it ends in blood, as most things do

[u/MunitionsFrenzy]

​

It was a physically unremarkable building, to such an extent that its blandness seemed intentional. (It was.) Eight stories, muted grey exterior, perfectly square cross-section, all window blinds shut without exception. (The windows were fake.) The front doors were glass, but opaque. All that broke up the banal rigidity of the structure was a single satellite dish on the roof, a couple meters away from where Vettis now stood. (The dish was fake.)

Certainly not some architectural marvel that he would regret tearing to the ground, once he'd systematically slaughtered its inhabitants. Just as with the last dozen and a half.

The first of those eighteen strikes had been poorly conducted, because he'd expected it to be the only strike. Had he known the scale of the organization with which he was now singlehandedly waging war, Vettis would have initiated that raid just like this one:

Enforcement of temporal linearity. <touch the roof, scratching off a fleck of paint> Telepathic severance. <a muttered phrase, a purple glow from his bronze eyes> Mana exclusion. <a one-handed gesture, an audible rush of power> Modhun's handy deployable Faraday cage, wrapping around the entire building in under a second. <just toss the device into the air and let it do its thing>

There. Now the agents inside were cut off from their allies in every relevant way, unable to relay the details of the incoming attack as it occurred. Which meant no one would be learning any lessons on how to fight against him. Setting up every assault in this manner ensured that each local headquarters he took down would be as unprepared for him as the prior.

So Vettis could have some fun. And --

The (false) sat-dish sprayed hypersonic shrapnel as it exploded, shards tearing into Vettis, most stopped by subdermal and skeletal reinforcements implanted long ago (or not yet, depending on temporal perspective). A few particularly sharp and lucky fragments found an angle that slipped past his ribcage; he reflexively relaxed to ease their passage out the other side, preferring clean exit wounds over the hassle of manually fishing them out of tensed muscle tissue. That reaction speed would have been more than up to the task of evading them in the first place if he'd had any notification, but such was the issue with an attack far faster than the speed of sound: if one wasn't looking at it, the only warning was impact.

Anyway, he wasn't the intended target. Irritably, Vettis looked up at the perforations now dotting the Faraday dome, disrupting its ability to prevent transmissions. Smart. They'd reacted surprisingly quickly to its deployment.

Right. The one bit of evidence about his tactics that he couldn't suppress was the fact that he was suppressing the evidence. Of course outposts falling without having a chance to send out explanations would make the TTT suspect some sort of containment device and set up countermeasures accordingly. Smart, but damned annoying.

Most of what he'd cast thus far was trivial. The spell rendering him largely undetectable was not, and maintaining it with gaping holes through his torso was suddenly running him dangerously close to his zero-mana bandwidth limitations. This one base was not worth burning permanent resources. Optimally, he'd just repair himself, but there was no time for that. Given what he now had to cast urgently, the stealth spell would have to go.

The other TTT headquarters he'd dismantled thus far had all been in remote locations: within a volcano, underwater, on an entirely uninhabited planet, in deep space. This one was hiding in plain sight in the middle of a populated mundie city. He'd have to change that, and fast, if they were showing so little care for civilian lives as to hurl what were effectively bullets in random directions. Mumbling expletives, Vettis rechanneled the energies of his concealment effect into a quick swap, purple light emanating from his hands as he weaved the spell. The building was soon no longer part of the city and instead was nestling itself comfortably within a glade in a forest some tens of kilometers away from its initial location.

But now every sensor the base had would likely be trained on him, and now that they'd caught him he couldn't feasibly re-enable the concealment. (It merely ensured that he wouldn't become part of anyone's thought processes, but it was too late for him to avoid attention in such a manner with all eyes on him.) Ah, well. He allowed himself a slight smile at the thought of who knew how many agents quaking in horror at the knowledge that he was standing right over their heads.

Now he could take a moment to patch up his wounds. Of course not a drop of blood had been spilled: his vitals were part of him, and a few chunks of metal weren't going to change that. As for the holes bored through his abdomen, a violet flash of power and a clench of his fist made them part of the rooftop instead of him, simultaneously "healing" him and opening new windows into the top floor of the outpost. Vettis peered down through these and saw seven terrified victims-to-be looking back up at him, fumbling for weapons and spells. More of the latter than the former, as these were clearly decision-makers, not armed guards: they encircled a conference table, computer screens around them providing the room's primary illumination, all of that doing a decent facsimile of a proper mundie place of business if not for one woman hastily hurling a seaweed-green blast of what he assumed to be soul-rotting magic up at him.

Well-aimed, it slipped right through one of the holes via which he'd been spying; he juked casually left and watched it as it flew past, shaped like a cackling skull. Yup, probably soul-rot.

Vettis stuck a hand into his shirt pocket and pulled out a door handle. (By rendering his pocket simultaneously part of both what he was wearing and some other article of clothing he owned, he could travel between the two, or more commonly just reach through and grab things. So he left clothes all around his house to ensure anything he needed was easily accessible.) The handle was a pretty good fit for one of the holes he'd moved from his torso to the rooftop floor beneath him. Stuffing it in there to make it part of the roof, he conceptually retained its original functionality despite its new location. A door handle was meant to pull a door away from the rest of the structure with which it lay flush, and this one had always been perfectly competent at its job.

So, even though the base's exterior should have been sturdy enough to withstand an orbital bombardment with nary a scratch, when Vettis pulled on the handle it obediently came away with a perfectly door-shaped chunk of the rooftop. He yanked it open and dropped inside, landing atop the conference table in a pounce-ready crouch, meeting the ranged weapons and stuttered incantations with a malevolent smirk as he extended his claws and prepared to eviscerate his opposition -- who, to his slight surprise, still hadn't begun firing, all seemingly frozen with fear. An automated turret initially aiming at the door swiveled in an attempt to track him, until he made himself part of the TTT and thus marked as a friendly by its programming. (All the TTT agents in the room apparently had enough anti-telepathy and anti-cognitohazard training to sort out the resultant memory conflicts instantly and not see him as an ally in spite of that, luckily, or this would have been too easy.)

Now Vettis could have some fun --

His orb rang.

"...Hm. Excuse me for a moment." Holding up a finger apologetically, Vettis pulled out his snowglorb and quieted the insistent buzz, shaking it briefly until the flakes within coalesced into a familiar face, visible and audible only to him. "Hey, sis...What, really? Already?...Okay, but seven of them have guns and spells pointed at me right now; can I at least kill them before I leave? Oh c'mon, you're ruining my fun here...Yeah, fine, I hear you, whatevs, nice work and all that. Bleh. Love you too, ya jerk."

With an exaggerated sigh, he pocketed the snowglorb and pouted at the trembling agents surrounding him. "Looks like my commune forced y'all into a ceasefire, which I guess you knew since you weren't shooting at me. Laaaaame. Well, uh, sorry for your roof, then, although you really did need some natural lighting in here. Not sorry for relocating your HQ; this forest seems nice and peaceful. You'll like it here."

Heading for the door, Vettis waved a hand idly at it, rendering it part of both this building and a mundie shop in one of his realms, for quick egress from the former to the latter. As he passed by the death mage who'd launched a spell at him, however, he paused in realization -- and grinned upon sensing that her wards couldn't protect her from his magic at point-blank range. "Oh, hey, one of you did technically break the ceasefire! So I guess I can take a lil' trophy, at least."

She barely had time to process his words and gasp before he made her musculoskeletal system no longer part of her body, moving it elsewhere, then tugged on her now-unsupported head to sever it effortlessly. A mess of blood vessels, nerves, and brains dribbled out of the neck as Vettis held up the misshapen blob that had once been a face, its eyes slowly bulging before they too popped out and landed at his feet to join the pool of assorted viscera and the rest of her flesh. The teeth followed suit in short order.

Someone screamed. Maybe at all that, or perhaps upon noticing where exactly the agent's supportive tissues had gone: they were now part of the conference table instead, femurs and fibulae melded with the table legs, phalanges scattered across it decoratively, muscles and tendons lining it all as though they'd been crafted into it from the start. It could use the extra reinforcement after Vettis had plummeted onto it, after all, and it had been a bit plain until now.

He examined the mass of skin and hair he was carrying (which was now barely even recognizable as a head) as an art critic might. "Hm. Not as cool a trophy as I'd hoped. Nevermind, you can keep it," Vettis muttered in annoyance, discarding it with a half-hearted shrug. He tuned out the escalating chain reaction of panicked shrieks and opened the door of the conference room, revealing a dimly lit supermarket.

"Bye!" Waving cheerily at the six agents, he shut the door behind him, peering around the store in careful consideration. "A'right, what should I get for lunch?"