Squall retraced his steps downward as if in a trance, with his body moving independent of his mind's control. It didn't bother him; his thoughts were coming into focus again, and he was busy planning ahead for the actions he would have to take once he reached the destination that he knew his legs would take him to.
He navigated the stairs down to the proper level without interference, and briskly strode down the corridor, retracing his path from memory. Though he probably made much better time than he had during his first trip, the walk seemed to stretch on forever. Finally, he came again to the door, paying only enough attention to the two armed guards stationed outside as was necessary to knock them both out by way of an Ultima stone. He reached the door and had already inserted the keycard before he remembered that it wouldn't work.
As he came to this realization, he also noticed that an alarm klaxon had begun to sound.
"Security alert," declared a voice from the intercom. "High magic discharge on Level 13. Initiating full security lockdown." With those words, the lights went off, and the hall was plunged into near-total darkness.
Squall closed his eyes, trying to work his way through the problem as rationally as he could. Security would be coming. They'd probably need a minute or two to get there; he had that long. The door certainly wouldn't open for him now; though as it wouldn't before, that wasn't a major development. His main goal was to get that door open; he'd deal with the rest later.
Taking a step back, he took a breath and called on the reserves of magic he carried through his GF. Triple, he silently declared, and paused as the aura surrounded his body. Doing his best not to be disoriented too long by the new level this gave to his consciousness, he opened his eyes, and forced them to focus in the dim light of the emergency lamps on the tough metal doors in front of him, then on an imaginary point just beyond them.
Demi. Demi. Demi.
He couldn't see the black vortices forming, one after the other, on the other side of the door, but he could hear the protests of the metal as it was forcibly twisted out of shape. By the second spell, he thought he could see it noticeably buckling; and by the third, the door was very nearly pulled free. Squall considered for a moment deploying another spell to finish it off; but instead, he backed up to the far side of the corridor, braced himself, and charged. His shoulder connected hard with the door, which in turn fell freely off its frame, making a dramatic crash when it struck the floor.
It was just as dark inside the lab as in the corridor, if not more so. He could only barely make out her form, illuminated by the faint, red light of some display or other on the wall to which she was secured. He made straight for her, nearly tripping over the table in the process. The restraints, he saw, were fairly simple metal cuffs such as those by which he had been held in the D-District Prison, held together by heavy pins but not actually locked in any way.
"It's all right," he said softly as he began to remove the electrodes and intravenous tubes that had been attached to her body, then worked to open the cuffs on her hands. "Rinoa, it's me. It's Squall. I'm going to get you out of here."
With the cuffs open, her arms hung limp and she began to fall. Squall caught her, supporting her weight as he worked to free her legs. She was a great deal lighter than he had expected.
"Squall," she whispered, as he lowered her to the floor of the lab, to examine her and make sure he would be able to move her. Being as it was still very dark inside, he had to resort to Scan magic to make the determination; while she was not physically injured, her body was very weak and she seemed just on the edge of consciousness.
"Great Hyne," he muttered, shaking his head. "What did they do to you?"
As he was preparing to pick her up again and make their escape, he heard the sound of footsteps approaching outside. He stood and quickly readied his gunblade before a trio of Galbadian troops, headed up by the square-shouldered silhouette of an Elite Soldier, appeared to challenge him.
"Hold it!" exclaimed the leader, readying his weapon; but the words had barely escaped his mouth before Squall, already lunging forward, cut halfway through the man's neck with a horizontal swing of his blade. The other two jumped away, one readying his sword and the other apparently preparing to cast a magic attack; a good strategy, but Squall was quicker than both of them. A trio of Thundagas, necessarily split unevenly between the two, nonetheless sent both to the floor.
Barely waiting to make sure both were finished, Squall hurried back to Rinoa, who still lay prone where he had left her. "I'm still here," he assured her, hoisting her onto his back in the manner he had perfected a year earlier during his trek across the Horizon Bridge. "Come on, Rinoa," he encouraged softly, hoping for perhaps a little help from her in holding on this time, but getting no measurable result. "Let's get out of here."
Quistis had been near the end of her shift, policing an unmarked corridor on Level Three, when the alarm began to ring. At first, coming as a sharp contrast to the pervading dullness that had previously been the hallmark of the assignment, she had failed to register just what the siren meant. Then, Galbadian soldiers began running past, paying little or no heed to her as they hurried off apparently to the site of some crisis. She had to step directly into the path of a passing officer in order to get the man's attention.
"What's going on?" she demanded.
The Galbadian gave her a look that expressed some mixture of annoyance and suspicion. "There's an intruder!" he snapped, forcing his way around her and off down the hall.
"What?" Quistis asked, but the man did not seem inclined to elaborate. Shaking her head with annoyance, she withdrew the pocket radio she had been given by the Galbadians and activated the communications link to the base's security control center. "This is Trepe on Level Two, Section..." she glanced around for the wall sign that would tell her where she was. "Four-Alpha. Request appraisal of the situation."
There was a brief pause. "Stand by," the radio eventually replied, before lapsing into an even longer pause.
After a time, Quistis tired of standing by. "Control, this is Trepe," she began again. "What is going on here?"
Another moment passed before the radio crackled once more. "Intruder on lower levels, Trepe," the voice explained. "Hold position and await further instructions."
Quistis nodded, less than happily. In other words, stay out of your way. Even out here, they want to keep us on the sidelines.
A moment later, she was approached by another set of running feet as Zell, apparently having not received the order to hold his position, bounded around the corner of the hall. "Hey!" he called. "What's goin' on? These Galbadians aren't tellin' me a thing!"
"All I know is that there's some intruder down on the lower levels," Quistis replied. "They want us to hold position while they take care of it."
"What?" Zell threw a punch at the wall in annoyance. "So when something actually happens on this stupid mission, they keep us up here like some stupid reserve? The hell is that about?"
"Well," Quistis said, "I guess there are a couple ways to read it. One is that they don't trust us for some reason. Another is the intruder is going to be coming up this way to escape, and they want us here in case he does."
"Yeah, but why not tell us anything about what's happenin', then?" Zell asked.
"Oh, I think they just don't trust that we'll help them instead of aiding whoever this intruder is," Quistis replied, with a sigh. "And I'll admit, the thought has crossed my mind."
The lifts had been shut down, and making his way up the stairwell with Rinoa on his back would have proven tiresome enough without Galbadian soldiers shooting down at him. So far, the soldiers had been content to retreat ahead of him, not giving him a clear opportunity to use magic by raining down bullets and the odd grenade that turned the maintenance of his Protect shield into an activity that easily consumed the majority of his attention.
Squall couldn't help feeling like the Galbadians were leading him somewhere, and that they were waiting to ambush for him at the top of the stairs, where he would have to come out onto the flight deck if he were to steal an airship and escape the facility. However, being as how there was nowhere else for him to go but up, he saw no choice but to risk whatever it was they had in store for him.
He was already at sea level, he realized as he passed a window that showed a a view of the massive columns that rose out of the water to support the landing pad directly above him. Two more levels stood between him and the top of the stairs. The Galbadian soldiers had stopped shooting, and the sounds of their feet retreating ahead of him had ceased.
Pausing at the landing of what he guessed to be the last flight of stairs before the exit, Squall set Rinoa down, leaning her carefully against the wall. "I'll be right back, okay?" he asked, eliciting a quiet moan from her before he readied his gunblade and set off up the stairs once more.
The doorway had barely come into his line of sight when the scene exploded into a hail of bullets. Squall had to literally dive back down the stairs to avoid a fragmentation grenade that was rolled down at him; and the blast took enough of a toll on the stairs where he had just been standing that he was given a great lack of enthusiasm about going back up again.
"Damn," he uttered as he returned to where Rinoa lay, still safe for the moment. "Looks like the airships are out. We'll have to find another way to get off this place."
As he stared out the thin, heavily reinforced window at the blurry view of the facility, something caught his attention. The massive columns that supported the facility widened at sea level so as to accommodate the floatation equipment that could allow the entire DSRC to be towed across the ocean. Also there, he noticed, was something that looked a great deal like a hangar door.
"What floor is that...?" he wondered out loud, squinting at the companion column through the window. "Looks like just one level down. Yeah, has to be." Quickly, he picked Rinoa back up and began heading back down the stairs. He thought he could hear he sound of Galbadian boots pursuing him now from above, and made the best pace he could safely manage while descending a flight of stairs and carrying another person on his back.
The keycard he had taken was rejected when he reached the door, so he quickly repeated his triple-Demi measure to gain entry to the level. Standing guard on the other side was a single guard robot that had already been severely weakened by the Demi spells and which Squall finished easily with a single swipe from his gunblade. Picking up Rinoa once again, he set off in what he could only hope was the direction of an escape craft.
At first, his efforts met with little success, and he very nearly became lost wandering through the corridors. Furthermore, the Galbadians seemed to have caught on to his new plan, and he could hear them coming after him, always seeming to be just around the corner and ready to strike.
Despite the certain paranoia inherent in that perception, Squall eventually did find himself ambushed by a pair of Galbadian soldiers, who had treated him to a pair of magic blasts before he could duck around a corner to disengage himself from Rinoa. Having no desire to prolong the confrontation, he returned to the fight and took them both out with an Ultima blast. As he went back to pick up Rinoa and continue, however, he noticed a sign at the end of the hall reading, HOVERCRAFT STORAGE - SEA ACCESS and accompanied by a large, heavy door. He almost smiled at the fortune of the development.
However, before he could pick up Rinoa and proceed to his escape, he heard another set of running feet coming to interfere with his plans. He spun around, bringing his gunblade to the ready once more, but any action he would have taken was canceled as Quistis and Zell came running around the corner.
The two of them seemed easily as stunned as Squall over the encounter, and for a moment all three stood frozen in the hall. Quistis' eyes darted from Squall to the prone form of Rinoa lying against the wall, which held her attention for a long moment.
"Squall?" Zell said. "What the hell is goin' on? Are you..."
Squall toned out the rest of his words. Not until this moment had he considered what would happen to the other SeeDs on his team; but now the Doctor's words to him came back in full force. If I get them involved, he realized, my actions will reflect back on all of Garden. He had ran himself into a corner, just as the man had warned he would.
An instant later, he saw a way out. He knew immediately that it was his only option; but still, it took a long, tense moment before he could find the resolve to execute it. Raising his free hand, he focused a wave of magic around himself, then channeled it outward towards the two other SeeDs.
Death. Death.
A pair of black clouds appeared before the startled Zell and Quistis, and the shadowy cut of a reaper's scythe drove through their bodies before they could react. To an ordinary person and some monsters, the attack would prove lethal; however the GFs junctioned to the SeeDs afforded them some protection. Zell collapsed unconscious to the floor, but Quistis was left completely unaffected by the spell. Physically, at least.
"Squall!" she exclaimed in shock. "What in Hyne's name are you doing?"
"Fight me," Squall instructed, tightly gripping his gunblade. Stepping forward, he called forth a trio of Meltdown blasts, which engulfed Quistis in a pillar of withering force. She recoiled under the attacks, a mad combination of emotions vying for dominance in her predominantly startled expression.
"Squall, I'm not the enemy!" she insisted. "Just tell me what's going on and —"
"Fight!" Squall snapped, jumping forward and making a swing with his gunblade. He came short of actually striking her, and Quistis merely jumped back to avoid the blow. When she still refused to take up a defensive position, Squall, heart pounding, lunged again, this time with a much harder horizontal strike that could well have cut his former instructor in half.
As he expected, Quistis' combat training finally prevailed, and her chain whip snapped out to intercept the blade. The whip wrapped itself around the weapon, arresting its movement as she ducked out of the way. With another snap of her wrist, Quistis tore the gunblade out of Squall's already shaking hands and sent it clattering to the floor.
"Squall, stop this —" she began in her most severe tone; however Squall did not give her the opportunity to finish. Rather, he caught the hand that was holding her chain whip with his own, then delivered a hard kick to her back that knocked her off her feet. Quistis reflexively let go of the weapon as she attempted to break her fall, but Squall held onto the hand and sent her crashing flat on her back. The other SeeD responded with her own martial arts training kicking in, sweeping out her legs to tangle with Squall's and sending him off his feet to join her on the floor.
Although the fall had obviously knocked the wind out of her, Quistis was also far from committed to the fight as the two of them picked themselves up off the floor. Squall, however, knew that she would defend herself on instinct if nothing else, so long as he pressed the attack. Before she had quite regained her balance, he attacked again, spinning and attempting to jab his elbow into her side. She ducked the blow, instead catching him in the stomach. Squall took the blow, lashing out himself with his foot and connecting with her side after all. He followed up the attack with a tough blow to the side of her head that would have rendered a normal person unconscious; but Quistis merely responded with a stinging uppercut that nearly took Squall out of the fight. Gritting his teeth, he caught her hand and drove his knee upward into her gut. She doubled over, and Squall backed away, trying to focus enough to concentrate on a magic spell.
Ultima.
Quistis' body was engulfed in an explosion of brilliant green, powerful enough to ionize the air around her. Already weakened by the Meltdown spells and Squall's physical assault, she nonetheless managed to remain on her feet through the attack. As she stood, wavering, and definitely out of the fight, she fixed Squall with an expression spent but able to convey one last message of confusion, and betrayal.
Finally, her consciousness gave up the ghost, and she collapsed to the ground. Squall, feeling incredibly drained himself, retrieved his gunblade, went back to pick up Rinoa, and continued on to the waiting hangar door.