The brief halo-flare of power necessitated by her leap from the building an alley across announces Bravo-Three's position to her handler. Wings twitch and distend her trench coat slightly as the HUD lights up with a simple indicator in her direction; deeply ingrained reflex makes the angel turn her head to check for threats, still mid-air, and she botches the roll onto the rough cement roof, tumbling and slapping her hands on the ground. The scrapes heal quickly, and for a second, the wind carries the scent of roses and iron.

She plays it off, lowering her head and approaching her handler with the hint of a smile. It's only her way of saying hi. Her halo shimmers and then fades into a slight distortion of the light.

"Perimeter normal. No visual contact, but identifiable aurals matching intel. I think she's hiding subterranean."

Ah, just the asset. She nods curtly and unstraps her backpack, starting to set up a ground-penetrating radar system. She pauses before turning it on, offering a wire with a circular connector to her colleague. "Give her a jolt?"

The angel checks her surroundings before crouching with her head oriented towards the connector. She glances up at her handler's eyes, smiling, and the halo lights up like a tesla coil, gold-laced electricity arcs of light and electricity flowing into the connector. It's a parlor trick; she could have done it with a finger, has done it again and again. The halo warbles and fades, but Bravo-Three's expression doesn't change, even as she whips back to look around.

She snorts. "Show-off. You know you're not supposed to show your halo in public, it lights you up like a beacon to anything with aetheric senses out there - which may I remind you includes our target - and you may be hard to kill but I'm decidedly not." She smooths the impulse driver's housing to the ground and steps away, control panel in hand. Then, she presses the start button.

Any contrarian impulses are long-since smoothed over into a dull feeling of chagrin. The reflex to say "sorry" is further redirected into a curt "Yes ma'am."

The machine whistles inaudible and lights up invisible—

The wide-spectrum radar scan has a lot to say about the city. Sewers and other underground infrastructure, indistinct blobs that might be rocks or buried treasure, building foundations, and, of course, a semi-comprehensive mapping of the local sub-level landscape. Lucky for them, basements aren't all too common in this little slice of the midtown residential zones, and of the three suspect apartment buildings, one stands out as dilapidated and condemned, scheduled for demolition, as B3 is quick to note. Certainly the safest place to look, if nothing else. 

The doesn't care what the techs at the shop have to say about it being "inaudible to humans" and "not even really sound", the damn thing is a nuisance and makes her eyes water. She starts packing away the equipment, she has what she needs to know. "Asset, next search target is at three o'clock, abandoned apartment building, full of places to hide. I know you don't think it's aboveground but start at the top floor, make your way down, kill anyone who gets in your way. If you see anything that you can't handle, you know protocol - I'll be on comms. Wait for me to get to the building before entering the basement. Never know what sort of traps it might have laid."

Her eyes go a little glassier than usual at the words kill anyone who gets in your way, but Bravo Three nods, the orders not arousing any particular reflection—this is textbook, recognizable, routine. It's easier to stay on the ball than to reflect. Makes it easier to keep the halo in check, too, which is important so that people don't get in her way.

That is, to Niki, it's easiest to stay focused when lives are on the line. Especially when she'd be the one killing them.

"Yes ma'am. Enroute." 

She doesn't botch the rolls this time. Swiftly landing on the roof of the target building, she feels carefully for aetherics before making swift entry through a top-level window. The building is, in many ways, made out of chaff. Creaks just enough on its own to make you look, filled with clutter and obstacles and distracting smells and the dreary, oppressive aural signature of a dying building that was never very good at being a building. Good for hiding in, and for laying an ambush. Bravo Three isn't very afraid of that; she just carefully notes where the handful of squatters are, and avoids them, floor to floor, keeping them out of her path as she passively scans room after room. She starts to feel something strange, the further down she goes. Not the same holistic wretchedness permeating the building, but not anything closer to divinity, either; or maybe just so, but dizzyingly shifted a few steps aside on the imaginary plane. It's like one other thing she's ever felt before. She reaches for the mic on the neck of her coat.

"Positive ID, aetheric. Target is or was in the building. Rendezvous location? Ground floor clear but may be too close, three civilians levels four and five, passive. Advise."

She circles around the back of the building looking for any non-obvious way in. This isn't her usual sort of mission, stealth and recon are more important than shock and awe here. The garbage cans out back look weird, and it takes a moment to realize why- there aren't any bugs, even a dumpster that's half-open and full of overripe fruit. She fidgets nervously with the hard edge of her vest, worrying the fabric. "Roger that, asset. Meet at the loading dock, we can find our way down from here."

She doesn't take long to double-check the service elevator (out of service as all hell, though that isn't necessarily an impediment to use as an escape route for someone like their target) and rush to the side exit leading to the empty loading dock. She picks out a nice corner with a view of the basement entrances, gates, and most of the threshold into the street. When her handler arrives, Bravo Three smiles at her, bowing slightly and gesturing at a side door. She gives a summary report on the possible entrances and exits to the sub-level, including what should be floor space weak (wretched, imperfect-feeling to the senses of an angel) enough to breach.

"I think it'd be safest for you to stay... um, vehicular," she segues, as a hesitant afterthought to the more standard, clipped report. "It's unlikely that the target will look for a second person. But if something goes wrong you can slip away."

She doesn't understand that "failure is not an option" isn't just something they teach angels.

"Negative, Bravo. You might need backup, and we cannot let the target escape." She sheathes the transmitter and instead cocks a heavy shotgun with runes on the barrel. Much good it'll do her, with an adversary like the one below. "You head in, I'll cover your six."

The asset frowns, nods, and quickly smiles again. There's no need to be unpleasant. And with hardly much to plan or prepare, the angel simply walks to the door, tries the handle, and, thwarted by the lock, works her fingers into the wood like kneading dough, and pries the mechanism open, snapping off a few pieces to conceal the shape of fingers on crushed wood fiber. The resulting effect isn't subtle, but it's quieter than kicking it down.

Swing the door and clear. She checks her corners from a respectable distance, but it just looks like she's walking, smooth, if in a bit of a rush, arms loose at her sides. Onward to the stairs, and the strange feeling hits her at full force.

Down the stairs now—

"And the heavenly light will reach down into the underdark, and shine upon the soot; And so it shall be known that the flow of light is from the heavens down into the pit, and the darkness will die." (Guardians 2:6–7)

Whatever is down here is not darkness.

A prism separates light into its spectra; an angel is born of a separation of the divine light. The light may well fade, and it may well be reflected or turned to ends not its own, but it may not warp in form; the unstructured light is not the light, and will shun its own imperfection and destroy itself. 

Whatever is down here is not the light.

AetherOps High Value Target Alef, Alef for short, has no precedent. Since operational data is given on a need to know basis, and there is little that can be gained tactically without precedent, only a handful of people know what Alef is. But the alien grace it emanates is no secret to an angel; and even a mere creature of the earth would start feeling something amiss standing so close. A disturbance of the appetite; not a hunger, exactly, but a disposition to consume. The clarion call of a holy feast, if all the world was made out of bread and wine.

The angel on point swallows audibly. There is a warped sensation; the smell of raw, clean flesh, touching the skin.

Whatever is down here is close.

Her senses aren't keen enough to feel the target the way her asset can but, well, that's why she has technology. She taps the side of her headset and one ear fills with static and a sharp beeping that grows slightly more intense as she faces Bravo, and growing suddenly into a nearly continuous wail as she swivels to stare unseeing into the darkness.

"Bravo, target nearby, 3 o'clock." The wailing is growing louder with every passing second, and her eyes water. Her vision is everything and she can hear on a level that is more than just the physical the sound of trumpets. She resists kneeling, but the compulsion rapidly grows more intense until she staggers under the weight and activates leg braces that lock her in a standing position. No worship of false idols, she reminds herself grimly. "And closing fast!"

There's a smell of blood in the air now and she's not sure if it's hers, or if the anomaly has plans for her.

Every angel knows the light by heart, no matter how fallen. This aura, to Niki, feels like coming back home after the war and finding your family in the middle of a human sacrifice. The Wrath bubbles up from the depths of her heart, but finds no real purchase in the feeling; just confusion and dread. There is no angelic response to this.

But there is an operational response.

She casts her coat aside with a rip of velcro and spreads her graying wings, tips sweeping the walls, length providing cover for her handler as something approaches from the darkness. 

Bravo Three lights up her halo like a beacon, bathing the stairwell in golden light. In her peak, that light alone could blind the wicked and innervate the pious; now, with atrophied purpose, she has lost some things and gained others. Such as the ability to use her halo as a cannon.

A spurt of light spins around her halo like a particle in an accelerator, speeding up, growing larger, and, as she feels the enemy close in at the threshold-

The light comes like a grenade soaring through the air, spinning with dazzling chromaticity, lighting up its path.

An open maw emerges from the darkness and eats it.

Rows and rows of white twinkling serrated teeth, teeth where teeth seem like they shouldn't have any use, all the way down the throat, shifting like the innards of a biological meatgrinder. A loud gulp is followed by the muted sound of an explosion as the distended jaws clap shut, and Alef steps up the stairs, letting out a burp like a hammer covered in sandpaper smashing into a bucket full of crystal glasses. It collapses into the stairs, spitting blood onto the steps with the whistles of the rushing wind, whining. Instead of wings, Alef has insect-like frills falling down its head onto its back, refracting the light of the halo in strange patterns. It screams, a choking whistle, and runs into the darkness.

She swivels to track it, whipping out her handheld radar to form the amorphous darkness into structure overlaid directly on her visual fiele with its inaudible scream. The target is on the move and... Ate Bravo's smiting? Troubling theological implications, that. Not that using ones halo as a cannon is much better.

"Track and capture, Bravo! I'll light it up for you."

She holsters her shotgun, trusting the asset to protect her and fires a strontium nitrate flare into the darkness. Hopefully it can't eat conventional illumination, she thinks, not very confidently.

Hopefully they won't leave enough of a time window for it to try; Bravo Three soars through the threshold of the basement in pursuit, following the trail of brilliant, scintillating blood left behind by the target. Demons will often take suicidal actions in pursuit of debauchery, including explosive encounters between imps of gluttony and angelic energy, but that wasn't actually nearly as suicidal as it ought to have been; whatever this is, it's at least somewhat resistant to the Light, if not as much as an angel. The relevant theology is ignored in favor of the tactical implications: fight other angels with their feet off the ground and a knife in your hand. This is a mockery of an angel, but it'll die like one.

Niki's eye twitches, and her halo glints an odd bronze color.

As the flare lights up over them and the dazzling reflections of the target catch her eye, Bravo Three leaps with a single flap of her wings and grabs it by the ankle, punching into the back of its knee with unnatural strength, causing it to crumple into the floor. It's still reeling, spitting and whining blood out through its lips and nose, but it manages a much louder scream at the angel's face. 

She responds by stabbing it in the gut. Repeatedly, with a very large serrated knife with a ring grip, which she pulls like a pistol out of an armpit holster. She feels a strange tightness around the knife, the wounds healing fast enough to see; the target is a flailing, screaming mess, which she manages to manage capably, until it backhands the angel hard enough to break teeth that can chew ruby, head snapping aside with a spurt of blood. She doesn't let go, maneuvering onto the target's back.

It's really putting up a fight and she's not nearly tough enough for close quarters combat. Best she can do is help to contain, no way for her to shoot without hitting her asset. She begins pouring accelerant in a long line, getting ready to cut off the combat zone of the basement. Bravo's wearing enough fire retardant-infused clothing that it should be able to get out fine if needed.

Stab, stab, stab, until she puts one right into the middle of the spine, and doesn't pull back. The target exhales and freezes up, twitching, near-paralyzed. The asset can already feel the tissues, tightening around the knife, pulling taut and severing themselves anew.

She pushes it on its side and... looks. The grasp of the shock and confusion of its alien aura is weaker now, and she can think. It's hauntingly beautiful; perfectly smooth, elven features in inhuman golden colors, frilled like an insectoid peacock. And Niki was about to kill it without a second thought. Suddenly, without thinking, she starts to whisper, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry...", twinkling tears falling from her faded green eyes, that she has to keep away from the twitching body to stop them from healing it. There's nothing here that's deserving of the Wrath; Niki's revulsion was all her own.

She looks at her handler with an agonized expression, begging for guidance. Anything to defer this. This was a capture or terminate mission, after all, so there's a chance, and a chance is worth something, even if it turns out to be for nothing...

It's already healing, despite all the damage done. It is not safe to take it in alive. She touches her earpiece. "Terminate."

She cringes, but nods stiffly, wiping tears from her eyes and swallowing audibly. She'll have to be focused for this. One thing they taught her was to push through the pain to follow orders. She grabs the knife and twists, drawing a scream out of the target's throat, and a sob out of her own. Grab the nape of the neck, concentrate energy in the palm...

A clap of thunder sounds in the basement, ear-splitting, and for a second it's hard to tell what just happened. Bravo Three turns to look at her handler-

The angel has a gaping entry wound in the center of her forehead, and falls to the ground.

She nearly screams with an emphasis on the nearly. She's already running towards Bravo's body, she may be the asset but Electra's not going to lose her this easily. She uncorks a phial of angelic tears that she carries for these sorts of occasions - it's easier for angels to forgive each other's wounds than to heal their own. She knows that the shooter's behind her, but she's going to be next if her Bravo isn't operational. It can patch her up anyways.

"That's a shame," a hoarse woman's voice calls out from the darkness. Click, and a metallic clattering, silver casing rolling slowly into the light. "She has a pure heart. They all do."

Thunder claps in the basement again, and a bullet heavy enough to penetrate an angel's skull tears through the bone of Electra's ankle. Soft, calm steps. Click, clatter. Legs as pale as the bright moon, veins visible, thin and frail, like an old woman's; she leans down, long snow white hair coming into view, and pulls out the knife from the abomination's spine. It whines, but stops trembling, and the woman scoops out a little plastic cup of its glittering blood, breathing deeply. The air smells like meat, meat and lilacs. 

She pours the blood on the dying angel's forehead, and her misty eyes regain some focus; she gasps and coughs, still-confused eyes coming into focus. The woman stares down at her, pensive, and then looks at the handler with a youthful smile.

"Your pet will decide what happens to you," she says, humorously, and simply walks away, the target limping after. It hisses at the handler like a flute.

Gone with the wind.

Sometimes she wishes she was one of those assets that they equipped to with autoinjectors, the ones who were hopped up on pain meds and stimulants and could not conceive of failure. Unfortunately for her, she's very aware of just how much her ankle is bleeding and just how much she's failed. She looks up at Bravo, trembling on the floor. "Are you... Alright?" She feels incredibly stupid asking, neither of them are alright, but. It's the spirit of the thing.