A pair of two meter tall squid robots squirm their way towards a slowly opening hangar door. As they set up a side by side blockade, a couple well placed plasma bolts take off huge chunks of them while launching them back several meters. A green, seven meter long dune buggy with two front seats and a large machine gun mounted on back burst through. Sora was driving, with Riku in the passenger seat sending plasmic death all around while Mickey was riding in back, keyblade in hand. Not a whole lot of action for him, but prepared, nonetheless. Hastily fused onto the dashboard was a wristband hologram map, directions set towards one of the laboratories.
"Recalculating route," the unit says, showing a flipping hourglass before settling on a route with a turn that Sora crossed just as it flashed up. It repeats the process, with Sora failing to make the turn again due to a lack of lead time.
"Just stop for a second," Riku says, thinking Sora took his directions to drive as fast as possible a bit too seriously.
"Okay," Sora acknowledges, stomping her foot on the brakes a little too hard. Riku ends up catching Mickey with his right arm as he gets launched forward. The navigation unit then shows that they need to do a U-turn. Sora starts up again, accidentally crashing through one of the squid robots and heading towards the missed turn. She makes the turn just a little too fast and ends up scraping against the wall. A couple more haphazard turns like this forces Riku to say something.
"Could you try not to do that?" Riku asks, sending another plasma bolt through a nearby squid robot.
"Maybe you should drive," Sora responds, irritated, "Since I haven't driven anything in years."
"Just drive a little slower," Riku responds, gunning down some more robots. Our heroes drive through a few more corridors before finding their path blocked by another large mass of Heartless. Sora stops the dune buggy in response, attracting the notice of the Heartless with the screeching of the tires.
"What now?" Sora asks, ducking as horrible accuracy lasers start streaming towards them, "That's our only way through."
"Drive through them, of course," Riku says, pressing a few buttons on the heavy weapon.
"But-" Sora counters.
"Go!" Riku shouts, opening up a rapid fire barrage of plasma bolts towards the Heartless. Sora sighs and stomps the gas, sending the buggy careening towards the large mass of Heartless. Riku focuses his fire on the Red Shirts while trying to clear a path through the center. When our heroes finish closing distance with the Heartless, there were still a couple assorted Shadows directly in their path. A couple painful, squishy crunches resonate as Sora drives over the unlucky Heartless, with a couple near miss beams streaming past their sides. The Shadows on either side of them proceed to randomly jump towards them, most of them missing but a couple managing to latch themselves on the sides. Mickey starts slicing them off as Riku pulls out a small shotgun-style plasma gun to blast them off. Sora ends up having to shove one Shadow off by herself.
With the last Heartless off of the buggy, our heroes drive through some relatively clear hallways. Outside of a few easily dispatched robot guards outside of the laboratory, there wasn't anything interesting. As they stop by the door, Riku jumps over the dividing barrier between the front and back 'seats' and grabs a hastily arranged dufflebag.
"Are you sure it's here?" Sora asks, repositioning the buggy so its back would directly face the door, "Romio has to have moved it by now."
"I know her," Riku starts, shooting the door panel and prying open the door, "She wouldn't deploy these until she did one last check on them. If they're not here, we're too late." Riku runs in to find only a large number of rocket pieces and test tubes full of fuscia colored blood in the first section. In the next section, he finds a pair of three meter long clusters of missiles. Jackpot. He looks around the room for the cart, finding it not too far away. He shoves the several hundred pound missiles onto it, carefully holding them down as he carts them back to the buggy. He comes out to find Sora waiting for him.
"Can't you just destroy them?" Sora asks, stepping to the side as Riku moves the cart right behind the buggy.
"I don't think blowing up a missile capable of destroying a world is a prudent idea," Riku comments, dryly, as he walks to the other side of Sora, "Anyway, take that side. On three. One, two..." Riku and Sora then lift the first missile and place it on the back of the buggy. They repeat the process again, with Riku pushing the cart back through the door once both missiles are off of the cart. He then pulls out a long length of cable from the dufflebag and tosses it to Sora, walking back towards the door.
"Where are you going?" Sora asks, untying some of the binds in the loop.
"I might not want to touch the missiles," Riku starts, "But I have no issues blowing up the rest of the lab. Anyway, make sure to tie under the buggy a few times. I'll be back in a few minutes."
With that, Riku ran back into the lab. He starts sweeping all the test tubes and rocket parts onto the cart, bringing it to an empty corner and dumping them all in it. He does several sweeps of this until everything on the tables were in the corner. He then goes to the refrigerator, carefully looking for something labeled 'propagating powder'. After carefully removing the small sack of it and tying it to his belt, he then tears out all of the shelves and dumps their contents onto the cart. After dumping that load into the corner, he pulls a half meter tall cylinder full of glowing blue plasma and carefully places it on top of the pile. He then runs over to refrigerator, tears the power cable from the wall, shoves it to the corner, and topples it, door open, on top of the pile of debris. Riku then runs outside, taking out a remote control and the plastic bag containing their old clothing.
"Why did you have to absolutely get those clothes, anyway?" Sora asks, getting back into the driver seat.
"You should know better than to leave anything magically linked to you behind," Riku answers, stuffing the clothes into the foot well of the passenger seat, clipping the remote on his belt, and picking up the huge gun, "Let's get out of here."
Mickey comes back from his sentinel position, carefully standing in what little space remained with the missiles on board. Riku presses in a new destination on the navigation unit and Sora starts driving. They immediately come across a large number of squid robots, forming a blockade and waiting for our heroes. Sora stops, starting to back up slowly as they move in.
"I think she figured out what we're doing," Riku comments, firing a few shots at the closest robots.
"What should we do?" Sora asks.
"Drive forward," Riku states, pressing a few buttons. Sora doesn't bother to argue and starts driving forward into the robots. Riku sends several meter wide spheres of plasma, detonating into large explosions that send all the nearby robots flying. Riku clears a path this way, with each explosion being just a little too close for comfort. They eventually break through the large blockade, with Riku turning around and bracing himself in the seat. He then presses a few more buttons and sends a massive burst of plasma at them. The recoil was great enough to noticeably speed up the buggy as the sphere of plasma creates a huge explosion, demolishing the blockade of robots.
"Overkill," Sora quips, rolling her eyes.
"Just keep driving," Riku says, tossing the cracked, smoking weapon overboard and pulling out the shotgun-style plasma gun. He then takes the remote off his belt and presses a button, with a minor shockwave emanating through the ship.
"Was that the lab?" Sora asks, turning the buggy down a long hallway with a Y split.
"I love plasma," Riku starts, tossing the remote overboard and pressing a few buttons on his gun, "Wish we had this stuff instead of the keyblades when we started with HIRA. Okay, no matter what, don't slow down."
Our heroes drive down the hallway, finding that one branch of the Y was infested with Heartless. In the middle of the swarm was a purple haired woman in an elegant gown slicing through them, effortlessly deflecting the beams of the Red Shirts as she does crescent swings. She stops when she notices our heroes, cutting a swathe through the Heartless as she runs towards them. Before she could make it to the intersection, our heroes drive past on the other path. Going increasingly fast, they go through a wide loop and find themselves gunning down a long hallway. From one of the branching hallways, two silver clad Heartless rocket through. Guess Riku got to see what the Heartless produced from Avenger users look like after all.
Riku fires a couple shot at them, all of which were deflected. Mickey draws his keyblade and takes a ready position, with the two Avenger Heartless closing distance. All of the sudden, a blue blade flies through the air and impales the Avenger on the left. As it bursts into dissipating black smoke, the blade vanishes a mere second before the second one gets impaled by the same weapon. As it dissipates, the purple haired woman from before emerges, flying through some unseen magical method. She gives a positively sinister smile at Riku before she increases her speed.
Riku fires a couple bolts, but she effortlessly deflects them all before blasting the gun out of his hands with a well placed keyblade fireball. As she gets within melee range, Mickey starts sparring with her. As effortless as Ami made things look, her lack of experience compared to Mickey really showed as she found herself narrowly evading his swings. Eventually, one of Mickey's lateral swings takes her off guard and she ended up losing focus and rolling on the ground as she stopped flying, her keyblade clanging on the ground. However, within a few seconds, she pushed herself up and started flying again. She desummons the keyblade and pulls out her wand from somewhere, generating a yellow sphere of energy and hurling it at our heroes. Mickey deflects it to the side, with it detonating into a large crater in the wall. She starts generating another sphere.
"Deflect and duck," Riku says, grabbing the handles on the turret. As Ami sends the sphere over, Mickey deflects it to the side and ducks, holding onto the cables binding the missiles. Riku starts unloading the turret at Ami, with her focusing a blue energy shield around her. The already low counter on the ammo readout starts rapidly dropping, starting at 300 but quickly becoming 250... 150... 100... 50... 25... 10... With a bright flash, Ami's shield bursts and she flips back in the air in slow motion, sparks flowing around her. She collapses to the ground shortly thereafter.
"We're almost out!" Sora shouts, putting her helmet down as they drive into the hangar. Riku and Mickey follow suit. With helmets down, they drive right through the dividing barrier between the hangar and outer space. The gravity of the space ship they were exiting alters their path slightly to go 'downwards'. As they freely float through space, Mickey fumbles with something inside of his suit. They get increasingly far away from the ship, which was going decently fast towards what appeared to be a solar system. They float for what feels like an eternity, the space ship growing more distant. Just when it was barely a speck in their vision, a yellow comet streams out of it. It immediately homes in on them, getting increasingly closer.
Just when it was within a few hundred meters of them, a bright orange flash of energy detonates near it, diverting the comet away as the energy around it turns blue and dissipates. Our heroes look the opposite direction to see one of HIRA's ships float within view, positioning itself with the hangar entry in their path. Twenty seconds of careful maneuvering later, our heroes and their dune buggy were floating within the degravitized hangar. Suddenly, they fall, crashing down on the steel floor and sending all of them in random directions away from the dune buggy. Riku crawls onto his knees, ripping apart the space suit as fast as he can. A bunch of crew members run towards Riku.
"Stand back!" he shouts, getting the top off. His right arm was now convulsing, with veins breaking and tons of fuscia blood spraying all over. The blood would quickly boil over, what little remaining fading back to its regular crimson color. As this happened, Riku's muscle structure in his arm twisted and contorted, going back to its natural state as all the pink and blue fades back to a regular flesh color. All the while, Riku was holding back his screams, eventually giving out one piercingly loud one as he loses consciousness.