"Shh-" the rubble crushing down on him was finally starting to shift. He was breathing fast, violently wrenching his limbs free to get more leverage under his body. Images of the hallway suddenly bursting inward and the sword wielding medic being ripped from his sight flooded his mind.
"SH- SHIT!!" he screamed throwing the slab of steel and concrete from his shoulders, "PHOENIX!"
Ginger ripped himself out of what was left of the side of the building, hitting the ground like an iron sandbag, and scrambled to his feet. Missiles tore through the air above him streaking the sky with smoke and slammed into the enraged behemoth still quaking the ground and causing the city to sway and shudder in its rage. Molten lead spewed forth when the missiles struck. What he thought he understood of the supermutant threat was brutally forced into perspective and for a moment he couldn't be moved. A true monster. But as he came to his senses and registered the other squad member's positions in the fight it dawned on him that the thing was as good as dead. Dead. Blood. Blood and flesh and skin and bones. Strewn across the ruined ground. Pounded into the mud. Phoenix. More explosions and planet shaking roars of fury muted the voices coming through his headset. Gun. Need a gun. The butt of his rifle protruded from the rubble about ten feet away. In seconds he was there, carefully but quickly digging it out... along with a crushed severed hand dangling tendrils of flesh and splintered bone. Phoenix was gone. A solemn reminder that Eagle Squad was far from immortal, that they were human and that life could be taken so easily. Ginger surveyed the area for the group and his next target. In the distance, atop a single story building, a massive mutant, though not by behemoth standards, was howling in furious agony and wreathed in flames. The flames alone would not be enough to take it down. He could fix that. Life was easily taken indeed.
"NAPA command," he spoke as clearly as possible, bolting toward the burning overlord.
"Issue command," a quiet, computerized voice chimed in his helmet.
"Activate overdrive," he commanded.
"Warning, please be advised of health risks associated with--" the armor's system began to argue.
"Bypass warning," he grunted as he hit the ground after leaping off a retaining wall and continued running toward the animal voices of the overlord and its entourage, "Activate overdrive," he commanded again.
"Overdrive engaging," the system finally conceded.
Ginger took a deep breath and prepared for the shock.
"Sorry, man, wish I would have gotten to know you a little better," he whispered to himself, "Consider this a parting gift."
The armor screeched.
Pain.
The supermutant overlord bellowed at the frenzied subordinates under him. They scrambled around organizing what little was left of their numbers for a desperate offensive push. Some were trying to smother the chemical flames still trying to burn away at his flesh. However, the overlord did little to aid them as there were more important matters at hand. They were losing. He growled at a soft piercing whine that grew louder and louder and rang in his ears. Then the noise stopped just before it threatened to drown out the unintelligible noise of the low class mutants. A deep WHUMPH! swelled in the air, reverberated in the overlord's chest and was immediately followed by an ear splitting metallic KA-CHINK! Blinding blue light surged around the gang just as the mutant next to him was blown back and had its head and most of its torso sheared clean off. After a stunned silence the body hit the ground and sprayed gore across it's comrades. A dark figure dropped out of the air and penetrated their ranks in the blink of an eye. Click. BOOM!
The group erupted into angry confused yelling, shots from their worn rifles and lasers were fired in every direction. The overlord stumbled over something. A mutant body with a large bloody hole blown through its skull. The panicked mutants couldn't land a shot. This demon was gone as quickly as it came. The annoying mechanical whine faded in and out with the thing's movements. The overlord became livid, the sound driving him mad. The massive blood-soaked, hydraulic sledge hammer he carried with him was heaved to the ready, daring the demon to return. Something rushed past him with a scrape of steel on concrete like a foot fall. His massive muscles contracted as he swung in that direction with a deafening roar. All he hit was the roof.
It cracked and rumbled. It groaned and sagged. All at once he was weightless with a cacophony blasting around him and slammed into the impossibly hard ground. Plumes of dust blasted through the building and exploded from the windows. More dust rose into the air around the collapsed roof. Mutants growled, hissed and shouted as they climbed from the rubble. Visibility in the building was zero.
Click. BOOM! Pained howling. Click. BOOM! Cut short. The overlord swung his deadly sledge. It hit nothing but air. Again and again and again he swung with a terrible blind ferocity until he hit the solid, sinking, thud of flesh. Bone gave way under the pressure with a muffled splintering. The soon-to-be corpse of one of his own sailed into a wall where it choked and sputtered blood suffocating on collapsed lungs. It was growing ever quieter. The voices of the mutants became mute one by one. Click. BOOM! A solitary frantic voice of a lone mutant. Click. BOOM! Silence. He growled through tightly clenched teeth and listened only to hear his own breathing and that ever present high-pitched whine.
Visibility was returning. He screamed out a challenge and carefully scanned his surroundings. The dust fell. He saw something move outside the window. There, twenty maybe thirty yards away, was that figure in dark armor laced with dimly glowing blue veins. The air around it seemed to ripple and warp like waves of heat. It was shoving some sort of charge into the side of a large rifle. Human bastard. He wouldn't give the worm time to shoot.
"CRUSH YOU!" the overlord spat. His hands clenched around his sledge and he rushed forward. The walls of the convenience store gave way easily against his brute strength. He charged out of the dust and rubble bounding yards at a time shaking the ground on each impact. He dreamed of putting a stop to that noise. Of how it would feel to watch the pathetic human suffer inside its smashed steel casing before he ripped it apart and strung it up. That worthless flashy equipment would make a nice shiny trophy.
It pulled up the rifle and hastily fired. WHUMPH-KA-CHINK!
Intense heat and pain flooded his senses starting from the side of his face and spread through his entire body to every extremity. He staggered from the force of the blow, screamed, howled and drooled blood, but didn't stop. His vision skewed like looking through only one eye. The human slung the rifle over it's back, wheeled around and started running. Fast. Faster than him by far. He was so close. He wouldn't lose it. He slammed the hammer into the ground with a tremendous force right on the human's heels. The human's footing on the city debris shifted and heaved under it. The overlord was upon it when it fell. With a blood-crazed yell, he rounded the sledge over his head and brought it down on the pathetic creature.
The sledge froze in place.
A dark gauntlet wrapped around the sledge tightly and held it in place just in front of it's helmet. It's arm shook visibly and the mechanical whine hit a maddening crescendo. A mysterious wave of heat emanated from the human. It threw the sledge away like casting aside a blanket. The overlord's grip on his weapon held fast but only left him sprawling on the ground when he was thrown with it. He got to his knees and met with glowing blue arachnid eyes... and the barrel of a .44 magnum revolver. Click. BOOM!
Ginger snatched the ejected case out of the air and crushed it to dust in his palm.
"Radiation exposure threshold and power output threshold reached," the little voice chirped at him, "Overdrive de-activating immediately."
His skin burned and his muscles ached. The deactivation felt like a bucket of cold water had been dumped on him. He gasped and fell to one knee. The arm he had used to bring an overlord's hammer to a dead stop shivered violently. He clenched the hand and opened it several times trying to relax the exhausted limb.
"Son-of-a-bitch," Ginger laughed and shook his head. "Overlord down," he confirmed over the comms.
Until he was able to catch his breath, he examined his handiwork: half of the mutant's over-sized face was nothing more than a bloody, exposed skull and the eye on the good side, a gaping hole. On shuddering legs he stood. It took another minute or so to fully recover from the overdrive, little movements, make sure everything still worked, that it was all still in one piece. Ginger started back to the squad covering ground quickly and keeping an eye out for straggler mutants. It would seem their task was all but completed as he looked over the barren cityscape. Next up, the vault.
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I'll be home in about an hour and will be in the cafeteria most of the night.
GravityFlux said
Betting Fee is 10 caps
Shut up and take my money.
200 caps on Golem *jingles money bag*
Yes! Can't wait :D
One injured character coming up. Except for I'm helping my parents into their new place today and tomorrow, so it might not be as timely as I'd like.
Part of me says death, the other part says we need a medic... But I also see no reason why another character can't step up to that plate easily.
It's raining snow here god dammit.
Sorry, been working on some personal things tonight... But then again my post is up.
When he announced the presence of stealthed targets Ginger didn't quite know what he expected to happen. A "roger" or two, maybe some mundane gunfire in the general direction if someone managed to spot it. A rifle boom and a sudden appearance of a headless mutant, even. The sudden surge of bright green laser fire pummeling the field wasn't quite what he had imagined. However, it worked, and marvelously so. The dark skinned nightkin lay in a smoldering heap not far from him along with a few other unlucky smoldering heaps.
"Nice shootin' Tex," he quipped through to Bear.
Chatter over the comms was becoming intense. He had seen wanamingos, floaters and their like from a distance and he wanted to keep it that way. He would go toe-to-toe with your average supermutant any day, but those damn abominations were too far over on the scale of bad to just plain wrong. Everything about them, the way they looked, the way the moved, the way they killed, it made him shudder and his skin crawl. Disgusting things will stay back if they know what's good for 'em, he mumbled to himself.
Several times over he repeated his routine; load a charge, aim, pop a mutant. Everywhere, sins against nature met their end in pieces at the nasty end of an electromagnetic explosion. Before long the serene Seattle landscape was covered in mutant bits, the noise was dying down and his targets were becoming scarce. He was taking a second to re-adjust, check his ammunition reserves and consider seeking a better vantage point when Deathstroke's voice came over the comms again. Time to move. That was just fine with him. This spot was getting rather corpsey anyway.
"Yes, Sir," he confirmed.
Bear and Golem were hard to miss pressing forward toward the city. Ginger was on his feet quickly and made his way toward them as fast as his equipment would allow. Though it had the ability to make the user faster and stronger it came at a price and at the end of the day it was still power armor. The squad came together soon and they made for the buildings on the edges of the metro area. For just a minute they stopped in a badly damaged little building. Deathstroke had been watching the broken skyline intently and Phoenix double checked that Whisper would remain stable after her rampage. He kept watch, making sure they hadn't been followed, lay his finger beside the trigger of his rifle and watched the entrances. Looking away for only a second he rolled out his shoulders, took a deep breath and... what was that smell? Sniffing the air he turned to look over his shoulder toward the door. Where there had only just been nothing he found an absolutely horrific looking Winter standing among them. The man looked, and reeked, like he had taken a few laps around a supermutant blood swimming pool.
"What. The. Fuck..." he said slowly and deliberately, "What in the nine hells happe--"
Winter cut him off, before he could say anything more "Don't ask. I went hand to hand with a dozen mutants. Just... don't ask. But one thing you can know is that super mutants are really... really heavy," he said in a fast tone.
"No shit," Tristan was glad nobody could see his facial expressions under his helmet.
No time for banter. Deathstroke was already calling out orders. Despite that, he held up a fist for Winter. Winter grinned and wiped off the blood from his hand on the wall before he fist bumped Ginger.
"Good god, mate," he said, in the most Imperial British accent heard to date. Invisibly grinning back, Tristan decided the freaks in this squad might not be so bad after all.
He listened carefully to the orders being doled out to each of them, prioritizing, organizing and memorizing. It wasn't hard to understand. The four of them were to stick together and head for the Needle. They were to kill anything that moved, they were to destroy anything in their way and under no circumstances what-so-ever were they to be subtle about it. He was positively bursting. There was no way this day could get better. However, it could get worse. He didn't relish the thought of going down into a vault, much less a vault exposed to FEV, even if it was for the sole purpose of uprooting the supermutant population. His thoughts turned back to his training in Eagle Claw. When they... Just for coming from a vault... No. He wouldn't let himself think of that sick, twisted little test. Not right now. Needless to say he accepted the duo of Rad-X capsules from the squad leader with gratitude. Removing his helmet to take them gave him the last breath of "fresh" air he would have until the job was done and let him shake the sweat from his hair and face. He popped the pills quickly, pushed his hair out of his eyes and slid the helmet back into place, re-calibrating his armor and taking it's true weight back off his shoulders. Everybody understood what was to happen next and it was time to move out.
"Catch you guys back at the virtibird for smokes," he said with a casual salute to the squad members he was leaving behind. He followed Bear and Golem out of the building with Phoenix.
"Nice shootin' Tex," he quipped through to Bear.
Chatter over the comms was becoming intense. He had seen wanamingos, floaters and their like from a distance and he wanted to keep it that way. He would go toe-to-toe with your average supermutant any day, but those damn abominations were too far over on the scale of bad to just plain wrong. Everything about them, the way they looked, the way the moved, the way they killed, it made him shudder and his skin crawl. Disgusting things will stay back if they know what's good for 'em, he mumbled to himself.
Several times over he repeated his routine; load a charge, aim, pop a mutant. Everywhere, sins against nature met their end in pieces at the nasty end of an electromagnetic explosion. Before long the serene Seattle landscape was covered in mutant bits, the noise was dying down and his targets were becoming scarce. He was taking a second to re-adjust, check his ammunition reserves and consider seeking a better vantage point when Deathstroke's voice came over the comms again. Time to move. That was just fine with him. This spot was getting rather corpsey anyway.
"Yes, Sir," he confirmed.
Bear and Golem were hard to miss pressing forward toward the city. Ginger was on his feet quickly and made his way toward them as fast as his equipment would allow. Though it had the ability to make the user faster and stronger it came at a price and at the end of the day it was still power armor. The squad came together soon and they made for the buildings on the edges of the metro area. For just a minute they stopped in a badly damaged little building. Deathstroke had been watching the broken skyline intently and Phoenix double checked that Whisper would remain stable after her rampage. He kept watch, making sure they hadn't been followed, lay his finger beside the trigger of his rifle and watched the entrances. Looking away for only a second he rolled out his shoulders, took a deep breath and... what was that smell? Sniffing the air he turned to look over his shoulder toward the door. Where there had only just been nothing he found an absolutely horrific looking Winter standing among them. The man looked, and reeked, like he had taken a few laps around a supermutant blood swimming pool.
"What. The. Fuck..." he said slowly and deliberately, "What in the nine hells happe--"
Winter cut him off, before he could say anything more "Don't ask. I went hand to hand with a dozen mutants. Just... don't ask. But one thing you can know is that super mutants are really... really heavy," he said in a fast tone.
"No shit," Tristan was glad nobody could see his facial expressions under his helmet.
No time for banter. Deathstroke was already calling out orders. Despite that, he held up a fist for Winter. Winter grinned and wiped off the blood from his hand on the wall before he fist bumped Ginger.
"Good god, mate," he said, in the most Imperial British accent heard to date. Invisibly grinning back, Tristan decided the freaks in this squad might not be so bad after all.
He listened carefully to the orders being doled out to each of them, prioritizing, organizing and memorizing. It wasn't hard to understand. The four of them were to stick together and head for the Needle. They were to kill anything that moved, they were to destroy anything in their way and under no circumstances what-so-ever were they to be subtle about it. He was positively bursting. There was no way this day could get better. However, it could get worse. He didn't relish the thought of going down into a vault, much less a vault exposed to FEV, even if it was for the sole purpose of uprooting the supermutant population. His thoughts turned back to his training in Eagle Claw. When they... Just for coming from a vault... No. He wouldn't let himself think of that sick, twisted little test. Not right now. Needless to say he accepted the duo of Rad-X capsules from the squad leader with gratitude. Removing his helmet to take them gave him the last breath of "fresh" air he would have until the job was done and let him shake the sweat from his hair and face. He popped the pills quickly, pushed his hair out of his eyes and slid the helmet back into place, re-calibrating his armor and taking it's true weight back off his shoulders. Everybody understood what was to happen next and it was time to move out.
"Catch you guys back at the virtibird for smokes," he said with a casual salute to the squad members he was leaving behind. He followed Bear and Golem out of the building with Phoenix.
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