What else do you call it when all the big shot nazis get squished?


Beta'd by Firstselector, SpytheEngineer, and Kinsfire.

Content warning: Nazi POV. It should be the last one, since it's terminal, but it is still a Nazi and contains slurs. Fair warning.


As if on cue, a man and a woman walked into view.

On first glance, they appeared relatively normal- the man's sandy hair was slicked back with too much mousse, and he was dressed in a full three-piece suit, if one in a cut that was a couple of decades out of style, complete with a rich purple tie and cufflinks (which, upon closer inspection, had the Iron Cross inscribed on them). The woman was, likewise, dressed up beyond what most people would expect, wearing the kind of floral print dress that Taylor would have expected to be all the rage at rich people dinner parties and covered with enough jewelry to put a disco ball to shame.

Their eyes, though… those were what put paid to the impression of normality.

Neither of their eyes were focused, gazing fixatedly into the distance beyond Taylor and even the window that Gladly had broken in his mad scramble to escape.

The way they moved also sent a shiver running down Taylor's back, despite Odin's experience with the uncanny and eerie, moving like some unholy combination of stop-motion animation and puppets, seeming halfway dragged into position by unseen strings.

"Young lady," said the man, in a voice that was the wrong side of the uncanny valley to be properly reproachful, "didn't your mother teach you to be a more courteous guest than that?"

Taylor mastered her immediate urge to immolate the two, removing the things that looked like people but didn't act like them from reality, in favor of verbal rebuke. "Courtesy is something I only extend to the people who aren't intending to sell me overseas to be broken into a Nazi slave soldier, so forgive me if I'm a tad indecorous when making a house call to… dissuade such a foolish course of action." The flash of actinic golden light from her one intact eye was entirely intended as an intimidating gesture and not an accidental loss of control borne of anger, if anyone were to ask Taylor.

Something about the two of them shifts- not physically, they're just as moving-mannequin as they were before, shifting with jerking, unsteady motions, but as Taylor allowed herself to look beyond the physical, she could see their spirits roiling inside flesh whose control has been stripped from them.

"Hold on, are-" Taylor opened her mouth to speak, but was interrupted by a spectral spear attempting to run her through from behind.

Taylor turned to glower at the echo of a man dressed in a mockup of a knight Templar's armor. "That was rude! Do you always interrupt people when they're talking? No, don't answer that." She flicked the shimmering gray apparition, sending it slamming backwards through a window and onto the man's actual spear where it burst in a bloodred flash, causing the man to stagger-drift backwards from where he was hovering outside the window, one hand flying up from his spear to hold his presumably pained head. "I don't take suggestions from someone who stole his whole gimmick from the last fucking Crusade."

"Such a shame, fraulein," came an electronically altered voice, one where the sheer sliminess bled through the modulation. "My friend Crusader always has the best suggestions."

Taylor turned a glare onto the man who spoke, no less ferocious for being one-eyed, and found herself no less unimpressed by the gray coat and gas mask that Krieg wore than she was the first time. "Ah, goody, the traitor's arrived too. All we need now is the wannabe god or the king whose mandate is far from heavenly, and your arrogance will be in the best company as it comes crashing down."

Despite the gas mask covering his face, Taylor could see Krieg glower. "Child, hold your tongue!"

"Nah, go fuck yourself," drawled Bella, already sinking into the shadows of her ursine form. "You clowns don't get to just come in here all dick swinging and say that we're full of shit for not wanting you to pull us out of our head and cram something else in and taking issue with the guy who was running the plan. You and your fucking sugar daddies in Germany can go fuck yourselves- well. Guzzle shaft can, I don't think you'll get the chance."

Krieg sighed, tutting in fake disappointment. "So uncivilized."

Taylor saw as much as felt both Bella and Victoria hurl themselves into action, but her attention was quickly taken up by Fog expanding beyond the confines of his flesh, corrosive mist already nibbling at the edges of the house, followed shortly by Night slamming into her in a blur of teeth, tentacles, and talons that, while not harmful, was distracting.

Taylor smashed her elbow into Night, sending her through a wall, and turned back to Fog. Again, the urge to destroy the cape rose up in her, and again, she shoved the urge down, some instinct nagging at her that there was more to the situation than met the eye.

Focusing her will, she blew out a mighty breath, and the misty form of Fog was compressed into a corner of the house, still causing damage but out of the way for the moment. That done, she drew on the wisdom of Odin, "seeing" through the layers of deception and hidden circumstances in this situation.

She stilled, lone eye glowing with raw fury, and it took Night slamming into her like a particularly angry chihuahua to draw her back into the physical world.

Taylor turned, feeling the tension in her muscles come up against the motion and be stretched to nothing, and grabbed Night firmly.

The grip was not nearly so fierce as the grasp she had had on Hookwolf less than an hour ago, chiefly because while they were both somewhat formless Nazi Brutes, Hookwolf was fully committed to his path and attacking her father, whereas Night (and Fog, to boot) was in the same boat as Othala, if much worse off.

Taylor gazed into Night's eyes, an uncanny calm present in them even as she tried to rip Taylor's remaining eye out with her nails, and breathed out again.

This time, instead of invoking hagalaz to send a mighty gust out, her breath was marked with gebo, and the gold flecks of the runes quickly painted Night's face in that same color before vanishing in a blue-white flash.

Immediately, the woman's face lost its terrifying blankness. In its place came some unidentifiable mishmash of emotions- fury, disgust, self-loathing, despair, terror, and more that even Taylor's divine judgment couldn't discern from the rest, before gratitude came to the fore. "Thank you," she said, in a voice that sounded much less like the uncanny tones of Fog's voice in favor of a smooth, deep baritone that would have been more along the lines of what she expected from a radio host.

Taylor set Night down gently, watching as they brushed off their dress and then wince at the garment.

"Don't thank me yet," replied Taylor, turning back to Fog with diminished but still fierce fury in her eyes. The expanding cloud of corrosive mist vanished in a flare of mannaz, the too-clean suit and pale face of Fog's human form taking its place.

Before Fog could activate their power again, Taylor hurled a stream of gebo at them as well, covering their skin with the same golden light that had covered Night's.

Like Night, the eerie posture vanished in a flash, and Fog's posture shifted, the broad lines of their form shifting into something far more demure. Also like Night, gratitude emerged triumphant from the scrum of emotions that warred on her face, although its victory was short lived as concern swept over his face a moment later.

Hearing Night wheezing, Taylor turned back, and the world felt… odd. It took her a moment to realize that the air felt thick, like moving through water- not something that she was hindered by, but the incredible strength that had crept up on her was head and shoulders above what Night or Fog could bring to bear, at least without their powers coming into play.

"Ignorant CHILD!" roared Krieg, followed shortly by the sounds of a large body being hurled through a wall. Taylor turned back to him, taking in the shallow gashes covering his coat and the massive, almost bear-shaped hole in the wall behind him as he stomped towards her. "Don't you know what you've ruined?"

"A crime against humanity," said Taylor, nudging Night back behind her as she turned more completely to face the bleeding man as he approached.

"I will ensure I leave enough of you for Gesellschaft to change, but with their healers, I can afford to teach you the error of your ways!" He charged forward with all the grace of a bull charging a matador.

Unfortunately, Taylor was more than a mere matador, and as her hand flashed out and clenched, a snarl on her face, she felt as much as heard Krieg's ribs shatter within his flesh, sending the man stumbling to the ground with a wheeze.

Only Krieg's power kept him upright, one hand clutching at a table and the other at his chest as the gas mask turned his pained wheezing into a hollow, metallic sound.

"Any last words?" asked Taylor, glaring down at the Nazi at her mercy.

He fell backwards, tearing the table's leg loose, and though he winced as his back met the floor, he still raised the length of wood like a spear above his head, other hand leaving his chest to hold it despite the coughing fit he'd gone into.

"So be it." Taylor snapped her fingers, and a small orb of flames punched into his chest. He screamed briefly, then flames erupted from his eyes like wings, shattering the glass of the mask's lenses as the table leg fell from limp fingers.

Taylor looked up out the window to see Victoria harrying a retreating Crusader, driving him towards the waiting form of Bella, surrounded with a veritable forest of blades of shadow pointing towards Crusader, resembling nothing so much as a horde of hungry piranha, and left him to them, turning back to the formerly brainwashed capes behind her.

"Okay, so, how are you feeling?"


Victor Gladly was not enjoying his day.

It had started well, between sending out the various groups of capes to their tasks and the anticipation of both having leverage to negotiate with Gesellschaft and having Lung removed from the city before things started… falling apart.

The first sign of things having gone awry was when the van that Fenja and Menja were taking to fight Lung swerved directly into a telephone pole. The driver died instantly, and while the Biermanns survived the impact, they hadn't managed to activate their power in time to protect them from being thrown around, so he'd had to lean on some sympathetic EMTs to retrieve the two of them and divert them to a safe house, where Victor could take Othala after the rest of the diversion operations closed out.

The failure of Krieg and Crusader to hunt down Panacea now that she was out from the protection of New Wave was a lesser failure, and they had almost returned to his house when Taylor Hebert had beaten them there.

Taylor Hebert, now that was a real waste of time. Months of manipulations, over a year of repurposed scheming, all down the drain, because one child gained powers beyond what even his vast networks of agents, sympathizers, and informants, and Victor's powers of observations, could ferret out.

It almost made sense, that Volur would be able to tear through Hookwolf and Cricket- she'd been growing stronger far faster than any normal cape, if the line from "skirmishing with the small fry" to "shrugging off Endbringer attacks" was any indication, so even if the waste rankled, he understood on a purely rational level how his plotting had all fallen apart.

It didn't make the sight of Kaiser being hurled through Purity by Lung any better, though.

No, the fall of the cause he had devoted his life to in the wake of having to buy himself and his brother powers was something that would leave ash in anyone's mouth, let alone if they'd caused it themselves, however indirectly and inadvertently it was. The loss of his power, that extra muscle in the back of his head, paled in the face of that.

Still, he and his brother were still alive, and while they hadn't managed to grab Othala on their way out, she was always a low priority for protection when captured, and the Herren safe house they were speeding towards would have plenty of resources and contacts to leverage Victor's power to free her, no matter what gypsy curse that dy-

The car CRUNCHed to an abrupt halt with a brief buzz grating against his ears, the whump of the air bags being the only thing that prevented him from flying out through the windshield.

Unfortunately, he could feel the splattering of unnervingly hot liquid against the left side of his body, and when he looked over to see his brother, he was already prepared to find a corpse there. Indeed, he saw the steering wheel having punched through the breastplate he wore into his chest, the jagged edges of his shattered ribs protruding from the sides of his torso.

That… shouldn't have happened.

Say what you will about him and his brother being cowards fighting from the back lines, but their costumes were as armored as they could afford, and with Medhall's backing that was a rather high bar. It shouldn't have just folded in the face of a mere air bag failure, so therefore…

His train of thought was preempted by the radioactive green glow that abruptly began radiating from every inch of his body.

He was abruptly jerked up, and then forwards, as if someone was pulling him out of the car by a fish hook embedded behind his sternum, and the windshield broke around him like so much rice paper. His eyes flickered around him, searching for the cape who had decided to kill his brother, before the force dangling him aloft jerked him around, and he felt the blood drain from his face as he recognized the two capes glaring down at him like angry gods.

"So," said Eidolon, glowing with the same actinic green light that radiated from his own body, "you're the one who Rebecca asked us to end. Ordinarily, we'd make sure to squeeze every piece of information we can get out of you, but given how dangerous your power is…"

Gladly opened his mouth- to object, to threaten, to bluster, to something- but before he could do more than register the lack of a mask that he'd forgotten on his table, Legend raised one fist and a beam of blue-white light punched through his chest like day-old Taco Bell through one of the Empire's foot soldiers' colons.

Victor Gladly did not remain alive long enough to hear Eidolon grumbling about the amount of clean up they would have to do now that they knew about the need, but if he had, he would have taken exception to the reduction of his magnum opus to a mess in need of cleaning.


And that's that!

I'm not sure if it's clear where I'm drawing inspiration from with regards to the Krieg death part, so I'll just say that it's from the Tartakovsky Clone Wars show (where Mace Windu crushed Grievous' rib cage) and the final death of Grievous on Utapau.

Nazi death toll: 9 confirmed (not including Stormtiger)

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