Successor (BTVS)

[X] Forrest is the weakest link. If she can end him and put a stop to all the electricity flying around things will get easier fast.

She broke to the right around the pit, looking to chase down Forrest. He hadn't closed with her once so far, and she was pretty sure it was because he couldn't. The Initiative or maybe just Adam had frankensteined him a decent ranged option, but in the end he was just a fledgeling vampire. He'd break easy.

Unfortunately, her enemies seemed well aware of the problem: Forrest started booking it in the other direction while Faith tried to cover his retreat as best she could. She held her knife out in front of her a loose grip as she shuffled backward, and Buffy was pretty much forced to acknowledge the threat instead of just running around her. Even that didn't present much of an obstacle though.

When Buffy had fought or even sparred against Faith before, the other girl's slightly taller frame had always given her a reach advantage, but that was more than reversed now. The long shaft of her hammer gave her insane reach when she used it fully, even if it compromised her control and power a little bit. She took wild swings at Faith's outstretched arm as she charged and forced her out of her aggressive stance.
KILL
Two swings later and Faith had to completely abandon her position as she dodged under a body blow, slashing at Buffy's ankles as she dove and rolled. She jumped the slash and would have been ready to massively punish Faith for the bold move, but more of the now-recharged electricity shot out in support and Adam reached the two of them right at the same time. Instead of counterattacking, she had to sweep away Adam's mess of tentacles with the shaft of her hammer, hoping they'd tangle around it and get caught for a second.

Just long enough to parry the lightning with the front half while she was still in midair. It ran through it and grounded through Adam, but frustratingly didn't seem to hurt him at all. She pushed backward off the electrified weapon to avoid getting shocked herself when she landed.
KILL
CORRUPT
She started another weird spiritual tug of war to teleport the hammer back into her hands, but Faith took the opportunity to attack her when she was unarmed. Buffy was still stronger and faster and just better than Faith, but Forrest was irritatingly good at firing into their quick skirmish and Buffy never managed to land a clean punch. She at least avoided getting shish-kebabed, but a close call took about four inches off her hair before she finally managed to pop her hammer back from Adam and Faith had to beat a hasty retreat.

Adam was advancing again himself, but at this point Buffy was so frustrated she wasn't paying him much mind. She was still angry at herself for falling for this trap. She was tired of being attacked from all sides. She was sick of Wilkins intangibly spectating off to the side. She was even sick of the room and all its weird special effects; it increasingly just felt heavy and oppressive. She had to create an opportunity, even if there wasn't one to be found.

Forrest was diametrically across the stairway pit from her now, knowing that it'd be crazy for any of the combatants to risk a jump over it (not because they couldn't cover the distance easily, but because they'd be too vulnerable in midair and could get knocked down into forever.) That'd keep him safe from her, but not from her hammer. Nobody was near him to knock him or it out of the way; she had to do it now.

"Can't play acrobat forever, I'm gonna tag you eventually," Forrest taunted her as he started firing again.
KILL
She struck out at Adam once more to keep him honest, weaved around the latest obnoxious bolt of electricity, and javelined her hammer right at him. She even put a jot of superspeed into it, just to make sure it had enough juice on it to hit.
CORRUPT
Adam of course took advantage of her distraction, but instead of whipping again he finally revealed what was up with his right arm. A gun barrel emerged from each side, and a flurry of superspeed-assisted bullets sprayed at her from nearly point-blank range. She desperately pulled her superspeed back on even as she'd been letting it go, dodging forward out of the line of fire.
KILL
It didn't completely catch her off guard, but she was badly out of position, and one of the first bullets caught her in the side and felt like it ricocheted off one of her ribs and back out. She avoided the worst of the rest, only feeling a few lines of fire along her back and one leg, but her momentum from the dodge sent her into the stairway of doom. She heard Forrest's scream of pain as she went, but had no attention to spare it.
CORRUPT
She turned her dive into a somersault with a jabbing kick against the edge, reorienting to just barely land on the first level of the spiraling stairs. Adam kept firing from behind her, the bullet storm crazily going in and out of superspeed as she frantically toggled it off and on. She was in a nasty situation where she needed extra speed to dodge the speeded bullets, but that just ended up producing more speeded bullets.
KILL
Actually being on down the stairs felt wrong, terribly wrong, just as she'd been afraid it would. The golden light was so bright down here that it burned on her skin and in her eyes. Moreover, the distance itself seemed to twist around her, the staircase somehow doubling in width to twenty feet from her new perspective just below the lip of the drop. The whole experience was seriously wooze-inducing, but she had to keep it together. Looking down at all this the first time had been way worse.
CORRUPT
The cascade of machine gun fire continued around her, but the warped space offered her a lot of relief. She ran down the stairs instead of up, taking only a couple more glancing shots as reality seemed to expand outwards and inwards and more and more. The iridescent burning was getting more intense too though, and clearly she couldn't stay down here, not for more than seconds; once she got to the other side she leapt upwards and out, back into the normal physics of the domed space.

After emerging from the pit, the main room felt even worse than it had before. She didn't have time to figure out why; Adam was still machine-gunning. Without superspeed and separated by the pit it was easy enough for her to stay mostly ahead of his fire though, changing direction, rolling, at one point going a little ways up the runed wall and quickly kicking back down. She'd finally mastered pulsing her speed just right to stay ahead of the bullets, even with some of the shots getting boosts off of it. Adam gave up after another few seconds and Buffy got to take stock of the situation. Hopefully his ammo was sorely limited after that.

Forrest was down on the ground, still barely undead; one of his arms had been completely torn off at the shoulder. Faith had come around again and was trying to drag him off, but she quickly retreated in the face of Buffy's next charge, leaving Forrest for dead.

"Hey! Never leave a man behind!" His shocked outrage would've been funny if she wasn't suffering from multiple bullet-wounds and a critical hair malfunction. He managed one last electric shock with his still-attached hand, but she juked it easily as she raced up to him.
KILL
"Guess you're 'it'," she commented as she popped her hammer back from wherever it'd landed and crushed his head with it. She didn't wait and watch him explode into dust, instead quickly turning to face down Faith and Adam again.

"Still gonna be cracking jokes when I'm giving your dead girl a second smile?" Faith drawled, waving her knife tauntingly.
KILL
Buffy had been starting to feel her wounds, but they were forgotten in a howl of rage as she bolted at Faith and Adam, eating up the distance between them and then lashing out with her hammer, trying to squeeze in an inch of superspeed in just the right way to get at Faith before Adam could block.
CORRUPT
Faith just managed to avoid the head of the hammer as Adam pulled her away, but the topspike at least tore a bloody line across her stomach to punish her insolence. Buffy hoped it scarred ugly. Adam used his whips again, but she'd been ready for it, adapting her move into going super low and crashing through his legs, using the mass of her hammer to add to her own and make sure she went through instead of bouncing off.
KILL
All three of them went to the ground in the aftermath, but Buffy was the first one rolling back to her feet. Faith didn't even try to get up; instead she ignored her minor injury to lunge at her with the knife. As Buffy dodged that Adam opened up with his machine guns again, and Buffy decided to just take a bullet through the left shoulder so she could close with Adam and hammer him in the face, striking right where his plate had been dented earlier.
CORRUPT
She swung at it again, and he didn't even try to get out of the way. Instead he weathered the blow and attacked with his whips, trailing all over her large assortment of bullet-inflicted scratches. It stung like hell and seemed to give him some strength, but she kept raining down blows, and she was sure he was losing back twice whatever he'd gained.
KILL
Faith interrupted their violent exchange by trying to stab Buffy in the back, but she was wise to her tricks and backflipped over her, escaping the front-and-back flank. Adam was off balance from the exchange they were having, and Faith saw the danger too late; the superspeed hammer blow was at an awkward angle but still managed to nail Faith in the chest. She was sent flying across the room to slam into the dome, and now Buffy had Adam all to herself.
CORRUPT
Of course, Adam rode the superspeed again and used it to recover his position, attacking now with both his gun and his claw whips, filling the whole area around Buffy with danger.
KILL
She danced around the whips and then smashed his right arm hard with her hammer, fouling one of the gun barrels before he could retract it.
CORRUPT
She paid for it as the whips came around again, scoring over her back, draining the area already scratched up by bullets that had barely tagged her.

She whipped herself away from the extended claws, looking for a hole in his defense to attack again, and then saw something terribly out of place. Wilkins hadn't rushed over to check on Faith, as she'd expected him to; instead he was right in the thick of things, practically shoulder to shoulder with Adam. She narrowed her eyes, trying to use her special senses to figure out if he'd become solid again somehow.

"Too late," Adam said.
CORRUPT
The nasty atmosphere she'd felt building all fight multiplied by a thousand as Adam grabbed Wilkins' hand, and all the golden light flowing through the room suddenly polarized, forming a wild tornado with the two of them in the center. The wind shear was impossibly strong, and Buffy stumbled backwards in the face of it, almost losing her footing.

"I've shook a lot of hands in my day, but I think this one's gonna take the cake," Wilkins said.

Adam ignored him, still speaking to Buffy. "Mother thinks you're intelligent, but headstrong. Too willing to use brute force before considering all possible angles of approach. She was correct, and all went along the lines I expected."

"What are you doing?" She was trying to hold position, but the wind was just too much. Finally she jammed the bottom spike of her hammer into the floor to stabilize.

"What all good politicians do," Wilkins answered instead of Adam. "I made a deal."

"The intensity of our battle has allowed me to take control of the Artifact," Adam said. "Soon I will be linked to the remnants of the true cosmos. I have reason to believe it will be enlightening."

"Well, I can't disagree with that," Wilkins said, and his smile got just a little bit wider.

There was a sudden change: the tornado of gold reversed direction, and Adam went to his knees, groaning.

Wilkins still had an iron grip on his hand. "I may have misrepresented some of the facts of the matter. We do that in politics too."

"You're betraying me," Adam said flatly.

"You say tomato, I say tomaa-to," Wilkins answered playfully.

"Trying to corrupt control of my own body from me, the epitome of corruption," Adam continued. "It's rather poetic."

"That's my boss!" Faith shouted from the edge of the room.

"I expected this as well," A bizarre glowing circuit of metal and glass emerged from Adam's chest, and then he slowly rose to his feet as it started to channel golden light. The ordered storm became a chaos of currents and eddies.

Buffy finally started making progress, using her hammer almost like a climbing tool to secure each step. When the wind had been unified, she hadn't been able to approach, but now she was taking one slow step after another.

"It would've been foolish of me to be unprepared for your betrayal," Adam continued. "Even considering my promise to empower Agent Lehane, you had much more to gain from defection than cooperation. It was simple game theory."

The golden light moved more and more crazily as the circuit on Adam's chest sped up faster and faster. The force of the wind was more than ever, but she had momentum now. Step-hammer-step-hammer-step, slowly but surely moving forward.

Wilkins was the first to see the opportunity she presented. "We still don't need to be at odds, Buffy. Sunnydale thrives. Faith is alive. None of your friends died either."

"It is not in your interest to help him," Adam argued calmly. "He is far older and more experienced than I, and possesses incredible power all his own. If you allow him to win control of my body you will be at a significant disadvantage."

"He's correct," CyberWillow cut into the conversation over the radio at Buffy's hip, loudly projecting over all the noise. "The records of Wilkins' extensive application of magic are clear. Working from the Adam platform he might be almost invincible."

"He's offering you an open hand B!" Faith couldn't approach, but still wouldn't shut up. "Adam's a psycho, he'll just go right back to war. Don't be a bitch for once in your life!"

She was almost in reach, just a few steps away. She didn't know yet what she'd do when she got there, but she was pretty sure she had to do something.

"He lied to me, he will lie to you as well," Adam said. "Conversely, you have less reason to doubt my honest goodwill."

Buffy took another step. She was going to have to make an ugly choice. The voice was screaming at her to do one or the other.
KILL

Vote: Feeling the Deja-Fu?

[] Smash the circuit attachment and KILL Adam

[] KILL Wilkins by attacking his ghost