Dreams of Angels, and the Falling Thereof

Ministration 2.6

7:21 am. Eleven hours since this whole thing started. Twenty five hours since I'd last slept.

I was running on fumes, adrenaline, and some instant coffee I'd scrounged from Vivian's kitchen the hour prior. Despite all that一despite the brick wall of exhaustion I should have already made a messy collision with, I felt fine. Not just fine, fantastic, even. Furious, excited, alive.

There were two Anarchists here, and three of us. I'd have liked a more significant advantage, but Artemis was insistent we couldn't waste this opportunity waiting for Jada and the other two to show up.

The plan was simple when you really laid it out: strike from cover, take them out before they could alert anyone else via the walkie-talkies they carried. That was how we'd found them in the first place, actually. We'd retrieved one of the devices from Daerksider, and used their, honestly quite abundant, chattering over the radio to track down the two groups the remaining four Anarchists had split into. Artemis, Rudee, and me were one group, while Jada, Naamah, and Angela made up the other.

I'd made some addendums to our initial strategy to better deal with the powers of our prey, Desecration and Magpie, although I was cautious in employing any information extracted from Daerksider. Poppy was a hell of a drug, after all, and there was no telling if she had even been wholly lucid while I spoke to her in the truck.

The only possible complication in all this, other than the fight going south, was that the police arrived before we could handle them. I just couldn't bring myself to worry about that, however. This was just too fucking exciting. I mean come on, we were about to launch an ambush against supervillains! Just saying that out loud was cool as all hell!

My enthusiasm was tempered only slightly by where the first hunt had led us.

I shouldn't have been surprised, I supposed, that they'd stopped here. I couldn't say I wasn't still disappointed, however. Their faces were a matter of national infamy at this point, and yet they evidently still felt emboldened enough to walk into some random corner store and start buying snacks.

Ugh, teenagers.

I could see through the windows of the shop that the guy behind the counter was a bleary-eyed young man with an acne-ridden face, who seemed far more interested in watching the TV above his head than looking at the two teenagers stalking through his store. In fact, he'd barely spared the supervillains so much as a glance when they'd entered approximately fifteen minutes earlier.

I shuffled my feet, glancing nervously up and down the road. No sign of any cars, no pedestrians out and about. A shelter-in-place warning had already been instituted after the earlier skirmishes, so I doubted we'd be seeing much of the town's evidently quite cautious citizens. This was most definitely a good thing. As eager as I was, the idea of inviting collateral damage into this messy situation brought me pause.

Some anxious part of me insisted this was a trap. There was no way they'd have split into such small groups without some devious plan in mind, especially since they were already roughly aware of how many Huntresses there were. Creating that kind of disadvantage for themselves was not just idiotic, but suicidal. Maybe they were overconfident, hopped up on the Angel's blood, as they were. Or一and as I watched them carry bags of processed junk food to the counter, I began to think this might be the more likely answer一they were just absolutely incompetent.

Either way, the time for deliberation was done. Our window of opportunity was fast approaching.

Artemis and Rudee had taken time to change into their costumes before we left. They looked more like a masked biker gang than anything particularly superheroic, between Rudee's abundance of leather and dangling chains, and Artemis' apparently fondness for jeans and camo. I, on the other hand, still had no costume. I was just in my leather jacket, mask clinging tight to my cheeks.