"We've lost…" the men behind him moved with the cautious steps of a well-trained unit, perhaps more cautious than his own had been –after all the men who had come with him were dead and so many more lay silent all through the city. They littered the ground like discarded dolls, so useless against the monsters that would destroy Cocoon. Before he had been in denial about what the l'Cie were capable of but now he knew, he knew that they could destroy Cocoon and there wasn't a damn thing that anyone could do about it.
PSI-COM, the Guardian Core, they knew that they were fighting an uphill battle but it was one thing to know that the odds were not in your favor, a man could prepare himself to fight for the long haul –he could dig in if there was the slightest glimmer of hope. It was an entirely different matter to fight against the inevitable, to know that it didn't matter what you did because no matter what you were going to lose.
He imagined that must be what the boy had felt like when he had been rounded up onto the train, the boy who had killed his men with a monster he called from a stone. The boy he had seen grow from a toddler always gripping at his mother's legs and hiding to the awkward teenager that he'd had dinner with just two weeks ago. The boy who had been like a twin brother to his younger sister, now that boy was a man –made into something unpleasant by circumstance.
A part of him imagined that he had seen something of the like before, in a nightmare or a horror movie. A giant reaching down and throwing him around like he had imagined doing to his opponents in arenas long lost to history, he'd been a gladiator in his youthful games but he had never quite grown into that aspiration. Now he had a choice to make, a decision that could save lives or damn so many more.
Standing PSI-COM Major, Justin Weriv turned sharply to face the leader of the unit behind who abruptly snapped a sharp salute at the sight of Weriv's insignia –acknowledging the higher rank. "Cease operations." He barked while reading the man's name, "Fields, our new objective is to evacuate as many civilians as we can, Cocoon is lost to us."
There was no question to his orders; with the monsters roaming the streets of Eden it was quite evident that there was no winning this battle. It was time for a strategist retreat but, "How, sir?" Fields asked quietly.
"The trains used for the Purge, the rail lines lead to sleds in the basement that will blast us down to Pulse." Already he was doing the mental calculations, they could fit up to five hundred people on a sled and if they could start evacuating now the maintained 'lifeboats' could get a large number of people away in time. Especially if they rain the hyper-rail and linked everyone together at the major rail, the more trains you netted together the faster you could go without fear of smashing into another at a crossing.
Fields snapped another salute and turned to start issuing orders to his men, Weriv turned back to his own unit with the intention of finding what was left of his Corporeal and the wide range telecommunication pack he was carrying. He had a broadcast to make, anyone who had decided to make the only smart decision before them needed to get organized immediately; men in chaos needed a plan of action they could follow. Hysteria was a luxury afforded to civilians and civilians only.