A lone MND Valkyrie traced a line across the New Berlin sky. Agent Ryker Konig operated alone more often than not, despite several warnings that not having backup was dangerous. His detachment from personal affairs made working with others unpleasant for both parties. The war on artifact proliferation was a silent one, hidden from the public eye as best as possible. That is how he ended up here, hunting a dealer of adapted weaponry. Setting down some distance from the factory, he unlatched his piloting helmet to switch it out for his combat helmet. His reflection regarded him briefly, a face crisscrossed with deep scars from when the predecessor of that very same helmet had melted and fused to his head, and he had to rip it off himself.
He felt nothing but a flash of familiarity as the hiss of air from his armor locking and normalizing the atmosphere within the suit. The night seemed a little darker than normal as he set out.
A stolen MND Valkyrie had landed some distance from the factory, and the Noth mercenary's Four had stepped out into the New Berlin air, sporting a few black-market armaments. He rarely had backup unless his sponsors had demanded it. Four was a cursed number, and he was a cursed man. He could list a few who would truly rather die than stand beside him. So, he had purchased a few friends for this outing: light armor, a helmet with a heads-up display and a few extra sight settings, a combat knife, and a sidearm. It felt better to hunt targets on his own, but the target this time was Nikolaus Strauss, the Devil given flesh. No amount of precaution was too much. He had haunted his dreams, taunting him, outside the reach of Four's blade.
The night seemed darker to him. Of course, when Strauss was involved, there wasn't any dark deep enough to be his shadow.
From outside the compound, two things caught Ryker's attention: His thermals showed a hot spot moving through the facility, and it was approaching an abnormally cold spot near the center. He wasted no time, launching a grappling hook and cable from the wrist of his suit and beginning to scale the outer wall. He had a vague idea of the factory's internal layout, he could approach through the exhaust tower, beginning only a few hallways and a room away from the cold spot, intercepting the heat signature as well. Ideally, he could kill them both and be done with this lead entirely.
His suit entered total stealth mode as he began rappelling down the exhaust tower, finely tuned hydraulic needles absorbing every sound his footfalls made. He drew his bayonet and his sidearm. The hunt was on.
Four felt two presences. The thing in the center of the building was Strauss's, no doubt. He could almost hear that nasty rattle. However, something else was approaching. Something human, or at least passing as human. It was hiding, certainly. Four couldn't tell exactly where it was, but he was certain that a third party was here to make his hunt a little more difficult. Hallways turned into corridors, turned into machining rooms, turned into hallways again, and at the end he saw a singular door, a foreman's office. He felt that it was hiding behind that door. But first...
He felt a chill in his spine. Bloodlust, and not his own. On nothing but pure instinct, he whipped around with the combat knife, coming eye to eye with the red-eyed helmet of a suit of armor, stopping a blade aimed at the base of his neck with his own. Sparks from grinding metal hit the walls as Four drew his sidearm and shot at the attacker. In an astounding display of reflex, the assailant dodged in an effortless manner, making space between them and aiming his own sidearm at Four. Wasting no time, Four kicked a nearby table to make a barrier, which only withstood two rounds from the enemy's high-powered sidearm.
Four backslid down the hallway towards the door, sidestepping plasma blasts and firing back as he went. He was stuck between a rock and a hard place, but he thrived in chaos, and involving whatever Strauss had in store would certainly introduce an element of chaos to this. As it stood now, he was slower than his attacker. Not enough to lose instantly, but enough that he couldn't keep up in an extended fight. He needed to even the playing field, and getting in that room would do it.
Ryker was shocked only for a moment. His suit eliminated sound from his movements and could even limit the disturbance of dust and gravel at a full sprint. He made zero sound, and yet this target had blocked his attack without looking. Even more, he showed no sign of shock and instead counterattacked instantly. The target backpedaled down the hall, using the waste in the environment to provide temporary cover from Ryker's sidearm and laying down retreating fire. Ryker's heart was pumping, this was going to be fun. The target backed into the room with the cold signature, shutting the door behind him. Ryker threw a disk at the door, which stuck and deployed. A small breaching charge blasted the door to pieces, but as he was going to rush through the door to continue the hunt, he stopped dead in his tracks.
Ryker didn't feel, more often than not. The silence in his mind was deafening. The only thing that made him feel alive was the hunt. But for a moment, true horror gripped him. His suit regulated its temperature to a perfect room temperature, but a chill crossed his skin that he had never felt before. The sight of his aim shaking as he aimed down the hallway, however, snapped him back to reality. He doesn't get scared. He was up against a cognitive hazard, some form of telepathy projecting into his mind. He was dealing with something Nomad-related, for certain.
Before the two men was what at first appeared to them to be a naked woman. Closer inspection revealed that she seemed to have been tastefully covered with some stone-like patches, until it dawned on them that the stone-like patches were protruding from within her skin. Ryker's helmet lit up with a warning: The material in front of him was consistent with the Scorpion Gunboat used by infected forces. Four's sixth sense told him something much worse: she was dead. The spark of life, of consciousness, of being an observer that could collapse quantum superpositions... she didn't have it.
Her smile stretched too far across her face. Her teeth were too pointy. She walked far too relaxedly, as if she were intoxicated. Faster than a wild animal, though, she lunged at Four, a maw full of teeth aimed at his neck. Her speed was unreal, a full room crossed in mere seconds, and while Four had already raised and aimed his gun at her, he very nearly didn't pull the trigger in time. A bloom of black, tar-like substance sprayed the room as her body collided with Four at a high speed, knocking him well off his feet and into the wall. Why is it always my neck?, Four questioned the universe at large as he quickly kicked the body off of himself and skittered as far back across the room as he could.
Ryker watched the whole exchange, barely able to keep up. The woman had an endothermic metabolism, somehow, sucking the heat out of everything. He was going to shoot Four, but his heads-up display gave him an early warning of an approaching object. The headless woman had stood up and was meandering in Ryker's direction. Slimy squelching sounds heralded the slow regeneration of her head. Ryker wasted no time in shooting at her again, but this time she dodged. Not how Ryker and Four had dodged each other, estimating the trajectory of each other's guns and moving out of the way beforehand. No, she was sidestepping the rounds themselves, whisps of black mist forming afterimages as she moved.
She finished by lunging at Ryker this time, who drove the bayonet in his other hand up under her jaw and into her skull, flipping her over behind him and slamming her into the floor. He was then knocked back out into the hallway by Four dropkicking him, who proceeded to sprint and jump over him, booking it down the hallway and out of sight. Ryker was going to shoot him, but he was more worried about the alien woman. Turning back to aim at her he saw that her arms had melted into a black mass, which she had stuck into the walls. The shadows were becoming darker, and his heads-up display was barely capable of warning him as a black crystal spike sprung from the wall, attempting to impale him.
Deciding that his other target had the right idea, Ryker dropped a grenade at the woman's feet and broke into a dead sprint down the hallway, remembering a window nearby he could escape from. Checking a rearview camera in his helmet, he saw the woman fully dissolve into the shadows. This did nothing to slow his pace as he rounded two corners and dove through the window, rolling as he hit the ground to absorb the shock. A Valkyirie streaked overhead, vacating the area at high speeds as Ryker sprinted towards his own. This report wasn't going to be fun to make.
Two lone Valkyries left the forests near an abandoned factory one cold April night, the site of a future MND investigation zone. Nothing would be found, but Ryker remembered one fateful arrest of an inter-colony terrorist, and Four remembered one horrible Federalist soldier.
And, of course, a Gardener won an argument about nature and nurture against Death.
I'll do something about my superiority complex when I cease to be superior.
"Whatever happened to catchin' a good old-fashioned passionate ass-whoopin and gettin' your shoes, coat, and your hat tooken?"
