Reves stood outside of a burning armory building. He had some other business to take care of by there, but it looked like it took a turn for the worst with Reves executing the people inside the small country of Washir. Soldiers ran through the buildings arming bombs and throwing flares to get the maximum amount of damage possible.
“Are you sure they will go through the hyperloop?” Toomes asked his commander.
“Unless Chase Team managed to capture them, they will go through here to get to Elvander.” Reves opened up a bag of chips from his suit pocket.
They were cheese-powder covered chips that were supposedly healthy for the heart as well as low in calories, but he didn’t care about all that. He was just a fan of cheddar.
“Are you sure they will even be alive?” Toomes asked.
Reves crunched on a chip for a minute before he gave him a sigh, “I really don’t care. Alive or dead, those guys are trained to get things done. Besides Washir’s neutrality was really giving me a headache, might as well have just gotten that done in the meantime.”
The crunching continued away for a few more minutes while Reves examined the destroyed area of the pocket-country. He poured the rest of the left over crumbs into his mouth and tossed the bag on the ground while another explosion appeared on his left side from another bomb. His combed hair became disheveled from the force of the blast, but he calmly fixed it back to its well-groomed state.
“We need to clear the store!” One of the soldiers yelled over to another group.
“Are you sure?! It looks empty!” Another soldier walked toward the store.
“Make sure you take the inventory.” Reves said.
“Yes sir!” The soldiers yelled out as they entered the store.
“I hope they save the snack cakes.” Reves sighed to himself.
“We found another survivor!” Another soldier from a different company brought a restrained man in his late-thirties to Reves.
“You people are like cockroaches. I kill one and four more takes your place.” Reves scoffed and then thought a minute about his remark, “No wait, a hydra. Analogy still works.”
His soldiers nodded and shrugged in agreement.
“You are a damn monster! When Elvander finds out about this, you will pay!” The man angrily gritted his teeth.
It’s funny, my dad used to sell his vegetables in this very country. I always hated coming here. The place was too small and never had much to do. I’m pretty sure the hyperloop wasn’t around if I remember correctly. Hmm, if you told me that I’d be back here as an adult, I would’ve called you a liar.” Reves smirked with a short chuckle.
The man stood silent as the Shadow Cannon ruler looked him in the eye. His thoughts weren’t absolute and he always kept people on their toes even after he made his thoughts known. He was sane as a chess player one moment and then psychotic the next. No one knew if that was actually his mind working or a strategy to get his enemies off-guard.
“Yeah, good talk.” Reves lightly tapped on the man’s cheek and turned away to check on the progress of the armory looting. “Throw him in the freezer of that store before you set it up in flames. Let’s see what kills him first, the heat or the cold.”
There was his psychotic tendencies in full-effect again. He put his hands around his back and looked at his masterpiece; a masterpiece painted in chaos on the blood of its civilians. The endgame of the man wasn’t one of reason, maybe he just liked the way it felt to be the most feared being on the planet.
He turned to face the store where the lone survivor was being dragged by the heavily-armored soldiers. The amount of warriors he had didn’t compare to the vast size of Elvander, but with their possible allies getting taken out, it may even the battlefield when the time came to go head-to-head in the war that has yet to come. Maybe there was a method to his madness.
The man’s screams were being muffled by the explosions that surrounded them and even if they were heard, no one was going to be able to answer that call. Reves successfully eradicated another city before Elvander even had a chance to check the news. At this rate, Shadow Cannon will have enough control of the continents and their enemy will have no choice but to bite the bullet or give up. Either way, the ball was in Reve’s court with the defensive team all calling in sick, giving him the chance to make his shots with no opposition.
“Sir! Sir!” Shadow Cannon’s intel officer ran up to Reves with his voice yelling in an urgent fashion.
“Calm down, you almost gave me a heart attack.” Reves calmly said. The intel officer couldn’t tell if it was a joke or he actually did scare the man.
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The intel officer tried to get his breathing under control.
“Now go ahead and tell me the news. Did they find them?” Reves had his hands over the officer’s shoulders.
“Chase team never checked in.” The intel officer gulped his nervousness.
“Because they were busy cleaning the blood of our enemies?” Reves tried to make the news work in his favor.
“I mean, their visor signals went offline. You know the things that connect to their vitals, meaning—”
“No vitals. Holy crap, they killed them.” Reves gasped, “No, no that’s good, that means they’re going to have to take the hyperloop! We got them right where we want them!”
“Actually…” The officer tried to break the rest of the news as gently as he could. His eyeglasses began to get blurry from the sweat pouring out of his pores.
“Please stop with the pauses! Out with it!” Reves squeezed the scared man’s shoulders.
“The ship was taken.” The officer winced.
“Of course it was.” Reves scoffed. “Did they at least send us something that can help us?”
“We were going to get a transmission, but he was cutoff before he even said a word.” The officer said, “The best thing we got was their last transmission, but with the ship taken… I don’t know how far they could’ve gone.”
“I know exactly where they are headed, but I would like to see how far they are from getting there.” Reves let go of the officer’s shoulder. “Let me know when you got those coordinates.”
The terrorist leader walked away while he fixed his suit’s collar then walked toward the burning armory. A loud explosion emerged from the ruins, possibly from some of the warheads that were armed and ready to be launched at a moment’s notice.
A few of his own men were caught in the chaos, but Reves stood still welcoming the shockwave of the sudden explosion. That was the price of business, if that’s what they could call it. No money was being made, deals weren’t being done, and only one side benefited from it.
“What do we do with the dead soldiers?” One of his men ran by his side hoping to save as much of his team he can.
“Get them and load them up in the ships. We’ll give them a proper burial after we finish up here.” Reves cleared his throat. A psychopathic leader like him was already numb from the countless corpses in his days, but he didn’t want to use that as an excuse to make his men become as heartless as he was. That made them vulnerable; it was something that made them want to be alive the next day, so they damn well had to make sure they were on their tip-top shape so they could go home in one piece. The moment they felt indestructible was when carelessness happened and in his army, that was a fatal flaw he didn’t want.
He had seen countless dictators think themselves as gods only to be gunned down while they were out shopping for their favorite shoes or they were poisoned inside the bathroom. They all had that untouchable belief when they were alive and to Reves, it was as bad as being suicidal because at least he had control of when he wanted to pull the trigger.
“We hit the motherlode!” Another soldier appeared behind him with a pallet jack of snack cakes, especially Reves’s favorite cream-filled sponge cakes.
“Oh sweet spongy goodness!” Reves knelt down to the boxes of cakes with a big smile across his face. “Put these beauties inside my ship and the rest you can distribute among yourselves.”
“Yes sir!” The soldier pulled the pallet jack toward the ship.
They were high in calories, but Reves could work it out during the week. His body wasn’t chiseled, but his body fat index wasn’t high either. His suits still fitted him well and he didn’t want to gamble when it came to indulging in food, but sponge cakes were his weakness and if he had to exercise for hours on end, so be it. That was a sacrifice worth doing.
“We found the coordinates!” The intel officer ran up to his leader holding his tablet with a satellite image on the screen.
“Good, give me them.” Reves began to make his way to his ship.
“It looks like they were last seen entering Jil’s airspace.” The intel officer showed Reves the screen to get a better idea of the location.
“They are getting closer by the second and with that ship it’s going to be damn near-impossible to catch up to them.” Reves sneered, “Please tell me that we got something else we can use to catch these damn rebels.”
“I was just downloading some of the footage from their visors. I didn’t think we were able to do it since, you know, it’s a new technology for us, but I think we got the hang of it.” The officer smiled while he scrolled through the tablet’s files to locate the videos.
He played a clip of the soldier that was thrown by Ragnar. His last few clips involved him standing by the pilot before getting dragged inside the grass. The footage then bounced around until he reached the other side of the ship and it held up the soldier while his camera faced the machine. For that moment, they got a good look of Ragnar and its traitorous face. Then the moment passed with the soldier getting thrown toward his teammate.
“What a monster.” Reves said quietly, “Play the next one.”
The next one involved the thermal scanning soldier looking down on the ground with his scope aiming at a figure that was covered in a silhouette of green and red. The face of the person couldn’t be seen, which bugged the young terrorist leader.
“I can remove the thermal if you like.” The intel officer scrolled through the settings.
“You can do that? Yeah, do it.” Reves stared at the video.
The thermal colors were soon removed and he got a crystal clear video of the person that was taking a shot at the soldier. A young woman whose eyes were looking through the scope of her Elvander made rifle before she took her shot at them. Reves facial expression went from curious to shock. He looked as if he saw a ghost and his calm, collected state was fading quick. His hands snatched the tablet and his footsteps hurried toward his ship while the soldiers finished up loading the snack cakes.
“Do you know who this is?!” The intel officer yelled out to Reves.
“All too well.” He quickly boarded the ship and stormed to the cockpit with the tablet in hand, “Take me to these coordinates.”
Toomes and Yusef managed to get to the ship before their boss made his quick exit.
“What’s going on, sir?” Toomes asked with a touch of curiosity in his voice.
“I need you to send another team to these coordinates. I don’t want a single survivor in that ship!”
“Not a problem, sir!” Yusef reached for his radio.
Something rubbed Reves the wrong way and it had something to do with that girl. No one wanted to question it, but this mission soon felt a little more personal.