Sara swore under her breath, firing her gun as fast as she could cycle the action and reload when an empty magazine dropped out from the underside of the massive weapon. Dropping into an alleyway to try and get a breather, Sara quickly reloaded her gun, noting how much ammunition she had used at the same time. She had gone through eight magazines, but had confirmed only one new kill, whom she had decapitated with her cannon from almost five hundred yards in a fluke shot that, by all rights and purposes, should have missed completely. Too bad the trooper had ducked in the wrong direction, allowing the AP spike to bore a hole through his left temple, taking much of the top of his head with it.

Most of the other ammunition had gone as suppression fire to keep the spec-ops team’s collective heads down, but Sara had also wasted ten shells splattering a group of greenskins that had been firing at several police cars with machine guns. Jacking a fresh shell into the chamber, Sara grinned for a second, ignoring the muscle twinge in the back of her neck. All this was done in midair, with Sara landing firmly on both feet less than a second later, sending debris flying everywhere with an echoing crash.

As she landed in the alleyway, the impact jolted her right wrist, making her involuntarily cry out in pain as the shattered bones ground their ways into several nerve endings. Above her, two shadowy forms stopped at the edge of the building Sara had jumped off of, and seeing her standing in the alley, they immediately ducked back as an explosive shell bit a missive chunk out of the side of the building, less than five feet from where the two had been glimpsed. Sara looked around for a likely hiding place, and found it in the form of a recently condemned building nearby. Desperate for any hiding place, she simply ran to a smashed window in the condemned building, and vaulted into the building in an acrobatic feat that she could never repeat if her system hadn’t been surviving on pure adrenaline.

Looking around the building for a few seconds, Sara instantly found out why the building was considered to be unlivable. The entire upper section of the four-story building, excepting the front wall, was a mass of rubble, blocking the stairwell completely after the second floor. Sara shrugged, looking at the rubble-cluttered ruin of the stairwell, and carefully clambered into the basement. Testing the walls, Sara felt that the basement stairwell was just strong enough to prevent from being blown apart from the trap she was going to set.

Moving quickly, but carefully, Sara pulled about five metres of the synthetic webbing from around her right thigh, where she had wrapped the tough cord. Cutting the cord with her knife, Sara used her throwing knives to stab parts of the cord into the wall, just enough to let the cord remain taut an inch or two above the step she had begun to rig. After finishing the rigging, Sara reached into her card pouch and gently placed five of the Chem-Ex cards on the cord, balancing them carefully so that if the cord itself was disturbed, they would knock together and explode, likely severely injuring whomever triggers the trap.

After she finished her rigging, Sara entered the basement of the building, soon finding something that could hide her for at least a little while. Sitting down on the pile of empty cardboard boxes, Sara shot down her armour just as the first crystal stated to turn a shade of reddish-orange, telling her that she was pushing her armour’s limits. Sighing, she examined her broken wrist, noting that the swelling had already begun to subside. Carefully, she moved her wrist, making the dislocated bones in the joint pop back into place. However, the effort required, combined with the physical and mental exertion she had gone through pushed Sara over the edge, and she fainted.

"Hold it. She’s gone." The commander looked at the person who was holding onto the expensive prototype of an EM scanner, and frowned as the broken remains of his team surrounded him. Overall, the prediction that Subject Alpha could very well be the end of the team seemed to be coming true faster that the commander had even thought feasible.

Angry, he stalked over to the prototype scanner, and glared at the screen for a few seconds. "And that means what to me? Your hunk of junk could’ve been broken by that last howler she shot at you, and you were damn lucky to have been missed by it too. Hell, she took McDonald’s head off with one of those spikes she’s been sniping us with, and whatever she’s doing, it looks like her aim’s improved too much for us to take this lightly."

The commander looked at the readout on the machine, swore slightly, and punched the flimsy metal. The machine, not designed to take such abuse, broke, spilling its metallic guts across the soft tar roof. Ignoring the operator’s almost-protest, the commander looked at the surroundings around him and sword under his breath.

"Forget about the damn machine. We’re going to resort to our eyes, ears, and common sense. Now, her armour needs to be shut down in just under five minutes unless our friend wants to become a vegetable. I don’t think she’ll go for that course, so she’s probably holed up somewhere. Look around in a three square block area. She’s probably in a condemned building of some sort, and she’s sneaky, so watch out for traps."

The commander finished speaking, just as a dull thunderclap rumbled down through the tunnel created by the two taller buildings on each side of the squat building most of the team was standing on. A second later, Ivonava was knocked onto her ass by the impact of a heavy bullet, which bounced off of her chest. Scattering for cover, the team instantly had their weapons out, and looked out at the direction of the shot. A second bullet whined into the darkness as it ricocheted off of the tar roof, carving a divot out of the soft material.

The commander, silencing the volley of curses about to exit Ivonava’s mouth by firmly placing his hand over her mouth, gestured at two of his demolitions experts. "Bellinger, Tsier. Find that sniper and splatter the sucker all over the place. Make sure that whomever it is has a block of C4 jammed up his ass before you detonate the thing."

Bellinger laughed, tapping one of the four blocks of C4 he had in a satchel."Yes sir! We’re gonna give that person a ride he will definitely regret." the two demolition experts, laden down with a good dozen incendiary grenades and nine blocks of C4 between them, headed towards the most likely sniper’s roost in the area: an old clock tower made almost entirely out of concrete and steel. The two men hid behind some old vent stacks that were large enough to hide them completely, at least until someone on a different building opened fire with a machine gun, pelting them with heavy bullets that actually damaged their armour a bit.

Slowly the armour degraded as the two man weathered the long, rippling blasts of fire from the machine gun, until one bullet punched through and took a chunk out of Tsier’s shoulder. Tsier, moving quickly, ran towards the tower as his armour continued to take a beating. Moving quickly, he slapped all five of his charges to the outside of the tower, shaping them to focus the blasts inwards and literally knock the top off of the ten-story clock.

Just as he leaped away from the tower, the sniper rifle spoke again. The bullet, perfectly aimed, intersected with Tsier’s flight path in such a manner that his spine was neatly smashed just below the fifth intercostal vertebra, instantly paralysing Tsier from the neck down. Unable to control the remainder of his leap, Tsier literally landed face-first on the lower roof of the cover building, piling into a heap like a limp rag doll.

Paralysed completely, Tsier didn’t feel the bullet that killed him, as it smashed into the same spot on his already critically weakened armour, punching through and severing his trachea. He gargled to death on his own blood in less than two minutes. Bellinger, seeing the second slug hit his friend, cursed, then he cursed again when a bullet from the machine gun that was still shooting at him smacked him in the back of the hand, nearly making him drop the detonator. Seeing that he was boxed in by the two guns, he pushed the detonator’s little red button, sending a charge through the electronic detonators in the C4 that had been moulded to the tower.

Jess aimed at the brief glimpse of the person’s arm she had seen, firing quickly, but failing to hit her victim. Suddenly, her view through the rifle’s scope was obscured by a massive cloud of smoke and debris, and she felt the floor she was standing on warp, crackling and popping like a sheet of thin ice. Jess grabbed onto the window frame as the intolerably loud roar of the multiple explosions rolled over her, physically battering at her as she staggered away from the window.

Looking up, Jess saw that the brackets holding the massive clock’s gears in place had been severely damaged, giving her tremendous cause to worry. Before she could react, the brackets tore loose, letting gravity take over and sending the gears plummeting towards her. Jess screamed in fear for the first time in her life, ducking and covering her head with her hands, despite the knowledge that it was a futile gesture.

After almost five seconds of creaking and groaning, Jess opened her eyes, surprised to note that she was still alive and in one piece. Moving slowly, she crawled out from underneath the shattered ruin of the clock’s gears, blankly realizing that she had survived only because the gears had caught themselves on two concrete pylons less than three inches before she would have been crushed. Just as she crawled free, curling up into a ball as she looked at the fluke that had saved her, the gears shifted, and gravity once again worked its laws into the gear’s positioning.

The gears smashed their way through all nine floors of the clock tower, only stopping after smashing flat the entrance to the basement. By some fluke, the only injury Jess had suffered was when one of the chains attached to the gears had whipped past her, laying open her left cheek to the bone. Jess ignored the bleeding, which was fairly severe, as she found herself looking at a heavily-built man, clad entirely in black. Looking up at him, she smiled, right before the man kicked her, sending her down into the hole opened up by the clock’s gears.

The man then moved quickly, setting four blocks of C4 in strategic areas of the tower, planning on bringing down at least the top three stories, just to prevent anyone from using the old structure as a sniping roost anymore. Just before he decided to leave, however, he turned to see a young woman standing in the window frame next to him, and holding a handgun on his head. She looked like she had been crying, but her eyes were still clear enough for the man to notice the anger flaring inside them.

"You fucking bastard. Take this!" The girl squeezed the trigger on the gun, sending a bullet right between the eyes of the armoured trooper. The armour held, barely, but the impact snapped the man’s head back. As the bullet ricocheted off, he accidentally pressed the switch that activated the detonators for his bombs. All four blocks blew up simultaneously, sending shards of metal, concrete, wood and glass everywhere as the upper three floors of the tower sagged down towards one side.

Two minutes later, as a dust-covered form vaulted out of the crumbling upper section, the tower fell into the streets below, smashing into thousands of pieces of fist-sized chunks of concrete that sailed through the air at speeds that were inherently lethal to any human. As the massive cloud of dust settled in the aftermath of the tower’s collapse, M-17 started searching through the surviving section of the ruined building, trying to find her friend. Finally, at the bottom of the tower, covered in shattered chunks of concrete and metal, M-17 found Jess.

Jess had been completely covered, having been pummelled mercilessly by the stone that had fallen on her. M-17's strength easily removed the stones from her friend, revealing the extent of Jess’ injuries. Jess was barely conscious, sustenance dribbling freely from the corners of her mouth, not to mention the massive gouge across her cheek, and she was gasping for air, sounding like one of her lungs had collapsed. The concrete, when it had fallen on her, had broken both of Jess’ arms, most of her ribs, and her right leg. However, those injuries were not as serious as her most visible one. Just to the left of Jess’ breastbone, covered in the techno’s glowing blood, was a jagged piece of re-bar protruding from her shirt.

"Jess?" M-17's voice had dropped to a whisper, and, in shock, she could only hold her dying friend’s hand as Jess breathed her last, hastened by the metal spike that had been put through her heart. Just before her body dissolved in the characteristic fashion of Fixed Ideas and technos, Jess reached up with her free hand, and gently stroked M-17's face.

"Sorry..." With that, her last breath, Jess collapsed limply to the broken ground, and her body flashed into nothingness, bathing M-17's face with the eerie green glow of sustenance, before disappearing completely. The only traces of Jess’ existence were her blood-covered clothes and her rifle, which had fallen nearby. The scope had been broken, and the magazine had disappeared, but there was one shot left.

M-17 listened carefully, then heard a faint groan from behind her. Turning, M-17 raised the rifle, and then smiled. There, lying on the ground, with a chunk of wood through his thigh, the man who had killed her friend tried to get up. He stopped struggling when M-17 walked over to him, tears coursing down her face. Silently, she checked to make sure that the last bullet was in the chamber of the rifle, and then pressed the muzzle of the big gun into the man’s face, leaning down as she did so.

M-17 then squeezed the trigger, causing the person’s head to jump a few inches before slowly letting a pool of blood spread out from underneath his head, which no longer had a back half. M-17 then reversed the empty gun, and, holding the sniper rifle by the barrel, she proceeded to thoroughly beat the dead body into a pulp, only stopping when the rifle was so badly bent, that it was useless as a club. Dropping the rifle, she then climbed onto the body and continued to punch it in its now quite smashed face.

Finally, gasping for air, and still crying, M-17 stood and went back to where Jess’ clothes lay. There, holding the only remains of the first person who had actually reached out and tried to call her a friend, M-17, once a young teen called Maggie, clutched her friend’s shirt to her face and cried openly, sobbing like a young child.

Sara was bordering on REM sleep, but she didn’t enter that state as a faint rumble from somewhere outside disturbed her just enough to prevent her from leaving her extremely light sleep. Instead, she remembered. Inside her mind, she remembered what had happened to turn her into what she was. It had all started in Africa, where she had been bitten by a monkey while collecting biological samples for her master’s thesis in Biology.

The virus had worked with amazing efficiency, disintegrating her skeletal structure at a rate that surprised many doctors. In less than three months, she had been totally bedridden, unable to move or even breathe without assistance. Then, she had made the pact with the devil. The result was that most of her skeletal structure had been replaced, she had been pumped to the gills with nanotechnology, and she had managed to graduate from the university with honours.

She then literally dropped off of the face of the earth. For two years, she had been trained, tweaked, and neurally reprogrammed to make her totally subservient to orders from any superior at the corporation. At the same time, she had fallen in love with one of the company’s informants, a young man named James. The marriage was quiet, peaceful, and happy, and was the last time Sara would feel truly happy. One year later, only a few months after her daughter had been born, James had been brutally murdered trying to protect Sara and his daughter. The bullet that had been intended for Sara missed, instead killing her child. The attacker had never been identified, as Sara, driven into a rage, had absorbed three bullets to the chest before she literally beat the killer to death with her bare hands. Sara had only stopped after she had literally pounded the man’s face into the floor, leaving only a large splatter where his head had once been.

After that, Sara had been sent on missions, never revealing that the neural reprogramming had failed, mainly due to the nanotechnology in her system. For two years, she had killed at the company’s behest, regretting it every time. Finally, when she was the lone operative on a mission, Sara took the chance to escape. For the last five years, she had been on the run. Taking jobs as a bounty hunter wherever she could, learning new skills from the masters, and collecting a trove of weapons that would make any museum curator jealous, she had finally arrived in the City of Darkness.

And now, she was fighting for her life in the twilight of existence. She then woke up, her pupils dilating to a size that made her irises disappear. Sara sensed something moving around, then heard a repeat of what had awakened her. The wooden boards above her head creaked slowly, allowing dust to sift through the cracks in the moisture-warped wood. Sara looked up, letting her eyes finish adjusting to the darkness as she watched a shadow overhead slowly move towards the stairs that not only would bring the person to the basement where she hid, but also into her trap on the seventh step.

Just as she finished waking up, the creaking footsteps stopped, but started up again, now moving down the stairs at a fairly slow pace. Sara reactivated her armour, pleased to note that the brainwave scanner was shining a neat shade of dark green, and quietly unsheathed her sword, which began to glow in anticipation of being fed twice in one night. Sara didn’t even bother to exert any energy to damp the sword’s anticipation, as she felt a strange thrill at being able to stick it to the troopers once more.

The footsteps above her quit being stealthy as the glow enhanced itself, bathing the room in lurid red light less than a second before the person stepped on Sara’s trap, dislodging all of the cards, and crushing one underfoot. That was enough. The first card blew up, and the sudden pressure wave and heat sympathetically detonated the remaining cards. The blast was powerful enough to send the victim of the trap flying into the far wall of the stairwell’s upper landing, and, as most of the blast was focussed up and down the stairwell, the only response from Sara was to smile as she felt the wall behind her bulge outwards slightly.

Sara waited a second after the explosion dissipated, leaving a massive cloud of chemical smoke and rubble behind. Sara however, knew almost exactly where her intended victim was, and charged up the short stairwell, sword already up and angled for a diagonal slash. The cloud of smoky dust was still shrouding the person who had tripped the explosive, though he was just beginning to stand up. However, Sara’s slash with the sword ended that prospect, as the blade neatly amputated the person’s left arm, sending it sailing through the air, trailed by a spray of blood that the sword hadn’t absorbed.

The tip of the long blade gouged through the wall of the stairwell as Sara swung the sword around for her second swipe, which, as the man ducked, only managed to chop a chunk out of the wall behind her victim. Finally, twisting the blade, Sara took a step back, and dropped the edge down, slashing right through her victim’s ribcage. The impact of the blade, followed by the last muscular reaction of the dying man, sent him jolting forwards and into Sara.

The man collapsed like a ton of deadweight onto Sara, stunning her for a few seconds as the corpse’s momentum smacked her into the smouldering wall, before being cut in half by the still-extended blade of her sword. The upper half of the body, already chopped open like a filleted fish, scattered chunks of the heart, lungs, sternum, and the occasional piece of rib down the stairwell until the remains of the torso collapsed against the bottom edge of the stairs, twitching spastically for a few seconds.

The corpse’s digestive tract, which for some odd reason hadn’t been destroyed by the sword carving a path right through it, uncoiled and spilled down the stairs as well, covering much of the stairwell with a steaming layer of gore and not-so vital organs. The trooper’s legs and part of the corpse’s lower guts remained at the top of the stairs, spouting fluids as they collapsed into a heap, and thoroughly dousing Sara’s boots with blood.

She swore quietly for a second, then sheathed her now-sated blade. Instead of going up to the second floor, where she had originally planned to leave, Sara unhooked her large gun, braced herself, and aimed at the damaged wall, where she could see a brief glimmer of light. The first slug was an AP shell, and did nothing more than punch a neat hole through the wall, opening up a little hole before continuing on its path to meet a solid concrete barrier two feet thick.

The second slug, one of the big chem-ex shells, hit two inches to the left of where the first one had passed through, and the heavy explosive punched through the first layer of drywall before exploding. The focussed blast simply knocked out a fifteen-foot wide chunk of the wall, sending a cascade of debris into the alleyway Sara could now see through the hole, which had expanded to about three feet in diameter from the backblast of the shell. Sara crouched through the smaller inner hole, then dropped into the garbage and rubble filled alleyway. She ran to the end of the alley, thankful that it was a ‘T’ intersection with another alley, and completely deserted.

Sara paused for a second, then smiled to herself when she heard an angry yell coming from the building, indicating that someone had slipped and taken a header down the stairs, and most likely ended nose to nose with the corpse she had left there. Sara jacked in the third round from the magazine and aimed her gun at the hole in the wall. Muttering under her breath for a second, she waited until she had the perfect shot. *Come on. The Widow’s waiting. Now, please, come into my web...*

Sara had braced the gun along her right forearm, despite the arcs of pain that crawled along it from her wrist, and kept the heavy gun aimed directly at the hole in the wall where she had exited. Sara noticed someone moving around inside the building, and she waited until the person paused in front of the hole. The person inside the building did exactly that, and Sara squeezed the trigger, sending another payload of pain in the direction of her enemies.

The bullet missed however, embedding itself in the wall only a few inches from the intended target. In response, the person cut loose with a volley from an automatic shotgun, several dozen impacts across Sara’s chest and arms telling her that the person was using buckshot instead of the potentially deadlier rifled slugs. Sara reloaded quickly, noting that she had only one shot after this one was fired off. Sara responded to the shotgun volley, blasting an even larger hole in the wall when the explosive slug hit in the same spot as the previous shot. The cloud of smoke and dust covered Sara as she fired her last shot, sending the magazine’s moaner on a short trip, where it didn’t seem to hit anything of importance.

Sara ducked back behind the wall to reload her gun, tossing the empty magazine over into the alley as the shooting intensified. Two more shotguns, this time using slugs, punched holes in Sara’s cover, but Sara retreated when someone took a potshot at her cover with a gauss pistol. The gauss slug missed by almost three feet, cratering the concrete as it carved a massive gouge out of the ground, spraying shrapnel all over the place. Instead of standing and fighting, as she actually felt an urge to do, she dodged around the nearest corner and ran down the second side street into a still-crowded boulevard. She swore again as she skidded around a group of drunken frat boys, and was involuntarily rewarded with some cover as a car stopped right in front of her.

Sara jumped over the hood of the car, and when she landed on the other side, she heard a student scream as he took a load of buckshot to the chest at point-blank range. The dead person, his upper body having been shredded into hamburger by the load of buckshot, collapsed, spraying blood everywhere. The five people in the car, looking like gang members, all piled out of the big vehicle, pulling what looked like submachine guns from the insides of their coats. Sara reached out to the driver, who had just finished loading an MP5K SMG, and, moving quickly, she yanked him down to the ground, broke his right wrist, and appropriated his gun. Gently, lowering the sobbing person to the ground, Sara leaned over and kissed him on the forehead. "Shh. You’ll thank me later."

Sara then smiled tightly as the four standing gang members were literally cut to pieces in a hail of gunfire, including two earsplitting cracks from a gauss pistol. The first gauss slug missed high and wide, but the second one caught the second gang member on Sara’s side of the car, slamming into his chest with the kinetic force of a freight train moving at two hundred kilometres per hour. The gang member didn’t even have time to gasp before his body was separated into its component appendages, his arms and legs flying apart as his torso and head were literally vaporised into pink mist.

Sara grabbed the second MP5 that had once been held by the now-thoroughly dead person, and, ignoring the twinge of pain in her arm, she lifted both guns and simply hosed the two pursuers of the squad that were close enough to be hit with any degree of accuracy. The two guns emptied themselves in seconds, and Sara, unsurprised to see the two troopers not even fazed, threw the two empty guns at them. Both guns hit their intended targets, and during the subsequent knockdowns, Sara ran, turning slightly and aiming at the gas tank of the car with her minicannon as she did so.

Seeing that there were no living bystanders near the car, as even the injured gang member had managed to crawl to safety, Sara fired one shot. The explosive slug penetrated into the car’s gas cap, and, just as the two troopers chasing her leaped onto the car, the shell exploded. Much of the blast was focussed right into the gas tank, and just like in Hollywood, the entire car blew up into the air, slowly flipping over as the fuel line erupted and blew all the cylinders in the engine through the hood of the car. The two troopers were long gone from the top of the car though, but the vehicle had served its purpose.

Sara had also disappeared, as her armour’s chameleonic mode had changed its colour to match perfectly with the shadowy wall she was pressed against. One of the troopers passed by, not knowing where Sara had disappeared to, and, as she held her breath, she felt his presence less than five inches away from her. Opening one eye, she found herself looking directly at the back of the trooper’s head, and so, she lifted her gun, planting the barrel right at the small of his back.

Before he could react, Sara had pulled the trigger, sending an AP spike through her opponent’s spine. From the front, the spike shot out of the man’s stomach at a downward angle, slamming into the concrete ten feet away as it pulled out a long loop of his intestines during the slug’s flight. The trooper, obviously surprised to see his guts stretched out almost twelve feet in front of him, groaned in agony, collapsing to his knees. Sara slowly stalked around him, reloading her gun with an explosive shell as she finally stopped in front of the man. The last thing he saw was Sara raise her gun’s barrel in line with his head, and then he no longer saw anything.

Sara herself had leaped backwards as soon as she had fired the slug point-blank into her enemy’s face, and, as the explosion cleared away, Sara absently noted that the dead body was decidedly cooked, smelling like some bacon that had been in the frying pan for an hour. Behind her, the other trooper, whom Sara had almost forgotten about, opened fire with her gauss pistol. Sara instantly ducked and rolled to the side, then leaped into the air while firing down towards her opponent.

The gauss slugs came perilously close to hitting her, though Sara also missed miserably with the last two shots in her magazine. Her AP slug smacked into the building’s wall behind and above the trooper’s head, though the explosive moaner sent after the AP slug literally buried the trooper with a pile of debris. Sara used her cape to prolong her flight time, using deft twitches of her hands to easily and silently land on the nearest rooftop.

Sara decided not to stick around, running south towards the old clock tower which she had fixed as a landmark. Behind her, the rest of the team had congregated, but, having lost sight of her, were forced to fan out again. Due to some fluke of luck, none headed in the direction Sara was. Sara finally landed near the clock tower, but was stopped cold when she saw that the ten-story tower was now a six-story truncated stump. Looking at the ruined building, Sara just shook her head, then noticed a small form nearby, holding something that was glowing a faint green. Thinking it was Six, Sara started over towards the person. However, she was wrong. The person put the glowing object away when she heard Sara’s footsteps, and turning, she pulled a massive handgun from somewhere, sighting the big weapon right between Sara’s eyes.

"You sent them after me, didn’t you?" Sara recognised the voice almost immediately, but kept quiet, not wanting to set the person off. "You know that this gun will probably go right through your skull, don’t you? Better learn how to pray."

Sara shook her head, muttering under her breath as she slowly lowered her arms to her sides. "Hold it. Why me? Because I tormented that shrivelled little midget for the last few months?"

M-17 laughed. "No. I’d have done the same thing to the midget. It’s because your two friends here killed my friend. Now, I’m going to kill you."

Sara shrugged, noticing that her armour’s weapons mode was active and moving quickly."Fine, get it over with. See if I care. However, you forgot something."

Sara finished speaking, and then yanked her right arm back, wrapping the armour’s integral whip around the girl’s legs and literally yanking her off of her feet. Sara dashed over before the girl could recover, and kicking out, she disarmed the girl, knocking the big handgun ten feet away. M-17, flat on her back, spun to her feet with a flashy move that ended with her staring down the barrel of Sara’s own gun. "Now, care to stop trying to kill me?"

"Fuck you, bitch." Sara responded by knocking the girl’s feet out from underneath her with her armour’s whip, then dropped to one knee, the other one having landed firmly across M-17's neck.

"One more chance. Care to stop trying to kill me?" Sara was getting tired of being hunted like an animal, and the strain was beginning to show through in her voice and posture. However, the girl continued to squirm, and Sara sighed, prepared to just put a bullet through the girl’s head and end one hunt for good. Reality intruded however, when a gunshot ripped into the gravel-covered roof, plowing a ten-foot long furrow that ended when it had smacked its way through a concrete barrier near an emergency power generator.

Sara swore, stood up, and said one thing before taking her own advice. "Run away, and don’t look back."

Sara had already fired two shots with her gun at the advancing spec-ops team, but both slugs went high, one of which went far enough to blow out an old water tower, drenching the crowds that seemed to gather whenever gunfire went on for more that two minutes. Then, Sara turned and fled, moving as fast as she possibly could without injuring herself.

The spec-ops team, however, had her in their sights, and they all shot at her at once. For some strange fluke of luck, every gauss slug fired at her, of which there were about two dozen, missed. Sara’s cape took most of the gauss slugs though, and it was torn to shreds, losing almost five feet of length as holes were blown through the cape with alarming efficiency. One bullet actually hit her hard enough to impart some added momentum to her headlong dash, but it came at the wrong time. With the added momentum, Sara couldn’t make a turn in time, and, skidding, she fell off of the side of the building. Falling headfirst was bad enough, but Sara’s head managed to whack a partially open dumpster lid on the way down.

Sara lay in the large metal container, head ringing like a gong, and tried to organize her thoughts. However, she couldn’t even think straight, and the lid of the dumpster, teetering slowly above her, soon crashed down, sealing Sara in total darkness. Just before she lost consciousness, Sara told her armour to shut down to the leotard, thereby saving her mind from the risk of being fried. Then, she slipped back into the darkness of dreamland.

"This is not good. We’ve lost McDonald, Bellinger, Tsier, Michaels, Davidson and Zwieback. And, all we have so far is a trail of destruction that roams through nearly a third of the city, several handfuls of empty 30mm cartridges, and this bloody mess." The commander motioned his left hand to where a young girl stood, held between the iron-like grips of two of his remaining troopers. The girl was shorter than him by a good five inches, was wearing a metal bracer on her right arm, and was giggling and muttering to herself.

"You." The girl started, almost as if she was scared of him, as the commander walked up to her, then giggled quietly, chewing on one of her fingertips.

"What the hell happened to you?" The commander couldn’t keep all of the menace out of his voice, but he did a valiant job of toning it down.

"My friend..." The girl giggled again, and looked wildly about her, as if she was going to try and jump off the roof.

"Your friend? Can you tell me what your friend looked like?" The commander was now genuinely curious, looking at the girl as she finished chewing off her fingernail, literally yanking the entire nail out by the roots.

"Tall, dark hair. Had a gun. Nearly shot me. Good enough?" The girl stopped chewing on her finger, then spat on the ground, as if she didn’t like the taste of her own skin.

The commander frowned, then looked at the two troopers holding the girl. "Let her go."

Ivonava looked at the commander, slightly confused. "Sir? Do you think that’s a smart idea?"

The commander shook his head. "No, but I can’t spare any one of you to guard her, and judging by the looks of her, she’s pretty far gone anyhow. She’d be dead weight, slowing us down. Just leave her."

The commander turned to the rest of the squad, and saw that a lot of them were exhausted. "Look, I’ll leave a scanner to see if our little friend shows up. Now, all of you, go back to base and get some rest."

The spec-ops team members scattered as the sky began to brighten in the east, some of them yawning. The commander waited for a few minutes, and walked over to where the crazy girl was sitting. "Look, I’m sorry if anything happened to you from what we’re doing, but maybe this will make up for it."

He then pulled out several large-denomination bills from a small pouch, and pressed them into the girl’s hand. With that, he jumped to the warehouse where his base was. Behind him, M-17 stood up, looking at the mass of money that had been given to her. Instead of pocketing it, she folded several bills into paper airplanes and tossed them over the edge of the roof, and she then ate the few remaining bills. She then chuckled, relatively calm, and decided to go and kill something cute and cuddly, just because she was feeling cranky. Behind her, the first rays of sunlight broke over the horizon, bathing the city in bright red and golden light.
 

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