Terra Duenuo - Chapter 2

Vindicator activated his jet boots, allowing himself to shoot to the side and avoid a burst of high-speed wind fired by his sparring partner, Twister. Vindicator’s high-tech armorsuit relayed the location of changes in air pressure and abnormalities in wind flow to a heads-up display on the inside of his visor. His gauntlets flashed as low-power concussion bolts fired from them toward his opponent. Twister shot to the side, his ability to fly aiding him greatly in this struggle. He loosed his ability to control the local atmosphere and conjured a hurricane-force wind behind Twister, blowing him across the basement of their headquarters and into a wall of super-compressed air just in front of Twister. The impact jarred, but didn’t harm, Vindicator.

A door behind the two of them opened as someone entered. The two fighters broke off their sparring match to see who it happened to be, and found that it was their good friend Monitor.

Who was Monitor? He was Nels Tennyson, but under a codename. Nels, Vindicator, and Twister were all part of a special division of the law enforcement force in Colonia, called the Guardians. True to their name, the team was put together to protect the colony against abnormal threats, like a metahuman or two on the rampage, a criminal mob, and similar things that the police would be hard pressed to do anything about. The team’s concept was suggested by Nels during his time on the police force, and since he had recruited his gear-head brother Leonard, Vindicator, and a past acquaintance and friend named Matt Callahan, Twister. The team of three had already had their work cut out for them with the recent appearances of a metahuman bounty hunter called Gauntlet. This mercenary wielded exceptional physical strength, even for a metahuman, and electric gauntlets that could add a shocking effect to his fists. The Guardians had so far been able to discourage him from his missions, even defeat him, but never contain him long enough for him to be detained. Even so, the team had succeeded at many other missions and had thus gained the support of the populace. Gauntlet was something of a sore spot with all three of them, especially Nels, who was the master combatant of the team and also team leader. The Guardians were always on the lookout for new members, but so far none had met the team’s standards. Even so, they kept hope alive that they wouldn’t be the only Guardians for long.

“Morning, boys,” Nels said with a smile.

Leonard, called Lenny by friends and family, retracted his visor, displaying his full face. “Hey, fur-face,” he said, referring to Nels’s cheek-length sideburns.

“Morning, boss,” Matt said to Nels.

“How was your night?” Nels asked.

They both shrugged. “Fine. Nothing happened,” Lenny replied. “I heard that you, on the other hand, had quite a night on the town.”

Nels smiled a little and nodded. “Steph stole something from Doctor Baine, but I returned it and put the kid away again. He seriously needs some help getting a life.”

Lenny smiled. “How is Rita after all this time?”

“Fine,” Nels said. “She had a new friend helping her with an experiment while I was there.”

“Ah, there she goes again,” Lenny said. “She still inventing stuff like mad?” Back when Nels used to know Rita from work, she gained a reputation with Lenny for being a strong competition in the inventing field. Lenny wasn’t bad -- he had, after all, built his entire armorsuit himself – but he knew Rita excelled in fields where he never did. It soon became a one-sided competition, with Lenny constantly trying to keep up, but always falling behind. He was not bothered by this, however, only participating in the one-sided race for kicks anyway.

Nels shrugged. “Dunno. I had to ditch Steph and get home.”

Lenny smirked. “A likely excuse. There was probably something you had to get ready for, right?” His expression made it clear to Nels exactly what he meant.

Nels crossed his arms. “No, Laurie and I did not have a date, you stereotypical little brother,” Nels replied, referring to his girlfriend. “I just felt some rest was in order.”

“You know, boss, I usually find some time with a girl to be rather restful. It calms me. Kinda therapeutic, you know?” Matt teased.

Lenny and Matt laughed. Nels did not. This was typical. Nels did not participate in juvenile humor; instead he sighed and shook his head, hoping that someday the younger men would understand.

A rap on the front door of Guardian Headquarters brought the conversation to an abrupt halt. Nels ascended the staircase of the modified house they used for a base first, followed by Leonard, then Matt. Nels opened the door to find, to his surprise, that Gina Tessar was standing on the front walk, looking apprehensive and somewhat tired.

“I feel calmer already,” Matt whispered to Lenny.

Nels could hear him, having superhumanly acute senses, but ignored him. “Hello, Gina. Can I help you?”

Gina nodded and pointed in the general direction of Rita’s house. “Yes, and you should probably hurry. The device was stolen again!”

Nels nodded once. “I’d be glad to help. Vindicator, Twister, continue sparring.”

Gina shook her head. “Oh, no, please. We’ll need all of you.”

Nels frowned slightly. “What? Is the problem that severe?” he asked brusquely.

Gina made a “so-so” gesture with her hands. “You could say that. The device was obviously stolen by a metahuman, since no human could have stolen it the way it was.”

“And what way is that?” Nels prodded.

Gina shrugged, feigning a casual outlook on the situation. “Well, there’s a wall missing…”

That snapped Monitor into action. He ordered Vindicator and Twister to follow by air while he and Gina took the car she had driven up in.

“Actually, could you drive?” Gina asked, handing Nels the keys. “I don’t feel so good.”

Nels nodded. “All right,” he said as he entered the vehicle on the driver’s side.

As they drove off, Nels began asking questions, either out of curiosity or necessity, depending on the question. “How was the machine “stolen” if the suspect smashed a hole in the wall?” Nels asked. “Wouldn’t it be more that he strongarmed you out of it?”

Gina rubbed her forehead and nodded. “Yeah, he would have, if we were at Rita’s house when it happened. We went out to breakfast.”

“Ah,” was all Nels said in response. After a moment, he asked, “If you don’t mind me asking, why don’t you feel well?”

Gina exhaled deeply. “I’m tired, and I have a headache. It’s not the ‘I’m about to be ill’ tired, but the ‘my muscles just feel like water’ tired. You know what I mean? You won’t get sick from me, if that’s why you’re asking.”

Nels smiled. “I probably wouldn’t even get sick from you even if you had a plague. My immune system is impenetrable.”

Gina nodded. “Oh. Right. Should’ve guessed.” After another sigh, she added, “Maybe I’ve just been working way too hard or something.”

Nels shrugged. “Possibly. Just don’t get too wrapped up in trying to figure it out. Everyone, even me, has bad days. Just wait. Soon you’ll feel like you can move mountains.”

Gina smiled. “Yeah, I guess you’re right. I just wish I wouldn’t be so tired when Rita needs my help.”

Nels nodded. “I understand. Just relax while Vindicator, Twister, and I try to track down the new thief.”

Upon arrival, information was exchanged, theories were concocted, and a decision was made. Nels believed that the offender was Gauntlet, and with Leonard and Matthew in agreement, decided to search all of Gauntlet’s usual haunts. He was a fairly predictable mercenary when it came to his actions after completing a job; he would always immediately seek out his client. This wouldn’t have been so predictable if there weren’t so few willing to buy his services. Only a handful of people ever bought Gauntlet’s services, and they always did so under codenames and disguises, so as to avoid the legal issues inherent in such a deal. Still, the Guardians knew where to look, and when. Nels’s time as a cop had served him well.

However just as a search was about to be initiated, a very sudden thing happened. Suffice to say that the thief had been Gauntlet after all, for as the saying states, the criminal always returns to the scene of the crime. The mercenary walked up to the massive hole in the wall, and smiled. “I knew I’d find you guys here,” he said calmly.

Immediately, Nels was in a jam. As leader of the Guardians, he could not condone casualties. Gauntlet was incredibly powerful, however, and didn’t have a penchant for being neat, as evidenced by the now-nonexistent wall in Rita’s house. Gauntlet had been known to cause injuries to people he wasn’t even aiming for, just because of his power, and with Rita and Gina in the firing line, things could get messy.

“Twister, blow the women out of here! We can’t risk harm to them!” he shouted.

As Twister complied, Gauntlet advanced. He was clad in an armored version of a standard metahuman adaptive suit, with mechanical gauntlets attached to his wrists, electricity crackling from them. Interestingly, though, it was not these accessories that gained Gauntlet his name. Before he even owned them, his opponents used to say that fighting him was like “running through a gauntlet of pain.”

“I knew I’d find you guys here,” the bounty hunter repeated. “This isn’t part of my job, but I felt like I’d just get you three out of the way from now on. You’ll probably irk my client in the future, so best to get this over with as soon as possible.”

Nels stepped into a defensive stance. He knew that, alone, he had little chance of defeating this foe, even with his strength, speed, agility, and skill, but with his brother and friend by his side, he know the odds were tipped more in his favor. Still, it wouldn’t be easy. Gauntlet was what was known in metahuman circles as a superhuman performer. All of his physical limits were far beyond the realm of normal human capacity, including strength, agility, speed, stamina, and durability. His strength was twice that of Nels’s, and Monitor could press a pickup truck on a good day. Gauntlet was also not wanting in skill and creativity, which made him even more dangerous. But, Nels thought, He’s no match for all three of us…I hope.

The six stood, three on one side, a lone bounty hunter on the other, and the women on the front lawn, waiting for the first move. Twister and Vindicator were hovering, Monitor and Gauntlet were standing, all ready for something to happen.

Nothing did, until finally Gauntlet stretched, cracked his knuckles, shrugged, and leaped forward at Nels. Immediately the lizard-powered fighter flipped backward, evading Gauntlet’s initial lunge. Vindicator and Twister both reacted at once, firing wind and concussion beams at Gauntlet. The attacks both connected with enough force to turn a normal man to mush, but Gauntlet simply stumbled and whirled back toward them. The mercenary leaped at Vindicator, who tried to rocket backward, but was snared by Gauntlet’s outstretched hand. The mercenary then flung Vindicator over his head at Twister, who dodged most of the way, but was still clipped by his ally as he went by and was sent into a wild spin.

Monitor had grabbed one of the exposed boards left over from Gauntlet’s destruction of a perfectly good wall and had now returned to the battle with it. Swinging it hard, he managed to send Gauntlet sprawling, and also to break the two-by-six board on Gauntlet’s back.

Vindicator had hit the ground hard and slid into a tree, but his armor had blunted much of both impacts. Sitting up, he saw that Twister was trying to recover from being spun so violently and Monitor was locked in a high-speed fistfight with Gauntlet, a struggle that, despite Nels’s incredible skill in the field, he had no chance of winning. Monitor ducked, thrust, and struck, but Gauntlet blocked, then twisted Nels’s arm and kicked him in the back, driving him to his knees. Nels lunged forward, tossing Gauntlet over his head and onto the ground. The impact jarred the mercenary and made him let go, giving Nels an opportunity to stand up. Nels then triggered one of his more deadly powers, causing inch-long claws to sprout from under his fingernails.

That was enough for Vindicator. Many fights alongside his older brother had taught him that when the claws came out, it was time to get serious. The armored fighter fired a galvanized steel grappling line from his right wrist launcher, and a spray of liquid adhesive from the other. The cable lodged in a wall beyond Gauntlet, and formed a trip-line that the mercenary fell over, heading face-first on an express trip to the ground. The adhesive then went to work, coating the ground below Gauntlet’s chest right before he landed. On contact, Gauntlet was stuck fast to the lawn. Vindicator rocketed over to him and fired concussion bolt after concussion bolt at the mercenary’s back, trying to force a surrender out of him.

After firing ten bolts, Vindicator stopped, but kept his arms raised and leveled at Gauntlet. “Surrender, and come quietly, and this won’t have to go on.”

Gauntlet smiled the smile of a wounded predator. He wasn’t in very much pain, but was quite angry now. “Frankly, I don’t plan to let you make that decision,” he said. “I decide when this fight ends, not you.”

With that, Gauntlet planted his hands on the ground and preformed a super-powered push-up, ripping his upper suit free of the ground. Before any could respond, he flipped to the side, lashing out with a kick in midair that sent Monitor through the hole in Rita’s house and into her living room wall. The mercenary took off with stunning speed, evading Vindicator’s concussion bolts and plowing through the front door of the house and leaping out onto the front lawn.

In that exact moment, thing happened very quickly for Gina. It seemed Gauntlet was coming for a hostage, and it also seemed that Rita would be the logical choice for that role, especially since she could, in addition to bringing a ransom, also teach Gauntlet’s boss how to use the device he had stolen. Gina decided to act. Using what little strength the currently possessed, she shoved Rita to the side and allowed Gauntlet to snatch her up instead.

The mercenary lifted her up by the front of her shirt, the six-foot-four metahuman heaving the four-ten Gina off the ground with ease. “I saw that move there. Very noble. So selfless. You’re almost like one of those men in the house,” he said, gesturing to the three Guardians, who had now regrouped and stormed through the front door. Almost immediately, Gina saw Monitor order a halt. Then she couldn’t see him anymore, because Gauntlet put her between him and the others.

“See?” he said coldly, the way he said most things. “This encounter is almost over, and it was my decision to bring it to a close, not yours.”

Monitor snarled, hunching over in the manner he did when he was angry. “What do you even want? What can you accomplish by kidnapping a civilian?”

Gauntlet smiled that calm, cold, predatory smile once again. “Power,” he said simply. “Power over you three, to make you do whatever I want. It’s really quite simple. You three value her life more than your own right now, so all I have to do it endanger her, and you will do whatever I want you to.” Glancing at Gina, he added, “And by the way, miss, you can kick me all you want. It doesn’t hurt. It really doesn’t.”

Gina, like Nels, was about to boil over. Here she was, suspended a foot off the ground by a heartless criminal, becoming a liability to those who were fighting to protect her, all because she could do nothing to help them. Her day-old feeling of weakness was at its zenith, and she soon no longer had any strength left to kick Gauntlet in the side. Her face remained fierce, but her body gradually went slack.

Then everything changed. Gina’s eyes snapped wide open. Her muscles tensed with newfound vigor. Her fingers clasped tightly into fists, Gina struck at the mercenary some more, but he still seemed not to notice.

Rita had retreated behind the Guardians, and now watched all this unfold. Something didn’t seem right. For some reason, it almost seemed like, in addition to apparently feeling stronger, Gina also looked stronger. It was strange. It was as if her anger was fueling her somehow.

Oblivious to all this, Monitor, Vindicator, and Twister locked ayes with Gauntlet, waiting for someone to speak. Finally, Gauntlet gestured with his index finger for the Guardians to approach him, his expression indicating that he wanted them to drop their guards. At first nothing happened, but then Gauntlet raised the thrashing Gina a little higher, a foreshadow of what would happen if the Guardians did not cooperate. Reluctantly, Monitor signaled for his partners to do just what Gauntlet indicated, and they approached.

That was when things got interesting. Gina had stopped thrashing to pay attention to what was going on, and once she knew what was happening, it made her all the more livid. She couldn’t let this happen. Rita, watching the scene unfold, had finally decided what was different about Gina. She seemed…larger somehow. Once Rita realized this, she also saw that Gina’s change was still going on, and accelerating. As Rita watched, her friend slowly expanded in Gauntlet’s grip, until, with clenched fists and a yell of rage, she suddenly became large enough to stand on her own two feet again, even with Gauntlet’s grip still in effect. That was enough to draw all surrounding eyes to her immediately, even Gauntlet’s, just before Gina’s newly supersized fist slammed into his face and knocked him across the yard.

With that release of some of her tension, Gina’s growth halted, but its effects were stunning. The apparently powerless Gina’s height had effectively doubled, and her strength had grown along with her height. With no one holding her back, she lashed out at Gauntlet, pounding the mercenary with blows several times harder than any that could be delivered by her at her previous stature. Gauntlet, too stunned by the turn of events to react, took each blow hard, especially the kick that Gina used as a finisher to her string of attacks, which launched the bounty hunter into Rita’s fence.

The Guardians were surprised by this event as well, but Monitor, always focused, recovered quickly. He snapped his partners out of their trances be ordering them into the fight to back Gina up. His commands came none too soon, because Gauntlet, too, had recovered from his shock and realized that, despite her new size, Gina was still far weaker than him, and began to strike back hard. As he readied an electric punch, Vindicator intervened, managing to get a lucky shot on the mercenary’s active gauntlet, ruining it. Gina tried to take advantage of the opening, but was not fast enough. Gauntlet sidestepped and landed a punishing kick to her thigh.

For her part, Gina wasn’t unaware of the unusual change that had come over her. She simply wasn’t worrying about how or why it had happened at the moment. She had gained an advantage, and she was using it. That was all her furious mind cared about at the moment. Still, even with her added strength, at almost ten feet tall, she was a much larger target, and Gauntlet wasn’t missing a step, or a chance to dish out the damage.

After securing Rita’s safety, Monitor joined the fray, tackling Gauntlet as he prepared to perform a flying knee smash to Gina’s midsection. The mercenary and law enforcer tumbled over and over several times, trading blows all the while, before, finally, Monitor stuck his hands to the sidewalk and whipped his body forward, using his tail to toss Gauntlet across the street. Before Gauntlet could even regain his footing, or his senses, he was picked up off the ground by a powerful air cushion such that he couldn’t get any traction. Immediately after that, he was hurled back across the street by a hurricane-force wind, right into Monitor’s waiting fist.