Rumors of War Part 2

I arrived at base as quickly as I could get the Triumph to move. I'd even stopped once in an alley to have M teleport me and the Triumph closer to base.

I hope no one decided to calculate how long it took Agent Shade to leave his penthouse in the Bronx and arrive at the base of operations in Clinton.

Hell's Kitchen was just as desolate as ever. At least these parts were where the real estate had long since given up and had been left to waste away as criminals and gangsters took over the neighborhood.

Stiff had an influence in this area so I had no fear parking my Triumph out in the open near the restaurant that served as a cover for base.

No one would dare to touch that bike. And even if they did, well, M would track them down and then they would certainly regret having touched the bike.

I stepped into the restaurant, my trench coat billowing in the wing I pushed past the threshold of the entrance.

I only paused to give the waitress behind the bar a nod. Valerie was a good girl, just one who had followed the wrong crowd and ended up in Stiff’s employ.

People like her and others I've come across since I became Shade were part of the reason why I could not fail this mission. Stiff must be brought down.

And that downfall just became even more urgent with what he was planning. The man was insane.

I moved into the kitchen, passing the chefs who were hard at work and the butchers who made me shiver anytime I met their eyes.

These were butchers indeed, in every sense of the word.

One would think Stiff made enough money from arms dealing to not concern himself with another niche. No, far be it for someone as opportunistic as the retired Colonel to ignore a niche as prosperous as organ harvesting.

I quickly walked past the kitchen, heading for the back exit. Near the exit was a ladder which led up to a trap door.

I climbed up the ladder and faced the trapdoor as a scanner protruded from it at the detection of my motion. A ray of red light beamed out and I made sure it found my eye, David's eye.

Once the retina scan was finished, the trap door pinged, clicked, and swung open in its own accord.

I quickly climbed into the room beyond. It was a bunker of concrete and steel and totally empty save for a staircase that led underground.

I took the stairs heading down and down for almost half a kilometer until I arrived at a door. A retinal scan, fingerprint scan, and facial recognition scan later, the door swung open for me.

I got in and entered the main base. This was an underground building with twelve rooms. There was a rec room, two dormitories, a gym, a shooting range, one storehouse, a single kitchen, two bathrooms, a conference room, a computer room which served as a security room for all the surveillance monitors, and finally an office.

The office was Lynx’s and that was where I headed.

The lighting of the base was blue and dim. It certainly made navigating through the corridors interesting. Most times when I'd been drunk here, the lighting alone had been enough to put me into a state of vertigo.

I winced at the recollection of those memories. The things I had to do to keep up appearances. I couldn't wait for this mission to be over so that I could get back to my life, get back to being me, Clarke Chambers, the Bastion of Genesis

The thing I missed the most were my powers. I still used them, but not as much as I'd have liked to and I had to be creative about how I used them else I'd have outed myself a long time ago.

The most painful thing was that regardless of how dangerous being Shade was, the missions I went on weren't the sort I needed to earn the right points for more access to my powers.

It was only when I managed to save some good people, keep something disastrous from falling into Stiff’s hand, or preemptively foil some of his dangerous plans did I gain more access. But these opportunities weren't as common as I'd like.

Reaching a year and I have only been able to unlock one new ability and was at twenty three percent. Three percent had been added to the pre-existing twenty.

And what ability had I gained from that? Well, I called it the Power of Magnitude because it was a power that illuminated the world before my eyes.

With the Power of Magnitude I could see the beginning of everything, the origin of anything that had an origin. I could see the beginning of the end of the war in the middle east, everything it would take to stop it.

I could see the beginning of any manufacturing or naturally occurring process. This greatly helped me with the Power of Morphreversion and the Power of Maturation. I could now return things to their origins better and initiate growth with more efficiency as I now had visual data of what I was supposed to be doing and how it was going to end up looking.

I'd reached out to Blin with M’s communication system and had learned that the Bastions of Finire had a counter ability to it. They could see the end of everything. Nothing with a finality could escape their sight. This made them highly dangerous as they knew how every fight, every altercation, was going to end, and knew just what to do to adjust things to fit the outcome they wanted.

I could also be creative with the way I utilized my knowledge of beginnings, but it wasn't always in my favor.

The Power of Magnitude was as much a blessing as it was a curse. It was what let me see how exactly Stiff planned to start this Panamerican War.

It was what showed me a grim vision of Stiff selling nuclear weapons to Spanish Cartels.