Unknown location, Unknown time.

The Number Man clicks his pen, spinning over his palm once and setting it's tip back down on his desk as he focuses on his monitor.

A swipe here on the touchscreen, a tap there. Three point eight billion dollars. Another swipe and it moves across the digital world. His fingers work at the keyboard as the money keeps moving from one account to another, splitting into smaller increments as it goes.

Money is the lifeblood of civilisation. People bleed for it,  die for it. Money makes the world go around. Without this fantasy, civilisation would collapse. Slips of paper and metal coins, no intrinsic worth beyond the materials they are made of, numbers on a screen, even less real. 

And yet, they have value, because people give them value. There's a simple beauty in that, he thinks.

His pen spins around his palm again and taps back on the desk.

Soon enough, all of that money will end up in various accounts, mostly in the form of anonymous donations.

The King's Men were still in debt, another donation will keep them afloat for another month or two.

He'll have to defund some media outlets, and fund others to be louder, recent events putting quite the spotlight on the Heroes. But the Protectorate still has it's uses, and will continue to be important for the next decade, most likely, maybe even two. So he can't let their reputation get too damaged, though it's an inevitability really.

It's a shame so many parahumans have to be so... rash, shall we say. Alas, without making the majority seek conflict, the Agents wouldn't get the data they want.

His pen spins again.

Valhǫll, formerly Gesellschaft, have started building themselves back up after being trounced by a collective assault from The Clowns. Money has been moving around, consolidating and protecting. They were preparing for something before, he'd noticed money leaving their accounts, just at the same times as various arms dealers were getting the same amount richer.

Unfortunately for them, Number Man didn't even have to deal with that himself. It's going to take some time for them to get themselves in a stable position again, half a year, most likely. It would have been longer, years even, if their leader had been killed. But Lusia spared his life, for whatever reason.

On the thought of Clowns, Number Man moves over to another set of accounts, splitting the screen to show all accounts made in the last month.

Still no change.

He spins his pen.

He predicts that his services will get called soon, a request from Negante, also known as Joker, asking to transfer her accounts to his own.

If everything she told him about Negante is accurate, he'll purport something about getting his money back as his reasoning. Except he likely won't touch the funds, just hold onto them.

It's a strange relationship they have. Then again, he supposes that's par for the course with Lusia. Their own relationship is hardly normal.

Another spin.

Every Clown uses his services, as recommended to them by Lusia. Of course, that means that he knows exactly how many of them there are, and he can extrapolate more from their spending habits and income. Alexandria would not be very happy with him if she knew about that. In fact, his power tells him that there is a high likelihood that she would lash out and break at least some of his bones.

Oh well.

He doesn't owe her anything, and she'll calm down once she stops being so pissy about her eye. She already didn't have an eye in that socket, so really what reason does she have to even be so upset?

Either way, he made a deal with Lusia that he wouldn't tell anyone how many Clowns there are, in exchange for her making sure that each of them make use of his services. A deal he was happy to make.

He doesn't think she knows about Cauldron, never mind his presence in it, but he suspects that she has at least some idea. Leopold knows about them after all, and he knows that for all she likes to claim that she prefers being ignorant, he knows that she likes knowing secrets, if nothing else. So it's not too hard to believe she traded his life for information.

He figures that if she knew he was a part of Cauldron, she would have touted her knowledge right away, attempting to hold it over his head.

She never did.

The pen spins again.

There are not a lot of people Number Man would consider a friend. His co-workers certainly aren't friends. They don't even necessarily get along, such as with Alexandria, who can't get over who he used to be.

But he supposes that's fair enough.

She lost her eye to The Siberian, who then joined up with Jacob, or Jack Slash, as he called himself after they killed King together.

Jacob was his polar opposite, but he was a friend, by some definition of the term. It's somewhat ironic that she now considers Lusia as something of a friend, considering she killed his old friend Jacob. 

Tortured him to death really, and supposedly sold the memory to Toybox, if his information is accurate.

Shaking his head lightly, Number Man lays his pen down, perfectly parallel with his keyboard, just the same as everything else on his desk. Parallel or perpendicular.

Turning around, not having to stand as he prefers a standing desk, not liking the idea of being vulnerable to attack by remaining seated, the Number Man takes in the expansive view behind him.

At the back of his office, is a wall-to-wall, ceiling-to-floor window, showing a mot beautiful scene. An impossibly huge waterfall in the distance, spitting up a cloud of mist as it crashes against the lake it has formed, surrounded by orange foliage and trees that tower for kilometres into the sky.

The view is not one of this Earth. It is  an Earth, just not the one he was born on. Not even the Earth he was currently on. Just one of the many, many Earths where Humanity was never born, where life is purely floral. He has Doormaker keep a portal open in the back of his office, changing it every week or so, so as to spruce the place up a little bit.

He's never liked the endless whites of the compound. White walls, white floors and ceilings. It's all so inexpressive, so  sterile.

So he tries to make his office a little less bland. To his right, he has a large print of the Golden Mean, the Phi decimal as a fractal image in gold against black paper, with mathematical notation surrounding it.

His opposite wall used to have Dali's Crucifixion, Corpus Hypercubus, blown up to one-and-a-half times the size, showing Jesus crucified on a fourth dimensional cross.

But he got rid of that in favour of a cute little thing that Lusia left for him. It's a series of photos, split into a four by three grid, with each photo showing her in the middle of a dance move. It took him barely a second to realise what she had done, beyond simply giving him a way to piss off Alexandria every time she enters his office.

She is using her arms to show mathematical functions, the first image being the wave of sin, then cos, tan, cot, all the way down to one over x, and then, amusingly enough, finishing with what seems to just be a random conflagration of limbs, using strings of her power to make even more lines. But a closer look shows that it is just all of the previous functions stacked on top of each other.

Honestly, the part he is most impressed by, is that she did it perfectly, the angles are all completely right. He's not surprised of course, he knows of her capabilities, but it's an important distinction. If the angles were all slightly wrong, then it would annoy him and be a joke, but as they are correct, it is simply a gift.

It also means that she went through the effort of checking that the photos are correct, something he is fairly certain she cannot do so accurately by herself.

She sent him it shortly after he confided in her what his power was, as part of another trade, of course, so she definitely knew he would appreciate the angles.

Now if only he could find out where she is, and what she's doing.

Ever since her stint in Oakland about a month ago, she has fallen completely off grid, to the point that even the Number Man can not find her.

Interestingly, Thinker predictions have unanimously confirmed that 'Tear' is gone. Dead to never be seen again.

The PRT and media has taken that to mean that she is gone, but clearly their critical thinking skills never developed.

Identity, like money, is entirely fictional. Money has value because we give it value, and names have weight because we give them weight.

'Tear' is dead, but predictions into 'Lusia Abel' have all come back either with mixed responses, or simply inconclusively.

He's curious.

As to what she will do, how she will return to the spotlight. He doesn't have much faith in her ability to keep from doing anything drastic eventually.

He only hopes that they don't need to come up with a plan for immediate extermination. No matter how much Alexandria might want them to.

In part simply because of the difficulty of the task, they only managed to convince the Faerie Queen to retire because Contessa could cheat, but also simply because he'd rather not have to kill her.

She  is quite fun, most of the time, and he somehow doubts that there even  is a Path that could convince her to retire.

Well, it hardly matters right now. He should instead focus on more immediate issues.

Such as the Endbringers. For all the Lusia is being called a Fake Endbringer, that doesn't mean that she is going to reset their schedule.

Leviathan attacked last, two days after Lusia caused worldwide floodings, so it's not going to be him.

Between Behemoth and Simurgh, his power tells him that there is a sixty-eight percent chance that it will be Behemoth, quite possibly pushing further against San Jose and the bay area that is still damaged from Lusia's actions.

There's also a eighty-six percent chance that the attack will happen three days from now, relative to Earth Bet's time, that is.

Which means it is his job to manipulate the world once more, move around enough money that groups that are fighting will cease hostilities enough that they can respond to the attack, hopefully working to stop the decay of humanity just that little bit more.

So with a light sigh, the Number Man turns away from the scenery and returns to his desk.

Truly, work is never done.

---

Istanbul, Türkiye, March 25th, 16:30.

Watching the Simurgh fly away back to low orbit, Miss Militia can only let out a sigh from where she stands in the backlines with the Tinkers and medical personnel.

Her power isn't enough to even inconvenience an Endbringer, this she knows, so she doesn't mind being left to the backlines, so she can use her power to launch hastily constructed Tinker payloads at the Angel of Death.

Once more, they only managed to do superficial damage to the Hopekiller before she left of her own volition. Thankfully, at least she did not stay long enough for Istanbul to be considered for a quarantine zone, though the channel connecting the Black Sea to the Mediterranean has been blocked off again.

With parahuman effort, that at least shouldn't be too difficult an issue to fix. The lives lost, city in ruins and even worse, vetting for Ziz bombs however, will likely take a lot longer. 

She would like to say that at least after having to, once again, face an Endbringer as it brings ruin to another city, she would have something to go home to. Something that could make this all just a little bit easier to handle.

The constant stress. The death, the knowledge that millions upon millions of live have just been uprooted and turned on their heads, and there was little she could do but stand by and watch.

It gets to you, no matter how inured to it all you are.

But she does not.

Miss Militia has no friends outside of her co-workers. She has no family, no boyfriend. Just her job.

And that used to be enough for her. America saved her, gave her freedom in life, and she will always strive to ensure that she can extend the same helping hand that was extended to her.

But now? Well, she recently got a promotion. Normally that would be a good thing, even if she wasn't sure she was ready for the position, no matter how long she's been fighting as a Hero.

It's just that to become the leader of her local Protectorate, it took the loss of the previous leader's life. Armsmaster.

He would never sit out a chance to fight the good fight, either out of duty or a desire for glory, it never mattered to her. He would fight for the sake of others, to help people. That was all that mattered in the end.

But Tinkers are only at their best when they have time to prepare. Every Endbringer's first appearance was always their worst, the defenders not knowing what to expect, what to defend against, and no one was prepared for the Fake Endbringer, Lusia Abel.

From what she hears, he was on the frontline, as he always tries to be. Except this time, all that meant was that he was among the first to die. Thirty-eight Heroes lost before the fight could even properly begin.

It's reminiscent of Behemoth's first appearance, back before anyone suspected that he would have a kill aura, a range around him where his powers could violate the Manton limit. The closest Heroes were killed in an instant, before they could even try to fight back. Just like Armsmaster.

So now, instead of going back to Brockton and  maybe getting to relax and unwind, she instead has to go back and get back to figuring out how to be a leader.

At least, as a Noctis cape, she doesn't have to worry about wasting time sleeping, and the eidetic memory is certainly helpful.

Thinking about her memory, she recalls that they are getting a transfer in the coming days to make up for the loss of Armsmaster, and she lets out a sigh as she realises that she's going to have to be the one to get them settled in.

Though, she likely would have been doing that anyway, as Armsmaster preferred to delegate when it came to interpersonal things like this, but at least in that case, she wouldn't have to be dealing with everything else on top of it.

At least the Fake Endbringer seems to be gone, one way or the other. She'll take any silver lining she could get at this point.

---

A/N: He~llo! Dear readers!

Wrote a little Armsmaster bit because I was questioned on where he was, as if that is something I would forget. So yeah, now you know. He just wasn't enough of a man for Lusia to even recognise he existed.

I honestly contemplated having Armsmaster be one of the 38 that died right at the start, it would have been really funny.... actually, I might do that.

If when you are reading this, there is no Armsmaster, then that means that I changed my mind after posting the chap to patreon, in which case, sucks to suck I guess, bro got wiped out by a stray thought lmao.

Also means you plebs missed out on a scrapped 500 words of Armsmaster being Armsmaster. (btw, that's him going "boohoo, I'm not the greatest hero ever! wahhh" so not much of a loss lol)

Also, I wonder what Simurgh was doing over in Istanbul? Surely that won't have any consequences down the line, right? 

ALSO!!! A hella dope piece of fanart came in for Jinx in da discord, showing that sad, tired boy in all his glory and it's perfect and exactly what Jinx should look like and I love it. RIP ma boy o7

5(+) Advance Chapters on my Patreon :D (There should be buttons below the poll)