Disclaimer: I don't own the Klokateers, Ginger, Robotnik, Nero, the Bride, Joruus, etc. I only own Sully, the setting, and the contents of this chapter.

This is sort of a reverse-intermission – instead of showing my character making his way to the beginning of the fight, I've got my opponent's characters getting a couple of minor weapon upgrades and getting to the positions they'll be in when the fight starts. It's also a little bit of a look into the lives of some of the couple hundred henchmen around the base, something I wanted to do and thought would fit best in here.

A Winner Is Two: Chiaroscuro

Prologue: Last Night of Your Life

It was times like this when Robotnik really wished he'd had access to the spare metal to build a good old cowcatcher on the front of his ATV.

"Oh, shit, Robotnik's coming! Scatter!"

"No, stop him!"

"Shoot him!"

"Drag the vehicle down!"

The hallways of BORED headquarters were, thankfully, wide enough to support his vehicle with several inches of space on each side. This, however, was not very much for any BORED employees who wanted to dive out of the way. Many of them were forced to run backwards until they found a closet or drinking fountain alcove to hide in.

"Shit, here he comes!"

"Jump over him!"

The intimidation power of having a clearly armed vehicle indoors was such that Robotnik generally didn't even need to fire the weapons. This was nice, because he needed to steer with one arm, and he'd rather keep his right arm still – it was attached to a broken collarbone, which was really quite painful. Still, the occasional bullet flew his way from behind or in front, forcing him to duck and protect his head white he put on a burst of speed and took the next turn.

"Is it the demon?"

"No, it's Robotnik, but he's got a buggy!"

"What's so bad about a bugHOLY SHIT!"

Eventually, of course, he found trouble. Specifically, one of the MIB-type goons he had been encountering repeatedly since he came had shown up wearing evlar SWAT gear and a carbine, and flanked with Klokateers carrying automatic weapons. Robotnik went with what had been working so far – he floored it towards his targets. His remaining rifle was affixed on the left side, so he fired it with his good arm while bringing his right hand up painfully to cover his skull. As the bullets rang against his armor and the hood of his vehicle, he was briefly distracted by the thought of which of his fellow 'contestants' earned the moniker "the demon". Then he remembered Trudy's words over the radio, and wondered instead how literal she had been.

"Keep firing!"

"I can't stop him!"

"Bah! You're both useless!"

The two Klokateers dove to the sides in the face of Robotnik's charge; one was too broad to properly fit between the chassis and the wall, and there was a satisfying crunch from his ribs. The man in riot gear, however, took the novel approach of leaping onto Robotnik's vehicle directly, pointing his carbine in Robotnik's direction. It was hard to maneuver while on the hood of a moving vehicle, so Robotnik was easily able to slap the gun away before the man could properly aim it at his head and fire. Instead, the man wrapped one hand around Robotnik's throat, hatred blazing in his eyes.

"I hate you! I hate you so much, you fat eggy bastard!"

Robotnik was understandably confused, and communicated this as best he could while being strangled and desperately pounding the man's face with his good hand.

The fact that said face was wrapped in a metal glove didn't seem to slow the man down. "I bet Ginger would eat you! It seemed so solid! I bet EVERYTHING, and now I'm ruined!"

At this point, Robotnik hit a wall, which was understandable given how distracted he was. The man flipped over the seat of the buggy, still retaining his grip on Robotnik's throat for about half of his flight arc. This had the effect of slamming him down on his back on the rear of said buggy, stunning him. Coughing, Robotnik massaged his throat, only to cry out in pain as the henchman grabbed his right wrist and pulled backward.

"I'll murder you like you murdered my future!"

"You did this to yourself!" Robotnik gritted his teeth and reached his left arm back the other way around the chair, aiming the plasma blaster his gauntlet where he estimated the man's body was. "Let go! Last warning!"

"NEVER!" The man roared, his voice cracking.

Robotnik took a deep breath and fired, and the pressure eased up immediately. He got up from his seat to inspect the front of his vehicle. It was fine; these walls weren't any harder than the local trees. Looking back, the rage-filled man was laying on the floor, gasping for breath, as was one of the Klokateers. The other just appeared stunned. Robotnik quickly relieved that one of his rifle and placed it in the vacant mount on his vehicle (replacing the one Ban had destroyed). "Humans are so irrational," he muttered, for his own benefit as much as the wounded man's. "And people ask why I prefer the company of robots."

"Interesting choice, myself. I prefer demons. With demons, you're never under the illusion that they care about your interests more than their own." Robotnik looked up. A bald man wearing a tattered cloak over a business suit had turned the corner in from the way he had come. Robotnik tensed, but the man simply kept walking slowly towards him. "And when you work with demons, all that nasty uncertainty about where you go when you die is gone."

"That's a unique philosophy," Robotnik observed. "I was just leaving."

"I'm sure you were," the man sneered. He stopped walking and snapped his fingers, and Robotnik witnessed what he recognized as several small tears in the fabric of reality forming around the man. Out of these rips spilled dozens of little black and purple, flapping creatures that circled their master. Robotnik's first impression was that of winged piranha, and he decided to take a seat on his ATV.

The creatures split into several groups. As Robotnik brought his guns to bear, one flew in front of the human controlling them and spread out, clearly intending to block the bullets. The others descended on the defeated henchmen in the hall, and Robotnik got a very good idea of what was happening to them. He fired several shots at the summoner, but the defensive swarm was successful in their mission – even though nearly every bullet resulted in a dead little piranha-thing on the ground, more were rising from the corpses as they were being digested. These, in turn, began to eat their freshly killed comrades. Robotnik became very aware that there was a turn wide enough for the ATV on his immediate right, and decided to take it. "Farewell!" he called. "Discretion is the better part of battle.

"Run, puny human!" the man called, leaving even Robotnik to wonder what scale the summoner was using where 'puny' was appropriate to describe him. "But you can't escape! For one faction or the other, tonight belongs to the demons!"

---

Beatrix Kiddo gazed up at the huge BORED base, or at least what she could see of it looming through the volcanic smoke. It didn't seem like a particularly wise place to build a headquarters, but then the shield supposedly erected around the entire island must have had an understandably high energy requirement. Besides, people with too much money, power, and ambition got… eccentric. Regardless, the only obvious way in was up a metal staircase and catwalk suspended over lava, through a volcanic cloud. The platform was probably boiling hot, and she didn't want to travel across it if she had a choice. She resolved to look for another entrance, although she'd travel up the stairs if she had to – it was a small danger after what she had already gone through.

Ironically, an alternate entrance didn't take her long at all to find. The valley nestling the base had sheer cliff faces on each side, and one of these had a rectangular hole cut into the stone. It was obviously a doorway, and there was even a keycard slot – however, the door was missing. Beatrix cautiously entered, and found the door (which had been marked 'MEMBERS ONLY' without a drop of irony) lying against the far wall. It looked to have been smashed in by brute force, clear off its hinges. The room was otherwise empty except for some flickering lighting and dust – this route hadn't been used much. Kiddo explored with her knife at the ready, but for the next couple of hallways, found nothing but restrooms (which she used happily, ecstatic for such luxuries as a toilet and two-ply paper after months in the forest), drinking fountains (likewise), and a set of vending machines selling Poop Cola, girl's panties, Duncan Hills coffee, blood, and something called Plasmids. She hastily vandalized the coffee machine and got herself a free Styrofoam cup of hot chocolate, but avoided the rest. Side doors led only to unused offices and janitor's closets.

She turned toward the fourth hallway, just starting to relax, and was instantly on alert again at the sound of distant battle. It seemed to be heading away from her, but she kept her knife at the ready in one hand and her cocoa (for throwing in faces now more than drinking) in the other. Holding her breath, she opened the door… and a man who was burning from head to toe rushed straight at her, screaming. Too startled to even scream, she dodged out of the way of his charge and prepared to counterattack. However, he just kept running the way she had come, still screaming. Kiddo blinked at him in bemusement before turning back to the hallway in front of her.

She was definitely following in somebody's path; most likely, it was another contestant. Maybe a dozen black-hooded men littered the hallway. Most of them showed high-caliber bullet wounds or slash wounds of the type a sword would inflict. Some of both types of wounds were charred. Her eyes scanned the hall for survivors; a cough immediately alerted her to one, and she turned to find a man with two huge bullet holes in his torso. "What happened here?" she asked sharply, leaning down to him.

"Ah, shit, there's more of you," the man wheezed. Beatrix tore off his mask; he was a man with reddish-brown hair and sideburns, and an awful lot of fresh blood around his nose and mouth. She'd seen worse, and didn't hesitate to hold her knife to his throat when she repeated the question. He grinned, showing a very bloody mouth. "Your knife looks thrashed to hell, babe. You should get a new one." It looked like talking was very painful to him. She responded that it would still serve well enough for ending his worthless life and repeated the question, digging into his throat a bit. "Your knife looks even worse off than your FACE!" he managed, and started laughing uncontrollably and coughing up blood. She slit his throat disdainfully.

"Holy shit, it's the Blood-Spattered Bride." She turned to find another survivor, down and across the hallway. She turned and walked over to him, crouching next to him. This one took his own mask off, showing a black mullet and goatee. "You know, for my personal angel of death… well, you're not first pick, but top five for sure. We've been watching the tournament. You're stone-cold, you know that? And really hot. I don't care what 420 said, you're still hot."

"What happened here?" she asked, ignoring the bizarre praise. She scanned over his injuries. His right arm was just a burnt stump, and his leg on that side had taken a blow of overwhelming blunt force just above the knee. You didn't get to be as great a killer as those in the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad without learning something about healing – if only to how likely a target was to live through a given injury. Beatrix's amateur diagnosis was that this man would live given any competent medical attention, but he would almost certainly be a double amputee.

"Another contestant came through; a guy named Nero. Didn't have a keycard, but we didn't reinforce our doors enough to deal with this guy. You shouldn't face him; he's been beaten once before, but that guy used some crazy powers. Nero's got a bunch of crazy-ass weapons and he ate through all our bullets like they were Rice Krispies." He started laughing. "Rice Krispies!"

"Why is everybody here so giddy about dying?" Beatrix asked in annoyance. Then she noticed the smell, and saw it lying on the ground. A joint. Now that she looked among the corpses and blood, there were a few. "You guys snuck down here to get high?" she asked in disbelief.

"Yeah, nobody ever leaves this way out of the base because there are better exits to any given outpost." The guy shrugged his non-mutilated shoulder. "It's why I'm not in excruciating pain, I guess. I mean, it hurts, but mostly I'm just hungry." He sniffed. "Oh my Dethklok, is that cocoa? I could go for some cocoa right now."

"Uh… here." Kiddo gave him the cocoa. "So, do you think I could reason with Nero?" She tapped her foot and looked around. She was starting to feel uncomfortable; if the man had been dead, it would have felt more natural to just loot the men present. She was about to start anyway.

"Probably not. Idiot's going to get himself killed; we've got some real demons hanging around down here. Speaking of…" he took a big swallow of cocoa. "You killed Joruus. We all saw it on the big screen."

"Um, yeah. So?" She looked down. There was a nicely sized Western longsword not far from the injured henchman. It looked like it could come in handy, and she bent down to check it out further. About 45 inches, a hand-and-a-half sword, kind of gaudy (it featured bat-wings as a guard, a horned skull for a pommel, and the inscription 'FLY WITH US TONIGHT. KLOKATEERS 2009' on the blade), but it looked very functional, and would probably serve her well.

"Thank you," he said with a new seriousness. "He was mind a lot of us, including some of my best friends. When he died, all the people he was controlling became comatose for a while, and a couple even died, but it was a weight off all our minds. That's my sword you've got there. I wasn't fast enough to use it against Nero when he came charging in; I hope you put it to better use."

It's not a katana, but it'll do just fine. This was the only sword in the room; there were other guns, but most of them looked to have been specifically targeted by Nero's attacks and destroyed."Thanks," she said, turning around, and froze. He had a gun pointed at her. The one she had taken off Harry. She noticed the spilled cocoa. The man had waited until she turned around to look at his sword, and pickpocketed the gun right out of a trained assassin's side pocket with his only remaining arm. That took balls. "Are you really going to shoot me?" she asked.

"I'm surprised I even got this from you; I'm not even left-handed," he said, with the wheezing chuckle characteristic of stoners. Than his face became serious again. "Death before dishonor," he announced, and pulled the gun under his own chin. "Thanks again for killing Joruus," he said. "One of the men he mind-controlled… one of the ones who died… should have been me. I called in sick that day so I could smoke pot down here, and 205 took my place." He laughed a little more, but there was something sad about it this time. "And sorry for wasting one of your bullets."

End of Chapter

Those had a weird feel to them, didn't they? They were originally meant to be a bit smaller, but they kind of took on a life of their own. I hope you guys like them!