[7] vs. Trisha

[Piper Juunanagou]

The battle was over—all that was left of Trisha Demolic was a handful of small blue fires clinging to life against the ruined exterior of the café. Try as she could to find a redeeming quality about the woman, Piper could not, which caused her to immediately forget about Kai’s dead wife and move onto her own problems.

“You’re good to go,” Sophia said with a flustered sigh as she sagged backwards against the wall of the small bar that the duo had garrisoned behind. “Do you have a plan?” The healer asked, repeating the same question that Piper had screamed over to Kaden a few moments earlier.

“Well…” Piper started before she was silence by the hail of machinegun fire. After the hail of bullets died down, the medic let out a heavy sigh and glanced over at her slightly frazzled teammate. “We just need to get up there and bludgeon those guys until they lose consciousness,” the redhead shouted as another spray of bullets punished the nearby area.

“How are we supposed to get up there?” Sophia shouted above the gunfire as a playful grin spread across Piper’s dirty, flustered face.

“You can leave that to me,” the medic snickered as she fizzled out of existence. With a cocked eyebrow, the blonde healer crawled forward and tried to peek over the shattered bar without getting her face torn apart by the various streams of energized bullets showering down from the second floor.

In a puff of light particles, Piper popped into existence behind a trio of gun-totting mercenaries. As the three trained killers tried to pivot their bodies in an effort to turn their high-tech weapons upon the medic, she sent two of them plummeting over the balcony with a violent clothesline. And then a split-second later, her right foot found its mark upon the third man’s chest and sent him crashing through the railing and down to the court below.

“Piper!” Kaden’s voice was almost a whisper against the cacophony of machinegun fire. Glancing quickly over her shoulder, the woman managed to flash her male companion a warm smile before another team of soldiers engaged her. Piper heard the courier’s warning, but by then, she was already gone—nothing left behind by an ephemeral cloud of dancing lights.

“Damn it,” one of Kai’s grunts shouted through his helmet as he began to scan the balcony for the missing woman. “Just keep an eye out for the frilly light show,” the soldier barked, his tone laced with smug sadism as he cocked his heavy weapon. In the court below, Piper’s tryst with the soldiers had given both Kaden and Sophia the time they’d needed to get out of imminent danger. As the courier scaled a broken section of the balcony, he saw his red-haired companion reappear at the very apex of the courtyard.

With the faintest inkling of a grin on her face, Piper let go of the fancy support structure and took a dive down toward the group of five soldiers. When she was close enough, she swung her legs down and used the man at the back of the group to break her fall. At the sound of their comrade’s cry of pain and the audible snap that resounded from his sundered knee joints, the other members of the squad swung around in unison and opened fire on the medic.

Kicking up from the broken, writhing soldier, Piper jumped over the group of soldiers and managed to land flawlessly on the other side of them. As they moved to one again open fire on her, the redhead sprung forward and wrapped her hands around the neck of the lead soldier. With a grunt and some torque, she ejected the armored soldier from the balcony. Unfortunately for Piper Juunanagou, her little display had given the remaining soldiers all the time they had needed to level their weapons square with her eyes.

“Last requests?” The mercenary in the middle rasped behind his translucent visor as his arm muscles clenched around the heavy weapon.

“Just one thing,” Piper said as she lifted her hands in a show of pacifism. Mildly amused by the retort, the same soldier let out a smug grunt and seemed to just slightly relax his aggressive pose.

“What’s that?” The same thug inquired.

“Look behind you,” the redhead spoke with a grin as she lifted a finger and pointed behind the trio. Before any of them had a chance to realize what she meant, Kaden incapacitated two of the thugs, leaving Piper just the window she needed to bury the tip of her boot into the middle man’s groin. Almost instantaneously, a muffled scream escaped through the visor as the thug’s grip on his massive weapon failed. Before the energy weapon had a chance to hit the floor, Piper had already sent its owner careening down into the food court with a solid kick.

“Thanks,” Piper said with another smile as another small battalion of soldiers rushed in through one of the nearby hallways. Before the duo could have a moment to talk, they were separated once again by machinegun fire. With a grunt, the medic threw herself back over the railing as the courier lunged toward the momentary safety of a disheveled burger joint.

One story below, the redhead hit the ground with a resounding thud and rolled a few feet before coming to rest in front of the shattered remains of a small pool that was filled with discarded change. A ragged cough fought its way up from the woman’s beleaguered lungs as she attempted to take the momentary reprieve to regain her bearings. Despite her wishes to the contrary, the break came to a loud and jarring end only a few seconds after it had begun.

Scrambling forward on her hands and knees, Piper clenched her eyes shut as she tried to put some distance between herself and the hail of energized bullets tearing apart the linoleum behind her. Incoherent obscenities ran rampant through the woman’s head as she snapped her eyes open in time to see that she was close to a large chunk of broken balcony.

With the heat of the encroaching energy bullets singing the tiny hairs at the back of her neck, the woman bit down on her lower lip and awkwardly hopped off the floor toward the chunk of steel and plastic. Reaching her desperate hands forward, the woman grasped at a twisted piece of rebar and used it to swing her body around the debris. As she tumbled to the broken, dusty floor behind the huge chunk of balcony, Piper let out a sigh of relief as the debris shuddered beneath the energized onslaught.

She knew her cover wouldn’t last for that much longer, but it would at least give her a breather from the unrelenting chaos that she had been dealing with since entering the mall. This entire scenario was making the woman rather exited to put an end to things and get back to the military base.

As if it had been waiting specifically for Piper’s thoughts to drift to happier places, the hulking piece of debris suddenly split down the middle, prompting the woman to dive to safety once more. With a grunt, she flipped up to a standing position and tightened her hands into tight fists.

Here we go again. Piper mused as she disappeared in a swirl of blues and whites.