Like a good communist, I own nothing.

NOTE: this is a sequel to "Gauntlet: Crucible" and thus should be read sequentially.

"Gauntlet: Lies"
Part 1

May 6

Butch narrowed his eyes and looked down the hall. It was quiet: too quiet. Stepping forward, he felt the gentle glow of a shaft of light from a barred window, high above, play across his face, and its mottled gray and black camouflage paint. In the distance, there was the flapping of wings as some wayward bird took to the air. The Rowdyruff Boy immediately stood perfectly still and listened for the telltale signs of an ambush.

Slowly, he pivoted, his palms sweaty on the bars of his oversized machine gun. It weighed almost forty pounds, but that kind of weight was nothing to him. He was using his powers as little as possible, as part of the hunt, but he had to use just a hint of them to walk with all his gear. Across the broken hole opposite where he'd entered, he just caught a hint of movement.

Then the same from the left, near a cracked window.

"Surrounded," He hissed from between clenched teeth. In the distance the staccato ring of gunfire echoed across the scarred battlefield. Carefully, Butch squeezed the forward trigger, warming up the weapon. He shifted his body, and just as one of the shadows moved, and cut loose with a volley of green fire.

The shadow howled in pain, writhed, and fell back.

Butch whirled, as he picked up the sound of charging footsteps from behind. Again, he depressed the primary trigger, and the gun responded with great enthusiasm. His charging opponents were like wheat before him, and they fell to the ground in waves as he passed the weapon back and forth, left and right, burning through ammunition.

"Beeeautiful!" He grinned, a long loop belt across his shoulder pouring more and more ammo into the hungry weapon. Slowly at first, then more quickly, he started to side step, avoiding the hastily thrown in cover fire of the enemy. As it grew in intensity, scoring hits on the ground at his feet and the wall behind him, Butch began to back up.

The ground was thick with writhing wounded.

"Boomer!" Butch called into the microphone in his helmet. "I'm pinned down here! Looks like I stirred up the whole damn hornet's nest! A little help?"

"Right! I'll be there in a second or two!" Gunfire came from the other end as Boomer answered.

"Damn it." Butch barely dodged as a projectile flew past his head, nearly catching him. He'd already taken a shot or two to the body, but his vest cushioned the blow enough to make it not count.

"Come on! Come on! You want some of this? You want some more?!" He poured on the juice, full auto. The last wave hit the ground, groaning and screaming. "Yeah! That's what I thought!"

Shouldering the large weapon, now almost empty, he heard footsteps going around the side of the building, through the concrete wall separating them. They were trying to cut him off from behind! Butch sneered, spat at the ground, and whipped out two semiautomatic pistols. With a feral cry, he ran forward, into what had been the thick of the enemy. At his feet, those still conscious were groaning in pain.

Breaking out into the open bush, Butch's eye caught the stragglers of the enemy offensive, and arms out, opened fire. The ground at his feet kicked up as scattered enemy fire dogged his every move, trying to catch up. Jumping over a rock, he rolled, and got back onto his feet, still firing at both sides. When both guns ran empty, he tossed them aside, reached down to his belt, and took out two more. Spinning around, he started to run backwards, still firing like mad, a warcry escaping his lips.

"I am the GOD OF WAR! None can stand against me!!" He yelled at the top of his lungs. When he ran out of ammo again, he fell back on his nearly empty big machinegun. Then, like a teardrop, he felt something small hit his face, just above his narrowed left eye. He'd been hit. Reaching up, almost in shock, his hand came back dark red.

"Aww... damnit!" He cursed, shook his head, and dropped his weapons. What few of the enemy remained advanced on him steadily, but didn't fire. Burly shapes: tall men, dangerous men, watched him warily.

Butch looked up, and then past them, at a careful form on the roof of a far off building. As Butch's enemies approached him, closer into the open, two of them suddenly yelled out and fell to the ground, holding to the back of their heads. Four more followed, and then a dozen, as they were picked off. There was yet more, heavier, gunfire as someone charged through the dense foliage. Just as the last body hit the ground, clutching his back in agony, Boomer became visible through the rough bushes.

"I'd call this sector secure." Boomer smiled and leaned over one of his kills. The body turned over, revealing several splatters of blue over the left breast of the chest. "Check this out man. That's what's called... fire control."

"Shut up, Boomer." Butch fumed. "I may be dead, but I sure as hell got the most kills, and that's what matters!"

"It is?" Boomer quirked an eyebrow at his brother. "In what universe?"

Butch just 'hmfed' and crossed his arms. Boomer started counting, and in a minute, Brick joined them, sniper rifle in hand. Looking around, he slowly nodded. Floating up into the air, he looked around, and then came back down to just off the ground.

"Looks like all of 'em. Start waking them up and we can tally up the kills." Brick was about to head off, when he stopped and looked over his shoulder. "Dude. You got shot."

"Yeah? How'd you guess, Sherlock?" Butch wiped a bit of dark red paint from his brow.

Brick just sighed and floated off. Butch grumbled under his breath and started lightly kicking the bruised and occasionally bleeding people. Those that were totally out of it were propped up against a long length of fence that had its electricity turned off. It took a while. The convicts they'd "borrowed" from Townsville Prison had scattered all over the makeshift battlefield, and predictably, a bunch had tried to escape from the enclosure.

They'd found a fairly weak part of the warehouse compound's electric fencing, and tried to dig out with makeshift tools and bare hands. That was the group Butch had run across on his scouting run. They hadn't gotten very far, luckily: that many of them getting loose in Townsville would've been a huge fiasco, even for the group of Boys that did whatever they liked in the city. Butch also gathered up the weapons that had been handed out to the convicts - all paintball guns of various manufacture - and put them in a big pile.

In between recounting battle stories, the boys counted their respective 'kills.' Out of the three hundred potential kills, Brick had 62, all clean kills - headshots. Boomer had 86, which left an even 152 for Butch. Of course, most of Butch's targets had been hit all over their body, arms, legs, torsos... and a few tenacious individuals had been splattered almost from head to toe. The boys were using large caliber powerful paintball weapons, many of which had been quickly 'modified' by Mojo to get them out of the house, and his hair, for a day. Naturally, then, a large number of the former prisoners were bleeding and in varying amounts of pain.

"HA!" Butch pointed at the red and blue ruffs. "I WIN!"

"No... you died. Boomer won," Brick pointed out. Butch scowled at Boomer, who just stuck out his tongue and gave him a big thumbs-up.

"I had half the kills, for cryin' out loud!"

"Boomer. Get the bus, would'ya?" Brick motioned for the blue Rowdyruff to go, and off he went. Brick then faced Butch, slightly annoyed. "Look man. You did great, kill wise, no one's disputing that. You were a killin' machine out there. I saw some of it myself. But you also died. You should have waited for Boomer, pulled back, and then we could have coordinated an attack."

"There was no time!" Butch rolled his eyes. "Look, Boss-man, I know that would've been the reasonable thing to do, but sometimes ya gotta throw reason and caution out the window, ya know? There's no glory in waitin' around!"

Brick sighed and spoke more quietly. "Man, I'm not gonna cross with you today on this. Just try and be happy for Boomer, all right? He followed orders, he survived, and he won the game, ok?"

"Yeah, ok, Bossman. No big deal." Butch looked up as Boomer descended, carrying two prison buses. The boys chatted and congratulated each other while the first load of despondent and beaten criminals boarded the two buses back to jail. The boys shuttled them back, dropped off their 'volunteers' and went for the second batch that Brick had stayed behind to guard. With the whole population returned, the three Rowdyruff Boys slowly cruised over the city of Townsville, looking for something to waste a few hours on.

Mojo had thrown them out for the day after something he was working on exploded in his face leading him to claim that they'd been distracting him. Hungry and still high on adrenaline, they crashed in on a fancy French restaurant and ordered (see: demanded) everything on the menu, taking little bits of each dish. Butch had hated the tiny portions, and blasted one of the tables before forcing the cooks to make some Creole-type seafood gumbo that he had virtually inhaled in less than a minute.

By nightfall, Butch and Boomer took a few sweeps over the city, looking for trouble, while Brick retreated to his typical perch on the Metrowest Building to think. Late that night, near midnight, Butch returned, more than satisfied for the night: he'd broken the arms of some guy trying to knife a lady in skimpy clothes (Brick coughed at that part when Butch tried to describe it) and, by chance, beaten the daylights out of some guy trying to rob a cheap convenience store down in the Townsville Chinatown. Boomer came back a few minutes later. He hadn't found anything that he beat anyone up for, but he did put the scare on a few weird characters that Boomer described as 'walking slime bags.'

Before they headed back to Mojo's, Brick stood and looked out over the ocean.

To him, today had been... in a very critical way, disappointing.

Out at sea, the weather was calm.

Too calm.

Beneath the waves, a predator lurked. The ship, a Los Angeles class nuclear submarine, was on maneuvers. Despite being almost fifteen years old, it was still state of the art: a powerful and silent threat three hundred and sixty feet long equipped with missiles and torpedoes more than capable of bombarding any oceanic or land based target up to two thousand miles away.

But it wasn't the biggest fish in the sea that night.

In the dark, something larger, older, meaner, was lurking.

The predator had become the prey.

May 7.

Townsville Docks.

"Eeewww!! Gross!!"

"COOL!"

"What is it?"

"That's why you three are here." Sarah Bellum fancied herself the most patient person in Townsville. The last few days had stretched her thin, however. The apparent death of the Powerpuff Girls, and the retreat of the Mayor even deeper into his own little world, had been a very hard time. She alone had tried to rally some sort of effort to arrest the Rowdyruff Boys, but the police had refused to get involved, and the Governor didn't want to risk an outright war in his State unless there was a clear and present threat to the town that warranted it. The Boys hadn't given her any sort of 'clear and present threat' to report beyond bullying, some petty theft, and severely injuring the occasional criminal. Even Mojo had refrained from doing anything terrible.

Then, of course, they had found out why, just after the sphere creature descended on Townsville. She had been one of the few who had knew about its impending self destruction. And, despite the return of the Girls, she had been convinced that it was her final hour. When the Powerpuff's attack had been repulsed and pushed back, it had seemed like the end was only a fraction of a second away. Of course they had survived, but the emotional rollercoaster she'd been on hadn't been a fun one.

Or an uncostly one.

"What do ya mean, why we're here?" Buttercup looked tired. No huge surprise - she and her sisters had been called away from getting ready for school. "We didn't do this."

"You didn't?" Ms. Bellum asked Blossom, just to be sure.

"Nope." She shrugged. "Maybe the Rowdyruff Boys did it."

Sarah sneered at that, and looked down at the mess that lay strewn over the dock. It was the remains of a large clawed hand, with webbed fingers and massive claws. The hand was attached, mostly, to a length of sinewy, heavily muscled arm. The skin was a sickly pale orange, like it was diseased and had been floating in the water for days, gradually decaying as it was nibbled on by half the sea creatures in the ocean. It ended abruptly halfway up the arm, trailing into ragged, torn flesh. It wasn't leaking blood, which she was thankful for, and was currently partly tangled in netting.

"I dunno. We'd have heard something." Buttercup looked more closely at the severed arm. "It's defiantly a monster's arm. Hmm..."

The brunette Powerpuff carefully examined the remains. Blossom may have been her intellectual superior, but no one knew as much about the physiology of maiming monsters than Buttercup Utonium. It was her specialty: her life. She pointed to the ragged tear between the bicep and triceps.

"It looks... like it was torn off. Twisted, and torn off. Notice the... uh... shearing, I think is the word. Like how a crocodile eats." Buttercup smiled and turned on Bubbles. "Grabbing some poor dumb animal, and twisting and ripping in a death-roll while it screams and screams and..."

Bubbles's eyes widened, she took one more look at the gruesome arm, and screamed. Blossom immediately interjected. "Buttercup! ...To the point. Please."

"Whatever." Buttercup smirked at Bubbles discomfort, and looked up at Ms. Bellum. "Anyway, I don't think the Rowdyruff Boys did this. It was probably another monster."

"I didn't think they... ate... each other..." Bubbles sounded slightly confused. "I mean, some of them talk and stuff..."

"Just because some of them can talk doesn't make them human. They're still monsters," Blossom answered, "Right, Ms. Bellum?"

"I honestly don't know." She sighed. "There was a ship that didn't come into port today. A fishing boat."

The girls all turned instantly serious.

"Were..." Blossom started.

"It was a chartered night fishing boat." Ms. Bellum frowned at the topic. She wouldn't have told them the details if they hadn't directly asked for them. "There were twelve people aboard. ...It could be nothing, though!" She hastily added. "They could just be running late."

The thought of dying, so soon after being saved from such a terrible menace as they'd just faced, just days before, struck the Mayor's secretary as horribly ironic. It was the kind of depressing thing that struck here every few months, when one crisis just seemed to follow another. At least she didn't have to officially deal with the press. She had the Mayor to take that flak for her while she got the meat of things.

Blossom thought back to the last crisis, but for different reasons.

"Did you get any reports from the Navy?" She asked. "We... sort of heard they had a sonar net between Monster Island and Townsville. And they have ships out there, too, I've seen them."

Ms. Bellum blinked. Since when had Blossom known about that? It was a matter of National Security, and it had been decided by higher ups not to let the Girls know about it. So how did they know now? Truthfully, there was a lot of traffic between Monster Island and the Townsville Coast, which lead to a lot of false alarms and misidentifications. It wasn't a foolproof system, especially when coupled with the fact that local operators had been infected with what she liked to call 'Townsville Disease' which made them more than a little blundering and incompetent.

"No, sorry. Nothing substantial that they saw fit to tell us." She yawned, using her notepad to cover her mouth (and face). She'd had a bad feeling last night and missed several hours of sleep.

"That's ok! We'll find out ourselves!" Blossom faced her sisters and motioned her eyes upward. They took the hint and flew up, meeting her a hundred feet in the air.

"What's the big deal?" Buttercup sulked. They hadn't even had breakfast yet, and she was starved.

"Mojo seems to be able to crack into that surveillance stuff. Remember what Brick said when he explained about that big sphere creature?" Blossom pointed out to sea. "Well, that sort of thing would be real useful right now."

Buttercup lolled her head to the side, reluctant to outright agree. "Ok. So, what?"

"One of us has to ask for it," Bubbles answered. The other two Powerpuffs looked at her. "I suppose I'll do it."

"Are you kidding?" Buttercup floated backwards a bit as she talked. She turned to Blossom. "You can't consider sending Bubbles over there alone!"

"Like any of us can fight off all three of those boys alone," Blossom said, sarcasm heavy. "I'll go."

"Why you?" Buttercup uncrossed her arms. If Blossom didn't know better, she'd have thought the green puff was concerned.

"It's my responsibility," Blossom explained, after a few seconds silence. "Besides, it'd probably involve a lot of talking and explaining and looking at boring diagrams and charts and stuff."

Buttercup relented at that point.

Bubbles, as always, wasn't willing to argue over it.

"Good. Don't worry about me. Just fly high over the water around the area and keep an eye out for anything suspicious. ...I doubt this one will come on land, or it probably would have already." Blossom gave her sisters a last, quick wave, and sped off for Townsville Central Park.

Breakfast was tense.

Mojo sat at the head of the table, as always, slowly eating his standard breakfast meal of two eggs benedict, with potato slices on the side, French toast (no cinnamon - Mojo hated cinnamon apparently), a tall glass of grapefruit juice and a steaming cup of green tea. As he ate, he read the newspaper, which was delivered right to the door high atop the Observatory, much to the newspaper boy's chagrin. Around the table, the Rowdyruff boys sullenly and silently ate whatever they felt like making.

Butch, trying to up his carbohydrate intake, or something or another, was pouring himself a third bowl of Wheaties, and ravenously stirring various things into it, probably jelly or jam of some type. It was pretty gross, actually. Brick was tempted to say something about it but decided not to - it was too early in the day, and they'd all been up late watching Mystery Science Theater 3000 last night when they got back.

Boomer was eating a couple pancakes, drowning them in honey and other sweet stuff. It was an awful lot of sugar, but Boomer never seemed to get hyper or 'high' when he ate too many sweets like Brick and Butch did. The blonde Rowdyruff then focused on his food, eating it at a neutral pace. Brick himself just stuck with whatever cereal was at hand. Today it was something with tons of marshmallows and junk in lots of shapes and some cartoon rabbit on the cover. Not feeling like taking out a bowl and then having to put it away, he just ate handfuls out of the box and washed it down in his mouth with some low fat soy milk that Butch had 'purchased' (demanded). He also watched Mojo carefully, and clandestinely, trying to catch a better glimpse at the mad monkey's mood. Their 'father' was up to something, keeping them all in the dark about it, and Brick was naturally suspicious.

The doorbell rang.

"Boomer, get the door!" "Butch, get the door!" "Brick, get the door!"

Silence.

Then the doorbell rang again.

"Butch, you get it!" "Boomer, get going!" "Why doesn't Brick do something 'round here for once?" "Will one of you answer the STUPID DOOR??"

Complete silence. No one moved.

And the doorbell rang again.

"Not me!" "Not me!" Not... Aw, man!!"

"Good." Mojo ruffled his paper and went back to reading. Boomer grumbled and got up, grabbing a case of donuts on the counter. The doorbell rang again, and everyone yelled for him to hurry up, so he deliberately started walking really slowly, dragging his feet as he went.

"Aaaa... tttiiimmmeeee... wwaaarrrppp... Janeway... heeelppp meee..."

At everyone's annoyed sounds of disapproval, he finally walked up and opened the door. Eyes half closed, one hand in the donut box under his arm, he blinked at the person at their doorstep. After a second or two he thought up something witty to say.

"Hey there, Red. What's up? ...Oh, if this is about the recruitment thing we talked about the other day, I still won't join unless I get to be the Purple Powerpuff."

"Nice to see you, too," she said, and looked at him curiously. "Did you know you're standing around in your underwear?"

"Yep." He chomped down on a donut and purple goo seeped out. "Why?"

"No reason... I guess. Caught you during breakfast?"

"No wonder you're the brains of the group!" Boomer laughed. "Come on in."

She followed him inside. At seeing her, Mojo jumped to his feet.

"Powerpuff Blossom!" He looked around frantically for some type of weapon. "I... Er..." He picked up his grapefruit juice. "I have obtained a beaker of acid! I am armed! I am dangerous! I am not to be crossed! Stay back or face the wrath of Mojo Jojo!"

Boomer laughed some more. "Relax, pops! I doubt she's here ta cause trouble."

Butch looked up from his food. "Not even if we start some?"

"Chill," Brick said and held out a hand. "You kind of caught us at a bad time, Bloss. We're eating here."

"I missed breakfast." She frowned at the red Rowdyruff. "Superheroes sometimes have to do that."

"Really?" Brick replied, sarcastically. "I never imagined..."

"Missed the most important meal of the day, huh?" Boomer raised an eyebrow and offered her the donut box he had been holding. "Donut?"

She remembered the last time she'd eaten too much sugar. It hadn't been pretty, Mojo could attest to that. She was pretty hungry, however. "No thanks. ...Do you have any fruit?"

Boomer looked down at the donut box. "This has purple stuff inside: purple is a fruit."

Brick sighed loudly and stood up. He was still holding onto a box of cereal in one arm and a carton of milk in the other. Without another word, he walked off to the side, to a spare couch, and tossed on a white shirt. Taking the hint, she followed him. Now sort of dressed, he finally spoke while picking his chosen breakfast back up.

"All right. What's all this about?"

"I want... I need to know if anything got through the Navy' Sonar Net you mentioned before."

"You mean last night?" Brick's eyebrows lowered into something resembling distaste.

"Yeah." She nodded. "How'd you guess?"

"I... figured as much," He said, quickly. "Yeah, sure. That shouldn't be a big deal." He led her to Mojo's control booth looking over the open area below. "Let's see here..." He worked at the keys, quickly. Silently, he was intending to check the information himself, sometime after breakfast. It was a simple enough thing to do, but he played for time and information, going through a roundabout way of getting the data. "So, what makes ya so curious all of sudden, Bloss?"

"Some people on a boat disappeared last night."

"Really? And you need access to a sonar net that detects things under the ocean... why?"

She shifted uncomfortably behind where he sat. Good.

"We found part of a monster washed up on the shore. An arm. Buttercup thought it looked bitten off or something."

"Ah." Brick tapped a key, and a flat screen monitor displayed the stolen information. Mojo had electronic taps into all sorts of military and commercial networks all over the world. His intelligence capabilities were astounding. Brick looked at the screen for a few seconds, highlighted the recorded disturbances and checked them. There were a bunch of hits last night, at least a dozen at different times. One of them was a nuclear submarine. As he double-checked them, eyes darting back and forth, he fought against his natural inclination to scowl.

"What? What is it?" She saw the tension in his face.

"I don't know about your missing boat." Brick hesitated, but decided to tell. It wouldn't hurt, and it would help to cement her on his side in the future. Besides, lies required constant maintenance - the truth was less complicated. "But here's a big one that went silent late last night. A... Los Angeles Class submarine, SSN-774: The 'USS Townsville,' ironically enough."

Blossom ran a hand through her hair.

"That's why no one told Ms. Bellum..."

Brick saved that bit of information for later.

"Losing a nuclear submarine right off the coast isn't something to be proud of." Brick leaned back, cupped his hands behind his head. "Still... it's highly unusual. We're not the Russians, after all."

Against his better judgment, he felt a twinge of eagerness. Last night - this morning, they were pretty much interchangeable. He should've known better than to just give up after midnight. It was a mistake he wouldn't make again. He printed out a copy of the screen, and handed it to her while he thought. "Here."

"Great!" She started to head off for the elevator down. He followed, taking his food with him. Shaking the cereal box, he confirmed that there was still a bunch down at the bottom, mostly the crumbs and stuff. Walking her to the door, through the open area that served as a sort of den, or living room, he poured the last of the soymilk into the box, and slouched it around a bit. He then drank it and licked his lips. He made a mental note: it had tasted better mixed beforehand.

"You guys are pretty weird, you know that?" Blossom looked at the soggy box in his hand.

"What? You know any normal guys?" Brick got a laugh at that.

"..." She pursed her lips, resisting saying what he was probably waiting for. "Thanks, anyway."

"Whatever." He pushed her out the door. "Get outta here before I kick ya out."

Without another word, she flew off and he closed the door. Facing his brothers, well one of them (Butch had obviously finished eating and left) Brick crumpled up the box of cereal and threw it in the trash bin.

"Boomer. Put some fightin' threads on." Brick's voice was chill: his professional tone. "I'll get Butch. We've got some stuff that needs doing."