Just Like Old Times
Brief synopsis: While patrolling the neighborhood around his mother's bar and surreptitiously checking in on his family, he finds Russian mobsters up to their old tricks, trying to shake people down for "protection" fees. Blinded by anger, Shillelagh dives in an makes trouble for the mobsters, only to get jumped by a bunch of heavy hitters under the employ of some joker named "Krasnyy D'yavol." Outnumbered and overpowered, Shillelagh is bested by these villains, who beat him up a bit more and humiliate him on camera to post on YouTube and the evening news. Shillelagh now has a personal enemy, but the threat of COIL and the Ophidian Plague still takes center stage, so he has to put this personal grudge on the back burner for now.
The team attempts to follow some leads and conduct some investigations to try and find the superpowered villains under COIL's employ, hoping either to take them out of play or possibly find COIL's base of operations if they can locate the henchmen. Their efforts yield minimal results, but it does stir the pot, so to speak. The villains come out of the woodwork with the Rod Squad making waves while clumsily searching for them, and they counterattack while the team is hunting for them. This leads to a full-on rumble in the streets of Seattle. In the course of the fight, one of the villains reveals an insidious attack: Oral tentacle rape! (is this a Japanese comic book, now?!) He targets Crosse with this attack, causing her grievous injury. Shillelagh is so incensed by this, that he unleashes the most deadly of his own combat maneuvers on the villain, trying to make sure to get past his defenses and subdue him quickly. Shillelagh learns--too late--that this villain doesn't have brick-like resistances like some of the others they have tangled with, so his flurry of strikes to vital body locations doesn't knock the wind out of him, it knocks the life out of him and kills him on the spot.
The Rod Squad is too spread out during this fight, unable to properly support each other, allowing individuals to fall to a "divide and conquer" approach by the COIL villains. Doc Nano surrenders to prevent one of the COIL heavies from picking his teammates off one by one, and the villains flee the scene with their captive.
