This was it. Her last day on Earth.
Lexi didn’t know how or why, but the recurring nightmares that had ruined her sleep on each day of the past week instilled in her a sense of foreboding that made ignoring the dreams impossible.
It started on the night Mason called to let her know he was being shipped off. They were vivid and clear, even after she woke up, which if you know anything about dreams, made that pretty freaking weird.
However, what turned these random nighttime assaults into an actual problem were their contents. They each played out her and Mason’s death in horrifying detail, the subsequent one more detailed than the last.
She’d be in her apartment, then men with voids for faces and silhouettes for bodies would break in, restrain her and knock her out. Instead of waking up again somewhere, the scene rather changed to Mason, angry, beaten, and bloodied in a way that cranked up the horror.
The person responsible for her boyfriend’s sorry state?
Homelander.
Even in these hazy dreams, that ridiculous cape of his stood out like Mason did wherever he went.
In these nightmares, the two of them fought every time and it always ended in Homelander’s victory, the world renowned supe bathing himself in Mason’s blood and guts after tearing him to pieces.
The shock of seeing this is what would wake her up, screaming her lungs out while her heart pumped vigorously as though she’d been in a furious sprint. It left her wheezing so violently she wondered if the nightmares were trying to tell her something.
Well, if they did, they didn’t have to go that far. The first portion of the dream already clued her in to what was happening. With the persistent seven foot thorn in their side out of the country, Vought was looking for ways to remove him… permanently.
This would’ve been farfetched, even for her, but then the second part of the dream happened and she knew she was right on the money. She almost laughed when the plan came together after simple deliberation.
Vought’s answer to dealing with Mason was to simply… remove him. No placating him, no hiding their buried skeletons better. No. They saw him as a persistent threat who didn’t fear nor respect them in the slightest and therefore acted accordingly by siccing Homelander on him.
On that part, the question about how they were going to do it without sinking themselves further into controversy was answered by her inclusion in the dream.
She was the key to isolating Mason so Homelander could do the deed. By using her as a hostage, they could lure him anywhere.
Based on the brief time she’d spent as his girlfriend, she’d learned enough to know Mason didn’t factor the likelihood of failure or death when he committed to a plan or action.
If he smelled the trap for what it was (he would) he’d still spring it because that’s the kind of man he was.
It made her a bit regretful and forlorn when she pictured what the future would be like without all these problems. She may not love Mason, but he felt that way toward her, even if it was because she was his first.
A huge part of her wished to see where they could've gone. What would the future be like if she didn’t have this stupid illness? If Vought didn’t stay their usual, evil selves or if they didn’t exist at all?
She laughed out loud at the answer. If these events and the people behind them didn’t exist, she’d have never met Mason. In fact, she wouldn’t be alive. That morning on the roof was her lowest point and she really intended to jump.
Mason was the one who pulled her off with his unusual approach and gave her an extra month. A full month where her problems and worries vanished into the ether.
It would suck to miss out on the world travel trip she’d planned, but hey, she was supposed to be dead anyway, so it actually didn’t sting too much. Her death was par for the course so she might as well accept it with grace.
Seated in the one seater cushion in her living room with her legs crossed, she swirled a glass of wine and checked off some mental boxes. All the money she had left had been transferred to her friend.
Her laptop with the recording explaining everything had been dealt with to ensure Mason would get it once he returned. God, just thinking about him stilled her hand, only temporarily though.
She’d gone into this hoping her last days on Earth would be blissful without any strings. What use was someone like her with an inbuilt doomsday clock falling in love with ten minutes left on the counter?
Yet here she sat, unable to stop the outpour of memories about the man… who made her breakfast and made her feel like a young school girl high on love once again.
A smile widened her lips when she stopped fighting the flow. She basked in the memories, reliving what she could of the brief experience. The instant the highlight reel ended, she blinked and noticed her door swinging open.
This was it. It was happening just like her nightmares. Two men in masks entered through the door she was certain she’d locked earlier and entered her apartment with the confidence of people who’d done this numerous times.
Their next actions played themselves across her mind’s eye, and the accuracy and casual demeanor of her kidnappers made her angry and defiant. The door clicked shut when one of the men pushed it gently.
His partner strode toward her, her unusual calmness putting mud in his step.
She maintained eye contact with the man even when he pulled out a gun and brought the glass to her lips, gulping down its contents in one go. She dropped the glass afterwards, ignoring the sound of breaking glass and the approaching kidnapper.
He, on the other hand, found her nonchalance not just worrying but annoying. He seized by the arm and yanked her to her feet. She went along with it, already feeling the potent cocktail of prescription pills doing its work.
She didn’t make teen feet before the buildup of unstable chemical reactions hit her full force, dropping her to the floor outside her apartment in a convulsing, foaming heap.
The last thing she heard were the exclamations of her kidnappers.
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Mason was in a good mood.
His deployment to Bolivia had ended way ahead of his projected timeline. Rather than the weeks and maybe months he’d braced himself for, it took he and his team less than a week to ensure Las Sombras and their competitors were dead and buried.
After the little hiccup with the energy leeching sicario and the teleporter’s sudden appearance and defection, the eradication campaign gained a pair of rocket boosters.
Though he failed to terminate the teleporter, the intel they left behind sealed the fate of Las Sombras. With the help of that information, Rey’s real location, among other things, were rooted out.
Hidden caches of weapons, money and Temp V for these exact rainy days were all found and destroyed. Well, the Bolivian government handled some of the money and the weapons, but they were kept in the dark on locations with the Temp V.
Mason handled these ones and a few others, netting himself a couple of million dollars, weapons upon weapons and more vials of the wonder drug.
Sure, the ones he pilfered from the pockets and lockers of the mine sicarios were a lot, but that was the thing about having an endless, portable warehouse… he didn’t need a reason not to hoard.
The remainder of the week was spent on aiding the Bolivian military root out the cartels and their remnants. Because where the Temp V stocks dust or not, a not so small amount of sicarios owned a few vials.
And that’s where Mason came in. He was the leading spear on every compound and hidden base assault. Any sicario to display the slightest bit of beyond human capability earned his personal attention.
In this manner, the C.I.A. team finished their work on Bolivian soil and smuggled themselves to Armenia, instead of Mexico where Rey de Azul had retired to. Retired. The balls on the guy.
Well, neither those nor the army of Temp V enhanced men patrolling his compound managed to save him from the assassin who slit his throat. When the information from the teleporter was processed and confirmed, Rey’s mansion came under every kind of surveillance known to man.
This was how just a few hours after being exposed, Rey’s hideaway showed a sudden flurry of activity. His men scrambled like ants and boarded trucks, leaving the estate alongside Rey’s heavily pregnant girlfriend.
Kelsey then used her contacts to get someone to investigate the estate and they found something no one expected. Rey’s rotting corpse sitting in his chair, a gash running across his neck.
Whoever sponsored his rise had cleaned house and covered their tracks. Now no one was closer to figuring out who had decided there wasn’t enough chaos in the world.
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Unlike Bolivia where stability crumbled and lawlessness and senseless murder abounded, Armenia was a wholly different story.
The Votnak crime family’s takeover of the crime scene didn’t involve as many explosions and deaths, mainly due to the mind control powers of one the sisters heading it.
Specifics were not known at this time, but her ability to know the contents of a person’s mind and warp it to suit her desires had been established by multiple sources.
One of the repeated sources was Ovsanna Votnak, the mind mistress herself. She was beyond careful in her usage, but also brazen in the way she went after powerful figures right off the bat.
She struck Mason as someone who believed wholeheartedly in high risk, high reward maneuvers and nothing else. Why else would she make sudden moves on a shipping magnate, letting the world know of their relationship?
That was another thing that stood out about her. She may not have the ego coiled around male crime bosses like pythons, but she had a need for validation and exposure that caused anyone who knew about her to do double takes.
Wasn’t secrecy the lifeblood of criminal organizations like hers? Did her powers and the scores of Temp V enhanced men and women willing to paint the streets red at her command erase this important bit from her mind?
Mason wanted to know, and he’d get the chance to ask her soon so he didn’t waste his brain power on endless speculation.
Taking a drag of the pointless weed vape, he exhaled the smoke and it obscured the screen before him partially. With so many unknowns surrounding such a volatile power, the plan to take down Ovsanna defaulted to this.
Three days after arriving in Armenia, they could finally get to work. Ovsanna was at a party, the kind where the rich and powerful gathered and did whatever the rich and powerful do.
Hidden in a van with Kelsey in the back and Rip at the wheel, they observed the woman at the party, trusting the marijuana to keep her invisible, mind altering tendrils out of their minds.
That little trick had come from Rayner, and it went to show how much human ingenuity could provide a way out of the most impossible situations and scenarios.
Someone had sat down and thought deeply about mind powers and come up with a solution as simple as mess up your mind so it can’t be read. Mess up was a stretch, but that was the idea behind the weed.
Its psychoactive effects were potent enough to render their minds slippery enough that the grubby mitts of Ovsanna’s powers were unable to grasp onto anything meaningful.
However, that was only step one: find a way to get close to her. Step two: secure her for interrogation, was the next field of glass they had to crawl through.
With the high profile nature of the gathering, grabbing her from there was a no go. They had to wait for her to leave, find a place where the capture wouldn’t draw much attention and then execute it.
Problem with that was, she wasn’t alone. A contingent of men and women followed her to the gathering, two of them wearing suits and the rest hidden in convoy vehicles due to their heavy body armor and high powered rifles.
While Las Sombras fully embraced the brutality of close combat due to Temp V, Ovsanna had done more than that. Her people wore armor and wielded weapons that would be too cumbersome for any normal man.
They were each covered head to toe in explosion resistant materials and carried around belt fed LMGs among other things. A force composed of normal soldiers would only be running into the grinder by going after her.
Hell, Mason didn’t believe a team of sicarios would fare much better either. Ovsanna didn’t spare the cost of training her people. It was actually frightening how well-trained they were.
None of this mattered in the face of the plan Mason and his team members had put together.
Rip was in charge of keeping the van moving. Kelsey was handling communications, ensuring that no one, not even Ovsanna’s people or law enforcement would catch wind of what was going on.
Mason’s job was the hardest of them all, not that it bothered him. He had the powers so it made sense to let him handle the difficult part.
They sat there for hours, watching the feeds, talking about things useless and important, all the while keeping the vapes going. Mason worried about his fellow teammates.
He’d never smoked weed before today, but he had powers that kept him straight and centered 24/7. They didn’t, which made their hours of sucking on the fumes of the devil’s lettuce worrying.
Kelsey assured him that the variants they were using had been processed by their own people. They wouldn’t go all the way high, just coast on a slightly higher baseline.
Their wait ended at around an hour to midnight. Ovsanna exited the building under the protection of her bodyguards and boarded her heavily armored car.
The convoy started moving not long after and so did Mason and co’s surveillance van.
‘Approaching the bend. You ready Nomad?’
“Good to go.” Mason stood up with a stretch, his suit hidden behind a plain jacket and pants. He nodded at Kelsey and pulled down his ski mask before opening the van’s rear doors and flying out into the night.
He soared into the night sky and quickly located the convoy and Ovsanna’s vehicle sandwiched between them. A deluge of smoke entered his lungs through his mouth and came out his nose.
The weed had no effects on him, but he enjoyed sucking on the vape anyway. It reminded him of when he was a kid playing with his sister, rolling up paper and lighting them up so they could smoke like in the movies.
Smiling at the memory, he put away the vape and flew toward the convoy, eyes on the target skyscraper and the van. He positioned himself right above Ovsanna’s vehicle, shadowed it unseen, and waited for the right time.