Non-Canon Battle Post - Maze Beneath The Waves
Like blood pumping through veins, the Numbered Brethren and the SA Ghouls slid between the thousand remote-controlled mines the ITSDA had dispersed beneath the waves. Their path was careful, yet efficient; they fearlessly launched themselves toward the prison, confident that their analysis of the minefield would not betray them. Three grinned as his DPV thrust through a titanic wall of water and ducked beneath one last mine.
But his confidence was misplaced. Though SA's Emily Nigma had effortlessly replaced the surveillance signals the mines were sending out, the machines still sprung to life as Three neared the submerged base. Tearing through the water in interlocking straight lines, a mine missed him by less than a second as he dove down deep.
“Scarlet, confirm. All exterior surveillance systems were disarmed?” asked One, her hand pressed to a button on the outside of her helmet as she gradually dove downward.
“Roger. That Nigma girl’s thorough. It’s not us; it’s an auto-alert response.”
“Auto alert?” Her brow furrowed and her eyelids lowered. She rapidly eyed Two and the others while Three crawled back up from the ocean’s depths.
“We need intel on movement inside the prison, ASAP.”
“Already on it, kid,” said Scarlet.
“But the prison’s got a tough hide; clear a path for us to get in close and my men’ll get you your intel.”
“Understood,” said One. She turned to face her team and pointed them toward their new positions far further away from the prison.
“Standby until pattern analysis is complete.”
A bar appeared on each of the Brethren’s HUDs as their onboard computers worked themselves into a frenzy trying to crack the code of the mines’ movement patterns. The mines buzzed all around the waters near the prison in a dizzyingly complex array. Fortunately, the computer’s eye was quicker than any mind and soon revealed the pattern to them. Seconds afterward, the mines slowed to a crawl and the pattern shifted. Mere moments afterward, they did so again. Then, nearly a minute later, it happened once more.
“The shifts take place at irregular, possibly randomized, intervals,” a nearly-silent growl escaped her lips. This was soon followed by a frustrated
“hmmm…” Just then, an X-ray view of a mine’s innards appeared on Two’s HUD. Simultaneously, the pattern shifted once more and the mines formed four rotating, concentric circles whose “pieces” regularly switched positions with each other.
“Two, on Alpha, trigger the mines I name. Four, Five, on Bravo, dash into the mines’ remains. Three, on Charlie, ride the designated wave and await orders.”
“Confirmed,” replied her squadron in unison. A moment of silence passed as she waited for the patterns to shift yet again. Another moment lost, and another. Finally, the mines began to slow and, as a result, bunch together.
“Alpha, go!” Two raised his needle launcher up to the mines.
“32, 31, 46, 65, 78, 91” shouted One. Six perfectly-aimed projectiles slammed into the mines’ weak points, one after the other. A half-dozen tsunamis of fire and force threw everything back instantly! But the only thing the laser-focused Two heard was the harsh noise of metal scraping metal as he reloaded.
“59, 82, 11, 20, 15!” Five more blades hit their targets dead-on. When the last exploded, all became clear. He had created a dead-zone, a spherical volcano of ripples that pushed all the living mines aside. He quietly chuckled at the brilliantly simplistic strategy his commander had concocted.
“Bravo, now!”
One, Four, and Five activated their micro-propellers and dashed through the dead-zone’s weakest points. Though the ripples’ force pushed them outward, they managed to remain just within the battlefield’s singular pocket of safety. They drew their weapons. Meanwhile, One peered through the camera attached to Three’s helmet…
“Charlie, L-C!”
Three’s DPV roared into the centermost wave on the left side of the dead-zone. Its engine revved loudly as it climbed up near the surface atop a world-beating capillary wave. It went dead as the wave funneled him down deep into the depths, inches from a string of accelerating mines.
“Good, leave your vehicle behind and proceed to our position.”
For a fleeting moment, the commando’s eyes went wide. But instinctively, Three followed her command as a mine slid past his face. He kicked off of his vehicle and desperately cut through the water toward his comrades. One and Two pulled him in to the rapidly-deflating dead zone as he flew overhead. Three took a long, labored breath and nodded. A mine crunched against the DPV, hurling shrapnel and wire across the depths.
A stunningly timed chain reaction cleanly tore the inner ring of mines to pieces. Now, the ring itself was pushing the mines away. But the ripples would only last so long; they had already halved in size!
“Proceed to target, now!” shouted One. The Numbered Brethren swam into the last remaining waves of their dead zone ripples and sped off toward the prison. The hum of their mini-propellers was soon cut off by the steady beeping of two high-speed mines that sliced through their tight formation. Two and Four spun out to evade the mines, but one still exploded as it grazed Four’s oxygen tank.
“Two, Four, respond!”
“Reporting,” said Two. He frantically pushed himself downward to chase a sinking Four.
“Four’s down, damage unknown.”
“Damn! EVAC’s impossible. Retrieve him, we’ll reroute movement toward the compound’s hospital.”
“Understood, Commander,” said Three and Five.
“Ma’am,” said Two. Gingerly, he placed his hands under his combat buddy’s battered head and broken back. He softly began kicking himself upward while mines crisscrossed the water above and below him.
“So much for a quiet entrance,” said Scarlet over One’s radio at the moment the prison finally came in to view. Clusters of torpedo launchers lined the outside of the enormous, rotund prison like turrets on castle walls. Satellite analysis of the compound suggested it was constructed from a nigh-unbreakable steel alloy created by a Gifted metallurgist.
“The alert’s our cover; if we’re quick enough, we’ll look like part of whatever’s going on in there,” said One, who crouched down next to one of the launchers and began syncing it with her waterproofed PDA.
“Bold, but risky. Don’t cost us our men here,” said Vivianne.
“We’re The Numbered Brethren,” said One, who stared at Four as Two carefully placed him down on the base and checked his pulse. “Every loss is an unacceptable failure of command.”
”Is that what they tell you?” asked Scarlet sarcastically. One was frenetically typing on her PDA’s built-in keyboard; such motion advanced their mission and, luckily enough, let her tune Scarlet out.
The pre-loaded program on One’s PDA instantly penetrated the prison’s main defensive systems. The mission had already begun with a major possible casualty; hopefully, this was not an omen. Or rather, she hoped that her failing Four was not indicative of flawed planning on her part that could mean this mission’s ultimate failure. She put that thought to rest, however, when she heard the launchers spring to life. Muffled rumbling rang out throughout the water; pockets of air hissed as mighty torpedoes were loosed. Carefully selecting her targets to trigger even greater chain reactions, she cleared a path for SA in no time.
“Your path is clear,” said One.
“I can see that. Thank you kindly,” said Scarlet, her voice dripping with the kind of bitter sarcasm the most irritable people consider politeness.
Upon Schwarze Augen’s arrival, Lady Scarlet’s Ghoul squadron broke into teams of two and placed bulky, waterproofed devices down near a large, mysterious hole in the prison’s hull. With the turn of a heavy dial, the devices’ microphones clicked on and a loading bar appeared on each of the Brethren’s HUDs. When the bars were filled, the NB squadron heard a chime and saw a sonic map of the surrounding rooms laid out before them. Emboldened by their ally’s aid, the team filed into the building and turned toward the prison’s hospital.
Meanwhile, the Schwarze Augen infiltration team secured the entrance, flipped the switches on the devices’ jamming systems, and trained their weaponry down every nearby hallway. While the NB’s identified Dieter’s location, they’d be cooking up some chaos inside the prison. A little chaos could, Dieter’s people had learned, add a lot of confusion to any combat situation…
Amidst the pitch-black silence, Zenith heard something. Not only the soft, slowed beating of his heart, but also the whirring of the fluorescent lighting fixtures, the cracking of the metal in the walls contracting as the temperature dropped, and the breaths of each and every last downed guard in the room. His cocktail had worked! With a burst of Herculean effort, he managed to pry open his eyes.
“Ahrh,” he groaned. The normally pale lights above him now looked to be nauseatingly colorful and blindingly bright; he actually felt his corneas burning as he glanced up at them.
“Heee-haeehee,” giggled Kane, whose pitch shifted disconcertingly with every little twitch of his lips as he suffered nigh-invisible spasms.
“I can see every-thing! Ahh. “That’s some good shit, Doc. Got any more?”
Zenith sighed at his compatriot’s uneducated description and ran his hand across his bald head. He couldn’t just “see” everything, he could also hear, taste, smell, and feel everything. The drug was a sensory stimulant the likes of which normal pharmacologists could only dream of, yet the boy’s words reduced it to a mere ticket to euphoria. That was the real problem with drugs, he decided; their glory was wasted on “the wasted.”
Shaking his mind free of that thought by slapping his own cheek, Zenith turned to his young friend and winced a bit. The boy’s pores were caked with blood, dirt, and puss from recently broken zits. Worse, disgusting, slimy little driblets of sweat ran down his face.
“Hey, you tried to kill me just now,” His laughing eyes dimmed and he flashed his drooling, ragged teeth.
“No, no, friend. I'm well aware of your intuitiveness and speed; I knew you'd get that pill."
“Yeah right, bitch!” Kane howled as he speared Zenith to the ground, pounding the kingpin’s head in with his fists in a remarkably human manner. Zenith’s arms shielded him as best they could, but the teenaged wildman was relentless. Shutting his eyes tight and focusing on the sounds beside him, Zenith wormed an arm free and smacked his elbow against the solid ceramic-steel weave of a guard’s helmet.
KRR-ACK!
The bone in his arm snapped. Kane’s grip loosened. Seizing the moment, Zenith used his other arm to twist the broken arm and slide it out of its socket. Kane’s ears filled with a disgusting, loud gushing sound that was only muffled by the yelping, animalistic screams. He shook with rage and sheer sensory overload as the sounds drilled their way into his head.
With his one good hand, Zenith gouged the boy’s eyes. A stunned, shrieking Kane swung his hands at the high-class dealer, but was just too slow. Zenith threw the white-haired punk off of him and shambled across the room, holding his dead arm tightly. It had to be here; he had heard it! With a psychotic killer’s panting closing in on his position, the Namidian remembered an old trick a blind client used to use. He clicked his tongue repeatedly, listening closely as the sound waves ricocheted off the room’s identical, featureless walls. As Kane’s screeching and the whooshing air of the boy’s movement neared Zenith, he threw himself in front of one particular spot. Kane grabbed his face and bashed it straight through the wall’s weak point!
Kane stood back and watched as Zenith’s busted head slid down the collapsed wall. His prey’s skull left behind a slick trail of blood made of millions of little droplets he could now see! Man, this was like killing people in HD. He needed more of this, now! But the loud static and tinny beeps coming from the device stashed behind the broken wall made his stomach turn. Kane ripped the cylinder out of the wall and shoved it in Zenith’s face. Though the professional slinger looked to be fading, his mouth still managed to hang open in apparent shock.
“That’s it, Doc? A pissy little bomb? Fuck, man; even I could do better!” In one smooth motion, Kane pulled the device away from Zenith and hurled it down the hall. His eyes then gleamed with lustful excitement as he turned toward Ash, who laid face down on the floor. “And I will.”
Kane picked a sad-looking sack of dead weight that was once called “Ash” up off the floor. The madman chuckled lightly at the sight of Zenith’s reaction. The punk was curled up into a ball, hiding his head with his legs. Kane scanned his next victim’s pale face and spoke into its closed eyes.
“Look at that, Ash. He’s not even trying to save you! But who cares, this’ll be sweet!” Kane began to twist Ash’s head as if to snap his neck clean off, but a sharp bit of broken wall nearly slit the boy’s throat! A twitchy dodge saved his skin; but didn’t save him from the second one. A thin, blood-splattered shank pierced his heart. But the hole began to close very quickly… his powers!
Zenith hissed the word “yes” under his breath. The “blood” on the impromptu stake through Kane’s heart was not all blood. The mystery liquid began to give off thin, wispy trails of colorless gas.
“Fuck you!” said Kane. His own blood flash froze inside him, forcing his arteries to expand until they exploded. Soundlessly, the boy cried out in agony as his consciousness clung to the pitiful pile of organs sprawled all over the floor. Zenith slung Ash up onto his back using only one arm and flooded his ruined body with stimulants. He then escaped the room by burning a hole through the door with acid sweat.
For now, and perhaps only for now, he was free. Just needed some bandages for his arm and that wet patch beneath his hair…
“Now onto business,” he said to no one in particular as he staggered out of the room.
Deep within the depths of the prison, The Numbered Brethren slowly, yet efficiently, maneuvered down a hallway in a double-file line. As they moved, their computers spent 80% of their processing power to engineer blueprints based on the compound’s size, shape, discovered rooms, and functions. The medical room was near. And, as far as they could tell, so were some of the more specialized chambers for high-level escape risks. The journey was nearly at an end. Their infiltration had proceeded well following Four’s injury. Most of the guards were heading toward either the Schwarze Augen diversion or Eastward. Combine that with the sonar allowing them to turn off their path and wait for approaching guards to pass by and moving unseen was simple. In the back of her mind, One feared an incoming trap. Even with diversions; this was too easy for the prison whose exterior defenses nearly broke her unit.
Ten minutes passed with no interruptions while Four’s breaths got shallower. Then six little blips appeared directly in front of them on the sonar. One came to realize as the Brethren drew closer that the ceaselessly still blips were on different levels of a wide-open room. Examining the map carefully as she slowed her troops’ movements by holding up one finger, she gritted her teeth. There were only two doors; there was no way around these guards.
“They’ve set up a chokepoint,” said One, her voice ringing with both light frustration and defiance.
“Five, move in. Calculate angles of sight - alert no one.”
Five was used to this. With a silent nod, she approached the room at the end of the hallway and flattened herself against a darkened wall. Even with night vision, she could not see a single guard from this angle - though they were doubtlessly watching the entrance. The ITSDA had planted their agents here excellently. Ironically, the group’s tactical forethought narrowed the agents’ exact locations down a bit. In order to give themselves a decent range of movement while maintaining ideal angles of attack and group cohesion with a squadron of six, they’d have to be placed in two groups. One group of four would be on the upper level with their guns trained on the door. The other would be on the lower level, ready to tackle any threats that get through the larger group’s wall of gunfire. With her knowledge of strategic positioning and the sonar, she identified the most likely positions and attack angles of the agents and marked them on her Brethren’s HUDs.
“Exact positions unconfirmed, play it safe,” said Five, who stared into Two’s helmet as she announced this. One mulled over strategies for a moment while her eyes drifted back and forth between each blip’s little line-of-sight marker.
“If backup is called, the mission is forfeit,” said One.
“But we can interrupt their lines of sight without being detected. Two, arc one past the lower group. Upon its detection, which we will track via sonar, we will immediately blitz the upper level – Three and Five engage from below, Two and I will engage from above. Understood?”
“Affirmative,” said Two and Three. Two placed Four down carefully and switched places with Five. The sharpshooter then aimed his weapon just above one of the agent’s likely hiding places…
“Understood,” said Five.
Two’s hands shook imperceptibly as he compensated for the weight of the needle and the pressure of the artificial oxygen being pumped into the room. Unlike the mines, he’d only get one shot at this. His pointer finger wrapped its way around the trigger; he held it in position for just one moment. He went over his shot one last time, then curled his finger back and fired the needle. It gracefully sailed through a tiny, diagonal corridor of space that the ITSDA’s best weren’t watching and slid right past one of the agents on the lower side of the room.
The Numbered Brethren all stared, unblinking, at the sonar map in the top-right corner of their HUDs. For a time, the dots stood as motionless as they ever were. Soon, though, the lower right-hand corner blip drifted, ever so slowly, toward the left. That was their cue.
The NB all hit the ground running, dashing into the room with guns blazing. Three and Five rolled into the arena and leapt to their feet the microsecond they needed to, taking down the left and rightmost agents with single needles to the neck. One and Two’s boots hit the thick steel of the room’s walls with loud thuds as they bounced themselves up to be level with their targets. Two more shots, two more down. As the Numbered Brethren’s leader and her compatriot fell in a controlled arc, they popped off two more shots that ended the battle right then and there!
Or so they thought. With his last conscious breath, the finger of the very guard they distracted slapped his gun’s trigger inward, ramming a bullet directly into Two’s helmet.
“Ahhhhhh!” cried Two, whom the bullet tossed to the ground. The reinforced glass had slowed the projectile to a crawl, but a piece managed to lodge its way into his eye. He screamed and seethed in pain as blood flooded out of the socket he desperately attempted to shield with his hand before he passed out from the pain. One dropped herself to the ground and examined her trooper carefully. Detached retina, excessive blood loss; it didn’t look good. The mission hit another snag; but the hospital was near. They just had to make it. She turned to her two remaining Brethren.
“Retrieve the injured and move quickly; medical assistance is two rooms away.”
Quickly, but not carelessly, Three and Five picked up their even-numbered comrades and trailed behind One as she raced toward the door. Even as Two squirmed and tried to wrestle his way out, Three gripped him to his back tightly.
They reached the door in seconds. It was locked behind a keypad; but that didn’t trouble her. Instinctively whipping out her PDA and inputting the macro for disabling all security systems within a small radius, One mentally spat curses at the ITSDA as the keypad remained active and initiated a 30-second countdown.
“Damn them all,” said One loudly as she slapped her open palm against the wall in front of her. She twisted her head 90 degrees and spat out an order while pointing to a downed guard.
“Wake him. Retrieve his password.”
Only 20 seconds remained. Three’s sharp, stinging kick roused the guard, but failed to wake him. Five’s slap did the trick.
“Who?! What? Enemy attack!”
“Password, now!” shouted Five as she slammed the agent’s shoulders down to the steel floor.
“There isn’t one. One-sided lock; the pad’s a trap,” said the half-stunned ITSDA agent as he lifted his face up to Five’s. “And you fell for it.”
A straight to the jaw took out the agency’s man, but not the timer. Ten seconds remained on the clock. One was silent as she hastily grabbed the agent’s rifle and blasted the keypad.
After twelve minutes of sneaking around disabling Gift inhibitors, Zenith heard sounds of slaughter off in the distance. The echoing screams, the desperate gasping and choking of opened lungs, the clanging of exploding metal; they were familiar. Not only familiar, they produced an almost nostalgic feeling within him. Still, joining in wasn’t a good idea with his body in this condition. So he’d just creep past it all, sliding one foot after the other into place while spines were being cracked apart only a few rooms away.
Though his eyes remained tightly shut, Ash began to stir right when Zenith knelt to listen to a straggler’s pathetic mewling. The pusher softly shushed his student and then began whispering as he heard something or someone proudly stomping down the hall.
“I know, brother. I know. But we need to run. And that’s not cowardice talking. It’s a tactical retreat, not a desperate one.”
The man calmly increased speed in response to the stomping sounds became massive booms. When they halted entirely, so did he. Through the relatively thin walls of the recreation area, he could hear it breathing and, even worse, laughing. And if he could hear it, it could hear him.
“That was intense,” said a shrill, confident female voice with a giggle. Zenith just had to stay, just had to keep perfectly still, and everything would be fine. He blocked the room’s light with his hand and filled his blood with sedatives. Right that second, the girl popped a metal flask open and took a big swig of its contents. One loud gulp and satisfied “ahh” later, silence fell over the room again.
“But you’ll be even better!” said Asher, her sultry voice breaking into a scream at the end of her sentence. Crashing through the wall with a one-inch palm strike, a dull-silver colored earring of hers was burning as Zenith immediately turn and ran.
“I want that Gift!”
The distressed dealer spat paralyzing gel at the ceiling, hoping it would ooze down onto the girl as she gave chase.
“Tag,” said Asher while he spit one. She instantly appeared behind Zenith and shoved him to the ground at 100mph. The paralyzing agent splashed the left half of the man’s face as it slammed him and his friend into the floor. His visage lay frozen in horror as she sat down next to him. Smiling widely, the psychotic punk girl rolled a small steel spike out from inside her ear and reeled back to stab it through the bald man’s heart.
Then the cavalry arrived. Twin streams of water punched her off Zenith and clear down the hallway. She hydroplaned hundreds of feet as the streams slid beneath her; then one shot upward and flipped her straight onto her head. On the verge of a blackout, Asher pet her skin’s burns as they disappeared into nothingness. Jet, scoffing and smirking, carelessly marched up to her and resumed his attack. By then it was too late. The titanic streams of water barely budged her svelte frame as her feet crated the ground beneath her. Sopping wet, but without a mark on her, she looked more pissed than damaged.
“You fucked up my hair,” she said, burning two large bracelets on her forearm.
“Screw it,” said Jet, forcing himself to grin at his terrifying opponent as he sized her up.
“Mine’s better anyway.”
Simultaneously, the two Gifted fired at each other from point-blank range. Jet held his palm flat and fired “water lasers” out of each of his fingertips as he rapidly chopped the air in front of him. Asher pushed herself back and mentally hurled dozens of bullets from her cape at the ITSDA stooge. Jet kicked himself up into the air and soared over her bullets in a sleek crescent arc. Asher simply stood still and let the streams’ trajectories arc away from her as their waves broke against the shore of her temporal force field and slowed to a crawl.
“Bored now. Can’t you just die?” asked the girl as she shrugged and cringed at his resistance.
“You know, like all your friends? I’ll make it real easy!”
“Good, I like things easy,” said the cocksure cadet, listing things off on his fingers as he spoke.
“Rides, waves, women, money…”
Asher wasn’t listening. Her chromium nose-ring was dripping molten metal down onto her lip as she bit down on it. Her eyes were practically screaming with delight as soon as she turned away from her opponent. She finally saw the thin, deathly-pale boy she had come to visit looming over her last victim!
“I bet that liver’s pretty tasty,” said the boy reaper as he picked a broken Zenith up off the floor by his neck.
“All that crap you pumped in; let’s find out!”
“Kane!” shouted Asher, who ran up to the great “Lord Death of Murder Mountain,” hugged him from behind, and laid her head across his back.
“I’m a big fan.”
“Hey, new pet,” said the slimy little imp.
“Wait a sec and I’ll throw you down on his entrails! How's that sound, babe?”
“Great,” said Asher, who squealed in ecstasy.
“There’s seconds down there!”
Kane tossed Zenith across the room, knocking him into a charging Jet and leaving both prone on the floor. Generating a black vortex from his hands, the maniacal teen lingered just a moment too long. Without even opening his eyes, the Namidian Ash stood up instantly. His movements were unnatural, and almost clumsily mechanical – like an amateur puppeteer’s first doll. Still, he ripped out some of his own hair, tossed it down the hall, and ignited it. In seconds, the hallway was shrouded in smoke.
Four ITSDA agents in thick, heavily-circuited combat armor emerged from the smoke and stepped around Ash, who stood aside for them.
“Our path through the medical facility is blocked; the mission is stalled. Requesting demolitions assistance ASAP,” said One, her crystal-clear voice failing to even change pitch despite the fear Scarlet knew she felt.
“Already on it,” said Lady Scarlet. In truth, her team stood on almost the exact opposite side of the prison from their allies in this joint operation and had just finished up freeing a handful of particularly predictable prisoners from the main detention center. However, she wasn’t lying. A small handful of Banshees carefully (and slowly) pressed a pulsating, brightly-glowing blue charge on a seemingly random wall within the prison’s secondary control center. A dozen ITSDA engineer corpses were scattered throughout the room, every last one of them shot through the head.
“Armed,” said a Ghoul. The charge snapped onto the wall and its glow’s hue turned from bright blue to deep orange. The trick that Vector taught them was finally going to be put to good use, Scarlet thought. Schwarze Augen’s top nerds had been working on this for weeks now; that Nigma girl even lovingly named this little toy “Big Crunch.”
Scarlet held up her open palm and waited for one of her loyal subjects to hand her the detonator. When one finally did, she steadied it in her hand and studied the bomb itself. Giving her teams a thumb up, she slowly paced the room while talking to her Brethren counterpart.
“We’re headed West. Get away from the door.”
A hideous, mechanical grinding noise deafened all throughout the prison. Torrents of air whirled their way out of rooms, guns flew out of soldiers’ hands, and anyone who was jumping fell toward the South of the prison complex. One could feel her own helmet choking her half to death as she ripped it off of her own head and watched her subordinates do the same. Her remaining squadron managed to make it dozens of rooms North before impact, but even that couldn’t save them from S.A.’s near-lethal carelessness. They’d pay for this, but not now. They had come too far, sacrificed too much; this would be completed.
While the Numbered Brethren struggled to their feet, the deadly pull instantly disappeared and gravity returned to normal in their immediate area.
“Reaction’s stabilized,” said Lady Scarlet.
“We’re in business. Locate targets and we’ll handle extraction via backup plan A-3.”
One gasped ever so slightly, leading Scarlet to stifle a giggle of childish amusement. A-3, One knew, was a stealth submarine escape involving a small team of lightly armed escorts. Nothing about this bomb was stealthy. And ITSDA backup was about to flood the area; she was insane.
Nevertheless, The Numbered Brethren’s top officer pointed her gun north and nodded her head.
“Proceed,” said One. The rooms they wandered through as they darted back toward the medical facility were eerily hollowed out by the blast. No equipment, no lights, no doors; everything was swallowed up in the bomb’s gaping maw.
Her troopers soon returned to their previous position, only to find water pouring through the crevice where a wall once stood. Far beyond the crevice, off in the distance, the soldiers witnessed a vortex of steel walls, hundreds of monitors, and millions of wires collapsing in on itself.
“Holy--” Three’s jaw dropped at the sight of the monstrosity before he could even finish speaking.
“Maintain focus. Target is close. Keep low, salvage the medical lab and get those two patched.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Stepping through the gate that once seemed impassible, One breathed an uneasy sigh of relief. They were there in no time. Though the tables had been thrown around, closets emptied, and patients killed, there were supplies haphazardly strewn about. One pointed toward a table and Five carefully laid Two flat across it. Three did much the same for Four. While her troops hastily examined their comrades’ wounds using the ITSDA’s custom C-MID (Complete, Multi-Level Injury Detector) wands, One examined the sonar map contained within her HUD. This wing was a dead-end and only three humans remained present and alive within the closed-off zone that had to be the High-Risk Prisoner area. Nine conscious humans, however, were approaching the medical facility. Their blips rapidly warped around her screen; they were too quick. Circling, charging, hitting, running; they were attacking each other! Both security and whatever set it off in the first place were approaching their position.
“Three, Five, leave them... on the floor!”
“What?!” asked Five, rapidly spinning to face her commanding officer.
“They won’t engage corpses; while we move, they’ll hide in plain sight.”
“…Confirmed,” said Three, still sounding a bit doubtful as he slid Four off of the operating table and rolled him next to a shredded ITSDA doctor.
“Now move!” shouted One. The endlessly loyal troops abandoned their comrades behind them as they fled the carnage right on their heels. One hated doing this, but they all stood a better chance of surviving if they weren’t weighed down. For, just as The Commander and experience taught her repeatedly, “speed is safety.”
Eventually, they came to a singular, curved, suspiciously thin-looking wall. Their sonar systems told them that their objective lay just beyond it, but they hesitated to try and open it. The last gateway was nearly unbreakable and trapped with a simple alarm; perhaps this was also trapped?
“Scan the immediate vicinity for traps, quickly! We cannot afford mistakes or delay.”
About seventy seconds passed while all three scrambled around the room, looking up and down the walls and tracing their fingers along every imperfection or bump on them. Three then stood up alongside his leader.
“Nothing.”
“Alright. Take it out, but maneuver with caution,” ordered One. Two injector guns began pumping needles into the wall’s weak points, forcing the commandos to duck and roll when their projectiles violently ricocheted off the specially-constructed wall.
“Damn!” cried One, whose right shoulder was hit dead-on. She gripped her shoulder tightly, ripped the needle out of her arm with a violent shriek, and swung her head toward the door.
“Break it down! Divert all power to calculating angles of attack; I’ll handle sonar.”
“Ma’am,” said Five, a note of alarm in her calming, pleasant voice.
“I’m fine.”
Three and Five stopped for only six seconds to aim, reloaded, then unloaded dozens of their bullets into the thin steel wall. Though their needles ricocheted off the walls, coming within inches of each of their bodies, One and her men stood perfectly still and let the dizzying hail of projectiles pass by. After nearly depleting their ammo, twin holes began appearing in the walls; Three and Five quickly widened them until the top half of the thin wall all but crumbled before them.
The hall beyond it consisted of a single catwalk and four walls entirely covered in gun turrets. A simple yellow "do not cross" line on the floor marked off the turrets’ territory. A wobbling, shaking One fired a needle directly into a turret’s barrel; a pair of bullets knocked it out of the sky before it even got halfway. Worse, One saw the battle creeping up on them as her increasingly heavy eyelids fell low, forcing her to slap herself awake.
“A rock and a hard place…” whispered One.
“Conceal yourselves, but keep in contact. Prepare to regroup following successful…evasion.”
A wild shake of her head and she was back in action, albeit temporarily. Five leapt through the hole in the wall, sandwiching herself in the tiny space between the wall and the turrets’ warning line. Fearlessly, she then swung herself over the catwalk’s railing and hung off its edge. Only her hands could be seen from anywhere along the bridge. Three, meanwhile, jumped up to the low ceiling and stretched out his limbs so they’d hold him in place. Even his trained arms began to shake as he struggled to keep them from sliding down the compound’s slick, polished steel. Lastly, One tossed herself beneath a pile of the room’s debris, hiding herself within and silently counting her breaths to keep herself awake.
The ITSDA’s Guard Team Six kicked open the unlocked door and fanned out throughout the room. Their armored forms were absolutely covered in deep scars, burn marks, and what looked to be gigantic bullet wounds. But the guards did not look scared nor concerned: their eyes looked straight ahead and their faces remained expressionless throughout their entrance.
“Locust, Urge, hold position here,” said their captain, pointing to a man with a swarm of nano-machines floating around him and a soldierly woman with a shaved head and a bandanna as he fruitlessly scanned all four corners of the room.
“Don’t let them through. Scout and I will secure Dieter.”
Three stared down at One, who moved her finger in microscopic intervals until he saw her point down the turreted hallway. Three mouthed the word yes and then winced as Locust strolled over One, forcing her to slide her prone form away without disrupting the debris. Locust’s boot came within less than an inch of her stomach, but contact was avoided.
The instant Scout and the captain climbed out onto the catwalk, Five dropped one of her hands off the ledge. Carefully observing their movements, the patient woman shimmied closer to the wall when the vibrations of the metal grew more intense. The agents had now reached the line; how did they cross it?
“Genetic Lock removed. Ten seconds remain,” said an announcement system with a male voice and an unmistakably British accent. The agents’ walk became a jog and then burst into a full-blown sprint. Five tailed them as best she could. She even grabbed the railing itself and raced down it, hand over hand.
“Four, three.”
Five dropped off the railing and used the momentum of her fall to leap down and across the underside of the bridge. She reached her hand up to catch the other edge as the countdown continued.
“Two,”
“Ugh!”
With a grunt, The Numbered Sister dug her fingers into the ledge. She was almost there!
“One,”
The world-class professional somersaulted up onto the bridge and rolled past the far wall in one fluid, gymnastic motion.
“Genetic Lock restored.”
Five trailed behind the agents, lingering in the shadows of the pitch-black inner prison. Meanwhile, One and Three watched Locust and Urge’s muscles tense and their bodies turn as they steeled themselves for battle.
“Contact confirmed,” shouted Locust. With a thrust of his hand, his swarm of featureless nanomachines flew at his enemies and morphed into miniature drills.
“Puppets, really? That was my thing!” said Kane sarcastically as he snapped his fingers and enveloped Locust’s swarm in a sheet of flame.
“Everyone steals from you,” said Asher while she mentally hurled the flaming nanomachines at Locust, forcing him behind a shield of his machines.
“Fucking hacks!”
Urge clapped and stared into Asher’s eyes. Suddenly turning her head, she leapt into the flaming swarm!
“I got you!” shouted Urge as burning drills slashed apart Asher’s back.
“Dumb bitch,” yelled Kane, who rocketed down the hall using his one-time slave’s Gift.
“Outta my way!”
“No!” screamed Urge as she stared at Kane. The madman did a complete 180 and rocket-punched his adoring fangirl in the stomach.
“I didn’t — huh?” asked Kane. Locust’s tiny bots formed a ring around Kane’s neck and began choking him out, but the boy just laughed as his trachea was crushed. Asher landed on her feet and pulled the machines toward her.
One’s one eye closed completely as consciousness fled her body and a chilly, quiet darkness overcame her mind. Three’s one arm dropped out of place atop the ceiling and he began to slip down toward the war beneath him. He had to cross and escape this fate. But without the proper genes, it was impossible. Three heard the roar of flowing water cutting through air long before it appeared. Then, he saw the air around the girl somehow redirect the wave. In an instant, the wave laser sliced off the tip of the machine man’s ear! As the man howled in pain and his machines scattered, Three watched the blood drip off the man’s lost flesh. That was his opening.
Drawing his needle gun one-handed and twirling it like a revolver, Three caught it in mid-air and fired his final shot. It bounced off the wall and harpooned into the bit of flesh, hurling it into Three’s arms as he jumped to the ground.
“What?!” shouted Urge.
“Get him!” screamed Locust. The third of the numbered scooped up the piece, dove through the hole in the wall, and passed the bloody bit over the “goal line” as nanomachines surrounded him.
“Genetic Lock removed. Ten seconds remain.”
The athletic Three sprung out of the swarm, sprinted, and slid like a baserunner to duck a wave laser. He made it with three seconds to spare.
“Yeah!” shouted the normally stoic soldier.
“Target secured,” said Scout, a ponytailed young man with a broken nose, while he stood in front of a bulletproof glass chamber in which Dieter calmly sat. The jet-setting businessman adjusted his tie while the world around him erupted into panic.
“Don’t be so sure,” said the captain, eyeing the room behind them suspiciously. Five hid behind the door and held her needle gun at the ready. A silhouette that soon revealed itself as Three raced its way inside the room, followed by the parade of soldiers and psychopaths he’d just escaped!
“They’re past the bridge!” screamed Urge.
“Plan Overboard!”
Scout held two of his fingers to his forehead. They began to glow and a white sphere of light surrounded the room. Predicting a charged attack, Five stuck out her head and fired. As if by magic, Jet fired the instant he Five appeared. And while his powerful blast knocked Five’s head against the ground, it wasn’t a direct hit. The blast smacked Scout through the glass behind him, allowing Dieter a chance to loom over the rookie while everyone disappeared.
Three, Five, Kane, Dieter, Asher, Jet, and Guard Team Six all reappeared in the depths outside the prison! A stubborn, wild-eyed Jet exploded toward a distant Three, who guarded Dieter. SA’s escape sub ran interference and ran over Jet like a Mack Truck. Concussed as he was, Jet managed to dent the sub and slow its charge with a massive burst from his joined palms. The outer hull began to crack, but SA’s secret weapon caused the man to turn away in the midst of mortal combat. Thirteen huge “Big Crunch” bombs went off in sequence far outside the compound’s walls, forcing the prison to tear itself apart like a splitting continent. The speeding submarine orbited the prison, picking up every Namidian it could with a giant suction device as their bodies were pulled into the “Big Crunches.” The Numbered Brethren, Ash, Zenith, and Dieter all made it aboard… along with a certain guest, a certain other high-level escape risk Dieter had taken a shine to. Spurt, however, was left to drown at the bottom or be crushed by the bombs. Unfortunately, Scarlet knew, there simply wasn’t enough room for everyone.
Meanwhile, a stunned Jet zoomed through the waves to recover everyone he could before they were swallowed up by the bombs. By day’s end, he had saved many lives and kept the short-lived “crunches” from killing everyone. At the same time, Asher cradled a crushed Kane and charged her steel earrings with physical speed and her cadmium with breath, hoping to manage an incredible surface escape. And who knows? The Bends might be great fun for someone who’s not afraid of a little pain.
One opened her eyes hours later aboard Lady Scarlet’s escape submarine.
“Did I – did we?” asked the disoriented elite.
“You should have left the retrieval to us as ordered, One,” said Lady Scarlet, who avoided eye contact with the awakening Numbered Brethren soldier and fiddled with her PDA. One rolled her paralyzed shoulder as best she could; still heavy.
“No plan survives contact with--”
“Nonsense,” said Scarlet with a haughty laugh.
“That’s just the whine of a poor planner. Ah well; what's done is done and our was accomplished.”
One looked to her battered, blinded, and half-dead associates and feared that her rival was right. She shivered as she took a deep breath and rolled her shoulder once more.
This message was lightly edited by the GM at 05:42, Tue 25 Oct 2016.
