CHAPTER 12: THE RAREST KIND OF SUPER MUTANT.

"If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war." -Leo Tolstoy.

The first thing Victoria realized was that she was moving when she awoke. She opened her eyes and saw the ground below her and quickly realized she was slung over the shoulder of a Super Mutant. The crimson redhead felt a jab of pain in her forehead, she figured there was cut or bruise. Victoria slowly moved her eyes and saw the other Super Mutants, and most of them were carrying a person too.

"Stupid human! Stop struggling! Or I break your bones!" one of them screamed at its captive.

"How many of these humans will the Overlord make into us?!" one of them asked the Brute.

"Don't know! Overlord decided that! I would rather eat them!" the Brute frown in anger. "Stupid human with long coat shoot me in eye! Can't see out of eye! I kill him! Kill him good! Smash him into ground!" it placed a hand on its wound.

"Louis..." Victoria whispered to herself, knowing he was the one that shot it. She noticed her weapons were missing, the Super Mutant carrying her had them at its hip in a large sling, along with all the ammo.

"Ha! We still make those humans run scared! They can't stop us!" another shouted out loud.

"Yeah! We take many of their ammo and weapons!" the one carrying Victoria shouted. "This red hair lady have bow! Bows are weak! Arrows are for weaklings!"

Victoria quietly growled in anger, she wanted to put an arrow in them so bad. The Super Mutants soon walked into the prewar town. They were greeted by the other Super Mutants waiting for them as if they were conquering heroes. They took the weapons and ammo to their armory as the ones carrying the prisoners went to the back room. Most of the captives started to regain consciousness and started to panic, but the abominations were quick to make them quiet down by throttling them. Soon the prisoners saw the cages filling the room and Victoria began to panic in terror. The cages filled her with dread, the memories of being a slave made her want to flee her captors, no matter what.

"No! I will not be put in a cage again!" Victoria suddenly shouted and elbowed the Super Mutant carrying her in the back of the head.

"Ow! Stupid bitch! Make head hurt!" the Super Mutant yelled.

Victoria managed to slip out of her captor's grip. She landed hands first on the floor and rolled, she looked to the other captors that were being shoved into the cages. She wanted to help them, but she was no match against all the Super Mutants, especially without weapons. "I promise I'll get help! Just hold on!" she said to them before making a dash for the exit.

But one of the Super Mutants quickly grabbed her by the throat and squeezed hard. "You stupid red hair! You can't escape us! We stronger than all of you!" it tossed her roughly to the floor. "Now I kill you so you don't cause more trouble!"

"Stop, idiot!" the Super Mutants froze up as the Overlord stomped into the room.

Victoria looked up to the aged mutant, trembling slightly in worry. She had heard many things about Overlords, how they command hordes of other Super Mutants and are tremendously strong and much smarter in combat. They were the most fearsome type, just a level below Behemoths.

The Overlord looked down to her, its massive size overshadowing her. It then kneeled down a little and grabbed a few strands of her loose hair and grinned. "Your hair, red like blood! I like blood, I like it when it comes pouring out of weak humans! You too strong to eat! You become one of us!"

"I would rather die!" Victoria bared her teeth at the Overlord.

The Overlord just chuckled and grabbed her by the neck. "You have no choice!" it lifted her up like a rag doll and went to a cage in the corner and tossed her in. The Overlord slammed the door shut and locked it. "We need more of us! You will be more of us! I'll come back for all of you later when I decide what to do!" it pointed to the rest of the prisoners.

The Super Mutants laughed at the people before turning and leaving the room. Victoria got up from the floor and ran to the cage door and started banging and rattling it in a desperate attempt to escape. But she finally gave up after her hands started to hurt and sat back down on the floor, the cage was against the wall. She rested her back against the cage and brought her knees up to her face with her arms crossed on top of them.

"Not a fan of cages, are you?" the town guard in the cage next to her asked.

Victoria looked up and turned her head to him. "I was a slave for most of my life. I've only been freed for more than a month."

"Unfortunately, these Super Mutants aren't looking for slaves. They either want to eat us or make us into them. I don't know which is worse." the guard said as he leaned back against his cage. "Were you serious about getting help?"

"I would never leave people behind like this. If I know my friends, they're on their way here right now." Victoria said to him, a little more confident.

"You mean that Vault dweller, the Ghoul, the mercenary girl, that guy with an attitude on his face and the giant dog?" the guard asked.

"That's them. They might not look like much, but we've been doing good so far together." Victoria relaxed a little.

"I hope they come through. I really don't want to be a Super Mutant's next meal or become them..." the guard sighed.

"Hey! Humans! Shut up or I kill you!" one of the Super Mutants at the door entrance yelled at them.

"I think for now, we should keep quiet and wait for my friends. Don't want to provoke them into harming us." Victoria sighed and leaned against her cage.

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Cavall sniffed another set of tracks and howled to the air. The other four Wanderers came in and started following him again, the footprints were deep in the dirt and in a tight group.

"How did those monsters get ahead of us?!" Doug asked with a pant.

"Super Mutants might be big, but they can move when they want to..." Joe said to him.

"We have to be close. Super Mutants like to make old towns and factories their home. So we'll probably come up to one of those soon." Chloe said with her plasma rifle ready.

"Just keep running, guys! According to my map there an old town up ahead! That's where they have to be!" Louis pointed in the direction his Pip-Boy was showing.

The group pressed on, determined to find Victoria and the other people that were taken.

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Inside the forge room, the strange Super Mutant finished another piece of metalwork. From the look of it, the item seemed to be a small blade with a leather wrapped hilt. The Super Mutant placed the blade on a shelf nearby and was about to start another project as the Brute with the missing eye came in.

"Hey! Overlord wants you to go upstairs!" the Brute shouted lightly at him.

The strange Super Mutant turned to him in confusion. "What Overlord want with me?" it dumb down its speech. "And what happened to your eye?"

"Just go upstairs! We captured humans! Lots of them! And Overlord want you to take shift! We can hear you pounding metal all day! Overlord tired of hearing it!" the Brute shouted before turning away.

"They captured Humans?" the Super Mutant said to itself. "Of course, the factory settlement! The Overlord had talked about it for sometime, but I never thought the Overlord would send Super Mutants to attack. This is really bad, they will either be eaten or turned into Super Mutants. I need to do something."

The Super Mutant walked up the stairs and down the hall to the room where the prisoners were. There was no other Super Mutants stationed at the time. The people in the cages looked up to the Super Mutant but didn't say anything to not provoke it. But the Super Mutant waited several minutes to make sure no other of its kin came to join in guarding the prisoners. It kept looking back at the prisoners before noticing Victoria and her incredibly red hair and raised a brow in intrigue.

"Is there something you want to say?!" Victoria snapped. "I know, my hair is red like blood! Your leader likes it very much."

The Super Mutant was taken aback at her boldness. "Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to stare. But it's true, I have never seen hair so red." it chuckled nervously.

Victoria frowned in confusion. Was the Super Mutant playing with her? "You seem...different from the others. Or are you just screwing with us?"

The odd Super Mutant looked to the entrance one more time to make sure it was clear. "You're right. I'm not like the others. I don't want to hurt people like they do. It's just...wrong, how much they enjoy killing people..."

"Don't listen to that monster! It's a Super Mutant! A freak of nature, all they do is kill people or turn them into Super Mutants! It will bite your head off for fun!" one of the prisoners called to her.

"If it was gonna do anything, then it would have done something." Victoria said to the prisoner as she got up and walked to the front of the cage door. "Right? Do you really not want to hurt anyone?"

The Super Mutant walked over to her cage and stood there for a few seconds. "No. No I don't..."

"Then that means you're one of those unusual kinds I've heard of. You're not like the rest of them, so why are you with these kinds of Super Mutants?" Victoria asked it.

"I...have nowhere else to go. I am a Super Mutant after all. I can only be with my kind or get killed in the Wasteland. It's the only choices I have." the Super Mutant sighed. "But I can't allow this. I won't let you people be eaten or turned into Super Mutants. I'll get you out." it started to reach for the lock and chain.

"Don't! If the others see you doing this, they will kill you." Victoria quickly stopped it. "Just wait, my friends are coming to help us, I know they will."

"How many are there?" the Super Mutant asked.

"Five, not including me." Victoria answered.

"That's a lot of faith to put into a few people. And there are at least thirty of us." the Super Mutant frowned with worry.

"A few people and a large dog." Victoria chuckled. "So for now, let's just wait and see what they do. If I know them well enough, they will cause a lot of problems for the Super Mutants here."

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The Wanderers finally spotted the town and took cover behind its old sign. The words had long faded, making its name lost to time. They spotted two Super Mutants standing guard nearby the street that lead into the town.

"Shit. Since when are they smart enough to do guard duty?" Joe frowned at the abominations.

"If we can't get passed them, then we're gonna have to go around the long way." Doug whispered to them.

"Hold on, I think I got a crazy plan..." Louis held his hand up to make them stay and headed off.

The Vault dweller went around the Super Mutants while staying low until he got a few feet from them and hid behind some junk and waited for them to talk.

"Bah! I hate guard duty! Guard duty so stupid!" one of them groaned.

Louis grinned and changed his voice. "Not as stupid as your face!" he made himself sound like a Super Mutant as best he could near the other one.

"Hey! Don't call me stupid! You stupid idiot!" the one complaining turned and shouted.

"I didn't say anything! Your ears are stupid!" the other shouted and glared.

"Yes you did! You lie! Your brain stupid!" the two Super Mutants lunged after each other and started fighting.

They began throwing their fists, landing heavy blows that would have injured a person with ease. The two then dragged themselves to the ground while fighting, giving the wanderers a chance to move without the abominations seeing them. Soon they came up to the main street of the town and spotted the mayor office with three Super Mutants patrolling the front.

"Now what? A frontal assault will get us killed." Chloe asked with her plasma rifle ready.

"There's only a few of them. We have to drag out the rest of them to get inside to free Victoria and the others..." Louis began to assemble the C4 and arm the detonator. "Doug, you want the honors?"

"Uh, do I want to use some of the most powerful explosives besides nuclear? Fuck yeah!" Doug smiled and took the trigger.

"I assume you're gonna use those explosives to draw the others out?" Joe asked as he was given one.

"Something like that." Louis smiled with the last of the C4 armed.

Everyone took a C4 pack and spread out with Cavall following the Vault dweller. They stayed low and out of sight and got close to the steps of the office and hid behind some junked cars. Each of them peeked over to make sure it was clear before tossing the C4 packs over. The blocks of plastic explosives landed where the Super Mutants were patrolling.

"What that?!" one of the Super Mutants looked down at the C4.

"This..." Doug answered to himself and squeezed the trigger.

The C4 went off, the Super Mutants were blown apart with ease, not even they could survive a direct explosion. Their body chunks hit the ground, which was charred black from the explosion. The Wanderers needed to move fast, the Super Mutants inside most likely heard the explosion and would come to see what was the cause.

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Back inside the cage room, everyone felt the building shake slightly and looked around in confusion. "What was that?" the strange Super Mutant asked.

"If I had a guess, that would be my friends. Although I have no idea where they got such powerful explosives!" Victoria said to it. "I hope they don't bring the whole building down on us..."

"I'm more concerned about the Overlord finding them, you have no idea how brutal that monster can be." the Super Mutant said with concern.

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The Wanderers began to spread out near the entrance of the old mayor office, Doug reached the side of the entrance as a Super Mutant stepped out and raising hell about the explosion. The Wastelander quickly raised his sawed-off and aimed inches away from the Super Mutant's head and fired. Chunks of its head went flying as the body landed hard on the elevated stairs, but soon they saw another Super Mutant with a spiked metal club come running out.

"What all that noise?!" it shouted as two of the mutant hounds came running out behind it.

One of the mutant hounds sniffed the air and turned to see Doug standing near the entrance. It growled and charged for him as he started to reload, but the hound leaped with its mouth wide open. Cavall barked viciously and managed to knock the mutant hound out of the air before it could hurt Doug.

The Super Mutant turned to attack with its club as Louis charged in with his machete ready. He raised the blade up and hacked it right into the back of the yellowish green monster's skull. The blade split the top of the Super Mutant's head with ease, down to the nose as it twitched and slowly fell to the ground.

Cavall and the mutant hound circled each other, both growling with canine fury. The mutant hound barked at Cavall as the large hybrid bared his teeth. The dogs then lunged, the mutant hound snapped at Cavall a few times before he dodged and circled around. The large dog sank his teeth into the mutant hound's shoulder, the mutated beast howled in pain as Cavall let go before it could bite into his side. Cavall then went in for the kill and bit down on the hound's neck, blood spilling heavily onto the ground. The mutant hound struggled and tried to get away, but it made the bite wound worse and ripped it open even more. The mutant hound finally collapsed from blood loss as Cavall bit in deeper just for extra measure. Cavall finally let go, his entire jaw was covered in blood.

The other mutant hound was about to after the group, but a few shells from Joe's combat shotgun put it down. Four more Super Mutants charged out from the building, this time they were armed with assault rifles.

"Stupid humans! We kill you good!" one of them shouted before firing.

The Wanderers took cover behind the old cars as the Super Mutants kept the heat on them. The lumbering abominations screamed and yelled with rage and ready to tear them apart until they finally ran out of ammo. As the Super Mutants were changing the clips, Louis armed another pack of C4 and tossed it over. The explosive landed a few feet from them as Doug happily squeezed the detonator trigger again. The C4 sent the Super Mutants falling to the ground from the explosion, they were alive but barely and crawled on the ground in agony.

They soon came out from their cover and ended the four Super Mutants with some shots and the blade of a machete and fire axe. But their victory was short lived as more then twenty of the Super Mutants came pouring out from the door, all of them holding various weapons. The Brute that Louis shot pushed pass all the other Super Mutants, a bandage was wrapped around the side of its head over the eye.

"You Humans stupid to come here! We eat you! We eat you all! Bones and all!" the Brute shouted.

"Oh yeah, well eat my bone! You ugly shit stains!" Louis yelled while poking his head up.

"Louis, keep your head down! That Super Mutant might recognize you!" Doug warned him.

"Come on, Doug, these things are as dumb as bricks. I doubt it would remember me." Louis shrugged.

The Brute's good eye twitched with rage. "You! You the human that shot me in the eye! I rip you limb from limb and stomp on your corpse!"

Louis palmed his face and sighed. "Are you fucking kidding me?!"

The Super Mutants aimed their guns as the Brute called out the order. "Kill them! Kill them all!"

Once again the five were pinned down by gunfire, and all the Super Mutants were carrying a lot of ammo to keep the fight going. The Brute carried a laser rifle with rapid fire, it clearly had it out for Louis since it was aiming where he was.

"So, anybody got any ideas?" Joe asked them from their cover.

"Not dying is still in play..." Chloe said to him.

"Maybe I can use my V.A.T.S. system to take them down. With my Desert Eagle, it can punch a hole right into their heads." Louis took out the magnum.

"Don't even think about it! There's no way your V.A.T.S. will last that long to take them all down!" Doug quickly stopped him. "And there's way too many bullets flying."

"I think I have a plan." Chloe pulled out four of the grenades they took and tied them together with a cord. "We just need to get into that building. We'll make it seem like we ran away after these go off."

"Nothing else is coming to mind! Roll the dice, Chloe." Louis nodded to her.

Chloe pulled the pins and tossed it over from their cover. The grenades landed near the Super Mutants, they quickly backed away just as the grenades went off. With the abominations distracted, the group ran from their hiding spot and to the side of the building where they spotted a window that was busted and not bordered up. They jumped into the opening and began searching the inside for Victoria.

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Victoria and the Super Mutant soon realized that the gunfire had stopped after the latest explosion, which made them worry. The Super Mutant grabbed the chain and lock of Victoria's cage and broke it off. "There's no more time! You people need to get out now." it then started breaking the locks of the other cages.

"But if that Overlord finds out you're doing this, it will kill you." Victoria said as she stepped out.

The Super Mutant sighed while breaking off the last lock. "Then so be it. I can die with more dignity then any other Super Mutant has."

"In that case, you're coming with us. You helped free us, so now I'm setting you free from this awful place." Victoria smiled a little at it.

"Hey, if we're leaving, it better be now!" the settlement guard said to them.

Victoria and the Super Mutant quickly walked out and went down the hall as the settlement guards went off in another direction. "Are you not coming with us?" one of them asked her.

"I can't. I need to help my friends and get my weapons back. You people just get out while you still can!" Victoria waved for them to go.

The settlement guards ran off as Victoria headed off with the Super Mutant following her. She rounded the corner and into a new hallway section. The redhead suddenly stopped in her tracks when she spotted her friends that came into the hall.

"Victoria!" Louis called out to her.

"Guys! I knew you would come for me!" Victoria smiled as Cavall ran up to her. She petted him in return.

"We're so glad you're okay! We feared the worse!" Louis walked up to her. "How did you even get out?"

"I...had a little help..." Victoria said as the Super Mutant came around the corner.

The group looked to the Super Mutant and aimed their weapons at it. "Victoria, move!" Doug said to her.

Victoria quickly got in their way. "Hold on! This Super Mutant is different. The guy even helped me and the other prisoners get free!"

They slowly lowered their weapons but still kept them pointed. "Victoria, what makes you so sure we can trust it?" Louis asked her.

"I know, but this Super Mutant isn't like the rest. The guy doesn't want to be with the others, and we should at least help until we get out of here and away from this place. I owe the guy that much." Victoria turned her head to the nervous Super Mutant.

Louis sighed while putting his gun away. "Alright. I trust you, Victoria. Now let's just get out of here."

"None of you humans are going anywhere!" the Overlord shouted.

The Super Mutant turned to see the Overlord standing behind it as the Overlord raised its fist and punched the Super Mutant dead center in the chest. The unusual Super Mutant slammed into the wall and almost went through before sliding to the floor. The wanderers were about to shoot the Overlord, but they heard heavy footsteps coming up from behind and saw the rest of the remaining Super Mutants, all pointing their weapons at them and itching to shoot.

The Overlord grabbed the other Super Mutant by the neck and lifted it up. "Traitor! You help humans! We kill human lovers!" it tossed the mutant back to the floor and turned to the Wanderers. "And as for you! All of you will pay! You let our prisoners go! You will not leave this place alive! Or even better...you will become more of us!" the Overlord growled with a deep grin.