For Those Who Cannot
or
Your Day Begins, Hassan
Attack on Sherman Square
Metal howled and crashed against concrete. Mechs, fighter jets, a sea of armored trucks with equally armored Hounds. Ground shook beneath his feet; he was still sitting in the movie theater chair he had procured for his conversation with Charlie. Disappointment washed down his face. Before he could see to the business of decimation, he had to return the stolen chairs to their rightful owners. Or… or he could use them as weapons.
In the footsteps of Icon, Pantheon burst from his seated position and into flight. With dwindling space between himself and the mammoth of technology, lust cradled the warrior. Battle. It was his purpose; open palms crushed into fists and locked the closer the compendium of mystic energy came to the mecha. The pull. Wretched boy and his squeaking pleas; muscles resisted advance.
”There is no time for this, child!”“D-don’t make me hurt you!” Hassan squealed, the crack of thunder and cuts of wind a violent murder of his voice. Children were better silent, anyway. The mecha pilot trained the machine’s automatic mini guns and its rocket launchers directly at Pantheon; no warnings were heeded, especially not by those of an unconvincing child.
This child was the weakest yet. The boy’s great grandfather was a veteran of Korea and Vietnam; his great great grandmother a doctor and healer. His grandmother never realized her potential, but she was a teacher, one of the top students at her university. This one, Hassan, was nothing but a whiner: full of sarcasm, indecisive, quarrelsome, jealous. Resilience, that was the boy’s one redeeming quality. It alone did not constitute the warrior the child wished he was.
Still, there was a surprising amount of mental fortitude the child possessed. This much resistance Pantheon had yet to face in any of his ancestors, and they had died for it; it was too easy for Pantheon to assume control of their minds, wills, passions. Reckless was Pantheon’s nature. He would lead them all to their deaths naturally: for his grandmother and all her knowledge, a vascular carotid disease which onset dementia for her failure to realize the power she had at her disposal. For his great grandmother the healer and doctor, Aabidah , and her inquisitivity and greed, a necrotic disease for her failure to uphold a deal between herself and Iblis. For his grandfather, death on the frontlines.
Hassan was harder to repress, and Pantheon could not force unnatural demise on any of his inhabitants, nor could he forcibly interfere with their wills. A passive god who had yet to be conquered within or without. No man made machine would be the first to do it, either. Rain pellets clanged against the body of the mech in violent stoccato; Pantheon faired no better, arms crossed as he floated in front of the story tall machine. Elevating himself to the mech’s head, his rainbow colored orbs glared into the pilot’s pit. Pantheon was forefront with Hassan acting as the only tether of restraint
”I am in a generous mood, human. I will spare your life if you take the rest of these fools and return home. If not, you will die.”Defiance abound, the pilot’s mech fired its machine gun rounds at Pantheon which--as they had with Icon--fell harmless from his body. The rockets followed, and Pantheon was too close to dodge them; atop the shock from the mech’s electrical defensive systems, impact from the first rocket sent him careening backwards. Black and gold shirt ripped to shreds, pants too. Pantheon himself unphased except for some black smoke which steamed from his mostly exposed torso and partially exposed legs.
Thunder boomed across the sky following the silent and soft arc of sea blue lightning rolling across the heavens. Hard contours of Pantheon’s face lit beneath the brief flash of aqua colored light, a sneer distorted itself into a smile, the sides of Pantheon’s mouth curling sinister. There were no words, only a blurred advance shrouded beneath the night sky and lashing rain.
A clenched fist plunged through the cockpit, but the pilot was steeled. The Hounds had trained these men not to wither in adversity, even if death was certain. One did not have to be a zealot in order to be willing to die for a cause; and not all of these men and women who donned black gear and Hounds insignias were evil or crazed. They fought for the same reasons the metas did; preserving their way of life, protecting those they loved. Ill knew no side, no ideology. So, it was no surprise when the mecha pilot continued to fight even when the protection he was assured (by his superior officers no less) would hold fast against metahuman onslaught was dismantled.
Pantheon had wedged his hands between the gaping hole of the glass which sat between himself and the presently nameless Hound. It was no wonder why Pantheon was surprised when his body was enveloped by a large mechanical hand and constricted--the harder the metal hand clenched, the more its screws popped and its gears whined against Pantheon’s otherworldly durable frame. The pilot wised up once he realized he couldn’t crush Pantheon to death and instead rose its metallic arm over its head slammed Pantheon into the pavement below. But the pilot knew he was fighting a losing battle; Pantheon admired the pilot’s resolve, and he may--he just
may--not kill him for his insolence.
Dragging Pantheon along the concrete, the giant mecha hand tossed Pantheon aside. He blasted through a building’s walls and his trajectory only halted thanks to a display of mannequins inside of a store several blocks away. It never got less annoying. He only hoped people didn’t start billing him for collateral. After he had crashed through the window, skidded along the shopping mall’s floor and created a fissure, it took him a few seconds to rise to his feet. Horrified mothers screamed and lustful wives settled on him a second too long for their husbands’ likings. Children were wide eyed and had jaws ajar.
“Mommy, look!” a young boy wearing wearing an Icon shirt exclaimed, ‘It’s Icon!” Pantheon was fixing the mannequins he had knocked over, accessories and all. Twisting on his heels, he approached the kid; his mother maneuvered her son behind her where he had latched one arm around his mother’s leg. Pantheon stood and stared down the mother for a few seconds before he tore off a patch of what was left of the sheared shirt completely, a portion of the gold lightning bolt emblem visible on what was left of its stitching and handed it to the child.
”No, little one,” the underlying aggression typical in his voice gone,
”I am not. I am Pantheon, superior to Icon.” the store shook as the mechas moved in unison and were taken apart by Angel and Icon; Pantheon’s business was unfinished, he turned to the young boy again,
”Take your mother and leave, child. If you are ever in need, concentrate on that lightning bolt, and I will come to you.”Pantheon took to the skies again. He bulleted himself into the side of the mech (who had begun unleashing his machine guns upon fleeing citizens, cutting them down without mercy) he was fighting before, the force of impact caused the mech to lose balance and begin to topple sideways. He would not let the mech or the pilot off that easy. Changing his flight path, he twisted around and used his blinding speed to fly to the opposite side of the mech which was upside toward the sky and wrap his arms around its arm. Generating enough resistance to pull the mech’s arm off while it was completely vertical was easy enough, but he had to make it harder for the pilot to react first.
Using the counterbalance, Pantheon created enough resistance to disarm the mech completely. He clasped the arm in both hands and maneuvered to the mech’s front.
SmackWham!THWACK!The mech’s cockpit was being compressed and crushed systematically. Critical system failure imminent. He tossed the arm aside. He’d done the same for the other arm with less restraint than before. Sparks flew from both sockets where the mech’s arms used to be. The pilot was busy trying to get the mech’s systems online. Meanwhile, Pantheon slapped both palms against the left leg of the mech and dug his fingers into its metal; audible groans from the mech’s stressed metal pierced the wind. Digging his feet into the concrete, Pantheon tore the leg from beneath the mech upon which it immediately began to collapse, the stress of bearing so much weight on one of its artificial legs too great. Before the mech could tilt sideways into any buildings, Pantheon flew to the opposite leg and wrapped his arms around it. He tore it from beneath the mech, leaving the massive torso to plummet to the ground.
Pantheon hurled the mecha leg a distance ahead of himself. Where it landed did not matter to him. The mecha’s other leg shared the same fate; the pilot was trapped in the compressed wreckage of the cockpit, for Pantheon knew he would attempt to run otherwise. Laying in a pool of wires and foiled scientific advancement, the pilot coughed violently. Panic wore on his face as Pantheon walked up the mecha’s torso to its head where the cockpit was, dug his hand in, and forcibly ripped the pilot from his deathtrap--for his vindication the pilot got a deep gash along both thighs, and cuts along his arms; metal lodged into his shoulder. Pantheon grabbed him by the collar and lifted him up, the pilot’s feet dangling in desperation. Death creeping upon him.
”I gave you a choice, Hound. Now you rot.” Pantheon tossed him aside and walked away. The Hounds had come with numbers, and this would be a long, gruesome fight--the kind of fight Pantheon was made for.
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