Ghost Claw called out to a nervous-looking guy standing near one of the doorways, holding a broom like it was a weapon he didn't know how to use. He was thin, probably in his late twenties, with the kind of posture that suggested he'd rather be anywhere else.
"Sven! Clean up in the room Ben came out from!"
Sven's face went pale, his grip tightening on the broom. "The... the room with the screaming?"
"Yes. That one."
Sven looked like he might throw up but nodded reluctantly.
Ghost Claw's attention shifted to another figure, a short girl, maybe five-foot-one at most, with a curvy build and bright red hair tied in pigtails. She stood frozen near one of the doorways, her eyes wide with terror as she watched the chaos unfolding in the hallway, her whole body shaking.
"Sasha!" Ghost Claw's voice snapped sharply, breaking through the girl's paralysis. "Follow Sven! Grab your first aid kit and make sure the guy in that room isn't dead!"
Sasha blinked, coming back to herself, and nodded frantically. She ran toward her room, her pigtails bouncing as she disappeared through the doorway to retrieve medical supplies.
Back in the main fight, Svetlana was grinning like she was having the time of her life.
She moved through the gang members with casual brutality, molly-whopping one after another with punches that looked effortless but sent men flying. Her focus wasn't really on the fight itself. Her eyes kept tracking back to Tòumíng, watching him move with his enhanced speed and strength buff.
She knocked out eight men with disinterested, almost lazy punches, each one perfectly placed, each impact devastating, while clearly paying more attention to Tòumíng's fighting style than her own opponents.
Eventually, the flow of combat brought them together. Tòumíng found himself with his back against Svetlana's, surrounded by advancing gang members on all sides.
Svetlana called over her shoulder, her accent thick with excitement: "You, scrawny boy! Vould you like to have Back-to-Back Badasses fighting moment? Vhere we are back to back, then look at each other, give quick nod before kicking ass side by side?"
Tòumíng's face lit up with genuine joy despite the violence surrounding them. "DO I?! That's a movie-goer's wet dream!"
"You are my wet dream," Svetlana replied casually.
"What?"
"What?"
"What did you say?"
"Nothing. Ve fight now."
They turned simultaneously, gave each other that promised quick nod, and launched back into combat side by side, Tòumíng with his buffed strength and speed, Svetlana with her terrifying natural capabilities that didn't need any supernatural enhancement.
Meanwhile, Ghost Claw and Lucy stood off to the side, observing the fight with professional detachment.
Lucy pulled out her phone and started recording, a grin spreading across her face as she captured the twins using unconscious bodies as weapons, Ben's pristine exit from the murder room, and Svetlana and Tòumíng's back-to-back action sequence.
"My friends are going to LOVE this," Lucy said, already composing a message in her head.
"Don't send sensitive operational information to civilians," Ghost Claw said without looking at her, her eyes tracking the fight's progression.
"Chill, grandma. I'm sending this to my hacker friends. CJ, Pris134, Ricky, you've worked with them before. They're vetted."
Ghost Claw rolled her eyes. "Whatever. Just make sure the metadata is stripped before you send it."
Think Tink The Tinkerer, who'd been hovering nearby with barely contained excitement, let out a dramatic sigh. "I can't use ANY of my jury-rigs? Not even the non-lethal ones?"
Ghost Claw's response was immediate and firm. "No. All of them are last resorts. Every single weapon you've built causes either too much collateral damage, too much suffering, or outright death. We're defending against gang members, not invading a military base."
Think Tink The Tinkerer pouted like a child who'd been told they couldn't play with their favorite toy. "You're no fun."
He turned and shuffled back toward the basement stairs, muttering under his breath about "perfectly good explosives going to waste" and "what's the point of building jury-rig weapons if you never get to use them."
As he disappeared down the stairs, another door opened.
A skinny, tall, lanky guy emerged, rubbing his eyes like he'd just woken up. He had massive eye bags, the kind that suggested either chronic insomnia or a lifestyle that involved staying up for days at a time. His hair stuck up in multiple directions, and he wore pajama pants and a wrinkled t-shirt.
He looked at the chaos in the hallway, the fighting, the unconscious bodies, the blood, the violence, with the kind of disoriented confusion of someone who'd just woken from a deep sleep.
"What's going on?" His voice was hoarse, gravelly from sleep.
Ghost Claw glanced at him. "It's okay, Melvin. Go back to bed."
Melvin blinked slowly, processing this information at the speed of someone whose brain hadn't fully booted up yet. He looked at the fight again, then back at Ghost Claw, then shrugged with the acceptance of someone who'd apparently seen this kind of thing before.
"Alright. Night."
He shuffled back into his room and closed the door, the sounds of fighting immediately muffled as the door clicked shut.
Lucy stared at the closed door, her phone still recording. "I forgot that guy existed."
"He works night shifts doing digital forensics," Ghost Claw explained. "Sleeps during the day. Doesn't come out much."
"What does he even do?"
"Dark web monitoring. Cryptocurrency tracing. Digital footprint analysis. Very good at his job. Also has narcolepsy, so he's unconscious about sixty percent of the time anyway."
Lucy shook her head and went back to recording the fight, capturing the moment when Polo used an unconscious gang member as a battering ram to knock down three more attackers.