Chapter Text
If you’re looking for Glass Cannon by nescias, you can find it here (Spacebattles) or here (Ao3), which I strongly recommend. The work you’re currently on is basically a fanfic of a fanfic, emphasis on the fan part. I didn’t mean to trick you, I just suck at naming things and combined the two titles out of laziness. If you’re just looking to get started on reading, go straight to 1.1. The rest of the preface is a preface and the house rules are just outlining my take on the mechanics of Glass Cannon’s premier power. Spoilers below for all stories involved. Also, I'm expecting formatting issues.
Did you know that Yen Press produces English audiobooks of popular light novels? I swear I’m not a shill, there’s a point to this. I’ve been listening through So I’m a Spider, So What? by Okina Baba, and having kind of a blast (except that the very long lists of skills being voiced take cumulative hours, and I swear the otherwise high-effort voice acting sometimes cracks in frustration when she’s just been reading Taboo 9 n%I=W for the hundredth time). So I’ve been listening to those and reading Glass Cannon as it releases, and they kind of ran together in my head.
The premise of this is that Glass Cannon’s Taylor died during her trigger event and Kumoko was placed in her body. I think it clicked for me because of the scene where Shiraori convinces Sophia to hurt herself for the sake of leveling up faster. Taylor is fully gone; if you want more of her, I again point to Glass Cannon or any number of fics, or best of all: Worm. Other than the main character, I'm trying to borrow the spirit of So I'm a Spider. Expect lots of interludes. In the author's notes at the end of every chapter, I'll have a skill list.
This is the first fanfic I’ve posted and I’m really not confident in my writing. I have a middle and ending in mind and, if I abandon it, I’ll post a summary so you’re not left hanging. You shouldn’t expect updates to follow a schedule. I like to write an arc out as a whole, go back and double check that everything makes sense, and do some editing. It takes me a minute.
This isn’t a stompfic or a fixfic.
House rules:
These are just my general rules for how AM’s power works. It’s all headcanon and mostly comes from me not really wanting to bother nescias for WoG’s.
Basics:
One shard = one offensive-minded power
The granted power must always be of a magnitude lower than the original, even at its best
There are Manton limits in play, but AM is less inclined to give Kumoko powers in which Manton limits benefit her.
General Cases:
Kumoko can get one power expression per shard. If powers are distilled, simplified, themed versions of a shard’s role, AM takes a distilled, simplified, offensively themed version of that power that is always weaker than the original. If it’s already a purely offensive power, she just gets a weaker version. Example: she gets killed by Spitfire, she gets just that power but shittier. Less liquid is spewed, she can’t send it as far, etc.
Manton limiting is in full effect - if Kumoko gets superstrength, she won’t break her arm using it. Think of it like situational durability as long as she’s doing the punching. If she has the power to emit lightning from her hands, she’s not going to get shocked. However, she’s much less likely to get a power that has implied durability - if she gets superstrength, most of the time it’s of the stronger than most people her size variety, not the bench a dump truck variety.
She gets powers by encountering powers. That means that if she’s killed by a superstrong cape with a hammer, she just gets skill with the hammer. If she’s killed by some duplicate hammer generated by a parahuman, she gets a power out of it. Easier example: getting shot by Miss Militia would give her more than skill with guns.
Finally, if she can’t precog it she can’t grab it.
Middling Cases:
Buds (in general): Let us say that Heartbreaker gains control of Kumoko and forces her to kill herself. She would then get a master power which slowly inflicts depression on her enemies, ramping up. At the high end, and exposed for an hour, if they have a gun in their hand, they’ll be hard pressed to resist pointing it at their head and pulling the trigger. These effects are semi-permanent, requiring another emotion manipulator or long-term therapy to combat.
Now let’s say we have something similar with Cherish, who emotionally overwhelms Kumoko into suicide. She would have a master power based on inflicting suicidal emotions on her victims, stronger but channeled. As soon as Kumoko stops, so do the emotions.
Because these two powers are so similar, my version of AM would say that being killed by one is basically the same as being killed by the other - it would just power up what she already has. It would take slightly longer if she only died from the opposite after dying to one (closer to 20 than to 15), but she’d never switch power expressions.
Same concept with Laserdream and Shielder. Kumoko gets laser blasts either way.
Clusters: In a cluster trigger, it’s possible for her to get more than one power - except that almost every person in a cluster still has one main offensive power and a complex number of supports. The closest would be Rain, but his prosthetics are weak enough that she would just skill in claw usage. Even in a case that I missed, it would still be one shard = one power, so if she was killed by another user of the same power (let’s say that one of Goddess’s clustermates was still alive and killed Kumoko with a variation of telekinesis), it would just be the telekinesis - not the master power, battery, etc.
Grab Bags: Thinking along the lines of Circus or characters that have a lot of secondary powers, Kumoko only gets the main standout. Triumph has some degree of superstrength to go with his sound manipulation stuff - she just gets the sound manipulation.
For another example, take Glory Girl. Glory Girl could conceivably kill Kumoko in a few ways, but two examples: just straight up physical force or accidentally causing a heart attack with her fear blasts (however unlikely that second one is). Kumoko gets either a power that lets her magnify the force of one physical attack that won’t backfire on her or the ability to send out a wave of extreme fear and dread. Either would be on cooldown, and she cannot get both.
Trumps: She can’t precog Eidolon or the Fairy Queen, so the cape she could get the single most use out of would be the Butcher. Even then, only things that can kill her directly. Butcher really has available to actually kill her are the wounds, the explosive teleport, and the superhuman strength.
Second Triggers: Second triggers work the same way as a general case. She gets killed by Narwhal, she gets the ability to spawn sharp energy fields that only affect organic matter.
Tinkers: Tinkers like Bonesaw and Armsmaster are sort of soft trumps in canon, and most named tinkers have some capacity for it. Same one shard = one power rule applies.
Let’s say that Armsmaster turned that electroshock bug killer up to 11 and it started killing people by blowing out their nervous systems, and Kumoko was caught in that. Because the power was already tuned heavily towards offense, Kumoko would simply get a weaker version of that - in the same way that if Spitfire killed her, she would just get a weaker version of Spitfire’s power.
Now, if electropulse-having Kumoko then manages to get killed by Battery, she would just find that her electropulse is stronger, because Armsmaster studied Battery’s power to come up with the electropulse. One shard, one power expression.
Edge Cases:
It’s funny how so much work has to be put into thinking about the technicalities when they’re almost never relevant.
Mundane Objects Manipulated via Powers: Let’s say that Kumoko is skulking around in an alley, as she does, and Glory Girl kicks a dumpster, misses the Nazi, and brains Kumoko instead. Because this would be impossible for a normal human, Kumoko gets the ability to throw one object with super strength on cooldown.
But let’s say that Kumoko is in really bad standing with AM and it wants to move on. She starts getting really hyperspecific skills that are too difficult to realistically use, like knowing how best to kill someone by shoving them with a dumpster.
If she’s in exceptional standing with AM, like really, really good standing, she could get a variation on Butcher’s “can’t miss in a certain range” power when hit by a ranged weapon.
The conditions are could a regular human do this and how much does AM like Kumoko right now.
Case 53’s/Monster Capes: Since AM isn’t a broken shard, Kumoko will get a more usable (but much less powerful) version of the case 53’s ability. If she were killed by Sveta, she’d get prehensile hair. For someone like Noelle, it would depend on how she died, but clones would never be an option. Occasionally, AM will just throw its hands up in the air and shake its head.
Clones: Speaking of Noelle, Blasto, Bonesaw, etc, clones are seen as individuals by shards. Getting killed by one of Noelle’s evil clones still fits under the one shard = one power rule.
Revoking privileges: Won’t happen in the story, but it’s possible for AM to revoke powers or skills if Kumoko plays too safe. A little like what happened to Moord Nag when she tried to game the system with clones mixed with Leet making his shard unhappy.
Endbringers: I’m deviating from how Endbringers work in GA’s canon due to differences in interpretation. Endbringers aren’t pathable but there is some precedent for them being predictable via powers - namely, Dragon and Armsmaster both had software that could predict them. Dragon in a broad “this is the next place they’ll hit” sense and Armsmaster “this is what they’ll do next” sense. Both seem to be Tinker versions of precog powers.
In Dinah’s interlude, she mentions that the Protectorate want her with the maximum number of questions available for the next Endbringer attack.
My interpretation is that, outside of the Simurgh, as long as the parahuman in question isn’t a legitimate threat to the Endbringer, the precog powers are allowed.
So, Behemoth and Leviathan are on the table.
That said, my version of AM isn’t going to hand out tidal wave powers or anything even remotely Endbringer-tier. Depending on how Kumoko dies, she would get what is essentially just a fairly powerful version of a normal GA iteration. Gets killed by a tidal wave? Something like what she got off of Stormtiger’s power, but water instead of wind.
Synergies: Powers do not hard synergize - if Kumoko gets, say, a power that lets her throw fireballs and a power that lets her create a patch of flame on the ground, it’s up to her to try to use them together. Or, put another way, there aren’t any affinity bonuses. She has to figure out how to make them synergize herself.