Chương 30: 29-Dinner Not Included

McKenna addressed the rest of the group as they had dinner. The food was bloody good, much better than anything they had eaten at the Federation. Babylonian cooks had well-deserved fame in the new world. It was a slow Tuesday night. The inn was empty except for them and the dour waitress. Huang tried to make some polite conversation. He always did whenever there was a female within a hundred yards.

"Not many clients, eh. Do not worry, beautiful, my friends and I can eat for twenty." The waitress did not even register his presence.

"Cut the clowning," McKenna hissed at him when the waitress was out of hearing range.

"We are on a mission. You can hit on whomever you want when all this is over. Until then, you will behave like a professional, or I will send you packing home."

"Sorry, Lieutenant," Huang answered.

"Just trying to lower the tension."

"Okay, final recap," McKenna said, clearly annoyed. It was the last time he got saddled with this clown in a high-profile mission. Alas, Huang was the only current Interceptor-class soldier, and they needed him to take down Dignity. Without him, they would be up to their eyes in hostile bodyguards in less than three minutes.

"Dignity, the Amazon royals, and Morton are to meet in the Council Hall tonight to discuss strategies for the coming war. Podachek will be attending as head of security," McKenna had produced a map of the Hall. They had good intelligence sources inside Babylon.

"There will be a heavy Amazon escort surrounding the building, but we are not going to have to fight past them. We will hide inside the Hall three hours before anyone comes. Our contact has made sure of that."

"We will hide in the adjoining room and attack as soon as the meeting has started," he pointed at the hiding place on the map.

"That is when Huang will strike," Sophie added. McKenna scolded her: "Class names only, Gemini one. Do you want these barbarians to take it on your family if they find out who you are?" Gemini looked properly chastised. McKenna pointed at Huang: "Interceptor will block Dignity's powers and stop her from calling for help. He will also input fake messages if someone decides to investigate. You may also steal her powers and use them during the fight, but only if she is weakened.

Remember, she is an Omega; if you go mind to mind against her, you will lose."

"Block her when the fight begins. That is all you have to do. Do not get creative unless I give you express permission. Do not fuck me on this, Interceptor," the lieutenant glared at him.

"The Gemini Warriors will take care of the Royals. Remember, I want you to switch forms every 10 seconds, fight together in a coordinated way, and switch opponents if you have to. I know you can do it. I have seen you train." Alan was an experienced warrior, but Sophie was a little green around the gills, and he wanted to inspire her. A good leader knows when to be tough and when to be fair.

"I will fight Morton. I trust our fight will generate enough Essence to allow me to poison the room to an extreme degree; he will never know what hit him," he said with some distaste. He hated using poison. This was not what the army was about. He berated himself—the army was about winning.

"If everything goes according to plan, and the soundwall holds, and it will, we can leave the hall through the secret tunnel without anyone realizing we have removed all their leadership," he paused for a moment.

"Then we begin phase two." He was aware that everyone present, Huang included, hated phase two.

"We infiltrate the enemies' homes in this order: Melanie, the remaining Brotonville Station current bosses, and Wu Na," he felt ashamed even by exposing the well-rehearsed plan. No military worthy of the name enjoyed the idea of assassinating civilians in their homes, while they were resting with their families. There was a high chance they would need to kill some members of those families if they wanted to wrap up the whole operation without being detected.

McKenna was not entirely sure he could follow those instructions. He would find out tonight.

"Shouldn't we take out the Fortunist first?" Alan asked.

"No, her powers make her the most unpredictable. We will take her last, and the Forestaller will initiate the fight," McKenna looked at Smitty as he said this. He nodded. He was a dependable fighter. That is why he had been chosen for his class.

"Let's not fool ourselves. There is a very slim chance of everything going according to plan," McKenna knew they all were aware of this. They were all experienced soldiers. Well, except Sophie, of course.

"If we achieve our goals, we will escape through the designated routes and meet at bivouac point number…"

"You will not achieve your goals," a new voice announced. It was the waitress. She was sitting among them. No one had noticed her move. Damn it! How much had she heard?

"No one has invited you here, lady," McKenna said, playing the role of an angry client. His right hand was already creeping towards his hidden dagger. He could not risk this foolish girl going to look for help. She was to be the first of tonight's victims. His eyes darted nervously towards the exit.

"No one is coming. I put the Closed sign on the door," the girl explained.

"And why would you do that?" McKenna's danger sense was on overload. The girl ignored him. She spoke directly to Sophie.

"Sophie, please, listen to what I have to say. Your friends are already dead. They are walking corpses. I have been in this business long enough to know that nothing I will say will sway them. But you still have a choice, Sophie. Choose to live." Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

"How do you know my name?" Sophie asked, clearly upset.

"I know everything about you. About all of you. Something very important is about to happen, and I can't have your Federation interfering," the woman calmly explained.

"The Losers have a crucial part to play. The fate of the Universe hinges on this. I can't have you distracting them and, in my book, killing their families and their friends counts as a distraction."

"In normal circumstances, I would have killed you all without batting an eyelid. But these are exceptional ones, so I took special care in preparing this fight to avoid the slight chance of one of you getting a lucky hit or pulling some kind of stunt." The Fed assassins stood up, forming a semicircle around the newcomer. The woman went on talking.

"I traveled forty-two years into the past to prepare this fight. I know that sounds like a lot, but believe me, it is like pocket change to me."

"I have been studying all of you since you were children. I know all about you. How you fight, how you think, how you will react. Sophie, I am talking to you because I know you are the only one I can talk out of the fight. But first, you must believe I am telling you the truth."

"So let's get on with it," she added, smiling at McKenna. McKenna lunged at her, aiming for her throat with his dagger. The woman threw a hot plate of soup at his face, almost like an afterthought. He screamed as the soup blinded him, but he could hear his men already jumping into action. Rutherford threw a fan of magically conjured knives at the woman, who rolled over the table, falling to the other side. The knives stood sunk up to the hilt in the wood like a file of steel dominoes.

The Restarter's powers changed every 30 seconds during a fight. He never knew which powers he would get, but his class perk ensured he was always supremely trained in their use. The perfect counter to Podachek's powers. Dawn was no Podachek.

"You have thirty seconds to live," she calmly told Rutherford, while avoiding a sword thrust by Smitty, also known as the Forestaller. He was the counter to Wu Na's powers, and he suppressed all outlier results. His power avoided black and white and reigned supreme in the gray. His aura made reliable, boring powers more powerful with repetition. Dawn looked at the forestaller and threw a reliable, boring punch at him. Then she increased her speed, making it hit him forty-six times in one second.

On the last hit, the punch was so powerful that it turned Smitty's head into mist. Huang was the Interceptor, and he could borrow powers from his allies at will. He took Chant Magic from Alan, also known as Gemini Two, who could currently use only his warrior abilities, as he was in his male form. He summoned a line of ghostly elven bowmen, who shot a fusillade of arrows at Dawn. They went through her without apparent effect.

"The problem with links is that they can be hijacked. You should know that, better than most. All tricks can be turned back on their user," she calmly explained to Huang. The Interceptor looked down at his own body and realized he had been riddled with all the arrows his constructs had shot at Dawn. He started to protest. Then he died. Rutherford kept throwing conjured knives at Dawn, who avoided them, looking almost embarrassed for him.

The Gemini warriors both transformed into their female form, combining their magical powers to hurl a fireball at Dawn. Rutherford's cooldown ended, and his powers began to change.

"Fun fact," Dawn told him.

"Your reset power is a watered-down version of mine, and I have a lot of practice with it. I have a lot of practice with everything." Rutherford tried to use his new powers. Then he discovered he had none. He had been reset to level 0. Dawn caught him by the arm and threw his unenhanced body in front of the fireball that was already on its way, consuming him. McKenna had recovered by now. The fight had produced a lot of essence, and that gave him a powerful weapon to use against Dawn.

His primary power was poisoning it, weakening and even killing Essentials with his mere presence, but he could also twist it into powerful weapons. He was not called the Dungeonslayer for nothing. He turned the essence into a temporary Dungeon Boss. It had absorbed some of the characteristics of the events that produced the essence—it looked like a demonic cook wielding a cleaver. The Gemini warriors had changed again: Alan was in male form while Sophie kept her female one.

They went for a tank-dps combo, the oldest trick in the book. All the tricks were old for Dawn. She had practically written the book herself. She positioned herself just in the right place, just the right way, and moved at just the right moment. Alan ran the demonic cook through, moments before it buried its cleaver in his skull. McKenna screamed with rage and jumped on Dawn, "Help me, damn you," he screamed at Sophie, who was paralyzed with fear and unable to move.

Dawn used a martial arts technique so subtle that she seemed not to have moved at all. McKenna somersaulted through the air, his own momentum turned against him, and fell on the table, crushing it into splinters. He stood up, swaying.

"Time to choose, Sophie," Dawn told her before McKenna could stand up.

"As I told your late friend, I have great control over my reset powers, but I can only use them on willing targets, him being the exception to the rule on account of his class."

"Renounce your powers, and live, or fight me and die," she went on.

"And this whole fight was for your benefit, Sophie, not mine. I knew you had to realize how outclassed you were before you surrendered. I could have killed you all with no effort at all."

"What makes you so sure, witch?" McKenna defiantly told her.

"Because I poisoned the wine," she explained to him.

"I would have poisoned the food, but I know Sophie does not drink. I know all about her. I know all about you." McKenna looked incredulously at her. Then he fell dead to the ground.

"What is it going to be, Sophie?" Dawn finally asked her.

"I renounce my powers," Sophie answered, weeping on the ground.

"Good girl," Dawn told her. She left the inn, not looking back once. With the inn, she left the life she had built for herself for the past 42 years, a gray life, ruled by the need to avoid becoming dissonant. A gray life can be useful too. You can study your future victims from the shadows, see them grow into the targets they will eventually become. She had been present during McKenna's wedding, a guest fading into the background.

She had seen Sophie's birth, twenty-three years ago, and had taken a liking to her as she saw her grow. I will spare this one if I can help it. She had seen a drunk Smitty drive over a man, leaving him to die alone. You will die first. She had traveled to Brotonville and lived a gray, meaningless life there, doing nothing that could alter history or make her dissonant. She had stayed in the shadows when the Lizard of Babylon attacked the city.

She had seen Elariana die for the Losers on the hill, and took pride knowing that she would protect her in the future. Then, finally, the present caught up with her. She was no longer in her subjective past—she was at the point in the timeline in which she would have been, had she not traveled this morning to the Black Tower and asked the Keeper to send her 42 years back. She was no longer an interloper in the timeline. She could act.

She watched the sun set on the horizon, feeling no fear, only the cold certainty of her own determination. Dawn would come in ten hours. Nothing could stop Dawn.