Hey, everyone! Hope you guys don't mind that I decided to post my very first Overwatch fic just for the hell of it. After I first played the game two months ago, I couldn't get it out of my mind no matter how much I tried. And the end result on that happened to be this. Be wary though, since I'm writing this from a USAF pilot's POV it's going to be a bit techno-heavy, and written with a lot of abbreviations. But worry not, I'm going to write a glossary at the end of this chapter to help the uninitiated understand what's going on.
Without further ado, I bring you my first Overwatch fic. Don't forget to tell me what you guys think via reviews. Enjoy. :)
"—Dagger Three, you got omnic UCAV on your six…"
"—Christ, where the hell are they all coming from…?"
"—SAM launch, wave off! Wave the fuck...!"
A burst of tracer fire zipped past his cockpit window, and on instinct he jerked his flight stick right and pulled back hard with his left hand, while the other gunned the throttle controls on the cockpit wall halfway to max output.
Moments later he felt his FA-1's twin turbofan engines accelerate on command, as he banked hard right to shake off his persistent pursuer, who was following him with such sheer tenacity and precision, that he knew only a cold, calculating machine could possess and manage.
"—multiple bandits four o'clock high! Engage, engage goddamn..."
"—is Gunslinger Lead, Gunslinger Two is down. I say again, Gun…"
Dogfighting with human beings was one thing, but engaging hostile and unfeeling omnic machine intelligence? That, however, was another thing entirely.
He sure as hell didn't expect for any of this to happen, that was for damned sure.
"—I'm hit, I'm hit! Dagger Five is ejecting! Grid coordinates to follow and…"
One minute he was chilling at his base, thinking that the war was already over with these damned machines a while back, and the next thing he knew, they had already surged with a vengeance at multiple locations in East Asia without warning. Hitting them, and hitting them hard.
Which currently led him being here now as of this moment, somewhere in the clear blue skies of South Korea, fighting for his dear life at twenty-five thousand feet AGL; with an enemy he knew he couldn't just blast so easily out of the sky like the flight sims from back when he was a trainee.
These bastards were so annoyingly unpredictable and precise, that they were practically forced to overhaul their entire doctrine on air power the first time they fought. Decades' worth of accumulative experience and knowledge, gained from countless engagements and battles since humans had first mastered powered flight—now figuratively and literally lost to the wind; as their new enemy had essentially tossed the known principles and nuances of air-to-air combat and just unilaterally decided to make their own, compelling them to adapt to present circumstances.
That wasn't even mentioning the primary birds and weapons the omnics were now using against them. And all he could say on the matter was that, in such a short amount of time, they had managed to create such fine instruments of warfare; and it was pissing him off to a degree at how fucking good it all was.
Their engines were good at generating a lot more thrust—and not actually breaking—their planes turned a helluva lot sharper, their air-to-air missiles insanely more accurate, and the guns. Dear God, the spread on those guns.
He cursed mentally as a second burst from the hostile UCAV—or unmanned combat aerial vehicle, for the uninitiated—flew past his helmet, just a little too close to his liking. Sweat poured freely from both his forehead and gloved hands, so much so that his fighter's controlled temp settings were already failing in trying to stave them off.
Another gun burst, and then he broke hard left. UCAV still in constant pursuit.
The distance between the two aircraft was dangerously decreasing, and it wouldn't be long now until his luck ran out and those omnic guns' legendary accuracy would blast his sorry ass out of the sky.
What was it that his squadron commander had told them in their pre-mission brief a few hours ago?
Ah, yes.
'We will engage hostile forces in the AO with superior and overwhelming firepower,' the guy had said, 'preferably from beyond visual range, with the help of dedicated AWACS birds and BVR ordnance. If that fails, close in and engage enemy with heat-seekers and in standard two-ship formations.'
That was the plan that they had dutifully followed to the letter. That is, right up until the instant the omnics just come out of nowhere, and started picking them off easily one by one.
Right now his wingman was God knows where, probably in the same situation he was at the moment, or had already bought it from taking an omnic heat-seeker straight down his throat, he didn't know. Their AWACS bird, which was supposed to spot for them at a distance and help them engage these assholes from beyond visual range—while giving them an edge—suddenly went offline; and to make matters worse, those clever robots had cunningly set up a surface-to-air kill-zone from right under their goddamn noses, even when initial sat-sweeps had indicated and verified that this area was clear of anything.
It went without saying, of course, but it didn't take a genius to know how utterly screwed he was right this second.
"All call signs this net, this is Anvil Lead," his helmet's built-in speakers suddenly squawked as he listened in on it half-heartedly, his primary focus obviously elsewhere, "be advised, Juliet Actual is down. I repeat, Juliet Actual has been shot down. Break."
"Tell me something I don't know." He spoke to himself as he pulled back a bit on the flight stick to gain some altitude.
Since they suddenly lost comms with them mid-transmission, he already knew in the back of his mind that Juliet Actual—the AWACS bird that was providing them with long-range scanners and was also directing the clearly one-sided air battle for them—had perhaps been shot down already, with its crew on their way to meeting their Maker in the afterlife.
Everyone with half a fucking brain knew that much, to say the least.
And who was it that was transmitting right now? Anvil Lead? If he recalled correctly, that was Captain Halverson's call sign, wasn't it?
New guy, just fresh off from flight school and East Point, if his memory served him right. That almost certainly explained why he was stating the fucking obvious. Damn FNG.
Also probably explained why the FNG's voice from earlier was somewhat indecisive. In another time, the guys from the squadron would undoubtedly give the man hell for it just right after the mission was over. Now was not going to be that time, though.
"Also got word of an Overwatch strike team en route to the AO now." Anvil Lead—aka Halverson the FNG—continued on. "They just established comms, says they'll be on-site in less than twenty-five mikes to take out the omnic See-Three-Eye site. Inbound from east-south-east at bearing one-zero-niner, angels one at grid tango-whiskey-two-two-four-seven-eight-one, speed three hundred knots. Single transport with no available escort. They're requesting immediate air cover all the way towards the X. Over."
Wait, wait—Overwatch?
Here?
Now?
Really?
Well, isn't that just fucking great!
As if they weren't busy enough trying to wrestle away this airspace from these relentless gearheads, now they have to play babysitter to a bunch of certified UN prima donnas, too?
He gritted his teeth in frustration. The omnic UCAV on his tail had already halved the distance between them in less than three minutes, and his aircraft's thermal sensors were actually registering the heat of the cannon rounds whizzing all around him.
It was that close.
In case those glorified action heroes haven't noticed, him and what was left of his guys in the 25th Tactical Fighter Squadron were getting their lily-white asses handed to them. And if this kept up, what was left of their squadron was surely going to be nothing more than atomized vapor, hanging in the clouds at the end of the day for all of eternity.
He really did not have any intention of being vaporized. Not if he could help it.
And as much as he appreciated Overwatch's timely arrival—since they were pretty much the reason why the original Omnic Crisis was resolved after all—he really didn't want to die a heroic death just yet.
"Punisher One, Anvil Lead," Halverson's voice called out to him all of a sudden, slightly surprising him, "sit-rep, over."
Anvil Lead, singling him out by name? What the hell does he want with him now?
"Anvil Lead, Punisher One," he responded with a curt and somewhat strained voice, just going along with it, "I got an omnic UCAV right up on my six, and he ain't letting go anytime soon. Don't know where in the hell my wingman is, and I think this son-of-a-bitch drone is cornering me into their SAM envelope at the primary target area. Over."
"Roger. Interrogative: can you shake him off?"
"Dunno, here's hoping to hell I can."
"Punisher One, be advised, you're the closest bird in the area to render assistance to the Overwatch strike team. The rest of the squadron is too far off, and unless omnic air dominance lets up, we cannot reach your position in time to assist. They're commandeering your bird as of now to provide air cover. Over."
What?
Did the FNG just really—him? Really?
He took a quick peek at his console's navigation panel just a foot away from him, to try and actually confirm Anvil's statement, and his blood ran boiling.
There, on his GPS nav-panel, was a single blue dot that wasn't there before. Encrypted data traffic from said dot was now automatically squawking back to his bird, to identify that the dot itself was a friendly and indeed was also sporting authentic Overwatch IFF tags. And it was also just a grid square or two away from him, practically next door.
Son of a—
"Say again your last, Anvil Lead. Did not copy last transmission."
"I say again, Punisher One is being retasked by Overwatch to provide assistance to their op, and establish overhead air cover in support of their ground assault."
"But—"
"It's out of our hands, Punisher One. Right now their CO is reciting me passages of this 'United Nations Omnic Defense and Security Treaty', and how apparently they have jurisdiction for this op. As of five minutes ago, they have complete execute authority."
"Tell them to go take a fucking number, then! I got—!"
His aircraft unexpectedly shook moderately, and the action jostled him a bit from his seat and his restraints. His helmet's built-in speakers rang a quick incessant bleeping, followed by the holographic console and heads-up display in front of him lighting up; displaying a top-down wireframe diagram of his FA-1, with a portion of his left wing's central area being highlighted in yellow, shown along with the words, 'light damage'.
He craned his head to the left.
And lo and behold, just right outside of his cockpit canopy, was several streaks of black that had now adorned the left forward-swept wing of his fighter.
Impact grazes from the UCAV rotary gun's cannon rounds, most likely. He was amazed it didn't completely shear the entire wing off, considering the rounds' infamous aftereffects (i.e. piercing armor then exploding).
His on-board computers had automatically run a quick structural diagnostic on the fighter's airframe, and deemed that his aircraft was still operational and was not going to completely tear apart at the seams. For now, anyways.
Although his gut on the other hand was telling him that he had about a minute or two tops before this bastard was going to snuff his lights out forever.
Goddamn it.
"Punisher One, acknowledge transfer of execute authority."
"Yeah, yeah," he impatiently answered back, "Punisher One copies all."
It would appear that he had won the babysitting gig by default.
Lucky him.
"Those Overwatch guys will probably contact you momentarily. Good luck, Punisher One."
He snorted at the other pilot's statement before he killed the channel off.
"'Good luck', my ass."
He really didn't have a lot of options to choose from here, regarding his current predicament of being someone—or in this case, something's—prey. If he was going to go back to the doctrine in which he was so rigorously trained upon, it's logic would dictate that he does one of two things in a scenario like this.
First, he takes full advantage of his aircraft's supposedly sharper turn radius in order to outshoot the enemy first, and successfully kill him with guns and/or a variety of air-to-air ordnance at his disposal.
Which really isn't going to happen anytime soon, considering the omnics have possession of obviously advanced aircraft; whose superior handling characteristics suit their clearly inhuman acrobatic maneuvers, that would otherwise kill a regular human pilot such as himself in an instant.
So that would be a definite no-go on that.
Or he could probably consider doing the second route, which was the most prevalent aerial warfare tactic in the early-to-mid 21st century.
Whereas he would engage hostile targets from beyond visual range, with the aid of his aircraft's or another asset's long-range radars/sensors, then let loose a bunch of fire-and-forget missiles that would systematically home in on the target's location at vast distances, on its own will after it had left the rails without the aid of further guidance from the pilot.
And no, as much as he hated to admit it, that too was also not going to work. Probably because all of the aircraft that both the omnics and humans have sent to kill each other have reduced radar cross sections, radar absorbent material and angular airframe construction; making them all but impossible to see on radar except via visual/optical imaging sighting or IR tracking.
In essence, it was pretty much wishful thinking at this point in time.
He can't kill them from long-range—which was obviously what him and most of the pilots in the world would prefer—and he apparently can't outturn the enemy without dying first from the extreme g-forces that would entail.
How in the hell did those fighter jocks from back during the day beat these gearheads in the original Omnic Crisis?
With the lack of more logical options, only one idea came to mind.
And it was supremely fucking dumb. Even by his standards.
"Ah, fuck this."
He jammed his throttle lever all the way forward.
In an instant, unadulterated momentum roots him firmly to his seat as his fighter's twin turbofan thrusters go on full burn, rocketing him high up towards the clouds at full speed whilst pulling back hard on the flight control stick.
In less than ten seconds, he's already broken through the sound barrier with a resounding sonic boom.
Which was followed by another one extremely close by, as his omnic pursuer dutifully followed in due pace.
His altimeter was already showing that he was slipping past the 39,000 feet mark in the time it took a person to breathe, while the IAS indicator on his HUD showed that he was speeding like a bat out of hell at Mach 2 and rising.
Throughout various points on his body, his worn g-suit was tightening its hold on his lower extremities; and he could feel his legs slowly numbing away, as the suit spontaneously began diverting blood away from them and pushing them straight to his brain, doing its task to hopefully make him avoid incurring G-LOC—or g-force induced loss of consciousness—and still be fully awake to do his job.
And also not crash into a fiery death, while he was at it.
His spur-of-the-moment 'plan', as fucking crazy as it was to begin with, relied on a combination of a few things that needed to happen. From going straight up towards the sky—which he was currently doing at the moment—to spoofing the omnic UCAV's sensors for just the shortest of moments, and then gunning it down with his internal 30mm rotary cannon while it was still readjusting from the prior spoofing.
And it had to be in that order specifically, with the events also having to occur at near-simultaneous moments from the other. Which wasn't exactly the easiest thing to do, especially under these circumstances.
If it all went accordingly, then he only had about five seconds, give or take, before the enemy UCAV would successfully recalibrate its spoofed optics and sensors; while eventually realizing how precarious its newfound position was and then immediately disengage, waiting it out until it found itself in a suitable position for another run at a takedown.
If he failed though, then there was no doubt in his mind that he was going to die in the hands of a pitiless machine, that's not going to feel anything once it shot his ass down in a fiery blaze.
He only had one shot at this.
"Alert," his aircraft's virtual assistant piped in on his helmet's speakers with a robotic female monotone, "altitude now at forty-four thousand feet AGL and rising. Speed fourteen hundred knots closure and increasing. Hostile aircraft distance at fifty meters and closing. Recommend immediate course of action."
"No shit." He sarcastically told the lifeless voice as a way of reply, even though he knew the annoying but useful assistant would never fully comprehend him besides rudimentary commands and instructions.
Behind him, his lone pursuer had inched even more closer than before.
It wasn't firing off any more prolonged cannon bursts as much as it did previously, he just noticed. Preferring to just catch up with him using its superior thrust capability and maneuverability, then downing him once the opportunity arose, which was pretty much going to happen in just a few minutes.
If he would warrant an educated guess, it was probably because it was calculating that the closer it was to the target (aka, him) the more successful its chances were of shooting him down and taking him out of the equation permanently. He most likely would've done the exact same thing if the situation was reversed.
This particular omnic bastard was definitely a clever one, wasn't it?
He certainly wasn't going to give this gearhead the satisfaction of shooting him down. Not now, not ever.
"Right, here goes nothing."
With an outstretched hand, along with all his hopes and dreams, he pressed a single button on his flight console.
And behind him, on his FA-1's rear just near and in-between the twin FNX-5010-K engines, four dispensers filled with several dozen canisters of aluminum chaff and high-intensity heat flares burst forth like an exploding geyser.
The canisters containing the chaff broke apart at its pre-programmed safe distance, quickly spreading thousands of tiny Mylar fragments and forming a damn-near impenetrable cloud of aluminum that covered a sizeable area just right on his tail.
The flares followed suit afterwards, the cylinders encasing the magnesium thermite compound igniting brightly like miniature suns, with the scorching golf-ball sized objects burning at almost a fraction of the star's temperature.
Both the Mylar cloud and the ignited flares seemed to linger in the air for just the briefest of moments—
—right before slamming directly into the unsuspecting and speeding omnic UCAV a fraction of a second later, like bugs splattering to a windshield.
It took him about a solid second before he came to terms with what just happened, and his initial disbelief had started to subside along with his agape jaw. But still…
He can't believe that actually worked!
The omnic birds had better speed and maneuverability, that went without saying of course, and everyone knew that since the dawn of the original crisis two decades' back. But for some reason, their primary sensors weren't as formidable as the rest of their gear. If anything else, it seemed as if the gearheads lagged behind in that department compared to the ones bolted on unto his bird.
As to the exact cause was as to why the omnics' instruments sucked ass, he really didn't know, nor did he actually want to. What matters was that he sure as hell didn't care, as long as it worked to his advantage right the hell now.
From his flight helmet's augmented reality functionality, he could see that the portions of the Mylar cloud had been sucked directly into the UCAV engine's air intakes, and the flares that did manage to hit the hostile aircraft started to burn sizeable holes unto the front end of the sleek hull. He had expected the former happening, but was more than surprised at the latter's occurrence.
The turbofan thrusters on the enemy bird were now starting to spew noticeable gray smoke, courtesy of the chaff that mucked up the turbines within; and its flight attitude was starting to get increasingly erratic due to the aerodynamics undergoing sudden fluctuations, via the jagged holes in its airframe.
This was it.
He quickly jerked back on both the throttle and the flight control stick, slowing his generated thrust down from full power and angling his bird upwards respectively. The sudden reorientation of his FA-1's angle, coupled with engine thrust being instantly lowered to two-thirds from max output, resulted in an almost disorientating deceleration that rocked his bird greatly. The abrupt and sudden maneuver had also made him grunt subconsciously, as the extensive g-forces from his stunt exacted a not-so-smooth toll on his body, while his restraints held him in place from the sudden inertial shift.
Just slightly below him, however, the omnic UCAV was unaware of his pulling off a heavily modified Pugachev's cobra, and proceeded to still fly straight and true into higher altitudes as if he was still in front of it.
And just conveniently right ahead of his sights.
He didn't even have to wait for his gunsight pipper to calculate a targeting solution before he depressed the trigger on his flight stick.
A near-constant stream of tracer fire erupted from his left, just a few feet away from his cockpit, as his FA-1's built-in 30mm rotary cannon started to rapidly spew out M297 HEI-T-SD shells in multiple ten round bursts, with each barely lasting a second and sounding like an enormous zipper closing off.
And at just about thirty-five meters apart, every round fired had impacted the omnic UCAV from front-to-end with dead-perfect accuracy.
By the time the hostile aircraft had unwittingly sped off further past him and into higher skies, it had already become a raging fireball, as one of his cannon rounds struck the bird's fuel tanks and set off a massive secondary explosion, with bits and pieces of his erstwhile adversary fragmenting into a dozen different directions.
Splash one omnic bandit. His very first gearhead kill.
And hopefully not his last.
Said fireball was now descending back to earth in an unusually graceful arc, as the excess momentum that rocketed it to the skies earlier had now bleed off, and decided to let gravity do the rest.
The entire engagement had all but lasted less than ten minutes, but to him it all felt like one huge blur after the other.
His plan, if he could even call it that, had actually succeeded. And all it took for him, to formulate such a stupid-ass idea right out of his ass, was to be scared shitless from an imminent death by remorseless machine.
It could've been worse, he supposed.
Shrugging off his post-kill high, he checked his long-range scanner panel to see if his sensors were registering any nearby threats, and was immensely grateful that he saw none.
Satisfied that no one was going to bushwhack him out of nowhere anytime soon, he gradually decreased his overall air speed and did a split-S, turning back around while lowering his altitude to rendezvous with the Overwatch transport just a few klicks away.
More than once on the way to his new tasker, he was hoping that these overhyped heroes wouldn't do anything that would warrant him getting killed.
Glossary:
UCAV - unmanned combat aerial vehicle (basically fighter without pilot).
Tracer - special bullets that can burn brightly to enable the shooter to see the rounds' trajectories.
SAM - surface-to-air missile (pretty self-explanatory).
AGL - above ground level (is a height measured with respect to the underlying ground surface).
AO - area of operations.
AWACS - airborne warning and control system (essentially one big flying radar station that can guide and direct fighters in aerial combat).
BVR - beyond visual range.
Two-ship formation - USAF version of the buddy system (i.e. wingman).
FNG - fucking new guy.
Mikes - military jargon for minutes.
Comms - jargon for communications.
C3I - command, control, communications and intelligence; pronounced as 'see-three-eye' (think command center).
Angels - brevity code for altitude (angels one means one thousand feet, two for two thousand and so on).
Knots - nautical miles (is a unit of speed that measures 1.852 kph, or approximately 1.151 mph; mainly used for air and maritime navigation).
Sit-rep - situational report (basically a military version of 'what's up?').
IFF tags - identification friend-or-foe (system designed for command and control, allows people to differentiate vehicle as either friendly or hostile).
Execute authority - means a higher-ranked officer can do whatever the hell he/she wants.
G-forces - is a measurement of the type of acceleration that causes weight (close example would be on a speedboat).
IAS - indicated air speed (aircraft speedometer that displays knots).
Flight attitude - orientation of aircraft relative to the Earth's horizon.
Mach - a measure of speed based on the speed of sound.
Pugachev's cobra -a dramatic and demanding maneuver in which an airplane flying at a moderate-to-high speed suddenly raises the nose momentarily to the vertical position and slightly beyond, before dropping it back to normal flight.
Pipper -a predicted impact pointer (PIP) marker on a pilot's HUD that shows the projected location of where a ballistic projectile is expected to strike when fired.
HEI-T-SD - high explosive incendiary, tracer, self-destroying (primary ammunition for use against high-speed aerial targets).
Splash - military jargon for hitting target with expended munition.
Split-S - is an air combat maneuver mostly used to disengage from combat; where the pilot half-rolls his aircraft inverted and executes a descending half-loop, resulting in level flight in the exact opposite direction at a lower altitude.
And there you have it. Here's hoping it wasn't such a complete turn off for the people here who prefer a casual read, I'll try my best to limit the jargons to a minimum next time.