Munich responded.
The Arc Spire didn't go up in a public fireball. It caved in on itself, quiet and deliberate. It was much to Weiss' design to be a controlled destruction to destroy only his work and not the surrounding city. But with the destruction of the building, sirens wailed throughout Munich.
Those that were locals woke up in confusion or looked out their windows, wondering what was going on. However, Weiss' people were well trained into what to do. They stopped the people from leaving their homes, assuring them that the situation was being handled.
By the time Dagger and what was left of his squad hit street level, the city had already started turning hostile. It started with the streetlamps.
Much of Germany was wiped out in the war, so there was many old serviced lamps and lights that should have been left unattended. One would assume that many things would remain left unchecked in a Talon occupied zone. However, Weiss was better than the Talon he left.
Now, every one of those lamps snapped on at once. Not amber. Not municipal tired-yellow. Hospital white.
They hit with sterile, surgical clarity and turned the freight lots and loading alleys into operating tables. Then the lockdown kicked in.
Steel shutters crashed down over side alleys with pneumatic force. Barricade bollards punched up from the asphalt at intersections. High catwalks between warehouse roofs sealed with rolling blast doors, locking them out of overhead movement.
Weiss hadn't just built a tower alone. He'd built a jurisdiction that would avenge him should he inevitably fall. Mara slid behind an overturned forklift, chest heaving, shoulder banded in frost. "He's sealing the grid," she hissed.
Six swore. "Citywide?"
"Local first," Silas said, low. "Then outward, if we don't move."
A low mechanical hum rolled through the air like pressure. It vibrated in bone.
Brann looked up. "Aw, come on."
The blimp wasn't corporate-branded security. It wasn't sleek. It wasn't pretending to be a "public safety partner." It was ugly.
A matte-black slab of an airship drifted low over the industrial block, all angles and hard plating, stabilization thrusters whispering as it held station in the mist. A sensor rig hung off its belly like an eye on a stalk. Floodlights ringed the undercarriage in a fan. As it passed over the yard, those lights snapped on.
White beams swept down and cut the street into search grids.
"Down!" Dagger snapped.
They dropped, bodies slamming into oil-stained concrete, ducking behind pallets, derelict cargo lifters, stacks of rusted barrels. The light washed over where they'd been standing a second earlier and hung there, breathing slow and mechanical, then scanned left.
Silas sucked in a breath. "That's not off-the-shelf," he muttered. "That's wide-spectrum city sweep. Each street light it hits scans not only the light in front of it, but the surrounding area."
Vex didn't look away from the sky. "Means don't get caught in it."
The blimp hummed along on its slow patrol line, lights cutting trenches in the dark.
Dagger did a fast count.
Brann. Vex. Mara. Six. Silas. Ash. Two.
Pip was gone. Rook was gone.
Brann swallowed. "We gotta move."
He wasn't wrong.
Weapons fire still echoed down the block from the Spire side. Weiss's men were spreading out — controlled, not frantic. They were shouting clipped German: "Links! Sperren! Hauptziele nicht verlieren!" Circle them in. Seal. Don't lose primary targets.
Primary targets. Them. Weiss's people hadn't even seen Weiss die. They were still moving under his last command set. So how did they know who they were looking for?
He saw the first team of Weiss's remaining soldiers round the far corner of the machine yard. Slate-and-white armor. Tight harness rigs. Visors down. A group of three.
"Stay here." He ordered and the team obeyed. This required finesse and precision, something they lacked.
Weiss' men slowly surveyed the area, carefully checking every nook and cranny like they should be. Their search was through before moving on to the next area. However, no one would expect someone to be on the side of a building above them. As they walked past, Dagger dropped down, blade first as it pierced through the shoulder into the heart of the one covering their flank. He managed to let out a brief cry of surprise, which made the other two turn towards him.
Their lights shone brightly into Dagger's face, and if he was a novice, it would have thrown him off. However, where they were was implanted into Daggers mind as two flashes of light left his hand. Both men heads cock back as two more blades embed themselves into their skulls before they could pull their triggers. Their bodies fall to the ground with a thud.
Dagger motions for the team to come as he pulls the helmet off the first guy that was dispatched.
"Impressive, boss. Maybe if I wasn't all muscle I could move like that." Brann commented but Dagger ignored. He was too focused on what he was seeing when he placed the helmet over his mask.
The visor carried a glare-bright projection field with faces, crisp and clean, flickering in the corner like ID overlays.
His face, or rather his mask. Brann's. Vex's. Six's. Mara's. Silas's. Ash's. Two's.
TARGET: DAGGER
ELIMINATION PRIORITY: PRIMARY
TARGET: SUBJECT SIX
ELIMINATION PRIORITY: HIGH
TARGET: BRANN
TARGET: SUBJECT VEX
TARGET: SUBJECT MARA
TARGET: SUBJECT TWO
TARGET: SUBJECT SILAS
TARGET: SUBJECT ASH
He realized that he had steadily underestimated Weiss. While they were busy fending off his units, Dagger had mistaken Weiss inactiveness durring the initial fight to him admiring his team and their prowess. However, Weiss hadn't just watched them fight in his study. He'd scanned them. Even dead, the man was still hunting them.
And that was before the heavy shapes walked in behind the rifles.
Juggernauts.
Four of them this time.
Same frame as in the tower, two and a half meters of illegal omnic bulk, matte black plating reinforced along the torso. Shoulder mounts spun up twin gun pods with industrial whine. Optic strips burned cold white across blunt heads.
They stomped in a shoulder-wide wall, guns already spinning. The floodlights from the blimp found metal. That was the only warning they got.
"Split!" Dagger barked. "Don't bunch. Brann, left Juggernaut. Mara, freeze centerline. Vex with me. Ash, Six flank wide. Silas float. Two, stay on Brann!"
"On it!" Ash shouted, practically singing.
"On it," Six echoed weakly, left arm hanging, right hand clutching a stolen rifle.
Two blinked, like syncing. "Brann. I got Brann."
"Good man," Brann grunted.
Then the Juggernauts opened fire. Brann ran straight into it.
Because of course he did.
He slammed himself into the leftmost Juggernaut before it got full suppression posture set. Rounds ripped into him across the torso and arms. His body answered, the Meret serum under his skin surged, plating up in thick ripples. It looked like gold light under meat for half a second, and then it looked like armor.
He hit the Juggernaut shoulder-first and forced the gun arm up. The initial burst tore into empty air instead of Silas' spine.
Brann laughed, a ragged bark. "Yeah, look at me..."
The Juggernaut's other arm pistoned.
Brann ducked barely in time. The piston smash cratered the freight container behind him instead.
Ash howled something ecstatic and launched himself onto a Weiss trooper. He hit him mid-chest, knocked the rifle up, headbutted the visor, then went for the throat. Laughing. Always laughing.
"ASH, MOVE," Vex snapped.
"WORKIN' ON IT," Ash yelled back while knifing someone's thigh.
Vex didn't have time to babysit him. She was already in motion with Dagger, their movements synced in a way that had nothing to do with code and everything to do with repetition. She drove low at the line of Weiss troops, hands going for wrists and weapons.
Dagger slid in behind her, blade out.
He didn't aim for center mass. Armor ate center mass. He went for seams in their armor under the clavicle, between shoulder plate and chest rig, just inside the collar where pulse beats hard and fast. In, out, in, out. Quick, efficient, brutal. They were dropping every second. One down. Second on down. Third tried to pivot in desperation, rifle angling.
Six popped up from behind a pallet stack, teeth bared, and shot that one in the visor.
The visor shattered. The man dropped.
"Got you," Six breathed.
Silas flowed behind a Juggernaut.
He didn't try to outmuscle it. He couldn't. He went for weak architecture: the cable cluster under the spine plating. He slid under its firing line like spilled oil, hooked both hands into the small gap Mara had chilled brittle, and wrenched.
The Juggernaut spasmed.
"Mara!" Dagger barked.
She inhaled. Frost bloomed off her in a burst, racing across asphalt, up the nearest Juggernaut's legs, flash-freezing joints white.
The juggernaut vented heat in response, an ugly whoompf of near-scalding exhaust straight out of its torso, and the blast hit Brann point-blank.
Brann roared, voice breaking for the first time in something that sounded like real pain. He dropped to one knee, skin blistering, armor plating on his arms bubbling and peeling in wet sheets. Two saw Brann go down.
"BRANN!" he bellowed.
He tried to surge. His body answered wrong. He swung wide, off-balance, right leg lagging, right arm twitching out of time. He slammed shoulder-first into the Juggernaut's hip instead of its centerline. And the Juggernaut's auxiliary gun pod, the one Weiss's engineers had built into the lower chassis for close-quarters suppression, fired.
Point-blank. Into Two's skull. The impact was obscene. A single heavy concussive pop and half of Two's head simply wasn't there anymore. He dropped instantly.
"NO!" Brann howled, voice raw and cracking.
Two hit the ground and twitched.
Then, horrifyingly, started to move. The Meret started to do it's job. The ruin of his skull started regrowing in a frantic, sloppy rush, sealing the breach, closing the machine so it could keep breathing. Flesh bubbled over shattered bone. New scaffolding grew. But his eye, the left one, was wide and empty. His mouth worked, opening and closing on a wet static gasp.
But you could see there were no light there. No awareness. No Two.
"Boss!" Brann yelled, voice almost breaking. "Boss, he's..."
"Drag him or leave him!" Dagger snapped.
Brann stared at him like he'd been slapped. Then grabbed Two under the arms, hauled him up like dead weight, and stumbled backward.
Dagger didn't let himself look longer than that. Their list of problems wasn't over yet. A dull thunk-thunk-thunk overhead. The blimp had stopped drifting and it was hovering now, almost directly above the yard, floodlights raking slow patterns.
A hatch irised open along its underside, and a new Juggernaut dropped. It hit the street like an artillery shell and sent a shockwave through the asphalt. The blast knocked Six straight off his feet and bounced Mara sideways into a stack of rusted drums. She hit with a hiss, one hand braced on the ground, sucking in fast, shallow breaths.
"Six!" Vex barked.
"I'm okay," Six gasped, which was a lie. His left arm now hung useless, limp from shoulder down. Bone poked under skin where it shouldn't. The new Juggernaut's optics strip shifted from cold white to a focused glare, and it turned directly toward Dagger. Its HUD reflection washed across its own faceplate just long enough for Shawn to catch it.
TARGET: DAGGER
PRIORITY: 1
EXECUTION DIRECTIVE: IMMEDIATE
Of course. He ran towards it. The Juggernaut swung. He hit it first as he had no choice. He slammed into its weapon arm right as it spun up, shoving the muzzle away from Mara. It answered with a piston strike that caught him in the ribs.
His vision flashed white as pain exploded. Something cracked hard inside his chest. His breath left in a grunt as the world tunneled at the edges. However, he didn't stop.
Vex came in low under him. She didn't go for the gun. She went for the Juggernaut's knee. She jammed both hands up into the joint and screamed through her teeth as plating under her skin surged to support the force.
Metal shrieked.
The Juggernaut's leg snapped sideways. It toppled, slamming down hard enough to crack the concrete. Its arm lashed out in reflex and caught Vex across the collar and shoulder. Her body folded, as she flew backward and hit the wheel well of an old hauler with a sound that made Ash flinch.
"VEX!" Ash shouted.
Vex didn't get up. At a glance, Dagger could see that she was breathing. Good. That was all Shawn let himself register.
He powered forward, vision stuttering in and out through the ribs, through the pain, through the ringing in his skull, and drove his blade up under the Juggernaut's head plating while it was down.
The knife sank into joints, not armor, straight into systems as Dagger prayed he didn't have to reveal his electrical abilities. The Juggernaut spasmed, optics strip flickering. It seized once then stopped.
"Go!" Dagger barked, voice ragged now. "East. Move. MOVE!"
"Boss," Brann snarled, Two draped over his shoulder like dead weight, "you coming or what?"
"I'll get Vex," Dagger said.
Brann hesitated a fraction of a second, face twisted with fury and confusion and something like grief. Then he nodded sharply, turned, and stumbled off after Silas and Mara and Six, Ash at his flank, hauling Two's twitching body.
They peeled off into the break between the freight stacks, toward the old machine yard fence line. The blimp's lights swung, hunting.
Dagger ran to Vex. Her face was mottled grey with shock. Her right arm lay at an angle that said "not attached correctly anymore." Her eyes were open, but unfocused for half a beat.
"Hey," he said, kneeling.
Her gaze snapped into him that was fast, hard, angry. "Not dying in a yard," she rasped.
"Good," he said.
He slid an arm under her and lifted.
She sucked a breath through her teeth, face going paper-white. "Careful, please."
"You bit Brann when he went 'careful, please,'" he said.
"I'm evolving," she muttered.
Sirens grew louder. Not Talon internal alarms.
City sirens. Munich. Whatever's left of the cops out here. Weiss's system would've flagged the area as "containment breach," and the city, which had been taught, by money, to listen to him, was responding.
If municipal forces rolled in now, they would turn them over to Weiss' men. It wouldn't be a fight. It'd be erasure.
He followed the others' trail, banged-open service gate, boot smears, blood streaks. His ribs screamed with each step as he now started to heal as he carried Vex, who was taking much longer to heal.
They hit river edge fast.
The Isar at night was cold and black and fast under the industrial zone, and Weiss had built high flood-barrier walls along the stretch behind the Spire to keep prying eyes and rival crews off his docks. Ten feet of reinforced composite and steel mesh, topped with ugly anti-climb barbs. Not something you just hopped.
Unless you knew the break. Which Silas knew.
He'd already got Brann there. Brann knelt, heaving, Two slung limp over his shoulder. Six crouched nearby, white-faced and shaking, left arm useless, breathing in quick, panicked sips. Mara was on her knees, hands braced on the concrete, pale frost still smoking off her shoulders. Ash paced, jittering, blood dripping off his chin, laugh gone, mouth set.
Silas was at the wall, both hands dug under a bent panel of composite that someone, him, probably, beforehand, had already weakened along a welded seam. He glanced over his shoulder. "Through here."
Brann glared at the gap. "We ain't all fitting through that."
"We're smaller than we think when we want to live," Silas said pleasantly.
Brann bared his teeth. "You start sounding like Cain when you get calm like that."
"Cain's not this elegant," Silas said.
"Less talking," Mara breathed. "More leaving."
Brann grumbled something, then shoved Two first, bodily ramming his twitching mass through the gap like shoving a rolled carpet under a low rail. Ash ducked after them with a hiss. Six stumbled, bit back a sob, and let Silas hook him by the good arm and slide him through. Mara followed, teeth gritted, frost trailing her palms as she dragged herself forward.
Brann jammed himself halfway through, metal popping and scraping as his too-wide shoulders forced the weakened composite to bend.
Shawn arrived with Vex just as Brann snarled and yanked himself the rest of the way.
"Boss," Brann panted from the other side. "C'mon."
Vex tried to tense. "Put me down, I can..."
"You can't," Shawn said softly.
Her jaw clenched. She didn't argue. The blimp's light swept lower.
Boots slammed concrete behind them. Voices, German shouting, getting closer: "DA IST ER! DAGGER! NICHT VERLIEREN!"
There was no time to argue, no time to patch, no time to pull anyone aside and explain.
So Shawn didn't. He shifted Vex in his grip, braced her weight against the wall, and leaned close to her ear.
Her breath hitched. "What," she whispered.
His voice dropped so low only she could hear it.
"I'm sorry."
She frowned. Confused. "For wh..."
He jabbed. Quick. Surgical.
His knife slid in under her jaw, up through soft tissue, hitting the brainstem clean and fast. No stumble. No mess. Just a shudder and silence.
Vex's eyes went wide for half a second.
Then they went empty. Her body jerked once in his arms. Then went slack.
He caught her, held her weight, lowered her instead of letting her crumple, and exhaled through his teeth. The failsafe.
Cyanide.
Introduce it to a Meret body and the adaptation chain crashed instantly, all those hungry self-repair processes seizing. The body didn't shut down on contact. It didn't die on taste. It just… lost its edge. Went soft. Helpless. And for just long enough to make a choice final, a single, precise strike ended them clean and without the serum throwing them back at you as a screaming animal.
He carried it on him on this mission, coating his blade in it before killing Vex. They would never get the chance to wake up confused, mind scrambled, like Two.
He'd seen all he needed to on this mission. The Meret could give them permanent upgrades, making them have powers if they were lucky with their adaptations. Based on the personalities, Meret could make them walking demigods. There was no guarantee that the implant in their spine couldn't be taken out and they could heal it back. This serum, was too dangerous to continue to allow to exist. Shawn had to clean up before it became a problem. Meaning...
And no one could ever use them against him or Overwatch. No one would ever be a Meret soldier again as long as Shawn was here.
He dragged Vex's body to the side of the alley, propped her in the shadows between rusted drums, and let her head fall forward like she'd collapsed from blood loss.
From the other side of the wall, Brann snarled, "Boss! MOVE!"
"Coming," Shawn called.
He crossed the alley in three long strides, grabbed Six by the neck with his free hand where Six had just barely crawled under the fence bend, hauled him up with too-strong ease, and leaned in under the noise, under the shouting, under the panic.
Six looked up at him through pain-glossed eyes, panting. "Boss?"
Dagger's voice stayed level. "Listen, it's nothing personal," he whispered.
Six's eyes widened. And in that brief flicker there was understanding. Real understanding. Six was fast enough in the head to read tone. He got it.
"Nah," Six whispered back, almost smiling through a broken mouth. "Yeah. Okay."
Dagger slit his throat. Six's body jolted once, quietly. Then went still.
He slid Six's body the rest of the way under the bent composite, left him on the far side in the weeds under the flood.
Ash turned back just in time to see Six slump.
"Ay.... Six?" he whispered.
Shawn didn't answer.
Ash stepped toward him, confused, about to speak.
Shawn caught him by the jaw. "Close your eyes," he said softly.
Ash blinked. "Boss, what..."
Shawn moved. Ash didn't suffer.
He hit like he'd hit Vex with a clean, fast, base of the skull hit, that same little pulse of poison he could dump through skin, just enough to drop the Meret engine, to let the blade end it. Ash's eyes went glassy mid-word.
Shawn eased him down next to Six, laid him like he'd bled out, like he'd passed from shock. Brann's back was still turned, still shoving Two through the gap, yelling. Mara had her forehead pressed to the cold concrete, breathing in ragged pulls. Silas was watching the alley mouth, cool and alert. No one saw.
Brann hauled Two's spasming weight through the bent panel and staggered upright, panting. "Boss!" His eyes were wet and furious now. He wasn't crying, Brann didn't cry, but the edges were there. "Let's go!"
Dagger stepped through the break last.
He didn't touch Brann. Not yet.
Brann wasn't down. Brann was still moving. Brann was still useful. Brann, burned and blistered, arms split and leaking and already trying to heal, jaw clenched, dragging what was left of Two like a promise, Brann wasn't breaking here. Dagger would respect that and let Brann finish what he started.
Two… wasn't Two anymore. He twitched in Brann's grip like a malfunctioning machine cross-wired into meat.
Dagger could deal with that after he got them river-side.
They dropped down the bank on the far side of the floodwall into cold dark scrub and trash, muffled at last from the floodlights and most of the city line of fire. The Isar ran black and fast at their feet, thick with runoff, loud enough to cover their breathing.
The air tasted like metal and winter. Brann collapsed on his knees in the mud, chest heaving, Two still clutched. Mara slumped beside him, hands shaking from cold-backlash.
Silas crouched in the reeds, head tilted, listening for pursuit.
Dagger stood.
For a moment, he let the night sit around them. Let the roar of the river fill the space where voices would've gone.
Then he turned to Brann.
"Look at me," Shawn said quietly.
Brann dragged his eyes up. They were fever-bright. Smeared with soot, ice crusting where Mara's frost had nicked him, arms torn bloody from the Juggernaut's vent-wash. Fury and shock and grief all tangled.
"What," Brann growled.
"You listen to me," Dagger said, voice low, even. "From here on, it's going to get worse before it gets better. You hear me?"
Brann let out a humorless bark. "Worse than this?"
"Yes," Shawn said.
Brann laughed once, ragged.
Shawn stepped in. He did it like a mercy.
Brann's eyes widened, anger spiking into instinct, hand starting to come up in a defensive swing. Shawn was faster.
He pressed his blade to the back of Brann's neck where the spinal implant sat.
Brann snarled. "The hell are y...."
Shawn dumped it. The dose was smaller, Brann was running hotter than the others, more plated, metabolism in full burn, but it was enough. The cyanide kick hit Brann's bloodstream like liquid ice.
Brann's body seized.
Not like Cain's shock, not like forced obedience paralysis. This was different. His eyes went slack, rage freezing mid-swing. For half a second, his whole frame loosened. Shawn slid his blade clean between vertebrae, straight into brainstem. Brann exhaled.
It wasn't even a sound. More like air leaving him for the last time. His body slumped forward, heavy, that impossible strength gone all at once.
Mara's head snapped up. "What—"
She never finished.
Shawn moved.
Her body temperature was still dropped from overuse. She was shaking, depleted, barely upright. He caught her by the jaw, tilted her head back, whispered, "Relax," into her ear, and slid the blade up under the hinge of her jaw into the soft place at the base of the skull. Her breath hitched.
Steam fogged in the cold.
Then she went still.
Silas turned, eyes narrowing. "Ah," he said softly. "So that's the shape of you."
Shawn met his eyes.
Silas didn't flinch. "Figures," he muttered. "Cain was never gonna get to keep us."
"No one was going to get to keep you guys. In fact, Meret is about to be scrapped when I return." Shawn said quietly.
Silas's mouth quirked. "So it seems that I've made a mistake. I thought I was going to make a difference in the world."
"And you did. But in the end, you weren't going to be able to decide what difference you would get to make. I'm just making sure that you guys won't be able to do something you'd always regret."
Silas almost smiled. "Hah. That's almost sweet."
Shawn touched his throat.
Silas didn't fight.
He let out a long breath like relief. "Make it clean, would you?"
"It will be," Shawn said.
Silas nodded. "Figure you'd say that."
He closed his eyes. Shawn made it clean. That left Two.
Two twitched in the mud, mouth working in that awful animal glitch, eyes blown and empty. Not dead. Not living right, either. Something else wearing his skin.
Shawn crouched, looking at him.
Two's head lolled to one side. His mouth opened. A wet, broken sound bubbled out. Nothing inside it but static.
Shawn sighed, very quietly.
He laid one hand against Two's temple, exactly where the regrown plating was still thin and wet.
"Hey," Shawn said softly. "Rest."
There was no flicker of understanding. Just the sound again. Shawn slid the blade in. He did not let Two suffer.
Then it was just Shawn. Alone in the scrub by the river.
The Isar rushed black and cold at his feet, throwing white noise up against the city sirens in the distance. The blimp's floods still swept somewhere above the rooftops on the far side of the wall, painting long hard arcs over corrugated steel and barbed wire. Weiss's men shouted to each other in hard, clipped voices, still sweeping, still hunting targets wearing faces they didn't understand.
Weiss was ash. The Arc Spire was dust as well. Munich was under localized lockdown.
Shawn wiped his blade off on his shredded coat. Blood, theirs or Weiss's, streaked into the river mud and smeared away. He exhaled once, steady.
Then he touched two fingers to the throat mic inside his mask and opened Cain's channel.
Cain answered on the first pulse.
"Report," Cain said.
Shawn stared out over the black water. His voice was steady. Cold. Contained.
"Target Weiss neutralized," he said. "Arc Spire purged itself. Data denied to all external actors. Structural collapse in progress. City grid contained, but I breached. Confirm extraction pathway available."
Cain was silent for half a breath. Shawn could almost hear him thinking in that silence, recalculating outcomes, rewriting cause and effect in real time.
Then: "Casualties?"
Shawn's jaw flexed under the mask.
"Heavy," he said.
"How heavy," Cain said.
Shawn watched the cold river slide past in the dark.
"All of them," he said.