Fist Leader Sioban crouched in the dark tunnel of the mines where Zayd once worked and checked the sensors of her Saighdear for what felt like the third time in the past hour. Unlike the four soldiers under her command, her combat armor had been modified to support additional command and control features. The most important of these, at the moment, was the ability to utilize the sensors of her soldier’s armor as though they were her own eyes and ears. Learning to juggle multiple sources of input at once to maintain situational awareness had been one of the most challenging elements of her training to lead her small team but once she’d done so she achieved a level of command coordination that was rare among leaders of her relatively young age.
At the moment, Sioban barely felt up to the task of leading her own small unit, much less taking a leading role in training Lady Nimue’s new champion. When they’d originally set out on this venture, she’d been the most junior of five Fist Leaders aboard the Spear of Destiny. Now, they’d lost three of their Fist Leaders, one of their Wing Leaders and Flight Leader Agravain was so badly injured that he couldn’t even pilot his mech. They’d lost so many people, it was a wonder they were still combat-capable at all.
Over the past several days, Sioban and her team had followed Wing Leader Tael’s training plan and mercilessly drilled the new Champion. Unlike the unfortunate human, each member of her team rotated out in ten-hour shifts as they put Zayd through everything from unarmed combat to flight maneuvers in his Saighdear combat armor. The pace their wing leader set was brutal and Sioban didn’t envy Champion Zayd in the least, but once he’d had a bit of time to acclimatize himself, he’d impressed all of the Fae with how quickly he absorbed knowledge and adapted to Fae fighting methods.
If Zayd had another month or two of training, Sioban had no doubt that he’d come up to the minimum standard for her unit. Unfortunately, they were running out of time with the human rescue fleet already on its way. Ready or not, today’s training exercise would determine whether they could trust their new Champion to join the raid or if he’d be forced to sit this one out for fear of compromising the mission.
“Broll, I may need you to take a stroll in a few ticks if he still hasn’t shown himself in the next hundred ticks,” Sioban said over the team’s com channel. “I’m worried that he’s going to slip past you and get loose in the tunnels. Once he’s in, it’ll be a lot harder to intercept him.”
“Heard, Fist Leader,” a quiet voice answered over the com channel. “I don’t think his odds are very good though. I’ve had the entrance to these tunnels in my crosshairs almost since the start of the drill and I haven’t seen as much as a moth flutter by. Sure you don’t want to bring Caedril forward?”
“We need Caedril where he is,” the team’s leader replied. “If the Champion gets into the tunnels, Caedril is the only one geared to stall him long enough for everyone else to converge on him. If he leaves the choke point, it clears the way to assault any of the objectives. I know Lady Nimue selected him as her Champion but Wing Leader has only had fourteen days to train him from the ground up. I don’t want to lose a single objective to such an inexperienced Champion.”
“Is he really that inexperienced, Fist Leader?” The latest voice on the com channel belonged to Saeyd, the least experienced member of Lady Nimue’s guard unit who had joined the crew of the Spear of Destiny just two years ago when she set out on her latest expedition. “I heard that he’s some kind of pure-bred super soldier on his home planet.”
“I don’t know that I’d use the term ‘super soldier’ to describe him,” Sioban replied. “He is the offspring of two of his homeworld’s most capable warriors,” she acknowledged. “But they applied no enhancements to his genome. They didn’t even use targeted therapies to suppress undesirable traits in their own genome to ensure that they got the best result from each genetic source. They seem to have allowed random chance to play out and hoped that one out of the thousand fertilized eggs would turn into something special.”
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“Lady Nimue must see something in him,” another woman’s voice added to the com channel. “She vetted every single one of us personally. Her eye for talent is extraordinary. If we didn’t have some of the best warriors in the Gael Guard, we’d never have escaped the Beithioch. Broll, Caedril, not to wish ill fortune but I hope the Champion makes it past you. I’m eager to cross blades with him and…”
“Spotted!” Broll called into the com channel, interrupting the eager soldier and bringing the entire team to a state of heightened focus. “What the hell is he aiming at?” Broll widened his eyes and flicked through several different magnified views but couldn’t see any reason the Champion had stopped to crouch behind a boulder halfway across the pit from the mine entrance. More confusing, he seemed to have aimed his Firelance at something further up the walls of the pit from the level where Broll had set up his sniper’s hide.
Suddenly, the Firelance flashed, unleashing a brilliant ball of superheated energy at the rock wall twenty meters away from Broll’s own position. Broll’s rifle tracked rapidly away from the entrance to the mine to place his sights on the young Champion only to jerk sharply as the rock ledge he was lying prone on shuddered beneath him.
“Rock slide!” Broll cursed, kicking off of the ground and unfolding a pair of glittering azure energy wings from the back of his armor. Rocks thundered and crashed their way down the pit as an entire side of the deep open pit crumpled under a ripple of explosions triggered by the Champion’s shot. Several smaller rocks slammed into Broll’s armor with a sharp CLACK while dodging larger rocks consumed all of his available attention.
On the ground, Zayd watched patiently as the opposing team’s sniper worked frantically to escape the rockslide he’d triggered. Tael might not praise him for detouring on his approach to recover explosives from the mining camp but Zayd didn’t see anything wrong with exploiting his home-field advantage. He’d worked in this pit for over a standard year and he knew where the fault lines were and how to exploit them. Outnumbered five to one, he’d take every advantage he could get.
Unfortunately for Broll, Zayd’s surprise attack with the side of a cliff produced too much chaotic flying rubble to avoid every boulder of significant size. Just as he felt that he’d gotten clear, a rock the size of a small mech slammed into him from behind, knocking him into the path of even more falling rubble and badly damaging the flight system of his armor.
The moment the sniper began a more rapid and less controlled descent, Zayd dashed out from behind cover, running to intercept the falling soldier. With a motion he’d practiced hundreds of times over the past few days, he slid his Firelance up over his shoulder and allowed the rail system attached to his back to guide the weapon into place while his opposite hand reached out next to his hip for the rail system to deliver his maul into his waiting hand.
Five meters from impact, Broll pushed his flight system to the limit, putting as much distance between himself and the still-falling rubble as possible with little attention paid to Zayd. Slamming into the ground feet first, the sniper quickly dove into a forward roll, cradling his rifle to his chest and coming up in a kneeling position pointing in the direction he’d last seen Zayd in. A proximity alarm blared in his ears, drawing his attention to his left side where he spotted the charging Champion swinging a massive maul.
Broll’s realization of danger came too late to save him. Zayd activated his own flight system for a burst of speed to cover the last few meters between himself and the snipper. With all of the force the mechanical muscles of his combat armor could produce, Zayd slammed his maul into Broll’s rifle, knocking it from the other man’s hands before he followed up with a second hammer blow, this time directly striking the other man’s head!
Alarms blared in Broll’s armor as the training program declared him ‘incapacitated’ by the blow Zayd had struck. His communication system instantly disconnected him from his team’s network while the muscles of his combat armor froze him in place as though he had ‘died’ on the field. Broll could only watch helplessly as the young strode away from his first victim, replacing the maul with his Firelance and heading into the dark entrance of the mine to find his next victim.