The stampeding horde of biotics tore through their fallen kin, meat and shining silver blood churning beneath claws and talons. Fire burned rampant through the area, filling trenches as we unloaded what few mortars we had in the area of the wall. It was a drop in the bucket, but every tool we had at our disposal was used to help slow down even a small part of the horde.
The only upside was that the gate wasn’t breached, that would take them some time to get through.
I ducked reflexively as my senses picked up on one of the Centaur’s tails inflating, a similar warning blaring across the others HUD’s on the wall. I synced my own senses to theirs, helping to unify our awareness to the maximum possible.
There weren’t many others here. A token force of Knights all that we had to support us from nearby. They were, however, damaged, a force that consisted of individuals whom were transporting damaged equipment for repairs. It was pure chance that they’d been in the area in the first place.
And they certainly weren’t up to much on the wall. Their ranged weapons had been emptied, leaving them stacking as many objects as they could find against the gate in an attempt to barricade it.
I stood back up, immediately tearing the head off of the Centaur that had fired with a quick burst of accelerated munitions. “Daniel, sweep the front! Keep tripping them up!”
The main-line mech answered by way of a torrent of firepower, auto-shotguns, vulcans, cannons, and roaring flamethrowers that seemed to put out as much sound as it consumed oxygen.
The dense stream of flame had been held in reserve, sticky and hot, more than partially to prevent friendly fire. It did the job well enough, searing a path that the horde was forced to move through, spending valuable bodies to smother the flame.
Only, the fire didn’t die off that simply, sprouting back to life at the slightest whisper of air until all of the fuel it ravenously consumed turned to ashes, along with any flesh that happened to be near to it.
Another pair of blips on my sensors sent us crashing back down behind the battlements, more spiked barbs sailing through the air.
I frowned, propping myself up and quickly culling the two of them, only to realize that there were groups of them now, pointing upwards at us with their tails lifted high, threatening us as a scorpion might. My field of view permissed me thirty such warnings blaring, the tails inflating and then constricting, allowing only the frontal portions of the deadly barbed weapons to explode.
“Down!” I ducked, hearing the whistling of a hundred barbs tearing through the air overhead, or snapping into the concrete wall.
“They’re learning, I guess,” Fran murmured, rising a moment later and sending a crashing wave of a hundred feathers towards the targets. They were durable, but Fran’s weapons were without mercy, puncturing the armor plating and then ripping back out. Several hadn’t died, no critical injuries found, but those that hadn’t were effectively stripped of plates of chitin, wailing in pain.
At least, until Daniel’s flame-tongue swept over them hungrily. With no defense, they died nearly instantly to the white-hot fire. He cut the flow a moment later with a grunt, “halfway gone, I don’t have a lot of this stuff.”
That was understandable, considering the Reaver’s had first dibs on what effectively amounted to liquid thermite.
Another series of warnings blared out, frustratingly, and we all hit the deck again.
“That’s getting really old, really fast,” Alice spat, still kneeling as she aimed her bow high in the sky. Guessing at what she was doing, I stood, painting targets for her and firing rounds off at several others. The twang of a mechanized bow firing a ridiculous number of arrows in seconds greeted my ear frenetically.
I ducked as yet another wave fired, this time a needle grazing my shoulder pad and leaving a shallow groove on the metal. ‘Hell, these things are ridiculous.’ I shook my head, knowing that direct hits would still penetrate armor from close range.
Below, I heard the gate groan as the Centaur hit it at full speed. Snapping noises accompanied the sound, suspiciously akin to bones breaking.
As the arrows fell upon the battlefield, exploding into my fragmentary shards, I risked looking over the crenellations to see what was going on below.
Sure enough, the first wave of biotics that hit the gate were looking very dead. The second wave had made sure of that, slamming them back into the material hard. Their sacrifice, however, seemed well worth it as damage was quickly growing upon the surface.
They pulled back from the gate a moment later, though. I had no desire to wait for them, though, and even as they did so I rained down hails of bullets into them.
Four were dead before their acid cannons pointed at the gate, pumping gouts of noxious, smoking liquid against the metal.
I glowered darkly at them, turning my eyes back to the advancing biotics. Enough of them that they filled out to the eight trench, an end in sight, but one still filled with hundreds of dangerous, and apparently learning, biotics.
“Try to keep the advance slow!” I shouted, “I have to help the Knights at the gate.”
“Will do!” Daniel shouted, dropping a quick burst of mortar fire in the center of the horde and sparing quick bursts of flame to the sides.
And then snarled as he turned to the side, ducking a moment too slow for the next volley of barbs. A handful punched into the shoulder of the mech, but it held strong, the biotics weapons snapping to pieces but leaving small punctures of thankfully shallow depth in his armor.
He’d already been heavily injured by one in the past and taken defensive capacity to the extreme. Even so, these things were literally designed for armor penetration.
Still, that didn’t stop my best friend from returning fire, shattering chitin and sending biotic bits and pieces spiraling through the air.
I hopped down from the wall, catching on a handhold halfway down to slow my descent. The Knights stood at the ready even as I moved to the front of them. Several of them seemed to respect that, nodding and taking heart that we weren’t leaving them to fend off a horde in damaged equipment with no support.
Though, I also did see a fair amount of grim expressions, a steely gaze that said they were ready to put everything on the line.
I shivered with excitement at the sight, not regretting helping Argedwall in the slightest. While it wasn’t required, it would be an incredible boon to gain the Knights as true allies going forward. Their courage and willingness to do what it took would be a great addition to the Legion, if I could convince them to join us.
“Alright, ladies and gentlemen,” I turned to look at them over my shoulder, the gate before us hissing as several more Centaur reached it and blasted it, only to have Fran mulch them moments later. “We’ve got our work cut out for us, but we only have to kill a few hundred of them.”
One of the men up front snorted with humor, “same shit, different day.”
Many laughed at that. “Another Monday at the office,” I joked, the Knights taking a moment before realizing it was, in fact, a Monday, and laughed heartily.
I stretched my arms, pulling out both of my long blades. Behind me, the clatter of metal and scrap shields resounded as the Knights did the same, no small number of them still laughing, morale improved.
‘I want them all.’ I grinned behind my helmet, ‘so I’d better work overtime here.’
‘We will Overcome.’ Wolvey writhed in delight in the back of my mind, ‘and Our power will grow, woven with Others.’
In spite of the general creepy vibes that Wolvey had from time to time, it knew well that I agreed wholly with it on this.
“And the Reaper cometh,” I whispered to myself, feeling my mind focus to a razor point, the Reaper’s Eye entrancing me and bringing forth only one goal. “And with black eyes beheld life, and with his white hands stained red, brought death.”
The world dulled, grey and dark in my eyes, my senses enhanced to the limit, but also excised of all superfluous information. I stalked forward as the gate buckled inwards, the barricade holding the bottom half in place. The top folded beneath the might and weight of Centaurs, the metal weakened vastly by the acid that still smoked and ate, even into the biotics that charged into it.
The first Centaur to walk forward screeched for a split second before my blade tore through its mouth, cutting the top half of it’s head clean off. The next moved, seemingly in slow motion, as jumped, lightly it felt, into the air. It reached for me as I moved leftwards, darting away from the first body as it fell.
My blade glided, hissing, through a forearm and hand, the second coming around before the Centaur could register that it was dead. I cut just deeply enough into the torso to sunder its heart before momentum carried me past it.
Crashing into another biotic, my weight destabilized it, shoulder driving into its gut as I pulled my feet in close.
As we fell backwards, I pushed my legs against it, sending both it and myself speeding off in opposite directions.
It crashed down, writhing in a pool of acid, while I landed firmly atop the barricade once more.
And then rocketed back into the fray, the Knights only now seeming to spring to action. A part of me, dull and unnecessary, said that I should wait for them to engage.
That voice silenced as I drove in low, deeper into the massing, stumbling biotics, severing legs and tails, leaving them alive and obstacles to their kin. My power armor ominously hummed, every motor and function controlled perfectly, in no small way almost making my movements jarring and erratic, like I was being jerked around like a puppet on unseen strings. Explosive movement and force dictated my feverish tempo, blades singing through flesh and chitin relentlessly.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
Then I fell back, acid spraying down upon the front-line of the horde from those behind, irreverent of their own kin. A voice, that very same from before, whispered that I needed to help the Knights, to draw attention and ensure that they could regroup in the wake of the acid attack.
I filed it away, it wasn’t pertinent to what was nec-
My mind shivered as I felt a strange sensation crash into me. Just as suddenly, it seemed as though some kind of code was being issued to me.
‘No, it is an order. Objective,’ I processed it, the format clearer to me than the voice, prescient and all important. The mission was being updated.
Instead of slaying all of the biotics, I felt a secondary objective rest within the grand goal, a stipulation that strained the fabric of my attention. And yet, I struggled to hold it within me, my trance fraying at the edges.
I felt the other voice clamp down on those edges like a vice, impressing me. It was helping ensure the mission was completed, in spite of seeming to get in my way previously.
The Knights would need to survive as much as possible. Changing the perameters to the mission strained Us less than seeking a new way to succeed, the other voice wincing and groaning in pain that shared across to me. It was endurable.
More so, because we had an answer.
‘Danse Macabre,’ I felt tremors of attention swim through my mind, feeding in details of the environment to me, diverted from elsewhere. Pressure built within my chest as I swayed, darted, ducked, and slipped between talons and acid. More and more, a culmination of attention as the Knights retreated. No attacks darted out from me yet, wading within and deeper into the horde.
It took every shred of attention, and distantly I became aware of the processing power that was freed up as we abandoned keeping track of the ‘Others’. The outsider, Wolvey, wove our attention together as we moved.
‘Our fight,’ Wolvey spoke, ‘this will be Our first fight as one fully.’
‘Affirmative,’ I responded.
‘What the actual fuck? I have another voice in my hea-you know what? Nevermind. It’s time to rip and tear these things to oblivion.’ I assented to the voice, we agreed fully on the mission.
The pressure in my head and chest suddenly seemed to release as I began to ravage the pack with murder, striding atop corpses to stay out of the acid. Further away, the Knights advanced to the lip of the gate, several Centaur snarling and swarming them.
Behind them I swept in, carving through them and dancing away, always keeping my fights to rapid one-on-ones. I used the broad bodies of the Centaur as armor against their fellows, striking from blindspots and leaving debilitating injuries, maiming them, or outright slaughtering targets as I moved.
And we danced with demise, the world a simple, bloody place for so precious a time…
-Terry Garand P.O.V.-
“Alright you piece of shit,” I promised the misshapen hunk of metal grimly, “you’re gonna work, right now, or I’m going to melt you into sewage piping if I live through this.”
Then I considered my wording.
“And rest assured, if I don’t live through this, I’m going to make sure that the last thing I do is melt you to slag.”
Better.
And now was the time for hope beyond hope.
I turned the lever for the generator, really just two heavily damaged generators abso-fucking-lutely McGuyvered together with one semi-functional generator that I said I had, but really didn’t.
What was I supposed to say to Matthew? “Oh, yeah, I only brought enough for four cardinal directions. It never occured to me that a fucking TRAIN would plow through one of them.”
Yeah, that’d have gone well. The Knights were vigorously fighting, expecting the Raijin Field to come to life aaaanny minute now…
And, of course, the generator let out a low whine, whizzed with electricity, and then spat a - blessedly silent - stream of smoke out before it simply stopped.
“I hate you.” My eyes narrowed menacingly at the generator, “I hate you so much.”
Involuntarily, I checked the view feed from the Western wall, realizing that, as much as we’d managed to push them back, they were steadily advancing again. Several of the biotics were figuring out how to actually use their biological hardware, and it seemed that for every one that learned it, many more were well on their way to picking it up.
A bad thing, when their anti-armor barbed tails were effective thirty meters away.
Harris shouted down to me, “how much longer?”
I grit my teeth, lying through them because I knew that saying ‘Fuck if I know,’ would not be great for morale, “five minutes!”
The Knight-Commander looked back to the horde and then to me, knowingness on his face. He nodded to me, “do what you can.”
‘He really is psychic,’ I sighed, “right!”
“Knights!” He began a riviting speech that I would otherwise listen to.
That’s not sarcasm, by the way, I actually have to blame his psychic powers for making his voice so damned easy to listen too.
I peeled back the panel on the good generator, tearing out equipment with reckless abandon. The first portions were with the mech’s limbs, but as I got deeper within, I realized what the issue was.
Swallowing hard, I knew that this would be, at best, a crapshoot.
“It’s fine, I just have to make components out of scrap,” I half-heartedly tried to convince myself that the adapter pieces didn’t need to be totally perfect. And that the partially melted wires weren’t utterly needed. Oh, and that the transformer wasn’t totally fuc-
Then I took a deep breath. This wasn’t the worst that had ever happened to me.
I couldn’t feel my legs, wouldn’t be able to walk again, my doctors had told me after the accident. They’d suggested insofar as to have a live-in nanny to help take care of me. Keep me fed, watered, clean me occassionally.
Like I was some kind of house plant or something.
A smoldering anger flared briefly within me as I got to work, several small tools hanging within my wide open spherical cockpit flaring to life as I soldered components and rapidly put together equipment. My mech and A.I. companion helped me with the little reminders and details, keeping me focused. I didn’t tell anyone that I had an A.I., and I wouldn’t either. Technically I’d stolen it from Reaper R&D, the same system that the Reaver’s used.
It was, however, far from being as safe as them.
In my defense, I hadn’t been aware that they were supposed to be framed after the pilot and melded to their nervous system. I also hadn’t been aware that it was basically like having a super computer that was also a child.
Which was actually cool, I’d always wanted kids.
Except it still didn’t really know how to talk. There were lots of kinks still.
I felt electricity run up my spine as it sent general information straight into my brainstem, something that I usually had him keep to a minimum. But it knew that these were desperate times.
‘Alright, we might have it this time.’ I nodded, slamming the components in.
And then realizing that there was another problem immediately after.
“You have got to be shitting me.” I groaned, pulling out one of the capacitors and many other adjoining pieces of the only good generator. ‘It’s a hairs breadth away from being giga-fucked.’
I felt a vein on my neck throb as I thought of how to fix that.
Dexter, my personal A.I., likewise was uncomfortably silent as we looked at it. Neither of us were perfect, and in spite of my naming him after a certain boy genius in cartoon shows, we did not exactly make for the dynamic duo at all times.
The front lines suddenly became a lot louder, and I noticed that bursts of acid were being shot forward, stopped only from sweeping a dozen knights from the fight by the debris they held over them like umbrellas. Anti-acid coatings also helped, but there were many more damaged.
“Incoming!” I heard Harris shout, a tremor of something - hopefulness maybe - in his voice.
I didn’t have to wonder for long what he was seeing as a frankly terrifyingly barbaric biotic that I’d never seen before smashed down through three Centaur. Two were crushed beneath huge leading fists, a third doing a very good impression of a lemon being squeezed over a jar by an elephant's trunk.
Because that’s exactly what it looked like that grabbed the third, minus the three pronged grasping appendage at the end of what should have been a nose. The gorilla-phant-treant thing towered over the biotics, nearly touching the top of the gate. It was broad, too, and bore a shaggy mossy coat that looked almost like fur and grew forth from gaps in dense bark-like armor.
It stood on its hind legs just outside of the gate and beat its chest with its fists, a force like a drumbeat that made my ears ache even from this distance.
And then it roared.
I felt my stomach flip as it did so, because it wasn’t just a monster's roar. Voices tickled the back of my mind, and I knew I wasn’t the only one.
The others around, Knights and Legion all, stared onwards in a mixture of awe, shock, and horror at the sound.
Because I could hear, literally, the echo of Patrick’s voice within, shouting and snarling defiance in the face of biotics.
“Oh. Okay.” I blinked, staring at the thing for several seconds as it smashed handfuls of biotics with every swing. It was exceedingly careful of the Knights, though, seeming to almost revere them.
It snarled as spikes exploded, puncturing into the bark armor and meat, dripping with a silvery-green blood that stood out amidst the battlefield. Acid ate into its hide, and as I watched, I realized that this wouldn’t last for long.
“Thanks, Bigfoot,” I turned my attention back to the generators, “don’t go sacrificing yourself before I figure out what you are.”
Then I blinked.
“Huh… I guess that would work, huh?” I asked Dexter, who seemed confused by what I meant.
I hooked the generator up to my mech directly, breathing deeply and swiftly. Dexter braced, too, and I felt my throat clench as I indignantly held back the whimper that threatened to spill out in my heroic moment.
I’d like to preface this with the fact that I definitely do not want to die.
And that I probably was about to anyways.
“What’s it the kids say these days?” I paused, hand on the switch and then grinned, all my nervous energy running into one word that I screamed at the top of my lungs.
“YOLO!”
And, perhaps as whatever cringing god's punishment, the generator started up just fine, with the expectec, the hoped outcome of the Raijin Field suddenly roaring to life and scorching 3/4ths of the remaining biotics; thankfully far too stupid to just single file in the scorched region.
Which was altogether too much electricity for my mech to keep from safely spilling over into me.
One upside, though, I could almost feel my legs again!
Too bad it hurt like hell.