36-37
The world spun for only a moment before she burst into smoke, killing her momentum, then turned invisible, grouping herself up high in the sky to whirl around and look for her adversary.
Said adversary was floating in place, spinning and looking for her, just twenty feet down.
It was the way she was flying, the way she held her hands, that made something click in her head.
It was a practised pose, the only real way to fly without looking goofy or strange, one knee half-bent and foot pointed down.
The squared shoulders, the tilt of her elbow, that odd but appealing way she held her fists out just a little, bending her wrists down a couple degrees to seem both ready and alert but not tense, she'd seen those before.
All she needed to add to the image was a cape and a silver helmet.
That vague, tiny hint of familiarity in the back of her mind joined the information, and it all clicked together in an image she never would have imagined in a hundred years.
Alexandria? She blurted out in the woman's mind, flabbergasted, and the woman whirled, checking her surroundings.
It fit, but it also didn't.
Why the fuck would a member of the… Triumvirate…
Through the physical and mental pain, she felt some small, fundamental foundation of her worldview shift.
It made sense. Too much sense.
She dashed away, and solidified.
She couldn't kill fucking Alexandria.
As much as she now hated the fucking bitch, the world needed her. She was one of the few symbols of hope their part of the world had left. The lives she saved during Endbringer attacks were far too many.
She had no idea how hard Smite would hit her. It might do next to nothing, it might cut her in half. She just didn't know.
She didn't need to kill her, thankfully. In fact, if she was alive, that would serve her better.
There was a chance she was making false conclusions here, but that fact did not change. She wanted the woman alive.
She materialised midair in the middle of her mad dash, coming out into a spinning flip a hundred feet away.
A brief moment of sight was all she needed, the woman rushing for her like a bullet.
She reached for a different summoner spell, and cast it, immediately burst into smoke again right as… who she thought was Alexandria rushed through her, scattering her in the wind.
That felt almost as horrible as getting gut-punched by a human freight train.
The woman screamed a high-pitched scream as she burst into flames, flailing limply through the air for a panicked moment before her flight reactivated and she bashed herself into the dirt, trying to put the fires out in vain, carving rends into the grassland like a plough through sand in wide, sweeping curves.
'Ignite' burned one's lifeforce and soul as well as their flesh.
If the flesh couldn't be harmed, the other two would suffice.
There were many Legends who could do the same and worse.
She positioned herself mentally, changing positions around the woman as she destroyed her suit and forced choking sounds of agony through her mask.
All she needed was to get that stupid fucking mask off her face. Everything else was just to stall for time, to find some way to end this, and end this fast.
A portal opened to the side, and her eyes jerked to it as the first sign of reinforcements came, a row of agents decked out in full Tinkertech gear, sprinting out and quickly scattering in a circular formation, not helping Alexandria, but simply looking for her.
To the left another one opened, a single man walking through, covered in Tinkertech armour, hands limp at his side.
She swapped Runes.
A tide of information came to her from Cosmic Insight, and she kept moving in wide circles as Alexandria tried to put the fire out in vein, rapidly losing her suit and being left in a bodysleeve.
Her eyes went to the man who arrived alone, and she felt half her options evaporate before her very eyes.
Can kill someone with a single gaze.
Considering how powers worked, that was a purely biology-focused power.
She needed a battlefield for just herself and Alexandria. She couldn't afford to fight all of Cauldron here.
A single Legend came to mind, and with an internal, self-directed cuss, she resigned herself to having her brain bleed out of her ears by the time this was over with.
Why hadn't she expected reinforcements? They were incompetent and overconfident, not blind.
Unbound Spellbook waited for her, and she reached for another cast of Ignite as the fires abruptly winked out.
She materialised in the air just long enough to cast it on the furious human shaped comet, her momentum as the mist carrying her to the woman.
Alexandria likewise rushed her, ignoring the pain.
She burst into smoke once more, then went invisible and flew up as Alexandria audibly snarled in fury and pain.
She reached for Mordekaiser, The Iron Revenant.
Thirteen feet of metal flickered into existence above Alexandria as she bashed herself into the ground, and she dropped like a stone towards the woman, her right hand throwing the mace's head out towards Alexandria as bullets and lasers and grenades battered her unyielding form, none of them forcing her to move any more than an inch.
Through a fleshless visage of metal, eyes that were not eyes glared at her adversary through metal sockets, and she reached for the woman's soul with her mace, a formless line forming between one vessel to another.
She threw her left hand out behind her to grasp a distant realm, something familiar and silent.
Eerie green light reached Alexandria right as she twisted enough to see her from within the ground she was churning through, and the world twisted around them as Taylor's clawed gauntlet grasped the realm of the undead and pulled a small piece of it to the waking world with a sound like a rusty churchbell rasping to a lifeless sky.
Alexandria rushed at her with a yell.
The world around them warped, sound distorting for a moment as if underwater.
A wave of green-black mist formed around them like a second skin clawing at the sunlight all around them.
Her iron boots broke the ground as she fell.
The mist exploded outwards from their bodies, obstructing her vision for only a moment as it rushed away from them in a near-instantaneous wave, replacing one world with another for a sphere of space barely a thousand feet wide.
A pale gray expanse of lifeless, broken soil, surrounded by an impenetrable bubble of mist, spinning and softly wailing, an arena for just the two of them in a realm as close to Hell as she could get.
She cast Exhaust right as Alexandria slammed into her chestplate and sent her to the ground, grunting in annoyance as she felt her soul rattle in its vessel, soulfire bursting out of every seam and joint of her armour.
She made a grasping motion in the air with her left gauntlet as Alexandria zipped back up above her and dashed down. She yanked her hand to the side.
A spectral gauntlet of green soulfire formed out of nothing and plucked Alexandria out of the air, its glow mixing with the orange-yellow sways of the Exhaust spell, and wrenched to the side, letting go and dissipating at the height of its momentum as Taylor directed it.
The woman blurred towards the wall of mist.
Fingers and faces formed before she hit it as if to welcome her in, twisting around her as she impacted it, mouths screaming and fingers grappling for what little scraps remained of her immaculate suit.
Then she bounced off as if the mist was made of steel, scraps of her soul lingering on the fingernails of the damned as Taylor lifted her own bulk with another gauntlet, yanking herself up, adjusting her grip on Nightfall.
The souls took their bounty, and retreated into the maelstrom.
She slammed her left fist into her own chestplate, soulfire flaring around her with a crisp clang of metal, coating her.
She thrust her chest out with a deep, booming snarl, metal untwisting and screeching back into place, soulfire rushing back into the gaps of her chest, done with its task as she thundered forward.
Alexandria rushed her, feet first, still alit with Ignite's dying embers.
In a normal person, having so much of their soul burned and clawed away would have left them a gibbering husk, barely able to stand from weakness, their body graying and decaying.
Besides some branch-like flesh she could see beneath some of the flames however, Alexandria did not appear affected.
Another summoner spell roared to life around Taylor, Barrier wreathing her in pale, magical wards, runes twisting at the edge of her vision as she swerved on her heel, showing Alexandria her back, raising the mace above her head to seemingly slam into the ground, double-handing it.
The hero didn't see the trap for what it was, somehow.
Nor the gamble that it was on Taylor's end, that this was really Alexandria and not someone else, because she doubted anyone else would survive this kind of strike.
Two feet slammed into the middle of Taylor's back, the barrier absorbing the majority of the impact and shattering with a whisper like cracked glass.
What was left of the impact, she used to her advantage, twisting snarls of metal within her hollow body to move the force into her arms.
Soulfire wailed as she pushed it forth, spewing out of the empty spaces of her mace like a jet turbine, and with speed that looked impossible on a titan of her size, she slammed it down in a blur.
She switched to the Rune of Sorcery, picking Arcane Comet. In the same instant, mid-swing, she grasped Flash, and cast it behind her, teleporting several feet back, behind the agent.
The woman didn't have a millisecond to react as the mace burst into existence above her face in a spew of sparks, mere inches away, her eyes still trained on where she'd just hit Taylor in the back.
The mace slammed into the barren earth and through it with a deafening sound that echoed and bounced within their bubble of space, digging the puppet into the earth, jagged teeth of stone exploding around them, dust billowing and obscuring both their sights.
The comet orbiting her waist shot up faster than her sight could follow, through the mists and out of sight, then a mere second later, fell down, the size of half a human and so fast that Taylor only caught a flash of indigo before it hit her mace and nearly ripped it out of her hands with how hard it stomped it through the earth, making her stumble forward.
The earth cracked like dry, layered ceramics beneath them, and she dropped to her knees to keep upright, unable to keep up with the aftershock and the impact itself as it decimated their arena, star dust flickering in the air and molten rock clinging to her greaves as she used her left hand to form a thousand grasping hands to stabilize the earth around her feet like nails and wires.
For a moment, the only sound was the soft moaning wails of the undead souls around them, distant and weak, and the reverberations of a hundred feet of earth being turned to smoking gravel and dust.
She couldn't even see anything past a foot or two away, and for a moment, she worried that she'd killed Alexandria. Worried that maybe that person wasn't actually Alexandria, and she just lost her only bargaining chip.
She was proven wrong by the overwhelming force that shoved her mace up through half a dozen feet of broken stone, almost launching it out of her hands, only a couple gauntleted fingers keeping Nightfall from being thrown to the mists.
A spike of agony twisting between her temples registered through the chaos to let her know she was running out of time and resources.
Before she could toss the mace down again, a blur shot out of the crater, turned abruptly in a ninety degree angle, and rushed to her head.
She switched to the Rune of Resolve, picking Grasp of the Undying, green energy swirling around her gauntlets.
She didn't get to hit anything, as knees dug into her shoulders and fingers dove into the Y-shaped slip of her helmet, wrenching it apart.
She jerked to the side, and through the rush of dust that motion cleared, she caught a clear look at the woman she was fighting.
She could recognize those eyes, even if instead of silver metal framing them, it was the thick remnants of a cracked black mask.
One real, one not.
She'd be the second to put a scar on this woman, then.
The helmet creaked as the iron began to peel apart, a snarl of fury on Alexandria's face.
She tossed her mace aside, and brought a fist to Alexandria's back, jerking her upper body forward for more force.
Neither of them were expecting Alexandria's arms to keel, nor a short wheeze to leave her before she straightened her arms again and kept pulling.
That wasn't why she hit her, however.
Grasp of the Undying latched onto whatever lifeforce Alexandria had left, and yanked out whatever it could, green energy full of life rushing over Taylor's knuckles and sinking into the summon core, rejuvenating what it could. The Second Wind effect combined with Rejuvenate, each bouncing off each other to push back, just slightly, that maddening agony shredding her brain apart.
The monstrous force trying to peel her helm apart withered even further, turning to nothing more than a strong annoyance.
Molecular stasis kept the woman tough.
But something about the woman's strength or stasis didn't seem to work right with lifeforce, or a severe lack of it.
She won.
She'd just fought Alexandria, and she won.
She burst into roaring, booming laughter, the sound like a halting funeral bell, dropping her hands and spreading them in challenge, the two green orbs of light that she called eyes looking into Alexandria's with a wide, unerring gaze full of triumph and delirious agony, not bothering to pull her off.
She won.
In the deep murk of her helm, the woman could not see the metal shards that formed her grin.
Alexandria growled, and wrenched a hand back, snapping it forward.
She switched back to Evelynn, swapping to the Rune of Domination simply for the physical boost, and burst into smoke.
The fist flew through her, and she twined around it, pulling herself in a half dozen directions. She materialised again, tentacles of bone and branches made of spines twisting around Alexandria to keep her still if only for a moment, and finally, her head formed in the blink of an eye above Alexandria's, golden eyes staring into one.
Her eyes flashed gold, and she pushed pure fuzz into her mind, just as Alexandria bucked and tore half of her tentacles apart.
Then she stilled, dropping like a rock.
They crashed into the broken earth, roiling dust clouds twining and pushing like snakes around them, and Taylor grit her teeth as she straightened, fixing her form to something more human, alien features turning to pink smoke.
She leaned down, and grasped the woman's chin, jerking it forward, empty eyes meeting her own.
She remembered as a child, hearing Alexandria explain that she was utterly immune to Master powers. In the PRT's files, they explained that it was because Alexandria's brain could not be altered.
Wouldn't it be oh so funny, if Cauldron believed the same?
As far as they knew, all she had were mere powers like theirs.
Her eyes flashed gold once more.
The valley was silent, even as more and more people poured out of the portals, agents and some of the few loyal Case 53's they had spreading out in a wide circle around the two strange, ghostly orbs dashing and flickering about where Summoner and Alexandria used to be.
Shamrock didn't know what she could realistically do here, but the reinforcement order went from yellow to an orange in a matter of seconds, so when the portal appeared in her room, she had little choice.
She was ready anyways.
She always was.
Her handler wasn't here, but she was told the flying man was the one in charge.
She sat amongst the general agents, one knee down, aiming down the scope of her plasma rifle at the central site, while ten feet down on either side of her, at least a dozen other agents were using the odd furrows dug into the earth as trenches.
The orbs eventually stopped, nestled close to the ground, then shifted again, one swinging lazily, the other rising in the air.
A sound like a whisper registered, and it began to ramp up rapidly over a few seconds.
Everyone tensed, ready.
Heartstopper moved closer at the edge of her peripheral vision, his handler keeping a tight grip on his shoulder to stop him. He obeyed after a moment of mindlessly moving forward, his armour whirring down.
With a sound like a gasp reversed through a hollow tube, a strange, dark, gray-green mist formed from the orbs, bursting like a pox ball, outwards and washing over them.
It smelled like a graveyard and tasted like the air of a tomb.
Utter silence reigned for a moment as the sun outlined a monstrous silhouette, taller than any people in the valley combined, thirteen feet tall and as wide as six or seven men at the shoulders.
In one hand, a blocky, gnarled thing hung.
In the other, a human shape did the same.
"Hold fire!" The flying man boomed, flying up, fists shaking as the mist cleared in the morning breeze.
Her eyes widened even further at the form it revealed.
Spikes and chains and metal plates curling in and out of eachother, backlit by green light and something eerie and foreign, all mixing with a form that looked like it could eat everything they threw at it and laugh at them.
She pulled her head back a little, giving a quick, dubious glance at her rifle.
It felt like holding a water pistol up to a polar bear.
She swallowed, and ducked her head down to the scope again, hoping her handler hadn't seen that momentary distraction.
Not a single word was spoken.
The metal construct groaned in the way only something made of metal could, slowly raising its left arm, its monstrous fist wrapped tight around a limp woman's head.
She couldn't tell if the woman was alive.
Half of her wore a scorched, torn and flaking bodysuit of some kind, while the other half revealed strange lines of gnarled, branch-like flesh, the marks shaped like fingertips and the outline of human teeth.
The flying man took a deep breath.
"Is she alive?" He asked, voice cold and filtered through the odd, half-done helmet he wore.
The metal titan shifted, its movements stilted.
" For now. " It rumbled, with a voice that she could literally feel in her chest, vibrating her ribs like a xylophone. " You heard our demands. Return our bounty and scatter, weaklings. Or else… " It rumbled, its voice somewhere between a growl of contempt and a purr full of sadism.
The gauntlet tightened, strange green flames that made her guts churn with unease flickering out between the plates of its glove.
"Will you uphold your end of this deal?" The flying man's mechanical voice asked, shouting across the open space.
Slowly, too slowly to be comfortable with, the giant nodded, a motion so small she couldn't have noticed it without the two massive spikes coming out of its helm making it so much more obvious.
"Alright! One moment! Don't harm her!" The flying man hollered, then raised a hand to his helmet.
A tense moment followed, followed by another, everyone but the giant essentially fidgeting.
Even she.
Then, three different portals opened, and through them walked three different people, pushed through by black-clad hands.
She allowed herself to briefly glance at them, feeling all the more confused.
A teenage girl, a man in a cape costume, and a middle aged man that looked terrified out of his mind, glancing around like he was tweaking.
The portals closed, and two more portals opened, one significantly larger than the other.
The giant turned its head to the gawking blonde and the dejected man in the suit, and jerked its head to the large portal.
The girl and the man in the suit gave a hesitant glance at the two or three dozen rifles pointed their way, then quickly made their way to the portals, walking through into what looked like... a well-lit tunnel?
The giant turned its head to the middle aged man who was eyeing the smaller portal.
" Go. " It growled, and the man jumped like a rabbit, nodded rapidly, and sprinted through it.
The giant lowered its hand, and with a flick of its wrist, like throwing away trash, tossed the woman aside to the closest row of agents as if she was a limp ragdoll, put the gigantic mace on its shoulder, and turned, walking to the giant portal with unconcerned, confident steps.
The portal closed behind it, and the flying man rushed to the woman the agents were trying to put on a gurney, grabbing her and zipping through another portal.
"Well done. Await return." Her handler's voice buzzed through the device in her ear, and she replied back with the words she was told to, quickly moving to the closest squad commander to follow them back whenever the portal maker could service them, folding her weapons away.
In the meantime, she looked out at the mostly pristine valley and the mountains around it, knowing this would not be a sight she would see often.
She might even try to smuggle back a flower into her room.
All in all, it was a good day for Shamrock.
Lisa was honestly speechless.
What does one say to the insanity she witnessed in those short few seconds?
That was Alexandria.
Taylor beat Alexandria to a fucking pulp. The woman was as limp as a potato sack. And scarred.
She remembered Taylor telling her she was practically Eidolon 2.0, but she hadn't taken that to heart until now.
She could deal with the worldview-shattering revelation that Alexandria worked for Cauldron later.
That annoying ass alarm could wait as well.
"Holy shit, T." She groaned out, both in relief and disbelief, rubbing at her face as she slid down the wall. "Thank you, by the way. Goddamn you're fast. Hadn't even been thirty minutes in that cell and I get thrown out onto a Windows background valley. I owe you like at least six foot massages."
Taylor didn't reply.
The monstrously enormous suit of metal sat completely still at their right.
Starting to feel a little nervous about having a metal titan silently looming over her, she glanced up.
Taylor made a sound, then flickered, returning to her real form.
Then she made some kind of strangled moan and collapsed.
Coil was the one who got to her first, preventing her from cracking her head open on the floor.
"Ma'am?" He rushed out quietly, and she scrambled up to help the bastard hold Taylor up, throwing one of her arms around her shoulder.
"Sam? Sam. What's…" She started, then trailed off when she noticed the faint glint of red on her cheeks, barely visible through the shoulder-length head of curly hair and the shitty lighting.
"Hold her still, make sure her head isn't moving around." She snapped to Coil, who did as asked, and she carefully tilted Taylor's head back, brushing hair out of her face.
She gulped, the remnants of adrenaline in her system firing up again.
Taylor was bleeding from her fucking eyes. And her nose, but her eyes. It wasn't just a few drops either, that- that was a lot of fucking blood to be losing from one's face.
A strangled grunt came from Taylor as Lisa stood there like a shocked fucking lemming, before her body emitted a bunch of weird green particles with a startlingly loud sound, making her hand flinch off for a moment before darting forward to brush more hair away.
Brown eyes flickered open, bloodshot, and Taylor tried to speak, the sound little more than a mangled slur, her neck limp as her head rolled to the side, Coil's hand gently stopping it from moving too suddenly.
Taylor tried again, trying to squirm out of Coil's touch, a hand trying to cover an ear and missing sluggishly before smacking Lisa on the chest.
Shit, the alarm.
Why the fuck was there an alarm?
Judging by how her own head was pounding and only getting worse from the sound, it wasn't exactly hard to piece together what Taylor was trying to communicate.
"Cover her ears, now. I got her."
Coil obeyed instantly, swapping posts with her, moving behind Taylor and clamping his hands over her ears tightly as Taylor made animalistic whimpers of pain.
How much did she overuse her power?
She'd never heard of someone dying from power overuse, but Taylor said her power came from a different fucking Earth, so all bets were off.
Fuck. Fuck, fuck fuck fuck, she couldn't deal with losing another- something like a sibling. She couldn't deal with the knowledge that if Taylor died it would be on her and fucking Coil getting kidnapped. That would be the worst fucking way for Tay to die.
With the minor Brute rating Taylor had given her, it was startlingly easy to carry her down the hall from her and Coil's office, down through three open, strangely unguarded doors, and out onto a walkway of grated steel overlooking one of the vehicle depots.
It was empty.
Why was it fucking empty?
The alarm was only getting louder the further they went into the main base.
A rushing guard moved ahead of them, glanced to the side at them, and nearly tripped over himself to stop himself in the middle of a dead sprint, giving them a baffled look.
She waved him closer, still uncomfortably half-carrying Taylor to the side with her free hand as she awkwardly walked as fast as she could to meet him.
Once he was close, she grabbed his plate carrier and tugged him down.
"Ear protection! Go to the range, get ear protection! The one they use for the big guns! Come to the med bay!"
Instead of rushing away, he paused, giving her an unsure, empty look, thick scarred brows furrowing. Then he opened his mouth, and glanced at his watch, wiping the glass with a glove.
"Miss, the med bay should be empty by now! Were you out of base? We're relocating! Liquid Red protocol, two hours and twelve minutes till detonation!" He quickly rushed out over the alarm, and she spent half a second trying to remember what the fuck a Liquid Red protocol meant before giving up.
"Detonation of what?" She half-yelled, trying to ignore Taylor's unsynchronized movements and the fear stabbing ice picks into her chest.
"The base! Self-destruct protocol! We're scattering to the safehouses until further notice." He clarified, giving Taylor a trained once-over. "What's wrong with her? I was a field medic!"
Shit. Shit shit shit.
Why did Taylor decide to just blow up their goddamn base?
You paranoid nutter.
Did the technicians get backups of Coil's files at least?
Did any of that fucking matter right now!?
"Any transport?" She snapped, ignoring him, because they didn't need a fucking field medic they needed a sensory deprivation chamber until Taylor was done using her healing power on herself.
He nodded, shoving his equipment as far as he could from his hands, and walking forward to lodge himself under Taylor's other arm, studiously ignoring her awkward pawing at his helmet as she moaned incoherent sounds of pain.
He started walking, and she did the same to keep Taylor straight, Coil awkwardly trailing behind them, his hands entirely focused on keeping Taylor's head leaned back and her ears covered as best as he could.
"I'll take you! We're just emptying the light loads at the moment, so the civvie vehicles are getting cleared out first with the support staff. We can take one of the sedans!" The soldier said, and she made a tiny thumbs up to him as they squeezed through hallways and rushing mercs that scraped along the walls to make room for them.
It took a bit of logistical wrangling, and a couple minutes of hacking away at Noelle's lower half, but the mercs had done a very good job at stuffing Noelle into one of the decoy trucks.
The only building that could house the girl was one of the dock warehouses which was conveniently close to the safehouse she had temporarily put the Travellers and their new additions in, so it followed that she'd make their hidden convoy follow in those same tracks.
If anything happened to Noelle while Tay was out, she was pretty sure Taylor would have an aneurysm.
The explosives grade ear protection and the blindfold unfortunately didn't seem to make Taylor feel better, as during the entire ride, she just kept letting out strangled whimpers and trying to put pressure on her head, followed by the occasional burst of green particles as she writhed in pain.
Judging from how the bleeding stopped after the second time she used it, she could guess that she needed to use the healing power multiple times.
It was still terrifying to consider the implications of that.
She'd never, ever heard of a Thinker getting a brain haemorrhage from power overuse, and if the internet was right, bleeding from the eyes was definitely a sign of severe brain bleed.
And Taylor's behavioural change was equally concerning because it meant that something in her brain was still fuzzy and drunk and messed up because Taylor would not whimper and try to curl up into a ball on the seat if she was all there in the head, not in front of her subordinates.
It was like whatever safety stops were supposed to be there in a power to stop it from killing its user were mere suggestions for Taylor.
She wasn't in the habit of ascribing overly sentimental motives to people who didn't operate on those things, but the thought that on some level Taylor had pushed herself like this for her and the dejected bastard in the other seat was turning her heart into a punching bag of guilt.
At the same time, she literally blinked and there was a fucking cell in front of her, someone's hands were halfway to her wrists, and out of the corner of her eyes she could see the back of Sundancer doing her hair, turned away from her, split along with a shimmering rainbow line.
There was absolutely nothing she could have done to prevent this.
She sighed, grabbing one of Taylor's roaming hands between her own and weaving her fingers through hers, trying not to flinch from how tight Taylor was holding her.
Now, to see if she could get Taylor to sit down and rest for a couple days.
And hopefully keep things from imploding in the meantime.
Lisa squinted at the paper in her hand, rubbing at her temples, feet kicked up on a cracked, dusty desk.
Through a single foggy window to the right, half-covered in duct tape, morning sunlight washed over the metal flooring and the cracks of metal railing outside the office, a low humm-shuffle of mercenaries whispering to each other and patrolling the tight spaces occupying her ears.
It didn't help to know it was a nice, bright sunny day, and she was spending it stuffed up in a warehouse's overseer office with fucking Coil, trying to wrangle order into a scattered organization.
It hurt her ego to admit that Coil was doing more than half of the work on that front. Bastard was good at management, much more than her at the moment, and she was learning from him.
It made her want to blow his brains out, but she refrained. Someone had to be a voice of reason around here, so she had to follow reason.
That, and it was much, much easier to work on moving and shuffling Coil's assets with the man himself there to do it. Impersonating someone for paperwork transfers was a pain.
The people were mildly easier, but not by much.
How the hell did Taylor do this? Managing so many people was driving her nuts, and even compared to Coil, Taylor seemed so effortless in doing it. Just point, order, and walk away.
It was not that simple for her, even with Coil on the next desk over.
Maybe the secret was in doing that Taylor thing, where she'd stare off into space with that look in her eyes like she wasn't spacing out as much as looking at something completely different that nobody else could.
She admired the girl, fucking sue her.
Just one day of dual management of their scattered assets made that admiration increase.
She put the paper between two fingers, and extended it to the side without looking.
Coil wordlessly plucked it from her fingers, barely glancing to the side so he didn't miss, and she paused at how natural and smooth their movement had gotten by now.
Then she scowled.
Something about having a moment of flawless teamwork with the fucker that got her old team killed and got her imprisoned by Lung for a month really, really pissed her off.
She wanted a civvie day. She missed those.
"So… Where's boss lady?"
Lisa, to her credit, didn't jump in her seat like Coil.
Mostly because she didn't have the fucking energy.
Her head rolled back, and she stared up at Imp's domino mask as she obnoxiously chewed gum, arms resting on the top of her office chair and looking down at her.
"We had a fight with another organization. She overexerted herself. What did you want with her?"
Imp blew a bubble.
Lisa wrinkled her nose, forcing her power shut.
She didn't need to know the flavour and how long that gum had been in Imp's mouth for fuck's sake.
"Didja win?"
"She fucked them." She snorted, and barely stopped herself from both bragging and ranting about fucking Alexandria what the fuck.
"Huh, nice. Anyways I uh, I dunno. Me and Spits are kinda in limbo right now, and all that. Your pitch was pretty basic and noncommittal cuz of boss lady, but I don't think we're gonna meet boss lady anytime soon, huh?"
A moment of suspicion passed, before she flicked her power on.
Another moment passed, and she pushed it back, sighing.
Imp was genuinely just fucking bored.
"She needs to recover for a day or four. So, I don't think so. But, I do think I know her well enough to make a placeholder job for you to do."
Imp jumped back, and spun in place to throw her butt onto her desk.
"Hey!" She barked, and grabbed the girl's collar with her left hand, yanking her clean off the desk and placing her to the side like a disobedient toddler, ignoring her girl's yelp as she hissed in frustration and straightened the papers Imp sat on. "These are fucking important. Stop acting like a twelve year old, I said I have a job for you." She growled, checking to make sure nothing had torn.
"Holy shit you're fucking strong. Aren't you some thinkie smartie girl?" Imp said, then gasped. "Oh and shit, nice tats. Where'd you get em?" Imp poked her forearm.
She glanced down and examined the geometric patterns Taylor had put on her arms.
She'd honestly forgotten about those. The bodysuit just hid them all the time.
Wait, fuck. She forgot to put the bodysuit on. She felt quite naked without bulletproof protection from ankle to neck.
She also forgot her hair was still black.
Self-image was confusing when one's best friend slash sister figure could mould someone like clay.
"The 'boss lady' gave em to me." She grumbled, and pushed the papers up to the side.
Coil's hand darted out to grab them and drag them to his own desk, seemingly on autopilot.
She frowned again.
She was getting way too used to the fucker.
"She an artist?"
"She's going to be the Slaughterhouse Nine kind of artist if I somehow make the Bay implode while in the driving wheel, so please just sit your ass in a chair and listen." She sighed, dropping back into her chair and checking the latest batch of reports on her screen.
Said reports were more important than ever now that their entire organization had spread itself out over half the fucking Bay.
Safehouses and abandoned buildings were only barely enough to house their organization, and someone was eventually going to wonder why a group of guys kept walking out an abandoned warehouse in the docks to haul giant bags of what smelled like rotting meat out to a trash truck.
And why there were like fifty heavily armed people hiding in the rafters, if the person to check the place had powers to get in undetected.
Imp pouted, stared at her, then sighed, flicking a butterfly knife out of nowhere and starting to spin it like the world's deadliest fidget spinner around her fingers.
"Sure, shoot. Bored outta my skull here, and poking the empire girl isn't fun when she can flick sunflower seeds to my forehead like little missiles every time I open my mouth. That shit hurts. " Imp hissed.
Lisa arched her back, grimaced at the meaty cracks, and relaxed back into her chair.
"Try not to annoy Rune too much. Anyways… So, for now, let's go for something low profile. First of all, did you know that cameras can show you, as long as the video is edited enough and with a considerable delay involved?"
Imp paused, blinking at her.
"The fuck?"
She nodded, flicking through an email from one of their insiders at the bay's local power company.
"Medhall submitted a video of you stealing from a pharmacy. But you said that electronics can't pick you up at all. So I got curious about who was lying. Gave myself a headache, but I figured it out. Turns out, it was Medhall. They didn't pick you up, they saw a video of half their shelf fucking disappearring, and started fucking with the video until they stumbled onto the fact that compressing and distorting the footage enough makes it possible to perceive you. Then they submitted it to the PRT. I mean, eventually they figured out that it was edited, so the footage is inadmissible in a trial now, but that's still how you came onto their radar. So, if you were to infiltrate a place, make sure your face is well covered, at least."
Imp tilted her head.
"Wow, that fucking blows. I thought I'm completely immune."
She put her phone on the table.
"Well, you pretty much are. Just not when it comes to leaving no tracks whatsoever. So, here's the job. I want you to go into The Rig and bug the place to hell and back. Shitbag over here-" She jerked her thumb to the silently working Coil, who didn't react, "-ordered a bunch of extremely high quality tinkertech bugs that he never quite managed to put in places that mattered, like the Director's office and the cape briefing rooms. And I want you to do that in some inconspicuous disguise, just in case someone for some reason fucks with the footage enough to turn your power off. Hate to have our ploy fucked over because someone turned the video down to show less than a tenth of its original pixels."
Imp stared for a moment, then snorted, shoulders shaking with laughter.
"Bugging the director's office in The Rig is "low profile" for you guys? Damn. I'm gonna like this job more than I thought. I'm in. So uh… how do I start?"
This was the most annoying part, actually. Coordinating people and logistics.
She sighed, again.
"I'll contact the team that has the gear, they're close to lordside downtown. I'll give you an address to meet the driver, he'll drive you there, you go in with the keys, grab the suitcase, read the instructions on the tech, dress in the suit and wear the weird skin mask, and then go to another address and wait until a woman I'll show you a picture of leaves her house and goes to work, morning shift. Just jump into her car, walk into the building, bug it all to hell, and wait for her to finish her shift to get out of there."
Imp stared at her blankly for a moment.
"Sorry, my brain turned off after the third step, can I get that in writing?"
Lisa let her head drop to the desk with a dull thud.
She missed having Taylor around.
She read the slip of paper that Taylor gave her.
She rolled her eyes, and wrote back a reply, putting it into her hand.
Taylor, horrifically slowly, read it.
"Good job, wow. But I'm not resting more than I need to. Too bad of a spot, too mush shfhuf pho do." Taylor whispered, probably not realising she slurred half a sentence into incomprehension.
She smiled, feeling oddly proud of doing a good job.
Then she scowled, glaring at Taylor.
"You're not getting back to work until you can speak normally."
Taylor stared, blinking slowly at her like a lizard before she slowly furrowed a brow.
"Can't focus to read your lips. Write." Taylor breathed out, and offered her the paper slip again.
Lisa put her face in her hands with a groan, then took it.
This was getting annoying.
The last person she expected to see when she grabbed Taylor's phone off her desk was Faultline.
With an empty, cranky glare, she picked up and put it to her ear.
"Faulty. It's me. Renata's busy. What's up?"
Faultline was silent for a moment.
"Right. Herald, how much time do you have-"
"Changed name again. Insight, for now."
Faultline didn't react.
Uptight bitch.
"I see. Insight, how much time do you have?"
She stared at the small tasklist she set up on the side of her monitor.
About a third of the way done. She was doing alright considering the situation and how barely a day had passed.
And Imp should be back by nighttime, which meant that info should start trickling into the information team and by extension to her, before tomorrow passed.
"I've got some time, but I don't want to waste too much of it talking to you, no offence. Can you be short and concise?"
"Yes. The situation is; we were contracted for a high-paying job two months ago, delivering a sensitive package to a port for further delivery. Unfortunately, the employer seems to have displeased the middleman who would send it, and they've been keeping it hostage for one reason or another. They held it for a couple weeks, and eventually the employer stopped responding just as they started working something out. So now they're stuck with a very valuable package that's a little too hot to keep around for much longer, that they can't use, and they're looking for someone to get it off their hands. They even contacted us to see if anyone we knew of had any need for something that looks like a giant Tinkertech battery."
She paused.
Oh, shit. This could be good.
"Elaborate?"
"Alright. About three and a half feet tall and wide, it's this cubic mess of metal with a dozen hazard stickers glued onto it. It has a bunch of weird, triangular nubs on the top, probably connections or coils, I don't know. Sometimes it made a lot of bizarre noises at random while ferrying it around which had us thinking it would explode, but it hasn't so far, and it's existed for months, so it's fairly stable. As for output, no idea, but Gregor got curious and put a stripped wire up to one of the nubs at the top, connected to a lightbulb. The lightbulb exploded and the wire melted almost instantly, so, it's probably something really strong. It's just a giant Tinkertech battery as far as we can tell. They offered it to us for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars."
Her brows rose.
That was practically pennies compared to what most interested parties would pay for it.
"What's the catch? That's way too low…"
Faultline sighed.
"The catch is that the reason it's such hot merchandise and nobody will buy it from down the coast, is that the Dragonslayers are apparently looking for it because Dragon is looking for it, and word's gotten around. Could just be a rumour, but it's a scary enough one for most people to steer clear. Petty criminals like them don't want to keep that kinda stuff on hand, no matter how valuable it might be. If nobody buys it by the end of the week, it's probably getting dumped into the sea. Do you want pictures?"
She chewed on her cheek.
Taylor could speak without moaning and whining like a patient in an insane asylum, but she wasn't sure if she should bring this to her right now. Taylor needed rest, and Lisa needed to feel the burden of leadership for a little bit because she was sure there would be plenty of times she couldn't rely on Taylor to be around and carry her organization's minutiae in the future.
There was a reason she was Tay's right hand at the moment, and that reason was trust from someone who didn't have a whole lot of it to spread around. She couldn't afford to stay in her comfort zone if she were to grow into someone worthy of this position.
She sighed, letting her power run wild in the back of her mind, feeding her snippets of Faultline's sincerity, hopes of gaining favour through a good deal to make up for their first botched pickup...
This was her choice to make, for better or worse.
She didn't know what they would do now that their base was rubble and had a whole bunch of city officials crawling around its corpse, but she knew that an independent power source was practically essential for anyone trying to stay inconspicuous and off the grid, at least without oiling some hands in the power supply companies.
Not that they had a fucking base to put the damn thing in, but Taylor pressed that self-destruct button with too much immediate confidence for someone without a plan.
"Yeah. Send pictures and buy it, bring it to us. Two fifty plus fifty for delivery fee. Three hundred grand. Sound good?"
Faultline waited for one, two, then four seconds.
Just as she was getting annoyed, the woman spoke.
"Sixty five for delivery. It's a long trip from way down the coastline. It'll eat up two or three days at the least, which we could be using for other jobs. That plus defence and tinker budget. Trainwreck's suit and Labyrinth both hate being around the battery, so we'll have to use two vehicles again."
She groaned.
"Sixty for Train's tinkering, and that's final. It doesn't take fifteen grand to drive a second car."
A moment of silence.
"Deal." Faultline said.
"Good luck."
She hung up, and rubbed at her temples.
Why was she worked up over paying ten extra grand?
Coil was literally multiplying their income as she spoke, abusing his power and resources as much as he could now that Taylor was out of commission enough to let him.
Honestly, she just didn't like capitulating to Faultline.
With another sigh, and holy shit was she doing a lot of that these days, she put Taylor's phone back on the desk, trying to ignore the incessant buzzing.
She had no idea what the hell Taylor did to get Bakuda to act like an obsessive, lovesick puppy with a strong streak of mania in it, but it creeped her out to read the messages.
"Yeah, she's not really backing down on the questions. She really wants in, and she's getting really fed up with us dodging the question." Trickster emphasized, and Lisa bit her cheek.
She didn't care too much about Rune's past with the Empire, because from what she gathered from Coil's info on the girl, her situation was painfully relatable to Lisa herself, with the whole 'running away then getting in way over your head on something you didn't know the scope of', bar the nazi stuff, but she still wasn't sure what the hell to do with her.
Rune wanted to leave Brockton. Likely afraid of retaliation from her old gang, and unwilling to target them either.
Their base of operations was in Brockton, however.
Despite her best efforts, she couldn't come up with a way to deal with her. She just didn't know what Taylor wanted to do with the girl.
Additionally, from what she'd observed herself before Cauldron kidnapped her, the girl seemed to have some troubles with authority. She liked the Travellers because Trickster was only their sort of leader, and he wasn't anal about it. It felt like their team was a group of slightly strained friends to the girl.
"Alright. I'll try to figure out something fast. Keep doing as you were."
Trickster grunted something, and she hung up, rubbing at her face.
So much depended on Taylor's word that she honestly wished she cared less about her, so she could just bring up the issue to her and be done with it rather than stall for a few days.
For now, she called up a merc to go grab some pizzas and takeout for the squads in their building again.
She was honestly getting sick of the taste of pizza.
Sacrilegious to her teenage mind, even if she felt far older than she was at times like this.
She sat in the passenger side of an armoured sedan, using the touchpad to move through the clipped recordings the info team gave her.
Trouble. Trouble trouble trouble, always more of it.
Imp had done a fantastic job with the PRT base, to the point where the only place they didn't have bugs in were the tinkers' labs.
Simple recordings were enough to get a very good picture of what was going on in the PRT.
In short, it was pandemonium.
The local director, Miss Piggot, was apparently getting replaced by a man named James Tagg.
It was honestly to be expected.
Capturing Hookwolf and the Valkyrie twins didn't do anything to lessen the blow of Thomas Calvert being uncovered as a local supervillain with multiple plants in the PRT, nor the following near-suicide of a Ward via costume swapping like a moron, nor the perceived failure of Shadow Stalker a few months back, immediately followed by the retaliatory murder of the new Ward she made trigger and forced into an insane asylum for four months.
If Piggot was allowed to keep her position after enraging the Youth Guard and the entire PRT by this extent, it would have been a miracle, but unfortunately, they didn't get that.
She didn't have access to the man's psych profile either, unlike with Piggot.
Piggot would have been perfect for what Taylor seemed to be going for, which was a down-low mutual agreement not to escalate too much into open warfare in the future.
Tagg?
She had no clue. Coil hadn't heard much about the guy other than him being an army man of sorts, which didn't sound great.
The thing was, she couldn't help but think that there might have been some way to prevent this.
She just didn't know what that was.
Taylor had no way of knowing that the PRT would, without a single warning, suddenly discover Coil's civilian identity, likely some kind of play by Cauldron, nor was there any real way for her to know that Clockblocker almost got himself killed because Lisa just brushed the whole incident off when it was fucking mentioned.
She'd been so focused on Coil, and so much started happening all of a sudden, that she was pretty sure Taylor never even heard anything about Clockblocker's chest getting caved in by the Travellers.
If she knew either or both of those, she probably wouldn't have staged her death, or at least not in that specific way, and this might have been avoided.
It was bitter to know the blame for the sudden director change was shared between her and Cauldron, mostly.
She rubbed at her eyes, shifted, sighed, and kept moving through the summary.
Aside from the Wards being on detention, the Director getting replaced, and the new arrests, even more was happening.
For starters, new arrivals.
Fucking four of them.
Two Wards, two heroes.
Not good at all, but could be worse.
On the bright side, Challenger was coming back to the Bay.
Woo…
Fuck, the woman hit heavy too.
Flechette, Weld on the Wards side, Challenger and an unknown on the hero side.
She couldn't help but think this was Cauldron giving them the middle finger somehow.
If Alexandria was working with Cauldron, how much influence did they have in the PRT?
Probably some, but they most likely didn't control the entire organization or anything insane like that. They likely had enough impact to make their lives harder, unfortunately, which was either what was happening, or the main offices caught wind of the colossal scandal that would happen if any of this were to leak and was trying to protect their PR by cleaning the Bay up before anyone's lips got loose.
The newspapers were one single whistleblower away from making the organization implode, and they were also being grilled over the coals by the Youth Guard in private. Piggot was complaining about lawsuits, but the muttering was hard to parse.
Other developments included Lung walking again, unfortunately, Bakuda reporting successful progress on her homemade nuclear bomb, and Imp being a very happy girl with a giant stack of money in her hand for the job she did.
And Taylor was walking and talking again, albeit tiredly.
Now, to talk to Rune and figure out what the girl wanted exactly, so if she couldn't figure out what to do with her, Taylor at least would when she was fine.
She carefully put the laptop in the bag again, and pointed a lazy finger to the windshield.
"Drive."
The man did as asked.
She'd gotten her brain melted before, but doing so through a Legend was somehow less vivid, considering she felt roughly the same amount of pain to then, when she finally went through that damn portal and dropped Mordekaiser.
Cumulative exhaustion was a pain, in both mind and soul, it seemed.
Some part of her worried that no matter how fast her soul and body grew accustomed to the summon core, it would never be enough. Which was stupid, because it most definitely would be for most cases, but the growth was slow.
That's why she felt like she absolutely needed other people to pick up the slack, among a lot of other things.
She still had a day and something before she'd feel alright, but it didn't feel like her brain was cotton made of strands of pure pain anymore, so she could do some simple, braindead tasks she'd been putting off for a few days.
First order of business was to just teleport to her drug chambers and then teleport back to give the Haze bags to one of her drivers to deliver to her mooks, which took about an hour of slow, almost meditative work.
Another was to visit Bakuda.
A text, which Mia replied to within ten seconds, and she was casting Teleport inside the woman's workshop, eyes shut and headphones in place.
Some part of her spine itched at losing her senses like this, but she honestly trusted Mia more than a lot of the people around her when she was at her most useless.
You can't fake being that desperate for attention.
Teleport finished, and she opened her eyes to a familiar workshop, lights thoughtfully turned off except a few hanging yellow Christmas lights along the edges of the room, giving it a warm, cosy vibe.
Movement drew her eyes, and she turned to see Mia, beaming at her with a face-splitting grin, eyes wide and disturbingly focused as she bounced on the balls of her feet, buried waist-deep in something that looked like an rocket engine.
She was also covered in oil, scorch, and grime, which explained why she hadn't attempted to hug her.
Mia's lips moved, and after a second of reading them, she shook her head, very slowly .
Wash yourself first, then we can do whatever you want. We should talk too. I'm also lip reading, so… speak slow and clear, she said softly, not really hearing a word of it herself, and Mia nodded incessantly, scrambling out of the machine and darting to the side to unclip an entire armoury's worth of tools from her belt.
She glanced around the workshop.
Not much had changed. Still a giant, overstuffed basement with racks and rows of grenades.
A second, slower sweep, and her eyes landed on the nuke that Bakuda had committed herself to making for no apparent reason whatsoever.
It was… shaped like a mechanical flower at the moment, almost, a mess of curved plates locking with other plates and with some very tinkertech-looking bombs attached at the inside of each one.
Of course Mia was trying to make a nuke by just making a giant ball of countless tinkertech grenades.
On the upside, the shell was genuinely impressive to look at. The ball joints… mechanical, the bore loaders were small and inconspicuous but they looked sturdy, and what she assumed to be the 'blooming' mechanism to open the thing up was a little bulkier than she'd like, but definitely reliable.
Wow. Good job, she said.
She glanced to the side where Mia was to catch a reply if it was given, and found the woman shamelessly stripping in the corner under an inert showerhead, starting to wiggle her kevlar pants off.
She quickly glanced back to what she assumed was the nuke, considering it was almost as tall as she was and the most complex thing in the shop by far.
This situation was already strange without Mia's shamelessness, she didn't want to make it worse.
She made her way to the couch, and lay back, lowering her eyelids, allowing the soothing mix of warm light and darkness to calm her.
The sight of Christmas lights was comforting. Soothing to the pounding in her skull.
A time she could honestly say she missed, when everything was simple and happy.
Ten minutes later, Mia's excited, smiling face entered her vision, thankfully covered by some baggy, comfy clothes, and she went to get up.
Mia instantly moved down to help her up, unnecessarily, and sat down where her back and shoulders were, allowing her to drop back down onto her lap.
The first thing she asked was a question that was eating at her.
Do you want me to change you back? To something more akin to your old self?
Mia's smile faded as she blinked at her repeatedly, then her brows furrowed. Her eyes tightened, and a hand rose to rub at them as Mia shook her head. Her lips moved, slow and obvious, her hand dropping as her lips slowly curled back into that wide, wide smile.
No. It's never been easier to be happy than now. I know I'm nuts and creepy, but just thinking about you makes me smile and want to dance. Or something close to that. Been a long time since she last did so much lip-reading.
Something in her speech slurred or repeated, because she couldn't understand what followed, but cohesion returned quickly.
There are times when I feel a bit miserable because I'm being ignored, but I know you're busy, and now you're here and I'm fighting not to squeal. I've never been this happy before. Can I braid your hair?
She closed her eyes, sighing.
She felt a lot better about what she did to Mia now, but it would probably still nag at her for a while.
Sure. Be careful. They're my best physical feature. She replied, and Mia nodded three or four times in quick succession, starting to very slowly and very gently gather her hair from where it was splayed out on her lap.
It would be a lot easier to relax if she wasn't practically foaming at the mouth to get back to work and work even harder and faster, but this… this definitely helped.
Lisa and Coil had done a great job so far, but two and a half days were hardly a big sample size.
Have you started working out? She asked, noting the more firm meat under her head, and Mia's mouth dropped, one of her hands covering her mouth as she began to lightly bounce in place.
It was mildly creepy and strange, but also cute.
And painful because her head was getting jostled a bit by the movement.
Yes! Holy fuck you noticed! Mia said, or most likely squealed, and she tried to give her a smile, patting her hip.
Good job. Calm down a bit if you can though.
Mia settled down instantly, biting her lip and nodding with a wide, proud smile, then resuming the hair braiding.
She just looked at her, and couldn't help but feel a fond affection.
She wasn't sure on what exactly the ethics of this situation were, but she honestly really liked Mia. Or the version of her she made through brute force mindrape. And the 'victim' herself seemed more than fine with it.
You didn't have to be at the frontline in that fight with Lung, you know? She asked rhetorically.
Mia's smile instantly dropped, and she nodded.
I know. Sorry. I wanted to prove I'm not just good at making bombs but also throwing them at the very least. I messed it up.
She patted the side of her waist in a sort of… there, there manner.
It's okay. Just try not to do things like that. It's perfectly fine to only be good at making incredible things rather than using them. You're too important to lose in some meaningless scuffle.
A smile wiggled back onto Mia's lips, quivering with an attempt to smooth itself out like a cat happy to be petted but not willing to show it and fighting the reaction of a purr.
Do you want to hear about the nuke? Mia asked in an attempt to change the topic, a bright gleam in her eyes.
Some part of her, the remnants of Jinx, practically wanted to jump up and scream fuck yes.
Taylor herself squashed that, and just nodded, feeling genuinely curious and inwardly, a bit excited about the prospect of such destruction. The look, the rush, the shockwave... she missed explosives.
Spending a day in silence with Bakuda ranting about her bombs, eating takeout, and getting her hair braided as she gave feedback on the nuke, like giving it a microbe-sterilising property through Tinker bullshit, and getting her entire back massaged by her minion on a sunken couch?
Therapeutic beyond what she'd first imagined, in all honesty.
She spent hours engaged and interested, in that relaxed, background kind of way, and by the time she Teleported back into the leaky warehouse they called home, she genuinely felt better. Lighter.
Next time she wanted to drag Lisa along so she would get used to working with people she didn't want to.
The amount of glares she threw at Coil for no seeming reason as Taylor crashed on the couch in the corner was a tad excessive.