I was standing there in my boxer briefs and some tactical gear, surrounded by three monster girls and this dude whose ass I kicked, holding a pair of gun-swords and about to fight my way out of an ambush and it occurred to me more so in that moment than in anything prior that my life had taken a wildly different turn than what I had expected it to.
I just wanted to be a firefighter, marry the nice quiet girl who liked drawing and going on hikes, and now look at me. What the fuck.
“Thirty seconds!” Io hissed.
I finished sawing and a roughly circular portion of our flooring and the roof of the next story suddenly dropped down into a—thankfully unoccupied—hotel room. The energy blades were no joke man. “Done!”
Tabitha stepped up beside me and planted a kiss on my cheek before dropping down to the next story. She bounced off the bed and landed on her feet, moving towards the exit with a spring in her step.
Io went next, kissing my other cheek before tumbling over the edge and landing with surprising grace in the room below.
Then it was my turn.
My doppelganger went in for a kiss and I took a step back. “Alright Euna, that’s enough.”
The real Tabitha and Io both chuckled from their positions up on the same floor as me whilst all three of the copies affected the same pouty look. Euna chuckled as well before sending her last copy down into the room below along with one of Io’s magical drones. The other drone would stay with us.
Her three copies were the distraction. Their job was to lead the enemies on a wild goose chase through the hotel’s upper floors while we pushed for our main objective; the service elevator.
“Sensors up,” Io announced.
Tabitha followed that up with a call of, “Explosives set!”
“Guys, they’re only five floors down, we gotta go!” Blitz said from the doorway.
“Alright people. Move.” I donned my HUD glasses and refused to acknowledge how ridiculous I looked right now. Underwear. Armor. Glasses. Whatever, man. I had bigger problems. Through the HUD, I got an overlay of drone feeds from Io’s birds and the sensors she had set up all down the hall. We moved out of the suite and left the main area of it trashed so that the big hole in the center was clearly visible.
Down the hall was a clear shot to the elevator with no deviation. Luckily for us all of these other rooms were emptied out by the Bureau ahead of time, or this next part might have gotten pretty messy.
All five of us got into position right as the elevator dinged and the doors started opening.
A squad of human Bureau agents—the lesser variety who weren’t Keepers but were instead called Hunters—fanned out into the hallway with rifles up and at the ready. They were wearing better armor and wielding deadlier weapons than the Ouroboros’s goons had, but I couldn't help but feel like the similarities outweighed the differences here. Compared to fighting vampires or a manticore, these guys were like paper targets.
The squad started moving towards the main suite, kicking open doors on either side of the hall as they went. Whilst their training and precision allowed them to head our way swiftly, they were in no rush to reach our end of the hall before the helicopter had cleared off.
Behind us in our main suite we heard three sonic explosions as the helicopter spun into position and fired off a barrage of twirling sonic grenades that impacted the easter wall of the hotel and instantly caved in those expensive floor-to-ceiling windows; bringing them down in a hail of shattered glass that filled the entire suite.
The helicopter pilot opened up with a minigun, sweeping back and forth across our safehouse and chewing clear through to the other side. He kept up the fire for a solid ten seconds—which felt like an eternity when a 50-caliber minigun was unloading superheated metal onto a location you were recently sitting and drinking a beer in—before letting the gun quiet down.
Immediately, rappel lines dropped down from the lip of the shattered window and a new squad dropped down from above, landing and bringing up their weapons to clear the hotel suite. Little green lasers swept across the entire once-luxurious room and many of them slowly came to rest on the giant circle carved through the center of the floor.
The elevator squad was halfway through our floor now, nearing our position.
“Phase one, go!” I whispered into our comms—we gave one to Euna but not Blitz.
Tabitha activated the explosives with no shortage of savage delight, a joy I shared in via our psychic bond. Her finger came down on the detonator and the hardened charges we had placed throughout the suite started going off, taking out one or two of the Hunters with each muffled blast.
In the same instant, Euna sent her copies running down the hallway one floor beneath us. The helicopter instantly tilted and started strafing in time with the trio of running figures, its minigun spooling up once more. Euna winced as the weapon belched out a volley that likely mowed down her copies in an instant, and I reached out to grip her shoulder reassuringly.
Io’s part of phase one came next. A flock of her magical drones swung around the south end of the building and sped towards the helicopter whilst it was in motion and focused on the fleeing copies. In their sharpened configuration, each of her drones mimicked the shape of a spearhead and rocketed through the helicopter at top speed. Aided by the vehicle's own trajectory, they punched through the helicopter like armor-piercing ammunition through plywood.
Through our HUD I watched metallic debris fly off the helicopter as it plummeted and spun down towards ground level. A predictive algorithm for its new trajectory placed it directly in the hotel’s outdoor amphitheater which was devoid of the little yellow dots that signified pedestrians.
With phase one complete, the elevator squad started moving towards the hotel suite at full speed, assuming that their three targets were already dead and moving to check on their buddies in the suite.
Once they passed the rooms we were hiding in, I whispered, “Phase two, go.”
Phase two was my favorite. Io jammed the Hunter’s radar so they could no longer detect us. Then Tabitha and I stepped out into the open from opposite ends of the hallway, aimed at the backs of the retreating Hunters, and opened fire. Blitz, Io, and Euna ran down the hallway towards the service elevator as we unleashed a barrage of fire upon the people sent to kill us.
First we launched three grenades into their midst. One concussion, one shock, and one incendiary. Then I sent a hail of acidic shrapnel their way that super combined on one or two of them whilst Tabby administered headshot after headshot.
We moved backwards down the hall and kept up a steady stream of fire, gunning down any of the up-armored Hunters dumb enough not to take the heavy hints we had laid down in the first round. It bought our allies enough time to get inside the elevator.
For a few short seconds my entire world shrunk down to this hallway. Behind me were people I needed to protect, ahead of me were enemies who wanted to kill me, and at my side was Tabitha; my super-hot werewolf girlfriend.
The minute the shooting started, some of the Hunters kicked down the doors of hotel rooms on either side of the hall and leapt inside for cover. They must have started breaching through room after room because suddenly doors started popping up all over and Hunters peeked out to pop off a few shots.
All told, the firefight probably only lasted maybe a minute. But my blood was up and Tabitha and I were in complete psychic sync. It felt way longer.
She dropped her rifle when it hit empty and yanked out both of her pistols. We pirouetted back and forth in the center of the hall, firing upon targets one of us had spotted and the other one struck down as our senses reached perfect harmony.
What she saw, I reacted to, and vice versa.
All at once there no longer appeared to be a point in our minds where one of our thoughts began and the other ended. ‘Tabitha’ and ‘Ryan’ ceased to be separate individuals and instead became one harmonious killing machine. As if our very synapses had intertwined.
We carved our way through the Hunters like we had rehearsed and choreographed the whole thing for months. A dance with death that left us standing whilst a horde of Hunters lay strewn across the hotel’s upper floor, a helicopter smoldering in its amphitheater, and the premier suite looking like a war zone.
Then we were inside the elevator and the doors were closing.
I was once again me, singular, and Tabitha’s consciousness faded back into her own mind. She was not so far away as she had once been, and I could feel my heart skip a beat from eagerness at the prospect of reaching out and intertwining once more, but it came with a shocking type of out-of-body experience. Going from being two people at once down to just one was jarring, to say the least.
“Whoa,” Euna said softly, staring at both of us in awe.
“I know right?” Io agreed. “They’re so fucking hot together.”
Tabitha’s instinct drove the action, but we both turned back and winked at Io in unison.
“See? Hot,” Io concluded.
“Philips and I never stood a chance against you did we?” Blitz realized aloud, his gun held at his side as if he had tried to find a good opening to fire it but never managed it.
Right before the doors shut, and I mean right before, a blur sped through the opening and into our midst. A shot of adrenaline like I had never felt rushed through my system and time slowed to a halt.
Literally.
Just like back at Hilltop when that primal had attacked, time itself slowed to a crawl and gave me an excellent view of what was happening.
One of the Hunters in the hallway must not have been as dead as he seemed. Because floating in midair in between me and all three of the most important living women in my life—and Blitz too, I guess—, was a primed grenade.