Spartan Alex-148 looked down with limited pride at the "parting gift" he had prepped for Reunion in the basement of the building.
He couldn't wait to see the looks on their faces when he executed his plan, though he knew he never would. They would be well away when he pushed the button on this thing. At least he hopped they would. He wouldn't want to be within 100 meters of this thing when it did go live.
However, he wasn't quite finished yet. He would need to do final preparations as they made their way up the building. Of course it wouldn't be easy. They would be making a fighting retreat from floor to floor until they were picked up straight off the roof by these Rhodes Island group's helicopter.
Each floor would be a running firefight and melee and would be taxing for both the Operators and himself.
Placing a hand over his wound, he tried to calm the still increasing pain. It threatened to slow him down and briefly wondered if he had time to take some more painkillers. However, his pondering was cut short when he heard a voice yell to him over the radio.
"Mroz get up here now! They're here!" Blaze yelled into her radio as he also heard her revving her chainsaw both over the transmission and faintly above him.
"Looks like I'm going to have to power through this for now. Just a bit longer before I can get that looked at." Mroz thought to himself as he drew his rifle and began walking up stairs. He would have to finish his work on the run.
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Zima was pissed at herself.
She had been stupid to trust those Rhodes Island people because right now she and the rest of the USSG plus that noble bitch were sitting in an abandoned office at the top of the building while they could hear gunfire and sounds of struggle downstairs.
Worst of all was the fact that that Mroz asshole had taken her axe so even if Reunion did get past the defense team down stairs, she would have no way of protecting herself and her friends.
Right now, the only thing she could hear in the room was the quiet sobbing of some of the other kids and the pained grunting of the wounded RI Operator on a stretcher. She wished that they would shut up at least for now.
She kept her own anxieties from showing.
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Most of the building had been overran.
"Get behind me and up stairs everyone! I'll hold them off for a bit." Blaze said as she came out of the doorframe last of the team. She was busy using her chainsaw... halberd... thing to try to keep them busy in the chokepoint while Mroz fell out of line for a second and placed something onto a support beam in the stairwell before running to just behind Blaze and tossing another grenade through the doorframe.
The explosion caught almost a dozen Reunion troopers in the blast and allowed Blaze to retreat back while giving her some suppressive fire from his M7 SMG. The 5mm armor piercing rounds cutting down the Infected targets in the close quarters and penetrating any body armor they may have had.
However they kept coming as the Spartan and Operator backed up, him keeping up the volume of fire by holding down the SMG's trigger and dual wielding it with his suppressed pistol and her cutting down any that got passed the barrage.
Eventually, both broke out into runs in order to ketch up with the rest of their team. In that time, both gave a small thought to their counterpart.
Blaze, while certainly more focused on her own fight, was still amazed by what she saw of Mroz's combat capabilities. He was frighteningly fast despite his armor, freakishly strong (she would have to put him in the same range as Skadi), and deadly efficient. His fighting style was more like a machine than a person with its sheer efficiency. Close combat with him was also something. While he was certainly not a dedicated melee fighter, he had very respectable skills in fighting and combined with his strength made even fighting some of the other Elite Operators in close combat a close match. However, he was very good at fighting in a team or a pair and even better at watching her back. Her assessment would be that he would make a great Operator and an even better teammate.
Mroz had spent enough time around ONI spooks and spent enough time in combat to know that observing allies and enemies alike was very important. In his opinion, Blaze was a very impressive fighter though a little impulsive and reckless. She was the first to throw herself into danger or at least would if he wasn't slightly faster. He was also sure that she was most likely augmented in some way. He was also able to confirm that what he saw earlier was indeed her attacks being cloaked in fire. Regardless, his final evaluation of her is that she's a highly capable combatant who could probably take him or another Spartan at least for a time.
However, both founded themselves distracted by semantics and returned their focus to the battle ahead of them as they rounded the corner of the hallway into the last level of offices, crawling with Reunion and with the beleaguered RI team taking cover behind overturned desks defending the position in front of the civilians. Mroz made his entry by kicking a very unlucky Reunion crossbowman out of one of the large windows while Blaze decapitated another armored enemy with her chainsaw.
Scrambling behind cover, Mroz looked over to Blaze. "How much longer before your helicopter arrives?" Blaze rolled up one of her gloves a little to look at her watch, "It should be just a few more minutes."
Mroz nodded, "Good, I don't think that we can hold this floor much longer." He popped out of cover with his battle rifle drawn. He fired several bursts, killing at least two enemies with each three round group before drawing his knife and stabbing an enemy who tried to tried to sneak up on him through the top of the head before charging towards a group trying to cut them off from the civies. With his knife held in a reverse grip in his left hand, he terminated nearly two dozen Reunion members in the span of a few seconds with precise stabs and slashes to vital organs, the head, and necks while using the rifle in his other hand to block any strikes that got close to him.
Meanwhile Blaze was currently introducing a quite large group of Reunion to a burning chainsaw halberd. First was a man who tried to breech their line, he was cut diagonally in half. Next was a man who suicidality tried to dive at a distracted Operator next to her. He was impaled with a blade through his gut before she spun it while he was still on the blade again just to confirm the kill and tossed the flaming body into a group of charging Reunion members, staggering them and covering her charge in.
They didn't last long.
Meanwhile, the rest of the team were desperately trying to maintain the security of their position. Everyone did what they could to deal with the increasingly large and close Reunion horde that was bearing down upon them. Swords, hammers, and other melee weapons struck those who got too close, even Schwarz added the bayonet on her crossbow to the carnage. Casters used their Arts to try to reduce their numbers as much as possible. However, there was a problem, Reunion won't stop coming at them. If anything, the horde was growing as enemies poured into the building faster than the team could kill them.
Hopefully, extraction would arrive here fast.
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The gunshots and battle were getting closer. This was very bad.
What the hell were those Rhodes Island people and Mroz guy doing if they couldn't keep the enemy off of them of them for...
Zima ended that train of thoughts when she heard footsteps run up to the door they were behind.
Everyone did what they could, some took cover, others tried to find weaponry of some kind, Gummy even tried to raise her vault door defensively. Eventually though, the door was kicking in and on the other side was a Reunion soldier who tried to raise his weapon against them.
Everyone panicked at first, even Zima due to her lack of a weapon or way to fight back. However, the key world was that he tried to raise his weapon against them, tried.
Half a ton of metal armor crashed into him and slammed him into a wall before he could do anything and then slid a knife into his neck just to make sure he would never get up again.
Looking down as the body slumped down towards the floor, the armored giant turned his head towards the students before be found Zima. He reached up to where her axe was located on the side of his bag, laid it down on the ground, and slid it over to her.
"Consider your weapon privileges reinstated."
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Bursting through the final door in the building. The Operators, Spartan, and Students found themselves on the roof.
Evac was still a little bit out, but they had to evac the previous few floors due to the enemy overrunning them.
The mission status was not looking too good. They were at their last phaseline, the enemy was still coming, and evac was still out. They would have to hold out for as long as possible.
Blaze tossed a colored smoke grenade to let the pilots know what rooftop they were on, snipers climbed on top of air conditioning units and reloaded in preparation for the numbers they would be facing, and melee combatants formed up near the door. Some of the students even tried to fill in where they could.
Then Reunion breeched the final doors.
Mroz emptied the magazines of all of his firearms into the crowd before he realized that he didn't have time to reload and that there still needed to be a dramatic reduction in the size of the the enemy group. He knew what he needed to do next.
Drawing his machete in his right hand and knife in the left, he leaped down from his perch and landed in a group trying to run past his position. The weight of his MJOLNIR crushing one under the weight with a quick succession of pops and cracks as the body deformed under him. He then stabbed with the knife and slashed with his machete at the two enemies next to his landing. They slumped down dead with blades imbedded in their neck and heart respectively.
He then jumped into the carnage around him and tried to take down as many of the enemies pouring through the door. Hacking, slashing, and stabbing, he took down charging men and women with a speed and ferocity that astounded everyone who had never seen a Spartan in action (so basically everyone except for Mroz himself).
While he was doing this, Blaze was busy trying to hold the door against the numbers. While they were cutting down opponents fast, they would need a good opportunity to retreat once the helicopter got here which sounded soon based on the noise of the rotors. Otherwise the enemy would breech through their line and have a straight shot at the helicopter.
They just needed... what was that?
Blaze looked and saw a large brick of plastic or maybe clay be thrown over her head with a glowing control block on one of its sides. She recognized it quickly as C4 or something similar to it and realized what was about to happen and ducked and covered as the explosion rang out, collapsing the she the door was in and sealing the staircase at least temporarily.
Climbing back to her feet in a haze, Blaze looked around and saw the helicopter just a few feet above the deck with the ramp extended. A few Operators were even climbing in as was and their man, Mroz, who was walking up to her and offered her a hand which she accepted.
The banging on the rock and scraping of the attempts to clear the stairwell though showed both that they needed to move as they both sprinted towards the large helicopter that was now mostly loaded with the team and civilians. Making final preparations, the areal vehicle dusted off as the first Reunion members made their entry through the now cleared entrance only to be met with the sight of their targets getting away.
The helicopter flew away and it could be seen that a very large number of Reunion troops had gathered on the ground below it and in the building itself. Mroz huffed amusedly to himself as he watched them teem around an in the structure before holding up three fingers.
It was then that Blaze realized something. He had at the start of their preparations said that he would leave Reunion a "parting gift" and he had placed a very familiar looking brick on structural supports every few floors during their retreat up the building. She soon realized what those bricks were. The same material he used to seal the top of the stairs.
Counting down the three fingers until after counting past one, he formed a fist and pumped it. A series of explosions starting with an extremely large one at the base of the building and a series of smaller ones that went up the entire structure then detonated. The building slid off its foundations before sheering apart in multiple locations causing it to all fall down practically on top of the Reunion army around it.
Mroz looked down approvingly at his handy work, nodded, and said, "I think they enjoyed that gift." sarcastically to everyone else in the transport.
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In the Penguin Logistics van, Texas was trying to save her sanity while her partner and stranger were shooting the breeze excitedly about her weaponry.
"This is a Misriah Armory SRS99 anti-material sniper rifle. It fires 14.5x114mm tungsten sabot rounds from a 4 round magazine. It supposedly has a maximum effective range of 2000 meters, though I've reliably scored hits and kills all the way out to nearly 4.5 kilometers." The nearly blind stranger said while holding the rifle on her lap and doing some basic functions with it. That showed she had a good degree of muscle memory with the system if she didn't need to look at it to operate it.
"That's interesting, I'm a but of a gun nut myself, but I've never gotten that into ultra long range shooting. I've mainly used SMGs and assault rifles for close to medium range work most of my life. I've also never heard of Misriah Armory before. Must be a new manufacturer." Exusiai said excitedly as she got to do the one thing that could hold her attention for more than a few minutes, talk about guns.
They had been doing this, FOR FIVE HOURS! While they weren't looking, Texas had put in earbuds and was playing music on her phone very loudly to try to not have to listen to this. It was like with Dad again.
While her Dad was an overall very good combatant, he was a specialist with guns and fighting at range and had tried to teach her to be the same when she was young. He was a pretty good combat teacher and rangemaster, but she just didn't have what it took to be a sniper though she could still shoot a pistol competently. Probably due to the wrist breaker of a magnum he taught her how to fire.
Luckily, she wouldn't have to put up with this much longer. The Rhodes Island Landship was in sight and only about 30 minutes out.
"Thank God." Texas thought to herself as it loomed on the horizon. Soon she could return to her usual quiet and send that message to her intended target.
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Mroz stood not wanting to trust the seats along the edges of the cargo bay with the weight of his armor.
This wasn't good. His wound was aggravated by all the movement he had done in combat and was growing exponentially in pain which the inability for him to sit down and rest was only making worse.
It was ok though. All he needed to do was to keep standing for a bit longer and they would be there. He could get medical attention and this wound dealt with and the crystal out. Yeah that seemed simple, that seemed doable, that seemed...
Black began to rapidly take up the Spartan's vision as he felt his grip on the overhead hand hold slip and be lost before landing face first on the deck.
Everyone turned their heads to see the giant lying on the floor after the loud thud and several people including Blaze and the medic that had been sent on the recovery mission ran over to assist.
Seeing that he was face down, the medic asked Blaze to help righting the man which was no easy task due to the weight of the armor. However, she, with some help from the medic and another Operator, flipped the man onto his back and Blaze got to work trying to remove the helmet so the medic could get to work.
His helmet resisted all of her attempts to pull it off. Feeling around its base, she found a button or maybe a latch located to the right of the helmet's chin piece. Pushing it in, she heard the characteristic hiss of air escaping a sealed environment before trying to pull the helmet off again, it twisting to the left, and finally coming off with one last heave.
The helmet was a surprisingly heavy thing. If she had to guess, it felt like it weighed at least 40 pounds which when she considered the weight of the rest of the suit, wasn't that surprising.
Placing it down beside where she had stumbled back to and wrapping whatever that other thing that came off with it around her fingers, Blaze leaned forward to see the face of the man that she had been fighting beside for a few hours now though she wasn't prepared for the result.
His face looked around her age and way too young for voice she had associated with it. He had short cropped black hair that was parted to the right and a light 5'oclock shadow over a good portion of his lower face. His facial features looked like they were chiseled out of stone or maybe forged out of steel and were sharp and rugged looking however they were marred by a severe burn scar over the left edge of his jaw and a scar going over his right eye. If she had to say, he was handsome though in the same way a sword was beautiful. It came from the rugged simplicity and the knowledge that it could take an impressive beating and be able to dish it back out tenfold.
She watched the medic check his pulse through the skin tight collar over his neck and check his breathing from his mouth and nose and took a moment to check what that other thing that came off with the helmet was.
She recognized them instantly, dogtags.
XXXXXX
Sierra-148, Alex
055417SII148
AB+
11 Jun. 25XX
Blaze as she looked realized that these tags were intentionally defaced with an "X" pattern placed over some information with a grinder or laser of some form. This made her think.
Just who the hell is this man?
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The Doctor may always be a busy man, though he always made sure that he was there to welcome teams back from missions he ordered them onto.
Right now, he and Amiya were walking out onto the hangar as the transport Helicopter for Blaze's team taxied in. He was about to walk up and say something to them when a stretcher being carried by a loadbearing robot rolled out almost as soon as the ramp hit the deck.
Blaze and the medic running next to each side of the robot.
"Make way, make way!" The medic yelled while Blaze shooed away people who got to close before breaking off to talk with her superiors.
Looking at the robot and medic making speed away from them, the Doctor and Amiya looked back at Blaze. "What was that about Blaze? Was he ok?" The Doctor asked.
Blaze took a moment to ketch her breath and looked her commander in the eye. "It's a long story Doctor. We tracked him from his crash site, found him protecting a group of civilians while wounded, and got him and the survivors out. He collapsed on the helicopter ride over and..." she reached into her pocket and pulled out a blood covered shard of originium out, "I think he may be in the early stages of Oripathy."
The Doctor and Amiya looked at each other after that and while it went unsaid, they both came to the same conclusion. Yeah, that was emergency enough to get that guy down to surgery stat.
The Doctor nodded back to Blaze, "Alright, get your team to debriefing and I'll have someone handle the paperwork for those civilians. In the meantime, I have to go meet someone else. Good job on the mission Blaze."
With that he walked off and let Amiya to help with the kids.
Walking over to the on ramp of the Landship, the Doctor saw a very familiar looking van pull into the small parking area and two even more familiar faces pop out with a... plus one?
"Texas, Exusiai, good to see you two. Who's your friend?" The Doctor waved to both and said in a welcoming voice at the two.
The woman was the first to speak, "Hello, I'm Sneg. They picked me up in the desert after I was injured and said that you guys could help me with my concussion." She tried to step down only to stumble severely, obviously off balance.
Exusiai then filled in for her, "Hey Doc, as we said, we found her in the desert dying of thirst and with some very bad head injuries. We told her you guys could help her out." She placed the woman's arm over her shoulder, "'I'll meet up with you in a bit. I'll take her down to medical."
The Doctor hummed to himself after seeing her armor and said out loud, "Hey, someone wearing armor like that just came in and was brought to medical too, wonder if there's any connection?" under his breath while walking up to Texas.
"So, Texas, anything new?" She looked up at him from her phone before responding, "Not much. Excuse me Doctor. I'll be up on the deck, I have a call to make." Before running off.
The Doctor soon found himself alone again and started walking back to his office, thinking about the oddness of today and their new visitors.
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AN: Sorry that my update schedule was off. I had writers block yesterday and didn't want to rush things. In the meantime, enjoy.
Until next time.
