"Where to next?" The blonde answered sa pamamagitan ng running past the elder assassin, leaving him to follow her. Her braid was just long enough to dangle between her shoulder blades, the bleached color startling against the black material of her suit, he noticed as they sprinting through the corridors. It was the brightest part about her, the braid. Her suit, combat boots, kutsilyo belt, sheaths, cowl were all black to compliment the stormy gray of her eyes and dark mood that was a constant around the girl. The man decided that he spent far madami time than necessary studying his enemy.
After taking out a handful of straddling guards, the pair finally came to a staircase, but as the man started upward, his guide started running down the steps to the lower level.
"The basement?" he asked. "No one sinabi anything about going underground, Angel."
"Guess they don't tell you as much as you think," she replied, pausing on the stairwell as she realized he had stopped following her. "I only know because it was my job to memorize the maps. What's your deal?"
Angel watched him shrug before he began following her again, even madami rigid than before.
"Stop freaking out, Gabriel," Angel told him, his tension making her uneasy. "We just have to acquire the Gift, then we can leave the ‘spooky’ basement."
"Shush!" Gabriel commanded in a hushed voice. Angel immediately stopped in her tracks. "You know, just because they decided to put you in charge, doesn't mean you get to be a gratified-"
"Hush!" he hissed again, "Concentrate!"
Angel stopped and honed her senses on her surroundings even madami than before. All she could hear was the clambering of machinery, the pinagmulan of the rumbling beneath their feet. However, she felt something else, something madami alert nearby. With a dagger drawn from its sheath, Angel crept on slower, madami careful feet down the last of the stairs. She stopped on the last landing and peered down at the door that would lead them to their prize.
"There are madami of them, inside," she concluded. "A lot of them."
"What do you suppose we do about that?"
A short pause for thought. "Do you have the charges?"
"Of course, but they'll only blast through the door. They won't do any damage to the inside," Gabriel pointed out.
"We don't need them for the door," she contradicted, already descending the last of the stairs, towards the door. "They gave me the code."
"Then why would they give us explosives?"
"Probably just in case I died before we got to this point."
"They have such little faith in us."
"Don't worry. They'll learn."
"Apparently our distinguished lineage isn’t evidence enough of our discipline," Gabriel summed up, engaging the pack of explosives that has been in his pack.
"Our parent killed each other," Angel reminded him as she took the signal to manuntok in the final number of the code. She pulled the door open from behind, putting her in the corner of cement walls with the iron door completing a barricade of protection. Gabriel threw the explosive into the room and ran up a few steps before the bomb went off. There was a bellow of smoke from the room, but no sound of living soldiers.
The assassins entered the room and ignored the gore of the last stand of guards, seeing only the radiant jewel sitting in the bullet proof, blood splattered glass case in the center of the room.
"The case might be rigged- AH!" Gabriel cried out as a dagger buried into the back of his guya and dragged down to his ankle. Angel threw a dagger, killing the wounded soldier who they had mistaken for dead, but the damage was done. She went to Gabriel’s side as he leaned against the wall, taking the pressure off his left leg. The lower half of his pants leg was shredded, already soaking with blood.
The man was unable to suppress a groan as she tied strips from a soldier’s uniform around his leg.
“See now why we wear higher boots rather than your weird low-cuts,” Angel informed him as she straightened. As soon as she met his dark eyes, the jaunting smile was exiled for her usual stoic expression. “I’ll get the Gift.”
Gabriel watched her every cautious step, her eyes scanning for any trip wires or pressure plate. He leaned against the pader and resisted the urge to sit and rest his aching leg in case they had to leave at any moment. There were so many bodies littering the floor, that it would seem that is any traps were set, then the fallen soldiers would have triggered them. But the assassins were not ones to carry out actions based on assumption.
Angel finally reached the case and stuck a suction cup on either side of the glass. She used them to pull the glass up, then waited for something to shoot from the walls or drop from the ceiling to kill her. When nothing happened, she set the case down and took the jewel from its holder. Gabriel saw her pause a moment, staring at the deep blue stone heart. It was dazzling even from where he was standing; he wondered what it was like to hold it. Was it cool to the touch, or was it as warm as a pulsing puso as the rumors suggested?
“Angel,” he called her back to reality, “We need to leave.”
The girl nodded and wrapped the diamond in a cloth before putting it in her bag. She made her way back over to the elder assassin and allowed him to balutin an arm around her shoulder and lean against her for balance.
“Ready?” Angel checked with the injured man. Before Gabriel could respond, a distinct sound of rushing water broke the silence of the corpse littered basement. There were vents lining the room, close to the floor, hiding in plain sight, and from them, water started to pour. Very, very quickly.