Adrian Siedelman walked into the school’s main office, looking like he hadn’t slept for most of the last two days. Pulling a hand-written note out of his pants pocket, he placed the short message in Dr. Zack’s message box. After collecting his own messages about the school’s current activities, Adrian waited for a few minutes, and smiled when the main doors slammed open, slowly swinging shut as the four people that had opened the doors trooped into the main hallway.

The vanguard of the small group was Lucas, looking about as harried as one could get without having ripped clothing. Right behind him and cursing every second step, Lori, Erin, and Hazel made up the rest of the small team. Finally, the entire group was covered in a layer of dust, and Lucas had a bruise already forming just below his hairline. Adrian took one look at the group and barely kept from bursting out laughing. "Okay, what in the world happened to you four?"

Lucas, having automatically been deemed speaker for the group, started up immediately. "Oh, hi Adrian. We were all up at about three in the morning, and nearly got killed in a gunfight."

Adrian sighed, wondering where Lucas got his store of good luck from. "Well, you’re still alive, so that’s a pretty good thing. So, anyone we know in the fight?"

Erin passed her left hand over her face, trying to keep a neutral expression, but was caught by Adrian, who raised an eyebrow in a silent question. Erin then slashed her free hand over her throat, gesturing that she’d rather keep quiet. Lucas didn’t see the gestures going on behind his back, and Lori and Hazel had disappeared somewhere, so he started speaking again. "Well, it was pretty dark, and I only caught a glimpse of the person, but she was definitely fast moving, agile, and loaded for bear."

Adrian raised an eyebrow, curious despite himself. "Really? How do you figure that?"

Lucas shrugged, sending a cascade of dust onto the floor around him. "Why do you think we’re covered in dust? She blew out a wall right above us with one shot from a gun!" Lucas was actually excited instead of scared, but he quieted down as some of the early students that had begun to arrive started to look at him oddly.

Adrian sighed again, than heard the lump of lard commonly known as Mr. Tilman walk into the school. The first thing the obese principal did was look at the clock, then he noticed the two dust-covered people in the middle of the hallway. "What the hell happened to you two? Were you watching the mayhem between the police and those ugly freaks last night?"

Lucas shook his head. "Actually, we were trying to track down the source of those horrible howls that were scattered all over the city last night."

Lucas shuddered as he spoke, remembering the almost-demonic groaning scream that had awakened him at two in the morning. Tilman’s response was unusually subdued, though Lucas paid it no mind. "Really. I’m surprised that you’re still alive, Lucas. Look, I’m pretty busy, but if you see our perpetually missing teacher today, give her my regards."

With that, Tilman walked into the office, leaving all three people looking at each other quizzically. "Okay, he’s definitely getting weirder as time goes by. Personally, I’m wondering when he’s going to retire."

Lucas scratched at his scalp, sending a cascade of dust onto the much shorter Erin, who didn’t like the effect any more than the cause. "Hey caveman, keep your dandruff to yourself. Why don’t you go and get your messages from the office?"

He took the growled suggestion, taking his leave of the vehement teen and Adrian. Adrian looked at Erin, shrugged, and gestured for her to precede him to the English classroom after the two had arrived in the classroom, Adrian turned and looked at Erin.. "So, what did you want to tell me?"

Adrian closed the door while Erin settled herself on a desk top, seemingly calming herself before she spoke. "Well, I recognised the armour the person was wearing, as well as the gun. It’s Sara."

Erin fidgeted as she spoke, but Adrian’s reaction was nothing short of surprising. He was so stunned, he dropped the master copy of Chaucer’s ‘Canterbury Tales’ he was convincing the class to read, and his jaw followed the thick tome to his desk. "Could you please repeat that, Erin? I just don’t believe it."

Erin sighed, then nodded. "The person who has been the focal point of all the heavy gunfights in the city since yesterday, and the moving source of those evil little noisemakers that have kept our nerves on edge, is our friend, Sara D’Arnise."

Erin ground her teeth together as she thought of all the possible things happening to her friend, and, glancing around for a second, she unsheathed her claws, and methodically began sharpening the titanium spikes on each other. Adrian digested Erin’s statement, ignoring the sound of metal on metal as he tried to think of something to say. "Well, we can’t do anything about it. Considering the firepower being thrown about, we’d be killed outright in just a few minutes. I hate to say it, but Sara’s on her own for this fight. Still, I’d bet solid money on Sara walking into this school tomorrow, looking a little worse for the wear. Actually, I’d also bet that she’s tougher than me."

Erin snickered at Adrian’s tacit reference to his nightlife, then resheathed her claws. "Okay. I don’t like it, but I’ll respect your wishes. Still, if something happens, I’ll be right beside her."

Adrian nodded. "So would I. Problem is, we’d both be hard-pressed to keep up." Erin was about to speak, but the ringing of the bell cut her statement short. Instead, she stood up and left the classroom, obviously thinking about something.

Sara woke up, feeling only slightly human. Despite being in a dumpster, and surrounded by darkness, Sara slowly stretched, feeling her muscles respond almost instantly as she carefully got to her feet, crouching to avoid whacking her head. She reached up with her left hand and felt her forehead where she had hit the dumpster, whistling softly when she touched the slightly sticky lump at her hairline. *Okay, I’m never gonna touch vodka again. Now, how am I gonna get out of this?*

Sara then used her left hand to push at the dumpster’s lid, and wasn’t surprised to feel the heavy steel lid stay put. She reactivated her armour, allowing the material to enhance her strength before she hauled off and punched the lid of the dumpster. The metal, not designed to deal with the sudden stress of kinetic energy being transferred to it, was sent flying off of the metal basin like it was made of tissue paper. Sara got out of the dumpster, wincing as the bones in her right wrist announced their state of being with a sharp spine of pain that shot up to her shoulder before fading to a dull throb.

She swore softly as she landed on the uneven concrete beside the dumpster, as she wasn’t being stealthy by any extent of the imagination, and then she swore again, with much more variety, when the dumpster’s lid crashed down to the earth less than ten feet away from her. Sara glanced around the alleyway for a second, absently wondering if anyone was coming to investigate the horribly loud clang. "Okay, maybe I should’ve restrained myself a bit."

Sara checked how much ammo she had used, and mentally tallied up what she had done. *Okay, I’ve used ten and a half magazines for my gun, two of my throwing knives, and five chem-ex cards. Now, I’ve tallied five, possibly six, kills and that bitch teen slaughtered the other two on the rooftop. I’ll have to give her a card. Maybe a nice explosive one will show her my feelings towards her.*

Sara jumped to the rooftop she had taken a fall from, and, after landing, she looked around for anything that could reveal where the spec-ops team had disappeared to. Instead of finding anything, Sara heard a whistling roar, and, looking up, she noticed a plane flying overhead with an engine belching smoke. *Well, this day is back to normal. Time to get out of here.*

Sara jumped east, heading towards the school, and was quickly spotted by children and adults alike, mainly because she decided that bouncing off of rooftops was too risky. Sara had dropped to ground level, right in the middle of a farmer’s market to boot. When she landed, not only had she smashed a portable stall into scattered early fruits and splinters, but she had accidentally given the proprietor a heart attack because of the great speed she was moving at. As Sara moved towards the school, occasionally jumping onto smaller buildings to clear large obstacles such as crowds, everyone that saw her could only catch a glimpse of a cloak-wearing form, moving like the legions of hell were after her.

"We have a confirmed contact. She’s moving east towards the High School. Let’s go." The commander turned, arming his gauss pistol by activating the capacitors in the small gun. He frowned when he noticed that the capacitors were only operating at 50% efficiency, dropping the gauss slug’s maximum speed from Mach 12 to just over Mach 6. Just as the remnants of his squad got to open air, the commander heard a piercing groaning howl, which rose and fell in pitch, setting everyone’s teeth on edge.

"Well, the entire fucking city now has a fix on our friend. We have ten minutes to find her before she goes to ground." With that, the commander led his squad into the city again, heading towards the High School.

Adrian was just starting on the second class of the morning, when he heard something that could only be mistaken for a chainsaw grinding away at a rotary saw, producing a hideous metallic screech. Just after the horrible noise ended, Adrian heard something thump to the roof, sounding like either six large people or one elephant had been dropped into the middle of the school’s roof. Adrian poked his head out of the classroom’s door, not surprised in the least to see all the other teachers, most of which were wondering what had happened. Adrian took his curiosity to the next level, and decided to go to the roof of the school to find out what was up there.

He excused himself from the classroom, walked calmly up the stairs, and heard some more dull thumps from the roof, pausing when a dull roar shook the stairs. Adrian, now concerned more than curious, started running, and charged up the steps faster than a normal person could possibly achieve. Not bothering with the complex lock on the roof’s door, Adrian simply kicked the door open, bending the four-inch thick metal plate outwards like a concave lens. Bursting onto the rooftop, Adrian stopped in his tracks when he saw what he had stumbled into.

Five people were standing in a ragged line, all pointing a variety of shotguns, rifles, and handguns at a sixth person, who was down on one knee, and holding a massive hand cannon that looked like its original intent was to amputate limbs at long range. Three of the five turned towards Adrian as he arrived on the rooftop, and the person who was on her knees took the chance the motion afforded. Snapping the big cannon up towards her opponents, the woman pulled the trigger and sent a shell towards her enemies.

The shell smacked into the tar-paper rooftop and exploded, sending fragments of the rooftop flying towards the five people, all of whom were pelted with the debris. Adrian didn’t stick around any longer than that, as he had dropped down the stairwell, curling up into a ball as he bounced down twenty metal steps, and earning himself some bruises.

However, his stunt saved his life, as a half-dozen gauss slugs tore through the area where he had been standing, and all of the slugs managed to blow holes through the primary supports for the roof doorway, sending the metal door crashing down the stairwell in an ear-splitting array of clangs and crunches. Above, on the roof, the cannon spoke again, its deep-throated roar of primal anger drowning out a second volley of lighter calibre fire. Adrian had just managed to land on the second floor stairwell when the cannon spoke for a third time, though the echoes of the blast were overlaid with a shrill scream of agony.

Adrian, normally having nerves of drawn steel, felt icy tendrils of fear crawl down the back of his neck, and he slammed open the door to the second floor, and getting his bearings, he ran over to Dr. Zack’s Physics classroom. Opening the door, Adrian simply grabbed Dr. Zack by his left arm, and pulled the older man out of the classroom. "Adrian! What in the name of god are you doing?"

"Quiet Tony. We’re going to the roof." Adrian pulled Dr. Zack to the upper part of the stairwell, pausing once or twice to examine the immense holes that had been blasted right through the weather shelter at the top of the stairs. With silence greeting the two teachers, they walked onto the roof. On the roof, at the tail end of a twenty-foot long spray of blood, was a dead body. The corpse was definitely the worse for the wear, as it appeared that the body’s chest had been crushed by a medium-sized wrecking ball.

Dr. Zack walked over to the corpse, turned the body onto its back, and whistled faintly as he probed at the gaping chest wound that had been covered by the person’s armour. "Amazing. This wound seems to be cauterised by a blast of heat."

"Really? How did you figure that with the armour covering most of the wound?" Adrian looked again, and noticed that the armour had retracted from the wound, apparently for easy access from a medic. Just as Adrian began to lean towards the corpse, a loud thump behind both people caused them to turn around in alarm. There, leaning against the shelter’s wall, was the person who had fired the heavy gun.

The person was obviously in pain, as she walked slowly, holding her hand tightly against her side. The dark purple suit she was wearing was actually smoking from several solid impact points, and as Adrian watched, one of the damaged sections of the armour reformed itself, quickly repairing itself to complete functionality. "Hi. Well, it looks like I’m SOL. My gun’s wrecked."

The person gestured at the cannon held in her left hand. The breech of the gun was knocked inwards, destroying the receiver for the big shells the gun used. Oddly, she was also smiling, a vision that turned Adrian’s stomach, as every one of the woman’s teeth was covered in blood. Dr. Zack recovered first, stepping cautiously towards the woman. "I don’t believe that we’ve been introduced."

The woman shook her head. "Sorry. I’m known as the Knife. But, you’ve known me for almost seven months in my normal identity, so I’m willing to let the fact that you’re reaching for your own knife slide."

"Your normal identity?" Adrian and Dr. Zack echoed the same statement simultaneously, and were rewarded with a physical answer instead of a verbal one. The person’s armour rippled oddly, then retracted into a leotard, leaving the person’s arms, legs, and face exposed. Then, still hidden in the shadows, the person slowly removed the ammunition belt that still held eight full magazines for the damaged gun, then placed the useless weapon on the roof next to her.

"Well, I’ve been here for a while, and am known for tormenting Lucas." Sara walked into the light, smiling grimly, which made her look like death warmed over. Sara’s skin was almost translucent from blood loss and shock, and she was holding her left hand over one of her ribs.

Adrian responded first, moving towards his friend, who had slumped to the ground, and was breathing slowly. "Sara? What? Why?"

Sara smiled wanly, keeping her hand clamped over the wound in her side."It’s obvious, when you look at it. I’m the person the corporation has been hunting. In a past life, I was Selina Del Naryen. I was an assassin, bio-researcher, and bounty hunter. Now, I’m just screwed over."

Dr Zack also walked over to Sara, and carefully examined the wound she was keeping covered. The gouge was long, but it had only torn off the skin and some muscle covering one of Sara’s ribs, revealing the dull greenish-grey metal that made up most of her skeleton. "Sara, what happened to you?"

Sara winced, noticing that her blood had already covered much of her left side. "A gauss slug happened. It probably wasn’t moving at top speed, but the damn thing punched into my armour, skipped off of my side, and wrecked my gun’s action. I’ll definitely feel it later, but right now I’m so stoked on adrenaline that I can’t feel much of anything."

Slowly, she stood up, hunched over, partially to keep a low profile, and partially to keep pressure on the long gouge, which was quickly clotting. She looked at her two friends, and seemed to shrug. "Look. I don’t think that this will end nicely for me, so just grab Cyb, Lucas, Erin and Reba. Head to the crater to the north of the city, and I’ll try to meet you there at three in the afternoon."

Dr. Zack, worried, tried to speak, but was interrupted by an array of gunshots that slammed into the roof of the school, cratering parts of the heavy stone construction. Sara instantly reacted, reactivating her armour and running towards the opposite side of the roof, yelling out a rather rude comment as she dropped off of the school, heading north.

Sara landed at the edge of the mile-wide crater, staggering towards a cluster of bushes as she felt the wound in her side start bleeding again, and soon soaking through the makeshift bandage she had created from a clean rag that had been appropriated from an empty laundromat, which had been turned into a shortcut during Sara’s desperate fighting retreat. Sara’s armour had taken a beating as well, and the protection covering her right shoulder was dangerously weakened from the after-effects of taking a burst of submachine gun fire in that spot for almost two seconds.

Her cape was also ruined, having been shredded down to less than ten feet of length, and much of the remaining length was tattered and ragged. For herself, Sara was wounded in several places, including her right wrist and side. In addition to those fairly serious injuries, Sara had also taken a bullet in her right thigh, which left an extremely large bruise that slowed her down, and limited her more acrobatic evasive manoeuvres to those that did not involve too much stress on her leg.

Sara frowned, knowing that all she had left were about thirty cards, four metres of synthetic webbing, her knife, and her sword. Moving quickly, she took off her cape, throwing the object away from herself as soon as she could, then unsheathed her sword, which she easily held in her left hand.

Sara slowly stood up, turning towards the ruined remains of the spec-ops team. They had all run out of ammunition a while ago, and so they had been forced to resort to close combat, which Sara was supremely more skilled than her opponents. However, the five survivors of the entire team were still hounding her, much like a pack of jackals would wear at a lone wolf until the more dangerous creature would collapse from exhaustion.

Sara bounded from cover to cover, preventing anyone from getting a good glimpse of her, though she was steadily being forced backwards towards the cliff’s edge. Finally, Sara was standing with no escape in any direction. Behind her was a three-hundred foot long drop into the ocean, and on either side of her was the same, with the addition of jagged rocks along the way. There, in front of her, were the five troopers that had come to capture her. Two hung back slightly, while the other three, two men and a woman, had told their armour to shift to their personal close combat forms.

Sara just smirked, pulling her dagger from her leg sheath and settling into her primary combat stance, which looked like a modified crane stance, as her dagger was set low and to one side, while her sword was held over her head, tip of the long blade coming down over Sara’s head to hover in the air three feet in front of her. "Well, the gang’s all here. Who wants to die first?"

Sara’s answer was instant, as all three troopers in front of her rushed towards her, ready to try and kill her. Sara’s response was instant, slashing outwards with her sword in a spinning arc that carried her three feet forwards and literally shredded one of the two male troopers. The sword had slashed through the man’s knees, waistline, ribcage, and neck, and, after a second or two, the neatly shredded body succumbed to gravity, leaking fluids as it flopped to the ground like a dead fish.

The other two troopers that had charged Sara were taken aback by the brutal efficiency that Sara had killed their companion, though they quickly recovered. The woman attacked Sara first, her armour having formed oriental fighting claws that were easily a foot long. Sara parried the attack with her sword, the supernaturally powerful blade literally ripping off the claws, and, when followed up by a powerful kick to the middle of the chest, the woman dropped back, trying to catch her breath.

The surviving male trooper was lucky, at least for ten seconds, as he was skilled at trapping Sara’s offensive blows. However, that changed when Sara feinted with her sword, which made the trooper dodge towards Sara’s knife hand., which hadn’t moved during the entire battle. At that one opening however, Sara snapped her hand up, then jammed her knife’s razor-edged point into the man’s left temple. Pushing hard, and ignoring her hand’s complaints, Sara shoved the knife into the man’s head until the hilt was literally jammed into the side of the man’s skull.

On the opposite side of his head, the tip of the knife had created an obscene little lump that burst when it had gone far enough, sending a gout of brain matter and blood into the air. Sara then yanked on the dagger, dragging it out of the corpse as it collapsed to the ground. However, she was immobilized for just under a second as she did so, and that was enough for everything to go to hell. One of the two men that had hung back pulled his gauss pistol from the holster, and instantly opened fire at Sara.

The first five shots all missed, carving a line of huge divots through the ground between the two. However, the sixth shot his Sara in the left shoulder, and wreaked catastrophic amounts of destruction to the joint. The slug was only moving at Mach 8, but that was enough to cut right through Sara’s armour like a knife through butter. The shell bored right through Sara’s shoulder, shattering every solid object it touched, before exiting in a spray of blood and bits of bone, both metal and real. The impact was so powerful that it literally picked Sara up and sent her flying ten feet backwards, spinning slowly until she landed, hard, on her right side, less than two feet from the cliff’s edge.

The internal damage was much worse than what could be seen from the outside, which looked like not much more than a simple in-and-out shot. In actuality, the entire shoulder joint had been shattered. The clavicle and humerus had taken the least damage, though both bones had been broken in half and twisted into not much more than metallic abstract art. The scapula, better known as the shoulder blade, was completely non-existent, as the gauss slug had turned the flat plate of bone into not much more than powder. Finally, the wound channel intersected both the primary nervous ganglion that controlled the motor signals for Sara’s arm, as well as the subclavian artery and vein, which cut off all blood circulation through Sara’s arm.

Sara tried to stand up, moving slowly, but a solid kick to her stomach doubled her over, coughing and tasting blood. "Well, it looks like the rabbit’s been snared."

Sara snarled in anger, finding the strength to climb into an angry crouch, her left arm hanging limp at her side. "Come closer and I’ll show you just how much I like you Vincent."

Vincent laughed, then raised his gauss pistol towards Sara’s face. "I told you that I’d kill you, Subject Alpha. After all, we only need your body to complete our research."

Sara frowned, dropping her knife to the ground next to her. She winced as Vincent pulled her up to a standing position by her hair, and silently endured the half-dozen punches he slammed into her stomach with vicious force. However, her hand had snuck its way into her pouch of explosive cards, soon reappearing with every last card from the pouch in a little stack, carefully held onto. "I thought I said that if you called me that I’d be forced to neuter you. Now, I’ll just kill you."

Vincent laughed, an ugly sound that was only made worse by his apparent glee. "Yeah? You and what weapon? You can’t use your sword, your knife’s on the ground, and you lost your gun this morning. What are you going to do? Knee me to death?"

Sara smiled, then spat in Vincent’s face. "No, you idiot. I’ll kill you the same way you killed those children in Malaysia."

Vincent snickered, remembering what had happened that year. "Yeah, that was fun, burning those little brats ‘till they were ashes. Well, it’s been nice talking to you and all, but I think that it’s time for this mission to end." Vincent raised his pistol, placing it against Sara’s left eye. Sara, resigned, slowly squeezed her right hand shut, feeling the uncomfortable warmth of the chemical reaction begin to bloom into the deadly reaction. Right before Vincent squeezed the trigger, Sara thought of an ancient manuscript, which she had read once, a long time ago.

"Sors salutis et virtutis michi nunc contraria,

est affectus et defectus semper in angaria.

Hac in hora sine mora corde pulsum tangite;

quod per sortem sternit fortem, mecum omnes plangite!"

The world then went white, slowly fading into darkness.

CyberSix had just finished sucker-punching the bigger of the two armoured troopers into the ground, right before turning towards Sara, who had just finished saying something. Six started forwards, trying to get to her friend, but was too late. Almost in slow motion, the man’s trigger finger squeezed inwards, sending the computerized impulse to fire into the gun. The magnetic coils flashed in synchronised motion, accelerating the two-millimetre spike at speeds that could not be endured by any normal object.

Just as Six opened her mouth to scream, the gauss slug entered Sara’s left eye, completely obliterating the pale sphere in a gout of clear liquid. Sara’s head snapped to the side, her body falling backwards as the slug continued moving, chopping a path through the cerebellum and part of the cerebrum. Sara’s right hand relaxed, an almost intolerable glow pouring out from between her fingers as the crushed mass of cards began to fall to the ground.

The gauss slug finally exited the back of Sara’s skull, blasting outwards in a hail of bone fragments and a cloud of pink mist, followed by several thick chunks of brain tissue. Finally, the wad of cards touched the ground, instantly exploding into a wall of heat, light and sound that nearly knocked Six flat. Overall, Six weathered the explosion better than her friends had, though her face and hands stung from the flying rock chips that had been scattered everywhere from the impact. Reba and Erin had both been knocked down by the powerful blast, but Dr. Zack was unfazed and Lucas had managed to avoid everything that had been sent towards him from the force of the explosion.

Six instantly ran towards the source of the explosion, moving quickly yet carefully as the residual haze from the blast dissipated from the cool breeze that blew through the dead area. Only one dead body lay in the fire-blackened clearing, and from the size of the person, it was not Sara. Six looked down over the edge of the cliff, and there, far below her, was a small reddish-silver stain on the surface of the water. "Oh, no. God damn it all to Hell!"

Six collapsed to her knees, looking down at the slowly disappearing haze of blood on the water, and started weeping. Silently, her friends slowly gathered together, Dr. Zack being the last to join them, as he had securely tied the two survivors of the spec-ops squad together, and made sure that they were unconscious. "Why? Why did this have to happen?"

Looking down, Six noticed something sticking out of the ground. Carefully, she picked it up, gingerly handling the hot metal of Sara’s knife. The leather that had been wrapped around the hilt had burned away, but the rest of the short blade was still in perfect condition. Lucas stood beside Six, gently resting his right hand on Six’s shoulder. However, at her whispered request, he nodded and gently ushered everyone back towards the city, taking the two unconscious members of the spec-ops team with them. Six remained kneeling at the edge of the cliff, gently cradling the knife.

------------------------------
A/N: The poem that Sara thinks of is from a 13^th century Benedictine manuscript. Below is the translation to English:

Fate opposes me in vitality and morality,

forced ever onward, burdened, always in shackles.

So this very moment, without tarrying, pluck the quivering strings.

Because Fate punishes the one who plays, all lament with me!
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