Seoul Train (LotF Dominion of Seoul)

[Kitt Solo]

She made it to the roof slower than the others.

She dropped to a knee beside Moira, still catching her breath. Grim-look spread across her pallid lips. The only emotion she felt off the sorcerer was confidence. And that was scary.

Reaching behind, she took out her modified Czerka riot-gun, the same one she tried using on Doc before they became something more than friends. Hefting the gun forward, she propped her elbow on one knee in her kneeling position and squeezed down on the trigger, sending a powerful and large stun ring toward the sorcerer's profiled torso.

@Jared Ovmar @Moira Skaldi @Dak Canton @Je'gan Olra'en

 

[Marcus Tritum]

Okay, my eyes might've bulged a bit when the hostile started deflecting bolts like he was born with lightsabers in his hands. Maybe he had been. I'd heard Jedi trained from birth or somethin' like that. Made 'em good fighters. This one'd be tough to take down. Worse, the hostile was using the unknown bogey and tryin' to put him between my line of fire. I grunted and my jaw tightened. I ceased firing and took the second to eject the Plug N Fire cell.

I caught movement in the corner of my eye and glanced that way. HUD IFF tagged them as friendlies. One looked familiar, but I couldn't tell from this distance. A woman. Brown hair. Didn't matter, she and the other were tagged as blue.

"Cross-fire, cross-fire! Unknown Fringe Friendly, disengage and pull back!" I yelled at the unknown bogey, @[member="Jared Ovmar"]. I pointed at @[member="Kitt Solo"] and @[member="Moira Skaldi"]. "Suppressing fire. Overwhelm with full-auto. We need 180 degree fire." I re-aimed, hoping the unknown friendly asset would disengage so we could all lay down simultaneous fire.

@Je'gan Olra'en

 

[Velok the Younger]

Rave's assault rifle and occasional spells cut down the enemy troops in her way, before the encirclement could be complete. Up ahead, the three-bodied, united-roof skyscraper glowed faintly. Blasterfire sluiced across the top, parallel to the roof. Something serious was going on, and at a guess, Rave wasn't going to get there in time. Powered armor thudded across pavement, and she continued to draw occasional fire.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

@[member="Kitt Solo"] @[member="Dak Canton"] @[member="Moira Skaldi"]

A really ridiculous amount of fire was coming his way. Good thing he was already at the edge of the real roof. Precog took him down off the ledge; one lightsabre flicked back to his belt, and he caught the edge left-handed as he hung beneath the illusory roof extension. Auto-shotgun and repeating-blaster shots snapped past over him.

The illusion he left behind was a little vainglorious. Force shields, a blur of blades, a lean and mobile form. And then, hopefully before they could note that their shots were going through him and his whirling guard, illusory Je'gan took the brunt of several scattergun and blaster shots, and died. Hard. Fell off the illusory roof.

Ideally they'd investigate, look off the edge that was three metres away from where it appeared to be. Hanging from the real edge, lightsabre unlit in his right hand, the real Je'gan used the attention he'd put into his fake death to wrap himself in full-scale Immersion. Invisibility and then some.

 

[Marcus Tritum]

"Tango down," I growled into the comm, watching with hard eyes as the hostile went down in a blaze of small arms fire and took a backwards swan dive off the ledge.

"Good copy, Omega Blue." The voice came across the comm slightly fuzzy. It was my Handler for Fringe Omega Special Command, or FOSC. We handle the 'special' jobs. TDY embeds with assault units, planetary ops, boarding ops, solo ops. You name it, we do it. "Confirm kill, over."

My jaw tightened. I just watched the target get shot several times in the chest and fall what had to be over fifteen stories, but command still wanted to get some hard evidence of his death. Well I wasn't about to go jumping off the building.

"Copy, I need CAS to do a ground sweep to confirm target neutralization. Over," I rasped, still in a kneeling position, blaster lowered slightly.

"Copy, CAS inbound, over."

The transport that had brought me in for infil came back around, moving low to the ground to check for the body. Hopefully FOSC would get a TAC team from regular army to do a sweep as well for double confirmation.

@Kitt Solo @Jared Ovmar @Moira Skaldi @Je'gan Olra'en

 

[Moira Skaldi]

@[member="Dak Canton"], @Je'gan Olra'en, @[member="Jared Ovmar"], @[member="Kitt Solo"]

"He has been terminated," Moira spoke blandly, mainly because this writer always wanted to use that line as the illusionist seemingly took a Brunswick dive over the roof, just an involuntary one. "So it seems." Logic and machine sensor told her that their opponent had been riddled with buckshot, blaster rounds and stun blasts, a ridiculous amount of firepower that had thrust him off the roof and to his certain and undoubtedly painful death, and that it had been him who took the fall.

Except force-users had this annoying ability to override the rules of logic and reason through the use of their 'powers'. Just how many times had Kerrigan survived when by all reason she should have died? Those butchered on Roche and Gehenna would have said justice demanded it as well, but Moira was absolutely indifferent to them. Illusionists were the most annoying since there were powers that could fool even a droid, such as the White Current.

She gave the Fringe soldier a curt nod as he ordered a ground sweep to ascertain they had taken the sorcerer down. After all, as any action holovid would tell you, the most common mistake for any villain was to assume that 'nobody could have survived that fall' or 'there's no body, but he's really dead', so it was always good to be genre-savvy.

 

[Tahira Solo]

[SIZE=10pt]@[/SIZE][SIZE=11pt]Dak Canton[/SIZE], @Je'gan Olra'en, @[SIZE=11pt]Jared Ovmar[/SIZE], @[SIZE=11pt]Kitt Solo[/SIZE], @[member="Moira Skaldi"]

[SIZE=10pt]She stepped out of her hiding place from white current, behind the two women on the roof. Like her partner in life, she too was wearing a ski mask that covered her face. She may not be a master illusionist like her husband but she was a master TK specialist and healer, able to manipulate living tissue and static objects on the minutest level. Myrtle-ellipses focused on her target: the blond woman. But she wasn’t a woman at all, not in the organic sense.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Her healer’s eye through the force could see that.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Instead of using the force to look for weak points in muscle or bone tissue, she used the force to wrap around the woman’s mechanic joints with surgeon-like precision and attempted to rip her arms right out of her cyborg-sockets. With a flick of her slender wrist, she sent a wall of a force push toward the male soldier, in case he got any bright ideas, with a trajectory to push him closer to the edge of the fake roof and potentially over the real one.[/SIZE]

 

[Moira Skaldi]

@[member="Tahira Solo"], @[member="Dak Canton"], @Je'gan Olra'en, @[member="Jared Ovmar"]

Back when she had still been employed by the Protectorate, Moira had served under the apex telekinetic specialist - and ridiculously oversexed and self-destructive - Siobhan Kerrigan, who liked to tear down buildings and throw walkers. Moira had born witness to that woman's duel with a possessed HK, whom she tossed across the grounds of the Bando Gora Temple and pretty much TK Hulked. Moira had long concluded that force-users were annoying. All sorts, especially since their powers were difficult to assess for her.

Her scanners had picked up on an organic as Tahira stepped out of her hiding place, but too late for her to act before she suddenly felt an invisible force - something that by all reason and logic should not exist, but the Force was a variable outside of the realm of logic - wrap around her mechanical joints with great precision. Kerrigan was a specialist of detail, her focus had been zero-finesse, mass destruction telekinesis, this one was like a surgeon. The end result was brutal enough though, as there was a powerful crack as Moira's arms were pulled and twisted, finding her limbs gripped in her mind-pincers.

Most annoying. Annoyance was an organic emotion she found herself disapproving less off. Her feet dug into the ground, putting her full body weight down to make it more difficult to push her off the roof, though she knew from experience with Kerrigan that size...mattered very little.

Her form rose up, arms spreading and metal groaning under the telekinetic assault, the first cracks in her armour appearing. However, a machine was incapable of being paralysed by fear and so in the time she had she acted. Gripping her twin boltguns tight she managed to yank her arms forward as metal groaned and squeeze both triggers, firing sprays of buckshot at Tahira, having fortunately reloaded. Needless to say these shots would not be very precise, but on the other hand buckshot was area of effect and so telekinesis was not much use against it. Based on Moira's understanding something that required careful manipulation, in this case the ripping off of her limbs, would require a measure of concentration, and her opponent should have some difficulty keeping her onslaught up while protecting herself, at least her concentration should be split for the droid to act.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

@[member="Moira Skaldi"] @[member="Dak Canton"] @[member="Jared Ovmar"] @[member="Tahira Solo"]

The dropship's searchlight found a vaguely man-shaped splotch at the base of the tower, hundreds of metres below where Je'gan hung -- at this range, and splitting his concentration this far, simple was all he could do. The 'yeah we found a body' bit would have come back to Dak right about the same time Tahira uncloaked and made her move.

And around the same time Je'gan made his.

Invisible and silent, he pulled himself up to roll through the illusory roof extension and onto the actual roof. Tahira could handle Moira Skaldi. Jared Ovmar was closer to Je'gan. A long high leap put him between Ovmar and Dak Canton, and his dual-phase lightsabres snapped to life, one in each direction, aiming for the heart of each man with a double-length blade. That compromised his invisibility rather forcefully -- even he couldn't make a lightsabre blade fully invisible and fully silent when it was going for someone's heart. The rest of him, however, stayed invisible.

They had a moment to act, here, before he turned off his sabres and rolled away.

 

[Tahira Solo]

[SIZE=10pt]@Dak Canton[/SIZE], @Je'gan Olra'en, @[SIZE=11pt]Jared Ovmar[/SIZE], @[SIZE=11pt]Kitt Solo[/SIZE], @[member="Moira Skaldi"]

[SIZE=10pt]Decades of healing on the cell-size level. Stopping a star destroyer with sheer force. Refusing the persuasion of a whiphid. Infusing not one, but two sith masters with the lightside. All these things and more, enabled her to shift her concentration in the slightest. Time slowed as if she walked with the Aing Tii Monks. The pressure suddenly released from the blond’s arms and shifted to bend and twist the barrel of both her guns in a sharp and wrenching upward angle. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Snap-twist.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]But not before buckshot sprayed forward. With a curl of her slender digits, she concentrated on the ones with a fatal trajectory. The shots were sloppy, so most of her effort pooled into a baker’s dozen which slowed, stopped, and hovered about six inches in front of her wind-buffeted clothes. The rest of the rounds sailed harmlessly past her form, save for one or two that sizzled and nipped into the fabric of her clothes, grazing just above her skin before they continued off into the void.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]In one fluid motion, as if finishing an intricate dance, she stepped forward and pushed the baker’s dozen floating rounds back at the cyborg, almost matching the force as when they were first fired. Their target: the machine’s ocular sensors and the weak points already created in the metal connecting her arms. If she had to rip apart this cyborg piece by piece, so be it. Her husband was on the roof.[/SIZE]

 

[Moira Skaldi]

@[member="Tahira Solo"]

If Moira had been in the mood - yes, despite their claims to the contrary about being wholly objective and dispassionate HRDs did have something like moods - to ponder this, she might have concluded that her unknown assaillant and Siobhan Kerrigan really should meet some time. However, she had more important things to focus on, namely her little one-on-one duel. Naturally the killer droid could not know that if she suffered a critical defeat against a force-user she would get cortosis!

The telekinetic pressure was abruptly released from her arms and shifted to the bolters, pulling them up hard and fast. Adjusting quickly Moira simply released her grip upon them and let them fall to the ground, their magazines depleted anyway. A spray of buckshot was coming shooting towards her, but she had already been in motion as it seemed her shots were being blocked. Moreover, the act of stopping the buckshot much like a certain fellow called Neo would mean that Tahira would have had to focus less attention and energy upon holding Moira. After all, area of effect. There was a reason even Kerrigan usually tried to dodge rather than block rounds fired from say scatter guns. Then again, Kerrigan was a total show-off who did not seem to realise that flying painted a real big target on her!

With superhuman agility and reflexes, almost equal to those of the Force, Moira advanced, inexorably, rolling to dodge the shots coming for her eyes, which would be the only really vulnerable spot, moving fast, very fast as she tried to roll under the hail, in the same motion gripping the flamethrower that was on her hip and bringing it up, aided by the fact that the shots would be at low velocity. In her evasion she was not completely successful and she was shaken as a two buckshot rounds slammed into her torso, another in her leg, knocking her back slightly, but these hits did not stop her. Buckshot was ineffective against most armour types and she happened to be wearing ultrachrome, not to mention the fact that the metal beneath her synthetic skin amounted to armour. So she advanced inexorably and flamer levelled at the Force Master she squeezed the trigger, a stream of blazing heat being ejected from its nozzles and shooting towards her, seeking to engulf her opponent in those beautiful, purifying flames.

 

[Tahira Solo]

@[member="Moira Skaldi"]

Stop. Drop. And Roll.

More like dive, roll, extend arms and send a shattering force push in the form of one flame-throwing cyborg.

The force push was not aimed at her front. It was aimed at her side, like a battering ram to knock the blond to the right as she dove to the left. Shoes were melting from the heat of the flame thrower just before she hit the deck. Following up the force steamroll, she used the force like invisible claws with a trajectory aimed to pluck the blond up from around the waste and fling her off the roof.

Knees snapped forward as she kicked off her melting boots, feet tops slightly reddish and mildly burned, her toes flexing on the roof as she came back to a nimble stand.

 

[Marcus Tritum]

I felt a brief moment of relief after hearing the confirmation from CAS on the dead body, then another Forcer jumped us. Looked like a woman, but she wore a mask too. One swipe of her hand and I felt a colossal force slam into me, like some giant decided to swat me. I flew backward through the air and landed on my ass.

"Ow," I gasped, before rolling onto my side.

I got back to my feet, but the freakshow didn't stop. A lightsaber blade materialized out of thin air and burned into the heavy duraplast chestplate. I could feel the heat from the blade, but the plasma itself didn't manage to cut through the thick armor. Pretty stern stuff, Katarn-class, but another stab in the same spot would burn right through. My rifle had fallen from my fingers and lay at my side, still on my person because of the sling I wore around my shoulder. So I reached for my pistol.

Now, I don't have a lot of abilities people would term as 'special', but I can hold a fantastic amount of beer and I can draw a gun faster than anybody else I know. Probably not faster than Jedi, with their Force reflexes and all, but 6 hundredths of a second is pretty fast. The concussion pistol was in my hand. Blink and you'd have missed it. I fired one shot straight in front of me at whatever held the lightsaber, because whatever it was I sure as hell couldn't see it.

@Je'gan Olra'en @[member="Jared Ovmar"]

 

[Moira Skaldi]

@[member="Tahira Solo"]

The battering ramming force push struck Moira, who had however picked up on the tell-tale signs of a telekinetic blast when Tahira extended her arms. It did not suffice and she was thrust hard to the right as the blast slammed into her side with great force, but in a blur as Tahira moved left the HRD managed to reorientate her flamethrower and send a blast of flame shooting towards her, aiming lower so as to hopefully catch the diving and rolling Rogue Master, not trying to hit her directly but rather to engulf the entire area around her in flames as she squeezed the trigger.

Suddenly invisible claws gripped her tight and she was pulled into the air to be thrown. She was flung hard across the roof, skidding across it and seemingly tumbling down, but at the last minute managed to grip ahold of the ledge and slowly pull herself up. Eyes flashed for a moment before resuming their human colour. The flamer, however, was sent flying down into the abyss.

The machine could not feel tire, she could not feel pain and could continue to fight even when missing a limb, but it was obvious that getting struck by a blast of telekinesis would impair her functionality as evidenced by her more sluggish movements, but she persevered. Her hand enclosed around an anti-forcer grenade, a frag one, and she tossed it towards Tahira. Perhaps it would hit, perhaps not since precision would suffer due to the rapidity, though the goal was more to distract her. Grabbing one of her discarded boltguns she quickly tosse Using the time perhaps granted by this she swiftly reloaded the weapon while running in a blur. This time she had not loaded buckshot, but the 30 mm x 45 mm explosive bolts that were the standard ammunition for it. As was known the bolts were armed at launch so any pressure exerted on the warhead would cause them to detonate. Such as force pushing them, trying to stop them like Neo and sent them flying back, likewise they would also explode and cause damage from blast and shrapnel upon impacting on a force shield, though obviously less damage would be sustained.

Advancing forward Moira fired.

 

[Tahira Solo]

[SIZE=10pt][member="Moira Skaldi"][/SIZE]
[SIZE=10pt]Kicked-off shoes were now a puddle of rubber and plastic on the roof, clothes thoroughly sweat-soaked from the surrounding heat. The fire forced her back, close to the roof’s edge; the real one. Je’gan’s illusion effects did not include tricking his wife. Danger senses tingled at the base of her skull as her myrtle ellipses tracked the grenade.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]There was no shield or force push, just a simple flight-path change by fluid TK manipulation. Without breaking speed or jostling the grenade, she mentally looped it upwards and back toward the thrower. When it was within range, she gave it a sharp, mental nudge. Without waiting for an explosion, she took one step back and seemed to disappear into the roof itself.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The blond’s distraction worked, leaving her few options to out maneuver the bullets beyond stepping into air. One of the advantages and arguably, disadvantages of fighting on a skyscraper was always having an edge of the roof nearby.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Fingers clenched the real edge of the roof as the bullets sailed over her head, some hitting and exploding into the pavement where she had just been standing. Shrapnel of debris nipped and embedded themselves into her arms. The chunk of roof she was hanging on shuddered and began to crumble away. Force-enhanced muscles jumped as she fell into a low crouch, back on the skyscraper fighting arena, the huge chunk of blown-away roof floating in front of her as a shield.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]She wasted no time in sending the person-sized chunk to pummel the blond. Over and over again, powered by an invisible hammer that would feel like a can-crusher.[/SIZE]

 

[Moira Skaldi]

[member="Tahira Solo"]

Moira would not be remaining stationary as the person-sized chunk of roof came shooting towards her. There was still quite some distance between her and the forcer, given the fact that the explosive bolts of the bolter were meant to be used at range and not at close quarters.

As the chunk of roof was pushed towards her like a battering ram with powerful kinetic force behind it Moira sought to dodge, swerving sideways to evade the ram, leaping high, very high as it came crashing down towards her, thus evading getting rammed by it. The machine did not have the Force obviously, but machine speed and muscles were almost as good. However, the battering ramming energy of the invisible hammer behind the chunk caught her and pushed her to he edge, making her stumble and then fall, descending down towards the ground at rapid speed from what presumably was a fifteen-storey building.

In other words hitting the ground would hurt...a lot. Well, obviously a droid could not feel pain but an impact of that sort would pretty much smash limbs. Of course, stories have been told of a Zabrak Sith Lord who could survive both getting cleaved in half and falling down a bottomless pit!

As she descended down ever faster suddenly grappling hooks shot out from a gauntleted hand towards the wall, connected to wires on her wrist, and some powerful mechanism pulled her downward, her descent now controlled as she scaled down the building.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

[member="Dak Canton"] [member="Jared Ovmar"]

Six one-hundredths of a second would have been fast, all right, but considering a champion quickdraw specialist in lab conditions normally couldn't top a quarter of a second, plus that whole 'getting hit and dropping the rifle' thing, that lightning-fast draw didn't quite measure up to the former Grandmaster pulling that most quintessential of Soresu moves and getting the feth out of the way with a whirling sidestep. Leaving the concussion pistol firing straight for Jared Ovmar.

The invisibility vanished, the sabres flickered back to normal length, and Je'gan hit the Epicanthix gunslinger with something he'd certainly never experienced before: A mental attack. He'd been mind-tricking Hutts, Toydarians and Epicanthix for five hundred years. This attack was quick, straightforward, and instinctive, Je'gan's bread and butter.

A powerful compulsion to drop the pistol.

 

[Marcus Tritum]

Turns out I'd been wrong about 6 hundredths of a second. What I meant to say was I could draw, level, and fire in .6 seconds. Now, the record holder was at about .2 seconds. So I may be pretty fast, but not that fast, see. Chalk it up to my bad math skills.

Anyway, back to me gettin' jumped by a couple of Force Freaks.

The shot went through thin air and straight toward the unknown bogey. I couldn't really worry about friendly fire right now. In a firefight, things happened fast. You had to have nerves of steel and confidence in your decision. Otherwise you'd get your whole unit killed.

A figure materialized out of thin air a little to my left. I felt some kind o' weird pressure on my brain. No idea what it was, never felt something like that before. ow, I'm no expert on the Force, but I wagered that this here Forcer was tryin' to get inside my head a bit. Probably the consequence of my headache. Old Epicanthix folklore talked about some Darth Baddy eons ago. This guy apparently could use his powers to read the minds of other Forcers. But then this Darth Baddy attempted to read the mind of an Epicanthix agent. Didn't go so well.

Didn't go so well for this guy either.

I swung my concussion pistol up and discharged three blasts toward his center of mass. The two meter blast radius would probably knock me on my ass again, but neutralizing the hostile was paramount. "Try blockin' those with a lightsaber."

@Je'gan Olra'en

 

[Ashin Varanin]

[member="Dak Canton"]

The whirling Soresu sidestep continued, sliding Je'gan's center of mass out of the path of the concussion spheres with a quick and complex bit of footwork. His lightsabres dipped beneath the shots; no impact meant no blast radius. Principles of circularity guided his feet with Force-enhanced speed. Some Jedi, amateurs in Je'gan's reckoning, thought Soresu was an immovable object for staring down unstoppable forces, but more often than not it was about positioning, avoidance, maneuverability. Not being there when the bad stuff hit. Ben Watts was a master of that; Je'gan never could quite catch up. But second-best to Ben Watts still put him well beyond the average bear.

Considering the White Current worked just fine against Yuuzhan Vong and automated sensors, shrugging off the mind trick wasn't going to buy the gunslinger much time. Fallanassi skills had kept Luke Skywalker's Jedi temple invisible to Vong and Peace Brigade searchers for years, and what was genetic immunity compared to Force-dead? The White Current had been known to convince entire planets they'd been infected, to the point where they started showing symptoms. The Fallanassi effect which settled over the Epicanthix was much more straightforward: A powerful impression that the concussion pistol had gone red-hot in his hand.

 

[Tahira Solo]

@Je'gan Olra'en [member="Dak Canton"] [member="Moira Skaldi"]

An exhale left her lips as the blond tipped over the roof. The man-sized roof-chunk came floating back to rest in front of the now, kneeling form of the rogue-jedi master. She took the moment to rest and re-gather her strength. Gaze panned to where her husband was fighting the soldier.

Her mind brushed his along their link.

I'm here if you need me, love.