Disclaimer: I own neither game franchise, just the characters and whatever other missions and/or details that I add in.
Chapter One: Fall of Ilima
He doesn't know how long he's been fighting, but from all the dead locust bodies, spent ammo brass, and discarded weapons that are scattered around, he's guessing that it's been a while. Doesn't matter now, he's grown used to the death and destruction that this war and the previous one brought on. He went from killing the UIR to killing the Locust Horde.
He will say this about them; they come up with some nasty ways to kill humans, he seen some gear get impaled with a modified sawed-off shotgun, then it fired at point-blank into his stomach. Tore the poor bastard right in half.
But in return, they too created clever ways to kill; a standard issue lancer assault rifle came with a bayonet meant for impalement, but against the Locust it was prone to snapping, though it never actually happened to him. They replaced it with a damn chainsaw. On occasion, he swore that if he ever meets the man who came up with the idea of using one on a grub, he's going to shake that man's hand. Maybe buy him drink, he didn't know yet.
He quickly shook his head, gathered more ammo for his lancer, gnasher shotgun, and boltok magnum, and went to the rendezvous point with the other Onyx Guards. Oh wait, he didn't mention that he was an Onyx Guard, did he? Doesn't matter now, his King Raven was shot down by Nemecyst that were inking the sky, so that means that he has to fight his ass all the way to the checkpoint. Ugh, this is going to be a long, long ass walk.
He's just another gear in the COG war machine, so he needs to book it to that checkpoint now.
"You there! Get your ass over here and bolster the defenses! DOUBLE TIME IT!" A fellow Onyx Guard orders him, clearly labeling him as the superior officer here.
"Yes sir!" He answers, running to the front barrier and getting behind cover.
"Sorry boys, my Raven got shot down, had to march my ass here." He tells the men next to him, receiving a few chuckles and head shaking.
"That's one hell of a wake-up call, anyways what's your name? Mine's Michael Wyatt." He tells him, nudging his arm with his elbow.
"Devin, Devin Carmine." He replies, checking his ammo for his weapons.
"Got any family left alive or no."
"Yeah, both parents, and older brother, and two younger brothers. I miss them." Devin tells him, patting his right satchel, where he keeps a photo of his family.
"That's good, keep 'em close. You'll never know when-" He never got to finish the sentence, as the main reason why the Onyx Guard are in Ilima City: General Raam.
"OPEN FIRE!" The officer screams, as they begin to fire at the very large locust general.
Devin didn't get time to reload as he was picked up by the helmet by Raam himself and was then thrown through a nearby window of an abandoned home. He groaned as he tried to get back up, but since fate was a bitch, the floor below him collapsed, sending him further deeper into the luxury house.
After falling roughly twenty or more feet, he finally came to a stop on the metal floor. After he rolled over and took his helmet off to catch his breath, internally thanking God and the Allfathers that nothing in his throat was damaged to the point of him not being able to speak and move it properly. Sadly though, his neck does hurt from being thrown like a ragdoll through a window and falling through the damn floor.
"Nothing can ever be simple, can it?" He mumbles, rubbing his neck in an attempt to soothe the pain he felt.
"What kind of basement is this? There's nothing but fucking lab equipment in here." He says, looking around the room and seeing various monitors and scientific papers scattered about.
Walking up to the table, he looks at the scattered pile and picks up one of the sheets with a name on it.
"Doctor Maynard huh… what the hell were you doing here?" He pondered to himself, reading the various papers and monitors, before stumbling upon something totally bizarre.
"Teleportation? 'By using Imulsion and this new element sample that I managed to sneak out of the laboratory, I have deduced that, when used together properly with ionization from negative and positive charges, should be able to send any matter within the transmat relay to another point on the planet entirely! This discovery in of itself will revolutionize not only the military, but the civilian populace as well! I'll have to run the equations by Professor Fenix, whenever I get the chance; I may be smart, but that man is entire leagues ahead of me in the science field."
The more he read it, the less sense it made to him. Teleportation? New elements? Just what the fuck were these guys doing, while everyone else was fighting and dying? He may be an Onyx Guard, who officially doesn't exist, that operates at the sole discretion of the chairman, but he hasn't heard anything about this level of science fiction trying to become reality.
"So, I need to head to the basement of the Illima City Public Library, evidently there's a secret laboratory hidden behind the archives… interesting."
Devin has accepted the fact that the guards on the street were killed, as evidence from the lack of lancer gunfire. May the Allfathers watch over them in the afterlife, they were good men who deserved better.
After climbing out of the basement, he seen exactly why the locust general was in the city: the bastards are using seeders to ink the skies above the city. In layman's terms, bringing in a kryll storm. The kryll will kill anything that's not alive in the entire city. Human and locust alike.
As he looks around, he sees that there's no locust guarding the seeder. He comes out from cover with his weapon raised, moving to the fallen gears. He kneels down and solemnly shakes his head, as he grips Wyatt's COG tags and collects them, along with his rifle as a back-up weapon. He does this for the remainder the gears, not leaving a single tag behind. As he does this, he also collects the unused mags and shells from their bodies, grimacing at the thought of them not needed the ammo anymore.
When he's finished, he shoulders his rifle and carries onwards to the library, stopping only to give the fallen soldiers one last look before continuing on his journey.
After an hour of walking, killing, screaming, and reloading, Devin hears the voices of other humans nearby, seems as if they're headed to the orphanage, if he can hear them correctly, that is.
He climbs over the wall to his left and jumps down, startling the gears as they turn their weapons to him out of reflex. When he stands back up, he sees the bald gear motioning to his squad mates to lower their weapons.
"Zeta team stand down, it's a friendly." He orders, looking more closely at the man who suddenly arrived.
"Not just any friendly Mihn, a fucking Onyx Guard." The largest of the five tells him, making most of them actually pay attention to who they're dealing with.
"What the hell is an Onyx Guard doing this far out? We've passed by an overrun post littered with your group's bodies." Mihn asks him, narrowing his eyes a bit at the spec ops soldier.
"General Raam is in the city, having seeders ink the sky for a kryll storm… the bastard destroyed a concrete barrier and then proceeded to pick me up by my helmet and throw me through a window of a nearby home. By the time I crawled my ass out of the basement, after falling through the floor, the entire place was littered with my fallen brothers…" He holds out a few of the COG tags for them to see, allowing actual remorse to fill his voice.
"I'm sorry, I didn't know that was the reason why Raam was in the city."
"Think about it Mihn, it makes a lot of sense to send that ugly bastard here to take over the city. One of the few grubs that could actually get the job done, you know?" The large one tells him, making him nod his head in agreement.
"What are your orders; escorting this civilian to an evac chopper?"
"Yes and no, we have to get to Ilima Orphanage to find-" Devin interrupts him with a raise of his hand and looks at the civilian in question.
"Name and age kid." He tells him.
"Uh I- I'm seventeen, sir. The name's Jace Stratton." He says, stuttering a little bit at the imposing black armor and blue glow of the facial lenses.
"You know how to use one of these?" Devin motions towards his assault rifle, looking at Jace while he shakes his head.
"Take it and have one of these gears show you how to use it, understood Stratton?" He tells him, handing the kid his rifle as he goes wide eyed at that.
"Oh shit, for real man!? I uh- I mean, yes sir." He corrects himself, taking the rifle from him and looking at it.
"Have one of these gears show you how to use it properly, we don't want to lose a fellow soldier now, do we?" He asks rhetorically, walking past the stunned group of people and continues on.
"Hey wait up there, soldier!" Mihn shouts at the man, running to catch up with the soldier.
"I don't know what your orders are, or where you're even going, but you can't just recruit a civilian into the army without any proper-" Devin interrupts him when he turns around and stares directly into the bald man's eyes.
"Under Article seven, paragraph eight, sentence three of the Military Enlistment Act, it states that under times of extreme duress, an officer of the Coalition of Ordered Governments is allowed to field recruit any civilian that desires to help with any form of military operation. As the senior officer currently on site, I did exactly what was within my capabilities."
He knew that the man didn't like that one bit, but he had to agree with him; he was only following protocol given to him by the COG.
"Sir, he's right. Even if you don't agree with him, he's the senior officer present." The girl tells him, even further proving Devin's point.
"Stratton, is the library in the same direction as the orphanage?" He asks the kid, hoping that the Allfathers would at least give him some luck today.
"Yeah it's right down the road from there, to the west to be exact."
"Okay then, I'll relinquish command back to you and after we arrive at the orphanage, I'll be on my way to the library." He tells the man, seeing him nod his head in acceptance.
"Might I ask why you need to head to the library? Or is that information classified?"
Devin stood there for a moment, thinking whether or not if he should say anything to the man. He ultimately decides that if this gets him killed, then why shouldn't he?
"Honestly… I don't even know what the fuck I discovered. Someone named Maynard was a scientist that was fucking around with a new element and Imulsion, I didn't understand most of what I read, except for the fact that this discovery evidently makes teleportation a scientific fact instead of fiction. Whatever it is, Maynard had it in his lab, located in the basement where the archives are. If this can be used to win this war, then this needs to be sent straight to Chairman Prescott."
They looked at him like he was stupid, or in belief… he wasn't too sure.
"That's… I don't even know what to say."
"How do you think I feel?"
With that, the group of six soldiers carried onto the road towards the orphanage, but not without a fight: the locust was at all angles, firing at them with hammerburst rifles, boltok magnums, gnasher shotguns, and even a few with lancers. Devin grabbed the spare lancer off of his magnetic plate and proceeded to put it to good use, imagining that Wyatt was smiling from beyond the grave at the prospect of his rifle tasting more locust blood.
Not thirty minutes later, he seen that same black Theron guard, the one who was with Raam back at the Onyx Guard outpost, the one who killed his fellow Gears.
He doesn't know what happened, but he heard the lieutenant shout for him to stop, but he ignored it. This thing will fucking die, die just like those it had killed, die just like the waste of flesh, blood, and bone that it was.
When he reaches the top of the street, he sees the orphanage right across the road, momentarily forgetting why he was running in the first place, until he sees locust general fly away on his reaver, two of those elite maulers going down the side roads for unknown reasons, and that damned locust ripping a civilian's arm off and stabbing the poor man in the chest with that sawed-off shotgun and firing it, ripping the man in half.
That was the straw that broke the camel's back for Devin: it was dying. Nothing else, just dying.
The Theron guard was relishing in the recent kill, feeling euphoria from killing that pathetic ground walker. But before he could react, he was tackled from the side by something large, black, strong, and very pissed.
Devin doesn't know how long he sat there, repeatedly bashing in the locust's face in with nothing but his fists, before standing up and began to saw its limbs off with the chainsaw bayonet, then cut it open placed a live grenade inside the damn thing rolling back just far enough to avoid being damaged by the blast radius.
"Lieutenant…" he starts, turning to face the man while reaching into one of his satchels and pulling out a few letters and old, faded COG tags with his name on it, "if I don't return from the library… I want you to give these to my brothers, Anthony, Benjamin, and Clayton Carmine. Tell them that Devin said that he's sorry that it came to this, he's sorry for everything he's done to them, and that being an Onyx Guard isn't the greatest… even if we don't exist."
He didn't wait for a response, already pushing the lieutenant out of the way, only to stop beside the man with the tattoos, "The UIR will be vital in the future, I can feel it. Take care of yourself soldier, we can sure use you for this war." After he told him that, the man nodded, and smiled at him.
"Life is not without its struggles, for if there was no struggle in your life to be conquered, then was it really a life to live in the first place?" He asks the man, who only laughed and shook his head, patting his shoulder before continuing on his mission.
It had been about twenty minutes since he left the squad of gears at the orphanage, hoping that they would be enough to at least stop the locust and evacuate the civilians. Leaping down a destroyed bridge, Devin spotted the library across the street… well what remained of it, at least. The entire roof collapsed on the building, making entering it a health hazard in of itself. But he had to check if the archives are intact, and if they are, then he'll check for that secret laboratory that Maynard had built into it.
When started to make his up the stairs, he hears a sniper round from a longshot rifle miss his head by a mere inch or two. Then all hell broke loose: bullets and explosions began pelting the stairs, sending Devin to the ground, where he rolled through the busted-out doors. Standing up, he planted a few frag mines on the walls and floor, setting up a small ambush for any unsuspecting locust bastard that will follow him.
He doesn't want to waste any ammo on the grubs, not yet at least, just in case if there's something here that he can use against them down in this lab.
Coming across the door that reads "Ilima City Public Library Archives" on the sign that has fallen to the ground, Devin revs his chainsaw and proceeds to start cutting open the blocked door, grunting as he gets way more resistance than it should be giving him. He quickly kicks the door off its hinges, when he hears the grenades detonate, no doubt killing a few of them bastards, and runs down the steps.
Activating the suit's thermal and night-vision hybrid optics, he sees the pitch-black room illuminate into a green background, with small rodents highlighting in red and orange. Got to love the level of tech and resources that each suit of Onyx Guard armor receives, they've definitely helped him since this damned war began.
He stops in his tracks when he hears chimes sound off, almost like a person announcing something over the intercom.
"Scanning COG identification… Carmine, Devin. Captain in the Onyx Guard. Access to Doctor Maynard's laboratory is granted, have a good day." The mechanized voice says, sliding a bookshelf out of its position and revealing a room much larger than the one that he was in.
"What the fuck…" Devin mutters, stepping through the now exposed doorway and turning around to see it closing by itself.
"Must be some kind of security system, that'd explain why an Onyx Guard would receive clearance to this place. They have to make sure that there won't be any security leaks, and since we don't exist…" He lets the thought continue in his mind and shudders a bit.
People who has came into contact with them before only thinks that they don't care about anything except the orders they're given by the chairman, but that's not true: they're just regular people with thoughts and emotions, except sometimes they have to do what needs to be done in order to keep the peace, which to others, looks like they're machines.
"So… this is what you were working on, huh Maynard?" Devin asks, kneeling next to a corpse with a very large, very heavy shelf fallen on top of it. Judging from the blood stains and how stiff the body is, he must've been dead for a few hours. Probably was killed when vibrations from the roof collapsing caused the shelf to fall on the man, killing him instantly.
"Let's see what you had going on here…"
Devin stands up and walks to the center of the room, seeing a platform glowing with the distinct yellow that Imulsion gives off, but inside of that glow is something blue, something that's making the Imulsion act weird. Weird as in making the miracle fuel move around on its own. His mom always said that if something weird is happening to something simple because of something weirder, don't mess with it. Just don't.
But, because he's a Carmine brother, he's going to throw caution in the wind and see what this weird thing does.
"Is this thing the teleporter that Maynard was talking about? If so, then what the fuck is this new element doing to it?"
He approaches the machine, seeing a control console with the option "ACTIVATE?" in bold letters. Now, Devin is by no means an idiot, but when it comes to something like teleportation and other science fiction machines, he's been known to just nerd out over it. But that was a lifetime ago, before he was sent to war immediately after graduating, before he became a killing machine, before he became an Onyx Guard.
But… just this once, he'd like to feel like the nerdy kid in high school again. Just this one last time.
With that in mind, Devin presses the yes button on the console, hearing a chime go off and the machine firing up to full power. Before he does anything, however, he runs over to a COG armory maintenance terminal, looking for schematics for his weapons and ammo to bring to the COG headquarters in Jacinto, if this is indeed where the teleporter is going to send him.
He knows that they already have the schematics for the weapons, but not these: these are solely for the use of Onyx Guards. Meaning they have better materials put into them, like an improved drive mechanism for the lancer chainsaw, higher caliber bullets, larger magazine sizes, better sights and optics, more stable recoil compensators, and a few other weapons not generally found in the COG army, such as the One Shot mk2 30mm cannon, an upgraded variant that has a faster loading time, faster charge-up, has an extra shot before it needs to be reloaded, and fires a higher, much deadlier round.
"Bingo." He says, grinning when he finds what he's looking for. He quickly downloads all information from the terminal into his suit's storage drive, damn he loves this suit, then proceeds to destroy it. What? He has to ensure that if this place gets discovered by scavengers, he can't allow them to have this information.
With that, he steps onto the platform, then immediately the alarms started blaring. The noise went higher in frequency and louder to the point of it being a constant ringing in his ears through the helmet. Not even his helmet's features could keep the blinding light out of his eyes. With a loud scream of pain from sensory overload, Devin disappears in a flash of light, causing the machine to explode and destroy most of the room with it.
All he sees is a blue vortex circling around him, flinging him around the area like a ragdoll in a vehicle colliding with another vehicle going through a tornado. Then, as quickly as it started, it ends with Devin tearing his helmet off and throwing up on the cold metal floor of wherever he is.
The air smells like ass… wait a second… COG Headquarters doesn't use red lights for illuminating hallways, the air wouldn't smell like shit, and-
Devin stops as he feels something small and circular press up against the back of his head. He instantly knew that it was a pistol.
He stands up slowly, evidently towering over whoever aimed their weapon at him. When he turned, after picking his helmet up and putting it back on, and stared confused at what he was looking at: it had a weird shaped head, long sharp teeth, and large, red eyes.
"What the fuck…" Is all he could muster in the face of an actual alien. An alien that is apparently trying to mug him, go figure.
It tried to speak to him, probably ordering him to hand his belongings to the alien fuck wad. In all actuality, the thing's face reminds him of a locust, well the teeth do. They both have theirs always showing, and they're long and sharp.
It then made a mistake, one that'll cost the fucker its face… more so than what life already did to it: it started motioning towards his weapons, wanting him to hand them over.
"Oh, I don't think so, you alien bastard. How about you go piss off and fuck a Berserker without it being chained down." He tells it, hearing it scream something in its native, guttural language of hisses and roars.
When it aimed the pistol at his head, he swats the weapon away and grabs it by the throat and throws it into its buddies, creating a ragdoll effect as it knocks them down too.
"Piss off before I-" Devin never got the chance to finish his sentence as he is tackled from the side by something large, red, and heavy.
When he looks at it, he briefly regards that it somewhat looks like a dinosaur, only human sized and uglier. Whatever the thing is, it tries to hit him in the face only for its fist to meet his hand as he caught it. Devin delivers a powerful kick to the thing's groin as he hears it makes a whimper and slides off of him.
'Definitely a male.' Devin thought casually.
"PISS OFF" He shouts at them, as he stands and then goes through the various corridors of this alien facility.
Meanwhile, this entire ordeal was being watched by multiple people, some human, others not. Especially an alien infiltrator that was scanning the area for possible clean up.
"Damn… Vakarian would want to know about this. A large human taking on Blood Pack by himself, with nothing but his hands? We could use him, if he doesn't prove to be hostile." Mused a feminine flanging voice, moving back into the shadows as she headed back to their group's headquarters.