We finally managed to gather everything we had here, including the medbots, and our captives- captive. Right, Zenia kinda joined us, so she's just coming along. I had Meda on my back, and Baulder was carrying Claire on his, with the help of those extra arms, he gained recently. Francis helped Zenia carry Caleb, who was still not in his top-shape.
We were passing through all the corridors we have previously crossed, and to our surprise, there was no one in them. I mean, we have pretty much either knocked out, or killed everyone in this entire base, but the part that felt fishy, was that there were no reinforcements. This was supposed to be a somewhat important base they had, with two of their most wanted people in it, breaking the entire place up, yet not a single soul wanted to show up, to stop them?
"Zenia, is there a procedure for reinforcements within the Order?" I asked our new member.
"In a nutshell, if a base gets run over, a group comprised of at least a few deacons and a lot of warrior-priests would show up," she explained, with mild annyoment on her face, "That's why I wasn't really stressing when you caught me."
"Okay," I replied, "What the hell is a warrior-priest?" I asked hoping that it wasn't some high-class fighter, that we couldn't handle.
"The ones lying on the floor around us," she replied, pointing at the fallen henchmen.
"Oh, I thought those were just some henchmen you had around for cannon fodder. They barely pose a threat, you know," I said, with a grin on my face.
"Yeah, they are just our- their soldiers," she said, with a slight blush.
"Should we account for some higher-ups? Like above a Deacon?" I asked one final question.
"Under normal circumstances - no. But this isn't one of those," she replied.
With that in mind, we continued running. I was expecting anything, really. Like expecting to the extent, that a certain Bishop might show up, hell, even the fricking Pope might show up, given that his son just screwed up some random operation in California. No matter, we didn't really have a choice here. We just had to run. Run, and not turn back, for the time being.
After a few minutes of running, I started to hear some sounds coming from the hallway in front of us. First, it was just steps, then it turned to rapid, and multiple steps that eventually led to some shouting. At this point I sure knew what was coming. I told the men to stop, and wait here in place. They were coming.
And sure enough, a few seconds later an entire squadron of these warrior-priests showed up. At a quick glance, I realized that there were probably abour thirty of them, and seemingly they were without a leader. That puzzled me a bit, but eventually, once they stopped, I couldn't be preoccupied by that thought.
"Attack!" I yelled, and started to launch an attack on them. Ventus and Zenia left Caleb sat down next to the wall, and jumped straight into action. Karver stayed back to protect the man, along with Claire, and I even placed Meda there quickly. I also ran forward, releasing a varied array of run-and-gun, as well as my [Greed Binders] latching onto them from the ground. I had some ridiculous range. I stopped a dozen feet away from them, in the cover of my [Protection Binder], and decided to attack from there. Even before they managed to pull their guns on us, we had more than half of them on the ground, flatlining.
The other half, seemingly randomly decided to fall back, but as they were running away, we tried to kill as many as possible. Right after they ran away, I yelled back to Baulder to carry the rest of our guys, and catch up to us. I raised my shield in front of me, and started running forth. Ventus and Zenia joined me in their pursuit, and we were catching up without an issue.
Well, without an issue, as in no issues catching them. The issue was, that they led us to a room full of other soldiers. Like around a hundred others. So, as any sensible person would do, we didn't run away. 'Cause why would we? Would that make any sense? Yeah, probably, but we were sort of in the mood. At least me and Francis were. Zenia? Probably not so much. Murdering one's own, even if she left the group, was probably quite the strain on her.
"If you don't wanna kill 'em, go back and protect Caleb," I shouted at her, "We can deal with them!"
She was puzzled, like I said something that was an affront to society, but she quickly realized, that I realized, that she realized that she doesn't want to fight her ex-mates. She bowed in gratitude, and ran back towards where Baulder was supposedly at. I looked at Francis, and he looked back at me. We both had the same idea in our minds, and we wanted to test it.
"Let's do this, Ventus."
"Let's get down to business, Tentazione."
We turned towards the really confused group of henchmen, and I let out one of those 'evil laughs'.
"What are you doing, grunts? Attack me!" I taunted them, and sure enough, they all turned to me. In that same instance, Ventus vanished, and a gust of air started forming around the warrior-priests. From their prior concentration on me, they suddenly started to look around, mostly confused as to what is going on, "Are you deaf? I said attack me!" I shouted at them again, but this time it didn't work.
Slowly, Ventus was gathering all of them in one spot, as they were backing away from the tornado-like wind. They even started panicking, and running through the wind, but anyone who touched it, was just a smear on the wall a second after. And here came I. Encircling them made them an easy target for my new dome-thing. I started to erect a multitude of Binders from the ground, eventually encompassing them entirely. Since that area was my realm, I could feel anything, and anyone in there. So, I pierced their hearts.
Ventus stopped running, and came back to me, slightly covered in blood, but he used some of his wind, and cleared himself. At the same time, I lowered my Binders, to let out quite a few gallons of blood, and about a hundred corpses. We looked at each other, and started to laugh.
"This was our first coordinated attack, right?" he laughed.
"And it was quite something!" I laughed back.
The rest of our group made it back to us, and stopped in the doorway, looking at the massacre in awe - or disgust. Zenia covered her nose, and even Caleb turned to the side. Yeah, we might've went overboard with this one. Anyways, they eventually recovered, and Baulder made a bridge from wood for us, so that we wouldn't have to walk across this here field of death.
We continued down the hallway, eventually making it to the entrance, and there, I finally got to marvel at the work of Andromeda. What a beautiful sight this was. A bunch of henchmen lying on the ground, their bodies charred, along with the (former] Fire-Deacon Ivan Dubinsky. But, as fate would have it, he wasn't our only enemy in the room, at least it seemed that way.
"Finally, you show your face, Sin of Greed," A tall, blonde woman said, with a suspiciously familiar costume.
"Oh-ho! The Giant is here!" said a man suspiciously looking like an armadillo.
"Hm," the final man 'said' as he looked at Meda, in the hands of Karver.
"Okay, what's going on?" I looked at them, and figured out who they are, "Why are you here, Vice-Wardens?"
Our three enemies from a few weeks prior suddenly appeared in front of us. The beautiful berserker, that is Stacey, a fat and round armadillo man, by the name of Donaldsson, and last but definitely least, Hattori the ninja. At least as I remember them. Without Russel, who obviously died, we had these three to still take care of. But the main question in my mind was, why did they come here, and how did they know we'd be here?
Were they maybe part of the Order as well? Or did they come here witha different agenda? But if that's so, how did they know we'd be here? It's not like we told literally everyone on this planet that we'd be hitting up one of the secret bases of the secretive oranization, that is the Order of the Coin. If that's not the case, than how was this possible?
But well, rather than hows, and whys, we should be looking at the facts. We had to face off against three of our prior enemies, that just so happened to have the duty of subduing villains, and general criminals. I don't want to spell this out, but we probably had a hell of a fight coming in our way, and I wasn't too keen on fighting it.
"We're here for her," Stacey pointed behind my back, straight towards Baulder, "The Warden would like to see his grand-daughter."