Once Ronan is relatively safer underneath the tables, or at least no longer having to fight like some crazed, dystopian knight of the office, Adam can breathe easier in spite of the now focused efforts of the chairs to breach the trench. “I didn’t think that far ahead.”

He looked around the small space. They had very little to work with. There’s the chair armour that Ronan has, the tables that are largely in use, and a few shards of shattered plastic from the chair that Adam kicked. He picked up one of the longer pieces, turning it over in his hands while he tried to think past the snapping chairs shaking the tables.

“We need the tables where they are for now, and you’re not going out there alone.” After a few seconds, Adam shimmied down to the centre of the sideways table and leaned forward, examining how the centre legs, currently folded up, were attached to the table top. “But we don’t need these if it’s not load-bearing.”

He tried to put the narrow edge of the shard into one of the flathead screws. It took a few tries, with grunts that might be quiet cusses in disguise, but the screw eventually started to spin. “If we can get these off, we might be able to use them to sweep the chairs to the side so we can ... do whatever counts as stopping them.”