The River King 11

The River King 11

Kirk Mueller

I opened my eyes to the dim darkness of Monarch’s hideout. It was a warehouse; I’d been in enough of those to recognize one even in the low light. Hell, it was practically tradition: If you weren’t Protectorate, you had to have a warehouse hideout somewhere.

The only source of light was a dimly flickering incandescent bulb that hung uncovered from the ceiling. It hadn’t even been attached right; the only thing keeping it up there was a stretch of duct tape over the wire.

Monarch, the sewer bitch, sat quietly in the corner. She looked like something out of a cheap horror flick, the kind where the black ones die first and the big-titted blondes miraculously survive.

I saw more as my eyes adjusted. Her mask, made from off-white silk, had an orange tint in the light. Her hair draped limply over her face, hiding most of it from view. The rest of her outfit clung to her stick-thin figure, soggy from that teleporting power she had. It was as if a drowned scarecrow had come to life.

Fucking pitiful. I couldn’t believe it. We’d lost to this bitch. We’d underestimated her. I hadn’t thought so, three capes were more than enough to deal with anyone not named Lung, but I was wrong.

She was still learning, still growing. Alabaster had said she wasn’t much stronger than a man, then Cricket got swung around on the end of a water tentacle like a pom-pom. Hookwolf said she had limits to her regeneration, then she came back with an arm made of sewer-water and a thirst for vengeance.

Worst of all, she was a cruel, vicious bitch. Worse than Cricket. Worse than Hookwolf. She used her bugs to watch and her water to ambush. It was as if we were hunting a rabid wolf with the intelligence of a man.

I laughed bitterly. And now, here we were. Cricket was as good as dead. I heard the dull snapping sound of her neck giving way. Othala could probably patch her up in a few hours, but that was only if we made it out. Given her hate-boner for Empire capes and our state, I didn’t like our chances.

Never mind leaving with Cricket, I was barely conscious. I felt lightheaded, the surest sign of blood loss. The sewer bitch used bladed tentacles that were damn near impossible to block completely. It was all I could do to avoid taking any lethal wounds.

“You’re here, right, Tahm?” I heard her muttering under her breath. She sounded fucking unhinged. “Is the deal still on? There are two more. Two more Nazi trash no one will miss.”

Carefully, I raised my head for a better look. If she was distracted, if she came closer, then that could be my chance. I had maybe two good claws in me. One to the back of the head should be enough, even for her.

I saw no phone. I thought she was talking to someone, maybe a collaborator. Krieg said that might be the case; bug and water control were too unrelated. He said that there might be a bug controller who acted as her information guy, leading her from the shadows.

“That’s good… I just… I need more power, Tahm,” she whispered. It was only the silence of the warehouse and my enhanced hearing that carried her words to me. “Two capes are good, right? I beat them. They’re a little banged up, but they’re still alive, even Cricket.”

She shifted and I saw what she was talking into. It was a bowl, almost the exact kind I ate my cereal out of this morning. The bitch was crazy, or maybe she was using her water portals to communicate.

She stilled and stopped talking. Then, almost like a wooden marionette, her head tilted towards me. Her face was still largely covered by her damp hair, but I knew instinctively that she was glaring at me.

I froze as my heart leapt into my throat. I felt like a mouse caught before a viper. She couldn’t have heard me. I used air to funnel noise towards my ears to improve my hearing. By the same token, the reverse could also be true: No one heard me unless I wanted to be heard.

But she knew I was awake. Something tipped her off.

Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted a cockroach. It scurried into my field of view. Then, as if it was mocking me, it stood on its hind legs and took a sweeping bow.

“He’s awake, Tahm,” Monarch giggled creepily. “Are you finished up there?”

I couldn’t hear what was said. “Tahm” had to be the bug controller. He was probably watching me, but if he showed himself, maybe that wouldn’t be bad. I was in no place to fight her, but a hostage could turn things around for me.

Monarch tossed her bowl onto the ground. It shattered, spilling its contents. The puddle that formed spread and spread, becoming larger than it had any right to be. The incandescent bulb reflected dully against the water. Then, that reflection became three. Two of them winked out, only to return.

Eyes. They were eyes. Bigger than my fists and glowing a sickly yellow. The puddle looked so much deeper. Even from the other side of whatever portal this was, I knew that he was looking at me.

Tahm. He was a Case-53, and big. I struggled to rise. Holding him hostage obviously wasn’t an option. I had to get out of here.

Large, meaty hands rose out of the puddle. His fingers were capped with thick, pointed talons. Each hand was wide enough to hold a man’s head like a baseball.

Then came the rest of him. He was a catfish-like Case-53, with a pair of whiskers that lashed like tentacles. The left one even sported a thick, bronze ring around the base.

The rest of him wasn’t any more ridiculous. He had a top hat that might have fitted my nephew. On his oversized dome, it looked like one of those ridiculous cocktail ornaments. He also wore a burgundy, collared shirt with special-made buttons to fit over his enormous girth.

All of that was overshadowed by his eyes. Those sickly, yellow orbs glowed with an inner light. Never once did they deviate from me. They turned an otherwise hilarious outfit into the most ominous thing I’d ever seen.

“Well, well, well,” he drawled as he approached. He had a southern accent, as if he’d stepped straight out of the Mississippi bayou. “You must be Stormtiger. Pardon our lack of hospitality; my name is Tahm Kench.”

“W-What the fuck are you?” I asked. My voice came out as a weak whisper. 

My mind raced a mile a minute. The water. Monarch wasn’t the hydrokinetic. This freak was. He had to be some kind of trump. Monarch was… She was just a decoy, a proxy to act on the city.

I saw the light glint off needle-sharp teeth as he gave me an impossibly wide smile. I knew then that we were dead. Me. Cricket. We never had a chance.

“Why, I’m the River King. Ol’ Yawn-Belly, some call me. I guess you could say I’m something of a businessman.”

“Business? What do you want?” I asked as wind gathered in my hand. I’d only get one shot. If I could charge a big enough claw, then maybe I could take one of them with me. The Empire would get revenge after that.

“Not with you, my boy.”

“Enough, Tahm,” Monarch interrupted. “They’re alive so the deal is on, right?”

“So it is, Taylor.”

Taylor. A name. A surge of adrenaline let me rise to my knees. The wind howled around me as I clawed at the fishy freak.

And then, nothing. Tahm Kench did not defend himself. He merely stood there as storm winds that could rend steel to ribbons pushed uselessly against his rubbery flesh. It was like trying to cut a tire with a butter knife.

His grin widened, sending an icy chill down my spine. “Well, I do like my dinner with a bit of kick.”

As if in defiance of God and man, his jaw unhinged with two, sickening cracks. A tongue lashed out, wrapping around me. It was just as rubbery and impossible to cut through as the rest of him.

I felt the crunch of my bones and the suffocating darkness. Then, I knew no more.

X

Taylor Hebert

I watched Tahm swallow Stormtiger, then Cricket.

I should have felt something, maybe a bit of hesitation or fear. I was literally watching a river monster swallow two people whole.

I took a deep breath. I reminded myself that there was no other option. The heroes? Prison? I’d tried that. Cricket had been delivered to them, practically gift-wrapped. She was out in less than a month.

I wanted my city free of Nazi trash. It wasn’t my fault that I needed a more permanent option. It wasn’t my fault the heroes utterly failed at their jobs even when I did the hard part for them.

The River swelled in me. There was a bone-deep chill that came with the smell of the bayou, but I was long since accustomed to it. More importantly, with it came power. Our contract was fulfilled. I would be an even stronger hero, someone who could clean up this city for good.

The puddle Tahm emerged from expanded to cover our entire hideout. He was such a drama queen. He didn’t need to speak to me through a bowl of water, but if he wanted to scare the piss out of a few Nazis, I didn’t see the harm.

From the water emerged crabs and lobsters. They were constructs, part of the River. I dropped a spider inside. Its senses were used as an extension of myself. I seemed to have an infinite well of focus when it came to my bugs; I didn’t see any reason the same bugs couldn’t be put to more direct purpose.

I grinned hungrily. I hoped Rune told them all about me. Even then, Hookwolf wouldn’t know what hit him.

X

Hookwolf had set up shop elsewhere. Apparently, the cannery down in oldtown wasn’t good enough for him anymore. No matter. He could hide his dogfighting ring from the few cops who cared, but not from my bugs.

His new base used to be an inn, the cheap kind that working men could crash at for a night. Judging by the locale, its clientele was probably truckers, train operators, or sailors. When the trade died, so did the inn. Two stories, plenty of individual rooms for dogs, and a central courtyard and parking lot partially closed off by the “L” shape of the inn.

His new base was dangerously close to the docks, and the ABB. That was probably on purpose. This way, he was a buffer to protect the rest of the Empire. Even if the Protectorate heroes knew about this place, they might hesitate to commit for fear of the fight spiraling into a three-way battle royale. 

I scoffed in derision. That wasn’t me. The time for hiding had passed. If the Protectorate loved their precious status quo so much, they could “secure the peace” when I finished taking out the trash.

I purposely chose tonight, when I knew for a fact the venue would be filled with skinheads gambling on the fights. I wanted as many people to see me as possible. Monarch was back. Cricket and Stormtiger weren’t flukes. I’d break them all and keep breaking them until Nazis were fucking terrified of being Nazis in public again, as was good and proper.

Truthfully, I’d spent more time figuring out how to meld my powers together than actually looking for this place.

The biggest issue was that my bugs couldn't breathe water. I could overrule their survival instincts of course, but that didn’t matter when my pilots would only last several minutes at most. I could control the constructs without them, but the additional processing capability my bug control provided made coordination so much easier.

There was also a sense of body dysphoria, a dissonance between their regular, chitinous forms and the watery constructs that now obeyed them. It made information feedback rather distracting.

The solution to both was one and the same: crabs. As far as my power was concerned, they were also bugs. They could breathe water. And, if I modeled the constructs after their forms, then the sense of dissonant feedback was also eliminated.

I remembered mom saying jokingly that evolution favored crabs. Carcinization, she called it. All species developed a crab-like body plan if given enough time. She just said that for fun, she wasn’t a biologist, but it apparently had some truth to it, at least among crustaceans.

With that bemusing thought, I ordered my army forward. I went in loud. Maybe crabs weren’t the most intimidating constructs, but these were each as large as I was. Each brackish construct sported club-like pincers meant for bludgeoning or crushing, or capture. Their shells were domed smooth, with a handful of blunted spikes for realism.

The Empire was not ready for me. They’d gathered in the central parking lot, not even bothering to hide. They thought that their numbers would protect them, that no one short of Lung would dare. I spotted coolers of booze and fistfuls of cash changing hands as they circled a pair of dogs. Hell, there was one guy who started cooking hot dogs on a portable charcoal grill. It was a goddamn tailgate.

The duality of it caught me off guard. People were genuinely having fun, treating this like the start of a block party. And if they weren’t into the dogfighting, oh well. Not their dogs, not their problem.

My little army, sixty strong, stormed the party without warning. I’d wondered if sixty was overdoing it, but there were enough people that my constructs had plenty of work to do anyway. They marched in rigid columns until they were spotted before fanning out to encircle them. 

Chaos was immediate and total.

Two of them scurried to the bookie. One flipped his table while the other grabbed his arms in either claw and yanked. Through the feedback chain, from water to crab to me, I dully felt the man’s shoulders pop out of their sockets. For good measure, I had it wring the joints like a dish rag. He wouldn’t be joining the fight.

Another grabbed the charcoal grill and swung it around. The burning coals scorched the chef and some of his buddies. They didn’t really look like Empire regulars, just college kids who got called out to a party. I refused to feel bad; maybe this would teach them to pick better friends.

At the same time, half of my crabs waded into the panicking crowd. They slammed their club-like claws into knees and ankles, toppling men like dry timber. If any tried to go for any weapons, they crushed and twisted fingers with the same careless ease as a child picking apart a chicken wing.

Some fled. Some fought. Most recognized the murky water as my calling card by now. Many of the cowards, I permitted to leave. Guys like that weren’t likely to be in deep with the Empire leadership, anyway.

The other half of my crabs went straight for the dogs. Only some had been taken out for the fight, but I’d worry about the ones in the old inn’s rooms later.

My crabs dragged out the cages one by one. They set them aside at corner of the “L.” They’d be safe enough there. One of the dogs got shot in the head by a ricocheting bullet, and a few more got hurt in the chaos, but I got most of them out.

Then, I heard a feral roar from the second floor. One of the doors burst into so many splinters as Hookwolf launched himself off the walkway. He was already transformed, an intricate mix of saws and blades and hooks that ground together to form a wolf. He landed with a deafening thud, cratering the ground beneath.

I’d known he was here, of course. He probably started this little party to show how unafraid of me he was. The challenge was obvious. It said, “Come here and I’ll make sure you stay down.”

Naturally, I obliged by taking the bait. He was the whole point of this little invasion. I wanted my arm back. I wanted to see dad again. I wanted to be Taylor again. And for that, he needed to die.

“Where the fuck are you, Monarch!” he roared. One of his lieutenants ran up to him, but an angry swipe of his tails flung him aside. Any slower an that man would have been disemboweled.

Perfect. I wanted him to be angry. This dogfighting ring wasn’t important enough to call his legacy, but he claimed it. It mattered because Hookwolf said it mattered. And if he couldn’t protect something he claimed, then…

Four of my crabs flanked him from all sides. He clawed at them with jagged paws that were more like flanged maces than the paws of a wolf. And for all his strength, they held their ground admirably. Water really did not like to be compacted. Kept solid, that worked in my favor, making for an extremely resilient construct. That, and their domed shells did a respectable job of parrying his blows.

He roared like a caged lion. More of his metal flowed into his forelimbs. His blows became heavier and heavier. My crabs tried to restrain him, but they lacked the strength to do so. Until eventually, he managed to crush one, overwhelming their power-enhanced surface tension and my hydrokinetic hold with brute weight and force. The rest rapidly followed.

Meanwhile, I commanded the rest of my army to secure the building. They removed dog cages and secured the gangsters. From that initial, chaotic melee, I spotted only seven dead, five of them from friendly fire. Two more had taken a bad hit on the head when they fell.

“Where the fuck are you, Monarch!?” Hookwolf raged. He thrashed like a wild beast, uncaring of who or what got in his way. “Get out here!”

I watched as he smashed my crabs one by one. His normally sleek shape had taken a squat, squareish appearance. His paws were now more like sledgehammers, perfect for crushing my crabs.

Fifty-six. Forty-one. Hookwolf crushed them all. They each had claws that could rip a man apart, but Hookwolf’s metal body didn’t matter. He didn’t care how messed up his exterior bits became because he had a metal core.

So, my constructs adapted. Crushing claws became drills, more like ice picks than pincers. They swarmed him with suicidal abandon, climbing up his jagged body. They found a nook and began to dig, slowly seeping my water into his metallic body. It was like watching a pack of wolves take down a bison, except the wolf was the one ironically being ganged up on.

But Hookwolf wasn’t a fool. The wolf aesthetic was just that, an aesthetic. He had no need to obey conventional rules of anatomy. When he could not dislodge my crabs, he became a metal serpent that twisted along a central axis. His back ground into the earth, forcibly dispelling my constructs.

Thirty-six. Fourteen. I was running out quickly. It wasn’t like I could replenish the crabs that acted as my pilots.

Still, I did not show. I was well over a block away, seated on a creaky fire escape of an apartment building. I had a slice of pepperoni pizza in hand from one of those late night pizzerias. Truly, using my bug control to extend my range was one of my better ideas.

Not that I could have done this before even had I wanted to. It was only after Cricket and Stormtiger’s deaths that I gained this kind of control. I smiled ruefully. It was funny how much stronger I’d become now that I resolved to permanently end the worst villains in my city.

Hookwolf splattered the last of my crabs. He sat there, coiled around himself like a giant serpent. He looked around wildly, his massive head darting to every corner of the trashed parking lot, not unlike one of his paranoid dogs.

Finally, I dusted off the parmesan cheese from my fingers and called the River. I rose from a puddle, not ten feet from him.

He didn’t try to banter or threaten me. There was far too much bad blood between us for that. He maimed me. He killed me by any normal metric. And I’d ruined his dogfighting ring twice now. I’d murdered two of his lieutenants.

With a snarl of hate, he struck. His jaws opened wide, wider than even a serpent’s. His eyes, protected behind bladed shutters, glared triumphantly down at me.

I met his charge with my own. The River followed me. My right hand grew until it was as large as he was. The puddles left behind by my slain army surged upward, fusing with my arm until it was thicker than his entire body. I grabbed his jaw and spiked it into the earth.

We wrestled, him like a thrashing sea serpent and me with a single, over-massed arm that split into as many tentacles as necessary.

Slowly but surely, I noticed him start to flag. He was not tiring, I didn’t think he could tire; he was being forcibly shut down from within.

At this point, I was quite sure that I knew his power as well as he did. I hadn’t swarmed him because I thought my army overwhelm him. I’d swarmed him because my domain was water. And, as Tahm loved to say, the River was an ever-flowing thing.

Every drill, every pinch, was a vulnerability into which the River could flow. His metallic body had many gaps. It had to in order for his body to move at all. I’d called this an invasion. My attack had taken place beneath the surface, the tide against a fortress of steel. And, by the time he’d crushed my constructs, his internals were as much made of water as metal.

I let go and stepped back. My right hand shrank to its normal size. Yet, Hookwolf did not move. He could not move. I’d wondered which of us had the stronger claim over our respective elements. Now, I had my answer.

I smiled up at him, not that he could see it behind my featureless mask. Water did not like to compress, but it sure as shit could expand. With the sound of tortured metal, he came apart at the seams.

He tried to resist, of course. His core extruded more metal, but it was far too late. The River was literally a part of me. Even what was inside him was but an extension of my will. I filled the gaps as they formed, even reaching into his core.. Until finally, his core cracked, torn open from within.

I was waiting for it. My right hand lashed out again, this time encasing his entire head. I gripped him by the head and began to shake him about like a ragdoll. He was made of sterner stuff than Cricket, but eventually, even his brute neck snapped.

I looked at his unconscious form. For a moment, I expected a surge of glee. This was victory, and without a single wound sustained on my part. No one could claim that against Hookwolf. And yes, there was a bit of that.

But most of all, I felt weary. It was not the exhaustion brought on by a hard-fought battle. Instead, it was the mental fatigue that came from knowing that the work was finished. This chapter of my life was about to close. I’d won. Hookwolf, who’d become my own Moby Dick, was dead.

Soon, I’d get my arm back. Taylor Hebert would rise from the dead, miraculously returning from whichever tragic story I settled on. I could go home and rejoin society. I could see dad again. The realization left a bittersweet feeling in my mouth.

I’d still be Monarch. There was no way in hell I was giving this up. I wanted to clean up this city, not quit just because I caught a decent-sized fish. It’d be a challenge balancing Taylor and Monarch, but I’d figure it out.

Then, as I was about to head into the River, I heard the sound of a motorcycle. Turning, I grimaced with annoyance.

Armsmaster had arrived.

Author’s Note

Stormtiger doesn’t have a name from what I can remember so his name is Kirk Mueller now. I mean, he’s dead but that’s more respect than most everyone else shows him, lol.

Also, apparently, the Nazis fielded a type of tank in WWII called the sturmtiger, or “assault tank.” That’s his namesake; it’s not a Tekken reference, at least according to the wiki. I will forever assume he’s racist-King however.

Animal Fact: Catfish can have up to 100,000 taste buds. However, they are distributed all around the fish’s body, allowing them to constantly “taste” the air for prey.