With one gauntlet, he moved her arm up to a part of his forearm where skin was still skin. He felt the hum shiver through flesh, making subtle changes.

A death sentence, like the one she and her team already carried.

He turned to Dragon, just to his right. She bent down, kissing the spot on his arm. It was purely ceremonial. She began to shut down systems, making preparations. Facilities across Earth Gimel and Earth Bet prepared to wipe everything clean.

The protests had died down, with this. Defiant offered his hand to Chevalier.

Chevalier pulled off his gauntlet, and clasped Defiant’s wrist, while Defiant clasped his. Defiant could feel and his sensors could hear the signal thrum through Chevalier’s body.

Chevalier’s voice was low, quiet, and heard by everyone present, “Here we go, old friend. To think this isn’t even the hard part.”

Last 20.10

The mood was somber. We stood in the midst of a warzone, with holes in the ceiling, holes in the building exterior, and wind whistling through those holes and down hallways. Rubble was strewn everywhere, bloodstains marked where people had bled more than twenty percent of their blood volume and likely died, and there were pieces of broken or dismantled tinkertech lying around that were cordoned off with more seriousness than the cracks in the ceiling that still shed chunks of concrete, or the holes in the floor large enough to drop a truck through.

The only fighting was in words, and those words weren’t shouts, not really. A few loud people, but many more people were remaining quiet out of respect for the dead, though the deaths hadn’t happened yet. Depending on where they stood on buying into this plan, those dead could be us, a majority of us who wore costumes and masks, or a minority share of those same capes, if the person arguing was an optimist. Among those who didn’t believe the plan would work at all, the relative hush and the subdued, respectful tones were for the trillions who would die. For humanity.

The Simurgh was out of action. Sleeper had her. She had wanted to enslave humanity, bringing us all into her siren call. From there, we, ninety-nine point nine percent of us if Chris was to be believed, would have been stuck in roles she had prescribed for us.

I’d already felt the impact of that, just in the span of the raid on this facility. That had been one decision, and we’d ultimately opted out of it. She’d chosen her option, and two members of Breakthrough were gone.

I couldn’t imagine that being every decision. Everything decided according to the whims of a monster that had killed millions and done untold damage on other fronts.