_ _ _Leeroy

The Black Hound was still burning west bound as Leeroy finished locking himself into his warplate. Five tonnes of unrivaled personal protection hugged him like the father he'd grown beyond. Suited up and locked in, he was the culmination of centuries of precision engineering and millenia of landsknecht eugenics. He was a weapon on the cutting edge.

Leeroy glanced to his strike team, the best he could pull from Celio's protection without overtly compromising the defensive posture he'd painstakingly built over these past four months. Havoc was flexing the clawed fingers of his gauntlets, gnashing the vanadium alloy because he couldn't wait to sink those talons into someone and tear. Pauz sat hunched over his autocannon, toying with his underbarrel shredder— loading flechettes only to swap for grenades before repeating the cycle. Jhordan, the strike team's forth and final member, was trying to persuade an outdated spectral-blocker shield that it had one more fight left in it.

On paper, they weren't much. Four hardened mercs each wearing a few million GSaC worth of gear. A betting man might have seen the odds, four mercs against an entire police precinct and their militia auxiliaries, and thought the cards were stacked against them. Leeroy didn't believe in leaving things to chance. He'd loaded the deck as much as he could, now all that was left was to follow through.

Suddenly the Hound started climbing instead of dropping. It tore left, throwing his strike team to the deck. Leeory could hear the shuttle's frame creaking as it fought the strain of immutable physics at play.

"Clancy what are you doing?!" He demanded.

The Hound banked left and opened its throttle wide in reply. Then he felt the roaring tremor of its afterburners firing on max.

"Clancy, what's going on? Are we under fire?"

It didn't sound like it. Didn't feel like there were shells buzzing past them. There was no ozone tinge of lasers flash-boiling the clouds or hull. Leeroy had been in enough gunned down shuttles to know he'd never forget those sensations. Clancy finally let off the throttle and picked up the intercom.

"I… I don't really know what I'm looking at up here."

Leeroy flicked his eyes, wiggled his face and stamped his teeth, pulling up the shuttle's camera feeds on his suit's HUD and searching for what he meant. His eyes passed over it three times before he saw it. The Hound's nose imaging was all looking at a cliffside in the city about four klicks from their target drop zone.

Something was tearing the mountain apart, throwing the biggest pieces kilometers into the air. As he squinted in, he could see that some of those chunks were entire buildings and a lot of those buildings were scattering smaller fragments— people, he realizes.

It reminded him of seeing an anthill kicked open. Watching all the insects scatter around in a panic. Only he wasn't looking at an anthill, he was looking at a city of more than twelve-million people.

Another swipe tore into the mountain and the spoil was cast aside. No flash of explosives, no shockwave of rail accelerators, nothing. A titanic pair of invisible hands were clawing through millions of tonnes of stone and infrastructure and throwing it all away.

He'd seen wars, both on the ground and in space. He'd seen men and women cut down in their hundreds, bombs leveling cities and even an entire ship getting slagged to atomic dust. He'd seen the alien horrors always skulking around humanity's peripheries in the Eldritch DMZ and out on the fringe worlds. But Leeroy had never seen anything like this, nothing could have prepared him for it.

He couldn't rationalize it, it was too big yet too specific. It was like a carpet bombing with a single-minded sentient hatred guiding each warhead. It was like a toddler had been given command of a war fleet while playing pretend. It was a cataclysm too localized to be natural but just indiscriminate enough to be slaughtering thousands of bystanders every minute.

"Jesus fucking Christ." The words slipped from his lips over the open air of his comm link.

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No one bothered to chastise him. They were all watching the same thing. There was nothing any of them could do to change what was already in motion. It was beyond anything humans and all their engines of war could hope to stop or imitate. But Leeroy knew someone who could.

"Get me a private link to Treu!" Leeroy barked. "Shit, does he even have one of our radios-"

"I do." Treu's vile rumbling purr answered instantly, almost as if he'd been waiting for the call.

"Are you seeing-"

"Yes, I am."

"You said I'd know it when I saw it."

"I did."

"This is it. Isn't it?" Leeroy asked, unable to keep the disbelief from his tone. "You have to put them down. I get it. I understand. Do it."

The open air hissed, waiting for Treu's answer as a sub-orbital meteor shower rained into the city below; hundreds of lives being snuffed out every time a rock touched down with dozens of rock falling every second. Leeroy's armor was rated for vacuum, but the air seemed thin. He could barely breathe.

"No, it isn't." Treu said at length. "And no, I don't."

Leeroy couldn't believe it. The implications struck him dumb. It was a battle, but Leeroy fought off his stupor and found his voice.

"You mean there's something worse— worse than this…"

He couldn't believe it. Couldn't conceptualize how any single being could have that kind of power. Leeroy hadn't meant it as a question, but Treu answered anyway.

"Yes. The creature still has two of three seals in place. What you are witnessing now is but a minute fraction of its power."

Leeroy couldn't believe it. He just couldn't fit the pieces together into a single picture that made sense. It was like there was a gouge missing from the hard drive of his mind and every time he tried to pull a thought from that section there was just… nothing. Stupification. Disbelief.

"She's a monster." Leeroy hadn't meant to speak aloud. The words slipped from his mouth of their own accord.

"Yes, it is." Treu purred the words with vile, perverse delight. "Tell me, are you familiar with the legend of the hydra?"

Leeroy tried to recall what he knew but the devastation below commanded his attention. Eventually, he closed his eyes to think. He could still see the desolation in his mind's eye, but wasn't as fresh—as commanding—which helped somewhat.

"It was a dragon," Leeroy recalled, "but it had many heads. Every time they thought it was dead, a new head would grow because they couldn't completely kill it. Every time they fought it, it just got stronger and stronger. Eventually it was trapped in a desert cave and starved until it was weak enough for the landsknecht's original clans to destroy it once and for all."

"Exactly." Treu said, practically purring. "What you are witnessing is a single head of a similar beast."

"One that keeps coming back… You need all of it to completely annihilate it for good."

The realization of Treu's motives brought up a sensation Leeory hadn't felt in years. Dread. Compared to Treu's dragon-slaying mission, everything else paled in importance. Leeroy and the outfit were little more than children playing soldier while a real warrior made ready to confront a threat so utterly beyond them that Leeroy could barely grasp the scope of it. Struggle as Leeroy might with the greater implications, Treu's actions and tactics suddenly became transparent to him.

"You're using Hiiro as bait, to draw the rest of her here so you can destroy her."

"I am." Treu confirmed. For the first time since meeting the man, Leeroy didn't harbor a shadow of a doubt that Treu was being honest with him.

"What do you need us to do?" Leeroy asked.

"Us?"

"Me. The outfit. Humanity. All nine bloody miles of Us. How do we kill her?"

"Pretend this conversation never happened and when the time comes, get the hell out of my way."

Leeroy opened his eyes and looked back at the video feed. Things have calmed down now but there was carnage everywhere. A city laid to waste as an afterthought. A Devil loosed upon this city specifically and humanity at large. It was all his fault.

Why had he ever agreed to this escort contract? Every step of the way, he had known something was off and now there was no turning a blind eye to consequences of his hubris. Bim was as much Leeroy's responsibility as she was Treu's. She had to be stopped.

"She's a monster." Leeroy breathed once more, unable to think of his mistake as anything but.

"Yes, it is." Treu confirmed, purring the words with vile, perverse delight.

"So what the hell does that make you?" Leeroy asked.

Treu paused long enough for Leeroy to think the connection died. Some part of him hoped it had. Bim was a monster, she'd just devastated an entire city district for fuck's sake! Any sane man should be scared shitless. So why did Treu sound almost excited by the idea of going head to head with that apocalypse in the flesh?

"I am what I have always claimed to be." Treu said in his succulent, vile purr. "I'm little more than the monster that kills other monsters."