Osar was running out of juice.

He had been fighting at the forefront of the group, using his great shield and Squallbiter sword to both defend his teammates and deal carapace-shattering death to any chitterer that dared to come within range of his blade. In Legion terms, he was the team's Breaker, the core legionnaire around which every lance was formed, and it was his duty to make sure he held the foe’s attention while his comrades aimed for the heart. Except his current companions were not Legion-Blooded or even trained, and they fought with none of the mindset that one of the Marked would have.

So instead of having Toppers to heal and give him buffs and a Sweeper or even a couple of Pincers to limit the numbers coming at him, he had been fending off most of the chitterer swarms on his own, and the effort of doing so was cutting into his aether reserves. He was down to nearly half of his core’s capacity, and felt like he had been fighting for ages, despite his helm chronometer showing that they hadn’t even been fighting for more than a quarter of an hour.

Battles were always chaotic, and even more so when you were in the thick of the fight. In the weird half light of the Stage, Osar had relied on his instincts, drawing on his long-buried Legion training and experiences as cutting, puncturing arms slashed towards him and metal-encrusted bodies tried to bring him down with the sheer weight of their bodies. He had blocked and evaded, using the heavy plates on his battlesuit’s shoulders and thighs to catch and turn attacks, before stomping forward and either smashing his attackers away with his shield or cutting them off him with his oversized sword.

It had been a near thing… until Cid let loose his destroying beam!

Ifni! In a split-second more than a hundred chitterers, almost the entire first wave, were obliterated, blasted away by a thick beam of concentrated and condensed aether fired out from Cid’s improvised cannon.

Panting heavily but feeling vastly relieved, Osar blinked his eyes in a vain attempt to remove the afterimage of the wildly destructive energies that Cid had just unleashed at the horde that had been at the brink of overwhelming their little group. Without conscious thought, the big Urgan rolled his wrist to remove a blindly flailing chitterer carcass that had somehow ended up stuck upon his blade.

< Fall back! > He heard his Jad-Os command coming from somewhere to the left, and he managed to look up fast enough to catch a glimpse of the man running over the top of a low wall. Behind him Osar heard Cid mumble something unintelligible before fumbling with the straps that held the smoking remains of the softly glowing, half-melted cannon to his shoulder. Another cannon barrel protruded over the scientist’s right shoulder, and Osar eyed it now with more respect than he had when Cid had first revealed what he had made to all of them.

For her part Serra was already moving backward, picking her way around the lower pile of chitterer corpses to their rear as more of the creatures in front began climbing over their dead comrades. Osar quickly fell in behind her, grabbing Cid by his upper arm and nearly dragging the preoccupied scientist as they followed in Serra’s wake.

As they hurried towards the safety of the Fortress, Osar admired the coolly efficient manner Serra created a path for the three of them through the scattered chitterer warriors that staggered about aimlessly. The veteran soldier swung her short-handled hammer with grace and accuracy, slamming every hostile out of their way. She had the instincts, the training, and the presence of mind to make a good Imperial line officer, despite Osar’s suspicions of what she had been doing to her build.

Unlike Jad Eric and Cid, Serra had not been as free with her questions for Osar regarding the makeup and choices for her build. While the male Terrans had been almost annoying with their constant questions and clarifications about what abilities to take and the possible entanglements with the intricacies of the System, Serra had by and large decided to keep her inquiries to the minimum. Osar had tried approaching her with some suggestions and possible directions to take but although Serra had nodded and listened politely, she had not seen fit to run her decisions through him before implementing them.

Being that Urgan society was heavily matriarchal, Osar wasn’t exactly upset about Serra’s independence, and besides it was a Universal adage that every adept had to carve their own path. No, Osar was more concerned that Serra was making the build choices that could mess up her future gains: The Foundation Stage of every adept’s Gens development was very important since it set the… well, foundation, for everything else.

Keshub se-engual yi yasorje, his old nest-guardian used to say, which roughly translated meant ‘The tree is only as sturdy as its roots’, a proverb that encapsulated much of the System philosophy the Urgan Seed-Tribes taught its younglings.

And Osar was very worried that Serra might be doing her future irreparable harm.

< Retreat is blocked! > The mental sending from Jad Eric galvanized all of them, sending Cid mumbling and cursing as he brought out the spear he had been training with. Where Serra was a closed book, friend Cid was as open as they came. Osar found the scientist both very anxious of the roles he now had to fill within the team, but also intensely curious about everything around him. If Osar let him, Cid would have gladly spent days questioning the Urgan, leaping from topic to topic with the predictability and constancy of a derykan borer, which was to say hardly any at all.

< I’ll hold the big one, the rest of you need to thin its back-ups. >

< Roger, Captain! > Serra said, while Osar just willed a spurt of energy into his already tired legs as he saw a handful of chitterer’s clamber over a small pile of their dead kin and leap straight at Cid, who managed to strike one away with the shaft of his spear.

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Unfortunately, the Terran was simply not a front-line warrior.

Not only was he not physically inclined towards combat, Cid was also mentally unready for the realities of personally encountering the death and gore that could be found on the battlefield. As a scientist and an arms-tech, Cid was perfectly willing to create and invent all-new and better ways to kill people; he was just not prepared to be physically present when those same creations he designed or made were actually put to use. Osar had tried to keep himself from any snap judgements regarding his new comrades, but all of his observations and conversations with Cid led him to believe that the scientist would not be in a good state of mind if they ever found themselves fighting against anything that vaguely resembled a human or any other creature with a humanoid form.

Despite Osar’s misgivings, the Terran scientist was doing tolerably well now though, jabbing his weapon forward and keeping his spear’s glowing tip between him and the charging foe’s pincers and mandibles. Serra was already in the deep of it, the distinctive crash and flash every time her hammer struck hard chitin signaling exactly where she was in the melee.

Osar engaged his Voidwalker-covered boots, skating through the clouds of dust and small-particle debris the battle had kicked up to catch a strike that would have disemboweled Cid on his tower shield. The impact of the blow knocked Osar to the side a bit until he could engage his suit’s add-on spatial jets, but the backhand sweep of his Squallbiter took three of the attackers’ legs at the level of their second joint, sending the meter-tall arachnoform crashing and sliding onto the metal surface of the roadway. Black, stinking ichor poured forth from the severed tips of the appendages, spraying everywhere until Osar swiveled his hips and thrust forward, skewering the creature’s multiple-eyed head.

There was a flash of bright flame at the edge of Osar’s vision, and a rolling wave of flame enveloped him and Cid.

< Hellfire! > Serra half-screamed through the squad net, and both Osar and Cid turned towards where she had been fighting. Serra was in trouble, as a chitterer had somehow managed to come under her guard and clasp her left forearm with a literal pincer hold.

< Jakobin! > Eric’s voice echoed through everyone’s helmets, worry, exertion, and concern somehow coming through despite the limitations of his comms ability. Cid was already charging forward at speed, his spear whipping wildly from side to side, its entire length now glowing with the amount of aether the man was pumping into it, the huge bulk of the cannon on his back giving him no apparent difficulty. Osar was torn, hesitating as he looked back and saw the tumbling, leaping battlesuit of his Jad-Os narrowly avoiding the attacks of the massive crab he was fighting. Somehow, despite the battle he was waging, his Jad was aware of Osar’s hesitation.

< Go to her! >

< As you command, Primus! > Osar reflexively answered, willing his suit’s add-on jump-jets to shoot him forward. As he used his sword to bat away the few chitterer’s in his path, Osar longed for his old Rovadin battlesuit, the one that had been damaged during his battle with the dragon and the Sesang beasts. Had he been wearing that suit; he would have been able to generate cutting electric whips that could sweep through these weak opponents with relative ease. He shook his head even as he sliced a long, many-legged monstrosity in half and bulled onward through the spraying ichor, disappointed with himself for his lapse of discipline: What ifs were not a part of the Legion Way!

Still, it would have been nice if he had had the time to repair his old suit using the auto-forge facilities on the Plunderer, except that he did not have the skill to operate it, nor the time to actually begin repairs. This new suit he was using, despite being a step above his old suit spec-wise, did not have all the abilities he had unlocked just by constantly using his old battlesuit.

Osar leaned back and slid between the stomping legs of a tall chitterer, his shield held above him and his Squallbiter held out and angled to the side, letting his momentum provide the force to shear through many of the creature’s legs as he emerged from beneath it and onto the scrum on the other side.

Serra was indeed down, red gauntleted hands desperately holding away a severely injured but still stubbornly murderous chitterer from biting off her head with its snapping mandibles. There was a slight glow around her, a sure sign that her aether reserves were running dangerously low, and the potion holders at the back of her suit’s waist looked depressingly empty.

Cid was already in the midst of the fight, his grey-clad arm sweeping outward as a small compartment opened and released a small cloud of mini-grenades. As the explosive spheres detonated, Cid leaped over a writhing chitterer and gained Serra’s side, his spear’s point sinking deep into the creature’s side.

< Thanks Cid! > Serra breathed weakly as she twisted and flung the dead chitterer to the road. She then collapsed against the creature’s carapace, panting audibly through the squad net, as she tried to get focused enough to attempt a heal on herself.

Cid gave her a grunt in reply, before throwing out his hands and creating a shimmering transparent dome over the two of them. Osar grinned inside his helmet, quickly checking his aether reserves, even as he skidded to a stop before the protective dome, the remaining chitterer’s converging on the three of them.

Had he been using his old battlesuit, Osar would have been able to draw on several aether reserve storage nodes built into the suit itself to use any of three abilities he had unlocked by constantly using the battlesuit over a period of nearly half a decade. This was because the best battlesuits evolved through constant use by their wearers, a phenomenon that had been explained to Osar as a result of a person’s personal aether constantly being cycled through the carved glyph arrays and sensitive mystically-morphic pseudo-musculature, resulting in the emergence of new abilities, or suit evolutions as they were usually called.

Unfortunately, he had none of those advantages with his new suit.

Still, a Legionnaire, even a retired one, did not go into battle with only one weapon in his spatial arsenal. In the blink of an eye the shield and weapon disappeared from Osar’s hands as he planted his metal-booted feet firmly on the ground in front of his teammates.

The surrounding chitterres surged forward.

With a twist of his wrist, Osar took out a grey cylinder from his storage ring.

Holding it in both of his armored hands, Osar twisted and pulled the two ends apart, even as he averted his head and closed his eyes.

There was a powerful blast of aetheric electricity, millions of volts running through the insulating channels and glyphs along the inside and outside of Osar’s suit, which was redirected onto the ground beneath his armor-clad boots. The electricity surged outward in a wide circle, coruscating and sparking all over Cid’s protective dome before moving on to kill every chitterer in the immediate area.

Even as a shout of triumph rang out from Cid and Osar’s throats, they heard a scream over the squad net.

< AAAARGHHH! >

Realizing his mistake Osar turned, in time to see a smoking, electrified Eric crashing to the ground in front of an enraged, albeit severely injured, behemoth crab.