"Looks like the gang from Naples got wrecked before they could make it home yesterday" Noah remarked while taking a brisk read through the newspaper, looking for his favorite sports section.
"Gang from Naples? Aren't those the guys we beat in the first round of Brawlhalla?" Crystal snatched the paper out of her cousin's hands and read the first paragraph out loud.
"Revenants Gang from Naples involved in ghastly road accident as their bus crashes into a gas station. Only 6 of them survived with injuries while the rest are confirmed dead. The driver is nowhere to be found"
The Taitanzu Heads were quiet for a while, taking the time to fully register what they had just heard and the fact that it could have been them that had been in that crash.
The silence was broken by the loud arrival of one of the members of the second branch, her countenance being one of pure panic.
"I'm sorry for the intrusion gang heads! The scouts reported some of our soldiers near the site of the bus wreckage...and there's some unknown gang with them!"
************************************
"Isn't this fucking great. It's always one thing or the other with this branch..." Casey grumbled while following his superior to the supposed location of the Taitanzu members.
"If we're lucky we should be able to catch up to them. From what the girl told us it sounds like it's our newest members who got caught on the wrong side of town" Triple remarked in an equally grumpy tone; irked by the fact that his plans to privately celebrate his gang's win with a cup of cold coffee (he couldn't stand it hot and at times even put ice cubes in it) were now shattered.
"Like that isn't another thing ta add to our list of problems...they gotta be newbloods too? Fan-fucking-tastic!"
The duo marched around the city of Tallahassee, beating up and interrogating all kinds of individuals on the way with occasional calls from Boris for updates on the situation at hand. Noah and Crystal were also searching for the lost gangsters on the Western side of the big city.
"Damn newbloods. Hell were they doing out here anyway?! Didn't they hear of what happened to the Revenants?" Casey sighed after almost a solid hour of fruitless searching.
"I don't know...but something isn't right. This Reaper guy's been running things that ain't sitting right with me..." The calm Branch 2 Head kicked a stone into someone's window only for the sound of it hitting the ground never being heard.
"Oi Casey...you hear that?"
Casey stopped walking and looked back.
"Other than the sound of that window shattering I didn't hear shit"
"Exactly"
Before Casey could ask what his friend was going on about, Triple had jumped through the broken glass of the window and into the dark void that was the next room.
"Don't just pull random bullshit like that you asshole!" Casey jumped in after him and landed on something squishy instead of the hard wooden floor of all the buildings that were found in this side of the town.
"...Triple....the fuck is going on...." Casey frantically moved his eyes around the darkened room, struggling to make out the silhouette of his Branch Head. A faint metallic smell hung in the air and it made him sick to his stomach.
"Casey...." Triple was about to move towards him when he slipped on something soft and fell to the floor, landing on something cold and heavy.
"Triple!" Casey hurriedly pulled out his phone and switched on it's flashlight, what he saw almost bringing him to his knees.
Triple jumped off the floor faster than a grasshopper when the light shone and revealed what he had landed on was the deceased body of one of Taitanzu's newest members; Triple looked underneath his shoe and almost threw up when he saw that what he slipped on was an eye.
Casey and Triple looked all around the room in a near catatonic state of shock, the floor littered with the dead bodies of people wearing Taitanzu uniforms, all of them badly disfigured and maimed to the point of being unrecognizable.
"...fuck..." Casey muttered.
"...fuck indeed..." Triple was about to take a step forward when something flew through the air and past his face, hitting the wall behind him and exploding into flames and glass.
"A molotov? The fu-"
Another one exploded to their right and another right in front of them, sending the entire room into a mixture of smoke and flame garnished with the smell of the beginning stages of rot.
"Quick Casey! Find the window we came in through!" Triple commanded while shielding his eyes from the black smoke that was beginning to smell like rotting flesh.
Casey fumbled through the blanket of flames and smoke, trying to reach the window that they used to come into this hell hole to no avail. It was like the room had transformed into an inescapable maze.
Triple coughed and stumbled over the dead bodies, trying his best to protect his eyes from the stinging smoke whilst evading the bodies and simultaneously make it to any source of escape.
A ray of light suddenly appeared in front of them(whether it was from the Lord or some other natural phenomenon, they shall never know) and Casey instinctively threw his body into the source of the light, his weight and momentum fortunately making the wooden wall give way and bust them a hole to freedom from this hellscape.
Emerging from the flaming building and running down the street, neither stopped running for a good 10 minutes till they were in the middle of some sort of park, both of them panting heavily like dogs in a desert.
The duo looked at each other and said the only thing that came to their frightened minds.
".... fuck....."
**********************************************
"I'm surrounded by idiots"
Reaper's eye twitched in annoyance as he watched the animalistic behavior of the gangsters around him.
He couldn't believe that he had succumbed to the terrible fate of becoming what he hated the most. A gang member.
Shortly before the opening ceremony of Brawlhalla, he bumped into the leaders of Deixis and the Destin Destroyers in an old alley, both of them shells of their former selves, the air of authority and pride that they once held as the leaders of two of the most fearsome gangs was now gone like a childhood memory.
As much as Reaper hated it, siding with the gang heads and then uniting their remaining soldiers under himself was a necessary evil for him because whether he liked it or not he couldn't take out all the gangs on his own.
Reaper got up from his chair and walked out of the room, the noise made by the gangsters preventing him from thinking properly.
Of course it was easy to get the former gang leaders to work under him. Madcap the leader of Deixis wanted to get revenge on an individual known as Killer while Omar of the destroyers had a score to settle with a certain Amber Alvarez.
Not that he cared.
Once he manipulated these puppets into eliminating the gangs in Florida he was going to slaughter them either way. He already had countermeasures in place in case they got wind of his betrayal.
Reaper took a deep breath of the air in their hidden base of operations, not so far away from the warehouse that he commanded Omar and his boys to leave the Taitanzu soldiers in.
The stench of smoke mixed with rotten bodies still hung in the air like a fog. And it was pretty disgusting.
But speaking of Taitanzu...
The serial killer put his hand in his pocket and pulled out the rock that Triple had kicked into the warehouse.
He was checking that Omar had done everything according to plan when the projectile flew in through the window and he instinctively caught it; it was probably the lack of sound of the rock hitting the floor that drew those other two in.
Reaper chastised himself for such a mistake and drawing suspicion attention to such a sensitive operation, made worse by the fact that Omar's molotovs had failed to kill the two Taitanzu Heads.
Nothing much to worry about though.
"Everything is still going according to plan"
**********************************************
"How did this happen?! You were supposed to make sure the vehicles were in pristine condition!" Freezy choked the head mechanic of their nameless organization with a frenzied look in her eyes.
"I d-d-don't know what h-h-happened! Every single part of that b-bus was was checked 5 times over! I s-swear on my life!" The mechanic struggled to get out of the grip of his boss to no avail.
"Do you have ANY idea how much MONEY we lost because of that accident! Money worth a lot more than your 30 years of existence!" The furious girl slammed him into the glass window of the skyscraper, cracking it.
Hangman took a sip of his ice tea and sighed in frustration.
It was true; a good 40% of their opening ceremony earnings went into compensation of the grieving family members of the Revenants Gang's soldiers. He had no doubt that one of the Kiken'na 5 was the source of this mayhem.
"Maybe...it was the driver...who caused the accident...he was the only individual whose body wasn't found...." Sleeper mumbled while eating a jumbo pack of jelly beans that looked so sugary one would assume a single bean was enough to give one diabetes.
"BULLSHIT! What kinda driver causes a car crash for no reason?! What foreseeable goal are they hoping to accomplish!" Freezy tightened her hold on the mechanic, losing a bit of her rationality with each passing second.
"I doubt that it could be the driver. Besides the driver we picked was recommended to us by the top driving schools in the state. Hasn't gotten a ticket or got pulled over by the cops once in his 60yr old life...." Hangman took another sip of his drink and took off his glasses, the stress of the last few days weighing on his mind.
In addition to the huge loss of money, he was also hearing unsavory rumors about an increased number of casualties, this time from the Taitanzu gang. He figured it wasn't good to let Freezy hear of it or she was going to kill them all.
"What if...something happened...to our driver? It could be...connected to that...Reaper..dude..."
"Whatever's responsible for this I never wanna hear of this again! Sleeper! Triple the security! Make sure the vehicles and stadium are checked 15 times over!...." Freezy eyed the mechanic and slammed him into the window again, shattering the cracked structure and sending him plummeting to his inevitable doom.
"Nobody fucks with Freezy's money!"