The bank was a single story building on the corner of a main street in a town called Grover, the kind of town that had one of everything and not much of anything else. One pharmacy. One hardware store. One diner with its lights still on in the early dark. And one bank with its front doors locked from the inside and no lights visible through the frosted glass and three cars parked wrong in the lot — two on the pavement, one blocking the drive-through lane at an angle that said whoever parked it wasn't planning to stay long and wasn't worried about anyone's opinion of their parking.
Max had the Rustbucket stopped half a block up the street with the engine off and the lights off and was looking at the bank with the flat focused attention he got when the grandfather stepped back and something older took over.
"Five inside," he said, reading from the communicator. "Three alien signatures, two human. Twelve civilian signatures." He looked at the building. "Vault is on the east side. Back exit opens into the alley behind the building."
"Who are they?" Gwen said.
"No faction tag. Independent crew." He set the communicator down. "They've been in there twenty minutes. No shots fired. Hostages are contained but unharmed."
Ben was looking at the bank from the back seat with those quiet steady eyes.
"Police?" he said.
"Four minutes out," Max said. "Maybe five. Once they arrive it becomes a siege situation and the hostages are leverage." He looked at the bank. "Right now it's just a robbery."
"Right now we can end it," Ben said.
Max looked at him in the rearview mirror. Ben looked back.
"The back exit," Max said. "Someone is going to try to leave through it when things go wrong inside. I'll be there." He turned around in his seat. "You two go through the front. Hostages first — get them away from the crew before anything else. Everything else comes after."
"Hostages first," Gwen said.
"Don't engage until the civilians are clear," Max said. "And Ben—"
"One second," Ben said. "I know."
Max held his gaze for a moment.
"One second," he confirmed.
He got out of the Rustbucket quietly and moved down the pavement toward the alley without another word, keeping to the shadow of the building line, and within seconds he was gone.
Ben and Gwen looked at each other.
"Hostages first," Gwen said.
"Hostages first," Ben said.
They got out.
The front door was locked. Ben looked at it for exactly one second — the glass, the frame, the lock — and then tapped the Omnitrix.
The green flash lit up the pavement outside the bank.
Fourarms put one hand flat against the door and pushed.
The door came off its frame without drama, hinges tearing clean, and Fourarms stepped through the opening into the bank.
The inside was one large open space — teller windows on the left, waiting area on the right with chairs and a low table with magazines nobody was reading, the vault corridor visible through an open door at the far end. Twelve people on the floor of the waiting area, hands on their heads, scared and quiet. Standing over them, two humans and two aliens in dark clothing with weapons that were not standard issue for any human law enforcement agency.
All four of them looked at Fourarms in the doorway.
The room went very still.
Fourarms looked at the hostages. At the crew. At the vault corridor.
"Move to the left side of the room," he said. Not loud. Just clear. To the hostages.
Nobody moved for a second because rooms full of scared people take a moment to process new information.
"Now would be good," he said.
They moved. Fast, scrambling, pulling each other up from the floor and pressing left toward the teller windows, away from the crew, away from the vault corridor.
Gwen came through the door behind Fourarms and her hands were already up and a barrier went between the hostages and the crew — solid and pink-white and immediate — and she held it there and looked at the crew with the focused steady expression she got when she had decided what needed doing and was doing it.
"Hi," she said to the crew.
The one who moved first was big.
He was the biggest thing in the room after Fourarms — broad across the shoulders, dark green skin with a ridge of bone along the jaw and down the neck, four-fingered hands that closed into fists the size of sledgehammer heads. He came off the wall fast and direct and said nothing because apparently he didn't feel the need to open with words.
He hit Fourarms in the chest with both fists simultaneously.
The impact drove Fourarms back two steps and cracked the floor under his feet and knocked three chairs over and Fourarms looked down at his own chest and then up at the alien.
"Rok," one of the humans said from across the room. Warning in his voice.
Rok didn't look at him.
Fourarms looked at Rok.
"Okay," Fourarms said.
Rok swung again. Fourarms caught it — both upper hands taking the impact, absorbing it, holding. The force of it shook the windows. Fourarms held.
Then he pushed back.
Rok went sideways into the teller windows and the glass cracked along the counter and he hit the floor and was up again in under two seconds, which was fast, and he was grinning when he came back up, which was concerning.
"Good," Rok said. First word. His voice was low and rough and carried the energy of something that found this genuinely enjoyable. "Good, good, good."
"You talk a lot for someone who just went through a window," Fourarms said.
"That wasn't a window," Rok said. "That was a counter."
"My mistake," Fourarms said. "Let me find you a window."
Rok charged.
Across the room Gwen had her hands full.
The two humans had split — one going left along the teller windows trying to get around the barrier to the hostages, one going right toward the vault corridor. The third alien, smaller than Rok, fast and wiry with orange skin and four arms of its own, had gone up — literally up, running up the wall with some kind of surface adhesion, crossing the ceiling above the barrier.
Gwen tracked all three simultaneously.
She shifted the barrier left, cutting off the human going for the hostages, and threw a disc at the ceiling alien at the same time. The disc missed — the alien moved fast and the angle was wrong — but it made it change direction and that was enough. She built a second barrier under it on the ceiling, which it ran into face first and dropped, and she had a binding around it before it hit the floor.
The right-going human — the talker, she could already tell by the way he moved, the way his head was already turning back toward her with that particular expression of someone about to say something — had stopped at the vault corridor entrance and was watching her work.
"Not bad," he said. He had a narrow face and quick eyes and the relaxed posture of someone who thought the situation was still manageable. "Seriously. How old are you?"
"Old enough," Gwen said. She rebuilt the left barrier higher. "Step away from the corridor."
"See here's the thing," Voss said, not moving, "we're almost done in there. Five more minutes and we're gone and nobody's had a bad day." He spread his hands in a reasonable gesture. "You and the big red guy wrap up whatever this is, we walk, the people on the floor go home. Simple."
"Step away from the corridor," Gwen said.
"You're not even listening," Voss said sadly.
"I'm listening," Gwen said. "I'm just not agreeing." She looked at him steadily. "Last time."
Voss looked at her. At the barrier. At the ceiling alien wrapped in her binding on the floor. At Rok and Fourarms on the other side of the room conducting what appeared to be a mutual appreciation of how hard they could hit each other.
He stepped away from the corridor.
He also pulled a weapon from his jacket, which was less cooperative.
Gwen had a barrier between them before he finished raising it and the shot — whatever it fired — hit the barrier and stopped and she pushed the barrier forward and Voss went backward into the corridor wall and she held it there.
"Five more minutes," she told him. "You said five more minutes. Clock's running."
Rok hit Fourarms with a chair.
Not swung like a bat — thrown, two handed, from across the room. Fourarms caught it with his upper two hands and looked at it.
"You threw a chair at me," Fourarms said.
"You were standing still," Rok said. "Seemed like a waste."
Fourarms put the chair down carefully to one side. "Are all your people this chatty or is it just you?"
"Just me," Rok said, moving left, reading the room, looking for the angle. "The boss doesn't talk much. Voss talks too much. The others are professional." He cracked his knuckles — all eight of them, in sequence, which took a moment. "Me, I like a conversation."
"How's this one going for you," Fourarms said.
"Honestly?" Rok moved right instead, fast, covering the distance before the sentence finished, low this time instead of high, going for the legs. "Pretty well."
He hit Fourarms low and hard and Fourarms went down to one knee and Rok was already on his back with both arms around Fourarms' neck from behind and the weight of him was considerable and Fourarms stayed on one knee for a moment processing the new geometry of the situation.
"You're stronger than you look," Rok said from behind him.
"You're talking more than you should," Fourarms said.
He stood up.
All the way up. With Rok still on his back, hanging off his neck, which meant Rok was now five feet off the ground and had several options none of which were good. Fourarms reached back with his lower two arms and got a grip on Rok and peeled him off and held him at arm's length — all four arms extended, Rok hanging in the air, his legs moving like someone who had just remembered gravity was a thing.
Rok looked at the four arms holding him.
Fourarms looked at Rok.
"You had the right idea," Fourarms said. "Wrong number of arms."
He set Rok down on the floor. Not threw — set. Like something heavy he was done carrying.
Rok hit the floor and sat there for a second with his legs out in front of him like a surprised child and looked up at Fourarms.
Then he laughed. A real one, big and genuine.
"Alright," he said. "Alright, I'll give you that one."
He got up swinging.
In the vault corridor Mira was not panicking.
Panicking was for people who hadn't planned. Mira had planned. The vault was open, the contents were in two cases, the exit was twenty meters away through the back door that her access codes had already unlocked from the inside. The floor was compromised — she'd known it would be compromised eventually, she'd built twenty minutes of buffer into the plan specifically for compromised floors — and twenty minutes was enough.
She picked up the cases.
She walked toward the back door.
She pushed it open and stepped into the alley.
Max was standing there.
He had his hands in his jacket pockets and was leaning against the wall across from the door with the particular stillness of someone who had been there for a while and was comfortable with the waiting. He looked at Mira and at the two cases in her hands and then at her face and said nothing.
Mira looked at him. At the alley behind him. At the one exit that wasn't him.
"You're not police," she said. Her voice was exactly as calm as it always was.
"No," Max said.
"Plumber?"
"Retired," Max said.
She looked at him for a moment. At the cases. Back at him.
"These are heavy," she said.
"I imagine," Max said.
"I could put them down."
"That would be the idea," Max said.
Mira set the cases down. She straightened up and looked at Max and her expression was the expression of someone recalculating, running new numbers, finding that the new numbers didn't produce a better result than the old ones.
She put her hands up.
"Smart," Max said.
Inside, the fight was ending the way fights end when one side runs out of options.
Rok was on the floor again — this time face down, which he'd arrived at through a sequence of events involving all four of Fourarms' arms working in combination that Rok had not anticipated and probably should have — and Gwen had Voss backed into the vault corridor entrance with three barriers overlapping and his weapon on the floor six feet away from him. The ceiling alien was still bound. The other human was zip tied to a teller window bar with restraints from somewhere that Gwen didn't ask about and assumed were hers.
Rok put both hands flat on the floor and pushed himself up to his elbows and looked at Fourarms standing over him.
"Best two out of three," Rok said.
"No," Fourarms said.
"Thought so," Rok said. He put his forehead back on the floor. "Good fight though."
"It was fine," Fourarms said.
"Fine," Rok repeated. Like the word offended him slightly. "It was better than fine."
"You threw a chair at me."
"A good chair throw is a skill."
"You missed."
"You caught it. That's different from missing." Rok turned his head sideways on the floor to look up at him. "Where'd you train?"
"Plumber facility," Fourarms said.
"Huh," Rok said. "Shows."
Gwen looked at this exchange with the expression of someone who had given up trying to make sense of it.
Green flash.
Ben stood where Fourarms had been, looked down at Rok on the floor, and then at Gwen.
"Voss?" he said.
"Contained," Gwen said.
"The other two?"
"Contained."
"Mira?"
The back door opened and Max came through from the alley with Mira in front of him, the two cases in his other hand, her hands bound with zip ties.
"Contained," Max said.
Ben looked at the room. At the five crew members in various states of containment. At the twelve hostages pressed against the teller windows, some of them on their phones, some of them just staring.
He looked at Gwen.
Gwen looked at him.
Neither of them said anything for a moment.
Then from the floor Rok said "Hey. Red four-arms kid."
Ben looked down at him.
"Good fight," Rok said simply.
Ben looked at him for a second.
"You talk too much," he said.
Rok grinned at the floor. "Yeah," he said. "I know."
The police arrived four minutes later.
Three cars, lights going, the particular energy of people arriving to a situation they'd been told was ongoing and finding it already resolved in ways they didn't have a framework for. An officer got out of the first car and looked through the bank's broken front door at five contained suspects, twelve unharmed civilians, an old man with a Plumber's badge, and two ten year olds standing near the door waiting with the patience of people who knew this part would take a while.
The officer looked at all of this for a moment.
He looked at Max.
Max held up the badge.
The officer looked at it. At the broken door. At Rok on the floor who raised one hand in a small wave.
The officer decided this was above his pay grade and got on his radio.
Max handled the conversation that followed with the efficiency of someone who had done it many times — clear, direct, enough information to process the situation and not enough to open questions he didn't want opened. Ben and Gwen stood by the broken door and waited. A paramedic came and went. Two more police cars arrived and then a van. The five crew members were walked out one by one.
Rok went last.
He stopped next to Ben on his way out, hands cuffed, two officers on either side of him, and looked down at him with that wide genuine expression.
"How old are you?" he said.
"Ten," Ben said.
Rok looked at him for a long moment.
"Huh," he said.
The officers walked him out.
Ben watched him go.
Gwen appeared beside him. "Five to four," she said.
Ben looked at her.
"That's mine," she said, nodding at the departing crew. "I got three of them."
"I got Rok," Ben said. "Rok was worth at least two."
"The scoring system doesn't have a weight category."
"It should."
"It really shouldn't."
"Rok threw a chair."
"And yet," Gwen said pleasantly, "five four."
Ben looked at the empty doorway where Rok had been.
"There are implied weight categories," he said.
Max appeared behind them with the Plumbers badge back in his pocket and the particular expression of a man who had just talked to four different police officers and several radio voices and was ready to be in a vehicle going somewhere quiet.
"Done," he said. "Let's go."
"Five four," Gwen said to Ben, walking after Max.
"Implied," Ben said, following. "Weight. Categories."
"That's not how scoring—"
"Rok was enormous, Gwen—"
"Size doesn't determine—"
"He threw a chair—"
Max walked ahead of them to the Rustbucket and got in and started the engine and sat behind the wheel and looked at the road.
The road looked back.
"Take it seriously," he said quietly.
To no one. To the road.
The road had no response.
The doors opened and Ben and Gwen got in still talking and Max pulled out of the parking lot and the bank got smaller in the mirror and the town of Grover went past and the highway opened up ahead of them in the dark and somewhere behind them five people were being processed and twelve people were going home and the night was quiet and ordinary around the Rustbucket as it drove on.