Justice and Revenge

Caledonia and Loki duke it out with an entire city hanging in the balance. Will either of them survive?

High above the busy streets of New York city…

 

Caledonia had been alive a long time.  In that time, she had seen mankind grow from tribal communities to thriving world-wide nations.  She had seen medical science develop from the use of leeches to remove excess bile from one’s system to complex nano-surgery on brain tumors.  She had seen transportation move from the development of affordable shoes for the poor to the development of supersonic passenger jets.  She’d seen her own people, the people of northern Britannia, grow and forget her.

 

She’d seen the evil of mankind over and over again.  She’d seen wars beyond numbering.  She’d seen weapons develop from sharp sticks and stones to weapons capable of destroying entire cities within seconds.  She’d seen the development of siege weapons designed to defeat tall castle walls and tanks designed to simply make them obsolete.  She’d seen naval warfare move beyond oar driven longboats to aircraft carriers each carrying enough firepower to level nations. 

 

She’d also seen the good in mankind.  No matter what age it was, no matter how desperate the situation, she’d seen men put their lives on the line to defend each other.  She’d seen the charity of children giving up food so that a sick parent could eat.  She’d seen men nurture the planet around them and help to protect endangered species.  She’d seen men show love. 

 

For the first time in a very long while, she was now seeing something new.  Today, she was seeing true evil.  She was facing madness and an expression of hatred for the living that surpassed even the most deranged psychopath.  She was seeing in Loki’s burning eyes a desire for war and destruction far surpassing even the most despotic dictator.  She was seeing evil and it frankly scared her.

 

She’d followed Loki to New York from Moscow mere days before.  The new tracking systems Bat MAn had created to monitor potential spatial and temporal tears on Earth enabled her to track the very unique energy signature he was letting off.  It was almost identical to the signature generated by the rift in Athens last year.  Given the fact that he was traveling with another easily traceable radiation signature made it easier.  She wished now that she had not attempted this alone.  Backup would be really good about now.

 

Both heroine and villain stood mere inches apart.  Their hands were both held up in the air at shoulder height, nearly touching.  The air around them rippled and buckled with raw power as if one was looking across the hot hood of a car in a Texas summer.  Caledonia had created a vortex around them that encircled the Empire State building and created an impenetrable wall of flying debris to hold Loki’s minions at bay.

 

Loki, in turn, was burning through his power reserves to heat up the atmosphere around them in an effort to asphyxiate her, cutting off her oxygen supply.  In an effort to stop the building from catching on fire, Cal had coated the uppermost layer with a thick sheet of ice.  She’s also encased Loki’s left claw in ice as well.  In it, he was holding onto a detonator tightly.  It resembled a toy car remote control with a large trigger and antenna, and Loki had tightened his grip around it, activating the device.  Allowing him to let go would detonate the bomb behind him and that is something Caledonia could not allow.

 

The real battle, however, was the one that nobody could see. 

 

Loki and Caledonia were in a psionic battle.  One powerful attack after the next was flying between them, brute force blows being delivered by each combatant in an effort to reduce the other to a drooling pile of brain-dead flesh.  The force of the blows was so severe that the top 10 stories of the structure had been evacuated after three men collapsed and began convulsing.  Most of the occupants of the old tower were huddled in the lobby level waiting for a chance to get past the hurricane force wall of wind gusting outside.

 

Below them, in that cramped lobby, the building occupants were terrified.  The raw might of the battle above them was shaking the structure to it’s foundation as if an earthquake had latched onto it and wouldn’t let go.  The elevators were inoperable and the two stairwells leading down to the subway station far below had collapsed.  Just outside the doorway was a raging wall of debris and air, the base of a large tornado that had settled over the building.  One frightened man had attempted to leave.  His body was swept away in the current of air and immediately disappeared from sight.  Nobody else tried.

 

Power was still coming to the building, amazingly enough, and one of the women switched on a television and tuned it to a local news station.

 

The screen flickered and snowed out for a second, but then focused and a reporter could be seen looking over a rooftop several blocks away.  Behind her, where the Empire State Building would have been was a massive tornado. It stretched up into the darkened sky blocking view of the structure.  Lightning arced from the funnel up into the clouds above but the funnel did not move from its fixed location around the tower.

 

“This is Christy Finecy reporting live from the scene of the battle raging in Manhattan at this very moment.”  She reached up and put her hand on her cap lest it blow away.

 

“You might remember similar scenes from Las Vegas earlier this year.  The damage has been limited so far, but local officials have taken the precaution of beginning the evacuation of the downtown area in case Caledonia, on of the Akkadian Knights, fails to stop the red demon from detonating the warhead…”

 

The screen flickered out.  The crowd gasped.  One of them turned on his I-Phone and tuned in another news station.  A man in a black suit and red tie sat in front of a set of monitors showing both the action above their heads on one side and what appeared to be a drawing of a military base on the other.

 

“… when yesterday a break-in at an old Soviet missile silo in northern Chechnya resulted in the theft of a Cold Age era nuclear warhead rated at…”

 

The power died and the building shook once more.  The feed to the I-phone was cut off.  The lines to the outside world went dead and the huddled mass silently stared at the ceiling in the darkness.

 

 

Above them, way above them, the battle raged on.  Caledonia was beginning to find it difficult to maintain focus against the beast.  He was drawing energy from somewhere she couldn’t see and had maintained a very high level since the start of the battle. 

 

For herself, Cal drew strength from the forces of nature around her.  Oftentimes, she would commune in her garden at the Knight’s keep, simply basking in the warm glow of the life she found around her.  It was a little harder to do in a city environment.  Mankind was exceptionally adept at re-structuring the elements of the Mother Earth and tended to overrun nature wherever he could.  She knew it was the natural order of things, but it made it harder for her to connect to her own energy source.

 

Fortunately, the spirits surrounding her knew the stakes involved and had banded together to continue to feed her to maintain her strength while she fought to save the lives of millions of people in the city.

 

Loki concentrated and drew even more power from some hidden source.  Where was he getting it from?  His eyes blazed a bright blue and for just a moment the world went fuzzy.  Cal closed her eyes to avoid the penetrating gaze.  When she opened them, she was no longer on the building.

 

She was standing in a pasture surrounded by pecan trees.  The sun was brightly shining and birds were singing.  She could hear the breeze blowing through the trees and a slight chill was in the air.  She looked around, not sure where she was.

 

She turned towards the nearest tree and beckoned it down to her.  One branch bent and it dropped some pecans in her hand.  She liked pecans.  As she cracked the first one, a small wimper reached her ears.  Looking around the tree trunk, she saw a badger caught in a woodsman’s trap.  The critter’s paw as stuck tight in the locked jaws of the iron trap.  Its fingers were disjointed and miscolored and it had a pained look on its face.  As she approached it, it turned on her and snarled.  The hair on its arched back rose up and the badger bared its fangs.

 

“Now, now, I’m not here to hurt you,” Cal said in a reassuring voice.  She began singing.  Her soft, rhythmic melody began to smooth over the small animal and it began to sway in time with the tune.  She reached down, the animal complete hypnotized, and began to open the trap.  The metal was cold.  Very cold.  The metal in the spring mechanism had shrunk as metal does when frozen and the spring had locked tight. 

 

As she began to warm it up, applying heat slowly to it, the wind whipped up again.  She could sense something was amiss.  She looked at the badger again.  Instead of swaying to her song, it was now stationary, staring at her intently with glowing blue eyes.

 

Glowing blue eyes…

 

BLUE EYES!

 

Cal shook her head, the scene around her faded away and the sound of the hurricane strength winds around her resumed their deafening roar.  She stumbled, but firmed her resolve and resumed her assault on Loki. 

 

For his part, he had managed to get her to weaken the ice coating on his arm enough to begin cracking the sheet.  He smiled ever so confidently.

 

“It seems I’ll be able to take my revenge out on one of you blasted Knights after all!”

 

“Why?  For what purpose?  Your master is dead!”

 

“Dead?  That’s impossible!  He was my creator.  He was my father!”  Loki visibly began to fade for a moment, becoming translucent and then reformed.  It was then that Cal realized where he was drawing power from. 

 

Barthandalus didn’t trust his creations enough to give them access to any other power source than him.  In Tartarous, she had faced Darius with Captain Atom.  Cap drew off the dead sorcerer’s powers and routed it back to the Knights, enabling them to defeat Fuma Hanzo’s hordes.  Barthandalus had granted him a large amount of power, but it was finite and completely contained inside the sorcerer. 

 

Loki was the same.  He was using his own life force, the power left to him by Barthandalus, to strengthen his attacks against her.  The ice around his left claw cracked further.  To use it to the point where he was fading out of existence meant that he didn’t plan to live through the encounter.  If he faded away entirely, the ice around his hand wouldn’t matter.  The bomb would detonate.

 

“There’s a rift in space and time meters above us.  When this weapon detonates, it will open that rift.  I might be destroyed, but this world will feel Barthandalus’ revenge!  He shall enter the world once more and decimate this planet!”  His eyes belied the madness gripping him and Cal realized that there was no stopping him.  There was only one thing she could do.

 

Cal let down her psionic defenses and grappled Loki.  With the defenses down, she couldn’t stop the assault hitting her and she screamed in pain.  Pushing as hard as she could, she threw him on the metal walkway.  She reached out and touched the nuclear warhead inches away as Loki slammed his left hand down into the metal railing, breaking the ice sheath.  As he let go of the trigger, the heroine, the villain and the bomb disappeared from sight.

 

  ››››››››

 

The tornado instantly began dissipating.  The cloud cover began thinning and a brilliant flash of light lit up the night sky.  Far overhead, the nuclear warhead detonated in high orbit.  Men and women all over the city covered their eyes as, thankfully, the cloud cover muted most of the blast.  Across the city, the power grid fluctuated.  A news helicopter 10 blocks away began to make an emergency landing as its instruments began to fail.  A deafening roar blanketed the city as the shockwave from the blast hit the atmosphere.

 

Minutes passed as men and women began to slowly work their way out of the buildings nearby.  Power resumed city-wide and the TVs came back online.

 

In the lobby of the Empire State Building, few of the huddled crowd moved.  They were fixed on the TV screens above them. 

 

“… surmise that the explosion over New York was caused by the stolen nuclear weapon.  Earlier reports indicate that Caledonia of the Akkadian Knights was on the scene battling with the demonic creature holding the detonator.  One of her reputed powers was the ability to teleport from one place to another and we can only assume that she was the reason the detonation happened in orbit rather than in the heart of our city.”

 

A man in the crowd looked up at the ceiling.  “Come on guys, if she’s up there we’re finding her!”

 

About a dozen men, mostly electrical contractors, began the long climb up to the observation deck.  Nearly 20 minutes later, the exhausted men reached the platform.  Bursting through, they saw twisted metal and broken concrete.  The observation deck was in ruins and was smoking, the metal having been burnt. 

 

Slowly entering the deck, the men spread out as they moved around the building.  It wasn’t long before one of them yelled out, “over here!”

 

All of them converged on a large hole in the exterior wall that led into a janitor’s closet.  Inside laid Caledonia, unconscious.  Carefully, the men carried her back downstairs to a cheering crowd. 

 

Vexator stepped through the front doors as Cal came to.  Helping her to his feet, he had a sorrowful smile, as if to say ‘sorry I wasn’t here’ and ‘you rock’ at the same time.  The two stepped outside into the sunlight and a street full of people thankful to be alive.