The spectacle Delilah was beholding at the moment warranted some consideration. She was watching as the ambulance that apparently had delivered her to this distant, off-the-beaten path thicket of woods was being torn apart from the outside in. It was already mostly just a dissolving frame that sat on the ground, the tires having been consumed in a flash of action at the very beginning of this 'process', apparently so that the blowout of pressurized air 'wouldn't call lookie-loos from kilometers around'.

"So... how does this work?" Delilah asked, flapping her jacket to dispel some of the muggy summer heat. While these clothes were somewhat on the extreme end of what she'd wear off-duty, they fit beautifully and the felt great. And she had to admit that her legs looked spectacular in these jeans. Hare, who was sitting on a tree stump near the fracas turned a glance over her shoulder to Delilah, and then offered a querulous 'hrm?' back to her. Delilah gestured at the dissolving vehicle. "All of this. I should have figured you could do this as well as build, but seriously. Why aren't there iron shavings all over the place, or scraps of rubber?"

Hare flinched her head to one side, as though turning off a switch inside her brain, and stood, making a showman's pose to the display happening behind her. "The pride and joy of any cell of Oedipeans, the mobile nanofactory," Hare said. She turned and shrugged her shirt off of her back. Delilah couldn't see what she was indicating, so Hare gestured her to come closer. And even closer she couldn't see anything but pale skin there. She even said as much. "What you're not seeing then is the thin, almost imperceptible grey smoke that is emitted from certain pores. That smoke contains billions of nano-scale micro fabricators and defabricators. Through a bit of mental effort, I can get them to do such things as... eat a tree," hare waved toward a juvenile pine, which vanished within seconds. "Or create a gun!"

Hare extended her hand, and a submachine gun Delilah wasn't familiar with appeared with its grip in her palm. She tossed it after a moment into the last pool of dissolving ambulance; the gun was torn apart just as quickly as the vehicle had been. "Or you can take your time, and break things down all the way, and start building them back up again better," Hare finished.

And when she said so, there was a swirl of black that mounted up at six points on the ground, blooming into tires, and an entire power system assembling itself out of swirling grey mist as it came. The construction was much more arduous than simply making a pistol or dissolving a tree. Hare seemed to fixate long on certain spots, otherwise having the rest of the new vehicle build itself up evenly from the ground to the sky. It was a tall thing, not quite as tall as a semi-truck but obviously much more intended for human habitation. She'd have called it a recreational vehicle, if there was any recreation in this vehicle's future.

And when Hare finished she gave a nod, then snapped her fingers at Lou and One. "Okay, start loading. Just put it anywhere, I'll sort it while Lou drives," Hare said.

"I've never driven something this big," she said. "And I don't know how to drive a manual."

"Do you really think I'd pick something so backward to put you behind the wheel of, Lou? Give me some credit," Hare said. One just shook his head and started moving small crates into the 'cargo bays' that ran along the flank of the vehicle. Hare turned back to Delilah. "Now I hear you not asking: 'where did the rubber come from? How are we gonna fill this thing with gas?'," Hare said, changing her tone as she did. Was she trying to imitate Delilah? Was that what Delilah sounded like? "The simple answer is I can make rubber, or anything as simple as that, at will, and for the second this bitch is electric, like any self respecting vehicle ought to be!"

"I was actually going to ask 'is that thing made out of those nanite things'?" Delilah corrected.

"No. Oh god no. That would be ruinously inefficient, and cripplingly expensive, as well as being a beacon to anything that can see Hyperfrequencies," Hare said. She then held up her hands. "I'm not saying it's never been done before, but there's just so many better ways of doing things!"

"Then where did all the matter that this thing," she gave the thing a thump with her fist, and it felt rock solid, "is made of come from? There wasn't enough smoke by a twentieth to put this thing together in the state it feels like it's in."

"Two words, Delilah: Goetic Storage. Imagine a massive, invisible, intangible pocket that only I can access, that I can shove materials into pretty much endlessly. Like having a demi-realm that I can use just for storage. And I can call the material out to build with it, as needed. But thank you for the reminder, I do have a couple of types of matter I need to stock up on. It's a good thing I've got the weirder shit by the bushel; I don't think this world is going to be producing hypercarbon matrices or quantum-entangled monopoles anytime soon."

"So anything you break down you can turn into any form you want? Did you break down other cars to get the material for this thing?" she asked, giving it a once over. It was painted half white and half blue, the line between them streaking up from the bottom corner of the front to the back. It had a little plaque saying 'I&M Co' directly above the door that lead up and into the side of this brute of a vehicle.

"Constipated thinking, Delilah," Hare said, and then picked up a large rock from the ground. She held it in her hand, and after a few moments, it dissolved down as though it were sugar being submurged in water. But then she flexed her fingers, and a much smaller strip of bright gold began to be walked along her knuckles. She finally grasped it in her fingers, and Delilah blinked at it. That couldn't be... "I can change the formations of atoms with these machines. Pretty much anything from hydrogen to bismuth; if I need an element that I don't have, I can simply make it."

"That's actually gold," she confirmed. Hare nodded. "You can turn garbage into gold."

"If I had a specialized Hive alongside the factory, I could turn garbage into much more interesting things than gold, I assure you," Hare said with a sad smile and a shake of her head. "But alas I do not. So I have to stock up on those elements and substances I can't make through common theft."

Delilah took the strip of gold, feeling the almost exaggerated weight of it in her palm. The implications of this were world shattering. "You were telling the truth. About breaking the economy," Delilah said.

"Where I come from, people like me don't deal in money," Hare said. "We have no time for it. We deal in what we need, not what we can exchange. I'll admit, it'll be a bit of an adjustment to be back here, where civilization is still somewhat civil and people expect us to pay for things."

"...are we rich?" Delilah asked, still holding the slip of gold.

"No, we're dirt poor, outnumbered, out of contact, and I'm one bad mistake away from Annihilation," Hare plucked the gold from her grasp and held it for a moment, before flexing his hand and revealing he'd turned it into a bangle, which he then tossed back to her. "So let's get on the road. Bangor isn't going to stay quiet forever, not with those Empyrean assholes playing their games. Get in. I'll tell you about the op as we go."

Hare opened the door to the vehicle and climbed in, leaving Delilah to stare at the bangle. Her world had gotten unimaginable over the course of the last few hours.

Then there was an unhappy 'mrew' sound, and Delilah glanced over to Smudge, his grey-and-white majesty still stuck in his little cat carrier. His face showed that he was couple more captive minutes away from throwing down against man and god alike. Delilah sighed, then picked up her asshole of a cat. If the world were getting stranger, then there would at least be this little shit to remind her of what's normal. She pulled herself into the vehicle, and a few minutes later, the vehicle backed out of the thicket, quietly pulled onto the road, and began its careful journey southwest, toward the border with the United States.


Helldiver III

Reconnaissance: Deus Vox; Maine


One literally felt muscles relax when the battle bus they were riding in crossed the border back into the good, sane old U S of A. Not to say that Canada was a bad place (it was, though), it was that Canada was a weird place. Walking into a Walmart and not finding the gun-section no matter how many times he canvassed it was going to sit in his nightmares for years to come. But things were returning to normal, and he was going back to familiar stomping grounds.

And more pressingly, he was getting back to the circles he used to walk. Hare might have said 'no talking to the government', but he – or she as the case might currently be – was obviously a mistrusting and paranoid sort. Humans always worked best when there was a clear chain of command.

"Smudge you are such a slut," Delilah said, staring balefully at her cat, who was currently loafed and purring loudly in One's lap. If One didn't know better, he would have said that the cat shot a smug look back at its owner before making biscuits in One's thighs with its paws and purring all the louder.

"Cats are cats, no matter where in reality you go," Hare said, moving through the interior of the battle bus and moving things around, subject to esoteric and not-at-all explained preferences. "I wouldn't be surprised at this point if cats here in Creation and even in the Prime Reality are mere reflections of some greater, feline ideal, who are assholes who make us love them anyway."

"You think everything's an evil alien, don't you?" Delilah asked.

"A surprising amount of the time, I'm right," Hare said.

One snapped his fingers, getting their distracted leader's attention. "Okay, how 'bout this. Now that we're back on the sane part of the woyld, how 'bout you tell us what exactly we're s'posed to be doing here?"

"That's a good point; this can probably wait," Hare said. She came to the table that the two 'recruits' were sitting at, slotting into the vaguely egg-like chair that was bolted to the floor and turning so that she faced them. Delilah and One both had a C shaped bench to sit on, with belts popping out of its cushions. The two of them were of course buckled in, because this was still a vehicle. The rest of the room looked remarkably homey, what one might reasonably expect the inside of an RV to look like, with a kitchenette, dining area, and second small seating zone near the walk-in to the driver's compartment. If it hadn't been for the blocked off and darkened rear section, the mirage of being a civilian vehicle would have been perfect.

One had seen the arsenal back there.

"The current objective is one of reconnaissance and, if possible, disruption," Hare said. She pointed at the ceiling of the dining area, and a descending setup with screens revealed itself. And on those screens were images of messily dead people with strange absences of tissue in their bodies. "Some infestations are easy to pick out if you know what you're looking for. This is what a failed Cog Proxy – their duped human pawns – looks like. Whereas this," Hare snapped her fingers and the image showed a woman who was very much alive, looking depressed and working at a coffee shop, "is what happens when the Vox can't find a use for you."

"What, they just let you go?" Delilah asked. Hare was emotionless for a moment, then snapped her fingers again. The image changed to show the depressed woman blown messily in half, and two people standing over a third who was cut to ribbons.

"For the Deus Vox, if you can't be made into a Vessel, they use you as a sleeper," Hare said. "Sleepers only have one explosive outburst of ruinous violence in them, but because of the subtlety of the implants that comprise them, they can typically get right next to us and use that outburst very effectively before we even realize we're in danger."

"So what's our play here? Wipe 'em out?" One asked.

"Not so simple. While a certain amount of civilian collateral damage is to be expected when fighting an existential war, it has an acidic effect on morale and, to be frank, on the human soul," Hare said, staring at the image for a moment longer, then snapping her fingers again. "No, we're here to see how invested the Choir is. If they have any Choirborn, for example."

The image now showed a strange bat-like creature, covered in an even stranger metal-plastic skin. The thing had to be as tall at the haunch as child.

"If they do, we leave. No questions, no heroics, we just fucking turn around and leave," Hare said. "You're not ready to fight their kind, and frankly, in the state I'm in, neither am I."

"Noted. What if there aren't?" Delilah asked.

"If there are not any Choirborn, and it's just a bunch of noise-obsessed yahoos with bits of technology installed into them, then we get their number, rob them blind if we can, and we spook them so that they scatter. It's not a permanent solution, but given we're pretty heavily outnumbered for a change I'll have to accept temporary solutions to what could become permanent problems," Hare admitted.

"I take it you usually take on these things with much bigger teams," Delilah posited.

Hare just nodded, staring at the bat-thing on the screen. "Much bigger," she agreed. "There used to be thousands of us. Thousands. When everybody said that there were only 300 Syntags in the entire world, we outnumbered them twenty to one, and they didn't even know."

One's brow drew down. "Okay, that's a question needin' answering; what exactly is a 'Syntag'?"

That pulled Hare out of her funk, and got her to look over to One. "It's the category of Integrated that we are. The old guard, the Paragons, the mostly got wiped out or Disintegrated during the Syncronicity Collapse. And most of the people that came up trying to replace them using the old methods were mere Legacies, a sad, pathetic reflection of what once had been the norm," Hare shook her head slowly. But then seemingly out of sheer defiance forced a smile back onto her face. "But then there were a bunch of humans who looked at the paradigm of the big Foundations deciding who got to be Integrated and said 'Fuck that, I'll Integrate myself, with blackjack and hookers!'. And then those lunatics actually did it. And those people were called the Syntagmata."

"I take it we're these 'Syntagmata' ourselves?" Delilah asked.

"Ehhhh, technically we're kinda Syntags and kinda not," Hare made equivocating movements with her hands. "Syntagmata don't have Founders. We do. Foundations aren't required to physically build the infrastructure powering their Integrations," Hare said, and then pulled that attache case that had turned into an entire fucking undergound complex, plunking it onto the table. "We, unfortunately, are. We have the perk that our Engines are really intuitive and we can shove 'em into people much earlier, but every single one of us is subject to Unwinding if things go bad and we overuse our powers or get careless against things which can Desync us. There's pluses and minuses."

Delilah frowned for a moment. "Is there a stigma against 'Syntagmata' where you're from?"

"Against the people who bucked tradition and directly mooched the flame of the gods? Yeah," Hare said. "There's a lot of distrust there. Especially because what Syntags are is frighteningly close to Noumenon Exurgents. And mentioning them, if we come across any of them, you inform me immediately. We can't do shit to the Vessels except kill them, and the Proxies are usually too brain-washed or stupid to bother with. But Noumenon Exurgents have at least enough of a mind left that we can talk to them, and enough connection to the Noumenon that they might know something that the peons don't."

"How would we even know 'em?" One asked.

"It varies by Synergy but it's usually visibly obvious," Hare said. She then snapped her fingers a few times, showing a harried looking man wearing a hospital gown, but sporting numerous metal coils and brackets that plunged into the skin of his arms, shoulders, and back. "This guy was the first Fulgrammaticus AEGIS was able to get their hands on, and he talked freely. We've managed to snatch a few ourselves, and some of them even outright joined us. I hate to be vague and wishy-washy on this, One, but the simplest answer to your question is 'you'll know it when you see it'."

"Alien bats, inflamed cyborgs, Terminator knock-offs, and whatever those black-suited things were..." Delilah began.

"Those used to be my guys," One said, quietly. He'd personally recruited both of the people who, at the very end, were holding him down and keeping him drugged. "Now... now I don't know what they are."

"...I don't think we'll 'know' anything when we see it," Delilah finished her thought.

"Look them in the eye. If you see a person looking back, you've got a better chance than even that they might still be sane," Hare said. She barked a laugh. "Just look at this this way, if you walk up to them and they react like they usually do around you – that you're about to beat them to death for no reason – you're probably dealing with an Exurgent!"

"I've never done that!" Delilah pounded her fist against the table. The table cracked, and all of them flinched at that. "Oh. Oh shit I didn't think..."

"Myomer replacements," Hare said, laying her hand on the table and having the cracks recede as it healed itself before their eyes. "All of your major skeletal muscles have been replaced by augmented nanite-structures with robust anchors to your spine, vastly increasing your force-output. Just bear it in mind when you get upset; you can and will break things, and will only get stronger as the swarms mature."

"That's what this is?" she asked, staring her arms.

"Yup. One over there has something similar with his twitch-muscles. You'll find your reflexes a bit keener than you're used to," Hare said. "The Deus Vox might have been some of the first to successfully hybridize the Noumenal and the human into an Exurgent, but they weren't the last. Still, if we find one of these," she pointed at the harrowed-looking cyborg on the screen, "try to figure out whether it's still human or scrambled before you put rounds into it. By the way, One: I've got a present for you."

"Oh what is this gonna be?" One muttered, leaning back against the bench behind him and scratching the purring cat's head.

"Delilah, you probably remember the gun you used in the last mission, right?" Hare asked.

"Did we lose the gun?" she asked.

"Of course not. Technically," Hare said. She got up and opened a box, extracting a gun that had some superficial similarities to that weird pistol that Delilah had used to blast the 'Recruiter' to scrap, but many other differences. Mainly that this was a bullpup carbine with an adjustable stock. "This uses the material from your gun and a few other extensions. I present you the AEGIS S-46, a high impact coilgun with an – appropriately – 46 centimeter barrel."

"This... looks like a gun outta Star Trek," One said, picking up the gun. When he held it, he felt the grip squirm against his palm, before showing a green light and having an entire optics suite pop up out of the top of the frame.

"More like '40K and the Tau," Hare said. "It fires ten-by-twenty-five millimeter ferro-nickel slugs at a barrel velocity of roughly 1600 meters per second. The vast majority of the weight of the magazine is the battery that actually fires the slugs; do not 'plus one' this gun. You will run out of battery before you run out of slugs."

"Sixteen hundred... that's, like... five thousand feet per second!" One said, doing the math in his head. "There's no gun on Oyth that can fire that fast."

"No gunpowder based gun, certainly," Hare said. "And be thankful. This thing wasn't perfected until the Nineties. You get to jump right past it's unreliable, extremely heavy, and randomly exploding forefathers."

"So no guns for me, then?" she asked.

"You missed the brain," Hare said. "You could have one-shotted it, but it's obvious that you aren't a gunslinger. One, by his Hackensack Scores, is," Hare then shrugged, settling back into her egg chair. "Besides, I'm thinking that whatever Engine is percolating in your body will be more than adequate to your needs."

"You did see me get folded like laundry the last time, didn't you?" Delilah asked.

"You weren't Integrated then. You are, now," Hare said. She snapped her fingers again. Showing on the screen was a brown brick building which, unlike the numerous incarnations that dominated Moncton, had some whisper of aged personality to it. "This is where some of the proxies were spotted. Whether that's because it's where they gather or because a few of them just work here, hard to say."

"Oh great. A 'Wellness Center'," One said, rolling his eyes hard at the painted window.

"Different groups use different bait to land a different catch," Hare said with a shrug. "The plan is simple: Reconnoitre, starting here, for the Proxies of Deus Vox. Find their Lair location. Infiltrate said lair. Tag and, if possible, bag. Then GTFO."

"And when somethin' goes wrong?" One asked, as the fluffy grey-and-white cat finally rose up and hopped onto the table, taking two steps away from its edge, and then laying down again, looking incredibly smug. Delilah glared at her pet, who was still on the far side of the table from her.

"Because of our precarious circumstances, the moment anybody involved Goes Loud, we leave," Hare said. "If we get discovered and we can't talk our way out of it, just knock a hole in the wall and get out. We don't have nearly enough resources or manpower that we can afford to lose any of it to these idiot bat-worshipers," Hare said.

"That sounds almost suspiciously sensible," Delilah asked.

"I'm not Alinejad. The mission isn't worth losing the only Oedipeans in this entire reality," Hare said.

"You're not who?" One asked.

"Hasan Alinejad. The Machine. I'll tell you about him one day," Hare said.

"So what can these 'Deus Vox' do?" Delilah asked.

"Their powers are primarily based around sound and force. You'll be going in with earplugs. If things start getting hairy, wear them," Hare said. "Beyond that, the Deus Vox are not the physical powerhouses that the Cognoscenti are. They're not as tough, but a lot faster. More likely to bug out, too, when things get bad. Think of it as less a hard-wired imperative, and more a beloved thought-leader telling you to do the dumb thing."

"Yeah, I get it, it's a cult," One said, flicking a switch on the side of the gun into to the 'conceal' position to see what it did. The thing let out an electric whine, and then collapsed down on to itself until the thing was a lopsided tube of polymers, one that he could easily hide inside his suit. Well that's convenient. "What do we do if the law shows up?" One then asked.

"We leave," Hare said. "We have no authority, per se, to do anything we do, outside of the good old Rule 303."

"The what?" Delilah asked.

"If you've got the means, you have the authority," Hare said.

"That's fucked up," Delilah said.

"Take it up with Harry Morant. Only you can't. Because he died a century ago," Hare said. "You're going to have to internalize this, One; We. Are. On. Our. Own. We cannot trust anybody who hasn't taken a dip in 'the evil bathtub' as you've so hilariously dubbed it to not work for our enemies either out of avarice or ignorance. And even if they have Reset and been brought in, a lot of Cells die because they have one member they shouldn't have trusted with this responsibility."

"So why even trust us with this?" Delilah asked. Hare sighed, rubbing a hand down her face.

"Because I'm out of options. And me and Lou aren't enough to do this by ourselves," Hare admitted. Then she got up, leaning back and flexing her back in various ways. "Now I'm gonna go into the back and try to get a nap in over the hour it'll take to get to Bangor on this road."

Hare then went into the back, the door sliding open and shut in front of her and leaving two recruits, a cat grooming itself, and a remarkably comfortable ride down the back state-road.

"So... cop, huh?" One asked.

"Fed, huh?" Delilah answered, slumping back in her seat.

"What he rescue you from?" One asked.

"I killed my police chief after he tried to murder me twice in 48 hours because I put in complaints about some heinous shit that Marquis' 'task force' was doing to the RCMP and refused to retract them," Delilah said, getting a dark, furious expression on her face as she did.

"...That's rough," One said. What could you even say to that?

"...yeah," Delilah said.


The vehicle that One had designated 'the battle bus' was not entirely out of place, there parked amongst the RVs of the people summering up here where the temperatures weren't quite so sweltering. A false premise; New Brunswick was every bit as hot as Maine. But it called to people who wanted to travel the highways of America and didn't want to leave their guns behind. And the plethora of other land-yachts if nothing else provided ample cover for them to park, hook up to the electrical grid, and give them an excuse to walk around.

"Testing earpiece, respond if affirmative," Hare said, through the 'plug' which was riding Delilah's ear canal.

"I hear you," Delilah said. She looked around Bangor and in Bangor she saw everything that Moncton was trying to be but failed to achieve. The buildings were brick, yes, but there was will and history in their construction. It wasn't red brick 'because red brick looked good', it was red brick because that was what the people who lived here 200 years ago had, and they did what they could with it. Necessity gave spirit even to the bland, that something born out of need and spite against privation had more soul than something merely made to recapture those same impulses.

No, she hadn't wanted to be an architect before her test-scores flunked her. Shut up.

At the moment, though, she just felt... fine. As though she hadn't been sleep deprived for days, as though she weren't running from adrenaline-rush to adrenaline-rush. As though she'd prepared for this for weeks instead of hours. And the people here in Bangor didn't give her a second look as she moved toward the spot that she'd picked out next to the place that they were staking out. This neighborhood was the crystallization of her thesis on why Moncton was terrible and didn't need to be: While nearly all of the buildings in eyeshot had red-brick as part of their construction, there was more than enough eye-pleasing variation, not just in the heights of structures but in the little frills and decorations that each building took upon themselves to make the place look not samey, but instead as a melting pot of different ages and styles.

"I've got a spot," One's voice came through next. And when Delilah gave a moment to look through the people walking to and fro along a street Bangor had the audacity to label 'Main Street' when it was clearly anything but. She spotted One for just an instant, as he shifted in his seat next to the window of a cafe. Which was smarter than Delilah just standing around like a fool in the street. There was no sign of Lou, but then again considering that Lou had a tendency to change faces more often than Delilah changed her mind, he could have been literally anybody on the street and Delilah would have no way of telling. And Hare, punk that she now appeared, was likewise out of sight, but that was because Hare was coordinating from the Battle Bus.

"I have eyes on one. Neon wind-breaker. Very eighties," a new voice came into the call, which would have to be Lou, by process of elimination. Unless Smudge somehow learned to speak, that was the only option. Delilah swung her glance along the streets, and spotted the one that Lou picked out. Though his haircut was very Zoomer, his clothing must have been dragged out of the deepest, darkest and most shameful recesses of a Generation X closet. Maybe he was wearing it ironically. It was hard to say.

The suspect was moving with a kind of swagger that people usually only had when they'd finally had sex after a long dry spell, utterly heedless of the neon eyesore his clothing broadcast to the world. A few of the older locals turned looks at him, shaking their heads. Maybe this was a thing she was too 'young-Millenial' to understand. But the windbreaker – along with the young man inside it – entered the Reiki massage parlor without a second glance. "Are we sure that this is the right place?" Delilah asked. "Something feels sideways."

"Sideways how?" Hare asked through the earpiece.

"There's no way to see out of that building to know when it's being surveiled," she muttered, glancing to its roof, which had no cameras looking down at the street, to its few windows which were all covered by black blinds. "There's too many ways that a person could get into this building without the people inside knowing it."

"You think this is a red herring?"

"I think this is a deke," she said. "Lou? Are you around the back?"

"I'm in the alley, yeah," Lou's new voice came.

"Keep an eye on the parlor's back door. I've got a feeling that somebody's going to be trying to slip out in a minute or so," she said.

"Have you done reconnaissance before?" Hare asked.

"I'm a police officer. Of course I have," she said.

"You're not a cop anymore, Miss Patel. I gave you that shirt for a reason. Best rip that bandaid off now before you develop a Block because of it," Hare said patiently.

"It's not my problem you're so brain-poisoned that you can't see that there are good cops out there," Delilah answered back.

"Do you know why bad apples have to be removed from the bushel, Delilah? It's because they literally and chemically spoil the bunch," he said. "Any system which enables and protects bad actors is…" Hare sounded like he was about to go on a rant.

"Guys, windbreaker just came out the back," Lou cut him off. "He's headed… away from me. Delilah, I think that's your side of the alley."

"On it," she said. Stake outs usually were boring affairs, and since she had a very distinct look, she usually was in the back of any vans, trucks, or command posts while others did this kind of work. But she hadn't always been the physical specimen she was now. When she'd just started out, before she started going for power rather than grace, she had done exactly this kind of work. Watching criminals until they committed crimes.

The street light was nearby, but not favorable to her. Still, with as few cars currently down this 'main' street as there currently were, jaywalking was a low risk enterprise. She quickly reached the other side of the street and started jogging along the wall of storefronts. This 'downtown' was so overbuilt with old-style construction that there were no ways into the alleys from the front. She'd have to go all the way to the end go all the way to the corner of the block to get eyes on the alley's exit. Only to have that expectation further subverted in that the first corner she turned showed no exits either. So she continued jogging, perhaps nearing a run but keeping her form so that people didn't think her actually in a hurry, until she rounded the next corner. And there, she just spotted Windbreaker as he crossed the street to the far side, where a parking garage loomed large.

She had the luxury of the light and the crossing this time, and slowed her descent as she followed after him. "Parking garage," she said, as he started walking toward it.

"Unlikely the end point. Deus Vox don't like dank, dark places, as a rule," Hare said. "It's one of the few architectural things which is good about them."

And exactly as Hare predicted, though the path of Windbreaker did come perilously close to seeming to duck inside the shady confines of the stacked parking structure, he continued on, up a one-way street and back into the built-up, old fashioned brick and mortar that made Bangor's old town.

"Sitrep?" One asked.

"He's just turned up Hammond Street," Delilah reported.

"You're fast," Lou's voice came from Delilah's immediate left and she started back from it. Lou was now a plain faced east-asian man with a gym-rat physique and more appropriate garb for doing cardio in the summer heat.

"Speak for yourself," she said. He was shorter than her in this form, but looked almost as muscular.

"I'm serious. I was on his tail the entire time and you literally overtook me," Lou said.

"Have you not done this before?" Delilah asked.

"Not running around. I don't see why people do this. It's very tiring," Lou noted.

"Like liquorice or spanking, it's an acquired taste," Delilah said. Lou turned a glance of mild disgust at her. "I've not acquired either of those tastes, Lou."

"...yeah, that's good," he said. Windbreaker continued to strut his way along the streets, not interfacing with any of the other people who were moving around in the heat, until his path took him to the foot of a large and ornate red brick, which was the crystallization of its proper use as opposed to its willy-nilly implementation in Moncton, with decorative brick-arches, inset windows, and a concrete facing at street level. And barely pausing in his strut, he threw open the doors facing the corner and strode in. "Maybe this is a bit more like it."

"What do we have?" Hare asked.

Delilah continued a short distance before seeing the building's name revealed by dint of parallax. "He just went into Heritage Building 15."

"Heritage building? How many floors?" Hare asked.

"Five," she said. Hare gave a long 'hrm' sound. "Is this the spot?"

"Look around. Are there any cell-phone towers? Church steeples?" Hare asked. "Five floors would be a bit titchy for the Deus Vox unless they were really desperate."

"Yeah, I can see a church steeple right over there," One's voice came over the line.

"Any wiring going up it?"

"Hare, every church steeple's required to have a copper wire running from steeple to ground. For lightning strikes," Lou said.

"Right, right. People stopped caring about little things like lightning after the Collapse and all the rules changed," Hare said. "If they've got a high spot they can wire into, and a high floor with good views, I'd say we've found where they've got their lair. I'm coming to…"

"Hare, you should sit this one out," Lou cut him off.

"Excuse me?" Hare asked.

"Reset or no, you're still two bad decisions from Unwinding again. Besides, now the other two Swarmborn are with me. And the Deus Vox are more likely to run than to fight," she said.

"Lou, just because I tell you something doesn't mean that it's always the case. I could just be wrong, you know!" Hare said.

"Are you wrong about the Deus Vox right now?" she asked.

There was a begrudging silence. "No. A building that size likely doesn't have a Priory, so won't have any higher-ups. Still, remember that it's called a fight or flight reflex for a reason," Hare said. Delilah glanced back just in time to see One crossing the street and moving up the road to meet with them. "So I've looked into things and… according to files 15 Heritage at Hammond and Columbia is a CPA's office. It says they're leasing the whole building."

"All but the top floors, I'm guessing," Delilah said.

"Or maybe somebody high up in the office is in the cult," Lou countered. That could also explain things.

"So what's our play? I could come out there and talk my way in…" Hare began.

"Again, veto," Lou cut Hare off.

"There's a fire-escape over there," One gestured at the side of the building he'd approached from, finally reaching their scrum and hearing the discussion.

"Welcome back, One. The fire escape is an escape for a reason; it's too obvious," Delilah said. She frowned. "Did you see any back doors? Loading areas?"

"Handicapped door 'round the side, yeah," One said. "No cameras, though. That's just sloppy."

"That's great, but how are we going to get in?" Lou asked. He held up his arms. "These might look great but they're useless compared to hers."

"I can get us in a back door," One said.

"Then head on in," Hare said. "And remember, if people are acting squirrelly, deescalate. If they get punchy, punch back. If they start doing voodoo, only then do we kill them."

"Noted," Delilah said, and One pounded the sidewalk to the ass end of the building which faced a dinky little parking lot, one which had a lot of cars packed into a tiny space. Delilah wagered they must time their going-home times according to schedule, because if they didn't, the only way they were going to get into their own rigs was to crawl through their own back-hatches. The back door was right there, in plain sight of the street. Delilah gave a concerned look to One, but One shushed her and pulled out a blank key with a few divots in its surface.

"I didn't get my company off the ground through the most law-abidin' methods, you understand?" One said, and rubbed the key hard between his hands for a few seconds. When he stopped, it was stuck to one palm as though it had turned slightly tacky. It wasn't metal, that was for sure. He glanced to the street, making sure the passer's-by weren't giving him undue attention, then shoved the key into the deadbolt above a card-reader. He bobbed his head a few times, as though counting down. Then, carefully, a wince on his face, he turned the key. There was a metal clunk, and when he pulled the door, it swung open. "I was hoping that'd still work."

"If it had been winter that would have failed," Lou said.

"Prob'ly," One said, but then slipped into the building. The hallway on the other side was exactly what she would have expected of a building full of accountants, all in shades of non-offensive beige with white paneled drop-ceiling to conceal the myriad wiring that such a place as this would require. The fluorescent lights were, mercifully, the silent variety. Still she was grateful if nothing else that she'd never had to work in a place like this. It would have made her lose her mind.

Lou adjusted the torq around his neck and his gym-clothes changed into business formal, tailored to make him look less overtly muscular than he was. That still left One and Delilah in the lurch, but considering that One seemed to favor being very up-dressed in general, he too had a claim to fit in here. So it was just sad, unarmed little Delilah with her 'All Cops Are Bastards' shirt who stuck out like a hammered thumb.

"One, glue to Delilah's hip," Lou whispered, as he took a step ahead of them and led them through the hallways of the building. The first floor looked like it was all small offices, a structure too old and too established to tear down walls and establish cubicle-hell. They probably used the first floor for meetings with clients. As such, though a few of the workers occasionally crossed their paths, they didn't spare much of a glance to the trio. Lou's instinct was right. By sticking One to Delilah, it made it seem like she was the weirdo client, he was her more professional CPA, and Lou was taking them to where they needed to go.

The stairwell up was nearer the center of the building than she would have liked, unlocked because why should a stairwell be locked? And the path up saw the lights grow if anything brighter.

Finally, the top floor. There was a camera there, and Lou pointed it out before anybody else stepped around the corner and into its vision. "Problem," she indicated it.

One leaned around, looking at the camera. "It's facin' the door. Why?" he whispered.

"So that it can keep track of things coming out, obviously," Lou said. "It needs to be dealt with."

"Leave it to me, bro," One said, slinking along the walls of the structure with surprising fluidity, ducking under the old boxy camera as it made its minute swings between the door and the piece of the stairway closest to it. One managed to get directly under the camera, out of its line of sight, then popped off his shoes. With his sock feet, he hopped up so that the wool caught in the brickwork, hoisting him another two feet up so that he could just barely reach the wires that dove from the camera into the wall. And extracting a razor blade from who-knows-where, One gently slid it into the wire, stopping about half way in. He then hopped down and put his shoes back on. "There. It's on the fritz 'till that blade comes out."

"How do you know how to…" Lou began.

"He used to be a criminal," Delilah said with a shrug. "And a pretty good one."

"Yeah, well," One made a dismissive move, and then grabbed something fine and draped it over a shoulder. Fishing line, connected to the blade. He then looked at the door, and its robust card lock. "That, on the other hand, I ain't got the tools to pop open and bypass. We might need to apply boot to metal."

Lou frowned for a moment, then turned to the two of them. "Not necessarily. Do you still have that key, One?" Lou asked.

"You think one of them might have picked up Transitive Property Manipulation?" Hare's voice was very distorted through the audio feed.

"Now would be a good time to find out," Lou said. She took the key once One provided it and pressed it into Delilah's hand. "Focus on the key. Focus your mind on the fact that it is a key, and that keys open things. And then let your Numen touch it," Lou said.

Delilah blinked at her, and tried to do exactly that. The key felt like a strange plastic, even as it looked metallic. And the face of the key, where the teeth ought to be, was even now slightly tacky like melting hot-glue. She focused on that, but for all she could feel her Numen (barely), it didn't seem to actually do anything. After a minute or so of concentration, she gave a shrug and handed it back.

"It was a gamble. One? Any luck with you?" Lou asked next. One rolled his eyes, then looked at the key. But then he did a double take, glancing around as though something strange were happening. "I'm guessing for you its a yes."

"What the fuck was that?" he asked.

"You've just performed your first Endeavor," Lou said. She gestured to the card reader. "Tap it."

"This thing's a pin-key, not a magnetic…" One began.

"It is a key. And the Transitive Property of Keys is that they open things. Open the door, One," Lou said, pointing at the lock. One looked more suspicious than anything, but finally sighed and tapped the 'key' to the card reader.

And just as Hare's did in Moncton, the card reader seemed to jive with the presence of One's false key, emitting a happy beep and a metal clunk as the lock pulled itself open. Lou quickly pulled the door open just a crack so that it wouldn't relock on them. "See? That wasn't so bad," Delilah said, giving One a light swat on the arm. One just turned a confused and alarmed look at her.

"Everybody gets used to doing magic eventually," Lou said.

"We're heading in," One said, still giving the key an askance glance as he tucked it back into its case. "You should'a rigged us for cameras, Hare."

"Torqs have live-feed telemetry within the influence of the swarm bubble. That's about four meters," Hare said. "And for the record, I did rig your suit with micro cameras. Delilah's jacket, too."

"Any pointers on what to say in there?" Delilah asked quietly.

"Silence is golden. Violence is platinum," Hare said. "And look out for weirdos. The more visibly weird humans there are, the more you should consider turning around and leaving."

"Noted," Delilah said. And then she gently eased the door open, and looked into the hall that this stairwell led to. It was… abrupt, ending before it seemed it ought to, because of some fairly drastic 'renovation' work. She stepped to the far side of the hall, sweeping both to and fro, but saw nobody up here. The hall's end nearest her ended with a metal pylon that plunged into structural brick in a way that hurt Delilah's sense of history. Affixed to that pylon were plates of something clear. Possibly glass, possibly plastic. Possibly something else. And when she took a couple of steps to get a peek around the corner into that open area, she saw at last humans.

They were all kneeling on pads that looked uniformly cushioned, like memory-foam, all facing vaguely toward a corner of the room essentially opposite Delilah. They didn't move to do anything but breathe, simply kneeling there, facing the corner, seeming to stare well past the pylon there that bolted metal into old-construction flooring and extended transparent barricades away from it. At the center of the room, and at the corners of it, there were tuning forks, one massive and the others merely large. The big one she could tell was vibrating just to look at it. The room, the fork, and the people were all shrouded in utter silence.

"What is this?" Delilah asked after ducking back around the corner.

"That… is unusual behavior from the Deus Vox. Not unheard of, but they usually only do that when Interdicted for long periods. To regain their attunement, I think. I'm admittedly not an expert on the Empyrean Noumenon," Hare said.

"Yo, look at this," One's voice came from behind her, and she quickly retreated toward where the man in his black suit was waiting. This corner opened into what clearly used to be a cubicle space, with only a few of the outermost rows still left intact. The innermost had been stripped out and left laying on the floor, and some strange… machines? Were those machines? It looked like something more out of Doctor Seuss than actual industry, gimble arms with pudgy white fingers, more organic than mineral, entirely too curvy, and chugging along to a strange metal-rubbing-metal rhythm that almost sounded like it was trying to lay down a layer of a polka track.

"With windows open to broad daylight. They must be desperate," Hare noted.

"Share with the class?" Delilah asked. She glanced to one, then to Lou… only to find Lou was missing. She quickly looked in all the places that Lou could have been. She'd clearly remembered him exiting the stairwell. Where the hell did he go?

"That's their hyperpolymerizer. It takes the building blocks of plastics – resins, oils, plant-matter, even bones in large enough quantities – and turns them into their special hyperplastics," Hare said. "One, turn a little to the right."

One frowned but did as asked.

"Balls. It's got a self-destruct on it. If we run them out it'll melt down," Hare said.

"This was a robbery?" Delilah asked.

"In a more ideal world, yes, yes it would be," Hare said. "We need resources that I can no longer make if we want to get our feet under us and get some actual weapons in our hands."

"I have a lot of questions about this," Delilah pointed out at a whisper. Then flinched down and into the nearest cubicle, dragging One with her, as somebody rose to standing in front of the Seussean machine, and began to audibly drag something away from it. Under his breath, he ceaselessly muttered nonsense words and word-fragments, seeming to be an automatic word-salad generator.

"Follow that guy," Hare ordered.

"Is this wise?" Delilah asked.

"No, but we're desperate and resource-starved," Hare answered. There were times when Delilah wished he would lie to her.

She grumbled quietly to herself but did lean out of the cubicle, noting that the 'man' in question had metal growing out of his back in intricate, spark-throwing coils. The sound that he was dragging was a children's wagon with two broken back wheels, laden with long bricks of off-white plastic each the size of Delilah's forearm and fist. She gave a glance toward the machine again as she darted across a gap in the cubicles. Wait a minute. The metal of it had been rust-red a second and a few cubicles ago. How as it now gun-metal grey? She gave her head a shake. There were more important things, surely, than her misfiring memory.

Clearing through the section of cubicles they reached a more restrictive area, this one playing host to boardrooms overlooking the street and parking lot one one side, and board rooms on the other. The board rooms all had glass that would leave Delilah as good as naked if she got up beyond a gremlin-like crouch. She hazarded to glance through a cracked door and was glad that she'd gotten low; the people in this board room, like the ones in the transparent bubble, were all staring in one direction, and that direction was nearly directly at where she would have transited them. She also heard a brief ringing in her ears as the door vanished behind her. Not sure what that was about.

The metal-bracketed man finally turned down a corridor away from the offices and boardrooms, and into a section that, upon revelation, produced a 'CEO's office' which had been gutted and transformed into a sterile clinic, with sheets of that funky plastic lining the floor and draping down hiding most of the grisly goings-on in white. The place smelled of solvents and cleaning agents. And when Delilah was forced to get close enough to peek between two translucent sheets and see what was beyond, she recoiled a bit.

There was a giant bat-man-thing laid out on the table, body shattered and split open. It had strange devices inserted into its throat, skull, and past its splayed-open ribs into the thoroughly bizarre organs that populated its thorax.

"Ho-lee-shit," Hare whispered. "That's a Tocxa."

Delilah, too close to a person who was standing with her back to her, only offered a querulous grunt at that.

"Remember that thing I told you to run away from? That's its species. But this one looks unaugmented. Maybe even wild."

Delilah remained silent, glancing back to see if One were following her. He apparently was not. Greeeeat. Only once she reached a place where she could be reasonably certain there weren't people to hear her did she whisper harshly for Hare's attention. "Why does that matter?" she hissed.

"If they are trying to zero a wild Tocxa… they don't have any Choirborn. If they don't have any Choirborn, Interdiction, and only a hand full of Fulgs… Holy shit," Hare said starting to sound excited. "Guys, change of plans. We're wiping these geeks out."

"Wait really?" One's voice came to Delilah's ear as she remained carefully on the coil-backed man's six o'clock.

"One, get your back to a corner and pull out the S-46. Lou, poke their eyes and throw a blanket. I'll clip their tongues, then I'm bringing the bus in. And Delilah? You deal with that Fulgrammaticus before it can close on Lou and One," Hare said. "We're gonna get a clean sweep here, guys!"

"This seems a bit extreme, changing things like this! I didn't prepare for this!" Delilah pointed out. Her memory of what happened the last time she fought one of these metal men sat unhappily in her stomach like a lead brick. It hadn't even tried very hard to massacre her, and she distinctly recalled the vision of her leg being ripped off of her body.

"Sometimes you have to change goals on the fly. No Choirborn and only one Fulg means this place is free real estate, and sister, we need that real estate," Hare said. "Lou, One? Go upon Delilah's engagement. You'll know it when you hear it."

She turned her attention to the 'Fulg' that was now turning toward a boardroom that overlooked the surgical suite, this one not host to dubiously praying people but instead was dark. Delilah darted in before the door could swing closed; if she could… frankly she didn't know what exactly, but if she could put the Fulgrammaticus out of action before anybody else knew, it'd be the better for everybody involved.

Delilah had a moment of stunned stillness when she looked at the boardroom which had been converted into something of a warehousing room. Bricks of plastic festooned one wall. But bricks of shining of metal – including gold, sat on racks, along with computer components and all manner of other bits of what she guessed were cybernetics-in-the-making. It was like she'd stepped out of 2022 and directly into 2080. And as she tried to get her bearings on how strange this room felt, not just to her aesthetic perspective but on a level that was deep in her gut, she felt her elbow brush against something.

That something then fell with a clatter of metal against metal. And when Delilah glanced from the falling pot of forceps and back to the coil-backed man, he was now staring directly at her. She looked into his eyes, as Hare had ordered her.

There was nothing human there.

"Fuck it, GO LOUD!" Delilah roared, and with an explosive thrust of her legs, launched herself at the ex-human.


The sound of Delilah shouting and a crash of something big hitting something bigger was all the warning that One was going to get, so he made the best of it. There were no corners for him to back into, not this side of that cubicle farm over yonder, and he had no intention of being swarmed from above and from ankle level at the same time. So instead he did the sensible thing, planted his back against the stairwell door, and pulled the heavily collapsed rifle out of his jacket while listening for which direction he'd need to shoot from first. He was hoping it was the left. The left was closer, and if he could cut through one wave of them, then he'd be girded on two sides.

The S-46 gave a rattle as the magazine well flipped open, and slotting a mag into it caused the thing to let out a rising hum and unpack itself, growing into a pretty respectable looking carbine. He hoped that this would at least be on par with an AR, but if it wasn't, he kept a machete in the jacket as well. It may be no ninja-to, but an edge felt better in his hands than trying to deal with it with his fists.

He saw the first person rushing around the corner, and it was indeed to One's left. In a movement that even all the time he'd spent in Admin couldn't erase, he flicked the butt into place and planted against his shoulder, the human being flinching back as though wishing to run away, but then having his face go slack and start to mechanically sprint toward him. That gave One all the license he needed to get the optics centered on the guy's chest and pull the trigger.

The recoil was weird, pulling the gun forward slightly, and emitted no expected 'boom'. There was only a very loud snap, and then there was a blast of red as the slug seemed to outright turn all of the guys insides into outsides. One almost wavered at that, but then looked at the optics again. Listed in the lower left corner were 'Max Pen 5mm Fe'. This thing even had overpenetration controls? What weird fuckin' sci-fi world did Hare come from to have guns like this that he could just hand out? His answer was cut a little short when two more rounded the corner, these ones offering no hesitation before starting to run at him. That spurred One to shoulder the rifle again. And this time he payed attention to the Optic, as it seemed to track that there were two targets, and dropped the 'Max Pen' setting down to zero for some reason. Well, whatever. He fired, to another loud but very-not-a-gunshot snap, and this time when the bullet hit the first woman just in the clavicle, her arm and neck practically exploded, and the lanky guy behind her was blown flat onto his back, riddled with holes as though One had unloaded a 10 gauge shotgun at him.

He decided that trusting this gun to be fucking terrifying was probably smart. And he could hear people starting to come from the right. Not wanting to deal with being surrounded, he started storming forward toward the dead. Three corpses begat a dozen more people, almost stumbling over each other in their desire to get into the fray. "Not today you fuckin' noyds!" One shouted, and he flicked the selector switch on the side of the gun off of 1 and up to FA. The optic registered 'Automatic' and when he fired this time, it was not to hilarious and gratuitous explosions of gore that the gun had created bespoke out of velocity and tumble, but instead a wave of raging debatably human enemies getting finger-sized holes blown through them, then through the guy behind them, and then through the next guy, too. The recoil was even easy to manage; the same training that helped him avoid muzzle lift easily fit into holding the gun to his shoulder and letting the pull of the gun aid his forward stepping. One imagined firing like this while going backward would probably suck.

A harsh buzz, the optics displaying 'EMPTY' across the top of the sighting aperture, and there were still two people coming at him. Of them, one of them had a hole in her, and wasn't in the best of shape; through her squat body and peripheral location, she had avoided most of the lawnmower of fire that he'd sent out, though not all of it. The other one, at the back, seemed to glisten, as though his skin were made out of oiled latex. As the woman charged him, her fingers fell apart, revealing knives that vibrated so quickly that they were practically blurs attached to her pudgy hands. One reached into his jacket and drew the machete in a method that actually harkened back to iaijutsu, ducking under her awkward swipe and managing to sever her arm at the elbow as the machete came out.

And it had been too easy.

He'd practiced that thousands of times and never got it feeling that smooth.

What the hell?

Whatever confusion he had was momentarily waylaid by the fact that the woman turned, though bleeding heavily, and drove her other fat fist into One's chest, and instantly he felt all of the wind evacuate his lungs and he was sent rocketing through the door into the office that overlooked the church steeple, bracketed by a strange synthetic 'gong' noise. His backward progress and moment of discombobulation was halted when he stumbled ass-first into a very plush chair, and then his momentum wheeled him directly against the wall next to the window. The fat woman was pulling her fist back, and One could see that it had a piston built into it. Oh fuck all of that. He trusted his body to do better than his brain and hurled his machete at her, managing to get the thing to dig into her cheek and prevent her from storming into the office, while he pawed at a pocket for another magazine. The woman showed what might be called a reasonable amount of pain, pulling that slightly embedded machete out of the flab of her face, but she still snarled and started walking.

But it had bought One enough time to find the first of his reloads and slam it into place. The gun let out a chirp, and he brought the S-46 to his shoulder again, seated comfortably in some bigwig's chair, flicked it back to single shot, and with a single trigger-pull caused her to detonate from the larynx up.

One took a moment then to wince, rub at his chest, at the pain of it. And he felt as he had when he did his bullshit with the key that there was something he could do about it. So instead of focusing just on the pain, he focused on changing it. And over the course of instants, the pain lessened from being nearly-debilitating to merely annoying. And he felt strangely… emptier, somehow. Like he'd used something up. Must be that Numen bullshit that Lou had talked about. Speaking of which, where in the sweet fuck was Lou?

He looked up, and saw the latex-skinned one glance at him, then to the gun at his shoulder, and then duck around the corner just in time for One to send slugs at him and miss. One then sucked in an overdue breath and fired a few more times, intentionally aiming for the walls and allowing the gun to figure out how to penetrate them. But he had only a few moments of peace before another human reached the door, holding what looked like some kind of grenade in her hand. One snapped a shot at her quick as his body was now able to, and though it nailed her left lung to the wall behind her, she still managed to drop the grenade more into the office than out of it.

"FUCK ME!" One shouted, diving behind the desk, seeing the grenade under the desk, and therefore pressing himself off of the floor and onto the pair of chairs that sat in front of the big, solid wood desk. And he did so not an instant too soon. As soon as the wood was screening him from where the grenade had landed, there was a sound that could be best described as 'wire violently unspooling', and One, flinching as he did, could see grey streaks tear at every wall and panel of the floor and ceiling, see the side of the desk shatter and fall into slightly ignited chunks, and even felt his chairs snap and tip over as something undermined them.

That was a monofiliment bomb.

Somebody had weaponized a weed-whacker and turned it into a grenade.

One was rolled off onto the floor, but the Wire Bomb had spent itself, now just spinning and disgorging small amounts of nearly invisible wire into its vicinity, while the entire office was utterly shredded. One quickly checked his gun. It had been up on the chairs with him. It was fine. His machete, though, was mangled and cut apart near the door. A young man with a strange, metallic looking throat and an utterly eye-watering windbreaker charged into the room with his own blurring, machete-like knife, only for One to open his mind in the most literal sense. He was already snapping his sights to the next adventuresome soul who'd come her to die, only to have the entire far wall of the building explode back toward him. Sheer reflex and instinct got him to duck behind what remained of the desk, which was essentially destroyed by the new attack. The plastic-skinned man was standing in the next office over, holding a 'rifle' that looked like one a' those one-time-use rockets the army used, if given a pistol grip and mediocre stock.

Both men hesitated only an instant before dragging rifles to shoulder and firing. One's shot hit first, catching the man in the shoulder and twisting him away to a sound of crunching bone, quite a change from the usual explosion of gore that usually resulted from using this monster of a carbine. Because the foe's aim was thrown, the shot he fired instead missed One by inches, a tube of visibly cavitated air emitting from the gun and impacting the all at One's side, causing the thing to crack and shudder, bricks shattering but not quite falling out of place by the violence of whatever it was that this thing was firing.

One snapped his gun to the dickhead's skull and pulled again. But this time, he was greeted by a different message on the optic. Battery Fault. He glanced down, and saw that the bottom of the magazine had been slashed by the wire-grenade, indicating just how close One had been from being reduced to pulp; it was emitting grey, noxious smoke and seemed to be catching fire. He stripped it out, glancing up at the man, who had finished ramming his arm against a wall to a new crunching of bone, reseting the dislocation that One's shot had instilled in him. He lifted his on tube-rifle to shoot at One, but this time there was only a weird 'buuuuh' sound that came out of it. He swore, stripping a section of the tube away and trying to hot-swap a second one, but by the time he'd half-completed his motion, One had ditched one magazine (which did indeed catch fire the moment it clacked against the floor) and slammed home another, aiming for the flailing man's head and pulled his trigger.

The man jerked directly back, falling to the floor and out of One's vision. He slung the carbine on its sling and vaulted what was left of the desk, quickly stooping to grab the still-vibrating machete that that one guy had brought in, and instantly had to swing it up and into the chest of a man who limped around the edge of the savaged door-frame; the man who had only part of his skin replaced by that greased latex shit let out a shout of pain and fear, until One twisted the machete into place and annihilated his heart. When he dragged it out, the wound spilled guts onto the floor and onto his arm.

He didn't know what to call what happened next. Kismet, maybe? Or just dumb luck? But whatever it was, he was reaching to grab the smaller tube-gun that the half-plastic man had dropped when a thud passed directly over his spine and the wake of it lifted him and dragged him into the side of the desk, which finally collapsed into a sort of speed-bump of teak. When One looked up, he saw the first plastic man with his tube gun now standing and readying a new shot; one of his eyes was mashed to ruin and his head was now lopsided, but he was still standing. What a tough bastard.

One just hurled that machete with all of the aim he had time to give it. And when it hit, unlike his old machete which only dug in for an inch, this one cut through the barrel of the man's sonic(?) rifle and then slashed out half of his neck. He stumbled, trying to hold in his blood, but it was spraying with violent, arterial bursts.

"Alright. Find a corner," One said, sucking in a pained breath. This time, as he passed the plastic man who was still gasping and twitching on the floor, he hooked his carbine's barrel right up against a nostril and fired twice. That finally stopped him. And he then heard a massive electric snap, and crashing of walls. "Hope Delilah's havin' fun over there."


Delilah was not having fun.

Her charge against the 'Fulgrammaticus' had been loud, impassioned, and fairly useless. By the time she crossed the eight feet to reach the thing, it blurred and grabbed her, hurling her through a non-structural wall, which hurt like an utter bastard because she was sure that, non-structural or no, her spine had split a stud. She flopped to the floor, and saw the cyborg seem to glitch, then streak away from the hole she could see him through.

She pushed herself to her feet just in time to see the streak of the cyborg launch a Superman punch directly at her head. And if she had been a quarter as well trained in The Sweet Science as she was, it might have even hit her. But all she had to do was shift her head and chest out of the line and what would have been an instant knock-out instead whiffed uselessly past her chest. And with the leverage that her juking the shot had given her she drove her own fist up and into the cyborg's face. And unlike when she tried punching the last cyborg she'd tussled with, this one actually took the hit like a person and not a block of metal. She tried to follow up with an upper-cut, to concuss this cuss, when he blurred again, this time seeming to be in front of her, beside her, and behind her all at the same time, before she felt hands grasp her by the back of her shoulders and then heave.

Her footing was lost and she had to kick off of a wall to get her feet to the floor again; though the fingers digging into the bones of her shoulder hurt, they weren't actually crushing bone. But as long as he had her by this strange direction, there was nothing she could do to stop him. So she glanced past her shoulders as she stumbled – never letting herself fall to the floor because if she did he'd be on her like corruption on the HRP – until she found a brick-wall corner that she could hook the toes of her boots against. That finally disrupted the cyborg's drag enough that she was able to meaningfully grab one of his arms and with a strength that she'd never managed to achieve in her life before now, she tore that clutch off of her.

The cyborg's glassy expression continued to stare at her, and he continued to ramble ceaselessly and meaninglessly. Her attempt to kick him back to proper distance so she could regain her bearing and her footing failed when there was a strange pop. On the heel of that pop the cyborg was gone. Having seen this trick once before, Delilah swung her arm in a backward hammer-blow directly behind her. And that blow did get warded by the cyborg's guard but it had been exactly what she'd been expecting. This thing wasn't as strong as the one from the tunnels, but was a lot more mobile. It'd keep trying to get behind her until she found a way to stop it.

She ducked and weaved a pair of sloppy haymakers, but the second one, which came closer to her than the first, managed to make her teeth feel like they were dancing against her jaw even though it didn't touch her. If one of those impacted her, it'd land a lot harder than it looked like it ought, she wagered. She danced back from a much faster jab that had the same gut-shaking energy attached to it, staying light on her feet, and then darting to one side to try to deliver a wide cross, but the effort turned out to be wasted. There was another blur, and the cyborg slipped into a doorframe near were she'd started this exchange of blows. It formed a circle with its two hands directly before its chest, the air there twisting and knotting, the coils running up and down his back singing with electric noise and life.

And then came the thud.

Her vision narrowed to a cone for a moment, and she vaguely felt pain in her back and in her scalp. But she gave her head a shake and forced herself to get to her knees. She was in another office, having been blown through yet another wall. For fucks sake, she was not a wrecking ball! This office, unlike most, was cold, slightly damp, and smelled of cleaning solutions and ozone. She could tell that she ought to be able to see through the windows here, only they were blocked and blackened with paint and boards. There was something else in this room with her.

The room became brighter, once the light illuminating it was not merely peeking through a crumbled wound in the wall but streaming in through an open door which the cyborg had opened in its advance toward her. She could see now what was in this room. Tubes with naked people in them, floating without touching the walls or sides. And as she reteated, she bumped into something.

She turned to see another cyborg with metal coils running along its shoulders and back. This one was a woman, wearing a hospital gown and nothing else. At being jostled, the second cyborg gave an electric buzz noise, and then stood from the hunched-over position it had been in, beginning to emit the same rambling non-sense that the first continued even until this moment to vomit forth.

"Oh fuck this with a cactus," Delilah noted.

The woman then blurred, grabbing her and with little ceremony slamming Delilah against one of the tubes; the plastic, once broken, caused the human inside to explode into gore as though the tube had been all that been keeping it intact and coherent. Then, with a twist and hurl, it sent Delilah rocketing between other tubes, heading directly for the windows. She managed to shelter her head from the boards, but the impact of it was bad enough. She knew that the fall would kill her from five stories up.

So she did something to stop it.

She felt her Numen move, and there was a metal snap at her back, as her flight was halted, and she began to simply... hover. She looked down, at the cars passing by directly under her dangling feet. And then she looked at her arms. Her hands were now glossy and seemingly metallic blue gleam over her dark complexion. A final glance, over her shoulder, showed that a pair of pylons were extending from the backs of her shoulders, and from those pilons blasts of brilliant golden light belched downward, holding her upright despite producing neither sound nor heat.

Well fuck it. If she could fly, she could fly. She'd worry about the hows and whys later.

She tipped herself forward, and instantly – noiselessly – she streaked back into the building, slamming into the cyborg woman who had defenestrated her and drove a her two fists in a double-rocket punch into the once-woman's sternum. The woman was knocked back, her coils crashing into the already damaged back-wall of the office and causing the wallpaper to burn as arcs of electricity played briefly along them.

Delilah had to quickly duck and weave as several blurring-fast attacks came in from the cyborg man, who took her distraction for weakness. She was able to hold ground against these things, but her fists alone weren't doing sufficient harm to actually kill them. So as she danced back from a tickle of knuckles against her ribs, she tried shifting her Numen again, to see if the thing which gave her literal wings also came with any sort of weapons.

And her body answered.

When the woman tried to slash at Delilah with a high-frequency vibrating blade that was concealed inside her arm, Delilah simply held up an arm in blocking posture, and when that blade that should have shredded her like Thanksgiving turkey touched her skin... it stopped. She could feel something sheathing her limbs now, like a third skin of naked force. And when she turned her attention back to the cyborg man, she was able to weave back from the pair of haymaker blows that would have likely shattered her jaw if they connected, waiting until training an instinct told her there. That this was the moment.

Performing an almost perfect Dempsey Roll, she found herself in a perfect position to surge her strength up from her leg up through her core, and then drive it upward in a savage uppercut directly into the cyborg's unprotected chin. She had expected that it would break bone, so hard did her fists feel now. She had expected that it would despite this thing's nature knock it on its ass. She did not, however, expect that same naked force that sheathed her limbs to concuss against the air, against his body, against space itself, amplifying an already savage blow into something that ought to have come out of the mouth of a Howitzer.

The Cyborg man was launched upward, his head exploding from the blast of unmitigated power, power which extended past the once-man's head and blasted a hole through the ceiling for the now-decapitated corpse to fly up and through, before landing most of the way onto the roof, whence gravity had its due and dragged him back toward the inside of the building before snagging his leg on some rebar and leaving him dangling, neck-stump down, into the room that she now stood in.

She stared at her own fist for a moment. How in the fuck did that happen?

Her confusion was interrupted when she felt intense and biting pain in her back, as her skin parted and she felt something grinding at the bones of her back. She threw a back-elbow, but the last 'living' cyborg darted back, holding up that wicked, shivering blade as she did. Delilah backed up, toward the door which still stood open, though that path did lead to her having to walk through the blood-waterfall of the dangling cyborg half on the roof. She pressed a hand which was relatively clean to her back, and saw that there was red on her fingertips when she reached back. A reminder in scarlet that these things could still shank her like a desperate crack-head.

There was no need to talk. She could hear a snapping sound coming from another part of the office up here but that was on One and Lou to deal with. She had to stop this thing. And this one had an advantage that the cyborg man had not; the ability to keep Delilah at arm's length with a very sharp, very deadly piece of metal.

The woman blurred more starkly, and then with a pop vanished. She immediately drove a donkey kick behind her, feeling it connect with something and using Newton's Law to give her some forward momentum away from where the Fulgrammaticus now tried to flank her. She managed to just barely avoid a decapitating swipe, but even in the time that Delilah was turning to face the once-woman again, she was beginning to blur heavily. Damn it all, she flattened her back against what was left of the wall, looking to her left and right as the pop sounded. Where was she going this time?

The answer came when there was a cracking sound from behind her, through the wall. Oh, so this bitch was just gonna wall-bang her? Well fuck that. She turned to deliver a savage blow, only to feel her Numen shift again. Her vision tesseracted down, fading to black for an eye-blink's time that seemed to stretch to days, before expanding in fractals to show the cyborg woman's coil-laced back, as she was savagely stabbing the wall from the hallway hosting the surgical theatres. And now, for some reason and by some method, Delilah was out here too. Not wanting to look gift grievous assault with a deadly weapon in the mouth, she finished her blow, driving her fist hard into the back of the machine, just beside one of the coils.

The once-woman turned to her, no expression on her face and gibberish still spewing from her mouth, and tried to swing that savage blade back at her, only to have Delilah check it's approach with an elbow, before rooting her feet, punching her other fist into the wound in this woman's back that she'd made, and starting to tear the once-woman apart like an unloved stuffed animal.

The once-woman tried to blur and zap away, but again she just let her Numen do its thing and trusted it to do good; again Delilah's vision pulsed and fractaled, but this time when the once-woman tried teleporting away, Delilah remained wrists-deep in the poor creature's back, though now the two of them were standing in that room with the clear walls on the other side of the top floor, where she'd seen all of the people 'meditating'. It blinked at her, as though unsure of what to do because she shouldn't have been able to follow it. Delilah just heaved with all of her might, and though traces of savage electricity played over her limbs as she did so, she felt metal and meat alike part under her grasp, until finally the woman was thrown apart, ripped apart by a cleft that ran from under her armpit to just above her pelvis. The fallen cyborg simply lay on the floor. Within a few moments, the electricity that played along the coils of her back faltered and died.

She stared at her hands for a moment. She'd just ripped a human being (more or less) apart with her bare hands. What he hell had Hare's voodoo done to her? Well, she had bigger things to worry about, because she could see a horde of people trying to press themselves into a corner office, only to have splats of blood erupt from their backs to the sound of loud, supersonic cracks. One of them hit near where Delilah now stood, impacting the clear substance and causing a small crack lattice to form, only to have it start to immediately if slowly recede.

One was getting mobbed. And though he seemed a slippery sort, she severely doubted that he had the raw physicality to avoid being ripped limb-from-limb by this mob. So she hurled a haymaker at the damaged clear-plastic, an impact that unlike her utilizations against meat and metal actually caused her knuckles to ache a bit and the reverberation to shudder her shoulder, she managed to unseat a panel of the clear substance that had hitherto been seamlessly pressed against its higher and lower brethren. With a way through, she quickly jumped through and then launched into her own Superman punch into the back of the head of the rearmost of the mob; that poor woman exploded like a water-balloon filled with viscera. And a crack sounded, making Delilah feel like she'd gotten punched in her ribs fairly hard. One was still shooting, and couldn't see her.

She sidestepped, reducing her exposure to the open door and started to pick her targets. At this point, it wasn't about technique anymore. If somebody turned and saw her, she punched him so hard in his face that said face either inverted or exploded. If nobody looked back, she drove rabbit punches into the backs of skulls. It was shocking how... simple... it was to do this now. She'd always been taught not to strike that spot, because it was so likely to kill the target compared to other head-blows. Now she was doing it exactly for that reason. She believed that at least some of the people that she sucker-punched were merely unconscious. Some.

Wow. Hare was right. This job did have an acidic effect on the human soul.

The tide broke when she was busy shattering a tall, fat man's jaw and the last of the mob at the door fell, perforated, no longer held up by the pressure of those behind them. The office now looked like a particularly ill-manned slaughter-house, with broken bodies piled up in mounds. The doorway was half choked with human corpses, and the carpets outside were now dyed red with human blood.

If these people hadn't tried so hard to kill her, she would have been shocked and appalled by what she'd just done. But the last few days had broken something in her, she felt. She just had to make the best of what was left of herself. "One? You alright in there?" Delilah called, grabbing corpses and pulling them out into a somewhat less-peopled area of floor.

"Delilah? You're alive? Shit man... I mean... shit," One said, stepping away from the back corner that he'd been forced into. At his feet were a number of that gun's magazines, and she wagered he didn't have more than one or two left based on how much pocket-space his suit had.

"This was messy," she said. She then glanced around. "Where's Lou?"

"I ain't seen him," One said, quickly glancing through his sights at the floor before letting his rifle sling onto his back. "Do you think maybe he got gacked in the confusion?"

"No, I'm fine," Lou's voice came as a door that Delilah hadn't noticed before opened, and released the business-formal gym-rat.

"Where the fuck were you during all that?" One asked, plucking a single-edged straight sword from a corpse nearby and swishing it a few times.

"Dealing with the Voice," Lou said. He shrugged. "Don't worry about it."

"I think it might behoove me to worry about it," Delilah raised her hand.

Lou turned to her, then sighed. "Shit. Elohim Array."

"Victory is mine!" Hare's voice came through Delilah's ear. There was a sound of air-brakes going off through the window next to One. "Okay, I'm in the parking lot. You all grab anything that looks blatantly supernatural and throw it into the dumpsters out the back of the building. I'll calm the hens out here."

"Calm the hens?" Delilah muttered, then waded into the room to look through the window at the battle bus which now inconvenienced an entire parking lot, which was starting to swell with confused and alarmed people. Hare quickly exited the bus and began to approach them, arms wide in a showman's pose and getting their attention.

"Let Hare do what he's good at. He's good at this so we've got about twenty minutes, maybe half an hour, before the police really show up here," Lou said. "Which while not critical could be deeply inconvenient. So grab any weapons they had and throw them out the back. They've survived far worse than a five story drop, and even broken they're of use to us."

"And I suppose you want the bricks and gear from that store room?" Delilah asked.

"As much as you can bring in twenty minutes," Lou gave a nod. "I'm going down to Hare to see if I can give you more time to ransack."


"Is the building safe?" one of the bystanders asked.

"Safe to stand near, yes, safe to wander through, no," Hare said. "We've got a couple of our inspectors inside ensuring the structural integrity of the building is such that we can send our repair crew in."

Hare always had a way with people, in Lou's experience. She always had exactly the right expression on her face, used exactly the right tone of voice, so that she could bend people to her needs with nothing more than a few words and a wink. This, by her own admission, was why she'd been recruited into her cell. Because she was good at hoodwinking.

Lou wasn't sure if she'd (or he'd, as Lou wasn't yet sure which it had been) been a con-artist or something similar in his life before becoming this, but getting people to react to her desired emotional timbre seemed to be a talent that she honed with paranatural advantage into nigh-insurmountable skill. Still, it was like watching a musical master conducting the world's greatest symphony watching him keep everybody from realizing that this example of mass-murder and extraordinary violence was in fact a robbery. Nobody seemed to notice the strange stuff that rained down into the area around the dumpsters just a corner away from where they congregated. And the only cops on scene, a single squad-car, seemed to have been caught hook, line and sinker.

It was hard to explain what he had seen while Delilah and One dealt with the physical threats of the Deus Vox. These things were much more physical than most Noumenon, but that didn't mean they didn't have their ephemeral side, the Vox itself, the Voice that they listened to and that bade them to become what moulded things they became. But there was that frequency, that song under the skin of reality, that once he felt it he could interface with it.

Maybe it was because his mind was cracked in exactly the way it was, that he could perceive that strange, underlying heartbeat of this place. Whatever the case, he had plunged her hands into the insidious threads that the Voice sent down into this universe through its attenuated song that spread across the impossible distances to its hyperreal source, and he, in a way which defied easy explanation, tied them into a knot.

And without the means to send for help, to teleport in more Fulgrammaticus or Choirborn, this 'branch office' was cut off and at the mercy of a couple of rookies who could kill crimes against reality and the sanctity of human integrity without having to worry about a swarm of backup.

Hare continued to gesticulate wildly and confound the onlookers, wandering around and keeping them from moving in the directions she didn't want while Lou kept clattering away on his laptop, looking through unsecured cameras on the other side of Bangor, spotting people doing minor crimes, and getting the cops to run after those instead. It was a simple thing, but he wagered every call that pulled the police away from here was a few more minutes that Delilah and One could pitch things into the shadowed alley behind the building which grew darker as the evening grew acute.

And the things that landed out there didn't sit long. Every time that Hare's confabulations drew her close to that alley, entire piles of blasphemous detritus seemed to dissolve away like sugar into water, leaving the alley briefly empty, before she wandered away and the pile began to mount again.

Lou had a notice chirp at him, and he glanced to a window that popped up. A shaky video on a streaming service that showed just for a moment Delilah, hovering above the level of the street as viewed from the passenger seat of a car, before she streaked back into the building.

"Hare, we're losing containment. We've got five minutes, max, before they stop being confused and start being alarmed," Lou said.

"I don't think we need five minutes," One said. "Hey, do you want us to pitch that weird fuckin' machine down here too?"

"You won't get enough of it to be useful. Just grab however much of it you can carry in one trip and bug out," Lou directed. "Five minutes asses-in-seats. If you miss the bus you better have a way to catch up to us."

Lou then got up and headed into the battle bus itself. She'd seen the Voice itself, long before she had been found by Hare and brought into the fold. It was a shining, hideous light that she had avoided in all her mad wanderings through impossible and unreal worlds, when she was still Lulu. There were other places, other things, other songs in the darkness that she had seen in those helpless, terrifying days. Things of darkness and teeming, hideous life. Things of light and rigid mechanistic control. Things of overwhelming power and things of pure idea and knowledge. She had seen them all, while trying her best to navigate a life of poverty and crippling insanity and exploitation.

Fuck she missed Sam.

When she had been lost, he found her. Every single time. Now Lou had to find himself. And despite all the control that Integration had given Lou, he still found himself doubting if it'd ever really be enough. Maybe the damage was too fundamental. Maybe he'd always be a pop away from his entire universe disappearing, and something stranger and more terrible taking its place. It was not an unreasonable fear. It had happened to him more than once when he was still Lulu.

"Ho-lee-shit that was wild," One's voice broke into her musings as he darted into the bus, throwing himself into the booth with a grunt and a long, tired sigh. "I finally know what that red fuck must have felt like in Joisey."

"I punched a man's head off. Why didn't you all tell me I could do that?" Delilah asked as she followed in a moment later.

"People's talents tend to be fairly individual here. There's no blanket statements for the Downfall," Lou reminded her. Then he shrugged. "Although I probably should have. Both a Juggernaut Factor and an Elohim Array both allow for pretty brutal hand-to-hand combat."

"No kidding," Delilah said. She looked down at herself, at the blood on her clothing. "I think I need to take a shower."

"We'll do that when we're safely out of town," Lou said. "Hare?"

"Coming," Hare said. And a few more minutes of truly spectacular bullshitting later, she hopped into the bus, which Lou backed out of the parking lot past the people wondering what had just come to their sweet little town, and then started driving away. Hare plunked herself into the egg-chair facing the booth, which both Delilah and One had slumped into, both of them looking exhausted. "Well. Today was unexpectedly productive."

"Really," One said flatly.

"Does it always go like that?" Delilah asked.

Hare chuckled and shook her head. "We've got to take the victories we can get. Now that we've got a bit to work with, let's relax and recover. I need to make contact with a guy, and after two missions back to back in forty-eight hours, y'all deserve a little vacation."

"Are we finally talking to Ngolo?" Lou asked.

"That we are, Lou. And we might as well do it somewhere nice," Hare said leaning back with a victorious smile on her face.


Amplitude

"The most common question I hear out of new recruits is 'why not just shove as many Engines into one guy as can physically fit' and at first blush it seems a reasonable question. After all, not all Engines go into the same spot. We're not all AEGIS Cyborgs who are basically a pile of guts and a brain inside shells of titanium and paranatural metamaterials. Common sense dictates that if you can fit more than one Engine into a body, you by all rights should. Well, there's one little problem with that; Amplitude Attenuation.

You see my mouldable little maggots, the moment that you joined with us and started building your Synchroncity Core, your Living Echo gained two things. One is Resonance. It'll get stronger the longer you last without fail. Your Resonance his all the shit that makes you different than buddy here. Smarter people than me call it 'your personhood'. I just call it the You Part of the equation. The other thing that you get is Amplitude. That's how clear the You Part stands out from the noise of reality. When you're fresh off the table, your Amplitude's typically as high as it can possibly get, and can only go down from there. Getting really fucked up, like edge-of-death if not worse, that can damage your Amplitude. And though there are ways to recover damaged Amplitude, some things cause permanent loss of it, attenuation and misery. And you know what in particular permanently damages it?

Yup, that's right, maggots; putting in Engines. Engines are a big 'fuck you' to reality built into a human body. Every engine you put in attenuates your Amplitude a little more, some do it more if they're more invasive, some do it less when they're more piddly. But one and all they put you closer and closer to Desync, and worse, to Annihilation. And even if you don't suffer The Big Death, the worse your Amplitude, the worse your Tuning gets, and I know you like to play with our laser-guns, so you wanna keep that shit as high as possible. That's why we don't just throw everything we have into everybody. Engines are a strategic choice. Once you've got 'em, there's no going back.

...Oh yeah, and they gum up your Capacity so you can't use as many Endeavors as Bezoar over there can. Trade offs, my man. I get you want to be the big shit in the unit... just don't let the up-front power blind you to the long-term costs."

- Orientation by Boss Sneed of the Doggerland Arcology Raiders, overheard 2063