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ax_mainMore remote than any of the other facilities, Team 4 finds themselves spelunking into a massive cave in search of Pietro. Team dynamics aren't the greatest, but they manage to get things done - if in a way a little more destructive than the other teams.
By the time Lance and Wanda had discovered that it wasn't just Pietro who'd been taken, and had met with Xavier, scrounged for information, and settled on a plan, Lance was about ready to take down the school in addition to the Right, for no other reason than the fact that they were keeping him from finding Pietro. Okay, maybe they were helping. Or something. But the kids they'd stuck him with didn't exactly scream totally stable and competent. And yes, that included 'Hades'. One of his own or not, the kid was creepy, and Lance didn't really trust him in the field yet. He didn't really want Wanda's boyfriend on his team either, but it wasn't as if he could have told her that. Not without being hexed through a wall. Still, no matter what, he'd promised Wanda he'd bring Pietro home, even if he had to do everything himself.
The GPS coordinates from Pietro's phone hadn't lasted long, but what they'd seen had been enough to zero in on someplace in rural Kentucky. Not exactly the kind of place Lance was expecting a lab to be, but then, he'd heard of weirder. Maybe the right was trying to cover their tracks a little harder these days? Whatever the case, the portal opened up inside what was clearly some kind of huge natural cavern, with tunnels veering off in three different directions, and he had to smirk. Zipping up a black vest over the bullet-proof one and sliding his protective glasses down over his eyes, he drawled, "These guys want to hide from me under a mountain? That's precious.."
Beside him, Clint glanced sidelong at the dark haired 'leader' of the Brotherhood. He was already annoyed at this whole scenario. When he'd volunteered to go after the Right, he'd meant find Caleb and fuck up anyone who had touched his roommate. He hardly even knew Pietro, besides that one time he'd pulled a knife on the guy. But...he was Wanda's brother, and he knew that Avalanche was Pietro's boyfriend. So he kind of understood the ire practically leaking out of their 'team leader'.
Dressed in grey fatigues and army boots, and some kind of black material that Gilmore had told him was supposed to be bulletproof, he had a quiver of arrows hanging from his belt, and his new bow folded up and strapped against his back. The whole getup felt vaguely military, but Clint still sported his sparkly, purple hearing aids, a huge 'Fuck You' to the Right and anyone who saw him coming. "They're going to have cameras," he warned them, already looking up and into the corners of the cavern they were in. "Keep an eye out for the wiring."
Namor stepped through the portal, not bearing his trident (he was given a stern look by Xavier that told him that such a thing was best left behind) but wearing a black stealth version of his more regal attire; his vest not quite as open as usual but still going all the way down to his waistband. Whereas this 'Avalanche' individual had been full of ire and bravado, Namor was facing his first outing with cool determination and the sureness of someone who was a practiced warrior. Not that Namor was, beyond wrestling for sport in the depths of Atlantis, but he was versed enough in the ways of war by this X-Force's training programs that he felt formidable enough to face off against humans.
There was something about this cavern, though... He touched the wall of it, and his palm came back damp. "They may be capable of flooding this cavern," Namor warned, ankle-wings bristling at the idea of having to pull all of these surfacers out from beneath a churning torrent of water.
Great. So Nico was at risk at being crushed or being drowned. He frowned after joining his teammates, looking around. At least there were shadows. And, well, dead people, but he didn't think his teammates would really like hearing that.
To be honest, he wasn't entirely sure how he got on this "team", other than Yana told him to make an effort and that maybe he could help. So he was going to try his best. "Alright Avalanche, what's our first move?"
Lance crouched in the middle of the cavern and closed his eyes as he touched a hand to the cavern floor. He didn't like the sound of the caverns flooding, which meant they had to work fast, and quiet, which had never really been his style. If it meant saving Pietro, though, he'd go the secret agent route. Closing his eyes, he let a low vibration rumble through the earth. He felt it moving through the rock, bouncing back at him at odd angles... until it slowed a hell of a lot more in one direction. If he had to bet, that was the lab they were looking for.
Rising to his feet, he jerked his head in the direction of the sluggish vibrations. "This way. Hawkguy, watch for cameras and take 'em out if you can. You other two, watch our backs as we move. Might want to raise up a few friends, Hades, but keep them far enough behind us that they don't draw attention."
Hawkguy...Clint rolled his eyes, but gave a nod, reaching for the bow on his back and snapping it out to full size. He had to admit, having a team leader who could tell where they were going through the earth was pretty fucking cool, even if he was an ass. He nocked one of his special arrows, and fell into step beside Avalanche, keeping his eyes up and along the walls as they moved, a beam of light from his bow arcing over the rock walls.
Namor didn't like being assigned to rearguard, but as Submariner, he knew that there were times at which he would have to follow, rather than lead. He was not incapable of swallowing his pride. Even if the taste was bitter.
He glanced askance at Hades, the 'compatriot' walking near him from this so-called Brotherhood. Namor didn't know what to make of them. They apparently had gotten up to some wanton destruction of several of these facilities. Destruction that, while Namor did not necessarily approve of, destruction that he felt was perhaps warranted. Being a ruler, being a leader, sometimes meant having to send a message to one's enemies, even if the message was particularly cruel. That was the only way to communicate, at times, with people. There was no desire in Namor's mind or heart to make small talk with these individuals. Focus was of the essence of their mission, and becoming distracted with idle chatter was a potential opening for their enemies.
Instead, he kept his eyes open, scanning the dark caverns for any clue of an attack or trap.
Couple of dead guys, coming up, Nico thought as he snapped his fingers. He ignored the guy glaring at him from the side, although as he felt his guys reanimating, he felt like maybe that wouldn’t gain him any new friends.
Oh well. Pietro bought him cereal and let him stay at Asteroid M, so that was more than worth creeping out a couple of school kids anyways.
Every turn they made through the caves made Lance more agitated. He knew they were getting closer, but he kept expecting to run into some kind of resistance. When they didn't, he started to feel like things were going too easy. He was so deep into his thoughts that as he turned the next corner, he almost walked right off the edge of a cliff, the light from his flashlight bouncing off of the rippling water menacingly. With nothing but instinct, he reached out for the wall, and it reached back for him, stone grasping onto his arm to keep him from going over the edge...into exactly what Submariner had warned him about - a huge flooded cavern below. "Fuck."
Clint barely had enough time to stop himself, but Avalanche's bulk just ahead of him managed to halt his progress, and he stumbled off to the side, looking out over the flooded chambers from a thin, three-foot ledge that crumbled off to both sides. He was just about to say something when he saw motion - the red light from an infrared camera sweeping toward them. Grabbing Avalanche, he hauled the guy back into the corridor and around the corner with the other two. "They've got eyes," he hissed.
"Let them see," Namor said, frankly. "If this is our only method of ingress, then we should besiege them. I can go ahead and find the mechanism by which they keep the water within the cave system, and destroy it," he offered, already starting to move around the corner where Avalanche and Hawkeye had been. "Unless there are other suggestions," Namor said. He wasn't the leader, after all. He was simply volunteering to take charge. Or make a charge, rather.
"Hey, here's an idea," Lance growled, wrenching his arm out of Clint's hand. "You both do what I say and we all go home alive. Hawkeye, take out the cameras. Then, Prince Mariner here can drain the lake. Or...whatever it is you do."
Clint snorted softly, but checked the corner, switching off the light on his bow and switching to laser sight. He wasn't really used to shooting anything in the dark, but that had never stopped him before. At least this way, they wouldn't see him coming. He moved the sight up the wall, along the ceiling to where he'd last seen the blinking red light. The taser arrow he had loaded was enough to take out the one camera, but he was also hoping that it would short the entire system.
"I have friends in the water," Nico told Lance, not really caring that he sounded as creepy as the sixth sense kid. He didn't really care for this water dude. Sure, he wasn't sure about following Avalanche's lead, but better him than water dude, right? "Want them to join the party?"
"There will be no need," Namor assured Hades, waiting for Hawkeye to loose his arrow before dashing forward with surprising speed and diving deep into the water. He felt no distress as he entered the cold depths, his eyes adjusting to the lack of light, used to the depths of Atlantis and speeding forward, Namor began searching for the telltale works of surfacers and their efforts to direct and control the water. A ways along the path, farther than any surfacer could have held their breath and reached, Namor found a series of pump pipes and the mechanical floodgate that would be used to drain the cave.
Namor put his fist through the seam of the floodgate, the metal shearing apart with the blow. He began to pry the gate open, the water draining quickly as his might bent and warped the gate beyond closing without being repaired or replaced. Once the water was draining and his work was done, he doubled back to meet the others. By the time he arrived, he was flying rather than swimming, and he alighted on the ground in front of them.
Lance had to stare, just for a moment. "Yeah, okay. That was impressive."
Down below them, the cavern was draining away to reveal a ladder leading down to a pair of large metal doors. Two cameras situated on the ceiling above sparked and sputtered before going dead. And, of course, Hades' friends appeared, waterlogged and clearly very dead, but menacing in their own right.
Clint stared for a moment at the undead, then looked back at the dark-haired kid with them, then back at the undead. That...wasn't unsettling at all, no. He was already fighting down his own instincts about the place, tamping down any panic trying to rise to the surface, and walking dead definitely did not help. He just prayed they weren't going to have to investigate any of the surgery rooms, because he wasn't sure his stomach could handle that.
Lance was the first to take the ladder, swinging down to the muddy silt and striding toward the door. He checked one of the walls to one side with his hand, then nodded to the others. "There's a room off to the right - probably security. I'll handle them. Hades - send your folks on recon. We need to find the detention area before they do something stupid with Quicksilver. Submariner, you got this door?"
Avalanche's approval meant little to Namor, other than the simple recognition of it. He answered the question as to whether or not he had this situation in hand with action rather than any kind of words. He dug his fingers into the seam where the doors met, beginning to wrench them open, which was not a quiet process. Already, a trio of guards, submachine guns leveled at the widening gap, began to fire as soon as they could see him clearly enough. The barking gunshots meant little to Namor; these crude surfacer weapons were inelegant and boorish by his standards. And, in equal measure, ineffectual. Between both the body armor he was wearing and his natural durability, the bullets were falling, mashed and misshapen from their impacts, at his feet.
Though his limbs shook with the effort it took to warp the steel, wrenching open a hole large enough for them to get through almost two abreast. Rather than wait for any kind of signal to attack, Namor took it into his own hands, charging forward through the air. His bellow rang out clear as a clarion call, filled with the fury of an affronted prince, as his fist connected with the jaw of the first guard, sending the gunman spinning from his feet.
"Imperius Rex!"
"Moron," Lance growled as he threw himself back out of the line of gunfire. Sure, fine, let's NOT be stealthy, you stupid aquatic son of a bitch. And, as the Submariner asshole continued his charge, he kept low and turned to the other two. "Change of plans. We'll use this ignorant ass as a cover. Hades, you're with me. You can shadow jump right? Right. We'll do that. Hawkeye, keep low and try to get as much off the computers before blowing them. Take the idiot with you if you need backup. Call if you run into trouble."
As he finished the last sentence, he turned and saw two more guards plowing out from the room and he put a hand up, throwing them back with a wave of force. Then he was through the hole Namor had left.
Right. Shadow travel. Cool. Cool cool cool. Nico's minions started wandering towards guards nervously as Nico himself followed after Lance. Shit, that Namor kid had really messed shit up. "Where, um, where are we shadow jumping?"
"To Quicksilver," Lance told him, kicking one of the guards in the head as he tried to get up. Between him and Namor, the coast was clear for now, but there were likely more coming. He led Nico into the security room where a wall of screens showed different areas of the facility. Several of them were blacked out. "What do you need? A picture, what?"
"We've just gotta hope he's somewhere dark. A picture would be helpful but...I can make do," Nico explained nervously. He could feel his guys continuing to be distracting miscreants throughout the facility. But shadow travel?
Well, Nico felt like now wasn't the time to explain that it was sometimes a little hit or miss. And that last time he passed out afterwards. "I haven't done it with another person before. Might feel weird for you."
"Whatever gets me to him," Lance told him, looking up at the monitors. Several more of the cameras had gone dark, and he saw the shambling shape of a zombie step out of a door on another screen. Guards and doctors were moving now, with guns and batons, and some other kind of weapon he didn't recognize. But, no Pietro. He snarled softly under his breath, realizing that he was either being kept off camera for obvious reasons, or they were looking in the wrong place. Either way, the quicker they found him, the better.
He looked over at Nico, murder in his eyes. "Just try and get me close. I'll do the rest."
--------
Outside, Clint stepped hesitantly into the hallway with Namor, surveying two branching tunnels of the same dull concrete and white tile that he'd seen for almost two years. He felt his heart speeding up and gripped the bow tighter, holding it down by his side. "They'll come in teams of two," he told the aquatic mutant. "I didn't think they'd be using guns, since they probably want us captured more than anything, but maybe they've decided to cut their losses."
"A sign of a desperate foe," Namor replied, still aloft in the air. "Let them come and focus their fire upon me," Namor said. "We shall provide ample distraction. But we should find their data storage," Namor suggested, though it had been pretty much ordered of them.
"Great suggestion," Clint muttered, staring at the two hallways. What they needed was the server room. He knew about that kind of thing, but only because one of the geniuses back at the school had told him about it. He wasn't even sure what a server looked like, but he was banking on big stinking computer. "So. Left or right?"
"To the right, first," Namor suggested. Given that no guards were actively spewing forth from it and the fact that that was also the case for the other side, all things created equal, it was best to just make a choice. He kept airborne, though slow enough that Hawkeye was able to keep up. If was in the air, he reasoned, as well as slightly ahead, then their foes would focus on him. Which, given their crude level of weaponry, meant that Hawkeye would be safe. Hopefully. But he kept his eyes open for passages that looked promising.
Clint was expecting the cavalry. Any day. You know, around the next corner. Or, no, just past that door. But no. The facility was eerily clear of all obstacles as they progressed past a few offices and through a set of metal doors. He paused then, gazing at another fork in the passages. Three, this time.
"We should split up," he pointed out to the guy hovering a few feet above the ground, and had to crane his neck to do it. Course, just saying that made him sick to his stomach, but Clint knew it was the right thing to do. Something was wrong about the empty halls, and sure, it might be a trap, but they had to find the server room, and they needed to get to it before the Right had time to come up with something smart. Like flooding the whole place.
Namor paused only momentarily to acknowledge Hawkeye's idea. "You will find I can respond quite rapidly if I am needed," Namor replied in acknowledgement, taking off with a triumphant shout down one of the corridors, going at his own pace.
Which was fast, because there were lives at stake. Lives of his fellow mutants in particular. He shoulder-rammed into a guard who had been coming out of an intersection far too slowly for him to notice Namor's approach, and Namor felt the man's ribs crack through his protective gear. He wouldn't be getting up any time soon, or perhaps ever. It troubled Namor little; these were people willing to barter and experiment on children, many incapable of defending themselves. While he wouldn't simply murder each and every one of these people with glee or even seek to do so, he would not shed tears for the loss of their lives, if it was coincidental. He cared little for the philosophical implications, at least at the moment. Those were things to consider later.
For a moment, Clint just stared after the guy, seriously wondering who thought it was a good idea to bring him along. At least he was a good distraction. Heading in the opposite direction, he was more stealthy in his movements, glancing briefly into a darkened lab before moving on. He didn't want to know, and the server room wasn't likely to be in surgical suite anyway. He started to pass the next lab two, but something came shooting out of the door in a spray of sparks, and he threw himself backwards, eyes narrowing as some kind of electrified net hit the opposite wall and slid to the floor.
He nocked an arrow, but the guy who came barreling out of the lab had a gun, and rather than let him get a shot off, Clint pushed off with one foot, throwing his shoulder into the man, forcing the assault rifle toward the ceiling instead. The guy was huge, but with the right amount of force, he fell backward into lab cart. In the back of his mind, Clint saw Gilmore, worrying over violence done with his creations, and Clint just smirked. Rather than shoot the man, he just whipped the titanium arm of his bow across the man's head, knocking him senseless.
-----
Nico awkwardly pulled Lance by the arm over to the most shadow-y corner of the room, trying in vain not to blush as he did so. So not the time, idiot. He closed his eyes, saying a prayer to Hades that he didn't fuck up, and tried to feel from the shadow they stood in to the shadows further along in the facility. He tried to think of the Brotherhood, of Wanda and Pietro, focusing on that energy and just....let go.
Opening his eyes once they traveled was a monumental feat. Tiredness seeped into his bones, but he felt waaaay too close to Lance. Annnnd they were in a closet. Yep.
Wicked sense of humor, fate. "Uh...sorry. This was as close as I could feel."
Lance fought to understand where they were, and why his head was spinning. One minute, Nico had been drawing him into a corner, and the next, his insides were trying to become his outsides and all he could feel was darkness and Nico's breath on his neck. He reached out to brace himself on something, which turned out to be Nico's shoulder, squeezing and coughing for a moment as the vertigo rolled through him. "Jesus, fuck. Where are we?"
Nico patted Lance's shoulder once before trying in vain to create some space between them, which was really a lost cause. Looked like shadow travel was not so nice for others. Duly noted. He, in the back of his mind, dropped some of his guys out causing mischief to save the energy. "I think a closet somewhere? Can you feel a door?"
Maybe in another circumstance, Lance would have bothered fumbling for a handle. But, as disoriented as he was, and tangled up with Nico and what he thought might be medical tubing, he just raised a hand and channeled seismic energy outward, blowing the door off its hinges and out into the lighted hallway. "Remind me to wear a motion sickness patch next time."
"That works too," Nico muttered as he managed to untangle himself enough to push through into the hallway.
"How close are we?" Lance asked as he managed to pull himself out of the closet and slowly regain his senses. It was a good thing too, because the sound of the door blowing open had alerted two more guards, and he raised his hand again, throwing them backward through the glass window of some kind of examining room.
"Pretty close...I think," Nico admitted with a slight frown. "He's not dead or dying, so I can't get an exact lock." But hey, that was good news, right? One of the guards started to try to get up from the examining room and Nico waved a hand, watching as a door opened and one of his girls came out and started bashing his head in.
For a moment, Lance just stared at the zombie beating the guard bloody, entranced by the grotesque sight, then he looked at Nico. "Okay. Maybe you've got the Brotherhood in you after all."
"Thanks...?" Nico responded, not sure whether or not that was a compliment.
"Don't thank me yet." Trusting his gut, Lance headed in the direction where the guards had come from. At the end of the hall, there were two metal doors, with a security keypad off to one side. He headed for it, but as he got closer, he could faintly make out shadows of people to either side of the door, behind the corners of an adjacent corridor.
Lance watched as at least six guards swept out in front of them, each with a submachine gun in hand. He just smirked. As each started to pull the trigger, the earth between them erupted, slamming outward in every direction around the doors, breaking them apart. The men were caught by the jagged, erupting tile, cement, and earth, not unlike a garbage disposal, and were flung, whole and in pieces down each of the three branches of the hall.
In the end, the hallway was left in pieces, and Lance kept walking, past the bodies and beneath the overhead lights, which dangled from their own wires from the ceiling above. And, beyond the doors, as expected, was a cell. One lone clear-plastic room sitting inside a much larger one.
-----
Namor was wreaking his own brand of havoc and chaos on his end of the facility. He heard the distant rumble of Avalanche's work and smirked only slightly to himself as he entered what he could only assume was their armory. Perhaps he could find some crude explosives and deal with these abominations. He alighted onto the ground, looking about. It was only too late that he heard someone behind him. As he was about to turn, he felt something metal wrap around his neck, and a great deal of his strength left him. He convulsed and hit the ground.
"Not so tough now," a man behind him confirmed, smirking and looking down at him. "We'll move you to one of our other facilities, I guess. See what the higher-ups want done with you. My vote's on vivisection, mutie," the man said, hauling Namor up by the newly-attached collar. "Why don't you gimme a scream?" the man asked, pulling out a knife. "You've killed good people today. I'm gonna make you pay."
Namor grit his teeth, and he seized the collar in his hands. "Your feeble technology will not suppress a son of Atlantis." His ankle wings weren't responding, and he'd lost a great deal of his strength, but he was still stronger than a surfacer. He pulled on the collar and felt the suppression of his abilities falter and then cease when the clasp snapped, and Namor cast it aside like the rubbish it was. The guard stumbled back and pulled a sidearm, unloading it into Namor's chest, to no avail.
"We have killed nothing here but scum and cowards who experiment on children simply because they were different," Namor said, taking the gun from the man's hand and wrenching it aside, breaking a few of his fingers in the process. The guard let out a pained cry and faltered back further, hunched down. "Your network of torture and exploitation ends here, today." The guard fell to his knees, clutching his broken hand. "And now you show me the respect I deserve, after you handled me like an unruly child, putting a collar on me as if I were a slave." Namor stooped and picked the man up by the neck, slamming him back-first into the wall. The man choked as Namor's grasp was perhaps a bit too tight. "Be thankful that my time is precious, and that I feel I have wasted enough of it on you." And with that, Namor threw him across the room, and turned back to the armory he had discovered. Now... what could he do with the things within to cause a suitable distraction?
-----
Clint was out of breath. He stood in the hall, two guys on the floor at his feet. He was bleeding from his lip, his head pounding, and his ribs... well, he was pretty sure at least one of them was broken. Apparently, according to the messages coming from one of the guards' ear comms, the reason why the halls were so empty was because they'd chosen to split their forces. They'd dealt with X-Force before, and they knew what they came for - the kids, and the data. So that's where they sent their men. Clint had already gone through three guys trying to get to the server room, but he knew that there were at least four more guarding the actual computers, and he knew he couldn't take that many on his own. Not in his condition, anyway.
Reaching down, he picked up two of the stun batons the men had been carrying, then stowed his bow on his back. He twirled the batons for a moment, testing them out in his hands. As he did, the facility rumbled, the floor vibrating beneath his feet. Avalanche, most likely. He had faith that between him and Hades, they had the guys guarding Quicksilver covered.
He'd just started down the hall when he heard commotion through his borrowed comm, with men and women both yelling to get to the armory. He'd disabled the rest of the facility's CCTV, so no one really seemed to know what was going on, except that they had to protect the 'prototypes'. As he got to the corner, he peeked around, watching three guards and at least one lab tech race in the opposite direction. Whatever that was about, it had just given him the opening he needed.
He took one step out into the middle of the hall, focused on the door at the end, neat and shiny with its perfectly labeled 'servers' sign above. He smiled, for half a moment, before the world tipped sideways and he found himself on his back, pain lancing through his entire midsection. He stared up at the man who stood over him, a baton in one hand, and some kind of odd device in the other.
Clint went cold all over, from his head to his toes, bumps rising up on his skin as nausea coalesced in his stomach.
The man who stood over him was well over six feet tall, with twice Clint's bulk and a military crew cut of jet black hair. The man's pale blue eyes glinted as he saw that Clint recognized him, the scarred side of his lips twitching in an odd parody of a smile. "If it isn't the baby bird. You never could die with dignity, could you Clint?"
Clint scrambled backwards and stumbled painfully to his feet, wheezing a little as he grabbed the wall for support. "Figure it's better to live with it," he managed to get out, gripping the stun batons harder. Panic was starting to set in, the blood rushing in his ears, but he knew he couldn't afford to freeze up. Not here. Not now.
Pierce snorted softly. "Not without your powers, boy. This time, this beating? You're not getting up from."
-----
Nico gingerly stepped around the broken Earth by his feet, feeling the life leave many of the bodies thrown of course. Well...more help for them, he guessed, snapping his fingers and feeling a few of the, er, more whole dead guards pull themselves up. "Fight your coworkers, protect us," Nico ordered quietly, following Lance a few steps behind.
He felt a little like he was intruding, so he kept the distance, staying by one of his undead guards. Close enough to help, but far enough to give Lance some privacy.
Lance stepped closer to the plastic, finding what looked like a door made from the same stuff. He wasn't sure why they'd use plastic to cage Pietro - he wasn't his dad - but whatever the reason, it also thwarted Lance's powers too, since plastic was generally resistant to seismic energy.
Pietro was weak from whatever they were piping into the room--it had to be that, since there hadn't been any more... dart-things. But he tried to get off the metal slab they had him on. His legs gave and he hit his hands and knees. But they were here. Lance was here. Fuck yes. Fucking--all these assholes were gonna die... just as soon as he could... get to them... and out of this stupid fuckin cell somehow...
"Shit," Lance cursed, jolting forward and putting a hand on the plastic surface. "P. Hold on. We'll get you out of there."
He was about to try blasting the door when he heard the sound of something clinking on the smooth tile floor. At first he thought it was Nico, but when he looked to the right, he saw four men crouched, rolling small grenade like objects in Lance and Nico's direction. He only had a second to react, forcing a seismic wave at the younger Brotherhood member to push him out the door of the room. Then it felt like his whole body went on lockdown as he crashed to his knees, blinded and stunned by the energy released from the grenades.
Nico crashed down into the floor where Lance had pushed him. Scowling he gingerly pushed back off the ground, waving a hand in the direction of the guards with a slight growl. He felt rather than saw one of his dead come up behind one of them and snap his neck.
One of the guards tried to rush Nico, punching him in the jaw. Nico feel to the ground again, and then felt himself be picked up by his neck. Shit, he needed to get better at fighting. Kicking the guard, he snapped a finger, and his dead female friend from before attached herself to his attacker. Blood sprayed from a particularly nasty blow on his heads across Nico's face.
Nico absent mindedly wiped with his arm across his face and, satisfied the guards were being taken care of, made his way over to where Lance had gone down.
"Avalanche?"
-----
Three guards entered the armory to a heap of broken weaponry that Namor had discarded wherever it had fallen. The lockers were smashed apart and twisted open. He hadn't managed to destroy everything; that was a task which he felt was beyond the scope of time they had.
The lab tech who followed was panting and sweating upon their arrival. "The-the prototypes. Ma--make sure they're intact," they said, to one of the guards, who went over to a row of high-tech looking cases in the back. "Looks like they're all accounted for."
When he turned around, Namor was standing over the unconscious lab tech and the other two guards. Namor plucked a keycard from the lab tech, which looked like it might open the cases to these 'prototypes.' "Wonderful," Namor said, striding forward as the guard drew his sidearm and began to empty it, fruitlessly, into Namor's chest. The prince of Atlantis strode purposefully but slowly toward the guard, and he said not a word when he wrenched the newly-leveled submachinegun from the guard's grasp, delivering a knockout blow to the side of his head.
He put a hand to his communication device. "I believe I have discovered experimental technology of theirs," Namor said. He would make sure it was secure until they had made their exodus, although he would move elsewhere if he was needed. "I believe it merits further study," he explained, via comms, to his teammates.
-----
Clint crashed into the floor again, sliding a few feet across the tile as Pierce growled and pulled a steel-tipped arrow from his shoulder. The man sneered, tilting his head as though he was listening to something. "It sounds like your friends are making quite the mess. Not sure why they thought to bring you along, you being broken and all. Do they really still call you a mutant? Can't wager why. But...before I scoot on out of here, it will be my pleasure to put you out of your misery."
"You can try," Clint coughed, getting to his knees as he focused on a PVC pipe above Pierce's head. With one quick motion, he fired an arrow at the pipe, piercing the plastic joint. "Some way or another, I always seem to find it."
Pierce glanced up, eyeing the arrow sticking out of the pipe, then looked back at Clint, smirking as a trickle of water started to leak out of the joint, dribbling to the floor. "Not real smart, are you, boy?"
Clint scrambled backwards, pulling another arrow from his quiver. He was running low, and his head was spinning from the blows he'd already taken. His left eye was starting to swell shut, and it hurt to breathe, let alone move. He heard Namor's report in his comm, but didn't answer just yet. If Pierce was planning on bailing as soon as he killed Clint, then things must be going good for the other mutants in the place. Good for them. "Well, I've been skipping a few classes here and there."
Stalking forward, the hulking ex-military sniper just smiled. He didn't even notice as the damaged pipe had started to break open and gush water into the hallway behind him. He tossed the stun baton away and pulled the assault rifle off of his back, settling into an easy stance as he positioned the barrel toward the teen on his knees. "Here's a class for you. Gun beats bow."
Just then, the pipe exploded from the force of the backed-up flow, breaking open and creating a massive waterfall in the hallway, drenching the man below. As it did, Clint released his arrow into the man's chest, right into his metal body-armor. The electric current suddenly released from the taser-arrow sparked along the lines of the metal and flowing water, electrocuting the man in his boots. The assault rifle locked in his grip and he shook and shuddered, then fell to the floor in the pool of water as the spray began to slow.
Standing slowly, Clint backed away from the water and pulled his last arrow. "Hope you're still alive. Promised someone I wouldn't use these for violence, you know? Just uh, lay quiet until they send the medics, kay? I'm just gonna take care of these servers. I promised another someone that I wasn't going to let this information get out. That means that my people can't get ahold of it either."
Turning back toward the open door of the server room, Clint nocked the arrow and took a deep breath before releasing it, straight into the computer bank beyond. The resulting explosion was enough to singe the hairs on his arms, baking his face in a fiery glow. It was only then that he touched his comm as he turned and limped slowly down the hall. "Server's taken care of. Meet you guys at the entrance."
-----
Lance struggled to get his legs to work right, clenching his jaw as he managed to get to one knee. Everything was a blur of color and motion around him. It took him a few moments to even begin to answer, but he finally touched his comm, answering both of the other teammates, "Meet us outside of the cave and hold the entrance." Vision finally starting to clear, he managed to look up at the younger teen, giving a stiff, jerky nod. "You got 'em?"
"Yeah, I got them," Nico promised, offering a hand up to his still dazed looking colleague. "Now we've just gotta get him." Nico nodded to where Pietro was.
Pietro tried to bang on the plastic. He couldn't quite wrap his head around what was going on out there--there were zombies or something and Lance went down and... Ugh. Stupid drug-air...
Lance took Nico's hand, pulling himself to his feet. His nerves still felt fried, but he stared at the plastic and Pietro's drugged expression and anger boiled back to the surface. He moved back to what looked like the door to the room and motioned to Nico. "Stand back. I'll try and blow this thing open."
"Can you do that with plastic?" Nico asked, concerned, even as he took a step back from Lance.
"Do you have a better idea?" Lance scowled.
"I could try to shadow travel in there," Nico said after a moment, not very excited about the idea but not sure what else they could do. Pietro looked drugged, so they'd have to count him out of the rest of this plan. Lance looked dazed still and Nico was pretty sure his powers only worked on rocks. Not, like, plastic.
Hades be, since when was Nico the logical one?
Lance eyed Nico, then the plastic cell. Because of the darkened room, there were shadows in there. "That didn't go amazingly the first time," he pointed out, raising his eyebrows at Nico in question.
"Look, our options are you trying to blow up plastic, or me giving your boyfriend Vertigo, take your pick," Nico said a little tersely, patience growing a little thin. Deciding just to do it (Lance would get over it if Nico could pull this off), Nico took a couple steps back to the corner into the shadows. He focused on the shadows in the prison cell and gave a quick prayer to whatever gods were listening. Please let this work.
Nico opened his eyes in the cell. He barely got a chance to smile before he realized something was wrong. He felt tired. Too tired.
Shit, they needed to go NOW. "C'mere Quicksilver, time to leave."
Pietro stumbled in the right direction. "Easy on the vertigo, kid... rough day... week... whatever."
Nico made as quick of a grab of the other boy as he could. He wasn't sure he'd have enough umph to get them out there, but shit if he wasn't going to try. The second he got a firm enough grasp on Pietro, and half dragged him into the shadows, he focused on getting the hell out of there. He poked an eye open and found himself at least in the right hallway, Pietro in hand.
Cool. Yeah, he was gonna pass out now.
Lance had to dart back down the hall a bit to find them, but grabbed Nico as he wobbled on his feet, then Pietro in the other arm. For half a moment, he stood there, pressing his lips to Pietro's temple, just breathing him in, then, with murder in his eyes, he hauled both boys through the labyrinth of tunnels, flinging people out of his way whenever someone attempted to stall their progress.
By the time they made it out of the caves and met up with their other two team members, he was starting to physically falter. Still, he handed Nico and Pietro off, then turned toward the mountain. And, with one furious, shuddering motion of his hands, caved the entire thing in, just as their exit portal appeared.
By the time Lance and Wanda had discovered that it wasn't just Pietro who'd been taken, and had met with Xavier, scrounged for information, and settled on a plan, Lance was about ready to take down the school in addition to the Right, for no other reason than the fact that they were keeping him from finding Pietro. Okay, maybe they were helping. Or something. But the kids they'd stuck him with didn't exactly scream totally stable and competent. And yes, that included 'Hades'. One of his own or not, the kid was creepy, and Lance didn't really trust him in the field yet. He didn't really want Wanda's boyfriend on his team either, but it wasn't as if he could have told her that. Not without being hexed through a wall. Still, no matter what, he'd promised Wanda he'd bring Pietro home, even if he had to do everything himself.
The GPS coordinates from Pietro's phone hadn't lasted long, but what they'd seen had been enough to zero in on someplace in rural Kentucky. Not exactly the kind of place Lance was expecting a lab to be, but then, he'd heard of weirder. Maybe the right was trying to cover their tracks a little harder these days? Whatever the case, the portal opened up inside what was clearly some kind of huge natural cavern, with tunnels veering off in three different directions, and he had to smirk. Zipping up a black vest over the bullet-proof one and sliding his protective glasses down over his eyes, he drawled, "These guys want to hide from me under a mountain? That's precious.."
Beside him, Clint glanced sidelong at the dark haired 'leader' of the Brotherhood. He was already annoyed at this whole scenario. When he'd volunteered to go after the Right, he'd meant find Caleb and fuck up anyone who had touched his roommate. He hardly even knew Pietro, besides that one time he'd pulled a knife on the guy. But...he was Wanda's brother, and he knew that Avalanche was Pietro's boyfriend. So he kind of understood the ire practically leaking out of their 'team leader'.
Dressed in grey fatigues and army boots, and some kind of black material that Gilmore had told him was supposed to be bulletproof, he had a quiver of arrows hanging from his belt, and his new bow folded up and strapped against his back. The whole getup felt vaguely military, but Clint still sported his sparkly, purple hearing aids, a huge 'Fuck You' to the Right and anyone who saw him coming. "They're going to have cameras," he warned them, already looking up and into the corners of the cavern they were in. "Keep an eye out for the wiring."
Namor stepped through the portal, not bearing his trident (he was given a stern look by Xavier that told him that such a thing was best left behind) but wearing a black stealth version of his more regal attire; his vest not quite as open as usual but still going all the way down to his waistband. Whereas this 'Avalanche' individual had been full of ire and bravado, Namor was facing his first outing with cool determination and the sureness of someone who was a practiced warrior. Not that Namor was, beyond wrestling for sport in the depths of Atlantis, but he was versed enough in the ways of war by this X-Force's training programs that he felt formidable enough to face off against humans.
There was something about this cavern, though... He touched the wall of it, and his palm came back damp. "They may be capable of flooding this cavern," Namor warned, ankle-wings bristling at the idea of having to pull all of these surfacers out from beneath a churning torrent of water.
Great. So Nico was at risk at being crushed or being drowned. He frowned after joining his teammates, looking around. At least there were shadows. And, well, dead people, but he didn't think his teammates would really like hearing that.
To be honest, he wasn't entirely sure how he got on this "team", other than Yana told him to make an effort and that maybe he could help. So he was going to try his best. "Alright Avalanche, what's our first move?"
Lance crouched in the middle of the cavern and closed his eyes as he touched a hand to the cavern floor. He didn't like the sound of the caverns flooding, which meant they had to work fast, and quiet, which had never really been his style. If it meant saving Pietro, though, he'd go the secret agent route. Closing his eyes, he let a low vibration rumble through the earth. He felt it moving through the rock, bouncing back at him at odd angles... until it slowed a hell of a lot more in one direction. If he had to bet, that was the lab they were looking for.
Rising to his feet, he jerked his head in the direction of the sluggish vibrations. "This way. Hawkguy, watch for cameras and take 'em out if you can. You other two, watch our backs as we move. Might want to raise up a few friends, Hades, but keep them far enough behind us that they don't draw attention."
Hawkguy...Clint rolled his eyes, but gave a nod, reaching for the bow on his back and snapping it out to full size. He had to admit, having a team leader who could tell where they were going through the earth was pretty fucking cool, even if he was an ass. He nocked one of his special arrows, and fell into step beside Avalanche, keeping his eyes up and along the walls as they moved, a beam of light from his bow arcing over the rock walls.
Namor didn't like being assigned to rearguard, but as Submariner, he knew that there were times at which he would have to follow, rather than lead. He was not incapable of swallowing his pride. Even if the taste was bitter.
He glanced askance at Hades, the 'compatriot' walking near him from this so-called Brotherhood. Namor didn't know what to make of them. They apparently had gotten up to some wanton destruction of several of these facilities. Destruction that, while Namor did not necessarily approve of, destruction that he felt was perhaps warranted. Being a ruler, being a leader, sometimes meant having to send a message to one's enemies, even if the message was particularly cruel. That was the only way to communicate, at times, with people. There was no desire in Namor's mind or heart to make small talk with these individuals. Focus was of the essence of their mission, and becoming distracted with idle chatter was a potential opening for their enemies.
Instead, he kept his eyes open, scanning the dark caverns for any clue of an attack or trap.
Couple of dead guys, coming up, Nico thought as he snapped his fingers. He ignored the guy glaring at him from the side, although as he felt his guys reanimating, he felt like maybe that wouldn’t gain him any new friends.
Oh well. Pietro bought him cereal and let him stay at Asteroid M, so that was more than worth creeping out a couple of school kids anyways.
Every turn they made through the caves made Lance more agitated. He knew they were getting closer, but he kept expecting to run into some kind of resistance. When they didn't, he started to feel like things were going too easy. He was so deep into his thoughts that as he turned the next corner, he almost walked right off the edge of a cliff, the light from his flashlight bouncing off of the rippling water menacingly. With nothing but instinct, he reached out for the wall, and it reached back for him, stone grasping onto his arm to keep him from going over the edge...into exactly what Submariner had warned him about - a huge flooded cavern below. "Fuck."
Clint barely had enough time to stop himself, but Avalanche's bulk just ahead of him managed to halt his progress, and he stumbled off to the side, looking out over the flooded chambers from a thin, three-foot ledge that crumbled off to both sides. He was just about to say something when he saw motion - the red light from an infrared camera sweeping toward them. Grabbing Avalanche, he hauled the guy back into the corridor and around the corner with the other two. "They've got eyes," he hissed.
"Let them see," Namor said, frankly. "If this is our only method of ingress, then we should besiege them. I can go ahead and find the mechanism by which they keep the water within the cave system, and destroy it," he offered, already starting to move around the corner where Avalanche and Hawkeye had been. "Unless there are other suggestions," Namor said. He wasn't the leader, after all. He was simply volunteering to take charge. Or make a charge, rather.
"Hey, here's an idea," Lance growled, wrenching his arm out of Clint's hand. "You both do what I say and we all go home alive. Hawkeye, take out the cameras. Then, Prince Mariner here can drain the lake. Or...whatever it is you do."
Clint snorted softly, but checked the corner, switching off the light on his bow and switching to laser sight. He wasn't really used to shooting anything in the dark, but that had never stopped him before. At least this way, they wouldn't see him coming. He moved the sight up the wall, along the ceiling to where he'd last seen the blinking red light. The taser arrow he had loaded was enough to take out the one camera, but he was also hoping that it would short the entire system.
"I have friends in the water," Nico told Lance, not really caring that he sounded as creepy as the sixth sense kid. He didn't really care for this water dude. Sure, he wasn't sure about following Avalanche's lead, but better him than water dude, right? "Want them to join the party?"
"There will be no need," Namor assured Hades, waiting for Hawkeye to loose his arrow before dashing forward with surprising speed and diving deep into the water. He felt no distress as he entered the cold depths, his eyes adjusting to the lack of light, used to the depths of Atlantis and speeding forward, Namor began searching for the telltale works of surfacers and their efforts to direct and control the water. A ways along the path, farther than any surfacer could have held their breath and reached, Namor found a series of pump pipes and the mechanical floodgate that would be used to drain the cave.
Namor put his fist through the seam of the floodgate, the metal shearing apart with the blow. He began to pry the gate open, the water draining quickly as his might bent and warped the gate beyond closing without being repaired or replaced. Once the water was draining and his work was done, he doubled back to meet the others. By the time he arrived, he was flying rather than swimming, and he alighted on the ground in front of them.
Lance had to stare, just for a moment. "Yeah, okay. That was impressive."
Down below them, the cavern was draining away to reveal a ladder leading down to a pair of large metal doors. Two cameras situated on the ceiling above sparked and sputtered before going dead. And, of course, Hades' friends appeared, waterlogged and clearly very dead, but menacing in their own right.
Clint stared for a moment at the undead, then looked back at the dark-haired kid with them, then back at the undead. That...wasn't unsettling at all, no. He was already fighting down his own instincts about the place, tamping down any panic trying to rise to the surface, and walking dead definitely did not help. He just prayed they weren't going to have to investigate any of the surgery rooms, because he wasn't sure his stomach could handle that.
Lance was the first to take the ladder, swinging down to the muddy silt and striding toward the door. He checked one of the walls to one side with his hand, then nodded to the others. "There's a room off to the right - probably security. I'll handle them. Hades - send your folks on recon. We need to find the detention area before they do something stupid with Quicksilver. Submariner, you got this door?"
Avalanche's approval meant little to Namor, other than the simple recognition of it. He answered the question as to whether or not he had this situation in hand with action rather than any kind of words. He dug his fingers into the seam where the doors met, beginning to wrench them open, which was not a quiet process. Already, a trio of guards, submachine guns leveled at the widening gap, began to fire as soon as they could see him clearly enough. The barking gunshots meant little to Namor; these crude surfacer weapons were inelegant and boorish by his standards. And, in equal measure, ineffectual. Between both the body armor he was wearing and his natural durability, the bullets were falling, mashed and misshapen from their impacts, at his feet.
Though his limbs shook with the effort it took to warp the steel, wrenching open a hole large enough for them to get through almost two abreast. Rather than wait for any kind of signal to attack, Namor took it into his own hands, charging forward through the air. His bellow rang out clear as a clarion call, filled with the fury of an affronted prince, as his fist connected with the jaw of the first guard, sending the gunman spinning from his feet.
"Imperius Rex!"
"Moron," Lance growled as he threw himself back out of the line of gunfire. Sure, fine, let's NOT be stealthy, you stupid aquatic son of a bitch. And, as the Submariner asshole continued his charge, he kept low and turned to the other two. "Change of plans. We'll use this ignorant ass as a cover. Hades, you're with me. You can shadow jump right? Right. We'll do that. Hawkeye, keep low and try to get as much off the computers before blowing them. Take the idiot with you if you need backup. Call if you run into trouble."
As he finished the last sentence, he turned and saw two more guards plowing out from the room and he put a hand up, throwing them back with a wave of force. Then he was through the hole Namor had left.
Right. Shadow travel. Cool. Cool cool cool. Nico's minions started wandering towards guards nervously as Nico himself followed after Lance. Shit, that Namor kid had really messed shit up. "Where, um, where are we shadow jumping?"
"To Quicksilver," Lance told him, kicking one of the guards in the head as he tried to get up. Between him and Namor, the coast was clear for now, but there were likely more coming. He led Nico into the security room where a wall of screens showed different areas of the facility. Several of them were blacked out. "What do you need? A picture, what?"
"We've just gotta hope he's somewhere dark. A picture would be helpful but...I can make do," Nico explained nervously. He could feel his guys continuing to be distracting miscreants throughout the facility. But shadow travel?
Well, Nico felt like now wasn't the time to explain that it was sometimes a little hit or miss. And that last time he passed out afterwards. "I haven't done it with another person before. Might feel weird for you."
"Whatever gets me to him," Lance told him, looking up at the monitors. Several more of the cameras had gone dark, and he saw the shambling shape of a zombie step out of a door on another screen. Guards and doctors were moving now, with guns and batons, and some other kind of weapon he didn't recognize. But, no Pietro. He snarled softly under his breath, realizing that he was either being kept off camera for obvious reasons, or they were looking in the wrong place. Either way, the quicker they found him, the better.
He looked over at Nico, murder in his eyes. "Just try and get me close. I'll do the rest."
Outside, Clint stepped hesitantly into the hallway with Namor, surveying two branching tunnels of the same dull concrete and white tile that he'd seen for almost two years. He felt his heart speeding up and gripped the bow tighter, holding it down by his side. "They'll come in teams of two," he told the aquatic mutant. "I didn't think they'd be using guns, since they probably want us captured more than anything, but maybe they've decided to cut their losses."
"A sign of a desperate foe," Namor replied, still aloft in the air. "Let them come and focus their fire upon me," Namor said. "We shall provide ample distraction. But we should find their data storage," Namor suggested, though it had been pretty much ordered of them.
"Great suggestion," Clint muttered, staring at the two hallways. What they needed was the server room. He knew about that kind of thing, but only because one of the geniuses back at the school had told him about it. He wasn't even sure what a server looked like, but he was banking on big stinking computer. "So. Left or right?"
"To the right, first," Namor suggested. Given that no guards were actively spewing forth from it and the fact that that was also the case for the other side, all things created equal, it was best to just make a choice. He kept airborne, though slow enough that Hawkeye was able to keep up. If was in the air, he reasoned, as well as slightly ahead, then their foes would focus on him. Which, given their crude level of weaponry, meant that Hawkeye would be safe. Hopefully. But he kept his eyes open for passages that looked promising.
Clint was expecting the cavalry. Any day. You know, around the next corner. Or, no, just past that door. But no. The facility was eerily clear of all obstacles as they progressed past a few offices and through a set of metal doors. He paused then, gazing at another fork in the passages. Three, this time.
"We should split up," he pointed out to the guy hovering a few feet above the ground, and had to crane his neck to do it. Course, just saying that made him sick to his stomach, but Clint knew it was the right thing to do. Something was wrong about the empty halls, and sure, it might be a trap, but they had to find the server room, and they needed to get to it before the Right had time to come up with something smart. Like flooding the whole place.
Namor paused only momentarily to acknowledge Hawkeye's idea. "You will find I can respond quite rapidly if I am needed," Namor replied in acknowledgement, taking off with a triumphant shout down one of the corridors, going at his own pace.
Which was fast, because there were lives at stake. Lives of his fellow mutants in particular. He shoulder-rammed into a guard who had been coming out of an intersection far too slowly for him to notice Namor's approach, and Namor felt the man's ribs crack through his protective gear. He wouldn't be getting up any time soon, or perhaps ever. It troubled Namor little; these were people willing to barter and experiment on children, many incapable of defending themselves. While he wouldn't simply murder each and every one of these people with glee or even seek to do so, he would not shed tears for the loss of their lives, if it was coincidental. He cared little for the philosophical implications, at least at the moment. Those were things to consider later.
For a moment, Clint just stared after the guy, seriously wondering who thought it was a good idea to bring him along. At least he was a good distraction. Heading in the opposite direction, he was more stealthy in his movements, glancing briefly into a darkened lab before moving on. He didn't want to know, and the server room wasn't likely to be in surgical suite anyway. He started to pass the next lab two, but something came shooting out of the door in a spray of sparks, and he threw himself backwards, eyes narrowing as some kind of electrified net hit the opposite wall and slid to the floor.
He nocked an arrow, but the guy who came barreling out of the lab had a gun, and rather than let him get a shot off, Clint pushed off with one foot, throwing his shoulder into the man, forcing the assault rifle toward the ceiling instead. The guy was huge, but with the right amount of force, he fell backward into lab cart. In the back of his mind, Clint saw Gilmore, worrying over violence done with his creations, and Clint just smirked. Rather than shoot the man, he just whipped the titanium arm of his bow across the man's head, knocking him senseless.
Nico awkwardly pulled Lance by the arm over to the most shadow-y corner of the room, trying in vain not to blush as he did so. So not the time, idiot. He closed his eyes, saying a prayer to Hades that he didn't fuck up, and tried to feel from the shadow they stood in to the shadows further along in the facility. He tried to think of the Brotherhood, of Wanda and Pietro, focusing on that energy and just....let go.
Opening his eyes once they traveled was a monumental feat. Tiredness seeped into his bones, but he felt waaaay too close to Lance. Annnnd they were in a closet. Yep.
Wicked sense of humor, fate. "Uh...sorry. This was as close as I could feel."
Lance fought to understand where they were, and why his head was spinning. One minute, Nico had been drawing him into a corner, and the next, his insides were trying to become his outsides and all he could feel was darkness and Nico's breath on his neck. He reached out to brace himself on something, which turned out to be Nico's shoulder, squeezing and coughing for a moment as the vertigo rolled through him. "Jesus, fuck. Where are we?"
Nico patted Lance's shoulder once before trying in vain to create some space between them, which was really a lost cause. Looked like shadow travel was not so nice for others. Duly noted. He, in the back of his mind, dropped some of his guys out causing mischief to save the energy. "I think a closet somewhere? Can you feel a door?"
Maybe in another circumstance, Lance would have bothered fumbling for a handle. But, as disoriented as he was, and tangled up with Nico and what he thought might be medical tubing, he just raised a hand and channeled seismic energy outward, blowing the door off its hinges and out into the lighted hallway. "Remind me to wear a motion sickness patch next time."
"That works too," Nico muttered as he managed to untangle himself enough to push through into the hallway.
"How close are we?" Lance asked as he managed to pull himself out of the closet and slowly regain his senses. It was a good thing too, because the sound of the door blowing open had alerted two more guards, and he raised his hand again, throwing them backward through the glass window of some kind of examining room.
"Pretty close...I think," Nico admitted with a slight frown. "He's not dead or dying, so I can't get an exact lock." But hey, that was good news, right? One of the guards started to try to get up from the examining room and Nico waved a hand, watching as a door opened and one of his girls came out and started bashing his head in.
For a moment, Lance just stared at the zombie beating the guard bloody, entranced by the grotesque sight, then he looked at Nico. "Okay. Maybe you've got the Brotherhood in you after all."
"Thanks...?" Nico responded, not sure whether or not that was a compliment.
"Don't thank me yet." Trusting his gut, Lance headed in the direction where the guards had come from. At the end of the hall, there were two metal doors, with a security keypad off to one side. He headed for it, but as he got closer, he could faintly make out shadows of people to either side of the door, behind the corners of an adjacent corridor.
Lance watched as at least six guards swept out in front of them, each with a submachine gun in hand. He just smirked. As each started to pull the trigger, the earth between them erupted, slamming outward in every direction around the doors, breaking them apart. The men were caught by the jagged, erupting tile, cement, and earth, not unlike a garbage disposal, and were flung, whole and in pieces down each of the three branches of the hall.
In the end, the hallway was left in pieces, and Lance kept walking, past the bodies and beneath the overhead lights, which dangled from their own wires from the ceiling above. And, beyond the doors, as expected, was a cell. One lone clear-plastic room sitting inside a much larger one.
Namor was wreaking his own brand of havoc and chaos on his end of the facility. He heard the distant rumble of Avalanche's work and smirked only slightly to himself as he entered what he could only assume was their armory. Perhaps he could find some crude explosives and deal with these abominations. He alighted onto the ground, looking about. It was only too late that he heard someone behind him. As he was about to turn, he felt something metal wrap around his neck, and a great deal of his strength left him. He convulsed and hit the ground.
"Not so tough now," a man behind him confirmed, smirking and looking down at him. "We'll move you to one of our other facilities, I guess. See what the higher-ups want done with you. My vote's on vivisection, mutie," the man said, hauling Namor up by the newly-attached collar. "Why don't you gimme a scream?" the man asked, pulling out a knife. "You've killed good people today. I'm gonna make you pay."
Namor grit his teeth, and he seized the collar in his hands. "Your feeble technology will not suppress a son of Atlantis." His ankle wings weren't responding, and he'd lost a great deal of his strength, but he was still stronger than a surfacer. He pulled on the collar and felt the suppression of his abilities falter and then cease when the clasp snapped, and Namor cast it aside like the rubbish it was. The guard stumbled back and pulled a sidearm, unloading it into Namor's chest, to no avail.
"We have killed nothing here but scum and cowards who experiment on children simply because they were different," Namor said, taking the gun from the man's hand and wrenching it aside, breaking a few of his fingers in the process. The guard let out a pained cry and faltered back further, hunched down. "Your network of torture and exploitation ends here, today." The guard fell to his knees, clutching his broken hand. "And now you show me the respect I deserve, after you handled me like an unruly child, putting a collar on me as if I were a slave." Namor stooped and picked the man up by the neck, slamming him back-first into the wall. The man choked as Namor's grasp was perhaps a bit too tight. "Be thankful that my time is precious, and that I feel I have wasted enough of it on you." And with that, Namor threw him across the room, and turned back to the armory he had discovered. Now... what could he do with the things within to cause a suitable distraction?
Clint was out of breath. He stood in the hall, two guys on the floor at his feet. He was bleeding from his lip, his head pounding, and his ribs... well, he was pretty sure at least one of them was broken. Apparently, according to the messages coming from one of the guards' ear comms, the reason why the halls were so empty was because they'd chosen to split their forces. They'd dealt with X-Force before, and they knew what they came for - the kids, and the data. So that's where they sent their men. Clint had already gone through three guys trying to get to the server room, but he knew that there were at least four more guarding the actual computers, and he knew he couldn't take that many on his own. Not in his condition, anyway.
Reaching down, he picked up two of the stun batons the men had been carrying, then stowed his bow on his back. He twirled the batons for a moment, testing them out in his hands. As he did, the facility rumbled, the floor vibrating beneath his feet. Avalanche, most likely. He had faith that between him and Hades, they had the guys guarding Quicksilver covered.
He'd just started down the hall when he heard commotion through his borrowed comm, with men and women both yelling to get to the armory. He'd disabled the rest of the facility's CCTV, so no one really seemed to know what was going on, except that they had to protect the 'prototypes'. As he got to the corner, he peeked around, watching three guards and at least one lab tech race in the opposite direction. Whatever that was about, it had just given him the opening he needed.
He took one step out into the middle of the hall, focused on the door at the end, neat and shiny with its perfectly labeled 'servers' sign above. He smiled, for half a moment, before the world tipped sideways and he found himself on his back, pain lancing through his entire midsection. He stared up at the man who stood over him, a baton in one hand, and some kind of odd device in the other.
Clint went cold all over, from his head to his toes, bumps rising up on his skin as nausea coalesced in his stomach.
The man who stood over him was well over six feet tall, with twice Clint's bulk and a military crew cut of jet black hair. The man's pale blue eyes glinted as he saw that Clint recognized him, the scarred side of his lips twitching in an odd parody of a smile. "If it isn't the baby bird. You never could die with dignity, could you Clint?"
Clint scrambled backwards and stumbled painfully to his feet, wheezing a little as he grabbed the wall for support. "Figure it's better to live with it," he managed to get out, gripping the stun batons harder. Panic was starting to set in, the blood rushing in his ears, but he knew he couldn't afford to freeze up. Not here. Not now.
Pierce snorted softly. "Not without your powers, boy. This time, this beating? You're not getting up from."
Nico gingerly stepped around the broken Earth by his feet, feeling the life leave many of the bodies thrown of course. Well...more help for them, he guessed, snapping his fingers and feeling a few of the, er, more whole dead guards pull themselves up. "Fight your coworkers, protect us," Nico ordered quietly, following Lance a few steps behind.
He felt a little like he was intruding, so he kept the distance, staying by one of his undead guards. Close enough to help, but far enough to give Lance some privacy.
Lance stepped closer to the plastic, finding what looked like a door made from the same stuff. He wasn't sure why they'd use plastic to cage Pietro - he wasn't his dad - but whatever the reason, it also thwarted Lance's powers too, since plastic was generally resistant to seismic energy.
Pietro was weak from whatever they were piping into the room--it had to be that, since there hadn't been any more... dart-things. But he tried to get off the metal slab they had him on. His legs gave and he hit his hands and knees. But they were here. Lance was here. Fuck yes. Fucking--all these assholes were gonna die... just as soon as he could... get to them... and out of this stupid fuckin cell somehow...
"Shit," Lance cursed, jolting forward and putting a hand on the plastic surface. "P. Hold on. We'll get you out of there."
He was about to try blasting the door when he heard the sound of something clinking on the smooth tile floor. At first he thought it was Nico, but when he looked to the right, he saw four men crouched, rolling small grenade like objects in Lance and Nico's direction. He only had a second to react, forcing a seismic wave at the younger Brotherhood member to push him out the door of the room. Then it felt like his whole body went on lockdown as he crashed to his knees, blinded and stunned by the energy released from the grenades.
Nico crashed down into the floor where Lance had pushed him. Scowling he gingerly pushed back off the ground, waving a hand in the direction of the guards with a slight growl. He felt rather than saw one of his dead come up behind one of them and snap his neck.
One of the guards tried to rush Nico, punching him in the jaw. Nico feel to the ground again, and then felt himself be picked up by his neck. Shit, he needed to get better at fighting. Kicking the guard, he snapped a finger, and his dead female friend from before attached herself to his attacker. Blood sprayed from a particularly nasty blow on his heads across Nico's face.
Nico absent mindedly wiped with his arm across his face and, satisfied the guards were being taken care of, made his way over to where Lance had gone down.
"Avalanche?"
Three guards entered the armory to a heap of broken weaponry that Namor had discarded wherever it had fallen. The lockers were smashed apart and twisted open. He hadn't managed to destroy everything; that was a task which he felt was beyond the scope of time they had.
The lab tech who followed was panting and sweating upon their arrival. "The-the prototypes. Ma--make sure they're intact," they said, to one of the guards, who went over to a row of high-tech looking cases in the back. "Looks like they're all accounted for."
When he turned around, Namor was standing over the unconscious lab tech and the other two guards. Namor plucked a keycard from the lab tech, which looked like it might open the cases to these 'prototypes.' "Wonderful," Namor said, striding forward as the guard drew his sidearm and began to empty it, fruitlessly, into Namor's chest. The prince of Atlantis strode purposefully but slowly toward the guard, and he said not a word when he wrenched the newly-leveled submachinegun from the guard's grasp, delivering a knockout blow to the side of his head.
He put a hand to his communication device. "I believe I have discovered experimental technology of theirs," Namor said. He would make sure it was secure until they had made their exodus, although he would move elsewhere if he was needed. "I believe it merits further study," he explained, via comms, to his teammates.
Clint crashed into the floor again, sliding a few feet across the tile as Pierce growled and pulled a steel-tipped arrow from his shoulder. The man sneered, tilting his head as though he was listening to something. "It sounds like your friends are making quite the mess. Not sure why they thought to bring you along, you being broken and all. Do they really still call you a mutant? Can't wager why. But...before I scoot on out of here, it will be my pleasure to put you out of your misery."
"You can try," Clint coughed, getting to his knees as he focused on a PVC pipe above Pierce's head. With one quick motion, he fired an arrow at the pipe, piercing the plastic joint. "Some way or another, I always seem to find it."
Pierce glanced up, eyeing the arrow sticking out of the pipe, then looked back at Clint, smirking as a trickle of water started to leak out of the joint, dribbling to the floor. "Not real smart, are you, boy?"
Clint scrambled backwards, pulling another arrow from his quiver. He was running low, and his head was spinning from the blows he'd already taken. His left eye was starting to swell shut, and it hurt to breathe, let alone move. He heard Namor's report in his comm, but didn't answer just yet. If Pierce was planning on bailing as soon as he killed Clint, then things must be going good for the other mutants in the place. Good for them. "Well, I've been skipping a few classes here and there."
Stalking forward, the hulking ex-military sniper just smiled. He didn't even notice as the damaged pipe had started to break open and gush water into the hallway behind him. He tossed the stun baton away and pulled the assault rifle off of his back, settling into an easy stance as he positioned the barrel toward the teen on his knees. "Here's a class for you. Gun beats bow."
Just then, the pipe exploded from the force of the backed-up flow, breaking open and creating a massive waterfall in the hallway, drenching the man below. As it did, Clint released his arrow into the man's chest, right into his metal body-armor. The electric current suddenly released from the taser-arrow sparked along the lines of the metal and flowing water, electrocuting the man in his boots. The assault rifle locked in his grip and he shook and shuddered, then fell to the floor in the pool of water as the spray began to slow.
Standing slowly, Clint backed away from the water and pulled his last arrow. "Hope you're still alive. Promised someone I wouldn't use these for violence, you know? Just uh, lay quiet until they send the medics, kay? I'm just gonna take care of these servers. I promised another someone that I wasn't going to let this information get out. That means that my people can't get ahold of it either."
Turning back toward the open door of the server room, Clint nocked the arrow and took a deep breath before releasing it, straight into the computer bank beyond. The resulting explosion was enough to singe the hairs on his arms, baking his face in a fiery glow. It was only then that he touched his comm as he turned and limped slowly down the hall. "Server's taken care of. Meet you guys at the entrance."
Lance struggled to get his legs to work right, clenching his jaw as he managed to get to one knee. Everything was a blur of color and motion around him. It took him a few moments to even begin to answer, but he finally touched his comm, answering both of the other teammates, "Meet us outside of the cave and hold the entrance." Vision finally starting to clear, he managed to look up at the younger teen, giving a stiff, jerky nod. "You got 'em?"
"Yeah, I got them," Nico promised, offering a hand up to his still dazed looking colleague. "Now we've just gotta get him." Nico nodded to where Pietro was.
Pietro tried to bang on the plastic. He couldn't quite wrap his head around what was going on out there--there were zombies or something and Lance went down and... Ugh. Stupid drug-air...
Lance took Nico's hand, pulling himself to his feet. His nerves still felt fried, but he stared at the plastic and Pietro's drugged expression and anger boiled back to the surface. He moved back to what looked like the door to the room and motioned to Nico. "Stand back. I'll try and blow this thing open."
"Can you do that with plastic?" Nico asked, concerned, even as he took a step back from Lance.
"Do you have a better idea?" Lance scowled.
"I could try to shadow travel in there," Nico said after a moment, not very excited about the idea but not sure what else they could do. Pietro looked drugged, so they'd have to count him out of the rest of this plan. Lance looked dazed still and Nico was pretty sure his powers only worked on rocks. Not, like, plastic.
Hades be, since when was Nico the logical one?
Lance eyed Nico, then the plastic cell. Because of the darkened room, there were shadows in there. "That didn't go amazingly the first time," he pointed out, raising his eyebrows at Nico in question.
"Look, our options are you trying to blow up plastic, or me giving your boyfriend Vertigo, take your pick," Nico said a little tersely, patience growing a little thin. Deciding just to do it (Lance would get over it if Nico could pull this off), Nico took a couple steps back to the corner into the shadows. He focused on the shadows in the prison cell and gave a quick prayer to whatever gods were listening. Please let this work.
Nico opened his eyes in the cell. He barely got a chance to smile before he realized something was wrong. He felt tired. Too tired.
Shit, they needed to go NOW. "C'mere Quicksilver, time to leave."
Pietro stumbled in the right direction. "Easy on the vertigo, kid... rough day... week... whatever."
Nico made as quick of a grab of the other boy as he could. He wasn't sure he'd have enough umph to get them out there, but shit if he wasn't going to try. The second he got a firm enough grasp on Pietro, and half dragged him into the shadows, he focused on getting the hell out of there. He poked an eye open and found himself at least in the right hallway, Pietro in hand.
Cool. Yeah, he was gonna pass out now.
Lance had to dart back down the hall a bit to find them, but grabbed Nico as he wobbled on his feet, then Pietro in the other arm. For half a moment, he stood there, pressing his lips to Pietro's temple, just breathing him in, then, with murder in his eyes, he hauled both boys through the labyrinth of tunnels, flinging people out of his way whenever someone attempted to stall their progress.
By the time they made it out of the caves and met up with their other two team members, he was starting to physically falter. Still, he handed Nico and Pietro off, then turned toward the mountain. And, with one furious, shuddering motion of his hands, caved the entire thing in, just as their exit portal appeared.
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Date: 2018-09-21 10:54 pm (UTC)Okay, granted, they destroyed the place and blew up the data (seriously, Clint?) but still. Awesome! And creative! I love it!
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Date: 2018-09-21 11:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-09-24 01:10 pm (UTC)