Work Text:
He stood with eyes closed and head bent, hands clasped as if in prayer. A moment later they spread, almost seemed to glow.
“Praying?” came a voice, near a whisper. “Is there a hero who does that kind of thing?”
“He doesn’t look religious.” Another voice, coming from a further window. “His hands are more open, anyway. Looks more like he’s got one of those passive powers, where you gotta commune with the energy of the world.”
He was sending out his fungus to eat their damn brains, was what he was doing.
Fang Shiqian had released his spores into the air in order to map the facility, incidentally hearing the speculations of the waiting villains at the same time. While his fungus didn’t quite eat people, the hero name “Aweto” more a tragic product of his edgier youth than accurate, it got pretty close. His fungus could eat their health in myriad ways, including actually consuming them, if he really wanted to go for it. Generally, he didn’t, since that was the kind of thing people would actually notice.
Unlike spores.
Luminescent fungus on the building’s roof drew out a checkmark above the map he’d been filling in, now complete with markings for the two lazy hostiles at the front windows, the open and unguarded back window, and the heavily locked and sealed door in a hall on the left. The layout matched their previous information, and the locked door undoubtedly guarded their target.
Wang Jiexi acknowledged him verbally, knowing he’d be able to hear, and then walked away before Fang Shiqian could write out anything more.
“Unbelievable,” Fang Shiqian huffed. Sure, they’d come up with their plan earlier, and he did not, in fact, have anything else to say, but still.
Wang Jiexi was well aware that his partner would have led with any important changes to the plan and had deemed his scouting complete, so he didn’t bother sticking around; he’d rather leave Fang Shiqian pulling attention out in the open for as short a time as possible. If new information came up, Fang Shiqian did not lack methods to make himself understood.
Wang Jiexi threw down a bottle so thin it barely made a sound when it shattered and rode the resulting updraft into the open window below, staff glider half-opened in one hand to control the speed of his fall. The window was wide enough to fit him, as it must have been for Fang Shiqian to mark it as an entrance, with no one in sight to guard it.
Suspicious, but this group was suspicious from the start. That was why their team had been sent instead of a more basic retrieval unit in the first place. Whether it was gathering information or a sudden, intense fight, Vaccaria and Aweto could handle it.
Wang Jiexi landed soundlessly on the floor, glider snapping fully closed into its staff form again. In the front of the building, the two uninterested guards were still debating if they should call someone to deal with the motionless hero out front. They were, at last, starting to lean toward “yes.”
The sound of a door opening echoed through the bare facility. Wang Jiexi saw two lines of mild luminescence grow just past a hallway; two new hostiles had appeared, then, just around the coming corner. Wang Jiexi rolled a freeze potion down his staff and blindly flicked it up into the side hall’s overhead, thin matte bottle looking like nothing at all in the low light. It shattered on the cement ceiling above the coming guards and sent ice crackling over the passage, freezing the villains in place.
The bioluminescent fungus faded out as Fang Shiqian returned its energy to himself, an indication that the threats were neutralized; Wang Jiexi didn’t hesitate to the turn the corner.
Past the encased villains in this side hall was the locked, but now unguarded, door.
Was this really all there was?
It wouldn’t be totally unusual if it were. “Suspicious” didn’t necessarily mean “dangerous,” and perhaps the villains really were just weirdly nonchalant about heroes taking them into custody.
The frozen villains were naturally tense, but not terrified, as he passed them. Wang Jiexi held his staff at the ready in one hand, the other positioned half inside his coat to pull out a bottle at a moment’s notice. The downside of his potion master ability was the need to rely on physical objects, but the far greater upside was that he had more abilities at the ready than any other active hero.
GPA’s standard unlocking device failed; Wang Jiexi’s acid didn’t.
The moment Wang Jiexi started to open the door, every nearby surface flared with bioluminescent light. Whatever Fang Shiqian had found in the now-open room, he definitely didn’t like it. Wang Jiexi was ducking backward before they even finished growing, just missing a stream of fire hotter than anything he’d ever felt before. The spores in the air proliferated at an unbelievable speed, interjecting themselves between the overwhelming heat and Wang Jiexi and burning to nothing just as quickly.
Definitely not normal flame. Fang Shiqian’s fungi were all imbibed with one of Wang Jiexi’s potions that should have rendered them immune to intense temperature fluctuation, acid, poison, really anything he could think of that might try to block them. For it to fail, this had to be far hotter than anything Wang Jiexi had seen before.
“Here for the GPA tech, are you?” the man asked disdainfully. Air distorted around his hands in a way that made them hard to look at. Further down the hall, the ice holding the other two villains began to melt. “They sent some baseline guy with a stick? This really is looking down on us a bit too much…”
Behind him, the last remnants of bioluminescent fungus “just happened” to linger in form of a rude picture before fading out entirely; this time, rather than signaling the end of the danger, the fungus retreated because Fang Shiqian didn’t want to give away his existence. Amidst the man’s own light and heat, he’d managed to miss the fungus’s previous actions entirely.
Wang Jiexi tossed a freeze potion toward the villain’s next attack, blocking that single gout and nothing more.
“Is that another of your paltry devices?” the man scoffed. “What use is that in front of my flame? GPA has no hero that can match up to me.”
Wang Jiexi could almost hear Fang Shiqian’s incredulity, though he made no obvious reply. At the end of the hall, Wang Jiexi absolutely could hear the sounds of crackling as the other two villains broke free from their previous restraints.
Glass shattered behind the fire-wielding man, the remnants of a bottle flung from the lower end of Wang Jiexi’s staff crumbling to nothing with the force of its impact on the far wall. Quick-setting smothering foam burst forth, but the villain’s reactions were fast and the rise in temperature faster. The dense, slow-burning foam was incinerated before it could hold the man back, turning the space around and between them into a mess of twisted, flaming material.
“Pitiful,” he said gloatingly, watching Wang Jiexi shift to keep out of the fire’s way and the new threats in sight. “Not even worth my time.”
“Don’t bother with him, Boss,” the farthest of the two previously trapped villains said. The closer one had been as hampered by the burning material and half-melted ice as Wang Jiexi. “We’re more than enough for…him…” He put a hand to his head, as if woozy, before starting to keel over. “You…” his eyes shifted sideways, down the main hall toward the entrance, then rolled back into his head.
The villain boss frowned. “Lock this guy up,” he told the closer subordinate as he strode toward his collapsed comrade. “Let me see what… Is that mold?”
Fang Shiqian had to be closer to grow a debilitating fungus quickly, and the main hall didn’t have many places to hide. Combined with the obviously power-related collapse of the subordinate closest to him, there was little chance of staying concealed much longer. Since he’d essentially already announced himself, Fang Shiqian didn’t bother with any more subtlety.
Unfortunately, this villain’s power really was beyond what they’d prepared for. The air ignited around him, burning away Fang Shiqian’s spores before they could get anywhere close. “You dare,” the villain snarled to his unseen opponent, picking up the pace down the hall.
Wang Jiexi’s staff had taken the brunt of the burning foam, unfortunately difficult to brush away, but it wasn’t fully out of commission. Clearing the area had taken long enough, and with Fang Shiqian about to face a direct threat, Wang Jiexi didn’t want to waste time on the determinedly approaching subordinate. He knocked one end of his staff into the assailant’s ribs, blocked an attack, slammed the man’s knee, and then followed the momentum of the strike to swing the end of the staff into the man’s jaw. It was the end still stuck with foam, so despite the immediate singeing, the man did not pass out immediately. In an incredible show of will, he gave Wang Jiexi a glancing brush with his hand on the way down.
Immediately, everything about Wang Jiexi slowed to a crawl. In fact, the effect wasn’t that strong, but Wang Jiexi’s eyes were focused on the villain boss’s approach to the corner. Fang Shiqian’s fungus couldn’t even stand up to the secondhand heat of the villain’s strike, and now the air was superheated to the point where they couldn’t properly grow…
A step. Wang Jiexi reached for a bottle, agonizingly slow in comparison to the villain’s pace. Another, and the villain had reached the corner. The dispersion potion rested in Wang Jiexi’s hand, mockingly sealed behind glass where it did him no good. Wang Jiexi didn’t hesitate between options or fumble in his rush, calm as always even as the villain sneered and said snide words Wang Jiexi wasn’t listening to.
He crushed the bottle between his hands.
The bite of pain came along with freedom from restriction, dispersion potion vaporizing instantly with the change in pressure and freeing the immediate area from all power effects.
Wang Jiexi paid glass shards and bleeding hands no mind, tossing a burst of wind behind him and snapping his staff’s glider open in the same moment to ride the rush forward. A split second later he was slamming into the villain, whose arm was already raised in Fang Shiqian’s direction, handfirst and tacky with a mixture of blood and dispersion. The villain stumbled sideways; just as quickly, the flame went out.
“You?!”
Whether surprise or rage, they would never know, because Fang Shiqian’s fungus sprang up with a vengeance in the lowered heat. The villain boss made a strangled sound as he dropped to his knees, energy immediately spent.
Fully consumed, in fact. Fang Shiqian was not merciful.
“‘My useless sidekick is already out of tricks’,” Fang Shiqian parroted mockingly. “I don’t even know where to begin with how wrong you are. Is there even a single word that was right?”
“‘My’,” Wang Jiexi said thoughtfully. Fang Shiqian shot him a look. “And maybe ‘is’.”
“Terrible,” Fang Shiqian said immediately. “I can’t believe you make me listen to you every single day. Don’t think you’re distracting me, either, you know you’re supposed to wait for…” His voice trailed off as he caught sight of Wang Jiexi’s hand. “Why are you bleeding?!”
“Finish the mission, first,” Wang Jiexi said, unconcerned. He turned back to the now unblocked door; Fang Shiqian fumed.
“It’s safe,” Fang Shiqian said begrudgingly. On the ground, the concussed man who’d slowed Wang Jiexi was being methodically and somewhat vindictively covered in fungus.
The mission really was simple, other than this. In a recent villain conflict, a hero had lost a bag of GPA tech they couldn’t afford to let stay in enemy hands. Now it was recovered, apparently not even disturbed. Maybe this group had intended to sell it, but that wasn’t a problem for the two of them to handle. Item retrieved, they walked back out of the building.
Near the front entrance were two unconscious villains, mouths stuffed with knockout fungus that had grown rampantly. Wang Jiexi raised an eyebrow at Fang Shiqian.
“Their fault for not noticing,” Fang Shiqian said, not in the least repentant. “You already make me suffer through enough idiocy on your own, I categorically refuse to put up with it from them, too.”
Wang Jiexi hummed noncommittally and called in a cleanup and arrest team.
“Completely unnecessary,” Fang Shiqian stressed, carefully picking out any remaining shards of glass from Wang Jiexi’s hand now that they were back in the potion lab. “I am not at all helpless, and you should know it.” Despite his seething tone, his handling of the treatment was deliberate and efficient.
“You couldn’t have stopped it in that heat,” Wang Jiexi pointed out. A problem he was already considering how to solve, now that they were out of the immediate situation. Clearly his resistance potion was not strong enough.
“I could have grown it directly on my skin,” Fang Shiqian groused, trailing his fingers along the newly cleaned lacerations. “There was some distance. Besides, even if I got hit, I could heal it immediately. I have my fungus, what do you have?”
Wang Jiexi tilted his head, and then his hand still held in Fang Shiqian’s own. “Don’t I have your fungus too?”
Honestly speaking, it was disgusting to look at. Fang Shiqian didn’t mind it, but he also knew how horrifying it was to see fungus growing in a fresh wound. Obviously it wasn’t actually growing from the wound, just coating it as it transferred health over, but…even healing at a noticeable rate, it looked bad. He knew it looked bad.
His was a power that grew best from plaguing others, storing health and giving it up again however he liked, and so there was no difference between the fungus that killed and the one that saved. They were the same thing used differently, and there was no way to tell which direction he was taking it at any given moment. In fact, the only obvious and also easiest use of the fungus was to give health to himself after stealing it from others. Even his ability to transfer health back out came from training rather than an instinctive, inherent trait.
Looked disgusting, took from others, gave to himself, no sense of security for anyone around him. It was, it could be said, a villain’s power. Fang Shiqian wasn’t a gentle person, either, and didn’t shy from using the fungus with its original intent, to steal health from others. The more someone saw him hurt, the harder it would be to believe he would heal, and Fang Shiqian was not the type to hide his thoughts in some misguided attempt at comfort. He was who he was, and anyone who couldn’t trust him for stating his mind wasn’t worth the effort.
Wang Jiexi, though, held up these cuts covered in growth like they were obviously good. Wang Jiexi had, from the very beginning, thought of him only as his partner and a hero. Fang Shiqian didn’t like Wang Jiexi at first, forced as he was to partner with him rather than Lin Jie, who’d decided he wasn’t cut out for work as a frontline hero. Lin Jie suggested the pairing because their powers were so complementary, Wang Jiexi with his magical potions, Fang Shiqian with his magical ingredients. One could very obviously provide for the other, but Fang Shiqian resented feeling used, and so on principle alone he resented Wang Jiexi.
Was it fair? Maybe not. But feelings weren’t fair, they just were. Fang Shiqian had all kinds of experience with that, and he’d learned to let it be long ago.
Wang Jiexi was a good partner, objectively speaking. He listened, he explained himself, he was patient and logical. He believed Fang Shiqian but didn’t take offense to his forms of expression. He trusted Fang Shiqian and learned how to work with him. Fang Shiqian didn’t care.
Well, he cared a little, but it wasn’t the main point.
The main point was that Fang Shiqian would charge his fungus on rest days, spending the day in lower health to store it for later, in battle or after. Once Wang Jiexi found out, he flat-out insisted that Fang Shiqian do the same to him, no matter how Fang Shiqian tried to argue against it. Initially, it was because it was none of his business. Then it was because at least one of them should be ready to fight at any time if they were called in. Then it was because having one’s health taken was uncomfortable enough for Fang Shiqian, who directly controlled it, let alone anyone else. Then it was because he didn’t want Wang Jiexi using his health like that at all, it was stupid and harmful and an utter waste.
Wang Jiexi turned all these arguments back on him, and after a long period of hardheaded conflict Fang Shiqian finally gave in. Somewhere along the way, concerns over Wang Jiexi “using” him became a thing of the past. They were partners. Partners didn’t keep track of debts. Partners didn’t mind giving up something to help the other. Partnership was all about trust.
Wang Jiexi lifted his hand covered in killing fungus and said “don’t I have you” without a trace of doubt, and Fang Shiqian almost felt moved.
Only almost, though, because partners were supposed to trust this way, it was hardly new to them, and so this was, obviously, Wang Jiexi’s attempt at diverting Fang Shiqian with sappy feelings. He would not be put off! “Shut up, you definitely could have afforded the singular second it would have taken you to actually open that bottle instead of literally grinding glass into your hands, you incompetent fool. I don’t want to hear another word from you about it. Sit there! Recover! Let me rest already, you are so tiring. An embarrassment. Get better soon, you half-sentient pile of fermented goo.”
“Okay,” said Wang Jiexi.
Wang Jiexi’s smile was unfairly distracting from Fang Shiqian’s fully justified anger. He refused to look at it.
Rookie heroes were assigned teams based on suitability, so it was no surprise when Gao Yingjie and his plant-based powers were assigned to join Aweto and Vaccaria. Though the plants Gao Yingjie could make and guide were just normal plants, many if not most of Wang Jiexi’s potions incorporated normal ingredients. As for Gao Yingjie’s personal growth as a hero, no one understood growing and manipulating life forms better than Fang Shiqian. It was a very good fit.
Unfortunately, Gao Yingjie’s nerves did not agree. He’d looked up to Wang Jiexi’s flashy and versatile style for a long time, so the days between being given his assignment and actually joining the team were plagued with worry. Gao Yingjie was anything but flashy. His power didn’t make the plants anything different from usual, even if he could direct where they went. It was basically an advanced form of gardening that didn’t need seeds, hardly the strongest power out there.
In person, they were even more intimidating. Wang Jiexi’s face was unreadable; Fang Shiqian’s looked like a thundercloud, and he wasn’t even looking at Gao Yingjie. In fact, he was looking at…Wang Jiexi?
“What kind of introduction was that?” Fang Shiqian asked scornfully. “Just a straightforward tour and you’re done? No inspiring talk or words of welcome? The kid obviously looks up to you, say a little more!”
Wang Jiexi contemplated Gao Yingjie for a moment. “Do you feel ready?”
“Reconsider your favorite hero,” Fang Shiqian told Gao Yingjie bluntly. “Seriously. He may be flashy, but he’s really always this bad.”
Gao Yingjie had no idea how to respond to that. Wang Jiexi didn’t look at all perturbed.
“In any case, you don’t need to answer him,” Fang Shiqian continued. “If you don’t feel ready, we’ll make you ready. Even if you do feel ready, we’ll still make you ready, that’s what we’re here for. You can rely on us.”
His tone wasn’t exactly warm, but it somehow eased Gao Yingjie’s tension anyway. “Thank you, seniors.”
“Such a good kid!” The more Gao Yingjie listened, the easier it was to find where Fang Shiqian’s tone spilled into the positive register. “You’d better not ruin him,” to Wang Jiexi; under the belligerence was a soft undercurrent of fondness, like maybe he wasn’t really that upset at all.
“Welcome to the team,” Wang Jiexi said, and Gao Yingjie found himself believing it.