The Four Heroes, Chapter One

It was like the first time they saved Nottingham.

Night-black hung the firmament above, its tempestuous vaults churning to herald some deadly threat that would scream down and wreak devastation from the city’s towers to its rooftops to its streets. Yet then, uprising before these scudding realms of dark as if to split the vaporous mountainsides and scatter them over the sky, leapt The Four Heroes as one.

Clearing the stone-flagged summit of the domed Town Hall with Joe’s incandescent hand etching a flame-trail along the thundery cascades, this quartet of soaring silhouettes daubed in fire and storm gained the apex and began to descend. From far below were heard the howls of Empress Ungus’s demon-horde, massed in their writhing legions to stand between The Four Heroes and their objective. Any such yells and ululations however were mere counterpoint to the piano and drumbeats which all at once exploded in pounding chasing rhythm that the very pavements resounded, and as four pairs of feet alighted then immediately sprang from concrete again to bring their bearers plunging fearlessly into that nest of nightmares, the golden voice of a girl-singer began to belt out the refrain.

Eclipse-shades and the intrinsic gloom that clung to the creatures’ bodies fled wheeling for the shadowy sidelines, as a living aurora struck from the heart of darkness surged through Ungus’s rabble in four vibrantly contrasting hues. From one quarter lashed the torrents and tongues of amber flame shooting from Joe’s palms, while another was aglow with luminous blue as Bret scattered demons in their dozens with his fists and feet. Neetra’s teleportation in bursts of brilliance blooming overhead and below and all around wrought a maelstrom upon the menagerie, whilst the fourth quadrant danced and spiralled with the vivid magenta of Dylan piling metallic objects and elements down upon enemy hides.

Leaving low-backed mounds of monsters slumping in their wake, The Four Heroes without words set off at a sprint down the steps of the City Centre. Uphill and above them bulked blocky masses whose cone-shaped heads pierced the lowering clouds, Future Fighter robots cheek-by-jowl in a fearsome blockade that spelled X-ray death to any human who drew near. Directly at this fortification of alien iron our heroes were bound, tearing together along the gradient while an avenue of tall buildings dropped away fast at their heels.

The one breach thus far punched in the Future Fighter ring was some distance off at the foot of the slope, and here the graven images stood steadfast and forbidding. This did not so much as check The Four Heroes’ stride. Dylan threw his arms open as he ran, and in a panoramic deployment of his powers, even giants trembled. Glassy eye-sensors boggled in their sockets and cantilever jaws worked convulsively up and down. Future Fighters were quick to adapt to a crisis, but their picoseconds of recovery-time were all our heroes needed. As Dylan maintained the pressure, Neetra grasped for Joe’s hand and teleported while Bret threw himself at the nearest tower-block and in a series of jumps began to climb.

Neetra and Joe rematerialzed amid gusty torrents alongside the spluttering visage of one of the robots. Riding out her momentum our heroine whirled about in a circle, carrying Joe with her, then released him. Joe cut loose with both hands and accosted the foe’s features with a bath of flame, as Bret’s swift ascension brought him into the same airspace. Facing away from Joe and Neetra to address the Future Fighter beside theirs, he boosted high from the building’s uppermost windowsill and drew back one leg. A single cleaving kick of impact beyond calculation toppled the whole of the Future Fighter’s planetary-proportioned mass, while Joe’s target likewise submitted to the supernova and keeled in the opposite direction. As the pair of mighty towers crumbled apart, Neetra grabbed the hands of both her comrades and teleported all back to terra firma where Dylan awaited.

Thus, with a noise that was barely to be imagined and a visual spectacle perceivable in full only from a mile up, the Future Fighters surrounding Nottingham’s City Centre fell like dominoes. It took half the time it had taken them to establish their barricade, but that one minute granted the singer opportunity enough to finish her song. When the last world-rending crash of mangled metal on concrete reverberated through the city, and Dylan completed the task by summarily accessing the Future Fighters’ collective consciousness and erasing it once and for all, the golden-haired girl’s closing chords rang out upon that hilltop in Nottingham where stood the reunited creators.

“Just like old times,” commented Bret with some satisfaction, looking around him.

“Not all of this is going to be,” said Dylan in return.

The shortness of his tone was a grim reminder of the truth behind these words. Dylan did not speak merely of how much had come to pass for each of The Four Heroes in the long interval since last they stood side-by-side like this, adventures spanning two different galaxies and a panoply of new and unexpected allegiances, certain of which would have been unimaginable to Nottingham’s champions at earlier periods of their history. It was the specific outcome of one such realignment of loyalties that hung heaviest over Dylan’s sentence. Although Joe said nothing, he knew all too well that his once friend referred to the last moments before this day when the pair of them had been together, and the chain of events that set them at odds stood on the brink of a final tragic confrontation. That being so, and no matter how much the action of the foregoing minutes might have felt like old times, The Four Heroes now faced the question of whether happier and less troubled days were something they could ever possibly return to.

Still, through their psychic link and telepathic congress with allies in the vicinity they were fast appraising the situation and, as those who find comfort in familiar habits, formulating a plan to save the Earth. Suddenly the discoloured heavens began to stir and contort, staining themselves anew with unclean tints that melted and mutated into the hideous features of she The Four Heroes must defeat. Empress Ungus, extending her sorcery through the forces of galactic cataclysm which she was at that moment mustering in the stratosphere, projected her huge illusory budlike head across the vista of Nottingham’s chaotic welkin to peer down from above the skyscraper-tops.

“Now that’s quite a bit like old times,” Neetra put in fairly.

It was to Joe and Dylan that the immense blazing eye-dots pointed. “You,” boomed Ungus’s ghastly voice, warbling its way hallucinogenically along the eldritch transmission-channel. “One of the pair I’ve met, and one of the pair I haven’t. We need to talk. Away from the other two.”

“I’ve seen some pretty obvious attempts at dividing our fighting-force, but that’s got to take the cake,” Bret remarked.

Neetra however then beamed a psychic message advising her three allies: I’ve got to have a little time before we do what we were just discussing. Can’t explain now. But we needed some diversion to keep her from what she’s up to, and this seems as good as any.

Over by the Town Hall the fallen demons were beginning to stir their tentacles and flex their claws. Bret glanced back that way and added telepathically: Goon squad’s not down for the count either. Someone better take care of that. Leave it to me.

Joe turned to the monstrous face and declared: “It is agreed,” knowing this went for his companions too. A round mushroom-cap starcraft from Empress Ungus’s fleet broke through the teeming cloud-cover and alighted before our heroes, unpuckering its fleshy embarkation-hatch.

“I shall attend on your arrival,” announced the Ungus-head, then dispersed into sky-smears and faded away.

“Hark at Sophie Ellis-Bextor,” sniffed Neetra as Joe and Dylan boarded, wordlessly and keeping some distance from each other. The entryway sealed itself behind them and the saucer-shaped shuttle ascended out of sight.

“OK, Neet,” Bret said, once they were alone. “Maybe you’d better let me know what you need this little time for. Though if it’s what I’m guessing, something tells me I’m never going to talk you out of it.”

For Neetra was gazing ahead, not in the direction of the City Centre but down the hill’s flank, where below the rubble of Nottingham Castle a phenomenal sphere of blue-white luminescence dwarfed the levelled landscape and army encampment over which it loomed. This radiant orb of intermingled temporal and psionic energies was what had first penetrated the Future Fighters’ defences, and still it swelled by the minute as if the volume of robots and real-estate it had thus far consumed could do nothing to abate its terrible growth. Neetra made her fellow hero the simple reply:

“I’ve got to rescue Steam.”

Bret was grave. “I’m not the psychic you are, Neet, but I’m getting nothing at all from that thing,” he declared. “It’s as if Steam never even existed. Can you look me in the eye and tell me it’s any different for you?”

Neetra didn’t answer this. “I can do it,” was all she said. “I did it before.”

It would have been stating the obvious for either of them to point out that this fluxball had expanded to a far vaster size than the previous one, or that Steam had been lost in its ineluctable depths for days this time instead of a mere evening. As Bret had already gathered, Neetra’s mind was made up. “Do what you have to, flower,” he told her gently.

Then, turning to his own road, Bret could not suppress a chuckle when he noticed the bike-park adjacent to the derelict offices by which they stood, and the high-powered motorcycle which had apparently rested there unclaimed and ignored throughout the Solidity occupation. “Funny how there’s always one around when I need one,” our hero smiled.

“Funnier still how you can never keep your hands off them,” Neetra added rather primly. “It’s Bardpool all over again!”

“That wasn’t yesterday,” Bret observed, and so saying leapt into the saddle to shake off his new steed’s coat of concrete-dust with a first booming ignition-rev. Thus exchanging swift good-luck wishes the friends parted, she teleporting to her desperate errand of mercy and he roaring down the incline into battle.

END OF CHAPTER ONE