“The danger’s over, friends, stay calm!” it called, lowering its weapon and relaxing in the cover of the portico’s statue-studded gutter rail. “Sorry to startle everyone. I am— Hey!” Sniper jumped at the gray-purple flash of a phasing stun-rifle, fired by one of Caesar’s guards, a modern marvel capable of passing clean through stone, but useless if it cannot find its mark. “I said stay calm!” the assassin snapped, its nose wrinkling like a child teaching a smaller child how the game is played. Too fast for us to see the means, it activated one of Cato’s masterpieces, six devices hidden around the Rostra, each no larger than a grapefruit, whose activation filled the air with electric sting, and fried all the electronics around the Rostra: the cameras, microphones, trackers, and all the elegant, nonlethal weapons carried by the guards.

Sniper waited for its own cameras to take over the severed video circuits and route its voice and image to the watching world. The portico was a perfect stage, packed below with crowds and columns, but flat and open on roof level, enough like a sports track to make our athlete feel at home. “Much better. Hello, friends and foes. I am Ojiro Cardigan Sniper, thirteenth O.S.” Its perfect doll’s face smiled softly to the cameras and the world. “I’m sorry. I know this is going to break a lot of hearts, but I swore an oath to protect the seven Hives, and my Hive most of all. That duty comes before all others, even my fans. I am the current leader of the Saneer-Weeksbooth bash’ assassins, a position called by the title of O.S. Many of you don’t agree with what we’ve done in the past, killing unknowing individuals to protect unknowing masses, but that’s over. Today is different. You may not like it, but Tully Mardi’s right, even the best parts of history have had a little violence. All free peoples in every age and every continent have agreed that assassins are necessary for one purpose above all others: to kill tyrants. That’s what I’ve done today. You’ve all been deceived. There was a conspiracy in this Seven-Ten list mess, a much darker one than my bash’ and Hive committing homicides to protect the world. The real goal of the conspiracy was to expose us and the CFB in order to rip four of the seven Hives apart, and make J.E.D.D. Mason king of what remains!”