Chapter Twenty-Seven

Over the course of two grueling hours, Seven breached the remaining nine walled areas, taking out eighteen officers and sixty-one Pokémon. Too tired to cloak herself, she had to wait for a gap in the patrols, dart in, knock out the officers and capture their Pokémon.

A Nidorino dodged the capture beam and lunged towards a door, but Blacksmith caught the Pokémon in a headlock and twisted hard enough to snap its neck. The burly man checked his arms for puncture wounds and kicked the corpse into a barrier, where it vanished in a plume of white smoke and a shower of sparks.

"Good thing I didn't lose my touch," Blacksmith said with a deep, booming voice brought down to a low whisper. Before Seven turned away from him, out of the corner of her eye, she saw him grab his gun and check the clip. The gun clicked again, but she didn't see what he did wit it.

Another time, a Noivern caught the sound of her footsteps and let out an ear-splitting shriek. Both Seven and the guards doubled over from the noise. Seven yanked the gas mask out of her hair and slipped it on. It muffled the noise enough for her to charge forward, kick one guard in the gut and grab the other by the neck. With a twist, she brought the thin, wiry man to the ground. He gasped for air and rolled don the floor with both hands over his ears.

She wrenched two pokéballs off his pocket, one of which recalled the Noivern, and the other a Vigoroth. One officer recovered and reached for his radio, but two Grunts grabbed him by the arms and slammed his head on the floor. Blood trickled from his nose as he was dropped.

The noise brought two more guards in, one from each door. The doorknob to her left twisted first, and before the door was halfway open, she wrenched the man through and leapt past him, scrambling for the second guard. That woman, a stocky, tall, officer, reached for her pistol. Just as she pulled the trigger, Seven brought one leg in a high kick, knocking her hands aside. The bullet caught a charging Machoke in the left arm, and it fell with a grunt.

Blood spattered Seven's uniform and mask as she leapt onto the woman. She twisted around the officer's shoulders and brought her down, one leg trapping her right arm, and the other pinning a knee into her stomach. She groaned and writhed as Seven tightened her grip. Seven slammed the butt of the officer's pistol into her temple, and she stopped struggling.

Turning back towards the previous room, she saw that the crowd of sixty grunts, led by Blacksmith, disposed of the other guards. They were stripped of radios and shoved through the door after they released the grunts in the one room.

Seven turned back towards the room she had leapt into. This room, though guarded just as heavily as the others, only had one cell, and that cell, half the size of the others, only had one occupant. A thin stubble of hair covered his scalp in uneven patches, and dark brown scabs showed where he had torn his hair out. His face looked skeletal, with skin drawn tight over his huge, pointy cheekbones and chin. Sockets that appeared empty unless he looked directly into the light and eyebrows too thin to see completed the image of a grinning human skull.

Mad Hax's hands twitched when he saw Seven approach. His voice was weak and raspy, but he sounded suave as he said, "Didn't think the Don would let a rookie on a high profile mission like this. Where's Fisher? I'd like a word with him."

"Fisher isn't here."

Hax's eyes narrowed. "Dekkard, then? I guess this would be a fine proving ground for him."

Seven held back a grimace as she saw the man, slumped on the floor, bleeding out of fifty holes in his chest. Holes she had put there herself.

"I'm the only one."

Mad Hax glanced around Seven, through the door she had opened, at the crowd of Grunts milling outside the door. Even in the back of the crowd, Blacksmith stood out above the rest. His eyes met Hax's with a blank, level stare.

"Ten of the best tried busting in here. They made it into one of the rooms before they tripped an alarm on the door and brought every guard in this anthill down on them. Then Giovanni sends one rookie down here, and you slip in and free everyone without a single alarm going off. How'd you do it?"

Seven considered her words carefully. "I hacked what I could, and worked around what I couldn't."

Hax grinned even harder, and his eyes sparkled like black diamonds in his deep, shadowed sockets. "It'd take a high quality Porygon to crack through this cyber security, and we lost our only upgraded version in the last raid. Giovanni may be powerful, but even he can't get his hands on a Silph Up-Grade in six months. Let me guess, you're using Thoth?"

Seven nodded, and Hax spat into the hole in the floor.

"A piece of garbage. That trash would take five minutes to a camera on the way down, and patrols pass that way every ten minutes."

Seven's tablet beeped, and the message "I heard that" blinked at her in big, bold script.

Hax sighed and leaned back, kicking one foot up onto his knee. He stared up at the ceiling and said, "I'm done beating around the bush. Are you going to kill me now, or does the Don want the pleasure himself?"

Seven felt herself tense, but the words Admin Colson coached her through came readily to mind. "Kill you? We can't afford to, not now."

Hax cackled, and the walls laughed with him, bouncing his voice back and forth like a tennis ball. "Don't give me that crap. Giovanni doesn't tolerate failure, and I fucked up big time. Just put a bullet through me so I can stop rotting in this hell hole."

Seven waited for his laughter to die and his attention to return to her face. Then she said, "Have you heard of the White Knights?"

If Hax had eyebrows, they would've been bunched up against his eyes. "I think I heard the guards speak that name once or twice."

"They've been causing trouble, lots of it." Seven counted off her points on her fingers. "They've burned down the Golden Magikarp casino, trashed two Pokémon smuggling rings, beat fourteen Grunts to death and injured six others, raided four warehouses, and stole a couple dozen Pokémon from a drop zone. They're popular with the public, and they don't negotiate." Seven made herself stare into those sunken eyes, each like an abyss. "Giovanni is only giving you one chance to redeem yourself, and he only does so because his back's against the wall. It's do or die time, Admin Hax."

As Mad Hax puzzled over her words, Blacksmith brought over the door. Seven held it up to the walls, and Hax stared in wonder as the barrier parted around the metal.

"It's so stupid it's genius," he said. "The others tried hacking them, but the security on these things is airtight. You couldn't slip a one through those firewalls point first."

"Come on," Seven said, motioning through the broken window. "And mind the edges."

Hax leapt through and rolled up onto his feet with a flourish. He got a few claps from the Grunts gathered around the door.

"Thank you, thank you," he said, bowing to the crowd. "And for my next trick, with my lovely new assistant… what's your name?"

"Steven," she told him.

"Steven," he said, rolling the name on his tongue. "Steven, would you mind telling us how you plan on getting out of here? As much as I'd like to think we're home free, there's a mile of concrete above us, they could drop a lake on us at any moment, and unless nobody noticed a mountain of corpses, we still have all the outside guards to deal with."

"Outside and inside," Seven said. "We're not killing anyone today if we can help it."

"Going the pacifist route? That's no fun." Even so, he grinned. "But it'd make for an excellent headline: incompetent police force let all the worst criminals escape. No police or civilian casualties. There's a story to get a commissioner sacked."

The Blacksmith stepped forward, shoving Grunts aside like blades of grass. "I'm sure you have a lot to chat about, sir, but we need to get out of here."

"Right, right," Hax said irritably. Then his eyes darted to the pistol sticking out of his loincloth. "Give it here." His command cut the air like a knife. Without the slightest hesitation, he handed Hax the gun, grip pointing towards him, and the former Admin took it. Seven felt a cold knot twist in her stomach, but she kept a calm face as she strode towards the door.

"Let's head back," she told them, "But first, put on as many uniforms as you can manage. It may buy us time if you're spotted."

"You should've had them doing that as you were coming here," Hax pointed out. He tsked at her. "You won't be an Admin anytime soon if you make sloppy mistakes like that."

Seven frowned at him. "Would you prefer to take the command?"

Hax laughed and held a hand to his stomach. "No Steven, you dug your grave, now you can dig yourself out of it."

Seven shrugged and turned away from him. She felt her back prickle, but she refused to turn around, in case Hax decided she was acting suspicious and shot her right then and there.

She led the way up the slow, circling ramp that wound its way through the concrete fortress. Leaving Blacksmith to keep the group in order, she ranged out a few hundred feet ahead and signaled when she was sure there weren't patrols waiting. They went half an hour without seeing a single guard.

Seven's stomach sank as she realized that there would be only one reason for those halls to be empty. Patrols ran down as regular as clockwork, with a flurry of randomly generated patrols to make planning around them more difficult, and they ran no matter the time of day. Even lunch breaks didn't disrupt the flow of guards through the hall.

"We have to run," she told them. "They're getting ready to flood the halls."

"And drown their own men?" Blacksmith asked. "I know they want us bad, but that's too cold even for them."

Hax laughed maniacally and pounded his hand on the wall. "They probably assume we killed them all. Honestly, that's what I would've done. He leaned back and looked up at the ceiling. "Looks like you got us all killed. Way to go."

The Grunts muttered anxiously as Seven quickly typed a command onto her tablet. "Stop the flooding."

"Can't. They kicked me out of the system. However, I have an idea. Just hold tight."

Hax glanced over Seven's shoulders. She felt herself flinch, but the former Admin didn't seem to notice.

"If that Porygon's our last hope," he said dryly, "We're all fucked."

Changelog

10/27/18 - minor edits