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Assault on Damsel City: Bunker Buster

By Psion

All Rights Reserved

As the sun rose on another day for Damsel City, the gathered army of superheroes, cyberfantasy adventurers, and post-apocalyptic warriors assembled outside of Junction and rode out to the looming city ahead of them. Tanks, armored personnel carriers, trucks, power armor, and motorcycles revved as the armed convoy rode towards the gilded metropolis ahead of them. Everyone had finally arrived; time to make an impression on the locals. The procession kicked up a cloud of dust from the endless desert surrounding the city, Colonel Wylder taking a moment from strategizing with the others to look out at their surroundings. Nothing but the road, the city in front of them, that joke of a village and the Scrapheap Mountains behind them, and miles upon miles of sandy desert devoid of life in every other direction. Somewhat symbolic once he started to think about it yet there wasn't much time to wax poetical, they were almost outside the city limits. And already it was obvious some of his fellow attackers were eager to get started.

“Titanium Rider, witness me!" Adam stood up and shouted from the back of a pickup truck.

From her motorized trike several feet away, the Mongolian biker glanced at him before turning back to the road and shaking her head. The rest of the Daughters of Khan hung in close formation behind the Mongolian Wild Ass, the uneven grading of the road causing the stout-bodied bikers to jostle and wobble with every jolt as they continued to drive along towards their enemy.

“A Mad Max reference, really Adam? You couldn't at least reference one of the good ones with Mel Gibson?" Elizabeth asked from her seat across from him in the truck bed as he sat back down.

“Hey, you only live once. And besides, don't you think a Lord Humungous joke would be a little too obvious even for Psion?" He countered with a smirk.

“Alright everyone, we're about to enter Damsel City." Colonel Wylder announced over the radio. “I've talked with the others and done some thinking, I want the Russians and the Chinese supers to take point and advance into the city first. Normally it shouldn't matter but I don't think 'normally' particularly applies to this place."

There was some grumbling about this at first, the Chinese and the Russian supers had all been at odds with each other after the Tzu debacle where a Chinese AI appeared to go rogue and raised an army of well-organized combat androids. But the APC carrying Mao Tang and the rest of the Chinese supers plowed ahead while the three armored Russian supers, Crimson Hammer, Night Witch, and Mortar, raced to catch up as the rest of the convoy slowed to a crawl. Engines quieted down to a barely audible rumble as the main group came to a stop in an underdeveloped neighborhood dominated by strip malls and abandoned shopping plazas and listened. At first the sounds of the city dominated but after the Russian and Chinese supers went past a certain point, everything seemed to stop. A seemingly impossible silence washed over the city, followed by sound of someone audibly sniffing the air. Then, with a booming echo that reverberated through Damsel City, a female voice shouted “COMMIES!" Like that, it became clear what Wylder's gamble was.

“FOR FREEDOM!" A distinct voice shouted, their battle cry punctuated by an eagle's scream.

“FOR DEMOCRACY!" A second voice and another eagle cry.

“FOR KIM KARDASHIAN!" A third voice shouted with the same seriousness as the first two.

“Well if that doesn't tell us bugger everything about who BRICK recruits." Harold remarked dryly.

“Yeah, I'll be surprised if we don't get at least one Russian asking how their country lost the Cold War." Adam replied sarcastically as their truck started moving again.

“Attention Delta Team, come in Delta. Do not follow us; Dr. Warner of the Hospitallers has requested your help in a developing situation east of the city. Repeat, break off of the combat group and assist the Hospitallers. We won't be able to accomplish anything without them." Colonel Wylder ordered over the radio. Adam and his cohorts, the members of “Delta" Team, grumbled and compiled. It was never a good thing when someone asked for them by name; it meant something unpleasant was lined up…

Adam White groaned as he and his three friends surveyed their surroundings. Yes, the script had seen that they drew the short straw for rescuing the Hospitallers from the Fit Freaks' main fortress, a former missile silo complex christened The Dungeon or some other unimaginative shit. While not quite true soldiers themselves, the four humans couldn't see how they could do much worse then the job the Fit Freaks did hiding their infamous lair.

On paper it sounded like the sports-themed supervillains started with a good idea, cover up the main complex with dirt and set up barns and farmhouses over all the secondary points of access, effectively burying it beneath the facsimile of a farm. Where they screwed up was in the finishing touches. Surrounding the farm buildings was ten unspoiled acres of rocks, clumps of trees, and rolling fields of tall grass left to grow wild. Essentially the farmstead appeared abandoned except for the four visibly armed humans dressed in body armor and gas masks carefully creeping their way through the tall grass wondering if or when perimeter security would invariably spot them.

Except that the illusion didn't look right at all, the buildings were all too new and too clean and surrounding these ten acres was countless miles of wheat fields spanning as far as the eye could see in any direction, all of it busy enough to give the more urban members of the team a good frame of reference for how an actual farm should look. In short, the finished product stuck out like a sore thumb that had been smashed with a masonry hammer by a psychopath; a “completely abandoned" property surrounded by a larger farm that by all rights should have expanded into it already.

And then there was the question of the base itself. The plans given to them by MacGuffin's spying frankly made no sense the way they were written. Most of the emphasis was placed on some sort of sprawling “challenge" the villains would run heroes through which made a sort of sense. Problem is that the way the rest of the document was presented, it sounded like critical facilities like the barracks, armory, workshops, and command center were mashed together in with this lunatic gauntlet instead of being kept separate like they would have in any intelligently designed base. Then again, if this lair design were properly executed, Psion probably wouldn't have made it the subject of an entire chapter.

“Shame we have to get the super docs out of here, otherwise I'd be asking why we don't ask one of the other groups for twenty minutes with a plane and a bunker buster bomb. Drop and detonate once it gets four levels down so we can collapse the fucker. Or just stick some C4 to all the access points, watch the fireworks from a safe distance, then go get lunch with the Adipose Gang." Elizabeth grumbled as the four of them carefully crept through the tall grass to avoid the risk of detection. Even without any sentries on the surface, instinct insisted to each of the four that there had to be some sort of surveillance with someone watching it. The Freaks couldn't trust their camouflage job so blindly that someone in the know could just waltz right in.

No one argued with Elizabeth's wishful request for a bunker buster as they carefully scouted entrance points and tried to figure out the best way to sneak into the enemy's fortress, all of them were thinking the same thing. On their frigid home world, an alien invasion had wiped out most of humanity. What little was left hid in heavily fortified underground communities. The most successful were ones that could hold off conventional ground forces for weeks on end. As such, each of the four survivors knew that bunker fights usually favored the defenders. The main thing that worked to their advantage was that their foe regarded this as a perverse sex game of some kind while the four knew that without the Hospitallers and their advanced medical science, a lot of people back home would die horribly from the grotesque fortunes of war. The Fit Freaks would expect the four to play by a set of arbitrary rules set up to favor the chemically augmented muscle heads, Adam and his friends had no intention of playing by them, the stakes were just too damn high for that sort of bullshit….

Eventually a promising entrance was located, a ventilation tunnel auguring straight down into the earth hidden in a small chicken coop. None of them could see the bottom in the inky blackness but based on the schematics given to them by Wylder, they knew it wasn't even half a mile deep. Ripping off the grate and tying climbing ropes to the lip of the opening, the foursome looked up at a lone and very obvious security camera watching the interior of the chicken coop.

“You sure you broke into their network Nicole? What about that camera?" Harold asked.

“Sure Ah'm sure, the network wasn't that hard to break into. And Ah didn't need a feedback loop, the wiring's shot on that camera Harold and looks like it's been shot for a long time now. Maybe they should let someone other then a protein shake-chugging meathead handle their Ah-T needs." The black-haired human hacker replied indignantly as the four of them prepared to rappel down into The Dungeon below.

With nothing else to say and the clock ticking down before Dr. Warren had to comply with the Fit Freaks demands lest the leader of the Hospitallers lose his entire team, the four started climbing down the dark shaft one after another. Flashlights pierced the gloom as four sets of hiking boots “walked" down the smooth metal wall. Traversal was not easy, the vertical terrain had very little purchase and at least one of them came close to slipping and dangling by their climbing rope. The only other source of light in the tunnel was the occasional ventilation fan sucking fresh air into the underground complex. Nine ventilation fans were passed before they finally found the bottom to the compound; that meant there were nine floors they would potentially have to fight through if the doctors couldn't be taken back up the ventilation shaft, ten in all.

Disabling the ventilation fan before promptly removing it with a handy screwdriver and crowbar, the four tech-savvy gunmen crawled out of the vent and into the prison level. There, separated in their individual cells, were the six missing Hospitallers. Cynthia “Speedy" Sliverstone, the team's Rapid Response specialist, and doctors Manx, Honeycomb, Bligeswann, Brenciska, and Honeypot were all clothed and accounted for. Badly bruised, battered, and missing their signature medical kits but still accounted for. Two guards stationed by the door leading to the elevator quickly got to their feet the instant they looked up from their latest issue of Muscle Babes Monthly and saw four heavily armed intruders where they weren't supposed to be.

“Hey, no substitutions for the Dungeon Run!" The lead guard rose up as he tried to charge Adam. The human merely drew his revolver and shot the muscular tiger in the chest, then shot him a second time in the face just to be sure while Elizabeth gunned down the other insanely athletic guard with a quick burst from her P90, some skunk chick the four humans didn't even bother to look at before turning his attention to the cells.

“Hello Manx, Honeypot, remember me? Warren sent us to get you out of here." Adam greeted as the four humans forced the locks open and released the doctors. Time to get them to their feet. Shame none of them looked to be in any shape to climb out the way the four humans came in and there was no way they'd be able to winch the six wounded doctors up ten floors before anyone spotted them, guess there was only one way out now…

The first floor of the Dungeon was practically a speed bump as far as the four survivors were concerned thanks in large part to the fact that the opposition was still unaware they were under attack. One of the two bottom rung branches of the Fit Freak gang, the Jocks, occupied a level modeled after a giant college frat house and dressed like their name suggested. The four humans quickly swept through dormitories, cafeterias, and exercise rooms before clashing with the Jock leader in a completely anti-climatic fight in a massive auditorium. The only real challenge was how the rooms kept rearranging themselves on the four intruders. At first the techno savants didn't even realize this was a feature, but then a corridor rearranged itself right in front of them during a brief lull in the action. Not having any of that, Nicole hacked the Freaks' wireless computer network and jammed up the system controlling that process before the group kicked in the auditorium doors for the first of many confrontations keeping them from heading up to the surface. Quarterback, the leader of the Jocks, hit home the biggest weakness of all the supervillains roaming BRICK's twisted kingdom. Not one, not a single damn one, despite any presented evidence to the contrary, could realistically hold a candle against a properly equipped team of regular joes that had their heads on straight and came prepared. Everything, absolutely everything, about them hinged entirely on their opponents not doing their homework time and time again. Unfortunately for these supervillain jokes, that was not what was happening here. Super-strength and sports-themed melee weapons mostly meant jack when your opponent insisted on fighting you at range, resistance to small arms only worked until the enemy brought out incendiary grenades or armor-piercing bullets. Rising from an impractical throne made out of baseball bats and football pads, Quarterback took one look at the four humans charging in like an ad-hoc SWAT team and ran up the stairs to the next level as a quartet of guns took down his personal guard. One floor down, eight more to go before the warriors of Anthracite City could see sunlight and taste air that didn't smell like the inside of a locker room…

After going up the stairs, reloading, and leaving their charges behind in a quickly fortified lounge, the team started to make their way through the second floor. From the frat house to the sorority house, the change in decor was obvious before they even ran into the first members of the Peps, the all-female counterparts to the Jocks, dressed like high school cheerleaders spawned from the bowels of hell. Just like with the Jocks, the intruding gunmen struck first and capitalized on what little element of surprise they had left. The resulting burst of weapons fire echoed through the level as the mentally dense Fit Freaks finally realized they had an unscheduled dungeon run. In an instant, the tempo of the fight changed. The Peps fell back and seemingly disappeared, leaving the four humans to slowly creep through empty corridors with weapons raised. Lockers big enough to hide a person lined the walls and reinforced doors leading off to dormitories, cafeterias, and equipment rooms lay ominously closed. Behind the rest of her cohorts, Nicole Smith adjusted the monocle over her eye and switched the multi-spectrum scanner to thermal. Immediately her friends were cast in a hue of warm yellows and reds as her surroundings were awash in a sea of blacks and blues that allowed her to pick out unidentified signatures up to twenty feet away… like the pair of suspicious heat images hiding right behind a door Elizabeth was about to walk past.

Before anyone could shout a warning, the door open up and revealed a pair of Peps hiding in a dormitory. Next thing anyone knew, the twisted cheerleaders fired a large gun that launched a bola at the petite Elizabeth and lashed her ankles together before roping her back in. The blond survivor was bound, reeled in, and the door slamming shut behind her all in the span of five seconds. The closest to the dorm Liz had been dragged into, Adam White had his shield raised and his revolver out as he kicked the door open and found… even after all the shit he had seen back home, mutilated corpses, people dying from horrifying diseases, relentless cold; the casualness at which the two Peps quickly turned to strip his cohort and sit her down on their heart shaped bed chilled him to the bone. The Fit Freaks looked at him with disdain in their eyes, arrogantly annoyed that he had dared to interrupt their “girl time" and one of them already fondling Summers' breast. Adam didn't wait, mashing the button that switched on the blinding LED flash on his shield with his thumb. Like that, Elizabeth and her captors were bathed in a blinding flash of light as bright as a flashbang grenade. Closing her eyes in time, the blond gunslinger managed to avoid being blinded as the two Peps were stunned long enough for Adam to level his revolver and shoot one squarely in the head. As for the one fondling Elizabeth, while the Peps had been successful in separating her from her firearms, the one that currently had her hands on “Tinkerbell's" breasts was about to regret forgetting about the hunting knife kept tucked away on Summers' belt.

Knocking her opponent off the bed with an adrenalin-charged scream, Elizabeth landed on top of her captor with her knife already drawn and in her hand. “No. One. Fucking. Touches. Me. Unless. I. Say. So!" She screamed, stabbing her opponent's face in time with every word before cutting her ankles free and rising back to her feet. “I'm... I'm all right. I just need a second to get my stuff back together and a cold shower when this is all over." She replied to Adam once the adrenalin in her body lessened somewhat, her shirt and face covered with flecks of the Pep's blood.

Adam nodded and left the room, checking the magazine of his shotgun as he waited outside with Harold and Nicole. No one said a word about what had just happened and once Elizabeth rejoined her teammates, Harold nonchalantly shut and locked the door before the group turned back to the task of escaping The Dungeon. The tension was still thick enough to cut with a knife but they needed to move on. They may not be part of an official Dungeon Run but the clock was still ticking; the longer they stayed, the more likely the head Fit Freak honcho Headmistress would be able to pull enough reinforcements out of her ass to keep them tied up until they ran out of ammunition. Hopefully the Fit Freaks had an actual armory for conventional weapons somewhere around here…

Queenie B, the leader of the Peps, didn't even bother meeting the four intruders beside the indoor tennis court that made up the second floor “boss arena." The court was empty and the stairway leading up to the next level was clear. Clearly B wasn't quite as stupid as her boyfriend Quarterback or thought she had a chance at ambushing them later. With everything about this base modeled like a bad video game so far, the group wondered if there was at least one combination level coming up soon. Regardless, with the floor clear, it was time to double back and take their charges to the next floor's safe room before starting it all over again.

Level three was the domain of the Fit Freaks R&D branch, the Exercise Geeks, a high-tech take on the high school and college motif that was starting to become a reoccurring theme. Here, chemistry labs and technical workshops joined the dorms and exercise rooms of the previous two floors. It was also the first level that held a proper safe room for the group to rest and leave their charges in relative safety, an honest to god armory containing shelves full of standardized rounds for conventional NATO and Warsaw Pact weapons, and one of the servers responsible for maintaining the base's automated functions. The latter had the power cords ripped out and cut off the instant the four heroes found it; the armory was heavily raided to replenish badly depleted ammunition stocks. Fresh ammunition was carefully fed into empty magazines and shotgun shells were slipped into empty bandolier loops before a curious wooden box in the corner caught Harold's eye. The lettering on the shipping label was almost completely worn away, leaving only the letters “So" and “rm" legible. Inside the box were a dozen slivery cylindrical grenades nestled in a bed of packing straw. Curious, the British chemist picked one up and held it up to his masked face. Weight and construction felt like a gas grenade of some kind, he figured as he gave the weapon a careful experimental toss in his hand. Believing an unknown edge was better then none at all, Harold whistled to the rest of his team and handed everyone three of the mysterious gas grenades to clip to their belts. As ready as they'd ever be, it was time to keep moving.

Still burning inside over her previous screw up, Nicole activated her thermal sensor and took point, silently gesturing towards groups of enemies hidden behind walls and around corners as they searched for the stairs leading up. Fortunately by that point the process had become somewhat predictable, start at one side of the floor and try to creep their way towards the exact opposite end where the stairs to the next lay. Also predictable was the ambush right outside the third floor “boss fight" that Nicole spotted before the group walked right into it, time to dig in and defend if they wanted to get out of here…

Adam gritted his teeth as he braced the shotgun against his gadget shield and got ready for the horde of muscle heads thinking they could bum rush them. The barrel of the gun slid into the slot he built into the shield more loosely then he may have liked but it looked like his idea would work, allowing him to manipulate both the gun and the shield's other custom functions with relative ease. Accuracy was almost certainly going to take a dive but the sheer volume quickly heading towards him unfortunately made it very easy to hit something. Figures by the third floor someone would have gotten pissed off enough at the foursome that they would try drowning them in bodies. Unfortunately the Fit Freaks were about to see just how good the four of them were at swimming through corpses.

The instant the first wave came into range of the firing line, Adam raised his shotgun and squeezed the trigger. A burst of buckshot roared in front of his ballistic shield and took down an excessively muscular Freak stupid enough to try and lead the charge. The hallway echoed with the simultaneous explosions of his cohorts firing off at the same time. After several years of working together between regular life and the apocalypse, the four of them had learned to move more or less in sync without much arguing or debate. Most of their problems, like the horde charging them right now, didn't exactly require complex problem solving either. Nicole hung back and kept working on hacking the Freaks' joke of a computer system, keeping the security system disabled and making sure the moving walls and floors in this ridiculous funhouse remained locked in place. Harold continued to provide badly needed fire support from behind the cover of a handy awning, the British chemist came down with a homemade flamethrower mounted onto his wrist, incendiary grenades, smoke bombs, and a handful of less then lethal chemical weapons that still made the others grateful for their M50 gasmasks. After giving the charging crowd a short burst from his flamethrower, the Anglo-African tossed a tear gas grenade allowing Adam and Elizabeth to move up. Foam fire suppression systems creaked and sputtered to life, the chemicals agitating his blistering hands. Droplets of burning fuel singed his skin, causing him to curse in disbelief that his foes weren't so stupid to let the system completely fall into disrepair.

Adam ducked behind his shield and pushed the oncoming crowd long enough to deploy the shield into a fixed barricade as Elizabeth came behind him with Hydra. All the others needed to do was to give Elizabeth enough time to overcharge the capacitors and warm up the motor then… the sound of Summers firing Hydra was as deafening as it was welcomed. Metal slugs screamed like fireworks as the petite blond sent one burst of bullets into the heart of the rushing mob after another. The sheer ridiculous penetration power ensure each shot tore into several Fit Freaks in row, blowing through the first in line before auguring into the second and third behind him. The few Freaks gifted with intelligence that weren't in the direct line of fire threw down their weapons and ran away from the volley of death. With the Fitness Freaks gang heavily depopulated, the four gunmen stopped shooting and fought to catch their breaths while watching their remaining foes retreat. No one shot at them. In addition to being unsporting, it was a bad habit to spend ammunition so frivolously back in the wastes.

With wisps of gun smoke escaping from the glowing barrels of their weapons, the four humans panted heavily and looked upon the tangled carpet of bodies in front of them. A borderline comical amount of Fit Freaks were sprawled over the metal floor, dead or dying from gunshot wounds or burns. A grisly scene to be sure given that the four defended themselves with fire and heavy weapons but it was hard to feel any guilt. The Freaks were just as heavily involved in the tapestry of rape and slavery that characterized Damsel City as the rest of BRICK's criminal empire. Mercy was a reward for those intelligent enough to see the error of their ways, not something to be handed out like a cheap party favor to enable those that refused to learn. This was perhaps the main reason why the foursome would never earn their capes. Then again, it wasn't like they were particularly interested in doing things the comic book way either.

“FOR SENTINEL!" Harold shouted with a raised fist. Raising their weapons over their heads, his friends soon joined in. The Headmistress in charge of the Freaks would have no idea they were talking about the city that made them the warriors they were but they didn't care. Practiced hands went through the motions of reloading weapons and chambering in a fresh round into the barrel as the four heroes packed up and moved on. Three floors down, six more to go. Like Queen B before her, RevCycle appeared to have largely abandoned her gang and probably planned to engage the foursome somewhere higher up in the underground tower after they had started to run out of ammo.

As the foursome ascended the stairs to the next level, a sharp pain in Adam's right hand made itself abruptly known as his body briefly slowed down on producing adrenalin. Looking down at his gun hand, he found his fingers bent in ways that even the anthros fighting against him, as unfamiliar as they were with human physiology, would immediately recognize as dislocated. Apparently during the fight he smashed his hand against his shield. With a cringe and a crack of bones, the techie squeezed his hand and popped the fingers back into place. His hand continued to throb with pain but it worked well enough to shoot and right now that was all that mattered. Besides, he'd like to see one of these gym brats do the same without bawling like a three-year-old.

The fourth floor was a combination level, combining everything seen in the previous three floors in a bland juxtaposition that the foursome had started to get sick of by this point. Fortunately, with their numbers still badly depleted from the showdown on the floor below and word starting to get around that the intruders were a bunch of ultraviolent post-apocalyptic gearheads that shot first, shot again just to be sure, and didn't stop to ask questions, the previous three Fit Freak gangs offered worryingly little resistance on this level. It was a nice breather, one made all the nicer by the fact that the four managed to recover the missing Hospitaller equipment from a reverse-engineering laboratory on this level. Still, even with their charges now able to perform basic doctoring on themselves, the foursome couldn't help but worry about the next couple floors. The last two Freak gangs, the wrestling Suplexers and the extreme-sports loving Extremes, had yet to make an appearance. Considering what a slog this was turning into, the four could only hope that Psion was going to let them have a vacation someplace warm before their next canon story…

The instant they arrived onto the fifth floor, the safe room doors opened to a stage overlooking a massive wrestling ring; a blare of trumpets and flash of pyrotechnics announced their arrival. Standing in the middle of the ring, surrounded by her fellow lady wrestlers, was the leader of the Suplexers; the infamous Pancake Queen.

Looking down at her from their position, the four were briefly taken aback, not so much by her bold defiance as by her appearance. Pancake Queen was a large black and white cow with a considerable bit of girth, particularly in her ass and thighs. Not quite “fastfood all day, every day!" Adipose City sort of girth but definitely much fatter then they expected for a member of the Fit Freaks. Considering the sport PQ practiced, a more Psion-esque figure with plenty of mass to throw around was not something they wanted to see. Unfortunately given that so far she had the most description out of all of these throwaway Fit Freak morons, the odds that she might become an official character later were high. After all, the unpublished All-Stars could still use a wrestler…

“WHO ARE YOU ASSHOLES?" The spandex-clad bovine wrestler shouted at the four paramilitary types that dared to enter her arena.

“MY NAME IS JOHN CENA!!!!" Adam shouted right back as the trumpets continued to play; the rodent selling barbeque sandwiches back in Damsel City wasn't the only one that could wield the power of Memes.

All apparent WWE fans, the Suplexers were not particularly amused by Adam's attempt at humor. Yet more concerning was how they were unconcerned by the fact there were four heavily armed humans with a perfect line of sight on all of them. The reason for this suddenly became a lot clearer when Pancake Queen raised a remote in her hand and pressed the big red button. In a flash, the trap door all four humans were standing on opened up and dumped them into an indoor Olympic swimming pool back down on the fourth floor.

Landing back down on the forth floor with a mighty splash, the four humans swam furiously to get to the side of the pool, looking up only just in time to see the Suplexers start swan diving into the pool after them. Water sloshed all over the place as each of them quickly climbed out and raced back upstairs. As a particularly cruel afterthought, Adam unclipped two frag grenades from his belt, pulled the pins, and flung them into the pool before running up the stairs. Adrenalin and pain crippling his aim, he threw wide and ended up throwing them into the far end of the pool away from the chemically-augmented wrestlers. The fuses went off the instant the last Suplexer surfaced from their dive, the resulting shockwave traveling through the water throwing the Fit Freaks around like dice in a jar, slamming them against the hard concrete. Pancake Queen groaned as the bruised bovine climbed out of the pool and rose to her feet, looking back to survey the damage to her team before collapsing from her injuries. In one fell swoop, the humans had wounded or KO'ed the entire Suplexers gang. Back upstairs in the safe room, the four intruders dried themselves and their gear off after their unexpected swim. Floor six and the Extremes awaited…

“Football… well at least it's European football and not American football." Harold sighed as they stepped into the sprawling sports field that dominated the sixth floor. How the Fit Freaks managed to fit this much into a single missile complex was a question for the ages.

“Maybe we'll get lucky and they'll ask us to play mini golf or something before we have to shoot our way past them. Hell, Ah wouldn't mind some regular golf with high explosives. That would be fun. Impractical, but fun." Nicole replied before she spotted the latest gang to challenge their ascent and made her blood run cold.

On the other end of the field, the Extremes emerged. Without a doubt they were the most menacing of the Freaks in appearance, their white and gold jerseys were worn under heavily padded sports armor adorned with spikes. Nicole clutched her sub machinegun nervously as she started to duck behind hot-blooded Elizabeth and heavily armored Adam, guys like these were why she preferred to stay firmly BEHIND her two friends from Wyatt Technologies.

Approaching the group in a tight formation, dribbling a soccer ball studded with wires and an ominous digital timer, Linebreaker, the leader of the Extremes, stopped and visibly primed the ball with his foot, then sent the object flying with a beautifully executed scissor kick. On reflex the four heroes all attempted to dive away from the explosive projectile… except for Harold Maalouf. Harold drew upon his pre-Invasion life and braced himself to do something that was both daring and completely bat-shit crazy. Once upon a time, before an alien invasion had destroyed his hope for a normal life, Harold was a young man born of immigrant parents living in rural Britain that simply wanted to go to university to study chemistry. A young man that, in his quest for academic enlightenment, joined the local soccer team, a team of nobodies, and ultimately took them to the national championship, subsequently he was a young man that was very much overqualified for showing this steroid chugging Yank how to properly counter a play like that.

Leaping up, the ex-soccer star countered the Extremes' kick with one of his own and sent the soccer ball IED right back at the Fit Freaks. Taken by complete surprise, Linebreaker and his cronies watched in shock as the timer counted down while the ball soared right back at them. 5… 4… 3… 2… 1… BOOM! The entire troop of Extremes learned the hard way why one should always be careful when playing with high explosives as they were thrown across the soccer field like rag dolls.

“Well, that was anti-climactic. Is that really all of them that came out to play?" Nicole groaned as she rose back to her feet. With all Linebreaker's goons down for the count, the way was clear. Or so it looked at first, a flicker of movement from the sidelines made all four gunmen jump, weapons raised.

“Eeek! Medic! Medic! Don't shoot I'm a medic!" The slender mink shrieked in fear with raised hands. Her foes lowered their weapons ever so slightly as they took in the Fit Freak that snuck in with a quick glance. At first she looked like just another Pep, clad in a skimpy American cheerleader's uniform dyed white with gold trim, but then the heroes saw the ring of red crosses sewn on the hem of her skirt and the chintzy red utility belt studded with white crosses worn around her slender waist. They had heard of this one, the other Freaks called her Sport Doc, the only real medic in a supervillain organization with well over a hundred members that made extreme sports athletes looks like pussies.

The four heroes were silent for a moment, faces fixed in intense contemplation as their fingers rested on the outside of the trigger guards of their guns. Normally, in this sort of story, the next paragraph would start giving a description of Sport Doc being bent over a bench in the nearby dugout, getting gangbanged by the four heroes. However, morality and time constraints meant that this wasn't going to happen. Besides, none of them was really into slutty, sweaty girls that acted like they never heard of a shower before. Harold and Nicole went back and retrieved the Hospitallers while Adam and Elizabeth watched Sport Doc go about stabilizing wounded Extremes with guarded glares. It would be easy, so very easy, to just shoot her in the back of the head and call it a day but there were standards that had to be upheld, even for “gun-toting maniacs" as the foursome were likely being called by those Damsel City spandex flops, and one of those standards was that you did not shoot unarmed medics just because you felt like being a dick. Time for level seven…

Floor seven was another combination level, this one devoted to the Suplexers and the Extremes and showed in a combination wrestling ring and sports arena with weight rooms and equipment storage facilities ringing a large stadium. As the Extremes and the Suplexers were completely incapacitated during previous fights, the seventh floor was largely empty and quickly traversed. Two floors left before the six escapees and their rescuers could feel sunlight on their faces once more…

Floor eight, the last floor before the battle with the queen Freak herself, was unsurprisingly the “everything and the kitchen sink" level. Everything that had been thrown at them before and everyone the Freaks could still call on had been sent to this last floor. All the elites that hadn't been sent to the infirmary were also on this level. Supposedly it was the hardest floor, few of the heroes that accepted this challenge ever made it past this level. Seeing it for themselves, the four could believe that few intruders dumb enough to play entirely by the Freaks rules even made it to this level. At this rate though, it wasn't entirely a sure thing whether or not Adam and his friends would make it past this floor. Fortunately they weren't out of tricks just yet.

“Hey Harold, you think now would be a good time to start using these breaching charges Colonel Wylder insisted we take along with us?" Nicole asked with a smile as the four sat in the safe room to catch their breath before taking on the eighth floor.

“Oi, is it also a good time for us to figure out what these So-Rm grenades do?" Harold tossed back as his hand hovered over the three clipped to his belt.

“Ah'd bet money they're somehow related to that Sleeping Beauty garbage Wrench Wench was telling us about before we started hitting Damsel City." Nicole replied.

“I wouldn't bet against that. Heh, maybe we can give them a taste of their own medicine before we go home." Adam interjected as he chambered a fresh round into his shotgun.

“Home… I wonder if I could spend a couple nights in Silicon City at Mira's place. Wonder what she's cooking." Elizabeth mused softly, still clearly a bit rattled by what happened with the Peps, even someone as hardened as her had her limits. She wouldn't be human otherwise if she didn't get rattled every so often.

Well, she'd be able to get a chance to relax soon, they all would, Adam contemplated as they opened the safe room doors into the eighth floor. Out there, the remaining Fit Freaks were geared up to throw everything they had at the four intruders to keep them from rescuing the Hospitallers. Time to see just what “everything" entailed…

Everything still covered quite a bit apparently. Queen B and Quarterback still had half of their respective gangs left and RevCycle, the leader of the Exercise Geeks, still had plenty of her own minions to rally as well. Thankfully the Extremes and the Suplexers appeared down for the count, a turn of events the foursome was silently grateful for as they slowly walked through the eighth floor and fought from room to room. Unsurprisingly, the décor for the eighth floor was combination of everything that had been thrown at them before, looking less like a level in a poorly designed video game and more like a proper athletics college for a band of sports-themed jackasses currently getting their asses kicked by regular people packing guns and explosives. Sport Doc was going to be a very, very busy girl with the Freak survivors when this was said and done.

Some Freaks roamed the halls, trying to flush out the four heroes so their cohorts could catch them in an ambush. Nicole's ability to see heat signatures through walls put the breaks on the second part of that plan, the group taking every opportunity that presented itself to blow holes into and shoot through the thinner walls to ambush the ambushers, showering themselves with splinters and plaster to get an advantage on the defenders. Gunfire echoed back and forth through the polished hallways of the eighth floor as the queen Freak finally saw fit to hand out actual guns to her minions. Jocks and Peps fought with AK-47s, MAC-10s, and other relatively common automatic weapons. While this increased the lethality of every fight on this floor significantly, it was nothing the four humans hadn't dealt with before. Everybody used guns back where they came from and the four of them had all become proficient at dodging incoming fire and fighting from cover.

Other Freaks, particularly RevCycle's goons, laid in ambush with a variety of traps that the tech-savvy humans had to concede were fairly ingenious. Impractical as all hell, but certainly ingenious like the fully automatic dodge ball cannon that lobbed exploding dodge balls at them from the far side of a cafeteria. Fortunately, as the Exercise Geeks appeared to be an all-female crew, they made the ideal test subjects for testing the commonly held theory that the So-Rm grenades were somehow related to the Sleeping Beauty gas that plagued Aphrodite City. There were eight of them in the cafeteria outside of the final arena where the gang leaders waited, eight fitness nerds divided somewhat evenly between three hastily thrown together emplacements built around a trio of automatic ball cannons pointed towards the doorway.

“Hey pick this up!" Adam shouted as three of the mysterious gas grenades were bounced off of the wall opposite of the cafeteria entrance and sailed into the center of the room in a perfect arc. Almost immediately the room was filled with a pale green gas with the consistency of a fine mist. While their gasmasks kept the fumes from knocking them out, there was nothing protecting the four humans from the smell of mint or the coppery taste in the air as they swept the gas-filled room.

Upon surveying the effects of the gas and seeing that she had guessed correctly, Nicole thrusted her hands in the air in jubilation. “Ah hope there's someone at BRICK's house to pick up that phone because Ah fucking called it!"

Indeed, the weird knockout gas was so effective it felt cheap. Eight targets that needed to be taken down, eight knockouts currently lying sprawled all over the floor in a dining hall that could seat fifty easily. Could be better but could be a lot an awful lot worse. Now to face off the Fit Freak Elites and then the Headmistress herself, Adam wished he could delude himself into believing the next two fights would be completely painless…

There was no way the Freak Elite battle wasn't going to hurt like a mad mother. Still, Adam almost couldn't get over the arena the Freak Elite had gathered for their last attempt to stop the human challengers. Roller derby? Really? Adam knew it had come back as a fringe sport shortly before the war with the Rik-Tah but really? Roller derby? White wondered where Psion encountered an idiot big enough to believe Americans still regularly played this forgotten relic of the seventies; fucking disco and leisure suits had a better chance of becoming popular again then roller derby, at least most people remembered those. Yet there they the four of them were, in the middle of a retro-styled roller derby arena with all the surviving members of the Freak Elite armored up like Satan's personal hockey team and flittering around the battlefield on rollerblades, their numbers bolstered from a pair of newcomers Adam swore had been kept in reserve up until this point. Quarterback the lion dressed in jeans and a varsity jacket, Queen B the slender tabby cat in her cheerleader outfit, and RevCycle the nerdy gecko girl in a modest tracksuit. All three of them dressed in their normal Fit Freak outfits… worn under heavily reinforced sports padding adorned with spikes. Three heavily armored targets and the foursome had finally ran out of armor-piercing rounds. And then there were the two new arrivals to fill in for Pancake Queen and Linebreaker…

The gun-toting techie glared from behind his gasmask as a male cheetah dressed in biker shorts dyed the Fit Freak colors and a leotard-wearing vixen resting a collapsible pole-vaulter's staff on her shoulder both regarded him with a smug grin. Sprint and Leap, if he recalled correctly. Assholes just like the rest of them, so full of themselves to think they can't be beaten by the shop geeks.

As the four intruders all had real guns and no problems with using them, the traditional rules of roller derby were thrown out the window and the Freaks instead focused on making themselves moving targets and use their mobility to attempt to catch the human techno-savants in a pincer maneuver. The gunmen countered by standing back to back, each one covering a separate firing arc, and abandoning any pretense at defense in favor of going all guns blazing. Even still, the battle was brutal. Weighted baseball bats and the armored Fit Freaks themselves were punishing once they manage to sneak in long enough for one good melee attack, dodge balls thrown with enough force to break ribs ensured that the elites could use their augmented strength at range as well as in close quarters. Bones cracked and pain ran through their bodies like a jolt of electricity but the foursome refused to give any ground to the defenders. The floor beneath them became littered with brass casings and spent shotgun shells as adrenalin barely got the attackers back up after getting knocked down. It wasn't going to end here, they were not going to lose here. Yet even then they were painfully aware that they were down to their last magazines, their hunting knives wouldn't offer more then a few seconds of deterrence if the Freak Elites rushed them all at once instead of one at a time like they have been.

Then again the Freak Elites in attendance were mostly female… Elizabeth realized as a desperate plan started to form in her head. Pulling one of the minty fresh gas grenades from her belt and holding it up over her head, she fumbled with the pin and enveloped her friends in a cloud of green smoke. “Time to mod this bullshit difficulty into something less Dark Souls." She shouted from behind her gasmask.

On cue her friends each tossed a grenade of their own somewhere into the arena, filling the room with plumes of gas that knocked out RevCycle, Leap, and Queen B, sending the armored females slidding across the polished derby floor. Separated from their cohorts, Sprint and Quarterback were easily mopped up. The fight finally ended in their favor, if only it didn't feel like it could turn into a hollow victory…

This was it, the final floor. The only thing between them and freedom was one last Fit Freak. Unfortunately it was the queen bitch herself, the infamous Headmistress, regarded to be the strongest of her gang of super-powered sports fanatics by a margin wider then a fatfur's ass… and Adam could feel the strain of running this gauntlet already start to take its toll on him and the others. Everyone was hurt bad, low on ammo, and put on edge from the countless traps and the endless parade of Gropey McRapeys that roamed the corridors of the old missile base. Unsurprisingly, the foursome stayed in the last safe room with their charges a lot longer then the previous havens, spending the extra time to relax and patch themselves up the best they could before they performed this dance one last time.

The final floor before the surface was entirely devoted to the Headmistress's personal quarters, the final battle itself taking place in a sprawling master bedroom suite that managed to unnerve the four heroes more so then much of what they saw so far. It carried the unspoken implication of what might happen if they faltered at this point, particularly as Headmistress stood at the opposite end of the room in her impractically fetishistic school teacher outfit and holding a riding crop in her hand. For not the first time since Adam started this stupid assignment, he wondered if they didn't make a mistake by not accepting Barry's tactical nuke. Burn all this shit into irradiated glass and call it a day, god even Psion at his worst wasn't this bad and Adipose City proved he could be pretty bad.

Tired, hurting in places he didn't even know he had, and a bubbling maelstrom of negative emotions typical of someone who had spent the past several hours being shot at, bludgeoned repeatedly, and molested at least once, the last gas grenade on his belt was in Adam's hand before he even realized it. Headmistress broke into a charging run, the humans readied their grenades and pulled the pins, tossing them and deliberately aiming short in order to catch her in a cloud of gas. Like that, the mighty Headmistress fell like a ton of bricks and skidded across the polished wooden floor before coming to an anti-climactic stop inches from Elizabeth's heavy boots. On reflex, the short, petite blond woman kicked the towering Amazon squarely in her cataleptic face…

That was it, it was over, the Fit Freaks had been beaten after a long, drawn out battle. The leader of the gang lay unconscious and all that stood between the humans, their charges, and the surface was a scoreboard marking the number of people who had successfully completed the Dungeon Run. For a long, ominous second, the number of successful contestants stood at a digital zero then, abruptly, a one popped in front of the zero celebrating the first ten to beat the Dungeon and the board logged their time at just a little over four and a half hours. Hell of a par time for a challenge that was supposed to take twenty-four hours. Now it was time to head back behind the frontlines, let Colonel Wylder and Doctor Warren that the dungeon raid was successful, and deal with the lingering mental and physical stress left over from this fiasco.

Back in Junction, the rescued Hospitallers and their champions were seen to. Injuries were set and bandaged. Despite being roughed up themselves, Warren's team insisted on giving the humans a look over and pick out the shrapnel half-stuck into their flesh. It was only now, once the adrenaline faded, that the humans could feel the throbbing of their limbs being stuck with dozens of irregularly shaped bits of debris. Wooden splinters from when they shot out walls to get the drop on enemies, even shards of glass, the events of the run had been such a blur that Adam had to think of where he could have gotten stuck with shattered glass during the raid. A moot point though as the Hospitallers weren't concerned with how it got into their rescuers, just that they removed it and bandaged the humans up before sending them on their way.

The body was treated and ready to start the slow process of healing but at first it looked like the minds of the four heroes would not be so easily fixed, at least until MacGuffin handed them a key to a door in Sonar's old barracks that they instinctively knew was not supposed to be there. Curious, they unlocked the door and were confronted by… they should have known that even The Lady would taken have offense to BRICK's shenanigans.

Upon seeing the Rubenesque Amora, Psion's one-off “holiday heroine" created for Valentine's Day and chosen avatar for the entity known as “The Lady", a figure apparently responsible for several pagan love goddesses in the Silicon City universe, Nicole promptly spun around on her heel and walked away. “Later y'all, Ah already know where this is going and I'm just not interested. Y'all have fun though, God knows we all earned it."

Amora at first opened her mouth to say something but promptly closed it and shook her head as Nicole walked away. The lusty red-hair vixen with a very voluptuous hourglass figure and a hot pink costume then turned to the other three and regarded them with those deep, soulful red eyes that suddenly filled with sympathy. Not a word about where the three of them had just been was said or needed to be said. Instead the vixen spread her arms wide and gestured to the pocket dimension currently anchored to Junction. “Welcome heroes to my home, where I rest from fighting The Lady's war on the enemies of Love, and where I entertain and heal fellow champions in the war for Love. Welcome to the Temple of Roses." She greeted with a warm, reassuring smile.

The Temple of Roses was very… red to the three visitors. The main hall, easily twice the size of the barracks for Sonar's decimated Adoptable Legion, where they all stood was awash with thick cherry-red rugs thrown atop polished stone flooring. Blankets and all manner of throw pillows dyed from maroon to scarlet were everywhere, positioned perfectly for a handful of tired heroes to recline and be entertained by the Temple's most generous host. The air hung heavy with the smell of sweet spices and dried flowers

“Wow… Thank you." Elizabeth managed, taken aback as it wasn't every day one was greeted by a demigod.

“No, thank you. Being an avatar of The Lady has its ups and downs but this is one part of my duty that I always love. I look at you and I see the pain of the last few hours. Do you know that most of you seem to have a slight twitch in your hands when you become stressed? It's quite noticeable even without my gifts. Fortunately, since introductions aren't entirely necessary…" The vixen began and clapped her hands and like that, the three humans found their boots and equipment magically removed and tucked away in a chest in a far corner as the pink-clad Defender of Love beckoned her guests to take a seat on the pillows and a trio of attendants appeared beside her from seemingly out of nowhere.

As the three humans took a seat and the lights somehow dimmed despite none of the guests seeing a single visible light source, Amora and her helpers smiled and began to dance. It started slow, moving with an exaggerated sway before picking up in pace. Styles seemed to blend into one another, across time periods and cultures, yet the message of desire remained the same. Hips shifted from left to right in perfect choreography, the reclining heroes briefly wondered how much practice this must have taken or if the vixen and her fellows were just so naturally gifted. And what a diverse bunch of beauties The Lady's Avatar had for backup dancers. The attendants began to weave in and out of the vixen's performance effortlessly, whether by magic or simple stagecraft Adam and his friends couldn't tell. A dizzying array of anthro species representing all sorts of seemingly forgotten ancient cultures from Norse and Egyptian to Indian and Japanese; graceful and athletic, fat and stout, every manner of big and small… and it was all an elaborate tease, the three realized as the performance reached its climax.

With the considerable mental powers she demonstrated both now and the last time she appeared, it was no big surprise for any of the humans to discover that Amora instinctively knew what “their kind of woman" was. But of course, where would be the fun for her if she didn't drag it out a little before presenting the handmaidens selected for her visitors? With a playful little wink, the mystical heroine danced her way into the background as the three attendants stepped forward and continued Amora's provocative dancing. Each human found himself or herself drawn to the anthros now dancing in the foreground, the chosen maidens captivating their attention so utterly that it might as well have been an entirely private performance.

For Harold, Amora summoned forth a gray furred feline wrapped in Egyptian finery and carrying an enticing hourglass figure, not quite as robust as who Amora had picked for Adam and Elizabeth but still quite curvy and thick in all the right places. The golden-eyed feline giggled as she danced closer and tempted the reclining chemist with a playful fondling of her F-cup breasts. Short black hair somehow managed to stay in place despite how swiftly the feline moved before she crawled up to him on her hands and knees and carefully settling in his lap to avoid bruising him any more then the Fit Freaks already did. Harold likely wouldn't have noticed even if she did, the intoxicating caress of her lips on his face seemed to wash away all of his lingering pains...

For Adam and Elizabeth, two “dude" bros with similar tastes in women, Amora had brought a pair of ursine Valkyries that looked eager to carry the two modern-day Vikings into Valhalla… or at least the brown bear sows' personal chambers in the Temple of Roses. Blond, blue eyed, and with stout, pear-shaped bodies clad in leathers and furs that looked about a size too small for the mighty shield maidens they contained. Both bear girls positively oozed confidence in how they presented themselves, eying their playmates with a smug grin as they flaunted thunderous hips and turned to wiggle generously rounded rumps at the two humans with a “Yes, you earned ALL of this!" glint in their eyes. Adam returned their cocky grins with one of his own and even Elizabeth, still a bit rattled by her experiences in the Fit Freaks' dungeon, managed a slight smile as the Valkyries stepped down and made themselves comfortable with the two unoccupied humans. White's lap vanished beneath one Valkryie's abundant rear as he found himself in roughly the same position Harold was in while Elizabeth, her concubine sensing her persistent unease, was gently held against the other bear's soft breasts. For all their upfrontness, the bears definitely knew how to handle warriors nursing broken bones or fragmented minds.

Amora smiled and finished her dance as her handmaidens began to get better acquainted with their chosen champions. Stepping forward with a confident strut, the hyper-endowed vixen regarded her three guests with a nod. “Did I pick well?" She asked with a knowing giggle.

“Heh… do you even have to ask?" Adam smiled as he stared in the pale blue eyes of Amora's attendant. “Though if you don't mind me mentioning… I'm surprised the madam of the house isn't on the menu." He asked as politely as he could manage.

Amora replied to his comment with a short giggle fit. “Oh Mr. White, I'm not a menu item… I'm the complimentary appetizer that comes with every entrée." The mystical guardian of Love replied mischievously as she playfully eyed the three of them up, vulpine hands letting her top loosen ever so slightly and give her heroes a peek at her considerable breasts. Yes, the three of them were looking at one wild night indeed… once their “everything" stopped hurting and their bodies ceased to feel like one massive bruise that is.