RWD: 4.x (Interlude)(Armsmaster)

4.x (Interlude)(Armsmaster)

The office was too warm. The radiator banged and hissed like a dying engine, every rattle another pebble in the shoe. Armsmaster—Colin Wallis, officially, though he was careful about thinking of himself as such here—sat perfectly still. The desk was an unremarkable slab of grey, the ergonomics designed by committee. He’d brought in his own chair months ago. There was a certain satisfaction in the click of the armrests, in things that bent to engineering.

He stared at the screens arrayed before him. Blue-white light bled into his vision, afterimages burned behind his eyes. One monitor streamed SIGINT results: chatter, logs, message-board dumps from the darker corners of the internet. Another was dedicated to the feed from PHO, where the latest "Hollowpoint" memes were spreading like a virus, the signal-to-noise ratio collapsing by the hour. Two more cycled through threat assessments, digital footprints, and the slow drip of whatever the feds deigned to share. On the far right, an analogue clock, ticking away the minutes he was not on patrol, not in his suit, not doing the work that had once meant saving lives instead of parsing the same two dozen files in an endless loop.

It was, by all accounts, a waste of his time.

He had long catalogued the facts, such as they were. Not many, just a little more perhaps than the public already suspected. It was annoying, being this uninformed.

Colin’s jaw clenched. He reminded himself, consciously, to unclench. Two hours of sleep in the last thirty-six. Coffee cooling by his elbow. He didn’t reach for it.

There were four internal PRT channels now dedicated to Hollowpoint and his “Peacekeepers.” A fifth, read-only, for watching the CIA and NSA get in each other's way, a sixth for the Bureau’s never-ending procedural complaints, and a seventh, newly stood up, for Homeland Security to threaten to take over. It was like a goddamn clown car, every agency wanting their turn at the wheel. A fucking shitshow.

Colin’s fingers hovered over the keyboard, hesitating. He typed a command, summoning a directory of the most recent incident reports. The data blurred together in his mind as he ran another behaviour analysis before coming back to the same results as always.

He leaned back, a creak of leather. Closed his eyes. The clues, as always, refused to add up.

He remembered the old days. The simplicity of a villain, a plan, and a counter. It was never easy, but it was clean: find the threat, respond, outthink and outfight. Now? Now every step was shadowed by uncertainty. Hollowpoint didn’t fit the template. No fingerprints, no discarded shell companies, no reliable leaks.

Every informant they’d turned—every single one—had turned out to be a dead end, or worse, feeding them corrupted intel. Colin’d begun to suspect double agents, or some more sophisticated compromise. Either Hollowpoint was running counterintelligence at a level that rivalled what the state employed, or the entire underworld had suddenly grown smarter overnight. He didn’t believe in that sort of miracle.

He stared at a list of asset names. The few “leaks” they’d managed to pressure out of the organisation. Most, he now assumed, were double agents. Nothing useful, nothing that lined up with surveillance, nothing that explained how the organisation built a credible missile program without triggering a single actionable tip. Not a whisper of a single actual base location. Not a single reliable description of Hollowpoint himself, just general surface-level intel and the manufactured mystique. Precise, controlled violence. Everything about them was an engineered narrative.

And now, thanks to the missile test, he had to share his already limited resources with at least three different federal agencies, all of whom regarded the PRT as an inconvenient provincial holding pattern until the real law enforcement arrived.

He clicked through to the shared files—incident logs, redacted, redacted, redacted. There was a message in that, too: you are not trusted.

Colin let out a slow breath through his nose, then toggled through the database of public reactions. He didn’t trust it—people lied, social media was its own beast, astroturfers and bots muddying the water. But the sheer volume of public support for Hollowpoint in Brockton Bay itself was undeniable. The city’s forums and local channels spoke with one voice: someone was finally doing the work. Not by the book, but by results. The PRT, meanwhile, had seen approval ratings crater after labelling the group as terrorists in the same hour as the photos of Hookwolf’s corpse went viral.

He checked the clock again. Thirty-seven minutes until the next inter-agency coordination call. The last one had devolved into a shouting match over who had jurisdiction on some maritime assets south of Greenland.

Colin tapped his finger against the edge of his desk. He needed an in. He needed something none of the others had—something actionable. The feds could chase their own tails for weeks, and meanwhile, Hollowpoint would move on the ABB, just as he’d moved on every other group. It was inevitable. The pattern was almost too obvious.

He pulled up ABB surveillance feeds. If Hollowpoint had a flaw, it was in the efficiency of his violence. Too quick, too public, too surgical. The kind of precision that left a signature even when everything else was wiped clean. That meant logistics. That meant movement. That meant, if Colin could just get one camera feed, one drone photo, one microsecond of the right radio frequency at the right time—

The phone buzzed, interrupting his focus. He scowled, answering.

"Wallis."

A tinny voice on the other end. Deputy Director Diaz, Homeland Security. "Colin. Coordination call's in twenty. You’ll want to have your incident summary ready, we’re getting new satellite passes. The White House is taking a direct interest. We're told the Secretary will be on."

Colin masked his irritation. "Understood."

"And make sure your people play nice with the Agency. This pissing contest isn’t winning us any friends. Last thing we need is a leak."

He didn’t bother to answer. The line clicked dead.

He returned his attention to the screens. The feeds, the data, the thousand small things he had to hold in his head at once. He thought of the Peacekeepers—what an absurd name—and Hollowpoint, their faceless leader, somewhere out there, watching the same city, playing his own game. The lines of conflict were clear enough: ABB, last one standing. Even the Merchants had gone into hiding and the E88 had finally dissolve, what was left anyway, the ones who weren't dead or broken had vanished into the cracks.

The feds would want their own collar. The Bureau would sabotage the op rather than let the PRT have it. If Colin wanted to be the one to finally put Hollowpoint in a cell, he’d have to move first and better. He would. He would outthink them, outwork them. That was what Armsmaster did.

He called up the next set of data. Set the code running on the latest encrypted transmissions—someone was talking to someone, somewhere. He would find the link. He had to.

The clock ticked on. Another hour, another three conference calls, another fifty pages of redacted files. By midday, the office was stifling. He removed his helmet, wiped sweat from his brow, then paused, thinking of the optics. Cameras everywhere now. He kept his expression neutral, professional. He drank the coffee, cold.

When the notification popped, he sat upright.

SIGNIFICANT SOCIAL MEDIA TRAFFIC—PHO, THREAD ID #3912457.

He pulled it up. A thread, three thousand comments in under ten minutes. The original post: a compilation of images, the hawk sigil, the message, JUSTICE DELIVERED—A GIFT FROM BROCKTON BAY’S PEACEKEEPERS. The commentary was an endless scroll of praise, outrage, theorising. The PRT’s earlier statement already buried in downvotes.

He watched the first few pages of discussion, then stopped on a detail.

A username he recognised: “Nail_Head.” One of the informants, or so the Bureau claimed. Posting at 03:17, minutes after the images were released, "The Peacekeepers are the only reason I feel safe walking home at night. If the PRT had done their job, Gallant would still be alive."

Colin felt a fresh wave of irritation. He made a note to cross-check the IP address, but he already knew it wouldn’t lead anywhere useful. Too professional. Whoever was running this had thought ten moves ahead.

If anything, the Hookwolf kill had been a gift and a curse—more data to analyse, but also more pressure from above. Colin opened a blank document and began to type, methodically, assembling the updated profile for Hollowpoint and his “Peacekeepers.” Methodology: Surgical violence, escalation of force, targeted propaganda. Assets: Unknown, but suggest a small core group with extensive outside contractor support. Tactics: Preemptive elimination of rival groups. Public relations: Manipulation of narrative, calculated exposure. Weaknesses: None yet observed.

He hesitated, fingers hovering. There had to be something. A way in.

He toggled the ABB feeds again. More activity today than usual, small groups, men with guns patrolling the perimeter of a warehouse complex in the Docks. Tension, the kind that comes when predators sense another predator circling.

He tagged the location, sent it to Dragon with a note: "Reminder: Increase coverage—expect escalation. Hollowpoint’s next move likely imminent."

The notification pinged back, "You sent this an hour ago. Are you OK?"

Huh… Did he? Colin didn’t remember.

Regardless, it would be enough, he told himself. It had to be. He just needed a single mistake. A single frame, a single voice on the wrong frequency.

He would be the one to catch them. He would bring order out of chaos, where the others saw only opportunity for promotion, or revenge, or settling scores.

The office was still too warm. The radiator ticked. Colin stared at the feeds, eyes dry, jaw set.

He could wait. He would wait. He was Armsmaster. He always came out ahead.