It seemed as if every gun was pointed in the team’s direction; it didn’t seem to be too far an assumption for Eagle. He immediately dove toward the nearest column of alien metal. Hot plasma followed his footsteps. He squeezed off two rounds, one nailing a grunt, the other striking a brute, before returning to his cover. He muttered lines of expletives as he reloaded.
The others ran in different directions. Kai, with his brute shot over his head, defensively barreled forward, before breaking to the left, leaving some jackals a fragmentation grenade in his wake. A thud sounded as the flightless birds soared through the air.
Bertha hid behind a sturdy tower as a persistent wraith hammered her position. Locating a second defensible point, she took off, emptying the fuel rod gun at the mortar tank. The wraith, pivoting to track her movements, failed to evade the plasma bombs, and exploded in a shower of shrapnel. The force of the explosion was sufficient to kill a pair of grunts unfortunate enough to take cover behind the tank.
Viper ran behind Bertha’s trail, pumping lead into brutes, jackals and grunts closing on their positions. The steady booms of the shotgun played a symphony of blood, a rainbow of colors as alien bloods mixed. He dove into a roll, relinquishing his shotgun for energy swords, and cut a brute right down the middle, before ducking behind cover.
Aura ran left, while Crackshot ran right. A banshee screeched toward Crackshot, launching a plasma bomb. She rolled and fired several rounds from her needle rifles; they did little damage as they glanced off of the alien metal. A ghost hovered to Aura, and the two exchange a barrage of searing blue, scorching the Forerunner surface under them. Symbols marred and distorted from the battle.
“Aura,” Crackshot shouted, “switch!”
Crackshot fired a trio of rounds into the brute on the ghost, triggering a needle supercombine, tearing him to shreds. Aura popped the banshee with a plasma pistol; the EMP kills the engines, and the vehicle dropped, shattering into pieces as it hit the ground. She returned her attention to the ghost, taking the deceased driver’s place, and fired into a phalanx of jackals. Crackshot reloaded her spent cartridges and began spearing down the panicked grunts.
The admiral’s erratic, if not insane, forward rush served to divert most of the firepower toward him, only to leave a blazing trail behind him. Eagle took this opportunity to snipe the distracted brutes, Bertha blew the phalanx of jackals to bits, and Viper rushed to engage in close-quarters combat. He struck down a few grunts, then wall-ran to meet with a low-flying banshee, severing its engine with his sword. The vehicle jumped, then immediately smashed itself into the wall; Viper braced against the scraps of purple metal that rained down on him.
Kai continued to mow down opponents that impeded his run. He brought up some screens onto his HUD. He noted the locations of the remaining ghosts, wraiths and banshees, and relayed them to Bertha and Eagle. He then marked the chieftain they had spotted earlier, and sent that information to Viper. The screens disappeared from his visor just in time for him to see Aura run down a line of grunts with the ghost’s speed boost.
The captain responded to the relayed command, and weaving through combat traffic, made his way toward the overlooking chieftain. The brute, enraged at his subordinates’ failures, unslung his large gravity hammer. His hammer seemed like a normal melee weapon, but upon closer inspection, the blade on the axe side had been replaced by a malicious curve of magnetically aligned fire. He lunged toward Aura’s ghost, which had been parked to cross fires with grunts under a fallen column. She noticed, but too late, as she tried to shimmy the vehicle aside. The brute brought the axe side down. Viper, who was able to close the distance, immediately parried the swing with his own. A loud clash echoed from them as the two collided, and both combatants slid away from one another. Aura hovered away from the duel, firing at the remaining enemies as she did.
Kai’s unorthodox maneuvers succeeded in thinning the numbers; most of the grunts were dead, as were many brutes, and only a solitary wraith withstood the assault. Then, it too succumbed to the jaws of warfare as Eagle fired successively into the exhaust port; it instantly exploded. Crackshot and Bertha picked off the jackals and grunts, scurrying for cover from their failed defense attempt.
The chieftain, annoyed that a petty human had impeded his kill, swiveled his hammer, and brought the flat side down on Viper. He leapt away, the pulse sending him farther than he anticipated. He landed feet-first a good distance away, but it did not deter him as he charged forward again. His strikes cut with a deafening hiss, but they only cut air as the brute skillfully avoided each attack, or else blocked it with his augmented gravity hammer, before retaliating in turn. The booms and hisses from swords and hammer reverberated throughout the cavernous space.
As the battle raged on, Viper’s swords began to weaken; the glowing blades winked on occasion as it struck against the hard plasma of the gravity hammer. Sensing the depletion of his opponent, the chieftain switched to the blunt end of his hammer again, and swung horizontally. Having been distracted by his failing energy swords, Viper had but a moment of shock before the full blast sent him sprawling across the paved floor. His swords clacked as they bounced away, the blades sputtering and the batteries dying.
“Viper!” Bertha yelled, concerned. She fired a pair of fuel rods toward the beast, but he reacted with his hammer; the first shot deflected off of the pulse, exploding harmlessly into a wall, while the second was completely obliterated with a full downward swing. She retreated to a pillar, hoping that she had ticked off the brute to lure him away from the captain. But when she peeked from her cover, she saw that the chieftain had once again turned his attention on Viper. “Damn.”
The others also took potshots at the approaching chieftain, but the brute was undeterred, agilely avoiding the penetrating rounds from Eagle’s sniper rifle, while letting the less lethal needles and plasma sputter on his shields. Bertha tried to fire off a few rounds, but was forced to cease as the chieftain got too close, where friendly fire became a dangerous possibility.
Kai was nowhere to be seen.
“Shit.” Eagle exclaimed, struggling to reload his weapon. “Damn it, someone help the captain!”
But by then the brute was fast, far too fast, and before long was looming over the injured Viper, whose shields strained to recharge. He struggled to look up, only to see the shadow of the chieftain. The brute roared, and lifted the hammer up. With all of his force, he brought it straight down. Viper braced for the inevitable impact.
“Viper!”
And then there was no pain.