Vacant Bulwark

Cobalt was flying. The wind blew past his ears with a loud 'hiss', and the scenery flashed past his peripheral vision in the blink of an eye.
At least, that was a generous euphemism. A more apt description would be Cobalt plummeting down a long and dark shaft at near terminal velocity, as the unfortunate inkling was desperately flailing his arms in the air in a futile attempt to stabilize himself. Where the shaft led to was unknown, the bottom completely obscured by blackness.

"Out of all the pathways I could've chosen, I choose the one that leads to a deadly drop. Seriously?" Cobalt thought to himself, that was a rough interpretation of his current thought process. Another interpretation would be "AAAAAAAAAAHHH".

A tone resounded in Cobalt's headset. Trying hard to stop one of his arms from flailing, he tapped a button on the side, and picked up the call.
"Yo, Agent 1 here!" Callie's voice said, "You're…Cobalt, right? Your signal's moving REALLY quick back here! Is everything fine over there?"
"If by 'fine' you mean 'falling down a ridiculously large drop', then yeah!" Cobalt replied sarcastically. "I don't suppose this headset comes packed with a parachute?"
"WHAT?! At that height and speed a drop like that's going to splat you! Shoot, lemme think, lemme think…"

As precious seconds ticked past, Cobalt fell past an outlet pipe embedded into the rock. The pipe itself was fractured by a considerable force, and a steady stream of fuchsia ink was flowing out of the leakage, pouring onto a long column of metallic paneling riveted onto the rock face. Spotting this, Cobalt began to comically breaststroke towards it in the air, trying to reach it.
"Woah, what are you doing?!" Callie exclaimed from the other end, "Are you trying to get yourself splatted even faster?!"
"Nah, I just had an idea. Trust me, this oughta work!" Cobalt replied. Reaching the stained paneling, he immediately plunged his right hand into the ink.

A searing pain immediately erupted all the way up Cobalt's entire arm, as the corrosion caused by the mismatched color coupled together with the sudden deceleration from the ink's adhesive properties. The masked inkling immediately cried out in agony, but he didn't stop there and plunged his legs into the ink as well, rapidly slowing his descent. Coming to a complete stop, he quickly pulled out one of his guns with his free hand and painted the wall with his own blue ink before the substance ate his other limbs away, turning into a squid and sinking into the liquid.
"Agh…! I'm never doing that again…" he thought to himself, before the pain caused him to fall unconscious as he fell from the wall. Fortunately he only fell another 4 meters before the shaft opened up into a massive cavern, with Cobalt successfully falling onto a respawn pad suspended in midair shortly afterwards, reverting back into normal in the process.

A shadow from the far distance stared as Cobalt's body fell from the ceiling, its eyes narrowing before it slunk off around a corner and disappeared from sight, the sound of a hovercraft barely audible in the giant cavern.

"…balt! …Coba…et up…"
"Urgh…" Cobalt groaned, "No, Chris. Five more minutes please…."
"WAKE UP, SLEEPYHEAD! I can hear you breathing through the receiver!" Callie's voice rang through his headset, causing him to jump from his lying position upright.

"Alright, alright, I'm up! Jeez, there's no need to yell!" Cobalt grumbled, stretching his body. "See? I told you that it'd work!"
"By almost ripping your arms and legs off?! You're lucky inkling regeneration's a thing, or you're screwed!" There was a shuffling noise followed by the sound of loud inhaling as Callie turned away from the microphone to take in a deep breath, before turning back. "Anyhow… where in the name of the gods are you? It is pitch black down there!"

Cobalt walked up to a nearby railing close to the respawn pad, and squinted his eyes as he peered towards the far distance. True to Callie's observation, what wasn't illuminated by the soft glow emanating from the respawn pad was completely shrouded in darkness. All Cobalt could barely make out was the contours of what appears to be a giant fortress in the far distance, but he cannot make out any further details.
"I can answer that question, inkling." A familiar voice said through the receiver. Cobalt frowned underneath his mask as he recognized it as that Octoling from earlier that proved to be quite the drama queen.
"What the?! Who are you and how did you hijack this signal?!" Callie spluttered.
"Commandant Eliza, leader of the Blue-Ringed Menace squadron, serial number E-115A, at your service." Eliza replied emotionlessly. "If Lord Octavio can hijack your signal so easily, this is child's play to me."
"Oh good grief… she's at it again, isn't she?" Cobalt could hear Octavio say from the background.
"Woah. Octavio? How'd you get back here so quick?"
"I ran." Octavio simply replied, before the sound of shuffling tentacles indicated he wasn't about to inquire on the details anytime soon.

"The building before you used to be part of a larger military complex." Eliza clarified. "Built in response to the construction of Smokestack, it was meant to utilize much of the generated power to its full potential. Weapons construction, training facilities, soldier barracks, resource mining and so on, it was designed to host over a hundred thousand Octarian units, and-"
"BORED!" Cobalt interrupted. "Get to the point, how am I going to get to the cross from here?"
"Hmph, if you were under my division I would've made you clean the latrines for that insolence." Eliza harrumphed. "The proximity of this ruined structure to the power plant means you only have to reach the access duct via the weapons testing chamber. To get there as efficiently as possible, you'll need to pass through the barracks, accessible from outside near your current location. Normally there would be a stairway that leads up to the entrance, but the structural collapse has destroyed it."
"Well, I can work out the rest from here. Thanks for the info." Cobalt said. Before Eliza and by extension Callie could reply, he immediately terminated the call, and ran into the darkness.

After traversing a series of walkways, the masked inkling successfully reached the fortress itself. It was even shabbier in appearance up close, with the stairway in question crumbled into a messy heap in front of him, large chunks of the wall lined with fractures, as well as entire sections of wall missing and its pieces built up into a messy heap in random locations. The entire fortress looked to even be leaning ever so slightly to the side as well, part of the structure sunken into the ground in a lopsided angle.
It wasn't particularly easy getting to the fortress. While the respawn pad platform graciously had railings, the path that led to the building itself not only lacked the safety railings but was also cloaked in darkness. Cobalt counted at least 6 times where he almost lost balance near the edge of the precariously suspended pathway while groping around in the dark, and one time in which he outright fell into a large underground lake. After being rebuilt by the respawn pad, Callie finally remembered a flashlight feature that was built in to the headset, which Cobalt was somewhat convinced she conveniently forgot to mention from being rudely cut off. There weren't any accidents afterwards.

"Well… I'm here now." Cobalt mumbled, shining the light on his headset upwards and examining the building. "Eliza's right, the stairway's out."
"Looks like you'll be swimming up the wall then." Callie's voice replied, "You know what to do, right?"
"That's correct." Withdrawing one of his weapons, Cobalt shot a steady stream of dark blue ink towards the wall. Upon impact, the ink surprisingly flowed off the surface unusually fast, refusing to adhere onto it. A few more attempts later, Cobalt holstered his weapon, slapping his forehead in the process.
"Inkproof concrete? That's a first." Callie remarked. "Well. I'm outta ideas."
"Ugggh… guess we're doing this the old fashioned way then." Cobalt grumbled. Spotting a metal rod jutting out nearby, the masked inkling proceeded to jump and grab hold of it, pulling himself up and onto a thin ledge, before shimmying along the ledge and grabbing hold of fragments that were sticking out of the wall, climbing up even higher. Slowly but surely, Cobalt began to make his way up the steep and fractured wall of the fortress.

After what felt like hours of arduous climbing, Cobalt finally reached the very top of the broken stairwell, where he proceeded to keel over onto the floor, hyperventilating as he tried to rest. His entire body was pockmarked with bruises and scratches from the many times he had scraped himself along the broken masonry during the climb.
"How come… I'm the one… that has to do all the hard work?!" He panted as he tried to lift himself from the floor, arms quivering with effort. "I swear, if Chris and the others are getting a gentle stroll to this power plant, I'm going to be SO mad…"
"Lemme go check on the others for a bit…" Callie said. There was the sound of shuffling chairs along with some background chatter, before Callie returned to the microphone. "Oh… Um… How should I say this…"
"OH COME ON! You can't be serious!" Cobalt's arms gave way completely, and slumped onto the floor with an almost comical crash.
"Callie, maybe you shouldn't have told him." Marie's voice said, barely audible in the background.
"I didn't say anything!" Callie protested.

A few minutes of barely comprehensible swear words and grumbling later, Cobalt dragged himself from the floor, and sat down next to a window that looked like it had seen better days. With a sigh, he withdrew a sandwich which he packed for dinner from his backpack, and looked around briefly before he lifted his mask to chew on the snack. His face was completely obscured in the pitch black darkness.

The inkling looked around the area as he swallowed another mouthful. From high up, he could see very far into the cavern he ended up in, though there was nothing in particular that caught his attention aside from the heavily corroded remains of what he presumed was the dome the fortress used to be in all the way in the far distance. It was also a bit too quiet for his taste, the only sound being the distant howling of air emanating from the shattered window next to him.
Finishing his sandwich, he replaced the mask onto his face before letting out a sigh. All this silence was proving to be exceedingly dull.

"Is it really necessary for you to be wearing that mask all the time?" Cobalt could hear Callie ask through the headset. "I mean, it seems a bit hard to be both wearing a gas mask and an Agent headset at the same time."
"The mask stays on." He replied, "It's stuck with me through thick and thin, I'm not getting rid of it. The Turf War equipment I'm wearing is about as optimal as it gets."
"Huh, are you a Turf War enthusiast?" Callie asked.
"More than that, it's more or less my job. It's literally my only source of income. After that whole deal with the Splatfest being cancelled though…" He sighed, "Life was rough, man."
"I see… well that makes three of us, I suppose. Me and Marie, we couldn't get any alternative work when no one came to Turf Wars altogether. I love being able to sneak out of the studio with Marie and blending in with the crowd to play some Turf Wars ourselves, but without it... well, I get the feeling I might not be able to sing if I wanted to. It's only this whole Agent program we're doing that keeps us going until this whole incident all blows over."
"Hum." Cobalt shrugged, turning to the window. "I'm surprised the two of you of all people couldn't be motivated to do anything about it either. Seems like there was plenty of reason to do something about it."
"I dunno. It's just… this empty feeling me and Marie seem to be sharing. We barely have enough energy left to get up and tend to Gramps or go out to eat, let alone actually doing something about it. I mean, at the end of the day, we're still two inklings, I guess…*sigh*"
Cobalt couldn't help but chuckle to himself. To think the two newscasters he often saw while passing by the TV screen were just as helpless as the team was when they started their journey, it was strangely humbling.

With a hint of caution, Cobalt climbed into the open window, taking care not to nick himself on the broken glass in the edges. The moment he set foot into the darkened corridor on the other side however, a harsh klaxon suddenly sounded as red flashing lights lit up along the side of the entire corridor.
"Uh oh." He said, pulling out his weapons. "Not good."

The masked inkling stood tense as the alarm echoed down the corridor, presumably all over the fortress. Standing stock still, his eyes darted to either end of the long corridor, expecting a hunter-killer squad of Octarians to come charging down one of them soon enough.

He waited…and waited… a slight twitch in his trigger finger betrayed the feeling of nervousness that was in him that very moment. Sooner or later, reinforcements will arrive, and he'll likely have to fight through them.

But eventually five minutes have passed, and the alarm was still blaring. The corridors were still devoid of any Octarian forces Cobalt had expected.
"Nothing's coming…" Callie remarked, "Do you think…"
"Well, on the upside, at least I can see where I'm going." Cobalt said, holstering his guns. With the red light illuminating his path, he began making his way through what remained of the barracks.

"Ugh, finally. The alarm's stopped." Cobalt grumbled, as the klaxon in the far distance finally became quiet.

Considering the fact he was technically infiltrating a hostile Octarian base, the masked inkling was having a very uneventful experience. By now he's passed by room after room of empty sleeping quarters, either with the doorway caved in or huge piles of rubble where the bedroom should've been. The ones that weren't buried under collapsed masonry looked to be in sorry condition, with the mattresses rotting and the covers worn and threadbare, and the light fixtures either broken or burnt out. It was evident there wasn't anyone using the barracks in a long time.

Cobalt stifled a yawn. By now his eyelids were starting to feel a little heavy, undoubtedly he's worn himself out from the climb, but a quick glance at his watch informed him that it was close to midnight.
"Hey Cobalt, you might as well just pick a random bed and get some shut-eye. You've earned it." Callie said through the radio. "I'll be…*yawn*…retiring too, sitting in front of a microphone all day is friggin' dull. See ya."
"Yeah… I suppose I might as well-"

Cobalt froze. There were voices coming down the corridor, and they seemed to be getting closer. Whirling around, he realized there's only one bedroom that's close by that wasn't blocked. Without thinking, he quickly barged through the door, hurriedly closing it behind him as silently as he could, before turning into a squid and slithering underneath one of the nearby beds. Pausing with bated breath, he waited…

The door opened, and the lights turned on. From his position, Cobalt could barely see two sets of boots walk across the floor, one of the beings still talking. Inching closer, Cobalt tried to eavesdrop on the conversation…

"…goodness that blasted alarm's stopped ringing. Whaddya reckon's tripped it?"
"Probably a malfunction. With everything falling apart down here, I won't be surprised."
"Eh, probably. Well…" Cobalt could hear the steel frame above him squeak as someone sat down on top of it. "If you need me, I'll be lying down over here. You go do…whatever it is you're supposed to be doing."
"TAI! You can't just… ugh, why do I even bother. You're the only other Octoling that's down here besides me, and there's no way in hell Octavio's coming to our rescue anytime soon! You're going to have to help me and the others gather supplies and reinforce this place if you want to live to snooze another day!"
"Ah, just leave it to Heather. I mean, that Octotrooper seems like a better candidate than I am."
"That one that's part of the…what's their name again… the Under-Sea-Dogs? I don't care, we're the only two with working arms down here! Get up already or I'll-"
Cobalt could hear snoring coming from above his head. Whoever that Octoling was that sat down onto the bed seems to have fallen asleep almost instantly.
"Oh why do I even bother with you…" With that said, one of the Octolings in the room stormed out in a hissy fit.

Cobalt glanced towards the bed above him. The other Octoling sounded like she was fast asleep, it might be entirely probable for him to sneak out of the door and find another relatively intact bedroom that's unoccupied if he could crawl out and leave without making any noise.
The masked inkling groaned internally. Stealth was not one of his stronger suits.

As quietly as he could, Cobalt slowly slithered out from underneath the bed, putting himself as much distance as possible from the snoozing Octoling before transforming back into normal. Creeping as close to the doorway as possible, his hand reached for the doorknob…

"C'mon… just a little further…" he thought to himself.

His foot unintentionally scraped past a small piece of rock. The scratching sound it made seemed amplified by a hundred times to the masked inkling.

"I'm sure she didn't hear that. I'll just go ahead and-"

"What the, what's an inkling doing down here?"

"Nuts."

Cobalt turned around abruptly. The Octoling that was snoozing earlier was now awake and staring right at him. Instinctively, Cobalt withdrew both of his guns and pointed them straight at the Octoling, who did the same with what looks to be a black and chrome variant of the standard Splattershot. A few tense seconds passed by as the two stared at each other with their weapons drawn.
"…eh. Can't be bothered." The Octoling said. To Cobalt's bewilderment, she dismissively put her weapon onto a side drawer, and turned away from the inkling while trying to stretch on her bed.
"What." Cobalt simply said, lowering his own firearms as well. "Nothing? Seriously?"
"Whatever, inkling, I'm not in the mood for a fight. Just go harass Aussie or something, I want some shuteye if you don't mind."

Cobalt stared at the unusually lethargic Octoling with a look of disbelief, before silently making his way to the door. Before he did however, a thought crossed his mind. Turning back, he laid down onto the bunk bed opposite to the Octoling that was now looking at him with a perplexed expression.
"You're not leaving." She said. "Unless… you wanna play dirty and splat me while I'm snoozing?"
"Look, I'm not here for a fight." Cobalt replied. "I…*yawn*…just need somewhere to sleep right now. Long story."
The Octoling raised an eyebrow. "Any reason why you decided to snooze it up down here in this stinkhole of a base rather than that decadent city you guys like to party up in?"

Cobalt looked around the room for a bit, before answering. "I kinda have to be down here, at least for a day. Don't suppose I can sleep now?"
"No." The Octoling was no longer lying down, but she's gotten up and sitting on the bed. "If you're going to be my bunk-buddy, at the very least tell me your name and why you have to so desperately share a room with lil' ol' me."
The masked inkling rolled his eyes in exasperation. "Cobalt. The name's Cobalt."
"Tai. Tai Inaba. So about that reason…"

Cobalt then spent the next few minutes explaining to the Octoling the events that had led him to where he was now, trying as hard as he could to summarize it into as little sentences as possible. It was difficult explaining the circumstances with his fatigue screaming at him to take a rest.
"…so after being separated from my friends, I'm down here. Not that much to talk about, basically." Cobalt concluded.
"Mmhmm." Tai dismissively hummed. "I kinda stopped listening after the third sentence. So why exactly are you sleeping here instead of the other rooms around here?
Cobalt tapped his head. "I'm lost. I was thinking that I could maybe ask for directions since you don't seem particularly hostile. So…"
"Okay."
The masked inkling was surprised. "That was quick. Not even going to bargain for anything?"

Tai waved her hand dismissively. "Nah, I heard enough. We'll talk more tomorrow… right now I just feel like taking some shuteye." With that being said, the Octoling laid back down onto the bed and fell asleep practically instantaneously.
"Well, that could've gone a lot worse." Cobalt thought to himself, reaching to turn off the lights before lying down onto the bed. As he drifted to sleep, a thought barely floated past his mind.
"Wonder how the others are doing…"

AN: Whew, I'm surprised that took a lot more effort to write than usual. You'd think the group being separated would reduce the word count, but no.
Still, I'm wondering if this format of the camera following one of the main characters specifically is being done right. Any thoughts?