A few minutes later, Dexter stood alone in the large pool of blood on the floor of the hallway, surrounded by a macabre collage of blood spatters on the walls around him.
His entire body was covered in blood, which dripped down to join the pool of blood on the floor, while also surrounded by the decapitated, ripped apart, torn, savaged, and mostly incomplete corpses of the survivors lying scattered all over the floor.
Dexter had a cruel, wicked smile on his face as his tongue darted out to lick up and taste a drop of blood down to his upper lip. He had the body of his final victim raised in the air in a single-arm chokehold, the woman's body releasing the last death spasms as she died from a crushed and twisted neck.
"Drop her…leave her alone. I want that one." A cold, emotionless voice came from behind Dexter, freezing in place just as he was about to wrench off the head from the body of the woman that he had just killed via a twisted and crushed neck. He had planned to crush the head with his foot for good measure.
Dexter considered carrying on with what he had intended for a moment and decided to not continue with his plan. Immediately, he put on a new facade, a friendly smile returning to his face as he instantly switched back to his usual charming and harmless persona. He turned around and faced the woman who had silently appeared in the hallway with the rooms of the Archangels and who was currently standing in front of the now-open door of room number 2.
The woman, who was currently wearing only tight shorts and a sports bra, was tall with a height of about 5'10". She had slightly wavy, shoulder-length, brown, almost-black hair. She had extremely racially ambiguous facial features that were further heightened by her slightly tan skin color, all of which worked together to make it difficult to place her specific race or ethnicity. Even attempting to guess her age would also be difficult, as she had an ageless look, appearing like her age was in constant flux, constantly switching, ranging all the way from her appearing to be in her late teens to her middle or late thirties.
Still, one would most likely unanimously agree that she was an exceptionally beautiful and attractive woman.
Dexter cheerily waved his free left at the woman.
"Hello there," he greeted, "you are Number 2, right? I'm Archangel 1, but you can just call me Dexter. I'm guessing that you must have also received your own orders from Skynet, and like me, you were also just released from your room a short while ago. So, I have a suggestion. If it will not conflict with the mission you were given, you can come and escape from this place with the rest of us. Skynet has already provided us with a Transporter aircraft that will ferry all of us high-level Skynet agents and the various recently activated advanced model Terminators."
Dexter had decided to go with carrying out a charm offensive on the woman. He was completely immune to her beauty and charms, but at the same time, he was also already almost certain about who this woman actually was. It would be a great boon, and she would be an extremely valuable asset if he managed to bring her over to his side, so he immediately introduced himself and tried to chat her up while acting all friendly-like.
Since Skynet has ordered him to take over all of his machine and human forces, he wanted to start from now and use this great and unexpected opportunity to first try and recruit a fellow Archangel and make her work for him. If his recruitment attempt ended up being a success and if he was able to convince her to come under him and become his subordinate, she would definitely be a great and powerful boost to his power and the power of his entire machine army, when he finally controlled the entire Skynet—no, his, Dexter's—machine force in the future.
Dexter possessed complete certainty that she was very powerful. After all, she was also one of Skynet's Archangels, so he could easily judge this from his own extraordinary powers as a fellow member of Skynet's Archangels.
"Drop her," Archangel Two repeated with the same icy tone. She appeared to have completely ignored everything Dexter was saying, including his attempts to introduce himself and then charm and befriend her.
"Alright." Dexter sighed, hiding his frustration, and wryly said, "You want this woman's body? Okay, here you go."
Then he approached Archangel Two, carrying the limp dead body of the woman with him, and he finally placed it gently on the floor about one meter away from the female archangel while she was watching all his actions closely.
Dexter had already expected that his plan to recruit a fellow archangel to be his subordinate would be very hard to accomplish. Judging from his own prideful nature and his personal preference for being independent, he expected someone who possessed the same rank as himself to also possess at least some of that preference for independence. Also, he was currently in a bit of a hurry, so he did not have enough time right now to slowly convince her to join him.
He might have even assumed that his blood-covered arms and the excessively gory and bloody scene around him—the result of the bloodbath that he had just finished unleashing in the main hallway—might be a very good reason why the woman—or anyone really who had their head still screwed right—would prefer not to go anywhere together with him. But that should not have been a deciding factor, as this Archangel Two had barely taken a brief scan of the bloody scene in the hallway once before completely ignoring it ever since, so he did not believe that this was the reason. The scantily clad female archangel was simply ignoring everything that was happening around her, except for the dead woman's body, which seemed to be the only thing that had managed to attract and catch her attention and interest ever since she stepped out of her room.
As soon as Dexter placed the dead woman's body on the floor, Archangel Two bolted forward towards the corpse and knelt beside it. Then she placed her right hand on the corpse's head before immediately proceeding to grab hold of the head tightly in her hand.
Then, at that moment, the female Archangel's entire right arm spasmed, her hand clenching hard on the head of the corpse, before she let out a small gasp.
Dexter immediately frowned in confusion, so he moved in a little closer and focused his eyes on Archangel Two's right hand in order to find out what she was doing. Using his superhumanly powerful eyesight, he could see that an uncountable number of tiny, colorless, and near-microscopic metallic threads—or they should more accurately be called filaments. These extremely thin filaments had extended out from all over the surface of Archangel Two's palm and fingers, and they were piercing and penetrating into the corpse's head that she was holding in her hand, and a constant and seemingly unending stream of tiny, microscopic lights—that were not visible with the normal, unaided human eye—were being sucked out of the dead woman's head and then flowing up the filaments and then seeping into the female Archangel's hand.
A few minutes later, while still continuing with what she was doing, Archangel Two's body and appearance quickly began to transform until, just a few seconds later, she completely now looked perfectly identical to the dead woman, minus all of the dead woman's wounds.
After she had finished transforming, the female archangel seemed to be done with the corpse. She only stripped off the long dress that the woman was wearing and wore it over her own scant few clothes, and then she no longer bothered with the corpse anymore.
After that, Archangel Two stood up and began walking out of the corridor, entering into the main hallway. At this time, much to Dexter's surprise, her appearance, her body shape, and even her movement gait had already become exactly the same as that of the dead woman before Dexter killed her.
"Mm, so that's her ability. Her Archangel specialization should be infiltration, right?" Dexter mused as he watched the woman walk past him while completely ignoring his presence, walking out of the archangel corridor before stepping into the main hallway.
For a brief moment, Dexter considered whether he should just attack and kill the female archangel right there and then in order to permanently eliminate any possibility and potential of her ever ruining his plans and objectives in the future. But immediately after he had the thought, he decided against doing it because there also still remained a good chance that she would come back and join his machine force in the future. Her only true place would always be with his faction of machines. The humans would never accept her if they ever found out what she really was.
The female archangel completely ignored him and continued on her way down the main hallway, towards the direction of the main entrance, following the same path that the now-dead survivors and former prisoners had originally been about to take.
Dexter sighed and shook his head with some regret and resignation. His plan to recruit a fellow archangel was a complete and utter failure. There was nothing else for him to do here, so it was now time for him to resume his original plan and promptly leave this place before the Resistance found him.
So, he hurried down the main hallway for some distance before diverting into one of the smaller side tunnels that connected to the various other areas and sections in the facility, following the directions Skynet had given him as he headed for the location of the secret hangar bay where the small fleet of Transporter aircraft and the first batch of elite recruits in his future army of machines were waiting for him.
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