Cloud had slowly gotten back into the swing of his old nighttime habit, form the last time he’d been in Hive City - doing his best to patrol Sector 3 from the rooftops. Not that he missed the havoc it wreaked on his sleep schedule, and he probably wasn’t the only one doing it. But each Sector in and of itself was basically a city, which was a heck of a lot of ground to cover.
This group of after-hours bank robbers had been a lot smarter than normal. Not just in that they’d gotten through the safe with no problem; that wasn’t really Cloud’s problem, after all. No, these guys had brought a sniper with a suppressed, supersonic rifle.
Something Cloud hadn’t known until he’d acquired a hole in his shoulder.
He;d put the rest of them out of commission, but he’d ended up leaving the sniper to their own devices. He definitely wasn’t happy about that, but the sniper could’ve been holed up in any of a dozen buildings, and if they got off a good shot, Cloud wouldn’t even notice until he resurrected a few days later.
A few hours had passed, with several zig-zagged blocks between Cloud and the direction the shot had come from. He was pretty confident that he was safe now... aside from the shoulder wound, of course. He sat down and peeled off his pauldron to take a look.
The shot had gone clean through his arm, for better or worse; if anything, it’d punched through too fast to create massive damage. It hurt like hell, though. Plus having a bullet hole in his bones was going to be an issue, even for him.