//------------------------------// // The Sinnerman Part 2: Where you gonna run to? // Story: Between Needles and Knives // by Dancewithknives //------------------------------// If the Chief of Security thought his job was boring, then he should have spent a night in the Archive Depository. Private Shirk had made his way down to his post and clocked into the security desk to replace the guard that had been watching the area for the majority of the day shift. The Private sat in his chair, reclining it as far back as he could, resting his hooves up onto the desk. There were two entrances to the depository, and both were on opposite sides of the basement. His area was newer. The checkpoint and his gated entrance to the archive was constructed when the elevators were installed into the building. Anyone who used his checkpoint would need a special key that authorized the mechanics operating the elevators to allow them to descend into the basement. Many of the workers at the Office found this system to be too cumbersome. Instead, they often used the original way and took the stairs to the older entrance and bothered the guard there that was old enough to be his grandfather. The Private, like he normally did, sat at the desk that would be his until morning. The security camera right above his head watched the elevator door on the opposite side of the hall. He reached under the desk with his magic, fiddled around the crossbow that was pinned down there, and grabbed one of the magazines that was hidden behind it. The cell-style door to the Depository was behind his desk. If, for some bizarre reason, someone did come down to request access and had the proper clearance, he was the only one at the time that could open it. The door was made of average yet sturdy metal bars, but the lock was enchanted. For the next eight hours, his magic was the key. With his legs propped up, head reclined, and not a care in the world, Shirk opened up the magazine and prepared to pass the night in the same fashion that he would spend every other night watching his hallway. The magazine opened, and the very familiar images of mares in rather… creative positions, took him away from his boring job. He was onto a two page spread of an incredibly tan farmer’s daughter taking a wide stance and her back to the camera when the alarms went off. Shirk, having no companion to complain to, looked to the ceiling and shouted, "Oh come on! Another fucking drill!" He shifted back to his magazine, “Fuck that, I ain’t going anywhere.” There was a low rumble. The unicorn looked down the passage and at the elevator door. It sounded as if someone had hit their head on the elevator door, but the normal sound of the car was missing. He waited, the door opened, but not in its usual fashion. Instead of seeing the well-lit elevator car on the other side of the door, what Shirk saw was just darkness. But what made him jump out of his seat was the pony wearing a white tuxedo, mask, and hat; standing on the edge of the threshold with his front hooves extended as he forced the doors opened. The inturder dove forward from the elevator shaft and broke into a dead sprint. In his magic, he grabbed a steel folding chair and folded it closed as he charged towards the pony behind the desk. “OH SHIT!” The Private shouted, dropping his magazine and reaching down for the weapon behind the desk. He grabbed for the crossbow with his hooves and practically ripped it off of the hinges under the desk and sat back up in his chair. Before the weapon was even close to being in a suitable firing position, Tuxedo Mask was upon him. In one bound, he scaled the desk. In his next step, he shifted the steel chair in front of him and dove with his back hooves into it. The chair, being blasted into the poor private’s face with the added force of the diving assailant behind the chair-turned-snowboard, hit him with enough force to eject him from his seat. From there, Private Shirk had no recollection of what happened until his brain began to focus again, and his horn was stuffed into the lock that secured the gate to the Archive. “Unlock the gate,” the pony said. His tone was unnervingly calm, like he had just ordered food at a restaurant. “Bite me.” Shirk spat back. Shirk’s body tensed up when a cold sensation occurred at his neck. In the corner of his eye, he could see an oddly colored purple blade placed against his neck. Without any further motivation, the lock disengaged while a puddle of urine began to form on the floor. Tuxedo Mask held his weapon against the Private’s neck. He lifted the weapon away, flipped it to its blunt side, and struck the knob against the Japoneese soldier’s right kidney. Other than the intense pain that left the unicorn rolling on the ground crying beside his issue of Playcolt, the only further damage due to the blow would be a few weeks of bloody urine and, to his disappointment, a month long case of what many stallions would describe as “Blue balls”. Tuxedo Mask, with the gate to the back entrance of the Archives open for him, quickly entered the vault and closed the door behind him. He ran down the rows and rows of gigantic filing cabinets and rounded a corner somewhere near the center. He ran mid-way down the row of silver lined drawers and watched the numbers until he found his prize. With a quick stab into the lock with his knife, the box was opened. He shuffled through the row of papers, scanning each one for a few seconds until finding the correct one. Upon finding the certain folder, he read the first note, scanned a few lines, and then stuffed it into his inner suit pocket. With his hooves, he dumped everything else in the folder onto the tiled floor. Tuxedo Mask sporadically opened other random deposit boxes and likewise threw their contents onto the floor. He opened his briefcase, flipped it over, and added the random papers that he had carried into the office to the growing pile. When done making a downright mess on the floor, Tuxedo Mask stepped back, pulled out a vial, smashed it onto the papers, lit a match, and watched as the pile lit up like a bonfire. Reaching into his white suit again, he pulled out what appeared to be a bottle of wine and threw it at the wall of files and further provoked the carnage of the records. The substance in the container disguised as a bottle of wine lit up almost immediately, creating a thick, black smoke. The menacing cloud floated up and throughout the Depository and triggered the fire alarms. Within a few seconds, every magical security lock simultaneously disengaged as their emergency protocol kicked in. The barricades unhinged themselves, the mechanisms unlocked, and the bars blocking the doors throughout the building released. In the control room of the National Offices of Archives and Securities, the Chief of Security watched as instant photos streamed in and circles on a magic blueprint of the building moved on their own accord. The junior officers watched as photos being printed became stacked in gigantic piles as a panic of ponies moved throughout the building. Many of these ponies were guards taking defensive hardpoints to trap and then surround their intruder while others were just scared employees breaking out of cover and trying to find their way to safety, lest they be caught in the crossfire. The last still photo they had was of him going towards the stair access, and then nothing after that. The Chief watched the mass of circles moving around the floorplan of the building, trying to find the one that stood out from the rest. “I got him!” one of the lower officers shouted. The Chief jumped over to the pony and inspected the picture, “Where did this come from?” “Archive Depository, the side with the elevators.” “The cell to the Archive just opened!” called another pony. Everypony in the control room shifted their attention to the blueprint of the basement level, seeing three circles in the sublevel, one in each entrance, and the last in the large chamber of documents. The head of this madness began to speak his thoughts aloud, trying to make sure his team and he were on the same page, “Okay… if he’s in the Archives, then he has only two ways out. Send all the teams to the basement. We’ll corner and apprehend him there. Even if he somehow slips out, the whole building is on lockdown, he can’t get out.” Orders were called out, and enforcer teams redirected themselves towards the basement. R-R-R-RING-ING-ING-ING “What the hell is that?” the Chief said, only to be answered a few seconds later when the sprinkler system above turned the security room, like every other room in the building, into a shower. “The fire alarm!” one pony shouted, “All the doors are unlocked now!” “Damn it all!” the Chief spat, watching the little circle on a blue piece of paper that he currently despised with the intensity of a hundred suns. “Well, at least we still know where he is. By the time he gets out, we should have more than enough bodies down there to deal with him.” He watched the avatar of the intruder as he walked away from whatever he was after, and then stopped at a wall. The dot was still for a moment, moved away, and then, defying all logic, simply walked straight through the wall and to the hallway of the stair entrance. The drenched Chief of Security stopped, scratched his head, and gave an audible “Huh?” Luckily for him, when the intruder made his ghost like transit through the wall there happened to be three of the Chief’s stallions near the anomaly. The Chief made a mental note to ask the three how the perpetrator made his ghost-like transition through the wall. Three security guards, upon hearing their new orders through the intercom system, had rushed down to the archive room from the main lobby through the old staircase entrance. Unlike the newer entrance, the older access was much better thought out. Instead of just one cell door between the depository and the checkpoint, there were two. A plate glass door around a reinforced frame was before the guard’s desk so he could lock anyone out, and he still had a door behind him. At the time the posse of three arrived at the door, the desk officer had already unlocked it for them. After they were through, he locked it once again. The three crossbow-wielding ponies ran in a staggered line towards the end of the hall with their weapons hanging by the straps around their necks. They were about halfway through when, for almost no reason, A heat wave stopped them all in their tracks as concrete and dust filled the hall in a fantastic explosion. The boom was deafening, being in a confined space as they were only made the sound waves echo worse. The force of the blast was so powerful that it knocked the leading guard off his hooves. The three stood up, reoriented themselves, and inspected the dense fog of dust and tenderized concrete that created a smokescreen before their eyes. The guard in front, who was the most affected by the blast, staggered to his hooves, coughed the dust out of his lungs, and hobbled forward towards the explosion. He constantly blinked and placed a hoof before his eyes in an effort to keep the microscopic airborne pebbles from stinging them. When questioned later, he would not be able to recall it, being that it happened so suddenly, but as he neared the new opening in the wall, a shadow in the smoke was seen by his comrades. It ran forward, jumped to its back hooves, twisted and curved itself to become horizontal, and in one swift motion, stuck its back leg out. Just by following the rules of momentum, the limb flew like an axe onto the side of the disoriented guard’s face, completely turning him around and leaving him sprawled out on the ground. The two guards behind him, witnessing the assault, reared up and raised their bows before shouting, “Fire! Fire!”. The enchanted string of their weapons raked themselves against the length of the semi affixed bolt. The shaving of metal, now turned into a neon colored slag, flew straight at wherever the weapons happened to be pointed at before the string reset itself in the firing position. Tuxedo Mask, being on the ground after his knockout-kick, rolled forward, shifting his weight to dive out of the way as the two neon-colored alchemical projectiles came his way. The second nearest guard to Tuxedo mask, having his safe distance diminished with every shot, waited for the intruder to dodge after he fired, and then advanced upon him. Rearing with his weapon raised over his head like a club, the officer shouted a battle cry and struck down on the stallion in white. Unfortunately, the thief was much more nimble than he anticipated. In an instant, Tuxedo Mask reared and crossed his hooves above his head, catching the makeshift club in mid strike and then threw the officer back. The guard had to back up a step to regain his balance, but charged forward and swung again- TAP TAP TAP TAP TAP TAP The guard was stuck in mid step from his forward charge. It was like a flash of lightening; his target had reared before him and struck him in a rising motion six times up his chest. His brain did not comprehend what happened, but he was practically frozen. All he did know was that his ribs stung inconceivably. He coughed, and blood fell from his mouth. As he breathed, he could feel his ribcage moving inside his chest, electrifying him with pain. He then realized that, in the amount of time that it would have taken him to blink, his attacker had broken all of his ribs. He fell backwards onto the ground and writhed as every tiny movement in his chest caused an electrical shock to his brain, begging him to stop. While his ally and the pony in the white suit had been struggling against each other, the final armed guard had shouldered his magic crossbow in his reared position and properly aimed it at the two entangled ponies. He kept his aim true, watching the intruder with the end of his crossbow, but kept a very strict firing discipline. He did not want to accidentally shoot a friendly. As the third armed pony in the hallway had properly hypothesized from all of the other security personnel who fared against this one enigmatic individual, the comrade who decided to trade fisticuffs against the intruder failed, and the third challenger was waiting with Tuxedo Mask clean in his sights. The guard, through the haze and dust around him, smiled and firmed his grip as the white dressed stallion turned to him. “Gotcha”. He fired, and the magic string raked itself against the metal bolt and the slag was flung at the core of Tuxedo Mask. The hot alchemical projectile flew at high speed towards its target, but before it could meet, the unicorn disappeared in a flash of white light against the charred concrete. He reappeared beside the shooter, diving into him with his hoof wound back tight, and let the blow loose. The poor soldier, being subjected to tunnel vision after focusing down the sights of his weapon for too long, could not brace himself for the blow that connected with the side of his head, knocking half of his teeth out, shattering his jaw, and sending him straight to dreamland. They say that it takes thirteen minutes for the troops garrisoned outside of Fellik City to arrive in Imperial Square in the event of a breach in security. It had been nine minutes when the first of the fastest airborne units had begun circling above the National Offices of Archives and Securities building. To their credit they did a good job, but they were already too late. As the security forces tried to head after the intruder, always running on old information and being two steps behind him, there was one particular guard who did not follow their lead. His name was Indra, and as the bulk of the guards followed the intruder, and the combat troops tried to create a perimeter around the building, he instead went to the only logical place to wait for this fox. He was not a normal security officer or private contractor. He was once a combat unit, and after a certain off-the-record incident, was “Promoted” to the Archives building. To keep the story out of the red tape, he had gone from active “black” operations to investigating pen theft and chasing down lost memorabilia. When the alarm went off, to say that a little part of him that he thought was dead had come back to life would pretty much sum up his reaction before he reached into his desk and armed himself with combat spurs. His combat training had not taught him his instincts, they only refined them. Where he was from, ponies were not at the top of the food chain. On his parent’s farm, the apex predator of the area was the fox. The fox was the most dangerous of all the creatures not for its brawn, but its brain. His father and he, like his father and the one before that, had struggled with the fight against the foxes attacking their stock and terrorizing the poor fools who would be found as their prey. One could not simply chase the foxes, nor could they contain them. After generations of warfare, his lineage had found a way, the solution to their plight, the long sought after secret that there was only one way to hunt a fox. The other guards were being played like fools. Like the foxes in the wild, this thing that had intruded upon their treasures was very proud in its ability, and based upon the forces in pursuit, it was right to feel that way. One could never get ahead if one were always behind, and this beast was too clever to be contained by the army forces making their way into the city. Indra, after applying razor spurs to the inner area of his front hooves, made his way to the roof. The only way to hunt a fox was to use its strength against it. It was too clever, too nimble, and too quick to fight in a conventional sense. Instead, a proper hunter needed to know the fox, to allow it to think that it had already won, and when it was about to make its escape, strike. He had come from the basement, there was one way out, and it was through the roof. Indra walked to the top of the roof access, and waited in the maintenance closet in the shadows between the staircase and the roof. There was only one way to hunt foxes, after all…