Aurelia escaped up the stairs after being met by a volley of fire from the parking lot. Her wounds healed by the time she had reached the second floor. It was a space sprawling with cubicles until the broad windows all the way to the other side of the space, her line-of-sight interspersed by numerous support columns. It seemed that this condominium building also served as an office space. Many of its workers must have also bunkered in the residential floors above.

A chainsaw-like revving of motors hovered close to the windows.

"Not again!"

Those motors were numerous, and so was the aimed rifle fire delivered from them. Two quadcopter drones, each the size of an office desk, each carried a large-caliber rifle, stabilized and recoil-dampened to the point that the drones looked as if they were bouncing off a horizontal trampoline in mid-air for every shot they took. A targeting AI supported each shot to preserve the limited ammunition that could be loaded onto any one drone, and the result was an average 90% hit rate on any fast-moving Gamma.

Of which, Aurelia wasn't an exception.

She scrambled up the stairs once more, escaping the initial volley of the rifle drones, of which one bullet managed to hit her. She arrived at yet another office level, but not even a second had passed when the rifles found her again. Rather, it was as if they were expecting her --- the targeting AI possessed a concept of object permanence. She had already been shot four times before she knew it.

She cursed and screamed from the pain, and cursed louder when she realized she had run out of stairs. There were only two office levels in the entire building.

The only option now was to head up through the emergency stairs. They were in the opposite corner to her. She had to run the floor's diagonal, through the precision fire.

"Those goddamned drones... Alright, let's do something about them."

She decided to finally shoot something today --- drones were drones, and were nothing to feel guilty about. She patted her hip and realized that she was almost naked.

Most importantly, there was no gun. Heck, there was no holster.

In this world, clothes or no clothes, if one didn't have a gun on them, they were as good as naked. The only cover that mattered here was covering fire.

She clicked her tongue. It must've been blown away at some point, most likely during that rooftop ambush. Her pants had turned into shorts, while her top had become mere strings. This was nothing, though, and it wasn't the first time this had happened.

Another bullet hit her.

She could do nothing but run.

With each shot trained on her, glass shattered so loud that she confused them for the shot itself. Aurelia sprinted, ducked, and slid, hoping to throw the drones' fire off. No matter, however--- no matter if she slid, no matter if she stopped, and least so whether she'd just sprinted right through --- the drones simply predicted and shot at each of her probable locations.

The drones fired three shots per second. It was nowhere close to being fully-automatic at all, but when each shot was a nearly-guaranteed hit, it might as well had been.

In the 8 seconds it took her to cross the floor, she had been hit 29 times. She threw herself against the emergency door. She wasn't sure if she had opened it correctly, or if she had simply overwhelmed the locking mechanism, but she was through.

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She was through --- but not done.

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Mocking her efforts, a loud bang echoed from somewhere in the stairwell below, and voices were shouting.

"Contact!"

As she propped herself up with the handrails, her eyes had met with another one of the soldiers. His rifle had already been raised. Immediately, she staggered as fast as she could out of sight, but not before he had already fired a burst. One of the bullets hit her, and the rest exploded the concrete around her. She pressed on without thought and continued up the stairs, all the while hounded by explosions of dust and the ear-splitting gunfire in such close quarters.

The fourth, fifth, then sixth floors --- up and up and up she went. For a moment, she considered that, maybe, the group that had ambushed her was still on the roof. Those armored guys seemed more trouble than the others. Compared to rifle bullets which merely passed through her, getting hit by a shotgun felt like having the air in her lungs blown away while a fire spontaneously erupted all across her body.

In that moment, the roof access door opened, and the echo of that metal door reached her ears. She stopped at the seventh floor so abruptly like a car making a high-speed J-turn. Luckily, the door was already opened, and so she jumped right in and quietly closed the door behind her, hopefully to fool, even for just a moment, those armored soldiers who would inevitably descend to meet her.

.

Darkness conquered the floor that she entered, and there, her other senses heightened.

The smell of blood.

The smell of blood.

The smell of iron.

A terrifying thought entered her mind: "I didn't enter an Unkillable's den, did I?"

Footsteps dragged around from somewhere. The echoes messed with her guesses as to where the footsteps were, and where they were going. All she knew was that they were getting louder.

"Tunk."

Such a sound echoed deeply from hollow metal pipes.

"Tink."

Such, too, echoed shrill from the hollow concrete walls.

Tunk. Tink. Tink. Tink. It was getting closer. The smell of blood was getting stronger.

.

.

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Darkness reigned supreme. Even then, she somehow knew --- that the enemy was right in front of her.

.

.

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"HAH!"

Her fist followed in the wake of her fighting spirit, and she hit something. She definitely hit something. That something bled. She felt the droplets hit her face and plaster her knuckles. That something replied with a roar. She felt the air in her lungs rush out her mouth. She felt her ribs crush inwards, as if gripping her organs.

She felt weightless --- that her feet didn't need to touch the floor. No matter any movement she made, there was no way she could retake control.

Then, her back slammed into something. She felt her spine crumble just as much as whatever she had slammed into. Maybe such an event was a godsend?

No spine? No problem! No need to feel the pain, then! That's great!

.

Except, she just kept going.

.

The thing she slammed into just kept crumbling. It seemed that she was stronger than whatever that was.

Then, there was light.

As she flew, she saw that she had left behind a human outline in the wall. She landed on her back and skidded to a stop.

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"I learned something new today."

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Shocked. Dazed. Unpleasantly surprised.

Getting shot to pieces and getting thrown off a roof and going splat on the ground before getting right back up --- such a thing was within her conceptions of reality. James had used her in insane ploys before: as bait, insurance, or a tank, which all helped her deal with the wild realities of being virtually immortal.

Even if going splat on the ground or getting half her body vaporized by pure firepower were objectively worse experiences than getting thrown through a wall, it was simply that she had never realized that it was even possible for a being on this Earth to have enough strength to kick a human being with such force as to leave a human-shaped hole in a concrete wall.

She jumped back on her feet just as the Unkillable roared and began its charge.

It dashed through the hole, and its identity was laid bare to her eyes: a demon with pieces of rebar stuck all over its body.

Its momentum hadn't stopped.

Aurelia's strategy was simple.

She stepped slightly aside, caught its momentum, and spun it 90 degrees right into another wall, applying just a bit more force into it --- just enough to send the Unkillable's face crashing through the wall, followed by the rest of its body.

.

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A smile appeared on her face.

The danger levels were increasing, but not for her.

The Unkillable attempted to stand up, but she grabbed its head, then slammed it into the floor.

The force was enough to shatter not just the floor, but also her arms. Unlike the floor, her arms regenerated, and in under a second at that. Her very footing collapsed just like that, and she and the Unkillable vanished into the lower floor.

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Sixth floor.

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Why should she stop here?

Again, she slammed the Unkillable's face into the floor. Again, her arms broke, and pain burned her nerves. Again, the floor broke.

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Fifth floor.

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If James or any of the scouts were to see her face right now, they'd recoil--- not. This was to be completely expected. This was a woman who expressed disgust seeing her dearest friends, and rejoiced when meeting her enemies.

With even more force than before, she sunk the demon through the floor, taking herself with it. The pain that was burning her nerves were, strangely, becoming a good pain. Whether it was the joy of "trying out something new", just as she had learned that throwing things through a wall hard enough could leave its outline in it, or whether it was the ecstasy of putting an otherwise overwhelming adversary in its place --- it didn't matter.

If pain came with it, then let the pain come!

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Fourth floor.

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Even in the midst of this power trip, she had been counting the floor she was on in her mind. After all, the floor below her was the third: an office floor, where drones prowled the windows, ready to prick her with precision rifle fire.

Perhaps she should try throwing a weighted tape dispenser or something at the drones?

No, no, if those things were made to shoot at other things, they couldn't have been made without the expectation that they would be shot back.

Though floorslamming the Unkillable through to the third floor wasn't an option anymore, she was still in control.

It was okay to play with prey, wasn't it?

She picked up the Unkillable. It was flailing around with fury. It swiped at her face, and blood gushed out from the wound. Such a thing was only proof of the Unkillable's desperation.

She threw it like a javelin into the next wall with such force that it left a crack in the wall the next over. She courteously opened the door next to the hole, and from the floor, the Unkillable leaped at her.

She responded by socking it in the face.

The force broke her knuckles, but her knuckles were among the first things she had broken back when she was still getting used to her "condition". It was to the point that she merely used the ensuing pain to gauge the amount of force she had applied just then.

"Not enough."

It had barely recovered and glanced at her when it received another blow. Her fist sunk well into its skull, but she didn't stop there. Her second punch sent it flying through yet another wall.

The concrete dust obscured the rebar it had sent flying as reply.

Several lengths of rebar came flying around Aurelia. Most of them stuck like darts in the wall behind her, but two of them managed to pierce her. One was a complete pass-through, while the second had been taken by one of her ribs, and it was left sticking out of her chest.

Finding that it was hard for her to breathe, it must have pierced one of her lungs. With a scream, she pulled the rebar out. The Unkillable came rushing with a length of rebar in its hands, apparently about to strike.

Aurelia met it with...

Her knee.

She used an arm to take the blow head-on, while she moved into the range of her most potent move: a subsonic knee to the chest.

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The effect was nothing short of explosive. She delivered a punch to the jaw to disorient it, and one from down low to throw it into the air. She jumped up right at the same time as she reeled it in with her arms --- all the muscles in her body were put to work to accomplish this move. The angle of attack caused a shockwave to move from its organs up until its brain.

Even if it was an Unkillable that infinitely regenerated, it was still necessary for it to have a functioning body in order to affect the physical world. If, for example, someone destroyed all of its vital organs all at once, it would effectively be "turned off" like an automaton that's run out of batteries.

.

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As it slumped down, a downcast expression appeared on her face. She tossed the body into a random room, as if throwing away a used toy.

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......

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In the space of a second following that, her thoughts spun like an unlubricated gear of the wrong size being forced into a high-torque industrial machine...

"Oh my god, I actually liked that?"

"I can't show this side of me to the others. Ever. This is so embarrassing..."

"Wait, as long as nobody finds out, it's fine!"

"I feel so evil..."

Such thoughts invaded her mind, all in the space of the one second she allotted for self-reflection.

But, there wasn't any more time to self-reflect. She had thrown Tristan against one of the armored soldiers. There was the fear that a stray shot had killed him, but until she confirmed it with her own eyes, she couldn't be sure. If he was dead, they should have left his body on the roof, so she should check there first.

On the other hand, she couldn't risk exposing herself on the roof. There was no telling how many drones were buzzing around out there right now.

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Nevertheless, she had to make sure.