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Metal slings were continuously roped down from the air, deploying many military units stomping down the grounds. Few men using sign language communicate from afar, preparing for heavy breaching up. Subsequent to attaching a few cables to themselves, Spectre operators began to venture forth into the forsaken wreckage after they turned on their hunting goggles. Those cables, known as Umbilical cords, consistently transmit massive data between the operator and his droids—one ops controlling seven mechs in total.
Following the orders, as the hand waved down, they breached an abandoned building after the clock ticked, unknowingly, only to be met with mine-grenades attached to strings that were being pulled off by their own blind dashes. Mines exploded, disarraying the formation of a single squad in chaos and suffering their deteriorating chronic effects. Human operators who control droids suffer neural damage from losing their droid, a triage side-effect of using umbilical cords. In this offline battlefield condition, there was no orchestrator system to mitigate abrupt neural damage from the droid’s transmission to Spectre Ops. In accordance, Apex sends these hunters right into the conductor's lair for her head, willing to trade off countless lives of operators. Even if it is beyond their capture capability, Apex insists on pursuing a single young woman, Noel.
They had no communication; the conductor could intervene in any electronic field or manipulate the signal. Leaving them an only choice of obsolete communication where they’re trained for. The hand sign stops an entire raid squad of Spectres, leaving the whole band momentarily idle. Multiple operators divide their droids around, waiting for the captain’s sign. As their leader noticed an abnormality in the air, the captain slung the fragmentation grenade to detonate nearby mines. With an EMP interference, locations of surrounding droids in Noel’s controls were revealed, after which she immediately retreated, leaving a trace for their hunting-game. There were also reasons why the unit was called Spectre. Not solely by their grim-like droid appearance, but their masters (human operators) are able to walk in pathless conditions on any terrain. Like an apparition, operators roamed upside-down, using the ceiling as their ground, with cluttered cables swarming the whole area. As a spider that intruded on its prey's territory, the whole ops were yet agile and experienced roamers on the enemy's webs. These units defy gravity with special military equipment specifically for search and assassinate missions, which their phantoms (Spectre droids) are also equipped with.
Over the course of this abandoned 20-story structure, it became a battleground for both sides' grand strategies. Unlike modern chess, both sides strategically reposition themselves every minute—or, to be precise—seconds. Squads of Spectres charge into the area, closing the passage in this big building one by one. During their waves of invasion, Spectre’s morality was drastically lowered due to Conductor’s act. She purposely failed her assassination attempts to scatter the squad's formation around multiple floors.
“This is why I like hunting over Analogs.” Said Noel, out of nowhere in the darkness, her voices were transmitted to the speakers to fool out Spectres for a false location. Gunshots rapidly illuminate the whole area, frame by frame, in stuttering flashes as they hallucinate by Noel’s mind games, haunting like locked in a slaughtering room. Noel tears down the first prey as she drops from a high ceiling in the darkness, the dagger she holds immediately back-stabbing through the operator’s throat, resulting in an instant decapitation as the gravity goes.
With a piece of broken dagger covered by the operator’s crimson glaze and deafening sounds of screeching metal coming from the over-tensioned cable, Noel sawed both furiously. It tore apart, releasing the stress, slapping each other's strips to the other end of the room just like a rubber band, which revealed the build quality of the cables as being military grade—that could cut through concrete if applied with an intense force. She took control of the fallen ops' droids, freeing these soulless metal robots from Analog's control. Spectre droids were released just like wildlife, standing up emotionlessly as the living dead being reincarnated and unplugging themselves by pulling cables with their own wills. And of course, their eyes are turning red just as our conductor’s scarlet gleams. Apex's greed begins to work against them as their own creations turn against the organization (forcefully).
“Tonight! The tides have turned; all the hunters—will be hunted.”
From afar, cranes above Tinker's workshop start moving, dropping containers of dust into the ground and covering an entire building in a smokescreen. An area fumed with thick-greys-noxious, obstructing vision and sensor performance. The mixture of sawdust was mixed with metallic glitter that especially disrupts field & depth calculation, creating a trump card for the conductor’s paramount advantage. A squad that can’t coordinate with the proximity of enemies is no different from having disabled deadweights. Who would have known that just a single crane drop over the building can create such a great interference, turning the disturbance tides to block Apex’s reinforcement, making them unable to blindly breach the building where conductor(Noel) nested in.
As the turmoil continued unabated, cards in Apex’s upper hand began to fall, while the conductor, Noel, deliberately gained from her deft counterstrategies. Every turn, she gains a new card, but our dealer (the Apex) loses. She knows what Apex had in their hands and what was left in their minds. It’s not even close to the point where Apex will conclude the battle yet; more likely, it's just starting play for them, lurking the prey on their grand chess.
Now, Noel has to plan out her move even more precisely. She detects sniper units with strong caliber rail-guns, not aiming at her but at those under her command, waiting outside to detonate their own taken-control droids. Previous moves granted her temporary protection of the building, but Apex already took down cranes in this large junkyard, so she rushed. Out of the 7 Spectre droids taken under control, 3 are sent to the next floor, where other spectre-ops roam; another 2 are dispersed as decoys; and the last 2 ambush behind the column. Even if she planned to blend in the taken-control droid, it would be impossible; the unit she gained had a spray painted over its head, therefore Spectre-ops easily notice proxies.
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With only a few magazines of bullets, she wields the ops’ pistol, waiting for her prey to tingle on her hunting web. Noel possesses multiple arrays of networks under her control, not just the Spectre droids she has. Whatever was within her range, received a wireless method of connection, or could be connected by any kind of signal, it all belonged to Noel. The conductor is surely a terrifying opponent, but remember that she wasn’t the only one; she minimized uses of her power in order to not get tracked in the past, but it doesn’t matter now anymore. But what makes the conductor special is that, ‘whatever’ once is under their control, it couldn’t be released by hijacking at all. There are two choices available: you either kill the conductor or let it release control from its own network. Either option is tough enough, I know.
Minutes passed, and she charged her attack over the vigilantly roaming ops separately. The ops were covered by spectre droids over which she had taken control. The umbilical cables were used against him by being tied tightly from his feet up to his neck.
“Any last word?—Oh, Right, you can’t speak.” Noel swiftly stabs right into the ops’ spine, where all the umbilical cables lead through, then slices up to their vital nerves. Those actions were packed into a flash, with her droids releasing the control of their malfunctioning droid kin afterwards, adding pawns to Noel’s roster. Just like conductors, these special ops suits are bulletproof; the only difference is that those ops feel pain from being shot while the conductor doesn’t at all.
With the loss of those droids during a surprise attack, she now has a total of 12 Spectre droids under her command. After all, Warren’s droid on her roster seems to be done for, but the pawns in her hand are steadily gathered and improved.
‘I need to hurry up; orchestrators are coming.’ While she traced electronic signals for the rest of ops(s) location, something familiar rang back in her mind. An orchestrator. Something unknown yet fearful to Noel might put her in a tough position if it ever arrives. With a faintly visible trace of Automatons (known as droids) creating a geolocation map in Noel’s head, she imagines and executes foreseeable orders to her droids. Suddenly, continuous flares lightened the whole corridor, along with echoes of mini-explosives firing from evaporated multiple barrel chambers. Multiple ops found her, firing unceasingly. The girl evades perfectly through inhumane choreography and then stands back behind the droid as her shield. It moves forward like a shielded footman, surfacing the bulletstorm resistance along with Noel, who hides herself at the droid’s back. Unhesitatingly, once it reached her range, she leapt out, using the droid to throw her with strong momentum, where she used applied-force to slash entire ops in a piercingl straight line as a star-aligned pattern. On the last ops member in the star-aligned (where they stand their guards on), Noel hastily grabs his neck and twists, changing her thrown vector into a strong twisting torque before landing hastily on the ground. Not even a single scream was ever bawled out in this fight; all her prey were ripped apart even before they felt pain. Those fallen ops might even recall dying, or even worse, unconsciously becoming non-existent. They were all killed in action in an instant.
Later, most of their ops were merely on the verge of extinction; generations of Spectres went on a one-sided-massacre, and the whole squadron perished. But not all were done yet. She watches the ground, sensing her surroundings, until she finds the sneaky one far away.
“This is the difference between humans and the Conductor!!” Noel pulled a broken metal pipe, aimed blindly at the concrete wall, and launched an impaling lance through the concrete with tremendous strength, impaling a squashy-brain over another building's rooftop. The head of ops splashed all his content around the wall like a piece of contemporary art that no collector would ever buy, releasing a squad of sniper-droids from Apex’s control a kilometer away. To seize her chance of victory, Noel had to outmaneuver Apex at any cost. The remaining Spectre ops in the building were taken down by armor-penetrated ammunition from the sniper droid squad, which Noel locates precisely by tuning the electrical field around them. Snipping them through thick layers of concrete a kilometer away.
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On the other side, Allen, after regaining his mobility, ventures in search of his beloved sister. By the time he awakened, unshackled from paralysis, a sharp staccato noise bombarded the air around, repetition noises of explosives and bullets had already occurred for a while. It feels bizarre, yet also faint. His body heats up like an eruptive volcano. He drags himself, grabbing walls of the corridor along the hallway, and heads to the exact location where he believes Noel had been fighting alone. His mind was blank and he was lightheaded, but his body kept moving toward the battleground.
Allen hides himself in the wreckage as soon as he sees squadrons of spectres retreating from the twenty-story building. They marched out quickly, attached themselves to the slingshot rope, and went back to the Harbinger aircraft. They left the droids behind; the cables became detached and detonated because they didn't have time to bring back their heavy armies. Allen quickly ran into the building while an aircraft was in transit in exchange for a different aircraft that was bigger and heavier. He had never seen such a grand aircraft like this before—two of the gigantic military cargo aircraft invading the skies of the junkyard while the Harbinger went for the border of Underworld.
Inside the dark, gloomy place, devastated by fragments of explosives and heavy forces, Allen trails the clue to the upper floor, where he finds Noel watching over the window outside. She combs her hair, wiping away the dust and ashes that have been smeared on her. Her eyes gleam in red fluorescence red color, a deep scarlet brights. The scene felt like wildlife was facing Allen over the eternal night—it wasn’t a single gleam alone, but multiple reflected scarlet eyes were gazing over him; she was with all her droids that obeyed her command. All the eyes turned toward Allen.
“Do you fear me after all?” Multiple sounds of Noel resonate from every droid by her side. Looking at Allen in shock, she turned away and went back to the window.
“You have seen an orchestrator’s aircraft, haven't you? Other Conductors are coming for me.
Maybe this is my end. You should run, brother.
Hurry.
While you have some time.”
. . .
The Orchestrator & The Conductor (2/2)