Shimmer, Glimmer, & Gleam - A Quest of Loss & Gain

You hold your tongue between your teeth for a long moment, and then you shake your head. "We need to pull out. I've got some ideas...fuck, the chain of command." You give Nattie what you believe is an imploring look, and whether or not you're successful in this, it seems persuasive. She sighs, and rubs her left thigh, wincing.

"...Walk me through your plan. If it seems viable, you're in charge of the evacuation. Most of the people who'd be upset about that idea are currently getting glared at by your surgeon anyway."

As you start outlining the idea, others gather. During the first stage, the wounded will be loaded into vans and so, for that matter, will anyone else that can fit in some, with the combatants mounted up. Is this safe? No. Good gods no. If anything happens to those vans the people on top of them are fucking dead, but speed is of the essence.

"To this end," you tell Nattie, "my team will help move the wounded. Sorry to say it but yours seems mildly more trained than 'not at all'."

"...Would you believe we did 'cling to a moving vehicle' training?"

"For the purposes of this conversation? Yes."

Once the formation reaches the freeway, the vanguard will move ahead with the wounded and abandon the healthy entirely while the noncombatants and the remaining forces plug the gap with the hijacked vehicles. It won't stop the APCs if they're real intent on getting through ("They'll chew their way through if they have to," Nattie says glumly), but it'll slow them down, and that's all you really need. With enough of a head start, you might be able to use your explosives as traps, or even to blow the freeway entirely, though that's a last resort; it will definitely kill any statues still in their cars wherever you do it. You don't like that, and it shows on your face.

"...The Captain would just kill 'em all," Nattie says, quietly. "Easy choice, for her. Three, seven lives for a couple hundred? She'd laugh it off."

"Well," you sigh. "I'm not laughing."

The formation may need to adapt as you move through, so spider-women will carry Nattie's riflemen as outriders, scouting out potential exits from the freeway. However, in an ideal world, everyone makes it back to Jillian's Farm and Fleet, where rooftop snipers and soil-bag barricades can give a nice entrenched position, to say nothing of your plentiful supplies of glass and metal with which to use your new-found power.

You're only about halfway through the plan when Nattie starts giving orders to feed the spiders full, and after some prompting, you too; you're gonna burn a lot of calories(? Evidently?) on getting these vans started. She's transferring command to you as the wounded are loaded up into vans; the University itself is a frenzy of activity as students, professors, family members, guests, and one person fused into its fursuit during Impact ("It's pretty cool actually but I'd like to have pants again") pack up books, lab equipment, research papers, personal belongings, snacks, drinks, more books, even more books, dear gods the books do they not know how heavy books are -

Nattie puts a hand on your shoulder. "From the look on your face you're thinking what I'm thinking, but the thing is...if we never come back here? The books might be more valuable than their lives."

You give her a long look. A long, confused look, and you ask her, honestly: "Is there a point in saving the books if all the people are dead?"

And she has no answer for you.

* * * *

The first mile is as smooth as you can ask for. You're riding the blonde spider-woman so you can keep an eye on the battlefield and trying not to think of the excited and soft look on her face when she'd passed you 'reins' of webbing that are lashed to her 'waist'. There is an automatic rifle slung across your back, given to you by Nattie from one of her troops too wounded to fight, and it feels distressingly familiar. This is not the first time someone has handed a rifle to this body, and asked it to kill strangers.

It might not be the last.

Then the bubblegum lights start up from behind. They're heading towards the university, and they will be disappointed. Will they start looking for all of you? You get on the walkie-talkie and order the formation to move as fast as they reasonably can, which, while still fast, is not much faster, and you put your binoculars to your eyes. SWAT is taking up positions at the gates...

The 'APCs' are seemingly normal vehicles. No melding with flesh, no strange refractions; if anything they seem stronger, more solid, as if this image was so seared into the mind of whatever culture preceded you that it could only become more itself. But they're disgorging an endless supply of near-identical cops in body armor, whose eyes are on the outside of their visors, moving about on stalks of glass. You shudder...and then one of them makes eye contact with you through the binoculars, and starts shouting and gesturing in the direction of your formation.

"WE HAVE INCOMING!" you bellow over the walkie. You look ahead and see the front of the formation is already disembarking, getting the wounded onto the clogged freeway, which is good, but are the noncombatants going to make it? Fuck. FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK -

Choose 1
[ ] Stick with the plan
[ ] Hack together a trap as fast as you possibly can

Lose 1
[ ] Your revulsion for this rifle
[ ] The battle with your burgeoning pyrophilia