57
"Should we just fucking desert?" Spitfire asked, breaking the silence.
Imp stopped playing with her butterfly knife to stare at her friend.
"Are you kidding? Why?" Imp asked, baffled, legs kicking as she sat on an armoured car's hood.
Rune scoffed, glaring at the bizarre portal across the giant void of a space they'd been coralled into.
"Spit's right. They drag us here, tell us nothing, then tell us to defend the lower floor while they go to war with fucking someone. We don't even know what to defend from. Or who. This is fucking stupid. And kinda breaks their promises to us." She pointed out, half-shouting to be heard over the absolute cacophony of chaos blowing into the room from the large portal, even if it was so far it was more of a nail-sized hole of light from all the way back here.
Spitfire worked her jaw.
"Not really. They haven't broken any of our agreements or anything. I just feel like this is a little too fucking big for us, you know? Like Rune said, this went from an on-call job helping some warlord Summoner guy, to us being involved in a fucking war that feels more than just… a turf scuffle or whatnot. Don't you think this is too dangerous?" Spitfire asked, gesturing around them at the layered walls of armoured vehicles and enough gun turrets to make the average American gun-nut have an orgasm on the spot.
"Besides, what are we even fucking defending? Who are the people down there?" Spitfire added, gesturing to the ramp, and the underground floor it led to.
"Fuck do we care? We're just here to do a job and get paid." Imp half-protested, projecting her voice loudly, resuming the knife tricks, the knife click-clacking endlessly, barely audible over the reverbs of the gigantic cave.
"Still." Rune butted in, frowning. "Spitfire's right. Like, look at this fucking place!" She shouted to be heard, gesturing upwards at the completely black, empty void. "I left the Empire because shit got way too serious, and now I'm here with a fucking shadow organization that can just casually drive half an army into a fucking mountain-sized hole that has no business being here!" She exclaimed. "And I don't know what's fucking happening either!"
Imp made a dubious sound.
"I mean, fair enough, but come on! We get paid by the truckload! Summoner's a great fucking boss, even if we don't know the fucker. Renata and the weird female Coil girl and Insight are also pretty cool. Ren's a bit of an icy bitch, but she hooked us all up with everything we needed in the first month of being here!" Imp reasoned, progressively increasing her volume to match the nonstop bombardment happening outside of the portal in the far distance, gesturing around them. "Also, look at all this shit! Don't you want to be on these fucker's good side for whenever they become some huge shadow government in the Bay, or some shit like that?"
She opened her mouth, then closed it with a clack, thinking about it.
It was once again a question of how serious she wanted things to get.
It couldn't get much more serious than some spontaneous war behind the shadows between two massive, shadowy organisations. Or one, at least, she didn't even fucking know who the enemy was.
"You're talking with a lot of confidence that whatever the fuck is going on behind us will end with Summoner on top." Spitfire pointed out, her mask opened at full mast to allow her to actually be heard.
Imp scoffed.
"Are you kidding? Some random dude in a golden medieval armour suit soloed Dragon and a full two teams of Protectorate heroes after popping out of thin fucking air. I ain't fucking worried here!" Imp said, her voice raising in that annoying… sassy black girl way, that annoyed her ears.
Conflicted feelings of racial behaviours aside, that… was also a good point from Aisha. Or Imp, whatever.
She rubbed at her eyes, frustrated.
Good bosses or not, the lack of information was what grated on her. She was used to being kept in the dark in the Empire, which was one of the big reasons she left. Only one of many, but a big one.
She, in general, hated feeling like there was no upwards path, no trust, feeling like a pawn being told what to do and nothing else.
She felt distinctly like a pawn, right now. Betrayed, too.
Of course, she wasn't that much of an unreasonable teenager. She knew this probably came out of left field, since it was all so sudden, so Renata and 'Sam', if that was even a real name, probably did not have time to fill in their measly part-timers while going to war, but god damn, just send a fucking soldier or something to fill them in! Were they this low on the totem pole of considerations?
If Nexu-
"CONTACT!" A mechanical tinny voice, from a rattling speaker, boomed almost straight into her ear, startling her.
She jerked her head to the right, as did the rest of them, quickly stomping out of the little nook they had to glance around, confused.
"TUNNEL SIX, REPEAT, TUNNEL SIX. FLASHING SPOTLIGHT, FOCUS FIRE. SINGLE HOSTILE, FIRE AT WILL! UNKNOWN COMBATANT!" The voice boomed, and a spotlight flickered on, pointed to the right, opposite the portal, flicking on, then off.
Every soldier in the vicinity broke into a sprint, vaulting over car hoods, throwing open vehicle doors to slither into the turret gunner positions, picking up their oversized weapons and sprinting past them to set up.
On the outer perimeter, she spotted a truck driving to the front, its back loaded with a shielded minigun, its barrels a spinning blur, ready to shred anything and everything in sight as its gunner calibrated something in front of him.
She stared, torn between the desire to participate, and her orders of staying put and defending whatever was under this ramp right behind her, jammed between two armoured turret trucks.
The Travelers were meant to be the first defence team here.
"Fucking finally! Action! See you losers later!" Imp said, apparently not having any such compulsions, hopping off the car hood, then speeding off into a sprint like an idi…ot?
Wait, who was she just thinking about…?
She shook her head, distinctly confused, and glanced at Spitfire, whose leather gloves were creaking as she tightened her fists to the beat of a pulsing heart, shoulders tense, ready to fight. A far cry from the shaking greenie of a couple weeks ago.
She'd never seen someone change so fast. It was… strange.
"You wanna…?" She asked, jutting a thumb out behind her, to the fight about to happen behind her.
Spitfire scoffed.
"Fuck no."
She nodded, agreeing.
Not her job. She was here to defend Amy Dallon, the shaggy dude in the labcoat, the fat nerd guy, and whatever the fuck else was on the lower floor behind that downwards ramp.
"LIGHTS OUT! NV's ON!" The speaker called, and the spotlight went out, as did most of the lights around.
She scowled, and pulled down her night vision goggles, fiddling with the insanely complex fucking mechanism of the fucking things. Who needed six gauges on a single fucking eyewear piece? Thank god she knew what they did from hanging out with the war vets of the Empire.
Spitfire pulled her own down, pulling her mask off with a scowl, since it was incompatible.
She was about to help her with calibrating the stupid thing, before gunfire began to ring out, hundreds, thousands of bullets, all at once, the crack of a hundred whips at once against her eardrums.
With a flinch so sudden she felt something in her neck crack, she yanked her ear protection on, and leaned over the side of the armoured truck in front of her, calibrating the zoom function to see what the fuck was happening.
She could see the tunnel clearly, but not much else, because there was just smoke inside it, being scattered by gunfire, then replenished by something unseen.
A smoke grenade zipped out of the smog, spewing grey as if to answer her unsaid question, then another, and another, all as if shot from a gun, bouncing off the stone.
Quickly, the entrance of the tunnel was completely obscured, as was a wide half-circle just outside it.
The explosive charges inside the tunnel exploded, and billowed a dust cloud that made the smoke grenades seem like confetti puffs in comparison, the sound of tumbling, crashing rock reverberating throughout the floor, her legs, her chest.
A couple dangerous cracks crept up the monstrous wall, and she got distracted for a moment, craning her neck up, up, and up, then around, gaping in disbelief at how fucking large the cave was when she could actually see the walls with night vision on.
She turned her head back down, focusing back on the moment.
The gunfire slowed, then stopped, a tense, relative silence sweeping through the soldiers, Summoner's portal aside, drawing her gaze back down to the tunnel.
The smoke grenades vanished, replaced by random objects, likely Trickster's work, clearing their vision a little.
Five seconds passed, and she saw the pile of rocks that had replaced the tunnel.
Collectively, she saw people's stances shift, relax.
A loud, muffled boom sounded out from the rock pile, sending stones tumbling, and laxness vanished, everyone ducking down into their scopes again.
She felt distinctly nervous.
A single combatant, who survived a couple thousand rounds, in a closed tunnel, then that tunnel's collapse, and was now… what, punching themselves out of its rubble?
She couldn't come up with anyone who could shrug off that kind of shit, not in Brockton. Executioner or Lung maybe, but they were on their side.
Another boom, this one louder.
More rocks shot out, more slid inwards, more rock dust scattered.
Still, nothing visible.
Another explosion, scattering stones like buckshot, shattering them into fine shrapnel, dust covering the area once more, the tunnel obscured in a veil of shifting mist.
Someone fired a rocket straight at the tunnel.
It all happened in a flash, but she caught a blip of light, something like a muzzle flash from within the dust cloud, before the rocket exploded mid-way to its destination, the shockwave blasting dust away to reveal the vague, jagged silhouette of a man.
A flaming coat shredded into strands billowed outwards as he stood tall, dark pits of shadow carving into his form like a pencil, orange embers dancing around him. A thin pistol stood still as stone, pointed towards them, before the dust and smog once more rushed back into place, hiding the man from sight.
Gunfire erupted, providing light through the dim green of her night visor, a strobelight of muzzle flashes, chaotic, distracting.
She scowled, tense, ready for a fight, her eyes hurting from the sight.
She wasn't going to die for Nexus, and she was a bit pissed at them, but she wasn't going to just roll over and run away. She wasn't quite there yet.
She tapped her fingers on some of the cards Summoner had given her, the red explosive ones held in pouches along her half-cloak, just in case, feeling wired, on edge.
The dust cloud continued being perpetually pierced and scattered by thousands of rounds as she wondered to herself if she had just seen someone shoot a rocket out of the air.
With that kind of accuracy… maybe she should duck down a bit more.
She did.
The minigun ahead of her, barely visible between the seas of armoured vehicles between her and the gunner, whirred up, the sound reminding her of a starting jet engine, and after a second, the dust cloud around the figure turned into a whirling vortex, tendrils clinging to the tide of visible, molten, luminescent lead rounds that punched through the man.
Her first detailed look at the figure, provided by the glowing stream of bullets, in tiny flickers, confused her even further.
A male, square figure, tall, large. Oddly thin, despite his size. The proportions were wrong in subtle ways she couldn't quite pinpoint.
Some kind of metal chainmail scarf scattered into pieces around his neck with every shot.
On his head, an air pilot's helmet, the thing chipped to crumbling pieces from bullets, pieces of glass and torn metal peeling off with every backwards jerk of their neck.
She knew very well what war memorabilia looked like.
He was a tapestry of them. Russian coat, German Luger pistol, American pilot helmet, SS Nazi uniform.
Every jerk of his body, each from dozens of rounds at once, made metal pieces on his coat glint, chip off and scatter.
Medals, she'd guess. A carpet of them, from shoulders to hips. Dented, full of holes, covered in dried brown blood.
She couldn't for the life of her figure out who this guy was.
Gesellschaft hitman, maybe? The Empire had been subsumed by Nexus, even if it was still a secret to the wider underworld, but its cooperation with Nexus wasn't.
She frowned, staring at the figure as he leaned forward, and took another jerking step, an uncanny mannequin, his entire body bucking around with each strike of lead, but not giving an inch of ground.
Shoulders jerked, coat crumpled inwards, chest caved in like cheap paper, torn to smoking rags, visible holes thicker than her arm burrowed into his torso, chewn out by a thousand bites of iron, yet, despite his body quickly turning into more holes than solid flesh, he stood.
Another set of stomping steps, yet no attempt to dodge.
She caught a bare, flashing imprint of a sharp, bony grin full of cracks and holes as the oxygen mask around his nose and mouth broke and tore, its pieces scattering in the murk.
The hair on the back of her neck rose.
Was that him? Or another mask? Plaster? Marble? Bone?
Shit, was he a Teeth member? He seemed like a psycho of that sort.
Holes formed, patched themselves, over and over, and he kept stomping forward, leaned almost at a thirty degree angle forwards, cutting through the smoke step by gruelling step.
Slowly, his hands rose, empty, palms upwards, his upper body leaning back from the constant impacts.
Was he praying, or something?
His left arm snapped off at the elbow with the deafening thunderclap of an anti material rifle, chipped off like marble before a chisel, tumbling back, out of sight.
Another stomping step, two, three.
A rocket flashed into him, and she saw him jerk out of his pose of rapture, an indeterminate buck, the dust kicking up to devour him once more as the projectile burst.
A moment later, he emerged again, a few feet closer, his outfit shredded to the bone, revealing a wiry, bony black-red mass, barely clinging onto a figure too sharp and skeletal and inhuman to register as a person in her mind, his right arm and shoulder gone, strips of leather and smoking cloth flapping in the wind.
He was like a walking smoke whirl. She could see little to nothing around or behind him.
Only chains made of tangled dog tags, flapping in the wind like the flayed, broken wings of a dead vulture, fraying leather strips swinging around his hole-ridden torso, peppering the ground with countless clinking bits of metal, a hollow rattle.
His left arm, regrown, burst into smoke, then held another rod.
He put it in the dark, smog-obscured void where his head would be, then pulled his arm back, the searing sparks of a flare erupting out of his head, like the breath of a dragon.
The eye-searingly bright light burned her eyes, and she hissed, yanking the visor off her head, blinking rapidly in the sudden darkness, trying to adjust to the cavern, lit only by the flash of unceasing muzzle flashes.
She raised a few cards, hovering over her head, wondering where everyone else was, where the capes had gone.
There weren't many left behind, but what the fuck were the Travellers doing?
The intruder still wasn't dead, was the problem.
She peeked at him over the hood of the truck, cards swirling behind her.
He was just out of her range, for now.
Something about him was eerie in a way she could not place.
The way he marched in a leisurely, meandering pace, his extremities being chipped off piece by piece. The flare clenched in his teeth, bathing him in blood-red light, a jerking scarecrow spotlit in the dark, only ducking or moving quickly to jerk out of the way of rockets and grenades, stumbling from the blasts but never stopping, once fast, once slow, unpredictable.
It was all just so inhuman.
Something muffled came from her radio, and before she could bother to try and process what it said, the figure and everything around it turned into dust and stone debris, gunfire replaced by a continuous stream of crisp pops and explosions, grenade launchers firing at full auto.
She relaxed, a little, watching the dust cloud grow and grow, halfway to the ceiling, washing over their temporary base like a blanket, squirming in between the trucks like misty ribbons.
Pebbles and rocks clunked and tinkled off metal sheets and glass windows, dinged off helmets and guns.
They kept firing.
Ten seconds of continuous fire, and everything around them was obscured by a thick, cloying miasma, the scent of gunpowder and dust so thick in the air it felt like slime going down her nostrils.
Fifteen seconds, and silence finally came with one last blast.
A long, expectant silence stretched on.
"Wide angle sweep." A voice came from the radio, and she scoffed, turning around, looking for something to fly on.
"What are you doing?" Spitfire whisper-shouted, and she made a dismissive shooing gesture at her.
She wanted to confirm the fucker was scattered into pieces. She was sick of sitting in the background while the normals handled a goddamn cape. She had some pride left.
A collapsible metal table covered in speedloaders for ammo caught her eye ten feet to her left.
She walked over, grabbed it, shook the stuff off of it, flattened its legs, then stood on it, before flying up on it like a surfboard, squinting down at the base below her, taking her ear protection off for a moment, hands on the table, knees bent.
Was there anything even left of the fucker to find-?
She felt her ribs shatter like dry twigs, shredding through her flesh, as what felt like a train slammed into her with the sound of cracking thunder, spine forcefully unwinding from her crouch, the world spinning as her world exploded into sharp spikes of agony, panic clawing at her brain like a feral rat.
She flailed, trying to reach for anything as she spun in the air, choking on nothing.
She caught a glimpse of a car roof through the swirling mass of dust around her, and twisted to the best of her ability, trying to protect her head, even as her arms refused to come forwards, the muscles tugging in an agonizing way.
Metal bounced under her back, unaffected the impact travelling through her every muscle and bone, through her organs, a travelling punch to every inch of her, rattling her brain in its helmet.
She was damn thankful she wore it, even as her head bounced off the car and her thoughts scattered.
Her heart skipped a beat, her chest convulsed, trying to suck in air as she writhed, shocked and confused, in a cradle of sheet metal, head pounding in agony under her mask and helmet.
Something grabbed her foot, pulling at her and her robe, and she struggled and flailed upright, grabbing at their arms, confused.
She caught a glimpse of a modular gas mask, and relaxed infinitesimally, still feeling like her eyes were trying to pop out of her skull as Spitfire dragged her off the truck hood.
Hitting the ground was agony, regardless of angle or which part of her hit it first.
Garbling some agonised nonsense, cusses and not, she heard screams, gunfire, picking back up.
"I CAN'T FUCKING SEE HIM!" A male voice screamed, voice cracking.
"WHERE IS HE?!" Another yelled back.
"CON-!" Another tried, only to be cut off by a gunshot.
"FUCKING KILL IT!" A primal roar, muffled by gunfire.
So many fucking flashing lights. Over the hoods, through the windows of the trucks flanking her on either side, each one wiping a thought process away, forcing her to blink rapidly.
Her ass hurt too. Was her tailbone broken?
"OI! RUNE! ARE YOU GOOD?!" Spitfire screamed in her face, shaking her.
She blinked, trying to focus, and shook her head before gasping for air in tiny, pained inhales as a wave of agony speared through her skull.
Concussed? Why couldn't she focus?
She tried to speak, and winced, only managing to take a breath before the agony of her widening solar plexus made her devolve into a choked, blood-frothing groan while she pawed at her chest, trying to relieve the crushing pressure on it, her other hand holding onto Spitfire's shoulder as the girl dragged her upright, and tried to drag her away, deep into the tight inner perimeter around the ramp.
There was a dent in her plate carrier, the size of her fist, was all she really registered with her frantic pawing.
She got shot with something big.
Summoner was fucking right about the vest shit being mandatory. She almost just died.
"Shit, SHIT!" Spitfire spat, and turned, opening her mask, and spraying liquid flame behind them in a wide, spraying cone, making a line so bright it hurt to look at, perhaps a barrier for the mouth of the encampment, or something for light, grabbing her by the straps of her robes, pulling up and along.
She hobbled with Spitfire, struggling to breathe, spots developing in her eyes as she grabbed at her friend's clothes for support, fighting the urge to curl up and puke.
"I'M TAKING YOU TO THE HEALER GIRL BELOW!" Spitfire yelled, "MAYBE FUCKING LISTEN NEXT TIME, DIPSHIT!"
Fuck you, she tried to moan out, but all that came out what an agonized grunt.
Spitfire brought the radio forward, and started barking into it, yelling cusswords at the Travellers for taking so long to set up.
She focused more on not passing out.
A shotgun jammed into his eye socket.
He jerked his head forward, the barrel slamming into the back of his empty skull, his left hand blurring in a left sideways chop that hit the shaft of the gun and bent the barrel like a wire, leveraged against his socket.
It fired once as the snarling soldier behind it pulled on the trigger over and over, achieving nothing but mangling the barrel further with the first shot, and clicking uselessly for the rest, the feeding mechanism destroyed as the man tried to scramble backwards, War matching him, step for step.
War's hands remained steadily trained on the men behind the brave soldier, two machine guns extended to either side of him, barrels red-hot from the constant fire, shredding through the group behind in bits and pieces of glass, blood, and shedding kevlar.
The soldier switched to his pistol, and unloaded into his head, backtracking, too slowly to escape him, almost running backwards. Then he tripped on the corpse of his comrade.
War raised a foot, and crushed his head in a burst of gore, an eyeball popping out with the entire nerve attached.
A shake of his head dislodged the shotgun.
He pushed onwards through the encampment.
Another patrol, their silhouettes barely seen through the flashing lights, contrasted by the searching spotlights.
He charged at them, and just as one of the men shouted in alarm, turning to fire at him-
He was on them.
Two fell under a hail of bullets that shot through the visors of their helmets, the third popped as a grenade pistol turned him to mist, and the last scrambled off the floor, taken offguard by the sudden explosion, turning to him with an LMG, already firing as it swung.
War's right-hand machete cut up, through the soldier's arm, his neck, half his jawbone, blood spraying freely.
The weapon hit the ground.
Even so, the man grabbed him, eyes unwavering, trying to stall him as life rapidly faded from his eyes, red seeping down his front, snaking between buckles and mags like the branches of a river system, as if from a faucet.
These men were perfect.
These people feared neither death nor indignity. They'd fight to the last breath, they'd fight like men possessed.
They were perfect.
They were like him, once upon a time.
Mad.
Desperate.
Fervent.
Unyielding.
It was such a joy, that they were part of the coming war.
He ignored the dying man clinging to his shredded coat, kicking him off, and lowered himself into a half-crouch, dashing into the dusty darkness, knives cutting thin lines through the clinging cloud.
He summoned makeshift flares, and with a pull of his teeth to the ring-pulls and a quick snap of his arms, more of the encampment showed itself to him, the flares bouncing off metal, the searing red light reflecting off the windows.
He could still hear it, could feel it.
He had to get to where the song led him. The next step.
The next turn of the wheel.
The next twist of the endless road.
Another group of six came into sight as he dashed through the encampment, boots slamming into car roofs and windows, an erratic charge towards the next step.
He shot the first man in the neck, the soldier instantly dropping, clutching his neck, writhing on the floor, firing wildly with a handgun in his direction.
The others startled, lowering their center of gravity, swinging their guns towards him.
He took aim, and switched to two machine guns, tipped with armour piercing rounds, trigger pinned to the handle, a hail of gunfire.
The impacts were devastating. What few bullets were blocked by their plates crushed bone and threw them like ragdolls. Most went through in a spray of crimson mist and broken bits of gear, flicked in every direction.
One man remained, hidden behind a bent and cracked ballistic shield that had almost torn off his arm from the sheer force of fire.
Their eyes met through the cracked glass.
He switched his guns for dual machetes, and charged him, the man backpedalling desperately, before dropping the shield to pull out his own weapon.
Bullets tore through him in a hail, punched his bones with enough force to crack, to force his body to jerk and buck as he pushed forward.
Thirty feet turned to twenty, fifteen.
Hateful, maddened fervour shone in the man's eyes, his face contorting in rage as he roared a battle cry, stopping his backtrack to stomp forward, drum mag clinking with fewer and fewer bullets, dust dancing around the barrel tip.
The darkness retreated for a mere instance with each muzzle flash, a brief story told in dimly lit flashcards, the gap between them closing with each by inches at a time.
The man's gun clicked one last time before War was upon him.
A swing from the right towards the left, a sharp, snapping arc of the blade, cutting halfway through the soldier's wrist, stopped by a metallic watch.
The man used his other hand to switch to a pistol, dropping his gun, the strap pulling his neck down to the left from the weight, bending him forward. He aimed at War's face, a clumsy left-handed grip, already firing through his thin torso.
War opened his jaw, and bit down on the gun, crumpling its barrel, before swinging his cleaver up into the soft point of the man's elbow, hacking the man's arm clean off.
The limb hung from his mouth by the deathgrip it held on the pistol grip, the finger still convulsing, pressing a useless trigger.
He twisted the swing into a clean pivot, transferring his strike's momentum, into a leftwards swing, hacking a clean cut through the grunt's neck, scraping at his spine.
He didn't wait for the man to die, he pushed him down, and charged over his soon-to-be corpse, spitting the gun and the arm holding it out of his maw to thud to the ground.
He felt something clamped around his leg that he dragged for a few feet before he glanced down.
The soldier's fading, glassy eyes glimmered in faint triumph, his left arm clamped around his ankle tightly by the bicep, an unpinned grenade clenched in his hand, weakly, just over his remaining, albeit mangled wrist.
What conviction, he thought, gleeful, before the grenade detonated, his senses whirling as parts of him disconnected, bones cracked, dust bounced off spinning forms around him.
In moments, he was whole again, and he rolled to his feet, running back towards his goal.
This wasn't his objective. They were just in the way, and he never took anything but the straight line to his goal.
War, after all, was Everything.
The portal was in sight.
The air cleared as he went deeper into the makeshift camp, allowing him to spot an open area encircled by armoured cars-
Then he was in a completely different spot in the blink of an eye, facing down a giant creature, ten feet tall, a mish-mash of animals and parts, as fast as him.
A bright star, a sun in miniature, torched the ground black, lit his coat alight, to his left.
He switched to automatic shotguns, and charged in as the furry, scaly creature roared, a serpentine tail whipping towards his head.
He pushed a weapon out of his form and in a rush of smoke, a rusted samurai sword materialized clenched between his teeth, a decorative thing from a long-forgotten excursion into a Japanese island during the second Great War.
His waist twisted like fabric as he lowered himself under the tail strike, and jerked his head to the left, cutting through the tail as it travelled, his teeth ripping out of his jaw from the sheer force needed.
A mere foot or two away now, an arm as thick as his torso blurred towards the empty cavity of his stomach.
He turned both shotguns towards it, and turned the hand into a cloud of gore and fur with a press of the triggers, twisting his torso so that the hollow of his abdomen would meet with the stump.
The arm, now a pointy broken bone wrapped in gore, sheared through his burning coat, missing his spine, coming out of his back, achieving nothing, and he immediately snapped the shotguns up to point at the thing's gorilla-like face.
Then he was in another place, without warning, a sun flash-melting his shotguns into vapour, mere inches away, turning his arms to ash.
He did something he had a tendency of avoiding.
He dodged.
It did less than nothing, as something slammed into him from the side with the strength of a missile, throwing him right back into the ball of flame.
In an instant, he was merely a collarbone and a black, cracked skull, tumbling to the ground, a whirlwind of dog tags and tooth necklaces undoing themselves in the darkness above and around him, melting just as quickly as his eyes caught sight of them.
The creature rushed towards him, a foot coming down on his head, his vision already fading.
His skull turned to crushed bits of bone, and his consciousness momentarily faded, an all-consuming moment of peace, the most vile, wretched of things.
Hatred churned in the fading remnants of his consciousness.
Sundancer panted, arms extended towards her sun, a light source for the camp as much as her weapon, cautiously staring at the mangled, torched bits of cloth, stringy flesh and bone left behind by their assailant.
It was bizarre to see the blur of a figure darting around the darkness, now reduced to melted scraps.
She'd just killed someone, hadn't she?
It didn't sting much. Perhaps unsurprisingly.
Trickster teleported himself in, adjusting his hat, frowning.
"I have a feeling that wasn't a person." He said, as if reading her mind, a counterpoint to something she didn't say.
Ballistic scoffed from the back, leaving his cover, strutting up, adjusting his armour.
"So what, we've got a Master out there who could send another one of these fuckers in here soon?"
They all paused at that thought, tense again.
Genesis's construct shifted, worried, staring out into the half-lit dust cloud around them.
"Maybe." Trickster said, then reached for his radio, turning his back to the corpse. "Trickster here to all Nexus personnel, yada yada. We've got him. It's dead. It doesn't look human, it could be a Master cape sending that thing in. Be ready for more. Y'all alright? Could hardly see shit."
She lessened the sun into a tennis ball, bringing it to her side, heart still racing as her eyes scanned around them, at the wall of vehicles and gunner turrets around them, a defensive position turned arena.
"Negative. Counting casualties." A far more professional voice replied through their radios.
It was almost eerie, this silence, after such ch-
Ballistic shouted, a wordless sound of alarm and she jerked her head towards him, sun flaring as she whirled around.
Where the intruder's remnants were, was a roiling figure made of pitch black smoke, the faint imprint of a jagged shape at its crest, and a gigantic rifle taller than herself, extended to Trickster's back, out of the cloud, held in two smoke-shrouded arms.
Two more arms like them, eerily long, tore out of the smoke, made of pitch black smoke that stank of charred flesh and mustard gas, like a triumphant rise from underneath the membrane of a womb, tearing out with a sickening sound she couldn't quite place, something like a garbled, broken echo of a radio static.
She watched Trickster startle, as if in slow motion, in the corner of her vision, while two massive guns formed in the third and fourth arms, aimed at all of them.
Trickster was replaced by an upright table, right as a hole the size of her wrist punched through like a cannon shot, obliterating it into a hundred scattering pieces.
The next moment happened too quickly to see anything other than a blur before a thunderous boom punched into her eardrums.
Then she was on her back, rolling across cold stone, covered in blood and guts that weren't her own, agony pulsing in her skull as she scrambled backwards, away, unsure of what was up and what was down.
The stone supporting her turned into a truck hood, and before she could gain her bearings, Trickster grabbed her, half-hiding behind a truck, yanking her over it, throwing her to the ground in a heap as she cried out in pain.
Another two shots rang out, just as deafening, her ears ringing.
She couldn't do much more than wretch, spitting bits of blood and gore out of her mouth with hacking coughs, pain radiating up and down her back as she dropped low, and squirmed flush against the truck.
Another shot rang out, deeper, a shockwave she could subtly feel through the floor, right as Trickster teleported out of her sight, replaced by a gigantic minigun that dropped to the ground like a stone.
Then Trickster was back, wide eyed, blinking rapidly.
"Wh-" He muttered, confused, then glanced back, and teleported back into the fray.
She breathed through her coughs, in, out, wondering where the damn thing was.
"Ballistic? Luke!! Lu-Luke?" Trickster shouted, voice morphing from concerned panic, to a disbelieving question.
Her eyes widened, and she scrambled upright, still fighting to regain her breath.
Her elbows scraped on the truck hood to keep her upright, and she saw.
She saw Trickster, his hat on the ground behind him, hands in his hair as he stared down at Luke's limp body, a wide-eyed expression of shock on his face as he took small, hesitant steps towards the teen he couldn't have quite called a friend.
"Fuck…" Trickster mumbled, to Luke's headless body, to his broken helmet, his face, torn into a million gory pieces in a wide cone, splattered against a dozen vehicles, a sickening canvas to a horrid painting that burned into her eyes like a brand, filling them with tears.
The dark figure was gone from the picture, relegated to the background, a thing of flashing lights, screams and gunfire behind a wall of steel frames and glass.
She only saw a flash of a monstrous form in the smoke, with four spinning arms, two much longer than the other two all firing guns too large for them, tearing through the camp like a whirlwind of death.
Keith honestly did not want to kill anyone here.
But those damn barriers had already forced him to. Accident or not, multiple Case 53's had been killed by his carelessness, his desire to protect the very people he accidentally killed.
The Purity clones were too dangerous to keep playing around with, however, and the situation below was dire, so he once again felt the acidic sensation of giving up another moral line, dropping deeper into the murk of this dreadful world.
He hated it.
Too many people, too strong opponents. The Case 53's below were getting slaughtered by Lung's clones like wheat before a scythe. It was horrifying. There was so much goddamn blood. Pools and pools and lakes and smears of it, enough for his eyes to drown in for the rest of his life.
He had to deal with the fliers, then he could go below. That was his thinking, his reasoning for killing the Purity clones. They would kill far more if he did not stop them.
What he couldn't understand, was where the hell were the rest of their forces?
Cauldron had led him to believe that they had so many more Case 53's than the couple thousand underneath. They never told him the full picture, but he had demanded enough for his cooperation that they told him a lot.
And the powers of those below were all so… anaemic. Weak. Not by his standards either, they just were.
Where were the stronger ones? Why were they all so-
He could only catch a glimpse, but it was chaos below. Unorganized, fleeing chaos.
He had been given next to no information on this, for obvious reasons. He claimed he'd only defend, and he was trying to keep to that, but the stakes for the people below was too high.
Another whirl, two.
A dozen blasts forced him to dodge, and dodge, and dodge more, unable to shoot back with safety.
He flicked back to himself, and decapitated another Purity clone.
Four down.
Then he moved, practically teleporting a half mile out, above Nexus's makeshift fortress, and flicked back to his human form to blast another clone.
He took a millisecond too long, because next thing he knew, he was wrapped in an unbreakable mould of black-purple energy.
Blackgrasp?
That had been Summoner, all the way back then?
He tried to blast through the mould, unable to move his physical form for even a millimetre, having trouble breathing, but Summoner-
Taylor Hebert, the girl, had too many tricks up her sleeve.
He switched to his light form, and despite how quick the transition was, the mould turned into a smooth bubble, containing him like a fish in a bowl.
He switched back to himself, and blasted through the aura, only to find it still there, his laser cutting through without effect.
It wasn't a physical barrier, then, unless the girl wished it to be, but could exert physical force regardless.
She could have made such a good hero.
The best counter to him, really. He couldn't punch through psychic force.
He grit his teeth, and whirled around, trying to find the familiar culprit.
"Purity Squad, stand down." An imperious voice rumbled, the voice carrying too far for its low volume, commanding in a way that seemed to wrap around his mind, as if a mild Master effect.
He immediately cringed away, and switched to his light form.
Like a rising comet, with speed that could startle Alexandria, a white-haired woman rose up to float before him, snapping to a sudden halt, regarding him with narrowed eyes, a blue orb held in her hand.
Against his will, he was forced back to his physical form, and before he could recover from the abrupt shock of his power disobeying him, the girl spoke.
"Is this really how low you'd sink, Keith?" Taylor Hebert asked, disappointed, in a voice not her own, and he froze, staring at her in shock for a mute second.
Then the implied threat registered, and his brows lowered into a furious glare.
He thought to tell her not to sink so low, but he knew that Cauldron already had. They'd gone after her father long before she knew his identity, even if he would have never agreed to such a manoeuvre.
He had no retort to the unspoken threat. She knew who he was, who he had in his life. If she went after his husband, his child… it would be fair game, in her eyes.
Damn it Eidolon. Damn you all for being so rabid. Arrogant.
"Why do you fight with them?" Taylor demanded, eyes narrowed.
The world around them continued to spin out of control. Explosions, blasts, bodies, and cracks seemed to wind around them like a yarn, yet, like a bubble had formed around them, nothing seemed to disturb them.
What few stray things tried, were batted away like mere toys with tiny flicks of the girl's fingers, with flares of black-purple energy, her eyes not even flicking towards them.
Why did he fight with Cauldron?
His heart pounding, he opened his mouth, then stayed there, glaring at her while his mouth refused to speak.
"Wha-? I…" He started, glancing around in bewilderment as the adrenaline slowly settled into confusion.
Why was she talking to him?
Why couldn't he switch to his goddamn light form?
"What is this about?" He asked, trying to even out his voice from the raspy growl it defaulted to under the current stress.
Taylor narrowed her eyes, glowing magenta cutting into his own.
"Why do you fight with Cauldron?" She repeated.
Because there's nobody else that can save the goddamn universe!, he wanted to scream, but something niggled at his mind, and he couldn't tell if it was some kind of Master influence or his own tumultuous, lost thoughts.
He had been asking himself that same damn question since this whole debacle with Nexus began, and even before the organization had a proper name. He still had no real answer other than 'who the hell else'?.
If the world was to end, who else would be a viable group to lend his help to? Nexus?
The thought… didn't seem as absurd as it might have, before this. Before he saw her raise an army in a day or two.
A Simurgh-tainted army of clones, as Eidolon or Alexandria would have pointed out. They'd be right, too. Nexus was a Simurgh ploy, it had to be. It would explode catastrophically eventually.
Or maybe this was the Simurgh's goal. Get Nexus to depose them. Disrupt the only chance the world had.
Were they the only chance the world had? He didn't even know enough about Cauldron to make a proper judgement. They hid so much and he could tell.
He tried to blast her away, in a fit of sudden, suppressed anger, brewing for weeks now, just to get free, not hurt.
Nothing happened. He could feel his power, could feel it exiting him, but it snuffed out like a candle the moment it tried to materialise.
He was forced to wait, to float in place and think for a second, before her unimpressed gaze.
Below him, the massacre continued, and he lowered his eyes to it.
He watched mutated men, women and children die by the dozens below him.
Gnawed apart by feral jaws, flash-boiled into sludge and mist by lighting, blasted and charred black by bellowing storms of white-hot flame by the dozens , coming from the hands of a Lung clone as it- he rode one of the duplicating lizards.
Taylor watched it too, her brow furrowing, increasingly troubled.
"Be quiet for a second." She suddenly said, and adopted an imperious pose.
Legend still in tow, she pulled them both down, down, and forwards, until they were both floating a mere hundred feet over the foremost frontline, where overwhelming numbers met overwhelming force and were trampled underfoot.
She poured mana into the command rune carved into the back of her spine, in her real body, until she could feel the phantom burn within her skin and mana circuits.
Taking a deep breath, she tried not to split her focus too much, only following a few threats, and batting away minor annoyances, as she prepared her words, pushed more force into them, into Syndra's own vocal cords.
"ENOUGH!" She barked, and the sound was a thunderclap, full of enough command to make both sides slam to a confused halt, swings stopping mid-way, blasts guttering out as everyone seemed to freeze at once, before both sides quickly jumped back to eye each other in confusion, and then up at her, floating in a maelstrom of otherworldly power, all to catch their attention, an aura of black-purple swirling around her like a black sun.
Her temple gently throbbed, her backside burning like someone had pressed a brand to her spine.
Too much mana in that shout.
In the sudden, deafening silence, only Red's enraged howls cut the atmosphere she needed for this to work.
He had stopped, to his credit, for a mere second, but continued immediately.
She extended a hand, and grabbed him by the throat with a leash made of malicious force, wrapping his head in an aura that swallowed his screams, then pulled him up, allowing him to dangle underneath her, in display, before a thousand eyes, dead and not, as he raged and twisted and clawed through his neck to free himself, a monstrous tangle of thorns and meat and claws without start nor end.
She spied Alexandria, eyeing her with a glare full of confusion, even as she obediently floated in place.
She didn't pay too much attention to the woman. She was Mastered, after all. The 'hero' would let her do what she must.
The Case 53's handlers reacted quickly, many of them waving their Tinkertech around, pressing at the shock collars, barking orders.
Casts of dark energy enveloped every single handler that piped up, not allowing them to move an inch, to even whisper.
The battlefield settled into an uneasy silence.
She focused on the terrified faces, the panicking masses, untrained.
"Mutants! You will all die, should you continue fighting us." She declared, an absolute truth that rattled the walls with its might and certainty.
"You are cannon fodder to them. Nameless, faceless meat. Do ANY of you even know who you are?!" She called out, and a thousand shifting eyes glanced around, each looking for someone who could say a simple 'yes'.
They found none.
"You are failed experiments. Do you even know who your masters, your slavers are? They're called Cauldron. And they make you all in a pot to grant you powers. Stirr, and hope it works. If it doesn't, they imprison you. You are all nothing but projects that did not pan out for them! Your powers are weak, your bodies twisted, so you have no worth in their eyes. They tear out your memories after. Leaving you with nothing. Did you find some kind of catharsis, in knowing what you were made for, finally, after all this time of imprisonment, when they pulled you out here and told you to die?!" She asked, impassioned, and slowly, the Case 53's below moved their eyes from each other, from her soldiers, to her, to Legend, captured by her side.
"Well, don't! They did not make you for this. You are accidents. They sent you against us to get rid of you. Because it's better to use up failures than Cauldron agents!" She called out.
Alexandria opened her mouth, to her surprise, but she swiftly surrounded the woman in a bubble, cutting her voice out at the first syllable.
Alexandria scowled, and punched through the bubble, achieving nothing, as her hand phased through, to no affect, the bubble following her. She had effectively been silenced.
Maybe Alexandria wanted to show her side now, to help her, but she didn't need her. She needed to say her piece before the tension snapped.
The Case 53's below watched her Lung clones quickly de-escalate, and she knew that she was weakening her side by doing this, but even that should work in her favour, when in the eyes of the Case 53's, their opponents seemed to be 'calming down', bit by bit, rather than trying to escalate and intimidate.
Dissent spread quickly, the fragile unity of the forces below withering into nothing as desperate eyes glanced at eachother, at her.
"You were never meant to win! To them, your masters, Cauldron, you. Are. Nothing!" She snarled, and the masses shifted, eyeing each other, their opponents, taking the moment to make precious space as her forces crept after them, not attacking, but not backing up either.
The temporary ceasefire was on a hair trigger. It couldn't last, so she had to get this out, quick.
"None of you even want to be here! Is this how you're willing to die? A faceless, nameless meatshield, having lived your life in cages fighting people you don't even know, for reasons you were not told? Have any of you ever even seen the sun since you woke up in these bodies? Have you learned your names? Are you content to die like this, before you ever get to?!" She barked, injecting her anger at this completely pointless damn conflict into her voice.
If Cauldron had just left her the fuck alone, she would have genuinely made it a point to ignore them. She had more important things to do than start wars with shadow organizations who were technically on the same fucking side as her! Hell, she wanted them to keep existing, to keep trying to save the world. It was always better than them not doing so.
But they hadn't left her alone. They kept sabotaging, and needling, and attacking and exposing her secrets for gods knew what fucking reason.
Maybe their powers had told them to, to drive more conflict into this world, and they, like the puppets they were and she wasn't, simply did as asked, thinking all of this to be their own idea.
Regardless, the pointlessness infuriated her.
Lung's clones, deescalating, all snuck glances between her, above them, and the enemy eyeing them in terror mere three dozen feet away, terrified and desperate, but listening.
She thought of what more to say, how to deliver it, her mind whirling from the rush she was in, because she couldn't afford her Lung army to de-escalate too much. The next wave would come eventually.
She looked down, then behind her.
Blood, corpses, and debris already stained a large part of the previously pristine field. It was only adding further truth to her words.
A cornered animal is the most likely to bite.
So, she would give them a way out. A way to live. Even if only because damn near none of them wished to be here, and what remnants of her morality still clung to her mind snarled at the thought.
"Come with us." She said, injecting even more mana into her voice, commanding, imperious, but currently, persuasive. "There is no need to die here. You are not our enemy, Cauldron is. Cross onto our side with your hands up, and fight with us. You can be free. You can live. Or you can die. So choose a side, and do it quickly." She emphasized, and just to demonstrate why they should choose quickly, went for a simple display of power.
The monstrous gunmetal grey shaft in the middle of the field, some kind of super-sized elevator shaft perhaps, glowed purple-black as she extended her hand towards it.
Then she ripped it out of its spot with a yank of her fingers, a hundred feet wide and hundreds tall, twisting it in place, slowly bringing it behind her, turning it horizontal.
This was still merely a speck of Syndra's power. This woman had upheld a small mountain as her throne, indefinitely.
But she couldn't quite push herself that far for a power play.
Before the pillar she upheld in the air behind her, she looked like an ant, overshadowed entirely.
She clenched her fist, and the structure crumpled with a monstrous screech in an instant , a thousand cracks of thunder, metal tearing and twisting like a wrung out towel, the scream scraping at her ears like nails on a chalkboard. Glass chunks and torn cables spurted out of it like organs from a corpse as she twisted it without mercy.
She unclenched her fist, and the structure unwound around her into a thousand separate pieces of debris, held in place, blanketing the air above the masses like a stormcloud.
With pointed intent, she brought her right hand forward, loosely pointing down at the mass of horrified mutants, even if only for theatrics, and the cloud of destruction crept up to surround her, a slowly spinning halo of pure death, her at its centre.
The irony did not escape her, that for a moment, had someone flipped the colour scheme and stuck wings on her, she would have looked like The Simurgh.
"Choose." She intoned, her voice reverberating through bone and steel like it was ready to rend it all apart.
It started slower than she'd like. Fear of Cauldron was too embedded into these people for it to be otherwise.
But with their handlers gone, Legend in her grasp, helpless and mute, merely watching in conflicted silence, and Alexandria pretending she couldn't just rush up and fight her to break the moment, return it all to chaos, there was nothing to stop them from reaching across.
So slowly, a shambling, twisted yeti of a wolf-man, with three arms and a spine so crooked he could barely walk, made his way across, shaking hands held up high.
He slowed as he neared the thinning lizards, and eyed Pyro like he was the devil himself, petrified of him, but the duplicating lizard monsters parted to let him through.
A second later, a dozen of the brutes in the front mustered their courage, passing the small chasm that separated the two forces, watching with their breath held tight in their chest.
None attacked them, and, slowly, they turned around, facing their old masters with trepidation, standing tall amongst a field of dragons.
The next wave was a hundred, all at once, from all over the field. Blasters, weak, slow fliers, things she couldn't even guess the power of, and like a line of ants pulling each other forward, a hundred turned into two, into three, into four, into five, more than half of Cauldron's forces surrendering, and switching sides.
Watching the enemy that was already slaughtering you, become even more numerous, more powerful?
The last ones left hanging onto some kind of loyalty or fear to Cauldron cracked, and everyone began to move.
A minute later, there weren't two sides of the battlefield.
All there was, was a hundred handlers frozen in place, on the farther side of the field, and a jittery, uncertain field of allies underneath her.
Alexandria muttered something, trying to be discreet, prompting her to pause.
"Door Alexandria." Legend said, abruptly, and she snapped her head to the right.
Nothing happened.
Immediately, she grew suspicious of something she'd not focused too much on until just now.
Why wasn't Doormaker active? He could have interrupted her at any moment.
Her answer came immediately after she posed the question, in the form of a hundred-something portals opening opposite to them, capes dashing out of them, and immediately firing with wild abandon.
Any peace immediately shattered, and the fighting resumed.
Cauldron's handlers were not considered, and Taylor didn't bother protecting them from the friendly fire, allowing them to perish in the crossfire.
Portals opened behind her forces too, and to the right side of Nexus's makeshift fortress.
She didn't have to micromanage anything. Her capes immediately split, and charged into the fight, ramping back up, immediately widening their united front into a circle, fighting from all sides.
From their makeshift fortress, countless bullets and rockets impacted barriers, culled numbers by the dozens, providing a solid backbone, preventing her little army from being completely encircled by Doormaker, just as she'd intended it to work.
The Case 53's on her side largely just ran around like headless chickens, trying to take cover under Kaisers' clone power, thick sheets of steel erupting out of the ground by the hundreds to cull the onslaught.
Portals opened above, and fliers, stronger ones, shot through, immediately.
The Purity clones were… she could only see three unnamed, then Enna, Duo, and Tria, the original three Purity clones who had been told to stick to lower ground, away from Legend.
The others, she could guess, had been bested.
The problem was, she had given Cauldron exactly what they wanted. She had let her forces deescalate, to save people who were, objectively, no more useful than a meatshield, even if it was the right thing to do.
No good deed goes unpunished, but she didn't bear the brunt of that punishment.
Her people did.
The Lung clone who only got faster got cut in half by something. She could feel his body, strewn across the field.
Half the lizards got annihilated, most of them acting as meatshields to protect sections of the field where Kaiser's clone wasn't quick enough to cover.
Her Case 53 allies did help tremendously in curbing the loss of her clones, to their credit, but against powers simply superior, they too perished, by the dozens.
She'd put herself on the backfoot to save a few hundred objectively weak capes.
Somehow, she couldn't feel bad about it.
But she had to interfere, at this point. Stabilize the field.
All the blasts aimed at her vanished the moment they entered the Nullifying Orb's field, and stray, less esoteric bits, were batted aside by mere flicks of her fingertips, hurtling through space as they were.
She did not move an inch, for a long moment, struggling to see past all the hundreds of projectiles hurtling towards her.
She didn't have time for further mercy. This was as far as she'd take it.
She switched to the Rune of Precision, to aim better, and to stack her lesser runes up through all the death that was to come.
A sweep of her hand, and the halo of rubble around her shattered, spun. A flick of her finger, and it all vanished.
Too fast for the eye to track, pieces larger than men and just shy of breaking the sound barrier, cut through hordes, tore jagged lines through the field, only trails of pulped viscera and flying body parts telling the story of what just happened.
She felt her Runes swell in power, absorbing the lifeforce of hundreds that she'd killed in a single blow, a heady rush that she tried to ignore.
Yet more portals came, and more capes poured through.
She contained herself, fists clenching.
They wanted her to exert herself, before taking her down. Otherwise, she'd be able to turn the fight at any moment. Otherwise Eidolon would be forced to fight, and he had to save his strength for the coming Endbringer attack.
It was already late by a week, after all.
"How can you just… do this?" Legend said, his tone ill and horrified, and she looked at him.
Jaw tight, eyes wide with horror, looking down at the field of corpses below.
Fury rose inside her, gnawing at her bones.
" I did this?" She asked incredulously, almost screaming from the sheer volume of incredulity. "ME!? You kidnapped my father and a young girl I see as a sister. You blackmailed me. You tried to imprison me in an empty planet for a decade. YOU tried to KILL ME." She hissed venomously, watching Legend recoil, his resolve, creaking and cracking as the seams. She could almost see his doubts bloom inside his eyes.
He wasn't stupid. He could understand what she was saying, the truth in it.
"And YOU sent THEM here to die! And for what?! I wanted nothing to do with you! I didn't start this war, I'm finishing it. So don't you dare say that I did this." She growled low, dragging him close, resisting the urge to strangle him where he stood.
He stared at her, lost. On what to say, what to believe. What to think, maybe.
It was so hard to focus on him, with that stupid Tinker tech thing on him to prevent her from seeing him, but this close up, while he held so still?
She surrounded herself in a barrier, and switched to the Rune of Inspiration, immediately casting 'Cosmic Insight' on him, just to try and get a glimpse of who this person was, because despite all Alexandria told her, she barely knew the man.
A rush of information, fragmented, held together by strings. She tried to gather the most complete pieces, but it felt like the Tinkertech was interfering with the rune, obscuring and revealing things from one moment to the next.
Always a mere few years too late to change the world for the better, through no real fault of his own. Kind.
Wishes to fill the void left behind by his betters, has been led to this point because of it. Doubts he can ever measure up. Hates the current conflict, deep down. Finds it unjustified. Believes in second chances. Believes in third chances. Will always do the right thing. Doesn't always know what that is.
She saw it, she heard it, she knew it, and yet the more she understood him, the less it made sense that he was here. Working with Cauldron. Being a part of all this. How much did he really know? Why was he here, goddamnit!?
"I'm- I'm not making excuses for that. It was vile . I didn't even know they were going to do that, I'd have tried to stop it if I did. But- you're just a teenager. How can you just… kill people like this? You don't even hesitate." He said, gathering himself, clarifying his point, eyes hard.
The unspoken question was, what is wrong with you, how many have you killed before? Should I even think of you as a child?
The answer to the souls she's claimed, was thousands. Millions, maybe.
Through the eyes of others, yes, but it mattered little when she lurked under their skin as they did so. She was them, and they were part of her.
His words just didn't make much sense, almost pointless arguing, until they did, until little bits and pieces of Cosmic Insight finally caught onto the fading grasp of their understanding of the man.
He was looking for a reason to stop.
He was looking for her to give him an excuse to drop out of this conflict, to leave, because he didn't know which side was the right one to pick. He would pick the right thing, but he was in too deep over his head to know what the right thing was at this point, when nobody told him anything.
Cauldron wanted to save the world. So did she.
She enslaved villains and monsters to make the world better, to save it.
Cauldron did anything necessary to save the universe. They cruelly imprisoned people who would be dead if not for them, in the name of that cause.
She ruled her organization with an iron fist, coated in a silken glove, and Cauldron ruled with a knife hidden in the sleeve of a suit.
He had no idea how to justify fighting for either side, against either side, and he wanted her to give him something to make sense of it all. To back out of this ill-thought-out war, to abandon his sense of obligation to his colleagues, to do the right thing.
Alexandria began to fiercely push out of her containment, for some reason, and her head throbbed as she forced her to stay still just a little bit longer.
She had to give him something to work with, something to kick him out of this stupid war, now.
"Amy Dallon is a child too. She's saved your team's life more than once, hasn't she? Yet I didn't see the PRT that you lead hesitate, In signing her Kill Order the moment she decided to join us, all for the crime of her power." She said, harshly, almost spitting the words out.
He reeled back as if struck.
"I- What? That never happened-" He protested.
"Just this morning." She snapped, glaring at him, and he shut his mouth, looking increasingly dubious and horrified. "They probably did it while you couldn't be bothered to check or listen out for it." She said simply.
Alexandria was pushing really fucking hard. It was giving her a headache, keeping her in place.
Just a little more. He almost looked horrified enough to back out, which was good, because she couldn't bear to Master or kill him. She wanted him out of the way.
He glanced past her, at Alexandria.
Alexandria scowled, and shook her head, in a negative, trying to convince him that she was lying.
Could she hear her? Or-
Lip reading.