I landed from the three-story-fall in a roll, using the momentum to launch myself into a run. Speed and surprise would be the key to victory.
T'vaoans are a special breed of kig-yar that evolved in and adapted to high-gravity environments. As such, they're far more physically capable than their more common relatives when placed in an environment with Earth-like gravity.
The Covenant deployed them in specialized groups as commandos and shock troopers, and even sometimes subordinated the command of other ground units to them in the place of Sangheili. Befitting their status, they carried better gear than most other Covenant infantry. Combat harnesses with smaller versions of the standard kig-yar energy gauntlet built in, carbines, needle rifles, beam rifles, and masks with sophisticated optics and sensors built in.
But their biggest advantage was their speed. T'vaoans have powerful legs that they can use to leap large distances and run up to speeds of forty-five miles an hour over flat, open ground.
They had their faults though. Like most kig-yar, they were still more akin to raiders than soldiers. They would run if they saw a fight as a losing battle and didn't have anybody to urge them forward.
I kept the cloak off as I ran through the grass, conserving the energy for when I would need it. Even if I did turn it on, any benefit would have been made pointless by the tall grass shifting around me as I moved through it quickly. The lensing field could make me invisible, but it couldn't hide how much of the grasses' mass was being displaced by my seven-foot-two body.
I could hear screaming as another one of the five remaining markers disappeared off my HUD as one of the markers representing a skirmisher passed over him. I adjusted course towards the man closest to me.
He'd come to stop, as a trio of skirmishers circled around him. The suit filtered out the sounds of gunfire and everything became quieter. The suit amplified the sound of the skirmishers relative to everything else. I could hear them squawking.
Call me crazy, but it almost sounded to me like they were laughing.
Like hunting down human beings was a game for them.
That just made me mad.
The three skirmishers didn't notice me as I got close. I had slowed my pace and changed my gait to a low stalking prowl, making sure to keep my head below the grass as I relied on the suit's sensors to guide me rather than my eyes.
I flickered into invisibility and came up right behind one. It was still squawking when I grabbed one of its shoulders with my left hand and clamped its beak shut with my right.
And then I twisted.
Without the suit, if it was just me, I could have broken its neck with just my augmented muscles. My MJOLNIR armor would have made the action even easier, but I still would have had to try.
I still would have had to put effort into it.
With the suit, twisting the t'vaoan's head around a hundred-and-eighty degrees took me no more effort than it would take you to flick away an insect.
I'm almost shocked by how easy it is.
These gray artificial muscles? Each cubic centimeter of muscle tissue can generate up to a maximum of four-hundred-and-fifty newtons of force and up to a maximum of ten-thousand G's of contractual acceleration.
Do you realize just how strong that is? A two-hundred pound man weighs in at just shy of nine-hundred newtons. It would take less than two cubic centimeters of this synth muscle to lift that man. Now keep in mind just how big I am, and that there's enough of this artificial muscle to wrap around my whole body and then some.
Yeah.
Now obviously I'm not exerting myself to that limit all the time, that would be insane. That's the absolute high-end of what I can do.
But, still.
I could kick cars clear across a two-lane road on a whim. I'm like Hercules' cyborg cousin.
It's important that both my augmented body and this suit are made of way tougher stuff than a normal human, or the force generated by the synth muscle would literally rip both me and the suit apart.
The other two skirmishers didn't notice their comrade go down. The man was spraying gunfire wildly all around him, not hitting anything but grass, dirt, and empty air, but he's making a lot of noise. Each shot rings out around a hundred-and-sixty decibels. A great distraction.
I pried a weapon out of the dead skirmisher's hands. A needle rifle. It's unusual grip felt uncomfortable in my hand, but it would do.
I bring the rifle up to take aim at the second skirmisher. It's just a few meters away, close enough that shooting through the dense green won't affect the trajectory of the projectile too much.
I can't see it through the grass but I know it's there. I tried to imagine its shape. I decided to aim low, towards the center of mass. I didn't want to take the risk of trying to line up a shot on the smaller target of its head.
I toggle the cloak and fade back into view right before I squeeze the trigger three times in quick succession. The first two shots land home, and when the third connects I'm met with the sound of a supercombine explosion. The result of the three Subanese crystal projectiles detonating together.
I see a spray of thick purple blood and a severed arm fly up above the grass for a fraction of a second, before it falls back down out of view.
It also alerts the third skirmisher. Something like that is pretty hard to miss.
I cloak again as it circles around the man who by now has run out of ammo. It's just three yards away when I see it, just barely, through the grass. The smooth surface of its helmet, its sharp beak, and the dark plumage that decorates its head.
It doesn't know I exist yet. Instead, it's winding up for a leap at the now defenseless man. It's crouching down, leg muscles contracting, getting ready to spring into a jump that could carry it eight yards with ease.
I slung the rifle across my back and put myself between the skirmisher and the man.
It leaps toward me.
I brace myself, one foot forward and one foot back. The cloak deactivates and the suit shifts into its armored state a half-second before the skirmisher collides with me.
I swear I can almost see its eyes go wide right before it slams into me like it's just leaped full force, face first into a brick wall.
The skirmisher's own strength becomes its enemy as it comes to an abrupt stop and bounces off of me.
Newton's third law; for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. I tank the hit, standing resolute as the force of the collision is overcome by the suit's armored state absorbing the impact. I don't even budge, my backfoot keeping me in place.
But the skirmisher crumples like a tin can, bones fracturing as it reels back. I lashed out one hand and wrapped it around its wrist and pulled it close as my other hand clenched into a fist, rocketing towards its head.
Its helmet might as well have not even existed for all the good it does. The blow shatters its skull and there's an explosion of blood and gray matter.
Behind me I could hear the man.
"What the hell?" His voice was quiet and filled with disbelief. I let the t'vaoan's corpse fall to the dirt as I turned my head towards him. He was quivering in fear.
I realized he was barely a grown man. A boy, maybe about sixteen or seventeen. Skinny, pale-skinned, and brown-eyed. There was a slight dusting of hair along his jaw and a tan-colored bucket hat on his head.
I took a step forward towards him and he cried out.
"Stay back! I'm telling you, stay back!"
Somewhere, it registers in my mind that his voice doesn't share the same accent that I'd heard in Klara's, but I paid it no mind.
I didn't have time to stay and chat, not that I could have. I pivoted and ran off further into the brush.
Bucket-Hat there would be fine as long as I could keep the enemies' attention on me.
I checked the map display and saw there were eighteen contacts left, which then reduced to seventeen when another burst of gunfire rang out. Another one of the men had died too, leaving their number down to five.
Save as many as you can, I thought.
Good news is that the rest of the birdbrains have realized they're down by three now.
Bad news is that most of them have given up the pursuit of the easy prey and were regrouping to deal with whatever was picking them off.
Most of them.
Running through the grass, I shot down two more with the needle rifle. A third tried to jump me, a blue energy cutlass grasped in its talon.
I side-stepped the attack. The t'vaoan landed gracefully before drawing a Nahle'hax pattern needler and opened fire. The suit tightened and shifted right before the needles hit my armored torso and shattered on contact, as they usually did against hardened targets.
It must have realized that its weapon was ineffective because it squacked something before turning to run. It didn't get far as I put three shots from my needle rifle into its back and it exploded in a supercombine.
I hear a scream and rush towards it. One of the men is pinned to the ground with a skirmisher on top of him. The two are struggling against each other. The man is trying to kick it off of him while it's got his arms pinned in its talons. The talons are bloody.
I yank the t'vaoan off the man by its leg. It lets out a yelp of surprise before I bring my foot down on its thigh, shattering the femur.
It starts squawking loudly, sounding out in pain.
I turn to look at the man.
I see something I'd seen too many times before.
The look in his eyes.
It's a look of pleading. Of someone who knows they're going to die but is begging not too.
He's gurgling and spitting up blood. His neck is colored arterial red as blood rushes out through a gaping wound, like a chunk had been torn out. He raises his right hand up at me, begging for help. His left goes to try and staunch the wound, but it's pointless. There's nothing I can do to help him.
I look back at the skirmisher. It's trying to crawl away from me. Its sharp beak is slicked red. It had torn out the man's throat with its jaws.
I lift it up by the front of its combat harness with one hand. It claws at me futilely. The swipes don't even leave a scratch on the suit.
"Kill it," the voice shouts in my head, filled with anger again.
The skirmisher is screaming by now. I can see on my tacmap that nine of its comrades are rushing towards me, coming to their comrade's aid.
I silence it by wrapping my free hand around its throat and start squeezing.
I crush its trachea and drop it back to the ground. It's friends will be on me in twenty-five seconds.
The man, he's gone by now. His eyes are still open, looking up emptily at the night sky.
I kneel down next to him. He's wearing green fatigues that are half-way to being soaked red. His body is weaponless but there's an old style fragmentation grenade at his belt. The kind that still uses a pin and striker lever rather than an activation switch.
I take it and close his eyes.
I'm sorry that I wasn't faster, I think silently.
I stood and turned back to the dying t'vaoan. It's weak now, too weak to even put up a pretense of fighting back. It's too busy choking as it tries and fails to suck in a breath through its collapsed throat.
I put the damn thing out of its misery before pulling the pin out of the grenade, making sure to keep the striker level from flying off and prematurely detonating.
Otherwise, it would be 'count to three and then throw'.
I pull the skirmisher's corpse over the grenade, using the weight of its body to keep the lever in place.
I've got ten seconds left until its nine buddies come into view.
And for those ten seconds it's quiet. The only sound is rustling in the grass.
I cloak, retreat a few meters away from the trap, and then wait.
The suit puts a counter on my HUD that ticks off the seconds for me.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five.
The rustling is getting louder.
Six. Seven. Eight. Nine.
I see them now, their guns are up and they're moving slowly. Cautiously.
There's a murmillo. An officer, carrying a beam rifle. His rank is given away by his orange armor which stands out against the gray combat harnesses of his underlings.
I realize that 'he' is actually a 'her', judging by her oily purple plumage. It makes sense; kig-yar are a matriarchal race.
She directs two of her underlings to inspect the bodies while the other six make a perimeter around them.
They don't notice the flattened and displaced grass just a few meters away from them. They don't see the slight distortion in the air, the artifacting of the lensing field. The only clue that I'm crouching and lying in wait, like a tiger that's about to pounce.
I'm down low, like a sprinter in a crouch start.
One of the two corpse examiners kicks the dead man's body after getting a close look at his neck, then says something in a guttural and raspy voice.
The other corpse examiner says something back while the murmillo listens.
The suit, smart thing that it is, puts together a rough translation. Sangheili is the lingua franca of the Covenant races, and while these skirmishers may be speaking their own bastardized version of it better suited to their single-jawed bone structure, there are still enough commonalities for the suit to put two and two together.
"There is no way the human killed him," one says.
The murmillo nods her head and agrees. "More humans here, find them!"
They're about to resume the hunt when one of the corpse examiners finally shifts the body of the dead T'vaoan.
With the suit's enhanced auditory sensors, I can hear the striker lever fly out.
I start counting. One. Two.
"What the?" the skirmisher says.
Three. Four.
The murmillo turns her head to look back at him. At the same time the cloak deactivates and the suit buttons up.
"Grena-" she only gets halfway through shouting before shrapnel and overpressure tear her and the two closest to the blast to pieces.
The other six are on the ground with minor injuries. Some damaged hearing and shrapnel wounds, but they're alive.
The split-second after the grenade detonates, I move. I spring out of my crouch to the first one and bring my hand across in a chop that shatters the vertebrae in its neck.
The second I take down with a shot from my needle rifle to its head.
I roll towards the third as it tries to stand up and swing my leg out in a kick that folds its back backwards over my knee.
The fourth dies by a shot to the head as well.
I grab the fifth by the neck and throw it into the sixth, then put three needles into its torso. The resulting supercombine kills both.
That makes sixteen kills on my part, plus one from one of the men.
I check the tacmap and see the last four contacts running full speed away on different vectors out of the grass and back into the forest. There's no way I would be able to catch them all. I see that another one of the men got picked off too.
Three, I think to myself.
I saved three.
I glance at the tacmap and see the three survivors heading towards the trainyard.
Good, at least I won't have to round them up like they're headless chickens.
I gather what I can from the dead; a sulok pattern beam rifle, ammo for my needle rifle and needler, a plasma pistol, an energy cutlass, and a handful of plasma grenades.
I find the survivors with Klara outside the engine shed. Bucket-Hat is there along with two others.
The first was a man, about six feet tall, broad-shouldered and black haired. His browned skin suggested that he came from a sunnier climate. His arms were thick and muscular and the veins in his biceps bulged. He looked to be about in his forties. He had a BR55 in his hands.
The second was younger, maybe in his twenties. Like Klara, he was pale-skinned and blonde-haired. He had big blue eyes that peered out from behind a pair of glasses with scratched, rectangular lenses. He was weaponless.
The suit ran its sensors over them.
"Scan complete. Subjects suffering from minor injuries, sleep deprivation, and post adrenal-response."
I walk towards them in plain view through the front gate, past the yellowed skeleton in the security booth and several rusting rail cars.
Biceps shifts to bring his rifle up to level, but Klara puts her atop the gun and lowers it. He sends her a worried look but doesn't say anything.
Bucket-Hat and Glasses were both jittering, eyes locked onto me, which made sense. I imagined that having something try to kill you was new for them. They looked at me with a mixture of awe and terror.
Klara closed the distance between us.
"I saw what happened from the roof. Are you alright?" she asked.
I nodded my head that I was fine when Biceps decided to interject.
"Just what the hell are you?" I turned my head towards him and saw him wilt a little. He was rocking back and forth on his heels like he was prepared to run. The rifle in his hands was angled at the ground, but it wasn't lowered all the way. He held it in a half-way position from which he could still easily bring it up to fire.
"He's UNSC," Klara replied for me
Biceps shook his head in disbelief.
"It doesn't look like any BDU I've ever seen. He could be one of them."
He's ex-military, I realize. I probably should have realized it sooner.
Bucket-Hat decides to speak up.
"He saved my life, Benny. He saved Pietro too," he said as he gestured to the younger man with glasses.
Judging by the name and accent, it was clear that Benny wasn't a native. He wasn't a recent retiree either, though. His hair was long and it went down to his shoulders, speckled with gray strands. It was nowhere near uniform regulation length and would have taken time to grow.
"We wouldn't have made it out of there without him," Bucket-Hat finishes.
"He saved my life too," Klara adds.
Benny finally lowers his rifle all the way, before breaking down. He chokes back a sob as he brings a hand up to his face.
"Goddammit, there were twelve of us this morning! Now there are only three of us left!"
Bucket-Hat and Pietro both look to the ground. They hide their misery well, but it doesn't seem like it's quite set in for them yet.
I can see plain-as-day though that Benny is suffering from some untreated post traumatic stress.
Bucket-Hat moves to try and help Benny collect himself, when Pietro looks at me.
"What's your name?" he asks.
"He can't speak," Klara says, "some injury."
"You we're heading towards the mine?" She asks him.
"Da, but we were attacked last night. Those fowl were hunting us all day."
I listened to his story, when the voice vibrated in my skull.
"Intercepting enemy transmission."
I could hear the raspy sound of a T'vaoan cawing. It had to be one of the four that had fled. The suit translated its words for me. It was calling for help.
I fixated on two words in particular.
Air support.
I knelt down and ignited the energy cutlass.
Benny flinched at the sound.
I heard Bucket-Hat say "what's he doing?"
Klara looked at what I carved into the ground and paled.
Covenant air patrol is coming. Gonna turn this train yard into slag. We need to NOW!