As we rushed outside, I heard a separate rattle of gunfire to the right and the left- from the grass and the forest. "I don't know who the fuck's commanding you, but you will not harm The Dominator!!", a man's voice screamed, as the tattered, bullet-destroyed body of an Enforcer was seen hurtling past the window, falling on the grass and drenching the soil with its blood. The remaining Enforcers - of which there were very few- died to the new arrivals, a hail of bullets turning them into nothing more than ground meat.

Who are these guys?

Then I remembered- Howie's Upgrade Squad, the ones that train on this island and practice advanced forms of Ninjutsu. We stepped out of the wreckage that once had been the metal mansion (the important stuff's A-OK though.. which will be a comfort if we can ever get back here when it's not a warzone. Then again, odds of us getting out of here are slim as it is.. getting back might be a fucking joke.) and greeted our would-be saviors. Black-clad all, they scanned the area for more threats and spread out some, military-style.

"Couldn't you guys get here just a little bit QUICKER?!", Howard screamed at them.

"We didn't know what the hell was going on. We thought it was just you until we saw the missile.. are you hurt? There's blood on your foreheads..", one of the men said, his tall form and muscular structure, grey mustache, and authoritative voice giving him the appearance of command- he's probably the instructor. Blood and a quickly-dwindling wound is about all that's left of the next-to-brain cut. I didn't even feel mine anymore, instead I felt something deep within.. maybe that's where I've been getting all this power from? The implant removal itself? The cocktail of adrenalin and various brain chemicals would do it..

"I'm fine. I'll tell you later. Right now, this place is a fucking hot zone. We have to leave here NOW.", he replied.

"Yeah.", the operative replied. Another missile headed straight for us. I used the shotgun to put it out of the air before damage could be done. The shockwave was mildly painful to the ears. "Take the jet!"

"What about you?", I asked. We could use these guys.. but there's no room.

"We are ubiquitous. We are here when you leave; we will be here when you return." The man's voice had an unearthly confidence, as if all the force in the world would simply not affect him.

"Guys- if that jet's not trapped, I am ashamed to be considered an Illuminati assassin.", Sarah said. "There is just no way it can't be."

"We don't have much choice.", the Anarch said, going back into the smashed mansion, pressing the button (which was still intact), and flipping the jet over. (Hey, wait.. when did he learn about that?! I suppose he just happened to pick the info up from whoever..) We followed him from a safe distance. Hey, he makes good cannon fodder. Maybe Howard should have had one of the operatives do this, though.

"No way. Just.. no way.", Sarah said, shaking her head. A missile came from the sky again and she sneered and annihilated it with a single well-placed missile. A jet/propeller dropship came in from overhead, and Enforcers were going to drop out of it (using hangcopters, no less)- and then Howard growled loudly, taking the Micro and cooking the whole business straight out of the air, blood and airplane parts falling from heaven in a grotesque rain as the gas tank was suddenly heated to thousands of degrees Celsius. Yes, the Enforcers did indeed drop- in charred pieces. Some reflection could be seen to boil some water some five hundred yards out, the microwaves doing their job on the water and the fish. He had angled that shot well.

The Anarch climbed in and a faint, unfamiliar sss-chunk was heard from the inside of the plane.

"Run.", Howard said faintly.

"RUN!!!", I yelled. We all took off in opposite directions (safe distances can only get safer with more distance..), and we threw ourselves to the ground when the explosion nearly deafened me, the BOOM followed by the flying of shrapnel overhead, the bomb being big enough to turn it into nothing but little pieces. I'm not hurt.. and neither is anyone else, no lucky shrapnel hits, even the Anarch got out in time. Paul's really going to have a nervous breakdown... he's visibly shaking, panicky, and gaining an incredible tendency to look behind him. Now he knows what Illuminated war is all about.. and it's good that he's panicky, that means he's not clutching any bleeding wounds and whimpering in pain. A wound we'd heal fairly quickly could permanently cripple or even kill him.. damn. At least he's good at staying the fuck out of the way.

I know Howard has a submarine.. but I bet that's trapped, too. And why the hell could I actually hear that bomb? It should have exploded the moment the Anarch opened the door. This isn't some cheap-ass adventure movie, these are the controllers of the world we're fucking with. We really should be long dead. What the hell's going on?

"The boat.", Paul said. "We've gotta take the fucking boat!!"

"Yeah- let's move!", Howard shouted, taking off in that direction. A boat-load of Enforcers shot at us from offshore and the two of us decimated them, the charred bodies splashing into the water, the still-moving boat leaving them behind, the water slowly turning red. Fucking reinforcements from Hell..

We got to the Anarch's boat and no one said a word about its inferior speed or 'where the fuck do we go?' We'd have to deal with the first, and normal territory for the second. Let's hope these assfuckers aren't willing to break secrecy just for this... oh what the fuck am I saying "just for this" for, this is the Dominator we're talking about, and it'll be interesting to find out what's more important- the Dominator's death or the eternal secrecy.

The next ten minutes were predictable and hellacious. Howard placed the Micro in the water when he wasn't shooting, to chill it as he fired. Both of us were screaming vulgarity and murder at the attackers- mine in English, his in Latin. I was thinking 'Ammo.. ammo.. ammo..' the whole time, as were Paul and Sarah. Ammo. We can't run out. Otherwise, we'll die to the torpedoes and missiles and Enforcers and guns and all the different kinds of flying death getting in our faces- thank God they're not using submarines, and thank the same God they're too mechanical/stupid to shoot at the boat with bullets instead of the passengers. It was a battle to behold. Sarah's fingers were alternately clenched and un-clenched, the hand-mounted mini-missiles following her targeting exactly. Paul's assault cannon was similarly alternating as he chose his targets wisely. The Anarch did not attempt to pilot the boat and fire weapons at the same time. The whole thing was a manic dance, bullet-dodging intertwined with rampant slaying. "Stop shooting at me, you assholes!!", I heard Howard scream in Latin, and I probably would have laughed if I had the breath. I envisioned us running out of ammo and dying by getting overrun (even with the Micro in Howie's hands..) or someone getting a lucky hit and sinking us.. but the attack abruptly stopped instead. We were too far away from the island, and someone could possibly see us and report it back. The attacks stopped coming. Secrecy would not be broken. They're letting us go.. I imagine all normal craft are being steered away from here.

Now, I realized in a flash of insight, the hunt begins. They didn't stop, they just changed tactics. Think undercover FBI agents, only a fuckload more deadly.. and even if we changed our looks and tried our level best to mingle with a crowd (and totally obliterate secrecy), it wouldn't last. They'd find a way. They always find a way.. none of us needed to say anything more. We knew what to do. We had to make ourselves one hundred percent scarce. Gone. A-la-byebye. Let's see how that stealth of yours really works, Sarah..

Eventually, the boat made it to an unknown shore- there were lots of risks landing on a normal, crowded beach... although the guys following us could have sealed off the place by now. We cruised the shoreline, looking for something fortunate, like a cave or a sewer pipe. They surely had us on some high-altitude tracking device (surprised they haven't nuked us with an orbital laser or somesuch..), and were certainly directing normal authorities out of our way, so that they may better go in for the kill. Only a matter of time if we can't get underground.. and then we found what we were looking for among the seaweed and the sand, a pipe. The grate was torn off by engineered muscle, the rusted steel yielding with incredible ease. It was too fucking small to walk in.. but just big enough to crawl through easily.

And crawl we did. With animal instinct, we hid in there, Paul entering last and looking behind him. He didn't seem to be scared anymore. He's probably well in shock.. or he's developed the inhuman coolness the rest of us naturally have. Fido didn't like the smell, but could trot along behind us.

I have no clue how long we were in there. We could have been crawling for minutes, hours, whatever. We just pounded the sides of the pipe as we went forth, glad in our hearts that nothing like sewer water was coming from the opposite direction. The Anarch eventually found a storm-drain, and popped it off like a can's plastic lid. We came out somewhere in an industrial district, a no-man's-land of flat brick buildings, parked cars, and too much sunlight, the storm-drain in a slightly watery depression that was probably the result of abandoned construction. Did anyone see us? Nope... but it's midday and there are people around here, certainly. Now what the fuck do we do..

"They're not here?", Sarah asked from behind us. "Well, we know it's not all of them.." If it was all of them, we'd have no hope. "Coast clear?", she asked before looking around. Clear so far.

I climbed out, Howard following me through the knee-deep muddy water. Ugh. Hate getting dirty in shit like this, no idea what it's polluted with. Sarah had her weapons at the ready, looking around, ready to destroy any threat to secrecy.

"Forget it, Sarah.", the Anarch said, pulling his muscular frame out of the pipe silently. "Any attack from your weapons would send people coming. We would not be able to kill them all without being easily discovered by a group of people far too large." We could anyway. Sheer luck could get us all killed..

"Yeah.. hate this!", she said, sneering. She wasn't alone. "Gonna get my claws into the bastard who tried that.." Fido climbed out, went into the mud begrudgingly, and rushed out shaking.

"You'll be lucky to have your claws after this is over.", Paul said, climbing out. For a brief instant I visualized someone hearing us, taking a look.

And, as per Murphy's Law, someone did.

"Who the.. hell are you?", the 40-something man asked from the top of the hill, some sort of hard rock/heavy metal (for some strange reason I thought I recognized the song) coming out of his headphones as he put them around his neck, looking at us like we were freaks.. which is sort of logical, considering what we are.

Sarah walked up to him. "You mean you've never seen two albinos, a guy on steroids, a normal-looking kid, a girl with bladed fingernails- all of them carrying weapons- and a white dog come out of a pipe before?"

"No.. is this some kind of joke?" Do you see any of us laughing?

"Yes." She threw him down the hill, conveniently snapping his neck on her leg- the Anarch grabbed the guy's Walkman and headphones as the guy rolled past to land face-down in the water. "And you're the punchline." She looked around. "No one else and there's some light forest here. Come on." We took the biggest risk to secrecy ever- we dashed a hundred yards to the strip of trees and underbrush blocking the industrial park from a freeway, Sarah shredding the scrub, all of us hunkering down out of sight from both the passing cars and anyone from the industries.

"This is all nuts..", Howard muttered. "They can't be the ones controlling the satellites, or we'd be fish food by now.."

"Quit underestimating yourself, Master. It's detrimental to long-term survival.", the Anarch said. I felt a flash of rage and didn't know why.

"He's got a point. It doesn't matter how many guys they can summon.", Sarah said, fingering her weapons. "They'd have a major crisis on their hands. The other ones are probably wise to something going on, your squads have already contacted them. Everybody's probably looking for us now.. but they don't know where that sewer led and maybe their satellites never saw it." How can they not know? This is the Illuminati! Unless other Illuminati are actively trying to hide that kind of information... which is logical, considering how some of them, probably most of them, must still be loyal to Howard.

"Hard to believe.. they've got to be fighting each other.. but then again, this whole thing..", I said, shaking my head.

"Is hard to believe. Since fucking Day One.", Paul finished. "We sure as hell can't stay here." Too open.

"Then let's go.. that way.", Sarah said, just picking a direction parallel to the freeway. We didn't get thirty feet before there was a helicopter overhead.

"For us?", I asked rhetorically.

"Murphy says yes..", Paul replied. At that time I thought I heard something. A series of.. thumps? What is that? Sounds like..

"Fuck, they're tracking us through the sewer.", Howard said. "Probably using scent detectors of some kind.. but they're not going to come out!", he said, looking through the trees at the place we had left. A circle of at least four people was looking down into the watery pit, one rushing to call for help- before getting a silenced bullet in the back of his head. Sarah just winced and squinted her eyes tightly; I'm sure that if she was a normal, she would have been crying. At the strangest things.. but there's a method to her madness. She knows what that symbolizes.

"Now we know..", she said, faintly. "There goes secrecy.", she said, as the other three died as well.

"Not entirely. It's just going to be a bigger cover-up than usual.", Howard said. "They want me.. they want us. Nothing else matters to them now. Let's just run." We ran- rushed- through a long stretch of semi-forest, and I heard the Enforcers get on our trail.

I looked around- and got a plan. "They're not that close. Anarch, you open that, you and Paul go in there. Fido, you too.", I said, gesturing to another sewer entrance- this time a manhole in a parking lot. "Follow me." We ran around back and forth between trees, the two of them getting the idea, running to mix up the scent and make it unclear where we all went. It's that or nothing.

But then they saw what we were doing- and shot at us with finger-snap bullets. Morons. There was a normal leader with them, too. As soon as he saw us, he saw the folly of attacking us with only four Enforcers (maybe he expected something else to happen? I frankly have no idea what's going on with the stupid operations, and I personally don't care at the moment), realized his hope was nil- and then he realized what he had to do. He bit down on a suicide tooth, killing himself as we quietly and efficiently disassembled the Enforcers, Howard and I wasting the ones to the sides, and tearing into the middle two just as Sarah dug in with her finger-blades. She took a whitish globe (illumination device? Yup, it's just a bigger flashlight, he saw his way through the dark, we didn't..) from the body of the normal who had died, and checking his pulse- yup, he's a goner. Forget hiding him. Let the secrecy squads do that, we've got bigger things to worry about.

"All right.", she said, lifting the sewer cover as easily as the Anarch had. "Time for some more Ninja Turtle shit."

"Not even going to ask how you've heard of them..", Paul said from below, as we crawled into the even-tighter sewer, the Anarch rapidly scraping his larger body against the walls. Sarah handed the light-globe to the Anarch- nope, it wasn't a bomb. He turned it on and we went back and forth, intentionally going back where we had been, doing our best to confuse anyone tracking us.