Facilis descensus Averno.
- Quote from Virgil’s Aeneid, most aptly translated as “the descent to hell is easy”
#
Mantis hadn’t really had a plan going in. She’d followed her instinct and her power, and she’d certainly planned heavily enough to identify when she needed to be there, but there hadn’t been much more depth when it ca to what she was going to do next.
There had been half-ford visions of questioning the supers here and using the information from that to work her way through Pine’s organization, but she realized as spike-arms fell to the ground, body twitching and voice screaming, that she might not have thought it out far enough.
The crowd might not have wanted to push through the threat of her power and her gun, but that changed when soone actually got hurt. That turned her abilities from a threat into a real, active danger that they wanted to fight or flee from.
Vivian was a thin college-aged girl, albeit a relatively fit one now, and they were by and large drunk adult n. She had a gun, but so did many of those in the crowd. Mantis had superpowers, but so did two fighters—well, one now. The other man would live, but not comfortably.
Almost every single one of them chose to fight.
The second one reacted the fastest, vanishing in a blur and reappearing a single step in front of Mantis. His all-white bodysuit flared in her vision before suddenly igniting with a kaleidoscope of colors. Before she could punch him, he vanished again, flickering back.
Imdiately afterwards, the closest spectators—the ones who’d backed off when she’d revealed she had a gun—charged her.
Mantis brought the gun back down.
“Get back!” she shouted. “This doesn’t involve you!”
Except it did. She’d walked into their safe space, breached a boundary that not even the Guardians did anymore, and seemingly killed one of their icons. The fact that he wasn’t actually dead was immaterial.
Even so, there were those for whom that mattered less than their continued survival, and they knew to fear soone ard. A couple of them stumbled back, tripping up the others, but there was still a wall of human flesh coming for her.
Mantis fired, telekinetically stabilizing her aim so as to hit non-lethal spots. Kneecaps. Shins.
Gunfire echoed painfully loudly in the relatively compact basent, and that did stem a few people. Blood sprayed, staining the ground red, and her targets fell, howling in pain and rage.
“Stay back!” she shouted again. Vivian’s voice frayed, and it ended up coming out more like a desperate plea than a command. “Stay—“
The brief sensation of a change in air pressure on her back was all the warning she had to leap out of the way as the teleporter lunged at her from behind. Sothing cold and sharp sliced her side open, hot blood imdiately welling from the point of contact.
Vivian hit the ground and tumbled, holding her side as she did. Pain exploded where she’d been… stabbed? Grazed? He’d missed sticking her with the knife, but it hurt.
With the pain ca a heady buzz so heavy it nearly overwheld her, Mantis’ vision filling up with stars. When her head cleared, she was down on her side, the sa costud man bringing a bloodied knife the size of her forearm downwards.
She seized the call of her power and punched outwards, but he flickered away again.
Danger sense. Her thoughts were hazy through the fog of her power. It had been let off the chain once, and it wanted more.
Mantis’ senses snapped back into focus just in ti to see the mass of n, unard and not but all with the sa look of hungry rage on their faces, their expressions promising that she was not getting out of this in one piece, if ever.
Stay back, she wanted to say. Don’t throw away your life for soone who doesn’t even care about you.
These were bad people, but they weren’t the root causes. They weren’t the villains who would topple cities for their own greed. They weren’t the so-called heroes who would brainwash thousands to keep control of their people. They were just normals. Basic humans. They didn’t deserve to be caught up in all of this, no matter their dangerous inclinations.
“S-stay—“ she croaked, wincing as her knife wound flared up with a vengeance. I really need to stop getting stabbed.
If anything, her seeming vulnerability just seed to spur them on.
One of them said sothing, his expression twisting into a gleeful leer, but Mantis didn’t hear a word.
Ten pounds of force. Her range was short, but everyone she needed to care about was within that range.
There’s no coming back from this. She had killed villains. She’d killed civilians who’d been turned into living weapons. This was a step past that.
Could Vivian make that step?
The only thing you can change is tomorrow. Sunrise had told her that, hadn’t he?
She had hesitated when it mattered most, and it had cost thirteen thousand lives. No, it hadn’t only been her fault, but she wasn’t going to let that happen again.
Mantis couldn’t change the past, but she could act now, and like hell was she going to let these—these nobodies get in her way. She couldn’t make the sa mistake she’d made before. Couldn’t let herself fall into systemic, organized failure like the Guardians had.
The man who’d said sothing kicked her in the side. Vivian’s vision went white. She might have scread. She couldn’t tell. What she could tell was that her power wanted to be used, and she gave into it, reaching out blindly in the direction that pain had co from.
When it subsided, her attacker was dead.
Mantis stumbled to her knees, her hair falling out of the loose ponytail she’d had it in before and draping down her face.
“W-warned…” she didn’t finish her sentence before using her power again. And again. And again.
She had a limit to how much force she could use at one ti, but it took only an instant to hit each person. In this mont, her power acted more cleanly than it ever had before. Mantis transferred one punch into another without a hitch. Though she was normally limited by how much she could conceptualize, Mantis’ thoughts were smoother than they’d ever been even as her senses scread at her.
By the ti the crowd around her realized what was happening, half a dozen people were dead or dying. Mantis was injured, but not so debilitatingly that she couldn’t walk. She stumbled forward, her power flickering through everyone within her radius.
Despite how addled she felt otherwise, her precision had never been tighter. Mantis aid for the brain stem and severed it without fail.
By the ti half the people in the room were dead, people started to flee. She let them. They weren’t who she had co here for.
The teleporter was long gone, having decided that this wasn’t a good fight to take, but the other super was still here… oh.
He was dead.
Mantis knelt down to double-check his pulse. Nothing. She must have hit it during her blind rampage.
She groaned partially in frustration and the rest in pain.
I need to call Lachlan. And get this wound looked at. Probably the latter first.
Vivian recollected herself, then paused.
The buzzing of her power had always been an insistent, unending barrage. Now, though, the tune was different. Like the difference between a phone on vibrate and a humming power line.
She felt awake. Her power felt alive.
Mantis had found harmony.
#
“What do you an, you killed Icefang?”
“That’s his na?” Vivian asked. She almost laughed, but she didn’t want to burst her stitches. She was glad the nearest urgent care ward hadn’t asked too many questions, though she’d ended up having to wait for a couple hours since she hadn’t been bleeding a lethal amount.
“You don’t just walk around killing people, villain or not! That’s not how we do things!”
There he went with the we again. We. The Guardians. Lachlan might have held different ideals from the rest of them, but what did that matter when he was so willing to beco a cog in their system?
“Look where that got you,” Vivian said. “. Us. Whatever. We didn’t get Killjoy when it mattered, and now Chicago is on fire and half of the main Indy Guardians team is dead.”
“That’s not how it works.”
“No? Then explain to
how it does.”
“You don’t understand what you’re doing,” Lachlan said. “Look, ecosystems, they’re—they’re in balance, right? And maybe soone thinks, hey, mosquitoes, they’re bad, let’s kill them all. So we do that, and suddenly the bugs and birds that eat mosquitoes don’t have a food source anymore, and they start dying. Then their predators start dying, and the shit they do for their environnt stops happening, and we see total collapse.”
“These people aren’t mosquitoes. They’re the people who held territory against an S-rank self-replicating super who didn’t go down against anyone but Contingency.”
“I thought you knew how this worked. I thought you were going to take a team.”
“A team?” Vivian snorted. “With who? Your people want to fuck my brain and make
a happy little Guardian. I don’t have a line to any of the indies here, and I doubt they want to work with
anyway. God knows I don’t want to deal with them.”
There was a pause.
“Where are you right now?” Lachlan asked.
Vivian paused too, looking at the roof she’d made her way up to. It was freezing out, but she didn’t mind too much.
The Lafayette Hyatt. This was where she’d t Lycoris and Lachlan a couple weeks back. It hadn’t even been that long ago, but it was a lifeti away now. They had been carefree then. Lycoris and Lachlan had decided to get together to do so neighborhood heroing.
Was what she was doing now all that different?
What did you think I was going to do?
“Mantis?” Lachlan repeated. “Where are you?”
So asks the all-knowing Esper, Vivian thought, rolling her eyes.
“If you really wanted to know, you already would.”
She hung up before he could protest.
“I’ll find them myself, then,” Vivian muttered. “I did the first ti. How hard could it be to do it again?”
As it turned out, not hard.
Every new kill turned out to be easier than the last.
#
Badge number XXX-0492 confird.
Welco, Rachel.
Note: this version of the SRU wiki is not public. Underlined sections differ from official reports. DO NOT DISSEMINATE THIS ARTICLE.
Mantis Shrimp. Kinetic (C, officially recorded as D)/Marksman (A, officially recorded as C). Overall A-rank. Independent vigilante operating as a hero. Based in West Lafayette, IN.
The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
Powerset: telekinesis in a limited range. During the first engagents of the now-infamous Killjoy Incident, she demonstrated an ability to cause extre pain at close ranges. Speculated double-vial. Unless her information differs from when she was examined by Guardians, she is a single-vial. We speculate that her power may not be plausibility-limited. Regardless, she should be treated as having a kill radius of 20 feet (recent figures show that it may be up to 50). Even if engaging as a friendly, it is advised to remain out of that range when possible.
Identity: Vivian Li. 19 years old. One surviving family mber. SRU forces are monitoring the residence of her father, who does not appear to be aware of her heroine presence.
The following events have been redacted from public view. DO NOT DISSEMINATE.
On 10-19-2024, shortly after the Killjoy Incident, Vivian Li entered an urgent care ward suffering from an unexplained stab wound, potentially linking her to the killing of C-rank Brawler Icefang, which had occurred earlier.
Over the following 24 days, she has been linked to a total of 14 other conflicts between the supervillain group associated with the A-rank Kinetic/Ruler Pine, resulting in a total of 12 superhuman and 41 non-super fatalities.
This has induced villain groups from outside the city to move in on the territory, particularly weakened ones from the aforentioned Killjoy Incident. As a result, Lafayette is seeing a disproportionate amount of superhuman activity for its size. A total of four superhuman groups amassing so 53 superhumans have entered the city.
Local Guardians have attempted to make contact with Mantis Shrimp to no avail. An arrest warrant is pending, but there are no officially confird cris under her na. Guardian support cannot be called from Indianapolis due to the recent devastation of its team; as such, Washers, auxiliary personnel from other states alongside corporate supers have been requisitioned.
SRU personnel have also been requisitioned. The developing situation has the potential to devolve into another A- or S-rank situation. Caution is advised.
Rachel stared at her computer, not quite comprehending the words.
“Vivian…” she whispered. “What the hell are you doing?”
#
sparrow: viv?
sparrow: hey, are you there?
#
Lycoris frowned, checking her new orders.
“I was just in Lafayette, like, last month,” she said. “It was pretty quiet then. The only real threat ca here. Why are we being called now? Doesn’t it look better to help relief efforts here?”
“I thought the sa thing,” Amazon replied, turning her phone around so Lycoris could see it. “Look at who the SRU thinks is the root problem.”
Ayaka’s eyes widened.
“Also my reaction,” Amazon said. “I find it likely they’re deploying us because she worked with us.”
“What’s the approach?” Lycoris asked. “I like her.”
“I do too. It won’t be like we’re fighting a villain. The priority is de-escalation.”
“De-escalation,” Lycoris repeated.
“I know it’s not photogenic, but they asked for us specifically.”
Ayaka shook her head. “I would’ve asked to go anyway. When do we go?”
“Tomorrow. November 13th.”
#
Vivian was sick of heroes.
It might have helped if any of them could live up to the facade they put up. She respected Sunrise, because who couldn’t—but the ones she dealt with day by day left her with nothing but disappointnt.
The Guardians system was a failure. A good portion of their forces were people who hadn’t avoided the fate she had.
“It’s !” an artificially cheery voice said. It was quite clearly forced.
Case in point.
Mantis turned her head towards the source of the sound—coming up the side of the parking garage, almost up to the third floor where she was leaning against a wall.
“Alexander," she said dryly, groaning to her feet. “Like the Great, if I’m not mistaken.”
The hero in question hovered well out of her range, sitting in the open air.
Or well out of what her range should have been.
It was clear to her by now that the Guardians had figured out more aspects of her power. She knew that she should have cared more about that, but she had already given up on caring about a lot of the mystery. People had known her power was more than just weak telekinesis for so ti, though she’d gotten away with pretending that was a separate facet of her power.
Whether or not the Guardians knew about the fact that she could violate the plausibility limit, they definitely knew that part of her power included being able to near-instantaneously kill people. She had the body count to her na, now.
Vivian kind of wished she felt worse about it. She’d looked up the people she’d killed that first day—the supers, at least. They had hurt people. They were going to keep hurting people.
In any case, the Guardians had learned that her range had increased. To be honest, Vivian also wasn’t entirely sure why it had happened. After that strange, aligned mont of near-ecstasy she’d had that day, her power had continued to respond to her with increased ease and fluidity.
As she’d continued onwards, leaving a trail of bodies behind her, her range had begun to increase too. As far as Vivian could tell, her capacity hadn’t really increased. If it had, it hadn’t been by much.
She’d never heard of this happening before, but then again, the majority of what she had known about superpowers had co from the internet and classes. After spending so ti as an actual hero—so to speak—she knew just how little that covered.
Alexander was not, in fact, outside of the area she could affect. She could feel him. When she was as in tune with her power as she was now, Mantis could let out small, nigh-imperceptible pulses of telekinesis that painted a picture of her surroundings.
“Mantis Shrimp,” he said. The cheer was gone from his voice. He probably hadn’t practiced this section as much. “Mantis, if you’d prefer. You’ve… had a busy month.”
Vivian laughed bitterly. “You could say that.”
It hadn’t been only Pine’s group that she’d dealt with now. There were other gangs moving in, fleeing the increased hero activity in Chicago. Whether they were coming because they knew of Pine’s network or if it was because they knew Killjoy had been based out of here, there were a lot of them.
“You don’t have to fight like this,” Alexander said. “You don’t need to kill.”
“Icefang,” Vivian replied. The kill that had started this. “Thirty-three civilian murders to his na. Multiple robbery. Put a Guardian in the hospital just two months before he died.
“Alloy. Poisoned his own family. Stole a bank. Also multiple murders, the last of which was three fucking weeks ago.”
“I get your point,” Alexander said. “But as shit is it is, why do you think we established rules of engagent? You’re only going to make this worse for yourself and the city.”
“Rules of engagent,” Mantis said coldly, eyeing him. “You an the ones where your family and friends and you were brainwashed to forget your na? The ones where the Guardians mind-controlled you until you were willing to play their ga?”
“The ones where we don’t kill sixty people in a month,” Alexander retorted. “Where we don’t bring hell down on a quiet town by fucking up the status quo. Where we—“
“Send another fucking Washer,” she said, rage exploding in her gut. “Second floor, coming up the stairs right now. I warned you the last ti you did this. You know what happened to Venus. Do you really want to do this again?”
“How did—he’s not a Washer,” Alexander said. “He’s not here to hurt you.”
“Heard that one before,” Mantis snapped. “Get him out of here. You too. Fuck off and leave
alone before soone gets hurt.”
“We’re not trying to take you in,” the governnt hero said. “Just… talk.”
“You said that last ti, too. I’m leaving. Don’t follow .”
Alexander did not.
Vivian didn’t have the best hearing, but she thought she could hear him saying sothing through his comms as he left.
Unless she was entirely making it up, she thought she could hear fear in his voice.
Good. There was a chance no corporate group would want her given the image problems she was sure she was starting to form. If she couldn’t get protection and do what she had to, then she would protect herself.
#
“Sunrise,” the nurse said gently. “Recovery is going to take a long ti, even with our best Healers. You should rest.”
Sunrise couldn’t. The news story he’d seen earlier kept on replaying in his mind.
Vigilante responsible for chaos in Lafayette identified as independent hero Mantis.
She’d taken his words to heart. She’d chosen to make a difference.
“But what kind of difference are you going to make?” he whispered, wishing he had so way to speak to her. “What are you going to bring upon yourself?”
“Sunrise?” the nurse asked. “Did you need sothing.”
“It’s nothing,” he said. “I’m fine.”
“Alright. Take it easy, okay? I’ll be back in an hour.”
By the ti the nurse returned, Sunrise was nowhere to be seen.
Injured or not, he was going to make the journey.
#
Pine was irritated.
He hadn’t had the grandest of ambitions for his group. Yes, they had been fairly large-scale plans, but it had been nothing compared to what his counterpart had been preparing. That man had actually gotten to the point of making his own supers. That, even Pine had been forced to admire. There was setting up a network to take advantage of the governnt’s process and there was making your own powers in a can. He knew which one he’d rather have done.
Lafayette had been a convenient city for him. It was near Actune, one of the companies he personally had a stake in and could thus leverage, and it was quiet enough that he was unlikely to be noticed by the more powerful Guardians groups. It was re coincidence that he’d run into another player of his caliber here.
Well, that player was dead now. While Pine would have liked to lord over the fact that he was still fighting, he had at least learned the pattern of how Killjoy operated. The sa wasn’t true for the people he was dealing with now.
The villain groups from Chicago were ones that he at least had so familiarity with through his intelligence networks. Still, they were operating on entirely different MOs now that they were desperate for survival.
If it had been them alone, then this situation would have just been a bullet point. He would have folded them into his own organization soon enough.
It wasn’t just them. The local Guardians weren’t acting out of the ordinary—there was an unspoken agreent between the two of them that so long as his people weren’t interfering with them, they would extend him the sa courtesy. Any indie in this area was aware of what he would do to them if they crossed him in the wrong way.
This new one, however, was different. She—at least Pine was pretty sure it was a she—had been the first in ages to actually kill his people. He’d tried to find who she was, but nobody ever spotted her out of costu anymore. His contacts in the Guardians had experienced the unfortunate developnt of violent deaths during the Killjoy Incident, which ant that he couldn’t even leverage that front.
Which ant that he just had to restructure his organization around the fact that on an average day, one of his supers was going to be murdered.
It wasn’t the worst possible situation. The best prospects for his larger-scale plan were still alive, and fewer others to compete with them for a limited set of resources.
When he’d fought in a Cataclysm in 2022, he’d learned of one of the few ways supers could increase their power.
Vials. The only new supply of them apart from new supers, and they only appeared in the worst of tis.
Pine didn’t have it in him to incite a Cataclysm, but he needed more power to complete his ultimate goals, and for that he needed another disaster. The last few had occurred so far away from him that he hadn’t been able to swoop in and gather more powers for his people and himself, but he had it on good information that the next was going to occur sowhere in the continental United States based on an analysis of the patterns of appearances.
His preparations for that were quickly being undermined, though. This Mantis… she was proving to be a colossal pain in his ass. Pine had ordered his people to flee if they saw her or go for the kill instantly, but that had barely changed anything. It seed like once she got close enough to soone, they would die.
As such, he’d ensured that he himself wasn’t in a place that she could reach.
Her involvent complicated so many things. There were Guardians coming. Corporates from Chicago. Heroes from across the country, all centered on what they thought had the potential to be a Killjoy Incident that could be stopped. People were coming for glory, for the recognition that would co in saving the world from a disaster like the one that had hit Chicago.
A buzzer sounded, indicating that soone was at the front door of the building he’d purchased as the primary front for his illicit activities.
Finally. He’d been waiting for her to fall into this trap for weeks. From his vantage point on the observation tower he’d taken over half a mile away, he let the hero who’d been such a thorn in the side in via remote control.
“I figured you were going to force the lock either way,” he said into a microphone, watching the masked girl on the other end flinch at the sound of his voice. “Let
explain how this is going to go.”
#
Fuck. I got sloppy.
Mantis hadn’t directly attacked a venue until now. She’d done her best to enter only when it was safe to, oftentis even doing literal drive-bys where she pretended to be a civilian as she induced lethal strokes in gang mbers conducting business a street over.
Now that she had, she found herself instantly regretting it.
“Don’t bother running,” the disembodied voice of the villain she assud was Pine said. “I’ve read up on you. Your range might have increased, but it’s not a mile. Mine is. If you run, you will die.”
As if to prove his point, gravity abruptly tilted towards the tal door, and Vivian fell sideways, collapsing into it with an unwieldy thunk.
“This building is scheduled for demolition any day now. The areas around it are clear. I can do this to the entire complex, not just you, but I’d prefer not losing my investnt. If you could make this easier by not running?”
“I don’t see why you wouldn’t have just killed
already,” Mantis said. “You already know why I’m here.”
“Of course I do,” Pine replied. “The bodies certainly prove that. Do you know what I see when I see that?”
“Why don’t you tell ?”
She was strangely unafraid of what he could do to her. Maybe it was because she’d seen so much death recently, so caused by her and much otherwise. The prospect felt distant, like it was happening to soone else.
“Offer you an opportunity,” Pine said. “See, right now, the Guardians are on their way to your location. Once they get you, I’m sure you already know what’ll happen. You chose to go it alone for a reason, right?”
“Not happening,” Mantis hissed. “I’ll kill them or myself before I let them use
like a fucking pet again.”
“I thought as much,” Pine said. “Then how about working with ? It’s not the sa as it would be with the Guardians.”
“Yeah, and I’m sure you’d let
near you without running my brain through a laundry machine. I don’t think that’s happening.”
“So allowances would have to be made, but I assure—“
“Assurances an nothing when you can erase them,” Vivian hissed. “Cut
a break.”
Control. It always boiled down to control.
Whether it was through a Washer or through threats, through governnt obligations or corporate responsibilities, social dia expectations or whatever leash the world had on them, no super operated without soone else trying to control them.
All she had wanted to do was make a difference, and she had been thrown from one group trying to own her to another. There had been one promising spot, but even that had gone to shit.
Her power was humming again, far louder than it had ever before.
“Are you sure about this?” Pine asked. “I don’t mind denying the Guardians an asset, but I’d much rather have you for myself.”
Sothing in the way he said that…
“Fuck you,” Mantis spat. She stepped outside the building—and imdiately started falling upwards, nothing under her feet.
Ah. He hadn’t been lying.
As she soared into the sky, accelerating up at nine point eight ters per second per second, she shut her eyes. Behind closed eyelids, she saw stars, singing a song she’d been hearing on end since she’d received her powers.
There wasn’t a hint of fear in her heart.
When she opened her eyes, gravity had righted itself, but she was still moving up alongside a good chunk of the building that had fallen off under Pine’s power. In seconds, she’d start falling for real, and then she’d be dead.
Except that wasn’t what caught her attention.
What she noticed as she tumbled down, head looking up into what should have been an unending grey sky, was a vial the size of her finger.
It split open, flashed towards her—and then it was empty.
The humming rose, spiraling into an aria, a symphony inside her head. Two powers rging to beco one.
No. One power absorbing another. Becoming more.
Mantis, forrly known to herself and the world as Vivian Alia Li, stopped falling.
The second thing she noticed was significantly more dramatic.
Nobody in the entire state could miss it. Not her, not Sunrise, not the SRU teams flying in, not the Guardians flocking in from New York and Florida and California, not the Echelon team she’d interned on in Chicago. Everyone saw the grey sky split open, a dark void yawning beyond.
They saw the creature that pulled itself from the dinsion nobody but the original alien could access. They heard its cry, the strangely lodic sound of a skyscraper-sized beast from another world.
Absolute, certain dread set in as Mantis realized what lody that was echoing.
It was a familiar tone. The sa one she had heard all this ti. The one that had just reached a fever pitch for more than one reason.
And she recognized what this was.
On the last day that she dared to call herself a superhero, Mantis caused a Cataclysm.
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