A Ranma 1/2 fanfiction

by Black Dragon


Ranma is the property of Rumiko Takahashi, and the T-virus was the property of Umbrella Corporation, but they got a little out of hand with the free samples.


Guardian

Chapter 25

Infection

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"... What's going on here?" Ranma groaned as he saw Tycho and Junko push a desk into place behind a barricade of office furniture.

Putting aside that Kyle was bare-chested and Junko was wearing nothing but a large T-shirt (he was becoming seriously desensitized to seeing her nearly naked by now), the scene looked like a battlefield. Spent shell casings were scattered around the feet of the police officers, there were charred blasts down the hall that looked to be from fragmentation grenades, and small bits of carapace and yellowish-green ichor were splattered all over the room.

"Bug attack. Before you ask, it's all Tiro's fault," Snake explained, snatching away the ammo crate. "C'mon people, you KNOW there's a second wave coming! Wattai, take the flamer! Commander, you take two! Chikiko, load up that shotgun and get back!"

Ranma winced and clutched his stomach again as his body protested. 'Aw, man... this really sucks. Not only do I have to fight giant mutant insects, but I have to do it when I'm sick!' He grimaced as he drew his Jackal and checked the ammunition. 'PLUS I've got a date with Mizu in an hour! What am I gonna do if we haven't secured the locker room by then? I'll have to go to dinner in my uniform!'

"It's another big one!" Blam! Blam!

"Aim for the head!" BLAM!!

"Which part is the head, exactly? These things don't look right..." FWOOSH!

Ranma stared as the insect writhed and sputtered on the ground, dark ichor bubbling from its cracked carapace as flames baked its insides.

"Hey, do you guys really need me for this?" He asked tiredly. Mutant bugs hardly seemed like a job for him, the super-invincible martial artist. At least, not until they reached human size.

Snake looked annoyed as he glanced back at the martial artist. "What? You got something else to do?"

"Well... kind of," Ranma hedged, looking away. "I'm just saying, between you and Kyle, do you need me around just to help you stomp some bugs?"

Bzrt! "Dear God!" Tiro shouted in a panic, "That one's SPARKING! Why the hell is it sparking?"

Snake turned around and angled his shotgun over the desk they were using as cover, and then swiftly ended the mysterious creature's life in a violent burst of 12 gauge pellets. "Look, I know it's a pain, but you know I can't rely on these dorks for anything. Just stick around until we find the queen, all right?"

Kyle let loose with his flamethrower as another group of smaller roaches started pouring in from the women's locker room. "There's a queen cockroach? I didn't know that."

Sakura frowned. "I'm pretty sure roaches don't have 'queens'..."

Snake rolled his eyes. "Well, NORMAL roaches don't. But once something becomes part of a dangerous mutant swarm, a queen will always emerge. It's like a law of nature." BLAM!! Another of the monstrous insects vanished in a burst of chitinous shards and acidic goo.

"The laws of nature don't ascribe to weird sci-fi cliches," Tycho groused as he looked around nervously. "This is real life, not some bizarre action story!"

"Says you." BLAM!! "Hallway's clear." Snake kicked away a few empty shotgun shells and then started reloading.

Ranma growled and kicked the wall, wincing slightly as the sudden movement sent little tendrils of pain writhing up through his legs and into his stomach. "Do we know where this 'queen' is? I've seriously gotta go, here!"

Junko rolled her eyes. "Well, if you insist on treating this like your standard monster invasion flick, it'll be in the darkest, dankest nearby region behind entire swarms of enemies and probably a few traps."

"So where the hell is that? It has to be in this building, right?"

Seras blinked, and then frowned as he rubbed his chin. "The maintenance hall below the sub-decks."

The others turned toward him.

"It's perfect. That's where all the sewage purifiers are. And it has piping that leads directly into the ventilation shafts in case the building needs to vent dangerous gases. It has all the convenient and semi-plausible entrances to every level of this building, and is only assailable to us through a single hallway rife with dangerously under-maintained, rusty piping and fuel lines."

"This is ridiculous," Junko moaned, sliding down to her knees. "If the captain were here, she'd tell you this is ridiculous. Dammit, why'd she have to go home?!"

"As I understand it, that's more or less YOUR fault," Snake said bluntly before smashing the butt of his shotgun on an oversized roach leg that was still twitching toward him, "and whether or not this is ridiculous, even the most implausible venom will still kill you."

Ranma was swiftly getting impatient, and began speaking before Junko could come up with a retort. "Okay, whatever, we know where this new threat is, right? Let's finish it off and get out of here!" He hissed slightly as he felt a sharp pain in his shoulder, and barely glanced at the cockroach that had bitten him before flicking it off. "I don't have time to... be..." blinking, he turned his head back around to the foaming wound on his shoulder. "Wait... where did that thing come from? Aren't all the roaches coming from the locker rooms?"

Blam! Snake blasted the cockroach that had bitten Ranma with his sidearm, and then shrugged. "Well, for now, yes. But these things are in the foundation. They could show up anywhere."

Ranma frowned, and then glanced at the floor around him, looking for any holes where more of the chitinous abominations might emerge.

Plop! Ranma blinked as he felt something small land on his head. It didn't take much imagination to figure out what it was, or where it had come from.

Blam! That roach too was annihilated by .35 caliber handgun fire, though Ranma was a little more upset this time around.

"HEY!! What the hell do you think you're doing?!" Ranma shouted, covering his head and ducking in a reflexive action that was almost a full second slower than usual - which generally made a considerable difference where bullets were concerned - before scrambling away along the floor.

"What? That thing was going to hurt you!" Snake said defensively, covering the pigtailed cop's retreat.

"I don't care! Do NOT shoot at my head!" Ranma shouted.

"Oh, fine, so I suppose I should just ask it politely to get off you next time?" the American shot back.

"You don't have to-"

Crack! Crick! Their shouting match ended instantly as the sound of breaking wood and plaster came from above, and everyone fixed their gazes above the spot where Ranma had been standing. A small hole in the ceiling dripping caustic acid onto the floor left little doubt as to where the insects had ambushed Ranma from, though the noise was more unsettling than finding another attack route.

Tiro raised his shotgun, only to have Seras smack it back down.

"Don't fire into the ceiling, you idiot! You'll merely create another damn hole for them to spill out of!" The medical officer snapped. Frowning as Tiro lowered his weapon nervously, Seras leaned back against the barricade and took another long sip of beer.

Tycho twitched. "Hey... how come we're all fighting these things off and you're hiding behind us drinking?"

"Because if it were the other way around, we'd all die," Seras said in a tone that was far too smug for someone taking refuge in his own incompetence.

Crack!

The ceiling split once more and dozens if not hundreds of small, writhing cockroaches spilled from the acid-smeared hole onto the floor in a veritable tide of insects.

"Fire! Fire! FIRE NOW!!" Tiro screamed, scrambling backwards rapidly.

BLAM!! BLAM!! FWOOOSH! Blam! Although he had really been requesting ACTUAL fire via the flamers Snake had thoughtfully procured, everyone with a weapon promptly started firing into the encroaching swarm save Sakura, who had been paralyzed at the revolting sight, and Ranma, who seemed paralyzed for different reasons.

Nonetheless, the tide of insects was demolished before the sudden onslaught, shredded apart by shotgun fire and burnt to cinders by roaring flame before they could launch any kind of attack.

Those not annihilated immediately rushed from the flames in blind panic, but didn't get very far before they were immolated or picked off by Snake's expert marksmanship.


"R-Ranma? Hey! A-Are you all right?" Sakura herself was feeling fairly woozy even as she asked this, so she certainly would have been the last to criticize that Ranma wasn't blasting or smashing roaches with the others, but the way he was slumped against the cabinet barricade they had set up while mumbling to himself was quite unusual.

Ranma looked up at the blonde woman, and immediately felt dizzy as Sakura's image split into two hazy visions and floated around him. "Uwah... huh?"

Sakura frowned, and she stopped trembling as the din of gunfire and the unnatural screeching of monstrous insects was pushed to the back of her mind. "Ranma, what's wrong? Are you hurt?"

"I..." Ranma coughed suddenly, and Sakura was relieved to see that no blood came from his mouth. "I'm all right... just... got a little dizzy..." Grabbing onto the barricade, Ranma slowly pulled himself to his feet, wobbling only a bit as he forced his mind to focus.

"Ranma, you're not all right!" Sakura protested, taking his arm. "Hold on, we'll get you someplace safe!"

"Like where?" Junko asked, sidling over closer to the pair while holding a shotgun at the ready. She couldn't actually use the weapon very well, as the kick was far too powerful and tired her out easily, but it was still the best weapon possible to compensate for her lousy aim and the size of the targets. She had also found a pair of pants somewhere, but that hardly seemed very important, given everything else that was happening. "The way to the entrance is blocked! And there's no place safe in the HQ!"

"I... I'll be fine," Ranma grunted, trying to gently take his arm from Sakura. He felt bile rise in his throat, but fought it back down. He wasn't going to get sick! Not now, not today!

"Please, just sit down!" The blonde insisted over the din of another volley of gunfire. "They can take care of this! You don't look well!" Seeing that Ranma seemed dazed and had started mumbling to himself again, she gently put a hand to his cheek to turn him toward her.

She immediately drew her hand back, surprised. "Ranma, you're burning up!" It was true, although his skin looked rather pale.

"Gwah?" He focused on Sakura for a moment, and then shook his head furiously as his vision began to swim. "I... I can still fight... don't worry... I..."

"No way are you fighting in your condition!" The blonde insisted firmly, gripping his arm tightly in an uncharacteristic display of will. "We need to get you out of here and to a hospital!" She quickly tugged off the jacket he was wearing, noting that it had blood and bits of roach on it.

As Ranma protested weakly, Junko raised an eyebrow. "Are you serious? The path in front of us is barricaded with roaches coming out of the walls, and the path behind is raining bugs... and on fire, to boot. How are you going to get through?"

Sakura tossed the jacket aside and started moving, tugging Ranma along with her to go around the barricade. "You can cover us! ... Or something. I don't know, but please, we need to get him somewhere safe!"

"Oh, for pity's sake..." Junko mumbled, rubbing her head. Then she turned around. "Hey! Snake! We girls need to evac! Can you clear us a path?"

BLAM!! BLAM!! "Evac? NOW? Why?" The American stomped on a bug that had managed to escape the flames, and then started slipping more shells into his shotgun.

Junko planted her fists on her hips. "Sakura has an appointment for a manicure! And I have to do my hair! I think getting attacked by killer insects is giving me split ends, here!"

Tiro and Seras sweatdropped as a vein popped up on Snake's head.

"Is that so? Split ends, you say?" Ch-chak! "We're being overwhelmed with hordes of acid-spitting mutant roaches, and you want to leave for an emergency shampoo?"

Junko nodded, seemingly oblivious to the thin red aura that was surrounding the lieutenant. "Yes. Oh, and we're taking Ranma with us. It's not safe for two lovely young women to be walking around alone in the big city, you know?"

Tiro's eyebrow twitched. "But... you're both police officers..."

"Well, sure. So we'll make sure to arrest any muggers or rapists that Ranma beats up, but we still need him along."

Tiro was about to launch another protest involving the fact that both Sakura and Junko were visibly armed, when Snake slipped a small cylinder out of his pocket and pushed the button.

BWA-KOOM!! The girls instantly ducked for cover as the barricade blocking the locker room doors exploded, turning the filing cabinets and chairs into so many shards of hot, melting shrapnel as the numerous roaches slowly digging their way through the obstruction were vaporized.

Slipping the detonator back in his pocket, Snake spoke with almost perfectly concealed contempt. "Well, you'd better hurry. Wouldn't want to be late for your appointment. We'll just be back here fighting for our lives against a mutant swarm that may yet consume all of Japan if you need us." BLAM!!

Junko smiled. "'Kay! Thanks! See you guys later!" She said happily, before grabbing a nearly-unconscious Ranma's arm and dragging him away toward the scorched crater in the hall. Sakura, bewildered as she was by the exchange, quickly grabbed Ranma's other arm and helped take the martial artist down the hall.


"What was THAT about?" Sakura asked as the two policewomen dragged Ranma through the smoldering remains of the barricade. "I think Snake's angry at us now..."

"Oh, big deal. Snake's always been good at focusing his constant, needless rage toward legitimate targets," Junko reasoned, shrugging.

"But why did you make up that story about us having 'girl stuff' to do? Couldn't we just tell Snake that Ranma was sick?" Sakura asked, kicking open the door to the front lobby before continuing to pull Ranma toward the exit.

"Sakura, baby, Snake isn't considerate enough to let Ranma know when he's about to blow up a building that Ranma is IN. Do you think he's going to care that Ranma has a fever?"

"Oh... I suppose you're right," the blonde murmured uncomfortably. "But... still, how did you know he'd let us go with that story?"

Junko smiled as she pushed through the front doors of the headquarters, allowing the two women to drag Ranma outside. "When Snake gets angry at somebody, his first, and usually only, impulse is to remove them from his presence. When he can get away with it, he does this with violence. If he can't he'll concede to ANYTHING in order to get them to leave."

Sakura winced. Not so much because of what Junko was saying about Snake, but rather because Hunter was on the steps to the headquarters entrance, his beak buried in a four-foot cockroach's thorax as he scarfed up its insides. "Wow... you know him that well?"

Junko grinned in a way that immediately made Sakura think of the redhead's psychotic alter-ego. "Hon, I know things about the men in this outfit that their own MOTHERS don't know. We'll have to sit down one night and have a nice long chat about our boys in blue. It'll be VERY interesting." She winked at the blonde woman, who felt a slight chill down her back.

'She may not be a knife-wielding lunatic, but Junko is a bit creepy in her own way,' Sakura thought. She turned to regard Hunter who was spitting up green slime and bits of roach legs that he apparently found less than appetizing. "Good boy, Hunter! You kill all those nasty roaches, okay?"

"SSSSSSHREEEEEEAAAH!!" The zergling pounded one claw into the shattered carcass he had been feeding on, then stalked up the stairs toward the HQ building, his tail whipping about behind him.

"Okay... so now we're out," Junko began, scratching her head, "should we take him to a hospital? Or-"

Before Sakura could answer, Ranma suddenly lurched forward, shaking as he grabbed onto Sakura's leg.

"Meep!" The blonde was startled at first, but quickly knelt down to cradle the martial artist's head in her hands. "His breathing is erratic! That's not normal for a fever!"

"Well, this is Ranma we're talking about," Junko reasoned, "any virus that could bring HIM down would have to be more than normal."

"Ghnng!" Ranma gasped as his chest contracted, and he huffed vigorously as his heart started racing.

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"Ranma! Ranma, are you okay?"

The martial artist grunted as he lifted his head slowly, his eyes squeezed shut tightly.

His entire body felt hot, like he was on the verge of being immolated. His head was pounding like a jackhammer. In general, his entire body felt like it was about to crumble, like the time he had fought Ryoga and been plastered with five perfect shi shi hokodans.

"What... What's going on? Why do I feel so-" and then he opened his eyes.

And then he blinked.

He blinked again.

"Ghg!" He made a slight squeaking noise in the back of his throat, possibly due to the rising bile he was trying to keep down.

Sakura stared down at him, her concern somehow evident despite the huge gashes across her face that had peeled the whole outer layer of flesh from her head. A single, damaged eye dangled from its socket by a single frayed nerve, while her other socket stared down at him completely hollow. Dried blood and gore matted her torn, dirty hair to her shoulders.

Gulping heavily, Ranma slowly looked down her body. Sakura's torso was still encased in proper body armor, and despite being splattered liberally with blood, seemed to have protected the whole of her upper body. Her arms did not get off so easily, and Ranma could see chunks of flesh that had been ripped off of her all the way to the bone.

"Wha... Wha... Wha..." The pigtailed man could proudly say that he had faced true, flesh-eating zombies in combat and taken them down bare-handed, but seeing a close friend in such a state had paralyzed him in a way that the pure horror of the living dead could never manage on its own.

There was also the uncomfortable fact that this particular zombie was cradling his head in her lap. In addition to being an extremely disadvantageous position from a tactical standpoint, it was also more than a little confusing.

"Junko, do you have a cell phone? Call an ambulance, quick!" The Sakura-zombie said, flecks of bloody spittle oozing from her lips and a few holes in her neck as she spoke.

'Okay... Okay... just calm down... this is not real... this is SO not real...' Ranma chanted mentally as the Sakura-zombie stared down at him again. 'I mean, zombies can't even talk, right? ... Right? I mean... well... crap, CAN they talk? I've always killed them on sight! Maybe they can!'

"Yes! We need an ambulance to that address right away! We're not sure what's wrong, but it doesn't seem like he's in critical condition... high fever, spasming, erratic breathing..."

Ranma turned his head slowly and choked down another scream as he beheld a grotesque, demonic creature that bore an extremely sketchy resemblance to the DAPC's redheaded bombshell. It was tall and spindly, with thin, lithe arms and needle-sharp teeth. Its skin was dry and leathery, with hundreds of scars all over it, and thick, spike-like hairs poking out at random points. A long whip of dark red hair grew from its scalp and coiled on the ground, a scythe-like blade at the end. It was something that Ranma imagined had come right out of a horror film, and was far more disturbing and terrifying than any of the mutant breeds he had fought in the past.

It was also talking on a cell phone, which Ranma was confident was not monster-like behavior. Added to the fact that it sounded an awful lot like Junko and not at all like a snarling demon, he felt reasonably assured that he was not, in fact, surrounded by monsters and was merely going insane.

'Aw, dammit! What's going on?' He groaned as the zombie cradling him gently lowered him to the ground, saying something about roaches escaping into the streets.

Ranma's eyes started roaming the streets, and he whimpered slightly. Everything around him was a hellscape. Cars gutted and burning. Walls streaked with blood. Rats and decrepit, mangy dogs scurried about, picking at bloated, maggot-infested corpses.

'This isn't real... what's going on? What's WRONG with me?!'

"-ma? Ra...... ear me?"

Ranma squinted as the zombie above him appeared to be snapping its jaw angrily, but in the back of his mind he could make out Sakura's voice... which was somewhat troubling, as he'd had no problem hearing her at all before.

"...kay. You'll...... ay, right? St......... ple...... anma!"

Ranma really did feel like he should be saying something in response to the monstrosity above him, but his stomach was fighting him desperately to relieve its contents to the point that he feared he might spit up something important if he didn't keep his mouth shut.

"...... coming soon... help......... what?"

Ranma heard the red-haired monster speak, but it was getting harder to focus...

His last fleeting thought before darkness took him was an image of Mizu, her face sullen as she looked down on him in concern.

'Dammit... now I'm gonna be late...... ugh...'

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"And how long has he had this temperature?" The paramedic asked Sakura as his assistant carefully checked Ranma's vitals.

"Not long. An hour, at most. When we were assaulting that pumping station, he didn't look sick at all," the blonde explained, wringing her hands. "He only lost consciousness five minutes ago."

"Sanaka! His pulse is getting weak! We need him on life support, ASAP!"

The man nodded grimly as he stepped up to the stretcher that was supporting the pigtailed man.

He stopped short as Junko took hold of his arm firmly.

"Here's the number to call when you get some information," she said, her expression determined as she placed a small index card with the DAPC's logo and contact information in the man's hand. Then she turned the card over in his palm. "Also... this probably isn't the best time, but that's my personal number on the back."

The paramedic raised an eyebrow as Junko leaned toward him.

"Just so you know, my turn-ons are weight lifting, a good sense of humor, and saving the lives of my closest friends."

The other eyebrow went up. "I'll... keep that in mind." Trying hard not to smile - he was at work, after all, and in a rather grim profession - the man quickly grabbed the other end of the stretcher and helped move his patient into the back of the ambulance.


Junko smiled brightly as the emergency vehicle sped off, and then sweatdropped once she turned around to see Sakura staring at her expressionlessly, her arms crossed under her breasts. It was a look that Asuka had seemingly perfected, and looked absurdly out of place on the bubbly blonde. "What?!"

"Junko," Sakura began in a perfect deadpan, "I know normally I don't have anything to say about your behavior, but there are times when you really have to just rein it in, okay?"

"It was supposed to be an incentive to make sure Ranma turns out okay!" the redhead complained.

Sakura kept her stare even.

"This is just sad," Junko mumbled as she lowered her head. "Getting scolded by Sakura."

The blonde nodded sharply. "As long as you understand."

"Hmph. I still don't think you'd be complaining if it were Tycho or Snake being carted off to-"

BWAAKOOOM!!

The two young women were knocked clean off their feet as the west wall of the first floor of DAPC headquarters burst open in a spray of flame, glass, and metal.

"GAH! Duck!" Sakura immediately scrambled for the wall and pressed herself against the concrete partition mounted on the side of the stairs.

Junko, having a slightly cooler head in general, recognized that they were in no immediate danger, and got back onto her feet. "What the hell do they think they're doing in there?! They'll rip the HQ to pieces!"

"N-None of the debris hit the ambulance, did it?" Sakura asked worriedly. "For that matter, maybe we should call it back? Someone might be injured..."

"The ambulance is fine. It doesn't look like the debris reached the street," Junko mumbled. "Anyway, we'd better get back inside... Sigh... I really was looking forward to washing my hair."

Sakura rolled her eyes as she got back to her feet, approaching the front door warily. "Snake? Kyle? Are you guys okay? Hunter?"


As Sakura pushed open the double-doors that she had so recently escaped through, a wall of thick smoke promptly wafted into her face, prompting her to back off immediately while coughing harshly.

"Hack! Cough! Blaugh! How the heck Hack! does Snake stand all this smoke that his Hack! stupid bombs kick up?" the blonde asked as she tried to wave away the dusty cloud.

"I suspect he can breathe it like normal air," Junko said sarcastically. "That freak was born for war."

After a few moments the smoke had thinned to the point where Sakura felt that she could get inside without suffocating as long as she stayed low. "Come on, there are gas masks in the lobby emergency cabinet," she said, crouching low before slowly creeping inside.

Junko frowned deeply as she made to follow. "Uhn... I have a bad feeling..."

"Is that supposed to be women's intuition, or does it have anything to do with Snake gradually blowing this building to cinders?" Sakura asked seriously.

"Mm. Point taken," Junko mumbled.

Both women stopped at the entrance, noting that there were several fires on the ground in the main lobby - many of them from the earlier bomb that had allowed for their escape - and a great deal more rubble than they saw on their way out.

"Hunter!" Sakura called suddenly, putting a hand over her mouth to keep as much smoke out of her lungs as possible. "Hunter! Are you here?"

At her call, a muffled hissing noise came from beneath a pile of debris next to the entrance.

"Hunter? Hold on boy! I'll get you out!" Sakura said in concern as she swiftly moved over to the wall of rubble that used to be Asuka's office.

Junko winced as she realized where most of that debris had come from. "Huh... I wonder, would Snake get the blame for blowing up the building, or Tiro for causing this whole mess? Or maybe Seras, for not giving Tiro instructions earlier?" She frowned. "Well, heck. Seems like there's enough blame to go around. I think we'll all catch hell for this one."

"Junko! Would you stop talking to yourself and help me? Oof! This stuff is heavy!"

The redhead groaned as she watched Sakura struggle with a bent length of steel. "Girl, your brother is a freaking superhuman. Let's find him and make HIM dig through the burning piles of rock and metal."

Sakura turned away to face Junko as she pried the metal loose, lifting a rather large chunk of concrete up a bit. "We can't! Hunter might be injured! And if Kyle's busy figh-"

"LOOK OUT!!" Junko screamed, her eyes going wide as she grabbed Sakura's arm and yanked her backward.

"Gwah?" Sakura tumbled over onto Junko helplessly, nearly missing the sound of snapping teeth behind her as the pair landed in a heap on the floor.

She quickly rolled off of Junko and whipped her head back around, her own eyes bulging as she saw one of the jagged-toothed worm creatures that they occasionally found slithering about. The creature was snapping frantically toward the two policewomen, its body darting forward before being yanked back.

"I... I think it's okay," Junko said nervously, deeply regretting that she'd dropped her weapon when she'd helped carry Ranma. "It's obviously pinned or something. We can just-"

A high-pitched snarl came from beneath the rocks, and the worm squealed as it was suddenly yanked back into the crevice from which it came.

"Sreeeee-hk!" Crunch! Snap!

The girls winced, and then slowly got up.

Sakura moved toward the rubble again, though she had the sense to approach more cautiously this time. "Hunter! Can you get out of there on your own? Hunter?"

"Srrrrrreeh!" There was a grinding noise as the debris shifted, and an armored head pushed its way through the rubble.

The blood drained from Sakura's face as a pair of blood-soaked pincer mandibles very unlike Hunter's armored beak hissed at her from the widening crevice. The rubble rose slightly, and a long, hairy leg poked up into the air before swiping a pair of thick, curved talons at the foolish blonde.

Luckily, Sakura hadn't moved so close that she was within grappling distance, but it didn't speak well of her that she remained completely frozen in place as the gigantic cockroach continued swiping at her.

Junko grabbed Sakura around the waist and promptly dragged her along into the lobby as fast as she could move while crouched. "As long as we're getting on each others' cases for inappropriate character traits," she deadpanned, "you could really stand to lose this 'damsel in distress' syndrome where you turn completely helpless every time we're in a dangerous situation. 'Cause, you know, we get in an awful lot of dangerous situations, and one of these days nobody'll be around to bail you out."

Sakura sniffled as she allowed the redhead to drag her away. "Ranma's been gone for five minutes, and I already miss him so much..."

"Yeah, well, luckily we have no shortage of muscle-brained men to kill things for us..." Junko gulped as the massive cockroach pulled its abdomen out of the rubble and shook itself free completely. It was almost four feet long with a carapace that looked thick enough to shrug off bullets. Horns jutted out of its wing case, leaving deep cracks that oozed thick ichor, and each of its legs sported a pair of viciously barbed, exaggerated talons. "So let's hurry up and find them! Like, NOW!"

The roach trembled briefly as it stood over the floor, its antennae whipping about randomly. Then it turned and hissed at the retreating women, as if upset that they didn't wait for it.

"Snake! Snake?" Junko passed by the point where the other police officers had been fighting off the roach swarm, and her heart sank as she saw nothing there but hundreds of bullet casings and a few discarded weapons. On the other hand, there were no body parts or streaks of blood to be found among the bits of crushed and splattered insect scattered everywhere, so it was far too early to assume the worst. "Kyle? Are you here? ANYONE?"

"Junko! The explosion came from over there!" Sakura cried out, pointing toward a ring of flames and more rubble that used to lead to the garage.

"Okay... so what? There's no way to get over there, and I really don't know why you'd want to be tromping around in a blast crater," Junko reasoned. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw that the giant roach was slowly creeping toward them. "Crap! Weapons! We need guns!"

The redhead immediately started picking up the various guns on the floor, checking each one for ammunition before tossing the empty weapons aside. "This is no good! These are all empty!"

"Uhm... well..." Sakura chewed on her lip as she stared at the redhead anxiously, although strangely enough, it seemed she wasn't panicking like Junko. "We always have... you know... the 'last resort,' right?"

Junko stared at the other woman blankly. "Last resort? What last res-" the sentence died in her throat as she figured out what Sakura was talking about; between the two of them, only the redhead had any kind of useful combat skills... or rather, she possessed a mental disorder with useful combat skills. "Wait. Waitwaitwait. Are you serious?"

Sakura nodded, managing to look timid and determined at the same time. "It's... It's either that or getting eaten by that thing, right? I don't really like Akina much, but this is her thing, isn't it?"

Junko whimpered as the cockroach crawled ever closer. At this rate, it would reach them in about half a minute... they could always try running, but it was entirely likely they'd just run into more of the monstrosities, and it WOULD be handy if one of them was an unstoppable killing machine. "Okay, fine..." she picked up a discarded shotgun and shoved it Sakura's arms. Then she took a deep breath and squeezed her eyes shut.

Sakura took a deep breath as well, and then raised the weapon up in the air, holding it by the barrel. "I'm sorry!" Thonk!

"OW!! Dammit!" Junko cursed and promptly clamped her hands over the spot where she had been struck.

"Akina?"

"NO, it's not Akina! You have to hit me harder than that!"

"What? I don't want to hurt you too badly... how hard does it need to be?"

"I don't know! Your plan sucks!"

"Fssssssssss!"

A high-pitched hiss reminded them of the current threat, and both women flinched as the gigantic roach suddenly darted toward them, more than tripling its previous speed as it made the final sprint toward its prey.

"AH! It's coming!"

Thwud! The cockroach flinched back as the ground suddenly lurched upward briefly, nearly knocking the two policewomen off their feet.

"What was THAT?" Junko asked in alarm. Though she was glad that the giant insect was also disturbed enough to stop, she couldn't imagine that whatever was ripping through the floor was friendly.

Luckily, Sakura could. "Hunter! It's lunch time! COME GET IT!!"

Thump! Crack! The floor began to split apart under their feet, and bits of tile bounced around as a fissure slowly opened between the mutant insect and its prey.

The roach, in its fevered bloodlust, ignored the warning signs of approaching danger and plowed forward. Large, scythe-like mandibles opened up underneath the armor plate over its head, and bits of green slime splattered on the shattered floor as it lunged.

Crack! At the last possible moment, the floor opened up underneath the insect's abdomen, and the vile beast was lifted up and knocked on its back as a pair of clawed arms and an armored beak ripped up through the tiles.

"Hunter! Good boy!" Sakura cried in relief.

"Get it! Get the nasty bug! Kill it dead!" Junko shouted encouragement from the sidelines, though she had taken the shotgun back and was now holding it like a baseball bat in case she needed to fend off the roach herself.


Hunter climbed the rest of the way out of the new hole in the floor, and then briefly shook the debris off his body.

The roach didn't seem terribly distressed by its helpless position on its back, and rocked back and forth slightly as its abdomen bulged.

SPLORT! Thick green slime burst out of the insect's body like a shotgun blast, hitting Hunter head-on as the roach itself used the recoil to roll back onto its belly.

"SHREEEEEEEAAAH!!" The zergling screamed angrily as he shook his body, acrid smoke wafting up as the venomous fluids ate at his armor. Acid was flung everywhere from his attempt to clean himself, and a few seconds later a ceiling lamp clattered to the floor as the acid rapidly dissolved the metal.

The cockroach, not having its survival instincts in order, decided it would be a good idea to attack the enraged alien rather than escaping. Darting forward, it hooked its front legs around the zergling's neck before biting onto Hunter's throat, taking full advantage of the alien's temporary blindness.

Hunter snarled in protest, and then slammed his head down onto the roach's back, cracking open the insect's carapace and dislodging its mandibles.

The cockroach started clawing at Hunter viciously, its talons digging shallow gouges into his armor, but as the alien beast pinned down the writhing appendages with his front claws, it was clear the struggle was over; no matter how freakishly mutated the insect had become, it couldn't match Hunter's purpose-bred strength and resilience.

Crunch! Hunter's beak dug deep between the two malformed plates that protected the roach's head and thorax, and then snapped the head off the rest of the body with a sharp twist as dark ichor sprayed out of the insect's neck like a punctured high-pressure hose. The body twitched and trembled as the life drained out of it, the legs somehow managing to support the roach's weight until it collapsed a good three seconds following the loss of its head.

The head was even more gruesome in its death throes, and continued snapping and snarling uselessly as fluids dribbled out of the back.

As the girls watching fought down their gag reflex, Hunter snapped his head up and open his jaws, tossing the roach head into the air before chomping down on it again on the way down.


Junko turned away from the crunching and snapping behind her, really wishing that she had joined Ranma on the ambulance. "So... uh... yeah... what now?"

Sakura blinked in surprise at being questioned, quite unused to being the one responsible for making decisions. "Well, we should find the others, right?"

"And where do we go to do that?" Junko asked, gesturing to the wall of burning rubble that blocked any progress further into the building, up or down. "This place is wrecked. Judging by our conversation earlier, everyone went downstairs into the deepest, darkest, most well-fortified and dangerous parts of headquarters. How are we going to find them?"

Sakura sweatdropped. Since when was she in charge?

She was distracted briefly from the current problem when Hunter trotted up and started nudging his beak against Sakura's leg, inadvertently smearing some of the infected ichor against her thigh.

"Augh! No! Back!" Sakura shouted, hopping away and wiping off her leg with her hand. "Eww! Hunter! Bad boy! You got roach guts on... on..." she trailed off and frowned.

Then the blonde suddenly brightened. "I know! You can dig through that debris, can't you Hunter?"

The zergling looked up at her, and tilted his head to the side slightly.

Junko nodded hesitantly. "Well, it's a start. Hunter can burrow through the rubble and then we can find the others."

The killer alien snorted and backed up a few steps. Then he ducked his head low and stabbed both his claws into the floor, ripping through the tile surface and the concrete foundation underneath with ease.

Junko winced badly. "So... what exactly are we going to tell the captain when she sees this?"

Sakura blinked, and was momentarily distracted from asking Hunter why he was burrowing into the ground instead of digging through the debris behind them. "Well... she won't be back in a while, right?"

"Right. So... we're going to fix all THIS in 'a while'?"

Sakura chuckled nervously as she glanced around at all the damage. "Well, sure, it LOOKS bad, but I'll bet with a little spackle and some paint-"

CRACK!

Both women blinked as the floor under them shifted, and they watched as Hunter's tail vanished into a considerable hole carved into the foundation.

Crumble! Crack! The hole was also getting bigger, and several of the fissures surrounding it were joining with fissures from the FIRST hole that Hunter had made upon coming to the girls' rescue.

"Yeah... spackle ain't gonna cut it this time," Junko drawled.

"Ohhh..." Sakura hung her head in resignation as the floor continued to shake slightly. "Yeah, this is... wait... is it just me, or is the floor shaking?"

CRACK! The girls stumbled forward as the ground under their feet dropped sharply a few inches.

"On the other hand, I guess it's pretty unlikely that we're going to live long enough to get chewed out," Junko deadpanned, her body trembling as the last of the foundation's strength gave way.

Crash! Thunk! Wham! Sakura grabbed onto Junko instinctively as the floor crumbled beneath them, spilling them down into the sub-levels.


"Owwww... BAD Hunter..." Sakura mumbled before coughing up the dust that had been kicked up from the collapse.

Realizing that she was still clutching Junko firmly, the blonde loosened her grip slightly to check for injuries. "Junko? Are you Akina now?"

"Ugh... no... my head is about the only thing that DOESN'T hurt right now..." The redhead said painfully as she waved a hand in front of her face to clear the dust before she started coughing as well.

Sakura slowly got to her feet, moving slowly so as to better keep her balance on the fallen rubble. It was fairly dark wherever they had fallen, but there was a pale gloom that wafted through the settling dust cloud, indicating that there was some sort of low-energy lighting wherever they had ended up. "On the plus side, I guess we've made it into the sub-levels. Now all we have to do is find the guys."

"Well, I guess you can cross that off your quest objectives," Snake said sarcastically, obviously annoyed.

Sakura blinked as the dust settled enough for her to see, and was pleasantly surprised to see that the entire company of police officers that she and Junko had abandoned previously was standing just a few feet away from where the floor - now the ceiling - had collapsed. Hunter sat on his haunches in front of them, lazily wiping cockroach ichor off of his beak.

"I take it there was a line at the manicurist?" Tiro drawled.

Sakura sweatdropped. "Uh, yeah. Something like that. Anyway, we're back to help out now!"

"Swell," Snake said, keeping his sarcastic tone. "And while I VERY much appreciate you two calling Hunter up through the flipping ceiling and nearly burying us in your efforts to find us, I don't really think Saotome's skill in kicking things really hard is going to make up for the extra problems we're going to have in keeping you two alive down here."

"Well, then I have more bad news," Junko said shamelessly. "Ranma was feeling bad, so we had an ambulance ship him off before we came back."

"WHAT?!" Tycho shouted in disbelief. "Are you serious? What was wrong with him?"

"I can't say for sure, but he had a severe fever and lapsed into unconsciousness before the paramedics arrived." Sakura explained.

"Wait... what was that?"

The blonde woman turned to see Seras slowly pushing himself up against the far wall, a bottle in his hand per the norm. "He had a fever. It seemed pretty serious."

"Yeah, I noticed too," Tiro said as he helped Junko down from the pile of debris. "So it got worse?"

"WAIT. Stop talking," Seras commanded, standing up unsteadily and rubbing his head. "Was... Was he wounded anywhere?"

Junko blinked. "Wounded? No..."

"Well, there was that little cockroach bite, but that's all," Sakura amended.

"C-Cockroach... bite..." Seras winced, then slid back down onto his rear. "Oh no..."

"What's the matter? Is Saotome gonna be all right?" Kyle asked worriedly.

Seras sighed and took a quick swig of liquor. "Well... this is tough to come out and say, but-"

A sudden, high-pitched musical number composed of mechanical-sounding beeps caused all the officers save Junko to jump to attention, startled.

"Is that somebody's cell phone? Dammit people, what have I told you? When we're shooting things or watching a movie, put it on vibrate!" Snake groused.

Junko rolled her eyes as she flipped the phone open. "Calm down. I think it's the hospital guy." She pressed a button and pressed the phone to her ear. "Since Doctor Jack Daniels here seems so concerned about Ranma's health all of a sudden, we can get a status report right away. Hello?"

M-Miss Chikiko? Is... Is this-

"Yes. Speaking," the redhead hurried, holding the phone away from her ear and pushing up the volume so that everyone could hear the man on the other end. "Is this about Saotome's condition?"

Ah. Right. His... condition. Well, it's kind of hard to say... he's not actually here, right now...

Junko blinked as Seras shook his head. "What? He was out cold when you left. Where'd he go?"

We're not... we're not TOTALLY sure... you see... well... you're not going to believe this...

"Here it comes," Seras mumbled, tilting up his liquor bottle as he guzzled down the remnants.

You see, just five minutes ago, he... he suddenly jumped up, shouted something about having to get ready for his date, tore himself free from the stretcher, and then leapt out the back of ambulance into rush-hour traffic!

Pshtoo! A thick spray of booze blasted from Seras' mouth, and he started coughing.

"WHAT?! A date?! With who?!" Sakura suddenly demanded, grabbing the phone away.

“Are you saying that Saotome ditched us too?” Tycho complained as the paramedic started stuttering excuses over the phone.

“Not only that, but he didn’t even come back with the women,” Tiro groused before turning toward Snake. “Can you believe that guy? What’s wrong with him?”

To the lecher’s surprise, the Texan didn’t immediately respond, instead staring silently as Sakura grilled the paramedic calling them.

“Well, then turn around and find him! He’s your responsibility, isn’t he? What if he gets injured running around when-“ the blonde yelped as the phone was suddenly snatched from her hand.

Snake toggled down the volume a bit and then held the phone to his ear. “Yo, you still there? Thanks for taking care of our guy. No, don’t worry about it. He’s a tough one, he’ll be fine. Yeah. Take it easy. Bye.”

“Snake! What do you thin-“ Sakura yelped and jumped back as the American casually tossed the cellular phone down next to her feet, and then drew his pistol.

Blam! Bits of plastic and micro-circuitry bounced across the concrete floor as the other officers flinched back.

“S-Snake?” Tiro asked, surprised.

“Let’s hurry up and get this roach thing taken care of,” the lieutenant said casually as re-holstered his sidearm.

“Huh? What about Saotome?” Tycho asked. Behind him, Seras was mumbling to himself and shaking his head.

“What ABOUT Saotome?” Snake asked, raising an eyebrow. “The man has things to do. Whatever his story is, I’m sure he has his reasons. Like the Captain, he’s earned an evening off.” He stared down at Tiro, bouncing his shotgun on his shoulder. “Don’t you agree?”

“Yeah, that’s fine,” Junko piped up, “but did you have to destroy my cell phone to make that point?”

“Yes. Now move it!”

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“Sir... while your patronage is deeply appreciated by myself and my superiors...” the sales clerk said nervously as he tugged on his collar, “I really think that... well, given your condition, I would be happy to sacrifice this particular sale for the sake of your health.”

“... Hahhh... hahhh... listen,” Ranma said, his voice coming out roughly as if his speaking was strained, “I escaped from an ambulance, was run over by a motorcycle, and sprinted nine blocks to get here before you guys close...” He took a few more gulps of air, some color returning to his face as he relaxed slightly. “Now... sell me a damn suit, or I’ll just stuff the money down your throat and take one.”

The clerk gulped as the pigtailed man glowered at him. The martial artist was currently wearing a black T-shirt covered in rips and bloodstains and a pair of nylon pants caked with dirt and splatters of roach innards. He was breathing heavily, and although he sported no apparent wounds, he had entered the store hobbling badly.

He also had a rather large pistol at his hip and a pair of knives strapped to his calves, which was extremely unusual even for the police in Tokyo. “Well... since you... insist. What kind of outfit were you looking for?”

Ranma panted for a moment as he thought it over. ‘Well, at least the stomach cramps are going away. I actually feel like I could eat something without spitting it up.’ “Formal. Well... sort of. Not like a tux or anything, but... nice.”

“Yes, sir. Right this way, sir,” the clerk said anxiously, leading the police officer to the back of the establishment as the other employees and patrons gave them a wide berth.

“Not too dressy, actually,” Ranma hedged as they approached a selection of crisp sports jackets, “it’s a first date thing, and we know each other pretty well. It’s not too good to be that formal, right?”

The sales clerk sweatdropped. “A... first date... uh...” he scratched the back of his head as he looked over the man. “Will you... Will you be needing something to obscure your... uh... ‘accessories’?”

Ranma blinked, and then looked down at the formidable pistol at his hip. “Oh. Nah. She’s cool with guns. I’m just worried that I’m going to come off looking too serious about this, and I don’t want things to get weird.”

“I... I hardly think that I’m qualified to judge something like that...”

The pigtailed cop considered this. “Do you have a girlfriend?”

“Well, sure...”

“Have you ever seen her kill a man? With a knife?” Ranma asked seriously.

The clerk twitched. “Ah... no. Not personally.”

“Hm. Well, then I guess I’ll just take the jacket and this shirt here. And some pants that match.”

“Ah. Yes. V-Very good, sir.”

“Can you ring ‘em up right here, so I can wear ‘em out?”

“Of course, sir.” The clerk tugged on his collar for a moment. “Ah... and as for your weapons, sir? The blades?”

“Oh! Those.” Ranma scratched his head. “I don’t suppose you have something classy to sheathe them in...”

“No, we don’t,” the man deadpanned, “however, if I may be so bold, if you were to wear a heavier coat, I suppose you could keep the weapons inside, under the sleeves.”

“Hey, yeah, that would work. Wolf gets away with that all the time,” Ranma reasoned. “I’ll need to get it in a dark color though, in case I get blood on it.”

The sales clerk winced. “You ARE an actual police officer, right? I’m not selling to some sort of street hoodlum? Or an American?”

“Yes, I am,” Ranma said, rolling his eyes. “Though I should tell Snake about this place; you’ve been pretty helpful.”

“Thank you. We have dark blue and black. Corduroy or polyester?”

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ranma irritably combed his fingers through his hair to try and relieve it of dust before Mizu arrived.

“Man, what a day... I wish I’d regained consciousness earlier, so that I could have taken a quick bath first.” While his fever had vanished and he seemed to be feeling much better in general, he hadn’t had much time to tidy up before his big date.

‘I was getting kind of worried there; I guess that T-virus gunk wasn’t all that bad after all. Wonder what Mizu was freaking out over...’

“Ranma, there you are!”

The pigtailed man whirled around and then waved as his date as she approached through the crowd.

Mizu looked fairly radiant in a sleeveless black gown, and her hair had been curled slightly so that it looked like an elegant ebony waterfall down her shoulders.

“W-Wow... you look great!” He said honestly, scratching the back of his head.

Mizu smiled as she reached him, and took his arm. “You don’t look so bad either...” she frowned slightly as she looked him over. “Well... you do look a bit dusty, for some reason...”

“Mutant cockroach swarm,” Ranma explained hastily. “But hey, I made it this time!”

Mizu chuckled briefly as she led him into the restaurant, choosing not to dwell on how serious he was about being attacked by mutated insects. “Well, that’s the... uh... important thing... I guess.” She raised her eyebrow as she stared at Ranma’s belt. “You brought your gun? Why?”

“It’s for shooting things,” Ranma deadpanned, rolling his eyes as they entered the restaurant.

Mizu pinched his cheek. “I know that, you dork. Are you planning on shooting anyone while we’re out here?”

“Not really. I never plan on something going wrong during my dates, but something always does.”

“And you have to shoot someone as a result?” Mizu asked dryly.

Ranma frowned as he thought over all the complete disasters during his teenage years that had been referred to as “dates”. “No, but it sure would have helped.”

Mizu rolled her eyes as she stepped up to the greeter. “Reservation for Kotetsu, please?”

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Brakk! Brakk! Brakk!

“Here they come!”

“Cheezus! They’re even bigger than before!”

Snake ducked under a wad of thick green slime, ignoring the hissing noise of the metal wall behind him fizzling away. “Aim for the head, damn it! Their backs are too well armored! Sakura, make sure you keep Hunter back there, we don’t want him running into the line of fire!”

“Y-Yes Lieutenant!” Sakura said nervously as she hugged the zergling around the neck to keep him from darting forward into the fray.

Sqwrch! Kyle crushed a smaller roach underfoot before blasting a number of holes into a larger one further down the hallway. The creature sputtered angrily as hot ichor burst up through the cracks in its carapace, and a few green bubbles came from its mouth before it sunk to the floor dead.

“Are they gone? We all clear?” Tiro asked nervously as he reloaded the shotgun.

Snake frowned, remaining silent for a moment. Then he pulled out his sidearm and aimed toward the ceiling. Blam! Blam! Blam!

“Shreeeeee!” A painful screech was followed by a brief shower of carapace and dark fluids, and THEN followed by a mid-sized roach (“mid-sized” being only two feet long, in this case) falling down off the ceiling, its legs curling up over its belly.

“What the hell? Where was that thing hiding?” Tycho asked in alarm.

Without saying anything further, Snake stuck his toe under the edge of the deceased insect’s body and then flipped it over.

The other officers winced. The entire top half of the roach was a dark gray; a perfect match for the ceiling in the sub-levels. The belly had been a dark brown, typical of all the other roaches they had encountered.

“Well, GREAT. That’s just great. Now they have camouflage?”

Seras frowned as he shook his empty whiskey flask. “The longer we have to deal with these creatures, the more improbable their rate of mutation becomes. If we give them a week, they’ll probably start talking and setting up a proper trade economy.”

Snake nodded solemnly. “We can’t allow shoddy insecticoid goods to flood our fragile human market. This must end here.”

Junko carefully stepped around the numerous roach corpses and puddles of splattered ichor as she looked over the map of the sub-levels. “I don’t know why we’re finding more of these things as we head down here... this hall terminates at a dead end.”

Snake poked his head around the corner. “Well, maybe the roaches have taken up construction and made their own tunnels.”

“That’s not funny,” Tiro groused.

“I know it’s not. The union is gonna be PISSED.”

Kyle whistled as he walked up behind Snake. “Wow. That’s kind of impressive. How thick are these walls?”

From the end of the alleged dead end was a wide, circular tunnel dripping with a thin green substance. A veritable carpet of white grubs writhed about on the floor of the tunnel, with the occasional roach scurrying about on top of them, seemingly oblivious to the nearby humans.

“Oh, gross!” Sakura said, still holding Hunter back as the alien snorted and snapped eagerly toward the tunnels.

“We’re not actually going down there, are we?”

Snake started rummaging through his grenades. “Well, duh. I don’t think the local exterminator can handle this.” Pulling out an incendiary grenade, he yanked out the pin and threw it into the tunnel, bouncing it off one of the nursery roaches and squashing it before it settled on top of the swarm of pupae.


THWOOM! The officers covered their ears as a high-pitched squeal filled the sub-levels, rising above the crackle of flames that consumed the infantile swarm.

“I didn’t know that larvae screamed when they died,” Tycho remarked as he watched the flames spread over the tunnel surface.

“When you work in this field long enough, you learn all sorts of interesting things about how things die,” Snake explained.

The flames began to thin out slightly around the initial blast area, but continued to spread further into tunnels, killing hundreds of bloated grubs as it crawled out the officers’ sight.

Srrrrrrrrrrrrooooooooooooh...

The officers all blinked as a gentle trembling shook the walls and ceiling.

“What was THAT?” Tiro asked. “It sounded like... something screaming? Or moaning?”

“And it wasn’t a grub,” Seras remarked from the rear of the squad.

Snake stepped up to the edge of the tunnel and observed the shriveled, ashen remains of the larvae. Then he turned toward the others. “Sub-level four, bio-weapon storage, psionic holding pens, and poorly-maintained viral filtration engines. Women and smartass drunks, this is your stop. Gentlemen, if you would follow me.”

“Oh, you’re not serious,” Tycho complained as the American stepped into the tunnels proper, the roasted roach larvae crunching underfoot. “Putting aside all the bugs that are probably in there, isn’t the entire thing dripping with acid? We might not even make it to the end alive!”

Seras, eager to show his appreciation in not having to go with the other men, piped up immediately. “Unlikely. While it seems that acid was used to carve this tunnel, by now it would have exhausted its potency. It should be perfectly safe for humans. The most serious concern would be oxygen flow, but given that cockroaches depend upon air as well, it should be fine.”

“Hm. We should probably ditch any more incendiary rounds, then,” Snake mused. “Sakura, Junko, you keep Hunter here. Don’t let ANYTHING get past you.”

After having Sakura explain was “incendiary” meant, Kyle dropped the tanks attached to his flamer and picked up an autocannon.

“Shhhs!” Through the gray smoke wafting up from the tunnels, more of the acid-spitting roaches emerged, their antennae whipping about irritably as their thorax plates bulged with corrosive slime.

“Here’s the next wave, people! Move out!”

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“Whatever your friends are going through, I’m sure they can handle it,” Mizu said reassuringly as she poured herself another glass of wine. “I know you always feel like you have to take responsibility for everything, but on occasion you need a break like everyone else.”

“It’s not that...” Ranma hedged. “It just seems really selfish to be out on a date while they’re all fighting.”

“And it was selfish of them to toss you into the terrorist-controlled facility by yourself to obtain a container of ultra-deadly retrovirus.”

Ranma rolled his eyes. “It wasn’t THAT deadly,” he scoffed.

“Oh? Then what is?”

“Cats,” Ranma answered immediately.

Mizu chuckled throatily as she sipped her wine, and then shook her head. “Whatever. Let’s talk about something besides work.”

Ranma frowned and gulped down some tea. “Uh... well, it’s kind of the most interesting thing going on in my life.”

“Then tell me about something less interesting,” the raven-haired woman insisted. “Have you gotten in touch with your family yet?”

Ranma’s face soured. “Why would I do that? The moment they know where I am, they’ll just start unloading their problems onto me again.”

“So what? Perfect strangers unload their problems onto you all the time nowadays.”

He mulled that over for a moment. “Yeah... but I get paid for it.”

“They probably know where you are, you know. You’re rather infamous in Japan right now.” Mizu said wryly, swishing the wine about in her glass under her nose.

“The only one of those twits bright enough to read a newspaper is Nabiki, and by now I’m sure she has more important things to do with her life besides playing detective for her family,” Ranma said mercilessly. Long ago, it had worried him greatly that Nabiki might track him down with her knack for information and networking, but it occurred to him that she was probably more concerned with running her own life now that he wasn’t a major influence – or pawn – in it.

Mizu sighed. "Oh, Ranma... how long do you really think you can live all alone like this? Are you happy?"

"Am I..." he began to repeat, and then stopped. WAS he happy? "I dunno. I guess."

"You guess?" Mizu pressed. "You don't have any major concerns? You don't have any big ambitions? You're perfectly fine being the unappreciated backbone of the most reviled enforcement agency in Japan, living all alone with a ravenous alien warbeast, and being cut off from your family, ex-fiancees, and everyone from your high school career with no closure whatsoever?"

Ranma was about to launch a weak, half-hearted protest when his stomach suddenly lurched painfully. "Ugh!"

Mizu didn't really see him do more than twitch, so she kept on speaking. "I mean, there are people in Nerima who you've known since you were six, and yet I'm your oldest friend now. And we've only known each other, what, two years?"

Ranma would have said something tactless about how he and Mizu hardly stayed in touch either - save when random coincidence saw fit to throw them into the same room - but was having serious difficulties with his stomach. 'What the hell is it now? I was feeling fine a moment ago! I thought I was done with this!'

"Ranma? Are you listening?" Mizu asked, frowning. Ranma seemed... distracted, though he appeared to be making some effort to hide it. "Is something wrong?"

'Damn! I can't go to the hospital! I'm going to get through this entire date even if it kills me!' He slowly raised his head and smiled uncertainly. "Yeah... I've just... uh, I've got to go to the bathroom." He flinched again, and got up unsteadily, trying not to hold his stomach and reveal that he was in pain. "'Scuse me!"

Mizu frowned as Ranma started walking to the bathroom, moving quite a bit faster than was strictly safe (though he was still moving at a rate that normal human beings could match). 'Hmm... it looks like something's wrong. I hope he's okay...'

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Ulghhn! Blech! Ugh..."

Ranma panted wearily and slumped his knees next to the garbage can he had just filled, his throat raw and his mouth filled with the repulsive taste of stomach acid.

'Well... this sucks. A lot. Though at least I've got an empty stomach for dinner, now.'

Groaning, he shakily got to his feet and looked around to make sure he wasn't experiencing the whole array of dizzying symptoms from before.

While he had meant to speed to the bathroom and take care of his protesting abdomen there, he hadn't known where it was, and instead dashed out the first exit he could find, ending up in the dark alley behind the restaurant, where the kitchen emptied its trash periodically through the night.

The area was deserted, which was nice since Ranma really didn't want people to see him hunched over puking his guts out like a common drunk. Or at least, in the few brief moments Ranma had spent glancing around in the dark before he leaned over the trash can, it had seemed to be the case...

"Well, well, what do we have here?"

Ranma shook his head lightly as he heard a voice from behind him, horribly embarrassed to be seen in such condition. Standing up straight, he ignored the fading pangs of irritation from his stomach and turned around to see who was addressing him.

A rather short, sleazy-looking man wearing sunglasses grinned at the martial artist, his hands in his pockets. "That looks like quite a mess, friend. This place must not be very good?"

Ranma twitched and scratched the back of his head in embarrassment. "Oh, no, it's nothing like that! I actually haven't had my meal yet! I guess I'm still fighting off the fever from earlier..." In the back of his mind, he noted that he was getting a weak sense of danger from the man, but it was complicated by... something else. A strange, gnawing urge that he was unfamiliar with.

"Ah, then I guess we've been hitting the bottle a tad too roughly, eh?" The stranger smiled unpleasantly. "Feel free to share any more liquor you got on ya... along with whatever's left in your wallet, scumbag."

And then the man pulled a gun from his pocket, aiming right at Ranma's chest.

Ranma blinked, perplexed. Someone was mugging him? HIM? An armed cop? The superstar of the most dangerous and violent company of police officers in Tokyo, if not all of Japan? The man that had fought past squadrons of Russian soldiers and packs of armed, flesh-eating mutants?

Of course, the man holding the weapon had no idea who Ranma was, and thanks to the darkness and the trash cans partially obscuring Ranma's waist, he couldn't see that the pigtailed man was carrying a pistol big enough to put down an elephant. Even so, however, the irony of the situation was staggering.

"Well? What are you waiting for? Wallet! Now!" The man started to get impatient, and shook his weapon for emphasis.

Still a bit dazed by how surreal the situation was, Ranma looked at the weapon that he was being threatened with. It was a 9mm. pistol of some foreign make that Snake could no doubt identify in a heartbeat with a large, bulky silencer fixed on the barrel.

"Huh... looks real... silencer an' everything," Ranma mumbled, scratching his head again.

The thug was rather upset that his victim seemed more flabbergasted than frightened, but was happy to focus more attention on his gun. "It IS real, chump. Don't make me prove it. Paid a small fortune for this piece." Then he grinned. "Pays for itself though, I've gotta admit. Now you have until the count of three to give up your valuables, or I'll shoot you dead right here, and nobody'll know until they take out the trash in the evening. Is this getting through to you at all?"

Ranma shook his head to clear it. The strange urge was getting more insistent, and it was kind of interfering with his other senses.

Sighing, he stepped closer to the mugger, preparing to disarm the fool.

Of course, this then brought him close enough for the criminal to see that his "victim" in fact had a large gun holstered at his hip. Panicking, he fired.

Pchnk!

"Glk!" Ranma jerked back as the tiny lead projectile drilled into his chest, right over his heart; evidently the mugger was a decent shot.

The pigtailed man looked down at his chest as blood spurted from the wound. "......" He gaped at it silently, confounded. He had been shot? Why hadn't he dodged? By now the reflex was automatic, fine-tuned to the point that he could slip to the side of a gun discharge at point-blank range. Or so it was supposed to be.

Ranma looked up. "Ow!" he said, almost as if it were an afterthought. The annoying hunger in his mind was even stronger now, and it was really starting to get frustrating. "You shot me! You jerk!"

The mugger stared at the pigtailed man with wide eyes, unable to believe what he was seeing.

And then things got REALLY creepy.

Before the criminal's eyes, the bullet he had planted in his victim's chest was slowly pushed away from the ribcage it had failed to penetrate and out of the entry wound, falling to the blood-spattered ground below. The shredded flesh on the edge of the wound rapidly turned gray, the cells dying and crumbling, and then the bullet hole started to shrink rapidly, vanishing within seconds to leave pale, unblemished skin behind.

Ranma was quite a bit surprised by this development as well, and idly rubbed the fresh skin through the hole in his shirt. "Huh. That's kinda interesting."

The mugger agreed emphatically by firing again into Ranma's chest, repeatedly.

Pchnk! Pchnk! Pchnk! "D-Die, you freak!"

"Ow! Ow! Quit it!" Ranma snarled, pushing forward and swatting the gun out of the criminal's hand.

Then, moving on instincts he didn't know he had, his hands darted into the folds of his coat, grabbing hold of the twin blades hidden there and drawing them before the mugger had even finished processing the loss of his only weapon.

Shlurkt! The first blade drove deep into the mugger's stomach, and he felt pain blossom in his abdomen as blood and bile began to crawl up his throat.

Shlunk! Then the second blade sliced up through his chin and sundered his brain case, and he didn't feel much at all.


Ranma stood shock-still for a moment before quickly withdrawing his weapons, stepping back to avoid a considerable spray of blood.

"I... I just killed that guy..." the pigtailed man mumbled as the corpse hit the ground with a wet Splat!

He blinked, and then raised his kodachi, still slick with warm, crimson fluid.

Oh, it wasn't as if he'd face any official penalty for killing this man. He was a police officer and he had been acting in self-defense. Heck, he had the bullet wounds to prove it.

Clink! Clink!

Ranma stared down at his chest, and then wiped a bit of drying blood off of the soft, fresh skin that was rapidly darkening and hardening to match the surrounding tissue. Okay, so he DIDN'T have the bullet wounds to prove it, but he still had a darn good case if anyone wanted to challenge him about it.

Having personally and deliberately killed a human being - not a mutant, or a human-esque demi-god, but a real, normal human being - felt... strange. Anticlimactic. Easy. Like he should have been clutching himself in horror and tossing down his weapons, swearing to never kill again, but instead was simply rationalizing it as a reasonable thing to do and moving on with his life. He couldn't even get worked up about the fact that he wasn't getting worked up about taking a human life; it just seemed so... so natural.

And then there was that stupid buzzing in the back of his head!

'What IS that? Damn, it's annoying!' Ranma grated his teeth as the unfamiliar urge intensified, and he focused his attention once more on the slain criminal.

His stomach grumbled. Loudly.

"Hmmmmmm..."

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Hunter snarled as he pinned down the attacking cockroach under his front claw, and then stabbed down with his upper talons, punching through the creature's thorax carapace in a brief, messy burst of dark fluids.

Splort! Another blob of acid splattered into the zergling's side, and smoke started pouring from the hardened bio-armor as the thick fluids bubbled and hissed.

Turning sharply away from the second roach, Hunter's tail smacked into it, not doing any actual damage but having enough force to knock the relatively light mutant on its back. From there Hunter turned completely around and then pounced on the incapacitated insect, digging his beak into its unprotected belly and feasting on the creature's innards.

Unseen by the zergling, a smaller roach dashed under his legs at a determined pace, either unconcerned with the alien or intelligent enough to realize that it stood no chance in combat. The humans huddled at the hall corner, using the zergling as a perimeter, seemed like a much safer bet.

Clang!


Junko raised the shovel that she had found earlier on in the hallway and nodded in satisfaction at the bits of carapace and dripping ichor that stuck to it. "The small ones aren't so tough... I think we just might get through this."

"Are you sure you don't want me to use the shovel on you, just in case?" Sakura asked worriedly.

Junko's eye twitched. "Look, Sakura, I know we haven't discussed this whole dual personality thing in-depth before, but I should tell you that I generally don't like having someone else in control of my body."

The blonde woman blinked, looking quite surprised by the admission. "Really? Akina doesn't mind having you in control."

"Well, that may or may not have to do with her not having much of a choice," Junko said, keeping a careful watch for any more roaches that might have gotten past Hunter.

"Actually, it would likely have more to do with the strain generated by the excessive output of psionic energies," Seras interjected as he stepped up behind the women, "she probably generates so much power that any moment she's NOT expending it in some way is very uncomfortable, or perhaps even painful!"

Sakura frowned. "Tuko, how do you know anything about psychic energy anyway? It doesn't really seem like a well-researched field of study..."

"Mad scientist college," he answered casually. "I needed an elective, and it seemed like an easy 'A'."

Junko's eyes narrowed. "Whatever. Where'd you go, anyway? We need all the help here we can-" then she recognized the dusty article of clothing Seras was carrying over his shoulder. "Is that Ranma's jacket?"

The drunk nodded. "I found it on the pile of debris that delivered you two to the sub-levels. I thought I saw it earlier, and after mulling over Saotome's affliction for a bit, I decided it might be worth my time to investigate."

"Speaking of his 'affliction'," Junko began, wincing as Hunter screeched viciously behind her and eviscerated another cockroach, "you haven't said anything about it, but it seemed like you were pretty troubled about him getting bitten earlier, and you were obviously surprised about his being okay. What's the story?"

"He was bitten by a T-virus infected roach," Seras deadpanned, "isn't it obvious?"

"Pretend that it isn't," the redhead insisted. "Some of us don't have the benefit of occasionally slipping into a state of competence by staying sober."

"Feh." Seras held out the jacket and clicked his tongue as he saw the blood encrusted on one shoulder. "The T-virus is a lethal pathogen, ladies. Putting aside its capacity for mutation - as you've likely noticed by now - and bringing things back from the dead as flesh-eating monstrosities, the T-virus is one-hundred-percent deadly."

"Wh-What? Ranma's going to die?" Sakura asked, horrified.

Seras shrugged. "At this point, I really can't say. Saotome's the only one I could imagine surviving the disease, save maybe your brother. If he was rendered unconscious but managed to recover, I see no reason why the virus should get the upper hand again, but his safety is far from assured."

As the girls glanced at each other pensively, the drunkard scratched his chin. "I need to get to my lab. We can settle this there."

He started to walk off, and Junko quickly fell into step behind him. "Wait! I'll come too!"

"Yeah, me too!" Sakura agreed, also following. "Should we bring Hunter?"

"No, we need him here to keep the little bastards from getting loose and spreading," Seras said. "So Sakura, you take the shovel and stay behind Chikiko. In case we need somebody to kill things."

The redhead groaned as Sakura took up her position as ordered. "You see? It's this sort of thing. THIS is why I didn't want it to get out. Jeez..."

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Mizu frowned as Ranma took his seat. "It's about time you got back! The food already arrived! What was taking so long?"

Ranma chuckled nervously as he picked up his chopsticks. "Ah... well, I wasn't feeling very good earlier, and... let's just say you don't want to hear about it right before you eat."

Mizu would have agreed promptly, but was distracted by Ranma's smile. "Ranma, are you all right? Your gums are bleeding!"

His eyes widening, Ranma quickly snatched up his water and swished it about in his mouth before swallowing. "Oh, I'm fine... just fine! Nothing to worry about!"

The raven-haired woman looked across the table suspiciously. "Are you really okay?" She noticed that he was wearing his coat and keeping it closed, even though he was seated. The coat also seemed to be slightly damp in some spots, although the dark color made it very difficult to tell what color the liquid had been; she chalked it up to stray water that may have splashed on him at the bathroom sink.

"I said I'm okay, didn't I?" Ranma asked, rolling his eyes. "Relax. I'm just getting over the flu or something. It's not like I just killed and ate a guy."

Mizu was silent for several moments as the pigtail man began eating. "Uh... y-yes. I suppose... that's true..." not knowing what else to say to an assertion like that, she relented and started eating her own dinner. 'Oh well, as long as he says he's fine...'

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Blam! "Srrrheee!"

The two-foot cockroach writhed about in agony as a .35 caliber slug punched through its carapace, unable to counterattack through the blinding pain.

BLAM!! Snake annihilated another insect on his left, and then stepped over to the injured roach before kicking it in the side, sending the mutant sailing further into the tunnel.

"How many of these freaks could their possibly be?" Tiro complained as he smashed the butt of his own shotgun against a smaller roach on the wall. "I mean, seriously! In order to grow this many bugs you'd need an equally abundant source of food, right?"

"That makes too much sense, and therefore is an invalid assumption," Snake said as he pushed forward, loading more shells into his weapon.

Tycho rolled his eyes as he and his fellow slacker headed up the rear, following Kyle. "That's really annoying, you know."

"What?"

"How you've come so far in accepting this nonsense as reality," Tiro explained. "Just because you've decided that you don't care about the physical limitations of the universe doesn't mean they don't apply. Science is science, man."

Tycho nodded emphatically. "It's hard enough to keep our sanity fighting flesh-eating zombies and mutant insects as it is; our little remaining faith in science is all that we've got left! Show a little respect for the immutable laws of nature!"

Snake stopped as he reached a large cavern at the end of the tunnel and leaned forward to peek into the yawning chasm within. "And just how immutable are these laws?"

"Pretty darn immutable," Tiro asserted.

"Or at least, I'm really, REALLY hoping so," Tycho amended.

Kyle scratched his head as he walked up next to Snake. "Huh... so, does that mean that roaches DO have queens after all?"


Lying in the center of the cavern, a bloated, throbbing monstrosity howled weakly at the intruders to its nest.

On either side of the beast, viciously hooked and barbed legs scrabbled uselessly to move the titanic bulk they were attached to. Stray bits of horned armor, once having belonged to a single, complete exoskeleton, clung to a thick, sticky film that covered the mutant creature, cracked and useless. The monstrosity's abdomen was a pale, fleshy, swollen sack of eggs covered in spider veins and birthing fluids. Its thorax had fared much worse when undergoing its mutations, and a multitude of legs - horribly mismatched in size and all of them useless for their original purpose of locomotion - stuck out awkwardly from underneath a thick, filth-covered bulb partially covered by the sundered bits of carapace. Dozens of tentacles originated from the bulb and had stuck into the walls of the nursery, and ichor dripped freely from numerous tears and seeping holes in the strange appendages.

Compared to the rest of the beast, its head was the least alien and disturbing. Bearing no less than seven glassy black eyes, a pair of long, barbed antenna, and dripping, razor-sharp mandibles, it was absurdly small relative to the rest of the body, despite being a bit larger than a human's head. Currently the head was gnashing about furiously, jerking back and forth as if hoping to pull its titanic body along with it to slaughter the unwanted humans.

"Okay Snake, seriously," Tycho deadpanned as he stared down at the freakish thing, "you have to either stop being right all the time, or stop making such horrible predictions."

"Scared! Very, very scared right now!" Tiro said, visibly trembling as he hid behind Kyle.

Kyle raised an eyebrow. "Why? It's not like it can hurt us." He leaned down and pointed to the queen roach, chuckling. "Ha! Look at it! It's too fat to move! Stupid bug!"

The sound of moving earth and crumbling rock had everyone else diving to the side right before a thick, fleshy tendril burst from the tunnel wall and clamped onto Kyle's arm with a pair of vice-like pincers at the end.

"OW! Stop that!" The genetically enhanced officer growled, grabbing onto the tentacle and yanking hard. The appendage squeaked slightly as it was torn apart, and it flew free of the new hole in the wall in a brief shower of murky fluids.

"Okay then. Despite the stupid bug being too fat to move, it CAN indeed hurt us," Snake noted as he crawled over to the edge of the chasm overlooking the nest. "Whatever. Shouldn't be too hard to kill this thing."

"What are you, crazy?" Tiro asked rhetorically. "All we brought were shotguns and handguns! That thing is huge!"

Snake smiled as he drew his sidearm and took aim into the nest. "Yes. But it's head - the universal weak point of monsters everywhere - is small. No sweat." Blam!

Ptwang! The queen roach's head flinched slightly as the bullet bounced off of its hardened carapace plating.

"Sweat," Kyle countered as the monster roach hissed angrily at them from below.

"What the HELL?" Snake shouted angrily. "That was an AP round! There's no way a bug's stupid shell could deflect that! It'd have to be harder than steel!" Raising the weapon again, he fired several more times into the mutant's trembling skull.

Blam! Blam! Ptwang! Tink! Blam! Twang!

"SEE? It's bloody annoying when the laws of physics suddenly decide not to apply, isn't it?" Tiro said.

A slight rumble alerted the officers to more tentacles coming from the walls, and Tiro and Tycho began scrambling about in blind panic.

One tendril emerged above Kyle, and he promptly grabbed onto it before tearing it right out of the wall, as he had done before. "So what are we gonna do? Do you have any of those anti-armor shells for the shotguns?"

"Despite coming from you, that's actually a halfway-decent idea," Snake said as he rolled quickly to one side just before a snapping pair of pincers emerged from below him.

Kyle brightened. "Thanks!"

Snake promptly turned and blew away the tentacle that had been grabbing for him. "Unfortunately, the answer is no! I didn't think anything down here would be bulletproof!"

"GAH!" Tycho beat at another tentacle frantically with his own shotgun as the wily appendage snapped at him clumsily. "Would you two DO something, already?! We might actually die here!"

Kyle shrugged. "Well, Snake says anti-armor shells might work, but we don't have any with us." Then he turned and stared down into the cavern. "Maybe there's some down there?"

Snake blinked. "Why would there be ammo in a mutant roach's nest?"

"I dunno. There's all sorts of stuff down there," Kyle explained, pointing down at the bottom of the cavern. "See? There's some beer and old magazines. I think that's the captain's computer. And that's the outfit that Junko left in the locker room before we ran away."

"What?" Tiro scrambled away from the tentacle that was blindly groping for him and then crawled up next to Kyle before looking down into the chasm. "HEY! Bad enough these mutant freaks are ripping apart the building and trying to eat us, but they're stealing our stuff too?!"

Tycho rushed to their side, eager to get closer to Kyle in case more tendrils ambushed them. "They must have been grabbing everything they could carry in order to bring food back to the nest... there might actually be some ammo down there."

"Ammo? Screw the ammo," Snake said as he grinned, a manic edge to his voice that made the others shiver.

"Huh? What do you mean? How else are we going to kill that thing?" Kyle asked.

Snake started rubbing his hands together. "Commander, one out of every ten objects in this entire building small enough to be easily carried by something smaller than a human is an explosive device," he explained gleefully. "That fat freak factory is sitting on a nest full of bombs."

Tiro brightened instantly. "Awesome! Then let's leave and blow them up from a safe distance!"

He started bigsweating as Snake rolled his eyes. "Please?"

"It's not that easy, moron," the weapons expert said as he stepped on another tentacle that was squirming out of the ground, pinning it down with his boot. "None of the bombs are armed, and we can't detonate them by shooting them or anything."

Tycho groaned. "You're not suggesting what I think you're suggesting, are you?"

"We're going to have to go down there, dig through the mess of eggs, grubs, and flailing limbs, find the bombs, and arm them ourselves," Snake explained before lowering his shotgun and blasting the tentacle writhing under his boot. BLAM!! "Well, we don't have all day. Get a move on!"

Tiro let out a brief sob as he stepped to the edge of the tunnel, staring down into the mass of throbbing eggs and pupae below. "I miss fighting heavily armed terrorists..." he mumbled as he jumped down.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Hmmm... this is strange..." Seras mumbled to himself as he adjusted the microscope in front of him.

A loud scraping noise made him turn from his observations, and he sighed as Sakura and Junko slowly pushed a supply cabinet in front of the door. "Girls, given that Hunter would have easily spotted and eviscerated any mutants larger than a TV remote, I hardly think that barricading the door is going to make a bit of difference."

"Really?" Sakura asked, obviously distressed.

Then she turned and stared at Junko pleadingly.

"NO! Akina's staying cooped up in my subconscious where she belongs!" The redhead insisted, holding the sides of her head as if to protect it.

"Would you two PLEASE quiet down?" The scientist growled, "It's hard enough to concentrate on this as it is! I'm still not completely sober, you know!"

"But what if the roaches follow us in here?"

Seras started writing something down on a notepad as he answered. "On the off chance that happens, we still have Chikiko's shovel. But I doubt it will be necessary. No doubt by now our comrades have already located the origin of the vermin and are even now enacting a risky and unlikely plan to end this plague."

Sakura sighed. "I just hope he doesn't have to blow up more of the building to do it..."

"Hope is the first step on the road to disappointment," the drunken scientist intoned. Then he frowned. "Tekai, could you hand me the shovel, please?"

"NO! Leave me alone!" Junko instinctively shouted.

"Would you relax? It's not for you," Seras deadpanned, "I just need a different virus sample. This one has been... well..."

"What's wrong? What did you find?" Sakura asked fearfully as she handed Seras the requested tool. The sample he was currently observing was the blood on Ranma's jacket, meaning that anything wrong with it indicated something that was probably wrong with Ranma as well.

"I... well, it's hard to say," the man mumbled as he took the shovel and gazed at the partially-dried muck stuck to the head. "This is... unexpected. Saotome may be in more trouble than I thought."

"WHAT?! Really?" Sakura cried, absolutely frantic.

Seras stopped to think for a moment. "... Well, actually, I thought he had died and become a zombie, and honestly, it's pretty hard to top that. So... no, not really." He turned back to his work as Sakura and Junko fell face-first onto the floor. "Now hush. I'm working, here."

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Your plans are the worst, Snake!" Tiro cried as his trembling fingers armed the detonator on the second block of plastic explosives he had found so far.

He was up to his knees in soft, warm, squirming flesh, and his entire body trembled from the sensations.

A smaller adult roach crawled onto his hand as he finished arming the bomb, and he immediately recoiled, tossing the insect off of him.

"I don't know; I think it's a pretty good plan," Kyle said as he waded toward another explosive inconveniently bundled under the roach queen's atrophied legs. As soon as he came close, the nearest appendage began stabbing toward him viciously with what little leverage it could muster.

The blond man grabbed the leg firmly as it darted toward him, and then drove it straight down into the ground, sinking it a good three feet into the cavern floor.

Then he raised his leg and stamped down on the writhing appendage, breaking it instantly and eliciting another quivering howl from the monstrous insect.

"Commander, whatever you're doing to piss it off, STOP!" Tycho begged, standing just a few feet in front of the queen's head and tenderly reaching toward it to arm the bomb lying just outside of biting distance. His other arm protected his face from the creature's antennae as they whipped about wildly, occasionally smacking into the DAPC's driver with surprising force.

"You know Yamazaki, this is all technically your fault in the first place, so I'm not sure you're allowed to complain about the plan to fix it," the American noted as he finished arming his fifth explosive device, ignoring the writhing larvae squirming around his legs.

Splorch! On his side, the queen's birthing canal vomited forth another wet, sticky ball of eggs.

Snake looked at it briefly, shrugged, and then raised his shotgun. BLAM!!

He smiled as the egg sack was reduced to shredded gunk. "Pointless. But fun!"

Rrrrrrrrumble...

Snake looked up at the cavern as it began to shake, and frowned. The numerous tendrils that originated from the roach queen's thorax had been trembling violently ever since they entered the nest, and now some of them were pumping back and forth furiously as they slowly worked themselves free of the earthen walls in which they were imprisoned.

Stopping briefly to pick up his leg and stomp on one of the adult roaches that were skittering toward him, Snake then turned and called to the others. "Guys? I think we should wrap this up! Queeny's having a major temper tantrum, here!"

"Tell me something I don't know!" Tycho growled as the insect's razor-sharp jaws snapped uselessly for his outstretched hand. A moment later he finally finished arming the device, and immediately turned before throwing himself on the chasm wall. "That's plenty of bombs! Let's leave! NOW!!" He started clambering up the wall with all haste, kicking his legs wildly all the while to dislodge anything that was clinging to his body.

Kyle frowned as he finished with his own bomb, not being completely sure he had armed the thing correctly. "Geez guys, calm down, would you? Where's your sense of pride?"

"I left it at home, under my bed, where I hope to spend the next twelve hours curled up in the fetal position trying to forget this nightmare," Tiro said as he dashed by as best he could atop the living carpet beneath him.

"I just don't see what the big rush is," Kyle mumbled, spotting another explosive partially buried under several plastic bags and other half-eaten trash.

Bwoom! A brief shower of dirt and rock poured down over the blond man as one of the tentacles twisting about overhead finally tore itself free from its earthen prison.

"What the he-OOMPH!" Kyle felt the air exit his lungs as he was swatted into the far wall by the thick tendril of flesh, smacking into the rock next to Tiro with enough force to almost make the lecher lose his grip. Only the man's terror-inspired death grip on his only route to safety kept him from sliding back down into the nursery chasm.

BLAM!! Green ichor burst from the freed tentacle as Snake opened fire, and it sagged slightly from the injury.

"Tch! Outta the way!" The American shouted.

BLAM!! His final shell finished the job, tearing the last bit of pulpy flesh that kept the tentacle in one piece. The writhing appendage fell to the nursery floor, useless, as a veritable shower of discolored gore sputtered from the bulb above the roach queen's thorax.

Crack! Bwoom! Two more tentacles were wrenched free from the walls, and Snake groaned as he tossed his empty shotgun to the side, deeming it dead weight.

"Goddamn bug... just HAD to be bullet-proof, didn't you?" He snapped as he passed by the beast's head.

With a terrible snarl, the queen jerked her head to one side, smacking the American in the chest with her antennae.

Snake flinched back slightly from the impact, then growled and grabbed the minor obstruction with both hands.

"Whoa, wait, Lieutenant, don't-"

Crack! Bringing his hands down and his knee up, the American snapped the great beast's sensitive antennae like a dry tree branch.

"SSSSSSSCRRRRRREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!"


Bwoom! Bwoom! Kroom! One by one, the other tentacles embedded in the walls tore free of their earth prisons as the queen sputtered in pain and rage.

"RUN!! RUN FOR YOUR LIFE!!" Tiro screamed, already in the process of following his own advice.

"Kyle!" Snake shouted, darting to one side as a tentacle attempted to slam into him from above, "Need a boost, here!"

Kyle, who was already halfway up the wall of the cavern, nodded grimly and held one arm out as the American reached him and jumped. The moment he grasped Snake's arm, Kyle pulled him up and very nearly threw him the rest of the way up to the chasm edge.

"Come on! Hurry!" Snake shouted back down as he turned to help Kyle up to the edge.

Wham! One of the smaller tentacles snaked into the tunnel and then smashed into his side, the American having nowhere to dodge within the narrow space.

Gritting his teeth against the pain, Snake pushed the fleshy tendril aside and then reached down over the edge to grab onto Kyle's arm.

Lifting himself up, Kyle promptly stomped on the tentacle trying to wrap around Snake, grinding it into a gooey pulp.

"No time! Let's get out of here!" Snake gasped as he dashed after Tycho and Tiro.

Another quivering moan followed them from behind, as well as two more tentacles that twisted and wriggled through the tunnels as they sought to bind and crush the interlopers.

Still running, Snake took the remote detonator out of his belt, then immediately fumbled it as a thick, slimy tentacle wrapped around his ankle and yanked him off his feet. "GAH! The detonator!"

Kyle ignored the device, and immediately grabbed onto Snake's hand, holding on firmly as the second tentacle slammed into his chest and tried to wrap around his neck. "Augh! Dammit!"

"The detonator! Forget about me and get-"

The sound of scuffed dirt was barely audible over the ruckus of his body being slowly torn in two, but it was enough to attract Snake's attention as he looked back to where Tiro was picking the remote up out of the dirt.

"D-DIE, FREAK!!" The cowardly lecher screamed. Beep!

KRAAAKOOOOOOOOM!!!

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

Roaches exterminated (larvae, eggs, adults): 2,706

Biological infeasible insect queens incinerated: 1

Muggers cannibalized: 1

End Chapter 25