I wasn’t particularly gentle when I ripped the gag out of his mouth, but at the same time the comfort of one Thomas Calvert wasn’t very high on my list of priorities.
To my mild surprise, he didn’t immediately begin protesting that he was affiliated with the PRT or that I would pay for making a mistake like I half expected. Which meant that he was already running his paths and decided silence was better than whatever my simulated copy did in response.
I felt that took some of the fun out of things, but whatever. I had a timeline to keep.
“It’s rude to talk to only one of us, you know?” I drawled, which got a full body twitch out of my captive. He definitely wasn’t used to dealing with people that knew about his little trick.
“Very well, what do you wish to chat about then, Rias?” Calvert said back. “After the Empire unmasked your little gang to the world and the Travelers rescued your hostage, I’d have thought you’d have more pressing things to deal with than attacking an unrelated party in his civilian identity. Rather hypocritical of you, given the emphasis you put on the Unwritten Rules in our previous encounter.”
“Well maybe we can start off by not blatantly lying to each other.” I scoffed lightly. “I already know you were the one that hired the Travelers in the first place and that they attacked us on your orders. I’ll admit I wasn’t expecting the Empire, but I probably should have. Much easier to shift the blame for anything that happens if no one knows the information about my Peerage’s identities came from you, after all.”
“An interesting theory. I hope you have the evidence to back it up, or every other faction in the city is going to come after you for this stunt.”
“That’s the beauty of being a villain, Thomas. I don’t need proof. And after the next few days, it won’t matter much either.”
Calvert narrowed his eyes. “Even villains need a dependable reputation if they want anyone to work with them. Unless you’ve suddenly decided to operate like the Teeth, that’s a rather shortsighted view.”
“Maybe, but I’m not the one tied to a chair right now, am I?” I replied smugly.
He said nothing to that.
In fact he was a lot more calm about being held captive than I would have expected, even with a spare timeline to try all the BS’ing and escape attempts without actually giving anything away. Part of me really wanted to know what he was trying to escape or convince me to let him go, but the rest was still pissed at him for attacking my friends and home.
“Shall we get to the point of this then?” Calvert eventually said. “Or did you just want to gloat?”
“Mostly just gloat.” I said honestly. “I don’t really need your cooperation for the next part, but I wanted you to know exactly how much you messed up. Your little sponsored villain team, the Undersiders, will soon be disbanded or working for me. The Travelers are going to get the hell out of my city the second I get Dinah back from them. And the Empire is about to have a few really bad days thanks to Kaiser breaking his word. Thanks for that, by the way. As for you…” I leaned forward to look him straight in the eyes. “You’re about to lose everything, Thomas. You came for the king, but guess what? You missed.”
“I’ll admit you took me by surprise, but did you not consider I might have contingencies in place?” He said calmly, but I could see the panic bubbling under the surface. “You can’t kill me if you want my assets and despite what movies imply torture is not very effective about finding out everything you want to know.”
I raised an eyebrow at that.
How badly were things going in his fake timelines that he thought I was going to jump straight to torture?
Instead I said, “Of course I know about your contingencies. After all, I’ve been preparing to take you down for months.”
“What?”
“Practically since I arrived in the city.” I nodded.
Out of all the established villains in Brockton Bay, Coil had been the only one I’d been ready to personally remove from the beginning even if I never planned on getting involved with Capes. The other gangs might have eventually made themselves an issue depending on how I went about things, but unlike them Coil would always be a problem that I couldn’t afford to ignore. Not because he was more dangerous than Lung or Kaiser, but because he could keep testing me and I wouldn’t know until it was too late to do anything but react.
Case in point, I knew Coil had been trying to get past my wards the minute the PRT had blockaded my manor. Even if Dinah hadn’t used my defences to escape from him kidnapping her, he would have wanted a way of infiltrating just in case he needed to remove me or my Peerage. And when he found one, he was patient enough to wait to use it until we were all distracted.
If I hadn’t known he was behind the attack when Dinah was taken or his relationship with the Travelers, if Carl hadn’t passed on what happened at the house, if I hadn’t created my own contingency to capture Coil with a teleport trap weeks ago… he would have had hours to disappear into the city and wait things out while my Peerage burned themselves out blaming the Empire for the attack and being hounded by the PRT.
Metaknowledge and preparation let me beat Coil so quickly. Not anything he did wrong or mistake I tricked him into making.
“That’s impossible. I had agents watching your movements for weeks. You never so much as asked someone about me or my operation!” Calvert protested. “Even when I had Tattletale approach you with information, you barely seemed to care!”
So he had tried to sniff out if I was gunning for him? Smart, but that would never have worked for one simple reason.
“I already knew everything I needed to take you down.” I shrugged.
“You have a Thinker power. Or one of your friends does.” Calvert was getting a bit more desperate. Definitely less subtle about getting more information out of me.
“Something like that. And while I’m sure you would like me to stand here explaining everything to you, I do need to get a move on.” I paused long enough to pull out an audio recorder and hold it up so Calvert could see it. “So if you don’t mind, why don’t you start telling me about those contingencies of yours and how to disable them. After that, we’ll move on to all your money accounts, okay?”
“Those are my only assurances you won’t just leave me at the bottom of the Bay when you have what you want. You did beat me and I’m willing to work with you to an extent as a result, but I need something to protect myself, you understand I hope. Perhaps if you include me in planning for your retaliation against the Empire? Since you clearly have an understanding of how my power works, you know how useful I could be to you.”
My eyes started glowing with demonic power. “I do, but what you don’t understand is that I DO NOT need you. Kaiser and the Empire are going to learn shortly there is a reason you shouldn’t break a deal with a devil. And like I said earlier – your cooperation is not needed. Now tell me what I want to know!”
“Wait, I–”
The hypnosis spell hit his mind like a sledgehammer and he soon started rambling off everything there was to know about his operation into the recording device.
As soon as I confirmed that, I moved outside the boat’s cabin and let out a shuddering breath about what I’d just done.
Yes, Coil was scum and on some level probably deserved it. No, definitely deserved it. But violating a person’s autonomy to the level I had just done… I didn’t see myself doing that again any time soon without a very good reason.
Mostly because it would be too easy to abuse it and fall into a cycle of being casually evil because I could get away with it.
Kidnapping Coil might have been easier because I knew his full name, two places where he worked, and had plenty of time to find out where he lived, but the actual method had been to break into Calvert’s house and implant him with a ceramic ball enchanted with a tracking spell I’d modified from the communication spell while he was kept magically asleep. A couple hours making sure the incision was healed and I’d secured victory over Coil whenever I wanted to make a move.
And proved I was just as willing to use similar methods as Bakuda if pressed.
I shoved my discomfort aside though.
There was one more thing I was going to do tonight that definitely crossed a few lines. But I had one opportunity to make Kaiser regret breaking a deal with me and this was the first time I had an acceptable test target.
I was going to create a curse.
-o-
I was dealing with mostly uncharted territory on two fronts with my plan to retaliate against the Empire.
Curses were fairly rare in DxD and from what I could remember never really explained in detail.
What happened when a party broke a devil’s contract had never been expanded on.
Luckily for me, I almost instinctively knew what I could do to Kaiser when he violated our deal.
When a normal contract completed, the link between the two parties was severed and a bit of extra energy was consumed by the devil for a slight power boost. With a broken contract, that link widened significantly instead to the point that if I wanted to, I could cast a spell on it like Kaiser was right in front of me.
The only problem? The connection itself was still weak enough that one spell would burn it out and it would snap if I pushed too much power through it at once.
I wasn’t sure if that was how all broken contracts worked or just this one – and I didn’t exactly have time to test things. So instead of trying to attack him through the link and giving him at worst a nasty shock or burn Othala would have healed in five minutes, I was going to do something that would make the gang leader’s life miserable for the rest of his life.
All I had to do was feed the spell slowly through our connection until it could use Kaiser’s own energy to keep fueling itself.
One simple curse with two effects that would make it impossible for him to keep being the leader of the Empire 88.
The first part I could do easily enough… Well, not easily because I had very little clue how to use this type of magic, but I had enough Demonic Power to fill in the gaps so I could get the effect I wanted.
Simply put, it would make Kaiser incapable of telling a lie.
Even for a normal CEO, that would be almost ruinous. But for a manipulator like Kaiser who relied on telling the people what they wanted to hear without a shred of belief or intent on following through if it didn’t benefit him? All the charisma in the world wouldn’t help him if he couldn’t say a thing.
And as for the second effect? The reason I needed a parahuman to test this out before I tried it on Kaiser? I was going to make it seem like every time he used his power, it felt like his blades were coming out of his flesh.
I couldn’t stop him from using his power, but I could make him reluctant to even think about it.
And with his ability to manipulate people and his personal power sealed, I was going to rip away the only thing Kaiser ever cared about.
Power.
“And with him gone, the Empire will crumble right behind him.” I mused out loud as the spell circle unfolded underneath me.
“...three enemies down…”
“...one to go.”