"Your turn, big boss!" Little Cato kept an anti-matter blaster held up and pointed at the reclined figure as he continued to yell. "Come on down off your high chair, why don't you? And fight me, one-on-one!"
The magenta figure uncrossed their legs and stood, simultaneously carrying themselves off the ledge and descending with a forming bridge of dark energy flowing down like a river in slow motion. Both arms raised, the Tenebrus manipulated streams of dark energy as though they were just ribbons, circling them together and twisting them into the shape of a motorbike of their own. The way the figure seemed to weave the void bits together like knitting gave the impression that using their powers was easier than for most of their other fellow Tenebri. Once all the streams of dark energy had strung together, the magenta-colored Tenebrus leader was immediately seated on a motorcycle designed similarly to a chopper model, only with larger and rounder wheels and tires. Without another second wasted, the motorcycle revved and zoomed down right at Little Cato.
"Little Cato!" Gary exclaimed fearfully as he saw what was about to happen.
The ramming impact sent the Ventrexian flying backwards, even rolling a couple times before he managed to stop himself on the building's edge. Little Cato immediately pulled himself back up and took a defensive stance. "Darn you, cheater!" he growled. "You got guts attacking me in the middle of a pose!"
"Maybe now's kinda not the time for posing," Gary loudly remarked from where he stood, a few meters away from where Little Cato and Mad Tenebri's leader were. He could hear some of his teammates talking to each other over the comms.
"HUE, what the tough-tiddy-Wampus is that toy!?" Quinn inquired.
"Just a concept model I discussed with AVA. Sorry." HUE replied.
Little Cato maintained his stance while he watched the Tenebrus biker spin their chopper in circles, grinding the tires against the deck floor while leaving a trail of dark flames behind them. He heard HUE speaking to him, "Try not to get too excited, Little Cato. Remain calm at all times."
"Of course, HUE," Little Cato said in an even tone, "Calm's the best state of mind." He spotted the Tenebrus leader wagging their fingers, beckoning him to make the first move. "Okay! Now you're gonna get it!" he shouted. He threw his mech hands forward and immediately opened fire. The magenta Tenebrus pulled their bike backward, skidding forward at Little Cato only on the rear wheel while using the front wheel to block Little Cato's shots.
"And just like that, my advice was deleted," HUE lamented while the Mad Tenebrus leader rammed their bike into Little Cato.
Both parties flew over the building's edge and began rapidly falling down the side. Little Cato pulled himself upright and threw a mech hand into the wall, digging into said wall in order to slow his fall. Once he felt he slowed down enough, he activated his mech suit's power jump function to leap to the next building, staying on the trail of the rogue biker who had leapt off to that building before he did.
He instantly was already running along the side of the next building as soon as he reached it. He had to pay careful mind to avoid the destructive trail left by the biker along the side of that building he was running on, but then had the idea of using one of the bent metal support beams jutting out as a spring to propel himself forward. Carefully timing his landing onto the beam, he activated his power jump function again and used that combo to launch himself further in the air over the street below, zooming through the air so fast that he caught up to the biker in midair and managed to land a punch on their helmet. Little Cato punched the biker hard enough that they were knocked off their bike.
They both hovered in the air for a moment but then landed on a passing flying car that was going the opposite direction. Their weight made the car veer into the side of another building, to which Little Cato took the opportunity to grab the Tenebrus by the head and scrape them against the wall. A second later, the Tenebrus returned the favor by jamming a shard of dark energy into Little Cato's mech suit. The car they were riding on spun out of control and knocked them both off, sending them flying back into the burning building they had left only moments earlier.
Slamming across the flaming promenade deck of floor 108, they rolled and then bounced up the wall that held the entrance to the deck, where the leader and their lieutenants first stood on. (Gary had to jump out of the way, already shocked out of his mind that his little Spider Cat had somehow chased the leader across the city skyline and then back here in such a short time, never mind that he was in their path just a moment ago) Little Cato stopped his momentum with his mech hand, grabbing onto the ledge to prevent himself from being flung into the dark flames that blazed at the top.
Meanwhile back on the Crimson Light's main ship, Quinn had just left to go back to the Hawk, having made up her mind to get back out there to try and help Little Cato and Gary, or at least look for any possible remaining civilians. On the bridge, HUE and Mooncake were still watching the battle on their monitor screens, with Tribore and Fox watching from another part of the ship.
"Oh Mooncake," HUE mused, "Why is it that my helpful advice is so hard to take seriously?"
"Chookity-chookity, pok-pok chookity-pok," said Mooncake.
"Forget I asked." HUE turned back to the monitor, analyzing data in his digital brain for any sort of strategy that may help Little Cato get an early advantage in his battle. He momentarily looked over other surveillance monitors to see Tribore and Fox getting ready to go back out the airlock, then the engine room, the virtualasium, the broom closet…
"Hey HUE, you seen KVN?" Fox called HUE over his comm link.
"He should be in the broom closet as he was supposed to on Gary's orders. Why?"
"Well, I just went by the closet earlier and thought it was really quiet in there. I looked inside and saw he wasn't in there anymore."
"That is disconcerting." HUE then contacted AVA. "AVA, where is KVN?"
"Well, he's not on the ship, that's for sure," AVA replied.
"Not on the ship? Where was he last?"
"Last I checked, KVN left through the airlock in his mech suit."
"And you let him?"
"HUE, this is KVN we're talking about. You'd do anything just to shut him up."
Little Cato held his ground, his eyes on the armored Tenebrus across from him, though he did notice that the damage on his mech suit's shoulder was already so severe, enough that a section of said shoulder fell off as soon as he saw it. On the other end, the Tenebrus leader lifted a hand to pull in a tendril of dark energy from the flames, solidifying it enough so that they grabbed the tip and broke off a sliver to use as a sword.
"Heh, now we're talking one-on-one!" Little Cato unfolded a part of one of his mech arms to extend an energy blade out of it. He slowly and carefully walked towards the armed Tenebrus as the latter was doing the same thing. "What sick pleasure do you get from wrecking people's homes?"
The Mad Tenebrus leader finally spoke, answering the Ventrexian in a very calm, cool, and airy, yet somewhat imposing tone, "Not our choice. The shadows are a part of us." As soon as both adversaries got close enough to each other, they began swinging away at each other with their weapons. The sounds of clanging pierced the air as their blades connected, flashing in curves from left to right while throwing in a few kicks as their strikes were momentarily in a stalemate. With another strike, the blades of both the Tenebrus leader and Little Cato both locked together, their users staring each other down. The leader continued, "We break things down to return them to the void. That's just how we Tenebri are."
"You're the one who should go back to the void," Little Cato retorted. "All you're doing is darkening everyone's day, so I'm gonna show you the light!"
"Don't kid yourself," the Tenebrus leader talked back, sounding a little more flippant as the blade-swinging continued more intensely. "We all got our dark days. You're not helping either."
"Shut up, you!" Little Cato swung hard with his blade that knocked back the leader a few meters. In response, the leader pulled out another tendril of dark energy from the inferno and threw it at Little Cato like a whip. Little Cato blocked it with a timed anti-matter shot.
The leader switched to generating dark energy in their hands into the shape of dual handguns that shot out a series of dark energy blasts like a machine gun. Little Cato shielded himself with the arms of his mech suit and then his bladed weapon while running at his opponent. Seeing their adversary getting closer, the Tenebrus reached into the dark fire again and pulled out a snake-shaped projection aimed at Little Cato's side, slamming it into him and sending him falling off the ledge and back onto the promenade deck.
Little Cato crashed on his back, momentarily leaving him pained and dazed, but he snapped his eyes open to watch the Tenebrus leader jumping down straight for him. He jumped away before his enemy could smash him into the floor and swung over the edge and through the windows on the next floor below. Firing up the accelerators on his mech suit's feet again, Little Cato zoomed across the flaming room, having charged up his mech suit's anti-matter blasters and shot directly above through the ceiling to blast at the Tenebrus leader standing above. The leader jumped away at the shots coming at them from below, backflipping and then reaching for the flames above them. Using their powers, they tore several metal beams from the window frames above and set them ablaze with dark fire before throwing them down to where Little Cato was below like a rain of swords or javelins.
Down below, Little Cato dodged the flaming beams left and right as they pierced through the ceiling, careful not to get caught in any of the little fiery shockwaves produced by their impact on the floor. He shot again, using his split-second view of the leader through the cracks to aim directly at them. At the same time, the leader up above threw a stronger blast from their hand at the approaching anti-matter shots, letting out an agitated battle cry. The collision of both adversaries' projectiles of energy caused a gigantic black cloud to explode and balloon across the whole deck.
The noise slightly died down and the dust had begun to dissipate when the Tenebrus leader created another dark matter sword. They then began walking to the part of the ruined deck floor where they speculated Little Cato to be in the floor directly below.
Gary stepped quietly, stealthily making his way behind the armored Tenebrus while keeping his anti-matter pistol raised and pointed at them. He watched how far and how fast the leader was moving, and once he felt he was close enough, pulled the trigger, shooting at the bigger target. The few little shots of anti-matter didn't do much, mostly amounting to just bouncing off the Tenebrus's shell. The leader stopped and then turned their head to look directly at the human.
"Oh crap," Gary whispered. The Tenebrus raised their free hand, the one not holding their sword, and split open the top layer of the deck floor below Gary with a shadowy energy-like miasma, making him fall down into the shallow hole. Then they pulled the ripped floor layer back into place, surrounding the man and trapping him up to his elbows, immobilizing him. They then turned to go on their way, not giving a care that Gary was commenting to himself, "Well, I'm out of ideas."
The Tenebrus leader walked closer to Little Cato's position, twirling their sword while doing so. They stopped in front of the hole and took a ready stance as they heard noise coming from below. The noise got louder…and out of the hole sprung a yellow orb-like robot piloting a green mech suit.
"Eeyyyy! How's it going?"
The shock of such a random and unexpected sight made the Tenebrus falter for a moment, which at the same time, Little Cato crashed through the wall on the same floor next to them and smashed into their armored body with the brunt of his own mech suit.
"KVN!?" Gary shrieked. "The hell you doing out of your closet!?"
"Stay calm, stay calm Gary," KVN answered with a pretentiously courteous tone. "I'm here to provide reinforcements." He spotted that Gary was stuck halfway in the floor, a rather tight bind. "Omigosh! Gary, you're stuck!" He then took off running towards the trapped human. "Have no fear! KVN is here! To the rescue!"
"NO! NONONO!" Gary was now wriggling with ferocity. "YOU STAY AWAY! FAR AWAY FROM ME!"
Meanwhile, Little Cato had just sent the Tenebrus staggering. Taking a little moment, Little Cato fired with his handheld anti-matter pistol again, getting in a few more useful shots even as his opponent kept trying to block them. The armored Tenebrus did a backflip and slid on the flooring to put some distance between them and the Ventrexian.
However, what caught Little Cato off guard was not any other sort of new move or trick up his enemy's sleeve, but rather as soon as they stood upright, their helmet's left side cracked open and shattered, revealing their face: a humanlike visage of light blue skin and one eye with a pink iris glaring from behind a head of dark pink hair, a wide bang of hair covering the other side. Apart from the rigid aggressive facial expression, the face looked feminine and indicative of a grown Serepentian woman.
"What the –!?" Little Cato gasped. "You're a girl?" He didn't have any time to wait for an answer as a flare of dark nebulous energy on the cracked shoulder of his mech suit caught his eye, moving like it was being controlled and tearing the rest of the shoulder apart. It moved and burst violently, instantly and progressively damaging the rest of the mech suit as it yanked Little Cato from side to side.
"Yeah?" the armored Serepentian female beneath the mask was now snarling as she approached Little Cato in a power walk, "Well, who brings a cat to a firefight?" She whipped her dark energy sword at Little Cato at every angle, hacking away at his mech suit piece by piece, breaking it apart as he could only stagger. "Get out of my way unless you got a death wish. You're lucky I'm not doing the wishing on you." She continued to relentlessly slash at Little Cato until there was nothing left of his mech suit, the Ventrexian himself laid bare sitting on the deck floor staring down the tip of an energy blade pointed at his face. "You've got no armor on now, just your own limbs and fur," the Serepentian continued, "Give up already."
Little Cato scowled for a second, but then curled his lips into a smirk. "Don't act so high and mighty, queen bee! You should know I'm…no, actually 'we' are…" he waited for it, "…a rescue team!" The moment he said that, the Serepentian was suddenly interrupted by a series of aggressively fired anti-matter shots, prompting her to turn around to face her attacker.
Approaching her at high speed, Tribore was firing with his mech suit's anti-matter blasters on all cylinders, not letting up for a second. The Serepentian was rapidly trying to block the shots with her blade while wrestling to get some space to put up a dark energy shield.
Right behind her, Fox had just finished climbing over the building's edge in his mech suit and finished with a high leap, letting out a bellowing war cry as he descended with both mech suit fists ready to smash into her. The Serepentian leapt out of the way of Fox's strike and landed onto him before jumping off.
Her escape attempt didn't last long as Quinn's Hawk blew through the smoke onto the scene, with Quinn rapidly spinning the Hawk around to collide with the Serepentian, knocking her back onto the promenade deck.
As she tried to recover from her hard landing, she was barraged by another bunch of anti-matter shots coming from a now-freed Gary who was running at her and shooting at the same time, with KVN right behind him shooting at her as well.
The Serepentian moved to try and flee another direction, but Gary managed to grab a component of Little Cato's mech suit lying on the floor and throw it in her direction, making contact with her armor and latching on tight.
"HUE!" Little Cato called out.
"You got it, dawg." HUE pressed a button on his holographic keyboard to activate a command, with Mooncake uttering an excited "Chookity pok" in the back.
All the separated pieces of Little Cato's mech suit suddenly shot out threads at the Serepentian, binding her based on aiming at the component attached to her armor. Once they were all tethered to her, they reeled themselves in, not even her attempts to slash them away doing her any good. They all bunched together, encasing her inside this new shell and shut down her struggling movements with a hissing cloud of vapor as they finally sealed. She was officially stuck.
"How's that?" Little Cato taunted, carefully walking towards her with his anti-matter pistol raised and pointed at her. "That right there is our rapid nega-kinetic suppressant." He stood right in front of her and raised a foot to stomp at the casing to split it open, to which he fired his anti-matter pistol at the same time to seal the Serepentian's wrists and ankles in crystals. With the leader finally immobilized and in submission, Little Cato could finally rest easy as he took an assertive posture and continued his speech to her while surrounded by his friends. "You just got a taste of real anti-Tenebrus teamwork, courtesy of the Infinity Guard's special op-team: Crimson Light!"
He leaned in closer until he was almost nose-to-nose in the Serepentian's face. "You amazed now? No one ever brought a cat to a firefight because they were desperate!"
"You're not the first one," the Serepentian only glared back with a deadpan tone of voice.
"The name's Little Cato," the Ventrexian pointed at himself, "I'm the deadliest Spider Cat in Crimson Light and the Infinity Guard! Keep that in mind for any other cats you meet, Mad Tenebrus!"
The Serepentian stared back before she answered, "It's Ash. Ash Graven." [-ASH GRAVEN-]
The two opponents, the Ventrexian Little Cato and the Serepentian Ash Graven, continued to stare each other down, maintaining the strong gaze that they had been holding towards each other since the first moment they met and fought.