Episode 1: Incubation II
Where the flying fuck am I? Alex Mercer thought as he wandered around the Docks. It was still dark outside, and it didn't look like it was going to get light any time soon. That should make it easier for him to lie low for a while until he got his shit together, but lying low didn't mean a damn when you were completely lost.
He hadn't made it out of gangland yet. After leaving Armsmaster and Miss Militia behind, he had taken a random path through a maze of alleyways to throw off any possible pursuers, before trying to assume the form of the thugs he consumed.
Big fucking surprise, that hadn't worked out. He guessed getting cooked to perfection by thermonuclear fire screwed up his entire biology. The thoughts and memories he consumed, however, were slowly getting less hazy. The occasional snippets of information bounced through his head whenever he looked at something relevant.
Like another group of Asian kids leaning against a wall.
Food, went a dark voice in Alex' head he usually ignored.
Lung, went the memories of Chuan-whatshisname he tried to ignore.
Lung…Lung was apparently some gangster bigshot. His presence was noticeable in the Docks, yes, what with all the teenage gangbangers skulking around.
Whatever. As long as they didn't bother Alex, he wouldn't bother with them.
Although he was very eager to see if he could shapeshift again, now that he got rid of that radiation…
Alex paused to fish a newspaper out of a discarded garbage bin, expecting to get at least something about the mess in Manhattan. Some things you just couldn't cover up, no matter how hard you tried.
Right of the bat, he noticed something was off.
April 12, 2011? What the fuck?
Alex just stared at that little header, now sure whether that was a typo or evidence of something really messed up. How the hell did you confuse 2008 with 2011?
…Did that nuke blast him to the fucking future?
Alex hastily skimmed through the paper. Some bullshit about donating to the Protectorate, a couple of advertisements from "Capes" lending their services, and an article warning Asian kids where to go for help if they were targeted by "Lung" or his "ABB".
Lung. Apparently, this guy went after anyone between twelve and seventy looking Asian enough to join his gang. If you were Asian and you lived in Brockton Bay, you belonged to him.
And that was it. Nothing about a freaking nuke going off in Manhattan's coastal waters. Nothing about a massive infection turning humans into monsters, or the enormous quarantine zone preventing said monsters from escaping.
"Are you fucking kidding me," Alex growled.
No way. No way Blackwatch managed to cover up that entire mess. No way –
"Hey!" Someone snapped, and Alex felt someone shove him.
Well, they tried to shove him, anyway. Even though he currently only weighed about as much as two, maybe two-and-a-half people, he barely even felt the impact. It sure didn't send him stumbling, like his assailant properly expected.
Growling in agitation, Alex turned around to face his newest headache.
More suicidal thugs looking for trouble. Great. And this time, there were three of them.
"What?" Alex demanded, discarding the newspaper. "I'm busy."
"Busy?" One of the guys scoffed. He pulled out a switchblade and pointed it at Alex' face. "Fork up, asshole!"
The other two tried their best to look angry and intimidating. Alex couldn't help but notice that these guys were Asians, too.
So the Docks were their territory, now? They seemed to assume he'd just "fork up" whatever he had on him. They didn't even specify. Must have gotten used to easy victims by now.
That meant they were likely to have some cash on them, too.
Alex smirked. He could do with some money right now.
"What the fuck you laughing for? I said – "
Alex grabbed the man by his shoulders and brought his head down, hard, while at the same time bringing his knee up.
Unmovable limb met not-so-unstoppable head and the results were to be expected. Cows went moo, dogs went bark, skulls went pop.
He felt the biomass of the poor fucker spiral around him, gradually disappearing into his own, but by then he was already taking care of the other morons. The first he punched with enough force to smash his head in, the second one he impaled with a series of sharpened tentacles, smashing his larynx so he wouldn't scream.
No nausea, no pain, no crippling radiation sickness, just the usual searing headache and disorienting identity crisis when their minds became a part of his. They didn't even have the time to scream or call him monster – not physically, at least.
This time, Alex learned a lot more than their general identities. He sifted through years of useless information in seconds, filtering what he didn't need and digging for something useful.
Lung. Parahuman. Supervillain.
Protectorate. Parahumans. Superheroes.
Golden man.
Hypocrite
Alex opened his eyes, sighing. Nobody would miss scum like them. They really shouldn't have tried to mug him while armed. Those two heroes, they tried to be nonlethal. They tried to talk and reason. These assholes were just a couple of jackals, trying to enrich themselves from other people's misery.
He'd seen enough of that in Manhattan.
Alex paused, then grabbed a hold of the last thug's genetic code. He willed his body to change…and it did. Biomass rippled along the outer edges of his body as it perfectly mimicked the appearance of the last person he consumed.
Finally, some good news.
Safely concealed behind the exterior of a perfectly-normal asshole, Alex continued East, moving deeper into the Docks. He kept his gaze low and avoided looking at anyone, instead keeping himself preoccupied with digesting all the information that now swum around his head.
For the moment, where the flying fuck am I had been solved. It was a city called Brockton Bay, which somehow managed to have an entirely different version of both history as reality than the rest of the US.
Manhattan had slobbering mutants and sociopathic special forces, Brockton had…superheroes and supervillains. The city had a population of about three hundred thousand, a small percentage of which had powers.
Superpowers.
The mind boggled.
Alex felt tempted to just dismiss it as all as the dying hallucination of some amped-up junkie. The things he had seen could be explained with technology…he guessed. Armsmaster and Miss Militia had called themselves "local heroes", not superheroes. That might be an euphemism, or a code or something.
Although that didn't really explain the newspapers.
As Mercer made his way deeper into the Docks, he noticed that his surroundings began changing. Nothing too overt, but the quality of the infrastructure and the buildings seemed to degrade. It was like he stepped from a Green Zone into a Yellow Zone. There were less normal civilians now, and more unconscious vagrants, prostitutes and thugs.
He caught the occasional glare from those people, but they generally left him alone. It wasn't possible that they all caught how Asian his current body looked, so there had to be something else about his appearance. Maybe the hoodie. Or the colours he wore. Something that visually confirmed he was with the Azn Bad Boys.
Problem was, he noticed things too. It wasn't just the quality of the buildings that began to degrade; the people themselves seemed to grow more agitated.
Alex passed by several groups of stern-looking Asians gearing up for a fight. Many of them looked angry, or apprehensive, but there was only ever one guy talking.
It almost looked like they were gearing up for something. A gang war on their own turf? That ought to be exciting.
And exciting it got. After ten minutes of wandering through the Docks, Alex began seeing groups of armed thugs running around, shouting orders at each other and generally making a big deal, like they got some sort of big conflict coming.
The moment Alex reached that conclusion, the memories of those he consumed stirred, flooding his consciousness with images and words.
He caught a glimpse of warehouses, rows of guns and stacks of drugs. He saw a tall man who had his entire upper body covered with tattoos, all of them depicting dragons from Eastern culture.
Alex assumed that was bad. He didn't want to get caught up in a turf war; right now, the plan was to lay low and find a way to get back to Dana, preferably without alerting the government that Zeus had popped up somewhere else again.
Of course, it didn't take long for him to be spotted. Some lanky guy with a hoodie of his own beckoned him, holding a pistol in his right hand with his finger already on the trigger.
Blackwatch would be proud.
"Come on," the thug snapped at him in English. "Orders from Bakuda!"
Alex assumed that was bad, too. Bakuda didn't resonate too well with the memories within him. The name seemed to draw a lot of fear. He had no idea why.
"What orders?" He replied, not sure if this was something he ought to know or not.
The Asian man replied with barely-controlled rage. "Fucking heroes come to shit on our business! We need to hold them off until Lee gets here!"
Oh, they were waiting for Lee. That cleared things up. "Right, right! Got a gun for me, too?"
The guy looked at him like he just asked him if the sky was green. "The fuck? Didn't you get the message? What's your name, where you from?"
Uh…
Alex provided him with the necessary information, wincing as he stumbled over his "own" name.
The gangster looked at him with blatant suspicion, but a distant explosion distracted him. "Fuck, they are here already? Come on, they need more people at the warehouse!"
"Lead the way," Alex simply replied, his interest piqued by the mention of the "fucking heroes". Apparently, heroes were a real thing in Brockton Bay. That, or everybody had brain damage.
He honestly couldn't tell which option was more likely.
Lanky guy led him past a series of reinforced buildings with armed gangsters running around. Another couple of explosions went off, each one sounding increasingly closer. Eventually, the two of them came to a stop in front of a large, decrepit-looking warehouse.
The area around here smelled…different. Alex expected the chemical whiff of drugs – coke or something – but this place had more of a human scent to it. Fleshy, a bit pungent. Like military barracks where a couple of squads spent a couple of nights binging with showering.
"You inside, now," the flunky snapped, gesturing with his gun at the metal door a couple of meters to their left. "Report to Hyun! She'll give further orders!"
Alex repressed the urge to offer the man a mock salute. He wasn't sure what he was supposed to do against the heroes, but apparently, reporting to "Hyun" would make all of his problems go away.
So Alex headed towards the metal door and tried to open it.
Locked. Go figure.
He was about to yell for his new buddy to come back and open the fucking door when someone already opened it for him. The sound of heavy chains and padlocks being undone came from the other side, moments before some big, burly asshole stepped into view.
Bald, covered in tattoos, but not the "Lung" everybody had the hots for. This guy was more fat than fit, and had a sleazy little moustache on his upper lip.
Fatso nodded once and jerked with his thumb at the hallway behind him. A bit puzzled by all this nonsense, Alex still decided to humour the man, quickly stepping inside as a tremor ran through the building.
The door was locked behind him and now he was locked in a foul-smelling warehouse with a bunch of angry assholes. Oh, the memories…
But the vague resemblances to the military bases in Manhattan ended there. Alex rounded the corner and found himself standing on a small flight of stairs overlooking a hangar of sorts. The first floor considered of a metal railing overlooking the bottom floor. Said bottom floor was filled with tables, couches and hastily-built offices. He saw white bricks, piles of money, stacks of handguns and melee weapons.
He also saw girls and young women of varying ages scattered around the warehouse. Dirty rags, expensive clothes. Elaborate makeup, dust-caked faces. Unblemished skin, bruises and split lips. Some were crying, others just stared blankly ahead.
Some were old enough to be mothers, others…not so much.
"What you waiting for?" The fat man said as he approached Alex from behind. "Hyun's in the back. You – "
Cobra-quick, Alex' right arm snatched out and grabbed the man by the front of his suit. He lifted the two-hundred pound thug in the air, walked down the five steps that separated him from the solid concrete floor below, and hauled the man overhead.
His first victim crashed head-face into the floor, producing a crater ten feet wide. The impact kicked up clouds of dust and shards of stone, as well as crushing everything above the man's chest into red paste.
Alex didn't bother consuming what was left. Even as the women began screaming and ducking for cover, he pushed deeper into the warehouse.
Seconds later, all hell broke loose. ABB gangsters began firing at him with their guns, while others rushed at him with knives and machetes, oblivious to what he just wrought.
Alex felt several bullets tear through his chest without doing any harm. The first thug reached him and swung his blade, aiming at his neck.
He easily knocked the blade from the thug's hand, then hooked his leg behind his and shoved him to the ground.
A bullet tore through Alex' head and his head snapped sideways. He ignored the wound even as the wound closed again, lifted his boot and brought it down on the boy's head.
A sound not akin to a watermelon exploding was drowned out by the noise of the concrete giving away underneath his heel.
That got the thugs to back off, unsure of how to react. The door to one of the offices suddenly slammed open, revealing a stern-looking Asian woman with her tied up in a bun. She carried an Uzi in her hands, with a sidearm stuffed in its holster at her hip.
She sneered, then opened fire on him, emptying her entire clip in two seconds.
Alex remained utterly silent as his body rapidly healed what little damage the hail of fire had done to him. Wordlessly, he picked up a pistol from a nearby table. Though the radiation sickness had messed him up big time, he still carried the collective knowledge of dozens of soldiers within his mind. With practiced ease, he gunned down the three Bad Boys standing at the far end of the warehouse, then put a round in Hyun's kneecap.
Then, the fucking gun jammed.
Alex threw the worthless piece of crap away and continued the old-fashioned way. Gangsters turned and ran, but he launched spiked tentacles from his back and speared them through their legs, keeping them from escaping.
One, he tore his throat out with his fingers. Another he decapitated with a simple punch. A third he flung to the ground, before straddling him and delivering a series of one-two punches that swiftly had him punching wet chips into a shattered concrete hole.
He'd seen enough fucked up shit in Manhattan. At least Blackwatch honestly believed they were fighting for the greater good. At least Blaxkwatch attempted to reach something with their actions. This? Humans treating other humans like merchandise? Kidnapping the weak and the poor from the streets and condemning them to a life of misery?
He might not be human, but to let this happen would make him truly inhuman.
None of them got out of there alive. Alex hunted them all down, tore them screaming from their hiding spots and ripped them apart.
The woman – Hyun – attempted to crawl away from the slaughter. Alex saved her for last, making sure he got all the other fuckers first. Then, he calmly walked up to her, then kicked her in her side to roll her over, breaking half her ribcage in the process.
Alex straddled her, then proceeded to unleash a flurry of furious punches with increasing cadence. When he felt his knuckles hit the concrete below – which really didn't take very long – he speared her motionless corpse and consumed her body .
A mess of thoughts and memories rushed through his head. Fragmented and blurry, like the others, but this time Alex managed to make more sense of it.
Azn Bad Boys. Empire Eighty-eight. Merchants. Undersiders. Bakuda. Bombs. Lung. Insects. Protectorate.
Even as he fell to his knees and clutched his head, he encountered the same strange images as before. The memories of the previous ABB gangsters filled in the gaps, and he managed to get a more complete picture of what the hell was going on in Brockton Bay.
This city was filled with heroes and villains. Fucked up people with problems outnumbered those who were willing to make a difference. The gangs outnumbered the local law enforcement, and the amount of capes – people with powers? – was heavily skewed in favour of the villains.
But it wasn't just that. There was something else going on in Brockton Bay. A thick carpet of terror blanketed the woman's last thoughts, but it wasn't caused by Alex himself. A coldblooded bitch like her, heavily involved in human trafficking, scared out of her mind by…someone.
Who? Why?
Alex felt a sudden shift in the air around him. His instinct screamed at him to move and he spun around just in time to catch a knife in his left arm.
His assailant was a man in a black outfit dressed up in an Eastern mask. He wore a belt with knives and other sharp objects fastened to it.
Alex immediately lashed out, landing a crushing jab in the middle of the bastard's face. His skull shattered into fragments, pieces of his mask flying everywhere as his cranium was pulverised. A torrent of red blood spread through the air -
The next second, everything that had once been a part of the man turned into black ash, leaving a thick cloud of dust behind, easily ten feet wide.
What the -?
Alex felt something prickle at his throat, He jabbed behind him with his elbow, feeling bones shatter underneath the impact –
Another detonation of black smoke. Alex quickly leapt out of the obscuring darkness and spotted the bastard standing near one of the gun tables, having picked up a gun.
This bastard could fucking telep-
Two shots rang out. Alex felt two solid objects slamming into his chest, but they didn't even penetrate anymore. He had consumed enough biomass to begin filling in the gaps the radiation had left. Even though he still couldn't shapeshift to a more extreme extent, he didn't need his Claws or Blade to tear this motherfucker apart.
Alex began advancing on the crazy teleporting bastard. As soon as he came within limb-rending range, the asshole teleported again, leaving a solid copy of himself behind to die at Alex's hands instead.
All the while, girls and young women were screaming and crying. It was very distracting.
Lee – assuming that the crazy fucker was the "Lee" the ABB thugs mentioned before – was a slippery bastard. He wasn't fast and he had no means of truly harming Alex, but he just didn't die.
He didn't feel like chasing this fucker around the warehouse like this much longer. Those "heroes" were likely to show up soon, and he didn't want to get more involved than he already was.
So he had to wrap this up. A dozen Blackwatch voices whispering in cacophony told him how to achieve this.
Lee appeared somewhere near the ceiling, standing on a platform that overlooked the entire bottom floor.
This time, he held a cut-down rifle.
Three gunshots rang out at the same time. The shot that Lee managed to squeeze off struck Alex in his stomach, actually piercing his "skin" and getting stuck somewhere in the middle.
Meanwhile, Alex's shots struck home. One got Lee in the chest, and the other in his leg. The ABB bastard stumbled backwards and fell, but the body that slammed into the ground exploded into a cloud of ash.
He managed to teleport to safety. Again.
The last echoes reverberated through the warehouse's interior. Then. Then…silence.
Alex found himself standing after yet another carnage. He waited for the moment of satisfaction to arrive.
It never came. These women would still be scarred forever and the system that got them here was still in place. Manhattan had some sort of bullshit information filter keeping the world from what knowing what really happened.
And the criminals had fucking superpowers.
Superpowers.
The people he consumed all but verified it. Brockton Bay had a sizeable population of people with superpowers.
Not Blacklight-infected monsters like him, but actual powers. How could –
Alex jumped backwards when the skylight above him shattered into a thousand pieces. The three other skylights met the same fate as several fast-moving combatants breached the warehouse.
Preparing himself for round two, Alex raised his hands in a combat position. But then…
"Hold your fire!" A voice to his left yelled. A voice he recognized, despite having only heard it once before.
It was Miss Militia, the first voice he heard since awakening in this place.
"What the hell?" Alex said, staring at the olive-skilled woman. "What are you doing here?"
Militia quickly scanned her surroundings, her gaze lingering on the bloodbath he caused. She sighed, before her pistol dissolved and turned into a large taser, which she then aimed at him.. "You killed these people."
Yeah, no shit.
The team she brought with her fanned out. Some of them were soldiers clad in white, their faces concealed behind faceplates. Others were likely to be capes. One of them was a man wearing red body armour, with a visor covering the upper half of his face. He directed the armoured people towards the women.
The other was a guy who looked like he got his fashion sense from the Roman Empire. A gladiator-themed suit with a gold lion helmet and skintight suit
Alex was at a loss for words, so he turned his attention towards Miss Militia. "Put that away," he warned her.
But she shook her head. "You are a parahuman. You used your powers against normal individuals, which is a very serious crime. Killing them with your powers…" She let her voice trail off, as if the very thought itself was too much to speak out loud.
"What about it?" Alex asked. "They had it coming."
"It's not that simple," Miss Militia argued. "Even if they were criminals, it was not your place – not your right – to kill them. Now, we will have to take you in, too."
Hold on, back up. "Take a good look around," Alex shot back. "Do you think these pieces of shit had the right to start abducting women from the street?"
Miss Militia scoffed. She lowered her taser. It was only a fraction, but the gesture was still there. "Of course not. They would have paid for their crimes."
"They did pay for their crimes," he pointed out.
Miss Militia cocked an eyebrow, then gestured at one of the mutilated bodies. "Is this your idea of justice?"
Alex couldn't help but notice how the other two capes had turned their attention to him as well. Fuck debating philosophy with some stranger; he knew enough. "Yeah, it is. See those girls over there? The people you are supposed to protect? They're safe now. These fucks won't ever harm anyone again!"
The skin around her eyes creased. Alex wasn't sure what to make of that. "Is that where you draw the line then? What is stopping you from killing again for another crime, justified or perceived? The criminal justice system is in place for a reason."
He scowled. He wasn't exactly a people-person, but he had not taken Miss Militia for the talkative kind. Unless she was just buying time. The voices in his head seemed to agree.
But still…what she said bugged him on a fundamental level. Of course he understood that killing was generally not considered the best case of morality.
What the fuck would he know about morality? He wasn't even human, let alone a functioning one. He was a virus wearing the corpse of a sociopath. He was a monster driven by the memories and voices of every person he ever consumed.
Fuck it, he didn't have the patience or state of mind to deal with this. He had to set priorities, solve his problems one step at a time.
"It doesn't matter either way," Alex said, not even bothering to hide his annoyance. "I have shit to do, you have shit to do. Let's – "
The moment he stepped away from that location, Miss Militia fired a warning shot at his feet. "Don't move," she ordered. "Your earlier hostility against Armsmaster and me, combined with your murders here, are enough to warrant your arrest. Will you surrender peacefully?"
Alex rolled with his eyes. One last attempt at diplomacy, then. "A case for self-defence, then?"
Miss Militia seemed to hesitate. "You classify as a Brute. Chances are, the ABB could not have harmed you even if they tried "
Well, she was right about that, but there was no way she could be sure about it. Whatever.
Alex didn't wait around to see if those white-clad "hero" soldiers truly carried around flamethrowers or not. He bowed his knees slightly and jumped. The roof shattered as hr smashed through it. Miss Militia got a shot off, but it narrowly missed him.
He landed feet-first and went off sprinting, kicking up pieces of stone and glass as the tiles underneath his heels shattered under the duress.
Once he was on the move, Alex' experience kicked in. He hastily put together a plan in his mind, and hurried to create distance between himself and the last point of activity.
He vaulted over a two-story building, slid underneath a rusted old gate into the backyard of some rundown factory and immediately ducked around the corner. Once he was sure that there was nobody around, he shapeshifted.
It was Alex Mercer who disappeared into the old factory. It was an Eastern-looking woman named Hyun who left it again. "She" flicked her hair over her shoulder, cast a haughty look behind her and vacated the area.
White armoured vans raced by in the distance, alarm lights flaring. Protectorate vehicles, Alex assumed. That was one problem dealt with.
…and a big problem added to his rapidly-growing list. He needed to know what the hell was going on in Manhattan right now. This superpower thing could be looked at later. Plenty of powered villains to consume for that. But bypassing a military information blackout? That would take some serious investigating. Too many things didn't check out.
Because seriously, Blackwatch could not have covered up a fucking nuke exploding off the coast of New York. Not while covering up a bloodbath of an infection as well.
Contacting the local heroes didn't exactly work out, since they apparently had a problem with him killing armed human traffickers. Granted, he did leave a lot of puddles of gore in his wake and the main problem was more that he used "powers" to kill them than the actual killing itself, but still.
As much as he wanted to work with the good guys – and definitely not against them – that option had flown out the window.
Maybe the local supervillains could offer him some insights. After all, Hyon's memories told him that there were plenty of gangs out here. One of them had to be influential enough to know at least something.
Right?
~0~
Before Miss Militia could say or do anything else, the cape bent his knees a fraction, before straight up jumping through the ceiling. The thick layer of concrete and metal bars did nothing to hinder his wiry body. Pieces of rock and shards of glass rained down upon the PRT arrest team.
Hannah sighed. She had a call to make…
~0~
Director Emily Piggot took a sip of her coffee as her computer booted up. Once it was done, she typed in her personal data and offered the security system her biometrics. The security protocols took a moment to chug through their Stranger/Master filters.
Not that she minded. She had a large stack of paperwork to attend to while the systems activated. Someone took down Lung, and Armsmaster took him in. Problem number one: there were pieces of Lung missing, and he had a massive dose of some sort of poison in him. She had a team of medics working around the clock to keep the bastard alive, tying up valuable resources with patching up a very dangerous villain.
Problem number two: cutting off the head of the snake only caused the body to go batshit. While they didn't have as many capes in their ranks as Empire did, they made up for that with sheer number of goons. And what remained of the ABB's leadership was making good use of those numbers.
The phone rang. Director Piggot glared at it. Every time that damned thing made noise, another problem got dumped on her desk.
After muttering a little curse under her breath, she answered it. "Director Piggot."
"Director," the person on the other end of the line said. "This is Miss Militia, reporting back from the ABB raid."
Piggot snorted. Yes, the raid on the Azn Bad Boys territory in the Docks. As if trafficking drugs wasn't bad enough. "I take it the strike was a success?"
"Yes Director. Only, we encountered…complications."
Complications. Piggot hated that word. "Go ahead," she warily said.
"Armsmaster and I encountered a parahuman, two hours before the raid. He came out of a conflict with some gangsters, in a bad way. It was clear he wasn't from around. He turned hostile when we approached him. He ended up knocking out Armsmaster and fleeing the scene."
Piggot took a moment to take all of that in. A parahuman strong enough to take out Armsmaster after having been wounded in a fight with some ABB thugs? Hah, not very likely. Someone got to him before the ABB did.
"Which parahuman was it? Villain, rogue? What is it exactly he did?"
"I would classify him as a Brute. Strong enough to lift Armsmaster in the air with one hand and throw him away like a toy. Tough enough to withstand bullets, but I didn't exactly use lethals."
That sounded like a Brute alright. Standard low-end powerset. A 3, maybe a tentative 4 depending on how he beat Colin. "Anything else?"
"Yes. He's fast enough to sprint up a building. Armsmaster had him clocked in at fifty miles per hour. Of course, he gave chase. By the time reinforcements got up there, the rooftop was shattered, and Armsmaster was down."
Director Piggot shook her head. A Brute with enhanced mobility? That was going to be a problem. "Do you have anything to go on? A name, some way to identify him?"
"Nothing. Just his appearance. Director, that's not all."
There's more?
"He was present at the target building. He slaughtered the hostiles defending it and managed to drive off Oni Lee. He escaped before we could apprehend him."
To Piggot, it sounded like Miss Militia just dodged a bullet. Intel suggested that the human traffickers had access to some pretty mean kit. Nothing on tinkertech level, still enough to pose a serious threat to unprotected capes. A Brute strong and fast enough to kill armed gangsters would be strong and fast enough to kill an armed Hannah.
"Strength, speed, toughness…I'll have people on the lookout. Anything else? Any casualties, important details?"
Hannah sounded like she hesitated before replying. "Director, we didn't see any signs of a forced entry. We breached through the roof like we planned, but all the doors were still locked. A Brute-rating seems appropriate, but I think there might be more to him."
It sounded like she needed to have a little talk with Colin after this. He would be eager for a rematch, and knowing him, he'd be itching to start investigating this mysterious Brute. "I'll handle it from here. The relieve team should be underway by now. You are to hold the warehouse until it arrives."
"Understood, Director."
With that, Piggot slammed the phone on the receiver again, her thoughts racing.
Rogues were nothing new in Brockton Bay. Not everybody with powers was willing to take a side in the ongoing conflict. But this guy deliberately entered ABB territory, murdered a whole swath of their veteran members and drove off Oni Lee.
The PRT wouldn't be only ones after him now. ABB would want his head served on a plate. What if the other villains got word of this, and tried recruiting him? It wasn't likely that the Undersiders would contact him, given the…bloody nature of his takedowns, but that kind of shit got Kaiser as hard as he could get.
She imagined what E88 would be like if they got another Brute in their ranks. One subtle enough to elude Miss Militia not once, but twice.
Director Emily Piggot decided that she did not like that thought very much. This guy might be a murderous asshole, but there were no reports of civilians or heroes being attacked by him. Arresting him was the best option for now, but failing that…
The Director shook that thought from her head. Things weren't nearly desperate enough for the PRT to start approaching rogues, especially not ones that left such big mess in their wake.
From then on, the rest of the day proceeded to be just another typical Thursday at work.
~0~
AN: I didn't think the first chapter would have such a positive response!
Now the main problem I have is the updating schedule. I only have time to write in the weekend, so the next update might take a while.