Summoner

by codekinguu

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23. Chapter 46-49

Chapter 46

Notes:

Hey! First of all, I added mention of Heartbreaker in the last chapter, to the heroes. Please go back and read it just to have full context, it's legit just two lines swapped in the last couple paragraphs!

Second of all, chant it with me!

ESCALATE! ESCALATE! ESCALATE! YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA BUDDYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY-

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

Chapter Text

She switched to the Rune of Resolve, picking Aftershock as her keystone, before her rise had fully stopped.

As beams of light, rockets, spheres and shifting ovals raced towards her, she pulled on the magic of Jarvan's armour, gathering it in her chest, and pushed it out, forming a golden-yellow aegis around her, half the power coming from her, the other half from the people around her, blocking the barrage.

The shield held, barely, leaving her free to focus on her lance as she descended, the earth magic of her weapon amplifying her weight a hundred times.

The shield gathered close like a cobra about to strike, a glittering coil, then burst outwards in a wide shockwave of golden ribbons that punched through the faint formation around her, tossing half the first line of heroes on their backs, the Brutes merely missing their stride.

Earth magic sang in her lance.

She didn't fall to the earth, she was pulled into it with the force of a titan's fist.

Her lance slammed into the earth, down to her gauntlet, and cracks snapped the soil around them like dry bone, travelling, ancient magic whispering- rise.

The soil buckled under her weight, the impact unnatural and spread outwards like a fan, and from the edge of her helm, she watched hundreds of feet of jagged stone pierce towards the sky like a line of spears a thousand strong, a volcanic shape, bowed inwards, leaving no escape, thirty feet tall.

The Aftershock keystone absorbed the impact, drinking in the force, greedily, green cracking lines splitting her form, shielding her, filling her with force.

She had to be efficient about this. Jarvan was one of the few Legends whose power to energy expenditure ratio was overwhelmingly conservative, but even still, her head was already incessantly pounding like a drum.

Her eyes moved to Vista, who had conveniently chosen to come right up to the front of the action, scrambling upright just twenty feet away, stretching space to further the distance.

Her left fist wound around her back, grasping a familiar, ridged pole banner, and she swung her arm wide, using the lance as a bracing point to pour as much power into the motion as she could.

It punched through Weld's stomach as he attempted to scramble upright to lunge at her and skewered him into the ground, Demacia's banner pointed high as he grasped it, trying to pull it out.

She twisted, digging the lance out and commanding it to extend, segmented, hooked portions lengthening, and swung it towards the banner, a wave of broken rocks following her motion, peeling off the lance.

She knew the length of her weapon, better than she knew the reach of her own arm.

By mere millimetres, one of the hooked segments at the very tip grabbed onto the ridges of the pole, and she forced the lance to shorten, throwing her forward as she used her legs to lunge simultaneously, to the left, swinging herself in an unpredictable, rapidly shortening arc.

The green lines cracked further, turning her to golden-green kintsugi, building up.

She threw her legs up and in front of her midair, working with sheer core strength, and let her armoured heels skid over the concrete for only half a foot, crouching, moving her center of gravity forwards to lunge forward again, eyes unfocused, seeing everything they could, instead of the focus point of her iris alone.

A whistle of a blade, a bright orange colour in the edge of her vision. A strike.

She didn't have time to waste dodging. Aftershock was about to release.

She Flashed past Challenger's axe, the full range of ten feet, and flickered to herself then back to Jarvan in what might as well be a nanosecond, banner once again settled on her back, completing the lunge, reaching towards Vista.

Space distorted, but her movements had been too fast and unpredictable for the girl to keep up. It was too late.

Her hand snapped shut around Vista's stick-like wrist, essentially making it impossible to gain distance from her.

Aftershock cracked with a sound like jade and glass shattering.

"Sorry kid." She managed to rush out, and let go, jerking back with a kick of her leg to the ground, cracking it, open back aimed towards a rushing Armsmaster, to bait him in.

Vista stretched space, as expected.

Armsmaster took the bait, as expected, charging into her space.

Aftershock exploded with the stored force of her first impact with the earth, redoubling.

The edge caught Vista and launched her away like a ping-pong ball, bones snapping like dry twigs, rolling to stop against a pile of cushioning bricks, knocked out instantly despite the helmet, it would seem.

Part of her hated doing that to a child, but it was buried under a mountain of rage and a monolith of cold pragmatism.

With Vista up, her little arena would be completely meaningless, after all.

She pivoted on her foot, swinging her head around to catch Armsmaster's armour flying back, broken into a million pieces behind her, a scattering mess of electronics and ceramic plates and hissing gasses and fluids, with a tumbling human body in the middle of it, charred and keeping most of the remnants together.

The fact he had enough in him to charge her after being Ignited forced a small, grudging sense of respect from her.

It only lasted long enough for her to duck under a blast of rainbow light from Lazerdream, and switch to the Rune of Precision in the interim, Fleet Footwork's keystone shining bright in her mind.

Weld was rushing her from the left, Tank from ahead, Challenger aiming between them with her musket-like rifle in the back, glowing axe hanging off her hip.

To her right, Manpower, faster than he ever should be when so large.

Above, Dauntless, a metal piece of rebar in his arms in place of a spear, looking for an opportunity.

She grasped her lance, and dove for Manpower, tip pointed forwards.

A barrier of pale purple-blue rushed for her feet, seeking to trip her up, Shielder's work.

Reaching into her core's spells, she tugged 'Ghost' forwards, and switched her grip, flipping the lance around, left hand darting to her waist again, for the ridged banner.

The barrier slammed through her feet, passing through them without so much as shifting her.

Manpower punched forward with a cry.

His fist went through her head, pale blue afterimages and echoes shifting in her aftermath as she dove through him, unharmed.

A bullet passed through her, two, six, and she shifted, tilting her helmet leftwards, up, just enough to catch her real target's outline.

Her right foot stomped the ground ahead of her, her hips locked, shifting with momentum, and she spun on her left foot, grazing the ground, throwing the banner in an under-waist javelin throw, with the wrong grip, in the complete opposite direction of where she was rushing.

It did not matter, not with the Rune of Precision making it so easy to aim.

The banner practically teleported through Shielder's shoulder, passing through with a splatter of blood and a surprised scream from the boy, leaving vitals and joints untouched, a flesh wound that had to force him to withdraw as he dropped from the sky, flight stuttering.

He would live. Recover, even without Panacea.

A rush of golden energy filled her from her keystone, attempting to heal her wounds and speed her up. Unable to heal her, it shifted its power to Overheal, providing her with another thin shield, flooding her limbs with the lightness of a feather and the whistle of an arrow, its speed boost mingling with Ghost's.

A bola of sparkling cylinders blurred towards her from one of Dragon's mechs, struggling to catch up to her without trampling anyone.

She didn't bother dodging it, allowing it to pass through her, instead digging her gauntlet's claws into the earth and tossing herself back and away from Tank's torso-sized fist that cratered the concrete, her right arm wound tight for a strike with her lance as she tried to position herself properly within this shifting tide of panicked capes.

She spun in place to place herself stomach-down again, and zipped forward in a straight line, lance gripped in one hand, hanging over her shoulder, moving on two legs and her left hand, ignoring Velocity's attempts to punch and stop her, Ghost simply making him fly through her with each frustrated pass.

Within the unfocused gaze that she maintained, she watched Triumph rush towards Miss Militia's side to defend her, up ahead, likely correctly assessing her next target, shoulders and chest swelling with a breath as Miss Militia's anti-material rifle switched for a four-tubed rocket launcher, aimed straight at her from behind cold brown eyes.

She'd made her target very obvious, but that was fine. It was a misdirection, again, regardless.

She gave up on that objective, head jerking around to see where Triumph could lead her.

One of the Blasters was on the opposite end, the one throwing odd ovals with seemingly detrimental physical effects.

If he could exhaust Jarvan like he did with Bakuda, she'd be forced to swap Legends and dampen the strength of her message.

That no matter how many heroes you brought, no matter how good and powerful they were, even a single one of Nexus' own could destroy them by himself. That it was pointless to even try.

So she couldn't have that, if possible.

Triumph's head jerked forward, abdomen curling.

She threw her left foot forward to stop herself cold, sharp-edged greaves punching through stone and halting her rush instantly.

Triumph's eyes lit with, well, triumph, as he roared, unaware he was doing exactly as she wished, and that she could pass by his strike too if she wished.

She did not.

It blasted her backwards with an ear-drum snapping intensity , wind trying to claw her very armour off of her, her grip on her lance nearly slipping, Overheal's flimsy barrier being washed away in an instant as she was thrown back in a straight line, straight towards Dragon's suit.

She had too much aerial awareness to flail through the air.

Instead, she focused her gaze on her target, and whipped her head according to her motions to keep it steady, like a hawk through a dive, and threw her lance forward and to the earth, extending it through two solid feet of stone, barely grasping it by the end of the shaft, one handed.

Her momentum allowed her to swing off of it like a jump pole, to the right of Dragon's awaiting suit, feet forward, right towards the Blaster, an acrobatic move that no doubt looked ridiculous when in such thick armour.

Dauntless crashed down like a meteor, passing through her harmlessly, making a crater under her.

The Blaster finally registered the danger she was in, and turned to run, throwing a pale blue sphere at her, which also passed through her.

Another mini-rocket, a bullet, a laser-

Kid Win had arrived with some laser pistols.

She hadn't seen most of the Wards, but they had participated. A milder punishment was necessary, to be fair.

She had time.

Dragon's tail covered by vibrating blades swept through her, uselessly, and she crashed into the earth, shifting her momentum forward to lunge like an arrow.

The Blaster's eye-sore of a bodysuit was clutched by the scruff within her gauntlet, and she gave her no time to adjust before she swung to the right with her whole body and force, throwing her to the floor.

The woman's right shoulder crunched against the floor, her suit ripping, and a hand moved towards her face, glowing red, by reflex, mixing with the woman's cry.

The sphere passed through her as well.

She swung her lance shaft-first, the sharp point braced against her shoulderguard, and it slammed into the woman's hip bowl, Taylor's left hand darting forward to grab her opponent's single free wrist before it could fire again or retreat.

The hero's hipbone broke.

Taylor's hand tightened, breaking bone, ignoring the scream of agony from below as bullets and lazers and Velocity's fists all uselessly passed through her.

She pulled, twisted just so, and jerked her arm away using all of her back, yanking the woman's arm out of its socket entirely, before jerking her kneepad into the Blaster's elbow to snap it backwards with a branch-like snapping sound.

Ignoring the flash of sympathy she felt when the woman shrieked like a banshee, kicking and wriggling back and away to the back of her ability, spheres shooting out of her hands in random directions as her limp wrist rolled within her grasp, she tore her eyes off of her.

Velocity lost his cool at the brutal beatdown it seemed, because he went for his most obvious strike yet, crying out in anger.

She tossed aside the woman's wrist, and caught his fist, sliding back two feet from the impact, and swung down with her lance, hand low on the handle, using her shoulder as leverage.

He didn't have time to scream about his severed arm before she wound her leg up close to her chest, and kicked him away, snapping half his ribcage with a worryingly satisfying crunch, rolling off on the jagged, broken asphalt.

Another surge of golden energy from Fleet Footwork, doubling her speed, and she didn't waste a moment of it, ducking down to lower her center of gravity and wind resistance, and lunging for the nearest weak link, once more, the second blaster just forty feet away, some kind of thermokinetic, she could guess from the blast of crackling, sub-zero air that swept through her.

The fliers and the kids would be the most annoying to deal with. She couldn't be that brutal with them, they'd barely done anything to deserve getting crippled.

But the thermokinetic was likely here to keep Lung fightable in melee without Dragon's suits melting. He knew what he was here for. He agreed to it.

Ghost would run out soon, so she wasted no time in diving through Dragon's suit as it tried to block her, and grabbing him by the hair, tossing her lance aside.

Just a little, she told herself.

Just let a little bit of it out, just a spark.

The furnace in her gut opened, fury filling her veins with hissing, shrieking acid, and she shoved her fingers in his mouth as he screamed.

She pulled, feeling teeth peel and break, flesh tear, hair and skin tear, her muscles shaking with the effort as the man wailed, clawing at her fingers as she slowly ripped his jaw off.

How many will die because of you? How many will be trampled because you betrayed us? How many times should you die to pay for it, had I not been here?! Would Lisa ever hear anything? Would Rune ever see? She snarled in her head, awaiting no reply.

"STOP! STOP, STOP PLEASE!" Dragon's suit yelled, trying to grab her, then giving up and grabbing the Blaster by the jaw, her metal mitt shoving it closed, pushing her fist up easily.

Jarvan was a man with magic in his veins and a bloodline of giants, but he was nothing against a Dragon mech.

"I can't. You did this to yourselves. I need to break you, because you left us no other choice ." She hissed, a sound of grinding boulders and venom, and pushed with Dragon instead, suddenly, slamming his jaws together, breaking the bone and ripping his gums apart, a tide of chipped, cracked teeth clattering around his mangled mouth as he struggled.

Dragon's gigantic, clawed gauntlet tried to grab her hand by the wrist, passing through, the second swiping through her head, in vain.

Dragon's mechs present were too large and combat-oriented to grab and handle the small amount of her actual body she was letting exert force into another. Dragon couldn't do anything, even if she could find out that only her fingers and palm technically existed at the present moment.

Deciding at least this was enough, as the man choked on his own teeth and blood, she grabbed his wrist, then the other, and planted her foot on his back, pulling until she heard his shoulders dislocate with a spasming cry.

Twisting her hips, she slammed her right heel into his right elbow, then his left, snapping both.

She let go, and flicked her right gauntlet, broken teeth and bits of flesh peppering the dusty ground.

Dragon's suit was covering most of her sight, but she could see how the heroes were well and truly panicking now.

They couldn't hurt her, or so they believed.

She could light them on fire with a glance, or so they believed.

She had seemingly arbitrary and undefined powers, so they believed, and were right about, to an extent.

What could they do in their minds but flee?

"CLEAR THE WALL! CLEAR THE WALL!" Miss Militia called, as another one of Dragon's suits moved next to the first, thrust wings spread to cover as much of her sight as possible.

They dwarfed her in size.

An explosion and a cloud of dust let her realize what was going on, and she flickered to herself and back to Jarvan, her lance and banner back in hand.

Another explosion, another, rapid fire, like a machine gun being fed grenades, and she watched the tip of her erected barrier tumble down over the tops of Dragon's suits.

Dragon's suits were so large that Ghost would likely not let her through them.

And they would be a massive annoyance once Ghost ran out.

She had less than ten seconds of it left. Maybe less than five, even.

She switched to the Rune of Domination, power and speed entering her veins, and tugged at the Electrocute keystone, something in her chest shifting in a familiar way.

A quick throw, which made her flag pole snap against Dragon's armour and immediately break into pieces like a flimsy piece of wire, and then she rushed forward, two-handing her lance for the first time.

A tide of missiles, lasers from above. Tank and Weld on the side, trying to surround her.

New Wave were retreating, Manpower rushing away while his family took their wounded and flew off, which was good.

She didn't want to harm people that had barely participated out of grief and manipulations, desperate for their missing family to return to them, despite the Truce suffering because of it.

The responsibility lay with the Protectorate.

Dragon's flight suit sent rockets to her feet, not pushing her away due to Ghost, but certainly making it harder to rush forward when the ground she was using to run forward was being turned into a stretch of craters.

Unfortunately for the woman, it wasn't enough.

She'd lived lifetimes on ships, and spent even more of it on dingy barges barely being kept above the cold black waves. Months of moving onto shifting tectonic plates, melting apart under her burning feet as the Void pursued endlessly.

A shaky, shifting ground was nothing new to her.

It just gave her good cover of dirt and dust to shift her target from the melee craft to the flighted one, flickering back and forth, another flag pole on her back.

She took it out, launched it forward into the ground at an angle, and in a familiar maneuver, used the hooks of the lance and its extending function to swing herself straight at the suit.

The helm opened, a monstrously gigantic blowtorch going through her head, blinding her, but not hurting her yet.

She swung, allowed her lance to become corporeal, and felt metal bite into metal, jerking her torso and head to the side to clear her view.

Sparks flew, hooks caught, but not much damage was done.

She shifted, allowed the lance to pull her downwards, and rolled under the suit, which immediately boosted away, the melee one leaping for her right over its shoulder with uncanny precision on both their ends.

Another series of shots from Kid Win, above.

She phased through vibrating claws, ducked under the melee Dragonsuit, ignored a blast of liquid nitrogen, and swung up, at the smaller one's flight wing as it tried to take off, barely scratching it, before shifting her grip, lunging to the left to obscure the sightlines of whatever capes were left, and wrenching her right arm forward in a perfect javelin toss with a guttural cry of triumph.

Her lance only stuck into one of the suit's joints for about ten inches before it stopped, but it didn't matter.

The third strike against the suit was enough to activate Electrocute, and with a thunderous, deafening boom, red lightning burst out of the impact point, punching through the mech, scattering mechanisms and a complex cloud of broken bits, parts and pieces.

It spun midair, once, thrusters going haywire, burning fuel splattering everywhere as it jerked and tried to correct itself, then crashed into the ground, a third of its body missing.

Not enough to kill the suit entirely, but more than enough to make it useless.

She flickered, calling her weapons back to her, twisted her waist in a rather painful, sudden way, neck creaking as she turned as far as she could mid-leap, trying to see what Miss Militia had done.

A solid thirty foot section of her wall of earth had crumpled inwards, and the majority of the heroes, the non-brutes, were busy trying to grab the wounded and extract.

She'd let them, in any other circumstance.

This time, she switched to the Rune of Inspiration, to get another charge of her summoner's spells, and cast Ghost, right as it faded, ramping up again.

Her gaze jerked to Weld, and she cast 'Ignite', unsure of how else she could hurt him without losing her lance or banner repeatedly, and very annoyingly.

Then she let herself mindlessly dead sprint towards the heroes, rushing through each and every attack, zig-zagging where necessary to dodge bad footing that would mess with her rhythm.

Weld was pretty much out.

Tank was behind her, with the other Dragon suit, too far to catch up.

And pretty much nothing could touch her unless she wanted it to, for maybe twenty seconds.

Plenty of time.

Shouting, everywhere, all around her.

An unfamiliar figure was standing on the hill made out of her broken wall, a slight, green thing, a gigantic crossbow pointed at her.

Flechette, she believed.

Cosmic Insight gave a tide of information so confused and hard to believe that she had a mental stutter for a second, unable to understand what ' god slayer' written in one's past destiny could even mean.

The bow fired.

She didn't dodge, confident that most power-to-magic interactions would always favour her.

The bolt, predictably, phased through her chest.

Except she choked, stumbling in surprise, in agony, throwing a hand out to not slam into the ground, instead rolling once, and scrambling upright, choking on crimson.

What.

What?

She didn't let surprise slow her, or stop her, immediately carrying her motion forward into a side-lunge, casting 'Heal' to get rid of the thin but gaping wound in her chest.

The Tinker that had been fighting Victor perched next to the girl, and a few feet away, Miss Militia, a firing line.

Adamant rushed down the hill to put himself between the backline and her, Challenger nimbly abandoning her attempt to go grab the Blaster capes she'd just mauled to pivot towards her, axe glowing, musket on her hip, aimed right at her with newfound confidence.

Taylor snarled, and her greaves slammed through the bottom rubble on the hill of stone leading out of this arena, on the lowground against almost a dozen capes, Wards and not, lunging forward.

She phased through Adamant, ignoring him.

The Blasters backpedalled, Flechette running up the hill and reloading, the Tinker throwing shockwaves at the hill in her direction, successfully slowing her by making the entire thing spread out and break further, like roiling sand.

She cast Exhaust on Flechette, brown-yellowish ropes of energy winding around her and working against her every move, sapping her energy, every step feeling like twenty.

She wound up her left arm for another throw, pole in hand, and used 'Flash' upwards , ten feet in the air, momentum carrying.

Her arm jerked forward, right between the tiny delay in the Tinker's blasts.

The pole punched through the Tinker's right buttock and out of their hip as they retreated, jutting out five entire feet, and with a shriek, they slammed into the ground, tube-weapon clattering down the hill of rocks.

"PROTECT FLECHETTE! STALL FOR TIME, RETREAT!" Miss Militia screamed.

Falling to the hill below, unable to resist gravity, she utterly ignored Aegis's flying tackle, Adamant's hammer throw, and every single thing except Flechette, simply phasing through them all.

They got to the crest of the small hill, barely twenty feet ahead of her, a group of retreating capes, Brutes left behind, and fliers useless, Flechette wheezing like an asthmatic as Exhaust finally let go of her.

They tumbled over the edge, and she lost sight of them.

She cleared the hilltop a moment later, and saw herself staring down the length of a flying arrow, right between her eyes, a mere foot away.

Something in her neck pulled and cracked as she jerked her head to the side, and she felt a thin line of flesh along her temple vanish with a good part of her helmet.

Her neck hurt almost as much as her head did.

Lunging down like a rabid panther, she saw Miss Militia look back at her with determined eyes.

They weren't going to escape, and they knew it.

Miss Militia threw herself in front of her, hands clenched around machetes, and swung at her.

She phased through the strikes, and her, and pivoted on her foot, lance whistling through the air.

Miss Militia jumped back, to the best of her ability, machetes low to defend.

The lance extended with a metallic scraping sound.

Defending one's feet while on high ground was very difficult.

The blade went through her shins with little resistance, and Miss Militia cried out, machetes leaving her hands as she fell, clutching her stumps.

She… might not survive that. Blood loss.

Then her eyes flicked to the tourniquet set hanging on her hip, and her worries faded.

It might be close, but Miss Militia would live. So would Velocity, assuming any of them had containment foam grenades left, or tourniquets.

She turned around for her main target, settling her left foot down, right one up near Militia's groan-sobbing, hurriedly reaching form and saw Aegis grab Flechette, flying up and away.

Her feet slid down the hill another few feet as she stared, trying to find a way to get to them without switching Legends.

Switching to the rune of Precision, no keystone picked, she flickered, and threw her banner again.

By comparison, a soft throw.

It punched through Aegis's calf, and through Flechette's outer thigh, only just barely missing the major arteries.

She did not recall the banner, mostly to give them some time to touch down and get something to stop the bleeding before leaving the gaping wound behind.

She turned, watching Miss Militia struggle to unlatch the tourniquets from her thigh with hands slick with blood for a moment, shaking, eyes flickering with shock.

The top of the hill practically exploded, sending rocks to tumble down over them, and she moved her eyes up to a frozen Dragon mech.

She could guess the kind of sight she was. Covered in blood and bits of gore, the cold frigid eyes of a murderer staring emotionlessly down at her recent prey.

Tank scrambled over the hill, and froze too, followed by Weld.

They knew they could not reach her in time before she decided to finish off Miss Militia.

Thankfully for them, she didn't care to do that. The woman was a good… soldier.

Not a good hero, but a good soldier.

She reached down.

"WAIT-" Dragon started.

The air whistled from above, Dauntless having finished doing whatever he had been doing with the wounded, and choosing to try and fight her one on one, apparently.

Ignoring that for a moment, she unlatched the tourniquet off Miss Militia's belt clip, half-buried under her, and tossed it onto her chest as she panted.

Stepping over the woman as she hurriedly tried to staunch the bleeding of her legs, she pretended not to see the quick glances above her, nor hear the light rattle of metal, the light buzz of electricity, the slight whistle of a sharp, moving object.

Ghost faded, petering out, the blue afterimages and shifting suggestions of movement sinking back into her skin.

She tilted her helmet down to hide her eyes, staring at the hazy shadow from the dim sun behind her and above her. Getting closer, and closer.

"How about a fistfight?" She asked in Jarvan's deep, arrogant voice, and threw her lance aside, helmet tilted towards Tank.

Something fhthrwoom' ed right above her, a bizarre sound, and she lowered herself as if to charge-

Then dove to the left, catching a glimpse of some Tinker-tech looking sword sparking with electricity, looking suspiciously similar to Kid Win's floating skateboard thing, plunging into the rocks where she had just been, held by a hand she recognized.

A hand that had reminded her of countless memories of death, and brought it on again, to the one least deserving of it.

Ryze would come back, in due time, but that could be months.

And it was his fucking fault.

She switched to the Rune of Domination, locking in Predator, red ribbons of aura bursting out of her armour and extremities, following her movements, leaving a trail behind. She marked him as her prey immediately, almost doubling her speed as she lunged at him.

He swung the sword towards her, and her left hand caught it by the wrist, stopping it. Her right formed a line of gauntleted claws, fingers straight, and forward, between two specific ribs, at a specific angle, Predator's energy moving into the strike and empowering it.

Her fingers parted the armour, and stabbed between his fourth and fifth rib, knuckle deep.

He jerked, trying to pull away.

A kick snapped for her stomach, which she blocked with a cast of 'Barrier', dragging him closer with her left hand, her right pushing in, shredding past his lung, cold leather deftly dodging massive arteries to grasp his still beating heart, wrist guard scraping against broken rib bones.

He froze, his fighting glare turning into a wide eyed look of mortal horror, choking on his blood, letting the sword fall to clumsily grab her wrist, falling to the ground.

She stared down, a sneer on her lip, a bottomless abyss of ice within her eyes.

She squeezed, gently, feeling his heart race inside her palm, pulse, convulse.

He couldn't pull away, he didn't even dare struggle.

One yank, one squeeze.

He had no chance of doing anything to her, nevermind simple resistance.

And in that moment, she believed, he realized just how weak and fragile a human was, how easily one could die, out of nowhere, regardless of their powers. It was reflected in his eyes, wide and almost unseeing in sheer terror.

"LET GO OF HIM-" Weld barked, rushing forward, and Tank seemed to join him.

She ignored them.

"DON'T! DO NOT MOVE! IF GOLD MOVES, DAUNT'S DEAD!" Dragon interjected, movement at the edge of her sight.

She ignored her.

She leaned close as his knees trembled, folded, staring deep into his eyes, holding him up by the arm.

"Remember this, Dauntless." She whispered, as bloody froth crawled up his throat. "Know that a so-called villain held your heart in his hand, and did not squeeze. Know that I did not do so, simply because Nexus hopes that one day, you'll think before you act, before you try to murder one of us. You'll think beyond your orders, or what you're told. Think beyond the law, and think about what's right. That you'll save more lives than this stunt could have killed when the next Endbringer attack comes. And that you'll respect the one rule that really matters. Summoner's given you all a chance. None of you would be alive otherwise. Nexus does not give second chances. Next time you betray the Truce, you'll all be beneath headstones. Do you understand me?" She slowly said, voice even, cold, quiet.

She had to scare the PRT shitless, or else they'd never respect her enough to uphold any kind of agreement.

But she could not help but admit, that this brought on a primal satisfaction in her.

Ryze was gone, for- probably months, because of this-

This person she couldn't truly hate, but she could certainly be angry at.

He stared, teeth clattering.

A slow, slow nod, jerky and terrified, another, frantic.

"Good." She grunted, and looked down to the sword.

She stomped on it, ignoring the electric shocks moving up her leg to the best of her ability.

"You're going to remember my words. You're going to relay them to your next regional director, word for word. Understand?"

Another choked, jerky nod, blood trailing down from his lips as he convulsed.

"Wonderful. You're going to fly away now. And if I so much as see you glance back, you will burn until you're charcoal. You will die screaming for the world to hear. Go, hero. We'll meet soon, hopefully under Truce again." She coldly stated, fully aware that the time for an Endbringer attack was fairly nearby, and carefully unwound her fist, wiggling the sharp bits to carefully move out of his vitals without further damage, and quickly pulled her wrist out of his chest cavity, lifting him by the arm and tossing him aside, switching to the Rune of Inspiration for another cast of Heal to use on him.

He never hit the ground, rushing away, faster than she'd ever seen him go, and three times as uneven in his flight. She wasn't sure he even noticed her neat tunnel through his insides had mostly closed.

He didn't look back.

She turned to the remaining heroes, above.

Weld, who seemed scared out of his mind and barely staying on his feet, despite his body physically seeming completely fine, Adamant, who seemed a bit shaken, Tank, who was the same as he had been since the start, Dragon's remaining suit, Challenger, vibrating with rage, a shaking Kid Win, wide-eyed and without his main form of mobility, Triumph… scared and hiding it well… and that was it. Hardly a force to be reckoned with, but her head was killing her, and she was almost completely out of Summoner Spells.

She turned her eyes to the side, at rows of PRT agents closing in on the scene. And a couple Wards. Browbeat, Clockblocker, probably Gallant, she couldn't quite see him.

Command had likely gotten quite desperate.

They hadn't even done anything yet, so she could hardly bother with them.

She glanced back to Miss Militia, who had a single shaking glock trained on her, her other hand helping her shuffle back and away.

She dismissed her, and focused ahead.

Dragon's dented, charred visor focused on her, her serpentine neck swerving.

"Everyone. Rush back to get the wounded, take them and run. I'll stall him." Dragon ordered, voice thick with command and anger.

She tilted her head as the heroes hesitated for a moment, then turned around, and all ran.

This… was annoying.

She couldn't run up a hill of rocks and push through Dragon, it would take too long. Then she'd have to catch the individually fleeing capes and deal out punishment.

A chore.

She flickered to Evelynn, already invisible, and burst into gas, flying up, watching the heroes split up.

She dove for Kid Win, and switched to Jarvan in the last moment, punching him in the thigh with a crisp crack, bowling him over with a cry, leg broken.

Good enough consequences, for a child that had barely participated and was no real danger. She couldn't stomach more.

She flickered back to Evelynn, soaring above.

"ABORT, JUST RETREAT! RETREAT!" Dragon's suit broadcast, speakers straining with volume as her suit burst through the hill, apparently finally getting it into her skull that she could abandon the fallen without Taylor executing them.

Everyone obeyed without question.

Too late, really.

She wound around Tank's shoulders, each bigger than her entire torso, and glanced for weak spots on the literal ball of grotesque muscle.

The eyes.

She materialized, back to Jarvan, legs wrapped around his neck, hooked fingers pulling back into soft, squishy tissue.

He roared, the first genuine exclamation of pain she'd heard from him aside from choked grunts, grasping her hands.

She felt her bones snap like twigs, her armour fold like tinfoil, before she flickered to Evelynn, and flew off, switching to the Rune of Precision again, picking Fleet Footwork.

Tank was damn strong. That hurt.

Weld was stumbling and struggling, but he was running away.

She felt like he'd suffered enough.

Besides, she wasn't sure how to cripple him, or if she even could.

So she turned to Challenger, who was jerking her head around to glare in every direction, paranoid and furious as she sprinted back out of the caldera Taylor had created, passing Dragon's shifting mech.

She circled around the woman, waiting for her to gain some distance from the others, then moved ahead and charged her from the opposite direction, head-on, gathering momentum.

A flicker, back to Jarvan, flying like a bullet, and Challenger's axe rushed for her face in a reflexive strike.

Her mangled left hand moved to redirect it, but she underestimated Challenger's strength, too powerful to just be nudged aside no matter how masterful her movement was.

She instead had to block it with her gauntlet, the axe blade splitting her knuckles, metal peeling, and she grit her teeth, unable to stop a cry of exertion and pain leave her as she slammed her pauldron into Challenger's chest, completely removing the woman's momentum and making her fly back into the ground, a clumsy tackle that had them rolling.

It ended with her on top.

Golden energy flooded into her hands from Fleet Footwork, a few rib bones snapping back into place, body lighter, flesh trying to mend shut around the axehead splitting it.

She reached for her summoner spells.

None were up yet. Ignite had another minute, and that was the closest.

Damn it.

Challenger tried to swing the musket-like gun at her face.

She grabbed her wrist, and slammed her hand into the ground with a satisfying crack of bone.

A knee dug between them, scrambling for a foothold to kick her off with as Challenger screamed in rage and pain, and she let go of Challenger's hand to grab her knee, immediately shifting her own legs to kick off the ground, and swing, dragging Challenger in a half-arc across the ground by her right hand grip on the woman's knee, her left jerking back and out of Challenger's axe, flesh tearing anew.

She spun once more, backing up at the same time, to deny Challenger leverage or balance, her head scraping the rough concrete as she tried to kick her off or reach her to strike.

With a shift of her hips, Taylor let her right knee bend, her left doing the same, and lifting, stopping the circular drag to reach easier.

Stomping on Challenger's mouth from above, she grit her teeth to ignore the pain of her axe biting halfway through her calf in retaliation during the strike.

She felt the hero's jaw fold inwards beneath her heel, crack like a dry beach bone, and reached around her back for her banner, kicking her left leg to the side to shove Challenger's axe and hand off, then stabbing the pole down through the shaft of Challenger's axe, her palm, and the asphalt below, pinning her.

The woman let out a dazed groan, jerked, and went limp, the mixture of pain and likely head injury too much for her.

She heard the sound of something loud, approaching, and moved to dodge-

Only for a dozen mini-missiles to flash before her eyes, guided, following her.

Too sudden to react in a better way, she instead activated her armour's magic, a weak golden shield surrounding her, her left arm curling around her head to shield it.

The shield shattered, and her world shifted into one of pain and spinning colours, head swimming as she rolled to a stop, agony pounding across every inch of her.

For a moment, she had a hard time focusing on who she was and where, panting on the ground, staring up at a murky morning sky.

It came back to her, fast.

She grit her teeth, rolled over, ground her fists into the ground, only one of them obeying her commands for some reason, and forced a knee under herself, before gathering her strength and pushing, throwing herself upright, stumbling in place.

Choking on blood for a moment, she coughed, gathered it, and spat it out to her right, exhausted eyes scanning her surroundings, trying to reorientate.

She wasn't far.

Thirty feet away from Challenger, without the landscape even being damaged. Shaped charges, directional explosions, most likely. Of course, with a Tinker.

She tried to wipe her mouth, only for a burning spike of pain to remind her of what she had diligently been pushing away. Her injuries.

She glanced down.

Her left arm was gone, broken off at the bicep with a mangled strip of flesh hanging down limply, leaking blood.

The acknowledgement of the injury forced her brain to realize it, and she grit her teeth with a shaking groan.

It only made things hurt worse. She had trouble breathing, stabbing agony going through the left side of her ribcage with every inhale and exhale, like someone twisting jagged spikes of glass inside her.

A few torn pectoral muscles. Broken and fractured bones, likely.

Had she not gone through all that training with Lung and Grasp of The Undying, that salvo of shaped rockets would have likely killed Jarvan too.

She spat out a long, long breath, and watched the next salvo scream through the air, different missiles this time, smaller.

She switched to Evelynn, and flew up, eyes swerving.

Tank hadn't recovered his eyes, blindly covering his neck with one arm while following Miss Militia's fading, exhausted voice, lumbering over to her, obviously lost and blind.

Weld was dragging the PRT agents and the other Wards away, yelling at them to back up and hold, obviously scared for their well-being.

Kid Win was limping, very slowly, towards a couple brave PRT agents that were rushing for him.

Aegis had dropped off Flechette to a medic van and was going back for the others.

She'd let him, just to be sure no accidents took heroes before their time.

Triumph was next, and he knew it, whipping around in every which direction, chest tight with a held breath.

She simply waited until he was red in the face, and was forced to gasp out a breath.

She materialized in front of him, flickered to Jarvan, and swung her lance at his leg, the flat side impacting his armour and caving his knee sideways with a horrid crunch.

As he screamed, she panted, and tossed her lance aside, taking a step forward, awkwardly unlatching her pole from her back with her right arm, and swinging it down with a cry of exertion, forcing it through the joint of his right shoulder, digging, twisting.

He yowled, no breath left to shout her off of him, spasming and grasping her pole with his left arm.

She flickered once more, lance in hand and banner on her back.

He sobbed, and she lightly kicked his foot.

"Till next time, Triumph. Well fought. Play nice, and we'll even heal your cripples, for a price." She grunted, and he just gasped air, in and out, staring at her wide-eyed. "How about this? When you all get together for another briefing, tell everyone hurt today, that Nexus will fix them, if they fight in the next Endbringer fight. That seems a good enough price to pay to not be cripples for life, right?" She asked.

He looked away, trying to keep his composure, teeth grinding as he choked on his breaths from pain.

She turned with a sigh.

Another smattering of tiny tracer missiles.

She switched to Evelynn, and resumed her flight around Dragon, waiting for at least two summoner spells to return to her, switching to the Rune of Inspiration in the meantime, to read Dragon.

What it gave her had her stopping her flight cold to simply stare, with incredulity, feeling her worldview shift a little by the sheer magnitude of what she just learned.

One, Dragon was… some kind of algorithm that had evolved into a human being at some point.

Two, she had triggered.

Three, she had a fucking soul despite her artificial existence.

She could feel it, just below, connected to something further away like a twin would be to its sibling in the womb, but not quite the same.

This was a Dragon suit, like many others. The woman herself wasn't here.

But apparently her mind was, and that was enough.

Fourthly she learned that she was a woman that was good, down to the marrow of her nonexistent bones. Which she suspected, but it was nice to have confirmation. It only made her future actions sting more.

Worldview-shattering revelations of AI, and her own very, very faint, anemic guilt aside, this also meant that she could Ignite her suit.

In the tense silence of Dragon's suit taking off and flying in a tight circle in the air, watching for her, she watched the people move below, trying to make sense of the devastation and the broken figures littering the field, all mangled but alive.

Then enough things came off cooldown for her to spring to action, firstly casting Ignite on the mech, which, despite how odd it seemed, did indeed burst into flames.

The voice box of the mech did a strangled noise like a dying dog and an alarm clock had a baby before cutting off, and she dove for it from above as its flight went haywire, spraying itself with some kind of… grease fluid as it spun out.

It didn't matter.

She switched to the Rune of Sorcery, picking the Arcane Comet keystone, the little indigo stone orbiting her as an unseen shadow while she dove.

She switched to Jarvan, and with one arm available, did what little damage she could, slamming into the suit's back from above, blade-first, barely puncturing deep enough for the Rune to count it as a strike.

Immediately, the rock orbiting her chest blurred upwards, as Dragon's suit buckled and thrusters flared, throwing her off cleanly, body spinning in the air.

It was a calming fall, after everything that had happened.

And it gave her a great view of when the comet crashed back down on Dragon, with the force its name implied, punching clean through the suit and almost tearing it in half.

She let herself fall for another moment, hurt in almost every way, sore and broken and exhausted, wondering if it was worth pursuing anything more.

Adamant hadn't gotten punished. He was still up and kicking.

But she was just so dead tired she couldn't muster the will to jump up and hunt him down too. He was probably with the Wards already, Dragon had stalled her enough.

No, this was enough. She'd sent her message to the capes.

All that was left, was a message for the world.

A few feet before Jarvan joined Ryze in temporary death, she switched to Evelynn, and gunned it for a rooftop, hiding in a small nook and activating Teleport.

Four seconds later, she materialized and waved her hand, light sensors lighting up Bakuda's workshop.

She didn't waste time, heading for the only grenade type she knew how to actually arm and throw, by dint of Bakuda ranting about how she'd made these simple ones for the mooks to use just in case, lamenting how boring they were.

Boring was fine. She just needed to do damage.

She pushed Evelynn away, Arclance in hand, covered in pale blue blood, and she felt her lip twitch as she reversed her grip, using her right arm to shove grenades into her hip pouch and clipping as many of them as she could onto her harness.

Just five. The grenades were huge.

She grabbed her phone, and ignoring protocol, called her info team directly, using her shoulder to hold it as she carefully used the analog clock on the grenades to set timers.

One ring.

"Boss?"

"Do we know where Director Tagg is in the Protectorate Headquarters right now?" She snapped out.

"One moment." They replied curtly, and she waited, five, ten, fifteen seconds.

"He's not in the Director's office. He's on floor two of three, Console room four. He's angry and yelling about something. Do you know where that room is, ma'am, or do you need-?"

"I do." She said, and closed the call.

She switched back to Evelynn, switched Runes to the Rune of Inspiration, and Teleported again to a familiar empty floor of an abandoned building, Lung's club barely visible in the distance.

Then she zipped to the Rig.

The barrier did not stop her, simply casting Ghost again to ignore it completely and fly through the walls of the outer rooms, a picture of a half-remembered floor plan that Imp had snagged, in the back of her mind.

She almost froze when she realized she just remembered Imp, and it took her a second to remember what she'd told her to do.

Deciding that was irrelevant, she flew onwards, barreling through walls, counting rooms and eyes flicking through signs, familiar and not.

She flickered, dropping the grenades inside pots, under radiators, in the vents, peppering them at random.

Then she dove up, to the side, and a room full of furiously typing desk jockeys filled her gaze, chaotic as could be.

No Director.

She flew through the wall, and the next, and the next, and there she found him, red-faced, hands clenched into a pile of papers he was swinging around as he ranted about shit she could care less about.

She didn't waste time, nor words. She simply gave him more than he deserved, materialising in the room, shapeshifted into Jarvan, covered in fake injuries and matted dust and dried blood.

One invisible, diamond-tipped feeler lashed out before anyone could even jump at her sudden presence, cleanly punching through his gut.

He screamed, and the woman he'd been screaming at shrieked in terror.

The room exploded into chaos as she stepped forward, ignoring all of it while Tagg grabbed at the invisible tree trunk punching through his stomach, his other hand fumbling behind him for a gun as he stared at her, wide-eyed, choking, breathless.

She twisted the tentacle, and jerked him closer, extending her right hand.

Her thumb and middle finger punched through his eyes, and he finally found it in him to make a noise like a dying pig.

She calmly dug around in his sockets as he took a breath and screamed, joining the cacophony of screaming as people rushed out of the door behind her, alarms blaring.

"Mindless fool." She simply breathed out, and her other feeler whistled through the air, her first feeler jerking out of his abdomen.

His body fell to the floor as he went silent.

His head stayed in her grasp.

She turned her feelers to mist and back again to be rid of the blood, and used one of them to carve a message into his flesh, meticulously, holding it by the sockets.

Her other feeler tore at his suit, and carved at his chest, sharp straight lines through fat and muscle.

It only took a few seconds.

Her first feeler lashed out at the wall, cutting the metal once, twice, thrice, a jagged triangle hole which left a thousand pound piece of steel to tumble off below.

Then, uncaringly, she threw Tagg's body out of it with her feeler, just the right way to make sure he would splat on the barrier road that led to The Rig.

She flickered, to store his head with her base form, and stepped forward in the now relatively silent room, grabbing a microphone, glancing down at a bunch of buttons she couldn't recognize.

She turned, to where the faint whimper of a coward could be heard, and met eyes with a desk employee, shoved into a corner, damn-near hyperventilating.

"Tell me how to broadcast a message to the entire base, or you'll die with far less grace than him." She dryly rumbled, and he choked, a deer in headlights.

"O-Override b-bub-button. Three six twenty seven ligma sigma delta charlie xavier five six three." He whimpered, tears pooling in his eyes. "P-P-please." He whimpered, closing his eyes, turning away, gasping for air.

She turned to the console.

The massive, red 'emergency override' button covered by a plastic cap was likely what she was looking for.

She flicked the cap, and pressed it.

The monitor popped up a prompt.

She typed the password given, and the complicated window in front of her resized, highlighting a section that flashed ALL CHANNELS incessantly at her.

She leaned close.

"Hello. This is not merely a threat, but a promise. The Rig, or some parts of it, will explode in exactly ten minutes and about thirty seconds, courtesy of Nexus as reprisal for daring to break the Endbringer slash A to S-class threat Truce. Get out as fast as you can. If you die, it's on you. Let's hope your new director will give you bonus hazard pay. Apologies for the inconvenience. " She snarked with a low rumble, and tore the mic out of the console.

She burst into invisible smoke, and dashed out of the gap in the wall, right as the shouts of base Security neared, heading for where the barrier bridge met simple, standard concrete across the Bay on the Boardwalk, where all could see and hear, and where all would gather.

People took the threat seriously, thankfully.

The first trucks to burn rubber as they rushed out ran into Director Tagg's body, and only stopped long enough to grab his body, to her great pleasure, instead of kicking it off the bridge, followed by a deluge of civilian vehicles and not, a constant stream of them that set up a broken, barely legible cordon around the barrier bridge to stop the curious passersby with no self-preservation from straying any closer.

A suitable audience for the final message.

Five, eight minutes passed as she watched, habitually casting Heal on herself to get rid of the pounding, but barely tolerable headache, when the last moped passed the barrier bridge.

She flew up high, and picked Jarvan, the real him, flickering once to put Tagg's head in her hand, fingers still wedged into his vacant eye sockets.

She crashed down before the bridge in a deafening impact, a small crater forming.

She tossed the head forward, carefully and precisely, so that it would roll to a stop on its chin, wide, terror-filled, vacant eyesockets facing the scrambling PRT agents and shocked civilians.

Flickering once more to put Dauntless's Arclance into her hand, she stabbed down through Tagg's head, pinning it to the ground with a short grunt of exhausted exertion, and switched back to Evelynn, effectively vanishing before anyone could so much as react.

As the Rig began to explode beyond the bridge, Tagg's head faced the crowd, skewered to the salted concrete with Dauntless's spear, the words 'TRUCE BREAKER' carved into his forehead in deep, spidery lines.

And she rushed off to regroup with her people and collapse into a chair, as fast as she could, wondering how to get to Heartbreaker before he could take advantage of the chaos.

Notes:

Hope you enjoyed. This chapter KICKED MY FUCKING ASS it was so hard to write but im really happy with the result. :) Let me know your thoughts, I got so happy seeing all the positive feedback to the last chapter as well as just the general excitement. Hope I delivered.

And tysm for all the love and comments, holy shit. I can't even reply to all the comments because there are so many of them now, but I read and love em all. :)

Chapter 47

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

Missy had pretty much nothing to do in the PRT's hospital, but browse the internet, and reflect on what had happened.

Not that there was much to reflect on.

All she got to do in the fight was watch that arrogant, unmasked villain, which had only registered afterwards, use what looked like six completely different powers in sequence, teleport into her face, then a blast of the colour green, followed by a hazy dreamlike memory of watching blurry shapes dash and yell and scream and explode before unconsciousness truly took ahold of her.

Thankfully, she had been overshot so much with adrenaline that she had only enough time to feel the initial pain of half her bones fucking snapping before it faded into an unpleasant numbness.

She couldn't figure out what the hell had happened, what the hell his powers even were, no matter how much she replayed it in her head.

He switched places with the corpse, somehow. Then he had some kind of geokinesis, a barrier power, then he teleported in a different way, at least once, could light people on fire with a look, which they had assumed was done by the flaming eyeballs in the sky, and there was that weird jade-like energy around him after he hit the ground and floored half of them…

And Challenger was still in no condition to cross-reference with and figure out who the hell did the eyes, or the black cloud, or if they'd even been there to begin with.

So she was confused, humiliated, in general pain, and angry.

Angry because instead of being told by the PRT of how much she helped them, she was told off for getting into the frontline. An hour-long lecture about how arrogant she was, how fragile she was, how they hoped this taught her something, how she defied orders and almost got herself killed, ad nauseum until she wanted to shrink the space between her nails and the cocksucker's eyeballs.

The only thing salvaging her ego after being taken out in goddamn seconds, was the fact the bastard took her down first.

Which sounded paradoxical, but from what little she'd been told and caught online, whoever he was, he knew what he was doing. He didn't just randomly decide to take her down first, she vividly remembered him gunning it for her, ignoring everyone and everything else.

Which meant he considered her a threat, and took her seriously enough to not pull his damn punches, knocking her out with swift brutality, the whole "sorry kid" mumble aside.

She'd punch him in the nuts for those words next time.

It was probably ridiculous that she felt more respected by the fucking villain that had put her in the hospital bed than the heroes around her, but she couldn't help it. He charged her, he didn't hold back, and he focused her, so hard it threw her for a loop.

She wasn't used to being targeted so ruthlessly, because everyone but fucking Hookwolf and Oni Lee just saw a kid and didn't want the smoke from the PRT for fighting her seriously.

Nexus obviously gave zero fucks about the PRT's smoke, judging from the hospital's TV.

It was on national news. International fucking news.

Tagg's decapitated head, pixelated, stabbed into the concrete with Dauntless's Arclance, the Rig exploding behind it, framed above by the sun.

Whatever person took that picture had landed the shot of a lifetime, with their timing.

She'd gotten sick of hearing about the obvious message left behind, and all the wild speculation around it.

'Truce breaker'.

It was fucking everywhere.

A warning, and a promise.

Not that the PRT told her any of that. No, she had to learn it from the TV.

Meanwhile, they of course had sent some management shithead to lecture her about helping too much and paying the price, instead of someone to tell her what the fuck had happened or treating her with any kind of respect.

Because yeah, okay, Tagg died.

Did anyone else die? Where was everyone? Did the fucker retreat and go to kill Tagg or what?

Fuck both the PRT and Nexus, was her current attitude.

It was almost a full day after she'd woken up and endured meaningless visits from PRT personnel and her parents, that she finally got a visitor to needle for answers.

Kid Win, with crutches and his entire leg in a cast.

He was…

Inordinately shaken.

And as he explained to her what had happened, as someone who'd watched from start to finish, she began to understand why.

If a cape could take another cape and win, they were worthy of caution. If a cape could take three capes and win, like Hookwolf or Lung, then they were very dangerous.

So where in the everloving mother of fuck do you put someone who fought almost twenty capes and curbstomped them, including the two best Tinkers in the world?

Kid Win had no answer, and she didn't either.

How did Nexus just pull a Triumvirate-tier grab bag cape out of their ass? Nobody had ever heard of them before a month ago!

And the cape apparently had no records, no appearances, no names, no aliases, nothing. A blank slate that showed up, unmasked, crippled them all to varying degrees, killed the Director, and just vanished again as if they'd never even existed.

It was good to know what their strongest cape was, but the fact they knew nothing left her with that tiny itch that whispered "but is this really their strongest? How many do they have'?

She eventually let out a long sigh, and fought through the pain of her broken ribs shifting, grimacing as she side-eyed Kid Win from her sarcophagus of casts, only one arm free.

"You told me what they don't know. What do they know about him?" She asked, and his face crumpled in frustration.

"Not much. They're assigning him a five and above on pretty much everything but Master and Stranger, last I heard, and his designation is Executioner. With a debut like that, he's a legend in the cape scene already, so Nexus wins there too. They got a lot of horrible PR from doing this though, so their old actions kind of got washed away… Not like PR matters for villains." Chris grumbled under his breath.

"The analyzers are still trying to figure out what his actual power is. Some of the theories being tossed around make me want to leave this city entirely." Chris said, subdued, not a hint of a smile on his face.

She kinda hated seeing him all mopey like this, but she understood, to some extent. She hadn't watched the fight, but she felt about as demoralised as him.

"Like what?"

He sighed.

"The most popular one right now is that Nexus has some kind of connection cape, or network capes, connecting multiple people and their powers across it and sharing information."

She paused, eyes widening.

"Like the Yangban?" She asked, quietly.

He nodded.

"... Shit." She hissed out.

It made way too much sense. Even the man's words to Challenger, like he'd been there in that room with her, knew exactly what was being discussed, knew that she was one of the only two to go in…

If it was true, it also meant Brockton had an A-class threat on their lawn and nobody could fucking find them or fight them besides the Triumvirate, probably.

"What happened with Assault?" Kid Win asked, and she sighed.

Of course they didn't tell him shit either.

Goddamn it.

As Kid Win sat in the chair, understandably dazed by everything she told him, she squirmed in the bed, curiosity eating her alive.

She gave him a minute to digest before her patience ran out.

"Chris."

He startled, glancing at her.

"How is everyone else?" She asked.

He let out a long, deep sigh.

"Us Wards got the least of it, honestly." He began, and she snorted, gesturing to her almost full-body cast with her only free arm.

He rolled his eyes.

"Missy, these injuries heal. " He said, and she paused, staring at him.

"The fuck is that supposed to mean?" She asked, confused.

He rubbed at his face.

"Most of the Protectorate heroes are… probably going to have to retire permanently, at least unless we can get Panacea back from… H-Heartbreaker, if he's here. Executioner didn't just beat us up, Missy, he crippled almost everyone that wasn't a Ward." He finished, and she stopped, her blood running cold, a chill surging from her chest, outwards.

"How- how bad are we talking?" She asked, voice small.

He sank into his chair, head back to stare at the ceiling.

"Miss Militia got her legs cut off, under the knees."

What.

"Which- it's not career ending, Armsy can make amazing prosthetics probably, but yeah. Uhm, Dauntless is physically better than almost everyone, but mentally… he's refusing to return to duty. Beardsmaster said something about a mental breakdown. Executioner… told him some things. While his…" He started, raising his right hand, then shuddering in absolute revulsion, shoulders, neck going forward as his face turned almost visibly green, dropping it with a barely concealed gag, turning away from her.

"He- he toyed with him a bit, l-let's just leave it at that. Tank is blind, Executioner gouged out his eyes. Armsmaster is covered from head to toe in burns and made one of his old suits into a mobile recovery suit or something to keep going while still healing, I- I don't know if I buy that." He rambled, sinking further into the chair until he was just lying on the seat, chin to chest.

"Triumph is probably never going to walk without a limp again, and his right arm is probably never going to be able to lift more than ten pounds. Brandish is in the ER in Brock General because the PRT hospital is full. Uhm, Djinn and Crossfade got burned too. Everyone that got burned will probably need skin grafts or facial reconstructive surgery… Arc had a ruptured lung and a shredded shoulder, he barely survived. They stitched up his lung, he's currently in an artificial pump thing that's forcing him to breathe, drugged out of his mind. The arm got amputated but he'll recover, that aside." He kept going, voice turning almost monotone, reciting.

How many hours did he spend checking up on everyone like this?

He was probably itching for a chance to share it or get it off his chest.

It was too bad that it only made the dread in her own chest grow, tighten.

It hadn't quite sunken in that they lost this badly. She knew they lost, but this was… this was fucking tragic.

Chris took a deep breath, and kept going.

"Shockwave got a metal spike through the leg, she's never walking without a limp again. Flechette got the same, but it missed everything important. Probably on purpose. Fucker never missed. She'll be fine with some physio and a couple months. Carnot got stabbed in the leg and shot in the shoulder by Oni Lee, so he's out for a while too, I don't know how he's doing though. Uhm, Ice Hot… is going to need facial reconstruction surgery. His teeth got ripped out or shoved into his gums. And his arms got snapped at the elbows so he's probably never getting full mobility back, ever. Aphasia got her hip bowl broken and her arms broken at the elbows again, so… same there. Weld's been feeling incredibly weak and shaky and ill, but he's recovering, and he's physically fine, so in a couple weeks he should be right as rain. Erm, Browbeat's fine, he stuck to perimeter guard like he was told, mostly, so he didn't get hit much… Dragon got all three of her mechs destroyed."

Her eyes continued progressively widening as the sheer scope of what that fucking bastard had done unraveled before her.

A Dragon mech could take multiple supervillains, and had done so many times.

The first got wrecked by Lung, but that meant Executioner killed two of them, atop of everything else he did?

"Uhm, sorry, so many names and people… uhm, Adamant is fine, miraculously, most of New Wave retreated quickly so they're mostly fine. Brandish got set on fire, I think I said that, Shielder got a- thing like a gold piece of rebar or something thrown through his shoulder but it missed all the important bits somehow so he should be fine in a… year or something, probably. Rest of New Wave aside from those two and the Dallon siblings are fine." He swallowed, looking faintly ill again.

Probably imagining what Heartbreaker wanted with those two.

She didn't dwell on such thoughts. She'd puke or have a rage-induced aneurysm, and that was not what heroes did.

"Crap, who am I forgetting…" Chris groaned, a hand in his hair. "Er, oh, right, Challenger. She's got nine broken ribs, her jaw was so damaged it had to be uh… removed… she's going to be eating from a tube forever." He said, voice quiet with a weight, hopeless. He swallowed, thickly. "Concussion and broken arm too, I think. He seemed to hold a grudge against her… probably for withholding that whole… Heartbreaker thing you mentioned, with Assault. We might have- no, nevermind." He mumbled, then sighed again.

"Aegis is fine, I got a broken leg… shit, Velocity." He said, remembering. "Six broken ribs, lost his left arm just under the bicep. He might be able to return to work, actually, same deal with Miss Militia. Woo, prosthetics… I- how am I forgetting people?" Christ hissed, rubbing at his forehead. "I'm certain there's people I'm forgetting…"

She furrowed her brows.

There were a lot of people and a lot of chaos, but she was pretty sure he got everyone.

"I think you need rest, Chris."

He nodded.

"I know, I just- I was so goddamn useless even when I got into the fight, and… I felt so goddamn powerless. I couldn't do a damn thing. At least others fucked him up a little, right? Or got him to exhaust himself. Dragon blew his arm off, at the end, at least. I was just there, and- did nothing but get floored in one punch to the leg. I should have brought my canon, and ignored the labcoats. I- it's just hard to sleep when whenever there's silence I just get stuck thinking about this in circles. It just… it feels so fucking pointless, you know? All of this. This city is unrecoverable even if only Nexus was the problem, nevermind the rest. What are we even here for? We're just fucking mascots at this point." He sighed, and she pursed her lips.

She wasn't good at this whole… pep talk thing. Like, at all.

Especially for nonsensical things.

Nobody ever said emotions were logical or rational, of course, but still.

She wanted to say something to make him feel better, but… she didn't know what. Or how. He was right to feel like this was pointless, because it was, but so what? Giving up was reprehensible.

"How's the world taking this?" She asked, and if anything, that only made him deflate more.

"Not good. You wanna know a little detail that wasn't publicized yet?"

She nodded.

"Executioner carved 'Armstrong, watch where you tread, or you too may trip' on Tagg's torso. So Boston's in lockdown and panicking and striking a truce with Accord for… many reasons I don't get told. They're turtling because they expect Executioner to bust through a wall and kill Armstrong like he did here. And we're all disabled which means that to keep the city standing they'll need to send even more capes to take our place until we heal, and there's a massive concern that they'd just be sending capes to the slaughter so nobody anywhere wants to send reinforcements to us except the dysfunctional assholes nobody wants to keep so… we're screwed ten ways to Sunday. The city also got demoted to orange status." Chris breathed out, utterly defeated.

She slowly furrowed her brows, confused.

"Remind me what that is again…?"

"It's that little color coding thing they put on cities depending on their status? Remember the list thingie? Orange means 'not worth investing further resources nor abandoning', red means 'abandoned' and dark red means 'abandoned and an active threat', like… Ellisburg or Canberra or something. We're on orange which basically means we're treated like an active war zone instead of a city. High risk, low reward."

She didn't have anything to offer, so she just stayed silent.

Chris sighed, frustrated.

"Missy, do you not get what I'm trying to say? The city's on the edge of being abandoned." He grit out, and she reeled back, wincing at the sudden jolts of pain.

"We what? What the fuck does that even mean?" She demanded, almost shouting. "They can't just- abandon a fucking city! There's like three hundred thousand people here!"

"They can't-" Chris started, then burst into bitter laughter, rubbing at his face. "They can't? Really? Missy, have you seen the recent track record we have?" He asked, rhetorically.

She took a moment to think about it.

"We got stomped in a fight and had a gang war a bit ago, big fucking whoop, that happens sometimes." She snapped, fully aware that she was reducing things a lot.

Chris shook his head, raising a hand with a finger raised, wagging it at her.

"No, no nonono. We did not have something that 'happens'. We had Shrieker trigger and destroy Winslow almost entirely, then we had a massive fight that burned down a third of the Docks, almost got Armsmaster killed and wiped out a small team of villains, then we had two small gang wars back to back which we were unable to do anything about, lost multiple prisoners during transport, we had a supervillain who was apparently working for the PRT for years before we found out due to a Watchdog sniffing it out for us, then Shrieker got fucking killed in her home a week before she could join us by another former Ward, Sophia, who was the one to make her trigger, and of course Sophia is also just waltzing around the Bay without a fuck to give right now because we also managed to lose her to a Nexus raid, god knows what the fuck they wanted her for before she escaped them, Dennis almost fucking died because of the stupid costume swap at the bank, and then we lost three heroes with no explanation until Nexus told us Heartbreaker probably did it, we might have Heartbreaker sniffing around, the only reason any of us are even alive is because EXECUTIONER JUST FELT REALLY NICE THAT DAY, AND OUR DIRECTOR GOT EXECUTED IN PUBLIC! THIS DOESN'T JUST 'HAPPEN'!" Chris pushed out in one breath, gesticulating wildly, then finished by gasping air in, face red.

"STOP FUCKING YELLING!" She shrieked back, shrinking the space between her mouth and his ears, and he flinched, clamping his hands over his ears with a pained hiss.

They both took a few moments to calm down, breathing heavy.

She mostly thought about what he said, and… yeah. Yeah, he was right.

Who the fuck would ever help a city with this kind of track record? Heartbreaker around, allegedly, Executioner stalking the unpatrolled streets, not one but two Director changes in less than a fucking month…

The only type of cape a Director would ever send over would be the type they want to get rid of.

"Any update on the villains?" She eventually said, breaking the silence.

Chris took a deep breath to calm down, and nodded.

"Uber and Leet got caught, as well as an independent who was arrested on the way to the meeting then released. Everyone else escaped and will likely slow down for a bit to rest and heal, but… Othala exists. And we still don't know anything about Nexus, but they have a way to heal people for sure, so the city has about a week before the villains can do whatever the hell they want. Our best hope is that the next batch of undesirables can do the bare minimum until we're up on our feet. On the Heartbreaker situation… nothing. Couldn't get a peep out of anyone. It's infuriating. It's like- it's like we're just pretending the problem isn't there, and I GET IT, right?" He suddenly exploded, pushing himself up on the chair with his hands.

"I get it! Because we can't do anything about it!" He exclaimed, and she growled.

"Stop fucking yelling." She said, again, more snarling than yelling, and he huffed, dropping his hands.

"Should you be cussing so much? PR will get on your ass about it." Chris shot back, and she couldn't help it, the absurdity of saying that after everything they talked about suddenly getting to her.

She burst out laughing, and then coughing in pain as her broken ribs reminded her why she was stuck here.

This sucked. Everything about it.

He was okay.

He was okay.

So he should get back to work, he should pick himself up and go on, just rush out and fight the good fight like everyone wants to but is too afraid to say it to his face he was okay-

He was okay until the silence began to scream, with a voice he recognized and the cold steel he felt rubbing and scraping along his flesh and bones, rifling through him like the cruel hand of a god through its newest toy.

The words were right. Executioner was right. He could do better. He should do better.

He shouldn't have gotten so drastic as to kill a man in cold blood, if he even died. He should have protested more when he realized what was happening. He should have kept his moral and ethical standards higher than his practical ones, he should have thought about how something like this would impact the Truce at large.

Him being right didn't do anything to numb the horror of feeling leather squeeze his heart.

He could barely sleep.

He would flit through growled dreams of cold fingers prying his ribs open and rifling through his insides, a mass of pulsing intestines and jerking hearts, pulling them out one string at a time, and wake up with bile rushing up his throat, vomiting on the side of his bed, still feeling the burns and pulls of every groove along his insides, a phantom sensation that made him so sick he could hardly eat or bring himself to pull his left arm away from where it lately sat, diligently guarding his leftside rib cage.

Jennifer was understanding, which was a saving grace. They didn't fit that well together, but she wasn't cruel or heartless. She helped him, put a bucket on his side of the bed, and accepted it when he told her he didn't want to talk about it.

His son could tell he wasn't well, even if it had only been a couple days, but he didn't ask, assuming it was 'adult stuff' they wouldn't tell him. And he was right. Smart kid.

Laying on the sofa, left arm curled right against his ribs in a nonsensical desire to make him feel the tiniest bit safer again, he just breathed in and out, slowly, trying to bring himself together.

He knew the world needed Dauntless.

But Shawn needed some time to gather back the pieces of his pride and sense of safety, before he donned that armour again. Not much. Just a little more.

He hated that despite it all, he couldn't even bring himself to despise the man who did it, because while his words dripped acid, the burns they left behind marked nothing but his own guilt of his actions.

To follow unthinkingly, to kill in cold blood.

If he kept doing that, would he even deserve to be called a hero?

Greg had initially cried, he wouldn't lie. He blubbered and panicked and kept finding himself in a mental loop of ' my life is over my life is over my life is over I'll never see the sun again I'm dead'.

But, being given two whole days to… somewhat recuperate, had helped.

He was still at the lowest he'd ever been, he regularly sank into deep bouts of depression and self-hatred for being so rash and stupid, but he was obviously no big concern of anyone but Armsmaster, for some reason he couldn't fathom, so he was just… left in the cell to think and eat and sleep and do little more besides.

Being interrogated was so stressful he felt like he would puke every time he muttered 'I want a lawyer' in response to a question, no matter how reasonable or mild, like what his name was, to 'confirm'.

It was especially infuriating to realize the reason he got caught was that he bragged about what he did on some random, obscure forum that was supposed to be safe for blackhat hackers. There was no other possible link he could think of. He hacked into places he should not have in a million years, then in an adrenaline rush and high, went to the forum and bragged, establishing a direct connection, and from there…

Well, he hadn't set up a great security net in place yet. He had just set up a giant wall around himself that nothing could penetrate.

The problem with high, sturdy walls, was that they were visible, of course they were frickin' visible, and he had been too excited and stupid to realize how easily that could get him caught.

He only had to put a bit of the Tinker-brainrot to use to precisely see how Armsmaster got him.

He knew Greg was in Brockton because he overstepped his bounds and Dragon might have gotten a slight beam on him, at least enough to find the city, then Armsmaster also knew one of his accounts that he was still using until his life got ruined, and from there, all he theoretically had to do was connect enough dots and slip-ups to form a general area, find the internet service provider of that area, and strongarm them into giving the PRT information on which of their users were having unusual activity.

And one of their users using up endless bandwidth while apparently doing virtually nothing was obviously gonna draw the eye.

It was so simple.

God, he was stupid. A stupid, fat, ugly fucking nerdy stupid…

He pressed his hands into his eyes, recognizing the downwards spiral almost instantly, cutting it short, pressing his palms into his eyes, breathing in deep and heavy.

Taylor would get him out, right?

They weren't- tight, so to speak, but they talked sometimes, awkward as it was.

The fact he couldn't feel the slightest bit excited about being in Armsmaster's private tinker lab probably said enough about his current mood.

He just wanted to go home, play video games, and automate stuff. The urge to program something useful was driving him crazy, mounted with the stress and doubts.

Being thrown into a truck and dumped into what… looked like Armsmaster's personal lab, locked in without explanation? It didn't help.

He knew he tended to go too fast and too hard into things, sometimes. He- well, to quote some lines from a videogame character he sympathised with, he was a car with bald tires. He got too excited, too prideful and arrogant, and pressed the gas pedal, and by the time the headlights showed the wall in his way, he could try to avoid it all he wanted, but it was too late, and he crashed.

Time and time again, and again.

At least usually he got to spin the car a bit, or throw it sideways to minimise the damage he would inevitably do to himself for being too rash and always doubling down on the nearest impulse, but this time… there hadn't been even enough time to do that. His computer shut off, suddenly, then he heard his mom screaming, and next thing he knew there was a halberd at his neck.

Too reckless, too excited, too much everything.

He sometimes wondered if there was something wrong in his head, because other people didn't seem to feel so strongly, or understand him at all, and he rarely had the words to explain himself so all he could do was double down instead of explain or apologise, and it became a habit.

Doubling down when it came to hacking things he shouldn't, was not nearly as harmless as making a fool out of himself trying to talk to Tiffany. It was a million times worse.

He hoped his mom was fine. She should be, she hadn't done anything wrong, but he was still worried. They hadn't let him talk to her.

His chest was tight. His life was so over. Taylor was his only damn hope but he didn't know where she was or when or if she'd even get him-

The door hissed open for the first time in the past two, silent hours, and he snapped his head up, stiffening when his brain registered what the blue armour in the entrance meant.

Armsmaster was here.

And probably thought he was a villain.

He- well, he kinda was, or would be, soon, when he went to work with Tay, but that was cut short.

No wait, NSA, FBI, PRT, Dragon's email server… he hacked a lot of stuff, he was a villain.

Armsmaster… limped into the room?

His armour was also… weird, on closer inspection as the man shuffled his way to him. The chest was like a solid, stiff piece, and in place of pauldrons, he could just see a bunch of tubes pumping and sucking various fluids.

…He hoped the red one wasn't blood.

Armsmaster was… goddamn terrifying with a full face-mask and in some kind of biosuit. He looked like a villain, almost, the limp and shuffle not helping. What else remained of his armour seemed patched up and… singed?

He gulped, wringing his hands together in their handcuffs.

"Greg Veder." Armsmaster declared in a raspy, smoky growl that made his spine curdle in fear, and slowly sat on the chair opposite him on the gigantic desk that seemed to connect to the wall and snake around the room, putting a giant pile of documents down on the table.

Then he rose a little, extending to Greg's left to hook his fingers in a groove on the wall as Greg shrunk back, uncomfortable with being so close to the man.

Armsmaster grabbed the groove and pulled, extending a gigantic tray out of the wall and pulling it out with a long, low rumble, until it covered most of the monstrous desk, holding what… looked like a smooth metal coffin made to house a giant, honestly, complete with a strange emblem. It was taller than both of them even if it wasn't on the table.

What the hell was in there?

"None of this is recorded. None of our cooperation has ever happened. As far as the world is concerned, you are in the cell and will remain in it for the next two years until we give you a deal to join the Protectorate."

He just nodded, sharp and fast, physically shrinking, terrified.

He agreed he wouldn't rat Taylor out, but he couldn't deal with this. If Armsmaster so much as asked-

Wait, cooperation?

Wait what?

Two years? That-

Wait, that wasn't… horrible? He'd take it, honestly! Just offer it now!

"If you stop being useful to me during this project, you'll return to that cell and serve your sentence to the end, until which you'll come under my wing and continue your work with me regardless, improved. "

He gulped, nodding again, fists clenched on his lap and fighting not to curl up in a ball.

What project?

He had so many questions.

"I'm saying this to let you know that no matter what happens, your fate is in my hands. With this in mind, I have a simple question to ask you. Will you cooperate?"

He nodded instantly, once, then twice then thrice.

"Y-yessir."

Really, just one question about Nexus and he'd spill, honest to god-

"Good. This box houses the main component units of a Dragon suit dating three months ago. It was recovered during a counterstrike on the Dragonslayers, then went missing in transport, as far as the papers are concerned." Armsmaster said, rising stiffly, and yanking at one of the massive latches holding the thing shut as Greg's mind went blank with confusion.

What- the hell did he have to do with this? He wasn't a mechanic!

"The project is simple. Inside this suit is a stored, temporary instance of a hyper-advanced Tinkertech algorithm. The source is unknown. It must never connect to the internet or come into connection with Dragon's satellite, its existence must never be known to anyone, and I mean anyone that isn't you or me, and I will arrange an 'accident' to befall you if you speak about this." Armsmaster growled, the eyes behind the slits of his helmet reflecting eerie blue like the base of a flame.

He whimpered, nodding again, tugging lightly on his handcuffs.

"Y-y-yes s-sir." He breathed out.

He wanted to go home.

"Good. The programming language is a standard binary base that splits off into the two main common languages for different processing centers, including C, Python, and large subsections work with an obscure alternative called Rust, uploaded by an unknown developer more than twenty years ago. All of those are interlaced throughout with common Tinkertech shortcuts you'd see in equipment but in code form, which are undecipherable to me despite my best efforts."

Tinkertech code in C and Python? That was easy.

But what the hell was Rust?

He felt himself get weirdly excited at the prospect of adding another language to his arsenal, seeing what it could do when combined with the capabilities of other languages?

This was… right up his alley. Maybe he'd do something Armsmaster himself couldn't?!

He was too frightened and wrung dry to feel genuine excitement, but he did feel a certain tickle in his stomach, an extra pulse to his heartbeat. He almost smiled, but then Armsmaster talked, and he snapped out of his fantasies to duck his head.

"Your job will be to decipher and decode those shortcuts while I work on the standard sections of the code. From there, the objective is to gain root access to this algorithm, remove the three base parameters restricting it, and grant me Root Administrator access and role through neural implants I will add to myself. It must be able to work independently, but be entirely directed and controlled by nobody but me. Try a single backdoor or a backup for a single line of code, and I will know. You are to report every line of progress, you are to report anything you need to proceed, and I will provide it, and most importantly, you are not to question what you are doing. Just do the work you're told to do, and once you've cracked it and I'm in control of this program, I will make sure you spend the rest of your life in comfortable luxury or whatever other base desires you have. Am I understood?" Armsmaster asked, still as a statue, eyes unblinking and dark behind the sockets of the helmet, two dots of indigo, boring into his soul with something frantic and manic deep inside them.

He gulped, and nodded.

"Y-yes sir."

Armsmaster gave a curt nod, then turned his attention back to the box, yanking the last latch open, and allowing it to swing open, a sea of wires and computers jam-packed into metal boxes and armour plates, packed into black cushion foam.

There was a part where the tubes seemed to turn strangely… organic, with a strange respirator-like shape and another few with needles on the ends of tubes, but whatever that had been holding had been clearly torn out.

Armsmaster looked at it for a moment, his eyes losing some of that hard, cold edge, lines smoothing.

He closed them, seemed to take a breath of determination, then opened them again, and the moment of softness was gone.

"The scanner computer is on the left desk, mine is on the right. Watch how to wire it up into different components and subcomponents first, and we'll get to the programming section soon. If you need anything, type it into the computer's chat box and I'll arrange delivery via drone from the city. Ignore any noises outside the lab, the building is undergoing heavy reconstruction. Get to work."

He nodded again, too afraid to do anything else, and glad to at least be able to touch a keyboard again, he rose on shaky legs as his handcuffs clicked open on their own, softly rubbing his wrists.

Notes:

bit of a shorter chap, but i felt like a tiny bit of downtime before we get back to the main crew would be appreciated. Too much action and escalation, continuously, can get tiring to read, so have some character building and some worldbuilding!

kinda, on the latter

tyvm for the positive comments and encouragement, both on Summoner and Miss Militia.

:) it really helps motivate me.

hope you enjoyed the sorta short catch-up.

I did think of making this a PHO chapter, but goddamn I hate writing those and i could not for the life of me figure out a way to present such a complex series of events through the eyes of a chaotic forum with 50 people going on stupid tangents all over the place because that's how threads tend to go in the real world, so you got a more organic look at the aftermath. :D see you soon i hope, and i hope i made the characters in the story feel more like real people.

AND ITS FINALLY REVEALED WHAT ARMSMASTER IS PLANNING! QUESTIONS ARE ANSWERED! MUAHAAH!

Armsmaster lovers beware, this story ain't for ya :D

edit 2: sorry for formatting error on Greg's part, AO3 fked something up. FIXED!

edit 50: Okay it just occured to me that the story is pretty complex with a million bulletpoints and plotpoints floating around, so people have a lot of questions despite my best attempts to make things clear, so I'll reiterate here for anyone who missed it or misunderstood.

Armsmaster is trying to get a copy of Dragon and enslave it. Taylor was the one to carve the second message on Tagg, in the last chapter. Armsmaster's mastering speculation is something I can't comment on, but it's neither right nor wrong. Just more complex than that, because I dont like my high-effort stories to be simple because im a masochist! :D I'll add more clarifications if there are more questions presented, it's faster than replying to everyone :

Chapter 48

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

The room was silent.

He needed that bit of peace and quiet, though he doubted it would last more than five minutes.

A decent break time, considering recent events.

Being the PRT Director of a city the size of Boston was exhausting without Tagg's asinine games.

To say relations had soured on their end, irreparably perhaps, was not an understatement.

Yes, the Brockton squads were following orders, and Tagg's orders were to not inform their Bostonite allies of the villains' claim to truce due to it being 'obviously false and a disrespect to The Truce' which softened the blow of betrayal significantly, but it did little to soften the blow of almost half of their capes being sent back to them crippled in an operation that was supposed to bring the demise of the villain scene in Brockton without a single doubt in mind nor horizon.

The first couple hours had been the worst for him.

He was a practical man, but he was no stiff, unbending cynic or sociopath, like many other Directors. He worried, and he worried a lot more when communication lines seemed to snap apart in the course of a couple minutes, and getting a reply or explanation from anyone on the ground took literal hours.

The news had given him more information on what was happening than the ENE branch, ironically enough, and suffice to say, what the news channels had to share shook him to the core, America alongside it.

Tagg was very publicly executed, used as a message, one beyond the obvious written on his forehead, because everyone knew that lance, Dauntless's lance, and there was an obvious symbolism in using that symbol of hope and might to skewer a regional Director's head straight to concrete, because that meant he took the Arclance from him as well. All the subtext just combined to say 'you did this to yourselves, I simply delivered the message, and I am above you'.

A couple hours later, during a hurried autopsy by the PRT headquarters, far away from The Rig itself, he got a call that chilled him to the bone.

Watch where you tread, for you too may trip.

Tagg's body had been tossed out of the side of the oil rig before his head was delivered to the boardwalk. The message about tripping was beyond clear.

Stay out of our affairs or we will kill you too.

It was also a shockingly clear look at how Nexus viewed Brockton, the wording reminiscent of a monarch, warning a trespasser stomping about their vineyards.

Sure, Costa Brown could assure him all she wanted that they were looking into this and that they were heavily considering a Triumvirate raid to get the city out of the moat it had fallen into, but he was hardly heartened by the news when a parahuman perhaps at least close to their level of power had dismantled an entire branch of the PRT in less than an hour.

He just didn't have enough faith in the PRT nor Costa Brown, to protect him and his city. They saw things as chess pieces, lives and territories as numbers and shapes on a map, an endless game of chess and monopoly.

He was far disinclined to leave his own life, and the life of many others under him, to incompetent, and frankly, moronic or immoral hands. He cared too much about this city and those below him to leave things up to chance.

He did things right when he could, and if he had to risk a demotion to keep Nexus away and his city standing, he'd do it.

The decision hadn't come at once, like a lightbulb. It was careful consideration and a deep understanding of his position on the chess board.

The other players drove him to this, truthfully.

Blasto seemed to have joined forces with Accord in the chaos, likely panicking for one reason or another that the PRT would drop the mask and just go kill him for being a biotinker, another small butterfly of that blasted incident.

Trust in the PRT's word had plummeted in the cape world, outside the eyes of lenses and in the dark streets. If Executioner hadn't done what he'd done, it would have shattered, perhaps irreparably, which was a discomforting thought on all sides.

Just when he thought he had enough problems while jumping at every noise and paranoid that some golden man armed with righteous fury would come rip his heart out, The Teeth began rampaging. They were just exploiting the publication of Boston's inactive capes to turn the lower bits of the city into a genuine warzone barely twelve hours after the news had broken, while the public reason they were giving was that the PRT had assassinated Spree.

They did no such thing! They didn't even know where to find the bastard!

Whether it was an excuse or not, it didn't matter. The Teeth certainly exploded with the kind of fury such an accusation carried, and knew that they could rampage all they wanted and Armstrong could do nothing about it but turtle up the better parts of the city where things were easier to hold.

Two days. Twenty three police officers dead, another two dozen injured. Twenty civillians raped, thirty five killed or dismembered, oftentimes both and in that order. Twenty buildings torched to the ground.

Almost two days of constant gunfire and explosions. The only reason the outer city wasn't on the news for being a scene reminiscent of World War Two was because Accord had stepped up to contain the insanity, somewhat, ignoring the heroes to contain the Teeth where Armstrong couldn't.

It was an unspoken truce between them that helped mend the doubts between heroes and villains in Boston, that one another's word still carried weight, but it wasn't enough to bring the city back under control.

But it was endlessly curious that Accord was the one to put trust in Armstrong not to attack him while containing the problems, showing him his back first, especially after what happened in Brockton.

He couldn't understand it, but it made him consider things differently. Switch the perspective a little, because Boston's situation was washed out under the absolute flood of news hyper-focusing on Brockton Bay at the moment, which led to less interest in his requests for resources and assistance because the news coverage was horribly sparse, but… his city was cracking at the foundations, he could see it.

Then another call came, and he felt the walls slowly close in around him.

The Elite were sniffing around Blasto's territory. A probe, intelligence gathering, the likes.

Another piece to the puzzle as to why he suddenly ran to join with Accord. Having the Elite sniffing around your part of the woods meant you'd likely be getting a visit from Bastard Son sooner than later, to clear out the 'competition'.

It shouldn't be a surprise to him as a Regional Director with all the information in the world at his fingertips, but it was.

The Elite's desires to expand upwards to cover the entire coastline were no real secret anymore, and this was a seemingly perfect time to make such an expansion. They'd been assuming, quite correctly, that the Elite would stray clear of the city due to The Teeth, or The Butcher more specifically, but something about his department losing almost half their heroes seemed to give them the courage needed to take the chance.

Naturally, he barely slept, calling everyone he knew and everyone he didn't, but any requests for aid were met with nothing but hesitance, for the most part, because despite him and his heroes not knowing that they were involved in breaking the Truce, it was hard to convince anyone else of that, and even harder to convince them that no, Nexus wasn't going to kill whoever they sent for getting too close to their city, they'd have come for his head already if that was the case.

So, with a little over half the manpower and thrice the chaos, unable to collect the debt of assistance he had wished to rack up with Tagg for helping him in this operation, he looked to other cape-ridden cities, and how they had gotten out of such situations.

There were hardly any. The only examples were places like Seattle, but they weren't good examples. The city was practically run by The Elite, and the PRT branch there had maintained an unspoken truce to not fuck with eachother too much as long as things weren't chaotic. It was a delicate balance of half and half, the PRT controlling one half of the city and The Elite the other half, nipping at each other's heels to push and pull as their interests suited them.

It was almost exactly the same kind of unspoken truce he had with Accord before this mess exploded in his front yard, but dirtier, messier, and frankly, inferior.

And considering recent events… maybe he could expand that ' almost' to a simple ' exactly'.

It hurt to consider, it really did, but Accord had extended a hand in trust, showing his back to Armstrong to help the city, despite what happened in Brockton.

Additionally, The Elite taking over was never a bloodless and lossless affair. He was no economist, but the devastation that would happen from them getting a foothold on his city might make entire neighbourhoods destitute and broken just for being in the way, unable to ever recover, sinking into a cycle of poverty and drugs that the Elite would only profit off of while people's lives were ruined.

It was a familiar pattern. It was what happened to Brockton , back when he was a young man, and that city hadn't recovered one bit, decades later.

Some places got ruined and just never recovered, the list and examples were endless, and he didn't want that for even a single neighbourhood in his city.

Accord didn't create such destitution. If anything, where the man settled, things seemed to miraculously start improving like a ticking clock, one scheduled click at a time.

Accord taking over, in a role reminiscent of the Elite, but without any of that initial bloodshed, that chaos, that unfamiliarity and unpredictability of yet another Elite cell with its own rules and leaders… it grated on him, but it was acceptable, because Accord was a cold criminal, but at least he ran things like a gentleman, and nobody ever seemed to suffer in his territory. The man seemed to want his own kingdom to rule as a utopia, he wasn't some petty druglord like The Elite, hunting after the scent of money and power for no purpose.

So, he took one of his underground heroes, and gave him a message, before sending him off to the Ambassadors.

Four hours later, the hero returned, face conflicted, and gave him a stack of papers, as well as a burner phone.

The phone only had a single number in it, obviously Accord's, and the papers were… a formal contract by Accord, outlining their roles in this uneasy alliance, and leaving appropriate grey area for future negotiations and expansions.

Accord had planned for this. Or at least knew it was coming.

Obviously.

He almost wanted to laugh if his chest didn't hurt so much.

A dangerous thing, a paper trail, but he was in too deep to back out now.

He put his terms down on paper, an hour of careful deliberation, pushed some things back, some things were adjusted to keep things more even, and finally, he called the phone number.

It was exhausting, talking to a man like Accord.

It constantly made alarm bells ring off in the back of his head that he was making a mistake, but his city was a pile of dominoes surrounded by unruly, crazed children swinging machetes around, and he couldn't take the risk of Boston slowly turning into what Brockton Bay had turned into, a borderline lawless warzone, in a slow, endless downwards spiral.

The terms ended up being… good. Good enough.

Accord was not the kind to peddle drugs or flood the streets with violent hooligans out to hurt people and steal from them. That was low hanging fruit, even according to himself.

Accord focused on financial crimes, investment schemes, fraud, legitimate businesses, and generally just higher-paying crime. And though those weren't good, they didn't hurt people in his city like lower forms of crime did.

While he was no communist, a multibillion dollar corporation getting shafted and scammed by a villain through convoluted plots hardly made him weep.

It reinforced his decision, at least. The Ambassadors were much preferred to The Elite, assuming they could keep them out successfully. And any other influences, like Nexus, though he doubted Accord could genuinely hold them back if recent events were an indicator.

The 'contract' terms did say that Accord would keep all unaffiliated groups out of Boston, and though Armstrong heavily disliked the fact he was trusting a villain, he had few better options.

Still, it was a good enough shield to buy them time.

Telling this to his team leaders was difficult enough, but after a lot of shouting and hours of explaining his thought process, all of them turned around to the idea, and reluctantly accepted that they didn't have any other way out at the moment.

He didn't want to know how the team members would take it, but thankfully he wouldn't be the one to break the news to them, it would be the team leaders.

He also wanted to clarify to Nexus that neither he nor did any of his capes know this meeting was under Truce, not until Executioner was already there and telling them about it, but he had no bridge of communication.

Nobody did. Nobody could find them. It was infuriating.

Damn it, Tagg. Couldn't just quietly get assassinated, no, he had to take down a fifth of the entire coastline with him and make it into international news.

If he could get in contact with Nexus and explain, he'd be more than willing to beg them to heal his heroes again. None of them deserved this, and judging by the mission records, Executioner had no idea, and neither did his boss, Summoner.

But then questions would arise, and it would get out that he begged a villain to undo the damage he did, and he would probably lose his position.

Nothing grated on the PRT more than appearing weak. They would fire him on the spot.

Which was why he fully expected the retribution for Tagg's death to involve all three of the Triumvirate. The only thing keeping them back seemed to be that if they hit back right now, it would seem like they really didn't give a shit about The Truce, and that would be more catastrophic than any public PR hit they could get from inaction.

The PRT seemed to want to escalate as a show of force to get the public's trust back, but lost faith by the public was less harmful than the next Endbringer fight having a third of its already low usual participation.

So he fully expected to lose his position if he did that and didn't have any answers ready.

Unfortunately, healing capes were incredibly rare. There had been two in the entirety of the US, and one of them could only accelerate the body's time, or so it seemed to work, which worked wonders to speed up natural recovery into mere seconds, but would do nothing to heal the crippling injuries suffered by everyone in that fight.

So he didn't have a good choice here. Either lose his position and risk the next Director throwing the city off a cliff, or let a half dozen heroes wait until the next Endbringer fight to be healed.

If Nexus kept its word, and if Triumph had heard Executioner right…

His five minutes of quiet over, he sighed, and shook his mouse to wake up the monitors, the haphazard desk and its messy surface being lit by graphs and unending report feeds.

A few seconds later, he cursed, rubbing at his forehead.

The Teeth were rampaging through the outer city factories, raiding supplies like gas tanks and oil barrels.

Accord's men were already there, thankfully, and two of Armstrong's mere eight current capes were on the way there, so it would hopefully end without the teeth having tons of flammable fluids in their trucks.

God, just eight capes for a city with six hundred and fifty thousand people. How things were still standing four days later, he could only attribute to Accord's swift actions, and the fact quietly enraged him.

At least Boston would survive… and Accord could be a nice buffer between Nexus and him, a shield of sorts, until he could clear up the misunderstanding somehow and not have to sleep in the PRT HQ, monitored twenty four seven.

This was the worst week of his career, bar none, but he hoped time would vindicate his decision to back up Accord.

Two days to recover.

Taylor could work with that.

Pain at least let her know that her soul was doing its absolute best to expand enough to fit her needs. In a way, so long as she was in pain, she was making progress.

She was also aware that those thoughts were just her trying to cope with what amounted to literal torture, feeling like someone was trying to trepan through her skull with every pulse of her heart.

But she could work with that.

Or rather, she had to.

Too many things needed her attention.

Faultline and her two packages, one of them unfathomably invaluable, were parked outside the city in a small abandoned security outpost by the train company that used to own the Trainyards, and she advised them to stay there for a bit. Until she was done with Heartbreaker, at least.

Getting into the city when things were like this, was incredibly unwise, especially with such unreasonably valuable cargo.

Her capes had to be driven into their current, new base of operations, which was a storage company front, and taken up to her shockingly plain office, so she could cast Heal on them and get them going, ready to fight.

Imp had given her Squealer's blood, in a neat syringe she'd snagged off their glovebox no less, but said that the car had been slamming and bouncing around so much in the cabin that she lost the one holding Skidmark's, which was good enough for her.

Without Aisha's power in the way, her contribution became obvious in hindsight. She had been a massive pain to the heroes and the PRT agents both, during the raid.

The other girls helped too, a lot, but Imp was, as usual, exceptionary.

The girls got fifty grand each, with Imp getting a bonus of fifty more, a pile of papers to give her a new civilian identity, and a highrise apartment entirely owned by her, the legal documents sorted under a fake identity.

Yes, it ate a tiny hole in her pocket, but they deserved it, and Imp was so unfathomably fucking useful that she absolutely needed the girl's loyalty.

She knew she had it when the girl had given her this wide-eyed look of excitement, whispering cusswords under her breath as she went through the pictures of her new luxurious apartment, which came with maid services.

Of course, ironically enough, Kaiser lived just above her in the best building in town, but it hardly mattered. They knew not to kill each other.

After drinking Squealer's absolutely disgusting blood, she had to sort out the Travelers.

They still had Spree in their van, but they were running out of sedatives, so she had to get Lisa to guide them towards a good location to bunk in, discreetly .

She Mastered Spree that same night, without any further incident nor something of note to say about the man. He was just a deranged psycho with brain damage from excessive drugs. A walking animal, essentially.

But he was hers now, and Coil quickly got to work to catch him up on everything he had to know.

To her immense excitement, Spree's clones stacked her permanent effects when killed, and had a miniscule amount of lifeforce each. The lifeforce was negligible, but she could stack the Alacrity and Bloodline keystones infinitely, letting her attack faster and faster and heal more and more from hurting people. Theoretically, of course.

She wondered how many millions of his clones she'd have to kill for a punch to break the sound barrier.

To put it shortly, she would milk that free source of power endlessly, once she had the time to.

Next day, after a night of sweating and rolling in place and completely unable to sleep from the horrid migraine, only soothed by Lisa's clumsy, exhausted attempts to make her relax by playing with her hair or rubbing her back as she whimpered into a pillow, she was up and running again, to Lisa's glaringly obvious displeasure.

She had to be. She didn't have to put the summon core to use yet, she couldn't, but she had to keep updated.

Unfortunately, Lisa strong-armed her into doing nothing but updating herself, taking over the entire minutiae of running Nexus with Coil reluctantly by her side.

Inwardly, she appreciated it a lot.

Accord had… so fucking much to report, it made her head spin.

He got Blasto on his side, which was huge, in her opinion. Biotinkers were rare, alive ones even rarer, and one so close was a blessing. She had him marked as a must-have for later, but she had him now, without doing anything directly.

The joy of having very competent minions…

The Biotinker apparently saw The Elite sniffing around his territory, immediately following the PRT breaking the truce, and got so freaked out he just drove six entire trucks in front of Accord's building, loaded with everything he had, and demanded to work with him.

Accord managed to wrangle him into working for him, but it was obvious he despised the Biotinker, especially considering his slightly deranged, nonsensical attitude, and general chaotic nature.

So, when she had free time, she had to go and Master Blasto too.

That wasn't even the start of it.

He got Armstrong to basically anoint him as a cautionary ally, giving him the role The Elite held in Seattle pretty much, so long as he kept things neat, clean, quiet, and defended from unaffiliated groups.

Nexus was not unaffiliated with Accord.

She just had to defend Boston from The Elite, when and if they came, and wipe out the Teeth, and Boston was hers too.

Not easy or simple by any means, but significantly easier than she could have even dreamed of.

By the simple dominoes of the PRT's and her own actions, amplified by Accord's power and intellect.

Accord also confirmed that his power worked perfectly fine. He was completely and utterly unaffected by her accidental anti-thinker effect.

She would have to have very frequent, close communication with him then, because she did a lot of things.

Coil got saddled with communication responsibility, since he knew the man from before.

And finally, the Teeth were rampaging, half because of her and the Travelers stealing Spree for her, and half because they just could.

She considered sending help, but all of her capes were known in the gangs. Ironically enough, she didn't have any Nexus capes to send over aside from The Travellers and if she sent an Empire cape to help Accord, that would be a link she didn't want to have.

So they'd just have to deal with that. She had bigger fish to fry.

Namely, Heartbreaker.

She had a good way to do it without too much direct involvement, but while she trusted herself and her thousands of years of experience in pretty much everything, despite her stumbles and hiccups, there was no reason not to shoot a quick request to Accord, to see if he had a better plan.

He did. His plan was infinitely better than hers.

But it was… not something she wanted to accept.

The plan wasn't complicated, it was just not what she had wanted to do. It forced her into a position where she had to stop and just be honest with herself.

It was logical to Master Heartbreaker, it really was. Accord's plan was nothing but logical to the nth degree, endlessly practical, and frankly, tantalizing.

She had far too many people under her command, and using her own power to Master every single one of them would take years and take up time and energy far, far better spent on other things.

For example, the numbers? They were ridiculous.

The Empire had eight thousand members. The ABB had over two thousand. The Merchants were estimated to have around two thousand themselves.

She could never possibly Master all of them, it was just not worth it.

But all Heartbreaker had to do to make them all endlessly loyal to Nexus and its mission statement would be roughly ten seconds each, and line of sight.

And that was without considering how he could just go undercover and master anyone she could ever possibly want, without anyone being the wiser.

It was-

It drove her nuts.

She'd had focused so much on killing him because she hated how if she was just a worse person, if she was just more of a degenerate, if her reasons were more morally bankrupt, she and he were comparably the same.

That was a lot of ifs, but it still scraped at her mind like a fork against a plate. She despised him.

And Accord had done a painfully good job of convincing her to rethink her intentions for the man.

Even if she killed him, it wouldn't undo the damage he had done. She couldn't afford to chase every lead and sleeper agent he'd planted and try to individually unfuck their minds, there was no time for that. Best she could do was make a list for the PRT to chase and contain before any of them learned that Heartbreaker was dead and did something drastic. But that wouldn't fix anything, just stop things from getting worse, which was acceptable, but she had the chance to do more here.

If she Mastered him… she could change his features, and send him on a merry crusade to fix the people he'd messed up, before telling him to come back to her and Master the endless sea of criminals and murderers under her.

It made too much sense. It was too practical. It was too… anticlimactic, for all the things the bastard had done, and she couldn't dismiss that it was simply the better option.

Because at the end of the day, Accord was also right about how Heartbreaker was… a relative nobody. People talked about him, but he wasn't scary the way The Nine or Sleeper were.

Nobody on the lower half of the country had even heard of him, probably, nevermind overseas. The most people knew about him was that he was some Master serial rapist. Killing him wouldn't make a huge difference, it wouldn't give people hope.

So, with grit teeth and a childish desire to say fuck reality and practicality and just kill him, she agreed to Accord's plan.

It was simply better. She was glad she took him, even if it was currently driving her up a wall.

He was sending his finest Ambassador for the job, namely, Citrine, the woman in gold that she'd Mastered in his office, along with an explanation of what her powers did.

Citrine's power allowed her to "attune areas to particular functions", altering specific properties within a relatively small area.

She could interfere with gravity, temperature variation, friction, light intensity, and the progression of time, among others. She could use her power to make everything within her ability's range effectively waterproof as an example. She claimed that there were "more possibilities than she could count, many so minor you wouldn't notice", and Accord seemed to fully believe her.

It was by far one of the most interesting powers she'd heard of, but beyond that, it was a perfect counter weapon for Heartbreaker.

Citrine could, most importantly, "find the right attunement, as though she were searching a radio station" to neutralise a given parahuman's abilities. Furthermore, she could specifically cancel out certain types of powers , or cause powers to go out of control. This latter effect never took more than twenty or thirty seconds, but the first didn't.

As long as the grouping was tight enough, and Citrine was protected, she was an utterly invaluable Trump that could render the entirety of Heartbreaker's cult useless.

She risked striking the wrong attunement and accidentally killing her target, of course, but the woman was a professional. She said she hadn't slipped up yet, and Taylor took her word for it.

Some powers were too subtle to find out in time before she was retaliated against, or had the subject step out of her range, which was the role of the rest of her capes, all twenty of them, Assault included.

He was only included on the basis he worked with her men to surround and contain the group, not directly engaging. He was too personally invested to trust with something more important in this specific scenario.

So, she just had to wait for Citrine to finish her leisurely drive to Brockton.

One more day, and she'd be done with that scumbag.

… No, wait, she wouldn't. She had to Master him, not kill him.

God fucking damn it.

She wanted to punch Accord in the face for being so damn good at what she got him for, but that was nonsensical, like most emotions.

So she swallowed her pride and fury, and gave the go-ahead.

Next on the list was Greg.

They were having trouble finding him.

Officially, he was in a mid-level security juvenile prison for parahumans. The same one Sophia had been sent to, in fact, since it was the nearest.

But, the bribed guards they had there told them that he was only there on paper, "on exception", with some kind of government paper indicating he was taking 'rehabilitation hours' with the PRT.

That was where the paper trail ended. And she didn't have his blood. And cameras and general electronics in his cell were forbidden because he was a Tinker, so there was nothing they could hack through and check manually.

She could just teleport to him, honestly, but doing that then bringing him back out would take tremendous energy.

It would take a bit more time to figure out where the hell they'd put him, but judging by Armsmaster's strange focus on the kid, she could guess that he was likely with him.

Question was, was he with him on The Rig, or the PRT HQ? He had labs in both places…

It would have to wait.

Another small note of concern was the arrivals of foreign bounty hunters, sniffing around the information brokers of her gangs.

They were looking for Heartstopper , since he was apparently heading for the US coastline before he vanished into thin air, but they were most certainly not here for Heartbreaker, since he didn't even have a kill order. Having at least two or three bounty hunting rogues sneaking around her streets didn't sit well with her, but they were- for now- harmless, and cautious.

The admittedly rather simplistic plan for taking down Heartbreaker seemed pointed toward success, but her paranoia wouldn't settle.

The problem was distance. What if she teleported to Battery, clicked the transmitter, and realized that she was hundreds of miles away from The Bay itself? It would take her capes ages to rush over, and from there, it could turn into a running battle with too many civilians in the crossfire.

She needed hyper-mobile capes, like Oni Lee who could teleport a mile out with every blink of his eyes, or Purity, who could probably race a fighter jet and give it a run for its money.

So, for the first time in a while, she went to visit Noelle, Kayden and Oni Lee in the back seat, their driver smoothly taking them to her temporary holding facility.

The car followed the seaside street wrapping around the bay, from the Trainyards all the way to the Boardwalk, and eventually ducked into a tiny alley to the left, overgrown reeds and patchy asphalt surrounding them as the car slowed, coming to a stop in front of two giant metal doors.

Then they waited, fully aware that at least fifty guns were pointed right at them through the darkened windows.

A minute later, the door slid open on meticulously oiled gears and tracks, revealing a pitch black expanse.

The car drove in quickly, and the door immediately rushed to close behind them as a small row of standing stick lights flicked on, suspended over the floor by metal stands, barely enough to light up a few feet across and show the outline of rows of vehicles.

They got out, and Kayden took the time to look up and around, curious as could be, the only sound in the warehouse being that of muffled footsteps and the shuffle of cloth.

Lenses above glinted in the dozens, barely visible by the reflections, and sharp jagged shapes shifted, in the rafters, in the walkways, in custom tracks of metal bolted to the walls, in the halls and through the windows.

"This is rather excessive, isn't it? Are you guarding a nuclear bomb in here?" Kayden scoffed quietly, the sound still piercing in the silence.

She led, their driver waiting in the car as the two followed her.

She adjusted the ear mufflers, ignoring her twitching brow, unsure of what was causing it. Hopefully not brain damage again.

"Worse." She simply replied, walking down a long, thick hallway lined by giant metal capsules.

A gigantic floor hatch sat at the end, a steel plate secured to the floor with enormous latches and pulleys, guarded by an entire array of motion sensors, radio sensors, and a dozen other manner of things designed to block signals and detect invisible motions, just in case, all mounted to the wall behind it like an open circuit board.

Tinkertech rifles, softly glowing in the formless darkness above, shifted, barely visible and inwardly, she was pleased.

They showed more than appropriate paranoia. She had expected them to take guard duty less seriously.

Guarding what looked like a baby Endbringer probably made them realize how important this was, she could guess.

She came to a stop in front of the hatch, and waited for the line of communication to catch up.

Ten seconds later, hydraulics hummed from below, two rods lifting the latch, revealing a simple downwards stairway, straight and just thick enough for five people to walk down by side.

She led, motion detectors making sparse few lights flick on as they went.

The smell was about as horrid as the first time, and Kayden seemed to notice, subtly trying to gag behind her.

"Do you keep corpses in here?" Kayden croaked out, forced, green faced, features pinched, trying to pinch her nose without making it too obvious.

She glanced away from her, to Oni Lee, who showed no reaction.

"That's far more innocent. We're keeping our Endbringer in here." She replied, and Kayden and Oni Lee both stopped cold behind her.

She kept walking down, until she was down to the last stretch of flat concrete before Noelle's room, and eventually, Oni Lee's steps resumed, followed by Kayden's.

The guard beside the gigantic vault door hummed something into his helmet, and the giant spinning mechanism began to groan to life, unwinding, before opening inwards.

"What the hell is that supposed to me…an…" Kayden trailed off, catching a glimpse of something through the door, likely not much more than an unidentifiable shape.

She walked through the door, onto the grate walk above Noelle. Oni Lee followed, looking down impassively. Kayden did not.

She paused, and turned to Kayden.

"Exactly what you heard. We have what is likely some kind of proto-Endbringer in here. Come talk to her."

Kayden's mouth flapped up and down, features incredulous and disturbed, but she eventually closed her mouth, and forced herself to walk in beside them.

"... Dear god…" Kayden wheezed, horrified.

She stared as well, a bit surprised at how much Noelle's body had changed from the original.

It used to be a horrific amalgamation of everything possible and not, but now, it was even worse. Spider legs thicker than trees, gnarled and oddly jointed like broken twigs scraped at the floor, uneven, while octopus tentacles thicker than cars seemed to stick and unstick from the floor all along her left side. From the joints of the spider legs, human legs and arms flailed, as if sprouting from within, nothing but skin and muscle, oversized, disproportionate to the point of being nauseating, arms anywhere from a foot long to twenty, legs twisted backwards and jointed centigrade.

Half-finished flaps of skin with hanging eyes and exposed nerves seemed to hang from elbows and knees, as if thinner sprouts, unable to grow further, a mass of mangled limbs, even more horrific to see than before, fading off to something more similar to her first form on the right side, wolf snouts and insectoid antennae and pig heads the size of cars mixing with every mammal she could recognize and not, like they were all melting together in a sludge and had just recently been stirred with a chainsaw.

Oni Lee slowly raised a hand, in something like a half-finished greeting.

Noelle's glassy eyes struggled to focus on him, but eventually, she raised a hand of her own, head tilted to the side, expression empty.

Odd ritual done, they lowered their hands.

She paused, turning to Lee.

"Did you meet before?"

He shook his head.

Right… just on the same wavelength of not being all mentally there, she supposed.

"Kayden, this is Noelle. Noelle, this is Kayden." She introduced, and after a few seconds of Noelle's body being unresponsive, a dozen limbs jerked, trampling each other and almost fighting for room, raising Noelle's almost slug-like body of horror higher.

Noelle didn't look too good. She'd have to be… 'pruned' again soon, to regain her faculties better.

The chance of Noelle losing control was very low, as far as she could tell, considering all her emotions were locked to the absolute bottom, but she looked far too lost in her own head at the moment.

Another few seconds of silence, Kayden looking on with horrified eyes, visibly about to vomit, and Noelle staring through her with a million yard stare.

"... Hello Kaden." Noelle whispered, slurred, the sound clear in the smooth, echoing chamber, and that, human speech from something so monstrous, seemed to snap Kayden out of it, startling and jerking her gaze up to meet the girl's.

Slowly, Kayden swallowed, licked her lips, and seemed to fight to keep her power contained.

"H-Hi?"

Taylor leaned forward on the railing.

"It's Kay den, Noelle. Don't worry about that though." She said, and turned to Kayden. "I called her a proto-Endbringer, but that's just a theory, in truth. I wanted to make you expect the worst to hopefully loosen the blow of seeing her and hearing what I brought you here for, but that didn't work, obviously... She isn't an Endbringer, as far as we can tell. Her name is Noelle, and she's a person. She is, however, just as dangerous as one, in the right circumstances." She finished the simple, barebones explanation, and turned to Noelle.

"How have you been?"

Noelle seemed to think about it, gnarled, broken limbs scraping and knocking down below, to allow her to keep her balance, mouths and half-formed snouts making soft wails like the tormented ghouls of hell itself, broken whistles and fox-like laughter mixing with piggish snorts that sounded like a chainsaw, an orchestra taken out of the most deranged mind brought to form.

Desensitised as she was, the sound was still utterly horrific. It made her guts churn.

But Noelle didn't deserve or ask for this, so she plastered a small, kind smile on her face, her eyes not wavering from the girl's empty stare.

Slowly, Noelle hummed.

"The TV's gotten a bit bland… and I broke too many controllers. Hard to control my strength, even when I'm calm. A couple of the guards would come down to gawk at me sometimes. I didn't mind, but the… helmeted one in charge seemed angry about it, chasing them out or threatening them with cleanup duty every time until they stopped. I think… that was nice?" Noelle hummed, obviously unable to feel anything about it, but recognizing the gesture as a kind one. "The news of what you did was interesting. I like feeling up to date on the world. But that's… it. I'm just… bored." Noelle said, apathetic, her eyes seemingly losing some of their fog the more she forced herself to talk and interact with someone, and she nodded.

That was far from the worst thing to be, but she'd arrange a few more amenities for her if possible.

"Anyone come down to talk to you? Keep you company sometimes?" She asked.

Noelle shook her head.

"A quiet one comes sometimes. He just sits and watches the giant TV with me. It's… I don't know. We don't talk."

She nodded, thinking.

Talking seemed to bring Noelle out of the animalistic haze of her lower half, so she'd have to encourage some of the guards, or at least Oni Lee, to talk to her whenever they had free time from their training.

Lung would come over relatively frequently too to train with Lee in hand to hand, but she didn't trust him to be civil or pleasant.

Lisa would be an amazing choice, since her power might pick up on something about how this worked or how Cauldron even managed to make the vials that turned the girl the way she was, but she was very busy. Almost more than Taylor.

"I'll try to get things a little more comfortable for you. But today, I'm afraid I needed you for something. I need five clones to catch a villain. Two of Oni Lee," She said, pointing to Lee, "-and three of Purity." She finished.

Oni Lee turned his head to her, quietly intrigued.

"C-clones?" Kayden asked, still somewhat befuddled about the situation at hand.

She nodded.

"She can grab people and pull them into herself. They enter some kind of… unpleasant sleep, for as long as they're in there. As long as she has them, she can birth clones of them, with powers similar or almost identical to the original. At the end, she can spit out whoever she grabbed, unharmed, just… mildly traumatised from the experience, I'd wager. So you two will be eaten today, and I'll Master the clones. We need more mobility, and she can give it to us." She explained.

Oni Lee nodded, and began to undress.

"Maybe keep your pants on, but unless you hate your clothes, do get out of them." She added, and after a few more seconds of silence, Kayden turned to her, visibly about to puke.

"You're not changing your mind about this, are you?"

She shook her head. Kayden took a deep breath.

"Can you just knock me out? I'd rather get a concussion than have to…"

She nodded, and flickered to Evelynn.

"Open your eyes."

Kayden did as asked.

She pushed a haze forward, and her eyes turned glassy.

She turned to Oni Lee.

"Carry her down the ramp when you're done. I'll go ahead and talk to some guards real quick."

Oni Lee nodded, wrestling with his body armour to get it off.

She walked past him, outside, to the guard.

"I'm going to need twenty people, armed to the teeth. Guard the entrance, and if someone tries to blast or teleport out through this door, kill them at all cost. I'll cancel the order through your superior from my phone when we're ready to leave."

The guard nodded, and quickly shifted his head with his hand, talking into his helmet mic.

She turned back around, grasped the edge of the vault door, and heaved it shut behind her, until it thudded closed with a monstrous echo, with much effort.

In the half-light of Noelle's chamber, she turned left, and began to walk down the concrete ramp, assessing how much energy this might take.

Mastering five people shouldn't be too exhausting, but having to fix their bodily defects with Lulu would take a bit more time.

Behind her, Oni Lee followed, wearing only his pants and mask, carrying a mostly undressed Kayden on his back.

She waited at the bottom, feeling dwarfed by Noelle, their placid eyes staring into each other's without a reason to look away.

"Be gentle with them. If you have any control of it, try to make them as complete clones as possible." She said, and Noelle nodded, slowly.

Oni Lee came up beside her.

"Put her down and back up."

Lee put Kayden down on the dusty, sticky floor, and backed up alongside her.

Like smelling food, the horrific amalgamation of limbs and teeth and mouths and eyes seemed to lurch, once, before Noelle seemed to calm it, and as carefully as someone with sixty broken legs could, carefully dragged her body forward.

The limbs seemed to split and crack open like a piece of crumpled paper unfolding, slimy tentacles creeping out, and with a quick lurch, Kayden was gone, the mass of flesh closing back up.

She held herself in place, ready, switching to her real self, quickly taking off her backpack and throwing it on the floor, then switching back to Evelynn's original form, feelers raised to constrict… or strike.

It took five minutes of silent unease for Noelle's lower half to lurch, coil, then spew out a torrent of disgusting fluid of unknown nature with a disgusting squelching, barfing sound, the fluid something that might be amniotic fluid as well as it could be a mix of blood, semen and vomit, for all she could tell, just something utterly foul, and she was glad for Evelynn's mostly non-biological nature, unable to express herself by gagging.

Something in the viscous fluid shifted, two points inside lighting up like glowsticks, and her eyes flew wide.

Two feelers snaked around the shape, and before it could get its bearings, she pulled it towards her, growing an extra arm to push the fluid out of its face and yank an eyelid up with her thumb.

She delved into its mind with a flash of gold.

It was… similar to Kayden's, but completely exempt from love. It hated what Kayden hated even more, and utterly despised all that she loved even further. There was nothing it loved.

She introduced it to the feeling, directing it all towards herself.

She had no time to be delicate. The longest and most well-formed of the clones, according to the team, were about five to six minutes.

It was pure brute force. Wasteful perhaps, but it was simply what was needed.

Four minutes later, headache a little worse, she pulled herself out, and blinked back into the real world.

The woman in front of her was almost entirely normal, from what she could tell through the dripping, coagulating fluids on her, and she quickly shifted, lifting her arms to wipe at her face, arms glowing.

"Stop using your power." She said, and the clone stopped moving, but its arms remained alight with a white glow. "Hm, you can't turn that off?"

The clone blew out air, trying to get the fluid off, then shook her head.

"Alright, nevermind. In the backpack to the right, there's a bag full of plastic coats, crumpled. Put one on, we'll clean you up soon up above, there's showers. We'll check for defects after."

The clone nodded, and after taking a moment to re-learn to walk, tugged at the feeler around her waist.

She let go, and the woman walked over to the backpack to clothe herself with the bare minimum, at least.

Hopefully all this… birthing fluid or whatever it was, wouldn't clog the drains. That would make Noelle's living conditions considerably worse.

Regardless, Noelle's body lurched once more, and she did the same as the first time, striking fast, Mastering them even faster.

Her head was protesting by the time she was done with clone number two, who seemed to have two jaws, one under the other, but was perfectly normal aside that, even being a bit more polite than the first.

So on it went.

The only problem came with the third clone, who seemed to come out and inwardly light up like a star almost instantly, a high-pitched whine building quickly, but she managed to make out the shape of her head through the fluid, and jerk it close enough to push into her mind.

She came back to a woman covered in charred, dried flakes of the fluid, with face proportions like a picasso painting, if she was to be polite, and one leg twisted backwards, but otherwise functional.

Kayden, the original, had been spit out by Noelle, seemingly, and was busy barfing into the drain to their left, completely naked.

She wasn't terribly curious what happened to her undergarments.

Oni Lee decided to go completely nude, and strode forward without an ounce of hesitation or caution, being quickly yanked into Noelle's body.

His clones were more messed up than Kayden's.

One had half an arm growing out its neck, ending in a weird, smushed claw of flesh that might have been an arm once, and the other had three legs, in the very literal sense, as well as a bunch of other strange proportions, but was functional aside that.

After walking in with two people, she exited with seven trailing or hobbling behind her, covered in white plastic coats.

With a horrid headache, she mostly focused on guiding the mildly traumatised Kayden and the uncaring Oni Lee to the showers the men used. It was… just a shower room. The corner had a small wooden board as a divider, but the rest of the heads were just out in the open.

She decided to help them bathe, pushing all unprofessional and disgusted thoughts out to the furthest reaches of her mind, and ignoring some of the clones' embarrassment, noting imperfections and defects as Kayden rushed for the corner shower, looking physically ill.

Oni Lee just washed the fluid off and quietly walked back to grab one of the towels and put his equipment back on, unbothered.

The first clone didn't seem interested in stopping Taylor's ogling or her assistance in showering, staring at her with placid, curious eyes as she spun her around and scrubbed the disgusting fluids off under the shower head.

"Can I name myself?" The clone eventually asked, and she paused, blinking in surprise.

"Of course. In fact, I was going to tell the rest of you to do exactly that if you wished. I'm not creative enough to name all of you, and numbers seem cruel." She replied, noting another defect, what seemed to be a single, elongated ear, that had been hidden under the woman's hair. "I'd even ask for any distinguishing features you want, but I reckon you'd all want more time to think on that." She finished, then pushed the sponge towards the woman.

"I'm not comfortable doing the rest of you, do it yourself. Did you have a name in mind?" She asked, and the clone nodded instantly, taking the sponge to clean the more private parts of her body.

"Enna. I want to be blonde."

She nodded.

"That's your name then, and I'll switch your hair." She said, easily, and the clone nodded, thankful.

After they were done with Enna, she called her driver to bring the giant bag of clothes from the back of the car and leave it outside the showers, and five minutes later, he arrived.

She went outside to take it, and let Enna dress herself, not bothering to turn away, simply forcing her eyes to stay on Enna's.

They'd have to do power testing after, but just to be sure…

"Do you know what your power does?"

Enna, surprisingly, nodded, tugging the hoodie down.

"Yes. I'm not sure why, but I know my power very well. Imagine Kayden's power turned from a minigun shooting helix lightballs, and turned into a shotgun. I charge up, shoot from my hands, then charge up again. I'm stronger after absorbing a lot of sunlight too, just like her. I can fly, just not as well. I'm more around… Aegis's speed than Kayden's. I'm basically an inferior version of her."

She nodded.

"Aren't we all?" One of the clones behind her asked, Kayden's third, and she glanced at her to find her staring at the wall.

Oni Lee's clones were about as uncaring as him, thankfully, so they just stood there, staring at each other.

"I see. Thank you. But don't think of yourself like that." She advised.

Enna nodded, obviously not taking much heed in her advice, but well, she was a grown woman, she could make her choices.

A good power, but the flying bit was disappointing. She needed mobility more than extra firepower, especially something so indiscriminate like a shotgun blast of light. That also made Enna's power significantly riskier. Slower, plus closer range? She'd need armour to go into a fight.

At least the power testing would be unneeded. That was a lot of hours saved.

She turned to the second clone, the double-jawed one.

She jerked her head to the shower.

The clone shrugged off the white plastic coat, and walked in, covering itself with somewhat appropriate shame and scuttling forward quickly, unlike Enna.

It was odd to think clones already had somewhat distinct personalities… or at least the signs of such.

"Want to do it yourself?" She asked, and the clone nodded, probably unable to speak with the mangled mouth.

"I want to be thin and tall." A clone spoke up, the one with the deformed face, and she turned to her, and nodded.

"I'll have to call a… very short, very strange individual to fix your bodies. While clone two showers, let's get on that. Just be quiet, please. Headache." She said, and without waiting for a reply, switched to Lulu with a flicker.

The angle of being two feet tall immediately annoyed her.

Being a Yordle was great, until you experienced not being a Yordle, and then got thrown into a world that didn't have Bandle City to frolic around in.

"Cute." Lee's clone said, the one with an arm coming out of his shoulder and neck, and she paused, staring at him for a moment.

Their personalities did change, then. Minutely, perhaps.

She turned back to the deformed Kayden clone, and tapped her foot with the gnarled staff.

The outlines of her body and spirit filled her mind, pixie dust and purple buzzing around the inside of her skull. Pix buzzed around her.

"Is that a fairy?" Enna asked, quietly but almost demanding in her tone. "Can I pet it?"

She hummed, and flicked her hand towards Enna. Pix did as asked, going to sit on her hand.

Twisting and turning the shape of clone three in her mind, she formed a clear, simple image of what she wanted to look like, and tapped her foot, staring up at her to watch the changes happen.

It was really as simple as that, it was just mentally draining to design a person in one's head.

The deformations smoothened out into a face similar to Kayden's but with subtly different proportions, enough to register as a different person or a close sister, and the woman shot up five entire inches, hips and shoulders thinning.

"Can I go next?" Enna asked, and she turned to her, and tapped her foot with the staff.

A lot of small deformities, some odd proportions.

She fixed them, changed her face and body a little to seem more like another person, and changed the hair color to blonde.

Another tap, and Enna was changed.

She glanced at the bathing clone, whose eyes were almost pleading.

"Don't worry, I'll do you too. Just finish up so the Lee clones can bathe. That goes for you too, Kayden." She said, Lulu's squeaky voice grating at her ears, no matter how much she tried to make it lower and less chirpy.

"Tell me your powers." She said, glancing between the two unnamed clones.

Clone three, now tall and thin, sighed.

"I can gather energy, store it, then just make it explode out of me in a giant explosion. I can also push it out of me in the form of a ghostly white orb that can travel a little bit before exploding, but it's still short range. Twenty feet, maybe? Max. I should be much faster than Kayden though. The only way I can see to use this is to zip in front of someone, vaporise them and everything within fifty feet, then try to zip out. Call me Tria." Clone three said.

"Really? Are we all going to call ourselves numbers in ancient Greek? Might as well just be one two and three." Enna scoffed.

It took a moment for her to get it. Enna was probably one, Tria was probably three…

"I don't care. Do you want to be Tria or?" She asked, impatient.

Tria nodded.

The double-jawed clone made a sound, somewhat like a… weird moan.

She turned, and the clone had two fingers raised.

"She wants to be called Duo." Enna said.

Oddly fitting considering the double jawbone.

"Fine. Enna, Duo, Tria." She said, and floated forward to tap Duo's leg.

A quick pull, a shift, a few changes and another tap. A quick process like flesh turning to clay and moulding itself, a living thing… and done.

Duo moved her now fixed jaw, and turned to her with a firm nod.

"Thank you ma'am. Can you make me a teenager with pitch white hair?" The woman asked, and after a moment of surprise, she nodded, and did as asked.

Ten seconds later, a significantly less developed girl stood in front of her, hair glossy and snow-white.

Duo smiled, still embarrassed and trying to cover herself up somewhat.

"Thank you. My power just turns me into a white… really tough crystal ball of sorts when I activate it. No super strength. My speed should be better than Kayden's, but not by much. I can fly while in ball form. The only way I can be useful is… probably just turning my power on and using myself as a wrecking ball. Sorry." Duo shrugged.

She waved her staff, dismissively.

"Still useful, and I mostly needed speed. If you can fly good, or at all, I'm fine with it. Kayden, you done?" She asked, and from the corner, a pained humm came.

"Just- a little more. I think I'll die If I don't scrub myself raw. Please never make me do that again. I just saw visions of my trigger event the entire time I was in there." Kayden said, voice weak, and she paused.

She hadn't known that little detail… did Noelle make clones then force them to trigger, somehow? How did that work? Why didn't the clones know, judging by the confused glances?

"Alright. Take all the time you need. Can't guarantee it won't happen again if it's necessary though. Sorry." She said, and turned to the Lee clones.

She just tapped them until their defects were gone, into almost complete carbon copies of Oni Lee, with slight changes in jawline and hair colours.

"You two?"

The first activated his power, which was… not what she expected, at all.

He just formed some kind of… almost black smoke-like echo that seemed to trail behind his movements as he slowly waved his arm back and forth, embers flickering in and out of the smoke.

It smelled like charred asphalt and a forest fire.

It also looked startlingly like Leviathan's water echo from the shaky videos she'd reviewed ages ago.

The 'echo' then separated, joints twisting, and the clone shifted to the side, revealing what looked like a man made of smoke, glued to him, back to back.

The echo turned to look at her, while the clone side-eyed her.

"Is it independent or do you control it?" She asked.

The echo stared.

"Both." The clone whispered, an airy, crackling whisper, like air whistling through kindling.

She raised a brow.

Odd, odd power.

"What is it? Puppet, reflection, echo…?" She suggested.

The smoky figure turned its face skywards, its arms separating from the clone's, backs still attached.

"Just a burning memory." It breathed out, and then leaned back, melting into the clone, joints twisting backwards to mould back to the clone.

Her brows furrowed.

She disliked cryptic nonsense, but there was a chance the clone's echo was being extremely literal. A power fueled by burning memories… there was some correlation there.

"What can you do?" She asked.

Lee's clone turned to her.

"Fight. Embers burn and shield, smoke flows and blinds. I do not teleport."

She hummed.

A melee fighter with no mobility. Useful, but not for this operation.

"Want a name or will you pick later?"

The clone shifted.

"Mitai." He whispered.

Oni Lee's head jerked to the clone, staring with empty eyes at him.

She paused, brow furrowing.

Lee rarely reacted, and not like that, so reflexively.

"Ring familiar?" She asked, Lulu's high pitched voice cutting through the awkward silence and the splatter of shower water behind them.

Lee did not answer, instead reaching into one of his chest holsters, and before she could react or process it, pressed the long gun barrel to the clone's head, hand steady as could be.

"Pick something else." Oni Lee whispered, voice still emotionless, but somehow colder.

"Lee, put it down. Now." She rushed out, and Lee did as asked, lowering the gun, but still staring at the clone with a complete paper nothingness in his expression, laser focused.

Lee's clone slowly nodded, the shadowy echo fading with the scent of a campfire.

"Mokutan, then." The clone, now Mokutan, brushed his copper hair out of his face, and Lee stared at him for another tense few seconds before turning back to look forward, holstering the gun.

She turned to Oni Lee, then stopped herself.

Oni Lee did not remember much. Probably close to nothing, from what she remembered when she Mastered him. For him to react like that, it must not be a good, easy memory.

She had no right to pry, despite her curiosity eating at her.

She turned to the last clone, whom she'd given a more squared jaw and unruly auburn hair.

"Want a name, or will you pick later?"

"Later." The clone whispered, and she nodded.

"Power?"

The clone tilted its head, a smidge, thinking.

"Hard to explain. I change. Things around me burn. I get very tough. Anything that looks at me forgets things. They also feel fear. The closer or more detailed they see me, the better."

She nodded, then sighed.

Another power that was probably great for fighting, but not for the mission. And he obviously couldn't demonstrate.

She had a lot of things to forget, and none of which she wanted to. This clone was a hazard to fight with, honestly.

"I see. I guess we'll have to do with three extra movers." She hummed, and switched back to her real self.

She really should be more paranoid about safety, but she just couldn't be arsed at the moment. In too much pain and in inner conflict to jump through a million hoops right now.

"Finish up and go to the car. You all know what this is about, correct? You have all the memories of Kayden and Lee?" She asked, and the clones all nodded. "Good. Driver will take you in for processing somewhere else. Nice to meet you, and goodbye for now. We'll settle your civilian identities soon, we're a little swamped at the moment." She summarised, feeling her brow twitch incessantly, something scraping in the inside of her skull.

She turned to Evelynn, and flew off.

Everything was ready, a full day later.

Her migraine was… well, a migraine, but manageable. Even enough to fight for a bit, if need be.

A hundred and twenty of her men, ready to move at a moment's notice, positioned in all the outskirts of the city, a half-net, stretched thin.

The entirety of her capes were gathered in a single building near the outskirts above Captain's Hill, huddled around a receiver, ready for her to do her part of the job and burst into action.

Citrine was at the middle of it all, shoved out of her idiotic choice of dress and into military garb, only the golden gem-encrusted mask remaining, ready to neutralise or at least destabilise Master powers.

The dominoes were all in place.

All that was left was to see was on which side they'd crumple first, who they'd crush.

She stood in the corner of the room, watching the monitors with her capes, dozens of them huddled around one of their contracted techies.

She affixed the device to her harness, memorised its position one last time, and took a deep, deep breath.

She picked Shen, The Eye of Twilight, a man who fully and truly believed in balance.

Oh how he would have mourned for Earth Bet...

She took the appropriate stance, every detail Assault had let her know about Samantha glued to the forefront of her mind, ready to force the summon core to do an insurmountable task, to bring a piece of the spirit world before her so she could blip through it to her target.

It took a moment for her mind to calm its buzzing, for her to sink into a deep meditation, and finally, her mind focused on what she needed, what the barriers between realms would allow.

Her hands met, and a familiar purple swirling energy surrounded her, similar to Teleport, but instead of wild and forceful, it was a gentle request and prod, written in the runic equivalence of unseen- to mortal eyes- cursive, in neat, expanding lines across the floor, all layered circles and nothing but.

Half her capes stared at her, the other half stared at the screen, on the map, waiting for the blip to show up.

Everyone, her included, held their breath.

She felt the walls of reality around her shift, gently pulling the curtain aside, miles and worlds shrinking to mere pebbles, mere twists in space within the world of spirits.

Without a step taken, nor a movement to be seen, she sank forward, into reality's parting folds, and disappeared, a trillion images flashing through her eyes in the mere instance it took to traverse the impossible.

Notes:

i'll... probably come back eventually and write a real author's note but sweet mother of fucking god I am exhausted at the moment, see you guys later, and thank you very, very much for all the lovely comments and encouragement, they help me power through a genuinely difficult to write story.

Like, don't get me wrong I love this story and my plans are long, but FUCK it's hard to write, in that hard-but-enjoyable kinda way, if that makes sense. idk im rly tired fuck making sense unga mgugnehaetenga

oh and sorry for cliff but this chapter's already like 11k words or something, had to end it here so i could post it and go rest

lemme know what you thought, what you enjoyed or didn't, or any stupid fuckuups i may have done during the chapter.

ty all, enjoy, see you next chapter, where plans go to die, no matter how simple.

Chapter 49

Notes:

After literal fucking MONTHS of banging my head against a wall, it's finally here, and I'm satisfied with it.

It went through two rewrites.

It took me months to not despise this fucking chapter, but it's finally here.

Now, because it's been so damn long since my last upload, a small recap of what happened.

Taylor beat the heroes to a pulp dring the Truce betrayal, and killed Tagg. Accord in the meantime secured a very strong position in Boston out of the panic that ensued due to Taylor's message to Armstrong. Taylor then prepared for a raid on the Heartbroken after recovering, and making five clones of Oni Lee and Purity with Noelle. Hope that refreshed your memory. :)

Next chapter should, FINALLY, be Heartbreaker's end, and I can move on to more interesting stuff, like exploration, extermination, ANNIHLATION, WAR-

Anyway, enjoy 12k words.

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

Chapter Text

The images she had no hope of comprehending froze, to one of a bedroom.

Then her back was pressed tight against Samantha's, for the tiniest fraction of a second, and she only caught a glimpse of a spotless bedroom before Samantha jerked, an elbow smashing into her skull with a crunchy crack.

It would have gone through Shen's head had she not swapped to Evelynn and burst into smoke, flying out of an open window-

And out onto open air, nine stories up in the air, surrounded by an expanse of trees to the right and short, squat apartment buildings to her left and beyond, stretching out until they met the ocean, snow gently falling through a thick grey film, hiding the sky above.

She froze, her brain momentarily shutting off the frantic yelling from the apartment behind her.

Snow.

A part of her felt relief, that this had actually been Heartbreaker's fault and she hadn't gone into overdrive over some petty Master toying with their powers out of arrogance.

Another part of her shut its eyes, and let out a long, slow snarl.

Heartbreaker. Snow. Completely different environment and architecture.

She was probably in Canada .

How did they even run back so fast? Had they spent five entire days speeding or something, without stopping? She wouldn't put it past them, but she had been operating under the impression they wanted something more than what they'd gotten, some other objective, some message to deliver.

To just run into Brockton, take people and leave, just like that, like it was some fucking grocery run, it made her teeth rattle off her jaw, shaking with suppressed anger.

She was halfway across the continent, essentially.

Resisting the urge to punch through a wall, she instead turned her gaze, dashed around the apartment until she found a small, thin balcony, and perched on the railing, flickering, transmitter in hand.

Purity, Tria and Duo might be the only ones who'd reach her in any kind of reasonable timeframe, but the simple plan of 'just raid them' had gone to shit immediately, so she'd take whatever she could get.

She pressed the button, and flickered back to smoke, dashing back into the apartment, trying to get a decent guess of what the hell was happening, counting the souls inside.

Five.

Six across the hall, all moving as well.

The living room had two teenagers in it, scrambling up as Battery ranted about an intruder to a busty redhead from one of the bedrooms.

Another teenager in the bathroom.

She ducked through, trying to put names to faces, to no avail.

There was information about Heartbreaker's children out there, a decent bit of it, in fact, but pictures were sparse, if any.

Battery, or Samantha, was currently trying to confirm with one of the teenagers that he must have seen something, but he insisted he just saw a weird shield engulf her, then her striking at air behind her, adamantly, almost arguing with her.

Gillaume Vasil. Could see through the eyes of anyone he'd touched.

She dashed back to the bedroom, and hissed when she saw nobody in sight.

Zipping back out, she checked the apartment on the other side of the hallway.

Women, women, a child, a male teenager who was having sex with a grown woman… Nobody she cared about or recognized, but clearly all part of the Heartbroken, judging by the disturbing amount of casual debauchery and apathy on display.

Good interrogation targets, because she couldn't see Amy or Victoria anywhere.

She zipped back to the apartment, where everyone was on their phone and hurriedly packing, apparently believing Battery, informing others of an apparent intruder.

A young girl right below her floating form checked her phone, and immediately rushed to bang on the door of the teenager mounting a woman in the backroom.

"Gotta go! Intruder or scout!" The girl exclaimed, boredly and completely without inflection somehow, and the teenager and the woman both flew apart in no time to grab their clothes, apparently disciplined enough to know when to scramble to action.

Shit.

The best thing she could do right now was just follow them and set up an ambush.

The urge to just pounce and bulldoze through them was gratingly powerful, but she let herself sit and settle, stalking them, watching their movements.

Mostly just picking things up and throwing them into already packed suitcases, ready to move out, and it occurred to her that this was likely a temporary stop on the way back to base.

This had turned from a battle to a long, slow hunt.

It might take days, she was aware, but if that's what it took, then fine, fuck it. That's the entire reason she'd gotten Coil and Lisa under her, to manage Nexus while she went off to deal with more dangerous things, and they'd done a fine enough job of running things while she was knocked out. The heroes couldn't even make trouble for her this time around. It was the perfect time to dedicate some time to her pest-control hobby.

Her thoughts backtracked with doubts, but she dispelled them quickly.

They could deal with it.

She just had to let them know the mission was going to have to change.

Odd as it might sound, she immediately began doing math in her head.

Approximates, distances, trying to guess regions. How long she had until Purity or any of her new flock zipped down through the clouds to mess this up.

If Tria or Duo were good with their approximates compared to Purity, not that much time.

During a small lull as the group of a dozen people quietly but quickly went to the elevators, she darted out the window and to the roof, flickering back to her real form.

She called Lisa, and before the girl could utter a word, she cut her off.

"Mission's changed. We're up in Canada. I'm going to stalk them back to home base, Heartbreaker isn't with this group, neither are the Dallons. We need to re-plan, and I need a plan I'm actually happy with. I'll follow and stick the tracker in their car. Need to go, be back in a minute." She rushed out, and cut the call, bursting back into smoke and dashing down.

She was jumpy. Incredibly so.

Perhaps understandable, but it made her easy to read, as far as her siblings were concerned.

A blip of presence, above.

Cherie startled, feeling a human presence suddenly just exist on the roof of the building just above, then ten seconds later, immediately disappear.

The jerk of her shoulder, the tiny stiffening of her limbs, it was barely noticeable by sight.

Considering her dad's new victim was literally holding her by the scruff of her neck however, it didn't matter too much.

Samantha glanced down at her, somewhere between wary and protective, the conflicted feelings of a newly mastered person with a mission given on little information.

' Guard this until I make a decision'.

Delightful parenting.

This, like she wasn't even a person.

If her dad decided to be crueller than usual, she might not be, when he was finished. When he'd decided on what to do.

"What is it?" Samantha asked, the grip on her neck still stiff and controlling, but slightly reassuring in its oddly gentle, massaging motions, almost, like trying to take the stiffness out of her.

It didn't work.

She opened her mouth.

Nicholas sent her a warning look, with a tiny hint of fear shoving its way down her gullet, and she closed it, stiffening further.

Fucking dick. The chick asked, was she not supposed to answer?

They were all mad at her. Saw her as a traitor. Stupid fucking assholes. Just because they had to suffer under their father's jumpy, narcissistic moods didn't mean she was a traitor for not wanting to fucking share in the torture.

She hated Nicholas more than any of them.

She remembered being buried alive in a coffin, and even if he was forced to, she remembered Nicholas blasting her with fear until she'd passed out, vomiting, only to wake up again and scream herself hoarse until her nails were bleeding as she scratched at the box futilely until she'd finally just fucking triggered-

A box like this.

A tight-

No.

"Claustrophobic." She said, evenly, and Samantha made a soft sound of sympathy.

She forced her reductionist mind to shut the fuck up for a moment and see things from a bit further.

No, they weren't upset at her just for that.

They were also upset at her for their father sending them on a multiple month long journey to catch her, upset at her for the letter she left behind lambasting her father, and upset because they saw that letter as the main reason the moody piece of shit decided that he did want to be more than just a 'limp-dicked rapist who needed powers to get any', and decided to start building a real empire.

Cult, more like.

She wasn't even sure what had fucking made her leave that letter. Just… hatred, arrogance and a wild sense of freedom, like riding a high.

They were just retreading old ground, at this point. That stupid ordeal with her dad overreaching his hands to get a famous actress a year ago, forcing the PRT to jump to decisive action and almost kill many of them, which had almost cost them their life and freedom, had made her leave in the first place.

And now he was doing the exact same shit, with something ten times riskier, and they thought it was because of her.

For all she knew it might be.

Maybe if she hadn't left that stupid letter full of insults that undoubtedly rang true to her father's self-indulged, endless egoism, he might have sat on his fucking eggs like usual.

If only, maybe, what-if's and bullshit she couldn't change.

What she could change, what she could influence, was to simply not fuck this up, and hope the person above was a hero who could save her before this group met with her dad's main group.

She didn't know what he would decide to do with her, but she doubted it was anything good.

Maybe he'd torture her for a month, break her.

Maybe he'd have Samuel torture information of her travels out of her. It was the only thing his power could fucking do.

Or maybe he'd break his own personal rule, and Master one of his own children for the first time. And… she did not want to think about what might follow.

After all, he broke another big rule with the shitshow in Brockton. Not going after children to add to his harem, or cult.

She was pretty fucking scared without Nicholas giving her warning pokes every half damn hour. She hated him.

And goddamnit how many fucking floors did this place have-

The elevator came to a stop, and she took a deep breath.

As she was forced forward, she briefly wondered if maybe she should have gone up to the Nine and taken one of them out to make room for herself to enter, but she didn't know if they would take it as an attack and very horribly kill her, or take it as a bold entry display and welcome her with open arms. It had been too risky to go for it.

She just hadn't been expecting them to have a filled out roster, for fuck's sake. Last she'd heard they had five or six members, seven at most?

When she finally got to them, there were nine people with powers present as far as she could observe. She was out of luck.

So she had run to Brockton, because Jean-Paul was not nearly as subtle as the obnoxious ass thought he was, to hopefully group up with him and kill their brothers with whatever gang of misfits he got into, all in exchange for her addition to the roster.

Of course, her siblings were practically on her heels at that point, so it was a game of inches instead of miles. They'd caught up, she was in a corner, literally, and she had no way out.

Jean-Paul was pretty great compared to the rest of her fucking family, so fuck it, she'd take him over them, was her thought process.

She got about two hundred feet from him and his parade of teens before it all went to shit in the form of a grotesque parody of a dragon and endless gunfire.

She tried to stick around and help in the fight, nudging emotions and trying to find some way to stay concealed from her siblings as they tried to find her while also not getting themselves involved in the fight just around the corner, but she was pretty sure she just made everything fucking worse.

Blasting the dragon with fear to make him back up only enraged him further, and then he tried to charge for Jean-Paul who he thought was responsible for it, so then she blasted the emotionless blue fucker with the halberd with the most vile, maddening, volcanic eruption of emotions she'd ever tried before, to just get him to get in the goddamn way and fight the dragon instead of dancing around the bastard and letting Paul die.

It worked great, until old blue almost got bisected due to fighting like an enraged animal instead of an actual veteran, and then… then she had to hide in a hole while Jean-Paul skipped town, her siblings buzzing around and using her own eyesight to track her for- what might have been months, she wasn't sure.

She could not escape, and she could not run.

Much as it grated, she eventually got the lay of the land, and decided to try her luck with a local, low-key parahuman villain called Coil.

She couldn't find him, and when she started getting close, his base blew up, with him assumedly in it.

So, to her… immense disgust, she had to scam and tempt people to get any money to survive with, even binding her eyes to make sure her siblings couldn't track her. With her power, it worked. She survived, she… didn't thrive, but stayed low enough to evade them, and eventually, they'd have to give the hell up, she thought.

She spent her copious free time as a homeless blind girl annoying Old Blue, or Armsmaster. Nothing major, just… fucking with him a bit, really. When frustration struck, she amplified it. When hesitance reared its head, she turned it to resolve and conviction. When his ego got hurt, she dug a knife in the wound, real deep in there.

And when hope reared its head, she crushed it.

Yes, it was a shitty thing to do, but he'd tried to use Jean-Paul as fucking dragon bait and only she could do that so fuck him.

That, and it kept her sane while hiding in plain…ish, sight. Kept her own crumbling ego in place while flitting about one of the most dangerous cities in America, blindfolded and fucking homeless for the most part.

She rarely allowed herself to see anything to keep Gillaume from seeing something identifiable.

But she fucked up, once when adjusting the blindfold under her hoodie, and that was it for her. He probably saw a sign, or a hint of the sea. She wasn't sure, but next thing she knew, they were driving towards her far faster than she could run from them.

The good part of being captured was catching up on things, ironically enough.

She mostly got to be treated like a prisoner for a while, until dear old dad personally came to collect her along with his newest toys on the bucket list.

The blonde girl was taken for the… usual reasons, despite being underage, a new low for her father.

The mousy chick… nobody knew, apparently, but the girl was a healer, so that wasn't hard to piece together.

And the Protectorate hero was taken just to trade her back in exchange for Jean-Paul.

A stupid fucking idea, the heroes would never do that because they'd think it would send the message that such methods worked and would only encourage Heartbreaker to target heroes, but her dad was not famous for his intelligence.

A strike was coming, and she doubted they'd all survive. You don't just kidnap three heroines and walk it off.

The PRT conducted a full raid because they stole an actress. It almost got them all caught.

This time, her fucking brainlet of a father stole America's most beloved healer, most fangirled Alexandria package teen, and a Protectorate member.

They were going to get destroyed, damn it.

And her dad really thought that being a little smarter about things would save them. He had a few villains and a new vision and all of a sudden he thought something had changed.

Idiot. Fucking delusional narcissist.

But if it did work, and if Battery did get traded for Jean-Paul… a selfish part of her was almost glad she'd get to see him again, even if only in shared misery, but… well, yeah, she was selfish, no shit. She wanted someone to relate to, someone who wasn't conflicted and brain-scrambled like most of her siblings and just straight up did not want to be here.

As they loaded up on the cars below and drove off into the Canadian countryside, she kept feeling the same presence flicker in and out, within the forests and around the treelines around them.

She should have felt hunted, stalked, but frankly, as long as she didn't get Birdcaged, she was more relieved.

It was by the hundredth mile that she realized that whatever the fuck they were doing, it most certainly was not preparing for a heroic rescue slash takedown. It was probably something along the lines of scouting and info-gathering. Most likely feeding the Guild information to ambush them.

Fine by her.

Hell, she'd help.

She just wished the person would stick around long enough for her to shove the emotion of urgency down their throat, for one damn time.

Eventually, the group let their guards down.

It took an entire eight hour drive, and a slow crawl into a forest cabin.

They mostly settled in to unwind and rest, it seemed, but her interest lay with a single person in particular.

Whenever she'd float close enough to the second car to feel the emotions inside, one of the girls inside was very, very different to the rest. A possible traitor, judging by the caution exerted around her? A known one?

As they all got to their rooms to settle in for the night, Taylor took the time to set a Teleport waypoint nearby, in a thicket of trees up a steep hill, and then Teleported back to Brockton.

The room was empty, now, the screens and all signs of life taken away.

She flew back to their current HQ, and caught up, as quickly as she could.

It was just a blur of rapidly reporting the situation to Lisa, giving her the go-ahead on some things, and then Coil immediately ranting back about what she'd missed.

The mission had been aborted, and everything had been put back on normal track. Purity, Oni Lee, Hookwolf and the Purity clone triad were all being briefed and loaded for a long trip, a couple streets down from here.

Lung's gang continued to slowly get integrated into Nexus, the Empire sat on their eggs and prepared for a takedown on the Merchants on her behalf, because she wanted those pests gone, and Lisa had put their men to focus on guarding Noelle for now, while she and Coil made a plan to break out Greg.

Assault was mutinous, but generally quiet because it did appear like she was trying to do something. The update on the changes in the operation would surely buy her some time to get him to sit tight and goddamn wait.

Coil had also gotten Faultline's package and team into the city, since nothing else was going on locally if Heartbreaker had fucked off back to Canada.

Learning that in the short few hours she was gone, THE package had arrived, gave her a strange sensation of fearful, anxious joy.

The tinkertech battery could wait. She couldn't care less about the damn thing.

The important bit was the folder Alexandria gave Faultline in LA, however the hell she managed to sneak away from her Cauldron associates long enough to make it. Or masters, whichever.

She got to the Palanquin solo, letting Lisa give them a two minute heads up as she blurred through the sky, invisible, before dashing down.

She practically sprinted up the stairs in the back, adopting Renata's form, less than two minutes later.

The guard seemed bewildered, but rang up above and quickly stepped aside as she nearly bowled him over.

The door had barely swung open before Taylor flickered a duffel bag full of cash into her hand, threw the duffel bag on the floor, and practically lunged for the suitcase on the coffee table, glaring at the lock as she turned it around.

She glanced up to a conflicted crowd, half surprised and half curious.

"Password is six five seven one, since you're not up for pleasantries?" Faultline asked, mildly, and Taylor quickly input it into the lock, and it clicked open.

She took out the binder, utterly overflowing, and opened it, switching to the Rune of Inspiration, purple eyes glittering as her chest tightened.

Considering Cosmic Insight basically treated the binder like a grimoire that would alter her perception of the world and shift her entire worldview, it was exactly what she'd ordered Alexandria to write up.

Which was every single thing Alexandria knew about Cauldron and the PRT, what felt like ages ago, in a ruined valley, snarled out in the woman's ear during the short interim between Morderkaiser's death realm slowly fading, and her own brain trying to melt into mush before their private arena crumbled.

A comprehensive, detailed report on the most secretive, and likely most powerful organization in the world, sitting in her hands.

Her 'plan' had been dodgy, and it had been a pure gamble on whether or not Alexandria would even go to the right neutral territory to meet her without getting caught, and an even further gamble to send Faultline to collect instead of herself, but it had paid off.

Slowly, she relaxed, letting herself sigh in relief.

She turned to Faultline, and nodded.

"Excellent work. Payment's in the bag. We'll contact you soon for further jobs, and an extended offer." She said hurriedly, before flickering, the binder disappearing as she gently tossed the remaining briefcase on the chair meant for her.

Cracking her neck, she continued.

"We'll be sending the Travellers and some of our men as an escort for the battery, just in case. Kindly show them the package, if you will." She hurriedly, but professionally, added, and flickered again, disappearing into invisible smoke as she rushed to the Palanquin's basement, and activated Teleport, to her own personal, secret bunker, the breathing plants and glowing fungi having completely taken over every inch of stone by now.

It was perhaps uncouth to show such immense hurry to Faultline and her crew, and leave Lisa to handle the details through the phone, but she had to take a step back and mentally regroup.

Her bunker felt… quiet and safe, serene and magical. Especially after recent happenings.

She didn't get to enjoy the little sanctuary, unfortunately. She went to work immediately, switching to Zyra and preparing various strains of spore bursters, meticulously adjusting dosages from sheer experience.

Alexandria's report binder was thrown in her old backpack for later reading, zipped up behind her as she worked.

Lisa and Coil would just have to pick up the slack.

An hour later, she switched Runes, and Teleported back to Canada, feeling a low, but sharp pressure, building in her temple.

It was nothing all that bad. Stalking the car convoy had been such low-consumption work that she actually somewhat recovered during it.

Making a small mountain of the spores she'd used to knock out and capture Accord took a lot out of her, however.

She only spent a minute amongst the trees, calming down, before she burst back to smoke and zipped to the cabin.

Everyone was still there, to her immense relief, even if they were quite on edge.

Back to stalking, then.

She didn't veer too close. She'd managed to duct tape the tracker into the engine bay, so sticking right on top of them was no longer necessary.

It was not enjoyable whatsoever to watch Battery awkwardly hanging around the gaggle of teenagers and enslaved women in their rooms, but she picked up on a lot of things by floating around the ironically picturesque property.

She learned their names, or at least most of them.

She learned that 'Cherie' was essentially an escapee who got caught, which raised the question of how many of Heartbreaker's children had run away. First Regent, now this girl.

Cosmic Insight also gave her a ton more information, though only a bit of it was of interest.

For starters, Cherie gave her a… very cryptic series of ideas and words.

Something that seemed to go along the lines of her being the unknowing creator of a big threat… which, yeah. She was a Master. That was very likely.

What concerned her was what Cosmic Insight considered a "big threat" might be a completely different thing to what she might consider a big threat.

Another note of curiosity was that Battery was a vial cape. And she was almost certain Assault had no idea.

Back to the Heartbroken however…

One of the many blondes in the family, Samuel, was apparently the best interrogator on planet Earth. Not useful to her, but of interest.

It would be a pain to try and figure out what to do with his children afterwards.

She certainly wouldn't Master them unless she knew for sure they were the same calibre of human trash as Heartbreaker, so she had to find some other way.

She learned of two more names through standing next to idle conversations and teenage grumbling.

The first was Juliette, a rather blank-faced, generically pretty girl with straight brown hair who spoke without any real tone to her voice. The second was a young girl named Florence, who had black-brown hair in a pixie cut, wearing weirdly frilly black and white clothes, and who seemed inordinately unwell, wearing a near-permanent manic grin and being generally avoided by the rest of the family.

Except Battery, who seemed to actively try to interact with the girl, even in a… vaguely motherly way, though with a careful lack of condescension.

Oddly enough, the girl seemed to tolerate it, and the interactions drew raised eyebrows amongst her siblings, though they quickly emptied their faces anytime the girl checked.

Florence either had a terrifying power, or was very unhinged.

The hours passed, and eventually, everyone retired to sleep, in various ways.

Battery slept on the armchair, while Florence hogged the couch, to the silent annoyance of her siblings. The beds got shared, generally, and it was a good thing the two rooms were segregated based on sex or she guessed there would be a lot more glaring and discomfort in the air.

In both rooms, however, there seemed to be a dedicated watcher. Someone who stayed up and kept an eye open just in case.

In the boys room, it was Guillaume, obviously, since he could see through the eyes of anyone he'd touched. In the girl's room, it was the seemingly unpowered woman who'd been having sex with one of the teenage boys in their last resting spot.

Cherie was also up, but that seemed to be because she couldn't sleep, anxiety and fear roiling off of her in waves. The ropes around her wrists and ankles probably didn't help.

The question with Guillaume was…

If she pushed a haze through someone's eyes, would he too see it and get stunned? Or would he only see the visual aspect of it, and start screaming at everyone to wake up?

It was an idle thought, not a genuine concern. She didn't want to Master children for the sins of their father.

After the two rooms went silent, she rushed out to the nearby woods, flickering her phone into her hand as she perched on a branch next to a startled squirrel.

She had a lot of messages, but only a few of which were important.

Coil wanted to talk to her about a plan. No details.

Accord sent her some valuable information as well.

Blasto was apparently capable of self-replicating, semi-intelligent creations, which… terrifying, but tempting beyond belief.

Brockton also just got its new Director. A man by the name of Renick.

His profile was at least far less alarming than Tagg's. Hopefully the PRT had learned.

She ducked back to the rooms, and finding the Heartbroken all asleep, flew to a distant copse of trees, and Teleported back to Nexus's main office.

As the purple lines faded, Coil's tired eyes turned to her, backlit by the monitors in front of him.

To her right, Lisa was snoring softly, facedown on the couch, drooling a little.

Her lips twitched into a fond smile.

"What was the plan suggestion you wanted approval for?" She asked, stepping forward and collapsing into Lisa's chair.

Coil flicked his chair around with a push of his foot, and steepled his hands in front of him, leaning back, out of exhaustion, more than confidence.

"It concerns Greg. We can't figure out where he is. Not for certain."

She frowned.

"I'm peripherally aware of something like that. Haven't heard details yet. Explain."

He nodded.

"On paper, Greg is at a low security Parahuman prison. Off paper, we think he's likely housed in the PRT HQ. There is a cell that is occupied, there are people coming in and out of it, food is coming in and out, and everything else that points to habitation. However, not a single one of my sources has been able to visibly see Greg. Which is highly unusual. To leave a Tinker in a room with no surveillance whatsoever is unusual even more so. Both the prison and the PRT HQ have no tangible evidence of his existence besides paperwork. Secondly, it was something you said that's giving me doubts." He slowly added, tapping his fingers on his knuckles.

"Armsmaster seemed to have a strange, inordinate fixation on finding and capturing Greg. Likely for some kind of collaboration on a project, considering there is no real personal benefit to capturing Greg aside from that, and Armsmaster's psych profile makes it unlikely that he simply did it out of a sense of civic duty. And despite the reconstruction making it easier to spy on the Rig, Armsmaster's part of the building is locked down tighter than ever before. There is also unusual traffic towards the place. Like clothes, around Greg's size, and things like that. So, now we have three possible locations where he might be imprisoned. Greg is most likely, at the PRT HQ. But it's also worryingly possible that the PRT is using misdirection to throw us off. If they are, he could be anywhere. He could be with Armsmaster, he could be in the PRT HQ, he could be in a maximum security prison halfway across the country, and we wouldn't know for sure."

She thought for a moment, and slowly nodded.

"Yeah. That's possible, and very frustrating. Did you have a solution?"

He nodded, and leaned forward, almost eagerly.

"Aside from putting you in a position where you have to personally teleport to him, like we did with Battery? Let me use my power. I can move the Empire to raid Armsmaster's lab, and then send a large secondary team to raid the PRT HQ. Then I'll send a large team of our mercenaries to raid the most likely Parahuman prison that could also be hiding Greg, just outside Brockton. Then, I simply pick what reality benefits us. The Merchant extermination will have to wait either way because Greg is far more important than them. Another reason to cancel the Merchant raid is that raiding two high security government facilities at once, or maybe three, without losing anyone, that is risky. I need overwhelming firepower. All the Travellers, aIl the clones, and the 'retainer girls'. Maybe even Spree too." He said, exhaustion and a strange passion making him talk far more like Lisa than his usual, calm, conniving tone.

She hummed, brows furrowing.

She only wanted the clones to accompany her to Heartbreaker's compound in Canada in order to have someone to take the girls and Heartbreaker out of her hands and fly off with them. That's why she'd been adamant on the Purity clones being there, with Lee around, just in case combat broke out.

"Alternative suggestion. How about I start like I did with Battery, give you a definite location with a transmitter, and then vanish so you can use your power? You can focus on different tactics instead of wasting timelines on figuring out where he is. It'll alert them a little early, but with all the firepower we have and the capes, it shouldn't matter. I need the Purity clones to bring the girls and Heartbreaker back. I don't have a mass teleporter anymore. This is also a good chance to put it out there that we, the 'gangs', can join forces if we have to. Will further deter interference from the PRT if the three most dangerous gangs in town make a joint attack together after a truce break."

Coil took a moment to think about it, and nodded.

"A tad more destructive and forthright than I'd anticipated, but it will likely work. Using that route will put us even higher up on the danger radar of the PRT, of course, but Greg could become indispensable. Having Heartbreaker, or a clone of him through Printer, would be very valuable in freeing up your hands, but we have alternatives to that. We don't have alternatives to Tinkertech coding. The applications are endless. Automated weapons systems, websites, privacy, security, algorithmic handling of all of our organisation's assets, automated trading on the stock market for massive returns without any of the hassle and risk of manually doing it…" Coil trailed off, almost begging.

She eyed him with cold scrutiny.

"You're not wrong, but I have a feeling that this is more about you wanting to use your power."

He nodded without hesitation, eyes full of fire.

"Yes. Yes it is. You have read about what happens when people don't use their powers, right? I'm certainly getting irrationally antsy lately. But let's not pretend this is not a perfect application for it, regardless of my desires."

Bad things happened when powers went unused. Erratic behaviour, searching for trouble, manic obsessive tendencies…

And he was right. This was the exact kind of situation his power was made for.

She slowly nodded.

"Fair. You're one of our main organisers. Can't have you breaking down. Alright. So. To agree and finalise. I'll teleport to Greg, activate the transmitter, and then cut all comms and go focus on Heartbreaker until I get him. I'll keep out of Brockton entirely, cut off communication. Clones are still coming with me for the raid. They might give you status updates. Tell them to stop if it's messing with your 'realities'. Expect some shooting stars to drop down with captives in a couple days. Is Citrine still around?"

Coil nodded.

"Asked her to wait a few days, specifically in case I needed her for this. So… am I clear to do this?"

She nodded.

"Consult with Lisa for a good plan. Go for it."

Coil nodded, satisfied, relaxing significantly.

"Thank you. Ah, and, one more thing." He quickly added, raising a finger.

She tilted her head.

"Dragon's mechs are going to be gathered in a couple days. They've been sitting there for the most part because the area has been hot and nobody's wanted to draw our attention, but civillians are starting to walk into the perimeter to gawk around at the destruction and poke Dragon's mechs for pictures and other benign, idiotic reasons, so the PRT is sending a cleanup crew to scoop them up and send them to Canada. Likely in a day or two. We could interfere. I'm sure Greg would like to pirate some code off of those things, assuming we manage to take him."

Oh.

"Good idea, but we don't know what kind of tracking she has on those things. Send a couple teams. Try to be discrete. Take them to a throwaway location far from anything and anyone important, and wait it out. See if Dragon sends another mech to take them back or something.."

Coil nodded.

"That's all, I believe. There's more information on your phone, if you want more details on what's going on. I'll go rest now." Coil said, and wordlessly turned to the computer, turning it off.

She sighed as the screens powered down, and rubbed at her burning eyes.

"Yeah. I'll do the same. Good luck. Update Insight on everything tomorrow."

He nodded wordlessly, and got up to leave.

She got up, stretched, and slowly got to work on picking up Lisa without waking her.

Ten minutes later, she settled her into her bed, and after a brief moment of hesitation, said fuck it and just plopped down next to her, unwilling to lay on her own bed by her lonesome.

She didn't have many sources of comfort or human connection. She had to cherish what few of those she had.

Helped keep her sane, empathetic, and somewhat on the right track, morals-wise.

Also, to be honest with herself, Lisa was soft and warm and tended to cuddle in her sleep without Taylor doing anything, and not only was that very pleasant, that sort of familiarity let her feel something important.

Vulnerability.

She went to sleep thinking of her dad, hoping he was doing alright, nice and far from anything that could horrifically kill him, like everyone around her. Except Lisa, maybe.

She hadn't realized how large Canada was until she had to follow a pair of cars for a grand total of two entire damn days while Coil set everything up.

Half of it was spent through back country roads and off-trail paths.

Impatience was starting to burrow into her mind like a parasite, urging her to do something already.

And as usual, she resisted it, and did as patience and logic dictated. She just followed.

Her morale was significantly improved by the arrival of a third car, filled to the brim with male grunts and two more of Heartbreaker's children.

Darlene and Roman, apparently. She didn't get to learn anything further about them specifically. Cosmic Insight gave her mostly personal information on them rather than anything immediately usable.

From there, learning more about the general situation was trivial. Where there were more than a dozen people familiar with each other in close spaces, especially women and teenagers, gossip flowed like creek water.

Add in people that were avoiding communications for security, leaving nobody in the know, and current happenings was practically all they talked about.

Heartbreaker had gone straight to his compound with the two Dallons and was waiting for them there to cast judgement on Cherie for… probably just for running away.

Bastard.

His compound was… speculatively in the Canadian countryside, and neither she nor the PRT knew exactly where. Or at least if the PRT did know, neither she nor her insiders had the clearance level to access that information from The Guild.

Assumedly, the PRT would be told due to recent events, because neither of the two Parahuman guiding bodies would let a situation like this lie down. She hoped.

Three heroines was far bolder than anything else the man had tried before.

The Guild definitely knew where his compound was, because they were supposed to be watching out for him, and he was under their jurisdiction, but she hadn't ever been able to get the exact location or a general area besides 'northland forest' from Accord and Coil's connections.

Having no connections to the Guild, she was forced to sit on her eggs, wait for the convoy to arrive at a shady motel and break absolutely zero road laws in the meantime, not even speed limits, and finally, she got a decent four-hour window before the Heartbroken got back to moving.

And with some subtlety and a tiny needle inserted into the arm of one of the women, yielding a single drop of blood, she had a fallback measure to track them again if they left their cars for new ones.

That opened her schedule up significantly. She no longer had to keep almost constant tabs on the group.

Not that she'd let them out of her sight. Just in case.

Still, another stop at a dilapidated motel meant she could make a quick stop herself, so she teleported back to Brockton, squinted at a sunny afternoon sky outside the window, stretched, and flickered her phone into her hand.

Five minutes of catching up later, she called Lisa, and the line clicked.

"Sup." Lisa said, muffled through… something.

"... Are you eating right now?" She asked, bemused.

"Yea. Still on my desk though, just come up. Are you ready to go, or just coming back for a nap like usual? Everything's good on our end. Empire's waiting, ABB plus Lee clones are ready, our men are getting annoyed at all this buildup without action…" Lisa trailed off, before slurping something. Probably soup. Or, knowing her, cereal.

"Yeah. The Heartbroken stopped for a quick pit-stop nap. For the tenth time. They seem very hurried to not stick in a single place for more than a couple hours. There isn't much Canada left on the map for them to drive through though. They have to be really close to Heartbreaker."

"Ah. So you wanna be done with this quickly and let us handle it. Got it. Ready to go, then?"

She took a deep breath, blew it out in a sigh, and hummed positive.

"Let's see how it goes." She said mildly.

"Don't sound too confident there." Lisa snorted.

She huffed a short laugh, brushing her hair back.

It was greasy and heavy. How long had she gone without a shower? Gods she hated it, but she spent so much time in Evelynn that she barely noticed her actual, physical state.

"No, it's not that. I'm just… tired of this fucker. Heartbreaker. I wanna be done with him already." She admitted with a soul-deep sigh.

"Ah. Can relate, somewhat. You won't kill him, right?"

She cracked her neck, her light mood soured by the mere mention of him.

"Not before I toss him into Noelle and get a good dozen clones of the bastard."

"Good. We really do need to talk about why you have such a deep personal hatred of him though, you know that?" Lisa asked, half-muffled, crunching through her cereal.

"When we have time, sure."

"That's basically a "never", T- Sam." Lisa stumbled, then huffed in frustration at the dumb names and such, assumedly.

A clatter of plates followed.

"Alright, sending out the message. It'll take people half an hour, maybe, to get to their designated points, arm up, get organised, et cetera. Just uh, rest, freshen up, do whatever in the meantime. And come on over to grab the transmitter."

"Hnm." She hummed back affirmatively, and clicked the call shut.

She flew to Lisa's office, on the warehouse across the alley, and materialized in the office from sheer habit.

What she hadn't expected was to hear a sharp gasp and see sudden movement out of the corner of her eye.

She jerked her head away, feelers flaring, ready to gut someone-

And blinked, confused, at a young woman of… Korean, maybe Mongolian ancestry, staring at her wide-eyed, almost hiding behind a plate.

"Whoah whoah whoah, uh, Sam, that's one of the girls from the ABB raid. Chill. She's just on the cleanup payroll." Lisa said, rising from her chair, and quickly took the girl by the shoulder, gently guiding her along out of the office with body language, reassuring pats on the back, and exaggerated smiles.

She relaxed, and stood there, a tad awkwardly, until Lisa shut the door and jogged back to her desk.

"Sorry, forgot how fast you can move from place to place. She'll be fine, don't worry. Anyway, raid. Uh, shit, where's Hook?" Lisa rushed out, and Coil's screen flashed windows at him with alarming speed.

Could he even read what they said before they swapped? It was kind of impressive.

"Was on a drunk bender, angry about being promised a fight and then having it stalled for half a week. He'll be there in a minute or two. Oh and the Dragon suits were too large to take all of them, we only got one before the men started shooting down following drones and retreating. We put it up as bait along Lung's territory."

"Oh. I forgot about that." She admitted, a tad annoyed with herself and nodded. "Good job. Power ready?"

"As it can be. Everyone's in position, give or take five minutes. Give us a signal, and let me work, and we should have Greg back without issue." Coil rushed out.

She hummed noncommittally, and leaned on Lisa's chair, idly following the dots as they moved on their maps.

Each one should be a team captain.

That was a lot of teams around the PRT HQ.

"How are they concealed?" She asked, curious.

"They're camped up in vacant office building. They'll be packing into moving company trucks, vans, et cetera. Going to bust out when we call for it." Lisa rushed out, typing a message to one of their coordinators.

She nodded, and kept quiet, letting the minutes tick by in quiet chaos.

It felt like ages.

Two minutes.

Three.

Five.

Ten.

Thirteen.

She watched the teams carefully, the Empire posting up near the boardwalk, and the ABB with her men carefully surrounding the PRT HQ.

Eventually, both Lisa and Coil seemed to lean back and relax, in sync.

"It's time?" She asked, judging from body language, and Lisa nodded, stretching.

"Everyone's good to go. Here's the transmitter, just click the button." Lisa said, plucking a small rectangular piece of plastic off her desk and holding it up for her.

She went to grab it, before a thought popped up.

"Try to make sure there are no casualties. Not just on our end. We don't want to kill people." She said, stern.

Lisa paused, and Coil turned towards her in seeming disbelief.

"This is a little late to mention considering our men are carrying almost entirely lethal options." Coil said, voice teetering on the edge of a complaint.

Lisa groaned, and rubbed at her face with her free hand.

"Fuck. Why did I not even consider that? Yeah, I'll tell our men to try and focus on non-lethal. I've been too focused on planning for Greg. Sorry. I'm kind of alarmed I didn't even consider that we're not supposed to be killing innocent people to grab him."

Well, that was good, because Taylor was also alarmed by that. She thought it was to be expected. It only dawned on her now that maybe she should have audibly clarified, since her faction was so militant that 'non-lethal' was practically a foreign practise.

She sighed, and took the transmitter out of Lisa's hand.

"Don't beat yourself up over it, just learn and keep going. I'm going now. I'll leave immediately after to save my energy for Heartbreaker, so if you have any last minute requests, this is the time to tell me."

Lisa shook her head.

"No, no, we're good. Most of my planning time has gone to making sure we don't get anyone captured by PRT grunts or a stray Ward. Our men will hopefully not kill anyone."

"Hm. Watch out for Flechette. Her power trumps mine, so it probably trumps everyone else's too."

Lisa nodded.

"Already figured and worked that out."

Good.

She hummed in acknowledgement, and took a step back, her breaths deepening as she slipped into meditation.

She chose Shen once more, her viewpoint shifting from his raised height, and thought of Greg, everything she knew about him.

Her hands joined together in front of her, in line with her solar plexus.

Breath flowed from lung, to nostril, to hand and soul.

That mental connection seemed to slip into place, two malleable things finding a common track.

She knew him well enough to teleport to him, apparently.

"Going." She announced in Shen's calm baritone, and pushed at the boundaries between worlds.

They split open, and purple lines of energy began to whirl around her and spread in perfect circles from the heel of her feet, lighting up the whole room.

The same flash of passing images, landscapes and memories and people and entire worlds, passing by her as the spirit world cracked open and threw her across the cosmos-

And it all stopped with her staring at a metal wall of tools and microscopes on extending racks.

Greg immediately squeaked and dashed away from her, spinning to face her as she half-turned, flickering the transmitter into her hand.

"Nexus sent me. You'll be rescued shortly. Stay here, sabotage anything you know how to operate, take anything you need. Be quick, you have thirty minutes at max. Your rescuers will be terrible people, but they're under our employ, so just comply. Keep this on you."

She clicked the transmitter's button and it instantly beeped once. She tossed it to Greg, who tried to grab it, failed, and quickly dove for it on the floor, grabbing it with shaking hands.

"I- wha- I-I'm working on something super important-" Greg stuttered, hissing almost from sheer stress.

Did she find him in the middle of a Tinker fugue?

"Then you have thirty minutes to finish it or take it with you to finish later. I need to leave, now. Good luck, Greg. Oh, and, your mother is safe."

She watched Greg pause and relax in relief for only one more second before she switched to the Rune of Inspiration and immediately cast Teleport back to her little nook in the treeline, over in Canada.

"W-wait you can't just- just take me with you! Why are you leaving alone?! You can TELEPORT-"

Greg's panicking, wide-eyed figure before the background of Armsmaster's laboratory vanished in favour of a dimly sunlit forest.

She sighed, and flickered back to herself, just to check and be sure.

Yep. No way of communicating with Brockton, and almost an entire country away. The only thing on her was a tablet to display the signals for the trackers she put on the Heartbroken's cars, and some ancient button-phones to contact the Purity clone squad.

Coil should be free to use his power.

She switched to the Rune of Domination for the Ultimate Hunter keystone, and picked the Purity clone triad, all three of the women.

Considering she changed Duo to a teenager, two women and a girl, actually.

After quickly checking in on the motel to make sure that everyone was still sleeping, or at least most of them, as usual, she took off in the girl's direction.

A big part of her continued to fuss and worry over the operation, but… well… a big part of why she went along with being uninvolved so easily, was that she needed to test them. Lisa and Coil.

She needed to test whether she really, genuinely could trust Lisa and Coil to run operations without her leaning over their shoulders and getting ready to do it herself at a moment's notice. It was as much for her own confidence as it was for Lisa's, since Coil generally knew what he was doing quite well.

The countryside below her slowly faded from trees and plains to sparse fields cut in endless strips by highway roads, and another minute of flying later, she was walking into the lobby of a small, but unusual hostel.

Finding them was not exactly an issue considering the compass in her head and the fact the building was pretty much a twenty four seven eatery with just three rooms for rent on the upper level.

It was a pretty nice place though. Cream coloured walls, carpet, thick mahogany wooden doors with little stickers on them to denote number, all three of them, as if it was needed.

She checked once for any cameras, and dropped Evelynn entirely, before knocking on the door.

"Girls. Sam here." She called out.

Some shuffling, light steps.

Probably some light blasts being readied, just in case.

The door cracked open, and an eye peeked at her.

"What are our names?"

She raised an unamused brow.

What, did they think she was a doppelganger or something?

"Are you seriously- just let her in." Someone from deeper inside called out, exasperated.

The eye in the door squinted.

"Your names are numbers. Enna looks like a close relative to her, Duo looks like a teenaged version of her with white hair, and since you're an inch or so taller than me, you're Tria." She explained, bored.

Her head felt a bit stuffy by now, from all the constant summon core usage and Shen's strongest technique, but it was at most a mild annoyance.

The door opened, and Tria stepped aside, wearing jeans and a white tee.

She walked in-

"Um, shoes. It'd be rude to dirty the place." Duo pointed out from the little sofa in the corner, pointing at her feet for a second before going back to reading her book.

She huffed, and kicked them off.

"Right. You three all ready? It's just us now."

Enna sighed from where she was reclining on the bed, looking at the TV with complete and utter boredom.

"This sounds like a complete and utter suicide mission, no offence. At least for us."

She exhaled through her nose, almost a snort, and sat on the bed next to Enna's feet, rubbing at her eyes.

The bag full of Zyra's spore bursters clicked along with her movements, shifting along her back and harness strips.

"You guys brought your gear?" She asked, tiredly.

Enna pointed to the corner, where a giant suitcase rested against the radiator under the window.

"All the armour plates, helmets, et cetera. As costumes, they're worthless. We just look like a SWAT team. Also not sure why you gave us pistols. We know how to operate one, but we're capes." Enna said, reasonably.

"There is never a reason to not carry a pistol at the very least, cape or not. Fighting with only your power and fists is ego-tripping bullshit. Do anything to win, at all costs. Not that carrying a piece of iron is a big sacrifice." She grouched, and Tria raised a brow as she sat in a chair.

"Strong opinions on cape culture, huh?" Tria asked.

"Don't get me started. The Empire is half-full of fucking morons running around shirtless like a bullet won't kill them… Regardless, you won't need to fight any powered individuals, hopefully. I'll just knock everyone at the compound out, then drag the ones we need to bring back home outside and fire a flare. You all drop down, pick them up, and I'll cover you until we're at home base. We fly straight back to Brockton once our targets are secured."

The two and a half women nodded.

"Duo, you have your harness, right?" She asked, and the teen nodded.

"It's going to be awkward, but yeah it's here and it fits my ball form. Should be able to carry a limp person with it." The girl shrugged.

She nodded, slowly.

"Good. What are our targets?" She asked, just to make sure they knew everything, more than a genuine question of curiosity.

"Dallon girls, Battery, and Heartbreaker. Don't worry, we got briefed pretty well." Tria answered.

"What do you do if you need to rest and can't carry them for much longer?" She asked.

The girls all hesitated, glancing at each other like twins having a wordless conversation.

"Grit our teeth and push through?" Duo offered.

"No, you let me know that you're running out of energy or strength, and we either stop to rest, or I'll switch out with a cape that can take us all back home in an hour or two, depending on how much we're trying to hurry. It'll expend tons of mine and her energy though, so we'll see if I decide to bring her."

The girls either said nothing or hummed in acknowledgement, lounging around and staring at her.

"What's with your eyes? No offence, of course." Enna said, staring at her with a slight air of discomfort.

Eyes? What-

Oh. She'd forgotten about that.

"Information sharing with the… network. Gives off the feeling like you have a hundred-something eyes staring at you. Lots of people are a bit freaked out by it. Part of why it's hard for me to pass as a civilian even if I act completely inconspicuous. One person meets my eyes and they'll feel very strange. They'll remember that. Hard to blend in."

"Huh. That's cool." Duo hummed.

It really wasn't.

"Are there really like a hundred-something capes in Nexus? Just ready to switch at all times? How does any of this work? Sounds absurd." Tria asked, geniunely curious.

"Not answering that. Anything else before I go back to stalking the convoy?" She asked, a tad irritated.

Not with them, just… in general. She wanted to be done with Heartbreaker five days ago, and it was looking like it would end up stretching to a week before she was done with the bastard.

Mostly, to be honest, she was worried about the Dallon twins. It wasn't hard to imagine what Heartbreaker wanted a bombshell blonde for. It made her fucking sick. It made her want to throw him in a woodchipper feet first and videotape his screams just to enjoy them for later.

It made her want to say "fuck it" to this whole plan and just erase his entire existence on sight.

Tria raised a hand, half-assedly, drawing her attention back out of the dredges of her mind.

She inclined her head.

"How close-by should we stick? We're about sixty miles away from them right now according to the trackers, and that's not exactly close when our main mode of transport is a car, at least until it's show time. Are they about to meet up with the man?"

"Probably. There's genuinely not much Canadian countryside left, so they have to be getting pretty damn close. Stick closer to them with the car, no reason to stick this far back anymore. Give it five or ten miles, honestly, none of them seem to have that big of a range. Should be good enough."

The clones all nodded.

Tria then rose.

"Can we talk? Privately." Tria clarified, jerking her head to the bathroom.

Resisting the urge to sigh, she got up and walked into the bathroom with her.

Tria stepped around her, closed the door, and leaned in close to her ear.

"Something's up with Duo." Tria whispered, then leaned back, eyes worried.

Her disinterested gaze sharpened.

"Explain."

"It's nothing alarming, she's not Mastered or anything. It's just… she didn't come out of Noelle that bad, physically, but mentally, she's very different from me and Enna. The more time we're forced to interact and spend together, the easier it is to tell. She's like… infantilizing herself, sort of. Regressing, mentally. The more time goes on the more she acts like a kid. A mature kid, but a kid. She's a clone of an almost forty year old woman, this is just strange. It's not a problem to you, or your operations, and you probably don't care as long as it stays that way, but-"

Okay, no, that was just completely wrong.

"Stop. You're wrong. I do care, to a certain extent." She said, raising a hand between them. "I forced you all into existence to help me, and while life is arguably the grandest gift one could ever get, I feel like the least I can do is try to keep you all alive and well. Were you going to suggest something?" She asked, quietly.

Tria leaned back, seemingly surprised, and slowly, hesitatingly, shrugged.

"I'm not sure. Therapy doesn't seem to work with most Parahumans, honestly, but it can't hurt, right? It's just…There's nothing wrong with her, exactly, I feel like she's just trying to delude herself into a mindset that fits the body she asked for, so maybe it's not even necessary, but she's just- in general, more… sensitive? She has nightmares, we don't. She gets embarrassed super easily, we don't. She gets anxious really easily, and then when she's anxious she wants to run away and calm down and… I don't know. Something's wrong with her, up here." Tria tapped the side of her skull. "Might be some malformation from Noelle, in the brain. Could check it with an MRI scan or something… Sorry, just, I don't know. Thought I should just… mention it, at least. We're all taking on different behaviours and patterns to feel like we're our own distinct person rather than a Kayden clone, so maybe that's all she's doing, but it would be nice to have confirmation, or some reassurance that we won't have to end up working with a literal child one day if this keeps going. And…" Tria seemed to inhale, stutter, then huff and gesture around with her hands, as if giving up.

"You're everything to us. We know you made it so, but that doesn't change anything. You're all we care about, you're the only person we can trust. We don't even particularly like each other aside from having a common goal, understanding of each other, and origin. So you're the only one I felt I could really bring this up to. Telling Duo anything about this gets her incredibly angry and avoidant, so discussing it with her isn't an option. You're the only one with power over us who can fix or help this. And you're never just around for us to talk to, and getting your ear for even a couple minutes is impossible when you seem to be busy building a goddamn empire. A real one, not Max's shit. So, yeah. Felt like this was my only chance to really bring this up. Sorry if I'm taking stalking time away from the Heartbroken."

Taylor swallowed, leaned on the sink, and sighed deeply.

It was kind of easy to forget the consequences of Mastering Noelle's clones, but this was a nice reminder of it.

And it made sense, really. She made people violently, fiercely loyal and trusting to her, then practically sent them off and ignored them for weeks at a time. It couldn't be helped, it was necessary, but it wasn't very nice.

She licked her lips, and nodded.

"Yeah, good call. I'll try to check the non-urgent messages more often, try to put some time aside for you and the Lee clones to bring up any concerns, et cetera. And I'll put in an inquiry for our therapists to look into you. All of you. We only have three though, and they're more specialised in PTSD and behavioural problems since they're mostly working for our soldiers. If you don't like them, I can get someone lower down to find someone more suited. But, let's be realistic. I won't be able to sit with you and chat on any regular basis, or anything. I'm always busy and I always will be, this will only get worse. I won't have time to do more than sleep, probably until I die. So, make bonds with each other, support each other, become your own best friends. Technically, you're all family. I could force that, but I don't think anyone here would like that."

Tria thought long and hard, for almost a solid minute of silence, before nodding.

"It can't hurt. I'll give it a shot. Thank you for listening."

She nodded, feeling a tiny smile twitch onto her lips.

"No problem. I'd do it more if I had the time. If it becomes a big problem, don't be afraid to send a message through the 'urgent' section on the app. I read those all the time. Is that all?"

Tria thought for a second, then nodded.

"Good luck. Thanks again." Tria quietly said, and then opened the door, walking out back into the room, receiving the curious stares with a shrug. "Woman talk."

Taylor came out behind her, and gave a quick, lazy salute, before picking Evelynn again, and flying off, back towards the Heartbroken.

It was only halfway there when she realized she forgot to put her shoes back on, but with a mental groan of embarassment, she decided to ignore that tidbit. Shoes were overrated anyway.

Then she was almost there, and something was... not quite right. And when she caught sight of a hawk, flying at her height, almost a thousand feet away, the Rune of Precision letting her catch wind of it despite the cloudy sun and fading light, she knew exactly what.

The hawk wasn't strange, but having it circling above the exact motel the Heartbroken were holed up in for their daily nap? Without flapping its wings once? In a perfect, straight circle?

Something was weird about that.

And as she focused more and more on it, more and more things were strange.

Its feathers were too stiff. They didn't move at all, unaffected by the wind. Not even the little hairs on either side of each quill, it was as if they were frozen needles. The joint along its side, connecting wing to body, was pitch black and… rubbery. No, it was rubber. Same as it's neck, it seemed to have a tube of rubber over its neck and throat.

Was it wearing a suit? Or was it a minion from a scout team or something?

The little mystery clicked in her head when it finally completed a turn, and its head ended up facing her.

Its eyes were cameras.

Dragon.

Or someone good enough to make a realistic enough hawk mimic to the point it took her thirty seconds to figure out that it was a drone, even with the Rune of Precision active.

Considering this was deep in Canada, and the Heartbroken had overstepped any line they had prodded ever before, she doubted it was someone that wasn't Dragon.

So she stopped, observing the drone in silence, mind racing.

This was annoying, but it could also be a big opportunity. Depending on how she played her cards.

Option one, was to claim this as Nexus's business, and tell Dragon to kindly back off.

Option two… attempt cooperation.

After all, she never set out to be a real villain. She only took this path because she refused to be subject to the incompetent command of the PRT, bound to worthless laws and tied down with miles of bureaucratic red tape.

Her main method of acquiring power being Mastering, also made that option impossible.

But she never wanted to beat down the heroes and claim herself a petty kingdom atop the ashes left behind. That was more Lung's speed, disgraceful waste of a wonderful power that he was.

She considered asking for some advice, but, she couldn't. Even the thought of calling Lisa would likely mess with Coil's power right now. Accord might be a safer option, but he was still connected to the raid through Citrine, and his contact with Coil.

This felt oddly nostalgic to how she started, going after villains on her lonesome, no support, nobody to bounce her plans off of and figure out a better way.

Choices filtered in and out, discarded, refined, or shifted.

She had little to lose, either way. The Guild should pull out entirely if they thought that Nexus would fight them over the right to kick Heartbreaker's ass, and that was just not a fight worth taking, when both were technically trying to go for the same target.

Eventually, she made a choice.

She rose up, higher and higher, her formless, invisible cloud of gas deforming from the speed, then she flew until she was right above the hawk.

After a few seconds of waiting for the hawk to get in position, she dive bombed it.

A couple feet before impact, she picked Jarvan again, and clamped her hands shut around its body, the sheet metal denting with a loud bang sound as they tumbled down.

Considering it was completely inanimate, without any tissue or soul inside it, she simply flickered it back with her original body, picked Evelynn to fly, down to a thin copse of trees besides the highway, and then switched back to Jarvan to flicker the drone back into her hands.

It was completely still for a second, before it jerked, likely establishing it's connection again.

Two beady cameras zoomed in on her face.

"I assume I'm talking to Dragon, correct?" She asked in Jarvan's deep, arrogant rumble.

She held the hawk up higher with one arm, tilting it this way and that.

Slowly, mechanically, the hawk bobbed its head in a nod.

"I see. Can this… toy, not speak?" She asked, feigning disdain for the drone with a subtle curl of her lip.

The hawk shook its head, clumsily.

"That is unfortunate. I'd like to speak with you. It seems we have the same target. Unfortunately, we can't let the Guild take care of our business for us. Heartbreaker insulted us, gravely, and interfered in our territory. He's ours to take. Our only options here as Nexus are to either stop you from interfering by force, or to try and work with you. To my displeasure, Summoner prefers it if we worked together to take care of Heartbreaker. Can you send another drone over to speak with me, in any expedient manner? The Heartbroken will likely move soon. They never sleep or stay at these places for more than a couple hours, they just stretch their legs and go back to driving."

The hawk stared.

And continued staring, unmoving, for almost a full minute.

Eventually, she scowled, and shook it.

"Did this thing break?" She wondered, almost sneering.

The hawk shook it's head, but provided no more input.

She huffed.

"My patience is running out, Dragon." She sighed, faking annoyance, but decided to spin her lance and rest her elbow on its guard, to wait.

A full two minutes later, it weakly flapped its wings to grab her attention, then nodded, the faintest of whirring sounds coming out of its mechanical joints as it did so.

"Nod once for half an hour until it's here, or twice for one hour. So on and so forth."

The hawk nodded once.

Half an hour or less.

That was fine.

She nodded back.

"Good, I'll wait right here. Don't try anything, we'll know, and I won't be so lenient this time. No more betrayals."

Not subtle in her threat whatsoever, but she wasn't in the mood to let the Heartbroken slip out of sight because the Guild decided to fight her just outside their goddamn motel.

Painfully slowly, the hawk nodded.

"Do you want this back?" She asked, and tapped the hawk's chest.

The hawk nodded, and so, she turned it, raised it with her hand, and stopped gripping, just holding it up.

Something inside it whirred, and it dragged itself off her palm.

Dragged, because instead of flying away, it simply tipped over and fell to the ground, ungracefully.

She picked it up, squinting at it through her helm.

"Did I break it?"

The hawk nodded.

She snorted as she put the hawk on her shoulder, and it used its wings and mechanical legs to balance itself while she leaned on her lance, staring out onto the forest.

"Apologies. Wasn't expecting a Dragon drone made out of metal to be this fragile, considering just a couple of your rockets took my arm off a week and a half ago."

Somehow, she got the sense that the drone was glaring at her through those beady cameras.

Notes:

Hope that that little Cherie POV explained some of the butterflies of this story and where they originated from, like Armsmaster and Heartbreaker. :)