Black Panther: Rise of the Princess (COMPLETE)

Chapter 13: Peter

When the explosion hit, I was about a mile away from the front of the parade. I decided that my disguise didn't matter, and it was more important to get to the injured than it was to maintain my cover. I activated the nano-suit and jumped down the street, getting out of the way of the hundreds of people running in the opposite direction.

It looked like the whole first float was rigged when I got there. The entire things was blown to pieces, and I couldn't even tell what it was supposed to look like now. Unfortunately, there had been people on the float when it exploded, dancers mostly. Most of them had flown away from the float, and were now covered in brightly colored decorations that didn't look that festive anymore.

The worst of it was the area next to the palace, though. It looked like the bombs had been shaped to damage the palace and anyone next to it the worst. I was about to jump up there and see if the rest of the royal family was all right, but I saw King T'Challa already helping them, and I decided to focus on the civilians first.

I just started moving debris to start. As I moved, I saw more and more people that had been crushed by the pieces of the float. I did my best to move them to safer places until guards or medics showed up, but I couldn't focus on one person for too long, since there were still a lot more that needed to get into the open air, and to hospitals. After a minute or so, I realized that Shuri hadn't said anything in a while.

"Hey, Shuri, I'm assuming you can already see this?"

I heard some movement in the mic, but she responded. "Yes, I am getting ready for the injured." Her voice was a little shaky.

"I've already moved a lot of people out of the way, Shuri. I'm going to help the guard pull people out of the wreckage, then I'll see if I can find anything." I looked around, trying to decide what needed to be moved next.

"Just stay safe, and forget about the suspects for now. This is more important." Yeah, she wasn't doing too good. I couldn't help her, though, these people needed it more.

All I could do was give her a quick "Got it" and get back to work. People were already starting to flood into the street with stretchers, and a couple of them came up to me.

"Anyone that you know is in critical condition?" One of them asked in a thick accent. I didn't know how they knew I spoke English, before I remembered I was wearing my suit.

I pointed up where T'Challa was helping his wife and mother. "The royal family got injured, they need help first." They ran off to cart them to a medical facility, and I got back to work. I moved as much of the float as I could, but then a few machines flew in, and they picked up the pieces a lot faster and easier than I could. I should have known, I'm in Wakanda.

Some of the buildings had been damaged, too. It looked like the terrorists, whoever they were, had been aiming to damage as many people and as much property as possible. They had certainly accomplished their goal, if that's what it was.

Even though the flying suspension machines were working faster than I could, I could still pull people out from underneath the debris and move them to safer positions. I tried to put them in places that were easy for the medics to reach, since they had to get through the mess too. The dancers on the float had taken the most damage, except maybe for the royal family. Thankfully, the medics recognized that too, and loaded them onto the stretchers first.

It was almost half an hour before I ran out of people to move off. The medics were quick about getting people out of the bomb site quickly, so I was working hard to keep up with them, even though I had gotten there first. I wanted to stick around and look at one of their stretchers, but I figured I would get a better look later, so I held off and kept working. We had to save as many people as we could, and we couldn't afford to waste time. Not when their time was running out.

When the action slowed down, I went back to the spot where the float had exploded. I tried looking for pieces of the bombs themselves, but it looked like the walls of the float had been built as bombs. I decided I needed help for this part.

"Hey Karen, scan this for me?"

"How much of it, Peter?"

"As much as you can. We need to get this to Shuri, fast."

She started working on the scans, and I moved around so she could get reads on as many pieces of the float as possible. The more we had, the better. I needed to thank Tony for the suit, again.

"Scans complete. Should I do something else before we head back to the Princess?"

I looked around. There wasn't much else we could do, but I asked her something anyways. "Karen, have you counted how many people we've pulled out of the wreckage?"

She ran some numbers through my mask. "I've counted 119 people that have been unconscious at best, and at least 100 of them are in serious condition."

I had to fight to keep my head up when she said that. 119 was way too many people injured. Whoever had done this wasn't kidding around. I could only hope that Shuri was ready to find these people, because they had to go.

Turning back towards the lab, I jumped and webbed the nearest building, making my way back to her lab. She would probably be busy with injured civilians, but I wanted to be there. We needed to stick together if we wanted to find out who did this, especially if it was HYDRA. Last time, in Germany, our biggest mistake had been splitting up. I didn't really want a repeat of the plane trap from Berlin, and if it was HYDRA, I knew it was all too possible. We had to find them before that happened.