Fighting erupted in the rest of the building. Before a knight could take aim, he was blasted away with a sonic boom. The immortal who did that was tased with an electric pike by the other knight. The immortal reached back to snap the pike in twain. They went to strangle the other knight, but the first knight froze their legs. The other knight plunged a knife into the immortal’s neck, but the knife skidded off on impact. The tear in the fatigue revealed the carapace underneath.
Scenes like this played everywhere the immortals clashed with the knights; while the immortals were outnumbered, their mutant abilities and equipment were more than a match for the knights. In a board room, knights were marionetted into fighting each other. A stairwell was slick with rain to the advantage of an immortal. In raw fisticuffs, metal crumpled sooner than flesh. A chaotic brawl was exactly where these intruders thrived.
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Garrick’s hearing was shot. His connection to the rest of his drones and Knights was severed. With the ringing in his ears, the only warning he could see was his Knights pointing behind him. The LittleBoy glanced over its shoulder, then turned around fully: a giant mound of dirt was rising just out the window. Delsin?
The LittleBoy primed its weapons systems just in time for the dirt from his office to swing behind his back and push him outside into the forming hand of the mound. With all the dirt collected, it now sculpted itself into a titan with the likeness of Anog Ite, the two-faced ogress. The first face was a beautiful woman who smiled at its tightened grasp as it crushed the scrap metal in its hand. The second face was the monstrous visage of an ogress that promised to on-lookers their deaths.
It was enough to distract the entire base from the two entities who used the distraction to make their escape. Some of the Knights throughout the building were also taken aback by the titan that appeared, just enough for Immortals to escape deeper into the building where they could regroup and use the thicket of the offices to their advantage.
In Ite’s hand, a vibration began. Ite clamped down harder and harder, but the vibration continued to spread until a discharge of energy blew her hand apart. Small coils along the LittleBoy’s arms and shoulders pulsed with blue electricity that shimmied along the pauldrons, the rerebraces, the couters, the vambraces, and the gauntlets. It was a fragment of GalvanGal’s power, but it was enough to protect him from the titan he hovered in front of now.
The rest of the arm motioned to swing but was frozen by blasts from the stump down to the elbow and a charged punch shattered it on its approach. The LittleBoy aimed its gauntlets at the other arm’s shoulder and a rapid succession of blasts froze the joint into a stiff block of ice. He primed the coils down on the cuisse, poleyn, and greave and blitzed through the shoulder with a charged knee.
The titanic arm plummeted to the ground with a crash that shook the entire complex. When the LittleBoy looked the ogress in the eyes, he did it with his cryocore primed to fire a laser that froze the titan’s whole head in an instant, brittle enough to be blown apart by a flying kick straight through it.
Of course, kicking dirt wasn’t going to do much but waste time. Inside, the three immortals were being held back by the two Knights while the prisoner was still in his seat. Hopefully one of them controlled the titan so that they could be put down as soon as possible. The armless, beheaded titan groaned behind him, and he had only a moment to see its chest open to reveal an arsenal of rocket launchers.
With robotic precision, the LittleBoy froze many barrels as they began to fire, and intercepted even more explosives in the air. A few found their mark in a fireball that engulfed the LittleBoy, and when the smoke settled there was nothing left.
Tyler watched this little scuffle from his seat. The guards did not seem concerned with him as they focused on what was in front of them. He could kill them both himself, but he opted to watch how his warriors performed. The Immortals were stuck behind the desk and FatMan armor at the moment, with an open expanse around them to be frozen in. They probably did not bring the plasma to begin with because it would be too dangerous to use in a building.
They also did not notice the LittleBoy cloaked behind them until it was too late. From the stagger of the titan and subsequent disintegration, the one that got hit first must have been Delsin; more importantly, there was a concerning thud in the fault line of the Earth. In short order, the Immortals had their hands bound in ice in the same manner as the cuffs of the one they were sent here to rescue. From the sound of it, the rest of the building was about to turn out the same way.
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A knight was webbed against the receptionist's desk, helpless as he watched a barrel be jammed into the gorget of another knight. A deafening crack could be heard, but it was the immortal who was on the floor. The ground floor lobby’s entrance had been demolished. The one who ripped off the webbing was—
“GalvanGal! There’s more of them throughout the building.” said the knight.
Without another word, a lightning bolt went up every floor. Whatever advantage the intruders had was knocked away in flashes. Their meager storms were blown away and their precious armor was sundered. The ones that were together were knocked down by a thunderous clap and the discharge of electricity kept them down. The GalvanGal spared not a moment more before she bolted to the last floor to go.
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The doors to the stairwell burst off their hinges as Hannah lept through the air and skated across the ground as she landed. She panted and heaved in the middle of the conference lobby as she tried to get her words out. Only then did Tyler stand up to the window behind him.
“Max… noticed the drone wasn’t responding,” she gulped, “so he sent me here, and I saw something was going on in the base but he said to go straight to the main building and I saw the ground rising but I was already going through the front door when I saw it and helped the guys deal with bad guys but they had this black flesh armor under their clothes so it surprised me so I had to actually put my back into it while going as fast as I could and I was already tired from training and… oh… you… you already got ‘em,” she panted.
She confirmed with her hearing that the base was safe, then was ordered to catch her breath. The subdued intruders were disarmed and put in cuffs. The body armor was removed to reveal something else underneath. If they couldn’t be stripped of the rest of their armor now, they could wait for these ‘Immortals’ to do it themselves in prison.
This was… a win? WhiteOut was right; as long as you didn’t let the shock tactics rattle you, you could win the rest of the fight. The enemy must know that. Why do it this way? This… wasn’t easy exactly, but it was over too quickly. Why do something time-consuming like evacuating civilians? Were they truly concerned about the safety of those people? What happened to the entities if Hannah isn’t hearing them? Could this have all been a diversion meant to distract from Tartarus?
Before other concerns could be addressed, there was, as far as Garrick knew, one last thing to take care of in the building.
“That crane is going to fall over,” stated Tyler.
“What are you talking about?” asked Garrick.
“That rusty crane tower ruining the skyline was not meant to stand up to an earthquake. Delsin hit a plate by mistake. It is tilting and will fall. Hippo could slow it down, but she will need Delsin to create pillars to stop it.”
“Huh? Did you say my name? Do you need something?” asked Hannah. Hannah said she was only here because Max told her, so the messengers may not have made it out. Even if an evacuation did start before, there would still be plenty of people around that area. Garrick did feel that quake, that was no lie. He recognized the cheap brand of that construction company all too well from his own experiences with corner cutters and branded them a safety risk. One of many warnings that fell on willfully deaf ears.
'What if they get it wrong?'
Garrick broke Delsin’s ice cuffs. He told Hannah to carry Delsin with her to stop the crane. The other two immortals would be brought out of the building by the Knights. The same would go for the rest of the Knights and their respective intruders. That just left the two of them across the room from each other. One man in a suit of armor, the other in handcuffs.
“Was this your plan?” asked Garrick, who picked up the axe and set it in the FatMan’s mitt, “I expected more than that. Come on, we’re roommates, you can talk to me.”
“Little Birdie is a mutant animal that allows us to communicate telepathically. The radiometer in my handcuffs has not gone off once. They have not communicated with me. This was not my plan.”
“Well, whoever planned this failed on this end at least. You need better friends or better equipment because right now both of them are being brought into custody on the base you attacked.”
“Plans, friends, and equipment rarely work out the way we hope they do. In the end, when your back’s against the wall, all you can rely on is your own skin and blood. Besides, I’m sure their objective was for me to leave your custody. All I have to do is walk out of this building for it to still be a success. If you can stop me from doing that, then I’ll tell you everything.”
“Got it,” Garrick shot a cryoblast at Tyler's shoe. He took one step to avoid the blast, which left a crystal stalagmite inches from his feet, with eye contact maintained on the LittleBoy. It was expected for a person to dive for cover when under fire, preferably under the nearby table so that the LittleBoy could fly over and freeze them from above. Garrick was warned about the way he minimized unnecessary movement, but mammals could never be as efficient or as enduring as a machine. The enemy had plenty of surprises in store today, but they were overcome by being patient and cautious. Whatever trick or technique this one has up their sleeve, Garrick would suppress it from a distance with superior firepower.
The gauntlets unleashed a fresh flurry of blasts and Tyler ducked under a table this time. The table was kicked into the air as a flying shield that blocked the next flurry of blasts. The LittleBoy skirted out of the way of the table and scrambled a set of blasts that were blocked by the cuffs that covered Tyler’s arms. The LittleBoy flew up but was axe kicked back down to crack the tile floor.
He stumbled back to his feet to be met with an uppercut, pushed past the secretary's desk, and into the wall of the kitchen. The frozen gauntlets struck concussive blows that dug the LittleBoy into the wall behind it. With Garrick dazed, Tyler split the brittle cuffs apart and shattered them against each other to free his hands. He lept up to the top of the stairs to Garrick’s office. He came back down with a vial in hand.
The LittleBoy only just pulled itself from the wall when that vial broke against its breastplate. The frozen bolt blew the LittleBoy through the wall, across the kitchen, smashed into a stove to break a hole in the wall behind it. His head and one arm dangled out of the building as the stove crashed into concrete.
What’s happening? He was across the room a moment ago. I went up and he was already above me. That strength and speed are inhuman, but the handcuffs themselves didn’t go off. Did I miss something? Is this what Hannah was having trouble with? When I win, I’ll have to apologize to her.
“Is this the effort that will lead humanity beyond the horizon? Here it is then: the horizon has arrived.”
The Gator grabbed the LittleBoy by the greave. He swung the suit overhead, through the ceiling panels, through the rangehood, plunged into the cooktop then through this floor. The weight of the suit broke the next floor, and Garrick collapsed into a computer cubicle surrounded by darkness.