Enemy Airspace
Sector Z / Lylat System
0700 Hours
The mission was simple: Find the enemy transports, and blast them. It would be Kyle's first full mission from start to finish. The human quickly mastered various piloting and dogfighting skills he'd need, but this would be the first time that he'd have to use them all at once. It was time to sink or swim.
The four Arwings continued in formation towards the target, Fox flew flight lead, Falco took the right wing, Krystal the left, and Kyle took a position above and behind Fox. A perfect diamond formation. After the first few simulations, the team voted that it would be best to take Slippy off the flight line and replace him with Kyle, simply because the human had better self-control in life-threatening situations.
The diamond closed in on the objective, knifing its way through the empty vacuum of space. It looked like an easy mission after all, the Arwing's scanners reading nothing in range except for the lone transport. But Kyle knew that technology could be fooled, and kept his head on a swivel looking for anything that could be unfriendly. As soon as the pilot glanced over his shoulder his grip tightened.
"Bandits! Brake Right!"
Coming in from above and behind his right shoulder Kyle watched as up to a hundred forty enemy fighters dove in for some easy kills. Not even bothering to confirm the human's call out, the Arwings turned right sharply, into the enemy attack. The seemingly suicidal move turned out to save the entire team from the initial attack by forcing the enemy to overshoot the Arwings, missing entirely and giving the team a strong position to counter attack.
"Good call out, Starfox: Engage at will!" Fox barked over the comms before the Arwings broke formation to engage the swarm of hostile fighters. Fox and Falco climbed performing a U-turn to slip into the enemy's rear from above while Krystal and Kyle did a Split S to attack from a lower position.
Falco got first blood as his lasers managed to hit their mark, destroying three fighters as he and Fox dived through their formation. Unfortunately, about twenty of the remaining fighters broke formation to avenge Falco's victims and quickly swarmed the bird's tail.
Krystal and Kyle had split up when they fired at the enemy formation, with the telepath going up through the formation while the human went inverted and pulled away after firing his burst. A few enemy fighters tried to match Kyle's maneuvers but simply failed to out turn the inverted Arwing, earning Kyle another few easy kills before the human spotted Falco's tailers.
"Falco, turn left and I can get a firing angle on them," Kyle ordered over the comm unit as he checked his rangefinder.
The bird quickly obeyed turning until he was at an 80-degree angle with the Human's flight path, baiting the enemy fighters to follow. The bandits obligated, only to be caught completely off guard by a perfectly lead burst from Kyle's Arwing.
The area was a frenzy of missiles and Blaster fire, no matter which direction the human looked, there was a surplus of hostile targets intending to blast him to debris. The stakes were at their highest, leaving no room for error. A slight miscalculation or brief moment of hesitation was fatal in a dogfight of this scale. Kyle had to be perfect just to survive.
Thankfully his inner warrior spirit and vast archive of human dogfighting experience flowed through his veins, his grip on the joystick remained solid and secure, unwavering and absent of fear. Something that no raw recruit had ever accomplished in the history of Lylat.
The Arwing dived and rolled aggressively after it's prey with determination and surgical precision the likes of with no one on Cornaria ever expected from a pilot so young and inexperienced. It was unnatural how a child miraculously possessed the instincts and experience of a legendary ace.
"They're starting to thin out!" Krystal announced triumphantly as her blasters scored several damning hits on yet another flight of enemy fighters.
"Good, we're breaking them. Keep up the pressure." Fox ordered as he rolled clear of enemy fire before sending the bandit his reply in the form of plasma.
Kyle acknowledged the order as he reversed course to re-engage any remaining hostiles in the "bowl." the main concentration of the dogfight. But with more targets turning cold and fleeing, Kyle switched to a support role, forming up with Falco as a wingman.
At least he was until a massive energy beam forced him to evade, even a glancing hit by a laser that size would destroy the Arwing instantly. Just when it couldn't get any worse Kyle's headset started to beep uncontrollably.
Missiles, lots and lots of missiles.
The new attacker seemed to teleport in front of him opening its wings and staring at him with many compound eyes.
Aperoid.
Swearing in both surprise and disbelief Kyle banked sharply to try and lose some of the missiles locked onto him.
"I thought the virus we gave the queen killed all of these blasted bugs!" Falco seemed to scream at the top of his lungs as he too did everything he could to shake missile lock.
"Must of missed one, just blast it!" Fox reasoned as he narrowly avoided getting hit with a missile.
"Be hell of alot easier if the thing wasn't spitting a fresh wave of missiles every half second!" Kyle snapped back as he pulled another split S, losing about half of the tailing missiles only to meet three fresh ones.
"Use the missile against it!" Krystal suggested noticing how a few of the missile trailing her broke of and began to track the space moth.
"Heat Seekers," Kyle realised, "If we make the Arwings go dark the missiles will track the largest heat source."
"How are we supposed to do that!?" Falco yelled as he rolled away from yet another missile.
"Get ready to cut power to everything but like support!" Fox ordered as the pilot's hand started to dance across his console.
"We'll have to make a sharp turn right before we cut power or the missiles will still collide with us drifting." Kyle warned as he too prepared to go dark.
Without warning he pulled back on the stick as hard as he could and cut the engine, Some of the missiles just continued blindly forward, but several of them peeled off and began to track the only large heat source: the Aperoid itself. Kyle smiled in satisfaction as the metal moth began to scream and flail as it died to it's own ordinance, finally detonating violently as whatever served as a heart for the thing was breached.
"Now if only mosquito repellent was that good at killing bugs. . ."
