The Shellraiser raced down the city streets again the next night.

"So, you have another boneheaded plan to fail us again?" Raph asked from inside. "Or are you just putting us on a mission for the third night in a row for some weird team-building exercise none of us wants a part of?"

Leo's grip on the steering wheel tightened. "We have to stop the Kraang," He replied. "Donnie said there's something new in the mutagen, which means the little brain blobs are up to no good."

Raph held his hand to his mouth in mock surprise. "What? The Kraang? No good? I thought that they'd be out visiting sick people and giving children Choco-Logs."

"Mmm," Mikey said. "Choco-Logs are delicious! Although I don't think the Kraang would be giving them out, Raph..." He looked at his feet. "It seems a bit too nice for them."

Raphael didn't even bother hitting Mikey on the back of the head. He just shot his little brother a disappointed look.

The Shellraiser turned into an alley and stopped.

Leonardo stood. "We're here. This is the place where the rest of the mutagen was to be shipped. Donnie, you brought it?"

Donatello held up a vial of a black substance and nodded. "If we can put this into the mutagen, it should contaminate it to the point they can't use or clean it."

"Alright, team. Let's go."

Swiftly, the four exited the Shellraiser and dodged into the shadows. They gathered by the building, their backs to the wall, and turned to Leo for further instructions. He pointed upward before slipping his shinobi claws over his hands and proceeding to scale the wall.

It wasn't a quick task. The building was quite tall and the windows were all several stories up, but eventually, they made it to an entrance and observed the room around them. The atmosphere of the building told them they were in the right place. Veins of a glowing bright pink substance lined the walls, their contents probably providing the energy that powered any Kraang facility. Other than the ominous glowing ducts, the room was pretty dull. It was filled with monochromatic desks and tables.

"Okay Donnie," Leo whispered, "Any idea where they'd keep the mutagen?"

"I'd guess on the higher stories," Donatello replied. "This place seems to be disguised under the pretenses of being an office, and if it's anything like TCRI, then their human workers would only have access to the lower levels, while they carry out their less well-known plans on the higher ones." He noted how Mikey tensed at the mention of TCRI and turned to his younger brother. "Don't worry, it's a smaller building. Shouldn't be that hard to get to the mutagen."

Leonardo peeked out the room's door and waved for them to follow him. They snuck to the end of the hallway and stopped. Leo glanced around the next corner and gestured for them to wait until a patrol had passed. He then ran to the stairs and held the door open for his brothers to sneak into the staircase. It vaguely registered in his mind that the Kraang patrol that had passed them was still continuing to the opposite end of the hallway. Strange. Usually Raphael would have taken them out from behind once they had passed.

The thought quickly vanished from his mind when the red-clad turtle passed him after Donnie and Mikey, and he refocused his attention on closing the stairway door behind the four of them without making a sound.

A tiring amount of stairs later, they were at the top of the building.

"Chances are, they'll keep their most important projects here, furthest from human eyes," Donnie said.

"Which will also mean the security will be heavier, so stay on your toes, ninjas." Leonardo signaled for Raphael to stand beside him, and indicated that Michelangelo and Donatello were to follow.

Leo flung the door open and charged out of the staircase. As he had suspected, the room was filled with Kraangdroids, all hovering about the giant vat of mutagen that dominated the center of the room, at least two stories high. Numerous pairs of pink robot eyes focused on the turtles.

"Booyakasha!" Mikey yelled as he jumped into the air. Lasers flashed by him, but none quite kept up.

Leonardo started to clear a path in the crowd for Donnie to get to the mutagen. Raphael was right behind him, doing the same.

Donnie looked at Raph and Leo as they stationed themselves on either side of him, using their weapons only to attack nearby bots and deflect incoming laser blasts. He sighed and stared at the ground. Didn't anyone trust him to take care of himself? "ACK!" he cried as Leo pushed him aside, diverting a laser beam that would have hit him squarely in the back of his head.

"Pay attention, Donnie!"

The purple-banded turtle sighed. Maybe they had a reason not to. Blushing, he hurried to follow his leader's advice. Maybe if he did this quickly, his slip-up would be easily forgotten. "Up there! I should be able to put it into the mutagen from that opening!"

Leo followed his genius brother's gesture to the top of the vat. He nodded to the purple-clad turtle, then to Raphael, then began to fight his way towards a ledge that would allow them to climb the enormous tank of mutagen. Upon getting closer to the ledge, however, he realized that it would not be high enough for Donatello to jump to the top of the vat from.

Leonardo noticed that Mikey wasn't with them, but in a different part of the room, taking down Kraangdroids left and right. He had a space cleared out for himself to fight and seemed to have no trouble swinging his nunchucks every which way to misdirect the bots, giving himself enough time to dispose of those in front of him before moving on to the next round.

"Mikey! Get Donnie to the top of the tank!"

Michelangelo used one nunchuck to fend off the attacking bots while he threw his other one, in kusarigama form, to hook around the rim of the vat. He took a running start and swung onto the ledge where Donatello was waiting before helping him climb to the top.

Leo took a second to note how instantly and effortlessly his brother had switched tasks before continuing to defend the ground by the ledge.

Donnie reached the tank's rim and fished for the vial of murky substance in his belt. He tipped the vial into the mutagen and watched as the substance spread in a darkening cloud, turning glowing green into muddy grey. "Got it! Let's get out of here!"

No one needed to be told twice. They raced for the door, and after seeing to it that all three of his brothers were safely in the stairwell, Leo slammed it behind them, cutting off the torrent of lasers.

"Quickly, before they call for reinforcements!" Leonardo said.

They practically flew down the stairs to the floor from which they had come, and only stopped when they were in the hallway containing the entrance to the room where they'd accessed the building.

"Well," Leo said, a grin growing on his face, "About time we had a victory."

Michelangelo mirrored his grin with a nod. Then he looked behind Leo and it fell from his face, and his pupils shrunk to pinpoints.

Leo heard Mikey yell a warning at the same time a laser shot rang out.

"AH!"

Raphael stumbled forward and collapsed, letting Leo and Donnie see the Kraangdroid patrol that had shot him.

Leo hadn't even thought about the patrol on this level. Wouldn't Raph have taken them out as he passed?

Leo then remembered noting that Raph surprisingly hadn't trashed the Kraangdroids when they had come up and cursed himself for forgetting it. And he had let his guard down in an enemy lair!

Donatello tried to help Raph up, but Raphael brushed him off. Donnie let out a relieved breath upon realizing that Raphael maintained his tough demeanor. Alarm immediately returned to his mind when he noticed that the red-clad turtle winced while doing so.

Mikey reduced the pair of Kraangdroids to fragments.

"Let's go," Leo said.

They climbed out of the window, down the wall, and into the Shellraiser. Leonardo immediately started it and drove away. He had made the mistake of hanging around an enemy lair longer than necessary once today.

"Where did it hit you?" Donnie asked, kneeling beside Raph's chair.

Leo's stomach churned at the poorly masked concern in his question. His knuckles tightened around the steering wheel when Donatello hissed- the injury Raph showed him couldn't have been insignificant.

Leonardo thought through the events of the fight. Not one time had Raph recklessly rushed in or tried to take on more than he could handle. He gritted his teeth and internally cursed himself. Had he been foolish to ignore Raphael's accusations of him being a poor leader? He sighed. "How does it look, Donnie?"

"I'm not sure," Donatello said. "I'll have to examine the burn with some tools I have in my lab before I say. But I can tell you from experience, getting hit by one of those lasers is no small deal. It hurt. A lot." He looked Raphael in the eye and his voice grew stern. "So don't try to say you're not hurt, don't push yourself, and tell me if it gets any worse. Got it?"

Raph groaned at this instruction.

Donnie took his response as a good thing. It at least told him that Raph was going to take his advice, however reluctantly.

Leo, on the other hand, strangely found himself hoping for Raph to argue against this order, although he couldn't place why. Raphael's unwillingness to fight it was disconcerting.

Mikey drummed his fingers together in the heavy silence that followed. He stared at the screens showing the streets passing by, and somehow found a way to talk about a restaurant's sign and how it reminded him of a really good comic he had read once. He spent minutes rambling on about whatever topic he thought of next, and though none of his brothers joined in his conversation, they were grateful that he was keeping the silence at bay.

When the Shellraiser was parked safely beside the turnstiles, Leo entered the lair with the bitter thought that although they had won the battle, they had more problems now than when they had left.