Office Building
"Fuck," Desmond said, squeezing the trigger faster and faster as the power armor slowly turned to meet where the shots were coming from. "Get back!" He yelled, hitting the deck under the window frame as the ceiling of the room he was caught fire as a long jet of flame went through the window as he crawled away. The bounty hunter rolled to his left once he reached the intesection between the hallway, main entrance and stairwell, which was only when he started to pat out the fire on the sleeve of his left arm.
Above him, the wood cracked and groaned as the flames started to eat through it, and small flecks of it started to fall down. Soon, the main entrance would be inaccessible, leaving them only one obvious exit. "Building's burning, main entrance is gone," he said, surprisingly level given the situation, on the comms so that the bounty hunters and mercs inside would know what was going on in that floor.
Giving another glance back towards where he had been, Desmond had also seen that the merc that was with him hadn't escaped the flames either. That power armor needed to go.
Upstairs, Kendra and the Rathe continued to pick themselves up while Danny looked for a higher point. Using common knowledge that every Nepleslian building had a roof access so that their occupants could enjoy the recreational use of firing their weapons into the sky, the bounty hunter had a good lead at an exit, but after a quick search he couldn't find any obvious ones, hinting that any ladder was probably knocked out of commission when half of the building collapsed. It looked like he'd either have to climb or use one of the windows for a quick twelve feet exit.
Warehouse
It wasn't clear whether it was because they didn't see him, or that the gangers couldn't believe what was happening right in front of their eyes, but none of them had fired at the senior citizen as he rushed inside the burning warehouse to help the Freespacer chained there and saved her from dying in the fire. At least for the first few moments they didn't fire.
When he broke the chains with his sidearm the bullets started firing from inside again, but at a lower rate since most of the people in there were either dead or had retreated through another exit inside. Dust shot up again as the neko that was behind him charged at the power armor, but the gangers seemed to have their sights completely on the competition shooter as the wall he was standing behind was peppered with bullets, covering him in the light-grey dust and small pieces of concrete.
South Courtyard
Upon hearing their boss on the radio, one of the mercs retried the launcher for the AT weapon, while his other buddy took out the warhead from his backpack and inserted it on the front of the SRF-01.
"Clear back blast!" The loader shouted back more out of habit than expecting that someone would actually be standing behind them, and got ready for the 'fwoomp' that came when a rocket like that was launched. When there was none of it, he also joined Salem in inquiring why Frank wasn't firing at the armor.
"I can't, god damn it!" The merc in question replied, crouched by the corner of the building and aiming the launcher at the bulked up power armor. "One of them hunters is on top of the fucking armor!"
And, true to his word, indeed that was what was happening.
Courtyard
Making it true to her words, Amanozako had darted towards the power armor after it had distracted itself with the fire coming from the office building, which meant that the bulky power unit on its back was facing her and its pilot couldn't have seen that the neko was coming. She crashed into it with enough force to make the armor stagger, but that's when the first problems started to occur.
The metal that covered the armor was searing-hot to the touch, which was a given considering that the armor ran off a combustion engine, and for how long it had been firing the massive flamer on its shoulder, as soon as the Neko touched it she might as well have walked inside an oven. The air around the armor was so hot that if a regular Nepleslian had been breathing there they would've choked at it and their air-pipes would've burned up as soon as they took a few breaths, but the former-NMX Neko's biology allowed her to cling on to the armor as its user tried to reach around to grab her but couldn't. The loose strands of cloth of her clothes that had been ripped off started to turn darker as they burned up once the Neko wrapped her legs around the suit's midriff for purchase, and she could feel the skin underneath flare up with pain as it burned.
As the grapple went on, Amanozako could feel the tips of her hair that touched the metal start to get singed and the palm of her hands burn up in excruciating pain, only to feel like they had been dipped in ice-cold water once the sensory nerves there overloaded and burned out, but at that cost she managed to hook the tip of her fingers under the lower frontal part of the helmet, and using her strength she could feel the leather straps that had been weakened by fire start to tear and give away. Anyone would've expected the headgear for a power armor to weight a lot, and that one weighed almost three times as that as the leather tore away and the neko slowly lifed the sixty pound Durandium helmet, her nerves overloading with the pain. The metal sizzled as it burned artificial skin, and it cleared the pilot's head it slipped from her grip and crashed againt the concrete surface of the warehouse with a loud thud.
Being that close to her foe, she could also hear his muffled voice through it. It was very unlikely that St. Burnard wasn't experiencing the same amount of pain that the Neko was going through even though he was likely wearing a thermal-insulating layer underneath the armor, and she could hear his yelling from inside the crude helmet get louder as the bulky metal bucket was removed. However, instead of being someone yelling in pain, or distress, the gang leader was yelling in something close to rapture. The sound of cooked meat, both hers and the gang's Saint was enough to make anyone's gut turn into a knot, and taking the first look at the gang leader, the red-eyed could see that the heat-sealing suit that he was wearing under the armor had practically melted against his skin, and the tubes that carried oxygen and some foul liquid to it wasn't a rebreather, but instead went right into his throat. It was without a doubt by then that the person there was indeed an ID-SOL, even an augmented and stimmed up Nepleslian couldn't take that punishment for that long before going into shock and dying.
By then, the situation proved to be too much even for someone used to pain and with a enhanced biology, and the last thing the neko saw before the strength from her limbs slowly sapped away were the two cybernetic eyes sitting inside darkened pits as the gang's Saint stared back at her after the thermal hood was pulled off. It looked as if he was grinning back at the neko, but she quickly realized that the skin on his face had simply melted away and there was nothing covering his teeth as she passed out and fell against the concrete.
