Well that set a lot up and I noticed that comment about normally clusters don't have others who can fight to seize the boost which the Butcher doesn't think will be an issue. It probably won't but not for the reasons she thinks.
Coil and Chariot have also been dumb enough to try being a double agent for the teeth instead of the wards which is shaping out even worse for him. Last time despite the frankly horrific treatment at the prt's hands they found out because he wasn't keen on getting their resources (because he had Coil's though given their horrific treatment it was still fair not to be keen even aside from hiding it just being a good negotiating tactic). Due to this in canon Kid Win illegally hacked his wifi to access his computer to get a copy out outgoing messages which confirmed it while here he was just tht obvious.
In case anyone is curious his canon horrific treatment was and remember they didn't know he was a mole at the time and this is how they approached a brand new recruit. They got reports of a new cape running around in power armour, they sent Assault to check it out, Assault runs him down, captures him, unmasks him, takes his armour, gets his civ id, phones his mum and tells her he was being oh so horrible running around in power armour (and that's it they knew nothing else), sends agents to drop him off in a van to his apartment in a block of flats and then the next day sends Kid Win to his place to make a wards pitch who again then purely because he thought the lack of eagerness was odd then illegally hacked his wifi and computer.
Now just to be clear while it was post levi so they wanted to make up manpower all he was doing was running around in power armour. Chariot is also black in the Bay which has the Empire or rather it's fragment groups since it's after levi and stayed in an apartment building with Kid Win noting people were staring at him on his way out because of how a ward had showed up and gone to someone's door. Yes he was actually working with Coil and intending to be a double agent but they didn't know that and that treatment is pretty horrible and probably made a ton of people realise Chariot's civ id.
Edit: Sorry, if it's slightly off-topic, but do any of you know any good Celestial Forge fics, I tried some a few years ago, but they seemed to ape the style of BCF or fail miserably with their originality, 3 or 4 are just generic Taylor alt-powers. I would prefer minor or original characters, SIs if done well. Been getting slightly bored with my 3rd reread of BCF.
There's a list on the discord. Personally I would recommend Doormaker Dog which is the dog of a prt agent gets the forge while they do horribly exploit them it's funny and amusing.
any one else think Piggot set up some sort of trap using kid wing to capture Garment? I'm thinking she already figure out Garment is connected with CF and is planning to used her as a hostage.
Piggot isn't trying anything her whole strategy currently is based on the fact she knows she will be losing her job and will be facing charges once things settle. Due to this all of her attention and a fair chunk of the prt ENE's is on kicking problems down the road so that when they explode they will be someone else's problem and mitigating the blame on herself in any way she can such as suppressing things or shifting blame.
Notably right after saying she didn't care about her career and would throw it away in a heartbeat to keep the Elite from getting a foothold in the city it was revealed she planned to get Apeiron a pre signed kill order because she was already setting up her media contacts to report it's existence in reports painting him as unstable to divert attention and blame onto him.
Not sure how I feel about massively overcomplicating the S9 situation. I get that he wants to make an example of them and crush their efforts trivially as part of that, but he could've achieved the goal so much easier with some common sense.
The Nine thing is really simple they are far away and he needs to wait until they get closer to avoid people panicking. Since I don't think people truly realise the details I'll explain them as they are now and not from when he first learned of them when they were further away with only a very large an rough area that they were somewhere in and people first called to go out and crush them.
Brockton Bay is in New Hampshire, the exact location is unknown but it is known it is on the very Eastern coast of New Hampshire. From the Nine's current location in the state of New York they have to travel through a fair chunk of the state they are in. No matter the route they take they then have to travel through the entirety of another state and based on their route possibly more than one to even enter New Hampshire. From there they then need to move to the East coast of New Hampshire and go to the Bay itself.
To put it simply that means even now the lowest you can express the distance between them is around 2 and a half states away and may go as high as 4 based on their route. To most probable locations where the Bay could be Google Maps rates it as an around 6 hour drive in modern conditions taking a route which is mainly motorways. However, the nine need to move with stealth in a big trailer to accommodate Crawler so are unlikely to take that route since it has tolls and are in 2011 Earth Bet in an area effected by Bakuda's bombs such as the big EMP one so are likely to need longer.
Going out to crush them now is thus too big a deviation and provokes too strong a reaction to be feasible especially since the nine are in New York state which is Legend's area.
Do his posing powers work on his heart or is this just divine craftsmanship at work.
Butcher 2 had the ability to see hearts, veins and arteries even through walls. They met at the Rock meeting which is after Joe's operation and creation of his Mega Heart which the Butcher could see.
For all that fortune energy he still hasn't stumbled on March and her merry band of shit stirrers again…
They haven't been dumb enough to venture outside of their lair and in order to find it normally you have to be scanning at the exact point it's anchored to detect anything.
Correct me if I'm wrong but I think he had 100 CP leftover from the previous chapter and +300 CP from the way you are making the 600 CP rolls work he should have rolled with 400 CP which means he should have taken another perk with the cluster. (that cluster is of 5 perks of 200 CP)
of course I could also be wrong somewhere
Rolls aren't done as +300 it's at + 200 every 6k. There was 100 left after trigrams the pr roll had to have been the first since nothing else was gained before or with it. That perk was 200 so that roll cancels out but then there was the miss in Alchemy meaning the bank is at 300 now and the next roll occurs with 500.
Is this foreshadowing for an Endbringer showing up in a couple of days?
It can't Levi canonically atked on the 15th of May and that can only be brought forward by a few days not the 2+ weeks to make that possible. However, in a few days Joe will be crushing the nine and will also get Bakuda's location along with possibly crushing Coil and the Teeth if the latter don't take the hint and bail.
Victor and Uber have both been confirmed to be investigating FMA transmutation. Seems likely that their respective Shards are facilitating research, perhaps far beyond normal human levels. Eldritch analysis and data-processing brain tumors for the win! (Or until performance of unholy rituals eats your brain and other internal organs. Either/Or.)
March sounds obsessed with continuing/repairing the Shard Cycle. And Uber is chugging that fruity punch and fervently declaring "Hallelujah, Sister!" Obviously a great combination.
Honestly, I'm confused about the need for a DEAD parahuman in order to further investigate Shard connections. What is so special about a clone's brain? Wouldn't it have been easier to paralyze Oni Lee and pop his skull open?
What March cared about is how she'll be with Fletchette forever in their shards after they die though that may have changed now that the version of her in their is controlling her body.
What's important to note is it isn't a dead parahuman that's important. It's important that it's a clone which had a working power. Shards are that dumb that they basically use dna to lock onto hosts and don't consider things like they have been dead for ages or there are more than one to be odd basically just thinking of them as the same being so gets the same connection. Oni Lee's clone also wouldn't work for this because they turn to ash after a few seconds or when hit.
What I think they are after is the Cluster boost trick where if people from the same cluster are close enough for long enough and one of them is sufficiently covered in the dna of the other they can steal the connection. This is usually done by the one getting the boost covering themselves in the blood of the other and then staying wrapped up together in a bed for a long time.
The effect is that the one boosted gets the associated power hugely boosted while the other is drained to the point of barely having a power albeit with the limit they can't get too far apart or the link breaks and things reset although to re-establish it just needs them getting close again.
Specifically they know that's a clone of Trickster so I think they are wanting to use the unknown method (Noelle/Echidna) the Traveller's have to clone themselves and them use that trick to boost their own powers by draining the clones due to Chariot being dumb enough to agree to be a double agent giving them a link and Coil being dumb enough to try it.
Fortunately, this plan is never going to work because even if Joe doesn't crush Coil in those 3 or 4 days until they move he earlier on predicted 3 until he had the location of Bakuda's base. That should happen first especially with the perks that have been gained since then like the sectional time speeding things up which takes out the ABB part and the Teeth don't know the message and may just back off especially after things like Joe crushes the nine.
Even if somehow they get to go through with it the cloning method is Noelle/Echidna. In order to clone someone she has to touch them at which point they are absorbed into her lower half and made to hallucinate. The clones are also twisted ones which hate the original and all they treasure which combined with the numbers they come out in and Echidna being unstable means the idea is unfeasible especially with March's lag issues from being remotely controlled which Alchemy will not be able to fix. In the extremely unlikely event they somehow manage to try and know and get past Coil and the Travelers all they'll do is set Echidna off which the forge will notice so they wouldn't get time to do the drain.
I kinda felt the same. How much real time has passed over the last 30 chapters or so? A few days?
And yet Uber and Leet are almost done with their new piece of supertech to disrupt Apeiron. Did they get a bunch of Jumpchain perks as well, while we weren't looking? How are they able to work so fast? 'March did it' doesn't hold water; in Leet's interlude, we saw she was badly impaired, focussing on brainwashing Uber.
Maybe it's because I didn't find them particularly compelling the first time, but I'm not all that excited to have March and Co. be the main antagonists once again. I feel like recurring villains should have some emotional connection to the MC; what's March, Uber, Leet or Bakuda's connection? That they're butthurt about losing?
Their connections are tenous March is basically controlling Uber but can't control Leet who just wants to finish his magnum opus and Bakuda wants to heal herself with Leet keeping her focused on that rather than going out in a bang.
Leet was working on the grid before the Rock meeting, at the time of the meeting only one component was fully working. However, since then it's been 3 days with another 3 or 4 predicted to get it working and he has the boosts of working against Joe, being highly in tune with his shard, burning untouched tech trees and the new data from things like sleeper.
Yes I agree that is fast for megaproject times but especially now with ward those have always been ignored whenever the plot demands. However, they shouldn't have enough time to pull it off because again they just predicted 3 or 4 days but Joe earlier predicted 3 days to locate their base which should mean they get taken down before they finish it or can try the Echidna thing.
