Amaranthine

CHAPTER 37

Lira had been in the dispatch booth when the comms went down and the power went out. Unlike her immensely powerful friends, she felt the icy sting of fear enter her heart, and hated herself for it.

Bill was freaking out.

That made sense, a pushpin salesman come calling to AEGIS would conceivably be a lethal event for him, much less whatever was causing this. The two had gone back and forth on what to do.

“We need to get out of here!” Bill pleaded, “figure out what’s going on!”

“Bill, buddy, sharp corners are a legitimate risk to your life and you want to go outside, potentially into an attack, to….. what?” Lira asked.

The bubbleman didn’t have human expressions, but Lira had gotten excellent at reading his body language after years of training sessions. He was losing it.

She opened her mouth to reason with him further when the first gunshots rang out inside the Pantheon. Lira froze, but only for an instant.

“Under the dispatch booth, now!” she ordered, and Bill scrambled to comply, letting out a pitiful squeal of pain as he lost a bubble to a protruding screw.

Told you man, Lira thought, wincing and taking up a position next to the door.

Okay, think, what would Elizabeth do? She pictured the raven haired beauty doing a dance of death through any intruders, single handedly holding off the attack.

Fuck, can’t do that. Cait? Her mind conjured images of the heroic blonde charging the enemy, both drawing and ignoring their fire, reaping a heavy toll before inevitably getting trapped, but having caused enough chaos her friends could clean up the rest.

Lira summoned her knife and glared at it.

I felt so much better when Gwyn gave me this.But I’m just a hot chick with a pig sticker.

A heavy booted foot fell outside the door, and she held back a whimper. She wracked her brain, trying to figure out if she’d learned anything when she’d helped out with close combat classes. A heavy impact shook the door, and Lira braced herself. A second, and the door burst inward.

With a calm she didn’t feel, she drove her knife forward, into the neck of a man dressed head to toe in tactical gear. He glared at her as he gurgled, dropped to his knees, and died. A surge of accomplishment buoyed her, until the sound of a weapon being chambered (and the already chambered round falling to the floor), made her freeze. She dropped the knife, raising her hands.

“Altered?” asked a weird voice, like a hundred of the same voice layered on top of one another, just out of phase with each other.

“Y-yes,” Lira said, feeling tears trying to break out of her eyes, but not letting them. She would not die crying. At the very least she’d leave a pretty corpse, maybe Cait could buy a heater.

“On your knees,” the weird voice commanded. Lira complied, shaking. “What can you do?”

“Tooltips, like in a videogame,” Lira stammered, barely able to get the words out.

“Hrm… might be impressive enough,” Lira heard the click of a radio. “Got a info pump restrained in the dispatch studio, catch or release?”

He never heard the response.

The thing about being a bubbleman, was that you had almost no mass. With no weight, Bill could move almost entirely silently. So, with the invader turned and his attention on Lira, Bill was able to get right up next to him, encasing his head in one bubble-hand. As he pulled his arm back, the bubble remained, for an instant. Then it imploded, crushing the man’s head to nothing as it did.

“Holy SHIT Bill, you could do that the whole time!?” Lira gasped, still shaking from the experience.

“I mean, yeah,” Bill responded, the quaking fear sounding strange in his resonant voice. “but I’m still made of bubbles. Not exactly like there’s a lot of chances to use it before…. Pop.”

“How did you even find out!?”

Bill managed to look crestfallen.

“Hamster,” he answered, no more explanation needed. No hamster had ever died a normal death. “Poor Beef.”

Lira just nodded, before her mind caught up with the situation.

“Fuck! He said he had me here!” she hissed. “We really do gotta move now, there’ll be more coming!”

“No, there won’t.”

Director Swan may not have been dressed in the iconic militarized tutu of the Black Swan, but the tight black bodysuit, plate carrier, and array of weapons, she wore made it clear she was not acting as an administrator tonight. The red-runed blade she held in her hand dripped blood, but as Lira stared she swore some was being absorbed into the blade. She looked up to the Director’s face, seeing a comforting smile there, but eyes as hard as Cait.

“You two stay put,” she ordered. “I’ve cleared the building, and we’ll have those comms up eventually. We’ll need people to coordinate. Right now, I have some motherfuckers to speak with.”

She flicked the blood off her sword, much less than had been there when she entered, and sprinted off towards the building’s entrance.

Lira whistled, long and low.

“I would not want to be those guys right now.”