"Consider the nature of the Body. Not as a fighting unit. As an organism.
Individual components can accomplish much. But as they band together, those cells become something more. A greater system. A machine, infinite in its complexity. More powerful than any single component.
You live here in isolation, servants of The House Eternal. Bound by a duty that others of your kind may never know, or understand. But make no mistake: you form part of that larger whole.
A single Cell, serving a wider cause. Your fates, intertwined.
You are Tenno. Bound by the Void. Bound as one.
Know this, and you will never walk alone."
- Trainer, addressing the Tenno of the House Eternal.
The Tenno fell back into the ziggurat.
Kael backpedalled; the electric shield in his hands shuddering under the weight of incoming fire. Doric and Sara blazed shots over his shoulder. A Hyena tried leaping over the rim of the shield, skittering across the wall; only to be wrenched to the floor with a searing crack of Mirage's whip; legs scrabbling for purchase as it was wrenched off its feet. Volt blasted it with a surge of power from his finger-tips. It shrieked in synthetic pain, stricken.
Doric brought Atlas' mighty fist down upon it; a single savage slap. There it lay; imprinted in the stonework. Doric raised his other hand. The floor around it burst upward; sealing the corridor ahead of them shut; fusing the Hyena directly inside it; its front paw twitching plaintively.
That bought them a moment. They could hear a thousand feet scrambling across the surface of the ziggurat. Skittering like ants over an abandoned picnic. Soon they would choke the other entrances, surging inside. If the Tenno fell, then Central Elevator would be in Corpus hands.
More time. They had to buy more time.
Mesa stopped at the edge of the battlefield.
Most of the clearing was open field now. A ruinous moonscape of craters carpeted with broken drones and littered dead. The ziggurat itself was a heaving blur of drones. Its surface teemed with their numbers; shimmering and shivering like a hive.
Corpus infantry established a careful perimeter; letting the proxies exhaust themselves as they continued to pile into the temple in industrial quantities. A wall of them lay between her and her Cell; establishing plasma mortars and marshalling an array of short range artillery Moa.
So intent were they on securing the ziggurat that they never thought to look behind them. Nobody paid Isolde any attention as Mesa strode across the smoking clearing; her cloak flitting and snapping in the wind behind her. Her hands extended out by her sides, palms upraised. On she strode: a deliberate, even pace. Her targeting system mapped targets calmly; logging targets as the muscles of her frame tensed. Her forearm glowed in anticipation. A small mote of light appeared before her; circling her. Her index fingers twitched, twice.
The Regulators spun free of their elbow mountings with a metallic snap; locking smoothly into Mesa's palms.
The closest Corpus spun around, caught flat-footed by the unexpected sound behind them.
Mesa cocked her head to one side; a wordless sneer.
Giving the Corpus just enough time to soil themselves.
Showtime.
Atop the ziggurat; Doric's summoned Titan mewled in frustration as Hyena models pounced from all sides; latching on and biting deep with plasma incisors. It roared, swatting one or two aside; before the Void's hold gave out. The golem fell apart; an avalanche of cascading rock that tumbled freely down the ziggurat; sending many of the Hyena screeching to their deaths.
The Tenno looked up in unison.
"Not good." Sara grimaced.
"For once we agree." Doric locked a new magazine into the top of his Soma rifle. Empty magazines cluttered the floor, vying for space with steaming casings.
Kael was too focused on the drones flooding in from the other entrances; swamping the inner annex before them. There was no end to them.
Warframes did not tire. Their muscle was adaptive Technocyte; their skin hardened sword-steel. Yet there was only so much power a Tenno could draw upon, without rest; allowing that conduit to breath, even if just for a moment. He raised a hand to blast another knot of charging Moa. The fizzle of power was pathetic.
He drew his machete once more. It was notched and pitted; a sorry, broken thing. It would have to do.
The Tenno met the drones head one; surging into the swarm; blades biting, fists flashing. Rock crunched against metal and sparks flew; as geysers of coolant painted the walls in great splashing arcs.
A desperate last stand, against odds they had not seen since The Old War.
Isolde was amongst them before the Corpus noticed her. Before the Regulators sang their murderous song. They were ornate pistols, meticulously engineered; carved with Orokin precision.
With Orokin precision they found their mark; sweeping from one direction to the next; criss-crossing before Mesa. Bodies fell. Drones were wrenched from the sky; blown asunder. Around and around she spun, dancing between them; sidestepping bodies as they toppled by. The bloodied rag tied about her waist soon found company in the ground around her.
A dance of death. A murderous waltz. Mesa twirled and wove through the rank and file; the gun-kata guided by the Void itself. Shaping her movements, weaving her from harm; her aim snapping from one target to the next. The Regulators screamed at fever pitch. Then they snapped back into their moorings; steaming hot smoke as the Void released its furious grip.
To linger was death. She was one amidst a thousand. It was move and kill, or stay and die.
Mesa leapt high into the air; a conflicting light show of beams chasing her though the air. She rolled smoothly into a crouch; leapt again, drawing the Pyrana and nikana smoothly. They too found a rhythm of their own. The Pyrana gnashing out; punching crewmen off their feet. The blade, opening stomachs and removing the limbs of anyone who dared close the gap. Move and kill. Kill and move. Again and again she leapt; raining a storm of shots down upon the army as she danced between them.
Isolde ripped through the foe, blitzing her way up the stairs.
Corpus cursed their luck with thinly disguised panic. Weapons inexplicably jammed. An invisible force took a hold of energy cells and snapped them free; or scrambled the targeting matrices of the drones as they thrilled at the sight of a such an outnumbered target. And yet their shots were confounded by a force unseen; often finding their allies who screamed as they were cut down.
The Corpus tried to rush her, to knock the flowing gunfighter off her feet. If the Pyrana did not find them; the nikana certainly did. Men fell in component pieces; wounds steaming in the cold air as they fell apart.
By rights it was a suicidal charge, born of anger and grief. It should not have worked. But surprise and power are two commodities that can make the difference between success or failure in any battle. The Board's army were turned, off-balance. She was but a single target, leaping and striking amongst them.
And yet for all its bravery, Isolde's charge would not work forever. For all of Mesa's lethal potency, numbers would decide the outcome. There were simply too many. When the Corpus army asserted itself, she would be worn down eventually.
Isolde didn't care. Her heart thrilled at the rush of combat. For years she had starved herself of the Warframe's embrace. Its power, its speed; its raw lethality. It was the vessel, and she the storm within.
On and on she killed; cutting a bloody swathe through the army that reeled from the killer in its midst.
The drones before the Tenno skittered and skidded on the floor. A new order swept the command line, wheeling them about. They surged back out of the annex as quickly as they had appeared.
"Anyone care to explain?" Sara asked aloud.
They heard the buzzing rattle of the Regulators long before they heard the laughter beyond.
They paused. It had been centuries since they had seen her.
"What are we waiting for?" Mirage looked at the others.
"Isolde made her decision long ago." Doric said, the wariness in his voice clear. "She fights for herself."
"And yet she's here." Kael replied, Volt nodding at them each in turn. "Same as Sara. Same as you."
"You never saw what she did." Doric cautioned him. "What she's capable of. She's a killer."
"We're all killers." Kael replied fiercely. "She just happens to enjoy it more than most."
Sara was already running, eager to see her friend once more.
Atlas' shoulders dipped in resignation.
"I hate it when she does that." Doric sighed.
They took off after her.
Drones above. Drones to the sides. A sea of Corpus below. Regulators flashed and clacked dry and locked back once more.
Isolde thought of Vern, broken and blinded on a machine shop floor; a nikana driven through his chest.
She snarled. The Pyrana snarled with her.
Odds be damned. Let them come. She'd bury them all.
Her rage blinded her. The Void's protection eased, if only for a split second.
The lapse in concentration cost her dearly. A dozen bolts slammed into her from all directions. Mesa twisted and spun; shields fizzling. Blood splattered the steps below her; Technocyte knotted itself to seal the trauma. Transference feedback spiked. Isolde felt the animal pain as her own. She screamed; the Frame shivering in agony as she rolled onto her back.
The Pyrana was still in her hand; defiantly seeking targets. A wall of drones swarmed up toward her. Isolde hissed, taking aim.
A twisting ball of curling light speared through their midst before she had a chance to fire.
Then a shape of blinding speed dove past her; a storm of electric power pulsing from it. Boulder after boulder tumbled by her either side, slamming into the army beyond.
Mirage appeared above her. Isolde froze; blinking up at the hand extended to her.
"On your feet!" Sara roared. "There's a battle to win!"
Mesa clasped Mirage's wrist.
Pohld the Helmsmen glanced back from his console as he eased forward on the throttle. He was a mousy fellow, with a jittery disposition that stood at odds with his focus at the helm.
"Can I just note for the record, before we get started? This is a terrible idea."
"Truly terrible." Teico nodded sagely.
"Awful." Stren agreed, before nonchalantly flicking a switch on his panel. "Weapons armed."
"If you all think this is a terrible idea, why on Earth were you cheering?" Kelpo asked, aghast.
Stren's bushy eyebrows knitted as he jerked a thumb back at Telin, who was growing steadily more unsure of himself with each passing moment.
The haggard weapons officer offered a shabby shrug.
"Well... good speech, wunnit?"
Captain Theo Plun's memory was reliable, in the sense that he was detail orientated. He had been a naval officer for as long as he could remember, as long as he was permitted to remember, at any rate. There were certain contractual obligations which forbade him from recalling anything prior to his service. Still, he had an eye for these things. Knew how to read a battle, its ebb and flow. Had cultivated that innate sense of when a push was going their way, or when further commitment was required.
He understood deployments. Troop movements, logistics; these were his specialty. He had gone nose to nose with Grineer frontline pickets more than once in his career; marshalling ground forces as the war frigates exchanged slug after slug with the Grineer galleons.
Captain Plun looked down at his XO, Lieutenant Sel.
"Explain to me, in very simple terms, what is happening below."
Sel simply shook his head in amazement, the expression on his tattooed face utterly baffled.
By rights they should be winning. By rights the colony should be theirs now. Its people brought to heel, any semblance of resistance broken. Instead his army were tangled in a battle that gripped the Upper Tier. The rest of the colony lay in open anarchy, entirely unchecked. Every conceivable deadline had been missed. The Board had expectations of him. Expectations that he, Theon Plun, was failing to meet.
Further failure would not be tolerated.
Before Captain Plun could act, something caught the younger officer's attention.
"Sir, unidentified civilian barges moving toward the ziggurat at speed."
"What?!"
The holo-display told no tales. Two radar contacts, previously greyed out on surface scans as being mere civilian rif-raff, flared an angry red. They steadily beeped as they inched closer and closer to the heart of the battle.
The angry colouration of the display meant only one thing.
Weapon signatures detected.
In the heart of the Orokin Barge, Eythan Dax took a knee before the shadowy throne. The blood dripping from his broken nose had healed, but his armour was burnt and scarred. Its golden lustre was gone entirely. His cheeks burned in shame.
No Dax should ever leave their weapon behind. Even if instructed otherwise.
The room was dark. It was always kept this way. The only light came from the underlit pools of water that lined the edge of the chamber; their reflection danced high against the ceiling. That and the gold of the Dax honour guard that lined the chambers; long fluted halberds in their hands. Each were worthy warriors; hand picked and trained by Eythan himself over the centuries.
The Royal Guard of the House Eternal.
The Last Cadre.
A melodious voice drifted down at him from the shadows.
"You look worse for wear, Eythan Dax."
"An unexpected obstacle, my Lord." Eythan Dax's eyes were locked on the floor. "I dealt with it."
"And our message?"
Eythan thought of his prized sword. His eye twitched as he nodded.
"Delivered, as instructed."
An icy chuckle filled the air.
"Excellent. Now all we need do is wait."
"Have your men make ready. We're about to have guests, and they may not be polite."
Eythan Dax rose to his feet; one arm folded against his breastplate as he bowed.
"As you command, Lord Septimus."