The second I break the threshold, I take a mental snapshot of Cage 07 and go over as many details as I can, using my IR illuminator to overpower the glow of the red emergency lighting. The process doesn't even last two seconds.
Huge room. Equally huge purple arm, solid bakelite leaking out of the walls, small RHIB stuck in the top layer of the bakelite pond, catwalks… We usually open up our room clears with a couple of flashbangs, but the boys made the right call to skip them this time. This space was way too big.
Ten hostiles, dispersed evenly throughout the cavernous Cage - dark uniforms, bullpup rifles, soft body armor and… bump helmets?
I let out a harsh chuckle when I see the vent holes in their plastic headwear, and line up my holographic sight on the head of the first guy that I acquire in my sector of fire.
Their lack of any real ballistic protection tells me that these guys were definitely not expecting us. Counter-assault teams with rifles were a much different threat than the SciDiv nerds with Glocks and Uzis.
Two trigger presses, and two rounds smash into the man's head, the first punching through polymer and the second carving a neat hole through his ocular cavity. He crumples, all of his motor control disappearing just as fast as the brain matter that geysers out of the back of his head.
My feet are still moving, propelling me deeper into the room even as I drive my rifle to my next target - in my left peripheral vision I see Mikey, John and Masa digging hard left on the catwalk. In front of me, Ryo and Chris travel along the right side, servicing targets and collapsing their sectors as they go. One by one, the JSSDF guys fall - some getting wild shots off, sparking off the walls, but most taken completely by surprise.
My next victim is a little deeper in the room, his head a significantly smaller target. He raises his rifle towards us, the barrel shifting between each of us with panicked jerks, as his task-saturated brain tries to decide who he needs to shoot first. The dim lighting probably isn't helping him either.
Fucking amateur. That half second of indecision is all I need.
I drop my optic down, holding the bottom of the crosshair on the neckline of his coveralls, and send three rounds into his upper chest. He probably thought his armor looked cool as fuck when he got ready for work this morning, but the shots punch through as if the vest doesn't exist. It reminds me of the time the blue-haired kid used the giant laser gun to smoke-check the giant floating diamond which, if I do say so myself, was fucking awesome to watch.
At least one of the rounds hits something important and he pauses, his rifle dropping out of his hands, then staggers backwards before slumping to his side and coming to rest against the Cage wall. He's not dead yet, but in about thirteen seconds he will be. His own heartbeat would finish him off - his blood is already starting to pool underneath him.
Just as quickly as it starts, it finishes with each of us owning our points of domination, and the JSSDF guys had no idea what hit them. Six infrared beams of light crisscross the Cage; we all conduct our last scans and collapse our sectors of fire to ensure that no enemy is left alive.
Satisfied, the IR illuminators blink out of existence one by one, disappearing from view in our NODs. This is our nonverbal signal to indicate that the room is secure - yelling out "Clear!" is for the little leagues.
"Going deep!" Mikey calls out, standing only a few feet away from a dead JSSDF guy.
"Go deep!" responds Ryo, and the team breaks out into a flurry of action, each of the guys moving to the closest dead body to conduct post-clear. CQB was like a synchronized dance of death - even coming off your point of domination required a set command, lest you accidentally shoot a teammate or get shot yourself.
"Chris, take the door. I'll pick up your spot."
Our machine gunner nods at me, and we switch places, effortlessly gliding past each other on the cramped catwalk. He deploys the bipod on his Mk48 and prones out in the doorway, angling his body to cover the hallway that we had just come from.
I take two large steps to stand over the body of one of the JSSDF shooters. Unlike a few of the others, he isn't wearing a facemask - I can see that he's just a kid, his features as soft as Commander Ikari's son's now frozen in death, eyes wide and mouth dropped open in a soundless scream. He couldn't have been much younger than our own Ryohei.
"Should we SSE these guys?" asks J.
"Don't worry about it. Just anchor them and clear the catwalks, then let's start digging in. I'm gonna try to reach the TOC."
The boys nod, and get to work. Normally, we'd process the bodies thoroughly - check them for ID, intelligence, radio frequencies and that sort of thing. Then, we'd subdue them with plastic flex cuffs to ensure they really wouldn't be an issue later down the line. Today, however, time was short.
Single gunshots echo in the Cage, and any dead body with an intact face gets a round in the head for good measure. It isn't excessive - anchor shots are actually a part of our SOP when it comes to this kind of fighting - and none of us make any open displays of happiness or smug retribution… "enjoy" might be the wrong word for what we are doing at the moment, but at present, it just feels right.
Fuck these guys anyway. I place my optic on the kid's forehead, adjusting for the mechanical offset at this point blank range, and sink a bullet into his nose where the skull is the weakest. He wouldn't be getting up anytime soon.
I step over his body and make my way to the closest wall-mounted phone, just a few feet away. I pick up the handset and dial the priority code for the TOC - it rings for a couple seconds, a series of low electronic beeps, before I'm greeted with the tense voice of a young man. Were those… gunshots in the background?
"Cage 07, this is Lieutenant Hyuga in the TOC! We're ah, a little… shit!"
Another two gunshots come over the phone line, much louder in volume than the previous ones. A woman screams, followed by what sounds like another man scolding her.
"... A little engaged at the moment. TOC has fallen."
"This is Charlie-01. We've secured the Cage - I pass THERMOPYLAE."
"Copy THERMOPYLAE! Major Katsuragi is retrieving the Third Child and heading to you shortly. You gotta hold the Cage until they get there - expect them out of Emergency
Elevator R-20."
I glance around the room, scanning, and my eyes settle on a sliding door at the far end of the Cage, marked R-20 just as Lieutenant Hyuga had mentioned.
"Wilco. Any further updates on the situation? We've been rolling blind the last hour or so."
"Still no-go on the QRF. Evangelion Unit-02 has begun to engage JSSDF forces in the Geofront - their reinforcements are now numbered, and enemy EW jamming vehicles have been knocked out. Wireless comms should be back online."
I can only imagine the mayhem that the little German princess is causing, hundreds of meters above us in the Geofront proper. I truly hope she's trashing those fuckers up there.
"Attagirl - that's good to hear. Once we get this purple bitch up and running it'll really be over for these dudes."
"Yeah, that's what we're hoping for," replies Hyuga grimly. A second later, three more pistol shots ring out, followed by more of the same woman screaming.
"We'll come for you guys after the Major gets here," I say, trying to reassure the young lieutenant. It's starting to sound very busy up in the Ops Center, with sporadic bursts of submachine gun fire adding to the cacophony. "Hold what you got."
"... Don't bother, Charlie-01. There probably won't be much for you to save up here. Just make sure Shinji gets in the fight."
The line goes dead, severing the connection with the Ops Center. This is probably the last we'll hear from them.
When the boys are done tossing the bodies from the catwalks onto the solidified bakelite, clearing our routes of movement, I signal them to rally up. One by one, with the exception of Chris, they saunter over and form a half circle around me, weapons held casually low, and a couple of them with chinstraps unbuckled.
"This position is far from perfect… but it's what we got. Batten down the hatches, prepare for defense in depth. We'll leave the main doorway open as our chokepoint. Make sure all other breach points are fouled, but also leave elevator R-20 open - we should be expecting the Major and Third Child from there soon. Comms should be back up, so get your radios on."
They don't respond - there is no need for them to.
"All right. Let's get to it."
"G11s?" Mikey mutters, hoisting up one of the dead men's rifles. He looks over the German gun with disdain and shakes his head. "Gross."
Nobody that matters ever uses bullpup guns, but we keep that opinion to ourselves when we're around the Eva weapons techs. They loved their pallet rifles.
"Looks like somebody in JSSDF purchasing had extra funds to fuck around with," I say. "Whole lotta good it did these clowns."
"I mean, on one hand, bullpup," says J, chuckling. "On the other hand… I'm not sure that any of our plates are rated for this ammo."
"Then let's make it a point to not find out."
Mikey shrugs and, after a couple of seconds of messing with the rifle's controls, ejects the magazine and racks the chambered round out, disabling it as best as he can. He tosses the gun into the dried bakelite pond, then reaches down to repeat the process with the next one.
Further down the catwalk, Ryo jogs up and deposits a bag full of grenades next to Chris, who nods in thanks. Out of all the frags we had brought down here, we were down to maybe half throwable - the rest had been allocated for booby trap duty, weaponizing vents and access passages and turning the main corridor into a fireworks show waiting to happen.
When things kick off, it will be loud.
After a few minutes of attempting to shore the place up, I've come to the realization that there's almost no hard cover in this Cage, no strong points - holding here really is going to suck.
We've done what we can to create little fighting positions, stacking all the tool cabinets and rolling desks that we could find, but there really isn't much to work with here. I'd kill for some sandbags right now… I'd also kill for a .50 or a minigun on a tripod, but beggars can't be choosers.
Our plan was simple: Chris would fight from the doorway for as long as he could before pulling back to my position, up on the 2nd story catwalk. Mikey, J, Masa and Ryo would hole up in the other two fighting positions on the bottom catwalk - one directly in front of the door, deep in the room, and one in the hard corner to its left… a classic L-shaped ambush for anyone who came through that threshold.
At that point it would just become a matter of smoking anybody that set foot onto our real estate, and hoping that the Third Child got into his purple death machine fast enough to give us a hand.
Ammo and warm bodies would be our limiting factors of the day. I wonder which one will run out first...
"Movement, main corridor," comes in Chris' voice suddenly over the team comms. "Enemy QRF - small arms, five to seven pax for now."
Shit, these guys moved fast. Looks like the bakelite didn't slow them down much, if at all… not a huge deal, but the timing might throw us off. Fuck it.
The team doesn't miss a beat, and the boys immediately move to their positions to settle in for the fight: Masa and Ryo facing the door, with Mikey and J off to the side. They sink in behind the cover with nothing but their weapon suppressors sticking out from the haphazard piles of metal.
I jog up the stairway to the second deck. When I reach the elevated platform next to the huge purple arm, I turn around and drop prone, forcing my rifle's magazine well up against the railing in front of me and settling my sights just above the main doorway.
I see Chris take his left hand off his gun - the right still holding to the pistol grip - and reach into the open backpack next to him. He pulls out the end of a belt of 7.62 ammo and leaves it on the ground nearby, ready for a quick reload, before returning to a two-handed grip on his weapon.
There is a dull thud, the first of our hallway booby traps going up in a cloud of fragmentation, and Chris opens up with his Mk48. The loud report of the gun fills the Cage as I expected it would, while 7.62 rounds fill the hallway outside as Chris tries to maintain a steady rhythm of outgoing fire.
It's on.