Cassie waded after their fishy foe even as it was swallowed up into the murky waters of the marshlands. A few pot shots at its fleeing form from their designated marksman didn’t seem to have any effect on it, but Cassie wanted to make sure the thing wasn’t lying in wait just beneath the surface. A few good stabs with her buster sword into the waters where the thing had made its escape later, nothing decided to pop back up to the surface to say hello. [color=a0410d]“Quick little bugger,”[/color] she mumbled to herself with a shrug and began trudging back towards the group. She was going to count that as a kill for her. After all, she’d got the last hit on it, and in her book that totally counted.

She smiled despite Selene’s frustrated yelling. As far as Cassie could tell, nobody dying or being injured meant things had gone pretty damned good, if not having to endure a slightly anticlimactic ending to their battle. But she let their leader rant without so much as a witty quip. The other woman was very much the perfectionist, Cassie knew, and no amount of telling her that it was impossible to plan for something like a giant fish monster spitting slime at their transport would make her berate herself less. It’d probably just make it worse, really. 

So instead she just planted her weapon into the ground and pulled her soaking shirt over her head and wrang it out several times before tucking it into her belt. There was nothing she could do about her drenched pants or soggy, water-logged boots, but at least she wouldn’t have to deal with that horribly clingy, wet sensation of her tee. She had a sports bra on anyway, so it’s not like it mattered; she ran around the gym in less all the time. And man, it was so much more comfortable.

The rest of their trip through the swampy lands was unfortunately uneventful. Cassie spent the first little bit amusing herself by throwing pieces of wet pancake from her pocket to the little fishes and critters they came across on their trek, and later swinging around her sword arbitrarily to keep her muscles warmed up and ready to fight. 

Eventually a cityscape came into view, and with it the slight rumblings and flashes of UDF ships laying waste through barrages of artillery fire. She bet there was a lot more excitement going on within the confines of the city. And she was sure they would have been doing a lot more damage to the enemy’s ranks had their group been allowed to fight. Sponge, Grunt, and Fodder (not to mention thousands of other soldiers she hadn’t met) were out in Astral somewhere, fighting the Mordrem threat without Guardians to back them up. The piece of paper, or whatever it was they were fetching, had better be important. The fingers wrapped around the hilt of her sword itched, and she realized that she had been gripping the thing so hard that her fingers had started to numb. 

She switched her sword to the other hand and shook out the tingling as they approached the access point to the city sewer system. Cassie couldn’t say she was thrilled with the idea of running around pipes beneath the city. She didn’t know the size of a standard city sewage drainage system, but she doubted it was nearly as large as she would prefer. That is to say, large enough where she could swing her weapon freely without worry of hitting a wall. Cass was… well, she wasn’t proud to say that she claustrophobic. And it was stupid, and it didn’t make sense, but that’s just the way it was. 

A full grown woman who ran headlong into anything you threw at her but couldn’t handle being a little cramped? Cassie snorted. 

Then the group of refugees appeared, and her heart clenched at the woman’s plaintive cries for help. If there was a worse death than being trapped underground, surrounded by human waste, and being attacked by Mordrem Cass couldn’t think of it. She wouldn’t wish that on her worst enemies, let alone scared war refugees and [i]little kids[/i]. Fuck. Every part of her screamed out to help them, except that one little seed of fear festering in the back of her mind. She was not accustomed to the feeling, and the way it made little worms wiggle around in her gut made her shift her weight uncomfortably. 

Cassie exhaled deeply, steeling herself. [color=a0410d]“Well,”[/color] she said after Eric had his piece, thinking that she’d managed to make her voice sound more confident than she felt at the moment, [color=a0410d]“We can’t really call ourselves Guardians if we don’t protect people, can we? It’s kinda implied in the title.”[/color] 

She wouldn’t let people suffer just because she was being a baby. Besides, sewers were made of metal, right? So she could use [i]Push[/i] and [i]Pull[/i] to make sure they didn’t all end up in some nightmarish, reeking tomb beneath the city. And surely Selene had some sort of plan to get them through it, because she always had a plan. They’d be fine. Super, even...