Things had been going so well that day. Not only had they finally found a group of Workers out and about; they were clearly from a different colony. They were more cautious and coordinated than the average bunker drone, and wore armor over their pilfered human clothing. It didn't protect them from laser fire or blades, but one had thrown himself in front of another and taken at least ten rounds from V's submachine gun center mass without issue. A sword to the face put him down shortly after, but it was still a promising new wrinkle.
Pretending to be distracted by the bodies of the fallen, J and V allowed a couple to survive and escape in hopes of following them to a new hole full of vermin to clear out. And things had been going swimmingly until the synergistic liability chose the worst time to try and make himself useful. They had followed the Workers into a parking garage when he came out of nowhere, moving faster than J thought he was capable of, and decapitated one Worker with his wing while palming the second one's head and smashing it flat against a concrete pillar with so much force that he nearly brought the whole thing down.
He'd ruined everything, as usual, and to his credit seemed to realize it as soon as J and V revealed themselves.
"Ah biscuits, did I steal your kills?" he asked sheepishly, unable to look either of them in the eye.
"Stole more than that, idiot," V snorted.
"They were from a different colony, Moron, and you just killed our best chance of finding it!" J snapped as she marched over to the fool, taking a perhaps unhealthy amount of pleasure in seeing him flinch.
"I-I'm sorry," he stammered, "I thought-"
"NO!" J screamed right in his face. "You don't think, you OBEY. Because when you 'think', things like this happen."
At that moment J decided that she didn't like looking up at such a waste of silicon.
"GAH!" the male drone's agonized yelp was accompanied by a spurt of oil from his mouth as a sword stabbed through his abdomen.
J licked up the bit that hit her face before slowly extracting the blade, giving it a little twist at the end and allowing him to sink to his knees.
"Every time I think I've set the bar low enough for you, you somehow manage to go under it," the pigtailed drone sighed dramatically before licking her sword clean. "Anyone with a modicum of intelligence would've thought, 'Hm, those girls are way too good to let those toasters get away. They must be up to something!' but not you. No, you, in your infinite wisdom, decide to follow us out here, despite being told to patrol an entirely different sector, insert yourself into an operation that had nothing to do with you, and ruin said operation."
"I'm s-sorry, but I had the s-same ide-" J didn't care for his excuses and lashed out with a kick to the side of his head that sent him tumbling through the snow.
"What am I gonna do with you, Moron-bot?" she groaned as she stalked after him, eyeing V from the corner of her screen. Normally she wouldn't do this in front of her, but perhaps the extra humiliation of his crush watching him get disciplined would help the lesson stick this time. And judging from her impassive, practically bored stare, their squad's resident psycho didn't mind. 'I'll take tacit approval.'
"P-Please, I'm s-s-sorry," the clearly defective unit whined, struggling to get to his feet. The crack in his screen from her kick had already healed, and just seeing that made her angry.
She didn't like it when he healed so quickly. It made her feel like what she was doing was meaningless, which drove her to greater and greater acts of violence in the name of getting the point across.
J was so focused on his healed wounds that she didn't even register that he was still pleading. Nor did she care as her right hand became a submachine gun and she put a round through the idiot's targeting sensor. He fell back to the ground, screaming.
