Revenant was, indeed, overjoyed when he heard that the knight most likely read their comics.

The ‘I wanna shoot someone in the face’ type of overjoyed. He sighs painfully, hides his face in his hands, counts to ten, looks up again and announces an emergency meeting to discuss the new development.

Revenant, Decay, Virtue, Destro and Humility end up being in attendance. The angelic villain got her face fixed by Overhaul, although it was clear that the injury to her dignity was still there. She wants to be present to hear what they know about the guy that stomped her like this.

All of them gathered up at his office. Revenant feels safe, productive and generally has a sense of being in the right place when he is in his office.

He briefly explains what just happened to everyone who missed out on the encounter. The atmosphere suddenly becomes significantly more tense.

“Humility.” He says once that part’s done. “You’re the only person who knows anything about that guy’s background. Talk to me.” By proving himself to be aware of the events of the comic, the knight suddenly elevated himself to a massively higher threat level than he previously assumed.

He needs intel.

It was a test, he knows that from the description of events. A moral test, and one rather brilliantly planned. The knight took Singularity hostage because he knew that Singularity had being a brainwashed puppet in her backstory.

The subject of the test? Whether Virtue (one of the ‘nicer’ among the villains) would treat Singularity as a human being, despite the puppet part. Would she appear to be genuinely surrendering at the threat, or would she try to push through or escape and leave Singularity behind.

They passed. But… was it a test for Virtue or for their entire group?

“You know the rough idea.” Humility replies. “Member of something akin to a societal elite of the RPC, with appropriate mindset and…”

“Details, Humility.” Revenant cuts in. “I need details.”

The AI spends a few seconds thinking that over. Eventually, it speaks.

“Alright.” Humility says. “I’ll try to provide those. Just remember, that there are differences between member states of the RPC, and sometimes even a single country might have certain regional variations.”

Revenant sighs. Even rogue AIs find it necessary to prepare themselves the foundation for a plausible deniability. Or, in this case, its younger cousin. The ‘I warned you so it’s not my fault that it didn’t work’.

Humility decides to ignore his exasperation. Great.

“Most of the nobles are in that class by birth.” Humility replies. “It’s not exactly an easy thing to be born into, quite the opposite. Yes, you can expect to have access to the best or nearly the best education and tutors, all the achievements of psychology and pedagogy, but let me put it that way. The knight we’re facing probably has a degree in criminology and law, maybe in psychology. He is a master swordsman, but you can expect him to be able to drive most combat vehicles and be at least a good shot with most conventional types of guns. Fairly sure he is a qualified bomb expert, and probably has enough skills with engineering and programming to fix his armor out in the field.” Humility finishes her long list of skills that, honestly, would make Revenant instantly hire the person in question to his organization if they were still in the old world. “By the standards of the knights and the nobles in general, that’s considered adequate.”

…

“Adequate?” Destro asks, clearly finding it hard to believe what he just heard. “That’s merely adequate?”

“Yes.” Humility replies. “It varies between less and more militarized ethnopolities. But if our friend is from Visehrad, you can bet your kidneys that he was brought up with the purpose of kicking ass from early childhood. With a very packed schedule. I once read an analysis that training and preparing a single knight is about as costly as one hundred regular soldiers. I respectfully disagree with that assessment.” Humility stays quiet for a second. “Because the higher in hierarchy, if there even is any as that varies between the RPC countries, the higher the expectations and the greater the investments. One hundred to one is the bottom line. Royalty can go far further than that.”

“That cannot be sustainable.” Destro, the one man that actually organized a regular army among them, cuts in. “The sheer amount of investments makes it completely…”

Revenant is in disagreement. With the size of the economy the sectoral powers have? They could finance a lot of stupid things. But… he doesn’t get to say that.

“No.” Decay decides to interrupt him. “It can work. In the right context. Right, Player One?” He adds while glancing at Revenant. And yes, Revenant already realized what he was talking about.

“A single knight massacred about thirty pirates.” Revenant replies. “Then about ten regular soldiers. In terms of simple material investments? It makes no sense, as I’m fairly sure that if they were engaging each other in a more open area, the greater number of weapons on the other side would triumph. But when you consider the issue of morale, it suddenly makes much more sense. Doesn’t it, Humility?”

“Yes.” The AI replies. “If you had them charge a line of fortifications, they would probably be repelled. But if they are sent into a place with restricted visibility, a place where they can practice hit and run tactics? They are terrifying. And this is actively exploited for the purpose of psychological warfare. Have thirty of them stay behind in a city you’ve just lost, and they can cause more damage than a few thousand guerillas. Each one-sided massacre is an inspiration to their allies and a source of fear for their enemies. And even if you kill one, you can expect their armor to explode, meaning no convincing proof to persuade your soldiers that yes, the menace is dead.”

That was, honestly, rather terrifying. Especially as the maze around them - that the knight clearly mapped out for themselves while marking potential ambush sites, hideouts and places to lose the tail - was basically the enemy’s dream environment.

“Not all nobles are knights, right?” He then asks.

“Oh, a minority of them goes that way.” Humility confirms it. “Nobles as a whole are more of a public servant caste with an ideology behind it. The deal is simple - you get more rights but also much more duties. It’s typically common for them to be influential, you can run into them in the universities, at the highest ranks of local companies and corporations, in the army and Navy. But you can also find them working their hands off in hospitals, and typically for free. It tends to become apparent what one is best suited for early in their childhoods when they are still getting more basic education. The rest is just helping them achieve their potential. Actually grabbing a sword and stabbing people to death is only one option.”

From what he heard about Visehrad, it sounds like it was a fairly popular option there. Being consistently invaded makes that sort of thing much more important.

“You typically have a whole family as a legal unit.” Humility continues. “They do a good job, they get stuff from the kingdom. In a way, a distant descendant of fiefdoms. It might be transmission bandwidth, acres of land, guaranteed place in a city council or even a seat of its mayor, small percentage of tax income from some area, rights to exploit an asteroid or two, etc. etc. They can’t sell those, they can give it back to the state, so typically to the local royalty who can then give those benefits to other houses. Naturally, things can be confiscated if some of the members of the house do something particularly bad.”

“The smartest way of policing people.” Revenant comments. “Have them police each other. Am I correct to assume that the punishment gets much worse if the House as a whole is found to have tampered with evidence to hide their shame?”

“Correct.” Humility confirms. “If that happens, the entire house might lose its status as a nobility. Also you can expect legal punishments for nobility to be much higher than for regular citizens, although of course whether it’s actually executed is a more varied issue. Connections are a thing, you can’t get rid of them entirely without straight-up brainwashing, but in general it tends to be executed correctly more often than not. Benefits of decades to smooth out issues.”

Not the dumbest idea Revenant heard, though like in many cases it severely depends on practice. Then again, if you have decades to work on establishing it, with all the benefits of knowing how past attempts at social engineering worked and with religion to act as an additional motivator and a foundation for the personal moral code…

… he can see it work. Although it opened an interesting question of whether social engineering nearly to the point of indoctrination - but one that was focused on serving the public selflessly for the greater good - was morally correct or not.

Actually, speaking of that…

“What happens when you don’t make the cut?” Revenant asks.

“Nobility is voluntary.” Humility replies. “You can always give up your status, at any point you want. It’s better than staying a part of it and then blowing up your house’s rep. It’s quite common for houses to have something akin to branch families that they are still close with, descendants of those people from their ranks that decided that they aren’t willing to bear the greater duties that come together with greater rights. Conversely, if a regular citizen achieves something big enough, they tend to be offered a noble status and a fief. And before you ask, yes you can marry a noble, you just need to persuade their house that you won’t mess up later down the line, as you need at least a few of them to vouch for you with their own reputation at stake.”

Yeah, and there totally aren’t cases of people still being pushed into doing it if only because the House needs more members to maintain its power.

In all honesty, it’s probably far from the stupidest arrangements out there, especially if someone was intelligent enough to resurrect Nazism. It’s just that Revenant is terminally cynical when things like that are involved.

But it gives him a decent backstory of the knight - even if one painfully lacking details. Best of the best, clearly looking to prove themselves, expansive education but with an unflinching moral code.

Let’s ignore the fact that he somehow saw and believed that they were characters from a comic (then again, with planet reshaping like this, the line between what was believable and what wasn’t moved far). Let’s think about something else.

The knight knew that Virtue killed a lot of people. However, he couldn’t be sure if it was the same Virtue or some recreation of it. If it was the latter (and it was), could she be punished for those deaths? No. So he didn’t attack her. Instead, he tested her.

She proved that she didn’t treat Singularity like a tool. That despite Singularity traveling alongside and fighting battles for them, they were treating her like one of them. Perhaps even… looking for a way to heal her thanks to the new technology now available to them.

She passed the human decency test. The knight immediately disengaged as he had nothing more to do there. Even before that happened, he didn’t fight to kill (where were the guns? he killed a lot of people with those). What did it tell Revenant?

To call them a fanatic would be going too far. They were intelligent, knowledgeable. Too intelligent to be indoctrinated in the traditional sense of the word, they probably had an extensive list of more or less sound arguments to support their beliefs and why they were doing what they were. Warrior-scholar in a way.

Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

They saw the world through the lenses of their ideology and religion but they didn’t default to murder when something odd happened. The knight saw something completely out of his world and reacted by carefully investigating the situation, analyzing it accordingly to his own religious and ethical beliefs, and then acted accordingly.

“He won’t attack us, at least not with the intention of actually killing anyone.” Revenant decides. Destro, judging from the faint nod on his face, arrived at the same conclusion. “He also won’t make our nature public. Because he knows where we’re from, and he wants to find out if we’re… redeemable, so to say. And if he announced that we’re supervillains to Palmer and Co, they would probably lash out against us… despite us not doing anything justifying it. At least since we were ‘born again’.”

“That’s a pain in the ass.” Decay complains. “If that guy loaded enough points into stealth to surprise Virtue, we can’t be sure that he isn’t listening in whenever we’re outside of Ball Python. And if we do something underhanded, we might get a new enemy. Besides, why the hell is that guy even here if the Visitor dropped only bad guys around this place?”

Revenant didn’t expect him to be good enough to surprise Virtue. Thankfully, it didn’t seem as if he managed to overhear the talks they had on the way back from checking out new corpses dropped around, or he would know that Humility is around. That alone would most likely make him an enemy.

Since he didn’t attack them yet, it implied that he missed that one detail.

Decay’s final sentence contained a very good question. Revenant glances at the Humility for an answer to it.

“He might have been attempting Róża’s Rampage.” Humility replies. Revenant has no idea what it means, and he clearly isn’t the only one with that problem. “One of Visehradian’s princesses had a Reich’s dreadnought knocked out with an EMP and boarded it alone. Slaughtered something like six thousand people, taking advantage of the enemy electronic system being dead and enemy comms down, so that she could slaughter them one by one. I can’t tell you for sure if it wasn’t a propaganda fake, especially as you can’t expect the Reich to be honest about it even if it did happen. But since then, many local knights have tried to repeat that feat, but on a smaller scale. Our friend might have boarded, say, a destroyer of some space nasties and got swallowed together with it.”

Destro blinks at the AI in shock, Virtue clearly having issues believing what she just heard as well. Revenant groans painfully while Decay facepalms.

“Oh my fucking god, I just realized.” Decay then says, the man shivering in his boots a little. “That whole Visehrad thing? It’s an entire fucking country of people like Lady Murder and Black Knight. Boss, where’s the escape budget?! Where is it when we need it?”

“Wha…?” Destro, once again, is out of the loop.

“An inside joke.” Revenant decides to clarify. “We had a special position in our budget, three million dollars monthly. There was no actual money involved, mind you, it was just a joke. It was written down as ‘constructing a ship to evacuate the VAA out of the Solar System if Lady Murder and Black Knight end up sleeping together and she gets pregnant’.”

It was somewhat funny. If you knew those two.

“How bad is that Lady Murder woman?” Humility asks.

“We were saved from the Rabbit of Caerbannog Ending because, to quote her, ‘sex was created when people took a close quarter fight to the death and took away or changed everything that was good about it’.” Revenant replies. He has a feeling that Humility would blink at him in shock if it had a face. Instead, Destro does it for the AI. “And Black Knight was a serial killer of heroes who was into it only because he had a rush out of fighting strong enemies to death.”

“Yes.” Humility replies after a few seconds of silence. “The vibe is, indeed, similar.”

Absolutely spectacular. One thing is certain, after he gets out of this place, Revenant isn’t settling anywhere near the Commonwealth. It sounds fucking terrifying. And that’s even without mentioning the murderous aliens.

“Son.” Destro decides to father him again. “It really feels as if fell into the bad crowd while I was gone, didn’t you?”

Decay cackles, Virtue smirks, Revenant refuses to respond. He is an adult supervillain, and he has his dignity.

***

“Thermy, I have something to ask you for.” Onslaught says. The two of them are in bed, Onslaught disregarding the (admittedly awesome) sex with Revenant for a night to get some additional cuddles with her older sister. And do some very important communication things.

No. She doesn’t consider herself to be polyamorous by nature. But… now that she thinks about it, wouldn’t going that route let her cuddle with Thermy and Revy at the same time, instead of forcing her to choose?

“Yes?” Thermy asks.

The two of them are, once again, cuddling in the bed. It’s warm. Comfortable. Onslaught loves it. Hypothermia loves it too. She might be a terrifying force of nature on the battlefield, but here she is a perfectly normal young woman (well, with a traumatic backstory) that just wants to deal with her impossible to satisfy touch-starvation.

Hypothermia loves Onslaught. Not in the sexual way, but to be honest, it might just be even closer and stronger than most romantic bonds. She was her first and best friend, a person that helped her slowly rebuild herself after what her parents’ cult did to her (she is bad now, she was worse in the past). But…

Even she finds it hard to not freak out once the words come.

“Do you want to go on a date with Revy?” Onslaught asks. Hypothermia blinks at her in shock. Did she mishear something?

“What?” Hypothermia asks back.

“You heard it right, Thermy.” Onslaught says. Hypothermia still fails to believe in it. “Look, after all that happened, I think that you do deserve a shot at love. So… do you want to…”

“No.” Hypothermia replies. “I don’t.”

That should end this. But… Onslaught is stubborn. And it might go contrary to her stated goal of keeping Revenant for herself, but… deep inside, she is a kind girl that wants those she loves to be happy.

She knows that Hypothermia loved Revenant (well, it was mostly Analyst in her memory) with a love that was comparable to her own. It might have burned even brighter, with a cold yet burning hot desperation in her heart. Onslaught also loves Hypothermia (just with different types of love). She wants her to be happy.

Unless she is one hundred percent certain that Hypothermia did for the right reasons, that she won’t spend years quietly regretting the decision, she refuses to go along with it. She refuses to put her own good over that of her best friend/adoptive sister.

Is it really love when you make the other person suffer for your own good? She doesn’t feel like this is how it’s supposed to be.

She needs to get something clarified first.

“Thermy, answer me one question, but do it completely honestly, okay?” Onslaught says. Hypothermia agrees with her with a quiet ‘mm-hmm’. “Are you doing this because you don’t love him, because you don’t want to try sharing him… or because you think that you won’t be able to give him what he needs, that you won’t be able to support him as he needs it while he is patching himself back together? And you love him so much that you don’t want him to be in pain, and you think that you being there next to him will cause that?”

Onslaught isn’t very good at reading people. She is blind, that alone makes it harder than usual. But with Revy and Thermy? Yeah. She is good at that. Very good. She can read Hypothermia’s answer immediately, even despite her not saying a word.

Onslaught sighs, her arms still crossed behind the back of Hypothermia’s head, their face so close that their noses were almost touching each other.

Thermy, you dummy.

She can’t even say it, because she made a policy of not calling her that way, she would take that too seriously. Her self-esteem issues were so bad that she unconsciously disbelieved all positives that were said about her, and took the negatives way too seriously.

“Thermy, you can’t be acting like that.” She says instead. “You’re a great person. You deserve happiness. Yes, you have… issues with your emotions, and… okay, want to hear me being honest here?”

Hypothermia lets out a scarce ‘mm-hmm’.

“You act… different from most people.” Onslaught says. “You are different from most people. If someone only saw you once or twice, they’d think that you’re not emotionally developed enough to enter a relationship. But, they’d be completely wrong.”

She pauses her words to brush their cheeks together. Hypothermia says nothing, but Onslaught can feel the reaction to it.

“You’ve been the biggest pillar of my emotional support for years, even bigger than my dad.” Onslaught says. A bit heretical, and Destro would be saddened, but… there were things she felt more comfortable confiding with someone her age than with her father. “You’re the most stalwartly supportive, helpful and empathetic person I’ve ever met. It’s just that the cult you were in messed you up to the point where you find it hard to act on it, to display it.”

If she could, she would absolutely fucking butcher those people. Slowly and painfully. When Hypothermia joined their family, she was too terrified of potential punishment to genuinely ask for something. She was supposed to be obedient, and work hard on her individuality and… little more than that.

But under all of that, there was a great person. Much more mature than everyone would assume. Just… beat a dog a few times and it’ll instinctively flinch when you raise your hand. Humans worked the same way, regretfully.

“And you know what?” Onslaught continues. “I think that Revy needs all the help he can get. He needs help if he’s supposed to turn back into Analyst. He needs the people he can open up to, he needs people that he can care for, be… protective of. It brings the best out of him, doesn’t it?”

“It does.” Hypothermia replies quietly. “He… cares. Even at his worst moment, he had people he cared for. People he wanted to survive the war. Thorn, the last one of his old classmates. Singularity. Decay. Chronoshift.” She stays quiet for a moment. “I don’t think he can live without that.”

Yeah. He was… weird when that was involved. Lovable dumbass as Onslaught called him multiple times. Analyst was the nicest person she ever knew, who even after Villain Academy (and yes, she was going to get the full description of his time there out of him eventually) wanted to help people. He just… no longer thought that heroes could help people.

Revenant sometimes terrifies her a little. She wants to help him become more of an Analyst. And she is fairly sure that Revy himself wants to do it. That’s what changes manipulating someone into helping them.

“You love him, don’t you?” Onslaught asks. She knows the answer, but… she wants Thermy to say it. Say it once again as she used to do it in the past.

“Yes.” Thermy replies. She says that quietly. So very quietly. She hates saying that, but has no other option. She hates lying to Oni more than everything else.

“Why?” Onslaught asks back.

“... because he was honest.” Hypothermia replies. “He never lied to us. When you said that I did something good, it felt as if you were saying that to cheer me up. When he did so, it felt… different. I’m sorry, I didn’t want it to sound like this and…” And now she’s panicking. Calmly, in a way.

“No, it’s okay.” Onslaught replies. She can’t imagine herself being angry at Thermy. Not after Hypothermia protecting Revenant with her life, in a big part out of Onslaught telling her to protect him in her stead. After that, lashing out against her for something, anything, would just make Oni look like the world's worst asshole. “I get it, I… at the beginning I did try to help you that way, I was a bit too enthusiastic about it. I’m… sorry about that, I…”

Revenant had it easier. Villain Academy taught him some basics of psychology. He didn’t make the mistake of overdosing the positive words and…

“You tried to cheer me up.” Hypothermia cuts in. “You don’t have to apologize. It’s my fault for misreading you like that. You did nothing wrong.”

On one hand, it’s nice of her. On the other hand, it’s the wrong reason for thinking like this. It’s a bit… sad. For now, she should probably change the subject.

“He changed a lot, didn’t he?” Onslaught asks.

“Yes.” Hypothermia replies. “But I saw him change. He is still the same person, just… injured. But I think that he started to heal a little once he got you back.”

“Yes, but…” Onslaught inhales deeply. “... you shouldn’t blame yourself for not helping him back then. It was… bad, I know that. You did your best, but… he couldn’t be saved. But now he can be. And if you want to try doing it from a bit closer distance, I’ll be alright with it. So let me ask the question again. Do you want to try dating Revy? Do you want to, uhm, you know, try to see if we can share him?”

It takes her a while to make a decision. But eventually, and slightly against herself, she lets out a very quiet ‘yes’.

Well then. It’s time to try to organize her boyfriend a date with her older sister. Completely normal thing to do, right?

***

“How long until Demiurge’s up?” Revenant asks, first thing in the morning. The lack of Onslaught in his bed is kind of sad. It really makes said bed feel pretty cold. He knows the actual timetable, he just wants a clear confirmation.

“Six hours.” Humility replies.

It’s time to see the first of his long-term plans to reach another step. It’s going to be interesting. And, regretfully, a time for Revenant to take the reins from the recently resurrected Analyst for a while.