It had been a surprise to hear Cecil recommend a complete newbie for such a high-level operation. His old friend had always left this type of mission to the pros. But after seeing Robot's reports, finding out about just which supervillains White Mask took down on his first run out, and the conditions Cecil set for the rookie, Brit understood what was going on.
This mission was a test. A test of White Mask's capabilities and his character.
Brit had read his file twice over before they moved. Robot's assessment had been clinical and thorough, but there was one line Cecil had underlined that stuck in Brit's head.
Willingness to kill those he judges as guilty of severe crimes.
He'd known plenty of people like that over the years. Some of them had been heroes. Plenty of them didn't stay that way.
That said, Brit would be the first to say having a no-kill rule was naïve. He'd lived too long and been in too many high-stakes scenarios to say otherwise. Some people just couldn't be rehabilitated or were too out of control.
You don't get to do missions involving superhuman threats without eventually having to take a few lives. That just didn't happen.
Even then, taking lives was almost always a last resort. There were exceptions, of course. But those exceptions usually involved aliens or monsters from another dimension. When the exception was human, the call got harder, the paperwork got uglier, and the decision rarely sat well with anyone who had to make it. But those calls still had to be made sometimes.
When dealing with human threats, the GDA still had to answer for the bodies. This might involve domestic law, international law, or congressional oversight committees that pretended they didn't know what Cecil did until a corpse made the news. The rules bent plenty for an organization like theirs, but they didn't disappear. And unless lethal force was the only option left on the table, they generally shouldn't be using it.
Then there were the other factors to consider if lives were taken. Who were killed? Why were they killed? How were they killed?
Was it necessary?
So yeah. A test. And Brit was the proctor. It wasn't the first time Cecil had put him in this position, but having the rookie on their team for a mission this big was.
Not even ten seconds after he dropped his hand, White Mask spoke through their comms. "Snipers down."
"Already?" Britney asked, brows arched.
"Seems like it. White's faster than we thought," Brit said, pressing on his earlobe. "Good job, you two. Wait until we charge in."
"Roger that. You forgot to mention just how well-armed they are. This sniper rifle looks like a prop from a sci-fi movie."
"There's a reason why I had you two take the snipers out first."
If it had just been him on this mission, he wouldn't have bothered. But his sister wasn't nearly as invulnerable as him, and these snipers were packing top-of-the-line equipment. The kind that can punch through Britney's skin.
With the snipers now out of the picture, he moved out of the tree line with Britney at his side. Floodlights swung towards them, throwing long shadows across the rocky ground. A mercenary near the western post shouted something in Russian, and then the night came apart at the seams.
Gunfire opened up from three directions at once. Brit felt the rounds press into his chest, a sensation he'd long ago stopped registering as anything more than rain. Beside him, Britney didn't so much as flinch as a burst stitched across her sternum and sparked off her collarbone.
Brit kept walking. Britney strolled beside him, hands in her jacket pockets like she was window shopping. This was the easy part. Getting shot was something Brit and Britney could do in their sleep.
"They always aim for the chest," she sighed. "No imagination."
"Give 'em a second. They'll panic and aim for the head. Then they'll really lose their minds."
They did. Three rounds caught Brit square in the forehead and one in the right eye. The mercenary who'd fired it stopped shooting, staring at him with gaping eyes.
"Evening," Brit said, and clotheslined him into next week.
There was a show happening above their heads.
He caught it in pieces, between absorbing gunfire and closing the distance on the western post. A streak of charcoal and purple cut across the sky, too fast to track properly. The guard aiming their gun down at them could only shoot a short burst that pinged off Brit before White Mask dragged him over the rail. The man let out a terrified scream, followed by the thump of his body hitting the ground.
The merc's chest was moving, but he didn't get up.
Well, shit. Brit raised a mercenary over his head and slammed him into the dirt. Robot wasn't kidding. If that tower was just a few meters taller, bastard would've died.
The flying cat was just as bad. If they were to be honest, they hadn't expected much from him. But they couldn't have been more wrong.
Even under a heavy barrage, Brit and Britney couldn't pull their eyes away when Lily's sword grew to the size of a bus and cut through a post made of metal as if it was paper.
As the structure collapsed into a heap of debris, Britney laughed, grabbing a mercenary by his leg and swinging him into a wall hard enough to crack it. Her voice barely pierced through the hail of gunshots.
"I don't care if these two are feisty little shits. I'm just glad they're on our side."
"Couldn't agree more!"
Going up against Lily and his size-changing sword would be a nightmare.
White Mask hasn't even used the other abilities he supposedly has, and we've already taken out half of their forces. I have a feeling Cecil's going to have a field day when he hears our report later.
The GDA was always in need of more superhuman allies. Whether these allies were directly under the organization or outside of it, it didn't matter because they needed all the help they could get. There were too many superhuman threats that appeared pretty much every day, both old and new ones. That meant even those not of adult age were sometimes pulled into the fights.
If it wasn't for other groups like Capes Incorporated, Youngblood, Dynamo 5, and Cyberforce, the world would be a much more dangerous place.
He and Britney broke through their forces like a pair of wrecking balls. Neither of them killed. They never did unless they had to. Years of practice had taught them exactly how hard to hit a baseline human to put him down without putting him in a grave.
Brit didn't have super strength the way the heavy hitters did. He could only use his full strength instead of the 30% percent normal people used, and his size wasn't impressive. But it didn't matter.
He could stand in the middle of a firing squad and take his time. He ran through their formation like a man wading through tall grass, breaking wrists, cracking jaws, taking guns and bending them in half.
Britney was less patient. She grabbed a mercenary by the vest and threw him into two others, the three of them going down in a heap of armor and groaning. She caught a rifle barrel as it swung toward her, crushed it in her fist, and put the owner on the ground with a tap that probably broke half his ribs.
The eastern half was where things got interesting.
Brit had been wondering when the Mantis' people would stop hanging back. Six of them came out of the compound's ground floor in a coordinated rush, and they moved fast, far faster than the baseline mercs, their suits whining with every stride. Blades extended from their gauntlets. The weapons were long, curved, scythe-like things that caught the floodlights along their edges.
They converged on the lone figure in the charcoal coat and white mask, who turned out to be bulletproof as well, decimating their forces with flying boulders and moving earth. Brit stopped throwing a man he'd been about to throw and just watched.
He'd seen a lot of fighters in his hundred-plus years. Soldiers, martial artists, metahumans, monsters wearing people-shaped suits. He'd learned to read a fight in the first few seconds to know who was going to win before either man did.
He couldn't read this one. There was no fight. There was just White Mask, untouched, in the middle of six men trying very hard to cut him apart.
The first exosuit operator lunged, his blade cutting through the air. White Mask shifted maybe a few inches, and the scythe carved empty air where his ribs had been. His palm came up under the operator's elbow, and Brit heard the suit's servos scream as the kid redirected the man's own momentum into the dirt face-first. He made sure the man stayed down with a swift punch, cracking the ground.
The second and third came after, blades flashing in a coordinated flurry that would have turned a normal man into ribbons. Brit had seen plenty of enhanced soldiers fight before. He knew exactly how much faster people could be in suits like those and exactly how much that speed mattered.
It didn't matter to White Mask at all.
White Mask danced around the blades. A scythe came down where his head had been, and his head simply wasn't there anymore. Another swept low for his legs, and he was already rising over it. Every slash found empty air an inch from his body, and the inch never closed.
One of the operators overextended on a cut. A hair too far, the blade slashing past White Mask's shoulder. White Mask's hand came up and caught the gauntlet's forearm, and Brit watched something strange happen.
He twisted his wrist and the blade bent. It curled back on itself like warm taffy, the metal folding under the kid's grip until the scythe pointed back at its own wielder.
Metal manipulation? Robot's file said earth and electricity. Didn't mention that.
The exosuit operator stumbled back, staring at his ruined weapon. He didn't get to stare long. White Mask stepped in and drove a palm into the man's chest, folding the suit's chestplate inward and launching the operator a good fifteen feet through the building's wall. The third operator followed a moment after.
The fourth operator struck from behind, aiming for the legs. White Mask spun on his heel and kicked. A column of fire erupted from the bottom of his foot.
The jet of flame, white-hot at the core, caught the operator dead on. It hurled the man back into a wall and washed over him for a good three seconds. The suit's electronics sparked and died as the smoking operator slumped.
Only two left. They hesitated, heads turning towards their fallen allies for a split second. That was a mistake White Mask capitalized on.
Brit had watched the kid fight for a minute and learned more about him than Robot's whole file. White Mask had the power to kill every man on this island without breaking a sweat. He had earth that crushed, fire that melted, and the skill to never get touched while he did it. He could have ended all six exosuits in the time it took to end two.
And he hadn't. He choked the full lethality out of every strike. Prime examples being when he snuffed the fire before it cooked a man alive and folded the blade instead of crushing the helmet.
Volatile and willing to kill, huh? Brit grabbed the last mercenary in his area by the back of the vest and knocked him out. Maybe. But not tonight. Not unless one of these poor bastards gives him a reason to.
There was a difference between a man who killed because he liked it and a man who killed because he'd decided someone had earned it. The first kind was a problem. The second kind was just a soldier with a conscience.
But conscience was just a compass. It pointed you in the right direction until the day it didn't.
Brit would reserve judgment for now. But so far, his early read on the rookie wasn't bad. While White Mask tended to use more force than necessary, he doesn't immediately go for a sure kill when he absolutely could.
It wasn't long before the last of the mercenaries dropped and the compound went quiet.
Brit took a headcount through the earpiece. "White Mask. Status."
"No one left standing on my side. Six of Mantis' guys and the corner posts are out. Lily already took care of the ones upstairs." He paused. "Wait. Movement underground. Both targets just left the room they were in. They're heading up."
"Probably coming to see why their men went quiet. Britney, on me. White Mask, hold your position. Let 'em come to us. Don't engage until we know what we're-"
The main compound doors blew off their hinges.
It twisted through the air and crashing into the rocks dozens of feet out. A hulking figure stepped through the wreckage, and beside him walked a familiar man in an exosuit that made the previous ones he saw look like toys.
Brit's eyes went to the second man.
He recognized Slaying Mantis on sight. The bastard wore a more elaborate version of his soldiers' exosuits, the scythe-blades on his gauntlets longer and glowing. He walked out into the open with his scythes already extended.
But it was the other one that made Brit go still. The Walking Dread. Brit didn't even know if he was human.
The Walking Dread loomed over their heads like an adult would over a toddler, and had biceps wider than Brit's chest. Under the metal plate covering the upper half of his face, pointed teeth resembling a shark's lined his mouth. Then there were his four-fingered claws that looked as if they could tear through metal.
And he was wearing something Brit had never seen before.
It wrapped around the man's torso, shoulders, and arms in segmented plates. Its surface crawled with light. Thin veins of blue-white energy traced across the metal, pulsing and gathering at nodes on the shoulders and chest. The air around the man had a charge to it, a faint electric hum that Brit could feel from forty feet away.
Is that armor generating electricity? Shit.
"That's new," Britney said. "Big ugly got an upgrade."
"White Mask," he said quietly into the earpiece. "You have eyes on the targets?"
"Yeah, I'm in the air. I see them. What is that armor? I read his file. I don't recognize it. And is it just me or is that thing generating electricity? If that's the case, this just got a lot more dangerous."
"It is. Wait for my order."
The armor pulsed brighter. Walking Dread rolled his shoulders, and the segmented plates flexed with him, the light blooming along his arms until his hands looked like they were dipped in captured lightning. When he spoke, his voice carried across the clearing, deep and unbothered.
"You broke my men." He looked at the scattered bodies of the mercenaries and the downed exosuit operators. His gaze settled on Brit and Britney before sliding to White Mask in the air. "GDA flies."
Beside him, Slaying Mantis tilted his head at White Mask.
"That one's not GDA. It's the fucking sap that took down Machine Head," the Mantis said, his accent clipped and Irish. "Lucky us. Getting these three should shut Mr. Liu up."
Brit shifted his weight, putting himself a half-step ahead of Britney, an old habit he'd never bothered to break. Whatever that armor was, he didn't like it.
Walking Dread raised one crackling fist and regarded it almost fondly. The light gathered, intensified, and the hum in the air climbed into a whine Brit could feel in his back teeth.
"The Walking Dread will enjoy breaking you."
Brit smiled at the threat. Not even his evil counterpart wearing the Omega Jacket could scratch him. "That's the funniest thing I've heard all day."
But they were still outgunned. Should he call for reinforcements? A strategic retreat?
"Brit, wait." White Mask and Lily landed in front of him. "I want to show what I'm capable of. I'll fight them alone."
"Alone? Are you crazy?" Brit nearly yelled. "What makes you think I'll let you-"
"Let's give him a chance," Britney interrupted, holding up a hand. She looked at Lily as she spoke. "You know him better than we do. The Walking Dread is even more dangerous when he has electricity to absorb. Not to mention he has Slaying Mantis as help. White Mask might be strong, but they're on another level. Do you still think he'll win?"
Crossing his arms, Lily spoke with unwavering confidence.
"Without doubt."