Well, like I said, Chapter 7 would be finished soon. And here it is, as promised.

Jeez, eight or nine months and I'm only up to chapter 7? What have I been doing with my life?! EH EH?!!

Anyway, here you go. Chapter 7 follows...


Chapter 7: Distraction to Retaliation

“Jack! Firefox! Everyone, get back here!” Wizard was screaming at the top of his lungs. In a few seconds, he had rallied the rest of them to him, including Indigo and Splitter. It was obvious how distraught he was.
Spaz was puzzled, worried, and confused. “So… what was that all about?”
Wizard turned to him. “That was one of the higher officers at R.O.A.R. That previous reptilian assault was just a diversion. They’ve changed targets. The Outpost is under attack!”
Jack’s eyes nearly popped out of his head. “What?! All that was just a distraction?”
“It was!” A booming voice rang out through the clearing. All the rabbits looked upwards, and there, looming above them, was Tank’s airborne battleship. The voice laughed.
“I suppose you know me. I am Buster Tank, the destroyer of your planet!”
“Getting a bit ahead of ourselves, aren’t we?” Jack said, under his breath. He continued to talk back in a normal tone. “So you’re Buster Tank, huh? Devan’s great soldier of doom? I’m willing to bet that was most of your army we just took to pieces, eh?”
“Those lizards that I threw at you? Did you really think I intended to stop you with them? They were WORTHLESS!”
“Yeah, and I’m sure if they were still alive, they’d thank you heartily for the compliment,” Jack added quietly.
“And now you have a choice. Save your precious Outpost… or save yourselves?”
Firefox shielded his eyes against the sun above, to focus on the airship. “What do you mean, save ourselves?”
The voice laughed again. “Exactly what you think I mean.”
Blaze’s ears, being the most finely tuned from being a spy, picked up the faintest whirr from above. But they all could see the gauss gun pointing towards them from the bottom of the airship. “Everyone out of the way! Duck and cover!”
Craters as wide as the fleeing rabbits were tall suddenly appeared in the ground where they had stood moments ago. Tank was still laughing as Jazz pointed his blaster at the hovering warship, and fired several times. Spaz had stumbled in his mad rush to find cover, and Jazz had intended to provide it. But all of his bullets were lost upon the thick armour of the flying battleship.
Suddenly, a red beam shot out of the bottom of the airship, and struck Spaz as he got up. The small red rabbit gasped, and his eyes were wide as the very space around him seemed to shimmer. He slowly began to glow brighter and brighter, then, with a flash, he disappeared.
“Looks like your little red friend didn’t have the sense in him to save himself. And now he’s mine. Unless, of course, you can stop me, which, if your tactics are any indication of your fighting skills, you obviously can’t.”
“No!” Jazz was about to run out from his cover, but Firefox held him back.
“Let me go! Spaz…! That monster took Spaz!” he screamed, thrashing against Firefox’s hold.
“Hold up, Jazz. If you were to go out there, you’d just be rabbit-napped as well. And then we’d have two lost Jackrabbits to worry about.”
But Jazz was not to be stopped that easily. He continued to batter at Firefox, even though the taller of the two was not about to let go. Finally, Firefox decided that there was nothing else for it. He raised his blaster, and was about to swing it downwards in a knockout smash to Jazz’s skull.
Then, for no apparent reason, Jazz stopped thrashing, and swatted at the side of his neck. “Aie! What was that? Something just stung me!”
Firefox looked to Wizard, and saw him wink back. The purple rabbit made a slapping motion to his own neck, then pointed to Jazz. Firefox caught on quickly.
“One second…” Jazz watched as Firefox moved his hand slowly towards the side of his neck. Then he pretended to swat the imaginary gnat biting Jazz. “Got it!”
Jazz turned around to see exactly what it was that he had “got,” but Firefox made a distasteful flicking motion, as if he had tossed the crushed gnat away. The red rabbit simply shrugged.
Jack held a quick discussion with Wizard, Blaze, Lori, and Indigo, then called the others over. “Obviously, we have two targets to deal with: the ship above our heads, and the R.O.A.R. Outpost that’s going to pieces as we speak. So, here’s what we do.
“Firefox, Wizard, Splat, Headcheese, and myself are going to go back to the Outpost to serve as outer defense. The Outpost has defenses already, but they’re not sufficient to stand up to an army even the size of what we just destroyed. We need to bolster our own defenses until we’re sure that the threat is gone.
“Splitter, Indigo, Blaze, Jazz, and Lori are going to head up to the flying battleship to get Spaz back. If nothing else, we can also try to get information about the satellite… that is, if it’s not more than a rumour. Then again, I thought Tank didn’t exist until now.”
“But I thought you had blueprints for the satellite?” Jazz interrupted.
“Well, Tank seems to be very fond of diversions. Those blueprints could very well have been fake. I’m not ready to trust any turtles of any kind on anything anymore. Anyway.”
He paused. “Wait a sec. How did you know about my having blueprints to the satellite?”
“Blaze told us when he found us at Carrotus Castle.”
“Oh?” Jack looked to Blaze, and the latter nodded significantly.
Jack continued. “So, everyone good with my plan? Any questions?”
“Yeah,” Lori managed to slide in sideways. “How are we going to get up to the airship? We don’t even have any airboards with us.”
“Don’t we?” With that, Jack nodded to Wizard, who instantly pulled five airboards from his pack. He handed one to each of the rabbits who were to take to the air. Lori and Jazz were both still awed by Wizard’s apparent ability to pull anything out of his pack.
As each of the sky-rabbits took, and mounted, their airboards, Jack whispered to Wizard, “So what was that ‘gnat’ Jazz got stung by?”
“A really small anti-hyperadrenaline dart. Jazz was getting a bit ballistic, so I slowed him down a bit.”
“Ah.”
Nothing was said for a few moments, and then Blaze spoke. “Good luck to you, Jack. Come back to us in one piece.”
“Same with you, Blaze. We need a dark, mysterious rabbit on our team, and you’re the only one we’ve got. Like our resident genius said, just don’t get dead, k?”
“Okies.”
With that, the two groups went their separate ways, with Jack leading the posse towards the besieged Outpost 12, and Jazz leading his airborne group to get his brother back.

Colonel Defalcon was pacing back and forth behind one of his base defense gunners. He was obviously extremely worried. He was second-in-command of the Outpost only to General Grath, and the mysterious General had disappeared recently. Which meant that now, he was the ranking officer at Outpost 12, and he had to do everything in his power to protect it. And the showers of NapalmPineapples from the HyperTanketyTankTanks below, coupled with the lightning blasts from the electrically charged turtle Shellshockers, didn’t help his plight.
Suddenly, he barked at the gunner. “Have those miscreants Jack Flash and Captain Firefox shown up yet?”
“Not yet, sir. But we just got word that their on their way.”
“They better be.”
Then, from out of nowhere, a rocket blasted one of the HyperTanketys to oblivion. The gunner called Defalcon back nervously. “Uh, sir?”
“What?”
Defalcon reached the window just in time to see Jack literally fly out of the distance and hurl himself, guns blazing, onto his opposition. Firefox, Wizard, Headcheese, and Splat weren’t far behind him, and they began tearing into the HyperTanketys and Shellshockers for all they were worth.
“Well, they were on their way, alright. Thank goodness they’re here.”
The gunner resumed firing his Concielian Cannon down at the hordes of Buster’s army, careful not to hit any of their new saviours. “Yes, sir.”
Meanwhile, the Shellshockers, being the only sentient beings there, had to turn their attention away from attacking the Outpost towards defending themselves against the new offence on the Outpost’s side. They were being bombarded from both sides now, and there was nowhere to run to. Yet some of the turtles broke off from the group and tried to run anyplace, just as long as they got away from certain death. They didn’t get far.
The HyperTanketys, on the other hand, were completely oblivious to the attackers at their rear. They continuously pounded away at the shaken Outpost, only to be completely destroyed by Jack and his cohorts. Firefox ended up grabbing a flying axle from out of the air and swinging about madly with it, putting good-sized dents in the HyperTanketys and completely destroying the ShellShockers, even though he got zapped a few times through their electro-charged hides.
After all of the turtles had either fallen or fled, and the HyperTanketys were reduced to smouldering embers, Jack, Firefox, Wizard, Headcheese, and Splat entered the R.O.A.R. Outpost.
It was a shambles. Everything was either scorched or simply completely destroyed. Countless rabbits lay dead on the floor. Jack and Firefox, being the two senior fighters of the group, recognized many of them almost immediately. Jack knelt beside his once dear friend Hauc, now lying burned and lifeless on the floor.
Even after all of his hard years of brutal warfare, even after innumerable victories and defeats, Jack Flash still knew how to weep for lost comrades.
But he did not weep.
He stood up, dry-eyed, and through grinding teeth, growled, “Buster Tank and all of his criminal scum will pay for this, I swear it on my life!”

Woo, melodramatic ending. Don't you just LOVE the suspense???