[The Soft Rains] Phase 01- The Cradle of Civilization

After only a moment's hesitation, Lakshika went for the Krysae rifle, folding away her Mattock-at this distance her rifle would do very little. Unless they had a sniper hidden away, she was most likely the one trained for this sort of thing. Her eyes darted around taking in several things at one: the direction the bullet had gone through the mannequin, the crazy guy daring the sniper to shoot him and the others huddled around her.

She set the rifle against her shoulder, going to one knee to brace it better. Each breath was deep and steady as she looked through the scope, looking, waiting. There. A flash of light in the right direction, sunlight glancing off glass.

She pulled the trigger and hoped.

Watching where PFC Rajapaske was firing towards, Cline pointed his Mk28 towards the window that the Recon Marine fired upon.

*P-TAK-TAK-TAK* The Mk28 barked as Service Chief Cline layed down some supressive fire.

Merrick rolled his eyes. People were always in such a hurry to die and he could never understand why. He stuck to cover and slowly moved towards the fence.

Whatever window Lakshika decided the sniper was simply deteriorated from the firepower thrown at it. Even then, Sellers only now reappeared with you, taking a knee beside the group.

"Everyone okay? Quick scan shows that all hell's broken loose outside and everyone plus their cousins have come to play. We can't get a quality idea of how they are armed, but we do have a drone en route to those mortars. Otherwise, we have a QRF en route from the coast. ETA's probably fifteen or twenty..."

Sellers was knocked back, barriers flaring as one man had partially climbed over the wall, brandishing a weapon nearly two hundred years old. Then there was another, and another, and a third carrying a hammer.

Then another segment of the wall literally collapsed, as several more tried charging in.

Fire is a living, hungry thing. You can hear the dull roar, feel it's breath as it billows out, filling and feeding upon the air itself until it starves to death.

What hit the insurgents climbing through the breach was its twin, it's inverse; creeping and crawling where it's brother roared and lunged. Slower but implacable where the fire was fast and lean. There was a weight to it. A heaviness that frosted the wall and rock with its passing.

It burned too you see?

It just burned cold.

Twin streams of aerosolized, suspended condensate particles crossed and uncrossed, dousing the hole, the men. War cries switching to brief, choked off screams as it froze them, turning their skin to so much icy stone.

A pause.

And then shots rang out, steady, methodical bursts of accelerator fire that shattered the statues. The pieces fell to the ground, the shards and razors cascading, larger fragments simply thudding and dimpling the sand beneath their weight, they oozed deep maroon; half congealed blood.

Vukovic leaned against an irregular chunk of rubble several meters away, crouching; his back to the shattered opening into Ozymandias, his face hidden away behind the polarized plate. He quietly jacked a fresh thermal clip into his Valkyrie

and waited.

Freh’ya suddenly saw Sellers appear.
“Looks like it, as far as I can overlook the group.” She replied to the question.

Finally some intel! But then the assault on the camp began again, Freh’ya tucked in her head when sellers was thrown back. Time to finally do something, now that the enemy was clearly showing itself.

She noticed how the huge marine guy covered the collapsed section of the wall. Where had he hidden until now? Good move though.

She stabilized the bubble where it was, it would hold for some minutes – that depended on the stress though. She grabbed her Disciple from the top of her bag and looked over at Cline.

“I am moving. If you see something primed and running, just detonate it!”

The man with the Hammer rolled as he dropped to the ground. Another man was instantly filling his gap on the fence, it was as if they wanted to swarm the camp, it was crude, it was suicidal!

She took aim and dashed at the man who was going after Sellers.
If you were hit by a dash and not wearing a hardsuit and no shielding, the result just wasn’t pretty. The hammer probably was the hardest single piece left. Next target…

More and more heads and bodies were appearing on the wall. After a short cooldown, Freh’ya delivered a warp on one of them. But before she could cool for a throw to disrupt him and the group around him, she was jumped by two guys dropping from the top of a container near her. She felt a jolt as a crude projectile was repelled by her barrier. Spinning around and dropping to a knee she released all four rounds of her Disciple to end the ambitions of her attackers.

She took cover and observed, using the cooldown to prime another attacker running across the yard.

A moment, a breath, then marine twisted and pivoted back over the rubble, leveling his rifle at the next wave of insurgents

before realizing that he couldn't shoot, he couldn't deploy combat apps, he couldn't even throw a fucking grenade because there was an asari who had oh so helpfully interposed herself in the middle of the firefight. That is to say the blue had apparently thought that CQC when you have the advantage of position and firepower was a good idea.

Well, had

the ability to fill the air with rounds from a cozy bit of cover was somewhat diminished by the idiot in the catsuit flashing all over the battlefield.

Behind his visor Vukovic's eyes started to smoulder.

Cline nodded towards Freh’ya. "You got it!" he said.

Waiting for an opening, he targeted the person that the asari had warped with a biotic throw. The resulting explosion sent a few people to the ground.

"كس أمك" he shouted in arabic, one of the many insults he learned from one of the men in his platoon from Egypt, before firing a few more rounds towards the invading mob.

Vanguards, Rajapaske thought as she carefully set aside the Krysae-at this range her Mattock was a better bet. Particularly with grenades out of the question and how careful she would have to be with each shot with the commando dashing about. She found cover quickly, bullets deflected by her shields, blue shimmering around her. She dropped to one knee, shouldering her rifle and carefully picking a shot, pressing the trigger at a man some hundred metres away as her crosshair lingered over his chest. He went down as the round went neatly through centre mass.

"Ma'am, you alright?" She called to Sellers, switching targets. She'd picked a breach to focus on. It was...This attack was madness.

Ah, so it wasn't just a shelling and sniper attack. It was an assault.

Considering that there was a small army (from what he could see so far) climbing the walls and, in some cases, outright breaching them, the Warrant Officer decided it would be best to get his rifle and helmet. He dove out of cover, sprinted low and hard, before diving inside.

It wasn't long before his face was covered again, and his rifle was decollapsed in his arms. He quickly left to rejoin the fight, sprinting again, before sliding into cover next to the PFC. He raised his Harrier and fired for a solid four seconds at the breach, downing at least two of the insurgents. His rifle clicked, indicating that it had overheated, but at least the tide from the breach had been quelled, if only for a moment.

As he fumbled for a heatsink, he noticed Freh'ya and Cline going all action vid some distance away. As he slammed the 'sink into his rifle, he looked up at Rajapaske and, in a strained voice, said, "biotics, huh? Bloody biotics..."

Being torn by a warp is not pretty. The guy was stumbling in his steps but nobody took aim at him. Instead he fired a salvo into nowhere and screamed incomprehensibly, if in in rage or in pain was not distinguishable.

Freh'ya heard the distinctive boom of a biotic detonation from behind the corner. After she felt her biotics cool down, Freh'ya waited two more seconds until she released the throw and another explosion sent the body flying a couple of meters were it came to rest in weird position.

Why in all the rifts was Vukovich not firing at the gap, she sure wasn't blocking his line of fire from where she covered? But maybe she could be happy so far nobody was firing on her too much. With two rapid throws she toppled two attackers off the wall onto the other side again and out of sight.

The mass keeps pressing, even as a few recoiled in shock and horror at the biotic and tech displays. Yet the massive throng pushed forward, bringing with it even the civilians who now began lifting rocks and throwing them at you.


Sellers rolled out of the way before lifting herself up and downing an armed woman who had pushed through the others. Whatever she shouted was quickly dimmed by the sound of a supplies truck crashing through another part of the barrier, followed by even more of the mob. Some of the mass couldn't have been over the age of twenty.

Among them was one man who brought an ML-77 to bear directly towards Cline.

Dano and Tendaji were nowhere to be found as the mass continued to force its way into Ozymandias.

Cline saw the man who was wielding the ML-77, putting him down with a quick three-round burst from his rifle before getting back into cover.
Watching the supply truck being driven through, he immediately shouted towards Sellers "When's that QRF supposed to Arrive?!

Rajapaske ducked down at the shatter of masonry and brick and metal as the truck came crushing through, swearing softly in Sinhala, her voice barely audible over the crack of bullets overhead. She hit the release on her rifle, heatsink falling free, "Reloading," She called to Hueyt, "Cover me."

She reached into her webbing, pulled out a fresh heatsink and slotted it into place. There were no need for the scope when she ducked back up, bring the Mattock up again. She simply fired. There were...a lot of them. Like shooting fish in a barrel. But so many of them, and so few of the Marines and contractors-how long until they ran out of heatsinks?

"Ma'am, is there a machine gun-even an LMG-on base we could call in to cover this breach?" She asked. An MG would be very fucking useful at this point.

Fuck this.

Fuck this?

Fuck this.

It wouldn't fucking matter at this rate, plinking away at them like they'd been doing. The ones in front would just act as shields for the ones in back, the ones behind would be free to hit and anything significantly nasty tech or biotic based either would either be useless, dangerous enough that it could endanger the rest of the camp (so worse than useless), or

no those were pretty much the only two options. Goddamn it was like going up against a pack of corpses again except these people (innies) didn't even have the decency to light themselves up like a store display.

Yeah fuck this.

A quick scan of the battlefield, the blue'd finally made herself useful and got into cover, Cline was taking potshots and whooping it up, while the tiny marksman from Recon and the garitrooper trimmed the horde down as fast as they could. Sellers was clear, as far as he could see anyway.

"Frags out." His voice cut through their comms as he lobbed a pair of small, black, oblongs over the battlefield. They disappeared into that seething mass of fucking pissed off humanity with barely a ripple.

They went off in tandem, hurling bodies into the air, shredding meat and muscle, scorching and toppling and rupturing with the sheer force of the detonations. The ones closet to the blasts soaked up most of the shrapnel, nothing he could do about that, but there were dead among them now, wounded howling and writhing underfoot.

Right, might not have been a huge chunk out of the overall mob, but image was everything yeah?

This was a slaughter and Freh’ya had no idea why. Why would these hordes just storm to their deaths? It was like as if they were acting like husks… it was exactly like that, including the fighting with teeth and claws part. They seemed like human beings but something was wrong here.

Vukovich finally had decided it would be a good idea to concentrate on the breach again.. She saw the truck breaking in and creating another wider gap. Someone was wielding a rocket launcher but was taken out quickly. Lift grenades would have been good now but all she had with her were stacked in the bag and that was sitting near the bunk. She picked her Carnifex, which was more useful for the distance. The power magnifier atop it was glowing in a light azure. Freh’ya targeted a guy next to the stopped truck with her warp. The subject stumbled and was flailing his arms.

While cooling, she took shots at other randoms, hoping no idiot would shoot at the primed individual….
Seconds later a throw set off the biotic detonation, even rocking the truck. The exploded guy and all of the group surrounding him went flying, the pressing horde behind them staggered in their steps.

Everyone was fighting for themselves, not much of an organized defense. She looked over her shoulder. As this situation was, there seemed to be no safe angles…

The grenade was like music to Hueyt's ears. From his position, Hueyt could see that Vukovic's grenade seemed to do quite a bit of damage. Unfortunately, it didn't seem to quell the tide too much. He readied his Harrier again, with a full clip, and unloaded it. It was a fine weapon, as far as the Warrant Officer was concerned but it was also bulky and chewed through ammo like nobodies business.

When the Harrier clicked again, he decided it would be best if he were to just use his sidearm for now, since most of the enemies didn't have barriers. As he produced his pistol, he noticed Rajapaske yelling to Sellers about what sounded like an MG.

"You're telling me..."
The Predator spat a few more rounds at the breach, dropping a few more innies, before he followed Vukovic's lead and lobbed an incendiary grenade on top, shouting, "fire in the hole! Fire in the hole!"

The grenade exploded, burning the few who had stood there. Hopefully the (quite literal) fire in the hole would keep some of the smarter ones at bay.

Emma's mind had a momentary flashback to the events of the Reaper occupation when husks hunted down the residents like animals, swarms of once sapient life consuming and destroying everything in its path.

The fact that the ones attacking the FOB weren't husks, but humans made this situation even more horrific. She reminded herself, as she unloaded a clip into the attackers, it was kill or be killed. In a way, Emma felt she had gone back in time to 1879, Rorke's Drift, her country's finest moment next to winning the Grand Slam.

As Vukovic and Freh'ya deployed frags, Emma's KB's flashed, one innie was firing wildly with an weapon that predated this century, thankfully he was even more inexperienced then her as she lined him up in her sights.

Inching closer to the rest of the group on his belly, Sinisa propped up his Eviscerator - which he had affectionately named Magenta - for another sally, looking inordinately content for a man with a matting of plaster and gore in his hair from where he'd struck his head leaping into cover.

Duck-hunting. That's what it was.

Oh sure, there were a lot of them, all flurrying about and kicking up an awful racket. But in the end, he was the one with the mass accelerator dispensing microscopic shards of serrated metal at speeds exceeding the sound barrier, while they were the ones armed with rocks and rifles that wouldn't have looked too out of place at the Battle of Kosovo Field. The poor unfortunates being swept along in their wake didn't phase him much; their resemblance to the slum-dwellers of Mumbai only gave him a thrill of vicarious revenge. If you had called Sinisa unsporting, he'd have shot you in the face.

But beneath all the blood-lust, his reptilian brain was muttering something about "self-preservation". Peasants or not, the enemy had advantage of sheer numbers; enough ducks could overwhelm a pack of wolves, provided they had opposable thumbs and guns and oh fuck, the metaphor is collapsing~

The point was that even with the benefit of an entrenched position, the company was barely holding. Sinisa was doing his best at crowd control, opening holes in the vanguard to prevent them from gaining a foothold, but that wasn't stopping those at the back from peppering the area. The rest of the company were raining down suppressing fire like Zeus pissing on Danaë; he blinked as an explosion went up amongst the rabble. But even with all this effort, they were only just keeping their position. If they were flanked now, it would be a total wipe. And only the black god knows when - or if - that QRF was showing up.

In between rounds, he rolled on his back and pressed his head against the dirt, calling over to Sellers:

"We're going to need some heavier support if we want to hold here! Turrets, mines, launchers, whatevadefuck. Less you wanna work on an exit plan."

Speaking of 'exit plan', Sinisa noted the conspicuous absence of Dano and his mercs. Just as he predicted.

Clever bastards, he thought, smiling, before he raised Magenta again and ploughed another spray of hellfire into the front row.

There's something to be said of an assault by a concentrated, trained military force. And then there's something to be said of a concentrated assault by people who only understood the concept of point hollow part towards person you want to shoot.

Against unshielded, unarmored, and barely clothed enemies modern weaponry is quite a terrifying thing to behold. Fist sized wounds, limbs shattering from sheer force, and that goes to say without the barrage of biotic abilities and good old fashioned technology. The crowd starts to waver.

The sudden flyby of Alliance gunships sent them sprinting. Sellers let out a sigh of relief as she lowered her weapon, scanning for any stragglers who might have the wrong idea. A small line of blood was smeared over her face.

"Status?" she called out, looking down and across the line.

It seemed for the moment that there were no more aggressors around, other than maybe several dozen who were writhing in pain now.


Speaking of Dano and Tendaji, at least one of them came back at the least. It was a rather enraged looking Dano, armed with the sword from earlier half shattered in his right hand. He was covered in what looked like blood and excrement, with a knife actually sticking out of his chest.

"Fookin' Daji was running interference. The lul was fucking us all over, you know that? Probably armed charges on the walls or something. Ran too, couldn't get 'em. Chased that asshole halfway through the slums before things got a little too popular... so what I miss here? And this thing is a piece of shite. Broke on the first head I smacked with it."

He tossed the blade into the grill, which had been flipped in the firefight.