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Their unit, sprinkled closely around the heavily armored tank and the protection of its heavy cannon, made it all of ten steps before the smoke and fire cleared enough for the Reapers to push through it. The fire, with nothing to feed it beyond steel that understandably didn't exactly burn all that well, died out quickly enough. The smoke from the explosion and subsequent short-lived fire had combined well with the heavy cannon and machine gun fire to keep them disoriented for the few short moments they had all been in full swing. During which only a handful of the creatures shambled through the smoke intact enough to be alive, only to be cut down by concentrated rifle fire from their formation.
Apt rewards, in his opinion, for their no doubt very hard work.
As it dissipated, though, the creatures found their way through more easily, strange biotic rounds flying around them. Their Asari, a natural Biotic as all her species were, climbed atop the tank to project a bubble around them protectively, standing behind its turret as the tank trundled forward and carried her and the bubble of safety with them. Pushing forward to the edge of the bubble, and standing shoulder to shoulder, they poked their rifles through to fire from safety and cut their way through the monstrosities.
For a few long moments, the creatures simply shambled forward to fire on them, seemingly not understanding why their shots didn't have any effect on their targets. Hissing, chittering and, ultimately, dying, they kept up their barrage. Biotic-electric blasts landed on the Asari's barrier and sparked around them in what would have been a beautiful light-show at any other time. Now, though, with biotic fire pockmarking scant inches from his face pulling holes in the barrier that only lived for seconds before resealing, he couldn't see the beauty in the display.
None of them could, he was sure.
Their attention was drawn instead to the Reapers who bayed for blood and were cut down by lines of lancing accelerator fire. The cannon thundered between the Coalition's finest and an explosion rocked them, hurling hunks of Adjutant and concrete skyward. As the smoke cleared they spotted a gap in their ranks, and few standing Reapers as well, and the Corporal raised her hand to signal them forward.
"Break through and reform on the other side of the gate!" She ordered, leading the charge as the tank jerked forward and the bubble fell, the Asari unable to maintain it at speed.
Something about the order made him uneasy, but as the squad moved forward with the tank, he followed. Resistance at the gate itself was light, a handful of Adjutants lashing out from around corners as they passed by which were easily cut down, their desperate ambush less a 'lethal trap' and more a 'desperate gasp'. The street ahead of them mirrored the one they had passed, save for the couple dozen milling and retreating Adjutants. As before, the Coalition forces opened fire, mass accelerator rounds carving through flesh and steel in a hail.
Most of the Reapers didn't even get to turn before their barriers were overloaded and their armor ripped apart.
"Spread out, and form a perimeter!" The corporal ordered as silence began to reign, looking for something and growing angry for failing to find it. As her squad spread out around the tank, forming a perimeter to defend the point from, she called out, "Veeran? Veeran, if you're out there, report!"
"Corporal, Reapers took him." The woman gave him a sidelong look, eyes narrowed behind her visor, and he shook his head. The meaning was clear, as was her understanding, the woman turning a glare on the ground. Awkwardly, he gave her a pat on the shoulder and added, "I'm sorry, for what it's-"
"Corporal!" The Krogan's voice boomed, "It's Veeran, he's alive!"
The two soldiers exchanged a surprised, and wary, glance before they moved towards the friendly voice. The tank move dup with them as they advanced the scant couple of yards to where the Krogan was standing beside an alley, using the armored vehicle's heavy gun to give them cover.
Inside the alleyway they found the haggard Asari formerly responsible for their Barrier bubble huddled over the wounded, badly bleeding Salarian. Green blood had long since stained his armor a sickly green. The same green blood that was currently staining the ground around him, running in rivulets from his partially torn throat and the stump that had once been his left arm to pool around him. Huge chunks of armor, and the meat beneath it, had been ripped off as well, adding to the rivers streaming down his body. His helmet had been ripped off along with part of his head and all of one of his horns, and then smashed into the wall beside him with enough force to have crushed even armor plating.
And yet, he breathed, gurgling a weak, "H-Help…"
"We got you." The corporal answered, giving the Asari currently trying to stem the bleeding a nod and turned back to the tank, calling out past him, "We need medical here! Get the field kit out of the tank!"
Kneeling, he laid a hand on the wounded alien's head and turned it, using a thumb to peel open an eye. A green eye looked back at him, hazy and strangely luminescent, and he asked, "Did the Adjutants do this?"
"The wha-?"
"The Adjutants." He asked louder, leaning in closer and earning a demanding 'hey!' from the Asari trying to tend to him. "The Reaper forces we were fighting. They swarmed you and dragged you away. Did they do this to you?"
"Who the hell else would have?" He gave the Asari a look, visor impassive, and she shook her head and held her hands up in faux-surrender.
"What are you getting at?" The corporal asked quietly at his side, standing over him while he knelt by the Salarian.
"Adjutants infect those they attack." He answered, listening to the delirious unfortunate ramble about having 'fucked up' and 'gotten got by the bastards'. Standing, he shook his head as another of the squad joined them, toting a heavy triage kit. "Drag them away, rip 'em up, and leave them alive. After a little while they… Change."
"Bullshit." The Asari defended, looking down on her damned squad-mate. With a heavy frown, she looked back to him, "Shit like that can't be real."
Contrary to her words, the wounds scored across his body were steeping, limbs twitching oddly. Blood tinged blue ran from his wounds, which slowed in their bleeding and began to themselves turn sickly grey. He peeled an eye back, again, and was met by blue rather than green. Dimly luminescent even as he murmured incoherently, delirious for pain or suffering under the change in his brain bringing out the sounds.
Not something he fancied thinking about, for the sake of his being able to sleep any time soon.
"Skin is greying, eyes have changed color, muscular spasming along the limbs…" He gave the Asari a look, hand leaving its place gripping the front of his rifle and crossing his chest to rest on the handle of his knife. "He's dead or soon will be and worse. A Husk."
"No… No I…" Whatever the Salarian was trying, through his haze, to say died in a hiss as his body spasmed.
Its head rolled to the side, grey skin creeping up its neck and horn twisting to the side and in, towards his forehead like the other Adjutants. The Salarian face winced, teeth bared as it hissed in pain and a hand lashed out, weakly smacking against the ODST's armored thigh uselessly, though he brought the leg back and away for safety regardless. He was turning, as old school horror movie as it sounded to think. Frankly, it looked as old school horror movie as it sounded.
His Krogan knife stopped a quarter of the way out of is sheath, a Krogan hand around his wrist to blame. He met the large alien's gaze and it shook its head, "We'll deal with him. You need to get out of here, before more Reapers show, Maw-Bringer." He nodded and the Krogan turned, shouting back, "Back on perimeter!"
The tank didn't move but, hesitantly, the squad that had been slowly filtering closer spread back out to reform their defenses. Giving the Corporal and the Salarian a last look, he pushed his knife back home and nodded. He knew when he wasn't wanted, and knew better than to force the issue. Turning, he went to the Mako to restock on ammunition and then, without another word, he took his leave.
Ten minutes of silence passed in a tense slog, creeping through alleys as was his wont, he heard a distant crack. He paused for a moment, listening as more gunshots began to rattle off. With them came screams and the strange whiz-bang of the Biotic shots of the Adjutants, who, coming from other battles they had won or elsewhere in the district, had come down on the squad and their armored support, fighting to hold the opening. For themselves, for allies that would retreat to them or come to help them push, it didn't matter.
Whether the first shot had been to give mercy to the soon-to-be Adjutant or not, he couldn't begin to know, but for a moment he considered turning back to support them. For a moment, but he had his orders, and so he shook it off and adjusted his rifle across his chest.
"Aria's more important." He grunted, slinking down the alleyway with his VISR pinging, looking for motion and heat more than anything.
Whatever the Adjutants really were or where they came from, neither of which had been in the reports he'd read, they didn't seem to take sides. As he made his way through the district, he passed dozens of Cerberus defensive structures. Barricades, checkpoints, even an out and out base built in a huge open courtyard of some kind. Adjutant bodies were piled along the streets in any direction that wasn't up, andmounded against the walls. Sections of the off-white plating had been ripped away in places and bodies and debris had been mounded against the walls in others, and both with the feral intelligence of the Reapers.
Piles of their own dead or holes ripped and blown in the walls of their target's defences, made for the Adjutants to get in.
Atop the wall were more Adjutants, bent over the walls where they'd died, but no Cerberus corpses. An arm here, a leg there and, in one case, a head laid on the hood of a car outside the wall. But no full bodies.
"Turned." He decided, feeling a pang of the same kind of sympathy he already felt for the warped soldiers echo in the back of his mind. He pushed it aside, though, and instead turned his attention to the other oddity. A very pressing concern, to his mind, "Where are the civilians, though?"
Dead and turned into more Adjutants or, equally bad in a lot of ways given Cerberus' reputation, evacuated. Whether that was elsewhere on the station, off of it before the attack was underway, or even if it mattered, he wasn't sure. Whatever the case, it meant that making his way through the district was a decidedly safe and simple endeavor. Deceptively so, with the distant din of gunfire echoing behind and above him, and the echoing howls of the Reapers.
None of which was his problem, for once, even if, also for once, he wished it was. He wasn't one to enjoy running from a fight at the best of times. Nonetheless, he busied himself with sweeping the alleys and streets he passed into and through, wary of traps and ambushes. Cerberus, Reaper, hell, even local resistors, it didn't matter. Mister grenade was only your friend part of the time and missus landmine hated everyone equally, as his sergeant had always said. Personally, he didn't understand some people's habit of humanizing weaponry whose use was self-destructive.
He'd been wise enough to keep that to himself, though, unlike one unfortunate trooper hopeful that had very swiftly learned what speech discipline was.
Sweeping a last street towards the section of hull he'd been designated to get to, the sounds of conflict grew louder and he sighed. Checking his ammunition one last habitual time, and of course found the same thermal clip he'd loaded fresh when he left, before he took a deep breath and advanced. Cerberus defences passed by in utter devastation for another block before the gunfire became the roar he was used to. With it came something he was less used to, and glad for it.
The hissing and snarling of too many Adjutants, and the explosions of Biotic attacks reacting violently with other Biotic elements. Barriers, bubbles, hurled explosive power, all echoed with and against the more static Reaper whip-bang and sizzle of the Adjutant's Biotics. He had trouble recognizing the Adjutant's attacks, but he could recognize the sounds of Warp detonations and the crackling of Biotic attacks sizzling across barrier bubbles as he ran to join the fight, and hoped to whatever gods existed that Aria was still alive.
He had his orders, after all, and he hated failing to meet his objectives.
Around one last bend he caught sight of sickly grey backs and skidded to a stop behind an old, rusted car. They hadn't noticed him and he rose to get a look for it, knowing he was safe for the moment. A couple dozen of the creatures swarmed the street, two in the back projecting the others with their own, electric blue barrier bubble, enemy rounds sparking off it and Biotic attacks cracking loudly as they struck and went through the normal violent feedback loop.
"Since when did they have stationary projected barriers?" The ones they had fought hadn't, but maybe it was something to do with those who had been turned. Mercenaries or soldiers might have known how, and though the thought disturbed him, it was possible the information had been ripped out by the Reapers.
Not a comforting thought, to say the least.
Beyond them mercenaries and Alliance soldiers were fighting their hardest from Cerberus fortifications, standing atop walls and firing down on the Reapers. Inside the moment he paused to look and adjust himself, raising his rifle to aim from behind the relative cover of the car, he saw the well-known dark armor of Alliance special forces, bold red stripes down the arms, sprinkle across the wall to reinforce it. Alliance N7 forces meant he was in the right place, near Aria's fighting line.
One of the red-striped solders were ripped off in the brief moment where he reached the top of the wall but didn't have cover and hadn't looked out to see the enemy's layout and sent sailing high through the air, over the Reaper line. He landed on his stomach and rolle dover, cradling one arm while the other snapped up his rifle, spraying Avenger fire at the approaching Reapers as accurately as he could. One fell before the weapon ran dry and he dropped it, scrambling back on his uninjured arm while the Adjutants rushed to swarm him and add to their numbers.
Not on his watch, to say the gods damn least.
Rising, he belted rounds into the side of the nearest Reaper, surprising it and sending it staggering into its fellows awkwardly. "This way!" He bellowed, stepping out of cover and spraying another burst into the Reaper and sending it sprawling and dead, "I have you covered!"
The N7 didn't hesitate for a moment, scrambling up and sprinting towards him, wounded arm pressed tight to his side. He slide by the ODST and into an alleyway, taking cover behind the corner, and drew his Predator, calling a clipped, "Thanks!"
"Charges going out." He warned, watching several of the Reapers turn to rush them and rolling a handful of detonators in his hand.
Hurling them high, they sailed over the rushing reapers and exploded, sending those attacking him and the defenders sprawling across the ground. Short bursts ended them and he stepped out of cover once more, putting long bursts into the lightly armor backs of those attacking his allies in the Cerberus base. Two fell before a Biotic cannonball slammed into the ground, an Asari wreathed in fire hurling one through a wall before grabbing another by the horn and ripping it off along with its head. A third rushed her and she spun, slamming the long horn through its face and then punting it into yet another Adjutant, crushing both against the armored wall of the Cerberus base.
The last Reaper, seeing the fate of its fellows, rushed him instead. In answer he sent short bursts towards its knees, sparking off Biotic protection and armor but slowing it. Taking a step back he adjusted his grip, stock of the rifle pressed into his abdomen while his off hand reached across his chest t grip his knife. It leapt and he snarled, wrenching the knife out and, in one smooth motion, swiping across its face.
It snarled in pain and rage and slammed into him, arms closing around him and crushing as it dragged him down to maul him. He grunted as his back slammed into the floor, the Reaper's weight more than enough to drive the air from his lungs and his rifle trapped between them. It roared and he rolled his eyes, inverting the knife in his hand and punching it to the side, into its throat. Its hiss died in a wheeze as thick, black and brackish blood splashed across his breastplate.
He twisted the knife in, back and up, and the creature went still, claws pierced partially through his undersuit goin still as it died, nearly decapitated and completely dead. A hand grabbed the creature and threw it aside with enough force it cracked into the wall of a nearby building, leaving him on his back with his knife in his hand and blood on his chest.
"About time you joined me, Sand Swimmer." He sighed at the cocky voice but took the offered hand anyway, letting her tug him up and to the side, to avoid the Reaper ichor on him falling on her. Aria smirked at him as he slammed his knife home, before she cocked a hip, and jerked her head towards the damages he'd caused. "Not bad, though. For someone without Biotics, at least. And oh! You saved a babysitter, too? How quaint."
"Hm." The soldier was wounded, and he made his displeasure at her disrespect clear, ignoring her to turn and speak to him instead. Ignoring her affronted and somehow simultaneously amused grunt, he asked, "What's your status, trooper?"
"Broken arm, fractured rib, and egg on my face." He grunted amid the static cracking of shots sounding off to end the last of the Adjutants nearby. Wounded but not dead or simply the last of the pack that had attacked them, it was all the same. With a grunt of effort, he straightened and shook his head, "I'll head for medical, Sir, if you don't mind."
"Go ahead."
"Good idea." The Asari gave him a look and he sighed, shaking his head and gesturing for the man to get on his way. Once he'd limped by, his leg or hip apparently hurt as well, he turned back to the Asari warlord. She met his gaze with a hand on her hip and a scaled brow raised and he grunted, "You're alive." After a moment he added, "Highness."
"Pretty damn disrespectful to someone that just saved your ass." She accused him, smiling thinly, teeth bared like a predator showing its fangs in challenge.
He chose not to correct her and point out he had already killed it when she 'helped' him but instead kept his peace, wiping the worst of the ichor off idly and waiting for her to move on. The blood had left his armor stained, of course, and he sighed for it. But there was nothing to do about it, and Aria was quick to move on a he'd hoped, not really being one for patience, like he'd bet.
A safe bet, to say the very least, but a bet nonetheless.
"Adjutants got out all over the damn district, here. Fuck knows how..." She started quietly, nodding her head towards the formerly Cerberus base and turning to head towards it, expecting him to follow her. Sighing, she walked with him, "They're everywhere, though. Attack in waves, like they're gauging us and then backing off."
"Hunting." He grunted, "And learning."
"The Biotic bubbles." Aria nodded as they stepped into the cramped, busy outpost. The mercenaries and soldiers both gave them a wide enough berth while they passed through, headed for an ammunition dump to reload. "Noticed that, too, yeah. Bastard's learned it fighting us, that's for damn sure. They didn't do it before I got forced off the station, I'd remember it."
While they talked and walked, the other soldiers busied themselves with preparing for the next attack or escorting the wounded out of the outpost and back, through the district to rest and be tended to more safely. A scant handful of blocks, from what he could see without knowing the full context of the perimeter inside the district, but still a safer place than here, with Husks trying to get in and rip them to pieces.
Or worse, recruit them.
"What's the plan?" He asked as he knelt to replace his used up thermal clip, reloading his rifle as he did. He spotted a rag and grabbed it as well, turning to sit down on a low, empty crate while he cleaned the gore from his knife and rifle. "With the Adjutants loose, Cerberus will either be entrenching in the upper districts, or bolstered by their numbers. Depending."
"On?" She asked with a climbing brow.
"I don't know, for sure." He shrugged, turning his rifle over in his hands to check its systems. Finding it in good shape he traded it for his knife, doing the same pattern of wipes and turning it over in his hands to check its edge, "But we know they're experimenting with artificial indoctrination and augmentation. Is it possible that these are some part of Cerberus' forces?"
"They killed plenty of Cerberus troopers out here, though. 'Sides, they didn't make the Adjutants, I know that for sure." She pointed out, quiet for once. Crossing her arms, she leaned back and stared up at the high ceiling, towering impossibly high above them. "Cerberus unearthed the Adjutants, they didn't make 'em. And that rat ass bastard Oleg hates them, too. He wouldn't use them."
"Even if he had to?"
"I hate the bastard, but…" She shook her head and sighed, "But he wouldn't use the Adjutants willingly- Someone get me some damn rations!" Her sudden bellow made the mercenaries near her flinch, a wiry Asari running over nervously with a fistful of ration bars that the warlord snatched away, shooing the anxious woman away and turning back to him. "He wouldn't use the damn Adjutants if someone had a gun on his old ass head, so something is going down up there."
"Something?" That was simultaneously a simple and ominous way of putting it, he felt. She only shrugged and he sighed, sliding his knife back into its sheath quietly. "That's not good… At all."
"Nope." The woman grunted, for once seeming a bit human in a way. She shook it off quick, though, with a shrug and the snap of the wrappers around her protein bars, ripping a hunk off and grunting agitatedly while she ate.
If the Reapers were really wild, and uncontained on the station, it would match what he'd seen. But if the Reapers were running loose, it added a whole 'nother shade to the problem. One he wasn't quite sure he could resolve easily, if he was honest.
"If I had to guess, though, I'd say a good deal of ripping and tearing is going to be involved." Distant howls and the echoing crack of rifle fire and explosions began to break the silence, as though answering her. With a tired sigh, the two stood and rolled their shoulders. "Time to get started, I guess. Reinforcements are five hours out, and we push when they get here. Have fun out there, Sand Swimmer, and try not to get killed. "
"Highness." He nodded, stepping by to climb a ramp onto the perimeter wall and look for a place to stand. A Krogan, standing behind a Human woman like a building towering over her protectively, saw him and waved him forward to give him space to stand. He grunted a thank you and they both murmured their responses.
It was going to be a long few hours, he could already tell that much for sure.
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Batman 9117
Thanks!
Cool Dude :
Probably not. For this story, at least. If/when a sequel occurs, I might consider it, but I want to keep John unique in being from another galaxy. Or whatever is happening.
Zombie Slayers :
I sneak them in from time to time. XD