Board Thread:Role Plays/@comment-5999656-20190205035159/@comment-5999656-20190612051111

Maris clutched Ordinator so tightly her knuckles were white, chest heaving and eyes wide as she kneeled on the cold concrete. Her Syndicate jacket was marred by countless large gashes, and strips of black and red cloth hung loosely from her trembling frame.

It was getting cold. With just a white undershirt underneath, Maris could feel the chilly sea breeze blowing against her bare skin for the first time, raising goosebumps all along her skin. But it wasn't just that it was colder all of a sudden. That wasn't the real reason she was shaking.

It was that woman, in the black trenchcoat with the fangs. She was blindingly fast, even with the heavy metal coat on. With just a large knife, she'd dodged all of Maris's shotgun blasts and closed in before she had a chance to change her weapon back into sword form. The teen spy had been left to barely fend off a flurry of knife jabs with a bulky shotgun. If it hadn't been for Sorrel, she probably wouldn't still be standing here at all.

With a grimace, Maris pulled herself to her feet, ignoring the aches where the blade had dug dangerously into her Aura reserves. Speaking of Sorrel... the male Syndicate agent groaned and pulled himself out of the miniature crater he'd made in the side of wall. And not a moment too soon - an array of cracks began to snake through the floor, gaping wide as they lightninged through the concrete. A number of these widened into chasms large enough to swallow a man whole. One such chasm breached itself open a few paces before Maris. But when she peered in, she didn't see the gloom of the sea, no. What she saw instead were dozens of gleaming ruby pinpricks, and what she heard was chittering, and the sound of hundreds of tiny rodents pelts brushing against each other.

Maris jumped back from the hole, gritting her teeth as she backed up several yards. There was a smell, too. Seawater and the musky scent of storage, mixed with something Maris recognized all too well from her brutal triad training back in Vale.

Freshly spilled blood.

"You alright, Maris?" Sorrel gasped, still out of breath as he returned to her side. His expression was concealed behind his shaded visor, but Maris could tell he wasn't doing well from how he was doubled over. No visible bleeding, but something like that was just a shallow reassurance considering the multitudes of other ways someone could be injured. Before she could respond, Wynston's voice sounded out behind her, and both agents turned to see Brunhilde sitting astride a massive crystal cobra speed past them, barreling through the debris in its path.

"Oi!!" Maris called out. She made as if to run after the snake, but then a certain familiar masked woman stepped into her path, barrel pressed to the back of a lanky cowboy whose face was obscured by his bandana. The woman started speaking, using that familiar condescending tone  from before to offer forth a mode of salvation.

... Something about partnering to get on the helicopters? Yeah, sure, whatever. The sound of all the rats was getting louder, and it wasn't like she or Sorrel had a better idea as for how to get their asses off this godforsaken facility. In a moment like this, she didn't have time to weigh all the options carefully and choose the most advantageous one.

Actually, scratch that. They only had one option in the first place. Maris opened her mouth to offer her assent.

"You know, that sounds pretty - "

Once again, Maris found her words cut off by the sudden arrival of yet another element. It was the same white-haired man who had seized her roughly just an hour before, but this time he was accompanied by a reptilian Faunus... wait no, a robot lizard. What the hell?

Maris's head swung back and forth as she rapidly processed this new situation. The irony wasn't lost on her. How many minutes ago had they been content to spout threatening insinuations and heavy-handed promises of death at each other? And now here they were ready to throw their collective eggs into the same basket.

"Go, go go!" Sorrel shouted, as the cracks began to widen once more in response to the heaving of the facility. Maris instinctively broke into a run, moving past Hazel and Dust to trail close behind Diaboli and his guard.

"Alright, let's do this," she responded in a low voice, finger still resting ready on Ordinator's trigger. The sound of light footsteps accompanied Sorrel's appearance at her back, turned so that he could keep track of Dust and Hazel behind them. They moved like this for a good twenty seconds, before a thought struck Maris's head.

".... Hey, aren't the helicopters that way?"

________________________________

Lustra, Nozomi, and Aster sprinted back into the other room of the facility, only to be greeted with a scene of total chaos before them. The ropes still dangled, but clinging to them were a multitude of Grimm rats, some longer than a human forearm. A few Hunters scaling the ropes high above clung tightly to them as the great pull from the creatures below drew the lines taut. Other Hunters were spread around the outer edges of the room like themselves, trying desperately to think of a way to circumvent the sea of darkness writhing before them. The least fortunate among them were stuck in the midst of it all, covered head to toe in rats that stuck to them no matter how hard they swung their weapons, or how violently they torqued their bodies, or how loudly they screamed and gurgled.

Lustra tried to ignore the sickening scene before her, and spun the cylinder in her staff to Wind Dust mode. With a carefully aimed gust, she could avoid climbing the lines entirely and send herself shooting up to the copters instead. She'd be safe. But then she looked at Aster, the least qualified combatant among their trio.

The boy had never even attended a Huntsman academy, never learned to channel Dust using his will alone. The fear written across his face, and the trembling of his clenched fists, betrayed his lack of a plan. At that moment, Lustra knew she couldn't leave him here. To abandon a weaker partner to save oneself... a true Huntress would never do such a thing. And despite it all, Lustra still considered herself a true Huntress. So her choice was clear.

In the next moment, Lustra had ejected all but the green Dust crystal from her staff. She ran up to Aster, and seized him by the arm. She met his eyes, and thrust her staff into his hand.

"Hold on tight," she said. In the next moment, she slammed the staff into the ground, and a shockwave erupted from the base of the weapon. The staff, and Aster grabbing tightly onto it, shot straight upwards, smashing through the skylight and into the waiting open bay of the helicopter carrier. Lustra watched him go, and released a breath as she saw him land safely far above.

Suddenly she felt a mass land on her back and scrabble all over her. The rats! In that one moment of opening, they'd finished off their last victim and went for her, the next nearest target. They were heavier than she expected, their teeth clamping into her clothes and her hair and her skin and pulling her to the floor. She briefly made out the shocked face of Nozomi reaching for her before the black bodies swarmed over her field of vision, pressing their smoky bodies against her face and stifling her breath. Even in the blackness, she could make out her tiny light flashes at a dozen different points, where the creatures were digging into her Aura reserves. Was this going to be how it ended for her?

No. No, it couldn't be. Lustra wasn't going to let it. Her fist tightened on the small crystals digging into her palm, and she let her thoughts flow into the gemstone pressed between her thumb and forefinger.

Activate.

Instead of an inferno, as Lustra had expected, the very ground beneath her crumbled into sand, and she plummeted twelve feet down into the facility's hold. She bounced off an empty cage and smacked into the ground a second later, the impact sending many of the rats flying off of her. Her vision flashing but free, Lustra gasped and switched the crystal in her hands. A second later, the sphere of flames she'd planned at first exploded forth, incinerating many of the horrid beasts in such a close vicinity. She laid there for a precious few seconds, blinking rapidly as she tried to regain her mental bearings. It was taking longer than usual. That was weird. Her body felt heavy, and it wasn't because of the impact.

Perhaps not far away, a certain SAINT operative might find herself struggling to throw off the same cold influence, coming from the humanoid abominations just a few meters away from the two of them.