Waiting for combat is the worst of war
Leandros, Blademaster, prior to the Battle of the Sigma Ridgeline, Excelon.
Aurelius had just enough time to realize the auxiliary was hostile before it crashed into him, sending both him and his assailant tumbled off the support railing into empty space. As they fell, the Battlemaster finally managed to grip the malfunctioning trooper's neck and choke the damn thing, but it kept fighting.
Aurelius felt bones crack under the pressure of his choke hold.
Still it fought.
Aurelius had enough time to ponder the reasons for the undying auxiliary for approximately two seconds more before he crashed into the structural supports of below the catwalks of the engineering room.
Scrambling up to meet his assailant, Aurelius hit the tactical lights mounted at the sides of his helmet, more or less to identify his opponent than to actually spot it, as the radical movements of the shadowy figure made it fairly easy to track.
What he saw caused him to nearly drop the hellfire pistol in his hand.
The auxiliary had once been human in structure, and was clad in standard tactical combat gear, but it still reminded him too much of the Exelon and Lementus.
But that was where the similarities with his old nemesis ended.
While it's face might have once bore some resemblance to that of a converted human's, it's eyes were gone, it's sockets empty and bloody, save for something that looked disturbingly like the fungal growths he'd seen bursting from the embedded corpses emerging from the darkened recesses of it's eyesight. Though auxiliaries had always reminded him of something that had been destroyed, dug up and then revived for the good of the council, this one looked too dead to be able to even walk. Yet it was doing so, right towards the Battlemaster.
The thing shambled at him again, emitting a series of groans and squarks as it lunged for the Battlemaster, as it flailed it's arms at him, trying to catch the Guardsman in a death grip.
Aurelius quickly backpedaled from the monster, but it continued to advance, following him no matter where he moved, despite it's apparently poor eyesight.
It came for him again, forcing the Battlemaster to evade it again. It was relatively easy to keep ahead of the beast - it's actions were slow and cumbersome, and easy to predict. He just had to stay out of range of the beast's arms; there was an unnatural strength behind it's movements, and the last thing he needed was to get locked in it's vice grip.
Just when the monster's back was exposed, Aurelius realized, with a sinking feeling, that he'd just backed himself into a corner.
As it came for him once more, Aurelius unsheathed his Talons. Half meter long, claw like weapons that were the staple of the Guard, the Battlemaster possessed three on each hand, retractable into the large gauntlets worn by the Guard. The blades were honed, as Aurelius had seen fit, and were now ready, to draw the blood of his present foe.
'Alright you bastard,' he whispered, 'let's finish this.'
The beast came lumbering for him again, only to stop meters from the Battlemaster, a solid blade protruding from it's neck.
Letting out a final groan, the corpse shuddered, before it fell to the ground, dead.
'Got tired of waiting for your sorry ass,' said Leandros, as he walked to greet his friend again, barely breaking his stride to retrieve his fallen blade. In the same action, he flicked the dark blood from the sharpened edges of the serrated weapon, leaving a broken pattern of blood on the ground, aside the growing circle that continued to radiated from the fallen creature.
Scaling back to the team with a number of drop lines deployed by the rest of the insertion group, Aurelius clambered back over the railing into friendly hands. He noted though, with a mixture of interest and concern, that a number of bodies similar to the one he'd just faced now littered the floor.
'They came out of the walls and the ceiling.' reported Korventhor, the Executioner cannon now held loosely in his hands, still purring for another target.
'Any injuries?' asked the Battlemaster. At that, Livianus, stepped forward, shamefaced under his helm.
'Sorry Battlemaster,' he said tentatively, holding out a bleeding arm. 'Bastard bit me. Nothing too bad though.'
Aurelius eyed the wound. It was at the inner elbow joint, where the hardened carapace gave way to far more fragile combat skin. Aurelius couldn't see much, but the wound bled and pussed, unnaturally so for a trooper with implantations.
'Alright,' he said, 'I want you back on the Omen.' The trooper began to argue, but Aurelius silenced him.
'Your suit is no longer pressurized; if we get in too deep, the only option may be outside, and you won't survive that. Get back to the ship, Guardsman.'
'Yes sir,' the trooper replied, though his thoughts betrayed him to Aurelius.
It's only a bite, he thought as he stalked off back down the darkened corridors of the Outcast.
Though other life evidently scuttled throughout the ship, the squad made no further contacts, as they advanced on the bridge, though Aurelius spent the better part of the time cursing the hollow design of the Outcast, as every single step of the infected proceeded to ring loudly, sending echoes throughout the ship without giving the Guard any solid direction to search for their targets in, while setting their nerves on edge.
At the same time, he cursed the spores that hung about in the air, that clogged the his suit's systems, and sent most of the advanced circuitry within his armor haywire.
Over reliance on technology had become the bane of the 23rd. Now they were left with the sheer basics, and nothing else. Already, they'd taken the wrong path twice, winding up at the entrance of reactor core, which no longer hummed with life, or the deserted barracks that had once housed the garrison of the Outcast. And in every corridor, the eerie fungal growths decorated the walls, floor and roof, occasionally with a figure in a ruined white suit grafted into the environment. But three times now, Aurelius had also spotted a dark figure donning the armor of the Shadow Guard amongst the growths.
He'd wanted to move in, recover their tags, but the fungal growths rendered that task useless, their twisting tendrils having crushed those identities long ago.
Finally, they reached the command deck.
Two corpses tay by the entrance, hellfire wounds evident across their bodies, but at the center of the room, an empty shell of light carapace that had been cracked open by brute force, lay.
The trooper's head was missing, and the hellfire pistol it's hand had once gripped lay loosely at it's side, pointed to where the missing entity would have existed.
'Guess he wanted to end it quickly,' muttered Leandros, as Aurelius moved to the corpse's side, and picked up the only identification chip he'd found since boarding the station.
'Horatio Ordias, Ensign, Deceased.' He read aloud, before he placed the battered chip within the pouch at his side. Another name to avenge, once he found the killers. Meanwhile, Korventhor moved back to the door, working with another Guardsman, Titus, to seal the door shut, although, devoid of power, it was a hard task. At the same time, Aurelius and Leandros leapt to the computers to pull data, only to recall that the power generator of the Outcast no longer hummed with power.
'Any volunteers to head back down?'
After the sudden attack in the corridor, Aurelius hadn't exactly been expecting a gun ho answer, so he wasn't entirely disappointed when not one Guardsman activated their acknowledgement light on his helmet.
'Alright,' he decided, 'I'll go, along with Lucius and Castor. The rest of you, hold down the fort.'
He was not met with any objections there, although there was a second of hesitation before the two Guardsmen he'd named flashed their acknowledgment lights.
Aurelius didn't blame them. After all, they'd sent in twenty auxiliaires, and only encountered five so far. The others; he had no idea where they'd find them.
The reactor core, dark and with plenty of places to hide, seemed the ideal place to start.
They moved back down the same path they'd taken from the hangar, ever watchful for the other infected auxiliaries, but never encountering them, only hearing their shuffling movements.
Aurelius led the way, with Lucius at his side, and Castor covering the rear.
Still, nothing came.
Even when they reached the reactor controls, and Aurelius counted a half dozen decent ambush sites for them, nothing came across their path.
The tension was probably worse than the actual battle.
At least a new reactor was loaded in place he thought, as he spotted the green glow from the control console, indicating a ready state. Must have been the last thing they managed, before they turned, he decided.
After navigating their way to the reactor's controls, and discovering the last body of the five man garrison aboard the Outcast, Aurelius weighed the risks of reactivating the reactor without warning, before he finally threw caution into the winds.
With a flick of the switch, the reactor burst back to life, and the battle began.
Hands grabbed at his feet, before Aurelius unleashed a pair of hellfires, severing the two upper limbs of the auxiliary that had attempted to hide beneath the catwalks, allowing the infected soldier to fall to it's death. Fire crackled throughout the vessel, as both the reactor room and the command center fell under attack.
Aurelius trained the hellfire rifle on another auxiliary that charged at him and his squad, planting a hellfire round solidly in it's chest, already seeing in his mind's eye the explosion that would tear the beast in half.
An explosion that never came.
The round merely tore through the infected, passing through it's body completely, but the hellfire remained unexploded.
Two more cracks of hellfire fire cut into the auxiliary, but they were met with the same results, until Aurelius opted for Korventhor's methods; switching the rifle to full auto, he opened fire on the auxiliary until it was reduced to a pile of flesh and iron.
'If that's what it takes to put them down with munitions,' Put in Lucius, eyeing the mutilated corpse ahead of them, 'I might stick with my blades,'
'Come on,' Aurelius said, loading in another clip, 'the others are probably in trouble too. We need to get up there.'
'More contacts!' Called Castor, before he lit up the corridor in fire as well, as three more auxiliaries shambled towards the Guardsmen, followed by another eight.
'We don't have enough supplies to take them on. Break contact and fall back!' ordered Aurelius, before he pulled the Hunter from the fray. He stopped to put down a few seconds of fire, before he too ran for the command center, and the refuge it offered, with the hangar bay now blocked with the undead.
'Have you pulled all the data?' asked Aurelius as he picked himself up from the floor. Having just made a desperate sprint when the squad was jumped by the remaining two auxiliaries, they'd thrown themselves through the door before Korventhor had sealed it with the power that now pulsed through the facility.
'Anything I could recover, although we'll need Caius to decipher it,' Leandro replied.
'Then we're leaving.' Aurelius turned back to Korventhor, who still stood by the door.
'About that,' he put in, 'the door is not exactly an option for us right now.'
As if to reinforce the Guardsman's point, a body slammed against the door with renewed force as he said the words. Aurelius however, was undeterred.
'Then we go out the hard way.' He said, gesturing with a thumb toward the bridge's observation window, and the space beyond it.
Though it was their only real option, nobody was entirely eager with the plan, even as Korventhor placed the demo charges on the window, namely because Omen 17 was currently unreachable due to the spore layer. They'd need to get outside, before contact could be made.
'This is a really bad idea,' Leandros whispered. Despite the fact it was Aurelius' plan, he had to agree with the Blademaster.
'It is, but unless you see another way, we're going out there in ten seconds.'
As he counted down, the persistent voice rumbled again, 'Really wish I could.'