A/N: I won't make any bones about it: I'm sorry. For the past 5 years I was in medical school, the decision to be enrolled in such wasn't my choice. There's just something soul crushing about having to excel at something you have absolutely no passion for. I tried to escape to my writing, and for a while it worked, but the deeper I went into the program, the less and less opportunity I had for escape of any sort. Time for myself was virtually non-existent. What wasn't devoted to studying diseases and biochemical processes were divided between my loved ones. And what typing I did do were for the stacks and stacks of paper work that is required of me by my consultants. And as I was rifling through my old laptop for old case reports, I found this chapter, half finished for over 3 years. On a whim, I checked my account here for the first time in what seemed like forever.

I had one message: Am I still alive?

Funny question, I haven't felt alive these past 3 years. I just went through the motions, keeping my head just barely above the water.

Reading my own story years later, it's almost funny. I'd ask myself what I was thinking when I made this twist or criticize myself for how I characterized certain characters. I realized I needed to stop doing this to myself. Writing this story, this day dream fantasy I had when I was back in highschool, made me happy once upon a time.

Goddamnit, I'm not going to live my life in dreary grays, I have a story to tell.

Chapter 37: Tooth and Nail Part 2

Somewhere.

Somewhen.

Somehow.

There was nothing, until a consciousness suddenly blinked a single twinkle in the dark.

First there was confusion, a crazed struggle of panic as to why it was, until it realized that it simply was.

How long has it been, he thought, since he had last had a thought to think?

At first there was only silence and darkness. An empty void, where all he heard was nothing but his own thoughts, all he saw was the pitch black void, and all he felt was nothingness.

It was as if he simply manifested, alone in the dark, in the nothingness.

Odd how it made him feel like this was sweet reprieve.

Moments passed, at least he thought they were moments, before he heard something else. Something that was oddly not him. It was scratching, like a small claw raking at wood, scraping deeper and deeper with each swipe.

There was a pause, a last moment of sweet nothingness, before they all appeared, overwhelming him like a powerful wave.

Whispers.

And that was when the darkness erupted into light and sound.

Countless whispers, a chaotic cacophony of sound, like swarms of insects buzzing all around him, crawling, stinging, biting and burrowing deep into his flesh. Each whisper was linked to an emotion, causing him to swell with happiness one moment, burn with rage the next and drown in sadness the moment after that. The sensation was tearing into him, and slowly the happy emotions started to get fewer and far between.

The whispers started to rise into screams, drowning out even his own thoughts, making him yearn for the darkness' sweet embrace once more.

The others had been too short sighted; their views astoundingly narrow and limited for ones who considered themselves omnipotent.

Such hubris; How were they any different?

Only he could bring about true peace.

The peace that once was before existence.

This was agony.

The sin of simply being.

His thoughts were interrupted by what he could only describe as a tether; an umbilical cord that stretched out into the expanse deep into the darkness.

If he could smile, he would imagine that he would have been beaming right about now.

Still, the darkness swirled and encroached around him, but that mattered not.

It was nearly time.

The maintenance tunnels swirled with clouds of dust as paths left untrodden on for decades were suddenly disturbed by a dozen running feet. The stealth team composed of Thane, Kasumi, Legion and three Shadow Broker agents covered ground quick as they navigated through the labyrinthine tunnel complex that sprawled underneath the entire area. Their mission was simple: Reach the other side of the blocked gate and clear away the obstruction that was keeping it from opening. Failing that, they were to scout the quickest route for escape on foot. Sounds about as simple as it can get, right? Far from it, but well, that was the general assumption, anyway.

The intended trip should have been a short one; unfortunately most of the direct routes to their destination had been caved in or otherwise rendered unpassable. They doubled back more times than they would have liked when faced with collapsed sections of the tunnel, noxious corrosive mists leaking from straining, rusted pipes or even almost opening a sealed bulwark that separated the tunnel from a portion exposed to the vacuum of space. The longer they took to clear their path, the longer Shepard and the others had to endure wave after wave of the ravenous Vorcha horde. The time pressure would have driven most people over off the brink of desperation. This group, Thane noted, was fortunately not composed of most people.

His team was comprised of some of the best the galaxy could offer. Kasumi Goto, master thief notorious in the galactic underworld and urban legend to everyone else. Legion, Geth infiltrator, a one of a kind model that operated on a literal legion of Geth AIs, who has operated two years alone behind enemy lines in its search for Shepard. And rounding them all up were the three shadow broker agents who came along for support, skills comparable to hardened alliance marines laced with a thorough understanding of stealth and tactical espionage that were almost up to drell standards.

Almost.

Save for the lone inorganic member, recon hoods and helmets were fully donned, just in case they made a wrong turn and run straght into a pocket of poisonous gas, or worse, the vacuum of space.

He consulted the holoschematics of the area on his omnitool as he led the silent procession and furrowed his brow, searching for the quickest detour they could manage as they approached another fork in their path. He raised a hand and signaled the others that they would be taking a left, the group not breaking their stride as they sped past the fork and deeper into the tunnels. This scenario was all too familiar to him. His entire life had practically been a long series of perfectly timed and executed maneuvers, skulking and slithering in the shadows. Only difference now was that he was hurrying to save lives, not end them.

"So…" Kasumi began on their secure channel, silent to the outside world, her voice laced with mischief. "Are we there yet?"

Legion turned its optic to her, looking at her curiously. "Again, for the 7th time in 15 minutes 53 seconds: Negative; we are not at our destination." It stated plainly. "We are wondering as to why you keep pursuing this line of inquiry, seeing as how you too are also using the same holoschematic map as us?"

Kasumi grinned, "Eh, just passing the time and taking my mind off of things." She said. "Else I'd be PANICKING ABOUT HOW LONG WE'RE TAKING OH MY GOD!" she said in mock panic, before speaking once more in her carefree manner, her screams silent to the outside world thanks to the secure comm channel. "Or something along those lines."

The female shadow broker agent with them barely stifled her giggle, earning her strange looks from her two male counterparts. "Well Ms. Goto, you people seem to be an unusual sort."

Kasumi put her hand over her mouth in a mock gasp. "Behold! The agents grew the ability to speak! Well at least one of you did, anyway."

The woman didn't bother to stifle her giggle this time, which bloomed into full blown laughter. "Sorry, force of habit. Silence is the best tool we agents have, even amongst ourselves."

One of the male agents snorted in contempt, "It would seem that's out of the window now isn't it?" He heatedly chided his female companion.

"Oh, I'm sorry." The other woman replied. "Faced with near certain death, I wanted to die with some semblance of having a normal social interaction."

"The point is we're not supposed to be normal!" The other one snarled. "we don't break protocol for anything."

She scoffed at him, "Apparently we break it to scold people for breaking protocol."

The other man, running alongside them groaned in exasperation. "I swear, I don't know how the two of you are so synergistic on missions despite hating each others' guts."

"Shut up!" The woman snarled.

"Well." Kasumi chuckled as the three bickered, "we got caught up with a livelier bunch than I expected." She turned to Thane and switched to a private comm channel between just the two of them, her voice dropping all pretenses of cheerfulness into a serious tone. "I still have my reservations about this plan, though."

"Peace, Kasumi." Thane said from ahead of them. "Those weapons are crucial to our predicament. I understand your anxiety, but we cannot do anything about the path shown to us except run its course. We take a left down here." He added as the group rushed down the long tunnels. "We seem to be encountering no resistance so far. If this keeps up, we should be nearing our destination soon without having to spill blood."

At this, Legion perked up. "Alert, we have detected 9 heat signatures up ahead past the indicated turn." It stated. "We will make contact in 27 seconds."

Kasumi whistled. "Way to jinx it, Thane."

"Hmm…" Thane mused as he reached into his coat for a handful of throwing knives. "So it would seem that way, Kasumi." He could already start to make out the snarls and chatter of the vorcha past the corner just up ahead. "No guns, can't risk alerting more of them." He said as the team readied their weapons. "I'll take out the first four, the rest of you pick and neutralize a single target each. We can't have them relay our presence to the rest of the enemy."

"My, my, the first four? How greedy." Kasumi smirked as she drew out Garrus' knife in one hand while her other hand shined with the kinetic energies of her omnitool. "Usually I'm the queen of subtlety" She said, "but let's make this quick and dirty."

"Contact in five, four, three, two…" Legion counted down just before the group rounded the corner and rushed towards the vorcha without breaking their stride. "One." Before the vorcha could react to their sudden appearance, it was already too late.

Thane drew first blood as he spun on his heel and flung his blades at the vorcha, the slick, razor-sharp knives flying through the air before finding themselves embedded in the exposed necks and eye sockets of the first four enemies right in front of him. The blades inflicted fatal wounds, but vorcha were notoriously hard to kill outright. Thane still closed in the distance between them to ensure that there were no hang ups. His hands snaked in the air as he went from vorcha to vorcha, snapping their necks like twigs and slicing jugular veins into crimson fountains of blood.

Before the four vorcha could even collapse to the ground, Kasumi and the female Shadow Broker agent somersaulted over them and dove right into the thick of the enemy, knives at the ready. Kasumi struck out with the knife, stabbing a vorcha up the lower jaw and straight up into its head. Pulling the blade out as blood started to gush from the wound, she drew her fist back and struck with her kinetically charged omnitool right into the bleeding vorcha's face, smashing it open and laying the foul thing on the ground. Beside her, the Shadow Broker agent slashed her target's throat wide open. The other woman then proceeded to charge up a neural shock in her omnitool, sending out several gigawatts of electricity coursing through the vorcha's body. Dazed and bleeding out, the vorcha was somehow still on its feet as the agent simply stabbed it in the head, obliterating it's frontal lobe.

Meanwhile, the three remaining vorcha raised their weapons to fire, but Legion and the two other agents crashed into them, grappling with their rifles as they wrestled them into the ground. Legion managed to not just yank the weapon away from the vorcha, but completely tear one of its arms right out of its socket in a messy display of rending meat. Using the severed appendage as a club, Legion savagely beat the vorcha with its own arm before crushing the vorcha's head underfoot with a big stomp. The two agents on the other hand were busy repeatedly pummeling their targets' heads with the butts of their rifle as flecks of gore flew into the air with each meaty thud. Although with considerably less finesse than the others, the last three were taken out.

The entire encounter lasted only about 8 seconds, and the group stopped just long enough past that for Thane to grab a communicator from one of the dead vorcha, before continuing on with their running as if nothing had happened.

As if on cue, the vorchas' comm beeped with an incoming transmission, luckily it was audio only. Thane looked at Kasumi, who nodded at him with understanding as he tossed the communicator to her, which she then hooked up to her omnitool.

Toggling a switch on her omnitool, a raspy voice came through the comm. "Hnngh, status report." It demanded in an unusually curt manner, for vorcha anyway.

Kasumi fiddled with some controls on her omnitool, and when she spoke, her voice was just as raspy as the vorcha she was speaking to. "Nothing to report here." She said.

An uneasy pause followed before the vorcha spoke again. "Yes-yes. Keep looking." With that, the transmission ended.

Kasumi sighed as she switched off her voice modulator. "Hook, line and sinker. Looks like we bought ourselves a bit more time." She said as she pulled the front casing off the communicator. Browsing through the adhoc mess of wires and circuitry, she ripped out a small chip and tossed it to Legion, the geth grabbing it casually out of the air without a look. "I got their frequencies, you know what to do Legion."

"Noted." Legion said as its omnitool linked with the chip. "The hardware is crude but the software is easily integrated." Legion noted. "Updating holo-map."

With that, Thane noted several dozen blips appear on the schematic he had been using as their guide, each one marking a group of vorcha whose communicators are linked to the frequency legion had tethered to. "Now we know where they are." He observed.

Kasumi whistled. "That is a lot of vorcha."

Thane nodded in grim agreement. "Let's move."

Shepard held his breath as he felt the kick of the rifle butt driving into his shoulder with each pull of the trigger. It was a disturbing sight, seeing dozens of vorcha erupting from the ruined remains of the stairwell, coated slick with blood and gore as they pushed aside one another, clambering, snapping their jaws and howling like rabid beasts towards them. He fired steady, controlled bursts into the mass, but no matter how many they killed, more seemed to bubble forth towards them. "Damn." He said as the steady streaming river of oozing blood covered more of the room like a macabre red carpet. "Hold the line, men!"

"Do these things not care about dying?!" Tali hissed over the comm through the steady staccato thumping sound of the gun emplacement she was manning. Huge caliber rounds tore into the vorcha, rendering them into messily shredded meat. "What are they thinking?! They aren't even bothering to shoot back!"

Shepard reloaded quickly as his gun clicked empty, the spent cartridge not even hitting the ground before he slammed in a fresh one, pulling the slide with the satisfying click of the weapon priming. "I don't think thinking is one of their strong points!" he replied, resuming his steady bursts of gunfire. "Dying however, that they're doing very well."

Grunt laughed in glee as he mowed down a row of vorcha that tried hugging the walls to flank around them. "These are just the dregs. They don't even have guns see? Just cudgels and crude blades." He observed as he walked down the firing line, casually blasting with his assault rifle while inspecting any other possible points of entry for telltale signs of flanking. He wasn't even aiming, just shooting blindly towards the horde. "They are just trying to get us to waste as much ammo as possible. But they'll soon realize we've got an armory's worth down here, so they should be changing tactics soon." His eyes fell upon a row of vents. "Probably try to sneak through the vents."

Aria clicked her tongue. "Centralized ventilation, they can't get to it from the outside." She said. "I'm more worried about them inching slowly closer towards us." True enough, even at the cost of dozens of lives, the vorcha seemed all too happy to pay the price just to ravenously advance mere steps at a time. "What's taking them so long, Shepard?" she demanded

"Thane and the others are the best at what they do, Aria." He said, "If anybody can get that gate open, it's them."

"Huh, let's just hope we'll still be alive by then." Aria snarked as her rifle clicked empty. Not even bothering to reload, she tossed it aside and hefted a large, heavy machine gun that was resting by her feet, her mechanical hand whirring as her grip on the handle tightened. The gun gave off a satisfying burst of fire that barked heavily, mowing into the vorcha lines.

Zaeed grit his teeth as he did the same, eyes full of a curious mix between bloodlust and boredom. "Tell me again why we can't just blast through the damned gates?" he sneered. Setting his gun to fire inferno rounds, he opened fire once again and watched in glee as vorcha flesh ignited in a blaze, sending wafts of putrid smoke into the air. "Or I don't know, hack it open from this side?"

"I told you, for the goddess knows how many times, the gate is comprised of 2 layers each of 10 feet of solid, reinforced, ceramite alloy." Aria said with a hint of exasperation, having to recount these details once more. "It's dated architecture, local access network only, no wireless connections at all. Sure it was old tech even for the time I bought it, but it was meant to stand up against anything short of a thanix laser! So that's the end of that fucking conversation."

"So why didn't you put control panels on the insi-?"

"I said that's the end of that fucking conversation!" She roared in annoyance, cutting Zaeed off. Despite the onslaught of their firing line, the vorcha just kept on coming. "Fucking vermin! There's going to be a lot of assisted deportations after all this blows over!" Pulling the trigger, the rather lithe asari was barely bothered by the recoil as her body glowed with biotic energy to assist in stabilizing her firing pattern, her shots shredding through the oncoming horde.

"Ethical implications of that aside…" Jacob said as he manned his own gun emplacement atop one of the APCs. "I'm really, really okay with that right now." The large bore rounds tore into the vorcha lines like water through sand, splattering gore across the hangar, painting the ceiling a sickly red paste.

Aria snorted with amusement. "I'm glad to have garnered your approval... Taylor, wasn't it?"

"That's Jacob Taylor, Jacob to my friends." he replied.

"Taylor it is, then."

"Ouch." He cringed, ignoring the bark of Zaeed's laughter that seemed to carry over the gunfire.

Grunt grunted with contempt as he reloaded. "Heh. Kill as much as you want and there would still be three more for each one you get." He said. "Like cockroaches but only half as smart."

Miranda scrunched her nose and cursed, reaching for her helmet and hurriedly wearing it. "That stench…!" she snarled as her suit pressurized, just barely managing to seal away the putrid scent that wafted in the air due to the victims of the inferno rounds. "Forget gassing us through the vents, these vorcha seem to be doing a great job of it in the here and now." Reloading her assault rifle, she let out controlled bursts that dropped a vorcha with each squeeze of the trigger. Lowering the rifle, she glowed blue and raised her hand into a fist, lifting several corpses into the air. With a grunt of effort, she swung her hand in an arc, flinging them straight into the mass of vorcha with bone-splitting g-forces. The act barely slowed the tide, as the vorcha merely trampled over the dead and dying and even those unfortunate enough to have tripped. "Spirited buggers…" She mused as she raised her gun once more to off them in more conventional means. She switched her comms to a private frequency before speaking once more. "Shepard, I have faith in the others, but I sincerely hope there's a plan B to this situation."

"That's the beauty of the human alphabet, Miri." Shepard said nonchalantly over the comm. "It gives you access to 25 other plans before you're officially screwed."

"Great, so what's the plan?"

Silence.

"Shepard..." Miranda probed after several seconds of unresponsiveness.

"I'm working on it."

"You're working on it?"

"I'm working on it."

"You've said that already."

"I know what I said."

"Bloody hell..."

"I don't suppose you have a plan, then?" Shepard inquired back. "Because now is the time to be heard, Miranda."

Miranda bit her lip as she cast aside an empty gun to a waiting loader and grabbed a full one from a row beside her feet. This stink was getting to her even in her helmet. Oh god, she thought, it must be stuck to my hair. Damn these vorcha, if they could only be offended by their own smell then they just might have a ghost of a chance. Good thing that at least her helmet was pressurized so she didn't have to whiff up more. That's when her eyes widened with realization. "Shepard, I'm linking up with Aria."

"Wait, wha-?" Before he could even finish, Miranda had cut off the frequency and pinged Aria's own comm.

"This better be important, Lawson." Aria's curt reply came. "I've reached my quota of stupid questions for today."

"Biological weapons." Miranda cut in, "Do you have any or the components to improvise one in this armory?"

"Biological-? I know the armory is impressive, but that was a little above my paygrade back in the day." Aria said.

"You're an intergalactic gangster! You must have something lying around?" Miranda insisted.

"Yeah, no. Hanging up no- wait." Aria said, cutting herself off. "Red Sand."

"What?" Miranda asked, one eyebrow rising. "The biotic enhancement drug?"

"Don't sound so fucking judgmental." Aria sneered. "I have a cache hidden here."

"How big is a cache?" She inquired.

Aria shrugged. "A couple of metric tons, give or take."

Miranda lpaused for a moment before nodding her head thoughtfully as she cast aside another empty gun. "We can do something with that..." she said. "I'm walking over, I'll meet you momentarily." She shifted back the frequency to Shepard's.

"I'm still working on it, Miri." Shepard replied.

"You keep doing that, we'll label it Plan C. Meanwhile let's try out Plan B." Miranda said, "Bring Tali and meet me ASAP."

"That works too." Shepard said, switching the frequency. "Hey Tali, you got all that?"

"Copy that, en route to rendezvous right now." She said, jumping out of the APC turret that was quickly manned by one of Feron's men.

Thane came upon the group of unsuspecting vorcha like a dark wind, dropping into the center of the squad in a flurry of kicks, punches and elbows, chaining move for move with blurring speed from one vorcha to the next with bone snapping power. In the dim, flickering lights of the tunnels, his movements seemed surreal, like an unnatural force given form. The vorcha barely had time to raise their guns before Thane sent all but one of them lifeless to the ground. The last vorcha trained his gun on the assassin's back and was about to pull the trigger when a turian combat knife spun from out of the darkness and embedded itself hilt deep into the vorcha's right eye, causing the vorcha to drop its weapon and fall limply to the ground.

"Missed that one." Kasumi said slyly as she materialized into view and walked past him. "Getting lazy in your old age?"

"I knew you had my back." Thane said simply as the woman pulled the knife from the vorcha's head with a splatter of blood and a sound of disgust. Smirking, he toggled a switch on his omnitool and addressed the rest of the squad. "All clear."

"8.5378 seconds." Legion replied. "A new personal record, beating the previous one by .4333 seconds."

The vorcha patrols were getting much more frequent as they neared their destination, and the group agreed that what they couldn't get by with stealth, they'd take out as discretely as possible. That meant sending only one or two people capable of taking out over a dozen combatants in mere seconds. That meant sending out Thane and Kasumi.

Thane inspected their surroundings and double checked their location on his holo-map. "We're close, but the vorcha patrols are becoming thicker." he said, toggling the map off and walking down the tunnel, closely followed by the others.

"You don't think they've also found the gate, do you?" Kasumi said, walking beside Thane.

"Not necessarily, but we can't take that risk." He said. "The sooner we get that gate open, the better."

"But it's not like they'll just let us go after that." Kasumi observed. "They'll give chase, and who knows how far they're willing to run after us before letting us go?"

"Assuming that they are willing to let us go." Thane countered as he looked over the holomap. After the winding maze that they had just gone through, their path seems to have taken them directly around Aria's safe house in a long curve, only a hundred meters or so away from their destination. Thane calculated the swiftest route before turning towards Legion. "Are we close enough to Shepard to use your short-ranged comms without being compromised, Legion?"

"Affirmative. With this range, this unit's scrambled frequency can go past the vorcha network undetected."

"Good, patch me through to him." There was a slight click and a spike of white noise before Shepard's voice greeted him through the comms over a near deafening racket of gun fire.

"Thane!" Shepard said, his tone tempered but relieved. "I hope you have some good news for us."

"We are approaching the target, a few more meters still before we have a visual." Thane said, calmly. "I am uploading the path we have taken to your omnitool should we fail to open the gate, as well as the nav-mesh of vorcha positions in the tunnels."

"It's something, I suppose." Shepard replied, analyzing the map on his end. "Looks like you took the scenic route, too."

"We had to make do with what we could."

"That wasn't a jab at you guys, you did a damn good job." Shepard clarified. "We're working on a little something on our end as well, keep me posted and good luck!"

"And you as well, Shepard. Thane, out." He said as the comm was cut off.

Kasumi sighed as they picked up their pace. "Well, they're still alive, at least."

There was a silent pinging sound and Legion hefted it's gun. "Alert. We are about to reach the designated area. Resynchronizing omnitool link-up."

They all nodded in unison, having already understood their parts in this operation.

Kasumi clicked her tongue. "I just want to know why Aria set another override panel OUTSIDE of her base."

"It's one thing to keep people out, it's another thing to get in quickly should control of her safehouse be taken from her by outsiders." Thane replied. "And I believe the earth saying is don't look a gift horse in the mouth."

"You don't even know what a horse is, do you?"

"I fail to see how that makes the saying less meaningfu-"

"Alert." Legion interrupted, "Scanners indicate a huge group of vorcha at our destination, estimated between 40 to 50 hostile targets." It began, pinging several dozen markers around the area on the holomap. "It would seem they're using the area as a hub for scouting teams that are searching for the gate."

Thane sighed. "That would be just our luck, wouldn't it? The vorcha converged on the very spot we're both seeking out."

"Heh, I'll be sure to hammer the irony into their heads." Kasumi said, drawing her pistol. "Preferably at muzzle velocity. I get a feeling that now isn't the time for subtlety."

"Sadly, we are racing against the clock, so we'll do it the way savages do, just this once." Thane replied with a hint of disdain in his voice. "All brute force and no class."

"Don't sound too excited about it, geez." Kasumi quipped. "So what's the game plan?"

"Hnng. All of you, hear me; We hit them hard, we hit them fast, and in between, somehow manage to open that gate before the rest of them swarm down on our position." He said, synching up their omnitools as he detailed their assault on the holomap. "I and two of the agents will open up with a full frontal assault from this point." He said, pinging a location on the holomap. "We'll start off with a volley of grenades; concussive, smoke, frag, all of them. We need to grab their attention and hold it on us. Meanwhile, Kasumi and another agent will flank them from this position here." He continued, pinging another point on the map.

"Well then, I'll be taking the lady then." Kasumi said, nodding at the female shadow broker agent. "What's say we leave these brutes to do the heavy lifting while we hog all the glory?"

"Sounds like my kind of mission, ma'am."

Thane made another grunt of disdain before continuing. "Your primary goal is to try and open that gate via the console over here while their attention is on us. Pick off as many of them as necessary but do not deviate from getting those gates open. Finally, Legion, we will need you to cast overwatch as well as guard our rear flank lest we get pincered."

"Affirmitive."

"Alright," Thane said as he cracked his knuckles. "Let's make a damned mess."