For a moment, it seemed that the Bloodsworn had beaten back nature's assault. The strange, vicious roots, their razor-sharp thorns now studded with impaled bodies that dangled like grisly fruit, clearly didn't care much for fire; they recoiled, burning and dying, as the marauders deployed their incendiaries. Driven back by the heat, they slithered back into the ground, the huge wooden tendrils moving like sinuous serpents. The Mongrel, his pierced hand still sending out waves of agony that rippled through his system, managed a sigh of relief from between gritted teeth. They'd acted quickly enough.
Still, the sudden assault boiling out of the very earth had cost them dearly. The Mongrel had assumed that, once the Bloodsworn were inside the depot's walls, their momentum and close-quarters prowess would carry them to victory over their mid to long-range specialized foes. But the thorn-studded roots had badly reduced that momentum and seriously reduced their numbers, leaving the marauders locked in a desperate struggle to survive. Wounded and surrounded by diminishing forces, The Mongrel did his best to fight through the pain, firing his scattergun until the telltale
click of empty echoed out of it.
He could
fire the gun one-handed, painful though each blast was to his poor, un-braced shoulder... but he couldn't possibly reload it. So he moved the weapon's shoulder strap and slung it over his back, out of his way, then drew a fresh pistol from concealment in his sleeve. The scattergun had done good work, ripping apart a half-dozen security forces and legionnaires that had charged him; this pistol would be more limited, with considerably less stopping power. Already he cursed the loss of his heavy blaster, buried somewhere in the chaos of battle. The enemy was closing in, and he was barely armed.
He could not have foreseen what came next.
With ugly, unnatural twitching movements, the bodies at The Mongrel's feet began to stir. They rose awkwardly, like badly-puppeteered dolls on invisible strings... and lurched forward, toward the Sith defenders. With hands curled into rictus claws and deathless hate burning in their blank eyes, they tore at the horrified enemy. The veteran marauder looked around and saw that the same thing was happening all across the compound; the dead, Bloodsworn and Sith-Imperial alike, were standing back up to attack the Brotherhood's foes. Far from unnerved, The Mongrel howled with glee at this abomination.
"The Dark Gods favor us!" he screamed.
The Bloodsworn warleader might not
understand magic, but he knew when he ought to appreciate it. Without the added weight of the zombie troops, it had been only a matter of time before the outnumbered raiders were brought down. This army of the dead had evened the odds... and perhaps even tilted the scale back in the Brotherhood's favor. The recently dead, it seemed, did not easily return to the grave once risen; the enemy poured blasterfire into the reanimated soldiers, but it took a staggering amount of it to bring even one of them down. Even with whole chunks of torso blown away, they kept coming.
The battle on Enenpa, however, was
full of reversals.
The Mongrel's heart sank as the deadly roots burst from the ground once again, the flames that had driven them away mostly extinguished by the press of cool, damp earth. They immediately laid into the zombies, crushing them flat or impaling them on their huge thorns; some of the undead, pierced but still animate, wriggled and clawed at the sides of the branches they were pinned to. The Bloodsworn warleader's calculus shifted again, his estimation of who held the advantage bouncing back and forth like a metronome. There was only one thing for it: to struggle toward their objective until they could struggle no more.
"With me!" he cried, rallying as many of the surviving marauders as he could. Let the remaining dead hold off the roots, which seemed oddly intent on destroying them; he needed warriors he could command, not lifeless puppets, which he was more than willing to sacrifice. With the ragged remnants of his raider warband gathered around him, The Mongrel led the charge deeper into the depot. They
had to take the landing pads, or this would all be for nothing. If the cargo shuttles couldn't touch down, the raid was over; there was no way the raiders could have carried all the goods at
full strength, let alone now.
Pushing their way through the chaos through brute force and sheer, ferocious will, the little band left the perimeter fence and the madness around it behind them, making for the central zone. They were few, and would soon face fresh security forces, but they trusted in the Avatars - and their own savagery - to carry them through. As they began to move deeper into the depot, however, The Mongrel caught sight of a crimson helmet. He turned, peering into the melee, and confirmed his suspicions: the second jetpack trooper had survived. She was still without her disruptor rifle, thankfully, but he knew the threat she represented. She was one of the enemy's best.
"Go on ahead," he ordered, waving his troops toward the landing pads. He knew that he had to seize this opportunity right away. If the Kainate's elite had been resourceful enough to bring down three out of six bogaranths in the first few minutes of the battle, he was certain they could find a way to disrupt or destroy the incoming transports, thwarting the entire raid. He couldn't allow that to happen... and that meant, battered and broken though he was, he had to bring her down. A rueful grin crossed his cracked lips. Had he survived the great clash on Csilla just to die on this wretched forest backwater?
The Avatars worked in mysterious ways.
Gritting his jagged teeth against his pain and growing exhaustion, The Mongrel jogged forward, raising his blaster pistol. It was a poor weapon to employ against a foe with such sophisticated defenses, but perhaps the Three were smiling on him; it looked like the plates of the Kainate trooper's armor had been crushed in places, held together only by a hasty battlefield repair. As the two surviving bogaranths thrashed in the background, trying to cut and crush the animated tree roots with shakes of their gargantuan, sharp-mandibled heads, the veteran marauder took aim. He needed to hit a weak point.
"War, Death, Rebirth," The Mongrel whispered, a quiet prayer lost in the din of battle as soon as it left his lips. Skidding to a stop once he was within range, he braced his pistol arm over the wrist of his maimed hand and slowly let his breath out in a long, measured exhale. Then, as the last of the air left his lungs, he squeezed the trigger. A trio of shots streaked toward
UX-0626
, carefully aimed at areas where her armor had been patched... though given the range and the marauder's pain, the shots could easily go wide. The Mongrel didn't wait to see. Instead he dove for cover, trying to reach the tall, solid safety of an inactive lumber-harvesting droid.
Until he got behind it, he would be an easy target...
