I pledge allegiance,
To this disclaimer,
And my love for the work of Takahashi-sama.
And to the anime,
And the manga too,
Which has action,
Romantic comedy,
N3kkid teenage girls,
With laughter and fanservice for all.

Guardian
Chapter 22
Operating Error

**********************************************************************************

Ranma awoke slowly, keeping his eyes squeezed shut tightly as he tried to regulate the pain in his head that had accompanied consciousness.
'Ugh... what happened? Uh... okay... last thing I remember... Seras is evil and sober now. He knows about the neko-ken. He copied my mind into a robot Ranma. Hmmm...' Finished updating himself, Ranma slowly cracked an eye open.
There wasn't much to see. The entire room he was in was a solid steel box, complete with a gigantic motorized vault door and only a small but equally solid-looking air vent to provide ventilation. Where the other room had several machines and hatches to allow for the equipment stationed there, the purpose of his current accommodations was obvious; it had been built to hold an individual and keep it from escaping indefinitely.
Pushing himself up off the ground, Ranma noted with some satisfaction that his headache was fading rapidly; it was probably a minor side effect from the neural transfer.
He walked over to the nearest wall and rapped on it with his knuckles, noting with a grimace that very little noise resulted from the impact, which indicated that whatever lay behind the wall of metal was of the solid and hard-packed nature.
'Hmmm... so if all these vaults are made to keep certain kinds of freaks trapped, then there must be different kinds of vaults for different kinds of monsters.' Looking around at his cell, Ranma had to guess that it was constructed with the sole purpose of being able to withstand intense physical punishment and probably high energy levels. Beyond that, he didn't see any restraining mechanisms anywhere, nor were there any hatches to hide tazer turrets within.
"Great. A ki blast could hardly put a dent in this," the pigtailed man noted sourly as he walked over the vault entrance and knocked on it.
Ah, you're awake! Very good!
Ranma growled as he heard Seras' voice coming from behind the ventilation grill. "You again? Don't you have to sleep or anything? You were up all night, weren't you?"
Hush.Your banter grates on my nerves. I just wanted to thank you for your assistance with my project, involuntary as it was. Your robotic double is everything I'd hoped he'd be... well... everything I'd expected he'd be, anyway.
Ranma frowned at that. "What, he do something wrong?"
Let's just say that I'm considering a more strict command OS to control them. Your double follows orders; he has no choice, but the WHINING...
The pigtailed cop sweatdropped. He'd never been pegged as a whiner before. Just what was going on? "Yeah, so now what?"
Now... well, unfortunately for you, I don't really have a use for you anymore. So I think I'll just leave you in there to rot for now. Who knows, maybe I'll need you again for my next experiment!
Ranma twitched, a vein popping up on his head. "Okay, you SO asked for it. Get a welcome mat ready jackass, 'cause I'm coming for you."
Unrestrained laughter came from the vent. Wa ha ha ha ha! Hah hah hah hah! And just what are you going to do to get out, hm? Poke the door until it explodes? Bwa ha ha ha ha! Click! The laughter ended abruptly as the intercom was switched off.

Ranma raised a hand to stroke his chin thoughtfully. Then he turned and looked at the vault door.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Seras turned away from his main control terminal and turned toward Robot Asuka, who was standing patiently behind him. "Okay then, now that we have our complete little army, we'll begin operations. Our first order of business is to secure more materials so that I can continue my weapons research. Once I can begin full-scale production of battle robots, I'll have enough power to take down Core, which will open the door to crushing Japan's central government. After that, it's only a matter of time until the entire world will bend knee to me, Doctor Seras Tuko!"
"Yeah, that's great," Robot Asuka mumbled without a drop of enthusiasm. "I assume then that you won't be building robot copies of Sakura and Junko?"
"Oh, of course I will! Because if there's one thing every robot combat force can't do without, it's a sex object and a klutzy medic," Seras spat sarcastically. "Neither really has its place in a cybernetic force, you see."
"Yeah, okay. I get it. What about Hunter?"
The sobered scientist actually stopped to consider this, then shook his head. "No, redesigning the neural transfer system would take too much time and energy; the zergling's brain is a very different organ from that which you and I have. I'll simply have the creature destroyed next time we find it."
Robot Asuka sighed. 'Great. Another useful asset going to waste for the sake of this idiot's ambitions.' "So what are your orders, Master?"
"Create a list of facilities to seize, then take Robots Ranma and Snake and-" BRAAAP!! BRAAAP!!
Seras jerked in surprise as the warning klaxon interrupted him.
WARNING! VAULT 4 IN CONTAINMENT BLOCK A HAS BEEN BREACHED! AUTOMATED SECURITY DEFENSES ARE INADEQUATE FOR CONTAINMENT AREA PACIFICATION! FACILITY SECONDARY PACIFICATION PROTOCOLS OVERRIDEN! DANGER!
"What the blazes? That's Saotome's cell!" Seras quickly scooted his chair over to the main security terminal and looked at the security footage, growling as he noticed a huge, gaping hole where Ranma's vault door should have been. "How did he do that? It doesn't make sense! I mean, look at that hole!"
Robot Asuka nodded quietly as she followed behind him and examined the crystal-clear image of the vault entrance from the outside. The remains of the door around the edge were jagged and twisted, while the materials that used to fill the hole Ranma had made were lying on the ground in small, fractured chunks.
What was unusual, of course, was that there was no warping, melted sections, or charred portions. Nearly any source of kinetic energy strong enough to break the door should have involved an exothermic reaction hot enough to turn anyone inside the cell into a few lonely cinders. If he had somehow acquired the strength to tear through a reinforced vault door that should have held up to Rayden, Kyle, and three or four maulers all beating against it at once, then there wouldn't have been much rubble, and all of it would have been on the outside.
"This is impossible! How did he blow up the vault?" Seras mumbled, pinching the bridge of his nose.
Robot Asuka rolled her eyes. "Maybe he poked it." Upon seeing her master glare at her, she shrugged helplessly. "So what are the secondary pacification protocols, and why aren't they working?"
Seras snorted as he got up from the terminal, heading for the door. "The secondary pacification protocols are a last-ditch set of security systems that were installed to annihilate everything in the facility to prevent them from overpowering the personnel here and getting loose. Of course, this includes the personnel themselves. I don't know exactly what means they had for doing this; the systems had been removed when the facility was abandoned and I certainly didn't want to put them back into place." He reached the door and opened it, walking into the hallway of the first level of the underground base, which was just one level above Ranma's containment block. "Back in its heyday, this place had the security systems to deal with this sort of thing. Not so much nowadays."
Turning into another entrance, he yanked open the door before charging in irritably.

Robot Tycho and Robot Kyle looked up from where they were playing Capcom vs. SNK 2. Robot Ranma and Robot Snake paid the scientist no attention, as the latter spoke intently to the former while holding a metal disc that was obviously some sort of explosive device simply by virtue of the fact that Snake was holding it.
BRAAAP!! BRAAAP!! Seras' left eye twitched as the security alarm continue to blare away, being completely ignored by the robotic individuals in the room.
"Welcome to my world, Master," Robot Asuka said dryly, crossing her arms over her chest.
"I'm going to forgo the obvious questions like 'what do you think you're doing' or 'do any of you hear that noise in the background', because I know you'd just provide simple, honest, and unhelpful answers just to be smartasses," the mad scientist said as a vein popped up on his head.
"Fine, be that way," Robot Tycho said sourly, not appreciating having his sense of humor picked apart and discarded. That said, he turned back around and returned to the game, and Robot Kyle immediately joined him. Robot Snake and Robot Ranma never stopped their careful exchange, having completely dismissed their insane master.
Several more veins popped up. "ROBOTS!! STAND AT ATTENTION!!" Seras yelled.
Immediately they shot up ramrod straight and turned to face Seras, their arms held at their sides.
"Ranma Saotome has somehow managed to destroy the vault door to his cell and escape, and is even now running around the containment facility," Seras explained hotly. "The only resources we have available that can possibly stop him are here in this room; none of the automated defenses, or Yamazaki's robot clone down in the block C, are any kind of match for him."
Robot Snake raised an eyebrow, having seen the vault doors and mentally calculated the degree of firepower it would have taken to destroy them. "He blew up the door? How?"
"He probably blew it up by poking it. He does that sometimes." Robot Ranma suddenly shook his head fiercely. "I mean, I do that sometimes! Well, I would, except it was actually him, and... AAUGH!! I hate not being me!"
Seras groaned as Robot Ranma slumped over while looking depressed. 'Why is it that he's the only one with mental issues from the copying? Bizarre...' "He did NOT blow it up by poking it. That's idiotic."
Robot Ranma raised his head up defiantly. "It is not! Watch!" Turning on his heel, the robotic double walked over to an aluminum table and jabbed it with his middle and index fingers. "Bakusai tenketsu!"
Kthunk! Robot Ranma's fingers went straight through the table surface, punching a small hole in the reasonably thick aluminum.
The others stared as nothing happened, and Seras shook his head.
"And he seems so STABLE, normally," the former drunk mumbled to himself. "Look, it doesn't matter how Saotome got out, but you're all going to hunt him down and kill him!"
"What? But I like Ranma!" Robot Kyle complained.
"It does seem a bit extreme, Master," Robot Asuka said nervously. "He's a powerful asset to us, don't you think?"
Seras rolled his eyes, once again contemplating the possibility of making his robots fully evil, rather than simply ensuring they followed his commands. With all their memories and attitudes unaltered, they had the same tendencies and memories as their real counterparts.
Not even Robot Snake jumped at the chance to hunt down his former comrade. "Can't this wait? I was teaching Robot Ranma how to disarm a time bomb. We were ready to begin a live trial."
"That's a proximity mine, not a time bomb," Robot Asuka deadpanned.
Robot Snake stared at her for a long moment. "Human, robot, it doesn't matter, does it? You LIVE to ruin my fun. Tuko hands me a way outta that stupid 'blow up Ranma, lose your guns' rule, and THEN you go and pull this. I never get to blow anybody up!"
Robot Ranma would have voiced his displeasure and incredulity at Robot Snake's comments, but was busy poking more holes in the table while shouting. "Bakusai tenketsu! Dammit! Why doesn't it work? Bakusai tenketsu!"
Seras seethed quietly as he watched the meeting break down once again; Kyle and Tycho were already sitting back down to continue their game. "ROBOTS! YOU WILL HEAD OUT IMMEDIATELY AND-"
WARNING! WARNING! The female-sounding, computerized voice buzzed in interruption of the general alarm that had been screeching for a good five minutes. UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY ON HEADQUARTERS GROUND FLOOR! PRIMARY DEFENSES HAVE BEEN BREACHED! MAIN FACILITY SECURITY HAS BEEN COMPROMISED! DANGER! DANGER!
"Well that's just dandy," Seras mumbled wearily, massaging his head. "Now we have a jailbreak AND an external security breach. What else can go wrong?"
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

DANGER! DANGER! BRAAAP!! BRAAAP!! BRAAAP!!
Robot Tiro glared up at the warning siren in annoyance, as if a withering look would intimidate the noisy device into silence. "What the hell's going on up there, anyway? Thing's been blaring for like five minutes..."
Asuka had to suppress a smirk as she scooted to the door of her cell. Apparently Seras had made a mistake - perhaps several - and she would take every opportunity to add fuel to the fire.
Cough! Cough! "Ex-Excuse me, Yamazaki?"
"Eh? What?" Tiro and his robotic counterpart mumbled as they both turned toward her.
Asuka fought the urge to slam the biological lecher in the face; right now she had to seem docile and submissive.
Not responding to the Tiro in the cell behind her, she made eye contact with Robot Tiro before continuing. "I... well... it's starting to warm up in here quite a bit..." she trailed off nervously, and began to tug on the collar of her uniform.
Robot Tiro raised an eyebrow, and then turned all the way around, giving the captain his complete attention.
"And I was wondering if you could let me out for a moment so I could change into something more... comfortable?"
Robot Tiro's other eyebrow rose, and the two organic police officers in Asuka's cell gaped.
"Uhm... well..." Robot Tiro hesitated as Asuka looked up at him with shy, pleading eyes that would have tipped off anyone else that she was manipulating them. "You can change, but... can't you change in there?"
"Yes! I agree! You can change in here!" Tiro and Tycho said at the same time, snorting as they nodded decisively.
A vein popped up on Asuka's head as her subordinates threatened to ruin her escape plan. 'This is EXACTLY why I would rather have been jailed with Sakura and Junko. Useless morons...'
Across the walkway from the three imprisoned officers, Snake looked up from where he had been resting on the floor of the cage and grinned. Obviously the captain was up to something, judging by the ridiculously fake tearful expression on her face. It probably wouldn't have worked on anyone else, but luckily the target was Tiro (or at least a mental equivalent); freedom was practically guaranteed. With victory, came the inevitable recovering of their armaments. With their weapons in hand they would bring about the brutal destruction of their foes. 'C'mon Cap! Let's get this party rolling!'
Coughing lightly to try and dispel some of her frustration, she looked up at Robot Tiro once again. "I can't change here! There are men watching! A girl needs her privacy, you know!" Then she flushed slightly as some of her apparent meekness returned. "Of course... you're a guard, so the situation's a bit different, in your case. I mean, you have to guard the prisoners, and you're a robot anyway, so-"
"So there's no problem!" Robot Tiro said eagerly, missing the bemused look on Tycho's face and the increasingly agitated one on Tiro's. Moving in front of the terminal at the end of the hall, he began to enter a sequence of numbers into a keypad. "Just let me get that door open, and we can go change in that chem suit closet over in the corner there! Heh heh!"
"OH, COME ON!!" Tiro suddenly shouted as his patience snapped, causing Robot Tiro to stop in surprise and Asuka to shoot a glare at him.
His captain's expression didn't intimidate his wounded pride, however, and he stood up in the electrified cell before crossing his arms over his chest. "Knock it off! There's no way I'm THAT stupid!"
Asuka's eyebrow twitched. "All things considered, you can be much worse," she mumbled under her breath.
Robot Tiro stared at his organic double, and then his eyes narrowed, and he smirked. "Yeah, right. Who do you think you're fooling?" Shaking his head, he finished punching in the code, and turned around as Asuka's cell door slid open.
He grinned widely in anticipation as Asuka stepped out, but then frowned suddenly as something the real Tiro had said tugged on the small corner of his mind responsible for common sense. "Uh-oh. I really am that stupid, aren't I?"
"It's not really your fault," Asuka explained as she approached the robot guard. "After all, you had a lousy origin."
Without wasting anymore time on words, the police captain slid forward and delivered an agonizingly accurate rising kick straight into Robot Tiro's crotch.
Clang!
Robot Tiro's eyes went wide as everyone else blinked in surprise.
"'Clang'?" Asuka said dubiously, retracting her foot from the android's bathing suit area.
Very slowly, Robot Tiro's eyes returned to normal, and he let out a breath he had been holding as a reflex that he had inherited from his biological counterpart. Then he smirked. "Ha! I'm afraid that's no longer my weak point, 'Captain'! Nice try, though!"
"Huh... okay then..." Asuka took a moment to scratch her head, then shrugged and walked up to the android.
"Hey, what're you-" Robot Tiro was cut off as the blue-haired woman grabbed him by the shirt and then shoved him to the side, knocking him into the cage that still held Snake, was still locked, and thus, was still fully electrified.
BRRRRZACK!! "GWAAAAUYTLSODTSZTKLAWERT!" Robot Tiro began spasming wildly as sparks shot out of his neck and hands, and his eyes slowly rolled up into his head before he slid to the ground comatose, electricity still arcing around his arms and face.

"Nice!" Snake chuckled, admiring his captain's handiwork. "Now let's get outta here and whip that pencil-neck drunk!"
"It's not fair!" Tiro whined over the still-blaring warning klaxons, "I'm not that dumb! I'm NOT!"
"Oh, shut up. Stupidity worked out in our favor for once... er... again," Tycho amended, remembering the several occasions upon which the foolishness of the DAPC's officers had granted them a much-needed and unexpected edge, "so stop whining. We have to get out of here before Robo-perv wakes up."
FSSSSSSSSS! Hot steam suddenly burst from Robot Tiro's neck, and a few sparks shot up from his shoulder. BANG!!
Asuka winced as the android's head popped like a balloon, sending hunks of shattered metal in the air that she barely avoided before they hit her. "Yeah... I don't think he's waking up."
"It's not fair..." Tiro mumbled dejectedly, now speaking too quietly to be heard over the alarms. "Not only is my robot the idiot that screwed up and let us go, but he was the first one to die, too. No respect. I don't get no respect at all..."
Asuka was glad that Tiro had lowered the volume on his whining as she concentrated in order to recall the sequence of numbers to open the cages. "Let's see... six... nine, nine, two... five! Now move the cursor to cell number three..."
Click! The lock to Snake's cage opened up, and the soft hum that indicated the cage bars were electrified stopped.
The weapons officer grinned fiercely as he kicked open the cage door, flexing his arms. "All right! Let's do some damage!"
"Putting aside that this is our own HQ and that damage is generally a bad thing to cause here," Asuka said with her arms crossed over her chest, "we're still stuck in this containment block. The door leading out works on an indepedent locking keypad, and I doubt we can salvage the code from the little pieces of Robo-Tiro's defective skull."
"No sweat," Snake said smugly. "That door isn't reinforced. I can blow it open easily."
Tycho raised an eyebrow. "How? There aren't any bombs in here."
Snake pointed to Robot Tiro's lifeless (and headless) body. "That explosion was probably from a malfunction that caused the air pressure to build rapidly in the android's skull. I know my explosions; that wasn't a chemical detonation."
The driver shrugged. "So?"
"SO, my slow, useless friend, that means the power core is probably undamaged." Snake smirked as he crouched next to the broken android. "Self-motivating robots have independent power sources. Power sources are basically bombs that explode really, really slowly. A little tweaking can usually fix that."
Asuka sweatdropped. "Only you would think of a battery as latent dynamite." Then she sighed. "But it's our best shot. Do what you can. Kyle's in the next section, so if we can get him out, then he should be able to batter down the doors in our way."
"Now they're cannibalizing my robot body for parts," Tiro complained, again being drowned out by the alarms that refused to quiet themselves. "No respect at all..."
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Who the hell is that?" Seras asked as he stared once more into the main security monitor, his squad of cybernetic warriors behind him.
Robot Asuka shook her head. "It's Rayden, the religious nut. This isn't good..."
The mad scientist frowned as he watched Rayden, Junko, Sakura, and Hunter move up to the stairwell, having secured the first floor. "What's his combat potential?"
"Lethal," Robot Asuka answered seriously. "He's impervious to normal small arms and carries an entire arsenal on him. If we don't take him out, he WILL take us out." Then she rubbed her chin in thought. "Though I can't imagine what he's doing here..."
"Apparently Junko's trying to tame him," Robot Ranma answered, shrugging.
Robot Snake nodded. "Well, that's neither here nor there. At the moment, our best bet is to divide our forces to meet our biological doubles head-on for an epic and climactic battle that'll probably tear the building apart!"
"There are two problems with that," Robot Asuka said sourly. "Three, if you count the destruction of HQ, which you probably don't. First off, we don't have any doubles of the people breaking into the main building."
"Well, then you can take Robot Snake and me to deal with them," Robot Tycho reasoned. "It's not like our doubles have gotten free yet."
WARNING! WARNING! SECURITY BREACH IN CONTAINMENT BLOCK C! AUTOMATED SECURITY SYSTEMS ONLINE! AREA PACIFICATION IN PROGRESS!
Seras' shoulders slumped as he grasped the edge of the security console, and he hung his head.
"Okay, fine. So Kyle's the only one still secure," Robot Tycho amended. "So the rest of us can go fight our doubles, and Robot Kyle can go kill the intruders."
"What? You want me to kill Sakura?" Robot Kyle looked alarmed and fearful at the prospect, and Seras' face darkened further.
Finally, Robot Ranma couldn't take any more. "I don't want to fight my double!" He suddenly shouted.
Robot Snake blinked. "Why not? I thought you were the type who always rises to the challenge and that sort of thing."
"The real Ranma is! I'm just a copy! I'll lose! I don't wanna lose!" Robot Ranma complained.
Robot Asuka sighed. "Which brings us to our second problem: He's right. Copies and clones traditionally have a very poor record as far as facing their originals in combat. More so in our case, because we're not really evil and actually have emotional attachments to the people we're trying to kill."
"Real smart move not making us evil, Master," Robot Snake said snidely.
"Yeah, this is all your fault!" Robot Kyle said angrily.
Seras groaned and massaged his head as he waited for his one competent android to get to the point.
"Really, our only hope for survival is to split up such that our strengths can be used against our enemies' weaknesses." Robot Asuka turned to Robot Snake. "Robot Snake, you have guns. Your counterpart doesn't. You can take Robot Tycho and wipe out our originals in Containment Block C." She turned toward Robot Ranma. "Robot Ranma, you seem to have some kind of stupid self-esteem issue, so you're in no shape to fight the real Ranma. You try and hold the intruders in HQ until the rest of us finish up and can join you." Finally, she turned toward Robot Kyle. "You'll take on Ranma with me. Your raw strength gives you a physical edge, while my tactical sense gives me an intellectual edge. We'll need both to take down Saotome."
A small smile blossomed on Seras' face as the androids reluctantly nodded, accepting their orders.
"Very well, then!" The mad scientist chuckled, and then pointed toward the stairwell. "Robots! I order you to hunt down and destroy the officers of the DAPC immediately! Do NOT fail, or the consequences will be dire!"
"If we fail, then they'll blow us up," Robot Ranma deadpanned. "We won't survive long enough to worry about YOU."
Seras rolled his eyes. "Just shut up and get on with it."
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

BRRZAAAAK! Asuka dodged across the hallway as the small stunner turret fired a long, twisting bolt of electricity at her, missing badly and scorching the wall with its discharge.
Turning into the doorway she had dashed into, she waved along Tycho, who sprinted across the width of the hallway a moment later.
BRRZAAAK! The stun ray was a bit slower in firing as it oriented on a new target, and didn't even fire until the driver had already made it to safety.
Snake saw the opening and grinned. Jumping out of the connecting hallway, he flung an object toward the ceiling turret with all his might.
Bam! Some sparks shot out of the protrusion as the charred metal foot smashed into the small autoturret, shattering the main sensor and snapping one of the motivators.
Snake planted his fists on his hips as his projectile fell to the floor, followed by a shower of electric sparks. The turret, trying to orient itself to carry out its functions despite being blinded and crippled, attempted to unleash another shock despite its projection rods being bent inward.
FZASH! A much larger explosion of sparks erupted from the device, followed by a popping noise that indicated a definite end to the minor threat.

The others emerged from their cover with expressions of surprise and reluctant admiration for their lieutenant, impressed despite themselves that the Texan could be a formidable combat force without proper firearms.
Well, actually, only Asuka and Tycho did.
"Damn it, Snake! Stop using my body parts as weapons!" Tiro growled as he followed the American into the hallway.
"It's not your body, so stop complaining," Snake insisted, crossing his arms over his chest.
"All right Stooges, shut it," Asuka snapped, taking point as she moved through the hallway along the wall, commando-style. "Our first priority is finding some weapons for when we run into our copies. Second priority is finding Kyle and getting him free. After that we can free Ranma and then join up with whatever it is that's causing those alarms, if it isn't Ranma himself."
Tycho nodded. "The banging noises from earlier weren't that far off, so the vault cell must lie at the end of the corridor... that way!" He pointed to the left where the hallway ended and split in two paths.
"It must curve back around. All these dark, underground labyrinths are about capitalizing on space," Snake murmured, remembering Deth's labs that had been built around his dungeon.
Asuka nodded and peeked around the corner once she reached the end of the hallway. "Damn, another turret. Snake, do you have any Robot Tiro left?"
"Hey!"
Snake shook his head. "Nope, just the real one. You want me to tear him into pieces so we can throw him instead?"
"HEY!!"
The police captain discarded the idea, shaking her head, though a momentary delay informed an increasingly malcontent Tiro that she had actually thought about the plan first.
"No... hey, wait..." Asuka looked up as the pitch of the frequently blaring alarms began to shift slightly in pitch and volume.
BRAAP!! BRAAP!! BEEEM! BEEEM! BEEEM!
Then the klaxons halted entirely, leaving the hallways with a dead, empty silence that nearly caused the police officers to stumble in surprise.
"Dang... I almost forgot what quiet sounded like," Tycho mumbled as Asuka checked around the corner again.
"Hm. The turret's gone," she grumbled.
Tiro brightened. "That's great! Let's go!"
"It's not great, nitwit. It's very far from great," the bluette chastised her confused subordinates as she suddenly dashed down the hall. "The only reasons why Tuko would deactivate the automated defenses is if the ones who prompted the alarm were dead, which can't be since we're part of that group, or if he didn't want the autoturrets interfering with an active defense force."
Tycho blinked. "An active defense force?"
"The copy bots," Snake muttered as he sped up to run alongside their leader. "Meaning that instead of clumsy, immobile stun guns in our way, we'll have to deal with androids with all our experience and skills."
Then, much to the disturbance of his companions, the weapons expert grinned. "Sounds like fun."
Asuka grimaced as they reached the end of the hallway. Lying before them was a large circular room with four vaults located ninety-degrees from each other along the circumference of the room. Around the room were scattered dozens of large, aluminum-plated crates, all of them closed and many of them looking beaten and worn.
Asuka glanced at the elevator shaft across from the hall exit, and noted with some relief that there was no indication that it was currently in use.
"KYLE!! YOU HERE?!" She shouted as she stepped into the middle of the room, trying to figure out a basic layout in her head to help determine which vault held the DAPC's mentally deficient mutant.
"Captain? Is that you? Hey, you're free!"
Asuka walked up to the vault door from which the gleeful voice echoed, and she winced. "Yes... but it's going to be harder to free you than it was for us."
Snake whistled as he stepped up to the vault and felt the finely-polished surface of the door. "Yeah, it's gonna take a lot more than Tiro to blow this thing up."
"Leave me alone!"
Asuka nodded, and then steeled herself, for she knew that the following line of questioning could be extremely hazardous to her sanity and future physical safety. "So do you have anything powerful enough to bust this open?"
Snake grinned; the least she could expect. "Oh, sure!"
She nodded again, bracing herself for the real question. "Anything that won't demolish the HQ?"
Snake blinked. Repeatedly. "The HQ?" His superior raised an eyebrow, awaiting his answer. "Don't you think that we should be discussing the survival of the surrounding neighborhood before you get your hopes up for the office? This thing is REALLY thick. Priorities, you know?"
"Shut up now," Asuka commanded darkly. "If we can't blast our way through, then we'll have to force it out of Tuko. It won't be-" She was cut off by a sudden grinding noise from the far end of the room, and she mumbled a quick curse. "The elevator! They're coming!"

Snake kicked the lid off one of the metal crates, ignoring his companions as they began to panic.
Looking down into the box, he frowned as he saw many brown and black-speckled ovals sitting in sytrofoam peanuts. "What the hell? Eggs?"
Asuka began shouting orders to Tiro and Tycho, and just barely stopped them from retreating back into the hallway.
Snake gave the collection of ovals a disgusted look. "Hmph. When one finds a collection of crates lying in the middle of an abandoned building, it's SUPPOSED to contain perfectly usable and often illegal weapons that the previous occupants left behind for no reason, not groceries." Snorting, he turned around the picked the crate top up off the floor, not noticing as the collection of styrofoam and eggs shifted and squirmed slightly.
"Sssss..." a dark, writhing shape emerged from amongst the contents of the crate, poking its head out as pieces of its former prison clung to its moist skin.
Seeing its prey leaning over with his back turned, the worm-like creature slid upward and freed the rest of its body from the other contents of the crate, coiling itself atop one of the large eggs and rearing its head back. Giving another quiet hiss, the worm opened its mouth for the strike, revealing long strings of dark, slimy saliva that fed between its long, jagged teeth.

Thump! Snake ignored the mild banging noise as he slammed the lid back onto the top of the crate.
"Hmph. Way heavier than it looked," he grumbled, wiping a bit of sweat off his brow.
"Snake! Is there anything in those things we can use as weapons?" Asuka asked, reaching the elevator and pressing her back flat against the wall next to the door. A brief light of hope had blossomed within her once she heard the elevator stop before it had reached them, but that thought was quashed when it began moving again soon afterward.
"Not unless you want to humiliate them before they kill us," the weapons expert mumbled, prying up the lid of a different crate. "What the hell? 'Daemon eggs'?" Shaking his head at the label that rested on top of the carefully placed rows of black orbs. They were different from the ones in the last crate, and there were less of them, but their presence still didn't help the officers' situation any. "Was this place some sort of breeding facility?"
Moving to the next one, he lifted up the top and looked inside. Like the first crate, there was no label, but unlike the others this container held no eggs, but only severed tentacles of some sort. Judging by the total lack of suckers on the tentacles, Snake was guessing they had not come from any sea creature he knew of, and his eyes twitched as he let the top fall. "Okay, not a breeding facility... unless there was some really messed-up breeding going on."
"Snake, get over here!" Asuka commanded, hearing the elevator car slowly rumble down. "All we can do is try to surprise them!"
Nodding, the lieutenant jumped over the crates and dashed toward the elevator, backing against the wall on the opposite side of the door from Asuka.
Asuka nodded as Tycho and Tiro ducked behind a few nearby crates, ready to pounce once the more dangerous officers began fighting.
Then, something occurred to her, and the steel trap that was her mind seized onto an important detail.
"Snake," she said suddenly, turning her head toward her subordinate, "if you were headed down on an elevator into a combat zone, what would you do?"
The man blinked, then shrugged. "I'd hang onto the ceiling and drop a frag the moment the doors opened to foil any ambushes like the one we're performing. Why do you ask?"
"I hate it when there's two of you," she sobbed gently, diving away from the elevator as the car slowly settled into its destination. Snake followed a moment later, guessing at his superior's hunch, and found a well-concealed spot next to Tycho as Asuka found cover next to Tiro.
Ding!

There was a rusty creaking noise as the outdated and poorly maintained elevator opened up.
Clink! A small, olive green cylinder bounced out of the elevator car and onto the floor.
BOOM! Asuka winced as she heard the fragmentation grenade detonate, and mentally thanked whatever entities were responsible for granting her such foresight as to ask Snake about his tactical habits.
'I hope Robot Snake is the only real fighter they sent; he's going to be hard enough to take down,' Asuka groused as she peeked out slightly and waited for the newcomers to exit the elevator car. 'If they sent Robot Ranma or Kyle down too, no amount of luck or planning is going to see us through this.'
"Goddamit Snake!" Robot Tycho complained as the two androids stepped out of the elevator. "Why didn't you tell me you were going to do that?"
Asuka sighed slightly in relief, seeing only Robot Tycho follow Snake's cybernetic double out of the elevator. Tycho was a lazy fool with negligible combat skills unless he was behind the wheel of some sort of vehicle. For that matter, he already appeared damaged, with a few shards of shrapnel lodged in his pants and one in his neck.
Robot Snake snorted as he slowly surveyed the room, his shotgun resting in his hands. "Stop your whining. You can't even feel pain, so what do you care?"
"I've got sharp pieces of metal lodged in me! I have the memories and experiences of a human being! Caring comes naturally!" Robot Tycho seethed, ripping out the piece that had been embedded in his neck.
"You should have followed my movements and done what I did," Robot Snake insisted, still scanning the room as he argued.
"You should have used the long, silent elevator ride down to tell me what you were going to do ahead of time, you psycho!"
"And ruin the element of surprise?"
"You're only supposed to surprise the bad guys!"
"We are the bad guys."
"SHUT UP AND LISTEN TO ME!!"
"You're not the boss of Robot Snake!"
The pointless and distracting bickering was brought to a screeching halt as an echoing voice came from one of the vaults located on the side of the main containment deck.
"Hey, are you robot guys out there?" Kyle shouted from within his cell, banging on the massive vault door a moment later.
The robots turned toward the vault and snorted.
"Hmph. Well, the idiot's still trapped, that's good," Robot Tycho said, snorting.
"No he's not! Tiro was just here! I heard him!" Kyle insisted, proving once again that two and two ends up just way too close to five.
Whatever Tiro's intentions were after hearing that, he didn't make the best of impressions by suddenly jumping up from behind his hiding place before pointing and yelling at the vault where Kyle was. "WHY IS EVERYBODY PICKING ON ME?! YOU'RE THE IDIOT!! I'M-" he suddenly fell silent, before squeaking out, "-so very, very screwed."
Ch-chak! Ch-chak!

The two robots wasted no time in opening fire on the department lecher, each one slightly relieved that their first kill wasn't one they would miss.
Tiro, being adept at two things and two things only - finding attractive women and preserving his life against impossible odds - quickly utilized the second of those skills, diving away from his former hiding place and rolling across the floor as buckshot pounded the floor and various crates around him.
BLAM!! BLAM!! BLAM!! Robot Snake growled as his normally impeccable aim was thrown off by Tiro's uncanny speed and completely random leaps for safety among the abundant cover provided by the stacks of metal crates. Luckily for him, the lecher was panicking too much to stay behind any one of them rather than running like a madman, giving the android plenty of chances. Tycho was absolutely no help, being a poor marksmen normally, and having little experience with firearms outside of machine guns.
"WAAAAH!! I DON'T WANNA DIE!! PLEASE DON'T KILL ME!!" Tiro begged as he stopped dead in run, squealing in horror as the wall in front of him suddenly burst into a patch of sparks and bouncing metal pellets. Reversing direction with an acceleration that would have impressed even Ranma, he then dove into another roll, passing behind two more crates which were soon ravaged by shotgun fire.
BLAM!! Robot Snake clicked his tongue as he missed again, but managed to glance around the room quickly to make sure there wasn't anybody else emerging to attack. Staying out in the middle of the ring of crates, it would be hard for an opponent to get to hand-to-hand range easily, but he had not survived for so long by letting down his guard.
"Hey! Are you trying to kill Tiro? Don't kill Tiro!" Kyle insisted suddenly from his prison.
BLAM!! "Why? Would you miss 'im?" Robot Snake asked as he blasted another crate apart, spilling small metal spheres onto the floor.
Kyle remained silent for a moment. "That's not the point! It's wrong!"
"I HATE YOU!! I HATE ALL OF YOU!!" Tiro cried, making a mad dash for the hallway.
Robot Tycho lowered his gun and began to run after the lecher, running closer to the scattered metal crates in the process.
Before Robot Snake could shout out a warning, Asuka's foot shot out and tripped up the android driver at the ankle, sending him tumbling forward.
Flinging out his hands, the robot tried to cushion his landing, but failed as Asuka darted out and grabbed the back of his head, slamming it into the ground.
Crack! The police captain quickly snapped her victim's head sharply to the side, eliciting a satisfying yelp from the robot. Then she grabbed him under the arms and hoisted him up, using the android to shield her body.
Robot Snake frowned at the scene, and continued reloading his Pancor Jackhammer, clearly in no hurry to save/avenge his fellow android.

Robot Tycho blinked as he stared at the far wall of the room, his head feeling oddly disjoined from his body. He knew he should have been facing forward, but his view, coupled with the responses from his body, told him that he wasn't.
"Hey, my head isn't moving. What just happened?"
"Gyah!" Asuka was startled despite herself as she struggled to keep the android between her and Robot Snake. 'Oh, wait. Robot. Right. Snapping his neck won't necessarily do anything. Great.'
BLAM!! She jolted back as the shotgun blast hammered her shield, her eyes wide.
"Gurk! Gugh! Khhhk!" Robot Tycho sputtered incoherently for a moment as various chunks of his torso components fell out of his sundered chest cavity. "You... You... You SHOT ME!! You crazy son of a bitch, you shot me!"
"Well, it's hardly MY fault that some idiot managed to get himself stuck between me and the target, now is it?" Robot Snake said as a shotgun casing bounced off the steel floor at his feet. "'Sides, I've never been fond of evil doubles."
"You ARE an evil double!" Robot Tycho screamed.
He regretted this posthaste once his cybernetic companion took aim once again, this time a bit higher. "Shut up."
BLAM!! Asuka ducked desperately as the robot's head burst apart into so many plates and shards of metal right over her head, and felt the android's body release a final, reflexive shudder before it shut down and became dead weight.
Dead weight was still useful though; weight could be placed between one's body and an oncoming wall of super-accelerated lead pellets. Which was precisely what Asuka did by kicking Robot Tycho's body forward into Robot Snake, forcing the active android to dodge out of the way so that he could get a clear shot.
Asuka wasted no time, hooking her foot under Robot Tycho's shotgun and kicking it up into the air as she turned.
BLAM!! Robot Snake frowned as his shot merely raked the blue mane of Asuka's hair as she ducked back behind cover.
And then his eyes widened as he caught something out of the corner of his eye. 'Wait, she didn't have time to grab the gun! Where-'
Ducking as he twisted around, Robot Snake angled the barrel of his weapon upward just in time to see the barrel of his companion's weapon angled downward, staring him in the face.
Snake grinned, totally ignoring the weapon aimed straight at his chin.
Robot Snake slowly grinned as well, and then stood up, his shotgun held steady.
"So, now it truly begins," Snake said conversationally, clearly not concerned with his predicament.
"It doesn't really seem fair though," Robot Snake said, frowning suddenly. "Now you and me are on equal terms, but you still have the captain plus two pieces of cannon fodder."
"WE ARE NOT CANNON FODDER!!" Tiro and Tycho shouted from their hiding places, unwilling to come out even now that they had the upper hand.
Snake frowned as well. "You're right, of course. This isn't like fighting that other clone after he stole my tank."
"Oh, yeah. I hated that guy."
"Me too. Total jerk. And no finesse, either. Hardly a decent clone."
Asuka growled as she poked her head up. "Can we get back to the battle at hand, please?"
"Right, right," Snake said apologetically. "Anyway, we can make this fair. We let the others escape to the elevator, and once they're gone, we'll settle this."
"Yes! Very good idea!" "Please! Please let us out of here!" The two useless men in the room cried out, much to the only woman's chagrin.
Asuka stood up hesitantly and saw that the two Snakes were completely focused on each other; a single gunshot no matter where it was aimed guaranteed death for the shooter, but the only guaranteed kill was right in front of them. "Normally, I'd use this situation to gain the upper hand, and bring my team through this debacle unscathed while completely annihilating the enemy, like a proper captain" she offered, tapping her chin. "On that note: screw it. You two can kill each other. I'm leaving. Yamazaki! Wattai! Get your sorry butts over here!" She immediately jogged to the elevator, still keeping one eye on the standoff of look-alikes behind her. "By the time I get back, there had better be only one of you left!"

Shoomp! Vrrrrrr...
Both Snakes smirked once the elevator began its climb upward, leaving the pair alone in the empty, secluded containment deck.
Whang! Whang! Whang! "Hey! You guys! What's going on out there? I'm bored!"
Well, mostly alone, anyway.
"I was hoping I'd get to fight you," Robot Snake murmured, ignoring the trapped blond.
Snake raised an eyebrow. "Why? Does facing me validate your existence? Do you feel that your life has meaning if you destroy or surpass your origin?"
"Eh, not really," the android said noncommittally, shrugging. "I just thought it'd be fun."
Snake grinned. "I like you."
"Thanks. Feeling's mutual."
"Ready to die?"
"Born ready, bro."
At some unspoken agreement, they both jumped backwards.
BLAM!! BLAM!!
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ranma frowned as he heard the alarms stop suddenly, and looked around the main deck area he kept coming back to.
"Hmph. Stupid tunnels lead nowhere," he murmured as he stared at the elevator that seemed to be his only way out. Unfortunately, the car was not there at present, and the terminal that appeared to control the elevator call required a keycode to operate.
Ranma was smart enough to figure out that, unlike the thirteen doors that had separated the different sections of the containment block and now rested in little bent, twisted pieces, this obstacle could not be overcome with brute force.
He was also smart enough to figure out that the elevator, which seemed to utilize an old, simple pulley system, was on a floor above him. So if he broke into the shaft, not only was there no suspended cable to climb, but any attempt to scale the wall could be thwarted by a large metal box falling on top of him.
"Hmmm... Alex's twin sister was right; I'd be pretty good at this secret agent stuff," he thought to himself, once again unable to remember the woman's name. He couldn't really help it; remembering people was never his strong point, and the brunette made a much softer impression than her evil megalomaniacal sibling.
The rooms of the containment block contained nothing, or at the very least, contained nothing that could help him more than it could harm him. Looking around at the various vaults and cells, he found prisons with the strangest labels, ranging from [Ghost Containment Unit] to [Symbiote Storage Vat]. From what he could tell, everything was barely running, and what little indication of the prisons' inhabitants he found were skeletal, but he was in no hurry to give himself another reason to escape the underground facility.
"Stupid jerk probably figured I had the best chance of escape, so he put everyone else on a separate level." He frowned. Ranma didn't like fighting people who used intelligence instead of brawn. Simply put, it was hard. While he wasn't exactly the dumb jock everyone thought he was, his area of genius was firmly grounded in physical combat tactics. Seras was apparently the other kind of genius; the kind that caught fighters like Ranma in cunning traps and sent nearly unstoppable henchmen after him without ever facing him one-on-one. Obviously, he had to find the mad scientist and crush him physically before the former drunk could leverage the full power of his intellect toward crushing the pigtailed man first.
RRRRRRRRRM...
Ranma clicked his tongue as he heard the elevator start moving. "Like it or not, here we go..."

Ker-chunk! The scaffolding around the elevator shook for a moment as the elevator stopped. After a split second, the doors burst open.
Thwack! "Put that grenade back!"
A second later, Robot Asuka jumped out of the elevator, quickly scanning the room for the target. Nothing.
As Robot Kyle stepped out to join her, the android woman scowled into the elevator. "Now get down there and destroy the others! And try not to blow up Robot Tycho in the process!"
"No promises," came a familiar voice in the elevator. A moment later the door closed.

Robot Kyle looked uncharacteristically nervous, despite the fact that he held a pair of M2 heavy machine guns under his arms.
His unease came not from the fact that he was carrying two weapons which were so large and heavy that an individual in powered armor would have had trouble correctly using one without a tripod or mount; no, for all the heavy guns bothered him they may as well have been water pistols.
His dread came rather from the fact that he had been ordered to hunt down and kill someone who his memories dictated was a friend, and potentially a brother-in-law.
And then there was the added fact that he had seen this person tear apart a mauler with his bare hands.
Robot Kyle didn't know if he was stronger than a mauler (due mostly to the chemical brainwashing that had blurred his memory of Yoshi's tests), but he had dearly hoped the subject would never come up.
"Stay along the wall, Kyle. And follow me," Robot Asuka mumbled, gripping a flashbang stun grenade in her hand.
She knew Ranma was fast enough to dodge bullets, so hoping he'd let an attack grenade hit him was ridiculous. A flashbang, however, had a very short fuse and didn't require that the target be anywhere near it when it exploded. Not a perfect plan, but it was one of many imperfect ones she was boiling up as quickly as she could.
Robot Kyle started mumbling to himself as he followed his cybernetic superior. "He could just blow me up from a distance... doesn't even need a gun... my own freakin' knife, right in the throat or something..."
Robot Asuka pushed aside the android lummox's complaints without responding; she had plenty of reservations about this mission as it is, and knew Ranma's capabilities far better than the blonde idiot she was leading.
"I mean, the guy can turn invisible... could be right in front of me, and WHAM..."
Or maybe she didn't.
"Turn invisible?" Robot Asuka snapped, glancing at her companion. "Since when can he turn invisible?"
Robot Kyle blinked. "Since we blew up the sergeant's car."
This did absolutely nothing to satisfy Asuka's query. "We don't HAVE a sergeant!"
"Well, not ANYMORE," The blonde android said in a "Well, duh" tone of voice.
Robot Asuka fiercely bit back the urge to strike the other robot, reminding herself that they could no longer feel pain, and that she therefore couldn't get her point across without severely damaging the idiot and jeopardizing the task at hand.
"Lieutenant Commander, are you telling me, truthfully and seriously, that Saotome can actually cloak himself at will?" This was bad. Very bad. Seras, being the slipshod excuse for a mad scientist that he was - being that he had just recovered from a decade-long drinking binge and was probably quite rusty - hadn't given their robot bodies any abilities beyond their human forms (though they were obviously tougher as a result of being made of metal). She had no thermal scanners or delicate sensors to detect anything that wasn't apparent to the naked eye.
"I swear to God, if we make it back to that bastard of a master intact, I'm going to get him drunk again, somehow," she scowled as she paid much closer attention to her surroundings, hoping that she'd see a stray indentation in a crate or hear the scruff of a boot if she paid enough attention.
It was hopeless, of course, as Ranma possessed all the stealth and dexterity of the average fully-trained Ninja, and she knew it. In this area, and with her current backup, she was completely outmatched.
She turned toward Robot Kyle. "Let's get... er..."

Ranma glared down at Robot Kyle, his legs spread slightly as he stood atop the two machine guns that the android was holding.
Robot Kyle looked up at Ranma and groaned. "Well, dang." It wasn't quite the sneak-attack he had been fearing, though this kind of approach was more intimidating.
Crack! Quickly kicking off of Kyle's chest, Ranma did a backflip through the air while sending the blonde android into the wall hard enough to jar his weapons loose.
Asuka cursed as the pigtailed man sailed to the other end of the room and disappeared behind one of the stacks of metal crates before she could snap off a shot at him with her shotgun. 'Not good, not good at all. Dammit, why didn't Ranma tell me he could turn invisible?'
Truth be told, there were quite a few abilities Ranma had that Asuka had no clue about, which were kept a secret for precisely this reason; with minimal knowledge of his more exotic tricks, his enemies were less likely to be able to defend against them.
"Get your metal butt off the floor, robot!" The android woman growled, slipping the pin out of the flashbang grenade she held while keeping the lever squeezed. This was going to be tricky...
Estimating how much time it would take Ranma to reach her by running behind the partial ring of crates (assuming he didn't want to risk detection by a headlong charge), she suddenly raised her hand into the air and let go of the squeeze handle.
Ranma knew what a flashbang was and had seen them in action, but he was never much of an explosives user, and had no idea how to tell one kind of grenade from another.
When he saw Robot Asuka raise the flashbang above her head, he assumed she still had some time before it exploded; he imagined that she liked her arm in one piece and attached to her shoulder, after all.
BANG!!
Ranma flinched badly as his vision went white and his ears started ringing badly, totally disoriented. The Umi-sen-ken cloak dropped immediately, causing him to appear as if summoned by the bright magnesium flash.
Yes, the mighty Ranma Saotome had no defense against the humble stun grenade, at least not yet. Unfortunately for him, loud noise and bright lights did nothing to hinder androids.
Robot Asuka turned and fired, scowling when she saw her target backflipping away; even stunned Ranma could make impossible dodges!
She didn't stop firing, though, and shouted to her only subordinate as she unloaded the full clip of the Pancor jackhammer at her nimble opponent. "Kyle! Get up on those crates and give me suppression fire!"
Ranma felt like cursing when he heard a loud noise from across the room. His vision hadn't recovered and he didn't have a good enough feel for the room to seek secure cover without it. In addition, Robot Asuka's last burst had actually winged him.
Skidding across the floor, Ranma impacted a crate and then kicked off of it, aiming for where he remembered the hallway being.
WHAM!

Robot Kyle blinked as he watched Ranma slam into a wall right next to the hallway deeper into the facility. "Huh? Did we win?" He hadn't even started shooting yet!
Robot Asuka scowled as Ranma slowly slid down the wall, conveniently slipping behind a smaller stack of the scattered metal crates.
Not about to trust their victory to dumb (very dumb, in her opinion) luck, Robot Asuka quickly detached a fragmentation grenade from her belt and tossed it toward the Ranma-shaped imprint on the wall.
Clink! BOOM! "OW!! DAMMIT, THAT HURT!!"
Robot Asuka "tsked" as she dashed toward the crate Ranma was hiding behind, her shotgun ready to pulverize his remains. 'Leave it to Saotome to take a frag in the face and just start complaining about it.'
Ch-chak! Hopping onto the metal crate, Robot Asuka lowered the barrel of her shotgun, ready to unload a lethal burst of twelve-gauge ammunition...
... Into the charred circle on the metal floor.
Ranma grinned as he dropped his cloak of his own volition, and suddenly dropped down onto the android from where he had been clinging to the ceiling. He didn't show any signs of damage from taking a grenade at point-blank range.
Bwack! Robot Asuka let out a startled yelp as she was tackled to the floor behind the stacks of crates, and knew it was over the moment her shotgun bounced away out of her grip. She had challenged Ranma's abilities with her tactical wit, and lost. There would be no second chances.
When she cracked her eyes open, however, it appeared she was wrong. Ranma's fist hovered in a chambered position, shaking slightly, and he was gazing down at her with a frantic, fearful stare.

'I... I just can't do it,' Ranma thought, nearly whimpering as he saw the artificial woman beneath him slowly crack her eyes open.
It had hit him like a sledgehammer, seeing the robot imitation of his superior suddenly flinch back, clearly expecting the swift destruction he had intended for her. It was a reflex. Robots weren't supposed to have reflexes; that was reserved for living things. Animals and people.

It wasn't difficult for Robot Asuka to guess what was going through Ranma's mind, and felt a horrible wad of guilt form inside her when she prepared herself to take advantage of his hesitation.
'Oh yes, some partial memory wipes are definitely in order,' she thought as her hand slipped down to the knife at her belt.
Ranma knew what was coming, and spat a quick curse as he jumped away and landed in a crouch atop the crates they were using as cover. 'Damn, I need a sec to get my bearings. I have to... uh oh..."
BR-R-R-R-RAAAAAP! Twin streams of lead tore into the wall as he frantically dove away from Robot Kyle's support fire, rolling across the floor and scrambling away in much the same manner as Tiro was doing on the previous level at the same time.
"Damn robots!" Ranma snarled, dashing at the wall full speed and then proceeding to actually run along the wall horizontally.
Robot Kyle tracked him along the way, trailing the pigtailed man with enough high-powered lead to rip an eighteen-wheeler in two before Ranma dove to the ground and then darted into one of the open vaults on the side of the circular room.

Ranma winced as part of the vault door frame erupted into a shower of sparks from the dozens of ricochets. 'Not good. Not good at all.'
He frowned. 'I can probably win against Kyle at range using my ki blasts, but... to dodge a machine gun, I'd need to give him my full attention, which leaves me vulnerable to Asuka. If I take it in close, I can disarm him, and I'll definitely win a hand-to-hand battle, but I still don't know exactly how strong he is, and I'll be wide open for another stun grenade.'
He spent a moment considering it as he heard Kyle land on the floor outside. 'The second plan is better, but if there's another way to do this... hmmm... you know, if these guys have our memories, maybe...'

Robot Asuka dashed to the wall and pressed her back against it right next to the vault Ranma had ducked into, grabbing her last flashbang from her belt. Seeing Robot Kyle back away from the entrance on the opposite side of the vault, she began flashing hand signs ordering him closer to her.
In response, Robot Kyle wedged one of his machine guns under his arm, and then waved at her. "Hello!"
'If we get out of this intact, I am going to tear him limb from limb and use him for spare parts,' Robot Asuka swore, rubbing her forehead out of habit to alleviate a headache she didn't have.
Suddenly, Ranma's voice emerged from the vault.
"Hey, Kyle! Try throwing a frag at me!"
Robot Asuka gaped and stuttered ineffectually as Robot Kyle took Ranma's advice without hesitation, wrenching a fragmentation grenade off his belt, tearing the key out, and then swinging it into the vault in a smooth, thoughtless motion (which was probably why he was good at it).
"YOU IDIOT!!" Robot Asuka cried. Immediately afterward, the grenade came back out of the vault, bouncing off the vault door frame and flying right toward the blue-haired android's head.
BOOM! The robot's head was torn apart along with the grenade as the explosive charge detonated less than an inch from Robot Asuka's nose, rending the face and skull apart into a burst of sparks and shrapnel.
Robot Kyle was appropriately horrified by this development, and as such didn't react immediately when Ranma dashed out of the vault and leapt toward him.
Thwack! Crack! In a blur of motion, Ranma kicked the two machine guns in opposite directions, and then lashed out with the same leg at Robot Kyle, striking the android in the chest.
The blond robot barely stumbled. "You bastard! You tricked me! You killed Asuka!" He launched forward with a right hook, only to have Ranma dance backward out of range.
"Oh, hush. I'm having enough trouble with destroying you guys as it is," the pigtailed cop grumbled. 'Keep reminding yourself: he's not human. Just a robot.' He ducked under another punch, and had the satisfaction of watching his cybernetic opponent strike the metal wall instead.
WHANG! He sweatdropped as he watched the wall bend inward around Kyle's fist, rather than the other way around. Still, the android was clearly jarred from the impact.
Taking advantage of Robot Kyle's distraction, Ranma darted in and jabbed two fingers into Kyle's midsection. "Not a person," he mumbled, "Just a robot. After all, the bakusai tenketsu doesn't work on people."
Robot Kyle blinked as he felt his body pressure began to rise exponentially. "Huh? What're yo-" KABOOM!

Ranma winced as he started picking out the fragments of Robot Kyle that had been embedded in his body from the explosion.
"There was a time when I could have grabbed all those pieces out of the air before they hit me," he grumbled to himself. "Besides that, my success rate with the breaking point is still something like one in three." It had actually taken him four tries to destroy the vault door from earlier.
As he walked toward the elevator, he also reflected upon how hard it was to personally tear apart the two robots simply because they had the faces and reactions of humans.
'Hmph. I'll bet Snake wouldn't have had any problem killing them.'
As that thought boiled over, Ranma stopped in his tracks, and his left eyebrow twitched. 'When did I start thinking of Snake as a positive role model?'
RRRRRRRRRM... The elevator began moving once again, and the pigtailed cop sighed. 'I need to revamp my training regimine. I think I'm getting out of shape.' With that uncomfortable thought, he vanished from sight.

RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRM... Clunk! The elevator car shook slightly as it came to a complete stop, and Ranma could hear voices from within as the door slowly opened.
"But what are we going to do? We still don't have any-GWAAAH!!" As soon as the opening was big enough, Tiro was forcibly ejected from the elevator at high speed before crashing into a surprised Ranma.
Thwack! Whump! Thud!
Ranma blinked in surprise as he finished slamming Tiro into the ground, his brain having caught up with his reflexes. "Wait... you're not made of metal..." Then he looked up to see the expressions of surprise on Tycho's and - more importantly - Asuka's face. "It's you guys!"
"Why... me...?" Tiro groaned.
Asuka let out a deep breath. "Thank God you're the real one. Have you run into any of the doubles?"
Ranma jabbed a thumb behind him at the cybernetic lower torso and the nearly-headless body that laid on the floor.
The police captain blinked. "What'd you do to my face?"
"Only what I had to," Ranma grumped. "Can we get on with this? I'm really looking forward to crushing my own double, now."
"Okay, but what about Tiro?" Tycho asked, turning toward their superior officer. "Should we take him along? He looks kind of worn out."
Asuka considered the matter for a moment as the man in question curled up into the fetal position and while staring at her with large, glassy puppy-dog eyes.
"Yeah, we probably should. Even if we have weapons now, we might need to throw something in the way of incoming fire while we run for cover," she decided with a light sigh.
"You people suck," Tiro deadpanned, resigned to his fate as Ranma dragged him into the elevator car by one leg.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Rayden halted and held up his arm suddenly, causing the two women and zergling behind him to nearly stumble into each other as they stopped.
Immediately Sakura and Junko backed away, fingering their weapons nervously as they peeked around Rayden's massive frame to look up the flight of stairs they had been ascending. Hunter moved forward instead of back, growling lightly as he moved up alongside Rayden.
The Catholic vigilante shifted the wrapped-up parcel on his shoulder as he reached into his pocket for a cigarette. "It shall begin soon. You'd best find cover."
"We have cover," Junko said as she scooted closer to Rayden's back, still peeking around his arm.
A popping noise interrupted the tense silence as a vein appeared on the gunman's head.
"Idiots," the Russian spat as footsteps came from the hall above. Placing the cigarette between his lips, he then pulled out his lighter/detonator and calmly lit up.
The girls glared in annoyance at the man they were using as a shield, irritated by both his smoking right next to them, and by his seemingly apathetic attitude. The fact that he was the only thing standing between them and any incoming fire kept them quiet, however.

Finally, a figure stepped into view at the top of the stairs, and Sakura gasped before darting forward.
"Ranma! Thank God you're-Gwah!" She let out a yelp of surprise as Rayden grabbed the back of her uniform and lifted her up into the air.
"What are you doing? Stop it!" Sakura yelled as the super-soldier put her down on the steps behind Hunter.
"That is not a human," Rayden said stonily as he took a long drag off of his cigarette, blowing a thick stream of smoke out of the corner of his mouth.
Hunter snarled viciously, taking another step up the stairs.
Robot Ranma shook his head. "Feh. This bites. Of all the robots to send to kill a couple of chicks, they send me, Mr. 'I'm so manly and chivalrous I can't hurt a girl even if she really deserves it.' Ugh."
"Ro-Robot?" Junko asked, gaping.
"Indeed. Mockeries of humanity seem to be all the rage in Tokyo now, or so I hear," Rayden mumbled conversationally, puffing out a few more clouds of tobacco smoke before withdrawing a sawed-off shotgun from within the folds of his trench coat. "Begone, metal doll."
BLAM!! Robot Ranma skipped back to avoid the double blast, and then cocked the shotgun he had been holding under his arm.
'I just have to draw him away from Hunter; if I try and take him down where he is, I'll get boxed in.' Dashing forward as bits of ceiling tile and twelve-gauge shot rained down from the ceiling, Robot Ranma raised his own weapon to bear.
Clang! Twong! Rayden didn't even flinch as he shifted the huge bundle on his shoulder in front of him, blocking both of Robot Ranma's opening shots with his haphazardly concealed cannon.
Pushing forward, Rayden grabbed the bundle at the bottom end and then thrust it forward, only to have Robot Ranma jump on top of the rag-covered parcel.
Robot Ranma dodged a swipe from Hunter's upper claws, and then leapt off of Judgment and down the stairs, flying over the heads of the huddling girls.
Touching down on the lower level floor, Robot Ranma immediately darted around the corner, avoiding a sudden burst of fire from Rayden's submachine gun, which had been drawn during the android's leap to escape.

Rayden blew out a quick puff of smoke in annoyance as Hunter tore down the stairs and around the corner. "He's separating us. Can either of you call that creature back? I don't think it will last long against Saotome's double."
"S-Sakura can," Junko stuttered, shaken by the lightning-quick exchange of gunfire that had blown over their heads before she had even gotten a grasp on what was happening.
Unfortunately for all concerned, the normally cheerful blonde had apparently blown a fuse as her perceptions of reality were once again turned on their head, and was wobbling back and forth from her position on the stairs in a daze while mumbling, "Ranma trying to kill us... can't be... evil Ranma... can't be... we're all gonna die... can't be..."
Rayden was, if for some reason the author hasn't pounded this deeply enough into your skulls, a devout Catholic. And as an almost fanatical believer in the concepts of good and just conduct, he would not leave a helpless woman to the mercies of a powerful robot that intended to kill them all.
Luckily, like all extremely religious people, he was extremely susceptible to logic when it conveniently suited his own ends, even when that logic did not accurately reflect the reality of any given situation; in this case, the Russian super-soldier decided that Sakura was a trained and full-fledged police officer of the DAPC, a group well-known for dealing with lethal, paranormal threats, and that therefore she and the disgustingly lecherous redhead could take care of themselves, even though one of them seemed to be experiencing a mental breakdown.
Feeling quite pleased with that rationalization, his expression shifted slightly, such that a particularly perceptive person (like, say, Cologne granted with psychic powers) might have wondered if he was smiling as he leapt down to the bottom of the stairs and then turned to run after Hunter.
Hey, the man may be a crusader for justice, but nobody had ever mistaken Rayden Shikodan for a hero.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"SSSHRAAUGH!" Hunter shrieked as he leapt at the pigtailed android, who seemed content to hop back out of range of every lethal slash before discharging a shotgun blast into the alien's head.
Luckily for the DAPC's loyal mascot/pet, Seras was quite ignorant about combat and capture when it didn't involve predicted incursions into carefully laid traps. He had tromped into the armory, given all the robots shotguns (reasoning that they were good for short-range, indoor combat) and grenades, given Kyle something heavier because he was super-strong but not an accomplished hand-to-hand fighter, and then separated them so that they could get to work.
Thus, Robot Ranma possessed no weapon with enough piercing power to even make cracks in the zergling's tank armor-quality carapace. The powerful shotgun blasts were, to the zergling, the equivalent of striking one's head on the wall. Repeatedly. Which hurt, and slowed Hunter down, but Robot Ranma was quickly figuring out that there was no way he'd put down his origin's pet with the shotgun before he ran out of bullets.
'Well then, we do this the hard way.' Robot Ranma had been reluctant to close in to melee range simply because he knew Hunter was capable of unpredictable bursts of speed, and because he was quite certain that one lucky swipe could shear straight through whatever metals Seras had managed to dig up to make his servants.
Crack! A swift kick to the side of Hunter's head sent the warbeast reeling to one side, even as his front legs and back-mounted arms lashed out fiercely to try and severe the offending limb.
Robot Ranma skipped back and then darted in again, lashing out with several knife-hand strikes that he normally used to shatter bones, as rarely as he needed to do so. He could only land a few hits before he found himself needing to dash away from impossibly sharp, bladed talons groping for his synthetic flesh, and frankly, it quickly began to frustrate him, as he had figured out that Hunter was using his superior bulk and reach to herd the android into a corner. With the zergling's wildly thrashing limbs, getting around the beast in the narrow hallway would be difficult.
Not to mention unwise, as he saw Rayden appear from around the corner at the opposite end of the hallway, letting the torn and ragged wrapping fall from Judgment's gleaming barrel.
Robot Ranma was hardly out of options yet, however. The hallway he was backing down was a dead end, but there were several doors to his left and windows to his right. The doors would lead to enclosed rooms that would force his most desperate moves once Hunter cornered him, but the windows...
The grisly scream of a .50 caliber machine gun filled the hall as Rayden fired over Hunter's head in a sweeping burst, but the bullets were wasted as Robot Ranma threw himself out the nearest window. Catching the top of the frame and heedless of the shattering glass, the android hoisted himself up and onto the outside wall, well out of Rayden's line of fire.

The Russian gunman paused to take another deep drag on his cigarette, watching Hunter carefully as the zergling growled at the broken window.
'Saotome is too quick to shoot unless I can slow him down or force him to charge at me,' the vigilante decided. The biologically enhanced nicotine rush that came from smoking cigarettes sent his normally slightly-higher-than-average senses into overdrive, giving him a sense of aim and timing that bordered on precognition. And he STILL hadn't been able to hit Robot Ranma before he had escaped.
Scanning the line of windows carefully, Rayden calmly walked up behind Hunter, the massive machine gun/cannon in his arms held at the ready. He knew that against a small opponent his smaller guns would be more effective, but Ranma was an accomplished melee expert, and Judgment was invaluable as a bludgeon and shield at close range.
Despite his caution and Hunter's unique senses, the both of them were still completely surprised when the pigtailed robot crashed straight down through the ceiling and landed a crippling knee drop on Rayden's head.
Smack! Robot Ranma quickly knocked Rayden's personal cannon away as he bounced off the Russian's skull, and twisted his body around in a lightning-quick roundhouse kick that sent Rayden into the wall.
Upon landing, Robot Ranma met with a lunging Hunter, and then jumped forward well out of the alien's reach as he threw his arms forward.
"Game over! Mouko takabisha!"
Hunter flinched backward, and Rayden pried his head out of the wall quickly, not wanting to miss what was obviously one of the famed martial arts "special techniques".
He was quite disappointed, and Hunter quite confused, when nothing at all happened, save that Robot Ranma adopted a horrified expression while he stood with his arms stretched out in front of him, as if he was shoving an object forward.

Robot Ranma's mind was busy trying not to blow up from panic, fear, anger, and the dreadful resignation to death that occurs when one's self-loathing has reached a particularly dramatic peak.
'I have no ki,' Robot Ranma thought, unable to believe he had gone so long without realizing it. All the other Robots had nothing but their normal senses to replicate, but Ranma's unnaturally honed alternate senses - his sixth through eleventh senses, though in explanation, most of those were for finding hidden food - were absent, and he had just discovered that the micro-fusion reactor in his chest didn't work the same as his favorite source of destructive energy.
'No ki equals no enhanced strength to rip through steel... or zergling armor,' he thought, twitching as he saw the zergling duck into a crouch, ready to pounce. 'Or physically impossible speed to catch bullets out of the air,' he considered with a growing sense of mortality as Rayden snapped his arms to either side, causing Desert Eagle pistols to slip out of his sleeves and into his hands. 'Nothing to help cushion my thin, fragile skin from hot lead, steel-rending claws, or violent explosions. Oh, and let's not forget the special techniques! No rising dragon, ki blasts, breaking points... nothing but the Saotome Final Attack! That's pretty much the only special technique that'll work without a drop of ki! Wow! I had no idea how screwed I really am!'

To say that Hunter and Rayden were shocked at seeing a copy of the DAPC's most accomplished warrior suddenly fall to his knees and start to cry was the mother of all understatements. Hunter would have facefaulted, except that his quadraped body's center of balance made such an action nearly impossible. Rayden was far too serious and uptight to allow such a humiliating and undignified reflex as a facefault, and settled for dropping his guns in shock (much more dignified, right?).
"WAAAAAAH!! This sucks! This totally sucks! I just knew I was going to die! Copies ALWAYS die! We never win! WAAAAAAH!!" Despite all his years away from his father and the life of a martial artist, Ranma had kept two of the main tenets of his lessons when growing up: Men didn't cry, and Ranma Saotome never gave up.
Of course, he was a robot, not a man, and unlike the others, a mental affirmation that he was NOT who his memories told him he was had been hanging over his head since activation due to the real Ranma's vast self-esteem, and so he threw those principles out the window and simply decided to wallow in self-pity until someone put him out of his misery. It wasn't a dignified way to die, but then, robots didn't need dignity either, did they?
Rayden shook his head and walked over to where Judgment had fallen, deciding to give the obviously distraught android a death as quick and sudden as the crying fit he had jumped into.
As the Russian stooped over to pick up his weapon, he idly took out his cigarette and crushed it between his fingers before flicking it into a convenient trash receptacle. There would be no need for enhanced aim to accomplish this execution. Fighting back some small mental protest at the thought of annihilating an opponent who was sobbing on the ground while hugging his knees, Rayden leveled Judgment and prepared to fire.
"Hey! What's going on?" Junko asked, emerging from the corner behind Ranma and stopping to a halt directly behind him, coincidentally in a perfect position to catch a few dozen bullets from heavy machine gun fire.
A vein popped up on Rayden's head, and he had to quickly activate the safety mechanism lest he give in to temptation and fire anyway.
"What's wrong? Why's he crying?" Sakura asked as she walked up next Junko, causing another vein to pop up on Rayden's head. Then she looked up and glared at the Russian super-soldier. "You made him cry! What did you do to him?"
Rayden immediately began mumbling calming litanies to himself under his breath, and desperately hoped he could find robot copies of the two useless women before him during their assault so that he could satisfy his ever-growing urge to destroy them.

"Awww... there, there, what's wrong?" Junko asked as she knelt down next to Robot Ranma and put and arm over his shoulders.
"Sniffle! It's no use! I'm doomed! I was doomed as soon as I was activated! Copies never win! Sniffle!" Robot Ranma complained, rocking back and forth slightly as he hugged his arms to his chest.
"Don't worry, it's okay," Sakura cooed, feeling her heart go out to the android. By now she had actually disassociated the android from Ranma better than Junko had; his attack, coupled with him curling into a ball and sobbing about being doomed, had convinced her thoroughly that this was an entirely different individual no matter what he looked like. That she managed to feel more sympathetic than afraid when faced with that individual could be entirely and justly attributed to misplaced kindness and a naive departure from reality. "You don't have to win! Everything's going to be all right!"
Robot Ranma sniffed again. "No it's not. I've failed, and now either Rayden's gonna shoot me or Hunter's gonna eat me or Master's gonna disassemble me to make more Snake robots..." he trailed off and sniffled again. "I'm no good. Got no ki. Can't throw energy blasts, or dodge bullets that move faster than sound, or even poke things so that they explode!"
Rayden frowned slightly at this, and turned toward Hunter (he had decided by now that the zergling was the second most competent organic being in the immediate vicinity, and thus most worthy of his conversation). "'Poke things so that they explode?' Can he really do that?"
Hunter let out a tired hiss and shrugged.
"Don't worry about it, we won't let anyone hurt you," Junko said, wrapping her arm tighter around Robot Ranma's neck and then pulling the android's head into her chest (her normal therapeutic method of dealing with distraught men).

Rayden's left eyebrow twitched as he watched the robotic clone suddenly start to stutter and act flustered, trying without much success to remove himself from Junko's surprisingly solid and sensual grip.
Turning away, he tapped Hunter's leg with his foot, catching the alien's attention. "We should go. There are important things to be done, and it is apparent that destroyers such as ourselves are not needed at the moment."
Left unsaid was the fact that there was a good chance that Robot Ranma was faking his apparent weakness, and that the android might suddenly kill both irritating females as soon as the local powerhouses were out of sight. That would be just AWFUL, and there wasn't a damn thing they could do about given that said women were protecting said murderous robot.
Rayden very nearly cracked a smile. One way or another, he would get to leave soon, and then he could finally leave the idiot women and get back to his life of being a feared and hated killer.

"There, there... do you feel better now?" Junko asked gently, rubbing her cheek against the top of Robot Ranma's head.
"Mrff mhfg murm," the android responded into Junko's cleavage, tickling her breasts and causing the redhead to giggle slightly.
Sakura sweatdropped, and hoped that Seras' robots didn't need to breathe. "Well, now that this has been dealt with, shouldn't we find the real Ranma?"
Robot Ranma put a bit more effort into prying Junko's arms loose, and managed to raise his head above the kneeling woman's breast level. "The real thing's on the first floor of the underground containment facility that Master discovered. The access hatch is in the center of the utility closet on the office floor. Master Tuko already sent Robot Asuka and Robot Kyle to deal with Ranma, but there's no way he'd lose." This last part was said rather bitterly, though the android found it very hard to be depressed with Junko's formidable assets squeezed against him.
Sakura seemed to accept this hesitantly. "Uh... okay... but... what about you?" She noticed that Junko had frozen solid, and seemed intensely interested in something as she stared straight down while still holding Ranma close.
"Well, assuming the others don't want to destroy me, I should be fine," Robot Ranma murmured, glad that his android body didn't seem to be reacting to Junko's stimulation; he would have had a lot of trouble keeping serious with a deep flush, or with blood coming out of his nose. "My programming allows me to drop my Master's orders if I decide that the task is impossible, so I'm really not a threat anymore."
"Ah. How... convenient," Sakura decided cautiously, deciding not to remind the android that accomplishing his goal of killing the two intruding officers was definitely possible now that Rayden and Hunter were gone. "Junko, what are you staring at?" Leaning over slightly, the blonde got a good look at what Junko was staring at with such intensity, and she immediately colored.
"What? What's wrong?" Robot Ranma asked, managing to struggle free even further from Junko's grasp, and looked down at his lap to see what was attracting so much attention. 'Oh. I guess my body is reacting after all.' He would have been blushing down to his toes had his skin possessed blood vessels.
Junko's head snapped up to look at him. "You're anatomically correct?"
Robot Ranma chuckled nervously and rubbed the back of his head. "I haven't really stopped to think about it or anything, but it looks like it."
Sakura turned away, blushing horribly. "Uhm, well, we sh-should probably get going now..." 'I wonder if Ranma's that big when he's... excited?' She would have flushed darker, were it possible. While she had seen Ranma naked by accident, and had burned the image into her mind, he hadn't been aroused at the time.
"Just a minute," Junko mumbled to her fellow officer while resisting a fierce urge to start prodding the object of interest to examine it further. "So, do you have blood, or what?"
The pigtailed robot was obviously uncomfortable with this line of questioning, but when he glanced over to Sakura, the blonde merely turned away to try and hide (unsuccessfully) the fact that she had been staring. "Well, no," Robot Ranma relented. "I'm pretty sure it's hydraulic, though..." 'I wonder if I have an instruction manual somewhere. It's annoying having to guess at how your own body works.'
Junko seemed amazed, and for some reason, quite pleased, by this answer. She turned toward Sakura.
"You go find Rayden and lead him to the facility. I'll take care of things here," she said seriously. It was much the same way Asuka would give a command, except that coming out of Junko's mouth, nobody would have ever trusted her.
"Er... I guess it's okay..." Sakura mumbled uncertainly, starting toward the flight of stairs hesitantly. After a moment of thought, she decided that Ranma's robot double, even if much weaker than the original, was perfectly capable of defending himself from Junko's lecherous whims.
Okay, so she didn't really believe that. But it was a good excuse if she was questioned later.

Robot Ranma was not so easily placated, and looked about nervously as Sakura fell out of earshot.
"Uh... so, now what? Am I free to go, or what?" the android asked cautiously.
Rather than answering, the redheaded police officer stood up, grabbed him by the back of his shirt, and then began dragging him toward the stairs. Confused, he asked what she was doing, but was given no answer, since Junko seemed entirely occupied with mumbling about some sort of calculations to herself quietly. Something about "thrusts per second" and "impact force".
Robot Ranma groaned as he wondered if he would have been safer having gone with Rayden instead.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Seras paced back and forth across the length of his control room, attempting to think of possible contingency plans in case his current countermeasures failed.
He wasn't having much success. Having spent the entire night rigging booby traps, building robot bodies, and adding fake wear and tear to the main office, the fatigue of a long night of work followed by a sudden burst of excitement was beginning to take a severe toll on the mad scientist. He had been planning to rest up while he sent his cybernetic minions out into Tokyo, but obviously that idea had been shot to hell.
"Yamma, is there anything with caffeine around here?" Seras mumbled, rubbing his forehead as he leaned over the control panel to the HQ defenses. Defenses that were severely inadequate, because he had spent his time and budget making the utility corridors beneath the HQ building look like authentic dungeon tunnels instead of installing more video cameras or stun turrets.
"No, nothing with caffeine. All you keep is booze, remember?" the dark-skinned man held up a bottle of scotch. "You want a drink? It's been a while since you've had any." Personally, the assistant medical officer was hoping to return Seras to full inebriation as soon as possible. While he didn't care one whit about the men and women of the DAPC who Seras was using as pawns, having to work as a mad scientist's lone henchman was a lot harder than poking at dead people while everyone else forgot you existed.
Seras snorted and waved away the bottle. "No, no more for me. I've been a fool, Yamma. For years and years I drowned my intellect in that swill, allowing those ignorant cretins to order me around like some filthy servant! Imagine! ME, whose mind is without equal, serving under those imbeciles! ME, who can create sentient artificial life at will! ME, who alone holds the secrets of positronic energy! I am the master of cybernetics, and no man may call himself my superior!"
Krackaboom! A flash of lighting lanced downward from the small raincloud that perpetually hung over the HQ/dark laboratory, briefly lighting up the room even further (as it was already properly lit).
Seras turned around and started hitting keys quickly on the keyboard of his console, which didn't actually do anything useful, but really added flavor and energy to his rant. "Only two men may dare consider themselves equal to me! And even those fools Deth and Konta will soon bend knee before my might! Annihilating those idiots that called themselves police officers will be the first test of my genius, but soon, all of Tokyo will be-"
Slam!
Seras jumped slightly at the sound of a door slamming shut, and turned to look at the door that led to the main HQ building. "Yamma? Where'd you go? I'm not done yet!"
"Actually, yes. You ARE done."

Beads of sweat started to appear along Seras' brow, and he slowly turned around toward the door that led to the main access hallway, and by extension, the elevator to the containment blocks.
Asuka stood in front of the door, her arms crossed over her chest and a cold, deadly expression on her face. Flanking her on one side was Ranma, who had his hands in his pockets casually, but was glowing with a thin blue aura as he glared at the mad scientist. On her other side was Tiro and Tycho, who looked decidedly less dangerous in expression, but wielded a shotgun and an M2 machine gun, respectively.
"Ah, uhm, er..." Seras stuttered nervously as he processed this new development, his exhausted mind in no condition to suddenly deal with self-preservation. "What a... surprise... to see you all here."
"I imagine it is," Asuka said evenly. "I'll give it you straight, Tuko. We are going to blast our way through any last-ditch countermeasures you have. Then we're going to seize you. Then we are going to beat you savagely. Then we are going to force-feed you alcohol until you're completely wasted. Then we are going to beat you some more. After all that, you will begin cleaning up these facilities and go back to your usual tasks as DAPC medical officer under severely reduced pay."
Ranma poked her in the shoulder, and Asuka turned toward him. "You forgot about him giving us the codes to get Kyle free."
The blue-haired woman remained silent as she turned back to Seras. "... We'll see." She wasn't really planning on leaving Kyle in a cell for long, of course, but it had been rather nice not to have to deal with him for this entire operation. Hearing about Ranma's tactic for defeating her robot clone might have also had something to do with it. 'He got me killed! That cretin!'
Seras, for his part, was carefully backing away toward his security terminal, fighting the urge to kick himself. He might've forgotten about the one contingency measure he had put into place if Asuka hadn't brought up the subject. "How kind of you to relent from killing or imprisoning me, after I tried to do both to you. But I'm afraid I'll have to decline your generosity." Lashing out quickly, he slapped a large green button on his personal console.
Shoomf! A giant, clear pane of glass suddenly fell down from the ceiling, blocking off Seras' half of the control room from the four disgruntled officers.
"Ha ha ha! How do you like that?" The scientist crowed. "Bullet-proof glass! You're trapped again! All that, all for... for..." he stopped laughing as the others continued staring at him with the same expressions. "What? What's wrong?"
Asuka rolled her eyes. "Bullet-proof glass won't stop rounds from a Browning M2, moron. Or just about any heavy machine gun, for that matter."
Seras remained silent for a moment. "Oh." There was another pregnant pause. "If it's all the same to you, I think I'm going to start running now."
In response, Ranma took his hands out of his pockets, both of which flared brightly with blue light. "Mouko takabisha!"

Ignoring the sound of armored glass being vaporized, and being extremely thankful that Asuka seemed reluctant to just kill him with a burst of machine gun fire, Seras dashed for the door that would lead back to the HQ.
Wham! He was knocked off his feet as the door suddenly burst open and smashed into his head, sending him sprawling backward onto the floor.
After shaking off the sudden vertigo, the scientist squeaked in fright. Stepping through the door was a giant Russian man wearing a trench coat. One of his hands held a gigantic gun securely over his shoulder, while the other held Yamma about a foot off the ground. Snaking around the vigilante's legs was Hunter, while behind him, Sakura was poking her head around Rayden's other side.
Rayden stared down at the gibbering man on the floor, then faced the wiry man he was holding up by the shirt. "So, he is the cause of all this? Then who are you?"
Yamma looked toward the trembling man on the ground, and then up into the cold stare of the Russian who held him. "Me? Nobody important."
As he was carelessly tossed to the side, Yamma profusely thanked God for his inherent forgetability.
Seras started scrambling backward, and then whimpered as he felt Ranma grab the back of his shirt and lift him into the air.
Asuka nodded sharply, then turned toward Rayden. "I don't really know what you're doing here Shikodan, but thanks for the assist. Did you meet up with Ranma's double?"
Rayden's left eyebrow twitched. "That one has been... taken care of."
"Good. If you'd like to hang around longer, feel free, but I believe this situation has been contained." She turned around and glared meaningfully at Seras before she started to crack her knuckles.
Seras gulped deeply, desperately searching for something, anything, to delay the inevitable pain. "W-Wait! Where's Snake? Did he survive?"
Everyone actually stopped to consider this, and Asuka shrugged.
"Possibly. If that robot copy was good enough, they might have destroyed each other. As long as there aren't two of them alive by the end of the day, I can live with it," the bluette muttered while rubbing her chin.
As if on cue, the door to the hallway opened.

"Dude! And then we blew it up with the tank! That was awesome!" Robot Snake said, laughing as he walked into the room with his arm hooked around Snake's neck. There were several torn sections in his abdomen, and he appeared to be leaking oil very slowly.
"Yeah, that was totally cool! And after that I blew up the testing facility! Nobody even knew I put bombs in there! How sweet was that?" Snake chuckled, his arm in the same position around Robot Snake. He was walking with a slight limp, and his shirt was scorched.
Both Snakes stopped to take in the collection of people in the control room, and their gaze fell on Rayden. "Hey, look, it's the Catholic guy!" Snake said, waving his free hand. "Hey Catholic guy! What's up? How's the crusade comin'? Kill any vile heretics lately?"
Rayden snorted and rolled his eyes. "Jews," he mumbled under his breath.
Robot Snake suddenly licked his lips. "Man, you know, I could really go for some WD-40 right about now. How 'bout you?"
"A martini would really hit the spot, actually," Snake agreed as the pair walked through the hole that had been burned in the wall of bullet-proof glass. "You know that bar down on Minato Street?"
"Dude! Of course I do! That place is great!" Robot Snake replied as the two passed by the captured Seras without giving him a second glance.
Seras panicked. "Robot! I command you to-GURK!" He was cut short as Ranma forced two fingers into his neck, pressing a pressure point that cut off his voicebox.
Still ignoring the captured scientist, as well as everyone else in the room, the pair of identical gunmen walked past Hunter and out the doorway back to the access area. On the way, Robot Snake hooked the edge of the door with his foot and pulled it shut behind them.
There was a moment of almost perfect silence, ruined only by Seras' painful wheezing.
"Huh. I guess Snake's okay after all," Ranma mumbled.
Asuka threw her head back to scream at the heavens. "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!"

**********************************************************************************

Bots trashed: 4
Vaults busted: 2 (Ranma got the other one later; Seras was too drunk to remember the codes)
Androids recruited for... other purposes: 2
Evil plots foiled: 1

End Chapter 22