[BMC] Purge (Captives + ISS/Mercs)

[A Wandering Esper]

Dioptase didn't scream.

She didn't even get the time to.

The last thing she saw was her - Tanzanite, Aree - and then the world faded to black just as the captain's broken body hit the floor, eyes still open wide.

A pool of red was gathering at Tanzanite's feet, and she didn't move. Didn't breathe. Didn't scream. Didn't weeze for air.

The first of the captured negaverse agents had fallen.  

[Orestae]

No.

That hadn't been her intention.

That hadn't been her plan.

Her eyes met Ares' with a horrified expression, her words barely audible, “...I lied.”




”Do you think it's all worth it...” Stéphanie Leclerc asked, looking up at the Captain with a faint smile. Their mission was over, their time together coming to a close. Over the months they had gotten to know one another, and in that time Tanzanite had found a sense of humanity that she had often thought lost to her forever. It had been that hopeful young woman, looking up at her with bright teal eyes, that gave Tanzanite hope.

“I think we're fighting for something that's worth fighting for,” Aree said quietly.

They sat together that night upon the Eiffel Tower, Tanzanite teleporting them both to a place where Dioptase could not have gone on her own. They were Stephanie and Aree now, and side by side they looked out over the brightly lit city, turning their eyes to the scattered starts.

“My mom used to tell me the myth of Cancer the crab,” Dioptase said, extending a hand to point it out. She traced the stars with a finger, “Do you know it?”

Aree looked up at the sky, following the young woman's finger to the constellation. She frowned, thoughtful, and shook her head, “My mother wasn't much for bedtime stories.”

“Well,” Stéphanie continued, “When Hercules was fighting the Hydra, Hera sent Cancer the crab to aid her. The Hydra was the strong and big one, and Cancer could only n** at Hercules' heels. But the crab was loyal to to Hera, and it knew it had to distract Hercules for the Hydra. So it nipped at his heels, it fought with everything it could,” Stéphanie's mouth turned in a slight frown, “But Hercules was too strong, and he crushed the crab underfoot.”

Aree looked sideways, and despite the grimness of their time together, she grinned, “Well, that's what little crabs get for fighting mighty Hercules.”

Stéphanie smiled, “But I'm not done! Because the little crab had fought so bravely to help the mighty Hydra, Hera lifted it to the sky, and it's body became the stars. Those stars,” she turned her gaze skywards, and for a long moment she was silent.

“Do you think that could happen to us, Aree?” She looked over to the older girl, and rested a hand on top of hers, “Do you think we could become stars, too, if we are brave and strong?”






The blood dripped from Tanzanite's face, and she was utterly silent. There was no anger, no rage, no fury. There was no screaming or shouting, only the shocked silence and she watched the light leave Stéphanie Leclerc's eyes for the very last time.

In horrified silence, the mighty Hydra watched her little Cancer die.

For what seemed like an eternity in her mind, Tanzanite was silent and still.

Then, it started as a whimper.

A low, quiet noise that rose in her throat, slowly at first. The whimper became a sob, and the sob became a scream. It rose until the unnatural voice was a horrifying scream, full of pain and anger and sadness that most would have thought her utterly incapable of. It was a terrible noise, and it tore out of Tanzanite's throat and filled the room with her pain.

Her body slammed hard against the concrete as her struggle tipped it over, her body laying in the ever expanding pool of Dioptase's blood. She strained against the chains, struggling to reach the young woman as though if only she could touch her, she might be able to somehow save her. In that moment, Tanzanite would have sawed through her own wrist to free herself, so that she might wrap her arms over that battered, broken, tortured body and pull her close. All she could do was rest her cheek against the other girl's, her body wracked by sobs and screams.

It seemed to go on forever, until those uncontrollable cries became soundless sobs.

And then, as she rested the black fingers of her hand against the side of the body that was now Stéphanie once more, she felt a tiny bump there, beneath the scabbed skin on one of the wounds in her side. A hard object that should not have been there, with just the faintest trace of a familiar energy signature. Claws moved, and the weakened tongue slid out like some lethargic snake, pushing it's way into the wound.

She had found it. The communicator crystal that Dioptase had forced into her own wound. The precious object she had given information to protect. Suddenly, Tanzanite understood.

Dioptase had never betrayed them.

She had saved them.

“I will find them,” she whispered, her words broken by a pain more horrible than anything she had endured those past two weeks, “I will steal all of their stars, all of them. You will be the reason they shine again...”  

[MoonKitsune]

For someone to call him blind when they were hacking up a girl was a little hard to accept. Ares has shown she was fighting out of revenge, and his mind wandered as he stared into his lap.

A life for a life.

An eye for an eye.

A war for a endless war and would succeed only when the last person on oen side dropped, and even if he died now, here, he would hope beyond all reason that it was their side. THEY would win. THEY would kill. THEY would destroy the monsters on their planet who fought in this crooked fashion –

But wait…..Tanzanite was here now, admitting she did the very thing, and again, the lines blurred.

There was no right or wrong way. There were no things like morals and mercy here. There couldn’t be! The one with the upper hand was the one who didn’t bother with a code of any set ethics of any sort but the only one, clear, express desire to win. In that winner, good would come. To bring about good, you had to be a monster, and monsters would clear the way for the ones who could have the luxury of morals and codes. If Ares side won, then Earth would die, a withered planet in darkness. Only the Negaverse could bring Earth to peace. They could all die for that. They had died for that. Rivers of blood with bodies floating endlessly on top.

To hear the cries, to hear the screams, to hear his loved ones break and shatter in high pitch notes that the body couldn’t bear made him wish he was numb, but everything was sharp to the point of being painful.

Looking up, a vibrant green eye narrowed at Ares. She’d die. He breathed hard, deep, nostrils flaring as best as caked on blood and broken nose could. “You’re a dumb b***h, Ares. You tell us you’ll kill us and threaten us with death. All those people you want. All those people you hate on our side. They’ll find you and kill you. Your whole entire group.” He glared at each and every one of them. “You’re so damn afraid of our Queen that you need her civilian identity. You can’t fight us on an even battleground but have to drag us in chains. I can’t wait till they eat your starseeds one by one.” Devour them. Destroy them. Chew it between youma teeth like sweet treats. Monster feed for monsters.
 

[Nio Love]

Primase continued her weak struggle even when Ares finally moved to give her a glimpse of what she'd done. Something deep inside her snapped, and she refused to acknowledge pain. She tugged so hard on her arm, that she heard it snap as the shoulder popped out, trying to get itself free.

Dioptase fell to the ground, and the singing had finally stopped. The pool of blood around her neck reflected Tanz above her, but that didn't phase Primase. All she could think about was that the singing had stopped. She couldn't stand it another second. She didn't know the song that Dioptase had been singing, but she needed to hear it. She needed to hear it so that she couldn't hear the screams coming from Tanzanite. The sound of blood dripping from Dioptase's neck. Why, why could she hear that sound, as loud as a drumbeat?

A thick, messy humming came from Primase. She struggled to grasp the tune that she'd heard only once. There were several notes wrong, and she would never be able to repeat the words, but she hummed. She hummed them just like she'd heard the voice humming in her head earlier. That beautiful woman's voice, humming in her head.

It was her voice now.

The blood bubbled out of the wound from her cheek every time she took a breath to hum louder, and louder. She stopped for a moment, choking, and spit several broken teeth out - before she immediately picked up the hum again. Louder still, until she was practically screaming - all just to hear Dioptase's song one last time. All so she wouldn't have to hear the blood, and death.

The sound coming from Primase was eerie, and primal - but she surged her voice with a violent pride, making it sound like a victory song instead of a funeral march.  

[Silent Spy]

Requiem was stunned. Tanzanite had a heart after all. There was something she cared for other than her delusional beliefs. Should she feel sympathy? Sympathy for the woman who had caused so much pain in her life? She would like to think not, but she couldn't help it. Her sympathy was minuscule compared to her overwhelming hatred for the Negaverse General, but it was present nonetheless and simply knowing that it was there ate the s**t out of Requiem's emotions and comfort in the situation.

She closed her eyes and tried looked away from the gruesome death of Dioptase, but she couldn't fully keep her eyes off it. It was far uglier of a death than one she had become so accustomed and desensitized to in the movies. No, this s**t was real. Like a bad car crash, she couldn't just look away, she had to stare. She was used to seeing death, in fiction and in reality. But her experience with death was always pretty. She worked with arranging funerals for the deceased.

She was used to make death pretty.

She was not used to seeing death be so ugly.

Requiem turned to Primase with a sigh of relief - some distraction from the bleeding body of Dioptase. Her sigh, however, was immediately followed with a groan. She was humming that ******** song.

"Shut up," Requiem demanded as she marched her way over to the agent. She didn't really care if she stopped or not. She had emotions to express, and these days, the only way she knew how to do that was with her fists. She grabbed Primase by the neck and slammed her other fist into her face, a solid punch aimed straight for the nose. "Stop it or so help me I will rip out the easy access to Dioptase's esophagus and wring your mother ******** neck with it until you don't have a choice to hum, a choice to breathe. Am I understood or do I have to demonstrate? Can you let the dead girl just be dead, or must you continue?"  

[SpaceSalt]

Zirconia had been watching in silence, concentration almost entirely on her task to keep them hidden. The same thing she'd been doing since the Blood Moon Court began this endeavor. And it was wearing on her. It was wearing on her so much it seemed like the entire interrogation was nearly going on in the background now. Echoing voices paid little attention and tuned in and out like a TV left on in the room while you tried to read or sleep, until Hades was mentioned.

She just barely tuned in at the name and looked weary and confused as Tanzinite went on describing the supposed encounter she had with the parallel senshi while her mental wheels slowly turned, not even clicking as to why that was impossible. It probably was, she felt like she'd know it was, but the reason failed to materialize in her brain. What did she know? She reasoned that much. She was not in a thinking or even really speaking state. She was far too ragged to even stand up straight on her paws and instead was hunched over like a weary stray or wild creature straight out of the forest, curved body coming to her head, hanging low and perfectly paralleled to the floor with intense eyes looking oddly hyper-vigilant with every sign of fatigue the rest of her gave away.

Then there was hysteria. And bloodshed. And she didn't even have time to conceive any thoughts on what had just transpired before the familiar pang of that particular brand of energy signatures she had come to recognize as being very, very bad news ran down her spine.

"...Ares."

She had to inhale and take a small pause to muster her voice up to normal after she had sat in silence for so long.

"Something's coming. They're coming," She stated in her usual flat tone and volume, the final words laced with suitable urgency as her body raised to a braced, standing position, and the animal's eyes firmly fixed on their leader, rather than vaguely glancing to Dioptase, other BMC members, or general space like they had been.

 

[cibarium]

It was warm. It was warm.

The final spill of Captain Dioptase's blood was still teeming with the warmth of life as it crept in a slowly growing puddle over the dusty concrete floor. Ares's shoes were covered in it. The front legs of the chairs were all dipped in it, even the walls had caught some of the spatter, streaking downward in slow rivulets, their course unchanged by the screams and cries of her comrades.

Captain Uranophane was suddenly aware of a itchy, tickling sensation caressing her toes and the bottom of her feet. Her first reaction, in spite of her situation, to flinch and try to recoil. She'd long since become accustomed to the fact that any foreign sensations there translated into rats. But then her gaze slowly pitched downward, in spite of herself, to see what the source of the feeling was.

She discovered that the entity responsible this time was none other than Dioptase.

It was her blood -- pooling its way under her feet, intermingling with the raw and open wounds there. Uranophane had never really met with the other Captain before. She was a transfer from General-Queen Laurelite's unit in Europe, she was aware, but otherwise she could hardly say they new each other. And yet, there was something incredibly personal -- intensely intimate -- about this bizarre contact she was having with her right now, mere moments after her death.

"You."

A weak, arrhythmic rattling sounded from Uranophane's share of the room. Her chains were scraping against the chair again. Her entire body was riddling with tremors. She was shaking. Her face was practically blank from exhaustion, still, but her expressiveness was coursing its way through her arms and legs instead: hands balling themselves into fists, and her mangled feet smearing more blood on themselves and into the concrete.

"You... you -- "

Uranophane's eyes had not taken themselves off the floor, but it wasn't hard to guess who she was trying to address. For a long moment, her raspy tenor struggled over endless false starts, stammering and slipping and shaking against her binds.

"You... have the nerve... to call yourself... the Blood Moon Court?"

She was terrified. She was furious. The curtain was closing on them all, and she was feeling more than she had felt in days. Primase, Helicase, Tanzanite, Wolframite -- they'd all seen the true colors that the Negaverse leaders swore up and down the senshi possessed. They were tyrants. They were spoiled by their power. Uranophane licked her cracked lips, cleared her throat, tried to get the reins back on her voice. "Blood Moon Court... that's -- that's one hell of a name."

And then, she lost control of her voice again, but this time, it was because a peculiar noise was escaping from her throat against her words. A strange, raspy staccato, her shoulders shuddering, eyebrows furrowed and the corners of her mouth peeling backwards. She was laughing. Perhaps out of some terrified desperation, her last breaths were being issued in the way that least matched the situation at hand.

Captain Uranophane looked up, her features strained into a warped parody of themselves. Her eyes were dull, her face was bruised and dirty, her lips and eyebrows contorted into something that was somewhere between hopeless despair and an attempt at a smile by someone who had never seen a genuine one.

"Because the Moon... the Moon does not bleed."  

[Nio Love]

Primase would not stop humming until her last breath. She was sure it was coming soon, so she knew she could hold out. She would not. Stop. Humming.

She felt hands pulling her up by the neck, and her nerves cried out suddenly as all of the pain she'd blocked away came flooding back in a whirlwind of feeling. Her eyes rolled back behind her head, and her mouth parted open, but the only noise she allowed herself was that same humming. Her voice rose in agony, high pitched and warbling, but it maintained the melody regardless.

A fist came for her, punching her nose until the crack of already broken bone crunched loudly. She felt slivers of it pierce back, causing fresh rivulets of blood to flow down her throat and choke her. She coughed and spit, forcing her throat clear every few seconds so it wouldn't stop her. Her hum gurgled out every time her throat filled with blood, but she just spit it out and started up again.

Her eyes returned down to look at Requiem, now sharp and focused. She'd found something to hold on to, until the end.

Though she couldn't hear very well, she could hear a voice. She couldn't place where it came from, but it never mattered.

They're coming.

Primase's hum became quiet, and foreboding. Her cracked lips turned up into a disturbing little smile.  

[Akina Tokuwa]

A lie.

It was so simple, so absurd. The Negaverse General had lied, and that lie had snapped something in Ares, revealed a weakness. Of course she had lied. That was what the Negaverse did. They lied.

Ares glanced to the bloodied dagger in her hand. Blood slipped beneath the bracers on her wrists. She stared at the smooth metal plates, waited until the bead of blood came out the other side and began to flow toward the bend of her elbow. She was aware of Wolframite spitting bile at her, of Tanzanite's frenzied cries, of Primase's insufferable humming, of Uranophane firing judgments. Gray eyes drifted briefly to Dioptase's body at her feet.

This was not her first kill, or her second. Or even her fifteenth. And if you counted her past lives, well... it was a big number. But the Captain of the Blood Moon Court got the distinct feeling that she would remember this one for a long time, perhaps forever -- however long that lasted.

"The interrogation isn't over," she said, voice hard but exhausted. "We're not done yet."

Ares knew she was angry, but she had gone so far past rage that she felt utterly venomous. She was afraid for an ally to approach her, even Gaia or Laocoon who must have felt the pangs of loss as sharply as she did. They remembered the Black Kingdom too. They were lost just as she was. It was easy for Ares to forget that, to get selfish and only see her own pain. For a moment, she feared what her own hands might be capable of.

By her feet, Ares heard the weakened voice of Zirconia calling up to her. She was so stunned by the speed at which things had unraveled that she barely had the presence of mind to listen to what the guardian cat was saying. It caught up to her in super speed, a flurry of information dancing around in her brain.

They're coming.

It was enough to snap her out of whatever fugue state she had fallen into after killing Dioptase and uncovering Tanzanite's misdirection. "Lock it down," she said, her voice dipping back to its controlled, hard-edged pitch. "Take the prisoners to their cells for bait and disposal. Alert the Court, arm the defenses." Ares stabbed the dagger into the table still soaked with Dioptase's blood. She was murmuring frantically to the rest of the Inner Sanctum.

One of the other parallels disappeared through a mirror. Two of the mercenaries picked up their cellphones and began calling for reinforcements. Primase, Helicase, Uranophane, and Wolframite were dragged out the door, leaving just Tanzanite, Ares, and the dead body of Captain Dioptase.

There could be no more questioning. Time was up.

The cavalry had arrived.

(( The Negaverse has determined the general location of the Blood Moon Court safe house! The battle for the captives is about to begin. Part One will begin tomorrow. STAY TUNED. ))

 

[Silent Spy]

A lockdown? s**t. Requiem knew not to panic, she couldn't let the captives think they won or even think there is hope of them living through the night. The chances were, nobody in the room - Negaverse or Blood Moon Court member - had a very high chance of survival. Deaths were imminent. But she needed to stay composed, she needed to not let Primase believe there was a chance that she could be a rare survivor.

"Ooh, lets take you back to your cell," Requiem grinned. "We can have some private and alone time, and see what we can do about your obnoxious humming. I have several ideas in mind, but I'm sorry to say that none of them involve your body staying in one piece." She was always better at talking the talk than she was walking the walk, and she liked to believe she was goddamn convincing. After dishing out her threat, she continued to hold a strong grip around Primase's neck, and used this strong grip to drag her out of the room.

As they made their way to the cell, she offered the lieutenant the right to choose which way she would like to die, and then listed her increasingly horrifying options.  

[Nio Love]

Primase's humming faltered when Requiem offered to take her back to her cell. Her eyes flashed down to Dioptase's body for a moment, and a wild look flashed in her eyes.

"I don't want to leave her alone. Let me stay." Primase tried one last push, lurching forward to try and fall beside the body of the fallen Dioptase, but she was held tight and dragged away. Every inch of her screamed with the need to stay at Dioptase's side - to die by her side. Not in some cold, dirty prison cell. Not that.

Anything but that.

"DIOPTASE!" She finally screamed out, though the end of the word was interrupted by another gurgle of blood, and turned the sound into nothing but a whimper. "You've got to wake up, do you hear me?"

They were rounding the corner, and her body was suddenly out of sight. As she was dragged away, her humming had been replaced by a single scream of the name, repeated over, and over, again. The sound of it echoed the halls, all the way back to the cell.