The effect of Fubuki's words on the group behind her was immediate and complete.
"Lady Fubuki—!" The voice that broke first belonged to Lily, and it carried the specific frequency of someone who had been holding their breath without knowing it. The sound that followed was not quite a word.
Within seconds the dam had broken, and several dozen professional heroes were doing things that professional heroes are not supposed to do in public, including crying, clutching their chests, and calling their leader's name repeatedly in voices that had abandoned any pretense of dignity.
"You really didn't give up on us—!"
"Lady Fubuki is the best, she's the best—!"
"I'll follow you anywhere, I swear it, anywhere—!"
Fubuki, who had expended everything she had on those three sentences, stood with her head down and her hands still clenched, breathing harder than the physical effort warranted. Her face was doing something complicated that she was not going to let anyone see properly.
In the sky above them, a vein appeared on Tatsumaki's forehead.
She looked at the group of heroes below her — several of whom were now genuinely weeping, hugging each other, or delivering impassioned declarations about dying in Lady Fubuki's service — and experienced a sensation that she would have described, if pressed, as being somehow cast as the villain in a situation she had arrived at with entirely reasonable intentions.
These people who've been dragging Fubuki down are looking at me like I've done something terribly wrong—
From the ground, audible even over the group's collective emotional breakdown: You really did go too far this time.
Tatsumaki chose not to respond to this.
Instead she moved her fingers, and Fubuki was no longer standing on the ground.
"—Sister, sister—!"
The telekinesis wrapped around Fubuki smoothly and lifted her into the air in a position that was not, technically speaking, dignified, and which at least eight members of the Fubuki Group witnessed in real-time before looking away with various expressions of distress. The anti-gravity function of Tatsumaki's skirt and the strategic engineering of Fubuki's bodycon dress both performed their respective functions adequately, so no one saw anything they shouldn't have seen, but this fact did little to improve Fubuki's current state of mind.
She hung in the air and looked at her sister's face, which was several centimeters from her own at this altitude, and tried to find words.
She found none. She settled for an expression that she hoped communicated the entire situation adequately.
Tatsumaki looked back at her. Something shifted in the small face — not quite the anticipated explosion, not quite warmth, but something that occupied the space between them.
"You've really grown up, Fubuki," she said, with a faint smile that she appeared to have produced involuntarily. "You actually yelled at me."
The acknowledgment lasted approximately three seconds before Tatsumaki's expression returned to its usual configuration.
"Stop this. You're not a child." She turned, Fubuki rotating in the telekinetic field beside her, looking at the city around them with the efficient assessment of someone identifying routes. "I'm taking you somewhere safe until this is over."
Below, in the street, someone found their nerve.
It was Lily, because of course it was Lily. She stood at the front of the reassembled group, white lilies trembling slightly, chin up, and said in a voice that was louder than it should have been given how much she appeared to be shaking: "Lady Tornado — please. Don't take our leader."
The words were out. The moment held.
And then, because courage in groups is contagious in a way that courage alone rarely is, the rest of the Fubuki Group found it too.
"Please — Lady Tornado, we'll protect her! We'll do everything—"
"We're not trash, we swear, we'll prove it—"
"Give her back—!"
"Please!"
The voices cascaded, overlapping, some of them still thick with emotion and some of them finding steadiness in the act of speaking aloud, all of them directed upward at the small figure hovering in the sky above their block. In the air beside Tatsumaki, Fubuki could hear every voice. Her eyes were doing something she had very little control over.
Tatsumaki inhaled.
Each shout from below produced a corresponding effect on her forehead. By the fourth shout the vein was very visible. By the sixth she had closed her eyes.
"SHUT UP, ALL OF YOU."
The psychic wave that erupted from her was not aimed at anything specific. It didn't need to be. It expanded outward from her position in a radius, and the buildings on both sides of the street — the already-evacuated, already-closed, already-empty commercial blocks that the no-man's-land had made available for exactly this kind of incident — responded to it as architecture responds to forces that exceed its design parameters: badly. Windows ceased to be windows. Facades peeled. A water main somewhere beneath the street gave up the fight, and the resulting pressure release drove a column of flame up through the collapsed structure above it in a shape that could generously be described as a mushroom cloud.
Thick smoke climbed into the Z-City sky.
Z-City Hero Association Branch. Operations Center.
The building moved.
It was subtle — the kind of movement that seismic equipment registers and human bodies interpret as something happened before the conscious mind has categorized it — but in the operations center, forty-seven staff members had been doing their jobs in forty-seven different ways, and every single one of them stopped doing those jobs simultaneously as the shockwave rolled through the floor beneath their chairs.
The silence lasted approximately one second.
"Alert! Alert!" The short-haired duty officer had the headset already at full volume, scanning her boards, her voice carrying across the suddenly very loud room. "Section Chief — massive energy reaction in the no-man's-land! Origin point unclear—"
"Get me the cameras." The duty section chief had materialized behind her with the energy of a man who processes emergencies through forward momentum. "Any camera in range. If they're down, get me satellite access—"
The message went up the chain at the speed of institutional panic. Within ninety seconds, the command center contained significantly more people than it had been designed to contain at this hour, including a young department head with glasses and the early signs of stress-related hair loss who was issuing instructions with the specific quality of someone who is performing composure rather than experiencing it.
"Operations: dispatch available heroes for investigation. Monster Assessment: disaster level determination, immediately. Publicity: disaster broadcast protocol, standby—"
He dabbed his forehead.
"This is above our authority level." His voice cracked on the last syllable, which he ignored with admirable professionalism. "Someone get Minister Lanny."
The footsteps that followed were audible from several floors away — a rapid, organized percussion that preceded the opening of the command center doors.
The room's collective anxiety reorganized itself the moment she walked in.
Lanny moved through the space the way she always moved through operational situations — blonde hair, burgundy glasses, the particular calm of someone who has handled enough crises to have developed a private sorting system for them. The cluster of branch executives in her wake arranged themselves efficiently. The command center staff, who had been cycling through various degrees of poorly-suppressed panic, did what command center staff always do when someone genuinely senior arrives: they stopped performing and started reporting.
She looked at the main screen. The explosion readout. The energy signature analysis.
The emerald green at the base of the blast was unmistakable.
She exhaled — a small, controlled sound that the nearest staff member could hear clearly and which communicated an entire volume of institutional knowledge in approximately one second.
"Stand down the disaster broadcast," she said. "Suspend the response protocol." A brief pause to let the room recalibrate. "I'll handle this."
She turned and walked out with the same efficient energy she'd arrived with, her figure moving through the door and leaving behind a command center that had gone very quiet.
The department head looked at the screen. Looked at the door. Looked at the emerald readout on the energy analysis panel.
Around him, forty-seven staff members engaged in the universal professional activity of trying to appear less confused than they were.
What Lanny knew, and what her subordinates could not have known without access to a very specific subset of Z-City operational intelligence, was this: the Tornado of Terror had been ranging in and around Z-City with notable frequency since the training camp had been established in the no-man's-land. And the Tornado of Terror had a well-documented pattern of arriving at situations involving her sister, and reacting to them in ways that municipal infrastructure was not designed to accommodate.
And the Tornado of Terror was, in the operational context of anyone who worked closely with Jordan Evans's affairs, not something you dispatched heroes to investigate.
You called Jordan. Jordan handled it.
Which was, Lanny reflected, walking back toward her office to make that call, an accurate description of approximately thirty percent of her job at this point.
She was not complaining.
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