"Are you three out of your fucking minds?"

We had just asked the General about going to China, and the first reaction we got was a bit worse than we'd been expecting. And things had been going so well. Finding the conference room in the unfamiliar facility had not been an issue, not with my senses and Mandy's divination. It was a rest area pretty much identical to the one we'd found at the facility's entrance, complete with enchanted metal tables and chairs. There we had found both Liz herself in the flesh and General Rinaker going through a stack of printed - and coded - reports. Or, since they were reading the apparent gibberish on those papers just fine, maybe it was some sort of weird shorthand they'd developed in self-defense against bureaucracy. Things like that were why joining their organization or any other sort of government had never crossed my mind.

The aging military man had been surprisingly accommodating, pausing in his work to listen to whatever we'd come to say. He even welcomed Mandy and Jerry and made polite small-talk about "joint efforts against criminal supers", "international outreach" and "coordinated efforts" for a couple of minutes. There was some noncommittal back-and-forth, teleported refreshments, a lot of smoking on the General's part and even more boredom on mine - and I hadn't even joined that part of the conversation.

It was after said introductions where things got interesting. General Rinaker let us explain the situation without showing any response to either our mention of the battle and shortened mountain or our report on the enemy's capabilities. He sat back in his chair, chin resting on steepled fingers, old wooden pipe puffing smoke like a ships funnel. He didn't look as well as the last time I'd met him. There were dark circles under his eyes, his face had an unhealthy pallor and his lanky frame had lost quite a few pounds over the past week. However his body was a lot stronger, its durability reinforced by a growing well of power and its measured movements those of a man that knew he could break things at a touch if he wasn't careful. I'd seen the same before on new supers who'd grown rapidly but wasn't a problem I'd really experienced myself due to awareness and control of forces being my primary power.

The old man hadn't asked questions of us either, letting Mandy and Jerry explain most of the events with my only contributions being about the fight in outer space. He seemed... not tired, supers bounced back quickly while outside actual battle, but worn down. I suspected the changes to his appearance had more to do with his self-image than anything else. If he saw himself as an aging man struggling under the weight of new responsibilities then that would be what he would appear as even when his actual body was healthy enough to bounce rocket-propelled grenades.

No, the real downer and constant source of interruptions in the debriefing was Liz. The black-haired woman kept questioning everything; our tactics, our intentions, our decision to engage in a battle at all when the enemy had come prepared for it rather than fleeing via superior mobility, not identifying ourselves and demanding the brainwashed fanatics leave the country, and so on and so forth. Honestly, I'd been tuning her out for most of an hour, waiting for Rinaker to cut in with his own opinions or questions or at least a reaction on his part, but he never did. But the moment Miss "Warden" started throwing around insults and curses, I'd had enough.

"You seem to be laboring under the misconception this is a debrief or interrogation. That you are in any way entitled to disparaging us for our conduct as if you were our superior," I told her and the General both. "It is not and you aren't. It is instead a courtesy call and a request for coordination between allies, in order to deal with a dangerous new foe. Stop treating us like that or we're leaving."

"Why, you-"

"Liz, enough," Rinaker spoke between puffs of his pipe. "They are our allies. They are right in at least that much."

"Really?" Jerry said dubiously. "After fifty-seven minutes of letting her-" he pointed across the table at Liz "-build up steam?"

"The reason I did not speak earlier is perspective," the General told him. He set his pipe on the table where it kept smoking on its own. "Whatever else you may be you're all young. Young as people but also young to your powers and young to having power in general. You are making lots of things up as you go, improvising and discovering. How could you not, when the entire world was stood on its end, when this whole situation is new to us all?" He sat back in his chair, fingers clicking against the table as he looked across it at us with those old green eyes of his. "This makes everything you are involved in unpredictable. Your decision-making, yes, but also what options you have available since you keep making new ones, let alone which option might be the best at any given moment."

"Do you claim to be different, then?" Jerry asked him, causing the General to chuckle.

"Not at all, young man, except for one thing. I understand the importance of perspective." He smiled rather self-deprecatingly. "I am a lot older than you. This has given me time to make my own mistakes, youthful or otherwise, for me to see the world changing and how newly appearing options are best handled, even if the changes I saw before the Invasion were not as great as those since."

"As so you... sat back and listened as Liz belittled us?" It was Mandy's turn to be confused and annoyed.

"Listening, I've found, is the one thing leaders should do the most if they want to be good ones," Rinaker said in turn. "And not belittle, challenge. Some of what you came to tell me was valuable information, and for that I thank you. But some was opinion instead, or assumption. In war those two can be dangerous." He waved at the table and the smoke formed tiny little figures fighting over a broken mountain. Three of said figures, maybe a quarter inch tall at the most, looked suspiciously familiar. "The Fog of War represents the uncertainty in situational awareness experienced by participants in military operations. The term seeks to capture the uncertainty regarding one's own capability, adversary capability, and adversary intent during an engagement, operation, or campaign." The figures fought on a blurry battlefield half-hidden by puffs of smoke, their positions and actions becoming increasingly hazy. "The newer and less tested the weapons employed the greater the uncertainty, and powers are very new. The less experienced the combatants on either side the greater the uncertainty, and youth aside, neither you nor those brainwashed fools had ever been in a similar situation."

"So you're telling us what?" Mandy charged on confrontationally, "that we did not know what we were doing?"

"Allow me to answer your question with a question." From his tone, the General did not seem at all offended by my friend being angry at him. "Not having met this Red Dragon or seen him engage in a battle where he was pressed, how confident are you that your assessment of him and his goals was correct?"

"Pretty confident-" Mandy started saying but she was interrupted by Jerry's armored hand on her shoulder.

"We are not entirely confident, no," the magical engineer admitted, "but we do have concerns about the threat that presented itself and attempted to kill us. Whether we underestimated, overestimated, or assessed it properly, the threat exists and we have to do something about it, no?"

"That is true, but the decision about what to do to counter said threat does not rest on you alone," the old man told us. "Not when you asked me, as a representative of the US government and a leader of the organisation of supers responsible for its security, to aid and support you in said efforts. It is a significant commitment to begin with, further complicated by situations and considerations you might not be aware of. This is why there was need for perspective, both for me and for you."

"In other words you want to talk without doing anything definitive," Mandy 'translated' with more than a little disgust.

"Young lady, who do you take me for, a politician?" Rinaker chuckled again. He really seemed to be enjoying himself in this role of... what? Teacher? Wise old man? Young super wrangler? I had no idea because even with super-senses I could not read him. All the reactions, the attitude he was showing, could be a fabrication as easily as they could be the truth. "No, we cannot allow enemies to grow unchecked, especially one who has skipped declaring war and went straight to launching terrorist attacks within US borders with impunity." He nodded, pleased. "Yes, that is good. By phrasing it like that to the people in Washington we'll be afforded a broader mandate to act, though we'll still have to handle the international complications with care."

If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

Not a politician? Who was he trying to fool? Any military officer had to play politics because politics, interactions with other people, were the source of military power in the end. Or at least they used to be. A military officer of flag rank? Those were politicians first and in the military second. They had to be; whether that was a bad thing depended, as always, on the individuals involved.

"Which means what, practically speaking?" my friend insisted. If she was looking for a definitive answer... from what I'd seen over months of people-watching via super-senses, decisions that big weren't made in a day. I wasn't sure if that was a good or a bad thing either.

"It means seeing what options we do have to deal with it before we actually pick one." A gesture towards Liz got one of the teleportation circles on the table flaring momentarily, replacing his spent pipe for a new, already full one. He picked it up and by the time it reached his lips it was already lit and puffing merrily. Utility applications for superpowers; far more interesting than politics. "Now tell me," he said, suddenly more serious. "What exactly do you have in mind for dealing with this Red Dragon? Walk me through what happened and what you intend in as much detail as you remember so I can see if there are things you missed."

xxxx

"...to sum up, storming China with a group powerful enough to guarantee quick victory is problematic for several reasons," the General concluded after another hour and a half of back and forth. "First, we do not know the nature and numbers of his allies and since he already leveraged your personal nemesis to set up a trap for you, we already confirmed he is not acting on his own."

As it turns out, our knee-jerk reaction to strike back as soon as possible was not very well thought-out. Who would have thunk it? That we didn't know what other supers were cooperating with the big bad was a serious problem because a single middling power could turn the tide in a battle, if it was the right middling power. The General had given a couple examples just out of the files of supers imprisoned in the Pit alone. More worrying was the second possibility of an alliance, though.

"What are the chances the enemy has found more than newborn supers to... enhance and how quickly could he assimilate them?"

"His curse wouldn't work with willing hosts," Mandy said. "They have to fear him or hate him, a strong negative emotion they will keep thinking about and that will be reinforced by their use of boosted powers."

"So he can't lure in recruits with false promises. He has to take them by force. That is good." The General waved his hand and a map of Asia formed out of smoke with hundreds of denser spots across it. "Here's what we have about super appearances abroad. We suspect the incidents to be underreported, but even so their rarity indicates a sharply declining rate of appearances the further one gets from Florida, Baffin Bay and the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Japan. You just cost him five hundred hosts; in the short term - that is, two to three months - he can't replace them without abducting them from outside China. Such a wave of abductions would be very noticeable."

"Which is why we need to take him down now," Mandy immediately and predictably said.

"Where would you find him?" the General asked with apparently genuine curiosity. "That's problem number two to your offensive approach, by the way. He's a terrorist, the enemy of a government that, unlike ours, would nuke their own people if it meant getting rid of him. They'd consider even a million casualties worth it, given how much of their cabinet has inexplicably disappeared since the Red Dragon blew up their own version of a super-prison."

"And yet they won't agree to us helping them beat the guy," Jerry noted with a tired chuckle.

"Welcome to politics, young man," Rinaker said with a shrug. "Two and a half millennia after their invention of Realpolitik, East Asian politics are still based on hierarchy and ritual obligation as a bedrock principle. To ask for help would be to lose face, admit inferiority and generate obligation towards whoever helps them. Things will have to get a lot worse before they do so."

"That's-"

"Their culture?" the older man sat back. "If you want to be heroes, my suggestion would be to stay away from trying to meddle in that. It never goes well, for either side." Was he speaking from personal experience? He was a General and our country had a history of foreign... adventures. "Which brings us to problem number three; the political reaction any unilateral international action on your part."

"Here we go again," I said with a roll of my eyes.

"You don't get to talk," Liz shot back immediately before anyone else could. "You've used nuclear explosions on US soil twice, of course people were going to freak out."

"The Canadians would be very interested in this claim that Devon island is part of the US," I snarked in turn. "Also, the place was uninhabited so no harm done."

"Wherever the enemy is hiding won't be," Rinaker put a stop to our little argument. "And if you thought mostly domestic use with support from the authorities caused a bad reaction, you definitely won't like the one to outright invasion of a global superpower. Even with the Agency keeping the true extent of top-tier superpowers a secret, aided by sheer disbelief, lack of familiarity and some amount of deliberate obfuscation, both governments and government-adjacent organizations are screaming bloody murder. If that very thin veneer of secrecy is pierced by your blatant violation of the parts of international law they actually care about, I can guarantee that arms races with the explicit purpose of killing you will start in more countries than not."

"Ugh, I should have stayed on Mars," I groaned and stared at the ceiling. On one hand, protecting the world from villains that would murder literal millions for a power-up was something that needed to be done. On the other, being the cause of global mobilisation and eventually war was not my cup of tea.

"Wouldn't such reactions be inevitable, then?" Jerry wondered. "Wouldn't the villains trigger them the same as we would?"

"Perception and public relations matter," the older man countered. "Imagine if you will that a distant relation, someone that still counts as one of your in-group if barely, had gone crazy and was causing trouble. Suddenly, some people from a rival family or mildly hostile business break down your door, barge into your home with heavy weapons, and wreck several rooms while shooting said crazy troublemaker to death. Now imagine instead that nobody intervenes and the crazy man wrecks the rooms himself until you are forced to ask for help to stop him. Which situation would likely lead to you hating your rescuers?"

"OK, I'm convinced," the power-armored ex-nerd admitted. "Is it really that simple, though?"

"Politics is anything but simple," the General warned. "...but first impressions matter a lot even in this. It is why we've been holding back the chaos by the skin of our teeth, slowing down reactions and letting people come to the conclusion that you're helping on their own. It is harder to do in some cases," he shot me a glare "which is why I'd appreciate you not acting as openly and grandly if you can help it. People's perceptions have to be eased into the new situation slowly, or they'll shatter."

"But what do we do if we shouldn't take him out as soon as possible?"

"Why, the same thing he has been doing." The smoke-map of Asia shifted instantly to that of North America, one with far, far more super activity markings stuck to it. "He did not set that trap for you without knowing about you, without building up his forces and growing stronger, without finding like-minded allies."

"What trap?" I demanded. "We captured one of his people and started looking into the Red Dragon's secrets, not the other way around."

"And he had five hundred people ready to hit you with very well-researched tactics... how exactly?" the General asked. "You captured one of his people, yes... in a city you've visited several times in the past few months, in a bar you were known to have previously frequented, following one of your former classmates that you rightfully feel contempt for, who was so badly disguised and self-controlled he couldn't have become more obvious if he had tried That, my dear, was undoubtedly a trap."

"Maybe." Though I was not fully convinced. There was more going on here than we had so far discovered.

"I can see my persuasion has missed its mark. No matter. We'll know one way or another by the time this entire situation comes to an end." He rested his chin on steepled fingers once more, returning his pose to how we'd found him when we first entered the room. "Now, to preparations."

"Are such preparations why you've been building up this base to this?" Jerry asked not the General but Liz.

"That was one of the reasons, yes," the brunette nodded. "As far as we know, the monsters are here to stay so we'll unlikely to run out of growth fodder. In fact, their numbers have only been growing. But everyone can kill a few monsters every day; to prepare ourselves for the battles to come we'll need all the improvement and build-up we can get."

"That's an idea I can get behind, provisionally," the engineer admitted. "But the armaments and infrastructure you put into this place. Just the city portion of the base could, based off a rough calculation, accommodate six million people. Don't you think this is too much?"

"We all prepare for the dangers we can see," Liz said with a smirk. "The magnitude of the preparations has to do with the extent of my foresight."

And there was the boasting again. As if showing off her base in a six mile long descent when we could have just teleported had not been more of the same.