A/N: So I was debating whether or not to do a chapter about the gang getting back together at Overwatch HQ before having them jump into a battle against Talon, but I decided not to. If you'd prefer that I had, please PM me or leave a comment. If I get enough requests, I'll write the chapter and slip it in. By the way, to any bothered by it, the space I'm leaving in D. Va's name is because of some weird formatting issue I'm having.


India (Pharah):

"Go! Go! Go!" With these words from Pharah, the current pilot of the Sentinel-class transport, Overwatch's strike force runs down the disembarkation ramp. Pharah waits just a fraction of a second once the last agent, the soldier calling himself 76, has cleared the ramp, and then dusts off at high speed. She lands the transport atop a parking garage, engages its cloaking, and kicks in her Raptora's thrust at maximum, straining to catch up to the rest of the strike team. With so few agents having returned, every one of them will be crucial in the oncoming fight.

Tracer:

Athena's discovery didn't come a moment too soon. Talon has launched an operation targeting a museum exhibit in Numbani, where Doomfist's gauntlet is currently on display. The artifact is powerful enough that Overwatch can't allow it to fall into the hands of the organization which has been wreaking such havoc across the globe. Lena feels somewhat guilty for not flying, since she's almost positive she could have gotten here even faster than Pharah did, but the last time she flew was…

She shudders, blocking out the memory. She can't allow herself to think about that right now. Instead, she turns her head over her shoulder to look back at the team, while triggering her chronal accelerator to boost her personal time passage for her signature "dash." It doesn't really move her, it just allows her to move in a time-stream which is faster than the rest of the world, but the effect is much the same, and she reappears perhaps fifteen meters ahead of where she "should" have been.

"Hurry, loves! We don't have much time!" Lena runs ahead of the team, seeking to get to the museum before Talon's strike force can. Only Winston can keep up with her chronally accelerated sprints, leaping ahead alongside her. The rest of the force sprints along behind them, spreading out in anticipation of contact.

"Tracer, you and Winston go ahead. The rest of us will get a perimeter set up and try to stop Talon before they can arrive," says the unidentified Soldier: 76. His voice seems familiar to Lena, but she can't place it, and before she can dedicate any more thought to it, something flashes across her field of view and plows into the building behind the team with a shockingly loud blast. She looks up and sees a black-clad figure standing atop one of the lower roofs of the museum with a rocket launcher. Before she can react, Pharah triggers her launcher and the shooter is tossed sideways, landing limply, as a rocket explodes less than a meter from him.

"Winston!" Lena shouts, and the gorilla scientist triggers his jump pack, hurling himself through the air and crashing down on top of a glass dome, flying through it and barely even slowing down. She follows, boosting her time-rate as much as she dares and darting towards the exhibit hall.

Soldier: 76:

Morrison sees Tracer and Winston dash ahead. He'd personally have preferred to keep the group together, concentrating their firepower and blowing their way in unstoppably, but he understands the necessity of interrupting any Talon agents inside, if only to minimize the civilian casualties which Talon has no qualms about inflicting. Besides, he trusts the two to keep each other mostly out of trouble, or at least intact. He turns his attention to working the fight outside. He isn't in command of the operation, but he is second, and since the first in command just jumped through a glass dome and is no longer giving orders, he takes over the fight outside.

"Pharah! Get to high ground and lay down suppressive fire! Reinhardt, take Lucio and Genji and try to push forward. Get inside and make sure nobody gets in behind Winston and Tracer. Zarya! Mercy! Mei! Try to outflank to the left. If you can, get to somewhere you can pin down those bastards in the garage. D. Va, Torbjorn, follow me!" He dashes to cover. The Talon operative with the rocket launcher was the first to fire, but several more have already opened up, and he hears the impacts of solid slugs crunching into the wall he's ducked behind.

At least two gunners, he thinks. Probably battle rifles, no more than thirty rounds in a magazine. Forty-eight, fifty-three… when he's counted sixty impacts, he spins out. One of the Talon gunners has ducked down to reload, but the other was foolish enough to remain upright while he dropped out his magazine, and Jack's tactical visor means that he knows exactly where the shooters are. Morrison squeezes the trigger, and his pulse rifle launches a burst of plasma downrange, flinging the idiot backwards in a spray of blood. When the other gunner pops upright, he fires again, this time a burst of three pulses, which knocks that gunner down too, dead or wounded. D. Va dashes by, using her mech's fusion cannons to set up a near-impenetrable interdiction field, and Jack takes the opportunity to reposition himself.

Torbjorn already has a turret positioned, and it's doing an admirable job of pinning down three gunners on the roof, so Morrison dashes across the road and fires a trio of rockets at their position. He rolls into cover as the rockets hit, but he's not the only one firing and a burst of fire stitches its way across the alley mouth just after he reaches it. A ricochet grazes across his knuckle, leaving a small, bloody scratch, but he's had much worse. From her position on the roof, Pharah launches a rocket which blasts the gunner apart, and Jack moves again, hammering another gunner's position with sustained automatic fire. His rifle's power pack flashes a red warning light as it drains its last bit of energy, and he ducks into cover to reload.

Tracer:

Her chronal accelerator is flickering, so she rolls to cover… and spots the two kids cowering there. Oh no, why aren't you out of here? is her first thought. But she has to say something, something to keep these kids from panicking and doing something that's just likely to get them killed. "Don't worry, loves. Cavalry's here," she says, picking a line she's sure they'll recognize and saying it in the most comforting tone she can manage. Across the room, Winston begins to charge, but Reaper turns both his shotguns on him, and then slides away as a shadow before Winston reaches him. The scientist collapses, battered nearly unconscious by the hammering of both heavy-gauge shotguns. No, this can't be! I can't help him right now, but I need to! she thinks. "Come on, big guy. Get up," she murmurs, almost without noticing.

Widowmaker's shot shatters the glass surrounding the gauntlet, and Reaper rematerializes, moving in for the coup de grace on Winston. Her chronal accelerator continues to send low power signals, and she worries that she's overstrained it. That thought nearly brings on a panic attack, and she freezes up for a moment, but her worry for Winston helps her fight it back. She peeks out just in time to see Reaper bring a booted foot down on her friend's glasses, and then hears the most welcome sound in the world- the hum of her chronal accelerator's "nominal power" signal. She darts out to rejoin the fight, in time to see Winston lunge forward.

Widowmaker:

Widowmaker steps forward, about to seize the gauntlet, but then hears the crunch of breaking glass and the roar of an enraged gorilla. "Imbécile!" she mutters, snapping her visor back down and stepping out to open fire. Across the room, Reaper is getting pummeled by the enraged Winston, a sight she can't help mildly enjoying - she'd appreciate it more if Talon had left more room for emotion, but they didn't. However, she does need to help her ally, and so she starts shooting. Reaper finally manages to resume his insubstantial form, shifting the nanotech which makes up his body into a cloud which is much harder to damage, and she turns back, only to be shocked when the gauntlet is no longer there.

She begins to stalk around the pedestal, when a young voice shouts "Watch out!" She turns, bringing up her rifle to aim at the fool who drew her attention, only to hear someone say "Hey!" behind her. She spins, just in time for the other boy who she'd seen earlier being shielded by Winston to slam the Doomfist directly into her midsection. She goes flying, landing barely conscious. She turns to see Reaper rematerialize, just about helpless- he must have overstrained his nanotech body too much for it to maintain separation and remain linked to the control unit- in front of the two Overwatch agents. She reacts, firing a grapnel up to the waiting, cloaked Talon dropship, and swinging across the room, grabbing her incapacitated partner and reeling herself in.

Winston leaps after them, but his jump pack simply can't boost that far under this much gravity and the dropship accelerates away even as she continues to wind in. She sees why a moment later. The rest of the Talon strike team is dead, critically wounded, or unconscious, scattered across the perimeter of the museum. Quel disastre, she thinks to herself as she heaves Reaper, who is beginning to return to consciousness, into the passenger bay of the dropship, and then pulls herself in after him. Judging by the blast of pain in her lower chest as she does so, that punch broke a few ribs. She'd be angry, both at the boy for the injury and herself, for the failed mission, if Talon had left her the capability to.

Tracer:

Having returned the (now apparently pretty bloody broken) gauntlet to its pedestal, Lena dashes outside, leaping gracefully up and out the massive hole in the dome covering the room. She winces at the destruction outside. The once-graceful architecture of the museum is shattered and torn in several places. Apparently, giving Overwatch agents (except for herself, of course, she thinks wryly) lots and lots of explosives on a combat mission – or pretty much anytime – is contraindicated. However, most of Talon's gunmen appear to have been neutralized, and she is elated when the comm channel breaks out with an unbroken series of status reports, all of her friends reporting that they remain mostly unscathed.

Boarding the flight back, Tracer thinks back to the fight with Reaper and Widowmaker. She has got to see Winston about getting her chronal accelerator recalibrated, or maybe even upgraded. The amount she'd used it prior to it nearly shutting down shouldn't have drained the power to that extent, should it? The realization of how close she'd come to being cast back into that between state nearly triggers a panic attack, but Reinhardt's tooth-jarring backslap distracts her long enough for it to subside to barely manageable levels. She hugs him back, and because nobody can see her face, nobody realizes that it's not in congratulations or joy at seeing him, but in thanks. Still, while her teammates chat excitedly about the success of their first operation, she spends most of the flight home silent, brooding over her close call, and her internal turmoil means that she doesn't notice how worried Mercy looks whenever she glances over.

Talon Base Alpha, unknown location (Widowmaker):

"This mission's result was… disappointing," states Liao, during Widowmaker and Reaper's debrief. "What happened to cause this chèdǐ de shībài?"

"Well, un raison was that nobody thought to warn us that Overwatch had been reactivated," Widowmaker responds. "Did nobody think to warn us of that, or was it unknown?"

"We had no indication that such an unfortunate event had occurred," replies another of the debriefers, who calls himself Volskoff. "Is this true?"

"Unless you can think of some other reason why Winston, Tracer, Mercy, Pharah, and several other known, or in one case unidentified, ex-Overwatch agents would have shown up, I think we have to assume that that is indeed the case," growls Reaper. He's clearly still upset at himself for his error in not finishing Winston off immediately.

"Liao?" says Volskoff, raising an eyebrow. "Did you have any indication that such a thing happened?"

"Méiyǒu. No," says Liao. "However, their arrival does appear to have been the main reason for the failure of the operation. As such, we cannot blame Widowmaker and Reaper for the failure of this mission."

Both agents relax in relief. However, Widowmaker soon speaks up again. "What actions shall we take regarding the return of Overwatch?"

It turns out rapidly that there is no plan for this situation, which does not exactly fill Widowmaker with confidence. However, there is nothing to be done about it, so she and Reaper take their leave.