Summoner

by codekinguu

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22. Chapter 41-45

Chapter 41

Notes:

been a while ey?

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

For her appearance to Accord, she picked something simple but endlessly elegant to mould her appearance after.

A sports car.

Odd as it sounded, it seemed like a good idea for a man like Accord.

So, she picked Evelynn, and began to meticulously mould her appearance.

Pale pink skin faded for a pitch black, utterly smooth expanse, glossy as if freshly waxed ceramic, reflecting every tiny mote of light that hit her. Feminine curves smoothed into complex eddying curves and waves and lines, every figure shape curving in artful ways to give off the impression of smoothness and motion, logic be damned.

The end result was a faceless black thing that vaguely looked like a pitch black glossy slate of moving, polished glass, naked save a single tie coloured in a flat, slightly lighter black.

"Thoughts?" She asked, flexing and adjusting her fingers, toying with the lines and trying to find a mix of beauty, grace, and danger.

Coil fixed his suit tie a milimeter to the side, and side-eyed her, trying his best to not turn his neck and wrinkle the collar of his suit even the tiniest bit.

"He appreciates whites, natural colors, and gold far more than black, but the figure and cleanliness alone should win him over. Your indecency won't be registered because you're too inhuman looking to be considered in any such standards. The way you move will make him very interested in you. You do not even breathe, which is perfection he can't even ask of himself. So, if we were here to talk, he would no doubt practically beg you to join his Ambassadors. And would draft whatever plan you asked for simply because he appreciated your nature and would like to build rapport. We could make him an ally very quickly and easily. He's a fairly simple man when one gets to know him." Coil quickly explained, then turned his eyes up to the small mirror in the car, obsessively looking over his mask and the folds of the fabric.

The annoyances of having no shapeshifting.

It was mildly interesting that Coil was trying to nudge her into the previous plan of not Mastering Accord, whether he was aware of it or not, but she couldn't care much about the question of whether or not the man did actually have a heart. Too late for that.

"Unfortunately, I don't have time for allies. I need subordinates that can pose as such." She mused, and settled on a nail shape, something elegant but just sharp enough to give the suggestion of danger, perfectly seamless, as glossy and reflective as the rest of her.

"Anything else before we go?" She asked, and Coil took a deep breath.

"No."

She nodded, and got out of the car.

Coil did the same, much, much slower, then spent a couple seconds correcting a tiny irregularity in his socks, one being higher on his ankle than the other, then carefully smoothed out the wrinkles that made on his inordinately tight suit.

If the material was not designed to smoothen wrinkles on its own, meeting the man would have been infuriatingly slow.

As they were, they simply walked through the immaculate underground parking lot, wound around to an equally unnaturally clean alley, and entered the skyscraper through the back door.

A couple minutes of confirming dates and times of arrival with his secretary, a quick rundown on Accord's expectations of them, and they were walking out of an immaculate elevator lined with gleaming bronze.

She took point, hands relaxed but still against her sides as she measured each step to the mechanical beat of a metronome, then stood before the silver-embroidered door that led inside to Accord's office, silent and still.

A few seconds later, a tiny beep came from Coil's watch, and she opened the door to get her entrance right on the millisecond the minute ticked over.

She liked Accord's style.

Two of his Ambassadors stood to either side of his desk, a man in a suit, utterly immaculate in a way that almost distracted her, and an equally appealing woman in a gold dress so tight it might as well be vacuum-sealed onto her body, golden ropes and ribbons twining around her upper body in graceful lines to make it seem less like golden body paint, most likely.

White and cream-coloured marble wavered around the floor and walls, immaculate leather on the furniture. Not much, if any scent, besides a small hint of lavender from the woman and something vaguely sea-like from the man.

She walked in, flickering once to get them used to the pattern, and was pleased to note only one of the three to be suspicious of the flicker and by extension, her.

A gigantic mahogany desk stood before Accord, who took a gloved hand and spread it to the two armchairs before his desk, his eyes nailed to her with a disturbingly powerful dose of interest in the air.

At least she knew she had his approval, for what little time she needed that.

Her new approach was perhaps overaggressive, but Accord was not as clean as he liked to appear. It did not grate on her conscience.

Confirming no eyes were on her back, she slowly moved her hands behind her as if to cross them and flickered again, precisely three seconds after her first flicker, establishing a pattern and easing the current parties as she walked forward.

Three peeled seeds the size of small lemons withered in the open air within her hands, dissipating a myriad toxins into the air, scentless and colourless, silent.

In the three seconds it took her to reach the chair across the enormous office, little was left of Zyra's seeds but the faintly blue-glowing core.

A flicker, and they were gone, back to her original body.

"On time as well. I must admit I did not…" Accord trailed off, and from the side, a distortion in the air snapped to life for a moment before flickering out as all four people in the room besides her slumped over, unconscious.

She flickered the antidote into her hand, a tiny little plant sack full of liquid with a hollow spike on the side, and jammed said thorn into Coil's neck like a syringe, squeezing it dry before flickering it back into her base form's hands.

Zyra's Legend was such a cheat. She had such variety in her plants. It was harder to remember what she couldn't make, than what she could make.

She didn't waste time waiting for Coil to wake up, instead walking around the desk, carefully removing Accord's mask, pricking his cheek on one of his fancy metal quills, licking the drop, then peeling his eyelids up.

Anticlimactic, really, but she much preferred that, and with Accord apparently sharing in Coil's paranoid patterns, there were no cameras in the room.

Her eyes flashed gold.

Mastering Accord was a simple matter of locking some of his useful emotions down, like his appreciation of order, symmetry and aesthetic, while taking the idea of herself, that sleek-black thing in his mind, and inflating it far and above them.

It was more draining than she'd like, but she was getting better at Mastering people. No superfluous overuse of power, like with Bakuda and Lung. She used a little extra just to make sure, but she didn't hammer herself out for it.

She would have to be a surgeon rather than a butcher, regardless of her bullish definition of 'diplomacy'.

Mastering Accord's two Ambassadors while Coil staggered upright and reoriented himself took considerably less time, as neither of them felt particularly strongly about anything beyond themselves, which… oddly fitting.

Merely seventeen and a half minutes since entering, she pulled back from the unnamed male Ambassador, and switched Runes just to be cautious before flickering to her base form to rifle through her pockets and get her phone.

Another flicker, and she was back to Evelynn, quickly updating herself on current goings-on, some important minute-to-minute things and some others which she'd mostly ignored until she had to pay attention to.

The girls they'd rescued had been pushed very hard to give an answer to their proposition, because they were on a tight time constraint to get things moving without bogging themselves down, and with most of them being shipped out to Boston, a few streets down from where she was, and New York, right now, they had a couple confirmed acquisitions that had stayed behind with them.

As Coil lifted his mask and rubbed at his face, blinking rapidly to wake himself up, she dove deeper into the report for a moment.

Of two hundred and seventeen women, and a few men, surprisingly, a whopping twenty two decided to stay with them.

She'd expected maybe ten. Max.

Four wanted to be soldiers, which… hm, wasn't a bad idea, honestly, if they could follow orders without being driven by drugs. She'd need organic military growth too, even if that wording made her wince.

Seventeen of them just wanted stable, safe work for an actual wage and relative freedom, and three of them wanted to keep working like they had before. Which she was sure her men would be pleased about, speaking from experience in Runeterra, but she'd have to ask Lisa to make sure those women actually wanted to keep doing that kind of work instead of being groomed into thinking it was their place or some vile shit like that.

She trusted Lisa, but she'd rather have that off her conscious.

She wrote a quick text as Coil gathered his bearings enough to dig into the back of his tight suit for another three little balls of antidote, carefully locked inside tight little plastic containers that he slowly and carefully lined up on Accord's desk, taking his time.

"If you have your hand-eye coordination, I'd rather you sped this up a little. We have a lot of shitty people to hit today." She murmured, moving through another report, skimming the important bits.

A 'lot of shitty people' was kind of underselling it. There were so many horrible, influential bastards in Boston alone it was kind of depressing to read. Coil had given her a stack of people she could take, instead of a small group. Lobbying groups hurting people for profit, fraudulent investment firms, all sorts of politicians and financial criminals who were at the relative top of the foodchain… it was sad to think that Runeterra, a magical-medieval society for the most part, had less corruption in day to day life life than Earth Bet.

Coil jabbed the unconscious woman, his free hand palming at her throat in a way that reminded her quite easily that he was a megalomaniac freak. It wasn't sexual as much as it was him relishing that he could do it to someone he'd never be able to touch normally.

The urge to jab him with a dose of agony surfaced, but he took his hand away relatively quickly, pulling the syringe out and moving onto the second one that he had for Accord.

Her eyes went back to the reports.

It was frustratingly laggy, but with some hacker apparently lurking around the Bay, her tech team had made some bizarre solution that seemed to make the app's network even more impenetrable and isolated than ever before at the cost of a huge delay.

Another couple seconds of further reports loading, and she read up one directly from Lisa.

Imp had bounced back well from her little trip, but she was a bit more closed off than usual and Lisa was half-complaining about how she was having to play base therapist because of her power.

Which was still incredibly useful because she now knew that Imp regretted not killing the guy who caused that accident.

It was a bit… no, it was honestly fucking tragic that Imp was even in this life to begin with, being only fourteen, but at least she probably wouldn't have that many qualms with assassinating a few horrible people here and there if and when Taylor asked her to, and was already sorting out what she wanted to do with her money.

Honestly, she wanted to pair the girl up with Lisa on a semi-permanent basis. They seemed to resonate oddly well with each other.

Rune was still undecided, Spitfire was recovering from a bullet that grazed her thigh while helping extract one of her teams during the police fight…

Everything seemed good.

The woman in gold stirred first, and Taylor flickered her phone back to her real self as she dropped the transformation, cocking a hip and putting her hand on it from sheer habit as she turned to look out of the window.

Coil carefully took out a burner phone, as secure as it could be made with mortal hands, complete with servers running entirely off one of their underground fronts and interacting with as little of the open internet as it could manage to send encrypted, trap-spring data packs, whatever that meant, and laid it in front of Accord's limp form on the desk.

It had their requests, now turned to orders, in it, as well as two contact lines.

She let Evelynn drop for a moment, revealing her current costume, which was just an adjusted kit from one of her soldiers made to fit her.

She checked her wrist watch, fingers itching to have a gun in their grasp just to be safe.

11:16 AM.

"Let's go. Schedule's got wiggle room, but I want to be done with this quickly." She said, and flashed back to Evelynn, already shifted into the form she used to walk into the building.

As the sound of shuffling cloth came from behind them, they walked out without another glance.

Seven minutes passed as they walked back out, through doors and checks and various expressions of meaningless wealth.

Almost ten minutes later, as she closed the door on their car and Coil began to drive, she flickered her phone into her hand, refreshed the app, and clicked on the first message.

Accord worked fast.

He would be a great 'ally', considering the tone of the message. She hadn't even messed with him that much, yet he spoke to her like an exemplary employee would to their boss. Just the right amount of deference while knowing their work, and enough supplication while also exuding confidence.

She'd have to move him in the future, but for now, he could sit here. That type of transition was more than she could handle in one day, or even a few days.

The tone and speed also meant her Mastering work was getting less choppy, which was good. He wasn't as unhinged as Bakuda.

A moment of navigating the menus as she flipped through Runes according to sightlines, possible, albeit paranoid, dangers, and her need to focus, and she called Trickster.

It hadn't even finished the first ring before he answered.

"We're getting close but we're drawing a lot of-" He began, immediately.

"I've got him." She interrupted, and he went silent. "Three nine six, one fortieth avenue. Along the coast, near the old container yards. That's the HQ of Spree's particular cell. Exact personal address, if he even has one, we don't know, but if he's not fighting he's usually hovering around there. Plan is the same. Find, teleport, neutralize, run. You'll be implementing some improvements we will draft you soon. Accord's work. Follow to the letter. Any questions? Complaints?" She asked, mostly rhetorically, and shifted her appearance to a middle aged woman as Coil took a slow drive through a tunnel, practically peeling off his mask in the process with hurried fingers and hitting the button to flip the licence plates to another set.

"Following Accord's maddening instructions… just like the good old days." He mumbled, then a shuffling noise as he likely shook his head. "None. All clear."

"Alright. Good luck. And try not to make Sundancer use her power unless you have to." She said, and cut the call.

Her last request was both practical and somewhat emotional, because Marissa's power was very distinct and incredibly attention drawing which she did not want, but she also wanted to keep in mind the Travellers' temperaments and personalities. They might be Mastered, but for once, it was not because they were too evil to bother redeeming, and Marissa did not want to use her power to hurt people for the most part.

She already felt bad enough, keeping them Mastered and sending them on errands, but there wasn't exactly an alternative until she somehow managed to kill the Simurgh.

The request might just be a small balm on her mind to remind her she had taken her standards of evil from 'serial murderers, human traffickers, and genocidal white nationalists' to people who committed financial crimes, corruption, and a whole host of other immoral practises, but it helped.

Besides, if terrible rich people were going to commit a dozen types of financial crime and cover up a million felonies, she'd rather they were doing it to benefit her instead of themselves, and she'd be able to cut down on their most erroneous behaviours to keep them and the innocents below them relatively safe.

How the hell these people hadn't been found out and taken entire sections of Boston companies down with them, she could only guess was due to even further corruption, or negligence.

Really, with how easy it was for Coil to find so many criminals in the upper echelons of one city, one would think the government would have done the job of sweeping through the bastards ages ago.

As she mentally refreshed what she knew of their first target, Coil drove with relative grace, even as he hastily and angrily stuffed his mask into one of his suit pockets.

She took the time to watch her surroundings, both to see what the good parts of Boston were like, and just in case.

Boston was…

Almost literally just Brockton Bay if it had money and less desperation baked into every tile and brick. It was like the before and after of a deep-cleaning video she'd find on websites when she was fourteen and trying to find a distraction.

She wondered how long it might take to make all of Brockton like this.

If she could manage it before the world ended, of course.

The car drive to their targets was not exactly a long one.

The convenience of already being in the richest, most peaceful part of the city, she supposed. All the rich and influential lived within the same couple blocks of each other.

"You're sure these men deserve it?" She asked, for the last time, because she didn't have the time to read up on their targets' absurdly extensive list of supposed immoralities.

"Yes. Michael Atlen, for example, our next target, used police and hospital connections to arrest a young journalist investigating him on trumped up charges. The officers beat her an inch away from a coma for "resisting arrest", while the footage of the arrest mysteriously vanished from the records through an 'error'. Then a hospital employee, unknown, 'misplaced' the journalist's medication and 'accidentally' put her into a vegetative state for the rest of her life by giving her the exact worst medication possible for her condition. She was twenty eight. I believe I know your standards for 'evil'. You will find no misunderstood men in this list." Coil replied as he changed gears, eyes cold with that unfeeling determination she has grown used to.

She chose to trust him, if only because he was Mastered.

Even if she knew that in the future, they… might have to do some similar things, depending on how things went. Depending on what was at stake.

She hoped she wasn't going down the wrong road, doing this. Despite her lived experience, she could only hope that she could limit the morally bankrupt actions of herself and her organization to a minimum, but with the world literally hanging over her head, she wasn't sure how much of those shiny morals she could keep, battered and bruised as they were.

It was one thing to make a militant organization with an ideology, not unlike a popular militia, and it was another thing to try to take over the American Government by yanking at its rotting, bloated strings, one piece at a time.

She flopped into the seat with a sigh, rubbing at her forehead, blinking tiredly at the mid-day sun.

They mostly knew where everyone was and would be, but two of the ten targets were nowhere to be found, so they were going to end up with a little less control over Boston than she'd like.

One was the CEO of an electricity providing company, which would make it easy for them to hide their electricity usage, and the other was the owner of a chain of restaurants that would be very useful for a lot of drug trafficking and money laundering.

It was a shame they couldn't find them, but they'd show up in time. And now that she had teleport points here, it would be much easier to return.

Regardless, she could not complain by any measure, even if she'd just spent hours bouncing from one penthouse, office building or suite to another, then to the car and back.

Coil wordlessly ducked out of the wealthy district, going as fast as the law would allow them to get out of Boston.

She spent her time thinking.

That was when an idea rose, and she jerked her head up.

"Stop. I need a brain scan."

Coil turned to blink at her in complete bewilderment, before hurriedly glancing ahead and slowing the car.

"Of- who?" He asked, haltingly.

"Me."

His brows furrowed further.

"Private?"

"Yes. Just… have an idea, need to know something first. Know anyone or do we ask Accord?"

She had to know if she had a corona pollentia before she could continue on that… highly risky train of thought.

Coil nodded.

"Shouldn't be more than an hour. I know a place. Do you want me to go now?"

"Yeah, drive."

He nodded, and took a left turn down an alley.

She cracked her neck as she hurriedly ducked out of the machine, and quickly walked off to the sectioned area to put all her gear and weapons back on.

She could see Coil talking with the back-alley doctor in the glass partitionment to the side, who looked very confused.

She quickly put everything on, as much as putting on sixty pounds of gear could be quick, and walked over, yanking the door open before ducking in, trying to ignore the scent of cigarette smoke and dust as she flickered into Evelynn.

"Ah, hello! So, these are-" The man began, and she ignored him, staring at the pictures on the lightboard.

"Do I have a gemma pollentia or not?"

The man snapped his mouth shut, and made a dubious sound, getting up with a groan to point to one of the pictures, at a small section of almost purple-blue at the back of her head, contrasted by the blue hues of the rest of the internals.

"Short answer is yes! Long answer is also yes, but it seems to be dead and inactive, somehow. It's not receding, or being absorbed, or necrotic, so don't worry, there's just zero activity. The Corona Pollentia is the part of the brain that controls a power and gives one access to them, however, when it's activated during a trigger event, it swells and connects to the brain in a more complete manner. We can tell whether one is activated or not through the veins. Such rapid expansion leaves a lot of trails, even months later. So, you did go through a trigger, which means that you are a parahuman, and this little piece of biology was activated at some point, but now it's just completely dormant. Which is… actually quite bizarre. But your power… the veins are connected but the lack of activity makes me think its somehow not connected, but that would mean you wouldn't have a power at all… hm..." He mumbled, scratching the side of his chin.

"This is… pretty fascinating. I'm just a man with a removed medical licence, but I know my way around a parahuman. Only a Case 53 had something even close to being as odd as this. Maybe your power just doesn't need the gemma pollentia to activate your power? But that goes against…" He trailed off, mumbling again, his grey, greasy hair swinging as he jerked his head from one picture to the other.

Well, there went her short-thought plan.

Killing Butcher before driving back wasn't going to be that easy, it would seem, because she… was a parahuman? Her power just… didn't exist? Or… wasn't connected?

Yeah, that made her previous plan a recipe for disaster. She was already not exactly the most stable human she could think of, if she got Butcher in her…

When could she have triggered though?

She briefly thought back to the locker, how there was a small flash of something incomprehensible and vast, a glittering cosmos of mirrors, before it was almost yanked away.

At first she didn't think much of that sense of her sense of self and perception being suddenly yanked in another inarticulate, non-euclidean direction, but now…

Did she actually trigger in the locker? Did the old summoner who blindly picked her as his successor somehow… what, intercept the connection?

She knew it was likely his attempt to break through the fabric of reality itself to reach her that killed him and wiped most of his memories from himself before she inherited them, but still, it was a bit of a revelation to her that even if that old bastard hadn't stumbled onto her, she would have still walked out of that locker with powers.

She took a deep breath, and turned away, waving Coil over.

She wasn't worried about the doctor. He'd be long since dead if he had a loose mouth, with the kind of people he worked with, and he didn't have much other than an MRI scan or whatever that piece of equipment was called and did.

The drive back home was pensive, on her end.

She would have loved to just nuke Butcher out of the face of the earth, and get rid of the bastard, but it would have to be done some other way.

Her mind stuck to him, or her, whichever it was, for the entire ride back.

She had ideas. A lot of them.

She doubted any of them were good, but she just might have to work on some of them regardless.

"Find some alley I can duck into and teleport without anyone seeing." She said, and thumbed at her phone.

The fading purple sways of Teleport hadn't even finished fading into the air before her phone started to buzz, and she furrowed an annoyed brow, walking up the stairs and swinging the door open to the ground floor of their current, temporary HQ.

Immediately, she paused, tensing at the inordinate amount of tension and alertness she saw in her men spread throughout the warehouse.

Most of them didn't even turn to her, precisely because she was decked out in the same gear they were, but the few she'd Mastered quickly noticed her and gestured to their headphones, either tapping or pointing at them.

Resisting the urge to groan, she took her phone out, and accepted the call.

"What's the problem now?" She asked.

"Our mystery hacker is way, way, way fucking better than we thought. Yes, I know you're listening, take that as a compliment. Anyways, long story short, he's blackmailing us. Which is just so heroic of them." Lisa snarked.

She paused, taking a deep breath.

She was doing a lot of that these days…

Reigning in her frustration was tough, and it was equally tough to guess how much this person knew.

They kept the most important things out of the app and away from cameras, like Noelle and civilian ID's, but that was still a lot of fucking information this person had, whether they were a tinker or a technopath.

Should she have been more paranoid and just nuked her entire communication system?

"What does he want? Money, fame, a job, a favour?" She listed, trying to think of ways she could get rid of this hacker.

If she had a name and a face, she could literally just go and execute them right now, theoretically. Getting that would be unlikely however.

"Apparently, they want to talk to you specifically. Name-dropped you. As in, your old civilian name. T-H. They said they used to know you." Lisa asked, voice dead flat serious.

She froze, eyes widening.

That- no.

No fucking way.

Why? How the fuck. What the- just- what?

" Emma? " She hissed in angry disbelief, turning her back to the rest of the room, and Lisa gasped in realization.

"Wait, that-"

The line cut in static, and a second later, the static cleared, to silence.

"Is that you?" She asked, voice utterly blank, struggling not to crush her phone in her hand.

A swallow.

"Uhm, no?" A male voice came through, and her head jerked back in surprise fast enough to give her a mild case of whiplash. "Uh, just so you know, this is a private line now, so we can talk freely. So… yeaaaah? Hi, uhm. It's- been a while?"

She still couldn't quite get her brain to compute the words and place the voice, but after a very long moment of awkward silence, she suddenly remembered.

"Greg?" She asked, in complete disbelief.

He cleared his throat, something in the background click-clacking incessantly.

"Y-Yeah. Hi! You've uhm, changed a lot! I mean, I, uh- s-sorry, this is just. It's hard to think about you talking like an RTS C&C commander, when just a while ago you were with us in the… kinda losers club. And your powers seem sick! I keep losing signal and you keep teleporting, and there's a bunch of other grab-bag stuff I can't quite place and- oh, right, uh, sorry for spying on you, took me a while to place that it was actually you- "

Holy shit he hadn't changed one fucking bit.

"Greg, stop rambling." She snapped, and he stopped, surprisingly.

She let out a sigh.

Good news was that this wasn't really something that serious. She expected something a lot worse than Greg.

Bad news was that the hacker was Greg. He wasn't exactly the type she wanted to work with.

"Alright, let's cut to the chase for a moment. I don't know why you told me any of this. Like, who you are, for example. You realize you just lost all of your negotiating power by telling me that, right? I'm a teleporter. I know who and where you are and I can teleport right to you and kill you in seconds if I have to." She said, voice cold and dead serious.

Greg gasped, as if he just fucking realized, and she wanted to shut the phone and slam her head into a wall.

God, he was so fucking dumb! How the hell did he get a power?

Wait, how the hell did he trigger? When?

Irrelevant.

"Uh, okay, uhm, please don't do that?" He squeaked out in a wheeze, likely realising what kind of situation he was in and Taylor wanted to slap him for being so goddamn stupid. "Look- I just wanted to act tough for a second, I- I don't know how to negotiate! I traded pokemon cards, not- military information or whatever the hell you guys are doing, okay? I was like 'oh okay I'll act all broody and mysterious and tell them I know everything and act tough and maybe I can get them to take me seriously and wire me to this Sam chick who I'm almost completely positive is Taylor' but then this Insight girl thought I'm blackmailing you! I know- I know you've changed a lot, so I'm a lot more nervous, s-sorry. Just- I wasn't trying to blackmail you! Honest!"

She rubbed at her face.

"Look, Greg, what did you even want? We wanted to have you onboard anyway because a technopath is useful."

Greg cleared his throat again, followed by an equally nervous mumble.

"Okay, so- I'm not a technopath, I just have a tinkering power around making programs. I might have- done a lot of stupid stuff. I- I had just gotten my power, I had a gaming computer with a lot of fricking power, then I got excited, and then I started digging a little too deep and I might have ended up hacking like three national agencies and the NSA and the PRT and and long story short I'm ninety percent sure Armsmaster and Dragon want to grab me and arrest me for breaching into national agencies and then use my crimes to make me their Tinker slave until im old and gray because holy jesus fuck the sentences for cyberhacking are so much worse than I thought." He rushed out with a wheeze, followed by a nervous laugh like he was trying to lighten the situation up for himself. "So, uh, I was thinking of trading? Thought you were my best option if I was right, because, well, we used to be friends, t-though I do get that that's- probably not the case anymore, with... whatever happened." He weakly finished, sounding quite regretful of... something.

They never were friends, but she didn't care to point that out to him.

She sighed as she turned and began to walk up to Lisa's office, tilting her head up and seeing her… 'little sister' leaning off the railing and staring down right at her with a quirked brow.

"Now that, I can work with. What's your proposal?" She asked.

"Oh! Yeah, okay, so! I was thinking, I can, give you like this super, super secure, much better version of the app you're using, something not even Dragon can get into, working off its own subnetwork of parallel servers like its own separate internet, pretty much, and In exchange, you give me like, a way out? Or, pay me? I mean- I- I'm kind of freaking out, you know?" He said, voice wavering with a hysteric giggle. "I just- I just got all these ideas and I got curious and then next thing I know Dragon's trying to track me down- and holy fuck my mom is going to skin me if I go to juvie for a decade. Or federal prison. Some guy got thirty years in two thousand and four for doing the same I did! Look, I just- I just want to be- safe. I want to be safe and I want to be paid for whatever I give you, that's it. Mostly safety! I can make a lot of money easily anyway, but being safe from a manual sweep from Dragon and Armsmaster… seems like the kind of thing I can't exactly program my way around. So, that. And- I don't want to be too… close, I guess, to you guys. You seem like you're doing some really serious spec ops Call of Honor kinda crap and I don't wanna get the death penalty for directly working for you so just, uh, pay me and I deliver stuff, like, what's it called- commission! Commissions? Yeah. Keep me safe and pay me when I give you stuff and uh. Don't tell me anything. I don't wanna know. Yeah, that- seems good. That's alright?"

She frowned, slowing her walk.

Reeling herself back a little, she had to stop and think about the fact that Greg was literally just a kid. He sounded like one too. A nervous teenager who lived in videogames and media more than real life, until very recently. And one that was absolutely terrible at negotiating. He practically had no chips on his side but her morals.

It seemed like it was quite the common theme in the bay. Kids getting powers and diving in far deeper waters than they ever expected.

"Alright. We can arrange that. What kind of safety do you mean, however? Giving you and your mother safety without her knowing about any of this is going to be nigh impossible. Stationing a couple coats around your house isn't going to cut it if the two most famous Tinkers this side of the world are out for your head." She plainly stated.

Greg's breaths turned audible, and she moved her ear away from the phone with a slight grimace of disgust.

"L-Look, I- I can't just tell her! Why wouldn't it… okay no, it wouldn't work. Fuck. " He whined, and she heard his chair roll backwards, the keyboard sounds stopping to be replaced by audible stomps as he began pacing. "Can't we… I- I don't know, like, give her a fake job offer in like a, security company, and then tell her she has to change all her legal documents to accept it? And then we just give her and me a new ID and you guys can make me a blackroom to work from, move us across the Bay or something?"

She hummed dubiously as she began to climb the steps.

"Surprisingly intelligent suggestion, and it might work, but I think we can both agree that's rather far-fetched to do without her getting suspicious or realising something is off. If you're that much of a pussy and can't tell your mom about what you did, and refuse to try, we can probably try that, but I don't think it will work. I suggest just coming out with it now. It will be much, much, much harder to do later, and it'll hurt a lot more."

Lisa just stared at her from the railing as she ascended.

"I… okay. Yeah, I- I know that…" Greg mumbled, sighing into the mic again, and she grimaced a little.

That was so annoying.

"I… okay. I'll- I'll tell her. Just, get us a safe place, fast, please? I know you guys have bugs in the PRT and we don't know when Dragon's gonna come here, but it might be tomorrow! So, just, get us a nice place to live and hide. Uhm, blackbox basement for me to work in. Your techie guys should know what that is. How fast do you want to do the trade? I'll tell her- today?"

Well, that was surprising.

Maybe he did grow up a little.

"Do that. Call us back, normally, and we'll have you two settled in… two days. Don't back out of an agreement you made, Greg. And do not get bright ideas about putting in any backdoors in the app you'll make. We'll know, and while you may be able to hide from Dragon and Armsmaster, you can't hide from me. Alright?" She asked, making her voice unnecessarily soothing and tired at the end to give off the impression this wasn't so much an implicit threat as much as it was something she had to say.

Assuming Greg was even smart enough to read between the lines.

"Uh, y-yeah. I uhm, I know you've… killed people. Don't worry about me trying to uh, what's the word… 'play you'?Aa-anyway. I'll- go now. I'll tell her today, and I'll call back-"

"Yes, Greg, we just said that. Calm down instead, you're rambling again. Call us back later." She said, and he mumbled something affirmative before the call ended with a tiny beep.

She took her phone off her ear, exhaled through her nostrils, and walked up to Lisa, bending at the waist and staring down at her men as they continued running around and stripping every bit of tech they had on themselves in neat lines.

"Eclipse protocol?" She asked, and Lisa chuckled.

"Only you would fucking remember how that shit is called. Yeah. One of the sargeants knew what to do the moment I told him, word spread quickly. Communications are practically all dead until this 'Greg' kid is done fucking with our stuff. He your friend?"

"Not really. Just someone I kind of knew from high school. Was... about as much of a loser as I was. Videogame nerd, not really attractive, pretty meek... Doesn't really matter."

So much had happened in a day, and it wasn't even afternoon yet.

"I don't know why, but I have a really bad feeling." Lisa mumbled. "This is too… convenient. I can't help but think Cauldron might be behind this, but…"

She sighed.

"Simurgh paradox." They both said, their words overlapping with the same exhausted tone.

"Yeah. Don't know if I'm being paranoid or not. What I do know is that I'm almost positive Cauldron is trying to fuck us over somehow even if they're not slinging Alexandria over here to kill us. I'm confident they're feeding the PRT information. They have way too much information on you. Just an hour ago, they wrestled the girls' case away from the FBI, because despite you having made no appearances yet, they somehow have you confirmed as a Master cape, which gave them jurisdiction to check the girls for Master influence."

She scowled, feeling her teeth grit.

"How much do they know?"

Lisa shrugged.

"Most of it is on documents, so we don't know. From spoken words we overhard; they know you exist, they know you're dangerous, they know they can't find you, and they know you have a 'weak' Master power. That's basically a step away from "kill on sight", as far as the PRT goes. They're terrified of Masters, and this Director is a forceful, hateful motherfucker. The entire PRT is going through Master Stranger procedures every other day, starting this morning."

She shifted, thoughts racing, a mild headache caressing her frontal lobe with blunted razors.

The PRT knowing she was a master was a tremendous fucking setback. She had done all this stealth and shadow games precisely to make it seem like she did something more than just force everyone to work for her. To show off the image that if she had so many people behind her, she must have something else about her. Something more.

Which she did, but she didn't have the damn time to be making friends and allies with the scum of parahuman society.

"Did the story get out?"

Lisa nodded.

"Yeah. Or it should, by tomorrow. This literally happened while you were finishing up in Boston. The journalists got all the information 'leaked' to them, and many of them were in our pockets, so their articles are a bit more positive than the big ones. I'm sure it'll hit national news for a day or so. People for some reason or another like to root for an anti-hero, and a criminal mastermind doing the government's work and giving the result to them on a silver platter, dismantling a large branch of a human trafficking ring out of the goodness of his heart? They'll eat it up for a little while until the news cycle moves on. People's inherent disdain of the government will make this even more popular. Won't last, but you got your debut, I suppose. Summoner will be semi-famous by tomorrow. "

She nodded.

It was rather anticlimactic, but no new cape could usually get the exposure of being on national news, even if only for a day or two, for their debut.

She was still miffed about being out in the open, but it couldn't be helped with how things had progressed. She had to abandon her love of the dark and step into the light, to some extent.

The agents she'd sent out all over the US should be ready for her next publicity stunt, so to speak.

Tomorrow, the empire, then, fixing something nobody in the world had been able to, so far.

She hated having to word good deeds like that, but it was what it was. The PRT did the exact same thing.

Cynical opportunism was the standard.

"Did the girls at least make it out alright?"

Lisa hummed an affirmative.

"As far as we can tell, yeah. No strange 'losses'. Too big of a situation for that. And none of our guys got arrested either. They should be driving the trucks back as we speak, though a few of them are struggling to evade authorities."

She let herself smile, just a tiny bit.

She'd need the armour suit she made with Zyra's plants sooner than expected.

"Oni Lee?"

"He's rooming with Printer and the little army we have around her at the moment. Extra security. They like him."

Printer?

Oh, Noelle.

A bit dehumanizing, but she assumed it was more of a security nickname than a cape name.

"Interesting name. Anyways... how many men did you send over to whip the ABB thugs into shape?"

Lisa waved her hand dismissively.

"Just ten, so far. Figure we need to start small, and we can't afford to use too many of our valuable soldiers on training new ones when we're still like this. On the bright side, we have a lot more places to hide our stuff and people, even if people are starting to ask questions."

Hm, that was going about as expected.

"Alright. If we have nothing else to do but wait for tomorrow, I'm going to set up some things for Greg, then spend the rest of the day exercising and ripping life out of our guys on the training mat. Need to keep a lot of juice in the tank." She said, just to break the quiet, and Lisa hummed.

"Ripping life...? Oh, yeah, the, green stuff… energy? Good idea."

Grasp of the Undying, but she hadn't told her that.

"Lifegrasp, as I like to call it, without being overdramatic about it. It's slowly making me tougher, but I need something larger to beat on. When we've got some peace, and he can stop pretending to be nursing his wounds from the 'betrayal' in private, I'll start fistfighting Lung. He should improve my progress by… a lot. " She emphasized, and deciding to relax on the paranoia a little, switched Runes and took off the helmet, holding it by her fingers as she watched things down below, unwinding for a short moment.

It was getting really sweaty in the helmet.

"Well, we can talk later instead of sitting here, thinking about what to do. We're sleeping together tonight. Missed it." She said simply.

Lisa smiled, hip-checking her butt.

"How romantic. And no I'm not flirting."

A moment of silence.

"We still haven't gotten that apartment, you know?" Lisa noted.

"I don't think we ever will, to be honest. How does an evil underground throne room sound instead? With spiked torchholders."

"Dork."

"Ass."

"Yes, it's quite nice." Lisa hummed, laughter in her voice, turning to slap her own ass with an audible, crisp sound.

"So uncouth." She said, wrinkling her nose, ignoring the horny teenage urge to turn and stare at said ass.

Then her brain blanked because she had no idea what Legend that even came from. Who the hell said uncouth? Jarvan? Leb- Yeah it was Leblanc. Tricky bitch.

"Holy shit you're such a grandma." Lisa quietly exclaimed, shoulders shaking with laughter as she bent forward, practically laying on the railing.

"I'll pretend I didn't hear that." She hummed, lips twitching upwards.

"Are we sure you're pretending? Want me to walk you down the basement to the training mats? Did you take your medicine?" Lisa cooed as if talking to a senile pile of dust, barely containing her snickers.

"... I kinda walked into that." She grumbled, smiling.

"Yep."

Her phone rang, and she raised a hand in a stop gesture as Dillan, her usual beating partner, gasped for breath across the mat.

She'd gotten a few uses of Grasp out of him before he started acting woozy. He was pretty lively for a man who was almost forty.

She walked over to the corner, where a pile of their equipment was, and dug her phone out, not expecting anything too groundbreaking with the state of their comms.

A single message by Lisa.

Rune's in.

She smiled, and put the phone back.

Dillan groaned.

"Oh come on, can I rest?" He asked, wiping his sweat with his shirt, revealing his abs for a moment.

Her eyes jerked down and stayed there for a moment until the shirt dropped.

Her self-directed annoyance flared up again.

Holy shit she had to get laid, this was getting so fucking annoying.

She'd gone through dozens of puberties but she still had kind of forgotten how animalistic her brain was when high on hormones.

With a physical shake of her head to push the thought aside for later, she wandered back to the mat.

"Come on. I'll give you pardon from base chores if you can last five more hits." She stated, getting into a loose, half-crouched stance with her arms limp almost to the floor, a stance that probably made no sense to the man across her like the other half-dozen she'd cycled through so far.

He huffed, blinking sweat out of his eyes.

"I'd say you're being overconfident before, but now... I don't know who taught you to fight, but I'd kill to get them to teach me. Do you know how humiliating it is to get fucked up this hard by a girl half my age? My ego's dying over here." He said, voice half-joking, and she mentally raised a brow at how personable he was getting, chatting like this.

She'd have to discipline him down the line if this kept up. More chores? An actual beating? Hm...

"Also, five hits with the green fire-like thing, or normal hits?" He asked, getting into a stance.

She tilted her head, considering it.

She was greedy.

"Green hits. Then I'll hit you with little fireballs again."

She had to, to raise her personal mana. Manaflow Band only activated and increased her mana pool if she hit someone with a spell, no matter how strong or weak.

He sighed, and took the first step, signalling the start of their fight.

She was kind of cheating because no matter how hard she fought, she didn't have a heart. The summon core would just keep her blood flowing in a bizarre mimicry of the organ, but there was no sensation of a heartbeat itself. It kept her going a lot longer for some reason.

With the thought of endurance, she remembered what she had to do tomorrow, and frowned.

She hoped she had enough juice in the tank for the Empire tomorrow, because fighting with a headache was making it quite a bit worse. That, and she had a really bad feeling about trying to do a full sweep of the Empire in a day.

She trusted her gut enough to assume the worst, within plausibility.

Notes:

This is a really hard story to write, and I'm just doing my best. Criticism is welcome, but if it's something so wide-reaching its unfixable, I'll probably ignore it and just keep going forwards.

The original plan for this chapter was to push harder, but I recognized that a small lull was a bit better for the moment. Still, a lot of things happened, a lot of hints dropped, and some minor mysteries were solved, not that Greg is really a mystery.

Let me know what you think about me including greg, btw. I was going to make an OC, but halfway through it i realized I was just writing Greg but skinny version, so i just took Greg instead. Worked better a bit too because he's a character people are at least peripherally aware of.

tyvm for ocmments, they're my secondary motivation to keep writing. I'll prob focus on Mom Militia for a bit because its less stressful to write, but i'll prob see u pretty soon.

Chapter 42

Notes:

Been a while, eh?

Short recap of previous events:

Taylor beat Alexandria's ass, settled a double-ended job for Faultline, dealt with Lung's sex trafficking operation and took over the ABB, then took a trip to Boston to grab Accord and a ton of corrupt assholes, then came back to finish dealing with the Empire while some strange BS is going on.

Chapter Text

She woke up to the sound of… a news report?

Getting up, she blinked blearily at Lisa as she watched something on her phone.

Lisa turned to her with a smug smile, and twisted the phone around.

It was a news station, a man speaking some words her brain couldn't process yet, while below him, a strip of text slowly rolled across the screen.

' ROGUE PARAHUMAN DISMANTLES SEX TRAFFICKING RING - BUT WHERE WAS THE GOVERNMENT?'

Wow that was a bold fucking headline.

ALS News… they weren't as large as others but they were pretty damn big as far as she knew.

His mouth noises slowly turned to actual words as she blinked the sleep out of her eyes, hurriedly sitting up and grabbing the phone.

"- and this… does raise the question; why is the PRT refusing to comment on this? Of course, the usual spiel is that- it's an investigation, so they can't comment on it. But what is there really to say here? We have the information, this is all leaked. It can't get any more straight forward than this. It's online, you, at home, can look this up on archive websites and read it all yourself." The announcer said, gesturing above his shoulder at a slideshow of the documents they provided with a pen he was fiddling with, his suit barely wrinkling from the motion.

"So just to recap; a rogue parahuman contacts an FBI agent, and says they have overwhelming evidence of a sex trafficking ring operating in the underbelly of Brockton Bay, a city with the second highest crime rate per capita in all of America and the last in government funding relative to its population."

The images above flicked to conversational transcripts that never happened, and she felt her brows raise at how… charitable this was going. She was expecting a lot more scepticism.

"In the images above my shoulder, you can see how this rogue parahuman describes things. Granted, they do sound a little overdramatic-" He chuckles, highlighting a section of transcript.

She squinted at the text as Lisa snickered to the side.

The highlighted text read ' if you won't uproot the rotting tree, I'll send you its ashes. Coward.'

"...Who wrote that? I mean, it's pretty much what I'd write anyway if I was pissed at an FBI agent and feeling dramatic, but come on…" She mumbled.

"I did. Was- a pfhh- g-good line." Lisa forced out between her snickers, cuddling into her side with a shit-eating grin as she gave her a dry stare.

She focused back on the presenter as the video of the transcripts turned the whole page back to black and white.

"But this 'Summoner', is a man- or a woman, of course, who claims to have enough information to bury a sex trafficking ring that most people have no idea even exists, headed by one of the most powerful capes on the coastline. Just last month this same cape that is in charge of this ring was caught on video nearly bisecting Armsmaster and fighting off almost a half dozen heroes by himself. And it takes nine pages of dialogue for this FBI agent who will remain anonymous, to say he will send an investigation request. Immediately after that he warns how this could take potentially months or years to get going into a proper raid. Requests, information, due process, bureaucracy. And then it'll likely be sent to the PRT for further inaction and delay, because the gang doing this is led by a parahuman. We, as citizens, already know this, of course. The FBI is probably too busy spying on your SNS messages to do anything actually useful, and the Protectorate is too busy posing for beachside selfies with tourists around these parts, at least under the PRT's command."

Lisa burst out into a snorting exhale.

"Ho-ho-holy shit I love this guy!" Lisa cackled, and she hurriedly shushed her, bringing the phone closer.

"But, take a look at this." He added.

The video behind him zoomed in on cue as he pointed at it with the tip of his pen, his brows sceptically furrowed.

"A week after this message was sent, this rogue Parahuman going by 'Summoner', simply replies, and I quote; ' the day after tomorrow. two hundred and fifty people, approximately. Boston, New York. Be ready' " He carefully enunciated, then turned to the camera with a theatrically puzzled face.

"Now, this… looks pretty ominous, so our unnamed agent asks for a clarification. None is provided, and nothing is prepared, of course. But, I suppose he got that clarification the next afternoon, when the city of Brockton Bay momentarily became a warzone. "

The video behind him changed into what could charitably be called a montage. Handheld phones recording out of windows as the sound of gunshots rang without pause, momentary shots of shaky footage of smoke and sparks, bodycam footage of police officers getting out of their vehicles and running into groups of black-clad men that fled on sight, throwing smoke grenades and vanishing, leaving behind nothing but armed corpses and burning meth labs.

"In the course of a single hour, there were a reported forty four casualties of gang-affiliated persons and criminals, three unrelated casualties, and over ten thousand rounds of ammunition fired, over fifty smoke grenades used, and over ten suspected IEDs detonated. All of this was started by what seems to be over fifty unknown individuals that were spotted, wearing all black, having no insignia or flag upon their persons, and having no apparent affiliation. Two civilians were killed, one police officer, from accidental crossfire, and forty four criminals alongside them. This happened all across the city, but mainly in the areas where gang activity was the highest in recent months." He said, and a rough hotmap showed up on the screen behind him.

She was surprised that anyone even bothered mapping Brockton Bay's crime locations…

Wow, they looked a lot deeper than what they sent them… though they were supposedly journalists, so that made sense.

The fact they hadn't mentioned Coil was strange, however. Did people really think he died in that self-detonation? She hadn't even planned on that.

"Some spots were distractions formed by use of fireworks, some were genuine assaults. The aftermath and purpose of this attack was made apparent the next day, when these same men drove up to police and federal buildings, offloaded dozens and dozens of women, children, and a few men, from their trucks. All with piles of paperwork in their arms. Then they simply drove off without another word. Nobody stopped them, because who could possibly think that that black truck was driven by vigilante militia? Who could think they'd have the gall to just drive up to an FBI office, drop off dozens of people, then drive away? It was such an audacious move that nobody reacted, nobody expected it. It sounds absurd just saying it out loud, doesn't it?" He exclaimed, expression and tone distinctly disbelieving.

There was some faint camera footage of the drop-offs, playing behind him. Disguised trucks, some just delivery trucks, some from moving companies, some simple decoys…

"An estimated number of over two hundred people were left in front of these buildings, precisely two days after that ominous text mentioned above. Almost all of them gave the same story. They lived in brothels, meth labs, warehouses, kept like cattle, until some people they thought were police walked in and began to kill their captors and took them away. They medically treated them, asked them questions, fed them and clothed them for a day, then sent them to those buildings with simple instructions. The only reply those men gave the victims as for the question of who they were? 'Nexus', apparently. Not that any of us at home has ever heard that name before. In fact, judging by the silence and what journalists have been able to find, nobody in general has heard that name before."

For a relatively smaller news channel, they did their work well.

She knew what had happened, but even she was oddly interested in the story, or at least its presentation.

This wasn't what she was expecting, but…

"I think it's fairly easy to make the connection here. A rogue parahuman and their armed militia did what would take the federal government months and years, over the course of less than three days. Some you might have noticed the obvious; that this is an individual who is dangerous. Who seems to lead what seems like a small army that calls itself 'Nexus'. Who, none of us has ever heard of before. Who has most definitely broken the law, probably hundreds of them. Yet, you might have noticed we have yet to call them a villain. That is because despite everything, this 'Summoner' personality has done nothing but return a young kidnapping victim to the police that goes by the name of Dinah Alcott-"

Her brows furrowed.

It wasn't hard to make that connection, considering the same method of delivery and Dinah likely being a little more loose-mouthed than expected, but she was quite annoyed he was namedropping a child on national television. That had to be some kind of irresponsible, right?

"- almost a week ago now, and then does all this, for no seeming reason but a moral disgust at the state of affairs, at least according to their messages, which we, of course, should take with an obvious, large grain of salt. And this entire situation, this person, it now raises a lot of questions." The man gesticulated, leaning back in his chair with a dissatisfied face.

He was almost like an actor.

He was good.

"While law and order makes a society function, when that law and order does not functionally exist in some places even in this very country, what is the alternative? And is it something we are willing to entertain? What state is our country in, when we look upon a parahuman criminal, and see their first actions in the public eye doing more good than any national agency or bureau has on that piece of the coastline in years? More than a decade, probably, unless there's something classified we haven't been able to find. And is this kind of justice, by blood and fire rather than law, something that we should welcome, for its efficiency and speed, or be afraid of, for its brutality and unaccountability? Think about it. We'll see you again at twelve thirty am, and have a good day ladies and gentlemen." He finished quickly, giving the camera a smile as he clicked his pen shut.

The news channel outro played.

"Holy shit, that went so well." Lisa breathed out.

She blew out a long breath, unsure of what the hell to even take away from that.

She had been treated far, far, far more charitably than she ever expected. And he wasn't even particularly biased during the entire segment, or what she managed to catch of it. Just… strangely neutral.

What on earth?

"Did we pay them?" She asked, incredulous, and Lisa shook her head on her shoulder.

"Not a dime. We just gave their journos 'leaked info'. They're semi-infamous for being overwhelmingly sceptical against the government and the PRT because they're funded by some people who dislike both, AKA fronts for The Elite, so this might be the most charitable piece you'll see today. I still didn't expect them to go that hard. I just thought I'd wake you up to good news, for once."

She snorted, smiling down at the screen, tapping out of the video.

"Well, you succeeded. I expected to be branded a villain doing a good thing for some self-serving reason, like how Marquis was talked of, or something like that. Not this. They didn't mention Coil or Oni Lee or anything either, which was unexpected… not sure if that's good or bad."

Lisa shrugged.

"The other stations probably will say your name for the entirety of next week, until the new Endbringer attack happens at least. Besides, they're a Boston news station, plus decent journalists. We're practically a drive away from them. That probably helped too."

Boston… did Coil or Accord pull some strings without telling her?

"Yeah, that makes sense. Alright… Let's get up. I have an emperor to catch. You get someone to start designing our brand. I have some design ideas." She hummed, nudging Lisa aside.

"'Brand'. Are we gonna sell bags?" Lisa snorted, and she rolled her eyes as she pushed Lisa off the cot.

"No, but we need a symbol. To have an effective leading group, you need a leader, and a culture. Flags, symbols, and iconography are a tried and true method of cultivating a culture. I can design some things, but I have to get the Empire now while they're still reeling."

Lisa nodded, yawning and going to reach for her silken bodysleeve.

She followed, stretching for a bit, putting on her shoes, her own suit, then casting Teleport into Sile's apartment, since he should be at work at the moment.

She was almost excited.

Max Anders held a consistent schedule.

It probably helped him stay out of suspicion.

From seven AM to one PM, he was in his office, working as the CEO of Medhall.

Unfortunately, Mastering him had turned out to be a much bigger frustration than anticipated.

His office was inundated with employees all the time, and the doors opened and closed so much she had to wonder if there was even a point to having them.

One employee in, another out.

He worked few hours, but it seemed that that made him all the more sought after by employees while he was here.

The rare moment of privacy she needed came three hours into her just floating by his side as an invisible gas cloud, and while waiting like that didn't eat up her resources much if at all, it still pissed her off to have to waste so much time doing practically nothing.

That moment of privacy seemed to come in the form of a phonecall that made him lock his doors with a button on his desk before answering because of course he had such a thing.

It was nothing exciting, unfortunately. Kaiser, or Max, simply answered in curt yes and no's, while the person on the other line was asking about Purity's civilian alias because they couldn't get a hold of her.

As the last goodbye was muttered, she materialized behind him, tense and ready.

The call beeped to an end, and before he could react, she snapped two feelers shut around him and lifted him up off the floor, squeezing him hard enough to make his shout of surprise little more than a particularly violent wheeze as his legs kicked in the air once, unable to connect to anything and use his power.

Their eyes met, and his fate was sealed.

She learned a lot about a man while rifling through his head, and Kaiser was no exception.

He was painfully bland. Just a narcissistic sociopath with a power complex.

By the time she was done, he just blinked back to awareness, and glanced down at her feelers still squeezed around him and keeping him up. He gave her an annoyed, constipated look.

"This suit is armani."

She stared at him.

She had no idea what that even meant, but she obliged, and put him down, allowing him to straighten his suit.

"So, who-"

She flickered a piece of paper into her hand, and presented it to him.

It was getting annoying, having to verbally tell people who she was and what she wanted them to do. Letters and messages were much easier.

He took it, and gracefully unfolded it, holding it loosely as he began to read.

It wasn't much. Who she was, who she had Mastered, the general chain of command, and what she wanted him to do.

A sudden bang sounded out from outside, and she glanced through the window, seeing… nothing, really. Could have been a gunshot or a little dynamite popper that dumb teenagers played with. She couldn't tell the distance either.

She ignored it, and turned back to Max.

He frowned half-way through the paper.

"Hookwolf and his crew are particularly hard to wrangle. I could get Hookwolf to you, but if I try to bring Cricket and Stormtiger over as well, they'll likely just ignore it. Hookwolf can tell them anything I tell him, in their eyes. One of the twins also is still regenerating her leg from Challenger with Othala's help, so neither of them will be moving anytime soon unless we're under genuine attack. I could, of course, give you an address."

She nodded, pale white lashes blinking slowly.

"Write the twins' current address."

He turned to his desk, and took a post-it note, writing quickly and handing it to her.

She hummed a short affirmative as she took it.

"Call everyone for a private meeting when you're done here and start working as Kaiser. I'll follow you. In pairs, or one by one, preferably. I'll Master them too. Any of them you believe are not evil enough to warrant being Mastered by the standards of an average, morally gray hero?"

Max took a moment to think.

"Cricket." He said, quite surprisingly, and she tilted her head.

"She has never killed or seriously maimed anyone. Hasn't participated in blooding or initiations either. She doesn't seem to have much of an opinion on anything, really. She's just an adrenaline junkie who loves fighting, harder and harder enemies, even if it one day gets her killed. She wants to feel alive, and she wants challenge. Easy to control, easy to please. She's hardly as morally questionable as most of us."

She frowned, surprised and confused.

She hadn't expected such deep insight from him, nor did she expect such reasoning.

It wasn't even bad reasoning. She knew a lot of people in her lives that were a lot like Cricket, according to Kaiser's description. Most of them weren't truly evil as much as victims of themselves.

"Anyone else?"

Max hummed, crossing his arms.

"For active members… Purity was my spouse, to start with. She cares deeply for our young child, but she has killed many. I'm assuming you have a heroic disposition, and wouldn't see familial love as enough to excuse her actions?" He ventured, almost reluctantly.

What a cold bastard.

She hummed.

"No. What kind of kills? How many is 'many'?"

"At least a dozen. Always opposing gangsters. One accidental civilian as far as I remember. She drank a lot when that happened. No hate crimes, in case you're wondering."

Hm. Not all that egregious, really. It was tragic an innocent died, but accidents happened.

As for the kill count… she herself had killed far more gangsters than that. And gangsters were still people, of course, and they were usually redeemable with years and years of work, but she hardly put the same worth to them as she did the normal, average, innocent person, and she didn't have such years.

She'd have to think about it.

"Anyone else?"

He nodded.

"Othala. She's kinder and gentler than Panacea, actually, as long as you're the right type."

… Or skin colour, probably, but she honestly didn't care too much about that so long as the girl wasn't going out for bi-weekly hate crimes with the gang.

She'd have to find some way to address and integrate that section of the Empire, no doubt, because she was really not interested in racial segregation or tensions within her own city, and it would actively work against the culture she wanted to cultivate, one where strength of body, mind and character was revered, rather than ancestry or phenotype. But for the moment, it wasn't really a big enough problem to put all her efforts into fixing.

There were ways, complicated ones… but that was what Accord was there for.

If his power worked around her. She'd verify that tonight, or even sooner, if Accord did as she asked with any kind of expediency.

Politics as a concept were about a struggle of power, and whether that power was used for the many or the few.

If she got her way, there wouldn't be politics in Brockton. She'd decide things with Accord, and they would be done.

Still a bit away from that though. Close, but not quite there yet.

She shook her head with a sigh, and rubbed at her eyes.

Hookwolf, Stormtiger, Night and Fog, Alabaster, Krieg, Crusader, who was a new face as far as she knew, the Valkyrie twins, and Viktor. The rest of them needed a bit of thought.

Purity… hm, really debatable. Especially considering the rest of what she knew about the woman's civilian identity.

Cricket, she'd probably just Master. No sense in letting her be, despite Kaiser's belief. She was too involved to not notice something was really off, and she had no idea what reaction that would eventually cause.

As for Othala, she'd… also just consider leaving the woman alone. She was just a good person with some racism issues as far as Kaiser's judgement went, which was by far not enough to warrant Mastering her. There was also no practical conflict there since Othala didn't participate in the gang too much except healing people and buffing before fights. It was a wonder if she'd even notice.

There was some argument to her being complicit to the Empire's atrocities, but she didn't know enough to make a judgement yet.

She hadn't been expecting the literal nazis to be less monstrous than the ABB capes, but then again, they had a much, much larger sample size. They had… what, ten capes? Twelve? It kept changing.

"Call everyone but Purity and Othala. Text the address you'll meet at. See you in…" She glanced at the clock on the wall. "Two hours. Burn the paper."

Max nodded, and leisurely walked to his desk, straightening and checking on his suit in the process.

"Farewell, 'Sam'." He said, intoning it in a way that made it very obvious he knew it was a nickname.

She wordlessly flew out, ducking through the slit of a half-opened window on the hallway outside, and rushed for Medhall's roof.

A quick check to make sure no cameras were pointed in her direction, and she materialized, softly landing on the gravel and flickering her phone back to her hand.

Comms were still pretty much dead beyond codeworded messages utterly essential to being even a little organised, but in case of emergencies, they didn't have many other options. Other apps usually went through the open internet, which could be made very, very secure, but not enough for her to be satisfied with.

The sound of police cars sounded out from the city below, a thing so usual it was practically just background noise to most Brocktonites, but combined with the loud bang she heard a little bit ago, made her pause. She switched to the Rune of Precision, focusing in the far, far distance, until she saw something vaguely concerning.

A thin and tall plume of dust and smoke, rising between a building, and… the PRT complex she had been guided through, what felt like ages ago but was less than a month ago.

She called Lisa, frowning.

She did not want to expend herself more than necessary, but an explosion at the PRT wasn't exactly the usual fare.

The line clicked, and she wasted no time.

"Explosion at the PRT building. Accident, or should I go check it out? 'Sword' is ours already, I have a two hour gap until he's done here."

Lisa hissed, a sound of frustration, while keys incessantly click and clacked in the background.

"Not an accident, but almost everyone is evacuating the building and it's going into lockdown, so we're not going to be getting any info until the heroes all group up and recap at the Rig. The Protectorate is a separate agency from the PRT so they don't know what's going on any more than we do and we don't have bugs in the PRT, just The Rig. Greggy boy, if you're listening, got any security footage to feed me?"

Silence.

"Guess not." Lisa murmured, sounding immensely stressed.

She pursed her lips.

She could call Maria… but that was really damn risky when she was on the job. She'd rather let the woman be, and preferably, let her be completely uninvolved with all this. She'd mastered the woman at a time when she had no resources, and it was a shame she couldn't take that decision back. Putting her at risk for some info wasn't worth it.

She sighed, squinting.

Logically, that explosion should not have happened in a million years. The ABB was under her thumb, the Empire was licking its wounds and its leader was hers, Coil was her lackey at this point, the Merchants were reeling from losing something like three or four dozens of their members to sudden attacks by military professionals… So who was left?

She had suspicions, some more logical than others, but she needed information.

"Why aren't you more stressed about this?" Lisa asked. "An explosion at the PRT from a hostile could only mean that either the Merchants completely fucking lost it, or that there's a new player around."

She resisted the urge to tell Lisa that adding that much context into the sentence made it meaningless to even use the codeword, and instead shifted her eyes across the far distance, watching men moving and rushing through the PRT's windows and halls with the Rune of Precision.

"Stress doesn't help. I'll go check it out, won't involve myself too much. This is too out of the ordinary to ignore."

"Roger. I mean, yeah, got it." Lisa mumbled, likely from spending too much time around military people lately, and closed the call.

She flew straight to the site, and lowered herself down in a slow spiral, brows furrowing as the scene peeked through the dust.

The entire front area of the offices she'd been led through, all twelve feet tall walls of layered glass, laid strewn about in a fifty foot area, glass shards embedded into wooden decorations, doors, and people. Along the edges of the front and usually behind cover were screaming and groaning people who'd mostly been dragged inside by now, only a couple dazed stragglers hiding behind cover, too scared to leave it while PRT agents rushed out around them.

Judging from the sheer amount of dust, she could guess that either a giant pipe beneath the dirt and concrete combusted, or someone threw a damn grenade.

As if to answer her question, a loud, startling roar was heard, and she spun, catching a glimpse of a lion helmet before the entire dust cloud exploded outwards and away, clearing things enough for her formless eyes to drop to a bisected, black-torched torso where the epicenter of the blast had been.

Her eyes flicked back to said lion helmet.

It was just Triumph. She ignored him and looked back to the corpse.

The top half was missing entirely. She could see charred chunks of it smeared across the cracked tiles.

She flew into the lobby, taking in a quick overview of the situation.

Miss Militia was giving emergency treatment to someone who seemed to have gotten glass in their eyes, comforting the sobbing, screaming secretary girl while the PRT's paramedics flit in and out of the doorways to snatch away the injured and retreat into the building.

She watched the woman that Miss Militia was helping for a moment. Watched the blood flow down her open, hyperventilating mouth, heard her sobbing wails as Miss Militia did her best to soothe her.

She felt her mind curdle in that familiar sensation of bodiless anger.

She wanted to Heal her.

She wanted to Heal her so much it hurt.

Ignoring the urge with the inner reasoning that Panacea would deal with it sooner than later since it was a Saturday, she took a deep breath, and turned to look for anything more.

Nothing but chaos.

Screaming, smoke, sirens.

There were two heroes on site already, but she had no doubt more would be coming.

She switched Runes to turn on Absolute Focus, simply so she could focus on all the various conversations happening around her, if they could be called that.

It was mostly screamed out questions and hurried, short answers as people got their bearings and the PRT agents secured a perimeter.

One of the security guards covering the entrance responded to a woman's questioning shout with the simple, hoarsely screamed words; 'suicide bomber'.

Which answered some questions…

But that just didn't make any fucking sense.

Who the hell would suicide bomb the PRT?

If they had a problem with heroes, they'd go for The Rig. Not this place.

Minutes passed as she idly watched people pass by under and around her.

Nothing further seemed to happen.

There was a lockdown, yes. The windows were all covered by metal plates, and every seeming police car within a five mile radius started patrolling around the PRT.

Heroes dashed in and out, Console directing them.

But not much else happened.

She followed Armsmaster to a corner as he checked something, Miss Militia by his side, her bloodied hands on her hips.

Armsmaster's vambrace clicked open, and a small, strange holographic keypad came out of it, while another small section joined it, swerving to be aimed at his eyes as it loaded what looked like… a fuzzy box?

It was very, very angle dependent. She had to practically wrap herself around the man's helmet for the image to clear and see he was quickly pulling up security footage and scrolling through the timers with the keypad's controller.

Miss Militia's foot began to tap, her hand going to the massive pistol on her hip, likely for comfort.

"Found it." Armsmaster grunted as the video scrolling stopped, and he clicked the play button… somehow.

He centred the video on a man inconspicuously walking in amongst the sparse foot traffic of office workers, PRT agents, and visitors.

There was nothing more to it, however.

The man just walked up to the glass doors, reached into his pocket, and with an angry, cold look in his eyes, took out a detonator and blew himself up.

The video burst to static, and Armsmaster went back frame by frame.

Nothing there either.

Just a still image of a man going from standing, to a torso-less fireball throwing burnt chunks of flesh out of its core, from one frame to the next.

"Nothing we can work with here. No apparent motivation, no face recognition positives, so he's never been in the legal system before. Strangely well-made explosive… Any chance this is Summoner or Coil's work?"

She felt the distinct urge to smack her head into a wall with frustration.

Was someone trying to set her up?

Miss Militia frowned.

"No reason I could come up with for them to do this. Neither individual seems the type… Could be anyone, realistically. The Empire has access to illegal weaponry of all types and the ABB has been having some kind of internal upheaval considering the fight between Oni Lee and Lung, so this could be literally any one group or villain. Or just someone that went crazy, was mentally ill and manipulated… Doesn't make sense. This might be Nexus trying to establish itself, but with all their efforts to appear as a morally gray villain the past week and something..." Miss Militia trailed off.

Armsmaster grunted.

"Sense is derived from long-term patterns. Coil never did anything of significance, one way or another, aside from infiltrating us. He doesn't have patterns aside from subtlety and the type he employs. This could be some ploy to draw us here while he does something else somewhere on the Bay."

He wasn't wrong.

Miss Militia shifted, thumbing the slide of her pistol.

"He could have waited for the gala for that. We'd all be in another city, it's public information."

Armsmaster paused, and frowned in seeming agreement.

"Suggestion?" Miss Militia asked.

"...We'll focus away from the PRT itself. This place is well-defended enough, and has less significance than other places. I'll coordinate Console to put patrols as far as reasonably possible from the PRT. This could still be a distraction. Put all the Wards on Rig patrols. It keeps up with their restriction without being disruptive, and we'd benefit from more eyes on the most important building this city has." Armsmaster reported, and Miss Militia nodded.

"Anything you need from me?" Miss Militia calmly asked.

"Do the… social things. Coordinate the Wards. Don't wish to deal with children right now." Armsmaster softly growled, the air around him faintly tasting of distaste-awkwardness-frustration.

Miss Militia nodded, and walked off.

Armsmaster switched to his visor, and the vambrace clicked shut.

She took a moment to turn and check to make sure everyone injured was being hurried to the small hospital on site of the PRT complex.

A whirr of servos had her turning back to Armsmaster, finding him locked in place like a statue.

What the hell was he doing?

She leaned closer, over his helmet.

His eyes and facial features were twitching like absolute mad.

Was he having some kind of seizure?

She saw something within his visor shift and move, and paused before bunching herself up and trying to get into his helmet to see what the hell he was doing with the visor.

Unfortunately, it was literally airtight.

She eventually huffed, and flew off, following Miss Militia.

Things calmed down quick, but the minutes still ticked and ticked. Twenty minutes later, Miss Militia got a message on her phone, and she checked it, allowing Taylor to peek at it from over her.

Ah.

Armsmaster was writing instructions. Somehow.

Triumph was to stay at the PRT complex just in case, with… who the hell was Adamant?

Fuck. More arrivals? How many goddamn reinforcements were they getting?

And why were they just getting them now? All these years the local PRT had practically the bare bones necessity to not lose the city, and all of a sudden they get three new capes and three more Wards? Two brutes, Browbeat and Weld, and one Blaster, Flechette, being so hyper-lethal she was practically an executioner ?

Was Cauldron pushing things to fuck them over? It didn't feel like a far-stretched thought.

When Faultline came back, she would know for sure.

This Director felt like he was getting ready for war.

She did not want to have that war. She'd much prefer to keep the PRT around, even if only as a showpiece.

Besides, the only way to get rid of all the heroes for good was to kill them, and she absolutely refused to do that.

She had no body with which to sigh at the moment, which made her frustration fester as she focused back on the instructions on Miss Militia's smartphone.

The patrol patterns were all in pairs, each pair a mile apart in the small map provided.

Assault with Battery, Dauntless with Velocity, Challenger with Armsmaster, and Miss Militia… was to contact independents and try to get them to cooperate for a couple days.

Brockton didn't have many independents, and fewer even still were actually known.

The list Miss Militia pulled up had New Wave, Parian, then a couple people she'd never heard of.

Chariot and Dovetail, with one marked as 'Arc', with a note attached saying 'Affiliation: Undetermined'.

She hoped they stayed out of things, but doubted it.

The fact Armsmaster was trying to coordinate with Independents struck her as odd, however.

Yes, it was a suicide bombing on the PRT HQ of all places, but…

No, the more she thought about it, the more confusing and suspicious this got. Armsmaster was right to be taking this super seriously, even if nobody but the bomber himself seemed to have died.

She stuck around, eavesdropping and sticking her nose into every conversation and screen, but after an hour and a half of few developments, she was forced to admit defeat and leave.

Leaving something like this so… unresolved, it irked her. Itched in a way.

Something was off about the bomber, but she didn't know what. And Cosmic Insight's only addition was to tell her he was driven purely by outside emotion his entire life until his death.

Which only created more questions. Was he mastered since he was young, or did that just mean he was influenced by outside perceptions too much and never even met a cape before? Was he just stomped on until he decided to take it out on the world as he left?

Seeing as identification would take a while for the authorities, nevermind her own men, she was mostly left with an unsatisfied feeling of paranoia. Or something going on around her she hadn't quite grasped yet.

If she had some time or a better location, she could extract a lot of things from the man's corpse, and even more from his soul. Enough information to know the guy a little too well.

But this was in the literal middle of the entrance. This place would never have a moment of being unwatched and unmonitored, not after this.

She eventually found a roof for a quick break, somewhere around Arcadia, quickly wrote a note for Lisa full of instructions, then flew off again.

Ducking into her friend slash sister's office, she dropped it off, then immediately shot back out to return to Kaiser's office to catch him as he left, not even staying long enough for Lisa to finish her startled yelp.

She'd apologise later with some pizza.

To her surprise, Kaiser had rounded up his capes with a pleasing amount of efficiency.

She'd expected him to have less control over them considering recent failures, but from another, naive perspective, the Empire had still won the gang war, so her worries were for naught. Spirits seemed to be high.

The only one who wasn't present was Stormtiger, for reasons unknown.

It took about an hour for all of them to be sufficiently gathered, but he'd set things up perfectly for her, and she had used the time to make some simple notes for her new additions.

A waiting room in a nondescript, outwardly abandoned weaving house, and an office so he could have some individual 'meetings' with people. Suitably sound-insulated door, to a degree.

Fenja, the uninjured twin, was to guard the door.

She couldn't verbally communicate with Max at all, because of Cricket's presence just outside the door, so she once again had to materialise in the room and resort to passing notes with Max like she was a kid in middle school trying not to get noticed by the teacher as she chatted with Emma through notes.

It was almost funny, in a way.

It took a few minutes to verify the order of entrance and confirm some things about each of the capes under Kaiser's command.

It took a few seconds to assume one of her older-used forms, of a white guy covered in scars, and she modified the look to add several dozen Nazi tattoos.

Mostly bland swastikas, iron crosses and gang signs and the like, she wasn't the most literate on neonazi iconography.

She allowed her soles to progressively harden to mimic approaching footsteps as she walked in a small circle, then walked to the door, and opened it, staring out at the half-full room of capes in varying stages of boredom or tenseness, exchanging reluctant small talk that instantly cut out as the door opened.

Her eyes went to Cricket as she leaned out a little, then jerked her head towards the room behind her.

"Ma'am."

Cricket snorted, a small sound, and got up.

Hookwolf's mask tilted to her, and she could taste his annoyed curiosity.

She went back into the room, and stood to the side.

This was reminding her of when she first got Coil.

Cricket walked in, and Kaiser gestured to the chair before his desk.

Cricket sat in it.

She walked past the woman and sat in the chair beside the desk, getting comfy.

She prepared herself.

"Melody." She simply stated, and Cricket's head jerked to her, eyes wide with surprise.

The woman didn't have the time to even form an opinion on her name being known to what seemed like a human grunt.

Gold flashed, and Cricket went still.

She got up, and pulled the woman's chin up, staring down.

She delved into her mind with haste.

She had to be good, and quick.

Being quick didn't lend itself much to being efficient.

She might be able to Master fifteen or so people, maybe twenty, in a day, but she had to take her time and be very careful with how much was too much and how little was too little.

Having to rush like this to not arouse too much suspicion or annoyance from the others meant she was working with just fifteen to twenty minutes per cape, taking the impatient, rasher ones first.

After she was done, Cricket took her note, read it, let out a long sigh with a faint swirl of combating emotion, then put it on the table, walking out without another word.

Kaiser pocketed the note for later burning.

Hookwolf was next.

His name was Brad.

He had the time to snap his eyes into a venomous glare directed her way before he joined her.

Hookwolf was…

A lot more complicated a character than Cricket who was just a prideful fight junkie.

He liked being superior, and he liked fighting. That was generally it. There were faint emotions towards Cricket and Stormtiger, but those were more like a stoic, distant friendship.

The only thing he seemed to have genuine love for was his late mother, which was more than she could say of Cricket.

Hookwolf was also a mild concern, because he was the first to outright glare at her as soon as he came out of his fugue and finished reading his note.

She could just tell he was wondering if killing her would remove the Mastering.

Which was damn weird, because she'd pumped up enough acceptance of her and the situation into him she couldn't help but wonder why he was wondering about it.

Maybe it was something he thought of about everyone he met, regardless of personal thoughts.

He didn't voice any such thoughts, just ' tsk'ed, shredded the paper note in his palm with his power, and tossed the fine confetti aside as he shouldered through the door, leaving without another word.

After the rowdy or impatient ones, the important ones.

Krieg.

Victor.

Kaiser's only real options for lieutenants.

They had both the skills and the temperaments for such a thing, so if anything happened and the rest of the room outside figured out what was going on, she'd still have the Empire secure and ready.

They were much more complex characters, but she didn't have the time to do anything beyond glance at the basics and twist things to fit her needs.

Krieg was a man of intense emotion.

He loved his wife and kids, as well as his people, or race, specifically. The intensity of it surprised her.

And he utterly loathed everyone else with equal intensity.

She felt… genuinely bad about making him more loyal to her than he was to his children or wife by a wide margin, but it was one of those things where she didn't feel like there was much choice.

Viktor was a tried and true sociopath.

There were faint feelings of comradery to the rest of the capes in the room outside, a general reverence towards an ideology, and a certain fondness for Othala, but that was about it. His main enjoyment seemed to be advancement.

Being better than before, regardless of if he earned it or not.

Alabaster next.

A tried and true hedonist.

Not much else seemed to matter to him but his own self-enjoyment and a sense of pride.

When she was about to call in Fenja, was when something quite unfortunate happened.

She opened the door to see Purity next to two people whose name didn't immediately jump to mind.

It took a moment to recognize them as her posse, Night and Fog.

Purity wasn't using her flight or power, wearing a pure white costume oddly reminiscent of what Glory Girl wore, likely finding no use to using her power it since the capes were all unmasked to each other, but seeing her had obviously thrown her for a loop as they stared at eachother for a moment.

Purity just looked like a… good looking, short middle aged woman with brown hair. Which she was.

The woman burst with light, something to conceal her identity to the unexpected guest in the meeting room, and her eyes jerked shut with a hiss as she hurried to look away.

All for show, of course.

"Apologies. I wish to see Kaiser." Purity succinctly said.

She took a moment to observe the woman's companions with squinted eyes.

Night, or Dorothy, was dressed entirely in black complete with a cowl, mask, hood, high-heeled boots, and a heavy cloak.

Fog, or Geoff, wore a gray costume with a hood and mask, largely a gray masculine version of his wife's costume without her other equipment.

This might get… hairy.

She didn't know what to do with Purity. Nevermind Night and Fog.

Logically, she should just Master them all and be done with it.

But Purity was on that fine edge between 'could be reasoned with' and 'hasn't done quite enough horrible stuff to warrant mental slavery'. She'd even tried to leave the Empire multiple times according to Kaiser.

Killing gangsters was hardly something she condemned, regardless of which side they were on.

Then again, Kayden's beliefs weren't too far from the rest of the nazis in the gang, according to Kaiser. She was just a natural moderate, or something like that.

Most of the genuine dirty work like torture, hits, extortion and the like, were all done by Viktor, Krieg, and the gang's grunts, after all. Capes didn't even need to do any initiations as far as Rune had let slip.

The average cape in this room was more clean than the average grunt due to the unwritten rules, and fifty times as useful.

But again, the fine line.

She was scared of being too soft on someone who deserved it, and too hard on someone who didn't.

And she was quickly feeling worse and worse about what she'd done to Maria, which this situation reminded her about.

Fuck.

Purity cocked a hip, and tapped her foot with impatience.

Definitely a mom.

She turned back.

"Sir, Purity wants to see you." She said, and Kaiser pitched his voice to carry.

"Let her in."

She stepped aside, mind whirling as she sat in her assigned chair, eyes downcast and face blank.

Fuck.

Night and Fog were people that, according to their information and Kaiser's confirmation, were completely and utterly twisted and broken by Gesellschaft. It was what led to them being sort-of kicked out. Kaiser didn't trust them with how much Gesellschaft had done to them. He didn't know if he could control them or if they were sleeper agents.

They were victims, in a way, and she doubted she could fix them. Not if whatever conditioned them had lasted this long without any reinforcement. So what did she do about them? Logically, Master them and move on.

But she wanted to have at least some shred of a moral compass by the time she was done fixing this place, or else it would feel… like she'd just removed one evil to put herself in its throne. Sure, people would be better under her than another evil, but some naive part of her was slowly growing wary of this kind of attitude.

She'd done this rote and dance before, during the Void crisis in Runeterra. From all sides of the table.

The Noxians wanted to thrall peasants and use them as meat shields to reduce their food consumption problem as well as take back some territory, which were both uttely vital in the small united front they'd formed since Noxians held the flank territories and everyone was starving, but on the negotiation table, she'd been both the one appalled by the notion, and the one to suggest it.

It was difficult to have such vast experiences. It made her indecisive sometimes, and this was one of them. What balance of practicality and morals to strike?

It began to sound more and more like she should just be rid of all three of them, but Purity was too goddamn powerful to just shoo away. Blasters like her were rare with a capital R.

Was she overthinking it? Likely, yes.

She could do one thing in particular, which was to negotiate and see where it went.

But that left holes, potential leaks. A danger to herself, if Kayden was to be captured and grilled for info. If Kayden changed her mind once she saw Taylor's vision.

She had to know what mattered to Kayden , not just Purity, and during the short conversation she had with Kaiser through hand-written notes on the table, the only thing she could bank on were the woman's children. Which she was supposed to be taking care of right now, which was why Kaiser had planned this meeting now.

So he could invite her during a time he knew full well she couldn't come.

Apparently they had miscalculated.

Purity sat in the chair, and crossed her legs.

Night and Fog followed, closing the door behind them and standing in a classic bodyguard position right behind Purity.

"Is there any particular reason you didn't want me to come to this meeting?" Purity asked Kaiser, and said man carefully flicked out a gleaming zippo lighter to burn Cricket's note, lightly tossing it into a small trashcan beside his desk.

"You were invited, were you not?" He asked calmly.

She stared at Purity, the light not bothering her too much in this form that wasn't truly physical, and noticed a scowl along the faint outlines of her face.

"Was I? You know full well that I'm busy picking up and managing important assets of yours during this time of day and that I cannot realistically be present during these hours." Purity said, voice full of carefully placed venom.

It was nice to see Purity wasn't stupid, but it made her job harder.

Kaiser carefully nodded.

"But you're here, whole and hearty, aren't you? I'm sure the assets can take care of themselves well enough for a couple hours. You know that too. I'm sure they'd like to see their creator sometimes as well. Could have brought them along." He suggested, calmly steepling his fingers on the desk.

That was a lot of emotion in the air that she could taste. It wasn't merely anger, it was this kind of acidic resentment that only long-term hatred could produce.

Kayden hated Max.

And probably cared a lot about her children, which was nice. It gave her something to work off.

This would either go swimmingly, or terribly.

Or she could just… let Kaiser talk Purity out of the room without adding anything. Play it safe, buy time.

She worked well under pressure. Maybe she should decide now.

Rune treatment, or Kaiser treatment…?

She was being too indecisive.

Kaiser and Kayden continued their verbal, passive aggressive spar, and she mutely sat in the chair, collecting her thoughts and largely ignoring the lot of them.

Mastering someone like she did was not something she could take back, not while the secret of her abilities existed.

Pressure pushed her to do something now, because she hated unresolved business, and Kayden was growing increasingly frustrated with Kaiser's dodging.

She tried to picture how it would go for her, trying to convince Kayden to play along within a gang of almost entirely Mastered individuals. Many of which she had personal connections to.

Kayden would likely just attack her.

Additionally, being a few steps away from being a Nazi, and a genuine sympathiser... Taylor couldn't really trust this woman with anything, could she?

She wasn't in the same spot that Rune had been when this was all explained. Rune spent a year and something with these people and ran , Kayden had spent two decades and she was still here, reluctantly or not.

Night and Fog… she wasn't sure she could fix them, she wasn't sure if she should, and they were damn useful.

Her heart sank into its pit of freezing oil, and she resigned herself to practicality.

There was only one real option here. She was hesitating for nothing.

"Oi, Fog." She interrupted, her fake male voice rumbling with indifference, and the sudden butt-in caused everyone to halt and look at her.

The average human reaction was zero point two seconds, roughly.

And nobody in here was wearing a visor.

She glanced at Fog, meeting his eyes, and her own hues flashed gold, before her gaze immediately jerked to Night, and repeated.

Kayden only had the time to stiffen in confusion before she got her as well, a three-stroke flash like a strobe light.

She blew out a breath, and watched the silent, blank-eyed trio for a moment.

"I was wondering what was taking so long." Kaiser hummed, tapping his fingers on the desk, sounding strangely fascinated.

The man had been stalling for the entire time, she knew, expecting her to do what she did to the rest, which hadn't helped with the background pressure.

With a low, groaning sigh, she got up off the chair, and pulled Kayden's chin up to see more clearly into her eyes, made expressly easier by the woman's power being deactivated.

She almost dove into her mind, before pausing and half-turning to Kaiser.

"Does she love her children? Does she treat them well?"

Kaiser nodded, tapping a finger on his desk.

"Yes. In fact, she spoils them rotten. She's too soft on them. They'll grow up to be worthless in her hands. A waste of potential…" He hummed.

Coming from someone like him, she could guess that Kayden was just the average, loving parent with riches while he wanted to use them for one thing or another.

"I'm fairly confident that she'll raise your children better. Give her full custody and let her be. Understand?"

Kaiser's emotions flared with a surprising burst of displeasure, but he only let out a long breath in response for a moment.

Power complex, narcissist. He likely hated being ordered around a little more than how much she'd made him accept his place.

Or maybe he felt like letting Kayden raise his children was a waste.

She might have to tune him up a bit later.

"Understood. She'll have them before the week is over." Kaiser stated.

She nodded, and turned back to Kayden' unseeing eyes.

There was an urge to say something, but she ignored it.

She had no justifications, excuses, or platitudes to offer. She knew she was taking the coward's way out here.

The problem was that she couldn't tell if that was the wrong way.

She dove into her mind, ignoring the needles grinding away at the back of her phantom eyes, a very particular, nasty type of headache.

The Empire was hers, fully. Hadn't taken long at all.

Victory tasted like satisfaction, condenced and purified.

The hardest part was over.

Chapter 43

Notes:

have a huge 10k chappy which is mostly uneventful actually

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

She didn't get any time to laze about, even after total victory.

Well, sort of. The Merchants were still going to be cockroaches scuttling about her boots, but she'd get them eventually.

There were a lot of logistical details to catch up with, regardless of the strange attack at the PRT.

Most of it was unfortunately things she couldn't do anything to speed up.

There was only so much haste with which their builders could construct an airtight faraday cage for their server room, especially one that was only to be temporary, and there was only so much her men could do to make Greg hurry the fuck up with his family situation so they could actually move him.

Thankfully, she had a… rather staggering amount of resources at her disposal, so some of the more mundane hiccups were solved through moving assets in between all three factions she had, and using a good chunk of change to grease some palms at the US Coast Guard, for example.

Her lab was on its way, supposedly.

It gave her heart a slight twinge when she read that the boat would smuggle things in through the Dockworker's Association. They'd taken a bribe, for the first time.

She knew things were really bad, and jobs were practically nonexistent in the actual docks, so it made sense that they finally caved into accepting bribes to look the other way about what few things were shipped in, but she remembered her dad taking a lot of pride in the Dockworker's integrity. How they had some kind of honour and would regularly refuse sketchy deals despite the money.

Unfortunately, pride and honour didn't put food on the table, and with the average pay in the Docks being eight hundred a month… they didn't have much choice.

It wasn't exactly a happy occasion, but it made her feel nice, to know that in a… really shady, illegal way, she was keeping the Dockworkers alive, nice and protected under her sharp-edged wings.

Speaking of which, she had to pay the Association's president a visit. Just to make sure he didn't pocket anything more than his fair share of the bribe, which he most certainly would. Nobody wouldn't, when the money proposed was over a hundred thousand extra dollars.

She paused, watching Lisa pant on the training mat below, getting her ass beat by an agent as she tried to force her power into working in combat, brow furrowing as she tapped her fingers on the upper floor's desk.

That didn't sound like something that could wait. She wanted it out of the way.

And she also had to speed the hell up. So many more hours in just this day, she could achieve so much so fast if she put her mind to something instead of thinking in circles in this empty office.

She rose, stretched like a cat, then sighed through her nose, sliding the window open.

"Insight." She called, and Lisa called a pause, turning to look up at her, squinting through the damp training helm. "Going to go settle some business with the dock boys. Once you're done here, gather SS, Lee and Lung, and find someplace where we can have an extended fight without drawing too much attention."

Lisa's expression scrunched up with confusion.

"Extended fight?"

"Roughhouse sparring, let's call it." She shrugged, and Lisa nodded, thoughtfully staring through the wall just under Taylor's arm on the windowsill.

"Sure. Might take a bit. Lee's with our men, putting the ABB's lieutenants into place. And uh, culling some of them, just realized I forgot to tell you." Lisa said, and she paused.

"...Culling?" She asked, quietly.

That sounded very… unnecessary.

Lisa nodded, adjusting her gloves and taking a few deep breaths before replying.

"He just said something about their eyes betraying them. I personally got that he just thought they looked too conniving and displeased with the recent changes, not without dragging some of- Summoner's agents to them to Master them." Lisa said, the stutter in her sentence barely audible.

She smiled, a little.

Lisa was getting better in keeping Taylor's numerous pseudonyms and fake identities separate.

She considered Oni Lee.

He likely didn't want to waste her time with people he didn't consider valuable.

Nice of him, but also kind of wasteful.

She'd deal with it later. A text would do.

"Right. Set it up as fast as you can once you're done here, text me the location. Greg's not a problem at this point, don't bother being paranoid about it. Still keep things tight and vague, but let comms resume, a little."

"Sure thing. Also, have some very good funding news to tell you later, once you're back. We're due to give one of our techies a huge raise. And hire a few more mercs." Lisa said, and she paused, glancing to the open space around them.

Not a good place to chat about finances or… anything of too much significance.

"Later." She nodded, and ducked back into the room, switching to Evelynn and flying out of the warehouse.

Jeremy Melona was a man of vaguely hispanic descent.

And he was the elected president of the DWA, at the moment.

Which wasn't a huge accomplishment considering it was just a union, but still, he had the most centralised 'power' at the moment, and was the one who'd brought their bribe proposal to some of the more trusted of the workers, who ended up agreeing to look the other way.

Cosmic Insight painted him as a man wracked with overconfidence, an inflated ego, and a good nature that was steadily eroding under stress and frustration.

But, not a bad person. Simply getting there, one bad day at a time.

She let him get to his car, swing into it with a tired groan, and after a brief glance around her, she materialized beside the car, bending down to tap the window in her form which she'd dubbed as 'jacked white dude'.

Without the nazi tattoos. She didn't want to make the man hostile immediately.

She bent down to stare at the man through the glass, and he stared for a moment, surprise and befuddlement mixing in his eyes until he finally rolled the window down.

"Can I help you?" Jeremy asked tensely, hand obviously straying near his waistband, giving her an uncertain stare.

"Nexus sent me to clarify something." She rumbled, calmly, and the man turned into a stiff, hunched brick, his forearm flexing as he likely gripped his pistol, out of her sight.

"And that is…?"

She leaned down, bent at the waist, hands crossed over eachother on the window sill as she gave him a cold stare.

"The security money. We'd like you to equally share it among the workers under you. No pocketing half for yourself, for example. We want our cargo, but if we're going to grease your hands, we're going to prefer that that money ends up spread around. We want people to work with, and we want longevity. And despite what you may think of us, we do value worker's rights. Shortchange someone once or twice, and by the third time, they're gone already. So. It goes against our principles, and it's detrimental to us long term. A hundred fifty grand. Spread it wisely, don't be stupid. We'll get more open about these deals in the future if all goes well."

Jeremy took a moment to digest that, staring at her, tense, bushy brows and thick mustache twitching.

He slowly nodded.

She tapped the window frame on her left with her right-hand knuckles.

"Well, that's all we wished to chat with you about." She said, and made to back up.

"Wait." Jeremy blurted out, brows relaxing from a glare into a confused gaze. "How the hell did you find me?"

You're across the street from your office, dipshit, is what she wanted to say, but she swallowed down that unnecessarily mean comment and gave him a dry stare.

"We've got eyes everywhere, buddy. Don't bother lookin' for em, you'll just turn paranoid before you find something. And no, I'm not trying to threaten you, just the truth. Have a good night." She calmly said, gave a lazy half-wave, and turned to walk away.

The car didn't move an inch until she turned the corner and burst into fog, swirling about in the air above the buildings to either side.

Her eye was drawn to distant figures flying in and out of the Rig, in the far distance, barely specs of white and black in the distance.

New Wave was probably helping the Protectorate.

She didn't pay it too much mind. It wasn't exactly a new development.

Flying back to the warehouse, she spent the trip thinking about what she had to do, what she had to wrangle together.

Coil's and Accord's contacts could get her a good team to work with soon, but having a lab would make things a little more organised.

She also had to figure out what she wanted to do with the absurd amount of resources she suddenly had at her disposal.

The Empire might not deal drugs in the Bay, but they exported a lot.

And watching Kaiser's financial report made her mouth sour with a simple fact she already knew.

Crime paid.

Crime paid a lot.

Rounding it all up made her feel so… accomplished in a way, even if she knew she'd have to do a whole lot of cleanup before this petty kingdom of thugs and druggies was anything substantial.

Just from selling cocaine and meth and exporting it to Canada, Europe, and Russia, most of it through Gesellschaft, the Empire was making roughly one hundred and twenty million dollars a year. Enough to support itself, without considering Medhall's income, which after taxes and the like, sat at a comfy three hundred and forty one million in pure profit.

Because pharmaceuticals were an evil, very profitable business when you were as big as Medhall.

Lung's gang made a nice ten million a year left over after paying its members their due and paying for their supplies, which was a good addition to their resource pool, but it surprised her how economically weak the ABB was without the sex trafficking to prop them up.

Coil's liquidations and then his quick shift to investing in weapons dealing to the rest of the world was also netting them another comfortable thirty six million. His legal ventures, fifteen.

It wasn't a huge amount, but ironically enough, it was the safest bunch of their income. Safe, legal, and stable.

She'd cut their gun trafficking revenue stream the second this current order was fulfilled. She felt gross, providing people more effective means with which to slaughter each other with.

They'd find a way to do it regardless, she knew, but contributing to a problem never made things better, even if Coil barely had five percent of the arms dealing market.

She'd rather move those facilities and people into the Bay so they could manufacture weapons and ammo for her very numerous current troops and the general law abiding American citizen rather than exporting AK47's to Africa so child soldiers could kill each other for mad dictators.

Besides, ammunition and gun factories needed a lot more jobs to fulfil than one might expect. It would help the Bay a lot to move five hundred jobs into the city. People were desperate.

And damn it, fixing that was one of her main goals for taking over this place.

Her accountants were going to be foaming at the mouth with how annoying it would be to sort this all into a manageable system. Especially with trying to move their revenue streams into something more ethical.

Aside from revenue streams, the saved up cash of each of the gangs was… well, suffice to say she was effectively a billionaire now.

But that was a good problem to have, all things considered. She felt quite good about it all.

Flying into their pseudo-HQ's office through a cracked window, she was surprised to find a sweaty, exhausted Lisa flicking through windows and chats and various screens, a look of utter focus on her face.

She materialized a few feet away, then dropped Evelynn, adjusting her face mask and peeking over the office chair at the screens, curious, throwing an elbow onto the back of the chair.

It creaked back an inch or two.

"Hey, Sam?" Lisa asked, and she hummed questioningly, flicking her eyes from one string of words to the next to try and catch what was going on.

Lisa blew out a long breath, eyes nailed to a security camera video that showed a floating speck of something, moving, moving, then slowing, stopping, and turning in a completely different direction before shooting off-screen with a much faster pace than before.

"That's Glory Girl, carrying Panacea." Lisa mumbled, and her mind quickly snapped back to the seeming swarm of fliers buzzing about The Rig like flies.

Shit.

Any levity she had left, quickly vanished.

She scowled, dragging out a creaky old chair and plopping down next to Lisa as she tabbed between windows and open chats with the information guys.

"What happened this time?" She asked, with a faint tone of tiredness she couldn't help but express, and Lisa spent a couple seconds snapping back a reply to one of their techies, before half-turning to her, eyes on another screen.

"So, we're facing a few possibilities here, according to my power and our information." Lisa said, rubbing at her mouth with her free hand, clicking from window to window like a hyperactive toddler on a sugar high.

Was she even reading them, with how fast she was checking?

"First possibility, Glory Hole over there just decided her sister shouldn't be around a recent bombing site and took her away in an act of protest towards her team's directions. Optimistic, thus, unlikely. Throwing aside a half dozen other speculative ideas… I think someone Mastered Glory Girl." Lisa breathed out, tapping keys on the board to rewind the video, before pointing and resuming.

"Look, look how she's moving. Confident, tense but not worried. Then it's like she just slowly realized she left the stove on at home, until she stops. You can see Amy Dallon squirm and turn, likely trying to ask what the fuck she's doing. Well, sort of, it's like ten pixels, but you can see movement from the front. Then something or someone tugs GG to go somewhere, and she seems to just go along with it, rushing off. Their phones and tracking devices are gone less than five minutes later, and they've just completely vanished. So… I think someone Mastered GG right in front of us."

She took a deep breath, putting her elbows on the table, steepling her hands and putting her mouth against her fingers, glaring at the video as she felt her chest tighten with worry.

"And who the fuck has the gall to do something like that?"

Lisa nervously swallowed, and Taylor's gaze slid over to her friend.

"... You know something."

Lisa bobbed her head, brushing sweaty hair back.

"I think Heartbreaker's giving us a visit." Lisa said, dropping the metaphorical bomb, and she felt her body tighten, almost instinctively, dots connecting.

"...He's trying to find Regent, isn't he? Why the fuck else would his cult of crazies wander down here?" She asked, getting up to pace, thoughts whirling.

Lisa leaned back in her chair, rubbing at her face.

"Ta- Sam-" Lisa then gave up with a groan, "God I fucking hate this spy ops bullshit." Lisa snarled to herself, then turned the chair to her.

"Maybe. He might be here for Regent. But we can't do anything about that, and much as I hate it, I just don't fucking know. This is a weird thing for the bastard to be doing, you know? He avoids authorities, he doesn't fuck with them for the sake of it. But now he's just… probably the one sending suicide bombers to the PRT and kidnapping heroes in broad daylight? It feels like he's trying to send a message to either the world or his kids, that harboring or hiding one of his children is a bad idea and running away is futile."

She considered that, pacing slowly, fingers itching for a weapon.

If he felt the need for that, that meant his children were rebellious or displeased enough to try and run. It wasn't just Regent.

"What he's trying to accomplish is a secondary concern. The real problem is that the heroes have no fucking clue that GG got Mastered because they don't have anything to work with." She said, with calm that didn't express her inner alarm.

Lisa took a moment to think, puzzlement taking over her face.

"I- I mean, I guess? We have the footage, they don't. They just have a graph from the Dallons showing them that Victoria randomly switched directions before her tracker went offline, so they're assuming that there's some kind of fight somewhere that they can't see, or that Victoria was baited and captured by us or one of the gangs. And Armsmaster, the protocol-hounding dumbass that he is-" Lisa gesticulated in the rough direction of The Rig.

Taylor froze, pausing mid-step.

"He split them up in pairs. All far away from each other." She cut in.

"Yep." Lisa said, dropping her hand. "And now they're mixing with New Wave and expanding further to try and both patrol, just to be safe, and try to find the duo. The last fucking thing you do when you're up against a Master is split up." Lisa huffed. "If the suicide bomber was Heartbreaker's doing, then Armsmaster is playing right into his hands with disturbing effectiveness. So, since I think this might be the case, and either Heartbreaker or some of his fucked up kids are mucking around in the Bay for some fucking reason, we either use the heroes as bait to get to the bastard, or we let the heroes know everything we do, and let them cut their losses, probably negotiate with the fucker to get the girls back and throw Regent at him. Assuming they listen to us." Lisa added, a constipated look on her face.

Which made sense. Regent was the sole survivor of Lung's assault on the Undersiders. Of course Lisa would be sour about him getting tossed back to his father.

And the option of not trading him was likely even worse in her eyes.

But that was defeatist bullshit.

She turned to Lisa, brows furrowing.

"Let them cut their losses? Lisa, we're not letting them cut their losses, we're cutting Heartbreaker's fucking head off." She stated with a low growl, then resumed her pacing.

She couldn't personally head into this right now, and she didn't want any of her people getting mindfucked by Heartbreaker and his hellspawn. It was fixable, of course, but she worried about how the overlapping influence of two masters would affect them…

But she wanted to kill him.

She didn't know anyone affected by him, not personally, but she took his existence personally.

Because he was the exact thing she hoped to never be compared to, and he was what made a large section of powers be pushed towards villainy. Masters were mostly hated because of examples like Heartbreaker.

That, and killing him would give people hope. Would hopefully make them start trying to live rather than just shuffle about, waiting to die.

So she wanted to kill the bastard for more than the simple reason that he deserved it a million times over.

How would she go about it…

She needed a name, a face, and some kind of familiarity. Some assumptions and connections to the person.

Her only option was Victoria, and then… maybe. Assuming she knew even the faintest bit of the girl, she could likely use her to get to him.

But Victoria would be a hostage that would surely fight her to the death before she even got close to Heartbreaker, or whatever bastard child of his was playing footsies around her territory, nevermind the other thralls surely guarding him. If he was around.

Best case scenario, she killed him.

Bad case scenario, she'd have to fight and neutralise dozens of innocents without really hurting them… Heartbreaker's kids mostly included, and he wouldn't even be nearby.

If they were young enough.

The 'how' was still a question. She had very few people that could keep up with her if she went full throttle.

She needed to lull the perpetrators into a false sense of security, make them overstay their welcome.

Sharing her info with the heroes would just put everything on high alarm, and Heartbreaker or solid leads to him might be just around the corner, ready to scram if things got too hot.

She wanted to tell the heroes.

But she also wasn't sure she should.

Her gait stuttered as she glanced to Lisa, who was giving her an uncertain stare as her computer setup continued its incessant beeping and clicking behind her.

"We need to let me recharge my power. I'm still having that sparring session. Send whoever can get Lung to ramp up and a private place for us to fight. Get Greg to send an anonymous tip to the heroes, asking for a meeting under truce. Tomorrow, early morning. What was that neutral place?" She asked, vaguely remembering something.

"Somer's Rock?" Lisa asked, and she nodded.

"Sure, that'll work. I don't care if we have to kick Greg's door down, get that done please. Try to find everything you can. The heroes will never work with us, but if we tell them anything now while none of us can move and get into a fight we know nothing about, they'll light the Bay up like a Christmas tree, call a quarantine like they did up in Montreal when they thought he was passing, and they'll just scare the Master away before we can do anything about them. So, we tell them tomorrow when I say so, then move immediately while they scramble to respond. If anyone else is caught in the meantime..." She trailed off, feeling her chest tighten.

"I..."

Shit. Shit, shit.

What the fuck would she do if not sharing her info got another hero captured?

"I mean... you could fix them afterwards, right?" Lisa asked, and she deflated.

"I could. But do you think the heroes would ramp down their aggression if they knew I was a Master strong enough to unfuck Heartbreaker's victims' mind, or ramp up?"

Lisa's mumbled 'touche', because the answer was damn obvious. She'd basically be telling them Nexus had someone who was a couple steps below Heartbreaker, and then, connecting the dots would be trivially easy to realize she had infiltrated Coil and the ABB, even if her attack on the trafficking ring was a nice false flag to steer suspicion away.

"We can't tell them. Or help. We just stay silent until we're ready to move, drop the bomb, then go kill the bastard." She mumbled, and promptly plopped down on the beaten couch in the corner of the office, covering her eyes.

"I... Okay, not to say he doesn't deserve to die, assuming he's actually around here, but wouldn't it be more efficient to just... you know, Master him back? You're spending a lot of your power Mastering people left and right, you know? He could do that for you, and you could just Master the deviant freak out of him and turn him into a puppet or something." Lisa suggested, and she raised her head to blink at Lisa.

She furrowed her brow.

"I don't need Heartbreaker for that. One of his kids, those reaching their twenties and following in their father's footsteps, and then I just throw them into Noelle, and I'll be golden. Or just, any Master, really. Heartbreaker himself needs to die, because the world needs to know Nexus and Summoner don't fuck around and lie about this kind of stuff. If the public learned I just took the worst people in the world and made them mine after I told them I killed them off... there goes any kind of trust or public perception. Any chance of... even passive cooperation with the heroes, too. And no secret stays one forever, Lisa."

Lisa chewed on her cheek, deflated in her chair with a sigh.

"You sound fucking old." Lisa snarked in reply, and she rolled her eyes, a smile tugging at her lips.

How to get to Heartbreaker before he scurried off with his spoils like the damn rat he was…

He didn't usually go for kids, but everyone knew what he did to women he Mastered. She had no reason to assume his goals were changed in any way just because the girls were a couple years under age.

The thought of what might happen to Victoria and Amy Dallon made her claws itch to burrow into flesh and claim his head for a trophy.

…

Wait, nails. She didn't have claws anymore.

She groaned, and sank lower in the couch.

One fucking day without a crisis popping up would be real damn nice.

She materialized up on the walkway above, leaning on the railing, watching her capes below, awkwardly standing around.

Shadow Stalker, Oni Lee, and the main reason she was even here, Lung, looking inordinately pissed off.

Reasonable, all things considered. Betrayed, and then enslaved.

Served him right. She had less than zero sympathy for the fucker.

Oni Lee looked as he usually did, indifferent, and Shadow Stalker was practically vibrating with tension and energy, unable to sit still for a moment, pacing, tightening her gloves, fingering her new knives and fiddling with her crossbow, looking like a rabid dog that was foaming at the mouth for a fight.

She'd have it.

She shifted, and Lung tore his eyes off Stalker, jerking his head up as the whisper of shuffling cloth reached him.

The aggression in his eyes faded, almost unwillingly, and he nodded to her.

Thank god she didn't mess him up with her Mastering, at least.

The others looked up too, and they all went still.

"So, are we fucking doing this or what?" Sophia asked aggressively.

She took a deep breath, considering her headache.

Mild… a slight scrape of pain behind her right eye, throbbing annoyingly, but nothing debilitating.

And she had a lot of Legends that didn't need much if any energy to use and maintain. It would get worse, but not by much. She was essentially just getting another human body with different muscle memory and musculature, overlaid with hers. That was very much not difficult to do for the summon core.

Pushing away Evelynn, returning to her real self, she cracked her neck.

"SS?"

Sophia tilted her head.

"Shut the fuck up and start hitting him." She dryly ordered.

Sophia did as asked, turning in a smooth motion, whipping her crossbow around and off her back one armed, a snappy crack foretelling a bolt that was aimed straight at Lung's shoulder, turning to mist to reload.

Lung slapped it away with his wrist, ignoring the large gash that caused, his expression twisting into a furious snarl as he turned.

To Oni Lee.

The resulting tornado of fire that spewed out of his knuckles resulted in two clones disintegrating before a third stabbed a knife into Lung's forearm from the side, dodging the man's backhand by ducking under, placing a gun to the edge of his chin from the side, and firing.

Flesh, teeth, and bone peppered the thick, foam-padded walls of the dark warehouse, lit by two fluorescent bulbs and heaps of flame.

She had so much appreciation for Lee, what he could be if he just worked on himself a little more.

Utterly ruthless, he was a half-decent fighter, and he was efficient and smart. He just had to train his melee and shooting skills for cases where blowing everything up just wasn't an option. That was his glaring weakness.

She thought of how she wanted to structure things, watching Lee and Lung play a blood-fueled game of cat and mouse, while SS peppered him with bolts.

She thought of what roles she wanted these people to play.

Oni Lee was a one man army, a teleporting killing machine that only had to keep his real self safe, and could theoretically deal with an entire Protectorate squad if he improved a little.

He would be surprisingly effective in exterminations. When she wanted groups wiped out, when she didn't care about espionage or subtlety and wanted people to know.

SS's power seemed to be the most geared towards picky, quiet assassination. Flanking and stabbing into weak points, dashing in to take out priority targets, killing pillars of the enemy's formations then vanishing and stalking about for another pick.

If she wisened up a little, that was.

Taylor could speed up that 'wisening' process.

Lung's biggest weakpoint was his fighting ability, ironically enough. He was too goddamn willing to take a hit, and too bad at purposefully dodging. Sometimes he did attempt to pull back of twist out of the way of some strikes, but all he managed to do was lessen the damage or make himself stumble rather than actually dodge.

On top of that, he just didn't know how to fight. His fighting style was more suited to a coked up street thug that thought he was invincible. Just punch, grapple, charge. That was it.

Yet another thing that required her attention. How she wanted these people to develop and advance, how she wished to use them.

She could probably explain what she wanted to Coil, and get him to do the micromanaging for her. He was good at that.

It took twenty seconds for Lung's eyes to start glowing like two hellish suns, his fire to nearly double in volume, and another foot to be added to his height, tunnel visioning on Lee.

He was pissed. Good.

She slowly put one leg over the railing, then another, sitting on it.

She picked the Rune of Resolve, and locked in Akali, the Rogue Assassin.

The kama in her hand felt so familiar it almost hurt.

"And you said I would probably never get to fight a dragon… look at me now, Master." She murmured under her breath with amusement, mixing with that background frustration and the thrill of a fight.

She scooted forward, and dropped in, kama raised high.

Her left foot landed on Lung's left shoulder, her right on his quickly balding head, barely making him budge.

She stabbed down into his left pec, and raked her blades up, prompting a snarl, and a twist, his left arm pushing up and back to throw her off as his right swirled with flame.

Pushing with her right foot to unroot herself, she planted her left on his left hand wrist as it swung outwards, and moved her center of balance forward, letting his arm cruise by under her and dropping down into the gap left in front of his chest.

His right fist spit out a belch of flame where she was, over his shoulder, barely a lick of it catching her boots as he tried to correct himself and awkwardly angle the flame down while already overextended.

She watched it in an instant as she fell to the floor, looking up at him upside down and inwardly scoffing at his performance.

He just didn't know how to fight, doing manoeuvres that his own body would block for her.

Her upper back hit the floor, and she rolled forward to her feet, away from Lung, and lunged away right as a cleave of flame warmed her skin, Lee taking over the assault with two gunshots and a clone scattering around a flaming fist.

She rolled, turned, wound up, and threw her right arm forward, a swing from low to high, throwing the kunai.

They barely went blade-deep, hip, shoulder, and rib.

She straightened, half-jogging in a wide arc, waiting for an opening, for Grasp of The Undying to charge a strike, putting her right kama in its holster as she took out a kunai.

A second later, both the opening and Grasp showed themselves, and she dropped low to the floor, lunging forward, chest brushing dusty, scorched concrete, swinging wide with her left kama, her right arm throwing the roped kunai to the right, rope burning her forearm as it unwound.

Her blade cut a shallow line through his calf as she flew by.

Green, misty flame rushed through her blade, into Lung, and back out, carrying lifeforce.

It sunk into her hand, and she gasped sharply in surprise as it washed through her like a tidal wave, crashing and washing away her flesh with groaning marble, feeling like someone injected her with a liter of adrenaline, skin tingling and writhing with energy, eyes bulging as she tensed with surprise.

That was almost as much life force as she'd gotten from hitting Alexandria…

And he wasn't even growing scales yet.

Lung's right foot swung clumsily back towards her, and unable to redirect herself, she instead yanked with her right arm, the roped kunai snapping taut and jerking her out of the way.

Letting go, she rolled to her feet, breathing hard.

It took her a moment to realize that a manic grin had found itself on her face.

It widened as the high of a Grasp proc faded.

She could start turning lifeforce to Qi in no time, if this continued.

And she had a few hours.

Time to see how many times they could escalate and de-escalate Lung in that time.

She switched out a kama for a row of kunai, and began to jog around the fight, watching Lung tower over them at eight feet tall, his snarls puffing smoke out, neck starting to glow with flame in tune with his breaths, his hair gone entirely, flame wreathing him from fingers to chest.

Lee was starting to tire and preserve his energy, by now. They'd have to take a break and restart soon-ish.

She threw a kunai, to stay in the fight and let another Grasp of the Undying build.

It barely stuck into Lung.

A quick lunge to scratch his back, darting back.

Green energy danced about her fingers, and she tossed another kunai, watching the energy flash to the blade as it struck, then back to her.

She kept her stride steady this time, feeling her cheeks burn as she continued grinning just a little wider.

That one felt even stronger.

It felt like she was made of wood rather than flesh.

Was her flesh stronger than Lung's? She had a lot less of it, but it had to be.

And she hadn't even begun to refine the extra lifeforce into Qi yet.

She burst out into elated laughter, throwing her head back, feeling a ball of stress she'd been carrying for ages dissipate.

The sounds of battle paused.

She took a deep breath, tore Akali's mask off, then grinned at the three confused parahumans staring at her with varying degrees of confusion.

She pushed Akali away, and dug her phone out, dialing Lisa.

Two rings in, she answered.

"Yea?" Lisa asked.

"Call in Hookwolf and Crusader. We've going to fight until we drop." She said, then waited for Lisa to hum positive, before she shut her phone, staring at the trio.

Lung had stopped growing, but he still looked like he was barely holding himself back from swinging again.

She picked Akali, filling her hands with kunais, taking a stance and starting to circle.

Lung snarled, and swung his fist wide with a torrent of fire, scorching the walls black and forcing Lee to start teleporting again as she sprinted to the nearest wall and ran up it for a few feet, feeling her skin sizzle from the flames barely missing her ankles.

Shadow Stalker would form up in the air, pop off a shot, then retreat to reload, and repeat.

She did the same, roughly. Circling, tossing kunais, waiting for Grasp to charge up, then dashing in for a meaningless nick, or simply throwing yet another kunai if there was too much fire being thrown about.

Grasp of the Undying felt less… effective, from range. Not by much, but there was a noticeable increase the closer she was to the target she was taking lifeforce from.

Two, three, five, fifteen times, she felt the sensation of lifeforce flooding her, until she started feeling weightless and genuinely invincible. A dangerous thing to feel.

By the tenth time, the sensation had become so intense it was almost bowling her over and forcing her to muffle some likely… obscene groans into her own throat.

Things got a lot harder ten or twelve minutes in, when Lung started properly using his tail and wings to attack, looking like Leviathan's angry cousin and making the inside of the enormous warehouse feel like a closed oven.

Eventually, Lung's tail clipped Lee on the knee, and with a crunchy snap and a startled grunt, the man fell, his clones fighting for another few seconds before scattering.

Lee teleported.

Lung moved forward, stomping on the head of the clone left behind, hunching over as if to charge at Lee, and she scowled.

"Kenta. Back." She growled, and Lung shook with obvious rage for a moment before forcing himself to lumber around towards her, his mouth elongated into a snout, his back hunched over and his four arms almost dragging on the floor. Towering almost half a dozen feet above her, a small mountain of silver scales and mangled musculature with nubby wings, slowly growing, he was a grotesque, impressive sight.

"Let's call a break and wait for the nazis to get here. We start again, then. Lee, don't move. SS, go up to the breaker board and flip the switch for the ventilation system. We can barely breathe in here." She ordered between deep breaths, and Lee nodded as Sophia wordlessly went to do as asked.

Lee swayed, awkwardly balancing on one foot and letting the other dangle, panting heavily and stiff with pain, literally smoking, steam wafting off of him.

And not a word of complaint.

She didn't want to play favourites too much, but Lee was definitely her favourite mastered cape, with Bakuda as a close second.

Lung was just a weapon for her to throw at Endbringers.

She walked over to him, ignoring Lung as he walked past her to the warehouse's corner, snarling and puffing to himself while he shrunk.

She put her hands on Lee's shoulders, staring into his mask's eyeslits. She patted him, smiling.

"Amazing work. Relax a bit." She said, and Lee did as asked.

She cast 'Heal', and with a meaty, grinding crunch and a spew of green motes of light, his leg jerked, his knee seemingly snapping back into place.

Lee didn't move or make a sound.

She cast it again, and backed up.

Lee experimentally put his foot on the ground, moved it left to right, then stomped down with force. He turned to her.

"Gomen." Lee breathed out in a rasp, barely audible through the combined panting of the three of them and Lung's growls in the corner.

She blew out a long breath, and looked down at her forearm, curious.

Glancing up at Lee, she extended her right arm, pushing Akali away, back to her regular self.

"Stab me. I want to see and feel the improvement."

Lee took out a combat knife, took a step, and without a shred of hesitation, grabbed her wrist, and stabbed down.

Naturally, she tensed, expecting it to hurt .

Instead, the tip barely went a centimetre deep before stopping cold.

She stared in disbelief, and flexed her forearm, muscles outlining clearly against her skin, blood leisurely pooling in the indent of the knife and crawling down her arm in a thin trail.

The knife moved before Lee's hand did, her muscles forcing it to move before tearing.

She wasn't any stronger, but her flesh was tougher.

"Try to dig in."

Lee pushed down insistently, and she grit her teeth mutely as the knife worked in further about half a centimetre, Lee's arm starting to shake and quiver with the strain.

"Alright, pull it out."

Lee did so, and immediately started cleaning his blade from the gory mixture of her and Lung's blood.

She turned around, sitting on the floor cross-legged, letting the blood stop flowing on its own, ignoring the injury.

Lee sat down next to her, continuing to clean the blade with a scorched cloth

Above, SS flit about the breaker boards and wiring, flipping switches.

Lung sat opposite them, giving Lee a death-stare as he quickly shrunk and started the gross process of turning back to a human again.

Something occurred to her, then, as she saw his naked state, his clothes burnt to ashes by now.

"... Did you bring replacement shorts or something?" She asked.

Lung snorted derisively.

Yeah, that answered it.

She didn't mind, because hey, Lung was quite physically attractive, and he obviously didn't give a crap, but it would probably be awkward for the others.

Oh well.

She wasn't sure how in the absolute hell things ended up like this, but they had.

Hookwolf did come, as did both Cricket and Stormtiger because 'they had nothing better to do and they wanted to fight', because of course.

Then Bakuda started spamming her phone begging to come over and hang out with her which she felt too bad to deny, even if Bakuda only knew about this 'sparring' because she literally had Oni Lee's phone bugged. She'd scold her about that later.

Crusader somehow ended up giving Krieg a ride to the place, too, so they had another extra.

Which ended up in the strangest goddamn night of her cape career so far.

Holed up in a warehouse she owned, covered in insulation and large enough to house two whole ass planes, surrounded by asians, nazis, a metal wolf and a giant dragon.

The area somehow felt cramped.

Watching them fight had gone from a mild annoyance in the back of her head to a genuine frustration, however. The amount of teamwork was... nonexistent, pretty much.

So what ended up happening was that Hookwolf and his crew would fight Lung with Krieg, Crusader and Oni Lee joining in whenever he had regained enough stamina to at least fight using his clones, and Taylor would throw shurikens or just shoot Lung to build up a charge, and dart in and out, focusing on… well, essentially just activating Grasp of the Undying as frequently as possible.

SS was relegated to watch duty, flitting about the rooftop and watching out for any suspicious movements or undue attention, and double-checking for any noise leaks to the outside, which they couldn't afford with the heroes on a hair-trigger.

Bakuda was… still batshit insane, unfortunately, but it was mildly amusing in its absurdity when she came over with her bike loaded to high heavens with refreshments, snacks, and a goddamn lawn chair for herself.

She just sat on the side and screamed encouragements at Taylor and only her like some kind of murderous cheerleader that seemed to have an odd fixation with trying to get her to rip Lung's balls off, rambling about complete random bullshit in between.

Which Taylor half-listened to and occasionally inquired about to make her feel heard, which then prompted more snarly, giddy rambling about her 'lung annihilator nine thousand Bakuda trademarked nuke' or… something like that.

Of course, it got on some people's nerves, but having a nine foot tall metal wolf covered in blood from head to toe snarling at her to 'SHUT THE FUCK UP' did nothing to deter Mia, who just pulled out a grenade launcher off her back and grinned at Hookwolf like she wanted him to charge at her so she could test what her bomb would do on him.

That mixture of dysfunctionality which forced her to reel the idiots back in line every couple minutes so they wouldn't start killing each other, and their… generally speaking, grating lack of coordination or genuine fighting ability eventually ended up making her so frustrated she just took matters into her own hands.

By teaching them. During and after the fight.

It was a stupid idea, but Lung wasn't going to grow any bigger and they were all boiling in their clothes and literally steaming sweat off while panting like dogs, so they had to take breaks. Which meant downtime of ten to thirty minutes.

Once she got into the role of instructor, the more and more she found wrong with how they fought.

Pacing around after gathering her thoughts for a few minutes while she regained her breath, she pointed to the WW2 reject.

"Krieg, I don't know how your power works exactly, but why aren't you picking up the razors and wires Hook's dropping while he's getting shredded and throwing them at Lung's face? Or trying to tangle his feet? Or a dozen other ways to mess with him? I've seen you toss my kunai without touching it a dozen times." She pointed at a Lung who seemed less angry and more just… cranky-tired, by now.

Krieg tilted his head, seeming contemplative.

"The field is pretty small, so length would be an issue, but it's not... impractical." Krieg said in that fake German accent of his.

Then she pointed at Hookwolf.

"Stop flailing like a moron who can't decide if he's a dog or a guy and failing at both. You're a goddamn shapeshifter and you're not restricted to a wolf. You could make some giant whiptail made of razors and decapitate half the people in this room from twenty feet away if you'd use your damn brain. Cut Lung's tendons instead of punching him and trying to stick to him until you start melting when you're clearly doing jack shit to him and just making it harder for the others to attack him."

Hookwolf sneered.

"Do I look like a coward?"

She dropped her hand, and glared at him.

"If you think attacking from range is cowardice I'd like to hear you say that loud and clear to Purity's face. I think you'd have about four seconds of life to regret your words before you're melted putty buried fifty feet into the floor."

Hookwolf snorted, scratching his neck.

"Killing me wouldn't change a thing. She'd still be a coward."

She raised a brow.

Hookwolf had the mentality of a literal teenage thug.

It was quite disappointing, honestly.

"Really? Has it occurred to you that the only reason you're willing to go into melee with Lung is because of your powers? If you were a regular person, or had some Thinker power or something, you couldn't, and wouldn't, go near him. Not in a million years, whatever your ego is telling you. You'd get turned to fucking paste in seconds." She said roughly, and Hookwolf's movements slowed, his head which was half-tilted in disinterest angling towards her to stare.

"A coward is someone who is scared, and runs away. Someone attacking with what they're given isn't cowardice, it's called not being suicidal. If you were a regular person and I told you to fight Lung, would you walk up to fistfight him, or would you grab a gun, you-"

Stupid motherfucker, she said internally, but held it in by sighing instead.

She didn't want to lower the level of this… impromptu lesson by speaking like a gangster. They'd get her better, but she wasn't stooping there.

She stared at Hookwolf as he considered her words, seeming to actually think, and think hard, judging from the furrowing brow.

Seeing as he wasn't gonna answer, she turned to Oni Lee.

"Do me! Do me!" Bakuda screamed from the back, hopping up and down and waving her arms like a lunatic in concert, grenades and random… welding tools or something, bouncing in tune with her.

She rolled her eyes.

"You're not participating in this because your power isn't applicable here. I'll give you points of improvement some other time." She dismissed, and ignored Bakuda's nonsensical cheer to turn to Oni Lee.

"You're excellent with using your power, timing things, distraction and confusion. But, to be blunt, your melee combat skills are simply above average and your aim at range needs a lot of work. Your gun isn't a melee weapon, and you use it like a second knife more than an actual gun. It's effective, but it hinders you and your clones. Additionally, you're not good at working with people. I watched your clones die more from Stormtiger's blasts than Lung's heat or strikes because you kept surrounding him right as people started firing. You need to stop forgetting your allies exist and think about things from their perspective, what they're seeking to accomplish, what you're seeking to accomplish, and try to find a way to achieve both with minimal effort or interference. You stick around with my soldiers regularly, ask some of the melee instructors to teach you melee and teamwork. They might not have a power but they could still kick your ass if you didn't either, and they all work in teams, they know how to teach you to cultivate that mindset."

Oni Lee gave a stoic… half-bow, almost.

Ignoring the surge of nostalgia she got from being even vaguely reminded of Ionian customs such as bowing instead of waving 'yes ma'am', she turned to Stormtiger.

She thought of his way of fighting, what she observed.

"You actually are really good at teamwork despite blowing up half of Oni Lee's clones. I noticed you never shot when you could hit someone on the other side of the encirclement if Lung somehow dodged it or got moved, and you only shot at Lee's clones and Hookwolf all the time because both could take it. Or that's my generous interpetation of it. If not, you suck at teamwork. I'm going to choose to think you don't. I also noticed you kept shooting for his extremes. Feet and head. Were you trying to destabilise him or just hitting whatever the others weren't?"

Stormtiger shifted.

"Destabilise. Hook's good on the ground. Grappling's his thing. Lung can barely roll over if he hits the pavement, not with those wings." Stormtiger replied, and she paused, as this was the first time she actually heard his voice.

It was actually surprisingly soft for a guy who looked like he drank steroids instead of water.

She hummed, and nodded at him.

"Nothing much to criticise. Good aim, solid strategy, good teamwork. But get a goddamn vest for fuck's sake, why are you shirtless? One bullet and you're dead. A civilian could literally kill you with one lucky shot. I've no idea how half of you people are even still alive. Regardless, well done."

He might not have done it consciously, but he did straighten up a little, as if proud. Then he nodded stoically.

She imagined his efforts to be a supportive kind of fighter were rarely noticed or recognized.

Moving on to Cricket, who seemed to be very eager to fight her rather than Lung, with how she was eyeing her like a piece of meat, likely due to Akali's strange similarity to her own fighting style, she tilted her head.

"Honestly, not much to say here because Lung's a horrible matchup for you. You didn't get to do much if anything for me to point out. Good job on trying to disorient Lung later into the fight rather than charging in. Also, good effort on immobilising him early on by slicing half his tendons, but you almost got decapitated by both Krieg and Crusader in the process. Don't take such risks for advantages that won't last. I don't care if you don't give a shit about dying, I want you alive. Understood?"

Kricket did nothing but tilt her head, still staring at her.

A slow, slow nod.

Turning to Crusader, she gathered her thoughts.

Honestly, he was carrying the entire team at the end when Lung had wings and was practically melting Hookwolf by just breathing on him, because he was the only one who could punch through Lung with ease and relative safety. His spectral spearmen or whatever his power was trying to mimic were also a perfect match for fighting something like a literal dragon. The matchup was good for him.

"You're good at teamwork. Precise, patient. But, you're too reckless when you do commit. You overcommit when you see an opening, before you can see if the opening is a trap or not as wide as you thought. I spotted three times when you committed so many soldiers on Lung that he could and should have been able to punt Hook aside and just charge you before you could bring them back to you, and you'd be dead."

Crusader's lips pursed, but he nodded.

"Understood. I'll be working on that." He said, sounding oddly grateful.

A nice surprise. He wasn't a grumpy shit like the others.

"Good. Lung. You're going to learn hand to hand combat, both in human form and dragon form. Go with Lee for hand to hand. I'll teach you how to fight as a dragon later. Alright?" She 'asked', trying not to be too much of a hardass, and after a long second, Lung scoffed, going back to staring at Lee.

She furrowed her brows.

"Yes, or no?"

He glanced at her, genuine annoyance in his eyes, his scales slowly sinking back into his skin.

The emotion faded quickly.

He grunted something vaguely positive sounding, then turned to stare at a far window.

Shadow Stalker… she had some suggestions, but none that were urgent. She'd text them to her soon.

Plus, she wasn't going to go fetch her. They needed a lookout.

"Alright. Lee, come here."

He stepped close.

She extended her forearm, and pointed specifically at the upper muscle winding around her elbow.

"Shoot here."

He took out a pistol, and carefully aligned the barrel.

She tensed.

He shot, and she jerked her arm to her chest by instinct, letting out a startled, grunting cry that trailed off into a hiss.

She extended her arm, and looked at the red mess, pushing around it with her fingers, teeth grit as blood gushed out and hit the floor.

No exit wound.

Where the f... there.

She dug her thumb in, then up, jaw trembling with tension.

A crumpled, bloodied bullet clinked softly to the floor, and she spat out a sigh of relief, bending her head down to look, trying to judge the damage despite the blood hindering her.

The bullet had made it… about a third of the way through her upper forearm before it was stopped cold.

She wasn't bulletproof, but she was bullet resistant.

From just a couple hours of 'sparring'.

And she hadn't felt so… vibrant and full of life in a long, long time.

Sure, she'd lose much of this toughness when she converted and refined all this lifeforce into Qi so she could use it for more things, but this was… very significant progress for very little strain on the summon core.

And Lung was only fighting six or seven capes. How large could they get him if she brought everyone over and let him ramp up, carefully?

How much could she extract from him?

It certainly didn't affect him like it did her men. He looked fit as a fiddle, if somewhat exhausted.

She cast 'Heal', watching the injury flare green and fill up in an instant, like a reverse video of her injury played at a thousand times speed.

Lifting her head, she regarded the odd crowd around her.

Technically speaking, they were all just her slaves. Horrible people forced into servitude.

Still, she couldn't help but… appreciate them, somewhat, as they lost interest in why Lee was shooting their new boss, and scattered off in the corners to chat, or just laid flat on the floor like a starfish, choosing to take a power nap, in the case of Hook and Crusader.

Or they brought her an iced tea thermos, like Bakuda, beaming at her like a kid on Christmas.

She smiled at her, genuinely, and took it, staring down at it.

Manufactured as this… entire group was, it felt nice to have someone care so much they brought half a bag full of snacks and drinks just for her. Small thing, but nice all the same.

She rolled her neck with a sigh, pushing her face mask up and taking a sip.

It was pretty good, all things considered. Refreshing after boiling in a closed room for two and something hours.

She turned to a nervously expectant Bakuda, and pat her head, earning a… slightly manic grin.

"I like it. Thanks."

Bakuda fist pumped, practically hopping in place.

"Can I hug you?" Bakuda rushed out right after, and she opened her mouth to say no, immediately.

It didn't quite escape her.

She should put some distance here, realistically, but she felt bad for Bakuda. It would feel like kicking a murderous, deranged puppy with some extra guilt sprinkled in because she created the aforementioned puppy.

That, and she still had Heartbreaker stalking about her mind, hovering around in the background of her thoughts, demanding she say no.

She was a bit conflicted.

She had about two hours left before she'd stop and start formulating a plan for the Master stalking about the Bay, so she forced herself to put the thought mostly aside, and turn to Bakuda.

"You know what? Sure." She said, and Bakuda surged forth, tools and clanking bits digging into her as Bakuda squeezed her like a paste tube, making a low, long, excited squealing noise of sorts.

She tentatively patted along her back, feeling a tad too uncomfortable to really hug back.

Unable to take another sip of her thermos, she lightly tugged Bakuda back, and Mia pulled away, beaming so bright it almost burned her eyes.

Bakuda leaned close, as if to whisper, and she tilted her head.

"Nuke's almost ready." Bakuda breathed out, barely audible.

Cricket's head shot up, staring at them.

Resisting the urge to groan, she sighed through her nose.

"No radiation, correct?"

Bakuda bounced in place, grabbing her shoulders and catching her eyes.

"None! Eco-friendly nuke!" Bakuda whisper-shouted.

She smiled at both how absurd that sounded and Mia's infectious joy, and Bakuda grinned so wide it was… kind of disturbing, like wow her cheeks could stretch really wide.

She nodded, and went to the lawn chair Bakuda had unfolded, sitting in it and resting as Bakuda bent down to show her a bunch of pictures off her phone. Mostly selfies and videos of her losing her mind about why one bomb wouldn't work or just vibing to music while handling dangerous explosives, singing along horribly and dancing in her chair.

How Mia hand't blown herself up yet, she wasn't sure.

Twenty minutes of humouring an extremely happy Bakuda later, she rose with a groan, and the capes took the hint, faint chatter pausing as everyone looked her way, and reluctantly got up themselves.

Bakuda moved her things out of the way, waving at Taylor as she took out a bunch of tiny mechanical parts, welding stuff on her lap in a crappy chair with a flashlight in her mouth and a magnifying glass taped onto a pincer arm she yanked out of nowhere.

Tinkers.

Everyone took their familiar posts, Lung already starting to exhale smoke in the middle of their haphazzard circle.

She picked Akali once more.

"Go."

Chaos erupted, and for the first time, Lung actually dodged first instead of immediately attacking.

It probably shouldn't have made her proud, but it did.

Notes:

hoo boi this story is TOUGH

gonna go chill with Mom Militia chaps for a bit.

Next chap, action!

If you enjoyed, drop me a comment or two, they really motivate me and make me smile. See ya soonish maybe

Chapter 44

Notes:

Remember when these chapters were short?

I don't.

Chapter Text

The next time Lee shot her in the arm, it only went in about half of the bullet length before it bounced off and hit Lee in the vest.

That's roughly when she decided to call it quits, and set some things up for later.

A lot of texts to Coil, mostly, telling him what she wanted him to do with her people, what to shuffle around, and generally getting updated on the minutiae of Nexus.

The biggest surprise was that one of their tech agents that had asked for a small grant to make some kind of gambling website for Coil had in fact done exactly that, and was now trying to negotiate with Lisa about getting out of dodge.

She had completely forgotten any mention of such a thing, truth be told. She wasn't sure she'd even heard about it.

Lisa only wanted her input on whether or not they should just seize the website, or try to buy it from him, because he was trying really hard to leave them.

Which made sense. If the numbers were to be believed and continued growing at the same pace, he could retire without working another day in his life. Why stay in this risky environment when he was set for life?

She was… mildly conflicted on the decision.

On one hand, the website made absurd profits, and he made it using their money, programs, and resources. It was running on their servers, or at least one small rack in the corner, and it was perfectly set up to be completely untraceable, technically legal in the country that supposedly hosted it, a country that barely had any internet to begin with and thus had no laws on the service, and long-term, it would only grow further and further.

In just four days of running it had made three point two million dollars for the man, because it hit the ground running due to the excessive marketing budget.

Stretch that to a year, and it would make billions. An international gambling ring that couldn't be regulated, traced, blocked, or taken down, in plain sight.

It was an ingenious idea and she wondered how on earth so few of such websites existed when it was so clearly profitable.

Getting a technical explanation from Lisa on how it all worked and why it was so incredibly smart and sophisticated made her head spin.

It was just a tide of words and terms she didn't understand. Relays, IP mixers, virtual private networks, peer to peer connections, virtual simulation engines, smart encryption, valve connections, layered proxies and randomised IP exits, along with a dozen more terms that sounded like Chinese to her.

She didn't understand a thing, but she did understand that their technician was a damn genius and she wanted to keep him on board.

But she also wanted the money.

Each of her agents cost over three hundred fifty thousand dollars a year to pay. That was just for the foot soldiers.

She could afford to drop that salary or erase it entirely for those she'd Mastered, but she'd at most go as low as sixty thousand, for example. They still should have some good savings if they ever got to retiring age, as they should, because they were her men.

That was without evaluating the costs of munitions, Tinkertech, repairs, networking, intelligence operations, vehicles, bribes, et cetera, et cetera. And they would expand to Boston soon.

She'd rather have an overabundance of funding than to have to be stingy and careful with every dime.

So she proposed a simple deal for Lisa to give him.

He'd either stay working for them and try to develop more revenue streams and services for them on the side, and get twenty percent of all profits from those programs, websites, or applications for the next six years, more than enough for him to retire as a multimillionaire when he chose so, or he'd be kicked out immediately with a payout of ten million, and they'd seize everything he'd made so far with a complete block on creating competition for the website or contributing to such competitors.

On both options, speaking about them or anything he knew to anyone meant immediate execution, of course. They could find him anywhere. She had his blood, after all.

Mandatory blood tests made sure she had everyone's blood in a safe somewhere, even if she hadn't gotten to drinking any of it yet.

It wasn't exactly a fair deal that they were giving him, but considering the usual standards of organizations in the underground, her terms were downright generous.

She was still too paranoid to let an intelligence agent go without first making a blood contract, but it would have to wait until she had the power to spare.

Delays, delays.

She went to sleep uneasy, twitching at the slightest sound and shuffle that Lisa made as she got comfy in their crappy cot, reports and numbers flashing by her eyes.

She dreamt of a faceless head dangling from her fingers, and she couldn't tell if it was Heartbreaker's, or her own.

They didn't need much sleep with the bracelets they had. Two, three hours, and they were up again, ready to work as if they'd had a full eight or nine hours of rest.

The early morning was no less chaotic than mid-day.

The shift rotation covered all twenty four hours, so while the early birds worked, the night owls rested, and vice versa.

The news that had been put on hold by the intelligence team until they manually checked made any notion of relaxation fade, replaced by that tight anxiety in the back of her chest cavity, sour with guilt.

Battery went missing.

The voice files from The Rig made her lips try to curl into a snarl.

Assault sounded like he was on the verge of hyperventilating or crying at the end of every sentence, despite his best efforts.

He woke up, and she was just gone. Not in their home, not in their bed. Nothing was missing, not even her shoes, just her keys.

Either Battery was abducted, or she literally took the keys and walked off in her pyjamas.

There were enough druggies and crazies around Brockton for someone walking around barefoot in their pyjamas to not be an alarming enough sight to call the police, so there were no reports or sightings. She could be anywhere.

"Fuck." She growled, and Lisa rubbed at her temples, playing the conversation again.

"Any plans, chief?" Lisa murmured, quiet and put out.

"Tell Greg to contact them. They're already starting Master procedure lockdowns, most likely. When did this happen?"

A click, a drag.

"Recording's an hour old." Lisa said softly.

She dug her knuckles into the desk, bent at the waist to stare at the boards of information on the monitor.

"Greg's probably sleeping." Lisa said, chewing on her cheek, her message left unread.

"He's delaying too much. And this is urgent. I'm going to pay him a visit. Somer's rock, asap. We're going personally, bring the retainer squad too." She said, and straightened.

"Wait, who?" Lisa asked quickly, confused.

"Imp, Rune, Spitfire. They should all be free, all they've been doing these past few days is adjusting and getting trained by Brigston." She clarified.

"Who the h- oh, random merc." Lisa realized, then nodded, turning to the monitor. "I'll wake 'em up. Good luck."

She didn't respond, switching to the Rune of Domination, flying high, and trying to locate where precisely his address was.

Perhaps Lisa jinxed her with that wish, because when she got to his apartment block, it was to the sight of suspicious black cars surrounding the entire building in an eerie silence.

She paused, wide-eyed, and only a moment later, felt the urge to grab a pillow and scream into it when the realization struck her.

She recognized those cars.

Hell, she'd been ogling half of them a while ago, when she was taking a tour of the PRT headquarters.

Where were the agents? They were all empty.

She dashed towards the building, where the stairway should be, and sure enough, she felt souls inside, moving in an orderly, tense line up the stairs.

She flew up, and faced the same.

What floor was he on… fuck, fuck!

She moved up and followed the very faint sound of yelling instead, until she was level with it.

Through a ventilation pipe, down into a hall, and around the corner. Into a dark apartment, out through under the doors, and she came out into a grungy, tight hallway, staring at the back of a half-dozen PRT agents aiming their foam guns into an open door.

She flew in over the agent's heads, and she only caught a glimpse of a hysterical woman repeating ' what is happening, get out, get out' like a wailing banshee as a PRT agent tried to cuff her on the couch, before the sight of cobalt blue drew her eye, from the right, and she turned to see…

Armsmaster. One arm on Greg's joined hands, the other tight on his shoulder, marching him out of what she assumed to be his room, two PRT agents behind them.

Greg looked too terrified to utter a peep, wide eyed and shaking like a leaf.

She briefly entertained her options.

Fighting?

Absolutely not.

They could get Greg out. It would be a pain in the ass, but a programming Tinker was incredibly valuable to an organization like hers. Letting them keep the teen would be a massive waste.

That left only one option.

Minimising the damage from Greg getting caught.

She reached out to his mind as they passed below her.

"Greg. It's Taylor." She said, trying to mimic her own voice as much as possible.

He yelped, jumping and stiffening, and Armsmaster pushed him down a little with a nondescript growl, pushing him forward with more force.

"Don't resist." Armsmaster said.

"Nobody else can hear me, obviously. Don't react, just listen."

Greg, being Greg, instead swallowed nervously, and nodded his head frantically, because he was a panicking dumbass.

"Confess to nothing. Do not speak to them, not a single word. Ignore any questions, even completely mundane ones. Just keep repeating that you want a lawyer. Say nothing. Don't panic, we'll get you out eventually. You'll be fine. Where do you keep sensitive information? Yours and ours. Disguise your words with rambling crap if you have to, just say it." She rushed out with force, and Greg spent a moment thinking frantically, his eyes darting around with shock at the black troopers outside his apartment door.

His mother continued freaking out and screaming like a banshee, which wasn't helping things.

"Uuh, I- uh, h-hard drives on my desk are p-pretty- pretty cool huh? M-my PC's expensive, please don't break it, It- uhm, it's not- emotional, it's got emotional value, and there's a red thumbdrive that's a Cosmos Warrior's collectors edition so-" Greg squeaked out, digging his heels in to delay the inevitable.

Armsmaster continued to push him like he weighed as much as a feather, ignoring him completely.

They crossed the front door, and Greg just made a wheezing, whimpering sound as the agents parted.

"Search everything. Be careful with electronics and contraptions." Armsmaster grunted, personally marching Greg down the stairs.

Seeing as Greg wasn't going to say anything further, and the agents outside had already rushed into the apartment, she was out of options.

Dashing down the hallway, she zipped into his room, materialized behind his door as Evelynn, and slammed the door shut, laying four feelers flat against it to brace.

A bed, video game and cartoon posters everywhere, nightstand, and a plain wooden desk.

The computer was off.

She extended her feelers as far they would go, rushing to the desk, and grabbed the four hard drives sitting on the desk in the open, pushing away Evelynn for a short second to shove them in her hoodie pockets, before bringing the demon forward again, bracing the door.

Just in time for the doorknob to rattle, an ineffectual pressure slamming once, twice, thrice into the door.

"Open up! Parahuman Response Team!" Someone hollered through the door.

She felt their soul back up to slam into the door as she took out the drawers of his nightstand, ripping the little furniture apart and throwing everything on the floor to find that red thumbdrive Greg mentioned.

Two more souls joined the first, one of them going back-to-back with the first while the other sat off to the side, likely covering them with a weapon if the door opened.

The door's wood cracked loudly with a dry sounding crunch, but with her feelers holding it in place, it still refused to budge an inch.

Cables upon cables, figurines, tissues, lube ew Greg really-

A flash of red, and she tapped the ball of her foot into the floor, a short, blunt spike erupting from the ground to launch the little USB stick up at her face.

She caught it, waited for the agents to back up.

Flickering to her real self, she shoved it in a pocket, and hurriedly flickered back, just barely in time to catch the door again.

She turned to the computer tower, and after grabbing it and roughly ripping it out from under the desk, the metal loudly crumpling in her grip, she paused.

She had no fucking clue where hard drives were on a computer's insides. Neither did she know if there was any way to gain information from other components, or imprints of them, or some kind of bizarre loophole that the PRT or Armsmaster could use to get information on her.

With a mental apology to Greg and an audial cacophony of ripping metal, she ripped the case in half, ignoring the fans and focusing on the components.

A giant circuit board, which she snapped into a dozen pieces, clawing it into shreds and scattering everything around the room. Two weird sticks of circuitry, which she snapped in half, a giant block with fans on it, which she did the same to, and… something boxy with fans on it, which she crumpled into fine, plastic powder in her hands.

Then a blocky piece of plastic that had come out of the giant circuit board, connected to some kind of input.

That was probably the hard drive.

She ripped it out of the slot, none too gently, and quickly pocketed it.

The door caved in before she could switch back, crumpling inwards and being held in place by nothing but woodchips and glue, half-broken.

She caught a glimpse of a helmet before she pushed outwards with the feelers and sent them sprawling back, the door more like cardboard than a solid barrier by now.

"Shit, parahuman! Parahuman!"

Damn it. Did he see her, or did he assume so because he got launched backwards?

Those were a lot of people approaching.

A quick glance about revealed nothing more of interest, except a small bottle of cleaning alcohol, which she hurriedly grabbed and poured all over the broken circuitry and components, just to be sure.

A few quick hand signs to form the half-dozen runes of a simple magic spell, and a relatively small but steady stream of fire spewed out of her palm.

She held it for a few seconds, being reminded of how utterly pitiful her personal mana was without the Summon core active through one of her 'Legends', and after making sure the small pile was well and truly on fire, she squished the bottle, allowing the flammable liquid to splurt everywhere in a radius of three feet, quickly catching as much of the carpet on fire as possible.

Pushing herself to go invisible, she waited for only a split second to burst into invisible smoke, dashing out of the open window.

As she silently seethed in frustration, she couldn't help but wonder what on Earth was so important about fucking Greg for Armsmaster to break his patrol schedule and general protocol during a general lockdown and drag two dozen PRT agents with him.

It didn't make sense.

Battery went missing a couple hours ago, but Armsmaster was across the Bay hunting down some relatively harmless programming Tinker? What the hell was his priority and why ?

Once more, she was left with the distinct feeling that she was missing something.

She hated that feeling.

"Yeah, you're right, that doesn't make sense. He's basically ignoring direct commands to go grab Greg. What the hell is so important about him?" Lisa asked, softly rubbing her temple. "Is his ego hurt or something? Or does he just really need a programming Tinker to finish some project?"

She hissed out a sigh.

"I don't know . I can find Greg whenever and get him out, that's not a tremendous problem at the moment. We gotta focus on the Master."

Lisa nodded, spinning idly in her chair.

"Sending anonymous tips to them for information exchange isn't gonna work. They're already heavily suspecting a Master, so I don't know if there's even a point to telling them. Too late now. Is there any information we need from them?"

She nodded.

"I have a cape that can teleport to someone from anywhere. Thing is, I have to know them, and be at peace with them, in a sense. They don't have to be my ally, but neutral is as far as I'd say it goes. I have to know their name or a pseudonym they respond to, their face, some parts of their personality, and what they're really like. Yes, it sounds stupid, but there's a specific reason for all of it, I can't get into it." She said, slowly pacing.

"Do you believe you could teleport to any one of the victims, then?" Coil asked from the side, hands steepled in front of him, elbows on his armrests, nose behind his hands, giving her a piercing stare that let her know he was focusing really hard on something.

She glanced at him.

"Maybe. The only person I have a chance of teleporting to is Victoria Dallon. But I'd have more options and more certainty if I could talk to the heroes and learn more about everyone kidnapped."

How the hell was she supposed to get that information though? Would they believe her?

Lisa stopped spinning.

"I think you were right, earlier." Lisa said, looking at her. "We need to fake a neutral meeting at Somer's rock. Make it clear none of us have done it, and call an official Truce. It's unlikely that the feds will shut down everything or block the streets, because they want people like Heartbreaker to run off and leave them alone, so it won't negatively affect Faultline's and the Traveller's deliveries either."

She slowed, thinking it over.

"Set it up. How does the PRT usually catch wind of this?" She asked, and Lisa's brows furrowed.

"I… don't know, actually. Coil?" Lisa asked, lips curling in distaste.

"The PRT has informants in the gangs. They're almost always found out easily, but rather than get killed or kicked out, they're usually isolated and kept in the gang as an informal line of communication to the PRT in extreme cases like this, one that's pretty easily deniable to the PRT if anything of it was to come to light." Coil explained, and she paused.

"Do we have any such people?"

Coil shook his head.

"The others you control definitely do though. They'll know who we're talking about. Shall I contact Lung and Kaiser?"

God, what terrible cape names. She really had to give them new ones.

"Yes. Are you coming to Somer's Rock?" She asked, and Coil stilled in surprise.

"...Haven't we semi-successfully convinced the PRT and the public that I'm dead?" He asked.

She shook her head.

"That was never the goal. It just kind of happened because of the self-destruct."

Coil made a small sound of realization, as if it hadn't occurred to him that she did something even once without there being a second and third objective behind it.

"I had assumed it was on purpose for something I hadn't quite grasped yet, or was allowed to know. If that's the case, then I believe I will. If I were to show subordination to you, it would also make the heroes believe that they know what my plans and purpose were in hindsight, when I arrived here, and give them very false assumptions." Coil said, and it took her a second to think about what he meant.

Her eyes widened, a little.

"They'll think you were sent by Nexus to pave the way for us. Preparing the scene for us to inject ourselves into the Bay without friction or danger. We're already using your men… It would make us seem more prepared and wide-reaching than we are, which could either be good or bad…"

"Better to look like a lion and bite like one, than look like a cat and bite like a lion." Lisa shrugged.

In a way, yes. In another, no.

Explaining that would derail the conversation, so she pushed it aside.

She nodded.

"Okay. Us three, and the retainer girls… anyone else you think we should bring?" She asked, glancing at both of them.

"I know an independent who sometimes worked for me, but they're very, very small-time. Circus." Coil said.

She nodded. "Bring them."

Glancing at Lisa for any suggestions, her friend shook her head.

Three of The Empire couldn't make it.

Purity had her kids to care for, and Othala was still healing the second twin, whom Taylor kept mixing up and had thus given up on trying to distinguish them.

Before any headcounting for the meeting however, she had to speak with Rune, and by extension, the girls.

She found them in the half-empty safehouse, scrounging up breakfast.

All… unmasked, surprisingly.

Huh.

She hadn't expected that.

Aisha, or Imp when masked, was on climbing duty, trying to get a pack of survival beef jerky off one of the top cupboards, huffing and grunting with effort to reach while Rune watched her with a deadpan sort of amusement, drinking…

…Was that whiskey?

Emily, or Spitfire, was eating cereal, ignoring both of them and half-laying on the small wooden table, a combat-rated laptop capturing her attention as she fiddled with its radio settings.

She materialized inside the safehouse, just out of sight, taking Renata's form, and walked.

The sudden footsteps seemed to startle them, as two steps in, she heard a varying commotion fill the building, and by the time she turned the corner, Rune had six knives and three of her stun cards floating around her in a tight circle, her chair discarded on the floor, and Emily was half-raised off her chair, leg on the table, ready to kick it over.

She slowed, and carefully raised an unamused brow.

"Who the fuck are you?" Someone asked, and she blinked at-

Aisha, holstering a knife.

Goddamn Stranger powers…

"Summoner sent me." She said, dryly.

Emily relaxed, slumping down in her chair. Then she jumped off.

"Shit, masks!" Emily yelped, turning around to rifle through an open ammo box, and she snorted with laughter.

"Pointless. I already know all of your identities. In the spirit of fairness, my name is Renata Glasc. You should have been briefed about me, no?" She calmly asked, and Emily paused in realization, sighed, sat back down, then buried her face in her hands.

"Not sure how to feel about you knowing our identities…" Tammi remarked, brow furrowed.

"Bleh, who cares, none of us have a civilian life." Aisha shrugged, sitting on the tiny countertop.

"Please tell me you have a job for us, and knock next time." Tammi grumbled, sitting back down, knives neatly slotting into the harness she likely stole and resized from one of her soldiers.

"Who knocks to enter their own house?" She replied, arrogantly, strutting forth, hand in her pocket.

Bit too douchey, perhaps, but Renata was like that.

"I have a job for you. Hm, well, sort of. It's safe and easy." She said.

Emily deflated with relief. "Thank god."

Tammi deflated with disappointment, her eyes losing most of their interest.

Aisha munched on her jerky loudly, then tilted her head. "Are we getting paid or just 'retainer' kinda work?"

"You're getting paid on top of retainer, but the job is too easy to give you anything too significant. Five grand if all goes smoothly. If anything happens and you help, we pentuple it." She replied easily, forming an invisible feeler on her back to grasp a chair in the corner and drag it behind her with a loud screech, smoothly putting one foot on the small footrest it had, and leaning back into it, one knee half-raised, the other extended forward.

She put her elbow on her knee.

The silence told her of their interest, though they were also likely wondering how she dragged the chair to herself, what her actual power was, judging by the flitting eyes.

"There will be a neutral meeting with all factions of the Bay at Somer's Rock, a quaint little bar a couple minutes out of the train yards. Excluding the Merchants. Independents, Empire, ABB, Coil, us as Nexus, and hopefully, heroes if they're not stuck too far up their own backside." She drawled, and extended an open hand to the side. "There's just one catch."

She leaned forward as if to tell a secret, giving small side-looks to her interested audience.

"The only ones there that won't be under Nexus's control, will be independents and heroes."

It took a moment for that mental connection to register, and Tammi seemed to startle, jumping up from her chair.

"Wait- you- what?" Tammi barked, in pure, unadulterated disbelief.

She leaned back, and shrugged.

"You heard me. Did Insight and her companion in that office not tell you that we were going to take over the Bay?" She asked, slowly, purple eyes leisurely blinking in a lazy stare.

"Wh- ba- I- th-" Tammi spluttered, then blinked and took a deep breath. "That's- that's bullshit. There's no way, it hasn't even been a week-"

"Do you want to speak to Kaiser?" She interrupted, voice carefully amused, and all three girls froze.

Tammi's eyes hardened as if in challenge, and she nodded.

She put her hand in her pocket, flickered, and took out her phone.

On speaker mode, one ring, two.

The call beeped once.

"Kaiser." She rumbled.

A shuffle.

"Is this this… 'Renata' I've been told about, or am I speaking to Summoner?" Kaiser asked carefully, and Tammi's eyes widened almost comically.

"Renata. Quick question for a small audience of mine here. To whom is your allegiance to?" She asked dryly.

"Nexus, America, and the white race." He replied easily, and she rolled her eyes as far as she could.

Right, she forgot to tell him she was planning on making him drop the whole 'white power' thing when she figured out what to do with him and his gang.

"Hm. See you at Somer's Rock."

"Of course." Kaiser easily replied, and she clicked it shut.

Tammi slowly breathed out a long, wheezy breath.

She stared at her.

"You can achieve many things when you can simply reach into one's mind and force loyalty." She said, and a wave of realization swept through the room.

"...Holy shit you guys Mastered Kaiser in less than a week?!" Aisha asked, grinning wide and wide-eyed with incredulous excitement.

"Wait- wait wait, does that mean that this Coil gang and the- ADB?" Emily asked, apparently unfamiliar with the cape scene in the Bay." Are they Mastered too?" Emily questioned, looking understandably uncomfortable with the idea.

Poor girl probably didn't realize what kind of human scum they were working with.

She let her gaze harden, bleed off emotion and warmth completely and utterly.

"Of course. We do not befriend and ally traffickers of all types, murderers, rapists, and all manner of scum whose only place should be ten feet underground as worm feed. We turn them into tools."

She let her proclamation hang in the air uncomfortably for a moment, Tammi's face looking more and more nervous and nauseous by the second. Emily looked conflicted, but reluctantly accepting of it.

She fixed Tammi with a piercing stare. Their eyes met.

"I'm afraid that means you might see some familiar faces. Can you deal with it?"

Surprisingly, Tammi nodded, after a short moment.

"Yeah, fuck em." Tammi rushed out, then swallowed. "All of them except- is Viktor and Othala…?" Tammi trailed off, looking pained.

Oh… wait, Othala was related to her, wasn't it? She vaguely remembered reading that in a report.

"Viktor's done far too many unredeemable things and is far too ideologically and morally compromised to extend any kind of deal to, like we did with you. He's ours. Othala was in the unique position of being almost completely uninvolved with the gang, and of its inner happenings, or anything of general importance. She mainly just supports them in fights, and helps Viktor. She doesn't know anything, doesn't seem to care about anything, she's just there as support. We were also told by Kaiser that she is quite a good person, racism aside, so we let her be. She doesn't know anything, and that will stay that way. Are we clear on that?" She commanded more than asked, and Tammi sagged with relief, letting out a sigh so huge she seemed to physically shrink with it.

"Yeah, that's- that's fine. Viktor was- I don't know. Just keep Othala out of it." Tammi said.

She tilted her head.

"We will, of course, but just to reiterate; do not tell us what to do. We're the employer at the moment, and you're a brand new hire. Bad look, to try and boss around the boss when you haven't done one job yet." She said, in a tone that was somewhere between formal and casual.

Tammi took a moment to digest that, and nodded, sufficiently humbled.

"Wait, you're the boss? Trickster said Insight's sister is top dog. I- I think that was the chick I talked to in the office? Weird tall chick wearing the same outfit as the Coil guy? Aren't you just another higher-up or something?" Aisha asked, genuinely confused.

Wait, what was the narrative with these three?

Fuck, keeping track of lies got tiring.

"As far as Trickster is concerned, she is the boss. As far as you're concerned, I am the boss. If the power structure was simple or easy to track, it would be a lot easier to behead the snake, so to speak. The only one you can truly trust controls everything is Summoner, and you'll hopefully never meet them for that exact reason."

Hopefully, because she had no idea what would happen if she overworked herself to the point of fainting without a Legend to cover her, who might see what.

Aisha threw another piece of jerky in her mouth.

"Real illuminati shit." Aisha sagely said through her food, echoing what she said the past couple times any of this was laid out to her.

"What's the job?" Emily piped up.

"Ah, we got sidetracked. It's quite simple." She began.

Somer's Rock was…

Frankly, a shithole.

She wasn't expecting the Taj Mahal or anything, but the place was a small, squat white building shoved between abandoned old clothing factories, with one singular entrance at the back, meaning they had to walk through a labyrinth of crumbling brick fossils growing reeds through the concrete floor to even find the place.

The inside was and looked utterly ancient to the point it almost felt like a museum or historical exhibit, had no signs to speak of and no windows, the chairs and tables were sturdy metal, and if the idle chatter of the Empire boys was to be believed, the only thing worth getting from the menu was a toast and water.

She and her posse arrived second, of course. First was the Empire, with most of them taking up the left corner and Kaiser taking up a single seat in the middle table, which she guessed was reserved for group leaders.

Third was someone that literally nobody recognized, wearing a hoodie and sweatpants with a black scarf for a facemask, and after a brief snarled question from Hookwolf, they raised a hand and simply tapped their forefinger and thumb together, forming a loud, very bright electrical arc that sparked out immediately as Hookwolf blinked the spots out of his eyes.

Considering they were only maybe five foot six, they would definitely need those to fight anyone in close combat.

"Arc. Independent." They simply said, voice bleeding nervousness, soft and trying too hard to firm up. They sounded… male-ish?

Hook snorted, leaning back further in his chair, on the verge of tipping over backwards.

"How the fuck did a muppet like you hear about this?"

'Arc' didn't say anything, awkwardly digging his hands into his pockets and shrugging.

After a moment of scrutiny, he conceded.

"A hero told me."

Hook didn't say another word to him, dismissing him and letting him go on his way to pick a seat along the edges of the room.

Something about him was just… fishy. She couldn't put her finger on it.

He moved like he was ready, alert, and experienced, but everything else about him exuded discomfort, down to the emotions she could taste in the air.

And he was definitely avoiding her eyes. She could tell he knew she was staring, but he seemed oddly determined to act like he didn't.

She and her own picked their seats next to the Empire.

Imp sat on a table with her team behind her, face covered with her dollar store mask, poking and annoying Rune to the best of her ability as the latter tried to keep her pristine new costume away from Aisha's dirty boots, flicking sunflower seeds at her forehead or tipping the table all over the place in revenge.

Children, she fondly thought.

Rune's costume consisted of a new bodysuit like her old one, except it was in green and white, as per her request, the mask being some kind of plastic, vaguely tribal-themed stone mimic with engraved runes all over it. Her military green harness was over her bodysuit, strapped to the brim with knives, stun grenades, and pouches, her shoulders and upper back covered with a brown shawl that lacked a hood.

They didn't have Spitfire's costume ready due to having to make it extremely fireproof which took more time to manufacture according to Accord, so Emily was just wearing one of her female mercenaries' downsized outfit, a domino mask paired with a jointed respirator that could open in half to cover her identity.

She looked tough enough, glaring venomously at Kaiser, who completely ignored her.

Thankfully, Emily didn't ask her for a free punch on the bastard, which would have been awkward and suspicious to the unaffiliated.

Lisa wore nothing but the bodysuit Taylor had made her, the bracelets, a small chest harness for the giant revolver she seemed to have grown so attached to, and black military-style cargo pants over the suit. Just like before, she wore only a domino mask to conceal her features, because there was hardly a concern for any of that since Taylor could change her entire facial structure in a few seconds if needed.

Coil wore his usual suit, as did Circus by his side.

Her people didn't talk too much, just sitting silently behind her.

The ABB arrived third.

Oni Lee wasn't with them, to keep confusion about what happened with that fight he had with Lung, but Bakuda was.

It was hard not to notice her when she literally kicked aside the door, put her hands on her hips, and sauntered forward, screaming "HEY, HEY, HEEEEEEEEEEEEEEY MOTHERFUCKERS!" through the grating voice box she had put in her helmet.

Lung paused, walking in front of her, and took a deep breath, before grabbing her by the arm and hauling her forward, practically throwing her into a chair as he took out his own, falling down on it with a tired, disinterested air.

A huff through his nose, and he crossed his arms while Bakuda leaned back and started rocking her chair back and forth.

Creak, creak, creak-

After five repeats, Lung extended a hand to Bakuda's chair, and dragged it away from the table or anything Bakuda could put her foot on.

"Sit." Lung growled, warning.

Bakuda let out a long sigh, as if bored, and complied.

Then they waited.

And they waited some more.

Finally, someone walked in.

To her pleasant surprise, it was Assault, and… a woman she didn't recognize, but could guess was Challenger, judging by the weapons. A giant axe and a clip rifle, a long black trenchcoat, with her upper face using bandages in the vein of a facemask, gold accents at her cuffs and leggings.

She could guess how the woman looked without the mask, it was so tight. Sharp cheekbones, sharp chin, a few grey hairs along her ponytail…

The whispering discussions paused for a moment as Assault strode in, oddly fearless, emotions… very, very suppressed.

Challenger warily followed behind him.

She caught Assault's eye, and nodded her head to her right, using an invisible feeler to slide the chair out.

It was expected that they would send Assault specifically, due to his past as a villain, but it was still debatable if they would choose not to because of the personal involvement at hand. She was glad everything was going according to plan.

The hero looked puzzled, staring around at the various new faces and costumes he hadn't seen before, but accepted the seat, Challenger dragging a chair behind and next to him, perching herself on it rather than just sitting, tense and ready for a fight.

She wasn't the only one who noticed.

"It's rather rude to stroll in and carry yourself like you're here to fight, Challenger. Sit, maybe? Order something?" Viktor asked, faux-politely, and Assault met his gaze.

"Perhaps it is, but we're quite outnumbered as you can see. We'd be fools not to be wary. We're just here to represent the PRT, since apparently, this is an all inclusive truce meeting." He said, evenly.

He was… somewhere between furious and depressed, but he suppressed it with the kind of grace she'd expect from a Yuain monk in Ionia.

"Fuck're we waiting for? Let's start." Hookwolf growled, because he never just said anything, scowling at the central table.

She nodded, steepling her hands on the table, one a purple amalgamation of chemtech and biochemistry, the other covered in a studded black glove.

"As the ones to call this meeting, we'll begin. Ye-"

She sensed three souls approach, just beyond the door, and paused, turning her head in tune with Cricket, Stormtiger, and Lung, who seemed to hear what she sensed.

For a moment, she didn't recognize the duo that showed up on the doorframe, nor the person behind them.

That was until she saw the giant M necklace around the reedy, dirty hobo's neck, and felt her eye twitch.

He gave a shit-eating grin to the silent room, with the world's most fucked up, ugly teeth, spreading his arms.

"Awh, am I fuckin' late?" Skidmark asked loudly, almost yelling, looking around him as Squealer ducked under his arm.

Just looking at them made her lips curl into a sneer.

Squealer was covered from top to bottom in what would only charitably be called underwear and covered less than such, revealing nothing but bony stretches of sickly skin, bruised in one way or another, smeared and caked with oil, wearing knee high work boots to go with it.

She looked like a crack whore with a cracked respirator on her face, to put it bluntly.

Skidmark looked like a hobo that stole a trenchcoat off the dump where it had been rotting for twenty years, his hair less dreads and more matted clumps.

"You're late, and not invited. It'd be best if you left." Coil spoke up from her side, his voice on the edge of condescension.

Lisa tilted her head, gaze moving from the Heroes to Skidmark, starting to get oddly tense.

"Suck my cock and balls, how about that eh? Fuckin' corpse." Skidmark spit out to Coil, stomping forward to the main table, dragging a stumbling Squealer with him.

The entire room tensed, and even Skidmark's rotted brain seemed to realize the implicit threat of their glares and stances.

She observed the woman, eyes narrowing at her state, while Skidmark began arguing with Kaiser in snarled words, acting like an indignant toddler demanding he be let in the party.

"You will not sit at the central table. Cockroaches sit in the dark corners, where they belong." Kaiser drawler, ignoring Skidmark's snarled indignance.

Squealer was high as a cloud, and just kind of swayed and made agreeable noises.

This could be a nice opportunity to snatch them up, once the meeting was done and the heroes and independents skulked off.

"Sit in the corner." She cut in, voice cold, and the tension swerved to her, both Kaiser and Skidmark turning to her.

"And who the fuck're you to tell me what to do, eh bitch?! You know who the fuck I am you two-bit suited shit!? Never seen your pissy ass here before, fuck makes you think your cunt should sit on that chair instead of me?!" Skidmark spit out, taking a step forward, nothing but bark and no bite.

This was honestly just pathetic, and she knew most of the room thought so, despite its silence.

Unfortunately, her flaws in Mastering seemed to leak out for a moment, as Bakuda snarled, extending her hand to her back to grab her launcher's grip, shoulders set in quivering rage.

If the room was tense before, now it was ready to erupt into a fight, whether to kick Skidmark out or kill Bakuda before she blew up the entire bar, people half-rising from their seats, hands hovering near weapons.

She thankfully didn't have to step in and reveal anything, as Lung gave a withering glare to Bakuda, nostrils exhaling smoke, and Bakuda turned a bit to see it, shook for a moment more, and relaxed fractionally, settling back into her chair behind him, fists clenched on her lap as she silently glared at the duo, unseen through the massive white helmet and its visor.

Skidmark seemed to find his courage at that, and turn to spit at her in particular, before turning around and conceding defeat, skulking off to sit in one of the side chairs, followed by the third person he brought, some girl in baggy, casual clothes and very long hair draped over her face like a curtain in lieu of a mask.

She stared down at the glob of spit, next to her shoe, and took a deep breath.

"Hate to agree with Skidmark, but yeah, who are you?" Challenger asked, from her right, seated next to a stiff Assault, her voice oddly smoky and raspy, hand always on her wooden rifle's grip.

A smoker. Twenty, twenty five years?

Lisa was probably halfway to figuring out the woman's civilian identity, with how many distinctive things the woman wore and carried.

"Renata. Representative of Nexus and its leader, Summoner." She answered, purple, luminous eyes examining the woman for a moment, before turning to the rest of the room.

"Any other interruptions before we begin?" She asked.

"Does Coil work for you now?" Assault asked, eyeing Coil who stood beside and behind her, next to Insight.

She turned to him.

"Are you here to fish for information, or to find out what problem the Bay's facing at the moment?" She asked, and his face blanked, emotions muting further even as they flared out into the air.

He said nothing.

She turned forward.

"So, to begin. I called this meeting in the hopes of establishing a truce, and if our collective egos don't clash too terribly, cooperation. The reason is that we believe Heartbreaker is in the Bay, or someone strong and ambitious enough to be a similar threat."

The good thing about talking into a room of people who were used to danger, was that nobody exploded, there was no giant rush of panicked questions.

Just sighs, growls, and skeptical looks. A couple muffled curses.

Assault's emotions to her right flared bright and high, fury and gut-wrenching dread flooding her senses.

"We have yet to assume any losses ourselves, but since we believe his reason for coming here is to hunt one of his wayward children in the form of the missing Regent, of the former Undersiders, we can assume he is a threat to all of us, not just the heroes taken. It's…" She trailed off, staring at Cricket, who was staring out of the door with furrowed brows.

"Well?" Kaiser asked, and she leaned back, directing her expectant gaze to the door.

Two figures walked in five seconds later, one large and muscular, one thin, both nervous and a little scared.

They were wearing… some kind of spandex suits with what she assumed were their initials on their chests, one indigo, one red.

At least they were also wearing pants over them.

After a second, she recognized them.

"Uber, Leet. Take a seat in the back, you're interrupting." She called out, and Leet glanced at her, nodded, and briskly walked to one of the few empty seats remaining, Uber's larger form following behind him, staring in befuddlement at the two heroes sitting at the main table.

"As I was saying, it's only a matter of time until Heartbreaker or whatever possible copycat this might be, begins to dig into everyone he can find for more clues and contacts, or maybe just to take people. The Undersiders have interacted with almost all of us, to varying degrees. Not only have they interacted multiple times with the Empire in skirmishes or robberies, the ABB's actions against the group might invite special retaliation or focus. As for us… we have a lot of what Heartbreaker is interested in, and one of Regent's old teammates." She dryly said, not having to specify too much considering she was flanked by four girls and only one male on her end of the large, circular table.

A long silence seemed to stretch, broken only by Skidmark's snickering in the corner.

What he was laughing about, nobody cared.

"You claim Regent was a child of his? Do you have any proof of such?" Kaiser asked.

Insight raised her hand.

"Insight, formerly Tattletale, at your service." Lisa snarked with only a smidge of bitterness, then reached down to her bodysuit's collar to tug it down, revealing a stretch of healed burn scar, and a faint scraping scar around her neck, like a collar.

Entirely cosmetic now, of course, since she'd healed both of those. Her and Lulu's work.

Lisa jerked her chin to Lung and Bakuda, voice bitter as she let the silk snap back to place, folding her arms across her chest again. "They did us in, they can vouch for me. I can almost read minds, figuring out that Regent was Heartbreaker's spawn didn't take that much time."

Lung slowly side-eyed Lisa, then gave a curt nod.

Bakuda barked out a laugh, leaning back in her chair.

"Glad you enjoyed my little collar. Wanna make it a regular thing?" Bakuda cooed in what might have been a seductive tone if not for the voice changer making her sound like a creepy, rattling radio.

"Ew." Insight replied, settling her chair a little closer to Taylor.

"I see. In that case, which of our kind were taken, according to your information?" Kaiser asked her.

"Panacea, Glory Girl, and Battery, to our knowledge. In just the past couple hours." She said, and turned her head a smidge, to the heroes. "My sincere condolences for your colleague." She said, not having to force any of the genuine sympathy in her voice.

Assault gave a tight nod, his neck and jaw flexing in quiet fury and dread. Challenger took a deep, angry breath.

Kaiser scoffed.

"If this is truly Heartbreaker responsible, which you have yet to claim with certainty, or bring any evidence of, it looks like our resident Master is mostly targeting heroes so far. We'd all benefit from more heroes leaving the scene, Protectorate aside. Do you truly expect me to agree to a truce that will only be to the Empire's detriment? We're not going to give Lung's corner any more time to expand back out in the distant off-chance that whoever is pulling strings from the shadows is Heartbreaker, especially considering how unlikely his involvement is. If he masters Lung and takes him off, that's also one more nuisance out of the way." Kaiser stated.

Lung snorted derisively.

She tapped her clawed, marble-tipped fingertips on the table, liquid purple muscles shifting on her left side, right hand tracing her own jawline.

"Really? No regard for the many women in your employ? Statistically of us all, you're by far the most likely to come into his sights and lose something or someone important. Nexus is not holding territory, so we're invisible. The ABB has a mere two parahumans, which will most likely draw his ire due to past interactions, but again, merely two. The Merchants…" She trailed off, and scoffed with condescension, ignoring Skidmark's growl from somewhere behind her.

"You're the biggest, the most visible, and the most tempting. Othala, the twins, Purity, Night… So I believe that risk, that mostly applies to you alone, would equalise the small bit of stability the ABB might scrape together in the interim." She said.

She hadn't given any of them a script beyond "act like nothing changed", so the discussion was bound to be a whole lot of debating over something that didn't matter, which, frankly, was just tiring.

This truce meeting, after all, was just an excuse to let any independents and the heroes know who might be out there, and with some luck, get some information in return from the heroes for it. Or at least get close enough to one of them to convince them to tell her more about those taken so she had more options.

Kaiser dipped his head, conceding the point, his gauntlets softly scraping together on the table.

On the surface, things could be justified without suspicion.

Kaiser's gang was licking its wounds and trying not to escalate too much by pushing right after jailbreaking Hookwolf out and almost losing one of the twins from blood loss. The Merchants were reeling from her strike and had lost a good one tenth of their estimated numbers. The ABB was reeling from losing Oni Lee, and Lung had fought a lot lately, so it made sense he'd rather duck down than invite further attention to the Bay.

It was a good time to call a fake truce and make it make sense.

"Not a bad point." Kaiser mused, calmly leaning back in his chair, seemingly thoughtful.

"Wait, hold on, I'm- we're kinda lost here. Heartbreaker's in town looking for people?" Leet piped up, standing tall and glancing around for confirmation.

"Yeah." Arc responded next to them, head ducking down as he frowned.

"Shit." Leet hissed, and sat back down.

"We can locate the victims, we believe." She said, and the heroes' attention swerved to her like the point of a needle, shifting quickly.

"How?" Assault almost spit out.

"We have someone who can teleport to someone they know at least on a basic level, and do not consider an enemy, from anywhere on the planet. Considering our interactions with those taken are absolutely minimal however, we need more information on them. Not their names, but we need their faces at the minimum, maybe some more personal information. General aspects of their personality and their nature more than specifics. Do you believe the PRT would be willing to give us such information? If so, we can locate them before the day is over by sending our agent to them with a powerful GPS transmitter."

Assault's emotions… became a whirlwind she couldn't quite figure out.

"I'm-"No." "-willing." Assault began, Challenger cutting halfway through.

Assault glanced to Challenger's stern stare, and glanced back at her, a long, conflicted look full of dread, obviously thinking very hard about something.

Something was off… a niggling feeling at the back of her neck.

"The PRT- the Director, would not be willing." Challenger elaborated, sternly, talking to Assault more than to her.

Assault took a deep breath, then got up, moved his chair until it was sitting right next to her, and sat down, fists clenched so tight she could hear the leather creaking as he sat down.

"I'm willing. How much do you need?" Assault said, and she slowly looked from him to the oddly nauseous-feeling Challenger, the wide gap between their seats and the lack of one between hers and the man next to her, elbows almost touching.

"Are you certain? This looks a lot like something that would get you in a lot of trouble." She asked, mostly for show, already knowing the answer.

"Are you lying just to unmask Battery?" He asked.

"No. I need to know her general personality, and everything else you're willing to give. Her face is most important, but a name might help too. "

A long silence, mostly split by shuffling and muttering.

"I'm certain, then. In which case, for this to proceed, you need to get out of here." Assault slowly announced, each word scraping out of his throat with something like apology and reluctance, Challenger wounding up so tight she looked an inch away from bolting.

Something was really off.

"...Elaborate." She cautiously said.

Insight's eyes were jerking back and forth from hero to hero, by her side. Then she gasped, sharp and small.

She turned her head to stare, an open question in her gaze.

Lisa, or Insight, put her hand on the revolver, angling herself and her hips like she was ready to jump up at any moment, eyes full of alarm.

"Despite my immense dislike for most of you, I suggest you all leave immediately. This is a trap. The local PRT Director decided that the Truce doesn't apply for minor threats-" Assault growled, "-and that neutrality can go fuck itself if he can bag all of you in exchange. This place is surrounded and there's a supporting team from Boston. They're going to gas this place any minute then pick off whoever doesn't fall unconscious. So," Assault continued, turning to look at her, "the only way I can cooperate with you is If I come with, and you don't get put in prison. Get moving."

She glanced at Lisa as the room erupted into angry swears and a rush of movement, everyone getting ready for a fight but also unsure of what to do, because there was only one entrance, and they were surrounded, apparently.

Lisa nodded, confirming her suspicions.

"Oh, and Arc is a plant. He's an underground Boston hero." Assault said, apathetic, and Arc stiffened in shock.

It earned the man no more than a few glances.

"Fuck do we do with the independents and the hero chick?" Hookwolf growled, razor spines swimming in and out of his clothes, and Lung grunted in agreement, still lounging in his chair, side-eyeing a very stiff, very worried Challenger.

She got up, straightening her glove.

"Challenger, Arc. You have five seconds to leave before we kill you both for being complicit in trampling the truce and disregarding neutral ground. Go." She growled, and neither of them had to be told twice, getting up and hurriedly rushing out under the barely restrained hostility of two dozen villains.

Challenger gave one last venomous glare to Assault as she passed through the threshold, who stoically stared ahead at the opposite wall, fists clenched.

Kaiser got up, adjusting his gauntlets, and with a deep breath of preparation, began to bark orders.

"Hookwolf, break through the wall when I say so. Krieg, up front, make a path-"

"We need to work together." She grit out. "We don't have time to panic or plan details. Bakuda, explode everything around us, we'll open a hole through the ceiling for you. Standard bombs, we need concussive force, not tinker stuff. We're surrounded by warehouses made of brick and concrete. The dust cloud should let most of us escape."

"Oh, I have molecule splitter bombs! They'll make the dust so thin it'll slip through the folds of your skin!" Bakuda cheered behind her voice changer, adjusting her grenade launcher.

She ignored her, glancing around the room.

"Either break through the encirclement with brute force or go for the sewer lines. Good luck, everyone. Prioritise. Lung, don't get captured." She rushed out, and turned to micromanage her own, hearing Kaiser begin to do the same behind her.

They didn't have much time, probably. Maybe ten, maybe forty seconds. How long would it take for the PRT to move in after Challenger walked out?

"Skidmark-" She turned, only to see the trio literally just run through the door outside without delay.

If the morons somehow didn't get caught, she'd eat her tongue. With a sigh, she turned back.

Lisa was frantically checking her stock of revolver cylinder clips and magical cards, and Rune was busy stomping around their side of the room, tapping everything she could see. Imp was fiddling with her knives, not trusting herself with a gun yet, apparently, looking at her for direction. Spitfire was kind of pacing, worried.

"Spitfire."

Emily's head jerked to her.

"Fine dust particles can be ignited, and explode. It's mostly sound and fire, not concussive force, but it'll do damage. Do not use your power unless we absolutely have to, and be aware it will probably hurt everyone in the dust cloud to varying degrees. Imp, I want you on sabotage. Steal foam guns, foam up alleys after us, disrupt the field, slash tires, break communications. Take some red cards from Insight, throw them at engine blocks and foam containers. Meet up at base after." She continued, as Imp rushed to Insight, shoving her hands into her pockets to fish out the red cards, putting most of them back as Insight ignored her, checking her tinkertech knife, a thing she took from Coil's men.

She grabbed Imp by the arm, dragging her close, bending down to her ear.

"Get Skidmark and Squealer's blood for me. Fifty grand." She whispered, shifting her voice to a lower, softer baritone that wouldn't carry, and Imp nodded.

She let her go, and-

... Wait, what had she been doing just now?

She shook her head.

"Rune." She called, and Rune turned to her.

"What?"

Assault's gaze finally broke and turned to Rune, just realising who she was, confused, glancing suspiciously between her and the Empire on the other side of the room.

"I want you to try and distract. Throw things through the dust, make it look like there's movement and fighting where there isn't anything. Worst case scenario, take red cards from Insight and glass the entire area. Better us than them. Insight, Coil, stick to me. I'll swap with someone more suited for this."

"Circus, focus on protecting Insight and Coil."

The- woman or man, whatever they were, nodded, taking out a giant sledgehammer out of their back pocket, somehow.

She turned to Assault, who was still in his chair.

Before she could ask exactly who they were facing, she heard a pwthoom sort of noise, followed by a click as a can-sized blur shot into the room through the door.

An invisible feeler slapped it out by sheer reflex, and half a second later, she saw it explode into a faintly blue-ish cloud of gas.

They were out of time.

"Bakuda!" She called, and Bakuda rushed to her.

"Rune, lift her up!" She called, and Rune nodded, sliding one of the tables to Bakuda, who jumped on it and stumbled as it rose with her on it.

Taylor quickly used an invisible tentacle to punch through the ceiling with a sharp diamond tip and undulated roughly like a drill, scattering dust, rock and grout all over Bakuda to widen the hole.

She pulled back, and the table rose, Bakuda squirming her upper half through the hole, grenade launcher first.

"Fire at will." She called, switching to the Rune of Resolve, locking in Guardian as her main keystone.

The only reply she got was a streak of maniacal, mechanical, unhinged cackling eerily similar to Jinx's, followed by a click, then the blink of an eye later, an eardrum-piercing explosion off in the distance, the faint sunlight coming in from outside the door being snuffed out by a cloud of dust and tumbling brickwork. The next was a strange sound like a pop, followed by a rush of scraping dust, like hearing sand fall.

One fucking day where nothing goes to shit, she inwardly pleaded, and switched Runes as Hookwolf swelled, and charged through one of the walls, the Empire rushing out after him, flanked by two walls of metal swords for protection, courtesy of Kaiser. They were followed by what few independents had come while Lung casually strolled out behind them, fists steaming as dust covered the entire complex like a shroud, seemingly unbothered.

In the distance, she heard a raging, crackling buzz of electricity only a split second before Hookwolf screamed, the sound echoing.

Her eye twitched, options flashing through her eyes, wondering how much to reveal, how to solve this.

Coil was on the laptop, and Lisa was on her phone, both likely contacting their men, not that she could hear them separate from the cacophony.

No solution she could come up with was good, only passable.

"They brought people specifically to counter the villains. You're the only group nobody knows anything about, really, so you have the best bet of getting out of here! Tell her to finish up and let's go!" Assault called out, barely audible through the explosions, shrieks of rending metal, and the sound of an entire complex of factories crumbling to pieces around them for cover, amped up, running in a tight circle.

A distinct click sounded out.

"I'm out of these nades! Can I flashboil these cocksuckers now?!" Bakuda called from up through the hole.

"Lower her."

The table lowered, and she grabbed Bakuda by the scruff of her neck, hauling her off the table and straightening her as she giggled, wiping her goggles of dust.

"Go with Lung. Lee should be here soon to extract you."

Bakuda nodded, and sprinted out of the hole in the wall, into an almost literal wall of roiling dust.

"Extract?" She asked.

"East, towards Captain's Hill." Coil called out, and she briefly oriented herself, and nodded.

She stepped out, breaking out into a hurried jog, and her crew plus Assault followed, trailed by a small mountain of hovering furniture parting the dust.

How intimidating, she snarked in her mind.

Chapter 45

Notes:

WE

GO

FASTER

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

There were many options to deal with this.

The problem was doing it in a way that didn't tip off Assault too much to the fact she was a single person, and not an entire shadowy organization of capes.

Thus, acting.

Thankfully, she was good at that.

What she wasn't good at, was putting espionage over her people.

She could get them all out, but in front of Uber and Leet and Assault and the retainer girls, she hadn't been sure how much she wanted to reveal before she saw how bad things were outside.

Unfortunately, they were worse than she expected and with every single thing Assault told her, the more she realized how much of a terrible decision it was to try and escape without revealing Ryze's existence or her ability to swap at a moment's notice.

The forces brought here were… not completely overwhelming, but it would be a bitter, bitter fight.

Practically every cape in Brockton and beyond was in this tight circle right now, and it was a wonder things hadn't exploded horrifically yet.

A flash of light drew her eyes in the far distance through the dust, barely visible, and she mentally noted Flashbang's power, meaning Brandish and the rest of New Wave were not that far away.

Shielder and Lazerdream were probably flying above to catch any aerial escapees…

According to Assault, it was insinuated by the current director that the perpetrators of these kidnappings were obviously the gangs, which was how he got them to agree to help.

The Wards were to provide distant support, all of them, meaning that Vista had turned the entire perimeter into a stretch of space at least half a kilometer long, all plain, barren concrete perfect for being picked off.

Then outside that perimeter was probably Flechette, two to three teenage Brutes, a tinker, a blaster, it just kept getting harder to escape, the more she thought about it.

This… wasn't as much an ambush as it was a literal killbox. They were powerful, yes, but they were caught off-guard, they had just split up, they still had no fucking clue how to fight like a team, aside from a single training session with only a few of her capes participating, and running away was going to be damn hard when there were flying heroes all over the place and helicopters if her eyes weren't fooling her, circling from far, far away.

Not a single person would likely be able to escape. They were cornered, so the only option was to group and push out in a single direction, go down through the earth , or teleport.

Ironically enough, the least resource-intensive of all the options seemed to be teleportation.

She switched to the Rune of Domination, directions flashing to life in her mind, her gait quickening as Relentless Hunter kicked in.

She couldn't see much, but the Rune of Precision had allowed her to see enough outlines and lights to get a half-decent grasp of what was going on.

Arc was stomping Hookwolf into the ground, somewhere to her right.

Above, something was flying around the edges of the dust cloud, but she could never make its shape out through the dust before it circled away. It was obnoxiously close.

Navigation wasn't easy on her group either.

They had to sprint through half-crushed layers of brick and steel, tumble down literal hills of dust so fine they had to hold their breaths and close their eyes just to pass, the girls making a line of hands.

And she also had to wrangle Rune into not flying up or out of the dust cloud, constantly.

Spitfire, Coil and Insight were all behind her in a tight grouping, Circus flitting about the formation with a giant road sign as a shield, wherever the hell she or he got it from, and Assault led from the front with her.

Assault only knew five of the heroes Boston had sent for assistance, and the only part of that sentence worried her.

A team of heroes was usually five, period. Not only five.

It was only a matter of time before fire got involved in this fight, she knew, but it was still sudden.

A flash of ear-rending noise and sound, light and a concussive force pressing in from all around her, the explosion pushing through entire sections of the rubble around them and making bricks and glass and random debris fling through the air and peppering everything.

It wasn't too powerful, it wasn't too hot or deadly, but it was the equivalent of having a dozen flashbangs suddenly detonate around you all at once.

She had the durability to hiss in pain and slam to a halt, boots sliding on dust for a moment, stiff with surprise.

The screams and grunts of her companions forced her head to jerk around, finding their somewhat organised group to now be a stumbling mess of bodies.

Her eyes immediately flit to what looked like Lisa's silhouette, writhing on the floor with her hands clamped over her ears and coughing her lungs out between grunts of pain, and she dashed over to her, momentarily ignoring the fact everyone was doing pretty much the same, even Assault.

She grabbed her shoulder, and Lisa startled before relaxing for a moment, hissing out a slurred mess of noises she couldn't understand, in between retching coughs.

She turned her on her back, feeling her chest burn, and tore one of Lisa's hands off her ear.

Red.

Ruptured eardrums, possibly damaged inner cochlea which meant Lisa probably wouldn't ever be able to even walk straight for the rest of her life, if she wasn't healed.

She felt her jaw clatter with rage.

She crushed it under a boot that had trudged through more corpses than ground, casting Heal on her without hesitation.

Just because she was here did not mean that she forgave the heroes about the what if, what if she hadn't been.

Most of the dust cloud seemed to have cleared.

Or ignited, rather.

She rose, fists clenched, and quickly grabbed Rune, who seemed to be ignoring her ears in favour of trying to claw her mask off.

She took her by the shoulder, yanked her up, and did it for her, ignoring her scrambling hands to look at the blood running down her face from her eyes, one running down her face in runny chunks, the other pulped in its socket, glass embedded into it.

The bad design decision of a rush job.

She hissed out a breath of mind-rending anger, stomping the emotion flat, throwing it in the furnace to cook, condense, boil her insides.

Espionage could go fuck itself.

She cast Heal on Rune too, and put her hands on the girl's cheeks, forcing her to look up at her, wide-eyed and panicked and terrified as glass literally squeezed past her eyes to tinkle down her face.

"WH-ahutg tcht efuck just-" Rune choke-wheezed, then paused, slapping at her ears in surprise.

She squeezed her, shaking her a little to get her to focus, which she did with a blood-eyed blink.

"Summoner healed you through me. Calm down, focus, breathe. No time." She said, curtly, slapped her shoulder lightly, and turned to watch Spitfire stumble up, eardrums clearly ruptured but thankfully coherent enough to stumble and cough and look around, despite the clear agony in her expression.

She could fight. Not well, but she could fight for as long as needed.

Circus was doing much the same.

Coil, the lucky bastard, seemed to have gotten the least of the damage, his full face-mask covering him despite its mildly singed status, reaching into his laptop bag to drag a pistol out of a pouch on its side.

She turned to see Assault, digging out his broken earphones with a grimace and confusion in his face.

He saw all that, didn't he?

She could honestly care less at the moment.

"Assault. Can you hear me?"

"Yeah! Yeah, I'm good." He called out, glancing around at the diminished dust cloud, and zipped to her side. "Hell're we supposed to do? You looked like you had a plan." He growled, ducking closer, glancing around the broken walls and scattered metal flooring forming jagged hills around them.

She nodded.

"We're holding our ground, right here. I'll be swapping positions with Summoner's private assets and associates who will gather some people from the other gangs, drag them here. Then I'll swap with another agent of ours and teleport everyone out. You all just need to hold out."

Assault paused.

"You know Strider?" He asked, surprised.

"No. We have a mass teleporter too. Look- just, hole up here. We're halfway through or so, we should be in the center. We have a minute to maybe group up and mount a defence. Rune and Spitfire can keep a basic force away, but Insight and Coil are Thinkers through and through so you will defend them. Don't get in the way, this is a fight for survival, and listen to them. I'll get others here to help. We're all getting out of here, and you won't get in the way or Heartbreaker's going to do whatever he wants with this goddamn city, understand me?" She snarled with a lot more force than necessary.

Assault nodded, likely used to it.

"Good. Be right back." She announced.

"Ren! We're using Blue Guy?!" Insight asked, from behind.

"Yes!" She called out, over the sound of screaming and gunshots and roars, and dashed into the scorched remnants of the cloud, before forcing herself to go invisible, bursting into fog and dashing up, towards Kaiser.

She got a first glimpse of the world outside the dust cloud, and cussed herself for her naivety again when she caught sight of something vaguely dragon-shaped zipping past, firing con-foam grenades down at an ongoing fight ahead of her.

Fucking Dragon was here. Why?

Probably for Greg, who seemed to be important for some damn reason, but why not help the largest fight this city has probably ever seen?

She spotted at least two of her craft zipping around.

There was no option for escape besides teleportation.

She dashed forward and ducked under a broken metal door the size of a truck, jutting out of the rubble, and switched to Twisted Fate, the Cardmaster, immediately throwing the fedora aside and inclipping her coat.

This would take a lot of energy to do, but seeing and hearing how severe this situation was left her with practically no good alternative.

With deft hands and some buckles unlatched, she dug out two packs of cards, hidden in her vest, pockets, and forearm pouches, and began to shuffle them, focusing her attention on nothing but herself, the cards, and the ever present, watchful eye of Lady Luck, magic gathering at her fingertips, a gentle pressure settling behind her eyes as if to watch.

Sound passed through her ears without being heard, wind and dust gently caressed her hands without being felt.

She closed her eyes, focusing, feeling for that unreachable something, that little glimmer of the spirit Twisted Fate had birthed from sheer belief, always looking over his shoulder, frowning… or smiling.

It wasn't quite a trance.

It was a mindset so specific she felt like she was slipping out of her skin and crawling into Tobias's instead, feeling memories fade and logic distort.

It was just one of those things she simply couldn't do without tearing down the barriers, uncomfortably wide.

A presence, looking over her shoulder.

A card flashed in her mind, another, a pattern forming, and her fingers turned into a blur, nails slipping into the stacks to punch them out, twisting them between her fingers and rearranging, piece by piece, a million mirrors that didn't exist.

It was tricky to control.

To think of the range, to think of how absorbed in it she wished to be.

Lady Luck smiled over her shoulder.

She opened her first two eyes with an exhale, irises shifting to a sun in eclipse, a flameless ring, seeing nothing before her yet everything around her.

A hundred more eyes opened, in the skies, in the streets, above fights and cars and every breathing thing within a mile with a tinny drawl of bronze scraping bronze, musical, almost.

Her perspective shifted, the cards fanning themselves out further than her hands as they disintegrated, twisting in spirals, an array of gold red and blue, writhing like liquids in and out of each other.

In the back of her mind, her perception squeezed, like a balloon trying to exit through a hole too small for it.

The eyes shifted, over a hundred, each her own.

Two hundred feet to the left, three eyes stared down at three capes, and the irises shifted with her attention, looking around, accessing the situation.

She could see over a hundred PRT agents, in vans, on foot, watched their movements from above.

Some looked up, unlike most, and met her eyes.

The news spread alarm throughout the groups, radio bleeps making more and more people look up at the flaming, singular eye hovering far above them like the sun, yet so close they could see its iris in detail, staring into their soul and fate, an illusion that never got further or closer no matter how much one flew at it, to the seeming frustration of one of Dragon's suits, keeping a distance and always focused on a single person.

The sudden disruption swept like a wave, the PRT's well-oiled machine groaning and creaking as its gears jammed with alarm.

Some PRT agents shot at her eyes, to no avail.

It was all an illusion, after all. Sleight of hand, magic and trickery.

She ignored them, for now, simply taking note of their movements, forming a battle map in her head.

Focusing on Kaiser, nestled in a mangled labyrinth peeking through the dust and smoke, a jagged trail of metal, something so twisted it was almost magical.

Knives, spikes and swords and thorns all seemed to punch out from the broken roof beams collapsed sideways on the tilted remnants of the building that was here, growing out of bricks and each other in stabbing lines, from the sides, above, from below, all half covered in shredded, smoking containment foam or melted into slag and charred black.

Below, Kaiser was on his back, one of the twins leaning on a wall of spikes for support nearby as she guarded from afar, seemingly trying to keep out of sight of Arc and his partner without abandoning Kaiser.

Whose eyes were closed, she could see.

She could guess it was Arc's work rather than the dust blast, judging by the spasms in his legs.

A miracle that Kaiser wasn't dead. Electricity damage was always a fine line between knocked out and dead. Fortune had smiled on him, for whatever reason.

Lady Luck gave in unexpected ways.

She observed Arc's companion, a blurry green figure she didn't know, seemingly dragging Arc behind him as he almost slid over everything in sight, a flightless hummingbird that seemed to defy the laws of physics, dragging Arc with an equal disregard, throwing him forward for moments at a time to slap one of Kaiser's walls.

Neither had yet noticed the eyes of fire looking down at them from the ashy dust above.

She watched Arc's electricity run down the line of swords and spikes, then form an arc from one specific sword to the other on the complete opposite end of the Valkyrie.

It barely missed her, a small branch of lightning popping out of the bolt to hit the woman's shoulder, making her cry out, spear arm throwing itself to the side, breaking and scattering swords, opening holes through the snail-like cocoon Kaiser had tried to make for them as the twin tried to out-manoeuvre the duo.

That cocoon was now a kill box.

To the side, Hookwolf seemed to be fistfighting in his human form against some utterly grotesque hulk of muscle that was purposely putting himself between Hook and Kaiser.

Hookwolf was shredding through him and constantly glancing back at Arc, not letting himself get too amped up, but he wasn't making much progress aside from a mountain of ever-increasing gore that showed no signs of slowing as his opponent kept regenerating.

Judging by the Lichtenberg scars that covered his entire burned, mangled torso, and were mostly still bleeding and smoking, he did not have a good time versus Arc.

Krieg was also knocked out and inside a bubble of containment foam up to his neck, because he couldn't redirect electricity either. This was such a good plan on the heroes' end that it was genuinely frustrating.

Half the Empire was countered by electricity.

Next to Krieg, only a dozen or so feet to the side, Victor was facing some thin girl with aviator goggles and brass knuckles that seemed to blink around in straight lines only, leaving red trails behind on every shift, but with far too much speed for him to do anything about. A strong Mover versus a regular human?

Skill did not matter there. Victor was going to go down soon, and it was ridiculous that he was even still managing to defend himself at all.

To the far right, Alabaster was being dragged around and away from Victor by what looked like a purple cloud of arms and grasping fingers, purple-black and swirling around him to haul him through the rubble as he screamed and shot and stabbed at it, to no real effect.

Likely being dragged off to Clockblocker.

The cloud seemed to spot the eye above as it focused on him, and seemed to startle and freeze for a moment, before being reminded of its captive, and continuing to drag him off with even more frantic movements.

Crusader, to the left, was being hammered by some Tinker that seemed to fire green shockwaves at him with a tube-looking gun, slamming into his spearmen and either bursting them like bubbles of forcing them to do nothing but form a meatshield wall to protect him, and a couple dozen feet behind Kaiser's panicked cocoon of steel.

Fifty feet away, within a complex maze of half-standing support pillars and I-beams, the only duo that was seemingly winning their duel, Stormtiger and Cricket, dancing around each other like they were born for it, fighting three capes and not losing yet.

Their opponents were a Boston hero she didn't know, Miss Militia, and Challenger.

A bad matchup there as well. If Miss Militia stopped holding back on lethal force, she could kill both of them by herself in a couple seconds. Cricket was good, but she wasn't dodge literal power-aimed bullets good, and Stormtiger, the fuckhead, was still shirtless.

This was too… efficient, too organised, and too well-matched. The heroes had to have Thinkers directing this or some kind of method to see through the dust and smoke-

Tinkers. Armsmaster and Dragon and Kid Win and probably another one or two she had no idea about.

Of course a bunch of Tinkers would have a way to look through dust.

They likely did not have a way to look through real darkness, however.

To that end, the eyes hovering over Alabaster and the cloud dragging him off sharpened.

Reaching for her small but powerful catalogue of summoner's spells, she cast 'Ignite' on a hero for the first time, the cloud of arms bursting into orange-white flame with no inbetween shades, rending through flesh and soul.

It puffed into a lanky human figure in long, flowing fabrics which howled in agony, rolling down and away from Alabaster, then burst into the same slug-like cloud of arms and fingers, scrambling away and flickering back with intermittent screams, rolling to try and put out flame that simply did not need oxygen or space to burn.

Unless the hero was incredibly weak, that wouldn't kill them. Certainly leave them horribly burned, possibly disabled, and near comatose for a couple weeks from having a good chunk of their soul burned, but death? Unlikely.

A proportionate response to breaking the Truce, in her opinion.

Alabaster immediately scrambled upright and started mag-dumping the cloud, firing pretty much blindly as he backpedalled into a pile of bricks, missing almost every shot, stumbling his way back over the jagged mess of bent metal beams, and towards Victor.

She turned back towards Arc and the person dragging him around, seemingly granting him the same immunity to physics he enjoyed.

They were luring the twin away from Kaiser. Slowly, but surely.

The eye following one of the Dragoncrafts confirmed her suspicion. Dragon was going to try and swoop down to grab Kaiser right in the middle of fighting. It was a good plan.

Arc wasn't the real problem. The twin could probably reach him without the Mover.

She was done being gentle with traitors, unfortunately for them. Anything short of death was permitted.

For the heroes, at least.

She switched to the Rune of Inspiration, for the Unbound Spellbook keystone.

Another cast of 'Ignite', and the mover immediately jerked with a strangled cry, letting go of Arc and tumbling into a wild spin as he lost his footing, crashing through a line of thin swords and doing much the same as her other victim, with more screaming and fleeing.

Arc, without the immunity to physics, immediately crashed to the cracked floor, breaking his ankle on an upturned piece of concrete, then skipped off the ground once, like a rock thrown at a calm laketop, and slammed shoulder-fist into a giant concrete block with a gut-wrenching series of snaps, a strangled sound like a dying pig leaving him.

Fenja or her twin, whoever it was, sprinted forward with deceptive speed, rushing towards Arc, and then stopped herself, on a hair trigger, spear ready but not executing the man yet as he rolled onto his stomach, crawling away with a dangling arm and coughing blood.

That was a serious injury. Hopefully he made it to the hospital.

She'd heal him if she wasn't sure he'd get right back to trying to fight them. Besides, better uses for it.

Her people came first. They always did.

Lung seemed to be attracting most of the heavy hitters at the moment, thankfully. A seemingly melee-focused Dragoncraft was busy wrestling with him to the best of its abilities, while Dauntless, Armsmaster, Brandish, and two Boston capes with Blaster powers utterly pummelled him from the ground.

Bakuda was captured, weakly trying to struggle in her cuffs, unharmed as three men dragged her away, half-sprinting.

She watched Lady Photon, Shielder, and Lazerdream, all rush towards the twin that was carrying both Krieg's containment foam ball and Kaiser's limp body under each arm, the Valkyrie sprinting blindly towards where she could hear Hookwolf snarling and shouting in rage at the futility of his duel.

New Wave was going to be a problem soon.

On the outer edge of the dust cloud, near the vacant low buildings that had collapsed and usually through them, Lung could barely swing a fist without losing it, and it was mostly Dragon's suit that kept him alive, funnily enough, by at least forcing the heroes to restrain some of their fire. He was more of a slug with a tail and a single, clawing arm, the rest ripped or blasted off.

What little leverage he could get was usually cut short by Dauntless's Arclance, the man darting in and out like a rapier, and just as precise.

Lung wasn't ever going to win that fight.

She just had to make sure he didn't lose either.

She cast Heal on him, twice, the burst of green healing magic momentarily blinding half his attackers as his wings returned to him, charred flesh replaced by a layer of fresh, gleaming silver scales. He nearly doubled in size, even if his three missing arms weren't fully recovered, stopping at the elbows.

Dragon's suit wasn't expecting that, and with the moment of surprised ceasefire, Lung finally, finally, used his goddamn limbs correctly, wings flapping with blurry snaps, kicking up enough dust and debris to buy him another second to bisect Dragon's suit, using his arms and tail to jerk himself around, snapping his four-pronged jaws around its neck while breathing out pure plasma, nearly twice the size of the gigantic mech, claws so bright orange it almost hurt to look at.

His tail and legs wrapped around the lower body of the suit, and she almost felt proud of the fact he actually listened to her advice from their sparring as she watched the suit tear apart in a spew of sparks and snapping wires, utterly deafening.

She only got a glimpse of something red and biological within the suit, before Lung's hind claws scraped through it, practically vaporising it.

She froze.

That- that wasn't Dragon, was it? There was no way. Biotinkering? A Tinker collaboration, maybe?

It… made more sense than Dragon ever putting herself in such personal danger. With a sigh of relief, she relaxed.

Dauntless crashed into Lung's back, the Arclance slamming through his spine with a horrid crunch, and Lung's lower body went limp as his spine was severed.

The eye above the Dragon suit dissipated in a wave of flame-like distortion.

Lung tossed the head and neck towards one of the Blasters with a twist of his neck, and for the second time in the past couple months, it was up to Armsmaster to hold him back as Dauntless darted off, back to the sky, dodging a pillar of plasma by the skin of his teeth as Lung roared.

His head jerked down, blue-orange plasma cutting a line through half-erected walls and levelling metal beams like a flaming line through mist, piercing and melting ancient machinery, removing half of the heroes' cover in one swoop and narrowly missing one of the Blasters in the back.

Armsmaster's odd ceramic umbrella was incredibly effective in blocking Lung' pillar of plasma, but he couldn't advance under it.

Manpower did it for him, lunging in with an olympic leap, fist wound back.

The fight fully resumed as Lung finally, finally fucking dodged for once in his life, ducking his head down under the strike, grabbing Manpower's foot with his mouth, then whipping him off like an arrow, disappearing into the distance and likely smashing through a dozen walls before he came to a stop.

With a scraping series of popping grinds, Lung's lower back jolted.

His legs, back to full function, clawed at the ground as he launched himself forward, feinting a strike against Armsmaster, who suddenly seemed incredibly confused, having been moving for a parry to a strike that never came, and instead slamming into a wall, peppering the entire area with flying, charred bricks.

Feeling oddly proud of Lung for listening to her back in that warehouse, she considered Crusader, who was actively retreating using two of his ghosts, the others forming a meat wall behind him for the blasts as the Tinker sprinted after him.

It was awkward, but neither could do much to the other, not like this.

Oni Lee entered her range, and, predictably, left a line of disintegrating clones as he gunned it for where Lung was, teleporting straight into a group of advancing PRT agents armed with giant tanks of containment foam, pins pulled.

The resulting explosion from his clone detonating himself made two of her eyes hovering over the agents fade and flicked off like a flame along with their life, but she didn't have the time or care to think about it at the moment.

Much as she wanted to avoid this outcome, this… this was war now, with how things were going in the Bay.

She watched many, many strangely convenient malfunctions and accidents occur, with other sets of eyes. Tanks bursting, vehicles' engines spontaneously exploding, PRT agents getting shot in the vests from absolutely nowhere, halting advance to move for cover, all in her favour.

Oni Lee teleported into the blaster's zone in the back, and almost immediately took out one Blaster with a knife to the leg and a bullet to the shoulder, point blank as usual.

Non-lethal, thankfully.

She dismissed that fight, for a moment.

Uber and Leet were caught, seemingly surrendering, but she hardly cared about them.

Ironically enough, it looked like Squealer's gigantic, trashy Humvee had more tricks than the heroes expected, and the Merchants would be one of the few to escape, considering their complete tank of a vehicle was also in the eye of an almost literal tornado. Likely the power of the cape that had come with them, another unexpected factor.

Night was… completely unable to use her power, what with the giant eye hovering over her.

She dismissed that particular eye, and hoped Dorothy wouldn't kill too many PRT agents in the interim.

Fog was heading for… the New Wave fliers that were just above where the Valkyrie twin was sprinting below, directions fed to them through their earphones by Dragon as to where to go and where to drop.

She could see Fog's fortune, near and short, a burrowed thing like destiny on her tongue, telling her of what was to come in his path.

He would kill them all in a second, before immediately going up to find and kill Vista.

A strategic, logically perfect move that she could not allow.

She had a bit of time before he got anywhere close to them, however. Shielder was slow in the air, but Fog was slow.

A hero she vaguely remembered from the PRT office bombing was called forward, jogging towards Arc, covered in pure metal with two giant metal hammers hanging off his hips.

Adamant, she believed.

Nexus' "main" group had kept a low profile, but eventually, Dragon seemed to direct a couple teams towards the strangely stationary group of capes.

She couldn't overhear well, but lip-reading was an option.

Gravity, Lantern, a squad of PRT agents, Triumph, and Weld headed for her people.

They could handle them without her intervention, she assumed, or at least stall long enough.

She spent another second checking, watching more bizarre happy accidents occur, watched Oni Lee and Lung slowly even the playing field as Lung's shoulders started inching towards twenty feet tall and being almost thrice as long, entirely draconic by now, barely being held back.

Another Dragoncraft descended towards Lung, while the last one continued moving in circles above.

She could guess that it was acting as the heroes' eyes.

Thoughts in order, she tapped her foot on the cracked ground, cards falling into place in a perfect circle around it, from the twisting aether, and she stepped into the circle as almost two hundred feet away, another circle formed in front of the Valkyrie twin.

Like sinking into something, all at once, a simultaneous sensation through every molecule of herself, she blinked.

Lady Luck's influence faded the moment she teleported, faced with a bone-tired, injured twin giantess, diligently holding her teammates under her arms, a wary glare directed towards her for only a moment before it faded, replaced by a sigh of relief and sagging shoulders.

"Run that way until you see our crew, join them and hold your ground. As fast as you can. Go. If you have juice left after that, try to regroup with Hookwolf." She said, pointing towards Lisa and the rest with her left arm.

The twin didn't even nod, simply turning, and setting on a dead sprint.

She picked Evelynn, bursting into smoke, and dashed up and towards a struggling Hookwolf and Alabaster.

After teleporting almost two dozen people, far enough to be able to scatter to safety…

She wouldn't have much if any juice left.

It inwardly enraged her, to think she could have killed Heartbreaker by now, only to be stopped by a betrayal from the heroes, breaking the only rule she considered as almost holy.

Because if the 'Truce' could go fuck itself, who the absolute hell would ever go to an Endbringer fight if they weren't a hero? And villains outnumbered the heroes almost three to one.

What the ever-living fuck was Tagg thinking?

Naive, short-sighted fucking scum. She should have thought ahead, to try and keep Piggot in that chair.

She flew up, and Fog's faint, thin, smoke-like Breaker form came into view.

She reached for his mind.

"Do not kill anyone. Back up for now. Defend ours if they're about to die. This is Renata, in case it wasn't clear."

Fog's form paused, then turned around and flew down, languidly.

She turned, and headed for Hookwolf's spot.

The fight came into sight.

Hookwolf had taken the lack of Arc in sight as an opportunity to shift back into full wolf form, and was keeping his ground against Adamant and the ten foot tall ball of mangled flesh that couldn't even be identified as a human anymore, while Alabaster was held up by a containment foam grenade having swallowed his foot and pinned it to the ground, having a shootout with the distant PRT agents that had fired it, dying over and over but preventing them from trapping Hookwolf too with sheer suppressive fire.

She switched to Nocturne, The Eternal Nightmare, one of the three demons in her arsenal, and prepared herself for a headache.

Her blades scraped out of their sheaths like the rasp of a dying prophet, the sin of patricide, the darkness of a world without sun.

She reached out, flying upwards.

"Darkness…" She whispered with Nocturne's voice, a hissing rasp, calling it forth, something like a prayer but too disconnected from anything holy to be such.

Everyone heard it, she knew.

That was the point.

Fear was a weapon, and light was her enemy.

From dust and every shadow, misty darkness bellowed, blocking out the sun, consuming everything in a tidal wave within mere moments, leaving nothing but pitch black darkness, roiling, part of her, wide enough to brush against the distant, stretched space that Vista was holding.

And in it, she felt hundreds of minds freeze, panic, retreat, all of the above and more.

Miss Militia switched to lethal ammunition, and began to blindfire towards Stormtiger and Cricket, likely believing it was only affecting them, or simply deciding she wasn't willing to risk it.

Stormtiger took a bullet to the stomach, and crumpled with a cry that the darkness swallowed.

He'd live.

The Dragon suit above tried to get closer, shining a searing light into the cloud, to no avail.

In here, no sound nor light that she did not wish could ever penetrate.

Almost the polar opposite of Twisted Fate's most tiring ability.

Lung grappled blindly with the second Dragoncraft suit for another moment, before it managed to wriggle around from under him, onto his back, and blindly fly up and away, smashing through a bricked wall in the process, leaving Lung tense and wary in utter silence and darkness.

New Wave dipped into her cloud, wary but curious and determined.

She reached into the Valkyrie twins' mind with Nocturne's claws, a cold, scraping caress against their scalp, and drank in the woman's spine-bending shiver.

"Keep going. Same direction as before."

The darkness parted before her, little fissures in the cloud of darkness allowing the barest hints of light to peek through, showing the way.

The twin redoubled her sprint without question.

She turned her attention to Hookwolf, and Alabaster as she floated in place, being little more than a pair of eyes, one and the same with the darkness.

There was little reason to go for deceit with people that had seen her swapping Legends and sparred with her. If Heartbreaker somehow took them, they already knew too much. So she eased up on it, a little.

"'Sam' speaking. Follow the path, we're regrouping. Another associate will teleport us out. Renata is fetching them." She explained in Nocturne's grating rasp of a voice, and parted the darkness in a careful line between Alabaster and Hookwolf.

"Free him and run."

Hookwolf took the order with a snarl and shaking spines of metal, bounding towards Alabaster, splattering bits of gore and leaving a trail of blood. He stopped next to him, then cut off his teammates' entire leg with a karate chop made of razors, before dragging him out of the containment foam and punching Alabaster's chest inwards with a paw-like fist the size of the man's torso.

Alabaster choked, died.

Revived, whole, his foot free and whole.

Hook grabbed him, and threw the scruff of his suit into his mouth.

She parted the darkness, showing him the way, and he galloped forwards, Alabaster dangling from his mouth.

She wormed her way into the minds of the ABB.

Bakuda was stripped of her weapons, and in cuffs, in the back of a PRT van, the door not yet closed.

She opened a line between Oni Lee and Bakuda, darkness parting, just barely, a crack.

"'Sam' speaking. Follow the path, it leads to Bakuda. Free her and follow the path back, we're grouping up to teleport out. Do as I say, we don't have time."

Oni Lee teleported off like a strobe light, to whatever ground her path let him see, swiftly closing in on Bakuda.

Cricket and Stormtiger, the latter of who was clutching his stomach, controlling his breathing, forehead against the ground as he waited, were as calm as could be in his situation, Stormtiger doing some kind of meditative breathing.

Smart man, Stormtiger. A calm heart would slow the bleeding enough to save him.

Slithering into Cricket's head, she cleared another roiling space in her darkness, enough for her crouched form to see Stormtiger, laying on the floor to her left.

The woman observed him for a second, before crouch-walking to him, tapping his shoulder. He groaned, slowly shuffling his limbs to assumedly try and get up.

"Melody, this is 'Sam'. Storm took a bullet to the stomach. Grab him and follow the path. We're all teleporting out."

Cricket yanked Storm up by the arm, wrapping his arm around her shoulders, and with practised ease, both positioned themselves so Stormtiger could lay across Cricket's shoulder, one arm and leg hooked over her arms, with enough leverage to keep the wound pressed.

To Lung, she simply showed the way.

"This is Renata. Regrouping to teleport out instead. Run to where I show you. Be quick, this is tiring. Good job on following my tips from the sparring session."

He snarled at her, mind alight with hatred and magma-hot fury, but after a second of huffing and puffing, turned, and slunk forward like a frantic centipede, shrinking rapidly, eyeing the shapeless shapes twisting within the darkness warily as he ran.

She reached for Night, a grotesque spider seemingly made of slick branches and claws and horrific in appearance, and Fog, lost in the cloud and rapidly rising out of it.

"Fog. Stop. Renata here. Follow the open path. Night, do the same. We're grouping up to teleport out."

Crusader was huddled in the middle of his ghosts, wary and twitchy as could be.

"This is Renata. Move, we're gathering in a single place to teleport out. Don't worry about the Tinker, just follow this path, it leads to Victor, then us. His leg is broken, and probably his shoulder too. Carry him down the path."

Crusader took a moment to process, but nodded, and as the darkness parted before him, his ghosts all quickly set themselves to grabbing his arms and flying him towards Victor, who was panting and barely standing upright, his opponent a mere four feet away, neither aware of the other after shifting about so much.

As Oni Lee slunk past the frozen, terrified PRT agents huddling on the floor next to the PRT carrier, rifles twitching and aiming at nothing in the darkness, he quickly began working on Bakuda's cuffs with her instructions.

Taylor reached for her main team, parting the darkness around them in a wide berth, letting a bit of light peek through her body to assuage their paranoia.

Lisa wasn't too fussed, simply staring up and raising a brow as if to ask 'is this you'?

"Renata speaking. Wait tight, do not be alarmed. Empire and ABB incoming. We're all teleporting out. No friendly fire."

Now, to simply wait, and get information in the meantime, worming into the minds of everyone within her, feeding on their growing paranoia and panic as the darkness refused to budge and every brush of wind sent them spinning, ready to attack.

Their fears stood out stark and alluring, tempting, in the void.

Lady Photon's biggest fear was losing her family, and so was Manpower's.

The rest of New Wave had already flown up and away from the cloud, her insides so to speak, and so, she could only guess.

Miss Militia's biggest fear was a place of broken morality, law, and chaos, a hellhole, a warzone, a field of corpses cooking in the sun under the uncaring eyes of the tormented.

Armsmaster's biggest fear…

Was to be unrecognised. To fail. To fade into history without achieving anything worthwhile.

Something about Armsmaster was ticking her off, the wrong way. She could never be sure if he was Mastered, or if he was just doing nonsensical things for a goal she had no clue of, but the man was odd.

Greg being a prime example.

Why hunt him so zealously, almost ignoring commands, if he wanted recognition and distinction? Nobody even knew Greg existed beyond him, Dragon, and a couple Government officials. This? This was his chance to shine, which he did by constantly getting in Lung's face and not dying until Lung decided to use her tactics instead of his own, so it made sense, but everything about him was weirdly shifty, aside this bout of normalcy…

She perused through them all with half a mind, even her own people's.

Lisa's biggest fear was to lose someone she loved through her own actions.

Oni Lee had no fears, not really. Just a mild, biological alarm, related to death.

Bakuda's biggest fear was losing her approval and disappointing her.

Coil's biggest fear was one he lived every day, subjugated and enslaved, but he lacked the ability to be horrified of it, her work at play. A dull, frozen thing.

Assault's biggest fear was the thought of undeserved, excessive suffering, to himself or others.

Lung's was to be powerless, helpless, fight against something impossible to beat.

… Is that why he refused to fight Endbringers before she came along?

Starting to feel oddly… skeevy, about perusing through the mind of her minions, she pushed aside the rest.

The Valkyrie twin got to Lisa's side unharmed, and Lisa quickly got to work cutting Krieg out of the containment foam with her tinkertech knife.

Lung arrived shortly after, now a mere humanoid at nine feet tall, scales retreating, still steaming.

He sat down quietly, eyeing Lisa's lower half.

"Give me your pants." He grunted, and Lisa glanced up from where she was cutting the containment foam, then down at Lung's slowly regressing form.

The harness technically held everything she needed, the pants were just there to differentiate from her old costume a bit more.

"Dickwad." Lisa growled, and to her surprise, took a moment to wiggle her pants down over the silk bodysuit, and kicked them over to Lung, who began ripping the tubes open so they could fit him, before resuming on Krieg as the Valkyrie twin sat on the floor next to her, shrunken down to normal size, panting and trying to compose herself.

She really had to learn the twins' names and differentiate them.

Crusader floated into sight from the path open in the hovering darkness, his ghosts dumping him and Victor on the floor gently.

Victor grunted, and carefully laid himself flat on the floor, holstering his gun at last and digging out a small compact medical kit with unerring precision, one handed.

"Anyone need emergency medical attention?" Victor asked, and nobody replied. "Really? That's surprising." He forced out, light hearted, pain getting the better of him for a moment, and then he started assembling the folding splint kit, stiff with pain all the way through.

Assault started looking quite confused at the general lack of venom between her people and the Empire, as well as the lack of arguing or questions, but she couldn't be arsed to wrangle everyone around to keep up this charade the entire time they'd work together. She'd just get him to sign a blood-magic NDA of sorts, later.

'Heal' came off cooldown, and she immediately cast it on Stormtiger as they neared, whom jerked in surprise at feeling a bullet be forced out of his body, as well as the small lightshow.

Cricket put him down, and he checked himself over, wiping at the blood on his abs to check for a hole, before shaking his head, and jogging ahead.

Cricket followed, and within a few more seconds, they walked into the dome of half-lit rubble housing her people, both exhausted, collapsing on a pile of crushed bricks like it was the most comfortable bed in the world.

Lee took the longest, because his teleporting didn't take people with him, and Bakuda was whining that someone had thrown some kind of blast at her that made her feel weaker than a toddler, so he had to carry her halfway across the inner length of the perimeter.

The blaster responsible might be one of the Blasters shooting Lung, maybe? Why did their blasts not do the same thing to Lung, though? Could they control it?

Regardless, Oni Lee had to carry her on his back and run the entire six or seven hundred feet to their end of the path, which took an exhausting five tense minutes.

In the meantime, Fog and Night strolled in, completely unharmed and fresh aside from some burns and sweat, prompting a couple looks of jealousy or accusation, she couldn't tell.

She switched to the Rune of Inspiration once, just to heal Kaiser to make sure he wouldn't die of heart arrhythmia from the shock he took, and mentally apologised to Spitfire, who was looking utterly miserable as she continued to cradle her bleeding ears, eyes scanning the dust and the darkness beyond it, tears running down her face despite the tough expression she put on her face.

As soon as Oni Lee dumped Bakuda on the floor and stumbled forward, panting for breath himself, she prepared herself, reaching into all their minds as she tried to calculate how long it would take to form a circle large enough for all of them.

"I'm going to swap out with someone else. This cover will vanish, and the heroes will be able to locate us for a bit. Hold out for maybe fifteen seconds, up to thirty, and we'll all get out of here. Gather tight in the circle, it will be visible. In ten seconds from now, we're swapping." She informed them, unable to change her voice from Nocturne's spine-scraping rasp.

Just to be sure she forgot nobody, she did a quick headcount.

Rune, Insight, a silently suffering Circus, Spitfire, Coil, Assault, Lung and Bakuda and Oni Lee, Kaiser, Victor, Krieg, Hookwolf and Cricket and Stormtiger, the twin, Crusader, Victor, Alabaster, Fog, Night… and Assault, determined and completely unbothered by the villains around him.

They were all here, in varying degrees of injury and exhaustion, but alive and present.

With a deep breath, she descended as a cloud of smoke with two white eyes, and swapped to Ryze, the Rune Mage, arguably the person that started all of this, in the middle of the dome.

The darkness flicked out like it was never there, gone in a millisecond, prompting hisses and flinches as people's eyes got used to the light, shining through the somewhat-settled dust by now.

"Console? Any updates?" Vista asked, fists clenched, staring at the almost apocalyptic cloud of darkness that seemed to roil and shift in place.

"Negative." A blank voice replied, a different one, again, despite it being the twentieth time she asked.

The cloud was so dark it was hard to tell anything about it. It felt like a hole in reality, sucking her gaze in, and if she focused too hard, she could hear voices, screaming in anger, faded and almost imagined, non-physical.

It creeped her out, it pissed her off, but mostly, she was worried about the people inside the fucking thing.

The plan was perfect. They had so much more manpower than they ever had before, she was given a huge role in the attack, AND Tagg had overrun Piggot's benching to get them all a role in perimeter guard.

Then things just started going wrong for no damn reason.

Challenger and Arc ran out of the building, dead-sprinting, and start calling on the radio that Assault fucking betrayed them.

She couldn't wrap her head around that. It made no fucking sense. His probably-wife got kidnapped, and he betrays them for the villains?

It was obvious the villains had done it all, but he went with them?! Did they blackmail him?!

She couldn't understand what the fuck was going on there, but it didn't matter at the moment. Her orders were to keep a wide, stretched area around the perimeter, and she did that. The villains had a bit of warning, but it had been less than a minute-

Then Armsmaster's canister got shot into the building, straight back out, and five seconds later she watched an entire complex of factories get turned to rubble with bizarre explosions, cone-shaped, straight lines, even just circular ones that turned everything to a fine powder that seemed to fly on the slightest breeze, the buildings falling like dominos, replaced by jagged rubble and a dust cloud so thick and tall and wide it entirely swamped the actual factory complex.

All of a sudden, the easy operation got a little harder.

But it was fine. They had the upper hand, and her binoculars were now goddamn useless but it was fine, because they were completely and utterly surrounded and outmatched.

Judging from what scarce reports she could catch from Console, directed at others, things were going well. They were going great, for a bit.

It was almost enough to make her feel better about being complicit in breaking the fucking Truce, but this was the best thing that had probably ever happened to the Bay.

Then Lung threw fire and made something in the dust detonate. It didn't seem to do too much damage, but it was loud and bright and sudden.

Still, things were fine. Minimal injuries, considering they were all wearing good ear protection.

They stopped being fine when people started screaming on the radio about burning eyes in the sky, and things got chaotic really fast because nobody outside the rough perimeter could see them, but everyone inside was saying there was a gigantic flame-like orange eyeball giving them a death-stare, up in the sky. Dragon could see it, from each of her suits, apparently.

Then Djinn suddenly started screaming over the radio, just- just howling, begging for help, when just a moment ago, he was being all cocky about how easily he could take Alabaster.

She didn't know what happened there, or if he was okay, but he was cut off by Console, told he was getting an evac team, and Djinn didn't open the radio again.

Slipstream eventually confessed, panting, that she somehow couldn't quite get Viktor knocked out, because the bastard was apparently just that good from stealing people's skills, and he was actively taking hers away.

He was beat up to shit, but standing, and Slipstream was exhausted, and he would win a war of attrition if it dragged on further, progressively sapping the woman's skills until she would stumble over her own feet.

Soon after, Crossfade followed in much the same way as Djinn, just screaming like he was being skinned alive, a sound so horrid she could hear it echoing in her ears even now, sobbing for help.

She wasn't told what happened there, no details, no nothing. She heard one of the numerous Console officers tell Crossfade to run to the perimeter if he could, and that he would send a medic team, and that was it.

Her role was specific, and Console rarely let people know everything, to keep them focused.

Console operators also had heart monitors on all of them, but they just didn't tell them what they saw. Still, she chose to believe they were alive.

Dragon barked into the radio that the eyes in the sky were likely able to light people on fire that they couldn't put out, and she could feel morale drop as horror rose, nevermind her own sudden nervousness.

Thankfully, she didn't see a single eye above her.

Still if Dragon was right, that was insane. That was- some Slaughterhouse Nine tier power. Eyes that people in a certain range could only see, that could selectively light you up like a match?

Gah… just… horrible.

A mere moment after that, Arc pressed the override button, choking and asking for help on all channels.

All in a minute of each other.

Who the hell was doing this? What happened? Was it Nexus? They were the only ones who were too hidden and new to know much about.

They didn't seem brutal enough for that, considering they were almost… vigilante-like in their recent actions against the ABB and Merchants, but on the other hand… the heroes, hell, Vista herself, they broke the Truce. It was entirely likely that they were trying to kill them in retaliation.

Which… would be justified, honestly, because they were breaking the Truce for god's sake and the last cape to do that was found with his guts spread over a balcony, but it was a worrying thought to have.

But this was justified, wasn't it? Was it justified?

Tagg said the villains were just trying to hide behind the Truce to stall for time and leverage their hostages to do so, and she kind of believed him. That sounded like exactly the kind of shit a villain would pull.

And the only thing about as scummy as breaking the Truce, was trying to abuse it for personal gain.

Too complicated, she decided eventually, and turned her brain off, focusing on keeping her power active.

Unfortunately, things kept going to shit.

Vehicles would randomly just- fucking explode. She saw it happen three times. Containment foam tanks? Poof, everywhere, blocking entire sections of the factory complex, or at least forcing people to take the long way around the hundred foot wall of foam.

Dragon requested someone help Arc, as he was 'disabled', and Adamant said something about going to find him, and two minutes later, said he was engaging Hookwolf with Tank.

The fact Hookwolf wasn't being melted into the floor by Arc meant that things got a lot more difficult for Tank in the meantime, but he was keeping up.

At least Lung was being curb stomped by all the heavy hitters. She got a really nice view of it too, and he was large and loud enough for her to not even need her binoculars and power to watch closely, despite the smoke and dust.

He was being curb stomped, until he wasn't.

She blinked, and then there was just an fading afterlight of green motes of light, fading into air, and Lung was nearly whole again, thrashing and roaring loud enough to rattle the rooftop under her despite being a quarter mile away.

Dragon's suit got shredded pretty quickly after that stumble in momentum.

And then Armsmaster suddenly did a mistake that she had never seen him do before, being launched through a wall by Lung, unharmed but disoriented.

A moment later, he opened the radio to say that Lung was changing his fighting style and his prediction algorithm was stuttering, which explained a lot but god damn it! They had been so close!

Oni Lee arrived right after, teleporting a couple rooftops down, and she cursed, ducking down, peeking over the edge to watch him teleport right next to Carnot and damn near shoot his shoulder off while a clone of his blew up a PRT squad moving in to contain Lung.

Cohesion fell from there. Oni Lee and Lung, fighting together again, whatever the hell had happened during their last fight? It got a lot harder to keep either of them in line.

They probably still couldn't win, but the longer Lung stayed in the fight the harder it got, and he was fucking huge already, a literal four-armed, four-winged dragon covered in silver and fire.

She felt an odd sense of deja vu from a couple months ago, when the Undersiders got wiped. Lung and Armsmaster squaring off while everything went to shit around them…

Hopefully Armsmaster wouldn't get nearly ripped in half again, because this time, Panacea wasn't around to pull his guts back in and somehow glue him back together.

A minute later, in the span of only a second, a gargantuan, pitch black cloud seemed to bleed into reality from below, rising and consuming everything, and the radio channel she was on, so full of reports and orders, went completely silent.

And what could she do but wait here? Nothing.

Thankfully, it didn't seem lethal. Most of New Wave came out of it, as did Dauntless, and then one of Dragon's suits, but their reports weren't comforting.

That thing apparently blocked everything to do with senses, or close enough to it.

The agents on the edge that ran back outside confirmed it.

So, they set up along the perimeter, waiting. The villains had nowhere to go.

They couldn't fly up aside from Purity, who Challenger said wasn't here, and Rune, who was not exactly a good flier, Dragon had underground seismic monitors if they somehow tried to dig down or go through some strange method, and they couldn't walk out either.

With the exception of the damn Merchants because that gigantic jeep was goddamn unstoppable with Skidmark on it accelerating the entire thing as well as making the machine gun on its back into the equivalent of a high-caliber naval turret.

And the tornado around the entire thing made it really hard to approach, and Weld couldn't catch up to it enough to glue himself to it.

Almost ten minutes had passed before the entire cloud of eerie, otherworldly darkness just… poofed out.

It revealed the battlefield with much more clarity than before, the dust having settled, the fires guttering out.

It was a rather… awe-inspiring sight, in a horrifying way.

So much sheer, unbridled destruction that had she not seen the before, she could never picture there being entire factories in the center of their encirclement, just a desolate stretch of metal spikes, melted asphalt and charred bricks, amidst piles of sand and giant splatters of containment foam, scattered around.

Her awe was cut short by a sudden beep in her ear.

"The villains are all gathered somewhere in the center! Look for the flare!"

Said flare immediately fired, pale blue.

"An unknown cape is doing something to the ground underneath them and it's glowing! It might be a portal!" Dragon rushed out, and she could spot the moment the confusion faded from all the capes, and they dashed towards the center, Armsmaster firing two grappling hooks off his forearms and extending something like a heely wheel from his feet to slingshot himself forward like a car, skillfully throwing himself around craters and zipping forward.

The fliers moved as fast as they could, whoever was slow being left behind.

The rest simply ran as fast as they could.

Seeing as the perimeter was now officially worthless, apparently, she let up, letting it snap back to normal space, and reached, further than she usually let herself in the presence of the Protectorate.

One step, and she was an entire three block's worth of distance down, on a teetering corner of bricks, as PRT agents below sprinted towards the largest group of villains they'd ever faced.

Fearless dudes, really.

Another, and she was next to Armsmaster, focused as could be.

This space around them, with a single point in the middle… it was just a perimeter, wasn't it?

She just had to inverse it.

Space shortened, hundreds of feet becoming dozens, shortening the trip for the heroes significantly.

C'mon, if you won't let me do shit, at least catch them, she cheered inwardly, watching Armsmaster's form distort as it entered her power, then exited, a mere fifty feet from the villains.

Two containment foam grenades fired from his arms.

Two metal tables of all fuckin' things immediately blocked them, before another two dozen bits of metal furniture started spinning around the group in a wide vortex.

"Surrende-!" Armsmaster began, only for a red, shining something to zip into the ground in front of him and explode in a red, almost flowing aura, tossing him back as he flipped to fall and slide to a single foot, unzipping his halberd, flipping it, and firing another cannister of his sleeping gas at the group, low to the side, where Rune couldn't see.

It was intercepted by a wall of metal swords, barely four feet tall.

Kaiser was back up, and she felt her fists clench in frustration.

A steady stream of napalm seemed to arch over the villain's heads like a sprinkler, burning high and smokeless, impairing her vision, aside from the sight of a multicoloured mass of people of all shapes and sizes, half-hiding behind metal spikes, firing guns, throwing shining red strips that exploded and formed craters, or throwing out fireballs in Lung's case, who was back to nine feet tall and hiding for the first time she'd ever heard of.

Underlit by a swirling blue light, coming from below.

The portal, she could guess. Charging up, most likely?

God damn it.

GOD DAMN IT!

This- this had been perfect! They could have cleaned up the Bay! Forever! How the fuck did it get to this!?

Dragon's suits dived, rapid-firing containment foam, enough to glue them all together ten times over, emptying their entire storage in a volley.

A burst of wind, in three cleaving shapes, flew up, and detonated, scattering them everywhere, the foam slowing and expanding midair, only making more obstacles in the way for the approaching heroes and blasters.

She snarled.

Fucking Stormtiger of all people just saved all of them! This-

A flash of light caught her eye, and she looked up , seeing Dauntless wind up a throw with his Arclance, looking like Zeus's modern depiction, lightning sparking off the spear.

Her eyes widened.

That… that was a throw meant to kill.

"STOP THE BLUE ONE IN THE CENTER!" Dragon shouted, urgently.

Dauntless wound up, and threw it, with a guttural cry.

She reached for the space between him and the blue man with glowing tattoos, and shortened it, cutting the distance in less than half.

"TAY-"

Blue light flashed, and the villains vanished into thin air.

A startled cry of strangled pain made her eyes focus on the blue figure, seemingly left behind, impaled from the left side of his shoulders to his right hip, blue blood running in rivers as the Arclance pinned him to the ground it cracked through, shocks making him jerk and spasm grotesquely.

Her wide eyes met his.

There was not an ounce of fear or resignation in his eyes, even as she watched his eyes dull, and his head slowly bow, his fingers go limp.

He flickered, and in his place, a tall figure stood, in front of the Arclance.

His costume… baffled her just as much as the blue guys'.

Medieval armour that looked like something a general in a fantasy novel would wear, complex and gleaming gold, with a strange, gigantic lance in his right hand.

He calmly turned, grasped the Arclance with his left hand, and shouldered it out of the soil, holding it in a reverse grip.

"Put your hands up and surrender!" Armsmaster barked, preparing his halberd, and the man's cold eyes disregarded him entirely, backlit by flames and spikes of metal.

She felt distinctly uneasy, looking at those eyes.

It felt like looking at something so old she couldn't even guess at its perspective. Something that had lived through far more than what they had to throw at it. Or perhaps he was just a delusional psycho, either way, he unnerved her.

He flickered, and the Arclance vanished from his hand, gone to god knows where.

She winced, knowing full well how long it had taken Dauntless to charge that damn thing up, what a big loss that was.

The man simply watched them, saying nothing, seemingly contemplating something.

"Put your hands! Up! Now!" Armsmaster barked.

Ten, twenty feet behind, Dragon's suits landed, giant dragon-like things, surrounding him.

The fact he did not look the least bit bothered felt off.

Was he insane? Psychosis, maybe? Delusions of greatness?

Why was he so unconcerned with being in the middle of almost two dozen heroes, or more?

More people neared.

Barriers from Shielder formed around the man, flat purple-blues.

The strange gold-armoured man just rested his lance on his shoulder, eyes on Armsmaster, who continued barking orders of surrender like a police officer, as he was trained to do.

Gold boy was waiting for something, seemingly.

Apparently, it was for every hero able to walk and talk to surround him, because it was only as the suits and Armsmaster got ready to get into melee with the man, that he seemed to react, with a sneering scoff, utter disdain and disregard in his eyes.

"Shut up. Your barking irritates me." He spoke, voice baritone and so arrogant it personally offended her, pitched to carry above the chaos.

Definitely delusions of greatness. Who the fuck did this psycho think he was?

She wanted to punch him.

"Put the weapon down, or face the con-" Armsy started to reply, halberd pointed forward, one armed, advancing.

Armsmaster choked, jerked, stopped in place.

She and almost everyone else turned to watch him, flickers of flame seeming to erupt from within the joints of his armour.

Whirring servos sounded out, locking into place, and the armour shifted in a thousand ways, completely enclosing Armsmaster's head, a full-body suit turned statue, silent.

"I believe I told you…" The man started, straightening up, cold eyes sweeping over the crowd around him. "To shut up." He finished, taking a step forward, steps heavy and unconcerned.

She saw Tank and half the brutes take a step back, for some reason, and looked around, confused at the reaction.

"You all broke the truce." He stated, simply, hatefully. "After we extended a hand in cooperation too. You might all deserve to be gutted like fish for this, but we're lenient with self-righteous morons who think they know everything, because we need you. But don't forget, that you need us, too." He snarled, taking another step, eyes burning.

"For every hero there are three villains. Do you think, when the next Endbringer kills your families, leaves behind burning wastelands and forgotten corpses cooking in the sun, villains will continue to throw their lives into the grinder just to be stabbed in the back? Do you cockroaches realize what you've done? Do you think nobody present here will talk? That this won't spread? That the next attack won't take the lives of thousands more because villains won't believe in the Truce anymore, all because of all of you?" He snarled, the ground vibrating with his voice, his hatred so thick and acidic she could taste it in her throat.

She felt a faint sense of dread rise and claw up her spine, swallowing roughly.

He… was making sense.

Too much sense.

She… hadn't even really thought about that.

Fuck… fuck.

"You hide behind the Truce while kidnapping heroes, and you sit here and PREACH-!" Brandish started, light sword shaking in her hands.

He glanced at her, and she cut off with a high-pitched scream, bursting into flames, immediately turning into a ball of light, dashing back, still on fire. She came out of it, still screaming, rolling on the ground as two heroes jumped on her, trying to put her out, to no avail.

Everyone else jerked back, in shock, in fear.

"Quiet." He snapped, taking a step forward, glancing around at them all with nothing but anger in his eyes.

Nobody uttered a peep, afraid they would burst into flames with a mere glance, tense.

Another step.

She took a step back.

Others took two, four.

He looked at Challenger, eyes narrowed.

"Did you tell them, at the very least?" He hissed, and Challenger glared back.

"Depends on what you're talking about." Challenger coldly replied, adjusting her grip on her axe.

"I'm talking about the reason that we tried to call for a Truce, the fact Heartbreaker or a wannabe of him is stalking about the Bay, kidnapping your people, the fact we wanted to talk about a plan to save them."

If there was silence before, she wasn't sure what to call this. She could just sit there and try to wrap her head about that insanely important bit of context that Challenger didn't fucking DEIGN to mention!

"And your reply to our extended hand is this..." He trailed off, glare swerving through them, all of them, as they tried to digest that information in silence. "To break the Truce and buy him time. But it's too late to walk back now, for any of us, and I'm not here to lecture you further. I'm not here for revenge, despite you very likely killing one of us and almost doing the same to another three. I'm not here to give you a lesson, because I think you knew what you were doing was wrong, and did it anyway, because you're only heroes in name."

Somehow, those words genuinely hurt, because they felt true.

"I'm here because the world needs to see consequences. Because the world needs to learn, feel, and see, that the Truce is unbreakable, and the price is a toll none can afford, not even heroes." He rumbled, voice calming down, chilling, becoming solid, frigid.

"I was sent here to do what must be done. I was sent here to punish you." He growled, crouched, and jumped straight up, twelve feet in the air, lance held in a backwards grip, pointed towards the ground below.

Everyone burst into action, backing up, half a dozen Blasters unloading on him.

Notes:

Down-time? What's that? :D

Enjoy another monster chapter that's like 11k words.

Edit: Added bits of conversation to the end of the chapter that reveal Heartbreaker's existence to the heroes.