The overtly hostile nuisance stopped and gazed haughtily at the approaching, wading hedgehog. He put his hands to his cheeks and twisted daintily at the waist.

"Oh no, oh no! Your secret power is glitter, whatever will I do n—" *SLAM.*

The metal door closed with heft and force just before anyone could quite get to it, and made a chunky, clunky latching sound. It was a sturdy door, albeit an old one; strong, but not impenetrable. And, if one listened hard, he or she might hear laughing coming from the other side. Just in case they couldn't hear, though, one of the rustic old PA speakers on the ceiling crackled up with his voice.

"Hey, guys! So, I'd like to know—What's your plan now? Get Power Flab to hat dance the door down? Yeah, I figured that was it. I'm just saying this to be a good sport: Don't even bother. Not only do I have the vault open, buuut, keep messing with me and you just might get yourselves hurt even worse, y'know? Oh, wow. Also! This thing is really shiny, just for the record."

Sheffer and any who followed him would have no trouble finding their target. It was quite dark in the moderately large chamber (lit only by a big set of computer monitors), but the kid had more than a few screens, panels, and meters decorating himself, on his shoes, gloves, eyepiece, and headset, and that made it easy enough to see him standing there next to the huge, open vault door in the floor. Subtlety certainly wasn't any concern to him, from the looks of things. There was one difference from a few seconds ago, though: He now wore a backpack. Badge's sensor would sure enough show that it had an emerald in it.

"You're in so much trouble," he stated matter-of-factly, smiling like the cat that ate the canary.

Badge was well-equipped to discern the room's nooks and crannies; a little nightvision would reveal to him that the chamber was about a hundred feet across, had one other exit at the opposite end of the room, and the open, round, vault hole in the floor, though it likely led nowhere. Meanwhile, a little infrared could show that puddles of cold water were all over the place, leaking in heavily from the ceiling, but otherwise, there were no anomalies; only heat from the various computer systems and ventilation, and something down in the vault, though it was very small.

In short, there was nothing apparently fishy in there except Mako, and yet still, the charming young man looked as confident as ever. He only grinned at the hedgehog's threats.

"It's really too bad we don't have time for this," he mused almost bitterly. "I know that makes it sound like I'm running, but, well." He raised an empty hand as he spoke and made a gesture in the air as if he was manipulating something on an invisible touchscreen. His glowing headset display shifted and changed, not very tellingly from an outside perspective, but it apparently gave him some sort of different HUD view.

"You'll see in about... fifteen seconds. You can still waste that time trying to get the emerald back from me if you want to, though. I think it'd be pretty funny if some bunch of doofy heroic strangers tried to call me on a bluff and died for it."

He just stood there as the hedgehog and shark charged from afar. Their (less than fast) approach was soon solar eclipsed by the blinding panache of Wild Badge leaping in a huge, noticeable, fast, aerial kick. It was telegraphed, but executed speedily and wildly enough that it should have been really hard for any human to easily avoid. That's when things got ridiculous beyond any craziness, flash and flair than the would-be superhero presently brought to the table, though.

The boy twisted and did a sudden, low-to-the-ground barrel-rolling motion that put him behind where Badge's kick was going to impact only a hair of a second later. In a maneuver that was short-lived and outright difficult to discern, he spun like a top on his head and hands, legs out, to instantaneously snap a whirling kick of his own out at the crouching raccoon's back as he landed, before hand-springing and doing some sort of rubber-man-looking triple-axle twist-flip back onto his feet and into a full-tilt run. (The attack against Badge wasn't that devastatingly hard, though—Perhaps it was more a besmirching of his acrobatic hero honor than a real bodily-harm attack.)

Entirely contrary to what Sheffer had expected, the boy was coming for him rather than running away, and there wasn't a bit of warning for it. One second there was something blurry-fast striking at Wild Badge, and the next, it was in the hedgehog's face as quickly as if a major league pitcher had hurled a baseball at him.

But he didn't strike. Instead, his foot stomped the ground meters before impact, and he soared overhead in nothing more than streak of color, light, and noise. He had unfurled his weapon from his pack in that second-long sprint, and used it to recklessly spray a full-auto barrage while flipping twenty feet through the air at ninety miles per hour overhead, directing the bulk of his voluminous, but wildly scattered fire in the general direction of the tortoise and griffin. He'd soon enough hit the wall above the door they'd entered from—Still firing nonstop—and kick off to gain yet more altitude, slugs and brass raining seemingly perpetually.

From first impression, he didn't seem like a hard hitter or a precise killer, but he was very much an aggressor, very much not merely human, and very much not bluffing. They only had seconds more to deal with him, for better or worse.