All along the main defensive line, boots scrabbled for purchase on a frozen shoreline rapidly melting under the heat of concentrated laserfire. The boots pushing northward, with the mud and slush of the lakeside sucking at their heels, were polished ceramite, a uniform white stained with the greys and browns of the battlefield. The boots pushing southward, slipping and sliding on the newly-wet stones of the ruined Chiss noble compound, varied wildly. They were leatheris and chitin, hobnailed and spiked, worn and new, often mismatched.
At first, that chaotic cluster of nonstandard boots did most of the backsliding. First Battalion slammed into the Mawite defensive line with the inexorable force of a rockslide, moving up in a steady, disciplined advance that the Brotherhood warriors lacked the momentum to counter. But the marauders had learned a thing or two from their many encounters with NIO forces. Though they reeled back at first, losing the jumble of earthenworks and trenches they'd thrown together as their first line of defense, they had a good fallback at the wall.
And despite the impression they gave, this was planned.
As Mawite champions scrapped with NIO elites at the base of the wall, the survivors of the overwhelmed trenches fell back through the gaps in the crumbling stone, their retreat covered by the E-WEB heavy repeaters mounted at intervals atop the ruins. As the likes of Shazzeke cut down their foes, hacking up the towering Brotherhood warriors, the line of battle shifted. The trenches that had sheltered the Mawites could now provide the NIO soldiers with cover instead, offering them a respite from the E-WEB barrage. Or so it seemed.
It had been years by then since the Battle of Csilla, but The Mongrel had never forgotten what he'd learned there. In command of the main Mawite attack against the triple layer of NIO trenches, he had watched as his marauders had overcome the lead trench, an event that he'd been sure - as a younger and more naive man - would spell the beginning of the end for his foes. With his legions of Moon Children deployed, the NIO could not possibly have held back the overwhelming close combat onslaught of the shock troops
inside the trenches.
But they'd taught him a lesson he was now putting to use.
Just as planned, his loyal sub-chiefs oversaw the retreat, Scar Hounds falling into position. And as the NIO forces moved up to occupy the trenches...
BOOM. The line of earthenworks collapsed, blown inward in a hail of dirt and permafrost, filling themselves in as explosives buried in their walls detonated. It would not kill many of the foe; even some of those who'd leapt in at the forefront would merely be temporarily buried rather than ripped apart. But it would do to the NIO
exactly what they'd once done to The Mongrel's Mawites.
It would deny them cover. It would force them to charge across open ground under enemy fire a second time. It would mean that far more of the enemy would fall to those blazing E-WEB emplacements, and all the mismatched weapons of the marauders who'd retreated to cluster around them. It would crush the hope of men who had believed they'd earned a respite. But the thing it would do most of all was to show the NIO
conclusively that they no longer fought a mere savage horde. Even without the Final Dawn's legions, the Maw was evolving.
It was learning from its enemies, and learning well.
-------------------------------------
Sluggish, half-frozen nutrient fluid oozed from his cracked brain case, rolling down the transparisteel in thick, slimy droplets before finally succumbing to the call of ice. The Mongrel imagined he could feel the cold seeping into his vat, frigid fingers dancing across naked brain tissue, but he knew that it was only his imagination; the organ, skulless and exposed in a way nature had never meant it to be, lacked the proper receptors to experience such a sensation. Was it the chill of death, then? Of his soul leaving his ruined body?
Or merely the folly of a man stretched too far?
Shai leapt back as his flames lashed out, warding them off with her shield so that they didn't catch and immolate her exposed innards. For a moment they had some distance between them again. She used it to pull the blade from her gut - as a trophy, evidently. The Mongrel found himself amused, and oddly nostalgic. He'd collected trophies once, when he'd been a younger warrior: a necklace of fingers, a Wookiee's ryyyk blade, a Gundanbard helmet. He'd always lusted after a lightsaber. But none of those things seemed to matter anymore.
He was too tired for greed, or for pride.
The warlord could plainly see that his situation was dire. He was weaponless and damaged, while his foe - between Erskine's blade, her beskar knife, and his own purloined sword - had quite a surplus of pointy things to stab and slash at him with. And he could plainly see though his variety of sensors that Shai's cybernetics were kicking in to stabilize her, distributing stims through her veins and systems to keep her in the fight. He'd used a similar system when there had been more organic bits left of him; it would've been of no use to him now.
She taunted him, flourished his blade, and came right at him, her jetpack putting speed and momentum on her side. But if there was one thing that his many duels with the NIO's finest had taught him, it was that the savage onslaught of a marauder was not always the most powerful move. There
were maneuvers that could not only hold back such relentless fury, but turn it against an opponent. The night thrust, if employed defensively, was one example. Technology was about to enable the cyborg warlord to unleash another on his foe.
Gowrie would've been proud of his development.
The Mongrel did not flinch as the heavily-armored Mandalorian Shistavanen cyborg (a combination of words that ought to send any sensible person running for the hills) bore down on him. There was no sense in delaying the inevitable, no sense in dragging out a battle when both of them were at the brink. Instead he simply raised one arm... not the flamethrower arm, but the other, fingers spread. He most resembled some mystical old Teras Kasi master from a martial arts holovid, ready to stop a charging reek with an open palm and inner peace.
But there was nothing serene about him.
As Shai closed in, her shield slamming into him with force that would crack organic ribs, his
repulse-hand activated. The weapon was not unlike the repulsor that the Mandalorian had used against him just moments earlier, only far more brutal. It wasn't designed to merely shove or crack a target with a strong kinetic push; its multitude of repulsor generators were designed to
shred its target, tearing flesh and shattering bone as waves of pressure shot out to strike the same area from many different angles. And with Shai's unstoppable momentum...
... well, the effect would only be
multiplied.
If it landed, anyway. The Mongrel had been granted only scant seconds (if that) to aim and fire the brutal cyber-weapon before Shai crashed into him, her shield denting his chassis in so deeply that part of his chestplate nearly touched his backplate. Servos were battered into oblivion, and warnings shrieked across the warlord's brain as wires were severed and connections interrupted. He hit the ground hard, a
puff-splash-scrape sounding as he struck the half-melted snow and slid along the rockcrete of the compound.
Sparks flew. He fought to rise.
If she still stood, stood
over him, he was finished.
-------------------------------------
Second Battalion was in for the fight of their lives.
On Hill 121, the brave pilots of Dagger Squadron held the line, even as the snow around them blackened and evaporated under the withering barrage. The blasters of dead NIO troopers, now turned to the dark purposes of the Lord of the Perished, joined the plasma guns and lightning cannons in besieging their position. Though the downed flyboys - and flygirl - fought hard, the numbers arrayed against them made their efforts look like nothing more than a dark joke, as if they were trying to hold off a raging inferno by fiercely blowing on it.
Until the Sabertooths began to draw Mawite fire.
Now Second Battalion was in against that same inferno, but they at least had a little firefighting gear... enough to earn a fighting chance to pluck their comrades from the flames. The Sabertooths were behind enemy lines, terrifyingly close to encirclement, only a hair's breadth from becoming just as entrapped as the pilots they'd come to save, but they showed neither fear nor hesitation. There would be sacrifices this day. There would be losses. But in the end, no one would be abandoned to the brutal and sadistic "mercies" of the Brotherhood.
The NIO would not leave any soldier behind.
For Massoud, the ultimate sacrifice was near at hand. The Sergeant-Major would have made an excellent Mawite in another life. Dauntless, fierce, eager for the eternal glory of a death in service to a higher cause, he led Diab Platoon into the mouth of madness without a flinch or a tear. With half his men dead in the snow around him, he refused to break. The clouds parted above him, bathing the site of his last stand in a pale blue light, an azure halo painting the slush of the melting hill. His shout of
"AVE RUUURIIIIIK!!!!" echoed down the valley.
Without Second Battalion, without Massoud, all the pilots' bravery would have been for nothing. No one would have ever heard the story of their courage, how they brought down the deathless soldiers of the Perished and the scavenger-cannibals of the Scar Hounds with little more than their sidearms and a hefty helping of inner grit. But while Massoud stood there, under the light of the moon, the Sergeant-Major's Edict was clear and present:
NONE SHALL PASS. All those who tried would meet their end by his gun or his blade.
All of them.
And there were
many who tried.
Such valiance can only emerge from the darkest of moments... and the valiant hero himself rarely does. A shot to the shoulder, a graze to the hip. The Sergeant-Major slowed, bloodied and winded. But he refused to fall, and sheer will kept him standing. The gutshot that burned through his small intestine did not put him down, nor did the blade through his thigh, nicking his femoral artery and rapidly soaking his leg with far, far too much blood. In spite of it all, he
stood. When no one would have faulted him for falling, he stood tall before his god.
Who was this warrior-saint, the Scar Hounds wondered? This man whose faith was equal to their own, even unto death, so unlike the weak and shrinking spawn of 'civilization' they were used to facing? Here was a man whose glory was bought in blood and grit, a man worthy of a righteous ending and passage to paradise. Perhaps, for one who fought as he did, the Avatars could make an exception. Perhaps they could open their gates for an infidel, just this once. He was flagging now, bleeding, broken. They would send him on his way.
They would light his funeral pyre.
The three fanatics charged up the hill toward the wounded Sergeant-Major, detonators clasped in their hands, howling praises to their dark gods. He got the first one with a clean shot through the head, dropping him to the melting slope. The second one took five shots before she went down, five steaming holes through her torso before she stopped crying out to the Avatars, dragging herself forward. But the third one got him. In a flash of flame and shrapnel, the marauder zealot exploded, blown apart in an instant - and taking Massoud with him.
In the wake of the warrior-saint's death, an eerie cry went up from the Mawite lines - not the Perished, still eerily silent, still clawing their way toward the pilots, but the Scar Hound scavengers who'd first pursued the downed starfighters. It was a keening wail, conveying some impossible combination of triumph and respect and strange grief for a kindred spirit. Then it was over, and the Tarar started up the hillside again, stepping over the broken forms of Diab Platoon. But not before they stopped to scavenge the remains, of course.
The fragmented bones of Massoud, scattered over the hillside by the explosion that had claimed him, were plucked from the melting snow. Cleaned and polished, they would be laid in little reliquaries built of crude durasteel and looted aurodium, to be worn around the necks of those marauders lucky enough to have seen the sight of the warrior-saint's martyrdom - or strong enough to take them from someone who had. Wearing the Sergeant-Major's bones, they believed, would grant them his courage, endurance, and unyielding faith.
They were precious talismans indeed.
Michael Barran
|
Nuruodo'kal'brast
"Dokal" |
Colton
Renfro |
Rika Hiro
| Annor E-059 |
Amadeus Blackwood
|
Djorn Bline
| Open (Allies to Ziare, enemies to Mercy)
