Fallout, Second Life

Chapter 322 - 322

Adam pulled himself to his feet and out the door back into the hallway where he ripped off his gasmask and took several long deep breaths, letting the fresh air fill his lungs, still reeling a bit from nearly being choked.Once he gathered his breath he, along with Pearl, dragged the unconscious members of the Gunners into the hallway to give them fresh air too. Once that was done Adam took out his last stimpack and injected Pearl with it.

"Why stick with tiny needle?" Pearl asked, despite having used stimpacks before.

"It's medicine Pearl, it will make you hurt less and help you heal."

"Oh! Pearl like not pain! Pearl like tiny needle." Pearl said proudly. Once Adam was done giving her the stimpack he took stock of his options. The cult leader was dead, stabbed and decapitated by Mira. However a sudden realization just dawned on Adam, even with the leader dead they just made him a martyr, not that he would have been better alive, but him being dead just meant there was no one left alive to end the violence. Even if he climbed to the roof and held his head aloft for all to see proclaiming he had been killed the cultists would likely just fight even harder, maybe even target him specifically for holding their beloved leader's head for all to see. Or maybe they would kill themselves, that'd be fine too. But Adam was not willing to take that risk.

Ultimately that left him with few options. They would just have to finish this fight by hand, killing every cultist here until they were either all dead or, much less likely, surrendered. However Adam was battered, out of stimpacks, and now he had the responsibility of watching Colonel Harrison and his men while they were unconscious.

The only saving grace was that the fighting around the other parts of the school sounded far less intense than before. There was still fighting all over, no doubt, but the severity of the battle had diminished notably, he could only hope that meant they were close to winning.

Paxton, the only member of The Gunners who was with the Colonel Harrison group with Adam but did not enter the room due to handling the MG and covering their rear, picked up the gun again and then walked over to Adam.

"What's their condition?" He asked, a professional tone in his voice as he set up the MG again, this time pointed down the hall to cover the other Gunners who were still unconscious.

"They inhaled some sort of gas. I do not know what kind but it had a hallucinatory effect. I was able to mitigate the full effects by using my gas mask, but the others were not so lucky. It seemed like they went mad, some attacking shadows, others attacking each other. The Colonel himself even was bashing his head on the wall." Paxton remained quiet for a moment and then nodded.

"I don't know anything about toxicology but there is a doctor moving with War's army, when the battle is over I can see if he can check them out. Until then I will stay here and protect the Colonel." Adam nodded to him.

"Alright if you got this then I have somewhere I need to go." Adam said as he took a deep breath and then got to his feet.

"I assume you will need this?" Mira said as she appeared out of thin air, her stealth dropping as she walked into view, now holding the keycard to the basement.

"I gotta admit, you are a mind reader." Adam chuckled. Mira chuckled a little bit too, taking off her helmet for a moment.

"Not a mind reader, just a practiced spook~" She winked and then got serious. "Come on, we got prisoners to save." Adam nodded to her and then looked at Pearl.

"Pearl, can you stay here with the unconscious Gunners? Help Paxton defend this spot until more help can arrive or until they can get back on their own two feet." Paxton looked over at Adam surprised. Perhaps at his desire to help defend the Gunners, or perhaps due to Pearl's presence to aid him. In either case he did look surprised. However Pearl just nodded with a grin.

"Pearl will help little green men!" She said as she pulled her specially made extra sized laser rifle Adam had made for her. In her hands it looked like a normal sized laser rifle despite being huge on Adam. More than that though she looked excited to use it.

Adam then took off with Mira back down the hall towards the underground prison where all the experiments were kept.

The path there was cleaned of cultists, well, alive ones anyway. The floor was covered in the corpses of dead cultists, and a few of those Adam had come with, but so far no one he recognized at least.

They scanned in with the card and made their way downstairs where they were met with a large number of literal children cultists. These were not like the few kids that Adam had seen up to this point that were fighting alongside the adults, these were children between the ages of 1 to 5. Far too young to even fully comprehend what was going on around them. There was one woman with them all, clearly a caretaker.

She pointed a pistol at Mira and Adam as they walked down. She did not look scared but resolved. Adam hesitated, not exactly sure what to say or do, not that he would hesitate to kill the woman if needed but it felt incredibly immoral to do it in front of the children. However Mira was not at a loss for words.

"We are not here to kill the kids. We will not hurt them." Mira said as she fearlessly took another step forward. "We won't hurt you either, unless you give us a reason." She said with a cold fierceness as Adam could only imagine her eyes glaring daggers at the woman from under her orange faceplate.

"You are infidels! Non-believers! I cannot permit you to corrupt the minds of these young children!" She said, now seeming a bit intimidated but not yet backing down.

"Your leader is dead, I killed him, I cut his head off his body myself. Your ideology has fallen and you are nothing more than a relic from a bygone era. So I will give you this one last chance. Either surrender or perish alongside your backwards belief." Mira said again, now with an almost seething anger to her tone. Adam had no idea Mira had such strong feelings about the whole thing but he didn't exactly blame her.

"I…I…" The woman hesitated, not sure what to do. "I won't give u-" The woman began as she closed her eyes and started to yell that she would not give up but as she did Mira dove in with lightning fast speed and stabbed her through the stomach with the chinese officer sword. In the same moment that she did this she let go of the sword, still impaled into the woman's stomach, grabbed hold of the gun that was in her hand and disarmed it. Then, once the gun was on the floor she flipped the woman over her shoulder onto the ground in one impressive fluid motion that looked a lot like a judo throw. The woman hit the ground with a thud that also pushed the sword out of her body as she hit the ground. Then, without missing a beat, Mira put her knee on the woman's collar bone and snapped her neck without mercy. She was dead before she truly had an idea what happened.

As Mira stood tall over the dead body of the cultist one of the children, probably the oldest looking like 4 or 5 years old, started to tear up. It seemed he had some concept of what happened, enough that it was scaring him.

Adam ran over and took a knee next to the kid as he gently placed his hand on the kid's head.

"Hey, hey, don't cry, it's going to be alright." Adam said with a soft soothing voice. Of course in the chaos of the moment, a single stranger's voice was not enough to stop the child from crying but for the moment he didn't seem to be having a full blown meltdown, just some quiet sobs. Adam brought him into a gentle hug and gently shushed him with reassuring pats on the back to help him calm down, which did seem to help. The rest of the kids were a bit too preoccupied with whatever sort of baby toys were laid out for them or were otherwise calmed by Adam's reassuring presence. Which was good, because if all the children cried Adam would have no idea what to do. And Mira didn't strike him as the type to revel in childcare either. Plus, even just from a glance she looked pissed based on her body language.

As if to add credence to the theory that she had no interest in the children she walked right past them all and began to inspect the cages for captured people who may still be alive. As it turned out, there were very few that remained.