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xp_logsTeam 1 infiltrates the Mandarin's penthouse.
Wade straightened the cuffs on his off-the-rack suit, then checked his earwig and the various weapons he had not so inconspicuously hidden about his person. "Right," he said, nodding to the others. "Getting in probably won't be much of a problem if we look the part. It's the getting out that's gonna be interesting. Let's just make sure we stay away from the palace - it's not guarded by my brethren."
Emma leaned down and carefully wiped an almost invisible speck of dust from her Jimmy Choo pumps. “I have to say that vintage Dior tuxedos,” she said, smoothing the front of the said tuxedo back into place, “are classic, unmistakable, impeccably tailored and I can still kick a man in the chin from a standing start. I wonder how many lady spies he outfitted, back in the day.” Once her clothing was adjusted back to her own high standards she nodded at the men around her. “Get me close enough to the building to let me scan and keep any other goons off me and I should be able to see if there’s any plausible reason to get us into the building. Well, a plausible reason that isn’t, “we shot all your security and hacked into the elevator controls”. Fun as that may be, I think it should be designated Plan B.”
“Do not say that,” North demurred from where he stood beside her, remarkably clean-shaven for the first time in a long while. “It means that Plan C already involves explosives and as a rule of thumb that needs to be at least Plan H.”
"In plan M, Hardison dies," Doug muttered to himself with a smirk. Doug's suit wasn't his White Knight outfit (that might have been a bit too ostentatious for the situation), but it was a similarly bespoke set of clothes that Emma had commissioned for those nights when her Knight might need to be in formalwear, but not 'officially' so. It hung well, and covered the variety of weaponry he had on his person. "Like Wade needs an excuse to bring explosives to the party," he said in a teasing tone, cuffing the mercenary gently on the back of his head.
Grinning, Wade batted at Doug's hand and then reached into one of the pouches at the back of his belt and pulled out a little piece of C4. "Never need an excuse," he said, kneading the C4 like Play-Doh. "Anyway, the whole point of this is to not die, so let's stick with Plan A."
"And I think we have a Plan A," murmured Emma who'd been mostly ignoring the banter as she had scanned the minds in the building. "Gentlemen, if you wouldn't mind turning your backs..." Doug, North and Wade looked utterly professional as bodyguards as they turned outwards, surrounding Emma and shielding her from view, fiddling with their cuffs in classic fashion. "And done," said Emma after a few seconds of rustling. When Doug turned back, she handed him the shirt she had been wearing under the tuxedo jacket, which instead now skimmed the edges of a truly magnificent décolletage. "Hollywood tape," said Emma to Doug's raised eyebrow. "Every girl should carry it. Now," briskly back to business ,"It seems someone in this building is having my kind of party. I should be able to make them understand that I'm invited."
Shoving the C4 back into its little pouch, Wade nodded toward the high rise and said, "Tally-ho." Then he took point and led the way toward the main entrance.
The security around Hightown was incredibly tight. And that was before one took into consideration the things that they could not see. Every direction they turned in there were city militia and private security forces, bulky frames clad in sharp black suits and armed to the teeth as they patrolled the cluster of luxury buildings. North traded glances with Doug behind Emma’s back, a slight inhale and minute twitch of his brow – invisible to all but his colleague – conveying his distaste of the situation.
Doug hunched one shoulder minutely, a shrug in reply to say that, even if he didn't like it, the plan and division of personnel was a sound one. And he personally didn't have as much distaste for it all as North - he was watching Emma's back, which came rather naturally to him, and he had Wade along. He and the mercenary were on such a close wavelength in their personal lives, that he knew he could trust his friend to have his back and move easily together in a tactical sense.
The only part he didn't like was the palpable tension as the various groups sized them up. It was civilization on the surface, but only the barest sheen of it covering a morass of predatory instincts, each of them ready to pounce on even the slightest bit of perceived weakness.
As they approached the door, Doug sized up the men in their way, reading the hints of tattoos showing under collars and cuffs, and the interactions of their body language. ~Don't talk to the obvious one,~ he sent tightly to Emma. ~He's there for show. You want...him.~ His eyes zeroed in on a slim man, lurking in the shadows as he smoked a thin cigarette.
Emma nodded her thanks to Doug, accepting the advice as she concentrated on the minds far above her to glean enough information to make her story convincing. It only took her a few moments of concentration and then she stepped to the front of the group, Wade, North and Doug parting at her telepathic tap to let her be the one who faced the men who guarded the building. Where other people might have quailed in the face of the menace that the men exuded, Emma subverted it, tapping into the machismo and adding it to her own, already commanding, presence.
“Good evening, Mr Murata,” she said to the man Doug had pointed, skimming his name effortlessly out of the soup of minds. “I apologise for being late. Are Mr Sasaki’s other guests already in attendance? At least I’ll be able to make a grand entrance, if they are.”
The confusion on Murata’s face was exquisite and quickly concealed. There was nothing doormen, particularly glorified doormen with guns, hated more than being caught out not knowing something, Emma had found. “Mr Sasaki,” responded Murata, stepping forward from behind the other men to confront Emma, “did not inform me that you were among the guests.”
“The guests?” purred Emma. “Of course I’m not amongst the guests. I'm the entertainment." She stepped closer to the man and pulled her tuxedo jacket open, exposing her breasts, allowing organic diamond to ripple across them. As a display, it was as utterly dazzling as Emma had expected. "You know how much Mr Sasaki and his guests love diamonds. Can you imagine how much they paid me to see what it feels like to fuck it?"
That was not the avenue Doug was expecting Emma to take. He covered his surprise well enough - only someone who knew him well enough would have noticed the microsecond of hesitation, the most minute narrowing of the eyes and tightening of the lips. Wade would certainly have caught it, but even North might have missed it. Emma...
There was a flash, a very complex melange of thoughts and feelings, and then the mental slamming of a door. Some things were too raw. Some things Doug didn't want even the person he had the fewest secrets from seeing.
"~I hope they brought enough lube, eh?~" he leaned forward and said jovially in an extremely coarse bit of Japanese slang. One of the guards snickered almost involuntarily, as if he'd been thinking the same thing.
Murata sized them all up, then finally grunted and waved them inside. The foursome were inside the elevator before Doug let his mask drop even a bit. "Well, I suppose that puts a new spin on 'flashing' someone, Auntie Em," he murmured.
"Nobody got shot, did they?" replied Emma, blandly, then her voice sharpened. "It was the quickest way to get past the thugs at the front door. Mr Sasaki tends not to give his minions the names of the entertainment he obtains for his parties. Plausible deniability when the bodies wash up. I may have to visit Mr Sasaki at some point in the future." The lift stopped, the doors opening. "But not today." Emma led her group to the door to the fire stairs. "Our little party is going to happen three floors up. Would one of you gentlemen care to get us up there without setting off the alarms?"
“Yes, Ma’am,” North said, slipping a long piece of flat metal from the seam of his belt and crouching down in front of the security panel. He wedged it behind the frame and popped the casing off, cocking his head at the insides for a long moment before inserting a finger and loosening two wires with the digit. Carefully, he wound spidery strands of copper wire around the metal piece, ignoring the small electric zaps against his callused fingers before swiftly shoving the whole thing back in and replacing the casing. The door opened smoothly, and the only sound echoing down the stairwell was from the release of the handle. North flexed his fingers with a slight crinkle to his nose. “After you.”
Wade gave North a small smirk and salute before unholstering one of his handguns and heading through the door into the stairwell. He checked below them for possible hostiles, gave the 'all clear' signal to the others, and began moving silently up to the next floor.
Doug brought up the rear, keeping Emma between him and Wade and constantly scanning for anything that might seem out of place. "I don't like it," he muttered. "A little too empty in here. No CCTV? In a place like this?" Gift horses and all, but it didn't seem right.
They were climbing up their last flight of stairs when North’s hand darted forward to halt Wade, his gaze raised towards an empty patch of wall. “Spoke too soon, I think. There is a trap outside in the hallway.” He glanced to Emma for confirmation. “A lot of men. Overlapping fields of fire. It will take some manoeuvring.”
Emma nodded at North’s words, noting the number of people that lurked behind the door with, quite literally, murder on their mind. “Best we have someone bullet-proof in front,” she said, feeling the pressure on her telepathy melt away as her body turned into diamond. “I presume I don’t have to warn any of you gentlemen about richochets?” she murmured and then sighed with regret. “I rather like this Dior. I suspect it’s not going to survive the next few minutes.” With that, she eased her hand over the door handle and then flung the door open, following the explosive movement with her own explosion into movement. Having placed the people outside the door, she pivoted into the man closest to the door, ignoring the bullets that began to shred her clothes immediately. With diamond-enhanced strength she gripped his wrists and spun him around, placing his body between hers and the rest of the gunmen who dotted the corridor strategically. It wasn’t much cover, she decided, as the man jerked and died in her arms, but it was all that she could offer the not nearly as bullet-proof men behind her.
Wade grinned despite himself as he dove and rolled into the hallway just behind Emma. He'd take every advantage given him in this situation. Holding his guns at her sides, he peered around Emma to make sure he was actually hitting the people he wanted to hit. Once he'd made a bit of room and the men in the hall were suitably wary, he ducked and rolled to the left so Doug and North could follow them out and into the line of fire.
Just behind Wade, Doug was already rolling right, a mirror image of his friend. His mind was already calculating angles as he came up to one knee, guns up and tracking. A blank expression came over his face as his left index finger flexed and pulled a trigger back. The flashes of powder igniting, the roar of the controlled gunfire throughout the hallway, the acrid smell permeating the entire floor - none of it seemed to register on his face as he smoothly fired again and again.
“Company behind closed doors,” was North’s next warning from the partial cover of the staircase doorway, his tone even and laden with certainty that could only come from foreknowledge. He picked up the pauses in between Doug and Wade’s shots, creating a beautiful, explosive soundwave that almost covered the pained screams of men. Reloading took but a quick second. “I will take care of it. Coming through, please excuse me.”
Emma nodded at North’s suggestion as he slid out of the line of fire and kicked open the door to the nearest apartment. She was fairly certain that there was no-one in the apartments leading away from their target but best not to be surprised - North sweeping them for occupants was the best use for the precog right now. Then she shook her head angrily as a bullet spanged neatly off her diamond forehead and away. She hated it when they shot her in the face. With a snarl, Emma identified the man who had done it and stalked angrily towards him, enjoying his expression as he backed out of the doorway he’d lurked in and back down the corridor. It didn’t help him in the end: Emma may not have been carrying a gun right now, but lethal diamond fingertips were far more effective in close quarters anyway and it didn’t take more than a couple of strides before Emma managed to get in close enough to deploy them. Wiping the blood off on the tattered remains of the Dior, Emma took the opportunity to review the way the remaining gunmen were scattered around the corridor.
The death of the last man who had been shooting at her seemed to have created a momentary lull in the number of people actually shooting at Emma. She took the opportunity to drop back into organic form for a moment and drop a map into the heads of Doug and Wade, with a brightly lit question mark over the door to the apartment that she thought housed their target, trusting their pattern recognition and combat skills to confirm her suspicion. She switched back to diamond just in time to deflect a stream of bullets sent her way by an optimistic assailant who’d thought to test her transition speed.
Doug flicked his eyes over to Wade, then gestured sharply with his hands, both moving forward, one just behind the other. The meaning was clear - move in tandem down the hallway, covering each other as they went.
Wade's healing factor made him the natural trailbreaker, in case someone got lucky with a shot. Counting off timing wasn't necessary, Doug's brain was processing at high speed, like an overclocked CPU. He slipped in just behind as Wade pushed off to begin moving methodically forward.
~Colt 1911 A1 .45 caliber, 7 in the mag, one in the chamber~
Doug's eyes swept the arc in front of him, spotting movement and shooting instinctively before even truly registering it.
~four, five...~
As the eighth round fired from Wade's gun and his thumb hit the release for the magazine, Doug's hand slapped up against the merc's ribs, a fresh mag between his fingers.
The butt of Wade's Colt met the heel of Doug's palm as the new mag slid home. He raised the weapon and swung it sharply over Doug's head, taking out a man lurking in a doorway they'd just passed. He nodded as he and his friend continued moving in tandem, neatly removing the last several men from their places toward the end of the hall.
They weren't even breathing hard when they reached the door Emma had indicated with a question mark in their minds.
The silence in the building after the stuttering roar of several minutes of heavy gunfire had an almost echoing effect of its own. Doug tilted his head left and right, shaking out muscles and tendons as he and Wade reloaded weapons quickly. North ghosted up silently, and Emma completed the party. Given the question mark from Emma, it was clear to Doug that someone or something might be blocking her telepathy, giving them less of an idea of what was inside waiting for them. "Ladies first?" he mouthed with a wink at his sparkling invulnerable Queen.
Emma nodded at Doug’s invitation and reached out and gently tried turning the door handle. It resisted her hand, so she stepped back and hammered her leg forward into the hinges. Her diamond form didn’t lend her anything like Molly’s super-strength but it did provide her sufficient assistance for the hinges to shatter at the blow and the door to swing open.
The first thing that surprised Emma on entering the apartment was how large it was. North may have cleared more than a few apartments behind them, but this single apartment must have taken up more than half of the floor of the building, an open space filled with columns. And an awful lot of people who all seemed to be running towards Emma.
The second thing that surprised Emma was the ninja-clad warrior that stood just inside the door to her right, with an almost identically clad ninja on her left.
The third thing that surprised Emma was the sword of the ninja on her right coming straight at her face and passing straight through in a holographic blur of light. It was so startling that she almost reflexively switched back to flesh form to see whether there was a mind behind the form.
Emma would remain ever after grateful that years of training herself in her powers meant that she no longer reflexively reverted to her base, organic, form. Because the fourth thing that surprised Emma was the sword of the ninja on her left smacking, very hard, into the diamond at the base of her neck. There wasn't just a mind behind his form but a very solid, very well-trained body and a really quite sharp sword.
As she was still diamond, however, aside from shocking her backwards from the blow, the sword did nothing but skitter off her throat and downwards and long-honed reflex made Emma drop her arm, catch the sword between it and her body and twist around, snapping the sword across its centre. Diamond fingers clutched at the sharpened steel end that she'd snapped off and turned it back towards its owner, neatly piercing up through his throat and into his brain.
The shock of the ninja's death as he slid off his own sword seemed to stop movement in the vast room for a second, enough for Emma to look around and work out what was going on. The blur of people coming towards her, some ninja-clad with swords and (she ducked) shuriken, the majority men in black suits holding some very sophisticated guns in very poor style (or, she was willing to concede, excellent style but poor technique), resolved into a new picture.
Twins. Triplets. Quadruplets. Real. And mirrors. Holographic duplicates scattering everywhere to confuse between the person actually shooting at them and the fakes whose bullets would dissolve in light rather than hurt.
"They're real. And holographs. I need time," Emma shouted at the three men behind her, even as the first bullet spanged off her hip. "To go flesh. I can take the real minds down if I've got time."
By sheer fluke, they were the perfect team for this situation. A telepath who could identify the real from the fake. A pattern recognition specialist. A combat specialist. And a combat specialist who was also a precog. All Emma needed was time enough between bullets and sword to turn flesh and she put the real people down in one burst.
The men behind her were going to have to find her that time.
Sliding quickly into the room and moving past the fallen ninja's body, Wade holstered his handguns simultaneously, ducked to avoid a spray of bullets, and rose to throw two knives in quick succession. One passed through a hologram to land in a wall while the other lodged in another man's throat. He narrowed his eyes even as he turned to take shelter behind one of the columns. He quirked a brow at Doug when the younger man looked around the door frame, then grinned and held up another two throwing knives between his fingers.
The mercenary waggled his eyebrows, grin widening as he shifted to throw the knives at more holograms, aiming for nonlethal areas in an effort to tag the real men so North and Doug could remove them from the equation permanently.
Equations. Arcs of coverage. Lines of sight. Doug's eyes broke down the room's geometry even as his hands were moving to bring his guns around. He'd given a lot of his spare time in the office over to the question of how to best control a large space with gunfire - maximizing efficiency, minimizing vulnerability.
Every meaty sound of one of Wade's knives sinking into flesh was answered by a gunshot following just behind, dispatching the flesh-and-blood combatants as they were identified. In between, his guns traversed the room, sweeping through wide angles as he pirouetted in the space between columns.
Reality. Illusion. Rather than concentrate on each detail his eyes were seeing, Doug did his best to lose himself in his breath and heartbeat, and let instinct take over.
As the two men took front and centre, the third slid smoothly behind Emma, unabashedly taking cover behind her. North’s face had settled into his characteristic blank mask as he swept up the few men that Doug could not reach, lodging bullets in foreheads with frightening precision and efficacy. No bullet missed its mark.
As they moved deeper into the room, the precog kept one eye on his watch, the other on the situation and his mind on the flashing possibilities of two minutes into the future. The ratio of illusions to real flesh and blood was steadily decreasing.
“Nine seconds. On my count, Miss Frost,” he said, minutes into the fray, as one leg shot out to the right to dissipate an illusion with a kick to its middle. “3… 2… Now.”
He spun them both, swiftly reversing their positions as the marksman pushed Emma between himself and a pillar, his next bullet finding purchase in the left eye of an assailant that would otherwise have done the same to her.
Emma normally strongly discouraged work colleagues from touching her without her express permission (and by "strongly discouraged" meant "inserted telepathic nausea into their brain until they didn't want to touch their lunch, let alone Emma Frost"). When the work colleague was a precognitive saving her from a bullet, however, she was willing to make an exception.
As North took out yet another real person, Emma dropped from diamond into flesh. For all the moments when the others had been dissecting attacks, she had been marshalling her resources, lining up the sequence of telepathic commands that she would need. And as she dropped into flesh, she started the sequence. First, a wave, a telepathic ripple outwards that separated mind from mind, dissecting them into friend, foe and... something else. Something harder and shielded from the kind of simple attack she could manage at short notice. Then a shielding: friend, friend, friend, marked and removed from her field of attack. Then a shout, a telepathic scream designed to stimulate pain and pleasure centres both to overload (but bouncing off the shielded mind - there, in the centre of the room, lost within the flashing holograms) and when she cut the scream off, there was a series of dull thuds as the real assailants fell to the floor and the holographic twins/triplets/quadruplets dissipated into nothingness and light.
One man left, other than her three colleagues. One man in a chair in the centre of the room, director of all of the men and women who now lay dead or dying or unconscious around the room.
"Well, hello," said Emma calmly. "I presume you have what we came for. Wouldn't it be easier for everyone if you just handed over the bloodstone now? I'd even be willing to let you arrest yourself, if you think it would save time."
"I have invested a great deal of time and money into this security and now it's lying on very expensive Indonesian teak. This interference into my affairs is really starting to piss me off." The Mandarin said on his throne, fingertips pressed lightly against the side of his face. "While I am tempted to destroy you now, I have pressing concerns to be attended to, more important then this demonic trinket. However, Ms Frost, you can consider me intrigued by your offer. I've possessed many diamonds in my life, but none with your suggested pliability."
He made a casual wave of his beringed hand, and his perch suddenly erupted in a shower of doves. The swarm was countless, blinding them as they sought upwards, breaking through the skylight and into the night. Mandarin's throne was empty, gone like the birds into the night air, leaving behind the oddly pulsing Bloodstone amidst a patter of white feathers.
“Well,” said Emma, dryly, into the surprised silence. “If he really does want to try his luck, at least he’s got the good sense to start with gifting me very expensive jewellery. Gentlemen, if one of you can collect that thing, I’m going to rummage through a few apartment robes and see if I can find something to replace this” her hand gesture encompassed the Dior, which now hung in bullet-shredded tatters, “and then we should get out of here. Via the back door. Very, very quietly.”
Wade straightened the cuffs on his off-the-rack suit, then checked his earwig and the various weapons he had not so inconspicuously hidden about his person. "Right," he said, nodding to the others. "Getting in probably won't be much of a problem if we look the part. It's the getting out that's gonna be interesting. Let's just make sure we stay away from the palace - it's not guarded by my brethren."
Emma leaned down and carefully wiped an almost invisible speck of dust from her Jimmy Choo pumps. “I have to say that vintage Dior tuxedos,” she said, smoothing the front of the said tuxedo back into place, “are classic, unmistakable, impeccably tailored and I can still kick a man in the chin from a standing start. I wonder how many lady spies he outfitted, back in the day.” Once her clothing was adjusted back to her own high standards she nodded at the men around her. “Get me close enough to the building to let me scan and keep any other goons off me and I should be able to see if there’s any plausible reason to get us into the building. Well, a plausible reason that isn’t, “we shot all your security and hacked into the elevator controls”. Fun as that may be, I think it should be designated Plan B.”
“Do not say that,” North demurred from where he stood beside her, remarkably clean-shaven for the first time in a long while. “It means that Plan C already involves explosives and as a rule of thumb that needs to be at least Plan H.”
"In plan M, Hardison dies," Doug muttered to himself with a smirk. Doug's suit wasn't his White Knight outfit (that might have been a bit too ostentatious for the situation), but it was a similarly bespoke set of clothes that Emma had commissioned for those nights when her Knight might need to be in formalwear, but not 'officially' so. It hung well, and covered the variety of weaponry he had on his person. "Like Wade needs an excuse to bring explosives to the party," he said in a teasing tone, cuffing the mercenary gently on the back of his head.
Grinning, Wade batted at Doug's hand and then reached into one of the pouches at the back of his belt and pulled out a little piece of C4. "Never need an excuse," he said, kneading the C4 like Play-Doh. "Anyway, the whole point of this is to not die, so let's stick with Plan A."
"And I think we have a Plan A," murmured Emma who'd been mostly ignoring the banter as she had scanned the minds in the building. "Gentlemen, if you wouldn't mind turning your backs..." Doug, North and Wade looked utterly professional as bodyguards as they turned outwards, surrounding Emma and shielding her from view, fiddling with their cuffs in classic fashion. "And done," said Emma after a few seconds of rustling. When Doug turned back, she handed him the shirt she had been wearing under the tuxedo jacket, which instead now skimmed the edges of a truly magnificent décolletage. "Hollywood tape," said Emma to Doug's raised eyebrow. "Every girl should carry it. Now," briskly back to business ,"It seems someone in this building is having my kind of party. I should be able to make them understand that I'm invited."
Shoving the C4 back into its little pouch, Wade nodded toward the high rise and said, "Tally-ho." Then he took point and led the way toward the main entrance.
The security around Hightown was incredibly tight. And that was before one took into consideration the things that they could not see. Every direction they turned in there were city militia and private security forces, bulky frames clad in sharp black suits and armed to the teeth as they patrolled the cluster of luxury buildings. North traded glances with Doug behind Emma’s back, a slight inhale and minute twitch of his brow – invisible to all but his colleague – conveying his distaste of the situation.
Doug hunched one shoulder minutely, a shrug in reply to say that, even if he didn't like it, the plan and division of personnel was a sound one. And he personally didn't have as much distaste for it all as North - he was watching Emma's back, which came rather naturally to him, and he had Wade along. He and the mercenary were on such a close wavelength in their personal lives, that he knew he could trust his friend to have his back and move easily together in a tactical sense.
The only part he didn't like was the palpable tension as the various groups sized them up. It was civilization on the surface, but only the barest sheen of it covering a morass of predatory instincts, each of them ready to pounce on even the slightest bit of perceived weakness.
As they approached the door, Doug sized up the men in their way, reading the hints of tattoos showing under collars and cuffs, and the interactions of their body language. ~Don't talk to the obvious one,~ he sent tightly to Emma. ~He's there for show. You want...him.~ His eyes zeroed in on a slim man, lurking in the shadows as he smoked a thin cigarette.
Emma nodded her thanks to Doug, accepting the advice as she concentrated on the minds far above her to glean enough information to make her story convincing. It only took her a few moments of concentration and then she stepped to the front of the group, Wade, North and Doug parting at her telepathic tap to let her be the one who faced the men who guarded the building. Where other people might have quailed in the face of the menace that the men exuded, Emma subverted it, tapping into the machismo and adding it to her own, already commanding, presence.
“Good evening, Mr Murata,” she said to the man Doug had pointed, skimming his name effortlessly out of the soup of minds. “I apologise for being late. Are Mr Sasaki’s other guests already in attendance? At least I’ll be able to make a grand entrance, if they are.”
The confusion on Murata’s face was exquisite and quickly concealed. There was nothing doormen, particularly glorified doormen with guns, hated more than being caught out not knowing something, Emma had found. “Mr Sasaki,” responded Murata, stepping forward from behind the other men to confront Emma, “did not inform me that you were among the guests.”
“The guests?” purred Emma. “Of course I’m not amongst the guests. I'm the entertainment." She stepped closer to the man and pulled her tuxedo jacket open, exposing her breasts, allowing organic diamond to ripple across them. As a display, it was as utterly dazzling as Emma had expected. "You know how much Mr Sasaki and his guests love diamonds. Can you imagine how much they paid me to see what it feels like to fuck it?"
That was not the avenue Doug was expecting Emma to take. He covered his surprise well enough - only someone who knew him well enough would have noticed the microsecond of hesitation, the most minute narrowing of the eyes and tightening of the lips. Wade would certainly have caught it, but even North might have missed it. Emma...
There was a flash, a very complex melange of thoughts and feelings, and then the mental slamming of a door. Some things were too raw. Some things Doug didn't want even the person he had the fewest secrets from seeing.
"~I hope they brought enough lube, eh?~" he leaned forward and said jovially in an extremely coarse bit of Japanese slang. One of the guards snickered almost involuntarily, as if he'd been thinking the same thing.
Murata sized them all up, then finally grunted and waved them inside. The foursome were inside the elevator before Doug let his mask drop even a bit. "Well, I suppose that puts a new spin on 'flashing' someone, Auntie Em," he murmured.
"Nobody got shot, did they?" replied Emma, blandly, then her voice sharpened. "It was the quickest way to get past the thugs at the front door. Mr Sasaki tends not to give his minions the names of the entertainment he obtains for his parties. Plausible deniability when the bodies wash up. I may have to visit Mr Sasaki at some point in the future." The lift stopped, the doors opening. "But not today." Emma led her group to the door to the fire stairs. "Our little party is going to happen three floors up. Would one of you gentlemen care to get us up there without setting off the alarms?"
“Yes, Ma’am,” North said, slipping a long piece of flat metal from the seam of his belt and crouching down in front of the security panel. He wedged it behind the frame and popped the casing off, cocking his head at the insides for a long moment before inserting a finger and loosening two wires with the digit. Carefully, he wound spidery strands of copper wire around the metal piece, ignoring the small electric zaps against his callused fingers before swiftly shoving the whole thing back in and replacing the casing. The door opened smoothly, and the only sound echoing down the stairwell was from the release of the handle. North flexed his fingers with a slight crinkle to his nose. “After you.”
Wade gave North a small smirk and salute before unholstering one of his handguns and heading through the door into the stairwell. He checked below them for possible hostiles, gave the 'all clear' signal to the others, and began moving silently up to the next floor.
Doug brought up the rear, keeping Emma between him and Wade and constantly scanning for anything that might seem out of place. "I don't like it," he muttered. "A little too empty in here. No CCTV? In a place like this?" Gift horses and all, but it didn't seem right.
They were climbing up their last flight of stairs when North’s hand darted forward to halt Wade, his gaze raised towards an empty patch of wall. “Spoke too soon, I think. There is a trap outside in the hallway.” He glanced to Emma for confirmation. “A lot of men. Overlapping fields of fire. It will take some manoeuvring.”
Emma nodded at North’s words, noting the number of people that lurked behind the door with, quite literally, murder on their mind. “Best we have someone bullet-proof in front,” she said, feeling the pressure on her telepathy melt away as her body turned into diamond. “I presume I don’t have to warn any of you gentlemen about richochets?” she murmured and then sighed with regret. “I rather like this Dior. I suspect it’s not going to survive the next few minutes.” With that, she eased her hand over the door handle and then flung the door open, following the explosive movement with her own explosion into movement. Having placed the people outside the door, she pivoted into the man closest to the door, ignoring the bullets that began to shred her clothes immediately. With diamond-enhanced strength she gripped his wrists and spun him around, placing his body between hers and the rest of the gunmen who dotted the corridor strategically. It wasn’t much cover, she decided, as the man jerked and died in her arms, but it was all that she could offer the not nearly as bullet-proof men behind her.
Wade grinned despite himself as he dove and rolled into the hallway just behind Emma. He'd take every advantage given him in this situation. Holding his guns at her sides, he peered around Emma to make sure he was actually hitting the people he wanted to hit. Once he'd made a bit of room and the men in the hall were suitably wary, he ducked and rolled to the left so Doug and North could follow them out and into the line of fire.
Just behind Wade, Doug was already rolling right, a mirror image of his friend. His mind was already calculating angles as he came up to one knee, guns up and tracking. A blank expression came over his face as his left index finger flexed and pulled a trigger back. The flashes of powder igniting, the roar of the controlled gunfire throughout the hallway, the acrid smell permeating the entire floor - none of it seemed to register on his face as he smoothly fired again and again.
“Company behind closed doors,” was North’s next warning from the partial cover of the staircase doorway, his tone even and laden with certainty that could only come from foreknowledge. He picked up the pauses in between Doug and Wade’s shots, creating a beautiful, explosive soundwave that almost covered the pained screams of men. Reloading took but a quick second. “I will take care of it. Coming through, please excuse me.”
Emma nodded at North’s suggestion as he slid out of the line of fire and kicked open the door to the nearest apartment. She was fairly certain that there was no-one in the apartments leading away from their target but best not to be surprised - North sweeping them for occupants was the best use for the precog right now. Then she shook her head angrily as a bullet spanged neatly off her diamond forehead and away. She hated it when they shot her in the face. With a snarl, Emma identified the man who had done it and stalked angrily towards him, enjoying his expression as he backed out of the doorway he’d lurked in and back down the corridor. It didn’t help him in the end: Emma may not have been carrying a gun right now, but lethal diamond fingertips were far more effective in close quarters anyway and it didn’t take more than a couple of strides before Emma managed to get in close enough to deploy them. Wiping the blood off on the tattered remains of the Dior, Emma took the opportunity to review the way the remaining gunmen were scattered around the corridor.
The death of the last man who had been shooting at her seemed to have created a momentary lull in the number of people actually shooting at Emma. She took the opportunity to drop back into organic form for a moment and drop a map into the heads of Doug and Wade, with a brightly lit question mark over the door to the apartment that she thought housed their target, trusting their pattern recognition and combat skills to confirm her suspicion. She switched back to diamond just in time to deflect a stream of bullets sent her way by an optimistic assailant who’d thought to test her transition speed.
Doug flicked his eyes over to Wade, then gestured sharply with his hands, both moving forward, one just behind the other. The meaning was clear - move in tandem down the hallway, covering each other as they went.
Wade's healing factor made him the natural trailbreaker, in case someone got lucky with a shot. Counting off timing wasn't necessary, Doug's brain was processing at high speed, like an overclocked CPU. He slipped in just behind as Wade pushed off to begin moving methodically forward.
~Colt 1911 A1 .45 caliber, 7 in the mag, one in the chamber~
Doug's eyes swept the arc in front of him, spotting movement and shooting instinctively before even truly registering it.
~four, five...~
As the eighth round fired from Wade's gun and his thumb hit the release for the magazine, Doug's hand slapped up against the merc's ribs, a fresh mag between his fingers.
The butt of Wade's Colt met the heel of Doug's palm as the new mag slid home. He raised the weapon and swung it sharply over Doug's head, taking out a man lurking in a doorway they'd just passed. He nodded as he and his friend continued moving in tandem, neatly removing the last several men from their places toward the end of the hall.
They weren't even breathing hard when they reached the door Emma had indicated with a question mark in their minds.
The silence in the building after the stuttering roar of several minutes of heavy gunfire had an almost echoing effect of its own. Doug tilted his head left and right, shaking out muscles and tendons as he and Wade reloaded weapons quickly. North ghosted up silently, and Emma completed the party. Given the question mark from Emma, it was clear to Doug that someone or something might be blocking her telepathy, giving them less of an idea of what was inside waiting for them. "Ladies first?" he mouthed with a wink at his sparkling invulnerable Queen.
Emma nodded at Doug’s invitation and reached out and gently tried turning the door handle. It resisted her hand, so she stepped back and hammered her leg forward into the hinges. Her diamond form didn’t lend her anything like Molly’s super-strength but it did provide her sufficient assistance for the hinges to shatter at the blow and the door to swing open.
The first thing that surprised Emma on entering the apartment was how large it was. North may have cleared more than a few apartments behind them, but this single apartment must have taken up more than half of the floor of the building, an open space filled with columns. And an awful lot of people who all seemed to be running towards Emma.
The second thing that surprised Emma was the ninja-clad warrior that stood just inside the door to her right, with an almost identically clad ninja on her left.
The third thing that surprised Emma was the sword of the ninja on her right coming straight at her face and passing straight through in a holographic blur of light. It was so startling that she almost reflexively switched back to flesh form to see whether there was a mind behind the form.
Emma would remain ever after grateful that years of training herself in her powers meant that she no longer reflexively reverted to her base, organic, form. Because the fourth thing that surprised Emma was the sword of the ninja on her left smacking, very hard, into the diamond at the base of her neck. There wasn't just a mind behind his form but a very solid, very well-trained body and a really quite sharp sword.
As she was still diamond, however, aside from shocking her backwards from the blow, the sword did nothing but skitter off her throat and downwards and long-honed reflex made Emma drop her arm, catch the sword between it and her body and twist around, snapping the sword across its centre. Diamond fingers clutched at the sharpened steel end that she'd snapped off and turned it back towards its owner, neatly piercing up through his throat and into his brain.
The shock of the ninja's death as he slid off his own sword seemed to stop movement in the vast room for a second, enough for Emma to look around and work out what was going on. The blur of people coming towards her, some ninja-clad with swords and (she ducked) shuriken, the majority men in black suits holding some very sophisticated guns in very poor style (or, she was willing to concede, excellent style but poor technique), resolved into a new picture.
Twins. Triplets. Quadruplets. Real. And mirrors. Holographic duplicates scattering everywhere to confuse between the person actually shooting at them and the fakes whose bullets would dissolve in light rather than hurt.
"They're real. And holographs. I need time," Emma shouted at the three men behind her, even as the first bullet spanged off her hip. "To go flesh. I can take the real minds down if I've got time."
By sheer fluke, they were the perfect team for this situation. A telepath who could identify the real from the fake. A pattern recognition specialist. A combat specialist. And a combat specialist who was also a precog. All Emma needed was time enough between bullets and sword to turn flesh and she put the real people down in one burst.
The men behind her were going to have to find her that time.
Sliding quickly into the room and moving past the fallen ninja's body, Wade holstered his handguns simultaneously, ducked to avoid a spray of bullets, and rose to throw two knives in quick succession. One passed through a hologram to land in a wall while the other lodged in another man's throat. He narrowed his eyes even as he turned to take shelter behind one of the columns. He quirked a brow at Doug when the younger man looked around the door frame, then grinned and held up another two throwing knives between his fingers.
The mercenary waggled his eyebrows, grin widening as he shifted to throw the knives at more holograms, aiming for nonlethal areas in an effort to tag the real men so North and Doug could remove them from the equation permanently.
Equations. Arcs of coverage. Lines of sight. Doug's eyes broke down the room's geometry even as his hands were moving to bring his guns around. He'd given a lot of his spare time in the office over to the question of how to best control a large space with gunfire - maximizing efficiency, minimizing vulnerability.
Every meaty sound of one of Wade's knives sinking into flesh was answered by a gunshot following just behind, dispatching the flesh-and-blood combatants as they were identified. In between, his guns traversed the room, sweeping through wide angles as he pirouetted in the space between columns.
Reality. Illusion. Rather than concentrate on each detail his eyes were seeing, Doug did his best to lose himself in his breath and heartbeat, and let instinct take over.
As the two men took front and centre, the third slid smoothly behind Emma, unabashedly taking cover behind her. North’s face had settled into his characteristic blank mask as he swept up the few men that Doug could not reach, lodging bullets in foreheads with frightening precision and efficacy. No bullet missed its mark.
As they moved deeper into the room, the precog kept one eye on his watch, the other on the situation and his mind on the flashing possibilities of two minutes into the future. The ratio of illusions to real flesh and blood was steadily decreasing.
“Nine seconds. On my count, Miss Frost,” he said, minutes into the fray, as one leg shot out to the right to dissipate an illusion with a kick to its middle. “3… 2… Now.”
He spun them both, swiftly reversing their positions as the marksman pushed Emma between himself and a pillar, his next bullet finding purchase in the left eye of an assailant that would otherwise have done the same to her.
Emma normally strongly discouraged work colleagues from touching her without her express permission (and by "strongly discouraged" meant "inserted telepathic nausea into their brain until they didn't want to touch their lunch, let alone Emma Frost"). When the work colleague was a precognitive saving her from a bullet, however, she was willing to make an exception.
As North took out yet another real person, Emma dropped from diamond into flesh. For all the moments when the others had been dissecting attacks, she had been marshalling her resources, lining up the sequence of telepathic commands that she would need. And as she dropped into flesh, she started the sequence. First, a wave, a telepathic ripple outwards that separated mind from mind, dissecting them into friend, foe and... something else. Something harder and shielded from the kind of simple attack she could manage at short notice. Then a shielding: friend, friend, friend, marked and removed from her field of attack. Then a shout, a telepathic scream designed to stimulate pain and pleasure centres both to overload (but bouncing off the shielded mind - there, in the centre of the room, lost within the flashing holograms) and when she cut the scream off, there was a series of dull thuds as the real assailants fell to the floor and the holographic twins/triplets/quadruplets dissipated into nothingness and light.
One man left, other than her three colleagues. One man in a chair in the centre of the room, director of all of the men and women who now lay dead or dying or unconscious around the room.
"Well, hello," said Emma calmly. "I presume you have what we came for. Wouldn't it be easier for everyone if you just handed over the bloodstone now? I'd even be willing to let you arrest yourself, if you think it would save time."
"I have invested a great deal of time and money into this security and now it's lying on very expensive Indonesian teak. This interference into my affairs is really starting to piss me off." The Mandarin said on his throne, fingertips pressed lightly against the side of his face. "While I am tempted to destroy you now, I have pressing concerns to be attended to, more important then this demonic trinket. However, Ms Frost, you can consider me intrigued by your offer. I've possessed many diamonds in my life, but none with your suggested pliability."
He made a casual wave of his beringed hand, and his perch suddenly erupted in a shower of doves. The swarm was countless, blinding them as they sought upwards, breaking through the skylight and into the night. Mandarin's throne was empty, gone like the birds into the night air, leaving behind the oddly pulsing Bloodstone amidst a patter of white feathers.
“Well,” said Emma, dryly, into the surprised silence. “If he really does want to try his luck, at least he’s got the good sense to start with gifting me very expensive jewellery. Gentlemen, if one of you can collect that thing, I’m going to rummage through a few apartment robes and see if I can find something to replace this” her hand gesture encompassed the Dior, which now hung in bullet-shredded tatters, “and then we should get out of here. Via the back door. Very, very quietly.”
