While Lucas is busy disassociating during his mental conversation with 427, he has completely destroyed the suffering addict’s wrists, to the point they’re not quite a secure hold on his arms any longer.

With blood gushing out of the malicious man’s ear around the painstakingly slow insertion of the Viblade, he makes one last desperate effort at self-defense, tearing apart his own flesh as he manages to rip his arms free from Lucas’s grasp by leaving behind the ruined wrists with their respective hands still attached to them in his grip.

Miss Masher is pinning his shoulders down well enough that he can’t quite flail his right arm enough for a proper attack without shaking her off first, but his left arm still has a horizontal range of movement, parallel with the ground.

[LUCAS, PAY ATTENTION!]

Lucas is startled into reality and sees the handless limb swinging in Miss Chievous’s direction, spraying an arc of blood through the air with its movements.

“Oh fuck!” Lucas and Jonathan both shout out nearly simultaneously as Lucas throws the gorey severed hands off to the side and then lunges forward to reach out for the recently escaped bloody-stump-ending arms.

As Jonathan had been paying far more attention to their opponent than Lucas was, he is significantly faster to physically respond to this change of events. That is, among other fairly obvious power-related reasons.

Knowing he has no hope of slowing down the Desperate Druggie’s attack, Jonathan springs forward out of his crouch, tackling Miss Chievous and shoving her away, wrapping his arms around her waist with his chin over her left shoulder.

The force of his high-speed impact with her knocks the wind out of her, and she loses hold of the Viblade. The shock absorption properties of Jonathan’s suit jacket soften the blow enough that she doesn’t suffer any injuries, and similarly it helps offset the pain she should have felt from her forceful collision with the ground.

Still powered on, the Viblade is sent flying a short distance away thanks to the transferred momentum from Jonathan’s forced repositioning, noisily clattering against the tile floor.

After she’s been forced onto her back, he kicks off of the floor with his toes, half-carrying and half-shoving her out of the attacker’s reach while he’s sprawled across her.

The OD’ed Offender had been swinging a bit upward within its limited range of motion and would have most likely struck her in the side of her torso if she had remained in the same position.

Thanks to his sluggish reactions combined with the speed at which Jonathan acted, he ends up swinging at the empty air above Jonathan’s heels.

All this failed attack accomplishes on the Addled Addict’s part is splattering a wet chaos of fresh blood the same shade of red as Lucas and Jonathan’s ties across the back of Jonathan’s white dress shirt and black slacks.

Meanwhile, Miss Masher was nearly thrown off by the man’s renewed thrashing, in part because Lucas wasn’t pressing down on his torso any longer, and also because he is now able to manage to shrug with some counterforce by using his freshly-freed arm to support him.

She’s able to push back and safely lift herself enough to stagger away, but now Lucas is left alone in restraining him, and his focus is currently fully dedicated to trying to re-grab the man’s flailing arms.

Lucas’s forward lunge does at least prove successful, and he manages to grab both of the man’s upper arms. As his opponent squirms within his grip, he starts to twist his body in an effort to shrug Lucas off while also attempting to flip himself over.

With Lucas’s wrath enkindled by this almost-fatal-for-his-friends near-miss, combined with being a bit freaked out by the man ripping his own arms apart to sever them from his hands, Lucas is significantly more forceful now.

Even though Lucas knew they were fully intending on killing the critically OD’ed man, there was previously still a lingering subconscious part of him that just couldn’t bring himself to be fully on board for severe abuse mode, but he no longer has any such hangups.

Now fully committed to the fight, Lucas effortlessly maintains his balance atop his thrashing opponent, adjusting his hold on the man’s upper arms so they’re tightly gripped just above his elbows, then yanks down and back with all his strength while heavily slamming one of his knees in between his opponent’s shoulder blades.

The man loses what little support he had and crashes right back down face-first into the ground.

These few short seconds of rage resulted in Lucas dislocating the man’s left shoulder, while he completely ripped off his right arm, which he promptly hurls behind himself to free his hand in order to violently shove downward on the back of the man’s head.

Of course, during this window of time, Lucas is by no means the only Lynn in a frenzied state.

Jonathan had rolled off of Miss Chievous over onto his left side as soon as he was confident that she was out of their foe’s attack range, then scrambled back onto his feet at top speed.

Now going to rejoin the action with his super-speed at full force, his shoes slide across the tile flooring a few times as holds himself in a three-point crouch, taking a few attempts before he finally gains enough traction to stagger upright and sprint over to grab the Viblade.

Snatching it in his right hand as he skids past it, he stumbles his way into another three-point crouch as he spins around. It once again takes him a few attempts before he can gain enough traction to run towards the task target, flipping the Viblade into a back-handed grip while he’s en-route.

As he’s skidding to a halt in attack range of the same ear Miss Chievous was previously slowly tormenting, he turns his head to glare at her, as he had noticed her starting to sit up while he dashed over.

“Stay back!” Jonathan shouts with an uncharacteristically commanding tone, his voice giving a brief demonstration of how he’ll sound when he finally reaches the other side of puberty.

Miss Chievous was hardly going to be moving anywhere anytime soon, as she’s still just trying to recover her breath. But, even still, between his look and tone, she actually pushes her hands against the ground to slide herself a small distance even further away, all while watching him with widened eyes and gasping for air.

As Lucas is gradually increasing the pressure he’s using to crush the Overmedicated Menace’s skull, a series of audible cracks sound out between the man’s pained screams, telling the tales of a broken nose, equally broken floor tiles, and an increasingly cracked skull.

With Miss Chievous as his audience, Jonathan stabs the Viblade into his self-declared nemesis’ ear, driving it in even faster and more forcefully with the aid of his left hand pressing down on the knife’s pommel.

While burying it into his skull is by no means a fast process, it’s fairly rapid compared to the playful pace Miss Chievous was previously using.

The task target is writhing with all of his strength, but it is to no avail.

The ear-piercing shrieks and screams he’s been making throughout the final scuffle suddenly cease upon Jonathan burying the Viblade deep in his skull, nearly simultaneous with the final crack from Lucas shattering his skull, crushing his head down into a gore pancake.

Jonathan yanks the blade out fast enough that Lucas doesn’t crush it, whereas Lucas pulled his arm back as soon as he realized the skull was rapidly becoming less than half of its normal width.

The two of them stay crouched over the corpse’s body a few moments longer, breathing heavily with their ties swaying along with each of their movements.

After a bit of a delay, Jonathan clicks the handle of the Viblade to turn it off, then shakes it a few times at top speed to flick the blood and brain matter off of it, his eyes never leaving the man’s flattened ex-head throughout the process.

The click serves as some sort of trigger condition for Lucas to finally start to relax, casually releasing the dead man’s dislocated arm and letting it fall limply to the ground.

He shakes his right hand a few times to knock some of the heavy gore off of it, then uses the tattered remains of the man’s shirt to finish cleaning it off as he finally sits upright.

Once he’s satisfied that his hand is clean enough, at least for now, he finally stands up, tucking the end of his tie back inside his suit jacket while doing so.

Without even turning to look, he slowly raises up his left hand, holding it flat palmed towards Jonathan.

After only a short delay, Jonathan shifts the Viblade from his right hand to his left, and then returns the high five.

[...Wow.]

-----

Lucas’s total kills: 8 [Wait, why does it say recalculating?]

Lucas’s total deaths: 12

Lucas’s total assists: 1 [Recalculating...]

Lucas’s current GDV: 17.43 [Recalculating...]

Lucas’s fame level: 6.0* [Huh? You’re recalculating too?]

Lucas's hero suspicion level: 2.0* [YOU TOO?]

Jonathan’s total kills: 7 [Recalculating...]

Jonathan’s total deaths: 4

Jonathan’s total assists: ? [Hey! This wasn’t even here before!]

Jonathan’s current GDV: 6.10 [Recalculating...]

Jonathan's fame level: 4.0* [Recalculating...]

Jonathan's hero suspicion level: 2.5* [Recalculating...]

Willy's fame level: 5.0* [Recalculating...]

Mr. Quacks’s fame level: 5.5* [Recalculating...]

Supervillain social circle size: 15

-----

Little character theater:

Jonathan, Lucas, and 427 are all unavailable for comment at this time. It was a rather intense experience for all of them.

Willy, Miss Calculated, and 23 are all having a grand ol’ time: Bark!

Author, scratching their head while looking at the metrics: Yo, Boss System, make up your mind!

Mr. Quacks and Quackette are happily showering praise upon Jonathan for a job well done. Oh, and Lucas too: Quack!