(LIMITLESS) CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT: BAKUDA

Bakuda knew she had fucked up.

She’d been caught in that blast—that fucking blast—and something vital was missing. She wasn’t sure what at first. A leg? An arm? Half her ribs? The ringing in her ears and the taste of blood flooding her mouth made it hard to focus, but she forced herself to move, to glance down, and nearly gagged. Yep. Leg. Definitely leg. Half of it was just gone, vaporized down to the thigh, the stump charred and smoking where the red wave had touched her.

Still alive, though. Alive enough to curse at the sheer unfairness of it.

She hadn’t planned for this. She’d accounted for Taylor Hebert storming her lair, sure. Accounted for PRT hit squads accompanying her, maybe some Protectorate heroes too, or hell, even the possibility of one of the Triumvirate deciding she was a nuisance that needed deleting. But this? This wasn't part of the plan.

After all, who the hell survives bombs designed specifically for them and could level a city block, then keeps walking forward like nothing happened?

Taylor Hebert, apparently.

Bakuda wheezed out a laugh that turned into a hacking cough. This was beyond absurd. Heroes were supposed to have limits. They were supposed to falter, to hesitate even momentarily, to care about civilians and let those concerns slow them down. That was their usual weakness, the flaw that made them predictable and easy to manipulate.

But though Hebert had slowed, that was only because she had to heal. She just kept coming, crawling out of wreckage and explosions like something Bakuda would have painted on the side of a bomb for intimidation value.

“You’re insane,” Bakuda muttered to no one in particular, spitting more blood onto the ground. “Absolutely fucking insane.”

Because, really, what kind of lunatic gets burned alive, shredded, crystallized, frozen, half-atomized, and still powers on?

Parahumans were all cracked in the head, every single one of them. Trigger events didn’t leave you well-adjusted, but still, this girl had to be something else. Something far past the bell curve.

Bakuda knew she’d fucked up. She just didn’t want to accept it. She couldn't admit it. She was Bakuda. She’d rewrote physics for fun, bent cause and effect into art, turned human flesh into weapons with a laugh. She was untouchable, brilliant, and to everyone who knew of her, a rising god of warfare. She wasn’t supposed to lose.

And yet, Taylor’s shadow fell over her, long and misshapen in the firelight.

Bakuda craned her neck up, and what she saw made her stomach drop. The girl looked half-conscious: skin still bubbling and knitting over raw muscle in places, and hair plastered to her face with soot, dirt, and gore. Her eyes glowed with something almost feral, yet oddly resigned, and her lips were moving.

She was talking, but not really to Bakuda.

“…your fault… didn’t save him… all your fault…”

The words were broken, half-coherent nonsense caused by adrenaline and exhaustion tangling together, but the venom was real. The power—that rising surge in the air of something, akin to pinpricks of current on her skin—in her voice was real.

Bakuda’s breath quickened, panic making itself known at the edges of her mind. She knew there was no way out of this, no button she could press, no hidden bomb she hadn’t already spent. She had no final trick in her arsenal. 

Fuck fuck fuck fuck… Her body screamed at her to crawl, to move, to do something. But her genius failed her, the seemingly endless blueprint in her head shorting out into incomprehensible lines of fucking nothing. For once, she had no clever workaround, not even basic diplomacy to fall back on. 

Taylor raised a hand.

Bakuda bared her teeth, tried to laugh again, or at least smirk through the blood on her lips. She tried to cling to the only thing she had left: pride. She was Bakuda, goddamn it. She couldn't die here, beaten by some half-conscious Ward brat.

“Fuck you,” she spat, the words ragged but defiant in the face of the end.  

The attack came a moment later, a flicker of that something coming to bear against the pale of her skin.

The last thing Bakuda ever saw were those black flashes searing into her vision, as the world narrowed to the shape of Taylor’s hand and its afterimages, blurred by the tears at the corners of her eyes.

Then nothing.