Rylan's back was pressed against the wall by the utility door. His weapon was loaded, and his finger was just a hair away from touching its trigger, ready to pull back at a moment's notice. He let out a low and quiet breath as he braced himself for what was about to happen.
His helmet HUD dings, showing Aylward that his target is on the move in his direction. Seeing this engraved a thrilled grin upon the mercenaries' faces. Rylan steadied his breath, tightened his grip on Ghoststar, and crouched behind the dust-covered wall, muscles taut and alert.
The dim red lights glow from the ceiling and reflect off the pitch-black visor of his flight helm as he hears the slow grinding of the metallic automatic doors that hid his target opening. The grinding of metal on metal produces sparks that slightly increase the room's luminescence.
The slow, paced sound of boots stepping on metal resounds for a few seconds before Aylward decides to take his chance now. He peeped from behind the rusted scrap metal wall before gently pulling his finger back upon his SMG's trigger.
The weapon recoiled slightly in Rylan's grip, producing a low, almost inaudible humming. To anyone else, the shots fired from Ghoststar were invisible; however, Rylan's flight helm's HUD had an inbuilt heat detection optic mode, which outlined his shots so he knew where each one would hit.
Within a few seconds, men wearing palladium body armor were punctured through by invisible plasma rounds and fell to the ground dead as a doornail, their wounds being cauterized instantly, not giving them a chance to get medical attention.
The two that remained from the initial assault moved to take cover with Lythan behind some industrial crates just out of the angle of Rylan's sights. Displeased with being shot at and their comrades being butchered, the two guards started firing their guns in every direction Aylward could be hiding in, not knowing where his shots came from.
"Shit." Rylan let out a whispered curse as the unmuffled shots rang through the air, alerting the entire Greykeep to the action. A kinetic round ricocheted right by his foot, but he didn't flinch; instead, two small irradiant black crystals pulsed with menacing purple energy as they consumed two of the lethal missiles.
Two more of these crystals appeared right by the heads of the last two guards before regurgitating their own bullets right into their craniums, killing them on the spot. Rylan quickly left his cover as he ran close to where Lythan was hiding before pointing Ghoststars barrel at him, finger on the trigger, ready to unload invisible fire upon him.
Just when Aylward was about to perform the kill shot on his target, Lythan blew up into black, purple, purple-tipped flames and sent a ball of the substance directly at Rylan's face, who rolled out of the way on instinct.
"You think you can kill the great Lythan Irun Don of the Nightshade syndicate in his own home so easily?!!!?" Lythan bellowed angrily as the flames wrapped around his body flared in abject agitation.
"Oh hell no, they didn't tell me he had a damned vortex!" Rylan shouted under his flight helms visor, an excited grin plastered upon his face. He threw Ghoststar into his back holster as he withdrew the two handguns and shot at Lythan's Pyro form.
The heat he produced was so strong it knocked the bullets, of course, piercing through the metal walls and floor of the room and leaving large gaping holes inside despite the bullets' relatively small size in comparison. In response, Lythan roared at Aylward, sending a plume of black-purple flames out of his maw and into the Mercs Flight helm visor, melting it off in an instant.
"Urgh, you fucker!" Rylan shouted in pain from the intense heat as he threw off the scrap that was his flight helm and used his own vortex to plant a black-purple radiating crystal inside of Lythans chest and spit his heart out through another one outside of the Dons' flaming body.
Lythans eyes widen as the flames around him dissipate, revealing his old wrinkly face and slightly scorched grey beard that flew to his chest, where a sizeable hole that hadn't been there before suddenly formed out of nowhere.
He falls to his knees and coughs up some blood as the light in his eyes dims, marking him as truly dead, and with one final loud thump, Lythan's face plants to the ground in a puddle of his blood. Instead of celebrating his victory, Aylward threw up some blood of his own as his legs wobbled, barely keeping him standing.
Despite his exhausted state, he scrambles quickly for the ventilation shaft he had crawled in from but stops for a second and bends town to take one of the guards he had just killed helmets and slips it on his head before instantly getting into the vent and closing it behind him.
Just two seconds after he escapes into the ventilation system, the sound of dozens of footsteps against metal resounds in the room of the butcher he just performed. He crawls away with a devious smirk upon his sickly pale face, obscured by the guard helmet visor.
The Greykeep alarm screeches loudly and echoes throughout the vents as Rylan slowly crawls away toward his escape. When he finally gets back to the observation center, half a dozen guards are looking through the video feeds, trying to find the assassin on any of the cams.
Aylward clicked his tongue in dissatisfaction at the situation he found himself in as he weighed his options to himself. 'Use my Vortex and potentially collapse or croak from overuse? Gunfight and get blasted to bits because I'm too exhausted to react fast enough? Hmm, options, options, oh, the options.' he lamented as he continued to plot out his next course of action.
"Eh, might as well." Rylan shrugged as he grabbed an antigrav detonator attached to his belt and lopped it into the room. Within seconds, all of the guards were sent up and slammed into the metal roof, dropping their arms in the process and most likely being concussed and knocked out from the impact.
Aylward turned on his boot's magnetic locks and began to walk down from the wall and back onto the floor after he had left the vent. Looking up at the now floating and unconscious guards, he shook his head.
"You silly goons Should have worn the proper protection if you didn't want to get hurt on the ride." he said condescendingly before walking to the command console and ripping out vital wires and electronics, preventing the cameras from a recording or following his next actions as the monitor's screens go dark.
Rylan then exited the door and rushed to the electrical room he had crawled in from before climbing back down to the Greykeeps secret sewers, where he made sure the guard helmet he had 'borrowed' was airtight.
Having made sure he wouldn't die of oxygen deprivation, Aylward moved forward through the grimy, unnaturally mossy metallic catacombs of human fecal matter swiftly.
Each step he took formed ripples in the muddle of human waste as Rylan waded his way closer to his escape. When the mercenary reached the halfway point to the Sarthach, he felt the flooring beneath him quiver slightly but continued on his path.
As Aylward made his way silently but speedily through the metal sewer light, tremors occurred occasionally. Suddenly, a loud crackling sound was heard, and a bullet flew right past his face.
In response to this, Rylan fired blindly behind him as he ran to the nearest cover he could find, unsure if he hit his mark. He dived into a pip that was expunging some type of green and yellow colored fluid into the channel of waste below for cover.
Bullets whizzed through the sewers' empty space, bounced against their metallic walls, and sank into the river of human wastes running through the channel beneath Aylward.
In response to the chaotic enemy fire, the mercenary took out Ghoststar again and returned their heat with some of his own. Throughout the firefight, the sewers continued to tremble with increasing intensity, like a volcano about to erupt.
One of Rylan's shots melted off the helmet of a guard whose face instantly went blue and started gasping for air as they grabbed their throat desperately, and within seconds, they suffocated to death from the lack of oxygen.
Suddenly, the sewers' shaking intensified to a degree that knocked Aylward out of the pipe he was hiding in. Without warning, the pipe started spewing a powerful jet of the yellow-green fluid it had been spilling out.
Rylan looked up from his prone position in the filth beneath him to see that the guards were no longer focusing on him but seemed to be running away from something. As the metallic tunnels shook more and more, he saw it: a massive tsunami of human waste flooding right in his direction.
"Oh shit, shit, literally shit!" Aylward hurriedly climbed back up to his exhausted and wobbly feet as he pushed his body to its limits and began sprinting as fast as he could manage toward the Sarthach in a panic.
The gushing wave of fecal fluid filled the metallic halls and consumed the guards behind Rylan who sprinted for dear life to avoid being consumed by the hungry maws of the waste tsunami.
As much as Aylward ran as fast as his tired legs could take his heavy body it wasn't enough as the Sarthach remained just barely in his sights down the way while the flood of fluids gained on him.
"damn it!" Rylan cursed as a human-sized black crystal that illuminated with purple energy appeared right before him where he entered just when the biblical amount of human waste was going to consume him.
Through another crystal, Aylward was shot out of it and into the Sartaches cockpit where he fell on the control console and slammed his hand down on the auto-pilot button. The Sarthaches engines blared as the ship took flight on its own and flew away from the raging flood of waste.
Despite the Sarthaches' speed the waste caught up to the ship and ejected it out of the waste disposal pipe causing it to spin through space as it was forcefully launched out of the Greykeeps sewers and the space station full sail.
This had sent Rylan's unconscious body slamming against one of Sarthaches walls causing him to cough and jolt awake in pain as he threw off the guard's helmet and began gasping for air. He looked around and breathed out a sigh of relief until he gagged at the scent he was giving off that the guard helmet had prevented him from smelling before.
Quickly Aylward went into the common quarter of the Sarthach and then ran to the right side door and entered a bathroom area. He immediately stripped down to his birthday suit and went into the shower to rinse himself off using as much soap as possible to rub the stench out of his skin.
After his body was purified from the putridity that had tainted it Rylan moved over towards his sweet, soft, lovely velvet couch which he collapsed down upon and passed out from exhaustion too tired to do anything else after the day he just had.