Warning: Graphic Content may be ahead. Viewer discretion is advised
A Few Minutes After the Last Issue....
As Nemesis and I come up to the stairs of Blaze's squad's location, which is an old, falling apart apartment complex, we can still hear the fighting inside. The whole backside of the building is smoking, soon to be up in flames. We're going to get a lot of unwanted early attention. As we open the door the sound of the fighting diminishes. We glance inside before stepping in, the adrenaline starts pumping. Nemesis' ability is too take the form of his opponent's worst enemy or fear, an intimidating ability, but there isn't much physical damage that can be done with that. Which is why we gave him an assault rifle. He readies his weapons and turns the flashlight under the barrel on. "Check each room." I order him. "I'll take the right side, you take the left." He nods in acknowledgement.
I clear every room I come by, checking the corners before going into the next room. It doesn't take long to find the body of one of Blaze's men. I check for his pulse, he's just unconscious. As I walk along every floorboard I step on creaks and the walls are covered with holes, it's like this whole place could fall on top of me at any moment. I check in with Nemesis over the headset, "How's your side?"
"So fah, so good." He responds with his heavy Bostonian accent. "Got two ah Blaze's guys layin' out in the next roo' ovah."
"Check their vitals, then leave them there till we find whoever did this. Keep me posted." I comment back. Just as I finish saying that I head into the next room, but as I'm moving through the doorway something slams into my chest, knocking me to the ground. "F*cking hell. What was that?" Before I can even turn around to see what hit me someone is on top of my back. They grab my head and start slamming it into the ground, then they take off before I can react. "Who the hell are you?" I question furiously. My eyes dart around the room looking for my assailant. Suddenly a wooden plank is broken over my leg, taking me down momentarily again. I snap around to punch the moron, but as soon as I turn another piece of wood crashes into my face.
Now I'm pissed. Instead of letting the hit take me down I charge into my attacker, tackling him/her through the wall. Soon as I do so a knee hits me in the gut and the attacker squirms away, but not before I notice this attacker is a woman. I grab her arm as she goes to run off to start her attack again. She turns around with a powerful kick to the knee she hit before. When I go to kick her back, she moves to the side and my foot goes through the wall behind her. She grabs a piece of steel laying on the ground and whacks me across the face with it. Brushing it off in a fit of rage, I go to lay a sucker punch on her, but she dives out of the way and my hand breaks through this other wall.
It pisses me off that she knows how to take me down. She doesn't need to fight fiercely or boldly, just smart enough, fast enough so I can't react with my abilities, and slowly chip away at me. And that's exactly what she's doing. "You're good." I comment as I pull my hand out of the wall, and shake the blood off it.
"There's only one way to devour a whale." She says. "One bite at a time."
As I go to turn around that steel bar she found slams into the leg she's been working on the whole time, bringing me to my knee. I look up to see Blaze propped up in the corner, barely conscious. "You let a girl beat yo-" Before I can finish I hear a snap. I turn around quickly, but it's too late. The woman chuckles a little as the whole room starts to fall down on me.
"You're the second terrorist I've had to deal with this week." She comments as I'm buried by the debris. I start to wonder what happened to Nemesis, but my thoughts are interrupted when, out of nowhere, the Shadow slams into the woman. It has her pinned and coils it's knife-like fingers around her neck.
"Stop!" I order the Shadow. I want to know who my attacker is. "I need to scan her mind." As I say that I fill my body with my telekinesis and make the debris that's trapping me burst away into the rest of the house. The Shadow smiles evilly at me before releasing his grip on the woman and fading into the darkness.
This is the first time I've noticed how close the fire from Blaze's fight with the woman is. We have to do this fast. The woman coughs from being choked by the Shadow, but before she can try anything again I lift her up and pin her against the wall, and start my scan. She winces at the pain of me burning through mind, but she refuses to scream. Hmm. That's interesting. She calls herself Peacekeeper. She's not a carrier. She works with the law enforcement. Basic stuff.
Now I enter into the deeper, hidden parts of her mind. Ah, she has quite the vault of secrets. She has a very peculiar relationship with her partner. And... What? What's this? She's... false. "You... You stole this person's body!?" I ask disgustedly, but already knowing the answer. I suddenly notice the presence of another personality, that of the original person of this body, this mind is split in two. A piercing pain shoots through my head, I'm able to comprehend multiple minds easily, just not one with a hint of another merging with it. In this split second of distraction I loosen my grip on her, and she takes advantage of the opportunity. She drops an explosive before kneeing me in the stomach and running off.
"Oh no, you aren't." I mutter before using my TK to take out her legs, knocking her down, and then pinning her down with my TK. If I'm going down, she's going down with me. Suddenly, I remember about Blaze back in the corner of the last room. There's a fire closing in on us from one direction and a grenade about to go off from the other direction. We're trapped in the middle. And if Blaze's squad left their explosives in here we're really screwed. F*ck. I release my grip on the woman and dive on top of Blaze. Suddenly I hear a window shatter. She's gotten away. Then I hear a faint tick. The back of the building starts to collapse from the fire. The flash of the explosion blinds me befo-
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