Sean-Michael Argo - Ghost Faction

What emerged from the shadows of the docking bay then was something out of the most raw nightmares in the human psyche. It was clearly one of the Hollow Horde that all of the Dire Swords had faced back on Gedra Prime, but unlike any hostile they’d seen so far.

It had once been a Helion battle trooper. It still wore most of the carapace combat armor, though the bodyglove beneath it had torn through in places. The flesh underneath the armor had been bleached, as if all the vital fluids had been rerouted elsewhere and thick cables could be seen buried in the creature’s exposed joints. The human hands had become elongated claws, metal blades crudely grafted to the fingertips that had torn through the tiny plates of armor that comprised the former trooper’s gauntlets. They twitched incessantly, clicking together as the creature approached.

The helmet was gone, from the back of the misshapen skull a nest of cables protruded. The glare of the creature’s (for it had long since ceased to be a man) eyes were now yellow, smoldering exhaust ports.

The creature opened its mouth, threw its head back, and howled. The jaw split down the middle and spread wide to reveal a maw filled with what looked like a blend of chainsaw teeth and sewing needles as it pushed it’s formerly human vocal cords to the limit. The sound that came forth shook even the hardest of the mercs to their very core. None of the warriors present had faced something so horrifying, save one, and even she hesitated for one critical moment.

When it didn’t seem possible that it could get worse, four hinged metal protrusions suddenly snapped out from the cradle on the creature’s back, additional limbs tipped with what appeared to be metallic stingers.

Jada tried to blink away her shock. For a second, it was not a Gedra abomination that stood before her, but the Stalker in the Dark.

Faced with her greatest foe, Jada still recognized it as her conscious mind attempting to make sense of what she was seeing. The storm of traumatic memories flooded her mind even as her body was racked with the sensations of her combat injuries, and worse, at the hands of the Stalkers. She recognized what was happening and let the hallucinations wash over her, embraced them.

As the other mercs stood in shocked disbelief, it was Jada Sek alone who acted.

She screamed as she raised her rifle, the hinged stingers tracking her movement, making her realize that they were actually small firearms, each of them seeming to be corporate weapons that had been re-fabricated to fit the Gedra.

The merc and the beast fired at the same time. Her modified Gedra rifle produced a salvo of armor-piercing rounds that punched through the Helion armor with a resounding crack.

The four modified corporate weapons of the Gedra beast sprayed a multitude of hard rounds at the squad, seeming to opt for a group attack over concentrating its fire on a single target.

While Poe and the others had been frozen in terror and shock at the sight of the vile beast, the explosion of gunfire snapped them out of it.

The squad scattered as they were pelted by hails of bullets, most of the projectiles being turned away by the stout armor worn by the mercs. Berg, however, jerked and fell backwards as several direct hits knocked him off of his feet.

In the back of Jada’s mind, she observed with interest that the abomination’s cannibalized corporate weapons did not have the same reactive connection with the user that the Gedra modified rifles allowed. That was a small boon, and it spared the lives of the squad, as they dove in all directions to avoid enemy fire.

Jada strode forward, heedless of the handful of rounds that spanked off of her armor. She snarled as she squeezed her trigger over and over. The merc drove round after round through the chest and neck of the creature, cutting short its furious assault. Jada’s rounds tore pieces of flesh and armor away from the creature’s body, forcing it to stumble sideways from the impacts. It screamed defiantly before Jada sent a burst of fire through its horrible maw and out the back of its skull.

In the rush of battle hormones and emotion, Jade had not even noticed the two rounds of enemy fire that had managed to bite through her armor. Her right thigh, just above the knee, seeped blood from a bullet that had managed to impact hard enough to drive a splinter of her own armor into the meat of her leg. The other was her right arm, just at the elbow, where a round had grazed the joint section and taken a piece of her flesh with it. Her enhanced physique was struggling to cope with what, to Jada, were minor wounds, though any unenhanced warrior would have lost the use of their right arm and left leg and surely been out of the fight.

“Contact!” barked Womack over the comm-bead, “Confirm Hollow Horde elements, heavily modified, they look to have been Helion.”

“Well, that’s at least one mystery solved,” muttered Poe as he helped Berg to his feet, the merc seeming no worse for wear.

“Contact! On the surround!” shouted Strega from far to Jada’s left. The merc turned her head to see Strega looking at her mounted short-range scanner, “I’ve got pings on three-sixty degrees!”

“Raid Alpha, stay on mission, engage and eliminate on your way to the master ring, don’t let them lead you down a murder hole!” commanded Womack over the company channel. “Let’s get what we came for and evac so we can nuke this site from orbit!”

“ Guns up!” shouted Berg as he fired a beacon flare in a high arc across the excavation site. As the flare hung in the air and began its slow descent, it illuminated much of the site that had been shrouded in darkness. Seconds later, its light was joined by a number of flares from other squads as they all worked their way through the massive excavation site.

Jada’s HUD immediately registered the beacon embedded in the flare projectile, and it served as a rally point for the squad. Given the near pitch darkness of the battlefield and the chaos that was likely to ensue in a matter of seconds, the rally point would be critical for allowing the squad to regroup. Even with the flare’s temporary illumination, the helmet’s low-light settings were cranked to maximum, and Jada knew this was going to be a nightmarish conflict fought out in the half-light.

As if in step to the rhythm of her mind, everyone’s HUD was awash in hostile contact as the enemy surged out of seemingly every deep shadow cast by the light of the flares. This time, none of the mercs shouted out the Dire Swords battle cry; it went without saying. They were in the depths of necrospace, fighting shoulder to shoulder with hardened veterans, while surrounded by darkness and bitter enemies. Death at this point was assumed; the only question remained was who would fall and who would remain standing.

Jada raised her rifle and fired as she caught movement out of the corner of her eye. The Gedra rifle, anticipating her needs, fired a burst of low-velocity tracer rounds, the accelerant of the cartridge having been put towards creating the brilliance at the cost of knockdown power. Still, a bullet was a bullet and several of them pounded into the flesh of the creature as it leapt from the shadows. The creature lost its footing due to the multiple impacts, though that did not stop it from firing wildly with its four gun appendages. Poe lent his fire to Jada’s and the two of them blew the creature apart with a combined salvo.

Behind them, Ranec rushed a network of scaffolding, aiming his weapon up to reveal several of the creatures moving through the ironworks with a sickening grace.

The merc’s precise shots caught one of the hollows in the mid-section and it nearly fell off the scaffolding. Its clawed hand caught a rail just before it fell, holding its weight as the wounded creature dangled from its high perch. The beast returned fire and pushed Ranec scampering into cover to escape the hurricane of small arms projectiles that chased him.