I do not own Avengers or any of the characters.
First Assignment
Sirens wailed as police and SWAT both responded to not one but two separate reports of an attack. One was reported as a machine gunner in a skyscraper lighting up a street. Another was reported as unknown projectiles killing people. As SWAT swung onto a road heading for the machine gunner's tower, bullets began to rip out of one of the windows, slamming into them in a continuous rain of deadly projectiles, not stopping until two of the SWAT troop transports bulletproof windows had shattered and the drivers died while the other six pulled off onto side streets.
At the other end of the city, Police and SWAT swarmed into an office building where a CEO, his chosen successor, and their secretary had been supposedly sniped. However, there'd been no gunshot, and no one had even known until someone walked in to ask the CEO a question. However, as soon s all of the troops were inside, a shining white arrow made of compressed energy, one with a shaft about an inch across and a tip about three inches across, sped down toward the cops. One of them looked, seeing a figure in dark clothes, a hood up, and too far away to make out their face, holding a similarly shining white bow. As he registered the arrow speeding toward them, noticing it out of pure luck with the bright daylight outside the window helping hide it, he only had time to shout for the briefest of moments before the arrow punched through the window, then hit in the center of the room and erupted into a blinding white explosion, demolishing the corner office. Bits of police and SWAT officers fell to the streets below the building, causing a panic, as did the building making up the floor of the office, and the ceiling of the roof just below it, breaking free from the explosion and also plummeting to the ground.
The archer smirked, pulling his neck gaiter up and turning sprinting to the edge of the building and dropping the ten feet onto the lower section of the roof. He walked calmly to the door leading into the stairs, but as he opened it and looked down the stairwell, he saw troops sprinting up them. One leaned out and looked up, a man with his hair in a military-style fade and gelled to make it stand up on top, a handsome, if rough, face, and a tight, sleeveless black shirt and pants, only to instantly jerk his head back as a white arrow sped past, hitting in the bottom of the stairwell and exploding, the stairs trembling. The archer walked back out onto the roof just as the stairs collapsed, crushing anyone who hadn't gotten off of them fast enough.
He smirked, walking to the edge of the building and looking around. The closest building was a skyscraper about five hundred meters away. He hummed thoughtfully just as he heard someone drop to the roof behind him. He turned, seeing the same guy as had looked up at him standing there, holding a bow of his own, a recurve, arrow aimed at his chest.
"Agent Clinton Francis Barton, A.K.A. Hawkeye," the archer identified the man. "I figured you'd survive the collapsing stairs. Anyone else make it?"
"I'm not sure," Barton said. "But I'm going to make you pay anyway."
"Will you?" the archer asked, smirking behind his neck gaiter. "Tell me, how's Natasha Romanoff recently? Or does she prefer Natalia Alianovna Romanoff?"
"How do you know that name?" Barton demanded. "Who are you?"
"You'll never know," the archer smirked before tipping backward and falling.
Barton shouted in surprise, sprinting after him and looking down just as the archer winked and saluted lazily, a second before a window beside him exploded, the fireball engulfing him for a moment before clearing, leaving the archer nowhere to be seen. Barton swore, then headed back into the building through the higher roof, moving to help evacuate the building.
As Barton was after the archer, Natasha Romanoff was sprinting up the stairway of the machine gunner's building, taking them three at a time. Finally, she kicked the door open, entering an emptied out office area where support pillars ran through the room, and the windows had been broken every so often. Bullet casings littered the ground, along with ammo belt links, all of the bullets 7.62 millimeter bullets, though the machine gun was also nowhere to be found.
Natasha held her two Glocks ready and moved to step around the square of plaster and cement the stairs occupied, being the only thing taking up any floor space on that level of the building, and turned the corner, spotting her target instantly and opening fire. Her target had a black sweatshirt, with a second collar inside to cover the lower half of her face, had black pants, and had black shoes. As soon as Natasha opened fire, the girl was moving, sprinting to the side and pulling an FN 5.7 from her sweatshirt and beginning to fire at Natasha rapidly. Natasha swore, taking off as well, making herself a hard target. Her guns, together, held fourteen rounds. The shooter's held twenty rounds, plus one in the chamber.
The shooter was fast and agile, sprinting constantly, changing directions, and soon began to close the distance. Natasha kept a careful count of the shooter's shots, even as her own pistols ran dry. However, Natasha's last couple of shots were misses because the shooter sprinted up the side of the stairwell's wall, then flipped backward, landing safely as Natasha dropped her pistols, moving to get in too close to be shot.
The shooter drover the muzzle of her pistol at Natasha's face, and Natasha leaned out of the way, the gun firing. Fifteen. Natasha threw several punches at the shooter, who blocked them expertly, trading several strikes as well before sweeping a punch to the side with her gun hand, then twisting her own arm to aim at Natasha. Natasha spun out of the way, barely avoiding another shot. Sixteen. The shooter jumped and swung a roundhouse kick at Natasha, who ducked under it, sweeping the shooter's support leg as soon as she landed. She dropped to her hands and feet and shoved off the ground, leaping a foot into the air, over Natasha's other leg as it kicked at her face. As she landed, she pulled her feet up under her and kicked at Natasha, who caught her feet and fell backward. The shooter kicked Natasha under the chin and flipped backward to her feet. Natasha lunged, grabbing her gun arm and shoving upward just as three shots went off. Nineteen. The shooter slammed her forehead into Natasha's then push kicked her. Natasha flipped to her feet and dove to the side as two shot hit the floor, skipping off of the tile and shattering the window behind Natasha.
Natasha sprinted forward and began to trade blows with the shooter, who continued to use the pistol as a blunt weapon. They traded punches, kicks, elbows, knees, always blocking the strikes until Natasha finally found an opening. She caught the shooter's gun arm as she jabbed at her, then twisted, grabbing her tricep with her free hand and hurled the shooter over her shoulder.
"You're at a disadvantage, you know," Natasha said. "You're a good fighter, but you're not beating me in hand-to-hand combat. And you've used up all twenty one shots."
"Have I?" the shooter asked, then spun, raising the pistol.
Natasha instinctively hurled herself to the side just as four shots rang out. Two missed, one punched through Natasha's right side, and one through her right thigh. Natasha swore loudly, scrambling back behind the wall and holding a hand to her side. She shouldn't have more bullets. Natasha had been careful. She had counted the shots. She couldn't have miscounted that badly, could she?
Just then, the door, which the shooter had ended up in front of swung open, SHIELD agents in full gear storming out of it, only to die in a hail of FN 5.7 fire. Natasha's eyes widened as she continued to count the shots. Twenty eight. Thirty. Thirty five. Thirty nine. She pushed herself up and looked into the stairwell just as the shooter shot a grappling hook from her belt buckle into the center of the stairwell's ceiling, slipping her pistol into her sweatshirt's pocket, then reached under it and pulled out a pair of modified Walter P99s with extended mags, before leaping into the center of the stairwell, flipping upside down and spinning, squeezing the triggers. Both pistols roared to life, spraying bullets into the SHIELD troops lining the stairs as she spun and descended, slaughtering them.
Natasha stared in shock as the shooter continued to fire for almost ten seconds without letting up at all before stopping. A moment later, the cable jerked slightly before beginning to sway as the shooter detached from it and left. Natasha did some mental math. Over two hundred rounds without reloading, give or take. That wasn't possible. She dropped against the wall, grimacing before radioing for a medical team for the entire force that had gone after the shooter.
"They both escaped you?" Fury asked.
"To be fair, mine was highly trained in hand-to-hand combat, and also had the ability to fire bullets from her guns endlessly," Natasha said. "She fired thirty nine shots from an FN 5.7 without reloading, then sprayed about two hundred out of a pair of P99s that she modded for full auto while spinning down a stairwell, upside down without letting up her fire to reload. I think it's fair that I wasn't able to catch her."
"And yours?" Fury asked Barton.
"Mine was able to make a bow and arrow out of energy," Barton said. "He shot an arrow into the base of the stairwell and the explosion collapsed the whole thing. I managed to get onto the roof of the next building over in time to find him, but he stalled by proving he knew all about me and Nat, calling both of us by our full names, including her Russian one, then jumped off the building, got caught in an explosion, and then was gone a second later when the flames and smoke had cleared. Whoever these two are, they're good."
"They're dangerous," Fury said. "How many people did each of them kill? A couple dozen for one, and a hundred for the other? Maybe two hundred?"
"At least we know one thing," Natasha said. "Whoever they are, they clearly work together. They forced us to split our forces to keep me and Agent Barton from working together against either of them. They're obviously teammates."
"You just can't help yourself, can you!?" the archer demanded, shoving the shooter. "You just can't help but draw attention to yourself!"
"Me!?" the shooter scoffed. "You're the one who dropped part of a building into the street!"
"You were shooting up two entire streets with a goddamn machine gun!" the archer snapped. "You drew in all the cops in the entire city! If you hadn't drawn so much attention, I could have killed my target and walked away! But nooo, you had to go and draw out every fucking pig alive and go on a hog hunt!"
"Oh please!" the shooter snorted. "You weren't going to do just your target! You killed those three people in the office to draw in cops as well, then blew up the office just to drop the piece of building on your target! I'll give you points for disguising your assassination as a freak accident, and making them think you were targeting someone in the office, while making your actual target look like collateral damage, but you can't blame the cops showing up on me!"
The archer sighed. "You might have a point. Still though, I'd have to say you disguised yours better than me. You killed damn-near two hundred people to disguise your assassination."
"At least you admit I'm better than you," the shooter said.
"Excuse me?" he growled. "Better? I don't fucking think so. You're only good at your job when you can spray a machine gun for twenty minutes. You don't have the finesse to be a real assassin."
"Oh and you do?" she snarled, yanking a pair of knives from the back of her belt. "Let's test that shall we?"
She lunged, slashing at him rapidly, both knives held in reverse grip, and he huffed, forming a pair of knives of his own from white energy. He knives were thin, short, black ones with grips contoured specifically for her hands, and with five inch, double-edged blades and ring pommels. His knives were a pair of blades and a grip, both blades being short, basically shaped ones, but they were as solid as a normal blade, so he was able to use them to block and deflect her blades with them, though he generally stuck to using his forearms to block hers, that way he didn't need to worry about her blades.
He kicked at her and she flipped sideways over it, slashing the side of his calf, then lunged, stabbing at him, only for him to spin around it, slashing her across the back before slamming a kick into her side. She staggered away, then spun, hurling one of her knives, stabbing it into his right shoulder. He shouted in pain, ripping it back out just as she reached him, already having replaced the knife with an identical one. He caught her forearms, then stripped both knives from her, only for her to tackle him, another knife seemingly appearing in her hand as she stabbed downward at him. He caught her arms, holding her back, only for her to drop her full weight onto the back of the knife, driving it down at his face. He jerked his head to the side, barely avoiding the blade before slamming a knee into her side and rolling them both over, forming a blade along the back of his arm and extended out six inches past his fist, then drove it down at her, only for her to sweep it out to the side, allowing it to stab into the ground instead. She stabbed up at his side and he caught her forearm, her free hand holding the back of his right elbow to keep his blade in the ground.
"That is enough!" an older voice snapped, both stopping instantly, his blade faded as they both scrambled to their feet.
He glanced at her as she slid two knives, exactly the same as the ones scattered around them, into her concealed sheaths, then turned his attention back to the man glaring at them. He was the head of their organization, and both of their master. He was a surprisingly kind old man, for being the head of a secret organization of assassins. He had grey hair that was beginning to turn white, a receding hairline leaving more hair in the middle of the top than to either side of it, a white mustache, a pair of aviator glasses with reddish brown lenses, a kind, aged face, a kind smile, and a wrinkled forehead from smiling too much. He was also a master of dozens of martial arts styles, and knew more than anyone either assassin had ever met about super powers, having taught each of them how to control theirs.
"You two never change," the man said. "You've been trying to kill each other for years. What's the problem?"
"He exists," the shooter grumbled.
"She's a cunt," the archer growled.
Both glared at each other, only for their master's walking stick, which hid a long, thin blade, to smack them both over the head.
"You two are both the best I've ever trained," their master said. "But you're also the most stubborn! You're arguing about each other's methods, when you should be thinking about the real problem with your missions today! How did SHIELD know where to find you so fast?"
Both fell silent, glancing at each other before frowning. The shooter may have been obvious, but the archer's best skill was stealth, and he had only fired twice, by which time SHIELD was almost all the way up the building. Both shook their heads.
"If it becomes a recurring problem, I'm going to assign Nick Fury to both of you," the man said. "Cut the head off the snake, and the rest will follow. For now, William, Olivia, I'm ordering the two of you to get along. No more fighting. No more arguing. And no more trying to kill each other. Understand?"
"Yes, Master Stanley," both bowed.
He dismissed them and they headed back to their rooms. As they reached their doors, Olivia spoke up.
"It's your fault he's mad," she snapped.
"Me?" he scoffed. "You attacked me first! As always!"
"Well maybe I wouldn't if you weren't such an asshole!"
"Cunt!"
"Bastard!"
"Bitch!"
"Pussy!"
"Sister fucker!" He slammed his metal door shut not two seconds before bullets began to slam into it, Olivia's shriek echoing even over the gunfire, demanding he open the door and let her kill him.
"No shooting in the base!" their master's voice thundered over the PA, drowning out both Olivia and her guns, which stopped firing instantly. "One more time and you're both going to be punished!"
William groaned, walking to his bed and dropping onto it, kicking his shoes off. It was her fault. It was always her fault. She was a cunt. He had tried to be nice and welcome her when she had arrived a few months after him, and she had responded by threatening to kill him. And she had only grown more and more insufferable as the years had passed. He sighed, closing his eyes, resolving himself to sleep until his next job.
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