Chapter Text
It had never been Chargebolt's intention to be messing with far too many wires, all too aware of the seconds ticking by as the sounds of fighting got closer and closer. Honestly, how did he even end up there?
… Well, he knew that, actually. Just because his memory was fucked didn't mean he forgot everything that had happened.
He had been fighting alongside the newly-appointed “heroes” — he wasn't sure the name would stick, since it did feel extremely cheesy, but hey, it worked fine for now — and trying to figure out how to get to the apparent bomb planted in the building Iwadare Ikumi had chosen as her base. He would've gone with Frostbite and a few others to help with evacuations if he didn't know he was probably the most qualified person to disarm any weapons the criminal — villain? Is that what they were gonna be calling them now? — might have, considering his experience and power.
"Chargebolt, we'll clear you a way through the side entrance, hurry," a voice crackled in his ear, and he shot a look towards the aforementioned door. The heroes were doing their best to push their opponents out of the way, just enough that he should be able to slip through and inside.
He caught the wrist of the guy he'd been fighting, electricity thrumming under his skin as it travelled through his fingers to knock him out, dropped him, and ran before the body even hit the ground. It took some weaving around and ducking from hits and kicks, but he slammed into the metal door and pushed it open, immediately letting it fall shut behind him with a thud. Not wasting time to catch his breath, he hurried down the corridor and began his search.
If he was trying to blow up half a country — yes, that was apparently the blast range of the weapon, planted in the middle of Japan, where many, if not most, superpowered people ended up in one way or another, considering its laws were slightly more tolerant of them than most other countries — he would plant the bomb either somewhere so obvious the heroes wouldn't even bother checking, or somewhere they would never even think of.
The entire building was buzzing with power running through the wiring; he could feel its flow all around him. Turning down his comm, he set his hand on the closest wall and winced at the feeling of the excess electricity shooting through him. It was easier to track where it was going like this, though, and he followed the energy to where most of it seemed to be headed. They didn’t have much information about the bomb Iwadare had made, but he figured it was safe to assume wherever the most power was concentrated would also happen to be the base of her operations; ergo, where he could potentially find the weapon, or at least some clue as to its actual whereabouts.
There were no guards in the building, it seemed; apparently, all the fighting was happening outside. Incredibly stupid, in his opinion, but he wasn’t about to complain about his job being easier.
All of the currents lead to the center of the building, so that’s where he headed; the whole structure was huge, being some old warehouse of sorts that Iwadare had bought a few years back and entirely refurbished as her lair-lab thingy. He passed by far too many doors damaged in way too many ways for his liking — he was pretty sure some of the stains scattered throughout the halls were old blood.
He thought back to the file he’d been given about Iwadare several months ago, when the Meta Institute finally got properly concerned about her actions and decided to track him down to get him in on the whole situation. She’d been on a watchlist for years, though the “heroes” — still called agents, then, more focused on controlling superpowers and their users than fighting crime — had never gotten enough evidence to receive the governmental backing necessary for an operation to take her down. She was too influential, too connected to the fine gears of the scientific and political world, for that. So, the Institute stuck to recon, trying to find anything to smear her image enough to be allowed to do something about it.
And then they found out about the bomb and Chargebolt got dragged into the middle of it.
He had his own connections and ways of gaining information, enough so that he knew to schedule more thorough and common patrols in the district Iwadare had settled in. He’d stopped his fair share of shady deals and deliveries she’d had her eyes on, he knew, stalled her progress at least a little. Clearly, it hadn’t been enough to stop her, though.
The Institute agent had basically thrown the file and ear comm at him, almost begging him to help. He’d agreed, of course — what else was he supposed to do? Let them do everything on their own, inexperienced and out of their depths, put the fate of millions of people in their hands when they had barely a drug bust to their names? Absolutely not, no, never. He hadn’t liked it, having to work with other people, most of whom had their stupid holier-than-thou attitudes just because they could throw a better punch than a normal person, but he did it.
And now he was here, having short-circuited a biometric scanner to get into a room that looked like an evil scientist’s wet dream.
“Chargebolt! I’ve been expecting you.” His eyes dart around the room in search of the owner of the voice — there . A short woman with black hair pulled into a bun so tight he was pretty sure it was pulling her eyes wider than they were meant to be stepped out from behind a pillar blinking with various colourful buttons. She held a translucent ball the size of a melon, though he could barely tell it wasn’t perfectly opaque with the pitch-black substance contained within it; he couldn’t tell whether it was solid, liquid, smoke, or something in between. He recognized her from the pictures attached to the documents he’d received.
“Yeah? Where’s my welcome committee, then? Don’t tell me you skipped out on the confetti.” His voice came out crackly and he cursed internally; he must’ve banged up his voice changer at some point during all the fighting. It was going to be a pain to repair or replace.
Iwadare smiled tightly. Every inch of her skin from the chin down was covered — turtleneck, lab coat, rubber gloves, pants, high boots, it was like she was shielding herself from the very air. She held her arms slightly in front of her, as though trying to avoid unnecessary contact with the object in her hands. Bad sign, that was.
“I’ve heard a lot about you, Chargebolt,” she said. Chargebolt frowned, sparks dancing through his hair and fingers twitching.
“Yeah? What did you hear? How much people love me?” The ball she held was obviously some sort of weapon; poison, maybe?
“Oh, no, no. Nobody loves a monster like you ,” she said and he tensed, curling his hands into fists. This wasn’t the first time he had been called that and it wouldn’t be the last; didn’t mean it didn’t sting just because he was used to it. She took a step forward, flashing her teeth for a split second. “But you know that already, don’t you? You’ve known that since you were made, haven’t you? B-24?”
Chargebolt's ears rang and electricity arched through the air, wiry claws spanning through the room. Iwadare’s eyes widened and she stumbled back, clutching the ball to her chest as her body spasmed with the excess currents tearing through her.
“ Don’t call me that ,” he spat, tongue buzzing with the taste of his superpower. “The bomb. Where is it? How do I deactivate it?”
She smirked, even with the pain cutting and twisting her face, and straightened up despite the currents he could see snaking over her body. The walls were covered in their own strings of electricity; Chargebolt was more or less resistant to it, but it still closed in on both of them like a cage.
“Thi-is li-ittle-e th-thi-ing?” She held up the ball, voice shattering in a similar way it would have had she been speaking into a fan. “Yo-ou ca-an’t. So-on as i-it bre-eaks, i-it blo-ows.”
Fuck .
“You were gonna die for this?” he asked, because Iwadare despised superpowers to the point of wanting to kill everyone with them, but did she hate them enough to kill herself ? He doubted it. There had to be something in place to protect her, something he could use to neutralize the bomb or, at the very least, minimize the damage it caused.
Her eyes darted to the side before focusing on him again, but that was enough. He followed her gaze to a bare piece of wall and marched over to inspect it. Once he was closer, he could see the faint outline of a door, which he traced with his fingers in search of the opening mechanism.
“This your bunker?” he asked. “What’s it made out of?”
He was met with silence and looked over his shoulder to check on the woman. She was now kneeling on the ground, curled around the bomb and spasming periodically with mute whines. He hummed, going back to the door. She wasn’t an issue for the time being. He tapped the comm in his ear.
“Chargebolt here,” he spoke, hoping his words were still understandable even through the broken voice changer. He waited until one of the heroes — Speaker, if he remembered correctly — acknowledged him before continuing, gently rapping his knuckles around the door to get a feel for the tech behind it: “I found Iwadare with the bomb. Ground floor, near the centre. Not a standard bomb, but some sort of glass or plastic ball with what I’m guessing is an explosive substance inside it. No deactivation mechanism, has to break to blow. Currently trying to find a way into Iwadare’s bunker, might be able to blow the bomb inside it and contain it. Over.”
“We’re sending someone as backup. Keep doing what you’re doing. Over.” Chargebolt agreed and the line cut, allowing him to focus entirely on his job again.
There was a keypad behind a hidden panel, he found, and sent a string of electricity into the wall to short-circuit it. Smoke came out of the panel and the edges of the door as they slid open with groans and suction sounds. He grimaced at the noise but turned back to Iwadare, stepping over to crouch in front of her. He poked at her shoulder, feeling the pricking static he usually did whenever he touched something charged.
“I’ll need that bomb you’ve got there, thank you very much.” It took some effort to pry the ball from her grip as she scowled and squirmed, but he managed after a few minutes during which he could hear some of the outside commotion move closer — his allies were likely having trouble separating from their enemies but still wanted to get to him to help. Noble, he supposed, but he wasn't going to appreciate it much if they pulled a fight into the room, considering the presumably fairly fragile bomb.
The weapon was heavier than he expected, and freezing to the touch even through his gloves. Now that he had a closer look at it, he guessed that the substance inside was a very thick gas, which was… probably the worst of the options. It meant it would likely spread far beyond the warehouse with ease, and he still had no certainty about what it would actually do. Was it poison? An explosive? Something else entirely? He had no idea, and he wasn’t stupid enough to think Iwadare would tell him anything about it.
She had implied its effect would be immediate, though. That… wasn’t good. Meant his plan of setting it off inside the bunker was less risk-free than he’d hoped.
He should probably figure out how to close the bunker door before those thoughts could proceed anywhere. So, he carefully set the bomb down in the corner of the bunker — which was furnished with a bed, closet, fridge, toilet, and kitchenette, shit , Iwadare planning for a stay long enough to need all of those meant nothing good — and turned to the faintly smoking keypad on the inside of the room. He pried the cover off to reveal the wires inside, all a mess he could hardly begin to try and understand.
He scowled at Iwadare. Somehow, she must’ve known about and prepared for how adept he was with tech innerworkings.
He could hear fighting.
Cursing again, he stuck his hands into the overabundance of wires to start parsing through them. There wasn’t much time — as soon as the fight entered the room, the bunker door needed to be closed. Too much risk otherwise. He needed to get it closed .
He slipped a blade from his sleeve to start cutting the wires. Many sparked, far more than they would have had anyone else been handling them, but he paid it no mind. He just needed the right ones, the ones that actually channeled electricity into the mechanism rather than through it, just in place to confuse him, and then he could power it himself. The wires all looked the same and there were so many , slipping through his frantic fingers and getting lost between all the other ones, but he just needed–
There.
Those half dozen or so. They were part of the keypad circuit. Now he just needed to–
Crash!
A body slammed into the wall next to the bunker door. Dressed in bright red-and-yellow, Chargebolt recognized them as one of the heroes he’d met during the mission’s first official debrief. Skipper? They groaned lowly, but didn’t get up.
And Chargebolt was out of time.
He gripped the needed wires tightly, making sure he was touching all the cut ends fully. He couldn’t afford a mistake here.
So much noise. Yelling and clashing and punching. He glanced up, meeting Frostbite’s eyes, which widened momentarily. He flashed her a crooked smile she couldn't see, she opened her mouth, abandoning the man she’d been fghting to reach towards him–
There’s never any thunder to accompany Chargebolt's lightning, but the door slammed closed faster than it had any right to nonetheless.
His whole body buzzed , and he clumsily let go off the wires with unfeeling fingers. The sounds of fighting were deafeningly silent beneath the ringing in his ears, but he imagined it continued. He wasn’t done yet. He wasn’t done until the bomb had been neutralized.
He glanced at it, laying harmlessly on the floor, black swirling within it like Death incarnate. It hardly looked like a weapon of mass destruction.
He knelt by it, brushing a hand over the surface. He needed to… set it off. Preferably while letting those outside know what he had done.
Hopefully, channeling all of his remaining energy into blowing it up would do the trick.
He pressed both hands flat against the bomb.
Breathed in.
He hoped Tenkami and the twins wouldn’t miss him too much
Breathed out.
And let the frail dam of his body break .