14 Nov. 2555
0812 Hours
Location: Unidentified Ruined City
Spartan Alex-148 checked the clock in his helmet. He had made it a very good ways into the city that he had crashed in. Currently he was sitting atop the roof of a medium sized building. Probably an apartment complex from what he could see of the interior during his climb up the fire escape.
"14, almost 15 hours. For a city this sized, I should have ran into others sooner or later." Sierra-148 thought to himself. In that approximately 15 hours, he had wandered away from the crash site. His objective was to try to find an elevated position to try to get a good connection on coms or just scout out the area. So far, his radio hadn't been much help. He was unable to pick up anything on any of the common frequencies used by the UEG, UNSC, Colonial Authorities, or Friendly Covenant Successor groups and Alex was not going to take a chance and broadcast on an open frequency with God knows what listening in. What few signals he could pick up were all either too distant to make anything intelligible out of or completely unusable and irrelevant, most likely civilian broadcasts.
This left him with one other thing to do up there, scout the area.
Alex walked over to the ledge and crouched, placing his BR55 on the ledge next to him, and activated his VISR's zoom function. The cityscape ahead of him expanded in his view and he was able to make out far more detail.
The Spartan surveyed the skyline for a good while and came up with a couple conclusions.
1. This city is nearly completely abandoned, though it looks like it hasn't been for long. Most likely, it has only been abandoned for a few months at most.
2. Whatever destroyed this place was not a nuclear explosion. The lack of radiation pockets on ground level, no detectable amounts of normal nuclear biproduct isotopes being present in the air, and highly inconsistent damage patterns disproved this. If a nuclear attack had happened, he would be able to see an area in the skyline of leveled buildings that would coincide with Ground Zero.
3. What did destroy this city was unlike anything he had ever seen before. The giant versions of those black crystals that stood like skyscrapers or archologies as far as his technologically assisted, superhuman vision could see attested to that part. The large number of foreign rock lying in crash sites across the city almost made it look like a meteor strike had hit the city, but if that were true, there would be a lot less of a city left for this much material to hit the ground.
4. It was still and quiet. Too still and quiet.
He had no clue what to call it other than his intuition, but he had a feeling that he wasn't alone out here. The occasional distant blip on his motion detector on the walk over didn't help anything. However, if Chief Mendez had taught him and the other IIs anything, it was to trust you gut and trust your equipment. Both were designed to keep you alive and multiply your capabilities on the battlefield. Right now, his gut told him to keep an eye out and that it hurt quite a bit.
The Spartan placed a hand over where the sealed wound was on his abdomen. There was still blood on his armor that was in the blackish sludge stage of drying. He knew that due to the painkilling properties of Biofoam that it wasn't the wound channel causing the pain, it must have been the debris left there from that black crystalline shard. He'll need to get those removed ASAP once he gets to a medical facility. In the meantime, there was nothing he could do about it here other than take some painkillers.
He hadn't found any injectable painkillers other than Biofoam which he was going to conserve until recovery so he took his helmet off as he backed away from the ledge for a second. Reaching into the backpack he had fashioned to his armor to carry his salvage from the Pelican, he pulled out a pill bottle containing some nonprescription pain meds. He poured 2 pills into a gauntleted hand and popped them into his mouth, chewing them as to provide pain relief sooner. The Spartan stopped his chewing though when he heard another rhythmic noise coming from below him. His augmented hearing at first struggling to make the noise out before he was able to isolate and perceive it. It only took him the briefest moment to figure out what that noise was. Recalling years of training and experience, he could point out that sound anywhere, boots on asphalt.
Alex peaked over the ledge while staying as low as possible and saw what looked like white uniformed figures on the street below him. He slid his helmet on and engaged the zoom once more. The figures became more clear, though it was still very difficult to make out much due to their clothing.
They looked like they were wearing white robes or maybe overcoats, black body armor over their chests and backs, masks, and with an orange emblem on their sleeve. He couldn't make out much of the emblem, but it did look like a stylized DNA strand. What was most notable to the Spartan though was the fact that they were armed and not well armed at that. They had an odd collection of weaponry, swords and other melee weapons were most prevalent with at least one guy with a crossbow and only one carrying a firearm. Even then, the gun looked like something from a history book, a Soviet era AK rifle from 500 (nearly 600) years ago.
While their weapons didn't even have anything that could pen his armor, much less his shields, he decided that he needed to keep an eye on this group. Whether they were Colonial Militia, Insurrectionists, Criminals, or something else, he needed intelligence and extraction and they were his best bet at that. However, he had a feeling that he should stay out of sight for now. Something absolutely trivial for the experienced super-soldier.
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Alex had followed the group and got an exact count on their numbers for at least this patrol. 12 men strong though still poorly armed and most definitively no match for him. They appeared irregular, lacked discipline, and talked quite a bit. He had managed to get close enough to them a few times to glean some information off of them.
Apparently, this city he was in was named Chernobog, they were members of some sort of irregular paramilitary called Reunion, this place was once a place that oppressed people like them until they overthrew the local government, and they were looking for survivors.
'Guess that gut instinct was right then." Sierra-148 thought to himself as he continued to watch from the rooftop as the group continued their patrol before he noted something off.
A loud metallic bang was heard by all. Both Spartan and Reunion squad looked in the direction of the bang, trying to figure out what to do. While Spartan returned his gaze to the men in the street below, they began sprinting in the general direction they were just looking. The speed they took off at surprised the Spartan who needed to come up with a plan to get to that side of the road. Luckily, a heavy duty road sign was available for him to sprint across before using his thrust system to help get up the ledge into the roof of the building across the street.
With the diversion out of the way, Alex realized that he had lost the contacts and needed to ketch up. Taking a look around and glancing at his motion tracker to ensure that no one was eavesdropping, he broke into a slow jog that was more similar to a normal human's sprint in order to ketch up. That sprint then turned into an actual sprint when he heard a gunshot ring out.
Running at speeds more comparable to road speeds than what you would see on a track, he began sliding to bleed momentum and allow him to slow down as he neared the scene of the shot. Eventually, he reached a normal speed-walk when he arrived at the nearest rooftop to the alleyway his targets disappeared down before stopping near the ledge again. Alex got a clear view of the unknowns again and they looked... disappointed.
"Damn, one of those brats got away again!" The man with the AK yelled to his comrades, unaware of the superhuman watching them. "I don't get it. Why does the Big Man not want us to go after them? They're just fucking Uninfected." That made Alex perk up. From how he just described it, it sounded like these guys were taking hostages. The UNSC and ONI may be ruthless at times, but they do teach one thing. Any group who takes civilian hostages is bad news and considering the language the Reunion member used to describe the individual, it sounded like they took kids as hostages. This was very bad. He reserved to do something if he could before extraction, however he still needed intelligence so that he can act most effectively in the limited time he had.
Alex kept listening for a few more minutes and had learned the gist of this hostage crisis. Apparently these guys corralled a group of kids into a major local school just to torment them. This made him sick. While Spartans tended to be called cold, most people tended to notice that they were very touchy about the harming of children and other innocents. Most people would never know why. The results were simple though, Sierra-148 resolved to do something about this.
He began drawing up plans to act on, mostly around rescuing the hostages and bringing them to Extraction too and informing the UNSC and ONI about this new terror group. In the meantime, he would keep following this group...
Or he would have if he hadn't seriously overestimated the weight bearing capacity of an abandoned scaffold that he was using to try to cross the gap between two buildings. With a loud metallic rip, the bolts securing the structure to the building tore free and dumped the temporary structure and the Spartan on it unceremoniously onto the ground. Alex managed to stay on his feet though his Battle Rifle was tossed to the ground next to him. Before he could reach down to grab it, the white garbed men he had been stalking turned to him and began yelling at him and drawing weapons.
The closest one to him pointed a sword of some kind at him and yelled, "Who the hell are you? If you're an enemy of the Infected, prepare to meet your end at the hands of Reunion!" If a look could kill, then the glare the Spartan was giving him could have destroyed a Marathon class cruiser, though it wasn't like he could have told from the other side of the opaque silver visor.
The Spartan quite coldly and frankly responded, "Drop those weapons and you get to walk. Try me and you'll never leave this alley way again." The sword man huffed at him before saying, "You think you can threaten Reunion and get away with it!? PREPARE TO DIE!" With that he lunged at the strange armored man. While the man was fast compared to an average person, but to a Spartan, he was practically (and literally in Alex's eyes) moving in slow motion. Before the sword even had a chance to make contact with the soldier's body, it was stopped mid air by an armored left hand that gripped it so hard that the metal bent from the force of the grip like it was wet clay. The armored figure only said five words, "I tried to warn you."
With that, he hit the man dead center in the chest with a right hook so hard that it caved his ribcage in, destroying his heart, flattening his lungs, and fracturing his spine, killing him instantly. He then reached up and yanked the knife out of its sheath on the left side of his collar and threw it at the man with the rifle, blade burring itself in the man's gut and launching him backwards a few feet.
Two down, 10 to go.
Sierra-148 charged forward towards the remaining enemies, killing one quickly with a turning kick to the side of the head. The limp man's body went rag-dolling away, stumbling the man behind him allowing the Spartan to close the distance in a flash, grab both sides of his head and slam it into his rising knee. He too was dead before he hit the floor.
One man charged him with a shield, but was stopped when it was grabbed and used to send him flying into a wall, hard.
Next was the crossbowman who fired a bolt at him that was almost comically easy to dodge. Alex used his thrust pack to boost forward and elbow the man in the face so hard that it broke his neck.
Three more began to approach him with various melee weapons drawn. Drawing his machete, they were met in kind, though fighting a Spartan in close quarters is not a good idea. In a storm of blade work that severed limbs, stabbed through torsos, and decapitated heads, all three were dead before they even had a chance to attack in return.
The last three seemed to have more sense and began retreating, though in vain. The first one, trying to cover the retreat of the others, was killed by being slammed against the wall so hard his neck snapped. The second was kicked in the back, breaking his spine, and launching him into the third. This knocked the final enemy to the ground and pinned him under his comrades body. The last thing he ever saw was the mysterious armored giant who wiped out his entire patrol in less than a minute glare down at him with a boot coming straight towards his face.
With the threats gone, Sierra-148 moved to go back to recover his Battle Rifle. On his walk though, he heard something.
"Command, threat is in sector 12 near the park. He's wearing armor, dark grey with silver details and a silver visor. Be advised highly...."
The message was cut short by a suppressed shot from an M6C SOCOM Auto-Magnum to the head of the survivor as Alex coldly walked over to recover his knife too. He picked up the phone the man was using too and downloaded a lot of its data onto his armor. This would grant him access to the enemy communications network and also a map of the area. These would be important for the Spartan's plan to save the hostages. Knowing where enemy patrols would be and the location of the holding area would make his job a hell of a lot easier.
While he had just proved to himself that he could defeat patrol after patrol with little effort, it would be best to avoid confrontation where possible. Spartan Alex-148 would run the rest of this mission by a simple mantra, move fast, move light, and stay out of view. Or as fast as the increasing pain from his wound would allow.
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Meanwhile.
Airspace approaching Chernobog
Rhodes Island's helicopter was inbound to the once great mobile city of Chernobog. It's cargo was a team of the organization's Operators.
They had identified a distress signal on this forsaken structure and were going to pull whoever was calling for help out.
As team leader, Elite Guard Operator Blaze was sitting closest to the open door as the city began to pass under them. Soon the pilot informed her and the rest of the team over their coms that they were over the drop zone.
"Alright team, someone down there needs help so lets get down there, kick Reunion's ass, and get whoever it is out. Let's move!" Was all the high energy operator said to the team before jumping out the door herself and into the abandoned square below.
