StarCraft: Brain Damage
Chapter 21: 1st Wave
Ayanami dropped a magazine out of her Impaler rifle, shouted "Reloading!" to Jax, and reached for another clip. The Confederate sergeant replied by letting loose a torrent of his own fire toward the Dragoon that Ayanami had been pestering. After nearly a full clip of ammunition, the Dragoon's shields dropped, exposing the armored material beneath to damage.
"Shields down over here!" Jax shouted to anyone nearby to hear him.
"Got it!" Jim said as he stopped next to Jax, his Impaler ready to fire with a full clip.
Just then, Artanix jumped through the air and landed on top of the Dragoon. In a flurry of strikes from his psi blades, the top of the Dragoon was split open in long gashes. The machine bucked and threw Artanix to the ground, where he landed and rolled onto his back just in time to see the Dragoon lift one of its legs above its body in line with Artanix's face.
But before it could crush his face, Jim crumbled the limb with a volley of 8mm Impaler fire. The leg bounced off track and landed next to Artanix's head instead of on top of it. The Zealot wasted no time in getting back up on his feet and jumping back onto the Dragoon's top. He stuck his hands down into the machine and wrenched the revived Protoss inside off its mounting and free of the cables connecting it to the robotic form around it.
He yanked the head out of the Dragoon and held it one-handed above his head.
"En taro Adun!" he exclaimed and smashed the head on his knee, splashing blood and coolant all around him.
"Why do they constantly feel the need to say that?" Jim asked no one in particular, "Do they think it sounds cool or something?"
Artanix stepped down off of the dead Dragoon and strode up to Jim.
"Perhaps I was wrong," he said, "Maybe you only lag behind a little, human."
"Gee, thanks dick head," Jim retorted and walked off to help Nick finish off a wounded Immortal.
"What is wrong with him?" Artanix asked Ayanami.
The blue-haired medic wasted no time giving him the bird and walking off, her friendly Probe not far behind her, holding an ammo crate in its grav field.
"I just don't understand," Artanix said to himself, "I gave him a compliment and he replies like that?"
"You know," Jax said, "Its like, a man takes a job, and he becomes that job. You know? Like a guy gets this one job and it becomes him. And if he lets it, it'll become the only thing in his life. Right? So like, with Jim, his job is being a Marine. So he becomes that job, so that makes him a Marine. You follow me?"
Artanix looked at him for a moment, wondering just how the man had managed to state such an obvious fact in such a long and drawn out way.
"Does anyone ever speak to you willfully?" he asked after a moment.
"Yeah," Jax replied as he took off his glove to pick his nose, "All the time. They love me!"
"How many of those people aren't imaginary?" Artanix pressed.
Jax didn't respond.
Shinji moved the targeting reticle for his 250mm guns across the ash plains, looking for something to pound into dust. Eventually he found something: a group of around one thousand Zerg.
"Oh shit," he said, feeling a bit of urine beginning to soak his uniform.
Quickly he flipped on his radio and disengaged the safeties on his walker's weaponry.
"Sir, I've got around one thousand Zerg troops headed straight for us," he reported as calmly as he could.
"Roger that, we'll tell the guys at the choke point to get ready," a male voice replied, "Begin bombardment when ready."
Shinji wasted no time in firing. In fact, he hardly had to aim.
Traz stood off to the side of the Zerg attack force, watching from a safe distance their progression. He was sure that they hadn't been spotted. In fact, he figured that their attack would be a complete surprise due to his lack of using any air forces to preserve that element.
Far off in the distance, he heard a series of loud whams followed by the whistling of incoming shells. Looking up into the sky in the direction of the Raiders refitting base, he could see the little white streaks that trailed the rounds as they bore down on the attack force. Realizing he was wrong, Traz could only cringe as the shells hit the middle of the formation and blew Hydralisks, Zerglings and Ultralisks alike to pieces.
Shinji watched the reloading icons as the cannons went through the process of emptying their breeches and inserting new rounds. The icons blinked green one at a time until they all read reloaded. Then Shinji squeezed off a second salvo.
Traz shook his head free of the shellshock caused by the first shelling and looked at the shattered formation. Thankfully, there were no injured members to deal with, as they would just cause difficult commanding and be more trouble then they were worth. He was about to get them all running at top speed for the choke point when he heard another whistling sound.
Looking up, Traz cursed his own optimism.
"This is fucking ridiculous," he muttered as the shells hit their marks.
The second barrage drove Traz into the dirt to avoid being hit by volcanic rocks flying through the air as debris, and when the smoke cleared he popped his head back up again to see another third of his attack force destroyed and laying dead on the ash fields. Now he made the decision to pull the remainder back and keep them from being totally destroyed by whatever the enemy had left.
That was until he saw a flight of Wraiths heading in on a side-to-side strafing run.
"No, this is fucking ridiculous," he corrected himself.
The Wraiths' air-to-ground lasers tore apart most of the remainder before turning around and heading back to base, leaving the survivors to retreat back to the Hive cluster.