Chapter 182: The Masters Plan
The Master lifted Joan from her bolted cot as though she weighed nothing at all.
The girl did not resist. She couldn’t. Her head lolled heavily against his shoulder, her half-open eyes drifting and unfocused as her mind still swam somewhere far below the surface after two full months of heavy suppression. It would take time for her senses to fully return—for the world to slowly knit itself back into shape behind her eyes. For now, she was little more than a warm, breathing weight in his arms, and the Master carried her with a strange, careful gentleness.
"She’s lighter than she should be," he murmured, speaking more to himself than to anyone else. "They starved her thin down here. No matter. We’ll fix that soon enough."
He turned toward the open vault door where Hexi and Shadow stood waiting in the corridor.
"The Hero Association will already be moving," the Master said calmly. "They’ll have heard the alarm the exact moment that technician made his radio call, and they have a stadium full of the world’s strongest heroes standing by. We won’t have long before the vanguard arrives." A thin, cold smile touched his lips. "Which is precisely why we’re going to give them a great deal to focus on."
He looked directly at Hexi.
"Open the cell doors. All of them. Every cell, every block, every floor. Let the entire prison out."
Hexi’s face instantly lit up like a child handed a lit match in a powder keg. "All of them? Even the big ones? Even the ones they keep permanently asleep?"
"All of them."
"Ohhh, you spoil me, boss." Hexi giggled, his fingers already twitching with manic energy. His two hollow-eyed puppets—the containment technicians still shuffling mindlessly on his psychic strings—turned in unison and lurched back toward the primary control banks lining the central hub. Their slack, lifeless hands reached out to the master release panels—the emergency overrides that no sane operator would ever touch—and began entering the security codes their muscle memory still held.
Deep within the subterranean walls of the facility, something massive and heavy began to unlock.
The Master did not stay to watch the chaos unfold. He gave a small nod to Shadow. The girl in the corner sighed, pushed off the wall, and spread her thin hands into the dark.
The thick shadows of Sublevel Nine—heavy and pooled in every corner—rose up around the three of them like ink filling a jar. The dark swallowed the Master and the sleeping girl in his arms, swallowed Hexi mid-giggle, and swallowed Shadow last of all. Within seconds, the subterranean wheel at the bottom of the world was completely empty, save for two puppet technicians methodically opening every door ever built to stay shut.
They materialized on the roof.
The cold night air hit them instantly—a sharp, clean contrast to the recycled dark below. The three of them stood at the absolute highest point of the prison, looking down over the vast sprawl of the city stretching beyond the outer security walls. For a brief moment, it felt almost peaceful up on the rooftop.
Then the screaming started.
It began small—a single, distant shriek—and then it spread block by block as the first wave of impures reached the city streets. The prison’s massive outer gates had opened wide onto a world that had no idea what was coming, and hundreds of the worst monsters humanity had ever locked away were pouring out into the night all at once.
From the roof, they watched the nightmare unfold like a living miniature display.
Panicked citizens ran helter-skelter through the streets below, tiny distant figures scattering in every direction imaginable. And the horrors came right after them. Some of the impures looked nearly human, sprinting fast and vanishing into narrow alleys to hunt. Others were not human at all—monstrous, twisted shapes that unfolded to the height of multistory buildings. One of them—a slick grey creature made entirely of limbs and extra mouths—tore straight into a fleeing crowd near the perimeter wall, pulling bodies apart without even slowing its stride.
Fires bloomed across the skyline. Emergency alarms wailed across the entire district. A hundred separate catastrophes ignited in the span of a single minute.
And then, one by one, the heroes began to appear.
Streaks of bright light and fast motion dropped out of the night sky and blurred in from the horizon. These first responders arrived directly into a nightmare, throwing themselves frantically into the spreading chaos. One costumed figure caught the collapsing side of an apartment building, holding it up. Another cut a rampaging beast off from a group of fleeing school children. It was nowhere near enough to stop the wave—not yet—but they kept coming, and more followed right behind them.
The Master watched all of it with the mild, patient interest of a man watching rain fall on someone else’s garden.
In his arms, Joan stirred.
Her eyelids fluttered weakly. Her fingers, curled loosely against his coat, twitched and moved. Her cracked lips parted to form the very first clear words she had spoken in two long months.
"...Book," she mumbled, her voice thin, dry, and small. "I want... a book. I want to read a book."
Hexi tilted his head at the faint sound.
"She’s waking up," he observed. For once, the chaotic giddiness had drained out of his voice, replaced by something almost thoughtful. He turned toward the Master, a genuine question surfacing behind his enormous, wide eyes. "Boss. What are we actually doing up here? She’s nearly awake. Weren’t we supposed to be gone by now? The plan was to get her out, take her somewhere quiet, and figure out how to point her power at the heroes properly. That was the plan."
He gestured down at the burning city, pointing at the streaks of hero light rapidly multiplying across the sky.
"Look at them," Hexi urged, clutching a fresh strand of his hair and winding it tight around a finger. "There are more and more of them arriving every single second. If we sit up here waiting for her to wake up, they’ll swarm this whole district. They’ll trip over us. They’ll take her back, and everything we did tonight will have been for nothing. We should leave right now. Why aren’t we leaving?"
The Master was quiet for a long moment, calmly watching the sky fill with heroes.
"Because that was never my plan, Hexi," he said gently. "Taking her somewhere quiet? Pointing her at the heroes later from a safe distance?" He shook his head slowly. "That was what you thought the plan was. It was never mine."
He shifted the girl in his arms, turning her gently so that her half-open, drifting eyes faced out over the burning city and the gathering army of heroes.
"I don’t want to keep the heroes away from her," he said softly. "I want them right here. As many of them as the world can possibly send. I want every single hero on this planet to come running to this exact spot." His smile widened—soft, pleasant, and utterly terrible. "The more of them that gather, the better it is. That is the entire point of tonight."
Hexi stared at him, genuinely confused. "...But why?"
The Master looked down at the small girl waking slowly in his arms—at the child whose deepest boredom spawned monsters, and whose wildest stories became flesh. When he spoke, his voice dropped to something almost tender.
"Because a story is nothing without an audience," he said. "And I have brought her the largest one in the world."
And in that very instant, as though his words had personally summoned it, the night sky directly above the prison tore wide open.
Dozens of spatial folds ripped into being across the air all at once, and through them poured the absolute best response the entire planet could scramble to send. The elite heroes of a dozen nations—straight from the tournament convention—dropped down into the burning district in a wave of light, power, and fury.
Nectron. Vixen. Dana. Mercury, heavily bandaged and grim. Furry, small and fierce. Raoi. Danqing. Walküre. Hunter.
Face after face after face—the absolute strongest fighters on Earth—arriving all at once to save a city.
Arriving, all at once, exactly where the Master wanted them to be.
He looked down at the gathering storm of elite heroes, and then down at the small, pale girl waking in his arms, and he smiled.
"Soon, this disease will be nonexistent."