[b][u]Outskirts of Kerovnia
Outlying forest
Status: Under fire[/u][/b]

Where there had been many, there now were more. What had been a relatively small and scattered force, though still beyond the ability of her party to handle at the moment, was now swelling to become a small army. Yet, even though the odds against her seemed to grow by the moment, Zsresrinn found the sight of the newly arriving enemy forces reassuring. The identity and motives of the assailants did not concern her, but until then their very nature had been unclear. Without knowing more, there were no weaknesses she could aim at, no way to tell when to avoid their fire and when it was safe to stop a moment and fire a round. For all she knew, there could have been decoys among them not worth wasting shots against, or every last one of them could have been impervious to spineblaster hits.

Not anymore. She could see, smell, taste them through the air as they came. Human. Tarrhaidim. Unztadlige. Still too many to engage directly, and she had no idea what those bio-constructs with them were capable of. But now the enemy had familiar body-forms to target. They could bleed. That was a step ahead.

As artillery hammered the remains of the craft behind them - had the human got out in time? - she felt a larger presence following in her trail. A backwards glance showed her it was the creature that Leaguer had kept locked in transit. Legius. An alien name for something with the body of a vrexul, though that was hardly the only thing off about it. The uncanniness of an otherwise familiar shape distorted so strangely by those outlandish augments and directed mutations unsettled her more than any other species, no matter how different, ever had, but that was not even the worst. A feeling in her head-vessels of something wrong under its carapace. She had felt something like that only once before, when a praolznevatz she had fought with had been overtaken by noxious Abzu parasites from overexertion. An imbalance. A flaw.

All the same, from how the Leaguer had kept it, the being was probably not to blame for its state. And right now, it seemed to want the same thing as her - get out of there in one piece.

[abbr=Do not go closer to the hostiles, hit them from here if you can.]“Approachnot-hostile-strike-stationary-possibleif,”[/abbr] she scraped at Legius, without stopping. Her speech would have made little sense to non-vrexul, but it came quickly and easily to her on the move. She could only hope the being had enough of its linguistic memory undamaged. [abbr=Follow me to reach the extraction zone, I will make cover.]“Reach-extraction-followby-raisingme-cover.”[/abbr]

Her agglomerations of meaning were cut short by a salvo of heavy fire crashing around them. One of the bio-constructs had opened fire towards them, and others alongside it were realigning their aim to do likewise. The unztadlige clearly had barrels to spare. A bolt struck her in the side. She did not feel the sting of pain, but a cold rush around the spot as dampening glands released their chemical signals to deaden the more distracting effects of pain. It had not gone far, no critical damage beneath the outer muscle layers, but it was a signal. Larger than the others, they were too much of a target.

Levelling her hellhammer with three limbs, Zsresrinn let out two brief bursts. Three shots at the construct, three at the unztadlige. With no immediate supply, the rounds were precious, but they were her only shot at doing more than grazing the massive eusocial creature’s defenses at this range. Even in the best case, though, it would retaliate.

She exhaled, and lines of orifices along her sides opened up like so many circular, toothless mouths. Deeper within her body, sphincters pulled apart, opening organic channels from the outside to the core of the evzredigor. As they did, streams of shimmering, ghostly blue fog, veined with crystalline smoke, vented out from the shard, spewing into the air around her as if there had been a furnace inside her. The deceptively thin vapours coiled around her as she moved, gathering in a writhing cloud that obscured the outlines of her body in a dim, refractive shroud. Heat dispersed along the unnatural fog in strange patterns, sure to mislead those enemies that relied on thermal sensors.

After the mist came a second wave. Thrumming, buzzing, twisting, a small swarm of symbiotic vermin spilled out from her body. They seemed almost worm-like, with elongated, twisting grey bodies, but twin pairs of insectile wings held them aloft. Instead of heads, each had a large, faceted black eye set where a mouth should have been. The concealing screen impeded Zsresrinn’s vision as much as that of anyone outside, and even her enhanced senses could not fully pierce through it, but not all her eyes were tied to her body. The parasites spread out, some flying ahead to give her vision of the path and terrain ahead, others leaving a trail for Legius to follow, others yet sparsely approaching the bulk of the enemy to gain a better view of their ranks.

[b]”-PORT WRECKAGE - THE PARK - CONTACT - THE RECLAI - HOSTILES - JAMMER DEVICE -”[/b]

The fog added further interference to the already broken-up transmission, so much that she could barely make out its mangled words. Luckily, it was enough. She could not see a park from where her swarm was, but the Reclaimer, she recognized - the human with the oddly heated armour. She had felt the surging heat signature move away to her right when she had left the shuttle. The regrouping point, then, was that way.

Covered in trailing mist, the vrexul turned about as fast as her large, many-limbed form would allow and began moving along her new course.