ic Incursion: Troopers

[Gizmo]

Meanwhile the Coalition troopers forged toward the cyberformed city and the conspicuous tower now serving as a communication relay for the enemy. The remaining antibody's offered less resistance, reeling from the staggering casualties they'd been dealt, processors refusing to compute that the wildly outnumbered insurgents were actually winning.

Redbird's voice crackled in Wander's ear as a streak of crimson and black flickered in and out of view up in the air. "I have telemetry on the target now, shieldmaiden. They cyberforming process has significantly added to the tower's structural integrity but I have noted several weak points that should offer inviting opportunity to our allies!"

[Brown Dynamite]

Roulette wasn't sure where he was.  He remembered doing something stupid.  Staring down the barrel of a multi meter with multiple heads and enough raw power that even his optic blasts.  And he actually chose to stick behind and hold that thing off long enough that a bunch of strangers could run off and destroy a communications tower.  But, that couldn't be right.

See Roulette didn't do selfless.  Selfless gets you killed.  Selfless got his dad killed.  No, Roulette played smart.  That's what one needed to do to survive.  You don't play hero, you play businessman.  It's what Roulette needed to tell himself.  It was what he knew for an absolute fact was the secret to surviving in the black of space.

And all of it was absolutely no comfort buried under the metallic waste he found himself in.  Move.  Frakking Move Turk!  As much as the Zultasian's mind raced, his body refused to respond.  Perhaps the crushing weight pushing down on him had something to do with it.  Or maybe it was the searing pain and doubtless sensation of a broken rib. 

Regardless of the reason.  Doing the upstanding thing felt pretty darned stupid.

[Electra]

Wander cursed as the mole-slug lurched forward toward Roulette and Eclipse, jamming her bat into the thing's tough skin to keep her balance. There was nothing she could've done to stop the attack, the wretched thing was supposed to be turning on her, not them! "That's great, Redbird!" she told the motorcycle. "Fly up and use your lights and comms to show them where to hit." She grabbed hold of her radio, fumbling it for a moment with a hand slippery with all kinds of unpleasant things, then thumbed it on. "Hey guys, my motorcycle has figured out some weak points on that tower. She's gonna show you where they're at so you can hit them. Now get the hell out of here!" 

[Raveled]

Corona flared her aura, giving the troops a place to navigate to. "Alright, everyone get in here!" She motioned hugely, pointing the soldiers deeper into the building. She ducked reflexively as the Terran's flying motorcycle dashed in over them, and before long the soldiers were all inside. She moved from squad to squad, quickly tallying their demolitions, and a quick calculation showed that they were going to be short. The engineers concurred; they had spent so many explosives fighting back the antibodies that they weren't going to be able to bring down the communications array.

Corona walked around to the troops again, arranging the squads to cover the different entrances. She returned to the engineers, where they were trying to figure out how they would do the job without enough explosives. She stood before them, glowing gold and red and powerful. "If you can point 'em out," she said to them, "I can rip apart some'a th' supports. Might make th' job go smooth."

[Fox]

"C'mon, purple man!" Eclipse, a relatively agile creature by nature, had manged to handle the landslide fairly well - though she didn't like the implications of how quickly that thing had broken ground. No one who'd taken as many injuries as she had could believe that luck could last forever. "Ain't ever seen someone as tough as you get knocked down for long! You wanna sleep, you do it on the ship home. You wanna live, you get up and do something about it."

She took a knee on some broken ground, taking aim with her blaster and ignoring its protests as she fired another few shots at the slug. "Maybe go see how they're doing inside. We gotta get that thing down and get out of here fast - I don't believe for a second they only have one of these monstrous things hanging out here!"

[Electra]

Wander looked down in the midst of her fight to see how the others were faring, and was simultaneously relieved and mildly annoyed to see Roulette and Eclipse still outside the settlement and on the field of battle. At least Roulette was alive, so that was a good thing. "Go!" she called again. The noise attracted the creature's attention, who responded by arching one large mouth in her direction. She waited till the last possible second before leaping away, letting it bite itself in the slimy throat with its own teeth, then bouncing back in to smash it with several hard strikes from her bat. It shrilled in rage and pain once more, but it was definitely beginning to slow down now, with little real fight left in it. "I've got this!"

[Brown Dynamite]

Roulette half listened to Eclipse's rally.  His body ached sleeping sounded great at the moment.  But, she was right.  There were credits to collect.  Every instinct told Roulette to follow the plan.  Run up to the tower and blast it to pieces.  Aside from the fact that he couldn't run.  Not as beat up as he was.  

Groaning the Zultasian dragged himself out of the heap of metal and sludge.  Slowly teetering along before turning.  His vision was failing.  It looked as if there were three Mole-Slugs instead of the one.  And no one needed to see that many mouths in triplicate.

It was a simple set of instructions let the Terran handle the monster and regroup after the tower went down.  Yet, he fired another blast of concussive force from behind the comfort of his visor.  Pouring as much energy as he could.  And managing to hit the Mole-Slug...or rather one of the Mole-Slug's his disoriented vision had spat up.  As for the actual monstrosity was left untouched.  Screeching along disgustingly.  Maybe licking it's wounds.  It was hard to tell with so many varying expressions.

 "The loudmouth Lor and the troops can take the tower.  The pragmatic option is not to leave it with a single target.  The Terran is the scarriest karking thing I'ver ever ran into.  Still she's just one target if left.  If we take the.  The...  The... What's the word?  If we take the higher ground we can assist from the range.  It has been slowed down enough for that."

Edited June 20, 2015 by HG Morrison

[Raveled]

As foolish as it was, Corona found herself racing. Not against time or against the on-coming Communion hordes, but against that damned Terran flying bike. She would grab a satchel of explosives and fly up to an indicated point at the structure, and then return for another load. in that time the flying bike (with the Grue soldier perched atop it, of all things!) would have made two trips and be leaving on its third. It grated on the Lor that she couldn't outfly the Terran machine. It wasn't at all logical, but this wasn't a day for logic. She found herself trying to fly faster and faster, slapping the packs up hastily and dropping back down. She stopped when one satchel almost fell on her head, dislodged from its perch by the mole-slug slamming to the ground. After that the Lor officer forced herself to move slower and take her time, and swallow the bile she felt at losing to the Terran machine.

Before long the entire structure was wired, and the troopers had withdrawn in good order to the side of the building farthest from the canyon and the moleslug. Corona landed near the center of the formation. Someone was already on the transceiver, calling for pick-up and evacuation at one of the pre-arranged points; the Lor listned long enough to hear the transport shuttle confirm point Lambda, then she switched over to the band used by the commanders. "I mightily hope you all heard that," she transmitted. "Th' ship's comin' in, and stars know how long it'll hang around." She waved the troops along and they moved further into the city and away from the blasting zone. "In th' meantime, th' tower is comin' down." She took flight, making sure she had plenty of air beneath her before entering the command for detonation.

The charges went off in sequence, bright flashes of plasma and cracks of detonation marking where the compturonium was being cut through. The tower groaned as it listed, almost drowning out as it fell. Fell away from the city, pointedly; the team had placed the charges so that it fell towards the canyon, and the moleslug, and the three superheroes still fighting to contain it.

[Fox]

"Haha - high ground! That's the spirit! That's a strategy I can really get--" Eclipse was cut off by the sound of the charges going off behind her. She knew that noise a bit better than she'd have liked - and something about the noise of this one, the order maybe, made the hair on the back of her neck stand up.

She turned her head just in time to see the direction the building had started to fall in and immediately burst into action, blaster snapping to her thigh as she made a bee-line toward Roulette. "TOWER'S COMING DOWN ON US," she shouted, hoping the Zultasian and the crazy Terran could both hear her. "GET OUT OF THE WAY OR EVAC'LL HAVE NOTHING LEFT TO PICK UP!!"

The rogue captain skidded to a halt next to Roulette, but only long enough to rather un-gently swing him up onto her back and then she was off again - slower, but with a speed and strength that betrayed the cybernetics not quite visible on the surface. "Swear to the ####ing #### gods," she panted, trying to ignore the feedback she was getting as she damaged, regenerated, and re-damaged her straining muscles while trying to rush herself and two hundred pounds of dead weight out of the way of a growing shadow, "if that ####ing Lor did that on purpose I'm gonna kick her so hard she's gonna fly into the sun still tasting boot."

Edited June 24, 2015 by Fox

[Electra]

Wander was intently focused on the finishing blow she was about to deliver to the tottering mole-slug, but she looked up at Eclipse's shout, just in time to see the tower collapsing in her direction! The loud exclamation she made was not conveyed by her translating device, but the intent was still perfectly clear. Racing down the bloody hide of the monster, she cleared the area just as the first chunks of concrete and steel began to fall. She paused  next to Roulette and Eclipse, who were themselves just out of the way of the carnage.

"I _know_ Redbird wouldn't have directed charges be set like that. I'm going to give that idiot Corona a piece of my mind and let her choke on it." the ichor-soaked Terran growled. "We better haul ass before she gets any more bright ideas. Can I give you a ride?" When neither of her colleagues demurred, she scooped Roulette into her arms and directed Eclipse to hold onto her back, then took off again towards the base of the tower. "I'm gonna drop you with the troops," she told Eclipse, shouting over the wind of her own speed. "Don't let Corona get anybody killed before I get back!" She suited deed to word, leaving Eclipse standing next to the main group of troopers while she herself raced for the landing zone with the wounded Roulette.

[Fox]

The assembled troopers got a good view of an Alarian's extra set of canine teeth as Eclipse ground them in frustration, but whatever was running through her mind could apparently wait. Instead, she jumped up onto the nearest piece of structure or rubble that gave her a better view of the group, and stuck two fingers in her mouth to issue a sharp whistle. "ALRIGHT! I hope everyone's enjoyed their break, because it is EVAC TIME! We've got a ship waiting for us, and after this mess it's not gonna be waiting long!"

Now that she had their attention, she hopped down and started striding, with purpose, in the general direction of their designated pick-up point. "Grab the wounded, leave nobody living behind, and if it's replaceable and doesn't kill things, drop it - we're going now, double-time, before the Communion has a chance to start poking around our handiwork here! Move out!"

Edited June 28, 2015 by Fox

[Brown Dynamite]

Roulette didn't mind being carried around.  At least his female transport didn't have tentacles for once.  As much as he wanted to flatten Corona into the background.  Her reckless destruction managed to kill the Mole-Slug.  Which was a win any way you sliced it when it came to the massive payday that was promised.  Assuming there was still a universe to spend that money after all was said and done.

"Don't bother yelling.  Lor don't listen.  Not unless it's another Lor talking to them.  Have to put a bit of fear-actually, she might listen to you."  Any advice about how hard headed Lor could be in the Zultasian's opinion was quickly overwritten.  Hardheaded or not, the Terran had at the very least proven herself a veritable force of nature.  Even if they had a bit of miscommunication/blatant disregard for her plan in deciding on how to deal with their Mole-Slug problem.