The Power of Ten Book Four: Dynamo

The Mountain started with the guard at the gate.

Mr. Hill actually weighed close to three thousand pounds, and was only getting heavier with time and more metals ingested. So when The Mountain got into motion, that was a lot of kinetic energy.

Learning to use his heavyfoot to move even faster only made it better.

He exploded right through the brick wall and the guard shack. His blessed silver knuckledusters smashed into the unfortunate Drinker, and The Mountain didn’t hold back. The guard’s chest was smashed flat as The Mountain kept right on moving.

Whichever vampire was tied to that Drinker immediately blurted out an alarm, just as The Mountain loudly blew through the front door. Without a care for anything, he proceeded right to the back and the vampires visible in the lounge and outside. Things like walls, doors, and windows were just trivial annoyances in the way as he came in.

He definitely got their attention, while they got out of his way at all speed, first sending out their mental attacks to try and take control of him.

That wasn’t going to happen. The biggest vulnerability of most Brick-types was to mental stuff. To that end, The Mountain had long ago purchased via favors a good kilogram of magnapsium, or Psychic Manganese, the same metal that Erik Lensherr, the Earth Angel and Champion of New Israel, used in his helmet, and had made famous throughout the world as a way to block the powers of mindbenders.

Mr. Hill’s skull and brain were now laced with the stuff, and his mind was totally immune to outside mental attacks like that.

He ramped up his Weight of the Mountain to double, and caught a couple vampires in it, reaching out and grabbing them as he blew through to the outside, and without much care slammed them down to the concrete and tiles out there.

When your weight suddenly doubles and you get smashed into the ground by something that strong, it’s generally bad news. Supernaturally tough bone cracked and crunched, and he dragged the stunned and broken vampires in and stomped down, once each. Their heads exploded, and that was that.

The vampires’ attention was so focused on Mr. Hill, including the quickly-retreating Master Vampire chanting and bringing up red-colored bands of light, that in their dives for the guns laying about they didn’t notice some of their own were abruptly falling over from cases of spontaneous EHS brought on by exposure to ballistic shock.

The crimson strands of magic lashed out and wrapped around The Mountain. Their strength depended on the Caster, and Mr. Hill grinned as he continued wading forward, eyes fixed on the master vampire, ignoring the gunfire bouncing off him.

The master, however, had other problems. “There’s another shooter in the sky!” he shouted out, looking back at four fallen vampires, and another one’s head exploded at the same moment.

---

Up in the sky, Hawkeye could easily tell the vamps from the Drinkers just by who showed up on electronics and with a heat signature. It didn’t affect his aim much, as his eyes were plenty fine at night like this. He could see the faint glow of magical shields around the master vampire, and didn’t bother to waste ammo on him.

Vamps and Drinkers on the second floor were coming to the windows with guns, trying to get a bead on him, and the air was suddenly exploding with bats.

He set off the Shrieker in his off-hand and kept firing, now as fast as he could... which was as fast as any normal human alive, and maybe faster.

The ultrasonic screams of the Shrieker in his hand were only a mild vibration to him, but dogs for a mile around burst out howling, cats yowled, and the bats simply couldn’t get close to him before they lost consciousness from the noise.

“RISE!” bellowed the master vampire, and all around the lawn, hidden coffins exploded upwards, venting forth bat-like, winged undead things.

“Fuck!” Hawkeye swore, clipping the Shrieker to his belt and jetting for altitude as he changed clips. The shooters on the second floor were all dead and sprawled out the windows, but his attention was now on these rot-winged, once-human things, some sort of modified vampire spawn, winging up for him.

He reloaded with speed, the .45 and its silver ammo roaring with less than a tenth of a second interruption as he emptied it, reloaded, emptied it again, and let it fall as he drew his own Gritworks sidearm and continued shooting.

No bullet was wasted. He was Hawkeye, one of the best gunmen in the world, and sure, he dressed in gold and brown and black and wore a Core Flyer and had some nice gear, but he got where he was because he could shoot, and shoot as well as anyone alive.

There were damn near forty of the things trying to reach him, impelled by the single-minded command of their master, but the rate they were falling at would have made some people think he was using an automatic weapon.

He was in Focus, aiming, centered, everything slowed down a bit as he picked his target and the next. His body followed through in rhythm and cadence, and silver shells found their targets one after another, batting the screaming, shrieking horde down from the sky every bit as quickly as they were ascending.

He saw the girl come leaping out the third-floor balcony from the other side, followed by nearly a dozen Disks with stuff on them, or rather, people. The things all looked like playing cards from up here...

He yanked off a flare and dropped it as the last of the varbats drove itself onto his stake – hey, he brought it along, he had to kill something with it! – and he booked for distance.

---

Down on the ground, The Mountain had reached over and grabbed a Drinker dumb enough to use a fire axe on him, tearing off the minion’s head with no effort, while watching the master vampire retreating from him as he kept wading forwards.

He saw the flare going off, and Hawkeye retreating into the distance, followed by the dark swarms of thousands of bats. He’d been watching the flash of his ex-corporal’s gunplay, the bursts as the silver rounds hit the vamp-bat-things there, and smiled in appreciation as the things fell flaming to the ground like unclean rain, admiring a professional at work.

He is definitely gonna clean those guns and kiss them once he gets home tonight, Mr. Hill thought.

The flare, though; that made things simple. It meant the girl, Dynamo, was out.

“Nice house you got here,” he said to the master, as a female vampire that had wound herself over his arm and back tried to bite his neck, and found a mithral collar there burning her mouth and fangs as she tried. With easy experience, he reached up and grabbed her head.

She shrieked when the silver knuckles prevented her from morphing and escaping. His hand closed like her head was a rotten peach, and silver flames burst around his fingers as her brains exploded in his grip.

He drove his Weight of the Mountain all the way up, looking up at the sky.

How’d Dyna describe it? ‘Oi, you wake up King Gravity up there on His throne, and you give Him a chance to show His stuff. He must love you.’

Hur-hur-hur!

“Say hello to King Gravity for me!” he bellowed, and one hundred times gravity blew out and around him as he spent some of his earthpower, and bore down on everything.

This maneuver would do absolutely shit to most Bricks, who could easily handle their own weight going up a hundredfold.

Buildings and beings not so strong, not quite.

The house didn’t crush so much as collapse, drawn down into itself as all the support beams and arches gave way under the massive increase in weight. The living Drinkers, the ghouls who were just starting to boil out of the house for him, and the lesser vampires were instantly smashed to the ground under their own weight, and if they were in the house, went right down with the floor as it gave way. Hundreds of pounds became hundreds of tons coming down atop them.

The red strands of magic binding him vanished as the master vampire was slammed to the ground under his own weight. He was plenty strong by the way he tried to resist and get up, but suddenly weighing ten tons was pretty damn high for a vampire’s strength limit. Maybe some of the bestial nosferatu could do it, but not him.

Master Vamp opted for transforming into gas, but found, to his horror, that the very air was now a hundred times heavier, thicker, and more viscous than water, and he couldn’t move away or spread out like he should have.

And that damn flare was lighting up everything, even with the lights out!

Hill walked over leisurely, shattering the tiles with every step, ignoring them as he did so, while palming a thermite grenade. He wasn’t going to test his aim in the maxed-out Weight, so he basically dropped it into the middle of the gas cloud that was writhing away from the pit and the crushed coffins below, and stepped away.

There was an explosion of fire, and the vampire screamed as he re-materialized desperately, half his body eaten away by the burning explosion that had barely ruffled The Mountain’s coat.

The Mountain shut off the Weight, King Gravity pouted and went back to sleep on His throne, and Mr. Hill bounced over, big hand grabbing the vampire’s head, blessed silver knuckle-dusters burning him and not letting him morph.

Clawed hands ripped over his face, raising welts on his impervious and rather unmoving hide with supernatural force and dark energies. He just smiled down at the red-eyed thing whose skull was in his hands, and closed his hand.

The vampire writhed with impossible, undead vigor, trying to get away, but Hill’s fingers were already inside the bone. The vampire was driven into the ground, and wasn’t going anywhere.

The vamp’s skull was crushed as his bloody red eyes stared at Mr. Hill, who simply grinned wider and brought up the pin of the second thermite grenade to his mouth as the master vampire died and, not having been staked, immediately resolved into mist to flee to his coffin.

Well, that didn’t work when the incendiary grenade, thoughtfully Blessed and treated with holy fire Runes, went off and fucking burned him away to less than ash.

---

A couple of the vampires had managed to get outside the house and onto the grass, and had survived the Weight. They didn’t survive Hawkeye turning around, the bats dispersing as their controllers died and in doing so opening up his field of view. Their heads exploded as Sun Shot silver bullets came down from above before they could flee.

The Drinkers hadn’t made it, their hearts and blood vessels giving out under the gravity, eyeballs popping out of their heads and blood out of their skin as it tore apart under the weight of their flesh and bones.

Wasn’t nothing moving in the pit down behind him either, and the eyesore of a house was no more. Most of the pool had drained into it when the concrete gave way, falling into the mess below, and leaking water lines were adding to the mess, along with sparking power lines that would be pretty dangerous to anything undead that might be alive down there.

Hawkeye came zipping down, his Shrieker stowed away as well as his Grit. He set down next to his old sergeant, and eyed his work.

“Every time I see you do that, I still remember that apartment block with those terrorists in it, Sarge,” he admitted, shaking his head. “Thought we lost you that day.”