Mannequin stepped back, and I watched as he retracted all of his blades, the slots they’d speared out of sealing closed behind them.  A wave of pressure and heat killed off every bug and likely most of the gunk I’d managed to smear inside.

Damn, he was prepared.

Yeah, I hadn’t figured that would work.  Plan one down.

Time for plan bee!

I ducked beneath his first swing as he closed in, but I couldn’t avoid the follow-up hit.  His second swing scraped off the armor on my shoulder and struck my chest.

Ouch!

Beyond the momentary pain, I was almost grateful for it, because the strike knocked me further out of his reach.

Well, that’s somewhat fortunate, I guess, as long as he doesn’t have more chain to extend his reach with.

Some of my bugs managed to squeeze inside the slots where his weapons had emerged.

Ooh! Now this is more promising.

The spaces didn’t perfectly match the bases of the blades, and the bugs were small.  There was nothing organic inside the sheaths.  Even the interior was completely sealed off.

But yeah, can’t have water or something get in there, let alone bugs.

Still, I managed to get bugs into the mechanisms, lodging their bodies inside the finer workings or killing one another to spill ichor and their bodily contents onto anything that felt sensitive.

Nice!

Or maybe, behind that hard shell, he was in the throes of mental anguish.  Maybe he was spending every second of every day reliving the day he lost his family and his dreams to a nigh-unstoppable, malignant force.

Reliving it from the other side of the situation? I suppose it’s possible.

There was nothing I could do about his past.  Whoever he had been before, he was a monster now.  I had to pull out all the stops to try and stop him from hurting anyone else.

Yeah. I don’t think there’s any redemption waiting for him in this story. Maybe in fanfics, but not in canon.

The only Slaughterhouse members who seem potentially redeemable right now are (from most to least redeemable) Burnscar, Bonesaw and Cherish, and that’s from the generous POV of a Steven Universe and MLP:FiM fan. I don’t think any of them will actually get a redemption.

It was time to enact battle plan number one, one of the two ideas I had in mind that almost definitely wouldn’t work.

Alright, let’s see this thing.

I’m guessing she’s right that the first battle plan isn’t going to work. Gotta build up to the one major plan that does.

I set my swarm on him.  Up to this point, I had kept them largely at bay, using only the bare minimum necessary to keep track of my surroundings.  Now I smothered him, piling them on every available surface.

Yeeah, I don’t know. Maybe it could mess with his senses and give Taylor a more immediate sense of what he’s doing, but beyond that, I don’t know what it’s supposed to accomplish.

It didn’t accomplish a thing, of course.  He started running toward me, weapons at the ready.  He wasn’t impeded in his movements, nor were his senses -sight or otherwise- impaired.

R.I.P. battle plan one.

The pain from being thrown around was belatedly making itself known.  Bruises, I could deal with.  Just so long as my body moved where and when I needed it to.  I felt the dull ache of a building headache.

Hm. A headache is not good – it has seemed to mess with her power a bit before, if I remember correctly.

From where I’d been gripped in the headlock?

Okay.  Still in one piece, more or less.  How much time had I bought?  One minute?  One and a half?  Could I hold out for long enough?  Could the bystanders?

I think the answer to that is a loud, resounding…

maybe?

The moment my bugs arrived would be the moment I could begin my plan.  I’d still have to survive after that, and there was no guarantee it would work.  In fact, my gut was telling me it was a long shot.

At least she has the unspoken plan guarantee on her side. I’m very much looking forward to seeing what she’s trying to do.

Thirty seconds to a minute.  I was panting for breath, counting every second that he silently stared at me as something I should value.

He seems to like doing that a lot. Maybe there’s more to it, like perhaps a sense that’s kinda slow?

What was going on behind that expressionless mask?  Was he coming up with a battle plan?  Maybe, maybe not.  He didn’t really need one.  It could be that he was calculating how best to destroy me: not just killing me, but ruining me.

I don’t know. He does seem to delight in taunting, but he appears to be quite efficient with his killing tactics.

There were enough ways he could do it.  Inflicting lifelong scars and injury.  Or he could go down the opposite road and murder the civilians, leaving me as the only one standing.

That last one seems more like his style based on what he was doing when she came in, but the former is also in line with his body modification thing.

Both were very real possibilities, both devastating in their own way.

And “both” is also an option.

I crashed into a pile of wooden boards that were riddled with nails and screws.

Classic.

The metal points jabbed at me but didn’t penetrate my costume.  I tried to get my feet under me, but the boards only slid underfoot.  His hand was still attached to my face.

Pfft.

Mannequin can still control it from where he is, though, right?

He began to pull me forward, no doubt to repeat the process.  Half blind under the grip of his hand, I reacted in a heartbeat, slamming the point of the knife into the gap between his hand and my face.

Nice!

Tattletale had said it was strong enough to serve as a crowbar.  I was glad to discover she was right.  Between the pull of the retracting chain and the leverage of the knife, I freed myself from his grip, his fingertips scraping hard against my scalp.

Woo!

Also hey, there we have the vulnerable spot I was talking about earlier. This is probably going to leave marks under Taylor’s hair.

Flying back to him, his arm clicked back into place.  I tried to blink a blurry spot out of my vision, only to realize I had a scratch on the right lens of my mask where I’d hit it with the knife’s edge.

Eesh. As a fellow glasses-wearer, I can easily imagine how annoying that scratch is going to be.

I drew my knife and gripped the handle.  Then I drove it at my throat.

What?

Or at Mannequin’s leg, which was folded around my throat.  Same idea.

There’s… a bit of a difference there. :p

I aimed at the ball joint, striking a mere two or so inches from my own face.  Once, twice, three times. 

I was swinging for a fourth hit when he shifted positions.  I couldn’t be sure if he had hoped to gradually strangle me, to leave me dangling until I started begging or if he’d been poised for something else, but he’d apparently changed his mind.

That did seem to be what he was doing. Did he get sick of the stabby stabby?

He turned over, his leg unfolding from my throat at the same instant one large hand closed over my face.

“Hey, don’t stab yourself in the face while you’re up there. Here, let me cover it up for you.”

“Mmmfffmfmf!”

He whipped me around himself in one tight circle, then let his arm go free from the socket, the whirring sound of chain feeding out swiftly becoming distant as I hurtled across the room.

Well, this is gonna hurt.

He didn’t slow or hesitate at my words.

“Bastard!”  I ran for him.  It was a hundred percent possible he was baiting me, forcing me into a situation where I had to do something stupid or let the mom and the little kid get hurt.

There’s a good chance of that, yes. Either that or he just doesn’t care about Taylor anymore.

Maybe if I’d been a harder person, I could have let him hurt them, knowing it was smarter in the long run.  But I wasn’t capable of doing that.

Yeah, in that case she would probably have taken the tactical advantage of staying down.

What could I even do?  I had to make the call in the three or four seconds it took me to cross the floor of the factory.  He was more than half-again as tall as I was, and my weapons couldn’t do anything to him.

I guess the best she could do with her weapons would be to knock him off-balance, but with how his body works, that would be of limited use.

I threw myself at the backs of his legs, colliding with the back of his knees and his calves.  Not all of his precarious balance was an act.

…or she could do it with her body. Fair enough!

He teetered and collapsed backward onto the floor, his legs on top of me.

Reminds me of a recent incident involving me, a ditch and my new bicycle.