Chapter 14
Alex glanced down at his phone display, then at to the number plate on the building in front of him, and then back to his phone again. The numbers matched, and he hadn’t been sure what to expect, but it certainly wasn’t a seemingly vacant used car lot attached to a machine shop. Hierro looked up at him and shrugged.
Two days ago, Alex had gotten a text on the burner phone Jiro had given him, the first communication he had received from the any of other heroes in two months. Instead of a message from Blaziken Man, it had simply read: “This is the Hammer. Come to the following location. Wear training gear.” A minute later, he had received a second text from the same number with an address and a date.
It had taken them the better part of the morning, but Alex and Hierro had crossed the Umber River, made three subway transfers, and finally made their way up to the upper west side. Alex raised his fist and rapped the door three times. He heard movement within, and the sound of several heavy door bolts being thrown back. The sliding metal door rumbled aside, and a Conkledurr loomed up in front of them. The fighting type looked them up and down. “Are they here?” a voice boomed from around a corner. There was a clatter, and the Conkledurr rolled its eyes. “Send them in, Siegfried, for Arceus’s sake!”
Siegfried stepped aside and motioned for them to follow, leading them through the main workshop, where two expensive sports cars were propped on hydraulic lifts. In a second work room, Johannes Schlagen threw aside a newspaper and hoisted himself to his feet. “Hawlucha Man! Good to see you!” Alex saw Johannes’s arm was still in a splint, but the man seemed otherwise in good spirits.
“And you, Hammer! But please, call me Alex.” He glanced around the workshop, where chrome beams and heavy iron weights were stacked in organized piles. “Did you need my help? I haven’t heard from any of the other heroes in weeks, and I was starting to wonder if—”
Johannes cut him off with a wave of his hand. “There’s no need to concern yourself, lad. Jiro, Lakshmi and I were simply waiting for the dust to settle. In the interim, I thought it prudent to spend some time with each of you younger heroes, to see what you can do.” He led Alex out through the back of the workshop to a long rectangle of packed earth, hidden behind a screen of junked cars. “Normally, I’d handle your training myself, but…” The Hammer glanced down at his broken arm and shrugged. “When you’re my age, you don’t heal quite so fast. I’ll have my pokemon take over instead.”
Siegfried lumbered out into the yard after them, and the Hammer stuck two fingers into his mouth and whistled. “Albrecht, come on out!” His Hariyama sashayed out from among the cars and took up a position next to Siegfried at the far end of the packed earth.
Alex glanced at Johannes. “What kind of training did you have in mind?”
“Oh, I’ve always preferred the hands-on, sink-or-swim approach.” Johannes snapped the fingers of his good hand, and his two pokemon surged forward. Hierro shrieked and tackled Alex out of the way, and they both sprang to their feet. Alex unzipped his windbreaker and cast it aside, leaving him in a t-shirt and loose, comfortable cotton pants, the sort of clothes he had worn when he was still training in martial arts years ago. A shared glance with Hierro communicated all he needed to.
The Hammer was unlikely to let his pokemon cause him serious harm, but it didn’t seem like they were going to pull any punches either. Neither he nor Hierro had the raw strength necessary to stop their opponents’ blows, so their best hope was to dodge and look for an opening. Johannes had trained his pokemon to be respectably fast, but Alex and Hierro were definitely faster.
Siegfried managed to turn around first and came at Alex with a powerful punch. Alex had a split second to be grateful the Conkledurr was not using its concrete slabs in this bout before he dropped his weight and rolled under the strike, lashing up at the fighting type’s forearm with a well-placed kick when he passed below Siegfried’s center of mass. He heard the Hammer make a surprised exclamation as the Conkledurr recoiled. Siegfried gritted his teeth and raised both arms above his head before bringing them crashing back down where Alex had just been an instant before. Alex jumped to the left and sidestepped around the Conkledurr before jumping up and delivering two swift kicks to the center of its back.
Hierro screamed as he raced towards Albrecht, bounding up and over the shell of a car to strike at the Hariyama’s upper torso. Albrecht took two hasty steps back and thrust out its open palm, knocking Hierro out of the air. The Hawlucha tried to sweep Albrecht’s legs out from under him, but the Hariyama’s prodigious bulk allowed Albrecht to keep his balance. Hierro hissed in irritation and puffed out his feathers before leaping back to try again.
Alex struggled to avoid Siegfried’s powerful strikes, knowing that if any one of them landed, he would be effectively out of the fight. The Conkledurr telegraphed all of its attacks, but even knowing what was coming, Alex was hard-pressed to evade. None of the blows he managed to land seemed to faze the fighting type; Alex knew he was far out of his weight class, and Hierro was too. Raw force wasn’t going to help them this time.
Alex grinned. Unless…
He whistled to Hierro. “Follow my lead!” The two of them dashed to the middle of the Hammer’s proving ground and stood back to back. Siegfried rushed at them from the north while Albrecht ran from the south. “We’re going to do a little science experiment,” Alex muttered. “On my mark.” He saw the Conkledurr’s muscles tense, saw the fighting type reach the point of no return, where it would carry through the strike even if Alex dodged. “Now!”
He and Hierro bolted to the side just as Siegfried’s fist shot out. It missed Alex and Hierro completely, but Siegfried was unable to stop the motion before his fist collided with Albrecht coming from the other side. The Hariyama was sent flying backwards and struggled to rise while Siegfried whirled on his opponents. The moment he turned, Alex and Hierro shot forward and jumped up, delivering a double uppercut to the Conkledurr’s jaw. Siegfried roared as he staggered back, clutching his jaw.
“Enough!” Johannes boomed, following it up with a deep belly laugh. “You never fail to impress, Hawlucha Man! How did you come up with that move?”
“One of the first things you taught me, remember?” Alex grinned and wiped the sweat from his brow. “Back when we were fighting the Iron Boyar, you said you were going to show me what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object.”
Johannes threw back his head and laughed again. “Well I’ll be damned! I’m a better teacher than I thought!”
Once Siegfried and Albrecht had recovered, the Hammer had them fight another two bouts. By the end, all four combatants were struggling for breath, and their muscles ached. When Johannes called an end to the third round, Hierro sank to the ground and flopped backward. Siegfried lowered himself on his haunches beside the flying type and did the same.
Johannes smiled and motioned Alex to follow him inside while the pokemon rested. They sat on either side of a small, rickety kitchen table while a small coffeemaker burbled. Alex rolled his shoulder to ease the aching muscles and regarded the Hammer for a moment. “Well, that was invigorating, but now are you finally going to tell me what’s going on?”
“How do you take your coffee?”
“Black, two sugars. And don’t dodge the question. It’s been two months since the Sins’ attack, and I’ve been in the dark the whole time. You all said you’d be in touch, but I haven’t heard a damn thing.”
The Hammer lowered himself into his chair. “We needed to be sure it was safe.”
“Safe? I’m out there risking my life every night trying to clean up the mess the Sins left us with. Safe isn’t even part of the equation. How can I be safe if I don’t know what I’m up against?”
“Alex,” Johannes said. “There’s more at play now than you understand. We’ve kept you in Avenbrooke fighting against the Baron and his men because that’s where you’re as safe as you can be in our line of work. The entire balance of power in Clarus City has changed, and there are now forces in play that are far more dangerous than anything Jiro, Lakshmi and I thought we would be up against when we began this. I was in the room when Marcus Braun died. I saw how it happened. Believe me, he was not an easy man to kill.”
Alex leaned back in his chair. “Then start at the beginning. Bring me up to speed. Who was the woman that went into Nimbus Tower? How did Sloth die? Why have the other Sins gone quiet?”
“I suppose it’s best to begin with Archangel.”
“What’s Joshua got to do with this?”
“How much do you know about espers?”
Alex shrugged. “As much as anyone else, I guess. Some people develop psychic powers, just like psychic type pokemon. There’s probably something genetic to it, but there’s other factors that we don’t really understand. Who gets powers and who doesn’t is basically random. But the odds are like one in a few hundred thousand, right?”
“More or less. The world governments loosely classify espers on a scale of one through five. Most class ones never even realize they have powers. They might just feel like they have good intuition, or hand eye coordination.”
“But it’s actually weak psychic voodoo?”
“Essentially, yes. Most espers that we know of as such are class twos. It’s a fairly broad classification, so how powerful they actually are can vary. Anything from moving bottle caps with their brain to telepathy to all-out mind control fall under the class two umbrella.”
“All right. So Joshua…”
“Archangel is a class three.”
“Oh.”
“You need to understand that the difference between a class one and a class two is immense, and the gap between even the strongest class two and a class three is far greater. Fortunately, the higher class an esper is, the rarer they are. To the best of my knowledge, there are less than fifteen class threes in the world, and the military and government of whatever region they are born in monitors them closely, usually in a laboratory setting. Archangel was taken from his family at an early age and was raised in a facility where his powers could be studied and honed.”
“He was raised to be a living weapon.”
“To put it cynically, yes.”
“That’s fucked up, man.”
The Hammer took a long sip drink of coffee to gather his thoughts. “Believe me, I had no knowledge of this until just a few years ago. I find it as abhorrent as you do. The project was shuttered and Archangel was released back out into the world. He’s still under close observation by the government, but there has been an attempt to allow him to live something approaching a normal life.”
“Okay, so Archangel is some crazy powerful esper. What’s this got to do with Sloth and Nimbus Tower?”
The Hammer sighed. “Archangel was not the only class three under observation. There was another, a woman, several years older. While Archangel’s strengths lie in telekinesis, this woman’s was a powerful telepath. Specifically, she excelled at mind control. She was kept in a hermetically sealed room and allowed next to no contact with any living person for years, for fear of what she would make them do. It made her go a little unhinged.”
“Can’t say I really blame her, under the circumstances.”
Johannes nodded to concede the point and continued. “Her name was Marinette, but her project designation was Dominion, and by all accounts, she preferred that. When the program studying her and Archangel was shut down, the government tried to keep her under observation, but it was impossible to keep track of her. Every time someone was sent after her, they would disappear for months at a time, and if they ever reappeared, it was months later, with no memories of the intervening time. Her ex-handlers were willing to assume she just wanted to be left alone.” He grunted. “Turns out they were off the mark.”
“So what happened in Nimbus Tower?”
“She just waltzed in and told the Sins to stop. When Braun tried to resist, she took control of his Slaking and hurled him out the window. A few minutes later, she had the other six all working for her.” Johannes drained his coffee mug and set the pot to percolate again. “I’ll be honest with you, lad. This woman terrifies me in a way that Marcus Braun never could. The Sins, the Baron, the Kuromori, all of them are dangerous, but they’re known quantities. We knew how they act, we know their patterns, and we know how the organizations work. They have a pattern. Jiro, Lakshmi and I have spent the past two months trying to connect the dots on Dominion.” Johannes shook his head. “There is no pattern.”
Alex scowled. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that she’s capricious. She’s unpredictable. None of her actions make any kind of damned sense. She’s been content keeping to the shadows for years, until one day, as near as we can assume, she just decided to topple the Sins as the dominant power and take over Clarus City, but then she burned herself out and circled the wagons. She hasn’t made a move, and she’s letting the day to day operations run on autopilot while her organization crumbles.”
“So when I didn’t hear from you…”
“It’s because there was nothing to report.” Johannes drummed the fingers of his left hand on the table. “Jiro also thought it was wise to keep you and the other heroes out of harm’s way. He was willing to draw all of her attention like a lightning rod if it meant keeping the rest of us safe. He told me he didn’t want her to compromise all of the city’s heroes in one fell swoop.”
“He thought he would be compromised?”
Johannes nodded gravely. “And if he was, he had plans for the rest of us to stop him. Fortunately, she hasn’t risen to the bait.”
Alex drained the last of his coffee. “So the less we knew, the better.”
“Precisely.” Johannes rose and refilled their mugs. “But the time for playing cautiously is over. No more keeping our allies in the dark. From now on, you will know everything we know. Our foes coordinate and work together, and it’s about damn time we started doing the same.”
“Are you training the other heroes too?”
“Echo and I have had several sessions, yes. And I have been training Isabelle and Archangel for several years, since we became heroes of Clarus City. The Phantom, try as I might, has been uncooperative.”
Alex smirked. “It seems like he doesn’t play well with others.”
Johannes snorted. “So it seems. But after seeing you in action, it’s clear you don’t need me to teach you how to fight. Your instincts are good, and you’re resourceful. Everyone can benefit from a bit of sparring practice every now and then, but I’d say you’re a natural at this.” He looked out through the open door of the work room to where Hierro was chittering away excitedly to Albrecht and Siegfried. “That Hawlucha of yours is certainly something. How long have you two been together?”
Alex shrugged. “About eleven years now?”
“Oh? Sounds like there’s a story to tell.”
“Maybe a short one.” Alex leaned back in his chair. “I never went on a journey. I’m from Unova, and the scars from the wars from when my parents were kids… well. It’s not as safe as it used to be going out on a journey, so my parents kept me home in Icirrus City. Like any twelve year old kid, I wanted a pokemon of my own, but my parents wouldn’t let me go catch one.” He took a sip of coffee. “So one day, the circus comes to town, right? This Kalosian troupe, and they’ve got everything. Acrobats, clowns, Pyroar jumping through hoops, a Riolu bending steel beams, the works. And one of the acts has this Hawlucha. Even from the stands, I could tell he wasn’t cooperating with the tamers at all, that he just didn’t want to be there. He was sick of being whipped and yelled at and made to do stupid tricks.
“So a couple days later, I sneak out of town to the marshes like I always did as a kid. I wasn’t supposed to but…” Alex grinned and shrugged again. “I was twelve. Anyway, I’m wandering around the marsh, and I see the Hawlucha from the circus trapped in a thorn bush. He was panicking, and he was only getting more stuck. It took me a while to calm him down, and by the time I was done I was covered in scratches, but eventually I got him out. I could tell that he’d run away, and he sure as hell didn’t want to go back. So I counted my pocket money and I made him a proposition.”
Johannes’s eyes twinkled as he listened, and Alex grew more animated in the telling. “I had just enough saved up for a pokeball, so I rushed back into town, bought one, and hurried back. The Hawlucha was waiting for me and… well, I caught him. I hid him from my parents at first, at least while the circus people were still in town. Once they left and weren’t looking for him anymore, I showed my parents, and after some cajoling, they let me keep him. Hierro and I have been together ever since.”
“Remarkable,” Johannes rumbled. “No wonder your bond is so strong. You grew up together.”
Alex looked out the door at his partner and smiled. “There’s no one else I’d rather have at my back. He’s my best friend.”
“And so you trained together?”
“Well, I’d been doing martial arts and gymnastics and stuff since I was little. But once I got Hierro, yeah, I started paying attention to how he moved, how he fought. We’re both small and light, so it made sense to copy his instincts. And then when I became Hawlucha Man, I needed him to teach me how to fly.”
“Remarkable,” Johannes said again. He stood up from the small table. “Come with me, there’s something I want you to see.” He led Alex into another garage in the back of his workshop, previously hidden from view.
A large metal structure stood in the middle of the room, composed of gleaming chrome pipes and half-covered in heavy metal plating. Tanks of hydraulic fluid stood in neat rows nearby, and Alex’s eyes went wide. “Is that…?”
“The Hammer armor, mark three,” Johannes said. “Braun and his Slaking did a number on the old model, so I had to start over. It’s taken me longer than I’d like, but when you only have one good hand, well.” He glanced down at his sling. “You do the best you can. Siegfried and Albrecht have tried to help as much as they’re able, but their hands aren’t made for delicate work like this. I’d like for it to be ready once I’m healed up, but at my current progress, that doesn’t seem likely. But if I were to have an assistant…”
Alex could hardly contain his excitement. “Are you asking me to help you?”
“Jiro says you’re doing mechanical engineering at AIT. If you’re looking for a little part time work on the side, I would certainly appreciate it.”
“Absolutely,” Alex said, without a second’s hesitation. “Just say the word and I’ll be here to help.” The long commute be damned, he was getting a chance to work side by side with the Hammer. Again.
Johannes led him back outside to where Hierro was waiting. “The summer term at AIT is coming up,” he said. “And most graduate students take on internships, yes? Have you secured something yet?”
Alex blushed. “Uh… no, not yet. My night gig is kind of getting in the way of, well, everything, honestly.”
Johannes nodded. “Let me make a few calls, I’ll see what I can do. I have my share of well-connected friends, and there are a few favors I can call in. You know,” he said, “I was an AIT man myself, once upon a time.”
“What?” Alex cried.
“There will be plenty of time for stories later,” Johannes replied. “I don’t want to keep you all day. Until my arm is healed, Clarus City is already down one hero. I need to give you some time to rest up.”
As Alex and Hierro left the Hammer’s auto shop, Alex glanced back over his shoulder. “Just a sec. Johannes, what are you? These sports cars, the metal suit, the well-connected friends, they’ve got to come from somewhere.”
The older man laughed. “Me? I’m just a mechanic! Now go on, get home. You’ll need to unwind if you’re going on patrol tonight.” He glanced down at Hierro. “You keep each other safe, you hear?”
Hierro snapped off a brusque salute and waved to the Hammer’s pokemon looming in the doorway. As Alex and Hierro walked back towards the subway stop, Alex reached down and smoothed Hierro’s feathered crest. He was ready to get back into the fight for Clarus City, to do more than just beat back the Baron’s hired thugs. The idea of Dominion gave him the creeps, but Alex felt that when faced with of the heroes of Clarus City, not even an esper that strong stood a chance.
The first thing the Hammer had taught him had been a physics lesson. The second was advice that Alex had taken to heart: always bet on the heroes of Clarus City.