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xp_logsWanda, Doug and Emma move to take out the complex and run right into a dangerous threat.
The base layout had been clear – there was a main server area that housed most of the data, and a generator that was designed as a UPS for the laboratory areas. When studying the plans, it had become clear that the system had a fault. Power loss would immediately kick in the generator, but the systems had been configured poorly to shut down with limited power. If the generator too went down, several experiments would suffer immediate power loss in their containment systems. They couldn’t blow the base up, but they could render it completely contaminated and structurally decaying before they left.
There had been a few guards, easily and quietly dealt with, before slipping into the server area.
Doug slipped along on quiet feet ahead of Emma and Wanda, the telescoping riot baton he favored for hand-to-hand out and low to one side. Gunfire, even suppressed, would draw too much attention, attention they'd rather avoid completely if they could. He moved to a monitor panel for the generator, tapping a few keys and verifying that the layout matched the information that SYN had provided. He nodded to Wanda, who was the natural go-to for this sort of thing, as her chaos powers could wreak untold havoc that few of X-Force, if any, could match.
Moving up behind him, Wanda grunted softly. "This might take a few minutes," she said, looking incredibly unhappy. The system was old and not as complicated as newer ones but it was also an old building as well. The last thing she wanted was to accidentally bring the roof caving down on them - which, according to what she was seeing, was a possibility.
She glanced over at Emma and Doug. "Just a few," Wanda promised, turning back so she could study the lines of chaos.
#I would suggest you work quite quickly,# said Emma, staying back in the shadows. #We are about to be interrupted. Quite rudely.#
Bullets ricocheted off the panels by Doug's head, and a woman stepped out of the shadows: Fontaine. She hefted the pistol with the ease of long practice, and behind her, guards began to swarm in. Most alarmingly were the ones who carried batons with long blue lights running down the length, glowing lightly.
The Countess stared them down from the end of the barrel, her head lifted high. The gun appeared to flow as an extension of herself.
"Mr. Ramsey...Ms. Maximoff ...still alive I see. Surprising," she said with the faintest of smiles. She cocked her head to the side.
"You would do well to surrender. I would prefer not to get blood on my new boots. It's hard to get out, but I won't be too broken up over it if it does happen. So we can also do it the hard way. I like the hard way too. Your choice."
She'd spun away from the console and into a crouch as their opposition started to cage them in. #There's too much for me to affect here,# she sent out, #but we could try and fight our way out if we had to. Emma? The easy way or the hard way? This bitch seems far too keen to get her claws into my eyeballs at the moment...#
#As hard as you can,# responded Emma. #They’ve made plans for us. I’ve got to shift.# The telepathic words cut off abruptly as Emma shifted to diamond form and moved forward out of the shadows.
The Countess cocked her head to the side, training her gun on the telepath.
"Crystal...no...diamond skin...a defense mechanism," she said, then smiled and shrugged.
"The hard way, I take it. Good choice," she added, then nodded to her men. They charged at Emma and anyone close to her, swinging their weapons. The air seemed to hum as they approached.
The way Fontaine had grinned predatorily at Emma's reaction spoke volumes to Doug. The Contessa had clearly planned this encounter just as tidily as she had the last one. The humming of the batons said sonics to him, and he didn't like to think what might happen if any of them connected with Emma's diamond form. And after all, a Knight's duty was to protect his Queen. And closing in to melee with the guards meant that there was less likelihood of Fontaine getting a clear shot at him.
Doug flowed forward to meet the first of the guards to cross the space. He wasn't sure what exactly the sonics might do to his own baton, and so his counterstroke went for the man's wrist, shattering it. Doug caught the weapon as it dropped from fingers that could no longer grip it, and felled the man with a sharp blow to the temple before he could even draw breath to yell in pain.
The heft of the guard's weapon was much the same as his own, and he continued forward fluidly, the pair twirling in defensive rondels.
Even as Doug engaged with the guards, several moved around the melee between her Knight and the men and towards Emma. She frowned at the batons, knowing from what she'd telepathically heard before she went to diamond form that they had been specifically designed for her, but unsure of the exact mechanism. They hummed as the guards swung them and Emma was fairly certain that there was some form of sonic device. The odds were that they were designed to interact with her diamond structure in a fairly unpleasant fashion.
"No matter which way I play this," muttered Emma, "this is going to hurt."
The first guard reached her and swung the baton at her glittering diamond form. For a few seconds, Emma was able to dodge the stroke of the baton, moving rapidly around it but finally the guard managed to get in a swing that she knew she wasn't going to be able dodge. instinctively her arm swung up to block the blow and, against instinct, she dropped from diamond form back to flesh as the baton struck. She flinched as the blow rattled through her body but the pain receded as she switched back to diamond as the guard drew the baton back again.
It was going to be a very painful fight, Emma decided. What she had to do was try and get hold of one of those batons and use it to block the blows. The blows to her flesh would incapacitate her quickly and the concentration required to flicker away from diamond would sap the attention required for multiple protagonists. But she knew how confident the Contessa had felt about the effects of the batons on her diamond structure, and Emma wasn't willing to risk them connecting.
"Oh well, if this is going to hurt anyway," she murmured and waited for the guard to strike at her again. As the baton connected and she dropped back to flesh form, she also struck out with her mind. The guard had rudimentary shields, but they couldn't hold against her utterly precise strike. With an incoherent cry, the guard could not stop his hand from spasming open and dropping the baton.
With a lightning fast scoop, Emma picked up the baton and felt the low hum of the sonics through her diamond hand. "Now, gentlemen," she said, grinning, "I believe it might be time to dance."
No one ever expected Wanda to go low. Nearly six feet tall and solid to back it up, people always acted surprised when she didn't come at them from the top or tried to meet their attack head on. Which is why she ducked, hearing a baton swish inches above her as she went under the swing, because surprise was just one of the tools that could be used. She came up swinging hard and landed a chaos fueled punch right below the man's armpit. She felt more than hurt something snap as he wheezed and went down with a gurgle.
Movement from behind. Wanda reacted, grabbing the next guy by his hair and yanking him around to shield her even as her hand dipped into her jacket and flickered out as the Contessa's gun went off. She had to trust that her aim, with a little bit of chaos thrown in, was true enough to stop the other woman from getting a bead even as she dropped the wounded man to the floor.
The Contessa let out an undignified shriek, clutching her hand to her chest as the barrel of the gun exploded. Droplets of blood stained the ground as she immediately took cover behind a column to assess the damage done.
"Andate tutti a 'fanculo!" she shouted.
"Che ne dici di fare, invece?" Doug called back, his voice dripping with malice as he took on a steady stream of the Contessa's guards. His boot crushed a kneecap, and then a baton crunched into the back of his opponent's head. The next one found his overhead swing trapped in the crossed X of Doug's weapons, followed smoothly by a knee to the groin and an elbow strike across the point of the jaw to put him down.
"Swine." There was the soft sound of a panel moving behind them; a feature not included in the blueprints, and an iron-like grip clenched the back of Doug's shirt. Before he could react, he was flung with immense force into the wall, the shock knocking his weapons away. "Two Americans and a piece of Gypsy trash, nein? You befoul the air here." Standing before them was a tall, broad shouldered man in a grey SS uniform. The Nazi insignias had been replaced by a multi-headed creature. However, it was the ruined face that dominated it. Blood dripped freely from the exposed flesh and bone on his grisly visage, and his eyes were intense, mad things set deep in his ruined face. Doug was just struggling to rise when a tremendous blow smashed him back to the ground, breaking his nose. A kick was accompanied by a cracking sound on the younger man.
Doug wasn't sure whether the retching and bile crawling up his windpipe was from the rib the new combatant had shattered, or the bloody flesh of his face. "Fick dich, du arschgesicht hurensohn," he gasped out as he struggled again to his feet. "Nazis," he nearly spat. "You know what I hate most?" he continued in a mocking monotone. "That I look like I could walk off of one of your damn recruiting posters, and..."
In the middle of the sentence, without any warning from his eyes or body, he pivoted, driving his fist toward the man's belly, a small blade barely visible between his fingers.
The impossibly strong grip stopped his hand inches from his flesh like a steel trap coming down. He shifted the grip, forcing Doug's arm upwards, pronating his joints. "I am Johann Schmidt, the finest mind in the Reich and the personal scientist to the Furher. For ten years, we advanced the Aryan cause into research your mind could not even hope to comprehend. And you, a mongrel proud of his pollution, think that you can trick me-" He brought his face directly up to Doug's, drops of blood and bits of flesh spattering him. "-to best me?"
There was a popping, tearing sound as he reached down and twisted Doug's arm like a man pulling off a chicken leg, and Doug's arm exploded in pain. Another hammer-like blow drove him to the floor. "I am the Red Skull. The master of HYDRA, and you insects are nothing but filth under my feet."
There was no taunting, no mocking him in the language of the 'dirty Gypsy', as Wanda finished dealing with the men that had been getting in her way. Shaking loose the blood from her hands, she knew that Doug would have trouble fending off anymore blows after that last one. And she was terrified that the next blow might be a killing one of the Red Skull was done 'playing' with him. So she gave him a new target.
As she'd said earlier, it was hard for her to manipulate many of the strings in the area but the Red Skull was - it made her ill trying to figure the chaos out in her head when she looked at him. It was hard to explain but they were unnatural and she would need more time than she had to figure out which one was best to manipulate. Which is why she lunged in towards his back as quietly as she could, planning on something like a kidney punched fueled by a raw chaos blast - it had worked earlier.
The chaos blast slammed into the Red Skull, and the man suddenly recoiled as the traces of red energy skipped across his body. But as Wanda closed in, he straightened up, and grabbed her by the chest. The hex blast had no discernible effect, and before she could stop him, Red Skull wrenched her next to him and planted a bloody, lipless kiss on her.
The instinct to scream or yell proved part of her undoing and a giant shudder rocked Wanda as she shoved her hands against the Red Skull's chest in an attempt to get loose. The thick, overwhelming taste of blood - metallic and wet - flooded her mouth and the idea of biting him as a defense was almost enough to undo her.
Her fingers scrambled against his where they were locked at the front of her before she reached out for his other hand. Red light danced frantically from her hand as she strove to break something, anything, on him if he would only just let go ...
The 'creature' simply reached up and grabbed her hand. Before the blast could take place, he twisted it around, audibly breaking several fingers with a sharp snap. He wrenched it further, rotating her wrist against itself, and making the bones groan until they finally cracked. He pulled his face back, his blood a mask on Wanda's face, and drove forward with his forehead, smashing into her face and breaking her cheekbone.
Wanda dropped like a stone, vomiting up the contents of her stomach as her body reacted to the pain and trauma. Her instincts were at war with each other as years of training tried to overcome the shock but she could manage was to attempt to roll away from him as the lights in the room started to violently flicker.
Emma finally managed to work her way through the last of the guards that had been concentrating their attack on the diamond woman, enjoying the fact that the confidence the Contessa had instilled in them had drawn them to her even as her seriously unconventional tactics had stopped the sonic batons from being effective against her.
Dropping into flesh form for a moment, Emma reached out with her mind, struck at the mind behind the quite frankly hideous mask that confronted her. Her telepathic probe was swift and hard but it skidded across some very well-constructed shields. This Red Skull had been well-trained over, she could feel it, an unnaturally long lifespan, a weight of memory far beyond the usual. What little of her probe struck through the shields revealed hints of a mind so vilely perverse that even Emma was impressed.
"Tell me," Emma said, as she reverted back to diamond form and stalked forwards towards the man who had broken her Knight, "have you ever considered joining the Hellfire Club? I think you'd fit right in."
As the Contessa crouched behind the pillar, there was another soft shushing noise behind her, and one of the Red Skull’s secret panels opened up. A young woman stepped through, wearing an unadorned grey uniform not much different than the Red Skull’s. She stepped forward quickly, taking cover next to Fontaine and drawing her weapon.
“They have the advantage on my father.” She said, brushing a strand of red hair from her eyes. “Is there anyone else, Valentina?” There was no love lost between them. Synthia Schmidt had been an experiment for the late Baron; a way to bond his family’s DNA with Schmidt’s, by creating a genetically perfect daughter to impregnate, and intermingle his genes with his idol’s.
However, when Strucker was believed killed, she had been pushed aside; a twelve year old afterthought of little worth.
The Contessa looked up from her bloodied hand, glancing over the younger woman with as much of an impassive look as she could give when not incredibly irritated with what the Stronza did to her. The sight of the young one didn't help her mood any but at least she could perhaps help with an escape.
"Three so far, but there are others. I do not know where they are. We must leave soon," she said, taking a step forward to get a better look around the column.
"Not we." Synthia pressed the muzzle of the gun behind Valentina's left ear and fired a single shot. La Countess jerked with the impact of the bullet, and slid sightlessly down the pillar to the floor, dead. Synthia stepped out from the pillar, and three shots drove Emma back from her advance and into her diamond form in the face of the young woman's accuracy.
She scooped up one of the sonic batons, and snapped the head open. With a twist of her fingers, the regulator inside was broken, and the baton went into overload, pushing out a punishing drumbeat of sonic waves, strong enough to make Emma's diamond form creak dangerously the closer she tried to get. Fortunately, the young woman did not press her attack, instead coming over to the Red Skull.
"Father, this place is lost. We need to retreat."
"I will not. In the face of these worms?"
"They are not alone, and there is nothing to be gained defending ourselves here." Her voice was unnaturally calm, and after a moment, he nodded. Both of them walked over to the wall, and she touched it to reveal another hidden door. As they slipped through, the Red Skull gave them one last bloody glare.
"This is very far from over."
The base layout had been clear – there was a main server area that housed most of the data, and a generator that was designed as a UPS for the laboratory areas. When studying the plans, it had become clear that the system had a fault. Power loss would immediately kick in the generator, but the systems had been configured poorly to shut down with limited power. If the generator too went down, several experiments would suffer immediate power loss in their containment systems. They couldn’t blow the base up, but they could render it completely contaminated and structurally decaying before they left.
There had been a few guards, easily and quietly dealt with, before slipping into the server area.
Doug slipped along on quiet feet ahead of Emma and Wanda, the telescoping riot baton he favored for hand-to-hand out and low to one side. Gunfire, even suppressed, would draw too much attention, attention they'd rather avoid completely if they could. He moved to a monitor panel for the generator, tapping a few keys and verifying that the layout matched the information that SYN had provided. He nodded to Wanda, who was the natural go-to for this sort of thing, as her chaos powers could wreak untold havoc that few of X-Force, if any, could match.
Moving up behind him, Wanda grunted softly. "This might take a few minutes," she said, looking incredibly unhappy. The system was old and not as complicated as newer ones but it was also an old building as well. The last thing she wanted was to accidentally bring the roof caving down on them - which, according to what she was seeing, was a possibility.
She glanced over at Emma and Doug. "Just a few," Wanda promised, turning back so she could study the lines of chaos.
#I would suggest you work quite quickly,# said Emma, staying back in the shadows. #We are about to be interrupted. Quite rudely.#
Bullets ricocheted off the panels by Doug's head, and a woman stepped out of the shadows: Fontaine. She hefted the pistol with the ease of long practice, and behind her, guards began to swarm in. Most alarmingly were the ones who carried batons with long blue lights running down the length, glowing lightly.
The Countess stared them down from the end of the barrel, her head lifted high. The gun appeared to flow as an extension of herself.
"Mr. Ramsey...Ms. Maximoff ...still alive I see. Surprising," she said with the faintest of smiles. She cocked her head to the side.
"You would do well to surrender. I would prefer not to get blood on my new boots. It's hard to get out, but I won't be too broken up over it if it does happen. So we can also do it the hard way. I like the hard way too. Your choice."
She'd spun away from the console and into a crouch as their opposition started to cage them in. #There's too much for me to affect here,# she sent out, #but we could try and fight our way out if we had to. Emma? The easy way or the hard way? This bitch seems far too keen to get her claws into my eyeballs at the moment...#
#As hard as you can,# responded Emma. #They’ve made plans for us. I’ve got to shift.# The telepathic words cut off abruptly as Emma shifted to diamond form and moved forward out of the shadows.
The Countess cocked her head to the side, training her gun on the telepath.
"Crystal...no...diamond skin...a defense mechanism," she said, then smiled and shrugged.
"The hard way, I take it. Good choice," she added, then nodded to her men. They charged at Emma and anyone close to her, swinging their weapons. The air seemed to hum as they approached.
The way Fontaine had grinned predatorily at Emma's reaction spoke volumes to Doug. The Contessa had clearly planned this encounter just as tidily as she had the last one. The humming of the batons said sonics to him, and he didn't like to think what might happen if any of them connected with Emma's diamond form. And after all, a Knight's duty was to protect his Queen. And closing in to melee with the guards meant that there was less likelihood of Fontaine getting a clear shot at him.
Doug flowed forward to meet the first of the guards to cross the space. He wasn't sure what exactly the sonics might do to his own baton, and so his counterstroke went for the man's wrist, shattering it. Doug caught the weapon as it dropped from fingers that could no longer grip it, and felled the man with a sharp blow to the temple before he could even draw breath to yell in pain.
The heft of the guard's weapon was much the same as his own, and he continued forward fluidly, the pair twirling in defensive rondels.
Even as Doug engaged with the guards, several moved around the melee between her Knight and the men and towards Emma. She frowned at the batons, knowing from what she'd telepathically heard before she went to diamond form that they had been specifically designed for her, but unsure of the exact mechanism. They hummed as the guards swung them and Emma was fairly certain that there was some form of sonic device. The odds were that they were designed to interact with her diamond structure in a fairly unpleasant fashion.
"No matter which way I play this," muttered Emma, "this is going to hurt."
The first guard reached her and swung the baton at her glittering diamond form. For a few seconds, Emma was able to dodge the stroke of the baton, moving rapidly around it but finally the guard managed to get in a swing that she knew she wasn't going to be able dodge. instinctively her arm swung up to block the blow and, against instinct, she dropped from diamond form back to flesh as the baton struck. She flinched as the blow rattled through her body but the pain receded as she switched back to diamond as the guard drew the baton back again.
It was going to be a very painful fight, Emma decided. What she had to do was try and get hold of one of those batons and use it to block the blows. The blows to her flesh would incapacitate her quickly and the concentration required to flicker away from diamond would sap the attention required for multiple protagonists. But she knew how confident the Contessa had felt about the effects of the batons on her diamond structure, and Emma wasn't willing to risk them connecting.
"Oh well, if this is going to hurt anyway," she murmured and waited for the guard to strike at her again. As the baton connected and she dropped back to flesh form, she also struck out with her mind. The guard had rudimentary shields, but they couldn't hold against her utterly precise strike. With an incoherent cry, the guard could not stop his hand from spasming open and dropping the baton.
With a lightning fast scoop, Emma picked up the baton and felt the low hum of the sonics through her diamond hand. "Now, gentlemen," she said, grinning, "I believe it might be time to dance."
No one ever expected Wanda to go low. Nearly six feet tall and solid to back it up, people always acted surprised when she didn't come at them from the top or tried to meet their attack head on. Which is why she ducked, hearing a baton swish inches above her as she went under the swing, because surprise was just one of the tools that could be used. She came up swinging hard and landed a chaos fueled punch right below the man's armpit. She felt more than hurt something snap as he wheezed and went down with a gurgle.
Movement from behind. Wanda reacted, grabbing the next guy by his hair and yanking him around to shield her even as her hand dipped into her jacket and flickered out as the Contessa's gun went off. She had to trust that her aim, with a little bit of chaos thrown in, was true enough to stop the other woman from getting a bead even as she dropped the wounded man to the floor.
The Contessa let out an undignified shriek, clutching her hand to her chest as the barrel of the gun exploded. Droplets of blood stained the ground as she immediately took cover behind a column to assess the damage done.
"Andate tutti a 'fanculo!" she shouted.
"Che ne dici di fare, invece?" Doug called back, his voice dripping with malice as he took on a steady stream of the Contessa's guards. His boot crushed a kneecap, and then a baton crunched into the back of his opponent's head. The next one found his overhead swing trapped in the crossed X of Doug's weapons, followed smoothly by a knee to the groin and an elbow strike across the point of the jaw to put him down.
"Swine." There was the soft sound of a panel moving behind them; a feature not included in the blueprints, and an iron-like grip clenched the back of Doug's shirt. Before he could react, he was flung with immense force into the wall, the shock knocking his weapons away. "Two Americans and a piece of Gypsy trash, nein? You befoul the air here." Standing before them was a tall, broad shouldered man in a grey SS uniform. The Nazi insignias had been replaced by a multi-headed creature. However, it was the ruined face that dominated it. Blood dripped freely from the exposed flesh and bone on his grisly visage, and his eyes were intense, mad things set deep in his ruined face. Doug was just struggling to rise when a tremendous blow smashed him back to the ground, breaking his nose. A kick was accompanied by a cracking sound on the younger man.
Doug wasn't sure whether the retching and bile crawling up his windpipe was from the rib the new combatant had shattered, or the bloody flesh of his face. "Fick dich, du arschgesicht hurensohn," he gasped out as he struggled again to his feet. "Nazis," he nearly spat. "You know what I hate most?" he continued in a mocking monotone. "That I look like I could walk off of one of your damn recruiting posters, and..."
In the middle of the sentence, without any warning from his eyes or body, he pivoted, driving his fist toward the man's belly, a small blade barely visible between his fingers.
The impossibly strong grip stopped his hand inches from his flesh like a steel trap coming down. He shifted the grip, forcing Doug's arm upwards, pronating his joints. "I am Johann Schmidt, the finest mind in the Reich and the personal scientist to the Furher. For ten years, we advanced the Aryan cause into research your mind could not even hope to comprehend. And you, a mongrel proud of his pollution, think that you can trick me-" He brought his face directly up to Doug's, drops of blood and bits of flesh spattering him. "-to best me?"
There was a popping, tearing sound as he reached down and twisted Doug's arm like a man pulling off a chicken leg, and Doug's arm exploded in pain. Another hammer-like blow drove him to the floor. "I am the Red Skull. The master of HYDRA, and you insects are nothing but filth under my feet."
There was no taunting, no mocking him in the language of the 'dirty Gypsy', as Wanda finished dealing with the men that had been getting in her way. Shaking loose the blood from her hands, she knew that Doug would have trouble fending off anymore blows after that last one. And she was terrified that the next blow might be a killing one of the Red Skull was done 'playing' with him. So she gave him a new target.
As she'd said earlier, it was hard for her to manipulate many of the strings in the area but the Red Skull was - it made her ill trying to figure the chaos out in her head when she looked at him. It was hard to explain but they were unnatural and she would need more time than she had to figure out which one was best to manipulate. Which is why she lunged in towards his back as quietly as she could, planning on something like a kidney punched fueled by a raw chaos blast - it had worked earlier.
The chaos blast slammed into the Red Skull, and the man suddenly recoiled as the traces of red energy skipped across his body. But as Wanda closed in, he straightened up, and grabbed her by the chest. The hex blast had no discernible effect, and before she could stop him, Red Skull wrenched her next to him and planted a bloody, lipless kiss on her.
The instinct to scream or yell proved part of her undoing and a giant shudder rocked Wanda as she shoved her hands against the Red Skull's chest in an attempt to get loose. The thick, overwhelming taste of blood - metallic and wet - flooded her mouth and the idea of biting him as a defense was almost enough to undo her.
Her fingers scrambled against his where they were locked at the front of her before she reached out for his other hand. Red light danced frantically from her hand as she strove to break something, anything, on him if he would only just let go ...
The 'creature' simply reached up and grabbed her hand. Before the blast could take place, he twisted it around, audibly breaking several fingers with a sharp snap. He wrenched it further, rotating her wrist against itself, and making the bones groan until they finally cracked. He pulled his face back, his blood a mask on Wanda's face, and drove forward with his forehead, smashing into her face and breaking her cheekbone.
Wanda dropped like a stone, vomiting up the contents of her stomach as her body reacted to the pain and trauma. Her instincts were at war with each other as years of training tried to overcome the shock but she could manage was to attempt to roll away from him as the lights in the room started to violently flicker.
Emma finally managed to work her way through the last of the guards that had been concentrating their attack on the diamond woman, enjoying the fact that the confidence the Contessa had instilled in them had drawn them to her even as her seriously unconventional tactics had stopped the sonic batons from being effective against her.
Dropping into flesh form for a moment, Emma reached out with her mind, struck at the mind behind the quite frankly hideous mask that confronted her. Her telepathic probe was swift and hard but it skidded across some very well-constructed shields. This Red Skull had been well-trained over, she could feel it, an unnaturally long lifespan, a weight of memory far beyond the usual. What little of her probe struck through the shields revealed hints of a mind so vilely perverse that even Emma was impressed.
"Tell me," Emma said, as she reverted back to diamond form and stalked forwards towards the man who had broken her Knight, "have you ever considered joining the Hellfire Club? I think you'd fit right in."
As the Contessa crouched behind the pillar, there was another soft shushing noise behind her, and one of the Red Skull’s secret panels opened up. A young woman stepped through, wearing an unadorned grey uniform not much different than the Red Skull’s. She stepped forward quickly, taking cover next to Fontaine and drawing her weapon.
“They have the advantage on my father.” She said, brushing a strand of red hair from her eyes. “Is there anyone else, Valentina?” There was no love lost between them. Synthia Schmidt had been an experiment for the late Baron; a way to bond his family’s DNA with Schmidt’s, by creating a genetically perfect daughter to impregnate, and intermingle his genes with his idol’s.
However, when Strucker was believed killed, she had been pushed aside; a twelve year old afterthought of little worth.
The Contessa looked up from her bloodied hand, glancing over the younger woman with as much of an impassive look as she could give when not incredibly irritated with what the Stronza did to her. The sight of the young one didn't help her mood any but at least she could perhaps help with an escape.
"Three so far, but there are others. I do not know where they are. We must leave soon," she said, taking a step forward to get a better look around the column.
"Not we." Synthia pressed the muzzle of the gun behind Valentina's left ear and fired a single shot. La Countess jerked with the impact of the bullet, and slid sightlessly down the pillar to the floor, dead. Synthia stepped out from the pillar, and three shots drove Emma back from her advance and into her diamond form in the face of the young woman's accuracy.
She scooped up one of the sonic batons, and snapped the head open. With a twist of her fingers, the regulator inside was broken, and the baton went into overload, pushing out a punishing drumbeat of sonic waves, strong enough to make Emma's diamond form creak dangerously the closer she tried to get. Fortunately, the young woman did not press her attack, instead coming over to the Red Skull.
"Father, this place is lost. We need to retreat."
"I will not. In the face of these worms?"
"They are not alone, and there is nothing to be gained defending ourselves here." Her voice was unnaturally calm, and after a moment, he nodded. Both of them walked over to the wall, and she touched it to reveal another hidden door. As they slipped through, the Red Skull gave them one last bloody glare.
"This is very far from over."
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