Powerhouse: Legend of the Archwave

Chapter 35 (Act IV) (TBOKSS): This Is Our Stop

We last read Chapter 34, in which the Spraywatch vandals Valentina Valdez and Tyrone Hoover struggle to stop the runaway King Street Station train while the Paragon James Markovsky a.k.a. Powerhouse and his companion Isabela Acosta a.k.a. Archwave fight Special Agent Warren Schaefer in an attempt to subdue him. Valentina eventually figures out how to activate the brakes on the train, but ultimately grinds it to a halt too quickly; the sudden stoppage of the momentum sends Schaefer slamming against the front of the sixth rail car and makes him fall on his left side. Before he can get back up, his stomach and chest are promptly crushed by an erratically rolling suitcase transport cart, breaking his ribs and puncturing his lungs with the resulting bone fragments.

The archer woman Archwave, upon seeing that Schaefer has been crushed, immediately tries to help him by pulling the transport cart off of him, showing compassion, heroism, and selflessness even after all the times Schaefer has tried to have her killed. However, after Powerhouse helps her pull the cart off—thanks to his super strength—Schaefer immediately whisks his right arm outwards and fires a fatal shot into Archwave's stomach as "thanks" for her rescue of him; she loses her footing almost immediately, falls to the floor of the sixth rail car, and dies despite Powerhouse, Valentina, and Tyrone's combined attempts to put pressure on her wound and stop her bleeding, with her not even being able to finish her final words.

As Powerhouse, Valentina, and Tyrone are all silently mourning, Schaefer chooses that exact moment to rub his "victory" in despite his own heavy injuries, stating that he had finally done exactly what he set out to do: kill Archwave with Powerhouse watching. An enraged Tyrone tries to finish Schaefer off with a stolen MP5, but Powerhouse discourages him from doing so for a number of reasons; namely, not wanting to pursue revenge and not wanting anything to tie Schaefer's death to them, if he indeed does pass away. Instead, Tyrone is ordered to simply disarm Schaefer, while Valentina leaves Powerhouse's side and returns to the front of the train to start reversing it back to the station whenever it comes to a complete stop; the chapter then ended with all of the survivors of the rescue mission lamenting their losses in complete and utter silence.

This time, on the way back to the King Street Station, Powerhouse, Valentina, and Tyrone take stock of the current situation before finally returning the train to where it rightfully belongs.....

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By the time everything had finally blown over, James Markovsky a.k.a. Powerhouse, Valentina Valdez, and her best friend Tyrone Hoover were the only able and active ones left standing, housed within a currently reversing train that was making its way back to the very station that it had left prematurely from. All of the train's hostages had already been evacuated, and all of the Schaefer loyalists had either been incapacitated or tossed out of the train altogether.

Special Agent Warren Schaefer himself had passed out from shock due to his heavy injuries, but a pulse was still detectable on his body, however subtle it was. His target, however—Isabela Acosta a.k.a. Archwave—had been killed by him mere moments before, collapsing in front of Powerhouse's eyes and dying in the hero's grasp. Monarch McIntosh and the rest of the Spraywatch gang had extracted themselves from the train shortly before the final scuffle in both the sixth rail car and the front of the train—as per Valentina's request—and all of them had likely fled to safety by this point.

Now, there was nothing left to do but ride the reversing train back to King Street Station.

Powerhouse plopped himself into one of the many empty seats near Archwave's body, slumped forward, and buried his face in both of his hands—his organic one and his prosthetic one—while shaking his head in sheer devastation, still coming to terms with Archwave's passing; he even had momentary flashbacks to the incident where his best friend Fritz Fornwright died under eerily similar circumstances.