AN

Welp, looks like I have some things to explain. First and foremost, sorry this took so long to get out, taking an entire week to write a chapter is damn near unacceptable for me. That fact is made even worse because I haven't even started chapter nine yet. I have only one excuse:

Xcom. It's a turn-based strategy game and it's eating my life. I tell myself every time I boot up steam, I'm only gon a do one operation and then I'll start writing, and yet, one op turns to three, and three to five, and I can't stop. It's so freaking addicting, I just can't even bring myself to stop.

I'm not even going through Writers block. When I actually stop and put myself in front of the word processor, I can puke out paragraphs with little resistance, but then I get this little itch, and I have to go back to shooting aliens and I just-

Ahem. Excuse me. This is my insurance chapter, and I'm just gonna let you read it now.


The Command Center's twin doors parted with a rusty screech of metal, and Takeru limped his way into the room. Darkness was the first thing his senses registered, followed by the permeating odor of spilled blood. He panicked at first, thinking that he'd been too slow in getting here, that his partner had died because he hadn't been quick enough on his feet, but then he heard a voice. It was weak and feathery, far too light for him to hear over the auto-doors, but in time, he trained his eyes on it's source.

He saw her in the corner of the room, slumped against a dark gray block of machinery and electronics. Her body was collapsed, her breathing shallow, and with eyes only barely open, she watched as he ran into the room.

"Hey, hey, Kurosawa." Takeru whispered frantically as he crouched beside her blood-spattered body, ignoring the intense pain that flared up in his leg. His first instinct was to ask, 'are you going to be okay?', but he quickly cast the thought aside.

"You're gonna be alright. I can fix this." He told her.

"...How?" She croaked hoarsely, her voice was hopeless and forlorn. And weak, too, brought down not only from blood loss but also by her own crushed morale.

This doesn't look good. She's bleeding pretty slowly right now, but all that tells me is that she's gone way too long without a bandage. Takeru thought analytically. Nothing I can do except apply a tourniquet, and maybe... There was the slightest bit of hesitation in his inner voice. Give her my blood?

"Shirogane...san?" She breathed again, this time much weaker.

"I can save you, Kurosawa. Don't worry."

Takeru got to work immediately, pulling from his side the leather satchel he'd pilfered not long ago. He gripped both the straps tightly, grateful to see that they didn't yield to his grasp easily, and pulled with as much strength as his flagging body could manage. For several moments, they held steady, but as he redoubled his strength and lowered his grip, they began to split off.

Finally, with sound akin to tearing fabric, the straps broke free and Takeru began to wrap them as tightly as he could around the girl's injuries.

"Talk to me. I don't care what you say, but you need to stay conscious." He told her with all the confidence and compassion of a trained doctor.

"I... I don't know what to say..."

"Doesn't matter." Takeru told her bluntly. "Tell me about your family, about yourself, hell, tell me about your favorite brand of ice cream. Just talk, dammit."

Kurosawa's lips creased weakly into an expression that could have vaguely been called a smile. "I like vanilla."

He smiled down at her. "It's a good flavor. What else do you like?"

"Mystery novels. The ones that have the British guy in them, and his sidekick, and... and all that. Those are my favorite." She told him in the wavering voice of a person on the precipice of death. "And I like cats, but they don't like me back. I always get scratched whenever I try to pet one."

Takeru nodded appreciatively as he tied the leather strap down as tightly as he could. The bleeding was stopped, at least temporarily, but the fact remained that she'd still lost far too much of it to be able to weather the subsequent shock. There was a solution in the fact that he had O+ Type blood, making him a universal donor, but without access to sterilized equipment he might as well just kill her outright to spare her the infection.

But right now, he just had to make sure she didn't pass out on him. If she went under now, there was no telling if he'd be able to revive her at all.

"You're doing good so far, Kurosawa. Keep talking to me. Stay awake."

She swallowed dryly. "Have you ever had a pet before, Shirogane-san?" She asked politely.

First, he thought of Tamase, but she'd been everyone else's 'pet' as much as his. "No, can't say I have. I've never really thought about it, either."

"Oh." She said simply. "That's a shame. I've never had one either."

"Because animals don't like you?" He asked absently as he rooted through his tattered leather satchel.

The girl nodded. "Yeah. I don't know why, either. I mean, aren't I cute enough? Aren't I nice enough? Am I not good enough?"

Takeru laughed gently. "That's not really something you ask a guy, you know. Not in this situation, anyway."

It took a few seconds for the words to register. "A-ah..." She made a noise of embarrassment. There wasn't a blush on her cheeks, however; she'd lost far too much blood to muster that much. "I-it sounds like I just-"

"Mhm." He hummed in agreement as he emptied out the infuriatingly useless satchel's contents.

Nothing but ammunition and grenades in here. Not one fucking bandage in sight!

"You don't care?" She asked in a tiny voice. "You're not... embarrassed?"

"Why would I be? It was an accident." He gave her a once-over with his eyes. "And I don't really think this is the kinda situation where I should be stuttering and blushing, seeing as how you've lost a leg and are getting your blood all over my uniform."

"O-oh, I'm sorry about that." She apologized.

Takeru raised an eyebrow. "Now isn't that strange. In case you forgot, you're the one whose injured. What the hell are you apologizing for?"

"But I got your clothes dirty-"

He sighed in exasperation. "You know, if you weren't literally two steps from death's door, I would slap you right now. Do you honestly think I give a damn about a little bit of blood?"

"No?" She offered hesitantly.

"Exactly." An idea struck him a moment later. He took the satchel and ripped off the leather covering with a knife and pulled out several threads of tough, unidentifiable fabric from underneath.

Leather wrapping was, by and large, a shitty substitute for a gauze roll. However, given his surroundings, Takeru was hard-pressed to find anything else that wasn't blood-soaked, covered in dust, or totally destroyed.

"Alright, Kurosawa, looks like I managed to make something to stop the blood flow. I still have to put it on, though, so you'll need to follow my instructions to the letter, alright?"

She nodded obediently. "Okay, Shirogane-san."

"Thanks. Now lift up your leg." He waited patiently for her to raise the bleeding stump of her right limb into the air. "Okay. Now hold this piece of leather between your teeth, and get ready to bite down when I tell you to." Takeru took a deep breath and held it steady, trying to calm his shaking hands. "Done? Good. I'm going to have to put a fuck-ton of pressure on your wound in a moment, so this is probably going to hurt really bad. I want you to bite down on that leather on the count of three."

Though she paled considerably, Kurosawa nodded.

"Alright. I'm glad you're so cooperative." He braced her leg with his blood-spattered left hand and prepared the makeshift leather bandage with his right. "One." Takeru said decisively.

"Two." He met her gaze steadily, trying to give her what little confidence he could muster.

"Three!" Grunting with a volume that almost bordered shouting, he pushed down on her injury with crushing force.

Instantaneously, nerve endings that had been previously sedated by adrenaline came screaming into life. Fiery agony raced up her body in rolling waves. Her leg jerked upward, but Takeru pushed it back and pinned it against the ground. With dexterous movements befitting a safe-cracker he wound the bandage around her injury and forcibly squeezed shut the severed veins.

He tied the leather covering to her injury with the fabric, wrapping it around the injury and winding the fabric up to the wrapped tourniquet to bind it in place. Tying the wire-like fabric around, he bound her wound shut as best he could. Within moments, the blood stopped draining, and Takeru breathed a sigh of relief.

The hole was plugged, and her condition was stabilized for the time being. Still, the girl was thrashing and moaning, and would have been outright screaming if not for the leather strip between her teeth.

"Hey, hey- Hey!" He shouted, grabbing her attention and bringing her tear-stained eyes to his. "It's okay. The pain's gonna go away real soon, you just need to relax, okay? Thrash around too much and you're going to undo all the work I just did."

She nodded desperately, hinging on every word he said. And miraculously, she slowed and quieted, inch by inch, second by second.

"That's good. Just stay calm, Kurosawa. You're gonna get through this; I'm not going to let you die." He waited several seconds for her pain to lessen. "How do you feel?"

"Not... good..." She gasped, barely choking out the words in between heaving breaths. "It hurts, Shirogane-san..."

Takeru nodded. "Alright, I hear you. I need you to hold steady for a few minutes, I'm going to go look for some painkillers-"

Just before he could stand up, she grabbed his sleeve. Without words, without expression, without anything more than the panicky, desperate look in her amazingly bright eyes, she told him to stay. And with a smile, he sat back down and leaned against the wall.

"I get it. I wouldn't want to be left alone like this either, if the situations were switched." After a few moments, he took his rifle into his lap and began to fiddle with it's inner workings. "Whenever you're ready to move, give me the word. We've still got a base invasion to survive, after all."

For a time, she said nothing. Any intelligible sound she could have made was drowned out by her gasping and panting as she tried desperately to cope with the searing agony in her leg. It was difficult to tell how much time she spent like that, but Takeru gauged somewhere between five and fifteen minutes with his internal clock before she spoke again.

"...thanks." She whispered. "I appreciate it."

"You don't need to thank me, Kurosawa. I already know that you're grateful."

"How?"

Takeru looked over and tapped his forehead. "Call it intuition, I guess. I've always had a knack for dealing with people-" People of the opposite gender in particular. "-so I usually have a good grasp on what others are thinking."

"That sounds nice." She muttered, her voice picking up strength.

"What do you mean?"

Kurosawa looked at the ground. "Connecting with people, I mean." She explained, only stopping to shift around uncomfortably. "Understanding them. It's always so hard for me to empathize with other people, and it's even harder to talk with them on a person-to-person basis, you know? It always feels like I'm talking to a mask, and not a human being."

She trained her eyes on him. "I've never really been shy, but I can never get close to others, either. It's just... hard."

Takeru had no words.

Somehow, her voice gained strength. "And yet, here I am, spilling my guts to you, Shirogane-san. In what kind of fucked up world do I speak more words to the person I've known for three hours than the people I've trained with for three years?" She lapsed into silence and looked down at her feet.

Seconds passed them by, the time spent not doing or saying anything, just sitting in companionable silence. Takeru put a hand on the girl's shoulder and gave her a reassuring expression.

"Feel better, now?"

"Yeah. I think so." Kurosawa told him quietly.

"Good. Because we've got a battle to win." Takeru stood to his feet with the aid of his rifle. "Take my hand. I'll carry you to the officer's chair."

"But, your leg, doesn't it hurt?"

Smirking confidently, he waved her off. "Do you honestly think a tiny little thing like a few pulverized bones could ever slow me down?"

She smiled at him, ever so slightly. "I guess that was a stupid question."

"You're damn right it was."


An hour and twenty minutes later

In a blaze of fire and flame, Mitsuki roared her machine onto a murderous and chaotic warpath. She broke through the enemy's neatly set up line of mortars and tank-artillery with a badly scratched TSF, barreling through jungle-wood and alloyed steel alike with a viciousness and fury that the devil himself would have been hard-pressed to match.

"Get the fuck outta my way!" She shouted at the top of her lungs. "I'll kill every last one of you bastards!" She cried as an enemy TSF charged her from the flank.

Mitsuki gritted her teeth and rolled her machine right, engaging her thrusters and sliding harmlessly past the enemy. Recalculating the very instant he realized he'd missed, the enemy pilot changed direction and charged back ahead. And yet, she was still a step ahead. Before the PB knife had even fully unsheathed itself, she raised her weapon high to parry an overhead strike. She barely even waited to feel the sensation of steel clashing against steel before shooting out her unoccupied left hand and burying it into the center of the enemy TSF.

A spray of blood jetting out onto her Zuikaku's hand told her that she'd ripped directly into the cockpit. With the metal husk of the enemy machine impaled on her arm, she shook her limb and cast it off into the UN complex's shell-shattered west wing. With a satisfying crash, it slammed into the concrete structure and sagged to lifelessness.

Yet, before she'd even finished throwing the dead TSF, her rifle was raised and firing in no time at all. Just before a deadly swarm of lead and depleted uranium could punch through her hull, the disabled machine was thrown and she was moving. A dozen electronic alerts lit up across her board as the heavy armament trucks locked their ordnance onto her machine.

"Kill me! I dare you!" She screamed furiously, burning her thrusters and pulling right as quickly as her TSF would allow.

A line of rocket infantry took positions behind her back. Mitsuki hadn't had time to register their appearance, let alone react, before they let fly a devastating salvo of rockets. They exploded against her hull in an orange-white shower, blackening the paint and biting into her armor. And yet, her machine held steady, no closer to collapse then than it had been moments before.

She reversed around and leveled the lower barrel of her rifle onto the massed infantry. There was no one-liner, no final words, not so much as a spared glance. Just the solid pulling back of one sweat-soaked trigger. A 120mm shell shot from her rifle's barrel at supersonic speeds and slammed into the ground, instantly vaporizing the platoon that had taken position there.

Without hesitation or thought, she soared high into the air and trained her guns back down on the massed enemy force. "No retreat. No surrender. Not for me..." She discharged a roar of imprecise gunfire, only slightly muffled by her armored suit's ear dampeners. "And definitely not for you."

Missiles dropping like rain bombarded her TSF's aerial position. The hail was upon her with no warning and no respite, but Mitsuki only grinned.

A crimson ball of fire enveloped her machine, blazing almost as bright as the sun above. And for several seconds, that was all anyone saw of her.

And yet, as sure as the day would end, Mitsuki survived. She was not just alive, however, but ecstatic. A grin, wide and terrifying and looking so damn natural on her features, bloomed to life on her face. Screaming in a mixture of joy and fury, she nose-dived into the enemy force.

The explosion had been devastating, but the anti-laser gel had ensured her overall survival. Her TSF was blackened and charred, and the majority of the armor plating was burnt off. It was this black appearance that the ground troops saw, screaming down toward them like a dark angel of death, bearing a blade in one hand and a half-empty rifle in the other.

Just before she could hit the ground and subsequently die a fiery death, she ejected her cockpit module, suited up into the exoskeleton, and took to the air. The Zuikaku she'd been piloting just moments prior slammed into the earth with a momentous blast, shaking the earth and vaporizing nearly everything on the ground in a fifty meter radius.

Mitsuki's exoskeleton crashed onto the glassed soil. Immediately and without pause, she sprinted recklessly into the enemy's firing line, brandishing a red-hot length of razor-sharp steel and a pair of 36mm shoulder cannons. The enemy force was disoriented, if only temporarily, thus allowing her to cut a swift line through their ranks and punch hard into their central ranks.

Moving with the unnatural speed only her exoskeleton could provide, she darted from man to man, severing flesh and limb in a blazing red dance of steel and lead.

Her movements were impossibly fast and equally difficult to track. At one moment, a man's legs were slashed out from under him by the bluish-gray blue sliding low past his right, and at another, a soldier on the opposite side was split diagonally in two from shoulder to hip. On the right flank, three heads rolled in rapid succession, and on the left, an entire clump of troops were splattered to crimson fragments.

"Don't fuck with me! I'll kill all of you!" Mitsuki shouted gleefully as she danced her deadly tango.

Some distant part of her mind registered the bullets ripping into her flesh and armor. But that distant pain was drowned out under the rolling waves of ecstatic joy coursing through her veins. Mitsuki wheeled around and launched her length of splintered steel like a javelin into the skull of a black-armored soldier. Bending back around she jumped the terrified form of another, ripping out his throat with her bare hands and pulling the knife from his belt.

Not even a second passed before she dashed ahead and impaled a human body, one she couldn't even fully see through the crimson screen of blood splattered over her eyes. Rounds blazed against her back, only a few of them pinging off the metal frame of her exoskeleton. Like a woman possessed, she sprinted ahead erratically and unpredictably, cutting into the infantry's rear-guard.

She slashed out a person's throat, slicing just under the full-face helmet, and pushed the body aside to more easily jump out at whomever she next saw. Seeing it's black outline through the crimson, she grabbed a soldier's arm, pulled it high into the air, and stabbed several times into the vague blur of the subsequently exposed armpit.

It was with a gasp and a scream that the man died. There was no remorse in Mitsuki's emotions when she heard it; nor had there been any other save for mindless and savage joy. She turned and charged in a random direction, eager to kill another.

A hammer-like hand slammed into her face and knocked her back, but she grabbed that hand and pulled it toward her. She stabbed her knife deep into the heart of whomever the arm belonged to, relishing the feeling of parting flesh and the sound of splattering blood. She pulled the body over and around, shielding her however temporarily from a blanket of rounds.

Then, without giving her the slightest moment to rest, an explosive projectile slammed into the back of her shoulder.

The explosion threw her to the ground and vaporized most of her exoskeleton, but Mitsuki was lightning-quick in pulling back her miraculously intact right arm and throwing her knife directly into the grenadier's face. She rolled back to her feet, the action made considerably more awkward now that her suit was destroyed, and pulled another knife from the ground. Soldiers were encircling her from every angle now, much like a troop of hunters would surround a wounded boar.

As if by signal, they all opened fire at once with pistols and rifles. Rounds flew from every direction, but all Mitsuki did was dive low and hard into the nearest body, stabbing to death what little she could reach before the bullets could claim her.

Rounds slammed into her armored back, crushing her bones with pulverizing force. She paid little mind, however, as she threw herself off another eviscerated corpse and into the shattered ground below. Black armored bodies surrounded her from every side, training the barrels of their guns on her body.

"I won't die! Not like this!" She screamed, her voice turning raw and painful.

The guns opened fire on her, sending hundreds of rounds screaming into her body. Mitsuki raised her arm, broken though it was, and pressed the big red button located on her armored suit's wrist. Immediately, the shattered remains of her exoskeleton heated to a cherry-red glow and vibrated tremulously.

The heat was tremendous, and wearing it was almost like being trapped in an oven. Her flesh was searing, boiling, scorching and cooking into an ugly shade of black. Mitsuki hadn't the time to notice, however, before the exoskeleton exploded violently into a brilliant plume of white.

Conveniently, the blast also happened to wipe out the entirety of her impromptu firing squad.


The two of them faced each other from across the steel table, looking down on the sheet of paper. Messily drawn schematics, floor layouts, and diagrams were put neatly in place, painting a clear image of the compound's inner workings. Kurosawa explained the plan, a steely light in her eye and a renewed vitality in her voice.

"The goal is to bring this base's internal power source back online. If we can do that, I'll be able to reactivate the guns from here and clean up every hostile inside the base. However, you have a lot of ground to fight through."

She shuffled her papers and brought up a similar-looking map of the compound, although now crisscrossed with bright red circles and slash marks. "The most damaged parts of the compound are the west wing, the north wing, and the TSF launching hangar, not to mention the many cannon shells that have punched through the halls and corridors."

Kurosawa coughed briefly. "Based on that information, I can tell you with absolutely zero certainty that hostiles have infiltrated these particular corridors." She pointed to the primary northern tunnels and it's connected pathways. Bright red scribbles of red filled in nearly the entire west side, as well as substantial portions of the south.

"This means that the only route you could take and not get shot to death is the eastern maintenance shaft. You'll have to head there and wind all the way around, hugging the wall closest to the exterior, and sneak past their main force. If you can do that well enough, you'll wind up in the northern atrium."

Takeru frowned. "The map says that the atrium is their main base of operations."

"Yes, that's true, unfortunately." She shuffled her papers again, and brought up a much more eclectic looking diagram of vents and crawlspaces. "The atrium is a large room, and it's got a lot of empty space beneath, around, and above it. Vents. You're going to crawl through these things and push your way back toward the center. Then, from those ventilation shafts, you'll sneak under the hostile force and make your way to the primary substation."

Shuffling back her papers, she brought up her final document, a large schematic of a bright white metal box. "This is the base's main power station. If what I remember from the pre-operation layouts is correct, then the only problem we face is a bunch of dead fuses. There should be replacements somewhere in that room. Repair the box and flip the switch, that should be all it takes to get the power back up and running again. Should be, anyway; I have no idea if the box has sustained any additional damage in the last hour."

He nodded. "Alright. Once I get that box running again, how do I exfiltrate?"

She was quiet for a moment. "I'm sorry, but... you don't." She squeezed her eyes shut, as if expecting an outburst. But when there wasn't one, she explained, "It's going to take me time to get the guns warmed up, so I need you to hold the room and make sure no one blows up that substation before they get done."

Takeru grinned. "Sounds like a suicide mission. I like it."

Kurosawa eyed him for a moment. "Well, that's a silver lining, I suppose. I hope you know that sending you to your death brings me absolutely no joy whatsoever, Shirogane-san."

"It'd be weird if it did." He agreed. "Is that all, Kurosawa-san?"

She nodded. "Yes. That's the long and short of this operation. I hope you have this memorized, because with the communications array losing power, there's no telling if we'll be able to stay in touch once you get moving."

"It's not a problem. I can do this."

Her expression shifted into a smile, however small. "I'll be counting on you then, Shirogane-san. Try not to take any undue risks."

"Tch." Takeru clicked his tongue. "Sounds boring." He turned around and limped toward the exit, his rifle barrel digging into the concrete.

That had been an hour ago.

Now, as he wormed his way through the cobwebbed vents of the atrium, he dearly regretted not picking up a splint or a shinguard or, well, anything. His leg was killing him, almost literally, too, considering the shards of bone moving about and slicing the inside of his limb. Repeatedly banging his pulverized leg against unyielding metal proved to be incredibly painful.

Yet, the searing agony in his legs paled in comparison to the great shock of anxiety he felt as he crawled his way through the vents. With every movement, with every crash of his sweating hands on plated steel, he could feel the presences of the several dozen soldiers literally inches above him. His rational mind told him that there was no way they would notice him, that the concrete above the vent blocked both sight and sound, and yet, he couldn't stop his heart from pounding like a drum.

Takeru couldn't hear them and couldn't see them, and yet, somewhere in his mind, he knew they were above him. He almost wished he hadn't stuck around for Kurosawa's briefing; if he hadn't, he could have safely crawled into these vents without knowing just how many soldiers were above him.

The impenetrable darkness did nothing to alleviate his anxiety, either. He hadn't brought so much as a lighter down into the depths, and that was yet another thing he regretted dearly. Going in, Takeru knew it was going to be dark, and so he'd read over Kurosawa's vent-map three times just to memorize it, but the long shadows of a moonless night were nothing in comparison to this black hell.

Sightless and panicking, every sound he heard was magnified a thousand times to his ears. The scurrying of a creature – whether it was a rat or spider, Takeru didn't know and was equally terrified – and the gentle whisper of moving air, all of it was horribly vibrant to him.

Something brushed against the back of his hand as he pushed forward. He froze, a jolt of fear striking his body rigid. The thing was hard and spiny, moving on the back of his palm with many, many legs. A spider. A very big spider. Takeru went rigid and held both his breath and his body, a renewed feeling of anguished terror in his veins. He knew this was stupid, that something as simple as a spider shouldn't scare him, and yet...

It was the tunnel. Everything was amplified in the tunnel. His fears, the sounds he heard, and most of all, his paranoia... all of it and more was brought to a brand new height of agonizingly exquisite feeling down in this godforsaken tunnel.

Getitoffgetitoffgetitoff His mind screeched frantically, sending signals to his body that Takeru had to fight tooth and nail to resist. He wasn't entirely sure if this particular one was venomous or not, he couldn't even see it, but on he didn't want to aggravate it on the off chance that it was.

The spider lingered for a few seconds longer, crawling up his arm with the slow and cautious movements of an animal suspecting danger. It was no longer touching his skin, not directly, but he could feel it, he could hear it. The rustling of his cotton uniform as it's legs brushed along the surface, the little impacts of it's dainty legs hitting the surface, and most disturbingly of all, the rubbing together of the many tiny hairs coating it's body.

A spiny leg brushed his cheek, and Takeru bit down on every nerve in his body to keep himself from screaming.

It finally passed, crawling around the side of his face and moving back behind him. He held both his breath and his body several seconds longer, waiting for it to leave entirely. And when the sounds of it's movement, alien and strange and totally unlike anything he'd heard before, passed out of his auditory range, only then did Takeru breathe a sigh of relief and move forward.

"It was just a spider. What the hell are you so scared about, tough guy?" He asked himself, laughing nervously. "Just... a spider."

He grasped out with his hand, now much more hesitantly, and gripped the next bit of steel. Pulling himself forward with a light grunt, he crawled ahead a few more inches. Slowly, steadily, he moved, consulting the map he'd memorized every so often, until he came to a stop under a dim patch of light.

It was only barely there, but after untold time spent in darkness, Takeru was more than glad to see even the thinnest, most watery ray of illumination. It spilled out into the vent from a grate, giving shape to the previously formless black. Cautiously, he looked up through the grate and scanned for anyone who could possibly see him crawling through the vents.

All clear. He thought satisfactorily before crawling ahead.

The substation wasn't far now. The grate was one of the few distinguishing landmarks mentioned on the map, and it told him that he had less than a few dozen meters left to crawl before he'd be rid of the horrific pain and terror this tiny vent had to offer.

With all the suddenness of a thunderclap, an explosion ripped into the west wing. It was significantly louder than anything that had preceded it, almost deafening in it's intensity, and it sent every soldier in the atrium into a dead sprint toward the source. Whatever had hit the compound, it was larger and much more devastating than a mortar shell could ever hope to be.

As the sound of heavy boots sprinting across concrete tiles filled the air, Takeru grinned weakly. It seemed that the gods, whomever or whatever they might have been, were on his side today.

"That's right, you bastards. Run to the explosion. Run fast, far away from here. And don't bother coming back, either."

Takeru redoubled his speed. With the enemy on the run and his objective sitting just a little bit further away, he found that he didn't mind the pain so much anymore. Within seconds, he was standing behind the vent's metal access hatch. Looking in, he noticed precisely one pair of boots, pacing nervously and standing by the door.

Thinking of leaving, huh? Well go ahead, big guy. I fuckin' dare ya.

When thirty seconds passed and the man merely continued to pace, Takeru's patience wore thin. At any other time, he wouldn't have hesitated to wait at least a token few minutes, but with a window of opportunity opened – one that could close at any time – he wasn't exactly eager to twiddle around with his thumbs up his ass.

He undid the hatch's screws quickly and dexterously, twisting the metal bits with one hand and readying his pistol with the other. Moments passed, and the sheet of metal fell to the floor loudly. Takeru took precisely half a second to aim before emptying half his clip into the soldier's exposed legs, dropping him to the floor.

Whether, in his final moments, the man was surprised, angry, terrified, or disbelieving at being shot so suddenly, Takeru would never know. When his target collapsed to the ground, his legs literally collapsing under him, he fired the shot as soon as the head blurred into sight. Almost as soon as the conflict had begun, it ended.

Takeru crawled out of the vent covered in cobwebs and rat shit, but otherwise intact. He didn't bother looking at the man he'd just killed, but instead, went directly for the fuse-box. With a flick of the fingers, the latch was undone and the panel swung effortlessly open, revealing the machinery to be relatively intact.

"That's a relief." He breathed a sigh of relief. "All I have to do is find fuses, then."

Of course, there was another matter to attend to first, of course. With the enemy temporarily distracted, there was always a chance they might not even notice the substation going back online at all. In keeping with that, Takeru would have liked it if, instead of coming here and finding a freshly killed corpse, they found a clean room with a lemony scent instead.

He grabbed the corpse by the arms and flipped it over onto it's significantly less bloody back. Then, he dragged it back and stuffed it into the vent he'd just crawled out of, pushing both it's legs in until the entire thing was obscured by darkness. Within a few minutes, the vent's cover was reattached, the blood was soaked up using the discarded jacket of the aforementioned corpse, and the fuse-box was fully restored.

Takeru grinned. "Too easy." He wiped away a sheen of sweat and pulled the breaker switches back and forth. Moments passed, and the substation came back to life not with a roar, but with an electric hum instead.

Experimentally, he brought his transceiver back to his ear and tried to signal Kurosawa. Only a half-moment passed before her voice came in through the earpiece, crisp and clear.

"My board is lighting up green, Shirogane-san. Very good work."

He moved toward the substation's door. "Of course. I aim to please, you know." Laying low and hugging the ground, he looked under the doorway for signs of anyone or anything that could have been listening.

Though of course, if there had been any hostiles in the area, they probably would have barged in earlier, when he was gunning one of their comrades to death.

"Anyway, how long is it gonna take for those guns to finish their heat-cycling?" He asked her absently as he prepared to open the door.

"Not long, actually. Shouldn't take more than two or three minutes." She responded promptly.

"Excellent. I'll contact you when that time comes, then." Takeru snapped off a salute that only he could see, and cut the transmission.

Pushing open the door, he stepped out into the corridor with his gun raised. It was in vain, however, because the entire wing was totally devoid of human activity. Everything that had been here just minutes ago seemed to have left in a hurry.

"It was a pretty big explosion, yeah, but does it really warrant this much-" Another blast, this one even more jarring than the last, rocked the entire complex. His balance shattered, he was thrown to the ground. Takeru gritted his teeth in pain as he fell to the floor, his leg slamming into the concrete with all the force of a sledgehammer.

Biting back a scream, he braced himself against the wall as hard as he could, grabbing his knee and biting down on nothing at all. Like an earthquake, the entire complex trembled precariously, small bits of concrete and dust falling from the ceiling. The doors rattled in their frames, the walls rattled with the unsteady noise of collapse, and every loose object nearby began to shift around.

It ended almost as soon as it began.

Takeru, however, had no such luck. His leg was screaming in horrific agony, his mind a blur of crimson and white. Further and further, the pain drove him against the winding edge of insanity. He held his breath, fearing that if he didn't, he might end up crying and screeching like a banshee.

Speaking in tense whispers, he told himself words of power over and over again, trying to keep his mind intact. "I can take this. I'm not going die. This little isn't going to kill me."

Dimly, over the soundless wave of his own agony, he heard the defensive guns cycling into life. Their targeting mechanisms looked him over once, identified him as friendly, and moved on. The same could not be said for the hostiles that had infiltrated the compound. A collective roar of gunfire filled the base, tearing open every single unprepared figure wandering the halls.

The gunfire started and stopped in ten seconds. That was all it took for the entirety of the invading force to die.

Takeru, if he hadn't been busy fighting back tears of pain, would have cheered.


AN

Okay, done and done. Don't got much to say here, other than I should probably start writing chapter nine. And I will, I suppose, but I can't see myself doing anything productive in the near future. Not until Xcom gets beaten again for the umpteenth time. Seriously, steam says I've logged six hundred hours on that game.

Review! Let's respond to it, eh?

Bastion: Yeah, I've noticed that too. A fair number of these Muv-Luv fics either die early with only ten or twenty thousand words, or get boring/annoying after a colossally strong first few chapters. Hopefully I can avoid that and become and outlier, but, I suppose only time will tell.