Phase 2: An unwelcome revelation about the antidote's whereabouts

"Let's blow them to kingdom come!" Au Revoir "strategized," before grabbing an assault rifle up from where the hallway guards had dropped it earlier. She was clearly prepared to spray and pray, not that a marksman with her level of combat prowess often had much use for praying.

"Wait! There's something you need to know," Nora huffed, panting and showing the tips of her pointed teeth as well as her forked tongue. The exit from the room had left her winded. "I don't have the antidote. When the Adder Adjutant cornered me, before you all arrived, they confiscated it. It must still be somewhere on their uniform."

"Damn!" Au Revoir complained, taking a moment to poke her head out and lay down gunfire, to stall the inevitable approach of Adder's forces. "Are you saying we have to be careful about who we shoot? I'm bad at that, sometimes."

"No, I'm sure the Adjutant is going to escape from another direction. They aren't likely to bunch in with their own forces. I just wanted you to know I don't have it... and that your goals of capturing Adder Adjutant and retrieving the antidote are probably now one and the same. Unless you can bring them into custody, there's no antidote. Without Adder's resources, I can't engineer another batch, either."

"Fuuuck! The only good news is that if we simply kill every Adder agent, we don't have to worry about the Bound Blood 1000, one way or another!" the blond Frenchwoman growled, taking that as a queue to shoot two agents dead as they began a charge through the hall.

Vaarvel, in her hiding place with Nora, shook her head with a thin smile. "No good. Adder's too smart to put their eggs in one basket. Even if they underestimated the chances for infiltration here, you can bet that they've got chains of command set up in the event that anything should happen to the Adjutant. Taking out one bigwig doesn't stop Adder's plan for world domination using Bound Blood 1000. That said... the Adjutant is sure to be a bountiful source of information. We need them alive."

"No promises!" Au Revoir half-joked, half-warned, firing another burst of covering fire down the hallway. "Once these dumbasses get smart enough to go through the windows and approach us in a pincer formation, we're screwed! Let me charge in and take care of them!"

"That's far too reckless. You're dressed in a bikini, not full body garmor," Vaarvel sighed, pressing one hand to her unmasked, Egyptian-disguised face. "You tell her, Ciao..."

Part of you suspected that Au Revoir really could successfully clear a room full of armed Adder officers... but another part of you didn't want to risk one of your most valuable agents on that hunch. You'd have to decide if you felt comfortable leaving it in Au Revoir's hands, or if you could come up with a way to help her clear the room without risking her own safety.