Doomfist.
A title and a weapon. When most people referred to Doomfist, it was in reference to one of two people. The first Doomfist, Adhabu Ngumi, who'd been heralded as the Savior of Africa, after fighting against the Omnics during the Crisis.
He was the pinnacle of what it meant to be a hero. Powerful, charismatic, kind-hearted. He would not run away from a battle if it meant innocents would be on the line. He was no Overwatch, not even close. He couldn't be everywhere at once, but he'd done his best.
For a single man, he'd done more than what was expected. A real, modern hero.
It ended when Akinjide Adeyemi murdered him, ripping apart the hero in cold blood. Publicly too. Lena remembered the global mourning that had happened right after that. A statue was even erected in the city of Numbani, a city that the first Doomfist had helped build despite fighting against the Omnics.
The second Doomfist nearly ruined all of that.
A raid on the City of Harmony, using the very gauntlet that had helped in its creation. Hundreds would die before a security team could be deployed. There, the people saw just how powerful the Doomfist could really be.
Punches that could level skyscrapers. Backhands that blew up streets. All power that had been in check by the first Doomfist.
Not anymore.
The second Doomfist went on a rampage, tearing through the continent, a warmonger through and through. Exacerbated by Adeyemi taking control of the mercenary group known as Talon.
In just two years, the whole of Africa was a no-man's land, bar a few strongholds like Numbani.
No where was safe.
That was when Blackwatch came in. Through covert operations, they started to systematically root out Talon from Africa, which they were still keeping up to this day. Time would tell if their efforts would be for naught.
With the subsequent murder of Adeyemi however, that changed things.
Overwatch had no intel on the direction that Akande Ogundimu would push the paramilitary organization. The fact that he had essentially orchestrated a violent coup did not look good though. They needed more data, and the only two persons that had that data were to be in Havana, both ripe for retrieval.
…
Lena set down the data pad with a groan.
"Kids these days, can't bother reading can you?" Archer huffed good-naturedly. Lena rolled her eyes, still trying to process the information overload.
"How the hell can you sit there and read through all that? It's like, five pages of legal!"
"Once you've dealt with the people I have, especially a certain inventor who wanted a twenty page report on the nature of Sumerian sand, you'll understand that this is a godsend."
"I don't need to know the height of a man at the time of his death." Lena stood up and stretched, groaning once more as she felt her back crack.
Archer shrugged, "Might be useful. Identifying a person when they become a ghoul is something to always keep in mind."
Lena paused midway through stretching her arm, rifling through what she remembered of Archer's explanations, "Ghoul? As in…zombies?"
"Yes. Dead Apostles can turn people into what can be colloquially called zombies. Normally, this comes at the cost of the loss of coordination, but I have no idea how cybernetic implants are going to affect that."
"...Yeah, so he was 6'3"."
"I know I've been briefed about this by Commander Morrison, but are you serious about that?"
They turned their heads towards the other occupants in the room. Captain Chase was looking at them with a raised eyebrow. The rest of the strike team, composed of Genji, Angela, Winston, Reinhardt and Ana, were a bit too far away for them to pay attention.
Morrison, Reyes and Lacroix had to leave earlier, having some other preparations to do, they said.
Wordlessly, Archer created a sword in his hand, handing it to the unimpressed captain.
"Hardlight? Anybody with the right tec-"
The sword burst into flames, prompting the captain to let out a yelp of surprise, and for the attention of the others to be drawn to them. Curiously, the fire did not trigger the sprinkler system.
"Ta-da." Archer waved his hands around as he spoke in the most deadpan voice she'd heard for a while, "Magecraft." The sword disappeared soon after.
'Archer! Play nice will you?'
"FIne, fine."
Chase sighed as she shifted her arm back into an arm, having transformed it into a bloody gun in the half second when Lena's attention was on the sword.
"Right, I'll believe you. Let's just go over the plan one last time, alright?" She waved over the rest of the team. Soon enough, they were back sitting at the war table, a map hovering on it.
"Intel tells us that Lacroix is being held at the local Don Rumbotico distillery, which we've determined to be a front for Talon operations. The layout of the distillery is as shown now, but we've no idea if Talon has added any off-the-record basements or whatnot. We'll be infiltrating through this service entrance on the west side, near the roof. We'll use short range EMP grenades to disable the cameras here, here and here, then we'll go from there."
"Response time for lost visuals?" Archer was the one to ask, to Lena's surprise.
Eyebrow raised again, Chase replied, "Long enough. Intercepted emails with the civilian employees have noted that most of their cameras have been experiencing blackouts due to sustained damage from the hurricane season."
"Civilians? How many?"
"About a dozen or so of them, most of them desk jobs. However, since Maximilien is visiting, the civvies have been surreptitiously pulled into an 'out of town team building session'."
"Hostile response is going to be hot the moment they detect us." Archer warned, narrowing his eyes on the map, "We'll be vulnerable from this side, open to any snipers."
"That's where I'll be coming in." Captain Amari cut in there, "I'll be running…overwatch, " She took a moment to chuckle, "On the team. Winston and Reinhardt here will both be on standby in case any of us needs extraction."
"We'll likely have to call them in once we start exfiltrating Lacroix." Chase nodded to the other captain, "Exit zone will have to be the courtyard two blocks away, it's large enough that our Orca should be able to land without disruption."
"Again, civilians? We'll be fighting on the streets if we want to get there."
"Might be unavoidable, though we'll be issuing a general evacuation notice once the operation starts."
Archer hummed, staring down at the map of the Cuban capital, where several points were still highlighted. Sighing, he ran a hand through his hair, "Get in quietly, then get out loud? I don't like this, there's too many variables that can go wrong. Not the least of which is Lacroix herself."
"We'll still try to keep this all quiet, in which case, we just get in, get out, no problems."
"Hm." With a snort, Archer nodded, "Fine, a plan is better than no plan, I suppose. Secondary objective?"
Right. Rescuing Lacroix was their primary objective, but their secondary one was no less important.
"Maximilien will be traveling along this route. Once we finish extracting Lacroix, deployed signal jammers will prevent his escort from finding out what happened. With luck, it'll be quiet enough that we can just grab and bag him when they park the car." Chase changed the map to a parking lot, near where they should have exfiltrated beforehand.
"The distillery doesn't have its own parking lot, thankfully, so they'll have to either park on the sidewalk, or here. We ambush them here and leave as fast as we can."
"In the event that it's loud?" Archer sure was asking a lot of questions. Ones that Lena was starting to be suspicious of.
"We've determined five escape routes. The moment we get Lacroix out of there, we split into four units, each covering one route. Captain Amari will watch over the fifth one herself, and when we determine which one they're taking, we converge and take them down. Any more questions before I go into the specifics?"
…
"Hey, you alright there?" Lena caught up to Archer as he quickly left the war room as soon as the meeting ended. They'd spent a good hour hashing out the details. Patrol routes, vulnerabilities, everything that could be a liability. So far, Lena thought she had a pretty good grasp of the operation, if missing a few non-critical details.
"What, you worried about little old me?" Archer gave a smirk, though Lena could tell his heart wasn't it.
"Something's wrong here."
The sudden thought from the man was a jolt of surprise. The only time Archer did that was when they needed to discuss in privacy. That he was doing that when they were already alone was worrying.
'What is it?'
They continued having some small talk while they made their way to the kitchen. To the outside observer, it would seem as if it was just a normal conversation between them.
"The entire plan. They were too damn vague. And why even give us data packets for Doomfist in the first place if we're going to be in Havana?"
'I mean, you did say that knowing your enemies is a good thing.'
"In a mission that is. Information that isn't relevant may as well be a detriment in any operation." They made it to the kitchens in short order. The cooks didn't so much as blink as Archer motioned for one of them to move over, then gave more orders for the cook he just replaced.
In short working order, Archer was back to being the Overwatch chef.
"I've got an inkling as to why, though I can't be sure."
'Go on…' Lena knew that she should probably be focused on the conversation, if only she wasn't being lured in by the smell of food. It's not her fault that she was still hungry! If anything, it was his fault for making a bloody Sunday roast knowing full well she was starving!
"Heard it on the grapevine," Meaning he broke into Overwatch's secure servers again, because they just couldn't stop him, "Some hacker was making their name known in Mexico, managed to break into some very, very secure documents. I'm talking world government documents, ones that should be classified till the end of time. Then, they disappeared."
'The hacker?'
"Yep. Vanished without a trace. Well, not a trace to anyone who can't read between the lines."
'Archer, please just say it already.' She mentally groaned, 'This is like, the fifth time you've made me ask you in the past week or so.'
"How impatient." Rolling his eyes as he pulled out the meat from the oven, Archer acquiesced, "Overwatch is completely compromised. From the very top, to even the desk jockeys. Quite literally, they can't do anything about it, but reading through some of the correspondence between IT and the leadership, they're aware of it, and are taking steps to at least mitigate it."
'So…what does this have to do with your paranoia? Cause it looks to me that you're the leak they're talking about.'
A plate of food was handed over to Lena as they continued, which she immediately started to devour. It really paid to have Archer as the chef.
"I'd be with you, had I not noticed that the camera's around the base have been following me around this entire time."
'Archer, you're a walking security hazard, of course they're going to watch your every step.'
"Oxton, these cameras are specifically designed to be unable to be manually controlled. They're looped to pan at specific intervals to prevent any blindspots. They've all completely stopped and are now pointed at me specifically."
Hearing that, Lena almost instinctively looked towards the corner, where the camera should be, only for Archer to set down a cup of tea, a warning in his eye.
"Don't look, you'll make it too obvious. But yes, when I said that Overwatch is compromised, I didn't mean just data. I meant that every electronic device within the base is effectively no longer under our control."
…
A/N: I don't think I've mentioned this officially, but chapters for the main stories (that is to say, the non-commissioned ones) are now around one chapter ahead on P-atreon instead of just the chapter for the following week. I can't honestly say when this happened, but it did.
If you like what I do and want to support me, check out my P-atreon at P-atreon•com(slash)Almistyor.
Thanks to my newest patrons: Francis, and Migs.
And a special thanks to: FireRogueWolf25, brutalcrab and Tassimo.