VT - Chapter 14 : Ideology scrambling PtV..... (Patreon)

Disclaimer: Worm belongs to the one and only absolute chad, Wildblow. Enough said.

Earth Bet

–Simon—

He smiled as he kept on scrolling PHO. The Parahuman Online website turned out to be quite the entertaining website. The first time he’d used it, he had looked at it with a purely clinical and analytical perspective, and once he was done gathering information, he had left the website. 

But after he’d made an actual account and uploaded the high fidelity video of the last moments of S9, he had been quite entertained by all the replies he got on his post. Not the earliest ones from the PRT or the terminally online ones, but the ones from normal peeps, who were all shocked, happy, jubilant, and more when they realised that the threat of the Slaughterhouse Nine was gone, for good.

It was amusing to see that Dragon had kept the videos up after all, only requiring a graphic content warning before people could see it. If she had truly deleted the videos or his account, he had no other way to access the website aside from creating sock puppets, and that was going to be caught one way or another.

The next best thing after that would have been to use the government's SOS resources to push part of the videos or the entire videos to the entire country, or even globally. He had a half baked strategy ready, but apparently, even Dragon agreed, or maybe some law enforcement higher up told Dragon to keep it up.

Either way, the videos stayed up, and within days, the views had already shot up so much. At this point, it was getting kinda hard to read all the comments and keep tabs on what they were replying to. Multiple controversies had happened over the videos. Many members were deleted; many were exposed as freaks who worshipped the likes of Jack Slash and Siberian.

Self-harm enthusiasts and cannibal people who adored them, and as such, came underneath his post to not just expose themselves but also profess their hatred for him, for killing their idols. Dragon was on top of that immediately, though, so all he had to do was watch the entire disaster unfold.

There were many other forum sites to report criminals being caught and apparently, Dragon had alerted the authorities and multiple middle aged men and women were caught being part of a cult that worshipped the Nine, with some of them hoping to get caught by the Nine to trigger and then become a part of the wandering murder hobo group. 

….Humans really were insane, it would seem.

Either way, it worked, and now, no one could say that the name Grand Chariot was not something to be feared. The President had put out a public statement, choosing to honor their privacy and wishes by announcing the donations made to multiple smaller charities.

There were over a hundred charities, each being given a part of the massive bounty. Apparently, they had stopped advertising the bounties, save for the internal PRT network of capes/rogues, to stop normal people from jumping to their deaths, so the whole world was quite shocked by the number.

And the PRT had to issue a public statement that one had to be a cape and an active member of a pre approved list to gain access to the bounty money, even if they were successful in killing the Kill Order targets. This was done to reduce any civilian casualties.

Over the past day or so, he’d taken the time to look into the charities, whose names were publicly announced, and for the most part, they seemed legit. He would do a thorough sweep later, when he was not on the lookout for some news about a particular member of the Triumvirate.

See, he’d known that the moment he had sent William Manton’s body to Rebecca’s office, with a note stuck to his body, that Legend was never going to see what was written in that note. Hence, the warning written in that note was for them not to dig too deep, or he might just expose their entire existence. Also, he told them he was looking for the silver bullet as well, and that he was aware of Scion and the Entities, and even more.

He was sure that Contessa was going to do double duty to find him now, but if she hadn’t found him till now, then there were very few chances that she was going to find him now, especially since he wasn't going to slip up anytime soon, hopefully. There was always the chance that he was, even now, playing into the hands of the most powerful precog on the planet, but thinking in that direction just made him depressed, so he did not dwell too much on that.

Either way, he had sent the body as a message to Legend, but the more important part was not sent with the body, as he knew it wasn't going to reach Legend. See, he knew that the rest of Cauldron were well aware of the Case 53 issue and their origins, but Legend was kept in the dark for most of the series. They told him that Manton was the one doing the whole illegal experimentation and creating new ones.

Now, he could have just told Legend outright that Cauldron was the one doing the whole thing, but it would have created an abrupt explosion within their ranks, something he was not yet ready for. But he also did not want Cauldron completely united to pose a threat to him and the next wave of public heroes he was going to empower.

Hence, he did the next best thing and told Legend, in no uncertain terms, that he had located all of William’s caches, and confirmed that they were all destroyed and that William only had a single partner, Siberian, who was dead as well. It was up to Cauldron to tell Legend or not about Manton being a cape or not, but he would be there, with a letter ready, whenever any new Case 53 was found.

Too much disruption was also not good for business. If he felt like the Triumvirate were being too pushy in the public sphere, he could always make use of this bomb to fracture the invincible image of the group. It wouldn’t hamper most of Cauldron’s operations, but it would help in the overall public perception, and then his empowered people would be right there, waiting to become the next generation of heroes.

Speaking of the next generation of heroes, he was still not sure of who to empower and to what extent. After all, according to his original plan, he was not going to be at the forefront of the entire operation.

He was going to be more akin to the guy in the chair, the support guy helping from the background. His power was perfectly suited for that as well, but he was so indecisive that he hadn’t chosen a single person to help.

Hell, even Taylor had stashed that grey comms patch he gave her in one of her drawers, along with the dismantled phone. He wondered when she would use it. He hoped that at least for her first cape outing, she would use it. Even if she did not, he had enough assets in and around Brockton Bay now that he could easily take care of a Lung that hadn’t finished ramping up yet. Hell, he could take care of the entire Brockton Bay Villains if he wanted to, within the night, but the repercussions of doing that, especially if done by a faceless entity, would be huge.

It would rock the entire city, and he wasn’t sure if he wanted to do that right now. If there was one thing his attempt at handling the aftermath of the S9 attack in Pennsylvania had taught him, it was that PR was important. Sure, Eidolon himself was mostly useless in terms of saving the crowd, and was actually attacking the bogies that had life saying stuff inside, but just because the public was aware of him and what he did and represented, the entire crowd calmed down and began moving out in an orderly fashion, practically erasing the risk of a stampede.

Sure, erasing all the villains in a single night was all well and good, but what after? He wasn’t going to be the one to police Brockton Bay. He had neither the ambition nor the expertise required to do it. It was a thankless job as well. Plus, there was the issue of that single action inviting more and more cape challenges from other parts of the country, turning Brockton and its surroundings into a fight cage, further endangering the people nearby.

All he could feasibly do was take care of the….villains.

He paused in his thoughts, thinking over a new line of thought that appeared in his mind. A new application of all the tech he had lying around the city. Maybe he could just kill all the Villain capes overnight in Brockton, declare that the entire city was going to be a villain free city, and then move on to the next. 

It was feasible, very much so, and he would have been quite excited to follow that line of thinking, if not for one glaring hole.

That his end goal was not a crime free or villain free Earth Bet. His goal was…

His gaze slid from the screen in front of him to the side, showing Scion’s current location, which was the man taking care of a cat and seemingly waiting for its owner, petting the cat that seemed to enjoy Scion’s ministrations. 

That was the end goal. The main villain of the setting. The being that could effortlessly destroy entire Earths and had already destroyed many civilisations. This was a once in a lifetime chance because Scion was a single part of two, and as such, quite vulnerable and aimless right now. 

He had to focus on that. 

….And as much as it disgusted him to even think like that, Cauldron’s approach of keeping the world on the edge of ruin to generate more and more capes to one day get the silver bullet was kind of right. From their perspective, it must have looked like the only option. Even so, it did not justify the continued existence of S9, so he killed them.

But now what? He couldn't just take over one city at a time, kill all the villains that did not surrender, and then move on to the next city to rinse and repeat, creating a villain free country within weeks if need be. No, that would just make him the villain in people’s eyes, and he had no idea how it would help everyone grow.

No, Taylor had to grow. Flecchete had to grow. 

And that growth could only come from conflict. He couldn't just remove conflict entirely. No, that was part of human nature, and if he dared to remove all the villains, then he would have the entire hero ecosystem against him. 

It would not help in any manner. Cauldron would take advantage of it and maybe even find him. Either way, the prospect of acting as the world’s Judge, Jury and Executioner, while tempting, was ultimately not the answer.

He sighed in relief and exhaustion, as his internal ideological fight had exhausted him mentally. It bothered him that he even contemplated Cauldron’s ideology being right, but the world being a death world, he was going to have to start with small wins.

Work his way up to make the world a better place, while making sure that the silver bullets grew up enough to make sure that the final threat could be handled.

That he could do. 

___xx__

Cauldron Compound

–Doctor Mother—

She was snapped awake by the shrill alarm that rang in her quarters. Her eyes widened in alarm as she recognised this particular alarm, a Door appearing in front of her immediately, taking her to Contessa’s chambers.

The alarm on her face increased as she looked at the thrashing form of Contessa, bleeding from her nose, ears, and eyes, as she immediately worked on making sure she was stable. 

She knew this. It happened when Contessa tried too hard to path around a blind spot, only for the blind spot to do something so drastic that everything around them was scrambled to the point that even the Path to Victory had to scramble, injuring Contessa further. But even so, this level of injury was rare. 

The recorders in the room were ON all the time so she could go over them later on, but as she went near Contessa, she heard their most important member mumble, “Ideology…” before slumping; the thrashing stopped.

She pressed a few buttons as Contessa was hooked to a tinker tech nutri fluid, designed specifically for her, her mind going back to the single word Contessa spoke of.

Ideology.