Screaming in rage and dismay all the way down, the spook goes splat on the tarmac, instantly dying from the impact. Moments later, the bomb that Kane stuck on its chest goes off in a massive explosion, far too big for something no wider than a dinner bowl and leaving a significant-sized crater on the edge of the runway... Talk about cutting it close. But now that he has some peace of mind at the moment, he'd notice that the Mazinger Z was getting manhandled by what looked like some sort of lizarman kaiju decked out in guns and armor.
Gungnir 8 has flatlined.
Hugin, requesting permission to exfil. I'm not losing any more of my team to the mammals.
Permission granted. The plan has gone to the next phase regardless.
Copy. Gungnir team, exit the stage and light the rest of the fireworks.
Negative Gungnir 1, I've almost got the treasure from the mimic.
You have 2 minutes Gungnir 4.
I'll get it done in one.
Ears ringing from the infernal racket caused by what had been unmistakably a railgun slug disintegrating upon failing to destroy its target, the Rayleonard Consultants grit their teeth and continued to press onwards towards their hangar. If the explosions weren't enough to wake up the rest of the base, then that massive clang should have done the trick. Reaching their goal, the consultants entered through the side doors.
"Friggin miracle we made it without anything deliberately trying to kill us huh?"
Stella however isn't quite as optimistic.
"Don't jinx it Bob. And you can put me down now."
The burly man does so, with Shinkai handing the cane back to its rightful owner. Up until now, he'd been dead silent; finding no reason to talk. Until now that is.
"Our plane."
Pointing towards their transport, the trio found the rear cargo doors opening all on their own, an extremely worrisome sight. For one thing, there was absolutely no other way to get the doors to lower automatically, it was all manual; done from inside the plane or through a secured control panel on the rear of the titanic craft. Which meant that something else got to their plane and its extremely valuable cargo first.
"Awwww hell..."
"We have to secure Split Moon. Now."
No more words needed to be said, and the trio quickly advanced towards their now-compromised plane. By the time they had almost reached one of the plane's doors, Shinkai suddenly widened his eyes in horror before he abruptly shouts:
"BOB TO YOUR RIGHT!!!"
Barely stopping himself, a gash suddenly appeared across Bob's belly, drawing blood but little else. Suppressing his scream of pain and shock with a hiss, the pilot then threw a left cross at where he thought the phantom attacker's head was. His instinct was on the mark as his fist created a dull cracking sound, clear evidence of him hitting the ghost where it hurt. Hopefully, more than he had hurt himself as he recoiled and screamed in agony at having most likely broken his hand.
Already moving despite getting rattled and as its cloaking field began to falter after Bob had punched a hole through its helmet, the spook struck at the pilot with its blade, shanking him on the belly, twisting as it pulled its arm out. But before it could deliver another stab, the power-armored infiltrator was tackled to the floor by Shinkai, who then tried to shove a ball-point pen into the hole Bob made on the spook's helmet with a yell of exertion. But the spook was way quicker, catching the young pilot's arm and stopping the makeshift shiv centimeters away from the hole and then kicking him off with its digitigrade leg, sending the ex-IJN pilot into the air for a short while before he comes to a rather harsh landing on the hangar floor, writhing in agony from the severity of the blow.
Kipping up, the fiend was about to march towards the prone pilot and crush his head like an egg beneath its foot if not for Stella's intervention; throwing her cane at the spook's legs with surprising accuracy, tripping it up and giving the young pilot time to recover, where he then scrambled for the stick while the phantom was distracted by his partner. Just as it was about to go after Stella, who tried to put on a brave face but was openly shivering in fear at the prospect of fighting the monster. Shinkai got between it and her, facing off against the power-armored saboteur with a Kendo stance. The very image of a Knight defending his lady from harm.
The fiend cocks its head in amusement at Shinkai's theatrics before obliging his desire to die with some dignity intact by having another wristblade pop out, this time from its off-hand before it moved in to attack, striking with a wild flurry of slashes and thrusts all while practically ignoring any of the young pilot's counterattacks thanks to its armor. As the fight went on, Bob was busying himself by limping up the jet's airstairs, having lowered them all while holding his guts and blood in; the feat made only possible due to Shinkai and Stella taking the fiend's attention away from him.
"Stella, Ikki, hang on tight down there..."
Barely avoiding getting his throat punctured by a lightning-fast thrust from the spook, Shinkai swung the cane's heavy, metallic handle at the side of the phantom's head, only for it to block the strike with its arm with barely any reaction from its part and then to try and wrench the cane out from the pilot's hands. To which he denies the attempt by putting all his weight behind a thrust aimed at its face, completely shattering its helmet's visor and forcing the fiend to back away, where it decided to take a breather to assess its injuries. With the opaque visor gone, Shinkai and Stella ended up getting a good look at the spook's exposed face: Revealing a distinctly reptilian pair of slit pupils on a scaly face pincushioned with shards of "glass", but drew no blood. Narrowing his eyes at the revelation and its implications, Shinkai then began to circle the spook; to keep his muscles from going stiff from the exertion and waiting for it to make its next move.
"Dinosaur Empire..."
The spook followed the young pilot's circling pace in kind, its posture radiating predatory hunger and responding to Shinkai's glare with one of its own, out of anger perhaps? But then it spoke, with an incredibly dry and monotonous voice, sarcasm practically dripping from its tongue.
"An astute observation." And then the reptilian commando attacks. A quick horizontal slash aimed for the consultant's liver to draw in a reaction. Successfully so as Shinkai proceeds with a block of his own, drawing the commando's wrist blade into a lock with the cane. But the dino's inhuman strength ended up forcing the cane to be pushed up high, leaving Shinkai's stomach exposed wide to a pump kick that crashes full force against the man's solar plexus. The sheer force of the kick was enough to lift the man's feet off the floor and send him hopping back about six feet. Forcing the breath out of the pilot's mouth through gritted teeth and causing him to double up in pain at his torso once again taking abuse.
Shinkai refused to surrender, forcing himself back to a proper stance despite the fact that the mere act of moving his torso was already starting to hurt. There was barely any time to recover as the assailant darted in for a follow-up thrust into the man's sternum, barely thrown off course as the cane was pointed outwards to bind against the wrist blade and fend it off course with a forceful flick before sequencing into a counter with a rising vertical strike that caught the spook dead in the jaw. For little to no effect besides staggering the attacker without causing damage due to its mostly intact helmet.
Growing angry and impatient at Shinkai's continued defiance, the infiltrator upped the tempo: Lashing out with a fearsome succession of thrusts and slashes with both blades, the assault was blocked and deflected away by the consultant's cane much in the same manner as the reptilian's earlier attempts, but with every strike he stopped, his reaction to the next attack got sloppier and slower. Lashing out with a hooking slash, the cane was at last smacked aside, breaking the consultant's guard.
Seizing the opportunity, the dino rushes in, seizing the cane with its off-hand to keep Shinkai from using it before stepping forward and delivering a palm strike underneath the consultant's chin, the force of the blow causing the pilot to involuntarily take a step backward and almost giving him a concussion from how violently his head recoiled before the fiend follows up by sweeping his leg with a low kick, unbalancing him further and finally sending him to the ground by wrapping his arm around the consultant's neck and shoulder before pushing him down head-first. All this in less than 10 seconds.
Stunned from the assault, Shinkai could do little to stop the spook from wrenching the cane out of his hands before it rears its arm back; ready to finish the pilot off.
"You lose." At the last possible second, Stella intervened. The red-haired woman made use of a wrench she found lying around and jumped into the back of the infiltrator, quickly wrapping the wrench around the front of its throat and pulling back on it with all her strength to choke the dino out, sending the fiend stumbling backward with Stella's weight pulling on it and forcing him away from Shinkai as it tried to pulled on the wrench to relieve the pressure.
Unfortunately, Stella's attempt to occupy the spook didn't last long. As the commando backpedaled into the closest wall with all of its weight, causing her to loosen her grip from being winded, the slam was a painful distraction for the fiend to pick her thumb out with surgical precision, breaking it with a quick, almost casual twist, earning him a bloodcurdling scream of pain from the operator and allowing it an opening to get her off its back with a well-placed elbow to the side of her ribs and then shrugging off the hitchhiker like a stubborn coat while she was busy writhing in pain.
Turning its attention back to Shinkai, who was groggily getting back up to his feet; the spook sends the consultant sprawling towards the ground with a cruel slap across his comely face. Eyes narrowing in arrogant satisfaction, the fiend once again raises its arm, to finally end the farce of a fight; only to be interrupted yet again, this time with a loud whistle coming from the jet’s direction.
"You're pre-history, punk!"
And there was Bob, propping himself against the jet's doorframe while holding and aiming a Barret .50 cal anti-materiel rifle that he had likely stored inside the transport, straight at the Dino's center of mass. Pulling the trigger before the spook could even fully realize that it was indeed history, the titanic rifle barks out its fury with a deafening boom that echoed throughout the hangar and the Dino suddenly found itself having a new orifice through its chest and straight out its back. The fiend remained transfixed for a moment, as if unable to register what just happened before sinking to its knees and falling over, dead.
Lying flat on his back for a few moments to both catch his breath and because he decided that the floor was very comfortable at the moment, Shinkai finally rises to his feet and looks towards his black, burly guardian angel; who had a massive shit-eating grin on his face despite him using the rifle as a crutch while still bleeding out from his hastily-bandaged belly wound.
"Bob, what took you so long? I got my ass handed to me."
“Gimme a break Ikki. Not exactly the easiest thing to bring Black Bart down from his crib while nursing a stab wound. ”
Seeing that Bob was fine for the moment, Shinkai turned his attention towards his partner, who was having some difficulty standing up straight without her cane. Wasting no time, the young pilot retrieves it for her and wordlessly hands it over, allowing her to finally get back to her feet.
“Thank you...”
Once again without any words between them, Shinkai picks up his partner bridal style before quickly making their way into the jet, where Stella immediately gets to her seat in the cockpit. Just as she was about to get to work, she suddenly bites back a hiss of pain at reflexively moving her broken thumb. Nonchalantly retrieving a bottle of painkillers from inside her coat, she pops in a pair without even needing to wash it down and quickly got back to the task at hand once the pain pills took effect by typing in a few commands on the console, causing a recessed radome to rise from the top of the transport.
“Radar is still good. Guess the Dinos couldn’t risk giving themselves away with jamming.”
Meanwhile, Shinkai attends to Bob; who was acting all tough as the younger consultant properly treated his wound, hardly making a sound. That is until he brought out the morphine syringe and the burly man immediately started getting very nervous.
“N-Nah man, I’m cool! I can ride out the pain! Bleeding’s stopped anyway!”
“Bob, I can’t exactly treat you properly without giving you this. Stella won’t let you fly the jet without finishing first-aid.”
“Yeah, but morphine’ll really take me out of it and we'd be grounded here!”
“C’mon Bob, we don’t have the time...”
Bob resists further by pushing against the consultant’s torso with his free arm, causing him to wince in pain, with the burly man’s face soon afterward contorting with guilt and shame.
“Kh!”
“Damn... You think it’s internal?”
“I’m fine, it’s only bruising...”
“Which’ll get worse if you go out there in Split Moon. But I think I’ve got the solution...”
Bob produces a small plastic bag from his coat pocket... Full of white powder.
”You have cocaine with you?!”
“It was prescribed! How do you think I could do those long intercontinental flights while keeping my sunny disposition? And besides, this stuff'll only make the bleeding worse so it's no good for me. You on the other hand...”
“I thought that that was just the coffee...
Mataku... Fine, let me at it...”
Nervously taking the packet from Bob, Shinkai shakily opens it up and began to take in the nose candy just like in the movies... Before promptly degenerating into a fit of sneezing and coughing.
“Woah, Woah! Take it in, take it in! Don’t let it out!”
“What’s going on back there?! What did you do to Shinkai Bob!?”
“Just helping him with an injury he took from that lizard!”
Then, the fits stopped and Shinkai was suddenly up and about, eyes darting every which way and his fingers constantly clenching and unclenching all while he began to restlessly chatter and clack his teeth.
“Shinkai? What did this fool do?”
"Nothing to worry about I’m fine I’m good. Gotta hurry or we’re all going to die. Get Split Moon ready for takeoff.”
Without even waiting for Stella to respond, the Shinkai was already halfway down the crew compartment before promptly disappearing behind a rad-shielded door that leads into the back cargo bay where Split Moon waited.
”...You gave him drugs didn’t you?”
“Desperate times. Princess, desperate times...”
Then the awkward atmosphere was broken by several successive sonic booms coming from outside. Not wasting any time, Stella goes back to her seat and promptly begins doing what her partner requested, with one small monitor to the side of the main screen transmitting a live feed of the Split Moon’s cockpit, where Shinkai had already begun to secure himself upon on the heavy reclined pilot seat in a near-supine position, quickly pulling wires out of ports from the futuristic-looking seat to plug into his wrists and the back of his neck, the act giving him seemingly no pain despite how invasive the procedure looked.
“Shinkai, you’re not in your flight suit, piloting Split Moon without it is-”
“No time. Need to be out there now, help others. Split Moon has the speed and me the reactions to dodge linear cannon fire from sniper. Hurry please.”
Sighing as there was really nothing she could do from where she was or to dissuade her partner from the course he was taking, she disengages the security and weapons locks, then proceeds to spool up the Split Moon’s reactor causing a steadily increasing buildup of radiation to emanate from within the cargo hold.
“Don't push yourself too hard... Commence the mission.”
“I won’t die, can’t. Not yet. Split Moon launching.”
All of a sudden, everyone in the area with the equipment and the means would detect a massive spike of radiation coming from inside one of the airbase’s hangars. And then something explodes out of said structure in a blinding, whitish blur of motion, leaving a large hole in the hangar on its way out before suddenly taking off in a westerly direction in a burst of whitish-green flame, its momentum carrying it further and further into the distance.
@Ironboi13 @Mazin Kiryu @The Ancient Purple @TrickOLF
