Chapter 3: The Ticking Floor

The fuel tank blew.

The shockwave hit first, a flat wall of force that turned the air into something solid enough to bruise ribs against. Jarrin's vision went white for a half-second, and when it came back the entire facility had shifted three degrees, as if someone had pushed the floor sideways and forgotten to adjust the walls. Kazir rode the blast forward on a platform of pulverized concrete, the orange glow still pulsing from his skin and the ground beneath his feet. He was coming toward them, fast, and every step he took left a crater that hadn't existed a moment before.

"Down!" Jazz yelled. She grabbed Jarrin's arm and threw them both sideways toward a cluster of support pillars. Jolly Roger appeared behind them, and a bubble formed at its fingertip, reaching for the chunk of ceiling that was already starting to crack. The bubble popped against it mid-fall, and the chunk turned inert, losing whatever structural integrity had made it dangerous. It hit the ground with a dull thud that would have been a skull if the bubble hadn't worked.

Tony landed hard on the far side of the room, rolling with a repulsor gauntlet already charged. Clint was half a second behind him, favoring his right side badly. Between the three of them and the pillars where Jazz had shoved Jarrin, there was forty feet of open industrial floor. And Kazir was crossing it like he was walking through a museum, hands outstretched, leaving a trail of glowing fractures in everything he passed.

Jazz split from the group without thinking. A card left her hand, spinning end over end, and caught the light from the emergency strips along the ceiling. She stepped into it. The card disappeared from where she'd thrown it, and appeared two feet to the left of Kazir's position, near a row of storage racks. Jazz came out of it, moving low, close to the ground, cutting the angle to Kazir's flank.

Jarrin stayed behind the pillar. He could hear Kazir breathing, heavy and controlled, like someone who'd spent years practicing how to make violence look casual. The orange glow around Kazir had spread to the floor in a radius of maybe fifteen feet, a circle of cracked concrete that hummed with energy. Every crack was a vein. Every vein was feeding toward the main tank, which was still standing, still whole, and still glowing from where Kazir had been touching it.

Jarrin's Stand manifested beside him, Jolly Roger stepping out from the pillar's shadow with its red eyes fixed on Kazir. The bubble formed at the tip of its finger, smaller than the last time, barely the size of a grapefruit. Jarrin had to be precise. Too small and it wouldn't connect. Too big and it would pop before it reached anything.

Kazir's gaze found Jarrin across the open floor. Recognition. That was the worst part, honestly. This man had looked at Jarrin and known exactly what he was dealing with. Bomb Voyage appeared around Kazir in a flash of orange light, a hulking figure with what looked like blasting caps for knuckles and a face that might have been human if human faces ever belonged to things that detonated for sport.

"I know what you are," Kazir said. His voice carried across the chamber with unnatural clarity, as if the room itself was carrying it for him. "Stand users. Two of them. You're the ones who destroyed my last position."

Jarrin didn't answer. He watched Kazir raise both hands, and the floor beneath Kazir's feet darkened. Concrete turned to mush, then to something that looked almost liquid, and then solidified again into a shape that could only be described as a ramp. Kazir was surfing on it, angled upward toward the upper level of the facility, and from up there his hands swept outward in a wide arc.

The floor exploded everywhere they stood.

Not all at once, but in sequence, pulses of concussive force radiating from a dozen points in the storage floor. Jazz was already moving through a card portal, appearing behind a support beam as the ground beneath her exploded, and Jarrin grabbed Clint by the back of his jacket and yanked him behind a tank before the next pulse hit. Tony took a hit to the left shoulder plate, and the sound his suit made was wrong, a high-pitched whine that meant something inside it had shattered.

"Stark!" Jazz called from behind the beam. "Are you operational?"

"My shoulder's fried. Repulsors at forty percent." Tony's voice came through the comms system, or his suit's internal speaker, Jarrin couldn't tell which. "I can still fly, but don't bet on it."

Jarrin peeked around the tank. Kazir was gone, gone from the open floor, vanished into the upper levels of the facility with that terrifying casualness of someone who'd already won and was just making sure they understood the scope. The orange glow was still everywhere. Everywhere he'd touched, the concrete was cracked and pulsing with a faint heat that made the air shimmer.

"He planted charges," Jarrin said. "Or something like them. Everywhere. The whole floor."

Clint was sitting against the tank now, breathing hard, his hand still pressed to his side. "We can't cross open ground. Every step is a trip wire."

"Then we don't cross open ground." Jazz's voice came from the beam overhead, and Jarrin looked up to see her looking down at them through a gap in the concrete. She'd thrown another card, and it was pinned to the beam's underside, shimmering. "We go up. I can portal us to the upper deck. He's on the upper deck, so we catch him on his own territory."

"Too dangerous," Tony said. "If he's expecting us up there--"

"He's expecting us to run. Or to die. He's not expecting us to come back." Jazz pulled herself up and disappeared through a gap in the ceiling that hadn't existed a moment ago. She came through on the other side of the beam, closer to the edge, looking down at them with that grin that always meant she was planning something terrible. "Who's with me?"

Jarrin stood up. Clint grabbed his ankle.

"Don't follow her," Clint said. "He'll have the upper deck rigged. Every surface. Every wall."

"Which is why we don't walk on the floor." Jazz looked down at Jarrin. "Take my hand."

He took it. The card on the beam shimmered, and Jarrin felt the familiar sensation of falling through something that wasn't solid, stepping sideways out of the normal geometry of the room. They emerged on the upper deck, a mezzanine overlooking the storage floor below, and Jarrin's first thought was that Jazz had been right about one thing.

Kazir was waiting for them.

He stood near the railing of the mezzanine with both arms crossed, Bomb Voyage beside him looking like it was on break, the blasting-cap knuckles resting comfortably on the concrete. The mezzanine stretched behind him, a long walkway lined with equipment and junction boxes and conduits that ran the length of the facility.

"You two are persistent," Kazir said. "I'll give you that. But persistence without understanding your own nature is just stubbornness. And stubbornness gets people killed."

"What do you want?" Jarrin asked.

Kazir tilted his head. "You don't know. You really don't know what you are." He looked at Jazz. "Or you. You both have the aura. The pressure. Standing users, at least. I've been hunting you for three years. Three years, and I've only found two."

"Three years?" Jarrin processed this. "That's a long time to stalk strangers."

"This isn't stalking. This is a cleanup." Kazir uncrossed his arms. "The world isn't ready for what you are. Stands. They're weapons. Reality itself, in the hands of people who treat them like party tricks. I'm doing this to protect the world from people like you."

"So you kill people," Jazz said.

"I neutralize threats." Kazir's expression didn't change. "Everything I've done has been precise. Targeted. The man who created me wanted this, and I'm the one he sent to do it. You two are the last pieces he didn't account for, but you're not the real threat. The real threat is what your powers represent. Reality-bending. Concept manipulation. If this gets out, everyone with a Stand becomes a walking weapon."

"Is that your justification?" Jarrin asked. "That you're the police of something you clearly have no idea how to police."

Kazir's eyes flicked to Jarrin's hand, and Jarrin understood what he was looking at. Jolly Roger was still visible to him, still standing just behind Jarrin's shoulder. Kazir had seen it the whole time.

"I know what your Stand does," Kazir said. "I've watched it work. You steal properties. Properties of objects. That's dangerous in its own right. If you could steal the explosive properties from my charges, every one of these tanks becomes harmless. Every pipe, every beam." He spread his hands. "That's why I'm ending this here."

He raised both hands again. The mezzanine shuddered. Jarrin looked down and saw the floor beneath Kazir's feet cracking, the cracks spreading outward in all directions like a map of some catastrophic earthquake. The orange glow pulsed from every fracture.

Jazz pulled a card from her jacket. A single playing card, face up, the queen of spades. She looked at it for a moment, then held it flat and tossed it toward a junction box on the wall. The card embedded itself in the metal housing, and Jazz stepped into the card's space as she'd done before, but this time she pulled Jarrin through with her.

They reappeared behind Kazir. He'd expected it. He always expected it. He turned and threw something at Jazz mid-air, a fist wreathed in orange light, and the fist hit Jazz's card portal just as she came out of it. The explosion detonated inside the portal's space, and Jazz took the full blast, thrown sideways and hitting the mezzanine railing hard enough to bend it.

Jarrin's Stand was already moving. Jolly Roger's bubble formed and shot toward the junction box on the wall where Jazz had thrown the card, popping against the metal. The orange glow drained from the junction box, the metal going dull and inert. Then the bubble reached the ground, the floor beneath Kazir, and the orange glow there dimmed to a faint pulse.

Kazir staggered. Just for a second. But a second was all Jazz needed. She was moving before the bubble popped, already pulling cards from her jacket, three of them, four, throwing them in an arc around Kazir's position. Each card caught the light and shimmered, and Jazz stepped into the nearest one, reappearing behind Kazir with a kick that caught him in the ribs.

Kazir went airborne. Jazz followed him through the card network, stepping from card to card like she was playing a game she'd invented, appearing above him, beside him, striking from angles that made no sense to anyone watching. Kazir tried to retaliate, tried to detonate the air itself, but Jazz's cards were creating pockets of displaced space where explosions couldn't propagate. Every time Kazir raised his hands, there was a card between him and whatever he wanted to detonate.

Jarrin saw his opening. Kazir was off-balance, recovering from Jazz's kick, and his hands were dropping. Jolly Roger formed a bubble at its fingertip, big this time, the size of a basketball, and sent it at Kazir's chest. The bubble connected with the orange glow still pulsing from Kazir's own suit, from the residue of Bomb Voyage's power that clung to his clothes like static. The bubble popped, and the explosive charge in Kazir's outfit vanished.

Kazir looked down at his chest. His eyes widened. For the first time since they'd met him, Kazir looked surprised.

Then Tony hit him.

The repulsor charge came from the stairwell entrance, a concentrated beam of energy that struck Kazir in the back and sent him face-down into the mezzanine railing. Kazir's body bent over the metal, and the rail cracked under the impact. Tony appeared from around the stairwell door, one repulsor gauntlet dead and the other firing in short bursts, moving with the precision of someone who'd been fighting since before the building had a name.

Kazir rolled. He rolled like water, like he'd anticipated the hit and was already gone before it landed, emerging from the other side of the mezzanine with blood on his temple and a fresh set of cracks forming in the floor. He didn't run. Running would have been normal. Kazir walked, deliberately, to the far end of the mezzanine where a service door stood open.

Behind him, the mezzanine began to glow.

Every crack that Jazz had been blocking, every charge that Jarrin had been stealing, flared orange simultaneously. The mezzanine itself was becoming the bomb, every section of floor and wall and railing pulsing with energy, and Kazir was just standing there watching them with his hands at his sides.

"Jump," Jazz said. She held up a card. "Jump through."

Jarrin looked at the card. Then at the mezzanine. Then at the distance to the opposite side, which was maybe thirty feet of glowing concrete.

"That's a lot of distance," he said.

"Jump."

He jumped. The card caught him halfway across the gap, and he stepped through it and appeared on the far side of the mezzanine, on a walkway that connected to a corridor Jarrin hadn't seen before. Jazz followed through, then Tony, and finally Clint, who limped through last with his good hand gripping the railing and his bloodied side pressed against the wall.

Kazir's side of the mezzanine detonated.

The explosion was massive, directional, aimed at the corridor they'd just crossed. It blew a hole through the mezzanine floor that dropped them two stories into the storage facility below, and they fell through it together, hitting the ground at the base of a storage tank in a shower of sparks and pulverized concrete. Tony's suit absorbed most of the impact, though Jarrin heard something crack in Tony's armor. Clint hit the ground hard and didn't get up for several seconds.

When the dust settled, Jazz was already standing. She looked around the storage facility, at the rows of tanks, at the corridors branching off in every direction, at the orange glow still pulsing from the ceiling where the mezzanine had been.

"We lost him," she said.

Jarrin stood up slowly. His ribs ached from where the shockwave had caught him, and his ears were ringing. "That wasn't a retreat."

Jazz looked at him. "What do you mean?"

"He blew his own position. He left the mezzanine to collapse on us. A guy who knows what we can do wouldn't fight us on our terms after giving us the advantage." Jarrin looked at the ceiling, at the hole where the mezzanine had been, and at the corridor Kazir had walked through with his service door. "He's not done. He's just rearranging the board."

Tony pulled himself up from the floor, brushing concrete dust off his shoulder plate. "The sonar's going haywire. There are--" He paused, looking at something only he could see. "Multiple signatures. Dozens of them. Everywhere. Every tank, every junction point, every structural node in this facility has a charge planted."

Clint finally stood. He was swaying, and the blood on his hand had gone from red to brown. "How many?"

"Too many to count. He didn't just charge that one tank. He wired the entire facility. Every surface is a potential detonation point."

Jazz looked at the ceiling. Then at the far end of the corridor. Then at Jarrin.

"He's stalling," she said. "For what?"