05-22-2015, 09:48 PM
The trio strode towards the barracks. Harry’s cape whipped, Proto Man’s feet clopped and the servomotors in Samus’s suit whirred. The entrance to the barracks lay before them. On either side of the black sliding doors were experienced-looking bodyguards with massive frames. They didn’t move as the three approached, but Samus had the feel that she was being regarded as fresh new meat by a pair of tigers. Their visor-clad faces betrayed nothing.
Samus stepped up. “We’ve been called to the barracks.”
The leftmost hulk pressed a few buttons on a panel to his right. Then he motioned to the group to go in.
Inside the barracks felt much like being in an underground bunker, despite its lofty height over the rest of the complex. Samus felt a familiar cold drop over her as her footsteps echoed in the brown corridors. Was this a deliberate tactic? Going from such lavish surroundings to such dim, subterranean ones?
The three did not speak but Harry and Proto Man stole glances at each other as they followed behind the blue-clad bounty hunter. They were thinking the same as Samus. Too easy. Something about this place vibed wrong.
“This place is like a prison,” voiced Proto Man.
The entry tunnel opened up into a wide, lit common space that reminded Samus of the canteens in her time in military academy. They passed them by, entering into the corridors marked as ‘Quarters’.
There were no names on each of the doors, only numbers. “One to ten,” elicited Blues.
Samus activated her x-ray visor. Her scan immediately revealed two female figures in the rooms to either side of them. Just from the silhouette, her chest felt a burning sensation and her heart rate all but tripled. This was it. This was what she prepared for.
“Go,” said.
They burst the door open to the broom cupboard of a bedroom, and the fight began immediately.
Cindy reacted as might one expected of a warrior used to sleeping around deadly carnivores. She whipped around, slashing outwards with a pair of purple-striped blades she drew from her belt. They immediately connected with the cannon of Samus Aran, which sparked before unleashing a quickcharged blast of plasma, directly above the head of the freelance Hunter.
Harry Dresden and Blues unarmed their respective choices of weapon; a red stream of flame coat-tailed by a blast of yellow plasma. They joined the fray and exploded into the crowded quarters of Cindy the Monster Hunter. Cindy shot back, wheeling outwards with a hammer that appeared in a wink in her hands and caused Samus to duck backwards, narrowly avoiding a concussion for the second time at the hands of the pale-haired hunter. As she fell backward, her backup fired in unison. Cindy’s silhouette vanished in the resulting explosion, which threw the already-destabilised Samus backwards, into the door behind Harry and Proto Man.
“Hey!” came an irritated female voice from behind the door. “Don’t make me come out there.”
Cindy burst outwards, shattering through the door frame on a lance that seemed to be a rocket. Proto Man and Harry Dresden dived to either side, and Samus, still recovering, back-flipped from her prone position simultaneously bringing her feet up into the monster hunter’s chest.
Cindy flew. Over and across Samus, clean through the doorway of the one opposite that of her own room. A figure inside darted out of the way of the airborne hunter, flickering back into view a spare moment later. The irritated occupant glared down upon her noisy disturbers. “I told you,” she said, “No … fighting!” With an outward thrust of her palms, she unleashed a torrent of bright white energy.
Alarms were going off all through the vicinity. In the background of the explosions, more voices could be heard. Samus ignored them. She whipped upwards, throwing the weight of her legs into the upper part of her body, and slammed her left fist into the open face of Android Eighteen. The android spun sideways into the barracks wall. “Out of the way!” Samus roared.
“Watch out!” bellowed Proto Man, as Cindy recovered from the floor and dived outwards like a cornered beast. Samus ducked underneath her blades, half-falling half-staggering backwards up the corridor.
Harry saw a phantom of his bloodstream trailing behind him as he fell to the ground, a few hairs in tow – the blades of Cindy had only caught the outward inch of his ear. The Winter’s Mantle fluttered, its instincts pressing in at the edges of the wizard senses. It was time to wake up. “Forzare!” bellowed the Winter Knight, unleashing a hand of spectral energy from the very force of his will with a single intent: ‘Capture Cindy’.
Cindy roared with pain and rage as the fingers closed around her. Her eyes literally went red. “Guys, do something!” yelled Harry, back to floor as he held the Hunter just barely at bay.
“I’m on it!” barked back Proto Man as he readied his arm cannon. The robotic boy’s suit began to pulse with an array of energy that shook the floor. It converged before unleashing a yellow blast of gargantuan proportions. “Finish BUSTER!” he elicited, as the entire corridor vanished in a flash of light.
The smoking vision of Cindy fell out of the air in front of Samus. The bounty hunter stepped up, placing a finger out in front of her. It traced the air in a green circle around the monster hunter. “What are you doing?!” coughed Cindy.
“Sending you back where you belong,” said Samus.
Cindy kicked and screamed. Harry and Blues ran over to hold her down, pin her against the floor against the magic of the Banishment Circle. It’s humming began to morph into a high pitched vibration that seemed to fill the air around it. The room became still.
And then the energy in the air vanished. Like a power cut, the hum stopped and the circle of banishment vanished into thin air.
Harry and Proto Man looked up at Samus. Her face held nothing but a mixture of confusion and rage. Cindy smirked.
With a twist of her torso, Cindy’s legs spun out and caught at the legs of her pursuers. Proto Man and Harry fell; Samus, meanwhile, caught the brunt of the opposing hunter’s arms, eating deeply of blade and ferocity. She fell backwards with blood spilling from her forearms. Cindy rounded on her.
“You think you’d really get away with this?”
Samus growled. “Do you really think you’d get away with tricking me?”
Cindy laughed. “I thought I’d get away with the Rathian Egg. The rest is up to fate.”
In her hand glowed the raptor’s egg. With a burst of golden light the creature broke free of its arcane entrapments, cracking open the very ceiling of the walls that enclosed them. “Dammit!” swore Harry, looking as much pleased as the others to be facing a dragon once again. Not even its gold-shaded body and comparatively diminutive form detracted from the immediate loss of morale they all felt from seeing a familiar foe. Samus grit her teeth. Blues steeled himself and fired a charge shot at the monster hunter.
From the entrance of the corridor, the bodyguards peered in. They glanced from the mass of flame and diving bodies to the figure of Android Eighteen, who stood with her fists upheld, humming with ionic charge. “You need our help, miss Number Two?” enquired the braver of the two bodyguards.
“No. No, thank you, that’s all that is required.” Eighteen smiled in a way that could not be described as optimistic.
The pair of visor-clad entrees backed off as their beneficiary strode calmly into the cacophony and began raising the volume of the explosions thus contained within. One of them dialled frantically at numbers on his digital watch. “Master Jak, sir! We’ve got a serious situation going down on the barracks! Need reinforcement immediately!”
“Of course.” Responded the tones of their stalwart employer. “I’ll be right there.”
A beep signalled the cutoff of the phone.
“Are you really going to send in someone to stop them?” asked Jak’s advisor, a nervous looking man in plain colours.
“Give it a few minutes,” said Jak.
The corridor continued to widen substantially. By method of plasma, light energy, flame, and seismic power, the structural integrity of the building had come into a new form of assessment. Proto Man ducked behind his shield.
“We have to pull back,” he said, calling across to Samus. “The Banishment Circle didn’t work!”
Samus gasped in air. “Harry! We need to move!”
“You guys go!” the wizard yelled backwards. In the same moment, Cindy crashed into him. Her legs wrapped around the mage’s torso, her right arm held high. Her violet blade shone in the moonlight.
“NO!” Samus’s bellow was almost inhuman in cadence. It reverberated out through the gaps in her helmet and off the broken walls of this now-ruin that they stood in. She threw her left arm forward. Her left eye squinted shut, the result of so many drills before. The beam snaked outwards from her arm cannon; a point of light attaching itself to the jacket enclosing Harry Dresden. She pulled back with one hand; thrust forward with the other. Harry Dresden flew backwards over her shoulder, just missing the wave of light that materialised in his wake. Cindy crashed against it, her blades slicing through the plasma walls that Samus defended with.
“Now?”
“Okay, now.”
The three insurgents fled their apocalyptic wake. Samus and Harry blew plasmic currents behind them as Proto led in front. “Out through this way!” yelled the electronic boy as the corridor yielded into a set of gates, unmarked and unremarkable.
Aran and Dresden picked up the speed, Samus grasping her compatriot’s right hand and pulling him along as her long legs grasped forward in an all-out sprint. Proto Man pushed at the door. Samus skidded to a halt in front of it, having to hold out her gun arm to prevent Harry from sliding full-pelt into the galvanised gateway.
“Just blast it!” spoke Samus.
Proto Man did as such. His efforts served only to destructure the hallways.
The footsteps loudened behind them.
Samus felt the cold rise up through the pit of her stomach and overtake her whole being. Something felt far from not right. Something felt deeply wrong about all this.
A trap? No way.
And even as the thought crossed her mind, a hissing sound caught the edge of her enhanced senses. Proto Man, Samus Aran and Harry Dresden looked at each other, the understanding that they’d all made a huge mistake not lingering long on their attentions. Before long the world of dreams had overtaken them each. Samus blacked out to the knowledge that she had led her team into almost certain death.
Samus stepped up. “We’ve been called to the barracks.”
The leftmost hulk pressed a few buttons on a panel to his right. Then he motioned to the group to go in.
Inside the barracks felt much like being in an underground bunker, despite its lofty height over the rest of the complex. Samus felt a familiar cold drop over her as her footsteps echoed in the brown corridors. Was this a deliberate tactic? Going from such lavish surroundings to such dim, subterranean ones?
The three did not speak but Harry and Proto Man stole glances at each other as they followed behind the blue-clad bounty hunter. They were thinking the same as Samus. Too easy. Something about this place vibed wrong.
“This place is like a prison,” voiced Proto Man.
The entry tunnel opened up into a wide, lit common space that reminded Samus of the canteens in her time in military academy. They passed them by, entering into the corridors marked as ‘Quarters’.
There were no names on each of the doors, only numbers. “One to ten,” elicited Blues.
Samus activated her x-ray visor. Her scan immediately revealed two female figures in the rooms to either side of them. Just from the silhouette, her chest felt a burning sensation and her heart rate all but tripled. This was it. This was what she prepared for.
“Go,” said.
They burst the door open to the broom cupboard of a bedroom, and the fight began immediately.
Cindy reacted as might one expected of a warrior used to sleeping around deadly carnivores. She whipped around, slashing outwards with a pair of purple-striped blades she drew from her belt. They immediately connected with the cannon of Samus Aran, which sparked before unleashing a quickcharged blast of plasma, directly above the head of the freelance Hunter.
Harry Dresden and Blues unarmed their respective choices of weapon; a red stream of flame coat-tailed by a blast of yellow plasma. They joined the fray and exploded into the crowded quarters of Cindy the Monster Hunter. Cindy shot back, wheeling outwards with a hammer that appeared in a wink in her hands and caused Samus to duck backwards, narrowly avoiding a concussion for the second time at the hands of the pale-haired hunter. As she fell backward, her backup fired in unison. Cindy’s silhouette vanished in the resulting explosion, which threw the already-destabilised Samus backwards, into the door behind Harry and Proto Man.
“Hey!” came an irritated female voice from behind the door. “Don’t make me come out there.”
Cindy burst outwards, shattering through the door frame on a lance that seemed to be a rocket. Proto Man and Harry Dresden dived to either side, and Samus, still recovering, back-flipped from her prone position simultaneously bringing her feet up into the monster hunter’s chest.
Cindy flew. Over and across Samus, clean through the doorway of the one opposite that of her own room. A figure inside darted out of the way of the airborne hunter, flickering back into view a spare moment later. The irritated occupant glared down upon her noisy disturbers. “I told you,” she said, “No … fighting!” With an outward thrust of her palms, she unleashed a torrent of bright white energy.
Alarms were going off all through the vicinity. In the background of the explosions, more voices could be heard. Samus ignored them. She whipped upwards, throwing the weight of her legs into the upper part of her body, and slammed her left fist into the open face of Android Eighteen. The android spun sideways into the barracks wall. “Out of the way!” Samus roared.
“Watch out!” bellowed Proto Man, as Cindy recovered from the floor and dived outwards like a cornered beast. Samus ducked underneath her blades, half-falling half-staggering backwards up the corridor.
Harry saw a phantom of his bloodstream trailing behind him as he fell to the ground, a few hairs in tow – the blades of Cindy had only caught the outward inch of his ear. The Winter’s Mantle fluttered, its instincts pressing in at the edges of the wizard senses. It was time to wake up. “Forzare!” bellowed the Winter Knight, unleashing a hand of spectral energy from the very force of his will with a single intent: ‘Capture Cindy’.
Cindy roared with pain and rage as the fingers closed around her. Her eyes literally went red. “Guys, do something!” yelled Harry, back to floor as he held the Hunter just barely at bay.
“I’m on it!” barked back Proto Man as he readied his arm cannon. The robotic boy’s suit began to pulse with an array of energy that shook the floor. It converged before unleashing a yellow blast of gargantuan proportions. “Finish BUSTER!” he elicited, as the entire corridor vanished in a flash of light.
The smoking vision of Cindy fell out of the air in front of Samus. The bounty hunter stepped up, placing a finger out in front of her. It traced the air in a green circle around the monster hunter. “What are you doing?!” coughed Cindy.
“Sending you back where you belong,” said Samus.
Cindy kicked and screamed. Harry and Blues ran over to hold her down, pin her against the floor against the magic of the Banishment Circle. It’s humming began to morph into a high pitched vibration that seemed to fill the air around it. The room became still.
And then the energy in the air vanished. Like a power cut, the hum stopped and the circle of banishment vanished into thin air.
Harry and Proto Man looked up at Samus. Her face held nothing but a mixture of confusion and rage. Cindy smirked.
With a twist of her torso, Cindy’s legs spun out and caught at the legs of her pursuers. Proto Man and Harry fell; Samus, meanwhile, caught the brunt of the opposing hunter’s arms, eating deeply of blade and ferocity. She fell backwards with blood spilling from her forearms. Cindy rounded on her.
“You think you’d really get away with this?”
Samus growled. “Do you really think you’d get away with tricking me?”
Cindy laughed. “I thought I’d get away with the Rathian Egg. The rest is up to fate.”
In her hand glowed the raptor’s egg. With a burst of golden light the creature broke free of its arcane entrapments, cracking open the very ceiling of the walls that enclosed them. “Dammit!” swore Harry, looking as much pleased as the others to be facing a dragon once again. Not even its gold-shaded body and comparatively diminutive form detracted from the immediate loss of morale they all felt from seeing a familiar foe. Samus grit her teeth. Blues steeled himself and fired a charge shot at the monster hunter.
From the entrance of the corridor, the bodyguards peered in. They glanced from the mass of flame and diving bodies to the figure of Android Eighteen, who stood with her fists upheld, humming with ionic charge. “You need our help, miss Number Two?” enquired the braver of the two bodyguards.
“No. No, thank you, that’s all that is required.” Eighteen smiled in a way that could not be described as optimistic.
The pair of visor-clad entrees backed off as their beneficiary strode calmly into the cacophony and began raising the volume of the explosions thus contained within. One of them dialled frantically at numbers on his digital watch. “Master Jak, sir! We’ve got a serious situation going down on the barracks! Need reinforcement immediately!”
“Of course.” Responded the tones of their stalwart employer. “I’ll be right there.”
A beep signalled the cutoff of the phone.
“Are you really going to send in someone to stop them?” asked Jak’s advisor, a nervous looking man in plain colours.
“Give it a few minutes,” said Jak.
The corridor continued to widen substantially. By method of plasma, light energy, flame, and seismic power, the structural integrity of the building had come into a new form of assessment. Proto Man ducked behind his shield.
“We have to pull back,” he said, calling across to Samus. “The Banishment Circle didn’t work!”
Samus gasped in air. “Harry! We need to move!”
“You guys go!” the wizard yelled backwards. In the same moment, Cindy crashed into him. Her legs wrapped around the mage’s torso, her right arm held high. Her violet blade shone in the moonlight.
“NO!” Samus’s bellow was almost inhuman in cadence. It reverberated out through the gaps in her helmet and off the broken walls of this now-ruin that they stood in. She threw her left arm forward. Her left eye squinted shut, the result of so many drills before. The beam snaked outwards from her arm cannon; a point of light attaching itself to the jacket enclosing Harry Dresden. She pulled back with one hand; thrust forward with the other. Harry Dresden flew backwards over her shoulder, just missing the wave of light that materialised in his wake. Cindy crashed against it, her blades slicing through the plasma walls that Samus defended with.
“Now?”
“Okay, now.”
The three insurgents fled their apocalyptic wake. Samus and Harry blew plasmic currents behind them as Proto led in front. “Out through this way!” yelled the electronic boy as the corridor yielded into a set of gates, unmarked and unremarkable.
Aran and Dresden picked up the speed, Samus grasping her compatriot’s right hand and pulling him along as her long legs grasped forward in an all-out sprint. Proto Man pushed at the door. Samus skidded to a halt in front of it, having to hold out her gun arm to prevent Harry from sliding full-pelt into the galvanised gateway.
“Just blast it!” spoke Samus.
Proto Man did as such. His efforts served only to destructure the hallways.
The footsteps loudened behind them.
Samus felt the cold rise up through the pit of her stomach and overtake her whole being. Something felt far from not right. Something felt deeply wrong about all this.
A trap? No way.
And even as the thought crossed her mind, a hissing sound caught the edge of her enhanced senses. Proto Man, Samus Aran and Harry Dresden looked at each other, the understanding that they’d all made a huge mistake not lingering long on their attentions. Before long the world of dreams had overtaken them each. Samus blacked out to the knowledge that she had led her team into almost certain death.
![[Image: 0bwAI3j.jpg]](http://i.imgur.com/0bwAI3j.jpg)