Rumble In The Bronx

A security guard walked the halls quiet, empty halls, a badge with the Apex Industries logo clipped to his lapel. He strolled the linoleum floors tiredly scanning the empty corridors, as he did every night, all the way until the morning shift. It was dull work, but he couldn't afford to be picky. He wiped dust from the corner of his eye and yawned. As he stretched out, he screamed, but his cry was stifled as a hand clamped down on his mouth. The guard's entire body trembled, the flashlight fell from his hand, and his eyes bulged from his head as a pair of arrows erupted through his chest. He looked down in terror at the arrows, blood dripping from the tips and staining his uniform. Suddenly, the arrows twisted inside him and every muscle in his body clenched, going lax as he drew his lest breath. His body was lowered gently to the floor and propped against the wall. His assassin stood in the cold dark, holding one of the arrows in each hand as she shook them clean of blood and setting them back in her quiver. She fished the key ring and access card from her victims pocket and hid his body in the nearby supply room, locking the door.

Jade had her eyepiece set to night vision,and she moved silently through the halls, arriving at the door behind which lay her reason for infiltrating the company. She quickly swiped the card on the lock, but this room was too secure to be accessed by just a simple card. She also had to punch in a code on the panel below, one which only a select group of people within the company knew. Jade, however, had an elegant solution. She ran her finger along the side of the panel, cracking it open and pulling out the wires. She took a small device from beneath the sash around her waist and unplugged a cluster of wires from the detached panel, into the device. Within forty-five seconds she had overridden the lock. She reset the code, put everything back as it was, and went inside.

The serpent looked around the room, walking deeper inside. The walls were lined with boxes and crates. The room was a cache of Apex property. She kept walking until she reached the back of the room. She looked down and nearly smiled beneath the black mask that covered her mouth.

Jade bent down on one knee before the green painted steel chest, undoing the clamps and flinging it open. The chest was filled with foam lining, pieces cut out to securely hold its highly valued contents, a pair of repulsor gauntlets. She pulled them out and admired them for a moment. Painted black, the gauntlets were but one component of a larger piece of armor, but they were suitable weapons on their own. Jade was a traditionalist, but she knew after previous failure that in order to carry out her vendetta against Longshot, she had to attain a winning edge. She had made sacrifices in order to become the best. Compared to what she had been through before, this was easy. She quickly slipped the gauntlets over her hands and powered them up, the circles centered in the palms glowing white. The serpent moved her fingers inside the armored gloves, growing comfortable with her new weapons, and left the room, running down the hallway to her escape.

Jade could hear the echo of roaring rockets trembling the hallways, drawing closer. She turned and saw the Editman hot on her trail, as she had planned for. She immediately turned and fired off a barrage of blasts from her newly gained gauntlets. They were strong, the power almost flinging her arms back with each blast. However, she kept firing, aiming for key points in his armor. She bounded off the walls, narrowly evading small rockets that flew from his fingertips. The force of impact was enough to throw her from her path and she tumbled to the floor. Her head was spinning, and something in her might have been broken, but adrenaline and determination kept the pain buried. She rose to her feet and faced her foe once again. His fist came bearing down on her, and she immediately dropped on her back, firing off at his chest as he flew over, jumping back up onto her knees he passed. Unfortunately, the steady stream of fire was cut short. She looked down at the power gloves trying to identify the problem, but she already knew what it was. He had used a jamming signal on them. They were useless.

The serpent was now left with the task of defeating a man clad in impenetrable armor, and that was exactly what she intended to do. He jumped up into the air and rapped her arms around the Editman's armored neck. She quickly drew a small, black metal halo and placed it on his smooth, metallic forehead between his eyes. It was an electromagnet. It wouldn't cause any permanent damage to the suit, but it would cloud his vision in static long enough for her to escape.

Jade immediately jumped from the man's back and made a dash for the stairwell, flinging a small impact explosive at him as she ran. She had to get back to her hideout and find a way to reactivate the gauntlets. If he managed to track her down, at least she would be ready.

Chains dangled from the rafters, swinging in the wing, water dripping from a rusted hole high up in the ceiling. Jade walked toward a folding table set up in the middle of the desolate warehouse, the two disabled gauntlets and an array of tools set neatly before her. She had gained access to some black market blueprints of the Editman suit. They were flawed, inaccurate, and if somebody tried to make a suit based off of them, they'd get, at best, a shambling frame of ineffectual scrap metal, and at worst, a death trap. However, they supplied her with enough understanding of the suit to do what was necessary. Without further delay, she took up her tools and struggled to strip open a panel on the underside of the left gauntlet. She gently examined wiring, circuitry, and countless complex components that all culminated in such magnificent power.

After some time, Jade found the right component and carefully severed it from the circuit board, tossing it aside. It was the chip that pulled the killswitch on the gauntlet. She began to reattach the panel of black metal to the rest of the gauntlet, and finished, slipping on the glove. A surge of power ran through her as the low hum of the weapon powering up echoed through the empty stone building. She clenched her fist with the strength of a legion, silently admiring the power she now possessed. Taking off the gauntlet and setting it back down on the table, she picked up her tools once again and prepared to start on repairing the right gauntlet. Unfortunately, before she could begin, a blast of thunder shook the ground beneath her feet, and a pillar of intense red light pierced the roof, scorching the cement floor. The very foundation of the warehouse began to tremble and Jade darted under the table to find shelter from the debris raining down, but not before snatching the gauntlets.

The groaning of heavy metal told Jade that she was no longer safe. She rolled out from under the table, just as a fractured steel beam crashed down, shattering the table beneath its weight. Sheet roofing began falling down. The archer twisted around them as they struck the earth, but she was caught in the shadow of one of the metal sheets, struck in the back and sent sprawling to the floor. Before the pile gathering on top of her grew too heavy, she rolled herself upright and pressed her right forearm under the sheet to prop the pile up off of her. She then took her left arm, rapped in a functioning gauntlet, and blasted apart the top layer of debris. She lifted the immense, but now manageable weight off of herself and crawled to safety, or the closest thing to it within the walls of this crumbling structure. She sat against what remained of the wall and examined the damage. Her body had been bashed and cut in the ordeal. Two of the arrows on her back had been broken, leaving only six, and her bow was buried somewhere in the wreckage. She flicked the side of her eyepiece and gazed up through the decimated roof to the man in the suit, hovering in the night sky, his powerful form eclipsing the moon. She had nothing to say to him. She raised her left hand and let the repulsor speak for her.