When the elevator had almost reached the top of the shaft, Vincent said, "We're stealing an armed chopper and blowing up as much of this place as we can."
"Sounds good to me," Cloud said. "Red?"
Red XIII peeled his lips back from his teeth in a feral grin. "No objections. However, I think we should put this elevator out of working order. It may slow Michael down a little bit."
"Point," Vincent said. "Cloud, we're welding it to the sides of the shaft." He pulled a Blizzard Materia out of his pack and bound it to himself. "You know what to do."
"Sounds good. You take the left side, I'll get right." The two men immediately started charging incinerating blasts, their arms glowing with power. Thirty seconds later, they unloaded the blasts, but not all at once – instead, they thrust their arms out and a continuous stream of orange flame poured out of their hands. They swept the streams along the sides of the elevator, liquefying the metal and rock there. Vincent immediately pumped a large amount of spirit energy into the Blizzard Materia, and an icy wave of frost exploded out from him and hit the sides of the elevator, instantly cooling and hardening the metal and rock, fusing it all together.
There was a loud, long grinding noise, followed by what sounded like a small explosion. The elevator stopped moving.
"What do we do if the Immaculate Swords figure out the plan?" Red XIII asked as they jumped the last ten feet up to the large steel doors, which opened at their approach.
"It's only been about fifteen minutes since we left that council chamber," Vincent said. "The Angels are probably still in session about their agenda. They're the only real threat. Between the three of us, I'm sure that we can take out anyone less powerful fairly quickly, even uplifted humans like Renbato or Alexandra."
"All right," Cloud agreed. "Let's hurry."
They made their way quickly through the hallways and pipes and up the several elevators that they remembered taking. They emerged in a hub enclosure and the three dozen or so humans – none of them wore jumpsuits to indicate having been uplifted – looked at them curiously.
"Your masters have said we can go," Vincent said brusquely. "Which way to the top?"
An older man pointed down one particular hallway near him. "Take the elevator through there. It'll pop you out at a level where you can take tunnels back to the glacier above."
"Thank you," Vincent said.
The three of them began moving past the man, who abruptly grabbed Cloud by the arm and hissed in his ear, "Take one of the Stingers. They have air-to-surface weaponry. You can level this entire base and give yourselves time to escape."
Cloud stared at him, shocked. "But…"
"We're not all loyal drones here," the man said. "Some of us had families to consider. Some of us would rather be dead, at this point. Don't worry about us." He let go of Cloud and moved away, a look of determination on his face.
Distraught, Cloud caught up with Vincent and Red XIII. "Did you…?"
"We heard," Vincent said. "But only because we have very good hearing. I doubt anyone else picked up what he said to you."
"The bastards," Red XIII growled. "Forcing people to join them by making hostages of their families."
"How will we know what a Stinger looks like?" Cloud asked.
"They're an old WRO stealth bomber," Vincent replied. "If we can get up to the landing pads, I'll be able to recognize and even pilot one. We will make them pay for what they've done and what they want to do."
They turned a corner and boarded the elevator. It whisked them back up to the way they'd come in before, complete with the entrance to the tunnel through the rock that led to the site where Uriel and Gabriel had ambushed them.
"Climb," Vincent said. "Red XIII, will you…?"
Red XIII coiled and leaped, landing almost vertically on the sheer walls of the crater. Cloud looked closely and saw that the beast's impressive claws were actually digging deep into the rock, grasping at handholds and creating them where there were none. "I'll be fine," Red XIII said. "Hurry."
The two men moved after Red XIII. The climb was difficult, but nowhere near as bad as Gaea's Cliff, and they made quick progress, getting up to the closest landing platform in less than two minutes. They heaved themselves up onto the flat surface and looked at the helicopter sitting on the pad. It was identical to the sleek, black craft that Alexandra had used.
"The two of you can take this," Vincent said. "Red XIII, you can show Cloud how to pilot it. We'll fly it up until we find a landing pad with a Stinger, at which point I can jump out and get into that. It's only a one-seater anyway."
"You sure? I've never piloted a helicopter before," Cloud said. "Or any kind of flying vehicle, for that matter."
"Cloud, you figured out how to pilot a submarine in five minutes," Vincent reminded him as they jumped into the helicopter. "You'll be fine."
"I guess you have a point." Cloud sat down in the pilot's chair and stared at the unfamiliar array of dials, switches, knobs, and gauges. "So, Red… what do I do first?"
A minute later, Red XIII had run Cloud through the start-up procedure and the craft was lifting into the air. Cloud was delicately gripping the yoke and peering up through the windshield to make sure he didn't fly the copter into a landing pad above them. The Immaculate Swords' setup did not make it easy, but he was managing remarkably well for someone who had never touched a helicopter before. There was just something about Cloud and vehicles, Vincent supposed.
It didn't take more than ten seconds for the helicopter to rise above a pad that had a Stinger resting on it. The sleek, compact bomber looked like an obsidian arrowhead, and Vincent felt nostalgia for the days back when the WRO made them en masse. He had always liked the way the planes had looked – although it wasn't technically a plane, as it could ascend vertically.
"This is where I get out," Vincent said, moving to the helicopter's side door and opening it. "Don't wait on me. Just get as far away from here as you can. I'll be fine."
"Roger," Cloud said. "Take care of yourself. We'll see you on the other side."
Vincent leaped out of the copter, managing to slam the door shut as he fell, and landed right on top of the Stinger. He quickly popped the cockpit, got inside, closed it, and ran the plane through its startup sequence. That took a couple minutes, during which Cloud brought the helicopter up and out of the crater and flew it out of visual range. The Immaculate Swords probably knew that something was wrong by this point, and leaving a helicopter hovering above them would only clue them in more on that fact.
The anti-grav engines of the Stinger, WRO tech that was by now lost to most everyone, hummed quietly as they initialized, and the plane lifted smoothly off of the ground. Vincent pulled it straight up into the sky and checked its weapons complement. He smiled when he saw that it still had all eight Hellfire Rocket-Propelled Ordnance Delivery Systems, powerful missiles that could level a large building.
He pulled the Stinger up into the sky, stood it on its nose, and pointed its weapons directly at the base underneath. "Take this," Vincent said to nobody in particular and squeezed the trigger on the yoke.
Two missiles streaked out of the Stinger's underbelly. Riding on jets of flame, they rocketed down into the crater, heading straight for the Immaculate Swords' base.
Suddenly, the missiles stopped dead in mid-air. Vincent stared and saw that they were visibly straining against something that their engines couldn't overcome, and they suddenly flipped around and rocketed back up at him.
He pulled the Stinger sharply out of the way, and the missiles streaked past him and detonated in midair, exploding into a pair of huge, golden fireballs that singed the Stinger's wings. Casting his gaze around, desperately trying to figure out what happened, Vincent suddenly realized that there was a single figure that seemed to be somehow levitating in the air amidst the landing platforms.
A voice spoke over the radio. "Vincent, I'm disappointed in you."
"Uriel," Vincent growled. "How?"
"Nothing that goes on in our abode is unknown to us," Uriel said. The figure began to rise steadily up towards Vincent. "The man who spoke to Cloud Strife about the Stinger has been chastised for his misconduct. We knew you would take his advice, and we've acted appropriately. If you were willing to leave in peace we would have gladly let you go and allowed you to live a bit longer, but as it stands, we must punish your flippant disobedience with death."
The figure suddenly accelerated to blinding speed and then stopped on a dime, hovering in front of Vincent's cockpit. Uriel smiled at him through the windshield and tapped on the glass. "Hello," he said.
Vincent immediately drove the Stinger into a dive and then sent it through a series of looping corkscrews that brought it up and around to point south at the Central Continent. He gunned the engines and the plane rocketed forward, going nearly two hundred miles an hour and accelerating.
Uriel flashed into view to the port of the plane, streaking through the air. "You can't run, Vincent Valentine," his voice crackled through the plane's radio. "Let me show you exactly why."
He extended a hand, and Vincent suddenly felt the plane lurch. It began to arc in a slow, wide turn to port. Something had latched onto the wing, and though Vincent stared at Uriel he couldn't see what it was. His mind flashed back to the way the man had ripped the Peacemaker right out of his hands from ten feet away. Could Uriel have developed some kind of telekinesis?
Then Uriel grabbed his outstretched hand with his other hand and yanked down, hard. Vincent swore as he felt the plane begin to nose down into a dive that would send it spiraling into the glacier below. He yanked up on the yoke, desperately trying to get the craft to level out, and then felt it snap upward as Uriel yanked up. "Can't have you dying too soon, Vincent Valentine."
"I'll make you feel differently," Vincent snarled. He pulled the Peacekeeper from where he had stowed it next to the seat and popped the cockpit open. He threw himself back in the seat to get his feet up, sandwiching the plane's yoke between his boots, and kept it in the air while he sighted down the barrel of the rifle at Uriel's hand.
He fired, and a bullet larger than a man's finger lanced out and blew Uriel's hand clean off. The plane immediately stopped spiraling to port, and Vincent managed to pull it back around in the right direction with his feet. He fired again, this time aiming for Uriel's head.
Time seemed to slow. In a single instant, with perfect clarity even from five hundred feet away, Vincent saw Uriel's expression turn murderous. He watched the bullet he'd fired be neatly bisected down the center.
Both halves flew off to either side of Uriel's head. "Oh, Vincent," Uriel said, his voice deadly calm. "That was a terrible, terrible mistake."
Vincent felt the plane lurch again, and the hum of the anti-grav engines cut out. A cold wind assailed him from the rear, and he looked over his shoulder, a mounting suspicion taking hold.
The back of the plane had been cut neatly away.
All the instrument gauges instantly died, and Vincent felt the remainder of the plane begin to nose-dive toward the glacier below. Without hesitating even for an instant, he pulled his feet off of the yoke, slammed them down against the floor of the rapidly falling cockpit, and jumped clear.
He twisted in midair and fired the Peacekeeper at Uriel again, but the man sliced his regrown hand through the air and the bullet split in half just like the last one. "Useless!" Uriel laughed. Vincent tightened his grip on the Peacekeeper as he felt it suddenly try to rip itself out of his grip. His arms wrenched, but he managed to hold onto his gun, and he actually stopped falling. Hanging weightless for a moment in midair, he realized that something very thin and very strong was wrapped securely around the barrel of the rifle.
"Got you," he murmured and lashed out with an attack from his Fire Materia, sending a searing whip of flame through the space between Uriel and himself. He felt the pressure on the gun instantly cease and he began to fall again, which was preferable to hanging three hundred feet in the air at his enemy's mercy. Vincent flipped himself over in midair so he was falling headfirst, let go of the Peacekeeper, and thrust both hands forward. Twin bursts of sustained flame erupted out of his palms, acting against his momentum and lowering him down to the ground at a speed that wouldn't break anything when he hit.
Just before he landed, he did a quick midair somersault and hit the ground on his feet, Cerberus drawn. He looked around for Uriel and the Peacekeeper but couldn't see either of them.
"Looking for this?" a voice asked from behind him.
Vincent whirled, ducking in the same moment, and fired Cerberus at Uriel, who was standing directly behind him, holding the Peacekeeper. The bullets never found their mark – they were shredded into bits in midair and swept away on the wind, and Uriel smashed Vincent across the face with the butt of the Peacekeeper, sending him sprawling.
"You seem fond of this gun. If you want it so much, I'll give it back to you," Uriel laughed. He launched himself fifteen feet into the air and hurled the Peacekeeper with enormous force. The rifle hit Vincent in the abdomen, and he screamed as the blunt barrel ripped straight through skin and muscle. He made a strangled noise and began to reach for the rifle to pull it out of him, but he screamed even louder when Uriel landed right on top of it and forced it all the way through him and out his back, smashing its tip into the ice below.
"You may have been able to defeat Renbato by yourself," Uriel sneered, standing on Vincent's chest, "but you couldn't even handle Alexandra without having to transform into Galian. If we ranked the uplifted on the same scale of power as the Angels, Vincent, they would have been Eleventh and Tenth, respectively, and you know that the curve is exponential. This is all true, so how do can you possibly hope to defeat me? Me, the Fourth Angel?"
Vincent fought through the haze of pain and said, "Because I have to." He raised Cerberus and pointed it at the man's head. "Because nobody else will."
"HA!" Uriel crouched down and put his face to Cerberus's barrels. "If you think you can kill me with solemn vows and crude weapons, Vincent, go ahead. Give it your best shot. I guarantee you that you will fail, and you will die."
"Fine," Vincent said, choking back the blood that was rising in his mouth. "I will."
He brought his gauntlet up in a savage blow that raked Uriel across the face, destroying both of the man's eyes. Uriel recoiled instinctively, the wound painful if not especially damaging, and Vincent fired Cerberus. The bullets snapped Uriel's head back and made him stumble off of Vincent, and the gunman seized his chance. He pumped spirit energy into his Fire Materia and repeated his trick with the sustained flames, except this time he produced them from the bottom of his feet. They burned straight through the soles of his boots and rocketed him across the flat ice of the glacier, tearing the barrel of the Peacekeeper out of the ice even as it remained buried in his abdomen.
"Futile!" Uriel screamed after him. He threw out both his hands, and Vincent felt the same thin, impossibly strong strands that had tried to yank his rifle out of his hands wrap themselves around his ankles. He retaliated with another whip of flame, but Uriel was expecting it and wrapped even more of the things around Vincent's legs, then yanked. Vincent's progress across the ice was abruptly halted, then reversed. He skidded painfully back toward Uriel, the flames emanating from his feet only serving to send him spinning wildly around. He stopped generating them and focused on lashing out with whips of flame to try to free himself, but it was no good.
Uriel looked down at him as Vincent came to a halt in front of him, Cerberus emptied and the Peacekeeper still impaled through his gut. "You just don't understand how pathetic this struggle is, do you, Vincent?" he asked. "Here. Let me show you."
He threw his arms into the air, and Vincent felt the things wrapped around his legs hurl him up into the air, spinning around helplessly. Uriel laced his fingers together in front of himself and then pulled them violently apart, spreading his arms out to their full span and leaving them there. Vincent felt strands wrap around his arms as well as his legs and he was suddenly immobilized in midair, being pulled in four different directions. He strained against the things holding him in place but found that it was impossible.
"Struggling is useless," Uriel said, his arms still splayed out, fingers quivering. "The things immobilizing you, Vincent, are ultra-thin 'wires' composed of my JENOVA-disease fluid, packed into an incredibly small space and consequently so dense that nothing but magic can cut them. I can manipulate them in any way I choose and I can extrude them from any part of my body. Right now I'm extruding them from my fingers and waving my hands around because that's the method of control that requires the least amount of effort." He rose into the air and stopped just slightly above Vincent so he could look down on him. "Don't you get it, Vincent? I'm utterly destroying you and I'm not even trying hard."
Vincent glared at him. "You talk big, Uriel, but you don't frighten me. We will kill you and everyone else in the Immaculate Swords. I promise you that much."
Uriel laughed. "Will you, now?" He snapped the fingers of his right hand, and Vincent could suddenly no longer feel his left arm.
He jerked his head around to stare at what had just happened. His arm, still clad in his brass gauntlet, was falling to earth. A huge gout of blood exploded from his shoulder, and Vincent screamed again, the pain hitting him like a charging behemoth. Uriel bent double, clutching his gut, laughing so hard that tears would have sprung to his eyes if he had been human. The sound of it was high-pitched and utterly insane.
Then all the mirth vanished from his expression in an instant. "Well, Vincent Valentine?" he asked, his voice deathly calm. "Do you give in yet? Do you recognize my superiority? I could kill you with a thought even as I speak. Give me one reason not to."
Vincent couldn't speak for the pain. He hung limply in Uriel's clutches, head drooping and eyes squeezed shut, clenching his teeth so hard that the sound of them grinding was like an avalanche in his head. Yuffie… I'm sorry…
"VINCENT!" Cloud shouted.
Uriel snapped his gaze up and saw the blonde rushing at him in midair, gripping the First Tsurugi and blazing with energy. "SNAP OUT OF IT!" Cloud yelled at Vincent. He slammed into Uriel with the force of a thunderbolt, bringing the First Tsurugi down on the insane man in a Braver. The blow liquefied Uriel's entire upper body and turned it back into JENOVA-disease fluid. The wires holding Vincent up abruptly lost all cohesion and he fell to the ground thirty feet below, landing with a sickening crunch.
Cloud pushed off of Uriel and landed in a crouch next to Vincent, the First Tsurugi ready. "RED, GO!"
Uriel was just beginning to reform when a helicopter smashed into him. Red XIII, who had been directing the craft by gripping its yoke with his tail, leaped clear of the vehicle as Cloud sent a fireball shooting straight into the copter's fuel tank. The helicopter went up in a brilliant fireball and Red XIII landed deftly on all fours. He immediately braced himself against the ice, claws digging into it, and spirit energy began to percolate into a massive red ball above his head.
Uriel emerged from the helicopter's explosion, burnt, half-reformed, and enraged, only to be speared straight through the chest by the massive burst of energy from Red XIII's Cosmo Memory. In fifty years, Red XIII had increased the power of the technique, and a densely packed ball of explosive mako followed the initial beam assault. The ball smashed into Uriel and detonated in a fiery burst, sending the Angel flying, completely out of control. He disappeared into the foggy sky a moment later, thrown into a parabolic arc that would end with him smashing into the ice more than half a mile away.
Breathing heavily, Red XIII asked, "You think that killed him?"
"No," Cloud said. "No, I don't think so at all." He pulled Vincent to his feet. The gunman was still reeling with pain, and he clutched at the still-bleeding, perfect cut where his arm had been. "Easy, Vincent. Easy. Red, could you…?"
"Of course," Red XIII replied, bounding forward and wrapping his tail dexterously around Vincent's severed arm. "Will we be able to reattach it?"
"Hold…" Vincent groaned. "Hold it to the wound. I… no energy…"
"We got you," Cloud said. "Give me your Restore Materia, I can use it for you." Vincent unbound the Materia from himself and handed it to Cloud, who took it and Vincent's severed arm from Red XIII. He pressed the arm to Vincent's bleeding shoulder and poured all the power he could into a Cure spell.
The spell accelerated Vincent's already augmented healing, and the severed flesh knitted itself back together as though it had never been severed. Cloud blew out a long, relieved sigh and gave the Materia back to Vincent. "Good as new."
"Only somewhat," Vincent said, sounding better but still looking even paler than normal. "We won't be able to fight him – the only reason you even managed to damage him was because it was a surprise attack and you didn't give him time to react. He could kill all of us before we even got a hit in if he was serious, but he was toying with me. It's the only reason I'm still alive."
"Works for me," Cloud said. "Let's get the hell out of here."
"He can fly. We'll never be able to outrun him."
"It's a good thing, then, that we can fly too," Red XIII said. "Observe."
The moment the last word left his mouth, an attack transport roared down out of the sky and landed in front of the three of them. The cockpit opened and revealed Marlene in the pilot's seat. "Well, what are you waiting for?" she demanded. "Get in!"
The three of them didn't need any further encouragement. It was cramped inside the cockpit, considering it had been intended to seat three at most, but they all fit, and Marlene brought the craft back into the sky, pointed it in the direction of the Protectorate, and gunned the engines.
Vincent blew out a long sigh and slumped wearily in his seat. "Marlene, you are a lifesaver. Thank you."
"Of course I am," she replied airily. "You're very welcome."
"Still. How…?"
"That helicopter had a radio that could cut through the EM interference," Red XIII explained. "Doubtless it was using lost signal-enhancement tech. As soon as we took off from the North Crater, we managed to get a message through to the Protectorate, who had Marlene in an attack transport only ten minutes out just in case something like that occurred. It's a shame we had to destroy the helicopter, but…"
"We have an identical one hidden in Modeoheim," Cloud said. "We can retrieve it at any time."
"Sounds like a plan," Marlene said, altering the course of the transport slightly. "Reeve figured that you would stash any aircraft you happened across at Modeoheim in favor of a stealthier approach, so he gave me its coordinates just in case. We'll go and pick up this helicopter so we can open it up and figure out how its tech works." She looked over her shoulder at Red XIII and said with a smile, "It's good to see you're okay, Red."
"Believe me, I am just as glad as you are," Red XIII replied, his tail wagging. "So. We've escaped with our lives and valuable information, though unfortunately we couldn't do any damage to the Immaculate Swords' base of operations. What do we do now?"
"Knowing what they're planning, there's only one thing we can do," Cloud said.
"Yes," Vincent agreed. "Cloud's right.
"We prepare for war."