Divide & Conquer 3 (Patreon)

Winter is Coming: Talia al-Ghul 1

Master and his associate's plan was simple enough. Now that the local feudal lord was under their thrall along with all the witnesses, it would be a simple enough manner to ensure a strong starting position for when the first of Master's true enemies arrived.

While Master's raw physical abilities were impressive, each on the low end of the average metahumans despite a lack of obvious specialty, what truly set him apart was the speed at which he learned and adapted. When their spar began, she’d seen nearly a dozen ways to incapacitate or kill him. By the end, those openings were gone, and any she saw and tried to exploit had been bait to lead her into a trap. Not even Belov… the Detective was such a fast learner.

She had to admit (only to herself, she wouldn’t do so out loud) having such an attentive and responsive student was… exciting, in ways that her instruction of the Detective and other agents of the League of Assassins hadn’t been. Every trick she used was analyzed and dissected, so quickly that even before she finished, Master was reacting to counter it.

“Milord, there’s something on the road ahead,” one of the peons riding at the head called out.

“Here we go,” Master’s associate muttered to herself.

The thing on the road was a dead stag, it’s throat torn out and one of its antlers broken off. Leading from the stag was a trail of blood that went off the road into a gully. As the peasants went into the gully, Master and his associate began to speak quietly to each other.

“So, before we get to Winterfell, there’s something rather important we should discuss,” Miss Revy opened.

“What? Taking out Bobby B or just how we’re going to conquer the North?” Master asked.

“No, not that. I’m calling dibs on all redheads.”

Master and I both turned incredulously to her, before Master spoke, “That’s your important thing to discuss? For fuck’s sake, you’re even hornier than I am. Besides, you can't get every redhead, I want some of that shit too.”

“Well, I called dibs. So tough luck slowpoke.”

“Fine, if you’re calling dibs on all redheads, then I'm calling dibs on all blondes.”

“Oh, that's bullshit! Pretty much every Kryptonian is a blonde, you can't take all of them!”

“And do you realize how many smoking hot telekinetic redheads there are in the omniverse? Damn near every powerful telekinetic that I’d want to bone is a redhead, and the only other one that comes to mind is a blonde. So if you’re taking all redheads, I’m taking all the blondes. So nyeh!”

If my self control were lesser, I’d have giggled at the sight of my Master sticking his tongue out at his associate like a child, making the aforementioned woman growl in frustration.

“Fine. Instead of blanket dibs, how about this: first pick. Any redheads we encounter, and I get the first pick of them. If we encounter duplicates of redheads already in my retinue, then I forfeit first pick on them. The same is true for you with blondes. How’s that sound?” Miss Revy asked through gritted teeth.

“Fair enough. Pleasure doing business with you, m’dear,” Master quipped while tipping an imaginary hat in her direction.

Miss Revy grumbled under her breath as the peasants all came back up to the road, but with…

“Are those…” Talia began, pausing as Master chuckled.

“Dire wolf pups, wonder how long until they become familiars,” he mused aloud, moments before his eyepiece and Miss Revy's phone chimed.

“Under thirty seconds, apparently,” Miss Revy muttered under her breath.

Talia kept a careful eye on her surroundings, listening with one ear to the conversation as Miss Revy and Master brainstormed a story for Stark to share with his people upon their arrival. She was to be Master’s wife and Miss Revy her sister and the three of them had been waylaid by bandits before Stark and his convoy had stumbled across them. One guard died to the bandits, but the bandits were wiped out. With their livelihood destroyed, they’d be relocating to Winter Town and Winterfell.

Master would be working in the kitchens while Talia and Miss Revy would be working as maids. It would be humiliating for a time, but Talia had done worse while operating undercover.

[center]Three Days Later[/center]

“So, how’s life slaving away in the kitchen monkey breath?” Miss Revy asked Master as the three met in the Godswood.

“You would not believe how lousy the cooks they had were,” Master grumbled as he kicked at a fallen branch.

“Well, while you were working to build up a relationship with your coworkers, I managed to bind both the Lady of the House and their pretty redhead daughter.”

“Speaking of daughters,” Talia interrupted, turning to face Master, “I believe I have laid the groundwork for the younger daughter to seek you out for unarmed combat training, as you requested Master.”

“Good girl,” he said with a smile, sending a rush of heat to Talia’s core, before turning and giving the face tree a contemplative look.

“What are you thinking?” Miss Revy asked as he walked up to it.

“Just a minor experiment,” he said as he pulled one of his collars from a pocket and clamping it around a branch.

“Congratulations, you’re capturing a tree. Never figured you for a hippy.”

Master rolled his eyes before saying, “I’m wondering if doing that will let me Capture whatshisname beyond the Wall, the guy stuck in a fuckton of tree roots.”

“So what’s that put you at?”

“Well, assuming he’s not worth any more than his would-be-pupil, it’ll be eight credits once I sell him to The Company. I don’t know about you, but creepy old stalkers that are more tree than human who’re after little boys aren't exactly my fetish.”

Both Miss Revy and Talia didn’t repress a shudder at that descriptor, but before any further conversation could be had, the sounds of footsteps drew their attention. Master immediately wrapped his tail around his waist, disguising it as a belt, and put his scouter in a pouch before wrapping an arm around Talia’s waist. Talia completed the image by leaning her head on his shoulder, while also enjoying the warmth emanating from his body and the feel of his firm muscles under the linen tunic he was wearing.

“Oh, I didn’t realize you were here,” Eddard Stark said as he entered the clearing.

“Just enjoying the peace and quiet,” Miss Revy said, before glancing towards Master and adopting a contemplative look. “On an unrelated matter, your daughter Arya is quite interested in learning to fight, yes?”

Stark paused for a moment, looking up at her with a wary look in his eye, before hesitantly answering, “Yes, she is.”

“Good. Draugur’s a skilled unarmed combatant. It would be good for her to study under him.”

“I saw what he did to Jardan, and that wasn’t skill, that was raw strength.”

“Was he the guy whose armor I punched through?” Master asked cheerfully, drawing a glare from Stark.

“Oh settle down Eddy,” Miss Revy chided before he could say anything unflattering towards Master. “If Arya asks for permission to study under Draugur, give it. It’ll keep her safer and help prevent anything like what dear Lyanna ended up like.”

Talia didn’t know who this Lyanna was, but she could guess enough from how Stark suddenly went silent and pulled out his executioner’s sword. Sitting down on a log by the pond, he began the process of cleaning it, studiously ignoring the rest of us.

The next few minutes passed in relative quiet, before the sounds of someone else approaching soon revealed themselves as Stark’s wife.

“My Lady, forgive me, I did not realize you were here,” she said as soon as she saw Miss Revy.

“That was kinda the point of being out here. There were one too many idiots who thought because I have tits I’d be interested in what they’re packing below their belt. Blegh,” Miss Revy said with exaggerated disgust.

“Correct me if I’m mistaken,” Master drawled with an amused smirk. “But weren’t you saying something about finding a way to give yourself a dick so you could knock up your redheads?”

“SHUT IT!” Miss Revy shouted as Stark’s wife blushed and Stark himself continued maintaining his blade.

“Now, now, Revy, no need to be so hostile. Anyway, would I be correct in assuming that there was a letter, Lady Stark?”

Stark’s wife looked down her nose at Master, before giving a begrudging nod and turning to Stark, “Maester Luwin received a raven from King’s Landing. I’m so sorry, Jon Arryn is dead. A fever took him.”

Stark looked to his wife in shock, before his gaze slowly turned towards the pond, trying to process the information he’d been told.

“I know he was like a father to you,” Stark’s wife continued, only for Stark to speak up.

“Your sister, the boy?” he asked.

“They both have their health, Gods be good.”

Master snorted, “‘Gods’ had nothing to do with it.”

“Watch your tongue, heretic.”

“Just share the rest of the letter, Red.”

She continued to glare at Master for a long moment, long enough for Talia to begin fingering a throwing knife she had hidden in her sleeves, before intentionally and pointedly turning away from him.

“The king rides for Winterfell… with the queen and all the rest of them,” Stark’s wife dutifully said, making Stark stare down at his blade.

“He’s coming to ask Eddy to be his Hand. Were we not here, it would set off a chain of events that would see House Stark all but wiped out, House Baratheon dead, Winterfell held by the Greyjoys and the Boltons, Daenerys Targarian with three dragons, eight thousand Unsullied, and all of the Dothraki, and to top this all off, the White Walkers waking up and making their way to the Wall,” Miss Revy listed off with all the interest that one would use to describe the weather.

“What?” Stark’s wife asked with an incredulous voice.

“Eh, don’t worry about all that, it ain’t going to happen now,” Master said as he put his hands behind his head and leaned back against the white-barked tree. “Even if it were just us, we have a much bigger impact than a measly butterfly.”

“What do you mean, if it were just you?” Stark asked, his gaze sharpening as he focused on the most important part of Master’s statement. Part of Talia was glad Stark had asked, because she didn’t know what Master meant by that either.

“Basically Westeros is going to become a battleground between teams of extradimensional agents serving as entertainment for an omniversal conglomerate to sell to interested customers. Revy and I were just the first team to arrive, the next two will show up somewhere on Planetos in four days. Once a team is eliminated, there’ll be a week before the next team is brought in. Each time, the new team will be more powerful than the last. As is? The two of us that took your little troop down without an issue? We’re chump change for what’s going to be coming.”

“You are strong enough to tear through castle forged plate with your bare hands and you think yourself weak?” Stark asked, to which Master gave a bitter chuckle, and Talia understood why. Much as it pained her to admit it, she could think of twenty individuals off the top of her head that would be able to kill Master easily.

“Stark, there are entities out there that possess more power in a single hair than you can possibly conceive of. Not because you are stupid, though you do let your honor dictate your actions far too often, but because you lack the context to imagine them. You can scarcely conceive of the moon as a physical place one can travel to, how would you imagine entities that devour suns?”

Stark and his wife stared at Master in suspicion and a touch of incomprehension.

"Alright, here's a better comparison: imagine there's a person from a land warmer than Dorne but so wet and humid that the only clothes that are bearable are flaps of cloth to preserve one's modesty. The society this individual comes from lives in tents and has never heard of metal. You find yourself in their midst, now try to explain the intricacies for how the most complicated device you know of is made," Master said.

"You can't, they aren't stupid, it's just so much context to be explained that there's no point," Miss Revy finished.

"We're getting off track," Talia calmly said. "What do you know about the other teams that will be arriving?"

"Basically nothing. We know that each team will have two Contractors like Revy and I, that they'll have been given access to the same Catalog we were, and they'll have a similar budget," Master said as he stood up and started to pace. "We know when they'll arrive but not when. We know what they can't afford, but not what they've taken of what they can.

"Both Revy and I focused on improving ourselves, but it's possible that the other Contractors focused on their retinues instead. If so that means we'll have multiple targets with who knows what kind of esoteric or basic powers."

"How did you improve yourself?" Talia asked, suspecting his tail was part of it but not knowing the details.

“I took the option given to become something more than human. While I can still get human women pregnant,” he paused to give Talia a significant look, “and I assure you we’ll be rather vigorously practicing that later, I am what is now called a saiyan. I’m faster, stronger, more durable, basically better in every possible way, physically. But the real perk is what’s called the Zenkai Boost. Every time I come close to death and recover, I gain an increase in power, depending on how evenly matched whatever came close to killing me was.”

“So you are the living embodiment of Nietzsche’s most well known phrase?”

“‘What doesn’t kill me, simply makes me stronger,’ yes. To top it off, I also took the first step in becoming a Fuck-Mothering Dragon.”

“It was fuck-mothering vampire, you shaved gibbon,” Miss Revy groused from where she’d pulled Stark’s wife into her lap.

“You turned yourself into a Targaryan?” Stark asked, resolutely ignoring the fact that Miss Revy was reaching her hand under his wife’s dress to fondle her chest.

Master chuckled, the sound a rumble deep in his chest, “Not exactly.”

In mere moments, where Master had stood was a figure that could only be described as a three meter, bipedal dragon. Its scales a shock, brilliant white, while arcs of electricity danced along its form as it stretched its arms and wings.

“This, Eddard Stark, is the least of what a true dragon is. What the Targaryans rode were not true dragons. They were runts, little more than animals. True dragons are more than beasts. True dragons are one thing given physical form: POWER!”

The voice was different, deeper and harsher, but Talia could tell, nonetheless, that it was still her Master. Just showing his true self, allowing them a glimpse of his true power and potential.