(A/N) Hey all, again, sorry for the delay, but we've got a pretty cool chapter here for you now to make up for it! We're trying our best to get more regular updates, and I hope you'll all bear with us in the meantime! Something that I forgot to mention last time round was that, since RTX, a big event occurred. Well, two big events.
Firstly, Roosterteeth are going to be making an X-Ray and Vav animated series, so this fic will, sadly, soon become AU. However, if you guys continue reading, reviewing, and passing this story on, maybe they'll get wind of it and incorporate some of our idea. Stranger things have happened!
Secondly, and possibly even more incredibly, one of our writers for this fic – Jerem6401 – has been HIRED by Achievement Hunter, and you've probably seen him in some of their videos by now. He has his own show there, with his Imaginary Achievements, so check those out! Of course, he's busier now, so will no longer be writing for this fic, but he might make an appearance in the future, and we've recruited one or two new writers to replace him, and you're going to love them!
Enjoy!
Chapter Thirty – Redemption
Agent Joel Heyman
Written by SpoonyAzul
"Redemption is something you have to fight for in a very personal, down-dirty way. Some of our characters lose that, some stray from that, and some regain it."
― Joss Whedon
"Superheroes were born in the minds of people desperate to be rescued."
― Jodi Picoult, The Tenth Circle
Achievement City had fallen into chaos.
Agent Joel Heyman didn't need to listen to the radio announcements in the car to know the city was in trouble. He saw it as plain as fucking dicks when the ever-growing army of mercenaries, armed to the teeth with a variety of different weapons, marched towards City Hall.
The only thing standing between the mercs and complete domination of the city were a handful of battle-worn FBI agents and scared police officers, that could barely hold on to their rifles and sidearms. The fight had taken a toll, with police officers and agents dropping like flies, and only a few, scarce clips of ammo left between them.
With X-Ray and Vav busy fighting off the Corpirate, or whatever the hell they had gotten up to, they had to settle on the unlikely duo of Iron-Ryan and Mogar. The former a cold, calculating cyborg who could analyse any situation faster than any computer and construct his "golems" out of literally anything. The latter, a monstrous behemoth whose primal, burning rage fuelled his massive strength, and with his giant diamond sword he could easily tear apart anything he came across. They once fought against X-Ray and Vav for the Community, but now the two superhumans set themselves on a different goal.
To get the bastards that had transformed them into freaks of nature.
"Heyman, where's our back up?!"
His partner's voice brought him out of his thoughts and onto the situation at hand. He reached for his radio and clicked it on, "Hey, Command, this is Agent Heyman! What's the sitrep on our backup?"
A patch of static sounded off before a woman's voice answered, "They're en route to your location, but they've encountered heavy resistance between 5th Street and Titan Avenue. ETA will be five minutes!"
"We're gonna be dead in five minutes!" Burns exclaimed, emptying his magazine before reloading a fresh one. "Reloading!"
"We are not getting paid enough for this!" J-Roll exclaimed to his partner while firing off a blast from his rifle at a group of Community mercenaries. He managed to take down a couple of mercs before one of them came out from behind a burnt out van, a rocket launcher in his hands, aiming it straight towards their makeshift cover.
"Fire in the hole!" the merc shouted when a missile burst out of the metal tube and right at Heyman, and he closed his eyes, preparing to be engulfed in a fiery explosion.
A bellowing roar echoed behind the FBI agent, followed by the explosion that he had been waiting for. A tall shadow towered over him and took the missile blast like a brick wall. He peeked over his cover to find the massive Mogar standing over him, at his full height, gripping his diamond sword and letting loose another earth-shaking roar. Another missile had been fired, but became nothing more than smoke and scrap metal with a single stroke of the sword, raining shrapnel down around them. A few more mercs gathered their courage and fired a volley of projectiles at the hulking beast, but with little affect.
"HOME RUN, MOTHERFUCKER!" Mogar bellowed as he swung his sword like a baseball bat. His weapon destroyed two of the missiles upon impact, while the third looped back into a corkscrew pattern before striking the ground and exploding into a plume of fire and gore. The giant lunged forward with sword in hand and brought it down, cleaving several mercs all at once.
Just as another wave emerged, a few of Iron-Ryan's golems gracefully drifted across the hot pavement in front of the FBI agents. The pumpkin faced snowmen launched endless snowballs as if they were grenades, and it was only when they landed that Joel realised that that's actually what they were. Any of the mercenaries unfortunate enough to get hit instantly froze in place, leaving them vulnerable to gunfire from the ground team and the snipers up on the roof of City Hall.
A large tank then came lumbering down the street, aimed its cannon and fired at the golems. The shells' impact ripped through the automatons like tissue paper, destroying them in a shower of sparks and metal shrapnell. The tank's cannon searched for a new target, aiming for the cover that Burns and Heyman were hiding behind, when something metallic punched through its front and left a gaping hole.
Before the tank's gunner even had the opportunity to fire at their opponent, a searing red laser sliced into the tank, splitting it in half, and possibly its driver and a gunner along with it, though Joel quickly turned away to face the…man…that had taken it down.
"Oh dear," Iron-Ryan muttered. He stared down at the ground before the tank ignited and exploded into large chunks of metal. The impact sent him flying towards the FBI agents, whom he passed by, before crashing into a nearby minivan. The cyborg lay there motionless, his face unchanging, before looking around at the noticeable indent in the vehicle, "Well, that was unexpected."
J-Roll looked out onto the large crowd of mercs threatening to overwhelm them, and could see no end to them. He just kept firing burst after burst until he heard a rapid click-click-click-click!
"Shit! Reloading!" he muttered, unloading the empty clip and fumbling for a fresh one. No sooner did he slammed in the magazine, his ears heard another sharp click-click-click-click next to him.
He turned to Burns, who had taken down a merc with the last of his ammunition. "Heyman! You got any clips left? That was my last one!"
The other agent tossed him a clip from his belt before firing upon the mercs again, "We can't hold out this much longer, Burnie! They just keep coming!"
"You don't need to tell me that! We need find the guy leading the assault, Heyman!" Agent Burns cut through the gunfire while dishing out a burst of his own. "We kill him and the army will scatter."
"But, there's been no visual of any commander. There's gotta be someone leading the army, though, but how the hell are we meant to find them like this!" Heyman screamed, as a rocket flew over his head, smashing into a nearby building with a dull boom, and an overpowering stench of smoke filled Joel's nostrils.
Then a realization struck his partner. "We should try and see if Iron-Ryan can help – guys got more eyes and ears than anyone else in the city, with all those golems, perhaps he can get a sight on whoever's co-ordinating this thing?
"Yeah, that-ARGH!"
Something struck and tore through Heyman's shoulder with the force of a hammer. He fell screaming, clutching his shoulder while blood seeped out onto the pavement and stained his shirt.
"Heyman!" Burns called out. He ducked immediately as another shot pinged off and destroyed the car door mirror next to his head. "Shit! Snipers! On the roof!"
At that moment, Iron-Ryan picked himself up from the wreckage and stood up to full height. A sniper's bullet struck him on his forehead, but he remained unfazed. A second later, his laser eye shot out a red beam while the sniper fell from the rooftops. Several beams later, he took a look into the crowd.
In a fraction of a second, he ran facial recognition scans on the dead or dying mercenaries around him, cross referencing them off of the FBI database, and running all the other information that he possessed by the paradigms that he had created.
"I'm always here to help, so just give me a little time and I'll see what I can come up with," he replied, in that creepy monotonous voice of his.
While Burns tried to patch him up, Joel saw several red beams shoot out of the cyborg's eye, searing through the soldiers' skulls and letting them fall into a crumpled heap. The method seemed to be working, but that delusion faded almost as quickly as it had appeared. With every soldier Iron-Ryan took down, two or three seemed to take his or her place.
At that moment, Mogar growled in frustration, throwing his sword on the ground. "Oh, come on, this is taking too long! Here!"
The colossal giant jammed his fingers into the street. His large hands gripped the asphalt as he lifted it off the ground with a yank. Another roar sounded off as Mogar brought the whole street down, whipping it as if it was a frail piece of ribbon. The pavement sent the group of mercs up into the sky alongside cars and streetlights, and smashed them through glass windows, walls, and rooftops.
Both agents gawked at the scene in awe of Mogar's raw strength and rage. Heyman couldn't stop himself from blurting out; "Maybe I'm going delirious due to the acute blood loss, but that doesn't seem physically possible."
"For any other human, no. But for someone like Mogar," Iron-Ryan said, as a merc whizzed past him, missing him by inches, and crashed into a wall, "It's not just possible, it's effortless. Crude as his methods are, it does appear that he has bought us some time."
He stared at the minivan that he had crashed into a few minutes before. "Hmm, the vehicle's destroyed, but the engine is still intact, having suffered minimal damage. This should suffice as a power source for two, maybe three..."
Iron-Ryan then shoved his arm into the van and ripped out the engine with one pull. While the cyborg ripped apart the minivan and began to mould into whatever he had planned, Burns patched up Heyman's wound and gave back his weapon. Suddenly, a burst of static came through the radio. "Boss, we've got multiple hostiles coming down the street! Looks like they're making another push!"
"Holy shit in a pita," Joel heard his partner mutter under his breath, immediately turning on the radio. "Command, where's our back up?!"
Nothing was heard but the white noise of static. Icy dread entered Heyman's veins as no one answered, and no one continued to answer.
"Command, do you copy?!"
Again, silence. Suddenly, dread permeated in the air while the army of mercanies stormed their way ever closer to City Hall.
"Oh g-god, we're g-gonna die," a police officer stammered, panicking, on the edge of hyperventilating. "We're gonna die. We're s-so fucking dead."
"How are we supposed to fight an army like that?" another asked, his hand barely hanging on to his handgun. "There's no way..."
"What are we gonna do?" a third muttered, his hands on the back of his head while he slumped against a car door.
Then something big leapt over their heads and landed in front their nearly destroyed car. Three golems now stood before them, each of them were apparently made of some type of metal, painted with a strange maroon colour with their circuitry showing at the joints. They creaked and grinded every time they walked or moved their arms, and one of them wore a car door for a shield.
"They're far from perfect," Iron-Ryan said, walking up to the police officers, "but they should last long enough to make a stand."
Mogar stood with the hastily made golems, wielding his sword with both hands and let out a deep guttural growl."Bring them on! I'll make those fucking assholes regret they ever crossed my path!"
"Alright, people," Burns shouted at the police officers. "Stand your ground! Do not let any of these bastards through! You have friends and family counting on you to defend this city! With all your–"
"Agent Burns? Agent Burns, do you copy?"
The heads of those gathered nearby turned, as one, towards the sound of the voice coming from the radio. "Agent Burns, we've got multiple reports coming in from all over the city. The mercs are falling back, I repeat, the army's making a full retreat."
The remaining FBI agents and police officers looked at each other quizzically, and with more than a few murmurs of confusion. They were ready to make a last stand, a final defence when the enemy clearly had the advantage and...they were leaving?
"What the fuck...?" Heyman muttered, glancing over the edge of his cover just in time to see the enemies' ranks fade away into the night.
"Yeah! Go to back to your fuckin' holes, you scared sons-of-a-bitches!" Mogar roared in his deep, monstrous voice. "Don't you ever come back!"
Once the mercenaries were gone, Joel saw civilians slowly crept out of their hiding spots, whether they had his inside buildings and alleys, or trash cans and dumpsters. One by one, they surveyed the damage from the battle, and then looked to Iron-Ryan and Mogar in awe and amazement.
Then, one by one, applause filled the streets and the tension that filled the air was replaced with pure relief that this – whatever exactly this all had been, was now over. A few civilians whooped and hollered in celebration around Iron-Ryan and Mogar, while others whispered to each other.
"Holy crap, that was amazing!"
"Are those guys the new heroes? I thought the metal one tried to rob a bank?!"
"That cyborg guy made robots out of a minivan! Incredible!"
"Dude, Mogar just lifted the street off the ground! That was awesome."
"X-Ray and Vav must've recruited them to defend the city."
"I'm glad they're with us instead of with those mercs."
"I can't believe it, they saved the city!"
The new superheroes seemed...new to this kind of praise. After all, they had fought for the other side not all that long ago and wreaked havoc on the city before X-Ray and Vav took them down. However, seeing them fight the mercenary army and defend Achievement City had somehow changed the public's mind about the pair. In their eyes, they had redeemed themselves.
Hell, Joel had to admit to himself,they redeemed themselves a dozen times over today.
Joel clutched his injured shoulder as he and Burns walked up to the two superheroes with Mogar still in his giant monster form, and Joel was the first to speak up. "Iron-Ryan, Mogar, thanks for helping us. We couldn't have done it without you."
Much to Joel's surprise, Agent Burns seemed to agree with him, and quickly followed up on his words of thanks. "Yeah, you guys proved that you're true heroes today. Thank you...for helping us."
The other agent glanced over at his partner in surprise, the praise uncharacteristic of the usually-gruff FBI agent, who hated both X-Ray and Vav with a passion, no matter how many times they helped them out. He even sounded like he had a hard time saying it.
"Burnie, did you just...?"
Burns turned to J-Roll, "Yes, Joel, I am capable of giving compliments to people. Just don't read too much into it. Now, let's get you to an ambulance and patch you up right."
Even with the bullet in his shoulder, Heyman couldn't help but smile.