Bud 3.4

It took a few seconds for the Console operator to finally respond, and I stopped running toward the PHQ to listen when I felt the speaker start vibrating. "-atter, Console. It's a coordinated, wide-scale attack across much of the city. The closest report to your location is Crusader making a mess of that district's police station. He hasn't gone lethal yet, but it's not out of the question. Challenger is en route as well, you need to support him in driving Crusader off. The address is being sent to your phone now, he's a Master 7 with selectively intangible duplicates. If you need assistance, call me, but we're not in the best condition over here so it might take a minute." There was a click as she cut the call off, probably moving on to the next hero or PRT squad.

I impatiently waited the handful of seconds it took for the text to arrive, and I shot into motion the instant it did. I hadn't been moving in completely the wrong direction, at least. Follow this street to the south for a handful of blocks, shift back into Ruby-mode long enough to catch myself on the corner and swing into a right turn, shift back into Scatter-mode to keep on moving, rinse and repeat.

Sirens were echoing through the city, eerily reminiscent of the Grimm alarms I remembered from childhood. The streets had cleared out in seconds. Granted, it was pretty late at night, but there had still been people out and about on my walk toward the PRTHQ. Not anymore.

I found the building quickly enough, more thanks to the small army of flying ghosts dressed in plate mail and wielding giant spears surrounding every exit I could see than anything else, and put my foot through the first one's chest in an instant. By the time its friends had noticed I was there, two more had been injured, and the first was just starting to fade from the damage.

Someone who hadn't spent as long as I had working to get stronger might have had some serious issues, but for me, their armor wasn't all that big of a deal. Still though, hitting those clones was feeling… weird. The punches didn't feel any different, but the kick had felt a little like I had done it without wearing boots. Something to do with his intangibility? I was still impacting, though, when you'd think he would have me go through them entirely if he could have. What was the rule here?

I knew literally nothing about Crusader. I'd never even heard of them, and I did wish that I'd asked console for a little more information. This would hardly be the first time I'd fought somebody with an unknown Semblance, and on the face, this one seemed pretty self-explanatory. A lot like Sun's Semblance, actually, just with a lot more clon-

The one closest to me lunged with its spear, and I was so caught off-guard by the fact that my Aura didn't ping to warn me of the incoming hit that I almost didn't manage to dodge it. I scattered around the blow and had to drop fully into my semblance and move up into the air to avoid the spear's sideways sweep.

I landed on another ghost, kicking off it into a backflip that dented its armor, backrolled over the street to come to my feet, and rose to face the half-dozen ghosts that had abandoned their attack on the police station to… keep me contained, by the looks of it. They weren't attacking at any rate.

I thought about trying to talk to him, maybe delaying until Challenger got here, but dismissed the idea. This was only a few of his ghosts, and the others were still running free. There were probably more of them still active in the station, but if there was fighting going on inside then I would be hearing gunshots or some other sign of fighting.

Besides, I hadn't heard any of them talk since I got here. They probably wouldn't be great for conversation.

I rushed the right flank, scattering from where I stood and reforming with my hands wrapped around the first ghost's spear. I tried to run my Aura through the spear like I would with Crescent Rose, to keep it from breaking in my grip or getting damaged when I swung it into something at top speed, but as I kicked up through the ghost's arm to release its grip the spear started to fade and my Aura... slipped off it like rain off a sloped roof.

The spear only had a couple of seconds of existence left, so I spun around, elbowed the ghost in the forehead to knock it away, and threw the spear as hard as I could. It was longer than Crescent Rose, and it was light enough to throw off my aim, but it still hit one of the ghosts that were now flying toward me.

The spear phased through, vanishing into the ground behind them and leaving no obvious damage. I wouldn't be using their weapons against them, then. Great. Unarmed, fighting at least a half-dozen flying, armored ghost-spearmen that my aura wasn't warning me about attacks from. This would be fun.

Alright, problem solving time. I dove into the fray, ducking under a swipe of one spear and rolling forward into an attack while I thought. Why wasn't I getting warned about the spears? I could touch them, so if they were illusions then they were good enough that the difference was meaningless.

...Console had called them 'selectively intangible.' If that meant what I thought it did, then… I didn't really know what to think.

The only way to test that theory was to get hit by an attack, but if I was right, then doing so would get me hurt. This was too dangerous to not know for sure, though. I thought back to my mental map of the surroundings, found what I needed, and scattered down flat along the ground before snaking my way through the ghost's legs and reforming on the other side. I jumped backward, planted my feet on a building, pushed off over the heads of the remaining three- no, four ghosts that were following me warily, and landed on top of the police department's wall a good forty feet away.

The wall was five feet high, made of brick, with another five feet of cast-iron fencing on top of it. I landed atop the fence, perched between two of the spikes on top, and waited. The group that had been chasing me reformed into a defensive wall and approached carefully, but entirely too slowly. Their plan was to try and distract me while their friends from inside the station hit me from behind, but I was keeping an eye out. The ghosts were silent, but they glowed enough that I could sort-of track them from ambient light levels and knowledge of how and where they were moving. In the moment before the ghost behind me struck, I scattered down to the brick, facing toward them through the fence.

The fence didn't even slow it down, which I'd expected. I'd also, as much as I'd hoped I was wrong, been half-expecting the spear to carry on, directly through my Aura and toward my leg.

I scattered as fast as I ever had, and didn't feel the wound until I reformed on the ground a second later. A sharp line of pain across the outside of my shin, where a thin cut had been scored into my leg by one of the spears, welling with blood. My Aura had been up, I'd been expecting the hit, but the attack had landed anyway. It wasn't a bad hit, and my Aura would heal it in the next few minutes, but the implications were… worrying.

His spears were phasing through my Aura like it wasn't even there. No Aura damage, no warning.

I barely had time to consider how wrong that was before I had to back off, almost putting my back to a wall before remembering that they could go through walls and rushing to the middle of the street instead.

Where was Challenger? The rapidly-shrinking part of my brain that wasn't focused on the fight at the moment let me know that it had started less than a minute ago, and that he'd need time to get here, but I could have really used the help.

Alright, focus. What did I know? The two examples I could think of for powers that worked like that were Sun and Blake, and both of their original bodies remained unchanged… or at least, Blake had worked like that. We weren't quite as sure, now. Not that every power like this left an original body, but it was my best clue. I seriously doubted that Crusader himself, if he was still around, was in the prison - it'd be a big risk for no real reward, as long as he could see through the ghost's eyes

Ghosts charged me from three directions at once, and I made a standing leap straight up to avoid their attacks. I landed on one of their spears, snapping it in the process, and kneed the wielder in the face as I jumped off it and over its head. I paused when I hit the ground for just long enough for the other ghosts to rush me, only to roll backward over my shoulder in a flash and launch toward them from behind.

He had to have a limited number of ghosts, right? Maybe if I could kill enough of them, I could see where the replacements were coming from. I'd just need to be careful.

I could see six on the field right now, with two more phasing through the station's walls as I watched. If I was careful, then I could manage this without getting any more hurt, but It'd be risky. This guy's Semblance was pretty close to hard-countering mine, in a way I hadn't seen since… Cinder, probably.

That was a risk I'd just have to take, though.

Weapons wouldn't help, so there wasn't much point in ripping a stop sign out of the ground or something. It was possible that they were weak to electricity, or fire, or something else, but I didn't have any Dust with me even if I had the time to test for a weakness. I'd have to do this by hand.

They were approaching cautiously, now. I'd damaged or destroyed five of them already, and they hadn't exactly hurt me much in return. They were staggered out further, three in the air while three more hovered closer to the ground. I rushed the one in the lower middle.

It tried to jab, but I was already inside its guard as it began reacting to me movement. My fist met its jaw in an uppercut right out of Yang's playbook, and it started fading as I rolled right. I jumped as I came up, kicked off his that one's face, and launched myself toward the upper middle one. I snapped out a leg as I passed it, sending it spinning through the air as it faded, and kept on my trajectory toward the upper left. This one, I grabbed by the spear, swung around, and swept toward the lower left, literally disarming them both in the process. The last one was watching the carnage as it retreated toward the building, and it turned to fly away as quickly as it could as I finished off the last of its friends. It was surprisingly quick when it wanted to be, but it wasn't fast enough.

Six dead ghosts, seven seconds. More ghosts were leaving the building now, but not nearly as many. Crusader must have been running low.

I took the opportunity to really look around for the first time since getting here. If Crusader was nearby, he wasn't being obvious about it. There weren't any helpful suits of armor peeking out of any nearby windows, at least. This being the police station, there were enough sirens running that I couldn't hear much of anything either. I could see movement through the police station windows, but it wasn't clear enough to act on. It was probably just officers running around, trying to control damages or whatever.

Five more ghosts were leaving the building, but they were running things differently this time. Four of them sunk into the ground as the fifth flew high into the air, and-

Aha.

I caught a sixth ghost trying to sneak in from the opposite direction, down the block and in the general direction of the Bay. It was being about as subtle as it could be, but it was only going to manage that so well. I rushed that direction at top speed, fast enough to hope that they might think I'd just vanished, and reformed a half-second later to find another ghost following after the first one, and two more in the middle of leaving a two-story shop tucked between two taller buildings that looked to be in the middle of renovations.

The ghosts were quicker on the uptake than I'd expected, and they were already coming back toward me, but they weren't nearly fast enough. I ignored the door and crashed through the window instead, looked up through a gap in the floor and finally spotted him.

The ghosts were pretty-much carbon copies of him, the only real difference being that he was flesh-and-blood. At least, I assumed that was what was underneath the heavy plate armor he was wearing. It was shimmering a little, and I guessed that he might be in the middle of making another ghost, but that wasn't the big concern here.

There were a dozen ghosts between me and him, six on either floor. Crusader himself was hovering a couple of feet above the ground, but he'd made the mistake of stopping to look toward me in surprise instead of getting out of there.

Lots of spears, but if I was pretty sure I had a workaround. It made it tricker for me to hit them, too, but not impossible. I memorized their locations, figured out where and how they were attacking, and went blind to the world as I scattered.

I had a faint impression of a breeze blowing through me as three of them swiped at me at once, phasing through my aura and hitting nothing but air and maybe a couple of petals. In response, I materialized a boot in mid-kick, and felt the impact of the ghost's chestplate as the hit landed. It was probably either outside the building, fading, or both, but either way it was out of the fight for the moment.

I scattered the boot, losing sensation from it as I did so, and moved onto the next. It didn't take long, even when I lost track of the last one. I reappeared to look around and figure out where it had gone, only to narrowly dodge a stab to the face as it came back down from the upper floor with its buddies. Crusader himself was gone, as far as I could tell.

They were more clever this time. Changing up their strategies. I managed to get three before losing track of the others, but that was plenty. I reformed, grabbed the shaft of one spear and vaulted up it to kick the ghost in the sternum with both feet, kicked off it into two more, and used the last as a stepping-stone in order to launch up to the second floor.

Crusader was outside, having exited through the balcony door and attempted to retreat toward the southwest. As high as he was flying, I might have had some issues catching up to him if it hadn't been for the glowing green pyramid keeping him contained halfway down the block.

Challenger stood on his own triangular forcefield, carefully avoiding the small army of ghosts that Crusader was sending toward him, trying to surround him and pin him down. It looked like those fields weren't any better at stopping these things than my Aura was, and it looked like he wasn't having much luck with them. Tiny fragments were spread all over the battlefield, slowly drifting from place to place instead of collecting to where he needed them.

I ran, jumping a story directly up with my Semblance to get to the next building, stepping off the other side and falling a good fifteen feet to hit the once after that. I built up more speed across that roof in order to get the momentum I needed to wall-run directly up the side of the next building and reach the roof, where I found-

A glowing forcefield, slowly hovering past where I stood. Past it, another, then three more on an almost-perfectly straight line directly to Crusader's box. Crusader himself didn't seem to have noticed me, focused as he was on getting Challenger to free him.

The first stepping stone cracked the instant I set foot on it, but I was already moving on to the next. Ahead of me, I saw the tiniest crack appear in the cell's walls. Crusader heard the crackling destruction of each stone on my path and turned to face me, only for me to appear inside his box with my forearm pressed against his throat.

A ghost tried to leave his body, but I kneed it into nonexistence the moment it appeared, followed up with a knee on him that dented the armor between his legs and he gave up after that. The ghosts around us vanished as he yelped.

Challenger spoke up. "Crusader's down, Console, no fatalities on our end. I've checked the station, they're alive and tending to wounded. Requesting PRT backup with foam sprayers and information on the situation elsewhere?"

Again, it took a tense minute for her to respond. I took the time to take control of my breathing and started mentally checking myself for anything that might slow me down. I'd tensed up hard when I realized that my Aura wouldn't be protecting me, and that was only going to slow me down.

Starting from my feet, I moved from muscle to muscle up through my legs, breathing in, banishing the slightest bit of tension where I could manage it, then breathing out. I saved the rest for when we moved out. It was a trick that had saved me a lot of pain over the years. There was nothing worse than getting a foot cramp while you were running on top of a raven the size of a large airship.

I was halfway up my torso when the response came. "PRT agents are on their way, Challenger. Empire gangers have started hitting more locations. We're not sure what they're trying to accomplish, but it's spread out enough that we're being spread too thin. You two are going to assist Assault and Battery; they're trying to divert Hookwolf, Stormtiger, and Cricket from their path toward ABB territory, without much success. Sending you the address."

Challenger nodded, despite the fact that she obviously couldn't see him. "We're on our way. What's the situation elsewhere?"

"Patching you through to Armsmaster."

"Appreciated, Console."

It took a couple more minutes, but one of the many sirens echoing around the city right now sounded like it was getting closer. Challenger didn't notice at first, but when the green-white lights started reflecting off the buildings he spawned a forcefield and stepped onto it, ready to fly. I scattered onto it as he took off, finishing the de-tensing job in one burst in the process. It didn't feel nearly as nice, but it worked. As we began to fly, Armaster finally spoke up again.

"The Dallons plus Manpower have engaged Jotun, Othala, Victor, and a telekinetic Shaker we haven't seen before, and we're thinking they were intentionally provoked. The Pelhams went after Purity, and she's giving them a merry chase over Captain's hill. Gleipnir and Munin are each hitting separate police stations, Miss Militia has engaged the former and Dauntless the latter. Alabaster tried to hit a hospital, he's contained by the BBPD. No sign of Kaiser or Krieg yet, but at the rate things are going it's only a matter of time. I'm waiting to deploy from the PHQ for when they do. Any questions?"

Tons, actually, but only a few that were relevant. I asked, "What happened to the bridge? Why'd Purity go after it?" Belatedly, I added, "Uh, this is Scatter."

"We don't know. She left right after taking it down, well before anyone got to her. She could have been trying to avoid the defensive emplacements, but they hadn't warmed up yet. Our running theory is that she wanted to separate us from the base, but we have enough people that can get there if need be that it doesn't change much. It might just have been an attempted distraction from everything else."

Well, that was worrying. "We're keeping an eye out over there, right? Who's there right now?"

Armsmaster took a second to reply, and his tone gave me the impression he was reading from a report. "Thirty-four PRT troopers, Triumph, Aegis, and Vista. The older Wards were training on the Protectorate console, and Vista was apparently on the training floor again. It's defended, and we can get reinforcements there if need be. Challenger, you're patched into this call, correct?"

"Yes, sir," Challenger responded, sounding a little distracted. "All due respect, sir, I'd appreciate a lack of conversation for focus unless it's important." We were picking up some serious speed, I noticed. Way faster than I'd seen a field this size move before now.

"I'll keep this brief, then. With the number of high-rated capes on the field, the Director has authorized our PRT agents on the Rig to begin loading up the missile defenses. We're not firing yet, but if it becomes necessary then we might need your fields to help mitigate damages."

Wait, we had missile defenses? When was somebody gonna tell me about that?

The field beneath our feet flickered a bit and I braced myself for a fall if it collapsed, but Challenger kept it intact. "...Yes, sir," he responded carefully.

"I'll keep you informed. Armsmaster out."

Challenger had wanted some quiet for this, so I didn't speak up. I'd have to ask him what was going on later. Instead, I sat on the field and waited until the ride was over. We were flying ten or fifteen stories off the ground, so I had a good view of the surrounding area.

There was a surprising amount of fire out there, actually. I could see blazes picking up in at least four places within ten blocks or so, and I could see glows from elsewhere in the city that looked like more. Console had said that the police were handling the ordinary gangers, but it didn't really look like it from up here. If anything, it looked more like the aftermath of the battle of Vacuo - but this place hadn't had anything nearly on that level to trigger this kind of reaction from the general population. If we weren't being expected to help out here… than what did that mean? Were the police used to dealing with stuff on this level?

How was it that a place without the Grimm still managed to end up like this?

That question had me distracted enough that I didn't notice we were dropping off until we started passing between buildings rather than over them. We were in the worse-off parts of town now, sort of like where I'd patrolled with Dauntless last week. It didn't take me long to spot why we were dropping, either.

A trio of obvious capes walked down the street, facing away from us and moving in the general direction of the docks. They weren't making much progress, but then I suspected that wasn't the point. They were a little occupied with the civilians. The smallest, a woman with a cage for a helmet and duel-wielding kamas, was holding back behind the other two for the most part, but ducking in front for brief instants to cut at an officer or civilian before getting back into cover too quickly for anyone to react. Nobody that she cut got back up again.

The middle one, wearing chains and a mask that I couldn't identify from the back, was practically strutting up the sidewalk, totally ignoring the occasional bullet that flew toward him and gathering distortions in his hands. Every few seconds, he'd raise an arm and one of the distortions would fly in the direction he pointed, exploding on impact. The noise of those impacts was drowned out by the third cape, and the one that was, with good reason, taking the majority of the attention here.

The best way I could come up with to describe… it was as a blender the size of a small car, growing and shrinking masses of blades from its body in such a way that it gave off the illusion of propelling itself on four legs like a dog or a fox.

It wasn't the most intimidating thing I'd ever had to fight, but it probably broke the top five, and the fact that I was totally unarmed didn't help in the slightest. Assault and Battery were nowhere to be found.

"That's them, I take it?" I asked, already jumping off the forcefield to engage.

Challenger didn't respond, but I heard him talking to Console as I hit the ground. "Console, Challenger. Scatter and I are engaging Hookwolf, Stormtiger, and Cricket. We're on Lord's and Spayder, downtown fringes, approaching the Docks. We'll try to slow them down and minimize casualties, but any help you can offer would be appreciated. Assault and Battery aren't here, so I need to know where they went."

I was already moving by the time he finished, dashing ahead of the cloud of forcefields that were appearing on Challenger's costume before flying toward the chainsaw-coyote. That left the other two to me, for the moment at least.

The woman looked like the smallest threat, and I could probably take her weapons, besides. I crossed the yards between the two of us in a fraction of a second and emerged from my Semblance to find her not quite where I'd expected her to be. I tanked a pair of Kama stabs from the ground underneath me, where she'd somehow reacted quickly enough to drop to the ground, and kept on moving under the force of my own momentum.

Catching myself on the ground, I launched myself for her once again, not scattering entirely so that I could see where she was moving at the expense of speed, and watched as she began to dodge within a millisecond of my starting to move. Enhanced reaction times, almost Hunstman-level, if I had to guess.

It wouldn't have saved her if it hadn't been for the warning flare from the Aura near my back. I scattered completely around the projectile as it appeared, reformed facing the direction it had come from, and heard Cricket rising from an evading roll behind me as I squared off with the chain guy.

The mask was patterned after a roaring tiger, a pale, almost-white blue. The distortions wrapped around his hands looked almost like claws and were actively growing less and less transparent as I watched.

At the same time, my Aura started giving off… something. Aura sensation was hard to describe at the best of times, but this was new. A sort of… shimmery, shuddery, high-pitched buzzing feeling, almost light enough to go unnoticed. After a few seconds, it seemed to vanish, leaving me more confused than anything. I didn't feel anything odd, and my aura wasn't dropping as far as I could tell.

Whatever. I got moving so I could maybe get out of the way of whatever it was, Scattering in two directions, toward both the guy I assumed to be Stormtiger and the girl I assumed to be Cricket, just like I had when showing off my Semblance when I first got here. The decoy headed for Stormtiger, and just as it vanished I reformed from the other and flew back toward Cricket.

She reacted as quickly as she had last time, but it still wasn't enough. I caught her around the waist, launched myself upward, then scattered and reformed on the other side as I kicked her into the pavement with both legs. She hit the road with a lot of grace given the circumstances, but that died as soon as I landed on top of her. I crouched down, put my hands on her shoulders for my third and fourth points of contact, and scattered both of us, just for a second.

When we reformed, Cricket was flying in Hookwolf's general direction, I had her sickles, and I was rushing Stormtiger as fast as I could.

In the background, Hookwolf was smashing glowing green forcefields with every motion, each field giving off a sound like a little thunderclap as it shattered into tiny shards and vanished. He was trying to approach, put himself between me and his friends, but Challenger was heading him off expertly. I knew from experience how much of a pain ranged forcefields were to fight, and I was a lot faster than Hookwolf was. Challenger reacted fast to Cricket entering the fray, shattering the fields between her and Hookwolf before moving and reforming them into a pair of huge walls pinning him in that location.

Hookwolf was facing the wrong direction to see her coming. He reared back and prepared to smash the field to his left, but at the last moment he spun, retracted the vast majority of his blades and ducked to keep her from getting impaled on them.

Hookwolf was… really gross, actually. He wore his hair long, greasy, and covering all of him I could see, which was more than I would have liked. He had a really cheap metal wolf mask covering his face, and wore a pair of jeans, but he wasn't wearing much of anything else.

Challenger hadn't herded him to the perfect position, but it was close enough. Cricket hit the ground inches in front of him, and in the instant Hookwolf tensed before throwing himself back into the fray, most of the fields collapsed and reformed such that the pair were being squeezed between a pair of walls the size of one of Beacon's arches. Hookwolf extended his blades once more, but apparently he couldn't muster the force to punch through them without building up momentum. The pair of them were stuck.

A shimmering distortion flew through the air behind me, smashing into the barrier nearest me. It held, but I noticed a series of tiny, rapidly-sealing cracks in the surface at the point of impact, no bigger around than my fist. I whirled around, and spotted Stormtiger behind us raising both his hands. I moved at the same moment he fired a shot from his other hand.

My aura flared a warning of a high-powered shot that would probably do more damage than I had expected from one of these blasts. Time for a test.

"Challenger! Shield, at an angle!"

He heard my shout and dropped from his platform in an instant as it shattered, the pieces shooting past me. They reformed into a barrier ahead of me, three feet wide and angled at what I judged to be a seventy-degree upward slope. Stormtiger's next shot slammed into it - but this time, it slid, just a little. The impact was more spread out, as the shot impacted the shield around two-thirds of the way up and splashed downward.

The shield still fractured, even more than it had last time, the cracks both deeper and wider-spread. They didn't look like they were sealing, either. The shot had been blocked, though, and even with the way he was alternating shots between his hands, he'd need to wait another second or two before firing.

I jumped up, planted a foot on the shield to launch myself further, and came down on top of Stormtiger again, Cricket's kamas raised. He fired one shot that I scattered around, but I noticed that he wasn't gathering another shot in his other hand. He backed up quickly, and he splayed the fingers on his other hand, down by his waist.

It took me a moment to understand what was happening, but I figured it out when I didn't land nearly as close to him as I thought I had. A wind had kicked up, and it strengthened rapidly as I ran toward him. I couldn't scatter this time, at risk of getting literally blown away, but it didn't really matter. I reached him in seconds, and even with the way the wind picked up to gale-force in the last couple of feet he couldn't do anything to stop the sickle that caught the back of his knee and pulled him to the ground before I planted a knee between his shoulder blades and held the other blade to his neck.

I took a second to breathe. Even with my Aura, this was getting tiring, and I couldn't even imagine how Challenger was feeling. Turning around after a half-second break, I had just enough time to register the glow that had suffused the area behind me before a double-helix of light shot down from above, shattered the field containing Hookwolf with a sound like a bomb going off, and sent waves of dust rolling across the battlefield.

Once it finally cleared, I saw a shape that could only have been Purity - glowing painfully bright, bright enough that the light hid all but the barest hint of any facial expression. What I could see, though, in her posture and the shape of her face, gave me an intense feeling of resignation and regret.

Challenger was picking himself up off the ground, but it was slow and he looked hurt. His fields were gone, and the people in them were free again. I saw a group of flyers I recognized from the news as New Wave approaching, but they weren't looking great themselves.

I raised a hand to my ear and murmured, "This is Scatter calling Protectorate Console. Challenger's injured, the Empire members are free, and Purity's here. I need backup ASAP, I repeat, backup ASAP."

For once, Console was prompt in responding. It wasn't the PRT agent this time, though. The voice that came through my earpiece was young, male, and it sounded wet and awful, like he was speaking breathlessly through a hole in his throat. It took me a moment to place it, and my blood chilled when I realized who it was.

"All Protectorate this is Aegis. There's something here, and it's- it's slaughtered its way through half a dozen PRT troops already. We need backup here, right now."

Bud 3.4: wherein Ruby Rose kicks copious amounts of Nazi tail.

Sorry about the delay here, the chapter kind of exploded on me at the same time some stuff started happening IRL. I feel like this one could be better, but I got done what needed to get done. (I guess this is what happens when I try to fit two fight scenes into a single chapter, heh.)

Don't have much else to say here, other than Spacebattles is coming I promise and that any comments or critique are appreciated. Thanks for reading, and I'll see you next time!

3/1/2019 EDIT: Midterms slowed me down, sorry. I'm skipping this weekend and posting on either the 9th/10th or 16th/17th, depending on what I can manage. I'll try to keep far enough ahead on schoolwork to keep it from happening again, but I just didn't plan well enough to manage it this week.