If roads were the veins of a city Brighton must have been the elbow, or that spot between your toes. It sure looked like someone had taken a city-sized needle to them, jammed it in over and over until all that was left was cracked blacktop rippled from years of water damage and freight. In the back of a cramped old McMasters Plumbing van it sure felt like it, at least, the bench-style seats bolted down by chop-shop boys hard on fat asses and slim asses alike. It wasn't the only one of it's kind swimming upstream, little white blood cells on the offensive. It had been a long time since someone had stirred up Hoxton's human immune system like this and the H10 Crew was pretty well determined to make them sorry they had.

Meanwhile, Alex was counting.

Thumbing bullets into a magazine, more importantly, but the principle was the same. About a week ago he would have said clip, as per common vernacular, and would have had no more idea of what he was doing than the average asshole walking down the street, but that was about a week ago. Now Alex was practically an expert, having researched the mechanics of the various most common firearms in the H10 arsenal somewhat extensively. He could have told you that the most common weapons they had were the 9mm handguns that were also statistically the most commonly appropriated by police officers and, thus, statistically the most re-sold by the blue on the take. He could have told you that the Glock 17 9mm in his hands was the most commonly confiscated gun in Chicago as of 2014, as well as the gun that was most spoken of in rap music. If you'd really wanted to know, he could have told you the seventeen different parameters the Austrian government provided in their initial request for a firearm to replace the aging Walther P138 service pistol.

Not that he cared, but you know. Good to be thorough in what you do.

What he didn't know shit about was the little silver pills burning a hole in his pocket. Some people had already taken theirs, back during Dante's little war-rally. Others were waiting, the effects of their powers a bit too extreme or detrimental in close quarters to warrant popping it before the moment. Dante had only just taken his, skin beginning to boil and blister and crack like tar, like something burning him from the inside out until all that was left was scorched carbon. When Alex had first heard about the effect his immediate thought had been 'what happens to his hair', answered now by the acrid smell invading the van as the long dreads sizzled away and fell like fuzzy, decapitated snakes to the floor.

"Man, that shit is nasty." KillRoy muttered from where he sat next to Alex, waving the stink away with a gloved hand. "The fuck you gotta do that inside for?"

"Like a dutch over, bitch. You think he don't wait to make you smell it?" Someone else from down the bench muttered, earning a tense laugh from a few of the rest as the driver thumped his hand to the ceiling.

"Yo jockies, saddle up! Two blocks to go!"

"This is it." Dante was muttering, teeth clenched together as they blackened and cracked, hardening and flowing at the same time. His eyes were balls of jet, rolling, and the van was sagging distinctly on his side. "This is it, boys and girls. Ain't nobody gonna walk into our house anymore, you feel me? Let's get this done and make it real."

"Fuck yeah."

"Make 'em pay."

"Fuckin' stains."

"Get ready to roar, boys, we're the fuckin' lions in here! I want fifteen minutes of apeshit from every one of you motherfuckers, am I clear?"

"Clear!"

"I said am I fucking clear!"

"Clear!" Fists pounded the ceiling, one hard enough to dent the metal and leave four little knuckle-marks of flickering street light above them. Its owner was sheepish for all of a second before Dante's craggy hand caught him behind the head and shook him hard enough to jostle his eyes.

"That's my goddamn boy!" He shouted as the van came to a stop outside The AutoMach, the nominally-retail auto-club the Breakers used as their base of ops. Dante and Alex' van might have been the first to roll up but it wasn't the last, two more skidding to a halt just behind them as the men inside stood and fumbled to get the door open.

"Show these assholes some apeshit motherfuckers, boys!!" Dante apparently couldn't be bothered to wait for the door to open all the way--he pushed off as soon as he saw fresh air and no tin-can sliding nonsense was about to stop him. It burst open like something out of Alien, tearing away against stone shoulders like it was nothing as Dante Black charged headlong through the wall and into what was very suddenly a mess of gunshots, shouts of alarm, and various battlecries.

Speaking of battlecries, whether it was the most eloquent thing or not Dante's bravado seemed infectious. As the rest of the assault boiled out towards the breach in the wall (or, you know, the front door) Alex waited for them to pass, hopping out only just before the van pulled away. There was no exit for this mission, no 'Plan B'. This was kill or be killed, and the H10 Crew had decided which side they were on the moment that stupid sonofabitch put his fist through David King's left lung.

His brother Alex pulled his hand from his pocket, fist clenched tight around three silver pills, and popped them into his mouth as one. He'd never taken so many at once before--Hell, this would be his second time glowing--but as the rush slammed through his system and pulled his lips back in rictus he flexed his fingers and chambered his first round with a cool professionalism he absolutely didn't have. Alexander King wasn't scared, no matter what anyone thought.

He was out for blood. And funny thing about that...

The voices inside the van seemed to grow louder the closer they got to their destination. As the adrenaline that was building up in their bodies manifested itself through shouts and pill-popping in most of the crew members, Sarah remained rather calm and quiet throughout the whole ordeal. It was really happening: They were going to war. It wasn't that Sarah doubted her crew or anything, she was simply not used to being on the frontlines. What she exceled at was being subtle, scamming people and finding out info, not holding a gun to someone's head and threatening to blow it up.

David King's death however had been a wake-up call. It was proof that, no matter how tough or prepared you were, any day could be your last in the streets of Hoxton. She still could not believe he was gone...he had been the reason she even joined the H10, eventually considering them a family and her biggest support in life. Thinking about David being gone made her unusually angry, revenge was the only thing on her mind at the moment.

Dante's speech had fulfilled its purpose: The crew was pumped, ready to take on whatever and whoever they would encounter in the AutoMatch. Sarah had been holding one of her three pills in her hand for the last ten minutes. She had thought about popping it already, but it would have served no purpose. Her crew's thoughts and intentions were clear as day, no one needed superpowers to see that. Instead, she mentally revised everything she remembered about handling and shooting a gun. She normally did not carry a piece, but she was an okay shot for the most part. Dante's voice suddenly brought her back to the inside of the van.

"This is it, boys and girls. Ain't nobody gonna walk into our house anymore, you feel me? Let's get this done and make it real."

The inside of the van was heating up even more, fists raised and pounding against the low ceiling.

"Clear" Sarah responded with the others, more to herself than to the group. What would be coming next was no easy task, she knew...

"Show these assholes some apeshit motherfuckers, boys!!" Dante's booming voice filled the inside of the van one last time before he stormed off head first into the fray. It was just like him to do something like that, but Sarah appreciated him for it. He was the type of guy to storm the battlements first, infecting everyone with his energy and determination.

When everyone had exited the van, Sarah stepped out just before Alex did and checked her surroundings. One of the walls had been breached, making a hole big enough to walk through without trouble. Some of the crew members followed Dante through the breach, others decided to attack through the front entrance. Sarah felt more comfortable following Dante, and as reached the hole in the wall, she popped one of her pills. It was the 3rd time she took Neon, but she was still not used to the feeling that came with it.

Sarah could feel the little hairs on her body tingle, her mind felt like it was being jolted with the tiniest spark of electricity. For a moment, it all went quiet. A second after that, Sarah's mind started to flood with a million thoughts.

"Fuck 'em up boys"

"Shit, what happened to that wall?!"

"Someone warn the boss, we have company!"

"Son of a bitch, get out of my way!"

And just like that, the war had started.

Lana was afraid.

She had pretty much snuck onto a van. And she had avoided the one bearing the leaders, because she didn't want to get pulled off and sent home. Some idiot had given her a gun, which she didn't know how to use. She watched the other members of the van, some of them nervous, more of them not (or at least hiding it well). There was a lot of talk of avenging David and hating on the Breakers. Some popped pills, some didn't. Some started to manifest powers, which Lana tried not to get distracted by. Many checked their weapons, used to relying on those during a fight. Lana mimicked them, trying to chamber a round with shaky hands. Her palms were too small and too slick to grip and pull the hammer of the gun. She hadn't expected the resistance to be so strong; it looked easy when other people did it.

She was the last one off this second van, and she only got out because the driver was going to pull away with her if she didn't. She fished one of the pills from the pocket of her tight jeans and put it on her tongue, wincing while she swallowed it. It was cold as metal going down.

She edged to the side; no way was she going in there with a gun she couldn't fire and no sign of powers yet. Just as she was crouching down beside a wall, it hit her, splintering her world and making her sway with vertigo. It curled pleasurably in the pit of her stomach and rocketed through her veins, amping her, making her feel inexplicably invincible. The dizziness that accompanied it was unpleasant and disorienting - the way she seemed to be able to see and feel two different things, like she'd doubled. The power, however, was undeniable, and she palmed the top of her gun with her left hand again and successfully slid the rack back. It probably had more to do with confidence than actual physical strength. Which, speaking of, where were her abilities?

She glanced around and was surprised to see a stray dog cowering in the space between her and the wall. How had she not seen it before? It was mangy and tan, the color of "don't notice me please." A frightened canine should have avoided eye contact, but it locked glossy black eyes with her, as if begging her to understand something. She assumed that it was as frightened as her, but that it understood what was happening less well. In a fragmented way, she could appreciate the animal's perspective: loud noises, aggression, people trying to hurt each other. Domestic animals were usually the first to get injured when people got angry.

Lana shifted to her knees on the gritty asphalt, further away from this terrified creature. She was shaking to match it, but she tried to rally herself. She held her gun out away from her body and looked at the sieged building, the people pouring into and out of it. She recognized everyone from H10, but she wasn't confident that she could hit someone who wasn't, not from here. Especially not without accidentally hitting one of her own. Not with her vision as wonky as it was.

A smell alerted her, startling her with its clarity and suddenness. Whoever was approaching was not one of them. She pulled toward the intruder, firing automatically. It was a Breaker who hadn't even been intentionally approaching her, just backing towards her as he tried to get a good vantage point to fire on the arrival gang. A shell hit the ground near his feet, drawing his attention. As he turned around and targeted her, Lana made a terrible decision. Instead of shooting back, she cowered and threw her arm over her head. Not because this would protect her - it wouldn't - but out of some primal reaction to too much stimuli, and the half-baked hope that by looking defenseless, she would be left alone.

Pain ripped through her side. Gasping, Lana immediately looked down at her white tee shirt. She expected to see it stained with blood. It wasn't. She pawed over herself: completely unharmed. Her ribs hurt like she'd taken a pointed kick to them, though, and her breathing hitched.

A labored whine from beside her reminded her of the stray dog she'd hidden with. It had taken a hit. She put her hand out to its side, pulled it away awash in red. She could feel the film of dirt and dander in its fur. It lay its head against the ground, eyes going dim. Yet it continued to breath, heart pumping blood out of the hole in its side, soaking her black-denim knees.

Lana's fear felt less. While part of her senses were starting to close down myopically, the fear was going with it. Which didn't make sense, because the shooter was approaching her, and this dog was dying a death she would soon share.

What happened next was completely impossible: the dog faded out.

Lana's eyes grew round as saucers, she felt for where it had been, finding nothing but air. Her body still hummed with Neon, but the vertigo was gone, the heightened smell, the doubled vision, the duality of self.

What is happening? The blood was still there and very real, she hadn't imagined it.

"Aww, did I kill your best friend?" asked the man, and she felt the barrel of his gun pushing through her hair at the back of her neck. Lana still felt fear, but it was smaller, weaker, shrunken and pushed aside.

She reacted foolishly, hopped up on whatever the hell this crazy drug was, and she twisted around to glare at the Breaker. She tried to lift her gun, he kicked it out of her hand. She felt pain in her wrist as a result and scrambled back from the cold metal now at her throat.

"You cunts are really fuckin' pathetic. You gonna' bring a thirteen year old bitch into my hood? You're all as soft as David. Bet his chest was like jello. What's yours like, whore?"

This time, Lana felt it happen. The moment of its manifestation was a wash of white-hot rage that swept through her, palpable from her prickling scalp to her curling toes.

A white bengal tiger exploded out of her, pushing the guy back as its long body appeared. Its growl was modulated by the man's sudden little-girl screaming, the ineffectual pops of his gun, the sound of teeth tearing through viscera and crunching bone.

Ferocity.

Lana could taste the man's blood on her tongue, even though her back was against the wall, staring half in wonder, half in elation as she watched it happen, felt it happen, made it happen.

The cat shredded its claws on the man's body a couple times merely for the fun of it (he was already dead) and then looked back at Lana. Its blue eyes were bright as sapphires, blood like rubies on its fangs as it snarled at her, and Lana smiled back.

"...The sun has gone down and the moon has come up, and long ago somebody left with the cup, but he's driving and striving and hugging the turns..."

Ramsay sung along as the lights of the city flashed across his half-closed eyelids. Though the way he leaned back in the drivers seat of the van coupled with an utterly bored stare across the road gave him a carefree appearance, his white knuckled grip on the steering wheel betrayed his true mood -agitated to say the least. One hand gripping the wheel like a teenage boy would a porno mag on a lonely night, the other shaking rather violently as it moved from resting on the back of the passenger seat to a gunmetal grey shape lying askew in the seat itself, stroking the cool metal to steel his nerves as much as it was to check that the tool hadn't moved. When his fingers found purchase on the curved grip of the gun, Ramsay's fingers arrested their excited dancing.

At least in comparison to his death-grip on the steering wheel, Ramsay's hold on the MAC-10 was almost casual, his hand allowing the weight of the automatic weapon to angle the barrel down towards the floor. He raised it, turning it over in his hands as he scanned it almost with pride. Certainly nothing special as far as guns go, but a bit different from H10's regular. Ramsay always found having something fully automatic was a hell of a lot easier to aim out the side of a car while driving than the semi-auto peashooters the gang usually carried. Inelegant? Maybe. Inaccurate? More often than not, yeah. Dangerous? Fuck yeah. But in the end, was it effective enough for the job? Honestly probably not, but Ramsay never was a gun guy. No, though Ramsay could tell you everything about a cars make and model just by listening to the engine, he never spent the time to figure out guns. He saw this little guy in a hell of a lot of movies and TV, and that was enough for him.

"..Because he's racing and pacing and plotting the course, he's fighting and biting and riding on his horse..."

Ramsay reached into the cup holder of the van, where a cracked mobile phone rested, blaring his music through speakers that made the music sound like it was run through enough cotton to make a plantation owner jealous. Calloused fingers fumbled across the slick silvery surface of the device until they found the protrusion they were looking for. The sound of the music dimmed to a harsh whisper with a surprisingly heavy bass sound still resounding. From the van ahead, Ramsay heard some muffled shouting and banging. He could only assume the same was happening in the transport ahead of that as well. A light smile shone from his face, dimples standing out stark amidst his stubble. The crew was getting riled up, certainly a good sign.

The lone driver took a brief glance to the back of his van, smile slowly vanishing. No comrades were to be found shouting and screaming for glory and Valhalla in this deathtrap of a tin can. No, Ramsay was accompanied by a far more somber party. Though Ramsay almost always had an odor of gasoline drenching him in lieu of cologne, the smell was even heavier in the air thanks to the rattling conglomeration of cans in the back, each a rusted red color. There was quite likely room for a few crew members to ride along in this makeshift funeral pyre, but Ramsay couldn't quite blame the others for favoring the transports that weren't destined to go up in a fireball. There was no way in hell that he would let the ignition go off prematurely, but hey. Nobody's perfect, or some motivational shit like that.

When the vans reached the AutoMach, Ramsay found himself lagging behind, quite intentionally. His rolling bonfire was parked just out of the way of the fray, but close enough to be accessed easily when they needed it. Ramsay walked stiffly over to the others as the two vans carrying H10 members pulled away. He frowned as he saw the door of one discarded on the floor. He had the strangest feeling that he knew exactly who it was that was responsible for that.

"Fuckin' a, that shit isn't easy to fix." Ramsay muttered to himself as he approached the din and chaos, hands clenching and unclenching uncomfortably. One hand was gripped tight around his fully loaded gun, the other even tighter around a pill. Two twins to the little silver miracle were in capsules around the mans neck, not something he needed to use quite yet. Eyes fixed tightly on the fist containing the pill, Ramsay was distracted as a wide grin found purchase on his face in response to the crescendo of battle cries that erupted from his crew. As men poured through the breach, Ramsay cocked his head briefly in a sort of 'fuck it' gesture, before slamming the pill back. As the effects of Neon took hold over Ramsay, he slipped his bandana up over his nose.

For a moment, Ramsay was completely numb and his vision narrowed like a letterbox film. Even as he squinted to make up for this, he felt the Neon really kick. His vision slowly returned to normal as he felt sheer power running through his skin, felt phantom fingers of his own running up and down every surface around. Every surface, other than himself, that was. He felt the heavy material of his flannel as it flapped behind him like a cape in his own simulated wind, but he wasn't able to exert any of that influence over himself, leaving him numb and, in a way, weaker.

That didn't stop Ramsay, or even put a falter in his step, as he marched on the breach with those of his crew that had yet to make it through. Tonight wasn't a test run for the Neon -nothing short of war, here. A shocked expression quickly turned to a smile as he saw one of the H10 crew (he hoped to god) tearing one of the Breakers up with a goddamn tiger. Approaching the path left behind by his comrades, Ramsay exerted his telekinetic influence on the van door as he walked next to it. As though lifted by a really strong guy, or just two normally strong guys, the hunk of metal lifted itself in the air, forming a moving piece of cover that kept itself just in front of Ramsay. He adjusted his grip on the MAC-10, raising it to eye level when he entered the AutoMach, and resting the barrel atop his cover as a makeshift tripod. Almost instantly on his entrance Ramsay felt bullets ping across the metal surface of his shield. Apparently an attractive target, he ducked his head as a bullet found itself striking a weaker area of the door and piercing directly through.

"Who fucking does that?" He asked himself incredulously. Peeking his head through the shattered glass window of his door, Ramsay locked eyes with the man who had shot at him -apparently just now realizing the ineffectiveness of shooting the man hiding behind cover. "You're shooting at the one guy who has a goddamn shield, you dense motherfucker." He muttered in protest, pulling the shield in closer. As the metal moved ever closer to his body, Ramsay felt his influence increase exponentially. Putting all of his force into it, he launched the makeshift shield at the shooter. He didn't bother to check whether or not the blow was fatal, the satisfying sound of metal colliding with skull was plenty for his aggression. Plus, he had more pressing matters to deal with.

"FUCK YOU." Came a rather creative shout from what Ramsay had thought was empty air. A fist caught him in the jaw, sending a violent vibration throughout his skull.

"At least buy me dinner first, tough guy." Ramsay spat as he recovered, one arm raised defensively. The perpetrator stood in an almost comical boxers stance, head and arms bobbing up and down giving the image of a cheap novelty bobble head figurine. The man spat on the floor, the spit itself sizzling upon impact. As if inspired by this sizzling, the 'boxer' looked down at his hands, which ignited with flame. He did a couple of punches in midair, maybe as an attempt at intimidation? "Neon's a hell of a drug." As his fists moved, fire trailed behind, leaving a line of red hot air that lingered for far longer than it should've. Ramsay raised his gun, only to find the man was now in his face, hitting him hard in the gut. The punch didn't ignite Ramsay, but it sure hurt like a bitch. Another punch quickly came, aimed at his temple, but this time Ramsay was able to get an arm up to block. The sheer force of the punch numbed his arm, and he dropped his gun on the floor with the impact.

"Y'all should've stayed at ho-"

A bullet, piercing through his throat, cut off the taunting voice of fire-fist-guy rather effectively. A fountain of blood ripped out from the wound, eager to find escape. Though his control was rather weak as far out as he had reached, it had been enough to shove that bullet in the right direction, and for that Ramsay was grateful. The immediate threats on his life dispatched of, he ducked down to grab his MAC-10 and knelt behind the cover of a heavy crate, to survey the situation and rest his sore injuries. As Ramsay raised his eyes to peer through the over, he felt his influence of the world around him slowly fade, eventually diminishing to nothing. No more telekinesis shenanigans, unless he wanted to pop more Neon, it seemed. A deep sigh escaped him before he snapped his head down lower in response to a bullet whizzing by his head.

K-Ton felt the effects of neon kicking in as Dante began giving his speech. It felt good. As the others hyped themselves around him, some also popped neon, some checked weapons. K-Ton half paid attention to the small murmurs happening around him, half paid attention to the glock 18 he cradled in his hands. It looked almost identical to the glock 17 that Dante and several others carried in their hands, and was for all intents and purposes very much similar. It shot the same 9mm cartridge, it operated almost the same, hell it even fit the same magazines. The main difference between the two was that with a flip of a switch, K-Ton could empty his extended 33 round magazine in a little less than 2 seconds. The '18 was his father's preferred weapon from his time in the Triads, and even though his dad was out of the game, he still kept his hands on a small arsenal in the apartment, just in case some grudge holding Triads decided to pay him a courtesy call. The old man had offered him a second one to pair up with the first- which as awesome as that would be, K-Ton needed his free hand to either control the monster recoil on this weapon, or to manipulate his powers. Instead, he opted for grabbing a couple 33 round extended magazines for the glock, loaded up with some hollowpoints to add injury to injury.

To be honest, the hollowpoints were as practical as they were deadly- they couldn't penetrate through targets so he didn't have to worry about making sure there were any H10 crew behind his targets, as was likely in the hectic close quarters they'd get into once they got into the AutoMatch, hollowpoints also expanded, or 'mushroomed' within the target's body causing far more damage to the baddie and putting them on the ground a lot faster. Sure, it wouldn't go through a vest as easily, but the chances of gangers having vests were low, and he had other methods of dealing with armor.

"-apeshit-"

Was all K-Ton heard, as almost instantly, the interior of the van-turned-gang transport. Dante was rousing the boys as he always did, and K-Ton was only happy to oblige. While he didn't scream and whoop like the others did, he offered the interior of the van a smart smirk as he began slamming his fist against the side of the van, the neon in his veins causing the sound to echo throughout the streets of the slums like it was some ghettofied war-drum. War was coming, and he was going to make sure everyone fucking knew about it. With his other hand, he grabbed at a ghetto blaster under his seat, a shitty, banged up boombox with fresh batteries. Sitting on top of the boombox was a half empty box of earplugs that K-Ton had handed out to everyone prior to leaving. They wouldn't need them for long, but Dante said the whole name of the game was shock and awe, so the two of them had cooked up something just for that.

"Show these assholes some apeshit motherfuckers, boys!!" bellowed their de-facto leader as the doors slammed open and people poured out of the van.

Following the others K-Ton casually stepped out of the van, boombox in one hand, glock in the other. Casually walking out a few steps and dropping the jambox on the ground, finding himself a cone of space in front of him relatively empty of H10 Crew, cracked his knuckles and switched the box on with a foot. Immediately, some loud, trashy, bassy, hip-hop began spewing out of the box's round speakers. The music began picking up in speed and volume until the mix hit its first bass drop, at which K-Ton slammed his foot on the ground. Instantly, soundwaves rippled across the lot- windows shattered, and the ground felt slight tremors, and the few individuals unfortunate enough not to protect their ears in time found their eardrums rattled in similar manner to the windows in the warehouse.

The high was fucking great. K-Ton had never used his powers like that before and it felt fucking amazing. Pulling his second pill out of his pocket, he quickly popped it before he came down the high of his first. Switching his glock to fully automatic and pulling its slide back, he rolled his shoulder as the second hit began kicking in. He kicked aside the burned out speaker-box and began his the charge of his own, following the others through the whole in the wall, he found himself in the chaos of a gang shootout. H10 and Beaters formed two rough 'lines' of battle, as the H10 Crew took what cover they could shooting or using their powers against a defensive line of Beaters who did the same.

K-Ton threw himself into cover against a large crate next to where Ramsey- one of their drivers was taking cover. He shot the driver nothing more than a breathless nod, neither of them had the convenience of making small talk at the moment. Despite the chaos of the gunfight, K-ton could hear the sound of someone sprinting nearby, likely trying to flank him and Ramsey's position. K-Ton swung his pistol around as the guy rounded the corner, only managing to dive out of the way as K-Ton sent a burst of bullets at him. Rounding the corner himself, K-Ton rapidly scanned for the guy, only to sense a wave of heat and dive out of the way as a fireball flew at where he once stood- singing the sleeve of his jacket. Rapidly pulling off his jacket with one hand, he poked his head out of his cover, finding himself facing down a Beater armed with both a pistol and a fireball. K-Ton ducked as the pistol flashed towards him.

"Get out here you fucking chink!" growled the Beater, as another fireball exploded at K-Ton's feet, sending sparks and embers flying at his legs.

"Yeah fucking right," K-Ton growled to himself, as if anyone would exit their cover simply because someone trying to kill them asked. Instead, K-Ton raised his free hand and felt the general direction of the Beater. He snapped his fingers, and while few heard it over the sound of gunfire, the Beater in question felt as though a flashbang had just went off inside his ear and collapsed to the ground in pain, clutching at his ears as they bled.

K-Ton stepped out of his cover, slowly approaching his now disabled opponent, scanning the area around him to ensure that their location was relatively out of the line of fire from other Beaters. The problem with making a flanking maneuver, is if you failed you were generally cut off without support from your allies. Kicking aside the Beater's pistol with a casual kick, K-Ton stepped down on the ganger's hand preventing him from throwing fireballs. He didn't bother saying anything to the Beater- the guy wouldn't be able to hear K-Ton anyway. Instead, he offered the Beater an evil grin before, he stuck his pistol in the Beater's leg and shot out his knee-cap, eliciting a wail of pain. Never breaking eye contact with the beater, K-Ton stuck his pistol into the other leg and blew out that knee-cap, causing the beater to scream a second time. This time, before the ganger could stop screaming, K-Ton slipped the barrel of his pistol into the open gap of the gangster's mouth.

The beater looked at K-Ton with what he could only imagine was a pleading look. K-Ton offered him a lazy shrug and grin before he blew the ganger's face off. Wiping the barrel of his pistol off against the corpse, K-Ton returned to where Ramsay and his crate was, watching the flank for a moment while he recollected his bearings.

The van lurched as they hit another pothole, violently rattling the H10 crew members about in the dingy interior of the tin-can they called a van. The sudden movement had Cassidy chomping down on her tongue and caused her mouth to flood with the thick, coppery blood. “Hn,” she grunted, leaning over to spit out a mouthful before digging around in the breast pocket of her blue button down to fish out her ammunition.

“That’s fuckin’ nasty,” quipped Jackie, who was sitting on the bench directly across from her and blaring some kind of bubblegum pop music from her phone. “Somebody’s gonna have to clean that up when we get back.”

“Uh huh,” Cassidy hummed, not paying the blonde much mind as she slid the buckshot home into the weathered shotgun. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. “I’ll see to it once we get back.”

The snort emitted from the other woman let the former nurse know that her white lie had been seen through. “Whatever, just stay in front of me, hillbilly. I’ve seen you shoot before…,” she stopped, before grinning and adding, “...your aim is shit.”

Cassidy’s eyebrow twitched in response as Jackie’s snide comment hit a sore spot, but it was true, so she couldn’t really argue. The first time KillRoy had taken her out for target practice she had comically missed her mark by ten feet or more and the recoil of the 9mm had caught her so off guard that she somehow managed to give herself a black eye. Weeks of practice saw no improvement, until eventually Dave had given her the shotgun.



"This is it, boys and girls. Ain't nobody gonna walk into our house anymore, you feel me? Let's get this done and make it real,” Dante said, his voice drawing Cassidy’s attention away from the memory and into the present. ’Gotcha,’ she thought, glancing over to their stand in leader. That was the reason they were all here and going to war, to avenge Dave, one of the most respectable and over all decent men in all of the Brighton. Or was, anyways, before one of those Breaker scum waltzed in and punched a hole in his chest. Cassidy’s jaw flexed as she bit back her rage, fingers twitching over her short’s pocket where her three little pills laid. She had a brief moment of confusion where she thought her anger had somehow manifested into the smell of singed hair, but quickly realized it was just a side effect of Dante taking his first hit of Neon. Her gaze narrowed in on the thick ebony locks that lay coiled on the ground, the ends still ember bright.

“Hey Jackie,” Cassidy started, a shit eating grin plastered across her lips. “Ain’t you fixin’ to ask Dante to clean up his mess too?”

“Shut the fuck up, Creed,” the shorter girl grumbled as she shoved a pill into her mouth. Cassidy responded with a cheeky wink, which only made Jackie groan further. “You’re such a bitch.”

There wasn’t much time for a smart ass comeback as the van chose that moment to roll to a stop and Dante Black ripped the entire goddamn back door off it’s hinges. “Mercy,” she breathed before shaking her head briskly and hustling after him and the rest of the crew. Their leader continued his path of destruction, tearing a hole in the side of AutoMach like it was shitty one-ply toilet paper instead of a brick warehouse. Cassidy followed close behind, but something barreled into her the moment she stepped across the threshold, knocking her shotgun completely out of her hands.

A skinny man was on top of her in an instant, the veins in his arms prominent as he reached down and wrapped both hands around her neck and gripped it with enough force to cut off her air flow. Cassidy bucked her hips but couldn’t manage to unseat her attacker, who she was beginning to suspect might be hopped up on meth instead of neon, given then half crazed look in his eyes, poor state of his teeth, and the way he was cackling like a madman. Her movements became more frantic as she tried and failed to draw in air, threading fingers through his short hair and yanking him closer while digging the thumb of her other hand straight into his eye. The Breaker let out a startled yelp but she didn’t let him go, instead channeling her best Mike Tyson and biting the ever-loving shit out of his ear.

The methhead finally relented, letting go of her neck to get away from both her teeth and her eye gouging. Cassidy used this opportunity to snap her head to the side viciously, the stranger screeching as she ripped a chunk of his ear free and spat it back up into his face. He snatched it out of the air with trembling fingers and held it against the remaining bit, like somehow that would fix everything and it would magically adhere itself back to its rightful place.

And then, somehow, it did.

Cassidy looked on in horror as the flesh began to knit itself back together and realized that she had miscalculated; this man was most definitely glowing. The healing left him visibly preoccupied however, so Cassidy reached up to loop her arms around his neck and pulled him close once more, using the movement to roll them over until she was on top. The freckled woman stretched out and yanked up the fallen shotgun, slamming the butt of it repeatedly into the other man’s face. Each blow made a sickening crunching noise and blood splattered everywhere, but his skin just kept on trying to mend back together like he was Wolverine instead of some street punk.

’Christ, how much Neon did this kid take?”

Finally she took the shotgun and pressed it flush against his chest before squeezing the trigger. The sound of the gunshot was deafening and the kickback was enough to jerk her whole shoulder back, causing Cassidy to let out her own yelp of pain. The hole left behind in the thug’s chest was cavernous and for a moment it almost looked like it was trying to fix itself again, busted veins branching out in an attempt to find their other ends, but after a second they stopped and his heart quit beating for good. She didn’t celebrate the victory, alternately choosing to get her ass behind some cover as swiftly as possible.

She found sanctuary behind a decrepit looking crown victoria and crouched down to palpate her neck before shoving another shell into her weapon. ’Five in the gun. Four in my pocket,’ Cassidy mused, picking up the hem of her shirt and attempting to wipe the blood of her face. She probably looked more like Hannibal Lecter than anyone else at this point.

If Alex thought a gunfight would be crazy, it was nothing like a gunfight on neon.

Bedlam. Anarchy. The laws of physics had apparently washed their hands of this little corner of Brighton as K-Ton dropped literally killer beats and Ramsay held a car door up with his goddamn brain. That little wannabe--Lottie? Lonnie?--had pulled a fucking tiger out of thin air. This was absolutely no place for a guy like Alex, who could barely tell which way to look. At the best of times he was one for focus, for tackling one issue at a time but this? He didn't even know where to start.

He actually sort of did, though, now that you mentioned it. There was nothing like that neon high. Alex had rocked the ganja at a party once or twice, even dropped some acid after getting out from big brother's lead thumb, but neon. People had told him some wild things--and he was seeing some unbelievable things just then--but it all fell away when the beat dropped and the world became a fucking symphony of lubs and dubs.

Having spent what felt like most of his life studying gross anatomy, circulatory systems, microbiology, there was something completely unreal about feeling it. And not just his own--that was the trippy thing. Yeah, he could feel the living system of it inside him, but he could also feel Lottie's. Lana's. Whatever, he could feel hers pumping from her fluttering little bird-heart into--

Well. Hers was confusing. But Dante's--dammit, another bad example. How could something like blood feel stony? But the rest of them were pretty much human, still, and he could feel it all. Why blood, though? That's what he couldn't understand. What could it possibly be about blood in particular--the leukocytes? The hemoglobin? Only Alex would look a super-gift horse in the mouth, but the sheer improbability of made him want to flat out laugh (or would, if he was the laughing sort).

Instead, he took a shot to the arm for thinking about high-school biology in the middle of a gang war.

It hurt. It really hurt, so much that it was surprising instead of horrifying. It had missed the bone, gone right through the muscle, but funny--it wasn't bleeding. There was blood, but it was sliding right on through like a happy little river. Just pumping along without a care in the what the fuck was he doing?!

It all slammed into him like a punch to the stomach. He was lucky it wasn't another bullet--another one had whizzed by but missed him entirely in lieu of the brickwork across the street. Probably from some idiot who didn't even know he was there. The Glock felt heavy in his hand, his mouth suddenly dry--he choked up on the grip, reassuring, before manning up and pretending like he belonged there. He dashed forward to the plaster and cement of the wall, pressed his head back to the peeling white paint. Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, get ready to move in--

And was bowled over by a sudden explosion of the drywall above him, sending him lurching forward with his head ringing. A Breaker was flat against the sidewalk, the storefront now entirely shattered thanks to someone from inside--Dante, probably, if the hollering from inside was any indication. The guy on the pavement wasn't getting up, but as Alex stood to head inside someone else popped their head through the hole in the wall. Someone he didn't recognize. Someone with a sawed-off he was busy leveling, and Alex shot him.

It was the kind of blind luck shit that happened at range like this, but it really was just that simple. No aim, just kind of point and squeezed, and there he was. Had been. If Alex was a better person he probably would have felt something more significant at the loss of human life, but when it came right down to it all he could think was that bodies were bodies once they'd hit the ground. The Breaker didn't look all that different from his brother after that fucked had wasted him.

No, scratch that. The Breaker had more of his chest left.

It was that kind of stupid body-horror realization that woke Alex back up. They were here because these motherfuckers had killed his brother. Because David was dead, and all the neon in the world wasn't about to change that. But it was about to give him some company, because seriously?

Fuck those guys.

It was easier after the first, now that his head was in the game. His arm hurt--really hurt--but between the neon and the adrenaline there were so many better things to think about. It was just meat, after all, just more meat, and looking around there was a whole goddamn butcher's shop of it in here. He'd ducked inside to take cover behind what was left of a Camero when he reached out, felt for the nearest lub, and dub'd.

And about ten feet away, one of the Breakers crumpled. He fell backwards over what probably used to be a couch before all this started and stayed there. There are approximately 5.5 liters of blood, or one and a half milk jugs for the less scientifically inclined, in the human body--about half of it was pouring out of the man's face. Gushing, boiling over, eyes and ears and nose... It had to go somewhere, after all.

It was that easy. Was that really all it took? Another reach, another squeeze and pop! A second Breaker down. And then a third. Two more men busted like gushers in less than ten seconds, and now Alex realized it actually could be that simple. Why not? Squeeze a trigger, squeeze a vein, waste an--

His back hit the crumbling wall behind him and he couldn't breathe. The world was blurry, but as it came into focus he could see the body of his cover-car twisted off it's cement blocks, Dante's massive black form smashed through the other side. The idea of something that could knock the granite man around was laughable, but as he forced himself to his feet with a hand that crushed the dashboard of the vehicle some fratboy motherfucker was making his way over and not looking to shy about it.

"You fucking punks." He was saying, not even real loud--the kind of way someone might shake their head at their kids when they acted up, except he was also working a pair of brass knuckles over his fingers in a way that made you think it wasn't the first time. "You've got no idea who you're dealing with, do you." He looked like the guy who killed David King, probably because he was, and he did not look sorry. This, to both Dante Black and Alex himself, was a problem.

"How 'bout you spell it out for me." The blackrock brawler was growling, getting himself to his feet, looking like he was ready for a--cross to the cheek, apparently. This guy was good, the kind of swinger you knew did this for a living. He hit like a truck and knew better than to let Dante get a hold of him, but for all of that Dante could take everything he could throw. For now.

Meanwhile, his buddy the psychic had shown up and decided it was time to play merry hell with people's guns. Maybe he had a thing for bullets, or maybe he just really good at this whole telekinetic thing--wherever he was, he apparently didn't have to stick his hipster head out to have everyone's favorite handgun about as useful as your average hair-dryer.

But they were losing, badly, and as the Breakers started to realize how far behind the eight ball they were the H10 Crew was starting to wear off and wear out. It was getting on time for the party favor, KillRoy firing off the flare for the one minute warning, but Alex and Dante only had eyes for fratboy.

One minute. Plenty of time.

The tiger drew more power from Lana than the dog had. It was the difference between walking on a treadmill or jogging on one. The latter took more effort, but it was also more effective. It fractured her focus even more strongly, but it also pulled her into a type of a zone where, for the space of only a few minutes, it almost didn't matter. Like it was natural and easy to be two things at once. She was awake and on, accelerating through turns instead of hanging back and dragging gravity. Riding the crest of a wave.

She could feel the ground through the massive paws of the tiger, pads sensitive on the grit. Sharp claws still partially extended, like nails on glass. Tension through liquid-sly muscles, heightened awareness of noise. Round ears flicked toward a new sound - music. The tiger growled low in irritation, disliking the thrumming base hijacking its vocal chords with its transferring vibration, buzzing in its ears like an annoying insect. Then K-Ton pushed his powers, sending a cone-shaped wall of soundwave at the building, and though Lana was outside of the target area, her tiger's sound sensitivity made them both suffer.

The tiger roared and flinched away from the sound like it was a physical attacker, ears flattening and hair bristling. Lana, too, cried out in pain, pointlessly clapping her hands over her ears. She was feeling it through her externalized ferocity, not herself. The vibrations sent through the ground were so much stronger to that animal, and it flattened itself nearly to the ground, snarling quietly now in distaste.

Lana was distracted from the emotion of ferocity which had manifested the beast in the first place, and she no longer had enough anger to hold onto it. It was slipping, she was losing her connection to it, the creature was becoming less strong. The Neon itself was also weakening in her veins. She could feel it leeching out with the pain of poison, leaving her colorless and ill, like she'd barely survived the flu.

It's too soon, she thought. But what she thought didn't matter. It was leaving her. The tiger evaporated, and Lana leaned forward and caught herself on her hands, so that she was on all fours, unintentionally mimicking the lost tiger's posture. Her head hung, and she focused on not retching. It was this feeling of sickness that drove her to slump over onto her side and work her second pill from her pocket, swallowing it down. She just wanted to feel not this.

Her ears were already better before that sick ice cube feeling of swallowing the pill, the vibration in the ground back to normal human reaction as soon as the tiger was gone. She could feel the ferocity back inside of her, but she felt alone, bereft and defenseless. Too much like herself. Human sensation was not enough, like nakedness, like losing a temporarily experienced sixth sense.

She couldn't even care about the mauled-apart body inches from her, or the insane things going on around them all. When H10 had arrived, they had taken the Breakers off guard with considerable destructive force, but the Breakers had long since had time to react. Those that had Neon stashes were in full swing, and those that didn't could still handle a fight well enough. By the looks of it, Lana thought that the Breakers might know how to use Neon a little better than many of H10 did. Certainly better than she could, at least. With her head on the ground, Lana could see a girl sending out flashes of silent pale blue light that knocked down her opponents. Lana closed her eyes and hoped she wouldn't be attacked.

Then the second wave of Neon hit.

Again, it swept through her body like cold fire: instant rejuvenation. She forced herself to sit back upright in the throes of it, inexplicably shaking. She didn't think of the gun that had been disarmed from her hand, or the faint pain in her wrist. The blood and gore in front of her was too clear; she looked away from it uncomfortably. She'd seen a dead body before, but not like that. Certainly not something she'd been responsible for. She half wanted to vomit, and she half wanted to murder again. In either case, she didn't want to think about it. The Neon made not thinking about it easy.

She could feel nascent ability, waiting and ready. What did she want? What did she feel? The tattoos on her arms itched. She watched H10 members getting put down around her, and when she looked at the Breakers, she didn't see a crew defending their turf, though it could have been argued that's all they were doing. She saw enemies, bastards, killing and torturing her family. Maybe not people she was close to, but people she'd grown up around.

Mine, you motherfuckers, she thought. The expression on her face twisted into one that felt unfamiliar and ugly. She wanted to cause pain, for the joy of hurting.

Cruelty.

This time it was almost a choice, and she doubled, sliding out of herself like a yolk from an uncooked egg white. Immediately, she was aware of fractured vision. A million of everything, so that she almost couldn't see at all. She felt dizzy, like she was looking out from inside a glass golf ball. Everything was almost painfully sensitive, the air on her skin, how stillness was a vibration, how movement and distance was a taste. With the part of herself that was still normal, her, she forced herself to focus, to look with with her regular eyes. A...hornet? She couldn't be sure, it was so huge. It was the size of a small scorpion. It was two inches long with a three inch wingspan, its body black and pumpkin-orange. Her brain supplied her with the information, some untraceable recall: the Asian Giant Hornet.

Flying was not something she had experienced before, but the hornet knew what to do. It was like being a helicopter and being seasick at the same time, because she wasn't moving but she felt like she was. Lana pushed back into the corner and closed her eyes, focusing on the the hornet and not the strong vertigo. It lofted into the air, an upward-drifting penny. She felt the weightlessness of its legs, hanging long beneath it. She felt the heaviness of its body, dripping toward the back into a stinger pulsing with intent.

Yes, she agreed. Let's hurt them.

She sent it towards the blue-light wielding woman, but whatever the blue light was pushed the hornet back, harmlessly as a butterfly in the wind current of an oncoming car. After several approach attempts, she gave up as the hornet was repetitively cast aside without even being intentionally targeted.

That's when she noticed Dante getting thrown into a car, which was a hard thing to miss, even when sharing split vision with discoball eyes. Dante was probably not in a lot of danger. It was more likely that whoever hitting him was going to get hurt. Even wearing a set of brass knuckles. (She didn't realize that Knuckle-fratboy might be the one who killed David King, and therefore if so, when on Neon, had chest-collapsing-punching-powers.) But no one got to throw fucking Dante around. It was a bit too much like watching one's dad get beaten up. The psyche's understanding of power can only take so much insult.

As she tried to come to his aid, Lana found that it was difficult to direct the hornet to the specific person she wanted. It was like moving a hand in the double reflection of two mirrors. Several course corrections and a careful landing later, (Brass) Knuckles had a giant hornet on the top of his head. Lana could feel the man's hair tickling the hornet's belly. It didn't matter, it didn't stand in the way. She drove the hornet's stinger down into Knuckle's head, simultaneously injecting venom as she did so. She felt his pain through intelligent, twiggy legs. It was a slow gunshot, or a hot nail piercing deep into flesh. Knuckles hollered and reacted, and she alighted into the air. It was easier now, the hornet's focus on this specific victim as if he wore a bull's eye. The hornet landed again, on bare skin this time, and stung him once more. His palm struck the hornet off too late, and she spun off into the air, unharmed.

"What the fuck!?" Knuckles shouted, several pitches too high. The psychic got distracted by his friend's plight, reacting the way anyone would when a hornet is flying around another person. "Look out! Get--move here--" he coached, getting too close, hands up, possibly to use telekinesis. She stung him, too, in the palm. He didn't bother to form words, he just screamed while the hornet withdrew its too-long stinger and floated backwards to look for another spot. Lana laughed from across the lot, a perverse rush of delight wracking her. This maniacal cackle was cut off when Knuckles punched the hornet, which was a surprisingly effective move. The small body was sent spinning back, and Lana threw up in her mouth.

Welts were rising, large and disfiguring, where she had stung her victims, but apart from some unpleasant side effects, they would be fine as long as they didn't have an allergic reaction. The welts would collapse into deep-sunk craters, severe nausea and suffering would plague them for awhile. Knuckles was already pushing through the blinding pain and turning back to deal with Dante, for whom time had merely been bought.

Psychic hipster boy was working one-handed, but working nonetheless. While Lana's hornet was dazed, he managed to pin her location and freeze her movement, similar to how he had jammed bullets. Lana was a sitting duck, and she knew it.

Fucking no!

She pulled her awareness back from the hornet, who was useless to her now. Cruelty was a bitter, addictive foam in her mouth. Could she somehow move herself to the psychic and get him to stop? If she could just distract him for a second-- then she noticed small black dots swarming through the air. Regular wasps, but a lot of them, pouring out of a nearby nest that had never been sprayed. They were drawn, she suddenly knew, by the venom her hornet had deposited in her victims. They would cluster to the stings and repeatedly attack these marked individuals for as long as they could. Again, it might not kill them (especially since she hadn't been smart enough to target their mucus glands), but killing wasn't even what she wanted most. She wanted them to hurt. A bonus side effect was that it would basically incapacitate them.

Lana had gone back to laughing, and a moment later, her hornet's body was unfrozen thanks to the distraction help of the wasps. She could feel her power waning, though. It was the Neon, it couldn't keep up, but she wasn't ready to let go of her vitriol. Her hornet landed on the crushed car, body throbbing as it rested, and Lana watched with two pairs of eyes and an infinite number of fractals while Knuckles and Psychic were mercilessly attacked by wasps. She swallowed down her last pill, a bite in her throat.

She focused back on the hornet, channeled her desire to inflict pain, and forced its lethargic body back into the air. It was much harder to control for a moment, before the Neon kicked in and she was surging once again. The hornet went from listlessly zigzagging, to slicing through the air at twenty-five miles per hour, dodging Blue Light's projected corona, and then giving her a brutal kiss on the cheek. Blue Light sent out defenses, but the hornet was too close, and then lifting off and flying away, knowing that the incoming wasps would give her plenty of trouble now.

The hornet entered the building, looking with initial difficulty for the Breakers. There was chaos everywhere. Gore splattering the walls, humans that barely looked like humans anymore. But when Lana focused on the hornet, time seemed to slow. Those earlier-sensed vibrations of stillness were capable of guiding her. Lana closed her eyes and gave up as many as her physical senses as she could so that she could better see and feel through the hornet, since it was inside a building she was still far away from. Maybe it was a flying insect's sped up receiving and processing power, but everything felt molasses speed, like a slow-motion scene in an action movie. It was almost too easy to weave through danger, wait until she was sure she was circling a Breaker, and then sting them. Flares of heat singed her too-fragile wings, legs broke as she received slaps. Bullets couldn't find her, and most of her victims weren't aware she was there until she'd stung them. The hornet could hear-feel-sense-whatever some wasps finding their way into the building, looking for the beacon-targets. They were drawn only to the marking venom of her hornet, so the H10 crew were probably safe as long as they didn't swat at one or something.

Lana rocked, knuckles on asphalt, dumb, absent smile on her face. She felt the silkiness of her long hair hair against her neck, a sensuous waterfall that mimicked her sense of the air sliding around the hornet's body.

Then, the flare. Even with her eyes closed, Lana's human body, linked to the hornet's sensitivity, felt the heat of it sear her skin, the light of it trace through her eyelids. She opened them and watched the flare disappear into the sky. She looked at KillRoy, unsure what to do. As a last minute interloper, she wasn't exactly solid on the plan.

Lana was still riding Neon, but her awareness of Cruelty blinked out. Instead her mind was occupied with, fuck, what now? and what am I supposed to do? How do we get out? She felt herself narrow, squeeze inward, and she knew her hornet was gone. Her only remaining vision was her normal sight, and the hypersensitivity on her skin as gone. The air no longer seemed to tremble or speak to her. She was still high though, still strong and sharp. Still a little compromised. And the hornet, being gone...she felt like she'd just undergone siamese twin separation surgery.

She got to her feet, moving slowly and carefully to make sure that she wasn't going to fall over. She spat out the taste of vomit, blood, hatred. Blue Light was being attacked by natural wasps now, and her smaller, erratic flashes of light were rendered ineffectual against H10. She was still up, though, swinging like a crazy person. Lana looked around, recognizing felled H10. Some were definitely dead, some were injured, and some she couldn't tell - especially a few that Blue Light had taken down just looked like they might be asleep. She went over to a nearby one. It was Jackie. Blonde, feminist Jackie, who had babysat and indoctrinated her more than once. She prodded Jackie's limp weight, tried to feel for her pulse. Lana couldn't find it with inexperienced fingers and heightened adrenaline. She grabbed Jackie's wrists and tried to pull her back, further away from the fray. Even on Neon, Lana wasn't strong enough.

She stopped and stood up straight, glancing around for help. Shit. What now? And panic, about death, was dropping on her. Don't manifest that - don't manifest that. She could feel it trembling in her chest, trying to break out of her. She wished now that she hadn't taken another Neon pill so close to the end.

When K-Ton took cover by Ramsay, the driver offered his fellow H-10 member nothing more than a friendly pat in response to the nod. Indeed, no time for a tea-time chat. He considered saying something, and opened his mouth to do so, but quickly thought better of it when a fireball whizzed past their shared cover. When K-Ton launched his own assault against the man, Ramsay peeked up from cover with his gun in hand, hoping to provide some covering fire and line up a shot. A spray of bullets from another direction changed his mind rather quickly as Ramsay was forced to duck down beneath a splintering shower of broken wood chips bursting from his cover. By the time Ramsay got his bearings and was able to look up again, he saw K-Ton standing over the Breaker.

BANG

"AAAAAAUUUUGGGGHHH!"

BANG

"AAAAAAAAAUU-"

BANG

Ramsay watched with wide eyes as K-Ton went through the brutal ritual of taking out the flaming Beater. Though his eyes at first showed nothing but shock, Ramsay let out an almost detattched chuckle.

"Hohoholy shit bro. Holy shit." Ramsay laughed out as K-Ton returned to the cover. He was otherwise at a loss for words. After taking a moment to breathe, a stray gunshot caught his attention, bringing him back to the fight. Peeking through a rather convenient bullet-hole that had punched through the wooden crate, Ramsay saw that one of the Breakers had a similar idea -just a couple feet away he was hiding behind a very similar crate. A smile slipped across Ramsay's face as he saw the Breaker begin to stand, about to switch from cover to cover. "OI! JACKASS!" Ramsay shouted to get the mans attention as he rose from cover, gun leveled at his head. The Breaker looked at Ramsay with the eyes of a dead man, stopping dead in his tracks. He had a strange multicolored glow coming out of every orifice, nauseating to look at. Hopefully an effect from Neon. "Lights out, prick." Ramsay said with a smile, pulling the trigger.

click. click. click. Came the gun's unenthusiastic response. It was the Breakers turn to smile as he raised his own pistol after he fully digested the situation. Not hesitating to let the man line up his shot, Ramsay dove at the man furiously, shoving him down to the ground. "Goddamnit, that was going to be really badass!" He shouted angrily, using his MAC-10 as a club to beat the man. All it was good for, at this point. Again and again, the cold metal of the gun came down on the gangsters head, crushing in the skull like a rotten pumpkin. Ramsay didn't stop until the face was completely unrecognizable, at which point he spit on the corpse. This time he didn't hesitate to move, truly understanding the gravity of the fight. He dashed to more cover, grabbing the Breakers pistol as he ran. Upon finding cover behind some old beat up jalopy -a junker of a Fisker, it looked like, Ramsay checked the pistol for ammunition. He looked back to the crate where K-Ton was, giving him a non-committal nod as he leveled the pistol across the hood of the car. He readied himself to provide cover for the man if he chose to move over as well, but otherwise focused on the fight.

Ramsay scanned the carnage, eyes lighting up like a kid on Christmas morning. Dead breakers were in a maccabre orgy of corpses strewn across the cold floor of the AutoMach, blood pooling into great murals of violence on the concrete -a tribute to the bloody deeds of the Breakers. All around, the fruits of their labor was evident: a man with a hole through his chest the size of a watermelon, a man shot through his kneecaps and face, a bloody pulp that Ramsay could only assume was once a living human, a man with a fist-shaped hole in his head- that one stopped Ramsay cold as he recognized the face.

Perhaps it had been naive to think that only Breaker blood would be spilt in this firefight, but Ramsay had never actually considered the fact that some of his crew wouldn't be making it back. Ramsay's eyes lowered away from the battlefield, hands shaking violently as he loosened his grip on the pistol. Even as he considered walking away, going back to the van and letting it all blow over, his mind strayed back to the poor Breaker lying on the ground with a hole punched through his chest -reminding him of why it was they were here. This wasn't a power play, this wasn't for territory. This was revenge. Goddamn if revenge wasn't something the H10 crew did best. With this inspiration, Ramsay popped his head up from cover, pistol waving wildly from side to side as he searched for a target. The corner of his mouth twitched upwards as he saw a Breaker just standing around, doing some Tai Chi shit or something. He squeezed the trigger and -

click. click. click.

"Son of a bitch! Again?" Came Ramsays infuriated response as the pistol in his hand sprung to life seemingly, the magazine coming out to waggle in front of his eyes tauntingly. He looked again at the Tai Chi motherfucker and realized he was riding a hell of a glow on Neon. His voice was small as he looked around at the psychic's influence over so many weapons around the battlefield. "But that was my schtick..." He said softly as his bullets danced around his head like sugar plums on Christmas morning. As if he had something to prove, Ramsay pulled a pill from his pocket and quickly swallowed it, taking no time to savor the chalky texture.

Almost instantly, Ramsay looked down at his necklace containing his two doses of Neon and realized his mistake. His skin tingled with stimulation from all angles, the exact opposite of Neon's effect on him. He turned out the pocket, trying to figure out exactly what pill he had just popped from his collection of designer drugs. His fingers shook, spilling little colorful capsules of wonder all across the floor, as well as the magazine he never loaded into his MAC-10. Forgetting his drug-induced plight, Ramsay hurriedly loaded the MAC-10 with a wavering chuckle before shoving it into a shittily put together holster at his hip, instead raising the half-assembled Breaker's pistol.

Even as he held up the 'borrowed' firearm, it was being pulled apart by the psychic. That just pissed Ramsay off more. He slid across the hood of the bullet-riddled car he had been hiding behind, and started a furious charge at the psychic, only to see him swarmed by... wasps? "Huh. Neat" Thought Ramsay as he lunged at the man to tackle him, prepared to pistol whip him dead like the other Breaker.

As he raised his pistol over the incapacitated psychic, he felt rough hands grab him from behind, and throw him to the floor. He realized he was in a pretty bad spot when the Breaker then mounted him, and slammed the end of a pistol into his temple. Head spinning, Ramsay raised his hands in defense, only to take another blow to the wrists that knocked his defenses down. Perhaps because he thought he had won already, the Breaker stood up and began hauling Ramsay's body towards the flaming wreck of a car. Perhaps thanks to the mystery pill he swallowed, Ramsay was able to fight through the pain and bite the Breaker in his shin.

"Fucker!" Shouted the man, earning Ramsay a swift kick to the chest. "Ow. Fuck. Yep, that's a broken rib." He thought as he felt a sharp pain manifesting. Almost lazily, he pulled his MAC-10 from the holster, and aimed it at the Breaker who was currently preoccupied with dragging Ramsay's mostly limp body. Ramsay's aim shifted from side to side quickly, trying to figure out which of the man's three heads to aim at. Finally deciding on the center head, he fired. Bullets ripped violently into the calf of the Breaker -not quite where he was aiming, but it'd do. The Breaker himself crumpled to the ground, blood gushing from the wound. "John Fucking Kennedy, is this a Tarantino movie?" Came Ramsay's internal monologue as he stared at the unnerving amount of blood that ran from the man's leg. "He really should see a doctor about that." He muttered mentally, thoughts slurring.

A flare from KillRoy brought Ramsay back to the fight, shaking off the drugs just a bit. "Shit. One minute. That's my cue!" He said to no one in particular, looking around for the exit. Finding the hole he had entered through, he made a mad dash through the firefight, stumbling over himself more than he'd like to admit. As he ran, he spotted a familiar face standing in the open, looking like a lost little puppy dog. "Lana? The fuck are you doing here? You... you need to get gone, it's a fuckin' cluster fuck out here. Listen, I'm going to go grab the 'party favor', why don't you come with so we can get you somewhere safe?" He said, eyes nervously shifting around as he spoke.

His eyes rested on Jackie's (hopefully) unconscious body lying next to Lana, and the realization hit him like a boot to the gut -well, not really. He had just taken a boot to the gut, and that was a hell of a lot more painful. More like a punch to the face from a vegetarian, really. He saw her draw a ragged breath, and cocked his head at her limp body. Ramsay was pretty sure he had seen something on a cop show about how you're not supposed to move people if they're hurt, something about making it worse, but hey -it's just TV after all. In something of a bastardization of a fireman's carry, Ramsay picked up Jackie. He grunted under her weight and soon felt the culmination of his injuries coming back. He buckled, and just barely caught both himself and Jackie. "Yep, definitely broken rib." He winced, before giving Lana a sideways nod. "C'mon kiddo, let's get going before I pass out too." He said, offering a wheezing laugh as the two made their way back to the fuel-filled van.

Cassidy had assumed she was alone in her sanctuary behind the crown victoria, but was once again proven unmistakably wrong when she found herself face to face with a Breaker kid who looked like he hadn't even managed to sprout his first chest hair yet. 'He's just a baby--,' she began to muse until the rat bastard cut off her train of thought by rearing back and head-butting her. She hollered, jerking away and knocking the guy off kilter by whacking him with the barrel of her shotgun in the scramble. Cassidy was in the process of arranging the weapon and blowing the dude's head off when he gave a gurgled shriek, blood shooting out of his eyes, ears, and mouth at an almost comical velocity.

Well, it might have been comical if she hadn't caught it full in the face, anyways.

The Breaker crumpled backwards over the corpse of a couch and Cassidy spat out another mouthful of blood, trying and failing to not think of the plethora of different diseases that could be contracted from that sort of thing. A glance to her right revealed the reason for her bloodbath. Alex King was crouched down behind the camero next to her, Breakers falling like flies around him with all sorts of gore shooting out of their faces in spectacular fashion. "Alex," she grumbled, wiping her mouth on her shoulder briskly. "That was foul." He either didn't hear her or didn't deem a response necessary, his scarred lips pursed as he concentrated on doing whatever the hell it was that he was doing.

She noticed the neat through and through wound to the youngest--scratch that, only King brother now and frowned, squinting to try and better access it through the dim warehouse lighting. Tiny rivers of blood pumped through the hole, as if the veins had survived the gunshot unscathed somehow. Fascinated, Cassidy stepped closer and reached out to catch his arm and inspect it further, only to jerk away when the car he had been taking shelter behind catapulted backwards and sent him careening into the brick wall behind him.

She winced in sympathy. That couldn't have felt good.

It was Dante's rocky form that had sent the camero of it's blocks as a Breaker with brass knuckles advanced on him with a sinister gleam in his eyes. Cassidy scrambled to level the 12 gauge, but the firearm made an audible clicking noise before shucking out the shells of its own accord. "What the flippity flap?" she gasped, grasping the gun tighter seconds before it was ripped free from her grip all together.

Somewhere in the distance she heard Ramsay's familiar voice yell out, "Son of a bitch! Again?"

'Agreed,' she thought, shoving a hand into her short's back pocket so she could fish out a pill. Cassidy hesitated, reluctant to take the hit even disarmed like she was, but Knuckles clocking Dante square in the face cleared up any doubts she was having. She shoved the pill into her mouth gracelessly and chomped it down.

"What the fuck!?"

"Look out! Get--move here--"

The neon's effects had yet to take hold of Cassidy when both Knuckles and his psychic sidekick started yelling and swatting around at something unseen. She squinted again, as if that would help her gain some perspective, but still couldn't make out what had them in such a frenzy. Whatever it was had the palm of the psychic's hand all boiled up and angry looking, like a particularly nasty blister. Then as if summoned straight from a nightmare, wasps descended from all corners of the AutoMach in droves and began casing general chaos and havoc. In the meantime, somewhere nearby KillRoy shot up the flare and Cassidy was just beginning to feel jittery and not quite right.

Her hands were sweaty, heartbeat humming bird quick, and her pupils were dilated to the point that they pretty much swallowed her irises up completely. It was lovely and terrifying all at once, to feel power and potential shifting just below the surface while at the same time knowing it was all so fleeting, burning out powder keg fast. Regardless of how awful/wonderful the pill made her feel, Cassidy immensely regretted taking it now that the signal had gone up and they needed to get the hell out of Dodge. All of the Breakers she could see were either laid out with their insides on their outsides or were fervently trying to smash the swarm of H10 guardian angel wasps, so she had no need for the drug's powers. In fact, they were more of a hindrance at this point in the game.

'There'll be plenty of time to beat myself up about that later,' she decided, her breath sunflower and honey sweet as she snatched her gun out of the air. The psychic was having an understandably hard time focusing when he was getting ate up by wasps. 'Let's focus on not being in here when Ramsay drives that fireball through here, yeah?'

The first thing Cassidy did was pick the hem of her shirt back up and secure it over her face so she didn't blow a mouthful of poison into any of her fellow crew members. Then she started towards the hole in the wall Dante had made earlier in the attack, only pausing for a brief moment when she crossed in front of Alex. "You alright there?" She questioned, voice muffled through the fabric obstructing her mouth as she nudged him with the toe of her boot. He had taken quite a hit earlier when he'd been thrown into the wall, and even though his neon trick kept him from losing blood that gunshot wound still looked like it hurt like a bitch. She didn't wait for an answer, instead reaching down to haul the kid up by his uninjured arm.

"Rub some dirt in it," she joked lamely, before adding, "But seriously, you a'ight? Ramsay should be rollin' by with the gas van here pretty quick and we need to skedaddle. You need a hand?" The air under her shirt was thick with her own smog, so she turned her head to better angle it away from him while focusing on loading her last four shells back into the hopefully now functioning shotgun.

"Hohoholy shit bro. Holy shit." was all Ramsey managed to say when faced with K-Ton's admittedly excessive display of violence. K-Ton shrugged and responded with a shrug and a sadistic grin. Was it excessive? Yes, yes it was without a single doubt. But so was pulling David's heart out of his chest. K-Ton had a bone to pick, and if he had his way, he would've applied similarly torturous techniques to every single Beater he could get his hands on. The crew had always known K-Ton was good at getting information- most of them chocked it up to his casual way with words and look, but only the older members knew how good K-Ton was with a chair, rope, and trough of water. Unfortunately for K-Ton, he had nearly enough time nor equipment to sufficiently torture each member of the Beaters as he wanted to.

K-Ton watched as Ramsey wheeled away to begin a brawl of his own, K-Ton diving out from behind the crate as well to join the battle. Catching a pair of Beaters rounding on Alex and Dante, K-Ton drew his gun, only to growl in frustration as it refused to work. It was the same Psychic prick once again, fucking with their guns. The same prick that stopped them from shooting them as they killed David was now fucking with their weapons once again. K-Ton cracked his knuckles and began to approach the psychic, who was paired up with a beater with knuckles preparing to put the hurt on Alex and Dante. The psychic might've been able to fuck with guns, but how well could he deal with soundwaves?

The question was ultimately left unanswered, as a swarm of wasps attacked the two beaters, and Ramsay popped out of nowhere to scuffle with the psychic before he was roughly pulled off by a third beater. K-Ton meanwhile was rounding on Mr. Knuckles, intending on helping the duo sort him out, all the while shattering eardrums with literal snaps of his fingers. He had just managed to approach the Mr. Knuckles when he was suddenly knocked off his feet.

Hitting the cement with little air in his lungs, K-Ton recoiled, and clutched at his chest, where the force had hit him. There was no blood on his hands, so he knew he hadn't been shot, but above him he saw a Beater standing above him with what could only be described as the same sadistic grin he had given Ramsey just a little bit earlier. The irony of his current position was almost more painful then the current pain in his chest- almost. The beater pumped his fist in the air, jerking his elbow in K-Ton's direction, and K-Ton felt like someone had just elbowed him in the gut, eliciting a harsh exhale as the air was beaten out of his lungs. On the bright side, K-Ton now knew the beater had control over some sort of air/force/telepathy based manner of propelling force from one place to another, apparently most easily manifested in punching or kicking motions.

"You fucking bastard." The beater spat, as he air-punched K-Ton int he gut again. "You're gonna pay for killing Kenny."

"And I suppose you're blissfully unaware of the ridiculous pop-culture references you're making huh?" K-Ton spat, as he jerked his head to the side, dodging an air-punch to the face. The beater was standing over K-Ton, but wasn't straddling him, so K-Ton still had control of pretty much all of his limbs- apparently this Beater had been under the impression that since he could air-punch, grappling was no longer important. So it there was little difficulty for K-Ton to kick his foot upwards and crush the man's balls. Sending the man sprawling to the ground, K-Ton snapped his fingers, blowing out the man's ears as a flashbang erupted near his head.

As he finished off the beater, K-Ton was vaguely aware of Killroy shooting off a flare, signalling their one minute mark. That meant Ramsey and his gas-van would be rolling in really soon, which meant it was time to skedaddle. He saw Cass helping Alex and Dante up, and half-approached, half got ready to book it out of there.

"Yo Cass, Dante, Alex, lets get a move on!"

Ramsay breathed a sigh of relief when he reached the van and saw that it was still there, just about as intact as it had been when he had left it. He grunted as he lowered himself down to a knee, gently resting Jackie’s body down on the concrete, head propped against the chipped white paint job of the van, red-brown stains of rust splattering the side. He carelessly flung open the back doors of the van, just to check that it was indeed still filled with fuel. He smiled on seeing the stacks of red gas canisters still in place. Ramsay took in a deep whiff, the heavy scent of gas calming his nerves. He slammed the doors shut again, a satisfying clap of metal slamming against metal accompanying the gesture.

He moved around to the front of the van, opening the passenger door and tossing in his MAC-10 onto the seat carelessly. It dropped heavily from the battered leather seat onto the cluttered floor of the van, resting among varied nuts, bolts, and tools that lay scattered across the stained metal. Ramsay swept a newspaper off of the seat hurriedly, and picked the gun up once again, this time more carefully depositing the weapon in the cupholder of the vehicle. The interior of the van looked like a strange mix of ‘abandoned for years in a scrap heap’ and ‘has a questionable number of homeless guys living in it’ -an aesthetic that Ramsay was quite used to at this point in his life.

”You know how to use this thing, kiddo? I’m gonna need you to cover me when we roll this in there.” Ramsay said as he gestured to Lana, holding the door open. His voice had a strangely grim and serious tone to it, something that surprised even him. When Lana scrambled in, slamming the door after her hurriedly, Ramsay opened his mouth as if to say something -he quickly thought better of it, and walked around to the driver side of the van, flinging the door open a bit harder than he wanted to. As he moved to slide into the driver’s seat, he couldn’t fight a slight tingling in the back of his mind -the feeling one might get if they leave the sink running perhaps. He was certain that there was something important he was forgetting, but what could it be?

Ramsay looked from side to side, eyes dully scanning around as if hoping to find the answer before they came to rest on Jackie, still leaning against the van. ”Shit. Shit. Shiiiiiit.” Ramsay muttered as the realization hit him. He looked around rather frantically, hoping that there would be another H10 member nearby to watch over Jackie while he dropped a flaming bag of shit on the Breakers doorstep, but the area was ghost-town empty. He wouldn’t have been surprised if a tumbleweed floated across the cracked pavement of the parking lot. He cocked his head to the side, grunting in frustration. He leaned down and picked up Jackie, straining to keep her still as he moved her.

He peeked into the back, trying to find somewhere to lie her down, but was unable to find enough empty space to safely put an unconscious body. ”Okay, this is fine. This is okay.” Ramsay said, his voice betraying the opposite. A stroke of genius, a solution to all of his problems, a straight miracle of human ingenuity. All words that one would never use to describe the plan that jumped to Ramsay’s mind in that moment. But goddamn if that was going to stop him.

Shaking in the driver's seat of the van, Ramsay carefully took one of the slick silvery pills from around his neck, tossing it down his throat quickly. Almost instantly this time, Ramsay felt hands spring out from him, brushing against every surface within his powers radius. White knuckled grip around Jackie, Ramsay gripped his surroundings even more tightly through the Neon. As if carried by an invisible Michael J. Fox, a set of keys floated shakily to the ignition, clattering through the air. Shifting his attention, Ramsay looked to his gun lying dormant in the cupholder. Snapping to attention with frightening speed, the MAC-10 moved from the cupholder to the window -smashing through the glass as the barrel moved from side to side excitedly like a dog sticking it’s head out of the window.

At the same time, Ramsay’s cracked phone floated in front of his face, dim white glow blazing like a spotlight in his eyes. An aux cord reaching with serpentine curves up through the empty space found it’s way to the headphone port of the phone with a light click. The van sprung to life under his power, engine revving while the lights blinked on and off. The roaring of the engine was accompanied by music blaring through the speakers.

“Shake it off, I shake it off-”

”Nope!” Ramsay shouted, quickly switching the track. Color rose to his cheeks as he telekinetically fumbled with the phone to find a more appropriate song.

“The bass and the tweeters-”

”Not quite…”

“Falling towards the sky...”



”There we go.” Ramsay said with an ever increasingly confident tone in his voice. He glanced down to Jackie, still held tight in his arms, before looking over to Lana. He gave her a reassuring nod, before snapping the gear shift into drive.



This van had been a lifeboat. An ironic feeling for Lana to have, really, considering that it was loaded with fuel and was meant to deliver the final deathblow to the Breakers. But that future wasn’t what bothered her. No, it was when shit started telekinetically soaring about that Lana’s unease increased and she started to re-think her choice to go with Trigger.

She did not know how to use ‘this thing’ (the MAC-10) but hadn’t said so, because she wanted in that van, dammit. It became quickly clear that he didn’t need her, though. He could use it without his hands. Ramsay was being watched with wide dark eyes and an open mouth. Okay, so a machine gun that looked as if it was being operated by a ghost was covering them. The three of them were crammed into the front of a blaringly-loud van, and Lana was starting to come so undone that her sense of panic detached from her. No, it didn’t detach, it manifested.

She didn’t notice it at first, with all the rest of the chaos flying around.

Half-huddled against the door behind her, one arm raised to curve above her head, she might as well have been watching Trigger from underneath a rock. What she thought was her heartbeat - or the havoc the bass wreaked on it - was slamming behind her seat. The spastic electronica thumped like a physical thing. Wait, no, it was a physical thing. Claws scraped over Lana’s wrist and she felt the rasp of feathers against her cheek.

Lana screamed and flinched the other way, this time closer to the driver. What looked like a large ball of gray feathers was fluttering against the passenger side window and windshield. While it beat its wings, it stirred Lana’s dark hair and added to the impression that a small circus might be residing in the cab. The bird’s claws rasped against the dashboard, finally managing to catch on the soft plastic at the base of the windshield.

It was nothing but a small cockatiel. Long tail feathers, washed in dull yellow. Sunshine-bright crest, raised like an eyebrow. Fireball explosions on each cheek, dove-gray feathers and wings edged in white, held slightly away from its anxiety-slimmed body. The heart in its breast was pounding, the whole creature shuddering with each rapid breath. Lana could feel her thoughts scatter, the overwhelming sense of too much hyper-awareness of...everything. The only answer was to get out of this van and fly as far and as high as she could to get a better vantage point on the situation. But no, that was the bird. Just as Lana was starting to get a grip on that, it began flapping around again. She huddled down, fingers laced behind her head.

The bird swung a loop around the van - shat on Trigger - and somehow managed to avoid escaping out the smashed window with the machine gun bobbing in it. It landed on the head of Lana’s unused seat belt buckle, wings splayed to either side, helping to hold it there. The bird let out an eeping squawk.



The cacophony of feathers and wailing went largely unnoticed by Ramsay, who was having a hard enough time keeping track of his gun, phone, the van, and Jackie. His concentration was interrupted -to say the least- by the sudden bid shit all over his flannel. He looked down at the green and white mess running down from his shoulder, eyes wide. When he saw the cockatiel resting on his dashboard, Ramsay lashed out with his power reflexively. An invisible fist smashed through the front windshield, spraying glass out from the front of the vehicle where the bird was. The bird was lucky that Ramsay couldn’t affect organics with his power, else it might look like a breaker after Alex was finished with him.

At the same time, he slammed down on the brakes, his telekinetic power almost reflexively grabbing the seatbelts on all of the seats and forcefully clicking them shut. Taking heavy breaths, eyebrows raised high as if they were trying to become at one with his hairline, Ramsay looked back and forth between the bird, Lana, and the shattered windshield of the van.

”Why the fuck is there a bird in my van.” Ramsay said, trying very hard to remain calm. Though the phrasing was that of a question, his tone of voice sounded far more like a statement as he looked to Lana, eyes still wide due to shock. And drugs, but mostly shock.



When Trigger hit the brakes, Lana’s little body went flying. Huddled down as it was, she hit her head and right shoulder against the dashboard, popping the glove box open. Even as this happened, the seatbelt snaked down across her newly aching shoulder. At the touch (which she thought was the bird) she sat straight upright, spine against the seat. It was not more reassuring to see the seatbelt reaching diagonally across her torso and locking her in. Lana made a sound, not a word: “Ah...h…” (Nor was it a laugh.)

Ramsay’s serious voice pulled her eyes around to him. “Uhm,” she squeaked, vocal chords feeling strangled. “I think that’s my fault.” She turned her head to look at the bird beside her face, silky wing on her cheek. She looked into its dilated pupil. The irises of its eyes were so dull and dark a blue as to appear black at anything but so close a distance, but she could see its slate-gray distinction contracting and expanding. Its hooked bill was slightly parted. It had a grayish pink tongue that reminded Lana of a pencil’s eraser. She could hear the breath hissing out of it.



Ramsay’s face softened when Lana spoke up, ‘taking responsibility’, so-to-speak, for the bird. He took a deep breath, before letting out a hearty chuckle that brought back once again the stinging pain in his ribs that cut off his merriment almost immediately.

”Hell, as long as it doesn’t shit on me again, why not.” He said in a mock-stern tone of voice, before letting out another wheezing laugh. The objects around the van once again snapped to attention, all moving into their previous positions. The vehicle sprung to life once more, driving in a wide loop around the AutoMach where the firefight was dying down. Ramsay wove between those of the H-10 slowly trickling out from the fight. A stray bullet or two ripped through the air after them, but many of the Breakers were retreating themselves as their Neon ran down and their glow faded.

Between the roaring engine, blaring music through the speakers, a din of screeching from Lana’s bird, and Ramsay himself shouting for blood, it was hard to not notice the van’s entrance into the AutoMach through an unfortunately open garage-style door. The vehicle stampeded through the building, glancing off of the side of an old jalopy of a Crown Victoria in it’s reckless abandon. When the van came skidding to a halt towards the center of the automach, a pair of Breakers came up to contest the new entrance -guns blazing as they walked.

As the Breakers approached, their progress was quickly halted by a hail of bullets from the seemingly alive MAC-10. The smoking barrel stayed trained on the two thugs long after they died, and long after the magazine of the gun was empty -largely because Ramsay was putting his focus elsewhere. Though he hadn’t popped the pill too long ago, the mass amount of multitasking Ramsay was attempting taxed his Neon reserve heavily, and he could feel his grasp over his surroundings weakening. Angrily, he clenched even tighter with his power at the surroundings, maintaining as much control as he could while walking around to the back of the van. While the immediate threat was gone, there were plenty of reasons to get gone ASAP.



Lana was white-knuckling the unwanted seatbelt with both hands. A bird flying around their heads was the least of their worries. In fact she hoped it might catch a stray bullet and save their asses. It had no such heroic swandive. Instead, it merely faded out at a moment unnoticed amidst the dangerous mayhem. Lana re-absorbed the panic, which unfortunately lived to be a totally useless hindrance another day. The bird didn’t go away because Lana was calming down. Far from it. The Neon was just phasing out and weakening in her system, adrenaline burning through it like a match.

Despite having seen everything, with her own eyes, Lana could not quite believe it. Most of all, more than all the unbelievable things she had seen today, she could not quite believe that she was still alive. Literally, she could not have told you for sure whether she was or was not. But it looked like most of them were going to make it out of this thing alright. Revenge: exacted, losses: mitigated.



As Ramsay slid out of the driver’s seat, clutching Jackie tightly, he saw her eyes flutter. Almost as soon as he hit the floor, Jackie began struggling against his hold. Surprised, Ramsay leaned down and let Jackie’s feet swing to the floor, still holding tight to her arm for support. ”Woah, Jackie, you okay? Can you walk?” Ramsay said with a voice dripping in concern.

“Yeah, I think I’m okay, thanks Trig. That bitch with the blue light just knocked me out is all. Don’t give me that look, I’m allowed to say bitch. Men aren’t. --Hey, I saw the kid...Svetlana? You get her out, alright? You gotta get everybody out.”

BANG

The gunshot cracked the white noise that filled the AutoMach, leaving a ringing silence in it’s wake. As Jackie fell limp, Ramsay’s vision blurred, eyes suddenly wet. He looked down, kneeling down to ease her descent. Past a maze of vehicles he could see the Breaker that shot her, already walking away without a second thought. Blood tore from the bullet wound in her neck, spilling across Ramsay’s shirt as he tightly clutched to her body. Even as he pressed a hand tight against the wound, he felt her breath growing more shallow and her heartbeat slowing -there was nothing he could do.



His eyes raised from the floor, narrowed with a new determination. Though he could feel his grip on the Neon weakening, he still had enough left in him. Fire burned in his eyes as he stood, Jackie’s body held tight against his blood soaked chest. As he walked by, the back door of the van flung itself open, and a canister of gas came floating out. Under a fist of telekinetic influence, the canister was crushed, sending a spray of gasoline out in a long line from the back of the van, painting a dark line of the liquid that pointed to the exit hole smashed by Dante.

Ramsay followed the line of gasoline, a sobbing, hyperventilating Lana close behind him as they went towards the exit. Rather luckily, they met little resistance on their way to the exit. H-10 and Breakers alike had seen enough bloodshed for the day, it seemed, and people were far more occupied with getting the hell out of there rather than killing off anyone else. When the grim trio reached the end of the trail, a lighter shakily made its way out of Ramsay’s pocket with the last of his power -his glow was running on fumes at this point. It flicked on, hovering just above the darkened pool of fuel for just a second before Ramsay was truly out of power and it fell to the floor. Light flared up, following the trail back to the van before punctuating the exit of the last of the H-10 crew.

You a'ight, she said.

No, Alex wasn't about to say he was 'a'ight'.

He very likely had a concussion, possibly fractured (and certainly bruised) ribs, and a gunshot wound to his left bicep. None of that said 'a'ight', but more importantly the guy who killed his brother happened to be right the fuck there and still breathing. That, more than the pain that was beginning to make his arm go slack or the throbbing that threatened to crush his skull from the inside like the world's biggest grape, kept him from being anything resembling alright. What it did make him was furious, and he was lucky that it did--without that laser-focus ferocity in him, God knows he might have passed out or something equally pussy-rific in front of the big boys.

Not that Dante would have noticed at the moment. He was a little busy turning Knuckles' trick back around on him.

Wherever those hornet had come from, they were certainly doing a number. It might have comforted the thug to know that he wasn't dealing with some little bumble bee--the Japanese giant hornet has a sting that is surpassed by an alarmingly small number of insects on the Schmidt Pain Index. Though not specifically mentioned, it is responsible for between thirty and forty deaths a year due to the sheer amount of its painful toxin that tends to be injected at any given time and thus was an appropriately badass animal to have him howling like a stuck pig. The rests of the hornets might be, but honestly it was about that point that Dante's big black foot hit him in the chest and sent him cartwheeling backwards. Whatever it was that gave him his strength must have reinforced him a bit as well, but a hit like that still left him winded, gasping, and in blinding pain from the swelling sting. As Dante advanced on him, cracking his knuckles with the cordite pops of splitting stone, he was about to have a very, very bad day.

Or would have been, had time not been up.

Not the flare so much as Dante's juice. He'd always burned through it faster than most--probably something to do with converting an entire body into what was normally an inorganic substance and moving it around like something out of Dungeons and Dragons--but now it seemed he was having some significant issues. Mid-step he halted and shuddered and fell to one knee, massive shoulders rolling as the back of him began to crack and split. Dusky brown skin began to thread through the black stone like magma flumes, stretching from his spine and cracking away the rock as if it had been no thicker than a Nestles chocolate shell. K-Ton might have been telling them to go, the clock ticking down, but Dante cracking crust or no Dante had a score to settle. He struggled to his feet at about the same time Knuckles managed to get to his, still howling in pain and beating his chest like some kind of gladiator, but both were thrown backwards by Trigger's sudden entrance.

The van burst through the bay doors and skidded to a halt, Ramsay and the ladies still inside, but the bay door it carried on top of it kept going. It smashed into Dante head on, knocking him to the ground mid-transformation, and very nearly took out Knuckles with a corner that he barely managed to dodge. Barely was enough, though, and as he made his way forward it was clear enough he had murder on his mind. His eyes might have been streaming, every vein in his body clenched tight and visible against his skin, but by God was he about to--

No. Really. Every vein.

It wasn't that Alex had ignored Cass or K-Ton or KillRoy--far from it. He'd even managed to hold up a single finger, and not the rude one. Universal for 'gimme a minute', he'd spent the time collecting getting his shit together for just such an occasion. While he wouldn't have minded if Dante were the one to put Knuckles down for good--probably--he sure as hell wasn't about to let it be the other way around. And since big boy had missed his shot, Alex was more than happy to take it from him. To see Knuckles stop in his tracks, he might as well have had a heart attack. His eyes suddenly bugged out, his arms halting mid draw-back. He stumbled, barely able to keep his feet, and the dark veins and bright arteries beneath his skin began to bead and run. They bulged and crawled like worms, struggling to keep up with the demands of Alex' imagination, which was bringing it all together in one place.

Up until now it had just been tricks with blood pressure, popping heads like champagne corks. Maybe a bit of rerouting internally, a little autonomous safety function. Now, though, there was intent. Now, though he wanted more than little tricks of anatomy. He wanted blood, figuratively and literally, and he wanted it all in the middle of that stupid benches-240 chest, because if he was ready to put a hole in David's then he had best be prepared for the consequences.

There were precious few seconds of recognition and understanding that the man could have had as the blood ran from his brain, his lungs, his muscles. Held up by nothing more than the pooling blood currently crushing his heart, in that second his gasping frog-lips tried their best to work out more than a croak. They might have managed it, too, if Alex hadn't felt every last bit of blood in the man's body and, with a sudden flex of his hand, willed it out.

If before the men before were gushers then this was a popped water balloon. This was forceful, angry, a rippling hydrostatic force that burst cell walls tore muscles and carried the ripped shreds of them with it as the man blew himself apart from the inside. It may have lacked the finesse of K-Ton's executions but it sure got the job done, and with it Alex felt the awful satisfaction that only cames from re-fucking-venge.

For a moment, Dante stared. Spattered even from a foot or two away, there aren't many men that can shake off a paint job like that off the cuff. That being said, a van full of kitchen-chemistry cocktails a shitload of gasoline was good for that.

"Fucking hell, move!"

The world came back up to full speed in that moment, Dante back in smooth, dark skin and stumbling on newly bare feet for the exit--any exit, the window behind Cass and Alex being the prime candidate at the moment. It was moments like this that Dante Black was at his best, unable to do anything but leap before looking. He picked up speed and, with the kind of wide-armed, action-movie, take-down-the-runner football tackle that would have won him MVP at some college bowl somewhere, Dante tackled the pair of them wholesale through what was left of the crumpled tin wall. It couldn't have been comfortable, but it beat being inside when the explosion went off.

And God, did it ever.

Automotive shops are not the best place for fire at the best of times. The initial explosion was shattering, ripping tin-roof and blowing out windows and walls like they were made of cardboard, but as the cars and fluids and various accouterments of the trade began to catch it was clear enough that nobody wanted to be anywhere near there for very long. Certainly not Dante, who was currently swearing like a motherfucker--more than a bit of shrapnel had ended up in his broad back, the heat of it practically cauterizing the wounds on impact, but if nothing else he'd saved the two beneath him from a fiery fate. Even if he had managed to smear them with Knuckles-gore in the process.

For Alex, it was almost the final straw. Yet another shake to his head, another impact to his ribs, another scream from his arm as it jostled against the wall. There was no thought of altruism or chivalry, whether or not he was on top of Cass or breaking her fall, but he could smell something sickly sweet and his head was beginning to spin and Christ, could he just pass the fuck...

"She's dying!"

He managed it as soon as he could speak because he felt it in a way he hadn't really before. Yes, he'd felt heartbeats, yes, he'd jacked pressures, but this was different somehow. Like a bird battering its wings against a too-small cage, like someone drowning and struggling for breath, he could feel Jackie's heart struggling. Stopping. If they'd never been close, if they'd never been friends, he couldn't let that happen. But could he stop it?

His own arm was running freely now, his body battered and bloodied and exhausted. Too exhausted. Even as he worked to shore up the circulatory system, even if the flow of her blood began to divert back into itself, he knew he would lost it. Was already losing it.

"The fuck... man, we gotta go!" Dante was insisting on top of him, pushing himself up with a hiss of his teeth and looking around for the escape route. This had not been subtle, and that fifteen minutes they'd bought from the cops meant jack shit after an explosion like that.

"Neon." Alex gasped, managing to point his good arm weakly towards where Ramsay and Lana were struggling with Jackie. "I'm out, but I...with Neon...!" He couldn't breathe, couldn't think. Couldn't get the words out. Couldn't save her without that boost, without that rush...that power. Looking to Cass, not plaintively but fiercely, he jerked his head towards Jackie to say what he wasn't able to. He couldn't just let her bleed out like that. They couldn't.

Right?