The entire facility seemed to be a tangled web of identical hallways. The metal walls, the sloppy white paint job, the lifeless grey tiles. It all created a dizzying dreamlike sensation as Blackout ran down one after the other. Every time he pressed one of those big red buttons at the end of a hallway, the mechanical security doors would slide open, revealing what-to Blackout’s eyes-was certainly the same hallway he’d just come from.

As if the loop wasn’t disorienting enough, red lights strobed in concert with a harsh, buzzing alarm. At least it kept Blackout focused. Any time his mind threatened to wander in the monotony of his current activity, the alarm would jolt him back on agenda. The progress Blackout was making in his cardio training was paying off, as he chugged along a seemingly never ending track. The fabric of his super suit was heavy with sweat. Any time his lungs felt like they were about to give out, he pictured Grace at soccer practice. If she could do this to beef up her college application with extracurriculars, he could do it to keep the largest cold light power plant on the Eastern Seaboard from melting down.

Finally, after smacking a button just like all the others, the security doors opened to something that wasn’t another hallway. Beyond the threshold was a cavernous room full of control panels and enormous apparatuses. This must’ve been the collider room. Unfortunately for Blackout, it was infested with henchmen. At the center of the room, the henchman who was presumably in command was presiding over a team that was fiddling with the control panels. This was a problem. Intel had said there’d only be four or five henches in the collider room. At this point, Blackout was more than comfortable enough to handle himself in one to one. However, he had no chance against a mob. A desperate part of him suggested one by one stealth takedowns, but judging by the alarm, meltdown was imminent.

Just then, from above, a figure dropped. As soon as the problem had arrived, so had the solution. Deathknell landed in a crouch in the middle of the crowd, scattering the henchmen. In her hand, her katana, Hunter, reared back for a strike. Shocked henchmen struggled to react to the scene before them. No doubt they recognized Deathknell. No doubt they knew her presence meant their demise.

“What are you waiting for?!” The commander screamed. “Get her!”

The henchmen looked around at each other, each hoping another was brave enough to initiate the battle. Unfortunately, the bravest among them turned out to be Deathknell, who started by slicing the head off of the hench directly in front of her. The hench to her right lifted the muzzle of his gun. Before he could bring it to firing height, Deathknell had already cut the barrel in half. From there, she pierced the man’s heart. The blade was in and out of man’s torso faster than he could gasp. She didn’t wait for the body to hit the ground before slashing the throat of two more. And just like that, the frontline of henchmen were all down.

Pandemonium. The crowd of henchmen became a churning sea. Waves of those trying to fight crashed against those trying to run. Deathknell was in the center, hacking her way out. Gunfire sprayed around, amounting only to friendly fire casualties. The bullets did cause Blackout to take cover. Behind a pipe, as wide as a redwood, he found himself face to face with two cowering henchmen.

The henchmen and Blackout had a momentary exchange of shock. One hench reached for his gun. Blackout threw a shroud up around both of his opponents, and jumped a few steps to the left. When he landed, the shroud disappeared. The hench fired at where Blackout had been standing a moment ago. From his new position, Blackout swept the hench’s legs, dropping him to the ground with a painful thud. Without missing a beat, he kicked the hench’s gun away. By then, the second henchman had drawn his gun and turned it to Blackout. Another shroud around the hench. This time, Blackout dove into the shroud, dissipating it instantly. The motion before the hench threw him off, which allowed Blackout to grab his gun wielding hand and bash it into the pipe. The gun dropped to the ground. Blackout seized a fistful of the hench’s hair and cracked his head against the pipe. The hench slid to the ground, unconscious.

In that time, the first henchman had regained his senses on the ground, rolling onto his back to face Blackout. The gun had fallen beside the hench. Both he and Blackout realized at the same time. The hench snatched up the gun in anticipation of a scrum. Instead, Blackout abandoned the gun in favor of a jump and a pushing kick off of the pipe, over the hench’s body, courtesy of an advanced parkour course. Blackout landed on his feet behind the hench’s head. A light kick to the dome, and the hench was out. Wasting no time, Blackout swiped the gun, and expelled the magazine as well as the round in the chamber. With the magazine and gun in each in a hand, Blackout threw both in opposite directions. Reaching into his belt, he produced two zip-ties. Being efficient with them, he had both henches’ hands tied behind their backs without any difficulty.

Once both henchmen were subdued, there was nothing left to do but wait until the gunshots had traveled primarily from the center of the room to the edges firing inward. The soundscape was a competition between screams, gurgles, and rapid footfalls. From there, Blackout jumped in to do his part: work the periphery. A pause to duck away from a few spray bullets that peppered the wall behind him, and Blackout put up a shroud. Carefully, he slunk around the shadows at the edge of the room. Seemingly every spot of cover had henchmen crouched behind it, firing at the whirlwind of blood and body parts that was Deathknell. At every instance of cover that Blackout passed, he ambushed the henchman behind it. These henches were significantly easier to dispatch of than the initial two. As their attention was firmly focused on Deathknell, it was a simple matter of sneaking up from behind and applying a sleeper hold. Where there were multiple henches sharing cover, a taser sufficed. Only a few times did he actually have to tussle. During those spats, the element of surprise provided swift victories.

The henchmen behind cover were the minority, and they were rewarded for their middling bravery. The truly brave were lying dead at Deathknell’s feet. The cowardly who fled would have to answer to Razorback later. Doubtless, their fate would be the same as those who met with Deathknell and Hunter. Those who were lucky enough to be trounced by Blackout merely got conked and restrained. They’d either be arrested or lightly reprimanded by their boss upon waking, depending on who got to them first.

After all this time in residence, Blackout and Deathknell had synced up in all sorts of uncanny ways. At virtually the same time that Blackout had zip tied his last unconscious hench, the sounds of violence around Deathknell had died down. Blackout emerged from cover to see his mentor soaked in blood and sweat, diaphragm heaving. Labored groans were the only indications that there were any henchmen left alive in the graveyard she had created. Blackout exhaled his tension into relief. It wasn’t clear when the switch flipped inside of him that allowed him to react to the sight of dead bodies with anything other than horror. If it hadn’t, he never would have lasted on Deathknell’s side of the Black Label. Blackout stuck his hand into one of the hidden pockets of his suit, and retrieved a relatively large, chunky key on a lanyard.

“Do you want me to start the override sequence, or do you want to do it yourself?” Blackout asked.

Instead of a response, Deathknell lifted her gaze to Blackout and glared. This was a look he feared more than any other. It meant “that is a stupid question not worthy of a response, and I’m annoyed that you even asked me”. It had been a while since he’d seen it, which had been a source of pride. That pride now bore a deep bruise. The problem was, he didn’t know which answer was supposed to be the obvious one. Ultimately, he took a guess.

“Sorry…” Blackout said sheepishly, tossing the key to Deathknell.

Rather than catching it, Deathknell swung Hunter, obliterating the key midair. Without breaking eye contact with Blackout, she pushed out an inhuman snarl. This was not the “Blackout is stupid” look. It was not any look he recognized. This was something new. In that moment, he realized that the eyes that were burning through him were no longer Deathknell’s, they were Hunter’s.

Fight or flight. It was a fallacious binary. There was in fact, a third option: freeze. Deathknell’s super speed and unparalleled skill with a legendary sword rendered both fight and flight absurd options. It was the choice between a sword through the front or the back. Freeze didn’t make sense either, but it didn’t have to; Blackout was already doing it.

Deathknell pounced. Blackout watched Hunter splitting the air in front of his face. The primitive part of his brain raised his arms defensively to block a blade that could cut through titanium as easily as paper. All Blackout could do was close his eyes and brace for the exact moment of fatality. The expected moment stretched. Blackout felt nothing, which he initially attributed to his own death. Then, he realized that he did feel something: his eyes clenching hard. Then, he heard something: a frustrated grunt from Deathknell. Blackout opened his eyes to see an oily black blade growing from each of his wrists, held up in an X. He immediately recognized them as identical to the one that had manifested all those months ago on the Whitestone Bridge. Hunter had been stopped, if only momentarily.

The eyes that had been Deathknell’s could only register a dull confusion. It quickly gave way to rage. Deathknell opened her mouth for a primal roar, delivered directly into Blackout’s face. The blades gave Blackout little comfort. Though he apparently now possessed equipment capable of withstanding Hunter, he lacked the skill necessary to survive the swordswoman. Death had only experienced a brief delay. Drawing Hunter out of Blackout’s X, Deathknell took a back stance, shuckling like a mantis honing in on the optimal kill point on its prey. Then, the strike.

Suddenly, a black object, the size of a pigeon, whizzed past Blackout’s ear and plunked Deathknell between the eyes. While stumbling backwards, Deathknell tried to right herself with a wobble, but her foot caught on the arm of a felled henchman. Down she went. The object landed right in her lap: a size nine men’s dress shoe.

Freeze was still the mode Blackout was locked into. Adrenaline allowed him to turn his head. In the doorway behind him, Drifter stood, messing around with his stupid little duffle bag. It appeared that the zipper had caught. Sirens blared and the room bathed in violent red light, as Drifter was wrestled with canvas.

“Hey, did you get the key?” Drifter asked, still struggling with his bag.

“Yeah…” Blackout said.

“Cool. What’d you say was the name of that restaurant with the Banh Mis?”

“Phan’s…”

“Yeah, I’m really feeling Banh Mis after this,” Drifter patted his stomach.

Movement from Blackout’s periphery. Deathknell sat up and groaned. With a shaking finger, she poked gingerly at an angry red lump where the shoe had hit her in the forehead. A quick wince, and she was satisfied. She picked up the shoe from her lap, and examined it.

“Is that why she sent this?” Deathknell asked.

“Well, it didn’t melt, so no,” Drifter said matter-o-factly. “It did the trick, though.”

Deathknell got to her feet and tossed the shoe back to Drifter, who dropped it into his bag.

“Come on,” Drifter complained. “Go start the override. I want to go eat.”

Deathknell laughed sadly and shook her head.

“Hunter destroyed the key,” Deathknell said. “We’re all dead.”

“Shit,” Drifter said with no discernible change in tone. “Well, I guess that’s a raincheck on the sandwiches…”