Omega [REDUX]
Chapter 10
"I see you've decided to respond."
"We're waiting, Ursula. You can see our current location. We won't move from our position." They had holed up in an abandoned building, having moved slowly across the simulated city so as not to trigger a response from Ursula, and also to make their movements decently obvious, to appear like they'd given up fighting altogether.
"And if you do?" Ursula was still being cautious. "What's going to happen then?"
"We won't because there is no point, just like you said. You'll find us and terminate us anyway." Damn, I ought to be getting an Oscar for the act I'm putting up, Elsa thought. "Just end the match."
Just the right amount of self-deprecation and sadness added into her voice. She was convincing. Convincing enough, evidently, for Ursula to believe it.
"Very well, Elsa." She could hear the snarl in Ursula's voice. "Let's get this over with."
The comm channel cut off. "They took the bait," Elsa reported to her teammates. "Ursula is coming."
"I still don't trust this," said Belle. "No one's ever been this crazy to try this out."
"The last time I said that," Merida chirped, "we took out 5 people straight from the getgo, directly from deployment. I won't mind going with this."
"This is… different," protested Rapunzel. "Very different from what we tried."
"Whatever this is," Anna cut in, "there are only two ways this can go; either we make the biggest play any team has ever done, or we go down as the most brainless idiots in the entire academy's history." She sent Elsa a wry glance, and Elsa could feel her own lips curl into a small smile. "I'm more inclined to the former, nonetheless," Anna continued. "This is definitely worth a shot."
Rapunzel shifted, her concerns clearly far from being put to rest. "Can I just point out that we have absolutely no idea where they're coming from? They could be right outside, moving in right now, picking up every word we're saying!"
"We've already done a scan of the area," Merida pointed out. "The building also has some rather obvious entrance points. We will know when they're coming."
"But we have no proper plan of attack," Belle noted. "There's no guarantee we can take them out."
"After that stellar performance by Anna and Elsa?" Merida looked close to incredulous, though she was betrayed by her beaming expression. "There's no way they'll survive an ambush."
"Alright guys," Anna cut in, clearly abashed. "Enough of this, let's just follow the plan."
Elsa herself was glad there was a helmet still covering her face, otherwise the others might have noticed the blush that had crept up her cheeks. But she remained objective, tactical as ever. "Rapunzel and Belle have a point, Merida. There's no guarantee we can wipe them out cleanly."
"Even with this genius of a plan?"
"You might be overrating it," Elsa deadpanned. "Luckily though, this building gives us a few advantages. Ursula's first mistake was to agree to our terms. Now we take advantage of it."
"This is it."
The recruit from Sledgehammer next to her nodded towards the seemingly dilapidated building. Ursula took a good look at it, her eyes sweeping the exterior of the building for movement. Nothing.
In that case… she glanced back at the helmet display of the member of Valor Team. Her team had managed to sync the helmet systems with a separate holographic projector. Since there's no one out here, this data is definitely accurate. She cast a glance back at their "prisoner", the member of Valor Team that they'd beaten up so bad that it hurt for him to breathe. She delegated the other members to drag him along, just to ensure he couldn't be killed so as to continue using his helmet's data.
As of right now, his helmet indicated that Anna and her team were holing up in a building.
Ursula relaxed. The killings would be clean; they wouldn't have to trouble themselves hunting down individual members. She hadn't wanted to waste that much time and energy. One clean sweep of this rifle should do it. "Right," she said, motioning to the rest of her team, looking at their prisoner. "Drop him here. They won't be coming out of that building anytime soon."
"With all due respect, Ursula," another recruit asked, "how do we know this isn't a trap? All things considered, it really looks like one."
In a rare moment of benevolence Ursula turned to the recruit instead of whipping around, and said in a decently calm tone: "We know exactly where they are. They can't trap us if we have them trapped instead."
She turned away, walking towards the building, rifle in hand, decently surprised with herself. Who knew I could be so kind?
Rifle over her shoulder and the rest of the tripartite team on her tail, Ursula strolled into the building. But even then she didn't let her guard down entirely. She still didn't know what kind of traps they may have set up to lure them in, despite already having the information that they were located inside what appeared to be a locked room. The abandoned building, with sunlight streaming in but casting shadows in places where she wasn't too comfortable, cast doubt over her. For all she knew, it was still unsafe.
Still, the information on her display didn't lie; the suit was meant to be hyper-advanced and practically free from technical difficulties, with an in-built troubleshooting system. The last thing it should mess up was allied teammates locations. To further compound her confidence, the fact that they were in a simulation practically removed the possibility of error.
Amidst the trees planted as decorations, the abandoned benches sitting next to them and the scattered debris slabs surrounding them, she sighted the door their opponents were hiding behind. Ursula leveled her rifle, aiming through the holographic sight again.
"Someone pass me a goddamn breaching charge."
Her teammates looked around uncertainly at each other. "We don't have any," one of them replied. "We didn't think it was necessary."
"What kind of fucking team," Ursula glared at them, "doesn't carry a breaching charge around on the Urban maps? The only reason why I don't have those is cause my teammate carrying them had a soldier drop on him!" She cussed a few more times, and then turned back to the task at hand. The door looked bolted shut, but seemed flimsy enough. Evidently, a well-aimed kick, the force enhanced by the suits they were wearing, would still be able to take care of the problem, though it was a bit riskier.
Ursula decided she could handle it; after all, the only team left was Anna's team, of all the opponents they could have been facing. "Never mind then. Move up, prepare to breach."
At least they know basic breaching protocol, she observed as they took their positions; two next to the door, two guarding her flanks, and Ursula herself directly in front of the door. She inhaled deeply, trying to calm her nerves as she tensed her leg, and prepared to breach.
"3."
Her finger tightened around the trigger.
"2."
She adjusted her arm so that the muscles wouldn't tense up if it went down to close quarters fighting.
"1."
Ursula's leg lashed out, her suit amplifying the speed and force of her leg; the doors' lock shattered, and metal splinters went flying as the twin doors were flung back into the room. Ursula's finger was about to slam down on the trigger, to open up on the hostile contacts that were supposed to be in the room, to see the defeated look on Anna's face, but no.
There was no one in the room.
Still trying to comprehend what was going on, Ursula looked down at the ground. A neat pile of five helmets lay before them.
A series of small "clinks" could be heard behind them.
"Open up!"
She heard Merida's grenade clatter onto the floor as she opened up with the pistol; a torrent of lead lashed out, semi-automatic and automatic fire combined into a singular, fluctuating white blur that cut into their opponents. Shields flared. Sparks flew. Blood spattered. "Keep it up!" Anna heard Elsa yell. "Don't give them a chance to recover!"
Names dropped off the simulation in quick succession; after only 5 seconds of continuous fire only two soldiers remained. But even then they recovered quickly enough to duck behind cover and return fire. Anna ducked behind the rubble they'd been hiding behind in the ambush to let her empty magazine drop to the floor, sliding a fresh one into the chamber.
"Stagger our reloads, guys!" Rapunzel yelled as she dropped behind cover to reload. "Keep them suppressed!"
"Anyone here without any kills?" Merida asked. "Because if not, I'd like one of those two left, so I can have a killcount."
Elsa fired off a short burst, and ducked instinctively as incoming bullets ricocheted off her cover, wincing as she did. "Did you bring explosive arrows?"
Anna watched Merida's face light up as she reached behind her back for an arrow.
Then a round caught her in the shoulder.
She didn't even have a chance to cry out before she collapsed to the floor. Her vision blacked out, and for a moment she thought she was dead, just before streaks of light streamed back into her pupils. There was no HUD to tell her if she was still alive for as long as she had no helmet on. Why her body reacted to that kind of wound in that way was beyond her. Hands grabbed her roughly as she was dragged back into cover, the gunfire echoing off the walls of her mind. "Don't die on me now," she heard a faraway voice call to her. "We're almost done—"
A singular explosion echoed across the battlefield, and suddenly everything was still. Not a single sound, not a single thing moved. And she couldn't move. Not even a fingertip. Not even to blink. The unfamiliar blue text materialized before her eyes: Valkyrie victory. She'd seen it once before, but only when she was dead.
Now though, she was there to experience it. She would have smiled if she could.
Before she knew it her own eyes, her real eyes, opened again to the blankness of the pod. The cushioned pod gave her a sense of comfort, but she was nowhere near at rest; she could still feel the adrenaline of winning pumping through her veins, a wide grin spread across her face. We won. To her, it still didn't feel real even when the familiar hissing reached her ears and light streamed back into the pod that made her eyes squint.
"WE DID IT!" she heard Rapunzel squeal and Belle turn towards her with a grin on her face. "We fucking trashed them!" Anna almost lost her balance as Merida threw herself onto her in a tight embrace, she herself overjoyed that they'd actually been able to win. "I can't believe it," Rapunzel continued. "After so long, we finally got a perfect run!"
Their simulation room erupted into laughter, choruses of cheers and numerous high-fives that Anna lost count of. She found it strange; smiles around her teammates had become rare, mainly due to continual poor performance, and the regime of Ursula still lingering in the back of their minds. Anna had always been a cheery person, no matter how bad things had gotten, no matter how much she was bullied, but she suddenly realized how rare and precious smiles from her teammates were. The only thing she could recall from their previous attempts at simulation were blank faces and empty stares.
But she wasn't about to complain for the nice change.
"Fucking MVP, Anna," Merida remarked wryly as she jabbed at Anna playfully, forcing her to curl as she laughed, attempting to push Merida off her. "You totally wrecked that game."
"You're too kind," Anna blushed, attempting to shrug off the praise before her head began to sell. "I just did what I had to do."
"You've definitely upped your game though," Belle said excitedly. "AND you beat Ursula. She'll have to think twice now before she tries to do anything to you."
"Yeah." Anna looked down, her heart still singing. "A lot of this is because of you guys," she said at last, after a brief pause. "Thanks for believing in me, even when I was down and out, or simply bad at this entire thing in general."
"But then again, we knew you could do it," Merida went on with a smile. "We all did."
"Yeah well, I did have a great coach…" Anna voice trailed off as she looked around, having just noticed the glaring exception to their team. "That's strange," she remarked. "Where's Elsa?"
Even when she was trodding silently down the empty corridors, her footsteps echoing off the walls soft as they were, she still didn't know why she left. Why she'd left her team to enjoy in their victory without her. Maybe it was because she didn't know how to act when everyone was celebrating; she lived too long with pain that she didn't know how to be happy anymore.
Maybe it was because she felt like she didn't belong there; after all, she was a bio-engineered superweapon, a manifestation of science fiction stories of days long gone by. She let her fingertips trail the cool surface of the metal corridors that would eventually lead upward to the rooftop she visited constantly, where she found she shared something in common with another human. Human. A funny, strange concept. Elsa realized she was biologically human, albeit faster and stronger, shared equally familiar features with lots of other people on the planet, but yet…
…she couldn't quite claim to actually be a human.
What does it mean to be human?
What does it mean to live?
Her traverses through the library and separate archives had brought her many literary texts and discussions about questions of those sort. The nebulous concept of humanity. For the millennia that humanity had roamed the planet the answer had still eluded them; what then could she expect of herself? How could she find the answer if so many generations before her could not either?
She refrained from slamming her fist into the corridor; the last time she did that, Hans had to replace the entire section, and had to cordon off the entire walkway. Instead she chose to restrain herself as she continued her journey up towards the staircase connected to the rooftop.
She'd heard talk all over the campus, how recruits wished they could punch harder or run faster, how that would solve all the problems they were having in their education. Elsa gave herself a bitter laugh; after all, no one was there to hear her. Her physiology solved all of the problems the other recruits were facing, but what she would give to have their problems for a day. To be like them for a day. To feel human, to be human for once, and face humanly possible problems, instead of the twisted mangled monster of a human that she was.
Elsa reached the stairwell. For a moment, her mind went blank as she ascended the grey steps, and reached the glass door.
The cool breeze caressed her cheeks as she exited the stairwell, stepping into the sunlight that engulfed the academy. The green plains greeted her again. She came up here to forget her troubles, to be dwarfed by the geographical anomaly that was the mountain the academy sat on, for it was the only mountain in hundreds of miles of plains, to gaze at the green curtains that wavered in the wind. It was only here that she could feel any form of peace, to be free from her burdens and worries.
Empyrean.
Not here, she complained inwardly as she sat down on one of the benches that gave her a scenic view of the plains. I came here to be free from this, not think of it some more! Elsa sighed as she leaned against the hard bench, her mind unwillingly accepting the intrusion and having difficulty moving on to other things to think of.
"Elsa?"
She could hear the voice echo up the stairwell even before the sound of her footsteps reached her ears, and by then she already knew who it was. She turned her head, not surprised in the least when she caught sight of the familiar body shape, the silky red hair and the absolutely gorgeous freckles that adorned her face. But even then her heart still felt constrained; Anna's arrival only seemed to add on to her burdens in ways she still could not rationalize. Elsa still didn't know how she felt towards Anna.
Even more terrifyingly so, she could not be sure how Anna felt towards her.
"What is it?" she said, in a tone that she desperately hoped wasn't more curt than it should have been.
Anna's response did little to answer that question; she responded cheerfully anyway. "Nothing, just that we were wondering where you went. The rest of the team is celebrating, so I came up here to find you. Sorry if I'm, you know, intruding."
Her face turned ever so gently away, and Elsa felt her heart ache. Is that the word for it? "No," she replied, "It's okay. You don't have to apologise. But you should probably go."
"But I just got here!" came the reply.
"You belong with them."
"So do you!"
"No, Anna," Elsa said somewhat exasperatedly, though she was sure she was more exasperated with herself, "I belong here. Alone."
"What do you mean, 'you belong here alone'?" Anna moved over and sat next to her with a curious, and somewhat sympathetic look on her face. Elsa's heart rate jumped. "You belong with us! With the whole team! You don't have to go up here all by yourself."
Elsa didn't answer; not that she didn't want to, but because she didn't know how. Lamely, she shook her head and averted her gaze, staring intently at the concrete floor of the garden roof.
She felt a familiar weight press down on her shoulder. "I'm not leaving until you are," Anna said, half pouting as she looked straight into Elsa's eyes. Elsa swallowed, feeling her hands tremble just a bit. "If you do go back down to meet them, we go together."
Those green eyes… Elsa found herself thinking. And those freckles! I don't need more things stuck in my head; I have enough of those already! She had no refuge, no place to runaway to, only to sit there and draft up all the possibilities this scenario could turn into. But the feeling of Anna leaning against her sparked off something within her that she couldn't comprehend.
For a while she panicked, and eventually her heart rate normalized, and she relaxed a bit. But the feeling still remained. She tried to identify it, if it was attraction to Anna or something else. She settled on the possibility that it was a mix of both. And strangely, she found that she liked it.
She felt a smile cross her face.