This was a good death, Mar decided.
Grall had died first. A praetorian. Picked him up with one spike, impaled him on another, and pulled. He would have been impressed were it not his krantt being ripped apart. The rest of clan Jorgal died as well, around him. A great line being extinguished was tragic, but in combat?
He coughed up blood, trying to laugh. You had to laugh. The Citadel above them had long since stopped firing its beam. Whatever Shepard what doing, it seemed to be working. At least they would be killed by collector forces, and not by a Reaper's plasma. It always seemed like cheating, to him, using guns. He never liked it.
His hammer lay next to him. A warlord should never be unarmed.
Should never…
Unarmed. Like the Scion that did him in. It should have known better than to try to lift a Krogan. Its arm lay on the asphalt. So did most of its organs.
Humans. Paved over decent earth, creating roads. Why not just build better vehicles? A mako can climb over mountains, with the right driver.
His mind was going, he realized. It was blood loss.
Should have noticed that grenade. Scions… grenade wielding pieces of shit. His own grenade belt was long empty. He grabbed the handle of his hammer. A warrior should not die without his weapon.
He coughed again, looking up at the Citadel in the sky. It was beautiful from this angle. He should have destroyed it during the rebellions.
It started to glow. It was still beautiful. The light filled the sky.
He would wake up somewhere else.
The husks didn't stop coming. It was ridiculous.
You fight people, eventually they realize they will die. All were the same in that. Asari would leave you alone, Salarians and Turians would try to kill you from a distance, and Krogans laugh and run in anyway. But they react.
Husks just climbed over their dead and tried to get at him. And his whips obliterated them. His arms were getting tired, and they just wouldn't stop.
He released a singularity, taking the momentary lull to look back.
The Alliance forces behind him had collapsed. Where there previously stood a tank, surrounded by soldiers, was a Banshee and a pile of glowing metal.
He screamed in anger, and charged.
It had no effect. The banshee seemed to regard him, somewhat quizzically, then grabbed him.
The sky above him began to glow. Both him and the banshee looked up.
He found himself in a dark street, in a different city.
"Fire in the hole!" Kara screamed, throwing another grenade into the horde.
This was great. It was her and her squad against a group of enemy… things. She wasn't quite sure what they were, but they exploded beautifully. And they released a horde of small things, which also exploded beautifully.
Grenades were beautiful.
Jerry was kneeling next to her, quietly kneeling and picking out targets. He was so boring… You'd think someone in a cape, with a sword, shooting laser beams out of his hand, would be a fun person to be around. But he took himself so seriously.
That was probably why he was team leader and she wasn't.
Because she was having the time of her life. London had fallen, sure. They were in a suicide mission doomed to fail and reliant on someone she had never met. They were going to die.
But she had more grenades and missiles than anyone would know what to do with. And her rifle?
What a work of art. Cerberus were monsters, and everything they did failed. Except for the Harrier. Talk about improving a classic.
So if she had to go, she was going in style. And style was throwing grenades like there was no tomorrow, and allowing her suit's systems fire rockets indiscriminately – it wasn't like the allied line was anywhere near them.
The enemy line was, though. A Brute. She hated those. Nothing should be able to take a grenade and keep moving like it doesn't matter. But the #1 rule of shooting still applied: Aim for the head. After throwing a grenade of course.
While she fired at the brute, someone on the other side seemed to have the same idea. Jerry had lost his head. It seemed to be in multiple places. Some of it got on her.
No time to worry about that, though. She threw another grenade. Inside the electric field, the monster finally got her point, and fell to the ground.
She didn't even notice when the flash of light from the sky consumed her.
When she came to her senses, it was raining. And she was in a completely different place.
The Geth looked down its scope. Inwardly, their runtimes were completing calculations, computing wind speed, planetary rotation, obstructions, and the effect of relativistic motion on half a kilogram of ferrous liquid. Outwardly, it was still. It corrected its aim, and pulled the trigger.
Five kilometers away, an Oculus fell to the ground as a round passed through a demolished office building, a radio tower, and a harvester, and found its mark in the Oculus's eye. It fell to the ground, crushing the bodies of dead Turians.
Eject boiling hot clip. Reload new one. Find new target. Aim. Fire.
A banshee and a brute fell, identical holes in their heads.
Eject boiling hot clip. Reload new one. Find new target. Aim. Fire.
A praetorian bearing down on a group of Krogan. Its beam fires into the sky as it collapses.
Eject boiling hot clip. Reload new one. Find new target. Aim. Fire.
A brute, bearing down on an N7 squad. A miscalculation – as the geth squeezes the trigger, it notes the legs of the brute giving away. A waste of a clip.
Its last one.
It cloaks. The runtimes calculate the fastest route to one of the many small headquarters where it can reload. It notes the glowing from the Citadel in the sky as an irrelevance, seven of the runtimes diverted momentarily from their tasks to process and store the information.
Its runtimes all recalculate when its surroundings change to a different city.