The bot charged, its motorized legs skittering at them at jarring speed. Before Barret could even fire a shot at it, he turned and fled from its storming path. Cloud ran straight into it and slid underneath before it rammed through him, kicking his electrified sword into the underbelly and hopefully damaging something. It sensed him underneath in that split-second, and Cloud got face-mashed by the scorpion bot's ass as it passed over.

  It slid across the stone while rotating back around. Barret unloaded with his minuscule gun arm on the thing's head, producing little more than colorful sparks and a few dents. The body swiveled to face him, cannons the size of his body primed to turn him into meat confetti.

  It was hard to scan the thing for structural weaknesses, but Cloud did remember that mechs like these have individual visual sensors on their weapons, making the bright red visor on their face a red herring.

  He jumped to Barret's rescue, charging his sword for a disruptive slash against one of the cannons where he thought its sensor was, blasting out a strike of lightning from the blade into the other cannon, leaving a smoking burn mark that glowed red for a second before cooling. He got a door-sized iron leg flicking him away in reply.

  The tail lashed at him next, stabbing down vertically and scraping against the blocking sword. The claws pierced into the ground as easily as planting a flagpole in an ice sheet, which gave him an idea. But it unlodged too quickly, and shot directly at him. The blade stopped the claws right in the middle, and his SOLDIER strength was enough to resist its heavy push against him. The electric current pulsing into the tail laser made the technology flicker with sparks, until he overpowered the tail and swung it down.

  With a jump and reach-around on the coil, he kept it at a disadvantage as it spun around flinging him up and down, and Barret pelted it with more gunfire at its cannons.

  "How the fuck do we take this thing down?!" Barret boomed.

  After a number of futile cracks at the tail coil, when it flung Cloud down again, he stabbed the sword into the ground as far as he could get it with the momentum, and gripped it with his life pinning the tail down, his body just behind the claws. "Working on it!"

  The scorpion turned around to face its pinned tail, and the cannons pointed right at him to blow him away. He let the tail fly loose and throw the mech off balance for a second enough to rip his sword from the ground and put the thick blade in front of an incoming explosive shell. The force of it blasted him back anyway, and the sword flew from his hand while spinning out of control. He caught his footing and recovered mid-roll, and swept the sword back up.

  The bot's tail swatted Barret away into the wall and rushed at Cloud. He was pinned in a corner with the mako pool just behind. He prepared for another cannon shot as it approached, but instead it pounced several feet into the air and tackled him to the ground with one of the legs, the sword being desperately held in front of it being the only thing stopping a 5-ton weight from splitting through his chest.

  Jessie shouted at Barret, and chucked the last grenade from her belt down, doing wise to stay away from the action. Barret recovered from the tail hit and raced as fast as his legs could carry that physically disproportioned body to the grenade on the floor, raced back, pulled the pin and held it for a calculated second, shouted, "Eat this, shitcan!" like a comic book character, and lugged it at the scorpion's side in time for it to explode right on contact.

  The blast of fire pounded the bot off balance and off Cloud, and small clumps of broken armor and machinery fell from the cloud of smoke around its body and arm.

  While pinned under its leg, Cloud got a still view of scorpion's armor plating and the gaps between them that were necessary to allow the limbs to move. He caught his breath for a second in the bot's disorientation, and rolled back in front of it to take an electrified swing at the joint between a front leg and the body. He leaped out of the way before it stomped on him again.

  Barret resumed fire at the cannons. "Ya sure ya ain't just recharging its battery with that thing?!"

  "We're not going to outlast the mech's battery."

  The scorpion's cannons switched modes internally and started blasting erratic machine gun fire at them, indicating the attempt to damage the sensors worked. Cloud hung behind it and blocked and dodged hits from the tail, while Barret ran in circles around it trying to slip the spray of high-caliber bullets. When Cloud could etch close enough, he slashed at the vents by the tail that excreted part of the heat the internals generated, trying to open a gash in the tough metal.

  A hood opened from its roof, and a deluge of misdirected rockets spiraled out one at a time, crashing into random spots on the ground or hitting the wall, the explosions only a few feet in diameter but concussive enough to knock around Barret and Cloud and pop their hearing out.

  Cloud caught the tip of a cannon barrel in the face while recovering, and the tail, steaming at the tip, shot out a bright blue beam of materia-powered energy that scorched across the ground in pursuit of Barret, and carved through the wall and split open a mako gas pipe before burning out.

  "What in the fuck does Shinra put in these things?!" Barret exclaimed after his near miss of being lasered through like butter.

  As the bot turned to him, Cloud got a properly wound up jump slash against the vent on its backside, swiped the ice materia from his pocket, and shot a frozen spearhead inside that clogged the whole duct.

  The tail came from above and lashed the claws into him, two of them digging into his arm and puncturing his skin, the other two getting caught in his turtleneck. His whole body was electrified in pain, and it became worse as the tail tried to yank him around.

  He couldn't wind the sword up enough with either hand, so he resorted smashing the claws with the ice materia, encasing it and part of his arm in a brittle cold ice chunk. He sliced through the ice just above his arm with the sword, and pulled the stuck blades out of his skin. The remaining two claws flung him up by the threads of his sweater as the ice shattered, but he easily dislodge them and dropped to the floor on his back. Blood leaked from his arm punctures, but not enough to cause alarm.

  Spraying mako gas from the burst pipe filled the air, and his senses and strength hardened. As the bot began spewing more erratic gunfire between the two of them, Cloud got back up and revved another electrical slash against the side of the cannon's protected visual sensor, partially breaking through the armor and exposing wire. The materia in his sword started sparking and dimmed from overuse.

  Cloud quickly shouted to Barret, "Aim for the optics!" before a blitz of cannon bullets came over him. The sword could block most in wide bursts of sparks, but a few slugs grazed his sides until the cannon fire moved away.

  Once Barret realized "optics" meant the eyes, he withdrew to a safe distance by the bomb and shot for its head. Cloud ignored the screaming from his damaged body and strafed circles around the scorpion, slashing at the limbs, stabbing between cracks in the armor, deflecting kicks from the legs and jabs from the tail, keeping its attention fixated on him like a nagging mosquito and whittling away at the machinery.

  The patterns of its attack behavior and weaknesses in its AI were being written into his mind. His eyes were dilated. He could control and direct every one of his movements with perfect precision, dodge and aim and block like a choreographed dance. It was the talent and instincts of the perfect SOLDIER; a one man army, a superweapon untamed. He wasn't fighting with this scorpion bot—he was ravaging it for blood.

  The facility had been locked down and evacuated with the defensive drone deployment. But it didn't matter. The infiltrating force had disposed of the entire unit of monodrives without a single casualty or sign of injury. Diem found autonomous shock trooper bots patrolling one hallway, and knew that wasn't where they went.

  The trail of emptiness led him to a corridor with luckily inactive sweeper mechs stationed on the walls. After passing through and turning a corner, he nearly ran into another man. The olive shirt and headband was all he needed to see to recognize the enemy.

  He pulled his pistol up as the first line of defense, but held it too far out. Diem easily grabbed his wrist and cracked it from his hand. He predictably went for a kick next, impressively going for a knee knock, but getting deflected, tripped, and decked in the chin mid-fall anyway.

  He skid on the floor on his back, and kicked away against the wall to stop Diem from pinning him down. He rolled back and onto his feet, clearly eyeballing the gun. His push to get back to it didn't go his way.

  Every push against Diem, every attempt at a blindside, every swing, every grab, he had a precoded reply to that came in seemless succession like he was running down a list in his mind. The man showed a genuine talent, but Diem's movements and reflexes were faster. He could simply dance and weave around all the man's attacks, and seize every opening he left in the process to send the hurt back two-fold.

  He fought with the attitude of a taunting bully; always letting his foe swing first and think he has the upper hand, before easily breaking the strategy, popping them in one vulnerable place, and pushing them down. And they would get up weaker than before, and try again. Popped in the chest, across the face, in the biceps, in the temple, in the knees, in the gut. They would get lousier after each hit taken, and become easier to hit again.

  It was his instinct in fistfights to rely on defensive reflex and wear the opponent down, but that was honed against tougher opponents. Diem was not evenly matched, and remembered he had to move quickly and get this over with.

  He rolled back and picked up the man's pistol. He desperately lunged to retrieve it, bruised and limping. Diem promptly struck his hands away with the gun, then cracked it into both halves of both of his arms, and tore across his cheek with the gun hammer. With offensive capabilities neutralized, he got kicked down onto one knee, and his pistol shot through his thigh.

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  He was pushed back onto the ground yowling in pain, clutching the bleeding hole in his limb. Must have been his first time. Diem skirted past him and said, "I'll be back for you," before darting down the hall.

  Well, shit.

  The scorpion's programming had it fighting on its most bare instincts. Its cannons had switched to shooting napalm shells across the field, and engulfed the area in puddles of fire, including its own leg. The air around the core was filling with smog and a blurry orange haze. The mech was scratched, battered, rusted, layered in soot and ash, and spazzing with every movement. Exposed wires sparked, and fires burst out underneath armor plates.

  The light in its tail laser started flickering again. Cloud sprinted out of the way as the beam burst across the floor where he was standing, whipped to the side and burned across the pools of mako, tore across the walls, and swung back and forth across the ceiling, severing chunks of steel beams and pipes.

  Debris splashed all around in the mako pools, and a large beam crashed in front of the mech, splashing in burning napalm. Droplets of it flecked onto Cloud, which he rapidly wiped off with his glove before it permanently singed his skin.

  The entire mako storage chamber was in smoking ruins. Streaks of white fire lined the mako pools where the laser burned. Barret stood just a few feet away from a nicked mako pipe on the wall that was spewing fire. He coughed and swiped away the air. "Goddamn! Ain't they got fans in here?"

  The bomb was still inactive. Cloud was about to tell Barret to start it so they could book it from this dying mech, until a figure emerged from the distant balcony they entered from.

  Diem yelled, "Shit!" upon seeing the madness below him, and leaped out to slide down Jessie's rope. He hopped catwalks and jumped stairs racing to the floor as fast as possible.

  Jessie called out, "Hey!" as she saw him fly past her overhead and glide down the ladder to the bottom. She grabbed her submachine gun and followed suit.

  Once they both landed and Jessie aimed at him, Diem whipped around with a pistol of his own and shot the gun out of her hand. The bullet broke clean through the barrel, busting it completely.

  Diem sprinted to the arena, saw Cloud in the eye of the firestorm and shouted, "SOLDIER!"

  Cloud could barely make out his face through the haze, but knew what was coming at him. Diem leaped in the air off the railing and chop kicked Cloud's blocking sword down, and unleashed a quick-fire of the rest of his pistol's ammo into Cloud's chest.

  Cloud fell into defensive mode from the disorientation of that hit, but the flurry of fists and feet came from all angles. He slid and ducked and flipped around with an agility and martial arts prowess Cloud could only narrowly keep up with on the edge of his toes. He couldn't utilize his sword either, as Diem would just punch around it or knock it out of the way. The civilian-strength hits wouldn't hurt normally, but Diem found and targetted every bruise and injury where he knew it would.

  Once Cloud recovered his bearings, he could start throwing hits back, and hold his sword firmer to push back with, though it was hard to make anything land. He clocked Diem's pattern of attack, planted the sword in front of his oncoming foot, and when they made contact, flung Diem back.

  Both of them stood like preying alley cats waiting for the other to make the first move. Diem said, "So, you're a deserter then. Still have the fatigues and all."

  Barret was left on his own to give the run-around to the scorpion mech. "What's it to you?"

  "It's the city's business if one of its mako reactors is under attack. We have no love for terrorists."

  "Piss off with the fake populism. You're not a civ either."

  Cloud lunged first, and Diem strafed getting skewered on the buster. He landed a spin kick on Cloud's side that knocked him against the platform rails, and tried to ram him over into the mako, but his posture held firm and rammed back.

  He got a proper slash at Diem that missed his body but caught on his winter coat, and a hard tug at the sword threw Diem to the ground. He recovered near instantly and kept away from the onslaughting blade as if they were magnetically repulsed.

  The scorpion, like most autonomous Shinra mechs, didn't have a proper IFF, and would attack any humanoid in its vision. Cloud's strategy was to push Diem back and in orbit of its aimless frenzy, but he wasn't letting it happen.

  The bot must have been running low on ammo and shells, and resorted to charging and swinging the arm cannons at Barret. The tail coil was brimming with excess heat from all the internal fires, and the laser fired out in short bursts whether or not it was aiming. Barret came at it with a gritty facial expression, but was clearly tired of shooting his gun arm.

  Diem maneuvered to stay away from the mech, Cloud maneuvered to bring him closer. They were matched in size, weight, shape, and build, unable to outpace the other. Diem slid and twirled around with absolute control, while Cloud tanked whatever came at him to not waste his instincts guarding. Diem needed to get that giant sword out of the fight to land more than surface jabs, Cloud needed to get him pinned down, and neither could.

  It was a tiring stalemate, accented by drifting laser fire and adding to the saturation of scorch marks throughout the room. Cloud saw Jessie just hanging back by the ladder still avoiding the fire and explosions, and decided to embrace Diem's retreat strategy.

  He momentarily gave up the fight to let Diem slip around him and away from the scorpion, then came bluntly swinging at him to make him jump further and further back in Jessie's direction, feigning exhaustion. They were out of the eye of chaos, and out of the smog. He stopped and panted, appealing to Diem's sense of combat superiority. To see a worn down opponent was his bread and butter.

  He bobbed on his feet like a boxer. "Kid, you think you're the first SOLDIER I've squared off with?"

  "I don't give a shit."

  Jessie jumped from behind on his back. He slammed her against the rails and tore her off, leaving a split-second for Cloud to act while he turned around to flip her midair and roundhouse kick her away.

  Rather than go again with his huge noisy sword and alert Diem, he went for the covert cheap shot; he grabbed Diem's ponytail and ripped down, cracking his skull on the rail. He pushed Cloud and clutched at his wobbling head, but Jessie came back in no time and the two of them got Diem pinned.

  Jessie didn't have Diem's martial arts chops—punching to do damage rather than protect herself—and would have been easy to quickly dispatch, but he couldn't stay vigilant against the giant sword at the same time. His slick defense started crumbling under the onslaught, and the jabs were starting to land.

  He opted to use gaps they left swinging at him to slip out of the encirclement, then take out his empty pistol to use as a blunt weapon. He was visibly struggling to get his vision back in order from that head knock as Cloud and Jessie got camped on either side of him. He tried to strafe backwards before they could crash down on him, but they moved with him. Wherever he slid away to keep them from pinning him again, they would just regroup and keep pressing.

  He wagered on dodging Cloud and attacking Jessie. She took a drubbing of metal from his gun as he tried to get her out of the fight, but he didn't spare the same effort to defend from her with a SOLDIER on the other side. She could cuff him in the arms or kick at his shins, and got one solid hook to his face.

  Diem ducked under Cloud's sword from one side, and the pistol struck Jessie's head on the other. He grabbed and flung her to Cloud as he was about to swing again, and backed away. His shaky posture and the edgy expression on his face made it clear he knew the game was up.

  Jessie felt the materia in Cloud's pocket upon running into him, pulled out the feintly glowing orb, and managed to throw the barest chunk of ice from her hand. He turned to block it with his winter coat, and it stuck to his arm. Cloud's sword flung at him simultaneously, utilizing that split-second moment of inobservance, and slashed into his forearm.

  He recoiled clenching his teeth, and backed into the railing again. Cloud hung back and let Jessie rush him. He could use both arms to punch and catch her hands, but not defend, and she made a point to swing and claw like a frenzied animal at his open wound. He beat and kicked the shit out of her still, matching her ferocity like his survival depended on it.

  Diem put her in a chokehold and held her against the edge. Cloud towed his sword and pounced, and Diem quickly realized his mistake. He got slammed against the rail with Cloud's superhuman hands clutched around his throat, and was held there.

  With there being no way to overpower the SOLDIER muscle, he kicked desperately, at Cloud's legs, his arms, his chin, but couldn't break any part of his iron stance. He pushed against Cloud's chest with the full strength of his legs, and even that couldn't beat his arms.

  The only thing to do in his last moments were stare into Cloud's hollow eyes, feeling the tightening crush on his neck, the popping and bursting and cracking in his throat, and the implosion of his windpipe. He narrowly gasped one more little string of air into his lungs until none more could pass through.

  Cloud could almost feel it too like it were his own neck. He lifted up Diem and toppled him over the edge, watching him lifelessly ragdoll into the mako pool and sink underneath, quickly vanishing in the thick waters.

  He looked past Jessie to the scorpion bot, and Barret exhaustedly scrambling to stay away from it as it skittered around tripping on debris, tail twitching and still firing erratic laser blasts. Even through the smoke, Barret wasn't looking too hot. Neither was the sentinel.

  He grabbed his sword again, and charged straight at it. He leaped and stabbed through the joint of one the legs, ripped the sword out, and furiously slashed away at it from all angles until cleaving it clean off. Its arm cannon got impaled next as it tried to smack him away. He jumped from the arm to the top of the mech and stabbed through its head, leaped off, and brought the blade crashing through the joint of its arm.

  He revved one more charge with the lightning materia, and drove his sword through a hole in its front armor. The tail tried to fire in his direction, but lasered through the mech's body instead. After enough time frying its overheated circuitry, the program shut down. The limbs froze in place, the tail slumped, and the glowing eye in its head fizzled out.

  The sword was dislodged as the machine became consumed by the internal fires. The sound of its sizzling and exploding components and the fires crackling all over the rest of the room were all that remained. The place was a scorch-ridden disaster. But the path out remained intact.

  Barret, bruised, cut, and layered with soot, cackled at the machine in celebration. "How the fuck you like that, shitcan?! You don't fuck with AVALANCHE!"

  AVALANCHE. That was unexpected.

  "The bomb," Cloud mentioned. "Start it and let's get out of here."

  Jessie caught up, even more bruised and out of breath with scratches and gun marks on her face. She bopped his shoulder. "We make a pretty good team."

  "We're not a team." He plucked the ice materia from Jessie and put it back in his pocket. The lightning orb in his sword looked empty. He popped it out to inspect, and saw a crack running through it.

  "C'mon, those aren't easy to get," Jessie complained.

  Barret activated the 20-minute timer, and they were out of there.