The large gymnasium loomed in the distance, its tall ceiling and thick concrete walls giving it the air of a slumbering giant. It lay at the center of an elevated parking lot, high above the flood zone, towering over all it surveyed. Cornelius Graham observed it from a block away and twenty feet down, feeling uncomfortably close to a mouse beneath an elephant.

His team waited behind him, most of them gearing up for the upcoming raid. Three more teams, Beta, Charlie, and Delta, convened along similar corners, boxing in their target. The full force of the Austin Police Department was leveled on this single building. Twenty-nine officers—Beta's team leader was still missing, a puzzle they all hoped might be solved with this operation—all highly trained and equipped with cutting edge upgrades. It might be overkill, but the enemy had at least one Natural.

Cornelius would have liked to have had Gregoir on this, but something about the man's power made it literally impossible for him to move quietly. His presence stuck out like a sore thumb; Gregoir couldn't sneak up on a deaf bat. For an operation like this, where surprise was absolutely vital, the big fellow would only be a hindrance. The whole point was that there wouldn't be a fight. This wasn't an engagement with Coldeyes' Crew, two forces battling it out in honorable combat, this was an execution, bloody, efficient, and final. Prisoners were just gravy.

Tracking down the Crew's safehouse had been tremendously irritating. Dunkirk had proven dangerously obstinate, refusing to share so much as a single scrap of information, and practically obstructing the APD's own investigation with whatever obstacles his waning influence could conjure. Cornelius couldn't fathom what was going through the mind of the man, if he had any kind of coherent strategy, or had simply reached the end of his rope and had decided to lash out at anyone and everyone nearby.

It was the retired Agent Valentine, young Freya's paternal grandfather and an old family friend, who had come through for the department. The Bering field office's armory had been raided, the contents of which the APD were not privy too, and Dunkirk refused to speak on. The reason for that quickly became apparent, as the senior Valentine revealed just how badly Dunkirk had fucked up.

Andros Bartholomew was largely immune to physical injury. His ability—Cornelius still weren't sure if he was a Natural or some kind of strange mutate—granted him enviable regeneration and no need for sleep. Traditional 'hard' interrogation techniques were all but useless on him, and the softer touch had proven impossible due to the man's sheer derangement. Cornelius had worried that the terrorist would spill the beans about Newman's involvement in his capture, but apparently Bartholomew had remained entirely silent for the duration of his imprisonment.

So Dunkirk, faced with the choice of sending away his prize to a specialist at Langley, thus losing standing and status, or improvising something devious, went with what came natural to him. He had requested a weapon from the Artificer's arsenal, the government sponsored Genius who had designed a variety of hyper-specialized equipment for black ops teams. The Genius himself was long dead, a victim of his own upgrade like so many of his kind, but his weapons and designs remained.

There weren't many left. Artificer had a deviant mind. He had been a sadist, who'd enjoyed the suffering his creations caused. Much of his stock had been purged in the aftermath of his death, when the details of his inventions had been leaked to the press by a politician looking to make hay. Some remained, nonlethal weaponry that might someday be understood by someone without a Genius upgrade and applied to a more civilized use. Waste not, as the saying goes.

Dunkirk acquired one of these nonlethal devices and had presumably attempted to use it during Bartholomew's interrogation. The thing was essentially a gun that shot pain. Cornelius could only speculate at this point, but he suspected Andros Bartholomew was entirely immune to pain in his vaporous form, and Dunkirk lacked any way to force the man corporeal. The weapon sat, unused and unutilized, in the field office armory, until it was stolen on the day of the gang war.

Artificer's designs could not be replicated. He was hardly unique in that fashion, many a Genius' created miracles that could not be understood by any mind but their own. While some used modern science to create, others, like Artificer, directly forged cosmic energy into their creations. These meta-materials are entirely unique to their creator, emitting a unique energy signature at all times. This was something that could be tracked, but any criminal canny enough to steal such a device would certainly keep it in a shielded room.

Enter Sergeant Kaneda Ito.

Over two decades ago, the surly officer had been called in to the aftermath of a bootleg cosmic generator gone critical. There, he had rescued a young Gregoir Pierre-Louise, who had clung to the older man like a deranged limpet. Ito had been so traumatized by the experience, that, within three months of meeting Gregoir, Ito had put in a request for a prototype energy spectro...something—Cornelius killed people, he didn't science—so that, in Ito's own words, "...such a thing could never happen to me again."

The city had been a very different place at the time. Cosmic generators were far more common, and the department had been considering investing in miniature sensors that could be mounted in police cruisers. They were little more than extremely precise Geiger counters, not good for more than a block or two, and were both expensive and fragile. They could pick up a wide range of signatures, but had to be tuned to each specific wavelength.

From Cornelius' admittedly limited understanding of the phenomenon, cosmic radiation wasn't just a single type of particle. It was a combination of things, poorly understood, and broad in range. Black market cosmic generators were notoriously unstable, producing all manner of crap that could genuinely harm a person in addition to giving them superpowers. But they worked, somehow, and thus people used them.

The prototype spectro-thingy couldn't identify these energy forms unless it was specifically calibrated to do so. This made it useless, really, as anything other than a very specialized tool. Certainly not the sensor net that the department had been hoping for. After testing the prototype, Ito had declared it worthless and overcomplicated. But, when properly tuned, it could pierce most common forms of shielding. That was the whole point of it, and Kaneda Ito had remembered.

It was Captain Gable who found the damn thing buried in a storage locker at the back of evidence control. It was caked in dust and extremely fragile, but it still worked. Valentine acquired Artificer's cosmic wavelength from his contacts at the FBI, and Air-1 spent three days flying a grid pattern over each sector of the city. The helo finally got a hit this morning, which lead to this very moment.

It was down to the wire now. Final checks were in progress. Cornelius' team was calm and methodical as they went about securing their gear. His second, Clara O'Brien, approached him from behind, and tapped a pattern on his shoulder. She went by Rapunzel when her mask was on. Unlike her fellows, her helmet had a specialized port for her hair to flow out of, looking like an exaggerated ponytail. Her long locks were loosely braided and hanging down to her ankles. They were beautiful, and deadly, like a pit of vipers waiting for prey to wander by.

The signal she'd passed along was simple. They were ready to move out, but he had a final speech to give. It was expected of him, their commander, and bad luck to ignore. Cornelius strapped on his helmet, the full mask dampening the surrounding sounds until his HUD activated. With a planned raid like this, he had time to equip all his favorite toys. The helmets automatically adjusted for light and sound, and were hermetically sealed. They carried enough air for three hours of combat use. This operation shouldn't take more than half an hour.

Cornelius checked his own weapons. Assault rifle and spare magazines, each loaded with specialized ammo. Flashbangs, grenades, incendiaries. He had a flare gun loaded with thermite rounds that he intended to use on the Natural. He was curious as to how the man would handle being shot in the face with a four thousand degree Fahrenheit ball of fire. His sidearm was loaded and secure. He could feel his boot knife, and the longer blade strapped to his lower back. He was ready.

Cornelius clicked on to the squad's private channel, and turned to face his team.

"This is it, lads and ladies," he said, his helmet keeping his voice from carrying. "You all know what we are facing, and you all know your roles, so I'll keep things simple. Combat doctrine is in full effect. We hit hard and fast and keep hitting until there's nothing left standing. Make no extraordinary effort to take prisoners, and be sure that your target is down before moving on. Stick together, and cover your six. Call out your targets, and leave the Natural to me. That's it."

He clapped his hands together softly, ran his hands along the straps of his assault rifle, then made a twirling motion with his finger.

"Alright, let's do this."

He clicked over to the command frequency, and gave the order.

"Go."