23 Facade (Reunion cont., with fight scene)

a/n: Such a juicy prompt and I am stuck in fight scenes. I cannot win.

cw giant scorpions, harm, and a poorly written fight scene

All the good things belong to Monolithsoft.

Neesae had a special method for long harvest quests. It was boring as hell to fight the same indigen over and over, especially when you had to follow the same pattern each time in order to get the right drops. If you could just try to go as fast as possible, that was one thing, or going into swarms and watching the hits fly around you. That could keep your attention. Or if you could switch it up, try weird combos to test the limits of your layout, that could be interesting. But on a run like this, where it was the same creature every time and you had to follow the right sequence in order to carve out the rare, fragile, and required organ? Neesae knew she would get sleepy by the third instance.

That's where her special super-secret technique came in. No one had to know that her scouter wasn't just helping with the accuracy of her sniper rifle. It was also linked to her comms device and was pumping out tunes to keep her going. Songs with rhythms that kept her going when the fight was devoid of adrenaline. Things with beat and bass and most importantly the drop to make time pass. She'd crank up the volume (unheard by the rest) and hit things on the beat. If she hit a little slower than maximum cool-down speed allowed, she hit a lot harder and more accurately.

It killed her that today she had skip it, especially because she had the exact thing to put on loop, with the perfect tempo and hits to match what they needed to do. But Rosalee's warning had shaken her more than perhaps was necessary. She was going to keep her ears clear for anything unusual.

The first three ictus encounters went by the book. Frye laid down a blast of bullets and made the overgrown scorpion dance on all of its cursed legs. Neesae waited for him to smack it hard enough to make it stumble. So strange to see how different their longswords were. Frye's was almost as wide as his torso and worked more like a club than a cutting edge. Hers was balanced and slim, short enough not to bend when she dashed between the temporarily motionless claws and wedged it under the front of the creature's skull. Skull, carapace, shell, whatever it was, she slipped the sword into the groove that ran along the edge of a vicious face and then she leaned hard until the plating popped loose. It was a tricky job; you needed to be fast to get in and out before the thing recovered but also heavy enough to make the thing go flying and yet still nimble enough not to accidentally impale yourself on a poison-covered spike when it all came loose. Neesae considered that maybe she was made for this job.

That left Carranza the task of cutting loose the dribbly bit that somebody in NLA was waiting for impatiently. Knife skills weren't to be sneezed at; Neesae was indeed a proud graduate of Akolov University and knew the value of knives and what they granted. The heals, the boosts, the confusion and, at their most basic, the sharp stab-stab-stabiness. She might worry that Carranza didn't have his head in the game, but he was taking the most dangerous if shortest job. He only had to be in direct contact for a second or three, but those seconds were just when the creature might wake up and that contact was kissing close.

On the third indigen, the mission went bad, although Neesae still didn't see why Rosalee was worried. Carranza's boot twisted underneath him. Maybe Mira had gophers or anthills, or maybe some mephite had laid down some particularly disgusting scat. He staggered and slipped, face slamming into the indigen's. Kissing close indeed. Neesae watched as he sagged toward the ground. Her response was instant. She was running back toward where she had just escaped. Frye wasn't slow either, and bullets were pinging off the claws that waved over Carranza.

It wasn't the claws or the mouth they needed to worry about, at least not this time. The creature's stinger had already arched over its body, so narrow that Neesae didn't feel any breeze from it, and plunged into Carranza's chest. The team leader's body armor might slow it, but it couldn't stop it. The man was going to be impaled.

A purple glow surrounded the group, indigen and victim and rescuers all. Neesae shouted a whoop of pure excitement. Rosalee, chilling in her skell, had bound the creature and god bless her fast action but she had managed to stop the ictus mid-stab. Neesae pushed Carranza deeper into the ground, working him loose from the tip of the stinger. Then she rolled away from the ictus, pulling him onto her shoulder as she went. She got to her feet and ran, Carranza flopping and dripping and most importantly COMPLAINING on her shoulder.

a/n: My secret today is Start a Riot on loop. Everytime "all the little grannies wanna sip their tea" comes round, I sip my tea.

Next up: We are not out of the woods yet.