[b][color=00a651]Fuka Nakano[/color][/b]

[quote=@Finetales]
[color=lightcoral]"Roger Peacenik, we've got your back."[/color][/quote]

[color=00a651]"Alright then Flight 2, go to work."[/color]

Mykhalio took the early initiative as was his nature. Fuka watched impassively as Brightspark nuked a radar installation before moving on to other targets with respectable gusto but a lack of protocol, firing off his arsenal without a single warning.  

[color=00a651]"Cobalt Five, do not fire without calling a weapon release code, I repeat, [i]do not fire[/i] without giving a weapon release code.[/color] 

The last thing Peacenik needed was to be dodging friendly fire because an errant shot crossed her path. Death by her own team would have been extremely embarrassing. But she wasn't there to ruminate; she had targets to find. 

The flight lead yanked her stick rightwards, throwing the Black Bunny into a hard bank over the airport. A big airbase like this would have multiple radar installed and probably an extra brought in. Heartbreak had already snatched one it looked like, Myk another, so then where was-

[color=00a651][i]Gotcha.[/i][/color] 

A beat-up [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-40_radar]P-40[/url] still in Russian green and mounted on an old school artillery tractor, tucked out of the way behind a stack of storage containers. She almost didn't see the thing due to having to watch her missile lock indicators, only just catching a glimpse of the venerable beast as she carved a path over the backend of the airport. Moving low and slow like she was allowed her to turn on a dime, stomach lurching as she whipped up and over with the Litening camera now active. With no time to lock on and too low to manually guide a bomb without crashing Peacenik made a split-second decision:

[color=00a651]"Magnum out!"[/color] 

The AGM shunted from her weapon bay like a punch from Heaven, rocketing towards the truck at Mach 2. Without a lock onto a specific target, it went for the biggest source of radiation nearby, turning the P-40 and its operators into nothing more than spall. 

A good hit, but she was running out of time. SAMs down below kept sweeping her, blinded by the number of targets available and unable to focus on any single one but quickly narrowing down their options. A  [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2K22_Tunguska]Tunguska[/url] crawling along in search of cover fired a burst in her general direction, Fuka responding with egregious overkill in the form of- 

[color=00a651]"Rifle out."[/color] 

Twin thirty-milimeters couldn't compete with a thousand pound JDAM.

[color=00a651]"This is Cobalt 3, I see one radar installation left-behind the control tower. I'm going to try and snipe it before things get too busy, watch my back. "[/color]

[color=6ecff6][b]Ximena Huang[/b][/color]

She had mixed feelings about her loadout. On the one hand flying her beloved sea bird with external pylons meant cutting back on its main function. Stealthiness took a dive when you duct-taped a bunch of missiles to the outside of a plane specifically shaped to better hide. She wasn't a complete sitting duck like Kitten or even Scott, but she was definitely more noticable than she liked to be. But on the other hand...

[color=6ecff6][i]Here we go, here we go, here we GO![/i][/color] 

...she was perched on enough ordnance to knock out a city block, and it was getting to her. Two Soviet guided bombs from the turn of the century and [i][b]NINE[/b][/i] American air-to-air missiles from the depths of the Cold War made her, de facto, an angel of death. As a little girl her father had told her stories of the grave and terrible Yanluo Wang, the King of Hell and the ultimate judge of souls. Such superstiton was frowned upon by the CCP of course, but he had told her anyway and the images stuck with her ever since. He was a dharmapāla, a wrathful god, who rewarded the pious with protection and punished the wicked with brutality. 

Jefe considered him something of a kindred spirit, her skull-marked plane and killer's talent making her as worthy a vessel as any other mortal. She was not overly religious but at times very spiritual, and those moments of quiet calm before a fight helped her enter a state of near-zen she struggled to find anywhere else.

Had she been crazy she might have actually seen herself as an angel or a saint or a god, but she was in fact perfectly sane.

That's why she only [i]felt[/i] like all of the above.

While the others dove in like vultures who found a fresh carcass she showed uncharacterstic restraint, climbing high into the cloud cover but keeping roughly in pace with Kitten's Warthog below. The A10 smashed the remaining runway (Ximena would probably just dump her bombs into the a building and call it a day) and continued to prowl, a big lumbering bear in contrast to Jefe's raptor. 

[color=6ecff6]"Hey Kitten."[/color] she hailed, voice almost eerily steady in contrast to the excitement around them. [color=6ecff6]"I'm the clouds with decent stealth and I've got basically nothing but missiles and bad intentions up here for anyone that comes your way. You see so much as a seagull moving towards you, tell me."[/color]

Whatever planes were left on the ground would be hard-pressed to make it into the air but Libya had other airfields. Within minutes there would be Mirages and MiGs a-plenty for the taking, so many they would blot the sky like mana falling from heaven. La Catrina would feast on their bodies, Ximena their fighting spirit. All would be well.

Some small part of her brain not drowning in adrenaline spoke up: perhaps she wasn't entirely sane after all. Ximena dutifully noted the possibility before ignoring it. Nuts, sane, supremely arrogant, overwhelmingly terrified, slightly sociopathic, outright traumatized-she was none of them and all of them at the same time. She was definitly [i]off,[/i] dials cranked up too far for too long. Shattered let her fire all cylinders because she kept a lid on things and produced results, an arrangement that suited her perfectly. All the adjectives one could call her didn't matter because they melted away when the shooting started. Once the enenmy crossed the horizon she would be one thing:

Sublime.