Hi guys, sorry for the late update. I wrote this one a long time ago. (It's almost to the end of the story)
Chapter 15:
Valka stared at her stomach, the sharp tip of an ancient, dark brown, World War Two time period bayonet stuck out from her body. It was her bayonet that she carried on her belt the whole time. Her fresh blood quickly dyed her uniform. She looked down from the HK 416 that she was holding with surprise. Valka was paired up with Astrid and two other SWAT officers, and after the team breached the door their job was to take control of the guest bedroom and bathroom of the first floor. The rest of Team Foxtrot and SWAT would take care of the rest. A platoon of North Carolina National Guard surrounded the house from outside and brought in armored vehicles.
Astrid would never betray her, Valka thought, and she trusted the SWAT. Their commanding officer was her classmate in the police academy.
Then the pain rushed into her brain, almost tearing apart every single nerve along the way. Even though she was always a field officer, she had never been severely wounded, at least not being stabbed by a bayonet.
"Really surprised, aren't you? I like the way you look when you are surprised and in pain," a familiar voice came into her ears as if the speaker was whispering to her.
Valka couldn't turn back yet since whoever stabbed her was still holding the bayonet and was trying to push it more into her body. She squinted her eyes.
Valka wanted to know why Astrid and the two SWAT weren't doing anything. They were standing only a few feet behind her. But two gunshots of an MP7 answered her question. The two officers laid down on the ground, each with a hole in the middle of their forehead.
She recognized the sound of that gun. Even though they were gunfighting on the second floor Valka could still recognize them. Only Astrid's MP7 made that sound. The clear chopping sound. Valka redesigned the barrels of that two MP7s, made them quieter while added more spin to the bullets.
"Yes, it's me the whole time," Astrid said in a tone that Valka had never heard before, like the forked tongue of a dangerous serpent.
Valka tried to say something to her earphone, but Astrid grabbed her headset and threw them into the corner.
"You are… Albert Manstein," Valka spat out the words in pain, but with a faint smile on her face. "Why did I only run face-id on men?"
"Because you are stupid?" Astrid chuckled as she pulled out the bayonet from Valka's body and threw it on the ground, the metal clanged as it hit the ground and drops of blood fanned out onto the carpet.
The sun was right above the house by now. Even though they had already surrounded the house at 3 am, they waited until noon to breach.
Meanwhile, when Team Foxtrot and SWAT were battling David, Nina, and Evan in that house, Hiccup and Emma were presenting their finished product to three DPA agents who came to pay the second half of the payment, two million dollars. Sam game Hiccup a small empty field along the trees behind Asgard to present the weapon to the representatives of DPA. Three armed guards were with them.
Astrid sent Hiccup a message before they breached that house and told him everything was fine and he shouldn't worry about her, so Hiccup woke up the next morning and went to Asgard and dived back into Project Bifrost right away.
"Congratulations!" the leading agent clapped his hand as he watched an apple turning into an ice cube in the shape of an apple as a visible laser-like beam struck it.
The molecules inside the apple had a speed 300 miles per hour faster than an airplane slowed to the speed of a bicycle when Hiccup fired the weapon armed with Bose-Einstein Condensate.
The so-called "weapon" didn't look like a conventional weapon at all. It looked more like an oversized flamethrower with the thrower part shaped like a trident.
"The three heads on the top can concentrate the condensation and charge them so that the touch of room temperature wouldn't affect them," Hiccup explained as one agent walked over and asked him about it. Gobber and Sam were standing beside them. Hiccup had run tests under their direct supervision for millions of times and they weren't new to everything Hiccup was doing here.
The only reason he tried to act all friendly was they didn't want the clients to think they had bad manners. The military could be a very good client.
A few engineers who were on their break time gathered around to watch, and some of them got into an intense conversation of which exact technique did Hiccup use to prevent the BEC to leave the barrel and not be broken down by the atmosphere.
The agent walked over to the frozen apple. He reached out his hand and tried to touch it after a few seconds of hesitation.
"Uh… you don't want to do that," Hiccup reminded him.
"Why is that?" the agent asked, but he didn't draw back his hand.
"It's like an ice cube, but a normal ice cube that you throw into your soda is about negative 10 Celsius, but that thing is about negative 200 Celsius. You need to wait until the air around us to warm it up. If you touch it, the apple will turn into pieces because they are too fragile, but you might lose your hand or your life as well."
The agent drew back his hand as fast as lightning.
"So you invented a freezer?" the third agent asked.
"If you mean those freezer guns in the video games then yes," Emma replied. She had been standing by the tank for the whole time.
"Have you tried them on humans before?" the agent continued.
"No, but any volunteers?" Emma asked with a smile.
The agent laughed and nodded at his companions.
"Our tech guys will take it from here," the agent said. "They'll take over Project Bifrost. The second half of the payment, two million dollars, have been transferred to Muspelhiem's bank account that Mr. Samuel Timothy gave us."
"Where are Steven and his buddy?" one agent asked his companions.
"They are on Team Bravo, which…" another one replied. "They are in the Amazon."
"Amazon as the forest? What are they doing over there?"
"You think they need Team Bravo for the Amazon company?"
"So are you three going to take this back?" Emma asked.
The three agents looked at the big machine, and then they looked at each other.
"Do you have delivery service?" one asked.
The SWAT team wasn't Astrid's opponent. After stabbing her team leader Astrid took out both of her MP7s and slaughtered almost all the SWAT officers on the first floor in half a minute. Astrid was lucky that the rest of Team Foxtrot was on the second floor, and considering the wild gunshots, David, Nina, and Evan were still resisting.
When Astrid ran up the stairs, she was greeted by Snotlout, who was holding an M249 and hiding behind a SWAT holding a riot shield. A riot shield wouldn't be bulletproof for a long time in short-range gunfights like this, but the officer was trying to take some chances.
"Snotlout why are you hiding the whole time?" Astrid shouted as she raised her MP7 and pulled the trigger.
"Astr…" Snotlout tried to say something, but it was too late. MP7's rounds were designed to pierce through the bullet-prove vests Snotlout and SWAT were wearing.
"What the fuck is this?" Tuffnut yelled at her. He still didn't question Astrid's loyalty. He thought Astrid had gone crazy.
"I'm sorry Tuff," Astrid fired three rounds at Tuffnut's chest. The bullets punched through his rib cage and tore apart his lungs.
"Oh no, you don't!" Ruffnut cried as she took out a small dagger from the sheath between her thigh and handgun holster and threw it at Astrid. "I have been watching you for a long time, bitch!"
The dagger missed Astrid's throat, which was where Ruffnut was aiming for, but it still made a scratch on Astrid's shoulder.
Before she could point her MP7 at Ruffnut, Ruffnut swung her AKM at Astrid's face. Astrid blocked the attack with her arms and seized the weapon. Before Ruffnut could pull out her handgun, Astrid threw a punch at her chest and another of her powerful sidekick landed on Ruff's head. Before Ruff could find his balance and strike back, Astrid picked up a fallen M416 from the ground and struck Ruff's head with the stock, that piece of metal finally knocked her out.
Clement, the field engineer of Team Foxtrot, turned into a corpse with two holes on his back head before he could realize who killed him.
Two more SWAT officers did try to kill Astrid since they sort of figured out what was going on with that weird woman, but their dual skills didn't let them live to tell the tale.
Astrid swept the second floor. She found Evan's body lying against the wall of the storage room, whoever killed him shot enough rounds at Evan that his guts spilled out.
He must've created a lot of trouble, Astrid thought.
She continued sweeping. She had never come to this safehouse before. She heard about it from Erik, but Erik had never given her the address. It was a gigantic house. It didn't look so big from the outside, but the second floor had at least four bedrooms and three bathrooms and a common room the size of half of the tremendous living room downstairs. The walls were stuffed with thick steel plates and doors were bullet-proof as well. Bed mattresses seemed to have Kevlar in them, maybe the designer thought whoever lives here could jump off the bed and flip over their mattress and get straight into gunfights.
Team Foxtrot seemed to have some trouble with the third bedroom. The person resisting seemed to armed herself with at least ten guns and enough mags to arm a platoon. She was shooting wildly at the door while shouting the dirtiest words on the top of her voice.
A SWAT officer tried to get in from the window, but Nina was already waiting for him when he repelled down from the roof. An MP5 blew up his head.
Astrid fired at the agents that she had fought alongside for years. She didn't have any hesitation. Why would she? Her goal was to get their trust and kill them at the right moment. She hated them. After being captured by them years ago at the coast of the Persian Gulf and endured weeks of being locked in a small cell and being tortured, her heart had become as cold and hard as a rock.
Hiccup was the only soft spot of that rock. She couldn't wipe out her past with him. The careless hours running on the beach of Charleston were carved in her brain.
Astrid froze when the thought of "what to do with Hiccup" crossed her mind, and with that time, the agents threw three hand-size granite tubes into the room. Nina was killed in the explosion, and when the agents went into the room, they fired rounds and rounds at her torn body, as revenge, since two agents and four SWAT officers died in her hand.
Ruffnut woke up. Her vision was still spinning, but her consciousness was enough for her to switch the channel of her earphone to DPA's public channel. It was designed for agents to reach for support when their team was down. DPA spent a lot of money to ensure the stability and range of that channel and agents could call from every corner of the Earth.
Ruffnut told whoever was listening about what happened in her Team.
Astrid recognized the chit chat behind her back, so her MP7 turned and pointed at Ruff. Astrid hesitated when she was pulling the trigger.
"Do it, you motherfucker!" Ruffnut roared at her while reaching her hand for the handgun resting in the holster on her thigh.
Astrid ran over to Ruffnut, knocking her out again, and threw her out of the window. Ruff would survive being dropped from the second floor. Astrid didn't want to kill her, even though she just killed Tuff a few seconds ago.
Even though Ruff had sent the message, it would take a while for DPA to notice the National Guards outside, who were the only armed force except for Team Foxtrot and the SWAT team who had the ability to start a good gunfight against Astrid, and the nearest Team was at least a few hundred miles away. Local police couldn't do anything to someone like Astrid with their Glock 19.
On the field behind Asgard, the three agents who came to pick up the weapon were who received Ruff's message first. They looked at each other.
If Astrid turned against them, it wouldn't be easy to take her down. DPA poured millions of dollars into training her. At that time the high command didn't expect Astrid to use the skills she learned against them.
"Where is our closest team?" one agent asked.
"Uh… Team Golf, in New York," an agent replied after looking at his phone. "It's actually half of Team Golf, the rest is in Paris."
"How many SWAT teams can we control in this area?"
"The one with Team Foxtrot right now, and another one in Asheville."
"Tell that team to go to that house right now and tell the National Guards there to put Astrid as a priority target," that agent, who was clearly the one in command, announced. "Call for as many back-ups as possible. We'll go there now as well, prepare the car."
"Astrid might be long gone by the time we get there," one reminded.
"Astrid?" Hiccup asked after watching his clients chatting mysteriously and not focusing on the presentation.
"It's our private things," one agent said.
"No, I know her. Astrid Hofferson, right?" Hiccup insisted.
The agent looked at his leader, and the leader nodded gently. He remembered that the engineer standing before them was the so-called "secret lover" of one of their finest agents.
"Yes, it's about Astrid."
"What happened to her?"
"She… one of her team members reported her betrayal actions and was in support of a terrorist group," the agent said after getting the consent from his leader. "These are not confirmed information, though."
"So what are you going to do?" Hiccup asked urgently.
"Check it out," the leader said. Then he turned to the weapon. "Do you mind if one of your engineers would accompany us with the weapon? This is a chance for us to test it in action."
"Wait wait, you are going to use it on Astrid?" Hiccup almost shrieked.
"No no! There are still terrorists remaining out there," the agent replied. "We are going to use it on the terrorists."
Hiccup didn't reply.
"So is that ok?" the agent asked Sam, who had already walked over to them to see what was going on.
"Only Hiccup and Emma know about that weapon well enough," Sam shrugged.
"No, I'm not going!" Emma cried as she stepped back. "I don't want to get caught in the middle of a gunfight."
The three agents looked at Hiccup.
"Fine, I'll come with you," Hiccup finally agreed. There was a chance for him to meet Astrid, no matter what side she was on right now. Hiccup knew that he would love her even when she was the most wanted terrorist.
David fought to the end as well. Even though SWAT and DPA did take them by surprise and Evan didn't have the time to detonate the bombs in the stairways, their gunfighting skills still kept them alive for a few more minutes.
At least five bodies of SWAT officers and three Team Foxtrot agents piled up before the door of the room David was hiding in. The order didn't say whether to kill the targets on the spot or capture them, but in the end, the SWAT definitely wanted to capture one, so that they could hit the hell out of him as revenge for their fallen friends.
David didn't let that happen.
Before the SWAT could smoke him out, David darted out of the room, both hands holding an Uzi and holding a hand grenade in his mouth.
The SWAT shot him down before he could do any further damage with the two Uzies, but the grenade rolled out from his mouth and exploded, dismembering David and the officer nearest to him.
The National Guards outside looked out from behind their armored cars as the gunshots in the house quieted down.
Astrid walked out of the house with the remaining SWAT. She didn't want to fight her way out of here, and the remaining SWAT was so focused on fighting their designated targets they missed what Astrid was doing, so they thought Astrid was still with them, just as the last person on her team.
She exchanged a few words with the officers after exiting the house, and then she walked to the SUVs parked on the road and sat into the one she rode on.
Astrid imagined this day would come, but she didn't know what she would feel toward all this. Yes, Astrid was a member of Heimdall, and she created another completely fake identity for her, Albert Manstein, in case "Astrid Hofferson" was in danger. But she couldn't forget the time she spent with Valka, Snotlout, the twin, and Team Foxtrot. She formed another connection with her enemy when she didn't know. When she stabbed the bayonet into Valka's torso, Astrid suddenly felt as if she was stabbing Hiccup or herself. Her mind was blank at that moment. If Astrid remained at that weak mental stage a few seconds longer, Valka had a good chance of killing Astrid.
But in the end, Astrid's real self broke the chains and went free, like Pandora's box.
At that moment, when Astrid was having a flashback of her time with her teammates, a black SUV with tinted windows stopped slowly beside hers. Astrid looked at it. It was the SUV that all DPA agents used. That means one agent received Ruff's message. Astrid's window wasn't tinted, and the person in the other SUV must've recognized her by now. Her only chance was to press down the gas pedal and runoff or pull out her MP7 and shoot.
She did none of them. Astrid just looked at the SUV like a little girl looking for her mom.
"What the hell is she looking at?" the agent driving said, one hand on the steering wheel, the other holding a loaded Scorpion Evo 3 pistol.
"Is she daydreaming?" the other one sitting with Hiccup replied.
Their plan was to use the Scorpion to provide covering fire and the other two agents tranq her with darts. But when they rolled up and saw her watching them with weird eyes, they all froze.
Astrid shook her head gently, bringing herself back. When she recognized that SUV, she pulled out one of her MP7s and shot at least twenty rounds at the driver's side window.
That wasn't the best choice since the gunshots would draw the National Guards and the remaining SWAT toward them, and the National Guards had armored cars with machine guns. Astrid didn't know why she made that choice. If she drove off as nothing had happened, the agents would just follow her, and the National Guards would think they were leaving.
The window was bulletproof, triple-layered, and reinforced, and Astrids' first twenty rounds didn't break the glass.
"Don't shoot at me, Astrid!" Hiccup yelled as he tried to hide behind an agent.
"Go go go!" the leader cried.
The driver pushed the door open and poured bullets at Astrid. Scorpion could fire up to 1150 rounds per minute, so it emptied the mag in about two seconds. But Scorpion wasn't known for its power. Most rounds were stopped by the windows and the steel frame. Only one punched through and made a small scratch on Astrid's arm.
At the same time, the leader fired the dart in his tranquilizer gun.
But the dart missed. It missed Astrid's neck by a centimeter and buried itself in the seat.
"Fuck!" he yelled.
Astrid fired again. She pulled out her other MP7 and squeezed the trigger as if she wanted to break it.
All forty rounds inside her customized mag were fired, and at least thirty landed on the leader. In this short range, his Kevlar only stopped another five or six rounds. Most bullets didn't pierce through his body, only scrambled his organs into pieces and wouldn't harm Hiccup, who was hiding behind him. But one bullet, which hit the agent's arm, wasn't stopped by his bones. It flew out from behind and buried itself into Hiccup's abdomen.
Hiccup was an engineer, not a fighter. He felt as if someone had opened up a hole on his belly and stuffed an entire hammer in it.
The third agent, who was sitting at the third row holding the finished weapon of Project Bifrost, raised up the trident-like barrel and pointed it at Astrid. Hiccup taught him how to turn a small knob to control the condensate flow, and in the end, controlling the freezing effect when he was doing the final presentation.
This time, after watching his companion being so brutally killed and body stuffed with thirty rounds, he turned the knob all the way and pointed the barrel at Astrid.
The instinct condensate current was so huge that the agent felt as if he was putting his hands into ice. When he fired, the flow was as wide as a human torso and it froze Astrid's body right at contact.
Astrid wasn't the only thing that was frozen. The entire SUV was covered by a thick layer of frost, created by the water molecules floating around in the atmosphere. One second everything was normal, and the next second the SUV looked as if someone had left it at the South Pole for a hundred years at extremely low temperature.
"Don't… don't touch… it…" Hiccup said weakly, covering his wound with one hand, but blood still dripped out from his fingertips.
Hiccup knew that the SUV, and Astrid, were at a temperature so low that the molecules in them were hardly moving at all, and the slightest touch would turn them into splinters. The only thing that was still holding Astrid and the SUV together was the overly charged electricity roaming around through the molecules, increasing the power they release from the slow movement.
"We need a team of scientists and doctors and engineers and everybody!" the SWAT, who was running toward them when they heard the gunshots, said to his radio when he saw the terrifying scene. He thought the man in the SUV must've fired some sort of freeze gun, like something from a video game or sci-fi movies.
Hiccup tried to climb closer to Astrid's body, but he was only moving a few centimeters on the back seat. He knew Astrid was dead, no human could endure that low temperature.
To be continued.
Ok I guess I'll just tell you guys, this is the second to the last chapter. Surprising, right? You might be thinking the ending might be too rushed.
But don't worry, there will be a sequel, which is going to be a separate story.