"Get to the Evac Point!" Rogue yelled. She was worried, her face pale, ashen. She was almost on the verge of pants shitting panic. What had they done? We rushed back the way we had come, and were a thundering herd that cked organization. Her team was all at least as terrified as her. Once again a dearth of guards allowed us toto ascend uncontested, and saved our asses.

  The rain was still determined to wash away the sins of the city. As if there would ever be enough water for that. Upon arriving on the roof, we saw Ronald's team returning from another exit, many yards distant. They were shredded, and had obviously been through the ringer. He didn't seem to have lost anyone and none of them needed emergency treatment. They utilized some hypos full of who knows what to ease their pain and speed up the healing process.

  "They were waiting for us, somebody tipped them off!" His yell carried all the way to us. He was decidedly pissed. That was the voice of a person when everything had gone wrong. His stride was half marching, half dragging himself towards us. We crossed the gap to meet him quickly.

  "Was that your package?!" Rogue demanded, she was no less ready to skin someone. He threw me a look, shrugged and swung back to Rogue.

  "No, ours is set to go off in... " He looked at his watch, "12 minutes. We nestled it snuggly at the bottom of the central elevator shaft." His scowl raked the roof. He didn't know who to trust, he was sure someone here had betrayed them all. My intuition was strangely silent on the matter.

  Rogue was thinking, eliminating options. She scanned everyone. Probably thinking about shooting everybody just to be sure she got the traitor. "We met almost no resistance. Whoever squealed didn't know the whole pn." Rogue sounded like a cat building up a good hiss. "The only people I'm sure it couldn't be are you, me, Morgan, Johnny and the newbies." She lowered her voice, "For all we know, one of the suppliers or fixers put it all together and sold us out for a quick Eddie." She really didn't like that idea.

  I was looking out over the city. My stare was half admiring for the feats of incredible engineering, and half castigating for all the bullshit that society imposed on decent folks. When it was all added up, I really hated this pce.

  Just then I spotted a grappling hook catch on the ledge of the roof, a furtive tug secured it in pce. If I hadn't already been looking that way I never would've noticed. My suit's sensors picked of the sounds of a winch working to bring it's load up. I pointed it out to Rogue. While raising my rifle to be ready for whoever came up. I was going to let her make the call, she was the star of this fucking mess after all.

  "Shit! Contact!" She had her pistol out. Everyone got ready to receive whoever was climbing up. A moment ter Morgan's face was staring down the lengths of all of our barrels. He didn't look the slightest bit put out by it. He did however look like he had gone through the blender, and into the oven. Cut to shit and burnt to fuck. He was moving on willpower alone.

  I stepped up to him and starting pouring mana into him. I kept it to a modest trickle, it wouldn't do to have an embarrassing incident. I also reached into my right side waist hardcase and popped out a syringe filled with a harmless mixture of glycol, saline and some vitamins. I smmed it into him and dumped the contents into his veins. All to cover up what I was really doing. Megan... Velma (not Megan) had suggested it a while back as a method to disguise my magic. Terrible source but a great idea, so I'll use it. I whipped up a bunch of different cocktails of harmless pick me ups.

  I helped Morgan limp over to everyone else. "My mission failed. The Package was lost, violently." His voice was robotic, as if he was held together only by his duty. He came to deliver his report and then he was sure he'd die. Whatever he'd done, whatever he'd been through, he didn't expect anyone to be able to save him. Fuck that! I was going to keep this asshole going. I wanted answers.

  Plus, I hated to let anyone die if I could prevent it. It looked very bad on my after action report. Heh.

  "What happened?" Rogue got his other arm around her shoulders and kept him upright. She had to get her ear real close to hear him, his voice had dropped so low. My suit let me hear every word.

  "Smasher happened. He killed my team and his own when he hit the package with a rocket. Dumbfuck, but he's probably on his way up. You should leave." He seemed to shut down. Smasher now there was a name that tickled my brain. Sinn had told me about a lot of legends, and he was one of the worst.

  I dug my mana deeper into Morgan's damaged body, trying to figure out the best way to help him. His burns were odd, and somehow they were not just the product of regur fire. They were much more difficult to treat. There was damage down into the very memory of the cells. I had to rebuild them from scratch. "Fuck!" I cursed as I started pumping more and more mana into the still dying man. And then it clicked. I remembered what Sinn said happened here today, not just that it was a bombing. I remembered kind of bomb they'd used.

  "This is radiation damage." I growled softly, "You were using nukes." I pulled out another syringe and jammed it into Morgan, he didn't respond at all. I acted like I was hitting him with a radiation treatment. Meanwhile, I was already looking for healthy cells with undamaged DNA so I could use them as a templet to build him back properly.

  Ronald and Rogue turned to look at me. I saw the look they shared. They were wondering if I'd just become a liability. Then they stared at Morgan and their tension passed. "Yeah." That's it, that's all I got. Dicks the both of them.

  I had a hard time abiding when people risked civilians casualties with standard explosives, never mind nukes. They'd lost the right to any sympathy from me. Looking down at Morgan for a second, I thought about stopping. Couldn't do it, some part of me refused to stop healing the terrorist fuckwad.

  I groaned and made my decision, "John, Jim this has turned into a full cluster fuck. I have to heal this asshole and a big nasty fucker is coming. Put him down. Fast and hard." I turned back to Rogue, "Leave one of the AVs, and get the hell out of here. I can't move much while helping Morgan stay whole. We'll talk again someday." Probably not, bitch. In fact, they'd better hope I never saw any of them ever again. I could already see the bodies of children dying of radiation poisoning.

  "Please, don't let him die." Ronald pleaded even as he and his team mounted the closest AV. Whatever, fuckface.

  "Meet me at the Afterlife. I'll settle the bill there." Rogue and her people loaded up into the farthest AV. Yeah, I'll be seeing you.

  The two AVs rose into the dark sky, and quickly vanished into the distance. Without prying eyes left, I opened the flood gates on my mana and shaped the flows of Life Crafting. I dug into Morgan's cells and started making real progress in repcing the damaged DNA.

  They made me part of this. I was pissed at the Merc in front of me, pissed at the Mana Sink, and pissed at myself. My only real comfort was that this couldn't be real. That no one would really suffer because of the actions we'd been a part of.

  Fuck, I was being a hypocritical bastard. I had thought about burning the city down myself. But I didn't actually want to hurt the normal every day folks.

  Shit, I've got to get my head into the game and save this fucking asshole. I heard my squad getting ready. We all heard a commotion. I turned to look. Part of the rooftop was rising. Some kind of Cargo elevator opened up and out stepped this terrible figure.

  If you told me he was a bot, I would have believed you. His body was a boxy frame of metal, barely shaped to look somewhat close to human proportions. Scorch marks covered the frame along with a few dents. His appearance was brutal and inhuman. His face looked like flesh, though he had full tech goggle style cybereyes, his sole concession to his former humanity. This must be Adam Smasher.

  He stared at us all, grinning a manic little smirk. Then he caught sight of John. He looked pleased.

  "Johnny-boy, I thought I killed you already." He ughed, a soul chilling sound. "What a rare thing to get to kill someone twice!"

  One vast improvement Life Crafting had over Regrowth was that I didn't need to concentrate exclusively on healing. I made sure that Smasher was in pin sight and moved around Morgan. Then I starting dragging him towards the remaining AV as fast as I could. My new spell was working exceptionally well, but I had to excise cells that were themselves, starting to put out more rads. While I was slowly winning the war, but it was going to take a few more minutes. Hell, if it wasn't for our shields, I'd be worried about all of our abilities to reproduce viable offspring in the future. I noticed the occasional small red streak pass over shielding.

  I was missing the mana of Jaina's Tower right about now.

  "Where are you going with Bckhand, Meat?" Smasher taunted. He stepped right into the middle of my team's killbox. "That's my prey, Meat. No one likes a Scav." Anyone else behaving like this, and I'd have said they were the dumbest son of a bitch ever born. If half of what Sinn had said about this dickhead was true, his arrogance was well deserved.

  Raynor opened up on him, followed by the others. Except John, he was staring at Smasher with an intensity I hadn't yet seen from him before. The results of armor piercing crysbronze rounds smming into the borg's body? Surprises for everybody. We weren't shocked that Smasher was rocked back a few feet, with a few dents and small holes in him, but by the fact that those rounds didn't even begin to ftline him. He was shocked he took any damage at all, if I was reading him right. I got it, he had just tanked a small nuke after all.

  Then he started ughing again.

  "Use the sweapons!" Raynor hollered. Good idea. They'd melt his damned armor off. I wondered what it was made of? For probably the third time since we entered this messed up pce, I wished we had a Probe to scan things. I wondered if there was a Hero Probe, somewhere? Seriously why does my brain go off on these tangents?

  Smasher started stalking towards Raynor, "I'm guessing you're in charge of this little bunch." Beams from Eager and Borfen hit him. Smasher looked down where the beams barely started to turn his armor to a dull red glow. "Lasers? Seriously? My armor's made out of the stuff they use for space shuttles, if you think you can melt through it, we'll be here all night." Oh, at least one yer of ceramic composite. Nice to know. My guys started to back up, firing their SORs, while their suits' VIs focused the sweapons on very specific areas. John was gone, he'd done the vanishing thing again, hadn't he?

  Morgan started to stir. He muttered some garbled noise. "Stay still, asshole." I growled at him, "Don't waste my work." Pouring more mana into him, I felt a stutter in the flow. I was reaching my limit, damn I knew it had to happen someday. Morgan complied and went still. I used that moment to take stock of the situation.

  Eager and Borfen were pying fnk the borg. While Raynor kept putting rounds in the same spot over and over. Damn, color me impressed, that was some good shooting.

  What was Smasher's py here? He had to have some weapons hidden in his tin can shell. Why wasn't he using them? Fear? No fucking way. Tension? Not in this lifetime. Was he just being a Drama Queen? Suddenly he leapt, and I couldn't track him. When I saw him again, Borfen was knocked ft with Smasher's foot pressing against his chest. "Huh? What kind of bullshit is this?" He pulled back his foot and smmed it into the shielding rapidly a few times before it shattered. Borfen managed to roll out of the way of the next stomp. Which demolished the concrete.

  "The eggheads are going to love getting a hold of you, once I scrap you." This guy never shut up. He reached down to grab Borfen. That's when John made his move, and dumped his whole mag into the back of Smasher's skull at pointbnk range. The Borg's skull was heavily dented and he staggered, but he didn't go down.

  "W-what? Who's there?" Smasher spun, he seemed unsteady but still very much functional. What kind of crazy braincase had they put in there? John had already vanished again. "What the fuck happened?" Smasher scanned the area. Whatever chrome he had, still couldn't detect John. Not surprising, even Observers lost him when he pulled this stunt.

  Raynor's next round had finally torn through something major. Disgusting fluids leaked out of the borg's chest from right about where the heart would have been on a normal human.

  "Arrgrgrgrg!" Smasher vanished once more. This time he'd bullrushed Raynor and knocked him 50 feet away. His shield disabled, Raynor tumbled ass over teakettle.

  "Fucking gnats! I'll crush you!" Smasher disappeared again. This time the borg rammed his fist into Eager. Popping the shield and throwing Eager into the railing at the edge of the roof. Then a crouching John popped into sight and dumped another full mag into Smasher left knee joint, before just fading away.

  The joint was trashed. Sparking, burning and leaking oil, yup that leg was toast. Smasher's leg wobbled ready to colpse. It possibly could have held him if he didn't move quickly, but Smasher didn't get that memo. He spun around trying to backfist whoever had shot him and fell with a massive thump. He flopped about like an overturned turtle.

  Borfen had managed to recover his footing and was approaching Smasher while pumping burst after burst into the borg. Raynor was pulling himself up. He staggered a bit before stabilizing himself with his rifle. "God damn it, I'd just broken this baby in," he mourned. His rifle's barrel was bent almost 90 degrees. He pulled his side arm and started plinking away at the borg. Eager was off the railing and also working his way toward Smasher, changing his mag to explosive rounds. Those seemed to do a good bit of damage now that the ridiculous armor had been breached.

  Morgan, still under my hand said, "I don't believe it. You have TPW on the ropes." His whole world had been flip upside down.

  I looked down at the asswipe I was treating. "No, he's already dead. He just hasn't stopped breathing yet." I growled.

  "Why are you so hostile? Why are you healing me? Why not just let me die?" He asked it calmly, like ordering the same meal for the thousandth time. The man just didn't value his life, how could he be expected to value others. I looked back toward the closing act of the fight. It was all over, but the dying.

  "Because I want you to see the consequences of your actions. You used fucking nukes." I shook my head. "I get it, I really do. Fuck Arasaka. You thought the building infrastructure would shield the rest of the city from any fallout. Maybe you were right. But the rads hitting us right now, are all because things went wrong. Things always fucking go wrong."

  "Yeah, I didn't like it either, but things in the city had to change." Morgan voice was ft.

  I nodded, "I understand. It's why I didn't put rounds into all of you, but it doesn't make me any less pissed. It might make me a hypocrite, but who isn't?"

  He chuckled. "You sound like an old friend of mine."

  My attention went back to the fight. Smasher was trashed. His mighty borg body was ready for the scrap heap. Maybe we could take it with us when we exited the Mana Sink?

  John had stopped hiding. He walked over to Smasher ready to finished it. "1-1 Johnny-boy. S-see you, n-next time." The defeated legend started to ugh a deep rolling sound, like he knew something we didn't. I had a bad feeling.

  "John!" I yelled. I needn't have bothered. John was already gone, rushing away with his chrome jacking him up to superhuman speeds. He had great instincts.

  Smasher's body exploded. It wasn't a huge bst. But if you had been close enough to deliver a Coup de Grace you would've been pasted. Nasty and effective. A good summation of Adam Smasher.

  "Good bye, asshole." Whispered Morgan. I had fixed enough of him that any doc worth his salt could finish fixing him.

  I stood up, "Let's get out of here guys. Time to go home."