"Vitals?" Lena watched as Chase and Angela checked Lacroix, with Genji and her watching over awkwardly. The pilot had experience in first aid, sure, but there was nothing in the handbook about treating someone that looked like they just got dipped into ice till they died.
"Temperature is low. Very low. 20°C, at its highest." Angela had attached a bunch of devices across her body, "Her heart is beating, but again, the rate is extremely slow. Her breathing is…fine. No lung damage to be had. Frankly, Captain Chase, I have no idea how she's alive right now."
"We'll worry about that later. Is she good for transport?"
"I, I think so?" Angela was unsure what to make of the situation, "Bar the obvious, she has no injuries, internal or otherwise."
"Then we proceed with extraction." Chase nodded, before her attention drifted to Lena, "Oxton, help Ziegler with Lacroix. Shimada, you're on perimeter duty." Genji nodded once, before heading out the door.
Lena approached the medic, her apprehension palpable. With a nervous smile, she defaulted carrying Lacroix on her back. The moment her hand touched the unconscious woman's body, however, she realised just how much she underestimated how cold she was.
20°C was a fairly normal, average temperature in London. For a human though? It was absolutely freezing. She took for granted just how much heat mattered to a human person. Lena could feel the absence of heat through the folds of her uniform, and it was just as unsettling as one might think it was.
Even as the admittedly attractive woman had moved in her state, Lena couldn't stop internally freaking out at the idea that this was one of the ghouls that Archer had mentioned.
Trying to distract herself from that as Angela packed up her tools, Lena looked around the room. The best way to describe it was: nondescript. There were no features that she could focus on. It was an empty room, with nothing to show other than dark tiles, a dark ceiling, and grey walls.
Wait.
Lena narrowed her eyes, staring into a solitary corner of the room. Maybe it was her trying to think of literally anything else. Maybe it was her paranoia after Archer basically bailed out on them at the last minute. Maybe it was a combination of both. But she swore that there was just something off about that corner.
"Captain Chase?" She tentatively called out to the squad leader. Lena had nothing to lose by asking, after all.
"What is it, Oxton?" A lifted eyebrow from the captain.
"Over there, in the corner," Lena pointed, her voice tinged with suspicion. "Something doesn't feel right."
"Hold position," Chase commanded, her tone becoming more serious. She signalled Angela to stand by, while Lena adjusted Lacroix's weight on her back. Shimada, get back here. We might have company."
Genji reappeared almost instantly, his hand already on the hilt of his blade. "What do you see?"
Lena's heart pounded as she tried to articulate her unease. "I don't know. It's just...there's something wrong with that corner."
Chase motioned for everyone to stay put and cautiously approached the corner, weapon at the ready. Genji flanked her, his eyes sharp and focused. Lena and Angela held their breath, watching intently.
The captain's eyes glowed bright cyan, her cybernetics scanning the corner, before she quickly turned to the rest of the room. She relaxed a moment later, "Nothing. False al-"
It struck. Light warped from the corner, and a figure in black and red appeared out of nowhere. They lunged at Chase's exposed back, only for Genji to react just as quickly, intercepting them before they could complete the ambush.
At the same time, Lena, with Lacroix still on her back, immediately started blasting with her pulse pistol. To her credit, despite having just been ambushed, Chase pivoted on her heel and had already shot at the would-be assassin.
They dropped dead almost immediately. For good measure, Chase shot them twice more. No movement. Then, in the next instance, she fired more shots into the other corners of the room. Nothing. Only then did the four of them relax.
"Dammit." Chase cursed, tapping the side of her head and talking, "This is Chase to Amari, be advised, Talon has some new stealth tech, old methods of detection are ineffective."
"Copy that, Chase."
With a grim nod, Chase cut off communications. The four of them prepared. They all knew what that meant. Talon could have been watching them the entire time, and none of them would have noticed. Turning to Lena, Chase gave her a considering look.
"How'd you know they were there?" Lena had to shrug helplessly. How would she properly explain that she got used to an invisible person staring at her enough that she developed a sixth sense for it.
"Just felt weird I guess?" She got three blank stares in return, prompting her to laugh nervously. Chase held the stare for a moment, before shrugging with a sigh.
"Fair enough. Wouldn't be the weirdest thing you've done, huh?"
Shaking off the moment of levity, the four of them focused once more. Kneeling down, Chase inspected the dead Talon soldier, "Hm. Custom made cybernetics, hardlight blades, and-" The captain tried to pull off the helmet, "Armor that's practically welded onto them. Yep, checks out."
"Captain?" While Chase was inspecting the assassin, the others were confused. Well, as Lena saw, Angela and her were. Genji looked like he already knew what they were, and was proven right as he spoke up.
"Talon specialists. When I was with Blackwatch, we'd regularly encounter them alongside regular Talon units."
Clicking her tongue, Chase nodded to the door, "Notice anything when you were out there?"
"Nothing." Genji shrugged, "All personnel that should have been there are already gone. I suspect they're going to ambush us the moment we step out there." The cyborg seemed resigned at that, as if he had expected it despite their efforts.
"Loud it is then. Is Lacroix secured?" The same could be said for Chase, who grimaced at her own words.
"As secure as she can be." With one hand on Lacroix, Lena had to remind herself that the woman was married, and that Lena had a fiancée that she loved.
"On my mark then."
…
As expected, the moment they got out into the open area of the distillery, shots were already fired. Talon troopers, decked out in heavy ballistic armor, came out of the woodwork to fire at them. Lena ducked behind a pallet of kegs - she didn't even realise they still used kegs for brewing - placing Lacroix down as she joined the captain in firing back.
Genji was already firing behind enemy lines, slashing those that he came across, while Angela joined her behind the kegs with her own pistol.
"Ziegler!" Across from them, Chase had hid behind some different railings. Lena could see the railgun in her hands light up in an ominous glow. Angela nodded, already knowing what to do. Pulling out her staff, a thin beam of blue connected to Chase.
In the next moment, the captain slid out of cover, jumping high into the air. Before the Talon troopers could even aim at her, a railgun shot was fired, punching through an unfortunately lined up group of four. Angela flew up after her, after Lena assured the medic that she was going to be fine.
While she did want to help her team, she first needed to get Lacroix to a safer position than this. Lena frantically searched her surroundings, and her eyes lit up as she spotted an unattended supply truck. Before she could even think of heading there, her world exploded into pain, just as her comms opened up with a shout of alarm.
"Shimada, sniper on your eleven!"
She let out a scream as her arm - or what was left of it - bled. A massive hole right in the middle of her joint. Diving back into cover, Lena tapped into her accelerator, forcing herself to Rewind despite the pain. In an instant, she was back to normal. The only evidence that anything had happened was the smoking hole in the ground next to her.
"Oxton, status!" Chase all but demanded as they continued to fire back. In the distance, Lena could spot Genji stab at the sniper, who was somehow on top of the large distilling machines.
"Had to use my Rewind, but I'm good now." She knew that they knew of her abilities. There was no need to hide it at this point, "Cap, I see a possible extraction vehicle. Should we take it?"
"Do it. Shimada, secure our six to twelve, me and Ziegler will take the other side."
"Understood, captain."
The four of them got to work. Lena used her Blink sparingly, still keeping in mind what Archer said, to get to the truck. Keeping low, she put Lacroix in the passenger seat. The Talon troopers were still shooting at her, though Chase and Angela were keeping them at bay. Lena had to flinch as a bullet impacted the window, only to blink as it was stopped dead in its tracks.
'Huh. Bulletproof windows, neat.'
With newfound confidence, she crawled over Lacroix and into the driver's seat, silently apologising as she accidentally kneed the woman in the side. With some difficulty, she activated the truck's engines. While she was no engineer, Lena still knew how to work vehicles, as her pilot training required it.
As far as she was concerned, hotwiring a truck was pretty basic compared to the repairs of a fighter jet.
Within a minute, the truck roared to life, the vehicle lifting off the ground, "Captain, I've got it started up!"
"Shimada, can I trust you to keep up?" Chase and Angela landed next to the truck as soon as she said that, clambering in as fast as they could. The railgun's pulses were continuous, the captain not stopping as she calmly asked Genji.
"Yes, captain."
"Good. Oxton, floor it, through the front, back to our extraction."
Lena gave a mad grin as she did exactly that. The truck - military grade, despite initially not looking like it - tore through whatever was in their way. A small line of troopers fired at them from the front, trying to get them to swerve or stop. The bullets impacted the front windshield, just before Lena ran them over. A glow of yellow from Angela, and the damage was already gone.
Right, the medic used nanomachines. They weren't just for flesh either, it could theoretically work for anything she wanted.
That only made Lena press on even faster. Bullets, plasma shots, and full on rockets impacted their truck, only for the damage to be repaired moments later. Soon enough, they'd reached the entrance, the heavy doors closed.
"Shimada!"
The cyborg was a blur of green in front of them. A spectral dragon formed around his sword as he slashed at the doors with one hand, and used his smaller sword to deflect bullets from the other. The doors burst open like a can, and as they passed by, Genji slipped into the open window by Angela.
At this point, they should have been scot free. Talon was still very much a company that was legally grey, as red as their ledger may be. They wouldn't risk civilians out in the open like this.
That was what they thought, at least.
It was with that that they relaxed marginally, the only thing they needed to worry about was extraction. Chase was not relaxed in the slightest.
"I can't contact Amari. Something must have happened." And, as if fate was listening to them right then and there, the houses near them opened fire. From the windows of residential areas, restaurants, and even a pet store if Lena's eyes weren't playing tricks on her, Talon troopers rained fire.
"Holy fuck, is the entire bloody neighborhood Talon?!" Lena swerved the truck into a side alley to avoid fire. Military grade as it was, enough focused fire would eventually get through, even with Angela's nanomachines.
"Fuck!" She barely missed a collision as another truck came through an intersection, manned with even more Talon troopers, these ones with a mounted minigun shooting at them. Two more were behind them, and Lena floored it as much as the truck was able.
"-hase! Vivian, can you hear me?!"
"Reinhardt?! Where the hell are you with extraction?!"
Genji climbed out onto the roof, smaller sword whipped out and kept up with the minigun. Chase leaned out the window, her left arm pulling back to reveal another gun, before firing it at their pursuers. An orb of cyan, spitting out blasts of electricity covered the three, shutting them down as they did so.
"Transport has been destroyed, we barely made it out!" The sound of something crashing through the comms, "Nevermind that, we need assistance as soon as possible! ANA! WATCH YOUR RIGHT! I'm setting up a transport marker at our location!"
"No choice then, we aren't getting out of here without assistance." Chase clicked her tongue, "We rendezvous with the others, and hold out till Morrison or Reyes can get an extraction unit out here."
The alternative was unsaid.
In some corner of Lena's mind, though, despite the first real mission out of the country being such a damn clusterfuck, she couldn't help but curse at Archer and his decision to ditch them like that.
…
A/N: If you like what I do and want to support me, check out my P-atreon at P-atreon•com(slash)Almistyor.
Thank you to my newest patron: Chosen of Dorn.
And a special thanks to: FireRogueWolf25, brutalcrab and Tassimo.