It had been a hellish 3 weeks that had been more akin to a total war than a skirmish to deal with a crime lord, and Ardan was beginning to realize that some of the powerful gangs on Omega operated like semi-professional armies with no small amounts of resources to wage a protracted turf war, although he wondered what was keeping another big outfit from mobilizing and striking both the Crimson Fist and Jekk’s men in a pre-emptive strike. 3 weeks of savage ground war, plus a couple very notable instances with some of those new Mantis gunships, made Ardan fairly unhappy to basically be turned to Jekk’s lapdog while the boss was out. He’d wondered if Nik had secretly died and Jekk was just stringing the team along, holding them to their leader’s agreement with the ruthless bastard while driving them further apart to the point where they would be indistinguishable from his own forces, and much more pliable to pressure into joining. 

He’d kept a good working relationship with Jekk’s men, particularly the sapper squad he’d been asked to work with, and tried to keep his head out of the bigger overall picture and instead focus on fighting a war, which was something he was entirely comfortable with doing. A war was something he knew how to deal with; potentially being a pawn for some four-eyed bastard with a hard-on for bloodletting wasn’t. It occurred to him on several occasions that he’d only seen the others in the team on a few occasions since they held the line alone against the Fists’ shock troopers and had been near constantly in the company of the seven other sappers he’d been assigned to help. It wasn’t that he didn’t catch glimpses of them from time to time; Haze had cleared out entrenched positions  that had pinned Ardan down on a few occasions from some unseen sniper’s perch, Raya had been impossible to miss from the biotic fury that accompanied her actions; Ardan suspected she was hiding her own pain and uncertainty behind an impenetrable wall of rage that tore through vast swaths of enemy mercs, and Daro was almost always working overtime behind the frontlines dealing with a triage of wounded fighters, saving countless lives. None of the four had any time to think, and in truth, Ardan missed them mightily, even though he’d only been with them for a short amount of time. He couldn’t imagine how they must have felt, they’d been together for quite a while before Ardan stumbled into their lives.

Still, there was satisfaction in the work to be done. Ardan was always cool under fire, and he’d had a long career of infiltrating warzones to blow the hell out of something while the defenders picked their asses, thinking themselves to be too far from the frontline to be a target. It was almost a shame that they wouldn’t realize the cost of their complacency for more than a few moments before the charges went off, ending a very poorly-led life. One notable instance had been an entire four-story apartment complex that had been long turned into a fortified bunker with countless heavy machine guns and other gun emplacements poking out of nearly every window. Ardan and the sappers, along with one of Jekk’s elite assault squads, had manage to infiltrate up to the building and in a well-rehearsed execution, cleared out the ground floor and kept the defenders upstairs from retreating downstairs while the sappers went to work at setting charges over the supports of the building. While three of Jekk’s assaulters were killed in the attack, the entire building came down in a devastating blast that killed all the defenders, and there must have been nearly 100 of them, and cleared an essential route for Jekk’s forces to mobilize and hit some of the Crimson Fists’ previously protected encampments. Ardan had gotten very, very drunk that night.

That was a week and a half ago. Now, for the first time in a long time, the team was back together and waiting for a set of mutual instructions that at least made the turian feel more at ease with the situation, and he was taking the brief downtime to enjoy a quick ration pack, at least the stuff he didn’t have to heat up. Jekk’s booming voice caused Ardan to reflexively look up and he blinked slowly, realizing who he had in tow. He offered Nik a wide grin, setting his rations to the side and approached his leader, slapping him on the shoulder. [color=00a651]“How nice of you to join us, boss! If you kept sleeping the war away, I was going to strap you to my back and take you for a nice refreshing walk through the battlefield to jog your senses.”[/color] His expression softened. [color=00a651]“But seriously, I was worried. We all were. It would be a damn shame to have the dream end before it gets started, and I don’t know how many more of Jekk’s bad jokes I can take before I’d eat my own shotgun.”[/color] He stepped back, looking at the ruined district. [color=00a651]“You missed one hell of a party.”[/color]