Katherine "Nekomata" Legato

"I feel like this is one of those moments where I should have some lame, semi-sarcastic quip," Kevin said as he stared off in the direction of the shore. "Like, uh.... Well. That just happened."

That sounds like something Alex would say, Katherine couldn't help but think.

No one was quite sure how, but something had caused the boat to unexpectedly tilt hard enough to flip over. The next moments had been stressful and chaotic. When Katherine resurfaced, she found that the boat had sunk, and that both Alex and that Vigilante were gone.

It wasn't hard to figure out where they'd gone, though. It was hard to miss a colossal, metal dragon booking it towards the not too distant shore.

Now, the whole team, sans Luna, was back on board a new boat. The new boat cut a striking difference from the previous one, as the entire thing was formed out of glowing, blue-green crystal.

Kevin had pushed his ability to its limit to form the boat for them. It might not have been strictly necessary, but it was better than trying to swim half a mile or more back to shore, or treading water until they could be rescued.

Now that the boat was formed, it took only a tiny flow of anima to sustain it. The one unfortunate part was that the awkward circumstances of its construction led to Kevin himself being lodged halfway through the solid material.

While he could have tried reforming it again, he wanted to save his energy.

"Did you know?" Laurence asked.

Katherine felt a surge of guilt well up inside of her. Should I have told them that I knew there was something suspicious about her? But—I still can't believe it was really her the whole time. How did she even do that? Katherine wondered if there were even more tricks up her friend's sleeve.

She shook her head. "No. I—I knew there was something strange and she was hiding something, but I didn't think she was somehow Alex in disguise. But I should have told you all."

Laurence frowned. "Thank you for that, but—that's not what I meant." He hesitated. "Is she really an Anathema?"

Oh. Katherine winced. "...Yes. I—" she took a breath. "I already knew that. Not when we joined your team, but later. After she disappeared in Vegas. But we need—wait. He's coming back."

Everyone's attention pivoted back in the direction of the shore and the now-familiar Tier 3 Guardian skimming along the waves in their direction. Katherine felt multiple abilities hum to a ready state among the rest of her team, but she didn't know what any of them could actually do.

From the rising smoke plume and flashes of light coming from the shore, though, it looked like Alex was still—well, doing whatever it was she was doing.

"Well," the sandy-haired Guardian announced loudly as he approached their makeshift watercraft, "It seems that I might have massively fucked up, and I'm also not really sure what's going on."

He jerked his thumb behind him in the direction of the unfolding chaos. "I doubt any of you can deal with whatever's going down over there, and at the moment, I don't really want to try. So uh, you all want me to help get you out of here and see if we happen to be on the same side?"

Silence. He rubbed his neck. "I promise I won't kill you if I find out we're not? I mean not today at least?"

Maria was the first to pipe up. "You could stand to work on your diplomacy, but sure, I guess?" She looked around at the rest of the team for confirmation and was met with a mixture of blank stares and hesitant nods, Katherine being one of the latter.

"Yeah. I guess we'll talk."

Alex "Giant Fucking Dragon, Baby" Huntingfield

Everything was on fire and it was only mostly my fault. The good news was that turning multiple city blocks into an apocalyptic inferno was both really easy and purely advantageous for me.

The heat, beyond failing to damage me, was a good rate of return on my initial power investment. Soaking it up was as natural as breathing fire, and the smoke was a total non-issue. I also didn't have to worry about falling rubble and structures collapsing on top of me.

No—nearby structures had to worry about me collapsing on them.

I wonder how many people I've inadvertently killed?

Von Jackass wasn't so fortunate. Sure, your average flaming rubble wasn't a huge obstacle for him, but when the entire area was shimmering with heat and the air thick with smoke, it was a lot harder to fight effectively if you weren't already at home in such an environment.

I really didn't expect this to be so effective. Setting everything ablaze hadn't been intentional, at least not initially, but I was now realizing that a burning city was my terrain in much the same way that the ocean and the beach had been Surfer Dude's.

It wasn't just the heat and smoke. The air was also my friend. The effect of so much heat over a large area, especially one with a grid of intersecting, open-roof 'tunnels' between buildings, only empowered my destructive capabilities further.

Yet none of that compared to my biggest advantage—there was so much metal everywhere. Cars, buildings, pipes, manhole covers, signposts—the lists went on.

It was with great satisfaction that I witnessed a loose fire hydrant slam into Von Jackass from the side right in front of my face and send him tumbling back off into the smoke.

That was not a hit I had any chance of landing on purpose. Von Jackass tended to attack faster than I could effectively react to, and when his hits landed, they hit hard. The best I could do was to keep escalating and hope something worked.

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By this point, along with blasting the shit out of everything with heat and air, I continually ripped free random chunks of metal from any and all directions, flinging them about willy-nilly. So far, the tactic actually worked—at least a little bit—but it was now contributing more to the ongoing destruction than anything else.

Shit. Where did he go?

A rapidfire sequence of bangs and crunches was immediately followed by all but one of my legs giving out. Fuck. Fucking bastard ran underneath and pinballed me.

It would have been funny if I fell and crushed him, but I had no such luck. He was way too fast for that.

"You know, the way you fight kind of reminds me of my mother," I said as I slapped my tail down, stopping him short before he could attack me from behind. I missed, of course, but it still prevented an attack and gave my legs more time to finish repairing themselves.

A blast of heat and light from my jaws cut short another attempted attack, from the side this time. "Except she'd actually be able to land a killing blow every time. Also, you could definitely take some notes from her style. She pulls off the quiet, expressionless, and deadly vibe way better. Even has an edgy jacket too."

I was referring to Saber, of course. I also wasn't lying. There would be nothing I could do in a situation like this to avoid going down in one attack if she was my opponent, and Von Jackass did remind me of her.

One good thing was that he wasn't really a speedster, or at least not the conventional kind. He tended to move in straight lines, bouncing off walls or stopping momentarily before changing direction.

That was pretty much it. It was dangerous and frustrating but not complex. He was also remarkably strong and sturdy for our tier, although I still won on both of those, the latter more than the former. His regeneration was similarly high. There was nothing else to it, other than that there might be something special that happened whenever he made a hit.

I still wasn't sure about that last part, but I didn't think his attacks were entirely just speed and power behind a bare punch.

Saber was, by all accounts, quite similar. It was hard to get any solid information on her, but that didn't stop people from trying. If anything, her refusal to speak or make appearances encouraged people to try getting good photos, or better yet, full videos of her in combat.

It also helped that while she avoided her paparazzi, she didn't go out of her way to frustrate them or break their cameras or anything.

Mostly, she was just really fast, really strong, and really hard to hurt. She could run on anything—up or down or sideways across sheer walls, on the ceiling, on water, or even on the air itself. I had no idea how any of it worked, but it definitely wasn't just abuse of normal physics.

And that was basically it. Technically, she was also known for ridiculously edgy looking, luminous, crimson weapons, but I had to wonder why she even needed them. Her range was limited—melee distance, essentially—but that didn't seem to matter.

How do you kill a hundred different Anathema at the same time with abilities like that? Simple—you zig-zag straight through all hundred of them and tear a hole through the hundredth before the first hits the ground.

There was some other miscellaneous stuff, like how in some of the better videos she seems to almost phase through obstructions or flex in impossible ways around attacks—in fact, the biggest Saber meme is probably the guy who insisted—and continued insisting in a very long forum thread—that he saw her somehow jump through the little movie theater booth ticket hole to eviscerate a skinner that had gotten the clerk.

Point is, he really did remind me of her. Just, way shittier.

"You don't have a 'mother,' beast."

I pouted. I wasn't sure how it would come across with my current form, but I did it anyway. "That's not very nice. She's a very lovely woman. I think. I don't actually know. But she looks cool, and you clearly wish you were that cool."

"Shut up."

"Make me."

He made me. The next attack was the full body, massive size difference version of a hard uppercut, and it was forceful enough to send my whole head careening backwards, putting uncomfortable tension on my greatly elongated neck.

I was forced to rear up on my rearmost pair of legs to compensate, and Von Jackass used that opening to hit me again, in the belly this time.

It was too much momentum for me to handle gracefully, and thus I went tumbling backwards through a large office building.

It wasn't that tall—maybe like thirty floors—but it was by far the biggest building I'd crashed into yet. It was big enough and sturdy enough that it didn't immediately collapse on top of me, which was probably for the best. It was a rather large building after all.

"Christ, do you not give a single shit about collateral damage?" I wasn't sure if he could hear me. I was taking up multiple floors now, with the bulk of my body smashing through the central ground floor lobby but my head tearing a vertical path two entire floors up.

Looking around made for a surreal perspective. The floor where my head ended up was a stereotypical, cubical office floor, but it seemed to have been evacuated. That was definitely for the best.

Overall, it was just super weird seeing a space like this while knowing that the rest of me was several floors lower and that this wasn't a hollywood miniature but an actual, real building. That's so trippy. I couldn't think of anything since first awakening my latent nature that was this viscerally weird to look at.

Not even getting up close and personal with a breach had glitched out my brain to this degree.

"No," came Von Jackass's muffled reply, "I don't."

Wow. What a genuine asshole.

Right as I decided that leaving him out of sight like this was bad, I felt the roots of both wings crunch. God, fuck you, man. "Alright, that's it. If anyone else is watching or recording or anything—I really didn't want to do this, but you heard the man. He—ow! He doesn't care about collateral. Really, he made me do it."

"Do what, beast?"

A leg this time. I grunted in pain, though the sound was more habitual than physiological. There was nothing in my fully alien biology that would cause me to grunt.

"Well if you really want to know—your moth-ow! Your mother."

In all seriousness, I did have a plan, and those words weren't for nothing. I really did want to leave a record like that on the chance someone really was recording or even just listening.

Shortly after turning a few blocks into an inferno, I realized there was something I could do in a situation like this if I really wanted to go all out. The realization came from a mixture of logical inference and primal, alien instinct.

It would be necessarily destructive, and it wouldn't work just anywhere. The environment had to be just right, with multiple factors being necessary. And while I might not be worried about all the people I might kill on an individual level, I wasn't keen on going absolutely nuclear without a very good reason. Not literally nuclear, of course—but also not much of an exaggeration.

Von Jackass was giving me that reason.

Alright, here goes. I knew I could win if I did this. That wasn't the question—the question was whether I could get away with it immediately afterwards.

I sure hope they don't decide to actually nuke me.

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