==========
Alex had finished in time, though barely. Basically got the last plates in place before the Wards' evening patrol. She wasn't going on official patrols, of course - had to have a debut first, before making public appearances.
None of the fancy materials Armsmaster had mentioned. She wasn't going to have a dedicated tinker budget until way later in her initiation, because right now she was basically a ghost in the system, getting fully entered would mean anyone who could see the PRT's files (like, say, the secret conspiracy that had edited public records to erase the real Rosemary and Persphone Duensing from existence) would know she was there. She'd used the PRT workshop and military-grade materials instead.
Dirt-simple power armour. Renaissance-style white plate of hardened steel over a spectra/kevlar mix, no frills, stark and gleaming. She preferred Gothic-style fluting or colour patterns like Greenwich armour, but art took time and she was trying to get something she could just get out there with. She hadn't even had time to temper the steel, so it was super-hard but very brittle, if it took hits it was going to shatter like a ceramic plate. No frills, no features, no electronics other than the pressure sensor body glove used to control it and a PRT helmet radio built-in. It barely even qualified as tinkertech.
It was embarrassing to put it next to Armsmaster's halberd, but with something on that size scale, it was the most she could finish in time to start searching today. She could put in more shop time as she searched.
Claire looked much more respectable as a cape next to the blank armour. Black bandana over her upper face, she'd picked up a bright red beret somewhere, and had somehow dug up a flamenco dress in rich purple, over which she wore a yellow-dyed bulletproof plate carrier and a red shawl. With a different kind of pistol holstered at each hip, along with a combat knife and a fixed-length baton.
… honestly Alex would not put it beyond Claire to just have a flamenco dress lying around. It was an eclectic look but it did look like an actual cape costume, despite Alex being the cape here.
Alex's escort had to fake being a cape as well, more or less. Alex needed to not be a Ward while she was out searching. She was undebuted, and any indications that she might be a Ward drew attention to that ghost in the system. So her escort couldn't go out in PRT battle rattle. But they still had to conceal their identity. Claire had just gone above and beyond.
"How are you supposed to even fight in that dress?" Alex had to ask.
Claire grinned distractingly-red lips. She'd gone full-bore on makeup too, it was ridiculous. "Have you seen the kind of dances people do in these dresses? I have so much freedom of motion." She demonstrated by swinging a shapely, uncovered leg straight up in the air, holding it over her head for a moment before dropping it in her next step.
Alex just nodded her visored head in acknowledgement, averting her eyes a bit from the display with a faint blush. It was way harder to ignore things like that ever since she'd changed. Her eyes had focused in a way they didn't used to. Claire either hadn't noticed, or had been merciful. "So what should I call you? You know my nickname for the moment."
"My callsign's Needlepoint, so go for that," Claire said, as put the finishing touches on her nail polish - an electric blue that quite stood out.
Alex just looked at her askance as they walked. Claire generally came to the salle in full makeup, but Alex had assumed she was just usually glammed up. It was quite another thing to see her literally doing herself up as she headed out for an actual mission.
"Hmn?" Claire slipped the nail polish away.
Alex just gestured. "Is this a hot date or something? Why all the makeup?"
Claire licked her lips, and smiled. It was a smile full of terror and promise. "Do you want it to be?"
Thankfully her helmet covered her entire head, so the blush that completely covered Alex's face wasn't visible as she whipped her eyes away. "N-no!"
Claire's laughter rang out. "Good, I'm a bit too old for you." The young woman - she was about twenty-four - looped a companionable arm around Alex's neck. "So, for the actual answer, you know the most important thing in martial arts is confidence, eh? Especially in ours."
Alex nodded, her blush cooling a bit now that the moment of teasing had passed. "Yeah, obviously." There was an attitude you needed to embrace to succeed in armizare. A complete and utter disregard for your opponent. You moved through them without any concern for their space or interest in their well-being. Confidence was crucial in anything that required bold and decisive action on a hair trigger, but in HEMA, you needed the confidence of a nobleman who knew the chaff in front of them was nothing to concern themselves with. The techniques wouldn't even work without that body language. They'd been made by people for whom that was natural.
Claire grinned. "The neat thing is, it's all kinda cross-applicable. The confidence that comes from being the hottest thing there is is confidence you can apply to a fight."
"Huh." Alex wasn't entirely sure about it, but Claire had been using her actual teaching tone of voice. Claire was happy to mess with people (a little too happy) but she never taught them wrong. Not like Alex would be putting it into action. She'd never been super-happy with her looks. She definitely had a better aesthetic appeal as a girl, but she wasn't going to be working it to anything like the degree Claire did. That was not at all appropriate for a guy to do, girl body or no.
The two walked the Docks, and they were absolutely drawing eyes. There was no way someone in power armour wasn't going to draw notice, so it wasn't like Claire's flamenco dress made it any worse. But it was unlikely to spread. People up here in the Docks didn't call the cops, and they weren't going to call the ABB unless there was an actual problem. Frankly the ABB didn't give a shit about randos walking their territory, even if a member spotted them and called it in, it wasn't gonna go farther than conversation. They had actual incursions and attacks to respond to.
It'd been a challenge finding a patrol to go alongside. Persephone was definitely in the Docks, that was where you went to find an empty building you could squat in. But the Protectorate did not densely patrol the Docks. The Wards almost never came any farther than the Lord Street Market, and Protectorate Docks patrols were quick motorbike runs that covered a lot of territory fast and not in-depth. The substantial majority of Protectorate patrols were downtown. There just weren't that many patrols in the area they needed to search.
Looking at the patrol schedules definitely explained a few things Alex hadn't thought to wonder until just then. The minor scandal last year when the head of the Wards, Necromance, had refused to graduate into the Protectorate and instead debuted as the independent hero Santa Muerte. The fact that the Protectorate was 6/7 white and the Wards 5/7 (counting Shadow Stalker, who was on probation and had never volunteered to be there) in a city that was only 44% white.
The Protectorate and Wards barely serviced the poorer, browner areas of the city at all. Alex had known people up here didn't call the authorities, and that was just good sense when it came to the police, but she hadn't realized the sheer degree to which even non-abusive law enforcement like the PRT had just abandoned these areas.
Not that Alex had any room to talk. She was just as white and came from the kind of nice background that got to attend Arcadia without it being any kind of big deal. She'd only even thought to look at the numbers because of her history of juvenile delinquency and wandering the browner areas of the city.
She wasn't really sure what to think of it, but… she'd have to do that thinking, probably. Alex didn't have any options but the Wards - she sure as shit wasn't capable of investigating and calling to account a secret conspiracy, she needed the PRT to deal with Cauldron and her father. But it would have been nice if that had been an unalloyed good, instead of just the best of a bunch of imperfect options. It felt like it really tarnished the shine of working with Armsmaster.
But that thinking was for later. Right now, they were searching for Persephone, and since those patrols were so limited, Alex had to make full use of the ones she could side-along with. Claire had a digital recorder held up to her lips, speaking into it when they found something worth note.
Brockton Bay was a lot of city, but there was actually only a pretty narrow slice of it that Persephone might be in. If she hadn't gone to a friend or made a new one that let her in, she was squatting in an abandoned building in the Docks. That building was going to be within easy walking distance of Lord Street - Persephone would have been crossing from the farthest possible point of the city, so she'd have taken the direct route up to the Docks, and she'd have made that trip in a state of considerable psychological distress, so she'd have taken the first available building rather than pushing her search area too far.
It would be secured with a padlock. There hadn't been time to get a locksmith in even assuming Persephone had the resources - which she certainly might, if she was a cape now. And if it was unsecured this far north, she'd have been kidnapped by the ABB for ransom. No demands had come through, so that didn't seem to be the case. And if she'd gone to a friend, the other investigation routes should turn her up.
So Alex's search pattern was basically just a fat line around Lord Street, north to south, with a pretty specific profile for the kind of building meriting closer investigation. Working with a professional investigator like Claire made a very wide possibility space narrow incredibly fast. It was amazing.
The first building that matched the criteria was a warehouse off the intersection of Lord Street and Wilson. Old, decommissioned, rusting where there was metal, vines crawling up the walls and grass breaking through cracks in the pavement. But the padlock on the doors was new.
Claire spoke the address into her recorder, voice crisp and precise, as she circled around the building, away from Alex. They didn't have time to stake out every location that turned up, so they had to check them as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Which meant one knocked on the door, the other circled around to look for a break-in point. Ideally the resident opened the door and they could check if it was Persephone, second-best-case scenario there was a way in without breaking a window or a lock. Worst-case, they'd move on with the location registered, and come back later. Unfortunately, neither of them knew how to pick locks, and while Alex was having ideas on how to solve that problem now that it came up, she hadn't had time to build any kind of tinkertech lockpicker yet. They could break in easily, Alex's armour and halberd would have no trouble at all against a padlock or window, but it'd compromise the place's security - it could endanger the inhabitants. And aside from being a dick move, if this was Persephone's place and they broke the security, she might not be present, she might come back home to a much less safe place.
Alex knocked, closing her eyes so she could focus on her hearing, listen to what was happening behind the door. Someone was there. Or… something. An extremely fast, high-pitched whirring.
Claire came over her radio a moment later. "There's a broken window along the side. Looks like a rock went through. Security's already compromised, so we can break in safely."
Alex stepped back a bit from the door so her response was less likely to be heard from within. "Something going on inside. Sounds like someone's running a blender? Or an electric drill, screwdriver. Electric rotational motor, anyway."
"Can you hear if they're coming to the door, or ignoring you? Kinda rude to break in if they're gonna answer."
Alex stepped closer again, listening carefully. "... no footsteps, just the motor."
"... Then they're either not here, or not opening the door," Claire decided. "Come around counterclockwise, we'll use your grappling hook to get up to the window and break in."
Alex nodded, slowly moving around to the right. She kept her eyes on the door, but it hadn't opened by the time she had to round the corner. Claire was towards the front of the building, and gestured up to the second floor (such as it was on a warehouse). Sure enough, the window up there was broken. Something had gone through the glass in the upper-right corner, and the cracks had propagated through the whole pane, leaving only jagged edges across the lower and left sides.
With one arm, Alex raised Armsmaster's halberd, converting the head into a grappling hook and launching it up to the window. The other arm, she wrapped around Claire's waist as the older-but-no-larger woman latched onto her side.
Trying not to reflect on how much more awkward this would be if she could feel anything through her armour (she knew from vision and grappling that Claire was very curvy, feeling all of that nestled up against her would be hazardous to her sanity, with the way her new body was making all of that harder to ignore), Alex tapped another control switch, reeling the halberd back in to its hook, and hauling the two of them up alongside. The motor didn't have any real trouble with it - it was built to handle the much bigger Armsmaster and his much bigger armour, Alex and her armour were lighter and Claire didn't really add all that much weight. Her arms didn't have trouble either, the strength enhancement was more than up to the task of carrying the weight of both on the one arm.
While Alex hung from the windowsill, Claire scrambled up her armoured body and the halberd without any difficulty, crouching atop Alex's shoulders and aiming a pistol into the other side. "Clear!" she barked, reholstering the pistol and slipping in, avoiding the broken glass.
It only took a moment for Alex to pull herself through the window and climb in. They were in a second-floor section, so they didn't have to fall all the way back down to ground level - the window led into a breakroom, a wide space with a table in the middle, a counter with a sink and a microwave, and a fridge in the corner. There was a hall that went down the front end of the building - places like this, that usually hosted bathrooms and offices - and to the right there was a landing and metal stairs down into the main warehouse floor.
And beneath Alex's boots, there was the crunch of glass. She crouched down, frowning behind her helmet, to examine it. "... this break was recent. No one's cleaned up the glass yet."
"Yeah." Claire had one of her pistols drawn again, watching both ways out of the room. "And it wasn't a rock." She nodded to the far wall of the breakroom. There were holes in the plaster. Alex had seen bullets embedded in a wall before, she didn't need to get right up there and examine it. (Not that they'd been fired at her or anything but when you lived in Brockton Bay and made a habit of wandering around the whole of it rather than the nicer areas, well. You were gonna find places where bullets had been fired and hadn't been cleaned up)
"... fuck." Bullets embedded in a wall in the Docks wasn't all that rare, but the angle was wrong. This was the second floor and they had come in pretty level, not from a sharply-below angle. And looking back out the window, there didn't look like any windows or openings at this altitude that could have been a firing position, or a stray shot from another building. The rounds had been fired from about the height of this window, directly into this window.
"Yeah. Someone beat us to it." Claire nodded to the stairs. "Cover me."
Alex wanted to hit herself for not realizing Cauldron would be looking for Persephone. Maybe someone else, but… well, Occam's Razor, the older girl was on the bad side of one organization willing to resort to violence, that was probably what was responsible for violent entry into a place she might be living in. Hopefully it was only might and this wasn't her place at all. Hopefully she wasn't home. Hopefully they weren't too late. But that sound of whirring motors took on a much more ominous tone now.
She shook herself, and followed after the older woman, halberd raised.
Claire moved around the doorframe, more than anything else. It was almost like the left side of the doorframe was a hinge around which she orbited, moving in an arc and sidestepping through the door, before an immediate step forward took her out of the doorway and out onto the catwalk landing.
Alex followed once Claire had made the room, her gaze tracking around the warehouse. There was a lot of warehouse, so it was a bit disconcerting, not immediately having a complete sense of it. Not normally disconcerting, but when you were entering a place someone with a gun had preceded you into, it suddenly became much higher priority to immediately know every inch of it, and she wasn't as good at moving tactically as Claire was, controlling her exposure and maintaining situational awareness. Alex wasn't completely unfamiliar with it, but her experience was shooting sports - airsoft, paintball, laser tag - not formal training and live-fire practice.
The threat was below. Right next to the entrance, watching it. A small quadcopter drone, four long spars hosting whirring rotors, and an oblong main body beneath. The whole thing was flat, wide, it looked about the size to fit into a pizza box. It was turning to face them.
Even as Alex spotted it, a single shot rang out from Claire's pistol, shattering something in the main body's housing. The high-pitched whirring instantly halted, and the drone crashed to the floor.
"... would've been better if I could examine it intact." Not that it was really a complaint. It might have been armed, low risks were better. Alex didn't need to fear much in the way of bullets, but Claire's bulletproof vest only covered her torso.
"Don't let me stop you on the next one. There wasn't a window this time. It was ten degrees off from facing us when I fired." Yeah, fair. Alex would have to be quicker on the draw to capture one intact safely.
The quadcopter was the only threat or activity of any kind. The warehouse was empty, old and dusty. With the racks empty of any kind of goods, they could see clear from one end of it to the other. The only sign of anything was basically a camp - a mass of blankets and pillows, clothes and sundries scattered around - in the far corner. Someone was living here, and not very well, but they weren't here right now.
Alex walked to the end of the catwalk, leaned over the railing, and pointed the halberd at the quadcopter. It took a few tries to grab it with the grappling hook and reel it back up, but it was still way faster than walking down to get it.
Yeah, Claire had been right to shoot it, there was a gun slung under the main body, and a camera lens at the front. The design was fully integrated - this wasn't a store-bought quadcopter and gun strapped to each other, the whole thing had been built in one piece. Maybe not tinkertech, but if it wasn't, the maker was professional-level and had a workshop to match.
Alex pointed the camera down at the catwalk - hard to tell if it was still active, best not to let it see anything interesting - and backed into the breakroom. "Needlepoint, cover me. I'm gonna take a look at this thing."
"Roger," Claire replied, backing up with her gun still at ready.
Alex took up a position in the corner of the breakroom in front of the counter, out of sight of both the doors to the stairway and the hallway, pulled her armoured gauntlets off and down to the body glove, and reached for the plastic-cased toolset at her hip.
Once she pulled apart the main housing, Alex had to grin. The radio was still intact, Claire's bullet had torn into the battery. She'd have liked to examine the battery back in the workshop along with the rest of it - if this was tinkertech there was so much she could learn from it - but the radio was the part she wanted to tinker with now. She could hook it into one of the halberd's power cells to make her little toy work.
"I should have led the way in," Alex said as she fiddled with the radio. "I've got the armour, I can take more than you can." It was a bit surreal watching the fingers of her gauntlets still moving, echoing the commands they were receiving from the body glove. Maybe she should've had a shutoff for when they detached from the rest of the system.
"I've got the training," Claire said, not turning to face Alex - she stood in front of her, gun ready, watching the viable angles of approach to Alex's little corner. "I'm less likely to take it. And I've got the responsibility. You're a brave kid, Ripple, but you're a kid. It's the responsibility of us adults to keep you safe." She paused. "Well, as safe as can be managed in the circumstances."
Did you still get to be a kid when your father was a murderer? Revelations like that seemed kind of childhood-ending. The loss of innocence, the weight of responsibility to do something about it, none of it smacked of childhood.
Apparently sensing her dissatisfied air, Claire grinned back over her shoulder. "I'm your teacher, and you're my student, Ripple. It's your duty to surpass me. And it's mine to see you to that point. That means I keep your risks dow-"
She stopped talking as the sound of whirring filled the air. "Incoming. Get your gear on."
Alex tugged her gauntlets back on, locking them in place. She was all but done, so with her less-deft armour-plated fingers, she finished attaching what she'd made of the drone's radio to the halberd's haft, and flicked it on. A rapid set of clicking noises ensued as she pointed the halberd towards the broken window, and back down the hall and its occasional windows. With a thumb, she carefully rotated the dial until the noises stopped. Lowering the gain until only the important signal would be registered. She could flick it back up if she needed to detect drones. But their controller was way more interesting.
There were short, sharp cracks of gunfire from down the hall. Individual single shots, breaking windows open so the quadcopters could enter. And ahead, four of the little drones hovered into view out the breakroom's windows, two of them at the front-side window and firing to break their way in.
Claire and Alex didn't wait, a bullet shattered one drone, while Alex fired the halberd's grappling hook at another. The drone whipped aside lightning-fast.
Take too long to reel the hook in and fire it again. Instead, Alex triggered one of this halberd's special features, a spatial compressor. It might've looked real weird from another angle, but down the haft of the halberd, the drone suddenly grew far closer, and with a hard thrust of the now-blunt end where the head should socket into place, Alex shattered the target drone, and pulled the grappling hook back. In the time it took for that, Claire had shot down another drone.
As if in response, the remaining quadcopter zipped up above the window and out of view. The whirring motors from down the hall proved they weren't pulling back fully. Just preparing for a concerted approach now that they knew where the targets were.
Then, surprisingly, a voice came from outside the window - the radio on the surviving drone. "To the one in armour. Are you Alex Masaryk?" The voice was feminine, and familiar, but Alex couldn't place it just yet.
It was almost shocking to have herself mentioned. She'd been so focused on Persephone, she'd forgotten they might be looking for her too. "... who wants to know?" Granted, she'd basically just answered the question with a no, there. Her voice was way too soft and feminine to pass for her old one.
"You may refer to me as Spiral. If you are not Alex Masaryk, what is your purpose here?"
"Give me a reason to tell you anything," Alex muttered, slowly turning the halberd in a three hundred and sixty degree circle.
"Without an answer, I will have to assume your purpose is hostile to my own," Spiral said. "That would make it unwise to leave either of you alive."
Ahah. There. The former radio started clicking. Alex grinned. Gotcha.
Since Alex was distracted, Claire continued the conversation. "Why don't you tell us your purpose here? We can trade."
"Confidentiality best suits my purpose."
"What a coincidence, ours too."
Alex tugged on Claire's wrist, pointing down the hall and whispering so as to hopefully not be heard by the radio. "I've got a bead on her location. Hundred metersish in that direction." She pointed with the halberd, northwestish. It was all 'ish', she hadn't exactly had the electronics on hand to rig up her detector with any way to read its signals other than a sounding rod.
Claire looked at her, surprised. "... how the fuck did you do that?" She shook her head. "Nevermind, tell me later. We'll make a break to that point."
Alex nodded. "Ready when you are." She hooked the captured drone to her utility belt.
"Out the north window. Destroy drones on the way. Take your hook down, run as far as it stretches. I'll hold the rear, once you have a good angle I'll zipline down the cable. Then we make our way there."
"Got it." She wanted to protest leaving Claire behind, but Alex was the one with the grappling hook. And ziplining down would be faster than climbing. Less time spent off her feet and unable to protect herself.
"Go!"
Alex ran down the hall, across the front of the building. There were a good dozen drones ahead, flitting out from the offices and the far window, guns aiming at her.
She ran through the hail of gunfire, the brittle plates of her armour cracking under the impacts, but she herself barely even felt the hits, lashing out with the halberd. It was a bit unwieldy - taller than Armsmaster, the weapon was very long, a bit hard for Alex's much smaller frame to handle efficiently. But it didn't hold her back from cleaving through two drones and shoulder-charging the rest, getting as many of them out of the air as she could before the less-protected Claire came through behind her.
Claire's gunfire and swinging baton took a few down as well, and then they were through the cloud.
Alex could hear gunfire from behind, but she had to trust Claire to keep herself safe back there. If she slowed down, Claire'd be in there longer. Turning to help would do the opposite. Alex just had to bear through the contradiction of hearing her friend getting shot at behind her and knowing the best thing she could do for Claire was keep her eyes forward on her own job.
She was at the window at the hall's end. The flick of a switch converted the halberd head to its grappling hook configuration (really it was more of a claw like one of those crane games). Alex hooked it on the windowsill and vaulted through what remained of the glass, playing out the cable to let herself down fast, without breaking anything.
There was gunfire above. She couldn't tell which end of it Claire was on, but… there weren't any screams yet. That'd have to be enough, Alex still had work to get done before Claire could get out.
Clenching her fists around the halberd's haft, Alex ran down the street to the north. The sky held more of the little quadcopters - it wasn't a super-dense cloud, but more and more were vectoring towards the warehouse from around the neighbourhood. The human denizens of the neighbourhood were either out of view or behind cover by now. They had no idea what was going on, but they didn't want any of it.
Finally, Alex felt a weight in the grappling hook's line, and looked back over her shoulder to see Claire, purple dress billowing around her shapely legs and coppery hair flowing in the wind, baton held between her hands across the cable, sliding down it like a zipline. Once she was low enough to the ground, she let go, continuing into a forward run past Alex to vent her forward momentum.
She was laughing wildly, a grin slashed across her face. "Ahahahah whooooo, that was bracing!" Acted the exact same after a good spar with Colin, so she didn't seem to be hurt in a way she didn't like.
Alex resumed running alongside her, quickly looking her up and down. No worse than scuff marks on her limbs, but there were bullets embedded into the yellow of her vest. She'd taken hits, but… it looked like nowhere unprotected. "Starting to see why you took this job," she drawled, the fear and nervousness draining out of her.
"I make no secrets, I love this shit!" Claire set about reloading her pistol as they ran. "Okay, so how's your dowsing rod work? How do you know we're heading to her?" She took aim up into the drones in the sky, firing. Single rounds at a time, every single one shattered a drone. No wonder the squaddies called her Needlepoint, she could probably thread a needle with bullets.
Alex dialled up the spatial compressor, cutting into the drones with the halberd blade. Small cuts, and a lot missed, the drones flitting aside with infuriating sprightliness, but it was a melee weapon right up in their face that just needed to flick to strike, followups were instantaneous and none lasted long. "It's a drone radio! It already detects signals on Spiral's command frequency, so I set it to ping when it detects them! Click like a metal detector, faster pinging the closer the source is!"
"Aren't all the drones broadcasting on that frequency?"
"Yeah, but they're tiny! Small transmitters, weaker signal! I tuned the gain down until the drones were invisible and there was only one source!" Alex paused. "I mean, it could be a relay rather than the main transmitter, but if we take that down the swarm loses command signal anyway!"
"Nice work!" Claire paused to shoot down another three drones, dumping her magazine and slapping a new one in. "Point of interest, for your specialty? I have never seen Armsmaster do that! I don't even know if he can, not as fast and light on working materials as this!"
Huh. Definitely something to consider. In-depth, thoughtfully, and later. As bullets ricocheted off her armour, Alex pointed the halberd at a drone, tuned the spatial compressor up until it was point-blank range, and snatched it out of the air with the halberd head in grappling claw form.
Dialling the compressor back down, shortening the halberd and bringing the drone within arm's length, Alex grabbed it, hooking it onto her utility belt next to its more damaged compatriot. Something to rip apart in the workshop later, now that she was done discussing trade secrets.
It tried to escape, obviously. The motors whirred madly. But there really wasn't much something that size could do against even a human's strength, let alone Alex's enhanced power armour. All it could do was shoot into the back of her legs, and she was just ignoring it as it did that. The kind of gun you could fit onto a drone that didn't weigh much more than a kilogram was enough to kill someone unprotected, but even the soft layer of her armour could eat it for days.
Which was good, because the hard layer was fracturing badly, riddled with cracks from the gunfire, and some patches had lost their little bit of plate - it was attached to the layer below with an adhesive, so it didn't just fall off, but once it was cracked away from the rest, a bullet's impact was enough to overcome the adhesive and knock it to the street below. She was going to need to completely replace it, this time with tempered steel instead of just hardened. At least she had time for that before next run, with an entire day for the whole thing to cool.
Claire wasn't as protected, but it was hard to hit fast-moving limbs and Alex was using her body as cover against the worst of the swarm, so she hadn't taken one to anything unarmoured yet. The drones didn't exactly have a lot of time to aim with her pistol fire tearing into them.
Eventually, they reached the target building. An old parking garage, cracked and beaten up, but surprisingly full of cars. Even as the building came into sight, the drones in the sky peeled off, swirling low and around the buildings of the area. Before too long, the only drones in sight were scattered wreckage, and the valiantly-struggling one at Alex's waist. And even it had either stopped trying to shoot her, or run out of ammo.
"Spiral is either withdrawing or massing them to make a final stand once we get to her point," Claire said, reloading her pistol, holstering it, and drawing the other pistol - it was much more recognizable than yet another steel-framed 9mm, a revolver chamber without a visible hammer and the barrel at the low end of the chamber instead of the top meant it could only be one of Emilio Ghisoni's designs, and the size meant it was a Mateba Autorevolver rather than a Chiappa Rhino. A gun with a much more robust firing system, capable of handling the biggest rounds on the market. Rather than upgunning her main weapon, Claire had a completely separate Brute Gun and one for literally everything else. "If it's the latter, she's going to have close-combat capability, which probably includes power armour if this is a tinker. So get ready, this is going to be a party."
Alex nodded, a flick of a switch converting the halberd head into grappling claw form and closing the claw into a pseudo-ball. Blunt object to hit people with. One configuration was as good as the next for blowing the drones, and the ball was better for capturing people alive. She could upgrade to the blade or the plasma injectors if the armour proved too resilient. "What do you mean if? Isn't this obviously a tinker?"
Alex led the way into the parking garage. There were ABB toughs guarding the entrance, rough-looking Asian men (boys, really, none even reached the mid-twenties) in red and green, but none of them seemed all that eager to bar the entrance of two determined capes (well, one determined cape and one determined fake), hanging back around the edges. One was on cellphone, so they were probably calling their bosses and it might be advisable to be not in ABB territory with reasonable alacrity.
"These aren't off-the-shelf, but they're within technological norms. They may be tinkertech, they're super high-performance, but that'll take you reverse-engineering them to tell. Evidence at hand still allows for these to not be tinkertech, and that'd mean Spiral has an entirely different power, or even no power."
Huh. Fair point. That was another thing that made Claire a professional investigator, she was good at keeping her leaps of intuition from getting too far ahead of the evidence.
A quick sweep of Alex's halberd proved the signal source was on the ground floor, and they made their way, carefully and quickly, through the ranks of cars, the occasional bystander ducking and hiding behind their vehicle.
The target was a big beefy panel van in blue paint, with an armoured figure standing in front of it. The figure was about Alex's size - a bit bigger, but that owed more to the armour's thickness than the person within being any larger. The armour was a completed tinkersuit unlike Alex's - it ran light on stylization and decoration, but it wasn't completely devoid of personal touches, just restrained. Not meant to express any identity, but there'd been enough time and care put into the design for hints of one to leak through. Little touches that weren't impractical, but hadn't been done for the purpose of practicality, like the shaping of the armour and especially the helmet, sleek and pointed.
It was a more conventional suit design, which was to say, something of a brick. All straight angles, and the sharp angles presented a degree of sloped armour, but the lack of curves proved the tinker had been working clean-sheet, without reference to preexisting medieval designs. (Armsmaster's suit was also not medieval in styling and had a grievous lack of curves, but that was because it was modular - each piece was equipped with an internal teleportation device that allowed him to swap out his entire suit for one back at the workshop, allowing him to instantly replace damaged parts, or fine-tune his array for the challenge at hand. The segmented design prevented the fully-integrated curves of medieval gear)
The hands were effectively mittens, the fingers other than the thumb all held in the one section rather than having the independent articulation of Alex, Armsmaster, and Dean's suits. Not a martial artist - not to say that the fingers were wiggling all over the place for them, but small shifts in hand and finger position allowed or assisted particular techniques, and Spiral clearly hadn't seen a need for that level of dexterity.
There were long blocks alongside each of the forearms - integrated weapons? - and a heavy lance/drill in Spiral's armour-mitted hands. "Don't think you're getting out alive," she said. With a cluck of her tongue, the space around them filled with drones, dropping from the upper levels of the building, flowing out from the back of the van, whirring so loudly it was hard to hear over.
So Alex had to yell. "Honoka?!" She'd finally placed that voice, now that she heard it directly rather than over a very small speaker.
Spiral went still. "... who are you?"
Alex looked around carefully, both to make sure there were no witnesses and to make sure the drones weren't going to shoot her, and pulled off her helmet. "... Alex."
The drill in Spiral's hands hit the pavement with a loud crash. "A-Alex?! What happened to you?!" She pulled off her own helmet, revealing the face of Honoka Inoue - Japanese, early thirties, dark hair in a short and sensible cut, a face that was always a little tired but never lacking in determination. A coworker of her father, she'd been around the house with some frequency.
The woman's infatuation with Richard Masaryk had been obvious to Alex's eyes. She'd always hoped to get them together. Tried more than one or two shipping shenanigans. Alex had had a mom, and she didn't need or want a new one, but she'd always hoped that if there was someone else at home, if it was whole again, that Dad might spend his time there. She'd take a new mom if it got her a father again.
It was all too obvious where Honoka and Richard worked together. It could have been a day job, a legal cover Richard worked at when doing things that weren't hideously immoral, but with tinkertech, power armour, and guns, there was no way Honoka wasn't a Cauldron agent.
"... you already know what happened," Alex said, voice hollow as another little hope died a small, strangled death. "I saw what Dad did for a living. I ran. I took the vials. Drank one. 'Deviated', I think your shop term is."
Honoka shook her head. "This is what we were afraid of, I… thank god it wasn't as bad as it could have been, but…" She swallowed, meeting Alex's eyes. "Come back to us. We can take care of all of this."
Alex snorted. "Like Dad 'took care' of Rosemary Duensing?"
Honoka flinched. "That's… it's more complicated than you think. She had to die. For everyone's sake."
"You're going to have to explain that one to me. Why everyone needed her to die," Alex spat. "Use small words, I'm having a hard time keeping up."
Honoka glanced at Claire. "... this is very confidential, we can explain it, but… it's better if we do it in private. Come back with me, I promise your father will explain. Or… if you're not ready to talk to him, I can…?" There was a faint, weak note of hope in her voice.
Alex just glared at her. "You can explain now. I'm not going anywhere with killers and monsters."
Honoka bit her lip for a long moment, so hard there was a trickle of blood, still looking at Claire, before finally turning back to meet Alex's glare. "... the world is in danger from the rise of capes. Social order is breaking down everywhere, entire countries have given way to warlordism and parahuman feudalism, and it's even worse than you know. It needs to be saved. It… it doesn't look pretty. We're riding the edge of extinction and we can't afford to hold back, to fight clean. There are things we need, things we need to know, things we can't get or find out in an ethical manner. Duensing… None of us liked it, but it had to happen."
So, an evil conspiracy to save the world. That was what Cauldron was, huh?
Alex sighed heavily. "... you know something my mom taught me?" She took a deep breath. "'If you have to live as a monster, it's better to die'. You've already thrown away your humanity, so I don't even know what the fuck you're saving at this point. But it isn't anything I value." She put her helmet back on. "Needlepoint, we grab her." And brought her halberd back up as she charged.
Honoka backed away, teary-eyed, catching the first blow on her armoured forearm, flinching as Claire's first bullet, heavy and hard, sparked off her breastplate. With a speed greater than Alex could muster, she shoved Alex back with an open palm, sliding her own helmet back on once she'd made herself the space. "Alex, please! Be reasonable about this!"
"I'm the only one here that is," Alex snarled, a heavy blow of the 'ball' at the end of the halberd smashing into Honoka's shoulder, struggling to drive her to the floor. She could finish this if she could get Honoka against a solid backing. Otherwise the blade was out and she wasn't sure if enough of a beating from the pseudo-mace would get through the armour to actually register on her.
"Rude!" Claire chirped, another shot lodging into one of Spiral's joints, a softer point in the armour.
"You're batshit and proud of it, Needlepoint!" Alex shot back. Honestly the snark improved her mood a bit. Open question how much of that was intentional vs just how Claire was.
"True things can be rude!"
Backing away, Spiral vaulted over the low wall of the parking garage, and never hit the ground. As soon as she was outside, an array of rotors sprung out from panels on the back of her armour, rapidly spinning up and pulling her away, up into the sky.
Alex launched the grappling hook to catch her, but a drone zipped in the way to sacrifice itself to the claw. Claire fired carefully, trying to hit the rotors, but there was no angle, the entire array had folded back up to hide behind Spiral's armoured body.
The drones filled the sky in Spiral's wake, sheltering her as she quickly pulled away, hiding around a far building, and trailing after her.
Alex stomped the ground, blowing a dent into the pavement. "Motherfucker!"
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