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Azure Armature BEFORE THE OPERATION:

Gathering in an "empty" single-story building - don't mind the curtains drawn black over the dim light from the outside, or the pool of rank fluid leaking from a corpse (or a re-corpse, depending on your spiritual views on the dead and un-dead), Azure Armature (who had introduced herself as "Blue" and checked everyone's Hobo Hero credentials if they're new) stands near a floating platform made out of shining hard-light, a map placed upon it and weighed down by a central weight.

"Everyone." Begins 'Blue', tapping the map. "This is a layout of the facility as last understood. We have no better intelligence. I have arranged for an explosive package to be deployed by Agent Batou in his stealth-tank on the perimiter wall here..." She taps the map at a location that had been pre-marked. "From timer zero, we will rapidly move across the intervening no-man's land and split up into two teams. Team one will be led by myself, and will move through this corridor, towards the central control area. Candle will bring his forces with me, burning as we go."

She gestures to Albert of the Flotilla. "Albert will be leading Team Two. Their operational objective is to move as deep as possible, free or eliminate any prisoners that could be used as leverage and any war materiel, and destroy whatever secondary and tertiary targets of opportunity they come across."

She taps a few grainy photographs. "Familiarize yourself with these photographs, as they are the suspected Lieutenants on the premisis. Killing them becomes an immediate primary objective. Otherwise, secure or destroy."

"Albert and I will remain in contact through secure band. Everyone, please take one flare-compass. I have arranged with the other teams in the city to carry flare guns. Once we've completed all objectives, operatives are free to fade or join ongoing fights in the city. Other teams will pop flares when signalled to help you find them, or if they encounter lieutenants."

"Any questions?" Blue finishes, with a tone that indicates that she actually doesn't care if there are any questions.

"Good. Synchronize time-keeping devices... now. Let's begin the operation."
Bloody Revelations     The Shackle Maw Penitentiary is a sight to behold. Deep within 'The Old Distict' as the local population calls it, for both its relative lack of renovation, and its obvious, advanced age, the massive complex is impossible to miss for its high walls, foreboding air, and the wheel of ravens that perpetually turns above it, making the continuous croak of thousands of birds in the far distance the only noise on these otherwise silent and crumbling streets.

    A moldering sign caked in smog-grime and mildew names this place "Hoshosen Hospice", on a Rhiannan street, but it looks anything but hospitable. In place of the simple and short, brick and mortar walls that once surrounded a courtyard, only an impediment to convalescents, black iron fences have taken over, topped with wicked barbs that are frequently host to skewered corpses, some picked clean by the birds up above, but others partially intact for the fact that they still move every now and again. The gardens have been laid waste to and now host only additional fortifications and postings for guards, including towers within the walls topped with massive mirrors that reflect colourless firelight into spotlight beams on the ground below to complete the dark and destitute Alcatraz air.

    Normally, nobody could be paid enough to come even this close, never mind want to stage a break in, so these things would be a formality. Instead, the place is packed with ghosts, mostly visible and tangible for the sun having set on the Shadowland. Where flesh and blood guards would walk patrol routes and man watch towers, silent apparitions stalk the dark paths, and often go straight through walls or across empty space, making getting past them complicated. Undead war hounds stitched together out of various vicious animal parts patrol the yard, lead around on soulsteel chains.

    Despite the significantly increased number of personnel, the surveillance network and its routine are largely unchanged due to its already exceptional efficiency. It's almost something of a miracle that everyone can get over the walls. It is in fact somewhat suspicious, when at one or two points a ghost seems to catch sight of a less stealthy someone, only to stare right through them or have their eyes slip over them. The creepy calm is a thin and fragile one, though. That eerie sense breaks along with the walls when the payload goes off at the designated time, and blows a ragged hole through the back end of one of the complex's departure bays, immediately raising an alarm: the booming sound of some tortured beast howling without pause for breath, immediately scrambling the guards into action, and setting the war hounds joining in the chorus.
Candle Candle is barely paying attention. His people aren't in the building, immediately speaking-- a few of them are, but that's only because they have to be. There's too many to just cram into this building. So he's got a personal guard and then the rest are going to join up with them when they leave and push forward into the operation.

The man himself is leaning lazily against his ludicrously oversized sword. One of his people looks at the pictures because nobody expects him to actually retain this information. Really, it's probably best to keep him close at hand.

A flare compass hangs from a cord around his neck. Because otherwise he'd forget that too. Other things he doesn't have-- a time-keeping device. As if he'd be able to read it. It's only when "Blue" says that the operation is beginning that he reacts properly. Embers flare within his eyes, and a ghostly flame spreads through the building.

An offering of power rolls through the surroundings, as it so frequently has in the flame champion's presence.

"This took too fucking long, Blue." He complains, stalling for enough people to leave the building so that he can drag his massive jawbone blade out the door without murdering friendlies in passing.
Starbound Flotilla     As mentioned before, Albert's scheme is strange and dangerous: A heavy underground incursion system! The massive tunnel-boring ground-rocket is built directly around some kind of linked gunship and a very small mecha embedded within as well. He's assembled it piece-by-piece below the building in secret through teleportation-smuggling, and set it to launch when he gets a targeting beacon down.

    This means following the main incursion at the back end. And that means armoring up for a heavy assault. He's wearing elaborate commando armor reconstructed with a much more strange form now. Where before there was a rebel spy aesthetic and a commando look to it, now he's got a set of heavy laboratory protection gear, and bristles with odd sciency tools gleaming in a shining white. Thick cords link his suit's power systems to something that looks like an LMG had a child with a radio tower. It is a brutal as hell ray-gun.

    "Find passage down, /now/! There's nothing of worth on the surface but /symptoms/. Find the source and we will /cauterize/ it." He issues his orders in a brutal, aggressive tone, and opens fire with his huge raygun, emitting gushes of radioactive fire that bring both the kinetic impact of a tank shot and the biohazardous effect of a nuclear meltdown to the guard towers he targets on his way towards the breach. As he walks, he's almost instinctively pinging his environmental scanner for the passage to the "caves" he seeks.
Batou From a safe distance, Batou watches a huge hole blow open in the wall.

"Hell yeah! In case you didn't hear it get ready!" he shouts over the comms to the rest of the op.

Batou orders the tachikoma to ram through the hole in the wall, scanning to discern between guards and prisoners.

"Engage only hostiles, Tachikoma! No casualties!"

"Roger!" Tachikoma shouts, wheeling full speed into the building.

Batou chases after, keeping pretty acceptable speed as he hears the beasts running towards their location."Ah, company! We'll take care of it."

For this specific op, Batou has a riot shotgon with him, ready to blast any bogies out of the equation. A run and gun sounds like a much needed change of pace.
All-Seeing Eye      Standing at the edge of the soft glow created by Blue's holographic display, the other Alchemical Exalt in the room wears what seems to be standard-issue attire. A double-breasted trenchcoat, a turtleneck, smart utilitarian slacks tucked into dark combat boots. All of his clothing bears empty velcro patches where identifying insignias have been left out, and the colors are deep, dark blues so as not to stand out in the night air.

     All-Seeing Eye shakes his head in the negative when Blue asks if there are any questions. With a few mental commands, his internal recording software's timestamp is synchronized with the rest of the operation. The grainy photographs are saved to the memory crystal inside his eye-drone.

     When the operation begins, he stalks the streets of the Old District, weaving in and out of alleyways and circuitously following Azure Armature. His vision penetrates the buildings to track her location, his path deliberately winding so as not to draw too much attention. The crowing of the birds reaches his ears and causes a frown to sour his features. That frown only intensifies when one of the ghostly guards nearly spots him.

     Hugging the wall of a dilapidated building, he waits for the apparition to pass, spying its route with his superior vision. A soft click accompanies the appearance of an artificial, bulging shape in his sleeve. He holds his hand up, ready to fire... only for the incident to pass without notice. He says nothing--his expression speaks volumes. A look of equal parts bewilderment and suspicion, golden eyes narrowing after the initial shock. 'What?'

     The internal timestamp begins to countdown to the moment of their strike, and the telltale explosion strikes. Eye breaks into a nimble, bounding sprint, dipping forward into a handspring and vaulting over the wall of the penitentiary in the chaos. His vision paints a picture of the surroundings, compensating for his inverted position. As his body turns right side up, so does his expression. With a confident smile, he hides in the shadows, waits for a straggling guard (alive or dead, material or immaterial) and strikes out with his Personality Override Spike.

     Immediately upon making contact, he begins searching--do the guards have any orders to ignore them? Is this a setup?
Tomoe Tomoe had only just been saved from being trapped in a crazy dream world. Well more a nightmare world, she had things she had to tend to in her life such as doing what she could to help. So here the Salamander woman was going over the beefing data. She looks over the pictures making sure to keep those images in mind. She takes the locators and flares putting them into her inventory to make sure she doesn't lose them for the moment.

She really does not seem to be happy but it's not really focused at Creation, it's likely aftermath from her kidnapping.

Now

She has opted to help Albert when it came down to the team so here she is following after him Tomoe is now in play taking to the skies and heading for some of the towers who have not faced Albert's wrath.

She ends up raining fire and bolts of light down on them in an attempt to take them down and also further divide the local forces.
Azure Armature Moving from the building's cover with an easy lope as the 'signal' is set up by Batou's Tachikoma, Azure Armature moves across the indicated No-Man's land with Candle's gaggle of goons falls in.

"When weighed against a lightning assault, a planned blitzkreig has better penetration power, force multiplication power, and above all, coherency."

Armature's right arm rings with digital lines and technomagical overlays, her palm spraying a cone of cheap energy blasts into the breach.

"Planning makes attacks better." She summarizes executively, as she powerslides through the breach low, firing more. "Don't bother with the alarm! Any time you spend on the grounds is wasted! Don't let them bunch up or form lines, break through! Every second wasted is a second you hand to the enemy!" The scarfed operator shouts to her allies, gesturing with her left hand as she sprays more blasts into crowds with her right, boosted by Candle.

As she moves towards the inner walls of the building, she ceases her shooting to gather up a more powerful charged blast, this time her arm spooling with magmatic earth. "Anyone with me, we're going up!" She announces, before firing a dedicated magma shot right into the wall. "Don't waste time with the trash! Go-Go-Go!"
Staren     After the SHENANIGANS of Emblem City, Staren is feeling extra cautious. Especially when going into a shadowland at night. He's gone full mechanical, hoping for a measure of extra protection against any death magic that is stronger against the living. He hasn't had a chance to replace the usual armor though, that was a customized Triax import -- so in its place are lighter armor plates made for espionage-model cyborgs, without his built-in weaponry -- although he has a pair of armbands with weapons built into them instead, and a harness with the forcefield emitter discs worn over it as well.

    Espionage armor or no, Staren's not usually sneaky -- He follows Albert, using his beam cannons on anyone in his way and deploying the armband's retractable vibro-claws (snikt, bub) to tear through walls and locked doors.
Empty Tidings Toriki Falling Rain is an attache from Lookshy who has been rewarded with her dutiful attendance of war councils and near-obsessive tracking of your movements by being assigned to go follow you in on this operation. According to her terse explanation upon her arrival, Lookshy is displeased by the utter lack of filed intelligence reports, and attaching their own agent to the op is their solution to the problem. Apparently, she's particularly good at breaking and entering.

'And filing all necessary reports,' she added, as if daring anyone to add to her obscene workload.

RIGHT ABOUT NOW

Actually getting over the wall isn't a problem for Rain. She's athletic, as all soldiers of Lookshy have to be, and naturally inclined to this sort of subterfuge. She maneuvers to cover without much trouble, keeping Blue and All-Seeing Eye ahead of her while she takes in their surroundings. She's particularly interested in seeing what it is they can do, and is keenly aware of her own lack of familiar support in this situation. She'd have preferred some time to familiarize herself with the rest of them.

The call goes out. Rain crosses open ground and heads for the inner wall -- and the big ol' hole in it, courtesy of a magma blast. "Impressive equipment," she asides on the way. She's loosened her sword in its scabbard, but seems to be the type who waits for a good opportunity rather than waving it around unnecessarily.
Miari     Miari's bound and determined to see the Mask of Winters' entire operation shut down and purged from Creation. And the Underworld too, if she could be so fortunate. He and his efforts are a stain on all that is decent in the world. An aberration and sickness that must be purged.

    It is her duty, as a holder of the Mandate of Heaven, to deal with problems like this.

    And this time, she's sticking with Albert, the man who seems most familiar with these operations of her fellows. Whom she's keen on studying and learning from!

    This time Miari's seen fit to dress up in battle regalia, currently wearing a Shogunate era battle dress woven of Essence silk (green and gold motif) with strategic placement of Jade-steel of multiple colors to dissuade strikes to vitals and extremities, without sacrificing much in the way of mobility. A circlet of gold beyond gold rests on her head, set with an oily-opalescent gemstone that glows within. A thin film of white-emerald light burns from her skin, currently so dim that only looking close would reveal it. Her power is brimming tonight, and she's doing little to hide it.

    And the moment Albert opens fire, Miari's right behind him. Calmly hurrying along. What targets he doesn't immediately fire out, STRANGE THINGS occur to as she glances at them.

    Guards are flung from towers. Supports holding them up simply give way as if cut through by an invisible blade. Actual DIAMOND SAWBLADES materialize for a few seconds to go flying at guards, and beams of disintegrating light spear from the ground to pierce towers from beneath.

    "I could burrow us a tunnel!" She suggests to the armored insurgent.
Bloody Revelations     The defenses --though perhaps better termed an early warning systems-- on the outside of the Penitentiary are compromised in two positions.

    Where the wall caves in 'behind' the building, on its northern side, the lighter guard (due to the fewer entrances) is overwhelmed immediately, and aren't dumb enough to charge the entering Elites in ones and twos, instead calling loudly for reinforcements, where guards and hounds nearer to that end of the building begin to converge. They keep a respectable distance from the breach until triple thick ranks of armed ghosts can line up, which is plenty of time for Elites to charge in.

    After they do, they'll immediately send the rotting, semi-skeletal dogs, each the size of a bengal tiger, in through the breach behind them, chasing them down by scent. The couple of ghosts unlucky enough to be on the opposite side are either obliterated by chunks of flying brick, or gunned down on the spot by Azure's entry fire, dissipating into fine mist. Straight away, they're pounding down grimy, barely lit corridors at a frantic pace, deep into the belly of the former hospital.

    Mere steps from the outer wall, it becomes almost impossible to see without portable lighting. Webs, mold, rust, and dried blood cake every surface, and the air is filled with not only the stench of rotting bodies and human waste, but no doubt several kinds of unpleasant fungal spores and diseased drafts. It's dank, hot, humid, and smells revolting, and is clearly not simply neglected, but /intentionally/ kept in this state.

    The interior at least appears to be lightly guarded, only resulting in the odd squads of sword-wielding guards trying to ambush from around a corner, because their only companions are the withered arms and grasping fingers reaching out to them through the barred slots in every ward door along the way, begging them to let them out. There must be scores of them here, if not hundreds, crammed into every available 'patient room' and left to rot on purpose. It doesn't even look like there's any way to push food into the cells. One prisoner seems to have been literally in the process of escaping when they broke in, and was cut down right in the middle of a four way intersection in front of them, slowly bleeding out as he struggles to even crawl, directly away from the guards closing in from behind, and towards a plunging set of stairs ahead.
Bloody Revelations     On the other end, Albert charges the gates. They're meant to keep the 'resistance' out and prisoners in, so they aren't properly militarized; only reinforced with chains and stone barricades, which splinter completely when he opens fire. With Tomoe, Miari and Staren busting in alongside him, they immediately come under fire, primarily from heavy bows being used by guards on the towers, which are blasted to pieces one after the other by the completely unfair disparity in firepower. One of the inner towers turns its spotlight on them, which then narrows into an intense, ice blue glare, suddenly scorching everything under the glare as if with incredible heat, though the sparse grass simply turns black and withers away instead of catching fire. An entire squad of the gigantic dogs come barrelling right at them, charging straight into the light without issue, and leaping onto each of their targets to sink their prosthetic steel teeth into their suits.

    As usual, the chaos of Elite fury turns out to be a great time for All-Seeing Eye to act. He catches one of the guards running to the gates from the shadows, and jams the spike into his 'material enough' corpus. What he finds is troubling. The guards absolutely have been alerted to the repeated incursions from Multiversals after they'd finally taken direct action against the Mask last time, and are in fact expecting to see an assault specifically today, to the point this one is vaguely aware of some countermeasures taken to deal with them. On the other hand, there are absolutely no standing orders whatsoever to /let/ them in, and they've been told to take every measure to stop them on the spot.
Azure Armature The team that follows Azure inside sees her slow her pace by a half-measure once the prisoner cells become apparent, the ambushes of 'lesser' threats more than likely just being punched in the or shot a few times and then shoved past, expecting the body of her team to fall in and passingly finish off the guards.

"If there are any of you with a dire need to release the prisoners, we won't be waiting! Shoot the locks if you want, it could create a useful distraction -- we won't be able to get them all out."

She thumbs behind her. "Increasing the chaos here will be to our advantage, and we'll be setting it ablaze after, so work quickly. Otherwise, push forward!" She calls, moving her pace back up to her shooting tactical jog.

As she moves, she brings up her digital mapping systems, checking for any major concentration or blips on her radar.

"Batou!" She calls down, not quite sure he came with her, before switching to her radio.

<"Albert. Heavy prisoner density. Consider clearing emplacements in the courtyard ahead of them being released into the grounds. High-Value Target not found yet. Will advise.">

<"Batou, coordinate HVT watch with your companion unit, and engage targets of opportunity. If you think it critical to break off, I'll leave that to discretion.">

She addresses Candle, who is CERTAINLY near her, as she jogs. "Don't confirm kills - and don't hold back. Fight at a moving pace, and let your van clean up! One strike, two at most, and we'll outpace these flatfoots!"
Candle "/Shit/. I know. It's just so gods-damned tiring." Candle continues to grouse, sending waves of fire spinning off into the surroundings with casual swipes of his jawbone blade. It's not until they reach the inner walls that he starts to spin out his Big Guns... even if they are largely /mobility/ guns. He sighs irritably at the (shortly thereafter irrelevant) presence of the wall, and then takes a step forward.

All of his followers -- the ones who don't get tied up with one thing or another -- explode into smoke. They press through walls and corridors to push ahead of their group, re-emerging into solidity with bursts of flames.

"Get up, y'whiny little shit." Candle says to the crawling would-be escapee. He secures his weapon on his back and pulls the man to his feet. His face splits into a wild grin and flames dance around his hands. His soldiers rush past to meet the oncoming guards, wielding blades of flame and ordinary shields of wood-and-metal.

But as for Candle and the dying prisoner...

With flames surrounding one hand he presses it harshly into the wound, searing it shut. If he has to, he holds the man fast. Immediately after he raises his thumb to the dying man's forehead and in flame draws the symbol of TREACHERY that adorns his own forehead. Another flare of embers emanates from Candle's eyes.

"I /can't/ stop you from dying. The bleeding inside is going to keep fucking going. But you won't bleed out /as fast/. Now--" Another offering of power pulses outwards, "Are you going to avenge yourself or are you going to die just so your ghost can get locked up too?"

It's at this exact moment that Azure Armature catches up to Candle after his phasing shenanigans. He turns 'round to look at her, blinking. Then he releases the dying prisoner.

"Ah, hell. You're right, I'm lagging. Let's do this!" The Flame Champion conjures a blade of flame into hand and rushes after Azure, doing as instructed-- if something pushes into their path, he'll cut through it. Likewise, his forces form a tight formation around them in a ^-shaped formation designed specially to drive the fuck in and keep going as rapidly as possible.
Batou These giant hell beasts don't feel like a problem to Batou, so he sticks to his guns, firing off round after round as he sprints into the complex. His thermals can see the multitude of bodies as he grimaces, turning off his sense of smell as it hits him like a wave. This stinking rot is not accidental. There's been /effort/ to make conditions this horrible. What kind of sick freaks treat people this way. Obviously not the kind that want to exist anymore if Batou has a say.

"Tachikoma, I want you to try and open as many of these rooms as you can. These people are dying like cattle. Least we can do is let 'em out."

Without a moment's delay Tachikoma starts firing shots at the locks, letting them be opened by their occupants, and offering a few shots in the way of actual guards. Batou hears Azure over the comms addressing him, and sends back a confirmation. He's more motivated than ever now that he sees these prisoner's conditions.

Spying Candle temporarily save the prisoner, he sprints down towards the stairwell, levelling any guards that stand in his way with near non-stop shots.

"Contact on those stairs! Shall we go?" Batou doesn't wait for a response as he leaps down into the depths.
Miari     Miari spots the bows long before they're turned to her. A few shots are indeed flung off, but she just narrows her eyes - and her irises flash with a swirl of focused Essence.

    The arrows disintegrate in midair, torn apart by a crushing but invisible hand. And Miari didn't even twitch a muscle.

    The sudden use of the freaky spotlight on them and swiftly increasing heat is another matter though. "Hyaaaaaowwwwwww!!" It's not often Miari screams, but her skin's SIZZLING AND COOKING. She's forced to slam her eyes shut and turn away from the brilliant glare and scramble back and away on reflex... up until she hears the rattling bones. And the unholy growls.

    Miari reacts swiftly, reaching up to her hair and undoing one of her many ribbons. The material crackles and sparks with emerald Essence as she brings it to bear-- and unleashes the sorcery within!

    A DELUGE of perhaps tens of thousands of BRASS WASPS materialize, thick as a tidal wave, rushing towards the canines and leaving very little room to dodge!

    Given a chance to breathe now that she's out of the direct glare, Miari slams her foot into the ground. Focuses her Infernal powers into it. The scorched and lifeless ground responds as reality gives way to her will. A sizable wall of craggly basalt inlaid with scraggly veins of corroded metals erupts from the ground between her and the spotlight!

    "That was a better defense than I was expecting...!"
All-Seeing Eye      A brief, false memory is inserted to account for the gap in time, and the spike is withdrawn. Eye backs into the shadows--or attempts to. During his flight to rejoin Blue's squad, he turns a corner and ends up behind the pursuing guard dogs. As artificial as his body is, it's sure to have a unique scent, and likely to attract their attention quickly. And with his delayed arrival, he's probably closer to the pack than his allies, too.

     Eye attempts to deal with this nuisance. His combat boots grip the dingy walls of the facility tightly as he runs up the side, placing him out of Batou's firing line. Bullets zip past him, taking chunks out of the wall with a sound that reminds him of some of Autochthon's more vicious servitors. Just when inertia tries to pull him down, he leaps, pushing himself over and across the mass of undead canines. His targeting suite searches for a firing solution, and three crossbow bolts are fired. When his boots hit the ground, he's close enough for the lead dogs to tackle him.

     Oft-ignored warning sensors blare this fact across his internal HUD as he sprints to catch up with Blue's squad. Behind him, his shots ricochet back and forth, creating a claustrophobic gauntlet of crossfire for the dogs to chase through. Just a scant few feet from his comrades, one of them manages to pin his leg and send him sprawling to the floor on his back. It's quickly dispatched with a curt crossbow shot fired straight up through the cranium, though his ankle does seem darkened with the sign of some sort of wound when he returns.

     Blue's commands do create a thoughtful expression, and he takes a moment to consider them. It slowly becomes a coy smile, and he skips along behind her, trailing blood (at least, the Alchemical equivalent) despite his apparent mirth. Working with 'Toriki' and Tachikoma, he picks off the last few doors with well-placed shots.
Starbound Flotilla     "Dogs." Albert grunts in contempt. It's not clear if he means the actual dogs or the foes in general. His armor lights up and sputters, sparking dangerously under the searing heat of the beam that overheats the man within. It's enough to stun him for a moment, and allow one or two of the dogs to close in. One goes for his throat, but gets its jaws around his arm instead, sinking teeth in and drawing blood. Slamming to the ground, he rolls, tries to pin the thing, and then activate heavy-duty strength-enhancers in his armor. Then he tries to grip the base of the jaw by slipping his fingers through the rotting, necrotic flesh, and then cleanly rip the jaw off and smash it into the dog's skull repeatedly, before leaving the rest of the pack for Miari and the rest. She's needing backup on the towers, and Albert intends to give it to her.

    He pumps a heavy induction coil and activates a vast array of capacitors. It's his classic method, the heavy-charging pierce attack. He braces behind the brass swarm that Miari has summoned, charges for about five slow, agonizing seconds, and unloads a blast of radioactive fire fit more for a gun on a capital ship, meant to punch a clean hole straight through the source of the pyrelight and fill anything near it with roiling atomic sickness, alive or dead.

    "Burrowing. Fine. Get more to the interior, then help me burrow if we can't find a way down." He grunts, through gritted teeth, and hoists his weapon again, intent on pressing the charge and keeping the momentum. Gotta get to the labs, gotta get to what he feels and has always felt is the source of the problem.
Empty Tidings Falling Rain gets in through the gap. She sees the assembling ghosts, and decides the best approach is the direct one.

She rushes them. With a yell and a flash of steel, Rain's sword leaps out of its scabbard, crossing the space in front of her opposite her other hand. With her right, she slashes a war ghost; with her left, she flings something into their ranks, a glittering crystal powder that clings to their incorporeal forms... and, by all appearances, forces them to materialize the instant before she hacks into them with ungodly strength and a terribly sharp blade.

Rain's eyes brighten and grow wet. She blinks tears from her eyes in time with sweeps of her sword, using overwhelming force to power through the mob and get into the interior. It isn't until the smell hits her that she slows for even a second, crinkling her nose and tugging a cowl up from behind her breastplate to cover her mouth and nose. She leaves the huge dogs to the others, taking up position near All-Seeing Eye and Batou to let them cover her while she works.

Rain faces a locked door and frowns to herself, flipping her sword over in her hand and holding it point-down in front of her. Her other hand hovers over the pommel with two fingers raised, her expression a picture of concentration. Phantasmal waves rush around her feet, a swirling pool of watery Essence that rises up in a corona around her body. Her coattails float as if immersed; her hair does the same. Every surface in her immediate vicinity begins to sweat saltwater. She slowly draws in a breath, lifting one foot --

-- and then, with a shout, /stomps/.

A violent ripple of Essence crashes through the whole structure. The door in front of her nearly explodes off the hinges as the lock seems to spontaneously transmute into a small amount of high explosive. The effect runs down the corridor in either direction, doors simply bursting open with a cacophony of shrieking metal, shattering stone and resonant, clanging crashes.

And windows.

And gates...
Tomoe Tomoe is not alone in supporting Albert's attack her own spells are doing some goof work here but then comes the light and she doe snot expect them to also be burning death rays. She's caught in the first one she's in pain she's burning and Tomoe pushes her flight as hard as she can to get the heck away form it and the moment she's not being burned? She's letting more spells rain down at the spot lights.

She is hurt the guards did get a good chunk out of them but for now she's trying to deal with those damn lights and will leave it to her allies to deal with the hound like things into them. She's really focused on those lights for the moment, wait did they pull aggro form Tomoe? They totally did!
Staren     Staren does not want to get grabbed. He takes to the air, risking being an easy target for the beam in order to fire on the dogs below. A translucent amber sphere of force flashes into visibility where the beam strikes it, 'heating' up to white before shattering in a shower of glittering particles so the process can continue with the next layer. Hopefully it won't take too long for them to get out of the beam's firing arc...

    As Albert fires a superweapon through one of the guard towers, Staren looks suitably impressed. "Wow!"
Bloody Revelations     The prison guards inside aren't any realistic match for the people storming the complex. More than apt for beating unruly prisoners into line, yes, but none of them are prepared to take a shotgun blast to the face or an augmented punch or five to the corpus. The group makes swift headway.

    The prison infrastructure itself is about what one would expect for something retrofitted from a hospital. Tachikoma only has to put a bullet through each lock, due to the important mechanical design feature of having hands. The sheer number of cells would make it an incredibly time consuming process, but it seems there definitely aren't any wards present either, because their Dragon Blooded attache fills the hallway with the rattle of daisy chain popping bolts and spills every door on the ground level open.

    The inside of the cells are even more revolting than the hallways (not helped for the slurry starting to dissolve into the saltwater), considering they no longer contain anything as medieval as a bed and chamber pot. A good number of the prisoners seem too stunned to do anything until they're practically shoved out the door. Some can make it on their own. Some are clearly too weak, starved, and/or sick to make a run for it, and can't even leave through the opened doors.

    The prisoner Candle hauls upright is a little different. While his men storm the breach, easily outpacing pursuit in their smoke form and covering the many mazelike intersections within, he stops to grab the one who looks like he'd shown some shred of initiative. The man is pretty young, to the point he probably caught stealing food for his family by the looks of him, but relatively unblemished, meaning he hasn't been here very long. He barely reacts to the intense cauterization of the gaping slash in his torso, which might have something to do with the fine surgical scar Candle can see on his forehead when he raises his thumb. That's all the warning he gets before the young man croaks out "I'm sorry-" and then convulses, gurgles, and literally explodes. His lungs rupture like bombs, blowing his chest cavity outwards from inside, and dousing Candle in a wave of hideous necrotic acid as well as bone shrapnel like a human teddy bear mine.
Bloody Revelations     The pursuit party seems ready to charge in behind them at the sound of the boom, but 'Eye beats them to it, and quickly overtakes the war dogs. A number of crossbow bolts don't seem to do much of anything, simply punching through one side of their emaciated flesh and out the other, but one straight through the underside of the head works, though it seems to dislodge some kind of mechanical coil rather than brain tissue, and further shots follow hence, downing the pack. The Alchemical is free to get up and move away, except mere moments after he finishes, the lead war beast's bones split with a resounding crack and burst into foul vapour. No less than a dozen pieces of its skeleton fracture into finely-engraved shards, releasing a hungry ghost imprisoned in each one, which set upon him instantly as a biting, clawing swarm, now packed into a tiny corridor.

    Batou is now ahead of most of the group save Azure Armature. Charging down the stairs, he finds a far more robust set of triple iron bolts and padlocks on a thick, rusted door ahead of him, except all of them blow off when Rain's spell reaches them, leaving him free to shoulder bash the door down like the military cyborg he is, given their degraded hinges. Immediately around a blind corner, a more fleshy looking guard jumps him, firing some kind of pistol-sized flamethrower directly into his face before attempting to tackle him to the ground and jam a wave-bladed knife into his neck.

    Outdoors, the towers begin to collapse as they are torn apart by combined fire. Relying on the undead war dogs to cover them, the archers are left high and dry when Albert beats one of them to a bloody pulp and tears the smashes the odd implement out of its head, and the swarm of brass wasps dives into the others, waylaying them in a viciously buzzing, shredding storm. The mysterious, cold-scorching spotlight is first blocked by the simple limitations of line of sight, and then as it tracks upward to Staren when he tries to get away, completely obliterated instead, turned inside out by the colossal beam that rips through it and then blasts into the penitentiary inner wall behind it, carving through the masonry, spearing multiple halls, and then just barely breaching into the lower floor at a shallow angle.
Bloody Revelations     It is so close that the team inside can see it lance through the floor a couple of intersections down, briefly filling the corridors with oppressive heat, though not quite serendipitous enough to vapourize the man ambushing Batou The few surviving ghosts only attempt to crawl away or roll around to put out the flames consuming them. The basement hall now exposed the inner team (the outside team has some catching up to do) is starkly different from the one above. Instead of old construction caked in filth and gore, the building down here is pristine sterile even. Everything is coated in bleak metal and well lit with bone lanterns, making it exceedingly bright by comparison, and leaving every reflective surface gleaming near-white, save for reinforcing points of metal that obtusely remains pitch black even under direct illumination.

    It looks like they've barged into a triage center, though every table has been surrounded in complicated circles of permanent calligraphy, fitted with excessive restraints, and are attached to extensive arrows of surgical equipment. Scalpels, drills, bone saws, syringes, and similar, decorate the many, multi-jointed skeletal arms of animated surgical assistants that go from table to table, expertly filleting the (thankfully) dead strapped to each one, while fleshy polyps with slavering tongues meander around the floor and greedily lick up spilled blood. Bolted desks are piled high with papers and tomes, as well as blood samples and other strange fluids, mixing medical implements with those of the occult. A large and highly detailed diagram is posted on one wall, indicating that the thirty or so fresh corpses in the room are destined to all be stitched together into a single, grotesquely flowering mass of unknown purpose.

    Those entering into the room from there are forced to cross the hall to proceed further inward, but as they do, the air within begins to vibrate, and then crackle as if with electricity. Those who enter feel themselves being pulled forward, at first as if by imagination, and then like a shallow but gradually worsening incline, as if they're sliding on a steep slope further into the facility, where an oddly electric hum rattles through their ears and their bones.
All-Seeing Eye      Eye's merry advance is halted by a swarm of hungry ghosts. Their attacks rip and tear his clothing, revealing in places his augmented musculature and sending dark rivulets of his man-machine lifeblood splattering into the slurry kicked up by Toriki's explosive opening of all the ground-floor doors. Though he can see each one of them clearly, sight can only offer so much before action is necessary.

     The tightly packed corridor makes for un-ideal space, and the Exalt suffers a multitude of cuts and gashes. "Enough." Bolts of lightning begin to streak from his eyes to strike out at his swarm of attackers, even as their claws and teeth scrape across his soulsteel implants. His primary consideration isn't so much the preservation of his own life, however. His arms raise up to shield his face, but the swarm persists, and then...

     One of the ghosts gouges out an eye in its ravenous attack.

     "ENOUGH!" The Exalt's usually saccharine voice is contorted into a bellow of rage that echoes throughout the corridor and into the next room. Pivoting on a heel and clenching his jaw, the Exalt twirls four whips--two of steel cable and two of pure lightning--around his body, attempting to lacerate the entire swarm at once. Purple lightning crackles across the ankle-high water, and Eye's anima billows forth freely. Standing at the center of a vortex of smoke, occasionally illuminated by concealed lightning, Eye throws caution to the wind.

     Without any regard for his own survival, he lashes out at any hungry ghost even remotely near him, empowering each lash of each whip with sizzling electricity. Within moments, the corridor smells strongly of ozone. Until the last hungry ghost is dissipated, he continues his onslaught, refusing to budge from his spot. When the smoke finally clears, he's covered in lacerations, his carefully chosen wardrobe revealing a litany of minor wounds that could've easily spelled a death of a thousand cuts.

     He peers into the water. A statuesque, furious face peers back, one eye missing, optic wires exposed and sparking, weeping the black substance that serves as lifeblood. The sight of his wound only fuels his rage, and the Exalt kicks the ankle-deep water at the exact spot of his reflection, letting out a bark of vindictive fury. It doesn't make him feel any better. So he does it again, and again, throwing a tantrum over the marring of his visage.

     Fists clenched, the Exalt moves to regroup with his allies once more.
Azure Armature There is something to be said about lightning attacks and blitz pushes: Momentum becomes a weapon that cuts both ways. Azure turns to glance at Candle's latest pressganged soldier.

There's a moment where she can appreciate his simple ability to take those tools discarded around him and forge them into useful things.

She catches herself on the sentimentality, considering they're mid-operation, but allows herself a single moment of ill-timed warmth.

It is, of course, precisely that moment that rules about sentimentality and the ironclad laws of mission objectives. No part of their mission here was to secure or save prisoners.

Azure Armature is thrown into a wall by the outside edge of the skeletal blast, her fatigues and poncho engulfed in pyreflames as she leaves a crack in the wall where she rests, stunned for a few moments.

Like a mantra, she has to refocus. "Re-establish mission coherence..."

"Candle! Batou! -- New girl! Sound off!" She shouts down the hallway, a static, 'damaged or exposed electrical wire' sound to her voice. "Damn... Damn! Can't be the line soldier's fault for an error in command..." She growls, dragging herself back to her feet. "Keep going! See to any critical injuries, sixty seconds, defensive formations! Then we keep going!"

She taps her neck, switching to her radio.

<"To all forces, critical alert: Treat all wounded or disabled prisoners as hostile explosive devices and neutralize at range or avoid. They're /not/ our objective.">

She gestures to Batou and Candle. "Falling Rain, if you've got medical supplies, see to Candle's men. Candle, are you alright? Batou! I'm tired of using stairs. Do you have any more explosives? Twenty meters down this hallways is a support structure - set sapping charges, and we'll skip the intervening floors by going vertical. Remember - treat any other prisoners we see as /bombs/. Mission hasn't changed!"
Miari     The moment that spotlight's down and the dogs have been blown back, Miari dives out from her cover and rejoins the advance! She doesn't much look it, but she's apparently capable of a fairly swift superhuman sprint.

    Hardly among the best of athletes as her fellows go, though. But more than enough to give what few archers remain considerable difficulty aiming their shots!

    Not that simple arrows fired from these guards can threaten her. The spotlight and the dogs were a problem. The arrows? Not so much!

    "Well done, Albert! They won't be rebuilding THAT anytime soon! What... WAS that thing? Its flames, they're eerily similar..."

    Well, now's not a good time. She rejoins formation with the Apeman in armor, dusting herself off.
Candle In spite of the complication, Candle doesn't fall behind. As his thumb rises above the living bomb's forehead, he notices what's there-- and the croaked warning is enough to spare him the worst of it. His body dissolves into a mass of water and then into so much black, ember-belching smoke. When he emerges alongside Azure Armature again it's not the /explosion/ but the acid that he didn't manage to clear out with that particular defense. Holes burn in his armor and the flesh beneath sizzles and smokes. Looks like he managed to shield his face with his prosthetic arm, which has /several/ large gaps in it now.

The /soldiers/ who were still in the tunnel don't make it. They're not quick enough on the uptake. The explosion balloons out and they're gone.

As he lowers his prosthetic, it becomes clear his face wasn't /entirely/ spared. Chemical burns dot his features, some spots burned away down to the bone. A particularly large gap along the side of his face exposes bone and muscle underneath. The worst of it seems to have landed in and mingled with his moonsilver eye, though. Even now there is a battle raging within the prosthetic artifact, the moonsilver attacking the acid within it visibly like a bizarre artificial immune system at war.

Candle inhales though the gaps in his teeth, a low hiss escaping his lips as he does so. He tests his prosthetic limb-- movability is seriously reduced. Fingers are basically locked up. He nods to himself, as if that was about what he expected. It's usable but not for any intensive tasks, which is a problem.

For several long moments, the Flame Champion ponders how to solve his problem. Then he begins to do something very odd, even as his remaining soldiers begin to gather around him.

He reaches over his shoulder with the prosthetic, where it hovers neatly over the shaft of his trident. With the opposite hand he closes the fingers around the trident, and then leaves it there. Quickly as he can, he digs beneath the gaps in his armor with his fingers and manipulates the mechanisms that keep the prosthetic plugged into its socket.

It falls off. Both it and the trident are still attuned.

One-handed, Candle picks up the arm-carrying-the-trident. He straightens the arm out a little so it isn't getting in the way so much, and stalks forward.

"I'll live," Candle spits, "and I'm tired of this shit too. ISLEBREAKER--"

He rears back the prosthetic-holding-trident and angles it towards the floor, "-- DO YOUR STUFF!"

The trident Islebreaker is purpose-made for tearing through the wonders of bygone ages. Were the structure made wholly of soulsteel, still it ought to be able to pierce through. And Candle is throwing it /hard/ at the floor.

Meanwhile to the rear -- and all around them -- men are scrambling around to deal with acid, with shrapnel, with injuries sustained from the sheer force of it all. There's plenty of them that need tending to. Plenty more that are just dead, or won't make it shy of a miracle.
Batou "Shit, fucking bastard!" Batou shouts, not feeling the pain as his synthetic flesh burns away, charred as it breaks apart partially, revealing the underlying mechanisms of his face, turning the top of his mouth to his eyes into a sickly sight with only the synthetic muscle immediately turning into an angry scowl. Unless the guard is extremely strong, toppling a 1000 pound cybernetic human is gonna be tough. Batou keeps his footing from the attempted toppling, and the knife grazes his neck, a flash of sparks letting off, causing damage to his facial expressions, but nothing more serious.

Batou chuckles, his face stuck in its grimace for the time being, as he just lets himself lean forward, letting his immense weight fall directly onto the guard.

-----------

Tachikoma continues unlocking the doors, but eventually can no longer continue this because it knows that keeping this stairwell secure is more mission-vital. As such it widens its stance, letting only those involved in the op past, firing on any stray enemies or hell hounds.

"This is my stairwell now, ghouls! Try to get past me without autorization and you're toast!"

----------

Batou smashes the head of the guard into the concrete as he uses it to stand up, just for good measure and runs into the room with everyone else.

Upon hearing Azure, he shouts confirmation, working quickly to set the charges at the pillars and puts the timer on. He rushes to just barely evade the explosions.
Tomoe Tomoe does like the spotlight from time to time but today is not one of those time, the spot light it certainly did burn. he doesn't stop with trying to take out the lights, no she takes out the towers or whatever they might be on too. She's really not happy. Miari's attacks are noticed and she keeps it up pausing for a moment.

"I have no idea but I don't like it!"

She says this while she land forming up with Albert and gets ready to move on they have more things to do and time is ticking away.

"All right Albert, your raid lead on this? What are we hitting next?"
Starbound Flotilla     Albert presses forward. "Radiation. Sear away anything with atomic fragility." He explains to Miari. "Everything depends on that balance of atomic peace. If they'll exploit social fragility, then exploit atomic fragility." He says. Tomoe asks, and he answers: "Advance. Down, there's a gap now. Kill, burn, or steal anything you can in the lab. Leave them nothing but ash, then annihilate the ash." He surges forward, trying to smash his way through the irradiated gap. Thank goodness his whole team is rad-proof or that the residual radiation is irrelevant to them.

    Get through the breach. Break into the labs. Labs. Sterile. Gleaming. Polished. Perfect. Albert's blood surges. Plasmids and viral genetic treatments surge through him. The VEP roils within. His eyes are practically shining. He needs to get in there. He needs to find everything he can.

    He's going to shoot, blast, and saturate everything he can in the cleansing radioactive fire, leaving behind a horrible, cancerous hazard. But as he does, he's going to look through the lab. He's going to try to search and identify particular products and topics, whichever he can find and wherever he can find them: Social control mechanisms like water treatment chemicals, enhanced interrogation mechanisms like torture mechanisms or truth serums, power and wepaon development things like fuel chemistry work... And bioengineering matters like frankenstein-like necro-engineering projects, of course. This structure may soon be fully activating his VEP madness if that Labyrinth event before was anything to go by, the same madness that consumed much of the Miniknog before, and it's likely he's going to try to do something with the contents before he leaves.

    As he descends, he activates his beacon, and the underground deployment of his gunship will hopefully surge in fast. He's wounded and doesn't have time for getting wounded more, as he will no doubt sustain more wounds as he fights to cleanse the laboratory of anything in it... Now including the prisoners.
Empty Tidings Falling Rain allows herself a moment of pride when the spell goes off without a hitch. The ground floor is opened to them, and to the unfortunates held captive herein. She takes a quick look into one of the rooms -- and immediately regrets it. The swirling aquatic energies around her are turning the filth into an ungodly sludge, sewage oozing into the halls where before it was more solid. She turns to report her success --

The blast staggers her. She throws her right arm up between her face and it, mercifully having people between her and immediate threats on either side. She blinks rapidly a few times, finding herself in a crouch from which she slowly rises. "I'm uninjured," Rain reports. "I --" She stops, backpedalling in a quick hop while All-Seeing Eye flips out and turns into a frenzied assault of lightning lashes. She stares with rapt attention for the span of seconds it takes him to go through the murderous motions.

She's still staring when he stomps. If he looks, he'll spot her staring before abruptly looking away and hurrying down the corridor towards whatever's left of Candle's men, fishing a sealed container out of her coat marked with a Seventh Legion supply seal. "...They weren't quite as lucky." She gets to work. There must be someone left to save.

Rain feels a sensation of her skin crawling, an awful chill slowly dragging itself up her spine. It feels like someone walked over her grave. Thoughts that are not her own flit through her head.

This is not your purpose, Princess, whispers the demon's voice. Do not force us to remind you again.
Staren     Staren lands now that the outer defenses are dealt with, hurrying inside after Albert. He quirks an eyebrow at the way radiation is carelessly being thrown around, but yeah, it doesn't seem like it should endanger anyone here, especially with only brief exposure. Albert's doing a fine job cleansing everything, so Staren doesn't really need to help. Most of this stuff isn't worth grabbing before radioactive fire, but Staren does collect papers and anything that is /obviously/ a magical artifact or made of magical materials.

    But then...

    Someone's messing with gravity. Why does this feel familiar? Oh, right, when they were getting sucked into the painting of Ariamis. Could this POSSIBLY be related? "What's DOING that?! Any idea, Miari?" Staren calls out, trying to find something to grab onto and improvising with the vibroclaw to slow his fall if need be.
Bloody Revelations     Put simply, the hungry ghosts don't stand a chance when the Autocthonian they're all over turns up the juice. A young and reckless Celestial may have actually been torn apart, given their advanced size, age, and bloodthirsty, but just as much as he's stuck in that tight space with them, they are with him, and there's no escape from the myriad whiplashes that slice through their corpus and boil it away with flashes of electricity, soon leaving them steaming in the repulsive water as every errant arc tortures them further, until they dissipate completely. Series of bullets whiz past him when it seems the rest of the pursuit party starts to catch up; they aren't a match for the Tachikoma's anti-personnel machine guns, and they're ripped apart almost instantly, oblivious to the basic aspects of modern urban combat such as cover usage.

    Unfortunately, though most of the prisoners who can actually move use that ability to head to an exit (or simply cower) two more do actually make a beeline for a party. One attempts to throw himself on Azure Armature, and another on Falling Rain herself, obviously blowing up if allowed to catalyze in the same way the previous one did. Another couple gun for the stairs, but the Tachikoma rips them to shreds easily as well, albeit there's only so long it has the ammo for.

    Batou is waylaid at the bottom of the stairs. Though fleshy, the man he grapples with certainly isn't alive, judging by the stink, but must be intelligent, because he immediately abandons reloading his apparently one-shot gun when Batou tanks it, and executes an unexpectedly skilled grapple, before he's overwhelmed by the cyborg's unexpected weight and strength and his head smashes like a melon. The body goes limp, and a ghost slips out of it and hurriedly through the floor, apparently the 'wearer'.

    Going further into the surgery bay, the occasional body hurls itself off the table to attack a passerby with its own ribs used like massive jaws, the occasional beaker blows itself up into a cloud of corrosive fog, and even one of the lanterns turns itself into an automated flamethrower around a corner. It seems someone with a particularly inventive bent spent a lot of time turning the lab into a killzone hidden in plain sight to those ignorant of necromantic principles (almost everyone), and no doubt has entire floors of horrific traps and surprises waiting for them of every description, hoping to pick them off on the way down --something nobody here has time for. Even if they could be circumvented, Albert is frequently forced to stop and gun down enemies, both ghost and necrotech, around ever corner and dropping from every hatch, slowing down his search for useful materials.
Bloody Revelations     The brutal and potentially fatal dungeon crawl is cut disappointingly short. Batou's explosives blow the supporting pillars keeping the triage bay underground, not at all designed with plastic explosives in mind. This exposes it to Islebreaker, which then cleaves straight through the floor, and then through four more floors downwards, splitting open multiple levels of expert dungeoneering with a explosive chain of deafening cracks that tear car-sized gaps straight to the bottom. The buried drill/gunship explodes out of the earth at roughly the same time, causing the damaged foundations to cave in completely, and countless hours of carefully constructed traps and more than a few lurking troops to spall into the hole, before it becomes nothing more than a convenient ramp of rubble and equipment going all the way down.

    This drops them straight to what was probably a storage facility originally, but now is plated almost wall to wall in solid soulsteel and lined with barbed cages rather than crates of medicine. Thick tangles of wires run from the majority intact ceiling into a dense mesh around a cluster of glass tanks full of bubbling, ice blue liquid in which a number of gigantic, artificial corpses can be seen. The center of the room currently involves multiple circles of calligraphy inked on a raised section of the floor, with a dozen unconscious human sacrifices tied down and ready for use.

    Lastly, what remains of the grand chamber is host to a piece of undead engineering almost fifty meters across, resembling (only vaguely) a giant spider without an abdomen, composed of woven sinew and arteries around a soulsteel frame, bristling with shifting spikes and control rods of the same, where eight pulsing green take the place of eyes in its recessed, meaty 'head'. It appears to be still hooked up to the engineering equipment, and partially incomplete, but some of its legs are currently in use supporting a shining web woven and suspended between them like a platform. A woman wearing something vaguely resembling a black victorian surgeon's outfit with a funeral veil in place of a mask, stands atop the web as if the glowing threads were solid, where crackling energy surrounds her feet. "What the hell did-"

    Okay, so it's impressive, but she clearly wasn't prepared for this, or at the very least, she wasn't ready in time for that huge shortcut. A gaggle of zombies are still moving about the workshop, hauling bodies and impaling them on the hundreds of spikes that jut from the monstrosity she stands atop of. "Where is that rat bastard?! He swore he'd take care of- ugh, forget it!" She tries to put on a more intimidating, rather than surprised and confused, voice. "You fools are dead anyways! You have no idea what you've stepped into with your 'clever' little trick!" She then stomps on the web, and the sensation of magnetism increases a hundredfold, more than capable of picking even Batou up off his feet. The source: the colossal spider, pointing its soulsteel spines outwards in every direction. The way the whole room around it seems to thrum with power means that it probably isn't meant to just crudely stab them to death --there's something worse going on. The operator doubles up by taking her action to draw a massive surge of power from the charged web, and then turn the ramp into a forest of razor-edged bone blades sprouting out of the floor, making retreat near-impossible for those inside, and descent extremely hazardous for those wishing to dive down.
Miari     MIari finally makes her way to the holding facility, and is immediately grateful to be surrounded by walls. It offers a certain security from sneak attacks when only two directions are open!

    The place itself though, is not at all what she'd call... accomodating. The instruments on display, many not exactly clean... "No dignity for the dead here.-- hyah?!"

    And then her elaborate battlegown ruffles in a weird - sorcerous - tug?! She starts sliding through the hallway. "Some kind of trap!"

    And she's not going to have it. There's too many freaky things here she wants to study and dismantle on her OWN TERMS, not whoever manages this place!

    "Hrrrrrngh... some work of clever sorcery, no doubt!" And her vision flares active on more than just the normal spectrum, attuning to the flow of power in the world around her as she seeks to find the source of this affect in hopes it's something she can neutralize.
All-Seeing Eye      There is a brief moment when Toriki observes Eye. As if aware of her, he reaches back behind his head and grasps a zipper on the back of his trench coat's collar. A hood is pulled out from a pouch sewn into the collar, and is rather tersely flipped over his face, concealing it from the eyes up. Beneath its shadow, only his frowning lips and the slow trickle of black oil-blood are visible, occasionally lit up by purple sparks.

     The veneer of mirth he came in wearing is gone, replaced with cold determination. The explosions which rock the prison to its core can't erase his scowl, nor can they slow his steady march forwards. It takes him some time to catch up to Blue and the others, but this just means he's able to make use of the ramp once the rubble which forms it has settled. That is, until the spikes erupt. This just isn't his day.

     The first one pierces through his foot rather cleanly, and he nearly meets his death from the resulting loss of balance. His face, inches away from impalement, is held aloft by the taut steel cable which clings to an overhead light fixture. The cable retracts, pulling him upwards. The sound of droplets hitting the floor reveals the sharpness of the bone blades for any who doubt it.

     "I'm in no mood," he says coldly. The Exalt attempts to retract the whip into his body, but finds it difficult--the magnetism is holding it fast to the light fixture. With a put-upon sigh, he continues. "You will deactivate your device and submit to arrest now, or I will make your butchery seem like the warm embrace of family. You have three seconds to comply." If three seconds pass without her compliance, he opens fire--not on her, but on the zombies impaling bodies on spikes.

     Those have to be important, right?
Batou Holy shit. This is getting really dangerous now. Batou flails for a moment, trying to keep himself upright but falls, cursing loudly. Just as the spikes nearly impale him, He's saved by the Tachikoma, moving in on its own once it heard the explosion, and now hanging from the wall, whirring happily."I've got you, Mr. Batou! We can do this!"

A long thin metal rope and grabbing his leg stops Batou from meeting a viscious spike, but he is upside down. However, he has some ability to fire his shotgun again directly at the bitch who put them in this situation.

Batou sees an anger probably not common from the damaged Exalt, and chuckles. "This is only a temporary hindrance Eye, they can't hurt you forever."

Tachikoma readies its arms as multiple volleys of grenades launch down onto the spider below. Time to go all out.
Candle Whenever he's needed to get somewhere fast, Islebreaker has always done the job for him. Candle looks down the entrance he makes-- until he hears a noise. Something /approaching/. Something coming for them. Actually, it's multiple somethings. But this time he's ready for it. With his free hand he hefts his ludicrous jawbone-of-a-monster blade and slides forward into the charge of one of the incoming suicide bombers. He was sick of this shit already, and he's doubly sick of this shit now. So he's just going to play this against their attackers.

Instead of going down the hole, he remains at the stairs -- along the entrance -- and begins to systemically hook incoming suicide bombers with the strange shape of his weapon and literally SCOOP them into the massive hole. His every intent is to send them tumbling down, down, down-- to explode on top of whatever is at the bottom of their improvised entrance.

    ADVANTAGES: There's a big ritual site down there that can probably be horribly messed up with the introduction of bone shrapnel and acid flying everywhere.

    DRAWBACKS: There are also allies down there. Whoops.

He didn't think this completely through. Candle really just wanted to spitefully re-use the suicide bombers for his own purpose.

His remaining soldiers -- a half dozen perhaps, and another dozen wounded but patched up by Falling Rain a few moments before -- are milling around the hole and staircase area, looking warily at the bone spike ramp. They're waiting for Candle to stop reallocating suicide bombers and to get on with it himself.

As for FALLING RAIN'S overall effort... there were about a dozen immediate dead, half dozen unwounded, another dozen wounded but fixable. Another three or four were wounded-and-fixable... if they weren't /here/. If Rain expended great effort piecing them back together they could've been carried along. But they weren't getting up anytime soon-- easier to just mercy kill them and have done.
Empty Tidings Rain doesn't say anything to All-Seeing Eye. Her momentary glimpse of his ruined visage, and the look on her face when she beholds it, speaks volumes instead.

And then, to work.

Outwardly, Falling Rain is a composed professional, only allowing herself a touch of visible concern for the injured she rapidly tends to. She's quick about stabilizing anyone she can, using pungent medicines to help them withstand the inevitable infection that will set in inside this place. They aren't her soldiers to offer a quick end, so she prolongs the seemingly inevitable. Perhaps there will be a miracle when this is all over.

Inwardly, she seethes. She almost always does when she feels that awful crawling sensation. The sense of a great shadow falling over her, crushing her with its metaphysical weightiness. She wants to get out from under it. She knows precisely how.

It is not productive to do so here and now.

Rain rises, turning back to rejoin the group. She gets up to within a few meters of Blue, glancing into cells as they pass them. Empty. Ruinous. Empty. Occupied -- Movement. One of the prisoners rushing at her.

"You'll do," Rain mutters, darkly.

The prison clumsily throws himself at her. Rain lowers her shoulder and steps into him. She catches him by the groin with her left hand, lifting him up over her head one-handed and swinging him over her to her other side. Her hand tightens on his thigh in mid-flip, and her right hand bends at the elbow, fingers straightening.

She thrusts it into his chest. Her gauntleted fingers puncture skin and break ribs with no apparent resistance. She curls her fingers closed, and makes a short, sharp tearing motion turning smoothly into an offhanded flicking motion. His lungs, divorced from his body, splatter against the far side of the room he just charged out of.

Before he even has time to start to gurgle, she's stepping forward into the path of the second. She shoulders Azure Armature aside, swinging the soon-to-be carcass in her left hand into the second and smacking him aside. She lifts the dying man upward and, with a yell, batters the second to the ground and leaves him crumpled in a heap underneat the mess that is the other prisoner-turned-weapon.

Rain reaches into the room and slams the door shut with her red right hand just before the second one goes off.

She looks to Blue for a second. "More bombs," Rain explains. "They're handled."

Rain stalks towards the hole. Her gauntlet drips fresh blood, running off in gruesome rivers as the accumulated seawater rolls off her armor. She stares down the enormous gap, waiting for an appropriate opportunity.
Starbound Flotilla     As he goes, Albert finds himself more and more caught up in his VEP madness. Operating tables, surgical equipment, corpses, blood vials... It stirs something in his mind and blood that should remain unstirred. He has no opportunity to find what he's after, but he'll make it later if he needs to. He moves down the ramp long before its hazard is established, dropping into the grand chamber.

    Albert lands heavily, with a slamming impact as his mobility systems kick into high gear. The massive gunship, also, falls into the hole, slamming down and landing heavily as its own automated systems deploy it in a proper way. He keeps his gun trained silently on the necroengineer and her work as she speaks, only shouting out when his feet give way and he's yanked towards the thing!

    With an uproarous shout, he grabs something from his waist and slings it towards the ground, now a wall of sorts. It falls below (now to the side) of the massive spiked beast, and goes off with a shimmering blast. It's one of Albert's heavy BATTLEFIELD GENERATORS! The detonation crafts a sudden surge in the earth, now forming concentric circles around the creature, making "platforms" of a sort that allow him to sort of jump around it, using its own gravitational pull like a gravity well and maneuvering therein.

    The gunship is unaffected, right? Albert leaps and jumps and even swings off a grappling hook, calling out, "Inefficient science made to produce fear as its only useful data is what I've walked into. Torture is a soft science and you've let it contaminate your work. So much power and so much intellect and so much bravery and I'll do everything I can to make sure you end this dead anyway, because I know the root of all that, I know where this cancer goes if you keep doing this. Die. Die! DIE!!" He calls out, leaping up and into the cockpit of the gunship, disengaging it from the drill, and immediately unloading a half-dozen bristling guns straight towards the body of the creature.

    The VEP inside him induces two specific emotional and mental outcomes: Manic intelligence when exposed to the implements of super-science (the tool of the Miniknog caste), and deathly fear when exposed to the weapons of super-science (the weakness of the citizen caste). Albert's entire body is surging with a mix of the two. His heart is pounding, his teeth are clenching, and his wounds from the dozens of corpse assailants are re-opening from the stress. This may be why he chooses to take his heavy white gleaming high-science gunship and slam it straight head-on into the body of the spider, and unload munitions head-first onto the scientist as well. In a vulnerable position like this, it's likely his gunship won't survive the counterattack. He plans to simply create as much damage as possible in all targets as he can, as quickly as he can, with little regard for his own materials.
Azure Armature Things go... according to (revised) plan. She doesn't spare Candle the distaste of fretting about him, seeing him handle himself well. As for his men...

A lost cause for any caught in the blast. Tch.

Acid continues to smoulder under her clothes, but the sixty seconds she had allotted for tightening up their party and seeing to any wounds tick down relentlessly, whether Azure Armature spends cycles reflecting on the situation and feeling sorry for herself or not.

Instead, she spends it confirming Batou's sapper charge placement - flawless, and watching All-Seeing Eye butcher the ghouls - delightfully efficient.

Instead of an encouraging rallying call, or a pre-speech, she announces rather tonelessly that 'Our sixty seconds are up', moving to brace for the explosion as the pair of suicide prisoner zombies close on her.

She almost misses them.

Spinning to engage, Armature considers for the briefest moment just blinking down the hallway as the zombies go critical. She spends almost a full heartbeat considering just cutting her losses on the dodge. But dodging would mean unacceptable losses to useful assets, ones she had further Plans for. So instead she brings up her energy-roaring right arm, spraying shots that--
        --uselessly do nothing, as Toriki and Candle has the suicide prisoners well 'in hand'.

Azure blinks once at Rain, her eyes adjusting with a subtle mechanical whirr at the Dragon-Blood's Pithy Comment. "Understood."

This lasts for precisely two heartbeats more, before Blue decides there is naught to do but go down. She doesn't shout to breach, as All-Seeing Eye and Batou actually get ahead of her in her stunned-and-reacting state, forcing the scarfed operative to fall in after, acrobatically wall-sliding and blinking near the bottom, deftly avoiding the spike pit at the bottom by the 'sacrifice of the advanced troops'.

It's around the 1-count that Azure drops in near and behind All-Seeing Eye, dropping to a knee instead of absorbing the whole of the shock with her legs, betraying a more advanced state of damage than she let on from her concealing clothes.

At the two count, Azure stands and her hand digitizes another charged blast of magma, charging it in a sheath around her arm.

On three, while ASE begins his own assault, Azure hoses down the obviously important sigils carved into the ground with her magma cannon. "You can keep talking, Strangling Sable Web. I understand you like it. As for the rest of you -- the mission remains the same."

Azure Armature appears to be Coolgirl Ignoring the entire monologue or giant necromantic 3/4ths Horror before them. "Capture the HVT for interrogation. Secure any material that you can. Burn the rest!"
Tomoe Albert is leading and she follows she gets the idea, burn what you can steal what you can. Given this is a place of the undead"? She's going to opt to burn it, option. It's the safest one when it comes to the supplies and everything else works here. She feels a sense of horror she sees that Albert does his thing the fire spells join his own action she's trying to burn everything she can but then comes the spider.

She's now pulled towards it and soon a sword is in her hand evne as it happens the spells have stopped and she hears ALbert's words.

"Say what you will."

Is all Tomoe has to say as wll she's fightin a giant mecha spider thing likely made of Soul Steel and well it seems to eb powring up she'll hope for some addtional supporet but right now the sword isn't the best idea in the world and she's going to ahve to deal with that until she gets stable enough to keep up with the spells again.
Staren     And then they all crash into a giant spider chamber. Staren's not waiting for what is obviously an abyssal engineer to TALK. He just starts blasting right away with the beam cannons and what turns out to be some kind of micro-missile launcher on the other arm. The missiles use an explosive to blow open the way for a high-speed penetrator, but the effect is somewhat reduced by said missiles being the size of a pen. Back-up weapons. If he had the armor he left in Emblem, she'd be facing at least a half-dozen plasma fireballs.

    After that, though, gravity... or perhaps magnetism? gets _even wonkier_. Staren has to focus on trying to mitigate it -- clinging to the wall, firing his grapple t-- oh he doesn't have the grapple tag either, DAMMIT -- and using his flight at this weird angle takes too much concentration for him to do more than fire wildly in the artificer's general direction.
Bloody Revelations     What Miari sees on her way down is beyond easy description. The source of the strange 'magnetism' is most certainly the spider machine itself. Partially incomplete it may be, but there is a complicated and sophisticated core of magitechnological equipment buried in the grotesquely pulsing nexus of legs, and it has everyone within a good hundred meters caught in its field.

    When it's cranked up like this, the corpses hauled by the zombies fly free and all but impale themselves, where the black spikes seem to siphon out their vital fluids and convert them into an Essence charge, which funnels up to the crackling web, which is practically blinding in enhanced vision --it easily has ten times the energy Miari possesses in totality coursing through its threads, with even more stored in its jewels. The Abyssal seems to be tapping into it by standing on it, though Miari can tell that this is a critical time, as their enemy's reserves are actually incredibly low, no doubt emptied on last preparations with the assumption she'd have plenty of time to recharge; several times, even.

    She immediately draws on another huge chunk of that energy to conjured another necromantic spell, causing a multitude of discarded and withered corpses scattered around the siege engine's feet to explosively unravel into whirling tendrils of sinew and bone, using the latter as hooked tips on a vortex of organic cables that whip into a frenzied cyclone. At the same time, they reach out to rake and claw at Miari, Azure, Eye, Staren and Batou, and also lash and swat and batter ammunition out of the air, tying together to soak the blasts of grenades and energy weapons where they get through, simultaneously attacking and shielding the Abyssal from harm in a complicated, grotesque, and fairly impressive display.

    When All-Seeing Eye shoots out all the zombies in the room though, the corpse supply runs dry, and excess bodies fall short of the flesh/bone-wind field, meaning that the sustained weapons fire chews through the violently flailing screen until it soon runs out of biomass to use. A salvo of micro missiles breach through and punch blazing holes through the main body of the spider, and a volley of Tachikoma grenades explode all around its master, who has to dance across the hanging web with a kind of freakish agility to step between the fire and shrapnel, audibly gasping as one piece finds her and punches the wind out of her. Her own blood drips from her dress and apron, splashing onto the soulsteel spikes and sizzling.
Bloody Revelations     She starts charging up again, hopping from charged power line to line to stay out of the gunfire where she draws on those reserves, and then casts a hand out to the black sigils scrawled on the floor, which light up with the same bright green as the spider's gems. The magical circle blazes with emerald flame for several seconds as a massive magical charge appears and condenses in the middle, only for Azure Armature to erase the runes with splashes of molten magma, and cause it to fizzle and splinter into randomly scattered bolts of magical 'laser' beams, further damaging the construct.

    "Damn you all! You have no idea what you're doing! How carefully balanced everything here is! You'll blow yourself to pieces if you keep flailing like struggling insects, so /sit still/!" she screams, still consuming her Essence faster than it can charge from the web (which is so fast that only someone inexperienced in Exalted combat could overcommit like that) and dumping the last of it into a ball of white light between her hands, which she compresses and then drops. It hits the floor and fractures like a bead of water, then throws out an enormous ripple of itself in every direction. The zombies and corpses are instantly skeletonized where it passes, surgically stripping flesh from bone like it is no doubt designed to do, though that obviously has harmful effects on the living flesh most people still have on theirs.

    A great deal of it is suddenly blocked by the perpendicular platforming section that pops up under Albert's terrain grenade, where she screeches at him "You know /nothing/ of torture you degenerate man-beast! Allow me to show you!", but her followup is cut short by a hacking cough of blood and a lack of necessary Essence to keep flinging spells. Whatever her plan was, it'll have to go unknown, because the remainder of the suicide bombers are dealt with by Candle and Falling Rain above right when she would most benefit from their intervention. Looking up to the ramp, as if on cue, a couple come tumbling down, but instead they land into the center of the room and erupt into indiscriminate acid geysers (also largely blocked by Albert's wall-platforms, thankfully) which melt straight through the machine's fleshy supports and cause it to crash lopsidedly onto its front side.

    Already too incomplete to move under its own power, the complicated abomination is in no position to even hold its own ground when the gunship crashes into it. The massive thing is physically tackled by a rocket-assisted vehicle, and for its spindly proportions, hurled into the opposite wall, ripping cables from their sockets and spilling both blue liquid, Essence sparks, and human blood, in great quantities onto the floor, to the point the first and last of those thinks starts to come up to the ankles.

    Just like an oversized spider, the war engine is crashed with a crunching splat, and then sends its legs into every corner of the basement floor when the gunships weapons fire at point blank, completely obliterating it, and probably taking the gunship out in the process as all of its Essence capacitors fracture and explode dramatically. The Abyssal is thrown free and audibly breaks something as she hits the floor. She bounces once like a dead fish, hits the ground again, rolls several times, and then slides through the chilling liquid all the way up to Azure Armature's feet, where she remains soaked and huddled in an agonized ball, clutching her broken ribs and bleeding stomach, completely spent of all her magical energy.
Azure Armature As everything goes to shit, explodes, and attacks are blunted by a clowncar of simultaneous TACTICAL PLANS operating in perfect chaos, a song of half-aborted attacks and near-misses from a scientist unused to the realities of true combat.

Azure had ducked behind a large part of Albert's cover, rolling out to re-engage when she found the battered body of the Abyssal at her feet.

Standing upright, she raises a fist. "Secure anything you can. Agent Batou, will you join me for an impromptu interrogation session?" She calls conversationally, glancing to All-Seeing Eye as she does. "And anyone else with information-gathering skills."

Her right hand, which had borne a sheath of magmatic energy began to boil with dark crimson metallic blood, forming into a long dagger. "We have one last primary objective to do, but it appears we have a few moments to take our time. Falling Rain can take a survey of the materials, and I have visual records of the magic circles."

She gestures back up the hole they came in. "Afterwards, use the compasses I passed out to join in the fight topside in the city unless you're too wounded."

Her normal smug smirk or emotionless flat expression this time is possessed of a wicked upturn at each corner of her mouth, perhaps emulating the person whose power she had invoked. "Now, let's complete our objectives with efficency, everyone."
Starbound Flotilla     Albert's ejected from the gunship, as it's shattered into huge chunks of steaming, smoking metal by the detonation of the spider. Albert himself barely avoided being impaled on one of those corpse-spikes that rammed straight into his cockpit, and his heavy-duty chemical safety helmet has a massive gash on it where the thing sheared past him, but it's thankfully still rad-proof. He's mounted up on that small mecha he brought in, the mechanism he ejected through. He remains mostly wordless, until he gets back to his work.

    He doesn't really have the mental health or the general demeanor to focus on rescues or prisoners. He won't get in the way of others doing their own work on that topic, but as he picks up his rad-fire raygun again with the heavy mecha suit, hoisting it in one strength-enhanced arm, he gets to work on the corpses left behind by all this. And the machinery. And the corpse-machinery. He gushes searing heat and irradiation into them, making them either irrecoverable or insanely dangerous for a necrotechnician to handle. Any ash left behind from his previous work, he sears with a fresh layer of radiation. He heads back up the ramp of sorts, crushing his way through the spikes with more time on his hands, and moves to the other levels, giving them the same treatment.

    He finds every corpse he can and burns it. Aside from those things he was searching for before, he burns everything useful he can find. He leaves a layer of gently glowing ash on almost any pristine surface. Records, archives, equipment must all be reduced to ash. Any hiding scientists, living or dead, must be incinerated. Anything recoverable, including the /physical location/, must be rendered unusable. This place, his hope goes, will be impossible for anyone, ghost or otherwise, to inhabit for many, many years.

    As he does, he mutters, angrily. A constant low mad-scientist ramble. "Torturers. Murderers. Tyrants. Oppressors. Pseudo-scientists. Small-minded. Greedy. Petty..." His history with the Miniknog has made him very obsessed, but has given him much of the same style of Mad Science moods, it seems.
All-Seeing Eye      At first, things had been going cathartically well. Then... a cat of a thousand tails and an energy blast later, Eye is quite the worse for wear, given his non-optimal choice of location for the fight. When the siege engine is destroyed and the magnetic field with it, he hits the ground with a splash. Little, ivory platelets of clay fall out of his hood, and from the sleeve of his right arm. Apparently, the blast the necromancer used wasn't so friendly to artificial flesh, either.

     The sparking of his missing cybernetic eye illuminates a deep purple death's head beneath his hood, an eyeless socket and a soulsteel-woven musculature revealed in brief, grimacing flashes. The revealed magitech skeleton on the right half of his face clashes with the beautiful, statuesque left half.

     Without turning to face Azure, he poses a response. "I would love to," he says coolly. "Thank you ever so much for the invitation." His palm opens, and the Personality Override Spike extends into his waiting grasp. "I don't have all of my tools with me... but I have the most important one."
Tomoe Tomoe will do what she can with the prisoners but she understand they got to focus on the main target, the people in those cells didn't have a chance this morning she tells herself but now they do. If they can bring down their target, right? She was saved from worse by the destruction of the spider thing and she's covered in things she does not want to think about right now. She needs to get ready there's another fight ahead...
Empty Tidings Falling Rain watches the carnage distantly, observing from the edge of the pit torn in the facility. She only begins her descent once the worst of it is over, picking her way down the collapsed layers of basement until she reaches the heart of the complex.

She sees the laboratory, and... has no real idea what most of what's in there is for. That's fine, though; she's not there to take one look at it and dissect its terrible purpose.

She starts carefully picking her way around the room, examining it from top to bottom. She'll collect research materials and anything that might be portable for proper examination later, of course. The things that aren't...

Well, they've got the burn-happy types down here for a reason.

"Be sure not to kill her," Rain calls to Eye. "Though, she only needs to be able to verbalize coherently for a... /normal/ interrogation..." She sounds momentarily thoughtful. Maybe she sympathizes. Or maybe she just wants to see the spike in action.