Bud 3.5

Before I was even done registering what Aegis had said, Armsmaster was in the midst of responding. "Aegis, get everyone you can and evacuate deeper into the base. Captain Jenkins is the watch leader, correct? He'll tell you where to go. Backup is on its way."

Purity was falling back again. One of the New Wave flyers, a teenage girl with brown hair, descended for just long enough to throw a red laser barrage worthy of an Atlas flagship toward Hookwolf before blasting off with her team. She got there just in time to get wrapped in a bright blue forcefield with the rest of her family a fraction of a second before Purity unloaded another helix of light in their direction. Hookwolf, meanwhile, got blasted down the street, and I heard a painful-sounding screech of metal overlapped with a roar of pain as shards of metal bounced across the street in his wake.

I rushed to Challenger's side and checked his condition. He was moving and breathing, but his left ankle and right wrist looked twisted into some seriously bad sprains after falling when his fields collapsed. He was blinking rapidly like he was still trying to get the flash out of his eyes. He'd have been fine by now if he was a Huntsman, but without Aura… He'd be out of action for a while if I was any judge. I stood up, raised Cricket's sickles, and put myself between him and the villains. They still needed to be stopped, so I'd just have to do it myself. If I could get close enough to Hookwolf, then maybe I could find some kind of weakness, and-

The comms picked up again as Hookwolf pushed himself to his feet. "Scatter, Piggot. Challenger isn't responding, what's your situation?"

Cricket had somehow ended up through a window in the chaos. A bunch of the glass in the vicinity had shattered, and it looked like she'd been thrown into a small grocery store. She clambered back out of it before picking a couple of the larger glass shards out of her arms and legs. I responded, "Challenger's wounded but alive, as are most of the Empire capes present. Purity showed up for long enough to wreck everything, but New Wave is chasing her off again. Preparing to engage Hookw-"

"No," Piggot cut me off. Stormtiger was standing back up as well, and he was pretty much uninjured. More distortions started forming around his hands as he turned to face us. "With Dauntless engaged against Munin and Challenger wounded, that makes you the only cape we have capable of reaching the Rig. A police chopper is en route from Boston to allow Armsmaster to deploy, but you have the opportunity to get there faster."

She didn't sound happy, but I couldn't really bring myself to care all that much. She wanted me to leave this fight behind? These capes were killing people when I got here! "Director! I can't leave! These people need to go down!"

She paused, just for a moment. "They've been wounded, they'll retreat once you do. Get Challenger, get out of there, and get to the Rig. This is an order."

"Di-"

"Scatter!" Piggot shouted. "Challenger is wounded. You are going to fall back immediately, drop Challenger off at the PRTHQ, and get to the Rig as quickly as you can."

"...Yes, ma'am." I turned off the comm with a growl of frustration and took a step back. Stormtiger raised both his arms, the distortions wrapped around them several times as big as I'd seen them yet. Hookwolf crouched down, barbs and hooks retracting as he prepared for a pounce. Cricket prowled around behind me, waiting for my guard to drop. In the distance, I saw the light show that was New Wave's fight against Purity begin moving back in our direction again. I kneeled beside Challenger, put a hand on his shoulder, and began running my Aura through him in one of the less-comfortable maneuvers I'd picked up over the years.

Without any prompting, all three of our opponents attacked simultaneously. In the same moment, Challenger and I both vanished into a cloud of red and green rose petals that blasted off in the direction of the PRTHQ.

There were a few things that any Huntsman worth their license needed to be able to do. One was, obviously, the use of their Aura for defense. More sophisticated techniques were useful, but putting up the basic forcefield was step one. The second was a personalized series of landing strategies and similar tactics to deal with taking a big hit - without it, you almost certainly wouldn't survive initiation at Beacon or any of the other schools, and Hunstmen fell off of tall things way more often than one might expect.

The third, one of the hardest to define, was mobility. Whether you were talking about ground speed or maneuverability, one of the best ways to prove your ability there was running on water. Most people typically found a way of using their Semblance to manage it, and their weapon if not that, but it wasn't unusual to have to rely on other people. Team JNPR, for instance, couldn't really manage it individually but had figured out some tricks with Nora's semblance to pull it off as a group if they needed to. Very few people managed it via running and nothing else - you'd have to be able to move something like seventy miles an hour to manage it, and most Huntsmen couldn't pull that off for long, if at all.

Seventy miles an hour, however, fit nicely just below my maximum ground speeds.

I cheated a bit, of course. If you weighed less, you could get away with less speed, or move at the same speed while using less energy. My Semblance let me cut my weight down to almost nothing while I moved faster, so I barely even had to touch the water in order to get where I needed to go.

That was why I was currently rocketing across the Bay as fast as I could go, drawing a loose, wobbly arc over the waves toward the Rig. The water was getting choppy and slowing me down a little, but it wasn't anything too debilitating yet. The storm clouds on the horizon didn't look good, though.

There was plenty of fog around, too. I had to wonder if it had something to do with how they'd gotten a cape over here. Assuming it was one of their capes, of course. The timing for something else to be on the Rig in the middle of all this would be crazy, but it would hardly be out of the question. I'd have to keep an eye out.

A blinding light caught me from above just as I reformed to skip off a wave, and spots filled my vision. I couldn't really stay reformed to blink them away, but seeing as I didn't get pancaked against the waves I assumed it wasn't Purity and kept moving. Over the crashing waves, I could make out some kind of incredibly fast, repeated whump-whump-whump from the general direction of the light, but I didn't have the slightest clue as to what it was.

There was one thing that was gonna make this tricky. The forcefield was still active, and without access to the controls on the Rig, I couldn't get through it without a lot more firepower than I had access to at the moment. That meant going around it - which was possible, but not easy. I reached the bubble, reformed, and dove. The water was freezing, but I'd dealt with worse. Just like the Director had told me, once I got more than around fifty feet below the surface the shield started getting weaker, and once I crossed the seventy-five foot mark it fizzled out entirely. I swam back up, the light found me again, and I kept moving.

The light followed me all the way to the Rig, falling off every once in a while but getting back on its target in a few moments each time. I really hoped it wasn't so obvious from outside, or this thing would totally know I was coming.

I hadn't really figured out how big the Rig was until I was approaching the base. It must've been eighty feet tall at least, and the concrete supports underneath it were wider than three of me were tall. With how I was traveling, I didn't really get a good look at it until I was underneath it, standing on one of the tiny platforms suspended just below the waterline. I scattered for a moment, leaving the water behind to dry off, then looked to the sky.

The light seemed to lose track of me as I got underneath the building, but I could see the source now. That didn't help me identify what it was, though; besides being some kind of vehicle, I'd never seen anything like it. It almost reminded me of an Atlas dropship, but instead of wings or visible engines, it looked like it was kept in the air by a giant overclocked propeller. Earth's answer to an airship, maybe? It didn't seem hostile, or at least It wasn't being shot down, but it wasn't approaching to land, either. I chose to ignore it for the moment.

Velocity's door was right in front of me, but I could see a more interesting entry point above me. Something had scrabbled its way up the opposite pillar, leaving four-inch deep holes and scrapes in the concrete and revealing a metallic supporting structure underneath in a few places. Where the pillar met the base of the structure, twenty feet above my head, a ragged hole had been torn into the building's structure to allow entry to whatever that was.

"DIrector, Scatter. I found the entry point, whatever this was got in from the bottom by climbing the pillars and tearing a hole through the floor. I'm going in after it. I'm seeing some kind of airship outside the bubble here, is it one of ours?"

"...No, it isn't. Renick!" I heard more talking, muffled by distance as Piggot probably leaned away from the phone. A second later, she came back. "It's a news chopper, apparently. Not a threat, just a crew of idiot reporters. We'll deal with it, you get in there."

Right then. I took a half-step back to put my back against the pillar and launched forward. I ran directly up the side of the pillar, took three steps up and kicked off into the gap, landing inside something that looked like it used to be a heating duct. I couldn't have fit inside it normally, but from the looks of things, whatever it was that had come through was a lot bigger than I was. It had followed the general direction of the duct, but it wasn't exactly being contained by the metal. There was an impressive amount of damage, actually.

Thankfully, it made for an easy trail to follow. I stepped forward, jumped slightly as a thunderclap rumbled through the building almost instantly after a flash illuminated the tunnel, took a breath, and scattered forward.

The light was limited, and even though the storm was kicking up outside I soon moved deep enough into the Rig that the lightning wasn't illuminating my path anymore. I had to move more slowly, looking for the barest hints of the terrain silhouetted around me and really wishing that I had Crescent Rose with me, for the flashlight if nothing else.

I must have been picking my way forward for a good ten minutes before I got anywhere. Every so often, the new tunnel would near a hallway, only to veer off at the last second. Eventually, though, I stumbled my way through the last few feet, finally in a light, dim and flickery as it was, and dropped through a hole in the ceiling.

This hall didn't look much better than the tunnel had, to be honest. Ahead of me, two out of every three light fixtures were shattered, and most of the rest were dangling dangerously from the ceiling and sparking. Similar cuts and scrapes to the ones on the support pillars littered the walls, floor, and even the ceiling in places, and I could see places where something had… worn away at any exposed surfaces.

"Director, Scatter. I'm inside, where am I going?"

I didn't recognize the voice that replied. "Scatter, this is PRT Console. The Director's focused elsewhere, so I'll be your controller for the moment. The Wards and several PRT officers are moving to the upper levels. Security cameras aren't lasting long when this thing passes by, but the ones that are vanishing imply that it's staying on the lower floors, moving deeper inside.

"It's still moving toward the brig?" I asked.

"It is, yes. Where are you at the moment? I can direct you there."

I had to spin a little to find any kind of signage. "Uhh… oceanside hallway, second story, by the gym cube's observation deck. Not sure I'll need direction though, this thing's path is pretty clear."

"Acknowledged, Scatter. Be careful, and watch out for any wounded troopers. We know of eight casualties, and the Wards are under the watch of fourteen more, leaving twelve unaccounted for."

Right. That wasn't ominous at all. "Understood. Scatter out." I tightened my fists and started moving forward.

Thunder rumbled outside as I moved through the halls as quickly as I dared. As I walked, I gathered what information I could from the way the gouges seemed to loop and twist around the hallway. Whatever it was, it could move quick in short bursts; almost as fast as I could manage from a standing start. It couldn't maintain that speed for very long, but it probably had more maneuverability at speed than I did, and it could climb walls and ceilings. It had at least four pairs of legs, each one capable of leaving gouges the size of my entire forearm in concrete, and it almost looked like the edges of the gouges were corroded somehow. Some kind of acidic skin, maybe? It wouldn't be the weirdest thing I'd ever seen on a Grimm.

I shook my head. Grimm didn't exist here, I had to remember that. Unless Raven had decided to mess with me by dropping one here, but I doubted it. It really didn't seem like her style. Whatever this was, it was a parahuman. Or it was linked to one, at least. Which of course meant it was probably smart, too. Wonderful.

I reached the stairwell to the third and fourth floors only to find it in ruins. It had been absolutely shredded as this thing had climbed through it, and steel and plastic dangled precariously from the walls. I had to take a few steps back and jump to reach the landing, pull myself up, then hop onto a railing and tightrope-walk upward to reach the third floor and continue following the trail.

The Rig was creaking around me, now. The occasional rumbles of thunder I could hear through the structure were getting even louder and more frequent, and at least one of them was close and loud enough that the Rig itself must have been the lightning's end point. I was keeping a tight enough rein on my nerves that I didn't jump when my communicator started talking, but it was a close thing.

"Scatter, this is Captain Jenkins. I understand you're on-base now, chasing down our intruders?" His voice had a slight twang of an accent to it.

"Yes, sir. I'm on the fourth floor, just past the stairwell and approaching the Brig from landside." I turned a corner and saw the brig's hallway. I could hear something happening a good distance inside, but I wasn't sure what.

His reply was immediate. "Uhh, copy, Scatter. We're right above you, at floor seven near the roof access. Requesting status on our missing troopers, you should have passed a few of them by now if you're following that thing's path."

...Oh no. There hadn't exactly been anywhere those guys could have been where I could have missed them. Either they'd run off and hidden somewhere, or… or they'd gone with the intruder. One way or another.

"Scatter, do you copy?"

Freakout later, Ruby. Keep things as positive as you can. "Um, sorry sir, I haven't seen any sign of them."

The reply took longer this time. "...Understood. We're fortifying up here, with Vista's help. If need be, we can coordinate efforts, but I won't be sending my troopers or these Wards against this thing if I can help it. Not after whatever it did to everyone else."

That wasn't all that surprising. When the Grimm showed up, the police and military got out of the area if they could. The big threats were Huntsman work, and everybody knew it. "Yes, sir. I'm approaching the brig now, so I'm signing off"

"Copy. Good hunting."

I suppressed a wince at the grandfather of all crappy Huntsman cliches before turning my full attention to the hallway in front of me. The brig's doors had been ripped off their hinges, and I heard the screeching and groaning of metal being shredded from inside. I crept forward, careful to not make a sound, not that it would hear me over the noise it was making.

I had a decision to make, here. Option one was to rush in, hope that whatever it was hadn't already gotten to its target, and try to take it down. On one hand, it sounded like it hadn't actually managed to break through the brig's defenses yet, but on the other, I had no idea how dangerous it actually was. Option two was to move slower, engage later, get any tools I needed to take this thing down, and see if I could find a better opportunity to engage. That carried the downside of this thing managing whatever it came here for - probably freeing Fenja and Menja, but I wasn't ruling anything out.

I really didn't want this thing to free those two. I'd beaten them with Crescent Rose, but even ignoring the intruder, I didn't like my odds without it. On the upside, I was pretty sure I could outrun whatever it was, given time, so in a worst-case scenario I could just get out of there.

Decision made, I scattered and shot through the door, made a ninety-degree turn directly up and caught myself on a hanging ceiling light. I looked down and identified the cell for at least one of the twins pretty much instantly by the sight of the giant cloud that had parked itself in front of it.

From everything I'd seen outside and the noise that had only just stopped, the cloud wasn't quite what I was expecting. Things became a little more clear when the cloud vanished, shrinking in upon itself to turn into a short man wearing a concealing gray hood atop a costume with very little in the way of decoration. As he drew himself together, I saw the second cape appear in the fading traces of mist; this one a woman in black, with heels, hood, and a great big cloak that I would almost respect if she hadn't been busy carving a bloody canyon through the rig tonight.

There were two of them? How much of what I'd seen was one, and how much was the other?

The pair looked up toward me with no fear in their body language whatsoever. They didn't speak a word, but I got the hint when the man exploded back into a room-filling fog. The instant he did, I heard the scrabbling, scampering, scraping of something big climbing toward me at high speed followed by a dozen incoming attacks on my Aura at practically the same instant. I left the room very, very quickly.

Like I mentioned in my profile and edited into the AN last chapter, I had to skip a post because of midterms. Real life kicked my butt for about a week right before they happened, so my plans went out the window, so this one was delayed by two weeks. I'm gonna try to put out 3.6 next week to make up for it, but no promises there.

This and 3.6 were originally supposed to be a single chapter, but I ended up breaking it in two for length and time. Once that's over, we'll have one more chapter and then be back to an interlude pair.

That's all I've got for now. Thanks for reading, and I'll see you next time!