[indent][sub][i]featuring [@Hank][/i][/sub][/indent]

     The journey through the tunnel was uneventful, which to any seasoned wastelander was never a good sign. When things got too quiet there was generally a reason for that, like a gang of muties holed up ahead or a deathclaw nest preventing anyone from settling or exploring an area. The molerats escaping the area had been a good sign of that, but McDowell had pressed onwards, perhaps hoping for a good death, or perhaps because he sought to impress the paladin. Slightly surprising to him, but perhaps less so to anyone that knew her, he had taken notice of the soft crunches of footsteps behind him. Perhaps these initiates were less cowardly than they’d been in DC. Or perhaps the crew had just gotten lucky with a decent initiate for once.

The stompy footsteps of the power armour were like an echoey alarm going off, at least to McDowells ears, but at least the background noises of the tunnel, such as dripping groundwater and other background noises from the blowing wind above did a halfway decent job of drowning it all out. These footsteps, however, would very suddenly stop, almost so sudden that in the darkness, it was hard to tell where exactly Gregory had gone.

“Initiate,” he suddenly said in a very uncharacteristically hushed tone, “there’s… something ahead.” The description was about as vague as it could get, but the reasoning for that would become abundantly clear when Laura would come to see for herself.

Ahead, a decently sized group of deathclaws of varying sizes were chained up to the bedrock as if they were slaves. They seemed to be sleeping, so at the moment they were not quite as big a concern as they would have been had they been free and awake. What was more distressing, however, was the group of… humanoids that were huddled around something in the distance, not too far from the deathclaws. They had gone unnoticed, for now, but if they were to go any further, that was unlikely to continue being the case. 

The swarm of molerats had elicited a verbal response from Laura, but the chained-up Deathclaws simply stunned her into silence. The tunnel opened up ahead into a larger cavernous formation with plenty of space for the huge, dreadful beasts to curl up next to each other. It was dark and hard to see anything in the cave, but the slow rise and fall of the sleeping behemoths was unmistakable. Every muscle in her body was telling her to [i]run,[/i] a primal instinct embedded into the most ancient parts of her brain that fired on all cylinders when confronted with the apex predator that was a Deathclaw, but she forced herself to stay put. McDowell wasn’t afraid either. 

The obvious question, once she had recovered from the initial shock and regained some of her composure, was who or what the hell had managed to capture and restrain the monsters? Laura’s gaze followed to where the Knight-Sergeant’s visor was pointing and she spotted the congregation of shapes at the far end of the cave as well. Willing her hands not to shake, Laura brought the scope of her laser rifle up to her wide, unblinking eye. It took several seconds for her to recognize what she was looking at. The humanoids were dressed in long cloaks and plate armor and were of such size that she initially mistook their forms for power armor, but the reality was far more absurd and bizarre. 

They were Super Mutants. The green skin and exaggerated features were found on no other creature that she’d ever heard of. It was a deeply unsettling realization. If they [i]had[/i] been clad in power armor they could feasibly have been Enclave remnants. Laura had heard of the way they’d turned Deathclaws into living weapons. But Super Mutants were… well, they were idiots. How could any of them have the intelligence and cunning to chain up multiple Deathclaws and live to tell the tale? 

Before she could say anything, she winced as the comms-unit in her helmet suddenly came alive with a wash of static and a barely distinct voice: “Get up -- now -- combat!” Laura took a step back and glanced up at McDowell. It hadn’t just been her earpiece, it had been his too. Whose voice was that? The Paladin’s? The only people with access to the close-range frequencies that the Recon Squad used were the other members of the squad and the comms-unit was tuned out of any other frequencies. “Shit,” Laura whispered. Trouble was brewing topside.

A glimpse of movement from the corner of her eye caught her attention. She quickly looked through her magnifying scope again and her stomach dropped into her shoes. The Super Mutants had turned their heads and were looking straight at her. 

“Go! Go!” she hissed and slapped a flat hand against McDowell’s armor, her respect for the man’s rank entirely forgotten in the fear of the moment. “The Paladin needs us and we’ve been spotted!”

Gregory seemed lost in thought when Laura called out to him, and the message barely registered. He stared at the figures huddled around… something in the distance, before half-mindedly taking a step back. At the last second he turned his body and began maneuvering the heavy power armour towards Laura. A task that was easier said than done, the gyro’s whirring under the pressure. Whatever had happened to them in the crash, it was Gregory that would pay the price for it now. He tried to go easy on the mechanisms, but there really was no helping it, so he started forcing it. 

Normally, someone in power armour would be moving at roughly the same speed or slightly faster than someone without one, but in this case Laura was probably better off running ahead at the snails pace Gregory was going. It didn’t take long for the muffled, but audible screams behind them to be heard. “Stop moving, stupid man!” Footsteps followed quickly, about as muffled as that of Gregory’s own power armour. 

Well, there were many things that Gregory would do, but stop moving was [i]not[/i] one of them. It took every part of his undersized child-like brain to control himself and actually do the smart thing for once, rather than stopping, turning, and fighting like he was trained to, but he managed under the wisdom that he was unarmed and not particularly keen of boxing with a deathclaw. “Laura!” he yelled under his ragged breath. The fact that he was forcing the power armour to move made it a bit more strenuous than it should have been, after all. “You better have a damn plan if you’re gonna make me keep flee- tactically retreat!”

Laura’s brain frantically rifled through the available tools and options at her disposal while they turned and ran back into the tunnel, but those were mercifully limited and it took her no more than a few seconds to figure out what the best course of action was. Even so, her throat constricted at the desperate nature of it. Under ordinary circumstances Laura would never have resorted to such drastic measures but she didn’t see another way out. 

“Keep moving, Knight-Sergeant! I’ll collapse the tunnel behind us and obstruct the enemy’s advance!” she yelled, intuitively turning to military jargon to match McDowell, subconsciously aware that her plan was likely to go down better with him if she dressed it up as a legitimate tactical maneuver. There was no way that he would be able to outrun the Mutants or, God forbid, the Deathclaws if they were unleashed to hunt them down, and she wasn’t about to leave him for dead. Not on her watch. 

But they needed more time for that plan to work. Laura skidded to a halt and pulled one of her unlit molotovs free from a pouch on her abdomen and, thinking quickly, set the cloth rag stuffed into the bottle on fire with a gentle squeeze of the laser rifle’s trigger. She turned and threw it towards the cave. The bottle sailed through the air, missing McDowell by a few inches, and exploded into a roaring pool of flame near the mouth of the tunnel, wide enough to cover the breadth of the underground passageway. She prayed it would buy her enough time. It had to do. 

While McDowell forged ahead, Laura produced the rest of her explosives arsenal from her tactical vest and, with trembling hands, forced the pins of the fragmentation mine into the wall of the tunnel, embedding it into the rock. Using a piece of combat webbing Laura wrapped her two frag grenades around the mine. She turned her head to look at the temporary inferno at the tunnel’s edge and she could swear that she saw the towering forms of the Super Mutants on the other side of the flames, their faces distorted by the shimmering air. 

“Come on... “ Laura hissed as she tied the knot to the webbing, her gaze flitting to McDowell and back -- he was almost out of the impending blast’s danger zone. With one last punch she hit the mine’s arming switch, got to her feet and ran after him. Behind her, the molotov cocktail’s fire died out. 

“Get them!” one of the Super Mutants yelled. 

Laura wheeled around, dropped to one knee and raised her rifle to her face. She took a deep breath and closed one eye shut. Her heart was racing but she willed it to slow down. Three, two one… 

[i]Thud-thud, thud-thud, thud-thud--[/i] 

In-between two heartbeats Laura pulled the trigger and the searing beam of laser energy ignited the explosives. 

The shockwave that raced up the tunnel hit her like a brick wall and she was thrown to the ground, her laser rifle prevented from flying away and out of her hands only by virtue of the strap slung around her torso. With an almighty crash and the roar of a subterranean god awakened, the roof of the tunnel caved in and sent a cloud of dust and debris to follow in the shockwave’s footsteps for good measure. Laura closed her eyes and let it wash over her. If the entire tunnel was going to succumb and bury them there wasn’t anything she could do about it anyway. She had to trust that her gut feeling had been correct and that the power of the fragmentation devices was only enough to collapse a portion of the tunnel.

And so she waited, the agonizing seconds creeping by as the rock and dirt that surrounded her groaned and rumbled in complaint, for the dust to settle, her ears ringing and her vision swimming from the impact. 

“Oh no you don’t.” A hulking figure stepped through the dust and the falling pebbles that very well could have pre-empted a larger rockslide. With a very heavy-handed touch, he grabbed Laura by the collar of her uniform, and dragged her backwards out of the danger zone, or at least as far as he could before the roof collapsed even further. The spot where she had been previously was now covered in rubble, but there was no time to contemplate life and death at the moment. Not [i]their[/i] life and death anyway. Paladin Moss and Estevez were at this point a far more likely concern, at least for Gregory.

“Get up, Initiate,” he commandeered again, having regained his composure. “There is work left to do.” He let go of her collar and turned to the large wall that they’d need to scale up to re-enter the warehouse. Right now he sure as hell wished he wasn’t in power armour. 

“Thank you, sir,” Laura mumbled as she got to her feet, half-aware that she would have been paste if it weren’t for McDowell’s compassionate intervention. She steadied herself until her head stopped spinning before she looked back the way they came. Visibility was practically zero, but there were no sounds of furious pursuit coming their way. Her plan had worked and they were still alive. 

“Ladies first,” he offered, not because he was trying to be prince Charming -- although even if he had been, it would not have come across that way at all -- but rather because he was dreading the experience of trying to go up that wall. Power armour was made for jumping off of stuff, not going up stuff.

The brief and unbidden question of whether the Knight-Sergeant wanted her to go up first so that he could enjoy the view flitted through her mind but she squashed it immediately. McDowell didn’t seem the type and it wouldn’t do well to think ill of her squadmates without provocation. Laura still didn’t agree with his decision to push ahead and ignore the warning signs of the claw marks, and her explosives arsenal was now down to a single molotov cocktail and pulse grenade, but it had turned out well in the end. Now they knew what was down there, and with any luck they had trapped the Deathclaws and Super Mutants forever. Despite the risks, Knight-Sergeant McDowell had acted gallantly. Laura felt herself warming up to him. She nodded and started to climb.

It would take Gregory several minutes to reach the top of the hole, climbing out of it with a very, very ragged sigh following. The sounds of gunfire weren’t too far off. Did the muties follow them? Have another exit? Whatever it was, Gregory wasn’t about to wait for things to come to them. Not after having just [i]fled[/i] from a bunch of uglies. Maybe it was foolish of him, but his frustration about being caught with his pants down got the better of him. He stomped past Laura, a different tread in his step now, no longer careful, casual, or anything of the like. This was the step of a man that was seething. She followed him cautiously and decided not to say anything.

Where he had previously shoved an entire container down the hole, he didn’t bother going through the same hole he made. Instead, he went directly to the area that would lead to the front of the building. As he approached the container blocking the way, he gave it a good one-handed shove, and by combining his natural strength and the power armour, casually threw the container to the side. It had probably been empty, which allowed him to do this, but it looked impressive nonetheless.

Through a stroke of good luck and coincidence, he noted a super sledge leaning against the wall, unknowingly to Gregory his own, and grabbed it with a new ferocity. With a loud bang he rammed his arm into the large, red warehouse doors that separated the warehouse storage area to the shop front where Estevez and Moss were now holed up, or at least trying to hole up. Louder than he had spoken the entire duration of the mission, he shouted, no, screamed, “AD VICTORIAM, PALADIN MOSS!” Without waiting for orders, the frustrated, seething caricature of a pre-war jarhead raised his foot and planted it firmly against the very door paladin Moss and knight Estevez were trying desperately to keep closed. He pushed it forwards, and kicked the door open with a power that shook the hinges of the door, only barely holding on to the doorframe. 

Almost immediately, a rain of gunfire started pinging off his chestplate, although that wasn’t so worrying. Knight-Sergeant McDowell was wearing what one could only call a pre-war tank on his chest, so small-arms fire were not quite the concern they would be to someone running around in their knickers and some leather armour. No, the real problem was the heavy handmade anti-materiel rifle that went off somewhere in the mix, planting an easy .50 round square into McDowells chest. Whatever the shooter had shot at him, it left a sizeable dent and kicked the air out of McDowells body. For a moment, the gunfire stopped, as if they were waiting to see whether McDowell would go down or not. Hell, it seemed like even McDowell was a little confused as to what had just happened. It felt like someone had just thrown a fat man at him.

Slowly but surely, McDowell stumbled backwards, keeping himself upright but only just barely, as he struggled for air. “Mother… fucker...” Still, there was no second shot, so perhaps they were hoping that McDowell would just fall over and die already. It must’ve been surprising that McDowell stepped forwards again, readying his sledgehammer, only to end up reaching for the large door and pull it back as he stepped back inside. For a moment it looked like he was going to shrug off the hit, and perhaps he might have done so had it not been for the fact that paladin Moss was watching. 

Once the door closed, that second shot did ring out, punching a hole the size of a mutfruit right next to the other mutfruit sized hole. Bits and pieces of metal flew through the air, but McDowell seemed completely unphased by that, or perhaps just entirely unaware as he stumbled back towards a wall and leaned against it with his hand, trying desperately to catch his breath. “Kni-knight-sergeant McDowell, sir,” he managed to push out of his throat, “reporting for... duty.”

He neglected to tell them about the supermutants and deathclaws below the structure. Whether that was by choice or just because he forgot, nobody could tell, but it seemed like they had more pressing matters to attend to at the moment anyway.