- Invitation Status
- Posting Speed
- Multiple posts per day
- 1-3 posts per day
- One post per day
- Online Availability
- I check in pretty much all times of the day, either from my phone or from my home computer. So it's likely I'll see messages shortly after I've received them.
- Writing Levels
- Intermediate
- Adept
- Advanced
- Preferred Character Gender
- No Preferences
- Genres
- Sci Fi, Fantasy, Fandom, Anime, Sometimes Horror. Survival, Romance, Furry, Magical.
The quiet tension building within the squad sharpened to the uneasy vacuum of sewer tunnels to razor edge. Or at least, Convel felt it scraping against his skin. He had never had fought a Stalker before, only seen their aftermath, and this was far from the team he'd have chosen to change that with. The ease of their progress didn't help. Memories of clearing housing units and canals played in his head, none of them quiet. This had all the makings of a veteran's horror story.
He found himself unconsciously pressing close and closer to the front of the pack. The hobbling form of Grimm didn't inspire confidence no matter how many platitudes Naomi offered. Every few minutes he stole a glance at the taccoms pad strapped to the inside of his forearm, confirming that both the mutant and his HUD were correct and they were still going the right way. When they came to the metro his chest tensed, clutching to the last breath before the inevitable start of combat. The exhalation was rough when they found only more quiet instead.
Exiting onto the square made his nerves go into overdrive. No part of Eternity was ever this quiet. Never. The silent pull of augmented experience tugged at his brain-stem as they walked down the square. It demanded that he find cover, call in support, shout, do something other than keep walking into what the dormant parts of him had already identified as a prepared grave. His sense of self preservation was silenced when the mech materialised to send Naomi flying.
In the space between heart beats the Combat Implant took over. He moved on instinct now, scooping towards the cover of the statue and firing at the sensor package of the mech along the way. The Lieutenant was dead, of the misfits in this piss poor excuse for a squad he had confidence two or maybe three of them could actually help him get out of this alive. With his back pressed to the concrete plinth he regained enough higher thought to begin assessing.
The screech of metal and clipped echo of the mech's PA registered. He snuck a glance around the edge of his cover to see the crumpled wreck of the car next to the Goliath. As he searched for an explanation only more confusion was added to it. Naomi was standing there, yelling orders, apparently fine.
"What. The actual. Fuck."
Her shoulder struck the cover of a concrete plant block, taking a moment to catch her breath after having been winded after the mech had tossed her like a skipping stone across the square. She took her rifle in both hands, peeking from cover to let off a few shots into the Goliath's sensory array before realising the barrel was bent from her collision with the car. A sigh was the only sound that left her as she tosses the useless weapon away from her, levelling her sidearm instead before letting off a few bullets towards the machine which plinked harmlessly off it's armor as the behemoth finally recovered from it's stagger.
An amused chuckle escaped it's exterior VOX speakers as the torso rotated, levelling the cannons on its arms once more. "Not bad, now it's my turn… " as soon as he finished the cannons discharged their salvos, obliterating concrete and everything in front of the heavy blasts as the Goliath's pilot made attempts to strike down the team.
Reflexively Convel pressed himself harder into the unyielding security of the statues plinth as the square disintegrated around him. Despite the overwhelming din of the battle he forced himself to think deliberately. The Stalker was alive, somehow, they had to have something, some sort of reactive armor that explained that. Those purple hexagons must be part of it, but they were too localised to be useful to anyone else.
JD was working well under the pressure, improvising something to make the Stalker's order to commit suicide into something else. Getting in close enough to make the sight offsets a problem, one that the mech's rookie pilot wasn't accounting for. With a bolt of inexplicable lightning he took his shot at the mech's legs. In that instant Convel remembered the countermeasures for downed power lines and Glowpunk shock traps and let out a warning cut short by the knowledge it was already too late.
"Whelp...fuck." he muttered to himself.
Their ace in the hole had fired himself, the Stalker had defied death once but didn't seem keen on giving that a second go, the rest of the team was in the open, and here he was hidden behind a forgotten monument fresh out of options. In the grand scheme of things, this was one of the more frustrating ways to go out. He stood up straight, rolled his neck, and began humming to himself. He squeezed the grip of his rifle to stop the tremor that had begun in his organic hand. With forced serenity the stepped out of cover to dump his magazine and embrace the obliteration that awaited him. Eyes wide open he held his gun on the sensor array, willing it to shatter before he did.
The assault mech whirred as it's cannons spat death in hail fire across the square, reducing most of anything in its trajectory into rubble as the guns released a thunderclap of sound with each sent salvo. Warnings flashed red across the interior of the cockpit as the on board sensors registered JD's presence on it's armor followed by an engine stall as the electrical current shorted out the mech for a moment causing it it's lights to flicker and it's cannons to lower from a combat ready position. The screens inside the cockpit flickered and the lights within went onto limited backups to keep the inside lit as the pilot began to make attempts to reboot the engine.
"Fucking animals!" the pilot spat over the exterior vox speakers as Sierra began to work on weakening one of the mechs legs followed by Hana's follow up, twenty long seconds passed allowing the team a little breathing room in which time Convel's bullets managed to penetrate and destroy one of its exterior camera feeds along with it's sensor. The engine would then reboot and power up again, a high pitched whine increasing in volume as systems began to switch on once more. Grimm's grenade detonated against the hull but unfortunately the armor was designed to weather explosions greater than grenades, although the left side of the cockpit bore a scorch mark from where the grenade impacted.
Within the cockpit the pilot reacted, adding new input commands before the screen relayed the damages, discovering that its ability to move were now greatly reduced from the damage to the knee joint inflicted by Sierra. There was a hiss as metal plates slid back on the assault mechs armor revealing small pod like shapes that began to protrude along it's armor before crackling with electricity. To the novice and uneducated they looked like armed missiles but to the trained engineer what they were would make it far harder for the team to pin the mech down. Tesla coils spat electricity between each other creating a barrier that'd serve to absorb another attempt to short out it's systems.
Naomi had since moved positions, halting in firing off anymore shots as she considered how to tackle the situation in a manner that didn't get everyone killed. JD's attempt had nearly exhausted him and any direct hit from those cannons would most certainly kill anyone save for perhaps her whom might endure it for a bit longer. "Convel! Grimm! Aim for the pods on it's armor!" she called towards the two on the team she assumed might be the most proficient with guns. "Zadok, look after JD we might need him to deal another blow if he's up to it!" her words were somewhat distorted in the sound of raging gunfire, interrupted now and again by having to move between cover. Meanwhile Naomi would withdraw back towards the further side of the square, she had an idea… a poor one, but any idea was a good idea at this point.