream out to any minds that might be nearby, aware that in doing so he was hurting Hourglass and Kali, but sensing that it was the right path forward.

He heard a pained moan from below him and teetered on the edge of awareness for a moment, before grounding himself with a painful memory of Christine. Focus on that, he told himself, shooting back toward the ground at the opposite side of the square.

He sensed a flash of movement directly behind him and, closing his eyes, slashed around in a wide arc with his sword. He launched himself into the air once again and chanced a glance at his blade. It was dripping red.

The man kneeled on the ground with his arms clutching desperately at his abdomen. Crimson sand encrusted his clothes. His power waned as he went into shock. Adam’s awareness expanded and he sensed on a rooftop nearby not just Lakshmi, but all of her soldiers—both ordinary human and Hype—and the men they had fought. Lakshmi was the only one still breathing, and she was near her end. Adam had hoped one of her men could help patch up Fantôme, but it would have been too late even if she had had a Hype healer with her. The man was expiring quickly.

Why did you attack here? Adam asked.

“Oh don’t bother me with all that,” said the man. “I’m dying. Just talk to me like a human being.”

“Fine. Now answer the question.”

“What would you like me to say? Because there isn’t much else left to attack? Because the end isn’t coming fast enough for us? Because we can’t rest until every superpowered human, including ourselves, is dead?”

“How did you even know we were here?”

“I could lie and say it was a good guess, you know,” said Fantôme, appearing to consider doing just that. “But no. You’d know if I were lying. You’d see the truth in my mind. We knew you were here because They know you’re here. We follow their movements, hoping to help them in cleansing the earth. We don’t get too close to the angels because even we, their faithful servants, are filthy to them and unworthy. But still, we observe from afar, and sometimes we see interesting things. Like, for instance, many of them gathering in Page. And we hear rumors that maybe there are some filthy demons up here in Shale. And maybe we put two and two together.”

His voice was becoming weaker and his chin was spotted with the blood he was spitting up with every word. Talking was becoming an effort for him, and Adam got the impression it was only pure hatred and contempt that allowed him to continue. He was spitting the words at Adam with unfiltered vitriol now, and with them came ever larger balls of blood and phlegm. He was choking to death on it, asphyxiating, and he didn’t seem the least bit bothered, such was the clarity and strength afforded him by his righteous anger during his last moments on earth.

“And I was too weak to defeat you, filth that you are,” he growled. “But no matter. They’ll be here soon. And They won’t be too weak. They’ll cleanse you as they cleanse everything.”

Adam had heard enough. Without a moment’s hesitation, he grabbed the sheared-off piece of a signpost from twenty feet away and drove it down through the man’s heart, pinning him to the ground. He wasted no more time on remorse.