[H1]Tar 'Mdalak[/h1]
[i]Paxopolis Simulated Training Centre[/i]
[hr]
The Major grunted dismissively at Jurna. He did have more experience to recognize what was actually happening. “No, fool. They’re jamming our motion trackers. Rely on your own two eyes, not your sensors.”

While the team had stopped, Tar was turned and covering the bottom of the stars with her Mauler. "Make a decision, recruit. Get us off this stairway." She said gruffly over comms.

Again, Tar’s instruction quickly set Ryssa into motion. “Move ahead. Carefully. Daha, cover our flank.” He instructed, prompting the generally silent Sangheili to give a brief acknowledgement, then follow with his gaze directed behind them.

The next floor mostly consisted of a large, open plan office space. A poorly lit walkway ahead of them cut through arrangements of workstations and holographic screens on either side. Flimsy plastic room dividers offered a degree of privacy for the worker bees in this area. In the middle of the room were a set of meeting rooms, partitioned by floor to ceiling plate glass.

Even without night vision, the team could see a faint red glow reflecting on the ceiling near the centre of the office space. Tar suspected Ryssa and The Major knew what it meant, but neither immediately acknowledged it so she focused the team’s attention.
"That's the Brute radar jammer on the floor over there. We need to destroy it."

Ryssa was quick to follow Tar’s instruction and gesture to them to move forward, but the Major was hesitant. He stayed in place, raising up his storm rifle and scanning his surroundings with his gaze. “Wait. If the jammer is here, then so too are the Brutes.”

Each of the recruits raised their weapons in turn, looking in different directions all around them. Beyond the team itself, the whole floor seemed to be but stillness and silence. The Jiralhanae attack was meant to have taken place at night, so there were no bodies of workers here, and the offices seemed to be undisturbed.

There was no shattered glass, broken doors, or overturned tables, just…silence. In that environment, it was easy to become acutely aware of every small sound that [i]could[/i] be heard: the tapping of their armored boots against the hard floor each time they shifted their feet, the slight stretching and compression of their undersuits each time they turned their heads or sufficiently moved a muscle, and even the breaths they took.

Among the recruits, it was actually Jurna’s eyes that were sharp enough to notice a slight shimmer through the glass on the far side of one of the meeting rooms. He was not sure of what he saw, nor how he should react, but he did nevertheless point his carbine directly at it.
The shimmer seemed to react to this, moving abruptly towards the edge of the plate glass wall and into the open.

Tar, who was covering the rear, detected a very faint haze moving between them and the stairway they had just ascended, cutting them off. “They’re behind us.” She reported, raising her Mauler even though they were out of its effective range. “It’s a tra-”.

Before she could finish, a fire bomb flew past her visor and landed right in the middle of the group. Flames exploded outward into a pool on the floor, lapping at the shields of Ryssa, the Major and Daha, who were up front.