Tali bit her lip and other things that nervous teenage girls did. She didn't know what to do and—honestly? She just followed James here because she thought he knew what he was doing.

…Evidently not.

He squirmed as Coronel hoisted him up over his shoulder. What was a girl scout like Tali to do, unarmed and surrounded by commandos on all sides?

Music started playing from James' pocket.

The Bio-Police shot him weird looks. Aurelia's ears perked up and she started making hand signs too fast for Tristan to understand. Tali recognized the song—James' personal favorite, Down to the River by Ben Caplan.

—Ah! This song!

She mentally braced herself, turning off her brain.

Coronel, Cain, and the rest of the Bio-Police turned their heads in indignation towards James' pocket-sized farce. The guy couldn't turn it off even if he wanted to, which brought Coronel to consider putting him down for a moment just so he could confiscate the phone.

Before he could, however, James formed an 'O' with his thumb and pointer and placed it over the nearby commander Cain's head like a target reticle.

At once, a bullet slipped between his fingers, right through the middle of the O, and slammed into Coronel's composite alloy head. At the same time, a handgun flew down the hallway and ricocheted against the back wall. The sniper's gunshot finally rang. The surprised commandos raised their rifles, recognizing too late the weapon that landed in Tali's hands.

Her shooting stance showed no rigidity nor professionalism. Regardless, she fired as fast as she could, precisely knocking away the weapons of nearly every commando in the hallway.

If you don't want to kill someone, then it's fine if you just go for their weapons, okay?—was what James told her way back when, so that's what she was doing. It was also precisely because of this talent that James didn't turn her away from joining the scouts, even at her tender age.

However, she couldn't possibly suppress each and every soldier piled up before the corridor. Including their sidearms, they had more weapons than she had bullets.

By no means was she the final act.

Aurelia made her entrance, running in with tremendous velocity. She kicked off the ground and landed on the wall, bringing her body parallel to the floor. In that split second of defying gravity, she reached out to the falling James, taking him by the hand. At the same time, she threw a bundled-up curtain at Tali, who reflexively grabbed it. Aurelia reeled her in, and she kicked off again.

Pure acceleration wrested James away from Coronel, who had only begun to hit the floor. Tali felt gravity go in the wrong direction for a moment, then she found herself being dragged along the floor down the corridor. Had the g-forces lasted a second longer, she would have blacked out.

In under five seconds, James and Tali found themselves together with Aurelia and Tristan.

With the Bio-Police scrambling to reorient themselves, Cain examined Coronel. The bullet had hardly dented his skull, so he was not in any danger of dying. It surprised him, though, that the shot had knocked out the old cyborg. His flesh brain might've been shaken around like jelly.

Ordinarily, those survivors' actions could be interpreted as hostility, but it was not so simple. In this case, aggression did not imply hostility. He looked down at the handgun that he had, himself, pulled out to respond to Tali. There was a bullet lodged the wrong way down its barrel. The story was roughly the same with his other men—bullets down the barrel, handguards dented, and receiver assemblies busted. Only impossible talent could have delivered those shots with unerring precision, and where impossible talents were involved, he had to factor in the intent of the shots and stop himself from ascribing it to simple dumb luck.

Simple dumb luck couldn't deliver 7 shots under a second within millimeters of error.

With Coronel out of commission for the moment, it fell on Cain to sort out this newly-evolved mess—

"GRAAAHHHH!"

The floor between the scouts and Bio-Police erupted, and amidst the debris and settling concrete dust was the Rebar Man. Its bloodcurdling shriek denounced its previous treatment.

The first to welcome it were the Bio-Police.

Commandos flooded the hallway with well-aimed fire. Unfortunately, half of their rifles were knocked out of commission by a certain fast-handed teenager. The few who still had their rifles squeezed shoulder-to-shoulder between their squadmates, some crouched and some standing, and dumped as much lead as they could into the Gamma.

It plowed right through them.

Their rifle rounds emphasized penetration to more efficiently cut down hordes, whose Alpha variants could actually bleed to death. Lacking stopping power, all they did was sting the Gamma and endanger the scouts who were lurking far down the hallway with a rain of stray bullets.

The Gamma stomped on those who had been knocked off their feet, and punched some of those who dared remain standing. The commandos' armor certainly could take such a hit, but being too light, they were sent flying. The other commandos started pelting it with their sidearms. The hollow point ammunition seemed to have some effect akin to jabbing the Gamma, but that was all it was. It rampaged further and sent more commandos flying.

Amadeus Io, the lone shock trooper, who could've prevented this one-sided steamrolling couldn't get a clear shot amidst all his comrades. In the first place, he was supposed to have been the first one into the corridor and taken advantage of the tight quarters with his specialist armor and combat shotgun, but the damn idiots all piled in before he could even stand up.

He felt his electrified machete fly out of its polymer scabbard. Surprised, he turned and saw that Cain had finally taken center stage, a crackling blue blade in his hand. "Keep that gun up, soldier," his CO ordered.

The Gamma pulled out a length of rebar and charged for the last of the commandos. The gentleman, finding himself the target of a terrible shanking, flipped out a 5-inch pocket knife—a little bit undersized in this scenario, but a man rarely chose his equipment. He resolved himself to receive the glorious posthumous nickname of Sir Stab-a-lot and have it engraved (vandalized) upon his grave by the bastards who'd make it out of this hallway alive.

Before the Gamma drove the rebar into the commando's steel balls, a much bigger blade flashed by, and with it went the demon's hand.

Now faced by two demons, the sorry commando exited left and scrambled out of the way, pulling one of his comrades—one of the better ones—along with him and out of the 6-square-meter arena. A flurry of attacks filled that entire space, electric arcs meeting metal, throwing sparks and fried gore left and right. There was no way that the Gamma could intercept Cain's attacks, taking each paralyzing chop and slice head-on, but there was also no way for Cain to decisively end the monster right then and there. He could hack off its hands, but then it'd start jabbing him with bone stumps. The raw power between each of the Gamma's attacks could shatter concrete, and with Cain's parrying and dodging, most of those attacks gouged out the surrounding walls spraying the surroundings with dust and debris. The machete's electric paralysis effect also started to dwindle along with its supercapacitor's charge. Of his allies, there were only two combat-capable soldiers behind him, and only one could actually hold his own against this thing.

If only that shock trooper could get a clean shot off one of its limbs, then Cain could hack the other three away and they'd be left with an angry torso. Amadeus couldn't get a clear shot, however, and the two demons danced much too fast for his eyes to understand, much less for his hand to perfectly time a trigger pull.

"Now's our only chance to get outta here!" Aurelia whispered, "Come on, while they're fighting, we can—"

"No, wait."

"James, are you nuts?"

Aurelia spoke for Tristan and Tali, who nodded along with Aurelia's protest. James shook his head.

"I've been bothered about this, but I think they've been trying to cooperate with us—"

"What? Cooperate? They've been hunting my ass down all day!"

"Because they think you're a killing machine! But just a while ago, they bothered to stop rushing you down this hallway, didn't they?"

Aurelia grimaced. She'd been wondering why they hadn't just dumped a bunch of flashbangs at her yet.

"I say, we place our bets in attack position and go all out. Show 'em we're willing to talk. Gain some recognition, yeah?"

"You say that, but I'm the one here who's gonna be doing the heavy lifting."

"Then, I'll give you three?" James said, shooting her a knowing look.

"You know, that's still underpaying me—"

"How about four?"

The knowing look intensified, to which Aurelia lightly covered her mouth and looked away. Tristan started to suspect something, but he couldn't imagine such a relationship going on in the background—I mean, technically, Aurelia's a corpse, so you can't really look at her that way, right?

"Hey now, that's—that's kinda a lot…"

"Didn't you just say you were underpaid? Then—five?"

The sounds of blade-on-rebar fighting echoed down the corridor.

"…I'll hold you to that."

As Aurelia sped off into the fight scene, James shouted, "Introduce yourself!"

The machete's charge completely died down, and Cain felt the change. The Gamma's attacks gained a tenacity comparable to a wolf biting down into its prey's neck and refusing to let go. He started taking hits—jabs, mostly—from the Gamma's bone stumps. One of its hands eventually grew back, and it took a swipe, tearing off much of the outer kevlar layer of Cain's body armor.

It was all only minor damage, but Cain was only an enhanced human. Any Gamma would still have more stamina than five cyborgs taking shifts fighting them, which didn't bode well for Cain.

"MY NAME IS AURELIA!"

The Gamma folded sideways and flew into the back wall, the impact spreading across its side. Before it could slide down, a blob charged in, throwing a left hook, breaking its chest, then a right hook, breaking its spine.

Only once the demon was paralyzed did Cain recognize the form of the supposed Gamma they had been chasing all-morning. Her fingerbones pulverized, she grabbed the monster's arm with her noodle fingers and threw it over her shoulder, smashing it into the ground, cracking the concrete in ten or more directions.

The development paralyzed Cain.

—Her name is Aurelia. She has a name.

…This is not a Gamma.

From the floor, the demon bent its neck back to glare at Aurelia, reaching out to her with its free arm. A flash of steel, however, severed that arm. As the arm flew, and the Gamma shrieked, Cain and Aurelia met eyes.

The eye contact held in that brief moment almost drew out to last a lifetime.

...of sharpened, bloodshot eyes...

Aurelia ripped out its other arm, while Cain sliced across its eyes. Aurelia stomped down on its chest, while Cain ripped a combat shotgun from a hesitating shock trooper. The commander's teeth showed and radiated his glee as he passed Aurelia his machete, and painted the Gamma his love.

Aurelia's strength crushed the connecting tissue between the monster's limbs, while each shotgun blast carved out a new cavity.

They blasted and cut, until nothing but a pasty torso remained.

The Gamma's flesh-paste and viscera writhed with fibrils, attempting once again to regenerate lost organs. Aurelia flashed her fangs towards the cursed things, and they seemed almost to straighten out of fear of her, pausing before continuing to carry out the regeneration with a timidity unbecoming of a flesh-rending monster.

Coronel had been conscious just long enough to watch the cooperative gorefest. Maybe Cain also deserved to be approached with diplomatic tact after this.