Was my prayer answered?

Were my cries heard?

I do not know.

What's happening in front of me is nothing but miracles.

B'ars are gigantic and dangerous beasts. A massive creature whose skin and fur thick enough to shrug off arrows and sword strikes. They have the strength of a dozen adult men and can easily lift a carriage. Their deadly weapons are their four massive arms, each as big as a tree trunk, with claws as sharp as knives. Along with a powerful jaw that can crush the hardest of skull. Each of its strike can easily smash a log in half. Finally, they have the ferocity and agility that is deemed impossible for creatures of such immense size.

There are even rumors about some species of b'ars deep inside the elven great forest that can cast spells and use magic. They are undoubtedly one of the most formidable animals in this world, just behind the likes of drakes and wyverns.

According to what I read in that book in my uncle house back then, to take on even a premature b'ar, a team of at least tier 3 adventurers and above is required. But this b'ar is a different story. It is much larger than a regular adult b'ar. It looks to be on the scale of an elder, which is even deadlier than a fully grown adult b'ar.

I remember that traveler used to tell stories of an elder b'ar in the northern mountainous canyon taking out a party of an elite veteran adventurer teams, all of which are tier 4, with a tier 5 leading them. After the battle, just 3 out of the original 7 strong party returned somewhat alive, while only managed to cut off one of its arms and poke out one of its eyes. The tier 5 warrior was the first one to get half of his body bitten off.

And yet here it is. An elder b'ar, roaring in pain as two of its four arms are easily blasted off as if they were made of paper. Its blood stain the ground in front of it.

I feel a strange vibration in the air. So I turn my head to the left. Something flew past me from the bushes. It moves so incredibly fast that I can only catch a slight glimpse of it. A strange blurry shape of black resembling something like a person.

For a split moment the shape stops, crouching on the ground with both hand holding and pointing something towards the b'ar . But that split second was enough for me to see it clearly. That is indeed a person, or at least something resembling a person.

No, not just a person, but a warrior, covered from head to toe with strange armor darker than lightfall. His face is featureless. There is nothing in the place where the eyes are supposed to be, the same can be said for the nose and mouth. There's not even any holes or slits like a knight's helmet. His entire face consists of just plain smooth blackness. He is carrying a strange long metal staff, with multiple bright blue flashes of lightning magic shines on one end. There are small streams of white smoke coming out from the glowing part. Yet the most striking feature of this warrior is that he is very large, way larger than any adult man I have ever seen before.

Yet he is able to move at such speed, approaching the beast with unbelievable agility. I can clearly feel each step of his legs stomping the ground.

Then some thing came out of his shoulder and bounce off the ground near the still growling beast. Landing near my sister's body...

...?...

Wait...

Where is my sister's body?

There's only a puddle of blood where her body used to be.

What is really happening?

What is going on?

Then suddenly, darkness embraces my vision. My hearing follow suits as the world around me fall into silent. Something has reached out from behind me then covered my eyes and ears. At the same time, what feels like a large hardened arm of a person finds its way around my waist and hug it tightly.

The next thing I know...

I was lifted off of the ground. All the while hearing many loud blasting sound through even my tightly covered ears.

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Talon Alpha. Local hour 0602. Location unknown.

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The shot naturally finds its target. Taking out both of its arms thus eliminating its ability to strike.

Well, half of it to be exact. Since this giant bear has up to four arms.

The shot went through its target, penetrate several tree trunks and disappear in to the woods. Its now detached arms lie motionless on the ground and the bear roars furiously in pain.

The ER-4 is meant to be an anti material DMR. So the shot's result obviously falls within expected predictions. Still this is an experimental weapon, a scaled down version of those giant railguns on ships, both in space and on the sea. Obviously cutting edge technology like this rifle is only reserved for the top tier special operatives. And we are Delta-6, a tier 0, one of the top.

There are many tiers in our military system. Special forces are generally divided into two tiers, tier 1 and tier 2. With tier 1 being slightly more elite, better equipped and of course better paid. Still, the difference in skill, training and experience between a tier 2 operative and a normal marine grunt is gargantuan. Everybody in the armed forces look up to the special force people, the infantries look at the tiers as if they look at superheroes.

We however belong to tier 0, basically a hidden tier that exist on parallel with tier 1 and 2.

Although Delta is within our name, we have nothing to do with the United States' own Delta force. We are a completely different branch and belong to the USG exclusively. We do not exist in any form of documents, in any form of papers, data or information. Our existence is shrouded from the public and any speculations are denied by the governments. We do however, exist in rumors, gossips and debates in the comment chains of Raddit of Quore. We are only acknowledged by the highest military commands and sometimes, reports directly to the leaders of USG.

We are trained and equipped to fight in extraterrestrial and alien environment. As such Delta-6 members are extremely proficient when it comes to specialized off planet combat, interstellar operations, fighting in zero G or worlds exploration. We now mainly deal with interstellar terrorism, separatist rebels and other internal politic factions on non-Sol worlds. Sometime we are called upon to do deep exploration on specially marked and hazardous planets. We are also trained for possible contact with alien life forms, both sentient and not. And this will be the first time our training with sentient lifeforms be tested in reality.

These high power weaponry are given to us after an OWES team encounter some large alien predators on some arid planet. They wandered into the territory of some sort of giant sand-digging worm like creatures and almost got eaten, their small caliber anti-personnel weapons couldn't even dent the things thick carapace. They made it out just barely thanks to their combat engineer teammate who quickly called a strike from their ship in orbit. That was just one, there were many more incidents where we encountered dangerous alien plants and animals. It didn't take long for people to realize that they need big guns to deal with big animals and this bear fits every descriptions of an aggressive alien predator.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

The Railjack's 20mm penetrator round is designed to penetrate the entirety of the target and destroy its organ. The sheer velocity and energy behind the projectile is large enough to penetrate any target, thick scales or armor be damned. Plus the projectile's heat is hot enough it create plasma and boil the target's blood and body fluid when penetrated, creating small explosions. Hence why the bear's arms blew up.

The bear now switches its gaze at me after hearing my shout from earlier. For a split second I can see raging anger from within its red eye.

"T1 safe and secured," Kai's comes through my earpiece, confirming the safety of the strange girl I went pass a few seconds ago.

"T2 safe and secured. Attempting first aid," Then comes Doc's voice. Confirming that he has gotten hold of the poor victim and is treating her right now.

Now that both civilians are out of the way, combat can now commence. The bear attempts to stand up and is about to charge.

It is looking directly at me... And then it roars rigorously again while using its remaining two arms to covers its eyes.

Yeah, bears do not know what flash bangs are. And that was not even a flash bang, that was a 9 bang. Which is a flash bang but nine folded.

My agility booster is still on so I immediately dash away while the bear is still concussed, keeping the distance against the target while I recharge my rifle again. The giant furball is now falling on its back, half blind and deaf, the remaining two arms holding its head.

From behind me, Mont immediately open up with his gauss assisted light machinegun, spitting hails of 7.5mm rods towards the thing, giving it no time to recover from the 9-bang. Miller on the side also join in with controlled burst of his 7.5mm gauss assisted assault rifle. Realising this, the thing tries to get up only to enlarge its already massive target surface and receive more hit from the LMG. It opens its mouth, no doubt trying to roar again but is unable to under the sheer amount of durasteel cored 7.5mm whizzing towards it. I swear I saw the bear's mouth shine some green light when it opened its jaw before being fed with mach 5 durasteel. The bear put its arms up to shield its face and try to retreat, realizing that it is completely no match against us. But I don't intend to let it go.

My rifle is loaded and fully charged for a second shot, this time I put an armor piercing high explosive slug into the rails. I line my scope's crosshair on the target's thermal signature, the dot lands on the bears rear as it is trying to run away from us. At this distance, aiming is trivial for a weapon like this, so I pull the trigger and let loose the second shot. The 20mm APHE teflon coated slug travelling at mach 9 reaches its target in mere instant.

Immediately afterward, an ear shredding sound of flesh getting blown apart reaches my suit's audio system.

The 20mm APHE slug pierce the thing's rear and detonate its payload dead center of mass. The poor creature turns into a thick fog of red mist, its front and back go separate ways. Whatever is left of the ursan giant are multiple blobs of red jelly spreading all around.

The aftermath is quite gruesome. The sheer kinetic energy released from the explosion detonated the entire beast from the inside. Once a ferocious monster is now just a pile of fur, bones, limbs and organs. Its blood splattered all over the place, dying the ground and the leaves in a crimson red. I didn't notice before but it seems that these aliens also bleed red blood. Unlike other aliens species we have encountered.

"Clear, no need to double check, that thing is 100% gone." I order the rest of my team and signal the end of combat.

My ear catch the sounds of high tech mechanical sound, that's Mont reloading his LMG and cycling more ammo belt into his gun.

I then move my eye to the top left of my visor. Looks like our perimeter is clear, no other major signatures has been popping up other than what looks to be small animals. Deman has been keeping the donut up there to provide us with more situation information.

Still, there's one problem. The two victims we have just rescued aren't what we were expecting. Hearing humanly screams, of course our first direction of thought were that of crash landed survivors. There's no other humans on this planet other than our fellow people from Athena station. Or so we thought.

I approach Kai who is still holding onto a small humanoid figure that strikingly resemble a young adolescent human girl. Already there are obvious unnatural features with her. One, there is not a single child within Athena station, and we didn't bring anyone that aren't fully adult with us on the ships. Two, she is not wearing any kind of environmental protective suits or gears, just simple plane fabric clothes. She doesn't even look like any typical girls of her age, her clothing looks way too simple. In fact, she somewhat resembles people from ancient Earth back before the first industrial era. Now that I look at her more carefully, she looks just like a generic medieval farmer kid.

I look into Doc's view through the POV sharing screen and take a look at the bloody figure that is the other victim. I can tell despite the poor victim's condition that she is a female. She is larger than this one on Kai's arm. And she is wearing almost the exact same outfit.

Last I checked, there weren't any antique medieval children cosplayers running around on either Athena or the transport ships. Plus both of them aren't wearing any high tech EVA suits and whatnot. So the only explanation for the two's existence is...

"Doc? Both of them, they..." I ask Doc and semi expect his respond to coincide with mine.

"Yeah, I think we have just ran into the sentient life of this planet." His answer is exactly like mine.

"Rescue, we've just rescued them, not just bump into them." Mont walks up from behind me.

"You guys really think that these two are the aliens?" Kai express his doubt, eye looking at me then down to the little girl in his arm. She in turn looks up at him without saying a word. Her face expression is that of confusion, relieve, curiosity and some little bit of fear.

"Details and evident support that statement." Eyes still glued onto the UI pad now attached to his left arm, Deman joins in.

"So what you mean is that aliens on this planet is just human? How?" Kai ask back, still confused.

"Judge a triple A game not by its promotional trailer. They may look humans, but we don't know that. They might be different on the inside." I answer.

"I agree. For now we can not tell until we have hard data and evident." Miller joins in.

"Damn, thing just keep getting crazier."

"Oh I think shits are only going to escalate from here on out, Kai."

And so with that, our squad first ever alien rescue mission has been concluded. And now that all threats are taken cared of, I switch my attention to the two unfortunate extraterrestrial souls that got themselves into this mess. Especially the one who is gravely mangled by that bear.

She bleed red.

Just like us.

These two looks no different to normal civilians who survived a terrorist attack.

This makes me subconsciously hope for her survival. But I'm confident in Doc's ability. Even if someone got decapitated, he would be able to patch them back up together.

"Alright, team, sitrep," I ask my men about the current situation away from the battleground. When we first split up, Kai went for the girl on her knees while Doc would obviously go for the injured one. Deman kept the surveillance with the donut, Miller went with Mont and I tried to separate the monster with its victim by shooting the arms holding her. So that Doc could pick her up and retreat away to treat her. Like many good life savers, he couldn't stand witness to dying civilians.

"She's safe and sound as you can see. A bit calmer now but haven't spoken a word. And she has been staring at either you or me the whole time," Kai reports. So it seems the little one is fine. That's good to hear, but now the injured one.

"This one looks nasty. She has extremely weak life signal. She lost too much blood and the shock from the attack broke many bones. Don't even mention the fuster cluck that is her ruptured organs," I can hear heavy breathing from him. He is trying his best to save lives, like he always do, " Scheiße, inner organ is a mess. Come on, don't you dare die on me."

We then regroup at where Doc is. After snatching her falling limped body in mid air, he dashed back as far as he could behind the frontline and put the girl's body on an portable stretcher underneath a shaded area. Multiple medical kits, stims, syringes, gel tubes and stem kits are scatter around where he stand as he works restlessly to stop her bleeding.

"Evaa? EVAA! Aun zis maein Evaa? Zu donviz heeir?"

We suddenly hear the voice of a girl screaming out in an unknown language. We turn our head around to where the voice came from. This only further her status as a local alien. Since she speaks in a language that non of us can understand. And each of us is required to know at least a handful of languages. Miller on the other hand know several dozens of them, being the one in charge of communication and intelligence.

The girl Kai was holding jump off of his arm and ran toward Doc where the other girl is.

It seems the girl lying over there is an important person to her.

She runs as if her life depends on it.

All the while screaming out loud.

"Zu donviz vu maein zis Evaa!"

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"A combat medic's job is no different to a doctor's. They fight the same battles. To save lives and fight back against Death no matter who the victim is. The difference is that combat medics themselves also play the part of Death as well."

Talon 1 - Squad leader - Master Sergeant Terian Ial Joner