acts_of_gord | Assault on City 17: Team Ninja

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Assault on City 17: Team Ninja

In better times City 17 had many, many ways of crossing town. For the most part, the citizens of today travel on the surface, and mostly on foot. This is partly because they're easier to track down, and partly because the alternatives haven't been maintained lately. On the other hand, the Combine don't use the underpassages any more either. Clearing one of the tunnels that crosses half the City is a priority for the Resistance; it'll give them a much better crack at getting behind enemy lines. Thus the infiltration team finds themselves in a small courtyard at the back of what was once a highway maintenance building, facing a poorly lit flight of stairs leading down.

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There's scores of the things, so shattered bits of metal and wire end up everywhere. The walls are rapidly speckled with chips and dents as pieces of flying manhack saw gouge chunks out of the paint and concrete.

Between Dinah's mace work, John's psychic wrecking crew talent, and the rebel's guns, the things do stop coming. Apparently there's only so many the Combine care to stuff into one area without a watcher. There certainly aren't any CPs or soldiers coming to check on the things. "That," the rebel says, "was incredible. Where did you two learn to do that?"

The stupidest part of the costume? No convenient belts for pipe stashing. Dinah lowers it to her side. and takes the opportunity to toss blonde strands away from her face.

"My uncle taught me to swing a club."

Casual as anything. It's not like she was using metapowers or anything.

He shakes his head ruefully. "Man. You must have some uncle. Well-" He squares his shoulders and gestures towards the flickering light of something that might be burning or might just be dying electricity up ahead. "Shall we continue? There's more of 280 to clear."

John turns and looks the man square in the eye. "I can scout ahead, if you need me to. I've got a stealth function built into the capacitor."

"I sure wouldn't say no," he answers. "Thanks, buddy."

The way ahead is clogged by fallen concrete and smashed vehicles. Possibly gas pipelines, too, if the occasional fits of fire are anything to go by. Clambering over concrete eventually leads to a narrow passage through which one must crawl. On the other side, the ceiling is long since gone, and the former freeway has become a high-walled trench into which every foul-smelling and toxic substance known has long since spilled.

There's no way those things crawling in the shadows are cockroaches....

John nods, and runs up behind a piece of rumble so that his party can no longer see him. "I'm still here," he calls, once he's behind, "so don't worry about me!"

With that, he runs up the alley silently and invisible to any manner of creature with a brain, occasionally becoming visible for a second to take out a batch of headcrabs with blue shockwaves. They don't even have the chance to stalk him before they're thrown backwards with that blood-curdling cry.

Dinah smirks to herself, wondering what exactly this stealth function involves. For her part, she stays by the man who, despite his obvious competence, she's already mentally designated as a civilian to protect, the same way she would if a cop invited himself along on her business at home.

Occasionally a headcrab might slip past John, but it's easy enough to smash them against the walls of the trench.

They do smash well, don't they? The headcrabs die faster from impact than from piercing, going down with one good WHACK or shattering from within under John's waves of force.

The formerly human things that begin to haul themselves out of the liquid foulness, bloody claws that were once hands scrabbling for purchase, may be another story altogether.

THere are quite a few of them.

There're a few of them, but at least they're human shaped,and Dinah's good with things that are human shaped.

She leaves the lone headcrabs to John and focuses on the zombies. And now she remembers the advantage of the heeled boots - a smaller surface area means more pressure on each parasite she kicks at, and the blows are even more effective.

And if she can't get a kick to the head in, she just needs to judo throw the whole thing back in the mess.

And John, for his part... well, the bigger they are, the harder they'll fall. But eventually, he runs out of psi energy, and pulls out his heavy tranq gun, making headshots on each of the zombies.

"Watch out, Dinah! They have claws! If I need to, I'll shoot for real!" John bellows

"I," Dinah says, turning her back to flip one against another and knock them both back, buying her time to kick the crab off another, "noticed! Go ahead and use real bullets. They're already dead."

She's right. When the headcrab's kicked off the corpse collapses. The skull's been ruthlessly, bloodily stripped of virtually all its flesh, and the top of the cranial vault's missing. We don't suggest checking inside, either.

One particular zombie stops some distance away from the two humans, apparently trapped behind a junked fifty-five gallon drum. It lets out a horrific bellow and swings its arms crudely at the thing. The drum goes flying towards the two humans at considerable speed.

John, in the middle of pulling out his SMG, pulls out his right hand from the tangle of limbs, and grabs the barrel, flinging it at the pack of zombies with a massive swing.

He then finishes putting the clip on his gun, and then pulls it out, opening righteous fire on the oil drum, which then explodes, taking out quite a few. And those that don't explode get a final death by lead.

As soon as she knows what John's intending - which is as soon as he moves his attention from barrel to gun, Dinah dives towards the civilian, knocking him down in time for the explosion to pass by harmlessly.

She kicks the headcrabs off any zombie not dealt with by explosion and bullet, and straightens, adjusting her wig as subtly as possible.

"Let's keep going."

The rebel straightens up, panting. "Nice moves," he says. "Oh, man, remind me not to get in you guys' way."

Ahead, there's fallen rubble in plenty from where 280 collapsed. Moving from rubble chunk to rubble chunk is the only way out of the sea of chemical nastiness. On the other side emergency lighting flickers faintly, and what might be a flare gleams in the darkness. Somewhere beyond that is the bluish-grey glimmer of daylight filtering in again.

John starts to move rubble around, making it possible to cross the pool of filth.

"Hey Dinah, you have some screaming ability, right?"

Dinah has no problems moving over the rubble - at least not beyond the occasional heel getting stuck in a crack - and keeps an eye out for the rebel to make sure he's OK as well.

"Yeah," she says. "I'm not going to use it until we get in the open, though. I don't feel like causing a cave in."

"Screaming ability?" the rebel wonders, but he's moving along with the same care as the other two. "More research projects?"

"In that I have to put up with a lot of scientists researching me," Dinah admits. "No one's found a cause for it yet."

"Huh. My dad told me there used to be singers who could shatter glass if they hit the right note loud enough," the rebel says, picking his way across the trail of debris with the greatest of care. "Something like that?"

"Like that," she agrees. "Turns out you can shatter just about anything if you hit the right frequency and volume."

"Huh. Too bad that doesn't work underground," the rebel says, expression going grim. "There's manhacks between us and the surface. The Combine're seriously flooding the tunnels."

And sure enough, the sound of the buzzsaw robots fills the air.

"Oh, shit! Not on the... shit!" John screams, as the hacks come closer and closer to the group. He knows there's no way they can stay alive if they try to fight the hacks on floating surfaces. "There's not enough--hold on!"

God, I hope I don't kill them please don't let me kill them John thinks in a mantra as he picks first Dinah and then the rebel up to deposit them further along down the way, onto more solid surfaces. He's picked up plenty of people before, but always with the aim of strangling them to death, never to save them.

Dinah, for her part, stays still and mobile while being moved. It feels weird, but not unlike being moved by Green Lantern, and she's fine with it.

When she lands on the solid surface, she launches straight into action, rolling under the manhacks to find a piece of pipe. And then, it's mace time again.

"Wnfgh!" says the rebel, or something like it. He's not being strangled, he's just startled as hell. When John releases him he stumbles, but regains his feet. "Nice one, doc," he says as he flashes a grin.

There's no time left for talking after that. The air is alive with the glaring lights and whizzing saws of the manhacks, and the least distraction is going to get somebody shredded.

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