Bonus Points:
[X] Also submit the opposing force's point of view for the Henriette/Antoinette engagement.
The pair of Hinds hangs high, above the low-lying cloud. They are, naturally, both loudly playing Ride of the Valkyries, at a volume which could even be heard above the noise of the rotors and the pulsing of the heartbeat in the machine.
"Aww, come on, sarge," Squaddie Wilson complains, playing with his knife. "Why do we always have to listen to this old shit?"
The hulking figure of his shirtless, scar-covered sergeant punches him in the jaw. "Shut your mouth, you fucker," the older man growls. He looks like an eighties action hero mid-way through their steroid-induced meltdown. "This is part of your history! Part of what we're all fighting for! It was written for the best film of the seventies! Apocalypse Now!" He shakes his head, wiping away a tear on his wolfskin scarf. "Colonel Kurtz is my hero," he whispers. "So listen up, maggots!"
"Yes, sarge!" the other six fully conscious members of the First Team in the back snap back instantly. They're the elite. They're better than the ground pounders in the APCs. They're also amped up on far more experimental combat drugs and have undergone deliberate amputation and grafting of limbs from other test subjects so they have multiple banes bound into their flesh and their fetish-limbs.
"Here we are, going up against Willy yet again! There's going to be lots of Willys down here! A fuckload! I want a nice clean deployment! We are the tip of the spear! We're going to be hitting these fuckers once they've expended their assets against the ground forces."
The radios crackle. "Charlie One is down! Repeat Charlie One is down! Unknown attackers!" That's one of the front-leading APCs. Clearly it's walked into a Gaian ambush.
"We're going to tear them apart and eat them in the name of the Wyrm," Jenny Mother-Fucker snarls. She's leading the pack of werewolves in the cargo hold, and while the fomori shock troopers are superficially dressed in a military style, no such rule applies to the Black Spiral Dancers who are barring one exception all in near-man form. Although most of them are wearing a mess of bane-fetishes made from military equipment, the weapons and gear come from thousands of years of human violence, or from the depths of Malfeas itself. Jenny herself is fully decked out in Malfean bane-bound brass, a gift from her very affectionate mother, and her armour bleaches the seat just from its irradiated proximity.
"I'm gonna get me some of their puppies," Red Scare growls, drooling notably. He's already in Crinos form, because that's the only way he can carry the vehicle-scale flamethrower equipment strapped onto his hulking form. His smell is filling the cabin. "I'll cook 'em and then eat 'em wh-"
There is no warning of a radar lock. No desperate attempts to evade. There's just the explosion and the sudden feeling of weightlessness.
"Fuck, fuck, fuck," the pilot screams over the intercom. She's fused to the helicopter itself, a torso protruding from the living machine, and she's screaming in pain. "My rotors!"
"What the fuck?" Jenny yells. "Brace for impact!"
...
Fire.
Noise.
It's hell down here, and not in the way she's fond of. Jenny crawls out of the wreckage, spitting teeth, and winces as new ones force their way through her jaw. Her mouth is filled with her own blood and when she screams it's just a gargle. She's bitten her tongue off. She works her arm as the broken bone knits itself together. Ahead of her, there's another burning crash site, from the other helicopter. It's bleeding ichor from its broken open hull, and another Black Spiral Dancer is painfully crawling from the wreckage.
"What the fuck!" she shouts, once she gets her tongue working again. She spits the remnants of her old one out.
Red Scare bursts from the wreckage, covered in balefire. The tanks on his back have ignited, and he runs screaming and flailing and mewling, off into the woods. Jenny gives a mad grin at that. The bastard still isn't dying despite all that? Hah. Tougher than she though.
"Help me," the pilot mewls at her over her radio. She ignores it and concentrates at breaking open the hold so the other survivors from her pack can crawl out. And look! There are even two fomors left alive!
"Get in front," she snarls, hefting her blade at the horribly burned messes of flesh.
"What the fuck was that?" Gut-Gnawer snapped at her, shifting into Crinos form. He's lost his minigun to the flames, so he's only got his envenomed blades and those work best when he has the tank-like bulk of his ultimate form behind him. "Where'd those fuckers get stuff that'd down us? Both choppers are down and the bosses are going to be fucking pissed."
Jenny shrugged. "They better be more afraid of me. Because they didn't tell use these tree fuckers had stuff like this."
"Yeah." Gut-Gnawer stabbed at a tree, which immediately began to wilt and die. "Jumped up banes try giving us shit for this, we'll fucking nut them and then... look!"
The cluster of humanoid figures creeping on the crash site open up immediately, in a blaze of automatic weapons fire and grenades. Jenny leaps over the first scything line of fire, and then lets Gut-Gnawer take the strangely-homing grenades for her. Bulking up into Crinos, she vents a considerable amount of her extensive frustration with this mission, letting the black hate of the Wyrm guide her blows.
And the fuckers don't even bleed! No, their skin turns out to be some kind of spray-on plastic and under that is just metal. It isn't satisfying at all.
She has the last one held by the throat. Leaning in, she sniffs with her almost bat-like, malformed wolf-nose. It smells of crystal, of steel and brass and coldness and clinical antiseptic absolution. "Weaverscum," she grinds, and crushes it in her hand, tossing the husk away.
Gut-Gnawer is howling in a mix of pain and rage. "Weaver! Weaver!" he gibbers, scampering over to snatch up one of the heavy weapons from the fallen combat robots. He tries firing it, and it promptly explodes in his hand, removing his arm up to the shoulder.
[Sorry, you do not qualify for a thirty day trial,] the remnants of the weapon he dropped states. [Please contact your nearest representative for processing, Reality Deviant scum.]
"Idiot," Jenny snarls. "How fucking stupid do you have to be to try that?" She takes a breath. "Listen! So the fucking weaverspawn are here! They're fucking human scum! Humans who think their tricks from the Weaver can defeat the Gaian fools here, let alone us! We are the true Garou! Our bloody legacy has claimed almost all the chosen of Gaia! We have the hate of the Wyrm! We have his strength! All the powers of Malfeas ride with us! To victory! To bloodshed! To triumph!"
"Mother-Fucker," Elise Finger-Keeper snarled, "smell! On the wind! Weaverscum, and their vehicles on the other side of those trees! And there are weak humans there! Not just machines!"
"Kill them all!"
The Black Spiral Dancers charged off, and then found that the area had been comprehensively mined ahead of time.
"Fucking weaverscum!"
...
Bleeding from countless puncture wounds which have got through her armour, stunned and shocked by the countless waves of explosions and feeling fucking hungry from all the regeneration she's had to do, Jenny falls to her knees.
It's like fighting mist. The fucking weaverscum refuse to stand and fight. They fall back. They send those goddamn robots to slow them down. There are fucking landmines everywhere. And somehow there are also fucking pits with fucking sharp silver tipped stakes at the bottom. How the fuck are those things in the area? Maybe the Gaian fuckers put them there.
Oh, she's seen the enemy. Fast moving cars which just fire grenades at her and then run away. Humans in pathetic thin armour which somehow means they can move faster, without any spirit blessings. Fucking Weaver and the way it gives these humans way to do things without the spirits. Suits of armour the size of her in Crinos form - or maybe just one suit of armour. She isn't fucking sure because every time she tries to close, she winds up standing on another fucking landmine.
And there's one big one. Clearly the one in charge, because it's the biggest and most powerful. It's bigger than even her in Crinos, and she's large for a Garou. And it's the one which shot down the helicopters! It's covered in missiles and carrying large guns and last time she saw it, it gunned down the two remaining members of her pack.
Well, she has a trump. Her mother told her to be wary of it, but fuck her. She isn't here right now! She's back somewhere safe! Fuck everything! Her pack's dead and - she feels tears well up - and it hurts, Wyrm dammit! It hurts in a bad way!
This came right from the SPD, though, and they used to be weaverscum before they realised the true power of the Wyrm. This'll let her win!
Growling, she pulls an oversized syringe out, the bright-green-glow of it rippling as it passes out from her armour of Malfean brass. In one motion, she injects the entire turkey-baster-sized contents into her abdomen. She can feel the tens of banes in the fluid getting to work, twisting and warping and descrating her flesh. She howls to the clouded sky as her muscles bulk and swell, her hair falling out only to be replaced by brass strands. A rack of ten long octopodal tentacles burst out from under the armour of her back, covered in eyes and teeth and leech-like mouths, only for four of them to knit together into insectoid wings. Cloven hooves, great ram-like horns, faces upon her flesh which gibber and moan and sing praises to the malejin... all of these flow across her flesh. It hurts so very much. In the last remnants of her sanity, such that remained to a child of incest born to a family which had worshipped the Wyrm for generations, she screams. It hurts! She didn't mean this!
And then one of the banes reaches her brain and squirms into it, giving her certainty. She can feel the Wyrm overtaking her.
It is a good pain.
"Kill," she grates out. "Burn. Maim." She lets the voices in her head guide her. On all fours, the vegetation around her igniting from the radiation which pours off her skin, she charges off leaving a wake of devastation behind her.
...
"Oh what the fuck," Henriette mouths at the sight of the heavily armoured and mutated wolf-thing the size of a tank bounding towards her, glowing green and with its sword held in its teeth. "That's just wrong."
The advantages of neural links are that doing that doesn't stop her opening fire immediately.