Her icy voice cut through the corridor like a whip.
Both men stiffened violently.
In perfect, ridiculous unison, they paused their brawl, shot each other a dirty look.
And snapped their heads toward her.
Recognizing her, both deadly assassins tensed up visibly.
They looked like two schoolboys caught brawling behind the bleachers by a strict teacher, suddenly radiating a bizarre sense of guilty apprehension.
Clearly, neither of them had expected The Panacea to show up here.
They kept their eyes glued to Serena, but the lethal tension humming between them didn't fade a single bit.
Neither loosened their death grip.
Neither spoke. Neither backed down.
Seeing them stubbornly locked in their standoff, the dark annoyance in Serena's eyes deepened.
She raised her hand and gave a sharp, clinical flick of her wrist.
Two silver needles tore through the air.
Jerrick and Jasper's expressions shifted in unison.
But before either of them could even flinch.
The needles sank with brutal precision right into the pressure points of their dominant arms.
An agonizing, paralyzing shockwave blasted down their muscles, instantly numbing them down to their fingertips.
Jasper's hand convulsed.
The throwing knife clattered uselessly onto the steel floor.
Jerrick's forearm, pinned to Jasper's throat, immediately lost all its devastating force.
The stalemate broken, both men shoved apart, stumbling back a step.
Jasper grabbed his completely deadened wrist, his eyes narrowing sharply behind the grinning silver mask.
Jerrick stared down at the needle jutting from his bicep.
For the first time, stark, heavy caution washed over his rugged, hard-cut features.
They both looked at Serena.
"Absolute idiots," she stated
lips.
mercilessly, an icy sneer curving her Brawling like stray dogs right under the enemy's nose swnovers
"What, are you both eager to get yourselves killed?"
With every word she spoke, the temperature in the room seemed to drop ten degrees.
She swept a chilling, bone-deep
glare ove
be
them. "If you want to
yuest. But do not dragt
down with your stupidity
.net>
bet
ontent
Jasper aggressively rolled his numb wrist, his stunning features twisting slightly behind the mask.
Just moments ago, he had mopped
up the hit squad in The Predator's
Den that had been planning to capture The Panacea alive. After cracking the un-deteted encrypted coordinates on Vance Miller's comms.
Won
Jasper had tracked the signal straight past The Med-Tech Quarantine and directly
into this service corridor bordering the vault.
He had come out here to hunt down whoever the hell had put a bounty on her head.
Instead...
The second he stepped into the passage, he ran straight into Fenris.
Seeing a massive man in ship security gear lurking in the shadows outside the vault.
Jasper naturally assumed this guy was the assassin waiting to ambush her.
As for Jerrick, he was right where Serena had told him to wait.
Suddenly, some sketchy, masked psycho appeared right on the critical intercept path for Specimen Fourteen's extraction.
He immediately assumed the masked man was a cleaner sent by the ship's administration.
Neither of these men were the talking type.
Exchanging polite introductions wasn't exactly in their vocabulary.
So...