Ow. My head.. my chest.. my HEART! Oh shit! How fast is that thing going?! I felt it throbbing like a rabbit's, beat beat beat beat beat beat.. beat.. whew. Still alive.. then I took notice of where I was, sitting on the floor with long cables hanging out of my head. I pressed the buttons and they detached with a pop, disconnecting from the brain tissue with no damage, the automatic bandage system gracefully folding the detached skull and skin back in its rightful place. Then my auditory sense kicked in and I heard firecrackers.. no, that's..

Shooting?

But this is the real world! We beat that thing! The rest of my .. friends .. were sitting upright, their cables popping out of their heads, getting to their feet slowly, because we all still had the same migraine from hell. "Fuck a duck..", muttered Sarah, slowly waking up. "That can't be.."

"It is!!", called the Anarch back to us. "Go and get your weapons! I can hold these guys off a little while longer.." Fido was whining like crazy, as Sarah disconnected his brain from the apparatus.

"Who the fuck is shooting at you?!", yelled Billy, his face as red as the rest of ours, because of all the blood pressure and the fight. "And how the fuck did you survive the implants?"

"Enforcers are shooting at me!!" Enforcers?! Why.. oh shit!! "And I didn't, I just evaded it for a while. That thing will be back for me when I go to sleep. Now get em.. I can't kill em all!!" No! NO!! I should have figured- a key Illuminated rule is to never do anything without a contingency plan!

"FUCK!!!", I screamed. "I should have seen this coming. Come on!" I sped to the elevator, and as soon as my ex-faithful Enforcers saw me, they immediately started blasting- large dents into the wall above my rolling body. I've still got enough power for this... I must!

"WAIT!! We can't take the elevator!", screamed Sarah, partially hiding in the guest bathroom to avoid being seen and shot, a place we all ducked into. "I assure you, it's trapped!" The Anarch was near us, and he groaned loudly.

"Shit..", he muttered. "All right.. I don't think so. So I'll go. Here!", he shouted, chucking the automatic rifle he was using and its ammo to Sarah. The Enforcers were climbing the stairs... and they were heavily armed and armored. Great! No way in Hell we can beat these fuckers, especially after that tiring dream sequence!

Sarah took the rifle and put them away, aiming for exposed skin (but then learning she didn't have to as the bullets tore through the armor), having to fire several times for each one because they dodge bullets almost as fast as we do. She anticipated them with lightning speed, killing them all.. but there were more. And they were probably getting reinforcements.

"Great! Just what I always wanted..", screamed Paul. "First we fight off that thing and now this? I feel like I'm in some bad RPG."

Then for absolutely no reason at all Billy and I simultaneously just started screaming our heads off using too much power in the diaphragm and both sets of vocal cords. I realized... slowly.. but surely.. I'm- we're- going insane... because we're going to die, no two ways about it.

Sarah was at a standoff, holding them back until the elevator came up, which proved her wrong about the possible trap, to my surprise. When killing someone like me, the Illuminati usually let nothing possible slip past, trapping everything and trying to minimize survival chances to a very small percentage. Maybe they figure I would have seen it sometime or a technician would have caught it. As soon as the doors opened, the Anarch jumped into the bathroom carrying a huge double handful of weapons, including the Micro, while Sarah laid down a huge burst of totally random cover fire, keeping the Enforcers away for a few more seconds. Good. We stopped screaming and started readying ourselves. I hope Paul doesn't try anything stupid.. I don't want him to die. He is only human, but after living with us for a while, he might think he can do things he can't... but regardless, I must survive. That's my primary job.

"Maybe, just maybe.", Billy was saying to himself. Which is exactly what I was thinking.

We reached for the weapons, readied them, and Billy and I resumed our screaming. Not a scream of fear, nor a scream of rage. A scream of power. Pure power. I'm not sure if it was the adrenaline or what, but for an instant, I felt like I could rip them all in half with a thought. Is it enough power for survival? Only one way to find out...

I looked at who had what weapons- I would unleash the Micro, Billy pulled out the super shotgun, Sarah got some Uzi-types, and Paul pulled out the biggest weapon he could find: an assault cannon that looked like something out of Batman. We rushed out the door in a single file line, Sarah first, me following.

I should have been prepared for the noise. The thundercrack of the Micro almost knocked me off my feet on its own, not that I wasn't off them already- flying back and forth, a bullet here, a bullet there, one aimed at my head- duck!- another at my chest- turn and dodge to the side, dodge the ricochet, get back to a better shooting position- and continually fire at guys. The couch exploded into flames. Three Enforcers were cut in half by the concentrated heat; I was using narrow-beam. Charred flesh and some steaming blood oozed out of both halves, the parts sliding off one another while the top halves kept shooting for a second or two. I know I don't have this many on the island. Where the hell did these guys come from?! And it feels like they're all firing at me..

Billy was taking careful, automatistic aim, getting one shot, one kill for every BOOM of the atomic shotgun. I took 1/20th of a second to see his face- calm and serene, as if firefights were a Tibetan monastery. It was like a cartoon- when he fired at an Enforcer, you could see right through it before it fell to the ground, dead as a rock, a beachball-size hole in its chest. They fired at him about the same amount as they fired at me. When he dodged, he moved right back to his original position as if nothing had happened.

Sarah was flipping over me, using every skill she had to avoid bullets (they weren't shooting at her very much, though) and plant attacks herself. Blam, blam, blam, in a frenzy of death. She concentrated further, and got one aimed shot for every shot made by the mini-missiles (which fire pretty fucking fast), stopping only to reload.

Paul got a clear line of fire and just unloaded. WHUDDA WHUDDA WHUDDA of wide-spray buckshot, and he's obviously got enough rounds to keep firing for a full five minutes. He barely held the thing still, but he managed to, and the Enforcers who didn't get out of the way quick enough felt the pain of high-velocity pellets tearing out chunks of their flesh. Paul's adrenalin must be letting him even pick that thing up...

And the Anarch was also shooting with his assault rifle, but he was doing something else.. singing?!

"I'm your eyes.. when you must STEAL!!", he screamed, and he seemed to be moshing to invisible music while dealing his share of pain and destruction. Another few Enforcers jumped through the broken glass to the outside (wasn't that thing bulletproof?) and tried to kill us before we blew them to Hell.

Then WHOOOOOOOM--- HOLY SHIT, something blew off some of the roof! Fortunately, there wasn't very much shrapnel- but another missile is coming this way! In reflex I turned the Micro up and blew it and two of its cousins out of the sky, the blast too far off to do us any damage (painfully loud, though)- and I noticed the reflection again, this time way into the sky. If I had hit it exactly dead-on.. well, we know how reflection works.

They're trying to nuke us. They're just using superior firepower to blow us to pieces because the Enforcers are failing. We've got to get out of here. More Enforcers fired, more Enforcers died in an orgy of gore. Remind me to recommend this scene to id Software, Valve, or Ion Storm if I get out of this.

I turned my head left to see an Enforcer take aim- who's it shooting at?!- and then see that Enforcer get knocked down by Fido, who tore its throat out in less than a second, growling like Cerberus on steroids, his jaws and face caked with blood. At that moment, I realized why none were attacking him; they were all going for me and Billy, since they had been ordered to and we were the biggest threats. Good. It means that Paul doesn't have to put himself up to our kind of acrobatics..

I had never stopped screaming, but I would have started by realizing what I did- I turned this thing up to full power when I first started shooting! The Micro is going to overheat and I know Sarah's running out of ammo! More missiles came and Paul got them all, quickly aiming the autocannon upwards to take them out- the effect was something like being right in front of a fireworks display. Sarah had to dodge a large bit of shrapnel, Paul ducked but nothing got him.. these calls are way too close for my taste, but it's a miracle we're alive at all...

We have to get out of this building, now. The Enforcers' numbers are dwindling, but the missiles will do the job.. and if the Micro blows, we're all toast.

I flipped all the way down over the railing, and then rushed them with my bare body. A solid kick imploded the skull of the first one. Then I summoned more power - and tore off the right arm of the second one, and beat it in the head with it. Another one was shooting at me with a hard-to-dodge diagonal firing pattern- then Sarah was just there, opening its skull with her bare hands, peeling the joints apart and scooping out some of the brain with the dislocated bone.

"I've always wanted to do this.", grated Billy in the voice of Satan. He jumped from the railing, pushing himself downward for more speed, blasting an Enforcer as he went down. The instant he hit the floor, he was running- and another two instants later, another two Enforcers no longer had throats, and I realized we were still screaming and we shut it off simultaneously. Fucking hell... they're not even a match for us anymore. This isn't even a fight, it's a massacre. Even with high-velocity guns and aiming ability vastly superior to the most trained normal, these guys die by the ton. And I thought we were going to die right off... we're not going to die, they are, because we can dodge dozens of bullets a second and our aim is only hampered by the guns we're carrying- which, in this case, is next to no hampering at all.

What the fuck are we now?