Smoke trailed the Walking Dread's body.
Leon spotted him through the haze of scattered clouds as a dark shape falling limp against the grey sky. The bastard was in a rough condition. His skin had blackened, the giant's arms hanging loose as his massive frame ragdolled through the air.
Leon stopped his fall and flew towards the falling body. His reserves protested. The wings flickered. The sustained output from the supersonic ascent, the use Detonation, and three minutes of sustained combat nearly drained him to his last dregs.
Thankfully, his reserves were quickly filling back up because of his high body heat. His sweat was even evaporating as steam rising from his skin.
He grabbed the man by his arm pits and began a controlled descent toward the island. Leon's aching muscles protested, but he held on. He set the Walking Dread down on a flat section of exposed rock near the compound's edge.
The moment the Walking Dread made contact with the ground, he checked the man's condition using Seismic Sense. His heartbeat was slow and irregular, but present.
Walking Dread was alive. Leon sighed in relief. It was a miracle his body was still in one piece, though Leon wondered if the outcome would have been different if he hadn't been juiced up.
Brit spoke through the comms. "Leon, what's going on?"
"Just taking a short break. That fight took a lot out of me. I'll be there in a minute."
"Roger."
It was time to put his contingency plan in place.
Leon crouched beside the unconscious giant, placed his hands on the man's scorched chest, and channelled Healing Light. The green glow spread across the Walking Dread's torso. It knitted the worst of the burns and stabilized his vitals. Leon healed him just enough to ensure he wouldn't die in transit.
Cecil would want him conscious for interrogation as soon as possible.
While the light worked, Leon's left hand shifted to the back of the Walking Dread's thigh. A quick pulse of energy was he needed. The brand settled into the skin, invisible to the eye and indistinguishable from the surrounding burns.
He wished he'd done this before with Machine Head.
Well, hindsight is always 20/20. If you ever get out of whatever hole the GDA puts you in, I'll know, and no one will be there to stop me from ending your life permanently.
Leon flew back to Brit and the others with the healed up Walking Dread in tow. The battle frenzy had fully receded now, leaving behind an ever-so-familiar ache of overexertion. The hollow feeling because of his emptied reserves was a new sensation though.
His arms were shaking and his waistcoat was torn in a few places. The mask, at least, was intact.
Brit and Britney looked completely undamaged for people who had walked into a hail of gunfire. Brit's green sweater had a few bullet holes in it and Britney's vest had a tear near the shoulder, but neither showed any sign of injury.
Knowing that a character had invulnerability used to get an eye roll from Leon. It was part of the package for any real powerhouse. But now that he was getting into situations where not having it meant certain death, its value was starting to sink in.
If he didn't have Reinforcement, he would have died in every fight he'd been in so far.
"That was reckless. Effective, but reckless," Lily said, eyes fixed on Leon. The disappointment in his eyes couldn't be more obvious. "I also taught you to fight better than that."
"Cecil's probably busy dealing with the Norwegian government's questions about that explosion right now," Brit added. Beside him, Britney arched a brow at the Walking Dread's unconscious form, approached it, and poked it with a stick.
Under their heavy gazes, Leon could only look away. "Yeah… I know. Sorry."
If the Walking Dread had been less durable, the Detonation would have killed him. Leon had gambled on the giant's toughness and won.
Wait. Was the gacha turning him into a gambling addict?
"What happened?" Lily asked. "After you felled Slaying Mantis, you could've ended the Walking Dread much sooner."
"After I activated Fight Mode and Removal, it was like all I could think about was caving their faces in. I think it was all the adrenaline and other chemicals flooding my system," Leon suggested. "You know how aggressive I become when I combine them. Cranking Removal to one hundred percent probably made it worse."
"That could explain it, yes," Lily said, holding his chin in thought. "We will discuss about this later."
"Hold on. Fight mode? Removal? What are you two talking about?" Brit asked.
Leon hesitated. Well, it wasn't as if anyone could use these pieces of information against him. "…They're abilities that let me fight at full power. Makes me more aggressive and reckless, too. Thought I had a handle on it, but I guess I don't."
"That explains the recklessness. Moving on to more pressing concerns." Brit waved at the compound around them before pointing at Slaying Mantis. "What part of 'don't level the compound' and 'leave both targets alive' was unclear?"
"I can fix the compound. Don't worry," Leon said, approaching Slaying Mantis.
They had placed him face-down and used rudimentary first-aid to stop the bleeding. The man was much closer to death than his ally. If it hadn't been for their quick thinking, Slaying Mantis would have died long ago.
"You can fix all this?" Brit gestured at the shattered remains of the main building's walls, the cratered areas of the ground, the ruined auxiliary building, and the general state of devastation that covered most of the compound. "Yeah right. Hey! What are you doing?"
Leon deactivated Healing Light and removed his now bloody hands from Slaying Mantis' exposed knee pits, discretely leaving another brand. "Fixing this guy up. It was a close call. I can heal someone's wounds, but I can't bring them back from death."
"Oh?" Britney perked up and stopped poking the Walking Dread. "Can you really heal people?"
"Take a look for yourselves."
Britney whistled, gazing down at the knee pits that were previously literal pits of muscle and bone. "Damn, kid. You're just full of surprises, aren't you? Cecil will want to know about this."
"I'll say," Brit added, looking at him with a curious glint in his eyes. "What did you mean by you can fix all everything here?"
Leon raised his hand toward the auxiliary building. "Reparo."
Shattered wood and twisted metal reversed their deformations, fragments pulling themselves from the ground and slotting back into place like a rewinding video. Warped steel straightened. Fragmented concrete reassembled.
Within fifteen seconds, the auxiliary building looked untouched.
Brit and Britney's eyebrows climbed.
"Convenient."
"Wow. It's like he's rewinding time."
Leon swept his hand across the compound, casting Reparo in a wide arc. The energy cost was noticeable on his reserves, but the results were immediate. Walls rebuilt themselves. Craters filled in as displaced earth returned to its original position. Glass reformed in window frames. Even the floodlights reassembled on their mounts, the shattered bulbs and casings piecing back together with quiet clicks.
The electronics inside the compound repaired alongside the structures. Monitors that had been cracked and dead flickered back to life. Server racks that had been toppled and smashed stood upright, their components fusing back into working order. Wiring re-threaded itself through the walls.
By the time Leon lowered his hand, the compound looked like nothing had happened to it. The buildings stood intact, the ground was level, and the interior equipment hummed with restored power.
Brit stared at the repaired compound for a long moment.
"That would have been nice to know before you blew everything up."
"Where's the fun in that?" Leon shrugged, half-joking.
"This isn't about fun, kid. You were given clear parameters, and you ignored them the moment your blood got hot." Brit's voice rose. "The compound's fixed. Fine. But that?" He pointed at the sky. "You can't un-explode a sky. Every ship in the Norwegian Sea saw that. Every fishing town on the coast saw that. Norwegian military probably scrambled jets the moment it went off. Cecil is going to be cleaning up this mess for days, and that's if nobody got footage."
Leon didn't have a comeback for that one. Brit was right. The Detonation at altitude had been spectacular, effective, and the single most reckless thing he could have done short of dropping the Walking Dread on a populated area.
"I understand," Leon said, head drooping low. "It won't happen again."
"It better not." Brit held his gaze for another second, then nodded. Something in his expression shifted. "That said, the results speak for themselves. Both targets are alive and secured without any casualties on our end. The execution was sloppy, yes, but the outcome is clean. Just tighten your discipline and you'll be worth the headaches."
That was as close to a compliment as Brit seemed to get.
Brit tapped his earpiece. "Cecil. Both targets are secured. The compound is intact. We need the tech team and medical for prisoner transport."
A pause while Cecil responded on the other end.
"Copy. Standing by."
Brit turned to Britney. "Cecil's inbound with the team. Let's clear the underground level before they get here."
The siblings moved toward the compound's main entrance, weapons drawn. Leon watched them go, then sat down on a section of repaired wall.
His legs were grateful for the rest. After his body cooled down, his energy reserves were hovering somewhere around fifteen percent, a dangerously low figure that he'd need to address before doing anything strenuous. The forest around the compound helped. Gaia's Child's passive regeneration had kicked in the moment his feet touched natural soil.
I'll recover faster if I stay on the ground. Give it thirty minutes and I'll be back to a reasonable level.
Lily walked beside him, shrinking into his small form. The exceed hopped onto the wall next to Leon and sat, his tail curling around his paws.
"You've grown," Lily said.
Leon glanced at him.
"When I first sparred with you, a single exchange was enough to put you on the floor. Tonight, you fought a creature twice your size for several minutes, adapted your strategy when brute force failed, and improvised a finishing technique using abilities you'd never combined in that way before." Lily's red eyes stayed fixed on the treeline. "Ignoring your recklessness, you did great."
"Lily, was that a compliment? Two in one night?"
"It was an observation. Don't let it go to your head."
Too late. Leon was already smiling.
Cecil arrived with a soft pop twelve minutes later, accompanied by Ms. Popper and a team of eight GDA personnel.
Cecil surveyed the compound. Leon watched his eyes move across the repaired buildings, the intact floodlights, the level ground. Then his gaze shifted upward, to the sky where the cloud cover was still visibly torn in a wide circle.
His voice was dry as sandpaper. "The sky looks like God sneezed."
"I can explain."
"Don't bother. I've already seen the satellite footage. So has the Norwegian Ministry of Defense. I've got three different agencies calling my secure line asking what the hell just lit up the Barents region, and I've been awake for thirty-one hours." Cecil adjusted his collar. "Next time you want to turn a man into a bomb, do it over open ocean. Or better yet, don't."
It wasn't as if he had another way to beat that damn tank. His hits were barely hurting him, and fire couldn't get through his armor. Leon doubted going into the forest or using Sunlight Spear would have worked either. The son of a bitch was too strong to restrain, and anything made out of electricity would just be absorbed.
But if there was one thing Leon learned from working at three part-time jobs, it was that making any excuse to your superior after something went wrong was the wrong move. Even if the reasons you gave were valid, it barely mattered.
"Understood."
"As long as you understand." Cecil looked at the two unconscious supervillains. The Walking Dread lay on a rock slab, his breathing steady. Slaying Mantis was flat on the ground nearby, his ruined suit still faintly smoking. Cecil studied them both clinical detachment.
"Both alive?"
"Both alive and stabilized. Ready for transport whenever your people are."
Cecil nodded to the people with the red cross symbol on their shoulders. Medical staff. They moved to the prisoners with practiced efficiency. Containment restraints went on first, then portable monitoring equipment. The Walking Dread required a reinforced gurney that two agents struggled to position under his bulk.
While the medical team worked, the people who seemed to be technical specialists moved into the underground level. Brit and Britney had already cleared it, confirming no traps, no hidden personnel, and no self-destruct mechanisms. The servers, monitors, and communications equipment down there had been untouched by the fight above.
The GDA team got to work immediately, pulling data, cataloguing documents, and imaging hard drives.
Leon stayed out of their way. His job was done. He sat on the repaired wall with Lily on one side waiting as his energy regenerated.
Brit found Cecil near the compound entrance and began his report.
Leon was close enough to hear most of it. Brit ran through the operation in clean, chronological order. The insertion, the tactical split, the snipers going down, the perimeter patrols being cleared, the exosuit squad, and the two targets emerging from underground. His tone was professional and clipped throughout.
When he got to Leon's performance, Brit paused.
"The kid's effective. I'll give him that. He's a better fighter than me and don't even get me started on his powers. Geokinesis, pyrokinesis, ferrokinesis, flight, some kind of ground-based detection that gave us a full tactical picture before we even started, and he redirected the Walking Dread's lightning back at Slaying Mantis. After that, he even healed the wounds of Slaying Mantis. Wounds that would have killed him otherwise." Brit rubbed his jaw. "Every time I thought I had a handle on what he could do, he pulled something else out of thin air. He's a damn wild card, Cecil. You could send him on ten different missions and he'd solve each one a different way."
"Wait a minute. Healing?"
Cecil glanced at Leon. Leon looked away and stopped listening in, feigning disinterest.
Wild Card.
The name settled into his mind and stayed there.
White Mask had always been a placeholder. A descriptor. It told people what he wore, but told nothing about who he was or how he fought. It was bland and forgettable.
Wild Card was different. It was vague enough that it would leave people scratching their heads, only giving them half of an idea about his capabilities.
Unpredictable. An unknown variable. You never knew what hand he was holding until he played it.
That's the one. That's my name.
He didn't say it out loud. There was no need to announce it just yet. But from this moment forward, White Mask was retired.
Cecil left Brit and walked over to Leon.
"Two Order members in one night," Cecil said, standing beside the wall. "With this, we'll be one step closer to getting a better idea about how The Order works."
"It's a start."
"It's more than a start. The intel my team is pulling from downstairs is already confirming what Titan told us about the pipeline restructuring. We've got names, routes, and staging points. If this pans out, we can dismantle Walking Dread's Eastern European network before it moves a single child."
"Good," Leon said, staring at the sky as he absorbed that information. "That's good."
Cecil studied him for a moment. Whatever he saw seemed to satisfy something, because he gave a short nod and moved on.
"The operational discretion issue isn't going away. I've got a cover story in motion. Atmospheric phenomenon from an unannounced Norwegian military exercise. It'll hold long enough to keep the press off it, but you and I are going to have a conversation about proportional response when you're not running on fumes."
"Fair."
"One more thing. Brit's assessment goes into your file. I'll be reading it tonight." Cecil paused. "For what it's worth, he doesn't impress easily. The fact that he called you effective instead of reckless after what you did tells me a lot."
He called Leon both, actually. But Leon kept that thought to himself.
Cecil turned and walked toward the underground entrance, already barking orders at his technical team. Ms. Popper stood nearby, hands clasped behind her back, waiting with the patient stillness.
Leon sat on the wall for another twenty minutes while the GDA team worked. By the time Cecil's team had finished their initial extraction and the prisoners were loaded onto reinforced gurneys, Leon was back to roughly forty percent. It was enough to move without worry.
Brit approached him one last time.
"You did good tonight, kid. Sloppy, but good." He extended a hand. "If Cecil puts you on another op, I wouldn't mind working with you again."
Leon shook it. "Likewise. And thanks for being a good safety net."
"You didn't need it."
"Was still nice to have."
Brit almost smiled. Almost. Then he turned and walked to Britney, who was leaning against the repaired compound wall with her arms crossed.
"Ready to go home?" she asked her brother. "I can't wait to have a hot shower."
"Been ready since we got here. Got a date with Jessica I need to get to."
Ms. Popper stepped forward. Leon felt space shift, and the island was gone.
OOO
The Suite was quiet.
Leon stood under the shower for a long time, letting the hot water run over his bruised shoulders and scorched forearms. The Wardrobe of Mending's clothes were already draped over the bedroom chair, beginning their twenty-four-hour self-repair cycle. His mask sat on the bathroom counter, clean and featureless.
The GP notifications he'd been ignoring since the fight were still queued in his interface. He pulled them up and let them scroll.
The total was staggering. Between the two defeats, the feats, and the miscellaneous GP from the exosuit operators, his bank had swollen by several thousand points in a single night. Combined with what he'd saved, his current GP total was the second highest it has ever been.
[Total GP: 7,292]
That's a lot of tickets.
He dismissed the interface and stepped out of the shower. Healing Light took care of the remaining bruises and the lingering ache in his arms. By the time he pulled on a fresh shirt and walked to the kitchen, his body felt close to normal.
Lily was at the counter in his small form, a cup of tea between his paws. Nyx was perched on the armchair, grooming her feathers with a self-satisfied air around her.
Leon opened the fridge and started pulling ingredients. It was past midnight, but his body wanted food with an urgency that bordered on demand. The God Tongue would settle for nothing less than a perfect meal, and his hands needed something to do that wasn't punching.
He cooked an entire rice cooker's worth of rice, with seared fish, pickled vegetables, and three bowls of warm soup. The kitchen was filled with the smell of sesame oil and ginger.
Lily watched him from the counter.
"You're going to want to train harder after tonight," the exceed said.
"I know. I'll be buying more tickets later, too. The Walking Dread's armor was compensating faster than I could damage him. If he'd been smarter about using the electricity offensively instead of just tanking hits, I would have been in real trouble." Leon plated the rice and laid the fish on top. "I need more power. More speed. Better control."
"And the discipline to apply all three without turning your enemy into a fireworks display."
Leon smiled. "That too."
He ate standing at the counter, Lily beside him with Nyx now dozing on the armchair. The Suite's nebula swirled outside the window, indifferent to the events of the night.
Wild Card.
He liked the sound of it.