2.6

-- Lt. Col. Tanya von Degurechaff Argent --

"Argent, to see Mr. Meadows. I don't have an appointment, but I expect he'll want to see me anyway."

If he didn't at first, I'd be happy to provide incentives.

The 'doorman,' a tattooed thug with a rusty shotgun, gaped. I'd come down on the lair at full speed, stopping on a dime before the entrance less than a second after plunging through my camouflage formula at two hundred meters. I'd half expected to invite some panicked fire, but none had come. Oh well. I'd naturally been ready with an active barrier, and staring the fools down while their best efforts amounted to nothing might have helped set the right tone for this meeting. Well, maybe not -- didn't want to intimidate them too much, just yet -- but it would have been satisfying. Good discipline or awful discipline? The gormless staring certainly hinted at an answer. His finger was off the trigger, at least.

"... I'll pass that along," he finally got out, disappearing into the suborned Endbringer shelter.

I waited 'patiently,' affecting a studied disinterest in the milling toughs who had been hanging about the entrance. The men were watching for anything truly threatening. Realistically, there wasn't much in that category that could be safely deployed in a crowd, but I wasn't willing to discount stupidity from Nazis.

(Enemy mages in among the troops can be nightmarishly difficult to deal with, even given doctrine's cold-blooded sanction of moderate collateral damage in such instances. Low to the ground, moving fast, and exploiting defilade, targeting with either anti-air guns or machine gun emplacements is impractical, and mages are effectively immune to infantry armament, given realistic limits on coordination of fire in such scenarios.

Short of widespread bombardment of one's own position, the only practical counter is to deploy one's own mages, which could get messy to say the least. The textbook answer is actually to not counter them -- combat mages near the ground can't actually do as much damage as they can from altitude, and, more to the point, can't defend their artillery spotters, who are every commanders' top priority. Still, it was the right move on occasion, like our raid on the Dacian's HQ.

Of course, the Chosen did not have mage parity. Their only flier, Rune, wouldn't last a quarter second in a straight fight. This wouldn't go well for them should the situation devolve into open violence.)

Unfortunately, the cape that ultimately emerged was not Brad Meadows alias 'Hookwolf,' the leader of 'Fenrir's Chosen.' It was Victor, whose name I hadn't bothered to learn, the Thinker and skill thief. After my recent experiences with the PRT, I had less than no desire to deal with either of those things. Fortunately, the theft took upwards of a minute to spin up, and the Thinker power would just let him know I'm serious.

"Victor." I gave him a polite nod. "If I still see your face in ten seconds, I'll cave it in. Go back and get your boss."

He stared at me for a couple seconds. I didn't mind. It was his time to spend as he saw fit.

"The truce--"

"Four seconds," I reminded.

He retreated into the bunker, though I couldn't be sure how far he really went. Tattletale was confident his power required line of sight, but the fact I couldn't see him didn't necessarily mean he couldn't see me. She hadn't thought there was much risk. The fact that Miss Militia, for example, retained her proficiency in marksmanship implied he was substantially more limited than her conservative guesses indicated. I couldn't sense any magic from him, but I hadn't sensed any from Cherie, either.

I briefly regretted not finding a way to bring Skitter -- she'd wanted to come and I was already missing her tracking abilities -- but on balance I'd determined her capabilities didn't justify sacrificing so much mobility and firepower. Of course, she could have worked from the ground -- not everyone within three hundred meters of the lair was Chosen-affiliated, and I hadn't needed anything overt from her -- but the taboo against doing 'cape stuff' out of costume was strong.

I didn't necessarily dislike the custom. It's laudable to maintain separation between one's personal and work lives, and the last thing I wanted was to discourage this single glimmer of professionalism in my new employees. And there's something to be said for keeping to good habits even when they don't seem important. But doing the job comes first, right? And super villainy is not a field that rewards coasting or clock-watching. You need to move fast and break things if you want to establish yourself. Of course, you'd ultimately want to carve out a stable niche where--

I paused, reviewing that thought. What the fuck? Am I actually starting to take this nonsense seriously? Taylor refused to help because she couldn't do it dressed like a bug. And it's one thing for kids to play dress-up, but I'm here to meet a thirty-something man who insisted people call him Hookwolf. This world is insane, and I can't let myself forget that.

I let a bit of that contempt show on my face as the clown finally emerged from his hole. His full face wolf mask hid his expression, but he didn't seem intimidated. Just as well. Fenja, Menja, and Stormtiger filed out behind him. I started casting.

"Argent," he growled. "Threatening my people under truce--"

"The truce is over. The Nine are dead or fled."

He paused, but not for long. He nodded to himself.

"I'd like to hear that story. You want to talk? Come in."

...What? I'd been told he was prideful and crude, unstable and violent. This was practically friendly! Did he have a trap set up in the lair? Well, I wasn't about to enter it.

"I think we can talk right here, actually."

"Oh, don't be like that. This isn't the sort of conversation you want to have in public. Not that my people aren't loyal, you understand, but it doesn't pay to take stupid risks. Victor can sit it out if you're feeling untrusting."

"... What sort of conversation do you imagine we're having?"

That stopped him. A frisson of tension passed through the group. Fenja and Menja spread out, presumably so they'd have room to grow.

"I'd assumed you'd want to negotiate an alliance against the Pure and the rest of the filth," he said, voice harder but still calm. "You didn't seem too fond of Krieg at the meeting."

I grit my teeth. The fucking nerve. I smoothed my tone with some effort.

"An alliance? With you?"

If he heard the disgust I struggled to hide, he didn't show it.

"Who else? The Merchants? Vultures and rats, cowards who feed on misery. The heroes? They're ineffectual and corrupt, and you've already made your opinion clear on them. Faultline only cares about money and the Undersiders are irrelevant. And trust me, the snake is not your friend. My Chosen are the cream of the crop. Disciplined, experienced warriors ready to fight for the cause. In your time we would have sought glory on the battlefield, but in this debased age it's all we can do to keep up with internal enemies."

... What a fucking moron.

"'Sought glory on the battlefield?'" I repeated, bemused. Who can truly take offense to the words of a lunatic? "Someone has to be first over the trench lip, I suppose. And there are always pillboxes that need filling."

He glanced at Stormtiger, trying to hide his confusion.

"... Look, I can see how some of our imagery might seem tasteless to you." He'd apparently guessed that hadn't been a compliment and was now aiming for appeasement. "And Krieg took it too far, he has no right to wear that uniform. But believe me, it's meant with respect. Keeping the flame alive in spite of all opposition, as the Fuehrer himself did after Versailles."

Ah, and there the anger was again. I didn't even really like the Empire, but implying that the Nazi regime was a continuation of the Kaiserreich rather than its repudiation? I didn't think I owed my second homeland much on balance, but I surely owed it better than to let that pass. Fortunate I'd already been planning to kill him, I guess. I'd need to play this up.

"Keeping the flame alive? Through drug pushing and sex trafficking and random violence? I'd sooner see the dream of empire dead and forgotten than continued in your person! Fortunate, then, that you so clearly don't understand it! You confuse the primitive impulse to ethnic tribalism with nationalism, the kinship found in dedication to a shared ideal. Not Frankish or Saxon or Frisian, but German! Not German or Austrian or Croatian, but Imperial! My Empire grew by finding common cause with the Pole and the Czech while your 'fuehrer' resorted to suppression and purges, the vile tactics of the communist. You want to talk about debasement? Look in the mirror!"

I subtly glanced around as the impact of my words was felt. The rank and file were muttering and glaring, hands on weapons. The masked capes were hard to read, but odd bulges moved beneath Hookwolf's skin and the twins had grown a good twenty centimeters. Well, it was fine if they didn't appreciate my rhetoric. They weren't the target audience.

"What do you want, then?" Hookwolf snarled.

Not going to try to argue? Perhaps he realized his grasp on history wouldn't hold up under scrutiny, or maybe he'd prefer to make his point to his people after getting rid of me. Just as well.

"To deliver this ultimatum: leave the city or die. Abandon your holdings, harm no one, and never show your faces in Brockton Bay again. I'll give you till sundown."

It was a very generous offer, not that I expected them to appreciate that. Taylor had wanted me to insist they turn themselves in. Earning some credit with the PRT might have been nice, but then I'd have been obligated to chase down anyone who managed to run away, which would have been a major pain. And I didn't actually want them in custody, at least in this city. Gesellschaft would probably send a team to free them, which I was certain would become my problem one way or another.

My first instinct, on the other hand, was to open with bombardment of the surface targets then flood the bunker with carbon monoxide. It would have been quick and easy and posed virtually no risk given their capabilities. As a battle plan, it was near perfect. But, as Lisa had pointed out, it left something to be desired as a marketing ploy.

"This is our city. You think you can drive us out with words?" Stormtiger demanded.

I shrugged.

"No. I expect you to do something stupid and give me an excuse to kill you. Honestly, my preference was to simply have the lot of you executed as looters and bandits. Questions of jurisdiction aside, you certainly deserve it and your victims certainly deserve justice. But while you might be born warriors, I am a fundamentally peaceful person driven to violence by necessity. I'm offering you a chance to prove me wrong."

And it was a marketing ploy, of course. I meant to clear out all the other villains in the city sooner or later -- if nothing else, I had a strong interest in Brockton property values given all the real estate I'd taken from Coil -- but the main reason to prioritize the Chosen was the potential for brand confusion. Brocktonites had heard their whole lives about an 'Empire' with vague German stylings led by a 'Kaiser,' and inheriting those associations was the last thing I needed. And even past that, I couldn't expect sufficient historical nuance from the general public to distinguish between the Germany of the first and second world wars.

Destroying the remnants of E88 -- something the authorities hadn't managed in over a decade, somehow -- should provide a clear, costly signal of my opposition to Nazism. Something to set the record incontrovertibly straight in my interview tomorrow. But why just destroy them when I could make a spectacle of it? Confront them face-to-face, denounce their poisonous ideology, offer them a generous deal, and only kill them after they reject my mercy, all on 'camera?' Well, it was probably an order of magnitude riskier. Against a serious opponent that'd obviously be disqualifying, but I had these clowns so thoroughly outclassed it made sense to trade some advantage for a PR boost that could help me avoid more dangerous confrontations down the line.

Doing it this way should be more impressive to the public, who'd been conditioned to expect spectacle from their 'heroes,' and my apparent willingness to talk should signal reasonableness to the capes. And if they tried to kill me first, the 'rules' permitted me to respond in kind. Or at least it would be a smaller violation? I didn't really understand all the nuance there and hadn't been convinced I should care, Lisa's best efforts aside. Taylor had clearly been upset about the planned killings, but she'd managed to hold her tongue. Progress.

"Fuck that," Hookwolf barked. "A 'fundamentally peaceful person?' I think you're just a coward. Let's settle this, you and me."

Well, that was easy. I nodded.

"Acceptable. Fair warning: I don't go in for play-acting. If we fight, one of us dies."

I didn't bother fishing for guarantees they'd leave peacefully after I won because I'd actually rather they didn't. I wanted to lead off by killing their leader to maximize the chance they'd lash out and minimize the chance they'd do so effectively. It was fine if a couple escaped, but a dead enemy is a joy forever.

"Fine. No one interferes. No flying away."

I nodded again, dropping to the ground. I didn't release my flight spell, though.

He spent a couple seconds sizing me up. I rested my hands comfortably on my rifle but didn't bother pointing it. Finally, he moved, metal bursting from his skin. I released the spell I'd been charging since he came out. He spasmed, grating metal substituting for the screams he could no longer voice.

The modern mage shell is a marvel of engineering. Through an elaborate system of thresholds and filters managed by a powerful, highly-customizable daemon, it can protect against practically anything, so long as your magic holds out. But it's not some inexplicable parahuman power, appearing fully formed in a moment of need. It was designed to protect against practically anything, at the cost of some pretty serious trade-offs and an enormous number of research hours. The daemon alone is so complex and so fast it consumes nearly a third of the entire manna throughput of the spell. Why was it designed that way? Because it is the product of a decades-long arms race.

The first versions were little more than a knight's shield, a plane held out in front of a mage capable of stopping moving objects like bullets. Enter the artillery spell, which produces a blast wave capable of killing around that barrier. Once that was solved, a variant was designed to shove manna through the shell before producing the blast. It was much less efficient, but bypassing the shell more than made up for that. So a shell variant capable of blocking foreign manna was created. And so on.

Sonic attack spells? That's why the modern shell automatically dampens loud sounds. Spells that produce poison gas? An airtight shell has aerodynamic benefits, anyway. Optical formulae may have killed more mages than any other type of spell, given how difficult it proved to design a counter to a speed-of-light attack. (The trick, of course, is not to try to react to it but to embed the necessary optical properties in the shell at all times. Admittedly, I never quite understood how that could work without distorting the view through it.)

We're presently in a shell-dominant phase of magical combat, where there's no better long range anti-mage spell than the artillery formula, which is just the maximally efficient conversion of magic to energy. (For which I'm very grateful, as non-shell-dominant phases tend to have much lower skill ceilings.)

Optical formulae still have niche uses -- it's a lot easier to score hits, which may outweigh the inefficiency if you're incompetent, and they're nice for avoiding collateral damage, in the rare instances where that matters -- and mage blades go right through shells, with the caveat that you have to be close enough to push it through. Otherwise, most of the enormous variety of known attack spells are simply left to languish, strictly inferior to those options in modern magical combat, only still installed on our orbs in case the enemy tries to cut corners on their shells.

Of course, parahumans don't have shells.

One particularly vicious variant, arguably the first of the 'poison gas' class, simply dumps all its energy into superheating the bullet on impact, producing a cloud of extremely hot copper and lead vapor in the victim's face. Even with magical healing, the complications could be nasty. Nowadays it's mainly used for reheating coffee, but all the magical machinery for its use as a high-power attack spell is still there. And while a rifle bullet can only hold so much manna, the hundred kilograms plus of metal under Hookwolf's skin could hold as much as I could pour into it over the course of our three minute conversation.

I didn't make it quick. I certainly could have. I can fully charge an artillery spell in three seconds. Admittedly, throughput wasn't the bottleneck in this case; I'd have completely exhausted myself in thirty seconds if I'd pushed as hard as I could, and I'd obviously wanted to maintain a reserve. Drawing it out just let me be more efficient. Still, there was approximately thirty artillery spells' worth of manna in this spell, enough to kill any mage in the world ten times over.

But killing him in an instant would have been a waste of an opportunity. Instead, I stared, faking intense concentration as he thrashed, metal body taking on a cherry red glow. He'd actually produced more metal out of nowhere when he'd assumed his Changer form -- something magical theory judged to be utterly impossible, for what that was worth -- which did somewhat ameliorate my attack. Metal is a good conductor of heat, unfortunately, and I could simply scale up the output of my spell as necessary.

A minute later, I lazily dodged another vicious if poorly aimed swipe. As Tattletale had said, his Changer form retained his human eyes, and they'd long since been destroyed by the heat. I was getting a bit impatient. Surely the others should have realized by now he had no chance? Why hadn't anyone tried to interfere? Well, Koenig would cut them down the instant they tried it, but I'd been hoping they wouldn't realize that, or at least that their loyalty would win out over their cowardice.

Hookwolf didn't have much fight left in him, not unless I wanted to make it completely obvious I was drawing things out deliberately. I gave up on the ruse and glanced around, only to find a sea of horrified faces, hardly any anger to be found. I briefly held a bit more hope for the capes, whose masks hid their expressions, but Stormtiger actually flinched from my stare.

I sighed and finished Hookwolf off with a twist of thought, outright melting most of his body. Well, this was a street gang, not an army. I suppose it was unreasonable to expect any real discipline or bravery. Still, it couldn't hurt to fish for another kill or two. The more I got out of the way here and now, the fewer I'd have to worry about later when they found their spines.

"I know we agreed that fight would settle things, but if someone else wants a go, that's fine by me."

I waited for a couple moments, receiving only silent stares.

"Maybe that was just a good match-up for me. None of the rest of you are made of metal, right?"

...

"Hey, you heard your boss. I'm a coward. And a race traitor and a little girl. Don't tell me I've scared you all off, just like that? Where's your pride?"

...

I scowled, getting frustrated.

"You know, maybe you could have saved him if you acted faster. That chance is gone now and it always will be. Every day you're going to have to confront the fact that you could have done something and you didn't even try. Even now you do nothing! How dare you! You call yourself warriors? Violent thugs, more like. But that makes it worse! You fight for pride, for territory, for stuff, for fun, for your fucking brain-dead ideology, but where was that warrior spirit when he needed you?"

I stopped, breathing heavily. As the echoes returned I realized I'd been shouting. Still, no one said anything. I stared around the group, blinking away tears. If anything, they looked even more scared. Not a single one looked ready to fight. And this scum dared call anyone else subhuman? Well, I wasn't going to give them a choice. If they wouldn't fight for revenge, they'd fight for their lives.

"Kill them all. No one gets away."

And we did.

--

"Oh, it didn't work out. They wouldn't take the bait. Fallback plan went off without a hitch, though," I informed Lisa.

"Tea, please?" I asked the henchwoman, sending her scurrying off.

"Fallback plan?" Taylor asked, dodging Lisa's kick.

"You know." I waved vaguely. "Killing them without all the rigmarole. Really, that plan was too complicated to ever work. We shouldn't have bothered." I turned to Lisa. "We'll have to switch back to the old script for the E88 question. It's not as polished as I'd like, given that we thought we wouldn't need it, so..."

Edit: Clarified Tanya's emotional state at the end