LOCATION: In jungle right outside Kaas City.
ENEMIES: None directly...yet.
ZOMBIE ACTIVITY: Pushing towards main wall of Kaas City, accompanied by several massive creatures of different species. They will attack anything protecting the city - turret emplacements and operators, walkers, creatures, and will climb walls using each other.
MATSU ([member="Valiens Nantaris"], [member="Siobhan Kerrigan"], [member="Connor Harrison"]) | She could taste blood between her teeth - not her own, but the metallic silhouette of her Undead’s feast, their ecstasy played over connection to her. They’d infiltrated a refugee camp, screams ringing in the Sith Lady’s ears as she concentrated on continuing her sprint towards Kaas City. And then the screams were right next to her, the blaring stutter sound of a lightsaber going out catching her attention as her head whipped to the right to watch a pair of Jedi slammed to the muddy jungle floor under a crushing pile of zombies. She might have liked to stay, to stand and watch them ripped apart.
Don’t worry! Don’t worry...this is the most painful thing you’ve ever experienced, and that means you get to live on the in the Next World! Pain makes you perfect...pain makes you powerful.
But the Force was screaming at her to keep running, and this time for more than the chance to see her vision realized.
Danger bore down on her, and though she relished the idea of pain she was not yet prepared to die before she saw the rest of them suffer for their lax behavior. The sound of her breathing roared in her ears as she dug in to the earth with each step, her wounded leg burning with the exertion. She could feel blood from the gash soaking in to her pant leg, sticky and hot against her skin. And then it happened - the shrieking sound of something falling fast enough to cut the air and she could only twist her neck to look back over her shoulder fast enough to catch the dark projectiles before the ground shook underneath her feet and tossed her like a ragdoll.
She was thrown against a tree, smacking against it so hard that she blacked out - seconds at most, but when she opened her eyes again, the world was on fire and the hideous sound of a tree falling met her ears. Reaching, upturned roots filled her vision as the tree she’d been thrown against gave way, the bombardment of the ground drastically loosening the soil in which it had once found purchase. Scrambling back, she almost found her feet in time before the massive old jungle sentinel slammed down, accompanied by her screaming as it pinned her left arm underneath it. She had no time to cut through the limb - it was laced with phrik and was resistant enough to lightsabers to make the job of removing it far more work than she could afford as fire crept closer and the cloying signature of Jedi encroached on her. Igniting her lightsaber, she proceeded to cut through the tree just enough to provide a space to yank her arm out through.
Her shoulder dislocated as she pulled, a sound like thunder in her head as she hissed in agony.
Her left arm was mangled, its metal bent backwards by angle at which it’d been pinned under the tree. When she tested the claws, they ejected from her fingers only a few inches before refusing to move any farther - the latch mechanism within her elbow must have been damaged. Leaning against the tree, she took a deep breath before leaning towards to bend her arm and pop the artificial joint back in to place, one last scream sounding through the jungle before she hoisted herself to her feet and took stock of where she’d landed.
She could feel that hundreds of her Undead had been taken out in the bombing in the immediate area, her mind shifting to make greater room for those remaining as she started once more on her headlong sprint towards the city. She was getting closer, and she could feel the presence of much more powerful Light signatures converging - or at least, Light enough to be against her.
And one…
Oh, she knew that signature.
“Hello, Connor…”
[member="Aldera Antilles"], [member="Zayen"], [member="Joza Perl"] | Zombies screeched as the rain of fire came down from above. Scrambling to climb on top of one another, the undead attempted to reach the droid hovering above them, their heads exploded as the metal contraption took them out as quickly as they could work together to attempt and bring it down from the sky. Their front line decimated by the flash of an attack, the rest stopped in their tracks. Their limbs shivered - something like anger, or perhaps an alien urge only familiar to those driven by a will not their own. It looked like insects roiling under their skin.
And then the reason for their pause came barrelling out of the jungle. Massive, eyes aglow, it seemed to act as some sort of Battle Meditation for the lesser zombies. As it charged with a roar loud enough to bend jungle trees backwards the rest of the horde resumed its chase, narrowing over the bridges that would bring them in to Kaas City behind the retreating Jedi. The ground quaked as the beast brought up the chase from the rear, quashing those zombies too dismembered from fighting to keep up with those strong enough for the continuing battle.
[member="Jenson Koraz"] | The safety of the med station remained as such for now, a respite from the horde of zombies bearing down on the city. Bodies - Undead and Jedi alike - lay in broken fashion across what had constituted the frontlines of the battlefield as the rest of the herd started their chase across to the city behind the Jedi moving back towards its walls. The city would need defending, but ultimately he had found perhaps the only place to catch his breath long enough to recharge.
[member="Audren Sykes"] | The rescused Padawan barely managed a ‘thank you!’ before sprinting to the relative safety of Kaas City. The zombies that had been climbing each other to reach him lay in a broken heap below, a tableau of limbs at unnatural angles and finally-hollow eyes. This close to the city however, the blonde-haired Jedi was in position to see the massive beast that came out of the jungle, tall enough to tower over the trees that stood momentarily before it pushed them out of its way to join the Horde. It seemed to bolster the group’s coordination, driving them to greater heights of frenzy.
It would be possible, with the direction the horde was moving, for the Knight to leave the creature to the Jedi defending the walls and move deeper in to the Jungle towards the ship the Sith had arrived in. But the beast was monstrous and posed its own special threat.
[member="Cerita Sarova"] | What was at first simply four, then another three, than another four, quickly became another twelve, fourteen, twenty as a section of the horde broken off by the bombing effort to destroy the Sith Lady attacking the planet was driven towards the coffee factories. Accompanying them was a hail of Mailocs they’d climbed trees to leap on and bite, turning them in to flying abominations.
A wall of the runners simply could not make it past the statues defending the area, seeming to simply find the ‘life’ snuffed out of them as they crossed some invisible and arbitrary line to fall to the ground.
The rest started screaming as they saw the tuk’ata, an opportunity to turn more creatures to their side...and perhaps feast. They were huge, and provided enough to eat for quite a few hours. They barely noticed the woman among the dark beasts. As they ran closer they pushed themselves off the ground to leap on to the backs of several of the creatures, bony fingers attempting to push in to flesh, teeth gnashing next to eyes and soft bits of the face. First they would destroy the tuk’ata, and then they would devour the woman standing among them.
The Undead Mailocs swooped low once they noticed said woman, beaks snapping and clawed feet reaching - perhaps to lift her, perhaps to scratch out her eyes or leave a cut that would infect her with their sickness.
[member="Nima Tann"] & [member="Nikias"] | For a moment the horde had wings, flying away from the blast let forth by the Jedi Master in her answer to their threat against her companion. Most of them remained intact, though quite a few split apart in to component limbs from the force of the push directed against them. One - the creature to go directly for Ice, as it were - dragged itself along by its hands since it had been separated from its legs, trying to get back to the Twi’lek that had so rudely stopped it from a delicious meal.
However, half the horde split as it smelled blood and felt another Jedi charge in to the clearing, silence predominate for a heartbeat before the entire group started shrieking in excitement. Through their heightened awareness they could sense the new darkness in the Twi’lek, shaking with unnatural excitement as they started sprinting off in two directions at both targets.
[member="Jericho"] | As the limb fell from his opponent, Matsu’s pet let out a howl of triumph.
The lesser zombies swarming the area cackled in excitement, a constant wall of noise that turned to rage as they fell on the arm only to realize it was not the flesh they so craved. Hunger not sated drove them to even greater heights, using each other’s bodies as a ladder to try and reach him where he hovered and gathered power. Those that managed to get to the top of the heap found what remained of their skin bathed in a whitish light, revealing their grotesque features and foggy eyes in unwanted detail.
Matsu’s Favored stood beneath the forming ball of defense created by the Master’s effort to pull power towards himself and gathered a response, hurling a disgusting torrent of acidic vomit towards the man hovering overhead. It hit the shield with no effect, dripping around the field of the force-shield and falling on the tower of Undead below with a hiss. With a roar of rage, the creature stalked over to a fallen zombie, the sound of its massive, rotten bones clacking together with each step. Reaching down, it tore a bow and a quiver of metal arrows from the fallen creature. Its ribcage came with, but the Favored One shook it off like so much garbage, pulling a bow from the quiver, nocking, and taking aim before releasing an arrow with deadly accuracy towards the man gathering power.
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