45

Chapter Text

There were many options to deal with this.

The problem was doing it in a way that didn't tip off Assault too much to the fact she was a single person, and not an entire shadowy organization of capes.

Thus, acting.

Thankfully, she was good at that.

What she wasn't good at, was putting espionage over her people.

She could get them all out, but in front of Uber and Leet and Assault and the retainer girls, she hadn't been sure how much she wanted to reveal before she saw how bad things were outside.

Unfortunately, they were worse than she expected and with every single thing Assault told her, the more she realized how much of a terrible decision it was to try and escape without revealing Ryze's existence or her ability to swap at a moment's notice.

The forces brought here were… not completely overwhelming, but it would be a bitter, bitter fight.

Practically every cape in Brockton and beyond was in this tight circle right now, and it was a wonder things hadn't exploded horrifically yet.

A flash of light drew her eyes in the far distance through the dust, barely visible, and she mentally noted Flashbang's power, meaning Brandish and the rest of New Wave were not that far away.

Shielder and Lazerdream were probably flying above to catch any aerial escapees…

According to Assault, it was insinuated by the current director that the perpetrators of these kidnappings were obviously the gangs, which was how he got them to agree to help.

The Wards were to provide distant support, all of them, meaning that Vista had turned the entire perimeter into a stretch of space at least half a kilometer long, all plain, barren concrete perfect for being picked off.

Then outside that perimeter was probably Flechette, two to three teenage Brutes, a tinker, a blaster, it just kept getting harder to escape, the more she thought about it.

This… wasn't as much an ambush as it was a literal killbox. They were powerful, yes, but they were caught off-guard, they had just split up, they still had no fucking clue how to fight like a team, aside from a single training session with only a few of her capes participating, and running away was going to be damn hard when there were flying heroes all over the place and helicopters if her eyes weren't fooling her, circling from far, far away.

Not a single person would likely be able to escape. They were cornered, so the only option was to group and push out in a single direction, go down through the earth , or teleport.

Ironically enough, the least resource-intensive of all the options seemed to be teleportation.

She switched to the Rune of Domination, directions flashing to life in her mind, her gait quickening as Relentless Hunter kicked in.

She couldn't see much, but the Rune of Precision had allowed her to see enough outlines and lights to get a half-decent grasp of what was going on.

Arc was stomping Hookwolf into the ground, somewhere to her right.

Above, something was flying around the edges of the dust cloud, but she could never make its shape out through the dust before it circled away. It was obnoxiously close.

Navigation wasn't easy on her group either.

They had to sprint through half-crushed layers of brick and steel, tumble down literal hills of dust so fine they had to hold their breaths and close their eyes just to pass, the girls making a line of hands.

And she also had to wrangle Rune into not flying up or out of the dust cloud, constantly.

Spitfire, Coil and Insight were all behind her in a tight grouping, Circus flitting about the formation with a giant road sign as a shield, wherever the hell she or he got it from, and Assault led from the front with her.

Assault only knew five of the heroes Boston had sent for assistance, and the only part of that sentence worried her.

A team of heroes was usually five, period. Not only five.

It was only a matter of time before fire got involved in this fight, she knew, but it was still sudden.

A flash of ear-rending noise and sound, light and a concussive force pressing in from all around her, the explosion pushing through entire sections of the rubble around them and making bricks and glass and random debris fling through the air and peppering everything.

It wasn't too powerful, it wasn't too hot or deadly, but it was the equivalent of having a dozen flashbangs suddenly detonate around you all at once.

She had the durability to hiss in pain and slam to a halt, boots sliding on dust for a moment, stiff with surprise.

The screams and grunts of her companions forced her head to jerk around, finding their somewhat organised group to now be a stumbling mess of bodies.

Her eyes immediately flit to what looked like Lisa's silhouette, writhing on the floor with her hands clamped over her ears and coughing her lungs out between grunts of pain, and she dashed over to her, momentarily ignoring the fact everyone was doing pretty much the same, even Assault.

She grabbed her shoulder, and Lisa startled before relaxing for a moment, hissing out a slurred mess of noises she couldn't understand, in between retching coughs.

She turned her on her back, feeling her chest burn, and tore one of Lisa's hands off her ear.

Red.

Ruptured eardrums, possibly damaged inner cochlea which meant Lisa probably wouldn't ever be able to even walk straight for the rest of her life, if she wasn't healed.

She felt her jaw clatter with rage.

She crushed it under a boot that had trudged through more corpses than ground, casting Heal on her without hesitation.

Just because she was here did not mean that she forgave the heroes about the what if, what if she hadn't been.

Most of the dust cloud seemed to have cleared.

Or ignited, rather.

She rose, fists clenched, and quickly grabbed Rune, who seemed to be ignoring her ears in favour of trying to claw her mask off.

She took her by the shoulder, yanked her up, and did it for her, ignoring her scrambling hands to look at the blood running down her face from her eyes, one running down her face in runny chunks, the other pulped in its socket, glass embedded into it.

The bad design decision of a rush job.

She hissed out a breath of mind-rending anger, stomping the emotion flat, throwing it in the furnace to cook, condense, boil her insides.

Espionage could go fuck itself.

She cast Heal on Rune too, and put her hands on the girl's cheeks, forcing her to look up at her, wide-eyed and panicked and terrified as glass literally squeezed past her eyes to tinkle down her face. 

"WH-ahutg tcht efuck just-" Rune choke-wheezed, then paused, slapping at her ears in surprise. 

She squeezed her, shaking her a little to get her to focus, which she did with a blood-eyed blink.

"Summoner healed you through me. Calm down, focus, breathe. No time." She said, curtly, slapped her shoulder lightly, and turned to watch Spitfire stumble up, eardrums clearly ruptured but thankfully coherent enough to stumble and cough and look around, despite the clear agony in her expression.

She could fight. Not well, but she could fight for as long as needed. 

Circus was doing much the same.

Coil, the lucky bastard, seemed to have gotten the least of the damage, his full face-mask covering him despite its mildly singed status, reaching into his laptop bag to drag a pistol out of a pouch on its side.

She turned to see Assault, digging out his broken earphones with a grimace and confusion in his face.

He saw all that, didn't he?

She could honestly care less at the moment.

"Assault. Can you hear me?"

"Yeah! Yeah, I'm good." He called out, glancing around at the diminished dust cloud, and zipped to her side. "Hell're we supposed to do? You looked like you had a plan." He growled, ducking closer, glancing around the broken walls and scattered metal flooring forming jagged hills around them.

She nodded.

"We're holding our ground, right here. I'll be swapping positions with Summoner's private assets and associates who will gather some people from the other gangs, drag them here. Then I'll swap with another agent of ours and teleport everyone out. You all just need to hold out."

Assault paused.

"You know Strider?" He asked, surprised.

"No. We have a mass teleporter too. Look- just, hole up here. We're halfway through or so, we should be in the center. We have a minute to maybe group up and mount a defence. Rune and Spitfire can keep a basic force away, but Insight and Coil are Thinkers through and through so you will defend them. Don't get in the way, this is a fight for survival, and listen to them. I'll get others here to help. We're all getting out of here, and you won't get in the way or Heartbreaker's going to do whatever he wants with this goddamn city, understand me?" She snarled with a lot more force than necessary.

Assault nodded, likely used to it.

"Good. Be right back." She announced.

"Ren! We're using Blue Guy?!" Insight asked, from behind.

"Yes!" She called out, over the sound of screaming and gunshots and roars, and dashed into the scorched remnants of the cloud, before forcing herself to go invisible, bursting into fog and dashing up, towards Kaiser.

She got a first glimpse of the world outside the dust cloud, and cussed herself for her naivety again when she caught sight of something vaguely dragon-shaped zipping past, firing con-foam grenades down at an ongoing fight ahead of her. 

Fucking Dragon was here. Why?

Probably for Greg, who seemed to be important for some damn reason, but why not help the largest fight this city has probably ever seen?

She spotted at least two of her craft zipping around.

There was no option for escape besides teleportation.

She dashed forward and ducked under a broken metal door the size of a truck, jutting out of the rubble, and switched to Twisted Fate, the Cardmaster, immediately throwing the fedora aside and inclipping her coat.

This would take a lot of energy to do, but seeing and hearing how severe this situation was left her with practically no good alternative.

With deft hands and some buckles unlatched, she dug out two packs of cards, hidden in her vest, pockets, and forearm pouches, and began to shuffle them, focusing her attention on nothing but herself, the cards, and the ever present, watchful eye of Lady Luck, magic gathering at her fingertips, a gentle pressure settling behind her eyes as if to watch.

Sound passed through her ears without being heard, wind and dust gently caressed her hands without being felt.

She closed her eyes, focusing, feeling for that unreachable something, that little glimmer of the spirit Twisted Fate had birthed from sheer belief, always looking over his shoulder, frowning… or smiling.

It wasn't quite a trance.

It was a mindset so specific she felt like she was slipping out of her skin and crawling into Tobias's instead, feeling memories fade and logic distort.

It was just one of those things she simply couldn't do without tearing down the barriers, uncomfortably wide.

A presence, looking over her shoulder.

A card flashed in her mind, another, a pattern forming, and her fingers turned into a blur, nails slipping into the stacks to punch them out, twisting them between her fingers and rearranging, piece by piece, a million mirrors that didn't exist.

It was tricky to control.

To think of the range, to think of how absorbed in it she wished to be.

Lady Luck smiled over her shoulder.

She opened her first two eyes with an exhale, irises shifting to a sun in eclipse, a flameless ring, seeing nothing before her yet everything around her.

A hundred more eyes opened, in the skies, in the streets, above fights and cars and every breathing thing within a mile with a tinny drawl of bronze scraping bronze, musical, almost.

Her perspective shifted, the cards fanning themselves out further than her hands as they disintegrated, twisting in spirals, an array of gold red and blue, writhing like liquids in and out of each other.

In the back of her mind, her perception squeezed, like a balloon trying to exit through a hole too small for it.

The eyes shifted, over a hundred, each her own.

Two hundred feet to the left, three eyes stared down at three capes, and the irises shifted with her attention, looking around, accessing the situation.

She could see over a hundred PRT agents, in vans, on foot, watched their movements from above.

Some looked up, unlike most, and met her eyes.

The news spread alarm throughout the groups, radio bleeps making more and more people look up at the flaming, singular eye hovering far above them like the sun, yet so close they could see its iris in detail, staring into their soul and fate, an illusion that never got further or closer no matter how much one flew at it, to the seeming frustration of one of Dragon's suits, keeping a distance and always focused on a single person.

The sudden disruption swept like a wave, the PRT's well-oiled machine groaning and creaking as its gears jammed with alarm.

Some PRT agents shot at her eyes, to no avail.

It was all an illusion, after all. Sleight of hand, magic and trickery.

She ignored them, for now, simply taking note of their movements, forming a battle map in her head.

Focusing on Kaiser, nestled in a mangled labyrinth peeking through the dust and smoke, a jagged trail of metal, something so twisted it was almost magical.

Knives, spikes and swords and thorns all seemed to punch out from the broken roof beams collapsed sideways on the tilted remnants of the building that was here, growing out of bricks and each other in stabbing lines, from the sides, above, from below, all half covered in shredded, smoking containment foam or melted into slag and charred black.

Below, Kaiser was on his back, one of the twins leaning on a wall of spikes for support nearby as she guarded from afar, seemingly trying to keep out of sight of Arc and his partner without abandoning Kaiser.

Whose eyes were closed, she could see.

She could guess it was Arc's work rather than the dust blast, judging by the spasms in his legs.

A miracle that Kaiser wasn't dead. Electricity damage was always a fine line between knocked out and dead. Fortune had smiled on him, for whatever reason.

Lady Luck gave in unexpected ways.

She observed Arc's companion, a blurry green figure she didn't know, seemingly dragging Arc behind him as he almost slid over everything in sight, a flightless hummingbird that seemed to defy the laws of physics, dragging Arc with an equal disregard, throwing him forward for moments at a time to slap one of Kaiser's walls.

Neither had yet noticed the eyes of fire looking down at them from the ashy dust above. 

She watched Arc's electricity run down the line of swords and spikes, then form an arc from one specific sword to the other on the complete opposite end of the Valkyrie.

It barely missed her, a small branch of lightning popping out of the bolt to hit the woman's shoulder, making her cry out, spear arm throwing itself to the side, breaking and scattering swords, opening holes through the snail-like cocoon Kaiser had tried to make for them as the twin tried to out-manoeuvre the duo.

That cocoon was now a kill box.

To the side, Hookwolf seemed to be fistfighting in his human form against some utterly grotesque hulk of muscle that was purposely putting himself between Hook and Kaiser.

Hookwolf was shredding through him and constantly glancing back at Arc, not letting himself get too amped up, but he wasn't making much progress aside from a mountain of ever-increasing gore that showed no signs of slowing as his opponent kept regenerating.

Judging by the Lichtenberg scars that covered his entire burned, mangled torso, and were mostly still bleeding and smoking, he did not have a good time versus Arc.

Krieg was also knocked out and inside a bubble of containment foam up to his neck, because he couldn't redirect electricity either. This was such a good plan on the heroes' end that it was genuinely frustrating.

Half the Empire was countered by electricity.

Next to Krieg, only a dozen or so feet to the side, Victor was facing some thin girl with aviator goggles and brass knuckles that seemed to blink around in straight lines only, leaving red trails behind on every shift, but with far too much speed for him to do anything about. A strong Mover versus a regular human?

Skill did not matter there. Victor was going to go down soon, and it was ridiculous that he was even still managing to defend himself at all.

To the far right, Alabaster was being dragged around and away from Victor by what looked like a purple cloud of arms and grasping fingers, purple-black and swirling around him to haul him through the rubble as he screamed and shot and stabbed at it, to no real effect.

Likely being dragged off to Clockblocker.

The cloud seemed to spot the eye above as it focused on him, and seemed to startle and freeze for a moment, before being reminded of its captive, and continuing to drag him off with even more frantic movements.

Crusader, to the left, was being hammered by some Tinker that seemed to fire green shockwaves at him with a tube-looking gun, slamming into his spearmen and either bursting them like bubbles of forcing them to do nothing but form a meatshield wall to protect him, and a couple dozen feet behind Kaiser's panicked cocoon of steel.

Fifty feet away, within a complex maze of half-standing support pillars and I-beams, the only duo that was seemingly winning their duel, Stormtiger and Cricket, dancing around each other like they were born for it, fighting three capes and not losing yet.

Their opponents were a Boston hero she didn't know, Miss Militia, and Challenger.

A bad matchup there as well. If Miss Militia stopped holding back on lethal force, she could kill both of them by herself in a couple seconds. Cricket was good, but she wasn't dodge literal power-aimed bullets good, and Stormtiger, the fuckhead, was still shirtless.

This was too… efficient, too organised, and too well-matched. The heroes had to have Thinkers directing this or some kind of method to see through the dust and smoke-

Tinkers. Armsmaster and Dragon and Kid Win and probably another one or two she had no idea about.

Of course a bunch of Tinkers would have a way to look through dust.

They likely did not have a way to look through real darkness, however.

To that end, the eyes hovering over Alabaster and the cloud dragging him off sharpened.

Reaching for her small but powerful catalogue of summoner's spells, she cast 'Ignite' on a hero for the first time, the cloud of arms bursting into orange-white flame with no inbetween shades, rending through flesh and soul.

It puffed into a lanky human figure in long, flowing fabrics which howled in agony, rolling down and away from Alabaster, then burst into the same slug-like cloud of arms and fingers, scrambling away and flickering back with intermittent screams, rolling to try and put out flame that simply did not need oxygen or space to burn.

Unless the hero was incredibly weak, that wouldn't kill them. Certainly leave them horribly burned, possibly disabled, and near comatose for a couple weeks from having a good chunk of their soul burned, but death? Unlikely.

A proportionate response to breaking the Truce, in her opinion.

Alabaster immediately scrambled upright and started mag-dumping the cloud, firing pretty much blindly as he backpedalled into a pile of bricks, missing almost every shot, stumbling his way back over the jagged mess of bent metal beams, and towards Victor.

She turned back towards Arc and the person dragging him around, seemingly granting him the same immunity to physics he enjoyed.

They were luring the twin away from Kaiser. Slowly, but surely.

The eye following one of the Dragoncrafts confirmed her suspicion. Dragon was going to try and swoop down to grab Kaiser right in the middle of fighting. It was a good plan.

Arc wasn't the real problem. The twin could probably reach him without the Mover.

She was done being gentle with traitors, unfortunately for them. Anything short of death was permitted.

For the heroes, at least.

She switched to the Rune of Inspiration, for the Unbound Spellbook keystone.

Another cast of 'Ignite', and the mover immediately jerked with a strangled cry, letting go of Arc and tumbling into a wild spin as he lost his footing, crashing through a line of thin swords and doing much the same as her other victim, with more screaming and fleeing.

Arc, without the immunity to physics, immediately crashed to the cracked floor, breaking his ankle on an upturned piece of concrete, then skipped off the ground once, like a rock thrown at a calm laketop, and slammed shoulder-fist into a giant concrete block with a gut-wrenching series of snaps, a strangled sound like a dying pig leaving him.

Fenja or her twin, whoever it was, sprinted forward with deceptive speed, rushing towards Arc, and then stopped herself, on a hair trigger, spear ready but not executing the man yet as he rolled onto his stomach, crawling away with a dangling arm and coughing blood.

That was a serious injury. Hopefully he made it to the hospital.

She'd heal him if she wasn't sure he'd get right back to trying to fight them. Besides, better uses for it. 

Her people came first. They always did.

Lung seemed to be attracting most of the heavy hitters at the moment, thankfully. A seemingly melee-focused Dragoncraft was busy wrestling with him to the best of its abilities, while Dauntless, Armsmaster, Brandish, and two Boston capes with Blaster powers utterly pummelled him from the ground.

Bakuda was captured, weakly trying to struggle in her cuffs, unharmed as three men dragged her away, half-sprinting. 

She watched Lady Photon, Shielder, and Lazerdream, all rush towards the twin that was carrying both Krieg's containment foam ball and Kaiser's limp body under each arm, the Valkyrie sprinting blindly towards where she could hear Hookwolf snarling and shouting in rage at the futility of his duel.

New Wave was going to be a problem soon.

On the outer edge of the dust cloud, near the vacant low buildings that had collapsed and usually through them, Lung could barely swing a fist without losing it, and it was mostly Dragon's suit that kept him alive, funnily enough, by at least forcing the heroes to restrain some of their fire. He was more of a slug with a tail and a single, clawing arm, the rest ripped or blasted off.

What little leverage he could get was usually cut short by Dauntless's Arclance, the man darting in and out like a rapier, and just as precise.

Lung wasn't ever going to win that fight.

She just had to make sure he didn't lose either.

She cast Heal on him, twice, the burst of green healing magic momentarily blinding half his attackers as his wings returned to him, charred flesh replaced by a layer of fresh, gleaming silver scales. He nearly doubled in size, even if his three missing arms weren't fully recovered, stopping at the elbows. 

Dragon's suit wasn't expecting that, and with the moment of surprised ceasefire, Lung finally, finally, used his goddamn limbs correctly, wings flapping with blurry snaps, kicking up enough dust and debris to buy him another second to bisect Dragon's suit, using his arms and tail to jerk himself around, snapping his four-pronged jaws around its neck while breathing out pure plasma, nearly twice the size of the gigantic mech, claws so bright orange it almost hurt to look at.

His tail and legs wrapped around the lower body of the suit, and she almost felt proud of the fact he actually listened to her advice from their sparring as she watched the suit tear apart in a spew of sparks and snapping wires, utterly deafening.

She only got a glimpse of something red and biological within the suit, before Lung's hind claws scraped through it, practically vaporising it.

She froze.

That- that wasn't Dragon, was it? There was no way. Biotinkering? A Tinker collaboration, maybe?

It… made more sense than Dragon ever putting herself in such personal danger. With a sigh of relief, she relaxed.

Dauntless crashed into Lung's back, the Arclance slamming through his spine with a horrid crunch, and Lung's lower body went limp as his spine was severed.

The eye above the Dragon suit dissipated in a wave of flame-like distortion.

Lung tossed the head and neck towards one of the Blasters with a twist of his neck, and for the second time in the past couple months, it was up to Armsmaster to hold him back as Dauntless darted off, back to the sky, dodging a pillar of plasma by the skin of his teeth as Lung roared.

His head jerked down, blue-orange plasma cutting a line through half-erected walls and levelling metal beams like a flaming line through mist, piercing and melting ancient machinery, removing half of the heroes' cover in one swoop and narrowly missing one of the Blasters in the back.

Armsmaster's odd ceramic umbrella was incredibly effective in blocking Lung' pillar of plasma, but he couldn't advance under it.

Manpower did it for him, lunging in with an olympic leap, fist wound back.

The fight fully resumed as Lung finally, finally fucking dodged for once in his life, ducking his head down under the strike, grabbing Manpower's foot with his mouth, then whipping him off like an arrow, disappearing into the distance and likely smashing through a dozen walls before he came to a stop.

With a scraping series of popping grinds, Lung's lower back jolted.

His legs, back to full function, clawed at the ground as he launched himself forward, feinting a strike against Armsmaster, who suddenly seemed incredibly confused, having been moving for a parry to a strike that never came, and instead slamming into a wall, peppering the entire area with flying, charred bricks.

Feeling oddly proud of Lung for listening to her back in that warehouse, she considered Crusader, who was actively retreating using two of his ghosts, the others forming a meat wall behind him for the blasts as the Tinker sprinted after him.

It was awkward, but neither could do much to the other, not like this.

Oni Lee entered her range, and, predictably, left a line of disintegrating clones as he gunned it for where Lung was, teleporting straight into a group of advancing PRT agents armed with giant tanks of containment foam, pins pulled.

The resulting explosion from his clone detonating himself made two of her eyes hovering over the agents fade and flicked off like a flame along with their life, but she didn't have the time or care to think about it at the moment.

Much as she wanted to avoid this outcome, this… this was war now, with how things were going in the Bay.

She watched many, many strangely convenient malfunctions and accidents occur, with other sets of eyes. Tanks bursting, vehicles' engines spontaneously exploding, PRT agents getting shot in the vests from absolutely nowhere, halting advance to move for cover, all in her favour.

Oni Lee teleported into the blaster's zone in the back, and almost immediately took out one Blaster with a knife to the leg and a bullet to the shoulder, point blank as usual.

Non-lethal, thankfully.

She dismissed that fight, for a moment.

Uber and Leet were caught, seemingly surrendering, but she hardly cared about them.

Ironically enough, it looked like Squealer's gigantic, trashy Humvee had more tricks than the heroes expected, and the Merchants would be one of the few to escape, considering their complete tank of a vehicle was also in the eye of an almost literal tornado. Likely the power of the cape that had come with them, another unexpected factor.

Night was… completely unable to use her power, what with the giant eye hovering over her.

She dismissed that particular eye, and hoped Dorothy wouldn't kill too many PRT agents in the interim.

Fog was heading for… the New Wave fliers that were just above where the Valkyrie twin was sprinting below, directions fed to them through their earphones by Dragon as to where to go and where to drop. 

She could see Fog's fortune, near and short, a burrowed thing like destiny on her tongue, telling her of what was to come in his path.

He would kill them all in a second, before immediately going up to find and kill Vista.

A strategic, logically perfect move that she could not allow.

She had a bit of time before he got anywhere close to them, however. Shielder was slow in the air, but Fog was slow. 

A hero she vaguely remembered from the PRT office bombing was called forward, jogging towards Arc, covered in pure metal with two giant metal hammers hanging off his hips.

Adamant, she believed.

Nexus' "main" group had kept a low profile, but eventually, Dragon seemed to direct a couple teams towards the strangely stationary group of capes.

She couldn't overhear well, but lip-reading was an option.

Gravity, Lantern, a squad of PRT agents, Triumph, and Weld headed for her people.

They could handle them without her intervention, she assumed, or at least stall long enough.

She spent another second checking, watching more bizarre happy accidents occur, watched Oni Lee and Lung slowly even the playing field as Lung's shoulders started inching towards twenty feet tall and being almost thrice as long, entirely draconic by now, barely being held back.

Another Dragoncraft descended towards Lung, while the last one continued moving in circles above.

She could guess that it was acting as the heroes' eyes.

Thoughts in order, she tapped her foot on the cracked ground, cards falling into place in a perfect circle around it, from the twisting aether, and she stepped into the circle as almost two hundred feet away, another circle formed in front of the Valkyrie twin.

Like sinking into something, all at once, a simultaneous sensation through every molecule of herself, she blinked.

Lady Luck's influence faded the moment she teleported, faced with a bone-tired, injured twin giantess, diligently holding her teammates under her arms, a wary glare directed towards her for only a moment before it faded, replaced by a sigh of relief and sagging shoulders.

"Run that way until you see our crew, join them and hold your ground. As fast as you can. Go. If you have juice left after that, try to regroup with Hookwolf." She said, pointing towards Lisa and the rest with her left arm.

The twin didn't even nod, simply turning, and setting on a dead sprint.

She picked Evelynn, bursting into smoke, and dashed up and towards a struggling Hookwolf and Alabaster.

After teleporting almost two dozen people, far enough to be able to scatter to safety…

She wouldn't have much if any juice left.

It inwardly enraged her, to think she could have killed Heartbreaker by now, only to be stopped by a betrayal from the heroes, breaking the only rule she considered as almost holy.

Because if the 'Truce' could go fuck itself, who the absolute hell would ever go to an Endbringer fight if they weren't a hero? And villains outnumbered the heroes almost three to one.

What the ever-living fuck was Tagg thinking?

Naive, short-sighted fucking scum. She should have thought ahead, to try and keep Piggot in that chair.

She flew up, and Fog's faint, thin, smoke-like Breaker form came into view.

She reached for his mind.

"Do not kill anyone. Back up for now. Defend ours if they're about to die. This is Renata, in case it wasn't clear."

Fog's form paused, then turned around and flew down, languidly.

She turned, and headed for Hookwolf's spot.

The fight came into sight.

Hookwolf had taken the lack of Arc in sight as an opportunity to shift back into full wolf form, and was keeping his ground against Adamant and the ten foot tall ball of mangled flesh that couldn't even be identified as a human anymore, while Alabaster was held up by a containment foam grenade having swallowed his foot and pinned it to the ground, having a shootout with the distant PRT agents that had fired it, dying over and over but preventing them from trapping Hookwolf too with sheer suppressive fire. 

She switched to Nocturne, The Eternal Nightmare, one of the three demons in her arsenal, and prepared herself for a headache.

Her blades scraped out of their sheaths like the rasp of a dying prophet, the sin of patricide, the darkness of a world without sun.

She reached out, flying upwards.

"Darkness…" She whispered with Nocturne's voice, a hissing rasp, calling it forth, something like a prayer but too disconnected from anything holy to be such.

Everyone heard it, she knew.

That was the point.

Fear was a weapon, and light was her enemy. 

From dust and every shadow, misty darkness bellowed, blocking out the sun, consuming everything in a tidal wave within mere moments, leaving nothing but pitch black darkness, roiling, part of her, wide enough to brush against the distant, stretched space that Vista was holding.

And in it, she felt hundreds of minds freeze, panic, retreat, all of the above and more.

Miss Militia switched to lethal ammunition, and began to blindfire towards Stormtiger and Cricket, likely believing it was only affecting them, or simply deciding she wasn't willing to risk it.

Stormtiger took a bullet to the stomach, and crumpled with a cry that the darkness swallowed.

He'd live.

The Dragon suit above tried to get closer, shining a searing light into the cloud, to no avail.

In here, no sound nor light that she did not wish could ever penetrate.

Almost the polar opposite of Twisted Fate's most tiring ability.

Lung grappled blindly with the second Dragoncraft suit for another moment, before it managed to wriggle around from under him, onto his back, and blindly fly up and away, smashing through a bricked wall in the process, leaving Lung tense and wary in utter silence and darkness.

New Wave dipped into her cloud, wary but curious and determined.

She reached into the Valkyrie twins' mind with Nocturne's claws, a cold, scraping caress against their scalp, and drank in the woman's spine-bending shiver. 

"Keep going. Same direction as before."  

The darkness parted before her, little fissures in the cloud of darkness allowing the barest hints of light to peek through, showing the way.

The twin redoubled her sprint without question.

She turned her attention to Hookwolf, and Alabaster as she floated in place, being little more than a pair of eyes, one and the same with the darkness. 

There was little reason to go for deceit with people that had seen her swapping Legends and sparred with her. If Heartbreaker somehow took them, they already knew too much. So she eased up on it, a little.

"'Sam' speaking. Follow the path, we're regrouping. Another associate will teleport us out. Renata is fetching them." She explained in Nocturne's grating rasp of a voice, and parted the darkness in a careful line between Alabaster and Hookwolf.

"Free him and run."

Hookwolf took the order with a snarl and shaking spines of metal, bounding towards Alabaster, splattering bits of gore and leaving a trail of blood. He stopped next to him, then cut off his teammates' entire leg with a karate chop made of razors, before dragging him out of the containment foam and punching Alabaster's chest inwards with a paw-like fist the size of the man's torso.

Alabaster choked, died.

Revived, whole, his foot free and whole.

Hook grabbed him, and threw the scruff of his suit into his mouth.

She parted the darkness, showing him the way, and he galloped forwards, Alabaster dangling from his mouth.

She wormed her way into the minds of the ABB.

Bakuda was stripped of her weapons, and in cuffs, in the back of a PRT van, the door not yet closed.

She opened a line between Oni Lee and Bakuda, darkness parting, just barely, a crack.

"'Sam' speaking. Follow the path, it leads to Bakuda. Free her and follow the path back, we're grouping up to teleport out. Do as I say, we don't have time."

Oni Lee teleported off like a strobe light, to whatever ground her path let him see, swiftly closing in on Bakuda.

Cricket and Stormtiger, the latter of who was clutching his stomach, controlling his breathing, forehead against the ground as he waited, were as calm as could be in his situation, Stormtiger doing some kind of meditative breathing.

Smart man, Stormtiger. A calm heart would slow the bleeding enough to save him.

Slithering into Cricket's head, she cleared another roiling space in her darkness, enough for her crouched form to see Stormtiger, laying on the floor to her left.

The woman observed him for a second, before crouch-walking to him, tapping his shoulder. He groaned, slowly shuffling his limbs to assumedly try and get up.

"Melody, this is 'Sam'. Storm took a bullet to the stomach. Grab him and follow the path. We're all teleporting out."

Cricket yanked Storm up by the arm, wrapping his arm around her shoulders, and with practised ease, both positioned themselves so Stormtiger could lay across Cricket's shoulder, one arm and leg hooked over her arms, with enough leverage to keep the wound pressed.

To Lung, she simply showed the way.

"This is Renata. Regrouping to teleport out instead. Run to where I show you. Be quick, this is tiring. Good job on following my tips from the sparring session."

He snarled at her, mind alight with hatred and magma-hot fury, but after a second of huffing and puffing, turned, and slunk forward like a frantic centipede, shrinking rapidly, eyeing the shapeless shapes twisting within the darkness warily as he ran.

She reached for Night, a grotesque spider seemingly made of slick branches and claws and horrific in appearance, and Fog, lost in the cloud and rapidly rising out of it.

"Fog. Stop. Renata here. Follow the open path. Night, do the same. We're grouping up to teleport out."

Crusader was huddled in the middle of his ghosts, wary and twitchy as could be.

"This is Renata. Move, we're gathering in a single place to teleport out. Don't worry about the Tinker, just follow this path, it leads to Victor, then us. His leg is broken, and probably his shoulder too. Carry him down the path."

Crusader took a moment to process, but nodded, and as the darkness parted before him, his ghosts all quickly set themselves to grabbing his arms and flying him towards Victor, who was panting and barely standing upright, his opponent a mere four feet away, neither aware of the other after shifting about so much.

As Oni Lee slunk past the frozen, terrified PRT agents huddling on the floor next to the PRT carrier, rifles twitching and aiming at nothing in the darkness, he quickly began working on Bakuda's cuffs with her instructions.

Taylor reached for her main team, parting the darkness around them in a wide berth, letting a bit of light peek through her body to assuage their paranoia.

Lisa wasn't too fussed, simply staring up and raising a brow as if to ask 'is this you'?

"Renata speaking. Wait tight, do not be alarmed. Empire and ABB incoming. We're all teleporting out. No friendly fire."

Now, to simply wait, and get information in the meantime, worming into the minds of everyone within her, feeding on their growing paranoia and panic as the darkness refused to budge and every brush of wind sent them spinning, ready to attack.

Their fears stood out stark and alluring, tempting, in the void.

Lady Photon's biggest fear was losing her family, and so was Manpower's.

The rest of New Wave had already flown up and away from the cloud, her insides so to speak, and so, she could only guess.

Miss Militia's biggest fear was a place of broken morality, law, and chaos, a hellhole, a warzone, a field of corpses cooking in the sun under the uncaring eyes of the tormented.

Armsmaster's biggest fear…

Was to be unrecognised. To fail. To fade into history without achieving anything worthwhile.

Something about Armsmaster was ticking her off, the wrong way. She could never be sure if he was Mastered, or if he was just doing nonsensical things for a goal she had no clue of, but the man was odd.

Greg being a prime example.

Why hunt him so zealously, almost ignoring commands, if he wanted recognition and distinction? Nobody even knew Greg existed beyond him, Dragon, and a couple Government officials. This? This was his chance to shine, which he did by constantly getting in Lung's face and not dying until Lung decided to use her tactics instead of his own, so it made sense, but everything about him was weirdly shifty, aside this bout of normalcy…

She perused through them all with half a mind, even her own people's.

Lisa's biggest fear was to lose someone she loved through her own actions.

Oni Lee had no fears, not really. Just a mild, biological alarm, related to death.

Bakuda's biggest fear was losing her approval and disappointing her.

Coil's biggest fear was one he lived every day, subjugated and enslaved, but he lacked the ability to be horrified of it, her work at play. A dull, frozen thing.

Assault's biggest fear was the thought of undeserved, excessive suffering, to himself or others. 

Lung's was to be powerless, helpless, fight against something impossible to beat.

… Is that why he refused to fight Endbringers before she came along?

Starting to feel oddly… skeevy, about perusing through the mind of her minions, she pushed aside the rest.

The Valkyrie twin got to Lisa's side unharmed, and Lisa quickly got to work cutting Krieg out of the containment foam with her tinkertech knife.

Lung arrived shortly after, now a mere humanoid at nine feet tall, scales retreating, still steaming.

He sat down quietly, eyeing Lisa's lower half.

"Give me your pants." He grunted, and Lisa glanced up from where she was cutting the containment foam, then down at Lung's slowly regressing form.

The harness technically held everything she needed, the pants were just there to differentiate from her old costume a bit more.

"Dickwad." Lisa growled, and to her surprise, took a moment to wiggle her pants down over the silk bodysuit, and kicked them over to Lung, who began ripping the tubes open so they could fit him, before resuming on Krieg as the Valkyrie twin sat on the floor next to her, shrunken down to normal size, panting and trying to compose herself.

She really had to learn the twins' names and differentiate them. 

Crusader floated into sight from the path open in the hovering darkness, his ghosts dumping him and Victor on the floor gently.

Victor grunted, and carefully laid himself flat on the floor, holstering his gun at last and digging out a small compact medical kit with unerring precision, one handed.

"Anyone need emergency medical attention?" Victor asked, and nobody replied. "Really? That's surprising." He forced out, light hearted, pain getting the better of him for a moment, and then he started assembling the folding splint kit, stiff with pain all the way through.

Assault started looking quite confused at the general lack of venom between her people and the Empire, as well as the lack of arguing or questions, but she couldn't be arsed to wrangle everyone around to keep up this charade the entire time they'd work together. She'd just get him to sign a blood-magic NDA of sorts, later. 

'Heal' came off cooldown, and she immediately cast it on Stormtiger as they neared, whom jerked in surprise at feeling a bullet be forced out of his body, as well as the small lightshow.

Cricket put him down, and he checked himself over, wiping at the blood on his abs to check for a hole, before shaking his head, and jogging ahead.

Cricket followed, and within a few more seconds, they walked into the dome of half-lit rubble housing her people, both exhausted, collapsing on a pile of crushed bricks like it was the most comfortable bed in the world.

Lee took the longest, because his teleporting didn't take people with him, and Bakuda was whining that someone had thrown some kind of blast at her that made her feel weaker than a toddler, so he had to carry her halfway across the inner length of the perimeter.

The blaster responsible might be one of the Blasters shooting Lung, maybe? Why did their blasts not do the same thing to Lung, though? Could they control it?

Regardless, Oni Lee had to carry her on his back and run the entire six or seven hundred feet to their end of the path, which took an exhausting five tense minutes.

In the meantime, Fog and Night strolled in, completely unharmed and fresh aside from some burns and sweat, prompting a couple looks of jealousy or accusation, she couldn't tell.

She switched to the Rune of Inspiration once, just to heal Kaiser to make sure he wouldn't die of heart arrhythmia from the shock he took, and mentally apologised to Spitfire, who was looking utterly miserable as she continued to cradle her bleeding ears, eyes scanning the dust and the darkness beyond it, tears running down her face despite the tough expression she put on her face.

As soon as Oni Lee dumped Bakuda on the floor and stumbled forward, panting for breath himself, she prepared herself, reaching into all their minds as she tried to calculate how long it would take to form a circle large enough for all of them.

"I'm going to swap out with someone else. This cover will vanish, and the heroes will be able to locate us for a bit. Hold out for maybe fifteen seconds, up to thirty, and we'll all get out of here. Gather tight in the circle, it will be visible. In ten seconds from now, we're swapping." She informed them, unable to change her voice from Nocturne's spine-scraping rasp.

Just to be sure she forgot nobody, she did a quick headcount.

Rune, Insight, a silently suffering Circus, Spitfire, Coil, Assault, Lung and Bakuda and Oni Lee, Kaiser, Victor, Krieg, Hookwolf and Cricket and Stormtiger, the twin, Crusader, Victor, Alabaster, Fog, Night… and Assault, determined and completely unbothered by the villains around him. 

They were all here, in varying degrees of injury and exhaustion, but alive and present.

With a deep breath, she descended as a cloud of smoke with two white eyes, and swapped to Ryze, the Rune Mage, arguably the person that started all of this, in the middle of the dome.

The darkness flicked out like it was never there, gone in a millisecond, prompting hisses and flinches as people's eyes got used to the light, shining through the somewhat-settled dust by now.

"Console? Any updates?" Vista asked, fists clenched, staring at the almost apocalyptic cloud of darkness that seemed to roil and shift in place.

"Negative." A blank voice replied, a different one, again, despite it being the twentieth time she asked.

The cloud was so dark it was hard to tell anything about it. It felt like a hole in reality, sucking her gaze in, and if she focused too hard, she could hear voices, screaming in anger, faded and almost imagined, non-physical. 

It creeped her out, it pissed her off, but mostly, she was worried about the people inside the fucking thing.

The plan was perfect. They had so much more manpower than they ever had before, she was given a huge role in the attack, AND Tagg had overrun Piggot's benching to get them all a role in perimeter guard.

Then things just started going wrong for no damn reason.

Challenger and Arc ran out of the building, dead-sprinting, and start calling on the radio that Assault fucking betrayed them.

She couldn't wrap her head around that. It made no fucking sense. His probably-wife got kidnapped, and he betrays them for the villains?

It was obvious the villains had done it all, but he went with them?! Did they blackmail him?!

She couldn't understand what the fuck was going on there, but it didn't matter at the moment. Her orders were to keep a wide, stretched area around the perimeter, and she did that. The villains had a bit of warning, but it had been less than a minute-

Then Armsmaster's canister got shot into the building, straight back out, and five seconds later she watched an entire complex of factories get turned to rubble with bizarre explosions, cone-shaped, straight lines, even just circular ones that turned everything to a fine powder that seemed to fly on the slightest breeze, the buildings falling like dominos, replaced by jagged rubble and a dust cloud so thick and tall and wide it entirely swamped the actual factory complex.

All of a sudden, the easy operation got a little harder.

But it was fine. They had the upper hand, and her binoculars were now goddamn useless but it was fine, because they were completely and utterly surrounded and outmatched.

Judging from what scarce reports she could catch from Console, directed at others, things were going well. They were going great, for a bit.

It was almost enough to make her feel better about being complicit in breaking the fucking Truce, but this was the best thing that had probably ever happened to the Bay.

Then Lung threw fire and made something in the dust detonate. It didn't seem to do too much damage, but it was loud and bright and sudden.

Still, things were fine. Minimal injuries, considering they were all wearing good ear protection.

They stopped being fine when people started screaming on the radio about burning eyes in the sky, and things got chaotic really fast because nobody outside the rough perimeter could see them, but everyone inside was saying there was a gigantic flame-like orange eyeball giving them a death-stare, up in the sky. Dragon could see it, from each of her suits, apparently.

Then Djinn suddenly started screaming over the radio, just- just howling, begging for help, when just a moment ago, he was being all cocky about how easily he could take Alabaster.

She didn't know what happened there, or if he was okay, but he was cut off by Console, told he was getting an evac team, and Djinn didn't open the radio again.

Slipstream eventually confessed, panting, that she somehow couldn't quite get Viktor knocked out, because the bastard was apparently just that good from stealing people's skills, and he was actively taking hers away.

He was beat up to shit, but standing, and Slipstream was exhausted, and he would win a war of attrition if it dragged on further, progressively sapping the woman's skills until she would stumble over her own feet.

Soon after, Crossfade followed in much the same way as Djinn, just screaming like he was being skinned alive, a sound so horrid she could hear it echoing in her ears even now, sobbing for help.

She wasn't told what happened there, no details, no nothing. She heard one of the numerous Console officers tell Crossfade to run to the perimeter if he could, and that he would send a medic team, and that was it.

Her role was specific, and Console rarely let people know everything, to keep them focused.

Console operators also had heart monitors on all of them, but they just didn't tell them what they saw. Still, she chose to believe they were alive.

Dragon barked into the radio that the eyes in the sky were likely able to light people on fire that they couldn't put out, and she could feel morale drop as horror rose, nevermind her own sudden nervousness.

Thankfully, she didn't see a single eye above her.

Still if Dragon was right, that was insane. That was- some Slaughterhouse Nine tier power.  Eyes that people in a certain range could only see, that could selectively light you up like a match?

Gah… just… horrible.

A mere moment after that, Arc pressed the override button, choking and asking for help on all channels.

All in a minute of each other.

Who the hell was doing this? What happened? Was it Nexus? They were the only ones who were too hidden and new to know much about.

They didn't seem brutal enough for that, considering they were almost… vigilante-like in their recent actions against the ABB and Merchants, but on the other hand… the heroes, hell, Vista herself, they broke the Truce. It was entirely likely that they were trying to kill them in retaliation.

Which… would be justified, honestly, because they were breaking the Truce for god's sake and the last cape to do that was found with his guts spread over a balcony, but it was a worrying thought to have.

But this was justified, wasn't it? Was it justified?

Tagg said the villains were just trying to hide behind the Truce to stall for time and leverage their hostages to do so, and she kind of believed him. That sounded like exactly the kind of shit a villain would pull.

And the only thing about as scummy as breaking the Truce, was trying to abuse it for personal gain.

Too complicated, she decided eventually, and turned her brain off, focusing on keeping her power active.

Unfortunately, things kept going to shit.

Vehicles would randomly just- fucking explode. She saw it happen three times. Containment foam tanks? Poof, everywhere, blocking entire sections of the factory complex, or at least forcing people to take the long way around the hundred foot wall of foam.

Dragon requested someone help Arc, as he was 'disabled', and Adamant said something about going to find him, and two minutes later, said he was engaging Hookwolf with Tank. 

The fact Hookwolf wasn't being melted into the floor by Arc meant that things got a lot more difficult for Tank in the meantime, but he was keeping up.

At least Lung was being curb stomped by all the heavy hitters. She got a really nice view of it too, and he was large and loud enough for her to not even need her binoculars and power to watch closely, despite the smoke and dust.

He was being curb stomped, until he wasn't.

She blinked, and then there was just an fading afterlight of green motes of light, fading into air, and Lung was nearly whole again, thrashing and roaring loud enough to rattle the rooftop under her despite being a quarter mile away.

Dragon's suit got shredded pretty quickly after that stumble in momentum.

And then Armsmaster suddenly did a mistake that she had never seen him do before, being launched through a wall by Lung, unharmed but disoriented.

A moment later, he opened the radio to say that Lung was changing his fighting style and his prediction algorithm was stuttering, which explained a lot but god damn it! They had been so close!

Oni Lee arrived right after, teleporting a couple rooftops down, and she cursed, ducking down, peeking over the edge to watch him teleport right next to Carnot and damn near shoot his shoulder off while a clone of his blew up a PRT squad moving in to contain Lung.

Cohesion fell from there. Oni Lee and Lung, fighting together again, whatever the hell had happened during their last fight? It got a lot harder to keep either of them in line.

They probably still couldn't win, but the longer Lung stayed in the fight the harder it got, and he was fucking huge already, a literal four-armed, four-winged dragon covered in silver and fire.

She felt an odd sense of deja vu from a couple months ago, when the Undersiders got wiped. Lung and Armsmaster squaring off while everything went to shit around them…

Hopefully Armsmaster wouldn't get nearly ripped in half again, because this time, Panacea wasn't around to pull his guts back in and somehow glue him back together.

A minute later, in the span of only a second, a gargantuan, pitch black cloud seemed to bleed into reality from below, rising and consuming everything, and the radio channel she was on, so full of reports and orders, went completely silent.

And what could she do but wait here? Nothing.

Thankfully, it didn't seem lethal. Most of New Wave came out of it, as did Dauntless, and then one of Dragon's suits, but their reports weren't comforting.

That thing apparently blocked everything to do with senses, or close enough to it.

The agents on the edge that ran back outside confirmed it.

So, they set up along the perimeter, waiting. The villains had nowhere to go.

They couldn't fly up aside from Purity, who Challenger said wasn't here, and Rune, who was not exactly a good flier, Dragon had underground seismic monitors if they somehow tried to dig down or go through some strange method, and they couldn't walk out either.

With the exception of the damn Merchants because that gigantic jeep was goddamn unstoppable with Skidmark on it accelerating the entire thing as well as making the machine gun on its back into the equivalent of a high-caliber naval turret.

And the tornado around the entire thing made it really hard to approach, and Weld couldn't catch up to it enough to glue himself to it.

Almost ten minutes had passed before the entire cloud of eerie, otherworldly darkness just… poofed out.

It revealed the battlefield with much more clarity than before, the dust having settled, the fires guttering out.

It was a rather… awe-inspiring sight, in a horrifying way.

So much sheer, unbridled destruction that had she not seen the before, she could never picture there being entire factories in the center of their encirclement, just a desolate stretch of metal spikes, melted asphalt and charred bricks, amidst piles of sand and giant splatters of containment foam, scattered around.

Her awe was cut short by a sudden beep in her ear.

"The villains are all gathered somewhere in the center! Look for the flare!"

Said flare immediately fired, pale blue.

"An unknown cape is doing something to the ground underneath them and it's glowing! It might be a portal!" Dragon rushed out, and she could spot the moment the confusion faded from all the capes, and they dashed towards the center, Armsmaster firing two grappling hooks off his forearms and extending something like a heely wheel from his feet to slingshot himself forward like a car, skillfully throwing himself around craters and zipping forward.

The fliers moved as fast as they could, whoever was slow being left behind.

The rest simply ran as fast as they could.

Seeing as the perimeter was now officially worthless, apparently, she let up, letting it snap back to normal space, and reached, further than she usually let herself in the presence of the Protectorate.

One step, and she was an entire three block's worth of distance down, on a teetering corner of bricks, as PRT agents below sprinted towards the largest group of villains they'd ever faced.

Fearless dudes, really.

Another, and she was next to Armsmaster, focused as could be.

This space around them, with a single point in the middle… it was just a perimeter, wasn't it?

She just had to inverse it.

Space shortened, hundreds of feet becoming dozens, shortening the trip for the heroes significantly.

C'mon, if you won't let me do shit, at least catch them, she cheered inwardly, watching Armsmaster's form distort as it entered her power, then exited, a mere fifty feet from the villains.

Two containment foam grenades fired from his arms.

Two metal tables of all fuckin' things immediately blocked them, before another two dozen bits of metal furniture started spinning around the group in a wide vortex.

"Surrende-!" Armsmaster began, only for a red, shining something to zip into the ground in front of him and explode in a red, almost flowing aura, tossing him back as he flipped to fall and slide to a single foot, unzipping his halberd, flipping it, and firing another cannister of his sleeping gas at the group, low to the side, where Rune couldn't see.

It was intercepted by a wall of metal swords, barely four feet tall.

Kaiser was back up, and she felt her fists clench in frustration.

A steady stream of napalm seemed to arch over the villain's heads like a sprinkler, burning high and smokeless, impairing her vision, aside from the sight of a multicoloured mass of people of all shapes and sizes, half-hiding behind metal spikes, firing guns, throwing shining red strips that exploded and formed craters, or throwing out fireballs in Lung's case, who was back to nine feet tall and hiding for the first time she'd ever heard of.

Underlit by a swirling blue light, coming from below.

The portal, she could guess. Charging up, most likely?

God damn it.

GOD DAMN IT!  

This- this had been perfect! They could have cleaned up the Bay! Forever! How the fuck did it get to this!?

Dragon's suits dived, rapid-firing containment foam, enough to glue them all together ten times over, emptying their entire storage in a volley.

A burst of wind, in three cleaving shapes, flew up, and detonated, scattering them everywhere, the foam slowing and expanding midair, only making more obstacles in the way for the approaching heroes and blasters.

She snarled.

Fucking Stormtiger of all people just saved all of them! This-

A flash of light caught her eye, and she looked up , seeing Dauntless wind up a throw with his Arclance, looking like Zeus's modern depiction, lightning sparking off the spear.

Her eyes widened.

That… that was a throw meant to kill. 

"STOP THE BLUE ONE IN THE CENTER!" Dragon shouted, urgently.

Dauntless wound up, and threw it, with a guttural cry.

She reached for the space between him and the blue man with glowing tattoos, and shortened it, cutting the distance in less than half.

"TAY-"

Blue light flashed, and the villains vanished into thin air.

A startled cry of strangled pain made her eyes focus on the blue figure, seemingly left behind, impaled from the left side of his shoulders to his right hip, blue blood running in rivers as the Arclance pinned him to the ground it cracked through, shocks making him jerk and spasm grotesquely. 

Her wide eyes met his.

There was not an ounce of fear or resignation in his eyes, even as she watched his eyes dull, and his head slowly bow, his fingers go limp.

He flickered, and in his place, a tall figure stood, in front of the Arclance.

His costume… baffled her just as much as the blue guys'.

Medieval armour that looked like something a general in a fantasy novel would wear, complex and gleaming gold, with a strange, gigantic lance in his right hand.

He calmly turned, grasped the Arclance with his left hand, and shouldered it out of the soil, holding it in a reverse grip.

"Put your hands up and surrender!" Armsmaster barked, preparing his halberd, and the man's cold eyes disregarded him entirely, backlit by flames and spikes of metal.

She felt distinctly uneasy, looking at those eyes.

It felt like looking at something so old she couldn't even guess at its perspective. Something that had lived through far more than what they had to throw at it. Or perhaps he was just a delusional psycho, either way, he unnerved her.

He flickered, and the Arclance vanished from his hand, gone to god knows where.

She winced, knowing full well how long it had taken Dauntless to charge that damn thing up, what a big loss that was.

The man simply watched them, saying nothing, seemingly contemplating something.

"Put your hands! Up! Now!" Armsmaster barked.

Ten, twenty feet behind, Dragon's suits landed, giant dragon-like things, surrounding him.

The fact he did not look the least bit bothered felt off.

Was he insane? Psychosis, maybe? Delusions of greatness?

Why was he so unconcerned with being in the middle of almost two dozen heroes, or more?

More people neared.

Barriers from Shielder formed around the man, flat purple-blues.

The strange gold-armoured man just rested his lance on his shoulder, eyes on Armsmaster, who continued barking orders of surrender like a police officer, as he was trained to do.

Gold boy was waiting for something, seemingly.

Apparently, it was for every hero able to walk and talk to surround him, because it was only as the suits and Armsmaster got ready to get into melee with the man, that he seemed to react, with a sneering scoff, utter disdain and disregard in his eyes. 

"Shut up. Your barking irritates me." He spoke, voice baritone and so arrogant it personally offended her, pitched to carry above the chaos. 

Definitely delusions of greatness. Who the fuck did this psycho think he was?

She wanted to punch him.

"Put the weapon down, or face the con-" Armsy started to reply, halberd pointed forward, one armed, advancing.

Armsmaster choked, jerked, stopped in place.

She and almost everyone else turned to watch him, flickers of flame seeming to erupt from within the joints of his armour.

Whirring servos sounded out, locking into place, and the armour shifted in a thousand ways, completely enclosing Armsmaster's head, a full-body suit turned statue, silent.

"I believe I told you…" The man started, straightening up, cold eyes sweeping over the crowd around him. "To shut up." He finished, taking a step forward, steps heavy and unconcerned.

She saw Tank and half the brutes take a step back, for some reason, and looked around, confused at the reaction.

"You all broke the truce." He stated, simply, hatefully. "After we extended a hand in cooperation too. You might all deserve to be gutted like fish for this, but we're lenient with self-righteous morons who think they know everything, because we need you. But don't forget, that you need us, too." He snarled, taking another step, eyes burning.

"For every hero there are three villains. Do you think, when the next Endbringer kills your families, leaves behind burning wastelands and forgotten corpses cooking in the sun, villains will continue to throw their lives into the grinder just to be stabbed in the back? Do you cockroaches realize what you've done? Do you think nobody present here will talk? That this won't spread? That the next attack won't take the lives of thousands more because villains won't believe in the Truce anymore, all because of all of you?" He snarled, the ground vibrating with his voice, his hatred so thick and acidic she could taste it in her throat. 

She felt a faint sense of dread rise and claw up her spine, swallowing roughly.

He… was making sense.

Too much sense.

She… hadn't even really thought about that.

Fuck… fuck.

"You hide behind the Truce while kidnapping heroes, and you sit here and PREACH-!" Brandish started, light sword shaking in her hands.

He glanced at her, and she cut off with a high-pitched scream, bursting into flames, immediately turning into a ball of light, dashing back, still on fire. She came out of it, still screaming, rolling on the ground as two heroes jumped on her, trying to put her out, to no avail.

Everyone else jerked back, in shock, in fear.

"Quiet." He snapped, taking a step forward, glancing around at them all with nothing but anger in his eyes. 

Nobody uttered a peep, afraid they would burst into flames with a mere glance, tense.

Another step.

She took a step back.

Others took two, four.

He looked at Challenger, eyes narrowed.

"Did you tell them, at the very least?" He hissed, and Challenger glared back.

"Depends on what you're talking about." Challenger coldly replied, adjusting her grip on her axe.

"I'm talking about the reason that we tried to call for a Truce, the fact Heartbreaker or a wannabe of him is stalking about the Bay, kidnapping your people, the fact we wanted to talk about a plan to save them."

If there was silence before, she wasn't sure what to call this. She could just sit there and try to wrap her head about that insanely important bit of context that Challenger didn't fucking DEIGN to mention! 

"And your reply to our extended hand is this..." He trailed off, glare swerving through them, all of them, as they tried to digest that information in silence. "To break the Truce and buy him time. But it's too late to walk back now, for any of us, and I'm not here to lecture you further. I'm not here for revenge, despite you very likely killing one of us and almost doing the same to another three. I'm not here to give you a lesson, because I think you knew what you were doing was wrong, and did it anyway, because you're only heroes in name."

Somehow, those words genuinely hurt, because they felt true.

"I'm here because the world needs to see consequences. Because the world needs to learn, feel, and see, that the Truce is unbreakable, and the price is a toll none can afford, not even heroes." He rumbled, voice calming down, chilling, becoming solid, frigid.

"I was sent here to do what must be done. I was sent here to punish you." He growled, crouched, and jumped straight up, twelve feet in the air, lance held in a backwards grip, pointed towards the ground below.

Everyone burst into action, backing up, half a dozen Blasters unloading on him.

Notes:

Down-time? What's that? :D

Enjoy another monster chapter that's like 11k words.

Edit: Added bits of conversation to the end of the chapter that reveal Heartbreaker's existence to the heroes.