A/N:

Apologies for the (most recent) delay; while I won't go all out and say I've been having a crisis of faith when it comes to this story (as that isn't the case whatsoever), what I've been suffering with is the rapidly approaching realization that if I keep doing what I'm doing (that is, following canon once Aldric hits Beacon), I'll get bored real goddamn fast, because that's a story already been told, and multiple times at that (both by actual canon and any of the dime-a-dozen OC-S/I's on this and other sites), and as such I've been hammering out exactly what I want to happen as I approach the 'in medias res' bit from the prologue, and what I want to happen afterwards, because the whole 'follow canon with minor divergences' shtick will get old real fast.
At least for me.

Fortunately, with the way I've been writing the story, and the numerous metaphorical guns I've been putting on chekhov's wall (if you'll forgive a horribly butchered phrase), as well as the plethora of ideas I'd had going into this, figuring out what I want to do once TPATS hits the point where it abandons any and all pretenses and goes full-blown AU won't be difficult. I've already got ideas ready and rearing to go, although God help canon once we get there. If you've read my Naruto story, you'll have something of an idea of how horrifically I intend to butcher things, to service the story.

Like the Joker said: Introduce a little anarchy, and everything falls to chaos.

All that to say: I had no idea what I was doing when I went into this, but I'm starting to form a picture now.
Although that picture looks like some unholy mixture of RWBY, House of Cards, and Dragonball Z.
(Shrugs) Anyways...

I know this is a little short compared to what came before, but... Well, I'll let it do the talking.

On with the show:

Chapter 21

For the Record

Well, the good news is I'm alive.

The bad news is that I was right (and I'm starting to hate how me being right is becoming increasingly bad!), in that Neo would probably get off on letting me agonize about this whole mess I've made. I went out yesterday night, but no Neo.

Oh, god damn it.

In other news, Ozpin thinks I'm a badass, and Qrow thinks I'm an alien.
Technically, they're both right.

I think both theories have weight, but one thing to consider is that, all else being equal, it was Salem that brought me here to begin with. I can't make any final judgements until I meet up with her - and can we just pause for a moment and note that I basically just said I intend to have coffee with Satan? What the fuck is my life?

Now, I like Qrow's idea about me being an alien, because, strictly speaking, that means it's easier to get home... In a crazy... Cosmic sort of way. My first thought process is to see if I can't use my semblance to build a tesseract and then FO back home, live like a superhero for the rest of my life... But something tells me that it won't nearly be so simple for a myriad of reasons, not the least of which being I'm a third-dimensional being and I may not be able to mentally process 4D space with my sanity intact... It'd be like trying to comprehend Cthulhu. Or trying to imagine a square with no straight lines or right angles.

And... You know: I don't even know how to build one in the first place. If I knew that, that would pretty much solve all of my problems instantaneously.

But I digress.

We're taking off, now. Cinder has grand plans for our new number four.
She heard rumors of some chick in Vacuo whose semblance - drumroll please! - is goddamn telepathy.

Hear that? That's the sound of the entire universe coming down around me, shattering like glass. I'm screwed.

All else being equal, at the very least that means she can read and control minds. So she can just crack open my skull and have me sing my Green Hornet song, and there's nothing I can do. I've been doing some thinking as to the science of how she could do it, and if there are any counters, but there's not really much I can do in the way of pursuing these counters until we land again.

At least I can take a little solace in that I doubt Cinder would let such a potentially existential security risk in on it, if she felt she posed... Well, an existential risk. So I'm praying that it's one of those 'if you know the trick' scenarios, where, if you know the person is invading your mind, you can - provided enough willpower - resist and fight off the effects.
Or maybe it's because Cinder is magic that she thinks she won't be affected, in which case I may not be either.

Or she's so desperate for someone with skills comparable to Emerald's that she's willing to let in a motherfucking telepath that could convince us all we're three year old girls.

'Till next time.

Aldric was starting to notice how much sleep he wasn't getting, as time went on. Ever since he'd clawed Amber's eyes out, and the plethora of issues being piled onto his plate after the fact, he'd begun relying more and more on the physiologic changes to his body thanks to his aura to keep him going, as opposed to keeping up a semi-respectable sleeping schedule. He couldn't remember the last time he'd gotten a peaceful eight hours, or eight hours period. Today he'd gotten three before he'd woken up in a cold sweat after a brief nightmare about Cinder charging into his room, followed swiftly by a cackling Torchwick and a smiling Neo.

Thank god for Coffee... Aldric thought, sighing into a cup of the hot brown liquid. During his brief tenure on Remnant he'd gone from not ever having touched the stuff to downing it habitually. Thank goooooood for coffee... He thought again, taking a sip. His eyes felt heavy and his body felt sluggish, even the bite of the heat of the drink sliding down his throat didn't do much to stave off the lethargy. If it weren't for his aura he knew he'd be approaching the limits of functionality.

Checking with his radar, he saw Cinder sound asleep in her dark room, and Mercury leaned back in the pilot's chair, deep in sleep but also, as Aldric had long since learned, ready and able to wake up the moment a single out-of-place sound graced his ears. If he didn't know them better, he'd have wondered how they dealt with it, but unfortunately he did know them. As rounded as they were becoming through mere fact of interacting with them, Aldric still knew that they were cold, and used to nightmarish tasks. These two could probably tear a man's head off and still sleep like a baby. It was something Aldric actually took comfort in, the fact that he couldn't sleep. It meant he hadn't gone over the edge, yet.

Idly, he pulled out his scroll. He - as did everyone else - had a box of burners in his room, as well as a cautiously growing stash of coins he'd been stealing from Mercury, but this one was his 'main' scroll. He used it to open the CCT and browse Remnant's internet. Nothing much had changed since the last time he'd done so, hardly twenty minutes ago. He'd gotten an email on the scarlet mail account he'd set up for Goud, Beacon had accepted his admission and had provided him information on the when and where of the entrance exams. He'd been slightly worried about how he'd get through the written portion, until he'd realized he could just cheat his way through the entire thing by using his semblance to peek at everyone's papers, and pick the answers he saw marked most often. This conclusion had led him to decide that Goud's story would be that he could still see, but only in a very short range, and only if he focused hard. This would allow him to convince his teachers to not give him his paperwork in braille, and would also be something he could keep to himself from whoever wasn't in the know, so he could play up his whole 'blind man' act. To that effect, he'd started using a white cane made from the Power Glove more often, even going so far as to figure out how to make it collapsible, so he wouldn't be spawning and despawning it constantly, and remove the risk of revealing that the shield and his pistol weren't his only weapons.

He had also, to his great relief, finally been able to take off the bandages that covered his eyes. It didn't really change the fact that he had two empty, still somewhat swollen pits in his eyes, but at least now he was walking around wearing a pair of thick sunglasses instead of two huge square gauze, with ace bandages wrapped around his head. It made him feel less like a walking pile of bruises and scar tissue and a little more like a human being. Unfortunately, whatever joviality he may have felt at reveling at the lack of itchy bandages on his face was quickly wiped away when he sensed that he wouldn't be alone for much longer.

Over in her room, he could sense Cinder's heart rate and breathing pick up, and after a brief twitch of her eyes, they opened up and she began to stir. Aldric had noticed recently that, even with her training on figuring out her half of the Maiden's powers, there was something about her. She'd begun to favor her right side, just a bit more than her left. He wondered if it didn't have something to do with some kind of imbalance, maybe it was the aura equivalent to an immune response. Maybe the Maiden powers were trying to overpower her natural aura like a virus, maybe her aura was trying to isolate and fight off the Maiden powers, like an immune system would fight off an infection. Despite this, though, she was returning to top form pretty quickly, her body was starting to acclimate to the powers; Aldric thought the speed of this adaptation may have something to do with Cinder liking to flash her powers like she did, to intimidate him and Mercury.

Cinder left her room, and upon noticing Aldric's presence, nodded to him. "Early." She grunted, smoothing out the wrinkles in her nightgown.

"The time, or my being awake?" Aldric asked, as she crossed the kitchen and prepared herself a cup of tea.

"Yes."

Aldric shrugged, "couldn't sleep. Trying to figure out what it is I'm missing with the whole Master business." He stifled a yawn behind a sip of his coffee. "How'd you jump it so fast?" He asked, "you no sooner had it than you were shooting that huntsman."

"I'd been trained, Aldric." She responded airily. "In a manner much similar to what you and I intend to do with you, when we return."

Aldric didn't even need to know what he did about Salem to realize there was more here than Cinder was letting on. He wondered if Salem hadn't found some way to temporarily 'spark' some sort of Maiden-esque power in Cinder, to get her used to what it feels like to control it. "And how long did it take you?"

"A year, before I was deemed sufficient enough to access them once I had obtained them." She responded. "But it will likely be just as long, once I gather what I am missing, to begin to master them as I would need to use them with any efficiency." She removed her cup and sat down at the table, letting it cool off as she submerged the teabag in the hot water. "Considering your previous feats, however... I would at least think you could reliably access them at rest before Goud leaves for Beacon."

Aldric nodded to the side, figuring she'd be right. He knew how to crack into it when he was fighting, and turning five seconds to five minutes, to eventually accessing them at rest, was only a matter of time. "Got the email yesterday." A pause, "we'll probably be back in time, but uh, you know." Another nod, "don't blame me if I cut and run when the clock hits twenty four hours."

"I would expect you to." Cinder countered, "Mercury says we should be landing in the morning."

"Fun." Aldric said, dryly. "What was her name? Fume? Ray?"

"Rayne." Cinder responded. "I've been meaning to ask you something."

"Oh?" Aldric said, before another sip.

"I was wondering what you thought of her semblance. How it works."

Aldric frowned, "like, how she can screw with the brain?" He asked, "scientifically?" She nodded, and he leaned back. "Well... You've got me at a loss, there, to be honest. The nature of thought, and all that, we were still working on it." He began. "And you're also asking a guy that looked up this kind of stuff for shits and giggles and stopped looking when it got too technical. The extent of my knowledge is that thought and consciousness is a mixture of the chemicals that flow through the brain and the electrical signals it creates. That's why things like pheromones and electrical brain stimulation work the way they do."

She frowned, "so... Gas or electricity." She said.

"A very simplified way of explaining it, but sure." He said.

"So what can we do about it?" She asked, brushing some of her dark hair out of her face.

"Well... The problem is we don't know exactly how... But..." He hummed, "you said she can read minds, right?" She nodded. "Well, I think that might point in the way of some kind of... Electromagnetic manipulation..." A pause, "she screws with how the neurons fire in our brains." He chuckled, "I confused myself there, trying for the fancy words." He said offhandedly, before taking another sip of his drink.

"What makes you think that?"

"Because as far as I know, there's no real way to turn chemicals to readable, translatable data. We can get a list of them and guess at what their function is, if we put them together, but that's about it. Chemicals by themselves don't tell us anything." He said, "but there is a precedent for turning electrical signals into something humans can understand." A beat, "we call them computers." And she nodded, understanding the joke and the comparison. "So... The question then becomes not, how do we protect ourselves from pheromones - which, itself is an easy answer. A gas mask. - but instead, how do we stop outside electromagnetic signals getting into our brain, and how do we stop our brain's signals from leaking out?"

There were a few seconds of silence before Cinder realized he was baiting her; she shook her head and said. "I do not know, Aldric. This was never my area of study."

"Need to fix that, lady. You Remnants are just a bunch of back-asswards savages, I swear." He chuckled, "a Faraday cage."

"What is a Faraday?"

"Actually it's a person, but that's not what's important. The long and short of it is... You wrap something in some kind of conductive material, like copper, or something similar. Doing that shields equipment from outside electrical influence." A beat, as he finished off his cup. "A common stunt is to make a cage and then blast the shit out of a guy with a tesla coil, or something - uh..." He shook his head, "- basically, a less powerful lightning bolt. The bolt will hit the cage, but won't affect the person inside. So pretty much, if it has something to do with the electromagnetic spectrum, if you stuff yourself in a faraday cage, it won't get in."

"You think that could protect us from a telepath?"

"Well, we're assuming she works on some basis of science, and it's not comic book-style astral projection nonsense." He said, before shaking his hand.
"Considering that most semblances I've found so far at least follow some kind of science, though, I'm willing to make that bet." He explained. "In a perfect world, she wouldn't be able to break through it. But this world is even less perfect than mine, so I'm thinking that, instead of instant 'I say, you do', it would be something closer to... She says something, but there's enough resistance with the cage, that we might be able to fight her off through willpower." A pause, "like... One hundred percent control without the cage, versus fifty percent control with it."

"Those are still concerning odds." She intoned, finishing off her own cup.

"Well you're the one wanting a mind reader. I'm just giving you what I got." He said, shrugging. "Though... I think for once it's a good thing you're not from Earth. Because the next part would make any self-respecting terran, myself included, genuinely consider mind control as a better alternative." A pause, before he nodded. "To prove the point, I honestly am."

Cinder frowned, "why?"

"Do we have any tin foil?"

Aldric felt he had a pretty good way to describe Vacuo: Tattoine condensed into one single continent. There was no formal law or order here, only a huge collection of isolated city-states, where those who had the power, had control. This equated to organized crime families, or less-than-moral Huntsmen, taking the place of official governments, but these were tenuous at best. The moment weakness was sensed, or someone stronger came along, it was only a matter of time before the current bosses lost control of their village. This even applied to the city that had sprung up around Vacuo's Huntsman academy, Shade - the staff and faculty there doubled as the city's bosses. It was as if the Justice League - the comic version - ran the planet because no one could feasibly fight against them; as a matter of fact, it wasn't uncommon at all for retiring Vacuoan Huntsman to go hunt down either their home towns, or some new one, depose the current boss or bosses, and take the place over, and from there it was a toss up for whether or not they were better or worse than the previous leaders, morally speaking.

For the Legion of Doom, this was both a blessing and a curse. It meant that they didn't have to worry about raising any red flags with Vacuo's government, but it also meant that they would have to be careful when they made it to Rayne's village. The word was that she had been top dog there for five years now, and considering what her semblance was, it wasn't terribly difficult to decide why: Anyone who challenged her one-woman rule was suddenly struck with a great and sudden urge to ventilate their brains. Considering that there wasn't even any reports on her having actually fought anyone, that theory held more weight, but it only made Aldric's heart drop out of his chest, because he knew without even having to ask that, if they were indeed able to resist her semblance, they'd likely give her the same tests they had given him once he'd unlocked his semblance.

And that brought him to his current situation: The faraday cages he'd 'built' for the others in the Legion. He was mountainously glad that he was the only one from Earth in the group, else he would have had a much harder time selling everyone on the idea. Though the fact that there weren't any 'tinfoil hat people' on Remnant surprised the hell out of him. Fortunately, they were able to at least escape actually looking like the fools he felt like, as they all had various manners of desert clothing covering them and shielding them from Vacuo's sun, from turbans to shemaghs, so their heads were covered and their 'hats' were out of view. In order to cast away his own notions about the plan, Aldric had forced himself to conclude that, technically, Magneto was a tinfoil hat person; he promptly vowed to return to the Garden and get them to construct a Magneto helmet out of materials that would serve much better as a Faraday Cage. It'd definitely fit with his earlier pipe dream about getting a cowl to match his armor, at the very least.

One good thing came out of it, though: The laughter that burst from Aldric's chest when he got a good look at Cinder's head before she covered it with her headdress was the most genuine, boisterous laughter he'd had since he'd come to Vale. He'd taken pictures, Mercury had demanded he send them to him. Aldric made thirty lien before Cinder threatened to stab him.

Once they left their port city, desert gear and supplies in hand, they began crossing the desert at a brisk pace. Aldric was tempted to say that the desert in Vacuo was the hottest place he'd ever been in, but some of the music festivals back home actually had this place beat, because that heat had had an oppressive humidity to it, whereas this was, appropriately, as dry as a desert, and easier to deal with. Didn't make it any less miserable, but that was where his semblance came in: Some moderate concentration, and Aldric was able to drop the temperature from miserable, to almost tolerable, and the result was that when Cinder and Mercury both soon began to sweat and take swigs from their canteens, he looked like some sort of ghastly monster, impervious to heat. He relished the astonished looks they gave him when they noticed how he was comparatively hardly even sweating. It also doubled as good training, like an endurance test, so he called it a win.

At their pace, it took them two days to reach Dira, the village Rayne had taken over. They took refuge outside of the village, hiding in an abandoned stone house, the idea being that they didn't want to find out if she could read anyone's mind in a certain radius, or if she could only do so to someone she could see and focus on. Aldric drew the short stick when it came to the first watch, and now here he sat, using his radar to check the environment around them, moon high in the sky and the desert night's temperature dropping like a rock.

As much as he would love to be doing anything else, be it opining in his journal, planning for his inevitable encounter with Neo, or simply doing more reading on the specificities of Remnant, he was agonizing about the more imminent problem: Rayne. He saw no good way out of this; because of the unknowns of her abilities, he had to assume the worst, and that meant he had to assume that it was less Zebediah Killgrave, and more Charles Xavier. She could crack open his skull and learn all his secrets if she were determined enough. As such, if his improvised Faraday cages didn't work exactly as he wanted them to, it was inevitable that she would learn about his Green Hornet plan; and because of how Cinder operated, when she inevitably got Rayne's undying loyalty, Rayne would spill the beans, and Aldric's goose would be cooked. Rayne was a walking, talking, living, breathing risk to not just his own health and safety, but also to that of the future: If she got ahold of what he knew about the show, there wouldn't be a snowball's chance in hell that the Justice League would win the war.

That kind of threat was existential, but Aldric had no idea how to fix it. Even if, god willing, the Faraday cages worked, and Cinder and Mercury would adopt always wearing it like he would, just one slip-up, one moment where he was inside Rayne's zone of influence, and the cage was broken or he wasn't wearing it - like, perhaps, all of the time he would be spending at Beacon - she'd have everything. He couldn't try to win her loyalty first, because not only would he not have the time to do so - he was leaving for Beacon in days - but if Cinder was willing to bet on her, Aldric took that as a pretty clear indication that her morals weren't clear enough to let him do his work. If he tried to double-deal right under Cinder's nose, Rayne would take that, shove it in his face, and tell Cinder.

All that, of course, was thoroughly ignoring the fact that Salem would eventually get her hands on what it was that Rayne knew through Aldric, and because Aldric would be dead, Salem - so far as he knew - would be free to crack open another portal to Earth, and not only try to sustain it for unlimited information on the future, but also search for someone with far more backwards morals than Aldric's, which would put Remnant in an even worse position, as then Salem would have an army of Masters, access to the history of things to come, and nothing but time. Rayne was a ticking timebomb, all but literally waiting to explode in his face, and kill everything.

And he had no idea whatsoever as to how to deal with her. Add the other timebomb in his life - the ice cream mute herself - and Aldric was starting to feel like everything he'd worked for these six months was built on a glass foundation. After a while, his head sank into his hands and he groaned, idly contemplating how simpler life would have been if he were still powerless, dealing with Beowolves and Nevermores after a plane crash.

Hell... Aldric thought glibly, Ozpin let slip that they found the crash-site, and took everything they could. Maybe if I hadn't gone to the temple place, and had just sat there and waited a while longer, my problems would have solved themselves. No Green Hornet, no Ozzymandias... He wiped his face, No Jane Wick, Yuno Gasai hybrid trying to get into my pants. That sounds good. He thought.

After changing shifts and sleeping the rest of the night away, the three members of the Legion met briefly before making way for Dira. Cinder ensured that they were all on the same page: Violence, while definitely an option, wasn't their first one. If they could convince Rayne to work with them of her own accord, that was most desirable, but 'another Adam Taurus situation' wasn't out of the question. As they were on a timetable - Aldric's timetable, specifically - they didn't waste time, and hightailed it to Dira. Along the way, Aldric tried to figure out what exactly would happen in the aftermath of killing Rayne.

He was willing to put money on the fact that Cinder wanted Rayne due to her semblance so closely resembling Emerald's. Rayne could alter peoples' perception of reality in a way similar to that of Emerald, and the logical extension was that Rayne would serve as Emerald's replacement when it came time to trick Pyrrha Nikos into killing Penny Polendina. If Aldric killed her, either the plan would have to undergo a drastic change, or someone would have to play sacrificial lamb and get grievously injured, similar to how Mercury pretended to get kneecapped by Yang. Blood would have to fly on camera.

But Aldric cut those thoughts off once buildings came into view in the distance. Dira looked like any desert town Aldric had seen in a movie before: Stone buildings, built low to the ground, and many of them clustered together, with people hanging out in front of, inside, and on top of them. They attracted a few eyes as they entered, but were left alone for the most part; Cinder used Aldric's radar pulse to guide them to a hotel in the center of town, where they blended in so Aldric could have the time he would need to probe the village.

The sounds of the patrons faded away into a white noise as Aldric frowned, furrowing his brow and using his radar like a searchlight, scanning the entire village to locate Rayne. It took a lot less long than he would have thought, though it did give him a headache, taking in an entire village's worth of 'data', so to speak, at once. He found someone matching Rayne's picture in a house a few stories bigger than the others, gated off and surrounded by guards. Just as he could with everything he brushed against with his radar pulse, he felt everything there as if it were an extension of himself, as if they were all nerve endings. He could see and feel the sweating guards, could feel their boots shifting the sand, and could even feel the sand being shifted by the boots.

"Aldric, what's taking so long?" He asked, feeling a brief poke in his shoulder.

Aldric's 'vision' snapped back to the area around him, and his frown became more annoyed than it was focused, as he turned his head to glare at Mercury. "Dude, I have to focus." He said, "I throw my radar pulse out in a three-sixty, and the further out I stretch it, the less vivid the details get." He explained, "I'm basically spotlighting an entire village to eliminate that problem... And you just wrecked my concentration."

Mercury shrugged, "sorry. Thought you could see everything, is all." He took another swig from his water.

Aldric rolled his eyes, and after a moment, threw his vision back to the compound. He probed through the house, and eventually ran across Rayne herself. She was still asleep in her bed, her heart calmly beating and her lungs taking air in and blowing it out. She looked to be around his age, give or take a few years, with sandy hair and brown eyes. It made Aldric feel strange, staring at this woman without her being any the wiser, especially since he knew well and good how easy it would be to concentrate a little less hard and see what decency was hidden by the blankets and bedwear.

If all else fails, I'd make one hell of a stalker. He thought, have that kind of all-knowing, creepy ass quality that'd make the Joker blush.

"I -" And as he began speaking, he had an epiphany. "Uh... Fuck. False alarm." He gave an expectant-looking Cinder a raised eyebrow, "unless the chick we're looking for is visibly pregnant."

"No, Aldric."

"I'm almost through the whole place."

His thoughts on the Joker had been what had sparked the epiphany. As would always happen when the villain entered his thoughts, the legendary performance in the Dark Knight inevitably joined those thoughts, and if it wasn't clear already, Aldric was a creature who existed to quote both the obscure and the not-so-much. One quote specifically came to mind, which sparked the epiphany. This entire time, Aldric had been trying to solve this problem backwards, when it was often said that the best solution was the easiest one, and barring a lucky streak of such godlike perfection that he honestly didn't believe he'd achieve, the best and easiest solution would be to remove the problem - to remove Rayne from the equation.

With extreme prejudice.

Of course, such a thing would sound difficult on paper, but Aldric was suddenly realizing that, with his semblance, it was far easier to just kill the Batman, than it was to try and beat him. To put it another way, what was easier? To locate Batman and drop an enormous missile on him and the surrounding area? Or to try and beat him in a fist fight? Was it easier to stab the hell out of Superman with a dagger of kryptonite, or to shoot him with a regular pistol? Would one rather try to beat the Sonic in a foot race, or kneecap him and be done with it? When the Joker, surrounded by mobsters, had told them 'it's simple, we kill the Batman', Aldric was beginning to realize that he hadn't been bragging, he'd been telling them.

What stunned Aldric was that the clown prince of crime was right. In Aldric's situation, what would be easier? To beat the living hell out of Rayne, and kill her through attrition, through pitched combat? Or to use his semblance - which he'd already long since demonstrated was up to the task - to, perhaps, create a blood clot in a major artery, or even in her heart, and straight up kill her? Or even just physically grab her heart and stop them from beating, or pulling a trick he'd already demonstrated he was capable of, and going full Darth Vader and choking the life out of her, without even touching her? Was it better to run the existential risk of having Rayne run around and inevitably figure out his deepest, darkest secrets? Or to just remove her from the problem entirely?

Worse, was that Aldric realized he could get away with this. He'd already long since established he tried his damnedest to not use his radar to peek under peoples' clothing, so if it came down to Cinder wanting to know how he didn't notice Rayne's heart wasn't beating - he had an in-built defense: He hadn't looked. Then consider that there wasn't even any physical evidence to link him to it in the first place, especially if he got creative and made it look like a 'conventional' murder, so it wouldn't look like she just dropped dead at the ripe old age of... However old she was, but therein lay the problem.

As with every adrenaline rush, a crash inevitably came afterwards. Even if he ignored the fact that she could very well still be under eighteen, and the moral quandaries of actively deciding to kill a kid, she didn't have anything to do with this. Yes, just earlier today he had been operating under the assumption that her morals lined up more with Cinder's than his, but that didn't remove the fact that he didn't know that, and that in the here and now, she was technically innocent. She hadn't done anything wrong, and he was actively considering assassinating her, in her bed, and implicating anyone but him, because it was a more convenient option than letting her live and potentially screw everything up six ways from Sunday. Considering he was still having trouble sleeping 'just' from gouging Amber's eyes out, and felt more than a little bad about selling out Blake to Adam, could he live with straight-up murdering someone he had never met, simply because it was more convenient than to let her live?

And it wasn't an issue of whether or not he could do it, either. It was becoming frighteningly clear to him that his semblance - no matter the specificities of its nature, be it an actual semblance or what was left over from him being a god - was a more effective assassination tool than John Wick with a pencil. He could literally tear the hearts out of everyone in this bar if he really wanted. Whether or not he could actually perform the act wasn't the issue, but rather if he could live with having done it, when it was blatantly obvious and painfully clear that, if he really wanted to, he could have avoided it. Yes, if he killed this woman, effectively all of his problems would be solved. No mind reader, no secrets in jeopardy, no potential for him to die and be replaced by an army of much more sociopathic terrans, no existential risk to life, the universe, and everything. So the 'could' in 'could he do it' was less literal than it was metaphorical. Asking less 'was he capable of it', and more, 'would it be worth it?'

As he struggled with this, however, something else came to mind. An argument he'd made on multiple occasions, - with varying degrees of success, ironically to do with the same man that had sent his thoughts down this dark path. It was an argument any two Batman fans would inevitably have with eachother: Wouldn't it just be easier if Batman killed the Joker? Wouldn't more lives be saved by taking the one, than would be lost by sparing it? And then there was the Punisher argument: Was it better to straight up remove evil from the world, than to give it the chance to commit more because said evil might turn a new leaf? In both scenarios, and for both characters, Aldric's very own argument had always been based on it being better to end one life to save a thousand.

To further muddy matters: Aldric's very presence in this world, his every action here, was predicated on the idea that him working with the Legion and assisting them in ending lives, would eventually lead to more lives being saved when (and if) he would assist in the Legion's downfall. He had literally designed part of his plan around a character who had killed millions of people, to save billions more, and based on that fact, Aldric had told himself he would be fine in being integral to lives being lost, if it meant more lives would be saved. He had told himself he was willing to take on that evil for goodness' sake. But here at the moment of truth, he couldn't put his money where his mouth is? How could he expect himself to go forward with the Breach, or the Battle for Beacon, if he wasn't willing to stain his soul for the greater good? This should be cut and dry: Right here, and right now, he was faced with choosing between one life, and potentially, literally, every other one; and while it could be argued that, based on that logic, the only 'good' solution was to kill himself, not only would that not solve anything, but it would create just as large a risk, when the Legion inevitably found and deciphered his data, meaning that Rayne would be spared, yes, but they would have his knowledge anyways.

So there wasn't a choice, here. Could he do it?

He had to.