"Ready?"
I can barely see his face. Out of the corner of my eye I can just make out the single curving line of his cheek, the edge of his visor sparking blue. Even the white wings are nearly lost to the shadows we're crouching in, looking down. Less than three feet away but there's only the flicker of breathing and the subtler vibration of his voice to tell me he's even there. Hidden deep in this maze of vaulted lines and metal and gridded walkways, and its forty feet to the bottom of this concrete well.
Above us and left, a patrol shakes our hasty perch as they quicktime along the catwalk. Even if they look down they won't see us, tight and sheltered as we are. I can hear two more below and right, their voices carrying in conflicting, muffled waves. Somewhere along the way they learned to mimic randomness, learned to shift the holes in their defenses to make them fluid and harder to target.
I know that was something we taught them, not that it can possibly matter. Our own training is modified to reflect the changes in theirs, a constant escalation of cat and mouse.
We're almost done with the waiting. Predator patient, for the moment to turn into something we can use, for the weaknesses to line up. Some of my attention is on the whisper of metal around us, talking to itself of stress and fatigue and joints welded too fast to hold. A larger part is staring at the drop, dispassionately counting the ant bodies below. But most of me is balanced on the razor of his voice, pitched just loud enough to reach me and no further.
This is as far down as we can get.
In a heartbeat it's all going to change. All this industrious, purposeful motion is going to splinter into a hundred, human fragments. Some will scream while others will run. Some will even fight but most... most of them will only have time to die.
Easy enough on the command bridge to listen to the plan, infinite variations on a theme; take out this machine, remove that target, destroy these lives. Even up here in the darkness it's easy to think only of the numbers, the pattern of advance and attack. But the reality is forty feet below and measured in hot sprays of blood, in the sound of bones breaking. Separated from the here and now by a dozen heartbeats and the thin sliver that is my reply to his not quite question.
There's a smile on my lips as I look down and count the odds one last time. Each time... each time I know I come back a little emptier, a little more hollow. Each time I know I lose something to it. Misplaced in the violence, buried beneath the bodies.
There's a instant, riding the slip of the driver ahead of you, when you know. Everything gone calm and cold, and you don't feel, you don't think, you don't even breathe... you just are. Blown clean away from yourself in the demand for speed and all that's left is what's necessary to win.
It's chilling how little is really necessary.
In the corner of my vision he's more silhouette than substance, barely breathing but on the ground his eyes will burn incandescent, centered in his own storm. He's an angel of vengeance and hell if I can even say whose.
Not Hakase's, though his were the hands that shaped us. Perhaps...mine. I'd like to think that somebody is exacting retribution for what's being carved away.
Habitual gesture to touch the gun at my side, to twitch three shuriken between my fingers. Stare down into the long drop into hell.
"I was born ready," I finally growl back, and the words are pitched just loud enough to reach through the shadows, and no further. "What the hell are you waiting for?"
One day I'll make the mistake of looking into his eyes, and I won't see anything I recognize. But that's okay, because by then he won't recognize anything in mine.