A few collapsed buildings, shattered streets, and assorted craters. The place is mostly empty, with scattered groups of mostly humanoid monsters roaming and trying to escape the guarded fence around the city. The most instantly noticeable change is an ongoing wordless singing in the back of the mind of anyone present. By itself it's just a sound. An unpleasant sound, and almost but not quite predictable as if someone were trying to attack the listener's sanity without saying anything, but possible to ignore. But along with it, any time a listener closes their eyes they get flashes of memories. Not their worst memories, but whatever negative ones can stick with them unforgettably. It builds up associations between the feelings in those images and almost anything else. Sometimes there's a recognizable common thread and other times there isn't.
An angel fights off teams of opponents. She's fifteen feet tall, extremely winged, with more wings than is strictly necessary for an angel. Even some of her wings have wings. All of them are asymmetric and varyingly sized. A spherical halo of weaponry surrounds her, firing at her more distant enemies from across the battlefield. Her opponents cycle in and out: a golden man, a man surrounded by a bubble, a woman in a dark costume, all flying. Others make certain to stay away after taking their turn, on rare occasions spending too long hearing the angel's music. Those ones voluntarily self-destruct.
A small group of ordinary humans takes refuge in a house as far from the battle as they can reach. The song is quieter here, and, they hope, less potent. Some of them run away from and back to the house, occasionally calling for help. They haven't found any.
(Maiden is fairly useless in the fight now that most everyone is either allied, blind, or immune to illusions, but she can still throw minor distractions and flashes of nonexistent movement at Kithabel.)
More monsters appear, these ones more flesh and less stone than their predecessors. They unleash parahuman powers, whether from recently defeated Suits or from opponents Crone has been saving up there's no way to be sure. Judging by how none of them are definitely useless against intangible people, it was probably from the one with a wider selection.
One monster gestures and uses a power that should make it impossible for Kithabel to tell friend from foe. Another encloses her in a tesseract, so all she can see in any direction is herself from an unusual angle. And one inflicts pain, and one nullifies powers, and one forces the thought wait, is this a good idea every four and a bit seconds.... They don't know what might stick, but Crone has a lot of things left to try.
And then she deletes all three Blasphemies at once.
Matron and Maiden disappear, but Crone is still deletion-resistant for whatever reason saved her before. Instead of resurrecting the other two right away, she keeps manufacturing more constructs. For just a fraction of a second too long.
The functional Suits bring down the remaining constructs, and ask for healing before trying any declarations of victory. Since all of them are blind and some have other injuries.
Not a perfect victory; even with civilians evacuated ahead of time there were some casualties. Ten of Swords is extremely dead, exploded by Matron's blast, and others painlessly lost their brains when Crone was mass-producing powered constructs. But still a victory, technically.
- come on -
"I'm sorry," she says to the ranking Suit on the field. She hands them a bead. "If you need me for anything later this'll call me."
"Thanks. We will. And you can call us, of course in the event that you're here and need anything." She glances around at the empty battlefield and the Nearly One Blasphemy. "However unlikely that may be."
Kithabel goes back to the United States. On her way she kills Sleeper, since she's killing particularly nasty villains now; Sleeper is a lot easier than the Blasphemies, a pleasant anticlimax she punctuates by eating a sandwich during the rest of her flight. She notifies her PRT contact.
The Protectorate is networked enough that she can just hang out in Arkansas for a while for a change of scenery, right?
Easily. Given that it's Arkansas there might be pretty much nothing but the scenery, but someone somewhere along the line will be able to come up with a local list of tasks anyway.
She notifies her contact person that at some point she may develop the ability to resurrect the dead and intends to try doing it periodically. Who should be her test subject and when she manages to dredge them up where should she drop them off so they can have things explained?
(A list starts being drawn for who else should be resurrected first, depending on the constraints. The two most cited are of course William Shakespeare and Thomas Jefferson, who'd need rather more explanation. But the Protectorate wants to focus it on capes for obvious reasons, and that's most of the result.)
Kithabel considers focusing on capes - well, heroes, in particular - reasonable. Although she develops the impression that she's really supposed to know who Shakespeare and Jefferson are, reads a couple sonnets, approves Shakespeare, disapproves Jefferson but strongly considers Ben Franklin, and mostly just tells her contact "sure, Hero's first in line, go ahead and compile more of a list for whenever I manage him".
There's a bit of debate about whether it counts as a violation of the Endbringer truce if they resurrect heroes who died during the attacks but not villains. Who knows; the truce wasn't set up with this in mind.
The other part of the reaction is to redouble the efforts to make sure Kithabel's list of tasks is as nonrepetitive as possible. It's only a slight improvement since that was already a focus, but it's there.
The momentum keeps increasing.
(Kithabel will empty a hospital whenever she damn well pleases; she remembers where they are. The list is a fallback guideline; it is not mind control.)
(And it would be impolite to suggest otherwise, especially so soon after the incident with not one but two sets of supervillains. Nobody mentions this.)
(Good. Kithabel is a nigh-omnipotent sorceress and when she wants the lame to walk and the blind see they will fucking do it.)
The lame and the blind are themselves in favor. And it's not all that much of a decrease from maximum variety.
...While she's at it, since the Protectorate seems pretty good at making coherent priority lists of people, she can render a small number immune to aging. This counts as a sustained effect, not a one-and-done - rolling back would be one-and-done - but she can cover some people with it. Any suggestions?
Might be a good idea to use aging immunity on the current President; Presidents are known for aging quickly, so to speak. And people in relevantly similar positions, some of whom are high up in the PRT.