Sean-Michael Argo - Ghost Faction

As the sharp stench of the creatures reached her senses even through the re-breather’s filter, the tangible truth of them brought a change over the merc.

The beasts might be as terrifyingly deadly as they once were, but Jada had become something far worse. The boarding knife was the only thing she’d kept from her days as a salvage marine, stolen from her kit just before she mustered out. There had been no convenient fitting for it while wearing her mag-armor, so Jada had not carried it into battle since that last fight on Gedra Prime. For this journey, she had strapped it to her forearm, in the traditional Reaper fashion. She could have raised her assault rifle and fired point blank into the wall of flesh that writhed before her, and yet it was the knife that suddenly filled her fist.

The merc was silent as she moved. Inside, her mind screamed in fear and anger, grief and horror as she sprang forward, letting the assault rifle fall back on its sling.

Before the nearest bone worm could react, Jada had wrapped her right arm tightly around its head, just behind the ridge of its hardened front end, holding it despite the creature’s formidable strength. The merc was an enhanced meta-human, extremely well-trained and conditioned, capable of feats beyond any unenhanced human, yet it still tested her strength and agility to maintain her hold on the frenzied beast.

She plunged her boarding knife into the creature’s sticky flesh, just behind the ridge and pulled the blade around in a circular motion, twisting the handle. The creature’s head was nearly severed by her deep cut and the thrashing of its powerful body finished its own decapitation.

Another worm launched itself at Jada’s upper body while another coiled around her legs. The merc was lost in a berserker’s fury and slashed wildly at the two worms as they wrestled her to the ground. She managed to get her hand under the mandibles of the beast attempting to burrow its head through her belly and stabbed it from point to hilt three times before it finally stopped struggling.

The worm near her feet had wrapped itself around her left leg so tightly that she had already lost feeling in it. Barbed teeth sank into her right leg just as she was able to turn her attention to it. Jada hacked at the worm with the knife, cleaving great chunks out of its flesh, but it continued to burrow into the meat of her leg.

The simple, disposable body glove she’d donned underneath her cloak was ripped to shreds as the creature chewed and swallowed a mouthful of her thigh muscle. Jada howled in pain and fury as she desperately fought against the urge to pass out from blood loss. Finally, she sunk the blade into the creature’s head, just behind the hardened ridge as she’d done with its brood kin, but before she could make good on decapitating it, the fourth worm joined the fray.

The keening sounded again and the fourth worm whipped its body at Jada, slamming into her and knocking the woman across the rubble-strewn floor and into the far wall. The merc was dazed from the impact, but thankfully, the force of the blow had loosened the grip of the other worm upon her body, though her thigh was spurting blood from their deadly embrace.

While the worm who had bitten her was hurling itself this way and that, the boarding knife buried in its body and seeming to drive it mad with pain, the remaining worm moved in for the kill.

Jada was wounded, but she was a veteran of many conflicts, conditioned to fight against the most terrible of odds and her reflexes were superb. Before she realized what she was doing, the merc slung her rifle around and fired it from the hip, squeezing the trigger over and over as she peppered the worm with high-velocity rounds.

The worm came up short as it reacted to the multiple projectiles that tore through its glistening body. The creature attempted to flee through one of the many holes bashed in the walls of the building and Jada tracked it as she continued to fire.

Shots rang out to answer her own and the merc dove for cover, instinctively putting both the worm and a large chunk of fallen concrete between her and the new threat.

Instead of returning fire, Jada leaned out from the other side and put one more clean shot through the fleeing body of the worm, eliciting a gurgling noise that sounded to her ears like a death knell. The other worm that had her knife in it was still writhing around, though its movements had become sluggish. She dared a brief glimpse before ducking back into cover. She could see that it had absorbed at least one of the errant shots from her initial salvo.

Two voices began speaking, and though their words made no sense to her, they had a gravel-choked accent that was very similar to that of Vol and the other cast-off denizens of Downspire.

It had been a number of years since the liquidation of Vorhold, and Jada found it likely that the survivors had developed a dialect that was nearly all slang words and very little common corporate vocabulary.

Jada had a thick Grotto accent, indicative of her low hab block ancestry, but through her compulsory education and life off-world, she’d taken the edge off of it. These were clearly Downspire folk who had been far enough removed from corporate culture that they’d become totally reliant on local slang. Samuel Hyst and Harold Marr had spent the most time mingling with the locals during the Vorhold campaign, and apparently even they only understood the Downspire speech about half the time.

However, it didn’t take much for Jada to guess, from their tone and direction, that these two hostiles were debating whether or not to engage her. After all, she’d just wiped out their four attack worms and likely that represented a heavy blow to their confidence, much less the caloric bottom line that all survivors in such a hellish environment would be keeping an eye on.

They likely didn’t know how badly she was injured, and Jada considered just giving them a blast on full auto to drive them away, but she had something to finish here and it would not do to have hunters at her back when she made her way into the debris pit. Resolved to see this fight to the end, Jada swiftly and silently swapped out her half-spent magazine for a full one and racked the slide to ready the first round.

The sound of her weapon chambering spurred her enemies into action. One fired on her position, no doubt to keep her head down while the other moved around to flank her. It was a good stratagem, one that she’d have attempted herself if on their side of the field. She was going to have to act quickly before the flanking hostile got into position.

The merc quickly reached into a pouch on her belt and produced a small first aid kit. First, she unceremoniously dumped a vial of clotting powder over her grievous wound, following it up with one of the combat cocktails that Marcus made sure each merc had in the field.

This particular batch was designed to give the user a boost of adrenaline while providing a localized anesthetic, the combination of which caused minor hallucinations, which is what kept that particular brand of combat drugs out of scope for unenhanced soldiers. The Dire Swords were well equipped to dealing with the incredibly unpleasant ‘crash’ that occurred once the drugs cleared the system, not to mention being old hands at coping with terrible hallucinations.

The drugs surged through Jada’s system and she gasped as a newfound chemical strength flooded her limbs. She opened her eyes and sprang from her position, her legs pumping to give her tremendous speed despite her wounded leg, and she sprinted across the short distance between her chunk of cover and the large hole in the wall that the worm had fled through.

As she expected, one of the attackers was drawn out into the open by the sight of what he or she perceived as an easy target and the hostile opened fire, hoping to hit Jada as she fled. The merc had taken a gamble, chancing that she would be able to turn the tables on the enemy before a clean shot brought her down. When she reached the hole, Jada leapt up and through it, her powerful body giving her enough airtime to turn over and face her enemy, as planned. Her assault rifle was at the ready and she got a brief glimpse of her enemy as they exchanged fire simultaneously.