The bartender clubs-up his spike thrower and butts Oliver in the head with it, crumpling the boy to the floor.
"Oliver!" yells
Hansel.
Báleygr's drone hovers over Taavi, shining its spotlight on the scene as the lawyer breathes shallowly, the blood in his mouth sometimes making bubbles. As the coverall-wearing mechanic sitting in the truck makes conspicuous gestures, Taavi's wounds begin to visibly seal and knit together
(+11hp, 11/14).
Taavi awakes, propping himself up on an elbow to see Shadrach scrambling on the floor near the corpses of several slaughtered wasteland bikers, but coming up empty handed.
Shadrach stumbles away from the gory mass of dead bikers near Taavi like a punch-drunk fighter, drawing his knife from his boot as he does so. He launches into a stumbling run toward the bar, giving the ghoulish dancers a wide berth. He throws himself against the bar, ducking down beneath the surface, and waits for the next discharge of the spike thrower.
Nora is a blur of poetic violence. She pulls her monoblade from the ribcage of one of the strippers as the monstrous creature slides to the floor, slashing the longknife across the necks of the other two without even blinking
(-3, -3), their attempts to impede her both foolish and fatal.
Grim melts out of the shadows cast by the drone lights, leaping onto the dissolving creatures now on the floor in Nora's wake. His muzzle disappears inside the shattered rib cage as his body undulates with gulping motions, the strippers' corpses melting into inky goo around him.
Hansel takes advantage of the bartender shifting focus to Oliver to carefully line up a shot, controlling his breathing, and slowly takes up the slack on the trigger while focused center-mass on the back of the bartender's head. The searing bolt of laser light knocks the man forward
(-5) just as Nora's longknife careens end over end through the air and skewers the man in the mid-back
(-9). His magnetic spike thrower clatters to the floor between Oliver's body and Hansel.
There is a racking sound as
both thugs on the stage reload, taking aim at Nora as she slaughters her way through the bar's employees.
BOOM! Muzzle-flash lights up that end of the bar as heavy buckshot tears through Nora's side
(-8). She cries out in pain, continuing to limp towards the bar to reach the unconscious Oliver. Iluminated by the flash, the two now-hideous performers on the stage both hiss at the group ransacking their bar, their fangs protruding.
"I... just... wanted... a... drink!" yells the
middle-aged man in the black duster as he hits the door bouncer repeatedly with his broken pool cue until the bouncer unfolds a pair of wicked fangs and sinks them into the man's shoulder. The man cries out in pain.
Hansel shifts forward at a crouch to check on Oliver's condition. He triggers his radio,
"I'm with Oliver behind the bar, he's bleeding from the head and unconscious. Bartender is down, stairs going down in kitchen! What's the status on Pete?"
"AI, scan for any other radio signals," says
Báleygr, still seated in the truck which protrudes from the wall, his attention shared between his real senses and those of the drones. The cube on the seat next to him pulses and processors in the comm server on the back of truck begin to whir audibly as their fans overclock.
"With the power generation on the roof disabled, there's no radio emissions," says The Heavy in a cool tone,
"But an auxiliary power supply in the lower floor beneath us is powering something with a distinct dimensional energy signature."
...
"Nice job. Cavalry coming in hot, keep them busy, the units should be there momentarily to dispatch them," speaks the drone as it hovers a few meters over Emile's head, filming his near-death escape.
Emile glances over his shoulder and sees the four women-like creatures falling back and giving up pursuit, intent on not being drawn away from the open bay door of the lower level. He ducks behind a cargo container that lies discarded along the back of the building, wheeling around and pointing his guns back in their direction, pausing only to consider his next move.
OOC: