Chapter 35
"The road to hell is paved with good intentions."
— Bernard of Clairvaux
July 2220
In the terms of the Orbital Dropping Death Dealers, they had two things that one should never do unless they specifically wanted to die. The first was the more common of the two, it was failing to do a pre-drop check on a Drop Pod. If one failed to do a pre-check, one could fail to see that their landing gear is dysfunctional and their thrusters could fail to fire, which would mean they wouldn't slow down enough to make an entry, and they would smash into the ground at several dozen meters per second, in effect, 'digging their own graves'. Per year, only five graves were self-made on average. Then there was the 'Naked Drop', or what happened when someone just jumped off of a ship with no drop-pod or reentry vehicle. This method of reentry was, simply, impossible with modern technology, and was one of the reasons the name 'Suicide Leapers' stuck, because the first man who'd done it had been an OD3, and someone had coined both terms in one fell swoop.
John S2-15 was the exception to the rule when it came to Naked Drops. SIGMAs, ever since the advent of HardLight technology, were among the only people able to perform Naked Drops and live to talk about it. It had become something of a tactic, because there was no greater way to control all of the variables of a drop than to just throw yourself at the mercy of gravity. With the small thrusters that came standard with every set of Titan Armor, be it the first or second model, and now Hardlight keeping their bodies free from harm and heat, SIGMAs could control everything about their drop, and many were starting to prefer it to Drop Pods.
John could see the translucent blue-white barrier surrounding his body, protecting him from the fires of reentry. The barrier immobilized him, such was one of the few real weaknesses of HardLight, but it provided him absolute protection - he could tank a nuke with it, almost point blank, and survive more or less okay. It also, since it was wrapped all around him, muted everything past his armor - the only things he could hear were the sounds of his own breathing, and Cassidy's status updates, which he tuned out once he had fed them to his altimeter. At ten thousand feet it became apparent he was off course by a few hundred meters, so he dispelled the barrier with a thought and fired the thrusters on his boots, his elbows, and the backpack-like harness. These thrusters, while not designed for actual flight, were impossibly powerful on their own - able to generate about the same as that of a jet engine. The dispersal of the HardLight barrier also had the added benefit of vanishing the flames that had enveloped him upon entry into the atmosphere, so now John had complete control over his descent.
John's target, once he got close enough to see the base without having to zoom in with his visor, would be where the prison would be on a regulation Alliance base - which, astonishingly enough, this base was looking like. Down to a T, this base screamed regulation. John's eyes narrowed slightly, there must be deserters here feeding them information.
"John, I'm getting three pings from Titan Armor, two are still showing active vitals, they are moving around the base." She highlighted the Titan Armor signatures in his Hud.
John squinted his eyes, wasn't he supposed to be the only one here? "Get me in contact with them." He narrowed his body and increased the speed of his descent as he passed five thousand feet. "Let them know -"
"They're not answering my hails."
"Are their radios working?"
"Yes."
"They must be on different orders than mine. Keep me informed of their positions but otherwise, don't interfere with them." John ordered as he descended past twenty five hundred feet. He righted his orientation, feet to the ground, and then clenched both fists, which sent the signal to all thrusters to fire at full power. It slowed his descent, but he'd still die if he didn't go again, so, closer and closer the ground got, he fired the small thrusters wired into his armor again and again. After a solid minute, he was a mere hundred feet off of the ground, his target just underneath him.
One last burst sent him back under the level of lethal speed, and John hurtled right inside the base's prison complex with a loud crash and a great explosion of dust and debris. Some would claim it was a miracle he didn't land on, or otherwise injure, the Marines inside, but Cassidy had been scanning the building and calculated exactly where he needed to land to avoid injuries to him or the Marines, and with John's augmented reflexes - even dulled through lack of experience as they were - he was able to track this trajectory perfectly. That being said, the duo could not avoid stunning the Marines, who all suddenly saw this seven foot tall monster crash through the roof and land right in between them and the only exit they could reach. John looked up, the red lenses on his helmet reflected the light of Manheim's two suns while his body was cloaked in the thick dust and debris he kicked up, almost giving him a wraith-like appearance. The AI and his onboard computers were instantly identifying all of the marines, giving them their names, ranks, and other such needed information, and thanks to his brain implant, he didn't even have to read the information - it was all sent straight into his mind, as if he'd known it his entire life. It was slightly jarring, the speed at which John was given information and the speed this information was assimilated, but it wasn't too difficult to adapt as long as he didn't think about it too thoroughly.
John stood up from his kneeling position, cast in a deep silhouette by the sun above him and the thick debris floating in the air around him. All inside the prison was silent for a total of five seconds, before it finally clicked for one Marine, a Quarian who, from the looks of his bio-comm, was suffering from several broken bones, blood loss, and shock. That he was the first to react was surprising to the SIGMA II, but the fact that it was a Quarian wasn't what shocked the SIGMA, no, what the Quarian did was what shocked the child soldier.
"It's a SIGMA! It's their SIGMA! Kill him!" The Quarian shouted in fear, pushing one of his allies away towards cover before he himself scrambled for it.
The highest ranking officer, a Lieutenant by the name of Ferell, and a Sniper whom John's computers recognized as a washout I candidate by the name of Dosdon S1-645, were the only ones in the prison that were armed. John didn't recognize the model weapon they held, but he registered the threat they posed when Dosdon fired and a bright green flash of light announced the thumb-sized green mass of heat soaring right for John's face.
Reacting with doubly augmented reflexes, John was already diving aside before Dosdon and then Ferell had pulled their triggers. He dove inside a cell and bodily crashed through its shut tight and locked cell door. "Blue, blue!" He called out, his deep voice broadcast clearly from the speakers on his helmet. Why were they shooting at him? Were they turncoats?
"Cassidy, get the call/counter from the Admiral, now!" John ordered his AI implant, as he activated his HardLight shield with a simple gesture of his left hand, and he braced it in front of him. He wasn't going to kill these Marines unless he had to, and given that his HUD only registered the two of them as armed, he felt he didn't even have to to begin with.
Bright green blobs of some sort of superheated substance slammed into his shield and slid off of it after impact, leaving him unharmed, but also leaving him in a bad spot - if they really wanted to try to kill him, keeping him pinned down and under fire from unidentified weaponry was the best way to do it. Just what were they shooting him with? His HUD identified it as some sort of ionized plasma weapon, but no species in known space could weaponize plasma to such an extent. Were these Prothean guns? Had the Rebels raided a Prothean vault?
Cassidy wordlessly displayed Ferrell's call/counter signs on John's HUD. He amplified his deep voice with his speakers, cutting through all of the chaos of gunfire and shouting. "Lieutenant Ferrell, your wife wanted me to remind you to pick up a gallon of milk before you come back home!" John called out, word for word, as was shown to him.
After a few seconds, the plasmafire stopped as a shocked silence temporarily filled the room. From behind his translucent shield, John could see Ferrell's hand in the air, the universal 'stop' sign. "Is… One percent or two percent?!"
John relaxed, they knew he was friendly now. "She said you would know." John responded, slowly standing up straight and letting the bright blue shield of physical light fade out of existence.
He strode out of the jail cell, shields at full strength but hands unarmed. Ferrell still tightly clutched his own pistol, but was otherwise not threatening John. "You're friendly?" He asked, his scarred face glaring angrily at John. He gave him a once-over, now that they weren't shooting, he noticed that his armor was different from other SIGMAs'. "What are you? That armor's not like other SIGMAs."
"I am friendly. I got an upgrade. Why were you shooting at me?" John asked in rapid-fire; the chaos from that kiloton explosion could wind down any moment now, and though relief efforts would add in a whole new layer of chaos and activity, he didn't want to try and work around that, he had to get these marines out of here before then.
"The Rebels have their own SIGMAs. Those bastards took down three quarters of my men before they finally stopped killing us." Ferrell growled, "and just so we're clear, until I learn where when and how they got SIGMAs, I won't trust anyone but my Marines."
John understood his last statement, but the first one sent off alarm bells in his head. If those SIGMAs were enemies, and he'd gotten pings from their armor, that meant they'd gotten a ping from his armor. They knew he was here, this accelerated and this changed things. Priority number one was retreating, evacuating the Marines and calling in backup - be it naval support, air support, or Marine forces, he didn't want to fight a squad of veteran SIGMAs on his own. The secondary mission was officially scrubbed - they were in escape and evasion mode now, forget the base, their lives were what mattered.
"How many of you are armed?" John asked.
"Just us two. We found a Prothean vault a few hundred clicks to the southwest and took their guns." Ferrell explained. "Good for killing everything, even their SIGMAs." He left the threat unspoken, though neither John nor his AI missed the tone in the man's voice.
"Where would the Rebels store these weapons? Are they reliable?" If John could get his hands on one of these Prothean guns, he'd have an immediate and tangible advantage over the enemy SIGMAs, which he would need in the inevitable confrontation.
Dosdon piped up, "most likely in their armory, but that's on the other side of the base, Sergeant-Major." He informed.
"We can't escape unarmed." John responded, "so here's what we do. You all stay behind me, the base is still in chaos from the underground detonation, we'll use that and the ash-cloud to sneak to the other side of the base and arm up, weapons, ammunition, armor. I want you all in squads of three and I want you all to maintain physical contact with each other. You follow me and you do what I say, are we clear?"
The Marines looked to Ferrell, who nodded. "We're clear, SIGMA."
"Then move out. If we're engaged by the enemy SIGMAs, don't wait, don't ask questions, run. My AI is clearing an evac-point as we speak and it will be uploaded to your HUDs. I'll hold them off for as long as possible."
John was right, the base was still in chaos. Anyone who wasn't injured was transporting injured or scouring ground zero for survivors and evidence of what the hell happened. Anyone who was injured was being brought to the infirmary, which had to be overflowing at this point - a full scale attack, and then a several kiloton underground detonation would create an overflow of injured. Couple all of that with a thick ash cloud coating the ground, it was the perfect environment for a hasty tactical advance towards an armory.
The problem was, John's opponents were, like him, trained in asymmetrical anti-SIGMA warfare. They knew the moment the Marines brought down their jammer that they'd have to fight an augmented response unit, and as such they prepared for it. If John were in their shoes, he'd predict that his enemy's goal would be the evacuation of the Marines, and he'd conclude that he wouldn't dare evacuate over a dozen unarmed men, women, and Quarians in varying states of injury. With that in mind, if John had been in the enemy SIGMAs' shoes, he'd set up a trap in the armory - either a bottleneck, a bomb, or a killzone. Make it impossible for him to advance or retreat and get him stuck in a no-win scenario.
But, therein lay the most fundamental point of anti-SIGMA warfare: The enemy always knows what you're doing. So, again in his enemy's shoes, John would have predicted that he would have therefor decided to skip the ambush in the armory entirely and make a full, hasty retreat. A risky maneuver, but that prevented the possibility of an immediate SIGMA assault. So with this in mind, John would have set up a trap outside of the base - mines, trip-lasers, motion sensors, anything to alert him to his enemy's position and give him time to predict their path so as to set up an ambush. So with that in mind, what the Rebel SIGMAs would want to do would be to set up their traps and their ambushes outside of the base and abandon the armory; but again, the point of anti-SIGMA warfare was that the enemy always knew what you were doing.
The obvious solution was to plan for everything. Given the complexity of setting up a large-scale trap outside of the base, John predicted that one of the two living armor pings he'd gotten earlier would be outside setting up the traps and making ready to set up the ambush, and the second would be lying in wait - likely with Rebel fire support toting Prothean guns - in the armory. So the best plan would be the path of least resistance - go for the armory, and then beat feet for the evac shuttles; but when facing overwhelming odds wielding advanced alien weaponry, when he only had two men with alien sidearms as backup, what would be the best solution? Going in headfirst would be surefire death, and the SIGMA watching over the armory would expect him to try an explosive entry from behind. John didn't have the time nor the resources to try going from below, and since his entire objective was to get as many Marines out alive as possible, he couldn't send in any as a suicide-distraction so he could sneak in and take as many out as fast as possible.
So, in a game of speed-chess when one's opponent knew and accounted for every possible move one could make, how did one win? Simply put, one made a move that couldn't possibly be accounted for, they flipped the table and pulled a gun on the opponent. When the front door and the back door were both accounted for and covered, John chose the rooftop entrance. Better yet, there was no rooftop entrance, and because his enemy would be prepared for it, his plan would be perfect: He would set up and detonate a pack of explosives to simulate a dynamic entry from above and behind, and then he would lead the assault from the front. He would dizzy his enemies from all sides and kill them all while they were distracted.
This is what they call checkmate. Thought John, as he set up his C7 explosives on the back entrance. His Marines were hidden around the front entrance and were waiting his go-ahead to go ahead. He'd divvied out any weapons they came across to the best, least injured shots, and given them each a grenade to use in emergencies. The Marines were instructed to wait until after the explosion, and until he gave a go-ahead, before they were to enter and grab any weapon they could find and enter the fight - the priority was killing the enemy SIGMA first.
Someone asked John how such a thing could be feasibly done when it had taken literally dozens of them, all of whom had the advanced alien plasma guns, just to bring down one SIGMA. John stared at the man for a moment and said "overwhelm him." Such was honestly the only weakness SIGMAs had anymore - thanks to HardLight, even McGraw's second condition couldn't kill them.
John turned the corner and it only took him an instant to stop his movement, halt his momentum, and leap backwards to avoid the wall of guns and the showers of gunfire that met him. Rule number one of anti-SIGMA warfare was to think of every one of one's enemy's moves and account for them, and his enemy had done just that and had pre-emptively attacked, as silently as he could, the moment he suspected that John-S2-15 was at his doorstep. While John hadn't planned for this, he was a good improvisor - eleven years of endless war scenarios with the best soldiers in the galaxy made one a master of such a skill; John also knew that if he wanted to win this, he would have to improvise in such a way that the SIGMA wouldn't be able to predict it.
So instead of returning fire or retreating, John detonated his C7, but he didn't run for the holes he made, he sprinted over several meters, right next to where Cassidy had the rebel position marked. He took two steps back, and with a clenched chest and a small scowl, sprinted forward, straight for the wall. Accompanying both detonations, he smashed through the several inch thick concrete wall with nothing but his augmented strength, his power armor, and his shoulder. All of the dust and debris in the air, doubled by the thickness still hanging in the air from earlier, would hamper only the Rebels.
With the debris flying in all directions and the rebels stunned from the explosions, they were simply unable to react fast enough to John's sudden and unexpected breach. The SIGMA leapt forward, arms held outward, and smashed into one rebel, his sheer weight caving in the man's ribcage, while his extended arms caught the throats of two other rebels and shattered their spines. John landed into a roll, and sprung to his feet, smashing his fist into one Rebel who was swinging around his rifle. The SIGMA's strength was so great that the Rebel's bones resisted about as successfully as wet paper resisted a rail-gun - they all caved in and the organs they protected simply shattered and burst under John's furious physical assault. John, quick as lightning, whipped his head to the side and parried a wild haymaker, unintentionally snapping like a twig the bone of the arm he batted aside, before he locked his hands onto the limp arm and bodily yanked the Rebel forward. Unfortunately for John, he again underestimated his newfound doubly augmented strength, and the power afforded to him by the muscle suit. Instead of throwing the Rebel forward like a Human battering-ram, he ripped the Rebel's arm clean off with a loud snap and a shower of blood and gore. On the other side of unfortunate, John's reaction time, even now, so soon after waking from the operating table, was in milliseconds - he had already known his original plan was doomed to fail almost before the arm had been detached. Improvizing, John simply kicked back with his booted foot and caved in the chest of the disarmed Rebel, and let the arm fly at the few who remained. John was a mere instant away from ripping his rifle from his back and dispatching his enemies, when he saw it - the damning blue dot on his motion tracker, hurtling towards him at inhuman speeds.
John had only a second to turn to face his opponent, who was moving too fast for most organics to process. John, utilizing his many perception-enhancing augmentations, saw the whole thing happening in slow motion, turning his single second into a short eternity. The SIGMA was sprinting, crouched down low in a bee-line stance, one arm stretched out and held back, the other hovering near his chest, one leg already extended and heading for the ground, the other pushing him forward with its superhuman strength. Faster than a blink of an eye, John made several rapid conclusions; the SIGMA was coming in for a savage right hook, he was moving too fast and was positioned to stiffly to try any other good attacks, though with the way his other hand was placed it was likely he may attempt a choke-slam. With the man's speed and his strength, his impact would hurt, even accounting for John's augments.
With a deep scowl, and in a flurry of movement, John quickly threw up his left hand to parry the right cross from the sprinting SIGMA. John threw his right hand in an upward curve, intending to catch the SIGMA in the throat, but due to the position of the SIGMA's off-hand, he was able to catch John's palm-strike and divert it. John side-stepped the SIGMA's sprint, keeping his hand locked to both of the SIGMA's, and used the One's momentum to bring him into a spin. John spun once before he let go of the One, who careened into a wall and crashed straight through it, sending it crumbling to the ground. John would have followed up the attack, but of the corner of his eyes he saw a faded, almost imperceptible silhouette standing up in the main entrance and aiming a weapon in John's direction, and barely a second after that, the blue dot was on the move again, heading straight for John. After a split-second calculation, John leapt out of the way of three rapid plasma shots, which instead sailed straight for the SIGMA, who too had to dodge them, forcing his eyes to be taken off of John. Using this distraction, John dropped a smoke grenade and a flash-bang to cover his tracks. He sprinted off to find a place to hide and launch an ambush, silently cursing his luck, but praising his technology.
The enemy SIGMA, with his Titan armor, would have the requisite vision modes in his visor to see through the smoke - electromagnetic vision, thermal, anything including night vision, though SIGMA eyesight was so good that they didn't really need it. However, while Titan Mk. II wasn't necessarily designed with II's fighting I's in mind, it was designed to be applicable in any situation, including ones where enemies would have enhanced vision. So when the enemy SIGMA came barreling after John, John's suit was already masking his heat signature and distributing it out through the ground at such a level and frequency that it would be mistaken - even by SIGMAs - to be simple ambient heat. John was effectively invisible, this fact led the enemy SIGMA to incorrectly assume that John was using his Tactical Cloak, and as such he searched less for heat signatures and more for the brief ripples in light that came from a moving target in a tactical cloak, and though John had considered that route, he knew that the SIGMA would be specifically looking for it, and wouldn't know to look for any of the Mk. II's tells. It was a minor victory, but he was fighting a purebred SIGMA - he needed all of the victories he could get.
I have him at the advantage… But I can't move if he's ever within five meters of me. Radar-fooling motion dampeners was a technology that had proved itself to be impossible to create for the last half-century, with the running joke being that neither McGraw senior, or after his death, his son, hadn't gotten bored yet. So John's advantage was as much of a disadvantage, if he even considered moving while he could still see E-SIGMA on his radar, the enemy SIGMA would see him on his radar, and John would be in for the fight of his life; so all he had to do was stay still when he saw the enemy SIGMA, move when he didn't, and find himself one of those alien guns. Anything less wouldn't work, he couldn't set traps because the SIGMA would see them coming, and he couldn't engage the man with conventional weaponry because that didn't guarantee fast results. Vi-Contactus held promise, but John doubted how well it would hold up in a life or death fight with a SIGMA - those few blows he'd taken in their brief fight amidst the smoke and debris were already beginning to burn and throb in pain.
Thus, the game of cat-and-mouse raged, with the stakes being the lives of the captured Force-Recon Marines. John didn't know what was keeping them, his radar couldn't see that far, and he feared using any surface-penetrating vision enhancers, because the SIGMA may catch it. Every step of progress John made, was hampered by an intuitive move from the SIGMA, until John realized after six and a half seconds of uninterrupted stillness and silence that the SIGMA had stopped moving entirely, in an effort to entice John himself to move. They were at a complete standstill, and John knew that the first person to move even an inch would be the person to die.
This is where advanced technology becomes a burden… Thought John, as he shot down the age-old tactic of very, very slow movement; such an idea would have worked a hundred - or even a mere fifty - years ago, but not anymore, motion sensors were very good at what they did, even reaching up to pluck a grenade from his vest and throwing it would tip the SIGMA off, ruining the distraction provided by the grenade.
Okay… Think. Thought John with a blank face, and wide, almost scowling eyes.
Outside, with his hands on his aching head and his sore body kneeling like a dog on the ground, Jorell'Sahn could only be described as livid. This entire day had been a clusterfuck of epic proportions, and by some curse of the Quarian Ancestors and the Human gods, he, Dosdon, Ferrell, and close to two dozen Force Recon Marines were being held hostage by five Rebels, one of whom was so overweight that Jorell's Drill Instructor would have laughed him off of the base. If they would have spared Jorell's mask from its quite literal crushing demise, it would have been steaming up from all of the unbridled rage radiating off of it. He hated his situation, he hated this day, he hated this planet, he hated the Rebels, and god damn it to the ancestors and back, he hated the fact that he couldn't use the Painters' guns!
So help me… I'm keeping one of those fucking things… And I'm going to fuck with it, smash it, hack it, rewire it, and stare at it until I can make it work for me. Thought the growling Quarian, as his three-fingered hands worked the interface of the cybernetic cuffs that were binding him, from memory alone, backwards. It was less picking the locks of the cuffs, and more hacking the interface - which, while possible, was difficult to do without handicaps, but with them, it was something approaching impossible. The only reason he knew how to do it in the first place was because the operating system the cuffs used was an off-shoot of most modern Smart Watch systems, meaning that the tricks that were important, were universal, they worked, and they were the only ones he needed - they were his lockpicks. The only problem was the tricks that didn't work - he had no way of telling whether or not he was doing something, the haptic interface was good, but it wasn't designed for blind people. This meant he had to rely upon his memory of the OS, button placement, keeping in mind that he had to mirror those memories to count for the fact that his hands were behind his back, and brief auditory cues to make sure he was on the right track. One mistake and he could lock himself out.
If this doesn't work.. Thought the Quarian, I think I remember where this model's power cells are. Electromagnetic locks need power - without them, the cuffs are only paperweights… Come on… Down, Down, Up, Up, swipe right, swipe left… Another left and another right… He heard a brief, satisfactory ping followed by a static noise - he was almost done. Back… Accept… Enter.
He heard a loud 'click', and the cyber-cuffs' electromagnetic locks powered down. He let loose a slow, shaky sigh of sweet relief. What he'd been doing could very well have had the opposite effect, had them tighten their hold so much so that they cut off his hands. Keeping his gaze locked on the boots of the impatient Rebels, the fat one of whom held the Painter Pistols stolen from Ferrell and Dosdon, the latter of whom was sitting next to him. Jorell wished he'd been sat to his back, Jorell figured he could have freed him too, but there was only so much luck one could have in one day, and it seemed that being able to train a washed out SIGMA turned Marine sniper was outside of those bounds. Getting to help despite his bindings, however, was not outside of those bounds.
Jorell bumped into Dosdon and grunted out, "cuffs off. Need help."
Dosdon almost immediately sprang into action, screaming hysterically as if in intense pain. He threw his head forward and back, from side to side, screaming and yelling, his eyes clenched tight, before he eventually started smashing his head onto the dirt ground. The Rebels guarding the Marines had been visibly startled by his display, and after a few seconds of Dosdon smashing his head on the ground, they forcibly pushed one over to check on the guy. The other Marines, the ones that knew Dosdon, were getting in on the act.
"He needs ARS shots! Dude's got augment-rejection!" Someone called out.
"Don't just let him die! What the hell kind of men are you?!"
"Get him to a hospital!" Another shouted, as the unlucky rebel came within striking distance of the sniper and the engineer.
Dosdon, upon seeing the shadow come over him, immediately forced his head upwards, into the unfortunate rebel's groin. The rebel didn't even have time to scream and shout in pain, because the moment he was hit in the family jewels, Jorell, forcing himself to ignore the pain of his numerous injuries, sprang to his feet and had the man in a headlock with one arm, and his human pistol in hand with the other. Jorell had scant seconds before the element of surprise wore off, and he knew he had to make the best of every one, so he forcibly hauled the Rebel around so he was facing his friends, who were only just now starting to react. Jorell lifted the pistol and, using his captive as a steady, aimed and fired at the Rebel with the Painter Pistols. By some stroke of the Humans' God and his own Ancestors, he pulled off a clean headshot, but the next shot - the one going for the Rebel with an intimidatingly large shotgun - went a little low and slammed into his throat, exploding out the back of his neck in a shower of gore.
Two rebels down, with a third struggling weakly against Jorell's headlock, the Quarian found himself now in a standoff. Rebels didn't have shields, and their armor was patchwork at best, so he wasn't willing to put too much stock in a meatshield. The other two Rebels were livid, their pale faces red with anger, but they were smart, too - here was a Quarian who'd managed to kill two of them and take a third hostage; while it was totally within their realm of possibility to open up on him and just end it, they couldn't just shoot their buddy. On the flip side, if Jorell fired now, with his surprise long since worn off, he'd sign his death warrant. But, luckily for him, the other Marines were feeding off of his stupidity, and the one closest to the Rebel who wore a bullet belt like some fool Hollywood action star, launched himself upwards from the ground, tackling the man and sending him careening to the ground. Jorell took his opportunity, whipped his pistol around to the other rebel, and fired three times, two hitting his chest, a third plowing through his nose.
"Down!" Jorell yelled to the Marine, who was savagely stomping on the only remaining Rebel's chest. The other Marine leapt back, and Jorell poured all but one of his remaining bullets into the machine gunner. The last one went into his captive.
They were free, but despite that, the thing running through Jorell's mind was a feeling of utter disbelief that he'd actually pulled this stunt off. How the fuck did I do that?! Silently demanded the Quarian of himself. He shook his head and got to work unlocking everyone's cuffs. While it was difficult to do it backwards, forwards it was pitifully easy - electromagnetic cuffs all had the same weakness: power. All he had to do was manipulate the interface and force them to kill power. First he had Dosdon free, who immediately sprang into action, grabbing a weapon and searching the rebels for keys, while Jorell worked to get the others free.
When ten minutes passed, and everyone was free, Jorell pointed to the building in which the two SIGMAs were fighting, before he shouted, "WEAPONS! GO, GO, GO"
Were the SIGMAs a petty bunch, they would have held their pride as super soldiers above their own mortality, and wouldn't have accepted any sort of help from the grunts, be they Marines or Soldiers, or anything above and below in skill. Fortunately for John, the first generation had pettiness and arrogance beaten out of them during the SIGMA Seven, and the second generation simply never had either in the first place - one of the first things they were taught was humility and acceptance of the fact that they may need help from time to time.
SIGMAs are not infallible. We may be gods on the battlefield, but even God has angels. Even the Devil has demons. Recalled John, as his motion-tracker showed a veritable sea of green dots flooding the building. Mere moments later he saw the SIGMA's blue dot, and a few Rebel red dots, all begin flooding the building he found himself temporarily stuck in. Likely, they were going for the same place he was, and he knew that his enemy SIGMA would be using this to his advantage as well - at this point, it was all a matter of who got to the armory first, and who did the most damage when they got there. With that in mind, John exploded forth, his heavy and fast footfalls leaving visible cracks in the marble floor. He saw the blue dot forcing his way through red dots, and he saw green dots making all-or-nothing mad-dashes for the armory, it was a race against time, and whoever got there first would win.
The rule of Anti-SIGMA warfare is to plan for everything, and act in a way your opponent can't plan for! John recalled, his face set in stone as he prepared himself for what came next. John brought up the scans of the building, and the location of the armory relevant to him. Two routes were immediately highlighted in his HUD - the safest, and then the fastest - but he ignored them both as he took in the building's scans, coming to conclusion that the computer's 'fastest' route was considering that he wasn't willing to make a bee-line for it; in other words, that he wanted to preserve the building's structural integrity. John, however, didn't care for that - all he cared about was winning the fight.
In less than two seconds, he had gone over all of the data and reached his conclusion: The best route was the easiest one, and the easiest one was to go straight for the armory. Not stopping for even a second, John literally tackled his way through a several inch thick stone wall. Modern day, regulation bases had their walls made out of a newer concrete mix developed in the 2170's, that was, on average and dependant on mixture, three times as tough as the concrete used before then, and John was putting his triply augmented strength, speed, and durability to good use by slamming through them, shoulder first.
"John!" He heard Cassidy call out, as his shields were stressed by the second wall. "John, you need to stop - one of your surgical scars -" With a brief command, John muted her as he smashed through the third wall and shattered his shields shattered, which meant on the fourth his armor was caked and covered in dust and debris, but by the fifth, he'd made his objective - a deceptively massive hall of guns and ammunition.
The left side of his body felt like it was on fire, and for a moment he'd feared he'd dislocated his arm, but his suit confirmed that the worst damage he'd done was some severe bruising and a few lacerations that had made it through his skin suit, though Cassidy did make certain to highlight that he'd opened up one of the surgical scars running down his abdomen. It was one of the smaller scars, and his suit was already growing into the wound to stop it from bleeding, but it was still an injury he would have to deal with.
He skidded to a halt, finding himself in the back of the armory, rows and rows of guns in front of him. In less than a second he was already issuing his AI an order, "Cassidy, scan the hall and find me the Plasma weapons the Marines fired on me with, and find me the biggest one." The AI implanted in his neck complied instantly by using John's HUD to blanket the room in a translucent blue/white field, before locating the weapons in question, all discarded in a large bin near the room's real entrance. The biggest one was near the top of the pile and the AI outlined it in a red wireframe, John crossed the room and was there in a second.
He grabbed the rifle and took just as long as it took to extend and activate itself to marvel at its sleek appearance and elegantly contained power. It transformed from its original, seamless, silver egg shape to a rifle, complete with a stock, a pistol-grip, and iron sights. The weapon, however, possessed no trigger, and due to its alien nature, John's HUD didn't sync up with it, merely displaying a grayed out rifle outline to signify that it knew he was armed, but not what he was armed with.
"Cassidy -"
"Best guess, squeeze the grip." The AI said before John could even finish, "you've got friendlies incoming."
John whirled around, aimed the weapon at the big wooden door, and squeezed the grip. It was made of some sort of rubber, gelatinous substance that molded around his fingers when he squeezed, and returned to its original shape when he let go. The pressure with which he squeezed dictated how much power it put into its beam - and a small holographic display to the left of the barrel indicated what John quickly surmised as a heat gauge, and in the three seconds it took to turn the door into a smoldering pile of wood, it barely even registered a quarter of its heat limit. Beyond the door, John saw Marines sprinting inside and desperately lunging for the nearest weapons, a green-suited Quarian at the head of their group, a pistol held tightly in his three-fingered hand.
"GET IN HERE AND GET ARMED!" John ordered loudly, as he kicked the bin over to the marines.
As the Marines stormed inside and started grabbing and loading the nearest weapons, John stacked up to the left of the destroyed door; the Marines didn't have to be asked twice, and trailing behind them were the far more numerous red dots.
"I want three of you with alien rifles covering the opening I made in the back, if we have to escape, that's our escape route! The rest of you, arm up with alien weapons if you can, and Alliance weapons with as much ammunition as you can physically carry, if you can't. We're going to kill their SIGMA and then we're extracting -" He ordered at top speed, just as the last Marine crossed the door's threshold and he started seeing Rebels round the corner, he broke cover and squeezed the trigger with all of his might.
The beam of bright green, super-heated plasma that shot out of his newly acquired alien weapon was as thick around as a basketball, belying its small barrel, and hot enough to melt steel, so when it smashed into the first unlucky rebel who, like all of his friends, wore patchwork armor and had no energy shields to speak of, he was flash-cooked and burned absolutely black. His clothes and armor were melted onto his body and the beam carved through his chest and kept going, killing two more rebels that couldn't dodge the beam, and grievously injuring three others that tripped over their newly dead comrades, before they all, out of fear and out of sanity, dived for cover. The heat-gauge jumped up to halfway between ready to use and dead to the world - as that was what John was assuming - and the fact that the grip wasn't crushed under his intense strength told John that this thing was made out of some sturdy stuff.
The firefight with the Rebels, especially when the Marines joined in with their own plasma rifles, essentially equated to the appetizer, to the fight with the E-SIGMA's main course. John and the Marines literally melted through the Rebels with ease, thanks not to their superior numbers or tactics, but to the Marines' primal fear for their lives, and the alien weapons they'd appropriated for themselves. When the SIGMA arrived, John instantly shifted his still-firing weapon onto the primary threat, carving a path of superheated destruction in his wake, leaving the concrete walls melted and bright red.
The SIGMA took a two second blast of plasma straight to the chest before he dived out of the way and into cover. John ordered the Marines to focus on the rebels while he took on the SIGMA, and he shifted his focus onto burning away the SIGMA's cover while he ordered an idle Marine to retrieve him another rifle, and put it on his back. John felt the metallic clamp just as the SIGMA realized what he was doing, broke cover, and fired wildly at John. John's plasmafire shattered his shields and slammed into his shoulder plate full-force, turning it bright red from the heat. John's own shields took fire but he was far better off than the SIGMA, who took a page out of John's book and tackled his way through a wall to get out of John's way.
"Keep fighting!" John couldn't let the SIGMA regroup, so with that order, he barreled through the door to the armory and sprinted after the SIGMA, running parallel to the blue dot and smashing through walls to keep up with him, his plasma rifle held in one hand and spitting a continuous stream of fire, and a circular Hardlight shield projecting from the other hand, taking the force of impact from the walls so his own shields wouldn't.
John and the SIGMA left destruction in their wake, and within seconds had smashed their way outside. With most - if not, all - of the Rebels down at ground zero helping with the excavation and emergency search and rescue, John and the SIGMA had a lot of space to themselves and a lot of ground to fight upon. They kept running parallel to each other, the SIGMA took more fire but himself fired at John, his bullets beating John's shields down to a quarter strength, as John's rifle neared its limit. In the brief instants John had to get a good look at the SIGMA, he saw a horrifying sight - the SIGMA was indeed wearing Titan armor, not a patchwork suit or something cobbled together, the man was wearing his Spartan plates. It wasn't a SIGMA Rebel, it was a Rebel SIGMA, a traitor.
I have to find out why. I need to stun him! John thought hurriedly, before he made a snap-decision and came up with the best course of action. "Cassidy, find me this thing's power cell, now!" John shouted as the rifle clicked on overheated, and all of the parts extended outwards, exposing its heat-sink to the open air and venting the whole thing.
Cassidy highlighted what it concluded to be the rifle's power cell just as John threw it like a javellin at the SIGMA. He predicted the SIGMA would halt his movement and dive the opposite way, and the SIGMA didn't disappoint - it was an instinctual reaction. John quick-drew his magnum and took aim with one hand, the world slowed down as he lined up the barrel of his pistol with the plasma rifle's heat-sink, he fired twice and the white-hot, glowing heat sink shattered. However, a testament to the opponent he was fighting, what he banked on didn't occur. The One almost instantly deduced what John was attempting when his back hit the ground, so as John was lining up his shot, the One drew his own pistol and lined up his own. What happened next was something almost out of myth: John's bullets shattered and destroyed the glowing-hot heat sink, and the SIGMA's bullets slammed into the butt of the gun, the result being that the gun spun out of control and away from its original intended target. In less than a second, the destroyed heat-sink showered the air with its nearly-slagged material, completely missing the power cell and failing to detonate the weapon.
Upon seeing his plan fail, John reacted in a few milliseconds, whipping his pistol back over to the One, steadying his aim, and firing. In what could only be described as a battle of reaction times, the One, still at the disadvantage, too shifted his aim to John, knowing that the only way to survive was to attempt the impossible. John had fired twice, meaning he either had fourteen or fifteen rounds left in his gun, whereas the One had only fired once - meaning he either had as many or one more bullets than John. Given his weakened armor integrity and recovering shields, he couldn't let a single bullet get past his defenses - it would weaken him to the point where winning the inevitable physical confrontation would be that much more difficult. The One's targeting systems kicked in, tracing John's gun and giving him a trajectory, simultaneously giving him his own line of sight and his own bullet's trajectory. He saw John squeezing the trigger, he adjusted his aim for lost time, and fired.
Were anyone else watching, what happened next would happen so fast that it would have been a literal blink-and-you-miss-it moment. John and the One each emptied their magazines, their bullets sailing through the meagre distance between them with pinpoint accuracy, but not a single one of them hit their opponent. In those blisteringly fast moments that only the SIGMAs were able to properly perceive, they saw exactly what happened: The bullets soared through the air and impacted eachother. Thanks to the prone One's aiming, he either outright halted or deflected the bullets fired by John; the veteran super-soldier shot the child-soldier's bullets out of the air.
Neither of them had even a microsecond to marvel at the One doing what, by all rights, should have been feasibly impossible, because when the display was over, John clicked on empty, but the One had just one more bullet in his gun. The One's final bullet hit John's shields right between his eyes, causing his head to snap back for an instant. The One scrambled to his feet as John's head snapped back, the Two clamped his gun to his thigh and charged forward, parrying a straight punch from the one by back-handing it away, before John launched his own fist forward towards the One's throat. The One held an advantage over John in the armor category - his were raw armor plates, with a density and strength behind them that even John in his power armor would have trouble breaking through them, meaning that John would only be hurting himself if he hit them, so instead, he targeted the only true weakness the SIGMA in front of him had.
John's fist slammed into the One's throat, collapsing his windpipe. The man clenched his jaw and crouched down low, before leaping upwards, grabbing John by his midsection and sending them both arcing towards the ground. John, however, clearly remembered his enemy's fondness for the ground - and the moment he confirmed that the man was indeed trying to take it there again, he acted. John ripped both feet out from underneath the man's knees and scissor-kicked, his legs locking around the man's head. As fast as he could, the Two grabbed ahold of both of the One's arms and lifted with his lower body, hauling the one over him in a leg-enabled suplex.
The One's head smashed into the ground, John heard the sound of glass cracking. Keeping a hold of the One's arms, John let go with his feet and spun around, reaching a kneeling position with the One's arms crossed painfully behind his back. John stood up and slammed his foot into the One's back - visibly denting his armor and causing the One to grunt in pain. John pressed forward with his leg and pulled back with his hands, hearing the one of the One's arms snap as it was dislocated - stunning the One long enough for John to talk.
In a deep voice and an extended cry that almost seemed to silence the entire base, John bellowed "WHY?!" With all of the air in his lungs.
The SIGMA, whose body burned from the plasma strikes and whose skin was slowly swelling from the physical assault given to him, slowly turned his head to the side, to get a look at John. The once proud golden visor was now visibly cracked, with some pieces chipping off and ruining the previously awe-inspiring visage. The One's breathing slowed by a fraction - as if he suddenly realized something that had been eluding him earlier.
"Oh my god…" A slightly garbled, but definitely feminine voice broadcast from mangled and damaged helmet-speakers, only slightly surprising John, who didn't care one way or another what gender this person was, or how Titan armor was intentionally built androgynously, so as to hide gender - she'd still turned coat, and he didn't know why. "I thought he was lying… They actually did it… You're -" She pushed backwards, managing to cause John to stumble just enough to rip one arm from his iron grip, shearing a surprising amount of black paint from her vambraces.
Using the dislocated arm still in John's grip as a pivot, the One swung herself around and smashed her good fist into John's helmeted face, before following it up with a knee to the gut. Despite hardening in response to the physical trauma, a debilitating amount of force was still sent through John's muscle suit, stunning the Two long enough for the One to grab his forearm and pull as she savagely kicked him in the side of his ribcage. His grip slacked just enough for her to rip her dislocated arm out of his hand, and with a roundhouse kick to the back of his knee, she bought herself enough time to forcibly set her arm. Her Titan suit immediately recognized the injury and in less than a second it had the arm properly set, undoing any mistakes she had made in her haste, and ready to fight again, but by that point, John had recovered, and the boy was livid. Fourteen years of rage, frustration, sorrow, endless training, reflexes, and skill, all released in one ear-splitting roar.
Before the One could blink, John was on his feet, lungs still straining to maintain his bellowing scream, his fist hurtling towards her face as fast as he could possibly make it. Even to her augmented reflexes and perception, it was difficult to follow, and even more difficult to react to. She attempted to intercept the blow, but wasn't able to halt it, or even slow it down enough to mitigate the damage. His fist caught in her hand and pushed it back, smashing it into her visor - further damaging it, severely denting the helmet, and sending her head reeling backwards. Before she could react, John grabbed the weakened sections of her chestplate and, with a furious roar, tore it from its joints, destroying the sensitive machinery held within and exposing her skin suit. John smashed the nearly useless chestplate into the One before he delivered a debilitating front-kick, sending her skidding backwards.
Quick as a flash, the One turned her backwards momentum into an advantage and leapt into it to gain some distance between the two. She rolled onto her hands and sprung upwards - landing on the wall with a loud thump and a visible dent in the concrete surface, her own suit-mounted thrusters pulsing briefly so as to make certain she didn't simply burst through the wall. Her head sprung upwards and her eyes locked onto John's helmet's soulless red plates. Before gravity could truly take ahold of her, she pushed off of the wall with all of her strength, managing to finally shatter it with the raw power behind her augmented legs. John was in a defensive stance before she could blink, but nothing he could do could halt her momentum, so when she hit him, she tackled him to the ground. She unleashed a furious assault on his helmeted face, visibly denting the helmet's plates, scraping off the light-absorbing paint and breaking skin on John's face.
After three powerful blows, John caught one of her fists in his own and wrapped his arm around hers, locking her to him. He wrenched backwards, his free hand smashing into her head as it was pulled forward with the rest of her, resulting an audible metal-on-metal clang, similar to a hammer hitting a nanvil. She reacted fast enough for someone taking multiple impacts equivalent to the force of a jackhammer to her face, repeatedly. She grabbed John's other arm with her free one, and planted both feet to each of John's sides. With a loud yell, she hauled John to his feet and spun once before she let him go and he flew into the wall she'd leapt off of, crashing straight through it and into a desk, which crumbled to pieces upon impact.
John sprang to his feet, and saw the One charging him, a knife in her hand, held in a reverse grip. He scowled and with little more than a thought and a brief gesture, generated a small hardlight buckler that curved around his left forearm, while his right hand ripped his own knife from the sheathe on his harness. The pale blue light of his hardlight shield cast the two of them in an ominous, almost ghastly glow in the otherwise pitch black former armory. With the dust and debris from their chase and their re-entrance still handing thick, the two were relying on equal parts instinct, senses, and technology to make out the other.
John deflected one blow of her knife with his shield and slashed at her with his own. She targeted any part of him she could get - again taking advantage of his large lack of any true armor plating - and he targeted the weakness he'd ripped off of her. Their knives clashed with muted clangs, chipping pieces off of each other and sending jarring vibrations down their arms. The One utilized her superior experience with a blade to keep John off balance, each attack flowing into another, some stunning with powerful electric shocks, some actually managing to breach his defenses and cut small grooves in his muscle-suit, which mitigated a great deal of damage by hardening, but was unable to avoid everything.
For what John lacked in battlefield experience with blades, however, he made up for with raw physical power and superior reflexes. The One was able to make several noticeable gashes on his suit, many piercing it temporarily and managing to cut into his flesh, drawing up rivulets of blood and causing brief but intense pain through a series of electric shocks, revealing to him that the warrior wasn't using an ordinary knife - she was using one specifically designed for people with ironclad defenses; even if she didn't create a deep injury, the electric shock would cauterize the wound and stun him long enough for her to attack again, to say nothing of what happened to his body every time he was shocked with dozens of milliamps of electricity. This revelation led John to conclude she had likely taken up the knife after seeing how well John was holding up to her physical assault. John brought up his buckler to catch a downward stab, catching the knife firmly. He switched from a defensive reverse-grip to an offensive forward grip in less than a second, and swung the blade upward, slamming it into her exposed stomach and ripping it back out before her suit could clamp down on the blade and break it. Three times he managed to stab her before she caught his knife-hand with her off hand, bringing the two into a raw physical struggle.
"WHY?!" John bellowed for the second time, as he felt her trying to overcome his muscle-suit's defenses and crush his hand.
"We are not ready, SIGMA!" The woman responded, equally as fiercely. "We are not ready to lead ourselves! Not on this stage! We need a guiding hand! We need time to learn!" She grunted, as John began making progress in their struggle, slowly putting her on the backfoot. "YOU are proof! Proof we are just NOT READY!"
With an angry grunt, John threw his forehead into hers, finally shattering her visor and revealing the upper half of her face to him and, more importantly, his suit's sensory suite, which was almost immediately activated and manned by Cassidy. He almost didn't even notice that he'd managed to injure himself with that hit - blood started pouring down his forehead.
"Why are you FIGHTING ME?!" John screamed, his voice reverberating inside his helmet and deeply penetrating her exposed ears.
"Because you'll ruin everything!" The SIGMA abruptly let go of her knife, causing John's left hand to rocket upwards and the knife to tumble downwards - right back into her waiting grip. She immediately stabbed upwards, piercing John's skin suit and sending thousands of volts of electricity directly into his system. She managed to get one more stab in before John yanked the hand she still had clenched to the left, knocking her knife out of the way of his core. John kicked at her gut, feeling her augmented stomach rupture from the force of his kick, almost immediately prompting the severely injured SIGMA to drop her grip and fall to the ground as she began bleeding internally.
Quick as a flash, belying his labored functions and multiple injuries, John had his knife sheathed and his backup-plasma weapon shouldered. She was now well and truly at his mercy, and his question still stood, "why?! Why did you desert - why are you fighting me - WHY ARE YOU MAKING ME KILL YOU?! I AM NOT YOUR ENEMY!"
The SIGMA shook her head, "no…" She croaked, hand cradling her injured stomach, "you're just a drone… Blindly following orders." She slowly lifted her head, her pale blue eyes locking onto the soulless red plates of John's helmet.
"Don't do it." John could see her muscles tensing and her face settling into a scowl, she was going to try and attack, to provoke him into killing her. "Surrender, I can help you." He didn't know what was wrong with her, why she was fighting him, but if she tried to attack him again, he wouldn't hesitate to incinerate her, and they both knew this.
"All I'll tell you… Is that it's you… You and your generation. You aren't SIGMAs. I didn't believe him, I thought he was lying… A government that considers this kind of cruel decision is not one that is fit to rule. SIGMAs who do not even know what they are have no right to defend." Without further delay, she jumped forwards.
John, in a fraction of a second, clenched the gelatinous grip of the rifle, a fist-sized beam of plasma burst out from the barrel and collided with her exposed head. In less than a second, the heat stunned her into falling to the ground, hands covering her plasma-covered face as it ate away at her skin. John didn't let up, and in ten seconds, burned his way through her nanotube-reinforced skull and turned her brain to ash and smoldering meat.
John slowly lowered the weapon, taking just a few seconds to take in the dead augmented warrior before him. It hadn't really clicked for the child-soldier until right now that he had actually been fighting a SIGMA! More shocking was that he'd won! This was a true SIGMA One, and despite how thoroughly trashed it was, she had the Titan armor, the reflexes, the strength, the skill and the tenacity to prove it, not to mention the beating she gave him. It wasn't a Rebel knock-off, it was an honest-to-god SIGMA One, and he'd killed her.
Unfortunately for him, his victory was not without cost. "Cassidy. Status report," he said with a clenched jaw.
"John, you can't take another fight like that, not so soon after waking up from augment surgery." Cassidy instantly responded, "her knife shocked with fifty milliamps, those attacks fried some of your nanites and they formed three clots - your wounds won't heal fast until the rest of the nanites fix these internal injuries. You're incredibly lucky you haven't stopped breathing, but your heart is fibrillating, and its everything your nanites can do to try and force it to coordinate and keep it from killing you. You're suffering from shock and light-moderate blood-loss, at least a quarter of your body is bruised or, you have severe whiplash, and multiple pulled muscles and lacerations."
John nodded, "okay." He said, swallowing some blood and shaking his head; he turned back to the armory, "Cassidy, get in touch with the Admiral and tell him to start sending down the evac shuttles. Also tell him that the enemy has SIGMA Operatives, two confirmed KIA and one MIA. Request a -" His motion tracker lit up with, showing a sea of red behind him. He whipped around saw outside a sea of bodies, loosely garbed in patchwork red and blue clothing, all two meters and with the builds of olympic athletes.
"John, what are -"
"Call in a HoG strike, low yield! This base needs to be wiped from the planet!" John didn't like assuming things, but with an abundance of alien tech on this base, it wasn't a stretch to think that other Rebel bases on the planet had similar tech, and his eyes didn't lie - every one of the armed new arrivals looked exactly the same, down to the blue eyes and surgical scars. If these aliens had access to ionized plasma weapons - which in and of itself was eons beyond anything the Alliance could cook up these days - it too wasn't a stretch to think that they were advanced in other areas of science as well, medical sciences included. Given how dug in the Rebels were on this planet, that meant they'd been here for a while, and had likely found a treasure trove of alien technology, and had time to study and reverse-engineer it all.
So, while it was something of a stretch, John would defend to the death that he was facing an army of cloned SIGMAs, which was anyone's worst nightmare. An unending clone of nigh-undefeatable soldiers with no self-preservation instinct would quite literally turn any battle on its head. John did consider that he would fare much better against these people - as they had no armor or apparent protection to speak of - but he did not want to test his skills so thoroughly.
I need carry a kiloton grenade, for situations exactly like this. John thought, as he sprinted back to the armory, taking fire from the clones as he did.
He took the route he'd made during his fight with the traitor SIGMA, and was back with the Marines in an instant. There were very few rebels left, and John's appearance finally inspired them to cut their losses and run for their lives, John let them, now wasn't the time to fight, now was the time to retreat for all of their worth.
"Marines, on me! We've got to get out of here!" He called out into the short-wave, he didn't care who was listening. "Cassidy, get me a route out of here that will keep me away from the enemy!" He charged into the armory and took point, the Marines followed him as he took the back way out, Cassidy having learned from his earlier stunts and showing him what was truly the most direct route - a straight line outward. Half of the walls were already broken, so neither he nor the Marines had to pause, but the final few John had to smash through, to light protest from Cassidy, who needlessly reminded John that, if he pushed himself any further, with the injuries the SIGMA had inflicted, he could be looking at permanent damage or death.
John and the newly deceased SIGMA's destructive actions had a partially intended side-effect, which John took full advantage of the moment all of the Marines were out of harm's way. The structural integrity of the building was severely weakened, it was still sound, but a strong enough explosion could level the whole place, and bury everyone - such as the clones rushing inside to give chase - inside. John ripped a grenade from his vest, pulled the pin, and hurled it as hard as he could. His strength didn't fail him, and just as its timer hit zero, it reached the remaining plasma rifles in the armory and exploded. The resultant detonation was so heavy and so destructive that it shook the very ground beneath their feet, killing everyone in the armory, and destroying the building itself, burying everyone else.
John didn't wait to see the fruits of his labors, he looked to the east and saw the path Cassidy laid out for him - it led him to a hole that had been carved into the Rebels' defences hours ago. The clones were to the west, and were still advancing - they didn't even care about their fallen allies.
Not good. Thought the SIGMA, "fall back!" He shouted, turning and firing at the advancing hordes as the Marines stormed past him.
A maskless Quarian in a forest-green suit stopped next to him, "what are we looking for?!" He demanded, out-of-breath.
Before John could speak, down from orbit came three massive troop-transport shuttles. Their fire-trails lit up the afternoon sky with bright plumes of smoke as they rocketed through the air, towards the evac-point, a few air-and-space fighters escorting them to their destination.
"Wherever those things landed! I'll be right behind you!" John responded, shoving the Quarian away to give him a bit of motivation. "Now RUN!" Some of the clones were taking cover to shoot at the SIGMA II and his Quarian compatriot, while others were picking up speed and rushing the two. "MOVE!" John couldn't maintain this position, but he couldn't just blast past the Quarian, so he took a third option and hauled the Quarian onto his shoulders in a fireman's-carry. Scant second passed as John sprinted as fast as he could towards the holes in the Rebel base's fortifications, he dropped the Quarian with little fanfare and pointed in the direction of Cassidy's E-Beacon. "Just keep going that way! You'll find what you're looking for!"
"And what about you?!" The stubborn Quarian demanded, as he hauled himself to his feet.
"I'll buy you as much time as I can, now move! That's an order!" John roared, ripping the plasma rifle and his own rifle from his back and shouldering both, it might be something of a stupid tactic, but John needed as much firepower as he could bring to bear, and he was strong enough to control an assault rifle's recoil, single-handedly, and was skilled enough to aim it precisely with his off-hand. It was out of necessity that the plasma rifle was in his strong hand, he needed to aim that one manually, whereas the assault rifle was synced with his HUD and could more or less be aimed haphazardly.
The 'V' shaped hole in the massive walls the rebels had surrounded their base with served as John's bottleneck. This exit was the only way the clones could get out without taking a massive detour, and as such, they couldn't run through it and dodge John's weaponsfire. As John fought against these 'men' with all of his might, he mentally took down everything he could learn about them, the most important of which being that they seemed stupid. They advanced and fought with a surprising amount of skill, but they were dumb, they acted like drones, as if they knew they were clones and knew that if one of them fell, two could replace him. They didn't have shields or any kind of protective armor, just patchwork red and blue clothing, and they went down very easily when they were hit by either of John's two weapons. Their own weapons were paltry compared to John's own, they jammed and misfired frequently, but they spat lead at higher velocities and faster rates than most standard-issue models, which meant that John's shields were stressed further and faster whenever they got their shots off on him.
John's conclusions slowly began to form as he applied any of the admittedly bad intel to the situation. This base was more likely to be the location of the cloning facilities than the alien armory, given the fact that there were more clones than there were plasma weapons, and given how drone-like they were and how marginally effective they were in combat, their training didn't come from brain or memory augmentations, but rather from muscle memory donated from the base - who himself was most likely a SIGMA, which explained the surgical scars on the clones' bodies, as no one knew augmentation procedures like SIGMAs did.
John crouched down to one knee and shoved his assault rifle in the crook of his left leg as he fired with the plasma rifle in his right hand. With his left hand, blindingly fast, John ejected the magazine from the Human weapon, tossed it aside, dove into his tactical vest, retrieved a new magazine, slapped it inside, and had a round chambered and the weapon back in hand and ready to be fired.
"Cassidy, where is that HOG Strike?!"
"The Admiral's giving me a hard time!" It responded, "But I have an idea, I'm speaking to Captain Shepard of the - Oh no…"
"What?" John growled, annoyed to no end by the AI's tendency to speak as if she had the time to do so. He crouched behind his cover from a sudden wall of gunfire, waiting for his shields to recover so he could slow the clones' advance again.
"SIGMA!" One of the Marines cried into the radio; with the roar of gunfire and the screams of men in pain, John couldn't tell if it was a Human or a Quarian.
"What?!" John broke cover and fired wildly at the approaching horde, they slowed down but didn't stop - for all of their faults, they were learning, case in point being them using their sheer force of numbers and the corpses of their dead as meat shields.
"We found the other guy!" Shouted the Marine on the comm, just as John heard a distant sonic-boom, one he instantly recognized as the sounds of a jet breaking the sound barrier.
John whipped around and saw one of the troop transport shuttles rocketing back towards the sky, a missile following it, doggedly overcoming all of its evasive maneuvers and breeching its defenses. John knew what would happen before it actually occurred - modern anti-air missiles were two stage detonators, the first detonation was just powerful enough to shatter the vessel's shields, the second was what actually took the ship down. The shuttle's left engine exploded and it began spiralling out of control - John sprinted away the moment it became apparent that it was hurtling towards him. He predicted it would hit the hole in the fortifications, and if it didn't seal it up, it would at least delay the clones for a while, giving him enough time to sprint towards the evac-point.
John set his jaw in determination, as he sprinted towards the evac-point. He had another fight ahead of him, but with how his body was holding up after the last one, he wasn't certain if he could properly win this one. He would need a game changer, but the only one he had could kill him - he had been refraining from going down this route specifically because he didn't know what he would find at the end of the road. His augmentations had changed everything about him, and while he was comfortable enough in his body to force himself to start moving and fighting, there was just one thing he didn't want to use. Unfortunately for John, he no longer had the luxury of choice, he had a mission to complete, and he had a SIGMA he had to defeat. Conventional melee combat wasn't an option, but he had one unconventional weapon that he knew would be outside of the SIGMA's A-S-Warfare plans.
As he thundered across the ground, his feet leaving visible divots in the dirt, he gave his AI his solemn order, "Cassidy, activate my biotic amps."
A/N:
So, I think I've said this before, but If I haven't, right now, after that fight, is the best time to get this off of my chest - my dream, the story I've always wanted to fight, is a sci-fi/fantasy series that essentially reads like the literary equivalent to Dragonball Z. Impossibly powerful individuals fighting even stronger opponents, with the scale just growing and growing and growing with every confrontation. From small bouts that end up leveling a house or two, to titanic duels that smash cities, alter the environment, and leave scars across continents, so large that they are visible from space. Drawing from sources such as Metal Gear's fantastic melee fights, the Matrix, anything by Monty Oum, and, of course, Dragonball, I've always been the biggest fan of what essentially equated to supermen cutting loose, and what happens when they do.
And, unfortunately, there is a reason I haven't been able to do that with the WarVerse - which, as you all may recall, I've described as being essentially a proving grounds for concepts from my own stories.
You see, the one and only thing about the WarVerse that has killed me with every word is what I did to perform this experiment - I took my universe and stripped away all of its fantasy elements, inadvertently creating a Halo rip, but explaining that story again isn't not the point of this A/N. What this strip did was essentially limit my action sequences to gun battles which, while fun, just aren't that much fun to write. There are only so many ways to write 'he aimed his gun and he killed him', but there are countless ways to write... Well, any kind of melee confrontation, really, though my favorite is indeed a good-ol'-fashioned fist fight. The only problem is, that doesn't really happen in modern warfare - not that often, anyways. And in fictitious warfare stories, whenever it does happen, it ends up feeling forced, or rushed, and no one ever really has any time or patience to have fun with it.
That being said, now that John's up and at 'em, and I've begun to establish Jorell as more of an engineer as opposed to a fighter, I'm hoping to use them [and the third supporting protagonist] and their skill-sets as a way to spice up the action in the upcoming battles.
This chapter (and, you guessed it, the one coming up) was my first real practice writing a fight that managed to weave itself believably into the setting. They didn't simply forsake their ranged weapons, they simply weren't in any position to use them, and were fighting to regain that position, whilst simultaneously trying to keep their opponent from also regaining that position.
I tried - oh boy did I try - to make it as realistic as I could, to try and make certain the fantastical inspirations were cleverly hidden or removed entirely.
Of course, I say that, and I made a rather blatant use of the 'Shoot the Bullet' trope, but I justify that both with the skill I've shown the SIGMAs to possess, and with the Rule of Cool trope. I mean... Really, my favorite part in Screwattack's Deadpool/Deathstroke fight was at the beginning, when they shot eachother with uzis, and both of them shot the spray of bullets out of the air. It was freakin' awesome!
I had, and still have, so many other ideas to put in for this fight alone. The chapter itself was done, from a drafting/editing standpoint, several months ago, but I've been adding and taking away from it so much and so often that the original 8 or 9 thousand word chapter turned into a 13K monstrosity. I literally had to stop myself from going any further, for fear that it would have dragged on too long. (Kind of like this Author's Note! Hahaha.)
But I digress.
The point of this A/N is to explain why, after thirty four chapters and barely a third of the story, I suddenly pulled an extended fist-fight scene out of nowhere, when typically those are reserved for the end. Obviously - grudgingly - due to the setting, this won't be a common occurrence; I could go into detail as to why melee fights work in some settings and not others, but I don't want to ramble, and I've said it before, and I'll say it again - I could go on forever about these things.
So, that out of the way, here's where you get a little bit of bad news. It'll only last about a week or two, but the story's going to take a brief break. For multiple reasons (none of which have to do with Fallout 4 coming out in two days, mind you.), but the primary ones being that I've been trying to edge my way into an EMT class, and haven't gotten any word as to when it will start other than 'soon' or 'we don't know yet'. I've got to get in touch with my LT and figure out what the deal is.
I've also got some BS at work I've got to deal with. Nothing job-threatening, but a lot of the people that essentially glue the place together are preparing to leave or move on, and with the ways the tides are turning, the place is getting ready to go downhill faster than... Er... I dunno, faster than the internet crashed when they released those new Star Wars trailers.
So, I've got to deal with that and make sure they don't think I'm one of the reasons the place is starting to go down the tubes, and I've got to start preparing contingencies in case I'm right and the place goes to shit like I think it will.
And... Okay, fine, Fallout 4 is coming out on Tuesday, and I'm pretty damn excited.
Though, significantly less so than I used to be. We seem to have something of a track record, this year, with big-name games failing to live up not to the hype, but to what they described themselves to be. Most recent example being Halo 5's ads claiming it to be some epic AWOL Masterchief vs Locke action, when it was really just a repeat of the scene in Halo 4, where the captain of the Infinity tried to have John arrested so they could go home and ignore the big bad, but you can check out my profile for my full rant on that.
Now, to extend a little bit on the Hiatus, I do have an idea about it that I might be willing to dedicate to. Given that the first third of the story will be wrapping up soon, I think I might keep releasing as usual up until that point, and then cut off for a week or two after that - that way, technically, you've been told a whole story, and are just waiting for the next part to begin, as opposed to being left on an ominous cliffhanger with an even more ominous release date for the resolution... But I don't know if I can feasibly do that right now.
My best advice would be to follow me on twitter -at-ProfFartBurger, I'm constantly over there, posting mini updates and chatting with fans.
'Till next time, folks!
-PFB