Saturday. Thirty-two days since the Omnitrix.
He'd been running the Southside routes for over a week straight and he knew their rhythm the way he knew the school bus schedule. Well enough to predict it, well enough to know when something had changed. Tonight something had changed. The usual lookouts weren't on the Garrick Street corners. The standard vehicle pattern was absent. Instead there was a single large truck parked on Hob's Street, no markings, engine running, with two standard Intergang operatives on perimeter and one other figure standing at the truck's rear.
He'd been watching the figure for three minutes.
'Okay so that is a very large person.'
Very large was doing a lot of work there. The figure stood maybe seven feet and broad in a way that suggested every part of it was structural. Silas had been seven feet tall in three different alien forms. He had a understanding for large that most people didn't have.
This figure was large by those standards.
'Intergang brought another meta, and by the looks of it no electrical power. Someone physical.'
He watched the figure open the truck's rear door with one hand, the heavy door swinging wide like it weighed nothing. The two standard operatives had put about fifteen feet between themselves and the figure without apparently deciding to.
They'd just drifted there.
'Even his own people are keeping distance. That's telling.'
Silas rotated the dial. Past Prism, past Cerebro, past XLR8. His thumb stopped on Brawler.
'Strength versus strength. Don't get clever. Just go.'
He pressed the dial.
....
Brawler dropped from the rooftop and the two standard operatives ran before the landing had finished. Silas didn't blame them.
The figure turned from the truck. Looked at Brawler with the unhurried attention of someone who had done this before and found it interesting rather than alarming. Then it smiled, small and genuine, and stepped forward.
"Shift," the figure said. Deep, flat, certain.
'It knows my name. figures Intergang probably told it everything they know about me. This isn't extra security, this is specifically for me. Okay that's fine. That's fine.'
"You've been hitting our routes," the figure said. "They want it to stop."
"Yeah," Brawler said.
"Not gonna happen though."
The figure, Mammoth though Silas wouldn't learn that name for another hour, nodded once like that was the answer he'd wanted. Then he came forward and the world got significantly more complicated.
The first punch arrived before Silas had started to move and it was a lot. A fist the size of a dinner plate with the full weight of something the size of a car behind it hit Brawler square in the midsection and the he moved. Two full steps back. The Brawler form, which had absorbed bullets and Apokolips blasts and a direct hit from a crate lid, actually moved backwards.
'Okay. That actually wasn't a bad hit . Get it together.'
Brawler's upper right swung for the jaw. Mammoth got his forearm up and took the full hit on the bone and registered it in his face as mild interest. Then he stepped inside the swing before it finished and drove a left hook into Brawler's ribs and Silas felt it in something that was technically not his skeleton but felt exactly like it.
'He used my punch to get inside my reach. He's not just big, he knows what he's doing.'
Brawler swung the upper left arm, wider arc. Mammoth ducked under it, which a seven-foot person his size should not have been able to do, and came back up with a right uppercut that caught Brawler under the chin and snapped the head back.
White. A couple seconds of white.
'He just rocked this form's head. An actual person just rocked this form's head with a punch. Okay this is significantly worse than the loading bay situation was.'
Mammoth didn't stop. Body shot. Shoulder charge that drove Brawler back into the truck hard enough to dent the panel. Another body shot before Brawler had gotten clear. Each hit placed, not wild, the work of someone who'd trained.
Silas caught himself getting purely reactive. Just responding to whatever Mammoth was doing instead of doing anything himself. He made himself stop.
'Four arms. You have four arms and you are using them exactly the way you'd use two. That is genuinely embarrassing. Fix it right now.'
Upper right and lower right swung simultaneously from two different angles. Mammoth blocked the upper one and took the lower one on the temple and for the first time he staggered sideways. Brawler was already moving, using the opening, lower left catching Mammoth across the shoulder as he turned, adding to the rotation.
Mammoth rolled with it. Converted the momentum into a spinning back elbow that caught Brawler across the jaw.
The street came up fast. Brawler's knee hit concrete.
'He just turned my hit into a counter. He used the force I gave him to hit me back harder. That is the most annoying thing that has ever happened to me.'
Up. All four arms up, covering angles. Mammoth came in low for the legs and all four arms came down simultaneously and the combination of weight and angles pitched him sideways into a parked car. The car crumpled. The alarm screamed. Mammoth stood up out of the wreckage with the alarm going off around him and blood on his lip for the first time.
'There it is. He actually bleeds. Okay. We can work with that.'
"Okay," Mammoth said, quiet and genuine, like someone had shown him something unexpected.
He came back harder.
Body shot, body shot, jaw body and Brawler was hitting back at every exchange and Mammoth was taking everything and continuing and the specific horrible quality of fighting something that wouldn't go down was starting to take up real space in Silas's head. Every clean hit landed and Mammoth treated it as nothing. He was learning from each one. He was getting better at being hit by this form.
'He's studying me. Every time I land something he's figuring out what to do about it. I cannot win this the way it's going. I need something he hasn't seen yet and can't adjust to in time.'
A seismic clap.
'Open street. No structural walls within range. No civilians visible. This is the exact situation you said you'd use it in. Stop thinking about it.'
Mammoth came in low again. Third time with the leg tackle. Third time same setup. Silas let him commit. Let him get inside the arm reach. Let him think this was going the way the last two had gone.
All four hands came together.
The sound hit first. Not quite a crack, not quite thunder, something in the space between those two things that moved through the chest and vibrated in the teeth. The pressure wave that followed hit Mammoth at two meters of range and he left the ground.
Not a stumble. Not a step back. He left the ground entirely, all of it, every kilogram airborne, and came down eight feet away and the street under him didn't crack, it cratered. Starburst fractures three feet across with Mammoth at the center, and every car alarm on the block went off at once, and the truck rocked up on two wheels before settling, and three windows in the building behind the impact site blew clean out of their frames.
'Oh. Oh wow. That's what that does. I've been careful about using that and now I know exactly why I was right to be careful.'
Silas stood with all four arms still spread and the residual vibration running palm to elbow and the Hob's Street alarm chorus around him.
'Also I should probably not just stand here.'
Right. He moved to the truck. Upper right through the engine block, terminal sound. Both upper arms into the cargo hold, crates onto the street. Done in twenty seconds.
When he turned back Mammoth was standing. Both feet, one hand on the ruined truck, blood on his lip, the crater at his feet. His expression had gone somewhere new.
Somewhere that looked like genuine respect.
"Good hit," Mammoth said.
'Yeah. Thanks. I'm going to leave now before you fully recover.'
Brawler pressed the Omnitrix on his chest. The dial sat on the left pectoral in this form, between the upper and lower left arms. He pressed the release and reverted. Human, costumed, standing on Hob's Street with the car alarms still going and the crater in the street and Mammoth looking at him with updated information.
"Huh," Mammoth said.
Silas was already on the fire escape. He heard Mammoth's feet behind him, then the fire escape groan once under exploratory weight and make its structural opinions known. Pursuit didn't happen.
....
Three blocks north. A rooftop above a hardware store on Shuster Avenue. Silas sat on the parapet and focused on breathing for a moment. The Omnitrix was green. No recharge lock. Early reversion, six minutes left, clean dial.
His ribs were filing a formal complaint about the evening. Dull and broad, the kind of ache that spread across the whole side and made itself known every time his lungs fully expanded. Not broken. He'd learned what broken ribs felt like from a basketball incident in tenth grade and this wasn't quite that. But Mammoth had been thorough about the body shots and Silas's body had feelings about that.
"Seismic clap," Robin said from behind him.
Silas didn't react. He'd heard Robin land on the rooftop thirty seconds ago and had been waiting.
"Yeah," Silas said.
"First time?" Robin asked.
"In an actual fight, yeah," Silas said.
"Effective," Robin said.
"I didn't know it was gonna do all that," Silas said.
He turned around. Robin was standing six feet away, same red and green, the R on the chest, the expression that was always running the same assessment program.
"How long were you up here?" Silas asked.
"Since the truck," Robin said.
"So you saw the part where he rocked my shit," Silas said.
Robin's expression did something small that wasn't quite a smile.
"I saw the part where you adapted," Robin said.
Silas looked at him. That was a more generous read than Silas would have given himself but he wasn't going to argue about it.
"The big guy," Silas said. "You know who that is?"
"Mammoth," Robin said.
"Runs with a group called the Fearsome Five. Intergang's going wider with the contractors now. Not just Livewire."
"Great," Silas said, in a tone that meant the opposite.
"Yeah," Robin said. He paused a beat.
"The four-arm form. That's not something I've seen before."
"New," Silas said.
"I figured," Robin said. He reached into his belt and held out a card. Different from the first one, same plain format.
"Still got the other one?" he asked.
"Back of my notebook," Silas said.
"This one's direct," Robin said.
"Other one routes through a relay. This comes straight to me."
Silas looked at the card. Took it.
"Mammoth's not the ceiling," Robin said.
"Yeah I got that impression," Silas said.
"You don't have to keep doing this alone," Robin said.
It wasn't pushy. It was just a thing being said because it was true. Silas turned the card over in his hand.
"I know," Silas said.
Robin held his eye for one more second. Nodded. Then he turned and went north across the rooftops, fast and clean in the dark, and was gone.
Silas sat back on the parapet. The car alarms had mostly died down. At least one police siren somewhere toward Hob's Street.
'Two more minutes and then go.'
....
He thought about the fact that he'd taken the card. Both times. He'd taken both cards without a long internal argument about it which probably meant something about where he'd landed on the solo question.
First card: relay. Arm's length. Professional distance.
Second card: direct. Robin's personal line. That was different.
'He watched the whole fight. He saw Mammoth rock my shit. He gave me his direct line after. That's him deciding something about me.'
His ribs ached. Mammoth had been the hardest thing he had faced. Livewire had been a problem to solve. Mammoth had been a question about whether Brawler was strong enough and the answer was yes but barely and only because of a move Silas had been genuinely uncertain about deploying.
'Who does Intergang send after Mammoth.' He didn't love that thought. He filed it under things to worry about tomorrow and stood up.
Both frequency cards went into the inside pocket of his costume. He looked at the Omnitrix. The hourglass green, steady, pulsing its slow four-second rhythm against his wrist.
Four pulses. Slow. Deliberate.
'Yeah. I know.'
He went home.
Saturday night in Metropolis, thirty-two days since the watch arrived. Two frequency cards in his pocket. A crater on Hob's Street. A name the city had been using for two weeks. A fight he'd won by less than he would have liked.
He went through the window. Suit off. He sat at his desk and opened his notebook and tried to start the operation summary and noticed that his hands were still slightly shaking. Just slightly. The adrenaline arriving late the way it always did, about twenty minutes after the thing that warranted it.
'You went out tonight not knowing what they might have sent. You went anyway. You won. That's the thing to actually be proud of.'
He wrote the summary. Then at the bottom of the last page:
*Day 32. Still going. Tomorrow.*
'Still here. Still me.'
He closed the notebook. Turned off the lamp. In the dark the Omnitrix pulsed once, hard and clean.
'Yeah. I know.'
...
End of arc 1
A/N: Didn't really like how the first arc turned out, it was so focused on Silas pov alone it didn't really give anyone else time to show themselves shine and the mistakes.....don't worry though arc 2 will be different