There's a point where it tips/there's a point where it breaks/there's a point where it bends/and a point we just can't take anymore


Beta'd by Firstselector, SpytheEngineer, and Kinsfire.

Also, to Aleucard, who said Kaiser's not going to be happy with Gladly on FFN… well, he's got bigger waterfalls to (fail to) leap.


Taylor took one look at the fight between Lung and Purity and turned from it- it was already a foregone conclusion who was going to walk away from that fight even if the Oni hadn't made a showing, with Hookwolf and Stormtiger already dead, and Brockton Bay's resident dragon could fight his own fights.

She rose higher, taking in the city as a whole as she tried to orient herself and find where Clausewitz had hidden himself away, and gazed down upon the chaos that ran rampant in the streets.

Here, Amy and her girlfriend fought a wave of street toughs making trouble too close to the hospital, flashes of a too-hot orb and bloodied claws piercing flesh. There, Vista and her cousin stood outside a school, shoulder to shoulder with those in red and green, glaring down shaven heads in leather jackets. Out near Captain's Hill, Laserdream was moving around like a pinball, bouncing off of trouble spots with a handful of blasts of red light before she turned her attention elsewhere, while her father and brother followed in her wake as best they could, binding Nazis as they went, and it was only the fact that she couldn't see Lady Photon with them that let her notice her jerking open the door to Brandish's house.

She heard as much as saw the Protectorate in their ivory tower, arguing with someone over telepresence about not being allowed to go out for fear of "exacerbating a gang conflict", and Taylor scoffed. The nominal rulers of the city had always benefited more from the Empire's presence than its absence, and the lack of police cars was yet another nail in that coffin. Maybe one or two of the heroes would stand and fight, uphold the values they claimed to stand for, but they weren't anything she could afford to count on, aside from Flechette and Clay, who had already commandeered a vehicle to take them to join the fighting.

"Volur!" shouted Victoria, and she turned just in time for the blonde to barrel into her for a hug. "I saw your door was broken down, and I was worried-"

"I'm fine, Victoria," said Taylor, pressing her lips to the blonde's forehead briefly. "Nothing that I couldn't handle, and I sent Danny off to- to a friend's house."

Victoria looked undeniably, almost unbearably sad, for a moment, before she shook it off. "Alright, so, what's the game plan? I'm assuming you had something in mind for the situation, if you were willing to come up this high." She pulled away from the hug almost reluctantly, but the warmth that filled Taylor's chest at her concern lingered.

"I need a moment, but it's Clausewitz's plan that started all… all this," she said, gesturing at the chaos. "He's had enough skulking about in the shadows, it's time I- we dragged him out into the light of day, what say you?"

Victoria made a show of cracking her knuckles. "Count me in."

"Alright, now if you'll just give me a moment…" Taylor closed her eye, then reached up and flicked the rune on her eye patch under her helmet, setting it ablaze with golden light. She spun, golden light playing over the entire city too dimly for anyone without enhanced senses to see, and a moment later, a nondescript house not too far from Captain's Hill lit up gold, a wisp of black smoke forming briefly into a kaunaz over the house before blowing away.

"There we go," said Taylor, letting the glow fade out. "Shall we?"

"After you." Victoria gestured at the house and, chuckling, Taylor turned towards the house and flew, Victoria in her wake.

It looked fairly standard, as far as houses went, the kind of cookie-cutter two-story that Taylor'd seen in just about every movie made this side of 1975, just like the rest of the neighborhood, and if she hadn't known with absolute certainty that Clausewitz was here, she would have ignored it.

"Knock knock," she said, rapping smartly on the door.

"Really?" asked Victoria. "You said knock knock out loud?"

"Force of habit," she replied.

Victoria gave Taylor a fond look, but before she could reply, the door opened, revealing a mousy brunette with an eye patch of her own concealed by a lank fringe. "Can I… can I help you?"

"No, I don't believe you can, Othala," said Taylor, eye flicking to the rune marked on the woman's eye patch. Part of her wanted to kill the woman for her impertinence, for taking something that didn't belong to her, but something stayed her hand, and a moment later, she saw it.

The woman was full of more compulsions and brainwashing than Taylor cared to shake a stick at, and while she wasn't sure how she knew, she could somehow tell that it was old, stretching back far beyond she ever got her powers.

"Go to sleep," she said, flicking eiwaz at Othala and catching her as she collapsed forwards onto her.

"What the hell?" asked Victoria, blinking with no small amount of confusion.

"Long story, but she's… there's barely a person under there, and I feel bad for her." Taylor sighed. "She's a weapon first, a wife second, and a person a distant third." A thought struck her, and suddenly her anger was rising again. "If this is what Gesellschaft has in mind for me, then I'm inclined to get some salt for the earth they sow in."

"I'll be waiting for it," said Bella, and Taylor did a double take.

"When did you get here?"

"Right after you put Othala to sleep. Should I…" She gestured sharply to the unconscious Empire cape, just the barest hint of a shadowy claw following in her hand's wake. "It would be a mercy, in some ways."

"Maybe if we can't figure out a better way," said Taylor, fury banking somewhat as she looked down at the girl who hadn't known anything resembling a choice of her own. "For now, though, we're letting her live, and here she'd just be in the way." She flicked her fingers and a hole in space opened, the couch inside of the massive tree that Bella had been living in on the other side, and she lowered the slumbering Othala onto it, before summoning a blanket from somewhere else in the building and covering her in it.

When she extricated herself from the portal, Victoria was giving her a fond look, while Bella's face was inscrutable. "Is there something on my face?" Taylor asked.

"Nah, you're just a fuckin' sap," said Bella, brushing past Taylor as she transformed into her hulking bear form. "Now come on, we got us some fucking Nazis to exterminate."

"Can't argue with that," said Taylor, cracking her knuckles with a sound like gunshots as she strode in through the door.

Most of the house was just as cookie-cutter as the exterior, to the point where Taylor would have half expected a film crew to be in one of the rooms- aggressively beige furniture, painfully bland wallpaper, and the only splashes of color in the white marble kitchen was the wood the table and chairs were made out of, inasmuch as brown counted as color when it came to internal design matters.

One room, though, was less orthodox, looking like a cross of a corporate boardroom and a military bunker, all hard edges on genteel elegance. In the center was a massive table, and it took a moment for Taylor to register the man standing at the table, in a full military uniform from two centuries ago, tassels and all, with enough iron crosses dangling from his breast to put an entire mob of Empire foot soldiers to shame and a mask that vaguely resembled a man's scowling visage, if that scowling visage was made of swords twisted and half-melted together.

"I hadn't taken you for the kind of cape to execute an unarmed woman," said Clausewitz, in a maddeningly familiar voice, "let alone with a gun."

"Sometimes, all we can offer is mercy," said Taylor, echoing Bella's earlier sentiment without technically lying. "Now then, Clausewitz…" She paused, tasting the name. "Ah, yes, name yourself after one of the pioneers of realpolitik. I take it you fancy yourself a hard man making hard choices?"

"Indeed," he said, inclining his head to her stiffly. "Not that I would have expected a deviant like yourself to understand the finer intricacies of pragmatism."

Taylor snorted. "I think you can dispense with the pretense. We both know that you know who I am, and have for far longer than I'd prefer." Taylor lifted her helmet off, revealing her face and the anger in her visible eye. "Use my name."

Clausewitz sighed, hands coming up to the sides of his mask. "I suppose it is only fair I return the courtesy, then, Miss Hebert." His hands came down, mask falling with them, and-

The screech of tortured metal had Taylor blinking, and it took a moment longer for her to look away from Victor Gladly's face towards the source of the sound. As it turned out, it was right in her hand, which had sheared through the enchanted metal of her helmet in a moment of unbridled rage. Distantly, she could feel her hand clenched into a fist, and she had to devote a great deal of mental effort towards opening said fist so she could drop the helmet on the table, golden runes playing over it for a moment before it flowed like quicksilver back into its proper shape.

"So that's why you never did anything for me," she said, head feeling as though it was light enough to lift her whole body off the ground. "You just needed a fucking propaganda piece out of the big bad black Ward bullying an innocent white girl."

"A regrettable necessity, yes," said Gladly.

"Regret-" Taylor's teeth clicked shut with the kind of force that most people associated with automobile collisions. "It was not a necessity in any stretch of the imagination, and I don't know whether your wholehearted belief in the idea is more foolish or arrogant."

"I'm sorry you feel that way," said Clausewitz, face perfectly neutral but an ineffably smug aura still surrounding him. "I did what I thought was-"

Clausewitz flinched back, biting off his words as the table splintered under Victoria's fist. "Shut the fuck up about regrettable necessities and greater goods, we all know you don't buy it. It's all about power, you sick fuck. Tell me, did you have my aunt murdered in her home to break the back of New Wave, or was she just a target of opportunity?"

The hesitation was answer enough for Taylor.

"All of this…" Taylor wasn't sure what, exactly, she was feeling- all she knew was that it was bubbling within her, the almost hollow sensation she'd felt when her mother died combined with fury beyond what she could have dreamed of, forever and five months ago. "All of this to glut your own arrogance, satiate your ego."

Taylor could hear him trying to deny it, honeyed words dripping from her ears just as his power tried to reach into her heart and make her agree, and she turned her focus to his passenger and its attempts to influence her mind.

It was hard to look at, resembling less a living organism and more like what she imagined someone smashing a watermelon into a beehive and then dropping the resulting jumbled mess of organic material into a butcher's pile of offal. It was all but dead, slowly draining the fluids that would have once been used internally to drip-feed Gladly the kind of persuasive power that would turn- had turned- mother against daughter, twisted an officer of the law to serve cruel prejudice instead of the duty that they'd carved into their bones.

Deal with the host, partner mine, said the Administrator, scuttling over to the mostly-dead thing and prodding at it with one spindly leg. I will handle the Broadcast Apparatus.

Taylor's focus returned to the world she was born into, seeing Victoria's aura lash out at Gladly with all the power of a wrecking ball, and she grudgingly gave the man credit for only taking a single step backwards under the full force of her power, although part of that could probably be chalked up to him noticing the blades that Styx had surrounded the man with.

There was a moment in which Taylor was tempted to just shove the man backwards onto one of Styx's blades, or summon a spear and strike him down herself, but she mastered the urge, eye flicking up to the slowly-pulsing kaunaz rune over his head, black as night and inevitable as the death that was creeping closer to Gladly. Then, a thought struck her, a punishment that Odin would have inflicted upon him, and she bared her teeth in what only a great fool would call a smile.

"Let him up," said Taylor, raising a hand, and Styx lowered her raised hand, allowing the shadowy blades recede into the corners they'd sprouted from.

"Thank you for your mercy," said Gladly.

"Mercy?" asked Taylor, a cruel smile on her face. "No, not mercy. Consequence."

She snapped her fingers as she manifested the runes that would presage his downfall- a purely theatrical gesture, but an effective one- and strode forwards to loom over the man. Absently, one part of her marveled at the raw power that she could summon up at a moment's notice, especially since a mere two months ago she would have had to spend minutes drawing in natural energy for an effect half as grand.

"Victor Gladly," boomed Taylor, "I hereby strip your power and the slaves it has made from you and bid you flee. Flee, as long as you can. Flee the consequences of your actions, until you can flee no longer and your arrogance catches up with you."

He didn't flee immediately, and Taylor could see the instant he realized that she wasn't bluffing as the sense of self-assured invincibility that he carried around with him, the kind she'd seen out of children on the playground and athletes who were about to encounter their first debilitating injury, dried up like so much blood on concrete.

"Run, run, run, as fast as you can," she singsonged, lips pulling back into a cruel smirk. "It won't help you, but you still can."

He dove out the window, leaving bloodied shards of glass in his wake.

Victoria sighed. "Did you really have to do that? He's going to get away!"

"Patience, my dear," said Taylor, watching Victoria shiver at the way her voice curled around her words. "He will die as ignominiously as he deserves, more so than the king he professes to serve. Besides," she said, turning towards the door to the rest of the house as she picked up her helmet, settling it back in place on her head, "the night isn't over yet, and we're about to have company."


And that's that!

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