Operation time: 0200 hours

Personnel: Nest elimination squad 3-E and criminal activity squad A-3

Objectives: Eliminate all infected in the vicinity and terminate all operations by any means necessary

This isn't the usual mission for Ananke. The usual mission takes place far out from Stronghold, not in the heart of the city, deep underground. The usual mission is spread out over No-Man's-Land, with radios closing the distance between you and your nearest operative. The usual mission doesn't involve squads from other teams, requiring the strained teamwork that comes when two branches intermingle in ways they're not supposed to.

And yet, here Ananke stands, one of four nest elimination operatives assigned to charge into this building, with the express mission of killing every infected inside. Two people from criminal activity flank her; she pays them no mind. Their job is to track down every human inside these wall and arrest them for either perpetrating or participating in these 'infected fights'. Her job is to fixate solely on the infected. Whatever politics goes on behind the scenes- the Spades, the Jabberwockies- isn't of any concern to her. She's just here to do what she does best.

She gestures to the door they're about to knock down. Other branches have more subtle ways of entering. Nest elimination does not do subtle, not with their guns and bombs and heavy armor. "Everyone at the ready?" It feels strange not to hear the answer filtered through radio waves and a long, stretching distance. "Alright. Begin in three, two, one..."

Everything happens in short order. The door is broken down. Her team bursts through, shouting orders to lay on the ground and stay there. The informant who had tipped them off had been kind enough to provide schematics of the building; they were on a balcony that would give them a view of the arena from above, and so Ananke circles around the edge until she finds what she's finds it.

And there it is. The snarling, drooling thing she's become accustomed to seeing. It feeds on two victims, already future corpses. Somehow, in the cramped confined of the urban building, surrounded by iron bars and now-spooked bystanders, it looks larger than usual.

It doesn't matter. That just makes it a bigger target.

Ananke draws aim, holds her breath, and begins to fire.

In a perfect world, this operation would have gone off without a hitch. Criminal activities would have restrained all the witnesses, kept them in check, Ananke and her team would have located all the infected without issue, and with a few well places bullets (and knives, and explosives if it really came down to it), every monster in the building would have been wiped out in the matter of an hour.

Of course, this world is far from perfect, and even the most carefully laid out plans can be derailed by none other than mass human stupidity.

Civilians are supposed to follow orders from military without question and without hesitation. Even without the training and discipline drilled into them, they're all aware of the law, and the consequences of breaking it. The unspoken rules were clear- you either obeyed, or suffered the consequences.

And yet, some of them decide not to obey. Some of them scream, some of them run, and some of them, bafflingly, resist arrest, as if being put in jail is worse than being eating alive by a living nightmare. It slows down the plan, prevents Ananke from locating the nearest infected as soon as she'd like, but it doesn't stop her from succeeding eventually. Herding in the humans is squad A-3's business. Her job is to kill every vampire in sight as quickly as possible.

Trapped in the pit serving as the area, the reaper is isolated, save for two victims that can already be written off as dead. It's easy enough for Ananke to localize her fire, and even though the reaper survives the first clip, the specialist can see it bleeding and slowing. Another round or two will put it down. This is good.

Then a stranger decides to grab her gun.

Ananke freezes.

She's unsure of what to do, mostly because no one has ever been so monumentally stupid enough to do this before. The possibility isn't even listed as a training scenario. “Are you crazy!?” The blond man snarls, as if he isn't the insane one for interfering with a military soldier's mission. “You could hit one of your own men!” He tries to convince her to stop, as if doing so won't mean risking exponentially more lives, military or not.

Not to say that friendly fire isn't a possibility, but Ananke and her team have trained to minimize the risk as much as possible. They've done countless drills, run countless scenarios, practicing and calculating and simulating dozens of formations to make each member as safe and effective as possible.

But explaining all this to this stranger, who is more an obstacle than a person at this point, would take too long.

"Let. Go," Ananke sees, jerking her weapon back in an attempt to free it. "You are obstructing official military business." It's a standard line, fed to her by protocol, but what she'd really like to say is 'or would you rather the Reaper eat us all first'.

He's an idiot. He's simple. He got dropped on his head as a child and the doctors couldn't save this. That's all Ananke can really think, can guess as to why this man, who is currently in a building with a man-eating super-powered creature, thinks it best to deprive her of the use of her gun, one of the few things that can kill said monster. Clearly he doesn't respect authority, but he also doesn't seem to care to use his head and think about all the people that will most definitely die because of his actions, compared to the people who might have died if he had done nothing.

She'd walk him through the math like a small, small child if time weren't so of the essence.

As it is, she's a little short and therefore must get down to business. Unlike Ettie, Ananke's voice is clipped and clinical, wiped clean of any ego. She is not so much a person while on the clock than she is a machine. "That's a shame. Then so will I." And so the soldier puts her foot down. Squarely down on the man's crotch, in fact. And just in time too, because the reaper down below had just caught sight of them, and sensing their distraction, had jumped and leaped its way up to the balcony the two were on.

Ananke always forgets how far these creatures can jump. Luckily, she's quick to remember again.

In the air, there's no were for the Reaper to dodge, and with a flick of her newly freed weapon, the soldier's bullets find themselves lodged comfortable into the center of the vampire's skull. With a shriek, the thing falls back down into the pit, alive but mortally wounded. With more pettiness than is normal for her, Ananke notes that she did not, in fact, hit any other civilians or soldiers while shooting. "Target down," she radios the rest of here team, hand to her ear. "Search the premises for any others."

For a few seconds, Ananke pays no mind to the fleeing man, her gaze instead locked on the much more dangerous Reaper flailing below her. It might be about to die, but until then the creature is still alive and still a threat. She's seen too many comrades let their guards down at the cusp of victory only to let a moment of carelessness cost them their life or a limb. So the specialist watches with laser-focus, waiting patiently for the beast to slow and stutter, drawing it's last breath.

Eventually, it does. It takes what feels much longer than it probably is.

"Good work, Specialist Drakos," someone says from the side, and it's enough to shake her out of her near-trance. She pivots around to see a member of the criminal activity squad congratulating her, more members pinning down the man from before. He's pinned and trapped, like an animal in a cage. Somewhat ironic considering what transpired today. Ananke stares him down, watching him struggle under the weight of his captors. He seems to be in a lot of discomfort.

"Make sure you add obstruction of justice to his charges," she tells the squad leader. She'll count on them to do their job. Meanwhile, she still has to do hers.

With a finger on her radio button, Ananke climbs down the stairs, now on ground level with the deceased beast. It's the only one in sight, but there could be more hidden elsewhere in the building. "Top level is clear," she reports. "Securing lower level now."

Lower level is significantly darker, away from the bright spotlights and tucked away in manners meant to deter mere customers from delving too deep. Somewhere down here, the Jabberwockies keep their cages, and only when her unit has tracked them down and confirmed that they are all empty will her job be done.

It's hardly deserted here- people run in a panic, and other soldiers chase them, either Jabberwockies afraid that their operation is about to be taken down, or customers not wanting to get caught indulging in their dirty impulses. They're all equally guilty, in Ananke's mind- if you're here, you must be up to no good- but she pays them no attention. Her focus is singular and laser-pointed, and dare she say it's the most important job of all. There's no saving these people from themselves if you can't save them from the Infected.

She can hear them now. The one in the pit certainly hadn't been the only one. "Other infected down here," she grunts into her radio.

"Confirm location," is the response she gets.

"Roger."

It'd usually be dangerous to look for them alone, but most likely the Jabberwockies will have these things locked up. It'd make no sense for them to be unrestrained outside of the arena. It's not like those criminals would do something as stupid as letting them all out to wreak havoc on friend and enemy ali-

Screams break out. They don't come from behind her, but around.

She spoke to soon.

"Shit." Well, at least she doesn't have to look for those cages anymore.

Chaos breaks out above, and judging from the static and screams from the radio, some of the other soldiers- Criminal Activity mostly- have already fallen prey. What a mess. Even a military soldier won't be able to handle an infected without proper training, and it's only a matter of time before the beasts chew their way out of the underground.

"Infected loose on both levels! Unit three, do you copy?"

One by one, her squad members report in. Ananke allows herself a sigh of relief. "Do not lift lockdown under any circumstances." It's one thing for a building of people to get massacred. It's another if these things break out, run free on the streets.

Speaking of free...

The sound of footfalls echo from behind her, and against her better judgement the specialist turns around to see who it is. Rather than another member of her squad, however, she sees the blond man from the before, the one she'd kicked earlier. He's missing his escort, and she can guess that happened to them. What she can't guess, however, is why he's still here, instead of trying to evacuate to a safe, non-infected part of the building.

And then he raises his gun at her.

At first glance it would look like Ettie's about to shoot her, but Ananke can tell- by instinct, experience, the creak of vampiric muscle and the faint sound of drool hitting the ground behind her- what he's really planning. So the soldier ducks, spinning around just in time to see the feral go down. A second follows soon after, but it's Ananke's turn to do her part, and she guns down the second with a burst of firepower.

The beast goes down. They're safe, if only for a moment.

Ananke whips around to look at the man who had apparently come back to save her. "You should have run." Not an indictment of his actions. Just a fact.

"They aren't 'my' men. But regardless, it would have been safer to turn towards them instead of the opposite direction." It's a common misconception to think all military soldiers are the same, but the truth is, certain units are very different from others depending on their training. Ananke, on one hand, has had the training to handle infected in large numbers and close proximity. Those from Criminal Activity, well...

Judging by which voices have fallen silent over the radio amidst the screams, they're not faring quite as well.

Even so, for a civilian, any kind of military company is safer than nothing. Ettie wasn't guaranteed to find her or another nest elimination soldier by simply blindly running into the fray.

Not that it matters anymore. He's here now. She's here now. So are all the infected. There aren't as many of her own squad here as she'd like, because the higher ups had been more concerned about making arrests than worrying about the possibility of infected running through the streets. When the man proposes working together, a soldier and the man she had just gotten arrested, Ananke makes the calculation in an instant. "You're right." Two guns are better than one, and he's already proved that he knows how to use his. (Well, except for the part where he was waving it around to dramatically prove his point, but she'll forgive him on account of the fact that they're about to die and he didn't accidently shoot anyone in the process.)

She immediately puts a plan into action. "We go through the lower levels. The lower ceiling makes it harder for them to navigate. You stay behind me, and we wait for the rest of my team to radio in before going up. Understood?"