[color=8dc73f][i]"Starting to think your friend spraying like severed neck might be a liability. Maybe we should take them off of you."[/i][/color]

A sound like a mag snapping into place played over the communicator-panel with a long but ultimately empty pause. No crack of the rifle nor spray of blood. Just the echo of submachinegun fire and cold tension, fading into the backdrop of distant battle with its volcanic roars of artillery. The desecrated and re-tooled cadavers rattled dry and crunchy; the thump of the heavy cannon the squad was sent to wipe out shook the entire area, silencing the last of the residual weapon report.

[color=8dc73f][i]"Your tarrhaidim associate had the right idea. The unztadlige's cannons as well. All teams, stand down."[/i][/color]

The surrounding wilderness remained quiet but the microforms had managed to pick up the traces of the sniper's fire - a pile of rubble covered by greenish-grey camo netting, one that stretched its fabric and shifted its colours ever so slightly to the various shifts in lighting throughout the smoky day. Far, far away from the area they had walked through, enought hat without patience and a sharp eye (plus visual manigifying capabiity) it would have remained a well-kept secret.

[color=8dc73f][i]"You mentioned an objective. I presume it is large, stationary, and causing problems for us down in the valley."[/i][/color] The voice continued as the sound of rumbling anti-gravitational engines neared. The thick silhouettes of some sort of aircraft could be seen among the clouds, gliding overhead the way the Envenomed squad had been heading. 

[color=8dc73f][i]"You may have an unztadtlige but they have something worse. You have seen the results; even a main battle tank would have trouble with this many vrexul. Yet you [i]do[/i] have an unztadtlige-"[/i][/color]

The communicator panel flashed red, green, then blue. The insurgent's voice fanished as its screen lit-up and the static vanished. Video-uplinks connected to the Envenomed squad's individual HUD's or equivalents as a flash of light lit-up the screen, revealing a scene of carnage and confusion.


[hider=VIDEO FOOTAGE FROM ALLIED FORCES][img]https://i.ibb.co/5hnpVCk/COMBINED-MECH-AND-INFANTRY-ATTACK-Eliott-Lilly-Concept-Art-01.webp[/img][/hider]


Scores of infantry, clad in armor far heavier than the insurgents they had fought alongside, surging forth amidst a creeping wall of fiery blossoms from scores of missiles and pulse-beam blasts raining from above. Heavyset automata, not military in origin but their civilian construction origins obscured behind reinforced armor and integrated heavy weaponry, stormed forth with blazes of rotary-cannon fire and shrieking trails of missiles before staggering or storming through scoring blasts of magnetically accelerated rounds and near-miss missile blasts.

The same squad they had seen in the foxhole viciously advanced, unfazed by the onslaught as augmented bodies snapped their weapons to distant targets shrouded in the haze of carnage and fire. Distant blasts where their rounds connected signaled their precision accuracy, flashes of shadowed bodies distorting and dismembering in the blaze speaking for their efficiency.

It was not long before they crashed behind the hole-gouged carcass of one of the walkers before one of them swung the camera to face themself.

[color=f26522]"When this mission finishes pray that I do not take up your lack of disicpline with your handler!"[/color] They called out, crunching forth as their cover rattled, spraying bits of metal fragments that caused the camera to blur momentarily. [color=f26522]"But you've finally picked up. Just in time, we're a little over halfway to our targets but resistance is stiffening. Are you [i]anywhere[/i] near the artillery platform?"[/color]