Mage Among Supers 2 by Dante King

Author:Dante King [King, Dante]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-04-25T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

Caliber Park was one of the biggest stadiums in the country, a huge tribute sporting endeavor. From the numerous snack stands in the parking lot to the flag poles towering over the entrance to the rows of seating stretching higher than the nearby buildings, everything about it was exaggerated, cartoonish, and spectacular.

This was what happened when the aesthetics of sport and superpowers combined, two flavors that already leaned toward excess, and that together became something truly mad. One of the food vans was even shaped like a giant football with a cape flaring off the back. It must have been a nightmare to steer that thing through real traffic, but it drew customers in droves.

Today, though, there were no customers. No crowds coming in for the game. No kids waving foam fingers. No families queuing up to order hot dogs and fries. Not even the cleaning staff and security guards who usually roamed the property on its off days. The few people visible were chauffeurs dozing in the more expensive of the few cars scattered across the lot and a handful of guys in black tracksuits trying to look inconspicuous in the doorways. If we’d needed confirmation that Riken and the Scorpions were here, that would have been it.

Fortunately, their positions didn’t allow the Scorpions to survey every approach to the arena. Moving carefully and quietly, taking cover where we could, we easily reached the walls of Caliber Park, then used magic and super-powered athleticism to get to the roof of one of the stands. Dressed in full superhero gear, Crypto, Mind Game, Hoplite, and I slid forward across that roof until we could see out across the park.

“Here.” Crypto passed each of us a pair of binoculars, each with an earbud attached. “They’re not just visual. There’s a directionally focused acoustic pickup incorporated into each set.”

“Meaning?” I asked.

“Put the earbud in, and you’ll be able to hear the things you point the binoculars at almost as well as if you were standing next to them, without other surrounding noises getting in the way.”

She opened a box, and half a dozen tiny drones, none of them bigger than a butterfly, floated out, then started a slow flight down into the arena. Another way for us to keep track of what was going on down there.

I put in my earbud and raised my binoculars. This felt like a proper old-fashioned private eye moment, perching on a rooftop, peering at a suspect through a set of magnifying lenses. Sure, this particular tech was a little more sophisticated than my professional predecessors would have used, but the principle was the same, the PI as prying eye.

Down in the arena, small groups of men and women were making their way out of the stalls and across the field. Most of them had muscular thugs around the outside of their group, a protective cordon signaling that they might be here to talk, but they sure weren’t here to trust. Only the most confident, which probably meant the most powerful, came without that sort of obvious backup.

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