"Come back!" the fancily – but horrendously – dressed man yelled, chasing Felix through the corridor. His steps were heavy, even on the carpet of the building's floor. Running in dress shoes would do that to anyone. It worked out in Felix's favor, since he could very easily tell when his pursuer was going to round the same corner he did.
As soon as the man's admittedly dumb-looking beard came into view, Felix popped his fist into the man's face. He felt something, probably the man's nose, break. Wincing, Felix felt bad for the man for just a moment before remembering that he followed a lunatic like Blast and was even helping him hold hostages. All regret for having completely messed up someone's face disappeared.
The conference room was still a few floors up from where Felix found himself. He prepared to take off at a run when he felt a hand grip his shoulder and really dig into it. Spinning around, Felix was shocked to find Sergeant Welters. "What are you doing here?" he asked, just now seeing that the rest of the team had followed her.
"You're not exactly the silent type, vigilante," she explained, glaring at him. "Don't think you can run off and leave us behind. For all we know, you're about to join Blast and seek world domination."
"You know that's not true."
"Actually, we don't. Please, let us help you." Oh, that wasn't a request. Sergeant Welters demanded his cooperation. Felix nodded in resignation. He'd take his babysitters with him. Shoulders slumped, Felix led the way further up the tower, taking the stairs so as to reduce noise as much as possible.
No other henchmen showed up to stall Felix's progress, nor did Sergeant Welters say much more than a few basic commands for her squad to follow. They were all dressed in bulletproof vests and held pistols, but none of them were the epitome of a special forces unit. Well, except maybe the sergeant herself. She looked like she could single-handedly defeat a small country.
Still, everyone remained remarkably quiet, given their lack of training in stealth. Felix was feeling a bit more confident in his mission. Maybe these new reinforcements could help Johnathan and Harper!
Then, looking up ahead, seeing one of the officers poke his head through a doorway, Felix heard a loud bang. The police officer's body dropped limp, the gun falling out of his hands. Not a single one of the rest of the squad made so much as a sound, standing absolutely still. Felix was easily the most affected of all of them, his knees locking him in place.
The door swung open with violent force, revealing a few more of Blast's lackeys. They opened fire on the officers, their pistols hitting at least four of the eight people remaining in the police squad. Only one of those hit stopped moving entirely, giving Felix hope that the others were still alive, if dreadfully injured. Sergeant Welters managed to drop one of their surprise assailants before the second orange-and-black suited man struck her with the barrel of his gun.
Felix broke free from his frozen trance. He needed to move if he wanted to save anyone else. Some of the police officers returned fire, but their shots were completely off-target. Their surprise had ruined their aim.
It was down to Felix to run straight through the hallway before their ambushers finished reloading their weapons. Fortunately, it was a short distance, so Felix was able to tackle one of them to the ground, putting out a leg to take the partner with the pair of them. He bore down with all the power he could muster, each punch fueled by adrenaline.
The two men were out cold in ten seconds, their faces bloodied and bruised. Felix's fist was similarly bathed in crimson, and he picked himself off the ground to look at the carnage that had torn through the hallway.
Bullet holes were present in the walls, and the police officers – those that could still move, at least – were pulling themselves together. Sergeant Welters herself was up again, though she was rubbing her face in pain.
Two men would never make it home again. Felix fought the urge to crumple to the floor in anger and failure, but he knew that he couldn't be the one to show sorrow. He hadn't known either of the downed police officers well at all. Their names remained a mystery to him, but their valor wouldn't.
Felix felt particularly bad because it was his mistake that had cost them men everything. He should have been the first one through any doors. The person with the best chance of surviving anything like what had just happened was Felix, without a doubt. He'd forgotten that, and now there was a price to be paid.
With a fire burning in his eyes, a fire that sought to consume Blast in the heat of its wrath, Felix stalked towards Sergeant Welters. "Will you continue?" he asked, growling more than speaking intelligible words.
"We will," she bobbed her head as she cuffed one of Blast's followers and left him against the wall of the hallway. The other man followed shortly behind. "We owe Blast, now."
"There's no way more people didn't hear the gunshots. We should be out of here," Felix noted, Sergeant Welters summoning her troops and following Felix to the next set of stairs. They were on floor eleven. Another four floors would see them to fifteen: to Blast. Felix knew Harper and Johnathan were hanging around somewhere there, going over their plan one last time. He just hoped they wouldn't be hasty.
Seeing as they couldn't really move any faster than they already were, Felix cursed whichever designer somehow got Eastman Tower's stair system approved. There was only one central stairwell that led all the way up the tower, but that was surely monitored. The other ways to ascend and descend the tower involved a decentralized system of stairs, most of which required the police and Rewind to cross entire floors. It was what had gotten the two killed: Adam and Jerrick.
His anger bubbled up again as he thought about them. Those would be names that he could never forget, and he'd make sure that they were names that Blast would never forget either, even if he had to get blown up countless different ways.
There'd be hell to pay.