Considering the amount of jittery and high strung personalities that were just being reigned in, having yet another volatile newcomer waving a fuck-off huge Revenant at the group at large was a miracle in the sense that she wasn’t immediately unloaded upon by the previously noted jittery personalities. What the human was hoping to accomplish by confronting the team alone, even with considerable firepower, was anyone’s guess, but had she run into people with slightly worse intentions and temperament, she wouldn’t have had time to learn that this was apparently the same team she was enlisted upon. Rykarn met a sideways glance with Partinax, the latter offering a heavy shrug. It was becoming something of a miracle nobody died yet.
Well, the night was still young.
Regardless, the orders were clear and the krogan was satisfied. Don’t kill them unless they try to kill you, and don’t break them more than need be, but kill if need be. Simple, straightforward, and to the point. The teams began to move out, heading down separate paths, Rykarn’s Tornado shotgun, a reliable and well-used weapon that was one of the older catalog models one of the turian military’s primary contractors put out into the public market, extended in hand on well-lubricated bearing surfaces. Slapping in a Cryo ammunition mod in the appropriate port, he watched as the newcomer, Salissa, joined the ranks after being given the quick rundown by Anderson. The man probably needed a glass of water by now from talking.
“You don’t really think things through, do you?” Rykarn asked the woman, bemused, as they continued through the tunnel, heading up to the vanguard position, keeping a keen eye out for danger. The tunnels were places he’d walked dozens of times, rarely encountering anything, but all you needed was a husk to jump at you from a drainpipe once to stay vigilant. Approaching the objective, Rykarn huddled in with the rest of the team to listen to their commander, who gave the quick assessment of the situation. From the confident way that Partinax assessed the situation, Rykarn concluded that the two Spectres had at least spent some time doing a reconnaissance of the site. The krogan didn’t really have any way to deal with shielding other than brute force, but at close range, the shotgun would break through just about anything. Moving and shooting would be easier with the spread, and the Cryo rounds would be able to disable targets non-lethally, provided they didn’t take another heavy hit that would shatter their bodies like glass. Checking his omnitool to look over the blueprints one last time, Rykarn nodded that he was ready. His blood was already pumping, and countless millennia of krogan bloodlust was running through his veins. He’d give a show that would be hard to ignore.
After carefully scouting ahead to the kick-off point, Rykarn took note of the 14 figures. He’d walked London’s seediest streets enough to know that these assholes weren’t homeless; it was pretty plain to see they’d been eating and the telltale rank smell of body odour was conspicuously missing. Resisting his instinct to charge in, Rykarn ground his teeth in anticipation, looking away when the first flashbang went in.
When the blinding charge went off, Rykarn was charging in a moment later, Ellis already up ahead as the distraction to have whatever Cerberus was hiding come out of hiding in response to the extremely visible threat. A body had an explosively bloody exit wound from a high powered rifle in Rykarn’s peripheral vision, and Salissa bellowed a surprisingly effective warcry for a human as she charged into the enemy ranks, manhandling the closest Cerberus operatives. A few of the turrets were hit, but Rykarn wasn’t chancing his luck with their targeting systems being down along his vector. With a well-practiced underhand throw, a fragmentation grenade landed under the closest turret’s barrel, detonating a moment later, ripping the machine from its mourning, warping the metal alloy and knocking the gun askew; a second grenade followed up to the one after, landing a bit to the side but still having the desired effect. Rykarn was close enough that shrapnel dug into his shielding, knocking off roughly a quarter of his capacitor’s limit, but certainly not enough to stop his momentum.
Rykarn punched a pressure plate in his forearm armour of his gun hand and he felt the medical injectors jab into the softer flesh between his plates, adrenaline suddenly surging into his system; the world seemed to move slower and the krogan was suddenly very aware of his blood thundering through his ventricles. He brought his shotgun up to bear on the closest Cerberus operative, the weapon thundering in succession as he unleashed three shots, reaching close to half of his heat sink’s capacity, and the heavy spread slammed into the Cerberus guard, staggering him, ice crystallizing over his exposed Hornet submachine-gun, locking its firing mechanism after the first burst escaped the weapon, brushing by Rykarn’s flank as the krogan charged at him, driving his shoulder and hump into the human, the force of an armoured alien weighing three times his weight hitting like a car and sending him sprawling painfully across the concrete. More shots dug into Rykarn’s shield, whittling his capacitor down but not enough to stop his momentum, the blood rage building within him; he grabbed his still-cooling shotgun by the barrel shroud and drove the pistol grip in a wide-running swing into the chest of the next guard, cracking into the poly-ceramic chest plating like a mace, doubling the Cerberus guard over while Rykarn grabbed the next man by the visor, exerting a terrible amount of force to drive the agent hard into the ground.
The krogan roared in jubilant-fury, his vision blurring and his muscles burning like they needed to really hit something. Pulling his Talon from his hip as he freed his shotgun with the other hand, Rykarn let out a hellish laugh as he opened fire on the next clustered group. ”No escape! Stand and die!” he challenged, bringing his shotgun into his other hand, aiming the weapon for lower-mass to try and freeze their feet. It was hard to pay attention to the rational side that reminded him he was ordered to keep the rutting pyjaks alive, but he was a professional, after all; he knew what his limits were.
Cerberus, however, didn’t.
Nyxella,
TokyoPewPew,
Tlaloc
