Mage Among Superheroes

Flasher and Iron Shell appeared even more difficult to Scry than usual. There were no guarantees about what they might do, but for the moment Great Girl's team was working with Midnight and me to prepare to take them down together if necessary. Midnight and I might brute force some glimpses of their surroundings if we kept working at it, but being prepared for a battle was also important.

Aside from magic training, I also trained with weapons. There was always more to learn, as people could use anything- mostly guns though. People liked guns. They were good at almost every range- until the point they suddenly weren't. Once within arm's reach, it was easy enough to get them off target that proper melee weapons were better.

Knowing how to fight against certain weapons also involved knowing how to use them to some extent. That was how I ended up in some supplementary training sessions with Sophia- Great Girl at work. She almost never had any use for weapons- when you could throw trucks, fists were good enough for most things. However, against over bruisers it was useful to have a mechanical advantage.

Not that Great Girl currently had a weapon that could stand up to her strength. Not at any significant size. For the moment, we were sparring against each other with staves- because they were one of the simplest weapons to make and because she could rip a light pole or something out of the ground. Not that she'd be able to bring that into any decent base.

It was quite difficult to keep track of someone that could shrink and grow as she pleased. Even if I knew that she was activating her power, she'd gotten pretty good at hiding how things were going to change. Was she going to thrust forward and extend her reach, or suddenly shrink and slip under my guard?

I was fit and had decent natural strength, but no supernatural physical attributes, so I had to use magic to keep up. I kept it to Enhance for the most part, for optimal training. Anything too much in either person's favor would make things pointless.

Our staves crashed against each other loudly, rebounding slightly. They were only so strong, so we had to control ourselves. Or constantly keep getting new ones, but that wasn't good training. A minute later, I ended up on my back with a staff pointed at my trachea. A minute wasn't too bad, though.

I lost most of the time, but that was fine. It wasn't my job to beat a bruiser in melee combat. My job was to delay long enough or take out mooks that way. I just needed to find openings to use spells, and I did. These particular sparring sessions I didn't actually cast spells, because if we were being serious I absolutely would avoid getting into melee in the first place.

I'd rather use a gun. Even a proper rifle wouldn't do much more than slow her for a moment, but as a general rule it was better. I had the most training with a single handed pistol, but lately I had been thinking about other weapons. Rifles were close enough to staves, though not at all magical and a mediocre conduit for magic. I could point them at a target better, and shoot down the sights while also using spells at the same target. Or one nearby, but that took more concentration.

I could store most weapons with similar ease. Basic Spatial Mastery allowed moving quite a significant amount of matter into or out of Storage for a low cost. I could even pop a weapon right into a firing position.

Great Girl also joined me for some firearms training, though there wasn't any sparring there. Not that we couldn't, but it was kind of pointless. Or at least, it would really be more of a bullet-dodging training. Useful, but not what we were interested in at the exact moment. The only reason Great Girl would have a gun is if she took it from someone, as she didn't carry one… but I could hold two just fine.

The vast majority of the time, Mono would take care of anything that required long range. However, sometimes circumstances didn't fit his style. The training was useful even if we didn't expect to use it repeatedly.

I added a little twist to my firearms training. I emptied my magazine and then… kept shooting. At first, I had less than a fifty percent success rate. Swapping things was difficult, and there were a few internal mechanisms that actually needed a clip to be pushed in instead of just… magicing its way in. The good news was that I couldn't accidentally overlap anything- at most I could get stuff jammed.

If Spatial Magic could overlap matter, I could just pull out sticks through people. People I wanted to kill. It might actually be able to do that at higher tiers of magic, but there were plenty of spells that directly killed people. The point was that it didn't work for trivial amounts of mana, and so far even intentionally sloppy mana control hadn't resulted in anything. I presumed it was magically expensive.

My accuracy was pretty good. Not in the top ranks, but there were plenty of gunslingers in the Power Brigade, people with powers much more suited to the task. But I was pretty decent.

"Now I just need something that can shoot through super cyborgs," I said.

"Pretty sure you don't have a license for any of that," Great Girl said.

"I can get armor piercing rounds." That was one thing I had been working on- swapping in the right clips. I had to keep a proper mental inventory of what I had in Storage for that to work, plus be familiar with the ammo itself so that I knew what I was actually pulling out.

I was still short of throwing a tea party like Wrickle, but I thought I was pretty good for the time I'd had to practice.

"Want to help me out with grappling practice?" Great Girl said. "We can load you up with some metal armor and you can grow big."

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"I don't have most of the things they have," I pointed out. "I do have fire shield though."

-----

For Great Girl, Fire Shield was more of a time limit on how long she wanted to grab onto me than an actual way to stop her. Thus, it fulfilled its purpose perfectly. I still wasn't a very good giant metal man though.

"You're not heavy enough," she commented.

"Or durable enough," I shook my head. "I don't have enough points to learn Iron Body. Or the requisite mastery to just improvise it." I was pretty sure metal wasn't an energy type. I was more certain that transmutation type spells were their own thing regardless. "I'm not sure if this is a good representation. If you can grab them, you should just rip their arms off."

"That's… not something I can do in public," Great Girl said.

"... Just enough to tear some parts?" I tilted my head. "Or like, twist them an extra quarter turn without ripping anything off. It's not like either of them have any flesh in that area."

"That's a bit tough," Great Girl admitted. "Depending on the height of the room."

"You don't have to stand up," I suggested. "Well, anywhere they can move around properly you can probably manage in a low stance." We were fairly likely to fight them in a lair instead of on the streets. Otherwise, we could make her big enough to grab one in each hand. "Has your maximum size improved any?"

"I might reach three times my height soon," Great Girl explained.

"Couldn't you already-" her glare stopped me and forced me to think. "So like… e twenty feet tall?" Putting an absolute number to it would give me a better idea of the actual amount.

"Something like that," she said. "Closer to eighteen at the moment, but that's my goal."

So she was somewhere around three and a half times her height now, aiming for four. She rarely had to go to her limits, though. It was usually a worse option against most opponents. It was too much strength in exchange for being somewhat slower and certainly less agile. Not that she was ever particularly clumsy- it was just an issue of size.

-----

Great Girl was one of the important image supers for the Power Brigade, so she needed to be seen dealing with problems or at least patrolling as regularly as possible. Calculator already knew I didn't want to be part of that, but I could at least do my best to not make our image any worse.

Grasp, Great Girl, Mono, Midnight, and I all patrolled along the streets. Mono would normally be perched atop a building, but it was kind of difficult for him to get an angle all along a patrol route- without making it just a straight line. If dealing with a specific threat, he'd find a good place to set up. If we ran into trouble on this patrol, I'd cast Fly and he could get to some rooftop swiftly enough.

The number of criminal incidents in New Bay was extremely high, but it was lower around patrols. Most villains tried to avoid them. However, they were intended not to be predictable enough that they could just skirt around them.

Some people were probably happy when many patrols went by without an incident. I didn't want more dangerous things to happen. I just wanted more of those that were going to happen anyway to happen around me. That way I could get experience. Sparring just wasn't cutting it, often giving only a single experience point per day. Sometimes less.

We'd missed a few opportunities, but finally we got called into something.

"Incident in progress, two blocks away to the northwest. A bank robbery."

How… dumb. I didn't even have any money in a bank. By which I meant physically in a bank. Did people really do that? I supposed they were required to keep some cash for transactions, but it wasn't much.

There were few enough of us that one Multicasting of Haste covered us all- we could have done one more, since Midnight was my familiar. Fly allowed Mono to move freely while the rest of us ran along the streets.

Map took over the job of interfacing with dispatch, directing Mono towards a good perch. "The bank is on a corner, so you can cover both streets from the opposite corner."

"What about back alleys?"

"There shouldn't be any access. But if you're willing to compromise angles along one street, you can roam an opposite rooftop and potentially cover the alley."

"I'd better do that. I can't fly whenever I want, and I don't have the powers to jump over a boulevard."

Mono's power didn't actually have anything to do with guns. It was sound manipulation. It made him pretty terrifying to some people, as people would only know he had arrived when they started getting hit. He often used various forms of less lethal ammunition as well as targeting people's limbs, but he could just shoot someone through the heart or brain. He wasn't a big part of the Brigade's image, for various reasons.

"Who are we up against?" Great Girl asked, doing her best to keep her words at the right pace. Map wasn't Hasted, since she wasn't anywhere physically present. I honestly wasn't sure I'd ever seen her in person.

"Reports are… the Neon Void."

"That new gang?" Great Girl said.

"The very same. They have power suppression tech, so we might not know who their heavy hitters are until we spot them."

We managed to confirm that it was them when the vault teleported out of the bank with a guy standing on top of it. He had indigo blue skin, shiny black eyes, and was obviously an alien. I also had the feeling he was a showoff, because normal people didn't teleport a whole vault. It was very nicely severed from its surroundings, though.

It was pretty obvious he had super tech. I could feel it. I had no idea what most of it did, but the gun in his hands probably shot something.

"You'll never stop me!" the man said.

He might have been right. Even with Haste, Great Girl might not have reached him before he teleported away again- depending on how fast his stuff charged.

But I didn't want him to run. I wanted him to fight. I gathered mana quickly, watching his posture to try to guess what he might do next. Hopefully what I was preparing would make that not work like he intended.