Capítulo 1276: 37
Abjuration 4.2
On Thursday morning, the day that in canon would have seen Dinah kidnapped and the Undersiders rob the Brockton Bay Central Bank, our latest exploits had been published to PHO and quickly spread through the news as well.
The vast majority of the commentary was extremely positive. Yesterday, there had even been quite a significant percentage of people criticizing Panacea for not healing anymore, but once the news of us destroying one-third of the ABB's operations came out, the criticism was overwhelmed by people cheering our success.
It was also worth noting that the Undersiders had disappeared. Their former base was empty and I couldn't find Lisa, Brian, or Alec.
Coil's information network found Rachel in a dog shelter, and just like in canon, she had also demolished one of Hookwolf's dogfighting rings.
I was a bit annoyed that I couldn't keep tabs on Tattletale, but it couldn't be helped. In this timeline, Coil never contacted her about the bank job, and because I refused to answer any of Tattletale's calls the last couple of days, she must have gotten spooked.
I also couldn't have Agate track her all day, as I had way more important things for Agate to do.
The only saving grace was that I knew where Brian's apartment was, and his sister Aisha was still within my monitoring, as she hadn't triggered yet.
However, I could contact any of the Undersiders on my own initiative…and I knew I could have leverage over Brian through Aisha as long as he wanted to take custody of her. He would need my help as Coil's replacement to handle the legal issues.
As part of the plan to handle Bakuda, Amelia agreed to use her powers on Coil to turn him temporarily mentally hampered enough to talk and give me the rest of the information needed to take over all of his assets and deal with any fail safes he had in place.
With that, I did a full review of everything I took over and found that I had $70m in personal direct liquid assets—cash and marketable securities, and estimated $150m value in non-liquid assets—real estate, shares in private unlisted businesses, trusts, etc. Through these non-liquid assets, especially the businesses, I also had access and control over even more funds in the form of operating lines, loans, working capital and operating liquid assets that were part of the businesses' general operations. For example, one business had an equity value of $9m, but had $23m in assets under control and $14m in debts owed.
As with any business, the structures could get quite complicated, so I couldn't simply put a number to exactly how much money was under control. There were businesses that were clearly meant to make profit consistently and legally, whose value could be extracted to Calvert's personal funds. There were some that were meant to launder funds into different accounts, without making much profit, or even showing a loss on paper.
Then there were businesses like Fortress Construction and East Pine Security, whose purpose was to use their actual operations to disguise other activities. Fortress Construction was used for building the secret base while publicly building Endbringer shelters, prisons, foreign military bases for the government, high security corporate buildings, etc. East Pine Security was a licensed private armed security company and weapons dealer. It contracted with the US government for foreign deployments and also corporate interests in low civilization countries. A number of the mercenaries at base were actually on East Pine's payroll as well, and went out on legitimate security jobs from time to time.
This was how Calvert produced legitimate paper trails to cover the things he was doing. If nothing else, I had to respect him for his talent and his dedication. With this kind of money, there was no chance of mercenaries betraying him—unless he spent it all on city revitalization, which is what happened in canon.
It was all very impressive. And now it was all mine.
In fact, given the way he had things set up, I was quite sure if he simply took some more loans out, he still could have easily paid his mercenaries enough money to keep their loyalty. But I could understand why things happened the way they did. It didn't really matter who had more money or if Calvert could pay triple—by the time the betrayal happened, the traitor mercs were committed to follow through.
The fact was, the moment the mercs decided to betray Coil, they knew that even if they went back to Coil, they wouldn't be trusted again. Even if Coil promised to pay them triple, he was just as likely to get rid of them afterwards.
During the late night, I had arranged to start sending resources to Bakuda. In the morning, her new access to far better materials and was already bearing fruit. Whereas she had been limited to making bombs out of household items before, I was able to send her high quality refined chemicals and processed raw materials precisely to her specifications.
Unlike almost every other Tinker out there, Bakuda was able to seemingly mass manufacture her bombs. Canonically, she had been able to install hundreds of bombs in all her forced recruits over a matter of days. Perhaps it was because she made consumable items instead of equipment, but whatever the reason, her output once given more proper resources to work with, instead of relying on converting household products, simply skyrocketed.
One might imagine that with all the assets I seized from the ABB, Bakuda would have a good amount of money to work with on her own. The difficulty for her was that most of those assets were tied up in maintaining the gang itself. Even if bombs could force loyalty, she had to spend money to make the bombs in the first place, so for all those old business employees it was better to just keep paying them. She also lacked the right channels to secretly acquire the substances she needed. Coil on the other hand, had plenty of connections to get whatever he needed and cover his trail.
Now with my help, not only was she mass producing chemical and kinetic explosives, she was mass producing smaller bombs and grenades with exotic effects, if her willingness to give me these bombs was any indication.
I wasn't stupid enough to keep them around me where she might remotely detonate them, even if I was clearly beneficial to her right now, so I stored them in Earth M where the signals couldn't possibly reach.
I also gave her intel on the movements and operations of the Merchants and the E88, allowing her to use her own soldiers to launch counterattacks.
I even fed her patrol routes and warnings about PRT and Protectorate responses. While Piggot did upgrade their security and started feeding false information to Coil's old moles, some intensive spying from Agate allowed me to obtain their new passwords, protocols to get into their networks, and she also simply watched in their console rooms to see where their forces were being moved.
Now in full command of Coil's forces, I simultaneously launched my own attacks on the E88.
O O O
"All units in position," Major Heroux reported.
"Begin," I commanded.
"Roger that."
I saw on my console screen from multiple angles the view of the battle.
One mercenary came out of cover on a nearby rooftop and fired an RPG at the entrance to the warehouse that was an E88 weapons cache.
The door was blasted open, and yells came from inside.
The mercenary with the RPG took cover again and quickly left the scene, returning to the armoured van that served as his team's mobile HQ, parked at a nearby alleyway.
The rest of his team emerged from the alley immediately and rushed the warehouse. Their laser Tinkertech rifles were already firing, smashing through the wall of the warehouse, providing cover for their run.
Nobody dared to come out of the warehouse while they rushed forward, and they lobbed grenades in through the holes, before taking cover behind the parts of the wall that weren't destroyed.
A series of screams could be heard as the pain grenades exploded, then a flashbang went off inside.
The visored and armoured group of six stormed inside and started firing.
Confused and stunned by the pain grenades and flashbang, the E88 members out in the open were easily subdued with rubber electroshock bullets. Those under cover attempted to shoot back with their pistols but achieved nothing against the armour my men were wearing.
It wasn't long before the whole warehouse was taken, and my men began to seize the things and men inside. A cargo truck pulled up on the street and parked in front of the warehouse door.
On another screen I saw Stormtiger and Cricket, two of E88's capes rushing over, along with a group of their foot soldiers. Without any prompting from me, the sniper who was watching them informed Major Heroux, who ordered teams 2 and 3 to get into position to support team 1.
Team 1 stopped what they were doing and took cover inside the warehouse, preparing to camp the incoming capes.
The E88 group came on the scene just as the truck seemingly began driving away. They started shooting with assault rifles at the tires when flash bangs came out of the warehouse onto the street where the E88 group was and they were forced to cover their eyes.
Team 2 emerged from an alleyway in front of them and started shooting rubber bullets.
Stormtiger sent blasts of wind at the incoming fire to deflect it, protecting his group. That was when half of team 2 switched to laser fire targeting Stormtiger, which was unaffected by the wind. Cricket and Stormtiger both effectively dodged the laser fire, but the rubber bullets got though Stormtiger's wind protection while he was distracted trying to dodge.
Several E88 members were hit and went down.
Cricket dashed forward, dodging everything at high speed, intent on taking down Team 2, when a black van pulled up thirty meters behind Stormtiger's group, and Team 3 deployed, lobbing over grenades and opening fire.
Stormtiger reacted quickly and used his wind manipulation to deflect the grenades and gunfire again, but then Team 1 emerged from inside of the warehouse and opened fire as well.
Caught in a pincer, the E88 cape was nearly hit from behind when he spun and his wind blast smashed those bullets aside as well. However, he couldn't protect himself and his foot soldiers, who all went down.
Meanwhile, Team 2 retreated backwards while maintaining fire on Cricket and throwing a canister.
Cricket recognized it as some kind of explosive and dodged backwards.
In the next moment, the canister exploded, flash freezing an area nearly twenty meters in radius, the the edge of it just barely catching Cricket, whose back was covered in frost. She screamed in pain and fell, then two members of Team 2 suddenly pivoted and threw wide range time slow bombs. Cricket wasn't fast enough to dodge the mass area attack while partially frozen.
Team 2 fully re-engaged, firing a hail of rubber electroshock bullets. Although the bullets were slowed down in the affected time slow area as well, because the firing was from outside the bubble, the difference was effectively multiplying the relative rate of fire, and giving Team 2 the extra time to coordinate fire in a way that made it impossible to dodge by covering all of the space around Cricket.
She was inevitably hit and went down.
The time slow bombs were temporary, and when the effect expired, the area was back to normal, with the exclusion of the ice that now covered the street.
Stormtiger was relentlessly deflecting a storm of bullets and dodging lasers from two directions as he retreated into the air from the obviously lost battle.
My men finished taking everything in the warehouse and rounded up all the E88 members including Cricket, before escaping. By the time the PRT arrived, they were long gone.
O O O
Because I was acting as "Coil", these captured criminals weren't handed over to the PRT. Instead, I quietly moved them all to a secluded space on Earth M with the assistance of Major Heroux. With access to Coil's equipment, I was now able to make much more effective restraints instead of relying primarily on the stockpile of super sedative Amelia had made.
I carefully managed several more minor attacks on the E88. Each time my men rapidly moved in and left before the PRT could respond.
Aside from the one battle where I'd captured Cricket, my men also had a very short engagement with Krieg, Victor, and Othala.
If I wanted to, I believed I could have won that battle with Bakuda's bombs, but I gave the order to retreat as soon as the capes were on site.
A big frost bomb covered the street in ice and delayed them enough for my men to make their escape.
These skirmishes allowed Bakuda to regain her footing and start fighting back. It also built up her trust towards the alliance.
Meanwhile, Cricket and the sixteen unpowered E88 prisoners I acquired would serve well for my magical experiments.
While there was little that could be done with Cricket or her power for now, I needed living and sentient test subjects for a particular spell I was working on in between managing my army.
O O O
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