"Shall I?" "No need. It would look rather suspicious if anyone in the surrounding area died of nerve gas. And I don't recall you ever being a sadist." "True enough. You handle them then, I'll make contact with our POI." "God bless you." "Which one? The irony is never lost on me when you say that." His companion smiled. "All of them. None of them. It's the thought that matters." A few seconds later, one of the fleeing kidnappers was crushed to the ground by a heavyset silhouette dropping on him from a nearby rooftop. His body became more akin to an obtuse angle, form angled into the ground below with shattered marrow and viscera littering the surrounding area. Their assailant was a well-muscled Tibetan man dressed in a holy man's black garb. In a quick-paced heartbeat, the preacher withdrew his weapon's head from the corpse beneath him. A terrible thing, looking like a monk's spade in structure, except corroded with sinew and pulsating flesh. Where a bell-shaped blade used to be were now two jawed pieces of the spade, snapping like a rabid maw. He whirled his spade around his back, slashing the living weapon's end across the throat of the second ruffian. An open scar of cyst-infested flesh was made in the wake of the weapon's warpath, nigh decapitating its target. The preacher's skin itched as he felt the final thug in the air around him: [i]the tense of fear. Fumbling fingers grasping a matte black handle. Then finally, the cathartic moment of squeezing the trigger. [/i] That fool didn't know that the preacher had full control of the situation around him. He became a blur of black, spinning to dodge the spray of SMG rounds. Grabbing a pistol from falling corpse of the second man, he continued his spin to roundhouse kick the firearm out of the thug's hand and end it all by placing a shot in his aorta. Falling to the ground, the thug would witness a few things before he finally passed out and died. His fellows' corpses were rapidly decomposing, the faces of their skulls visible through their wizened flesh. And the face of the preacher, who was looking down at him with his living blade's hungry maw snapping at his throat. "Guide them on their journey, Father, Yahweh, Allah, Creator..." It was all wrong. The bloodstains that darkened the preacher's garb were disappearing, as if the raiment was feeding upon the crimson that was soaking it. As if the clothes he wore were as bloodthirsty as the weapon he wielded. Sympathy was seen in the preacher's eyes. That was the last anthropogenic emotion the thug would see. ~~~ "I must say I'm impressed, good sir! No casualties other than the ones of your making, all hostages accounted for... you handled this quite nicely!" Approaching from the direction the thugs came from was a man in a suit. He wore a dark blue blazer and suit pants over a white dress shirt and a hunter green tie that matched the turban of the same colour. White gloves adorned his hands, contrasting with the skin tone of the Arabic man. A sharply dressed stranger walking in after a hostage rescue... The pyromancer's day was about to get much more peculiar. He raised his hands and slowed his pace to show the hostages' saviour that he meant no harm. "My name is Mr. Moss!" he announced from his distance, "and I am here to deliver a message for you! But first, can I have the reassurance that if I walk over there, I won't end up like those charred corpses you just created!"