The squad pushed deeper into the excavation site, their enhanced bodies and powerful armor allowing them to move with great speed amidst the fury of combat.
Jada had served alongside the godlike warriors of the Folken in years past, but they were heavy infantry, designed to be the equivalent of human battle tanks. The Dire Swords, with their blitzkrieg-style of warfare, had tailored their armor and their bodies for the specific task of lightning infantry assault. The six killers ran across the excavation site with a deadly grace, all while engaging enemies from every direction.
Jada sprinted across the smooth surface of what she now understood to be a former building and leapt across the gap between it and the next, her body sailing over the flowstone alley where at least one of the creatures roared and fired upwards at her. As she stuck the landing, Jada tucked and rolled, having noticed a hollow charging her from ahead. She managed to evade the hail of bullets that spewed out of the beast’s gun appendages.
Poe opened fire as he leapt across the gap, and several of his shots punched into the creature’s chest, knocking it off balance and causing it to stumble.
Jada rose to a kneeling position and raised her rifle to her shoulder to fire while she continued to move into a standing position. She leveled her sights at the creature and squeezed off a single round that went into the screaming abomination’s open mouth and exploded out of the back of its skull.
“Left flank!” bellowed Strega from the alley below while she turned her rifle to face the next threat as a hollow scuttled low across the ground, having just emerged from a dig pit covered in shadow and catching the merc by surprise. The beast had all of its appendages at the ready and they began to spit hard rounds at Strega before she could get her own shot off. Most of the rounds were turned away by her armor, though several bit through the joints and into her flesh.
As Strega and the creature exchanged salvos of fire, the Dire Sword was driven into cover by the sheer intensity of the enemy’s advance.
Osric emerged from the other side of the alley and opened up, pushing the hollow towards Strega as it twisted its limbs to return fire. The wounded merc swept her rifle around the corner and added her weapon to the crossfire. In seconds, the shredded corpse of the creature collapsed in a heap.
Ranec rushed past Strega as he fired from the hip, his Gedra rifle hurling hollow-point rounds through the re-animated flesh of a creature that appeared to have been one of the deck safety officers. A bright orange reflector vest still clung in tatters to the creature’s chest.
“Holding!” shouted Ranec as he sent suppressing fire against the dark shapes moving in the gloom both ahead and to his left.
“Moving!” answered Berg, running past Ranec and up a metal gangplank that appeared to lead to a series of flowstone rooftops, one of which had been capped with a security bunker.
Jada saw Berg emerge from the streets below and once again marveled at the sheer tonnage of dirt and stone that must have been removed from this site in order to unearth the flowstone urban area and the master ring itself. Much of the outer limits of the urban zone had been left only half excavated, though as the warriors pushed deeper into the ancient site, they could see that the terrain was more and more urban.
When they had first started conducting missions on Ellisian worlds, the bizarre rock formations had seemed strange, but over time, that strangeness had evolved into something with obvious intention, but still alien in concept. Now that the mercs were positive that these were crafted urban structures, Jada found she could intuit her way through the area, and could recognize the difference between streets, pedestrian walkways, and alleys. It was a strange sensation to realize that she had begun to intuit an alien urban environment, yet it felt right, as if any sentient being that thought to build a city would inevitably achieve a similar metropolitan layout.
She saw the security bunker that Berg was rushing towards and altered her course by cutting sharply to the left. A set of scaffolds occupied the side of the buildings ahead of Berg, and from her vantage point, she could see one of the creatures climbing up on an intercept course with her fellow merc.
She built up speed by sprinting across the roof of the current building and cast herself powerfully into the air. She landed on the metal awning of a supply container which allowed her to slow her momentum and slide across the smooth metal as she fired several haphazardly aimed shots at the creature before dropping the last few meters to the street below. Her attack distracted the creature, foiling its ambush. It held onto the scaffold with one hand, snarling at her as two of its four gun appendages turned in her direction and fired.
Jada was already moving, passing through one of the now familiar cold spots that were so common in these forgotten landscapes, marveling that even that oddity had become normalized in the eternal grind of conflict. Projectiles chewed up the stone street as she sped across the open ground towards the base of the building. As she ran, she heard Poe’s rifle go off, and by the time she reached the base of the scaffold and looked up, the broken body of the creature was falling limply into the street below.
“Overwatch, I have a security bunker that has been completely stripped, easily forty-plus small arms slots on the rack are gone, all magazines,” observed Berg over the company channel as Ranec ran up the gangplank to join his battle buddy while Poe made the jump and crossed the street to join Jada. “Looks like they cannibalized most of the restraining joints, too.”
“Copy that, Raid Alpha,” crackled the voice of Marcus in everyone’s comm-beads. “Recon showing half a dozen or more posted in the site. Working theory is that this particular hollow horde has had more time to transform, so their modifications are more complex and effective.”
“I’m not seeing any ammo belts on these guys,” added Poe over the squad channel. “They probably just have the one magazine in each appendage and then they’re out.”
“Hence the teeth and claws,” Strega replied, nodding as she shuffled up to the scaffold with Osric pulling security behind her.
“Push through it, mercs,” growled Womack over the company channel. “We’ve got them stirred up now. Proceed to the master ring, frags authorized once all elements converge.”
Jada looked at the three mercs standing with her and could see that it wasn’t just Strega who had been hit. In the chaotic, running firefight, both Osric and Poe looked to have taken a few glancing hits and Jada herself was still nursing minor wounds in her thigh and shoulder. Likely, Berg and Ranec were suffering similar injuries. They were lucky that the creatures were outfitted with small arms weapons and nothing tremendously high caliber. The price they’d paid had brought them well into the enemy’s territory, and soon they would reach the beacon and past that, the ring awaited.
Jada could see parts of the base of the ring looming on the horizon, illuminated by the sickly green light of the multitude of flares fired by the various assault squads.
The sound of combat was all around them as Dire Sword mercs fought running battles against the hollows, but in that moment, Jada felt at peace.
Battling against terrible foes on a distant scrap of rock in the light of a dying sun, did have something of a spark to it. Perhaps this was not the tale of heroes and villains that she had grown up on, but here she was, standing alongside what could be considered knights and making war with abominations as terrible as any storybook monster. They served no king, had no country, the glory was not as important as the gold, and even the money was only a pretense. After all that she had seen and done, like every Dire Sword, there was no life but this one, no calling in life but the drop siren.