Your request for a strike on the Regime asset designated as Fourth Fist is denied, and you will receive that response through official channels, but I also wanted to communicate with you directly, and let you hear clearly my rationale.

First off, I understand exactly where you are coming from.  These bastards profaned the very sanctity of our people’s souls.  Meghan and the other victims show no sign of returning to their former selves, and can never be trusted again.  Promising careers ended, beloved friends and colleagues replaced by traitors strangers behind their faces.  It was an atrocity, a violation of all that we hold dear.

But, and it pains me to write this, that is kind of par for the course as far as the Regime is concerned.

The particular nature of these atrocities are new, to be sure, but First Fist made someone eat their own baby.  We’ve been angry at these individuals for a very long time.

When we decline to expend assets against Fists it isn’t because we don’t share your anger.  It isn’t because we don’t wish them gone.  It is because bitter experience has told us that trading lives with people who are returned to life every day is foolhardy.  Increasing the number of their victims won’t bring back those they have already taken.

Fourth Fist, in particular, is an almost impossibly hard target.  Haunter, the soul monger, has a million lives.  Fisher is as hard to kill as a shadow.  Indulger cannot be killed unless we lay waste to the very earth about him, and Condemner thrives on the lives he takes.  And none of those are even the squad’s anchor.  Preventer is simply invincible, absent the direct intervention of certain Gauntlet assets, and even that would be a roll of the dice.

Beyond this, current intelligence puts them in the middle of the Pantheon’s Grand Host, presently the strongest conventional enemy asset known.  Any and all engagement with the Fourth Fist would be complicated by an enemy more numerous and tenacious than any other.

There will come a day where we can make these monsters pay for the lives that they have ruined, but it will not be today.  Devote yourselves to your duty.