[hider=Part Four][center][img]https://img0.etsystatic.com/058/0/9502762/il_570xN.770204074_79t0.jpg[/img][/center] 

“On your left!” too late, he hadn’t fallen yet, but he was a dead man walking. Harris, the once college football quarter back, once marine, once husband, once father, was now meat, taking up space on her line. They’d toss him over the balcony, or push him back behind them, but either way he would be moved, and another would take his place, just like Jones and Wilder before him. She’d lost three of her best within as many seconds. There weren’t enough of them to deal with something like this, and Ashley knew it. She was a mom, a wife, a sister, an aunt, and right now, none of that mattered. Right now she was a blaster rifle, a commander of other blaster rifles, and she knew that her rifles weren’t enough to deal with the super bitch they were engaging. These weren’t your standard rent a guns, either, everyone on her team was trained and experienced in one thing; making living enemies dead enemies, before they could make you dead. Right now it didn’t matter who they were outside of that one aspect of their personality, that one unifying bond shared by all on this team. They were the one percent of the one percent of the two percent, that bracket of the population that excelled in making their fellow human beings cease being, usually against their will. This was just something else, something her and her people had never engaged. You can’t simulate a situation like this. She’d had her turn in the holo room, she knew more about engaging supers than practically any living non super, but it’s not the same as… This. 

This girl wasn’t some punk with minor control over pyrokinesis, or some super strong wall smasher who was just as susceptible to blaster fire as any other meat suit. She was a Class S, reality warping, shit stomping badass who didn’t seem to have the usual aversion to killing as the standard super. Even super villains usually didn’t waltz around blasting security teams, they preferred to use silly ass tricks and smoke bombs and misdirection, all that nonsense, sending the less well trained security forces scrambling and simply engaging in fist fights with their fellow super freaks when they eventually caught up to them, and they almost always did. More power to them; let the regular humans play at their tactics and laser weapons, and the supers fist fight and throw cars at each other without regard to the use of the conventional human stuff. That was the way things usually were, and she along with the rest of the world were happier for it, everyone remembered the things that happened when supers decided to play at war like the rest of their species, if you can still consider them human to begin with, and none of it was very good for the normal old war fighter’s wellbeing. When supers started to combine conventional tactics and weaponry with their incredible advantages, well, things just got taken to levels that couldn’t be planned for, couldn’t be assessed beforehand, and the best thing to do once that kind of shit hit the fan was bow out as graciously as you could and just step away with as many of your bits intact as you could fight to hold onto. 

Then again, Ashley didn’t think this chick was going to be inclined to letting them go if she put up a white flag, hell, she didn’t have a white flag to put up, anyway. This was like something out of a nightmare, like those Japanese cartoons her kids watched on the TV, except they didn’t seem so bad until you were facing something that could do the kind of shit those characters could. Jones had drawn a bead, and just before he fired on the bitch she caught a glance of him out of the corner of her eye, spun the blaster around and out of his hands, and the thing’s just floating there in midair for a split second before it lights him up, ten, twenty blasts to center of mass, from a few feet away, all within two seconds and entirely without their being so much as a finger on the f#$%ing trigger, like it just decided to grow a conscious mind of its own and realized Jones had always been an asshole. Jones had been an asshole, Ashley was aware that he had been accused of terrible crimes during the war and was entirely sure knowing the guy that he was guilty as shit of all of the things people had accused him of over the years. Maybe this was their karmic destiny, after all the shit they’d done over all these years, but when she’d walked away from her old life and taken this job working for Anne Scarborough she’d stopped believing in Karma. After the things she’d done to people, if there was karma it shouldn’t have let her get this far. 

Couldn’t believe in it now, either, couldn’t think about the kids, stupid Japanese cartoons, any of it. Right now all she was, could be, was a rifle, a commander of rifles. A nod, and someone was getting Harris out of the way, and she was going to make sure they didn’t take a round in the process. She popped up over the cover of the balcony, laying down suppressing fire once she found the bitch. She was wearing a scarf, all neon blue, just the nuttiest thing, like it was electric or something. There were butterflies just taking off and floating around, coming off of the scarf before they just disappeared into nothing, ephemera. They weren’t illusory, either, this chick really bent reality around her, casually creating and destroying life, matter, without even thinking about it, just as some eye candy, costume jewelry. The girl didn’t seem to care about the lasers flying around her, should’ve been hitting her but of course they weren’t, and threw a bag to the wall before she just vanished. A flash, and Ashley was blind, deaf, figured she was dead, except everything was white and painful, and there wasn’t any fire anywhere. Her eyes started working, picture coming back into focus, and she could see that half of the far wall was gone. That shit was thick, too, must’ve had something on the other side go off simultaneously. Just then some chick wearing a rabit head as a mask came through the maw in the wall, blaster rifle in hand, and geared her attention, along with her weapon, on none other than Ashley herself. [i]Did that mask just blink at me[/i]? [/hider]