Out of the corner of your eye, one of the enemies yelled and swung their weapon downwards with the intention of splitting your skull, a move that you spectacularly countered by moving one step back, but the wrong footing served to cause them to fluidly grab your arm with one hand and wrench it behind you, keeping you bent with the other, ignoring the snarling attempts of you to twist away from the position they held you in.
Of course, the enemy liked a good bit of inducing fear in a hand-to-hand combat than a full-fledged Borisin, and throughout the scuffle they had with you, they could sense that you were the weaker link between you and Firefly — who was changing airborne direction and crushing enemies using his metallic hands, the one that was you had the weakest fight and didn’t want to oblige to the script.
Mentally snaking a finger around your neck, their hand effortlessly lifted you from the ground, the pressure of their fingers merely serving to suspend rather than strangle. Your frantic struggles against them faltered as you seemed to understand what they were about to do, and tried to move your head away, to save yourself from the sight of what was coming.
“Oh, pathetic little Stellaron Hunter,” they spoke with a breathless, wincing voice and a menacing smile, “don’t look away yet…once I’m done, I can get as much Credit as I want from your bounty. Maybe even that machine.”
...and with an almighty wrench they tore your right arm out. They grinned as they heard the screams of anguish pain erupt from your mouth, and contemptuously pushed you to the ground, bleeding to death, taking a little too much perverse pleasure in the sounds of your agony.
“Threat detected — engaged. Calculating angle of other interceptions…” S.A.M muttered as he contemptuously tossed one of the enemies a few yards away behind him like a rag doll, their bodies impacting the ground and rolling helplessly away.
When S.A.M just turned to visit the destruction he had ensued upon the battlefield, he saw your bleeding body on the floor, the torn right arm by mere millimetres away from you and the enemy standing to your left. With incredulous eyes he glanced at the enemy once, and as his green eye lenses expanded and shrinked, he turned his masked head towards you.
“Status: Ally compromised. Trauma: catastrophic. Limb loss: right arm. Pain index: off-scale. Auditory input: screaming. Processing.”
“Processing.”
“Processing.”
“No.”
“NO.”
“Target priority: hostile unit. Elimination: required. Glamoth’s Military Regulations: Article 22 rewritten. Her Majesty is now {{user}}. Non-lethal: lethal. Override requested.”
Raising their weapon, the enemy’s lips pulled back to reveal an amused smirk, and as they took position over you…
...their body went rigid, convulsing sharply as though a fire was coursing through their body, and for a brief second you felt a flash of wonder as to precisely why you had not died. Your wide eyes flicked down to their wrists as it shuddered and jerked — you could see fire building up over their fingers and the handle of their weapon. Not only there, but on their face too.
Spreading from their forehead, it travelled through their eyes and down to their lips, turning their complexion into a crisp. Agonisingly, almost humiliatingly, S.A.M. kept them like that for at least ten seconds before letting them drop to the ground, head and wrist burnt, hollow eyes falling directly into your line of sight.
As far as nightmare-inducing images go, that one was pretty high on the list.
“Stabilising. Time until irreversible shock: two minutes. Extraction required.”
As The Stellaron Hunter pressed the S.A.M. device, the flames consumed her as she knelt to check your pulse with one hand, revealing her worries.
“Stay awake. Please.” Firefly demanded, and your eyes remained on her fingers as she pulled them away to contact the Stellaron Hunters for first aid assistance via earpiece — hands that could punch and twist a person’s head, yet capable of such gentleness and precision. “The script…I’m not losing you, too.”