[center][h2][b]Ilshar Ard’sabekh[/b][/h2][/center]


Noise and motion died down, but the tension in the air - and the commwaves - went nowhere. Taking a moment to center yourself with a field meditation technique did wonders, but Ilshar supposed one needed to have a spore of the Nexus to properly find that balance. If you lived for nothing beyond the world under your feet, moments like these were a time to be anxious. With a grunt, he splayed and clenched his fingers, severing the etheric wellspring that allowed the two Chasm-born that had not been shredded by gunfire to maintain their material presence. The serpentine bodies dissolved into strangely writhing clouds of fog that lingered in the charged atmosphere.

He squinted, reducing his eye-organs that faced the prize of all this bloodshed. The infernal machine inspired little confidence in him, and he was glad that Rasch was the one relaying their handler’s commands to its targeting systems. Picking up League small arms was all well and good, but this kind of ordnance was sure to have some diabolical etheric mechanism or worse hidden in its bowels, and he did not want to be too close when it fired. Going to watch over the wounded was as good an excuse as any, though he wondered if the voidhanger didn’t have some other motive to keep him distant. It did not take a savant to see that the Intransigence’s plans for the cannon weren’t going to be to the ZRF’s liking. Typical. No such thing as benefactors in the Rim.

Ilshar trudged back through the ravaged camp, leaning slightly to the right, where his arm had begun to feel heavy with clogged capillaries. He walked around Echo, whose bluntness made him question if unztadtlige really weren’t some kind of synthetic. Halting behind the endoform, he gave the guerrillas a knowing shrug.

[b]“Relief forces go at their own pace. Pray you will not need the likes of us on your world again.”[/b] For their sake, he hoped there still was a world left after all was said and done. This wasn’t the War, but one never knew.

The two Envenomed who had weathered the worst were easy to find not too far from the gunship’s crash site. He wasn’t sure what to do with them besides stand watch; what basic first aid training he had did not extend to anything other than fellow tarrhaidim, and the supplies to tend to his own wounds were wholly integrated into his body. Not that they would have helped someone with an endoskeleton or lymphatic vessels that wide.

[b]“Everything under control here?”[/b] he addressed Alice, who at least seemed lucid, [b]“Shouldn’t be too long until extraction now, unless our handlers have some other surprise for us.”[/b]