48

Chapter Text

The room was silent.

He needed that bit of peace and quiet, though he doubted it would last more than five minutes.

A decent break time, considering recent events.

Being the PRT Director of a city the size of Boston was exhausting without Tagg's asinine games.

To say relations had soured on their end, irreparably perhaps, was not an understatement.

Yes, the Brockton squads were following orders, and Tagg's orders were to not inform their Bostonite allies of the villains' claim to truce due to it being 'obviously false and a disrespect to The Truce' which softened the blow of betrayal significantly, but it did little to soften the blow of almost half of their capes being sent back to them crippled in an operation that was supposed to bring the demise of the villain scene in Brockton without a single doubt in mind nor horizon. 

The first couple hours had been the worst for him.

He was a practical man, but he was no stiff, unbending cynic or sociopath, like many other Directors. He worried, and he worried a lot more when communication lines seemed to snap apart in the course of a couple minutes, and getting a reply or explanation from anyone on the ground took literal hours.

The news had given him more information on what was happening than the ENE branch, ironically enough, and suffice to say, what the news channels had to share shook him to the core, America alongside it.

Tagg was very publicly executed, used as a message, one beyond the obvious written on his forehead, because everyone knew that lance, Dauntless's lance, and there was an obvious symbolism in using that symbol of hope and might to skewer a regional Director's head straight to concrete, because that meant he took the Arclance from him as well. All the subtext just combined to say 'you did this to yourselves, I simply delivered the message, and I am above you'.

A couple hours later, during a hurried autopsy by the PRT headquarters, far away from The Rig itself, he got a call that chilled him to the bone.

Watch where you tread, for you too may trip.

Tagg's body had been tossed out of the side of the oil rig before his head was delivered to the boardwalk. The message about tripping was beyond clear.

Stay out of our affairs or we will kill you too.

It was also a shockingly clear look at how Nexus viewed Brockton, the wording reminiscent of a monarch, warning a trespasser stomping about their vineyards. 

Sure, Costa Brown could assure him all she wanted that they were looking into this and that they were heavily considering a Triumvirate raid to get the city out of the moat it had fallen into, but he was hardly heartened by the news when a parahuman perhaps at least close to their level of power had dismantled an entire branch of the PRT in less than an hour.

He just didn't have enough faith in the PRT nor Costa Brown, to protect him and his city. They saw things as chess pieces, lives and territories as numbers and shapes on a map, an endless game of chess and monopoly.

He was far disinclined to leave his own life, and the life of many others under him, to incompetent, and frankly, moronic or immoral hands. He cared too much about this city and those below him to leave things up to chance.

He did things right when he could, and if he had to risk a demotion to keep Nexus away and his city standing, he'd do it.

The decision hadn't come at once, like a lightbulb. It was careful consideration and a deep understanding of his position on the chess board.

The other players drove him to this, truthfully.

Blasto seemed to have joined forces with Accord in the chaos, likely panicking for one reason or another that the PRT would drop the mask and just go kill him for being a biotinker, another small butterfly of that blasted incident.

Trust in the PRT's word had plummeted in the cape world, outside the eyes of lenses and in the dark streets. If Executioner hadn't done what he'd done, it would have shattered, perhaps irreparably, which was a discomforting thought on all sides.

Just when he thought he had enough problems while jumping at every noise and paranoid that some golden man armed with righteous fury would come rip his heart out, The Teeth began rampaging. They were just exploiting the publication of Boston's inactive capes to turn the lower bits of the city into a genuine warzone barely twelve hours after the news had broken, while the public reason they were giving was that the PRT had assassinated Spree.

They did no such thing! They didn't even know where to find the bastard! 

Whether it was an excuse or not, it didn't matter. The Teeth certainly exploded with the kind of fury such an accusation carried, and knew that they could rampage all they wanted and Armstrong could do nothing about it but turtle up the better parts of the city where things were easier to hold.

Two days. Twenty three police officers dead, another two dozen injured. Twenty civillians raped, thirty five killed or dismembered, oftentimes both and in that order. Twenty buildings torched to the ground.

Almost two days of constant gunfire and explosions. The only reason the outer city wasn't on the news for being a scene reminiscent of World War Two was because Accord had stepped up to contain the insanity, somewhat, ignoring the heroes to contain the Teeth where Armstrong couldn't.

It was an unspoken truce between them that helped mend the doubts between heroes and villains in Boston, that one another's word still carried weight, but it wasn't enough to bring the city back under control.

But it was endlessly curious that Accord was the one to put trust in Armstrong not to attack him while containing the problems, showing him his back first, especially after what happened in Brockton.

He couldn't understand it, but it made him consider things differently. Switch the perspective a little, because Boston's situation was washed out under the absolute flood of news hyper-focusing on Brockton Bay at the moment, which led to less interest in his requests for resources and assistance because the news coverage was horribly sparse, but… his city was cracking at the foundations, he could see it.

Then another call came, and he felt the walls slowly close in around him.

The Elite were sniffing around Blasto's territory. A probe, intelligence gathering, the likes.

Another piece to the puzzle as to why he suddenly ran to join with Accord. Having the Elite sniffing around your part of the woods meant you'd likely be getting a visit from Bastard Son sooner than later, to clear out the 'competition'. 

It shouldn't be a surprise to him as a Regional Director with all the information in the world at his fingertips, but it was.

The Elite's desires to expand upwards to cover the entire coastline were no real secret anymore, and this was a seemingly perfect time to make such an expansion. They'd been assuming, quite correctly, that the Elite would stray clear of the city due to The Teeth, or The Butcher more specifically, but something about his department losing almost half their heroes seemed to give them the courage needed to take the chance.

Naturally, he barely slept, calling everyone he knew and everyone he didn't, but any requests for aid were met with nothing but hesitance, for the most part, because despite him and his heroes not knowing that they were involved in breaking the Truce, it was hard to convince anyone else of that, and even harder to convince them that no, Nexus wasn't going to kill whoever they sent for getting too close to their city, they'd have come for his head already if that was the case.

So, with a little over half the manpower and thrice the chaos, unable to collect the debt of assistance he had wished to rack up with Tagg for helping him in this operation, he looked to other cape-ridden cities, and how they had gotten out of such situations.

There were hardly any. The only examples were places like Seattle, but they weren't good examples. The city was practically run by The Elite, and the PRT branch there had maintained an unspoken truce to not fuck with eachother too much as long as things weren't chaotic. It was a delicate balance of half and half, the PRT controlling one half of the city and The Elite the other half, nipping at each other's heels to push and pull as their interests suited them. 

It was almost exactly the same kind of unspoken truce he had with Accord before this mess exploded in his front yard, but dirtier, messier, and frankly, inferior.

And considering recent events… maybe he could expand that ' almost' to a simple ' exactly'. 

It hurt to consider, it really did, but Accord had extended a hand in trust, showing his back to Armstrong to help the city, despite what happened in Brockton.

Additionally, The Elite taking over was never a bloodless and lossless affair. He was no economist, but the devastation that would happen from them getting a foothold on his city might make entire neighbourhoods destitute and broken just for being in the way, unable to ever recover, sinking into a cycle of poverty and drugs that the Elite would only profit off of while people's lives were ruined. 

It was a familiar pattern. It was what happened to Brockton , back when he was a young man, and that city hadn't recovered one bit, decades later.

Some places got ruined and just never recovered, the list and examples were endless, and he didn't want that for even a single neighbourhood in his city.

Accord didn't create such destitution. If anything, where the man settled, things seemed to miraculously start improving like a ticking clock, one scheduled click at a time.

Accord taking over, in a role reminiscent of the Elite, but without any of that initial bloodshed, that chaos, that unfamiliarity and unpredictability of yet another Elite cell with its own rules and leaders… it grated on him, but it was acceptable, because Accord was a cold criminal, but at least he ran things like a gentleman, and nobody ever seemed to suffer in his territory. The man seemed to want his own kingdom to rule as a utopia, he wasn't some petty druglord like The Elite, hunting after the scent of money and power for no purpose.

So, he took one of his underground heroes, and gave him a message, before sending him off to the Ambassadors. 

Four hours later, the hero returned, face conflicted, and gave him a stack of papers, as well as a burner phone.

The phone only had a single number in it, obviously Accord's, and the papers were… a formal contract by Accord, outlining their roles in this uneasy alliance, and leaving appropriate grey area for future negotiations and expansions.

Accord had planned for this. Or at least knew it was coming.

Obviously.

He almost wanted to laugh if his chest didn't hurt so much.

A dangerous thing, a paper trail, but he was in too deep to back out now.

He put his terms down on paper, an hour of careful deliberation, pushed some things back, some things were adjusted to keep things more even, and finally, he called the phone number.

It was exhausting, talking to a man like Accord.

It constantly made alarm bells ring off in the back of his head that he was making a mistake, but his city was a pile of dominoes surrounded by unruly, crazed children swinging machetes around, and he couldn't take the risk of Boston slowly turning into what Brockton Bay had turned into, a borderline lawless warzone, in a slow, endless downwards spiral.

The terms ended up being… good. Good enough.

Accord was not the kind to peddle drugs or flood the streets with violent hooligans out to hurt people and steal from them. That was low hanging fruit, even according to himself.

Accord focused on financial crimes, investment schemes, fraud, legitimate businesses, and generally just higher-paying crime. And though those weren't good, they didn't hurt people in his city like lower forms of crime did.

While he was no communist, a multibillion dollar corporation getting shafted and scammed by a villain through convoluted plots hardly made him weep.

It reinforced his decision, at least. The Ambassadors were much preferred to The Elite, assuming they could keep them out successfully. And any other influences, like Nexus, though he doubted Accord could genuinely hold them back if recent events were an indicator.

The 'contract' terms did say that Accord would keep all unaffiliated groups out of Boston, and though Armstrong heavily disliked the fact he was trusting a villain, he had few better options.

Still, it was a good enough shield to buy them time.

Telling this to his team leaders was difficult enough, but after a lot of shouting and hours of explaining his thought process, all of them turned around to the idea, and reluctantly accepted that they didn't have any other way out at the moment.

He didn't want to know how the team members would take it, but thankfully he wouldn't be the one to break the news to them, it would be the team leaders.

He also wanted to clarify to Nexus that neither he nor did any of his capes know this meeting was under Truce, not until Executioner was already there and telling them about it, but he had no bridge of communication.

Nobody did. Nobody could find them. It was infuriating.

Damn it, Tagg. Couldn't just quietly get assassinated, no, he had to take down a fifth of the entire coastline with him and make it into international news.

If he could get in contact with Nexus and explain, he'd be more than willing to beg them to heal his heroes again. None of them deserved this, and judging by the mission records, Executioner had no idea, and neither did his boss, Summoner.

But then questions would arise, and it would get out that he begged a villain to undo the damage he did, and he would probably lose his position.

Nothing grated on the PRT more than appearing weak. They would fire him on the spot.

Which was why he fully expected the retribution for Tagg's death to involve all three of the Triumvirate. The only thing keeping them back seemed to be that if they hit back right now, it would seem like they really didn't give a shit about The Truce, and that would be more catastrophic than any public PR hit they could get from inaction.

The PRT seemed to want to escalate as a show of force to get the public's trust back, but lost faith by the public was less harmful than the next Endbringer fight having a third of its already low usual participation.

So he fully expected to lose his position if he did that and didn't have any answers ready.

Unfortunately, healing capes were incredibly rare. There had been two in the entirety of the US, and one of them could only accelerate the body's time, or so it seemed to work, which worked wonders to speed up natural recovery into mere seconds, but would do nothing to heal the crippling injuries suffered by everyone in that fight.

So he didn't have a good choice here. Either lose his position and risk the next Director throwing the city off a cliff, or let a half dozen heroes wait until the next Endbringer fight to be healed.

If Nexus kept its word, and if Triumph had heard Executioner right…

His five minutes of quiet over, he sighed, and shook his mouse to wake up the monitors, the haphazard desk and its messy surface being lit by graphs and unending report feeds.

A few seconds later, he cursed, rubbing at his forehead.

The Teeth were rampaging through the outer city factories, raiding supplies like gas tanks and oil barrels.

Accord's men were already there, thankfully, and two of Armstrong's mere eight current capes were on the way there, so it would hopefully end without the teeth having tons of flammable fluids in their trucks.

God, just eight capes for a city with six hundred and fifty thousand people. How things were still standing four days later, he could only attribute to Accord's swift actions, and the fact quietly enraged him.

At least Boston would survive… and Accord could be a nice buffer between Nexus and him, a shield of sorts, until he could clear up the misunderstanding somehow and not have to sleep in the PRT HQ, monitored twenty four seven.

This was the worst week of his career, bar none, but he hoped time would vindicate his decision to back up Accord.

Two days to recover.

Taylor could work with that.

Pain at least let her know that her soul was doing its absolute best to expand enough to fit her needs. In a way, so long as she was in pain, she was making progress.

She was also aware that those thoughts were just her trying to cope with what amounted to literal torture, feeling like someone was trying to trepan through her skull with every pulse of her heart.

But she could work with that.

Or rather, she had to.

Too many things needed her attention.

Faultline and her two packages, one of them unfathomably invaluable, were parked outside the city in a small abandoned security outpost by the train company that used to own the Trainyards, and she advised them to stay there for a bit. Until she was done with Heartbreaker, at least. 

Getting into the city when things were like this, was incredibly unwise, especially with such unreasonably valuable cargo.

Her capes had to be driven into their current, new base of operations, which was a storage company front, and taken up to her shockingly plain office, so she could cast Heal on them and get them going, ready to fight.

Imp had given her Squealer's blood, in a neat syringe she'd snagged off their glovebox no less, but said that the car had been slamming and bouncing around so much in the cabin that she lost the one holding Skidmark's, which was good enough for her.

Without Aisha's power in the way, her contribution became obvious in hindsight. She had been a massive pain to the heroes and the PRT agents both, during the raid.

The other girls helped too, a lot, but Imp was, as usual, exceptionary.

The girls got fifty grand each, with Imp getting a bonus of fifty more, a pile of papers to give her a new civilian identity, and a highrise apartment entirely owned by her, the legal documents sorted under a fake identity.

Yes, it ate a tiny hole in her pocket, but they deserved it, and Imp was so unfathomably fucking useful that she absolutely needed the girl's loyalty.

She knew she had it when the girl had given her this wide-eyed look of excitement, whispering cusswords under her breath as she went through the pictures of her new luxurious apartment, which came with maid services.

Of course, ironically enough, Kaiser lived just above her in the best building in town, but it hardly mattered. They knew not to kill each other.

After drinking Squealer's absolutely disgusting blood, she had to sort out the Travelers.

They still had Spree in their van, but they were running out of sedatives, so she had to get Lisa to guide them towards a good location to bunk in, discreetly .

She Mastered Spree that same night, without any further incident nor something of note to say about the man. He was just a deranged psycho with brain damage from excessive drugs. A walking animal, essentially.

But he was hers now, and Coil quickly got to work to catch him up on everything he had to know. 

To her immense excitement, Spree's clones stacked her permanent effects when killed, and had a miniscule amount of lifeforce each. The lifeforce was negligible, but she could stack the Alacrity and Bloodline keystones infinitely, letting her attack faster and faster and heal more and more from hurting people. Theoretically, of course.

She wondered how many millions of his clones she'd have to kill for a punch to break the sound barrier. 

To put it shortly, she would milk that free source of power endlessly, once she had the time to.

Next day, after a night of sweating and rolling in place and completely unable to sleep from the horrid migraine, only soothed by Lisa's clumsy, exhausted attempts to make her relax by playing with her hair or rubbing her back as she whimpered into a pillow, she was up and running again, to Lisa's glaringly obvious displeasure.

She had to be. She didn't have to put the summon core to use yet, she couldn't, but she had to keep updated.

Unfortunately, Lisa strong-armed her into doing nothing but updating herself, taking over the entire minutiae of running Nexus with Coil reluctantly by her side.

Inwardly, she appreciated it a lot.

Accord had… so fucking much to report, it made her head spin.

He got Blasto on his side, which was huge, in her opinion. Biotinkers were rare, alive ones even rarer, and one so close was a blessing. She had him marked as a must-have for later, but she had him now, without doing anything directly.

The joy of having very competent minions…

The Biotinker apparently saw The Elite sniffing around his territory, immediately following the PRT breaking the truce, and got so freaked out he just drove six entire trucks in front of Accord's building, loaded with everything he had, and demanded to work with him.

Accord managed to wrangle him into working for him, but it was obvious he despised the Biotinker, especially considering his slightly deranged, nonsensical attitude, and general chaotic nature.

So, when she had free time, she had to go and Master Blasto too.

That wasn't even the start of it.

He got Armstrong to basically anoint him as a cautionary ally, giving him the role The Elite held in Seattle pretty much, so long as he kept things neat, clean, quiet, and defended from unaffiliated groups.

Nexus was not unaffiliated with Accord.

She just had to defend Boston from The Elite, when and if they came, and wipe out the Teeth, and Boston was hers too.

Not easy or simple by any means, but significantly easier than she could have even dreamed of.

By the simple dominoes of the PRT's and her own actions, amplified by Accord's power and intellect.

Accord also confirmed that his power worked perfectly fine. He was completely and utterly unaffected by her accidental anti-thinker effect.

She would have to have very frequent, close communication with him then, because she did a lot of things.

Coil got saddled with communication responsibility, since he knew the man from before.

And finally, the Teeth were rampaging, half because of her and the Travelers stealing Spree for her, and half because they just could.

She considered sending help, but all of her capes were known in the gangs. Ironically enough, she didn't have any Nexus capes to send over aside from The Travellers and if she sent an Empire cape to help Accord, that would be a link she didn't want to have.

So they'd just have to deal with that. She had bigger fish to fry.

Namely, Heartbreaker.

She had a good way to do it without too much direct involvement, but while she trusted herself and her thousands of years of experience in pretty much everything, despite her stumbles and hiccups, there was no reason not to shoot a quick request to Accord, to see if he had a better plan.

He did. His plan was infinitely better than hers.

But it was… not something she wanted to accept.

The plan wasn't complicated, it was just not what she had wanted to do. It forced her into a position where she had to stop and just be honest with herself.

It was logical to Master Heartbreaker, it really was. Accord's plan was nothing but logical to the nth degree, endlessly practical, and frankly, tantalizing.

She had far too many people under her command, and using her own power to Master every single one of them would take years and take up time and energy far, far better spent on other things.

For example, the numbers? They were ridiculous.

The Empire had eight thousand members. The ABB had over two thousand. The Merchants were estimated to have around two thousand themselves.

She could never possibly Master all of them, it was just not worth it.

But all Heartbreaker had to do to make them all endlessly loyal to Nexus and its mission statement would be roughly ten seconds each, and line of sight.

And that was without considering how he could just go undercover and master anyone she could ever possibly want, without anyone being the wiser.

It was-

It drove her nuts.

She'd had focused so much on killing him because she hated how if she was just a worse person, if she was just more of a degenerate, if her reasons were more morally bankrupt, she and he were comparably the same.

That was a lot of ifs, but it still scraped at her mind like a fork against a plate. She despised him.

And Accord had done a painfully good job of convincing her to rethink her intentions for the man.

Even if she killed him, it wouldn't undo the damage he had done. She couldn't afford to chase every lead and sleeper agent he'd planted and try to individually unfuck their minds, there was no time for that. Best she could do was make a list for the PRT to chase and contain before any of them learned that Heartbreaker was dead and did something drastic. But that wouldn't fix anything, just stop things from getting worse, which was acceptable, but she had the chance to do more here.

If she Mastered him… she could change his features, and send him on a merry crusade to fix the people he'd messed up, before telling him to come back to her and Master the endless sea of criminals and murderers under her.

It made too much sense. It was too practical. It was too… anticlimactic, for all the things the bastard had done, and she couldn't dismiss that it was simply the better option.

Because at the end of the day, Accord was also right about how Heartbreaker was… a relative nobody. People talked about him, but he wasn't scary the way The Nine or Sleeper were. 

Nobody on the lower half of the country had even heard of him, probably, nevermind overseas. The most people knew about him was that he was some Master serial rapist. Killing him wouldn't make a huge difference, it wouldn't give people hope. 

So, with grit teeth and a childish desire to say fuck reality and practicality and just kill him, she agreed to Accord's plan.

It was simply better. She was glad she took him, even if it was currently driving her up a wall.

He was sending his finest Ambassador for the job, namely, Citrine, the woman in gold that she'd Mastered in his office, along with an explanation of what her powers did.

Citrine's power allowed her to "attune areas to particular functions", altering specific properties within a relatively small area.

She could interfere with gravity, temperature variation, friction, light intensity, and the progression of time, among others. She could use her power to make everything within her ability's range effectively waterproof as an example. She claimed that there were "more possibilities than she could count, many so minor you wouldn't notice", and Accord seemed to fully believe her.

It was by far one of the most interesting powers she'd heard of, but beyond that, it was a perfect counter weapon for Heartbreaker.

Citrine could, most importantly, "find the right attunement, as though she were searching a radio station" to neutralise a given parahuman's abilities. Furthermore, she could specifically cancel out certain types of powers , or cause powers to go out of control. This latter effect never took more than twenty or thirty seconds, but the first didn't.

As long as the grouping was tight enough, and Citrine was protected, she was an utterly invaluable Trump that could render the entirety of Heartbreaker's cult useless.

She risked striking the wrong attunement and accidentally killing her target, of course, but the woman was a professional. She said she hadn't slipped up yet, and Taylor took her word for it. 

Some powers were too subtle to find out in time before she was retaliated against, or had the subject step out of her range, which was the role of the rest of her capes, all twenty of them, Assault included.

He was only included on the basis he worked with her men to surround and contain the group, not directly engaging. He was too personally invested to trust with something more important in this specific scenario.

So, she just had to wait for Citrine to finish her leisurely drive to Brockton.

One more day, and she'd be done with that scumbag.

… No, wait, she wouldn't. She had to Master him, not kill him.

God fucking damn it.

She wanted to punch Accord in the face for being so damn good at what she got him for, but that was nonsensical, like most emotions.

So she swallowed her pride and fury, and gave the go-ahead.

Next on the list was Greg.

They were having trouble finding him.

Officially, he was in a mid-level security juvenile prison for parahumans. The same one Sophia had been sent to, in fact, since it was the nearest.

But, the bribed guards they had there told them that he was only there on paper, "on exception", with some kind of government paper indicating he was taking 'rehabilitation hours' with the PRT.

That was where the paper trail ended. And she didn't have his blood. And cameras and general electronics in his cell were forbidden because he was a Tinker, so there was nothing they could hack through and check manually.

She could just teleport to him, honestly, but doing that then bringing him back out would take tremendous energy.

It would take a bit more time to figure out where the hell they'd put him, but judging by Armsmaster's strange focus on the kid, she could guess that he was likely with him.

Question was, was he with him on The Rig, or the PRT HQ? He had labs in both places…

It would have to wait.

Another small note of concern was the arrivals of foreign bounty hunters, sniffing around the information brokers of her gangs.

They were looking for Heartstopper , since he was apparently heading for the US coastline before he vanished into thin air, but they were most certainly not here for Heartbreaker, since he didn't even have a kill order. Having at least two or three bounty hunting rogues sneaking around her streets didn't sit well with her, but they were- for now- harmless, and cautious. 

The admittedly rather simplistic plan for taking down Heartbreaker seemed pointed toward success, but her paranoia wouldn't settle.

The problem was distance. What if she teleported to Battery, clicked the transmitter, and realized that she was hundreds of miles away from The Bay itself? It would take her capes ages to rush over, and from there, it could turn into a running battle with too many civilians in the crossfire.

She needed hyper-mobile capes, like Oni Lee who could teleport a mile out with every blink of his eyes, or Purity, who could probably race a fighter jet and give it a run for its money.

So, for the first time in a while, she went to visit Noelle, Kayden and Oni Lee in the back seat, their driver smoothly taking them to her temporary holding facility.

The car followed the seaside street wrapping around the bay, from the Trainyards all the way to the Boardwalk, and eventually ducked into a tiny alley to the left, overgrown reeds and patchy asphalt surrounding them as the car slowed, coming to a stop in front of two giant metal doors. 

Then they waited, fully aware that at least fifty guns were pointed right at them through the darkened windows.

A minute later, the door slid open on meticulously oiled gears and tracks, revealing a pitch black expanse.

The car drove in quickly, and the door immediately rushed to close behind them as a small row of standing stick lights flicked on, suspended over the floor by metal stands, barely enough to light up a few feet across and show the outline of rows of vehicles.

They got out, and Kayden took the time to look up and around, curious as could be, the only sound in the warehouse being that of muffled footsteps and the shuffle of cloth.

Lenses above glinted in the dozens, barely visible by the reflections, and sharp jagged shapes shifted, in the rafters, in the walkways, in custom tracks of metal bolted to the walls, in the halls and through the windows.

"This is rather excessive, isn't it? Are you guarding a nuclear bomb in here?" Kayden scoffed quietly, the sound still piercing in the silence.

She led, their driver waiting in the car as the two followed her.

She adjusted the ear mufflers, ignoring her twitching brow, unsure of what was causing it. Hopefully not brain damage again.

"Worse." She simply replied, walking down a long, thick hallway lined by giant metal capsules.

A gigantic floor hatch sat at the end, a steel plate secured to the floor with enormous latches and pulleys, guarded by an entire array of motion sensors, radio sensors, and a dozen other manner of things designed to block signals and detect invisible motions, just in case, all mounted to the wall behind it like an open circuit board.

Tinkertech rifles, softly glowing in the formless darkness above, shifted, barely visible and inwardly, she was pleased.

They showed more than appropriate paranoia. She had expected them to take guard duty less seriously.

Guarding what looked like a baby Endbringer probably made them realize how important this was, she could guess.

She came to a stop in front of the hatch, and waited for the line of communication to catch up.

Ten seconds later, hydraulics hummed from below, two rods lifting the latch, revealing a simple downwards stairway, straight and just thick enough for five people to walk down by side.

She led, motion detectors making sparse few lights flick on as they went.

The smell was about as horrid as the first time, and Kayden seemed to notice, subtly trying to gag behind her.

"Do you keep corpses in here?" Kayden croaked out, forced, green faced, features pinched, trying to pinch her nose without making it too obvious. 

She glanced away from her, to Oni Lee, who showed no reaction.

"That's far more innocent. We're keeping our Endbringer in here." She replied, and Kayden and Oni Lee both stopped cold behind her.

She kept walking down, until she was down to the last stretch of flat concrete before Noelle's room, and eventually, Oni Lee's steps resumed, followed by Kayden's.

The guard beside the gigantic vault door hummed something into his helmet, and the giant spinning mechanism began to groan to life, unwinding, before opening inwards.

"What the hell is that supposed to me…an…" Kayden trailed off, catching a glimpse of something through the door, likely not much more than an unidentifiable shape.

She walked through the door, onto the grate walk above Noelle. Oni Lee followed, looking down impassively. Kayden did not.

She paused, and turned to Kayden.

"Exactly what you heard. We have what is likely some kind of proto-Endbringer in here. Come talk to her."

Kayden's mouth flapped up and down, features incredulous and disturbed, but she eventually closed her mouth, and forced herself to walk in beside them.

"... Dear god…" Kayden wheezed, horrified.

She stared as well, a bit surprised at how much Noelle's body had changed from the original.

It used to be a horrific amalgamation of everything possible and not, but now, it was even worse. Spider legs thicker than trees, gnarled and oddly jointed like broken twigs scraped at the floor, uneven, while octopus tentacles thicker than cars seemed to stick and unstick from the floor all along her left side. From the joints of the spider legs, human legs and arms flailed, as if sprouting from within, nothing but skin and muscle, oversized, disproportionate to the point of being nauseating, arms anywhere from a foot long to twenty, legs twisted backwards and jointed centigrade.

Half-finished flaps of skin with hanging eyes and exposed nerves seemed to hang from elbows and knees, as if thinner sprouts, unable to grow further, a mass of mangled limbs, even more horrific to see than before, fading off to something more similar to her first form on the right side, wolf snouts and insectoid antennae and pig heads the size of cars mixing with every mammal she could recognize and not, like they were all melting together in a sludge and had just recently been stirred with a chainsaw. 

Oni Lee slowly raised a hand, in something like a half-finished greeting.

Noelle's glassy eyes struggled to focus on him, but eventually, she raised a hand of her own, head tilted to the side, expression empty.

Odd ritual done, they lowered their hands.

She paused, turning to Lee.

"Did you meet before?"

He shook his head.

Right… just on the same wavelength of not being all mentally there, she supposed.

"Kayden, this is Noelle. Noelle, this is Kayden." She introduced, and after a few seconds of Noelle's body being unresponsive, a dozen limbs jerked, trampling each other and almost fighting for room, raising Noelle's almost slug-like body of horror higher.

Noelle didn't look too good. She'd have to be… 'pruned' again soon, to regain her faculties better.

The chance of Noelle losing control was very low, as far as she could tell, considering all her emotions were locked to the absolute bottom, but she looked far too lost in her own head at the moment.

Another few seconds of silence, Kayden looking on with horrified eyes, visibly about to vomit, and Noelle staring through her with a million yard stare.

"... Hello Kaden." Noelle whispered, slurred, the sound clear in the smooth, echoing chamber, and that, human speech from something so monstrous, seemed to snap Kayden out of it, startling and jerking her gaze up to meet the girl's.

Slowly, Kayden swallowed, licked her lips, and seemed to fight to keep her power contained.

"H-Hi?"

Taylor leaned forward on the railing.

"It's Kay den, Noelle. Don't worry about that though." She said, and turned to Kayden. "I called her a proto-Endbringer, but that's just a theory, in truth. I wanted to make you expect the worst to hopefully loosen the blow of seeing her and hearing what I brought you here for, but that didn't work, obviously... She isn't an Endbringer, as far as we can tell. Her name is Noelle, and she's a person. She is, however, just as dangerous as one, in the right circumstances." She finished the simple, barebones explanation, and turned to Noelle.

"How have you been?"

Noelle seemed to think about it, gnarled, broken limbs scraping and knocking down below, to allow her to keep her balance, mouths and half-formed snouts making soft wails like the tormented ghouls of hell itself, broken whistles and fox-like laughter mixing with piggish snorts that sounded like a chainsaw, an orchestra taken out of the most deranged mind brought to form.

Desensitised as she was, the sound was still utterly horrific. It made her guts churn.

But Noelle didn't deserve or ask for this, so she plastered a small, kind smile on her face, her eyes not wavering from the girl's empty stare.

Slowly, Noelle hummed.

"The TV's gotten a bit bland… and I broke too many controllers. Hard to control my strength, even when I'm calm. A couple of the guards would come down to gawk at me sometimes. I didn't mind, but the… helmeted one in charge seemed angry about it, chasing them out or threatening them with cleanup duty every time until they stopped. I think… that was nice?" Noelle hummed, obviously unable to feel anything about it, but recognizing the gesture as a kind one. "The news of what you did was interesting. I like feeling up to date on the world. But that's… it. I'm just… bored." Noelle said, apathetic, her eyes seemingly losing some of their fog the more she forced herself to talk and interact with someone, and she nodded.

That was far from the worst thing to be, but she'd arrange a few more amenities for her if possible.

"Anyone come down to talk to you? Keep you company sometimes?" She asked.

Noelle shook her head.

"A quiet one comes sometimes. He just sits and watches the giant TV with me. It's… I don't know. We don't talk."

She nodded, thinking.

Talking seemed to bring Noelle out of the animalistic haze of her lower half, so she'd have to encourage some of the guards, or at least Oni Lee, to talk to her whenever they had free time from their training.

Lung would come over relatively frequently too to train with Lee in hand to hand, but she didn't trust him to be civil or pleasant.

Lisa would be an amazing choice, since her power might pick up on something about how this worked or how Cauldron even managed to make the vials that turned the girl the way she was, but she was very busy. Almost more than Taylor.

"I'll try to get things a little more comfortable for you. But today, I'm afraid I needed you for something. I need five clones to catch a villain. Two of Oni Lee," She said, pointing to Lee, "-and three of Purity." She finished.

Oni Lee turned his head to her, quietly intrigued.

"C-clones?" Kayden asked, still somewhat befuddled about the situation at hand.

She nodded.

"She can grab people and pull them into herself. They enter some kind of… unpleasant sleep, for as long as they're in there. As long as she has them, she can birth clones of them, with powers similar or almost identical to the original. At the end, she can spit out whoever she grabbed, unharmed, just… mildly traumatised from the experience, I'd wager. So you two will be eaten today, and I'll Master the clones. We need more mobility, and she can give it to us." She explained.

Oni Lee nodded, and began to undress.

"Maybe keep your pants on, but unless you hate your clothes, do get out of them." She added, and after a few more seconds of silence, Kayden turned to her, visibly about to puke.

"You're not changing your mind about this, are you?"

She shook her head. Kayden took a deep breath.

"Can you just knock me out? I'd rather get a concussion than have to…"

She nodded, and flickered to Evelynn.

"Open your eyes."

Kayden did as asked.

She pushed a haze forward, and her eyes turned glassy.

She turned to Oni Lee.

"Carry her down the ramp when you're done. I'll go ahead and talk to some guards real quick."

Oni Lee nodded, wrestling with his body armour to get it off.

She walked past him, outside, to the guard.

"I'm going to need twenty people, armed to the teeth. Guard the entrance, and if someone tries to blast or teleport out through this door, kill them at all cost. I'll cancel the order through your superior from my phone when we're ready to leave."

The guard nodded, and quickly shifted his head with his hand, talking into his helmet mic.

She turned back around, grasped the edge of the vault door, and heaved it shut behind her, until it thudded closed with a monstrous echo, with much effort.

In the half-light of Noelle's chamber, she turned left, and began to walk down the concrete ramp, assessing how much energy this might take.

Mastering five people shouldn't be too exhausting, but having to fix their bodily defects with Lulu would take a bit more time.

Behind her, Oni Lee followed, wearing only his pants and mask, carrying a mostly undressed Kayden on his back.

She waited at the bottom, feeling dwarfed by Noelle, their placid eyes staring into each other's without a reason to look away.

"Be gentle with them. If you have any control of it, try to make them as complete clones as possible." She said, and Noelle nodded, slowly.

Oni Lee came up beside her.

"Put her down and back up."

Lee put Kayden down on the dusty, sticky floor, and backed up alongside her.

Like smelling food, the horrific amalgamation of limbs and teeth and mouths and eyes seemed to lurch, once, before Noelle seemed to calm it, and as carefully as someone with sixty broken legs could, carefully dragged her body forward.

The limbs seemed to split and crack open like a piece of crumpled paper unfolding, slimy tentacles creeping out, and with a quick lurch, Kayden was gone, the mass of flesh closing back up.

She held herself in place, ready, switching to her real self, quickly taking off her backpack and throwing it on the floor, then switching back to Evelynn's original form, feelers raised to constrict… or strike.

It took five minutes of silent unease for Noelle's lower half to lurch, coil, then spew out a torrent of disgusting fluid of unknown nature with a disgusting squelching, barfing sound, the fluid something that might be amniotic fluid as well as it could be a mix of blood, semen and vomit, for all she could tell, just something utterly foul, and she was glad for Evelynn's mostly non-biological nature, unable to express herself by gagging.

Something in the viscous fluid shifted, two points inside lighting up like glowsticks, and her eyes flew wide.

Two feelers snaked around the shape, and before it could get its bearings, she pulled it towards her, growing an extra arm to push the fluid out of its face and yank an eyelid up with her thumb.

She delved into its mind with a flash of gold.

It was… similar to Kayden's, but completely exempt from love. It hated what Kayden hated even more, and utterly despised all that she loved even further. There was nothing it loved.

She introduced it to the feeling, directing it all towards herself.

She had no time to be delicate. The longest and most well-formed of the clones, according to the team, were about five to six minutes.

It was pure brute force. Wasteful perhaps, but it was simply what was needed.

Four minutes later, headache a little worse, she pulled herself out, and blinked back into the real world.

The woman in front of her was almost entirely normal, from what she could tell through the dripping, coagulating fluids on her, and she quickly shifted, lifting her arms to wipe at her face, arms glowing.

"Stop using your power." She said, and the clone stopped moving, but its arms remained alight with a white glow. "Hm, you can't turn that off?"

The clone blew out air, trying to get the fluid off, then shook her head.

"Alright, nevermind. In the backpack to the right, there's a bag full of plastic coats, crumpled. Put one on, we'll clean you up soon up above, there's showers. We'll check for defects after."

The clone nodded, and after taking a moment to re-learn to walk, tugged at the feeler around her waist.

She let go, and the woman walked over to the backpack to clothe herself with the bare minimum, at least.

Hopefully all this… birthing fluid or whatever it was, wouldn't clog the drains. That would make Noelle's living conditions considerably worse.

Regardless, Noelle's body lurched once more, and she did the same as the first time, striking fast, Mastering them even faster.

Her head was protesting by the time she was done with clone number two, who seemed to have two jaws, one under the other, but was perfectly normal aside that, even being a bit more polite than the first.

So on it went.

The only problem came with the third clone, who seemed to come out and inwardly light up like a star almost instantly, a high-pitched whine building quickly, but she managed to make out the shape of her head through the fluid, and jerk it close enough to push into her mind.

She came back to a woman covered in charred, dried flakes of the fluid, with face proportions like a picasso painting, if she was to be polite, and one leg twisted backwards, but otherwise functional.

Kayden, the original, had been spit out by Noelle, seemingly, and was busy barfing into the drain to their left, completely naked.

She wasn't terribly curious what happened to her undergarments.

Oni Lee decided to go completely nude, and strode forward without an ounce of hesitation or caution, being quickly yanked into Noelle's body.

His clones were more messed up than Kayden's.

One had half an arm growing out its neck, ending in a weird, smushed claw of flesh that might have been an arm once, and the other had three legs, in the very literal sense, as well as a bunch of other strange proportions, but was functional aside that.

After walking in with two people, she exited with seven trailing or hobbling behind her, covered in white plastic coats.

With a horrid headache, she mostly focused on guiding the mildly traumatised Kayden and the uncaring Oni Lee to the showers the men used. It was… just a shower room. The corner had a small wooden board as a divider, but the rest of the heads were just out in the open.

She decided to help them bathe, pushing all unprofessional and disgusted thoughts out to the furthest reaches of her mind, and ignoring some of the clones' embarrassment, noting imperfections and defects as Kayden rushed for the corner shower, looking physically ill.

Oni Lee just washed the fluid off and quietly walked back to grab one of the towels and put his equipment back on, unbothered.

The first clone didn't seem interested in stopping Taylor's ogling or her assistance in showering, staring at her with placid, curious eyes as she spun her around and scrubbed the disgusting fluids off under the shower head.

"Can I name myself?" The clone eventually asked, and she paused, blinking in surprise.

"Of course. In fact, I was going to tell the rest of you to do exactly that if you wished. I'm not creative enough to name all of you, and numbers seem cruel." She replied, noting another defect, what seemed to be a single, elongated ear, that had been hidden under the woman's hair. "I'd even ask for any distinguishing features you want, but I reckon you'd all want more time to think on that." She finished, then pushed the sponge towards the woman.

"I'm not comfortable doing the rest of you, do it yourself. Did you have a name in mind?" She asked, and the clone nodded instantly, taking the sponge to clean the more private parts of her body.

"Enna. I want to be blonde."

She nodded.

"That's your name then, and I'll switch your hair." She said, easily, and the clone nodded, thankful.

After they were done with Enna, she called her driver to bring the giant bag of clothes from the back of the car and leave it outside the showers, and five minutes later, he arrived.

She went outside to take it, and let Enna dress herself, not bothering to turn away, simply forcing her eyes to stay on Enna's.

They'd have to do power testing after, but just to be sure…

"Do you know what your power does?"

Enna, surprisingly, nodded, tugging the hoodie down. 

"Yes. I'm not sure why, but I know my power very well. Imagine Kayden's power turned from a minigun shooting helix lightballs, and turned into a shotgun. I charge up, shoot from my hands, then charge up again. I'm stronger after absorbing a lot of sunlight too, just like her. I can fly, just not as well. I'm more around… Aegis's speed than Kayden's. I'm basically an inferior version of her."

She nodded.

"Aren't we all?" One of the clones behind her asked, Kayden's third, and she glanced at her to find her staring at the wall.

Oni Lee's clones were about as uncaring as him, thankfully, so they just stood there, staring at each other.

"I see. Thank you. But don't think of yourself like that." She advised.

Enna nodded, obviously not taking much heed in her advice, but well, she was a grown woman, she could make her choices.

A good power, but the flying bit was disappointing. She needed mobility more than extra firepower, especially something so indiscriminate like a shotgun blast of light. That also made Enna's power significantly riskier. Slower, plus closer range? She'd need armour to go into a fight.

At least the power testing would be unneeded. That was a lot of hours saved.

She turned to the second clone, the double-jawed one.

She jerked her head to the shower.

The clone shrugged off the white plastic coat, and walked in, covering itself with somewhat appropriate shame and scuttling forward quickly, unlike Enna.

It was odd to think clones already had somewhat distinct personalities… or at least the signs of such.

"Want to do it yourself?" She asked, and the clone nodded, probably unable to speak with the mangled mouth.

"I want to be thin and tall." A clone spoke up, the one with the deformed face, and she turned to her, and nodded.

"I'll have to call a… very short, very strange individual to fix your bodies. While clone two showers, let's get on that. Just be quiet, please. Headache." She said, and without waiting for a reply, switched to Lulu with a flicker.

The angle of being two feet tall immediately annoyed her.

Being a Yordle was great, until you experienced not being a Yordle, and then got thrown into a world that didn't have Bandle City to frolic around in.

"Cute." Lee's clone said, the one with an arm coming out of his shoulder and neck, and she paused, staring at him for a moment.

Their personalities did change, then. Minutely, perhaps.

She turned back to the deformed Kayden clone, and tapped her foot with the gnarled staff.

The outlines of her body and spirit filled her mind, pixie dust and purple buzzing around the inside of her skull. Pix buzzed around her.

"Is that a fairy?" Enna asked, quietly but almost demanding in her tone. "Can I pet it?"

She hummed, and flicked her hand towards Enna. Pix did as asked, going to sit on her hand.

Twisting and turning the shape of clone three in her mind, she formed a clear, simple image of what she wanted to look like, and tapped her foot, staring up at her to watch the changes happen.

It was really as simple as that, it was just mentally draining to design a person in one's head.

The deformations smoothened out into a face similar to Kayden's but with subtly different proportions, enough to register as a different person or a close sister, and the woman shot up five entire inches, hips and shoulders thinning.

"Can I go next?" Enna asked, and she turned to her, and tapped her foot with the staff.

A lot of small deformities, some odd proportions.

She fixed them, changed her face and body a little to seem more like another person, and changed the hair color to blonde.

Another tap, and Enna was changed.

She glanced at the bathing clone, whose eyes were almost pleading.

"Don't worry, I'll do you too. Just finish up so the Lee clones can bathe. That goes for you too, Kayden." She said, Lulu's squeaky voice grating at her ears, no matter how much she tried to make it lower and less chirpy.

"Tell me your powers." She said, glancing between the two unnamed clones.

Clone three, now tall and thin, sighed.

"I can gather energy, store it, then just make it explode out of me in a giant explosion. I can also push it out of me in the form of a ghostly white orb that can travel a little bit before exploding, but it's still short range. Twenty feet, maybe? Max. I should be much faster than Kayden though. The only way I can see to use this is to zip in front of someone, vaporise them and everything within fifty feet, then try to zip out. Call me Tria." Clone three said.

"Really? Are we all going to call ourselves numbers in ancient Greek? Might as well just be one two and three." Enna scoffed.

It took a moment for her to get it. Enna was probably one, Tria was probably three…

"I don't care. Do you want to be Tria or?" She asked, impatient.

Tria nodded.

The double-jawed clone made a sound, somewhat like a… weird moan.

She turned, and the clone had two fingers raised.

"She wants to be called Duo." Enna said.

Oddly fitting considering the double jawbone.

"Fine. Enna, Duo, Tria." She said, and floated forward to tap Duo's leg.

A quick pull, a shift, a few changes and another tap. A quick process like flesh turning to clay and moulding itself, a living thing… and done.

Duo moved her now fixed jaw, and turned to her with a firm nod.

"Thank you ma'am. Can you make me a teenager with pitch white hair?" The woman asked, and after a moment of surprise, she nodded, and did as asked.

Ten seconds later, a significantly less developed girl stood in front of her, hair glossy and snow-white.

Duo smiled, still embarrassed and trying to cover herself up somewhat.

"Thank you. My power just turns me into a white… really tough crystal ball of sorts when I activate it. No super strength. My speed should be better than Kayden's, but not by much. I can fly while in ball form. The only way I can be useful is… probably just turning my power on and using myself as a wrecking ball. Sorry." Duo shrugged.

She waved her staff, dismissively.

"Still useful, and I mostly needed speed. If you can fly good, or at all, I'm fine with it. Kayden, you done?" She asked, and from the corner, a pained humm came.

"Just- a little more. I think I'll die If I don't scrub myself raw. Please never make me do that again. I just saw visions of my trigger event the entire time I was in there." Kayden said, voice weak, and she paused.

She hadn't known that little detail… did Noelle make clones then force them to trigger, somehow? How did that work? Why didn't the clones know, judging by the confused glances?

"Alright. Take all the time you need. Can't guarantee it won't happen again if it's necessary though. Sorry." She said, and turned to the Lee clones.

She just tapped them until their defects were gone, into almost complete carbon copies of Oni Lee, with slight changes in jawline and hair colours.

"You two?"

The first activated his power, which was… not what she expected, at all.

He just formed some kind of… almost black smoke-like echo that seemed to trail behind his movements as he slowly waved his arm back and forth, embers flickering in and out of the smoke.

It smelled like charred asphalt and a forest fire.

It also looked startlingly like Leviathan's water echo from the shaky videos she'd reviewed ages ago.

The 'echo' then separated, joints twisting, and the clone shifted to the side, revealing what looked like a man made of smoke, glued to him, back to back.

The echo turned to look at her, while the clone side-eyed her.

"Is it independent or do you control it?" She asked.

The echo stared.

"Both." The clone whispered, an airy, crackling whisper, like air whistling through kindling.

She raised a brow.

Odd, odd power.

"What is it? Puppet, reflection, echo…?" She suggested.

The smoky figure turned its face skywards, its arms separating from the clone's, backs still attached.

"Just a burning memory." It breathed out, and then leaned back, melting into the clone, joints twisting backwards to mould back to the clone.

Her brows furrowed.

She disliked cryptic nonsense, but there was a chance the clone's echo was being extremely literal. A power fueled by burning memories… there was some correlation there.

"What can you do?" She asked.

Lee's clone turned to her.

"Fight. Embers burn and shield, smoke flows and blinds. I do not teleport."

She hummed.

A melee fighter with no mobility. Useful, but not for this operation.

"Want a name or will you pick later?"

The clone shifted.

"Mitai." He whispered.

Oni Lee's head jerked to the clone, staring with empty eyes at him.

She paused, brow furrowing.

Lee rarely reacted, and not like that, so reflexively.

"Ring familiar?" She asked, Lulu's high pitched voice cutting through the awkward silence and the splatter of shower water behind them.

Lee did not answer, instead reaching into one of his chest holsters, and before she could react or process it, pressed the long gun barrel to the clone's head, hand steady as could be.

"Pick something else." Oni Lee whispered, voice still emotionless, but somehow colder.

"Lee, put it down. Now." She rushed out, and Lee did as asked, lowering the gun, but still staring at the clone with a complete paper nothingness in his expression, laser focused.

Lee's clone slowly nodded, the shadowy echo fading with the scent of a campfire. 

"Mokutan, then." The clone, now Mokutan, brushed his copper hair out of his face, and Lee stared at him for another tense few seconds before turning back to look forward, holstering the gun.

She turned to Oni Lee, then stopped herself.

Oni Lee did not remember much. Probably close to nothing, from what she remembered when she Mastered him. For him to react like that, it must not be a good, easy memory.

She had no right to pry, despite her curiosity eating at her.

She turned to the last clone, whom she'd given a more squared jaw and unruly auburn hair.

"Want a name, or will you pick later?"

"Later." The clone whispered, and she nodded.

"Power?"

The clone tilted its head, a smidge, thinking.

"Hard to explain. I change. Things around me burn. I get very tough. Anything that looks at me forgets things. They also feel fear. The closer or more detailed they see me, the better."

She nodded, then sighed.

Another power that was probably great for fighting, but not for the mission. And he obviously couldn't demonstrate.

She had a lot of things to forget, and none of which she wanted to. This clone was a hazard to fight with, honestly.

"I see. I guess we'll have to do with three extra movers." She hummed, and switched back to her real self.

She really should be more paranoid about safety, but she just couldn't be arsed at the moment. In too much pain and in inner conflict to jump through a million hoops right now.

"Finish up and go to the car. You all know what this is about, correct? You have all the memories of Kayden and Lee?" She asked, and the clones all nodded. "Good. Driver will take you in for processing somewhere else. Nice to meet you, and goodbye for now. We'll settle your civilian identities soon, we're a little swamped at the moment." She summarised, feeling her brow twitch incessantly, something scraping in the inside of her skull.

She turned to Evelynn, and flew off.

Everything was ready, a full day later.

Her migraine was… well, a migraine, but manageable. Even enough to fight for a bit, if need be.

A hundred and twenty of her men, ready to move at a moment's notice, positioned in all the outskirts of the city, a half-net, stretched thin. 

The entirety of her capes were gathered in a single building near the outskirts above Captain's Hill, huddled around a receiver, ready for her to do her part of the job and burst into action.

Citrine was at the middle of it all, shoved out of her idiotic choice of dress and into military garb, only the golden gem-encrusted mask remaining, ready to neutralise or at least destabilise Master powers.

The dominoes were all in place.

All that was left was to see was on which side they'd crumple first, who they'd crush.

She stood in the corner of the room, watching the monitors with her capes, dozens of them huddled around one of their contracted techies.

She affixed the device to her harness, memorised its position one last time, and took a deep, deep breath.

She picked Shen, The Eye of Twilight, a man who fully and truly believed in balance.

Oh how he would have mourned for Earth Bet...

She took the appropriate stance, every detail Assault had let her know about Samantha glued to the forefront of her mind, ready to force the summon core to do an insurmountable task, to bring a piece of the spirit world before her so she could blip through it to her target.

It took a moment for her mind to calm its buzzing, for her to sink into a deep meditation, and finally, her mind focused on what she needed, what the barriers between realms would allow.

Her hands met, and a familiar purple swirling energy surrounded her, similar to Teleport, but instead of wild and forceful, it was a gentle request and prod, written in the runic equivalence of unseen- to mortal eyes- cursive, in neat, expanding lines across the floor, all layered circles and nothing but.

Half her capes stared at her, the other half stared at the screen, on the map, waiting for the blip to show up.

Everyone, her included, held their breath.

She felt the walls of reality around her shift, gently pulling the curtain aside, miles and worlds shrinking to mere pebbles, mere twists in space within the world of spirits.

Without a step taken, nor a movement to be seen, she sank forward, into reality's parting folds, and disappeared, a trillion images flashing through her eyes in the mere instance it took to traverse the impossible.

Notes:

i'll... probably come back eventually and write a real author's note but sweet mother of fucking god I am exhausted at the moment, see you guys later, and thank you very, very much for all the lovely comments and encouragement, they help me power through a genuinely difficult to write story.

Like, don't get me wrong I love this story and my plans are long, but FUCK it's hard to write, in that hard-but-enjoyable kinda way, if that makes sense. idk im rly tired fuck making sense unga mgugnehaetenga

oh and sorry for cliff but this chapter's already like 11k words or something, had to end it here so i could post it and go rest

lemme know what you thought, what you enjoyed or didn't, or any stupid fuckuups i may have done during the chapter.

ty all, enjoy, see you next chapter, where plans go to die, no matter how simple.