Author's: Sorry We were late. No excuses; just too busy. More tomorrow, and hopefully Thursday & Friday Thanks.

It was Otacon who heard the first hoofbeats like drums rumbling the ground.

He came back into camp calmly, intelligently, and collectedly. He had been off looking for any salvage that might have interfered with nearby flora or fauna. So when, as Lara smiled a greeting at him and he went immediately to her side and began whispering in her ear, the cold that came over her was less a construct of training and experience, a dim arctic fever before and during a fight, than a result of being taken completely by surprise.

Their earlier talk had tapered with little fanfare; Vines, at least, seemed to be on their level and for that Lara and Otacon both felt collectively better for it. The .45 Otacon had been given laid with Vines, given a spare holster from the plane, and he was less intent on being sure Otacon was armed than Snake had been. As to what Vines could offer, they hadn't discussed it, but he held the rifle well enough to remind her of what would be required.

It was then unfortunate, she thought, that they would require his ability so soon.

"There are a bunch of people on horses."

She did her best to keep her face blank.

"I don't know how long they've been here. I didn't even hear them, I felt them."

She nodded agreement, raising one eyebrow and faked amusement. She sat down. Otacon followed suit.

Lara looked to Vines, hoping to catch his eyes. Maybe they could play offensively, getting into position before the attack hit and put their aggressors on the defense-

It didn't matter.

In the valley, maybe only a few short miles off, a single pistol shot blew out.

Vines head snapped to its direction. "What the hell was that?"

"Vines." This time, she did catch his sightline.

She slipped one pistol out of her holster, then the other, and his eyes trailed her thumbs as they flicked off the safety.

His nod was almost imperceptible.

They were surrounded on every side save one by trees, and the last was a small rockwall that could easily be vaulted over. There was nothing to hide behind.

Before the world collapsed into a rhythm of bellowing fire, she had only time to realise what the shot in the distance had meant, and between whom the gunfire was being exchanged.

Otacon opened his mouth to speak. She thought she heard, "Vines, can I have-"

In the brush, a woman whispered.

The veridian behind him moved, leaves and shrubs shifting. Lara pulled leather and fired, dual USPs swallowing sound and eating the air itself, a ghost of flame snapped from either barrel and anything aural being swallowed by the staccato hatred of their return fire.

In the periphery of her hearing, horses neighed and stamped and cried out in protest.

Suddenly at her side, Vines opened up with the assault rifle. The rate of fire was easily three, four times the speed of her ability to pull the trigger on the pistols.

A wall had been erected between her senses and her understanding of them. The sound of Vine's rifle might have likewise been multiplied, but she was not hearing sound but feeling its vibration. Lara saw her sight behind her eyes. Every moment was just a series of still images fluttering by without pause.

She became likewise acutely aware of her body, in a way that she hadn't been before. The stance she'd taken, on one bent knee, arms akimbo with a pistol in either, but those were surface ideas. She felt the ground beneath her knee, the moisture seeping into the cloth, the verdancy of its nutrient-rich soil. Vines was close enough to her that, while he fired in bursts, her arms were in near enough proximity that the gasses from the rifle's ejection port were heating her wrists.

Everything was shimmering through the a haze of superunderstanding. Every action was reflex and each moment was only water through a sluiceway of muscle tissue and adrenaline. Thought did not exist.

It felt good. No, it felt great. And that scared her.

Vines nudged her with one cocked elbow, still aiming aside her right flank, and paused only long enough to be heard. "Reload and get your man!"

Lara had counted how many rounds she'd used, and she spat a few more rounds into the direction of their attacks. They had gotten lucky and were not surrounded, but with no cover, offense was the only option, and one that would siphon their resources in only minutes.

Lara fired her last round while stepping carefully, slowly, backwards, and once she was dry she took to one knee to Otacon's left. "We've got to get out of here!" She shouted, certainly she had only been half heard, one pistol's well emptied of its clip and the other holstered during the reload.

A volley of gunfire cut off Otacon's first attempt to question, but the second made it through. "Where?!"

"Snake and Ellie! It's our best shot!" One pistol reloaded and she began work on the second. "Stay behind us!"

Vines was retreating the same manner she had, firing while backing up cautiously, and she traded him spots. They'd had no chance to engage a trade-off for Vines to reload; Lara heard before seeing. A triplicate of horses, and their armed riders, coalesced out of the underbrush.

The beat of hooves ran vibrations up her legs, their gait a persistent, dull drumming at her eardrums. The three riders circled them, with Lara, Vines, and Otacon back to back, having taken to standing in abandonment of their broken frontline.

"Lara."

She looked to Otacon.

"Don't. It's over." He placed one hand on the inside of her elbow, gently pushing for her to lower her twin pistols.

"You're out of your mind if you think-"

"I am afraid very much that the American is correct." A fourth horse emerged from between a gap of trees, moving to the centre of their line of sight. In its saddle sat a woman of forty, thin as a lathe, dark as a nut. She was clothed in loose-fitting camouflage fatigues not unlike Lara's, but with only a tanktop around her midsection, and on top of that was strapped a hunting rifle. Her hair was closecropped, and on her head a perch of auburn crown.

There was also a very obvious burn, veiny with discolouration, running up from her shirt's collar, wrapping itself around her throat like a noose.

"Please, lower your weapons. This isn't about you." Her voice was warm, with a trace of an accent, and brilliantly calm. She might have been quietly ordering another glass of wine. She might have been commanding an execution. There was no inflection save patience; regard; suffering. But no sadness. "I did not expect you see you. Maybe the American military, but not you. You're that Englishwoman, correct? The adventuress?"

Lara stared at the woman. She said nothing.

"My name is Merlose. You seem hardly in need of an introduction, I expect." She looked to Vines. "I was not expecting to find you taking up arms. How would your organisation look at you now?"

Vines followed Lara's example in silence.

"You know this is not a fight either of you can win. Especially not with him." The woman gestured at Otacon. "I would ask why you are here, but if Doctor Emmerich is with you, I believe I have an idea."

"Emmerich?" Vines glanced in his periphery to Lara, and she jerked her head away, as if his scrutiny were an insect bite.

"Merlose, is it? Well, I don't care to chat. Let us alone. Take your horses, and your killers, and crawl back to hell." Lara spoke through gritted teeth. The boiling blood coursing throughout became like sludge. She felt oddly laconic, and what Snake would have called combat high was rapidly crashing to its bottom point. It was queer. She'd never felt it die off so suddenly, and with such adverse effects.

Maybe this is what real defeat feels like, Lara thought. She then pushed this out of her head.

"You are not in a position to bargain, so please, no wasting time." Merlose closed the space between them, placing her ride between herself and the others. The horse was close enough Lara could smell the stable it'd been kept in. The sawdust, powder, and oats, her own sweat. Merlose dismounted, placing her body within inches of the double barrels trained on her. Vines had long since let his rifle drop.

Her hands were at her sides. She stared Lara in her eyes, and in the glare of light filtered through cordate chloro-filtres, the mist that drifted about them was as dreamlike lime breath. "Let us take Emmerich. I guarantee that he is much more important to us than to you. If he designed this, he can fix it."

"I'm not fixing anything for you people." Otacon took a step toward Merlose and attempted to say something else. What it would have been remained unknown: it never got that far.

Lara never saw Merlose's arm shift from her side until Otacon was sent sprawling, spinning in his descent to the forest floor, face skidding along the soil and the pebbles before the rest of his body followed in the crash. In the impact, she heard his glasses shatter.

When Merlose turned back to Lara, she already had a hand around her throat, flying across the small space and parting between the horses. Her grip was a vice wrapped around Merlose's windpipe, pinning her to a tree, one pistol left abandoned in the process.

Gunmetal clicked all around her. Each barrel was a yawning mouth waiting to eat her alive.

"I swear to God if you touch Hal Emmerich like that again, I will break you in half."

Merlose waved one hand away at her confederates, and they dropped their stances, guns at the ready but not trained on them.

When Lara understood what was happening, she'd joined Otacon on the ground.

Her chest burned. The guns were gone.

From her periphery, Vines was being yanked to his feet, one eyes already swelling with a blow Lara had neither seen nor heard.

It was only later that Lara was able to reconstruct it. She had taken a heel to her chest and felt the air filling her lungs evaporate into fire, the veins in her neck threatening to burst with the sudden force of the blow. When that hadn't been enough, she'd taken another blow to the side of her mouth enough that it loosened a bicuspid's residence in her gumline.

Her vision had gone into a blur of fluid colour that was spotted by white pinpricks that shifted like fireflies. When it cleared, she turned her head, gathering herself on her hands and knees, to look at Merlose. She looked down at Lara dispassionately, and said nothing.

Merlose's radio, mounted at her high hips, spit and hissed. She picked it up, held down a button on its side. Lara had barely enough wherewithal to translate the Portuguese. "Keep this short, please."

The other side spoke also in Portuguese. "We have eliminated their second party."

"Alright," Merlose said. "Thank you." She replaced the radio to her side.

In the brief duration of the call, Merlose and Lara's eyes never left each other.

"How did you know he was here? That he designed it?" Lara

Merlose smiled at her. It was like watching tombstones form to make mimeography. Lara thought it was hideous in its ivory satisfaction.

"Whose name," Merlose said, "did you think was on the blueprints?"

Lara stared as much into the barrel of Merlose's bolt-action rifle as she did into the twin marbles planted deep in Merlose's skull.

"Stop."

Otacon was getting to his feet. "I'll go. Just stop. " When he spoke, Lara could see the red tinge lining his mouth like moribund crimson syrup. "No more killing. We didn't come here for anyone to die."

"Hal," Lara whispered.

It didn't matter. Merlose took hold of Otacon's arm, picking up his glasses before doing so and giving them to him, and then mounted her horse.

Lara pushed every bit of humiliation and anger and combative fury into her legs and found them cowardly. Her spirit and her flesh held fast their divergent desires.

Without another word to anyone else, and with Otacon riding with tied wrists behind his female captive, they road away.