55

Chapter Text

Eidolon came through the portal, took one look at them, and let out a long, growling sigh as the portal shut behind him, clipping the end of his cape.

Rebecca stared at him, unmoved.

Legend's fingers tapped the table with frustration and impatience both, outright glaring at him.

Doctor Mother looked at him like a disappointed teacher.

Contessa simply stared, as motionless as she was.

"Who was it?" He asked, resignedly throwing the chair out of its place, then snapping it back forward behind his knees, dropping into it gracelessly.

She could read the frustration in the lines of his body, that petulant air of I'm being scolded for something I don't think is wrong.

If only the consequences of this were as childish as Eidolon's actions.

"Clairvoyant." She said, adjusting her body suit's sleeve.

"I was expecting Doormaker." Eidolon said, shifting in his chair. Not to get more comfortable, but to better project unbothered confidence, leaning back, wrists limp on the armrests.

"Are you going to keep that mask on, or will we talk like adults?" Doctor Mother asked.

"You just want Rebecca to read me better." He replied, voice even, but with a touch of frustration.

I can do that just fine because your voice and body can't hide anything .

Her mind wandered to all her exhaustive attempts at giving Eidolon anti-thinker training, most of which were blown off for various excuses. Some of them valid, even.

He wasn't bad at masking his humanity, but the fact she could still read him like an open book meant his progress was minimal if he wanted to deal with Thinkers.

A good-hearted man, a powerful man, but she always firmly believed his downfall would be his pride, his ego. Perhaps that had come to fruition.

Then again, her own downfall had been her refusal to compromise, to negotiate instead of blackmail, to have anything less than absolute control, so she could hardly judge him. No, this was more… a simple observation.

"Humour us." Doctor Mother said, calmly.

Knowing he'd look insecure or too combative if he did not, he let out a tiny 'tsk', and took the mask off, flicking his wrist to throw it on the table where it spun once, twice, then went as still as the rest of the room, save Legend's mildly irritating tapping rhythm on the table.

"Have you gone mad?" She asked, allowing reprimand to enter her voice, instead of voicing it like a genuine question.

He wasn't stupid, he'd understand regardless, but she felt the need to be crystal clear about all this.

"Oh please, I figured out a way to get rid of our biggest problem, and all of a sudden now you're all upset. What is wrong with you?" He emphasized, glaring at all of them, jaw tight.

"And you did not think to notify any of us, explain what this method is, explain what you understood so we could think about the best course of action. You just stole one of String's Theory's cannons and decided to damage it to achieve what, exactly? Kill Summoner's lackey? Prove a point?" Contessa asked, genuinely curious.

"There is no Summoner. And yes, I tried to kill her. The reason I told none of you what I found or what I was going to do is that you're all waffling, arguing, dealing with inconsequential bullshit while all our hard work is falling apart, just going along as usual. Keith's just doing hero work like it matters, like it isn't a tremendous waste of resources to save puppies and do administrative work all day. I don't even know what Rebecca's doing half the time, Contessa's been relegated to playing god on the absolute edges of our damn multiverse just to steal some technology we can't even find a use for and make more cannon fodder, and we're still making vials in futility, which are now starting to fail because Contessa had been the glue that made those vials work through her bullshit power . The one thing we've been banking on, making more of me or Keith, is practically gone, and we're just going along like usual. " David griped.

That was a paper-thin excuse for why he didn't tell them, and she could tell on the face of it. Something else was the real reason. 

Some part of her agreed with him, however. He was right.

"So why exactly did you call me in here? Is it to whinge and complain about how I didn't subject myself to watching you all talk in circles about how we might be able to somehow make this idiotic child listen to us?" David asked.

Her brows furrowed.

It seemed like he figured Taylor out, completely. He was no longer talking with uncertainty, uncertain terms, caution of the unknown. He was directly focusing on her.

A little later than she had figured the girl out, but still, annoyingly quickly.

He wasn't a stupid man, unfortunately.

How could she try to obstruct this discussion without seeming suspicious…

That in itself might be suspicious. Best bide her time.

Still, she huffed, putting up an air of annoyance.

"Why are you so fixated on Taylor herself? We've still not confirmed she isn't just part of a greater network, or one of many controllers, or even just a puppet of someone else-" She began to point out.

"You haven't." Eidolon butter in, gloves creaking on his armrests as he leaned forward. She could practically taste the righteous brag in his voice, and had to resist the urge to roll her eyes, as she often had to. "All we had to do was watch her, but because you've all been unwilling to use Clairvoyant to his full potential-"

Doctor Mother's eyes snapped wide open in disbelief.

"You pushed him to the point of seizures. He has minor brain damage from overusing his power to cover up for Contessa's paths being gone. But we were unwilling, Alexandria was unwilling because she forced him to rest ? " Doctor Mother asked, brows high, hands balled into fists on the table.

That had been a particularly annoying debate to have with David, when it came up.

She'd mostly been trying to get Clairvoyant to rest because she had to get information to that damn girl somehow, and if Clairvoyant kept an eye on her due to her 'injuries', he'd see her typing up a storm and escaping to some seedy bar in New York to deliver it to Faultline's hands.

Making the duo rest by force on occasions that suited her was just part of her work in trying to get this conspiracy under Taylor's hands without being caught.

But it allowed her to claim some false moral high ground over Eidolon, additionally, which was bound to annoy him. He wanted to be the practical one, but also the morally righteous hero, even if only deep, deep down.

"He isn't Contessa, and he can't replace her. Get it through your head. Is-" Doctor Mother's words halted, realization alighting on her face. "-is that why you've been visiting him? To watch that girl through his power?" Doctor Mother asked, but it was not a question, it was a realization just waiting for confirmation.

Ah… she hadn't considered that yet.

That was clever. Feigning cold concern for the young man to visit, to ' see what he could do' with his more supportive powers, then making Clairvoyant give power-sight to him so he could observe Taylor enough to notice and understand how her powers worked when everyone else was busy doing something else.

Of course, not mentioning it to any of them just so he could get the satisfaction of being the one to crack the mystery and surprise them was very in character for David. Glory hogging was a habit she doubted he'd ever overcome. It wasn't even conscious, in her opinion.

"I know your sentimentality would get in the way, so I lied." David said, simply, shoulders straight. He truly believed he was in the right.

A small question, bittersweet, rose in the back of her mind, barely affecting her emotions at all, but still an unpleasant thing to think about.

How did we get here? I remember very different people when I think back a decade or two.

"Sentimentality? His Thinker migraines are torturing him - " Doctor Mother pushed.

"Oh what a terrible price to pay to potentially save the world. He might be a vegetable when he's an old man if we don't stop him, and that's surely worth risking annihilation of the human race for." David snarked, full of sarcasm, lips curling into a subtle sneer.

Doctor Mother took a deep breath of frustration, eyes sliding shut.

You were not too far from a 'vegetable' yourself, once, she thought, and kept that thought inside. It wasn't conducive to this conversation.

"This is not how we do things." She started, re-joining the discussion. "If we can't deal with someone or they're too volatile, we don't hunt them down, we let them be and focus on what we can do. You know this." She pretended to disapprove with a slight furrow of her brow.

Doctor Mother nodded in agreement next to her.

She knew, of course, exactly why he did what he did.

She didn't agree or approve, but she knew.

Personally, she would try and genuinely negotiate with Nexus as equals, or something close to that, since the more forceful approach didn't work the first time. 'Didn't work' was a slight understatement, in fact, considering everything.

David, unfortunately, decided to single-handedly lock them out of that route by doubling down on their earlier aggression, right as she had been preparing a meeting to suggest diplomacy again, and hopefully establish a bridge with Nexus so she could coordinate with the damn girl and figure out what exactly she wanted from her.

It was frustrating. David was frustrating.

David's eye twitched, almost imperceptibly, as he turned his head to her.

"We tend to do that because until now, none of them interfered with us. They couldn't. Contessa dislikes pathing Mama Mathers, but she isn't a real obstacle. This girl interferes by existing ." He pointed out.

Contessa nodded in agreement.

"And your first idea was to try and kill her? Did it not cross your mind to kidnap her and clear her mind with The Slug? Or to try diplomacy? " She emphasized, hoping to use this as a bridge to segue into her suggestion of clearing this mess up.

"You tried diplomacy, and all you got out of it were scars." David said, a note of satisfaction in his voice mixing with annoyance.

Judging from what she knew of his psychology, it was likely he enjoyed watching her be taken down a peg, at least personally. The less people on his level, the higher he was by comparison.

Of course, he probably didn't realise that thought process, entirely subconscious. The more practical, surface part of him surely was annoyed at her failure.

Hence, the mixed emotions.

People were so nonsensical.

"You can hardly call kidnapping and coercion 'diplomacy'." Contessa reasonably pointed out. "I'm assuming Alexandria means a less forceful approach." Contessa finished, her eyes flicking to her.

Keith's fists clenched harder.

"A bit late to consider diplomacy now." Keith added. "But not too late." He added, thoughtfully, scowling at the table. "We all want the same thing, after all."

Keith was ever-so-naive. She liked him, frankly, because he was in a sense trying to fill in the moral hole that Hero left behind but…

They were just too far down the rabbit hole by the time they let him in, and they still kept most of their activities away from his attention. He couldn't be their moral guide, not this late into things, when they were so set in their ways.

He might be able to help her change this situation though. This would be hard to wrangle into not being a disaster… but she didn't know what Taylor would do to respond. She didn't know how the girl thought, nor what her actual powers were. It was hard to predict how to act when the person who Mastered her had no way of contacting her. All she had were instructions whispered in her ear as she passed out in a valley.

This was such a mess.

"Diplomacy with her cannot work." David said, with utter confidence. "And it's not because she's unreasonable. It's because her power makes that impossible."

"Really?" She asked, acting condescendingly curious, which certainly pushed some bad buttons.

She wanted him to be a bit sloppier than usual for what came up, and anger always helped in that.

"Put a pin on that for now. What did you discover about her that made you so certain you could kill her? Especially right after she went on a spree of fixing one of our biggest mistakes?" She emphasized, backtracking in the conversation quite a bit, and after a moment of hesitation, David relaxed back in his chair, scowling.

Hold on a second… was that another reason he tried to kill her? For trying to fix a mistake he felt personally responsible to fix?

Or was that giving him too little credit? It was always hard to tell with David. He never felt the real need to explain himself.

"We couldn't have known about Gray Boy." He deflected, then lightly pursed his lips in thought. "As for the girl, it wasn't certainty that drove me, it was the fact that even if I failed, I'd cripple her a little and get a definite answer for how her power works. The reason I did it right after she fixed some of Gray Boy's bubbles was that she'd done the most labour she'd done in a while, and her stamina was low. The next locations would be much readier and have much fewer victims. Tomorrow the Kill Orders will go online, and she would also be on much higher alert going forwards, assumedly. This was the best chance I'd get in a while, and we don't have the time to sit and wait around. Killing her didn't work because her power is like a mixture between me, the Butcher and Glaistig Uaine, while lacking any of the strong points of any of us."

That caught everyone's attention.

Emotions were primarily physical sensations, things she primarily lacked, so it gave her an edge in not drawing her brows into a sharp glare, but she couldn't help but allow the slight tightening of her brows.

"Did it not strike you as weird how fluidly she switches with other capes? How despite everything about her changing, those eyes never do?" He asked, rhetorically, before continuing.

"Those are the previous holders of her power. Someone Triggered at one point with a minor grab bag power, then they died and the power moved onto someone new who got the previous holder's power and memories, so on and so forth. She's around the hundredth holder. It explains everything to do with her instability as well. But the second, and main thing that made me decide to kill her is that her power is not from this reality at all." He stated, dead-straight certain, and that made the room pause.

Her confusion was shared in everyone's else's questioning glances.

"Lip reading through an unfamiliar power's sight is hard, but not impossible." He started, laying his hands flat on the table, adopting a lecturing tone that grated on her. "Her power came from another reality, and she's aware of it. That tear in Scion's barrier around this section of the multiverse, that impossible to penetrate barrier we can't even perceive, even if we know it exists? That was her. The dates line up, the logic lines up, the reason all her powers look so strange and her capes are all medieval themed in one way or another, looking like something Myrddin would cook up, why few if any of them wear masks at all, everything clicks when you realize it, and the reason her power tore through Scion's barrier has to be that that power comes from another Entity, in another cycle, in another reality." He said with absolute certainty, dropping the metaphorical bomb with a spread of his hands, brows lowered into a narrow stare.

The implications of that were…

Enough to write several thousand pages of speculation and experimentation on. They were too vast. Too horrifying, too uncertain.

For example, was the barrier to keep the humans contained… Or to hide the entities and their prey from whatever else is out there in the vastness of space?

They still knew next to nothing about the Entities, and even less about the barrier.

Damn it, she could understand it now. Why he chose to shoot first, ask questions later.

That was if, if he was right.

That was a very large 'if', however, it just made too much sense.

As if reading her mind, David continued, almost quoting her thoughts.

"It's the only thing that makes sense. Why her power seems to mix so terribly with everyone else's, why it messes with precogs in this world, and most Thinkers, why she's so unstable, why she thinks and acts so strangely, why all her power personifications look like they came from a medieval cycle, and it explains why her Shard had to open a hole in Scion's barrier to even connect to her." David continued, impassioned, gesturing with his hands by now.

Doctor Mother's anger slowly, slowly faded for a look of pensive thoughtfulness.

And just like that, Rebecca's plan to try for peace had just crumbled into a million pieces and scattered in the wind. She'd have to try so hard to get anyone to agree, much less everyone. Trying that hard and insistently would make everyone get intensely suspicious, and her cover would get blown. Just that tiny tidbit closed off her options.

The only outcome that could come out of this was a war in the shadows, between Cauldron and Nexus, if they chose to trust Eidolon even a little.

Ordinarily, they'd dominate Taylor through spread, attrition, and compartmentalization.

Unfortunately for her colleagues, she was here, and not... entirely on their side.

Hm... was she on Taylor's side?

It was hard to tell, honestly.

"So not only does keeping her here possibly add the eyes of another Entity into the picture, we don't even have the guarantee that when she dies, her power will transfer to someone inside our reality, because how did it get here to begin with? Maybe her Shard will simply open the barrier back up, and return to its original reality, maybe it'll return without affecting the barrier at all and nothing will change, maybe it'll go somewhere else, but what is the risk here if she dies? What about that one in a million chance we succeed, if she dies during the fight, will that open up the barrier again? Will another pair of entities come to assist him? Or kill him and take us over? If she fucks up, what are we left with? A peeping hole for another pair of Entities. Even if her power stays here, why? There has to be a reason another duo of Entities went through so much trouble to send her here, and I doubt it was just for the data." He asked, rhetorically, teeth grit as he speared them with an impassioned glare.

"Oh no..." Keith mumbled, taking a deep, deep breath, eyes far away.

The silence in the room was thick.

They didn't know much about Entities, not even now. The possibilities of what another pair could do might be less horrific than they thought, but with how things tended to be in this world, it was likely that if such an Entity existed on the other side, it would be far worse than whatever they could imagine.

Even if they somehow survived Scion, they could not survive another Entity. Especially not a pair.

And she could imagine at least ten different ways that would end the world, immediately. Ten different ways their fate under another Entity might be worse than just dying. What if that Entity wanted to keep them all alive and mad forever in perpetual war, because it figured that such a cycle was more conducive to data? Entities could certainly do that.

Were one pair of Entities to another even different to each other, whatsoever?

They just didn't know.

Of course, none of this was fact, or anything more than believable speculation from David that made sense, but even that mediocre chance was still just too much to risk for such little gain.

Taylor's existence brought forth no tangible benefit, and only slowly ruined everything, from their perspective.

David was right, for once. She had to kill Taylor. They had to kill Taylor, at any cost necessary.

But her emotions, those blasted things, they told her not to.

They were muted, because the physical sensation part of emotions just didn't exist in her, but Taylor had gone so far and deep into her mind that the idea of killing her was more like an observation of what she should do, rather than something she could or would do. It just refused to turn into an actionable motive.

"Yes, exactly." He said, likely regarding their silence, almost gloating.

"You all kept dodging a meeting, and I saw a chance tonight, so I took it." David said, puffing his chest out and jutting a thumb into his solar plexus, then leaned forward, elbows on the table as he crossed his arms. "And that's not even all the reasons we have to get rid of her. When these avatars of previous power holders are harmed enough? They die. They're gone. She doesn't pick them again, she can't." He emphasized, and she realized where he was going a moment before he finished his point.

"So your concerns about her being able to stand up to Scion, being a valuable asset? Aside from blocking pre-cog and most but not all Thinker abilities, she won't be anything that could swing the fight. One power at a time, that vanishes when she's damaged? That's not enough to warrant keeping her around. We can't engineer which world or to whom her power will go to when she dies, we can't control or forcibly snowball her into being a threat to him either, she can only use small grab bag powers alongside her main, equipped power, and when those projection powers are damaged, she gets progressively weaker, progressively runs out of options as they die. She's only being a detriment to thousands of other capes across the entire world, us because of Contessa, and all we're getting out of it is a teenage girl who has a hundred powers but can never use more than one of them at a time." He calmly explained, and stared at them as the room paused.

Doctor Mother took a deep, deep breath.

"That is a lot of circumstantial evidence, conjecture, and 'if's', David." Doctor Mother pointed out, calmly.

He scoffed, relaxing back in his chair.

"And you and I both know that circumstantial evidence, conjecture, and 'if's' are all the precursors to scientific study and eventually fact, but we don't have the time to study her and figure out the implications of her existence. Oh, and for some reason we keep trying to ignore the fact she's printing Simurgh clones, out of a Simurgh bomb, while she herself is mentally unstable ala Butcher style because of her power being similar. We need to eradicate her, now." He emphasized by hitting his pointer finger on the table with his fisted hand, keeping it there as he stared at them.

She pretended to think about things, staying silent.

"I'm afraid I must agree." Contessa added, unsurprisingly.

"I'm abstaining. I'll have no part of this. I'll help defend you and your work if it comes down to it, because the stakes for the world are too high, but I will not participate in killing a child." Keith grit out, drawing the entire room's silent disapproval.

He ignored them, getting up.

"Door me."

With that, he was gone.

Ironic that he said that, when by tomorrow or the day after, he would likely realize who the PRT directors had authorized a Kill Order for.

"Agreed." She added, to break the silence, pushing that aside.

"Then our course of action is settled. David, next time, communicate. We weren't avoiding meetings, none of us had time and you simply did not communicate the importance enough to force us to make time. And let's not pretend you had no other choice. You wanted the satisfaction of personally getting rid of her then telling us off in this exact scenario to vindicate yourself." Doctor Mother pushed, and David's jaw worked silently as he narrowed his eyes, but remained silent.

"Good thing about our newest urgent mission is that we don't have to look for a way to get rid of her. She's getting ready to come to us, according to Clairvoyant. We don't know how, but based on her confidence, she has to have a portal maker of her own, of some kind." Doctor Mother reasoned.

… Of course she was planning to come to them. She couldn't not immediately declare war, apparently. Seems her plans to try for negotiation were doomed to fail regardless.

"You said you observed all of this through Clairvoyant's power?" She asked David, trying to see if she could poke some kind of subtle hole.

"Yes, in conjunction with a few Thinker powers that weren't completely useless against her. The weaker and more surface-level the power, the more it seems to work on her. Most of the things I told you are things she directly said herself, and me picking up subtext from minor Thinker powers. A few days of observation while she interacted with her most trusted, and it all slipped into place." He said, voice even, but she could somehow detect the subtle bragging under it.

"I see." She said, and left it at that.

Taylor would come here to wage war.

Now… how could she help? Which side? When would her strike hurt the most, to whom?

She had much to think about.

"What should we be expecting? What's our time frame?" She asked Doctor Mother.

"She's cloning her strongest capes right now, then they'll likely rest, then they'll come for us in some way or another. So, tomorrow. Let's move this meeting to Clairvoyant's room, since he can keep up updates on their movements, at least for a few hours more." Contessa said, portals opening around the room for them.

This was going to be… fun, almost. A mental exercise, more than mere brawn. She liked mental challenges, since physical challenges did not exist.

At least the strength drain from her fight with Taylor was not permanent.

Whether it was or not, her biggest weapon might not even be her power, but instead, the fact that both sides trusted that she was on their side.

In reality, she could pick either side here. Because she did not make her decisions based on emotion, and half the aspect of an emotion was lost on her. A unique advantage that Taylor likely never considered or learned.

She was, at one point, compromised enough to try and give Cauldron over to Taylor, initially. To help her, even. She wrote that binder, after all, and tried to prod things inwardly to the girl's advantage.

That was before they learned what they learned about, and before she realized that she could not both save the world, and help the damn girl with whatever her objective towards Cauldron was.

She was in the perfect position to swing this all on its heel, she realized, whichever way it went.

Now... she was not sure of what to do. Or for whom.

Unfamiliar territory, for her.

They skimmed most of the binder.

It was all information that people would kill for, but they didn't have the time to go through sixteen hundred pages in one night. They focused on Cauldron's members, structure, locations, their strengths, weaknesses, and most importantly, the keys of the organization.

The fact that Eidolon and Legend were part of Cauldron as well was as shocking as it was disappointing. Though Legend seemed more like… an outer agent than a real member, from the wording.

Even so, the descriptions of their facilities and the member list, at least the most dangerous ones, were enough for them to write up a general report to Accord, and then rest, surrounded on all sides by the first trios of Purity and Oni Lee clones.

For Lisa, that 'rest' was a simple, fitful sleep. For her, it was half-lidded meditation, awake and aware, but in a semi-restful enough state to recuperate without dropping her guard, ready to pick up a Legend at the drop of a hat.

Far from comfortable, but the bare minimum she could accept since the last assassination attempt.

While they rested, the rest of Nexus sharpened its swords.

Tomorrow rolled in, the slow dawn a calm before the storm.

As she and Lisa got ready, the sky's darkness slowly retreating above them, the air fogged with their breaths, peeking rays lounging on their windows like lazy cats.

Grim silence was followed by the click of guns, the rumbling purr of starting engines, and the tight, coiled readiness of men grown tired of guard duty, eager for the action they were supposed to expect, like a spring waiting to fire.

Amy was far from that, after having to work on forty deformed clones, trying to make them into ordinary people. Her men said they practically had to carry her into the truck, she was so exhausted.

It was a shame most of Lung's power variants were almost the same as his main power. Escalation of force, in slightly varying ways and styles. Some were pure pyrokinetics who became devastatingly powerful the more they fought, some only got faster and could process information faster the more they fought without too much shapeshifting, turning into vaguely draconic figures, a couple of them were just versions of Lung without pyrokinesis but lighting powers instead, equally as powerful as the original.

A couple of them stood out above the rest, in terms of apparent power. Three, specifically.

The first, who asked for the name of 'Komodo'.

No secondary blaster power like most of the variants. Nor could he turn into a building sized monster.

Instead, he seemed to turn into something like a lithe, almost cat-like lizard, and once reaching a certain threshold of physical growth, something like a medium-sized truck, he split in two, like undergoing mitosis.

That didn't sound impressive until one considered that the clone could then clone itself. So in a prolonged fight, he could exponentially clone himself. It wasn't escalation in a way she would expect, but when a long fight risked having thirty two giant lizard monster copies to fight, and then a minute later, sixty four, so on and so forth, it was a power that fit the theme perfectly. It was an absolute must to shut him down early, or lose any fight without a chance of fighting back.

For the cherry on top of the cake, all the copies shared senses with the main body. Unfortunately, the clones lacked regeneration unlike the main body and would scatter much like Oni Lee's copies if damaged enough.

Still, with the tactic she was planning on using to storm Cauldron, he was perfect.

The second, who was named by one of Heartbreaker's clones apparently as 'Red', was the complete opposite.

His power was to slowly turn into some kind of large, fast, spiked monster with a bladed tail, that progressively became a more powerful Brute and a lot angrier the more he grew.

A double-edged sword, because a tremendously powerful, pure Brute was incredibly useful, but less so when the man himself became a crazed, rabid animal who would likely fight anything with a pulse to the death, even if outmatched. Not that that was a problem here. Casualties were expected.

No seeming relation to a dragon form either. It was described more as some kind of vaguely humanoid, reptilian… rake, of sorts. Just spikes on spikes and claws on claws. It almost looked like some kind of folklore demon, apparently, so she knew what to look for in the chaos.

If he fought long enough, he'd likely go completely mad and attack them as well, so at some point, he had specific orders to pull out, or go deep into the enemy lines and die fighting in there, away from them.

The third, was an unnamed clone who was given the temporary "name" of Thirteen, for obvious reasons.

His power was half Changer-Mover, the ability to instantly change forms to a sleek, traditional Chinese dragon, a long, red-scaled snake of sorts granted the ability to fly without wings, and half Blaster, with the usual sprinkle of escalation thrown in. He was about fifty feet long, mildly armoured by his scales, able to spew explosive balls of liquid plasma out of his throat at horrifying speeds and ranges after a few seconds of building up, each consecutive one being stronger than the last in both travel speed, maximum range, and blast strength.

Frankly, his power was just odd. It was almost designed like aerial artillery, like he was supposed to fly up high, and pelt an area below in swoops and dives like a plane.

It was the most out-of-theme of Lung's variations, simply because it was not really focused on direct combat. Even one of the pure Blasters they had gotten out of it who could probably glass an entire neighbourhood with a few swings of his arms if he amped up enough, he had little genuine range away from himself, and no mobility to speak of. He had to be in there, close to the fight.

That was the main, common aspect with all the clones coming out of Lung.

Except for Thirteen.

It was very strange not just because it seemed unfit for Lung, but also unusual for powers in general. Not many Blasters had such range and impunity. Not even Purity was designed to sit miles away from the fight, the range he quoted was just absurd.

She'd keep him in the back for a bit while she scouted out whatever battlefield they'd pop out onto.

That was the main problem, really. Where this war would be happening. Skimming the binder had given her good guesses as to where Cauldron would decide to fight them, but nothing concrete.

None of their facilities were built for fighting in, not really, and it didn't seem likely that they'd fight them in one of their Case 53 prisons because they had to know that would put all of the monster capes in severe danger. Then again, they dropped their monster capes around the globe without any support for seemingly no reason, so maybe they didn't care too much about their safety. A prison of theirs could definitely be a viable battleground for them.

Other notable exceptions in the clones were few. It seemed the stronger the power, the more appropriately powerful the clones of it were, but it wasn't a tremendous difference in power.

One of Kaiser's clones could apparently control any piece of metal within a whole two block's radius with his mind, with incredible speed, force, and precision, according to himself, able to control thousands of pieces individually at the same time, doing different and varied tasks if necessary. Asked for 'Magnet' to be his name.

Incredibly powerful considering he could be a perfect safety blanket against any rockets and bullets. She really wanted to keep him alive.

They'd give him a pile of ball bearings, bayonets, and grenades to control, and he would be a tremendous obstacle for Cauldron to overwhelm them. Especially since most metal-based gear would be useless within his range.

Another notable exception was one of Oni Lee's clones, designated 'Baku', who claimed he could devour someone's memories, physical and mental, with a firm touch, and then use them like fuel to make himself faster, stronger, and able to defy physics to varying degrees, rendering his target a memory-bereft mental toddler in the process. The person technically didn't die, but they would have to experience the world all over again from nothing.

It seemed like a power with a faint theme of escalation, like Lung's, since he could buff himself into a stronger Brute, get more memories to burn by jumping on people, and then keep going, amping up and up. The only difference was the finality of his power. It didn't escalate so much as it required fuel to burn to give him power. He would have to manage the memories he'd consumed because they were a scarce, finite resource.

Interesting, horrifying, but its usefulness was uncertain as of yet.

Purity's clones had only one outlier, a woman who asked to be called 'Hardlight', and who could create constructs made of 'hardened, solid light'. It came in the form of near-weightless armour, weapons, and even golems, though their intelligence started and ended at 'kill thing, hold thing still, pick up thing, put thing down'.

The rest were either different expressions of Blaster powers, or simply put better versions of Purity herself.

Aside from reading up on the outliers of the clones that she would need to keep in mind and ruminating on possibilities of what environment they'd end up in, she also had been forced to wait an hour or two to confirm Accord's plan, and adjust it to her abilities and judgement, which had delayed them considerably.

It was not the plan she had requested from him, but more of a commander's squad split. What cape to go with what cape, how to split up the entire roster into proper teams that could make up for each other's weaknesses, and general advice without swamping their heads with scenarios. A wiser approach.

He had apparently judged that he could not actually do much for a battle plan with such little information as they had on where it would happen and who the enemies would be, so he focused on something more practical. A good call. The teams had been mixed up and arranged accordingly, and given specific guidelines and battle plans to follow, each, allowing Taylor to focus on fighting Cauldron's biggest trump cards, as their main powerhouse.

Battle speculation aside… she'd prepared contingencies for those she had to support, as well, in case she died. Or rather, Coil had done so for her, assuming correctly that she'd like it.

Assault, and Battery would not be left out in the cold, and neither would her retainer girls, nor Amy, of course, in the somewhat likely chance she died.

It was the least she could do.

Eventually, everything was in place by the time she slid into her place in the convoy, the very front, her spine tingling and trying to curl like a snake before a strike.

With a single, terse 'Go', spoken into a handheld radio inside one of their armoured trucks, the mobilisation began.

Two hundred of her soldiers, Mastered and not, well-trained and organised. Seven hundred Mastered grunts, lowlives from the gangs, mere cannon fodder, armed to the absolute teeth, guided more by sheer fanaticism for Nexus than brains or training, tailing in the back in their own vehicles and trucks.

The Empire's capes in their entirety, the ABB, thirteen total clones of Purity, thirteen total clones of Oni Lee, ten Lung clones, ten clones of Kaiser for crowd and terrain control, one of Heartbreaker's clones, the one who could Master someone the fastest and most accurately to flip a fight on a dime, and finally, Lisa and Coil, grouped up with Noelle in the back.

The retainer girls, the Travellers, Amy and Blasto were to all turtle up with one hundred of her men in the base and wait. The rest were to fight with her.

Noelle would be coming with them in the fight, unfortunately. She couldn't afford to leave her behind with the knowledge that someone might pop open a portal and torch her to atoms within a couple seconds, without any substantial backup left behind to protect her. It would make her life infinitely harder going forward, and it would not only put Noelle in extra danger, it would also put everyone she put around Noelle in grave danger as well.

So, much as she hated it, she was coming with them. A useful contingency as well, if Cauldron tried to grind them down through numbers, because she could just order Noelle to turtle up and start spewing clones left and right, so long as Heartbreaker's clone was still alive and with them.

She focused on the movement of their troops on a tablet, while Lisa focused on the outside world, notifying her from the back seat, crammed between two soldiers peeking out of the windows, warily.

Their rescue of the Gray Boy victims had completely taken over the news, country wide, while they had been busy getting ready for this. To her surprise, only about half of the news stations tried to hide who did it by classifying them as 'rogue parahumans'. The internet at large knew, and a couple of the far smaller news stations were brave enough to outright name them in their headlines, so that narrative was bound to collapse by tomorrow, and everyone would have to admit who did it to preserve some kind of sense of integrity.

By the end of the week, the whole country would know they were the ones responsible. More confusion for the public who had come to see them as villains.

Good news was always to be paired with bad news, unfortunately.

As the humvee rumbled down a bouncy, run-down street leading out of Brockton and winding around to pass one of the hidden tunnels that led to their base, Lisa showed her the new additions to the Kill List, the government's unofficial bounty board.

She could not do anything but sigh as her eyes slid over the website on display.

So the Director's meetings had been about Kill Orders, to some extent. It could have been about more things, but Kill Orders were included, obviously.

The number of them, and their excessiveness, was what frustrated her.

This was no longer going to be a war against Cauldron alone, but also a tide of bounty hunters, and the PRT itself.

Sure, they could try to keep amicable relationships with the PRT. She would even be willing, had they only given a Kill Order to someone immaterial like Summoner who didn't truly exist, but not while they were claiming open season on fucking children that just happened to want to hide under her wing.

Specifically, a child by the name of Amy Dallon.

Kill Order, starting bounty of fifty million dollars.

Jack Slash's starting bounty had been two million, and even now, it was only at seventy because of the American people and the government itself, who tended to sprinkle in an additional million every couple years.

The bounties were raised through a mixture of people donating to bounty funds, and the government adding its own money if they really wanted someone gone, but fifty million for Amy, right out of the bat?

That was fucking ridiculous, especially because Amy hadn't done anything wrong.

It also meant that Carol Dallon did as Amy predicted. She went to the PRT and told them what Amy was capable of. Or perhaps they'd known all along.

Regardless, the PRT knowing about Amy's power was the only explanation for that ridiculously high bounty. Fifty million was chump change to the government if it meant they could prevent Nexus from having access to biotinker plagues, so she understood why they did this.

It still did not lessen her frustration.

She saves people, she gives the PRT an out for one of their longest term fuck-ups in the form of the Nine and their inability to do anything about the bastards, she gives them upward of three hundred potential recruits out of it as well, and this is how she is repaid.

Kill Orders the very next day.

The problem of dealing with overconfident government bureaucracies instead of people. Maybe Lisa was right. She should probably just take over the entire fucking government and be done with it. Maybe she was not the best pick for governing two hundred and fifty million people, but at least she wasn't going to reward altruism with fucking execution orders.

Coil had replaced Amy's guards for this trip with only Mastered soldiers, for extra safety. Fifty million was too much to trust to normal mercenaries who could easily try to cash the bounty in themselves.

The other Kill Orders were not as absurd, but certainly far more unexpected and just as infuriating.

Lung, Kill Order, starting bounty of one million.

Kaiser, Kill Order, the exact same.

Summoner, Kill Order, starting bounty of ten million.

More likely than not, it was Cauldron pulling strings in the PRT to push for idiotic decisions, though she honestly could not say that the PRT would not do something so stupid without Cauldron. They tried to break the Truce, after all, all on their own.

What these bounties meant was that all the rogue bounty hunters crashing around their side of the coastline for Heartstopper would likely switch targets and make a beeline for Brockton.

Another small crisis to take care of in the background, once they were done with Cauldron. If they were done with Cauldron.

No further urgent developments, as far as Lisa claimed.

Accord was resting, Blasto and his supplies as well as the lab equipment for him and Amy, were already loaded onto the trucks behind them, and Coil was paying ultra premium prices to get started on illegally wiring internet and landlines into their base.

For now, it was more of a fort.

The National Guard was an annoyance, as she expected.

Their convoy didn't try to attract attention, but they had trucks and vehicles made for war, oftentimes bought directly off the military's surplus and refitted to withstand Parahumans to some extent or another, painted in all black and loaded to the brim with everything. It was difficult not to attract attention, even if it was five in the morning, even if they moved in crisp, orderly lines through the least populated parts of the city.

Her current convoy was the only one, and thus, its size was several streets long, starting from her in the front, tracing the line of the Docks, spilling down to trace around the vast, wide expanse of empty concrete in front of the warehouses. There had to be over a hundred and something vehicles. It was an all-out parade.

This route was out of sight of the main streets, perfectly wide enough for them to stay together in a relative huddle, but also very visible from across the Bay. All one would have to do is squint at the black shapes rumbling down the docks in the distance, either from The Rig or from Shantytown, and figure out that something big was up.

Behind her, was Noelle, trimmed down to the size of a small tree, loaded in a gigantic truck with the Tinkertech battery and surrounded by armoured jeeps.

Behind Noelle, a truck full of the original three Purity clones, and the other ten that Noelle had made while they rested. Their designations for now were just numbers until they settled on something.

If they got to settle on something. It was entirely possible nine out of ten people in this convoy would never return, even if they won. She was not willing to make such a sacrifice, but she was ready to make it.

Had Cauldron succeeded in their assassination attempt, all of this would crumble, and whatever remnants of Runeterra lingered on inside her mind and body would shatter and fade forever.

The old man who held the Summon core last, after all, was the only one who knew how to transfer it, and he and his memories were gone. She was the last possible holder of this thing. And the possible cataclysm that might happen were she to die was another concern. She had no idea what would happen. Not even Ryze knew. Technically, no holder of the Summon core had died, and she was only the third. 

If she died, these were the risks, not only to herself, but to Runeterra's legacy and Bet's survival.

That was without considering the possibly cataclysmic consequences of what might happen should the Summon core get in the wrong hands, or break with her.

Long story short, she could not afford to die here, no matter what happened, no matter how hard she might fail or how deep into despair she might crumble. There was still a world to save.

If necessary, she would run. She doubted it would be, though. They were lesser in numbers, but far superior in quality to Cauldron.

But that was for later. Now, every vehicle in the convoy was loaded with Parahumans and regular men armed to the teeth, from start to tail, and she was on high alert because they were just begging to be seen with the tactic they picked. Not like she had many good options there though. She didn't have a reason to assume that Cauldron wouldn't just open portals and pick off her convoys if they were small, sectioned things.

Their chosen strategy did make them radioactive in terms of attention, unfortunately.

Already, she had reports of many minor altercations happening when Lung and the Empire had begun to move in to group with her, while she and Lisa were resting.

So it was no surprise when the radio interceptor in the Hummer's cabin burst into life with static, just ten minutes into their ride.

"-ot an unmarked convoy, organised. All black, no sigils or signs. I see mil… ry trucks, humvees, jeeps, gun turrets, there's got to be a hundred vehicles in that thing, it's going down two entire streets. Requesting orders, I have visuals."

She stared banefully at the buzzing box, trying to will the answer that would return, to be the right one.

"Affirmative. Westbound Reed's street, correct?" A calm, bored voice replied.

"Correct."

"Any Parahumans on site?"

"Can't know, sir. This looks like Nexus. There's bound to be some."

"Do not engage. Escape on contact. Follow from afar, shadow them. Notify the PRT immediately, I will ensure the BBPD is aware of the situation."

"Roger."

With another buzz, the interceptor went quiet.

"Which direction?" She asked the driver, one of their best and better paid technicians.

He glanced down at the small screen attached to the bulky box embedded into the dash, eyes flicking between it and the road.

"West of us. Approximately a couple hundred yards. They must have seen us through one of the grid line streets."

She exhaled through her nose.

What the fuck was a 'yard', again? She'd long since forgotten.

Nevermind, she'd find them.

"Good work. Be right back."

She didn't have Evelynn, not anymore.

Thankfully, the need for subtlety at this point was zero.

She opened the door, and jumped out, switching to Syndra, the Dark Sovereign, mid-air.

She flew straight up in the air like a dark rocket, and switched to the Rune of Precision, flicking her wrist to slam the car door shut behind her.

Hovering in the air, her dark glare swept through the streets, latching onto movement.

Eyes, a couple cell phones from the early risers. People walking around, obliviously. A cat on a windowsill a mile away, staring at her.

She moved to the left of her massive convoy, moving to the direction of the apparent signal.

It didn't take long. Two roads away, parallel to them, a small group of three military jeeps were breaking traffic laws to keep up with them, flanked by a police car silently flashing its lights without the sirens.

She dropped like a diving hawk, low enough for the first jeep driver to look her in the eye, and stopped her descent a couple feet off the floor, glaring at the driver.

He slammed on the brakes with an irritating screech, the car sliding five feet before jerking to a stop at her shin, the ones following panicking to do the same.

The jeep behind bumped the one in the front.

Without a word, she extended a hand, and grasped all of them in dark, black-purple energy, a malevolent aura.

A flick of her wrist had all the doors of their vehicles ripped off, discarded in the street. Like statues, still in their seated positions, she ripped them out of the cars, holding them midair.

Her second hand extended, grasped the vehicles tighter, then tightened into a fist.

With a horrid screech, the vehicles crumpled into sparking balls of steel, their oils and gas splattering everywhere as their gas tanks and oils burst, splattering everywhere for a mute moment, before they burst into flames with a harsh burst of air and a sharp 'thwoom'.

Pulling the men away from the blaze, she dragged the driver of the first jeep close to her, his hands still tight around the steering wheel she'd ripped out alongside him, staring at her with naked horror in his eyes.

"Try and follow us, whether it's through land or sky, and we will annihilate you. Keep your eyes on your own affairs. This is your last warning. Relay this to your superiors, and anyone you're in contact with, PRT included. Understand? We're busy, and neither you nor any innocent civillians are a part of this, so stay out of it."

She let go of his head, and he remained stock still, staring in stoic, frozen silence.

"Nod." She snarled, squeezing his chest a little, and he choked, eyes bulging as he jerked his head up and down in vehement nods.

"Good. Tell the PRT too."

He nodded again, a strange wheeze in his throat tickling her ears.

She let go of all of them, allowing them to drop to the ground, unharmed aside from sore butts, and zipped up into the sky, switching to the Rune of Domination to pinpoint Lisa's location through the Ultimate Hunter rune.

Flying back into the car, she settled into her seat before pushing Syndra away, and yanking the door shut.

"Taken care of?" Lisa asked.

"Yes."

"Good. We've got a couple drones launching off the PRT HQ. Do you want to chat with Dragon, or do we just have Purity shoot them down?"

Neither.

But she had to, didn't she?

With another growling sigh, she flung the door open again, and picked Syndra again, just to get some height, before switching to Quinn, Demacia's Wings.

It was far less tiring to fly when it was as organic as just having a gigantic blue eagle carry you around, and she would need every last bit of her stamina.

She'd have liked to have picked Quinn's 'legend' sooner, frankly. She missed Valor a lot.

It was not the time for sentimentality, however.

His claws, hooked into her harness, tightened, and she watched through both their eyes, a conjoined soul now, as he flapped his wings with all his might, scattering trash below in the streets and rustling the trees, a graceful ascent against the rising sun.

Valor's eyes were always far sharper than Quinn's, and with the Rune of Precision, that was taken to the next level.

She could see the drones, miles away, flying full tilt towards them.

Dragon had stationed drones here in Brockton Bay, huh?

Was it a request from Armsmaster, or her personal way to get to talk to Jarvan without her initiating the conversation?

Regardless, she flew straight towards them, straightening herself into a plank position, Valor's claws adjusting lower on her harness as he flattened his chest to her back, and sped up.

Just to go faster, she picked the Rune of Domination, the physical boost and Relentless Hunter almost doubling their speed, Valor's wings a blur that sent roof antennas below rattling and swaying as they tore through the sky like a swerving jet.

In just a few seconds, they were close enough for Valor to lean back and flap against his own momentum, and she let her core muscles relax, pressing two mechanical buttons at her waist so that Valor's handles would slide back up her spine, all the way up to her shoulders, allowing her to hang down with a semblance of grace.

One of the drones went to them, the other moved past them, trying to follow the convoy.

She side-eyed the fleeing drone for only a moment before deciding what to do about it. A quick switch to the Rune of Inspiration, and she immediately cast Minion Dematerializer on it.

With a strange, spiralling twist of space, and a crisp, loud pop, it vanished out of existence entirely, scattered into sub-particles.

She raised her hand at the approaching drone, a greeting of sorts, and when it was a mere dozen feet away, she pointed to the roof below.

"Executioner needs to talk to you. Now. "

The drone regarded her for a moment, then turned its fans off to drop like a rock.

She unlatched her claws from the harness, and Quinn dropped too.

It was so odd to watch herself fall from Valor's perspective above, while at the same time experiencing said drop through Quinn.

A moment before impact, she changed into Jarvan, half-crouched from the impact that likely woke up any poor bastard on the floor under her feet, and straightened to look at the hovering drone.

"Hi. Do not follow us. Do not even attempt to look at us or track us. This is not negotiation or a threat, this is a warning. We will respond with lethal force if you continue to try. No, we will not elaborate or tell you why, beyond clarifying that we're not taking any offensive actions against anyone you know or care about. Your Kill Orders haven't been a help to how charitable we feel toward your intentions." She emphasized, glaring at the drone. "We will contact you when we're clear and able to resume amicable communications. Any heroes sent to confront, track, or interfere with our convoy in any manner will be incapacitated at first, and if you keep sending more, we're simply going to kill them . " She continued.

"This is not a threat to you or any innocent civilians. I reiterate, again . The situation does not concern you in the slightest, nor does it concern anyone you care about, both you specifically, as well as the PRT and The Guild as well. Steer clear until we reach out to let you know we're taking the spikes down. Take your drones back before we destroy them too, because we will, and I wager these cost a fortune. Goodbye for now." She said, then paused, as she realized this might actually be the last time she spoke to Dragon. There was no guarantee she'd survive this. A high likelihood, yes, but no guarantee.

With a slight moment of visible hesitation, she set her jaw.

"And for the record, just between the two of us, if we never talk again; I quite liked you, despite our scuffle in the factories. You're a great hero. A good woman. Don't let this cesspit of a world beat you down." She said, allowing her aggressive demeanor to relax a little. "Now leave, before I have to ruin more of your work for nothing. And as a parting statement… something's wrong with Armsmaster. Be very wary of him, especially when it pertains to your… special circumstances. And biology, or lack of it."

The drone reeled back, as if a biological reaction of shock, before quickly zipping back forward, practically touching her nose, wordlessly demanding answers.

The drone, equipped with neither a screen nor a speaker, apparently, just stared at her for a solid five seconds, before it backed up in defeat, bobbed up and down in a facsimile of a nod, turned, and sped away with a whirr.

That settled, she dove off the side of the building and switched back to Quinn and Valor, rattling the windows below with gusts of wind as she flew over the rooftops, Valor's monstrously large form dwarfing her own, his wingspan at an impressive twenty feet.

Valor swooped down to the car, hanging her down, and she climbed in through the window, settling down before switching back to herself.

"Any other problems?" She asked, eyeing the mirror between the seats to look at Lisa.

Lisa frowned.

"That remains to be seen, but for now, no."

She settled back in her seat.

The ensuing ride to the edge of the city, then out of sight, behind the gigantic hill that formed the Trainyards and Captain's hill, was almost suspiciously quiet.

No police cars neared, the radios were silent, and despite the paranoia present, not a single car but their own was on the side street they'd taken. No witnesses, nothing in the sky, no radio chatter, and yet, somehow, she felt watched.

She knew to trust her instincts. Cauldron was definitely watching her.

Judging by the silence, the easy way they allowed them to group and get to their destination, they wanted them to group up, and make a frontal assault.

Confident that they could defeat them all, naturally. There were only so many ways one could assault an interdimensional conspiracy cabal, after all. They knew her approach would be up-front.

Everyone here was going to walk into a trap, she knew that.

But Cauldron did not know what she could do. They thought they did, because until now, she'd been using nothing but the bottom of the barrel, as far as powerful Legends went.

She'd been destroying herself since she got out of the asylum, working herself to the edge of exhaustion with every opportunity. Her soul had been on a near continual loop of tearing itself open on the summon core's sharp edges, healing, then repeating, growing tougher for every second of pain she endured.

She might not be able to go full out, not even close, but she could give them a taste of what Runeterra could muster.

They made it to the secret entrance, without further reports of interference or following. Their drones whirred around above the convoy, looking out for stragglers who might have witnessed the whole thing.

There was a single driver in a car that had seen them, and one of her men on a motorcycle was in the process of dragging the man out of his car and threatening silence from him in the form of a gun barrel to the face, his growled commands coming out of the earpiece on her right ear as she shifted through the channels with her tablet.

But aside from that one witness? Nothing. As far as the PRT was concerned, their convoy peacefully left the city, then vanished into complete thin air after taking a turn into a copse of trees just off the highway.

They even made sure Dragon's satellite was not in the right place in its orbit to track them from above.

The driver slowed before one of Captain Hill's few steep edges, a ten foot wall of branches and bushes.

A black figure squirmed out through the shrubbery, and flashed a signal at them with a flashlight.

The driver flashed back another series of lights. Morse code, most likely, which she had yet to learn.

The figure disappeared into the shrubbery.

A minute later, the tree branches and bushes groaned, the faint rumble of a winch coming out of the thicket, and various steel cables painted and treated to look like vines pulled taught, pulling the hurried, makeshift door wide open, the sound of snapping branches and rustling greenery almost louder than the idle rumble of the entire convoy.

A few seconds later, all that was ahead of them was a massive, squared tunnel, framed by leaves.

The convoy slid into the tunnel, headlights bouncing off dark figures jogging in the corners, armed and loaded with supplies, laying down wires and setting up haphazard rows of antennas along the length of the tunnel, sensors, remotely detonated explosives, just in case they needed to collapse a few tunnels.

The tunnel eventually ended, almost without visual warning, and an endless stretch of darkness with a flat rock floor greeted them, nothing but vague suggestions of a shape visible, speckled throughout the purgatory-like space.

The convoy kept driving straight, until the shapes slowly became easier to see, paired by a thousand orbs in the dark, glinting dark green and moving erratically, almost like spiders, half-crouched.

The shapes sharpened, gradually. Lines of hasty sandbag barriers, rows of night vision goggles as her men set up last minute defences, pilled up ammunition, and the blocky shapes of mobile barriers, all set up in the center with small gaps in between them, an encampment on flat ground.

Armoured vehicles filled the perimeter as cover while deeper into the circle, the transport vehicles slowly moved through the chaos, turned, and drove down the ramp to the floor below to guard the tinkertech battery, the ramp covered in oil and burned rubber by now.

Their convoy joined the encampment, a brick sliding into a wall. Armoured vehicles like hers turned around, and formed another defensive line, while everything else moved into the lower floor, with all the capes that wouldn't be joining them, but needed to stay safe anyway.

The driver parked, eventually, and the moment the engine turned off, they all got out.

Their technicians and non-combat personnel walked off to the encampment and their commanding officers, while every cape and soldier followed her as she started walking past the encampment, to the far left wall.

She was stopped by a technician waving at her as he sprinted out of the encampment, trying to get her attention.

She paused, and turned to stare at him impatiently.

"Ma'am! We figured out what the battery does! Someone flipped one of its switches by accident while moving it!" He called out, and she paused in surprise, her impatience fading for intrigue. "It remotely powers everything. And it doesn't fry anything, somehow. We don't even need wires or batteries, look!" He called, still two dozen feet away, and pointed to the very few active lights in the encampment.

She couldn't see much from so far and in such darkness, so she pulled her phone out.

One hundred percent charge.

It was at eighty six when she entered the tunnel.

"Good work! Don't touch anything else!" She called back, pocketing the phone, and started her march into the darkness once more.

She could dwell on the uses and implications of such a thing later.

It took a few minutes to get there, but eventually, the dim nothingness slowly took the form of an imposing wall, a hundred-plus feet tall, the faint outline of a ceiling reflecting faint speckles of light from their lights.

She turned around, faced by a wall of faces and masks, familiar and not, canny and uncanny, people slowly shuffling to form a semi-circle around her.

The entirety of the Empire, appearing somewhere between excited and bored, excluding Alabaster, due to his importance to a later plot she had him ready for. Bakuda, grinning at her, Oni Lee, in his usual dead-eyed state, Lung beside them. The gangs were going to be going in last, Lung excluded. The first ones to go into the fray would be the clones, not because they were lesser, but because they had literally been created for this.

The soldiers were dressed in all black, as usual, in military gear. The gangster cannon fodder were dressed much more… scrappily, and much less practically, but in black all the same.

The capes without a costume of their own were dressed in the same gear as the soldiers, except painted a thick red, with ballistic masks instead of visors, and a symbol on their chest and back to dilleniate whose clone they were. White star for Purity, a black pair of horns for Lung, a white sword for Kaiser, and a hooded figure overlapped by another in black, for Oni Lee clones.

It wasn't perfect, but it was what they could come up with in such a short timeframe.

"You all know what to do. Realistically, not all of us will return. Judging by what me and Insight know of Cauldron's capabilities and forces, it is not unlikely that most of us won't. If you realize you're about to die, try and make it count. Your families, for whatever few of you have those, will be taken care of if we win but you die. That is all. Begin." She finished, and stepped to the side, hands behind her back as she walked, and walked, and walked, making enough room for what was to come.

Everyone mimicked her, except the Lung squad, and the man himself.

They walked into the free space, stretching, cracking their knuckles, preparing themselves. Those with shapeshifting aspects shed their shirts, kicked off their shoes. Those without, made room, and adjusted their gear.

Everyone else took position, opposite them.

The Lung clones eyed each other with a palpable scent of bloodlust in the air, buzzing with anticipation.

"Go." She commanded, and they did.

The darkness vanished, replaced by a roaring cascade of flame, thunder, and zipping figures. Steam erupted from the moist air, the sound of gunfire echoed off the walls like cannon shots in an endless barrage of flashing lights, swords and spears of steel piercing flesh.

Meaty thuds shook the ground with every impact of flesh on flesh, bones cracked with the sound of trees tearing in half.

A lizard-like figure zipped in one direction within the flashing chaos, then the next, and tackled an elongated man covered in bony spikes, jaws tearing open on the claws, claws tearing and snapping against scale.

Lung threw the lightning focused clone of his to the ground, and was then dragged down himself in a frenzied wrestle.

Roars of fury followed as Red begun to pummel Komodo, and the pure pyrokinetic Lung clone opted to blast away three others to make room for himself, backpedalling like a rocket, flame coming out of his feet like jet engines.

Everyone quickly backpedalled as the roaring heat boiled their eyes, as within seconds, the cloud of chaos broke its containment, bladed tails and half-formed monsters senselessly thrown about as if to kill each other.

She didn't move, letting the adrenaline begin to crawl through her bloodstream, letting that buzzing sense of danger coil tight around her mind and squeeze like a lemon.

She would need it.

Ten seconds passed, the gunfire slowly petering off as the Lung squad escalated and the guns ceased to be a threat, but now a simple waste, the berth she and her men gave the brawl widening considerably with every passing second.

Twenty seconds passed.

Thirty seconds passed, and only their strongest Pyrokinetic and a brute with a strengthening forcefield were even vaguely human, mere shapes struggling not to be crushed by roaring giants.

A silver serpent, short and thick and stocky, deafening them with blasts screaming lightning as he clashed with Lung on the floor, who was twenty feet tall at the shoulders and was growing his fourth arm. Komodo split, again, the four truck-sized, gunmetal gray-coloured lizards beating Red into the floor turning malleable for only a moment, before pulling to either side like a splitting cell, leaving eight to surround Red's hideous form.

Red let out a howl that made her spine curl and shiver, and scattered the pile on him with a movement so quick it snapped at the air like a whip, ruffling her hair from dozens of feet away.

She only caught a glimpse of something resembling a red urchin crossed with a lizard and a gorilla, ten feet tall at the shoulders and thirty from maw to tail, before it blurred forward, shattering the reinforced floor as it tackled one of Lung's clones, another half-dragon covered in blue flame, tearing its arms off in a quick motion before visibly restraining itself to return to its fight with Komodo's clones. He was quickly buried in another mountain of flesh and teeth.

Slowly, the distance between everyone else and the brawl widened, to one hundred feet, two hundred, three hundred.

Bits of debris would sometimes shoot past them like bullets, deflected by timely metal barriers put up by one of Kaiser's clones, sitting just as proudly still as his original.

Thirty seconds passed.

Lung's second set of wings burst out of his back. His lightning equivalent grew a third spear-tipped tail, and gutted him for the third time, intestines spilling, then pulling themselves back in like sentient ropes.

The blue-flamed version of Lung joined Komodo's fight against Red, seeing that Red had ceased to escalate, Komodo no longer a threat, despite his sixteen copies barely letting him so much as throw a punch without being buried into the floor.

Thirteen was a whistling blur, his scaly underside only seen in brief flashes far above them all as he dove like a falcon to toss a ball of exploding plasma with increasingly devastating explosions, before he swerved in turns too tight to fathom, and vanished into the darkness behind them all again in the blink of an eye.

"How much more!?" Lisa screamed in her ringing ear to be heard over the chaos, shockwaves and lightning breaths colliding with white plasma lighting up the entire cave with blinding intensity, the reinforced rock smoking and slowly starting to glow a faint orange from the heat above and below them.

"Thirty seconds!" She screamed back, leaning to the side but not taking her eyes off the carnage.

"Will the place be able to take it!? We're going to be buried at this rate!" Lisa screamed back, a hand cupped up to her ear.

A blast of flame from the pyrokinetic swallowed the entire fight as if to emphasize, a cone of orange-blue flame that flared fifty feet high, then squeezed itself into a tight, pressured stream, as if controlled by a faucet.

The thin laser of flame corrected after a slight bit of flailing at nothing, and then slammed into Red, and punted him like a golf ball, the spinning shape of spikes and teeth bouncing on the concrete once, twice, then slamming into the far, far wall.

Red bounced off the wall, unhurt, four long, spiked arms tearing gouges into the concrete as he blurred back into the fight with a gaping, smoking hole in his chest, crossing a hundred-something feet in the blink of an eye, tackling a Komodo clone.

To her immense shock, he just ripped the lizard's head off. Completely, in one motion.

He was shortly restrained by six more, and the pyrokinetic took the time to blow flames out of his feet and run away, continuing to throw precise, superheated jets of fire at Red.

Forty seconds passed.

Lung's lightning equivalent was starting to equalise his fight against the original Lung, two dozen feet to the left, locked in their own duel. The lightning breaths tore Lung apart and kept tossing him back like a ragdoll, and though smaller, he seemed both tougher, and stronger.

Lung regenerated faster, unfortunately. He was not winning, but he wasn't exactly losing either. A stalemate.

Fifty seconds.

A minute passed, mercilessly, no pause in sight. 

Two minutes passed, and she switched to Syndra, floating to the wall, above the explosions, the shockwaves, the deafening cracks of lightning that were pinning the original Lung to the wall. 

Red was starting to worry her a lot. His struggles against Komodo's clones, now thirty of them, turned from beatings to maulings. Limbs flew, blood flowed, and two clones were torn to shreds like they were merely red jelly, turning to ashes that scattered in the shockwaves.

It seemed more luck than anything, that he hadn't grabbed Komodo himself instead of one of his duplicates. He was going to kill him, at this rate.

"Pyro!" She boomed, projecting her voice, injected with mana.

The pyrokinetic, nameless, took a moment to realize she was probably calling him, and glanced up at her.

"Pin Red to the wall, now! Everyone else, I'm starting. Be careful!" She boomed.

Red was slowly losing control, and she could see him shaking and seizing at times, struggling not to kill more of Komodo's lizards, but he was not succeeding.

The fighting didn't stop, but they had the presence of mind left in them to stay away from her as she saw Lung grow a second tail, a third pair of wings. He towered over his lightning-themed brother, at twenty-something feet tall, the other only fifteen or so.

The newly dubbed 'Pyro' did as asked, and a flash of flame slammed Red into the far wall, again, leaving rainbow spots dancing in her eyes from the sheer brightness.

The pyrokinetic was the most horrifying in terms of power, ironically enough. She had underestimated him.

He was holding back, severely, but the arm-thick pillar of pure white flame that he shot into Red was somehow twisting mid-air and turning to follow Red and force him back to the wall, torching through him like a welding arc through paper, keeping him back from the fight, with seemingly little effort.

Three of Lung's similar, but lesser versions, each fifteen feet tall or so and varying degrees of draconic, joined up together to fight Komodo's horde behind her as she descended, the air singing her lungs and boiling her eyes.

'Thirteen' peppered the fight's outskirts with smaller blasts from the back, slowly pushing the chaos away from her.

She hovered, the molten floor below her burning her skin from the heat it radiated.

She readied herself to switch to Bard, the Wandering Caretaker, but did not take the plunge yet, hesitating minutely.

The only Legend who had done something as audacious as to simply enter the Summon core out of his own volition, without permission nor his death, remaining hidden, discovered only after Ryze had taken up its power, and its duty.

It was for that reason, that she knew very little about him. She hadn't lived his life. She had seen fragments of it, enough to understand him, but never enough to drive her mad, never enough to understand the full scope of his goals, his purpose, his power.

Never enough to understand why or how he snuck into the Summon Core. He was supposed to be a collector of powerful magical items, not be a part of them.

She also didn't know the full scope of his abilities. Neither Ryze nor the old man in robes had ever known for sure. All they knew was that he was older than the Astral Realm, and had been the only one that Aurelion Sol had regarded as somewhat of an equal.

Which was saying something considering Aurelion Sol was the creator of every star in the universe of Runeterra, and the reason planets or humans ever even existed in the first place, even if it was a sheer accident.

Point was, Bard was an outlier, a force she knew little about, and thus, he made her wary.

But she didn't want to pick Kassadin for this.

Using Legends with Void origins made her nervous, paranoid that that nightmare would somehow leap out of her skin to infect this world as well. Rek'Sai, Kha'Zix, Kai'Sa and Kassadin were four Legends too many with Void connections. They had no corruptive power, so she understood why they were included, but they made her twitchy.

So, she took a risk. Bard.

Another series of explosions blew her hair in every direction, her eardrums pinging with pain. She didn't let it distract her.

Bard being a mystery wasn't exclusive to mortals. Not even her memories of other celestial beings had much to say about him.

A seeming agent of serendipity who fought to maintain a balance where life could endure the indifference of chaos, the stillness of oblivion. Many Runeterrans used to sing songs that pondered his nature, yet they all agreed that the cosmic vagabond, a creature from beyond the mortal realm, yet even further from the Astral One, was drawn to artefacts of great magical power, for some purpose that neither she nor Runeterra's residents could ever figure out.

Surrounded by a jubilant choir of helpful spirit meeps, it was always impossible to mistake his actions as malevolent, as Bard always served the greater good… but nobody ever really knew what exactly that was, in his mind.

Another second or two of hesitation.

She had a bad feeling about this.

Red's enraged screech that rattled her brain in her skull reminded her that she was on a deadline here, and so, she took the plunge, and picked him.

Instantly, an overwhelming tide of compassion and calmness flooded her mind, a jovial, calming tune, a song.

She looked down at her hand, floating in place. Had she a face, she'd be smiling serenely right now.

The fight continued below her. How playful!

She paused.

That was not her thought.

She clenched her hand into a fist, unclenched it.

This was fine. She had control, still. The degree of influence was alarming, but that was the price of pulling out the most powerful Legends in her arsenal. Their soul was not a mote of light, but a star, and she could easily be burned by it while her own soul was so weak.

Pulling at the latent power inside the legend, she reached towards the wall, pulling Alexandria to the very forefront of her mind, her essence and soul, an astral tether gently curling around the concept of the woman, everything she is, was, and will be.

A golden circle flared to life on the rock, a hundred feet tall and wide, beautiful as the mortal mind could understand.

Just as she was about to gently prod the cosmos, space and time to twist itself, handle its nature, to beseech primordial essence to twist and allow her to pass through with her allies, a cosmic tunnel crossing dimensions uncountable, her hand, gently opening and pushing her essence out into her oncoming creation, stopped without her prompting.

She felt her mind and body separate, then her body separate from itself as her mind did the same, and in the blink of an eye, she was powerless.

A familiar passenger slid into the empty space between, and she felt her mind curdle like milk as she tried to move the body she inhabited, but couldn't.

The hand before her gently closed its padded fingers without her prompting, and though her body had no reaction, her mind choked in horror.

She tried to move, cast a spell, do anything, switch Legends. She could not.

She was a prisoner in the body of a celestial being, a spectator, just like she had been for thousands of years, hundreds of lives.

Fear speared through her soul, barbed and cold and sharp.

No.

Not again.

Not again-

The hand stretched, then the fingers curled into a pose as if about to flick something away. Bard's arm curled- no, Bard himself, moved the hand towards his own mask, and as her heart sank into the utter depths of despair, he flicked his own mask, where the forehead would be.

A prick of pain shot through her mind like the sting of a rubber ring, paired with gentle reprimand, and though the message was not verbal, nor written, it was clear in her mind all the same, like an intrusive thought.

Not yet.

And with that, she flickered back to Syndra, floating in place, hand in front of her face.

She could feel again.

She moved, flew from side to side erratically, stared around her incredulously at the chaos below, clenched and unclenched her fist, wide eyed and breathing hard, almost hyperventilating.

She was back.

Her eyes caught Red below, dangerously close to the rest of the Lung clones and mindlessly roaring enough to shake the entire base, only held back by Pyro's blinding rays of white flame, and she physically slapped herself to focus, trying to somehow ignore the fact a literal god was alive and sentient inside her fucking chest-

She slapped herself again, blinked rapidly at the wall behind her, and pushed it aside.

She'd have time to unpack all that later, no matter how world-shattering the realization was that she was not alone, she was not the only one left from Runeterra. She was not alone.

But her company was a god, not an echo, a living, breathing god, and right now, she was an ant.

Focus, for fuck's sake. War is unfolding at your command, she snarled to herself internally, trying to channel Swain into the thought.

It worked, a bit. She compartmentalised the fear and joy, and closed it away for later.

Now was not the time for this.

So, with Bard out of the picture and no other option left for something like this, she picked Kassadin, and drew her blade, descending.

"Cease fighting!" She boomed through her respirator, and everyone except Red and Pyro stopped over the course of a few seconds. Red still kept coming, fighting against a winding tide of white flame pillars pushing him away as he thrashed, charred down to the bone but still fighting and regenerating ceaselessly, roaring.

Komodo had doubled again. Sixty giant lizards of varying sizes and injury flanked her, an entire pack of monsters.

Her feet touched the floor, half-melted, and slowly, she moved her blade forward.

Her mind pushed the concept of space into the artefact, the fabric of reality.

Her blade sunk into nothing, its winding purple blade vanishing as she moved it forward.

A sound like a whistle came, the blade vibrating.

With a deep breath, she did much the same as she had with Bard.

Thinking of Alexandria, she reached for the immediate space around her, and with a grunt of effort, heaved the blade to the side.

A whispering howl rattled her bones, injected her blood with ice, and filled the cavern, drowning out Red's rabid snarls and Pyro's roaring flames with ease.

Air howled, sucked into the crack in reality, trying to suck her into space's wound.

She dug her feet, and walked, dragging the blade through a twisting, glimmering expanse of nothing. Space squirmed like a living serpent, half-awake.

The howl changed pitch, a low keen, air screaming as it was sucked into the space between worlds, the space between existence and oblivion.

She kept walking, ten, thirty, forty feet, then she stopped, before flying back to the middle of the wound, trying not to stare too deeply into the incision, the colours that man was never meant to see squirming into her eye sockets like hungry maggots.

It was nothing more than a flashing, squirming line in space, right now, but still. Staring too deeply into an abyss only tended to bring forth madness.

So she didn't, she simply stabbed into the middle of the wound, and flew straight up, dragging her sword up mercilessly, another forty feet, straight up.

She dropped back down once she was done, and stabbed into the focal point of the two lines.

Something flashed through her sword, a vibration of sorts, and poured into her mind.

A twisting space, a mind-rending twist of space and infinity, stretching out around her, overtaking her vision.

She clutched that infinity in the bloodied gauntlets of her mind, and stretched it out, a rope, reaching for the space around Alexandria.

A twist of her sword, and a mental order, her mana grabbing at the edges of the wound like hooked claws, and pulling, flaying the fabric of space off reality, sinking it into the in-between, stretching the skin into a tarp, a tunnel.

The thin lines deepened, sucked into a purple-tinted vortex, and like a tapestry, the stone wall of their base peeled back with a tortured groan, revealing a maddening swirl of flashing purple lights.

The lights pulled aside, and space adjusted.

A triangular portal lay ahead of her, forty feet wide at the base and forty tall, the edges flashing and squirming in a sickening purple hue, something like smoke being perpetually pulled into the other side, the squirming insides of a shifting beast.

And the other side revealed itself as the tunnel finally finished its twists and turns, straightening, clearing, compressing and thinning into a small outline of wounded space.

She only saw a hurried image of a line of monstrous capes, set into a firing line while Alexandria floated above them, set up a hundred or so feet from the portal, before Alexandria barked out 'fire!'.

A small square portal opened in front of the Case 53's, and she recognized the barrel instantly as it lit up in a familiar white light.

Instantly, a wall of metal swords rose in front of her, then a wall of spears, then a wall of flat, thick metal plates, then spikes, then flat, circular pillars, then stone, then shining crystal.

The benefit of having eleven Kaisers.

She switched, just to be safe, into Leona, shining like a star, brimming with stored energy.

"Red, go!" She called.

She heard a roar behind her, and braced for what would no doubt be one of the harder fights she'd endure, that wouldn't involve Endbringers.

Deep in the Bay's still, cold waters, a skeleton's fleshless, sharp-toothed grin inexplicably widened.

War began his march, through the silt and gravel, through the docks, through the open streets. 

For the first shot had just been fired.

His march quickened, to a sprint, a run, and he simply followed the sound, as always and forever.

Notes:

Writing Cauldron is so fucking hard, man. GRRRRR. I FEEL LIKE I KNOW THEM BUT EVERYONE IN THIS ENTIRE FANDOM DISAGREES ON WHAT THEY'RE LIKE AND HOW THEY'RE WRITTEN SO IM JUST KIND WINGING IT AND HOPING IT'S MILDLY ACCURATE. FUAAARK

Anyway.

I'm going to enjoy the fight scene writing, but it's going to be a long one, so u get a cliffhanger because this chap is already 15k words and I don't wanna drop another 30k chap. Not TOO much happened here aside from some spooky revelations and set-up. sry :D

edit: fixed some editing and contingency errors from said edits

hope you enjoy, let me know if i did anything wrong, this chapter's been inordinately FUCKING difficult, even if it's enjoyable.

ps: Due to how much you guys loved War, he will be included much more heavily in the story than I was first considering.

edit 2: fixed more stuff

edit 3: Alexandria's conflict is now consistent. Rewritten, a little, the first part of the chapter. Thanks to chinese name man Jin Xie(?) for pointing it out, I think I forgot what I was doing with the start cuz i dropped it midway like a week ago then came back and forgot the original plan. Now much better. Re-read the first bit, if you want. Plz? It's important. @_@

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