Chapter 29: The Lady & The Blade

....His cute face.

SWISH!!!!!

With a lightning fast flash of a sword swipe, both terrorists are screaming in pain, clutching at their right arms as their machine guns clatter down the stairway, spraying a few harmless stray rounds as they rattle away.

"En guarde!" And there she stands, poised for combat. Her long, lacy black skirt had been long since discarded to reveal a very shapely pair of charcoal black thigh-high stocking-ed legs.

Her stiletto high heels give this new combatant on the theatre of battle an air of mystery and danger.

He wasn't sure how she had come to arrive here at this very moment. She came out of nowhere and everywhere, all at once. He didn't imagine that this woman of opportunity and sheer force of will had somehow managed to escape her safehold in the drawing room by the same way he himself had snuck in. He couldn't think that such a pure, sweet girl with beautiful platinum blonde hair trailing behind her had the ability to use a grappling rope, scale up and down walls like a spider, face the eerie frightening darkness crawling through icky murky dusty ledges and somehow find her way through it by instinct alone.

And on top of it, emerge from her daring climb with fencing sword in hand on the second floor of the mansion just at the exact moment Quatre Raberba Winner needed her to appear and rescue him--

His angel of light.

"Dorothy!" He cries out her name as she, quite happily it seemed, continued to slice and dice at the two terrorists. They put up two pairs of now quite cut and bleeding arms to shield themselves from this vicious swordswoman's wrath.

"Don't stand there gawking at me, Quatre Winner! Disarm that bomb already!" Her high voice hisses out, but she was almost singing. Her eyes were dancing at the pure excitement of hand to hand combat. She relished every moment as the two men back away from her unrelenting sword's blade.

"Trowa!" Quatre, his mind firmly back in place, screams out as the final minutes and seconds begin to flicker away....

8:14 P.M. C.E.T.

15 seconds to go.

"Already on it, Quatre." The soldier Trowa Barton was never lost sight of his main objective. The screams, the raging battle, the cacophony of combat from all around him, above and below mattered not. Trowa's heart knew what was the right thing to do at all times. And he had the mind to be able to carry it out as well.

As he catapults over the railing, grasping the briefcase in his hands, he pops open the black boxed case whose exterior was fairly badly damaged from all the dropping, kicking and passing about just in the last five minutes. But to Trowa's eyeslit dismay, the interior was still intact, and the nuclear device was still armed. The bomb was still deadly as its final sequence ticks down.

In about 8 seconds, it was about to deliver the impact of a hundred thousand tons of nuclear fission energy on the unknowing innocent residents of Sanc--and the greater part of a continent within a five hundred kilometer radius.

Unless, one man knew how to disarm it and fast.

Seven, six, five....

His mind races as he watches the red digital numbers slowly tick down towards zero. Every detonation device was different. Every mad scientist who created one built the next to be even more difficult to defuse, more precise--and more easy to set off if done wrong...

Four...

"Pull the red wire! Pull the red wire! It's always the red wire! Pull it before we all blow!!!" Duo Maxwell's frantic voice shrieks out from where he lay in a bloody pile at the base of the steps Trowa was kneeling down over.

Three...

There wasn't a red wire in the box. But Trowa wasn't one to speak at such a moment. In fact, he was one to rarely speak in any situation.

No. He was one to act.

Two...

Reaching his thin hand into the mad hodge-podge of wires, circuitry and lights, Trowa does just that. He knew that perhaps this might be the last thing he and all his embattled friends about him would see. But through all the hurt, the pain, the blood and the fear--Trowa's mind's eye envisions the last glimpse he had seen of all the innocents who were counting on him to protect them.

Each face flashed in his mind as he clasps his fingers around the circuit board that he was empowered to stake his and every life in Sanc upon....

Until his thoughts finally rest on her. His Cathrine's beautiful eyes, her smile, her peace. They all filled his heart as he removed the main circuit board from the armed nuclear bomb in his blood stained, yet still pure hands.

A hush filled the entire room. Duo's screams of panic, Wufei's pain filled groans, Dorothy's giddy sword scrapings with the two cowering terrorists, Relena's gasping, Quatre's hard breathing, Heero and leader of Epyon de Telos still strangling each other on the ground floor--all of it, everyone of the human beings in the room stopped, starkly still. Each one realized that this could be their last moment on Earth as they all give witness, staring down the device in Trowa's hands for the longest second their world had ever seen....

Ding dong, ding dong

From the belly of the large grandfather clock that had remained in the hallway heretofore unnoticed for decades since it was placed there to chime it's quarter by quarter hourly duty, a loud ringing resounds through the hall's eerie silence. The bell tolls with the clock going off--

But it was only the timepiece's ominous tones and then silence.

No bright flash of light to blind them. No energy explosion. No death, no destruction, no nuclear detonation. Nothing but the silence that some filled with prayers, some filled with inner angry cursing, and one cracked and defeated terrorist--

Fills with cackling, insane laughter.

"Ha ha ha ha. Ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha!"

"Uh oh. Funny farm time for our friend there." Duo was feeling a bit more jovial (now that that "darn bomb's been fizzled out. Way to, Tro! I always knew you were my buddy.") despite the aching sore deep knife cut in a place on his body he wouldn't like to mention in public.

"Ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha ha ha!"

The leader of de Telos continues to cackle insanely. Heero, clamps the bruised and battered man's hands down to the marbled floor. He had just about had enough of this loser laughing up in his face and was just about to deck him--permanently--once and for all.

"Why are you laughing like that?" Relena Darlian's soft hand firmly lands on Heero's raised, fisted one, halting it. It wasn't with her own physical strength, but with a spiritual strength of the bond her peaceful heart shared with this wandering loner of an assassin.

"The nuclear device has been defused. Your mission of treachery and destruction has come to an end." Relena states, gathering herself up from the floor she had been thrown down upon just minutes ago as she watched Heero fight it out with the terrorist leader.

Patting Trowa on the back for a job well done, Quatre takes the circuit board out of his silent friend's strong hand.

Imagine, this little thing could cause so much trouble.

Quatre humors to himself, turning and holding the small green and copper chip up to the moonlight from the window before him with a shaking head and relieved smile.

Just then, Dorothy Catalonia (still having fun fencing the now defenseless terrorists at the peak of the spiral staircase) lets out a surprised screech as she kicks one of the two with her heel in his face. But the other uses her forward momentum against her, lunging out and shoving her backward towards the stairwell.

"Gotcha!" This time, Quatre was there to save her from danger. He had halted her nasty fall down the steps backward with a powerful pair of hands.

"Hold onto this piece of evidence--please." The blonde boy says rather calmly as he passes the troublesome little circuit board into Dorothy's hands. She cocks her dazed head quizzically at first him, then it. She tucks it between her cleavage to keep her hands ready and free and then looks to him again as Quatre with an...arrogant?...smile right into her face takes a step forward, makes a growling face, and sends a manfully flying punch squarely on the jaw of the unkind gentleman who had just shoved his lovely lady. He decks the man with one power filled wallop and the last terrorist sinks down on the top floor of the stairs.

"You've been defeated. Your battle is over." Relena almost triumphantly states, dusting herself off as she stands over the broken man.

"That's what you think, Princess Peacecraft! Ha ha! That's what you think!! HA HA HA HA!" The man just continues to cackle. Relena's eyebrows knit.

"Somebody take his batteries out already." Duo whines, rubbing his, ahem, and nursing his wound.

"Yeah. Before I decide to chop his head off to stop that awful laughing." Wufei adds. He grits his teeth as the incision a knife had sliced across his chest was rather too tender for this warrior's spirit to handle.

"What do you mean?" Relena turns back to the terrorist. "The danger has passed." She sees the growing suspicions reflected in Heero Yuy's thick browed eyes up at her.

"You won't think so when you're castle's gone. My final offering to rewriting history." The insane terrorist begins to cackle once again. Every person in the room feels their hair stand up at the back of their necks' at the evil doer's ominous and threatening words setting them on edge in fear one more time....