The Law of Averages

Book 2: Chapter 26: Conflict

Before anything else, Dan needed to decide if he should hide his own identity. What he was about to do was, strictly speaking, legal. His crisis volunteer certificate gave him the same privileges as a police officer if he were to encounter villains while performing his duties. Dan was, technically, allowed to use his power in the defense of himself and others. It just... wasn't something people tended to actually do.

Dan could handle being unusual. What worried him, was showing what his power could actually accomplish to a building full of feds. His paperwork was solid, backed by Anastasia, but it could only cover him for so much. Dan fully planned on firing off a ball bearing in someone's general direction, and he couldn't really explain that away.

It should go without mentioning how bad an idea it was, showing his face to a pack of armed gangbangers while he thwarts their plan. Dan wasn't exactly a 'known' entity, but why take the risk? Well, the answer was simple. Vigilantes were, both under law and public perception, almost indistinguishable from villains. If Dan threw a mask on his face as he tried to fight off the Coldeyes' attack, he was liable to get shot in the back by a confused federal agent.

That would be suboptimal to say the least. Dan couldn't hide himself. The consequences of doing so outweighed the risks. He needed to limit himself to his known abilities, which admittedly, were many. No cutting with his veil, he would have to fully teleport things, and he needed to lay hands on at least a part of his target. Normally, Dan would just run his veil through the ground to reach people. It was harder on moving targets, though, and he'd have to get closer besides. If he was going to look suspicious, he'd rather be loud and overt. The quiet, sneaky strategy wouldn't be an option here, with so many eyes around, watching.

So he, in turn, watched them.

Dan knew the brief ceasefire wouldn't last. He needed to take advantage of it while he still had a clear view of the situation. Soon enough, things would dissolve back into chaos, and he'd have to be ready for it. His eyes roamed the gathering, taking it all in. Never had he been so glad for Cornelius' lessons in memorization. Even the man's drunken ramblings on threat prioritization were coming into use.

The first priority was collateral damage. Which enemy could cause the most destruction, the easiest? Which could kill you or your teammates, even when they weren't aiming at you. These enemies were the rarest sort. Upgrades generally did not scale well. Something that could kill a man in an instant, often could not as easily kill a group of men. There just weren't many upgrades available that could produce that sort of result, even with mutations taken into account. This was, of course, by design. The dozens of watchdog organizations that controlled and registered upgrades constantly kept an eye out for that sort of threat.

Nobody wanted another Cold Star.

Regardless, he hadn't seen anything particularly destructive from the villains. Danger they had in spades, but crashing a semi-truck into a building would have been unnecessary if they had the power to blow it open themselves. The team was built with precision in mind. The most threatening individual that Dan could see, at least in terms of collateral damage, was Dunkirk himself. His shout was widespread enough to cover the entire battlefield, but it didn't seem particularly powerful. Gunfire, then, was the main threat to Dan's life.

His gaze roamed over the six armed and armored gunmen, their positions and weapons, how they stood, the angles of their barrels. He committed it all down to memory with speed born of painstaking repetition. They likely had upgrades increasing their speed, reflexes, or accuracy. Or all three. Certainly, the armor indicated that they were no tougher than the average person. Unlike the bare-chested man who had first emerged from the trailer— who was, even now, standing out in the open, unafraid and taunting—these men were actually utilizing cover. His approach on them would have to be nearly instantaneous, else he'd get himself shot.

Priority number two: speed. Who could he take out quickly and efficiently? The armored giant was going to be a problem. Dan had seen the way bullets had just splashed against him, and felt how he twisted the metal of the cargo trailer as it touched his skin. Even if he could teleport away the armor, Dan was dubious that his railgun trick would work on the man. The feds would have to figure out a way to deal with him.

Dan's biggest advantage was that he could simply blink past cover. If he was right about the gunmen, disarming them would effectively take them out of the fight. The Coldeyes' members would be a little more difficult, given that they obviously had more overtly dangerous upgrades. Most didn't even bother wielding firearms, though Dan could see the grip of a pistol sticking out of Zim's waistband and a submachine gun slung across his shoulder.

They weren't bulletproof, at least. Each of them had conjured up some sort of defense to deal with veritable swarm of gunfire being passed between the opposing sides. Their upgrades all seemed fairly similar, which made sense given what Dan had learned about how gangs operated. They likely only had one or two upgrade patterns that were distributed between gang members. The lucky ones, the ones who mutated something useful, were promoted up the ranks and sent into battle.

There were seven cold-themed villains that he could see, plus Zim, but they had perhaps only three upgrade variants between them. The first was the ice golem upgrade. Two Crew members were encased from head to toe in a layer of shifting, grinding ice. It was thick enough to block bullets and, though they moved slowly, their swings had enough mass behind them to dent steel.

The second upgrade was the fog generator. Dan could see it pouring slowly out of the man's nose and mouth. Where it fell, he could see ice forming. Tiny crystals, frozen water droplets, hung in the clouds, catching light and twinkling. The fog pooled around the man's feet, slowly creeping outwards. He was tense, waiting for an opportunity to throw cover back out for his allies. He was the only one with his upgrade that Dan could see.

The last of the Crew used the same upgrade as Zim, some kind of ice projection. It seemed the most versatile power, so it was understandable that it would be given out in greater numbers. Zim had used his to create a barrier of ice. The after-effects had left the man's hands coated up to the elbow, but whether that was a downside or not was yet to be seen.

Zim and his four fellow upgraded Crew members, had very clearly been focused on battlefield control. There were pillars and walls of ice all across the field office. The ground was coated in a layer of hoarfrost, as was most of the cover that the feds were hiding behind.

Dan watched as an icicle sprouted out of Zim's arm. The Coldeyes lieutenant casually glanced around the edge of his frozen barrier. Dunkirk was in the middle of a heated exchange with the armored figure, shouting at the man from behind cover. The rest of the feds were nervously sweeping the field with their rifles. Zim smiled, then whipped his arm towards Dunkirk, and Dan knew that he'd found his opportunity. All he needed for his railgun trick to work was for something else to take the blame. The icicle!

He left the world before the icicle left Zim's arm. Dan floated in t-space, eyes closed, and focusing entirely on that moment of frozen time. His veil extended from him, wrapped around the ball bearing that, even now, fell through t-space. It was a paradoxical existence, to be staying still while his projectile flung itself across the Gap. He was both falling, and not, and in the same exact space. He couldn't maintain it for long. He had to act now, before things spiraled out of his control.

Dan knew exactly what he wanted to do.

He willed himself back into the real, and his navigator did the rest. Dan appeared beside Zim, his outstretched hand already clamped around the villain's frozen arm. His veil immediately whipped out, seizing the icicle an instant before it could be launched, and dragging it out of existence. Dan met Zim's eyes, cold fury clashing with startled confusion.

He wanted to say, "Connor Graham sends his regards."

Instead, he pointed his finger center mass and triggered his veil. His hand, trembling slightly from stress and anger and bottled up fear, missed the mark, and he sent the two and a half inch steel ball through Zim's clavicle at supersonic speeds. The man's arm disappeared in a spray of gore and a whipcrack of air, as the sound barrier shattered. The iced over ground behind him was painted red, and cracked by bone shrapnel. Zim's eyes widened in pain, his mouth opened to scream, but Dan was already gone, whisked away to the Gap before the world could catch its breath.

He breathed in for a moment. He let his emotions feed into the eldritch thing connected to his soul. He stayed cold, numb, focused. He planned out his next move with the methodical precision of an emotionless automaton. Dan reappeared behind two of the villain gunmen, both of them caught mid-turn in response to Dan's previous attack. Zim's scream hadn't even yet crawled out of his throat, when Dan slammed his arms against the gunmen's armored backs.

His veil slid through the armor, traveled down their arms, past their gloves, and across their guns. He dropped back into t-space, taking their armor, clothes, and weapons along with him. He let it scatter in the formless void, casually snagging one of the assault rifles and examining it.

The weapon wasn't anything he was familiar with. It was a bullpup configuration, with the action behind the trigger, and it had a sleek, futuristic look. He checked the magazine, noting it was longer than normal. Sixty rounds in 5.56x45mm, enough ammunition between the six gunmen to shred a small army. Dan briefly considered using it, before tossing the idea aside. He could shoot—he'd grown up in Texas—but he wasn't trained.

Dan trusted himself to watch his line of fire while bird hunting, not while in the middle of a frantic firefight between terrorists and federal agents. If he started unloading into a group of villains, he was as likely to hit one of his own people than one of them. Not to mention, the one time he'd ever shot a fully automatic weapon he'd damn near shit himself at the astronomical rate of fire. It wasn't like the movies; the damn things ran dry in seconds. No, he'd leave the shooting to the experts. He could use these guns in a different way.

As a club.

He dropped out of t-space at terminal velocity, converting that momentum horizontally, as he appeared behind another gunman. He swung the assault rifle like a baseball bat, and it shattered against the helmeted man's head. Dan flickered, erasing his own momentum, before lashing a hand out at the next closest villain. He had just enough time to connect to the man's gun before everyone exploded into motion. Dan ripped the weapon away, and teleported back to the medical station. fleeing the sound of renewed gunfire.