14332/Extreme Problems call for Extreme Measures

Extreme Problems call for Extreme Measures
Date of Scene:	06 March 2023
Location:	A recently renovated warehouse on Gotham's harborfront
Synopsis:	The hunter becomes the hunted becomes the guy buried under a burning warehouse. Kate's definitely doing fine. Just fine.
Cast of Characters:	Kate Kane, Victor Creed

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Kate Kane has posed:
Kate wasn't sure how to bait her trap. The trap itself was the easy part. Shuffling funds around through blinds and corporate fronts and shell companies, it was _incredibly_ easy to buy an old harborfront warehouse that practically dated back to the days of sailing ships and whale oil. And, really, that was the difficult part. Because it was so... impersonal. Analytical.

Boring, she has to admit to herself.

The rest of it was far more direct. Physical. And handled personally by Kate. A week of sleepless days, and nights on patrol. A careful balance of stimulants to keep moving forward, and making sure she didn't slip to the point where the jitters began to take over and that little voice inside wanting more got it. It was a close thing. The main room of the warehouse needed reinforcing, she didn't want it collapsing early, and she had a feeling they'd be hitting the support beams hard. Welded brackets to reinforce them took most of a day. The strobe lights installed along the ceiling didn't take much effort. They won't pass a building inspection, but she's not expecting them to. Frankly, if the building remains standing long enough for the city to take notice, she'll be dead.

But between electrical work, some maintenance on the sprinkler system... and some additions to the hallway that used to head into the administration offices... those offices are walled off now, boarded up. And after a few more laps of the building, Kate's ready. She knows the bait now. It's her. She's the bait, the trap, everything all in one. And while she might not have a spotlight to signal Sabretooth. She's got a phone number.

She's seething with rage. One cut corner. One lazy fake ID using an existing person's information for the backstop, and untold pain was unleashed to an innocent civilian. But she knows what that means now. That phone number's not to a civilian anymore. A message is easy to type in. 'Come and get me. - Stacy' and the address of the warehouse.

And now she's been waiting. Inside the double doors that lead into the warehouse's long, non-descript hallway, leading to the darkness of that main room. It's not so dark that it'll be pitch black when they get there. But she's not planning to wait in the darkness. No. She's going to wait inside the doors. And see her prey before the hunt begins.

She's planned this carefully. Planned it in ways that would make her friends try to talk her out of it. Nearly did, in fact, from just the little they saw.

Victor Creed has posed:
Victor had known it would only be a matter of time before he would find himself face to face with the bat woman again. Admittedly, he had thought it would be sooner, after having visited what he thought was her apartment. He had only intended to leave a message for her, but once he realized that he had been duped, he had left a very different sort of message. All he knew now was that the bat woman was not named Stacy, but a woman named Stacy would was in a far worse place because of that bat woman.

He had spent a few days poking around and trying to figure out where the trail led, but it was cold nearly as soon as the blood on his jacket was. And so his mind had turned to other pursuits. He had learned patience through the years, after having spent decades trying to find Logan, he had just ended up crossing paths again. There were only so many heroes and villains, and at some point, he knew, he would meet the bat woman again. And he would pay her her due respects.

Getting the text message, though, was a surprise. He was not hard to find, having an international reputation. He grins a bit as he peers at it, knowing how much effort, and likely cost, it took her to find him. And likely what her reward would be, when all was said and done. She was going to make it easy on him, and she had no idea what she was inviting onto herself.

He retrieved one item that could not be left out of this particular dance, and headed towards the address provided. A wiser man might have come a bit more prepared than usual, or researched the locale a little bit. But this was sport, and what better way to enjoy it than to go in blind?

Victor arrives outside the warehouse and takes a few moments to look it over. It seems suitable enough. No doubt the entire thing was a trap. But tougher people than the bat woman have tried to take him out through the years. And she was only just a human. She didn't stand a chance.

He wraps a small piece of fabric around his right hand, and opens the door to the warehouse with his left. "Stacy," he calls out into the darkness. "Daddy's home." He sniffs at the air, trying to determine whether she had brought an army with her or not, and then steps inside.

Kate Kane has posed:
Kate's waiting, still, calm, almost eerily so. Her breath controlled, her heart rate steady. She's practically in a trance. She's sure Sabretooth can figure out the door. It's not locked, steel doors a dark grey of weatherproof paint, with a familiar red bat symbol spraypainted across them. She hears that sound of hands on the door, and waits. Pauses.

And then they're opening, and she can _tell_ it's him. The presence, that pressure in the air. That voice calling out seals it, and her answer is immediate and violent. She's in her suit. Her utility belt. No bar hopping jacket and blouse. She's not Kate, not Stacy, this is Batwoman. The one from that first bar. Only this time she's got a vendetta. A score to settle.

And while Batman insists on no killing, on limiting injuries, and most batarangs are dull, blunt objects meant to cause concussions and unconsciousness... hours with a grinding wheel and ill intent has sharpened Kate's arsenal to a razor edge and she's sending three flying towards that opening doorway before the primal, animal roar of rage has even left her throat. And that roar is drowned out before it can fade. The entire building practically jolts from the bass. Industrial scale speakers, the kind of sound system that the crustiest punk band in Gotham would think are a _little_ too hardcore blare to life. It's deafening for a normal human. For someone with enhanced hearing it's either going to be torture, or at least limit that enhanced hearing.

Kate only waits to ensure Victor's charging in before she's sprinting back down that long hallway. It's got to be a hundred feet to the next set of doors into that darkened core warehouse, and Kate's moving at speed, The lobby was just to make sure they saw each other. To start the hunt.

It's nothing compared to what's coming as bass and synthesized noise fill the air. the song might even be catchy if it wasn't at apocalyptic volumes.

Victor Creed has posed:
Oh, Victor knew it was a trap. If anything, knowing that just made him more eager to trip it. He was expecting something to come firing his way, and he was already set to move nimbly. As the batarangs whirl towards him he starts to move, shifting out of the way, dropping down to move under them. Then comes the blast of sound, and it almost immediately drives a white hot fire into his head.

His hands move up to cover his ears, and the pause in his dodge lets one of the batarangs hit his forearm, slicing through flesh and muscle as it passes by.

Victor roars with the pain, both from the sound and the blade. But mostly from the anger that the bat woman has drawn first blood. That is HIS job.

He turns and focuses his attention as she takes off down the hallway, and he tries to endure the shock of the loud sounds. She may have drawn first blood, but it's last blood that counts, isn't it?

He takes off down the hallway, loping after her with violent thoughts running through his head.

Kate Kane has posed:
Kate's pace is measured but quick, like she's run this path a hundred times. But only because she has. She knows the exact number of steps to the lightswitch before the doors. The lightswitch she hits without breaking stride.

Because there's a strange, sizzling crackle from the ceiling when she flicks it.

That crackling is from improperly insulated wires. Is it a fire hazard? Arguably. But the bigger fire hazard is the makeshift claymore mines that are angled down to fill the hallway with hundres, perhaps thousands of ball bearings propelled like God himself stepped down with a shotgun to scour the hallway clean.

Which would be fine, except Kate kind of eyeballed the explosives on this, and so as she flicks the switch she opens her mouth. She might be about to suffer from a concussion, but she's got a feeling Victor's in for worse. In retrospect, Kate thinks before the first of the sequenced explosives goes off... the sound system wasn't really necessary to screw up Victor's hearing.

Well, there's no kill like overkill. That's really the entire guiding principle of her plan.

She'd have gone for more overkill, she really started to run out of ideas. But she hopes she's packed enough into what's to come to more than even the odds with Sabretooth's mutant-given gifts. She almost wishes she could enjoy it. But they're just not that similar.

Victor Creed has posed:
If Kate expected something like this to catch Victor by surprise and flat footed, she does not know Victor very well. But then, no one really does.

He sees the danger falling and he leaps up and to the side. He may not be a wall-crawler like Spider-man, but his claws are sharp and when he already has momentum they can keep him off the floor for a good bit of distance. And so as the ball bearings drop and bounce all around, his pursuit continues. Sure, he endures plenty from it and he will be somewhat the worse off at the end of the corridor, but this does not drop him entirely as she might have hoped.

Or maybe this was just yet another step in her attempts to bring him down. He wonders just how many she prepared.

Kate Kane has posed:
Kate's beyond thought. This is instinct, training, and rehearsed performance all in one, and none of it involves conscious thought anymore. If it did, she'd probably spare a moment for how her cousin would be conflicted about the amount of planning she put in, the redundancies and counterplans and layers of misdirection.

But that cousin's got some very deeply held beliefs that would make this next step a no-go for him.

As she disappears into the disorienting flashes of the trigged strobe lights ahead, into bare metal shelving, she's leaping up onto the first raised section, a little over seven feet in the air.

The claymores were never meant to finish Creed. Slow him down? Sure. Ideally more than they did. But if they'd worked ideally the building would be an inferno and she'd be leaving it in her metaphorical rear view.

The Batfamily is renowned for trying to keep the streets of Gotham clean, and for their ardent and deeply held belief in not killing, and not using firearms.

And since Kate went into this knowing she was breaking one of those rules... well, what's another demerit point on her Bat license?

She considers for a moment if those bits of info she dug up on Sabretooth were true. Something about him being older than he looks. If so, he might recognize the sound that meets him as soon as the door opens, a roaring scream like a buzzsaw from hell.

Or, more accurately, the roar of an incredibly high rate of fire from a modified MG-42. Kate was meaning to destroy it anyway after acquiring it in an actual goddamn Nazi base on the Moon.

But she'd picked up several belts for it and... well.... when you've got a machine gun, and a hallway of improvised explosives only slowed your prey down, it's a pretty reasonable Step 2. And besides, the doorway she's unloading into is going to go through a lot worse than a spray of high velocity lead by the time the night's done.

Victor Creed has posed:
The anger is building up within Victor. Sure, there is some respect there for the Batwoman. The trap she laid has been pretty well thought out, painful, distracting, and otherwise effective at slowing him down. He appreciates having the opportunity to face off against a worthy foe. It keeps him sharp, and so few really can rise to his level. But even so, he cannot get past the raw pain he is feeling, and the temerity of this /normal woman/ thinking that she could own him in such a way.

If he was not more focused on anger and pain than on common sense, he would have known that there was a trap behind that door. But also, he wasn't about to take the door like any normal person either. So reaching down from above to open it, he sees that spray of bullets. The sound is /very/ familiar. All too familiar. And the smell. There was not the same pungent pervasive smell of blood that he associate with the last time he heard these en masse. There is a bitter laugh from him at the realization that if not for him, and what he did, when faced with this very weapon, the bat bitch might be speaking German right now. But how could she know how familiar he was with it? And how he knew just how long to wait until the belt exhausted itself.

As soon as that belt runs out, he flips out from above the door frame and charges at where he presumes the mount must be.

Except he did not account for her vantage point.

Or that she would have more than just the one belt.

A more patient man might have considered that. Victor was just chasing driven by rage and instinct.

Could he go to her before she could set the other belt in it and wheel around her aim? That was the life or death question.

Kate Kane has posed:
Kate's lips are pulled back in a snarl, and as many rumors as there are around Gotham about her, at least one could be disproved... her canines are not in fact fangs. She is not, in fact, a vampire. But that enraged snarl lessens when finely trained instincts tell her the belt on the gun is running dry, while her prey is rapidly becoming the predator.

It's really only the obsessive, dedicated physical training that Kate does that makes it so easy for her to handle the gun with one arm as she knocks the box magazine free and grabs another duct taped to the support strut of the shelving, slamming it in and hitting the charging handle while she hurls herself backwards as Victor closes in.

For a moment, it looks like this is it, there's hundreds of pounds of claws, fangs, and muscle washing over Kate as she falls back under the sheer pressure of Sabretooth's charge.

But that fall was really just to buy those final scant fractions of a second as she tightens her grip and /roars/. Or maybe she's simply opening her mouth in a silent mimic of a roar. Because it's impossible to hear over the far more literal roar as that machine gun unloads, stock jammed to the floor, acting like a tentpole to keep Sabretooth at bay for another moment.

The gun was never to kill Victor. No, it was efficient. Another step in the plan. Slow him down, injure him. Up close? He's proven too much twice now. Injured and enraged? That's easier to exploit. That's the sort of mental state that might make him miss Kate's left hand reaching behind her back until it's whipping out towards his neck, a gleaming razor edged combat knife held in overhand grip to slash his throat as deep as she can.

Just another step in the plan. None of this is what he deserves. But each step is closer to him getting just that.

Victor Creed has posed:
There is literally no concern for his body. How much of that is sensible because of his confidence in his ability to recover from any injury or the way his rage overrides all reason, it does not really matter as Victor leaps at Kate regardless of how close she may be to getting the machine gun operational again.

It does, in fact, keep him at bay. For a moment. Not much more than that. He is used to the feel of hot metal slicing through his body, he has felt it plenty of times before. And it will be worth it to feel his claws slice through the body of his attacker. He can endure all of that, and more. Such is his way.

Of course, the more that animal takes over, the more that reason is lost. And so while Victor might have seen that knife telegraphed, Sabretooth not so much. It slices through his neck, and while he can recover from most wounds, he cannot operate without oxygen. Or blood. And that knife presents a challenge to both of those.

Finally, he staggers. Slows. His pursuit dulled. Not by fear or pain, concern or shock. Simply the increased damage making combat less sustainable for him.

As long as she does not take too much time to celebrate...

Kate Kane has posed:
Kate's in no mood to celebrate, her legs coil, knees to her chest, feet driving into Victor's sternum to launch him off of her and send him sprawling on his back. She springs up, swaying a little, just for a moment, breath rasping, desperate, hungry.

But then, taking down Sabretooth is hard work. And works' not over yet.

Her dwindling stamina slows her just enough that the move from standing to leaping on top of Victor and driving that blade into his ribcage isn't instantaneous. But once she's in position, it's brutal, rapid, a cry of rage escaping her chest.

Kate knows more martial arts than most vigilantes, and yet this has all the grace and control of a prison shanking. At some point, the blade snaps, and Kate resorts to punching.

Rapid fire strikes to those knife wounds... and then one is different. She's not just punching those wounds, she drives her fist /into/ one, and when her hand comes up, there's a ring dangling from her thumb.

And the spoon of a grenade gripped between two fingers.

Kate might've been drummed out of West Point, but she took her training seriously. And once the pin is removed, Mr. Grenade is not your friend.

So there's no monologue. The closest she allows to a quip as she springs away is a hissed, ragged "Fuck you!"

And that springing motion has her heading back towards that bullet-riddled hallway, and as she sprints past the pull station for the fire alarm, she yanks it. The shrill metal bells being to shriek... and the sprinklers begin to spray down the main room of the warehouse.

Boy, that sprinkler system sure smells like diesel fuel.

That's probably fine, right? Kate's not going to have turned an entire warehouse into some sort of killing floor that would be more suited to one of the costumed maniacs she normally takes down.

Because that would be /terribly/ alarming. It might even be a sign that she's teetering on the brink of one of those classic Kate Kane breakdowns.

Victor Creed has posed:
There is not much for Victor to do at this point. Throat sliced, no way to return commentary. Deprived of so many vital things required of life, he just lies there, absorbing blow after blow from Kate. But the odd thing is, or at least, it might be odd to Kate, is the way he just looks up at her with a grin on his face. There is a grunt each time the blade penetrates him, but almost a smile up at her as the animal recognizes animal. He feels her fist drive in, another grunt, and he knows something is in there that shouldn't be. The ring is easily recognized. He has been around it enough.

But Sabretooth does not panic. He sees her quip, and he just almost seems to ... laugh? That can't be right. No sound comes out, but that sure looks like it.

He reaches in with his hand, slow and sluggish thanks to the wounds she has delivered to him. He tilts his head to watch her escape. Her form crystalizing in his mind. If he were faster, or more panicked, he might have gotten the grenade out fast enough to hurl at her. But he has long since determined that she has won this day, and so he settles for insuring that the blast does not expand his rib cage. His hand, however, ceases to be.

His nose clearly tells him what is coming down from the sprinklers. That will be a problem. But for now, Victor is no longer pursuing. His body is too broken, injured, bleed out.

So instead of trying to escape from the room, to pursue Kate, he settles for one last measure.

He looks towards her as she makes her escape.

And he smiles knowingly at her.

Kate Kane has posed:
For her part, Kate doesn't look back on her way out. For one thing, she'd rather not be around in fifteen seconds. When the grenade detonates, she barely twitches a satisfied little snarl of a grin... because it's the sound several seconds later of the delayed incendiaries in the basement igniting that she was waiting for.

Warehouse fires are common in Gotham. And they're not a high priority for the GCFD.

Kate watches from several rooftops away until she hears the building's beams giving way, the wood cracking, metal shearing, tumbling down, a wave of smokes, flames, and sparks erupting into the sky.

It's the better part of an hour after she ran out the door when it happens. More than enough time for her to have cracked open a bottle of Jack Daniels. It's medicinal.

It's why she's only drank half of it when she pours the rest out and leaps off the roof to land on her bike and scream off towards home.

Mission accomplished. She'll deal with the fallout if anyone even bothers to put the pieces together later.

For now, she's going to go have a peaceful, restful sleep,

She's earned it.