Good Friday and welcome to another chapter! Thanks for joining me once again, for reading, reviewing, for the faves/follows, and for just checking this story out. Special thanks, as always, to my fantastic beta readers BrambleStar14 and Minaethiel. Let's have some fun.
Violent Delights
Written by TunelessLyric
Their shoulders held the sky suspended;
They stood, and earth's foundations stay;
What God abandoned, these defended,
And saved the sum of things for pay.
-A. E. Housman, 'Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries'
The fog rolled in like a living monster. Dark armoured shapes washed in and out of view, the lights on their suits struggling to burn it away. It muffled everything, drawing down a deafening silence as they sketched in the dirt with sticks.
"This is the FOB," Harper was saying, drawing a lopsided rectangle as he snagged on soaking grass.
"That's a blob, Boss. You've lost it." Firefly's stick poked at the offending edge of the oblongish shape. "There. Now it's an FOB."
The team leader bared his teeth at his subordinate. "You're a fucking artist. Happy? You want to lead the briefing?"
The pyro held his hands up and backed up a step, nearly treading on Geist's boots. "You're the boss, Boss. Have at 'er."
"As I was saying," Harper growled with a long look at Firefly, "FOB."
He added a shaky elliptical shape and a couple of squiggly lines that could have been U shapes. A few strokes of the stick carved out a frowny face. "Their beachhead."
"It's not on a beach."
Harper sighed. "All right. Fuck it. Get your shit, let's go." He snapped the stick in half, tossing half of it into the grey wall, never to be seen again. The other half bounced off Hunter's chest for the comment. "I hate all of you, we have Covvies to kill. I don't care. Bliz, Circuit, you're with Falcon and Crosshair on the left. The rest of you go right. Do your things."
He stalked away, nose in the air to underline how much they had taken the wind out of his sails.
"Man's an artist with a blade, but the second he gets his hands on a piece of tree, he becomes a three-year-old." Falcon shook his head with a sigh. Visor turning toward Blizzard, he asked, "You ready?"
She flexed her fingers and reached for her assault rifle. With the comfortable weight in her hands, the black and blue-speckled helmet nodded once. "Always," she answered. No hesitation or question when it came to the Covenant.
The conditions were far from ideal. With the dense banks of cloud drifting between the trees, VISR would be close to useless. The damp air masked heat signatures and screwed with their motion trackers. But the weather was keeping the nest of Covenant forces subdued.
Everything had been clear when they'd been up in orbit. Just for that hour or so after jumping into the system, the skies had been open and inviting. No sooner had Falcon settled their Pelican in the clearing than the clouds had gathered until the entire jungle was socked in.
Blizzard couldn't help but question the wisdom of not simply waiting the temperamental elements out. The heat and humidity would break eventually. Still, she fell in beside Circuit and something eased in her chest.
She couldn't deny that her finger itched for a Covvie in her sights.
They picked cautiously through the jungle. Moss-crusted logs loomed out of the nothing without warning. Branches appeared at head height, trailing spindly fingers over their helmets as the Innies trekked towards their goal.
Just a routine sweep that had led to this. To an anomaly bouncing their signal back, scrambled. Like it hadn't been re-assembled properly after being dismantled in an attempt to figure it out. Which had led to a recon team from some other URF outfit. And that had turned up this little archaeological dig site.
Quite the heavily-armed archaeologists.
The UNSC was entrenched in a ground battle on the other continent, totally unaware of the hidden pocket of alien activity.
More bad intel. Blizzard shivered at the idea, narrowly missing a branch that snapped back as Circuit shoved his way through a bush.
Loud clicking and drilling filtered through the fog as they approached the site. Walls of grey, walls of sound, and they were only thickening. Everything was so close, trees shouldering together so closely that bark rubbed over armour as Blizzard squeezed through. Mist swirled toward her with each breath, being sucked in through the air scrubber.
She couldn't escape it. Couldn't breathe as the fog strangled her, pressing on her chest.
A hand flew to her throat, trying to peel the clinging undersuit away from her skin. Breath coming short, spots popped before her eyes. A rock shifted underfoot. She was down on one knee. Leaning on the butt of her rifle. Trying to breathe. Trying to think.
Weight dropped on her shoulder. Fingers hooked her chin. Panic swarmed up her throat as she fumbled with her helmet. She tore it off. Tossed it away.
"All right." His voice pushed through the walls squeezing into her. "Look at me."
Insistent fingers tilted her head up to meet brown eyes. He was so close, faces nearly touching. She tried to pull away, to put space to breathe between them as she gasped.
"In through your nose. Listen to my voice."
She clenched her teeth and sucking air down as she drowned in the strangling tendrils of grey. He stared into her, seeing the wild terror flooding her system.
"Let it out with me." He modeled, exhaling in a steady, slow gust that moved her hair.
Her own breath came out all at once in a rush.
They knelt in the damp dirt, just trying to control her breathing. Footsteps crunched around them, circling them cautiously without saying anything. Concerned eyes landed on them even though they kept their distance.
Slowly, as her wild gasping receded with the trapped feeling, a face faded into focus. Phil was completely calm as he held her face. As he paced her breathing and talked without saying anything. A small smile appeared as he realized she was calming down.
"That's better, yeah?" His grip loosened on her face as he sat back on his heels.
She offered a shaky nod. "Yeah." There wasn't that screaming need to tear the heavy armour from her body anymore. The fog had peeled back several feet.
He took her hand and helped her stand. "Good. Get your helmet and weapon, soldier." Falcon turned away to take point again.
Crosshair sidled up with her missing gear.
"How did he learn that?" she wheezed, pulling the helmet over her head.
The sniper hesitated, holding out her rifle. "Hunter's claustrophobic too."
She felt the air leave her chest in another hard rush. Swallowing hard, she accepted her rifle and forced her legs to resume their walk. Forced herself to think about the fight ahead instead. About the noise growing ever louder the deeper into the trees they wound.
Geist flashed a green light on their HUDs as soon as he was in position.
It all happened without warning. One second they were slogging through the dense jungle, the fog too thick to see anything. And the next, the cloud thinned until shapes were visible in the abrupt clearing. The ground turned from leaves and vines to hard-packed earth with lines of alien tracks criss-crossing each other. And in the centre, looming out of the haze, an open pit ringed with unidentifiable technology and glowing equipment.
Blizzard adjusted her grip on her assault rifle, taking in all of the contacts registering through her VISR. Red outlines covered her HUD, moving with a flurry of activity. Looking for all the world like a nest of annoyed insects swarming.
Even though Harper had tried to make a big deal over their plan, it was pretty straightforward.
The two squads opened fire simultaneously, from opposite directions.
Icy numbness crept through Blizzard as she targeted a Jackal. It pricked up like a curious bird, head cocking with interest at the dark figures emerging from the fog. A burst from her rifle sheared through its chest, spinning the corpse in almost a complete circle before it fell.
Angry Elite shouting rippled through the wound in the ground. The clinging mist lit up with blue and green as plasma weapons were brought to bear on Phoenix.
"All right, mates," Harper's voice was in her ear, high-pitched with excitement, "let's have a blast."
Nobody wasted the half-second's thought to acknowledge the comment. Already they were focused on the next kill.
Blizzard's attention snapped to the Grunts running in confused circles. To the blue-armoured Elite attempting to organize the excitable cannon fodder into some semblance of combat awareness. In that second, Phoenix slipped away from her. Some dim part of her brain tracked them out of habit, but her full and undivided awareness siphoned all else away.
It was just her and the monsters that had wiped so many UNSC soldiers off the map. And the ice clenched around her heart like a fist.
She emptied an entire magazine into the alien's shields before Crosshair's sniper rifle gave a muffled pop somewhere in the distance. A gout of phosphorescent purple erupted from its skull as it dropped bonelessly to the dirt.
They left the Grunts to Falcon and Circuit. Their teammates were as brutally efficient. This wasn't a firefight, Blizzard realized with a dose of satisfaction. This was an execution for Phoenix as much as it was for her.
Good.
Sliding a new magazine into her weapon, she took advantage of the Covvies' disorganization to move up to some sort of drilling machine. Green plasma boiled through the air behind her as she ran, a lethal reminder that her job was to stay alive as long as she could.
Leaning out to aim around the giant machine, she came almost face to face with a plasma pistol and a shielded Jackal. The image of Theresa swam behind her eyes, plasma grenade glued to her abdomen. She punched the shield aside, hearing the spindly arm joints pop as they overextended. The Jackal had time to let out an angry squawk, jaws opening wide to reveal rows of serrated teeth. Blizzard jammed the barrel of her gun into its maw and pulled the trigger. She kicked away the limp corpse in disgust.
A couple of chattering Grunts, separated from their Elite, stumbled across her line of fire. A burst of automatic fire found one methane tank. The unsuspecting alien rocketed into the grey sky, pinwheeling end over end as it shrieked. Its partner dropped its weapon and ran, waving its stubby arms overhead until another burst from Blizzard turned its head to chunks of grey and blue.
Glancing around, she didn't see any new targets. Or her teammates. The mixed sounds of ballistic and plasma weapons still raged somewhere in the soupy grey. Flashes of orange, blue, green lit up the fog like a light show all around her. But she didn't see anything.
She was alone in the wasteland. Could stay there forever if she wanted to. Could climb down the damp dirt switchbacks into the open pit mine the aliens had dug and lay her bones in the muck below.
"Eyes up, mates, two Hunters just showed up!" Falcon's warning was breathless.
Blizzard blinked, breathing deeply as if waking from a long sleep. Her fingers flexed and stretched as she looked away. The familiar hum of a Hunter plasma cannon heating up shuddered through the air. Fog rippled in the heat of the acid green glow.
"Circuit, down!" she barked, flattening herself without regard to what bony corpse she was pressing up against. There was only the barrel of a plasma cannon pointed at herself and the black figure between them.
The friendly outline on her VISR hit the dirt while the massive alien shuffled into position. It fired an opening shot well over the engineer's head. The angry roar shook the ground under her, a challenge to its quicker prey.
Blizzard hooked her arm around the dead Jackal and rolled to her feet. She gave herself one spare second to wish its shield was still operational, but split her focus between the Hunter and patting down a dead Covvie.
Circuit darted into the fog, melting into the nothingness. Becoming one more flickering blip on her motion tracker. One more source of the gunfire bouncing off the thick armour plates covering its soft body.
"Crosshair, quit playing around. Shoot it," ordered Harper, an irritated edge in his voice.
"More Elites coming from the jungle," added Firefly.
Another flurry of muffled plasma rifle fire rumbled through Blizzard's gut as her hand closed around the Jackal's belt. She fumbled blindly, dragging the corpse with her as she backed around the drill. She couldn't—wouldn't—take her eyes off the Hunter as the spines on its back flared. If it charged her, it would mash her and the Jackal into a disgusting purée, indistinguishable from one another.
For one wild second, she wondered if the fall down to the bottom of the pit would kill it or just make it pissy.
Her hand bumped against something warm, grabbing it on reflex. Shifting her grip on the dead Jackal, she stared the Hunter down. Either the cannon would charge and leave a smoking Blizzard-scented crater in the world, or it would bull rush her and stomp her into oblivion.
"Bliz." Out of the shouting and taunting and calling out new contacts, one voice cut through the fog. "What are you doing?"
"So I once saw this corpsman watch his entire unit blown away by a Hunter pair," she said slowly, watching a curl of mist jerk toward the orange alien's head as it inhaled. "I'm pretty sure his steel balls were the only thing that survived their charge, but he got them both with the same frag."
"Are you—?"
"Falcon, do me a favour and shut up. Don't miss the shot if I don't pull this off."
The Phoenix second fell into silence as they both concentrated. As her eyes roved over its body, waiting for it to make a move. As their staring contest dragged on, Blizzard's patience snapped. She released the dead Covvie in her arms, kicking it toward the Hunter.
It jerked into action at the sudden motion, some reptilian part of its brain clicking on as it put its head down behind its shield and lunged. The former ODST flinched. She couldn't help it. Not with several tons of furious worm and alien alloy sharpened to a lethal edge barreling at her. Not with the hard-packed dirt cracking into deep gouges with its every step, ground trembling.
She stood, defenseless except for the plasma grenade in one hand, and pulled the cold mist into her chest. Let it spread through her system with each pound of her heart until there was nothing left but Blizzard. The Innie counted off the Hunter's strides, watching as it swept the shield up to bring it crashing back down with enough force to level a building.
There was no time to pray that she hadn't waited too long before spinning on her heel and sprinting for her life out of its path. It tried to correct its course, but it was too late. Too committed to the lunge and too bulky to match its prey's agility.
The shield slammed down. The Hunter crashed into it with a metallic scream that pierced through Blizzard's armour, drilling through her bones. It couldn't turn quickly enough, but it sure tried. With a grace that belied its massive size and weight, it twisted to track her.
But she was already behind it. One hand clutched the edge of an armoured leg as she vaulted up. Swinging from her handhold, she landed on the back of its other knee. Not thinking about what it might feel like, she shoved her free hand into the mass of writhing worms. Its answering roar vibrated through her body before the noise thundered in her ears.
It shifted underfoot, twisting as two tons of Covenant metal ripped through the air in search of her. Taking the final warning for what it was, Blizzard primed her plasma grenade and jammed it deep within the Hunter's bulk. She rode the momentum of its wild swing, leaping off and rolling with the impact of solid ground.
Air came rough, dragging through her throat as she plunged blindly through the fog. Didn't matter what she ran into, as long as she put distance between herself and the doomed Covvie. When the explosion came, charred orange worms pelted the ground at her back. Metal shards chewed deep into the dirt. The rain left scars.
A large dark shape melted out of the mist. The Elite stood there, jaws hanging open, arms limp at its sides. Blizzard drew her combat knife and flipped it, catching the blade and cocking her arm back. The hinge-head stared stupidly at this tiny Hunter-killer right to the bitter end. Her knife punctured its throat. Stretching up, she caught the hilt as the stunned alien just stared and stared. A quick jerk severed the major artery and it dropped like a sack of lead.
Blinding white flashed through the world, lighting up the fog all at once. It burned away in an instant, revealing the carnage she had missed. There were twisted and shattered Covvie corpses strewn across the dig site. The second Hunter lay stretched out in a sea of mashed Grunts, a hole punched through its back.
And seven figures stood among the dead, all staring up at the sky. At the second sun that burned furiously, swallowing a UNSC frigate.
It was a familiar sight for Blizzard, who made herself watch. Made herself remember this. No matter how many ground battles they won, the Covenant would beat them in space. They would win the war by orbital bombardment, ground forces be damned.
She stepped up to Crosshair, his spine stiff as he watched the destruction with the same lack of understanding she had seen written all over her last Elite. She touched the back of his hand, wondering if he was remembering another Covenant-Human explosion. If they all were when they looked up and saw that fireball.
He dragged his gaze down, the blank faceplate not enough to hide the ache of failure she knew so well. The sniper's attention snapped off somewhere beyond her, body tensing.
Blizzard spun around, mouth tightening. She bit her tongue and sank deeper into the damp chill still swirling through her blood at the way Harper clutched his Hunter's hand. At the way the two men leaned toward each other.
"Contacts!" Crosshair's voice was rough.
Geist was the first to react, sword still in hand and slick with alien gore. He stepped forward to carve through the squad of Elite Zealots without hesitation. Harper and Hunter were right behind him, breaking away to engage different targets.
Circuit wisely hung back, switching to his magnum instead of going toe to toe with the best the Covenant had to offer. Blizzard left Crosshair's side to keep the engineer in easy reach.
The mêlée was chaos. The three humans danced between the six Zealots in a sea of limbs and weapons. Plasma rocketed into the distance, barely missing their targets. Through it all, Harper laughed as he bled from a gash on the forehead from where an armoured fist had split the skin.
Firefly washed flame over a Zealot's back, softening its shields so Geist could run it through, batting its plasma repeater aside to get inside its guard.
Between Circuit and Blizzard, they managed to bring one down. They turned their combined firepower on another.
On his own, Falcon kept a steady pressure on one Zealot, separating it from the tight group as he dove into the jungle. Teasing it, he played a lethal game of Cat and Mouse until Harper sidled up and buried his knife in its spine.
And Hunter had taken on another of his own. He stayed beyond its reach, trying to bait out an overextended lunge that he could punish with extreme prejudice.
So when Crosshair's Elite lost interest in the sniper in favour of igniting its energy sword, nobody else was paying attention to it. There was a split-second's hesitation as Crosshair's quick mind raced. As his mouth struggled to keep pace.
"Hunter, look out!" he finally managed.
The Innie backpedalled from his dance partner, beginning to turn to get the second Elite in sight.
Circuit dispatched his Zealot with a well-placed shot to the chest as Blizzard's attention slipped from their fight. She watched the energy sword slash at Hunter. The armour-piercing round erupt from the back of the Elite's head as Crosshair ended its life. And she saw the look on Harper's face.
The utter panic.
She was running, she realized as she slammed a fresh magazine into her rifle and brought it back to her shoulder. Blizzard emptied the entire clip into the sixth Zealot, even after its shield popped and several other weapons fired on it.
Just to be sure.
Falling to her knees, she realized the ground was slick with blood. Purple and crimson mingled with the earth to create a sucking mud loath to part with anything it touched. Her fingers shook as she reached for the long wound that dug deep into Hunter's belly. His hands clamped over the ugly mess, trying to cover it, trying to pull the blackened flesh together. She didn't know if he was even sure which way was up as shock tore through his mind.
Not again.
Rough hands locked around her shoulders. A solid body collided with her, sending her sprawling. Breath rushed from her lungs, the ground hitting her like the fear burning deep in her chest. It took a second to figure out which order her limbs were supposed to be in and by the time she got herself organized, Harper was kneeling before his Hunter. His hands were bloody, laced through the injured Phoenix's. Face ashen pale.
The rest of the team crowded around their downed member. Falcon and Crosshair were rummaging for biofoam and bandages.
The UNSC frigate burned like a funeral pyre as it tipped into the atmosphere.
Harper snarled something and Falcon got back to his feet, hurrying back into the jungle. No doubt off to bring the Pelican here so Hunter wouldn't have to be carried.
Hannah let her head drop to the dirt, lying flat on her back as the apocalypse unfolded above, unheeded by anyone else. She made herself watch even though she would rather have shut her eyes and let the tears come. Rather have banished her teammate's corpse left in the wake of an Elite with an energy sword.
There was a strange beauty, she decided, in the exact way human ships imploded and turned to falling stars under the onslaught of plasma cannons.
She lay there, forgotten and forsaken, until the Pelican set down nearby. Then she peeled herself from the dead planet and dragged herself up the ramp to collapse into a seat while Harper panicked over Shaw.
Only then did she allow herself to close her eyes. But the tears didn't come.
Not as the freezing wind iced her over.