The kid forwent cocky posturing for a ready stance, himself, looking markedly cautious, at least for someone so confident. As transparent as he seemed, though, getting a read on him might have been a fishier ordeal than it looked on the surface.

"What?" he blurted with a quick little laugh. (He poked at his headset once or twice for some reason.) "You don't wanna know the other reason I'm here?"

"Ughhh," Coop groaned, "do I?"

"Actually, yeeeah, probably not," Seven conceded with a falsely pained grimace.

Though he spared Coop the details, there was a distant blast, clank and clatter from a lower floor on the building that told the story in full to the burly bird. Somewhere down below, a group of wiry, helmeted figures stood in near total darkness in front of a formidable metal door, which had just been defeated with a careful application of explosive paste and a swift, synchronized kick from two of the eight invaders.

"Easier to talk somebody to death than fight'em to death, you know?" Seven chirped with a big grin, then turned tail and took off into the hall in a blur.

If Seven had bothered watching the gears turn behind Coop's head, it might have been quite gratifying. There was the initial confusion, and then apprehension, and then a ferocious mental back-pedalling as panic began to rise behind the massive Eagle's eyes.

This all took place in a few seconds, after which the Eagle came out of his crippling mental stasis, and exploded forward, propelling himself into a run. His wings beat heavily, blasting dust into the air with their downdraft as he thundered down the hall after the noise.

As Seven ran through a series of lit rooms, he might have noticed an inordinate amount of what appeared to be waxed red yarn, looped in great, figure-eight shaped bundles. On another table might be seen a collection of glass dishes filled with strange, white paste. Brass firing pins lined a table—some of them already clamped shut around bits of cord, or stuck up to their hilts in carefully cut blocks of what appeared to be waxy play-do. Pieces of electronics lay scattered along another table, where a small soldering iron lay, gently cooling, on a stand.

Anyone with a passing interest in explosive compounds might at that point have felt a great unease in their soul as they ran through the room.

The sight of the room was, however, quickly lost in the blur of the chase. Coop rushed up to a desk, stopping to grab the grenade launcher, and hurtled onwards down towards the vault, deep in the building, where the Chaosol emerald was being held.

Rage creased his face, deep lines sinking into the surface of his skin as he snarled in silent hatred. He rushed up to the edge of the stairwell, and leapt over. He dropped through the air, taking the shortest possible route to the bottom-most floor before—he hoped, the miniature home invader could reach it.

Seven's speed made Coop's rage all the harder to act on. He had taken the same reckless leap down the stairwell as the eagle, and just seconds before him. For all the fall seemed to bother him, the boy might as well have been made of rubber; he made nary a noise when he hit the bottom and shot into the hall.

Awaiting him was his infiltration team. Were one expecting burly men clad in tactical vests and armor and carrying guns, the reality would be far from it. The five gangly figures that were emerging from the reinforced, secured (but now breached) room down the hall and around the corner were an uncoordinated looking mess wearing rudimentary blue jumpsuits. With their metal helmets glinting in the dark and yellow eye lenses aglow, they ducked out of the room with odd postures and gaits, swerving and looking about not unlike a loosely organized squad of paranoid schizophrenics hopped up on adrenaline. Several of them carried satchels, at least one of which held a Chaos Emerald or a Chaosol Emerald, or both. Neither had been left behind, whatever the case; in the makeshift vault they left behind, an electrified dome-like cage of sorts lay sparking and mangled off to the side next to where it had once covered some elaborately shielded case the emeralds were previously stowed in.

Tough, dark hoses connected the strange soldiers' bodies and limbs to devices worn like backpacks, while white and transparent cylinders, pulsating with green light, protruded asymmetrically from the backs of their heads. They looked absolutely alien in every way, and a little awkward to boot. When they saw Seven had rejoined them, though, they darted like cheetahs.

Down the hall ahead, across a dark, open room of abandoned desks and collapsing cubicles, a barricaded, boarded-over window exploded outward on cue, spilling harsh, orangish artificial light into the building. The entire group leaped out in perfectly organized single file, across a significant gap filled with noxious purple chemicals, and landed on a precarious platform that, from the looks of things, was once the top of a chemical storage tank.

A tall, metal tower standing in relative solitude, its guts of pipe and wiring splayed open amidst grey steel beams and weathered yellow-and-black-painted caution stripes, stretched upward to a flat platform overhead where a small VTOL dropship waited for its passengers. The six immediately launched up the side of the structure and began to scale fluidly but chaotically, like a small cluster of spiders.

Coop erupted from the hole in the side of the building without breaking stride, picking up into the air with a backwards angling of his wings. He swooped up, taking only a few seconds to locate the final destination of the deranged pack of cyborg ninjas that had made off with his entire end-game with only thirty seconds of carelessness.

There—ship. He saw the drop-ship waiting there. His mind raced. There was no way he could disable it if it was at all armoured. The grenades he had would char its armour, nothing more, and he could only make one feasible shot before he would be in danger of them reaching the top.

As he circled higher, his brain began to pick out features of the drop-ship, he could see—he couldn't see a canopy—no weak point there. He could see an entry hatch—some kind of… wing system… and…

He dove towards the drop-ship where four super-quiet turbines were humming, spinning at speeds just sort of take-off velocity in readiness for the rapidly arriving team of invaders, and crashed onto the roof. Splitting open the back of the grenade launcher, he hurriedly shoved one of the glossy black grenades into the breach of the device before snapping it back shut with one hand, like cracking a whip.

With his other hand he had brought his blast mask down over his face, and—taking only minimal time to brace himself against the impending spray of shrapnel, he clenched his jaw, braced his hand against the top of the barrel, and fired down into one of the turbines.

Seven grasped the side of the tower, looking over its top as the transport burned and flamed. The grenade worked as intended; while the blast was impressive, it did not create any movie-caliber explosion, but it did cause the turbine on that corner of the craft to grind to a squeaking, screeching halt, not unlike how one might imagine a cheese grater to sound against a chalkboard.

Knowing that a hostile was on board, and that they were under fire, the pilot took off without his passengers—or tried to, anyway. The other three engines revved, the bulky VTOL crookedly ascended, tilted and veered off in the direction of its destroyed engine, and the pilot struggled to make corrections. The machine could clearly still fly with only three, but it wasn't doing a very good job of it. However, it wasn't alone: a smaller drone, barely detectable with its super-silent engines and slim profile, stationed some hundred meters out, lined itself up and fired a volley of brightly-burning plasma bolts at the eagle, narrowly skimming the shots above the flat top of the VTOL.

Seven and his bizarre jumpsuit crew meanwhile pulled themselves the rest of the way atop the broad platform atop the tower. He contemplated his options.

"That guy's pretty tough, don't you think?" the boy observed inanely. None of his cohorts seemed to have the presence of mind to reply, and only stared at him vacantly.

Coop stumbled and flapped awkwardly as the ship began to drift up off the platform. Staggering, he looked around, squinting through the blast mask for something to get footing on amidst the mass of smooth, matte exterior plates, and saw…

A momentary flash, in the distance, low over the horizon. The flash repeated itself several times, but by the second flash, Coop had lurched to his left, out of the way of the incoming stream of fire.

"Hngrm!" He grunted to himself, hunching over on the top of the dropship as it lifted further into the air. He popped the shell of the previous grenade out of the launcher, and whipped it in the direction of one of the other engines' intakes.

Removing another grenade from a pouch on his bandolier, Coop began to load it into the breach of the his grenade launcher. His eyes burned from the smoke of the destroyed engine, and for a second, he had to feel which way to align the cone of the grenade before it slid down into the barrel.

The failure of its first volley ascertained, the drone opened up with a second, fully-automatic spray of searing little plasma toroids, thumping out several per second. Some actually struck the VTOL itself, but most seemed to do a very good job of homing in on the eagle. The rate of fire diminished within seconds, though, possibly due to barrel overheating.

Seven meanwhile sorted through one of his troops' satchels, collecting a few cylindrical canisters, for whatever purpose. He didn't seem too hasty or worried.

Coop, intensely focused on his task as he was, and limited by the closed field of vision afforded by the small visor in his mask, did not see the next burst of fire coming.

As the first bolt struck, just in front of him, he jerked backwards. The next bolts arrived split-seconds later, peppering the ship with charred pock-marks, and skimming over the surface. Coop felt his left arm convulse, and was aware of a searing pain that spread up his arm. There was a distinct sensation of having his brain lining riveted to the inside of his skull, and then Coop was tumbling sideways off the side of the drop-ship.

For a moment, he sailed down, falling past the tower in a indistinct pile of smoking feathers. Then he spread his wings out again. They caught the air with a snap, slowing his descent to a glide.

The trigger of the grenade launcher had been caught in Coop's fingers as he fell, and by the narrowest of narrow margins, he had managed to hold onto it as he brought himself down to ground level, where he promptly collapsed onto his knees.

He pushed himself up onto his arms, and ripped the blast mask off. His slightly blood-shot eyes stared out of his already-black face through the extra coating of smoke-stains that had gathered on his features.

"You—" he spat under his breath, teetering upright, "I'm going to make you choke on your helicopter, you toy super-hero."

He ripped out another grenade, stuffing it into the back it into the back of the grenade launcher, and snapping the breach shut like he was snapping someone's neck.

"Right," he hissed, sighting the barrel of the grenade launcher up at the drop-ship as it slid crab-ways through the sky.

"Eat it."

He pulled the trigger.

*Toomp*

Such a charming, satisfying sound. Seven watched the grenade arc overhead, sailing almost delicately through the air to its target. Like most things Coop did with explosives, that one shot was a small work of art in itself: not only did it connect as directly as it possibly could with the turbine, but the turbine was also the least convenient one that could have been hit. It was on the same side as the first one he blasted. That said, all the craft's weight on that side plummeted, all of its thrust on the other side rotated it over, and in no time, the whole dropship zoomed right over Seven and his troops' heads (prompting them all to duck and shield themselves, as it only very narrowly missed taking out the whole tower in the process).

The ship clipped large pipe main, ripping it in half and skewing its own flight into a mad cartwheel. It then collided with a nearby chemical storage tank, which copiously spilled green fluid and caused a rust-colored, noxious cloud to form some distance away. The flaming ship meanwhile sank quickly into the chemical soup below.

The boy flung out a hand in some sort of signal motion, wordless for once. Three of his cohorts instantly took a flying leap off the platform, landed on a catwalk, and charged with inhuman speed at the eagle, their locomotion loose and flappy, and their ensuing acrobatics completely erratic. Their metal-bound wrists and hands, emanating a strange glow, were evidently somehow CE-charged; a successful blow, though not enough to take down a man of bulk like Coop, would quickly make most any target wary.

While Seven watched, a warning tone shot through his ear. His HUD, with its radar-like overview, showed a pair of potential hostiles coming in fast.

"Beauty, ID," he commanded abruptly.

"Unknown," BIU-D replied just as curtly.

"It's not the two from our break-in?" he asked, brows suddenly flat.

"Negative. They may still be in the area, but I have detected no other movement yet," reaffirmed BIU-D. "The incoming hostiles are not them. Hostiles appear to be two non-human primates."

"... Rogers' crew," mumbled Seven in realization. He gestured toward one of his troops. It produced his SMG from its satchel and placed it in his hand.

As the things, whatever they were, raced towards him, Coop turned to face them, squaring his shoulders in preparation for the attack.

He let the grenade launcher, still clasped in his right hand, slip down through his grip until he was holding onto the end of the barrel like the handle of a crowbar. Swinging it back, and flipping it around in his hand, to get a feel for it, he held the thing with the hooked end of the stock angled forward into the swing.

As the first of the three loping mini-soldiers reached him, he did a crooked, almost awkward-looking hop-skip to the left, before abruptly bringing up his arm and punching forward at the sprinter's chest, using the butt of the gun as an extension of his fist.