Before Nico could come up with a smartass response, Max breached the stairwell door and moved forward to clear the area.

There were no stairs up, only down from here, and no sign of enemy movement as the automatic lights flickered to life. He moved around the corner, checked the gap down to the lower level, and found nothing, except that the stairwell only went down one single level. The stairs to the next level must be in a different spot than these ones were, a safety precaution against a breach in containment or an accident in the labs down below.

Nico closed the door behind them and welded a spot shut so that the hybrids couldn't follow as easily if they were using the elevator to get around, then followed close behind Max as he prepared to open the door to the second floor.

He had briefly considered disabling the elevators, but there was a team at the doors, and they could take care of anything that tried to get out of the facility.

"We should have asked for a per-head bounty. We'd be rich after this mission." Nico laughed as she hacked the floor's security system and relayed the locations of the occupants to Max.

Two hundred hybrids, none with visible weapons, except for the ten who were gathered around the door. Most of them seemed to be busy with whatever tasks they had been assigned, moving papers between desks and typing away at consoles. It seemed that either they weren't concerned or didn't know that anything was coming for them, and they were doing their jobs the same as any other day.

If they had based their assumptions on the enemy being on the same power level as their defence troops, that would make sense, but that was not the case when Max and Nico came calling.

"You take the right, and I'll get left," Nico suggested, as Max had his shield in his left hand, putting it toward the room if he took the right side.

They didn't have visible weapons now, but they had sharp claws, and there were a lot of them gathered on this floor. Max gave the door a mighty kick that made the hydraulics of his Mobile Suit squeal, and the alloy barrier went flying up into the roof, only to get lodged in the ceiling tiles.

Max stepped forward, shooting at the guards and blocking their return fire, while Nico charged into the ones behind him, carving them to pieces before they realized that there was a second Mobile Suit in the room.

For a split second, everyone else just stared in shock, and then their training kicked in. Workers scrambled to wipe computers, running around with large magnets to destroy the data on drives and corrupt hard data on the chipsets. Those who weren't on magnet duty were working to delete everything that they could, except for the first rank, which began to charge at the two intruding humans.

"For the Great Mother." An admin assistant in a cheap suit with the name Phteven written on his nametag shouted as he charged at Nico.

When she saw him coming, Nico altered her swing to bisect him vertically, then grabbed his left side and stole his nametag before throwing his body at the next closest hybrid.

"Stephen with a Ph." She giggled as the nametag disappeared into her flat space storage, and Max shook his head at her antics while he laughed and shot down two more magnet-wielding workers.

They didn't actually need to stop them, they had cloned all the data in the room and sent it both to their ship and to the Alliance embargo line before Max kicked in the door, but it was best to keep up appearances, and convincing the workers that they were here for the data was the best way to keep them from running and hiding.

Not that the data here was particularly important. These were the administration offices, dealing with accounts receivable and payable, payroll and scheduling. Nothing on the floor's entire mainframe had to do with the work done here. Even the employee data didn't mention what sort of work they did here other than a basic job title, such as researcher, clerk, or janitor.

Max parried a low strike with his blade, then turned and punched the hybrid in the face with his shield, sending the mangled corpse flying across the room.

This version of the Mobile Suit was an augmentic armour, but with a higher capacity than the stock version, and the total enhancement of his strength was quickly reaching the cartoon superhero level. The sight was gruesome, but the way that the body flopped as it slid down the wall was so surreal that Max double-checked to make sure that his mind hadn't been pulled into an illusion or a virtual reality simulation.

It would be an excellent trap if they could pull it off, having the landing of the stairs pull intruders into a VR simulation, leaving them unaware and helpless to avoid being captured.historical

These weren't combat hybrids in any way. They were no faster, smarter or more skilled than the average office worker, and it was a waste of energy to shoot at them unless he could line a bunch of them up to clear out all at once.

Their behaviour was familiar, though. Klem Drones would continue their tasks unless interrupted, going about their business to the bitter end. These office workers were not quite at that level, but they were getting close to it, and Nico was carving a bloody swathe through them as she made her way across the room at a jog.

Max crushed a skull with the flat of his sword and then paused as a new target showed up in the ceiling. He wasn't sure which one of his sensors had picked it up, but the System's targeting was almost never wrong.

So, Max put a pair of Laser shots into the ceiling, and a six-armed Klem Warrior fell to the ground in front of him, flailing for purchase as the life left its body through the gaping wound in its chest.