Three Square Meals Ch. 083

*We've been attacked by assassins,* the Nymph stated calmly. The rich timbre of her lovely telepathic voice did nothing to calm Alyssa's rising sense of panic, especially when Jade added, *The twins, Sakura, and I were caught in an explosion. Irillith and Tashana are alive but unconscious. Me and Sakura are alright, but I don't know what happened to Calara, Dana, or Rachel.*

Alyssa sent out a frantic telepathic call to the missing girls, but when there was no answer, she felt icy fingers of dread clawing at her heart. Reaching across Jehanna's slumbering form, Alyssa shook John violently.

*Wake up!* she boomed at him, making him practically leap out of bed in shock.

"What the hell?!" he blurted out, staring at her in astonishment.

"Assassins attacked the girls!" she exclaimed, climbing over Jehanna to grab her clothes and flinging his own at him.

John's eyes widened in fear, his face matching the same anxious expression that Alyssa wore. He switched to telepathy simply because it was faster to communicate that way. *Anyone injured? Give me everyone's status!*

Even as he said the words, he closed his eyes, knowing he could find out himself. It only took him a second to check the mental compartments in his mind, but when he saw the girls' images, he realised it had been too long since he'd fed them and the glow had faded away. He no longer had an active connection with any of the girls...

*Sakura and Jade are okay, Irillith and Tashana are unconscious, the rest we don't know about!* Alyssa informed him.

John leapt out of bed to join her in getting dressed. *If they don't need immediate backup from Faye, we need her to send the Raptor to pick us up.* he said decisively. *Are they still in danger?*

*I don't know,* she replied, her brow creased with worry.

He nodded, then stared into her eyes. *We can't afford to take any chances. You know what to do.*

Alyssa nodded, hearing his every thought.

***

Omoikane lunged forward with his ninjato, but the blade swiped straight through Faye's purple form. He stumbled forward, thrown off-balance by the lack of contact as he realised she was only a hologram. Before he could react to that realisation, he felt a shocking surge of electricity course through his body and he shrieked as tiny sparks arced across his internal organs, flooding his senses with pain. He had just enough presence of mind to deactivate his pain receptors, allowing him to think straight once again. Only the surge protection built into his system had saved him from being fried alive, his HUD flickering from the blistering jolt of electricity.

Pulling himself off the ground, he saw the remaining three cyborg assassins similarly reeling from the vast amount of power poured into their bodies. Their nanoweave suits had caught fire, smoke pouring off the scorched synthi-flesh covering their metallic chassis.

The purple sprite nodded then said brightly, "I knew you cyborg-types needed a little more oomph! I'm sure you could probably survive being zapped again!"

Omoikane leapt upwards and drove his two swords into the ceiling in a frantic attempt to escape the electrified floor. He heard the shrill electronic screams from the rest of Team Mittsu, as they convulsed with the lightning blasting through their bodies.

Faye fluttered up to the ceiling, beaming a sparkling smile at him from only inches away. "You'll do nicely!"

The sound of doors opening to either side of the corridor interrupted the agonised warbling from Team Mittsu. Omoikane glanced to his right, desperate to find a way of escaping this hideous trap, then gasped in horror at the red-eyed metallic monster that leered at him with a terrifying grin on its face. It pulled back its arm then slammed a fist into him, the thunderous impact felt like being hit by a freight train. The blow smashed him from his hanging grip on the swords, battering him to the ground. Flinching as he expected another blistering charge of electricity, Omoikane felt greatly relieved that the electrified floor had been deactivated, and he skittered unharmed across the deck between the charred wreckage of his team.

He activated his reflex and speed enhancers and they kicked in with a low hum, preparing his body to sprint in a blur across the floor to safety. Just as he was about to run, he was knocked sprawling by a deafening blast wave of sound. His artificial skin tore free from his metallic limbs as he was pounded by one booming explosion of sound after another. The shots were coming from sinister-looking cannons mounted on turrets, which had slid smoothly from the walls. Omoikane's titanium chassis was impervious to the damage, but most of his body was now revealed for the full cyborg conversion that he was, the covering of golden-brown coloured synthiflesh ripped to shreds.

Those hideous grinning robots were on him now, grappling him before he could recover from the stunning effects of the Sonic Cannons. He tried to struggle free, but their grip was fiendishly strong, the four robots eventually holding him spread-eagled between them.

Faye landed lightly on his chest and sat down cross-legged, giving him a friendly smile. She glanced down at his body and her eyes settled on his right wrist. "Data-jacks... how interesting!"

Beckoning one of her robots over, she hummed a happy tune to herself as it approached the cyborg's rigidly-locked chassis. Omoikane watched fearfully as the robot popped out data cables and attached them to the ports. "What're you going to do?!" he blurted out, his voice distorting slightly from the surge damage sustained to his voice modulator.

Faye tilted her head to one side as she concentrated, holding up one finger for him to be patient. She suddenly smiled and said cheerfully, "Silly boy! It looks like you deactivated your pain receptors. Don't worry, I'll turn them back on for you!" Leaning forward, her glowing eyes narrowed as she added ominously, "You'll definitely be needing them..."

Omoikane tried to shut them down again, but he found he'd been locked out -- of everything!

"No, please!" the cyborg begged, desperate to do anything to escape from this hideously deranged AI. "What do you want?!"

"Start talking!" Faye demanded furiously. "I want to know everything! What were you planning to do to my friends?!"

As Omoikane began to speak, he heard the roar of retro-thrusters off to his left. When he twisted his head to look that way, he saw a white gunship rocket out of the hangar. Terra loomed large in the background, clearly visible through the hangar door, the Invictus already entering the planet's upper atmosphere.

***

"Raijin! There were three survivors from the explosion!" Izanagi called out over the comlink, sounding profoundly shocked.

"Impossible," Raijin replied with absolute certainty, while pushing open the black wooden door into the women's bathroom. "Nothing could have survived that blast at such close range. There's no body armour capable of withstanding an explosion of that magnitude."

"I'm not debating this with you," Izanagi said sharply. "Three of them live! I'm looking at them right now. Also, one of them is-"

Partly irritated by the other assassin's tone but more by the apparent defectiveness of the explosives, Raijin snapped back, "Team Futatsu attack! You know Mikaboshi's orders: all must be eliminated except our target!"

"Hai!" Izanagi replied respectfully.

Raijin crept into the bathroom and saw the three comatose women sprawled unconscious on the ground. The sound of whistling wind filled the room and he looked up in surprise at the shattered window.

Activating the comlink he said, "Sarutahiko! I have secured our target, meet me at the broken window on the west side for extraction."

"I have already begun my approach," Sarutahiko replied, in his deep rumbling voice. "Prepare for extraction in twenty seconds."

Nodding in satisfaction at the man's initiative, Raijin felt grateful to his Master for sending another of Mikaboshi's favourites to help execute this mission. Such expertise and dependability could not be underestimated in their worth.

He padded across the ground, drawing his ninjato as he stared at the three girls. Only one had value, the other two were... expendable.

***

Sakura nodded with satisfaction as a cloud of cooled air began to pour from her fingertips. It reminded her of the cold fog rolling down the slopes on Mount Daisen as the white vapour flowed down her arms. She just had to cover her body in this and she'd be invisible to the assassins' heat vision.

Suddenly Alyssa's urgent voice rushed through her mind, *We'll be with you soon! Protect the girls until we arrive!*

*I'm already on my wa- AIIIEEE!* Sakura's reply twisted into a shocked scream, as her ethereal connection to Alyssa was thrown wide open.

A tidal wave of psychic energy washed over her like a tsunami, utterly overwhelming her senses. Her back arched as she lifted off the ground, eyes blazing with an icy-blue radiance as her arms were thrown wide. The chilled air that had been swirling around her hands ramped up into a howling gale, blasting out from her fingertips and forming into billowing clouds. They poured off the platform beneath her and surged down the scorched corridor, blanketing everything in a swirling white bank of cold fog.

Sakura panted with the exertion, her chest heaving as she sucked in her breath. Her entire body felt like it was tingling after that sudden burst of raw power from her Matriarch. Sakura realised she had never really appreciated just how much energy Alyssa held inside her, not until that moment. The last time she'd channelled psychic energy to her, it had been tightly controlled - a measured scaling of energy to help bring out her latent Cryokinetic gift. This time though, Alyssa had been panicked, uncontrolled, and in her frantic, anxious state she'd given Sakura a glimpse of the vast titanic power she handled so effortlessly.

Concentrating for a second, Sakura harnessed that throbbing battery of psychic potential and funnelled some of it into her psychic speed. The swirling cloud banks started to slow and she sprinted down the corridor in a blur.

There were figures moving in the mists, their shapes indistinct, but still partially visible as they moved through the fog. She knew exactly what they were, and by the speed they were moving, both assassins had activated their reflex and alacrity enhancements. Capitalising on the advantage of surprise, she charged silently down the corridor, rushing forward to grapple the closest of the two cyborg ninjas. A shearing crack echoed down the corridor and she channelled as much intense cold as she could into the heavy metal body that she knocked sprawling.

The assassin tried to react but she was already on him, frost riming his body as she shorted out the nanoweave fabric of his stealth suit. The black faceplate of his mask shattered with the cold, his face contorting in horror as Sakura chilled him to the titanium bone. The man might have had a metal body, but he was a cyborg, not a robot, and the icy cold penetrated deep into his chest, dusting his internal organs with frost. His strangled cry of terror froze on his lips as Sakura turned his torso into a solid block of ice. Wrenching his twin black ninjato from brittle fingers, she whirled around to face her second adversary, who advanced on her warily.

The second assassin was confused and alarmed by the sudden appearance of this fogbank, sensing that the supernatural must be at work to explain this surreal meteorological phenomenon. He hadn't seen what had struck his companion, only that whatever it was appeared to be invisible in this accursed fog. His thermal imaging proved useless, showing a featureless blue mass of cold before his eyes. Normal vision wasn't much better, with thick fog obscuring everything, which just left him with mag view.

He activated magnetic imaging and immediately saw his companion lying contorted on the floor, body twisted in agony and frozen in place. There was movement by the dead cyborg's hands and a pair of ninjato were wrested from claw-like fingers, then turned to point his way. Seizing this opportunity, the assassin lunged forward, stabbing out towards the central point between those blades, at the body he knew must be there.

Sakura saw the two swords flash out of the fog, black ninjato standing out against the swirling white clouds. She was moving just as fast as the assassin and easily parried those blades, matching her own enhanced strength against the cyborg's mechanically augmented grip. They were a fairly even match and she was able hold the parry without too much strain.

The assassin danced back again, shocked that his opponent had been able to react in time, but he shook that off in readiness to strike again. Suddenly a whistling wind whipped down the corridor, stinging hail slashing at his body as he was pelted by sharp fragments of ice. A bit of hail was nothing to worry about, not for his tough metal exoskeleton and he shrugged off the ice pellets, ignoring them as he watched the two floating blades twirl in the air.

Watching in mag-view, he wasn't aware that the obscuring fog around him had been blown away, just as the sharp ice tore rips through his nanoweave cloth, removing that concealment too.

"There you are," Sakura said with a grim smile of satisfaction, readying herself for the fight.

The assassin slashed with one sword, then the other, used to exploiting his speed advantage to quickly overcome his enemies with a rapid flurry of blows. To Sakura, the strikes seemed clumsy and haphazard, proving easy to parry for someone also moving in an accelerated state. She waited for him to move his arm back in a predictable backswing, then lunged forward herself, stabbing the cyborg in the shoulder with her ninjato. His metallic body was too strong for her to cleave through his shoulder with the relatively weak sword she had acquired, but that had not been her goal. The blade jammed into the joint, locking the cybernetic arm out mid-backswing.

Before the cyborg could react, she let go of the hilt of her ninjato and grabbed for his throat, her hand already swathed in bitterly cold ice crystals. His scream of terror came out in a hideously distorted wail as she quickly froze his voice modulator, the tendrils of ice then starting to snake out over his head. Sakura intensified the cold radiating from her fingers, so that she could penetrate the cyborg's solid titanium skull. His black mask became brittle under that icy assault, shattering into a thousand pieces as she rapidly dropped the temperature in his head. Turning the assassin's brain into a flash-frozen grey slab, she released him, letting his cybernetic body topple over backwards to land with a heavy thump.

Whirling around, Sakura darted for the bathroom, the last place she knew her friends were intending to be.

***

Jade shifted back to her Nymph shape as she knelt next to the Maliri twins, quickly checking them over to see if there were any other signs of trauma. The incredibly resilient Paragon Armour had saved them both from being killed in the blast, but they were both still unconscious and she had no way of telling if they were suffering from internal injuries. Satisfied that they were at least alive and could be healed by John or Rachel, she watched the smoking nightclub, wary for any danger.

Her sharp, cat-like eyes instantly spotted one of the assassins as he smashed through a top floor window and she watched him tumbling earthbound in a shower of glass. His shrill scream pierced the night sky and she followed his rapid descent until he smashed into the ground with a sickening crunch. She had a feeling there might be more of them about but she was in no position to defend the Maliri in her soft Nymph shape.

Closing her eyes, she shifted into her jade tiger form, knowing that the huge feline's highly-refined senses would help alert her to the approach of unseen assailants. People were fleeing past her from the burning building and the appearance of a nine-hundred-pound tiger in front of them provoked more screams of fear. She ignored the frightened citizens as she stood protectively over the two armoured girls, her attention on more sinister threats.

Barely thirty seconds had passed since she'd landed as a falcon, when Jade first caught that tell-tale scent of hydraulic oil - the same faint aroma that had followed Shinatobe. A moment later, her hyper-sensitive olfactory receptors picked up two more of those unnatural scents, all heading towards her from the same direction. These assassins were used to hunting human prey and the thought of attempting to approach downwind never even occurred to them.

*Incoming assassins, Alyssa, I can smell at least three coming for us,* Jade warned her Matriarch. Her ears twitched as she concentrated harder, picking up the faint but unusual crackle of cloth against tarmac approaching from behind her. *Make that five.*

*We can't get there in time!* Alyssa exclaimed in alarm. *The Raptor hasn't arrived yet!*

*Feed me more power,* Jade said calmly, her green tiger form shimmering in a dark-green haze.

She could feel Alyssa doing exactly that, as she channelled a portion of her vast pool of psychic energy over their connection. The sensation felt thrilling to the growing Nymph, causing her whole body to tingle in response. It didn't feel as deeply fulfilling as when John was carefully nurturing her, but the sudden onrush of new psychic energy allowed her to temporarily exceed her normal limitations.

Throwing her head back, she opened her colossal jaws and let out a gigantic roar in challenge. Her body had swelled to immense proportions, weighing over fourteen tons and measuring forty feet from the tip of her thick tail to her fang filled maw. Her twelve-inch teeth sparked with lightning, while electricity arced over her thick green hide.

Stomping down with one of her enormous rear legs, she let a pulse of electricity course from her body and charge the floor. It wasn't sufficient to risk hurting the nearby Maliri, but it was enough to short out the nanoweave stealth suits the five approaching assassins were wearing. As the light-bending invisibility crackled out, the black-clad assassins were fully revealed, standing rooted to the spot in fear. They could only stare in utter disbelief at the fifteen-foot-tall Tyrannosaurus Rex that had suddenly materialised from nowhere.

Before any of them could react, Jade lunged forward, clamping her massive jaws down on the upper body of the closest assassin. Immensely strong teeth punched through steel as the lightning dancing over her jaws fried the terrified ninja. His desperate screams of terror filled the air as Jade bit down, severing his cybernetic legs completely in a shower of sparks, the metal limbs dropping to the ground with a clang. She whipped her head around and released him, sending his dismembered torso flying, until it slammed into the Enigma building in a shower of rubble.

Izanagi stared at the behemoth in horror as it grabbed another of the assassins by his arm, then tossed him around like a rag doll. Finally overcoming his mind-numbing terror at seeing this gigantic ancient predator made flesh, he drew both his ninjato then activated his reflex and alacrity boosters.

The rest of Team Futatsu followed his lead, sprinting towards the T-Rex in a blur. As Jade tore off the cybernetic arm in her mouth and sent the assassin cartwheeling through the air, the three remaining ninjas slashed at her dark-green hide in a flurry of frenzied sword strikes. Her hide was extremely tough, but their razor-sharp black blades managed to punch through in several places.

Jade shrugged off the pain and whirled around to snap at her attackers with her mighty jaws. They were moving too fast for her to bite now, nimbly darting around as they stabbed her, but that was no longer her intent as she carefully lured the assassins away from the unconscious Maliri.