A Matter of Time

[Classist_Wierdo]

He jolted awake, as a rush of cold swept through his body.

He sat up, and immediately was struck by the sense that things were not right.

He looked left. He looked right. And then he looked down, and saw the bed he was in.

It was a twin sized bed, with gray covers, in the corner of a small room that was decorated with posters of superheroes that he initially didn't recognize, and situated across from a computer set

This wasn't his bed.

His bed was a queen sized bed, centered in an unadorned room across from the door.

He furrowed his brows, as he went entirely still, as he listened for any indication of just what the hell was going on.

Nothing.

Complete silence.

He released the breath that he was holding, and threw the blanket off his body, to go outside the room and figure out where he was.

And then he saw his legs, and was shocked by how pale they were. Even with the only lighting coming from a faint crescent moon shining through the window, they almost glowed with how pale they were.

He wasn't white. So why were his legs so pale?

For a moment, he thought they weren't even his, but when they responded to his twitches he knew they were his. For a moment, he was entranced by the way his leg muscles rippled at the slightest impulse.

He shrugged it off. It was just another thing that wasn't right about this situation.

With a sort of grace he knew he didn't have before, he came to his feet causing only the slightest noise from his feet hitting the carpeted floor.

He stood straight up, and looked around for a moment. There was a desk beside the bed, and on it were a number of papers. School work, by the looks of it.

And at the top of those papers, scrawled out in messy handwriting, was a name.

Greg Veder.

Like a lightning bolt, the realization crashed through him. This was Greg Veder's room. He was here. He was Greg Veder.

But how-

The gauntlet.

The last thing that he remembered doing before arriving here was making a build for the Worm Gauntlet. In that build, for the Origin, he chose Greg Veder.

If that gauntlet was real, then it would put him in Greg's body. It would explain the room, and why he's so pale.

But then, that means that he's in Worm.

A cold dread washed over him.

If he is in Worm, then that means he's on the same planet as the Sigmurgh.

His eyes widened. In the build he purchased a power specifically to counter Thinkers.

That same power welled up within him, as things that before were background noise came into sharp relief.

He could feel it. There were three thinkers currently watching him.

With the barest intent, that power slammed into existence, forming three inviolate barriers, blinding each of the thinkers to him.

Still, this gave him only cold comfort.

Earth Bet was a shit hole slowly grinding towards societal collapse, while the world's most powerful capes were either psychotic villains, or actively cultivating this slow collapse.

To make things worse, he took a drawback that guaranteed that Golden Morning would occur no later than it did in canon.

He took a deep centering breath, to calm himself down.

There was no reason to panic, he said to himself, he had all the tools he needed. He just had to stay focused, work hard, and not fuck it up.

He sat back down on his bed, as he put himself to planning.

First, he had to take stock of his situation.

He was Greg Veder.

He had eleven total perks. Of those eleven perks, nine of them were powers.

The first of those powers was the Anti-Thinker power he had already used.

The rest were a collection of eight different tinker powers, four copies of canon tinkers and four original specialties. The copies were of Dragon, Armsmaster, Chopshop, and Masamune, while the original specialties were of Energy Generation, Durability, Material Engineering, and Programming.

The two perks that weren't tinker specialties were Peak Human and High Attunement.

Peak Human, as the name suggests, made him into a peak human. The example used in the perk description is MCU Captain America. Notably, the perk is not only physical, but also mental and spiritual. Meaning that he also has enhanced intelligence, and a peak human 'spirit', for whatever that is worth.

High Attunement, on the other hand, was a perk that granted him the instinctive ability to use his powers well, along with the guarantee that his powers will grow more powerful as he used them to solve problems, as if his powers were sentient and actively trying to help him.

In terms of actual equipment, he only purchased two things. A Tinker Vehicle, and Power Armor. The vehicle is described as equivalent to a 'strong' cape, while the Power Armor is described as equivalent to an 'average' cape, equating a threat rating of 5.

But where they actually are, he wasn't actually sure. He knew he didn't have a Cosmic Warehouse, so they should be around here somewhere. He shrugged it off, and continued his situation assessment.

He also took a number of drawbacks, six of them total.

Some of them, Gauntlet Blues and Shard Influence arguably aren't even actual disadvantages. Gauntlet Blues forbid him from using stuff from other jumps, which meant nothing to him since this would be his first jump.

Shard Influence on the other hand put him under the influence of his powers, which, due to High Attunement, were very predisposed to him already.

His other drawbacks were significantly worse, though. Golden Morning ensured that Scion would initiate his genocidal rampage no later than he did in cannon, while Titanic Troubles ensured that many of Scion's shards will go crazy, and start forming endbringer-like avatars in pursuit of becoming the new entity, along with ensuring that he won't find a solution for them until his final year here.

The worst one, however, was In the Grimderpness of the Third Millennium. It specified that the setting was Cannon Worm. Which on it's own wouldn't be much of a drawback. But what really makes this a severe drawback is the final sentence.

'When in doubt, use the least helpful interpretation'.

This means that whatever logic is used to generate this world from the text written by Wildbow is choosing the worst possible version of Earth Bet that didn't actively deviate from the things that are clarified by Wildbow.

Off the top of his head, he could consider a number of things that were only implied or briefly mentioned in canon that could be interpreted in terrible ways for him. Things like the size and power of Gesellschaft, the Machine Army, the Three Blasphemies, and whatever the fuck the Sleeper is.

Let alone the half of the world that was never mentioned in canon.

Whatever malevolent judgment that created this world basically has a blank check when it comes to Central and South America. So it is probably a nightmare down there.

He took a deep breath, and recentered himself.

He had a lot of work to do, and stressing about what is out of his control at the moment is pointless.

For now, he's going to start with Brockton Bay. The ABB is implied to be involved in sex-trafficking, in canon. And since this world functions on the worst possible interpretations, that means that they are running a very large sex-trafficking operation.

Immediately, this puts them at the top of his shit list.

And, luckily, they shouldn't be too hard to deal with. Lung requires time to ramp up. Time he wasn't going to get.

Oni Lee, though, is going to be a problem. Fanon Oni Lee is basically an anime style ninja, and as far as he can recall, nothing in canon contradicts that, so he's probably even more dangerous than Lung.

It's also left ambiguous when precisely Bakuda joined the ABB, so she's almost certainly going to be a threat here.

Despite that, he knew that he could take them, and soon. Any one of his eight specialties were at minimum on par with an average cape's entire power set. All eight of them working in concert meant that he was effectively the most powerful tinker in the world, and by a wide margin at that.

Perhaps he was being arrogant when he thought this, but he thought that, as a tinker, he was even more powerful than Hero.

And besides that, he already had Power Armor and an advanced vehicle already made for him. So he wasn't even starting from zero.

No, it was only a matter of time.

(Here is the build:
Oigins: Greg Veder +1
Perks: Peak Human -1, High Attunement -1, A-List(Dragon) -5, B-List(Armsmaster, Chopshop, Energy Tinker, Anti-Thinker) -8, Cape(Durability Tinker, Masamune, Material Engineering TInker, Biotinker) -4
Items: Tinker Vehicle -1, Power Armor -1
Companions: None
Drawbacks: Gauntlet Blues, In the Grimderpness of the Third Millennium, Golden Morning +5, Titanic Troubles +5, Sequel Blues(+100 years) +10

Note: I'm using wiki descriptions for each of the copy powers and as my primary source of information. Also, ratings in the power perk descriptions are used like power levels.

A rating is just guidlines for how a team should approach a specific cape. Take for example that anti-thinker power. It's useless against the vast majority of capes, and all unpowered people. It would be a Trump/Stranger 0, even if it blocked Scion.)

 

[ZavellDragar]

Nice chapter! Hope this blossoms well and good

 

[Classist_Wierdo]

He found the tinker tech vehicle in the backyard.

It was a practical aircraft, with thick metal plating, a total of six thrusters, two at the nose attached by two mechanical arms, two on the sides, and two stacked atop each other at the tail.

At a glance, it was intimidating, being quite large, enough that it filled the backyard completely. He honestly wasn't even sure where to begin with this thing.

And then, at once, eight voices erupted into raucous shouting, clamoring for his attention, dumping countless ideas as to what he could do with this vehicle.

With a flex of his mental muscles, he forcefully silenced the voices. It was too much for him all at once. He needed to get them to focus.

He decided that, first, he'd begin with Dragon's power, which was Reverse Engineering.

He'd take it all apart, first, ascertaining the functions of all its systems, and hopefully figuring it out completely. Then, once it's fully taken apart, he'll rebuild it using the full power of all his various tinker specialties, for a new and superior vehicle.

With that in mind, he called forth the loudest of the voices, and let himself wash away in it.

…

"-eg, Greg!" A woman shouted out at him, breaking him from his fugue.

He set down the power cell he was in the process of ripping to pieces, and turned over to her.

"Oh, uh, hey Mom." He said, with a faked casual tone, internally panicking, as he had forgotten about his mother.

"Greg! What is all this?" She said, confused and alarmed, "What's going on?"

"Uh, I got powers," He answered,

She blinked, "...How?" She said, "What?"

"I'm a tinker," Greg said, "I'm going to rebuild this ship,"

"Where did all this come from?" She said,

"It came with my powers." He said, thinking quickly, taking advantage of how little she knew about powers.

She just stood there shocked, for a moment, "Okay?" She said,

"I built a stealth field generator already," Greg said quickly, "No one is going to see me building or tinkering here, and once I'm done building this ship, I'll move out to the beach."

"Greg, people don't just 'get powers.'" She said, "What happened?"

"Hey, don't ask questions, and I won't tell any lies." He said,

"Greg, this is serious." She said putting a hand on her hip,

"I'm serious too," He replied, "I have anti-thinker measures for myself. I can't shield you. There's nothing stopping the scary hat lady from learning anything I tell you. Let alone the naked lady in the sky."

"Greg, are you okay?" She said, concern in her voice.

"Yeah, I'm fine," He answered. "I'm kinda busy, though. I want to get through this ship as soon as possible, because I need to upgrade my power armor."

"...You know what, I'm going back inside. Don't forget, you got school at 8." She said,

"I'm not going," He called back, "I got bigger stuff to do."

"Whatever." She replied, not even looking back, as she reentered their home.

Greg let himself fall into the fugue, hoping to complete his project.

…

"Hey," His mom said, poking him in the shoulder, "Uh, you should eat. You've been out here all day."

Greg put down the soldering iron, and blinked a pair of bleary eyes. "Yeah, I probably should eat, and get some sleep." He answered.

…

Some time later, a few days, perhaps, the fugue faded, and Greg came to his senses.

There, right across from him was his power armor, massive, and haunting in it's visage, the color of wrought iron, and covered in thick metallic plating, like a heavily armored knight.

He could barely remember tearing it apart, but the actual building process was an inscrutable haze.

He laid a hand on the breastplate of his power armor, as he recalled just what the armor was capable of.

It was a little over ten feet tall, from the bottom of the foot to the top of the head. Its chassis was made of a synthesized alloy that he had yet to name. It was hyper insulative, though, and extremely strong in every sense of the word. The rest of it was made of nearly two dozen different alloys all specialized to serve different purposes.

It had three primary systems. A Hydraulic Servo System, a Graviton Engine- and associated power storage and distributed systems-, and a Stealth Field System.

The Hydraulic Servo System was, as the name suggests, a series of hydraulic servos distributed all through the armor that were the primary form of locomotion on the ground. The main limiting factor is the durability of the armor, since the pipes will burst long before the Graviton Engine reaches maximum power output.

The Graviton Engine, on the other hand, is a tinkertech energy generator that, truth be told, Greg wasn't entirely sure how it worked.

He did know how well it worked though.

The Graviton Engine generated so much energy that the bottleneck wasn't the actual process, but instead the robustness of the actuators and the power cells, both of which would explode long before the Graviton Engine reached maximum output.

Some back out the napkin math showed that the Power Armor would explode with force comparable to a nuclear bomb if it ever did go over what it could handle, and its theoretical maximal output is measured in exajoules.

This Graviton Engine also provides the means for both locomotion and long range combat, since it's power cells fueled fairly primitive lasers, and the gravitational anomalies that the Graviton Engines create are used both to prevent the hyperdense armor from sinking into the Earth's Mantle, and to provide flight capabilities.

Again, this is only by estimation, but he's fairly certain that he could glass a city in an afternoon, and that his armor is capable of hypersonic flight.

The stealth systems, on the other hand, were far less impressive, despite their comparative sophistication. Effectively, they just made him invisible and silent.

Still, he figured that he'd get significant mileage out of that, just as a pure practical measure.

As he opened up the armor, to step into it, he idly considered just what to name it. After a moment, the name came to him.

Invictus Pattern Power Armor.

A fitting name for an armor designed to be able to take on any challenge head on.

His airship, on the other hand, was simply the Invictus Pattern Power Armor, but scaled up and shaped like an airship.

It had all the same systems, just scaled up to the size of a ship.

Greg honestly wasn't sure what the top end of the ship's safe output looked like, but he did know enough that it was overkill for anything short of an actual Endbringer.

He had half a mind to just hop in his ship, fly out to wherever the Slaughterhouse were last seen, and just glass everything in their general direction.

He wasn't going to, though.

If he could probably take them right now, some three days into his gauntlet, in a week or two, he could kill them all without even giving them a chance to fight back.

Of course, that is assuming he keeps ramping up as quickly as he has so far.

Which is unlikely, considering that he built this ship and this armor by cannibalizing literally every bit of tech available to him. And it was only possible because he was beginning with already powerful tech.

Or maybe not.

After all, half the reason why his tech turned out so well was because both of them were at the intersection of literally all eight of his tinker specializations.

Theoretically the perfect tinkertech creation that fit all his specialties was something based on reverse engineered designs that was very large, efficient, durable, with integrated power systems, using exotic materials, and was run on computer programming, and also was involved in mass production.

Both the armor and the ship fit all but one of those qualifications. And that one was arguably the weakest specialization for this kind of tech, since mass production was suited to pumping out massive amounts of low level tinkertech, instead of making one or two large projects like he just did.

Greg was broken from his musings on his creations by his mother opening the back door, and walking out into the backyard that he had claimed as his workshop.

"Hey, Greg," She said nervously, "You… You aren't becoming a supervillain, aren't you?"

I turned in my power armor, "No." I answered, "I'm going to be a hero."

She visibly slumped in relief.

"I'm going to be honest, you've been scaring me." She said, "Please, if you are going to do this cape stuff, please don't get yourself hurt."

"Mom, this power armor has enough firepower to turn Brockton Bay into a glass crater." Greg said casually, "My warship could make Legend look like a child with laser pointers. You have nothing to worry about from me."

He was exaggerating, but she didn't know that.

"If you say so…' she said uncertainty,

"Trust me," Greg told her, calmly. "It's only a matter of time, after all."

With that last word, he entered the Warship, and, with vocal commands, directed the ship's flight systems to put the ship into the sky.

Now, it was time for the first order of business. Resources.

In most fanfics, most tinkers resort to things like thievery, and whoring themselves out to the PRT.

Greg was not 'most tinkers'.

No, he was going to do something that most tinkers would never even dream of.

He was going off the grid.

----

In the mostly uninhabited Canadian North, between the subzero temperatures, the barren land, and the high population of large and aggressive mammals, it's as if Mother Nature personally had it out for you specifically. Just trying to survive up there is a task for only the most hardened and experienced of woodsmen.

Greg laughed in Mother Nature's face, and took to Nunavut with a casual ease that was only matched by an American going to a McDonalds in a foreign country.

Despite how inhospitable the place was towards normal people, Greg only saw an unending font of materials ripe for the taking.

Literal tons of trees, snow, and dirt. To a normal person, these would seem like barely anything, and essentially worthless. To Greg, who put together a molecular fission reactor in an hour and a half, and a nuclear fusion reactor in half that, it was the same as if it was pure gold.

After a day dedicated to building, and rebuilding those two reactors over and over, Greg had access to practically the entire Periodic Table, limited only by how much time he was willing to spend producing a specific element.

Another day dedicated to building more and more of these fusion reactors, Greg had well and truly reached a point where his only resource limits were what he allowed himself to have.

And now, with that out of the way, he set himself on preparing the scanning technology necessary to detect parahumans.

With his Stealth Field Generators, he already had the basis for that technology.

The Stealth Field Generator's energy requirements varied depending on just how much light and sound it was going through. It would be trivial to create a computer program to map out the variations in energy consumptions, to create what is essentially a 3d scan of whatever is in range.

After that, it would be just as easy to prepare a program to actually parse through the data, to find whatever criteria he needed it to find.

Before long, just in time for night to fall on his sixth day in this world, Greg's Scanner was complete and ready to use.

And so, he returned to Brockton Bay.

----

The hardware was complete, as were the programs that would generate the data, and turn that data usable. Likewise, he had already collected all the data he needed to train his automated recognition systems.

Now, all there was left to do was to put it into use.

Greg took a deep breath, as he reclined in his cushioned custom leather chair.

He never intended to play by the rules. He had bigger things to worry about. The inevitable Golden Morning meant that every moment spent grinding away under self-inflicted binds was risking the lives of countless people across countless dimensions.

The fate of humanity rested on his shoulders.

That didn't make what he was about to do any less of a risk.

What he was about to do is tantamount to declaring an open war of extermination against nearly eighty percent of the cape population.

As powerful as Greg knew himself to be, he was still only one man, and his power was nascent yet.

An open war against any one of the myriad major villain organizations, the Elites and the Gesellschafts of the world, may prove to be too much for him. Let alone each and every single villain in the world all at once.

No, Greg had no delusions about what he was about to do.

Still, no matter how he sliced it, this was the best course of action.

In one fell swoop, he would-

His train of thought was interrupted by a beep, as a light flashed green.

One of his unmanned Invictus Pattern Power Armor had returned with the targets in tow.

Greg stood up out of his leather chair, and walked out of the bridge of the ship, into a sterile white room down the hall to the left.

In that sterile white room, there were three unconscious people strapped to tables, their visible squalor cast into sharp relief by the harsh white light bouncing off the bleached white walls.

These three were the only three capes that were affiliated with the "Clubhouse Playa's", a gang of relatively small renown native to a small city in Northern Washington. A city so small that there was no PRT base.

As such, these three capes, the Clubhouse Playa's, were given free reign over the city, since they were the only three capes in the whole city.

Of course, they knew to play things safe. They didn't bother with costuming up and going out into public. No, they kept to the shadows and their smokey clubs, choosing to remain mere rumors to the public, and petty kings to their immediate surroundings.

They came to his attention while he was training his scanner programs. The program flagged an unusual occurrence. So he reviewed it himself.

What the program showed him made him sick.

He still remembered it as clear as day.

He remembered how the middle cape's beard was splattered with blood as he put his skull through the head of another. He remembered the visceral disgust he felt, when he saw that the middle cape was completely naked, and fully erect.

He remembered the creeping horror he felt when he realized that the victim, a young boy, maybe eleven or twelve, had been raped by all three of them before the middle cape killed him.

He even remembered when he began to examine the surroundings, and found the other three still cooling bodies they had piled in the corner like a bunch of broken toys.

Greg shook it off, and stepped into the power armor responsible for capturing and retrieving the three villains. With a spoken command, another set of power armor entered. With another command, it began to mirror his movements, and transmit its sensor's data to his own power armor, effectively allowing me to control it remotely. With a final command, he activated the stealth field generator.

With that extra layer of security on the off chance that any one of them awakened enough to use their powers, Greg took a scalpel in hand, and as he began dissection of the brain, he called upon the power of Dragon, letting it whisper secrets into his mind.

----

He's wasted enough time in hesitation. Any more would stray into inaction.

With a press of a button, the Scanner activated, and began sending coordinates across the computer systems that pilot his fleet of Power Armor.

In absolute silence they exited his ship, and descended onto Brockton Bay, to ambush each and every single villain in Brockton Bay all at once.

 

[Classist_Wierdo]

Greg pressed a button, and the flow of tinkertech melatonin ceased, allowing the villains he had restrained in his ship to begin to wake up.

It'd take a moment for them to wake up.

True to his predictions, they began to awake almost immediately. Just as quickly, they erupted into audible raucous panic.

"Wha-"

"What!"

"Hey!"

"The fuck is going on!"

With a command spoken under his breath, inaudible to the captives, the ship's Stealth Engine activated, silencing them all at once. It took only a moment for them to realize that they were inaudible.

Greg allowed himself to take a moment of sadistic pleasure at their silenced panic, but only a moment. As much as he knew they deserved it, he had a timetable to keep, and this was digging into his tinkering time.

"I am Atlas." Greg said, an internal voice modulator making his voice deeper, and giving it an inhuman quality. "I have captured you all. And I have surgically removed each and every single one of your powers. And now I will be giving you all to the Parahuman Response Team, so that you will each be tried under the full weight of the law."

Greg waited for a moment, letting that statement sink in.

"This is mercy." He said, "That I did not administer a summary execution to those of you who have committed crimes such as repeatedly organizing and subsequently profiting off of rape, countless repeated violent hate crimes, and the distribution of drugs which have claimed the lives of thousands in this area alone."

Greg took a breath. He had seen Lung's 'farms' with his own eyes. They were so much worse than he had imagined.

"If, by some form of happenstance, any of you escape justice, I will not stay my hand a second time."

Greg uttered another command, disengaging the ship's stealth field.

"Now, stand." He said, as the wall on the other side of the ship came down, creating a ramp down onto the boardwalk, directly facing the Oil Rig, where the PRT was located.

They remained seated, hesitating.

"I will not repeat myself." Greg said warningly.

They came to their feet quickly, and moments later, their manacles activated, forcing their hands together in front of them, and then gravitationally locking into two lines.

"Now march." He said.

They began to walk, a slow and miserable trudge.

Greg rose from what would best be described as a throne at the far end of the ship, and began to walk in between the two lines of villains, towering head and shoulders over them in his massive power armor.

Soon, he stepped into the light, and saw the crowd that had gathered around. And, fortunately, the local heroes were already here.

Greg walked slowly, careful to not outpace the two villains at the front of the line, Coil and Hookwolf, though only Hookwolf was in costume.

Greg came to a stop some fifteen feet away from the hero at the spearhead.

With an intentional movement, he clasped his hands behind his back, and widened his feet, falling into a militaristic stance.

"State your purpose, villain!" barked Armsmaster, as he readied his technological halberd.

"I have captured each and every single Protectorate recognized villain in Brockton Bay." Greg said, more to the crowd than to Armsmaster, "My purpose here is to turn them in to the Parahuman Response Team, so that they can be tried in a court of law."

Armsmaster visibly looked past Greg, at the captured villains, who were mostly in civilian clothes, and said, "Right." skepticism thick in his voice.

"Believe what you will." Greg said, "And I care not what you do with these criminals. I have more important things to do."

A compartment in his armor opened. From it, he pulled out a gunmetal gray box with a large black button on it. He tossed it over to Armsmaster, and it came to a stop mid air, floating directly in front of him.

"That device will deactivate and remove their bonds." He said. And then, he turned, and began to walk away. Armsmaster just stood and watched.

As he walked, he came to a stop some ten feet from the entrance to his ship. He turned to address the crowd.

"I am Atlas!" He said forcefully, "And this is only the beginning. To those of you who wear the title of villain proudly. To those of you who commit crimes against your fellow man. To those of you who think yourself above justice- Know this! Soon, you will face retribution!"

With that final word, he walked into the ship, and had it close.

The crowd watched on in awe as the ship began to float into the air with a futuristic buzz. With a flash of blue light it blurred off.

A moment later, Greg engaged the Stealth Engine, and reengaged the scanners. A floating screen followed him as he stepped out of his armor, and began speed walking to his on board labs, to keep up his tinkering.

With that screen he monitored the ongoing sixteen simultaneous raids on ABB, Empire, and Merchant facilities that he had his army of power armors undergo.

It all went without a hitch. The various unpowered gang members were hilariously outmatched in every conceivable way.

Less than five minutes after they began, it was over and every single gang member was subdued, and arranged face down on the nearest sidewalk.

Moments later, the autonomous power armors began to fly off, each carrying a victim to his base, so that he could provide medical care, and provide whatever other aid they may need.

----

Medical technology was easy.

His scanning technology could read at the atomic scale, and his computers had literal billions of examples of healthy humans. Likewise, Nanites were entirely under Armsmaster's purview.

It was trivial for Greg to create nanites capable of completely rebuilding a human body on the molecular level.

The problems came with repairing the psyche.

On the physical level, the level that Greg operated at, it was all chemical reactions, and electric impulses. It wouldn't be hard for him to add some extra correction parameters, since his nanites were already capable of corrections on this scale.

The hard part was deciding where the line was.

Some of these women were willing prostitutes. Those ones were easy. A warm meal, and a one time healing session was all it took to get them into good shape, and many of them even had families that he could return them to.

Some of these women were chained down onto beds and raped over and over again until they broke.

Some of these women were forced to mate with animals, because some sick fuck wanted to get their rocks off.

Some of these women weren't even women. They were children.

How do you even go about healing this many people?

Greg would have spent days or weeks, or even months agonizing over this. But he didn't have days or weeks or months.

The Sigmurgh was going to attack in a little over two months, and he needed to have his anti-endbringer weaponry fully online before that.

So, he created an AI, trained it on every book on psychology and therapy he could find, mass produced a humanoid customizable chassis for it, and put it in charge of the issue, so he could get back to work.

----

Project Birdshot was Greg's first real megaproject.

It's purpose was simple.

Kill the Sigmurgh.

The process was less so.

The Sigmurgh posed a dilemma.

It's ablative hyper dense body surrounding a practically indestructible core were effectively inviolate to conventional forces.

So Greg didn't use conventional forces. No, Greg fell back onto his most reliable technology. His Graviton Engine.

The primary instrument that Greg prepared was a repurposed Graviton Engine several dozen kilometers across.

It's function was simple, create a gravitational field, effectively multiplying the Sigmurgh's weight so much that she collapses into a black hole.

There is just one problem. How would he power it?

His projections for how much the Sigmurgh would weigh, even on a lowball estimate, mean that a Graviton Engine powerful enough to fuel it would need to be nearly a dozen times the size of the initial graviton field generator at minimum.

And Greg had no intention of risking a failed attempt.

So, his solution was to have the power source separate from the field generator.

Then came another problem. How to stop the Sigmurgh from hijacking and reverse engineering the field generator before it had a chance to activate on her.

Greg's solution was as follows.

He was the only thing that she was blind to, besides Scion. So, he would leave the field generator far away, and then he'd push her into it, because she can't move her, and then manually activate the generator, so that she couldn't predict it.

So, with a plan, he did what he did best, and started to build.

Soon, it was complete, and now, all that there was left to do is put his plan and preparation into action.

(Note: Chopshop's power, at least as described in the wiki, is a tinker based trump power, that improves as the size of the project increases. I'm ruling that it also improves his other powers. Also, Greg's powers are shardless. He lacks a conflict drive, and many of the limiters to thinkers, due to the interactions between his specialties powers.)

 

[Classist_Wierdo]

He armored up in absolute silence, his stealth fields would allow nothing else.

And then, in his power armor, he flew upwards, ascending nearly one hundred meters to the opened nape of a titanic nearly completely humanoid mech.

The power armor slotted into it's systems neatly.

"All systems online." said a mechanical voice.

Good. If even one of the mech's systems failed, the entire Canadian North would be obliterated by the meltdown that would follow, and the ecological effects alone would damn humanity.

As it was, he had already hollowed out nearly thirty continents' worth of mass from the mantle.

If his systems failed here, and he died, those cavities he created would collapse, causing a chain reaction that would result in nearly every volcano on the planet to erupt at once.

No, it was very important that his systems came online successfully.

"Initiate Birdshot Protocol." He said.

"Command recognized." The system responded.

The roof of the massive hangar the mech was built in opened up, splitting down the middle, and making room for his mech.

Greg engaged phantom muscles, and the mech's flight systems engaged, causing the whole thing to rise.

As he began to fly, the additional systems began to engage.

"Warship Shadow Caster fully online." Said the system.

Good. Shadow Caster was the entire point of the project, and the thing that would kill the Sigmurgh.

Greg watched on the 360° screen that ran around the control port, giving him a complete view of his surroundings.

"Engage thrusters, full throttle." Greg said. The mech accelerated to hypersonic speeds in an instant.

If Greg hadn't already completely replaced his central nervous system, he wouldn't be able to keep up with the machine.

As it was, however, Greg kept up with ease.

On his display, there was a small holographic globe showing his position and the position of his target.

Greg then turned in precisely the opposite direction to the Sigmurgh, and said, "Engage Negative Gravity Field Locally, Maximal Output."

A mech whose weight was measured in tons and written in scientific notation reduced it's effective mass and inertia to less than that of a compact car.

At the same time, Greg accelerated his mech to the highest possible speed.

"On my mark, completely reverse Negative Gravity Field." He said to the system, as his mech circled the globe, accelerating to subliminal speeds, only barely missing the Sigmurgh each time.

Soon, less than a minute after Greg initiated the project, a light on his screen flashed green.

The automated half of Project Birdshot was complete. He was cleared for impact

Greg already having a rhythm established, only took one more lap around the Earth. "Engage Shield Engine!" He shouted, as the g-forces were beginning to take effect on the parts of his body that were still organic.

And then a moment passed.

"Mark!" He shouted.

Greg passed out for a moment, even with his power armor providing local inertia dampening, the g-forces were enough to knock him out briefly.

When he awoke, his mech was gone. Now, he was floating in the exosphere with only his power armor.

And in front of him, only a couple dozen miles away floated a black hole, surrounded by gunmetal gray blocks, circling, with a single ring floating around it, rotating lazily, covered in flashing green lights.

If Greg still had the bottom half of his face, he would have grinned.

Project Birdshot worked!

He collapsed the Sigmurgh into a black hole!

Now for the fun part. Dealing with the important people.

----

Taylor Hebert heard about Atlas. Everybody has.

For the first week after he purged Brockton Bay, it was all everybody wanted to talk about.

Shit, it was national news.

New tinker appears out of thin air with a goddamn army of robots, and singlehandedly arrests four separate villainous cape teams, and tears out the metaphorical spine of the Brockton Bay Underworld literally overnight.

Taylor herself saw the impact in her own day to day life.

Literally the next day, the entirety of the gang population in Winslow abandoned their gang-colors.

She overheard horror stories from a guy who had been at an ABB facility during the Purge, which is what they had taken to calling it.

Brockton Bay Purge, is what they would call it in the news.

Of course, she would have heard of the cape responsible.

That said, she was still caught a little off guard when everything turned black for an instant.

The giant laser caught her even further off guard. A ray of burning orange piercing through the black, like a pillar of lava, like God himself decided to strike down humanity.

For a moment she wasn't even really sure what she was seeing. Then, a moment later, it was over.

The laser petered out, and all that was left was a gigantic skyscraper sized gunmetal grey monolith, in the same place the laser came from, it's tip still burning red hot.

A nearby pedestrian, some guy Taylor didn't even look twice at, screamed, pointing up at the sky.

She looked up, and couldn't help but scream herself.

An absolutely enormous black circle in the sky, taking up a huge portion of it, more than five times the size of the sun.

"Attention! Attention!" shouted a robotic woman's voice, like an answering machine, "This is not an emergency! Please direct your attention to the East, for a video message from Atlas."

East? Taylor looked towards the bay, and saw a gigantic screen floating in the sky, large enough that anybody on the city could see it.

And on that screen was the image of Atlas, standing in that military stance, with shoulder width feet, and hands clasped behind his back, standing in what looks to be the bridge of a spaceship.

Taylor felt intimidated through the screen.

"People of Brockton Bay, I am Atlas." he said powerfully, "And I have slain the Sigmurgh."

What?

"The black hole in the sky is the Sigmurgh's corpse. The Hopekiller is no more."

Taylor was stunned.

"In interest of the peace of mind of the public, I shall explain what, precisely, I have done."

The man turned and began to walk.

"Project Birdshot, operated off of four separate megastructures. The first, the lynchpin of the project, the mechanism by which the Sigmurgh was collapsed into a black hole, was Warship Shadow Caster. A twenty five mile spaceship designed for the sole purpose of creating a space of hypergravity."

"Now, the Sigmurgh is a tinker. Obviously, leaving such powerful tinkertech within her reach is a recipe for disaster. This is the purpose of the Sicarius Mark IV, a Kinetic Mass Driver capable of flying at subliminal speeds in atmosphere. In essence, the very very large hammer, too fast and too robust to be tampered with by the Sigmurgh."

Taylor was beginning to wonder if this was even real.

"The purpose of the Sicarius is to strike the Sigmurgh hard enough to launch her into the Shadow Caster's Gravity Well. There is a problem with this. The Graviton Engine, the gravity field generator, would produce too much radiation. If I ran it at the levels that are necessary to collapse the Sigmurgh into a black hole, the resulting energy waste would almost certainly knock the Earth out of orbit, and the heat alone would ignite the atmosphere, and glass the whole planet."

She felt her heart drop.

"This is the purpose of the Lumina Reactor. That structure out in the ocean, that is the Lumina Reactor. It is a Quantum Hyperstate Anti-Matter Generation Plant, and the means by which the Shadow Caster is powered."

Taylor looked over, and saw the metal spire looming over the city.

"That laser was the energy transfer immediately preceding the full activation of the Shadow Caster, and that blackness that you all experienced was the Radiation Dampening Field that prevented the transfer beam from igniting the atmosphere."

"Holy shit..." She heard that bystander say under his breath.

"The final part of the Project Birdshot was the Mirror Space Ring. It is not visible to the naked eye from Earth, but it is what is responsible for keeping the sigmurgh's corpse from eating the planet, and it is what is responsible for shielding the planet from it's radiation."

Atlas came to a stop in front of a glowing holographic map, one of the ones that are the whole globe stretched flat, with several glowing points marked.

"Now, people of Earth, what does this mean for you," He said rhetorically, "Ultimately, nothing. I have no business interfering with the lives of common man. My actions here is fulfilling my duty to mankind. I am no philosopher, and I do not claim to be a sage, and so I do not trust myself to rule humanity as I could. I shall do what I know is right, and I leave the rest in the hands of those who can suffer the consequences."

Atlas pointed to the map.

"I shall eradicate these existential threats to mankind. The Endbringers, most notably, but there are greater threats hiding in the darkness. And then, once there are no more monsters to slay, I shall retire my mantle, and I will return to my family, and leave the fate of humanity in it's own hands."

Atlas put his hands down.

"And, to those of you who have terrorized mankind, content to rule as petty kings and killers, I have already dispatched my Orbital Bombardment Platforms."

The video abruptly ended, and the screen blinked out of existence.

What? What the hell just happened.

Taylor, a little shell shocked, decided to just go home, because what the hell else was she supposed to do.

Taylor idly wondered if this was what people felt like when the Endbringers first appeared.

Soon, she made it home, and went straight up into her room.

Pretty much as soon as she took off her backpack, and changed into her pajamas, there was a knock at the door.

Taylor was surprised. She honestly couldn't even remember the last time somebody knocked on the door.

She walked down to the living room, and, in a fit of suspicion, peered through the peephole, only to see nothing but a grey chestplate.

For a moment she wasn't sure what she was looking at, she heard another knock, and realized it was power armor.

Power armor! A cape!

Taylor, immediately opened up the door, and came face to waist with a familiar figure she had just seen.

Atlas.

"A-Atlas!" She said in surprise, "Wha-what brings you here?"

What business does a cape like Atlas have with her? Did he find out about her powers? Wait no, why would he care? Its not like her powers were anything special. And Taylor already knew she hasn't done anything illegal.

"May I come in?" He asked, in his inhuman baritone voice, "This is a very important matter best discussed in private."

"Of course," Taylor said a little too quickly, and stepped out of the way. For a moment, Taylor was struck by how massive the cape was. Or at least his power armor.

He had to duck and enter the doorway sideways.

"Ms. Hebert, it would be best if you had a seat for this."

Immediately, her stomach dropped. She knew that this meant nothing good. Still, she did as he said.

And then, she watched as he slowly lowered himself onto the couch next to her.

"I'll be frank, you are a Sigmurgh Bomb, and I am here to diffuse it."

Taylor felt shock and then horror. "What? How?" she said,

"Brockton Bay in general was a ticking time bomb that was going to blow either way." he said, "You were just the enriched uranium that turns things nuclear. But that doesn't matter anymore, because I am here to prevent that explosion."

Taylor, couldn't comprehend what he was saying. She was a Sigmurgh Bomb? How would that even happen? She had never gone anywhere near an endbringer battle. "How? How am I a Sigmurgh Bomb?"

"Well, to begin with, you won't stop going to Winslow. That means that the bullying campaign will continue to escalate, more and more until you are forced to use your own power. What you don't know is that Sophia Hess is Shadow Stalker, a Ward. You would almost certainly maim or even kill her. And when a Ward is attacked by a villain, which you would be, that means that Alexandria comes to town. And your power is effectively a hard counter to her. You would kill Alexandria."

Taylor, once more was stunned.

"A dead Alexandria will have wide reaching consequences. But locally, that means that the other two members of the Triumvirate will not risk fighting you, and the local Protectorate Branch will also pull out, leaving New Wave as the sole heroes in the city. This will result in a gang war escalating into open warfare, with massive civilian casualties. To make things worse, the moment a member of New Wave gets killed, Panacea is going to snap and turn Brockton Bay into an even worse Ellisberg."

Taylor didn't even know what to say to that.

"I have already largely defused the situation, with my Purge, but there is still the risk of you attacking Sophia Hess. Or worse, having a second trigger, which would make you unhinged, and even more dangerous. The solution to that particular risk is simply to prevent both Sophia Hess and Emma Barnes from bullying you."

"How are you going to do that?" Taylor asked.

"That is up to you." He said, "Personally, I could care less. If it was up to me, I'd atomize them both and be done with it, but your psych report indicates that you'd prefer to take them to court, and have them prosecuted under the full weight of the law."

"Is... Is that possible? Nobody would speak up for me. And we can't pay for any lawyers."

"I have effectively infinite money." Atlas said,

"Oh," She replied. That rather neatly solved that particular issue.

Atlas pulled out a phone from a compartment of armor, and handed it to her.

"You will be contacted by the lawyers I will hire through that phone. My contact is saved in it, so if you change your mind at any time, you can call me so that we can discuss it. Now if you'd excuse me, there are many things I need to do."

He then vanished.

Taylor wasn't entire sure that this was even real.

And then the phone began to ring.

Spoiler: Author's Note

Probably not going to update this one for a little while. I debated on having a romance subplot based around how Greg, the original, had a huge crush on Taylor, but I decided to cut it, since I figured it would harm the pacing, and also delay this post even further.

 

[Jack-21]

Don't really know why he addressed the people of Brockton bay, it should have been more appropriate to say people of the world.

 

[Classist_Wierdo]

I'll address that next chapter, but this message was pre-recorded. The rest of the world got a different message.