[X] Gwarg could ruin their surprise if they don't get rid of him. It'll mess up their schedule, but they need to track him down and finish him off. It's still daytime, so hopefully he couldn't have gone too far.
"We can't let him get away," Buffy said. "Even if he's toothless now, and I don't buy that for a second, he might blow the whole operation." They'd realized that inevitably some assassins would slip through the cracks, but if they were discovered this early they'd hardly get any of them.
"You saw his lair on the way to help us, didn't you?" Giles asked. "Perhaps he's still lurking there."
"Yeah, I passed a little alcove thing running here, but I didn't notice anyone home and I thought he must have been here," Buffy said. The party abandoned the grisly scene and started following Buffy back the way she came.
"If he isn't just hiding though, he's probably getting further and further away," Jonathan said.
"I could summon up a monkey and have it search the nearby tunnels!" Andrew offered.
"I don't want us to get separated, wait until we get to the place and do it there," Buffy said. She wasn't sure one flying monkey was up to the task, but it was better than nothing. At least they could see in the dark.
Gwarg's lair was even less impressive than she'd thought it was from her quick glance a few minutes earlier. It was a sort of notch taken out of the wall of the sewer tunnel with about as much space as her bathroom at home, and a variety of of janky rags and broken down tools were scattered around a mat of old blankets that was probably a bed. Buffy unceremoniously rooted through it all with her hammer, but no Gwarg appeared from hiding.
"Harmony, I don't suppose you can smell anything useful?" Buffy asked. Meanwhile, Andrew finished summoning his monkey and it flew off down the tunnel.
"In this?" She gestured to the sewer all around them. "Oz wouldn't be able to smell anything in this."
"Point," Buffy said.
"There could be a secret passage. This kind of looks like a decoy lair? We ran into a different vampire using one of those last month." Jonathan was tapping around the walls and looking for pieces that would move.
Buffy shrugged, and taking Jonathan's example, tapped around on the walls. Given that she was holding a giant hammer, she did it a little more violently. She would've been more reluctant in her own sewers, but she figured LA had the money to repair any incidental damage. Sure enough, she ran into a part of the wall that sounded different, and a couple more swings knocked out the (relatively) thin wall panel that Jonathan had missed.
"Hey, this place looks kind of cozy!" Harmony said, stepping through the new hole first. The rest of the group followed her, and she had a point. This room was not only dry and clean, but apparently had electricity; there was even a little TV in the corner surrounded by worn furniture. The room seemed a little ransacked, as if someone had gone through things and then left in a hurry, and a weapons rack hanging in pride of place on the wall was empty. It'd probably been holding the bow Buffy had read about him using in his file; he was a real wild vamp type.
"Hey, this definitely wasn't in the plans!" Willow said from the radios. "How big is it? Maybe I can figure if there are any other ways out."
"Thinking it's the big old tunnel," Buffy said, moving forward into the new tunnel leading out of the other side of the room. "Andrew, can you direct your monkey, I dunno, more in this sort of direction?"
"Yeah, I've already been sending it around to the other side of this, it's ahead of us now. Maybe I can eliminate-" then he squinted and rubbed his forehead, cutting himself off. "Ow! Sneak attack. Something killed it! With claws."
"Probably in the right direction then," Buffy said. She reached a dead end in the new tunnel, but a few swipes of her hammer took care of that and they were back in the normal sewers. "Which way?"
"Nearby," he squeaked out, still looking pained. "Down that left junction."
Buffy dashed down and Harmony followed, leaving the rest of the group behind. Vampires could move fast in these conditions, and with all the delays already she was worried they wouldn't be able to catch Gwarg on his home turf. Before long they came to the sad little flying monkey body, floating in the muck and already disintegrating.
"Where is he? Already gone?" Harmony asked. Buffy frowned. Something seemed - and then something small tried to jump on her head from the ceiling.
KILL
Her hammer came around and pulped it before she was even sure what it was. A black cat maybe? Meanwhile Harmony was shrieking because a bat of all things had gotten tangled up in her hair. Unfortunately for her girlfriend, the high screams brought Buffy clarity. Claws, not teeth or arrows. "It's a trap! Harm, follow me when you can!" Then she dashed back towards the frailer group they'd left behind. More screaming came over the radio, and she picked up her pace.
The scene she found back at the hidden room's exit could've been worse, but it wasn't good. Giles had an arrow sticking out of his back but was trying to swordfight against a charging Gwarg anyway, and he'd have been losing if not for a swarm of flying monkeys by his side. Jonathan was nowhere to be seen, but even as Buffy was closing Gwarg tripped forwards over 'nothing' (which was rapidly resolving back into Jonathan) and went into a half-controlled cartwheel to avoid a fall.
It was unfortunate for him that Buffy arrived before he regained his balance. He was still able to dodge around the first swing of her hammer and sort of cling onto it as it flew by, but that just set him up for a solid punch with her other hand. He punched back at her but she just absorbed the blow to her head and then whipped her hammer back, throwing him off it and into the wall.
He tried to spring back off it and onto the attack but a couple of the flying monkeys got in his way and spoiled his move. Buffy made him pay by hammering him down into the muck, and then before he could get his feet back under him she had a stake in his chest and he was dust. Right after she was done Buffy turned and looked for her watcher. "Giles!"
The monkeys now lacked a target and had gone out of control, but she batted a few of them away and the rest flew off down into the sewers, hopefully not to make too much trouble before they disappeared. That done, she zoomed over to Giles, who looked surprisingly OK for someone with an arrow in his back. Buffy still wanted to fuss over him.
"It's only a flesh wound," Giles tried to dismiss it. "It barely penetrated the stab vest." Xander had bought a closetful of them with his last burst of arms shopping, and he'd insisted everyone (alive) wear one for 'the big ole assassin adventure.' Buffy had honestly forgot she even had one on, but everyone else had been complaining about how heavy they were. Well, this would show them to be careful and stuff.
"We still need to treat it," Buffy worried. "It might be poisoned or something. We should get back to the minivan."
"He doesn't have a history of using poison in his file, but it's probably seriously filthy down there. It could get infected," Willow's worried voice echoed over the radio.
"Ice cream headache doesn't begin to describe this," Andrew said in a quiet whine. Buffy belatedly noticed that he wasn't in good shape either, but Jonathan had been tending to him.
"Oh, umm, was that too many monkeys?" Buffy asked.
"It was more that he did a lot of different summons with a lot of them dying in between, I think," Jonathan said. "He should probably rest for a while too."
"Oooh, cool bow," Harmony said, finally catching up, her hair still looking a mess from the bat encounter. Well, at least she was having some fun.
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The vampire's parlor had its windows blacked out, blocking the light of the sunset, with the interior dimly lit by flickering candles as Buffy and her team cautiously moved inside. The air was heavy with incense, and seductive music from an earlier era played in the background. Buffy was wary for complex traps or sudden ambushes despite the inviting ambience, so it kind of caught her by surprise when Raven DeMorte strode into the room, calm as you please. Her hands were raised somewhere between a sign for peace and a come hither gesture.
Raven's eyes swept over them absent of concern, and full of… something else. "My my, what a distinguished group of brave adventurers I have today. Are you here to slay me?" Buffy had seen some pretty girls in her day, (and she'd recently started appreciating them a bit more viscerally) but Raven was really something else, and she was wearing something less. The vampire flicked a strap of her dress off her shoulder, making the garment hang precariously on her form. "But maybe you'd like me to slay you instead? I assure you there's enough for everyone to go to sleep very happy."
KILL
Buffy rolled her eyes. Sure, she was hot, but in what universe was a corny trick like that ever going to work. She hadn't even had any way of knowing Buffy and Harmony were… into that kind of thing, now. "Tell us another one lady. Maybe we'll all just bare our necks to make it easier for you to eat too?"
"I don't know Buffy, perhaps we should hear her out," Giles said.
"Yeah! We could make her promise," Andrew said. "Will you pinky swear not to kill us?"
"Uh, umm." Jonathan wasn't forming words very well, but his hesitant steps forward made his intent clear.
"What, do you have some kind of magic?" Buffy said, more amused than anything. "Hello, two of us are girls here!"
"I mean, it is a pretty attractive offer," Harmony said, sidling up to Buffy. "She isn't really strong enough to kill us, and the benefits, well… " Harmony vulgarly indicated the space around her own breasts with both hands, as if to remind Buffy of the assets Raven was displaying right in front of them.
"Really? You too? You people are sex crazed," Buffy said. Then she darted forward and traded a few blows with a shocked and backpedaling Raven DeMorte before finishing her off with a casual staking. Buffy shook her head in annoyance as the dust cleared. "Everyone's always obsessed with the breasts."
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Buffy looked on in dismay as the weird amalgam creature darted away on its bicycle. You wouldn't have thought there were bikes built for three legs, but there one was, and it was going way too fast for her to catch it on foot. She looked to the rest of her group and they had their crossbows out and firing, but none of them had the aim to hit such a weirdly moving target, and she didn't think she could manage it with her hammer, either.
Harmony had been prepared though, and she might save the night yet. She drew out the bow she'd looted from Gwarg and strung one of the few arrows that had survived the battle. She was like a vision of Diana as she carefully aimed and then loosed, her bowstring flicking musically as the arrow sailed through the air. Her form looked so pretty that Buffy thought she must have done archery before at some point, and for a moment she wondered why Harmony hadn't tried to use a bow this summer already.
Then the moment passed, as the arrow flew super-wide and impaled an innocent utility pole. Everyone gave her a skeptical look.
"What? I spent all my time in Archery Club trying to look sexy, not trying to hit stuff!" She said.
Buffy looked forlornly back at the escaping Chaos demon as Harmony pulled back and loosed again, only to miss even wider. She was about to ask Willow to predict how they could circle around and cut it off when blocks away, a minivan raced out the alley the bike was passing and bowled right over the demon and his special bike. It clunked as it grinded over the body, and a bike tire went sailing off from the crash and rolled down the street. Buffy wasn't sure the demon was dead, but the minivan went into reverse and backed over it with another two clunks. And then it drove forward again, over it a third time.
When Buffy and the gang reached the scene of the crime, Cynthia was out of the van and calmly examining the corpse. "I believe that's one for me. Now, where do we need to go next?"
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"Stop for a second, there's an old guy moving through the hall," Willow's voice over the radio was just a whisper. Buffy didn't really want to have any witnesses for this one.
The necessity worried her, a little bit. To her neighbors in the skyhigh apartment complex, Vanessa Brewer probably just seemed like a normal person. The government thought she was too; at least officially. She had a real passport and a well paying consulting job; the two times she'd been arrested were just embarrassing mistakes on the part of public servants. After all, a blind lady could hardly be dangerous.
Her Wolfram and Hart file had shown Buffy and the Scoobies otherwise. Vanessa Brewer was a trained assassin with mystical powers and a known kill list a dozen names long. Sure, she was technically blind, but with her monk training to 'see with the heart' it seemed like more of a bonus than a disability. It let her be the worst kind of criminal, one that the police couldn't ever convince a jury to put away, even when she killed powerless civilians that had little to do with magic or the supernatural.
Buffy still felt a little conflicted about how she had to do this. Sneaking into the building masked and in stealth gear and having Willow remove all traces on the security footage made her feel like she was the criminal assassin, even if she knew in her head that Brewer would certainly kill again if something wasn't done. She was like Faith, a human with superpowers running amok in a world that didn't know how to deal. Buffy had to solve the problem now, before Wolfram and Hart sent her to Sunnydale and she was attending a funeral. That's what she was telling herself, and it still didn't feel good.
"Alright Buffy, you're good, you should be able to reach her door," For her part, Willow hadn't shown any such compunctions. Giles had been more understanding, but there had been a reassuring lecture about the difference between humans and civilians, and how it was the duty of the Slayer in the modern world to stop people that the police couldn't. Harmony obviously didn't care about these kinds of subtleties and even had wanted to come along herself, but Buffy had felt better leaving her outside with the rest of her beaten-up gang in case Brewer made it all the way down the fire escape outside her window.
They'd hit five more assassins since Gwarg and none had been nearly as problematic as him, but injuries and tiredness still piled up among the frailer members of the team. Giles' wound from earlier had only been skin deep, but she was still concerned for her watcher, and Andrew's mana supply or whatever it was that he used was only just recovering from his overuse earlier. Even Jonathan had gotten bruised up when he'd taken point against the invisible girl (Buffy was like, 95% sure it hadn't been Marcie.) Without Harmony to anchor them in an emergency Buffy worried that someone experienced like Brewer could be too dangerous to fight.
And now here Buffy was, right at Brewer's door, the hallway abandoned. It had a nice little nameplate with braille. Buffy wondered if she had friends who were actually blind. Ugh, no more vacillating. Buffy hardened her heart and snapped the doorknob easily, pushing the door open to reveal her target's upscale open-plan apartment.
The scene wasn't what she expected. Brewer was already standing by the kitchen window, facing Buffy with sheer terror in her expression and a lit match in her hand. She threw it at the stove and there was an explosion of accelerated fire as she flipped out the window, surely looking to clamber down the fire escape and away from her spontaneous arson attempt. The fire was already spreading to cover her escape, but Buffy thought she might be able to get through it mostly OK if she moved fast.
Vote: What does Buffy do in the heat of the moment?
[] Her friends outside can handle the assassin, Buffy has to try to put out the fire and pull the alarm before it gets out of control. This is a giant complex and tons of people could get hurt.
[] The fire department is going to have to handle this one. Buffy dives through the fire and goes after Brewer to make sure she can't fight her way free through the rest of the team.
