The simplest plan would just be to ambush Coil before he had any idea what was happening. Unfortunately while from our perspective his powers wouldn't make much of a difference his resources would. Once he knew I was coming for him he'd be able to throw mercenaries, tinker tech weapons, bunkers, and when sufficiently backed into a corner politics at me.

So I couldn't make the attack until I was fully ready to commit. If he got away things jumped around to full orders of magnitude more difficult for me to deal with.

So that meant we had to goad him into splitting the timeline when we wanted, without giving away what we were doing, with no obvious clue that he'd just done so.

What a delightful game that was.

Fortunately it was one Lisa, or rather Tattletale was well suited to play.

How do you spark a problem important enough to get Coil popping his power left right and center without letting him know it was you?

Convince someone else to be his problem.

Coil had enemies, had to. As much as his power let him have his cake and eat it too you couldn't be a supervillan much less a successful businessman without collecting a ton of them.

I just wish I remembered who they were. Wasn't there a thing with a cape named Accord? I think there was a friendly yet cold blooded rivalry... or was it just plain friendly?

My brain was swiss-cheese, I remembered a lot of general facts, but fine details... the more I gripped at them the more they slipped through my fingers.

Then again maybe that was less the eldritch titan empowerment messing with my head and just me being tired.

Fortunately I'd already subcontracted that problem. The finding someone to sic on Coil one, not the brain issue.

Lisa had been plotting to take down Coil since day one and that had included finding out just who she could turn loose on him.

The good news was that she had no problems doing so, I didn't know who she had gotten, but she had gotten someone and had assured me they'd be making their move shortly.

The bad news was that would drive Coil right to his hidden underground bunker full of goons armed with laser guns that could melt walls while he was busy running overall strategy in consolidating and wielding his resources.

Returning to the good it had taken Tattletale all of fifteen minutes to find said underground bunker once she knew it existed.

...I really shouldn't have been relying so heavily on someone I just met half an hour ago. That counted as a bad point but I wasn't sure for which reason. There seemed to be many. That I needed to was just the crowner.

Either way I wanted this done tonight.

And on the bright side, if he loaded up his base with a big scale self destruct he was unlikely to make use of it while he was in the thing.

The more and more I thought of this the worse and worse of an idea it sounded.

~Chickening out?~

No.

No, I couldn't. I wasn't even really afraid of the danger as much as the consequences. Best case scenario I was about to murder a man. Worse he gets away, the base is rigged to blow and thousands of innocents die for inflicting nothing but a significant problem to him.

Oh, and I die.

It was funny how little a problem that actually seemed really.

But I had to do this anyway. I could reassure myself that Coil was a monster, that if given the opportunity he would do worse, remind myself what he turned loose in the original timeline. Go over all the ways he had this coming a mile off.

But mostly I had to do this because Tattletale had already overtaken my vengeance quest at this point and gone fully into launching her own. If I backed off now all I'd do is set him off and leave her stranded with him really, really pissed.

It was funny how simple the sunk cost fallacy made things.

So I waited patently for the signal in my little spot in the back ally across from the back ally that happened to have a door which lead to another door, which lead to-

A van pulled up in a hurry and a impossibly skinny man in a suit stepped out in a rush.

I blinked once, twice.

I could not be that lucky.

I burnt power, embers of green light flashing behind my eyes, as I sharped my perception to supernatural levels.

...Apparently I could.