Wretched Joy 29 (Patreon)

No. You don't get to sleep.

Commissioned by southmonk

Wretched Joy

Chapter 29

-VB-

So. 

The Empire Eighty-Eight: removed. 

Azn Bad Boyz: annihilated.

The Archer’s Bridge Merchants: gutted. 

Coil: unmasked and neutered. 

This left nobody for me to hunt. 

Sure, there were small timers like Uber and Leet, the Undersiders (if they remained), Parian, Faultline’s Crew, and other unimportant capes.

Half of them were villains, yes, but they weren’t the mustache twirling and cartoonishly evil people. Uber and Leet were just cartoon gag characters, after all. Undersiders… none of them really did anything to deserve getting shanked or thrown into the Nightmare Circles. Faultline’s Crew were just sophisticated thugs trying to solve the mystery of the Case 53’s, or were they thugs because violence was the only way to gain even a hint? 

Whatever the case was, Brockton Bay was now “cleared” of villains as it was ever going to get. 

Alexandria was still hanging around, but it was clear to me that she wasn’t going to stick around. She’s felt that real fear of death again from the cuts I’ve given her. If she stuck around to try to take me down, then I might cut off a hand or two. 

She was, after all, a villain in my eyes, but she provided enough “good” to society that outright eliminating her was as bad as letting a villain live. 

That and she participated in every Endbringer fight. 

Ugh. I hated having to decide someone’s sin and usefulness on a scale. 

It wasn’t as if I had a scale…

…

…

Could I?

Could I enchant a scale or a calculator to compute an individual’s value into a single variable or number? Some kind of “human causal calculator”? 

I thought about it. 

Why not? 

It wasn’t as if I was going to improve any of my personal protection at this point. For a week’s worth of enchantment, I might get a calculator that calculates “the good” someone does for themselves and their society but the same number of charges on any of my protection gear would see no difference. 

The Compass of Corruption and the Compass of Good to point out my targets with a binary bad or good. After that, use the “human causal calculator” to determine just how much impact my target was having on society. Then I would make the final decision based on the type of crime, quality of crime, and the distilled numerical “good” the person was also having on society. 

Obviously, just because someone wasn’t doing too bad didn’t mean they were good. 

Like that Deputy Mayor whose legs and arms I broke! I had no doubt that he was bad, but he had also worked under Mayor Christener, which meant he had done some good, either because it was his job to work on it or because he genuinely worked to do good. The latter was obviously false.

Maybe this was how I should determine who lives and dies. 

An objective judgement based on the impact of the individual after taking context into account. 

And those who live but are evil get the “limb breaker” treatment.

… Maybe. I don’t even have the calculator made right now. I’ll revisit this potential solution to many of my and everyone’s problems at a later date once I made the thing. 

Because right now, I was enchanting belt pouches. 

See, I originally thought to use a ring to make storage like a hammerspace, but I quickly learned that the space available to each ring was … small. After ten charges, a ring would have enough space for a nailing hammer and nothing else. A belt pouch that could hold one of my fists, however, would net me a human-sized internal storage after ten charges. 

Testing those out cost me three weeks worth of charges. 

If I had given those charges to a single wrench and made it some kind of tinkering power, then I would be able to match Kid Win or Armsmaster in how good the power was. 

Ugh.

Ah, well. That’s how it goes with experiments. 

I tied the belt bag onto my belt (which had twelve charges of Protection) after putting on the rest of my outfit. I dropped all of my weapons into it except for the Nightmare Sickle and the Bat. 

Now.

I’ve been thinking. 

If I stayed in the city, then I wouldn’t be able to do anything elsewhere. I would have to constantly hold down the fort to prevent opportunistic parasites from digging into the freshly cleaned city. 

So what if I … shared my responsibilities a little? 

-VB-

“So we’re supposed to just let him be?” 

“Right now, yes,” Director Piggot hissed out while trying her best to not explode. “Because if one of you pisses him off and he decides to go a step further, then you’re going to end up like Kaiser: one national television and very, very dead. Aside from the fact that any of you dying is a loss for the rest of us, it will lead to further clashes with Everyday Joe. If that were to happen, then we would lose control of the city like how the city no longer has a parahuman criminal gang.” She took a deep breath in and let it out, making her large body seem like it inflated and deflated. Then she glared at the one person in the meeting room that wasn’t supposed to be here.

Vista was here in the Protectorate meeting in clear defiance of her orders. 

In the weeks that had followed Kaiser’s death, Skidmark’s execution, and then Joe’s clash with Lung and Alexandria where he walked away the victor, she had grown increasingly defiant in all things. She patrolled when she wanted to. She trained when she wanted to. She slept at the PRT HQ and made a complaint every single day to the Youth Guard about the “stressful home life,” documenting everything that was said in her home which was usually between her parents. 

Suffice to say, she was no longer under any of her parents’ custody and had all the reasons she needed to live out of the PRT HQ. 

She did, however, go to school.

It was a small blessing that she chose to continue to go to school.

Because if she truly wanted to, then no one could stop her.

That was the power of Brockton Bay’s strongest Shaker, a title she still retained despite Everyday Joe’s many feats, including the Nightmare Circles. 

“... So what’s going to happen to our department?” Assault spoke up after a while. 

Piggot glanced over to the ex-villain. 

He asked a good question.

What was going to happen to PRT ENE? Not only were they in a city that no longer had any powerful villains to speak of (mercenaries and rogues not counting), they had indirectly humiliated the national PRT by having been “gifted” this cleaned city. 

People didn’t forget that they hadn’t been able to stop Joe. Or that they had been left to do cleaning after him. The media spun stories about decades of incompetence. They spoke as if they knew what fighting capes were like. 

This was why she hated the media more than she hated the capes. At least capes were predictably troublesome. The news media were backstabbing motherf-. 

… The city hadn’t forgotten either, but they were far more graceful and understanding. They had, after all, struggled alongside the PRT and Protectorate ENE. They knew what the situation was like. 

Medhall was gone. Employees walked out, board members dipping with company secrets, several important managers got arrested, and people found all sorts of shit under the company’s secreted caches. The city got rid of all of the gangs, yes, but it also lost the biggest employer. There was a distinct lack of trust between the white-majority elites and the rest of the city, too. Whether it was true or not, people thought that the city’s elites - barring the PRT - were in on it with the E88 and Medhall. 

The ones taking the heaviest hit was -.

Pop.

“Oh. Most of you are here.”

That voice.

Everyone snapped around to face Everyday Joe. 

Because the bastard can literally pop in and out of PRT’s bases like they were his second home. 

“Hello hello,” I said. “How’s everyone doing?”

“... Why are you here?” Armsmaster gritted out. 

Of all of the heroes, he’d taken Joe’s achievements the hardest. 

“Oh, I came to offer you another gift. Like the compass.”

Then he pulled out a packet of paper from his belt pouch. Even though the belt pouch was far too small for an A4 paper packet to fit into it. 

“See, this is a list of people I was going to hit over time. Some five thousand names, of which there are just one-hundred fifty more here in Brockton Bay.” He paused. “You could accept this and get to work expediently rooting out corruption in our city. Tell them it’s either you arresting them and them giving up information to incriminate themselves or me getting to them, breaking their legs, knees, thighs, arms, forearms, and elbows, and then stapling a piece of paper with their crimes onto their chest.”

“That is not how law is carried out!” 

“Yeah, well, what did that get this city, hmm? It’s obvious to everyone that the law is taking its sweet ass time catching up to the reality on the ground nor will there ever be a situation where every single PRT, police, and fire department across the nation to have enough funding to be able to meet the threats faced by everyday citizens.”

The sudden tirade threw them off guard. 

Piggot didn’t lower her guard, though.

“That is not up for you to decide.”

“On the contrary, I have strength in spare, the willingness to use them, and the record to prove that I am the person who gets to decide,” he snapped right back at her. “All major criminal gangs destroyed. Examples made out of the criminals who ruined tens of thousands of lives if not hundreds of thousands of lives,” he hissed, growing louder as he went on. “So this is my order to you lot. You’re heroes. So you will fix the problems now that you have been made aware of them. Failure to do so will mean you are abetting these crimes, which in turn makes you criminals in my eyes. Do not make me come after you for your inaction.”

Then he disappeared. 

The thick packet dropped with a heavy thud onto the ground. 

“Well. That just happened,” Vista, who hadn’t even gotten up, said almost casually. 

“Vista…” Miss Militia began. “Do you not realize the situation we are in right now?”

“We’re being threatened,” she hummed. “But I doubt I’ll be labeled a criminal,” she huffed as she hopped out of her seat and walked over to the packet. She looked over the first few names. “Oh. Mrs. Tyler is not going to be happy with her husband. I better go tell my friend’s mom what’s about to happen to her family.”

And then she was gone.

“... Shit.”

For once, it wasn’t Assault. It was Battery who said that. 

Armsmaster was already charging out of the door after taking a brief glance at the top of the page.

“What are you waiting for?! Go get her!” Piggot shouted and then the rest of the capes finally burst into action. 

They scrambled over each other to get out. It was only once they were gone that she walked around the meeting room’s central table to pick up the packet. 

She sniffed. 

And started flipping through them.

With a grunt, she flipped it close and walked out behind the capes. 

At the very least, she now had targets of convenience to vent on.

But on the inside, she seethed at being left in this position.