The Planning Period

Insanity is the act of constantly repeating an action and expecting a different result to come. Delusion is a belief held with strong convictions, despite superior evidence to the contrary. Delusions can lead to becoming insane. Insanity can lead to become delusional.

But what occurs when a person suffers from both at the same time?

xxXxx

The Vandenreich had been harrowed these last few months.

Everything had started small. At first it was only small patrols and hunter teams that were disappearing or being killed. The occurrences were thought to be little more than a string of wild hollow attacks. That theory was thrown out the window when it was revealed that plenty of hollows were turning up slain as well, and since their bodies didn't so much as sport a bite mark, it couldn't have been the work of another hollow. Finally, higher tier officers started to disappear. Soldiers of actual worth and power were starting to die in ways that mirrored that of the other killings. They weren't obliterated by the result of superior power, but by precise cuts and broken necks.

So a hunter unit was sent with their overall leader Kirge Opie, to purge this threat.

If possible, they were to take it alive and bring it back to either be recruited or destroyed. The team had been sent out well over a week ago, and never reported again after the first day of their assignment. The quincy of the hunting division began to question as to whether their leader was dead or not. After all, it was not like him to disappear for so long, and with such a capable force at his side. Their overall lord and general squashed this doubt, pointing out that Kirge's spiritual energy had never shown any spike or pick up in power. The captain would never die without a fight, and if he fought then the men manning the quincy reishi scanners would've immediately picked up on such a powerhouse of energy. Instead, all they found were quick bursts of reiatsu from the hunting captain's team. Nothing overly dramatic. It was likely just a training exercise rather than a true battle. Kirge and his men were simply unresponsive and not dead by any extent.

A day later, the decapitated head of Kirge Opie was placed before the front gates of Hueco Mundo, bled out and showing signs of decay.

The Vandenreich then got serious. This was no longer an ignorable threat. This was something that had killed one of their best warriors, baring the Stern Ritter and the emperor himself. The quincy army had set a full lockdown on Hueco Mundo, halting their current plans to finish off Soul Society in its weakened state. In their midst was an ambushing predator that had already made a notable dent in their forces. Until it was neutralized as a threat, all of the Vandenreich were to halt any Soul Society related missions and hunt for whoever or whatever was killing their men.

In a far off cave in the middle of the Menos Forest, amongst the thousands of feral hollows of all classes, and amongst the dead forest and dry air, a single creature sat hiding and waiting. The one body that hosted two souls was simply listening in on their enemy. They had managed to connect themselves into the Quincy radio network by manipulating the COM system in their own armor. Every order the quincy command console issued by radio, the hybrid heard. Every sentence was analyzed. Every troop movement was tracked. The general locations of these 'Stern Ritter', were also accounted for. Once they were certain that one of these Stern Ritter was separated enough from their allies to be picked off, the hybrid would make their move on the Vandenreich by picking off their best warriors one by one. Then they'd work their way down until the Vandenreich were all but falling apart.

This was a guerrilla war. In such wars, knowledge and enemy disposition were paramount. Attacking a point that was too strong or easily reinforceable would only end in overall failure. Making a single miscalculation when attacking a weak point would end in overall failure. Too much or too little activity would inevitably result in overall failure. If they failed once, their life was forfeit and this little 'war' would be officially over. Every attack must be a victory or it would be an early death. The Vandenreich could lose hundreds of engagements and achieve only a single victory, which would be enough for them to have won the war. The hybrid could win every battle and lose once, and they would lose everything. These were the stakes for what the hybrid fought for. Regardless, it was a war nonetheless.

And war was all that the Meta lived for.

xxXxx

The president of the PWCD was fighting back a migraine as he read the reports before him.

The one thing that the president was dreading more than any number of ghosts or monsters was coming into effect the more he read into it. The U.S. production times table on those nanosuits of theirs was being accelerated a few months earlier than expected. The suits were already undergoing field testing and modifications at the moment, and yielding pleasing results to those overseeing the project. Apparently, someone realized that making an entire suit out of nanobots would be pointlessly expensive and time consuming, and that simply making an exoskeleton with nanobot armor to cover and enhance any vulnerabilities was several times more efficient. It turned out that they were right, as the production of at least 3 suits was nearing completion, with 5 more coming into the final testing phases.

And from what the reports showed, the nanosuits made ordinary humans into super soldiers that seriously rivaled the augment special ops divisions. Strength capable of moving several tons of weight, hyper-reactive armor, targeting assistance, amplified movements, and slightly improved reaction times were all given abilities that the Crysis nanosuit could provide. And overall, the process through which it was placed on and removed was so complex that only U.S. bases with specialized equipment could separate a nanosuit from its operator.

The president wouldn't have minded if these were the only troopers that he had to deal with. He would've been glad even. With the Americans starting a steady production of Crysis nanosuits, the PWCD presence in the states could be reduced and distributed to places where the PWCD presence was a little more short-handed. If these super soldiers proved that they were anywhere near as competent in neutralizing monsters as the PWCD augmented special operators were, than they would only be a boon to the organization's efforts.

But such was not the case.

No one knew where they had come from or how they had formed, but a new militant force of mercenaries had sprouted up in the woodworks, and had made their name pretty big. They were only a small band of mercenaries who only accepted contracts where they acted against non-human targets. They weren't augmented genetically or technologically. They were entirely normal humans without any potent form of support or heavy armor to even a fight between themselves and non-humans. This mercenary group was as new as could be, having only officially started working in some back water area of Africa. Even those of the PWCD who saw non-humans in the lowest form of contempt would hesitate to label such a group as a potent anti-youkai force. Apparently quite a few youkai had fled to the continent of Africa after the PWCD had started to crack down hard on non-human activities as a result of the Japan genocide, moving to the places on Earth where the presence of human monitoring was weakest as far as they knew.

Most of the monsters wanted to live in peace, but a South African warlord had discovered them when he had started to investigate into the sudden influx of foreigners in his lands. So he moved his entire militia to raid every location he knew of to have any large amounts of foreigners, murdering hundreds of humans and non-humans alike, but losing hundreds of his own men in return when the monsters organized. A vampire had rose to become the leader of the non-humans in South Africa, driving them to fight off the human aggressors through tooth and nail, even willingly giving out his blood to a select few to make his fellow monsters better able to fight. While the PWCD were preparing a large force to intervene in a conflict that had been instigated by their own kind, that very African warlord had hired the aforementioned mercenaries to kill the creature who was leading the youkai. The band of mercenaries managed to beat the PWCD to their location quite quickly.

F.E.A.R. was what they had named themselves, which was an acronym for 'First Encounter Assault Recon'.

The mercenaries swooped in on the conflict, gunning straight for the youkai commander, a vampire by the name of Strigoi. The FEAR team came in, using a privately owned old World War 2 German bomber plane to drop a payload of dirty bombs on all the major concentrations of youkai, which released a white gas upon impact. It was later revealed that the mercenaries were dropping shells filled with highly lethal amounts of white phosphorus, which burned and suffocated any living creatures caught in the general area of the blast zones. While the youkai below were dying a painful death through inhumane weapons, the mercenaries had come in wearing full body covering uniforms and gas masks. It was reported that from what few bodies had actually died of non-white phosphorus related causes, many youkai were killed by bullets coated in an oiled form of ricin of all things. Ricin was a chemical agent that killed its target painfully over the course of 3-5 days. It was also a plant capable of being grown at a common home without any special gardening methods. The fact that the mercenaries were employing these weapons in addition to lethal amounts of white phosphorus scared the PWCD president on several levels.

The next time the FEAR operatives were seen, they had marched into the South African militia's camp with full gear and gas masks and hand-delivered one of the fangs of the vampire to the African warlord.

With the youkai now in the throes of chaos and confusion without their leader, the South African militias renewed their assault with every bit of brutality and vengeance they could muster. The youkai they had fought weren't warrior tribes or naturally combat oriented species at all. They were simply non-humans that didn't want to be caught up in a conflict, but were forced to do so anyway for their own self-defense. They stood no chance in the face of the heavily equipped South African militias and had been butchered every time they had tried to reform into a legitimate fighting force. It was reported that any youkai found were being executed en mass, and through methods that exceeded the inhumanity shown in the conflict in Rwanda between the Tootsies and Hootoos.

The PWCD president didn't know whether or not he should be scared that humanity as a whole was simply watching the massacre without lifting a finger to help the youkai. In fact, PWCD agents had found out that someone was actually shipping munitions from overseas to finance the South African's genocide against non-humans. Humanity wasn't simply watching, but encouraging their behavior. The president had wanted to write it all off as humanity showing retaliation for the Japan genocide, but he knew that it went deeper than that. Quite a few of the people in Africa didn't even know about the Japan genocide, despite it happening just a few months ago on worldwide television and being talked about on the news ever since.

But that mercenary outfit was what had been bothering the PWCD president more than the actual conflict. Those men had employed deadly chemical weapons in the most inhumane applications possible, using munitions that no mercenary group should've been able to get their hands on. They used tactics that would've had them arrested and tried for war crimes if they had been employed on any human target, militaristic or civilian in nature. This wasn't to mention that their actions had led to one of the most infamous (or famous, depending on one's opinion) genocides that humanity had ever witnessed.

And this FEAR team made several reappearances. In the past 3 months, they had abducted a suspected magus in India through the use of nerve gas and raided a vampire's castle to kill the entire family and staff of non-humans through the use of ricin coated bullets. It was in the latter case that they had finally found out the identity of FEAR's leader.

He went by the alias of 'Bane', which was appropriate for his almost trademark use of chemical agents.

The PWCD had tried to track them, but somehow they could never keep tabs on the movements of FEAR. The PWCD had tried bugging them, using false mission offers, and sending agents, but no method they used seem to draw out the seasoned monster hunters. It was like they knew exactly what information to trust and what information to ignore. Even the actual face of this 'Bane' character was unknown, as his only visual sighting had come from a dying vampire who had a lethal amount of ricin put in his bloodstream from the bullets that Bane had personally fired into his neck and chest. The vampire's body healed the outer punctures, but trapped in the heavily poisoned bullets, which only accelerated their effects. The dying vampire's description was that of a muscular Caucasian man who wore what looked to be like an iron muzzle across his face. His voice had a vaguely German accent that was both muffled and amplified by the contraption across his face.

The Crysis nanosuits would soon be mobilized to the field, and with these FEAR mercenaries running about, the PWCD would find themselves with far too much competition. Any large scale missions they took in America would soon become missions for U.S. soldiers equipped with Crysis nanosuits to participate in. If the PWCD took a mission that would send them into combat with a widely known and apparent threat, there was a possibility that PWCD special operators would encounter FEAR mercenaries. This would raise a slew of questions and rights that mercenaries had with which to work under, assuming that the mercenaries didn't fire on the PWCD augments on the basis of them being altered on a genetic level.

Then the president thought about it. The PWCD was a group who took already advanced and seasoned soldiers and altered their bodies to face non-humans on even physical ground. The Crysis program created suits through which the wearers became heightened and powerful soldiers. FEAR did nothing to make their men stronger, but instead made their enemies weaker by assaulting them on a genetic level. The fact that all the ammunition and explosives FEAR used were either coated in or carrying a payload of chemical agents only reinforced the lengths through which FEAR would go to win a fight, no matter the lengths. Then finally was the production of armed drones who would be programmed to only fire on non-human threats, and do so without hesitation or thought. These were simply the more noteworthy measures that humanity was going through to combat monster kind, ignoring the increase in munitions and weapons development many industrial countries were going through. Humanity wasn't being divided even further by the numerous groups who wanted to take a shot at non-humans, as the president of the PWCD had first thought.

They were only getting stronger.

The man smiled in contentment. He had long believed that only the PWCD would be capable of dealing with non-humans after having done so for so long. After years of losing and gaining some of the best men he had to offer, he had fallen into the same pitfall that caused so many non-humans to fail. He began to see his currently used methods as the only viable ones, refusing to be more flexible and open minded on the issue. He firmly used to believe that only augments could fight and win against any potent monster threat. Yet here they were, normal and unaugmented humans who were not only capable, but superbly efficient in doing so through means that the PWCD only rarely ever considered. It made the old man happy to know that the PWCD could up and disappear at any moment in time, and humanity would still be fully capable of fighting back and winning regardless.

xxXxx

The airborne super soldiers had long since been relieved of ghoul hunting duty once the rest of the occupants of the nearby PWCD base arrived.

There were now over one hundred augmented super soldiers, over a dozen normal humans in hazard suits, and numerous aerial vehicles in the town, rescuing civilians and purging the town of ghouls. Of course, samples were acquired to figure out what it was about dead apostles and ghouls that made them so highly infectious. In addition, the Russian civilians were being checked over for signs of infection and being evacuated to safe locations.

Yuri and his shock troopers gave a swift debriefing to the overall commander and were immediately back in the air, scouring the city for any large concentrations of ghouls the rest of the augments may not have been aware of. Upon sighting the umpteenth group of ghouls, the shock troopers prepared to carry out their usual method of attack, which was have everyone single out an individual ghoul, land feet first on top of them, and let gravity do the rest of the work. The cannibals were so busy devouring a dead body that they failed to notice the encroaching super soldiers.

And right before the augments went in for the kill, someone beat them to it.

The group of 6 ghouls was ambushed by a group of hooded men and women with crosses adorning their robes. In several flashes of metal, the ghouls were all pierced through at the heart and brain. The creatures all collapsed to the ground without much of a struggle. The kill was quick and efficient. By the time the shock troopers finally landed, the mystery group had already organized into a loose formation and faced the augments before them without any hesitation. The shock troopers responded to the unexpected and unwelcome aid by leveling their rifles at the hooded group, unsure if they were humans, dead apostles, magi, or whatever. All they knew was that the group before them was armed and dangerous, if that display with their weapons had shown anything.

The Church members didn't flinch, but they did subtly move their sleeves and hoods to better cover their faces, believing that their Kevlar uniforms would protect them. They also had their short blades ready, three to a hand. The augments noticed the movements, but were unaware of the material of their enemies' cloaks. Kevlar or dragon skin vests seemed the most likely, but either one would've been useless. Kevlar halted normal bullets, while the PWCD only used specialized ammunition, armor piercing rounds being the most common. Of course, the material could be laced with some sort of magic or energy as well, which would be more likely to halt high powered bullets. Regardless, if the hooded group made a hostile movement, the augments intended to find out.

Yuri spoke up first, deciding that he disliked western stand-offs such as these.

"What are you?" Yuri asked.

A plain and simple question. If they answered human, then there was a chance that they wouldn't be hostile. In that instance, Yuri would see to it that they talked to the PWCD operations commander, and find out what it was that such an obviously well trained and seasoned group of soldiers was doing here. They'd also question as to the purpose of the Roman Catholic symbol on their uniforms. If the group before them answered to that question as non-humans of any sort, they'd be gunned down on the spot. Simple.

The hooded group shifted, parting to let a singular member of their entourage walk forward to meet the hammer wielding colossus that was Yuri Boyka, pulling their hood back to see the man eye-to-helmet lenses.

Yuri blinked under his helmet when he saw the face of a rather young woman with a serious look in her eyes. She had a straight and slim face, her hair done up in a bun so to keep out of her field of vision. Her hair was dark brown and her eyes a similar color. Most noteworthy however was the fact that she seemed completely unconcerned that she was looking up into the face of a 7ft. 9 super soldier that was carrying a hammer longer than she was tall. She didn't seemed fazed by the fact that there were 10 other armored giants sporting guns, knives, explosives, and other hazardous equipment right before her. And they didn't even know that she had seen these very soldiers end the entire bloodline of a dead apostle ancestor family with no apparent wounds or exertions to show for it.

"We are the executioners of the Holy Church, members of the Vatican who hunt monsters, daemons, and heretics where they appear." She stated without missing a beat. Yuri liked her already.

"So you're human?" Yuri confirmed. It wouldn't be his first time encountering non-humans who only hunted other non-humans. He'd still kill them for not being human, but he'd at least remember to feel a little bad for it afterward.

She almost seemed offended. "Of course." She stated, giving him a hard look. The effect was somewhat diminished considering she had to crane her neck just to see his helmet.

"What is your business here?" Yuri asked, moving to strap his hammer to his lower back and signaling for the augments to keep their weapons ready.

These people were human. That alone meant that the PWCD had no reason to be fighting them. Maybe there would be a jurisdiction conflict over other humans trying to do the PWCD's job, but that would all be purely political, which wasn't in the shock trooper's job description. However, he did take note that she had said they hunted heretics, which could possibly mean him and his men. Yuri himself wasn't religious, but the vast majority of his men were. Also being a 'heretic' in their eyes could have nothing to do with one's religious orientation. It was also likely that the men and women before them didn't have the slightest idea that the men before them were humans, and had only hesitated from attacking either out of fear or to deliver a message.

"Simple. We had originally come to slay and burn the dead apostle ancestor and her children, but it seems you beat us to it." She stated with a slightly approving look.

Well... that had thrown Yuri off by quite a bit. Here he was, prepared to have to either kill or escort these...'Church' members, yet it turned out they had been planning to come kill the very targets that he and his men had annihilated. The shock trooper then frowned, giving her and her slightly relaxed allies a good once over. For monster hunters, they didn't seem very well equipped.

"You seem pretty under-equipped to be hunting monsters and daemons don't you think?" One of the shock troopers quipped, voicing Yuri's thoughts and earning himself a pointed glare from the woman and a lot of concealed frowns from her allies.

"We've hunted down creatures a lot more dangerous and powerful than her and you before." She stated brazenly at the mouthy super human, making sure to note that she saw them as 'creatures' and not human. She flinched when she heard a harsh bark come from the augment that she was directly facing. It took a moment for her to realize it was laughter.

"What a coincidence!" Yuri boomed, taking a step forward, which also caused the woman of the church to take a step back. The shock trooper bent over so he was at eye-level with the woman, ignoring the tense air being emitted by her allies and his own. "So have we." He whispered loudly in a harsh voice. That had shaken the woman enough for her to remember her situation.

"Well regardless," She straightened up, taking another step back to regain her personal space. "We didn't come to talk to you. We wish to get into contact with your overall leader."

"You mean the base operations commander?" Yuri questioned, standing straight up again. He noticed the other executioners relaxing at the decreased threat the augment commander presented.

"No, not the leader of your particular outpost. The leader of your entire organization. The leader of the PWCD." She clarified.

"..." Yuri was quiet for a moment. The PWCD president didn't simply answer to whoever came up to an augment and said that they wanted to meet their leader. There were various protocols and levels things like this went through. "Well in that case you'll have to speak with the base operations commander regardless. I don't have the authority to simply introduce you to the leader of a worldwide organization simply because someone asks me to."

"That'll be quite fine." She clarified, motioning over to her allies. The rest of the executors walked up behind her, which prompted the shock troopers to step forward and back up their own leader. "It does not have to be an immediate or even face-to-face meeting, so long as we do meet him."

xxXxx

The PWCD president had thought he heard everything.

He had sent spirit energy and power armor enhanced super humans to go infiltrate the headquarters of an army of heartless spirits. He had sent genetically enhanced supermen to assassinate vampire lords. He had unveiled the existence of an afterlife society that for all its claims of hosting the afterlife, he had threatened with nuclear retaliation if they dared to encroach on human territory. By God, he had ordered a world-wide organization to move all of their soldiers into a single island country, all to repel an invasion by another species, which they had ultimately succeeded in doing at the cost of nearly 100 million lives. At this point, a man could run in claiming that aliens from space were invading the planet, and rather than question the validity of that statement, he'd be questioning as to these alien species' numbers and capabilities. Absolutely nothing should surprise him anymore.

So why was he so flabbergasted that the operations commander in Russia had just sent him a report of the Vatican approaching the PWCD for a military alliance? The world made absolutely no sense anymore.