Wretched Joy 4 (Patreon)

Wretched Joy

Chapter 4

-VB-

The thought of having the entire Empire Eighty-Eight after my head didn't make me nervous or upset.

No, I felt vindicated.

I hurt them.

I made them bleed.

I made them wary of every Joe and Jane on the street.

I made them feel weak and insecure to the point that they lashed out.

Sure, a few people died because of the E88, ABB, and Merchants clashing but those were deaths that would have happened sometime later at some other place. Or was it?

See, I have been thinking. Yes, I wanted the Empire gone, and I would probably move on and strike down the other gangs before moving onto petty criminals. However, I knew that people would try to fill in the literal and political power vacuum, whether these people were the government or the independent organization of varying morality and ideology.

Boston Games was one such event, and even Houston, where Eidolon operated, still had gangs.

This upset me, of course. What was the point of doing anything if my work would be rendered null and void? I mean, I didn't care beyond the city, because I was realistic enough to recognize that even with all the powers in the world, I wouldn't be able to force my will upon the world. Therefore I looked for a solution specific to Brockton Bay's issues.

At first, I thought about making a field of some kind that canceled out powers before realizing that I would affect Panacea, the most valuable cape in the city.

I also thought up a plan to make another field that prevented harmful actions! It, however, infringed on too many people after even a little bit of a thought experiment on how it would work. My beef was with the Empire and then the gangs and the PRT. I didn't want to involve bystanders. Besides, the sheer complexity and range requirement would make any enchantment for it impractical because of how many charges it might need to eat up. Even at my most optimistic estimate of 3,000 charges, the enchantment in question would not extend beyond a few blocks.

Yeah, there was no ceiling on my power, but certain things had a hard curve while others didn't.

The third plan I thought of was much more viable. I would copy Coil, but instead of villains, I would make heroes.

Speaking of Coil, I needed to get rid of him.

-VB-

Finding Calvert was easy. After all, I knew his name, cape and civilian, and used it to hunt him down.

I expected the compass, upgraded now to be able to show me the distance between me and my target, to swivel this way and that way because of how Calvert’s power worked, but it didn’t do that. Instead, maybe because of how many motes of power I gave it, it pointed unerringly towards a single direction.

This was good.

What wasn’t good was that the bastard never seemed to leave his underground base.

That was bad.

Worse, he seemed to know that I was after him.

… How did he know?

It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure it out. Right now, I wanted him dead. If Coil makes two timelines as he usually does and sends one timeline home, then that timeline’s me would chase after him and kill him.

Merely by acting on my desiring as I have done so far had alerted my enemy to my intent and action!

FUCK!

Okay, I needed to seriously rethink how I was going to go about hunting because so far, I have only encountered brutes to kill and so haven’t thought about encountering non-brutes.

… Or I could just leak Coil’s identity.

It's not like I cared about the Unwritten Rules.

Now, what would the effects of releasing Coil’s identity be? Sure, the man could cause havoc within the PRT. Hell, he might even release the Empire’s name using a puppet accounting claiming to be me or someone else. Would he do that?

… Whether or not he makes havoc later, I needed to do all I could to cut away at his tendrils.

-VB-

If someone in the PRT ENE headquarters had to summarize this day, then they would have said two things.

"Director Piggot is pissed,” Battery hissed.

"It's a purge,” Assault agreed with a grim hum.

Dragon, called in to help as a trusted outsider, would have agreed with them. Nearly all of PRT ENE's digital systems had been backdoored and infiltrators and spies were getting discovered left and right.

What caused this controlled chaos was a simple message and a mundane compass that hadn't been so normal because a normal compass did not consistently point its arrow at the nearest criminal.

The message itself was simple as well.

It had the civilian name of Coil and the first names of all of the Wards and Protectorate ENE members barring only one wrong name.

It was enough to send the upper echelons of the PRT ENE and Protectorate ENE into a frenzy.

Civilian identities were safety nets for the stressed heroes. An out that let them release pent-up emotions that came from being celebrities, soldiers, and role models when most of them were ill-equipped to do any one of them.

To have their names shown so easily and clearly?

All of the Protectorate and Wards ENE were on high alert. They looked over their shoulders constantly and some were giving out from the added stress already.

Director Piggot grabbed their stresses and anxiety and funneled them into anti-corruption investigations, even the Wards. Though their names were out to someone out there that was obviously not a member of the PRT or the Protectorate, the device They got along with the message could at least help them.

It took a lot of testing but it worked. It only pointed to the nearest criminal and nothing more but it was some kind of enchanted tinkertech that worked flawlessly.

And by God, they purged their ranks with the fervor found in the desperate and wrathful.

The idea that one of the PRT's advisors was a villain also spurred the PRT on.

They had been at this “purge” for eight hours, a full shift, and expected to continue for another half a shift.

As for who sent the message…

Well, the message had been signed by an "Everyday Joe." Coincidentally, there was also a cape out there in the bay who went by Joe and also openly stated his disdain for the Unwritten Rules…

It was for this reason that he was labeled a priority target for capture and arrest, and was labeled a Thinker 3.

But then just a minute ago, Everyday Joe had gone and published Coil’s civilian identity not only on PHO but also on any site that did not have as great of a policy towards cape’s civilian identity.

Sure, on PHO, the moderators and the admins managed to crack down on the post quickly enough, but the problem was the other sites. Many others followed the same rules that PHO followed, but quite a few didn’t.

What happened since then was a political clusterfuck on the national level and a workplace clusterfuck on the local level.

Director Piggot was getting yelled at for allowing a villain to be part of the PRT, while she defended herself by stating again and again that he had been hired before she had been appointed the director of the PRT ENE branch. Of course, there was no protocol to MRI scan every single employee.

The other belligerent directors and opportunistic politicians didn’t care. All they saw was faults to point out and exploit.

Dragon wished people could cooperate when things were dire or were this merely the limitations of humanity? To feel joy at the sufferings of others?

Forced to defend herself constantly from outsiders, the director was less and less available to actually direct the investigation and removal of enemies.

Instead, this had gone to Armsmaster on top of his plethora of other duties.

This also cut into their tinkering session time, so Dragon now had a personal reason to not like “Joe.”