[centre][h1][b][color=#edd06f]|| Duncan Mallard||[/color][/b][/h1][/centre] [centre][h3][b][color=#edd06f]|| 002: The Fight and Flight ||[/color][/b][/h3][/centre] [b]"Yes, they are good people."[/b] It only took five little words to break the storm raging in Duncan’s mind. Calmness took him. He closed his eyes, inhaled deeply, held it, then slowly exhaled. All of his doubts and trepidation were swept away with that breath. Good people… Five little words and suddenly everything made sense. The Knights and Mages were good people. But there are some things that Good People can’t do, so that’s why he and his brothers were there. They were the Bad People that could help the Good People take down the Very Bad People. Just like in the shows that he would sometimes get to watch with Ms. A… Miss…who? He shook away the thoughts. Calm. He was calm. And filled with new found resolve. Ducky returned the Holy Man’s kind smile with one of his own, reflecting Kai’s gentleness. Mimicking it. He then gave a nod before he pulled his attention to the drag bag he clutched close to his chest. As he did so, a face began to form in his mind. A face he had been learning for days now. The face of a Very Bad Person. A Very Bad Person who did very bad things. He was strong. Too strong. He made the game unfair, so he had to be removed. That was Duncan’s primary objective: The assassination of Vincent Ryder. [hr] As the shuttle touched down and the ramp began to lower, it was the Holy Man who was front and center. Duncan watched as projectiles cut through the air in their direction, only to harmlessly fall to the ground once they made contact with Kai’s barrier. The lead Spectre then turned to his brothers and gave a rally. [b]"Let's get to work now and take care of each other out there. Light be with you all."[/b] Ducky nodded, but only sat back as the others began to spill out of the vessel. He pulled his sidearm out and checked the magazine count. When he was satisfied with that, he leaned forward and closed his eyes in concentration. Along the boy’s spine, a long metal plate was affixed. Of the five partially sunken orbs, one began to twitch. A dull light emitted from the grooves in the steel sphere before it popped free, twisting and folding until it took a new shape altogether. It hovered in the air for a moment, as manic and frantic in its movements as a hummingbird, before darting out of the shuttle and climbing higher and high into the sky. Through its lens, Ducky scanned over the chaos from upon high, the warriors no more than ants beneath him. It was…staggering, just how many people there truly were. He was no stranger to battle, but the nature of his speciality rarely took him to the frontlines. But this mission would be different. His mark was likely to appear close to the action. The problem was the sheer amount of action happening. Finding his mark in this mess would be like finding a needle in a haystack. Or perhaps a needle in a needlestack would be a more fitting scenario. In any case, just marveling over the scale of the work would do him little service. It was time to get to it. The drone’s lens shifted, zooming in on an engagement on a far side of the battlefield. A group of Belisian soldiers were pushing into the enemy line. From his place in the shuttle, Ducky pushed forward with his mind, first traveling high to his drone…and then falling down onto the group he had been observing. As he fell, Ducky reached out, trying to grab hold of anything… He lightly grazed something. Something warm. Excitement? He pushed into that feeling, immersing himself until… Ducky’s sight became filled with dirt and blood. Suddenly it shifted. A face he didn’t recognize lay below him, twisted in a horrible grimace of pain. A knife is pulled from the neck, with a flood of dark red behind it. A groan escapes the mouth it spits and stutters. Already the eyes go from piercing into him to searching for something past him. The sky? Ducky’s vision shifts, scanning over what appears to be a number of Belisians engaged in melee with Vaimese troops. A loud bang cuts through the air as a geyser of sand spits skyward. Shooter. A second bang fires out, but Ducky is aware of it before he hears it. Intense pain shoots through his leg before crawling across the rest of his body. His sight shifts again, and Ducky can just barely make out a pair of eyes in the distance. So he pushes forward. In the next moment, he is surrounded by rubble. Makeshift defenses. In his sight, he sees a boy lying in the dirt, a lake of blood growing around him. He can feel the cold metal of the rifle in his hands, even if he can’t see it. His hands move to the action but his sight never changes. He’s a passenger to a shooter. A good one at that. Ducky can tell by the shooter’s steady sight that he’s found his next target. The boy tries to push into the shooter’s thoughts…but there’s nothing. The man is focused. So Ducky focuses as well. Underneath the chaos of the battle around them…Ducky hears something. Unsteady. Heavy. There’s somebody else. Out of sight but… Ducky pushes his mind towards the sound. Blind to it, he flails wildly…until he grazes something. Again, he latches onto it, trying to pry his way inside. A dark sky fills his sight. Unsteady breathing is making him shaky. A loud bang cuts through the air and Ducky’s sight comes across the shooter from behind. She curses and goes to load another round, but a distant clapping sound is heard, and dark crimson sprays over Ducky’s vision. It goes dark for a moment, as the body wipes the viscera from its face, but when the sight returns, Ducky observes the shooter slumped onto her side, the rifle still gripped in her hands. She’s unmoving. It was a good shot. Duncan feels something cold. It’s fear. He begins to push deeper into his hosts’ thoughts. A string of curses. Despair over his comrades’ deaths. Anger. Resentment. A question. An angry, repeated question: where is Diamond Company? …what is Diamond Company? The boy released his grip on the fearful Vaimese’s mind. The tension snaps his consciousness back to his body in the shuttle. His breath unsteady, Ducky looks around for a moment, touching the seat of the shuttle, his drag bag, then finally his face. He’s back. He’s him. He settles himself, before pushing back to the eye in the sky. From above, he searches the battlefield, looking for any sort of transport heading for where he was. Nothing. Although… Something had caught his attention. The wreckage of a downed enemy shuttle. It would be difficult to know where it was heading, but it did at least seem to be roughly facing the appropriate area. Interestingly enough, there appeared to be another downed shuttle not too far away. An allied shuttle. Back in the shuttle, the boy twitched as another orb sprang to life. It too shot out before taking to the skies, this time making a beeline towards the pair of downed dropships as it passed over a contingent of Knights heading in the same direction. It arrived at the allied ship as survivors of the crash began fighting off attackers. A pair of allied mages arrived shortly after one another at the scene to offer reinforcement, but it was of little concern to the boy as he soared overhead towards the other shuttle. It didn’t have to go too far before the little Duckling found what it was looking for. A group of non-standard highly-equipped enemy soldiers were marching from their downed ship to the other downed ship. They seemed a little banged up, but more than that, they seemed pissed. Ducky began to push his mind toward them for a little probing when he laid his eyes on the mark. Vincent Ryder. How fortunate. He could just take a little peek inside Ryder’s head and figure out where he would be go- A shot rang out and Duncan’s vision began to spin. He was falling. He was tumbling. He tried to steady the orb, but another shot rang out and it was no use. His vision cut out. It was dark. Blinded, Duncan tried his best to flail his mind, grab onto something, but it was no use. He found no purchase and quickly snapped back to his shuttle, where he let out a pained squawk. Those… Those [i]MONSTERS[/i] They shot his baby. His little duckling. THE AUDACITY OF THESE FUCKS! Shaken, Ducky pulled his sidearm out again and his hand tightened around it in a death grip. His face felt warm. He rose to his feet, pulling his drag bag’s strap over his shoulder and made his way to the shuttle’s ramp. A number of Spectres were still around, but if he noticed, he made no sign of it. In this moment, he was blinded and deafened by rage. It may have been his mission to kill Vincent Ryder, but that was just work. It was his job, nothing more. There was nothing personal about the whole thing. But then his goons shot Ducky’s baby. His sweet, innocent little Duckling, who had never hurt anyone. [sub][sub]yet[/sub][/sub] That was going too far. Way over the line. Muttering to himself, he stomped off toward the downed shuttles, his eye in the sky trained solely on the fuckers. The remaining three drones had all deployed and circled above Duncan like a halo, mindlessly firing at any poor Vaimese that got within their sights. He was a man on a mission. Mama off to avenge his baby.