Cait punched the entry doors off their hinges. Necessary? No. Cool? Hell yeah, and she knew Sharon Smart would be recording everything with those static-washed eyes of hers.

  Cait glanced behind her as she entered, catching the reporter’s eyes trained on her behind. She flexed a cheek, and winked when Sharon looked up in surprise.

  The trio entered the building without any more trouble.

  “Bets on whether or not these work?” asked Kennedy, walking up to an elevator and hitting the call button. “They call themselves the Elevated Race, sooo….”

  Cait and Qi both groaned, then the elevator blew the fuck up. Kennedy slammed back into Cait, coughing dust and smoke out of her lungs.

  “GodDAMN it!” she yelled, looking down at her shredded clothes. “Is this what it's like for you all the time?”

  “Pretty much!” Cait agreed, running her eyes over Kennedy’s body. She inwardly cursed that those black scales had done the female fantasy dance, meaning Kennedy was basically still wearing an armored monokini, but still.

  Not fucking bad.

  “Eyes on the prize, big girl,” Kennedy said scowling at Cait but with a shine of amusement in her lambent orange eyes.

  “Already were,” Cait said, keeping her gaze on Kennedy for an instant longer, before tearing them away to look at the stairwell. “But if you mean the mission, yeah, let me go first from now on. God forbid you end up more naked.”

  Kennedy’s claws tink’d against Cait’s shoulder as she slapped it. Cait kissed her on the forehead and set her upright, making her way to the stairs.

  “Stand back for this one guys, looks like they’re feeling boomy.”

  However, she pulled the door open without issue, and mounted the stairs.

  “Stay down there for now!” she called back down after herself. “Trap might be upstairs.”

  She jogged up the concrete stairs, not paying too much attention to if there were sensors or trip wires. Better she trip them, to be honest. Cait made it to the second floor without being blown up, but looking above her found a big ol’ slab of Onyxiron blocking any further ascent.

  She peeked through the window in the stairwell exit door, flinching as someone trigger happy on the other side put a bullet through the glass.

  Gotta shake that reflex.

  “You guys can come up,” she whispered into her comm, “but stay in the stairwell for now. Imma see if any of these mooks feel like surrendering, but I bet they shoot the shit out of me first.”

  Kennedy and Qi crept up the stairs behind her, staying low. Bullets probably wouldn’t hurt them, Plazload or not, but no reason to tempt fate. Cait nodded to both of them, then grinned, blew a kiss, and opened the door.

  Kudos to the defense team, the sheer volume of small arms fire was actually enough to push her back a step. Cait waved her arms in front of herself like she was trying to fight off a cloud of mosquitoes.

  “Hey! HEY!” She yelled, slamming an explosive stomp into the ground as she gained her bearings. The gunfire tapered off like indecisive rain as the shooters seemed to accept it wasn’t doing anything. “THANK you.”

  She surveyed the floor. It was mostly an open cubicle farm, or hell, as she liked to think of it. Instead of the usual office drones however, around 30 black and silver clad para-militants covered behind one cubicle or another. Cait swept her eyes across each one.

  “Okay. So, obviously you can’t hurt me,” she said, deciding that just tearing 30 dudes apart would be a little much for a murder-virgin like herself. “But I can and will kill you. Any of you that want to surrender, drop your guns and head downstairs. Can’t rightly say what will happen to you, but it won’t be certain, implacable, death.”

  Ball’s in your court, fuckwits.

  Cait saw a few of the guards lick their lips nervously, their eyes darting around to their teammates.

  There were a few, tense moments of silence, before the first gun hit the floor, and hands went into the air. Six dudes, all told.

  Welp, that’s six more moms that don’t have to mourn today.

  Cait nodded at them, beckoning them to approach, while daring those that weren’t surrendering to try something.

  One by one, the smart people filed past Cait, and out the door. Until the last one.

  Cait felt a spike of warning from Kennedy before something slapped onto her back.

  She had time to get out “GodDA-” before whatever was on her back went off and her mouth filled with quickly hardening foam.

  Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

  Kennedy saw the guy slap the device on to Cait’s back, and was one step too slow to stop him. In the time it took to take that step, Cait was encased in the world’s shittiest play-doh, and Kennedy’s claws were in and out of the man’s throat.

  “Fuck!” she yelled, glaring at the men around her, who actually seemed shocked by their teammates duplicity. She felt the heat of Qi’s fire inside her, needing to be let out. The fear in the other men’s eyes quelled it, just enough. She held a scaled hand up to stop Qi, who she didn’t expect to show the same restraint.

  The back of her hand was washed in flame, proving her right, before it cut off with a weird little hiccup. Qi glared at her, but Kennedy just shook her head.

  “Let’s let these pieces of shit live long enough to see they made the right choice.”

  Qi’s roar was deafening as she burst through the door, resolving into a bone-shaking laugh as rounds burst against her armor. She showed the fighters exactly how meaningless their cubicle cover was, charging straight towards the nearest man without so much as a stumble. That man scrambled back, falling over in his haste, only for his neck to be caught in one of Qi’s massive talons. A grisly snap sounded as she used it as a lever to fastball him at a fat guard hefting a heavy weapon in the back.

  Whatever that weapon’s payload had been, it didn’t find its target, instead exiting the barrel to find the flying boy-corpse right in front of it.

  “FU-” BWuuwmp!

  A hole seemed to tear in space as the muniton detonated, sucking in the body it had impacted and three more men besides.

  “Yeesh,” Kennedy said, dashing past a wickedly grinning Qi, “watch out for that shit.”

  Kennedy got fire, strength, and scale from Qi, but not her increasing size. She stayed lithe and low, dashing between the chaotic cube maze, striking like a fire-breathing xenomorph. Cries of surprise cut off abruptly as their makers were pulled out of eyesight and silenced.

  Not that stealth was really necessary. Qi was letting the rage take hold, and nothing these men had left could stop her. Each limb was lethal, a kick crushed a chest, a claw disemboweled, and a whip from her tail could easily snap a neck. Shit, Kennedy watched her straight up bite a quarter of a guy’s torso off, and was 90% sure she swallowed.

  Kennedy’s own kills were pinpoint. The tail she received from Qi wasn’t the massive, muscular bludgeon Qi possessed, instead a whip-like appendage with a needle sharp point. Kennedy put that through eyes, ears and temples, few targets even seeing her before they saw nothing, ever again.

  Mom always preferred the shadowy approach, Kennedy thought with a savage grin. That worked great until her tail pierced through one guy's helmet only to clink as it stopped dead against his skin. The helmet shattered, revealing a heavily armored mantis-like face. Kennedy was probably projecting, no way it could actually make facial expressions, but it looked pissed.

  Two extra arms burst out the sides of the man’s body armor, forcing her to dodge back as their scythe blade ends raked the air millimeters in front of her. With his humanoid arms, the guard pumped a shotgun, and Kennedy barely got her arms up in time to take the brunt of a blast of Sonic Shot. She flew backwards from the hit, slamming through a cube wall right behind another, very surprised, guard. Kennedy’s tail shot out, catching him below the chin and coming out the top of his head.

  She shook the fresh corpse off just in time to avoid a scythe blade that damn near took off her tail. She whipped that tail around, knocking the shotgun off center as the guard let off another blast, destroying a workstation instead of sending her flying. Kennedy stepped in close, catching an incoming blade on the thick armor of one forearm as she grabbed the guard’s neck with the other talon.

  She inhaled.

  When she exhaled, all the fire that had built up inside her came out, right into this guy’s weird bug face. She saw the cells of his compound eyes begin to sizzle and pop as he let out a weird, chittering scream, but she didn’t let up on the torrent of flame until he went limp in her fist.

  She let him drop, searching for another target, but just found Qi, fully draconic now, giving her a slow clap that sounded weirdly sharp, scale on scale as it was.

  “First bitch roast!” she exclaimed. “Nothin’ like it. Mine woulda melted that fucker though. Cover the stairs to the next floor, I’m gonna see if I can’t burn out our girl.”

  “Our girl?” Kennedy questioned, the fire in her chest more metaphorical now, but still burning.

  “Cait!” replied Qi, casually.

  “Not what I-”

  “I know what you meant,” Qi said, cutting her off and hefting the foam cocoon currently holding Cait. A torrent of flame left her throat, starting to burn away the immobilizing substance.

  Kennedy glared at her back, but had to scoff, and turn back to watch the stairwell. Mission first, bitches that needed to learn their place second.

  Her eyes flicked between the entry door and where Qi was burning out the girl they both seemed to be becoming increasingly possessive of.

  What the fuck is even with that? Kennedy thought. When I think about Cait with her, it's hot, but together with her? No fucking way.

  The flame had eaten away enough of the foam that a beautiful blonde face poked through, looking sheepish.

  “Sorry guys!” Cait called, still immobilized. “I have a learning disability.”

  “Really?” asked Kennedy. She just didn’t know Cait well enough to tell if she was joking.

  “No, but it would explain a lot, right?”

  Qi’s torrent of flame had a few breaks as she chuckled. A minute later, Cait’s arms were free and she began to help, jackhammering away at the remaining foam.

  “Ahhhhh,” she moaned, stretching performatively. “Good to be free!”

  She assessed the room, finding it a gory, charred, mess.

  “Excellent hero work people,” she said, fixing each of them with a shit eating grin.

  “Fuck you,” Qi growled. “They shoot, we put them down. Way it has to be right now.”

  “I know, sorry, just…. Not like the comic books you know?” Cait sighed. “No problem with murkin’ these assholes in principle though.”

  “You were reading the wrong comics,” Kennedy countered. “Just think more Punisher, less Superman.”

  “Point!” conceded Cait. “Y’all mind if I just try jumping straight through the fucking ceilingr? I think we can assume they’ve got more ambushes set.”

  “It’ll keep ‘em guessing, at least,” Kennedy shrugged. “Give it a shot.”

  Cait crouched, and shot straight up with a BOOM. Then, after a resounding clang, bounced right back to the floor.

  “What the fuck? Are these Onyxiron reinforced? How much money do these guys have!?” Cait asked, rubbing at her head out of habit.

  “More than any of us realized, I think,” Kennedy said, glaring up at the exposed black metal.

  “Samsara?” Cait asked, searching for another solution besides doing a DREDD on the entire building.

  Kennedy shook her head, “She can only warp to near people she’s karmically linked to, and the shitlord at the top of this place does not fall into that category.”

  Cait groaned, glaring at the stairwell.

  “Alright,” she sighed, “If they’re gonna make us kill every motherfucker in the building, we better get to work. I’m already behind.”