The last of the pier's flames flickered across the rotting boards as the battle finally staggered into chaos. Shocker's vibro-blasts had torn holes through the warehouse siding, Jack O'Lantern's hellfire still clung to the rafters like burning cobwebs, and the air stank of electricity, smoke, and panic.
From the roof of an adjacent building, Delilah watched it all through her thermal scope.
Then—there.
A heat signature detached itself from the knot of combatants inside the warehouse, rising straight upward in a smooth, unnatural arc.
Parker Robbins. The Hood. Running.
He wasn't moving like someone sprinting for his life—he was focused, moving with intent. He landed lightly on the roof of the warehouse, only distinguishable as a shimmering blur of heat due to the invisibility cloak.
Delilah exhaled slowly, the cold night air fogging against her scope.
Luc Moreau's voice echoed in her memory, "The cloak is useful, ma chère. But the man wearing it? He's a rat with a matchbox. Never chase a burning rat in public. You're more important than the cloak. If you can get it fine, and if not, that is okay."
And Luc was right. Taking the cloak by force tonight—right under the nose of the NYPD—was pure suicide.
She scanned again.
Parker bolted from the rooftop, sprinting along a catwalk and disappearing into the maze of alleys behind the pier.
Delilah lowered her rifle.
There was something else she should prioritize even more than the cloak.
The mercenaries.
Inside the Warehouse, gunfire cracked as ESU officers poured into the ruined facility, their riot shields forward and weapons raised. Shocker and Constrictor fell back behind a forklift, Jack O'Lantern hovering overhead like a flaming, demonic lanternfish.
Madame Rapier stood in the center of the chaos—still, poised, unreadable—as fifteen guns trained on her and her hired crew.
Detective Yuri Watanabe stepped forward, voice hard as reinforced steel, "Drop your weapons and lower your hands! Now! This warehouse is surrounded. ESU trucks are forming a perimeter. If you want to leave alive, you walk out with your hands where I can see them."
Shocker cursed under his breath, "Fuck, this is bad."
Constrictor muttered, "Hey, team lead. What the hell are we supposed to do now!? I'm not paid enough to go against the cops!"
Jack O'Lantern swooped low, whispering, "We can easily get away, but then there'll be a manhunt, and we'll need to go into hiding. That's inconvenient."
Rapier lifted her hand, and the mercenaries fell silent.
She weighed the room, the angles, the number of guns, the exits. They weren't escaping this cleanly. But they weren't surrendering, either.
Before she could speak—
Two gunshots rang out from nowhere.
CRACK—CRACK.
The shots didn't hit anyone—but they hit close enough.
ESU retreated for cover.
The mercenaries froze.
Yuri Watanabe jerked her head up, eyes narrowing. "Sniper! Move!"
A controlled, calculated storm of noise erupted.
Rapier's eyes flicked upward.
Someone was herding them.
Still prone on the rooftop of the building next to the compound, Delilah chambered another round, sighting down her scope not at targets—but at angles.
Controlling panic.
She fired again, a deliberate shot sparking off a support beam inches from Constrictor's head.
He flinched and dove in the direction she needed him to go.
Good.
Rapier blinked, then noticed the earpiece sitting atop a crate—one Delilah had pinned with a bullet for emphasis.
A slip of paper lay beneath.
Pick me up.
She snatched it up.
Rapier slipped the earpiece into place.
Delilah's voice hissed straight into her ear.
"Move your men toward the northeast crates. There's a floor hatch."
Rapier's calm flickered. "Who are you?"
"Someone who just saved your life. Move now."
Rapier signaled the mercenaries with two sharp gestures.
Shocker bolted. Constrictor followed. Jack O'Lantern strafed sideways overhead, spewing hellfire to force the ESU into cover.
Yuri shouted, "Hold your positions—do not fire blindly! Damn, weren't the nearby rooftop cleared for snipers before the operation began! Why is there a sniper now!? Get a unit up there now!"
Delilah smirked.
They would find nothing there but cooling shell casings by the time they got here.
Rapier reached the stack of crates, fingers brushing the floor until she found the micro-seam Delilah described. She pressed her palm to the indentation.
A magnetic lock snapped open.
A hidden hatch slid aside.
Below was darkness—and stale sewer air.
Delilah's voice crackled again.
"Jump. Now. Remember to shut the hatch. The cops have seen it, so doing that will buy you a few extra seconds. More units are minutes away."
Rapier questioned nothing further. She dropped.
Constrictor followed, muttering.
Shocker scrambled after them.
Jack O'Lantern swooped down last, releasing a disk of hellfire behind him—a blazing curtain of flame that roared upward, sealing the exit in a roaring inferno.
Up above, ESU forces scrambled away from the heat.
Down below, the mercenaries landed in knee-deep water.
Rapier steadied herself and looked up.
Another slip of paper on the sewer walls.
It read: KEEP MOVING. I'LL CONTACT YOU LATER. – D
Rapier clenched her jaw—equal parts annoyance and intrigue.
Whoever "D" was…
She was effective.
Three blocks away, Delilah finally spotted Parker again. The thermal imprint of the cloak had vanished—meaning he'd removed it. Delilah was quite surprised that a cloak could have a thermal imprint. Regardless, now that she knew where he was, she switched her scope to a regular one and found him again.
She zoomed in.
There he was, tucked in a narrow alley, stripping off his bloodstained jacket, wiping soot across his face, mussing his hair, and pulling on a plain worker's coat.
Delilah muttered under her breath, "Oh… you clever bastard."
Parker Robbins—mob boss, murderer, amateur demon host—was deliberately making himself look small.
Insignificant.
Arrestable.
She watched as he opened a crate and placed the cloak inside it before sealing it up.
He tugged a wool hat low over his face.
Then he walked out of the alley with the exhausted shuffle of a low-level grunt trying to flee a crime scene.
Two ESU officers immediately grabbed him and slammed him to the hood of a car, "Down! Do not resist!"
Parker whimpered like a terrified civilian.
In the distance, someone shouted, "We found a body wearing the Hood's cloak!"
Delilah nearly laughed aloud as she watched.
Parker wasn't escaping the law.
He was using it to disappear. Imagine that turning the cops into you accomplishes.
Farther up the road, a sedan coughed twice before roaring to life.
Madame Masque—now wearing a simple brown coat over her golden mask—leaned back in the driver's seat, satisfied with her hotwire job.
In the passenger seat sat a canvas bag.
Inside was the Hood's spellbook collection
All untouched, all priceless. Gaining an artifact that gives you demonic powers, then making someone a believer real quick. That's why Parker committed himself to collecting many occult books, knowing that magic is real.
Masque checked her mirrors.
The NYPD blockade had a gap on the east side—one that she knew how to exploit.
She shifted into drive.
The tires squealed as she slipped through the shadows of the industrial district, ducking around the last patrol car just as its occupants exited to join the warehouse chaos.
She exhaled softly, "Luc, hmm, looks like your little canary is more loyal to you than I thought. Well, his plan is for me to befriend Delilah and make her think she's in control while I really control things. She'll be the face, and I'll be the brain. It works well enough for me, but the girl still doesn't trust me and didn't let me know how she'll escape. Looks like I've got my work cut out for me, I guess."
The books shifted in the bag as two squad cars chased behind her.
Madame Masque did not look back. She'd lose her tail and then ditch the car before making sure she wasn't being followed. Once that was done, she'd head back to the house.
Back on the rooftop, Delilah watched the dozens of flashing lights converge on the pier—officers, paramedics, tactical vans, even helicopters sweeping their beams across the water.
The battlefield was collapsing inward.
Everyone had escaped exactly as Luc predicted, and now she needed to vanish. There should be officers running up the building stairs to arrest her, but Delilah seemed rather calm, and she went through what happened on the mission.
Parker vanished into police custody. Masque had secured the tomes. The mercenaries were alive, in the sewers, waiting for pickup.
Delilah slung her rifle over her shoulder. As soon as officers busted through the door, Delilah smiled and jumped off the side of the building. With her super strength and durability, she landed, and as the shocked officer looked down the side of the building, she had vanished, leaving only a crater where she landed.
By the time they got down, Delilah had vanished. Making her way out of the blockade, Delilah whispered into the wind, "Extraction complete. Now I have to meet up with those guys and give them my offer before I return home. As for the hood, I'll leave it until the police finish up, and if they take it, then forget it."
Figuring that she'd done enough to consider the mission a success, she stepped silently into the darkness.
Back at the pier, it was a graveyard of smoke and flashing blue lights. Yuri Watanabe stood by the central command van, her coat snapping in the biting wind as she watched paramedics treat a row of ESU officers for minor flash burns—parting gifts from Jack O'Lantern's hellfire.
She took a slow, steadying breath. Despite the heavy ordnance, the structural collapses, and the unexpected sniper fire, the preliminary reports were coming in clean: no fatalities. She felt a brief, sharp sense of relief, grateful she wouldn't be making any "knock-at-the-door" visits to families tonight.
But as the adrenaline faded, a cold, hard anger took its place.
"Sergeant!" she barked, waving over the tactical lead. "I want the names of the sweep team responsible for clearing the adjacent buildings before we breached. Now."
The sergeant blinked, startled by the edge in her voice. "Ma'am?"
"A sniper managed to set up a nest, fire multiple rounds into a tactical zone, herded our targets like sheep, and vanished from a supposedly 'secured' rooftop without a single officer spotting them," Yuri said, her voice dropping to a dangerous, quiet hiss. "I want to know how that happened."
Before he could answer, her radio crackled with a new report. "Dispatch to Detective Watanabe. We've located the suspect vehicle. A brown sedan, ditched three blocks east. Engine is still warm, but the driver is gone. We called forensics, but it looks clean. We've got nothing."
Yuri closed her eyes and rubbed her temples. A sniper nest missed, a vehicle breached through a maritime and land blockade, and four high-powered mercenaries disappeared into the sewers. To say this was a shitshow was an understatement.
"The level of incompetence on this operation was staggering," she muttered to herself, ignoring the uneasy look from her sergeant.
She looked toward the perimeter where two officers were loading a soot-covered, shivering worker into the back of a squad car—the man they'd found fleeing the alley. Nearby, an evidence tech was bagging a tattered red hood found abandoned in the rubble.
Her instincts screamed at her. This wasn't just a botched raid; it was a choreographed play, and she had been led onto the stage exactly when the director wanted her there.
"Pack it up," Yuri ordered, her jaw set. "I'm heading to One Police Plaza. If the Commissioner wants to know why the most expensive task force in the city let the Hood and the Golem's crew slip through their fingers, he can hear it from me. Also, bring in the Golem for questioning. I'll handle the interrogation myself."
As she climbed into her car, she didn't look back at the pier. She was the one in charge, and she would take the responsibility for the failure —but she was already planning her next move. Whoever was pulling the strings had won the night, but they had also just made it personal.