Xaviers!

The Red Skull stood, dramatically, atop of some overturned cars his Blitkrieg Squad had set up to be a makeshift base of operations, surveying the street towards the university.

From cover in a shadowed corner of a roof, a prone Chase watched the Nazis through a pair of fancy X-Men binoculars.

He tapped his earpiece. "I have eyes on our German friends," he radioed quietly.

[for whoever is manning the fort]

"Perimeter appears to still be secure. If they're moving, they're being quiet about it."

There was an advantage to being a 1-person recon team, able to watch several parts of the campus grounds at once with instant communication.

"Do these guys even know what this school is for? Did it used to be something else in the forties?"

"The school used to be a private manor." Ashlie informs them over the radio as she approaches the perimeter of Jezabelle's with the group of reinforcements. She's in the back, transporting the slapped together temporal anchor on the back of a reinforced green jeep, idly wondering if nobody ever read any of the brochures or historical information about the school.

"So they probably just followed the others when they pulled back. I doubt they expected immediate resistance."

Tosh was also in the jeep, doing some last minute programming of the device. He was pretty damp with stress sweat by this point.

"Well that's a little bit of good news. I was worried it was used to develop secret super weapons or crack the enigma code or something."

The Skull barked something in German, and the tank started to roll forward.

"I hope that hail Mary is finished, because they're on the move to storm the school."

Chase began to run and jump across the rooftops towards the school like, well, a ninja.

"It called a Temporal Displacement Nullifier," Tosh corrected.

"We don't have any time travelers on campus... right?"

"Short answer, we don't. No one this should affect anyway." she says without any further explanation. Not that there'd be time with a tank bearing down on them anyway.

"I never thought I'd be able to fight a Nazi tank outside of a video game." Victor sounded almost excited, which considering how he was going to vomit from carrying a giant battery was a little odd.

"Put me in coach, I'm ready to play."

Emilie smirked, looking sidelong at Victor.

"I can make a distraction. I'm good at that." Already having a vague idea of what was probably in his head.

"Yes, clear a path. We need to get to the original site of the time-distortion and this delicate equipment doesn't take well to being run over by a tank."

"They won't be expecting one lone warrior." Emilie commented to Victor, mimicking someone he'd be more than familiar with as she bent back the flap of her satchel.

"Your chariot awaits, shrinky-dink. If yer up for it."

It was then Emilie got very serious business.

"Listen Big Boss, I think Vic and I can disable that tank. If i'm extra lucky I might be able to get ahold of something he deems valuable enough to chase after me over, but I can't offer much more than that.

"But I don't know how long he'll focus on us so if you wanna make my display yer opening, best be ready."

Ashlie doesn't look too thrilled at that suggestion, but they don't exactly have many options.

"Take care of the tank while the rest pushes through to engage their remaining forces. Don't go running in there by yourself. We're essentially assaulting a Hydra laboratory and don't know what weaponry they have at their disposal."

"We'll distract them as long as we can." Victor tried to sound reassuring as he dwindled in size, despite the fact that he was pretty scared. Obsolete or not, that was a tank, a machine engineered to withstand explosives and crush all opposition. He grabbed onto the edge of Emilie's satchel and pulled himself inside, peeking out from the "safety" of it's confines.

"To die will be an awfully big adventure." Emilie stated as reassurance to Ashlie that she needn't worry for her, deciding that even if Victor wasn't learned or grown enough to piece together the subtleties of her cryptic language, Ashlie would get the gist of the secret message.

However, she turned to the tiny Victor in her pouch and frowned at him through her shades.

"Not for you, though. No dying, I forbid it.

Hold on tight now."

After the warning that things were going to get choppy, Emilie began to move towards the barricade and the tank coming towards them. She didn't exactly rush towards it, trying to keep the element of surprise for as long as she could. She used the terrain of rubble and the unused abandoned vehicles (that must have been deemed unworthy of HYDRA sanctioned roadblock) to get closer still to the tank. The less space she had to book it like a maniac, the better.

For her part, she may not have been artificially tiny but she wasn't very big either, and incredibly nimble on a 'regular people' scale.

Popping her eyes just over the window frame of a vehicle, she peered through the two sets of glass to get a better view of the slowly moving tank she was about to bum rush like an idiot.

"Anywhere particular I need to drop you?"

"How good is your throwing arm?" Not exactly an answer.

" 'cause if I can get tossed onto the front or turret, we're golden."

"Don't get too close. This ain't rocket surgery, I'm not askin' ya to hit a bullseye. If you can get a general shot, that's as close as you need to get. You're tough but they've got machine guns and stuff."

Chase took up a sniping position to cover Emilie, stun arrows ready.

"I hope you know what you're doing Cherry Bomb," he radioed.

The tank continued to roll, and gunfire erupted as the Blitzkrieg Squad fired at Ashlie and the main group of talking heroes!

Tosh yelped and ducked lower in the back of the jeep. He had brought a keyboard to a gunfight.

Will lept over a nearby parked car and charged headfirst at the Nazis, attempting to draw their fire.

Emilie waited patiently, seeing her opening as Will went to draw fire.

Bringing up her shields she darted out from her hidey hole and passed in front of the tank. As she did, she grabbed Victor from her pouch and lobbed him right at the front side of the death vehicle, Victor passing through her own shield in a small opening she made to let him through. She would stop for a moment to make sure he made the connection.

Chase took Will's distraction as an opportunity to try and take down a few soldiers with his stun arrows. Nazis were technically still people.

Thwip! Thwip! Chase's arrows hit their marks.

They also inspired a spread of gunfire towards him.

Victor's body hit the front of the turret near the main gun like a frog thrown against a window pane, staying affixed to the side for a moment before sliding down onto the "deck" where he teetered with the rough and lurching movement of the massive vehicle. Rather than waste time in trying to return to his normal size and gain entrance via one of the hatches he ran toward the front of the tank. The driver had a narrow open slit to look through as they drove, narrow enough to keep out small arms fire and shrapnel, but unlikely to keep out a more dexterous and determined former-projectile. Dropping himself from over the front of the deck Victor attempted to catch the ridge of the slit and swing himself inside the vehicle.

Chase kept moving, slipping from cover to cover as he continued to release arrows between enemy bursts.

Victor Freud wrote:Victor's body hit the front of the turret near the main gun like a frog thrown against a window pane, staying affixed to the side for a moment before sliding down onto the "deck" where he teetered with the rough and lurching movement of the massive vehicle. Rather than waste time in trying to return to his normal size and gain entrance via one of the hatches he ran toward the front of the tank. The driver had a narrow open slit to look through as they drove, narrow enough to keep out small arms fire and shrapnel, but unlikely to keep out a more dexterous and determined former-projectile. Dropping himself from over the front of the deck Victor attempted to catch the ridge of the slit and swing himself inside the vehicle.

Vic managed to get inside the tank, where a very surprised man in a tank commander's uniform blinked, momentarily too stunned to react.


Chase was playing bob-and-weave with the foot soldiers and having luck, but they were closing ground on him, and he was outnumbered.

Once He Was In ,Emilie got to moving afain, rushing the closet Nazi to her and bringing her fist above her head, readying herself to punch the crap out of him.

Chase began to pull back, now doing far more evading than shooting.

"Those reinforcements would be nice about now," he radioed.

Victor fell in through the window, bouncing off of the lap of the tank driver and tumbling to the floor below. Once combat started the floor of an armored vehicle became littered with shell casings and bunched-up floor mats. Victor was counting on this to make it more difficult for any of the soldiers to catch him before he had a chance to be a proper gremlin in the machine. As soon as he recovered from his fall he got to his feet and ran for the back of the tank.

Victor had to dodge footfalls along the way, as the soldiers inside tried to squash the rodent!

Tosh hit one last key on his laptop and threw up his arms in celebration.

"Done!"

"Dudes with guns Bro."

Then his eyes went wide and he quickly brought his arms down, not wanting to get a hand shot off.

Meanwhile Ashlie is cowering next to the large energy core, occasionally popping out of her cover to fire a precision shot from her weaponized glove at Nazis who get too close for comfort.

The rest of the co-Hydra and Nazi group were now marching up the road to the university, and were about to blow down the gate.

On the plus side, no one riding in the tank was dumb enough to try to shoot Victor; if they missed the bullet could ricochet multiple times before hitting someone. But on the negative side there wasn't a lot that he could do at his tiny size; it was only a matter of time before one of them succeeded in stepping on him or catching him. So if he was going to do something he had to be quick about it.

Tank crews weren't trained the same way as infantry, they didn't spend as much time on the firing range because they were too busy being trained on how to utilize and repair armored vehicles. But as they would need to defend themselves should their tank be knocked out, basic infantry weapons were kept in every German tank; the most common of which being pistols, a few SMGs, and the rather iconic potato masher. Increasing in size had made Victor easier to catch, but by the time the commander had tackled him he already had one of the Stielhandgranates in his grasp as was busy twisting the cap on the bottom of the handle to pull the string which would light the fuse.

The fuse was lit! In panic, the soldiers started pouring out of the tank.