Published at 12th of August 2022 9:14 pm

Book 2: Chapter 92: Restraint

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In retrospect, Echo couldn’t have picked a better city. Austin had seen nothing but peace for over a decade. Its people were entirely unused to the oppressive tactics often unleashed by military forces during extreme villain attacks. It was an intellectual thing; something that happened to other people, not them. Austin was peaceful, prosperous, safe. Those vicious things weren’t required, here.

Some would call them spoiled, or privileged. Echo hoped for a country where everyone could be so privileged, but getting there would be a bloody and brutal process. Villain attacks were common things, and large-scale engagements against unhinged mutates or Naturals happened two or three times a year, on average. A city of Austin’s size should have had at least a handful of incidents over the past ten years, but between the city’s general prosperity and a great deal of luck, they’d stayed more or less unaffected by the conflict that routinely enveloped most major cities. It made for a population easy to rile against perceived injustice from the brutal military currently occupying their city.

But even Echo was surprised when a student cast the first stone. Literally. The decorative rock, large and heavy and the size of a man’s torso, soared from somewhere within the crowd. It flew on a low, fast arc, clearly tossed by someone with upgraded strength. The lead soldier was the target, but the man simply side-stepped the projectile. The rock soared past him, all of his men, and ricocheted off the concrete walkway. It ended up embedded in the wall of a nearby building, the impact strong enough to shake the ground beneath Echo’s feet.

The soldier was still as a grave, his head canted towards the gathered civilians. Echo could see the decisions going through the man’s head. Search for the aggressor? Subdue the crowd? It was more than justified, but the optics would be terrible. With the city in the state that it was in, there was a real risk of open rebellion if they were to put down a mob of angry students. There would be no hiding it, not with hundreds of cameras running in the crowd.

Echo patiently waited for the soldier to make his decision. He held himself in Champion’s posture, arms clasped lightly behind his back and chest straight. He eyed the gathered soldiers, noting that he still heard the sound of circling helicopters. He dared not look skyward, lest some clever grunt take advantage of his distraction.

The students at his side had finally realized their position. Some had stiffened in alarm, a few were vibrating in anger, while the girl who had first approached him was giddily filming everything on her phone. Echo wondered if she would survive the day’s events. He hoped so. She seemed like a sweet girl, if in dire need of an introduction to reality. No need to worry on that account; their meeting would be soon.

He felt the edge of something press against his open palm. He closed his fist, fingers squeezing against a square pane of force that hovered in the center of his hand. After a moment, it vanished. Echo’s worries faded away. Bastion was here, watching and waiting. It seemed as if he might survive the next few minutes. Things were going to plan.

Mostly.

Where are you, Anastasia?

Echo had expected her to make a personal appearance by now, if only to try and murder him. She couldn’t have gone after Bastion’s sanctuary. He would’ve heard that fight from across the city, and the man was present besides. He cautiously concluded she was in one of the circling helicopters, waiting to see how this would play out. Cautious to the very end. He’d hoped the traitorous woman would catch some blame when the situation inevitably went wrong, but he’d settle for her fucking off back to Florida in a hurry just as soon as Cannibal made his presence known. It would certainly make Echo’s job easier if she wasn’t around, though it would be infinitely less satisfying.

His thoughts were interrupted as the soldier made his choice. His hand flicked towards Echo and a shot rang out from somewhere in the distance. The students beside him screamed, and a bullet flattened itself against the air, approximately ten feet away from Echo’s head. Ripples from the impact flowed across the surface of an invisible barrier, slowly traversing the wide box of force protecting Champion from the outside world.

The students burst into motion at the outrageous attack! One young fool charged the soldiers, his actions immediately spurring a dozen others to join him. Shouts of outrage from the crowd were accompanied by a hail of thrown projectiles. Rocks, beer bottles, backpacks and books clattered off of overdesigned armor. More people rushed the soldiers, and the mob turned to madness.

The soldiers’ weapons flashed up and the roar of gunfire filled the plaza. The charging students faltered, but quickly rallied as they realized Champion was the target. Bullets struck Bastion’s shield, causing more and more ripples as the specialized ammunition did its best to break the unbreakable. Other soldiers stepped forward to confront the charging mob, and swathes of white gas erupted from their fingertips.

The students hit the gas and stumbled, coughing and wheezing and clawing at their eyes. The soldiers swept their hands out and the gas expanded outwards, pressing against the edges of the mob. This did little to quench the riot. Young men and women, high on adrenaline and outrage, pushed past the tear gas and charged the soldiers attempting crowd control.

The first to reach them bore some kind of animalistic upgrade. He snarled and leapt like a charging tiger. The soldier took him down gently, redirecting the teenager’s lunge and planting him into the ground. The rash young man was restrained and zip-tied in less than a second, giving the soldier’s partner plenty of time to intercept the next angry student and do the same. And the next.

And the next.

And the next.

Until that trickle of bodies became a flood.

Echo held most of the soldier’s attention, despite the approaching mob. Once it became apparent that bullets wouldn’t do the job, a wave of sustained flame crashed into the floating barrier. Echo guessed they were trying to superheat the insides through convection. The military was clearly operating under the belief that Bastion’s shields were not immune to the elements. Echo thought that a rather optimistic assumption.

The students beside him were screaming now, but Bastion had helpfully included them within the square force cage. He turned to them, still every inch their Champion, and smiled reassuringly.

“Fear not,” he said calmly, “for no power can breach this fortress.”

The ground beneath him quaked, and a fist broke through the earth to embed itself in the plane of force suspended an atom’s-width above it. Fingers scrabbled at the surface, then swiped violently sideways. Crackling lightning vaporized a chunk of earth, sending several students into fits of screams. A soldier appeared in the gap, buried beneath Echo’s location and trying his best to close the gap. He pressed up against the transparent screen, electricity dancing along his limbs and surging into the floor to no avail.

Echo looked down at the man, an eyebrow raised.

“Did you need something?” he asked politely, letting his power press down on the man. His voice suggested apathy, compliance, obedience. It washed against the man, but found no purchase.

The man held up his hand, pressed his middle finger against his thumb, and snapped his fingers. Light sparked to life, a second sun below the surface of the earth. Echo quickly glanced away; even through the protection of Bastion’s fortress, the soldier’s display left him seeing spots. One of the students cried out in pain, falling to the ground and clutching his face.

“That was very rude,” Echo informed the soldier. Once again, his power failed to find purchase. Echo clicked his tongue. They’d come prepared for Champion. He doubted that they could hear a single thing he said. It was unlikely they could even see his movements, at least not all of them. There was probably some kind of program processing their visual feed and automatically blurring out any hand commands he might make. He wasn’t a physical threat, so the infinitesimal delay shouldn’t cost them. Something similar should be happening with his voice.

He laughed to himself, then asked the soldier, “Do I have subtitles?”

The man responded by pressing the barrel of his pistol against the barrier and firing repeatedly. Echo turned away from him and scanned the plaza. The stream of fire had subsided, but the plaza was now covered in thick smoke. Echo could make out brief flashes of movement from within, the occasional gunshot, and the sound of combat. But above all of that was the constant keening wail of the crowd. It was an angry, vicious thing, and utterly unending.

It was chaos, and Echo couldn’t help but smile at what he’d unleashed. Twenty-odd soldiers against a thousand angry students. He wondered—

The curtain of smoke was ripped away with a blast of noise and wind! The plaza revealed itself to Echo, and he let out a surprised laugh. One of the helicopters was on its side, rioting students crawling over the machine like a horde of angry ants. A handful of soldiers were on the ground, helmets and armor in pieces. They were breathing, but clearly badly beaten and unable to move. Tens, hundreds of impacts were impressed all along the ceramic plating. They’d been overwhelmed, plain and simple. Everywhere Echo looked, students lay on the ground, beaten and broken. Dozens had been restrained, until the soldiers had run out of zip-ties, but hundreds more remained in the fight.

The soldiers still standing had regrouped and were at the center of a massive brawl. The mob had entirely encircled them, cutting off retreat to their helicopters. It wasn’t as if these men couldn’t defend themselves, so much as that they were completely out of their element. FATs were meant to blitz an enemy with hyper-lethal force. Everything, from their equipment to their upgrades, was tuned to this result. They didn’t really do non-lethal, and this was becoming an enormous problem.

The soldiers were clearly pulling their blows, keenly aware of all the myriad consequences of opening fire on a crowd like this, but that patience was obviously eroding fast. It snapped as a gunshot came from within the crowd. A soldier’s head rocked back, a hair-thin crack on the faceplate. The man in charge gestured sharply at the crowd, and assault rifles were shouldered.

Whatever restraint remained on both sides ended in gunfire.

Echo didn’t watch the results. The soldiers would run out of bullets long before the students ran out of bodies. His eyes were in the distance, at the approaching mass of green squares, and dull engine roar audible even above the screams and gunpowder staccato. Those were tanks, Echo realized. Five of them that he could see rolling across the campus, and behind them, a wave of armored personnel vehicles.

The National Guard had finally arrived.

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