The city of Los Angeles had become a battlefield, one unlike anything anyone living in the city could remember. None of the battles that had rocked the City of Angels during its long history had ever involved huge, animalistic monsters, after all. They had the raw physical strength to overturn cars, or to pick them up and throw them at fleeing pedestrians.

As was the case in almost every other part of the world, military and police forces were being completely overwhelmed by the attacking Zoanoids. Unlike most other places, however, new forces were emerging to challenge the Zoanoids on equal terms. They were the ones fighting and winning against Chronos' army of mutant soldiers.

XxXxX

Captain Malcolm Fillion, leader of the "Rolling Armor" Stryker division, was on a hunt. Along with his comrades in the still mostly untested "Hellhounds" and "Shadow Wolves" squads of the Mobile Armor division, Captain Fillion kept his eyes open for either civilians that needed rescuing, or other military and civilian defensive units that could benefit from the ACTF's assistance. Since that covered pretty much everyone else, Captain Fillion wasnt feeling too particular about which group he and his people ran into first.

Civilians, cops, Army, or Zoanoids; each of them would demand a different response, but his troops were prepared for anything.

XxXxX

"You sure there's nothing but hostiles in this area?" Mark Berenson asked, fingering the trigger for the plane's bomb-bay doors.

"Positive," came the voice of his fellow pilot, John Henderson, over the comm. "Our guys on the ground already evac'd this area. There's nothing but the enemy."

"Speaking of enemies, you might want to take a look up ahead, sir.

There was about half a minute of dead air, followed by the subdued, "Well, fuck me." It definitely summed up the situation, Berenson had to admit.

There, not so far in front of their squad, their feathered bodies forming a living wall between their squad and the city full of Zoanoids, was a virtual army of flight-type Zoanoids. These were the brown-and-yellow Eagle-looking Zoanoids that had been popping up more and more lately. Berenson remembered being briefed about them: the model-type was called Davu.

They were pretty weak in terms of ballistic resistance, or when confronted with incendiaries or high explosives; still, they came in packs, and what would kill one or two wouldnt be much good against a flock this size.

Still, there was more than one way to skin a cat, or a flock of Zoanoid birds, as the case may be. "All right, you bastards," he said with a harsh grin. "Have I got a surprise for you."

Flipping a switch on his F-15's control board, Berenson retracted the covers on his planes nose-mounted gattling guns. The shells were tungsten carbide and fired at near super-sonic speeds, good for taking out soft-skinned Zoanoids and pretty much lethal to anything below a Hyper. Berenson knew he wasn't the only one hoping that none of those things would show up during this fight.

The shells shredded the Davu before they could even think of massing for a charge.

XxXxX

Reloading his Zoanoid Buster Mk II, Captain Maxwell Carson searched for any other Zoanoids that might try to attack the convoy he and his people had formed up to protect. There were civilians in this convoy, people who had been evacuated from their homes and lives at great risk to both their rescuers and themselves. The convoy reflected the mixed nature of those rescuers, being made up of a couple battered firetrucks, four surviving police cruisers - two with their bar lights ripped off - and ten civilian trucks of various models.

There were also a select few firefighters and cops in the actual convoy itself - those few that hadn't started transforming into Zoanoids and gotten themselves shot on sight. That was also the reason none of the soldiers who weren't affiliated with the ACTF were part of the convoy: they'd either died in fights with Zoanoids, or they'd been Zoanoids themselves. A few of the most level-headed civilian authorities had been given anti-Zoanoid weaponry and briefed on the new situation.

The rest of them - those who still didn't quite believe what it was that they were facing - had taken it upon themselves to tend to the wounded, falling back on their training when rationality seemed to have deserted them.

XxXxX

Jarred Tompson, formerly a highly trained officer in the LAPD, sighed as he scanned the crowd of refugees the Anti Chronos Task Force soldiers - a division that he hadn't even been aware of until today - had rescued. Wincing as his left hand gave another painful twinge, he pulled the hand out of his pocket. What was left of it, anyway.

"What was left of it" wasn't much, just the occasionally twitching stump of the heel. That ape-faced bastard he'd encountered during the evacuation of the city hadn't even had the fucking courtesy to bite it off properly, leaving a shredded mass dangling from the end of his wrist, crushed, splintered bones sticking out and everything. It meant the soldiers who'd ended up having to evac him had been forced to - in light of their lack of sterile implements to perform amputations - use more gauze than they would have if that goddamn thing had just bitten his hand off at the wrist like a good little beastie.

Looking over at another of his fellow passengers, Jarred saw the kid staring mindlessly forward. The kid, Milton something-or-other, looked like he had just lost everything in the world that had ever mattered to him. Of course, a lot of people looked like that; the rest of them just looked shell-shocked, like they still couldn't quite believe what was going on, in spite of all the obvious evidence that this was all indeed real. Hell, he'd been the exact same way, up until that ape-faced thing - the ACTF guys had called it a ram-o-cheese, or something like that - had bitten off his hand. He'd learned better after that.

Deciding to see if he could do something for Milton, Jarred moved closer. All of his fellow surviving officers were busy tending to the remaining wounded or trying to comfort the more obviously distraught civilians. So no one was really available at the moment.

Add this to the fact that Milton was the kind of person most people tended to overlook - brown hair, brown eyes, not especially tall or short, not really fat or thin, and quiet on top of all that - and Jarred could tell why most of the civilians in the truck were ignoring him almost entirely. The fact that he was a teenager, and fairly androgynous, only added to the "ignore me, I'm not really here" vibe the kid was giving off. You just didn't see people like that. Well, most people didn't, anyway.

He was trying not to be like most people; most people would have been either dead or severely messed-up by now.

"Hey there, can I sit?" he asked Milton.

"Could I stop you?" the kid volleyed back, with an expression that might have been a wry grin under better circumstances.

"I guess not," he said, settling down in an empty space on the kid's right.

"So, whats your story?" Milton asked.

"Aren't we supposed to be introducing ourselves before we get into the life-stories part of the conversation?" he asked, both bemused and slightly amused.

"Didn't all the normal rules get blown straight to hell when those weird Battle Beasts started showing up?" the kid retorted, smirking.

"Point taken," he conceded with a wry grin of his own. "Still, I would like to know your name."

"Milton. Milton Langston."

"Nice to meet you, Mr. Langston," he said, offering Milton a handshake. "I'm Jarred Tompson."

"You're a cop," Milton observed, taking in his somewhat worse-for-wear uniform. He'd lost his badge somewhere along the line, but today he couldn't really bring himself to care. "How'd you get mixed up in all this? I thought the police were the first ones to get offed by those monster goons. If they didn't end up turning into one of them in the first place, at least."

"I guess I was just one of the lucky ones," he said, offering a one-shouldered shrug; not that he considered himself particularly lucky, but he was still glad not to be dead.

"Guess you were," Milton said, leaning back against the wall of the truck; there was really nothing more to say after that.