Greg Vs Raid 0 (Interlude: PRT) - Rough Outline Frame
The conference room at the PRT ENE Headquarters was aggressively sterile, a space designed to bleach emotion from any discussion held within its beige walls. The long, polished table reflected the cold, fluorescent lights from the ceiling with perfect, dispassionate clarity. Two weeks after the battle, the air was still thick with the ghosts of rattled nerves and the scent of industrial-strength cleaner that couldn’t quite scrub away the memory of saltwater and ozone.
Around the table sat the fractured leadership of Brockton Bay’s Protectorate. Director Emily Piggot presided from the head, a fortress of a woman whose exhaustion seemed to have settled deep into her bones, making her appear more immovable than ever. Her gaze swept over the assembled capes, each one a study in contained fatigue.
The members of Brockton Bay’s Protectorate seated around her weren’t in much better shape. Miss Militia’s posture was ramrod straight, as always, but there was a tightness around her mouth that hadn’t been there before Leviathan. Assault was slumped in his chair, his usual manic energy replaced by a sullen weariness, one arm in a high-tech cast. Beside him, Battery looked coiled and furious, her scowl etched so deep it seemed permanent. Dauntless sat quietly, his gaze fixed on the table’s surface, replaying moments of the battle only he could see.
And then there was Armsmaster. He was still, a monolith of blue and silver armor, but the relentless, quiet hum of his suit’s systems seemed more agitated than usual. The silence in the room stretched, heavy and suffocating, until Piggot broke it.
“Let’s not waste time with pleasantries we don’t feel,” she began, her voice a low rasp. “Triumph is stable and undergoing a full battery of tests at the Guild. Velocity… will recover. In time. As for the city, the initial reports are in.” She slid a tablet across the table. A series of images flickered across its screen: casualty statistics, infrastructure damage reports, federal aid appropriations. “Lowest casualty rate in Endbringer history. A victory. A miracle, according to the national news.”
She let the word ‘miracle’ hang in the air for a moment, letting it sour. “And we all know who the public is thanking for this miracle.”
Her gaze swept across the room before landing on a new file she opened on the main screen, a familiar, smirking face under the name ‘Gregory Veder’ appearing, along with his known aliases: Hardkour, Void Cowboy, White Knight.
“Which brings us to the actual reason for this meeting. The boy.”
Battery let out a sharp, incredulous grunt. “So it’s true. The kid running the new ABB, the one who’s been giving us headaches for months, is the same one who… who did that?”
“He is,” Piggot confirmed, her tone flat. “And let’s be perfectly clear about what ‘giving us headaches’ entails.” She tapped another key. A rap sheet filled the screen; multiple counts of destruction of property, aggravated assault, vigilantism, and at the top, a charge marked in stark red: Homicide.
“So,” Battery said, leaning forward, her voice dripping with acid, “the kid’s got a rap sheet dripping red on the table, he killed Deputy Director Calvert, and he's running one of the biggest gangs in the city? And we’re supposed to send him a fruit basket? Great.”
Assault stirred, finally speaking up. “Calvert was Coil. Calvert was a snake who was playing all of us. The kid did us a favor, even if he didn't know it. And as for the gang…” He shrugged his uninjured shoulder.
“The one who took over the Azn Bad Boys,” Piggot corrected, her eyes hard. “Let’s not forget that part. He isn’t just some rogue vigilante who stumbled into an Endbringer fight. He is an active, and expanding, gang leader.”
“I don’t think you understand the situation, Assault,” Piggot emphasized, her voice dropping lower, somehow managing to loom over the red-suited parahuman from the other end of the table while sitting down. “He’s assimilated nearly half of the ABB’s old territory since taking it over, and since his showing with Leviathan, his rate of expansion has only accelerated. His recruitment is skyrocketing. Disaffected youths, former ABB muscle, even some of the Merchants’ old territory is being quietly absorbed. Give him another two months, and his new-model ABB will have taken over the full quarter of the city the old one used to control.”
Assault shrugged, the motion casual but his eyes were fixed on Piggot. “Good. Better them than the Nazis. At least the kid doesn’t seem to have a political agenda beyond… what? Punching things and liking anime?”
“A gang is a gang,” Battery bit out, her voice tight with disapproval. “They deal in extortion, prostitution, narcotics, violence. Unsanctioned violence. It doesn’t matter what flag they fly.”
“We have no evidence Veder’s operation is involved in narcotics, or any of the former three anymore for that matter” Armsmaster interjected, his voice a low, mechanical monotone. “Analysis of their territory indicates a sharp decrease in drug-related crime, organized prostitution, and a statistically significant increase in the… forcible removal of dealers affiliated with other organizations.”
“He’s a crime lord who happens to dislike competition,” Piggot countered dismissively. “It changes nothing.”
Assault: “Last I checked, Veder’s crew hasn’t been the one firebombing minorities. They’re violent thugs, sure, but they’re equal-opportunity violent thugs. That’s practically civic progress in this town.”
“That is not the point!” Battery snapped, glaring at her husband. “He is a murderer and a crime lord who is consolidating power right under our noses! We can’t just let that stand!”
“And what do you suggest we do, dear?” Assault shot back, his tone mocking. “Send him a strongly worded letter? Arrest him? Did you see the light show he put on? The boy who saved the city from a tsunami is not going to go quietly, and the public would crucify us for trying.”
Miss Militia finally spoke, her voice calm and measured, cutting through the argument. “Assault has a point, however crudely he makes it. Politically, our hands are tied. White Knight is, for all intents and purposes, untouchable right now. Any move we make against him would be seen as a betrayal. We’d lose what little public trust we have left.”
“So we do nothing?” Piggot asked, her eyes narrowing. “We just allow a teenage kingpin to build an empire because he happened to save us from something worse?”
Miss Militia leaned forward, her focus absolute. “What else do we know about him? His psychology? His motivations?”
Dauntless cleared his throat, and the room quieted. All eyes turned to him. “During the fight,” he began, his voice steady, “before… everything. He saved me. And the people on that bus.” He looked at Armsmaster. “It was… excessive. He dropkicked a city bus back into position. But it worked. Later, I saw him save Aegis and Triumph. He was reckless, disorganized… but he was prioritizing rescue over engagement. He was acting like a hero.”
“He was acting like a child with a god-complex,” Battery muttered.
“Perhaps,” Dauntless conceded. “But he put himself on the line. I don’t know what happened to him after he was first taken down, but the cape who came back… he was different. He was rage. Pure rage.”
Piggot let out a sound that was almost a sigh as she answered Militia’s question as if she hadn’t heard Dauntless’s little speech. “Other than what we’ve been able to compile of his powers and his identity, not much. Our profile is… contradictory. He displays the strategic thinking of a seasoned cape one moment, and the emotional maturity of a toddler the next. From what we can gather, he is incredibly powerful, unbelievably immature, and remarkably oblivious.”
“That’s a bit much, Director.” Armsmaster finally spoke, his voice a low, synthesized rumble. His frown was invisible behind his helmet, but it was there in his voice. “I… wouldn’t go that far.”
“Hn,” Battery let out a grunt, her scowl far more pronounced as she turned it on Armsmaster. “I would. He ignored direct orders, caused massive collateral damage, and operated with a reckless disregard for any established protocol. He sang a theme song from a children’s cartoon while piloting a sixty-foot monster made of garbage. That’s not tactical adaptation, that’s a child playing with toys, goddamnit.”
“A child who did more tangible damage to an Endbringer than the entire Protectorate has in the last decade,” Armsmaster retorted, his voice remaining level, but with an edge of steel that was unmistakable. “My sensors were active throughout the final engagement. The energy readings from his… construct… were off the scale. The spontaneous manipulation of mass… it defies conventional Tinker-tech classifications. He wasn’t piloting a machine, Director. In a very real sense, he was the machine. From what I can tell, he sacrificed his own biomass to power it.”
“More than that,” Armsmaster continued, turning back to Battery. “‘Oblivious’ is inaccurate. His actions during the battle, while unorthodox, were not random. He created openings. He drew Leviathan’s aggression at key moments, allowing for coordinated strikes that would have otherwise been impossible. He was adapting, constantly. That is not the behavior of someone who is oblivious.”
The room fell silent. The implications of Armsmaster’s words hung in the air, heavy and cold. They weren’t just dealing with a powerful cape kid, then.
“His file indicates a thinker ability, ‘Analyze,’ the keyword Dragon’s drones heard him subvocalize, which seems to grant him information on people and objects,” Armsmaster continued, ignoring Battery and pulling up a complex series of data streams on the main monitor. “This is likely how he identified Calvert as Coil. As for his other abilities… the list is extensive and growing.”
The screen filled with shaky footage from the battle. A figure wreathed in red-orange fire. A blast of flame that turned a water echo into a cloud of steam. A sixty-foot mech made of shipwrecks and scrap metal. A pillar of blue energy that dwarfed the city skyline.
“His primary power appears to be a form of self-enhancement, what he often yells out as ‘Reinforcement,’ which scales his physical abilities to an unknown degree but one that pushes his strength, speed, and durability into the high-end Brute and Mover categories, at the cost of his own vitality. Then there is the matter of… this… thing..” He gestured to the image of the giant mech. “A high-level Shaker ability, allowing him to construct and animate a golem from surrounding materials. The scale of this power is… unprecedented.”
“And the final blast?” Miss Militia asked, her voice hushed.
“Unknown,” Armsmaster admitted, and the word sounded like a physical blow. “The energy output of that final beam exceeded almost anything I have ever recorded. Apart from some of Eidolon’s most powerful attacks in the past.”
The room was silent again. The weight of that last statement settled over them.
“His power is reactive,” Armsmaster continued, pressing his advantage. “Escalatory. Every conflict seems to serve as a catalyst. He gets stronger, more versatile, the harder he’s pushed. My initial assessment was that we needed to engage him with overwhelming force to prevent that escalation. To break him before he could fully realize his potential.”
He looked around the table, his gaze lingering on each of his teammates before finally settling on the Director. “That assessment is now obsolete. The ‘potential’ we were worried about? He’s already there. He reached it. He fought an Endbringer to a standstill and survived an attack that should have, by all metrics, killed him instantly.”
Director Piggot’s eyes, hard and weary, fixed on Armsmaster. The faint hint of something that might have been grim satisfaction touched her lips. She remembered their arguments, his insistence on a hard-line approach, his confidence in the face of her caution.
“You were the one with the plan, Armsmaster,” she said, her voice quiet, but each word a perfectly sharpened blade. “The one who believed we could take him down with overwhelming force before he got in over his head. You believed pushing the conflict early was the only way to prevent a breach of the unwritten rules, to stop him from growing stronger.”
Her eyes bored into his helmet, stripping away the armor, the tech, the title, leaving only the man and his failure.
“He has now fought an Endbringer and won. He has demonstrated power that rivals the Triumvirate. He is the city’s savior. Your original assessment was correct in one thing: he got stronger. Unimaginably so.”
She leaned forward, the full weight of her authority pressing down on him.
“So, I’ll ask you again. How do you intend to bring the brat down now?”