Oh, God! it is a fearful thing
To see the human soul take wing
In any shape, in any mood.
-The Prisoner of Chillon, Lord Byron

The Grissom Academy atrium was nice. Doubtless expensive, though; the river probably clogged up a lot, someone had to rake up the tree leaves. And, in a curious design oversight, there were no cunning little nooks for the students to get a little private time.

Misty Shepard took in the Cerberus troops in her second second in the room.

She dove for the low wall in front of her, Vega and Tali right behind.

"Tali, pop fly."

"Roger," the Quarian said, and started prepping a recon drone.

"I'm crushed, Shepard. You're replacing me?" came a raspy baritone over the com.

Shepard grinned in spite of herself. "Chiro, I thought I told you to stay on the ship."

"Sorry, my helmet's audio receivers were acting up." Chiro's name added itself appeared on her fireteam roster. "I can always go back."

Misty sighed on the inside. "Where are you?"

"Around. More importantly, where's the Phantom trying to get a bead on you?"

A round bounced off the other side of the wall.

"Correction; bead gotten."

"Could you be a little more useful?"

In response, the tag for the Phantom popped up on Shepard's HUD, along with a whole slew of other Cerberus tags.

"Thank you."

There wasn't much cover between Misty and the forces in the basin, and the Phantom had an excellent oversight position.

Of course, this also meant that there wasn't much cover for the Cerberus troops either, so the students' loss was her gain. And their gain too, if they could work from the upper balcony.

Then again, that was assuming conventional movement.

Misty Shepard took a deep breath, and drew blue energy into her, through her, became one with it, and pushed-

She had heard it compared it to flying, once. It seemed entirely inadequate.

The sniper never knew what hit her.

Misty had to give her credit; she was a tough girl. Most people wouldn't still be awake after a Charge, much less reaching for their sidearm. Of course, any cybernetic augmentations she had must've been designed for delicate motor control, not hand to hand with an N7 marine who specialized in close combat.

None of the Cerberus forces even noticed the gunshot.

Shepard caught the rifle as the sniper dropped to the floor and began to self-destruct. "Jack, move. We'll cover you."

In response, one of the troopers below suddenly screamed as someone - probably a heavily tattooed someone - created a small warp bubble, centered on his face. He dropped his shield and clawed at his helmet, and Shepard dropped him with a shot through his ruined faceplate. Mercy kill, really. Mercy they didn't deserve.

The white clad troopers took a second to react before turning to pepper Shepard's position with suppressive fire, and she went prone, kicking the sniper's corpse off the side as she did so.

"Carnage and Sabotage, let's go!"

Vega and Tali responded appropriately, and the Cerberus troopers reacted predictably, with their Centurion dropping smoke. Of course, that meant they couldn't see anyone else either.

"I don't have sight, and this is a bad angle for the sonics," said Chiro. "Displacing."

Tali yipped "Are you going to -"

"Yep."

Shepard looked up just in time to see Chiro leap from his perch, spread his cloak into a sort of glider, and start to swoop across the atrium. She had just enough time to think so that's what they were working onbefore something blasted up from the cloud of smoke and tagged him, sending him spiralling down.

No.

Not again.

Entirely unbidden, the tune from "Modern Major-General" floated through her head.

"Does anyone have eyes on him? Security cameras, anything?" Shepard peered through her scope, to find, well, smoke. Even the thermal mode in her optics didn't do anything.

Vega and Tali both returned a negative.

"Jack, can you push back the smoke?"

"Maybe if I -"

An ID tag pinged on, in the middle of the cloud, and Shepard blinked. It was Chiro. A second later, he sent through a feed, images generated by a combination of visual and his sonics.

There was a rifle pointed at his head.

He had tapped into the troopers' feeds, and they were discussing whether to take his mask off, whether they should just kill him or try to hold him hostage.

A message appeared on the feed. "AIM HIGH. NOW."

"Gladly," Misty murmured, and fired. Potshot, really. Didn't expect to actually hit anything.

On the feed, the troopers automatically ducked and, more importantly, brought their guns up. In that moment, Chiro acted.

Like any N7, Shepard was excellent at hand-to-hand, though a solid elbow to the face tended to put down just about anything. But Chiro, Chiro was different.

She would have to analyze it, later. Play it back a dozen times in slow motion, with Chiro himself explaining. Hackett would request it be used for the ICT training scheme. It would be a lot simpler than it looked.

First, he activated his gauntlet omnitools, blue spikes flaring out with a whisper. The he palmed two of his throwing knives, and jammed both of them into cracks in the armor of the two troopers closest to him, at the ankle and knee. As both activated in a rush of cold, he trapped the rifle in his omni-spikes, jammed it with his EW suite, sat up, pulled the rifle out of the troopers hands with a twist, unjammed it, then turned it on its former owners.

It took maybe five seconds.

"Behind you!" Shepard barked, and fired at a Cerberus assault trooper. At close range, Chiro's sensors could relay even greater detail, but she still missed. Apparently, the fall had damaged them. Shepard dropped her aim to center mass, and fired again, this time more successfully.

There was another contact, running low to the ground, and she saw Chiro's shillouette suddenly bring his stolen gun up in a block, and then lean back as the Phantom stabbed her blade straight through it, right at his face. He tried to twist the rifle to lever the blade away, and the assassin didn't even react. In fact, the rifle spun out of his hands and nearly hit him before he managed to stop it and the sword on his gauntlets.

Rotating wrists, that's new.

Problem was, they were at an impasse. Chiro couldn't bring his launchers to bear without giving the Phantom an opening, and the woman's augmented strength would undoubtedly win the day sooner or later.

Probably sooner.

Of course, Chiro could use the palm dispensers, but the only one of his little gadgets likely to be effective at that range were the explosive ones -

(Everyone's dying.)

"Tali, can you hack the Phantom?"

From the distracted sound of her voice, the quarian had anticipated her. "I'm trying, Shepard, but they patched the firmware. I can't-"

"Vega -"

"Negative. I do not have a clean shot, not with the current sensor quality."

Sensor quality which Shepard knew about already, or she would have taken the shot herself. She bit back the urge to yell at Vega.

"Aren't you forgetting something, Commander?" a certain tattooed someone drawled over the comm. "Kids, drop the shield. We're going for the Collector special!"

A blue, biotic bubble appeared over the smoke cloud, then moved away, carrying off the smoke. Okay, it wasn't exactly what had held off the seeker swarms, but it did expose the cinched pair. She still didn't have a clean shot, but -

"Keelah!" cried Tali triumphantly. "I got it. She's locked up!"

"Chiro! Clear!"

The cloaked man slipped bonelessly away from the stiffened assassin, and Shepard sent a surge of biotic energy through her arm. "Tali, cut her loose."

The Phantom floated into the air, wreathed in blue light. The last thing she heard was a gun firing, and the faint noise of the round narrowly missing her head. The last thing she did was look up. The last thing she saw was Artemis Shepard smiling down at her from the far side of a sniper rifle.

She didn't even use the scope.