"You," said Coop, darkly, to the last of the remaining tiny soldiers.

After a couple seconds of eyeballing the thing, what-ever it was, he lunged at it in an attempted tackle, throwing his weight into the plunge with an attempt at bowling it over.

Coop was unfortunately left with a whole lot of nothing to probably stumble and grab at. The final troop turned and retreated at top speed in some random direction. Called back? Possibly. (The one on the ground still wasn't going anywhere too soon, though, and no sign of the one under the chemical soup.)

They had done their job, though. There was no audible or visible sign of Seven or his crew, and all Coop had remaining for company was Rock, who was almost in fightin' distance... but not doing anything brash yet. Actually, he was just looking at the eagle with a blank, unreadable expression on his face, his hands empty, and posture normal. Sizing him up? Hard to say.

Coop fell, with bad grace, as the thing sprinted away.

Annoyed, confused, and in pain, he scowled at the Monkey with a venom that, if converted to energy, would probably obliterate a small town.

"Wh—" he began, and then stopped. He looked down, he looked up again.

"What is the matter with you?" he growled, and then, with with nothing further past an over-the-shoulder glance of loathing, leapt into the air and flew up-wards, looping outwards in increasingly wide arcs as he circled into the sky to look for the escaping emerald-thief.

At that moment, as if in perfect harmony with Coop's own expression of vile hatred. There rang out across the suddenly still night air, an ungodly shriek of a guttural snarl, resonating endlessly into the sky.

Coop ascended—spiralling higher and higher into the air above Chemical Plant until the wind whistled in his ears—and searched for something to follow.

Up here, the strange, tinny smell that pervaded the air above the factory was thinner. The stink could still make even the most level-headed of individuals feel a paralyzing need for a gas-mask, but after any length of time in the depths of the place, the experience of a mere odour was a welcome relief compared to the over-powering, gnawing headache that meant that your sinuses were being eaten away, and that any minute you could expect to drop dead of some form of cancer. Actively volatile the plant may no longer have been, but there was still enough cadmium down in that water to power Grand Metropolis for the better part of a decade.

He circled, up in the air, trying to pin-point the location that the distant shriek had come from, with little success. The blanket of night was being wrapped in ever thicker layers around the bulk of the factory, and…

Coop heard Rock's voice echo up at him, and something very tiny—some minuscule, over-strained little elastic band in his head that was somehow, against all odds, keeping his temper in check—snapped, with an almost audible 'ping,' behind his eyes.

With a howl of rage, he turned and dive-bombed.

Coop touched down with the grace of an anvil, slamming into the metal of the walkway with a clang.

He turned around, anger etching his face into the deranged facsimile of a theatre mask.

He clutched his hands in the air and let out another bellow.

"NnngaaAAAUUUUGGGH," he vocalized.

There were a few seconds while he stared at Rock, almost uncomprehending, then—

"GAAAAAAAAUGH!"

He made another charge.

Coop's head snapped to the right and he banged against the railing with a dangerously rickety clatter. He turned away from the second punch, catching most of the impact on his shoulder as he clapped his left hand over his face.

He grunted in pain—eyes still on Rock over his fingers. For a brief moment, Coop seemed unmotivated to move—hunched against the railing as he was—but abruptly he lashed out, swinging his left hand out and across at the Monkey in a backfisted swat. After a second, he was up again, chasing the swat with an angry right cross.

As Rock threw the punches into Coop's torso, he grunted again—the grunts having a slightly shaky quality as the shock from the blows rattled his ribcage—and pulled back his arm in time to catch the last punch on the elbow.

"Kgggh," he huffed out, and backed away. Through some means of converting all the pain he felt to loud grunts, Coop was managing to shrug off most of his injuries, although the somewhat crazed look in his eye hinted that the big bird was perhaps beginning to become a little unsteady.

With a lunge, he grabbed at Rock's head, swiping at him wildly like a child trying to grab the last cookie on the plate.

And it worked.

It was with very little grace that Coop fought, at the best of times. He was not especially well versed in any form of martial arts, and credited most of his victories to the basic principles of nature—that is to say that objects in motion tend to remain in motion and that no two objects can occupy the same space at the same time. People's heads could not occupy the same space as Coop's fists, and his fists usually had enough motion to be anywhere they pleased, and so Coop won most of his fights.

The same principle, however, worked just as well in reverse. As the punch connected, Coop's jaw slapped shut with the sound of someone hitting a brick wall with a sock with a rock in it. The momentum continued up into the bird's skull, snapping his head back like it was on a string.

Coop staggered, and then recovered, with a faintly perplexed look on his face as he straightened up. He blinked, uncertainly, and swayed back and forth for a few moments, before seeming to come to some sort of decision that it was not worth his time to stand up. He tipped over backwards, falling heavily onto the walkway, and stayed there.

He was not unconscious, but the impact seemed to have stolen a few mental functions from him. He blinked, a couple more times, and stared blearily up into the air.

The dog-tags lay in his open hand, the chain tangled between the slack fingers.