Published at 12th of August 2022 9:14 pm

Book 2: Chapter 91: Fight the Power

This chapter is updated by NovelFree.ml

Word spread fast, and soon students were streaming in from every direction as they heard about the spectacle building at the campus central library. College students were not known for their rationality, nor for their ability to evaluate risk, and they flocked to danger by the thousands. Phones were out and recording, an endless array of video evidence uploaded to cloud services or streamed live, all focused on a singular event.

Champion sat on a bench feeding pigeons.

It should be about this time, Echo mused, that the FATs will have realized where his haven had been placed. Assuming, of course, that they had a way to track the things once they’d been dragged back into the world. The didn’t matter in this case; he had to assume the worst. Their location protected them. It had been tricky creating a haven inside a college dormitory, but the result was well worth it. Rather difficult to justify a FATs preferred level of force being unleashed within a college campus. Not with the city in the state that it was in. Austin was closer to full-scale rioting than any city had been in decades. The federal troops would have to act carefully, lest the city rise up against them.

Which was, of course, the entire point.

One brave student approached Echo, and he gave the young woman a winning smile. Champion had been good at those, and so Echo was no different. The girl blushed scarlet, but courageously moved within reach.

“Is it really you?” she asked, wide-eyed and breathless.

Echo nodded, and lied through his mentor’s lips, “It’s really me.”

The girl did a little dance, suppressing a noise of shrill glee. She pulled out her phone and unlocked it, taking a few steps closer.

“Can I take a selfie with you?” she asked. Her eyes widened, and she waved the phone enthusiastically. “Oh! You probably don’t know what that is! I want to take a picture with you, using this—”

“I know what a selfie is,” Echo interrupted with a friendly grin. “I’ve been doing my best to catch up. You may take a picture with me.”

The girl bounded over with a bright smile. She spun around, planting herself on the bench beside him and bringing up the camera app on her phone. She leaned backwards, pressing her back into his side and smiled into the camera. Echo dutifully leaned forward and smiled alongside her.

“Cheese,” they said as the moment was immortalized.

“Thanks!” the girl said brightly. “I’ve basically just won at social media.”

“My pleasure,” Echo replied, checking his watch. It really should be any minute now. There were more than enough cameras on him. He glanced around, noting the girl’s reckless courage had emboldened a handful of others, who were quickly approaching the ‘harmless’ hero. The more the better, really.

“So, what’cha doing here?” the girl asked, perfectly at ease on the bench beside him.

“Waiting.”

“Waiting on what?”

The campus villain alarm cut through the dull roar of the surrounding crowd. It ended the constant speculation faster than a gunshot, leaving a ringing silence in its wake.

“That,” Echo replied simply.

The students had certainly been conditioned well. The sound evoked an almost instinctive panic response, as they began to shuffle like uncertain herd animals, searching for a threat. But Echo had given them a target already, and they were young, curious, and reckless. All they needed was an excuse.

Champion was here, right out in the open, and he was harmless. Obviously there had been a mistake. Obviously, someone had seen the commotion, seen its focal point, and drawn all the wrong conclusions. Obviously, these young men and women knew better than whoever had set off that stupid alarm.

Echo remained seated. Passive, peaceful. Not a threat.

A handful of the smarter students began backing away. The crowd thinned, somewhat. Most remained. The girl beside Echo had barely even twitched at the siren and several of what he had to presume were her friends had arrived beside the bench. They crowded his seat, somehow seeming both hesitant yet eager, as they asked him a flurry of questions.

“Are you really Champion?”

“Did the government really experiment on you?”

“Are you seeing anyone?”

“Is Bastion seeing anyone?”

“Will you show off your powers?”

“Can I get your autograph?”

Echo let out a genial laugh, and answered their questions no matter how ridiculous. He was being recorded by hundreds of cameras, and there were probably nearing a thousand students packed into the large, open plaza in front of the campus library. Every second that passed without him murdering someone earned the trust of another rash teenager. They approached him by the dozens as he engaged in an impromptu interview, with ever more filtering in from the distance, despite the ringing sirens.

With every spoken word, with every answered question, he released the faintest traces of his stolen power. Not Champion’s: he would never defile his former leader in that way. The power he had selected originated with Mr. Charleston’s Roofme upgrade. The man had broken in the end, and he’d armed Echo with a crucial piece of his Champion disguise.

Echo had always kept the details of his power close to his chest. Nobody knew the exact mechanics, and he was versatile enough that his limitations were just as clouded in mystery, even to his own allies. This served two purposes. The first was, obviously, information control. While he had his fair share of weaknesses, he had no intention of sharing them with a single soul.

The second was more personal. Echo was, and always had been, slightly ashamed of how his power functioned. It was, at its core, a vehicle of envy and disgust. Envy for that which others had, and he did not. Disgust at how they used it, and how he could do better. Echo had been a jealous man, he still was at times, ever longing for the superior gifts of others. When he’d found his own, it was a match made in heaven.

He had always envied Champion. The man’s easy way with people. His confidence in himself, his faith in others. He saw the world in a way that Echo wished he could, even if it wasn’t the truth. He envied the simple happiness his mentor felt when helping another. He envied the man, and thus he could take his face and his form. But Echo held no disgust in his heart for a man who had shown him nothing but kindness. There was no contemplation of the man’s power, and how Echo might use it better. He respected Champion too much for such a thing to stick in his mind. No matter how the man had died, he’d lived doing what he believed in, and no amount of mental cajoling had been able to change Echo’s opinion of that fact.

Mr. Charleston held none of that esteem. He was a leech, a parasite on humanity. His upgrade was revolting, and his personality matched. Yet it was perfect for Echo’s purposes, especially after it had Broken. He needed it; he desperately, fiercely desired it. Nothing smoothed the path to revolution like a bit of brainwashing here and there. And thus, disgust and envy, he held one man’s form and another’s power within himself. Or his own interpretation of it, at least.

He spoke to the students around him, relaxing them, soothing them, easing their worries. His voice carried across the plaza, a low and dulcet tone that brought serenity to those who heard it. Their fear was squashed, pressed down, pushed away. Anxiety faded and did not rise again. Not even when the sound of helicopters sounded across the campus. Not even when the sky blackened with soldiers. Not even when armed men landed on the college campus, pouring out of their aircrafts by the dozens.

The students sat, and watched, and waited.

Content.

Champion rose as the soldiers approached, raising his arms into the air in peaceful surrender. His hangers-on didn’t like that, clamoring for him to run, to hide, stepping between himself and the soldiers like the brave fools that they were. Echo’s power hadn’t done that; it instilled no loyalty. That was all them, reckless and young and full of fire. He remembered those times fondly. He hoped some of them survived this day.

“Hello,” he called to the special forces soldier, clad in black, featureless armor. He was flanked by his team, and at least another dozen men were unloading from the choppers.

“Is there a problem, soldier?” he asked, lacing his voice with concern. The students shifted with the emotion, stirring with discontent.

The soldier looked as if he dearly wished to execute Echo where he stood. His head panned across the college campus, the gathered students, and the thousands of phones pointed towards him. Conclusions were drawn with the inevitability of clockwork. The blacked out glass that served as his face returned to rest on the visage of Champion. Echo held back a smile. It wouldn’t do to seem too smug. Champion had always been a picture of propriety.

“Vigilante Champion, you need to come with us,” the soldier stated with the gravitas of a man used to being obeyed.

Echo smiled at the appellation. It seemed they would not be calling his bluff in public. Fear, he assumed. Fear of the unknown. Not even Anastasia Summers knew his true capabilities. If the hard route wasn’t available, they had to go soft. He had space to draw out the string.

“Vigilante?” Echo echoed. His voice carried hints of confusion, but his stolen power sent feelings of anger flashing through the crowd. “Its been half a century since I was a vigilante, young man. I’m quite sure the statute of limitations has expired, even for vigilantism.”

The soldier took another step forward. His men mirrored him. The crowd rustled and muttered, some stepping forward in tune with the soldiers. The gathering around the plaza began to shrink, a vast crowd of student bodies encircling their Champion, and the soldiers sent against him.

“You are wanted for questioning on the whereabouts of the villain Cannibal, and for disseminating restricted government information,” the soldier stated coldly. He took another step forward, inching ever closer, and repeated, “You need to come with us.”

“I spoke out against my unlawful imprisonment,” Echo rephrased, smoothly redirecting away from Cannibal, “and now I am being arrested for it. I wonder, will I see the inside of a courtroom this time?”

He sent more anger into the crowd. Indignity. Injustice. The feeling of a crime being committed in front of you and being helpless to stop it.

“This is bullshit!” someone shouted from the mass of bodies. And with that, the floodgates opened.

“You can’t do this!”

“Get out of here!”

“Leave him alone!”

Dozens of voices rising to the heavens, screaming out with youthful exuberance from within the safety of the herd. Dozens at first, but quickly blossoming into hundreds. The mass of people became a trumpeting choir, outrage building with every passing moment. They were minutes, and a single wrong decision, away from a riot. Judging by the soldier’s posture, he knew it and only just barely cared.

“I’m giving you a lawful order,” the soldier stated firmly. He had an assault rifle slung across his shoulders, and one hand crept down to its stock. His voice was stern and his posture, ready for violence. “Will you comply?”

In any other circumstances, with any other man, the feds would have already ended this farce. They would have struck him down, and not given a single thought to the consequences or the collateral damage or the image it presented. They would have spun it as an unavoidable tragedy, lives lost to safeguard the future. All for the greater good.

But this was Champion, and whether it be in life or in death, his existence could never be waved away.

“Will you comply?” the question, the demand, came once more.

They stared each other down, the soldier and the vigilante, two limbs of a bow and the crowd, the string.

Echo cut the line.

“No,” he mused, as he pushed anger-anticipation-outrage into the crowd. “I don’t think I will.”

The soldiers went for their guns, and the plaza descended into mayhem.

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