Despite the number of important people involved and the scale of the event, things actually wrapped up fairly neatly after the attack. Only a small part of it was damaged in the assault, which indicated it had been up to proper standards. Technically there were larger Bunvorixian battleships that could have leveled the whole building, but they would have likely been harder to slip past the solar system’s defenses. Someone would still have to figure out how that happened.

  Spot was captured. Gloom and Darkstargirl retreated. A few people with portal powers had been arrested before they got to do anything. I’d gotten to meteor swarm most of the Bunvorixian fleet that had landed.

  We were pretty sure that the Bunvorixians hadn’t sabotaged the Embassy, but that was a problem for someone else to look at.

  Everything went fine. It did seem to eclipse the news about the isekai abductions, though. So now I had people pestering me about that, even though there were literal people whose jobs it was to answer those questions. The Embassy was entirely for talking to people, but I guess the news organizations couldn’t just accept the press statements.

  -----

  I furrowed my brow. Everyone had the right to have supernatural powers, and that shouldn’t be taken away from them. “There’s only one reasonable solution. We’ll have to kill him now.”

  We obviously couldn’t leave Spot around to cause more trouble, so that was the only choice.

  “We can’t do that!” Midnight said.

  “That’s fine. I can do it.”

  “That’s murder.”

  “We’re at war!”

  “He’s a captive now. Also, I’m not saying he won’t be put to death,” Midnight continued. “There’s just a process to this.”

  I paused to think for a few moments. “So you’re saying… we shouldn’t have tried to capture him.”

  Midnight cleared his throat. “The Power Brigade handbook is very clear on ‘accidents’. And it would be unreasonable to have said that we couldn’t do this. Given our current conditions.”

  “Eh. I’m pretty drained.”

  I’d used up most of my mana. Or… half of it, anyway. The expected limit for most people with my power system.

  “Anyway,” Midnight said. “Since he was captured inside of the embassy, Spot is officially a prisoner of the Celmothians and not anyone from Earth or Mars. We’ll have a trial of our own.”

  “Ugh. Sounds tedious.”

  “We’ve gotten quite efficient at prosecuting war criminals,” Midnight said. “There isn’t much defense he could offer. Simply being on Celmothian territory is a crime.”

  “We’ll have to make sure Zeb doesn’t come here, then.”

  “She should be an exception. But… it’s still better to avoid that. It’s not easy for old fogies to get over a generational war.”

  Midnight sounded extremely wise and pragmatic there. Of course, he was the one that had been afraid of dogs when I met him. He didn’t exactly have many nice things to say about Bunvorixians in general. Though, they were at war and there hadn’t been any mixing of their populations beforehand. Any dog looked like an enemy combatant.

  He’d done fine with Zeb once he got to know her, though. Zeb was great. Midnight had also been fine around the revolution. It would be stretching it to say he was a neutral judge as far as Bunvorixians went, though. Celmothians understood that the top dogs were at fault for everything, but it was still difficult not to resent the rest that were still involved in working against them. Everyone had friends or family lost to the war.

  “So, how does the trial work?” I asked.

  “I don’t usually pay much attention. There’s a lot of video evidence and stuff. It’s hard to have anything resembling a fair trial, but… active war. And the Bunvorixians don’t take many people alive so we can’t do any exchanges. As a general, it’s impossible for Spot to evade responsibility. We actually planned to work out a deal with Earth to hold onto some of the engineers and rank-and-file. Though clearly the Bunvorixians can get here easily enough.”

  “Yeah,” I nodded. “I wondered about that. How come there aren’t a bunch of Celmothian ships around?”

  “It was expected that something like this couldn’t happen. But we might be changing things now.”

  Technically, the Embassy was fine. Nobody had been trying to kill civilians- the villains were smarter than that. There wasn’t a lot of leeway for villains that would engage in random killings. Even so, an incident like this was quite disruptive. Relatedly, said villains had disengaged but might raise a fuss upon realizing that Spot was captured.

  Or maybe they would abandon him. I had no idea how Darkstargirl’s brain worked, and Gloom even less so.

  -----

  A fist struck a concrete target, shattering it. While Great Girl was known for her great strength, at ‘normal’ size she wasn’t usually considered terribly impressive. I wondered if it hurt.

  “I can’t believe I didn’t make it!” she screamed. “Those cowards ran away as soon as possible. I couldn’t exactly leave people in that burning building, though.”

  I nodded. “You’ll get another chance.”

  Great Girl was excellent for rescuing, because she could become big and strong. Alternatively, she could fit inside a building without much fear of it collapsing on her. With the right gear she could rescue people trapped away from windows. Most likely she wasn’t the first choice, but any super that could do something about such disasters always participated if they were nearby. She might not have made it to the Embassy incident even if she departed immediately upon our call for help, but there would have been a chance.

  With both people being her career-long rivals, Great Girl always looked for chances to face off against them. Although we had been winning lately, being unable to capture them left a sour taste.

  “I’m going to do that-” Great Girl gestured to the chunks of concrete. “To their skulls!”

  Gloom was a borderline case where killing the spooky fear based villain wasn’t unreasonable. Darkstargirl was absolutely a betrayal of heroic standards, but it would still be bad form to kill her if there were reasonable alternatives.

  Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

  Obviously Great Girl didn’t need to hear that from me, though. She knew it. “Gloom would be difficult.”

  “Not so much with you around. And hey, you’re into enchanting now? Can you make my gloves Ghost Touch?”

  I pondered for a few moments. “Presumably that is a specific thing you’re referencing. It sounds difficult.”

  “What? It’s pretty low level! You can cast Gate.”

  “Spells are easy,” I said. “That just happens. I’m not imbued with the knowledge of enchantments, and I haven’t interacted with anything of the sort as far as I’m aware. Gloom is already semi-physical, though. You might not need it.”

  “I’ve tried grappling. It’s awful. Though… part of that is the feeling. Both the touch and the darkness. But you can fix the second one!” Great Girl nodded. “Seriously, how do you have perfect abilities for both my rivals?”

  “That’s because-”

  “Mages are versatile. Yeah, I get how it works. I’m just complaining.”

  “You’re strong though. How’s your training going?”

  “Pretty good. If I really push it, I can hit fo- three and a third times my height.”

  “Just say twenty feet,” I suggested.

  She nodded. “I can only be twenty feet for a few moments, so it’s not that useful. But I can also squeeze into pretty small areas. I’m also maintaining more strength in other forms, though… that might be unrelated.”

  “You work out,” I noted. She was also a werewolf. But she never slacked off on her training, so it was reasonable for her to become stronger. Incorporating more strength into a neutral form was surely something that fit. I considered options that might make her feel better. “If your training is going well, want to punch a meteor?” She raised an eyebrow. “I’ll shield you from the fire. It would just be for fun.”

  Of course, fragile people would still be crushed by the kinetic impact of the spell. Seeing the king of the Many-Colored take them on directly had made me want to test the spell against other people, though.

  “... Yeah, alright.”

  -----

  I couldn’t say either of us learned anything critical from our attempts. She did punch the meteors, but we already knew that any decent heavy super could do that. She was a bit lacking on the elemental resistance side of things, though mostly we just didn’t want to give Francois too much repair work. She punched them, and I watched the explosions. I did learn I could delay the descent of individual meteors to drop them sequentially, but they seemed to get weaker- both from the lack of combining their power and lost energy due to modifying their behavior.

  At some point I would need to learn other high tier energy spells that I could study to improve my mastery, but first I would want to improve my spatial magic. I used that often, and there were more risks with changing how it worked. Actually, I could use some of the Advanced tier more. Like Dimension Door. Teleporting around to attack someone from a better angle could be better than using the same mana to just throw lightning at them.

  -----

  Spot was, obviously, no longer on Earth. He had been sent off to Celmoth as naked as the day he was born- which was to say covered in fur. Bunvorixians and Celmothians could use clothes for extra protection or style, but they didn’t really need it. Though it was far more usual to have some sort of utility suit, usually smaller grabbers and the like instead of something as outrageous as Midnight’s adaptable combat suit. Most people didn’t need military capabilities in their day to day.

  There was a reason Midnight had ended up on Earth without anything. The teleportation glitch had occurred as he casually went out, which had probably made things more traumatizing. He basically stepped out his front door onto another planet.

  I had to specifically aim for a portal that popped up in Master Uvithar’s room. The difference was I chose that.

  Along with Spot’s transportation- which included a billion scans to make sure he didn’t carry any secret transmission devices inside him- we contacted the Bunvorixian resistance. We’d been coordinating for a while, and now seemed like a time when something relevant might happen.

  There was some chance that the Bunvorixians would give up on Spot. I wasn’t actually sure if they could properly contact the villains without him, and attacking Celmoth directly seemed risky. But they’d done crazy things before, and I didn’t expect them to stop.

  “Your part of the plan is boring,” I commented.

  “And yours is crazy.”

  “I think you mean exciting,” I grinned.

  Midnight would be on Celmoth for the near future. Also, Great Girl and her team, plus maybe some other members of the Power Brigade. It was an official assignment, coordinated with New Bay as a sort of apology and promise for future good relationships. The chances that there would be some sort of trouble were high. The villains weren’t expected to reach Celmoth, but if they did… Great Girl would be there. And it was easier for Midnight to send them to Earth if necessary than for them to be called in from an arbitrary location. Celmoth had established rapid communication with Extra now, so Midnight and I didn’t have to use Sending.

  It was apparently expensive, though, so we wouldn’t have any casual chats. Midnight would just have to wait to see what random thoughts I had when he returned and got all his texts.

  As for my part in things, I was going with Zeb to Bunvorix. Last time we’d gotten stuck there because I was rescuing Midnight, but it was better to not have Celmothians with us unnecessarily. Even if the resistance was fine with them, it wasn’t safe in public. They also wanted to do things themselves… and they could pay for our services. I would have helped for free- and Zeb was helping for free- but for safety we would have some other members of the Brigade too.

  It was unlikely we could have been authorized to do anything but a rescue mission if not for the latest attack. That had been a huge mistake on the part of the Bunvorixians. They underestimated how much New Bay was willing to do to defend itself. I was pretty sure that the next flying saucer to get within a hundred miles of the city was going to have some top heroes tearing it apart within a few minutes. The Brigade might toss Captain Punch up there if he was nearby.

  Or maybe Doctor Doomsday would get to it first. He could always steal more Bunvorixian tech. That was probably a problem, but at the moment it wasn’t my problem because I’d been off planet so much I hadn’t thwarted any of his random plans in a while.

  The final decision for the team sent to Bunvorix included those we thought would be effective against them.

  First was Ice Guy. Even if they had developed frost shielding, it was unlikely to be everywhere. Some of it had probably just been Energy Ward cast by Spot. It was possible he’d managed to get others Portal Powers at some point, but it had been a while since people who didn’t already have magic had been cut off from my old world so their numbers should be limited.

  Second was Magnet Man. I honestly had only fought alongside him once, and it was in one of the many teams we sent against Iron Shell to capture her. Relatedly, I couldn’t help but worry about her now that she was out. There had been a number of incidents, but none I was personally involved in. Anyway, unlike his name Magnet Man actually just had metal control powers which was something that would cause advanced tech users to just break down and cry.

  Along with Zeb and myself, we got someone unusual. Specifically, someone that wasn’t involved with the combat side of things. That was Khithae, my gecko-like friend. She had artificer powers and she had been able to discuss advanced tech with Zeb, so she would be valuable against Bunvorixians. Hopefully she could help disable security either magically or with her own knowledge. She had been lacking tools, but some parts were supplied by the resistance that should help. Apparently.

  There were a number of others in the Power Brigade who would probably be effective, but we were already nearing some important limits. First, the buff limit- though that wasn’t a strict limitation. More important was the fact that humanoids didn’t exactly blend in on Bunvorix. We needed to keep a relatively small team, which was why we didn’t bring in a few more familiar faces.

  Oh, right. There were also all of Zeb’s companions.

  Miss Flutter was a dire bat who didn’t exactly blend in, but having intelligent winged friends could always be useful. Fluffy could be quite effective against the Bunvorixians as a rust mole, and he even had a combat uniform now. Miss Flutter and the squirrels too, though the latter’s were more mass produced. Francois didn’t like it, but he really didn’t have time to make… however many squirrel outfits of varying sizes. No seriously, how many were there? I honestly couldn’t tell anymore. Was Zeb going to get one of every species? She even had some that weren’t from Earth. She might have two of some.

  The Bunvorixians were going to be ecstatic about the squirrels. The revolution had been preparing some groundwork for their arrival. Honestly, I wondered if that wouldn’t be a bigger event than whatever sort of physical sabotage we actually got up to.