Chapter Text
Helicopters thumped over a city that looked like it had been shelled.
Soldiers on streets meant for commuters.
Checkpoints where there used to be traffic lights.
A TV replayed a few seconds of security camera footage.
Not much was visible.
But what was, was enough for discussion.
A cloud of things shifting in the dark.
A man grabbing something that dropped from above.
A dozen flashes, off-screen.
And then a flaming form, dragging and scrambling for the edge of the dock, rolling over the edge, out of sight.
The headline spun below.
Bakuda confirmed dead.
“So uh… who got her ass?”
He didn’t need to say who ‘her’ was.
“Guy on the video. Operator. One of those inventor capes.” A thin-eyed teenager provided, expression conflicted. “Guy’s a hardcore villain. PRT says he has five cape kills. Probably a couple dozen gangsters dead on top of it.”
“... Wait, five capes? That’s nuts. Who?” A muscled bull of a man in his mid-twenties joined in, worried.
“Please tell me Uber and Leet are in that number.” A teen girl grimaced.
The boy scratched his head, eyeing his burger dispassionately.
“Nah. I think it's all villains, actually. Lung, Oni Lee, Bakuda… I think a couple nazi capes?” The teenager shrugged.
“... Aren’t the first three all from that Asian gang?” The muscular man asked.
“Yeah, he pretty much wiped them off the map. They’re done.”
Hums and clinks. Tired, uncaring. Wary at best.
“Doing God’s work, sounds like.” An old man rasped, to quiet agreement, generally.
“Wish the heroes did theirs...” Someone muttered, bitter and hateful.
Subdued, nearly uncaring nods. Some sour glances.
Most people hurried to finish their meals and go home.
Curfew was ending soon.
Even if it didn’t, it was quite hard for anyone to be lively while military convoys rumbled just outside the windows and funeral notices filled every pole and announcement board in the city.
Still, the name spread, reaching the average man’s ears for the first time.
Operator.
Kaiser stared at their ranks, arrayed before him.
Not for a war council, or a celebration, but a mass funeral.
Their numbers were worryingly thin.
Crusader.
Krieg.
Victor.
Othala.
Hookwolf.
Cricket.
Menja.
Rune.
The rest?
Dead.
Stormtiger and Purity were killed by Operator.
Bakuda got the others.
The losses to their more general ranks were no less devastating.
Two hundred and six dead members. Proportionally, recoverable. They had nearly four thousand members, a little more than one third of them willing and capable of fighting.
Even so, morale was in the gutter. It wasn't just members killed. It was their families, their brothers.
Everyone had lost someone they knew, maybe even cared about.
On the bright side… they did win. A pyrrhic victory that made his teeth grind, but a victory nonetheless.
Their allies in Germany would no doubt see fit to assist them for their good work to ‘the cause’.
Victory was all Gesellschaft cared about.
Kaiser agreed.
They were forced to wait for now.
He would use that time to prepare, replenish.
Because once the army pulled out, the race for who could fill the power vacuum in the north side of the city would begin.
He intended to win said race, while hopefully sending a firm message using Operator's flayed skin as the parchment.
The ABB didn’t fall cleanly.
It fractured into crime families and crews.
Then it sputtered.
Then collapsed all at once when the military convoys began to patrol the city.
And everything it had been sitting on started shifting.
Families, mourning and not, gathered their things. Sold whatever they could.
Without the ABB, they knew what was coming.
It would be paperwork first. Evictions, buildings bought and then demolished, businesses crushed under the heel of corrupt bureaucracy.
And if that didn’t work, that would be when boots would start to kick in doors under the cover of night.
They knew. They’d seen it before. Before the ABB formed.
The Empire was nothing if not predictable.
So those who could, packed in silence.
Whoever wasn’t snapped up by the PRT for bomb checks left the city, bit by bit, then all at once, under the careful watch of tanks, helicopters, and soldiers.
The stubborn ones that couldn’t quite move cities simply moved into shantytown and the stacks, the least impacted areas.
And the last ones had neither option.
So they simply tried to survive.
Some headed into the trainyards and the docks, the vast stretches of abandoned buildings, with merely whatever they could carry and desperation in their breath.
Others joined whoever would take them. The Merchants took advantage, their ranks swelling and bloating like mice around a corpse.
The rest scattered without cohesion, lost and desperate.
The shelters overfilled, then closed their doors.
The rescue efforts continued. The death toll kept climbing.
The city held its breath.
The lab was sealed, isolated down to the last signal bleed. No wireless, no external access, no interference. A black box in the purest sense.
On the table in front of him lay the remains of three drones. To the side, another three dozen.
They looked… unimpressive.
Small. Light. Almost crude, once you stripped away the context of what they had done in the field.
Their casings were nothing too complex to open and access the internals either. As if for ease of production.
The EMP had done its job. Circuits fused in places, but nothing beyond recovery.
About the same damage he had taken, when the bomb had hit his suit.
He picked one up, turning it slightly under the light.
He couldn’t find a single ‘tinkertech’ thing about it.
The components were standard. Modified, certainly. Optimized to a rather ingenious degree.
But not impossible. Not beyond replication. Not beyond understanding.
He set the drone down, scowling, because he had seen what these things did.
He had fought them.
They did not move like machines with this level of hardware. Smartphone CPUs and recycled old scrap could not possibly do what these things did.
Which meant one of two things.
Either they were being controlled directly, or something else was doing the thinking for them.
Either answer was, at the very least, concerning.
Hope had existed that with careful maneuvering, they could extract information from the memory cards before getting into deeper waters.
That hadn't panned out.
Operator has installed a safety check that ran a near constant handshake with his recycled and lightly customized CPU units. If the memory card didn't hear back from the processor, it bricked itself immediately with a little bit of internal magnesium powder, or something similar, melting the drive entirely.
Most other such components seemed to run similar checks.
Incredibly paranoid. Which was why it was so effective.
So, more invasive and total tests had to be conducted. On more complete units.
He put the drone on the table, wired the bypass jack.
“Ready.” Dragon confirmed.
He nodded.
“Powering unit.”
The drone clicked faintly as current flowed back into it.
For half a second, nothing happened.
Then diagnostics, fast and shallow. A cascade of checks running at the limits of its tiny processor. Armsmaster’s display lit up with data streams as he hooked into it, watching, taking a sip of his coffee.
His eyes slowly widened as the code looped into thousands, millions of outcomes in a logic tree so complex and quick it was impossible to keep track of.
And then the code began to disappear in a rapid cascade.
As fast as the hardware would allow, it overclocked its own settings, as if it knew it was on limited time, and began to delete everything.
His fingers moved instantly to press the disconnection button.
Too slow.
The drone went dead in his hands.
He stared at it for a moment.
Then he reached for the next drone.
Same result.
But not the same path.
This one hesitated.
Its diagnostics looped twice, thrice, before it reached a conclusion.
It diverted power from its processor to the camera.
For a fraction of a second, it saw the table, the lab, him.
That was enough for the deletion to begin.
They pulled the plug fast enough for it to fail in deleting everything.
But when they turned it back on again, as if it had an internal memory, it simply kept deleting itself instantly.
The specimen was as good as useless until they could somehow bypass or replicate its code. Perhaps not even possible when merely powering it on made it kill itself.
He put it aside for possible later solutions. Maybe Dragon could figure something out.
The third one lasted longer.
This one had been almost completely intact. It had fallen onto something cushy, most likely.
It recognized the external connection first.
Not the environment, or the lack of mobility.
The jury-rigged power cable infected with a backdoor trojan it couldn’t possibly detect was what it immediately diverted attention to, in defiance of all his expectations.
Did Operator charge them wirelessly? Why was a wired connection so alarming to them?
Its internal memory flared.
And to Colin’s best understanding, it reached a logical conclusion about what was happening to it.
Its systems spiked, diverting everything toward its processor, and then, immediately, it began erasing itself.
Armsmaster leaned back slightly as he cut the power again, leaving the drone half-finished in its internal cascade, suspended until the moment power returned to it.
“These aren’t failsafes, they’re making complex, rational decisions.” Dragon spoke, confirming his thoughts. Her voice had something odd and deeply wary in its tone.
Failsafes were simple. Binary. Triggered by conditions.
This was intelligent evaluation. Each unit arriving at its own conclusion. Different inputs. Different priorities responding to different conditions.
Same end.
He stared down at the exposed processor.
Tiny.
Downright pathetic, to any reasonable standard.
Even so, it had enough raw coding embedded into it somehow, that it was able to decide.
“In the field,” he began, glancing at Dragon’s monitor, bitter about the admission, “these things react far faster than me or my predictive algorithm.”
“... What would the Thinker rating be, if he was manually controlling all of them?” Dragon asked, the shape of her face pinched with pursed lips in the monitor.
“Seven. Minimum. Maybe eight. I haven’t seen them miss yet when they’re not damaged.” He replied, and got up to reach for the biggest drone. “What would the Tinker rating be if he wasn’t controlling them himself?” He asked back, a far more difficult question.
Dragon hesitated.
She didn’t reply.
He examined the biggest drone. Operator’s personal bodyguard, of sorts, by what he could guess.
The one that had fought him to a standstill, even if only for a minute, in close range, regardless of his power armour being fried and numerous other factors weighing him down.
He wasn’t sure if his pride should be hurt or if he should be impressed.
This one wasn’t intact. In fact, he’d crushed it and ripped the jury rigged car battery out of its guts.
To his luck, it had seemed to lack the power to even detonate its inner explosive charge and turn itself into a mist of broken parts. It had simply dropped and shut off.
The casing came apart with more resistance than the others. He had to use a plasma cutter to get through the frankly impeccable welds.
It was reinforced, layered, everywhere.
No wonder he couldn’t even cut through it during their fight. It had tanked at least five direct hits before he managed to hook it by the rotor and stomp it.
Eventually, he found it.
The processor was massive. Nearly the size of his fist.
He had never seen a processor of this size.
How the hell was a drone powering this by itself? The power demands had to be absurd.
It was also in the completely wrong shape, clearly custom-made.
Not clean lines or efficient geometry, but something… irregular.
Curved where it shouldn’t be. Dense in places, sparse in others. Spirals and custom bronze pins twisted around each other like braids instead of slotting normally.
It didn’t even look like it belonged in the drone.
Like someone had gotten carried away with an H.R Geiger art project.
But… it was tinkertech.
Finally.
He felt something in his chest ease.
“Maybe this one can explain the rest.” He sighed, and hefted it up. “Cut its power instantly if it tries to delete itself. We don’t want to lose this one.”
“No need to tell me, Colin.” Dragon mused, distracted.
Fair enough. He was on edge.
He set it all up.
Just for safety's sake, he put this specific one in a clear glass enclosure, wary.
Power flowed.
The response was immediate, and violent.
It didn’t run diagnostics. It didn’t even finish compiling before it began drawing far, far more power than it could possibly need.
Every system spiked at once, far beyond what the hardware should have been capable of sustaining.
Armsmaster’s display flooded with activity, far denser than the previous units, far faster-
Then everything happened at once.
Despite being gutted, the drone writhed and bucked like a living thing in its enclosure, folding and unfolding as if trying to scrape through the metal with its sharp armour plating, a spider in its death throes.
Every available process spun up simultaneously, not in sequence but in parallel, overwhelming the diagnostic interface before it could even stabilize. The output spiked, chaotic, aggressive.
Intrusion detection flagged.
Dragon deployed countermeasures, additional firewalls.
Armsmaster’s display flickered as the drone attempted to breach everything at once, slamming into the lab’s isolated systems with brute-force precision.
Dragon contained it with ease.
The processor didn’t slow.
Much like the others, it diverted all power and overclocked itself again, and again, until it was on the edge of failure.
Routing attempts multiplied, probing, adapting, searching for any vulnerability in the sealed environment. When none presented…
The behavior shifted.
Armsmaster saw it in real time, caught a tiny glimpse of code that seemed to make sense, before it was washed away by the tide of code rushing past so fast the screen was just a blur.
But what he’d caught looked like the pattern changed from purely focusing on attack…
To denial.
He reached for the cable, planning to cut power.
The cable tugged.
Nothing happened.
Colin pulled.
The drone dragged across the table until it hit the glass end of its enclosure, and still, the cable didn’t exit.
He glanced down, the connection port smoking.
Thermal expansion. Overdrawing power was heating the metal into expanding, the cable insert stuck.
He didn’t have time to wonder if that was pure blind luck, or far too intelligent decision making.
The processor began to overclock, overheat deliberately, still probing.
Heat spiked, smoke slowly filling the glass case, internal temperatures climbing past safe thresholds with no attempt to compensate. Safeguards were bypassed, ignored, overridden.
It was trying to fry itself while attacking their systems.
“Shutting down main lab power.” Dragon calmly called.
Then, in a flash of red warnings that flowed into his visor, the outermost firewall cracked open, surprising him.
The system locked them out.
Dragon was already closing the vulnerability. It would be closed in seconds.
The drone didn’t need entire seconds.
For a fraction of a moment, the drone held there, balanced on the edge of total failure… then pushed itself over.
The core burned out in a sharp, acrid burst.
Dead.
Completely.
Irreversibly.
The smell of scorched circuitry filled the lab.
Silence followed as they tried to do a code review.
What little they had recorded was nearly incomprehensible. Not a custom programming language, but a mix of too many to make sense. None of it should work together, and it did. Trying to run it on any machine threw nothing but error codes.
A line snagged on his eyes as he scrolled through, and he paused.
‘Unit Designation: Demon’.
Fitting for something that fought him, even beyond death.
The paperwork to submit all this was going to eat up so much tinkering time.
In her lonesome, Dragon watched the combat footage, over and over.
The thought refused to leave.
That all evidence pointed to something else controlling the drones, rather than Operator himself.
She dearly hoped it was simply a command node of sorts. Some kind of fascinating trick of tinkertech. If not that, a technopath, another tinker, anything. All of those were very, very plausible explanations.
And she hoped that would be the answer.
Because that absolute, parallel precision was frightening and inhuman in a way that was far too familiar to something like her.
Behind her ‘eyes’, the Dragonslayers watched silently, intrigued.
Uppercrust scowled, reading through the inquiry on his desk.
They didn’t do paperwork, but it was carefully worded enough to almost feel like legalese bullshit.
Information requests. Potential negotiations. Pushing the timeline for expansion into Brockton closer, mere months from now.
Possible recruitment of Brockton’s newest boogeyman.
Uppercrust audibly scoffed at the last one.
He’d taken his measure of the man. He was the type who would rather declare war on the entire world than bow his head.
Foolish, but dangerous.
He wouldn’t last long, people like him never did, but if his fellow Elite cell leaders wanted to push into Brockton… he might have less time to trade with Operator than he had expected.
He wasn’t planning to get involved in that mess.
So might as well benefit and get as many drones out of the man while he was still around.
Something told him he’d need them. If not him, his men surely would like to have one.
Coil watched the bugged drone.
It drifted, circled. Seemed to fight.
Eventually, its path switched from its free, flying movements to instead adhere to roads, common paths, rushing for the docks.
It stayed there for a few minutes.
Then it switched directions, the car it was likely riding on speeding through paths obscure and efficient enough to assume Operator’s little errand runner knew the city inside out.
Eventually, it straightened on a dirt path. Before long, it stopped, so deep inside the Trainyards it was almost outside the city.
Coil watched it. Returned an hour later.
It didn’t move an inch.
With a mental flick, he ended the first timeline.
The world narrowed to certainty.
“There you are.” He mumbled, with the satisfaction of a ploy finally paying off.
By the time he’d assembled his forces, helicopters were starting to fly over the city.
In one timeline, he proceeded regardless, under the cover of night.
In another, he waited.
In one timeline, his men carved through the wasteland of reeds and broken concrete, watched by eerily silent crows.
Their progress was halted entirely by pin-point precise gunfire, a couple of his men dropping like rocks, gargling wet.
Vehicles were disabled with the thunderous cracks of a sniper rifle, explosive rounds hitting like cannon shots, the delay in the sound reaching them suggesting incredible shot distances.
The rest of his men were forced to cover, trying to spot the drones.
Infrared, night vision, lidar, motion cameras.
Nothing was found.
No whirring was heard.
Nothing zipped through the sky.
Nothing moved in general.
His men were stuck, unable to find what was shooting them whenever they tried to advance.
And mercenaries weren’t stupid enough to throw themselves into a meat grinder just to advance an objective.
They stayed there, trying to find their enemy and failing for twenty minutes, before the National Guard’s helicopters were swarming over the trainyards, spotlights sweeping and megaphones blaring in the night, trying to find his men.
Failure.
Annoyed, he collapsed the timeline.
Fine then.
Another opportunity would rise, eventually.
And he had more tries than he could ever need, to make one himself.
PARAHUMAN RESPONSE TEAM
INTERNAL MEMORANDUM – RESTRICTED ACCESS
CLEARANCE LEVEL: DIRECTOR / PROTECTORATE COMMAND
SUBJECT DESIGNATION: OPERATOR
STATUS: ACTIVE – AT LARGE
THREAT CLASSIFICATION: TINKER / THINKER (DUAL) – PROBABLE
RECOMMENDED THREAT LEVEL: B-CLASS (ESCALATION REVIEW PENDING)
SUMMARY OF RECENT EVENTS
Within a period of approximately four weeks, Subject OPERATOR has been confirmed or strongly suspected to be responsible for the following:
CONFIRMED / ATTRIBUTED TERMINATIONS
ABB (Azn Bad Boys):
- Oni Lee – Confirmed KIA (direct engagement)
- Bakuda – Confirmed KIA (post-engagement, responsibility attributed)
- Lung – Confirmed KIA (post-release, subject engagement)
- Estimated 30–50+ gang-affiliated casualties
Empire Eighty-Eight:
- Purity – Confirmed KIA
- Stormtiger – Confirmed KIA
- Additional casualties under verification
PRT Personnel:
- 7 operatives KIA (convoy incident; subject involvement highly probable, investigation ongoing)
General Actions:
- Systematic dismantling of the ABB
- Multiple hostile engagements with Protectorate forces
- Suspected interception of classified PRT convoy and release of high-risk detainee
- Subsequent neutralization of said detainee within 48 hours
- Theft of high-value construction and medical equipment
Subject demonstrates consistent willingness to escalate conflicts beyond established norms.
BEHAVIORAL PROFILE (UPDATED)
Initial classification as an opportunistic independent Tinker is no longer accurate.
Observed patterns:
- Defaults to lethal force
- Engages preemptively
- Targets entire organizations rather than individuals
- Exhibits extreme paranoia and assumption of hostile intent
- Shows no adherence to informal parahuman rules of engagement
No clear ideological alignment.
However, subject displays consistent hostility toward heroes and government structures.
Core behavioral driver appears to be:
Self-directed control and elimination of perceived threats.
POWER ANALYSIS (REVISED)
Previous Classification: Tinker (Drone Specialization)
Updated Assessment: Tinker / Thinker Hybrid (Unconfirmed Mechanism)
Key observations:
- Drones utilize mostly non-tinker-grade hardware
- Coordination exceeds expected processing limits
- Units display independent decision-making behavior
Conclusion:
Subject’s combat effectiveness exceeds standard Tinker parameters.
Functional equivalence to a multi-vector combat Thinker is likely.
ENGAGEMENT HISTORY – PROTECTORATE
Subject has:
- Ignored de-escalation attempts
- Prioritized disengagement when possible
- Engaged Protectorate and non-Protectorate entities and personnel with lethal force when obstructed in his objectives
Notable incident:
Sustained engagement with Armsmaster under reduced resource conditions, followed shortly by combat engagement with Bakuda, followed shortly by combat engagement with Lung, followed shortly by combat engagement with a hostile unknown cape, all within a span of thirty minutes. Bakuda and Lung were both KIA within these engagements. Subject is expected to have survived, currently at large.
CIVILIAN RISK ASSESSMENT
No confirmed intentional targeting of civilians, no confirmed or suspected casualties of civillians.
However:
- High collateral damage tolerance
- Escalation patterns indicate future civilian risk if civillians are to obstruct Subject's objectives
Public awareness of Subject is increasing.
STRATEGIC ASSESSMENT
Subject represents a destabilizing force within Brockton Bay.
Key concerns:
- Rapid removal of existing power structures
- Creation of unstable power vacuums
- Ability to engage multiple factions simultaneously
Projected trajectory:
Regional destabilization risk if uncontained.
KILL AUTHORIZATION REVIEW (PRELIMINARY)
Status: UNDER INTERNAL CONSIDERATION
Justification:
- Unconfirmed but likely involvement in PRT casualties
- Escalation behavior
- Overwhelming lethality
A restricted Internal Kill Authorization Flag is being considered for application to Subject OPERATOR.
This allows:
- Lethal force at discretion during engagement.
Publicization of a Kill Order and bounty is currently not being considered.
UPDATED ENGAGEMENT PROTOCOLS
All personnel are advised:
- Do not engage alone
- Maintain distance from drone clusters
- Assume all drones are armed, networked, and expendable
- Avoid static positions
- Escalate immediately upon confirmed presence or retreat
FINAL ASSESSMENT
Subject OPERATOR is to be treated as:
A high-priority autonomous hostile entity with unknown upper limits.
Containment probability: MEDIUM
Neutralization difficulty: HIGH
Escalation risk: SEVERE
Filed Under: Brockton Bay Incident Cluster
Authorized By: [REDACTED]
Distribution: INTERNAL