"Look out Tucker!"

As a veteran of many ghost battles, Tucker had enough experience to know that when someone shouts 'look out,' actually looking is a bad idea. Dodging and ducking is a better one. So when Sam yelled at him, the techno-geek flattened himself against the harsh metal of a dumpster to get away from where he'd been standing.

He'd barely moved when Skulker's deadly knife sliced his throat as it whipped past at blinding speed.

Blood sprayed in the night and for just one second Sam's heart stopped. A massive sabertoothed cat crept softly behind her.

"Just a scratch." Tucker yelled, pulling his hand away and wiping off the blood. More welled up in its place but not the gush of a nicked artery. Sam felt her heart start again.

"Crazy idiot!" Sam turned away from him just in time to nail the pouncing prehistoric ghost with a Fenton Thermos. She switched to an ecto-gun, this weapon aimed at the ghost hunter who brought them all here.

Skulker dodged the hail of ecto-fire from Sam only for the halfa to blindside him. Not a quib came from the ghost boy, his green eyes blazed with the same deadly intent as his hands. Skulker tried to dodge but Phantom was faster. One glowing fist punched through the ghost hunter's arm.

"What is with you Ghost Child? Agh!" A rain of scrap metal fell to the roof of a nearby apartment complex as Danny blew the arm off. Skulker could only gape at his right shoulder, not even a stump left of the limb. Never had the halfa attacked with such viciousness.

"Very well, you have bested the ghost zone's greatest hunter but only for now." Danny's ectoblast destroyed the other arm and poisonous green eyes focused on his head. This was not the sort of focus Skulker was used to seeing from the normally wise-cracking halfa. The look in his eyes was akin to a maddened cape buffalo whose herd had been threatened, filled with unstoppable, protective rage. All that wrath focused wholly on the hunter.

"I surrender!" Skulker screamed frantically. An ectoplasmic sphere of flickering green flame loomed before his bulging eyes.

A tiny blob shot away from the battlefield and into the hazy darkness, ejected from his body suit just in time. Below the real Skulker's feet, the ghost-child's ecto-blast slammed into the suit's head at point-blank range. When the debris cleared nothing remained atop the shoulders. The headless robot crashed into the unforgiving asphalt of the alleyway's maw, sprawled like a corpse and Skulker shuddered as though someone had walked over his grave. Then the halfa turned that terrible, deadly glare upward.

Had the ghostly hunter still been alive, that solid, unbroken venomous-green gaze would have slain him as surely as the Basilisk's gaze of legend. When the Fenton thermos's characteristic blue-white beam engulfed his vision and then him, Skulker actually relaxed for once. He hadn't thought the ghost child would be of a presence of mind to grant such mercy.

"Got him," Tucker said, capping the thermos. "Dude, it's okay, I think we got them all." Sam had just finished sucking in the last mammoth.

"Are you okay," asked Danny, eyes on Tucker's throat wound.

"Oh, is that what all that was about? It's fine, just a scratch like I said. Anyway I got Skulker and between the three of us we got all his escaped prey. Looks like we're finished here."

"We should release the escaped ones back into the ghost zone," said Sam. "It wasn't like they were doing anything wrong, just trying to get away from Skulker. Keeping him in there for a while wouldn't be a bad idea though." Sam glared darkly at Tucker's thermos. "Just to make certain he can't hunt down all these ghosts again."

"Yeah," Danny said harshly, eyeing the thermos in Tucker's hand. "Good idea. Sam I think you need to stitch this up since Tucker can't do it himself right now."

"It's just a flesh wound," Tucker teased with a British accent.

"Hardy har black knight. I remember a few months ago when you got a scrape like that," Sam said a little too lightly. "You freaked like Paulina when she was shoved face-first down that mud-hill."

"It was blood…" Tucker trailed off.

"And that isn't?" Danny said ironically. "Sam, where's the med-kit?"

"Tucker has it in his scooter. You know, you should learn a thing or two about medical stuff too, just in case."

"Yeah, I suppose. Wouldn't want to have to rely on my medical skills right now."

"Tucker the medical expert, who is right here, also says this is not an alleyway-worthy emergency. I promise to hold off on bleeding to death until we get home," Tucker joked.

Danny chuckled weakly, "Good to hear Tuck."

Sam shot him a 'not funny' glance. Tucker cleared his throat awkwardly. "I'll be glad to teach anyone the fine art of thread and needle anywhere other than a dark, dirty alley."

"Fine, Sam is your house clear? You said something about your folks going to that country club party."

"Not now, it's well past midnight. My early bird parents are probably fast asleep…but my grandma might not be, she went to that poker night and could come back any moment. With our luck she'd come back the same time we did."

"Yeah and she barely bought our last excuse. Okay, we'll head over to my house. My parents locked themselves in the observatory with a new invention just before I left. We can bandage that in my room before I drop everyone off."

Tucker nodded, "Sounds like a plan to me, but let's hurry it up. We have that big gym event to train for in the morning, right?"

"Later this morning. The presidential fitness test," Sam added.

"Ugh, don't remind me," Danny grumbled good-naturedly. He picked both of them and hauled the scooter awkwardly on his back before flying to Fentonworks. "That is going to suck all kinds of hell."

Tbc…

A/N: Inspired by Bluemoonalto's "Living Larger" and Firefury's episode re-write challenge I decided to tackle Micro-Management. Hardly my least-favorite episode, but I like to think Micro-Management had potential for some interesting character development. So this story is what could have been and what I wanted to see. Hopefully my re-write is at least a little better than the original. It also ties very subtly in with my other story, "Heroic Build," and takes place just before chapter 3: Gain.

Enjoy!