When five minutes had passed and still no one had emerged from the QRIB, the Spook patched into Syndi’s sound system to declare his ultimatum:
“ATTENTION MILITANTS! THIS IS YOUR FINAL WARNING! IF YOU DO NOT SURRENDER WITHIN THE NEXT SIXTY SECONDS WE WILL OPEN FIRE! YOU WILL MOVE OUT OF THAT HOUSE OR YOU WILL FACE THE CONSEQUENCES!”
QRIB Deaths
When the sixty seconds ended, the Spook ordered in the Rock Breaker.
With remarkable speed for such a massive sixty-four-year-old man, the Rock Breaker leapt over the barrier and sprinted across the street, his mystic hammer John Henry in front of him like a sword.
At the final second before his strike could rip out the corner of the QRIB temple, dark tentacles tore out of the soil and tripped up the elderly black man, knocking him to the ground and seizing the fallen John Henry. Rising from the soil with his tentacles like a giant black daddy longlegs spider, the Dreadlocker closed on the Rock Breaker to rip him to stumps.
And then a twenty-foot battering ram of an arm smashed the Dreadlocker into a smear on the sidewalk.
Super Bastard, piloting his giant “Transformer” suit of linked robotic trailers, stood to his full six-story height, scraping the gore and dreadlocks from his arm before displaying evidence of his kill for the Spook.
“HOW’S SHE LOOKIN, PARTNERS?” he boomed, before the QRIB’s roof exploded from the emergence of a six-story-tall Arnold Drummond, Esq.
For terrifying seconds it was giant lawyer against giant lawyer, prosecutor against defense, locked in lethal litigatory combat, until Arnold Drummond got the upper hand and knocked Super Bastard down with one swing of his massive supersubpoena. The trailer-Transformer fell, crushing the Rock Breaker into the potholed street. Drummond jeered, “Whatchu talkin about, Bast’d?”
The Spook: “Red Five, take him out!”
Kid Kombat Sr. knelt, bowing his head for clearance, and smoke trails streamed six hundred feet diagonally upward from his back to sear Arnold Drummond’s face, turning the left side of his giant skull into a cratered ruin of ravaged, sagging, burning flesh. An abattoir’s worth of meat and bone pelted the ground like human hail.
Roaring in his death throes, Drummond charged the line before another tendril of smoke exploded through his midsection, dumping him dead overtop the struggling megaskeleton of Super Bastard.
Seconds before Kid Kombat could fire into the QRIB temple itself, his backpack exploded. Aflame, he fell to the ground screaming and flailing, dying like a crab dropped into a pot of boiling fat.
The Spook: “What the hell—”
I switched angles on the monitors. Charging across the street was Aunt Ester of the Supa Soul Sistas, who must have aimed her chemotrophic powers into the unarmed missiles on Kid Kombat’s back. Still advancing, she transmuted five of Smithing Wesson’s bullets into blossoms of steam before the sixth one punched a hole through her sternum big enough to reach through.
The scene devolved into chaos: Onyx Fox, another Supa Soul Sista, executed a hundred-foot arcing wire-work sidekick into Smithing Wesson’s back—the King’s English hurled his bobby hat, which transmuted midtumble into a vicious, scrabbling badger that chomped on to Onyx Fox’s leg—the Diva emerged, shooting her Look, and everyone in range dropped to their knees in worship until she and Syndi locked eyes and powers in diva-to-Diva combat—Saber-Tooth Beaver dashed across the smoking, flaming attack zone to start gnawing a new entrance into the QRIB—Anita Hill waded through strafing fire, her shield-law protecting her while she inched ever closer into range to unleash her power of discovery—
And then three giant silver-black wedges flew screaming overhead and dropped incendiary “eggs” on the QRIB.
The temple roared flame into the sky like Vesuvius.
Arcing out of their first bombing run, the Spook’s terror-dactyls circled wide, aligning for their second attack vector.
Having leapt all over the surrounding tenements, the fire transformed the entire block into a massive, multistory bonfire. The QRIB’s walls fissured and burst, and what remained of the roof crumbled and shattered through the four lower stories until all that remained was a rubble inferno.
For just a moment I activated Syndi’s OM Meter, seeking an empathic survey of the situation. Beyond her horror, what I felt from her was a hammering heart, a throat raw from singing and screaming, and a nose scorching with the stench of smoke and burning meat.
The Spook: “Attention all units. This is Red Squad Leader. The target has been pacified. Repeat: The target has been pacified.”
Regardless of what the adrenaline addiction of superheroism may afford you, if you’re serious about “pacifying” yourself, you’ll need to look past such easy solutions as immolating those who spin you into a shame spiral or body-check you into belligerence. Remember: No one can “make” you “feel” anything.
The power is yours—and yours alone—to actualize yourself, to create your own reality, to free yourself of the illusions that imprison you more completely than could any malevolent mastermind. Had either X-Man or the Spook remembered such basic truths for achieving psychemotional equilibrium, they could have saved themselves not only lethal, destructive combat but substantial consternation.
Final Lessons at the Alma Mater
By the time I scan-switched over to Sunhawk Island, Blue Squad had engaged its enemies. In the inky indigo dusk over the Blue Pyramid, orange flares and sparks lit up the combatants. But otherwise beyond those light sources I was blind, so I patched my OM Meter into Wally’s cognistream:
~~What is all this crazy junk in m’face? M’team’s gettin clobbered an I caint hardly see nuthin—better comm Festus. He’ll know what t’do…
“Mission C’mmand, this here’s Wally—”
“Copy, Blue Squad Leader. Over.”
“MC, I’m getting blindeded out here—some kinda black cloud fulla lil ol squares is followin me—”
“Look carefully, Blue Leader—are the squares tiny words? Over.”
“Uh, well now that y’mention it, yes, yes they is—”
“All right, then—they’re logoids! Have you seen Edgerton anywhere? Over.”
“No, not yet—”
“Blue Leader, White Squad’s engaged his word-creatures at the Hyper-Potentiality Clinic! He’s overextended—there’s no way he can keep manifesting so many apparitions at once for long without completely draining
