[???] New World

Point Green, Massachusetts.
Global Occult Coalition Operations Base, Eastern Seaboard.
0855L, August 24th, 2021.

Luna Varriano ambled into the briefing room, her claws clicking softly on the linoleum as she walked. Levy was there first, as usual, looking deceptively human. Verdant had suggested getting a human form with regular-looking eyes, but he'd insisted on visibly draconic ones and hiding them with thaumaturgy when needed instead. Luna understood why. She had done the same herself, even if she didn't use that body very often.

"Hey," he greeted her.

"Hey yourself," she thrummed, "ready for our big day?"

"I think I have test anxiety."

"And here I thought I was supposed to be the anxious one."

"Honestly, you were. Before, well..." In lieu of words, Levy blinked sideways, nictating membranes sliding over his eyes. They'd all decided to take advantage of everything that Verdant had been willing to offer, outside of a new place to call home.

"Scales helped a lot," she mused. "I wasn't exactly a shrinking violet before, though. You think the colonel's going to be comfier if I put on skin for this?"

"I don't think she minds scales, but unless you want to cast a spell or talk through the speakers..." Having human-like vocal cords in a dragon form was possible, she'd been told, it just wasn't ideal. Besides, it was sometimes fun to play the unthinking beast.

But today, she could tolerate putting on the monkey suit. "Fair." A flicker of silver reformed her into something more human as Morrison and Fletcher came in.

"Hey killers. Colonel not here yet?" Morrison asked, falling into his seat with a thud.

"I dunno, maybe she's got a grey suit on," Luna joked.

"Pretty sure we'd still see her if she did," Fletcher replied. She was understating it, severely. They'd played out a few scenarios with their own kit, and while they weren't omniscient, their new senses came damn close.

"Speak of the devil, actually," Morrison said, <and she will appear. [VID]>

<One of these days the base sysadmin's going to have your head,> Luna replied, looking at the CCTV footage of Colonel Robertson coming around the corner.

<They can have it, I have extras,> he replied, standing to attention with the other three.

"At ease," Robertson said, briskly walking into the room. "How are my favorite little PTEs doing today?"

"As scaled and fire-breathing as ever, ma'am," Levy replied.

"Good. I have a bit of a bomb to drop on you all today."

"Ma'am?"

"Let me make my point, Levy. You'll see this everywhere in about a month, but we know now, so you're finding out now. I assume you're all aware of KTE-6500?"

The team glanced at each other. They knew, of course. The whole world behind the Veil knew. Magic was dying, thaumaturgy, the anomalous as a whole, everything. But not Assessment Team 535, and not the worlds on the other side of the Shallow Ocean. As best anyone in the Coalition could figure, the universes through the Ocean were fully separate from the prime universe, a literally infinite expanse of other prime universes. What to do about all that was less clear. Verdant had floated the possibility of simply moving... but there was no guarantee that 6500 wouldn't follow them.

"Heavy topic for 0900, ma'am," Morrison said.

"It's a bit of a heavy situation. A decision's been made. We know what's causing it, and the Council's decided how we're going to fix it."

"...ma'am?" Luna asked.

"It's the Veil."

"Ma'am, are you—" Fletcher was saying.

The colonel cut her off. "No. I'm not fucking with you. I have authenticated documents and recordings from the Council to prove it. Use access code nine-alpha-nine-omega-nine on the fileserver, I know you can all go through it faster than I can."

Luna pulled up the files.

COUNCIL OF 108 - CONCLAVE
28 AUG 2021
FOR IMMEDIATE DISTRIBUTION
LIST: DL_GOC_ALL; DL_GOC_ORDERS; DL_COUNCIL_ALL
AUTH HASH: 6A130ED8B7A8BE1EA94C124BB7E87E78
Council Directive 20210828-1 (66Y / 42N)

All Coalition personnel are to immediately begin preparations
for the total cessation of the Veil Protocol on 1500Z, 27 September
2021 as a neutralization measure for KTE-6500. All active or 
planned Second Mission operations are to be ended as immediately
as possible without risk to intelligent beings.

This Directive serves as formal notification of release from
SECURITY NON-DISCLOSURE GEAS A ("THE VEIL") for all personnel,
regardless of their perception of this notice. 

As of 1500Z, 27 September 2021, the Fivefold Mission will be
amended as follows...

Luna's mouth dropped open, and hers wasn't the only one.

"Holy fuck," Fletcher said, dumbly.

"I'll give you a few moments," Robertson said, "but I need to know now if you have any complaints."

They kept reading. "Full veilbreak... formal recognition of nonhumans... what the hell's the Foundation going to do?" Levy asked.

"They're straight-up disbanding. Whatever's left is getting reformed into some sort of paranormal education and security organization."

"Oh, gods." Luna made a pained groan.

"What? Isn't this a good—" Levy started.

Luna interrupted, "How many skipper agents and MTFs are gonna get decommed and toss their folks into unemployment? I mean, how many of ours are? Hells, some of the Strike people were already pissed enough about including Coalition nonhumans under Fivefold Mission objectives."

"Oh, fuck me," Levy whispered. "This is going to be bad, isn't it?"

Colonel Robertson nodded. "I heard from Rasmussen half an hour ago. He's already making some uncomfortable noises about his oath of enlistment, and we both found out an hour ago."

Luna scoffed. "Of course he would. The good colonel never met a parathreat he wouldn't drop a JDAM on. Asshole made sure to let me know personally that he didn't want me on the team."

Fletcher blinked. "...before or after February?"

"Before." She hadn't wanted to join Strike, but the hostility wasn't what you wanted to see.

Robertson interrupted before they could continue. "Look. You all understand the problem. I need to ask you some questions, and I can't afford to dance around the subject."

Levy nodded. "Shoot, ma'am."

"Is anyone here not on board with Veilfall?"

Four heads shook. "I'd like to be able to visit my mom without lying to her about what I do at work," Luna said. "...or how I transitioned. Jesus, that'll be a story."

"Would open up my dating pool a lot," Fletcher mused.

The colonel nodded. "You willing to shoot at other boys in blue helmets?"

Morrison winced. "Jesus, ma'am." The GOC didn't really wear the UN-blue helmets, but they all knew what she meant.

"It's..." Robertson sagged, a tired expression Varriano had never seen on her CO before. "I'm sorry. It's just a precaution, and I'm overreacting."

Luna shrugged with her wings, abruptly realized this was the wrong body for that, then shrugged with her shoulders instead. "We all remember Brussels. Easier doing it again if they're making a choice."

"Not sure I want to remember that. But, yeah. If it comes down to it..." Morrison trailed off.

Levy spoke hesitantly, "If it's defending civvies? Sure. Parathreats? Depends on circumstances, but... yes. Like Varriano said, we've done it before."

Robertson looked to the last of the four. "Fletcher?"

"Only thing I'd feel is the recoil, ma'am."

"Okay, let's turn down the intensity a little bit." Fletcher grinned in response. "In happier news, you're back on the regular training roster. For as long as we still have one of those. I'd update your resumes, if I were you."

"Are we disbanding like the Foundation?" Levy asked.

"Not quite. We'll still need military force. But how much force we'll need if we don't have to conceal anything? I'd expect cuts."

"Roger," he replied.

"But, the official reason you're here today is for your readiness assessment. You just passed the psych one, as far as I care. The practical one will be a bit trickier, because we've cooked up a real fucker of a field problem for you..."

Point Green, Massachusetts.
Global Occult Coalition Operations Base, Eastern Seaboard.
2210L, September 28th, 2021.
Veilfall, T+12 hours.

Luna tucked her head up against her side, curled up in a giant pit of cushions. Along with everyone else on the planet, they'd been staring at the news all day: the Veil was lifting. A Foundation guy— Daniels, she'd seen the dossier —had talked at the UN, shortly followed by Director Fine. The Foundation was dead, but lived on in Vanguard. Conveniently, Vanguard had most of the same personnel, and everyone was a little too busy asking about the basics of the paranormal to ask whether Vanguard was really any different than their predecessor. There was someone doing thaumaturgy on CNN, a bunch of talking heads trying to talk about the toaster, the casual disclosure of SCP-113, which would have obviated the insane ritual she did to swap her gender, a documentary on Three Portlands, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, a call from her mom.

She shifted back to something with human vocal cords before she picked up the phone.

"Hey honey..."

"Hi mom. You've been watching the news?"

"Yeah. It's... it's a lot. How are you handling it?"

"Well... better than you might expect. I kind of have some more stuff to drop on you, if you feel up for it?" Her heart was racing, like her mother was going to suddenly decide that the three-ton dragoness with a digital mind on the other end of the phone wasn't her daughter anymore.

"For you? Of course. What's wrong?"

"Uh. Well, I'm a witch, I guess? And also kinda lied about everything I've done for the last eight years?"

She paused for an uncomfortably long amount of time. "...are you happy?"

"More than you could believe, mom."

"Then I'm happy for you! So, spill the gossip. What have you been up to?"

A measure of relief washed over her. "Gods, where do I even start. Um. When I got out of the Army, I got recruited by the GOC, the UN occult guys you saw on the news. Their, uh, health plan is magic. Literally."

"You mean...? I mean, I didn't want to pressure you with transition but—"

"They offered me something called retrocausal identity reassignment, which is... well, complicated. But I don't take hormones, they swapped me down to the DNA."

"...that would explain some things, in retrospect. I did think you got surgery awfully quickly..."

"Yeah... sorry for snapping at you about that back then. I wanted to talk about it, but I literally couldn't. Like, magically couldn't. There's a thing called a geas—"

"It's okay, honey. So I guess that means you're not a physicist, then?"

"Well, I was going to be, but that procedure made me a magic-user, somehow. Nobody really knows how. So they sent me to ICSUT, a thaumaturgy college. MIT was just a cover story. Sorry."

"Oooh... I bet none of my friends had their kids go to wizard school."

"Yeah. Probably not."

"So what do you do, then?"

"I'm, uh, basically a man in black. Woman in black? We clean up paranormal stuff before it hurts anyone. Or used to. It's... a little weird now. I, um," she took a breath, "I got turned into a dragon."

"A dragon?"

"Yeah. It's complicated." Her heart was pounding, more than she'd ever been able to get it to do through exercise.

"...did you want to get turned into a dragon?"

"Yeah. A lot."

"Well, honestly... aside from not knowing that could happen, I'm not surprised. You always loved dragons as a kid! How big are you? Can you fly? Do you—"

She felt the stress drain out of her immediately. "Easy, mom. I can, um, shapeshift. I look mostly human right now. Normally I'm about thirty feet long, tip to tail, and yes, I can fly. It's really nice."

"Ooh... what color? Can you send me a picture?"

"Sort of a dark silver. And, yes, but it's a little tricky because I was very secret until, well, today, and I couldn't take selfies, and also my phone screen doesn't work with claws—"

She was interrupted by her work phone going off.

"Shit, mom, work's calling on the other line. I have to take this."

"Okay! I love you, Luna, go save the world."

"Love you too, mom."

Luna glared at her work cell. No caller ID, as usual. She took a deep breath to calm her nerves.

"Great timing. Who's this?"

Colonel Robertson's voice answered her. "Scramble mission. Get your black suit on, Levy will brief you while you're suiting up."

Shit. "Roger," she replied, the stress of coming out again vaporizing with newfound urgency. Luna stood and stretched, her human form never quite as comfortable as her draconic one.

Well, "human" form. She'd wanted as much kit in her non-dragon form as Verdant had been willing to give her, and the warship had obliged with glee. She wasn't quite a warform— those were too superhuman for the warships to feel comfortable donating, apparently —but she was very, very far from baseline.

She went down the mental checklist: underwear, jeans, ballistic t-shirt, socks, sneakers, a quick check on her charge level and the argon canister in her right forearm, and a brief thought about how some Maxwellist would probably cream their pants if they knew what she was.

<Luna, you ready?> Levy had gotten used to being able to talk in each others' heads fast. The technology wasn't actual magic, just good radio, but from the last decade Luna had spent using shitty field radios, it felt pretty close to magic.

She felt Morrison and Fletcher join her in the link as Levy responded, <As of today, Veil's dead and gone. Unless you've got a sidearm with more juice than your built-in...>

<Yeah. Where are we headed?>

<Moving,> she said, willing her scales forth once more. <What's in Boston?>

<This guy is,> Levy replied, pulling up a glossy Coalition employee photo, <Agent Martin Bowe. And before anyone asks, yes, his last name is that Bowe. PENTAGRAM general's his dad.>

<How the hell did that get past security?> Fletcher asked.

<I'm more surprised a woman let Thomas Bowe cum inside her.> Luna said. <Dude's a fucking ghoul.>

Luna landed next to the Way, folding her wings. It wasn't a far flight, not with how fast she could move like this. <So, what, we black-bag him and put him in a hole for the rest of his life?>

Fletcher whistled. <Oh hell yes. An actual kill op?>

<Why us?> Morrison asked, <We never even did a snatch and grab before, much less an outright kill op. These are delicate. Bowe's baseline, isn't he?>

<...yeah, that tracks,> Morrison said. <Still, why us? There's gotta be a dozen teams better at this than us.>

<Because the Coalition doesn't have a lot of teams that it trusts right now,> Fletcher replied.

Nobody said anything for half a minute. Levy landed next to Luna, perhaps a smidge less gracefully.

<...there's no way it's that bad,> Luna finally sent.

Morrison said, strolling into the alcove with Fletcher right behind.

Levy shifted in a flicker of iridescence. "No scales for this one."

The other three followed him. "No eyes either, I take it?" Luna asked.

"Unless you feel like talking to reporters."

"Absolutely not." She pulled out a pocketknife and pricked her finger in a single motion. Magic welled up where the blood dripped, and she shaped it with a gesture and the image of a ritual circle in her mind's eye. Her vision distorted for a second, then cleared, the magic obscuring their distinctly draconic eyes from would-be observers.

Levy looked the three of them over. "Looks good. Let's go."

Ray was minding his own business from across the street when the Way spat out a quartet of operator types. Sure, they were wearing casual clothes, but they were casual clothes, the kind of thing you wore if you were trying not to be noticed, not the flamboyance that could be expected from anyone who was supposed to be coming out of a Way. The way they looked around at their surroundings when they came out confirmed it. Regular folks— well, regular way-travelers —wouldn't look around a back street like they were clearing a room. He tapped out a message on his phone.

found some more lost boys in blue

make em fuck off lol

working on it

Ray decided to stop minding his own business, put his book down on the cafe table, and strolled on over, weaving his way through the various passersby. He approached the group— two women, two men, equal opportunity oppression —and spoke loudly, "So, what are you four? Skips, gocks, or feds?"

"GOC," the taller woman said without missing a beat. Ray did a double take. "We're looking for a rogue agent."

"Damn, that sounds like a good thing."

"We get it," the thin white guy replied. "Can we skip the bullshit? Veil's dead, we're trying to let our grudges go with it."

"Just like that? You fucks destroyed centuries of—"

"—and how many of our guys got killed by the Hand for a cause that doesn't matter anymore? It's a new world, let the old one die."

The two agents who had spoken looked at each other briefly. The man nodded.

When she spoke again, her eyes were slitted and vibrant blue. "I also wouldn't say we're personally invested in maintaining the Veil." Her eyes returned to normal, the masking spell suddenly noticeable to him.

"...huh."

"We're looking for this guy," the man said, pulling a photo out of his wallet. "Martin Bowe."

"Any relation?"

"Yup."

"Daddy's favorite son get thrown in the drunk tank?"

"Daddy's favorite son tried to ensure the universal death of magic and is in deep fucking shit," the woman in the back growled.

"Oh, sure, I'll help, here..." He reached into his pocket and pulled out a closed fist with middle finger raised. "Roll back to Point Green, assholes."

He stalked back to the cafe table after having a good laugh.

they're burners, here for a martin bowe
yes, the pentagram guy's kid
told em I had something that could help and handed over the bird lmao

lol, lmao, etc

yeah
kids in real trouble by the sound of it
but that's not the weird shit
they've got parahumans or something in there now, no guns either, not just a mage

bad joke

no, I'm serious
lady had dragon eyes, was hiding them with a spell
others had some weird shit going on too, dunno

huh
that might be worth telling someone

<Man, this fucking sucks,> Fletcher said as the four of them lurked in various observation positions around the building. They'd been there for hours, long enough that it was past midnight, and Luna was increasingly frustrated that she had been scrambled just to wait.

<Yeah, stakeouts suck,> Morrison replied.

<No, not that. I mean, the Hand was literally right the entire fucking time. That kid was ready to spit on us and I can't even say he was wrong to do it.>

<You still on that? Yeah, they were right for safer stuff,> he replied. <That was basically fact even before all this, remember the chair?>

<Course I remember the fucking chair,> Fletcher sent, <they'll be reminding the Coalition about the goddamn chair until the sun goes out.>

<If I might wade into this discussion with a take of my own,> Levy interjected, <Hand folks don't have the same skillset we do. They get to choose what they interact with, and we don't usually get a call unless there's already a risk to safety. Need a calm hand? Call them. Need to stop a nazi ghost tank? Call us. There's a place for both, especially with the Veil gone.>

<Then why did we get iced out of Vanguard?> Luna asked. The fact that most of the modern world behind the Veil was either in Vanguard, in the Council of 108, or hostile to everyone else, had not been lost on her.

<I'd be surprised if the Council voted to join it in the first place,> he answered.

<Look at who joined up,> Fletcher sent. <All evangelists. Serpent's Hand, Maxwellists, Nälkäns, they've all got something they want to share with the world. Not to say they're wrong to do it, I mean, but Vanguard's a media platform as much as anything else.>

<Wait, yeah, hold on,> Luna replied, <what the fuck are they doing with all those Foundation guys? They've got some names in there that make Nuremburg look like a daycare.>

<Amnesticized, if I have to guess. Maybe personality reassignment? The Hand and Nälkäns would absolutely demand some sort of justice.>

<Ladies, gentlemen,> Morrison chimed in, <if I may interrupt our rampant speculation, I believe I see our target. The, uh— here. [TRGT]>

Luna caught a glimpse of him, the integrated datalink highlighting Bowe as he hopped off the bus. <Fletcher, did you bring your rifle?>

<Yeah, want me to take the shot?> she asked, deadpan.

<No!> Levy exclaimed, <Do not take the shot! Jesus, if you blow the guy's brains out in front of a hotel—>

<Kidding. My rifle's on my scales.>

<Don't joke about that shit. It's already unpleasant enough being the men in black hit squad.>

The next time Levy spoke, it was over the radio, not their internal link. Both were technically radio, but radio was just audio. The link— it had no other name, at least according to Verdant —was for everything. Senses, text, emotions, audio, video, any arbitrary data that you could think of could go over the link. It might have been more useful if more than four people on the planet could comprehend it.

"Command, we have visual on the target."

There was no response.

"Command?" Luna could see the radio transmitting, the "rudimentary" ELINT system in her head picking it out with relative ease. <It's not on our end, your radio's fine.>

"Command, this is 535. Please respond."

"███y█ █a█m████'s lo█t hi█ fucking mind, he's—" The garbled transmission cut out as suddenly as it had started.

"Say again, command!"

<Boss?> Fletcher asked.

<Shit,> he cursed. <Morrison, can you boost that? You're better at this thing than me.>

<Negative. Loss is on their end.>

<Shit, shit—>

A different voice spoke on the radio, carefully enunciating their words. "Activation, six, black, nine, green, seven, white, orange, twelve—" There was a gunshot, then the original voice returned. "535! Everything's gone to shit, don't fucking come back here! They're—"

The transmission cut out with a second gunshot.

<Well,> Levy said, <fuck. I think that's a mission abort, folks.>

<Might be understating that a bit,> Morrison said.

<Just a bit.> Levy paused for a moment to think, and when he transmitted again his tone was ice-cold. <Fletcher, Varriano, go shake Agent Bowe down for information, he seems well-connected. I don't care how you do it. We'll figure out what to do while you're taking care of him.>

<...tracking, yeah,> Luna replied.

<Care if he lives?> Fletcher asked.

<No.>

<Fun.>

"How do you feel about subtlety?"

Fletcher smiled. "I'm optimistic this time."

"I have an idea. Play along." Luna knocked on the door. "Martin? It's Luna and Abby, from work."

<Abby? Seriously?> Fletcher complained.

<Nah. Even my boyfriend calls me Fletcher.>

<Sure, but you don't exactly have a normal relationship—>

Whatever banter Luna would have had in reply was cut off by Bowe speaking through the door. "Who are you?"

"We're PHYSICS, Assessment 535 out of Point Green. You're in danger, we need to move."

"Shit. Come in." The lock clicked, and a haggard-looking Bowe opened the door. "Who's after me?"

Fletcher locked the door behind them as they entered. "We are."

"What—" Before he could react, Luna swept his legs out from under him and drew her ritual knife, putting it up under his chin. "We have some questions for you, Martin. I assume you recognize a ritual knife, so don't think you can get out of this by dying."

He swallowed nervously, and Fletcher grinned.

<Rasmussen's behind it,> Luna sent, wiping the blood off her knife. <He's making a play for Point Green, with supposedly more around the world. The Council's got a lot of folks playing on the Veil's side still.>

<Shit>, Levy said.

<I'm a trained blue, Levy. Of course.>

<And Martin?> he asked.

<Dead,> Fletcher replied.

<[VID].> In the playback, Fletcher's integrated gun unfolded from her forearm and flashed, sending a few milligrams of high-velocity plasma into Bowe's brain.

Luna added. <If we need him, we can go pick him up in the Ocean. Though I don't think he has much more to tell, I don't get the vibe that he was the man behind the curtain. Any update on what's going on at home?>

they just murked him holy fuck

him?

bowe

wait what? really?

yeah
interrogated with thaumaturgy, then shot him in the head
some sort of energy gun in the tall lady's arm, short one's a mage

@m.shand heyyyyy scroll up like 20 posts

Huh. Is this related to the stuff in Point Green?

what stuff?

Right now? Gunfire, apparently, enough that the locals noticed through the wards.

its happening its happening its happening

Can you not shitpost for ten seconds, please? Keep an eye on them, I'll be there in half an hour. Getting GOC parahumans on side would be big.

ray was already rude so

You don't have to talk, just keep eyes on. I'll make contact with them.

okaaaay

"It feels wrong riding the bus," Luna said as the four of them stepped off.

"How so?" Morrison asked.

"We can fly. Hell, I'm not even meant to have two legs."

<We're in public. Use the link,> Levy chastised.

<Anyone with the right radio kit would find this a lot more suspicious than a quiet conversation,> Morrison said. <We look like we're using high-grade military radios on a tightbeam mesh network. Because we are, I guess.>

<And? I'm not a comms guy.>

<Morrison,> Fletcher said, <most people aren't wandering around with an ELINT suite. But they are wandering around with a pair of ears.>

Luna laughed, <Never fails to make me laugh that with everything that changed, it's the radio you're most excited about.>

<Look, we can't all have species dysphoria.>

<Speaking of, I didn't expect going back to skin to be this rough on me,> Luna mused. <You'd think that with our... abilities, now, they'd have sent us on missions that could actually use it.>

Morrison snorted. <You'd think.>

<Hey,> Levy interrupted. <People over there.> He motioned down the road with his chin.

<What about them?> Luna took a second look. There were a half-dozen or so people two hundred yards or so down the road, sitting on park benches and in a gazebo. <Just random folks? Instrument cases, so probably musicians. How would anyone know we were going to visit this park just so we could shapeshift and fly away? We didn't even know that.>

<Getting a bad feeling about this,> Fletcher sent. <Morrison? You seeing any radio stuff?>

<No, nothing.>

Luna took a third look, her new eyes having little trouble making out their faces at this distance.

<All clean-shaven, all with bland clothes,> Fletcher added. <Not a single beard or graphic tee in a half-dozen musicians?>

<Strike, MTF, PENTAGRAM, MCD mercs?> Levy asked.

<Varriano, any blues?> Levy asked.

A trio of affirmatives answered him. Luna pulled out her ritual knife and pricked her finger once again, twisting the magic into a scrying spell. Her awareness expanded, almost like she was projecting herself out into the night air. It only took a few seconds to glance over everyone in the park, their auras glowing brightly with EVE... and it only took a few seconds for some of them to glance back.

<Shit! Two blues, two snipers. [TRGTx2|TRGTx2], get down—> There was the sudden crack of a supersonic bullet whipping past her head. As she ducked down, she turned just in time to see a second shot turn Levy's head into a shower of glittering spinglass and wet gore. Fletcher cursed, her arm-gun unfolding as she raised it to point at a sniper. Her return fire flashed out, milligrams of argon plasma accelerated to several hundred kilometers per second. Luna watched the sniper's head pop as the plasma struck, before another sniper shot caught Fletcher in the shoulder with a thud, flattening her to the ground.

Luna didn't even really think about what she should do. She knew. She was already shifting, dark-grey scales replacing skin, interposing herself between the sniper and her ally, welling up the magic inside of her.

"Morrison! Kill agent, now!"

He didn't even look up from Fletcher, <[IMG].>

Luna pulled open the image, taking a good look and intertwining it with her magic, and—

COUNTERKILL WARNING!
   countered fault detected, neural mask active
   masking successful (1.34e+9 iters)

A nest of fractal, interlinked spheres appeared around her for a brief second. The gunfire stopped.

"Ow," Fletcher said.

"Right, sorry, are you okay?" Sort of a stupid question, given the hole in her shoulder. Whatever caliber the shots had been, they were powerful enough to punch through Fletcher's subdermal aramids, her shoulder blade, and still exit the other side.

"s' fine. I have a spare." Fletcher shifted, replacing herself with a sleek, jet-black dragon. "Morrison, shift. Let's move." Even with Levy's head mostly gone, her tone of voice never wavered.

He shifted in a pulse of inside-out space. "Fighting? Or running?"

"They brought kit to kill us. Time to run."

She watched silently from her vantage point as three dragons took flight from the park. Vanguard would have something to say about all this, certainly, at least if there were any bodies left by the time the sun came up.

...a state of affairs that seemed much less likely when the illusion disguising the instrument cases broke, revealing them as shoulder-launched anti-air missiles. Her heart lurched as they fired, a trio of white streaks visible in the moonlight.

Luna had scarcely gotten off the ground when something hit, what felt like a storm of knives shredding her left flank and underside. She looked up bleakly as she fell out of the sky, Fletcher and Morrison tumbling down with her.

There was a thud.

...

She had expected to pass out on impact, then die shortly thereafter. That hadn't happened, and in retrospect she managed to grasp the reason why, even through the pain. Her mind was still a four-inch cube of glassy computing substrate, completely uncaring about the stresses of a slamming into the ground at a hundred miles an hour. She wasn't even disoriented.

But her body didn't work. Of course it didn't. They'd hit her with a missile, presumably, because she could feel the steel burning inside her when she tried to call up her magic. But they'd made a mistake, whoever they were— they hadn't used cold iron. They might have known what she was and how to kill her, but they didn't know that she had died once before, and wasn't afraid to do it again.

There were plenty of outlawed thaumaturgical techniques. Every mage worth their salt knew at least one or two, just in case, and her outlawed thaumaturgy of choice was suddenly very, very relevant.

Luna Varriano touched a match to the wick that was her soul.

The observer broke her silence to whisper a reverent "holy fuck" as the grey dragon got back up, blazing plumes of EVE leaking out of her wounds. The team closing in on her opened fire, to little effect. It wasn't that their shots weren't having any effect, it was that the effect didn't matter to a being that was rapidly becoming a dragon-shaped ball of searing fire.

Her first victim was aiming a rifle at her and holding down the trigger. Luna didn't even flinch, a flaming claw ripping him to pieces. She was somehow getting hotter every second, the grass blackening underneath of her as she pounced on another soldier. Another died when she spat a cone of fire so bright it hurt her eyes. One moment he was there, another he was simply gone.

Hurt was a relative term, though. She was still being shot at, of course. but each bullet that ripped into her simply let out more heat. Another pair of soldiers died, the second one igniting even before she laid a claw on him. Now, the bullets ripping into her were molten, and there was so very little of her scales left.

It wouldn't be long. She could feel the fire fighting to escape, to waste itself on her surroundings. There were three left— she could see them, splotches of darkness against the blinding light of her own aura. She pushed, a gout of flame bright enough that it lit up the field like it was daytime incinerating her target. The second-to-last she batted with her tail, not even making contact before he burst into flames.

Luna pounced, a flap of her wings accelerating her towards the last of their killers even as they set the grass ablaze. She was so close, just a few more yards—

And then she ran out of time. Death was instant.

And then she was alive again, staring out at an infinite expanse of shallow ocean for the second time.

Luna cast a simple messaging spell and sat down to wait.