A/N: It's been more than a year since the last chapter. I'm writing this on only a few hours of sleep as my dad decided to spontaneously adopt two new puppies. Cuddly and adorable, yes, but a lot of work.

Now, the last time we saw our protagonist, she'd just eaten Lung and inadvertently set off Bakuda's mad bombing spree. Feeling responsible for the destruction, she stopped off to warn her father away from going off and looking for her in the chaos before hunting Bakuda.

Contagion 1.14

Tommy Kim had settled into the understanding that he was a perpetual loser. Frail, cowardly, not particularly intelligent, he'd found his only moderate fortune was to live in the territory of the ABB. Being Korean, he was under their protection and found a decent living as an errand boy. Messages, packages, he'd run deliveries between various gang bosses and even civilian "partners." Lung was terrifying and he had no doubts that Oni Lee wouldn't even care about killing him as collateral damage. But overall he had a decent life.

Until Lung brought home his newest pet. Bakuda was a rabid pit bull with delusions of grandeur. Normally Tommy wouldn't know that much about a random Tinker under Lung's umbrella, but she'd taken to building weapons in secret. And anyone unlucky enough to stumble upon her work? They ended up with a bomb implanted at the base of their brain.

Which is how Tommy ended up as part of the cannon-fodder legions of the ABB (Under New Management). The moment news of Lung's demise reached the rest of the gang, Bakuda declared her leadership. No moment of silence for their fallen leader, no plans to retaliate against his killer or killers. She wanted control of the gang. And now, rumor had it that she was building some sort of super-bomb with the intent of holding the entire country hostage.

Fucking Tinkers, was Tommy's last coherent thought before his mind was addled with utter panic. He'd lagged behind the rest of his patrol group, hoping that if fighting did start his involuntary comrades' bodies would take the brunt of the fire. Instead, black-and-red tendrils engulfed him. They restrained his arms and legs, stretching across his mouth like saran wrap to silence any cries for help. He watched through blurry, terror-glazed eyes as the ground pulled away from him.

"Oh for the love of god, calm down. You're going to give yourself a heart attack." A tall young woman stood in front of him, looking at Tommy with disdain. "The last one I tried to interrogate melted, so I'll open by asking: Where's the bomb?"

Tommy could barely process the words. When the blood-colored mass receded from his lips, he could only mumble incoherent nonsense. "Mgh, bwuh, spuh?"

"English, motherfucker, do you speak it?"

Oddly, the line from Pulp Fiction jarred his brain back into some semblance of coherent thought. "Wh-what, I mean, which bomb?"

If he hadn't been deathly pale from fear, he would have flushed at her responding expression. "The bomb that will detonate you. Jesus Christ," she began to mumble to herself, "are they all this fucking stupid?"

Coming from a job where he'd worked under gang lieutenants for years, the casual abuse actually set him at ease. "I, uh, it's in my neck. I think. There's a scar there. She said it'd blow if I was disloyal and I really hope this doesn't count as being disloyal." Tommy squeezed his eyes shut, expecting to pop or melt or catch fire. Instead, he felt a sharp pain in his neck. His vision blurred again, this time from the tears that suddenly materialized in his eyes.

[Taylor]

The last few ABB goons I'd tried to devour had most definitely not agreed with me. Even just consuming their brains resulted in detonation, and I had no idea how much of my prior meals I'd wasted in reconstructing myself after the blasts. This time, I was keeping the majority of myself inside myself. It had been a difficult task but rewarding in its aesthetics to hide a pool of my biomass within my own shadow and then produce tendrils from there. It resulted in the illusion that the tendrils came from my shadow itself – good for confusing the goons, if they decided to squeal. My tiny feelers and even proto-eyes probed into the scar tissue until I found the tiny explosive. I dug blades through his flesh and excised the explosive, linking the tissue to my own biomass in order to imitate life signs. With a flick of the tendril I launched it out of him, the bomb detonating dozens of feet into the sky.

My hostage yelped and tried to drop prone, forgetting that I still had him restrained. I rolled my eyes. At least the shreds of memory and personality I'd managed to absorb from other ABB members had him responding more coherently to me. "Bomb's gone. Now, what's your name?"

He stared at me in disbelief. "I-it's gone? No, of course it's gone. You're that Astra or whatever, right?" I narrowed my gaze ever so slightly. "Oh shit, right! I'm, uh, Tommy. Tommy Kim. Nice to meet you?"

I began to pace around him. "Do you know why I selected you, Tommy Kim? You don't move like a fighter. You glance around, frightened of everything. Your body language says you'd rather be anywhere else, even in a police cell. So I've taken it upon myself to rescue you. You're free now. Well," I paused in front of him, letting my smirk curl too far along my cheek, "free of Bakuda. You see, my own creations are much more intelligent than crudely-assembled bombs. You can tell the police or the PRT about me. But if you talk to any ABB member about this encounter, your body will turn into a horror show of hungry tentacles and consume you as well as everyone around you. And you'll be alive through it all, feeling every single person's pain." I let deep red blend into my sclera until my eyes looked like two pools of blood.

All Tommy could do was squeak.

"But you wouldn't do that anyway; after all, I just saved you from Bakuda's grasp. And in exchange I ask for only one thing – tell me about any gang lieutenants you know who can help me find Bakuda. I want names, hideouts, anything you can give me." I hadn't lied about why I picked him, which was exactly why I didn't want to just eat him. I was trying to save people, and petty criminals needed to be given a chance to turn their lives around. If they kept causing trouble, I'd hunt them down later – I had his scent, after all.

Tommy Kim babbled everything he knew.

(BREAK)

It had only taken another day of hunting, ripping out bombs and eating gangers to get enough information. Bakuda had been grossly overconfident in her ability to imprison her lieutenants. Oh, she'd programmed in all sorts of failsafes, from GPS synchronization to ensure they didn't skip town or even go into certain areas of the city without authorization, to a proximity sensor which would detonate if they came too close to her without permission. But she hadn't accounted for me.

It would be the last mistake she'd have a chance to make. But she wouldn't die as quickly as her former master. Bakuda had broken every last rule of engagement that held parahuman warfare in check. She'd enslaved noncombatants and indiscriminately killed innocents, and now apparently planned to hold the entire nation hostage. She wanted to be the center of attention; I'd give her that spotlight.

She never saw it coming when her own shadow ate her feet and then wrapped her up like a fly in a spider's web. Leaving her restrained and rising out of my liquid form, I looked around at the various bits of equipment. Drawing on the technical knowledge of those I'd consumed, I realized I could use all this. What had before been an idea percolated into a plan.

(BREAK)

[Emily Piggot]

Since her crippling injuries had landed her a desk job watching over the very power-drunk maniacs that had caused her wounds, Emily had not been a happy woman. Overall, however, the various powers kept one another in check well enough that the Protectorate didn't have to do overmuch in order to maintain a relatively safe status quo. Director Piggot had learned from her predecessors' work and the great "success" of the Brockton Bay Brigade: the Bay was a hellhole and any meaningful change only made things worse.

She'd managed to keep this balancing act going until a few weeks ago when Adrestia showed up. While the Merchants weren't a real threat, nor did they have enough power to make much of a difference, the sudden and wholesale slaughter of the capes and many of their unpowered members agitated the actual threats.

Then came the news that Lung was dead.

Piggot had braced for the Nazis to go to war, but she'd never anticipated the mass destruction that came in the wake of that discovery. The PRT was aware of Bakuda to a degree, but she'd done nothing to draw their attention since being brought in from Boston. And now she threatened to depopulate the entire city.

Cheryl, her personal assistant, flung open the office door. Piggot's arm jolted for her shoulder holster, then she recognized who was at the door. Then she realized that Cheryl was at the door rather than contacting her over the intercom, and she grabbed at the pistol again.

"Director! You need to come see this now!"

Doing her best to conceal the discomfort of standing, Emily shifted her bulk and rose from her chair, waddling to follow her PA.

"Armsmaster confirms it's on every local channel," Cheryl stated as she gestured to the TV. It displayed a small Asian woman with pale blue eyes. She was zip-tied to a chair, wearing what looked very much like a parahuman's costume, albeit without a mask.

"–wise known as Bakuda," a deep voice said from offscreen. Jarringly, Lung himself stepped into the picture!

"I thought we'd confirmed his death," Piggot hissed.

"We did," Cheryl hissed back, her voice and expression betraying her utter disbelief.

"It must be Adrestia's work," Armsmaster said, having just entered the room. "I'm watching the feed through my helmet but I thought it would be best to be able to confer about this."

"Even while working under Lung," Lung's doppelganger continued, "she was not content with protection from her crimes and a high rank in the ABB. No, she began to secretly implant explosives in Lung's lieutenants, promising to kill them horrifically if they reported her to their master. By the way, those explosives are still active but no longer have any means to detonate. So all you who were conscripted? Feel free to take out your anger on the ABB who helped kidnap you. Have fun.

"On top of this," he ruffled Bakuda's hair, "she's been working on a super-bomb that is supposed to be powerful enough to destroy the entire continent, and planned to hold America hostage. But that wasn't enough for her: she had to hurt people, make them afraid at a personal level. Which is why she started bombing the city. Now that we've gotten introductions out of the way...what do you have to say for yourself, little lady?" Lung ripped the duct tape off her mouth.

Bakuda immediately spat at him. "Fuck you! Whoever you are, you're even more of a joke than Lung was! You're a coward! Sneaking up on me and cutting off my fucking feet!? You couldn't take me head-on so you had to stick to the shadows!"

Lung clucked his tongue. "Such a mouth on this little girl. And hypocrisy, too. Maybe we can teach her a lesson here at Adrestia's Reform School." His hand unwound itself into a hideous mass of muscle fibers, reforming into an enormous pair of shears. As casually as brushing back his hair, he snipped off her left pinky finger. She screamed.

"Rize, all you do is hide behind others. You started your illustrious career as a villain by holding your college hostage because you were upset over a poor grade you most definitely earned. Even Lung thought your essay was trite. Anyone fool enough to confront a psychotic Tinker in her workshop is stupid, not brave. And since you were too cowardly to come out to me, I had to come to you. That's alright," he patted her head, "I forgive you for being stupid."

Bakuda gritted her teeth, tears flowing down her cheeks from the pain of her lost finger. "What the fuck is the point of all this? What is this in aid of?"

"I suppose I could say that you've been inspirational to Adrestia. She was impressed with your terror campaign, even if she finds you completely vile and beyond any consideration as a human being. The problem is, our work has thus far been in the shadows. She was hoping that she could exist as a bogeyman and frighten the criminals into behaving. But you've been a revelation: some people are so evil, so beyond the realm of human thought and empathy, that no degree of fear will register with them if they can convince themselves that they're immune to retaliation. So this is to prove them all wrong."

Lung turned to the camera. His eyes were a luminous red. "Bakuda is hiding inside a pocket dimension. None of you would ever find her except through pure luck in stumbling across one of the dimensional projectors. You could interrogate as many ABB as you like, but they'd all die and likely take you with them. But here I am, inside her workshop. No-one is beyond our reach."

He returned to Bakuda, still addressing the camera despite showing his back. "This is a message to every cape left in Brockton Bay. Oni Lee, the Nazi clique, and the Protectorate. All of your dirty secrets will come out. You have the chance to come clean. Surrender to the proper authorities and you can at least keep your lies. We won't hunt you once you're incarcerated. If we find you first, though..."

Lung's clipper hand transformed again, into a bouquet of flexing needles. "I've found that prison isn't much of a deterrent even for unpowered criminals, who face years of incarceration and the abuse of cell-block gangs. For parahumans, who often see the inside of a jail so briefly it might as well be a revolving door, there's no real fear of consequences for your actions. The point of punishment is not only to make a person regret their actions and not want to repeat those actions for fear of the consequences, but to spread that fear to others who would consider the same.

"Historically, thieves would lose their hand. This not only prevented them from stealing so easily a second time, but it was a permanent reminder to them and to everyone else regarding the consequences of theft. Murderers were left in barbed cages to starve to death and rot away, their desecrated corpses eventually dumped in a ditch. That level of suffering ensured others would think twice before killing. Of course, thieves still stole and killers still killed, but it instilled fear in many who might have considered the actions. In this case, I think we need something a bit more significant. You all need to understand what you will face."

Those needles dug into Bakuda's skin and began to peel it back. Lung's copy was unspooling the woman's flesh, literally flaying her alive with surgical precision. As the skin was removed, more tendrils tipped with little pincers began to snip and pull apart her muscle fibers. All the while her major blood vessels were kept intact, ensuring she wouldn't bleed to death any time soon.

"Uckhn ithh," Bakuda gurgled, her eyes locked onto Lung even as the lids were removed. "Oo ihl oozh!" Her remaining facial muscles contracted, suggesting that she was trying to squeeze her eyes shut. Then she exploded. Lung's copy was blasted apart but already reassembling himself, when the camera captured an energy field imploding to a singularity.

"Bakuda must have had the dimensional anchors tied to a dead-man's switch. Our only consolation is that any other switches she had wouldn't receive their activation signals once the pocket dimension destabilized," Armsmaster said, mouth dry.

Emily stared at the now-black screen, the signal dead. What hell had been unleashed upon the city?