Everyone at the Black Balsam base watched the footage transmitted from the audio-visual bugs which Haliaeetus had planted. Cathartes interlocked his fingers before him and sat back. A bloody battle was playing out at the 1564 base, just as he had planned. Brett Lawyer herself was witnessing the chaos from her laptop at home through an online call. More shots resounded. And more shouts and yells.

“Uh, how would you say it’s going?” Sagittarius inquired of Cathartes and Haliaeetus, speaking over the gunfire playing live from her laptop. She could not stop moving in her seat. Cathartes and Haliaeetus stood behind her, watching the grainy footage intently. At this point, they saw the bouncer suffer a shot through the heart and fall through the door. Things didn’t turn out well for the police either. Quickly, Edmund Jefferson was taken out, and then John Sanders—by someone above: it had to be Richard Tate on the roof. Matthew Taylor entered the room alone. The 1564 gangsters inside their base all drew their weapons. Flashes of gunfire blanketed the whole screen.

“Quite well. Quite well.” Cathartes nodded deeply. “Like I said, the footage is not of the best quality. Besides, we can’t see outside the base and on the roof, so it will take a while before we discern who lived and who died. But from the chaos we can tell, we have dealt substantial damage.”

The next thing they saw was what appeared to be the driver of the kidnapping van being blown through the doorway with gunfire. His body flew across the room into the shadows near the stairwell. Then, Deborah Smith was struck by Zachary Xander, and brutally finished off by Tate. Xander himself was then blasted to pieces by Carl Devon. Devon approached to take a peek at the base, coming close to the doorway. He was shot from above. Jonathan Williamson tried to escape and was shot. Then Devon was hit again, and then again, in the head.

“Damn, that Richard Tate really is something.” Cathartes clapped. “What do you think of our handiwork, Mrs Brett Lawyer? Or your own handiwork, rather!” he asked over the live call. 

“Excellent.” She held back an explosive laugh. Her eyes were crazed. Her face shone with a terrifying antithesis of grief. Yet that something was not joy. “I couldn’t have asked for anything better. Just as I expected from all the good things I've read and heard about you. Thank you for making this happen!”

“Thank yourself. After all, your email was the Writ of Revenge. It was an excellent forgery of personality. Act III is going smoothly. A pity you couldn’t join us here today, ma’am.”

“Yes, I needed to be at my husband’s funeral wake.” She sighed. “It’s over now, but I wanted time for my daughter and I to be with him. It’s our last chance. She’s asleep now. But I’ll be sitting here with him for the night.”

“How is that going?” Haliaeetus asked.

Brett Lawyer angled her laptop upwards. Behind the couch she was sitting on, there was a coffin, placed in the middle of her living room. Cathartes noticed that it had a transparent cover, and the body it held was visible. Damaged, but clean.

“Thank you, Haliaeetus, I am glad to have seen that,” Cathartes whispered dryly. 

“What? You’ve already seen that in the case files of his death. What’s turning you off this time? Besides…we facilitate deaths all the time…”

“Ehhh, that’s not the same. Context. Context matters. Seeing someone who died and seeing a dead body is different. Wanting to know how he died is interesting. Randomly seeing a corpse in a coffin in the middle of a house is not pleasant. Not really.”

“And seeing a corpse outside of a coffin in the middle of a house isn’t unpleasant?” she asked as members of both the gang and the police fell successively from fatal bullet wounds.

“Not if it’s freshly killed and thrown on the floor, no. Not if it’s messy. Because that would be a crime scene. But this? This is too clinical and too clean. Look at that wooden coffin. Its edges are so well-defined. Its texture is so smooth. Everything has been cleansed, apparently—except it hasn’t. A battered man in a pristine white sheet. An out-of-place artefact. Now that is a disturbing juxtaposition. It’s like execution by the state, really.”

Tears fell from Brett Lawyer’s eyes.

“Oh, you’re crying again. I thought you had quit that habit,” Cathartes remarked.

“No. No. Well, yes. But these…these are tears of joy! Retribution is near. This is an absolute success! Your work, I am showing it to him right now.”

“Him?” Haliaeetus asked. Then she realised who that was.

The sound of more gunfire played from both their screens. Brett Lawyer tapped on the coffin and cried out to the corpse, turning the laptop towards it. “Look! Look at this, Walter! Look at this! These kind people set it all up. Those people who sabotaged you. You are avenged! But there’s still the mastermind behind it all, and I promise they will bring him to us. Alive. Come on, Walter!”

Cathartes let out a neutral laugh. Haliaeetus did not know what to say. Sagittarius shifted uncomfortably in her seat.

“You guys continue. Tell me when it’s done.” She stood up and crept into the side room with the rest of her gadgets. Haliaeetus trailed her with her eyes as she left, and did not say a word. Cathartes kept his gaze fixed on the laptop.

“Now that room has been really messed up…” Cathartes tapped the darkened corner of the grainy screen where the stairwell was. “Wait, someone is heading for the stairs to the roof—a 1564 guy, clothes all torn and tattered. And another one—an officer, crawling up now from the pile of bodies! It looks like—”

“Taylor?!” Brett Lawyer exclaimed in disgust. “Goddamn it, this guy is tough!” Cathartes stared closer at the screen. He scratched his head and crossed his legs.

Haliaeetus interjected, “Mrs Lawyer, I didn’t place any bugs up on the roof. So we don’t have a visual.”

“There’s going to be a showdown on the roof. We’ll just wait to see if anyone returns downstairs,” Cathartes calmly reassured them.

“And the bugs placed below might be strong enough to pick up sounds from the roof. If the door is kept ajar.”

“Hey.” It sounded like the voice of Richard Tate. His footsteps indicated that he was walking towards the door above. They sounded cautious. As seen from the audio-visual bug, the other grainy gangster ascended the stairs. The door was kicked open and he stepped onto the roof, out of sight.

“They are bulldozing us downstairs!” his voice could be heard.

“Huh?” Tate repeated.

“We were getting them too, at the start, but this guy is going crazy, shooting us up! He’s coming for you! That Taylor guy!”

Cathartes smiled under his mask. “So it is indeed our boy Taylor. Hmm…”

“Ah, after I shot his brother-in-arms, huh?” Tate replied to the other gangster.

“Yes.”

Tate let out a maniacal laugh. He closed the door. The rest of the conversation was muffled. The door was opened again with a creek.

“Hello there. Surprised?” It was Matthew Taylor at the stairwell. He casually reloaded his weapon and cocked it. 

“He’s here!” the other man on the roof could be heard saying.

There was another noise of Tate similarly arming himself.

“You brutal savages killed my partner just like that! And everyone else! That will not go unpunished!” Taylor rushed onto the roof.

The deafening sound of a sea of fire followed.