Well, looks like she took my advice. Before I can regain my balance, the combat angel’s rocketed away, in a straight line this time, and gotten out of both sight and earshot. Maybe I shouldn’t have given her that one for free. It’s certainly irritating, but I’ve got one of her sickles as a consolation prize. No reason not to hold onto it, maybe she’ll come lookin’, and I’ll get another shot at her. I slip it onto the back of my belt, just under the hammer slung across my back.
Heh. Hammer over sickle. Little ironic, given who I’m working for. Not that I’m a true believer in the cause or anything. Just, I doubt my employer would much appreciate the iconography. Something something graven imagery of fallen empires or whatever. Gods may pay well but they sure are wet blankets. Whatever, not like he’s gonna see it anyway. He’s a little too good to talk to the likes of me, and anyway the sickle’s blade doesn’t even exist without the activation rune. It could be a sword for all anyone looking at it knows.
The angel girl’s house seems to have been picked clean, nothing useful in there. Nothing hidden, either. Seems she really might not have planned any of this in advance, which is… interesting. I’m gonna have to get my hands on her sooner or later, but that’s not my problem just yet. For now I just need to report our findings.
I make my way back to the safe house, sticking to main roads. Someone of my size and stature doesn’t really stand much of a chance of passing unnoticed. I’d only look suspicious for trying, and end up drawing more attention. Besides, there’s not much reason for me to bother trying to avoid attention. I’m more than capable of handling myself, not to mention I’ve got plenty of backup ready to fuck up anyone who gives me any worse than a sideways look. They’d regret ever seeing me.
It doesn’t take long to get back to the safe house, and when I do I casually walk in and throw myself down on the couch. “We cleared the place out, T. Nothin’ there.”
A voice responds from the other side of a desk chair facing away from me, toward a computer. “Nothing? Not a damn thing?”
“Not a damn thing. Either she’s really good at covering her tracks, or she’s in way the fuck over her head.”
“Which do you think is more likely?”
I stretch and let out a small groan. “She’s a streamer, Tim, and not a particularly smart one. She’s got no idea what’s going on, I’m sure it was all a big accident.”
Tim finally turns his chair around to face me, fingers tented in front of his gaunt face. He’s been in this business a hell of a lot longer than I have, and you can tell it’s gotten to him. He barely leaves the house, and his skin is so pale it’s almost pink, making his horns look darker in comparison. His face looks like it could drop off his skull at any moment. “You’re not starting to feel bad for the poor girl, are you, Kara?”
“Of course not, you still see the horns on my head don’cha?”
“Indeed I do, but that doesn’t mean anything. We saw how much that halo really meant on her.”
“Can it, T. You know I can’t afford to grow a conscience, even if I wanted to.”
“Mm, I’m sure.” He turns back around, leaning back in his chair with his hands behind his head. “So where do we go from here?”
“How the hell am I supposed to know? You’re the one with informants and shit, you tell me.”
“Did you find anything in the other girl’s apartment?”
“Nah, she’s a pro. I did run into her on the way out of Alice’s place, though. Almost managed to bring her in, but she slipped me at the last minute. Had to leave one of her weapons behind to do it, though, so it’s mine now.”
Tim glances over at me, one eyebrow raised. “What do you need with a combat angel’s weapon?”
“Nothing, but I’m sure she’s gonna want it back.”
“Fair enough.” He reaches for a small, black uplink that’s docked next to his computer monitor. “You wouldn't have happened to have gotten a good look at her, would you?”
“Of course I did. Go ahead and plug me in. I doubt anyone’s seen her since I ran into her, she was really bookin’ it out of there and has probably been laying low ever since.”
“Well, she can’t stay in her hole forever.” He tosses the uplink across to me and I stick it against my temple.
The uplink looks like a small rock covered in almost imperceptibly small sigils. I’m assured it’s actually an unfathomably complex little feat of magical engineering, but using it is as simple as can be. I put it on my head, and it pulls information out of it, but only that which I’m willing to give up. Apparently it would be much simpler and easier to make these things in such a way as to just pull a full dump of recent memory, but there are issues with that. For one, I would never let ‘em get it on me, and for another, if I did I’d probably end up a vegetable. Mucking around with people’s minds against their will is a dangerous and tricky business, it took over a century to get halos where they are now and even still there’s a pretty hard limit on what they can do, as we saw when our angel friend decided to pay the office a visit. This stuff just works better if you let the brain you’re interfacing with set the parameters, but it’s also complicated and difficult to create a spell that will do that by default.
I go ahead and relinquish the memory of Victoria’s face, which we funnily enough did not have access to an image of when we first hired her, and throw in most of the details about her and Alice’s apartments for good measure. Nothing in there that could come back to bite me, and who knows, it might help. Tim taps a few keys and sends a mugshot reconstructed from my memories out to his network of eyes and ears. If she tries to go anywhere outside of wherever she’s been hiding, we’ll probably know.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
“So what’s your read on her?”
“Victoria? Huge stick in the mud. Little too self-assured for her own good, but decent at thinking on her feet. Standard combat angel.”
“Sounds like you had fun.”
“Yeah! I did!” I’d be lying if I said I didn’t love knocking some humility into a combat angel. Most of ‘em are so used to being able to rely entirely on their speed advantage that they just don’t know what to do with someone who knows how to get the drop on them and put a strength advantage to use. Victoria seemed to be a little better about this than most, but not much. Hell, she didn’t even get a good hit in, it was all she could do to bolt when things were looking a little too rough. Maybe next time I see her she’ll have learned a little bit about how to approach a demon of my stature, but if not I’ll have plenty of fun manhandling her again. “That’s beside the point, though. Do we have anything else coming down the pipe? I’ve kinda hit a dead end as far as Alice is concerned.”
“Nothing that would interest you,” Tim replies. “Routine enforcement jobs, that sort of thing.”
“Hey, you don’t know what does and doesn’t interest me. It just so happens that I’d love an opportunity to pummel something since Victoria got away before I was really able to seal the deal.”
“Alright, alright, my bad. In that case, you should get going. There’s some shit going down at Faron’s in the industrial district in half an hour, you can probably make it if you leave now.”
I stand up and stretch again, cracking my neck and checking to ensure my hammer is securely held in place on my back. “What kind of shit?”
“It’s Faron, what kind of shit do you think?”
Faron is notorious for failing to hit manufacturing deadlines, but I didn’t think it had gotten so bad that they’d start sending people like me to knock down his door. Bit of a shame, he never seemed like that bad of a guy to me, just kinda flakey. Not much to do about it though, a job’s a job and I did just say I wanted to pummel something. Besides, Faron probably isn’t gonna be who I end up pummeling, that’ll be his guards. The man himself will get a love tap or two, just to show that failure has consequences. A night or two of R&R and he’ll be back in the game, and hopefully producing much better results than he has been up to now. “Anyone else on the job?”
“Yeah, Ricky and Bill. With you, that makes three, which should be more than enough to deal with whatever he’s got waiting for you.”
“Oh? They’ve got Ricky doing jobs now?”
“Yeah, he’s still pretty green. Keep an eye on him, would you?”
I nod, take my leave of Tim, and make my way down to the subway. Normal humans don’t see the red tone of my skin, or the horns on my head, but the hammer on my back does draw some attention. Nothing concerning of course, it’s weird but it’s not illegal. I'm sure everyone here has seen weirder, anyway.
It takes 20 minutes to get to the industrial district, and from the station it's another 5 minutes to Faron’s office. When I get there, there's about as much muscle around the place as I was expecting. Ricky and Bill have already arrived, and are each engaging the first guard they've run across. As I approach I can see one more guard making his way around to blindside Bill, who's occupied with the guy he's grappling. I break into a run to intercept the newcomer. The guy’s got some pretty serious tunnel vision on the seemingly defenseless assailant he’s after, so it comes as a bit of a nasty shock when a hammer swings into his side, knocking him across the ground. The way his head hits the pavement looks like it’ll leave some scars, and more importantly stop him from getting back up for the time being.
Bill seems to have things covered now that there’s no longer someone sneaking up behind him, so I turn my attention toward Ricky. He’s fighting a losing battle with a much larger guard, dude’s almost as big as me. I’ll have to give him a talking to later, he should know better than to take someone that big head-on. Hell, even I would be sneaking up on the guy to try to land a clean finish before he sees me, if I hadn’t already drawn his attention by laying out his buddy. Instead I just sprint up to him and take a swing from the left while Ricky attacks from the right. The guard makes the correct decision and ducks a strike from my hammer that could honestly have stood a good chance of killing him had it connected, eating a punch from Ricky in the process. Not ideal, but certainly a better tradeoff than the other option available to him. The punch barely winds him anyway, but it’s quickly followed by another, and then a third. Ricky may not have the strongest tactical sense, but once he gets in he doesn’t back off, and his flurry of blows is enough to keep our friend occupied while I take another swing, catching him right across the jaw. Bad luck, pal, pretty sure that’s dislocated. Probably broken in a few places, too.
From there it's pretty easy for Ricky to finish him off. Fighting with a gravel jaw is pretty hard, as it turns out. Before long he's out of commission, and Bill looks to be just about done with his guy as well. Might as well take this opportunity to check in on my friend.
“Hey there Ricky, you doin’ alright?”
He nods, wiping his bloodied knuckles on his pants. I’m pretty sure none of it’s his blood. “Yeah, things were a little dicey until you showed up but I should be good.”
“This your first job, or have you been busy since I last saw you?”
“First one, fresh outta training.”
I smirk, clapping him on the shoulder. “It shows. We’ll talk after this is finished.” He nods, looking a little forlorn. “You’re not doin’ too bad though, good job keeping the pressure on that guy after I opened him up.”
Bill finishes off the guard he’s fighting, joins us with a curt nod toward me, and the three of us make our way inside the building. In short order we burst through the door of Faron's office and Ricky and Bill run forward to grab his shoulders and push him back down into the chair he was beginning to stand up from.
“You know why we're here, don't you, Faron?” No reason to mince words, this isn’t a social call.
“I- Yeah, listen, I'm working on fixing the-” Faron always was a ratty little worm of a man.
“And you definitely know that I'm not here to have a discussion. I bring consequences, nothing more, nothing less.” With that, I jab the end of my hammer’s handle into his face. I definitely held back, but I can feel a few teeth come loose anyway. That should be plenty. “And now they've been delivered. You have a good day, Faron. Take care.”
With that, my buddies release him, and he clutches his bloody mouth, blinking back tears. I don't stick around for him to pull himself together enough to reply. The three of us leave the office and catch a subway back to Tim for debriefing.