Because I don't know if I'll get more of it done in the next few days.
Sometimes, there's really no substitute for some good and honest grunt work.
At least that was what she told herself. It could be that the stress was finally getting to her.
Not that she'd ever had what would be commonly considered a calm sort personality.
Oh, methodical and meticulous when she had to be, yes, but sometimes ...
The last Rent-A-Thug went slamming through a wood-substitute tabletop, and following through all the way down and into the floor with a bone-jarring *thud*.
"You know, Ryo, I never really thought it was possible for you to sink any lower," she commented to the only other still conscious person present. "But you've managed to surprise me. Congratulations."
She smiled. It wasn't a nice smile.
In fact, it made the slick haired man, who could pass for a sarariman if encountered on the street, and who was currently sitting behind a cheap desk in a way that suggested he wanted to try and make a break for it, but knew that said course of action wasn't a good idea, cringe. And want to hide. Preferably in a very deep hole.
"But, see - I've got a little something to discuss with you, so I'd be willing to let bygones be bygones and treat this as an unfortunate ... accident. No, don't talk quite yet, I'm not done."
She came around the desk, stepped behind his chair, and put her hands on his shoulders. Then she squeezed. Hard.
The yakuza underboss whimpered.
"See? You haven't forgotten basic hospitality since I paid you a visit last time, have you? It's only been, what, a few years? You talk when I say you talk, got that?"
Silence.
"Good. Now, I've been hearing something about you having a bit to do with an incident that came about lately. Something about a buyout of a meat shredding plant ... oh, sorry. I meant warehouse. Supposedly cheap, too, after all the yellow tape went down. Kinda makes all those nasty suspicious types think that you could have had something to do with what went on there, doesn't it?"
Another squeeze.
Those hands felt like a pair of iron vices. That was new. Last time, only one had been quite that bad.
"But I'm willing to give you the benefit of the doubt here if you maybe just, oh, share your ... educated guesses on the matter with me. After all, you're still so well informed about what goes on down here, right? That much hasn't changed since I was last visiting, has it? Give an old friend a helping hand."
Hashima Ryo hadn't gotten to where he was by being soft ... but he also hadn't gotten there by not knowing when to cut his losses. A very important thing to realize when dealing with this particular person.
Messing about with Jeena Malso was not even remotely in the realm of good ideas.
***
Priss blinked.
Well, she thought to herself, this was new.
She was used to giving one member of the band or another a bawling out every now and then, when their efforts were lackluster ... but it was the first time she could recall having that same thing pulled on her. Worse, she wasn't particularly inclined to turn around, yank the door of the Hot Legs, which was still deserted save for the practicing Replicants, open, and give back what she'd gotten, with accrued interest.
Instead, she settled on her bike, and frowned ...
Hell, she'd spent the morning sitting on the steps of her trailer, nursing a bottle of Jack, and strumming all melancholy and shit out of an old, woefully out of tune acoustic she'd had for as long as she could remember and hadn't bothered with tossing. This wasn't like her, damnit!
... or maybe it was. She couldn't really tell, today.
She didn't tend get emotional, or rather, didn't get emotional in any way except getting well and righteously pissed off, either. Hadn't for a good few years now. Until last night, when she'd gone through what could have passed for a nervous breakdown in any other set of circumstances. But then, misery loved company. Loathe as she was to admit it, it had been a liberating, almost cathartic experience.
The engine rumbled to life, and seconds later she was flashing down the dingy roads and alleys with the deft assurance of someone who'd done it more times than they could count, in weather considerably worse than the present minor rainfall. The blurring road and press of wind helped her get a semblance of her usual attitude back, at least ...
She couldn't help but wonder how Sylvie was dealing.
***
He'd never had much of a problem adjusting to new accommodations back when he'd hadn't been technically immune to any physical discomfort, and it wasn't a problem at present either.
'Yeah, well, it wouldn't be too bad if it weren't for everything being so damn _small_!'
It was just his luck that the seemingly 'best' of the safehouses Kiba had pointed out when they'd said their goodbyes happened to be little more than a sub-basement underneath, ironically enough, the remains of a church.
It wasn't _the_ church, of course, since there wasn't enough of it left topside to constitute even a good try at 'ruins' ...
Things would have been a lot simpler if they could have just found the damn place, but ruined places of worship - while not exactly a dime-a-dozen in the Canyons and the general Fault area - weren't exactly marked on your usual maps, nor were they places that garnered much attention from even the shadier characters.
Unless you counted squatters, and even those tended to pick more comfortable places. Or at least ones that weren't as drafty.
In any case, it was just as well that he'd never really had any sort of phobia related to being in small, enclosed spaces either, because, however surprisingly apt the D.D. was at moving through urban environs, despite having been designed with battlefields in mind, it was still rather big.
It gave him a whole new level of appreciation for Sylvie, who'd managed to not only not get caught while driving the thing-that-was-now-his-body through the city when she'd still been 'out for blood', pun intended, but also hadn't caused a ruckus with any cases of hard to explain damages to the surroundings other than the occasional footprint or two. He'd been having trouble getting used to the new proportions of things for a while after their initial meeting, and he _was_ the machine, for all intents and purposes.
Not that they'd spent a lot of time there, since as soon as he and a slightly out of sorts Sylvie had even gotten set up, she'd insisted on following through on Kiba's parting gift.
Which, he noted, brought him back to the initial subject of this idle flight of fantasy.
The solar panels that all but filled the rooftop were almost, but not quite, a veritable forest of metal and reflective surfaces, but there was plenty of space underneath this umbrella of sorts for maintenance work to be done ... meaning he could just barely squeeze in without damaging anything. The position wasn't exactly the best in terms of offered view, perspective, or pretty much anything other than concealment and proximity to the apartment complex that one Millie Jackson was registered as a resident of.
Not that actually getting up there had been easy to do without drawing all kinds of the wrong sort of attention. Sylvie, though, had come back determined enough that there really wasn't any talking her out of doing at least an initial bit of recon.
The rain that had been falling since sometime a few hours before dawn, but seemed to be slowing down now - likely, the skies should be clear come evening - had been a big help in getting up to the rooftop without getting spotted by bystanders or anyone else for that matter. Though the fact that they'd done so an hour before dawn was a factor, since not many of even the most zealous corporate drones, not to mention the other productive members of society, were up at the time.
Things would have been more difficult, had the place been in the vicinity of a college campus, but luckily no such problem needed to be worked around in this case. There was only so much even a coffee addled mind on too little sleep could dismiss as hallucination, and a Battlemover wasn't quite within that bracket.
"You've had a productive evening, then," he'd asked/stated on the way through the ruins of the Canyons - still one of the most secure routes they could take, even with the increased vigilance of police and military forces.
"Yes. No. Maybe," Sylvie had said, haltingly. "I'm still not sure if it wasn't a cascading error in my empathy program. We finally ended up pretty much where we started from ... undecided."
He'd inquired about details, and she'd informed him.
"It sounds perfectly normal to me," he'd replied, with not a little wryness. "Do you want to talk about it?"
She'd hesitated, had gone to nod, and stopped halfway, instead opening the privacy protocols that either side had place on the superweapon linkage.
The somewhat uncomfortably emotional exchange that followed didn't take as much as a second, but both sides had gotten a few insights out of it.
He could still recall Sylvie's unease when she'd found that this 'quest' of hers was one of the main things keeping his own mind in relative equilibrium. It was, he'd explained, in a way the logical extension of how he'd always approached some things, and if he focused his attention on something to the near exclusion of everything else and it kept him more or less sane, well, who was she to argue.
Although, and he didn't know whether she'd let it slip on purpose when the linkage was being limited again, he'd been mildly perplexed when she'd felt oddly flattered upon learning of the above.
The rest of their transit had been spent in silence, both literal, and metaphorical.
***
It took a while, but at the same time, less than it would have pretty much anybody else.
She still knew the city. The beat of it thrummed in her blood, in the electrical impulses twitching artificial muscle, in the way she walked.
She'd _missed_ it. For all the dreams, some of them her own, ground into the ground and crushed under the feet of indifferent masses, there was no other place quite like it.
And to Jeena, Megatokyo was home.
An occasionally rat infested one, desperately needing renovation, but home nonetheless. And none of the rats were big enough to seriously bother her. They hadn't been then, they sure as hell didn't get any better over the years.
A part of her was faintly disappointed.
The rest wasn't considering that there and then, because it was busy being surprised, then suspicious.
The trails and the peculiar style of mediating the contract were both familiar. Enough that she really hadn't needed to be quite as rough on poor-stupid-Ryo ...
She snorted. As if.
The corridor started in a back alley, leading under the building that proclaimed to all the world the delights of soy and sinking down quite a bit further after some point. She'd caught at least five separate sensor plates at varying intervals, but wasn't really concerned. Unless she'd suddenly become persona-non-grata here, which wasn't likely, she wouldn't be more than warned off. Meaning that she'd simply need to find another way.
Apparently, that wasn't to be a problem. She reached the end of the corridor without incident, climbing into the small freight elevator that sat behind a suspiciously unlocked security hatch. Both it and the hatch looked like they were going to fall apart any minute, which wasn't something one could dispute without a more focused examination. The appearance of either was, naturally, a carefully maintained faint for anyone who'd gotten this far.
The ride down was as smooth and quiet as she remembered it being, obviously at odds with the way things looked.
When the lift finally did stop, in a chamber much like the one several levels above, she dismounted with little fuss. It was, she remarked to herself as she pushed open the door she knew led to one of the main storage areas of the place, time to meet an old friend.
"Huh, I wasn't expecting you ... not this soon, at any rate," the white-haired woman said, not looking up from the obstinate arrangement of power-cells the refused to properly align with the drive train receptable of the antiquated K-6 Personal Trooper. The entire space was filled with boxes, full of more in the way of weaponry than even she knew the details of, and quite a bit of miscellaneous kipple besides. "What's the matter? Can't buy a thrill?"
"If I wanted to, I'd be trolling the strip joints in Tinsel City. Been a long time, Kiba."
***
"But ... no, it can't be ..."
"I'm sorry to have to bring you this sort of news," his hand reached out to squeeze hers. A futile gesture of trying to comfort somebody who'd just had the world ripped out from under here.
Again.
"Couldn't we _try_? At least to talk to her, sir? I know I could get through, I just know it!"
Hope springs eternal in the human breast. Or one close enough to it to not matter very much, at least.
"If there is a chance. But I'm afraid we can't risk it," he sighed ruefully. "There simply is no window of opportunity to do so. Things will be coming to a head soon, you know. What we do, we do for the betterment of the world. Some things ..."
She shivered. Then, hesitantly, nodded. The concept wasn't one she was unfamiliar with, but not exactly something pleasant either.
No. Not pleasant at all.
"I'm sure she'd approve," the woman said, drawing herself up. "If it's against GENOM. It's their fault, after all. Their machine. First they took Nam, Lou, and Meg ... and now they're taking Sylvie away from me."
Arms came around her, pulling her close.
Mismatched eyes looked down on the aquamarine haired girl.
Over the top of Anri's head, Largo smiled.
In the distance, a brief flash illuminated the coastward city skyline, briefly filtering through what was left of the ruined church's stained glass windows.
***
Kenichi Hoshi had never wanted to play hero.
All he wanted was to be left more or less alone, to be able to pay his bills and buy Mari a few of this month's 'absolutely must have' things to keep her from verbally biting his head off, and maybe catch a few beers with his friends at the end of a long day.
There'd been a bit of a tight spot when GENOM bought out the company he'd been working for a month ago, but fortunately he wasn't one of those people who'd been let go at the end of the day.
It may not have been his dream job, but he had a sort of knack for working security that wasn't just there due to his being six foot even and around two hundred pounds of pure muscle. He was thorough, conscientious, and took what he did seriously ...
... but he'd never wanted to play hero. It got people killed.
And, like Iwagami had aptly demonstrated a moment ago, trying to take on three assailants in powered armor with small-arms wasn't just 'playing hero'. It was 'playing stupid hero'.
Kenichi stumbled up the stairs, limping. A spray of fire from one of the attackers hadn't quite caught up with him, but the chips that the impacting projectiles had torn from the concrete wall he'd ducked behind a few dozen paces behind and below had.
The five 55-C models they had on shift were long gone, the assailants having gone through them without even thee most remote bit of difficulty, which had prompted Kenichi's desire to be somewhere else in the first place ...
... thought things seemed to be quieting down now. Which either meant that the threat had been dealt with - not likely, all things and prior performance considered - or that ...
The loading doors below rumbled, high yield hydraulics making a characteristic sound that he could recognize in his sleep.
An inkling of hope flared within him as he shuffled over to one of the windows that overlooked the loading yard below.
A cargo hauler roared from the building, tearing through the yard and out the gates, and Kenichi breathed in relief as the glaring lights outside illuminated the three hardsuits of the assailants.
The impromptu tourniquet he'd tied off just above the injured part of his leg would keep him from bleeding to death for the next while, and the frantic panic of having to run for his life was passing.
It was over. He nearly laughed in relief.
He was still alive!
Which was when the sound of servos working the loading doors closed was overshadowed by a deep, heavy rumble ... and the floor, as well as the bays below, two floors above, and nearly the whole breadth of that storage section of the warehouse complex was engulfed by and explosion.
It was enough to light up the sky for a moment, and the fires that raged until the following morning would cast an eerie radiance throughout it all.
That's it for now. Thank my looking for something entirely unrelated for finding that I did, indeed, pack my flash drive and take it with me ... I'd just misplaced it. One or two of these scenes are revamped ones that I wanted to use in the previous version of Ch.4, but they fit in without too much of a modification.
-Griever
When tact is required, use brute force. When force is required, use greater force.
When the greatest force is required, use your head. Surprise is everything. - The Book of Cataclysm
Sometimes, there's really no substitute for some good and honest grunt work.
At least that was what she told herself. It could be that the stress was finally getting to her.
Not that she'd ever had what would be commonly considered a calm sort personality.
Oh, methodical and meticulous when she had to be, yes, but sometimes ...
The last Rent-A-Thug went slamming through a wood-substitute tabletop, and following through all the way down and into the floor with a bone-jarring *thud*.
"You know, Ryo, I never really thought it was possible for you to sink any lower," she commented to the only other still conscious person present. "But you've managed to surprise me. Congratulations."
She smiled. It wasn't a nice smile.
In fact, it made the slick haired man, who could pass for a sarariman if encountered on the street, and who was currently sitting behind a cheap desk in a way that suggested he wanted to try and make a break for it, but knew that said course of action wasn't a good idea, cringe. And want to hide. Preferably in a very deep hole.
"But, see - I've got a little something to discuss with you, so I'd be willing to let bygones be bygones and treat this as an unfortunate ... accident. No, don't talk quite yet, I'm not done."
She came around the desk, stepped behind his chair, and put her hands on his shoulders. Then she squeezed. Hard.
The yakuza underboss whimpered.
"See? You haven't forgotten basic hospitality since I paid you a visit last time, have you? It's only been, what, a few years? You talk when I say you talk, got that?"
Silence.
"Good. Now, I've been hearing something about you having a bit to do with an incident that came about lately. Something about a buyout of a meat shredding plant ... oh, sorry. I meant warehouse. Supposedly cheap, too, after all the yellow tape went down. Kinda makes all those nasty suspicious types think that you could have had something to do with what went on there, doesn't it?"
Another squeeze.
Those hands felt like a pair of iron vices. That was new. Last time, only one had been quite that bad.
"But I'm willing to give you the benefit of the doubt here if you maybe just, oh, share your ... educated guesses on the matter with me. After all, you're still so well informed about what goes on down here, right? That much hasn't changed since I was last visiting, has it? Give an old friend a helping hand."
Hashima Ryo hadn't gotten to where he was by being soft ... but he also hadn't gotten there by not knowing when to cut his losses. A very important thing to realize when dealing with this particular person.
Messing about with Jeena Malso was not even remotely in the realm of good ideas.
***
Priss blinked.
Well, she thought to herself, this was new.
She was used to giving one member of the band or another a bawling out every now and then, when their efforts were lackluster ... but it was the first time she could recall having that same thing pulled on her. Worse, she wasn't particularly inclined to turn around, yank the door of the Hot Legs, which was still deserted save for the practicing Replicants, open, and give back what she'd gotten, with accrued interest.
Instead, she settled on her bike, and frowned ...
Hell, she'd spent the morning sitting on the steps of her trailer, nursing a bottle of Jack, and strumming all melancholy and shit out of an old, woefully out of tune acoustic she'd had for as long as she could remember and hadn't bothered with tossing. This wasn't like her, damnit!
... or maybe it was. She couldn't really tell, today.
She didn't tend get emotional, or rather, didn't get emotional in any way except getting well and righteously pissed off, either. Hadn't for a good few years now. Until last night, when she'd gone through what could have passed for a nervous breakdown in any other set of circumstances. But then, misery loved company. Loathe as she was to admit it, it had been a liberating, almost cathartic experience.
The engine rumbled to life, and seconds later she was flashing down the dingy roads and alleys with the deft assurance of someone who'd done it more times than they could count, in weather considerably worse than the present minor rainfall. The blurring road and press of wind helped her get a semblance of her usual attitude back, at least ...
She couldn't help but wonder how Sylvie was dealing.
***
He'd never had much of a problem adjusting to new accommodations back when he'd hadn't been technically immune to any physical discomfort, and it wasn't a problem at present either.
'Yeah, well, it wouldn't be too bad if it weren't for everything being so damn _small_!'
It was just his luck that the seemingly 'best' of the safehouses Kiba had pointed out when they'd said their goodbyes happened to be little more than a sub-basement underneath, ironically enough, the remains of a church.
It wasn't _the_ church, of course, since there wasn't enough of it left topside to constitute even a good try at 'ruins' ...
Things would have been a lot simpler if they could have just found the damn place, but ruined places of worship - while not exactly a dime-a-dozen in the Canyons and the general Fault area - weren't exactly marked on your usual maps, nor were they places that garnered much attention from even the shadier characters.
Unless you counted squatters, and even those tended to pick more comfortable places. Or at least ones that weren't as drafty.
In any case, it was just as well that he'd never really had any sort of phobia related to being in small, enclosed spaces either, because, however surprisingly apt the D.D. was at moving through urban environs, despite having been designed with battlefields in mind, it was still rather big.
It gave him a whole new level of appreciation for Sylvie, who'd managed to not only not get caught while driving the thing-that-was-now-his-body through the city when she'd still been 'out for blood', pun intended, but also hadn't caused a ruckus with any cases of hard to explain damages to the surroundings other than the occasional footprint or two. He'd been having trouble getting used to the new proportions of things for a while after their initial meeting, and he _was_ the machine, for all intents and purposes.
Not that they'd spent a lot of time there, since as soon as he and a slightly out of sorts Sylvie had even gotten set up, she'd insisted on following through on Kiba's parting gift.
Which, he noted, brought him back to the initial subject of this idle flight of fantasy.
The solar panels that all but filled the rooftop were almost, but not quite, a veritable forest of metal and reflective surfaces, but there was plenty of space underneath this umbrella of sorts for maintenance work to be done ... meaning he could just barely squeeze in without damaging anything. The position wasn't exactly the best in terms of offered view, perspective, or pretty much anything other than concealment and proximity to the apartment complex that one Millie Jackson was registered as a resident of.
Not that actually getting up there had been easy to do without drawing all kinds of the wrong sort of attention. Sylvie, though, had come back determined enough that there really wasn't any talking her out of doing at least an initial bit of recon.
The rain that had been falling since sometime a few hours before dawn, but seemed to be slowing down now - likely, the skies should be clear come evening - had been a big help in getting up to the rooftop without getting spotted by bystanders or anyone else for that matter. Though the fact that they'd done so an hour before dawn was a factor, since not many of even the most zealous corporate drones, not to mention the other productive members of society, were up at the time.
Things would have been more difficult, had the place been in the vicinity of a college campus, but luckily no such problem needed to be worked around in this case. There was only so much even a coffee addled mind on too little sleep could dismiss as hallucination, and a Battlemover wasn't quite within that bracket.
"You've had a productive evening, then," he'd asked/stated on the way through the ruins of the Canyons - still one of the most secure routes they could take, even with the increased vigilance of police and military forces.
"Yes. No. Maybe," Sylvie had said, haltingly. "I'm still not sure if it wasn't a cascading error in my empathy program. We finally ended up pretty much where we started from ... undecided."
He'd inquired about details, and she'd informed him.
"It sounds perfectly normal to me," he'd replied, with not a little wryness. "Do you want to talk about it?"
She'd hesitated, had gone to nod, and stopped halfway, instead opening the privacy protocols that either side had place on the superweapon linkage.
The somewhat uncomfortably emotional exchange that followed didn't take as much as a second, but both sides had gotten a few insights out of it.
He could still recall Sylvie's unease when she'd found that this 'quest' of hers was one of the main things keeping his own mind in relative equilibrium. It was, he'd explained, in a way the logical extension of how he'd always approached some things, and if he focused his attention on something to the near exclusion of everything else and it kept him more or less sane, well, who was she to argue.
Although, and he didn't know whether she'd let it slip on purpose when the linkage was being limited again, he'd been mildly perplexed when she'd felt oddly flattered upon learning of the above.
The rest of their transit had been spent in silence, both literal, and metaphorical.
***
It took a while, but at the same time, less than it would have pretty much anybody else.
She still knew the city. The beat of it thrummed in her blood, in the electrical impulses twitching artificial muscle, in the way she walked.
She'd _missed_ it. For all the dreams, some of them her own, ground into the ground and crushed under the feet of indifferent masses, there was no other place quite like it.
And to Jeena, Megatokyo was home.
An occasionally rat infested one, desperately needing renovation, but home nonetheless. And none of the rats were big enough to seriously bother her. They hadn't been then, they sure as hell didn't get any better over the years.
A part of her was faintly disappointed.
The rest wasn't considering that there and then, because it was busy being surprised, then suspicious.
The trails and the peculiar style of mediating the contract were both familiar. Enough that she really hadn't needed to be quite as rough on poor-stupid-Ryo ...
She snorted. As if.
The corridor started in a back alley, leading under the building that proclaimed to all the world the delights of soy and sinking down quite a bit further after some point. She'd caught at least five separate sensor plates at varying intervals, but wasn't really concerned. Unless she'd suddenly become persona-non-grata here, which wasn't likely, she wouldn't be more than warned off. Meaning that she'd simply need to find another way.
Apparently, that wasn't to be a problem. She reached the end of the corridor without incident, climbing into the small freight elevator that sat behind a suspiciously unlocked security hatch. Both it and the hatch looked like they were going to fall apart any minute, which wasn't something one could dispute without a more focused examination. The appearance of either was, naturally, a carefully maintained faint for anyone who'd gotten this far.
The ride down was as smooth and quiet as she remembered it being, obviously at odds with the way things looked.
When the lift finally did stop, in a chamber much like the one several levels above, she dismounted with little fuss. It was, she remarked to herself as she pushed open the door she knew led to one of the main storage areas of the place, time to meet an old friend.
"Huh, I wasn't expecting you ... not this soon, at any rate," the white-haired woman said, not looking up from the obstinate arrangement of power-cells the refused to properly align with the drive train receptable of the antiquated K-6 Personal Trooper. The entire space was filled with boxes, full of more in the way of weaponry than even she knew the details of, and quite a bit of miscellaneous kipple besides. "What's the matter? Can't buy a thrill?"
"If I wanted to, I'd be trolling the strip joints in Tinsel City. Been a long time, Kiba."
***
"But ... no, it can't be ..."
"I'm sorry to have to bring you this sort of news," his hand reached out to squeeze hers. A futile gesture of trying to comfort somebody who'd just had the world ripped out from under here.
Again.
"Couldn't we _try_? At least to talk to her, sir? I know I could get through, I just know it!"
Hope springs eternal in the human breast. Or one close enough to it to not matter very much, at least.
"If there is a chance. But I'm afraid we can't risk it," he sighed ruefully. "There simply is no window of opportunity to do so. Things will be coming to a head soon, you know. What we do, we do for the betterment of the world. Some things ..."
She shivered. Then, hesitantly, nodded. The concept wasn't one she was unfamiliar with, but not exactly something pleasant either.
No. Not pleasant at all.
"I'm sure she'd approve," the woman said, drawing herself up. "If it's against GENOM. It's their fault, after all. Their machine. First they took Nam, Lou, and Meg ... and now they're taking Sylvie away from me."
Arms came around her, pulling her close.
Mismatched eyes looked down on the aquamarine haired girl.
Over the top of Anri's head, Largo smiled.
In the distance, a brief flash illuminated the coastward city skyline, briefly filtering through what was left of the ruined church's stained glass windows.
***
Kenichi Hoshi had never wanted to play hero.
All he wanted was to be left more or less alone, to be able to pay his bills and buy Mari a few of this month's 'absolutely must have' things to keep her from verbally biting his head off, and maybe catch a few beers with his friends at the end of a long day.
There'd been a bit of a tight spot when GENOM bought out the company he'd been working for a month ago, but fortunately he wasn't one of those people who'd been let go at the end of the day.
It may not have been his dream job, but he had a sort of knack for working security that wasn't just there due to his being six foot even and around two hundred pounds of pure muscle. He was thorough, conscientious, and took what he did seriously ...
... but he'd never wanted to play hero. It got people killed.
And, like Iwagami had aptly demonstrated a moment ago, trying to take on three assailants in powered armor with small-arms wasn't just 'playing hero'. It was 'playing stupid hero'.
Kenichi stumbled up the stairs, limping. A spray of fire from one of the attackers hadn't quite caught up with him, but the chips that the impacting projectiles had torn from the concrete wall he'd ducked behind a few dozen paces behind and below had.
The five 55-C models they had on shift were long gone, the assailants having gone through them without even thee most remote bit of difficulty, which had prompted Kenichi's desire to be somewhere else in the first place ...
... thought things seemed to be quieting down now. Which either meant that the threat had been dealt with - not likely, all things and prior performance considered - or that ...
The loading doors below rumbled, high yield hydraulics making a characteristic sound that he could recognize in his sleep.
An inkling of hope flared within him as he shuffled over to one of the windows that overlooked the loading yard below.
A cargo hauler roared from the building, tearing through the yard and out the gates, and Kenichi breathed in relief as the glaring lights outside illuminated the three hardsuits of the assailants.
The impromptu tourniquet he'd tied off just above the injured part of his leg would keep him from bleeding to death for the next while, and the frantic panic of having to run for his life was passing.
It was over. He nearly laughed in relief.
He was still alive!
Which was when the sound of servos working the loading doors closed was overshadowed by a deep, heavy rumble ... and the floor, as well as the bays below, two floors above, and nearly the whole breadth of that storage section of the warehouse complex was engulfed by and explosion.
It was enough to light up the sky for a moment, and the fires that raged until the following morning would cast an eerie radiance throughout it all.
That's it for now. Thank my looking for something entirely unrelated for finding that I did, indeed, pack my flash drive and take it with me ... I'd just misplaced it. One or two of these scenes are revamped ones that I wanted to use in the previous version of Ch.4, but they fit in without too much of a modification.
-Griever
When tact is required, use brute force. When force is required, use greater force.
When the greatest force is required, use your head. Surprise is everything. - The Book of Cataclysm