“Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit” Avice muttered under her breath as her Zaruga’s systems slowly went through the process of restarting. Like everyone else she had shut down her FRAME completely to avoid detection. Unfortunately when the order came to active their FRAMEs, Avice’s chose instead to crash all of its systems, forcing her to start the booting process from scratch. Normally that wouldn’t be too much of a problem, taking less than thirty seconds, but those seconds felt like hours when unseen explosions could be heard all about. 

Avice let out a sigh of relief as her FRAME finally finished booting up, only to curse under her breath. Things had progressed quite a bit while she was out of the fight.  Four, maybe five, hostiles were down; although, despite their loses the Dreqs were regrouping. Avice cursed again when she noticed Ryder had chosen to charge into the midst of the Dreqs; there were a couple of Dreqs she would have loved to fire a barrage at that, unfortunately, Ryder was in front of. 

Choosing to shift her attention elsewhere, Avice fired a short barrage at one of the Dreqs advancing on Cecilla. Several of the twenty millimeter rounds slammed into the Dreq’s left leg. The rounds failed to penetrate, but the Dreq was thrown off balance regardless. Avice set her missile to lock on to the Dreq, waiting for the series of beeps to turn into a single drawn out beep before letting her missile fly. A moment later the Dreq exploded in a glorious fireball, shards of metal littering the road around it.

Several incoming rounds slammed into a tree near Avice’s frame, the Dreq that fired near her quickly adjusted his aim and fired a second barrage. The sound of metal scraping against metal as twenty millimeter rounds tore the paint, as well as several centimeters of metal, off of her FRAME’s paint caused her to wince. She began to bring her own gun to bear but thought better of it when a third barrage tore one of her should mounted missile launchers to pieces.

“Thank god I already fired that missile” She muttered as she swung her FRAME into cover behind a cluster of nearby trees. Not that the scrawny plants would provide much protection from a twenty millimeter round. 

“Azor here” She radioed as she fired a quick burst of twenty millimeter rounds at the Dreq, “One of the Dreqs has me pinned, can anyone give me a second or two of cover fire?”